Comyns A Touch of Mistletoe

1. Auflage 2021
ISBN: 978-1-911547-87-7
Verlag: Daunt Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 352 Seiten

'The morning I left home Mother was recovering from being poorly and she'd been sick in the vegetable basket.' Sisters Victoria and Blanche grow up in their grandfather's house in Warwickshire. It's a secluded existence: their mother is a war widow with a thirst for port and sherry and their last governess leaves never to be replaced. When their grandfather dies, their mother replaces drink with housework and the girls plan their escape. Blanche heads off to train as a model at a dubious institution in London. Vicky wants to study art but answers an ad leading her to Holland, where she tends a pack of miserable bull terriers. This is just the beginning of the sisters' adventures, which take them from the poverty of cooking eggs over a candle in their Mornington Crescent bedsit, to a wider bohemian world, as they encounter love and the fluctuating fortunes that come when you're open to the strange twists life can take. First published in 1967, A Touch of Mistletoe is a unique coming-of-age story that shows Barbara Comyns's

Barbara Comyns was born in England in 1909. She and her siblings were brought up by governesses, and allowed to run wild. She wrote eleven books including Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead,Sisters by a River, Our Spoons Came from Woolworths and The Vet's Daughter. To support her family, she worked a variety of jobs over the course of her life, including dealing in antiques and vintage cars, renovating apartments, and breeding poodles. She was an accomplished painter, and exhibited with The London Group. She died in 1992.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Comyns, Barbara

Leseproben

INTRODUCTION

I discovered Barbara Comyns a few years back, the result of a chance encounter with an old English teacher of mine. It was Comyns’s 1947 debut Sisters by a River I landed on first and I was drawn in by its sheer oddness. Where I had expected pastoral frolics of limited consequence, I found the shapes of such familiar scenes burdened unexpectedly by menace and decay. While I was beguiled, and found much to admire, I was also jarred by its misspellings and grammatical errors. They were included, I assumed, as a stylistic flourish by Comyns to capture a child’s eye view. ‘Mary was the eldist of the family, Mammy was only eighteen when she had her, and was awful frit of her,’ goes an introduction to one of the book’s five sisters. Such a gimmick seemed to me at odds with the originality and intelligence of the writing as a whole.

I was interested, then, to learn that some of these mistakes were originally genuine errors, omissions of knowledge which resulted from sporadic education in Comyns’s formative life. The mistakes were not only allowed to remain by the book’s publisher but heightened and multiplied, the better to create a sense of unvarnished ingenuity. Sisters by a River was also serialised in Lilliput magazine before its eventual publication, under the title The Novel Nobody Will Publish. The combination of these two facts came together to impress something on me about the manner in which Comyns’s work had been received. There was appreciation, certainly, for what was undeniably compelling and singular fiction, but there existed an inclination to appreciate it through the prism of an assumed innocence, or even ignorance, on Comyns’s part. Even the most unimpeachably literary praise she has won – Graham Greene was a fan and supporter, and Alan Hollinghurst blurbs a 1985 reprint of The Vet’s Daughter – concentrates on her innocence and childlike naivety.

This book, A Touch of Mistletoe, is for me the great rejoinder to any idea that the freshness and simplicity of style which characterises Comyns’s work can be attributed to a mere unknowing ingénue. In fact, here is something sophisticated and rare – the ability to contain many moods in a single, matter-of-fact tone. This tone is not glib, nor purely comic and wry in a way which flattens emotion (though there are many very funny moments). It is instead simply accepting of the vagaries of fortune, as our narrator Victoria Green is also.

A Touch of Mistletoe follows Victoria from the age of almost-eighteen (an important distinction from seventeen) in the 1930s through to the 1960s, taking in a life made up of marriages, poverty, addiction, mental illness, a love of art, children, and war. We meet her sitting with sister Blanche on a June evening after the funeral of their grandfather. The two have been living a strange sort of half-life in his estate, alongside their brother and a mother who is constantly busied with either drinking or feverish domesticity. The lack of social mixing and norms in their youths have made the sisters seem and feel younger than they really are. They are unseasoned and unprepared for what comes next, but no less eager to jump into it for that. Victoria is antsy in her undefined role in the home, wafting about, cleaning up a bit here and there, waiting for something to happen or for a proper and right course of action to be forced upon her. She jealously regards those with more permission than herself to make good and pleasurable use of the world: ‘I tilted my chair back and, frowning, watched a cart pass the window. It rumbled past the house, the young driver standing up in the cart, his cap on the back of his head, laughing to himself. I felt how brave and free he was, while I sat in a room with stuffy red wallpaper eating chocolate cake and being scolded by my mother.’

She has a great yearning for the unknown something she understands to lie beyond daughterhood. While men may prescribe their own course toward this something, she is lectured by her mother, her brother and the family lawyer about the necessity of choosing a sensible path. Instead, she takes the two hundred pounds her grandfather has left her in his will and uses it to embark on a trip to Holland to work as a family-help. She begins her first foreign voyage with satisfaction and exhilaration but it quickly sours into a comically abject failure. Hungry and forlorn, she lies down in a frozen field with a bag of monkey nuts and ‘slowly munched them as tears of misery and cold ran down my cheeks.’ A bite on her finger from one of the Dutch family’s wretched dogs becomes livid with infection as she traipses the streets, calculating a return to Britain.

This first, failed attempt at romance and adventure is a key example of what endears me to A Touch of Mistletoe. In the kind of conventional coming-of-age novel one might mistake this for, Victoria would be a pluckier sort of heroine. Her desires would be clearly defined, the path toward them perhaps rough, but reachable with determination and grit. Instead Victoria has a far more touching, true kind of appetite, which is to say the general and clueless and searching kind. She hasn’t any conclusive ambition to find a man, to be a film star, a society girl, a genius, or rich. She doesn’t have a burning wish that fuels her life’s course. She wants everything or at least a thing to happen, she wants action, she hungers in the sincere but aimless way that most of us do in youth.

The failed European trip accomplishes one thing at least, making her hardy enough that even seedy old London seems comparatively soft. ‘I had now lost my fear of public transport,’ she says, and moves with Blanche to a hostel for young ladies. On Saturday afternoons in Camden Town they buy ‘grim little oranges for two a penny’ and bags of broken biscuits, and after one ill-advised attempt at securing some nutrition, a cabbage which languishes stinking in their cupboard. Their hardship is not drawn as comedy or tragedy but as an ordinary fact of life. Where they can take some small pleasures they do so, and when they cannot they hold towels against their faces to cry into. They do, though, live in a state of perpetual struggle and hunger and their shared experience of poverty will shape them both in very different ways. Blanche lacks the curious hope for adventure that Victoria harbours. She is focused on accruing manners and beautiful clothes and, through those things, a husband who can keep her well. She is burned, traumatised really, by the feeling of always scraping by, the mystery of where next month’s rent will arrive from.

Victoria has a different relationship to poverty. Rather than being haunted by the feeling of wondering where things come from, she finds at least a little reviving wonder in the fact that they do always seem to come, in the end, in some way. One afternoon, walking around Hyde Park in the throes of hunger: ‘We were nearly crying and I was saying “Fortitude” over and over again. Blanche stopped me with “Damn fortitude! The only thing I want is roast beef with roast potatoes and Yorkshire pudding.”’ Several minutes later, a car pulls up full of inconsequential boys who fancy them and want to take them for lunch. They eat their magical roast beef and never see the boys again, satisfied by the unlikely sleight of hand luck has turned for them.

I have a distrust of fetishising make-do attitudes when it comes to poverty, and as the novel circles World War Two the potential for this to be romanticised is even greater. But the sanguinity of Victoria’s making do is never laden with forced cheer. Poverty is not ennobling but nor does it rob her of her sense of self or her will to enjoy life. Money behaves as misfortune does in the book, always coming and going, as inevitably variable as the weather, nothing there is any point in despairing over.

The clear-eyed approach to the world spills over into her artistic ambitions. She sincerely loves art, well enough to recognise that her own talents are too modest to compete with the greats: ‘From studying paintings in galleries I knew I would never be a serious painter myself, though I had a chance as a commercial artist.’ This fact does not cause her any long nights of the soul. She moves along swiftly as ever and finds work in studios and animation. Her frequenting of museums leads her to the great love of her life, her first husband Gene. He is a half-French and entirely passionate young art student who follows Victoria around the Tate one afternoon before taking her for a coffee and beginning a dreamy romance. His profession and lack of solid prospects cause Blanche worry before she meets him, whereby she too is taken by his earnest eccentricity (‘Perhaps he’s a genius or something,’ she wonders).

Gene is the source of many of the novel’s most memorable comic and tragic moments. He proposes by ranting around their bedroom for half an hour about the petit-bourgeois trappings of marriage, a thing he could never countenance, before collapsing, spent, down on the bed beside his love and saying, ‘All the same I think we had better get married, don’t you?’ His hatred of what he sees as aesthetic excess – anything with bows or frills or prettiness – sends him into spirals of fury: ‘Once a friend took us for a drive in his...