Summer reading

When I wrote this post, I was still in the middle of my second Margery Sharp, The Nutmeg Tree. It’s several weeks later, and I’m still reading Margery Sharp novels. I think she’s going to keep me occupied well into July, if not for the rest of the summer. 

*****

The Nutmeg Tree ended very abruptly, leaving me hanging on several fronts. I never did find out definitively what happened to Julia and Susan. It’s reasonable to assume that Julia ended up happily married to Sir William but whether or not Susan and Bryan ended their disastrous engagement or went on as stubborn young people will do to the altar and an almost-certainly disastrous and unhappy marriage, we will never know. I’m guessing that The Nutmeg Tree was an unfinished novel that Margery Sharp’s literary executors just threw into the collection. Anyway, it’s just as well because Julia and Susan were beginning to wear me out a bit, and I was ready to move on to volume 3, The Flowering Thorn. There’s a four-year-old orphan boy and a beautiful and young and stylish but impecunious young woman who has thus far lived a wild and carefree life. We can easily guess where Margery is taking us, but she will make the road there very interesting and entertaining. 

*****

And it was. The Flowering Thorn is absolutely wonderful. Imagine if Rebecca West and PG Wodehouse collaborated on a novel about a hard-bitten, cynical, beautiful upper class English woman who adopts an orphaned boy and moves out of her stylish London flat and away from her stylish London life to a rustic cottage in the country, and you’ll have some idea of how great The Flowering Thorn is. 

Yes, Lesley (the beautiful protagonist) did adopt the orphaned boy just as I predicted, though it happened much sooner in the story than I expected. By the midway point, Lesley adjusts to motherhood and country life, and even makes a few friends. She doesn’t fall in love with her young charge; at least not right away, but she cares for him scrupulously and faithfully.

When Lesley arrives in the village, she’s determined to do her duty by her adopted child, to keep him safe and fed and clothed until he’s old enough to go to boarding school; and then she plans to resume her former life in a fashionable London neighborhood. She has no sentimental attachment to the child, nor any idealistic notions of motherhood. But eventually, she comes to love her new life in the country. Sharp writes about Lesley’s realization that a little boy, a dog, a cat, and a rough-around-the-edges village woman who helps with cooking and cleaning all depend on her for their sustenance and safety. We understand that just months earlier, Lesley would have been horrified by such a realization; instead, she is somewhat humbled, but also proud of her position as the center of the world for her unconventional little family. 

Does this sound like a Hallmark Christmas movie? In the wrong hands it could have been. 

Without giving away too much, Sharp manages to tell the story of a woman who finds fulfillment in family and home life, without making it into a morality tale or drawing an unflattering and judgmental contrast between the devoted country mother that Lesley eventually becomes and the self-involved single city woman she had once been. Lesley herself rejects this dichotomy, dismissing friends and acquaintances who praise her for her self-sacrifice. She is only fulfilling a commitment; and she doesn’t even believe that she loves her adopted son, but the reader understands that she does love the child. A person doesn’t give up a life of freedom and glamour and excitement for a rustic life of chores and children and animals for any reason other than love. Love is an action, not an emotion. Love is what you do for a person, not how you feel about them. 

*****

OK, we have just imagined a Wodehouse - West collaboration; now, just imagine if Shirley Jackson and Muriel Spark had worked together to write a novel, and then you might have some idea of what The Innocents is like. This was the last of the four novels in the collection, and the second one in a row about a single woman who adopts a young child. And there the similarity ends. The Flowering Thorn’s Lesley, a rich and spoiled London socialite, impulsively adopts an orphaned boy, regrets this impulsive decision almost immediately, but is then determined to fulfill her commitment, and ends up finding meaning and purpose in the process. In The Innocents, the unnamed first-person protagonist also cares for a child not her own, an arrangement that is supposed to be temporary but becomes permanent as a result of the untimely death of the child’s mother. In this case, the adoptive parent does have a deep, emotional attachment to the child, who is autistic, although Sharp does not use that word. I’ve read some reviews of The Innocents that suggest that it is a heartwarming story of an elderly woman’s unselfish love for a developmentally disabled child. But without revealing anything, let me just say that the love is far from unselfish; and the titular innocents are not the child and her caretaker, but the child and her unfortunate mother. It is both bitingly hilarious (that’s Muriel Spark’s contribution) and macabre (that’s where Shirley Jackson comes in). 

*****

Cluny Brown is probably Margery Sharp’s most famous non-rodent literary creation, and I picked up volume 2 of the collection expecting that it would be included, but it’s not. So I got a stand-alone copy of Cluny Brown, and it is my favorite Margery Sharp so far - an absolute delight of a story. Margery Sharp must have read PG Wodehouse, not to mention Jane Austen and George Eliot and George Bernard Shaw, because I can hear all of their voices in her writing. And Sharp herself was obviously an influence on Muriel Spark, with the same wry, sharp humor, but more tempered with kindness than Spark. Muriel Spark would have written Cluny Brown in the first person, and her Cluny would have judged Uncle Arn and the Carmels and Mrs. Maile and (especially) Mr. Belinski much more harshly. Of course, she would have been entirely right about Mr. Belinski, who is a self-important cad. 

I’m about 70 percent through Cluny Brown, and I’ll be sorry when it ends, except that at least I will know what happens to Cluny and Andrew and Mr. Wilson and Betty and the obnoxious Mr. Belinski because right now I have absolutely no idea what to expect. Anything could happen. And of course, I have another whole volume of Margery Sharp novels waiting for me as soon as I finish with Miss Brown. Margery Sharp is filling the gap left by Hilary Mantel and Muriel Spark, whose work I have read from start to finish; and she is rapidly becoming one of my favorite authors. As far as reading is concerned, it is shaping up to be a delightful summer.