This is a guest post by Christopher Hawtree.
The Figures in the Boarding-House Carpet
Many a novel has sprung from a paragraph in a newspaper. Notable among them was that New York Times snippet about a houseful of murder victims in the Midwest which Truman Capote chanced to see — and so began the trail that led to In Cold Blood. Three decades earlier, William Plomer returned to London after a weekend away when his eye was caught at the railway station by something larger than a paragraph: posters announced SHOCKING BAYSWATER TRAGEDY.
The newspaper revealed to him — in late-November 1929 — that this tragedy had taken place in the very house where he lodged. It was a narrow escape, for it is likely that he would have joined his landlady in the mortuary had he not been out of town. She was the common-law wife of a man given to the obsession that she would succumb to any man who paid her court. Mania turned into murder as he set upon her with an open razor while their child looked on; with her dead, the man looked for Plomer, but the police were soon on the scene, samples taken — and, in due course, the returning novelist cleaned up the remaining mess.
Hardly surprisingly, that friendship with his landlady and the encounter with the blood which had spurted from her veins were to haunt him. Two years later, in the summer of 1932, he published his third novel The Case is Altered. After the South Africa of Turbott Wolfe and the Japan of Sado, this was a raw but deeply felt account of those clinging onto life by dint of a rented room in somebody else’s house.
Since his childhood, split between South Africa and terms at Rugby School, Plomer’s life had since been varied, and he knew such humble lodgings as well as Patrick Hamilton, who was to make a career from boarding houses, with such works as Hangover Square. Another boarding house novel, Marie Belloc-Lowndes’s The Lodger, inspired not only Plomer but also Norman Collins, whose London Belongs to Me has recently won new attention. One might also think of works by Muriel Spark, Emeric Pressburger, Tennessee Williams and Sarah Waters as examples of the continuing fascination of such settings, which provides dramatic unity while characters move in and out the shadows of rooms whose carpet is no longer as fresh as the time when it had been obtained on an instalment plan.
The Case is Altered proved to be Plomer’s most popular novel, one of the bestsellers of Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press, as had been Orlando, Vita Sackville-West’s The Edwardians and Saturday Night at the Greyhound. The last, by Plomer’s friend John Hampson has something in common with The Case is Altered: set in a pub, its timescale is limited and to the fore is a cruel husband.
According to Plomer, the houses in his fictional Cambodia Crescent “have the self-righteous air of a selfish and uncultivated person who thinks that he is a good and wise, and the ornamentation around the doors, windows and chimneys forms a lasting insult to the beauties of natural stone and careful craftsmanship”. As this is in hailing distance of Kensington Gardens, one can be sure that Plomer’s house would now command cool millions.
Almost a century ago, it had simply been spotted by Mrs. Beryl Fernandez (with her impoverished and ailing common-law husband Paul), who thought that with care, it could become a profitable enterprise. She planned to run with the help of her friend Mrs. Gambits, “who belonged to that numerous and depressing class of women who are not exactly of the kind known as decayed gentlewomen, but whose chief aim in life is to be taken for decayed gentlewomen”. This was an era when even Mrs. Fernandez’s modest funds could stretch to the hiring of a manservant, Mr. Empringham “with grey hair and rather a puzzled expression on his face, as though he couldn’t quite make out why life had treated him quite the way it had, or what it was likely to do to him next”.
Among the lodgers are a couple, the Rudds, forever in hope of winning crossword competitions and siring a child. They are joined by Constantia Brixworth who is down on her luck after losing her money in an American railroad scheme. She is friendly with Frances Haymer, a former explorer, to whem she regularly entertains with tales of her fellow residents, whom the writer regards with all the curious avidity that she had showed in chronicling foreign tribes.
This is a finely-observed novel. Plomer describes Miss Haymer when she ventured out, as she “used a stick with a rubber end, and tottered along on heels that were rather too high, supporting, like some caryatid, a large, oldfashioned hat, decorated with a bird or two and some fruit, as in her heyday.” Of particular interest to both Miss Brixworth and Miss Haymer is young Eric Alston, who works in a greengrocer’s “and had a very fresh complexion, as if his cheeks were reflecting a rosy glow from the apples and peaches which it was his work to sell”. Eric is walking out with a girl who works in the kitchen of a clothes shop which, called Pélagie, proclaims itself as trading in “Robes and Modes”.
And so the scene is set for lives of aspiration running into frustration and worse — none blessed with “that assurance which the possession of money brings with it”. The novel’s title has a double meaning. A Miss Brixworth says to Alston (to whom she offers tea and omelettes), “When I had more money, I used to have an ordinary afternoon tea and late dinner, but now the case is rather altered…”. And nearby the house is a pub with that very name: a plaque relates that “it was originally called The Three Cranes but in the eighteenth century a famous highwayman was caught there unawares by a young lord whom he had robbed. ‘Now, sir,’ cried the peer as soon as he had made sure of his capture, ‘it seems the case is altered!”‘
Briskly told in nineteen chapters across some three hundred pages, the novel has something of the “tea-tabling” manner for which Christopher Isherwood praised his and Plomer’s mentor, E.M. Forster. Despite a cinema fire, dramatic incident is rare; everything turns around the simmering of domestic matters, one small table-side event knocking into another much as a billiard ball sets up a chain reaction across the green baize. Worthy of Forster, or Proust, is the observation of Paul Fernandez who chain-smokes in the dead of night, the night-lamp’s shadows an emblem of his maniacal anxiety. “The idea of cruelty (which is only a diseased form of sympathy) was beginning to exercise a fascination over his thoughts. Not content with love, and love fully requited at that, he wanted power as well, he wanted to command more love, a stronger, more intense kind of intimacy than is humanly possible, and so he began to seek how he might obtain such power.”
And so begins a descent which will take down many with it against a background which forms an indelible view of the Thirties, whether in spiritualist gatherings, a mediation upon the nature of conscience, a suggestion of the homosexuality which had been to the fore in Sado, or advertisement hoardings “covered with huge posters. Each of them showed a gigantic human figure, and each figure seemed to live in a strange world of the imagination. A giantess in evening dress was in raptures at having discovered a new tooth paste to apply to a set of teeth that looked like the keys of a piano”. Whether observing people’s tendency to walk towards a window when contemplating the future or a man who “indulged in none of those humorous sallies which are so important a part of an auctioneer’s technique”, Plomer shows those powers of description which made people relish his letters’ arrival (would there were a collection of them).
Rather than dwell on the murder which was its inspiration, one relishes The Case is Altered for its life:
an immense murmur made up of the traffic of human beings going about their business and pleasure, a rich and subtle and continuous sound which it takes more than motor-cars to make, for it must contain as well the cries of infants, the ranting of demagogues, the tapping of the blind man’s stick, the happy laughter of young girls, the vomiting of drunkards, the stirring of squirrels in their sleep, the fall of leaves, the growth of trees, the threats of blackmailers, the solicitations of whores, the shuffling steps of lecherous old men, the banter of soldiers, the coy shrieks of housemaids, the shy kisses of young lovers, the worm in the bud, and the millionaire’s last words.
The novel put Plomer’s quiet life in good stead, although he was not to know such success again until its very end, in 1973, when his sequence The Butterfly Ball was illustrated by Alan Aidridge, who brought a similar style to his work in The Beatles Illustrated Lyrics. FThough his satirical and lyrical poems are a particular delightr, Plomer may now be best known as the publisher’s reader who, in the face of opposition, persuaded Cape to take on the first of Ian Fleming’s James Bonds novels, Casino Royale, and worked closely on the rest of them.
How has the equally if differently thrilling The Case is Altered fallen from print? It last appeared half a century ago in a hardback series called the Landmark Library. Perhaps some have balked at another aspect of the Thirties. As early as page twenty-six, one learns that “even if Miss Brixworth had not been able to see at once that Mrs. Fernandez was a Jewess, it would be soon have been able to tell that she was one, by the way she began over-emphasising her partiality to bacon for breakfast”. Two pages later, she “launched out into a sea of Jewish visions of luxury and comfort far beyond her means” and further in, there is “that Jewish impulse towards grandeur so noticeable in Mrs. Fernandez”.
Plomer was a humane man. These are the tropes of an era, similar to the first edition of Brighton Rock, which featured a Jewish Mr. Big in a seafront hotel (later editions turned him into an Italian, as if that made it all right). The narrator of The Case is Altered notes that “you can never make out whether the Jews want to be aristocrats or socialists. Half-way between East and West, they maybe somewhere near the truth, if the truth really lies in paradox. Jesus Christ was the greatest and most paradoxical of the Jews. He had the most aristocratic nature imaginable, and yet he lived with the lowest of the low. He was unique, and yet expressed himself in terms of what is ordinary and universal”.
For all that “Jews kiss and kill at the same time, just as a sportsman may feel a real affection for the game he slaughters”, The Case is Altered has a power which impressed its first publisher, Leonard Woolf, a Jew. As felicitous as it is raw, here is a novel which remains as provoking as when it appeared in 1932.
Christopher Hawtree is a writer and editor. You can read more on his website, ChristopherHawtree.com, and follow him on Twitter (@chrishawtree).