Brigid BrophyRecensioni

Another banger from London.

Helped me understand some reasons why books became famous. It's tongue-in-cheek, but also serious.

Ronald Firbank's grandfather was the classic Victorian self-made man, who started out as a Durham mineworker at the age of seven, educated himself and became one of the leading railway contractors of his time. Just to prove that there's nothing in heredity, Ronald (called Artie before he became a writer) turned out to be allergic to all forms of organised schooling, never passed an exam in his life, and was so unsuccessful as a writer in his own short lifetime that he had to use his (quite modest) inherited wealth to subsidise the publication of all of his books.

He's scarcely better known nowadays: if you come from a certain kind of background (mostly centred around middle-aged Oxbridge/Ivy League queens of high-anglican leanings, I suspect) you'll have heard of him as a cult early-20th-century author of camp novels with a hint of LGBT naughtiness, but the chance of your actually having read him is pretty minimal. And that's despite the way a whole succession of influential writers have gone out of their way to promote him, including in his own time Evelyn Waugh(*), the Sitwells, Lord Berners, and Carl Von Vechten; later on others including Anthony Powell, John Betjeman, Brigid Brophy and Alan Hollinghurst stood up to be counted.

Brophy's critical study of Firbank is almost as long as his collected works, coming in at some 600 pages in paperback, but it turns out to be a very lively read, because she has strong opinions about the merits of his writing and the way it's been treated by people who don't have the perception to appreciate it properly (including his previous biographers). She makes a very strong case for Firbank as someone who made an important contribution to modernist ideas about fiction and how it should work: at times she seems to see him as the Stravinsky of Eng Lit, but she doesn't seem to be able to tie him into direct influences on later writers. Or indeed contemporaries. We don't get much more than hints that Virginia Woolf read Firbank, for instance.

Naturally, Brophy has some sillinesses of her own too: she's writing in 1973, so there is far more Freud than we really need (to give her credit, she has clearly read Freud attentively and criticises him from time to time: she isn't just quoting off the peg theories). And she has a bee in her bonnet about Firbank's Irishness, through his Anglo-Irish mother, something there's scarcely any trace of in his writings.

Where she is undoubtedly on the mark is in her close attention to the huge influence Oscar Wilde had on Firbank, and the way he used his early writings to work this out of his system, culminating in the Salome-pastiche in The accidental princess.

In the final chapters of the book, we are led one by one through all of Firbank's books in quite some detail: this turns out to be very helpful, both in revealing patterns that we might otherwise have missed and in giving hints at decoding some of the more deeply encoded references in the text. She also discusses Firbank's many oddities of spelling, grammar, punctuation, translation, etc., some of which are clearly simple mistakes, but many turn out to be stretching language in unexpected ways. He seems to have had a kind of horror of being quite precise in any language other than French, including English. His Italian and Spanish are both horrible (intentionally or not), and his English often picks up odd French tinges of word-order and vocabulary. For instance, he uses "berce" as a verb several times, a word that doesn't appear in the OED, but whose meaning "to cradle" would be obvious to anyone who understands French (and could be guessed from the context anyway).

What Brophy doesn't bother to explain are Firbank's occasional buried dirty jokes: those are left to surprise the reader (including some I only picked up on a second or third reading...).
---
(*)The young Waugh gave Firbank rave reviews — later on he cooled off rather. Brophy suggests this is because he didn't want readers to see how much he'd stolen from Firbank's techniques in his early books. More prosaically it's probably got a lot to do with the older Waugh's lack of sense of humour where Catholicism was concerned.

Dull..

Professor Darrelhyde is studying a pair of Hackenfeller's Apes at the zoo...despite female Edwina's efforts, her mate, Percy, is disinclined to mate in captivity. One day the Professor is informed that Percy is to be sent into space on a rocket, and determines to save him..
A sobering tale with an unexpected, shocking end. The author's commitment to animal rights shines through, even as dull-witted bystanders dismiss the proposed space flight withsuch fatuities as "it's helping science" or "theres more important things to think of than monkeys"

What the hell happened there? The first 3rd of this is great. Very introspective, lot of different ideas, lot of puns, mostly its about language i think.
Its very experimental and 60s. The puns and other humour had a certain rythmn to them that made it feel almost like beatnik poetry in places.

The setup, person waiting in an airport, an important minor point is that they have a copy of the Story of O. Or some equivalent work, i think this one was something like the Language of Oc.
This 'Story of O' parody i eventually realise is another joke, with Oc representing language /grammer itself and the joke being that grammer is being tortured by authors these days or somthing.
Its also about sex, mostly it seems because in certain languages, such as french, all objects are made either male or female, a fact the author seems obsessed with. The tongue apparently is female.

However after the first third things start happening, events occur, and it becomes more external and less internal and far less interesting. I thought it might recover after this clunky middle section but instead it just turns into surreal parody with noir and fantasy bits and invasions of nuns and revolutionaries... its just complete bollocks.

Its all still quite tolerable with its puns and its nonsense but very disappointing after that opening. I'm trying to think if i've actually liked any of the so called experimental literature of the 60s?
In any case, this is another one thats more Frankenstein than Lisa (weird science).

Well that was fun :) . The trials and tribulations of various characters from the small democratic monarchy of Evarchia. Mostly following the members of the royal family.
Clearly inspired in parts by [b: Gormenghast |39063|Titus Groan (Gormenghast, #1)|Mervyn Peake|https://d2arxad8u2l0g7.cloudfront.net/books/1327871204s/39063.jpg|3250394] but its players are more real and a little less grotesque. Its a book about characters and setting rather than plot. You could also compare it to Dickens books like [b: Bleak House |31242|Bleak House|Charles Dickens|https://d2arxad8u2l0g7.cloudfront.net/books/1280113147s/31242.jpg|2960365], or [b: South Wind |1198855|South Wind|Norman Douglas|https://d2arxad8u2l0g7.cloudfront.net/books/1181816741s/1198855.jpg|1186973] by Norman Douglas.
Its a very funny book too at least to start with although the humour, while it doesn't disappear, gets pushed into the background during the final quarter.

I actually found Brophy's writing style a little... complex. Its not that she uses long words or anything but the way she puts sentences together, just seemed to throw me off at times and i was forced to reread.
The other thing which i had to adjust too is the scene changes. Some scenes can be very short and when you which to the next your never sure how far the jump will be, will this be 5 mins ahead or days or weeks. As someone who's mind tends to travel on rails this can be a little disconcerting.

Finally due to its lack of plot the ending doesn't really seem to mean much, it comes so far out of left field.
Overall though, much like Gormenghast this is a beautifully drawn (rather than written) book and left me wanting more, which is always preferable to the alternative :) .

What a fun, odd, and specifically atmospheric novel—I can't think of anything else like it I've read. It all takes place during one New Year's Eve costume party in England in the early 1960s, I think, with the guests dressed as 18th-century figures—many out of Don Giovanni, which makes me wish I were more up on my opera, but it's not necessary to enjoy the slightly plotless action: a one-night stand, a deflowering, a death, a pompous professorial lecture, and a bunch of missed connections with masks on that make the whole thing quite delicious.

This book is actually funny.

Amusing, though intended seriously, takedown of some works of high repute and others now almost forgotten. Lovers of Shakespeare may be amazed to see Hamlet listed, but admit it, don't you really want to give that young man a kick in the trunk hose? And I have often felt that Hemingway got his reputation because he allowed male English professors to feel manly by association.

A good read, albeit almost too short to qualify as a novel, and with an ending so abrupt that one is uncertain whether to ask for more!

When I came across this old VMC in a seaside second hand bookshop I pulled it out to look through it – never having heard of the author before. The lady serving in the shop noting my choice said ‘ooh I haven’t read Brigid Brophy for years’. Although the slightly bizarre cover art didn’t exactly speak to me – I bought the book. So often it is these random, spontaneous buys that turn out to be among our best acquisitions.

The King of a Rainy Country – was Brigid Brophy’s second novel. As the author explains in her afterword to this edition, the novel does have some autobiographical elements, especially in the characters of Neale and the first person narrator Susan. Brophy creates a fascinating world of both London Bohemianism and European glamour, suffused through with humour, depth and for me moments of poignancy. I absolutely loved it.

“O I’m so afraid that it’s true about to travel hopefully being better than to arrive. It might be all in the quest, all in the search, all in the anticipation. When it came, there might be nothing there.”

In this brilliantly stylish, witty novel Brigid Brophy introduces us to the world of two post war impoverished bohemians, Susan and Neale. As the novel opens Susan is moving in with Neale – although their relationship is somewhat ambiguous. On the day she moves Susan manages to secure a badly paying job, working for a definitely dodgy bookseller, coincidently in premises directly across the road from the flat she will be sharing with Neale. The proprietor Finkelheim is a distinctly odd man, his name an assumed one, it isn’t long before Susan discovers his chief trade is in pornography.

On days when Finkelheim is absent, Susan invites Neale over to spend time with her during the afternoons, the pair start examining some of the stock. Leafing through one of Finkelheim’s books Susan is taken aback to see a nude picture of Cynthia – a girl she had known at school, and for whom she’d had complicated feelings. Seeing the picture of Cynthia brings back memories of Susan’s adolescence at school and her all too brief friendship with Cynthia.

“The memory was quite sharp, but distant. It was like a small photograph in which, if I tried to enlarge it, the detail blurred outwards into nothing. The four of us were there in the sunlight, miniature figures in school blazers: myself a short compact child, with a fringe of dark hair across my forehead, large eyes and a tiny, very white-skinned nose; my satellite, Gill, a still smaller girl, monkey-like in her way of moving and her sense of humour; Annette, tall, thin, unsuitably named, colourless in hair, face and personality, who accompanied Cynthia everywhere; and Cynthia everywhere; and Cynthia herself.”

Neale is quick to embrace the mystery of what happened to Cynthia, where is she now and how did she end up in the pages of that book? Susan becomes determined to find Cynthia, her faltering investigations even taking her to visit her former headmistress. Susan and Neale decide to pursue their quest for Cynthia wherever it might take them. They discover that Cynthia is probably in Venice for a film festival, and so Susan and Neale feel they must follow her there.

Giving up the flat and leaving their belongings with a friend they manage to secure jobs as couriers to a coachload of American tourists journeying through Italy – a tour which will finish in Venice. First time couriers – the duo encounter difficult passengers, eccentric coach drivers and engine trouble as well as breath-taking scenery. There are lots of joyfully comic moments, including a passenger who will only sit in seat number 13 or sleep in room 13- so in one hotel the digits of room 31 have to be hastily reversed.

There is a definite shift in mood in this section, from the first part set in London, but for me that shift doesn’t in anyway jar or feel unnatural – which must say something I suppose for the skill of the writer. The tour ends in Venice, and Neale and Susan freed from their courier duties begin to look for Cynthia – and find her quickly and almost accidentally.

“Neale brushed Cynthia away. He talked with his head bent side sideways, watching Helena Buchan. In the darkness, her gaze apparently fixed on the table top while she listened, she was like the audience to a play we were giving in a small lighted circle. She was outside the arc. We could only project our words towards her, sensing her attentiveness from her silence and immobility; from the dimness there came to us now and then a rustle, occasionally the sound of a spoon against a cup, often a laugh – unexpected by us, because we could not see its preliminaries on her face.”

Having met up with Cynthia they are introduced to Helena Buchan a famous singer, and her friend Philip. Loves and loyalties between the group – who almost immediately start spending more and more time with each other – begin to shift and change. This third section of the novel is quieter, echoing with the ancient beauty of the city of Venice. There are lots of beautiful ambiguities in this novel, some surprises and an ending of quiet tragedy and absolute perfection.

1956 British novel about a drifting young couple of sexually ambiguous London bohemians, by the genre-defying Brigid Brophy. Last seen as a Virago Modern Classic in 1990, now republished by youthful indie fanzine types Coelacanth Press. This edition also comes with a couple of new introductions, helping to argue why this dusty old novel - and Brophy herself - are worthy of wider attention today.

I'd compare it to the later films of Lindsay Anderson, in that it feels both incredibly British, but also very European, trying to kick back at its Britishness at the same time as commenting upon it. There's doses of dazed Camus-style existentialism, plus a hint of Muriel Spark and Beryl Bainbridge's autobiographical works about bright young women in the post war era. It also echoes the genre of gay coming of age novels, and even a touch of the Beats when the location moves to Italy.

Although it's not as experimental as her later works (eg In Transit), I was particularly impressed by Brophy's device of carefully omitting the narrator's own name throughout the whole book, except at one crucial moment (as far as I can make out).

This novel has it all - operatic references to the central theme (the protagonist's unclear sex), a lesbian underworld to which our hero(ine) descends, plenty of silly puns, (post)modernist metanarratives going on, stereo writing, porn... I'm less keen on the (somewhat dated) revolution parody bit, but nevertheless this queer experimental novel is very close to my heart.

Witty and stylish like they don't write them these days. After the light, picaresque adventures the odd ending comes rather sadly and abruptly. I suppose a "happy" straight and a "happy" queer ending are out of the question for different reasons - all in all, this novel feels like it's "in the closet" and cleverly jumping through hoops to remain so while giving plenty of winks to queer readers between the lines. Compare to the author's later "In Transit" which is very much "out of the closet".

First published in 1956, this is the (partly autobiographical) story of Susan, living in an ambiguous relationship with Neale in London. Money is short; Susan works for a dodgy bookseller. Browsing through the soft porn he deals in, she comes across a picture of a girl she went to school with and once had strong feelings for- Cynthia.
Hearing that Cynthia is now in films, they decide to try to meet up with her at a film show in Venice. This is achieved by getting themselves employed as holiday couriers, taking a group of awful American tourists through Italy...much comedy and lovely descriptions of the country.
Finally they meet up with Cynthia and also the famous opera singer, Helena Buchan....

This bizarre novel is a work of modern fiction set in an airport, and like the architecture of airports it is very modern but dated in the way that modern things from the 50's, 60's & 70's seem to age rather quickly. The narrator is "in transit" - between flights - at the airport having decided to skip the ongoing flight and reflecting on the narrator's past life and the undefined status of being in transit. Suddenly, the narrator cannot remember his/her sex and rather comically tries to figure that out. More odd events transpire eventually leading to a rebellion against the airport. The book is full of wordplay, especially puns, and satire of the modern world. It's the best book with a gender-ambiguous narrator that I've read since Written on the Body by Jeanette Winterson.

Favorite Passages:

"Have you noticed how little of the twentieth-century life is in fact conducted in twentieth-century surroundings? There are precious few places where you can glance unhibitedly round you and be sure of never placing eyes on an artifact that's an anachronism. Indeed our century hasn't yet invented a style -- only a repertory of cliche motifs which aren't in fact functional, since they can be stuck on anywhere, but which imitate the machine-turned and stream-lined and thereby serve the emotional purpose of signaling that our century prefers function to style." - p. 22

Finished reading Hackenfeller's Ape by Brigid Brophy over the weekend. This is an intriguing story of a scientist, Professor Darrelhyde, who befriends an ape, Percy, in the London Zoo. Darrelhyde discovers Percy is to be shot into space. The yarn takes off with the professor's efforts to save the ape. Along the way Brophy weaves quietly ironic observations about our relationship with animals. Published in 1953, Brophy went on to write "The Rights of Animals" for The Sunday Times in 1965.

"To us it seems incredible that the Greek philosophers should have scanned so deeply into right and wrong and yet never noticed the immorality of slavery. Perhaps 3000 years from now it will seem equally incredible that we do not notice the immorality of our own oppression of animals."

The Grumpy Vegan had the good fortune to meet and hear Brophy speak on several occasions. She exuded sophistication (black nail varnish!) with a political radicalness that made you want to have her as your eccentric Aunt Brigid. What fun that would have been.

This book is one of my dearest books because I sent it out on BookCrossing -- and it went all the way to Iran and came home! It's also a swell book, very English, very low-key, very funny. Neglected, I think.

Brophy was a passionate opera lover.

From one of the book boxes that Moem sent to me. This one looks too interesting to let go without reading. So, I'll host it on my shelf for a while.