Behaving Badly – and Barbara Pym

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Barbara Pym, Barbara Pym Society, Behaving Badly, Catherine Heath, Green Leaves, Judi Dench, St Hilda's College Oxford

‘I could hardly make a big production of it, you know… when he told me, about how he’d spent the night with some girl called Rebecca, all I could think of was the fact that I’d bought turbot for supper…’

Catherine Heath’s fifth and final novel Behaving Badly gives us one of the most brilliantly-conceived comic heroines ever. Published in 1984, it is somehow perfect escapist reading for today, taking us to a past which feels in retrospect to have been more innocent and less complicated.

‘I was going to do Hollandaise sauce, and I thought, oh dear, our lovely dinner’s going to be quite wasted. So when he told me about this girl I just said, oh, yes, I see. Oh, thank you for telling me. And that was all and we ate the turbot and do you know I quite enjoyed it… So I mean, there’s no point in putting on a tragic act. It stands to reason that nobody, nobody that greedy has much dignity to stand on.’

Fifty-year-old Bridget Mayor has dutifully filled her life with hobbies, television and church-going after her husband dumped her five years earlier to marry a much younger woman. Nothing very unusual about that for women in seventies Britain. But what happens when an Excellent Woman stops being excellent and decides she will start pleasing herself instead of other people? What’s the point in clinging to dignity? To her husband’s horrified discomfiture Bridget insists on moving back into her old home in Hampstead, where her devious ex-mother-in-law Frieda conspires to get rid of the intruder Rebecca. But that’s just the start…

Writing in The Times, Isabel Raphael wrote of Behaving Badly: Here is an exceptional novel, brisk and unsentimental, touching and subtly romantic. It is also very funny. Her style is poised and cool and her dialogue as artfully artless as that of Barbara Pym; and there is no higher praise in novels of this kind.

There are connections between the two novelists Barbara Pym (1913-1980) and Catherine Heath (1924-1991): both studied English Literature at St Hilda’s College Oxford, both seamlessly combine wit, satire and sympathy, and both died of cancer aged sixty-six. But it’s disappointing that Catherine Heath remains relatively unknown. In the Barbara Pym Society’s publication Green Leaves of November 1998 Hazel K. Bell wrote how she hoped that Catherine Heath’s wonderful novels would one day be rescued from obscurity, in the same way as Barbara Pym’s have been.

That hasn’t happened, despite Judi Dench’s superb performance as Bridget in the 1989 British television series of Behaving Badly, now available as a DVD. If only they would show it again!

Behaving Badly clearly isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. It will seem too dated for some, too much a piece of social history, even too trivial. But for others it’s an altogether delightful read where favourite lines can be relished over and over again: Upstairs Frieda closed a detective story. It was useless. She had no access to South American arrow poison. And as one character says near the end, using a very Barbara Pymish word, ‘Isn’t it, in a way, splendid?’

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sanditon – ‘I must not depend upon being ever very blooming again’

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Andrew Davies, Another Lady, Georgette Heyer, Marie Dobbs, Mr Woodhouse, Sanditon

In rereading Jane Austen, we are able to experience something of that age of elegance which too often eludes us in the twentieth century. We are unrepentant about this form of escapism and turn to her six novels for relaxation… Like Mr Woodhouse, we enjoy the company of these old friends best; and though we prefer their actual company to secondhand discussions and speculations about them, anything concerning them will always hold a fascination for us…. writes Another Lady AKA Marie Dobbs.

In her An Apology from the Collaborator, included at the end of Jane Austen’s Sanditon completed by Another Lady published in 1975, Marie Dobbs admits that she offers her version for our sheer enjoyment, aware that Jane Austen’s language, integrity and meticulous technique cannot be faithfully copied.

She was too hard on herself. Marie Dobbs’ completed Sanditon is peppered with delightful passages poking fun at human vanity and folly, which feel as though they could be written by Jane Austen herself. The Miss Beauforts… were certainly no longer content to remain on their balcony now these two personable young men were to be perceived strolling about admiring the Sanditon views. Indeed, they felt a definite obligation to improve the landscape for them immediately by dotting graceful feminine silhouettes wherever they be most visible. The very next day Miss Letitia carried her easel out of doors and began moving it from sand to shingle, from hill to Terrace with tireless and unselfish activity. No concern for completing her own sketches interfered with her sense of duty to adorn whatever vista might require her presence.

There is some splendid Austen-ish dialogue too, as in this speech from Reginald Catton, one of the only two on-stage characters added by Marie Dobbs: ‘So that was Miss Denham! Predatory female – Sidney warned me. He said I would not be in the least danger from anyone else – could handle all the Miss Beauforts with ease – but Miss Denham would be hanging about me forever if once she caught sight of my barouche. I told the groom to keep it well out of sight in the stables.’ 

Reginald Catton may also remind fans of Georgette Heyer of her comic young men about town, such as Ferdy Fakenham in Friday’s Child. Marie Dobbs makes the hero Sidney Parker resemble the witty, charming, teasing Henry Tilney in Northanger Abbey, but in his unassuming kind-heartedness there are echoes of Georgette Heyer’s endearing Freddy in Cotillion. The later developments of the plot come close to Heyer regency romances too – no problem for those of us who love both authors, as we must suspect Marie Dobbs did  – but perhaps some literary critics might argue that Jane Austen was intending to take a different and sharper line.

It’s difficult not to feel disappointment that Andrew Davies’ recent television adaptation of Sanditon didn’t follow the story and tone of the Another Lady/Marie Dobbs completed version. In the eleven chapters Jane Austen wrote before illness stopped her in March 1817, she set up everything we love in her other novels and Marie Dobbs fulfils the sparkling early promise with grace, respect and humour. Added to this we have in Sanditon a merciless satire of hypochondriacs and medical quackery, speaking to us all the more poignantly when we remember that Jane Austen was only four months away from her death on 18th July.

But as the ever-so-sensible heroine Charlotte says to the would-be seducer Sir Edward who has read more sentimental novels than agreed with him: ‘our taste in novels is not at all the same.’ Nor is our taste in television adaptations all the same, and this is probably a very good thing.

Oxford delights: Jilly Cooper and Barbara Pym

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19 magazine, Barbara Pym, Barbara Pym Society, Georgette Heyer, Harriet, Jane and Prudence, Jane Austen, Jilly Cooper, Lisa & Co, Nancy Mitford, Oxford, Petticoat magazine, Virago

What’s the connection between Jilly Cooper and Barbara Pym apart from them being quintessentially English and writing splendidly funny novels?

Jilly Cooper’s introduction to the 2007 Virago edition of Barbara Pym’s Jane and Prudence, first published in 1953, tells the story of how she borrowed the novel quite by chance from a library and fell in love with it. ‘I shamefully lied to the librarians that I had lost it, paying a 3s 6d fine … over the years, as Barbara Pym replaced Nancy Mitford, Georgette Heyer, even Jane Austen, as my most loved author, I devoured all her books, but Jane and Prudence remains my favourite.’

Jilly Cooper was therefore the perfect and altogether delightful guest at a magnificent tea in Oxford, celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Barbara Pym Society, as part of the Society’s weekend conference featuring Jane and Prudence.  Some of those attending might never have read a Jilly Cooper novel; others like myself have delicious youthful memories of revelling in her stories serialised in magazines like 19 and Petticoat, some of which were subsequently expanded into short romantic novels named after their heroines.

It’s in Harriet, partly set in Oxford and published in 1976, that we get a rather endearing echo of a scene in Barbara Pym’s Jane and Prudence; in both novels young girls remark to each other that thirty sounds so old but forty must be worse… whereupon they brood silently upon this horror!

Jilly Cooper might be more famous now for her ‘bonkbuster’ novels, starting with Riders in 1985, but perhaps the older among us will always have an affectionate soft spot for the irresistible heroes and scatty/naughty/dreamy/kind-hearted/unselfconfident/innocent heroines of the early romantic novels Bella, Emily, Octavia, Prudence, Harriet, Imogen and her collection of short stories Lisa & Co, first published as Love and Other Heartaches. They offered the escapist, romantic, comfort-with-comedy reading we sometimes needed when growing up.

As Jilly Cooper wrote of her short stories in 1981 ‘I cannot pretend that these stories are literature. They are written purely to entertain… Their mood is rooted firmly in the sixties, where we all lived it up… when the young were still optimistic about marriage, and believed that God was in his Heaven if all was Mr Right with the world.’

Jilly Cooper met Barbara Pym just once – at the Hatchards Authors of the Year Party in 1979 – a wonderful memory she will always treasure. I know I will do the same after meeting Jilly Cooper.

When only a Georgette Heyer will do

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Barbara Cartland, comedy, Georgette Heyer, heroes, heroines, Jane Austen, Of Human Telling, regency romances

‘I ought to be shot for writing such nonsense’ wrote Georgette Heyer, ‘but I think I should rather like it if I were sitting in an air-raid shelter or recovering from the flu.’

Nonsense Georgette Heyer’s regency romances may be, but there are times when they are just what the doctor ordered. From the first page we are taken into another world, knowing we are on safe ground where love and happiness will win through, in much the same way as Golden Age or cosy crime fiction leaves us with the reassurance that the baddies will get their come-uppance, good will triumph and order will be restored. Confidence and happiness is catching. Escapist literature gives us more than just a respite from our increasingly unpredictable and confusing world. It makes us feel better.

But why am I sounding so defensive? Perhaps because Georgette Heyer is sometimes viewed with disdainful superiority as being a literary stablemate of Barbara Cartland. Which is a mistake. This is not to criticise Barbara Cartland; I read one of her books when I was young and rather enjoyed it. If others had come my way, I’d probably have enjoyed those too. But anyone who has read more than a page of the regency novels of these two authors knows how entirely different they are.

It’s not surprising that Jane Austen devotees are often voracious readers of Georgette Heyer; it’s not only the regency setting and happy endings the novels have in common but the perfect grasp of comedy. We never tire of the humorous aspects of Mr Bennet, Mrs Elton and Mr Collins and so it is with the unforgettable comic characters who pepper Georgette Heyer’s books. Ask Georgette Heyer fans about which secondary character is the funniest and a clamour of opinions starts up, with Ferdy Fakenham in Friday’s Child a hot favourite.

Nor is it surprising that feminists often approve of Georgette Heyer because rather than creating soppy, milky heroines subservient to men, she shows us strong-minded, spirited young women who think and act for themselves: capable and feisty like Deborah in Faro’s Daughter and Sophy in The Grand Sophy who give as good as they get to any man who tries to rule them, intelligent and sensible like Drusilla in The Quiet Gentleman and Elinor in The Reluctant Widow.

Love doesn’t come one-size-fits-all either. We are shown mature love developing out of friendship in Sprig Muslin, the growth of self-knowledge and confidence in The Foundling, and a perceptive examination of the difference between infatuation and commitment in A Civil Contract.

‘A crash course in romantic novels – Georgette Heyer say – and men might learn what’s expected of them’ I made a disappointed character say with joking irony in my novel Of Human Telling. For Georgette Heyer offers us heroes to meet every changing taste as we grow older: boyishly charming Lord Sheringham in Friday’s Child, autocratic Lord Worth in Regency Buck, reformed rake Damerel in Venetia, philanthropic Waldo Hawkridge in The Nonesuch, wild Lord Vidal in Devil’s Cub, unassuming, kind-hearted Freddy in Cotillion. They may be very different but they have one thing in common: we can feel quite certain that they will always be faithful to the women they come to love and marry.

Georgette Heyer fans endlessly re-read her novels, catch themselves using the regency slang used by her characters, and hoard their tattered paperbacks so that unlike popular thrillers or issue novels you rarely find secondhand copies in charity shops. As the entirely wonderful Freddy Standen in Cotillion would say, stands to reason!

A woman ‘must improve her mind by extensive reading’ pronounces Mr Darcy in Pride and Prejudice, and nobody can argue with the principle in spite of the haughty manner in which it is delivered here. But most of us need a varied diet – light-hearted, sun-filled novels as well as more serious, thought-provoking, questioning ones.

There are many other delightful authors whom we may turn to for sheer undemanding enjoyment or when we are feeling ill or in need of comfort. I only know that Georgette Heyer will always, like Sir Tristram Shield in The Talisman Ring, ride ventre à terre to my side.

Richard Gordon

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Anaesthetists, Doctors, Hospitals, Richard Gordon, Soup, Walking the dog

Today’s obituary in the Times of Richard Gordon, the author of the comic Doctor novels, records his writing routine thus: in the morning he would write; a tin of soup would be his lunch; in the afternoon he’d walk the dog, dictating as he went any ideas that came to him; he’d then put in another couple of hours writing (except during the cricket season).

He’d given up his job as an anaesthetist (which he said he chose as he didn’t like patients, so here was a medical job where they were all asleep) when his writing started to progress. His wife (also an anaesthetist) supported him until the Doctor books became so successful. I hadn’t realised how much else he wrote, novels and non-fiction.

He said, “I have had a jolly easy life doing nothing, because writing is nothing, really, it’s dead easy.” Well, he was a writer of fiction …

He made a lot of people laugh.  RIP.

NIGHTMARE ON HARLEY STREET

 

BIFFIELD:           Don’t let them get me!

THERAPIST:         You’re perfectly safe, Mr Biffield. Lie back on my couch and relax.

BIFFIELD:           But I’m NOT safe…

THERAPIST:         My receptionist will bring you some green tea.

BIFFIELD:            No! Keep her away from me. She’s sure to be one of them.

 

 

THERAPIST:         Okay. Just the two of us, then.

BIFFIELD:          Lock the door. Quickly!

THERAPIST:        That isn’t necessary. You’re clearly suffering from some    kind  of persecution complex. Let’s talk it through quietly.

BIFFIELD:          There’s no escaping them. Dark glasses don’t help. A beanie hat fools nobody.  Should I try a false beard?

THERAPIST:        WHO do you imagine is after you, Mr Biffield? The Russians? MI6 agents? Aliens?

BIFFIELD:          The bastards always look innocent. Bin men.   Double glazing  salesmen. Pizza delivery guys. Yummy Mummies in the Waitrose queue. It’s a massive conspiracy.

THERAPIST:      Why on earth would these people be after you, Mr Biffield?=

BIFFIELD:         Because…  Oh, God. I can’t take any more. Even my wife…

HERAPIST:        Your wife?

BIFFIELD:          My EX-WIFE. The evidence was on her computer. She plotted to entrap me. I never even suspected. NEVER!

THERAPIST:         You’re having a panic attack. Try deep breaths…

BIFFIELD:          Discovering she was like all the rest. (SOBS) That was what    finally broke me.

THERAPIST:         But who ARE these people?

BIFFIELD:          WRITERS, man! Aspiring bloody WRITERS! They HOUND me. Night and day.

THERAPIST:         Writers HOUND you…but why?  Unless… You don’t mean you’re…

BIFFIELD:           A literary agent? YES, I am. 

THERAPIST:         Wow. Now I understand.

BIFFIELD:           At the beginning of my career I enjoyed work. Loved                having  envelopes rammed through my letterbox at midnight, handwritten in purple ink and secured with knicker elastic. Book proposals thrust at my poor cleaning lady. But now…

THERAPIST:         I feel your pain Mr Biffield. The quest for another Harry Potter must be challenging.                           

BIFFIELD:             …these days switching on my computer unleashes a sunami of synopses that are total gibberish. Chapters heaving with adverbs and split infinities. Letters insisting that absolute drivel will sell millions of copies.

THERAPIST:         You must have suffered terribly. Fortunately, I believe I have the cure in my desk drawer.

BIFFIELD:          Happy pills? I’ve swallowed them like a kid with Smarties. Useless.

THERAPIST:         Far better than that. A two-million-word trilogy about a voluptuous female vampire who is desperately in love with her handsome psychiatrist. My mother swears it’s a masterpiece…

 

 

Anglican Women Novelists: a treat in store

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Anglican Women Novelists, Barbara Pym Society, P D James, spinsters

The bodies were discovered at eight forty-five on the morning of Wednesday 18th September by Miss Emily Wharton, a 65-year-old spinster of the parish of St Matthews in Paddington, London, and Darren Wilkes, aged 10, of no particular parish as far as he knew or cared.

This, the irresistible opening sentence of A Taste for Death by P. D. James, was among the excerpts in the handout at a scintillating lecture given by Professor Alison Shell entitled ‘Anglicanism and Women Novelists: A Special Relationship’ at the Barbara Pym Society meeting in London on 7th May.

Crime and humour: these seem to be the predominant threads in Anglican fiction. Spinsters loom large … we were treated to excerpts from Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers and of course Barbara Pym.

Professor Alison Shell  is currently co-editing with Judith Maltby Anglican Women Novelists which includes essays on P. D. James, Rose Macauley, Barbara Pym and others from Charlotte Bronte onwards. The good news is that it’s being published by Bloomsbury early next year, so there’s not long to wait for what sounds like a fascinating study.

Agents Chatting, Over Coffee…

(With apologies to any agents who may be reading this!)

Erica:        I hear you’ve snagged a new author?

Dominic:   Yup. Huge talent.

Erica:        Exciting. What’s the elevator pitch?

Dominic:   Vampire lover of the Machu Picchu Mummies chats up girl on train.

Erica:        Wow!

Dominic:    I know. Vampires. Sex. Desiccated bodies. A girl and a train.

Erica:        You lucky sod.

Dominic:    She’s promotable, too. Young. Photogenic. Married to a neuro-surgeon.

Erica:        And all I’ve got at the moment is a talking caterpillar…

Dominic:    Tough.

Erica:        Though maybe the vampire thing is losing its edge…

Dominic:    My publishers reckon it still has bite. The mummy thread unravels a bit, but that should be fixable.

Erica:        Providing she’s co-operative, of course.

Dominic:    True. When they first get an agent, writers think them the best thing since chocolate fudge cake. Sadly, that doesn’t last.

Erica:        Tell me about it. The minute you want to edit their manuscript, you become Godzilla.

Dominic:   Yeah. Ask them to cut fifty thousand words, or tone down the sado-masochism and stick in a werewolf, and they go all Jane Austen on you.

Erica:        Writers, eh? But I guess we need them.

Dominic:   I know. The dream. Finding another JKR. Earning enough to buy that yacht – and never needing to plough through another mountain of bloody awful submissions again…

I’m not going to Hull this year

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Black comedy, Christopher Fielden, Dark humour, Office parties, Santa Claus, To Hull & Back Competition

Hats off to all those shortlisted and longlisted in the 2016 To Hull and Back competition! See http://www.christopherfielden.com/short-story-competition/results-2016.php for those fortunate names – and for their photos and biographies if you follow the links.

I scanned down the list hurriedly in order (I confess) to see if my name was there. It wasn’t. Then I looked again, for any other of the ninevoices. Alas, no. So my rather nasty story, about a bully at an appalling office party who gets his comeuppance when dressed as Santa Claus in our local shopping centre, will have to blush unseen and waste its sweetness on the desert air.

This comp has got quite a few mentions on this blog. We must wait until next month to learn the winners. And then there’ll be an anthology – last year’s included some remarkably quirky stories. (‘Quirky’ is an understatement for many of them … ) In Chris Fielden’s words, “there needs to be some element of humour within the story, even if it’s just one brief amusing moment. Black comedy and dark humour is fine, as is fluffy kitten mainstream amusement.”

Well done the eventual winners.

‘Rumpole and the Penge Bungalow Murders’

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John Mortimer, Penge, Rumpole, The law

LOL!   That was me on the train from Stoke-on-Trent to London Euston on Monday, reading Rumpole and the Penge Bungalow Murders by the late John Mortimer. I don’t know how annoyed or amused my fellow travellers were by my unsuppressed hilarity as I was too busy reading.

Devotees of Rumpole will know that throughout his career at the criminal bar he refers to his early success in the Penge Bungalow Murders case, which he won “alone and without a leader”. It’s a running joke. The details of this are not (as far as I’m aware), spelled out in the earlier books. Then, towards the end of his thirty-year long Rumpole-writing career, in 2004 John Mortimer decided actually to tell us this story.

What makes the novel so delicious is that we also discover the very first occasion that Rumpole gets involved with the Timson family, the irredeemably thieving family from South London, and their eternal feud with the Molloys. They are to feature throughout Rumpole’s career at the criminal bar. We also learn what we must always have wondered (well I have, anyway) – how on earth Rumpole got married to Hilda, She Who Must Be Obeyed. The details of their courtship (hardly the right word) are here laid out for our delectation. Poor Horace Rumpole …

We are in the 1950s. Rumpole is at the very beginning of his career as a criminal barrister (a ‘white wig’). He finds himself in the chambers in Equity Court in the Temple that we are going to get to know so well in his future stories. Two ex-RAF war heroes are found shot dead in the bungalows they inhabit in the same road in Penge, archetypal south London suburbia. All the evidence points to their having been shot by the son of one of them. Rumpole’s Head of Chambers (father of the future She Who Must Be Obeyed) gets the case, but his concern for what he sees as ‘the finest traditions of the bar’ seem likely to doom his client to the rope. How Rumpole’s role in the case increases, and its outcome, are the guts of the story.

For me the best bits of the novel are the court scenes, written with all the experience and skill you would expect from John Mortimer QC. The ways Rumpole cheeks the judges always amuse me. But also the scenes in chambers, with characters we have got to know over the years, also appeal. And it’s not just funny: the hangman looms over the story throughout, and Mortimer’s dissection of the absurdities of the legal system has its serious side.  The principle that someone is presumed innocent until proven guilty is also a key focus.

I do see the actor Leo McKern when I read Rumpole. And the Penguin edition I’ve been reading displays McKern on the front cover. As many of the Rumpole stories were written after the TV series had been such a success perhaps Mortimer too came to see McKern when he wrote Rumpole. I see from Wikipedia that he initally wanted Alastair Sim for the role (“but he was dead”).

Because I’ve been watching and reading Rumpole for so long I can’t really imagine how this novel would work for someone completely new to it. The cosy feel of the familiar characters, the running jokes, all add to my enjoyment – I do think that it is so fluently written, and with Mortimer’s skill and knowledge, that a newcomer would still enjoy it. If that’s you, do give it a try, and post your reaction!

My family gave me this book for Christmas. They got it in the local Oxfam shop. A very little money well spent.