“Bikka’s rats are large, fierce and tenacious. They find rich pickings in the garbage of the extravagant Bikka poor which nourishes bodies and whets appetites for yet more. Only the boldest or most foolhardy of the Bikka cats ever stalk one, so they go from strength to strength; feared and shunned or abhorred and ignored.”
The opening lines of Kathleen Sully’s first novel, Canal in Moonlight, make it clear that the reader is well past even the territory of the “kitchen sink realism” of the Angry Young Men. This is the lavatory pan (toilet bowl for us Americans) realism. Indeed, one of the early crises in the book is the loss of the one and only lavatory pan at number 65, Bikka Road, home of Horace and Belle Hoppe and their sixteen children.
The Hoppes live along a former industrial canal, “now disused … a problem to the local authorities, a forbidden place of muddy excitement to small boys, and a dump for rubbish.” And, as the story develops, for junky old cars, broken furniture, and other unwanted problems.
“Canal in Moonlight” may be a romantic image, but there is nothing remotely romantic in this book. The Hoppes have far too many children to care for or even reliably keep track of. Belle is a former prostitute wed years ago to Horace, considered of “abnormal or subnormal intelligence” by his family. An utter stranger, he had walked up to her on the stroll one evening and proposed marriage. She had accepted. “Whether she had ever loved her even she did not know, but her respect for his respect of her was beyond measure, and she had never overcome her surprise at being asked, nor did she ever come to the dregs of her happiness arising out of it; her cup of happiness was ever full.”
So this is a family living in filth and degradation, totally dependent on the tiny allowance Horace receives from his wealthy brother (clearly to keep him at a safe distance), despised by their neighbors, never more than an accident away from complete disaster. Yet Belle considers herself near constant bliss. And despite the fact that Horace “had a strange, detached, unpractical and at times wholly stupid attitude towards all that his parents held important,” we soon come to realize that he is far closer to a holy innocent than a shiftless idiot. Indeed, when he feels compelled to provide Belle with the slight relief of a day’s outing to the seaside, he goes right out, secures a job as a delivery boy, and quickly pulls in some generous tips for his exceptional service and courtesy.
Such are the paradoxes that fill Canal in Moonlight. The Hoppe house may be crawling with children, not to mention the pregnant goat in the living room and the decrepit old horse in the front yard, but there burns a steady flame of … well, call it as you like — goodness, joy, or love. Meanwhile, next door at the house of the “good” Dyppes (surely Sully meant something by this Hoppe/Dyppe parallel), an air of bitterness and resentment prevails — and proves only a veneer covering a far more profound sickness at its core.
There’s no doubt that Sully was aiming for something that proved somewhat beyond her reach. As in the two other books I’ve read so far (Merrily to the Grave and A Look at the Tadpoles), she likes to work with a cast of dozens (a dozen and half just with the Hoppes) and as one might expect with a first novel, a few of them seem to have no particular purpose or quickly get lost in the hub-bub of her narrative. Some of her detours in telling the tale prove dead ends.
But as most of the book’s first reviewers recognized, there is a remarkable and original perspective on view for the first time in Canal in Moonlight. From those first lines, you know the narrative arc can only be headed in a downward direction. Bad things are going to befall the Hoppes, and they prove to be very, very bad things. And yet … well, it’s a bit hard to explain, but none of them manage to snuff out the little flame that each of the Hoppes somehow manages to keep alive. “So quiet, my soul, relent thy bitterness, garner thy strength,” Horace thinks as he briefly contemplates suicide near the very end of the book. “Who knows what struggle yet awaits us….”
Kathleen Sully was forty-five, a housewife and mother of three in Weston-super-Mare when Canal in Moonlight was published. No Angry Young Man, she, nor a heady young woman such as Doris Lessing or Iris Murdoch. But neither was Canal in Moonlight a safe bit of middlebrow comedy or Regency romance. And I think this was part of the problem that dogged her throughout her next fifteen years and sixteen novels. Those whom the gods would forget they first set outside any the limit of the known labels and categories.
This is so evident in the cognitive dissonance expressed by many of her reviewers:
- • John Davenport, The Observer
- Canal by Moonlight is a first novel. It is very odd. I don’t quite honestly, know what to make of it. I do know that I couldn’t put it down; or rather, that I dropped it like a hot brick, again and again, only to pick it up once more…. A short, phosphorescent insomniac’s white night.
- • Douglas Hewitt, The Guardian
- It would be difficult to find a greater contrast than between the work of the astute Mr Powell [a fair number of the reviews discussed Anthony Powell’s The Acceptance World alongside Sully’s book] and Kathleen Sully’s first novel, Canal in Moonlight, which is, in its own way, just as distinctive a performance. The brief notations with which a reviewer indicates to the potential reader that he will have met this kind of thing before and that this is a good or bad specimen of the type will not do for this novel. It bears all the marks — good and bad — of proceeding from a markedly idiosyncratic individual vision.
- • Angela Milne, The Sketch
- But no summary can give a clue to its quality; for here the ordinary standards of happiness and virtue are challenged and, through a sort of Chorus in the form of the spinster next door, Kathleen Sully puts forward a philosophy that binds these beautifully-written pages into a work of war. “She is a good mother,” the spinster says of Belle; and in that paradox lies the essence of a book that you may hate to read, yet will be glad to have read. It is a first novel for which “promise” is a mild word.
- • Elizabeth Bowen, The Tatler
- Bizarre? A nightmare prose-poem, a lyric nightmare? How shall one describe Canal in Moonlight?…. A well-nigh witchcraft quality in Miss Sully’s art makes what is barely possible seen probably — and, as in an Elizabethan play, violence goes hand-in-hand with purity.
- • Vernon Fane, The Sphere
- Canal in Moonlight is short and it is misleadingly simple. It is also dramatic, violent and unexpectedly tender in turn. This is Miss Kathleen Sully’s first novel and I know of no exact category into which it can be fitted, except perhaps that of books that are very well worth reading.
- • The New Yorker
- A curious piece of work — awkward, spontaneous, honest, and as real as the dream that wakes one suddenly in the middle of the night.
- • John Betjeman, The Daily Telegraph
- Kathleen Sully is above all things a born writer. This explains the mystery of her being able to hold one from her very first sentence to her last.
- • Julian Symons, TLS
- From the dramatic moments of these stunted lives Miss Sully has made comedy; but this raw, strange, imperfect novel is notable also for its awarenes that human dignity can endure through wretchedness and filth.
- • Isabel Quigley, The Spectator
- It is difficult to describe the extraordinary power of Canal in Moonlight. Among the rest of the week’s novels it sits about as cosily as an esquimo in an espresso bar. For it is a true primitive, something preciously rare among novelists, with the ruthlessness, the ferocious exactitude of observation that implies; an exactitude that may even make things look unfamiliar, so used have we grown to the layers upon layers with which our normal experience is overgrown…. To say it is a slum story of seduction, murders, suicide and desolation, conveys nothing. To say the house in it stinks of goats, blood seeps under the garage door for a child to bounce his ball in, and the warehouse rats are as big as cats, gives an impression of plain squalor. And squalor is far from being the final mood. This impressive book is, even more impressively, a first novel. I cannot for the life of me imagine what Miss Sully’s second will be like, for this one reads like a single, compact, and unrepeatable phenomenon.
For me, three novels have not quite been enough to form a coherent view of Kathleen Sully’s work. But Canal in Moonlight was certainly a unique book in 1955 and remains so from a distance of 63 years, and provides proof enough that her utter neglect in British literary history is inexcusable, if explainable. I have half a Hoppe-ful of her other books on order. The exploration continues.