The ethos of the English novel
“Englishness”
Orwell: The Lion and the Unicorn (1941); “England Your England” (1941); The English People (1944)
“deep England” is “somehow bound up with solid breakfasts and gloomy Sundays, smoky towns and winding roads, green fields and red pillar-boxes” (The English People)
“They were standing in the shade of hazel bushes. The sunlight, filtering through the innumerable leaves, was still on their faces. Winston looked out into the field beyond, and underwent a shock of recognition …
‘It’s the Golden Country - almost,’ he murmured.
‘The Golden Country?’
‘It’s nothing really. A landscape I’ve seen sometimes in a dream.’ (Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four)
“Now I am quite prepared to believe that other countries can offer more obviously spectacular scenery. Indeed, I have seen in encyclopaedias and the National Geographic Magazine breathtaking photographs of sights from various corners of the globe; magnificent canyons and waterfalls, raggedly beautiful mountains. It has never, of course, been my privilege to have seen such things at first hand, but I will nevertheless hazard this with some confidence: the English landscape at its finest possesses a quality that the landscapes of other nations, however more superficially dramatic, inevitably fail to possess. It is, I believe, a quality that will mark out the English landscape to any objective observer as the most deeply satisfying in the world, and this quality is probably best summed up by the term ‘greatness’. […] it is the very lack of obvious drama or spectacle that sets the beauty of our land apart. What is pertinent is the calmness of that beauty, its sense of restraint. It is as if the land knows of its own beauty, of its own greatness, and feels no need to shout it. In comparison, the sorts of sights offered in such places as Africa and America, though undoubtedly very exciting, would, I am sure, would strike the objective viewer as inferior on account of their unseemly demonstrativeness.” (Stevens in Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day, 1989)
The gender of the English novel. Novel of manners, novel of sensibility
“ ‘Oh.’ Mrs. Armitage did wonders with that word. Only an English person could have appreciated it completely. Well, perhaps anAmerican if he had lived in London ever since the war.” (K. Amis: Difficulties with Girls)
Flaubert: “the unadorned precision of the realist style could be achieved only with masculine, not feminine, phrases”
John Fowles: “If the novel must be written on a few inches of ivory, we are not to be beaten in England. This palladium still lies in a sacred triangle, among hatred of excess, respect for the past, and good taste”
Domestic novel: Ivy Compton-Burnett
“It is unusual to have all one’s experience under one roof. And I have really had none outside it. I cannot imagine anything happening to me anywhere else, or anything happening to me at all. Not that I mean anything; I do not much like things to happen, or I should not much like it.” (Ivy Compton-Burnett: Manservant and Maidservant, 1947)
Novel of manners:
(Jane Austen), P. G. Wodehouse, Agatha Christie, Ronald Firbank, Nancy Mitford, Angela Thirkell, Barbara Pym, Margaret Drabble, Hilary Mantel (Meera Syal, Zadie Smith)
“ ‘Moving is such a business, isn’t it? It seems to take so long to get everything straight. Some essential thing like a tea-pot or a frying-pan is always lost . . .’ Platitudes flowed easily from me, perhaps because, with my parochial experience, I know myself to be capable of dealing with most of the stock situations or even the great moments of life – birth, marriage, death, the successful jumble sale, the garden fête spoilt by bad weather . . .”
“I wondered that she should waste so much energy fighting over a little matter like wearing hats in chapel, but then I told myself that, after all, life was like that for most of us – the small unpleasantnesses rather than the great tragedies; the little useless longings rather than the great renunciations and dramatic love affairs of history or fiction.” (Barbara Pym: Excellent Women, 1952; Mildred Lathbury)
Margaret Drabble: The Millstone (1965)
Novel of sensibility:
(Henry James), Elizabeth Bowen, Rosamond Lehmann, L. P. Hartley, Henry Green, Elizabeth Taylor, Elizabeth Jane Howard, Eva Figes, Elaine Feinstein, Anita Brookner, Salley Vickers
Rosamond Lehmann: The Echoing Grove (1953)
“I want to tell you I saw your father quite a short while before he died. We talked for a long while not about the War but about really important things – people, human relationships, personal feelings, which he understood about better than most people.” (Dinah and Madelaine Burkett, Rickie Masters)
Elizabeth Bowen: The Heat of the Day (1949)
“His [Harrison’s] concentration on her was made more oppressive by his failure to have or let her give him any possible place in the human scene. By the rules of fiction, with which life to be credible must comply, he was as a character ‘impossible’ - each time they met, for instance, he showed no shred or trace of having been continuous since they last met.” (Stella, Robert, Mr. Harrison)
Elizabeth Taylor: A Wreath of Roses (1949)
“Trying to check life itself, she thought, to make some of the hurrying everyday things immortal, to paint the everyday things with tenderness and intimacy – the dirty café with its pock-marked mirrors as if they had been shot at, its curly hat-stands, its stained marble under the yellow light; wet pavements; an old woman yawning. With tenderness and intimacy. With sentimentality, too, she wondered. For was I not guilty of making ugliness charming? An English sadness like a veil over all I painted, until it became ladylike and nostalgic, governessy, utterly lacking in ferocity, brutality, violence. Whereas in the centre of the earth, in the heart of life, in the core of even everyday things is there not violence, with flames wheeling, turmoil, pain, chaos?
Her paintings this year, she knew, were four utter failures to express her new feelings, her rejection of prettiness, her tearing-down of the veils of sadness, of charm. She had become abstract, incoherent, lost.”
“ ‘Life persists in the vulnerable, the sensitive,’ she said. ‘They carry it on. The invulnerable, the too-heavily armoured perish. Fearful, ill-adapted, cumbersome, impersonal. Dinosaurs and men in tanks. But the stream of life flows differently, through the unarmed, the emorional, the highly personal.’ . .” (Richard Elton, Camilla, Frances)
Elizabeth Taylor, Palladian, 1946
“Cassandra, with all her novel-reading, could be sure of experiencing the proper emotions, standing in her bedroom for the last time and looking from the bare windows to the unfaded oblong of wall-paper where ‘The Meeting of Dante and Beatrice’ in sepia had hung for thirteen years above the mantelpiece”
Anita Brookner: Hotel du Lac (1984). Edith Hope (Vanessa Wilde), Mr. Neville, Geoffrey Long, David Simmonds
“For they were reasonable people, and no one was to be hurt, not even with words. Above all, not with words.”
“My idea of absolute happiness is to sit in a hot garden all day, reading, or writing, utterly safe in the knowledge that the person I love will come home to me in the evening. … I am not a romantic. I am a domestic animal. I do not sigh and yearn for extravagant displays of passion, for the grand affair, the world well lost for love. I know all that, and know that it leaves you lonely. No, what I crave is the simplicity of routine. An evening walk,, arm in arm, in fine weather. A game of cards. Time for idle talk. Preparing a meal together.”
Novel sequences (C. P. Snow: Brothers and Strangers (11 vols, 1940-72), Doris Lessing: The Children of Violence (5 vols, 1952-69), Richard Hughes, Simon Raven
Anthony Powell: A Dance to the Music of Time (1951-1975, 12 vols.)
Nicholas Jenkins, Charles Stringham, Kenneth Widmerpool
“The lack of demur on her part seemed quite in accordance with the almost somnambulistic force that had brought me into that place, and also with the torpid, dreamlike atmosphere of the afternoon. At least such protests as she put forward were of so formal and artificial an order that they increased, rather than diminished, the impression that a long-established rite was to be enacted, among Staffordshire figures and papier-mache trays, with the compelling, dteached formality of a nightmare. … I was conscious of Gypsy changing her individuality, though at the same time retaining her familiar form; this illusion almost conveying the extraordinary impression that there were really three of us - perhaps even four, because I was aware that alteration had taken place within myself too - of whom the pair of active participants had been, as it were, projected from out of our normally unrelated selves. ... In spite of the apparently irresistible nature of the circumstances, when regarded through the larger perspectives that seemed, on reflection, to prevail - that is to say of a general subordination to an intricate design of cause and effect - I could not help admitting, in due course, the awareness of a sense of inadequacy. There was no specific suggestion that anything had, as it might be said, ‘gone wrong’; it was merely that any wish to remain any longer present in those surroundings had suddenly and violently decreased, if not disappeared entirely. This feeling was, in its way, a shock. Gypsy, for her part, appeared far less impressed than myself by consciousness of anything, even relatively momentous, having occurred. In fact, after the brief interval of extreme animation, her subsequent indifference, which might almost have been called torpid, was, so it seemd to me, remarkable.” (A Buyer’s Market)
**
“The men at work at the corner of the street had made a kind of camp for themselves, where, marked out by tripods hung with red hurricane-lamps, an abyss in the road led down to a network of subterranean drain-pipes. Gathered round the bucket of coke that burned in front of the shelter, several figures were swinging arms against bodies and rubbing hands together with large, pantomimic gestures: like comedians giving formal expression to the concept of extreme cold. One of them, a spare fellow in blue overalls, taller than the rest, with a jocular demeanour and long, pointed nose like that of a Shakespearean clown, suddenly stepped forward, and as if performing a rite, cast some substance - apparently the remains of two kippers, loosely wrapped in newspaper - on the bright coals of the fire, causing flames to leap fiercely upward, smoke curling about in eddies of the north-east wind. As the dark fumes floated above the houses, snow began to fall gently from a dull sky, each flake giving a small hiss as it reached the bucket. The flames died down again; and the men, as if required observances were for the moment at an end, all turned away from the fire, lowering themselves laboriously into the pit, or withdrawing to the shadoes of their tarpaulin shelter. The gray, undecided flakes continued to come down, though not heavily, while a harsh odour, bitter and gaseous, penetrated the air. The day was drawing in.
For some reason, the sight of snow descending on fire always makes me think of the ancient world - legionaries in sheepskin warming themselves at a brazier: mountain altars where offerings glow between wintry pillars; centaurs with torches cantering beside a frozen sea - scattered, unco-ordinated shapes from a fabulous past, infinitely removed from life; and yet bringing with them memories of things real and imagined. These classical projections, and something in the physical attitudes of the men themselves as they turned from the fire, suddenly suggested Poussin’s scene in which the Seasons, hand in hand and facing outwards, tread in rhythm to the notes of the lyre that the winged and naked greybeard plays. The image of Time brought thoughts of mortality: of human beings, facing outward like the Seasons, moving hand in hand in intricate measure: stepping slowly, methodically, sometimes a trifle awkwardly, in evolutions that take recognizable shape: or breaking into seemingly meaningless gyrations, while partners disappear only to reappear again, once more giving pattern to the spectacle: unable to control the melody, unable, perhaps, to control the steps of the dance.” (A Question of Upbringing)
**
“And then, all at once, Jimmy Stripling came into sight again. He was stepping softly, and carried in his hand a small green chamber-pot. As he advanced once more along the passage, I realised with a start that Stripling proposed to substitute this object for the top-hat in Farebrother’s leater hat-box. My immediate thought was thatbrelative size might prevent this plan from being put successfully into execution; though I had not examined the inside of the hat-box, obviously itself larger than normal (no doubt built to house more commodious hats of an earlier generation), the cardboard interior of which might have been removed to make room for odds and ends. Such economy of space would not have been out of keeping with the character of its owner. In any case it was a point upon which Stripling had evidently satisfied himself, because the slight smile on his face indicated that he was absolutely certain of his ground. No doubt to make an even more entertaining spectacle of what he was about to do, he shifted the china receptacle from the handle by which he was carrying it, placing it between his two hands, holding it high in front of him, as if it were a sacrificial urn. Seeing it in this position, I changed my mind about its volume, deciding that it could indeed be contained in the hat-box.” (Question of Upbringing)
**
“Smith, is there any champagne left in the cellar?”