Serious wit: the genius of Molly Keane

I thought more doses of Molly Keane in her earlier incarnation as M J Farrell were what I needed for a bit of light reading after the epic Transylvanian Trilogy of Miklós Bánffy. I found I'd underestimated her more lethal powers and the depth of her observations about nature (and the decadence of a huntin', shootin' ruling class out of place, in this case the Anglo Irish, has many points of correspondence; like MB, MK experienced the milieu she writes about, and both can be ruthlessly objective about it). The situation comedy I remembered from Good Behaviour and Time after Time, the later works which I'd adored when they first appeared, may occupy the brittle first third of Devoted Ladies in the manner of Compton Mackenzie, an earlier admirer. But when the action moves from an (untypical) London social setting to Ireland, the poetry of place comes gradually to the fore. As it does more swiftly in Full House, one of the two I especially love:

They were walking nearer to the sea now, and the evening light was the same now over the land and over the sea, not as in the daytime when the difference would be strangely marked. Now there was a level flow of light. Quiet pigeon-like colours were steeped in the sea and the turning birds were as white as old lime wash. The noise of the waves too was a quiet pigeon-breasted noise, and the turning of the river water sweet and deep, and without any vulgar brawling. The roughest streams were quiet and the few dark flats delayed themselves under the stoop of fuchsias that grew in the banks as willows do, delayed and flowed on, carrying red flowers to the sea. 

Sadness hangs over so much of Full House - John, the young man walking in the above landscape who is an unquestioning part of the natural scene, has just returned from a spell in a psychiatric institution - and Two Days in Aragon, my other favourite, is a tragedy, giving a voice to a character with IRA connections, the one novel in which relations between British officers (usually invisible in this novelistic world) and natives turn truly nasty. There is no real nostalgia here, in 1941, for the country-house life of two decades earlier, but a sense of difference and complexity:

Death and new hats, tea and fear and pain - Aunt Gipsy's remembrance of Doatie's pain. Grave clothes and lilies and mourning, grandeur and power, old grudges and mistrusts, the tremblings and small gaieties of Aunt Pidgie's life, all these things were so thick they were almost within the touch of hands on the old nursery air that evening. What was there then in the air of houses that is not now? Was it more stirred by the emotions of the past than now when the life of the present is gay and firm in the ether with the radio ministering to the loneliest [?] Radio has stirred away the hauntings and stillnesses in old rooms. There is not the same heaviness and languor in the air of afternoons, air that can at any moment be broken by the good, the vulgar, the wholesome, the beautiful, the terrifying, the useful things of the present. The waves of the past cannot lap and lap quietly encroachng on the solid sands of now. Houses and memories have less power to injure, less power to assuage. But this afternoon was April, 1920, an afternoon in the time of long memories and quietness and dull ageless stretches of time. A time when a bitter little war went untidily on, and news of its progress went from mouth to mouth in whispers. Many old and beautiful houses that year had their last hours of life. They were stilled for death that summer. They waited in beauty and quiet for fire and the end. Did they have a foreknowledge of their deaths? Was that air of desolate distance, of exquisite sadness, that lesser fainter appearance which Irish houses have in comparison to the stability of their kind in England, was it foretold in their stars, grown sadly in their very stones? An awareness and an acceptance of violence and desertion, desertion far more tragic than any sudden ending?

The author, as young Molly Skrine, knew something of this: the family house, Ballyrankin, was burned to the ground, her parents made to sit and watch outside, while their daughter was away at a French school in Bray. The ruins are described in this article, a link to which gives me I hope permission to use one of the photographs higher up (fair use and all that). 

A wider context for what happened between 1920 and 1923 is given in this excellent book accompanying an exhibition I saw in Dublin (essentially just panels with the same information and photographs as in the book). The brutal executions of patriots from the 1916 uprising onwards, the stationing of British troops, senators targeted in reprisal for their mercilessness towards anti-treatyite prisoners all give reason enough (and some of the houses were bloody ugly, though that's beside the point). As the novelist observes, there were other base motives on both sides, personal envy and grudge being high on the list.

The houses that survive are subject to decay and collapse, a view more subject to sharp irony and wit in Treasure Hunt and Loving and Giving, where the neglected building is more vivid a personality than any of the human characters. Eccentrics are more vividly drawn in earlier works, like Aunt Pidgie, dominated by the perscuting, powerful and ultimately tragic figure of 'carer' Nan of Aragon House (her niece has 'a chill moment before the customary way of seeing Aunt Pidgie came back to her, and she was blinded again by custom to that moment's vision of a different creature: alive, rather wild, strong in its desires'. No-one stays fixed in a semi-comic pose: of the Aragon butler, Keane/Farrell writes 'in his own extreme self Frazer had a loose way of talking that would have shocked deeply the self he had made'. Treasure Hunt comes closer to both caricature and kindness in Aunt Pidgie's resurrection as Aunt Anna Rose, who uses her drawing-room sedan chair to 'go travelling'. But then this is a novelisation of a successful, well-made play directed by John Gielgud with Sybil Thorndike playing the great eccentric. Here are a couple of production photos from The Sphere of 1 October 1949, reproduced in the biography.

Both great thespians, along with Peggy Ashcroft, were friends who gave Molly a wider scope for fun, social differences and joyous observation. Their takes in the beautifully-written biography by daughter Sally Phipps - who rises to her mother's daunting challenge to make a novelistic job of her life - are a breath of fresh air after the outward restrictions of Anglo-Irish life. Phipps sums this up especially well:

They lived in a half-mythical place and they deluded themselves about the nature of Ireland. Their empathy with the landscape made them feel part of it, and because they mostly got on well with the people around them, and with those who worked for them, they thought they were loved. They were loved up to a certain point, but the Ireland they chose to ignore, the lost country (untainted by anything English) nurtured in people's hearts and carried in code by music, song, and poetry, was always there. It was usually submerged but from time to time it erupted and overturned all other loyalties.

The one real drawback about the daughter-biographer is that I don't think she quite grasps how remarkable the Farrell novels of the late 1930s, running in to 1940, truly are. Conversely she surely overrates Loving and Giving, a swansong with descriptions full of Keane's literary flair that aren't rooted in depths of feeling (in her 80s, she was now decidedly frail). I still have no idea what to make of the protagonist, and there are gaps in the drawing of other characters. At the other end of the literary output, the early novels seem to take an uncritical, mythical view of the horsey hunting life; I just started Conversation Piece (1934) and had to give up.

It's certainly fascinating to have Phipps's take on the many sides of her mama, veering between kind and cruel, but far more on the kind side. She may have been conservative in nature, but she had the serious novelist's rare gift of seeing so much from so many angles. Judgmental sometimes, yes, but more often inclined to will on young love, for example, even between conventional folk (the crucial love-match in Full House wins us round by degrees). Her attitude to hunting is typically complex, or at least covers more danger than we tend to think about. Grania of Two Days in Aragon, on the cusp of womanhood, is 

dirty and passionate and generous. She was greedy and had only begun to live. She had not learnt to grow steady, learnt to fear danger, or settled to any soberness in life. She wanted danger from horses [she is in love with the master horse trainer Foley], and hardship any way she could get it. There was something between her and river water, and the blood of rabbits she shot, and the feel of wind in her bleached untidy hair, and the feel of running, and the new-found sight of something wild - an otter blowing out its cheeks on a little shaley river beach, dark beneath alders - there was something between her and these things which made her strong.

For Molly Skrine, Phipps writes, 'hunting was romantic, elegant, savage, and the ultimate escape from the frustrations of home into the glorious life'. And later:

 her identification with wild things was deep. The vacillation of empathy between the hunter and the hunted, so apparent in her books, was perhaps the chief paradox besetting her own nature. The pull of conflicting elements is her natural habitat. It is evident in her leanings towards glamour and austerity, courage and nervousness, the call of the wilderness and the aspect of her that liked to see "rushes well trimmed, and gravel raked carefully, and money saved through thought and denial.

This perhaps explains how the teenager who got her first novel - one she later disowned, yet it was still reprinted - published by Mills and Boon, giving her pin money for party frocks became the great writer who married wildness and discipline, careful prose and tumbling chaos both within and outside characters. Yes, she's up there with the very best.