Crewe Train by Rose Macaulay

In thinking of Arnold she forgot the Catholic Church, and slipped into an ecstasy of love. Oh, yes, she would be a Mohammedan if Arnold wished it. For Arnold she would be a Roman Catholic, learn to talk, read books, be intelligent, sociable, and like other people. She would eat off as many plates as he liked--hundreds and thousands of plates, and a fresh knife and fork with each of them. She would have meals cooked and laid in courses, and not snatch things out of the larder when hungry. She would, in brief, fully embrace the higher life, and, if to join Arnold's church were part of this, Arnold's church she would join. She would be ready to accept whatever the Church taught as belonging to the deposit of faith. She would learn, if necessary, to answer all those foolish questions in the Catechism. She would even undress modestly, thinking about death.

Denham Dobie is a loner. Living in the high mountains of Andorra, she prefers the solitude of nature to people, long walks to long talks. When her father dies, she's whisked to London by her aunt Evelyn, who ushers her into a world she can barely understand, full of dinners, gossip, and the restrictions of social convention. She falls for a publisher named Arnold Chapel, and they marry, but it doesn't take long for their incompatibility to be revealed: Arnold is a creature of London, attached to the pleasures of people and society, all the things which are, for Denham, sheer torture.

There's something of the "holy fool" about Denham: her ignorance of social convention makes her a powerful critic of it. She's constantly questioning why one "must" wear this instead of that, or have their servants "turn out" a different room each day, or eat six-course meals instead of eating simple food from the pantry whenever they are hungry. But Macaulay takes Denham's character farther than this, past social satire and into something more extreme and perhaps less palatable than a simple introvert. Except for Arnold, she really has no interest in people whatsoever. When she discovers a small cottage on the Cornish coast with a secret cave and passage to the sea, Arnold buys it, thinking that perhaps they will spend a holiday or two there, but Denham means to live there forever, away from London, away from all people, hidden in her cave.

Macaulay never quite suggests that Arnold and Denham's marriage is a mistake, though their incompatibility ultimately drives them to separate lives. What is more disturbing, actually, is that the love they share is sincere and ineradicable: "Love was the great taming emotion; perhaps the only taming emotion." Denham is right, of course, when she doesn't understand why people must change for others, when each can just go on living as they prefer. But of course, it doesn't work that way; love drives people into bargains they might otherwise never have made. It transforms, and not always in ways we would otherwise choose.

One of the more interesting satirical aspects of Crewe Train is the way it deals with writing and the publishing world. Both Arnold and Denham's uncle are publishers as well as writers. Arnold writes a book called Lone Jane, a piece of modernist nonsense that's clearly meant to be an attempt to get inside Denham's head. ("A woodpecker, that's a woodpecker, because the woodpecker would peck her, why did the lobster blush, because it saw the salad dressing, no, because the table had cedar legs; can't remember the questions, only the answers...") Denham, not recognizing the attempt, remarks that Jane "was a little queer in the head." Later, Denham's aunt Evelyn also tries to put Denham on paper, writing a salacious romance that drives the Arnold character into the arms of a character modeled on her own daughter Audrey. It's nonsense, but the story spreads, as Evelyn spread the story of the secret passage beneath the cottage, and in the same way ruins everything: the friendship between Arnold and Audrey, and very nearly the marriage of Arnold and Denham, for whom Evelyn has invented a Cornish fisherman lover. Macaulay seems to be suggesting here that literature is merely a kind of fancy gossip, and she may not be too far off there.

Staying with Relations by Rose Macaulay

As she trotted round the room in the arms of Adrian, Catherine felt again the comic strangeness of this handful of modern western persons tripping with their ordered steps to mechanical music round a rococo ballroom erected on a Spanish monastery, on an Indian palace, in the heart of the primeval forests.  Round the villa jungle creatures prowled and roared, Indians and Spaniards and half-breeds slept and waked, and a strange stone army crowded up against the house, Maya gods, sixteenth century Spanish missionaries and saints, and eighteenth century beings in togas or cocked hats.

But it was not really stranger than anything else, thought Catherine.  All the world is strange.  Strange looks passed from eye to eye, strange touches, strange half-phrases.

Rose Macaulay's Staying with Relations emerges from the same Anglo fascination with the non-Anglo world as The Towers of Trebizond, which was my favorite surprise read of last year.  Like that novel, Relations skewers the provincialism of the English traveler, who skips halfway round the world to drink the same tea, read the same books, and talk to the same white people as in London; trading only the Turkey of Trebizond for Guatemala.  In that way both books are comedies, but they simultaneously recognize that the obsession with travel emerges from something near horror; we are fascinated by the Other but terrified to embrace it.  The alienation of the traveler, for Macaulay, is a stand-in for all kinds of alienation: from others, from ourselves, from God.

Catherine, a young popular novelist goes to visit her aunt, uncle, and cousins in Guatemala, where they live in the renovated hacienda of the Imperial Spanish.  Guatemala is a wild place; the jungle is dotted with Spanish ruins that speak of Nature's power over Western civilization.  Her uncle is a dilettante archaeologist, constantly poking around his own residence for the mysteries it might contain.  Her cousins are blithe, cultured, and utterly bored by Guatemala.  The jungle's threatening nature becomes suddenly literal when Catherine's cousin Isie is kidnapped by native Guatemalans in return for a mysterious "treasure" which the hacienda may or may not contain.  Until this point the book seems like little more than a bland travelogue; once the kidnapping is proved to be a ruse by an untrustworthy white friend, the novel veers again, as Catherine and her cousins pursue the culprit through Mexico.

The villain had to be white in the end.  It's okay, in the latter half of the twentieth century, to write about white heroes in a non-white world, but the only permissible subtext is we were the monsters all along.  That's probably a fair standard, and as Conrad proved, even that is enough to save your narrative from being morally questionable.  For Macaulay, the perfidy of the white neighbor shows that we cannot trust each other, because we do not know each other.  Even the relations of the title, are, in the end, unknown to us.  Catherine, who is known as a novelist with an eye for character, is constantly misjudging her own family--surprised that this one is having an affair, or that that one isn't, etc.:

Catherine thought, perhaps if we travel together, I shall get to know them at last, for so far I have been all wrong, and they have turned out different to what I thought.  How is one to know what people are like?  I wonder what Julia would say.  Perhaps one can never know; perhaps people are uncapturable, and slip away like water from one's hand, changing all the time. 

But still, as a novelist of human character, she felt that she must try to understand it.  After all, there it is; people must be like something, if only one can discover what.  How does one penetrate through the idea that they give of themselves into the elusive spirit behind?  Can it be that one never can do that?

The Guatemalan jungle becomes, rather than merely a symbol of unknowability, a source of misdirection for human bewilderment.  In the end, the jungle is what it is; it is other people who contain mysteries.  Conrad's error was that he mixed up people and the jungle; the Londoner, the African, and the jungle were each as inscrutable, and possibly evil, as the other.  It's only the Londoner he expected to surprise you.  The native Guatemalans turn out to be as banal and ordinary as anyone else, but even banality proves not to be penetrable.  As Catherine notes, "All is strange."

The Towers of Trebizond by Rose Macaulay

He left me, and I stayed there and the rail, looking at the bitter Black Sea and its steep forested shores by which the Argonauts had sailed and where presently Trebizond would be seen, that corner of a lost empire, defeated and gone under so long ago that now she scarcely new or remembered lost Byzantium, having grown unworthy of it, blind and deaf and not caring any more, not even believing, and perhaps that was the ultimate hell.  Presently I should come to it; already I was on the way.  It would be a refuge, that agnosticism into which I was slipping down.

Mid-century Turkey, as described in The Towers of Trebizond, hardly qualifies as a foreign country for Westerners: you can't throw a stone without hitting a well-heeled Brit writing his "Turkey book," or a BBC crew filming a television program, or even Billy Graham on a missionary tour.  The protagonist Laurie travels to Turkey with her Aunt Dot, who has two goals: to write her own Turkey book and to aid Muslim women by converting them to Anglicism, though she rarely makes headway in either.  With them is the Father Hugh Chantry-Pigg, an "ancient bigot" whose name perfectly captures the kind of religious boorishness he exemplifies.  Also, a camel.

Aunt Dot's earnestness and Father Chantry-Pigg's obliviousness might otherwise make for a darkly tragic novel of culture clash, but Macaulay's light touch ensures that the setup remains comic and harmless:

But first it was to be the eastern end of the Black Sea, and we were to sail in a ship that took camels and plan our campaign from Istanbul.

"Constantinople," said Father Chantry-Pigg, who did not accept the Turkish conquest.

"Byzantium," said I, not accepting the Roman one.

Aunt Dot, who accepted facts, said, "How many of our friends are in Turkey just now?"

"A lot,"  I said.  "They are all writing their Turkey books..."

It also contains one of my new favorite sentences:

Then he stopped laughing, and said in the voice one uses when a friend has been killed by a shark, "You heard about poor Charles?"

Yet The Towers of Trebizond is heavily invested in questions of personal faith and social religion.  Laurie, coming from a stolidly Anglican family, is carrying on an adulterous relationship with a married man which has led her away from the Church:

I was agnostic through school and university, then, at twenty-three, took up with the Church again; but the Church met its Waterloo a few years later when I took up with adultery; (curious how we always seem to see Waterloo from the French angle and count it as a defeat) and this adultery lasted on and on...

Turkey seems like an awfully odd place to set a story about one woman's struggle with her specifically English religion, but it provides an isolation for Laurie that is crucial to her self-reflection.  Moreover, Macaulay draws an explicit link between Laurie's faith and the Orthodox Christianity that has disappeared from Turkey, only to be found in the form of ruins.  I particularly like this exchange, in which she talks with a Turkish convert to Anglicism who is thinking of converting back to Islam for her lover:

She sighed as she ate her yoghourt.  I thought how sad it was, all this progress and patriotism and marching on and conquering the realms of culture, yet love rising up to spoil all and hold one back, and what was the Christian Church and what was Islam against this that submerged the human race and always had?  It had submerged Anthony and Cleopatra, and Abelard and Heloise, and Lancelot and Guinevere, and Paolo and Francesca, and Romeo and Juliet, and Charles Parnell and Faust, and Oscar Wilde and me, and Halide and her Moslem man, and countless millions more.  It kept me outside the Church, and might drive Halide out of it, it was the greatest force, and drove like a hurricane, shattering everything in its way, no one had a chance against it, the only thing was to go with it, because it always won.

I love the control Macaulay exhibits in this passage, carrying us along rapidly as if on the hurricane of love, yet her prose is brilliantly clear.  And I appreciate this attitude, because I think we are bombarded constantly with the idea that love between two people is stronger and more valuable than any belief or other facet of human experience.  It can be a destructive force, too; it binds us to another flawed person, after all.  No wonder that it blindsides us so frequently with agony.  And yet it is hard to escape from under, as Laurie knows.  Macaulay has a way of making everything seem ironic or insincere, but I think that these words are genuine.

Eventually, Aunt Dot and Father Chantry-Pigg abscond into Russia to convert the Soviets and Laurie has to travel around Turkey on her own.  The farcical elements of the book recede without them, though I did laugh at the bit in which Laurie, having mistook the phrase in her Turkish phrasebook for "I don't speak Turkish," accidentally asks everyone she meets to "telephone Mr. Yorum," until a real Mr. Yorum appears at a hotel and they share a very confused dinner.

The end of the book caught me completely by surprise.  It seems, like I've said, like a harmless tale, one in which even getting killed by a shark is played for a joke and not for pathos.  Yet the ending is incongruous and deeply sad, in a way that is somehow more sad because the book is exceedingly not.  It was, for me, one of "the times when you wake suddenly up, and the fog breaks, and right and wrong loom through it, sharp and clear like peaks of rock, and you are on the wrong peak and know that, unless you can manage to leave it now, you may be marooned there for life and ever after."