Book Review by George S: David Garnett was one of the younger members of the Bloomsbury set. His father was Edward Garnett, the critic and publisher, and his mother was Constance Garnett, the translator of Tolstoy, Chekhov and Dostoyevsky. Born in 1892, David Garnett had been a conscientious objector during the Great War, working on a fruit farm in East Anglia. This short novel was published pseudonymously in 1919 by T. Werner Laurie, whose list included much sensational fiction, such as books by Hubert Wales and Victoria Cross.
The novel begins in a cornfield, where Roy Gordon and Beatrice chase have been embracing. He asks her to marry him, and she is delighted to agree (though she actually suspects that he does not feel as stringly for her as she does for him). She is a doctor, and he is a medical student about to take his final exams. Soon after the engagement is announced, however, the two go to a night club, where they meet a vivacious girl called Claire, Roy dances with her and discovers that there is more to life than Beatrice. That night:
Roy went up to his room, but for some time he did not think of going to bed, staring at a blank patch on the wall, while the gas hissed and spluttered.
He struggles with his conscience, but eventually deserts Beatrice to be with Claire, despite the fact that he has discovered that Claire is addicted to cocaine. The presentation of Claire is interesting and quite complex. She is at first presented an innocent and open, singing English folk-songs ‘with the simplicity and innocence of a milkmaid straying along a country lane.’ But she is also capable of wild daring. In later life Garnett said that she was partly based on the wild socialite Betty May, and he ascribes to her an exploit that Betty May is supposed to have done in real life.
She was absolutely without fear, and even fond of danger. One night, reeling about the floor of the night club, she bet anyone five pounds that she would get out of the window and sit on the ledge outside while the window was shut behind her, and there uncork a bottle of champagne and drink it off without taking it from her lips. A German Count took her bet, and Claire climbed out, with a bottle and a pair of nippers in her hand. A hundred men and women drawn form all classes of society crowded round to watch her and no-one had the decency to interfere. Claire drank the champagne, and then smashed a hole in the window and threw the bottle into the room hitting the German on the head.
Betty May
The book is very moralistic about Claire’s cocaine habit;
At eighteen. Claire Plowman’s mind and character were already completely formed. She had varied and horrible experiences, and had contracted one of the most terrible vices in the world. Sniffing cocaine is the most terrible, the most dangerous and horrible habit that can be formed. The devotees of cocaine all end under sentence of early death. In a girl of Claire’s age there is practically no hope.
As a medical student, Roy knows the dangers, and tries to wean Claire off the habit, but is unsuccessful, and she persuades him to try the drug. They marry, three weeks after they first met..
He too might have gradually sunk into addiction, but sudenly the war comes (The reader was prepared for this by a couple of hints, such as a band striking up that new tune ‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary.’)
Roy enlists in August 1914. He could have gone as a medic, but enlists as a common soldier. He has a distinguished war, performing acts of heroism, winning the M.C., being commissioned as an officer, suffering grim conditions, winning the D.S.O. (All described with the sort of inexactness that one finds in authors who have never themselves been near a battlefield.) Garnett had been a conscientious objector, but this novel follows the standard pattern of popular fiction, presenting the war as essentially a fortunate occurence, since it solves the problems of peacetime, by making Roy a better man, and separating him from drug-addicr Claire.
Claire had promised to stay off cocaine for the duration of the war, but she can’t manage it. Meanwhile, Beatrice, working ‘with quiet resolution’ in St Xavier’s, a London hospital, is busy saving lives and still feeling a deep love for Roy. The news comes from France that he has been dangerously wounded, while carrying back a fellow officer from No-Man’s-Land under fire. Beatrice arranges for him to be sent to St Xavier’s.
Meanwhile, Claire has sunk very low, desperate for cocaine:
She panted, she snarled with rage horribly, an angry animal noise came from between her bared teeth.
Roy has a piece of shrapnel lodged dangerously near his heart. Only a very risky operation can save him, and heroic Dr. Beatrice undertakes to do it herself. It is a close thing, but he survives. After this, Beatrice is called away to a new patient elsewhere in the hospital. It is Claire, suffering from the effects of the deadly drug. She dies. Beatrice and Roy head for a well-deserved happy ending.
David Garnett later said that he wrote this book purely for the money, Perhaps so, but I find it interesting that a conscientious objector could have written a book so consistent in its depiction of war as ennobling. The contrast between on the one hand, decent soldiers and noble medics, and on the other wild drug-crazed party-goers on the other is very common in novels of the early twenties, and not just in trashy fiction. It is there in Wilfrid Ewart’s Way of Revelation, for example, and in Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End. And of course, the book is based on the most standard corny trope of all – the virtuous hard-working girl getting the man in the end, not the glamorous flashy one.
David Garnett’s later fiction was much more the sort of thing one might expect from the Bloomsbury set – Lady into Fox, is a sexy fantasy, and Aspects of Love is a depction of tangled love-relationships. This book is sensational, stereotyped, and utterly obvious in its conventional morality – so just about the opposite of what Bloomsbury is generally supposed to stand for. Which for me makes it quite intriguing.
How Laurie’s Popular Library was advertised to the trade, in the Bookseller magazine.
