The Constant Nymph: Love and Loathing in Bohemia

The Constant Nymph: Love and Loathing in Bohemia

Margaret Kennedy’s 1924 bestseller combines psychological acuity with romantic idealism. It also betrays some shocking attitudes to social class in pre-war England 

When The Constant Nymph was published in 1924, its author, Margaret Kennedy, achieved what most novelists dream of: literary acclaim followed by huge commercial success - on both sides of the Atlantic. It was a bestseller that earned praise from, among many others, JM Barrie, John Galsworthy, AA Milne, Cyril Connolly, and Thomas Hardy. It was adapted as a stage play starring Noel Coward, and there were three separate films made of the novel in 1929, 1933, and 1943. It is a clever and occasionally poetic novel, emotionally shrewd and sardonically observant, dealing elegantly with grand themes and contrasts: love and lust, beauty and cruelty, jealousy and trust, art versus ‘culture’, security versus freedom. 

Yet today, if not actually forgotten, The Constant Nymph barely features in most people’s mental lists of significant 20th century novels. 

The most obvious reason for this is that the story centres on a love affair between Tessa, a 14-year-old girl, and Lewis, a man twice her age. And in contrast to Nabokov’s Lolita, published over 30 years later, this age gap is not even placed at the heart of the story. The mutual love between Tessa and Lewis (which is not consummated), is presented by Kennedy as something inevitable, unshakeable, and pure. Tessa’s extreme youth is an inconvenience, a practical obstacle blocking the path to the couple’s predestined union, but it is not really depicted as a moral problem - certainly not in the way it would be today. 

This makes it an intriguing example of a novel that is more risky to recommend or dramatise in 2015 than it was back in 1924. 

Another difficulty with the novel is that it is deeply veined with snobbery and the permutations of class (some crude, some exquisitely subtle). It also includes some frank anti-Semitism. 

The anti-Semitism tends to appear in what the characters say, rather than in the author’s own voice, so arguably Kennedy is simply reflecting the common unexamined prejudices of the time, like many other writers of the same period. This view is supported by the portrayal of Jacob Birnbaum: the children call him ‘Ikey Mo’ (a derogatory nickname for Jews), but Birnbaum is actually one of the book’s most likeable characters. 

The treatment of class, however, is more insidious and thus more interesting. Rather than seeing the snobbery as problematic, I think it opens a window on the nuances of social hierarchy in pre-war England, and this is fascinating. The novel simply oozes contempt: the lower middle class, the pretensions of the upper middle class, the socially ambitious, the fat and awkward, the ‘refined’, those who aspire to be ‘cultured’ – all these and more are in the firing line. But the harshest contempt is reserved for those who, like Lewis’s wife Florence, try to harness the purity of art to some external purpose, whether this is money, success, social improvement, or, in Florence’s queasy words, “the business of living beautifully”.

Kennedy implicitly criticises the pretensions of Florence and her circle, and this is very effective. But she also reveals plenty of social disdain on her own account, expressed in her authorial voice.

I was 14 when I first read The Constant Nymph, exactly the same age as Tessa, the novel’s young protagonist. At 14, I used to read uncritically. That is to say, I had complete trust in an author’s authority. If something sounded odd, unfair, or even wrong, I unhesitatingly put my doubt aside, attributing it to my own lack of understanding. In many ways I still think this is the right way to read fiction – to surrender your scepticism for the duration. But as an adult, regardless of how immersed you are, there is always a second voice whispering underneath the text, quietly taking notes, swimming to the surface on the final page with a list of queries and objections. So I thought it might be interesting to compare my reaction to the book at 14, with my re-reading of it as an adult.

The Constant Nymph: the 14-year-old's perspective

I came across the novel via another novel. I had just read, and loved, Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love (1945). In the latter, the narrator, Fanny, has an aunt who is about to marry. Fanny says that a cousin is “now teasing me with The Constant Nymph. She read aloud the last chapters, and soon I was dying at a Brussels boarding house, in the arms of Aunt Emily’s husband”. The fact that Nancy Mitford assumes her readers will be familiar with the novel’s plot is some measure of its former ubiquity. 

Intrigued, I had to read about this nymph.

I never questioned the ethics of the age gap between Tessa and Lewis, other than feeling incredulous that a mature man could find a 14-year-old schoolgirl interesting in any way, let alone fall in love with her. I remember admiring Tessa’s self-possession in adult company, I was impressed that someone my age could make such intelligent contributions to a conversation, and thought Tessa seemed far older than her years: “Her trouble was not the bewildered groping of adolescence for a goal in life, but rather the sad finality of a woman who has beheld her destiny too young.” 

While I could not really relate to this, my sympathy for Tessa took off when she is uprooted from her continental gypsy life, separated from Lewis, and sent with her sister to an English boarding school, Cleeve (based on Cheltenham Ladies College). 

Tessa writes to Lewis: “. . . truly the only place where you can be alone here is the lavatory, which is not very comfortable, and they come rattling at the door if you stay there too long . . . our chief business here is to be always running as there is some place, on a timetable, that we must be in every minute of the day”. 

I never went to boarding school, but Tessa’s italicised emphasis of “every minute of the day” conveyed the imprisoning horror of constant supervision and, combined with the denial of privacy, this has remained with me as an idea of hell. 

Margaret Kennedy, 1896-1967. Interestingly, Margaret Kennedy was herself a pupil at Cheltenham Ladies' College, the school on which 'Cleeve' is based. Her characters, Tessa and Paulina, hate it so much they run away. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

Florence’s slow transformation from benevolent older cousin to shrill and resentful persecutor is frightening, but at 14, the threat to send Tessa back to school after she runs away seemed scarier than the attempt to split her from Lewis. I applauded when Lewis and Tessa fled England for Brussels on the boat train, and while the ending was sad, it seemed romantic; Tessa “slept on, where they had flung her down among the pillows, silent, undefeated, young.” It seemed preferable to the alternative. 

One incident in the novel offers a perfect definition of imaginative understanding between people, and the difference between this love and mere liking. Tessa, Lewis and Florence are sitting on a mountainside, and Lewis describes a childhood memory of sleeping out on some cliffs in Cornwall, hearing birds flying out to sea just before dawn. Tessa’s mind “swung back to meet the mind of that lost boy who had lain awake upon a high mysterious cliff, beside a whispering sea. She too, heard wings.” Tessa recognises the memory as one of those rare fleeting experiences that become “the inspiration for a lifetime”. Florence, however, merely asks Lewis a banal question about whether he had ever lived in Cornwall.

Achensee near Pertisau, in the Austrian Tyrol. The first part of the novel takes place in this area.  (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

This made an impression at 14, and still does. It also foreshadows a more sinister moment near the end of their story, when Lewis and Tessa are on a tram in Brussels. Tessa is looking at “a menacing sky: rags and banners of red cloud hung above the noisy streets and lit the faces of the people with an angry flame. The cries and shouts of the city sounded like cries of danger, warnings called forth by the wild light.” She turns to Lewis, wondering if he has noticed, and finds him “gazing at the bright sky with the extreme concentration of purpose which he used for all important things . . . gathering in that noisy radiance and stowing it away in his mind.” 

As for the question of mutual contempt among the characters, I simply accepted it. When Kennedy does not actually tell the reader what to think about a character’s social position, she nudges you firmly in a certain direction. And when she is not doing that, her opinion of the characters emerges clearly in what they say. As a 14-year-old, I obediently went where the author told me, but the book left me feeling ambivalent and vaguely uncomfortable, and now I can see why. 

Re-reading The Constant Nymph as an adult . . .

The “fat Slav”
Even at 14 I had found the introduction to the Sanger family a little confusing. Re-reading it later, I’m not surprised. The first characters the reader meets are Lewis Dodd, a youngish composer, and Kiril Trigorin, a choreographer, in the Tyrolese Alps. They are on their way up from the valley to visit Albert Sanger, an eccentric musical genius and patriarch, in his remote mountain retreat. Lewis is going as a beloved friend of the family, Trigorin as a eager (and as it transpires, unwelcome) guest. 

It seems as if you are being invited to despise Trigorin, via Lewis’s reactions, but it is not clear why this should be. Trigorin is richly dressed, but “his eyes, which should have been bold and greedy, were strangely unhappy and disclosed, in their direct gaze, an unexpected diffidence, an ingenuous modesty, entirely out of keeping with the rest of him”. 

Which sounds vaguely sympathetic. It is true that Trigorin is embarrassingly effusive. He lavishes praise on Lewis, who obviously finds him a crashing bore: “this fat person must be going to stay with Sanger; there was no other explanation for him. For the rest of the journey they would be compelled to travel together.” But it gets worse. Trigorin praises Lewis’s artistic work, but Lewis says to himself: “it was not for the appreciation of people like this fat Slav that he [Lewis] had written the ‘Revolutionary Songs’.”

“Are you a Jew?”
This situation continues when we meet Teresa (Tessa) and Paulina, two of Sanger’s seven children, ragged figures waiting on the lakeshore. They both greet Lewis with enthusiasm, but poor Trigorin is welcomed with rudeness.  “ ‘Can he eat bacon?’ whispered Paulina in an audible aside . . . ‘he looks a little like a Jew.’ ”  Tessa “turned to Trigorin and enquired baldly: ‘Are you a Jew?’ ” (He isn’t). 

It emerges that the girls have put a pig’s carcase in the cart that is to carry them all up the mountain: “draped in a tartan rug and crowned with Teresa’s straw hat, it was a horrible object, but not unlike a stout German lady.” Again, we seem to be invited to find this funny rather than macabre. I don’t remember what I felt about “Are you a Jew?” at 14, but I do remember being struck by the rudeness, and repelled by the dressed-up dead pig. I thought there must be something wrong about Trigorin that had somehow escaped me. 

To be fair, Tessa does suffer some pangs of conscience over the treatment of Trigorin: “She found herself wishing, absurdly [why absurdly?] that Lewis had been kind to the poor fat person,” and tries to reconcile the completeness of her love for Lewis with the cruelty and arrogance she discerns in him.

Trigorin is used partly as a literary device – his questions and Lewis’s answers provide information about the cast for the reader. But his treatment sets the tone for the whole novel – he is one of the crowd of outsiders who are ruthlessly excluded from the enchanted circle that surrounds Tessa, Lewis, and Tessa’s full siblings, the ‘natural aristocrats’ of the book. It is an exclusion that is echoed, much later in the novel, when Lewis’s wife Florence arrives home to find the Sanger children with her husband: “Her first impression, as the party round the fire rose up to greet her, was that she was an intruder. The children flung themselves upon her with every appearance of joy, but, for a fraction of a second, she knew that their faces had fallen.”

Temperament and ‘breeding’
Kennedy then gives a satisfyingly full description of Tessa and Paulina, using precise physical detail to establish personality. “Teresa was the fairer and the plainer; her greenish eyes had in them a kind of secret hilarity, as if she found life a very diverting affair. But she had begun lately to grow out of everything.”  The girls are barefoot and dressed eccentrically, half peasant, half gypsy. But Kennedy adds this: “Both contrived to have, at unexpected moments and in spite of their rags, a certain arrogance of demeanour which proclaimed them the daughters of Evelyn Sanger, who had been a Churchill.” So while the girls dress in peasant clothes, Kennedy is careful to separate them from the real peasant class of Austria. 

At the Karindehutte, the house in the mountains, the sublime beauty of its situation in a flowery meadow with the sound of cow bells “rising very faintly like single drops of music distilled into this upper silence” contrasts with the seething emotional tensions in the ramshackle family group. Tessa’s older sister Antonia has grown beautiful, a fact that irritates her father’s mistress, Linda Cowlard, “a vast dazzling blonde” who likes to spend the day resting in a hammock. ‘Cowlard’. . . Linda’s surname, which unites the cow with pig-fat, encapsulates how Kennedy wants you to see the character. Linda’s lower class is confirmed when Kennedy says that “her origins were obscure, but it was believed that she had once been the daughter of a tobacconist in Ipswich.” 

But it is the description of Linda’s daughter Susan, the youngest member of the Sanger family, that delivers the most violent blast of snobbery: 

“It [sic] was a wholesome, plebeian-looking brat, pink and formless as a wax doll . . . Linda was very fond of it, dressed it in white with pink ribbons.” It? Not content with this, Kennedy goes on to underline where the difference lies between Susan and her half siblings: “The child did, in fact, look something of a stranger among the others; her healthy inferiority especially distinguished her beside the brood of the ill-starred Evelyn, with their intermittent manifestations of intelligence and race.” 

Here we are being told by the author to despise the child Susan, as her half-siblings do, before Susan has said or done a thing. She implies that distinction is a matter of inheritance or ‘breeding’. After this, though, the snobbery in the book becomes more subtle, expressed mainly through Florence and her social ambition. 

Florence, the cultured steam-roller
When Sanger dies, the children are left homeless and penniless, and their older cousin, Florence Churchill, comes out to Austria from England to rescue them. Florence is the the most interesting character in the novel, partly because the author does not tell us what to make of her. She is multi-dimensional, changes frequently and develops the most, and her true nature is betrayed by her words and thoughts, rather than her origins. Florence is intelligent, cultured, educated, well-connected and beautiful. She travels to the Tyrol full of benevolent intentions, and is seduced first by the beauty of the landscape, and then by Lewis. 

There is one early hint of the darker, relentlessly controlling aspect of Florence’s character, and this comes from her father: “Sometimes, viewing her unswerving pursuit of a chosen course, he was compelled to liken her to something slow, crushing, irresistible – a steam-roller.”

With Florence’s arrival, the novel gains pace and homes in on Lewis’s failure to understand his own feelings for Tessa, and the consequences of his mismatch with Florence. His attraction to Florence is highly sexual, and he is also touched by her apparent concern for Tessa’s welfare. By contrast there is no discernible sexual element in his relationship with Tessa, who represents a sort of wild purity. 

Florence, for her part, wants to tame Lewis, to publicise his musical genius, using her contacts to launch them both into London’s artistic high society. This leads to some devastatingly acute observations on different views of the purpose of life and art. Lewis wants to create music, Florence wants to create an effect. They buy a house by the river near Kew, in London, taking Roberto, the Italian servant from the Tyrol, with them.

Florence: “He’s exactly the kind of servant I’ve always wanted. . . Really feudal. He gives the right tone to the house.”

Lewis (puzzled): “The right tone?”

Florence: “He’s the sort of servant we ought to have. He goes so well with the sort of effect I want to produce.”

Lewis: “Why should you want to produce any sort of effect?”

Florence: “. . . I want this house to look like us . . . pleasantly Bohemian . . . a sort of civilized version of Sanger’s circus, don’t you know, with all its charm and not quite so much . . . disorder.” 

Florence also believes that influential people, however unpleasant, must be made use of. Lewis has a spiteful, petty-minded sister called Millicent. Florence wants to invite her round, because “She carries a good deal of weight in some quarters. It wouldn’t be at all difficult for her to put a spoke in your wheel.” “I haven’t got a wheel,” retorts Lewis, who believes that art has no purpose, that “ideas are best conceived in a world of violence, that civilization must of necessity end by quenching the riotous flame of art for the sake of civic order.” 

So the philosophical cracks in their marriage are more like canyons, and they exist long before Florence is properly aware of the threat posed by Tessa. 

Nowhere is the difference in world-view between Florence and the Sangers more brilliantly captured than in chapter 21, in which Lewis gives his first concert. The Sangers make no distinction between the great opera houses of Europe and their own home; music is life and vice versa. Florence on the other hand, “possessed a special concert room demeanour – a still, serious, attentive carriage which sometimes, on special occasions, showed itself quite early in the day, as though she were practising inwardly.” What a superbly acid description of unconscious social and artistic pretension. 

Kennedy allows the reader to feel some sympathy for Florence, who, after all, finds herself in an impossible situation which distorts her better nature. She also has enough self-awareness to mourn her own transformation: “What had happened to her? Life had become a shipwreck, a desperate, snatching , devil-take-the-hindmost affair.” However, she sabotages the reader’s sympathy because, in the end, what matters to Florence far more than love or pride is social position. Even when Lewis tells her plainly that he loves Tessa, not her, Florence will not let go. And at the end of the book, in the midst of tragedy, she is full of coldly practical strategies for hushing up the scandal, and, rather like Scarlett O’Hara, laying bleak plans to reunite herself with Lewis, “to build upon wrecked love a monument of worthy achievement.”

Strand-on-the-Green, on the Thames in London, where Florence and Lewis begin their rocky married life. Florence wants the house to be an exquisitely tasteful backdrop to their entry into London artistic high society. Lewis sees it as a 'silver sty', and himself, presumably, as a trapped pig. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

The Constant Nymph today

This article has focused on some of the more troubling aspects of this novel. Is it worth reading in 2015? Certainly, for its precise, entertaining, and often uncomfortable human insights, its memorably poetic images, and the array of original characters (many of whom I haven’t even mentioned here). Is it a period piece? Again, yes, but the assumptions about class in the novel are worth noting for their own sake, as is its passionate perspective on the role of art in society.

I have not yet seen any of the three films made of The Constant Nymph (they are rarely shown and difficult to come by), so I can’t comment on their interpretations. I think the book could be dramatised as a modern TV serial, but it would take a brave scriptwriter to do it. They would somehow have to deal sensitively with the problem of Tessa’s age, as well as preserving the idealism that gives the book its heart, the sharpness of the psychological insight, and the snobbery that (hopefully) pins it to a period in the past.

© Josephine Gardiner 2015 


Some interesting footage on YouTube of Brussels in the 1920s, where the story ends.
(Thanks to 'StephendelRoser' for putting this on YouTube.)

Squirrel Nutkin: Anarchy for Under Fives

Squirrel Nutkin: Anarchy for Under Fives

Nutkin embodies the spirit of irreverence, making him an excellent role model for children

Graham Greene, writing about Beatrix Potter in 1933, called The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin “an unsatisfactory book, less interesting than her first (The Tailor of Gloucester).” 

I couldn’t agree less. 

First published in 1903, Squirrel Nutkin is more than “a Tale about a tail”. It is a story of brave defiance in the face (quite literally in the face) of tyranny, with a morally ambiguous ending. The hero, a squirrel named Nutkin, is one of the most flamboyantly subversive characters in children’s literature.

The book also presents the child with images of a wild, pristine world free from human intrusion: pictures of Lakeland wildlife and landscape that are precise and physical, but also romantic. These images last a lifetime. The one that took root in my own imagination shows the squirrels coming through the wood in a long single file, each carrying a fish. Their leader, however, carries no fish, is not walking in line, but is bounding ahead, singing:

“The man in the wilderness said to me,
‘How many strawberries grow in the sea?’
I answered him as I thought good –
‘As many red herrings as grow in the wood’”

This strange, formal procession through the green forest, with its suggestion of religious or pagan ceremony, together with the teasing beauty of the verse and Nutkin’s ecstatic fearlessness, created a sense of enchanted freedom. When I look at it now, the illustration has lost much of its power - it is even a bit pale and disappointing - but the mental image formed decades ago remains just as vivid. 

The procession through the forest, bearing gifts of fish

The story of Squirrel Nutkin is simple in form, a rhythmical repetition of similar events over six days. The tension builds through the steady escalation of Nutkin’s provocative challenges to authority, and the reader’s nervous uncertainty about exactly when that authority, in the form of a huge tawny owl, will react. 

It begins with a society of squirrels living in a wood by a lake, including Nutkin, his brother Twinkleberry, and their cousins. Twinkleberry has no real role in the story other than as the only named member of the large crowd of cousins. It is Autumn, and the squirrels sail across the lake to an island to gather nuts. But before they can do this, they have to ask permission from Old Brown, the owl who lives in an oak tree at the heart of the wooded island. It is not explained why Old Brown has the power to grant or deny this permission. 

On the first day, the squirrels offer Old Brown “three fat mice” and all of them (except Nutkin) bow down before the owl: “Old Mr. Brown, will you favour us with permission to gather nuts upon your island?” But Nutkin scorns such obsequiousness from the start, preferring to dance up and down and demand that the owl answer a riddle – the first of eight rhymes which punctuate the story. The owl studiously ignores Nutkin and shuts his eyes, saying nothing. 

Each morning, the compliant squirrels bring a new set of gifts to propitiate Old Brown – a fat dead mole, minnows, beetles wrapped in dock leaves, honey, and finally, an egg. Notably, all the presents are either dead smaller animals, or items stolen from other creatures. And each day, Nutkin’s behaviour becomes more provocative and defiant. 

On day two, he tickles Old Brown with a nettle:

“Old Mr B!, Riddle-me-ree!
Hitty Pitty within the wall,
Hitty Pitty without the wall;
If you touch Hitty Pitty,
Hitty Pitty will bite you!”

(‘Hitty Pitty’ is the nettle itself)

Provocation: Beatrix Potter's Old Brown is a remarkably accurate portrait of a tawny owl

Now Old Brown wakes up and fixes Nutkin with the expression of a cat wondering whether it is worth the effort to pounce on an insect. The owl’s ominous silence throughout the story adds to the sense of imminent danger. 

The denouement comes on day six. Nutkin chants another riddle, dancing up and down “like a sunbeam”. But it’s the picture that tells the real story here: Old Brown’s huge owl-face bursts out of the tree, inches from the reckless dancing figure of Nutkin. The sense of sudden movement in this illustration is extraordinary, and, for a small child, as shocking as those moments in horror films when a face thrusts up out of nowhere, pushing right into the viewer’s own face. 

Dancing in the face of danger: one of the most frightening - and inspiring - pictures in children's literature

A couple of pages later, Old Brown’s patience runs out, and he catches Nutkin: “There was Old Brown, sitting on his doorstep, quite still, with his eyes closed, as if nothing had happened. But Nutkin was in his waistcoat pocket!”

As Potter writes, this should be the end of the story, but Nutkin is not so easily extinguished. He escapes, but loses his tail to the owl’s claws and beak. 

This ending is quite abrupt and is left open to interpretation. Many children will listen to the story being read aloud by a parent, rather than reading it for themselves, so they will be at the mercy of any spin the adult chooses to impose on the conclusion. This might involve the implication that the loss of his tail serves Nutkin right for defying authority, with the adult framing the story for the child as a lesson on the consequences of wilful nonconformity. 

This is certainly the majority interpretation given by the reviewers (all adults) on the Goodreads website.  Almost all of them, depressingly, call the book “a morality tale” in which “impudent” Nutkin “got what was coming to him”, or “a cautionary tale about how manners do not cost a thing and you should respect people.” Most of them express admiration for the saintly patience of Old Brown, and “no sympathy” for Nutkin.

So the superficially conventional ending allows the book’s more anarchic subtext to slip neatly under adult radar, like Peter Rabbit squeezing under the fence. 

 
For children lucky enough to have parents who resist the temptation to moralise (I was one of these), or those with the precocious strength of mind to reject such interpretations, the ‘message’ is less trite and more fertile. Nutkin loses most of his tail, but he’s still alive, and it is his name, not Old Brown’s, on the cover of the book. His loss of speech and poetry is a little more concerning, although this return to zoological reality also occurs at the end of Mrs Tiggywinkle, when she loses her clothes and her true hedgehog nature is restored. 

Potter’s prose tends to be dry and tactfully detached; she never patronises her young readers by telling them what to think, so I doubt whether the ending is intended as a lesson. Also, I’m not sure how much Potter’s original intention, whatever it was, matters, compared with the book’s effect on children. 

This effect, when you are three or four years old, resembles the experience of vicarious pleasure in watching another child defying an adult: Nutkin is the child who goes too far, and who, thrillingly, is not burdened by the natural timidity that keeps others obedient (look at how the other squirrels are all watching intently, from a safe distance).

But there’s more to it than this. Nutkin is the spirit of irreverence. He ignores the concept of ‘respect’ and ridicules the owl’s complacent authority. He suggests that creativity and play are as worthwhile as duty and conformity (he may not work with nuts, but he does invent games). He shows that you can confound and baffle tyrants using words, humour and poetry, and he does it with an inspiring insouciance. I can’t think of many better ‘lessons’ for young children in 2015. If The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin is misinterpreted by adults, but continues to fascinate and delight children, then that is a measure of its subversive power. 

© Josephine Gardiner 2015 

Beatrix Potter as a child, photo taken by her father
Photo: Wikimedia Commons

‘Owl Island’ in the book is St Herbert’s Island on Derwentwater, in the Lake District.

The quotation from Graham Greene is from an essay about Beatrix Potter in Graham Greene: Collected Essays, Penguin, 1970.

All illustrations of Squirrel Nutkin in this article are from the Project Gutenberg Ebook of The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin.

(This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net)

The Runaway by Ruth Morris

The Runaway, by 

Ruth Morris

 

(Published in America as ‘Runaway Girl’)

Updated April 30, 2015

*Contains Spoilers*

I plan to talk about children’s literature here occasionally, so I’ll begin with a book that fulfils all my self-imposed criteria for inclusion in this blog: it’s underrated, obscure, and (more or less) forgotten. It is out of print, though you can still find plenty of old copies on Amazon. It is also remarkably difficult to find any information about the author, Ruth Morris, who does not seem to have written any other books. 

 
Until I read The Runaway at the age of 10, Australia was just a big blank island on the map, sitting there at the bottom of the world, home to koalas, kangaroos, and a few dusty facts from geography lessons. It had never really occurred to me that real children might live there, children with the courage to walk off alone into the outback to escape their ghastly relatives.

The ‘outback’ itself was a new word and a new idea, opening up a vision of vast spaces and wild emptiness that was, and still is, fascinating for an English child from an intensively cultivated landscape. Other strange words were used by the characters in the story, none of them explained, so you had to guess from the context: swag, bonzer, beaut, billy, crook, tucker, kelpie, galah. 

From what I have been able to discover, the book was first published in 1961 by Michael Joseph. The American edition was retitled ‘Runaway Girl’ by Random House and came out in 1962. In 1964, it appeared in paperback under Penguin’s Peacock imprint. The U.S. edition was illustrated (by Beth Krush), the British edition wasn’t. 

The Penguin Peacock edition

Reading it again for the first time in decades, I was surprised by how closely it fitted my memory of it, and how well it has weathered the test of time. In fact I can’t see any reason why The Runaway should have disappeared from children’s shelves.

The American edition, retitled and with illustrations by Beth Krush

Joanne Mitchell, the narrator, is a 12-year-old orphan who has been living for some years with her aunt and uncle, wealthy socialites in Melbourne. Aunt Valeria, Joanne tells us, “used to tell her friends I was ‘a civilized child, intelligent about prettying up the house’.” But when Aunt Valeria and Uncle Robert take a cruise to Europe, Joanne is cast out of civilization and packed off to stay indefinitely on a sheep station in remote Queensland, with relatives she has never met. She’s OK with this idea, imagining picnics in the bush and exciting drives to visit other sheep stations. 

Her arrival at the isolated backwater is powerfully described. “Red dust lay thickly over the tired wooden station buildings and stirred little eddies underfoot.” She is met by Uncle Fred, “a bent stick of a man with sparse gray hair and the face of someone who is always stubbing his toe on disappointment.” A bleak lunch follows in the station hotel, heavy with uncomfortable silences over slices of cold boiled mutton. 

“ ‘How’s Aunt Lilian?’ ” Joanne asks, trying to make polite conversation. 

“ ‘Good. She’s good.’ The flies settled back on the tablecloth. And in the sugar bowl too.”

But Aunt Lilian is not good, she’s grim. When Fred and Joanne finally arrive at the sheep station after 30 miles by jeep over rough, empty country, it is clear that Aunt Lilian sees Joanne only as a useful pair of hands. The house is spartan, cheerless, scoured clean, the yard a flowerless desert. For the next two months, Joanne is an unpaid servant, helping the neurotic Lilian scrub every inch of the already spotless house, every day. Aunt Lilian is no Marilla Cuthbert – there is no warmth hiding behind her dour exterior.

Life with Aunt Lilian 

Joanne finally snaps after Aunt Lilian sends her to help out at her (Lilian’s) sister’s farm a few miles away. She travels alone, in a horse-drawn buggy, full of hope that the sister will be different. But she finds another bare yard, chained dogs, dirty scattered bones, and a neat, arid, empty house (Lilian’s sister is out). 

“A solitary petunia raised a defiant but ill-nourished head from the edge of a drain. It must have been a great-great grandchild of the last, long-forgotten cultivated flower that ever bloomed at Four Creeks.”

Turning the reluctant horse, Darkie, around, Joanne heads off into the unknown and the adventure begins. She cuts off her red hair and becomes Joe Casey, judging that a boy will attract less attention than a lone girl wandering and camping in the outback.

The character I remembered most clearly from my childhood reading of this book was the old sheep drover who encounters Joanne (now Joe) on the open road. This memory seemed slightly surprising; gnarled, short-tempered old men have no obvious appeal for 10-year-old female readers. The drover, though, is an original creation, and I was pleased to find him exactly the same, full of laconic anecdotes about the dogs, sheep, bars, and mates of his past, stories that always begin with “Knew a bloke once. . . ”

From a distance, the drover looks like “a mound of rags with a hat on top”. He is unimpressed by his young companion’s clumsiness in harnessing horses and lighting fires, and contemptuous of her ignorance of the subtle distinctions between types of sheepdog. But he saves Joe/Joanne from starvation, and teaches her how to survive in the bush. 

Camping in the outback with the sheep drover

The drover is not a cosy character. Joanne notes his tough treatment of his “dirty, smelly” dogs, and he blithely abandons her alone at a desolate crossroads when it suits him, with a casual “So long”. He’s a man of the road who doesn’t ask too many questions; he accepts you, but admits no responsibility. He does however give Joanne a puppy, which makes the lonely black nights camping rough in the bush a little more bearable.

The trio – Joanne, the horse, the puppy – continue the road trip, staying for a while with the Bryce family, a struggling mother and her brood of boys (the challenge of pretending to be a boy among real boys is something girl readers might empathise with). This brief respite is curtailed when Mrs Bryce’s husband returns and becomes suspicious of the cuckoo in his nest. 

Joanne’s sense of freedom and her discovery of the natural world is set against her acute loneliness and constant hunger. Every random stranger represents a possible threat: the danger of being discovered and sent back to Aunt Lilian. 

Joanne's lonely nights with Darkie the horse and Abby the puppy 

The happy ending, with Joanne finding a new home, is not delivered before a final burst of tension. She runs away one last time in the middle of the night, terrified that her new family will find out that she is not a boy, and reject her (echoes of Anne of Green Gables).

The conclusion gives the book a satisfying symmetry. Joanne’s story begins with a long-distance train journey westbound into the unknown, and ends with another long, despairing train ride to Brisbane, where she descends among strangers onto the platform, before her new father appears and all is well.

Re-reading the book, I was looking for reasons why it should be out of print, and couldn’t really find any. It is set in the 1950s, but there’s nothing that freezes the story in that era; it feels timeless. There is no racism. If you were hypersensitive, you might object to Mr Mitchell’s implication, on discovering Joanne is not a boy, that girls are naturally disposed to enjoy helping around the house. But the broader message is that girls are the equal of boys in terms of courage and survival in the wilderness. Adults might wonder why Joanne’s adoptive family were not contacted by social services, but this is not likely to worry young readers. The descriptions of Joanne’s puppy sometimes border on the over-sweet, but again, this seems unlikely to irritate the literary sensibilities of children. 

As a character, Joanne has an everygirl quality, making her easy to identify with. She has no exceptional talents or quirks, but is simply an affectionate, observant child in need of a home. She doesn’t seek adventure, but is forced to confront it. The story perhaps has more appeal for children outside Australia, because they are most likely to enjoy the exploration of an unknown territory and culture. Joanne is 12, but I would suggest a slightly younger readership (9 to 11), given the greater sophistication of children in 2015.

So who is, or was, Ruth Morris? The only information I could find initially came from the website Jane Badger Books, which says that she was born in 1926 in Queenscliff, Melbourne, Victoria, the daughter of the garrison commander at Port Phillip, Victoria, and was educated at Melbourne University. She taught for a while, then spent two years in England working on farms and for people with disabilities, before returning to Australia. The Runaway was apparently based on a journey she made through Queensland in an old Ford in 1956. 

This biographical information was confirmed by Dr Catriona Mills, senior researcher at AustLit, the Australian literature database. She said that they had no record of any publications other than The Runaway. 

Ruth Morris in 1961, when The Runaway was published. From the Australian Women's Weekly. 

Catriona Mills did however unearth three newspaper articles about the publication of the book. The first, in the Australian Women's Weekly, dated November 8, 1961, says that Ruth’s trip around Queensland lasted six months, was undertaken alone apart from her cattle dog, Cappy. “I never would have done it without him,” she said.

The article says that she married a Geoffrey Webb of Culcairn, New South Wales, after her trip, and, mysteriously, that she had finished another book “about two youngsters’ adventures in the foothills of the Baw Baws.”  But I could find no record of this book. Nor did the the Peacock edition of The Runaway include one of those useful ‘about the author’ sections that all Puffin books used to have.
 
It is surprising if Morris did not publish again, because The Runaway is the work of someone who enjoys writing and does it with conviction.

If anyone reading this knows anything more about Ruth Morris (not to be confused with the Canadian prison reformer of the same name, born in 1933), or would like to share anything else about The Runaway, please feel free to comment below. 

© Josephine Gardiner 2015 

A galah (Eolophus roseicapillus). Joanne talks about seeing flocks of these pink birds against the pale blue skies of Queensland.  Photo: David Cook/Wikimedia Commons

Many thanks to Jane Badger Books, and to Dr Catriona Mills of AustLit, the Australian literature database, for the biographical information and links to newspapers. 

Links to articles from the National Library of Australia's Trove digitisation project: Australian Women's Weekly 1961, 1962; and The Canberra Times, 1962. 

What is it like to be a psychopath? 'Engleby' by Sebastian Faulks

What is it like to be a psychopath?

Another look at Engleby by Sebastian Faulks

The Sea of Ice, by Caspar David Friedrich, 1823. Also known as 'The Wreck of Hope'

* SPOILER ALERT * – please don’t read this if you have not read the novel.

Where would fiction be without the murderer, the psychopath, the serial killer, the ripper in the shadow, ‘the smiler with the knife’? Eviscerated, is the simple answer, with Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley, Graham Greene’s Pinkie Brown, Ruth Rendell’s Teddy Grex, all cast out along with numberless other nightmarish figures who stalk the pages of crime fiction (and ghost stories). Some murderers are no more than plot devices, while others break out of their crime-genre boxes to secure an enduring place in the popular imagination. But, with very few exceptions, the interior life of the psychopath remains mysterious in fiction, we look at him or her from the outside, from the perspective of the police officer, psychiatrist, relative, or victim.

It seems fairly safe to assume that few novelists have committed murder, so it is unsurprising that many writers have preferred to investigate what it would feel like for a sane, sensitive character, for whom the idea of killing is alien and repulsive, to be drawn into murder through some accident or momentary moral failure. This imaginative effort has given us (among others) Dostoyevsky’s Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment, and more recently, the five undergraduate murderers in Donna Tartt’s superb novel, The Secret History. 

Getting under the skin of a genuine psychopath, showing the reader what the world might look like from their perspective, seems to me a more difficult task. Of course, ‘psychopath’ is an imprecise and elastic label of dubious medical or legal value, a word that means nothing more than ‘sick mind’, but in fiction, what it describes is popularly understood to mean a person without remorse, antisocial, manipulative, possibly sadistic, and probably delusional. 

Ruth Rendell has made an enormous contribution here, singlehandedly and prolifically creating some of the most frightening characters in fiction, such as Eunice Parchman (A Judgement in Stone), or Senta in The Bridesmaid, and Rendell invites the reader in to listen to their interior voices. But there’s still a narrowness to Rendell’s psychopaths. Like the fanatically hygienic Minty in Adam and Eve and Pinch Me, they are trapped in, and defined by, their manias, obsessions, and fetishes; we watch in appalled fascination, tempered with sympathy, as the character’s compulsion or phobia expands and tightens its grip, distorting and conquering their reality. They murder to escape what seems to them a greater horror. Also, Rendell’s murderers are clearly mentally ill, and, like most fictional psychopaths I have met – they are so sick, so strange, so utterly beyond the borders of normal experience that they are oddly reassuring. The reader can think, ‘well, at least I’m not like that’.

Is Mike Engleby mentally ill? The answer is almost certainly yes, but the hesitation in making a glib diagnosis is part of what makes the character so disturbing and original. It is much more difficult to define yourself in contrast to Engleby. Instead of feeling comfortably distanced by his oddness, you catch yourself cheering him on as he lampoons lazy thinking, or exposes pretentiousness, complacency, and rudeness in others. He also elicits sympathy as he wrestles with the ‘curse of consciousness’, and when he is haunted by a sense of something that has been lost in modern life: 

“You need the air to be warm, not hot, but balmy with a smell of grass or hawthorn. You need the black outline of branches against a sky that, while dark, still has a blue shade to it. What you’re trying to do is get plugged into the depth of history going down through these villages, these houses, these lawns panting with their garden scent at evening.”

But the Mike Engleby who wrote that passage is the same person who can write the following about the final moments in the life of the young girl he has abducted and killed: 

“I don’t remember how, but I became aware that she had wet herself. Was there a smell? Did I hear it? I don’t know, but she’d made herself disgusting . . . her face was ugly with crying.” 

As the narrator, Engleby offers a number of possible causal explanations for his own ‘condition’: a violent father, poverty, a semi-detached mother, a sickeningly brutal experience of abuse and casual sadism as a scholarship boy at a squalid public school. He also suffers physical and psychological symptoms: headaches, insomnia, memory lapses, addictions, and episodes of dissociation in which he experiences a sudden violent dissolution of his sense of self, which he describes as a physical sensation. 

Any combination of these might be enough to make him a murderer, but this does not answer the old question of why other people who suffer similar difficulties do not kill. Faulks also probes the slippery question of guilt and insanity, and the extent to which the latter wipes out the former. In the novel, Engleby is committed to a psychiatric hospital (rather than prison) on the grounds of ‘personality disorder’, but whether he should be let off the hook in a larger moral sense is left to the reader to decide. I don’t think he should be, and I’ll explain why later. 

For me, the attempts at explanation, and the public school bullying chapter in particular, are the least interesting and successful aspects of the book.

The novel does three things brilliantly, however. First, it offers you a convincing experience of inhabiting the consciousness of someone who has committed murder, and he is an astute, perceptive, sardonically witty murderer with a phenomenal memory. 

Second, the story forces the reader to define precisely what is wrong about Engleby, what it is that he lacks. To achieve this, Faulks uses something akin to the Socratic method: as the story proceeds, he knocks away your assumptions about what a serial killer might be like (brutal, unreflective, inarticulate, blinkered, lacking in insight, humourless, unable to understand the perspective of others, incapable of change) building up a portrait of an original thinker, a damaged outsider who seems to possess far more insight than those around him, until finally, shockingly, Mike’s memory returns, and you are there with him in a dark Fenland lane, reliving the murder of Jennifer, forced to watch as he unmasks the monster. 

The shock comes not at the discovery that Mike has killed Jennifer (this is strongly signposted, you just don’t know how), but in his complete lack of simple pity for her terror (“her face was ugly with crying”), and the way he blames her for “what she’d made me do.”

The third excellent thing is spookier, and only emerged (for me) on a second reading. It concerns manipulation, a trait often attributed to the psychopath. Mike’s narrative voice (we are reading his journal, over several decades) is interspersed with long quotations from the diary of his principal victim, Jennifer, which Mike stole from her, along with one of her letters to her parents. It is these extracts that establish Jennifer’s character, her distinctive voice. But in one of the diary entries, the style changes markedly, gaining eloquence and flow; suddenly it sounds like Mike, and you start to wonder if some of the ‘voices’ (we also hear from Mike’s only friend, and his psychiatrist) are the creation of a clever simulator, and how far you, the reader, are being manipulated by the psychopath emerging from the pages. It’s an unsettling sensation. 

We first meet Mike as a student at Cambridge in 1972. He tells us he is in his second year at the university, describes his room, the architecture, the food, the dons, his favoured pubs, Folk Club, and his first sightings of Jennifer Arkland, the confident, fair-haired history student with whom he becomes obsessed. The narrative trots along entertainingly enough, but after a few pages you become aware of something slightly amiss. The tone is curiously flat, deadpan, like that of a clever boy at boarding school obliged to write a letter home. There’s also a striking lack of references to friends; he’s in his second year, but only seems to have acquaintances (“most nights, I go out alone”), and the only note of affection comes when he mentions his younger sister, Julie. In fact Julie is the only character in the novel who inspires any genuine tenderness in Mike, but she remains a ghostly, peripheral figure.

Mike does not explain why Jennifer, rather than any other female student, is the focus of his rapidly developing obsession. He doesn’t mention sexual attraction, and he has never talked to her, but wonders “what her room was like. What was her life like?” Mike then records a couple of strange speculative fantasies about teatime in her hall of residence, one cake-filled and cosy, the other bleak. But we don’t hear from the real Jennifer until Mike opens her private letter and reads her stolen diary. 

The style of these diary entries is perfectly judged by Faulks. Writing in an abbreviated, student-essay-notes form, Jennifer has a sure instinct for predictable adverbs and safe adjectives, combined with an artless unconcern for possible banality. The cold is ‘arctic’, she cycles ‘vigorously’ on her ‘trusty’ bike, she ‘dutifully’ sets her alarm for an early lecture. Studenty 1970s words like ‘zonked’ and ‘budge’ sprinkle the pages, but she is still a good enough writer to give us a vivid picture of her life and a strong sense of her physical presence. She sounds absolutely authentic. 

Jennifer can be seen as Mike’s opposite, which might explain his fascination with her. She is preternaturally cheerful, so full of optimism and gaiety that she feels obliged to tone it down for propriety’s sake. Even the Cambridge cold inspires good humour. She’s balanced, equable, conscientious without being a “swot”, bright rather than brilliant; she goes to pubs but doesn’t get drunk, it is her roommate Hannah who forgets keys, not her, and she has a healthy interest in boys, but knows she’s too young for a “long-term thing”. Her life is overflowing with friends, clubs, plays, boys, volleyball (she would have been a natural for Facebook) and, in stark contrast to Mike, she has the support of an extremely loving family and a stable, middle-class background.  

Jennifer is also profoundly unoriginal, and I think this is a strength in the novel. The temptation would have been to create an exceptional character, a warm and empathetic genius to point up the contrast with Mike and solicit the reader’s outrage at her death. But her ordinariness, or at least her youthful immaturity, helps to underline Mike’s lack of compassion. For the reader, Jennifer is not particularly interesting, but her death nevertheless provokes a sharp horror and pity. For Mike, the perpetrator, it really doesn’t, even though he is fascinated by her. 

When Jennifer first goes missing, Mike has no memory of the deed, and we do not know he is the killer. So he is reporting her disappearance in his journal from the standpoint of an innocent fellow student. His comments are revealing. While watching a TV appeal, Mike bursts out laughing at Jennifer’s boyfriend’s demeanour, which he considers artificial: “he put on a grown-up voice.” This  surprises another boy who is also watching. He (this boy) “looked up at the noise of my laughter with a puzzled and slightly accusing look. He appeared to have tears on his cheeks.”  Later, at a ‘service of hope’ for Jennifer (her body has not yet been found) a friend gives a tribute. Mike wonders “how Anne had got to know Jen so well and care about her so much so quickly. I mean, they were just student pals, weren’t they?” 

This heartless reaction is followed by an accurate but equally chilly dissection of newspaper editorial style when reporting missing girls, concluding shrewdly that “Notoriety is a very odd thing. From the moment her face appeared on that poster, Jennifer has stopped being herself . . . something pious has attached itself to her.”

As Mike is preparing to leave Cambridge, thinking about what he will and won’t miss about the place, he hints at what he got back from his fixation with Jennifer: “What I liked about it (Cambridge) was a version lived by others. For instance, by Jennifer. I enjoyed her time here.” 

I enjoyed her time here. There’s something unnerving about that sentence when you remember he is talking about a girl who is missing, presumed dead. He might not realise he has killed her, but he knows her likely fate. There is also pathos in it: unable to engage with life himself, he borrows the perspective of someone who, in his view, is better equipped for living. 

The case goes cold, and over the next decade Mike moves on, hacking out a successful career on London newspapers, while Jennifer is marooned in 1974, aged 21, listening to prog rock, dazzled by the vista of her bright future, presumed dead. “I haven’t thought about Jennifer Arkland for years,” Mike notes at one point. James Stellings, his only friend from university, invites him to a dinner party with his wife and some well-heeled banker and lawyer friends. 

The description of this excruciating evening is one of the funniest episodes in the novel, and it is impossible not to sympathise wholeheartedly with Mike as, seated between two of the wives, he is obliged to discuss children’s schools, and au pairs, first with one, then the other, then back to the first “like watching Wimbledon in slow motion.”

“She asked me if I had any children and I said no. Then she told me which of her children were good at which subjects. . . . then she talked about the reputations of various schools that her children were not going to but which friends of hers had children at . . . ” 

Anyone who has ever been trapped in a similar situation will recognise this particular type of rudeness, a combination of  self-absorption and total lack of curiosity about other people. 

And yet . . . Toward the end of the book, after Mike has been found guilty and is confined to psychiatric hospital, Stellings still visits him regularly. We get to read Stellings’ witness statement, describing Mike. In it, Stellings sounds honest (we learn for the first time that Mike is physically unattractive), quite perceptive, and generous. “He (Mike) could be very funny, but he hardly ever laughed . . . I did like him, though . . . and I will stick by him.” 

Engleby however has nothing but contempt for Stellings’ assessment, calling him “pedestrian” and “radically inarticulate”. This then puts a different slant on that dinner party, and you wonder if Mike was really the victim of rudeness or the cause of it. The perspective shifts, and Engleby changes shape again. 

Mike Engleby tells us he has memorised Jennifer’s diary, word for word. But we only have his word for this. The suspicion I mentioned earlier, that Mike may have overwritten Jennifer, comes with this passage attributed to Jennifer, dated 25 May, 1972:

“So where’s it coming from, this feeling, this funny low euphoria? A little bit from the town, I think. I do love the dirty brick of the miniature terraces and the mist from the river and the cold mornings, even now in May. And then the sudden huge vista of a great courtyard of King’s or Trin or Queens’, when everything that’s been pinched, and puritanical and cold and grudging and sixpence-in-the-gas-meter is suddenly swept away by the power and scale of those buildings, with their towers and crenellations and squandered empty spaces, built by men who knew that they’d calculated the mechanical laws of time and distance and there was therefore no need whatever to build small.”

I simply don’t believe that Jennifer could have written that at 19, when a year later she was writing like this: 

“Early college brek with Sue Jubb and Liz Burdene. Poor Sue’s hair looks as though she has been electrocuted as in a Tom and Jerry cartoon. They just have tea and toast, but I get hungry later, so had to have the fried egg etc. The egg had been sitting for a long time so had to lever off hard little cap from the yolk. Underneath, it was fine. At least, nothing that salt and pepper and a bit of tinned tomato couldn’t disguise. Check pigeonhole for letter from Simon (nothing: sob) and pedal furiously to Sidgwick.” 

This second passage is entirely typical of Jennifer. Of course, Faulks may simply have slipped up and lost Jennifer’s voice in the first extract. But I prefer not to believe this. It is more interesting to think that this is Mike, playing with his readers, and using Jennifer - his idea of her - to breathe some life into his own experience. “What I liked about it was a version lived by others.”

The last pages of the book confirm Mike’s will to control the past, to control Jennifer, and to control her writing voice. They reveal his lack of real remorse. He creates a final diary entry for Jennifer, dated the day after her disappearance. This time, Jennifer gets into Mike’s car, but instead of driving off with her out of Cambridge, into the the fens toward her death, they end up at her house, in her bed.  The style is pure Jennifer, but nothing else about it is. Jennifer’s role in this repellent fantasy is only to comfort Mike Engleby. There’s no more of her reality as a separate person than there was when he ignored her terrified screams in the car, and smashed a slab of concrete on her head in a dark lane. 

The truth this book exposes is a simple one, that a person can have impressively superior gifts, but without compassion, these are hollow. The journey there, taken inside the mind of the killer, is exhilarating and entertaining as well as disturbing. 

While Engleby does not fall into the ‘forgotten’ or ‘obscure’ categories I imposed on this blog, I do think it is underrated. It is well worth a second read. 

© Josephine Gardiner 2015 

Engleby by Sebastian Faulks. Vintage Books, 2007.