“After all, he’s not a young man,” Dorothy Rutherford’s mother advises her. Dorothy, in her early thirties, working as a bank clerk and living with her parents, has the limited options available to many lower-middle-class women one hundred years ago. She can continue at the bank, after which, as her mother tells her, “You’ll have to live out your old age in one room on a tiny pension.”
Or she can marry. Unfortunately, at her age, handsome or even passable eligible suitors are no longer looking her way. Her one offer comes from Frank Chappie, a red-faced, twice-widowed retired furniture store owner. His merits, as Mrs. Rutherford assess them, come down to two: “He must be seventy, if he’s a day — you’ve only got to look at his neck. Well — mind you, one would never wish anything to happen to anybody — but it’s obvious he can’t last very long.” And once he’s gone, “You’ll be rich — and free.”
And so, Dorothy agrees. And soon learns that “can’t last very long” is, in fact, insufferably long. Mr. Chappie (never Frank) is demanding. “Girlie!” he calls to his wife whenever she’s out of sight for more than a minute. He is tight-fisted. And he is ardent. Turpin captures the horror of the old man’s kiss:
“My darling,” he murmured, folding her soft form in his bony arms and pressing his hard, thin lips against her full, naïve ones. He kissed insatiably as if he were trying to drain the fountain of youth and beauty. Then from between his lips she sensed the stealthy advance of a little serpent that was trying to insinuate itself into the privacy of her mouth.
Like any prisoner confined against her will, Dorothy seeks relief in fantasy. In desperation, she latches onto Tommy, a driving instructor and cheap version of Ronald Colman. Lessons with Tommy provide Dorothy’s one furlough from Mr. Chappie’s funerary passion. Working on commission, Tommy is happy to encourage Dorothy’s demand for more and more frequent sessions behind the wheel, even if at the price of an older woman’s unwonted advances. He has “a predator’s streak of cruelty. He liked to keep his victims, conquests, until, as he expressed it, they almost cut their throats themselves.” Among other things, “This saved recriminations.”
With Dorothy’s ever more frantic longings for Tommy, Tommy’s ever mor cautious manouevering to thwart them without losing a client, and Mr. Chappie’s increasing suspicions and unrelenting desire for proof of her affection, the situation spirals upwards. In a French or Italian opera, this would all culminate in a great coloratura aria. In this tight-laced English novel, nary an antimacassar is disturbed. Instead, all the dramatic tension resolves quietly, efficiently, and without the slightest risk of embarrassment in the eyes of the neighbors.
Though Behind the Net Curtains is set in the 1930s, it could just as well — and often seems to be — set during the Edwardian era, or even — aside from the crucial role automobile driving lessons play in the plot — in the late 19th century. As seen in The Laughing Cavalier, Allan Turpin wrote in the 1960s and 1970s novels set in the 1920s and 1930s that rang with the features and attitudes of the decade before his birth — demonstrating, perhaps, the truth of V. S. Pritchett’s observation of “how long the shadow of Victorianism was, how long it takes for a century to die.”
Turpin might well be considered a male counterpart of Ivy Compton-Burnett (if somewhat less prolific), writing over and over tight-knit family dramas that — no matter when written — always seem to take place in some ambiguous period between the 1880s and the death of King Edward VII. And like Compton-Burnett, the pleasure of Turpin’s small dioramas is his cold-blooded and sharp eye for hypocrisy in all its subtle manifestations. You don’t care to know any of his characters, but you enjoy watching them set to their paces.
Behind the Net Curtains, by Allan Turpin London: Hamish Hamilton, 1976
How does a book or writer get forgotten? There are a few instances where it’s a matter of deliberate suppression: who in Nazi Germany read the work of Stefan Zweig or Thomas Mann after their books were burned? There are cases where it’s a matter of institutional prejudice, such as the tendency of university English departments to ignore the work of women writers and people of color. Cultural disinclination is a big factor: until magic realism burst upon the scene with One Hundred Years of Solitude, Latin American literature was considered as obscure specialty subject in the U.S. “Canadian novelist” is a label still dismissed by many American and U.K. readers; and “French Canadian novelist” is almost the kiss of death, as the example of Marie-Claire Blais illustrates. Product distribution channels disable as much as they enable access to writers’ work: where U.K. books routinely leap over to U.S. bookshelves, one in ten of the same number of Australian titles make the trip across the Pacific.
But the most common and by far most effective way things get forgotten is inertia. Forgetting is the human condition. Dementia is only noticeable because it’s such an aggressive form of forgetting. Remembering takes effort, and if no one makes the effort, the inevitable result is that people and what they accomplished in their lives are forgotten.
Take Allan Turpin as an example. He published ten novels in his lifetime, most of them in the space of a little more than dozen years between 1964 and 1977. All received favorable but not glowing reviews: praise for his light, sophisticated comedy, mild caution over his old-fashioned style. None of them were ever reissued. When he died in 1979, there was no notice in any of the major papers. He died without heirs and left his entire estate to the Royal Literary Fund.
If Turpin is remembered at all today, it has nothing to do with his writing. In 1925, he and a young woman named Molly Ackland convinced themselves they were in love and decided to get married. He was 22, she was 19. He had little experience of romantic love and neither had experience of heterosexual love. The marriage was misguided from the start and was ultimately annulled. Molly Turpin began wearing male clothing, transformed herself into Valentine Ackland, became a poet and met and became the lifelong companion of the writer Sylvia Townsend Warner. Richard Turpin — born Allan Richard Turpin, he was known to his friends as Richard — exited stage left and disappears from Ackland’s story.
Part of the problem with the marriage, as Ackland later wrote in her memoir For Sylvia, was Turpin’s confusion over his own sexuality: “Richard was without any experience of women, and he was suffering from remorse and fear because of certain homosexual relationships he had enjoyed recently. ‘Enjoyed’ is the important word. He was now horrified to remember that he had been happy.” Her suspicions may have been well-founded. After the annulment, Turpin remained single for the rest of his life and census electoral records show him sharing an address with another man or a married couple.
Turpin shared some of Ackland’s desire to write, though it manifested in a very different way. Where she wrote confessional poetry, he converted his own experiences into a diffident sort of comic fiction. His first novel Doggett’s Tours, published as Richard Turpin in 1932, drew from the several years he spent as a tour guide on the Continent. His first love was for the theatre, but he had little success there. A comedy titled “The Fare Includes Romance” was produced in 1933 and closed after a week. His adaptation of Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw was forgotten just as quickly in 1946.
James remained, however, a dominant influence on his writing. On the strength of The Laughing Cavalier, I would describe Turpin’s work as Evelyn Waugh channelled through Henry James: his pages are peopled by ridiculous people, his paragraphs riddled with sentences of near-Jamesian convolution:
No particle of her was excited by George, fair-haired, as pink-cheeked as a girl, naïve, awkward, diffident; with the wrong ties, slovenly speed, and an unappetizing background; given, once his diffidence had worn off, to a great deal of rather foolish laughter and talk about nothing; generous, but feckless, and apparently without ambition ever to be anything more than a clerk on 30/- a week; a young man who, although the least knowable of young men since he never knew himself, seemed on first acquaintance rather boringly knowable and predictable; an absurd young man who, nevertheless, like all men, took his feelings seriously and could be alarmingly melodramatic and sentimental — than which nothing is less attractive when you don’t want it.
If Turpin’s style owed something to James, his attitude could be attributed to Waugh (or perhaps, going back a generation, as Turpin often seemed wont to do, Wilde). “I think that animals are fortunate in that their relationship with their parents is healthily short,” Turpin’s narrator announces at the start of The Laughing Cavalier. “Rather than see children exposed to the enormous risk of being brought up by their own parents,” he argues, “I would prefer state rearing. A visit to hospital must convince anyone of the extraordinary amount of disinterested humanity that exists where there is a need for it.”
The Laughing Cavalier was one of what Turpin at some point intended to be an eight-novel sequence called Memoirs of a Naïve Young Man. The naïve young man, Geoffrey Gillard, clearly becomes a fictional stand-in for Turpin himself once one discovers the coincidences between Gillard and Turpin’s life.
Allan Richard Turpin was born in 1903 to Frank Turpin and Clara Turpin (née Gillard). At the time, Frank Turpin’s profession was listed as “stamp dealer” — the same profession as George Gillard, the narrator’s father and the subject of the book. An earlier volume in the Memoirs series, Innocent Employments, describes the rise of this stamp business. As in the book, Richard Turpin joined his father in the business after a few unsatisfactory years as a tour guide. A passenger list from a trip he made to the U.S. in 1927 identifies Turpin as a “philatelist.” In 1930, Turpin and his older brother took over F. B. Turpin when their father retired.
Laughing Cavalier, a portrait by Frans Hals (1624)
Turpin/Gillard takes his title from Frans Hals’ famous 1624 portrait Laughing Cavalier. Remembering his father as seen through his son’s fourteen-year-old eyes, Turpin describes “a man who, although his thick auburn hair and pointed imperial were quite impressive, was, beneath them, unexpectedly short and rather self-indulgently plump; a man who, because of this beard, his rich red complexion, and light blue, constantly smiling, not very penetrating eyes, rather resembled, everyone said, Hals’s Laughing Cavalier, of which we had a colour print in the hall; a man than whom, in fact, no one could be more amiable and less terrifying.”
George Gillard disappoints his son by his obstinate insistence on being himself. It’s not the obstinacy that irritates: it’s his father’s blithe disregard for how relentlessly mundane his taste, talk, habits, thoughts, opinions — even his gestures are. Though a tremendous success in his stamp business, he is utterly lacking in ambition. Though he can afford to go to the theatre regularly, he enjoys the most formulaic romance every bit as much as something by Shaw. And yet, to his son’s annoyance, he is also “the most universally liked man I have ever met.”
If you pick up The Laughing Cavalier hoping for a Waugh-like dissection of the older generation, however, you’ll be disappointed. Writing reflectively at 66, Turpin finds it harder to maintain the uncompromising standards of a twenty-something. “If I did not admire my father, I, as I have already suggested, loved him much more than I knew,” he writes about halfway through the book.
George Gillard’s greatest failure in his son’s eyes is his failure to adequately mourn the death of his wife. Although her son acknowledges that his mother, who was often ill through his childhood, often left his father in the position of having to attend social engagements solo, he is shocked when — just six months after her death — he begins to court another woman. “If he had not murdered my mother, he had, in my youthful eyes, committed a crime that was almost the equivalent of murder”: “he had not regretted her death.”
Choosing to close up and sell off the house his sons had grown up in, George falls from an exotic-looking younger woman he meets when viewing a prospective new flat with his son. Turpin’s description of their accidental encounter contains one of the many gems of observation that are studded throughout the dense weave of his prose: “We moved across the sitting-room and, at the door, confronted the ladies, who were just about to wander in. There was the usual exchange of ‘sorries’ by which the English cover their acute embarrassment when proximity forces them to recognize the existence of strangers.”
Fifty-seven to the woman’s thirty-five, ready to retire from a successful but not wealthy business, George fails to see the limitations of his attraction, much to his son’s further exasperation. To everyone’s great relief, when the woman does let him down, she does so with enough grace as to merely deflate, rather than shatter, his ego, and a much more suitable mate is soon found. Turpin lacks the cold-bloodedness to leave any of his characters in shreds.
And this may offer a clue to why Allan Turpin’s work has become forgotten. It was just this quality that appealed to Turpin’s original reviewers. Claire Tomalin wrote that, “With fewer ponderous generalisations and more laughter this would have been an even better book: as it is, it deserves a place in the rich chronicles of the English petty bourgeoisie of our century.” Robert Baldick, in The Daily Telegraph, observed that “If Mr. Turpin cultivates a small plot of literary earth, he tends it with exquisite skill, and the results are never disappointing…. Few authors have written so perceptively about the father-son relationship: it is high time Mr. Turpin’s quiet talent was more widely recognized.” Instead, Turpin’s quiet talent was forgotten soon after his last book was published. This is good but unshowy work. The lack of cold-bloodedness is considered a virtue in a female middlebrow novelist: gentle-hearted satire has long legs in this era of Persephone Books and the Dorothy Whipple revival. In a male middlebrow novelist, however, gentle satire is reason enough to let his work slowly moulder into earth.
I’ll admit that when I first started reading The Laughing Cavalier, I was put off by the Jamesian-ness of Allan Turpin’s prose. But at a certain point, probably no more than a chapter in, I found myself relaxing, giving in to the leisurely pace, appreciating the subtlety of observation and the lightness of the comic touches. And once you adapt to Turpin’s Edwardian speed, the journey becomes much easier to enjoy.
The Laughing Cavalier, by Allan Turpin London: Michael Joseph, 1969
