Collected Works of E M Delafield

by E M Delafield

  What, therefore, can be hoped for, in the case of the women in detective books, when this is the best that can be managed for the men — who are always vastly in the majority in this type of book?

  Not so very long ago there were only two women to be found in any detective story, and one was called Mary, which meant that she was the heroine and would have to be rescued from sinister and extraordinary machinations, and the other was called Mrs. de Lacy, or Señora da Silva, or any other name suggesting un-English connections, masses of blue-black hair, and a discreditable past, sprinkled with lovers.

  This convention has now passed away. Instead, we get something very very young, and modern, and colloquial, called either Jane, or Susan, or Ann, and far from having to be rescued, she usually does all the rescuing, and a good deal of the detecting, herself.

  Let us suppose that the body of her uncle and guardian, with whom she has always lived, has just been found sprawling across the library table, with a dagger between the shoulder-blades, the face mutilated beyond recognition, the room spattered with blood, the clock stopped at 2 A.M., a loaded revolver on the blotting-paper, a hideously sharp Malay kris from the collection on the wall lying on the floor, and the poker, all covered with human hairs, clenched in the corpse’s hand. (Besides all the doors being locked, and the shutters fastened from the inside, and the fire burning on the hearth so that nobody could have come down the chimney.)

  Confronted with all this, Ann may, or may not, exclaim: Oh, poor uncle! — but if she does, it’s as far as she goes. The next moment she is examining the blotting-paper for clues, and noticing some frightfully significant detail, such as that one candle has been burning longer than the other, or that the uncle’s left shoe-lace is done up wrong.

  She says nothing about this, at the moment, because all the rest of the house party is also in the library, but later on, usually about tea-time the same day, she confides the whole thing to the amateur detective of the party — a young man of about her own age — and they decide to unmask the murderer themselves, from amongst the guests. The guests, we may add, do not disperse just because their host has been found murdered. They stay on and establish cast-iron alibis for themselves, and break up the cast-iron alibis of one another, and on the evening of the very day on which the crime was committed they all come down to dinner in their usual evening clothes and are put through the third degree by Ann and her friend, in a modern, colloquial, and thoroughly flippant style.

  Readers of detective fiction will not require to be told that the criminal is by these means unmasked, usually within twenty-four hours, and that Ann and her collaborator decide to become engaged — their love scene probably taking place in the identical library, with uncle, kris, poker, and all, still uncleared away.

  We can but leave it to our readers to decide whether even the youngest, and most up-to-date, feminine nervous system is really up to this sort of thing. Personally, we know very well that at no time in our career could we have done any of it, nor could any of our friends, relations, or acquaintances.

  Apart from these extraordinary young girls, detective novels also have less-young, but still young, wives. The main thing about them is that they are such prize liars. They have to be, partly so as to confuse the evidence and make it more difficult for the detective, and partly because they always have: (a) a lover, (b) a collection of fearfully compromising letters, (c) a secret connected with their past which must, at all costs, be kept from their husbands.

  So that these young wives, really, although so necessary to the plot, are not terribly interesting as studies in human nature, being all so very much alike, and actuated throughout by the instinct of self-preservation and absolutely nothing else.

  The only remaining type of woman in the detective story is the domestic servant, and anything less like human flesh and blood it would be practically impossible to find. She drops her H’s, she listens at doors, she wipes her hands on her apron, and is verbally comic under cross-examination, and generally behaves after a fashion that would ensure her instant dismissal within half an hour from any house in which she might have taken service.

  It seems fair to add that detective stories, in the main, form a most desirable addition to any library, and those who write them are, in the opinion of the present writer, faced with a task that requires an almost superhuman degree of intelligence, accuracy, and ingenuity. So that really it seems unreasonable to ask much in the way of feminine characterization.

  VI

  Years and years and years ago somebody published a novel elliptically, but intelligently, entitled The Woman Who Did. This created quite a fuss at the time, and it is a curious and interesting thought that, in order to create any similar amount of fuss nowadays, a novel would have to be about a Woman who Didn’t — because anything else is now so frightfully unoriginal.

  The only question in a modern novel is why she did, and this is usually explained in pages and pages of dialogue between the woman and some man with whom she either is, or isn’t, in love.

  Because — (and this is what makes it so difficult to write this article so that it can be read in the Home Circle) — the modern woman in fiction views life, apparently, simply and solely in terms of sex.

  It makes no difference that she usually has a career. That’s only just thrown in for local colour. She may be living in a flat in Chelsea with another girl, or married and looking after her husband and children in the suburbs, or running a house of ill-fame in New York — but, sooner or later, this overrated question as to her relations with men will take the bit between its teeth, and we shall hear of nothing else for the whole of the remainder of the book.

  Well, the present writer feels rather in despair about the whole situation. Quite evidently, falling in and out of love is very important and interesting, and readers like reading about it, and authors, God knows, appear to like writing about it. But from the point of view of ordinary, everyday life, there are quite a lot of other things going on, and if we are going to be psychological and analytical, their effect upon the modern woman should really not be so completely ignored. What, for instance, about the absolute impossibility of ever finding a petticoat that is not either too long or too short to wear under a thin frock, and the perpetual difficulty of getting any attention in any restaurant unless accompanied by a man, and the state of one’s overdraft, and the fear of starting a cold, or having to have a tooth out, and the strain of fitting in a shampoo-and-set once in every ten days?

  These things, and millions of others exactly like them, are going on all the time, whereas the vagaries of passion, even in the most exotic careers, do ebb and flow quite a lot. But to read the great majority of novels about modern women, you’d think they never gave a moment’s reflection to anything whatever except emotional considerations.

  It will not, after this, come as a surprise to anybody if we add that the modern woman in fiction shows practically no sense of humour whatever. When she does laugh, it is an affair of bitterness, and is caused by the discovery that her lover has run off with her best friend — or that her husband, for whom she has sacrificed everything in the world, doesn’t really love her after all — or that the only man she ever cared for has just been killed at polo.

  “She put down the letter, and sat perfectly still. The crumbs upon the table-cloth ... she found herself counting them ... one, two, three.... Presently a strange sound broke the silence. Like the buzzing of a dental drill....

  “She realized that she was laughing.”

  That kind of thing. Of course, there may be women who will recognize these symptoms — to whom it all comes home — who will exclaim, as they read about the crumbs on the cloth, and the dental drill, and everything: “Goodness me, yes! That was exactly what happened when I heard about Daddy having gone off with that woman and left me and the children to face the creditors.... I remember the way I laughed, just like that.... Human nature is the same all the world over, doesn’t that just show?”

  And if
so, of course, it is one up to our modern novelists. But if not, on the other hand, it begins to look as though the last word hadn’t yet been written, in psychological novels about women.

  Sometimes the author takes the woman about whom he is writing from the cradle to the grave. Usually, then, it is all very introspective, and melancholy, even in the very earliest chapters of all, and long before an ordinary person would have thought it possible, we are all mixed up with sex again, and never get really far from it until the last few pages — by which time the heroine has become a grandmother.

  There is yet another type of modern woman in fiction, and she is usually quite young and does practically nothing except drink, dance, and go about with men. It is a gay life to read about. But literal-minded people get quite worried, wondering where on earth the young men came from, when everybody knows quite well that there isn’t such a thing to be found, as a rule, and especially not in the country. And even if found, they don’t want to be making love all the time, but would rather be out in the nice fresh air, killing something, or playing with a ball. But in the books, they drift about from one party to another, and talk endlessly, and make love to women, or get tired of them and break their hearts. Or else it’s the other way on. Whichever it is, one would like to see women in fiction rather more realistically, and less conventionally, treated.

  Of course, it might seem prosaic, after all the strange types of womanhood now irrevocably associated with modern novels. But then, why not let’s make up our minds to admit, once and for all, that real life, and real people, women included, are prosaic?

  CHILDREN IN FICTION

  I

  If Women in Fiction, why not Men in Fiction, and/or Children in Fiction? There is no reason why not, except that there are fewer of them.

  Children in fiction are, by comparison, quite rare, and this is really a very good thing, because they are almost always very depressing, and quite extraordinarily unlike children in real life. (Not that children in real life are not very often depressing, especially to their parents, but that is for quite different reasons.)

  Dividing children into types — since it is the mistaken, but almost universal, custom amongst authors to do this with the characters they write about — we find that there really are only two types of children in books: the sort that the author believes him- or her- self to have been and the sort that he or she is perfectly certain that he or she never was. Both kinds are often to be found in the same book, and it is usually a very long one.

  Sometimes it begins with a genealogical table, which is a comparatively simple expedient, but sometimes it goes back to the most ungodly lengths, and starts by saying: Hardly had the last shot been fired at the Battle of Bosworth Hill, when young Homfray Rook, then aged twenty-two, ran away with the wife of his elder brother, Nigel Rook of Rookscliffe, a lovely red-haired creature of scarcely seventeen.

  (The lovely red-haired creature is, of course, the wife — not Nigel Rook, who is as black as his name, and probably drinks, or makes himself unpleasant in other, worse ways.)

  Well, one may or may not be interested in lovely red-haired creatures, scarcely seventeen, who let themselves be run away with by their brothers-in-law. The present writer is never terribly enthusiastic about them, but very likely this is simply jealousy, since almost everybody would like to be lovely, and red-haired, and seventeen, but very few of us ever are, and then not for long. But anyhow, one does one’s best to follow it all intelligently — only to find that after about fourteen pages, Mary, or Nancy, or whatever her name is, has been rushed successfully through motherhood, grand-motherhood, and very likely widowhood as well. Years and years have rushed by, and have been crammed with places and people, and descendants, and the original children of the original couple have married complete strangers, and had children of their own, and these have repeated the process, and it is absolutely impossible to remember who anybody is. And then, at the end of the fourteen pages — which the reader has had to turn back many more than fourteen times, in order to try and find out the relationship between any single character and any other — then, it turns out that the whole intricate and breathless accumulation is simply there in order to lead up to the birth of one particular baby, round whom the rest of the book will revolve.

  Nothing, in fact, could be more disproportionate than the way in which whole long lives are compressed into tabloid form, — and then every single detail of the hero, or heroine’s, infancy and childhood is spread out upon the page. Every single detail, that is to say, which seems relevant to the author, for there are many things readers would like to know that authors leave for ever unrevealed, and still more things that readers care very little about, but that authors are determined to put on to paper.

  We are, however, straying from the child in fiction; and we are first of all going to deal with the little creature as presented to us by the author who is secretly convinced that it accurately represents the childish self of the writer.

  Two things about this child immediately spring to the eye: it is phenomenally sensitive, and it has entirely preternatural powers of observation. Things that an ordinary child in real life would take in its stride, or overlook altogether, make the most terrific impression on the child in fiction. Scenery, to which in everyday life children are coldly indifferent, has the most extraordinary effect upon it. For it is always a most intelligent child, and often very gifted as well, and its naughtiness is an affair of temperament, and of obtuseness on the part of everybody else. And it has interesting faults like temper, or pride, or obstinacy, but it is never untruthful, averse from washing, or addicted to teasing animals. Yet in everyday life, as every mother knows ...

  As for its powers of observation, they really border on the miraculous. The little thing, from a cot in the night-nursery, overhears astonishing, and often very improper, conversations between its parents, or the servants, and not only remembers every single word of them, but draws from them the most distressing conclusions, which turn out to be perfectly correct.

  Time goes on — though not very fast — and the child goes to school. The whole scholastic question, in this kind of novel, revolves round one single word; and it is a word, we are afraid, that any reputable printers would certainly refuse to print. So we will only say that if the school is a Public School, things are worse and more lurid than if it isn’t. This convention is an absolutely cast-iron one amongst authors.

  Soon after these searing experiences, the child passes into a slightly more mature stage, and is no longer a fit subject for this article. But we have said enough to show that authors, as usual, have loaded the dice heavily, and that children in fiction, however interesting, bear little resemblance to ordinary ones.

  For one thing, they never talk about their food, and real children prefer this to almost any other topic.

  II

  The best and most popular novelists do not, as a rule, have children in their books at all, and this is wise. Parents are about the only people who are interested in children, and they merely in their own ones. Doctors, dentists, and teachers, indeed, have to be interested in children, whether this comes naturally to them or not, but they do not carry their interest into the realms of fiction, as will readily be understood.

  There are, however, authors who think that they can, and in fact must, write about children. Many of them have a passion for what they call fantasy — (and we should like to take this opportunity of saying, once and for all, that it is a passion wholly unshared by the present writer).

  They begin with what seems like a straightforward statement of fact:

  “It was Peter’s seventh birthday” or “Jean had found a robin’s egg that morning”.

  Well, that’s all right. But what does it all too often lead on to? The most extraordinary and improbable revelations, such as Peter’s invincible determination to find the crock of gold at the foot of the rainbow, and his preliminary passage through Halls of Fear, and Towers of Truth, and other, similar, architectur
al impossibilities. And at the end of it all, as like as not, there isn’t any crock of gold at all, but only some not-very-original discovery to the effect that Courage overcomes Cowardice, or Kindness is better than Cruelty. Common sense tells us at once that Peter could have found this out much more easily by staying at home and looking it up in his copy-book.

  As for Jean and the robin’s egg, the whole thing is a plant. There is nothing for ornithologists, and nature-lovers, and people like that, to get excited about. The robin’s egg will turn out to be symbolical, or not really there at all, and Jean will do nothing but talk about Mothers, and Little Furry things that Live in the Woods, and Love making Everything Easy. (As we all know, it usually, on the contrary, makes everything extremely difficult.)

  Authors do not seem to like writing about children as they really are. This is, in a way, understandable, because in real life children are seldom picturesque, and almost always disconcerting. But all the same, the present writer thinks that there ought to be some limit to the extent to which authors draw upon their imaginations when dealing with child-psychology.

  Almost the worst type of child in fiction is the silent, intelligent, determined, sensitive little boy — usually called either John or David, although Thomas is creeping into fashion — with the utterly worthless mother. (Fiction writers take no stock in the theory that great men have remarkable mothers. Remarkably foolish and frivolous, perhaps, but nothing else.)