BIRTHDAY PARTY
C.H.B. (Clifford Henry Benn) Kitchin was born in Yorkshire in 1895. He attended Exeter College, Oxford, and published his first book, a collection of poems, in 1919. His first novel, Streamers Waving, appeared in 1925, and he scored his first success with the crime novel Death of My Aunt (1929), which has been frequently reprinted and translated into a number of foreign languages.
Kitchin was a man of many interests and talents, being called to the bar in 1924 and later amassing a small fortune in the stock market. He was also, at various times, a farmer and a schoolmaster, and his many talents included playing the piano, chess, and bridge. He was also an avid collector of antiques and objets d’art.
Kitchin was a lifelong friend of L.P. Hartley, with whose works Kitchin’s were often compared, and was also a friend and mentor to Francis King, who later acted as Kitchin’s literary executor. Some of Kitchin’s finest works appeared towards the end of his life, including Ten Pollitt Place (1957) and The Book of Life (1960), but though they earned critical acclaim, Kitchin was bitterly disappointed at their lack of success with the reading public. Kitchin, who was gay, lived with his partner Clive Preen, an accountant, from 1930 until Preen’s death in 1944. C.H.B. Kitchin died in 1967.
Adrian Wright is an actor and writer. His works include Foreign Country: The Life of L. P. Hartley; John Lehmann: A Pagan Adventure; The Innumerable Dance: The Life and Work of William Alwyn; A Tanner’s Worth of Tune: Rediscovering the Post-War British Musical; West End Broadway: The Golden Age of the American Musical in London; the novel Maroon and The Boy Detective Stories. For more information, visit www.mustclosesaturday.co.uk.
By C.H.B. Kitchin
Curtains (1919) (poetry)
Winged Victory (1921) (poetry)
Streamers Waving (1925)
Mr. Balcony (1927)
Death of My Aunt (1929)
The Sensitive One (1931)*
Crime at Christmas (1934)
Olive E. (1937)
Birthday Party (1938)*
Death of His Uncle (1939)
The Cornish Fox: A Detective Story (1949)
The Auction Sale (1949)
Jumping Joan, and Other Stories (1954)
The Secret River (1956)
Ten Pollitt Place (1957)*
The Book of Life (1960)*
A Short Walk in Williams Park (1971)*
* Available or forthcoming from Valancourt Books
BIRTHDAY PARTY
by
C.H.B. KITCHIN
With a new introduction by
ADRIAN WRIGHT
VALANCOURT BOOKS
Birthday Party by C.H.B. Kitchin
First published London: Constable, 1938
First Valancourt Books edition 2014
Copyright © 1938 by C.H.B. Kitchin
Introduction © 2014 by Adrian Wright
Published by Valancourt Books, Richmond, Virginia
Publisher & Editor: James D. Jenkins
20th Century Series Editor: Simon Stern, University of Toronto
http://www.valancourtbooks.com
All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without prior written consent of the publisher, constitutes an infringement of the copyright law.
All Valancourt Books publications are printed on acid free paper that meets all ANSI standards for archival quality paper.
isbn 978-1-941147-19-1 (trade paperback)
Also available as an electronic book.
Set in Dante MT 11/13.2
INTRODUCTION
Clifford Henry Benn Kitchin is the only writer I have ever stalked. When other teenagers were in thrall to Batman and James Bond, my nose was buried in the novels of the much less glamorous Kitchin and L. P. Hartley. By an extraordinary chain of circumstance, I went on to write Hartley’s biography, but I knew that publishers would never consider a life of Clifford Kitchin. Determined to get my man into the spotlight, I anyway managed to sneak him prominently into the Hartley biography.
Years later, when I wrote the novel Maroon, my principal player, the ageing novelist Jocelyn Hawk, was based on Kitchin, and I had the temerity to borrow Kitchin’s description of the central character in his last book, A Short Walk in Williams Park: “There goes an old man, to whom nothing has ever happened.” This has always seemed to me to be a chastening reminder of the writer’s place in the world. Visits to Brighton also revive the links with Kitchin, when I make a pilgrimage to the block of flats where he once lived, imagining him counting the crowds on Bank Holiday days teeming onto the West Pier, in which he held shares. Somehow, this does not seem at odds with the generosity toward humankind and constant sense of ecstasy that pours through Kitchin’s work, or through the lines of a letter in which he recalls his delight at riding the rollercoaster at a pleasure beach. Hartley and Kitchin were both observers of life, but only Kitchin collaborated with it, and beneath the reticent note of his novels, passions run deep.
Kitchin perhaps muddied his literary waters by winning a reputation as the author of detective stories, beginning in 1929 with Death of My Aunt and winding up with The Cornish Fox twenty years later. Even Agatha Christie had difficulty establishing her non-detective Mary Westmacott novels; similarly, admirers of Kitchin’s detective fiction may have looked to his “straight” novels with puzzlement, and the balancing act possibly detracted from Kitchin’s more serious intent.
Birthday Party, Kitchin’s seventh novel, published in 1938, marks the beginning of a sea-change in his novels proper, which resumed ten years later with The Auction Sale. Between those years, much happened to the man to whom nothing had ever happened, not least the death of his partner, Clive Preen. “I feel as if my real life began in 1930 and ended in 1944,” Kitchin wrote. “The steady purpose, which during the last thirteen and a half years had given everything, even in my nerviest moods, a reality and a justification, has gone, except for such faint gleams as an uncertain faith occasionally gives me.”
It is from this time of “steady purpose” that Birthday Party springs, perhaps a cousin to the novel that preceded it, Olive E., the story of Olive Everett, a not out of the ordinary young woman. Women are at the heart of Kitchin’s fiction: the kindly Miss Elton is the driving force of The Auction Sale; The Secret River (1956) is wholly concerned with the life of Harriet Ashworth and her domineering mother; Ten Pollitt Place (1957) is presided over by the watchful Miss Tredennick; The Book of Life (1960) is overlooked by a gallery of aunts. Kitchin’s empathy with the opposite sex is just as obvious in Birthday Party, in which half of the book is taken up by first person accounts from Isabel Carlice and Dora Carlice, with the males represented by first person accounts from Dora’s hapless brother Stephen Payne and Dora’s stepson Ronald Carlice, who warns us about first person narratives: “Art, especially modern art, is always in the first person. I, me, my. It emphasises our differences rather than our homogeneity. It panders to the cell, rather than the whole body of the state. It differentiates and divides, harps on personal interests, personal importance, even personal property—everything we’re out to smash.” It is a brave thing to attempt first person accounts from a quartet of voices, at the same time as Kitchin is pulling another trick, for Birthday Party is as much an experiment in detective story writing as a novel proper, framed at top and tail by two deaths in the gun-room at Carlice Abbey. Kitchin brings it off with some deft touches that might have impressed Christie, but it is the human d
ilemma that dominates.
No matter how effective each of the four characterisations is in Birthday Party, Kitchin cannot resist using at least one of them as his representative, and it may be that he identifies most closely with Isabel. She has learned Kitchin’s manifesto of life, and is fed lines that suggest the sermonizing passages that often creep into his books, as in Mrs. Rivett’s speech at the close of The Auction Sale and in the final pages of A Short Walk in Williams Park. So it is that Isabel, as Britain awaits the announcement of a great war (the inevitable consequences of which haunt the novel), defines a society that is about to recede: “. . . if I believe anything, I believe that life must have a drawing-room if it’s to be civilised. We’ve built up the drawing-room by centuries of struggle, and to destroy it, just because it doesn’t hold everybody, is to my mind a reversion to savagery. I admit, we may have underrated the bathroom.” Thirteen years later, Kitchin still believed as much. He wrote to a friend, “I have never had any instinctive veneration for the moral law as such, and have regarded its existence—if it exists—as a necessary evil—no more an end in itself than lavatories or bathrooms which make one fitter to enjoy gold music-boxes in the boudoir.”
The now and again tendency to preach on the meaning of life (and very wisely he does it too) cannot account for Kitchin’s tussle with popularity. As early as 1921 he wrote to Hartley, “I feel convinced that nothing I write can ever appeal either to the gross but lucrative public, or to the select and jealous circle of literary critics. I shall always be a little out of touch . . . out of tune. When I pipe, they dance not. When I weep, they laugh.” There is a revealing exchange in Birthday Party, when Stephen admits to Ronald that he is not a proletarian novelist. Ronald replies that “I suppose you write for a few dyspeptic escapists who feel as you feel, and then you’re surprised at not being a best-seller . . . You write for people you think count.”
The celebration towards which Birthday Party inexorably travels, is not a jolly affair of ice-cream and jellies; how could it be, when it is the continuance of tradition, intellectual comfort and financial contentment that drives the novel along. The great prize is Carlice Abbey, the family pile in Wiltshire. Isabel speaks of “the essential earth of Carlice”, which may be “quite worth a murder”. Will it, after all, be saved from the hands of the Communists? Three years after writing Birthday Party, Kitchin believed that it “is strange how to be a member of a privileged class—at one time thought worthy of so much admiration—is now regarded as a criminal offence”.
That remark suggests that Kitchin was removed from the everyday world that most of us are condemned to occupy, but that is far from the truth. For me, Kitchin’s voice rings true in all his books, the author interested in each passing shadow of man or woman or flower. He wrote of critics that they “lap up proletarian studies of delinquency and they tolerate a plunge into high life, but they can’t abide the stratum between these extremes, though to me it seems the basis of our civilisation”. An admiring visitor to Carlice tells Isabel, “The world will be much poorer when these standards disappear.” In Kitchin’s hands, much that has been lost comes back with a radiance that is distinctive and compelling.
Adrian Wright
Poringland, Norfolk
May 8, 2014
BIRTHDAY PARTY
To
DARCY BUTTERWORTH KITCHIN
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
Chapter I: ISABEL CARLICE
Chapter II: RONALD CARLICE
Chapter III: DORA CARLICE
Chapter IV: STEPHEN PAYNE
Chapter V: ISABEL CARLICE
Chapter VI: RONALD CARLICE
Chapter VII: DORA CARLICE
Chapter VIII: STEPHEN PAYNE
Chapter IX: ISABEL CARLICE
Chapter X: RONALD CARLICE
Chapter XI: DORA CARLICE
Chapter XII: STEPHEN PAYNE
Chapter XIII: ISABEL CARLICE
Chapter XIV: RONALD CARLICE
Chapter XV: DORA CARLICE
Chapter XVI: STEPHEN PAYNE
This story is told by four of the characters.
The name at the head of each chapter is that of the narrator.
Chapter I: ISABEL CARLICE
1
THIS afternoon we had tea without artificial light for the first time since October. My visitor, the female novelist, who has just left me, must have noticed a wistfulness in my voice when I told Simmonds not to draw the curtains; for she said, with that quiet sophistication which some of these London women still affect, “Dusk has already become a feature you would like to enjoy?”
I looked at her. She was vivacious and wore gay colours. There was something of the parrot about her. I felt her to be young—compared with me.
Then she began to “draw me out.”
“I like to think of you, in these days, just sitting here,” she said, “enjoying a later sunset every day, and filling this lovely room with spring flowers. You’re one of those people who make us feel that life hasn’t yet gone to pieces.”
I demurred.
“Oh no,” she replied. “I don’t mean that you’re bucolic or self-satisfied. But you do lead the right kind of life—the elegant life. It sets a standard for those who can’t or won’t. The world will be much poorer when these standards disappear.”
“Will they?”
She gave me a look of pity.
“But of course! You’re not really a Londoner, are you?”
“No. I was brought up in the country, and lived there again when my brother’s first wife died.”
“Oh yes, at Carlice Abbey. I should have remembered. Do tell me about it. Is the Abbey really very old?”
“It was one of the first religious establishments to be dissolved by Henry VIII, when it was given to someone who took the name Carlice, or Cœur de Lys, which was its earlier form. We trace ourselves to him very deviously.”
I told the well-worn story. Someone said once that I have the knack of making my listener feel as if I were divulging a secret. I hope I have.
“And is it really very beautiful?”
“It is, or was, hideous. My grandfather, who married a rich wife, enriched the building in a mid-Victorian way, adding a billiard-room and a conservatory. At that time they thought the Georgian house, which had been superimposed on the remains of the Abbey, too plain for words.”
“But the remains of the Abbey——?”
“The original Abbey was largely destroyed in the Civil War. It was rebuilt, on a smaller scale, after the Restoration, and burnt down a hundred years later.”
She looked at me with penetration.
“You know the exact date, of course?”
“Yes, as a matter of fact.”
“But you were afraid of sounding too pedantic?”
“Perhaps.”
She smiled at the point she had made—a little touch, perhaps, for her next novel.
“And now, do tell me what it’s like to-day.”
“My father——”
“The Ambassador?”
“He was never actually even a Minister.”
“He disagreed, I suppose, with your grandfather’s taste?”
“Yes, and as he didn’t marry money, like my grandfather, the house was far too big. He pulled down the billiard-room and the conservatory, and other additions too. The house became smaller, though it was (and is) still too big.”
“But it regained its beauty?”
“It’s now not much more than a Georgian house gone a little wrong.”
“Oh, I’m sure it’s lovely, and that you adored living there.”
I said nothing, and feeling perhaps that she had touched a sore place (though she was soon to touch a sorer), she hurried on:
“I want to know
much more. I suppose you have a huge hall, a vast drawing-room and dining-room, a morning-room, a smoking-room, a boudoir and a dozen spare bedrooms?”
“No, it’s not so big as that. But we have three bathrooms.”
“You disappoint me. I had hoped for one only—a big room in a high tower, draughty but panoramic.”
“There are no towers. It’s too Georgian.”
“No, it was a silly joke. And outside? Stabling, I suppose, and a coach-house?”
“Yes.”
“And marvellous shooting for miles?”
“A little bad shooting. Mostly rabbits.”
She clapped her hands with sudden delight.
“Oh, and of course, you have a gunroom?”
2
It was with the gunroom that I had intended to begin the autobiography which I shall not write. Why go too far back? It is the me of to-day which I must give other people—if they want me at all. It’s no use my showing them someone who has ceased to exist, someone I should be guessing at. Memories? Of course. But they will be the past possessed by the me of the present. They must emerge as I recall them, not be set forth in any historical sequence.
I was asked once, almost seriously, by a publisher whom I met at a dinner party, to write my memoirs.
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