Megabrill at the boarding-house
Francis King
WHAT HETTY DID by J. L. Carr
Quince Tree Press, £3.95
It is easy and tempting to present J. L. Can as a gifted amateur. Now 72, he came to novel writing — which, by his own admission, he has always done in the time that he can spare from publishing county picture maps and 16-page booklets from a back bedroom — when he was in his late forties, after a teaching career which took him variously to a Birmingham school for subnormal children and to the high school in Huron, South Dakota, which must surely have provided the setting and even some of the characters and incidents for his 1985 novel, at once hilarious and grim, The Battle of Pollocks Crossing.
It is no less easy and tempting to present him as an eccentric. Although it is highly unlikely that his previous publishers can have rejected a book as fine as this, he has chosen to publish it himself, in an attrac- tively illustrated edition of 2,850 copies at an amazingly low price, under an imprint of which he declares that it is the first and may perhaps be the last book to appear. The elaborate dedication takes in 'A, H, P.S, M and N and many a landlady gone', a friend in his 98th year, and 'Memory of John Baskerville of Birmingham, who de- signed this type fount, invented wove paper, and lost money on particular books which he published.' But behind the seeming artlessness one is always aware — as one is always aware in the case of Beryl Bainbridge — of a highly selfconscious artificer; and behind the seeming eccentricity one is always aware as one is also always aware in the case of Beryl Bainbridge — of someone extremely practical and shrewd. Can and Bainbridge may constantly surprise and disconcert one by doing things, whether in their novels or in their lives, in a totally idiosyncratic *manner; but they usually do them more capably than people thought to be far more professional and worldly.
Can's best books, like Maugham's, are written in the first person. But whereas Maugham's narrator — cynical, wry, toler- ant, worldly — is always the same, Carr's keeps changing. The narrator, Tom Birkin, of his 1982 A Month in the Country is a young man who has survived the first world war with his nerves in ragged, raw shreds. The narrator of his 1968 A Season in Sinji, to my mind the best of his novels, is a totally different kind of young man, stolid, self-possessed and composed. The narrator of What Hetty Did is an 18-year-old girl, the Hetty of a title which inevitably brings back to my mind the What Katie Did of my sisters' adolescent years.
For a male writer in his seventies to attempt to assume the persona of a modern girl in her teens is clearly a challenge. In general, Carr meets this challenge remark- ably well. One believes in Hetty as the sort of 'quaint, old-fashioned little thing' (no one calls her this in the book but someone might well do so) whose record collection, mostly 78s, ranges from Fats Waller to Byrd's Mass for Five Voices, who can recognise Monet's 'Poppy Field' when she sees a reproduction on a wall, and who quotes extensively from the Victorian poets, notably Browning. Can catches the idiom not merely of her talk but, far more difficult, of her sinewy, tough, ever- enquiring, ever-perceptive mind.
Having discovered that she has been adopted by 'parents' for whom she has neither affection nor respect, Hetty runs away from her Penland home to Birming- ham, where she takes up residence in a boarding-house, run by a Miss Rose Gilpin-Jones, in which she receives free board and lodging in return for domestic help. To some extent, therefore, this book belongs to the boarding-house genre of novel — of which Patrick Hamilton's Craven House and The Slaves of Solitude provide the most notable examples in modern English fiction. Eccentric herself, Rose has eccentrics as her lodgers, the majority of them characters from earlier novels by Carr. Emily Foxberrow, for example, 'well and truly round the bend', goes 'maundering on half the night', cla- morously reliving a life in which her former husband may or may not have committed a murder. Another female lodger once bicy- cled across Turkestan unaccountably dressed as a schoolboy. Matthew is a 'very small, very black man' from Sierra Leone, who is curate at the local church. Ivan the Terrible is a Russian on a British Council cultural exchange scheme, determined to investigate all that is most Dickensian in the capitalist way of life in Britain.
All the picaresque happenings of the novel — Hetty's relationships with these and others of the lodgers, her involvement in a race riot, her visit to a music-hall (surely difficult to find in Birmingham these days?) — are strung on the thread of her search for the mother who gave her away for adoption. The mother is eventual- ly found, in a scene which cannot fail to move the reader without for a moment slithering into the sentimentality which one constantly dreads. The father is also found, although Hetty is less concerned with him — a university don, flame-haired like herself and an admirer of Joseph Conrad, who interviews her for her entrance to Cambridge.
It is in the book's satire of modern life in England today that Can's impersonation of Hetty becomes insecure. There is, for example, a scene in which Hetty accompa- nies her landlady, who is suffering from an unaccountable ringing in her ears, to the local hospital to join a queue of bench- bound supplicants. There are scenes when Hefty battles with bureaucracy first to find some useful work and then to wrest some information about her mother. A Britain which might well strike a man of Carr's age as rackety, rubbishy and inefficient would surely not so strike a girl, even one as reflective, self-sufficient and old-fashioned as Hetty. The stoical, disapproving know- ingness which permeates these scenes is one of experience, not of youth.
But that said, the book, generally so witty, so vivacious and so original, is a gem — or, as Hetty's generous-bosomed school pal Mariana, devotee of Tennyson, would put it, megabrill.
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