Jarrolds' Publishers - both October 1936
These are the other two novels I read on holiday at Halkidiki. As usual, I looked up on the Internet what I could find out about the authors. As I read through a fairly detailed biography of Ethel Mannin (1900-1984), my heart sank rather. Her father Robert (d. 1948) was a member of the Socialist League who passed his left-wing beliefs on to his daughter. At school, Ethel - on being asked to write an essay on 'Patriotism' - produced an advocacy of anti-patriotic and anti-monarchist ideas. At first she supported the Labour Party, but became disillusioned in the 1930s. A supporter of the Soviet Union, she visited the country and then became disillusioned with Stalinism. She then turned to anarchism and was actively involved in anti-fascist movements (at last, I can agree with her!). She supported the Spanish Republic in their war, but opposed the Second World War. In her seventies, she still described herself as an anti-monarchist and a 'Tolstoyan anarchist'. So, I approached her her novel with some trepidation.
Ethel Mannin
I was pleasantly surprised. I enjoyed her novel, finding it full of richly-observed characters, all realistic. It is partly a story of farming life seen through the eyes of a young girl on the cusp of adolescence. Her third-generation farming father is a lazy, day-dreaming, half-Irish man whose lethargy and lack of ambition riles her mother, an ex-school teacher whose ambition to improve things are frustrated time and time again. She has become bitter and her moods infect the home atmosphere. Her brothers, Stephen and David are the proverbial chalk and cheese - the former impatient, even aggressive, the latter a day-dreamer like his father. Linda loved David and disliked Stephen.
It follows Linda through her first 'love' for the young servant girl, Ruth, and then a passion for Garry Payne, a young fisherman. There is life and laughter and death and tragedy, but very little politics. It ends with Linda, lying down by a hedge in the orchard and ruminating on the meaning of it all.
...there pressed upon her increasingly this sense of her life flowing all one way like a river. Like a river flowing out to a limitless sea, life flowing, flowing, into a sea of eternity...a great orange moon stared across at the sinking defeated sun. And standing between them she knew herself from that time forth bound up with the cycle of the moon, and that henceforth it would draw her lkife as it drew the tides of rivers and seas, in regular relentless ebb and flow, and she was filled with awe at the mystery of this life-rhythm, and a nameless sorrow.
She walked slowly out of the orchard, carefully closing the gate behind her, she who a few hours before had entered it as a child through a gap in the hedge.
Paul Selver
(Percy) Paul Selver (1888-1970) was the Son of Wolfe and Catherine Selver, A Jewish family. Studying at the University of London, he gained a B.A. in English and German. He served in the Brish Army in the Great War and then, becoming proficient in several Germanic and Slavonic language, he made a living as a translator. In the Second World War, he was a linguistic assistant to the exiled Czech government, but was dismissed when the Communists took over. In 1968, he gained a Civil Service pension for his services to literature.
Private Life started promisingly and ended with a startling twist. It detailed the life of Stephen Pollock, a Civil Servant in his mid-thirties, who tries to discover the murderer of his friend Edgar Bellamy, of similar age, who was brutally killed by a blunt instrument in his room. There are some interesting scenes and characters but I felt the story meandered somewhat with a less than fascinating main character. Pollock appeared cast in the mould of a rather dull, junior civil servant - not the most inspiring type to follow in pursuit of a killer. I won't read it again.
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