Collected Works of E M Delafield

by E M Delafield

  Things like that — all terse and epigrammatic, and yet at the same time profound.

  Nor are country women usually allowed to end up happily, in dialect novels. They are very often murdered — (which is, in a way, understandable) — sometimes by a husband, sometimes by a lover, but almost always in some rough, unpleasant way, such as strangulation, or the old-fashioned blunderbuss that hangs up over the chimney-piece in the living-room.

  Having now shown that the dialect-novel type of woman is almost altogether encompassed in gloom, we will turn our attention to the greatest contrast afforded to her in fiction — the heroine of the Pseudo-Historical volume.

  II

  The pseudo-historical book can be recognized at a glance by its title. This is almost always alliterative, and quantitative as well: Twelve Terrible Termagants, or Horrible Harlots of History, or Virgins of the Vatican. That kind of thing.

  The women in this type of book are Simply Awful. There is no other way of describing it. If they weren’t, people wouldn’t want to buy the book. No book of this kind has ever yet been called Seven Sinless Spinsters — or if it has been, nobody has taken the least notice of its publication.

  Sinless women have no place whatever in the affections of those who read pseudo-historical books. Such readers only want Depraved Duchesses, or The Thirteen Worst Women of West Wickham, or else the life-stories of peculiar creatures who for years pass themselves off as Admirals, or Foreign Legionaries, or even Popes, and then give the whole thing away by suddenly producing a baby.

  Let us leave them to it, and turn to another branch of the pseudo-historical. The kind of book that begins something like this:

  “How now, Fabiola!” exclaimed a tall youth in a toga one morning of spring in the year A.D. 400 as he strode across the tessellated marble pavement to the plashing fountain where sat the maiden Fabiola, of noble Roman birth and pensive mien. “How now, Fabiola! Art thou not coming to see the dogs of Christians thrown to the wild beasts in the presence of the Emperor and the whole Court?”

  Fabiola, however, backs out. She does not say, in a straightforward manner, that she has just become a Christian herself, because if she says anything like that, she knows, and the reader knows, that it is asking for trouble. The kind of trouble, moreover, that will bring the story to an end too soon, and is being kept for the last chapter.

  So the tall youth in the toga goes away discouraged, and enjoys the entertainment without Fabiola beside him. Fabiola, who takes her pleasures quite differently, borrows a black lace scarf from a faithful peasant-girl called either Maria or Lucia, which serves to disguise her completely, and goes off to the Catacombs.

  And that, practically, is all we ever get to know about Fabiola. It has been evident from the first that she will come to a violent, painful, and heroic end, and that the sight of it will certainly revolutionize the view-point of the youth in the toga, the faithful peasant-girl, and several rough centurions, coarse jailors, and renegade Christians. And this, though very fine, is not as interesting as it might be, from the point of view of feminine psychology.

  It must, however, be admitted that the Fabiola type of book is not in fashion nowadays, and is seldom seen except at school prize-givings. (School Prizes, strangely enough, are not selected by their winners. If they were, Fabiola would never stand a chance against Mickey Mouse, Wilfred, or Bulldog Drummond. School Prizes are selected by Schoolmasters — than whom there are no worse judges of juvenile likes and dislikes in the whole world — and with them Fabiola continues popular.)

  The historical novel proper usually contains about two women, one of whom is thoroughly bad, and the other one thoroughly good. Neither of these states bears any relation to any known condition prevalent in human beings, and therefore we are again reluctantly obliged to suggest that these female characters are lacking in interest. There is a third variety — usually an international spy — who starts thoroughly bad, but, rather unfairly, makes a bid for compassion at the end of the book by falling frantically in love with an English Gentleman, or some quite hopeless person of that kind, who naturally won’t look at her.

  (Why should he, when there is a good, pure, English girl who has been marked out for him from the very start?)

  So the female spy either commits suicide, by a direct method, or gives up her life for somebody else. There aren’t any alternatives, like getting over it, or falling in love with somebody else, such as are so readily to be found in everyday life. Historical-novel characters are nothing if not thorough.

  Finally, we come to a type of woman in fiction only too terribly popular nowadays. Not historical, exactly, because the story doesn’t go back as far as Beshrew me, and Oddsbodikins, and Nay, my liege, rather let me lose my life than my virtue. Not present-day either, because the whole point of the book is to show how extraordinarily well the author has recaptured the atmosphere of Victorian days, and with what astonishing diligence he or she has looked up the old-fashioned illustrations of the period, so as not to mix up crinolines with bustles, or pork-pie hats with Dolly Vardens.

  The result is usually very sartorial. The reader learns more about the heroine’s frilled drawers, leg-of-mutton sleeves, wreath of white camellias, and so on, than about her disposition. Her relations with her parents are made a good deal of, since it is well known that all parents living under good Queen Victoria and/or King Edward VII. were unconscionable tyrants. Her relations with men fill the last half of the book — sometimes more — and are gloomy in the extreme, and all the fault of the Victorian period. The chief merit of this sort of woman in fiction is that she gives her creator an opportunity for working off all the repressions and resentments of youth.

  III

  In allegorical fiction there is almost always a character called the Woman, another one called the Man, and hosts of minor ones, such as the Child, the Dog, the Spirit of Charity, the Essence of Ammonia, and so on.

  It is, unfortunately for ourselves, the Woman with whom we are concerned. Unfortunately, because she really is more wholly intolerable than almost any other female in fiction. In fact, nothing will do justice to her except a short excerpt from the type of book in which she is to be found. (And usually it is an expensive little book, though small and thin, bound in a bilious green, with a ribbon marker that comes off after about a week, and all its T’s and C’s linked together at the top in an affected style.)

  The Woman, as often as not, is a mere stumbling-block in the way of the Man, and then she goes on something like this:

  Scene. The Garden. (Allegories are always given an out-door background, we do not know for what reason. Why not an allegory in a tea-shop at Ealing, or the out-house of the golf-course at Burlescombe? But no, it has to be in a garden, or an orchard, like Adam and Eve and the Book of Genesis.) Very well, then:

  The Garden — or A Garden. The Man is standing at the Gate — (always a Gate in allegories, though in real life more often a hedge of Portuguese laurels, or two cement posts and a wall with a door in it) — and on his shoulders he is carrying a Pick — which is the allegorical symbol for work, not Grave-digging — or a Burden, or a Wounded Stag, or a Naked Child, or any other utterly improbable article that he almost certainly wouldn’t be seen dead with in real life. The Woman, who always has long hair, regardless of fashion, and wears something rather unpractical like a tunic, or draperies, or sometimes nothing at all, is standing at the Gate too, usually on the other side of it, because she is certain to be either luring him in or keeping him out, and either course will turn out to be treacherous and bad.

  The Man begins by saying: The time for play is over, the buttercup wreaths have all faded, and the work of the world is calling me. Let me go. (This is the allegorical way of saying: Don’t keep me, dear, or I shall be late at the office.)

  Stay, replies the Woman, and help me gather wild asphodels. (There’s nothing like asphodels, in an allegory, unless perhaps it’s amaranth. Sooner or later, one or other of these turns up, whatever the season, in every a
llegory.)

  The Man says some more about the work of the world.

  Stay, repeats the Woman, and help me gather wild asphodels.

  Then the Man has usually quite a long speech, recapitulating all the things it is necessary for the reader to know, about his previous relations with the Woman, and the buttercup wreaths, and his inward certainty that the time really has come now to make a break, and get a move on with the work of the world.

  And at the end of it all, the Woman just says, all over again, “Stay, and help me gather wild asphodels”. And if she says this once, in the course of the allegory, she says it a hundred times. Allegories are rather like anthems, in the way they go on reiterating one single phrase. To the ordinary mind this is an aggravating trick.

  Well, they just go on and on like that. The work of the world — wild asphodels — backwards and forwards like a rocking-horse. In the end the Woman wins. That is to say, the Man puts down whatever he is carrying, and joins her. (Nothing is ever said about what happens to the discarded Pick, or Wounded Stag, or Naked Child. And yet either of the two latter, if left about too long, would get him into serious trouble with the police.)

  And the end of the Allegory is the slamming of the Gate by the Woman. To the strange mind of the allegory-writer, there is evidently something frightfully final about the slamming of a gate. No doubt he, or she, is not in a position to realize that the slamming of gates is an effect that can be, and constantly is, produced all over the place either by defective latches or careless children.

  The mention of children brings one at once to another type of woman in allegory. She is, either actually or potentially, The Mother.

  She has little in common with the Woman, except that her clothes and her hairdressing are equally unusual. Her conversation is more extensive, and she makes extraordinary and inaccurate generalizations:

  “When a sunbeam falls on a lettuce-leaf, it means that, somewhere in the world, a baby has hiccoughed.”

  Or:

  “Every time a little child weeps, a cloud passes across the face of the moon.”

  Common sense and statistics alike revolt at the statements of the allegorical Mother. But, in the allegory, she gets away with them every time, and the other characters seem to think that she has said something significant and moving.

  The Old Man passes his hand across his furrowed brow, and mumbles that his Mother told him that, bending over his cradle in the middle of the night and stirring the red embers of the peat, close on ninety years ago.

  The Little Children press close to her, and look wistfully up into her face. (Well they may, poor little things, probably hoping that they were hearing the beginning of a Grimm’s Fairy Tale, with robbers and wolves in it.)

  And The Man is there, too, because all allegories have some of each sex in them, and in fact sex is usually the main interest in allegories, though it would not do to say so.

  The worst type of allegory of all is disguised as a children’s story, and is called The Kiss of the Rainbow or How Bunnie the Rabbit found a Soul, and no ordinary, normal kind of child can endure that sort of story. The children in the allegory have names like Little Mirth, or Gentleheart, and walk about in woods and gardens hand in hand, looking for ridiculous things like The Purple Flower of Happiness, or the Great God Pan, or Eternal Love. And when they’ve wandered about for pages and pages, exchanging the most sickeningly whimsical, wistful, quaint, and utterly impossible conversation, they find a dead bird, or a trapped butterfly, or God knows what, and some Spirit or other surges up out of nowhere, and explains that this is really what they were looking for all the time.

  Enough has now been said to show that the present writer does not care much about allegories, nor the female characters in them.

  IV

  Of almost all the women in fiction, prostitutes get the best treatment nowadays. They are credited with every kind of virtue, but especially generosity, courage, and good-heartedness. The respectable women haven’t got a chance in the same book as a prostitute. The best thing they can hope for is that they may have their eyes opened by her to the utter futility, selfishness, and triviality of an ordinary breadwinner, wife or mother, when compared to a heroine of the streets.

  Stories about prostitutes are mostly written by young writers. It helps them to feel grown-up, and it makes the female ones — we regret to say — hope that reviewers will mistake them for men.

  Prostitutes, for reasons not fully understood by the present writer, are tremendously associated with pink. (Not, of course, the official “pink” that people wear out hunting, but just the ordinary colour, pink.) Their bed-sitting-rooms are entirely decorated in pink, their own underwear — always a good deal insisted upon by the author — is a dingy, flimsy pink, so are the lampshades, the bedspread, the cushion-covers, and the flowers — if any — on the table.

  From a psychological point of view it is difficult to take the prostitutes in books very seriously, first of all because they are all so exactly alike, and secondly, because the books hardly ever tell one the really interesting thing, which is how they originally entered the ranks of their profession. Sometimes, of course, the prostitute tells the hero of the book the story of her life, beginning with the old Rectory garden and the artist who came to lodge in the village in a long-ago May, just when the apple-blossom — and so on. But even that story, moving though it is, doesn’t really account for everything, because, after all, one swallow needn’t necessarily make a whole summer, and in fact in real life it hardly ever does. This continual discrepancy between women in real life and women in fiction is nowhere more apparent than in stories that have anything to do with prostitutes, and discourages one quite a lot from reading them. At the same time it doesn’t do to be unjust, and there are writers who go in for the most terrific realism, and produce long-short, or short-long, stories that almost always contain prostitutes, sailors, boxers, negroes, and climatic peculiarities, such as torrents and torrents of unceasing rain, waves of unparalleled heat, or spells of Antarctic cold. These stories are very modern, and don’t have any plot at all, and just as you get interested in one of the characters, three little dots appear ... and you have to turn your attention to somebody quite different.

  They don’t have any beginning or end either, because that wouldn’t be modern; they just kind of drop on to the page with some statement, usually of a thoroughly unpleasant nature, like: “He knew that he was going to be sick” or “She loved him so that it made her long to strangle him and then trample his body under foot”. (Yes, I know, when ordinary people in everyday life love anybody, they do not have these unhallowed impulses, but there it is again — women in fiction bear but little resemblance to anything human.)

  Almost all the stories of this type show a strong resemblance to one another, even though some — only too many, in fact — have a Russian background, and perfectly impossible names, all several syllables long and indistinguishable from one another, and others take place in squalid and sordid parts of London, and almost all the rest in some bit of New York called the Bronx, or Chinatown, or Harlem, and end inconclusively, and are compact of solid gloom from start to finish. (Shakespeare, of whom all writers always say that they think so highly, took quite a light-hearted view of harlotry, but modern novel-writers never attempt to imitate him in this. However, that may have something to do with their chance of selling their film-rights — which after all didn’t exist in Shakespeare’s day — so one must not judge hastily.)

  The single point on which the authors of all these books and stories are absolutely at one, is that every prostitute has a heart of gold. There is apparently something about her way of life that makes it inevitable. And really, having said that, there seems very little else to say about the prostitute in fiction. Little or nothing is told one about her other characteristics. Either she is unutterably young, and entirely devoid of paint or even powder — which is perfectly ridiculous, in reality, and only male writers ever put it in — or else she is quite
elderly, with a raddled face and dyed hair, and drinks.

  But neither age, youth, drink, nor anything else interferes with the heart of gold. A prostitute and a heart of gold just seem to go together naturally, like country-women and aphorisms in a dialect novel.

  On the whole, prostitutes add but little to the average person’s enjoyment of novel-reading. On the other hand, authors like writing about them, because they are pretty well the only topic left on which it is still permissible for the modern writer to be thoroughly sentimental.

  V

  Detective novels, nowadays, are very highly thought of by publishers, who are as a rule the last people to think highly of any book, whatever they may say in their advertisements. (We are writing from inside knowledge, having had both interviews and correspondence with various publishers, on the topic of our own books. And we have subsequently been astonished at the difference between what the publisher eventually puts on the jacket of the book, and what he said about it to us, firmly and regretfully, when we were trying to persuade him to let us have twenty-five pounds in advance of royalties.)

  Detective novels, then, are the mode. All sorts of eminent people confess — usually to one of the daily papers, always a good medium for confession — that when they are over-worked, or unable to sleep, or worried about super-tax, they read a detective novel. Naturally, after this, authors who wouldn’t otherwise have thought of such a thing, sit down and write a detective novel, and some of them do it passably, but most of them don’t, and a very, very few do it really well.

  All of them, however, seem — as usual — to slip up when it comes to the female characters in their books. No doubt the writers concentrate on the murder, and the necessity for keeping the identity of the murderer, and the method employed, concealed from the reader until the last page but one. And such powers of characterization as they may display are always lavished on the amateur detective. The other people in the book have to be content with labels, and are just the peppery old Colonel, the voluble charwoman, the querulous invalid, or the wealthy, relentless, and extortionate blackmailer. As for the detective himself, he may be anything, or do anything, or have any number of extraordinary idiosyncrasies, like being able to see in the dark, or play the trombone, or disguise himself as a Chinaman so that his own mother wouldn’t know him. And if, in addition, he has a broken nose, or an eye-glass, or a foreign accent, then he is absolutely firmly established as one of the most real and vivid creations in detective fiction.