Barbara Comyns’s Conversational Conformity
A special knack for the feel of casual storytelling makes her bleak fiction strangely inviting.
BARBARA COMYNS (1907–1992) BEGINS CHAPTER NINE of her second novel, Our Spoons Came from Woolworths (1950), with her heroine, Sophia Fairclough, the narrator and ostensible author of the book, writing: “This book does not seem to be growing very large although I have got to Chapter Nine.” And it’s true: In my NYRB Classics edition of the novel, chapter nine begins on page 41. None of the Comyns novels I’ve read (all but two) could be described as long, and most are downright short. The longest of her books that I’ve read, A Touch of Mistletoe (1967), maxes out at 213 pages. In Our Spoons Came from Woolworths, Sophia goes on to say her book might be longer if she wrote dialogue in the regular way, with each reply beginning a new line. She doesn’t spend much time on dialogue; her books read like someone is talking to the reader. Comyns’s style was unique without presenting any hardships for the reader. In a strange way, her sometimes very bleak fiction can feel almost inviting. She wrote each book—regardless of whether the story being told was one of clear-eyed realism or a kind of fantastical darkness (or a mix of both)—as if it were casually, but artfully, being told to someone sitting nearby. Not quite conversational in style, but with a kind of “and then this happened” flippancy with which stories taken from real life are often told.
According to Avril Horner’s new biography, Barbara Comyns: A Savage Innocence, Graham Greene described this style as “cool” and “distancing.” But how can those adjectives apply to fiction that is also inviting? Perhaps because there are few things when reading a novel as inviting as experiencing a story unfold at a casual, unforced pace. Additionally, given that much of Comyns’s fiction can be rather grim, the ease of her storytelling can take the sting out of something that is otherwise shocking. Of course, Comyns knows that the absence of that expected sting gives the moment an extra chill, a different kind of shock. Take this bit from Our Spoons Came from Woolworths. Sophia has one child with her husband, Charles, but was forced to abort a second child. When she becomes pregnant yet again, the father is a man she’s having an affair with (in the context of the book, and of Sophia’s life, you can hardly blame her). Here, she’s breaking the news to her lover, an art critic named Peregrine Narrow. After Peregrine suggests a second abortion, and Sophia refuses, the conversation continues:
So he thought again, and suggested I should let Charles think it was his. Just pretend it was born a month premature, and it would appear to be his.
I said, ‘Charles simply hates babies, and can’t afford to keep his own, so I don’t see why he should keep yours.’
I must have sounded rather fierce, because he put on a very sad face, then put his face in his hands, but he cheered quite soon and said, ‘Perhaps it will be born dead.’
This is essentially Sophia’s life: one hardship, casual cruelty, or offhanded selfishness from someone who claims to care for her, after another. The first line of the novel is, “I told Helen my story and she went home and cried.”
OUR SPOONS CAME FROM WOOLWORTHS is one of Comyns’s more straightforwardly realistic novels (though at one point there is, very briefly, a ghost), and it’s a superb example of its kind. But apart from her unusual style, it was when her imagination latched onto something, some macabre idea, that she produced novels that couldn’t be easily compared to anything else. One of her most astonishing novels is her fourth, The Vet’s Daughter (1959). In this story, a young girl named Alice lives under the rule of her vile bully of a father, a veterinarian. Early in the novel, Alice’s kind mother dies (there is a hint that her very ill mother’s demise was hastened by her husband), and Alice’s father replaces her mother with a brashly aggressive and unpleasant woman named Rosa. Rosa, who wants to raise Alice in her image, attempts to force her into a relationship with a putrid little man named Cuthbert, who tries to rape her. Alice fights him off, and later:
In the night I was awake and floating. As I went up, the blankets fell to the floor. I could feel nothing below me—and nothing above until I came near the ceiling and it was hard to breathe there . . . I kept very still up there because I was afraid of breaking other things . . . but quite soon, it seemed, I was gently coming down again.
This newly discovered ability to levitate is not all in Alice’s head. In the reality of the novel, it actually occurs. Initially, Alice believes that this is probably something everyone can do, but it soon becomes the one thing in her joyless, anonymous life that makes her feel like an individual. Not that it does her any good; ultimately this ability brings more horror upon her, and those around her. If The Vet’s Daughter is merciless, that doesn’t mean it’s pitiless. Though it is pitiful. There is even a glimmer of Comyns’s pity to be found in Alice’s father, who is last seen escaping the novel’s horrible climax into a seclusion he doesn’t deserve.
EVEN WILDER IS Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead (1954). As Horner explains in her biography, much of the basic idea behind this novel was taken from fact. In 1951, in a French village called Pont-Saint-Esprit, a strange outbreak occurred. Citizens were driven mad, and some died, after eating “bread made with rye contaminated by a parasitic fungus.” Comyns took this fact, transplanted it to a small English village, and added a flood, which opens the novel. Read now, Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead reminds one, oddly, of the modern horror subgenre that depicts zombie-like behavior caused by some sort of natural or man-made virus, though Comyns’s book is much more interesting than that. Breaking from her more usual first-person narrative voice, here she uses third-person to write about not just the core family, the Willoweeds, but the other citizens of the town as well, Comyns creates a finite mini-apocalypse.
Here we read about the terrible guilt of the baker who made the rye:
“I’m a mass murderer,” he thought. . . . “There is no good smell of baking bread coming from my ovens because I’ve caused such dreadful and sinister things to come about. I who have always been gentle and meek and never mis-called my wife for her goings on, and never took birds’ eggs as a boy or caught lizards and put them in little boxes to die. I never felt much anger towards any man or struck a blow that I can remember; but I’ve caused more suffering than any man alive.”
And the personal grief of family loss:
So they went to their dead brother’s room. Already it smelt damp and unused, and the small black iron bed looked flat and lonely all stripped of its clothes. Seeing his bed like that seemed to make it more definite that Dennis would never come back any more, and the sisters sat on the window-sill and cried together.
As well as the inhuman callousness that permeates most of Comyns’s fiction. The Willoweed matriarch is an awful, selfish, abusive woman (as bad in her way as the father in The Vet’s Daughter). Meanwhile, her son, Elbin, the father of the four children at the story’s center, uses this tragedy as means to restart his failed journalism career. There is suicide, a terrible murder carried out by a frightened, angry mob, unaccountable loss. All of which, finally, ends. When the sickness is flushed from the town, things return to normal. Some characters even move on, conceivably to better things. Avril Horner puts forward a reasonable argument that what might appear at first to be a surprisingly happy ending to such a dark novel in truth depicts everyone returning to conformity (conformity being the not-so-secret villain of much of Comyns’s work). Horner isn’t wrong, but I would add that Comyns is continuing with another common theme of hers, which is that life goes on. There’s not much to say about this idea, as it doesn’t allow for a lot of deep thought. Because of course life goes on. What else would it do? But life going on does not mean that it goes on happily. (What is Our Spoons Came from Woolworths if not an unhappy story about life going on?)
This is another example of what I described earlier as Comyns’s flippancy. By that, I don’t mean her work is somehow unserious: I find her fiction to be completely serious, even when it’s funny, as it sometimes is. But a lot of things happen to her characters that are out of their control, and when they’ve moved beyond it they can only regard it as part of their past. Sometimes what’s happened comes from something outside of them, some incident that affects them though they had nothing to do with it, as in Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead. Sometimes it’s because the characters are children, and almost by definition have no control over their lives. One heart-breaking example of a child in a Comyns novel taking what control they can is at the end of The Skin Chairs (1962), when the young narrator, realizing she can’t literally bury the titular chairs (relics of the Boer war, six chairs upholstered in human skin), decides that at least she can read over this grotesque furniture the Christian Order for the Burial of the Dead. Per the ceremony, she has to give the chairs names, and she chooses to name them after poets:
It would be nice for the chairs to be called after poets. It took some time to choose names that suited the chairs and appealed to me, but I eventually decided on Percy Shelley. I didn’t care for the name Percy, but I loved Shelley and decided that the chair with the lighter skin should be called after him.
Reading Horner’s description of Comyns’s uneven, stop-and-start career, it seems the two people most responsible for keeping her name from disappearing from history are Graham Greene and Carmen Callil, the founder of Virago Modern Classics, which reprinted her novels in the 1980s and brought them to a new audience. I dearly want this to happen again for Comyns. Few writers deserve it more than she does.
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