fbpx

novella

Betty Swanwick, Artist and Subversive Novelist

Portrait of Betty Swanwick by Clive Gardiner (c.1948).

If Betty Swanwick is remembered today, it’s usually for her painting The Dream, which was used on the cover of the Genesis album Selling England by the Pound. And it’s as a painter she would probably prefer to be remembered, since she resigned from her long professorship at Goldsmith’s College School of Art in 1970 to pursue her unique style, a blend of traditional realism and somewhat exaggerated modernism.

Cover of Selling England by the Pound by Genesis, cover painting by Betty Swanwick.

But it would be an injustice not to celebrate her brief but distinctive career as a novelist. Whether she decided to write novels as a vehicle for her illustrations or as an outlet for her literary inclinations, between 1945 and 1958, Betty Swanwick wrote and illustrated three slim novels that gleefully subvert many of the tropes and conventions of the 19th century novels and more than deserve recognition themselves.

Born in 1915, the daughter of a professional draughtsman, Swanwick entered Goldsmith’s College at the young age of 15 and studied under two masters, Edward Bawden and Clive Gardiner. She fell into a long-term relationship with Gardiner, who helped get her a teaching position with Goldsmith’s after her graduation. It was a job she held for over thirty years, though she ultimately saw it as an obstacle to her own creative development.

Cover of The Cross Purposes (1945).

She supplemented her teaching income by taking on occasional illustration jobs for clients ranging from London Transport to Strand magazine and, less frequently, illustrating children’s books such as Marjorie Seymour’s Camille Cat, “the story of a cat who liked green figs far too well.” Perhaps she felt she could do just as good a job with the words as the illustrations, for in 1945, she published her first novel — or, more properly, novelette, as specified in its subtitle, since it’s just 64 pages long.

Esmeralda and the Reverend Randall.

The Cross Purposes opens in the manner of any good Victorian novel, with the Reverend Robert Randall and his sister Esmeralda traveling to take a vacant curacy in the prosperous town of Frogs Copping. The beautiful and eligible Esmeralda catches the eye of Frederick, son of Sir Edward Chalmers, the town’s most prominent nobleman, and everyone assumes that the Reverend Robert will pair up with Chalmers’ ward, the lovely Hermione Beauchampers.

Nothing in a Swanwick novel ever turns out quite as planned, though. Hermione is beautiful, cruel, and conniving and more than happy to lure the Reverend into matrimony, but she is no match for her governess, Miss Whistle:

Miss Whistle, mark you, was a woman of shrewd perception and quick ideas, and, being of an uneasy age, seized the possibility of being a respectable married woman with both hands. What more could a plain, intelligent woman require than a plain, egotistical husband with settled means? It was a very good and manageable catch, thought Miss Whistle to herself whilst saying her prayers at night.

Soon, two engagements are announced, and Hermione departs to the Continent in search of wealthier fish. Sir Edward plans a betrothal ball that sets his “noseholes quivering with lively anticipation.” Swanwick knows how to draw her story to an end according to the formula: “There now only remains the winding up of this story to universal satisfaction and cosmic gratification.” This doesn’t, however, mean that everyone lives happily ever after.

The double wedding.

Swanwick is too much a realist to risk going into details about what happens after the dual wedding. She sides with Sir Edward, who would be just as happy to see the vision of the two couples at the altar in the lavishly decorated church prolonged indefinitely, “until the whole of them, the bridal party and all, were slowly consumed by death, standing up in a breathless trance in the Floral Chapel.”

Paddy Rossmore’s catalogue raisonné, Betty Swanwick: Artist and Visionary, lists few works between The Cross Purposes and her next novel, Hoodwinked (1957). Rossmore notes that this is more likely due to the fact that she concentrated on teaching and commercial work and the latter, held by the Society of Illustrators and Artists, was discarded in the course of moves and reorganizations. In any case, when she turned to fiction again, it was to revisit the theme of matrimonial mismatches — but this time brought up to current day and with even more subversive twists.

Cover of Hoodwinked (1957).

Cora Fox and Madeleine Mudie are old friends with a common problem: uncooperative children. Cora’s older daughters, Laurel, Flora, and Philippa are mad about jazz and are only interested in improvising and jitterbugging. Her youngest, Gemma, is the loveliest and most conventional in her attitudes … aside from her penchant for lying and cheating. Madeleine’s son, Castor, is handsome, of age, and an ideal candidate to be matched and married off … aside from his disinterest in everything except designing womens’ wear. The solution in obvious to both women.

Mr. Fox’s suicide.

And its urgency increases when Gemma arrives home, having been expelled from her boarding school for egregious cheating. The shadow it casts upon the family name leads Mr. Fox to take his life in front of Gemma (Swanwick illustrates the scene in case we have trouble picturing it). Gemma sighs with relief at the sight of her dead father. “Phew! Well, that is that,” she says, “very coolly fanning the smoke fumes from her eyes.” Castor and Gem are hastily brought together in hopes of kindling sparks.

Madeleine, Cora, Castor, and Gemma.

Unfortunately, Castor prefers older women. Cora, to be specific. While he goes through the motions to please his mother, he insinuates himself into Cora’s companionship, and finds her love-starved and not entirely unwilling. At the same time, an enormously wealthy and utterly socially inappropriate Indian Rajah buys the estate next door to the Foxes. Gemma may have cheated on a fair number of her subjects, but arithmetic was not one of them. You can see where Swanwick is going. All it takes is the sudden death of the distraught Madeleine to remove the remaining obstacle.

Cover of Beauty and the Burglar (1958).

A year later, Arthur Barker Ltd. published her third novel, Beauty and the Burglar, while kicked the Victorian matrimonial formula to the curb for good. Once again, an eligible pair — this time, the ward Palma Purre and the earnest reformer Bernard Follow — are brought together through the machinations of guardians and parents with the aim of achieving a quick and socially profitable match. Palma is not entirely unwilling, but Bernard’s feet are so rooted in the 19th century that it’s hard for her not to get a bit exasperated. “It is to be hoped that we shall see a good deal of each other in the future,” he tells her.

I would find it satisfying to develop you in other ways also: of course, it goes without saying that we refer to the higher ways. There will be much gratification from these services that I am more than willing to render you. Whenever I am free from tours and lectures, I shall endeavour to see you and train you for the proper purpose in life.

Luckily for Palma, one night a cat burglar named Rowland Swagger sneaks into her bedroom to steal her jewelry. Instead, he falls instantly for Palma — and she for him — and the two abscond to his hideout, which happens to be a school where he is teaching a new generation to carry on his dishonorable profession. Rowland proudly shows Palma around his Royal Academy of Crime, allowing her to observe classes ranging from safecracking to the art of proper coshing.

Coshing class.

Rather than taking exception to Rowland’s criminal enterprise, Palma is inspired by its educational potential and proposes to deliver a lecture to the students on the “Art of the Golden Section,” aided by an attractive and scantily clad model. The lecture gets a tremendous response and before we know it, the R.A.C. begins transforming into the G.C.C. — the Golden College of Culture. All ends happily at the altar again, or rather the bridge, as Rowland and Palma and Bernard and the thoroughly inappropriate Melba find themselves before an old sea dog named Captain Blott.

Betty Swanwick, around 1958.

John Betjeman found Swanwick’s novels “Strange, startling, funny, and with a weird beauty.” Other reviewers struggled to categorize her books, drawing on everyone from Jane Austen and Wilkie Collins to David Garnett and Damon Runyon in hopes of finding a familiar point of reference. Angela Milne probably described them best by writing that they were “small and funny in the way [Daisy Ashford’s juvenile comic novel] The Young Visiters was funny” — but “not unintentionally so.” In fact, she argued, everything Swanwick did “points roundly to its adulthood.” And it would be wrong to dismiss these three little novels as pastiches. If anything, I’d say they looked forward, not back, towards 1960s satires of long-standing British traditions such as Joan Littlewood’s Oh, What a Lovely War! and Lindsay Anderson’s If…. Swanwick was not just saying that those Victorian tropes were dead but standing in front of their grave and saying a derisive, “Good riddance.”

Betty Swanwick died in 1989 from complications due to cancer. None of her novels has ever been reissued, but several can be had for under $50 if you’re interested. They’re lovely little packages of subversive fun.

Three novels by Betty Swanwick:
The Cross Purposes (1945)
Published by Editions Poetry London

Hoodwinked (1957) and Beauty and the Burglar (1958)
Published by Arthur Barker Ltd.

A Shark-Infested Rice Pudding, by Sylvia Wright (1969)

Publishing is almost as notorious for its misleading packaging as the recording business. We may never know what Doubleday’s remit to the Paul Bacon design studio was for Sylvia Wright’s A Shark-Infested Rice Pudding, but the vaguely romantic cover that was supplied in response represents in not the slightest way the book’s contents. For one thing, this is not a novel but a collection of three novellas. And three novellas that in no way resemble the sort of narrative a fan of Georgette Heyer or Anya Seton might expect.

Sylvia Wright doesn’t even pretend to know how to write such a book: “How do you make fiction?” she asks in the opening line of “Fathers and Mothers,” her opening novella. After contemplating fiction’s components — information, characters, plot — she confesses within a page or so, “I cannot grasp this craft.” And in the subsequent 180-some pages of the book, she makes no attempt to.

Although one can detect the influence of Nouveau Roman at some points, Virginia Woolf at others, there is no deliberate imitation here. In fact, it would be easier to place A Shark-Infested Rice Pudding in the context of the wave of American experimental fiction just then making itself known in the work of Donald Barthelme, William Gass, Robert Coover, and others. Except even that suggestion is misleading, since Wright’s career as a fiction writer (well, even though she claimed not to grasp the craft, it’s the most convenient label we have at hand) was too brief to allow any sort of network of influences to form. None of the three pieces in A Shark-Infested Rice Pudding were published previously and this is her only work of fiction.

Sylvia Wright was not a naïf, though. Soon after graduating from Bryn Mawr, she learned about both novel-writing and publishing when she and her mother worked with Mark Saxton to turn the 2300-page manuscript left by her father, Austin Tappan Wright, into publishable form. Though its bulk (over 1,000 pages even after editing) put off many readers, Islandia (1942) became, and remains, a cult favorite, a blend of utopianism, fantasy, romance, and what today we’d call steampunk.

Sylvia Wright
Sylvia Wright, 1969.

She translated that experience into a job on the staff of Harpers Bazaar, eventually earning her own monthly column of humorous observations on life. A couple dozen of these were collected and published in 1955 as Get Away From Me With Those Christmas Gifts. Many have titles like, “My Kitchen Hates Me” and “How to Make Chicken Liver Pate Once.” But one piece has worked its way into our vocabulary: “The Death of Lady Mondegreen.”

In it, Wright recalls learning a Scottish ballad, “The Bonnie Earl O’ Moray,” as a child. In particular, she memorized the lines, “They have slain the Earl o’ Moray/And Lady Mondegreen.” Only, in the balland, that last phrase is actually “And layd him on the green.” “I saw it all clearly,” she wrote:

The Earl had yellow curly hair and a yellow beard and of course wore a kilt. He was lying in a forest clearing with an arrow in his heart. Lady Mondegreen lay at his side, her long, dark-brown curls spread out over the moss. She wore a dark-green dress embroidered with light-green leaves outlined in gold.

“It made me cry,” she writes. When she did finally learn the correct wording, she clung defiantly to her version. It was better. And this led her to champion her invention: the mondegreen. For Wright, mondegreens are not errors. They are portals into other worlds:

If you lay yourself open to mondegreens, you must be valiant. The world, blowing near, will assail you with a thousand bright and strange images. Nothing like them has ever been seen before, and who knows what lost and lovely things may not come streaming in with them? But there is always the possibility that they may engulf you and that you will go wandering down a horn into a mondegreen underworld from which you can never escape.

Wright got her mondegreens from poetry, newspapers, and advertisements. Popular music lyrics have been a rich source for them, even when many of us didn’t know they had a name. And Wright was right in viewing them as transformative. A mondegreen, for example, turns Jimi Hendrix’s ode to LSD, “‘Cuse Me While I Kiss the Sky,” into a celebration of homosexual love: “‘Cuse Me While I Kiss This Guy.”

And perhaps the notion of mondegreens is a clue to understand what Sylvia Wright is doing in A Shark-Infested Rice Pudding. In the first novella, “Fathers and Mothers,” the reader can reconstruct a straightforward story: a Greek mother and father are sharing an apartment in Boston with their son, his American wife — the narrator, but only sometimes — and their infant grandson. The father is suffering from lung cancer. They have come to America to get the best medical care. After months of treatment, the father dies. The family returns to Athens for his funeral.

But that’s what’s happening in the background. In the foreground, the thing that attracts Wright’s attention is how her in-laws (in real life she was married to a Greek man, so presumably this is somewhat autobiographical) deal with their new world. Part of that new world is cancer and sickness and too many hours in the hospital. Another part is America is another part. They are Greek. At home, they can glance out their apartment and see the Acropolis. Ancient Greece and modern Greece are intertwined.

So naturally, one would expect similar things in America. “Have there been preserved here some of the songs and stories of the old Indians, so that one can get a sense of their rhythms, their sonorities?” the mother-in-law asks. A natural question. Except that even today, most Americans would be stumped to indicate any aspect of the culture of our indigenous peoples that hasn’t been processed through Longfellow, the Boy Scouts, and Hollywood. All we know is the transformed version.

The mother-in-law, in particular, is the transformative agent in this family. When not at the hospital, the father-in-law spends most of his time lying limp on the couch. The mother-in-law is the one questioning norms, pushing for routines to be changed, not being satisfied by the status quo. “Now, if this were a story,” Wright observes, “a real story instead of whatever it is, then this could be interpreted and the story shaped to advance through the interpretation.” And those interpretations “would serve the delicious purpose of turning the mother into the villain.”

But which is the truth? The interpretations — the mondegreens — or “the information,” as Wright refers to one of her elements of fiction? The tension between the two alternatives runs like a motif through all three novellas. In the second, “Dans le Vrai” [In truth], the “story” is about the narrator’s visit to her sister and nephew in upstate New York. It’s the late 1950s or early 1960s: the great Federal interstate highway system is in the midst of being built. The characters go to see a section under construction nearby, a great excavated gash through the countryside.

Then, suddenly, the narrator announces, we’re in a new story, a story within a story called “The Thruway.” Or is the narrator the story?

I am the Thruway. I live in a new world in which I must stretch myself to touch, to contain immeasurably unexpected combinations. I will link discrepancies. No, I will be discrepancies, encompass contradiction, and out of that compute what meanings — what secrets — out of what snail-like and dreary settled pasts will now freshly dart what pleasures in rooms without shapes, corners, of dimensions I cannot now imagine. Ah, yes, I will be reconciled — No, not be reconciled, never be reconciled, that will be the strength — but action — one’s life will be —

Following Sylvia Wright through her fictions is like watching someone trying to put together a jigsaw puzzle where all the pieces have the same color but just ever-so-slightly different shapes. She takes a piece of “the information,” places it against reality, sees where it fits … but also where it doesn’t. And so she sets that piece down and tries another. Which way does the mondegreen work? Which represents truth? The piece or the rest of the puzzle?

If this makes A Shark-Infested Rice Pudding sound maddening … well, it is. But only in the sense that Sylvia Wright refuses to accept the simple solutions. She is every bit as perceptive into the gestures and mannerisms and pretences of individual characters as Virginia Woolf or George Eliot, and there are plenty of moments of just the sort of pleasure one gets from reading about the interactions of human beings in more conventional fiction.

But she also reminds me in some ways of one of the most challenging and frustrating writers that ever lived, Dorothy Richardson, who puts such extraordinary effort into trying to get her impressions right — and yet always adds, “Yes, but there’s still something more.” Despite its extraordinarily odd title, A Shark-Infested Rice Pudding may be the best work of fiction I’ve read this year.

Sylvia Wright died of cancer in 1981 at the age of 64. She published no other books after this, though she left an unfinished biography of her great aunt Melusina Fay Peirce, wife of the philopher and mathematician Charles Sanders Peirce.

Oh, and a shark-infested rice pudding is the punchline of a joke. You’ll have to read to book to get it.

A Shark-Infested Rice Pudding, by Sylvia Wright
Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, 1969