A Son at the Front (1923) by Edith Wharton

 

A Son at the Front was one of four novels written by Edith Wharton in the 1920’s after she had won the Pulitzer Prize in 1921 for her book Age of Innocence. These novels focussed on the growing sense that World War I had brought about irreparable damage and had left an indelible mark on society.
A Son at the Front, as its title implies was set during WWI, and opens in Paris in 1914 just before war was announced. Edith Wharton was involved in relief work in France and this novel was inspired by a young man she met during that time.

American artist, John Campton, resided in Paris and was looking forward to his holiday with his son George who had finished his studies in America and was returning to France to visit before taking up work in a bank in New York.
By a twist of fate, George had been born in Paris and not in America. His parents divorced early in his life and his mother, Julia, had remarried.

It was almost impossible to Campton to picture what it would be like to have the boy with him. For so long he had seen his son only in snatches, hurriedly, incompletely, uncomprehendingly: it was only in the last three years that their intimacy had had a chance to develop. And they had never travelled together, except for hasty dashes, two or three times, to seashore or mountains; had never gone off on a long solitary journey such as this. Campton, tired, disenchanted, and nearing sixty, found himself looking forward to the adventure with an eagerness as great as the different sort of ardour with which, in his youth, he had imagined flights of another kind with the woman who was to fulfill every dream.

Life had perpetually knocked him down just as he had his hand on her gifts; nothing had ever succeeded with him but his work. But he was as sure as ever that peace of mind and contentment of heart were waiting for him round the next corner; and this time, it was clear, they were to come to him through his wonderful son.

Before father and son could begin their holiday together, George was called up to join the French army and the trip could not take place.
All three parents were desperate for George not to go to the front and used every means they could to prevent it happening.
As the war progressed it touched the lives of everyone around them. More and more families they knew received the news that their sons had died, gone missing or had been severely wounded in action and Campton struggled with the morality of pulling strings to have his son relegated to an office job.
George had seemed ambivalent about war service and this gave a false sense of security to his father, although subconsciously he wished his son to do the honourable thing.

This novel is more about the families left behind than the sons at the front. When Julia had remarried, George’s rich stepfather and millionaire banker, Anderson Brand, provided for George and brought him up and loved him dearly. There is much tension between the three parents and Campton had a huge chip on his shoulder because of his lack of success in life, generally.
I thought Wharton had good insight into the relationships involved and her treatment of the effects of the war on the different characters throughout the novel were brilliant.
I’ve been reading the author’s lesser-known novels and short stories and I’m surprised that they aren’t as popular as her longer works. She had a profound insight into human nature, her writing is just beautiful and her vocabulary is rich. I occasionally come across words I’ve never seen before and often can’t find them in my Oxford dictionary. I think they must be peculiar to America, although not necessarily words in regular use.
That she wrote from personal experience is obvious and her work is realistic, portraying some of the senseless crimes the war had perpetrated- describing it as a monster whose daily meal was made up of ‘an incalculable sum of gifts and virtues.’

I loved this reflection by Campton when he discovered his son’s ardour for literature:

Campton perceived that the millionaire’s taste for owning books had awakened in his stepson a taste for reading them. “I couldn’t have done that for him,” the father had reflected with secret bitterness. It was not that a bibliophile’s library was necessary to develop a taste for letters; but that Campton himself, being a small reader, had few books about him, and usually borrowed those few. If George had lived with him he might never have guessed the boy’s latent hunger, for the need of books as part of one’s daily food would scarcely have presented itself to him.

Initiation had come to them in different ways, but their ardour for beauty had the same root…
Campton, with a passionate interest, watched his son absorbing through books what had mysteriously reached him through his paintbrush.

The Library of America has published the four novels of the 1920’s in a hardback edition that is very nicely done. ISBN: 9781598534535

Nine Coaches Waiting (1958) by Mary Stewart

 

Linda Martin was back in Paris after an absence of nine years. With an English father and a French mother, she had grown up in France during the Second World War. When she was fourteen both of her parents were killed in a plane crash and she was sent to an orphanage in England where she remained for seven years. When she was offered a position in France as governess to nine-year-old Philippe, Comte de Valmy, she jumped at the opportunity to go back to the country she loved.

'Those sweet, those stinging memories…things I had never before noticed, never missed, until now I saw them unchanged, part and parcel of that life that stopped nine years ago…I was back in France; that much of the dream of the past nine years had come true. However prosaic or dreary my new job might be, at least I had come back to the country I had persisted in regarding as my home.'

Arriving at the Château Valmy in Savoy, Linda found that her young charge was a reserved, lonely child, heir to a large estate kept in trust by his uncle after the boy's parents died. It didn’t take Linda long to warm to the young boy and to discern that he was afraid of his uncle. His uncle had no time for his nephew and was cold and harsh towards him.
A shooting which narrowly missed Philippe, another near fatal ‘accident,’ and an unlikely romance, sets the scene for adventure, danger and uncertainty as Linda commits herself to take care of Philippe while trying to work out who the potential murderer might be.

This is the second book that I’ve read by Mary Stewart (the other being, Madam, Will You Talk?) and it was every bit as good as the first. It took a little longer for the story in Nine Coaches Waiting to develop, but it was also longer than the first.
There were some similarities between the two - a vulnerable but strong young woman, a lonely child who needed protection, the French setting, and a romance.

‘An owl called below me, down in the woods; called again. Its muted melancholy found too ready an echo in me. I felt tired and depressed. Too much had happened today; and the pleasant things…had somehow faded back out of mind and left me with this queerly flattened feeling.
I know what it was, of course. I’d lived with loneliness a long time. That was something which was always there…one learns to keep it at bay…’

Again, Mary Stewart’s writing is just lovely and each chapter is introduced by a literary quotation, e.g.

‘I am two fools, I know,
For loving, and for saying so.
John Donne: The Triple Fool.'

And this on the ability of poetry to educate the mind:

'The cruellest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land…yes, that was it. That was it. Not for the first time I was sharply grateful to Daddy for making poetry a habit with me. The best words in the best order…one always got the same shock of recognition and delight when someone's words swam up to meet a thought or name a picture. Daddy had been right. Poetry was awfully good material to think with.'

There are some allusions to Cinderella and Jane Eyre intermingled in the story which were nicely done, as were the revelations of what underpinned the actions or thoughts of various characters.

‘Wrapped up in my loneliness and danger I hadn’t even seen that his need was the same as my own. He and I had hoed the same row, and he for a more bitter harvest.’

A great book to curl up with a cup of tea and no interruptions, if possible, because Mary Stewart’s books are hard to put down - at least the two I’ve read so far have been.

 

Madam, Will You Talk? (1955) by Mary Stewart

 

Mary Stewart was a new author to me in 2022 when a friend recommended her books and what a delightful author she is! Madam, Will You Talk? was her first book and it is a cracker.

Set in Southern France, it is a suspenseful story that doesn’t waste any time in plunging the reader into murder and mystery.

When I wrote that summer, and asked my friend Louise if she would come with me on a car trip to Provence, I had no idea that I might be issuing an invitation to danger…though the part I was to play in the tragedy was to break and re-form the pattern of my whole life, yet it was a very minor part, little more than a walk-on in the last act…How was I to know, that lovely quiet afternoon, that most of the actors in the tragedy were at that moment assembled in this neat, unpretentious little Provençal hotel?

Charity Selbourne, a twenty-eight year old woman, and the book’s heroine, narrates the story. I warmed to her character immediately when she befriended a lonely and deeply unhappy twelve-year-old boy. It’s not the usual stuff of romantic suspense but in one of Mary Stewart’s other books (Nine Coaches Waiting) she sympathetically portrays another young boy. I read in her obituary that:

At the age of 30, she suffered an ectopic pregnancy, undiagnosed for several weeks. Peritonitis set in and she nearly died. It was a long time before she accepted childlessness.

Mary Stewart’s writing is beautiful and descriptive, and reflects not only her own personal experience but also her interests and educational background. There is an abundance of literary allusions, nods to the classics, and knowledge of theatre and art scattered throughout this book. Her rendering of place/setting, in this case the south of France, in particular Avignon and Marseille, play their role as characters in the story - as does a dog!

Then fate, in the shape of Nidhug, took a hand.
My cue had come. I had to enter the stage.

Avignon is a walled city, as I have said, a compact and lovely little town skirted to the north and west by the Rhone and circled completely by medieval ramparts, none the less lovely, to my inexpert eye, for having been heavily restored in the nineteenth century. The city us dominated from the north by the Rocher des Doms, a steep mass of white rock crowned by the cathedral of Notre Dame, and green with singing pines.

le Rocher des Doms à Avignon | Avignon et Provence (avignon-et-provence.com)

The deserted town of Les Baux, in medieval times a strong and terrible fortress, stands high over the southern plains. The streets of eyeless houses - little more than broken shells - the crumbling lines of the once mighty bastions, the occasional jewel of a carved Renaissance window, clothed with ferns, have an uncanny beauty of their own, while something of the fierce and terrible history of the ‘wolves of Les Baux,’ the lords of Orange and Kings of Arles, still seems to inhere in these broken fortifications.

Les Baux-de-Provence Travel Guide - France - Eupedia

I saw the first light, fore-running the sun, gather in a cup of the eastern cloud, gather and grow and brim, till at last it spilled like milk over the golden lip, to smear the dark face of heaven from end to end.

In addition to her quality writing is an exciting, convoluted plot with many twists, including a thrilling car chase through the Rhône-Alpes. I enjoyed the (highly improbable) romance and the old-fashioned feel which reminded me of Agatha Christies’ The Man in the Brown Suit and (just a little) of Helen MacInnes’ writing style.

A wonderful read on a rainy day for me, and best of all, I have two more of her books waiting for me.

Mary Stewart's legacy as an author is vast. She is considered by many to be the mother of the modern romantic suspense novel. She was among the first to integrate mystery and love story, seamlessly blending the two elements in such a way that each strengthens the other.

 

 

I Will Repay - a Sequel to The Scarlet PimperneI

The Death of Marat by Jacques-Louis David (1793)

I Will Repay (1906) is one of the numerous sequels to Baroness Emmuska Orczy's famous book, The Scarlet Pimpernel. It's a stand alone book but you do need to read The Scarlet Pimpernel beforehand or you won't catch an important allusion that is referred to.

Paris, 1783, and the code of honour among the French aristocracy was rigid and without logic. When the wealthy bourgeois Paul Delourede blundered and inadvertently offended a young hot-headed aristocrat, Vicomte de Marny, the only acceptable outcome was a duel.
Delourede was a brilliant swordsman and having the advantage, his intention was to disarm the younger man, but the Vicomte became reckless and lunged at his opponent, falling upon the other's sword.

Vicomte de Marny had a younger sister, Juliette, fourteen years old at the time. Their invalid father, the Duc de Marny, had lost his wife ten years previously and his mind was fast losing its reason. Juliette was his joy but the Vicomte was his pride. On him the old man rested his hopes and in his future he saw the glory of the family name recreated.
On the evening of the fateful duel, the Victome's body was carried home. The old man, when left alone with his daughter, threw off the lethargy he had shown on first seeing his dead son, and feverishly seized his daughter's hand. Placing it upon her dead brother's breast, he made her swear an oath to avenge her brother's death.

Ten years later, Delourede was a well-known and respected citizen. Up until this time Juliette had nourished revenge in her heart but when circumstances placed her under Delourede's protection, she began to know the real character of the man and was torn between his kindness and growing love for her and the oath she'd made.

I mentioned that The Scarlet Pimpernel should be read prior to this book. He plays a short but important role in this story and a knowledge of the first book helps in appreciating the Pimpernel's comments to Delourede about love and idolatry which hearken back to his own painful experience.

 "And 'twill be when you understand that your idol has feet of clay that you'll learn the real lesson of love," said Blakeney earnestly.

"Is it love to worship a saint in heaven, whom you dare not touch, who hovers above you like a cloud, which floats away from you even as you gaze? To love is to feel one being in the world at one with us, our equal in sin as well as in virtue. To love, for us men, is to clasp one woman with our arms, feeling that she lives and breathes just as we do, suffers as we do, thinks with us, loves with us, and, above all, sins with us. Your mock saint who stands in a niche is not a woman if she have not suffered, still less a woman if she have not sinned. Fall at the feet of your idol an you wish, but drag her down to your level after that—the only level she should ever reach, that of your heart."

The author's sequels to The Scarlet Pimpernel retain the author's romantic, melodramatic tone and tend to have more mature themes than the original. I Will Repay, would suit readers about 13 years and up.

An excellent & comprehensive website containing information on all things Scarlet Pimpernel is Blakeney Manor. The books are available as e-texts on this site also.

Reading Europe: The Greengage Summer by Rumer Godden (1958)

According to the author, The Greengage Summer is true, or at least partly so. In 1923, when Rumer Godden was fifteen years old and her elder sister Jon nearly eighteen, their mother announced,

  “We are going to the Battlefields of France and when perhaps you see the rows and rows of crosses for those young men who gave their lives for you, it might make you stop and think of your selfishness.”

In the Author’s Preface to my copy of the book (a lovely Folio Edition that I picked up for $3 in a secondhand book shop 🙂) she gives a brief outline of her childhood experience that became the basis for The Greengage Summer. In the book the two girls were called Joss and Cecil and they were aged 16 and 13 years respectively. Godden had two younger sisters and the book replaced them with three young siblings, Hester, Willmouse and Vicky.

The Greengage Summer is narrated by Cecil and I nearly gave up on the book in the first chapter until I realised that the thirteen year old’s perspective was so well done that it coloured the whole narrative and seemed to jump around in the telling. I’m very glad I persevered as its quite an unusual story overall as well as a rather scary look at five children who were basically left to their own devices in a foreign country. With their mother very ill in hospital after an insect bite became infectious on the trip to France and their father somewhere unreachable in Tibet on a botanical expedition, Joss and Cecil are thrust into an adult world in post war France - living in a French hotel alongside some questionable characters, expected to pay their way, look after their younger siblings and get by with their limited experience of life - they were quickly initiated into the vagaries of human nature.

Joss’s beauty complicated matters. A jealous Mademoiselle, her enigmatic lover who becomes infatuated with Joss; a feral young waiter and then a murder, The Greengage Summer is a combination of mystery, deception and coming-of-age that depicts young people trying to navigate the world of adults before they're ready for it. Added to all this is a good smattering of French throughout the narrative.

A tense read at times but it resolves well, and I have to say I LOVED THE ENDING!

The Greengage Summer wasn’t published until 1958 and it would be ten years later that Rumer Godden officially converted to the Catholic Church. Several of her later novels dealt with women in religious orders, for example, In This House of Brede, which is a very different book to The Greengage Summer.

Linking to the 2021 European Reading Challenge: France