Mastowe is a miserable industrial town on the English coast. Life there, writes Kathleen Sully, “seemed to know no moderation”: in the summer, “everything became dehydrated”; “in the winter everything was wet and cold”; and even when frozen “Mastowe managed to be uncomfortably wet — wet walls, wet bedrooms, wet cellars, wet feet, wet overcoats, and spirits, damp perhaps elsewhere, were sogged and water-logged at Mastowe.”
And the most miserable being in Mastowe is little Celia Wick. With lice in her hair, a rip in her bloomers, locked out of her house for hours on a cold and rainy day, going to bed hungry because her mother is too busy arguing with her father for coming home drunk, trying to fall sleep on a filthy straw mattress. She escapes by flying out her bedroom window, floating down the streets, transporting herself to the sea to watch a magical show: “the shells gave out tiny musics and the pebbles captured the light of distant starts, and the waves, separate and personal for an instant, each broke upon the living sands, then merged into the mother sea again with contented sighs.”
Through the Wall is Kathleen Sully’s grimmest story. Celia’s father dies of tuberculosis; when her mother remarries, the new husband refuses to accept the child and she is given to a friend. Any happiness that might come her way is soon replaced by a new tragedy. At fifteen she hitch-hikes to London. We last see her being taken into a lay-by by a trucker.
Suddenly, the story jumps forward twenty years. The step-father who disowned her is tormented with guilt. He convinces himself that a woman in London who’s been sentenced to hang for murder is Celia and sends his nephew off to find her and seek her forgiveness. Reluctant at first, eventually the nephew leaves on a long and largely fruitless search that leads him through a series of London neighborhoods as hard and poor as Mastowe.
Through the Wall contains some of Sully’s strongest writing. As her first book, Canal in Moonlight suggests, she had more than a brushing acquaintance with the smells, the sounds, the sensations, and the desperation of poverty. The row houses with broken windows, a jake in the back, and underfed and dirty children playing in the street. The crowded pub full of people looking for an escape:
… the mixture of other sounds, the warmth of alcohol within, and the close-pressing bodies without, all added to the feeling of unreality and confusion.
A pair of feet tapped out the rhythm of the piano’s tune; two or three voices sang the words; glasses clinked; a man shouted, “Two beers”; a woman laughed with a full, unrestrained voice.
… A woman caught his eye, but her stare was vacant, unseeing; she raised a glass of gin to her mouth, drank, continued to stare, but her thoughts seemed far away.
A man rolled up his shirt-sleeve, and carefully explained something about a scar to a disinterested group of people who drew seriously on their cigarettes.
An old woman, black-hatted, stockinged, coated-and-scarfed, nodded her shriveled head as if counting the throng, and smiled secretly into a glass of stout every time she took a sip.
The power of Sully’s spare but evocative prose cannot disguise the awkward seam that joins the two parts of her story. Gradually, however, the real link between Celia and Rodney, the nephew searching for her, becomes apparent, and it has little to do with their practical circumstances. Through the Wall is ultimately a book about the possibility of spiritual survival in a relentlessly harsh world. I’m not sure I say that Sully fully realized what she attempted, but once again, she demonstrates a voice and vision that was unlike anyone else’s. My respect for her achievement grows with each book.
I came across her name in a list at the back of Margaret Crosland’s survey of 20th century English women novelists, Beyond the Lighthouse (1981). Doing a little more digging, I quickly discovered a few things. In the space of 15 years, she managed to write over a novel a year, all of them published by Peter Davies, and none of them are in print or have ever been reprinted. Which meant she was a perfect subject for this site. And I very much agree that she is in a class of her own. She wasn’t highbrow, like Spark or Iris Murdoch or Doris Lessing. She wasn’t middlebrow, since most of her work deals with people in the lower or lower-middle class. And she certainly wasn’t an Angry Young Man. The only writer I can liken her to is Georges Simenon, and even that comparison is loose at best.
I am very much enjoying your reviews of K. Sully’s novels. How did you come across her? She seems to be in a class of her own. A bit of M. Spark, some E. Taylor.. C. Stead’s “The man who loved children” comes to my mind as well. Look forward to reading more about her work.