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callmemadamThis review was meant to be just a paragraph in my monthly roundup but somehow, it grew.
The book cover is designed around a beautiful portrait by Sargent of Angela Thirkell as a young woman. ‘My Sargent’, she called it. A quick search on my blog found that I’ve written a surprising amount about Thirkell. In spite of disagreeing with all her political opinions, I still find her books highly entertaining and amusing. Anne Hall’s book told me a lot about Angela Thirkell that I didn’t know, but raises as many questions as it answers. Did she really have ‘a heart of stone’ as someone said? She certainly had a waspish side and an acid tongue on occasion. The trouble was that so few people met her high standards. Thirkell was born into a world of art, music and literature. Her grandfather was the artist Burne-Jones; Stanley Baldwin and Rudyard Kipling were second cousins. Her father was a distinguished scholar, later OM and J M Barrie was her godfather. Pembroke Gardens, Kensington, was ‘home’ even when she wasn’t living there.
She had two failed marriages, which produced three sons, each of whom became a writer; also a daughter who died very young. Her first marriage was doomed as James Campbell McInnes, a wonderful singer, apparently, was gay or bisexual, and drank, which made him violent. She divorced him, a scandalous thing at the time. You’d think the experience would have put her off marriage but in 1918 she married a handsome Australian officer, George Thirkell and moved to Australia, where she was to live for ten years. The journey to Australia was described in Trooper to the Southern Cross (1934), published under the pseudonym ‘Leslie Parker’. Thirkell wrote this in the first person as a male, Australian doctor. It was a terrible voyage: there were prisoners on board, who caused trouble and the Germans, from whom the troopship had been seized, had sabotaged it by interfering with the plumbing and the electrics, with alarming results. I just dipped into the book and it really is brilliant. No wonder Barry Humphries once said it was his favourite book. Amusingly, ‘Cousin Ruddy’, who called Angela a ‘demon’, referred to her as ‘Ag’ and complained that she ‘cannibalised’ her family by writing about them, praised and recommended this book, not realising she had written it. Kipling wasn’t the only reader to believe that it had been written by an Australian.
Australia and Thirkell were never going to get on; middle-class Melbourne was stultifying for her. Nevertheless, it was here that her career as a writer began, when she had articles published in magazines. She needed the money as she felt her husband was not supporting her and her family (three boys, now), as he should. Eventually, she simply left, having borrowed the fare from Barrie. She left behind not only her husband and many of her possessions but her two eldest sons, taking the only ‘Australian’ boy, Lance (Lancelot) with her. Poor George Thirkell; the boys found him a thoroughly decent bloke, whom they called ‘Dad’ and his portrayal in Trooper to the Southern Cross is of a brave, honest man. In manners and interests, sadly, the couple were totally mismatched. No wonder she made her novelist character Laura Morland ‘happily widowed’.
Back In England, her first published book was Three Houses, a memoir of houses she knew when young, with portraits of some of her famous relatives. It’s a charming book. Her other non-Barsetshire books were: Ankle Deep (1933); Oh These Men, These Men! (1935); The Grateful Sparrow (1935); The Fortunes of Harriette (1936) and Coronation Summer (1937). I’ve only read two of these and don’t have copies. In 1933 she published High Rising, the first book in the long Barsetshire series. From then on, there was a Barsetshire book every year until her death; her last, Three Score and Ten, was completed by C A Lejeune and published in 1961. All were brought out by Jamie Hamilton of Hamish Hamilton, with whom she had the same kind of friendly relationship that Laura Morland, her fictional alter-ego, had with her publisher. No one could her accuse her of laziness. The books were always bestsellers. In Kingsley Amis’s That Uncertain Feeling (1955), librarian John Lewis visits a grander home than he is used to and notices ‘the latest Greene and Thirkell’ on a table.
I simply love High Rising and the other, early books; the war made Thirkell bitter and what some critics called ‘cantankerous’. I won’t say much about the books because you can read some of my views here. Thirkell hated the post-war world and referred constantly to ‘Them’, by which she meant the Labour government. ‘Atlee’ (sic, she always mis-spelled his name) was the hate figure, although later she heard that he was a nice man. This chimes with Chips Channon, whose diaries I’ve read in the last couple of years. He hated Attlee on principle, just because he was a socialist yet noted a couple of times (quoting off the top of my head here), ‘Mr Attlee very pleasant, as he always is socially.’ The trouble with people like Thirkell is that they blamed post-war austerity on the Labour government, rather than on five years of total war. There’s a truly terrible line in one of the books in which Mrs Morland says that she sometimes wishes the war could have gone on forever, as ‘we were so happy with Mr Churchill’. Thirkell could be really tasteless: when she was having a hard time at PG looking after elderly, ill parents, she headed her letters from there ‘Belsen’. In spite of all this, the post-war books remain good reads; I particularly like Private Enterprise. In her very last books she insulted her readers with inconsistencies worthy of Elinor M Brent-Dyer.
Angela Thirkell had troubled relationships with most of her family. She never got on with her sister Clare, who was always ill with some undiagnosed problem and took up a lot of her mother’s time. She lost patience with her once-loved parents when they were old and fell out with her brother Denis (Denis Mackail, author of Greenery Street) over the estate when their parents died. Nor did she have a happy time with her sons. Geoffrey, the eldest, moved to Canada before the war, where he met his father. Angela visited him twice; she liked having grandchildren but thought they needed smacking. Colin, who changed the spelling of his surname to MacInnes, wrote books which she considered very good but ‘filthy’, She eventually disinherited him. The youngest, Lance, was the most loyal to her but even he found her exasperating. A difficult woman, anyone would agree but one whose middlebrow books are still popular today.
I enjoyed this book because I was so interested in the subject but I would have liked a family tree at the beginning and a list of her books at the end. I would also have cut out at least half of the mentions of family friends and connections, as I found the first two chapters quite confusing.
The book cover is designed around a beautiful portrait by Sargent of Angela Thirkell as a young woman. ‘My Sargent’, she called it. A quick search on my blog found that I’ve written a surprising amount about Thirkell. In spite of disagreeing with all her political opinions, I still find her books highly entertaining and amusing. Anne Hall’s book told me a lot about Angela Thirkell that I didn’t know, but raises as many questions as it answers. Did she really have ‘a heart of stone’ as someone said? She certainly had a waspish side and an acid tongue on occasion. The trouble was that so few people met her high standards. Thirkell was born into a world of art, music and literature. Her grandfather was the artist Burne-Jones; Stanley Baldwin and Rudyard Kipling were second cousins. Her father was a distinguished scholar, later OM and J M Barrie was her godfather. Pembroke Gardens, Kensington, was ‘home’ even when she wasn’t living there.
She had two failed marriages, which produced three sons, each of whom became a writer; also a daughter who died very young. Her first marriage was doomed as James Campbell McInnes, a wonderful singer, apparently, was gay or bisexual, and drank, which made him violent. She divorced him, a scandalous thing at the time. You’d think the experience would have put her off marriage but in 1918 she married a handsome Australian officer, George Thirkell and moved to Australia, where she was to live for ten years. The journey to Australia was described in Trooper to the Southern Cross (1934), published under the pseudonym ‘Leslie Parker’. Thirkell wrote this in the first person as a male, Australian doctor. It was a terrible voyage: there were prisoners on board, who caused trouble and the Germans, from whom the troopship had been seized, had sabotaged it by interfering with the plumbing and the electrics, with alarming results. I just dipped into the book and it really is brilliant. No wonder Barry Humphries once said it was his favourite book. Amusingly, ‘Cousin Ruddy’, who called Angela a ‘demon’, referred to her as ‘Ag’ and complained that she ‘cannibalised’ her family by writing about them, praised and recommended this book, not realising she had written it. Kipling wasn’t the only reader to believe that it had been written by an Australian.
Australia and Thirkell were never going to get on; middle-class Melbourne was stultifying for her. Nevertheless, it was here that her career as a writer began, when she had articles published in magazines. She needed the money as she felt her husband was not supporting her and her family (three boys, now), as he should. Eventually, she simply left, having borrowed the fare from Barrie. She left behind not only her husband and many of her possessions but her two eldest sons, taking the only ‘Australian’ boy, Lance (Lancelot) with her. Poor George Thirkell; the boys found him a thoroughly decent bloke, whom they called ‘Dad’ and his portrayal in Trooper to the Southern Cross is of a brave, honest man. In manners and interests, sadly, the couple were totally mismatched. No wonder she made her novelist character Laura Morland ‘happily widowed’.
Back In England, her first published book was Three Houses, a memoir of houses she knew when young, with portraits of some of her famous relatives. It’s a charming book. Her other non-Barsetshire books were: Ankle Deep (1933); Oh These Men, These Men! (1935); The Grateful Sparrow (1935); The Fortunes of Harriette (1936) and Coronation Summer (1937). I’ve only read two of these and don’t have copies. In 1933 she published High Rising, the first book in the long Barsetshire series. From then on, there was a Barsetshire book every year until her death; her last, Three Score and Ten, was completed by C A Lejeune and published in 1961. All were brought out by Jamie Hamilton of Hamish Hamilton, with whom she had the same kind of friendly relationship that Laura Morland, her fictional alter-ego, had with her publisher. No one could her accuse her of laziness. The books were always bestsellers. In Kingsley Amis’s That Uncertain Feeling (1955), librarian John Lewis visits a grander home than he is used to and notices ‘the latest Greene and Thirkell’ on a table.
I simply love High Rising and the other, early books; the war made Thirkell bitter and what some critics called ‘cantankerous’. I won’t say much about the books because you can read some of my views here. Thirkell hated the post-war world and referred constantly to ‘Them’, by which she meant the Labour government. ‘Atlee’ (sic, she always mis-spelled his name) was the hate figure, although later she heard that he was a nice man. This chimes with Chips Channon, whose diaries I’ve read in the last couple of years. He hated Attlee on principle, just because he was a socialist yet noted a couple of times (quoting off the top of my head here), ‘Mr Attlee very pleasant, as he always is socially.’ The trouble with people like Thirkell is that they blamed post-war austerity on the Labour government, rather than on five years of total war. There’s a truly terrible line in one of the books in which Mrs Morland says that she sometimes wishes the war could have gone on forever, as ‘we were so happy with Mr Churchill’. Thirkell could be really tasteless: when she was having a hard time at PG looking after elderly, ill parents, she headed her letters from there ‘Belsen’. In spite of all this, the post-war books remain good reads; I particularly like Private Enterprise. In her very last books she insulted her readers with inconsistencies worthy of Elinor M Brent-Dyer.
Angela Thirkell had troubled relationships with most of her family. She never got on with her sister Clare, who was always ill with some undiagnosed problem and took up a lot of her mother’s time. She lost patience with her once-loved parents when they were old and fell out with her brother Denis (Denis Mackail, author of Greenery Street) over the estate when their parents died. Nor did she have a happy time with her sons. Geoffrey, the eldest, moved to Canada before the war, where he met his father. Angela visited him twice; she liked having grandchildren but thought they needed smacking. Colin, who changed the spelling of his surname to MacInnes, wrote books which she considered very good but ‘filthy’, She eventually disinherited him. The youngest, Lance, was the most loyal to her but even he found her exasperating. A difficult woman, anyone would agree but one whose middlebrow books are still popular today.
I enjoyed this book because I was so interested in the subject but I would have liked a family tree at the beginning and a list of her books at the end. I would also have cut out at least half of the mentions of family friends and connections, as I found the first two chapters quite confusing.
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Date: 2023-02-17 07:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-02-17 07:33 pm (UTC)