Ethel Mannin's 'Crescendo' 1928

 

Jarrolds' 'Jackdaw' Library paperback edition - 1937

Although I have read three other novels of Ethel Mannin's in the 'Jackdaw' Library editions, I must admit I struggled through this one. More than once, I thought I would give up, but ploughed manfully on. The Problem? Quite apart from it being a pretty 'dense' read anyway, I found the main character (one can hardly call him the 'hero') repellant. Gilbert Stroud - whose life began as it ended, with a woman's death - lasted but thirty years; but what three decades of self-centred unpleasantness. His mother died in childbirth, after a mere eight months' of marriage, and his father, John Stroud, married again, within a month. The new bride began her married life in the radiant-bride manner, in the full flush of sensual awakening and satisfaction, and at the end of ten years died worn out physically by a series of futile and too-frequent pregnancies, and mentally by embittering disillusion and regret.  So, not a good start in life for young Gilbert. 

Five years of marriage had reduced his step-mother from a high-spirited, passionate girl to a depressed, neurotic woman, her soul warped and twisted by resentments whose appetites grew with what they fed on until she became both sadist and masochist. It is, therefore, no great surprise that, one day at the dinner-table, she seized a to-hand carving knife and brought it down on Gilbert's fingers The physical scar he bore for the rest of his life; so, too, did the mental scar, graved upon his soul. Gilbert is sent away to boarding school where he hates the matron and develops an almost violent animosity towards women. At sixteen, he goes to university where he walked in arm with young men who also inclined to the misogynist view of women. Then the Great War came; Gilbert went 'over the top' and was grievously wounded. He decides to end it all, but his revolver proves too heavy to use. Instead, he is 'rescued' by the Germans and taken to a PoW camp. After the War ends, he is restless; so, in the summer of 1919, at the age of twenty-five, he sets out for Europe, and there began that dark odyssey to which all the rest had been in the nature of a prelude.

The only character for whom this reader felt any sympathy or liking for was Mary Thane, the girl Gilbert met on the voyage from Canada to England. He saw dark straight hair smoothly parted on either side a high forehead, confused dark eyes, straight nose, mobile unpainted mouth, not beautiful, no; her face was too intelligent for beauty in the accepted sense...but attractive, yes, expressive - definitely interesting - refreshingly interesting; alive. Poor girl; they become lovers, stayed at her flat and sojourned on the East Anglian coast, where Mary had a bungalow (her money comes from her writing). But Gilbert wants to travel in Europe. Before this, he goes to Oxford, where he despises the 'bright young things'. He realised that he was of an in-between generation, neither pre-war nor post-war. More importantly, he catches a brief glimpse of a person who is out punting on the river: He had seen that face before. The white, unforgettable intensity of it; the dark, blazing intensity of those eyes with that look of something that is tortured yet will not surrender, something that cannot forget the passionate bitterness of its resentment, and carries it through torment. Through a 'nightmare' that same evening, he recalled he had seen the man in the German prison camp, striking a German officer.

Gilbert travels through Paris to Marseilles and then Florence. Here Philip Raymore, an American twenty-two years old, five foot high, and clothed in very voluminous knickerbockers of bold design, a blue yachting jacket with brass buttons, and a beret... thrusts himself on Gilbert. The man is a boring pest, but Gilbert cannot shake him off. They travel together to Rome  and there they meet Nicholas Stemway - the Oxford punter and German PoW character. He becomes Raymore's nemesis - regularly tormenting and taunting him until the latter goes off in a fury. it was somehow dreadful to see Stemway sitting back in his chair with his eyes mere slits in his white face his mouth more suggestive of a baring of fangs than a smile the dark lock of hair over his brow, his body taut with a suggestion of every nerve keyed to a concert pitch of concentration, and Raymore floundering helplessly in his clutches. Raymore finally has had enough of the taunts and leaves: "I'm going - I won't intrude. I'll leave you to your precious friend - since you seem to have a taste for - perverts!"

Stemway then attaches himself even more firmly to Gilbert. The latter felt that it was impossible for him not to believe that Stemway was inextricably interwoven in the fabric of his life...by comparison, Mary Thane became a mere minor accident...that day when beside the shell-hole he had chosen life, he had chosen Stem. The two men live together in Rome, then go skiing at St Moritz; but Gilbert's father wants him home to help run the Stroud business - and get a wife (and heir!). Although Gilbert meets up again with the long-suffering Mary, he is soon linked to the Lady Isabel Merrill the beautiful only daughter of the Earl of Tringham, owner of a the run-down Tringham Castle. She is colder than ice - certainly to Gilbert. It is entirely a marriage of convenience - her title and his wealth. It would give too much away to chart the disaster to its tragic conclusion. Suffice it to say, that Lady Isabel has a lover - her cousin Rex Merrill, who has also married an American heiress for her money. Gilbert asks his wife if she is sub-human, so socially frigid is she to him.

The story builds to its 'Crescendo'. A thoroughly unlikeable main character married to an equally unpleasant wife; a long-suffering girlfriend entirely put upon; a repulsive, closet-homosexual, mummy's-boy, who has a disastrous hold on Gilbert; and a dense text moving remorselessly along to a tragic denouement. The Morning Post called Crescendo 'a powerful book' - yes, it is; Bystander wrote it was 'undeniably entertaining' - no, it wasn't. Moreover, I am fast going off the 1930s!