More Betty Miller (3) : The lovely Sharon Griffiths on Farewell Leicester Square

After reading earlier posts here about the intriguing writer  Betty Miller, my learned friend Sharon Griffiths - Columnist, Journalist, Novelist, - read Betty Miller’s Farewell Leicester Square and was buzzing with opinions -  


Here's Sharon :

'Can a book be  too honest for its own good? Or, more importantly, for the greater good?  Sometimes, just sometimes, it might be better not to publish.

In 1935 Victor Gollancz, a publisher both Jewish and English,   refused to publish Betty Miller’s Farewell Leicester Square.   She was  utterly convinced of the novel’s worth. Told a friend it would be ‘one of the best novels Gollancz has ever published.’  Only Gollancz didn’t publish.

At first that seems surprising.  Though still only twenty five years old, Betty Miller already had three successful novels by Gollancz.  Her writing is fluid, intelligent, entertaining. The book was eventually published six years later by Robert Hale.

Farewell Leicester Square has much to recommend it.  It tells the story of Alexander Berman, a young Jewish boy who rebels against life in his father’s tobacco shop and yearns to work in the booming film industry.  As a young man he is helped by a famous English director who lives in a very English middle class house and has two very English middle class children , Basil and Catherine– seen,  briefly by Alec on their way to a riding lesson, dressed in jodphurs, casually swinging riding crops.  Alec falls in love, not only with 14 year  old Catherine but everything she represents.

Alec becomes a successful director.  Yet is always aware of the Jewishness that sets him apart.  Betty Miller’s  descriptions of him are physically unappealing.  Alec’s own observations of his Jewish friends are not flattering.  The book notes the subtle anti-semitism of the English middle classes, but above all, it observes the anti-semitism of its own Jewish hero.

He marries Catherine.  They have a son.  Yet Alec seems  frightened of becoming an involved father and when his son is teased at school for being Jewish, it seems that he allows Catherine and the boy to leave him  and does little to protect them or keep the family together.  Instead, he retreats to the his own  birth family and  the Jewishness that he’d rejected years before.

But it is not  a positive choice, more an easy way out that will justify his failed marriage, in the way that we all go home when there is nowhere else to go.

Alec Berman is in many ways a successful and sympathetic man, yet he seems to pin all his problems  on the fact of being Jewish.  This is not only not entirely true, it also becomes unpleasant and, ironically the worst sort of racism – the sort that would be mocked years later by Ali G and his ‘Is it because I is black?’ refrain.

The novel emphasises the difference of Jewishness,   makes Jewish characteristics seem repellent  and suggests that a Jew can never be properly English.  It might be honest, but it’s not attractive.  At the moment that doesn’t matter that much.  In 1935 it did.

At a distance of more than seventy years  Betty Miller’s  frank depiction of the attitudes of its time make it even more fascinating to read now.  But that’s also  exactly why it wasn’t  the sort of book to publish in the 1930s.  Gollancz was right.'


Shows why some novels are important in and out of their time. Makes you want to read it even more ...w

Betty Miller On The Side of The Angels (2)

Isaiah Berlin: Betty was a pensive and melancholy girl…she also had a quality which I can only call moral charm….  

Betty Miller, to a girl who asks her advice about becoming a writer: You should get married as soon as possible and have children. You have to conform with the outside world, do all the rituals of being a wife and a mother – but keep true faith to yourself and hide every trace of it.’   

This hyper-domesticated response describing  the  life of a writer - as deep undercover in domestic territory as any commando - also fits Honor, the main character in her novel On The Side of The Angels .

 Honor’s  baby, her toddler and her husband Colin (like Betty’s own husband, an army doctor in a wartime military hospital) define her actions, reactions and carefully delineated emotions. She perfectly evokes the sensual lassitude of  a still nursing mother with her  slightly messy domestic setting with strewn toys  and stained romper suits. Our Twenty-First century empathy for her dilemma is somewhat allayed by the full time but almost invisible presence of Edith the nanny/maid who , being cross-eyed  and not too bright, is unfit for war-time service, so is available. 

Betty’s  daughter Sarah,  in her introduction to the novel, says  her mother saw herself as thin skinned and very shy, as domestically incompetent  with an excessive fear of people. Whether or not this is true of Betty these characteristics are  deeply echoed in the character of Honor in this novel.

However although we note this apparent lassitude, with Honor sitting in chairs and deckchairs musing the time away, the reality of Betty’s own character is better expressed by her daughter’s description. Whenever I think of my mother, I see her in the dining room…typing rapidky on  her battered Olivettti portable, or , pen poised over her manuscript, rubbing her nose with her spare finger while she polished a sentence … then as soon as my father’s key was heard in the door. Typewriter, manuscript. Reference books and all were at once swept of the table and hidden away from sight. 

It is a fact that On The Side of The Angels replicates elements of Betty’s wartime experience in the wake of  her husband’s role as a physician and psychiatrist on army service.  In a note to the writer John Verney Betty said: ’…it is (but for the Commando Officer) an almost exact picture of the military hospital wherein Emanuel was a Lt .Colonel during the war… the book is very close to reality.’

The novel focuses on the social nexus of a military hospital where the professional  men are in  uniform, seen relishing their quasi-military patriotism and pirouetting around  the very peculiar CO who acts like their liege lord bestowing and withdrawing favours at will. The women – including Honor and her more feisty sister Claudia – are seen as intruders in this very male dance. The well drawn, charismatic Commando officer is a fictional device to add to the narrative thread of the story. But many of the others are, I think, close portraits, including  - in the middle ground  - Adrian Stephen, brother to Virginia W.

Running through this excellent novel like silver strands through are important ideas such the impact of  war on the individual, the seductions of  patriotism, the volatility of  identity, the cultural definitions of crime  and  the tacit nature of unexpressed love.

The details - of the house, of food, of the dances in the Officer's Club are perfect. But I most  enjoyed Betty Miller’s deeply sensuous, highly interiorised style which offers   an intricate psychological balance to the weight of these extravagant ideas. 

However , at the time, her dense, luscious style had its critics among people close to her.  Her mentor the writer St John Irvine was among these.  ‘Words intoxicate you … You have a high, if hysterical, sense of language and a quite extraordinary seriousness…but you overwork your words and you yield too much to your seriousness…’

Her friend Rosamund Lehmann is  a bit Parson’s Eggish:  ‘It is so intelligent and – rare treat – has a moral problem in it. Sometimes too stressing of sensuous impressions … as if anything a little overdone for my taste but there is some wonderfully vivid and sensuous writing; and the characters are stereotypically clear.’

As thin-skinned  writer myself I can imagine how  discouraging such views of her well-wrought work must have been. She wrote only six novels, only one of which is still in print -  Farewell  Leicester Square  Also a new edition of this novel On the Side of The Angels, introduced by Betty's son Joanathan, is due out in May

Much is made in the reportage of the fact that Betty Miller’s  literary reputation was finally established by the publication of her biography of Robert Browning  and her subsequent membership of the Royal Society of Literature.   However, in the end she only wrote six novels. One wonders how her deep talent for fiction would have developed if she'd had more positive encouragement for this form of writing from her circle, where a kind of benevolent  literary snobbery pervades the commentary.

As I read this novel I kept thinking of the work of Virginia Wolf with  her streams of consciousness and James Joyce with his tumbling piling on of detail.  Virginia famously abandoned thoughts of being a mother to focus on her art.  Perhaps Betty’s  talent for fiction was hijacked by her lack of confidence and found some expression in her focus on family life where, after all, one is always imagining lives to be lived or abandoned, lives rebuilt, or ways of surviving within th crucible of the family. That takes sensitivity , imagination and psychological eenergy.

Or perhaps she was just not given her due, in her time. Was there pure sexism in some of the  guiding critiques of her acquaintances and friends? Of her first novel her respected advisor  St John Ervine said. ‘Aren’t there enough novelists in the world  without you adding to their number? Aren’t there too many women novelists and not enough cooks?  If you had written to tell me that you burnt your manuscript  and made a fine cake I’d have cheered.'

This is a fine, absorbing novel. I recommend it to everyone.

*

 

 A small note: to the twenty first century reader this is definitively a novel of  the professional middle classes. The maid Edith is dismissively drawn (Called uncouth twice but that’s about it…) . But then one could say such things of Virginia Woolf.

A Writer of Talent: Betty Miller (1)

Betty Miller

I am now deep in the novel On The Side of the Angels by Betty Miller, originally published in  1945,  On his Must Read list Norman Geras tells a story in praise of a novelist Betty Miller (see below...) Here is a novelist of whom I have nevery heard and I was very curious, I have ordered a copy of Goodbye Liecester Square in the Persphone edition but I got hold of a copy of the 1985 Virago edition of On The Side of The Angels which has a beautiful  introduction by the late Sarah Miller, Betty's  daughter.

I see now that this year  the there is to be a new edition (May) of this novel, introduced by her son the polymathic scientist, artist and entertainer  Jonathan Miller.

It has a much more snazzy cover but I hope they have not abandoned the Sarah Miller introduction which I find fascinating, It is full of insight, anecdote and understanding.

I am enjoying the novel and will write  more about it here, But I wanted to post this here today, before I rush off to ny birthday tea. It will perhaps  to complement the  post on my other blog which is a poem about my own mother which I hope might show similar insight,

Tomorrow: More about Betty Miller

W

Norman Geras's Must-Read Pile



A Book for Every Step...


Wendy
One of the pleasures of wandering the web in the last few years has been the discovery of the Weblog of Norman Geras . I relish Norm's irony and perception as he comments  in depth on poiltical and social life in Britain and the world. His posts include observations on literature, music, cricket  - and more or less everything.
It's great that Norm has agreed to share with us his must- read pile. Looking at his pile I nearly entitled this post Promises to Myself. I suppose that's what a Must-Read pile is. It's also, I think, like the centre of a bookish spider's web which ultimately includes every book one has ever read.  

Norman Geras Thanks to Wendy for inviting me to write about what's on my must-read pile right now. I'd better start with the confession that I don't have just a pile, I have a whole shelf. It currently holds some 60 titles. I keep telling myself I can't acquire any more novels till I've cut the number by... ooh, half. But then something catches my eye in a charity shop, or I absolutely must have another book by an author one of whose novels I just finished reading, and so it goes on. Anyway, I won't inflict the whole shelf on you. Here's a representative sample of 10 books that are to be read.

 

Eventide by Kent Haruf

This is a sequel to Plainsong by the same author, a novel I read a couple of weeks ago and liked so much that I have to get to this follow-up soon. It's a bit like Anne Tyler, except set in a small Colorado town rather than in Baltimore. Actually, it's like Tyler only in that it's life going on for ordinary people in different varieties of family, and quietly powerful.

Villette by Charlotte Brontë

This is the last step of a reading project of mine, of which I have several. I've read all of the Brontë novels (Charlotte, Emily and Anne) apart from Villette and I need to complete the set.

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

It's a book I haven't read yet - still! Enough said.

Portrait of the Bride by Betty Miller

I recently read her Farewell Leicester Square and was mighty impressed by it, so resolved to get hold of some of her other titles, most of which are out of print. Lo and behold, visiting my Mom in Israel last month I spotted Portrait of the Bride among her books and she kindly let me take it. In this case I love the physical book even before I've started it. It's a somewhat battered old copy, published by Blue Ribbon Books Inc, New York, in 1936; and it's an ex-library copy, with a cancelled stamp from Norelius Community Library, Idaho. The borrowing slip is still attached to the back endpaper and reveals that the book was borrowed 55 times between September 1941 and January 1991. For what would I want a Kindle?

In A Free State by V.S. Naipaul

I've never read anything by Naipaul and I doubt I would have got to him but for the fact that a friend kindly gave Adèle and me a copy of this one at Christmas, and urged us to try it. So I'll give it a go.

What Maisie Knew by Henry James

Another of my projects - to make my way through the works of 'The Master', which is what he is.

The Best of Everything by Rona Jaffe

I'm told both by women in my family and by women outside it that this is a marvellous book. I just gotta read it.

Eight Months on Ghazzah Street by Hilary Mantel

This one I bought not long after reading Mantel's A Change of Climate. I've enjoyed all of her books that I've read (which don't include the biggies), so it's a safe bet.

Sabbath's Theater by Philip Roth

Yet another of my projects, to do the complete works of Philip Roth. I've got through 21 of them to date, and I'm not about to stop. He's a towering figure in American fiction, Carmen Callil notwithstanding.

The Master Bedroom by Tessa Hadley

I didn't know anything about either the book or its author until a few days ago when we were round at my daughter Jenny's. She said I would like it and encouraged me to take it home. Jenny has a pretty good, if not infallible, idea of the sort of books I like, and the success rate of her recommendations is high.

 

 

Norman Geras  is Professor Emeritus of Government at the University of Manchester. In a long academiccareer, he has contributed substantially to the analysis of the works of Karl Marx particularly in his book Marx and Human Nature and the article 'The Controversy About Marx and Justice', which remains a standard work on the issue.