I’ve been interested in reading No Goodness in the Worm ever since I read A Prison, A Paradise, the memoir in which Gay Taylor, writing under the pseudonym of Loran Hurnscot (compiled from what she saw as her two worst sins, sloth and rancour), recalled her obsession and affair with A. E. Coppard and the decades-long process of moving beyond it. Unfortunately, the book very rare and priced accordingly (the cheaper of the two copies currently available goes for $400). However, I stumbled across a copy for the relatively low price of about $100 last month and sprung for it.
I think it helps to read No Goodness in the Worm having A Prison, A Paradise in mind, because it reveals the extent to which Taylor was able to achieve a perspective on her experience through fiction that took her a much longer time to gain for herself in real life.
The story at the heart of both books starts with the marriage of Harold (Hal) Midgley Taylor and Ethelwynne (Gay) Stewart McDowall in 1920. “Both of us got a bad bargain,” Gay Taylor later wrote in A Prison, A Paradise. She hated housework, cooking, and most of the conventional “wifely duties.” He suffered from tuberculosis and a penchant for business ventures he had no ability to run. Their wedding night was a disaster. “Hell, the first night, is what a woman never forgives,” she later wrote. He went off to his mother’s house. She returned to the flat she shared with her friends Bee Blackburn and Pran Pyper.
Yet a few months later, all four decided to move to a village in Berkshire and founded, using Hal Taylor’s remaining savings, the Golden Cockerel Press with the questionable business model of publishing books of poetry and short stories “that could not expect to command great popularity or wide sales.” Combined with Hal Taylor’s ill health and the utter lack of experience on the part of all four, the press quickly headed for failure.
At the same time, the marriage was headed for failure as well. Taylor later summed up her husband’s attitude as, “Since happiness is not for me, it’s unbearable to me that anyone should have it.” Fortunately for the press but not the marriage, in stepped A. E. Coppard, a man of considerable charm and practical skills. He managed the press well enough to keep it alive until qualified hands came to the rescue. And he seduced Taylor.
For Taylor, it was a head-over-heels passion, one that consumed her body and soul and overruled any concerns about propriety. She and Coppard escaped to live in a little love nest some miles from the press. While caring for her husband as an ailing and frustrated man, she had no patience for his self-pity and half-hearted attempts to control her. She described his appeal as: “For heaven’s sake go back to being unhappy, and that will give me peace.” Unfortunately, Coppard proved a mixed blessing himself. “He goes itching after almost every woman he sees — he’s a miniature Frank Harris,” an acquaintance later told her.
In real life, Hal Taylor found escape from his misery by dying in March 1925. Taylor went on and off with Coppard for longer, until finally abandoning him after several years and several short-lived reconciliations. When she wrote No Goodness in the Worm, therefore, she had just a few years’ distance from the experience, and it’s easy for anyone who knows something of the story to find the parallels between the fiction and its source. Valentine in the novel is Gay; Humphrey, the husband, is Hal; Coppard is Francis Merryweather, although his skill is furniture making rather than writing; and Sikey and Jane are Taylor’s friends Bee and Pran. (Taylor came up with different names for all of them in A Prison, A Paradise as well.) Taylor changed a number of the practical aspects of the story: Humphrey’s only illness is emotional; the foursome and Francis/Coppard aren’t engaged in any business together, thriving or not.
Husband and wife are still miserable, though. “It’s an odd thing to find out that you’re married to your worst enemy,” Valentine tells her Sikey early in the book. The marriage “had never been a properly adult relation, a mature interchange between man and woman;” instead, she describes it as “a mutual propping association.” And when the impish and charming Francis comes into her life, “a golden haze” comes over Valentine’s “mental landscape,” and “some dimly prophetic part of her mind recognized that it would not life, nor Francis Merryweather be perceived as other human beings perceived him, until the whole drama of their relationship was nearing its close.” Humphrey’s response is only slightly less dysfunctional than Hal Taylor’s: “You’re free to have your little affairs; I’m not a slave-owner. But I won’t be let down in front of everybody and I won’t allow you to let me down.”
The outcome of this affair is, of course, predictable, foretold by the old verse apochryphally credited to William James:
Hogamus Higamus
Men are Polygamous
Higamus Hogamus
Women Monogamous
Valentine wants Francis, Francis only, Francis wholly, and Francis wants … oh, what’s this? This looks fun. “To anyone with a spark of sense, life is simply the opportunity for exquisite sensation,” he tells Valentine. Such is not the foundation of a stable or lost-lasting relationship. In the end, Valentine suffers intensely, suffers to the point of attempting suicide. Though she survives, she sees her future as one of long, slow, difficult recovery. And Francis gets married, has more affairs, sells lots of custom-made furniture, and disappears off into a golden haze.
Ironically, the most interesting relationships in the book are not between men and women but between Valentine and her friends. As the TLS reviewer put it, “The talk of the three young women together is crisp and amusing and natural, whatever the crisis they are facing.” Sikey is an independent-minded social scientist who treats going to bed with men as one step above laboratory experiments. Jane is more grounded, yet she also rejects convention, marrying a dying man to give his young daughter a step-mother and home.
Valentine’s real tragedy, it seems to me, is that she allows herself to forget how much she has going for herself compared to men. Indeed, it’s hard not to find some pretty powerful parallels to the state of women and men today:
It was a commonplace between them that since the war men had become almost unendurable; they were spoilt, bored, irresponsible; virtue had gone out of them…. [T]he twentieth century or war (they were never sure which) had given them a world of half-men to grow up among, half-men who mechanically aped emotions, or who, unable to bring contentment to one woman, would appease their own impotence or vanity by sniffing around among half a dozen or more, or who clung to breasts and skirts in the prolonged infantility of grown men unable to face the world that they had made.
It’s not surprising that some contemporary reviewers (see Frances Lamont Robbins below) took exception to this viewpoint. Despite the emergence of a whole generation of remarkable women writers and artists after the First World War, not everyone was prepared to see the sexual tables turn so completely. What is surprising is how many reviewers accepted and welcomed this perspective. Gay Taylor clearly revealed a need to reconsider the balance of power between men and women, and it’s sad that so little has changed in the 80 years since No Goodness in the Worm was written.
Other Reviews
- Frances Lamont Robbins, in The Outlook, January 21, 1931
- Things must be looking black for the men in England. There feminism is an anti-male movement. (Here it is only indirectly so.) If English feminism has a literature, this novel must represent its lowest point; for it is one of the rankest pieces of nonsense that this patient reviewer ever read. Such incredible, such dreadful men; indeed there is no goodness in these worms! And, by natural sequence, such incredible, dreadful women, too…. The writer of this novel has considerable feeling for rich words, and some narrative skill. But we do not think she meant her novel to be funny–unless she is a man.
- Bernadine J. Scherman, in The Saturday Review of Literature, February 21, 1931
- It is a great satisfaction–after reading the dozens of contrived and artificial novels that are dumped on the public every month—to come across at last a novel that reveals a soul. The author of No Goodness in the Worm may have had no such lofty purpose, but unconsciously or otherwise, she has achieved it…. Though the author never states a thesis, and writes her novel only as a personal story, still the impression remains that this is indeed the state of mind of most thinking English women of thirty or so.
- After all the proportion of women to men in England before the war was about three t« one, and since then of course far greater. Women have had to become economically independent, and to this end, better educated and far more emancipated from families and tradition than before; while the flower of their own generation of men has been killed off. It is an abnormal state of affairs apparently affecting many of the younger English writers, and certainly admirably reflected in this first novel of Miss Taylor.
- Guy Holt, in The Bookman, February 1931
- … [I]n far too many years of haphazard reading I have not previously encountered just the point of view which Miss Taylor so ably expresses. I have read books written in bitterness against man; I have read books which were the product of defiance, or contempt, or pathological frigidity, but this springs from none of these. It is simply the work of one who, through her. characters, views man dispassionately and finds him, on the whole, dispensable. And that, I take it, is score one for the novel of 1931.
- Marjorie Grant Cook, in The Times Literary Supplement, July 3, 1930
- A sensitive and comely piece of work. No Goodness in the Worm is a first novel of exciting quality: one of those uncommon books whose first page is a good through which the reader enters a little world of other people’s lives and is lost for the time to his own….
- When it comes to love scenes this writer thinks sometimes, unconsciously, in the phrases of Lawrence. For the rest she very definitely writes her own book, and the justice and wit of her expressions are constantly stimulating…. The talk of the three young women together is crisp and amusing and natural, whatever the crisis they are facing. A book that grows in strength as it nears its end makes a second novel by the same hand something to look forward to.