language – Page 2

Love In A Cold Climate by Nancy Mitford

I love this book. It’s a masterpiece of social comedy and it deserves to be more widely read, so that’s why I’ve decided to rave about it today. Imagine Pride and Prejudice set in the 1930s, and you’ll have some idea of the plot. Not that it’s really about the plot – which, for the record, involves posh English girls attempting to find suitable husbands. The real joy of this novel lies in the characters, particularly Lady Montdore, the wildly ambitious mother of beautiful Polly, who is ‘destined for an exceptional marriage’. Lady Montdore is a monster – self-centred, snobbish, bossy, greedy, completely deluded as to her value in the world – but she’s a very entertaining monster. She provides the author with numerous opportunities to send up the English aristocracy, as in this scene, when Lady Montdore berates our poor narrator, Fanny, the wife of a professor:

“‘You know, Fanny,’ she went on, ‘it’s all very well for funny little people like you to read books the whole time, you only have yourselves to consider, whereas Montdore and I are public servants in a way, we have something to live up to, tradition and so on, duties to perform, you know, it’s a very different matter . . . It’s a hard life, make no mistake about that, hard and tiring, but occasionally we have our reward – when people get a chance to show how they worship us, for instance, when we came back from India and the dear villagers pulled our motor car up the drive. Really touching! Now all you intellectual people never have moments like that.'”

Of course, things don’t go to plan, and Polly rebels in a manner calculated to drive her mother mad. This sets the scene for the introduction of another wonderful character, Cedric, the heir to the Montdore fortune. It was unusual enough in 1949 (the year the book was first published) for a novel to mention homosexuality, but it was revolutionary to have a happy and openly gay character who charms nearly everyone he meets. He even manages to dazzle the Boreleys, a family notorious for its intolerance:

“‘Well, so then Norma was full of you, just now, when I met her out shopping, because it seems you travelled down from London with her brother Jock yesterday, and now he can literally think of nothing else.’

‘Oh, how exciting. How did he know it was me?’

‘Lots of ways. The goggles, the piping, your name on your luggage. There is nothing anonymous about you, Cedric . . . He says you gave him hypnotic stares through your glasses.’

‘The thing is, he did have rather a pretty tweed on.’

‘And then, apparently, you made him get your suitcase off the rack at Oxford, saying you are not allowed to lift heavy things.’

‘No, and nor am I. It was very heavy, not a sign of a porter as usual, I might have hurt myself. Anyway, it was all right because he terribly sweetly got it down for me.’

‘Yes, and now he’s simply furious that he did. He says you hypnotised him.’

‘Oh, poor him, I do so know the feeling.'”

Then there are Fanny’s eccentric relatives – her wild Uncle Matthew, vague Aunt Sadie, hypochondriacal stepfather Davey, and exuberant little Radlett cousins – with many of these characters inspired by Nancy Mitford’s real family. In addition, the author provides a wickedly funny look at English politics, fashion, marriage and child rearing.

Love in a Cold Climate is actually the second book narrated by Fanny. The first, The Pursuit of Love, was published in 1945. I hesitate to call it a prequel, because that would suggest you need to read it first, and I don’t think you do. It stretches over a longer time period, and is mostly the story of Fanny’s cousin and best friend, Linda (Lady Montdore, Polly and Cedric don’t make an appearance in this one, unfortunately). Some readers prefer this first book to the second, but I think it really depends on whether you regard Linda as a tragic romantic heroine or a spoiled, self-centred brat. As you’ve probably guessed, I’m in the latter camp (I really can’t forgive Linda’s treatment of her hapless daughter). I also think this book ends too abruptly – as though the author suddenly got tired of typing. However, there’s a lot of enjoyment in the descriptions of the Radlett family, so if you adore Love in a Cold Climate, you’ll probably like The Pursuit of Love as well. There’s also a BBC television series based on both books, but I haven’t seen it (and it doesn’t appear to be available in Australia).

I’ve previously written about one of Nancy Mitford’s earlier novels, Wigs on the Green (1935), which is interesting for historical and political reasons, but doesn’t have much literary merit. I cannot recommend The Blessing (1951) at all, because it’s awful. However, it and Don’t Tell Alfred (1960) have recently been re-released with lovely illustrated covers.

I can recommend Noblesse Oblige: An Enquiry into the Identifiable Characteristics of the English Aristocracy, a biased but very entertaining collection of essays and cartoons about ‘Upper-Class English Usage’, edited by Nancy Mitford and including contributions from Evelyn Waugh and John Betjeman. Laura Thompson has also written a biography of Nancy Mitford called Life in a Cold Climate, which discusses all her books and the influences for her novels.

‘Dated’ Books, Part Four: Police at the Funeral

When I read books written in the past, I try to keep in mind LP Hartley’s idea that:

“The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.”

That’s what makes visiting those books so interesting. I can’t help noticing the characters’ (or the author’s) different attitudes to race, gender and social class, among other things, but I don’t tend to get annoyed about the attitudes.

Except when I’m reading a Margery Allingham book.

Right, so my friend H, who shares my love of 1930s British literature, recently acquired some of Allingham’s crime novels. H loved them. I just had to read them, she informed me, because they were so charming and funny. She said she’d send me two of the best ones, although she did warn me that they were “totally politically incorrect”. This turned out to be the understatement of the decade.

Police at the Funeral, the first Allingham book I read, is actually the fourth in a series featuring Albert Campion, gentleman private investigator. It was first published in 1931, although the edition I read was published in 1965. Apparently Campion is meant to be either a spoof of, or a homage to, Lord Peter Wimsey, and certainly both of these characters are aristocratic, independently wealthy, clever, skilled in martial arts and the use of various weapons, and able to solve the most puzzling mysteries using the tiniest and most ambiguous of clues. In Police at the Funeral, Campion is summoned to Cambridge by an old friend, whose fiancée’s family has been involved in what appears to be a murder. The ancient family matriarch wishes to avoid any hint of scandal and asks Campion to do what he can to solve the crime, or at least, cover it up. Pretty soon, family members are dropping like flies, getting killed in various bizarre ways, and Campion is the only one who can save the family from extinction, or even worse, social disgrace!

This leads to the first way in which this book is dated. I know the British class system continues to exist in the twenty-first century, but thank Heavens it’s not as bad as it used to be. Almost all of the characters in this book accept that their position in life is due to the social class into which their parents were born, and that this is how it always has been, and always should be. (The sole exception to this is one of the villains, who comes to the violent end he ‘deserves’.) In this book, working-class characters are consistently depicted as either ugly and violent; ugly and stupid; or ugly but amusingly foolish. In fact, Campion, supposedly the smartest person in the book, firmly rules out the notion that any of the servants of the household could have been involved in the murders. Only someone from the middle or upper classes would have the brains to plan a crime, you see.

But it’s not just the working classes who are stupid and unlikeable. There are also the (upper-middle class) women, who are all either hysterical, shrewish or insane. There is one female university student who seems reasonably sensible, but she doesn’t do much except help her friend each time the friend faints (which is quite often). It’s also firmly stated that this sensible character is not “conventionally beautiful” and that her manners are “startlingly American”. Oh well, that explains it, then.

The worst, though, has to be the attitudes towards race. Remember that recent debate in the United States about banning Huckleberry Finn because it contained a certain word no longer used in polite society? Well, that word is used casually by the characters in this book. I thought that was as bad as it would get as far as ‘political incorrectness’ went, but then a body was discovered by an “Indian student”. I cringed, anticipating the student’s interview with Campion, but in fact, it could have been worse. The student is described as:

“not an attractive person. He seemed to have embraced European culture with a somewhat indiscriminate zeal . . . He was full of his own importance . . . [and had] a gleam of childlike pride in his eyes.”

The reader is meant to be amused by the student, but he does turn out to be an observant and intelligent witness whose descriptions of the crime scene are invaluable to Campion. No, the worst is yet to come, when Great-Aunt Caroline explains why a particular character has been blackmailing her family. As the following is, a) a mild plot spoiler, and b) appallingly racist, I’ve hidden the text. If you’d like to read on, highlight it with your mouse or click ‘Select All’ in your browser:

It turns out Caroline’s husband had a nephew who was

“shipped off to the colonies [that is, Australia] many years ago. He returned with a certain amount of a money and a wife . . . She was a peculiar-looking woman and of a very definite type . . . They had a child, a girl, and when that child was born the rumours that had been rife about the mother were proved beyond a doubt. By some horrible machination of heredity the stain in the woman’s blood had come out . . . The child was a blackamoor . . . They left, of course, and the disgraceful business was hushed up. But to my own and to my husband’s horror, although the first child died, these criminal people had a second. That child was George.”

Even worse, George is “not in the least ashamed” of his “half-caste blood”!

It wouldn’t be so bad if Campion, the hero of the story, thought or acted in any way that showed he disagreed with Caroline’s attitudes. But no, he feels “honoured” that she has confided this family secret to him, looks at her “admiringly”, tells her she’s the “cleverest woman he’s ever met”, and ends the book by describing her as “very beautiful”.

Maybe it’s just because I’m a “colonial” with “half-caste blood”, but this is one of the few scenes I’ve read in recent years where my jaw has actually dropped, and I’ve thought, “How could she write this? How could they publish this? ARRGHH!”

Leaving apart the classism, sexism and racism of this book, I still had difficulties with it. It has one of those convoluted plots that hinge on a series of implausible coincidences. Whenever something illogical happens, it’s due to the murderer being insane. Still, the plot’s no worse than most of Agatha Christie’s novels, and Margery Allingham does have a sense of humour. I particularly liked the dignified dog who insists on shaking hands with Campion, and the ‘mermaid skeleton’ that Campion unwillingly acquires as a reward for his endeavours. The characters may be annoying, but some thought has gone into making them rounded and interesting. Fans of 1930s murder mysteries may well enjoy this, even if I didn’t. For example, this reader felt that the book was “extremely well-written”, although he acknowledges that Allingham is an “acquired taste”.

I must also add that I later read Allingham’s Mystery Mile, the first in the Campion series, for comparison purposes. There was still a bit of racism and classism, but I enjoyed this book far more, perhaps because there was more humour, a more interesting and plausible mystery, and a greater opportunity to get to know Campion and his factotum, Lugg. On the whole, though, I don’t think I’ll be actively searching for more Allingham books. Sorry, H.

More ‘dated’ books:

1. Wigs on the Green by Nancy Mitford
2. The Charioteer by Mary Renault
3. The Friendly Young Ladies by Mary Renault
4. Police at the Funeral by Margery Allingham
5. Emil and the Detectives by Erich Kästner
6. The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
7. Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome
8. Kangaroo by D. H. Lawrence

Eats, Shoots and Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation by Lynne Truss

I’ve spent most of this year reading depressing non-fiction about the Second World War, but after I handed Montmaray Three over to my publisher, I gave myself permission to read anything I wanted. Something fun! So I decided to read a book about punctuation.

I heard a lot about this book when it first came out, but the author came across as kind of bitter and humourless in interviews, so I thought I’d give the book a miss. Readers, I was totally wrong. Not only is this book hilarious, it could have been written specifically for me. As Lynne Truss says, it is a book for punctuation sticklers:

“Part of one’s despair, of course, is that the world cares nothing for the little shocks endured by the sensitive stickler. While we look in horror at a badly punctuated sign, the world carries on around us, blind to our plight. We are like the little boy in The Sixth Sense who can see dead people, except that we can see dead punctuation . . . No one understands us seventh-sense people. They regard us as freaks. When we point out illiterate mistakes we are often aggressively instructed to ‘get a life’ by people who, interestingly, display no evidence of having lives themselves.”

Ms Truss is the sort of person who stands outside cinemas “with a cut-out apostrophe on a stick” in order to demonstrate how to punctuate the film title Two Weeks Notice. However, she readily acknowledges that the rules of punctuation are complex, that rules vary between nations (and even between publishers) and that one stickler’s pet hate might not be shared by another stickler. She is not a pedant. She loves punctuation because it helps us understand what we’re reading, and she hates punctuation errors because they cause confusion. For example, look at how punctuation alters the meaning of these two sentences:

“A woman, without her man, is nothing.
A woman: without her, man is nothing.”

She claims the book is not a punctuation guide, but it does provide clear instruction in how to use apostrophes, commas, semicolons, colons, exclamation marks and other forms of punctuation. I particularly liked her discussion of the comma, which demonstrates her pragmatic approach to punctuation:

“See that comma-shaped shark fin ominously slicing through the waves in this direction? Hear that staccato cello? Well, start waving and yelling, because it is the so-called Oxford comma (also known as the serial comma) and it is a lot more dangerous than its exclusive, ivory-tower moniker might suggest. There are people who embrace the Oxford comma and people who don’t, and I’ll just say this: never get between these people when drink has been taken . . . My own feeling is that one shouldn’t be too rigid about the Oxford comma. Sometimes the sentence is improved by including it; sometimes it isn’t.”

[Evidence for the passion the Oxford comma evokes can be found in this post at Bookshelves of Doom. And don’t you love that American commenter who chose to study at a British university, then was outraged that the British professors wanted her to use British punctuation? The nerve of them!]

Eats, Shoots and Leaves also contains some fascinating historical facts about punctuation, and an interesting discussion of the future of punctuation in a world of e-mails and texting. My only criticisms of the book are minor. Firstly, it lacks an index. I think it ought to be compulsory for all non-fiction books to have an index. (Actually, it would be quite nice if fiction books had them, too, so that I could go straight to my favourite bits when re-reading a novel. I can see that constructing an index for a novel could be rather difficult in practice, though.) Secondly (and this isn’t the author’s fault), the edition I read was written in 2003 for a British readership, so it was not completely relevant for this Australian punctuation stickler. Nevertheless, Eats, Shoots and Leaves is a terrific read and I heartily recommend it for fellow sticklers.

The Kitchen Front, Part Two: Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam . . .

I’d been intending to do another Kitchen Front post for a while, but sadly, my attempts at authentic 1940s meals have not been a success. The vegetable part has been easy – I like vegetables – although I must admit, quite a lot of British recipes of the time seem to involve boiling the poor things to death, then smothering them in a margarine-based white sauce.

No, the problem has been meat. Meat was rationed during the war, of course, but what made it tricky for me was that it was rationed by price, not weight. Each adult was allowed one shilling and ten pence worth of meat each week, although this had fallen to one shilling’s worth by 1941 (while food prices had soared). I think this would have bought a couple of chops or about twelve ounces (340 g) of mince or stewing beef. That doesn’t seem so bad to me (it’s as much meat as I’d usually eat in a week), but I had to remember that in pre-war Britain, families who could afford it ate meat at breakfast, lunch and dinner. It must have been a real hardship for them, trying to adapt to rations. I should add that bacon and ham were rationed separately, with the total amount ranging from eight ounces (225 g) to four ounces per week. Poultry, fish and rabbit weren’t rationed, but were difficult to obtain, unless you were lucky enough to live on a farm in the country.

Given these restrictions, it’s no wonder the British welcomed the first shipments of SPAM® after the signing of the Lend Lease agreement with the United States in 1941. I thought I’d try it out myself, and purchased a tin from my local supermarket. I’d read that it could be used straight from the tin to make tasty sandwiches, so I put a few slices of it on wholemeal bread with margarine, mustard and lettuce. Readers – do not try this at home. It was like eating a very salty piece of pink sponge – and I’d bought the salt-reduced version. But perhaps I’d put too much SPAM® on my sandwich. My next experiment involved dicing it and adding it to a hash of potato, cauliflower, spinach and whatever other vegetables I could find in my fridge. This was better, although I don’t think the SPAM® contributed much to the dish. I still had a third of a tin of SPAM® left, so in desperation, I added small cubes of it to a stir-fry of bok choy and rice noodles. This was quite nice, the little pieces of SPAM® providing some salty, fatty goodness to an otherwise healthy meal. However, it wasn’t exactly an authentic 1940s British dinner. Bok choy would have been unknown to most British diners, and rice was in extremely short supply, due to the British not being able to import it from Asia, especially after the Japanese entered the war. In fact, I read about one Chinese restaurant in London that chopped up spaghetti to make ‘rice’.

Still, if I’d been living in England during the war, I probably would have eaten SPAM® and liked it – although I think I might have been tempted to become a vegetarian and exchange my meat ration for cheese.

And speaking of spam, why does my blog attract such weird examples of it? I don’t mean the usual offers to increase the size of my (nonexistent) penis or make me a millionaire in thirty days. I’m talking about the spam comments that seem to have been translated through several languages by someone with very little understanding of any language, let alone English. For example:

“Out! Gone. And I maid the, misconstrue the bus, the close halfwit!
Clara Hyummel kicked in spleen nor innocent stool. My sinfulness, Alya, overlooked! Underestimated.”

and

“All the in in the terra won’t mutate the at one’s fingertips’s awareness of him as a scant Napoleon with a eminent mouth.”

I know it’s usually generated by a computer, but it’s hilarious how even the relatively coherent ones manage to be completely unrelated to the blog post on which they are ‘commenting’. For example, this appeared on my blog post about fan mail:

“my partner and i love this specific, where can I receive much more home elevators this particular topic?”

(And it wasn’t even advertising ‘home elevators’ – the link in the address looked like a site that sold Windows-related software.)

And this was a response to my post about my favourite fictional girls:

“I have to say that I thought this piece was very profound . . . It has shown me a new insight in to my research about current government policy.”

Of course, most spam is far more creative when it comes to English grammar:

“I firm next to way of this blog ask for up and it is really incredible.I patently genuinely enjoy your website.Perfectly, the chunk of posting is in pledge the very finest on this genuinely worth even though subject.”

However, my award for Spam of the Month has to go to this spammer (advertising a real estate agent), who posted the following comment to my blog:

“Im completely fed up with this, in the event you spam my internet site or even blog site 1 more point in time I am going to expose you!”

Even the manufacturers of SPAM® are fed up with spam. Thank goodness for Akismet spam filtering service.

How To Write A Novel

The Saturday edition of The Sydney Morning Herald has been running “a series about how to write”, which I have been reading with increasing irritation. First there was Sue Woolfe, who stated that anyone can write a novel, provided they “don’t stick to a subject, a character or, worst of all, a plot”. Her advice is not to read what you’ve written until you have a hundred thousand words “about anything”, whereupon you add “some narrative techniques and suspense” and, voila, “you’ll have the novel you knew you could write”! Oh, and you mustn’t use a computer – that’s death to creativity.

Then there was Debra Adelaide, who insisted on “total extermination” of adverbs. She isn’t keen on adjectives, either – they’re the “cockroaches of prose”.

MERCIFULLY (I intend to saturate this post with adverbs), most of the other articles in this series have been wiped from my memory, but they were EQUALLY ANNOYING.

Phyllis BnF Francais 874, Folio 11v — The author resolutely ignores all those urging her to delete her adverbs

Here’s why they annoyed me. They imply that all you have to do to write a good novel is to follow a set of simple rules that apply to all writers and all situations. I agree that a writer needs to know about grammar. However, blanket statements, such as “Adverbs are evil”, make me bristle. Yes, deleting all the adverbs in your prose may make it sound cleaner and more contemporary. But if you’re writing a series about, say, posh British people in the 1930s, your prose (and especially your dialogue) will sound inauthentic if you delete all the adverbs. I’ve studied English grammar and I think about it constantly as I write. But sometimes I start my sentences with conjunctions or end them with prepositions – because that’s what works in a novel written in the first person, narrated by a teenage girl. Every writing project – and every writer – is unique. Some writers need to do detailed planning before they begin a first draft; other writers work best by jumping into the project feet first. Some people find it efficient to edit as they write; others find this slows their writing down. Telling writers that there is ONLY ONE TRUE WAY TO WRITE A NOVEL is wrong and silly. Writing is not brain surgery. If you try something and it doesn’t work, you’re not going to kill anyone. Just press ‘delete’ ON YOUR COMPUTER and try again.

FORTUNATELY, Gabrielle Carey restored some sanity to the series in today’s Herald by saying:

“There are many things one can get out of a writing class: advice on character, structure, grammar and punctuation. But that leap into the creative realm is something you can only do on your own.”

EXACTLY! She also talks about teaching creative writing to rich, successful adults, who, having achieved all their other goals in life, decide they’re going to bang out a novel:

“They pay exorbitant prices for creative writing classes but by the end they often come up to me and say, ‘Well, it’s been interesting. I’ve learnt a lot. But I’ve realised it’s just too hard. I’m going back to law.'”

It’s true, writing a novel can be hard work. It takes concentration, good language skills, persistence, an ability to exist on limited sleep and funds – plus a mysterious, amorphous element called ‘creativity’. It’s tempting to try to get around all this by persuading an author to surrender what Ms Carey laughingly calls “some secret code or some magic advice”. But I agree with her – there ISN’T a secret code.

Of course, I’ve never actually done a creative writing course, so what would I know? Group instruction for a solitary pursuit like writing just isn’t my thing, but I’m sure some writing courses are great, especially the ones that take place over a long period of time, have a small number of students, focus on a particular type of writing (say, ‘writing a short story’ or ‘writing fiction for children’) and are taught by someone with both writing and teaching expertise. You don’t need to do a creative writing course to become a published novelist, but if you like the sound of a particular course and can afford it, why not?

What I can recommend from personal experience is working with a mentor. A mentorship is for writers who’ve committed themselves to hard work – who’ve sat down and written a draft (or several drafts) of a novel and realised they need help with the next stage. Mentors can give specific advice on your manuscript, once they’ve talked with you about what you want to achieve. Some of them also know agents and publishers, which is useful if you feel your novel is complete and you’d like to try to get it published. Your local writers’ centre may have a mentorship program, and free mentorships are awarded each year by the Australian Society of Authors and the Children’s Book Council of Australia.

Of course, you don’t need a mentor to become a published writer. You don’t need a literary agent, either – at least, you don’t if you live in Australia. But that discussion is probably best left for another post.