The Journeying Boy by Michael Innes

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J I M Stewart was a literary academic who published works of criticism as well as several novels. Under the pen name Michael Innes, he had an extremely successful alternative career, producing a steady stream of detective novels from the late 1930s to the 1980s. The Innes novels employ a playful tone that gives the impression of a highly intelligent person enjoying himself and entertaining his readers in the process, but careful reading often reveals something a bit more serious underneath.

The Journeying Boy from 1949 contains a rather neat self-referential description of the sort of book that Innes wrote: “. . . that milder sensational fiction, nicely top-dressed with a compost of literature and the arts, that is produced by idle persons living in colleges and rectories.” It seems appropriate that a story having so much to do with identity and impersonation should have been written by someone who had a successful “alter ego”. The title of the novel itself and something of its theme comes from Thomas Hardy’s poem Midnight on the Great Western. It is as a journey of character development as well as a physical one.

The rather stuffy Mr Thewlis has been hired as private tutor to the fifteen-year-old Humphrey Paxton, son of the eminent nuclear physicist Sir Bernard Paxton. Thewlis is to take Humphrey to stay for a month with some distant relatives in Ireland, a combination of a holiday and the chance to bring Humphrey up to the academic level required for him to proceed with his education. Thewlis has gained the impression that Humphrey is something of a problem child.

Right from the beginning there is something dubious about the whole affair. Leaving his interview with Sir Humphrey, Thewlis sees a far more likely candidate for the job going in. Having failed to secure the post, Thewlis is told at the last minute that the other candidate has dropped out, and arrangements are made for him to meet Humphrey at Euston.

At the station, Humphrey puts Thewlis through an elaborate rigmorale to prove he is who is supposed to be. On the train, Thewlis, who did not meet Humphrey at the interview, is assailed by doubts about the real identity of the boy. He attributes Humphrey’s talk of spies and plots to an overactive imagination or even a mental disturbance of some kind. He therefore dismisses his own suspicions about their rather odd fellow passengers.

Perhaps what Thewlis should be asking himself is why Humphrey and the mysterious Miss Liberty are having an ongoing conversation about the merits of Bulldog Drummond and his creator Sapper.

Meanwhile back in London a murdered man has been found in a cinema. He was shot during a film called Plutonium Blonde. Inspector Cadover of Scotland Yard tries to establish the dead man’s identity with only fragmentary entries in his diary to go on.

We now have a double narrative, the detection plot in London contained within the thriller plot of the train journey. At this point, the reader knows a bit more, although not much more, about what is going on than Cadover and Thewlis, because Innes has let the reader know that the dead man is Captain Cox, the original choice for Humphrey’s tutor. It’s a complex plot and I’ve only really given the bare bones of it. It is easier to read than to summarise. There is an awful lot packed into the 325 pages here; another writer might have made more than one book out of it.

Cadover’s painstaking investigation into the identity of the dead man is very well done. He is a shrewd and skilful detective and he has to work out whether Cox was murdered to prevent him going or to ensure that Thewlis did go. As with all the Innes books, events are compressed into quite a short space of time. After several surprises, the two halves of the plot eventually come together in an action finale in Ireland and the reader is left in awe at Innes’ ingenuity. This is the John Buchan style of thriller modernised to reflect the fears and preoccupations of the early atomic age. Sir Bernard’s secret work is of crucial importance to the defence of the realm. Have his anxieties somehow transferred themselves on to Humphrey?

Then there is the description of the Plutonium Blonde herself, looming huge and seductive on the poster, luring the cinemagoers in to what Sir Bernard dismisses as “a film dealing in a cheaply sensational way with what is in fact a shadow of unimaginable calamity impending over our civilisation. . .”  The firing of the shot during the nuclear explosion at the climax of the film is a neat nod towards Hitchcock. There is a cinematic feel to the book as a whole, so I am quite surprised it was never filmed.

There are also a lot of literary references here and by page 70, we have had quotes not only from Thomas Hardy, but Yeats, Shelley and Keats as well. Later on, there are several allusions to Hamlet and a neat use of an Edgar Allan Poe story.

It has to be said that Innes is probably not for everyone. His elaborate prose style with its long sentences was slightly old-fashioned even when he started writing, but I suspect this was quite deliberate. The pre-occupation with the manners of what used to be called the gentry has dated. But although he writes with a jaunty tone and a certain lightness, this book cannot be dismissed as a mere comedy or send-up of the genre. Innes studied psycho-analysis in Vienna in the 1930s and this is apparent here in the thoughts of Mr Thewless as he ruminates on the psychological and sexual tensions that adolescent boys are prone to and tries to establish just what exactly is the matter with Humphrey. In the end, Thewless turns out to be something more than a pedagogue and Humphrey himself has grown up quite a bit. The Journeying Boy is as much a character study as anything else.

A School Story by M R James

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I have known and loved the ghost stories of M R James for many years. I like to re-read my favourites from time to time. Earlier this year, I did something I’m not sure I have ever done before; I read Collected Ghost Stories from cover to cover.

One story in particular made a much stronger impression on me than it had done on earlier readings. This is A School Story, first published in 1911 as the opening story of the volume More Ghost Stories. In his preface to Collected Ghost Stories, James writes that the story was a “Christmas production” and “made up for the benefit of the King’s College Choir School”. He also states that the location he had in mind for this story was Temple Grove, East Sheen.  A little research reveals that this was the preparatory school that James attended as a boy.

The story is quite short, only some ten pages, and lacks the slow build-up of atmosphere so characteristic of James. It’s almost an anecdote, but it is packed with detail and not a word is wasted. If you have not read it and want to do so I should warn you now that there are spoilers ahead.

It starts in classic ghost story fashion, with two men sitting in a gentlemen’s club, discussing the ghost stories that circulate in schools. They conclude that these stories are mostly the same and probably taken from magazines anyway. Then one of the men tells the story of a real haunting that took place at his own school, some thirty years ago.

There was a young Latin teacher, Sampson, popular with the boys because he had travelled widely and had a fund of stories. He had a charm on his watch chain that he showed to the boys. It was a gold Byzantine coin, worn smooth on one side, on which he had had engraved “GWS 24 July 1865”. He told the boys he had picked it up in Constantinople.

He was in the habit of teaching by getting the boys to make up their own Latin sentences. The narrator’s friend McLeod made up a sentence referring to four yew trees. Sampson was greatly troubled by this and questioned McLeod as to why he had thought of it and what his family background was. McLeod had no idea where the image had come from.

In a later class, there were sixteen pupils but seventeen answer papers were handed in. The extra paper had one sentence written on it in red ink: “If you don’t come to me, I’ll come to you.” Sampson was so disturbed by this that he became ill and had to leave the room. The narrator says he kept the paper, in fact has it with him now. He produces it, revealing that it is blank. It turned blank shortly after it was handed in, and he has never been able to restore the words by any chemical process. The narrator says of Sampson, “I’m pretty sure, of course, now, that there was something very curious in his past history, but I’m not going to pretend that we boys were sharp enough to guess any such thing.”

One night soon after the incident with the red writing, McLeod woke the narrator in their dormitory. He said that he had seen a figure, that he assumed to be a burglar, climbing through the window of the main building opposite, where Sampson lived. The narrator replied that he couldn’t see anyone there now. McLeod described the figure as being wet all over, adding “I’m not at all sure he was alive”. The next morning, Sampson had disappeared, never to return.

That would appear to be that, but there is a coda. Someone who overheard the story told in the club is staying at a country house in Ireland some years later. His host tells him that he has something in his possession that was found there. It is a gold Byzantine coin, worn smooth on one side, on which is engraved “GWS 24 July 1865”. And where exactly was it found? On one of two dead bodies that were discovered, locked in an embrace, in an old well in a yew thicket. The bodies looked as if they must have been there at least thirty years.

One of the fascinating things about this story is the way that McLeod unknowingly seems to act as an agent of whatever is pursuing Sampson. It is left to the reader to speculate about the implications of this story and what it may reveal about M R James himself.

The Waggon-Maker by John Masefield

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I have made tales in verse, but this man made
Waggons of elm to last a hundred years;
The blacksmith forged the rims and iron gears,
His was the magic that the wood obeyed.

Each deft device that country wisdom bade,
Or farmers’ practice needed, he preserved.
He wrought the subtle contours, straight and curved
Only by eye, and instinct of the trade.

No weakness, no offense in any part,
It stood the strain in mired fields and roads
In all a century’s struggle for its bread;
Bearing, perhaps, eight thousand heavy loads,
Beautiful always as a work of art,
Homing the bride, and harvest, and men dead.

There is a sense of perfection about this sonnet, with every word and every stress in its right place, that mirrors the theme of the poem beautifully.

There is a deep respect here for country tradition and for the rural working man, who is probably unable to read. Masefield was born in 1878 in Herefordshire and his poems often give one the feeling that he remained a countryman at heart.

The last three words hit the reader with a jolt, reminding us that craftsmanship, whether in wood or words, will outlast the human lifespan.

The poem appeared in Masefield’s 1936 collection, so well into the era of motor lorries and modernist poetry.  Never directly stated, but perhaps hovering over the poem, is a feeling that the waggon-maker is the last of a dying breed. Perhaps Masefield saw himself the same way, content to be a master of traditional poetic forms.

London by A S J Tessimond

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I am the city of two divided cities
Where the eyes of rich and poor collide and wonder;
Where the beggar’s voice is low and unexpectant,
And in clubs the feet of the servants are soft on the carpet
And the world’s wind scarcely stirs the leaves of The Times.

I am the reticent, the private city,
The city of lovers hiding wrapped in shadows,
The city of people sitting and talking quietly
Beyond shut doors and walls as thick as a century,
People who laugh too little and loudly,
Whose tears fall inward, flowing back to the heart.

I am the city whose fog will fall like a finger gently
Erasing the anger of angles, the strident indecorous gesture,
Whose dusk will come like tact, like a change in the conversation,
Violet and indigo, with strings of lemon streetlamps
Casting their pools into the pools of rain
As the notes of the piano are cast from the top-floor window
Into the square that is always Sunday afternoon.

I am always interested to discover poems about London that are new to me, so here is another poem by the mysterious A S J Tessimond (1902–1962). Something about the overall atmosphere makes me think it must date from the 1930s.

There are actually three Londons presented here and each one is personified. The poem begins with the extreme class divisions familiar to us from black-and-white photographs of that era. Clubland is insulated against “the world’s wind” that might be blowing from Germany.

Then we have a place of emotional repression, enforced by the physical structure of the city itself. What a striking phrase is “tears fall inward”.

The third verse bursts into colour and there is a kind of beauty in the foggy dusk, with the lamplight reflected on the rainy pavement. Then the last line brings us back down to earth again, emphasising the somewhat muted, downbeat tone of the whole poem.

Ford Madox Ford by Alan Judd

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Alan Judd is one my favourite current writers and Ford Madox Ford is one of my favourite writers of the earlier years of the twentieth century so, for me, Judd’s 1990 biography of Ford is a perfect match of author and subject.

Ford Madox Ford, grandson of the pre-Raphaelite painter Ford Madox Brown, came from the sort of late-Victorian artistic milieu where no-one expected to have to work. Everyone seems to have had property to sub-let and if they needed money, borrowed it from family and friends. In this world, writing was taken for granted and Ford became a professional writer after he left school and never earned his living in any other way, not that he ever earned that much. That was not his priority. He was a true servant of literature throughout his long and eventful life. He was a real Bohemian. So long as he had a devoted female companion, good wine, good conversation and somewhere to produce his daily quota of words, he was satisfied. In this way, he produced some eighty or so books. The best-known of these today are The Good Soldier (1915) and the Parade’s End sequence (1924–1928), which have become permanent classics.

Poet, novelist, memoirist, editor and soldier, Ford Madox Ford was born in 1873 and died in 1939. He was an important figure in the development of modernism, not just through his own writing but because of his generous promotion of younger writers. He had already collaborated with Joseph Conrad, when as editor of the English Review, he discovered D H Lawrence. He had an instinct for spotting literary talent. He was a lifelong friend and supporter of Ezra Pound.

He separated from his wife just before the first world war, a scandalous event in Edwardian London. She refused to divorce him, so despite several subsequent long-term affairs and more children, he was never free to re-marry. He appears to have been one of those people who are a magnet for trouble and misunderstanding of one kind or another, his generous nature often puzzled by what came his way in return. As he put it “I am the green baize door that everyone kicks on the way out”.

He also suffered repeated problems with publishers, leading to some of his best works not being as widely available as they could have been and perhaps not as well-known as their quality deserved.

Possibly to escape his marital situation he enlisted as an over-age junior officer in 1915. At first, he enjoyed the army, finding the life easier to cope with than the squabbles of the literary world but trouble followed him even here as he fell out with his commanding officer. Despite not being a front-line combat soldier, he endured the shelling and ended up with what we would today call PTSD. After the war he went to live in France with his latest girlfriend and never returned to England. He used his war experiences in the Parade’s End books. Later on, he spent a great deal of time in America where his literary reputation was greater than in his home country. (In fact, when I first discovered Ford’s books, I assumed he was an American writer.)

Alan Judd’s biography is plainly a love letter from one writer to another. He brings Ford and the times in which he lived vividly to life in these pages. There is a fair amount of quotation of Ford’s works, particularly the poetry, which is hard to find these days. There is just enough critical interpretation to make clear what Ford’s ideas about writing were, without interrupting the flow of the story.

Ford’s aim in fiction was to remove from the text any presence of himself as the author. For this reason, he particularly disliked the technique of English novelists such as Joseph Fielding and William Thackeray, where the author comments on the events and characters of the novel. In The Good Soldier, the illusion that the story is being told to us by the narrating character, John Dowell, is complete. Ford likes to make the reader do a little more work, and part of the fascination of his novel is that we begin to realise that events may not have happened quite the way Dowell describes them. He is keen to make us think of him as the passive and innocent dupe of the other characters. As we read and re-read the novel, we are troubled by the feeling that he might have had a much more active role in the dark events of the story. It could be that what really happened is almost the opposite of what Dowell tells us. But in the end, Ford is making us realise that, like life itself, there is no definitive interpretation, everybody has their own point of view and the mystery must remain.

When I first read The Good Soldier many years ago, I was amazed that anyone could write a book like that. It remains a real favourite of mine to this day. The title of my blog is an allusion to it. I believe that Alan Judd was inspired to write his biography of Ford Madox Ford because of his admiration for it.

Graham Greene wrote that Ford had “a half-belief in a posterity that would care about good writing”. Ford’s best works have passed the test of time.       

Eden Rock by Charles Causley

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They are waiting for me somewhere beyond Eden Rock:
My father, twenty-five, in the same suit
Of Genuine Irish Tweed, his terrier Jack
Still two years old and trembling at his feet.

My mother, twenty-three, in a sprigged dress
Drawn at the waist, ribbon in her straw hat,
Has spread the stiff white cloth over the grass.
Her hair, the colour of wheat, takes on the light.

She pours tea from a Thermos, the milk straight
From an old H.P. sauce-bottle, a screw
Of paper for a cork; slowly sets out
The same three plates, the tin cups painted blue.

The sky whitens as if lit by three suns.
My mother shades her eyes and looks my way
Over the drifted stream. My father spins
A stone along the water. Leisurely,

They beckon to me from the other bank.
I hear them call, ‘See where the stream-path is!
Crossing is not as hard as you might think.’

I had not thought that it would be like this.

This poem was written later in Charles Causley’s life, in 1988 when he was 71. It has since become one of his best known.

Sometimes poems find their way to you at the right time in your life. I discovered this one some years after both my parents had passed on. It might not have made as much sense to me if I had read it earlier.

The poem is a mixture of memory and vision. Causley is thinking of his parents as they were when they were young. He seems to be both longing to return to a happy childhood and also imagining being re-united with his parents in the afterlife. This is expressed by a mixture of realistic detail and other-worldly atmosphere, and finally he contemplates the river that, sooner or later, we all must cross.

There is a sense of time being frozen and the parents being thought of in an idealised way. Perhaps that is always how we think of those we have lost, as an ideal version of themselves.

The striking last line can be interpreted in more than one way and leads us to think back about what the poem has said.   

Restaurant Car by Louis Macneice

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Fondling only to throttle the nuzzling moment
Smuggled under the table, hungry or not
We roughride over the sleepers, finger the menu,
Avoid our neighbours’ eyes and wonder what

Mad country moves beyond the steamed-up window
So fast into the past we could not keep
Our feet on it one instant. Soup or grapefruit?
We had better eat to pass the time, then sleep

To pass the time. The water in the carafe
Shakes its hips, both glass and soup plate spill,
The tomtom beats in the skull, the waiters totter
Along their invisible tightrope.

For good or ill, For fish or meat, with single tickets only,
Our journey still in the nature of a surprise,
Could we, before we stop where all must change,
Take one first risk and catch our neighbours’ eyes?

If air travel is going to be affected by current events, and “staycations” are the thing for now, then this poem is rather appropriate.

Louis Macneice (1907–1963) turns an indolent, pleasurable holiday journey by train into a metaphor for life itself, rather as Walter de la Mare did in The Railway Junction.

We are rushing into the future, intent only on idle pleasures. The waiters on their “invisible tightrope” remind us that the pleasant life requires an army of servants.  And life is not a rehearsal because the journey is “still in the nature of a surprise” and we have “single tickets only”.

This poem has something of the atmosphere of the 1930s about it, although I think it is actually a later poem, from around 1960.

Murder in the Basement by Anthony Berkeley

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Anthony Berkeley Cox (1893–1971) is regarded by critics as the most innovative of the golden age detective story writers. Murder in the Basement (1932) is unusual in that for the first part of the story, the mystery is the identity of the victim, rather than “whodunnit”. The structure is also quite unorthodox and the contrast between the police’s methodical evidence-gathering and the amateur detective’s more psychological approach is well done., There is also a good deal of sly humour here, rather similar to Malice Aforethought, published in 1931 under Cox’s other pen name, Francis Isles.

The novel opens with the discovery of a body buried in the cellar of a house recently occupied by a newly-wed couple. The dead young woman has been shot in the back of the head, so the police are immediately aware that they are dealing with a murder, but there is nothing to suggest her identity.

The first part of the novel describes the painstaking procedures of the police as they try to identify the body. An X-ray reveals that the woman had a plate in her leg as the result of a broken leg. By a great stroke of luck, this plate was one of a limited batch, which narrows down the field considerably, so eventually the police are able to trace where and when the operation was done and hence the name of the victim, who worked at a school near London.

At this point, Inspector Moresby consults his friend, amateur sleuth and writer Roger Sheringham. Here, there is an enormous co-incidence that the reader must simply accept as a narrative device making the whole thing fit together, part of the enjoyable contrivance of the golden age. Sheringham was working at the school on a temporary basis, covering for a friend, but also using his time there as a source of material for his writing. He has written several manuscript chapters using the staff of the school as his characters. Moresby asks to read this, but withholds the identity of the victim from Sheringham. The manuscript forms the second part of the novel, a flashback describing events leading up to the murder with the reader placed in the same position as Sheringham, knowing that one of the women must be the victim, but not which one.

The book goes on to describe the subsequent investigation, in which Sheringham is involved alongside the police. Moresby fixes his attention on one particular suspect, who he is convinced is guilty. This person is a steely individual who greets each question with a flat denial. It now seems to be simply a matter of building the case against them or forcing a confession. The reader may begin to have doubts about this suspect’s guilt, as does Sheringham. Finally, Sheringham reveals the real murderer, but only to the false suspect, not to the police or the world at large, and the novel ends with the killer having got away with murder.

There is some very clever psychology here. Sheringham realises that a fictional incident he created in his manuscript reveals the real nature of one of the staff. Sheringham had picked up the truth about them subconsciously.

Berkeley is adept at creating convincing female characters, individuals with their own desires who are not necessarily pleasant or good people. He also uses a neat gender reversal, with men planting ideas in women’s minds so the women think it is their own idea, a ploy usually attributed to women. There is a slight feeling that he was not altogether keen on women. I read that there were problems in both his marriages.

I spotted who the killer was about half way through, but then thought it must be another character, the result of a clever bit of misdirection. The false suspect is covering for someone else by encouraging the idea that he himself is guilty. The reader will have to be very sharp to work out who he is protecting and why. The real murderer is revealed to be a weak personality and sexually frustrated, rather like Dr Bickleigh in Malice Aforethought. The irony is, that if they had made a better job of burying the body, the displaced bricks in the cellar would never have been noticed and there would have been no investigation at all. As it is, for various reasons, they will never face justice. There is even a suggestion at one point that the victim might have deserved to be murdered.

There are a couple of things I was not so keen on. Berkeley has a fondness for double negative sentences of the “I shouldn’t be surprised if that wasn’t. . .” kind, where it is almost impossible to tell what is meant. There is also a gap at the end of the narrative and I wasn’t sure if this was the realistic loose end of any police case, or whether Berkeley couldn’t be bothered to work it out himself.

It was only after I put the book down that I realised the resonance the name “Wargrave” must have had for the original readership in 1932, particularly when applied to a character who, like Berkeley, was a veteran of the Great War.    

Ode to Me by Kingsley Amis

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Fifty today, old lad? Well, that’s not doing so bad:
All those years without
Being really buggered about.
The next fifty won’t be so good,
True, but for now – touch wood –
You can eat and booze and the rest of it,
Still get the best of it,
While the shags with fifty or so
Actual years to go
Will find most of them tougher,
The going a good bit rougher
Within the Soviet sphere –
Which means the bastards are here,
Making it perfectly clear
That all double-think
(Both systems on the blink,
East and West the same,
And war just the name of a game)
Is the ballocks it always was.
But will it be clear?
Because
After a whole generation
Of phasing out education,
Throwing the past away,
Letting the language decay,
And expanding the general mind
Till it bursts, we might well find
That it wouldn’t make much odds
To the poor semi-sentient sods
Shuffling round England then
That they’ve lost what made them men.
So bloody good luck to you mate,
That you weren’t born too late
For at least a chance of happiness
Before unchangeable crappiness
Spreads all over the land.
Be glad you’re fifty – and
That you got there while things were nice,
In a world worth looking at twice.
So here’s wishing you many more years,
But not all that many. Cheers!

Kingsley Amis (1922–1995) is much better known as a novelist. Although he carried on writing it, poetry took a back seat after the success of his novel Lucky Jim in 1954.

As the first line makes clear, Ode to Me must have been published sometime after his 50th birthday, which would have been in 1972.

The cold war references mark the poem out as very much of its time. 

I am including it here for two reasons. First, I like it, particularly for the down-to-earth humour. And second, it is hard to find online, and I think it needs to be more widely known. So, here it is, on what would have been Kingsley Amis’ birthday, April 16.     
 

Newsreel By C Day Lewis

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Enter the dream-house, brothers and sisters, leaving
Your debts asleep, your history at the door:
This is the home for heroes, and this loving
Darkness a fur you can afford.

Fish in their tank electrically heated
Nose without envy the glass wall: for them
Clerk, spy, nurse, killer, prince, the great and the defeated,
Move in a mute day-dream.

Bathed in this common source, you gape incurious
At what your active hours have willed –
Sleep-walking on that silver wall, the furious
Sick shapes and pregnant fancies of your world.

There is the mayor opening the oyster season:
A society wedding: the autumn hats look swell:
An old crocks’ race, and a politician
In fishing-waders to prove that all is well.

Oh, look at the warplanes! Screaming hysteric treble
In the low power-dive, like gannets they fall steep.
But what are they to trouble –
These silver shadows – to trouble your watery, womb-deep sleep?

See the big guns, rising, groping, erected
To plant death in your world’s soft womb.
Fire-bud, smoke-blossom, iron seed projected –
Are these exotics? They will grow nearer home!

Grow nearer home – and out of the dream-house stumbling
One night into a strangling air and the flung
Rags of children and thunder of stone niagaras tumbling,
You’ll know you slept too long.

A few years ago, this poem might have read like ancient history, but now it could be taken as a comment on current events.

In Newsreel, published in 1938, C Day Lewis describes the cinema audience as numbed by the fantasies of entertainment and oblivious to the implications of the war scenes depicted in the newsreel. They see it as something distant that will not impinge on their own lives. This was the era of the Munich crisis, of Neville Chamberlain’s “a quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing”.

The poem is technically very adept. The sudden switch from familiar, cosy and domestic footage to the images of war at the end of the fourth verse is almost like a cinematic jump cut itself. There’s an image of fertilisation and pregnancy running through the later part of the poem, with the guns seen as phallic in the sixth verse. In the final verse there is an extraordinary image for the destruction of buildings in an air raid: “stone niagaras”.

There is a slight feeling here that Day Lewis is looking down at the masses who cannot see what is coming. He was though, in that group of intellectuals who were well-informed about the Spanish civil war and had a shrewd idea of what it might lead to.