TEN POLLITT PLACE
C.H.B. KITCHIN
With a new introduction by
SIMON STERN
VALANCOURT BOOKS
Ten Pollitt Place by C.H.B. Kitchin
First published London: Secker and Warburg, 1957
First Valancourt Books edition 2013
Copyright © 1957 by C.H.B. Kitchin
Introduction © 2013 by Simon Stern
Published by Valancourt Books
http://www.valancourtbooks.com
All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without prior written consent of the publisher, constitutes an infringement of the copyright law.
Cover art by Val Biro
INTRODUCTION
By the time C. H. B. Kitchin published Ten Pollitt Place, in 1957, he had already published fourteen books, including the detective novels that account for most of the attention he still receives today. He had first established a name for himself in the 1920s as a writer of evanescent, witty prose in novels such as Streamers Waving and Mr. Balcony, which were published by the Hogarth Press and which earned him comparisons to Ronald Firbank. L.P. Hartley observed of these novels that they ‘display an element of fantasy sometimes so strong as to overpower actuality, and a glitter of surface and brilliancy of technique that dazzle while they enchant.’ The Hogarth Press also published Death of My Aunt (1929), Kitchin’s first detective novel and probably the book for which he now remains best known. It was widely praised by the reviewers, one of whom observed that Kitchin had ‘adapted his style’ to the mystery genre, suffusing the story with an air of quiet realism and imbuing the narrative with ‘quick touches of description and . . . minute psychological “pointers”’ that, taken together, were reminiscent of ‘the technique of Stendhal’.
Over the following decades, Kitchin abandoned the extravagant mode that had characterized his earlier fiction, instead writing more contemplative, even nostalgic novels about the state of England. This trend was forecast in Olive E. (1937), which surveys a variety of English personalities as they react to the harbingers of the oncoming war, some by preparing for crisis and others by ignoring it. The Auction Sale (1949), often seen as one of Kitchin’s best novels, centres on a three-day sale of the effects of a great country estate, which provides the springboard for a set of meditative reflections by Miss Elton, the novel’s main character, about the history of the estate and the uncertain outlook facing the country. The book ends, however, on an optimistic note, as Miss Elton looks toward the future with the aid of two mementoes that she has acquired at the sale: a painting called The Pleasures of Love and Retirement and a bowl inscribed with the motto ‘He knoweth thy walking through this great wilderness’. To some extent, Ten Pollitt Place continues this inquiry into England’s past and its prospects for the future, now focusing closely on a group of characters living together in a London boarding house.
In situating ‘the Pollitts’ in the book’s first chapter, Kitchin evidently had his own London neighbourhood in mind. Like the house described at the outset, his three-story terrace house at 23 Montpelier St. (where Thomas Hardy lived briefly in 1870) was in a ‘roughly triangular area’ just south of Kensington Road and east of Exhibition Road, in a tangle of streets including Montpelier Walk, Montpelier Square, and Montpelier Mews, a dead-end street like the ‘obscure cul-de-sac called Pollitt Mews’. Garrows, the large store where Dorothy Fawley goes shopping and eats lunch, apparently refers to Harrods, near the Montpeliers and just on the other side of Brompton Road (called Parkwell Road in the novel).
Similarly, Kitchin seems to intend the novelist Justin Bray as a self-portrait. Once regarded as ‘dangerously advanced, a highbrowish enfant terrible’, Bray is now sniffily disdained by one reviewer as ‘only fit to be read by elderly ladies wearing lavender-scented gloves’, while another reviewer condemns him as offering ‘a mixture of stale platitudes unhealthily sweetened with a pinch of saccharine’. Kitchin himself did not receive such negative reviews; if anything, his novels were more likely to be criticized for being too enigmatic than for being syrupy. Nevertheless, while his most recent books—The Auction Sale, The Secret River (1956), and his short story collection Jumping Joan (1954)—had been highly praised when they came out, they were not widely reviewed, nor apparently did they sell many copies. When Justin Bray observes that his new book, Seven Silent Sinners, cannot be found in the shop-windows, he echoes a remark of Kitchin’s about Jumping Joan in a letter to Nevill Coghill: ‘The book is a flop. It doesn’t seem to exist in the shop-windows. My amour propre resents the thought that I am becoming known throughout the trade as a “worst seller”.’ Kitchin’s sense of amour propre was hardly improved by a typographical error on the dust jacket of Ten Pollitt Place, which added a decade to his age by listing his year of birth as 1885 instead of 1895. In the copy that he inscribed to Coghill, Kitchin crossly annotated the date with the observation that if only the printer had put 1855, he would ‘truly be the grand old man of English literature’.
It is tempting to speculate that in choosing the street’s name—and in referring to the locality as ‘the Pollitts’—Kitchin was inspired by the Pollitts of Tennessee Williams’s play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, which won the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1955. The play explores a complex web of sexual deceit and emotional manipulation through a set of conflicts involving two generations of the Pollitt family, centring in particular on the inheritance of the family fortune. What Williams presents in a high-octane emotional register, Kitchin presents in a more muted register, although the novel does have occasional moments of melodrama. One of the primary features contributing to this effect is Hugo Muller’s prediction, in late October, that someone in the house will die before the end of the year. In a novel that often proceeds at a slow and measured pace, Kitchin builds suspense by placing the date in the title of each chapter, making us wonder when Hugo’s prediction will come true. The structure is one that Kitchin had used twenty years earlier in Olive E., which also includes a prediction of death and a series of chapters captioned according to their slow march towards the announced date.
As we await this outcome, the house’s residents pursue various activities ranging from the mundane to the erratic. Miss Tredennick spies on her neighbour and keeps a journal full of salacious details that she imagines submitting, one day, to ‘the authorities’ as ‘evidence’—until the object of her obsession suddenly vanishes. Justin Bray, working desultorily on his twenty-fifth novel, entertains aristocratic acquaintances whom he appears to despise. Robert Fawley carries on an affair with Mrs Muller’s daughter Magda, and seems to be on the verge of breaking up with his wife Dorothy. Fifteen-year-old Hugo Muller is the house’s oddest resident, and the one who seems to manage the others’ fates through a combination of chance and preternatural instinct. In love with the dustman (who is twice his age), Hugo not only understands the erotic challenges that he faces, but even tells his mother that he never wants to grow up because ‘nobody loves a grown man—at least, not the kind of person I want to love me—and not in the way I want to be loved.’ Suspicious about his sister Magda’s affair and intent on trailing her, Hugo proves intuitively capable of selecting just the right kind of cab driver to help him out—one with ‘three or four children, whom he had spoilt for the sake of peace and quiet, but by now . . . [were] grown up’, and a nagging wife whom he ‘was always relieved to get away from’. Significantly, even though his own moral judgments chime almost perfectly with Miss Tredennick’s, Hugo is also familiar with the ‘vulgar and barbaric tune’ favoured by their scandalous neighbour across the street—so familiar that
when this maddeningly repetitive song awakens Miss Tredennick in the middle of the night and sends her into a temporary blindness, Hugo is able to tell the doctor its name: ‘Will you do the doodle ’em with me?’
Hugo, one of the queerest characters Kitchin created, seems to be the one who connects—and disrupts—the lives of everyone else at Ten Pollitt Place. While it appears that Miss Tredennick is slowly losing in her struggle to preserve the dignity of the neighbourhood, the novel ends on a far more ambiguous note than The Auction Sale. Hugo’s own interventions serve directly to resolve the uncertainties about the Fawleys’ faltering marriage and indirectly to precipitate the death that he has predicted. Yet even as he constitutes the linchpin of the novel’s wayward plot, Hugo himself stands as an inscrutable figure whose own fate is impossible to discern. Dorothy Fawley’s assessment of Hugo, when she begins to grasp his understanding of her marital situation, might well apply to his role in the plot as a whole: ‘That little flaxen-haired boy with his angel-face, on which the bitter experience of a thousand years seemed suddenly to have left an imprint—what an envoy to choose!’
Simon Stern
Toronto
April 20, 2013
Simon Stern received his Ph.D. in English literature from Berkeley and his J.D. from Yale and is an associate professor at the University of Toronto, where he is a member of the Faculty of Law and the Department of English.
To
NEVILL COGHILL
I
THE POLLITTS
The surname of William Pollitt, a speculative builder of the eighteen-thirties, still provides Londoners with a sevenfold chance of confusion. Even postmen have been known to go astray in ‘The Pollitts’,—such being the generic name for a roughly triangular area which has one of its vertices almost in Parkwell Road, another within a stone’s-throw of Kensington Gardens and the third jutting out towards Exhibition Road. A letter directed to a house in Pollitt Square may find its way to a similar number in Pollitt Crescent, Pollitt Place, Pollitt Terrace, Pollitt Row, Pollitt Rise, and, if the number is below eight, in an obscure cul-de-sac called Pollitt Mews. The list is arranged in a descending order of social significance, which, however, might in these days be almost reversed, since the fine houses of Pollitt Square have all been split up into flats or tenements. Much the same is true of Pollitt Crescent, though in its gracious curve there are still one or two lucky families who manage to keep a whole house to themselves. The charms of the Terrace, the Row and the Rise were first recognised in the early twenties of this century, when those who preferred a home, however small and with however limited a view, to the largest and most luxurious of flats, began to buy the freeholds as they came into the market, or bribe away residents of the type for which those narrow streets were originally designed.
Pollitt Place, which is more or less in the middle of the Pollitts, now lies, as it has always lain, more or less in the middle of the social scale. The houses, which were once far too small to attract those who boasted of living in the Square or the Crescent, are now too large for the housewife of middle-class resources. The south side of the street shamelessly takes in lodgers, but the north side (even numbers from two to forty-two inclusive), though sub rosa it may do much the same, still makes a parade of being privately residential, with one family—or shall we say, one group of friends?—to each house. The real difference is that on the north side, the freeholders for the most part live on the premises, while on the south side they are nearly all absentees, and indeed never could be present in the flesh, since they are corporate bodies, such as insurance companies and Garrows, the big store in Parkwell Road, and have an eye only to the lucrative day when they will be able to get rid of the occupants and rebuild. At all events, on the north side of the street, brass, paint-work, door-steps and net curtains are apt to make a braver show than they do across the way.
One of the pleasantest features of the Pollitts is that its unity does not exclude diversity. Not a single house is precisely like its neighbours,—as house-agents learn to their cost when they assume that the description of a house they have just sold will suit the one next door. Number Ten, for example, has an extension at the back which one would never suspect from a frontal view. It is a house of four storeys,—basement, ground-floor and two floors above, with the hint of another in embryo in the roof. It is faced with white stucco up to the level of a balcony on the first floor, and thereafter with well pointed red brick, which has evidently been cleaned since the end of the Second World War. Three broad steps lead up to the front door, and the railed-in area between the house and the pavement is so big that it not only lets ample sunshine into the basement but gives those who live there a generous view of the far side of the street. The balcony, though too narrow to use with any comfort, is a pleasure to look at, with its balustrade of intricate iron scroll-work, its curved lead canopy and wide french windows.
‘How pleasant,’ one might be tempted to exclaim, ‘it is to see a real Regency house in such good trim.’ This description may be a little too flattering, but in the middle nineteen-fifties Number Ten does suggest a more elegant age,—till one notices three bells by the front door, and a brass plate adjoining them:
MISS TREDENNICK
FAWLEY
JUSTIN R. BRAY
and underneath, is a name with no corresponding bell:
MULLER (Basement-entrance)
Then, if one is an old-fashioned reactionary, one will add, ‘What a shame! They’ve had to turn it into flats after all.’
II
THE FIFTEENTH OF SEPTEMBER
The summer that year had been unusually fine and persisted to the middle of September with hardly a break. After a day of continuous, windless sunshine, the night air was heavy and hot, but without any hint of thunder.
Two o’clock had just struck in the Neo-Gothic tower of St Ethelred’s Church and Miss Tredennick, dozing fitfully in her bedroom on the top floor of Number Ten Pollitt Place, lurched awkwardly on to her left side and faced the windows. She had just dreamt that she was back in Cornwall, in sole possession of Polvannion, now that her father was dead. But she was still plagued by his stuffed birds. They were everywhere,—on the stairs and in the bathroom and even in the cupboard where she kept her hats. She had offered them to museums in Truro, Falmouth, Camborne and Penzance, but nowhere could the collection find a home. There was no escape from those beaks, those glassy eyes, those moulting feathers, unless she ran away and lived in London. She could take Gwen and Magda with her and open up her father’s town-house, left derelict during the war. Miraculously the bombs hadn’t damaged it, and still more miraculously the local Council hadn’t yet filled it with unwanted guests, who would carve their names on the pinewood panelling of the dining-room, let cigarette-ends burn on the chimney-pieces, wrench the ormolu handles from the doors, keep coal in the bath and steal the lead from the roof.
But she must be quick. There were horrid stories of the havoc which the new Labour Government was making or planned to make of the best residential areas in London. She must decide at once. She had decided. (At this point her musings became less of a dream and more of a retrospect.) Gwen pushing and Magda pulling, she had climbed the stairs to the top floor and said imperiously, ‘I shall live here—and I hope to die here. You can do what you like with the lower part of the house—within reason, of course,—but if you look after me, you won’t fare too badly.’
And there she had gone, with Gwen, Magda and Hugo,—the Muller family who lived in the basement and ran the house for her. Not that they were at all uncomfortable in the basement. There were still obliging builders to be found, who didn’t set much store by the silly limits which the Government, regardless of rateable values or the surtax one paid, imposed on house-decoration. At all events, the conversion was most handsomely carried out, and the house soon comprised an agreeable ‘lower ground-floor’ (with four rooms, a kitchen and bathroom), a self-contained flat of two big rooms, kitchen and bathroom on the entrance-fl
oor, another somewhat similar flat above it, and above that, on the top floor, Miss Tredennick’s quarters,—her bedroom, facing the street, her sitting-room, bathroom and kitchen behind it, and a box-room that was half-way up in the roof.
She was now fully awake, but prolonged deliberately the train of thought which had taken shape in her sleep. She and Mrs Muller had chosen their tenants well. Mr Bray was an ideal occupant of the ground-floor, where, she had been told, special caution was needed in the selection of lodgers. Nor could one say anything against the Fawleys, if one was content to take them as they were. They were both exceedingly respectable. The husband was a worthy, if dull, youngish man with a smile that could sometimes break through his boorishness, while his wife would have been of no account at all, had it not been for an introspective nerviness that redeemed her from nullity. Poor thing, she seemed unable to realise that we are living in a cold revolution and must grin and bear it—and kick back when we can.
Miss Tredennick herself had no illusions, or thought she had none. The whole world had changed for the worse and would soon be changing to something still more hideous and hateful. Meanwhile, the old survivors of a derided and dying civilisation—like Romans who had read Horace and Martial and had been left behind in ancient Britain among the Celts, awaiting the Saxon onslaught—had somehow to live. ‘And we do live,’ she thought. ‘Here am I at seventy-six, arthritic and dyspeptic, but with keen ears and eyes that are still keener.’
But she admitted to having made one mistake. She had assumed that though the Square and the Crescent might have lost every trace of their old dignity, the Place would remain comparatively unchanged. She had vaguely heard of the tussle between the Periwinkle Insurance Company and Garrows for the ownership of the south side, but thought it was of little consequence as long as a few freeholders held out. She had been assured by her old friend Mrs Molyneux-Green that nothing should induce her to stir from Number Seven. The Bastions were once more settled in Number Fifteen, as were the Laxtons in Number Twenty-one. Number Nine, that most important of all the houses on the south side, since it was immediately opposite Number Ten, was still owned by the wealthy Miss Webster, though the unfortunate woman seemed destined to spend more time in a clinic than in her own home. Miss Tredennick valued these neighbours far less for their friendship or their company—Lady Bastion was an insufferable woman—than for the stability they gave to the tone of the street.
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