'It has given place to the age of melodrama, when nothing is too strange to happen, and no one is ever surprised.'
My next foray into the writing of Rose Macaulay was Potterism - A Tragi-Farcical Tract, first published in 1920 and recently republished by Handheld Press, and if ever there was a book for now this is it.
It's somehow reassuring to discover that human nature changes very little...
That reactions to extreme life and world events remain equally unpredictable and perhaps, dare I say, are occasionally bizarre and incomprehensible.
As Sarah Lonsdale suggests in her introduction,
'A slim and superficially light volume, Potterism's trenchant criticism of the popular press in the wake of it widespread failings during the First World War, caught the public mood.
'You can't believe a word you read,' said contemporary commentator Charles Montague, and Rose Macaulay took up the cudgels to tackle the issues head on in Potterism, her tenth novel and her first best-seller.
Twins Johnny and Jane, the children of newspaper magnate Percy Potter benefit from the best education money can buy. Johnny an alumnus of Rugby and Balliol. Jane an alumna of Rodean and Somerville, and both emerge from this rarified atmosphere ready to take on and undermine their father's newspaper empire. Meanwhile their mother writes novels under the pen name of Leila York and this will be equally troublesome to her opinionated offspring
Nothing like biting the hand that feeds you.
Mr Potter meanwhile is well aware that his newspaper fails to meet the intellectual or political requirements of his children, or his wife, who for all her pot-boiler romance novels feels she has perhaps pulled the family up the social echelons just a little
The twins along with a group of like-minded yet disparate friends set about their dismantling with the Anti-Potter League
'Facts are too difficult, too complicated...Potterism has no use for them. It appeals over their heads to prejudice and sentiment...Potterism is all for short and easy cuts and showy results...plays a game of grab all the time - snatches at success in a hurry ....It's greedy.'
Life becomes a complete and unintelligible mix of what is acceptable and what is not and, as is so often the case, the boundaries blur and those who throw stones often find themselves in the most fragile of glass houses.
Jane will become embroiled in marriage and a tangled love affair that proves almost impossible to resolve, and events take a very dramatic turn which I couldn't possibly divulge but expect drama and intrigue.
The First World War interrupts the Anti-Potter League project and Rose Macaulay cleverly writes the same scenarios from differing viewpoints. One hundred years on its easy to imagine who might be the subject of her gimlet eye and wry humour now. No one would be spared.
With its themes of women's lives, and the limitations of marriage and childbirth, along with a fascinating element of anti-semitism (Rose Macaulay was most definitely not anti-semitic but portrays it astutely) I must now confess that I read this cover to cover back in July, couldn't put it down and so took very few notes. Six weeks have passed and I am at the limit of my lucid thoughts, but Potterism and The Towers of Trebizond both so good they awakened my interest in Rose Macaulay, and that thrill of finding an author I knew so little about, that I set to and found as many of her books as I could.
I have been reading Jane Emery's biography Rose Macaulay, A Writer's Life and what a fascinating and complex woman Rose was.
I like her.
Born in 1881 and growing up in the boarding school environment that was Rugby, where her father was a teacher and living alongside Rupert Brooks' family, Rose Macaulay would eventually move on the edges of the literary circles of the time. Virginia Woolf seems to have been an acquaintance rather than a friend and, not surprisingly, less than complimentary about Rose in that waspish way she somehow made her own. Nancy Mitford likewise in a letter to Evelyn Waugh in 1962 is equally scathing in her opinion, I came across it by chance...
'Did you ever know an old spinster called Rose Macaulay? It appears she was no spinster but had a lover (hallucination?) and she wrote a lot of disagreeable letters to a protestant clergyman in America. The publishers said did I mind references to myself in them.... I didn't know her so I said, yes, I minded. I met her at Mrs Fleming's once and thought her sharp but ladylike. Not all the kind of person to gush to a parson.'
Somehow this all made me like Rose Macaulay even more. She was most definitely her own person, knew her own mind, seemed to worry little what others thought of her and functioned at the deepest level spiritually.... and yes I have a volume of her letters to 'the parson.'
At the same time Potterism was written and published Rose was in the midst of an ongoing affair with Gerard O' Donovan, a married man and once a Catholic priest. Jane Emery suggests that Rose's life and conscience seeps into Potterism in various covert ways. Rose the first to admit she is 'part- Potterite' and therefore not exempt from responsibility or culpability for her thoughts and actions, something I'm not so sure Woolf or Mitford would have recognised, let alone acknowledged, in themselves.
Of her love affair Rose Macaulay writes to the 'parson', her confessor and spiritual director Father Johnson...
'Oh why was there so much evil in what was in so many ways so good? Why did it have to be like that. all snarled up and tangled in wrong, when if we had been free it would have been almost the perfect thing?'
And Potterism most certainly reflects those tensions with some added nuances and complications, I commend it to the house and don’t forget with the discount code EMILIE you can buy the book for £10 inc.postage from Handheld Press.
I've added in Elizabeth Bowen and Rosamond Lehmann in with Rose Macaulay for a little joined-up reading trail because they seem to have known each other and have so many connections. I know very little about them either. The trail will either flourish or fizzle, but for now it's holding my interest whenever I can manage to put the new Robert Galbraith (aka J.K.Rowling) down.
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