Brightness

Continuing my progress through the (hard-to-find) novels of Elizabeth Jenkins, I have just finished reading Brightness. Though not in the same league as The Tortoise and the Hare, it's a fascinating piece of work and well worth a read, if you happen to come across it.
 Published in 1963 and set in the then present (unlike the fact-based Harriet and Dr Gully), Brightness portrays a fairly tight-knit Home Counties community with a pen as sharp as and often more brutal than Jane Austen's. The first chapter is a masterclass in skilful scene-setting, deftly introducing the key characters, telling (or rather showing) us just what we need to know about them, and placing them precisely in the social milieu of New Broadlands, a pleasant town set on a high ridge, its earliest houses 'built in the Edwardian era by a community of high-minded cranks'.
 What unfolds over the first three quarters of the novel seems to be a fictional study of parenting, good and bad, of youthful rebellion and delinquency and the 'generation gap'. The Tortoise and the Hare, you might recall, included a vitriolic portrait of a couple with modernistic progressive views, especially on the raising of children - views that amounted to an abdication of all parental responsibility. A background element in The Tortoise and the Hare, Jenkins's loathing of progressive thought, in particular in relation to the upbringing of children, comes right to the fore in Brightness.
 The most conspicuous representative of progressive thought in general is the frightful old humbug Mortimer Upjohn, 'a figure in the tradition of the town's Edwardian past', with his knitted waistcoat, grass green jacket, sandals and thick white woollen socks. Pursuing his self-imposed mission in life as a thinker and speaker in the progressive cause, he carries considerable weight in local affairs and is 'a man of no vices, unless a combination of bumptiousness with meanness could be called so; he was genuinely devoted to things of the mind; no sensual pleasures, to him, could compare with the interest he took in the discussion of social and psychological theories'.
 Upjohn's ruling idea, based on popular psychology, is that the blame for criminal actions 'rested entirely on those who tolerated the environment that had conditioned them'. He believed that 'the young were the only section of the human race that could be considered interesting and worth talking about. Of the young, the most sacred were the young criminals. From their double claims Mr Upjohn appeared to derive an extraordinary stimulation; he never tired of descanting upon them, as their exponent and defender; yet these subjects had nearly all to be drawn from hearsay and the public press. There was disappointingly little juvenile crime in New Broadlands...'
 Good knockabout stuff, but more central to the novel is Jenkins's withering portrayal of the nouveaux riches Sudgens, he a successful businessman, his wife a selfish and silly woman who cannot forgive or forget anything she regards as 'criticism', the pair of them engaged in bringing up their now late-teenage son with a toxic combination of unrestrained indulgence and non-existent discipline. As a result, the loathsome son is interested in nothing but the pursuit of his own massively subsidised pleasures - girls, money, jaunts to London and abroad, and fast cars.
 As contrast to the terrible Sugdens, we have Una Lambert, a widow with a beloved - and not indulged - son who is at Cambridge and, having got through a period of adolescent sullenness, is turning out to be a remarkable young man, a credit to his mother. We see much of the action through the eyes of the sympathetic Una, a woman more interested in the possibilities of Christian faith (though not a conventional 'believer') than in the inanities of progressive thought.
 As the novel progresses, a good deal of broadly theological discussion and speculation enters the picture, making the reader wonder: where is all this going? Is it a satire on progressive thought and parenting, a study of parent-child relations, a reflection on the nature of faith? It is all of those, but where it is going is towards a shocking and tragic event, about three-quarters of the way through the story, that changes everything in the most profound way, and puts all that came before in an entirely new perspective.
 It's hard to say much more without giving away the plot. Suffice to say that in its last section Brightness becomes a very different, stranger, sadder and more interesting novel than it seemed to be in its early stages. I'm not sure that it works, but it's certainly a remarkable piece of writing.
 The title, by the way, comes from St Bernard of Clairvaux, as quoted by Una's son:
'He said: "Bright is that which is brightly coupled with the bright", and he described mystical experience as "an immersion in the infinite ocean of eternal light and luminous eternity".'

Harriet: A Cold Hand

When I tried the page 117 trick the other day to see what 2017 held for me, the book that came to hand was Harriet, the latest novel by Elizabeth Jenkins (see here and here) that I've tracked down.

 Like Dr Gully, Harriet is a fictional treatment of a Victorian murder case. Unlike Dr Gully, it is one of the most harrowing books I have ever read. The case it is based on - dubbed the 'Penge mystery' - caused a sensation at the time, involving as it did the apparent starving to death of a young woman by members of her family eager to get their hands on her inheritance. The worst of it was that the young woman, the Harriet of the title, was a 'natural' (or, as we would say today, had 'learning difficulties'). Her mother had raised her with care and affection, encouraging her to dress well and present a good front to the world (that's her in the photograph, posing for her engagement portrait), and she spent a good deal of time staying with various family members, who were glad enough of the money they were paid to look after her. All was well until a handsome and utterly ruthless fortune hunter with connections to the family found out about her inheritance, wooed and married her, in the teeth of fierce opposition from Harriet's mother, who could do nothing to stop him...
 The facts of the real-life 'Penge mystery' are not entirely clear-cut (as evidenced by a successful appeal against the initial death sentences on all the defendants), but Elizabeth Jenkins sees in the case a stark and terrible lesson about the depths of evil to which outwardly normal, quite decent people are capable of sinking. She drives the lesson home by establishing the comfortable milieu in which Harriet, when we first see her, is settled, and by depicting the characters around her as normally, humanly, fallible, with normal human weaknesses, no more. There is a hint of danger in one of them - Patrick, an aspiring painter, self-centred and short-fused - and, more obviously, in Lewis, the brother who hero-worships him. Lewis it is who single-mindedly sets his sights on marrying Harriet and getting his hands on her money. Once he has done so, that comfortable milieu dissolves away and Harriet is gradually drawn into a wholly alien world of deprivation, degradation and suffering.
 The events that unfold are, as they draw near their terrible denouement, almost too painful to read. The pain is less in the details of Harriet's ordeal, hideous though they are, than in the depiction of the steady growth, in those supposed to be looking after her, of an ability to regard her as something less than human, something whose suffering and fate are a matter of indifference. The novel was published in 1934, and reading it I couldn't help but think of how a similar process was about to unfold across Europe ('and the seas of pity lie, Locked and frozen in each eye'), as quite ordinary people found it easy enough to believe that certain of their fellow humans were untermenschen who could be mistreated and killed without compunction. I also found myself thinking of more recent events, particularly of the horrific cases of child neglect, starvation and cruelty that are continually coming to light...
 In Harriet, Jenkins's vision of humanity is bleak indeed - which wouldn't be so unbearable if she wasn't such a damned good writer, with the gift of drawing you into an entirely convincing world. A review in The Observer described this novel as 'like a cold hand clutching at the heart' - and that, for once, is no overstatement.

Dr Gully: Stuff and Passion

Having found so much to enjoy in Elizabeth Jenkins' The Tortoise and the Hare, I've been seeking out her other novels, with limited success (this really is a very nearly forgotten novelist). I've just finished reading Dr Gully, which I found in a 1976 Penguin edition (published price 45p!). This is a fictionalised biography - or, more accurately, a fact-bound novel - that takes as its subject the eminent Victorian physician (and psychic researcher) James Manby Gully, who, towards the end of his life, became unwittingly embroiled in the sensational, and still unsolved, Charles Bravo murder.
 The most striking aspect of Jenkins' novel is that there is no mention of Charles Bravo until more than three-quarters of the way through, and the murder itself - and the ensuing inquests - don't happen until the closing chapters. This is all, as it were, back story. Charles Bravo doesn't even feature as a speaking or active character and is only heard of indirectly. That is how tightly focused the novel is on Gully's feelings and experiences. It is a rich and compelling portrait of a fascinating, clearly charismatic man with a mesmeric presence - a man whose spell the author herself seems to have fallen under.
 The essential action (as against plot) of the novel is embodied in the passionate love affair that develops between Gully and a beautiful, rich and very much younger patient, Florence Ricardo. She is trapped in a deeply unhappy mariage blanc with a hopeless alcoholic, while Gully is shackled by a defunct marriage to an older woman from whom he long ago parted but who is still alive. The course of the superficially unlikely romance between Florence and Gully is traced with such imaginative insight that it becomes entirely believable, and we follow its vicissitudes with real emotional involvement.
 Elizabeth Jenkins is not one of those rare novelists who don't so much write about the past as effortlessly inhabit it (think Penelope Fitzgerald). Rather she works her way in by building a world rich in abundant and intricate detail, a world of stuff - furniture, textiles, dresses, hats, coats, carriages, lamps, curtains, medications, mourning dress, stationery, wallpapers, toiletries, jewellery, wash stands, all the equipment of opulent upper-middle-class Victorian life. Jenkins not only tells you about these things, she often tells you which suppliers they came from - and you can be sure the information is accurate; this is a diligently researched book.
 In less skilled hands, this would be tiresome, but here it is essential to the writer's purpose, conveying the oppressive world of stuff - and servants, ever present, ever vigilant, ever gossiping - in which the principal characters are obliged to live their lives, while trying to keep their love affair secret. It is giving nothing away to say that this affair is ultimately doomed, and that in the end Florence Ricardo becomes Mrs Charles Bravo. By then she has parted decisively from Gully, and we have only indirect knowledge of what is going on in her life. Gully is now a helpless observer, looking on as the terrible climactic events unfold...
 After the parting of the lovers, a good deal of the heat goes out of the story, and it unfolds in a different manner, closer to a more conventional kind of true-crime historical fiction. This, however, is interesting enough in itself, and Gully's piecing-together of the events that led to Charles Bravo's death is entirely plausible. What is less satisfactory is the near-sentimentality of some of the final scenes, in which Jenkins seems almost besotted with her creation, her James Gully. She might have done better to end on a sharper, more ambivalent note. That said, though, this remains a very fine exercise in making a persuasive and involving fiction out of a mass of factual material. If you can get hold of it, do give it a try.
 (The picture above shows Dr Gully with the materialised spirit known as 'Katie King'.)