Tag: Literary Fiction

For Esmé, with Love and Squalor by J D Salinger

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There are two good reasons for writing about J D Salinger’s 1950 short story, For Esmé, with Love and Squalor. First, 6th June 2024 will be the eightieth anniversary of D-Day. And second, I recently heard a BBC radio programme about Salinger’s time as an American serviceman in England during the war, which forms the background to this story.

The story is in two distinct parts, or perhaps three, because a short introductory section makes it clear that the narrator is looking back from a happy and settled present day at events that took place sometime earlier.

A bored and lonely American soldier stationed in England in the run-up to D-Day is spending his day off wandering round the town in the rain. The church notice board catches his eye and he goes inside to watch the children’s choir practice. It strikes him that one particular young girl in the choir seems a bit different to the other children.

He meets the girl again later when she comes into the teashop with her governess and small brother. She detaches herself from the governess, comes over to the table where the narrator is sitting alone and strikes up a conversation. Esmé is poised and perfectly mannered in the English upper-class style. She is slightly precocious in her use of language, using words that are a bit beyond her years and not always quite correct. We find out that her father has been killed in the war. Her mother is also dead, but that is not explained.

The narrator has already told us that his fellow soldiers are solitary types and Esmé instantly says, to his surprise, “you’re at that intelligence school, aren’t you?”, perhaps explaining why that should be.

She gets the narrator to admit that in civilian life he is a short-story writer. She hopes that he will write a story for her. As we read on, we realise that the story we are reading is, as the title tells us, that very story. She hopes that he will return from the war “with all his faculties intact” and promises to write to him.

If that is the “before” part of the story, there is now an abrupt switch to “after”. The scene changes to occupied Germany at the end of the war. The narrator identifies himself as “Sergeant X”. A page of description makes clear that his war experiences have left him a dreadful state. He has spent some time in hospital. He chain-smokes but can’t taste the cigarettes, his gums are bleeding, and he can’t sleep. He has what we call today PTSD: “Then, abruptly, familiarly, and, as usual, with no warning, he thought he felt his mind dislodge itself and teeter like insecure luggage on an overhead rack.”

He contemplates a book by Goebbels left behind in the house the American soldiers live in. It belonged to a woman, an official in the Nazi party who the narrator himself arrested. There is an inscription in her handwriting: “Dear God, life is hell.”  

There is a fleeting reference to the Hurtgen forest. This was in fact the gruelling battle that Salinger himself was involved in. It’s also made clear that the narrator and his jeep-mate, “Corporal Z”, have been involved in the whole campaign, from D-Day to VE day.  

He takes out a letter from a pile of correspondence that he has put on one side and not read. It is letter from Esmé, enclosing the gift of her father’s watch, with its smashed face. This loving gesture from the young girl he befriended is the beginning of healing for him. He has been unable to sleep and suddenly feels very tired. The nightmare is over. He realises that his faculties are, despite everything he has been through, intact.

The story is only twenty-eight pages long, beautifully written and profoundly moving. It appears to be quite autobiographical, closely based on Salinger’s real-life wartime experiences. It makes its meaning as much by what is understated or not quite stated as much as by what is said directly. It brings home the very real human cost of the liberation of Europe, both for soldiers and civilians.

It’s also worth noting that Salinger’s state of mind after his experiences in the war influenced his descriptions of Holden’s mental troubles in his famous novel The Catcher in the Rye, published in 1951.

Tender is the Night by F Scott Fitzgerald

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One of the things I like about being a bit older is going back and reading books that I read many years ago to see whether they pass the only test that matters in literature, the test of time. How accurate were my earlier judgements and how much were they a product of the enthusiasm of youth?

Tender is the Night, published in 1934 is not quite as well-known as Fitzgerald’s earlier novel, The Great Gatsby. It is longer and more complex than Gatsby, and does not quite have that sense of perfect construction. It’s a more difficult read but perhaps a more satisfying one.

I always preferred it to Gatsby though, and going back to it, I’m stunned at just how good I still find it to be.

It is the story of American psychiatrist Dick Diver and his marriage to wealthy heiress Nicole Warren, who is his patient before becoming his wife. This takes place mainly in the glamourous locations of the French Riviera and Switzerland in the 1920s. There is also the wider background of the aftermath of the first world war, something we are reminded of during a visit to the abandoned trenches of the western front.

At that time a favourable exchange rate meant that Americans found the dollar went a long way in France. At Gausse’s hotel on the Riviera, the Divers have gathered a group of friends around them, including alcoholic composer Abe North, French-American soldier Tommy Barban and would-be writer Albert McKisko.   

This tale of wealthy American expatriates in Europe inevitably recalls the writing of Henry James and Edith Wharton, but there is a lush, poetic feel to the language here and the title is taken from Keats’ Ode to a Nightingale. Yet it is faster paced and there is a fluidity of time that shows the influence of modernism. We are in a different era, the characters are more volatile and there is an undercurrent of violence here with events such as a duel and a shooting featuring in the story. Some of this is similar to the world depicted in Hemingway’s Fiesta.

It’s a very American novel in that most of the references to the British are negative, mentioning the decline of the empire, and one of the few British characters, Lady Caroline Sibley-Biers, is quite decadent.

The novel has a clever flashback structure, opening in the south of France at what is actually the middle of the story, before going back to the beginning in Switzerland in 1917 then resuming in the 1920s and going on to the tragic ending. This gives a mystery element and a dramatic tension to the whole opening part of the novel. What is the secret behind the Divers’ idyllic world and seemingly perfect marriage?

This is enhanced by the whole of that opening section being seen through the eyes of Rosemary, the young film actress who is attracted to Dick Diver. We see the Divers and their seemingly perfect world through her eyes. Dick is attracted to her as well, but it is not immediately apparent why a seemingly happily married man might be tempted to stray. The tensions in the Divers’ marriage are gradually revealed.    

Throughout the novel Fitzgerald subtly varies the point of view. This is particularly effective in conveying the way in which Dick declines and Nicole rises, as their relationship changes. At first, the reader hardly notices what is happening, as Dick begins to drink more, and his charm and perfect manners begin to drop away, alienating their circle of friends. The tipping point of the story after which the balance between them shifts is when Dick has an affair with Rosemary in Rome, gets into a fight and is beaten up by the police.

There is some very murky psychology on display here. Nicole’s mental troubles have been caused by sexual abuse by her father. Dick is as much her doctor as her husband, a figure of authority. “Control yourself!” he snaps at her as she begins to unravel. The film that has made Rosemary a star is called Daddy’s Girl. Her mother, too, is a controlling figure who encourages her relationship with the older, married man.

The novel has an autobiographical element, based as it is on Fitzgerald’s marriage to Zelda and their life in France.

Finally, Dick is corrupted by wealth, drink, and endless leisure, his plans to do pioneering work in psychiatry abandoned and his career in tatters. At the end, Nicole and Dick divorce and he disappears into an obscure life as a local doctor back in America. With Nicole cured and now married to Tommy Barban, Dick has served his purpose as far as the Warren family are concerned. “That’s what he was educated for” her older sister cynically says. She had planned for Nicole to have a doctor husband all along, she just didn’t necessarily think it would be Doctor Diver. The reader knows it was a real love, on both sides. As Nicole said “I don’t ask you to love me always like this, but I ask you to remember. Somewhere inside me there’ll always be the person I am tonight.”

The final image is very poignant, as Dick says goodbye to the beach in front of the hotel where the story opened. He and Nicole created a world and now it is all gone.

The later parts of the novel are almost unbearably sad. It is beautifully written and an absorbing, heart-breaking reading experience. It was Fitzgerald’s own favourite of his books and he was rather puzzled by its relative lack of success on first publication, but its reputation has risen steadily ever since.  

A High Wind in Jamaica by Richard Hughes

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As well as novels, Richard Hughes (1900–1976) wrote poetry and plays. He was also the author of the first-ever radio drama, Danger, broadcast on the BBC almost one hundred years ago. That makes it a good time to look again at what is probably his most famous work, the novel A High Wind in Jamaica, published in 1929.

I don’t think I’ve ever come across another book quite like it. I’ve re-read it several times over the years. It is relatively easy to read but reveals new depths over time.

The story seems quite simple. Sometime in the late nineteenth century, after a hurricane wrecks the family home, a group of English children living in Jamaica are sent by their parents to go to school in England. The ship they are travelling on is attacked by pirates, who realise when they sail away that they have unwittingly hijacked the children as well as the cargo. The children take all this in their stride and at first assume it is all part of the plan for the voyage.

After some aimless cruising round the Caribbean, the pirates try to offload the children in Cuba. The rather incompetent pirates eventually manage to transfer the children to another ship and they arrive in London as intended. Yet during their time with the pirates two people die, one adult and one child. When this comes out, the pirates are put on trial and sentenced to death for murder. That’s it, more or less, except that there is rather more to it than the bare bones outline reveals. The story may be straightforward but the narrative method is not. What looks like a children’s adventure is more a piece of psychological modernism.  

It has a haunting, dreamlike atmosphere, particularly in the beautiful descriptions of the lush Jamaican countryside and the long slow days at sea, yet it is punctuated by sudden violent shocks. It has an exotic setting, pirates, and a cast of young characters, but it is not a children’s book. It’s a sea story but it doesn’t feel much like anything by C S Forester or Joseph Conrad. It’s a novel of empire that takes a fairly sympathetic view of the black inhabitants of Jamaica, given the time it was written.

The main character is a ten-year-old girl and much of the story is seen from her point of view. The novel starts with a first-person narrator, but we are never quite sure who he is or what his relation to events is. We gradually lose the sense of him as an individual and the story settles into omniscient narration, which allows Hughes access to the thoughts of all the characters, adults as well as children. It enables him to show how the adults and children misunderstand each other completely. They live in two quite different worlds, based on assumptions that they can’t communicate to each other. This is done with great skill, because the language never seems too sophisticated for the children or too simple for the adults. I think Henry James might have been attempting something similar with What Maisie Knew, but didn’t bring it off with the clarity of language that Hughes achieves.

It’s quite funny in places and much of the book is heavily ironic. Characters misunderstand each other, or misinterpret events because they have a partial knowledge about what has really happened. Only the reader knows the truth.

There is also a dark undercurrent lurking all the way through this book for the careful reader. Without giving too much away, it can be summed up by the lawyer’s questioning of Emily near the end: “When you were with the pirates, did they ever do anything you didn’t like? You know what I mean, something nasty?”  

The London scenes have an almost “Martian” quality, when the children, who have only ever lived in Jamaica, cannot imagine how a steam train could work. “Why do we have to sit in that box?”, as one of them says. The fog-bound streets of London contrast strongly with the sunlight idyll of their early years as Emily is absorbed into the normal life of a Victorian little girl, despite her experiences on the pirate schooner.

Towards the end, the novel takes on a page-turning urgency as the reader wonders how all of this is going to be resolved. What understanding is the adult world going to have about what really happened on the pirate ship? The real irony is that when Emily blurts out the truth at the trial, it is misinterpreted and the words “did she not know what she had done?” come as a shock to the reader, having two possible meanings.   

Published well after Freud, but set back at some unspecified period of the late 19th century, we are a long way on from Victorian ideas about the innocence of childhood here. The story demonstrates quite the reverse, in fact. The phrase “little savages” might be appropriate. It seems curiously ahead of its time, particularly when Emily realises that she might not have the same opportunities in life as the boys, when she grows up.

The American title was The Innocent Voyage, which is more appropriate, I suppose, but somehow not as poetic as the title under which I know it. It’s often seen as a forerunner of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, but apart from the exotic setting it is quite different, really.

The biographer Michael Holroyd has written very perceptively about this novel. He got to know the by then elderly Hughes when he was researching his biography of the painter Augustus John.       

Russian Hide and Seek by Kingsley Amis

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Russian Hide and Seek by Kingsley Amis was published in 1980. Recent events have prompted me to have a look at it again. It’s not one of his best-known novels and probably not even one of his best. It is fascinating, though, for reasons that I hope I shall make clear.

It’s a sort of science fiction novel that depicts a Britain under Russian military rule at some unspecified point in the twenty-first century, after an event referred to only as the “pacification”. The central character, Alexander, is a young Russian officer who becomes involved in a plot to undermine the government and restore rule to the British. He is an unsympathetic figure, selfish, vain and chiefly interested in his numerous affairs with women, including a rather strange mother and daughter. Character and the rather convoluted plot are not really the point here, though. What is so compelling is the believable world of a conquered Britain.

The oil is beginning to run out and cars are reserved for senior Russian officers. Horses are once more the main mode of transport for everyone else. Computers have been and gone. Everything seems dirty or degraded and there is a general air of shabbiness. Most of the trees have gone from the gardens of English country houses. Inside, the old furniture and paintings have long since disappeared.

Nothing, from clothes to alcoholic drinks is made to the standard that we would consider normal. Most people are reduced to eating a sort of peasant diet of broth and vegetables.

Everyone speaks Russian most of the time and English dialogue is printed in italics. It’s fashionable among the Russians to drop English phrases into their conversation but with no real knowledge to draw on they get them wrong, and it comes out sounding like a sort of mangled Bertie Wooster.  

We are told that there was a deliberate policy of “de-nationing”. British history and culture have been almost completely eradicated. The civilian population has no knowledge of what happened in the second world war. A festival of British culture is planned and it becomes apparent that no-one remembers Christian church services, or understands Shakespeare.

Something else that has been and gone in this world is Marxism. The Russian rulers have reverted to a sort of Tsarist autocracy. There is no moral centre in this world where both Christianity and Marxism are things of the past.

The game of the title is a variation on Russian Roulette, played with live ammunition.

It’s not really clear what Amis was up to here. On the one hand there’s a certain similarity to A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess, where the “Russian” slang of the teenage characters stood in for the American slang of the rock and roll era. Is it all meant to be a sort of allegory of the late 1970s when it was written, a warning about the loss of traditional British culture from a writer who was becoming increasingly conservative in his political outlook at this point? Or is it a sort of transferred depiction of the actual quality of life inside the Soviet Union at that time?

It’s not the easiest read, but a thought-provoking one. It’s a major structural fault, I think, that so much of the information about what exactly happened in the past is held back until too near the end. There is a pointed mention of the fact that the Americans did not intervene.

Too many Russian names are introduced too quickly at the beginning. Oddly enough, this is precisely the problem that English readers often have with Chekov or Tolstoy, so it rather makes me wonder whether it might have been intended as a parody.

It is compelling, though. For all its faults, I’ve read it three times.

There’s an interesting anecdote about this book in Amis’ Memoirs. It was his current book at the time he met Mrs Thatcher. On being told what it was about, she replied “No, no, no!”, indicating that whatever her other qualities, an understanding of fiction was not among them.



Black Narcissus by Rumer Godden

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Black Narcissus by Rumer Godden was published in 1939 and is an extraordinary novel. It is the story of a group of nuns who travel to the Himalayas to try and establish a convent in an abandoned palace there. Not the most promising material for a compelling story, you might think, and yet it is an intense reading experience quite unlike anything else. It’s tempting to see it as a sort of metaphor for empire, but I think it is above all a psychological novel.    

What makes the novel so powerful is that it seems to exert the same hypnotic, trance-like effect over the reader that the environment does over the nuns. The sense of place is so strong that the reader feels they have been transported to the convent in the mountains, with its bell hanging between two wooden poles at the edge of the precipice. Rumer Godden shares with other British writers who spent their formative years in India, such as Rudyard Kipling and Lawrence Durrell, a particular ability to render light and colour in words.

We are in the far north of India, beyond Darjeeling, an extreme environment in the shadow of Kanchenjunga, so high up that the nuns at first experience altitude sickness. The constant wind and the bright light reflected from the mountain snow seem to cast a spell over them so that their sense of time changes and they find themselves daydreaming. It is difficult to keep their attention on their work or their religious obligations.

Nor do the nuns understand the local people, who are more like Tibetans than Indians. Mr Dean, the local agent of empire, warns them that they must not treat any child in their clinic who is actually ill. The locals are used to children dying, he tells them, but if a child who has been treated dies later on, they will blame the nuns. He thinks the whole enterprise is doomed to fail. “I give you until the rains come”. The nuns find their beliefs and ideas unravelling as the environment overwhelms them. Sister Philippa becomes obsessed with planting flowers rather than vegetables in the garden. Sister Blanche becomes so attached to the children who come to the clinic that she longs for a baby of her own.   

Mr Dean is the only other European in the area. The nuns are dependent on him for help and his masculine presence is a disruption in other ways. They do not consider him to be a good man by their standards. He drinks too much, for one thing. He persuades the convent to take in Kanchi, a local girl who may or may not have been his girlfriend. He has “gone native” but this means that he completely understands the way of life and attitudes of the locals, and their pantheistic religion. He believes any attempt at conversion to Christianity to be  pointless. “They think God lives in the mountain”. This is emphasised by the presence of the holy man who sits motionless under his tree overlooking the convent.

There is a good deal of repressed sexuality beneath the surface here. There is a sort of battle of wills going on between Mr Dean and the Mother Superior, Sister Clodagh, but also a feeling that she is attracted to him. The deeply disturbed Sister Ruth makes no attempt to hide her feelings for Mr Dean. Another disruptive masculine presence is the young prince who comes to the convent to complete his education. He wears brightly coloured clothes and he is fond of the perfume Black Narcissus, leading one of the nuns to make that his nickname.

Sister Clodagh finds herself remembering things she has not thought about for many years. Although he looks nothing like him, the young prince reminds her of the man she thought she was going to marry, back home in Ireland. It was finding out that he intended to go to America without her that led to her decision to join the order. These memories are so strong that she is living half in the present with all its difficulties and responsibilities and half in the past. Much of the novel is seen from her point of view, so we experience her sense of memories swamping the present and this is very skillfully conveyed by Rumer Godden.

In the end, the whole situation is too much for all of them, and the mission fails, as the previous mission run by monks failed earlier. Mr Dean has been proved right. The nuns depart a year after they came, leaving the lonely grave of one of the order, their presence in the mountains destined to become just a distant memory for the locals, who will carry on much as before.   

The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford

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“This is the saddest story I have ever heard.” That is the striking opening sentence of The Good Soldier, Ford Madox Ford’s 1915 novel.

It is the story of the relationship between two wealthy couples who meet at a German spa town in the years before the first world war. Edward and Leonora Ashburnham are English; John and Florence Dowell are American visitors to Europe, the sort of characters we might expect to find in a Henry James novel. The health resort visits are necessary because Edward and Florence have heart conditions. At least, that is what appears to be happening, but nothing is quite as it seems in this world where the most important thing is keeping up appearances. 

It is a dark and ironic novel of adultery and betrayal; we know, from the beginning that it will end tragically. It is also one of the most fascinating novels I have ever read, a novel that reveals greater depths on every re-reading.

That is very much down to the way the story is told. The narrator is the husband of the American couple, but he does not tell his tale chronologically. He tries to piece together the complicated events by moving backwards and forwards in time. He lets slip crucial information to the reader in a seemingly casual way. “I have, I am aware, told this story in a very rambling way so that it may be difficult for anyone to find their path through what may be a sort of maze.”  

A major theme of the book is the impossibility of ever really knowing anyone else. As we read on we might think that Dowell is trying to explain himself to himself as much as trying to explain the actions and thoughts of the other characters to the reader. Just how reliable a narrator is he? He is often conveying to us, particularly in the later stages of the novel, what was told to him by others after the event – he was not actually there.

As we read on, we become aware that there is something of a mystery surrounding Dowell’s actions and the reasons behind them. Just why did he marry Florence in the first place and come to live in Europe? He has no occupation in both senses of that word. He is wealthy enough not to have to work, but has no particular interests to take up his time, and seems to drift through life. There is the occasional hint of something rather darker about his personality. Is he quite the innocent dupe that he wants us to believe him to be?

The overall effect is a bit like Henry James without the reserve. It’s not sexually explicit, yet it is quite clear when sex is being referred to. It’s quite striking that some of the characters have an innocence about physical matters that is hardly imaginable today.

The title was not Ford’s choice. He had originally intended to call it “The Saddest Story”, but his publisher considered that title unsuitable during the first world war. The new title focusses the reader’s attention, perhaps too much, on the character of Edward Ashburnham himself, “the good soldier”, distracting us from the fact that this is as much Dowell’s story as Ashburnham’s. By the end, even that opening sentence can be interpreted as slightly misleading.  

I will leave the last word to Dowell. “Why can’t people have what they want? The things were all there to content everybody; yet everybody has the wrong thing. Perhaps you can make head or tail of it; it is beyond me.”