The Outward Room - Millen Brand

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A long, long time ago (I can still remember) I was sent Millen Brand's The Outward Room (1937) to review - in fact, I had asked for it - and it has taken me absurdly long to read it, and a couple months longer to get around to reviewing it.  But it is really very good indeed, and worth the wait.

The reason I asked for this NYRB edition was (apart from the fact that all NYRB editions are beautiful and belong on my bookshelf) that I remembered The Outward Room being mentioned once in a Persephone Quarterly - and it fixed in my mind.

The Outward Room starts with Harriet Demuth's life in some sort of mental hospital, having suffered a nervous breakdown as a result of a family tragedy.  Estranged from her parents and frustrated by her doctor's blinkered obsession with Freudian analysis, Harriet's life has been sucked dry of anything but routine and confusion.  Her ability to articulate her personality and self have been stifled by illness and by the unsympathetic institution which came as a consequence to it.  Brand writes this section very well, but it is necessarily claustrophobic and begins to stifle the reader.

But Harriet escapes.

She makes her way to New York, pawns her brother's ring, and lives hand-to-mouth for some time.  The Great Depression has given the city a desperate air, and she struggles to find the means of supporting herself - her first 'job interview' is for a single day's work, and consists of standing in a long row with many other women, and not being pointed at.  There are some poignant scenes where Harriet first rents, and then must leave, a tiny apartment.

After about 100 pages, Harriet is sitting in a late-night cafe, unable to afford a cup of coffee, when a stranger approaches and offers to buy her the drink.  John (for this is his name) invites her back to his house for food and shelter and - desperate, and a little naive perhaps - she goes.  At this point I expected awful things to happen to her, or for John's apparent kindness to (at least) be revealed as covering ulterior motives.  What I wasn't prepared for was a gentle, gradual, and quite beautiful love story.  Through simple, ordinary scenes of everyday life and undramatic conversations, Harriet and John fall in love and become necessary to one another.  We see some of Harriet at work, and the friend she makes Anna; we see a neighbour or two - but the beauty of The Outward Room is the quiet unfolding of a believable, unassuming relationship.

I don't normally just give all the plot in a series of paragraphs like that - I usually try to break it up with some of my thoughts about the author's approach, etc. - but it seemed important to lay out the  structure of The Outward Room and the direction the novel takes before addressing the issue of style.  They are so interrelated.  At the beginning, Brand opts for quite a lot of the disjointed and fragmentary prose that is often used to represent mental disharmony or any kind of mental illness.  Personally, I find it very easy to overuse this style.  Stream of consciousness has of course often been used to portray thoughts, especially of a disturbed mind - but I think it has to be done exceptionally well (we're talking Woolf-standards well) to work, otherwise it can simply seem sloppy.  These were the sections of The Outward Room which I found least convincing.

However, when Brand didn't concentrate this effect into single chapters, he used a more successful variant on it - by simply omitting verbs and pronouns.  It's a bold way to start a paragraph, giving a sense of both immediacy and uncertainty, and it think it works well within a sparser descriptive mode:

Dark, the smell of stairs.  She began to notice the stairs as she had not the day before.  She leaned and looked down the dark stairwell.  These stairs were not solid; their treads sagged, the staircase was pegged to the walls with iron rods at each landing.  The house was old.  She went down and when she came into the light of the lower open house door, she looked around her.  She saw only a bare hallway; on one side was a large metal barrel with a warped cover, on the other a table on which were several letters - evidently this was where mail was left for those in the house.  Except for this, the hall was vacant; scribbled on the plaster were a few names - "DIDOMENICO 2nd" "LICORA" --

Brand moves between this fairly straightforward narrative and a fluid, more consciously beautiful prose.  And that is the result (and the cause) of the relationship between John and Harriet.  Which comes first?  I don't know - the gentle unfolding of their love is both mirrored and created by the gentle unfolding of touching imagery and emotional explorations.  This paragraph was picked more or less at random, but hopefully it gives you a sense of what I mean:

Breathing the air deeply, she looked down at the courtyard.  Hardly changed, a little dirtier from melted snow, the tinge of winter.  Frost had made new cracks in the cement, in the so-called paving.  Yet the evidences of winter were small only to be seen, like the signs of spring, by the heart that feels small changes.  The room too had its changes from winter, but because of her need of its permanence they too were small, only what had been absolutely necessary.

It is incredibly difficult to write about this sort of novel, because it is of the variety which can only be appreciated once one is reading them.  Perhaps that is true of any book, but it seems especially so of The Outward Room.  And that being said, it is especially impressive that Peter Cameron writes such a good afterword in the NYRB edition.  Good afterwords and introductions are hard to find, aren't they?  One thing Cameron writes will strike home with many of us:

It's somewhat frightening to learn that good books - even books heralded in their time - can disappear so quickly and completely.  We like to think that things of enduring quality and worth are separated from the dross and permanently enshrined, but we know that this is not true.  Beautiful things are more likely to disappear than to endure.  The Outward Room is such a beautiful thing.  

None of us are surprised when we find that wonderful, beautiful books have fallen by the wayside - we all know too many examples.  Despite having an initial print run of 140,000 copies (wow!), The Outward Room has fallen victim to this disappearing act - its peculiar qualities are those which can so easily be overlooked.  Thank you NYRB for bringing it back - the novel definitely deserves it, and I hope you give it a chance too.

Summer Will Show - Sylvia Townsend Warner

Yes, the excerpt yesterday was from Sylvia Townsend Warner's 1936 novel Summer Will Show.  STW has had quite a few mentions at Stuck-in-a-Book this year, since I've been researching a chapter of my thesis on her novel Lolly Willowes, and I read Summer Will Show for the same reason.  Well, it's very different.  Warner is renowned, in fact, for the disparity of her topics - which include a missionary on a desert island, a medieval convent, a woman becoming a witch, and, in this instance, the French Revolution.  The only tie between her novels is her striking prose and observational eye.

Our heroine is Sophia Willoughby, who begins Summer Will Show as a rich, aristocratic wife and mother in 1840s Dorset.  Her marriage is not an especially companionable one, but she doesn't seem particularly upset about it.  Indeed, it seems to be par for the course.  Warner expertly encapsulates the change in temperament between an engaged woman and a married woman of the period:

Sophia might refuse her food, pine, burst into unexpected tears, copy poetry into albums and keep pet doves, while her marriage was being arranged and her trousseau ordered; but once married it was understood that she would put away these extravagancies and settle down into the realities of life once more.

Sophia seems rather unfeeling at the outset - strict, rather than motherly, and without any noticeably emotional attachments.  Warner often summarises people's essential characters through seemingly incidental - and here is Sophia's sentence: 'She disliked sitting down in the middle of a walk, she disliked any kind of dawdling.  A slow and rigid thinker, to sit still and contemplate was an anguish to her.'

She is contented, if anything, when her husband absconds to Paris - but even her delight in the freedom afforded by her unassailable singleness is tainted when she learns about her husband's Parisian mistress, Minna Lemuel:

For even to Dorset the name of Minna Lemuel had made its way.  Had the husband of Mrs. Willoughby chosen with no other end than to be scandalous, he could not have chosen better.  A byword, half actress, half strumpet; a Jewess; a nonsensical creature bedizened with airs of prophecy, who trailed across Europe with a tag-rag of poets, revolutionaries, musicians and circus-riders snuffing at her heels, like an escaped bitch with a procession of mongrels after her; and ugly; and old; as old as Frederick or older - this was the woman who Frederick had elected to fall in love with, joining in the tag-rag procession, and not even king in that outrageous court, not even able to dismiss the mongrels, and take the creature into keeping.

Ouch.  But doesn't Warner arrange an image well?

Something tragic happens, which sets Sophia off to find her husband - even with the obstacle of Minna.  She arrives in Paris, and first encounters Minna while the latter is telling a story about her past to an assembled group of eager listeners.  The difficulty about having a great raconteur as a character is that the novelist must be one themselves (it's one of the things which makes Angela Young's accounts of storytellers so wonderful in Speaking of Love, incidentally) - Warner is pretty impressive, but her strength lies in unusual metaphors and striking images (which only occasionally go too far and become too self-conscious), rather than compelling anecdotes, per se.  Here's another of those curious little verbal pictures I love so much:

And with dusters tied on her feet she [Minna] made another glide across the polished floor, moving with the rounded nonchalant swoop of some heavy water bird.  Her sleeves were rolled up, she wore a large check apron, she had all the majestic convincingness of a gifted tragedy actress playing the part of a servant - a part which would flare into splendour in the last act.

Indeed, Minna's personality is captured most effectively when we are told that 'she was always pitching herself to an imaginary gallery'.  Her dramatic nature captures Sophia's interest, and the burning resentment with which she arrives turns into affection, and then devotion...  The excerpt I posted yesterday comes into play here.

I enjoyed the first half of Summer Will Show.  Warner's prose is certainly dense here, not to be read speedily, but the dignity and spark of Sophia still came through strongly.  Her concerns about reputation in a judgemental aristocratic world were interesting and subtle; her relationship and re-encounter with her husband were vibrant and never slipped into the sort of unrealistic emotionalism seen in a lot of novels from the 1930s.  But... the second half dragged and dragged.

First edition (can be bought here)

Perhaps my main problem was that I'm not especially interested in the French Revolution - and I'm certainly not coming from the impassioned left-wing perspective with which Warner wrote this novel (although she later grew rather less zealous in later life.)  Understandably a lot of the action of revolutionary France takes centre stage later in the novel, and as the narrative wandered a little away from relationships, hurt, and pride - themes Warner explores rather masterfully - I lost interest.  And yet even in the first part of the novel, I admired more than I loved.  It was enjoyable, but I couldn't respond with the fervour with which I greeted Lolly Willowes.  The writing was so thick, so relentlessly beautiful, even, that I felt exhausted reading it.  That can hardly be labelled a criticism of Warner, but it prevented me loving the novel deeply.

I have heard Summer Will Show praised to the heights, and thus part of me thinks a re-read in a decade or so would be a good idea.  I don't thrill to the thought.  Harriet Devine has also recently struggled to love this novel, so at least I'm not aloe in my assessment.  For those more interested in historical fiction than I am (and it would hard to be less) maybe you'd get more from this than I did.  For the reader new to Warner, I would certainly suggest Lolly Willowes as the first novel - but I have grown increasingly to think that her greatest triumph is her letters.  I've heard people say the same thing of Virginia Woolf, about her letters and diaries, and thought the assessment rather silly - but, for Warner, the chief qualities of her fiction-writing (adeptness at unusual imagery; an eye for original perspectives) appear in her correspondences, without the flaws which creep into her novels.  The Element of Lavishness is still the best thing I've read by Warner, and Summer Will Show didn't come close to challenging the throne.