Matthew Dennison | The Spectator columnists & writers

Second chances: The Marble Staircase, by Elizabeth Fair, reviewed

To reject ‘in rainy middle age the poignant emotions that belonged to youth and Italy’ is the lesson learned by the heroine of Elizabeth Fair’s last novel. More than 60 years after its author consigned the typescript to a black tin trunk, following her literary agent’s failure to find a publisher for this, her seventh novel, The Marble Staircase finally sees the light. This is thanks to Furrowed Middlebrow and Dean Street Press, the company responsible for reprinting the six light, romantic comedies that, in the 1950s, earned Fair an appreciative following and commendations from writers such as Compton Mackenzie, John Betjeman and Stevie Smith. Literary rediscoveries are always potentially exciting. Uppermost in this one’s case is the contrast between fortysomething Charlotte Moley and the author’s earlier heroines.

The road to independence

Alone with her father’s dead body, Olive Piper says, ‘I don’t know anything, except what I feel, and how can anyone know more?’ In Susan Hill’s new novel, Olive’s acceptance of the primacy of feeling represents a coming of age. Her maturity is achieved at a cost. As in a number of her recent novels — Black Sheep and A Kind Man — Hill explores with great economy an idea of the ubiquity of differentness. Olive, her very name suggestive of something drab and unobtrusive, is a girl of conventional background: in appearance and, apparently, outlook and ability, she is unremarkable. Her life seems predestined for ordinariness. As a schoolgirl she accepts a career in teaching as ‘inevitable’, though she remains convinced that ‘real life was elsewhere’.

Wings of desire

Maria Sibylla Merian was a game old bird of entrepreneurial bent, with an overwhelming obsession with insects. Born in Frankfurt in 1647, she sacrificed her health and financial stability in pursuit of her passion. It carried her halfway across the globe and earned her lasting renown among a handful of cognoscenti. Merian was 15 when Jan Goedart published the first of his three volumes of Metamorphosis et historia naturalis insectorum and is unlikely to have seen the book until later. Goedart’s purpose, based on close observation of a range of insects, was a fuller understanding of insect life cycles. It was the same purpose to which Maria Merian devoted herself — even resorting to selling snakes, lizards, a tortoise and a crocodile to fund her compulsion.

Osbert Lancaster: a national treasure rediscovered

True to his saw that ours is ‘a land of rugged individualists’, Osbert Lancaster, in his self-appointed role of popular architectural historian, presented the 1,000-year history of Britain’s built environment from a resolutely personal perspective. Like the majority of his generation — Lancaster was born in 1908 and published Pillar to Post in 1938, following it with Homes Sweet Homes a year later — he cultivated a vigorous dislike of all things Victorian. Again and again he demolished the earnest conceits of 19th-century orthodoxy: ‘the antiquarian heresy’; ‘the great dreary moth of Victorian revivalism’; ‘the jackdaw strain inherent in every true Victorian’. Lancaster’s skill lay in the accuracy and apparent gossamer lightness of his touch.

The art of Beatrix Potter

Portrait or landscape?

One of the default settings of garden journalists is the adjective ‘painterly’ — applied to careful colour harmonies within a border (or equally considered clashes) and long, swooping vistas. It evokes soft sfumato smudges of pink and green, much as I imagine the interior of the late Queen Mother’s wardrobe must have looked. But it’s also misleading. Among minor inconsistencies of British culture is that, despite the national obsession with gardening and an attachment to landscape painting, the two have failed to find one another. We still have no more than a fitful tradition of garden painting. Granted there have been moments. Under the later Stuarts, a gaggle of Netherlandish artists produced paintings and engravings that offered the viewer aerial panoramas of country houses within their garden and landscape settings.

It takes a thief...

In the words of one of his contemporaries ‘a man of down look, lean-faced and full of pock holes’, the 17th-century ne’er-do-well Thomas Blood sounds an unattractive proposition. His latest biographer, Robert Hutchinson, works hard to imbue him with the pantomime glamour of a lovable rogue. Hutchinson roots Blood’s rackety life firmly within the context of the equally rackety Restoration underworld, with its network of spies and spymasters, venial courtiers and religious fanatics. Appropriately he makes vivid use of the sort of rhetoric more often associated with old-fashioned adventure stories. His Blood is a forerunner of the Scarlet Pimpernel, ‘a man of action who would risk all to liberate his friends even at the eleventh hour’; he indulges in ‘madcap’ and ‘harum-scarum’ ‘escapades’ and his chief weapons are ‘daredevil audacity’, ‘astonishing effrontery’ and ‘buckets of Irish charm’.

Wellington’s PR machine

The history of portraiture is festooned with images of sitters overwhelmed by dress, setting and the accoutrements of worldly success. Vanity, complacency and, frequently, insecurity have led men and women to commission or sit for likenesses in which an extra swag of braid, another row of pearls, flounce of silk or plume topples the finished image from celebration to indictment. In such portraits, the artist hardly needs to essay psychological insights: luscious visual bombast betrays the chasm between appearance and truth. In images as diverse as Van Eyck’s ‘Arnolfini Portrait’ of 1434, Antoine-François Callet’s 1775 coronation portrait of Louis XVI and Sargent’s ‘Mrs Carl Meyer and her Children’ of 1896, ostentation becomes the keynote that, unwittingly on the sitters’ part, leads to revelations.

The merry monarch and his mistresses; was sex for Charles II a dangerous distraction?

In a tone of breezy bravado in keeping with their concept of their subject’s character, Don Jordan and Michael Walsh have written a swashbuckling life of Charles II. This is narrative history that seldom slows to accommodate analysis, the Restoration court presented as the stuff of a TV mini-series: febrile, frenetic and vivid. At the centre of the vortex, Charles himself emerges as an amorous roisterer, dominated by his libido. The King’s Bed reminded me of the Ladybird history books of my childhood, biography in bite-size chunks, centred on suitably memorable happenings or themes, the events of the past pithily retold and pared down to externals. But while the Ladybird books were at pains to offer their young readers a wide-ranging (albeit short) overview of their subjects, Jordan and Walsh maintain a single focus: Charles’s sex life.

Elizabeth is about to become Britain’s longest-reigning queen. Here’s how she’s changed monarchy

On 24 September 1896 Queen Victoria was given a present of a paper knife, and expressed herself ‘much delighted’. The handle was set with overlapping gold coins each bearing the portrait of a British monarch. The uppermost coin bore an image of Victoria herself; the one beneath it, that of her grandfather George III. As Victoria recorded in her journal, 23 September 1896 was ‘the day on which I have reigned longer, by a day, than any English sovereign’. She had exceeded George III’s record of 21,644 days on the throne and, unlike her grandfather, remained of sound mind (if you overlook her taste in interior decoration and her views on women’s rights). Recent Buckingham Palace calculations suggest that at her death in January 1901, Victoria had reigned 23,226 days, 16 hours and 23 minutes — in layman’s terms, 63 years and seven months.

Snow - art’s biggest challenge

In owning a flock of artificial sheep, Joseph Farquharson must have been unusual among Highland lairds a century ago. His Aberdeenshire estate covered 20,000 acres — surely enough to support the modest local ovine needs. But Farquharson was a painter, the fake sheep artist’s models. For cleanliness and biddability, few grazing ewes can match a woolly dummy. Joseph Farquharson was 27 when he scored his first hit at the Royal Academy in 1873. ‘Day’s Dying Glow’ depicts a handful of sheep negotiating a snowy incline alongside an icy burn. Leafless trees crown a mound. Behind them a sickly sun is sinking or possibly rising. It is an image of some technical proficiency, which a Victorian audience, versed in reading paintings as visual narratives, could just about imbue with meaning and sentiment.

Fifty years of Inspector Wexford – and a new detective on the block

Early on in The Girl Next Door, Ruth Rendell gives the reader a sharp nudge. ‘Colin Quell had very little interest in people, what they might think, how they might act in the future.’ The novel is Rendell’s latest stand alone mystery, the uninterested Quell its detective inspector. Forcibly she announces that neither physically nor temperamentally is this Wexford territory. Quell’s stomping grounds are the outer suburbs of London, where the capital spills into Essex, specifically Loughton, where once the octogenarian Rendell herself attended the County High School. In the present day, though not at the time of the novel’s buried crime, Loughton lacks the residual rural outlook of Wexford’s Kingsmarkham, itself inspired by Midhurst in West Sussex.

You’ll never look at dried pasta in the same way again

A calculated ordinariness unites the protagonists in Graham Swift’s new collection of short stories. In each of these mini fictions, as in his novels, Swift revisits his conceit of the narrator as man (or woman) on the Clapham omnibus. Invariably he endows these blank ciphers with aspects of the extraordinary — percipience, insight or understanding — or exposes them to feelings and events which place them in extraordinary positions and offer them opportunities to behave remarkably while remaining apparently run of the mill. Swift revels in the trappings of Pooterishness while denying his protagonists Mr Pooter’s silliness. His vision may be contrived but it never patronises. The experience of these stories rescues Swift’s ‘ordinary’ men and women from stereotype, a moral in itself.

Not quite romantic fiction, or literary fiction, or commercial fiction – but still quite good

Elements of Raffaella Barker’s new novel, her eighth for adults, suggest commercial fiction: a narrative that oscillates between the aftermath of the second world war and the present day, and two failsafe locations, Cornwall and the Norfolk coast. But From a Distance is not commercial fiction. Barker’s narrative is sparingly studded with quotations, but this is not literary fiction either. There is a strong love interest, which does not blossom into romantic fiction. Barker’s novel is a hybrid, enjoyable, ultimately heart-warming. It lacks the freshness and charm of the earlier Hens Dancing, but recalls some of its vividness and forensically detailed scrutiny of family life. In 1946, Michael, a demobilised soldier, avoids returning to his prewar life.

Margaret Drabble tries to lose the plot

Halfway through her new novel, Margaret Drabble tells us of Anna, the pure gold baby of the title, ‘There was no story to her life, no plot.’ That statement is partly true. It is also a challenge, a gauntlet cast by this very knowing writer at the reader’s feet; in terms of Drabble’s narrative, it is something of a mission statement. Seven years after her last novel, and despite suggestions (by herself) that her fiction-writing days were over, Drabble has written a novel that consistently resists readers’ simplest assumptions. The Pure Gold Baby is a fiction apparently based on fact, which works hard to suggest that it has no pattern, no plot and will reach no neat ending. Drabble’s rationale suits her subject: her chief focus is the life of Anna’s mother, Jess, over a 50-year period, beginning in the Sixties.

The imitable Jeeves

For as long as I can remember — I take neither pleasure nor pride in the admission — I have been one of those people who feels an irresistible curling of the lip at reviews of the ‘I laughed till I cried’ variety. Something about that hackneyed claim, invariably trumpeted in bold letters outside West End theatres, inspires absolute scepticism. No longer. At two memorable moments in Jeeves and the Wedding Bells I did indeed laugh until I cried. To readers unfamiliar with his role as a team captain on Radio 4’s The Write Stuff, the literary quiz which culminates each week with a pastiche of an author’s style, Sebastian Faulks, still best known for his novels Birdsong and Charlotte Gray, may appear an unlikely candidate for donning the mantle of P.

Mrs Bridge and Mr Bridge, by Evan S. Connell - review

A policeman encountering Mrs Bridge on the home furnishings floor of a Kansas City department store recognises her at once for what she is: ‘a bona-fide country-club matron’. Had she been asked to identify herself, Mrs Bridge would have said the same, after asserting unequivocally that she was first and foremost the wife of Mr Walter Bridge, successful Kansas City lawyer, as entirely constrained by her status as professional spouse as Chaucer’s Wife of Bath or Jan Struther’s Mrs Miniver. Like Mrs Miniver, Mrs Bridge inhabits an interwar world shaped by a promise of certainties — domestic, social, cultural and sexual — which are never wholly realised and remain frustratingly elusive. As a result, every aspect of her life is dominated by the same unresolved anxiety.

Another bleak house on the Fens

Some years ago, Susan Hill stated in an interview: ‘It’s not plot that interests me but setting, people in a setting, wrestling with an abstract subject.’ In her ghost stories, of which Dolly is the latest, Hill exploits the impact of setting on character: the role of atmosphere and environment in shaping human suggestibility and the dramatic and sensational possibilities of this encounter. Hill’s ghost stories are consciously literary creations. Beginning with The Woman in Black, she revels in the long shadow of Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw. She makes allusions to Wilkie Collins and throughout Dolly and The Mist in the Mirror (first published in 1992, now reissued in hardback), Hill’s descriptive writing — the recurrent evocation of setting — recalls Dickens’s famous ‘fog’ passage at the beginning of Bleak House.

Old lovers...

If it is true that we demand of our favourite authors above all consistency — a certain fidelity to the territory that they have earlier marked out as their own — Ancient Light contains ingredients certain to please Banville aficionados. ‘Images from the far past crowd in my head and half the time I cannot tell whether they are memories or inventions,’ the novel’s narrator tells us at the outset. On the instant we are transported back through four decades of Banville’s writing: ‘We imagine that we remember things as they were, while in fact all we carry into the future are fragments which reconstruct a wholly illusory past,’ he asserted in an earlier novel, Birchwood, written in 1973. And so, in Ancient Light, it proves to be.

Bookends: Tilling tales

Several years ago, I listed as my literary heroes Herbert Pocket in Great Expectations and E. F. Benson’s Lucia. The latter was the more damaging admission. Lucia is an egotist of monstrous proportions, ruthlessly selfish and staggering in her snobbery. But she is also a life force and, in her flawed but thrusting glory, profoundly life-enhancing. Since her debut in 1920, Lucia has inspired her fair share of loathing — and a corresponding degree of ardour.That ardour stimulated Tom Holt’s two Lucia sequels in the mid-Eighties, and now the second of Guy Fraser-Sampson’s Lucia forays, Lucia on Holiday (Elliott & Thompson, £7.99). Holt’s Lucia novels worked by over-emphasising the role of Benson’s minor characters, thereby lessening the pressure on the author where Lucia herself was concerned.

Prince of progress

The tragedy of Prince Albert was not that he died at the age of forty-two 150 years ago this month, but that his quick-tempered and lusty Hanoverian wife loved him too well. Queen Victoria’s orgiastic response to widowhood — her determination through four decades of sorrowful singledom never again to be amused — kicked over the traces of the real Albert and replaced him with that earnest-looking paragon who stares cheerlessly at pigeons and commuters alike from some 20 or so heavyweight sculptures and monuments scattered across the British Isles. Victoria’s grief was elemental: ‘My life as a happy one is ended! The world is gone for me!’ So absolute was her absorption in her suffering that it became her raison d’être.

Death of the Author

The death of the Polish-born British novelist Joseph Conrad is the central event of David Miller’s debut novel.The death of the Polish-born British novelist Joseph Conrad is the central event of David Miller’s debut novel. A reimagining of Conrad’s final days, Today explores the nature of bereavement. Within the novel’s confines, Conrad exists simply as a character — a dying man whose profession has been that of a writer and whose working life has necessitated the presence of a secretary, Lillian Hallowes, who, up to a point, offers the reader a commentary on the novel’s happenings. Miller attempts no assessment of Conrad’s work, his literary status or psychology. In this, Today resembles a television drama: it exploits verifiable events as a backdrop to universal human responses, namely those of Conrad’s friends, colleagues and family to his death.

UnEnglish triumph

Sometimes an exhibition does what it says on the tin. The Pre-Raphaelites and Italy, the Ashmolean’s first major show post-revamp, is such an exhibition. Sometimes an exhibition does what it says on the tin. The Pre-Raphaelites and Italy, the Ashmolean’s first major show post-revamp, is such an exhibition. This fidelity is simultaneously its strength and its weakness. In a dazzling and far-reaching show, the exhibition organisers ultimately leave us questioning the nature and meaning not only of Pre-Raphaelitism but also of 19th-century concepts of Italy. This may be part of the exhibition’s achievement. It does not make for the easy ride exhibition-goers have come to expect from the Pre-Raphaelites. In place of those all-too-familiar lusciously coloured images of narcotic sexiness and tantalising sidelights on to their creators’ erratic private lives, we are presented with 140 pictures produced by a large group of artists.

Pass the cheese, Louise

Widowhood in 1955 was not a desirable state. Not, at any rate, for Louise Bickford, heroine of The Winds of Heaven (first published in 1955, now reprinted by Persephone). Louise is 57. She has a small, inadequate income from her parents. From her ghastly husband Dudley she has inherited nothing but debts. She has lost her house and all her possessions, save a few clothes, and with them her way of life, her identity and her place as an adult invested with those attributes. In middle age, she has been downgraded to second chilhood. None of which is her fault. Within the parameters of Monica Dickens’s mid-century, middle-class world, such is the inevitable result of financial ruin and dependency. At a time of economic uncertainty, this is a troubling suggestion for readers today.

More than a painter of Queens

The last words of Hungarian-born portraitist Philip de László, spoken to his nurse, were apparently, ‘It is a pity, because there is so much still to do.’ As Duff Hart-Davis’s biography amply demonstrates, for de László, art — which he regarded as ‘work’ as much as an aesthetic vocation — was both the purpose and the substance of his life.The last words of Hungarian-born portraitist Philip de László, spoken to his nurse, were apparently, ‘It is a pity, because there is so much still to do.’ As Duff Hart-Davis’s biography amply demonstrates, for de László, art — which he regarded as ‘work’ as much as an aesthetic vocation — was both the purpose and the substance of his life. De László himself estimated that he completed 2,700 full-scale portraits in oils over the course of a fifty-year career.

Big frocks, silk stockings and lissom ladies

Matthew Dennison on the life of Augustus Harris, the Victorian showman who invented the Christmas pantomime and pioneered sex, celebrity and excess as an art formForget Lord Leighton and his fleshy goddesses forced to bare all in the interests of classical scholarship. Forget Wilkie Collins and Mary E. Braddon, and those sensational stories of exciting young women with a past. Foremost among 19th-century efforts to cloak titillation in the garb of respectability is the invention of the principal boy of pantomime. You know the scenario. The stage is set. Young boy is looking for love. Bad guys — an overdressed middle-aged transvestite plus accomplices, most of whom appear and disappear in puffs of smoke to the accompaniment of hissing and booing on the part of the audience — do their best to stop him.

Dog days for British breeds

Imagine the scenario. You are a military man who retires at 40. Able-bodied, cushioned by a small army pension and the income from a rural estate in west Wales, you turn your back on soldiering. You remain through and through a sportsman. Across your peaceful acres foxes, badgers and otters carve their busy paths. In barns and hedgerows rats and rabbits run amok. How to rout out so much quarry? Only one way presents itself to the resourceful mid-Victorian landowner: breed your own terrier. It is 1848. Meet Captain John Tucker Edwardes.Edwardes knew what he wanted: a sporting little dog, low to the ground, tenacious, brave and mostly white in colour — in every way a characteristically 19th-century British ideal.

Strangely familiar

In 1935, Noël Coward included in his series of playlets, Tonight at 8.30, a jaunty, song-filled exposé, in Victorian dress, of fam- ily relationships, Family Album. Penelope Lively’s novel of the same title, her 16th, covers similar territory — without the jauntiness or predisposition to burst into song.It is an apt title. Lively’s novel is an extended meditation on the meaning of family, the nature of blood relationship and our interconnectedness based on the accident of birth. In place of conventional plot, it proceeds by snapshots and vignettes, a series of portraits and first-person narratives, not so much a story as a sequence of word pictures held together like beads on a string by the flexible thread of the subjects’ kinship.

The day the music died

An earnest young man upbraids his singing teacher. ‘Why don’t you sing classical more often?’ It is Bombay in the early Eighties. The young man’s father has enjoyed a successful career in management, with the result that ‘his childhood had been almost entirely chauffeur-driven’. His singing teaching, peddling remarkable gifts to earn an unremarkable living in the rambunctious city in which his talent is only one among many, is older and pragmatic. You cannot practise art on an empty stomach. Let me make enough money from these lighter forms; and then I’ll be able to devote myself entirely to classical.The argument is not a new one. Amit Chaudhuri’s latest novel successfully revisits a debate about the role and place of art in the human experience.

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