So last week I said that I'd read and enjoyed Richmal Crompton's Family Roundabout, one of the novels for adults that she felt was overlooked in favour of the William series (which is wonderful, to be fair). My copy is one of the beautifully understated volumes published by Persephone Books, who specialise in forgotten English twentieth-century middlebrow women writers, always include a very good introduction – yes, I am the person who reads the introductions, though not always first – all packaged up in cool, elegant covers. The bespoke bookmarks for each volume are a lovely touch.
Reading Family Roundabout led me to the book next to it in the Room of Unreads, another Persephone classic, Winifred Watson's Miss Pettigrew Lives For A Day (1938). It's a glorious romp: Miss Pettigrew is a depressed, lonely spinster on the verge of entering the workhouse when she accidentally gets entangled with some very fast Bright Young Things who spend their time sleeping with inappropriate young men, drinking cocktails, attending Night Clubs and sniffing cocaine. Miss Pettigrew, at the end of her tether, suddenly realises that she doesn't have to be a tedious old moralist about all this and gives in to temptation after temptation proffered by the hipsters, who detect in her something admirable. In return, Miss Pettigrew gives them the benefit of her experience (especially about which men might be reliable over the long term) and they treat her as some kind of oracle, with happy results all round. It's enormously funny, quite satirical and has a heart of gold. There are also, sadly, some very interwar features that haven't aged well: foreigners and Jews are very much not part of the joke.
Watson wrote several rural-romance style novels to good reviews and sales, but really struggled to get Pettigrew published - the publishers thought it would scare off her imagined readership of old ladies: she persisted and it was an international hit. I loved it – it takes such joy in reversing the expected response of someone from the older generation meeting the kids at their most hedonistic – Miss Pettigrew's epiphany is a salutary lesson to anyone who finds themselves reaching for words like 'snowflake'.
By contrast, I also read the latest Rivers of London book, False Value. Highly enjoyable, good plot, decent satire of the tech billionaire class, stuffed with Hitchhiker's Guide gags but not as tense and scary as the author clearly thinks. If your narrator has to tell your readers that the final encounter with the forces of darkness felt a bit evil, you probably haven't quite pulled off the atmosphere. Next up: Jeanette Winterson's Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?, her belated non-fiction version of her semi-autobiographical debut novel Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit. If that's confusing, blame Winterson, who's made a career out of brilliantly blurring generic boundaries of all sorts.
I'll also be reading Francis Beckett's The Enemy Within: The Rise and Fall of the British Communist Party. The CP was a funny beast: founded by people influenced by the humane traditions of Methodism, Guild Socialism, Chartism and countless other precursors, run on Stalinist lines even when Stalin did things like murder its General Secretary's partner, massively popular in particular times and places, enormously progressive in some ways (such as feminism) and deeply conservative in others (solidly opposed to the Beatles and long hair, which is why it was largely irrelevant to the popular perception of The Sixties, which of course wasn't the one most people experienced), at once oppressive and liberatory. CP lifers ('red diaper babies', as American hereditary communists referred to themselves) are at the forefront of so many good causes, yet the party stumbled from crisis to crisis, losing support at every step. Policy changed at the whim of Moscow, factions split off constantly whenever deviation was spotted, Tankies and Trots faced off, Euro-communists were suspected of betraying The Cause…and yet peace and picnics and joy were all part of membership: it was as much a community as a party, perhaps more. I remember attending a conference on CP culture (speaking about Lewis Jones, novelist, councillor, seditionary and a man who insulted Stalin to his face and survived) at which every faction and impulse was represented. It was kind of a wake: nostalgic, regretful, baffling, but also the kind of wake at which the various survivors accuse each other of murdering the body they're gathered around.
For a comic, but also very moving take on being a 'red diaper baby', try Alexei Sayle's memoir, Stalin Ate My Homework ('a pack of lies, according to his mum') or Michael Rosen, who writes and speaks beautifully about his Jewish Communist upbringing.
Anyway, that's all I've got to say this week. Politics is utterly depressing. Neither I nor anybody else has anything useful to say about Coronavirus, and all my current trades union representation work is serving to remind me that there's absolutely no correlation between intellectual and emotional intelligence – and I don't just mean management! At least the sun is shining.
2 comments:
Ah, the CP. A friend of mine who called her son Joe was asked by a couple of different left-wing friends whether it was after Joe Stalin; at first she thought they were joking. Later she got to know another couple whose son was called Joe, and it was after Joe Stalin - whose picture they had over the mantlepiece. Manchester, mid-70s.
The thing about the CP is, in its day it was big. Peter Fryer, who left the party after 1956, said that he used to wonder why so other few people had left at the same time (relatively speaking). Then he started making a mental list of all the people he knew to owe their career to their party membership; he stopped when he reached 200.
One other vignette: when I was Cultural Editor of Red Pepper I ran an article which critiqued the folk revival, arguing that CP activists had dug up something that was already dead and buried, that by the 50s the "people's music" was most definitely not folk, and (for good measure) that Frank Sinatra was a better comrade than Woody Guthrie. I didn't often get much reader response to articles in the Culture section, but the next month we could have filled the Letters page with complaints about that article.
Having finished Beckett's book on the CP, I'm left with the same feelings - that it was packed with intelligent people who desperately wanted to change the world for the better, and became so institutionalised that they would condone inhumanity on a mass scale rather than accept the complexity and moral responsibility required to be a full citizen. Once tied to the fate of the CPSU, there was no room for independence of thought at all.
I loved Red Pepper, so thanks for being part of it. I also happen to love folk music, but I agree that the CP-approved stuff was deadly. My colleague has a thesis about the blues which locates it as the invention of nostalgic white people trying to preserve in amber a moment in black musical culture which had passed, and I think that applies to the CP and folk. Understandable intellectual origins but deeply conservative at the same time. Mike Waite's really good on this - he's an expert on the CP's reaction to The Sixties.
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