Thursday Throwback
Revisiting my university blog reviews
Rosalind Murray’s 1926 novel The Happy Tree never raises its voice and has long lay in obscurity. In 2014 though it was discovered and re-published by Persephone Books, specialists in out-of-print works by 20th century female authors, for the centenary of the outbreak of World War One. Revealed is a story of understated beauty.
On the eve of her 40th birthday Helen Woodruffe recalls the events of her youth. These centre around Yearsly, the country estate where she grew up, and her relationship with her cousin Hugo. Contrasting with these is her marriage to an academic historian.
She and Hugo are kindred spirits but when their friendship develops into romantic love awkwardness puts them at an impasse. Instead she marries ‘the wrong person’. During the war she and Hugo re-connect to a degree before being separated for good by Hugo’s death in France.
The emotional impact of these experiences is belied but gradually made clear by Helen’s minimisation of them (encapsulated by recurrent use of the phrase ‘That is all’). It also suggests itself in the novel’s overall tone.
Through most of the story Murray gives Helen a curious and distinctive narrative voice, as though ‘things that have happened to me had happened to someone else’. Every scene consequently has an emotional honesty and economy of description that makes them as memorable as sketches on a blank page.
Dialogue is minimal and brief. Words and phrases often repeat themselves within a sentence or paragraph. The narrative can seem bare to the point of flatness. If taken at face-value this could appear dull or simply poor writing. However, as events build and the pace quickens, Helen becomes more sympathetic and understandable. The whole book turns out to be a risky but skillful expression of a spirit numbed by loss and disappointment.
Supporting this theory is the lyricism of the early Yearsly passages, Helen’s last meetings with Hugo in wartime and her outpouring of grief after he is reported missing. The latter two are hauntingly vivid.
‘I stood where I was, looking after the train. Hugo did not look out of it again, and I did not wave my hand.
I watched it drawing past me; carriage after carriage reaching the bend of the line where a station lamp threw a glittering light upon the windows; then out into the fog and darkness; and the smoke drifted back, chilly, mockingly, along the empty line.’
‘I was calling Hugo…I called to him through the rain and the darkness, across the expanse of sea and land…I pressed my hands against my eyes, trying to see in the dark, to force myself to see, to hear his voice answering me through the emptiness of the night. But I saw and heard nothing.’
Hugo himself is vague and unformed. Helen is often most active as a character in connection with him. With its roots in childhood, The Happy Tree‘s simplicity and frankness are child-like. In many ways Helen and Hugo resemble children adrift in an ill-fiiting and prosaic world.
They’re also poetic souls and the story feels like poetry in its rhythms and use of metaphors and symbols (Yearsly and the Happy Tree becoming overt symbols of change toward the end of the book). Reading it feels like immersion in a clear pool, all the while sinking deeply into the lives of its inhabitants.
It’s easy to forget sometimes that it’s fiction. Features of Helen’s life do closely resemble the author’s – a partly aristocratic lineage, socially busy mother and an unsatisfying marriage to an Oxford don. Murray’s background could have influenced a couple of other things in the novel – Helen’s aesthetic distaste for her present surroundings reflects a common attitude among literary circles of the time towards burgeoning suburbia, as was a genteel idealisation of rural life; references to children as ‘it’ and ‘that’ may spring from Murray’s ambivalent attitude towards her own offspring.
There are also significant differences in the two women’s lives. Murray eventually ended her marriage, converted to Roman Catholicism and took up farming with a lapsed monk. Helen’s story is ended in stasis, ‘like thousands of other women’. Here another side of female experience is evoked – largely passive; private and reluctantly domestic; quiet and anonymous.
This was Rosalind Murray’s penultimate novel, published twelve years after the previous one. Its story is a mature contrast to the melodrama of earlier works but shares a theme – young women torn between men representing different ideals and the consequences of their choices. The Happy Tree‘s nuanced portrayal of these makes its re-publishing another good move by Persephone.