In his Observer review of Canaille, Kathleen Sully’s second book, John Wain wrote, “one never knows what she will do from one page to the next, only that it will probably be something surprising.” After reading over a dozen of Sully’s novels, I can say that truer words have rarely been written.
Canaille (French for vulgar, roguish, blackguard) collects two novellas, “For What We Receive” and “The Weeping and The Laughter.” Neither is the least bit like the other, and while “For What We Receive” is a bit in the vein of Canal in Moonlight, Sully’s first novel, and Through the Wall, which followed a year later: life among the hardscrabble poor of industrial England, the bread-and-drippings set. Although she occasionally descends into “we were poor but honest” sentimentality, Sully never softens her edges. “For pity’s sake use your snot-rag, Nat” is the opening line, and personal hygiene is no one’s strong suit in this book.
Nat is Nathan Mellowe, a likeable but clumsy and slow lad working in a garage. The six Mellowes live in a shack at the edge of town, Mr Mellowes being a farm laborer whose primary skill is shoveling. Nat and the rest of the Mellowes come to the rescue of Beryl, the garage’s pretty typist, when she is left in the family way by a Yank lothario passing through town, and he and Beryl wind up married merely to provide her with a semblance of propriety when the baby arrives. A few more bumps along the road of their life and, with the help of family, co-workers, and neighbors, something more grows from their Platonic relationship. “For What We Receive” might well be subtitled, “It Take a Village to Make a Marriage.”
“The Weeping and The Laughter,” on the other hand, might be described as a nightmare within a dream about a nightmare, and even that isn’t close to being accurate. It opens in a hospital ward, where an elderly woman with her leg in a cast is furiously writing out an account of a dream. It it, she escapes in the night from a hellish boarding house, perhaps a brothel, and encounters an equally mysterious man as she stands on a bridge contemplating suicide. “I learnt to get out of myself: I used to flow through the top of my head, go to the window, jump off into space and fly about like and owl,” she tells him.
She then relates how she married a Scottish fisherman and lived with him and his mother in a rough stone cottage by the sea. Winter sets in, the mother dies, and she is sitting there by the fireside, knitting the man’s socks “and hating it with all the hate I had.” Then she is the woman of the house in a fine city residence, surrounded by convivial friends, when she floats away again:
Sitting, sitting, sitting, and eventually thinking nothing, hearing nothing, seeing nothing, feeling nothing but a sense of smug possession.
The bell must have clanged on, noting each hour of each day, week, month and year. The community must have gone about its business of waking, working, eating and sleeping. There must have been merry-making, and mourning, too; and there must have been accidents, blood must have flowed and music must have set young feet dancing and gay hearts beating, yet I was aware of nothing until some time, I have no notion of when, the bell stopped.
Then she is a slum mother of nine thin, hungry children, worried about lice and scabs and where the next meal will come from. Then she is in a train station, watching other people in a mirror. “One face interested me more than the others, although it was a caricature of a face.” She discovers the face is hers. She takes a train to a remote seaside village where she rents a caravan near the beach and wanders about, trying to unravel her dreams. A neighbor, a beachcomber living in a shack (shades of A Man Talking to Seagulls) recites Ernest Dowson’s poem, “They Are Not Long”:
They are not long, the weeping and the laughter,
Love and desire and hate;
I think they have no portion in us after
We pass the gate.They are not long, the days of wine and roses,
Out of a misty dream
Our path emerges for a while, then closes
Within a dream.
“It isn’t true,” she tells him. “Every desire, every smile, every hateful thought, all leave their mark and are carried by us to where next we go.”
Where next we go is into a Somerset town, where Mr. Upforde, a draper, lives with his wife and their three daughters, Vera, Grace, and Lennie. Vera is lovely, Grace homely and awkward, Lennie rather peculiar, not quite all there. Mr Upforde dotes on Vera, ignores Lennie, and shuns Grace to the point where she cuts herself just to get some attention. We follow the girls through several decades and several alternate narratives, winding up in a seaside cottage where the three women, all spinsters now, sit in a fetid bath of bitterness and recrimination.
Somehow Sully manages to tie all these odd, diverse, and loose threads together in the end. It is all as convincing and unreal as a nightmare. Reviewing the book for the Guardian, Norman Shrapnel summed it up well:
A woman’s day-dreaming has, as it were, its bluff called and is transposed into real life. Where does the one end and the other begin? The writer seems to be suggesting that the boundary is subtly confusing and yet vital to disentangle, which is rather like scrambling all the eggs and then telling us to count our chickens. But again she has the power, and it is an unanswerable one, of being able to carry us with her into her fantasies.
The TLS reviewer of Canaille described Sully as “a Sunday writer,” adapting the phrase, “Sunday painter.” I think this is a fair assessment of Sully’s talent. On the one hand, she was unschooled, unstylish, sometimes incorrect in her usage (e.g., disinterested to mean uninterested). But that lack of schooling also allowed her tremendous imaginative and narrative freedom, to a degree comparable only with that of Doris Lessing and J. G. Ballard in her generation of English novelists.
(As an aside, one possible reason Sully was largely neglected even when her books were in print is the erratic quality of her dust jacket designs. When I first received Canaille, between the French title and the coarse yet artistically affected figures on the cover, I thought it would turn out to be a story set on the waterfront in Marseilles. Even Gollancz’s simple but garish canary yellow covers are better than this.)