Tag persephone books

In Praise of John Moore

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We are already nearly a month into 2025 (and who shall not be delighted to see the back end of January recede into the distance once again?) and I realise that, for all the words written about books in 2024 I never once mentioned what my favourites were. In truth there were several things vying for the top spot and all three of them, unsurprisingly, were written before I was born. First is Noel Streatfeild’s ‘Saplings’ (1945) which I read in another of those gorgeous Persephone reissues that I have been consuming and collecting over the past few years (their grey and cream/off white spines make a very pleasant decorative element above the bed). I may write more about ‘Saplings’ at some point, just not today. Suffice to say that it is a wonderfully written novel that captures much of the disruption and uncertainty of English family lives in the early years of WW2 and provides a piercing critique of class attitudes of the period. I’ve heard it suggested that the novel is a kind of “dark inversion” of Streatfeild’s classic children’s book ‘Ballet Shoes’ but not having read that one, I cannot be sure. ‘Ballet Shoes’ is certainly on my sizeable ‘to be read’ list though, which in turn sits in the shadow of the physical ‘to be read’ piles and the ‘to be read’ Kindle collection. This is how life ought to be, however, so that is fine.

Is ‘The Wind In The Willows’ (1908) a children’s book? My copy says ‘Penguin Classic’ so I am sure that it is admissible for adults to read it, even if they are not necessarily seeking to rekindle the feelings they might have felt on reading it in their childhood. Regardless, I am certain that one reason I never read it in my youth is that it is another of Those English Things that were rather scorned in Scotland. I know that I Make A Lot Of This these days but it is something worth repeating, I think, because of its essential truth. To me, if to no-one else, although I suspect it is also a truth that is, if not universal, at least quite recognisable to those of a similar age and geographical background. Anyway, the point here is that I finally read ‘The Wind In The Willows’ in 2024 and was startled by just how beautiful and ageless it is. Lots of little cultural puzzle pieces fell into place on reading it too, which is always a delightful feeling. Humbling too, for this kind of experience also shows how little one knows, or half knows. The roots of the present are in the past, after all.

Just edging these two titles for the dubious prize of being The Unpopular Book Of 2024 however would be John Moore’s ‘The Waters Under The Earth’. Originally published in 1965, this was another of the Persephone reissue titles that had sat on the aforementioned ‘to be read’ pile for a good eighteen months before I finally got round to it, but goodness it was worth the wait! Although written in the early 1960s the novel is set a decade earlier, in the Gloucestershire countryside that Moore knew and loved so well. It is a rural landscape that Moore had written successfully about previously, and his ‘Brensham Trilogy’ books (‘Portrait of Elmbury’, ‘Brensham Village’ and ‘The Blue Field’) published between 1945 and 1948 sold handsomely at the time. So too did his enormously entertaining 1951 novel ‘Dance and Skylark’, whilst ‘September Moon’ (1957) apparently sold half a million copies. All of these are worth reading, and whilst I believe that ‘the Bresnham Trilogy’ have been collected and reprinted within the past decade or so, second hand copies of early editions can be picked up cheaply. In many ways each of these books seem to set the groundwork for ‘The Waters Under The Earth’ and each seems to inform the subsequent instalment. Characters return, sometimes in alternative guises but usually recognisable, whilst through it all the rural landscape and the rhythms of its life emerge as the dominant presence. All of these books are marvellously entertaining reads. Short and comedic, they also explore themes of class and industrial ‘progress’ that lend them a degree of weight. The books are light but never slight.

‘The Waters Under The Earth’ on the other hand stands out in being much longer and by some distance more sombre than any of Moore’s previous books. This is perhaps apt since it was to be his last prior to his death, in 1967, at the youthful age of 59. It also arguably reflects a degree of disillusionment in the post-war Labour government and the Urban/Rural divide apparent in much of the later 1940s and early 1950s. Being unashamedly a ‘countryman’, Moore’s books are necessarily conservative in much of their tone, yet ‘The Waters Under The Earth’ is noticeably more apologetic for the way of life lived by the rural land-owning classes than any of his previous books. Whilst there remains a lingering affection for hunting that might cause a degree of hand-wringing amongst many Waitrose shopping Guardian readers of the 21st Century, this is tempered with a growing awareness that Tradition need not be an excuse for cruelty. What comes across much more strongly is the sense of the landowner as custodian of nature being replaced by exploitative greed. ‘Growth’ and ‘Progress’ at all costs and hang the consequences. Indeed there is arguably a deep seated sorrow at the heart of ‘The Waters Under The Earth’, a recognition that human beings are doomed to destroy themselves by their lack of empathy and understanding not just for nature but for each other. There is a kind of existential ennui suffusing much of ‘The Waters Under The Earth’ that feels at odds with the comedic pulse of Moore’s earlier books, yet at the same time the book retains a warmth that is heartening. This is a difficult balancing acts to pull off, but Moore does it admirably. He also pulls off an exploration of class in the post-war period with remarkable even-handedness, escaping a class partisanship which might have otherwise derailed things. Slightly less effective is the theme of romance which suffers somewhat by what Amanda Craig refers to in her excellent preface to the Persephone edition as being an example of the trope where “posh young women take up with ambitious working class men”. Craig suggests that this in turn may be “perhaps not unconnected to the ending of the ban on ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’” and whilst mildly irritating it also arguably lends ‘The Waters Under The Earth’ an additional degree of historical cultural context.

Like Ronald Blythe’s ‘Akenfield’, all of Moore’s novels are to an extent records of a disappearing rural landscape and way of life. What perhaps differentiates between them, however, is the context of the two authors: Blythe being from yeoman stock and a childhood of rural poverty, Moore from a comfortable middle class, growing up in a Tudor townhouse in Tewkesbury (now The Tudor Hotel). This possibly explains too, in part, the different lasting degrees of recognition for their work, ’Akenfield’ never being out of print since 1969 and Moore’s books being only sporadically reprinted in much smaller numbers. After all, when ‘The Waters Under The Earth’ was published four years before ‘Akenfield’ it perhaps already suffered from entering a publishing realm where the fashion was very much for The Voice Of The Working Class. The Angry Young Men in the ascendency and Swinging London getting into its stride. This might explain why Moore seemed so quickly to be forgotten. A voice of The Past when all that mattered was the shiny and new. Or NEW! AND IMPROVED! as the advertising lingo might have put it. Did ‘Akenfield’ then slip neatly into the space between that Swinging London POP explosion and the ‘back to the earth’ Hippie daydream, and was ‘The Waters Under The Earth’ just a little too late and a little too early to gain the traction that it perhaps, in hindsight, deserved? Perhaps.

Whatever the reasons for its sixty odd years of neglect, ‘The Waters Under The Earth’ more than deserves a place on the top shelf of classic rural fiction. It deserves attention too for its apparent prescience of what was, in 1965, The Future and is to us, in 2025, the recent past and the present: The Earth exploited for personal wealth; faceless corporate/syndicate wealth wielding power; the cult of individualism insidiously dismantling notions of community and class. The roots of the present are in the past, after all.

What Comes Next?

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It must now be about a year since I read Margaret Kennedy’s ‘The Feast’ and started to notice just how much I was enjoying fiction (both detective/crime and ‘non genre’) from the years immediately after WW2. How the cataclysm of that event altered the nature of many writers’ output and how the understandable preoccupation with What Comes Next manifested itself. It’s something of a disappointment then to see that there is, on the surface, little of this in Clifford Witting’s 1947 ‘Let X Be The Murderer’, in which Inspector Charlton makes another appearance, this time solving one of those kinds of ‘impossible crimes’ so beloved of the inter-war years detective puzzler. In some ways this rather positions ‘Let X…’ as one of the weaker of the Charlton/Witting books that have so far been reissued by Galileo Books, although it must also be pointed out that this is no great criticism, for Witting is surely amongst the very best writers of detective fiction in any period. Yet ‘Let X…’ feels as if Witting may have been pressured by a publisher who was rather keen to have a more, ah, ‘traditional’ yarn in their catalogue. One can picture the publisher having Witting over for lunch (a meagre affair, in the post-war years, one imagines) and saying “now then, Clifford old boy, let’s have Inspector Charlton make an appearance right at the start shall we? No point leaving him lurking in the background until we’re two thirds of the way through the book, now, is there? And what about a bit of that ‘Impossible Crime’ stuff? And a Country House… Y’see dear boy (and at this point I imagine the publisher will polish his prince-nez) it’s important that we re-establish some Rules, don’t you know. Hmmm?” To which one imagines Witting inwardly groaning and, thinking of the trials and tribulations of Austerity, grinning and bearing it. Perhaps I am being altogether too harsh on the imaginary publisher and too lenient on Witting. Perhaps Witting himself thought that Tradition ought to be invoked… “Structure! That’s what we need Witting. STRUCTURE dammit!”

And structure you shall have. For ‘Let X…’ is broken neatly into four sections that distill the investigative process: Theorem; Hypothesis; Construction; Proof. In another’s hands this approach would risk being unutterably dull, but Witting is never that, and so ‘Let X…’ rises above many procedural plodders with allusions to ghosts and with undercurrents driven by jealousy, vengeance, greed and, uh, Class Warfare. It is, of course, with these threads of Class, Position and Wealth that Witting positions ‘Let X…’ within the traditional inter-war forms whilst acknowledging the uncertainties of The Future. He carries this off admirably because he is such a fine writer, but one cannot help but feel that a marginally more experimental approach might have yielded greater dividends. “Less structure!” as the heckler once shouted at Huggy Bear. But only a little less, if you would be so kind…

There is a strong possibility that my slight disappointment with ‘Let X Be The Murderer’ has been coloured simply by the fact that I find myself, if not wearying of the detective/crime genre, but at least finding other seams of literature to be currently more enjoyable. Most significantly these would be the ones mined by the Middlebrow women writers of the inter and immediate post-WW2 years. I do use that categorisation in the broadest and most positive of manners of course, and largely as a result of so many wonderful books having been salvaged in the past decade or more by the ‘Furrowed Middlebrow’ imprint. It is tragic to think that, following the death earlier this year of publisher Rupert Heath, we may not see further titles unearthed, but in reality the catalogue is so extensive that there is enough to keep one happy for a long time to come. There are numerous D.E. Stevenson’s, Susan Scarlett’s and Elizabeth Eliot’s still to explore for me, whilst in recent weeks I turned my attention once again to Stella Gibbons, whose ‘The Weather at Tregulla’ I read whilst on a four day trip down to The Lizard.

Previously I have written a little harshly about Gibbon’s ‘classic’ ‘Cold Comfort Farm’ and drawn criticism for doing so. Fair enough. Yet I still stand by my belief that the book is too long and that the jokes wear thin rather quickly. I blame Gibbon’s youth when writing it, myself. There are few things more tiresome than the wit of a an intelligent young person poking fun at things the older generations venerate, except when one is young oneself. Then, it is the ‘wit’ of these older generations nodding sagely and saying ‘you’ll see…’ that is tiresome beyond words. Naturally I plead guilty as charged to that particular crime.

Whatever. I stand by my position of having enjoyed ‘Westwood’ and ‘Here Be Dragons’ considerably more than ‘Cold Comfort Farm’, whilst ‘The Weather at Tregulla’ may well be my favourite Gibbons so far. Perhaps reading it whilst being generally in and around the locale where the book is set helped, but Gibbons does a tremendous job of conjuring the Cornish land and seascapes regardless. Published and set in the early 1960s, the book already laments a Cornwall being disfigured by the scourge of Tourism and Outsiders who rather tiresomely both celebrate and diminish it by their actions. It’s a book that perceptively recognises the inevitable pull/push of place and people on The Young, whilst also making rather scathing digs at Class (an English infatuation, and understandably so, one has to admit) and perceptions of the, ah, Artistic Temperament. It is also a Love Story, a Romance of fine quality in which expectations are adhered to and standards upheld, at least up until the point where they aren’t… For, as with E.M. Delafield, the ending of ‘Tregulla’ is a difficult blending of tragedy and happiness, where the nature of both is called into question. I rather like to think that there is something here of Gibbons casting a beady eye over her younger self and saying something about how Things Aren’t That Simple. Even when they are.

Now I am not sure if Mollie Panter-Downes would fall into the category of ‘Middlebrow’, but I do know that I have devoured three of her books in rapid succession. Her 1946 novel ‘One Fine Day’ ranks up with Margaret Kennedy’s ‘The Feast’ in being one of the best post-WW2 novels I have read. It is a deceptively soft novel, one where the hardships of daily existence rub up against glorious observations of nature. In the first chapter there is a delicious depiction of Barrow Down above the village of Wealding, where in spring “dog-violets filled small blue lakes in the bleached grass, followed later by the pink and white restharrow, clean as sprigged chintz, and the great golden candlesticks of mulleins.” I myself am notoriously ignorant of the names of plants (C needs to remind me of what everything is called each time we walk along the hedgerows or I pick through the terrific over-filled magic of our/her garden) but I do so enjoy seeing them conjured on the pages of books. Also, there is a magnificent mullein in the raised bed outside my studio window, so that one at least I know (until I forget)…

Barrow Down, then, is immediately positioned by Panter-Downes as emblematic of timelessness: “Up here, on the empty hilltop, something said I am England. I will remain.” It’s an important point that she is making too, for it marks landscape as the thing that both holds and projects a sense of identity. Certainly it is a landscape with ancient human intervention, but this is a relationship softened by time to being obfuscated and mythical. The hill, then, dominates the landscape as it does the book in a vivid yet gentle way. The story may revolve around the difficulties endured by people in the aftermath of war, specifically the comforts of the middle-classes that seem to have been eroded from both ends, but the magical energies of the hillside suggest that all such notions of class and position evaporate in their presence. And I say it is a’ deceptively soft’ novel because whilst it feels rather quietly optimistic in its outlook, the eighty years or so since its initial creation rather lend it a depressing air. One cannot help but read it now and despair rather at How We Ended Up Where/How We Are. In England. In the world. One wonders why/how Human’s didn’t learn. But then they/we never do/did. I blame the teachers.

There is too a vivid sense of this in Panter-Downe’s ‘London War Notes’, which is a collection of her ‘letters from London’ originally published as a regular column in ‘The New Yorker’. Whilst such pieces retrospectively suffer somewhat from that fact that We Know How It Ends, ‘London War Notes’ nevertheless hold one’s attention in riveting style. What is perhaps surprising to a 21st Century eye is the degree in which there is criticism of certain strands of British government throughout the span of the war. This criticism, given the target audience, rarely if ever falls on Churchill himself, but it does often extend to the various other positions and characters, both political and military. One rarely hears of such disgruntlement in Official Histories of the home front during WW2 (particularly so in the polarised post-Brexit context) so seeing it so openly stated takes one’s breath away a little. Similarly, whilst there is clearly a need for the pieces to uphold the air of ‘London Can Take It’, there are also nods to the fact that whilst this might be true, it’s also a jolly hard life, even whilst daily life goes on. Indeed, it’s the regular references to things like the theatre and sporting events that draw one up a little rapidly. Somehow the notion of a ‘cultural’ life going in in wartime feels rather alien; the idea of cricket matches against the Australians still taking place at Lords in 1943 something of an affront. One can imagine the indignant cries of the retired Colonels: “Why are these young men not in the Forces?! Why are they bowling cricket balls when they could be hurling hand grenades?!” And then immediately forgetting themselves by adding “oh, fine stroke… fine stroke… well played, Sir. Well played indeed.”

Much of what she put into her ‘London War Notes’ surfaces in the largely previously un-published short stories collected in ‘Good Evening Mrs Craven: The Wartime Stories of Mollie Panter-Downes’. Bookended by two ‘Letter from London’ pieces, these short slices of fiction are terrific reading, even for someone who usually struggles with the short story form. Whilst filled with the author’s perceptive journalistic eye for detail, the stories add an appealing veneer of playfulness and imagination that lift them, in my opinion, above the ‘War Notes’ in terms of ultimate reading pleasure. Apparently Panter-Downes herself was rather dismissive of her fiction, disowning all of her novels except ‘One Fine Day’, and preferring instead to see herself as a journalist. There is nothing wrong with that of course, but there is more than enough evidence in these short stories and in ‘One Fine Day’ to suggest that she may have significantly undersold herself as a brilliant purveyor of fiction.

And then, finally, if we are to consider WW2 and imaginative fiction, there is Barbara Euphan Todd’s wonderful ‘Miss Ranskill Comes Home’. Published, like ‘One Fine Day’, in 1946, ‘Miss Ranskill’ takes as its premise the idea of a woman returned to England in 1943 after four years stranded on a desert island with only a working class Carpenter who dies before Miss Ranskill can take to the ocean on the boat he has crafted. This isn’t a spoiler, incidentally, as you will see when you read the opening pages of the book… On one level of course all this desert island stuff is a preposterous notion, and there are points indeed during her, ah, ‘reintegration’ where Miss Ranskill/Euphan Todd acknowledges this in a kind of meta-fictional nod to the audience, but it is SUCH a preposterous idea that it works tremendously well. Miss Ranskill’s struggles to re-establish herself within the turmoil of the war-torn Homefront allow us to reflect on the absurdities of life under duress that populations allow, indeed encourage themselves to accept, perpetuate and ultimately celebrate. Euphan Todd indeed seems to take great delight in showing up the hypocrisy of some of those involved in keeping the home fires burning, and in doing so delivers a withering critique of class structure that is only lightly clothed in the tattered outfit of humour and absurdity. As in ‘One Fine Day’ there is something too of the missed simplicity of nature in ‘Miss Ranskill’ that appeals enormously. Perhaps this is not entirely unexpected in the work of someone more famous for the creation of the Worzel Gummidge character and stories, but that’s for someone much more familiar with those books to say. All I know is that ‘Miss Ranskill Comes Home’ is one of the most unusual and marvellously engaging pieces of WW2 fiction I have come across.

Now, what comes next?

Expectations Of The Age

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Last time out I was about to turn to some middlebrow ‘romance’ as an antidote to the bleak existential sensuality of Georges Simenon and the post-WW2 Japanese turmoil of Seishi Yokomizo. Having just read Nicola Beauman’s ‘A Very Great Profession’ which is, as I’m sure you know, a superb treatise on women writers in the interwar years, I was rather spoilt for choice as to whether to try some new names or to further explore an old favourite. Needless to say the latter won the skirmish, so whilst the likes of Elizabeth Taylor and Elinor Glyn remain on the shelves of To Be Tried One Day, it was to E.M. Delafield that I turned for pleasure.

Now, like any typical Johnny Come Lately, my esteem for Delafield to this point was based entirely on several readings of the masterful ‘Diary of a Provincial Lady’ and its attendant supporting cast, with several of her other novels having sat in the To Be Read pile for Far Too Long Really. ‘Diary…’ often feels to me like the pinnacle of the interwar years middlebrow women’s writing. That is, if Delafield even is ‘middlebrow’, for really the way in which her deliciously witty ‘Diary’ cloaks sharp criticisms of English society is masterful.

It was for a similar blend of the serious and the arched eyebrow then that I looked to ‘The Way Things Are’ and ‘Thank Heaven Fasting’, and if I came away disappointed not to have experienced that, it was very much tempered with the feeling that I had read two novels that were altogether more Serious and Literary. Reading these books after ‘Diary of a Provincial Lady’ is a bit like listening to Simple Minds’ ‘Real to Real’ and ‘Empires and Dance’ after, say, ‘New Gold Dream’. In each instance you can just about see the connections from the earlier work to the later, but as much as you admire the experiments and awkwardness of the one, you can’t help but be pleased that they figured out how to make it all appeal to the masses, how to turn POP, if you will.

‘The Way Things Are’ is not Pop in the way of ‘Diary…’ but in the figure of Laura the template is certainly set for the Provincial Lady. There are no mere allusions to disquiet here, though. Instead, from the off, this is quite starkly outlined as the challenges facing a young (Laura is 34) married woman with children as she falls in love with another man and consequently Questions Everything She Believes In. It is tempting to suggest that this was a situation particularly prominent in the interwar period, when women hastened themselves (or were hastened by their families) into marriages with one of the few(er) young men available in the aftermath of The Great War, with Love a distant consideration next to Security. In truth, however, I rather expect that this is an ageless conundrum and is why books like Delafield’s continue to reverberate. The novel, then, is essentially Laura considering the possibilities and their inevitable consequences as she grapples with the thought of leaving husband, children and position for the burning passion of romantic love. I don’t think that it is much of a spoiler to say that the decisions she ultimately makes are, perhaps inevitably, rooted in The Expectations Of The Age. Yet the simple fact that a novel that suggests that there might be alternative ways for women to live could be successfully published in 1927 says much about the (slowly!) changing times Delafield lived in.

By the time of 1933’s ‘Thank Heaven Fasting’ Delafield seemed to have shifted her attention back to what might have been the lives of Provincial Ladies in their younger years. In many ways this is bleaker than ‘The Way Things Are’, and the desperation felt by individuals and family about how their marital possibilities might, or might not pan out is, to a more progressive 21st Century mind, startling and depressing. As a critique of societal structures of class and the place of women, ‘Thanks Heaven Fasting’ pulls few punches, and if the expected Happy Ending plays out in a similar way to ‘The Way Things Are’ then it is similarly tinged with a bittersweetness that bares its teeth in a seething grimace of forced delight. They do say that history works in cycles and that if one sticks around long enough one will see the wheel turn back to where it started. To paraphrase Lynch, that gum you like will come back into favour. It is pertinent and depressing then to read ‘Thank Heaven Fasting’ in a 21st Century context where many of the same patriarchal constraints (and, indeed, restraints) remain in place with the merest hint of a new colour scheme.

And then there is Delafield’s 1919 novel ‘Consequences’, which follows Alex Clare’s short young life as she attempts to navigate a world where her sexuality and spirit are alien and unwelcome. If we were to continue that Simple Minds analogy, ‘Consequences’ is like ‘Life In A Day’, or perhaps more accurately a demo tape by Johnny And The Self Abusers in that it is Hard Going and Hardly Cheery, yet at the same time strangely compelling and peculiar. Indeed, ‘Consequences’ reads very much as a set of demos for ‘Thank Heaven Fasting’ as the narrative is essentially the same and it shares some character names with its later sister novel. It is a significantly longer book and I admit there were points, particularly in the section set within the Belgian convent, where I was rather skimming and skipping. There is very much a sense that Delafield learned from this, and as an, ahem, consequence, ‘Thank Heaven Fasting’ holds the attention rather better.

Still, there is something dark and compelling about ‘Consequences’ that makes it feel strangely more Modern than its 1933 counterpart, even as it mercilessly depicts the stifling nature of The Season for young ladies of class in London. Spanning, as it does, the latter years of the 19th Century and concluding under the cloud of what we know is the coming Great War, ‘Consequences’ is also very much about the passing of generations and the illusory nature of changing conditions for The Young and for women in particular. So whilst we have a sense, towards the end of the book, that Alex’s younger sister may have more ‘freedom’ and of living a much more carefree existence, we appreciate that these notions are all so much window dressing and that essentially, Nothing Has Changed. Or, indeed, will.

At its heart, ‘Consequences’ is a brutally bleak novel and unremittingly so for the majority of its length, and with a conclusion that might have influenced Virginia Woolf’s tragic ending, Delafield makes no attempt to hide its desperation and desolation behind the net curtain of even a bittersweet Happy Ending. In truth then, these three novels, and ‘Consequences’ in particular, perhaps have more in common with Simenon’s existential anguish than they do with ‘Diary Of A Provincial Lady’ or, say, D.E. Stevenson’s tremendous romances of the same period. Not the lighthearted diversions I was expecting, then, but None The Worse For That.