Josephine Tey

by Jennifer Morag Henderson

  Arriving at Garnie (which has a real-life near-namesake in nearby Dornie), there is a little confusion between real places and imagined, as Garnie, with its sandy beach, seems to bear more than a resemblance to Applecross itself, rather than Shieldaig, where the beach is stony. There are islands visible off the coast at both Applecross and Shieldaig, and Beth was familiar with several west-coast beaches, after her time working in Oban. The fishing lochs so important to the story are matched with fishing lochs in the hills around Shieldaig – there’s no ‘Loch Finley’, but there are other places with similar names, like Loch Lundie. There is a choice of manse and other houses in the area which could have been models for Mr Logan the minister’s house, since, as described in the book, there are both Free and United Free churches. Walking up from Shieldaig to the site of Colin’s family croft at Camus na Leum, I passed several large stone houses which reminded me of Mr Drysdale’s.

  Despite the Highland links, neither Kif nor The Man in the Queue were recognized as ‘Scottish’ novels. Beth’s pen-name was widely known locally in Inverness, but she was not fêted as a local celebrity. She did not court the local press, but, under the heading ‘Novel by Inverness Author’, The Man in the Queue was very positively reviewed in the Inverness Courier on its publication, in June 1930. This is the first local press cutting I have found for Gordon Daviot.22

  Neil Gunn, now a full-time writer who had made enough from the proceeds of his novel The Grey Coast to build his house Larachan on Dochfour Drive, and who certainly did enjoy being fêted as ‘our local author’, noted the Courier review of this ‘Inverness lady who has already contributed an excellent novel to the literature of the day, and who bids fair to become well-known as a writer of fiction’. Gunn’s concerns as a writer were focused on his national identity, and 1929 was the year he officially joined John MacCormick’s National Party of Scotland, the forerunner of the SNP. In his published correspondence, a letter from the exact same time, dated May 1929 and addressed to publishers Hodder and Stoughton, expounds at length on what Gunn saw as the impossibility of any Scottish writer getting published.23 Gunn’s latest novel had been rejected. Privately, at the same time, Neil Gunn also sent his rejected novel to Gordon Daviot’s publisher, Ernest Benn. Benn rejected it as well.24 A few months later, Gunn wrote to another friend and writer, Nan Shepherd, concluding that perhaps the reason his novels were being rejected was that they were too political.25 Kif, in its criticism of the way former soldiers were left to fend for themselves, and its analysis of class division, has a strong political message – though not, of course, the area of politics that Gunn was keen to discuss. Gordon Daviot’s disassociation from Gunn, and the writers he considered his contemporaries, had begun, and was to increase over the years, particularly as their views on Scottish nationalism developed.

  In some ways, Gordon Daviot’s work sits more easily with British writers of her time than it does with those of her Scottish contemporaries who were explicitly concerned with a ‘Scottish literary renaissance’, like Gunn, MacDiarmid or Grassic Gibbon. Another way to contextualise Kif is to compare it with contemporary literary novels such as those of Elizabeth Bowen, who published The Last September in 1929, and who shared the same literary agency as Gordon Daviot. Bowen was an Anglo-Irish writer, and, although her Irish background is central to some of her plots, she is very interested in characterization and her novels are very British. For example, The Heat of the Day is a novel about the Second World War first, then about betrayal, and then a London book. Beth MacKintosh’s books, even the genre mystery novels, are similarly concerned with character. They also share the obsession with London.

  After her earliest short stories, Beth never again wrote about Scotland in quite the same way. She no longer deliberately used specifically Scottish words, and her descriptions of Scotland often came with qualifying statements or comments from her characters about what they thought of the country. As she became more and more fixed in Inverness, she wrote more longingly about the England she would no longer live in, and both Kif and The Man in the Queue are full of joyful descriptions of London’s attractions. Beth’s sister Jean, in autumn 1929, moved to London to work for a solicitor, while their youngest sister had left both college and her baby nickname behind her and had also headed for the capital. Mary Henrietta had ditched the name Etta, which she had never liked, and now called herself Moire, the Gaelic version of her first name.26 After leaving domestic science college, Moire found an excellent job working in London for the Gas Board, as a demonstrator and tester of gas cookers. Moire enjoyed London life immensely, and Beth was able to visit both her sisters on holidays, indulging her interest in theatre and horse racing. It is amazing to think that The Man in the Queue was published four years before Gordon Daviot’s massive theatrical success Richard of Bordeaux – Ray Marcable’s show presages the extraordinary turn Daviot’s career was to take over the next few years. Daviot was creating in her imagination and writing the life that she wanted in London, and she was almost able to write it into being – but not quite. As she proved to her family that she was able to write and look after Colin, Beth wrote herself into a corner. There was no reason now why she shouldn’t stay in Inverness, as she could work from there. Beth’s next writing projects began to take a different turn.

  Chapter Eight

  The Expensive Halo, ‘Ellis’ and Invergordon

  After her first two novels, the next publication of Gordon Daviot’s was actually another short story: ‘Madame Ville d’Aubier’ in the English Review. It could have been written and sent off before her two books came out, particularly since the attached biography makes no mention of either novel, but Beth did continue to write and publish short stories throughout her career. ‘Madame Ville d’Aubier’, although it’s not really a mystery, does feature another murder. With the same character names and similar setting to the Glasgow Herald story ‘The Exquis’, Daviot was continuing to build up her world, and the theme of artists in France was something she was to return to again in her playwriting. However, the thing that stands out in ‘Madame Ville d’Aubier’ is the opening description of the Scottish countryside, which is among the best things that Daviot wrote. The cold wintry landscape contrasts nicely with the descriptions of France, while the maturity expressed in the sentiments is already a world away from the jealous traders in the short story ‘His Own Country’, published two years before:

  Outside, the white dead moors stared blankly back at me as the train trailed its slow length across the Grampians. The hills stood withdrawn and cold and magnificent. Even the winter sunlight that lit them to beauty could not make them less aloof, less symbolic of eternity. And suddenly the chugging train with its load of little mortals, each busy with his own futilities, was somehow heart-breakingly pathetic. If we were to count so little, it was surely unfair that we should suffer so much.1

  Daviot obviously realized the power of this image, as she refers back to it in the closing sentence, giving it one of the more satisfying conclusions of her short stories: ‘And we went to luncheon, watched by the staring indifferent hills’. This haunting closing image, set on the train, shows that Beth was an already powerful writer – and it shows a snapshot of her life, as that train journey south from Inverness was so well known to her, and was to continue to feature throughout her life.

  With an agent and publisher in London, and her sisters based there too, Beth took many trips south. The Man in the Queue was serialised in the Evening Telegraph in 1930, and, although these sort of spin-offs from her work could be organized by letter, Beth took pleasure in her visits.2 The colourless, grim, post-war landscape of Kif was not the only reality. This was the time of the Scottish Colourists, whose vivid paintings show an altogether different side of Scotland, and, for some sections of society, the post-war years were gay and bright. Those who had made it through alive wanted to celebrate their lives, not endlessly commemorate death. It was the time of the Bright Young Things of the twenties. Evelyn Waugh published Vile B
odies in 1930, and Nancy Mitford’s Highland Fling came out the following year. All in work, and with money to spend, the three MacKintosh sisters could enjoy London: the parties of the original aristocratic ‘Bright Young People’ had, by the early 1930s, become a widespread youth movement that everyone was aware of, chronicled and mythologized in literature.

  The Expensive Halo, Gordon Daviot’s third novel, is her contribution to this world; an alternative view of the post-war years that stands in contrast to Kif and gives a glimpse into an upper-class world of parties, privilege and boredom – balanced by a contrasting story about the children of a greengrocer. Obsessed with class, the novel shows that talent and money can’t buy happiness, or entry to a closed society – it is a cynical take on romantic relationships, firmly a novel of youth. The Expensive Halo is probably Gordon Daviot’s least-known book today, but it is one that deserves proper attention because of what it tells us about her development as a writer, and also what it tells us about her development as a person.

  The Expensive Halo features as one of its main characters a stern father who runs a shop selling fruit and vegetables. This fictional fruiterer is called Mr Ellis – the maiden name of Beth’s grandmother Jane. Little incidents in the book bring the fiction uncomfortably close to the reality. Mr Ellis is as strict and religious as Jane’s real-life husband, Beth’s grandfather Peter Horne. The fictional fruiterer ‘Alfred Ellis’ used to work with his younger brothers, as Colin MacKintosh had done, but buys his brothers out of the business because he doesn’t like to defer to other family members.3 Colin and his brothers had clashed too, though not for these reasons.

  It’s hard to see quite what Beth thought she was doing with this mixture of fact and fiction. Beth’s connection with the surname ‘Ellis’ was not well known outwith her own family, but many of her cousins (and her own sister) had been given Ellis for a middle name, as Josephine and her siblings had honoured their mother. In contrast to the extended family of her babyhood, Beth and Colin had now lost touch with many of their cousins, but they still lived in the same small town. Beth’s pen-name of Daviot was widely known in Inverness and further afield: one of the first articles I have found ‘revealing’ her real identity was in 1931 in the Chicago Tribune, following the US publication of The Expensive Halo.4

  Colin’s upbringing had made him a strict, though loving father. Whether ‘Alfred Ellis’ was meant to be a portrayal of Peter Horne, or an amalgamation of many people, there are passages in the book that must have worried Colin and strained his relationship with Beth. Beth had proudly dedicated a personal copy of Kif to him, and Colin was an avid reader, though neither he, nor Beth’s sisters, shared her passion for literature in quite the same way. Perhaps The Expensive Halo was some sort of challenge, to see if any of Beth’s family or acquaintances were actually reading her books. Perhaps she thought they weren’t reading, and so it would slip under the radar. Perhaps it was a deliberate attempt at provocation, as she found herself living in a town where she did not want to be, looking after her father instead of being allowed to live independently as either a teacher or a full-time writer. Perhaps it was naivety, or an over-commitment to her fictional world – Beth was often known as a sharp person, whose first consideration was not necessarily other people’s feelings. Perhaps she felt it was essential to express her feelings somehow, and safer to do so in writing.

  Knowledge of Beth’s real life changes the experience of The Expensive Halo for the modern reader, but it is perhaps worth saying that in a town as small and as gossipy as Inverness, there has never been any suggestion that Beth put her family into her writing. However it may seem at this distance, and with extra knowledge of her background, to their contemporaries there was never any suggestion that Alfred Ellis was Colin MacKintosh – and the connection to Peter Horne was not even mentioned. Colin and Beth were already at a distance from that side of the family, and Colin’s own reputation was established. The novel may have harmed relations with her father, but it did not do Beth any harm with anyone else.

  The Expensive Halo turns firmly away from Scotland, and is set in London, telling the story of two sets of siblings: a rich girl, Ursula, falls in love with a poor boy; whilst unknown to them the poor boy’s sister falls in love with Ursula’s brother. The novel is narrated from the point of view of both Ursula, the rich girl, and Sara, the poor girl, and one of the strengths of the novel is that each voice is distinct: whoever is narrating is the person the reader understands and feels sympathy for. Gordon Daviot was always excellent at writing in different ‘voices’, and it is one of the aspects of her novels that most strongly recalls her skills as a playwright. Some of the dialogue has a dry humour that matches the way her friends described Beth herself, while there are some biting comments:

  ‘Darling, did you see her at Raoul’s last night with Freddie Owen?’ Julie said. ‘In a frock that looked like a telephone cover that someone had sat on.’

  ‘What does she spend her money on?’ someone asked.

  ‘Cocaine,’ Lola said.

  ‘Oh, is she trying that now?’5

  However, there are parts of the dialogue that don’t ring true, particularly the romantic scenes. The blurb for the novel describes it as a ‘sparkling comedy of topsy-turvy London in the hectic Twenties’ – but I wouldn’t say that ‘sparkling comedy’ is the description that comes first to my mind, however her publisher wished to market it. I think Gordon Daviot was trying to write a more serious literary work, but one of her starting points may have been a rather theatrical or cinematic, artificially heightened version of English life – something like a Noel Coward play.

  The Expensive Halo in fact started out life as a play script.6 Beth had made clear her interest in the theatre in The Man in the Queue, and she continued to attend the theatre with her sisters when she visited London. It was her aim to write a stage play. She made several attempts that she was not quite happy with, and The Expensive Halo seems to have grown out of one of these abortive attempts. Perhaps the transposition of genre accounts for some of the slightly off-kilter feel of the book, but again, the fault seems to come back to the character of Alfred Ellis. As with most of Daviot’s work, observed characters are her speciality, but this central character is not fully rounded. There are some beautifully descriptive passages, such as the incident with Mr Ellis’s attitude over the lodger Dastur bringing flowers to Mrs Ellis, but there is a lack of understanding at the heart of Mr Ellis that makes him too much of a caricature. The father has no redeeming characteristics, and there is little attempt to understand why he is the way he is, and why Mrs Ellis may have loved him. Mrs Ellis herself is a more rounded character, as Sara can see her faults, and see that she encourages her husband, but Mr Ellis remains a one-dimensional villain. When Sara comes home from the party, and suddenly finds her father’s anger at her funny, I think this is meant to be more of a climactic scene than it actually is. Because the reader has never understood him properly, his undoing is not the relief it should have been.

  Perhaps Beth, who, along with her father Colin, seemed to have followed a policy of not seeing family that she didn’t like, didn’t really understand her religious grandfather, or whoever had been the inspiration for ‘Alfred Ellis’. Perhaps Beth was not as grown-up and sophisticated and clever as she thought – perhaps this, too, explains why she thought she could get away with writing nasty characters with the same name as her family. It’s almost a step back from The Man in the Queue which, for all its dismissal of Gaelic and west coasters, seems to have more of a genuine understanding of Colin’s family background. Something has gone wrong here – Beth is no longer trying to understand and fit in with her family; The Expensive Halo is a novel of youth, where family only holds back the heroine. It is a novel of fashion; a novel of Bright Young Things, and the Highlands have little place in that.

  The people that Sara meets are far from the Highlanders Grant met in The Man in the Queue, and the biggest preoccupation is always with class. Gordon Daviot t
ries to express that inexpressible class feeling: ‘Why should she [Sara] expect to feel at home with these people? And (the next moment) why shouldn’t she? They were just human beings like herself.’7 It is at the races, at Kempton Park, that we get the first explicit sense that Sara feels she is out of her depth with her upper-class boyfriend and his associates. It’s worth comparing the Kempton scene in The Expensive Halo with the similar scene in Kif – in Kif there is less of the nuance of class that Sara is aware of, though this, to me, says more about Gordon Daviot’s ability to write from different points of view: the young boy Kif would not have been aware of the people around him in the same way that the young girl in love, Sara, was aware.

  Sara’s prospective father-in-law is a Blandings-like pig-owning aristocrat, a character that recurs in Daviot’s writing, appearing again in her posthumously published play Mrs Charing is Cross. Was he too based on a real person? There does seem to be slight evidence for Beth, at some point in her teaching career in England, having perhaps had a third significant romance, with an upper-class man. Then again, as a teacher in both private and comprehensive schools, and during her time as a VAD, Beth would have had plenty of opportunities for meeting people from many different classes and social groups.