Collected Works of E M Delafield

by E M Delafield

(The present writer, who has been married for years and years, often wonders very much what makes authors think that any man ever looks at a married woman when there are unmarried girls anywhere within miles. The present writer is not complaining — only just wondering.)

  To return to John:

  He puts up with things that no husband outside the pages of a book would either tolerate, or be asked to tolerate, by even the most optimistic wife. He sits up at night over the bills that his Claire has run up. He always does his accounts at night, and they always take hours and hours. He never seems to have any bills of his own, although in real life it is usually six of one and half a dozen of the other.

  One might suppose, after two or three of these nocturnal bouts, that John would either put a notice in the papers disclaiming responsibility for his wife’s debts, or have the sense to separate from her. But neither of these courses so much as presents itself to him. He tells her that he is overdrawn at the bank, and so on (and makes as much fuss about it as though no one had ever before been in this painful, but thoroughly familiar, quandary), and explains that he is already working as hard as it is possible for anybody to work. And then he goes and spoils the effect of all of it by suddenly telling her how much he adores her.

  In real life, very few English husbands ever say at all that they adore their wives — and absolutely none at the very moment when they have been scrutinizing bills that they cannot pay.

  Sometimes John and Claire have a child, and Claire is not at all pleased about it. As she makes no secret of this, it is not reasonable of John to be filled with incredulous dismay and disappointment when she neglects it — but all the same, he is. After this, things run a rapid down-hill course, and Claire goes off with somebody else, and John is plunged into an abyss of despair, although it is perfectly impossible that there shouldn’t be times when it must occur to him that he is thoroughly well rid of her.

  But if so, we are never told about them.

  And the child grows up, and adores her father, and they are perfectly happy together; and after about fifteen years Claire wants to come back again, and John has the incredible idiocy to let her do so, and she turns out to be dying, and he forgives her.

  And if that is the author’s idea of being a successful husband, it does not coincide with ours.

  *

  The other type of husband in fiction has really only one noticeable characteristic, and that is a most phenomenal and cast-iron stupidity. He is, in fact, rather out of place in this article, because in the books where husbands are of this kind, it is naturally the wife upon whom the author has concentrated. A good many pages are given up to her struggles between Love and Honour, and in the end she decides that the brave, straightforward, and modern thing to do is to go to the man she loves. (This is not the husband, needless to say.) And authors, strangely enough, very seldom tell one what the husband feels about it, or what happened to him afterwards. Though, after all, he has to go on living ordinary everyday life, just like anybody else.

  On the whole, husbands are not particularly well viewed by authors. It is not, perhaps, for us to judge, but the thought does occur to one that possibly this may be because authors themselves very, very seldom make good husbands.

  FATHERS

  In books, fathers are almost always called “Daddy”, because this is somehow more touching than just “Father”. And fathers in books are nothing if not touching. Unless they are absolute monsters of cruelty or stupidity. We will, however, deal with the touching ones first.

  Their chief characteristic is a kind of whimsical playfulness, that would be quite bad enough taken on its own merits, but is made much worse by masking a broken heart, or an embittered spirit, or an intolerable loneliness. Fathers of this sort, conversationally, are terribly fond of metaphors, and talk like this:

  “Life, sonny, is a wild beast. Something that lies in wait for you, and then springs out and tears you to pieces.”

  Or:

  “Grown-ups have their own games, dear, just like you kiddies. Sometimes they pretend to be heroes, and princes, and wear glittering armour and go about looking for dragons, and lovely princesses. But the armour has a way of falling to pieces, and when they find the princess, somebody else has got there first and carried her off, and there is only the dragon left.”

  “And is the dragon real, Daddy, or does he fall to pieces, too?” asks the obliging child, who never misses its cues.

  “Yes, little one, the dragon is real enough,” says Daddy, with a strange, far-away expression. “You’ll learn that some day. The dragon is always real. It’s only the prince and princess who are not real.”

  Also — this is our own addition — the entire conversation, which is not real. Because a flesh-and-blood father who went on like that would find his children quite unresponsive.

  “Now,” they would say, “tell us something sensible, about an aeroplane, or a cat-burglar.”

  But in books, the relation between the father and his child, or children, is a good deal idealized, so that the kind of conversation given above may take place frequently. Also, the children ask questions. Not the sort of question that one hears so frequently in daily life:

  “Father, why can’t we get a nicer car, like the one the Robinsons have?” or “Do you have to brush your head now, instead of hair?” or even “Why aren’t we allowed to stay in the bathroom more than ten minutes and you have it for nearly an hour?”

  But questions that give openings for every possible note to be struck in the entire gamut of whimsical pathos or humour:

  “Has your heart ever been broken, Daddy?” and “Why do your eyes look so sad, even when you’re smiling, Daddy?”

  The answer to the first one is: “Hearts don’t break very easily, girlie. Sometimes we think they’re broken, but Time has a magic wand and mends the pieces, and we go on — not quite the same as before, ever, but able to work a little and dream a little, and even — laugh a little.”

  The answer to the second one is — but there are many alternatives, for it really is an admirable question, in the amount of scope that it gives. Daddy can talk about the lady called Memory, who looks out of his eyes, and about the Help that a smile is, and all that kind of thing; or he may be of a more virile type — a clean-limbed, straight-gazing Englishman — and then he just says something brief but pregnant, about White Men who Play the Game and Keep Straight Upper Lips and Put their Backs into It. And, in any case, whatever he says sinks deeply into the consciousness of his child, and returns again and again to its assistance on strange and critical occasions, as when it violently wants to cheat at an examination, or — later in life — is in danger of sexual indiscretion.

  Fathers in books are almost always either widowers, or else unfortunately married. This leaves them free to concentrate on their offspring, from the page when, with clumsy, unaccustomed fingers, they deal with unfamiliar buttons and tapes — (why unfamiliar? their own shirts and pyjamas have buttons, anyway) — till the end, when either the daughter marries, or the son is killed in India, and the father left alone. They are, indeed, a lesson against putting all one’s eggs into a single basket.

  The other type of father is generally either a professor, a country clergyman, or an unspecified bookworm — and always very, very absent-minded. His children are usually daughters, and he calls them “my dear”, and everything he says, he says “mildly” or “absently”.

  The daughters of real-life professors, country clergymen, and bookworms must wish to goodness that their fathers were more like this, instead of — as they probably are — the usual quite kind, but interfering, domestically tyrannical and fault-finding, heads-of-the-household.

  Finally, and fortunately not very often, we get the absolutely brutal father. He is usually lower-middle class, and his daughters have illegitimate babies — since this is the one thing of all others that infuriates such fathers — and his sons run into debt and then hang or shoot themselves sooner than face the parental wrath; and his wif
e dies, or goes mad, or deserts him. Books about this kind of father are compact of gloom, and are described by the reviewers as being Powerful.

  On the whole, fathers in fiction are a poor lot, and bring us, by a natural transition, to the subject of the next article, which will be Criminals in Fiction.

  CRIMINALS

  When it comes to criminals, authors of fiction completely let themselves go. They endow their heroes with qualities that they simply wouldn’t dare, for one moment, to bestow upon any respectable, law-abiding citizen — qualities like chivalry, and tender-heartedness, and idealism. You feel that they absolutely adore them, and admire their crimes far more than they would anybody else’s virtues. And we will at once forestall the remark that shallow-minded readers may feel inclined to make, by saying definitely that it is not women writers who usually indulge in this kind of hero. On the contrary.

  Well, the things that jump to the eye about the criminal of fiction are several. To begin with, he has no Christian name, but is just known as Jaggles, or Ginger Mac, or Flash Ferdinand. And he is always frightfully, frightfully quiet. Not so much when he is actually on the job — because then, after all, quietness would naturally be taken for granted — but in his manner, and appearance, and behaviour, and voice. And this quietness merely denotes his immense reserves of fire and fury, all of which come out later when the blackmailer is threatening the helpless girl, or the heavily armed householder is getting ready to shoot. But, even in his gravest straits, or most heated moments, the criminal hero never shouts. He just says, very, very quietly, things like: “The game’s up, I think,” or “Check-mate — Colonel.” And he always remembers to smile a little, with the utmost nonchalance, whilst covering his man, or, if necessary, men, with a six-shooter, or heavy automatic, or machine-gun, or whatever it is that he carries about with him.

  Curiously enough, the criminal of fiction is rather good at love-making. He takes an interest in it. This is probably because, as a rule, he seldom has any contacts at all, except with devoted but intellectually inferior male followers, detectives and victims. One is never told that he has parents, or brothers and sisters, or ordinary social acquaintances. So, naturally, he can concentrate on the one woman he ever seems to have anything to do with.

  And either she loves him and says that she will wait — (meaning until he has finished his sentence at Wormwood Scrubbs) — or else she throws herself between him and the detective’s gun, and dies of it.

  Either dénouement is rather unsatisfactory.

  In real life, people who serve sentences in prison very seldom come out quite the same as they went in, and it isn’t every woman, unfortunately, who improves by waiting.

  As for throwing oneself about in front of bullets, this is not really as easy as it sounds, and might quite well end in a mere flesh wound, and would anyhow almost certainly bring down the most frightful curses on the person who got in the way, for men like to settle things for themselves, unhampered by feminine interference.

  A delicate question to those who have the interests of morality at heart is: Do these criminals of fiction ever repent? The answer is — as so often in life — both Yes and No.

  If the book is to have a happy ending, Ginger Mac, just before embarking on a final enterprise, says: This is the last time — the very last! and then kills off somebody so unspeakably bad that it is almost a good deed to have rid the world of him, and then goes to find the woman he is in love with, and says that he is utterly unworthy of her, which is probably very true. And the book ends with some rather ambiguous phrase, as it wouldn’t quite do for criminality to triumph openly. So the author just says something like:

  “But as she turned away, he saw that there were tears in her beautiful eyes.”

  Or:

  “In a year’s time,” she echoed. “In a year’s time, who knows?”

  Well — the author knows, and so does Flash Ferdinand, and so does the least experienced reader. So that’s all right.

  When the criminal does not repent, he dies. This rule is never violated. To the mind of the fiction-writer, there seems to be nothing whatever between reformation and death. The possibility of persistence in wrongdoing does not apparently occur to him. So Jaggles, gentleman-buccaneer, or burglar-sportsman, or whatever he may be called, either jumps off the highest sky-scraper in New York to avoid capture, or is shot at the very last minute, and dies saying that it was a Great Game after all.

  There are, of course, other types of criminals than the ones we have indicated. There is the criminal in the detective-novel proper, for instance — but the writing of detective-novels proper has now been brought to such a fine art that nobody can possibly tell who the criminal is, till the last paragraph but one. And then it turns out to be the idiot grandmother, or the fine old white-haired magistrate, or the faithful servant.

  Lastly, there is the criminal in those short, powerful, gloomy, sociological novels that have pages and pages without any conversation at all, and that are so full of little dots.... In these cases, there is never any doubt as to guilt. The criminal committed the murder all right, but the guilt lies with almost everybody else in the world — the rich, Society, the Church, politicians, the older generation, the younger generation, the men who administer the law, and so on.

  It is all very painful and realistic, and ends up with the execution, and more dots, and then some utterly irrelevant statement like: “Outside, a small, orange-hued dog was nosing in the gutter — —” and then a final crop of dots....

  WOMEN IN FICTION

  I

  Fiction is always full of women, and it seems rather a strange thought that so few of them are really at all like ordinary everyday women in real life. Authors, unfortunately, divide women into types — the Modern Girl, the Prostitute — (these are two separate types, not one and the same), the Country Woman, the Mother, and so on.

  Let us begin with the dialect novel.

  There are about three kinds of women in a dialect novel: two young and one old. The old one is almost always a grandmother, and either full of silent wisdom or else of crafty malignancy. The silent sort just look, with far-seeing eyes, at the distant hills, or the rolling tide, and say very little until the absolute end of the book, when they suddenly sum up the difficulties in which all the other younger characters have become involved.

  “Ah, my dears,” they say quietly, “it isn’t the law that matters, it’s whether you’re found breaking it or not.”

  In this way a new light is cast on the whole situation, and everybody realizes that great-great-grandmother has acquired wisdom and tolerance and kindness, and all those sort of things, in the course of her ninety-seven years. And when they have realized this, somehow everything looks absolutely different, and in a way the book might just as well never have been written at all, because whatever the problem was that has occupied its three-hundred-odd pages, it now completely melts away in the illumination cast by grandmama. Nor does she in the least lose her head after this achievement, but just quietly — she is always quiet — brings the whole book to a conclusion with something very simple and homely:

  “Put up the shutters, lad, whilst I broil thy grandfather’s slice of bacon.”

  And picking up her pattens, or her Bible, or her darning, she walks — still quietly — into the old farm-house.

  The malignant grandmother is — naturally — quite different. She dominates the book, and all the people in it, and the destinies of every one of them. Briefly, it is the general rule that her sons should be weaklings and degenerate and her daughters neurotic victims of sex-repression, but her grandchildren, curiously enough, are fearfully strong characters, and end by defying her. Grandmothers of this description end either by having strokes — brought on by their suddenly getting on to their feet in an access of rage, after being bedridden for nigh on fifty years — or else by being found dead, usually by the old dog, or the village idiot, or somebody quite unexpected like that.

  The younger women in dialect
novels have the most terrifically strong passions. Either it’s the old homestead, or the moor, or George who is married to somebody else, or the Squire’s oldest son, or perhaps their own oldest son. But whatever it is, they are unbridled about it, they never change, and it leads them to every sort of length. This rather singular tenacity has something to do with the soil. Country women, especially in dialect novels, are very closely connected with the soil, and it has this extraordinary effect upon their characters. Their conversation is also unlike that of other women, in that it abounds in agricultural similes.

  “My hair is like the red bindweed, that the curlews nest in come April,” they say, as if it was the merest matter of course.

  Or:

  “To be jealous is like eating the young leaf of the rhubarb-plant that grows below the monkey-puzzle tree.”

  Nor do they ever give a straight answer to a straight question, for even if asked something quite simple, like the time, or the date, they have to reply that it’s the best part of an hour since the sun sank behind the top of Dead Man’s Rock, or it’ll be a fortnight come Lammas since the old sow farrowed.

  Most of the women in dialect novels seem to be mothers — sometimes in wedlock, sometimes out of it. But in or out, their method is seldom very successful. They take the whole thing too seriously. (Probably this is the soil, again.) If married, they take that seriously as well, and are never happy about it, but usually fall in love soon after the wedding with the husband’s younger brother, or the travelling man who comes round with lisle-thread stockings, and this immediately leads to trouble.

  Humour is one of the qualities that women in dialect novels hardly ever possess, and when they do, it is of a very obscure description, and difficult to distinguish from their other characteristic conversation, because it, also, consists mainly of agricultural similes.

  “Children in the house be like onions in a stew: a little of ’em goes a powerful long way.”

  “Husbands allus puts me in mind of feyther’s old donkey: the more you urge ’em the less they heed.”