Sitting down to write about Betty Miller's novel Farewell Leicester Square I did a search on here (it's the only way I can find anything too...really I should do an index one of these days) and found a long-forgotten post from three years ago about The Exile, one of her short stories which I had read in the Persephone Book of Short Stories. I have taken the liberty of allowing an abridged version of that post see the light of day again before one about Farewell Leicester Square later this week, because I have discovered again what an excellent writer Betty Miller was, astute and deeply perceptive about the small moments that matter in Farewell Leicester Square and likewise in this short story...
....Witness the serendipitous way that reading connects with itself as I picked the book up again only to find that the next story to read (from the front end) happened to be The Exile by Betty Miller (1935). This just as I was reading The Exiles Return by Elisabeth de Waal.
I am new to the writing of Betty Miller but on the strength of this one story I will definitely read more. I have a copy of Farewell Leicester Square, and also the lovely old Virago edition of On
the Side of Angels with that fabulous cover. I did know that Betty Miller was the mother of Jonathan Miller but no more, so as always the Persephone website supplies the details...
'...was born in Ireland to a Lithuanian businessman and a Swedish teacher whose (Polish) family was distantly related to the philosopher Henri Bergson. She went to school in London and did a diploma in journalism at University College before publishing the first of her seven novels. In 1933 she married the psychiatrist Emanuel Miller (1892-1970)..'
It all sounds like ample experience to have grown up in the midst of (much like Resi in The Exiles Return), plenty to offer insights into the life of an exile there, and it was fascinating to read this story alongside Elisabeth de Waal's book to further understand the impact of the exile on those around them. There is much discomfort expressed in The Exiles Return which Betty Miller's story elaborates on with great insight.
Irina, the Russian emigree, works as a maid in 'this semi-suburban, semi-countrified village' but is mysteriously being passed around from one home to the next...
'Irina is not the ordinary type of servant. Mrs Clark told me on the 'phone that she was really a very cultured person.'
'Then why's she doing this sort of work?'
'She's an emigre, dear. The revolution in Russia, you know. Why, in Paris there are grand-duchesses who are waitresses and chambermaids.'
An excellent cook, 'adept and thorough at the housework'. willing and very hard working, there seems no apparent reason why once captured this 'real treasure' should not be kept at all costs.
But no one has bargained for the impact of the emigre psyche on those around them...
'There was in their midst someone to whom life meant really nothing: measuring themselves, their joys, their pleasures, ambitions against that awoke on each of them something curiously restive, something that undermined with alarming ease all their ordinary standard of values.'
The guilt at having so much ...'unthinking fleshly profligacy,' when someone else has lost everything and now has so little...
The seeming 'plenty' and the shallowness of the lives that Irina serves discreetly yet very obviously delineated to the reader...
'...prosperous of paunch beneath his waistcoat,'
'..her perfume tantalised the air...'
And then the willing revelation about her husband's brutal demise rapidly dispelling any aura of mystery surrounding Irina's past and invoking even more discomfort in those around her.
Slowly but surely the unease pervades....
'What sort of life are we living...what meaning, what spiritual value...just suffocating in day-to-day material things...doping ourselves comfortably, pretending we'll never die.'
It is clear that Irina is a painful reminder of so much that most would prefer to leave below the surface, and whilst the exile has developed survival and coping strategies borne out of extreme necessity, it is clear that those she serves can only fall back on the securities of home and castle, the exact same thing the exile has lost.
Written in 1935 how prescient this story and that fragility is, given that we know with hindsight that every man's castle is about be threatened beyond anything he could ever have imagined. But the story still feels of relevance now. Those who have been exiled will understand, those of us who may not have been may well be able identify with the discomfort as we watch a news bulletin these days.
Ultimately Irina is too much of a painful reminder of how quickly everything can be taken away and the answer to that is ...well, I won't spoil it, but if you read either one of these alone, Elisabeth de Waal's The Exiles Return, or Betty Miller's The Exile, definitely seek out the other.
If you have read any of the books mentioned here please do share your thoughts...
And what about other books about exile...
Austerlitz by W.G.Sebald comes to mind but there must be so many more...
And maybe the impact and meaning of the word 'exile' has shifted nowadays to include many other forms of separation, in which case I can think of a number of books that might be relevant, and I am sure you can too...
Recent Comments