Book Review by Chris Hopkins.
I had never heard of Ronald Fraser, but bought this novel on impulse in a charity shop several decades ago because I liked the title with its repurposing of the title of one of Britain’s chief business papers to suggest a focus on economics in a particular period. Our January 2024 topic of novels about work made me remember the long-neglected copy and reminded me it had spent thirty years beside my bed bringing my clock-radio up to eye-level for consultation in the (overly frequent) event of wakeful moments.
The novel focuses almost solely on a single and large family – a family made up exclusively of artists. The father, William Longfellow Wollacombe, is a painter and he paints only one subject: cows. However, his rendering of the animal has bought him fame and popularity, his work being acquired by galleries and collectors, and reproduced as prints for more modest pockets. The mother, Ella, is a poet. They have thirteen children (and Wollacombe augments these with further children from his other relationships). Woolacombe’s cows bring in a steady income, but he is careless about arrangements for his children, as is Ella, nick-named ‘Love in a Mist’ because she is so absent-minded, and apparently doesn’t know which children are hers (excusable given the parenthood fatigue she must surely feel), which are Woollacombe’s, and which are just visiting. As a consequence, none of the children are sent to school, nor are there any set meal-times in the house: everyone lives on raw vegetables or salads, apart from Woollacombe, who aways dines out. However, the children are remarkably resilient and seem to thrive: some become self-taught painters or sculptors, while a larger number become self-taught musicians (some instrumentalists, enough for a string quartet and other ensembles, one a composer). Each child is named by Woollacombe after an artist he admires. Thus there are seven boys: Leonardo, Perugino, Titian, Rubens, Carpaccio, Holbein, Raphael, and six girls: Veronese, Francesca, Gentile, Claude, Ingres, and Lippi (it is noticeable that the girls are not named after female artists).
Our initial focus is, however, on the one unhappy child: Titian cannot stand the disorder, the lack of mealtimes nor the constant artistic environment – and above all he detests the perpetual music-making. It is all ‘repugnant to his precise, tidy, conventional mind’ (p.9). At a spontaneous and naturally chaotic party in the Woollacombe house, Titian, aged ten has an epiphany (though I am sure he would have hated it to be called that): ‘[He] raged at everything around him. But after the storm there broke over him a clear light. He saw his way. He made up his mind . . . ‘I’m going into business’ (p.9). He duly finds a nearby Prep school for himself, and goes to interview the headmaster. The headmaster asks why the little boy’s father has not come to make the arrangements, but on being told his father is William Wollacombe of Cow fame, is delighted to take Titian as a pupil who can only bring reputation to the school. However, the curriculum at this prep school and subsequently at his minor public school does not engage Titian. It is dominated by useless subjects such as ‘ancient history, Latin and Greek’, while his interests are restricted solely to Commercial Geography and Book-keeping, which he has to teach himself in his spare time. In addition, he makes further good use of holidays and weekends to study the good and comparative prices in each of London’s chief department stores, and becomes a precocious expert on retail goods.
He has a further (I hope he would excuse the word again) epiphany when aged fifteen he meets a girl whom he finds irresistible, called Daisy. So far in his life Titian has never done emotion (except negative responses to his siblings, art and music), but he knows at once that he is in love (and of course he is singularly determined and never changes his mind about anything). She finds him odd, as she admits, but does not exactly reciprocate his feelings. Titian however determines to win her giving her everything she can want, and that he realises will need money. His epiphany is to realize that handling of goods will not be enough: he must handle that which underpins all goods: Money. He decides on the spot to aspire to a banking career in order to win Daisy (I wonder if Fraser had read Scott F. Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby published in both the US and Britain in 1925, and been partly influenced by his Daisy?). Soon, Titian departs from school with its many useless subjects, and becomes the most junior bank clerk.
He loves and lives banking, following its rules and principles scrupulously, and informing on any clerks who break any of them (such as incurring debts). Titian cannot understand why his peers all dislike him, and as we might expect he makes no friends. Next the narrative follows his swift career though the banking hierarchy: a repeated scene is a manager telling Titian that he personally very much dislikes him, but that he has no choice but to promote him for single-minded efficiency. The narrative has a clearly deliberate whirlwind pace, which soon has Titian working as a kind of special investigator for a national bank to see if big clients are as viable as they seem: he often reaches negative conclusions and their bankruptcy follows. In as much as he understands such a state he is happy: ‘He was now in the region of high finance, almost of politics. Next thing it would foreign currency, gold movements, and the real international racket. He was excited’ (p.70).
In due course, he is made Chairman of the London, Lambeth and Provinces Bank, and is advising the Government (civil servants and politicians) about matters monetary and economic, as the difficult conditions of the post-World War one period transition into the crises of the nineteen-thirties. None of these impact Titian, and his advice is always very orthodox (and includes the absolute necessity of returning to the Gold Standard). The narrative (in an uncharacteristic moment) observes without any further commentary that Titian has contributed to the unemployment and poverty of millions and to the prospect of another world war. He is knighted for services to banking.
However, for many years Daisy is resistant to his interest – and Titian notices that she goes out with two of his brothers in turn but that each chooses a different partner. Eventually, Daisy agrees to marry Titian and he is happy, though she makes it clear it is more of a business arrangement than anything else: she must be allowed to acquire all the things she wants, including a grand stately home, and to entertain constantly. It is not an intimate marriage, but they do have children. After some years, Daisy tells Titian at his request that she most of all wanted to marry into the great Woollacombe family of artists, but that in the end she only had the chance to marry the only unartistic family member and the one she least liked: him. This registers even on Titian, and indeed he has had some odd, unfathomable moments over the years when he had a half-feeling that there might be something in life he was missing.
In the main, the novel is a brilliantly external satire of an absolute materialist, but in the second half there are these odd moments which suggest that he has an inner being, even if he is hardly in contact with it. Towards the end of the novel, in a very different mode from the great majority of the narrative, he has a near-death experience and talks to his own Soul. On making a partial recovery, he insists on attending the premiere of his (naturally) musical son Michael’s symphony, which is indeed about a world beyond this (with a notable use of trumpets). Daisy and his family are convinced that going to the concert will kill Titian – because it will make him so impatient and angry! In fact, he does have his third epiphany while listening to the symphony: ‘Titian knew now what his children meant when they spoke of the Delectable Mountains and the Celestial City’ (p222). However, his wife and children never know of his conversion to things beyond the immediately material, because he does indeed die at the concert in this moment of revelation. It was only after I had finished this review and was looking for an image of the dustwrapper of Financial Times (my copy lacks one) that I realised that there is also a review of the novel by Brad Bigelow on the excellent Neglected Books website: see https://neglectedbooks.com/?p=6495 . On the whole, he takes a similar view as I do of the novel, praising many of its features (including its opening sentence), but is sceptical about how well the change of mode at the end works. I would recommend his review and also Ronald Fraser’s novel: forgotten but well worth reading. I wonder if his twenty-six other novels (many written while a career diplomat) are as striking?