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Brandy for the parson, baccy for the clerk, laces for a lady, letters for a spy
Smoky House (1940) was Elizabeth Goudge's first novel for children and fortunately she got better, but I am fascinated that for her first outing she tried a sentimental and redemptive fable of fairies, angels, and wise animals riffing so strongly on Kipling's "A Smuggler's Song" (Puck of Pook's Hill, 1906) that it contains not only the brandy and tobacco, the parson and the clerk, the laces and the spy and the doll all the way from France, but its own ballad of looking the other way. The results are an incredibly mixed bag. Not even chapter by chapter, but scene by scene the tone careens between merry adventure, moral instruction, and treaclous levels of twee. The high-wire numinous intermingling of Fairy and Paradise which is the foundation of The Valley of Song (1951) gets a foreshadowing in this novel's household-helpful Good People and the Angel-of-the-Left-Hand-Back-Bedpost, but their metaphysics are nowhere near as successfully blended, especially when Goudge is still classing the old gods among the unseelie company of the moor-haunting Bad People. The Christianity overall is much stickier than I associate with her work, whose bedrock Anglicanism elsewhere shows no difficulty in coexisting with various strains of folk magic, classical myths, and even the zodiacal, elemental hierarchies of mysticism or ritual magic. Here it seems primarily a matter of praying very nicely, which isn't even how it works in her adult novels to this point:
Faith, as no doubt you have discovered, is a very powerful force. If you believe sufficiently firmly that something nice is going to happen to you it generally does happen. Your faith is like a fishing rod with a hook on the end. You can reach out with it and hook the thing that you want towards you.
Lady, if there were any virtue in the power of positive thinking, my excitement at discovering a hitherto unread children's Goudge in the Malden Public Library earlier this week would have made this book much better than it is. The language is consistently charming to lovely, especially when describing the natural world or music or the less precious manifestations of angels and fairies. The youngest of the five children is a believable eight-year-old who communicates preferentially through such disruptive and eloquent noises as cats-on-the-roof, cork-coming-out-of-a-bottle, squeaking-slate-pencil, and lions-roaring-after-their-prey, failing which she will just yell. The best of the three animals is a magnificently rotten-tempered jennet who can scent the thoughts in a human mind as if catching them on the wind and will unerringly eat the most cherished bush of flowers in any garden. The most poetry in the story clusters ironically around its least pleasant character, the sharply secretive Fiddler whose misery radiates off him as mystifyingly as the beauty of his playing which is likened to the music of Pan and the angels and can gladden any listener but himself:
He was certainly worth looking at. He was unusually tall and thin, and dark not with the russet colouring of the West Country but with the unfamiliar sallow darkness of a foreigner . . . And when West Country people speak of a foreigner they don't necessarily mean someone born in a foreign land, but just some one not born in the West Country . . . His eyes were very black, set in deep pits of shadow, and seeming to be without light even when he smiled. His face, lean and hard, looked half-starved, and his lips had a bitter twist to them. His clothes were mad and gay; a bright blue coat, an orange scarf twisted round his throat, a black hat with a wide curly brim; but torn and shabby and mud-splashed. He wore gold rings in his ears and red ribbons fluttered from his fiddle.
Much later, when he is thinking over his life with something more than his usual embittered self-justification, the animals who are his only audience think that his regret smells like violets. That kind of poignant, poetically unexpected detail taps much more into Goudge's strengths than cutely informing the reader that the mer-people, despite being the prettiest of all the fairies, are also the stupidest because spending so much time in the sea is like having a perpetual cold in the head. I am guessing she panicked over the youth of her audience, since Island Magic (1934) which is shot through with fairy lore has no equivalent propensity toward saccharine, but it means that when she writes of the world under the roots of the trees of which humans can merely dream and even the best of dogs is permitted only a day, its caverns roofed with glow-worms and curtained with green leaves, its inhabitants occupied with the immortal work of caring for their subterranean charges of foxes and rabbits and moles, it bounces off Arthur Rackham and Richard Dadd and comes to rest, with an infant mole being taught to say its prayers, with Brian Jacques. It really does feel like a dry run for the Valley of Song—flower fairies who take care of the flowers, and insect fairies who look after the butterflies and bees and things, and tree fairies and bird fairies and animal fairies—and if she needed to write one in order to get to the other, since the other was a formative book of my childhood I am glad that she did, but the power and the weirdness are not there yet in Smoky House. I am much more persuaded by the idea of music being like time in that nothing is ever lost in it. And if it is apparent that many of the novel's whimsies do not land for me, I genuinely like the punch line to the otherwise tiresomely moralizing discovery that money gained by theft cannot be redistributed even with good intent without passing at least a minor misfortune on:
And the next day there would be rumours all over the countryside that the-Man-with-the-Handkerchief had been seen again, that a rich traveller had been robbed up on the high moors, and that a poor traveller had had a bag of money thrown at his feet by the unseen hand of a Good Person, and had heard a voice saying from behind a heather-covered hillock, "Pick this up if you don't mind having spots."
tl;dr the novel is minor Goudge and I am not sorry to have read it, especially its sketch-forms of ideas she would much more creatively return to, but I am probably not its target audience beyond its intertextuality—for good measure, there are echoes also of Shakespeare and Yeats—and being a sucker for certain character trajectories even when didactically written. I finished it and went and re-read the Pharaoh Lee stories out of Kipling's Rewards and Fairies (1910) and will re-read some other Goudge as soon as I can borrow it. I like having a library in my life which reminds me of the ones in my childhood, whether it furnishes me with the same kind of favorites or not.
Faith, as no doubt you have discovered, is a very powerful force. If you believe sufficiently firmly that something nice is going to happen to you it generally does happen. Your faith is like a fishing rod with a hook on the end. You can reach out with it and hook the thing that you want towards you.
Lady, if there were any virtue in the power of positive thinking, my excitement at discovering a hitherto unread children's Goudge in the Malden Public Library earlier this week would have made this book much better than it is. The language is consistently charming to lovely, especially when describing the natural world or music or the less precious manifestations of angels and fairies. The youngest of the five children is a believable eight-year-old who communicates preferentially through such disruptive and eloquent noises as cats-on-the-roof, cork-coming-out-of-a-bottle, squeaking-slate-pencil, and lions-roaring-after-their-prey, failing which she will just yell. The best of the three animals is a magnificently rotten-tempered jennet who can scent the thoughts in a human mind as if catching them on the wind and will unerringly eat the most cherished bush of flowers in any garden. The most poetry in the story clusters ironically around its least pleasant character, the sharply secretive Fiddler whose misery radiates off him as mystifyingly as the beauty of his playing which is likened to the music of Pan and the angels and can gladden any listener but himself:
He was certainly worth looking at. He was unusually tall and thin, and dark not with the russet colouring of the West Country but with the unfamiliar sallow darkness of a foreigner . . . And when West Country people speak of a foreigner they don't necessarily mean someone born in a foreign land, but just some one not born in the West Country . . . His eyes were very black, set in deep pits of shadow, and seeming to be without light even when he smiled. His face, lean and hard, looked half-starved, and his lips had a bitter twist to them. His clothes were mad and gay; a bright blue coat, an orange scarf twisted round his throat, a black hat with a wide curly brim; but torn and shabby and mud-splashed. He wore gold rings in his ears and red ribbons fluttered from his fiddle.
Much later, when he is thinking over his life with something more than his usual embittered self-justification, the animals who are his only audience think that his regret smells like violets. That kind of poignant, poetically unexpected detail taps much more into Goudge's strengths than cutely informing the reader that the mer-people, despite being the prettiest of all the fairies, are also the stupidest because spending so much time in the sea is like having a perpetual cold in the head. I am guessing she panicked over the youth of her audience, since Island Magic (1934) which is shot through with fairy lore has no equivalent propensity toward saccharine, but it means that when she writes of the world under the roots of the trees of which humans can merely dream and even the best of dogs is permitted only a day, its caverns roofed with glow-worms and curtained with green leaves, its inhabitants occupied with the immortal work of caring for their subterranean charges of foxes and rabbits and moles, it bounces off Arthur Rackham and Richard Dadd and comes to rest, with an infant mole being taught to say its prayers, with Brian Jacques. It really does feel like a dry run for the Valley of Song—flower fairies who take care of the flowers, and insect fairies who look after the butterflies and bees and things, and tree fairies and bird fairies and animal fairies—and if she needed to write one in order to get to the other, since the other was a formative book of my childhood I am glad that she did, but the power and the weirdness are not there yet in Smoky House. I am much more persuaded by the idea of music being like time in that nothing is ever lost in it. And if it is apparent that many of the novel's whimsies do not land for me, I genuinely like the punch line to the otherwise tiresomely moralizing discovery that money gained by theft cannot be redistributed even with good intent without passing at least a minor misfortune on:
And the next day there would be rumours all over the countryside that the-Man-with-the-Handkerchief had been seen again, that a rich traveller had been robbed up on the high moors, and that a poor traveller had had a bag of money thrown at his feet by the unseen hand of a Good Person, and had heard a voice saying from behind a heather-covered hillock, "Pick this up if you don't mind having spots."
tl;dr the novel is minor Goudge and I am not sorry to have read it, especially its sketch-forms of ideas she would much more creatively return to, but I am probably not its target audience beyond its intertextuality—for good measure, there are echoes also of Shakespeare and Yeats—and being a sucker for certain character trajectories even when didactically written. I finished it and went and re-read the Pharaoh Lee stories out of Kipling's Rewards and Fairies (1910) and will re-read some other Goudge as soon as I can borrow it. I like having a library in my life which reminds me of the ones in my childhood, whether it furnishes me with the same kind of favorites or not.
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Thank you! I love The Valley of Song. I don't even think I agree with most of it theologically and I love it. It has such deep, strange strength that I can live with its occasional hiccups. Parts of it have been in my head for almost forty years. I hope it treats you well.
[edit] I can also guarantee that it requires no content warnings for sexual assault.
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Also I did not know 'A Smuggler's Song' either, and I like it very much. It does make smugglers sound oddly like fairies.
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It does! "The Gentlemen" totally sounds like a euphemistic name.
(I really love Peter Bellamy's settings of Kipling's poems. I fell into them almost twenty years ago and learned many of the poems by their tunes.)
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Right out of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell! :D
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Little White Horse or bust, but this was a very good review and obviously written by a person with a deep grounding in Magical Children’s Literature, books in which there may be steep peril but, to possibly manglequote F.H. Burnett, the magic won’t let the very worst thing happen. (Eli seems to have jacked my bedroom copy of A Little Princess, which I’d’ve thought not enough of a boy book for him.)
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I still think you've got to walk toward the thing when it's dowsing. She must have meant telewhatsis.
Little White Horse or bust, but this was a very good review and obviously written by a person with a deep grounding in Magical Children’s Literature, books in which there may be steep peril but, to possibly manglequote F.H. Burnett, the magic won’t let the very worst thing happen.
Thank you! I did read a lot of that.
(Eli seems to have jacked my bedroom copy of A Little Princess, which I’d’ve thought not enough of a boy book for him.)
I am delighted. If he goes for it enough, we should pirate him the 1986 LWT version.
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Then we should just watch it.
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BWAHAHAHA. <3 The number of times I've had a similar response to someone banging on about positive thinking.
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You do understand! (Thank you.)
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I love the details of this that you offer that are not treacly--the child talking in noises, and the jennet that scents thoughts are brilliant, as is regret that smells like violets. But mermaids with headcolds and moles being taught their prayers, not so much.
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I very much hope you enjoy it then!
I love the details of this that you offer that are not treacly--the child talking in noises, and the jennet that scents thoughts are brilliant, as is regret that smells like violets. But mermaids with headcolds and moles being taught their prayers, not so much.
It's just such a scramble. And she was writing perfectly functional novels for adults all through the learning curve of writing for children, which also fascinates me, since I don't think of the two as all that different the way she wrote for both at her best, but either the skill set transferred less than I would have expected or she had to learn to trust herself that it did. Not appearing in this review is the untidy, energetic, red-haired young Squire, whom I also like when he isn't stuck by the plot with anything too soppy. He has an argument near the end about the cruelty of imprisonment even when it is made comfortable and safe which hasn't gone out of relevance even when the notion of an angel stork-delivering babies has mercifully I hope gone the way of the dodo.
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I hope it was more of a cultural wink than a real thing that people told their children to believe, but I've never been sure. I am not a good test case for any of these household myths. I knew about human sexual reproduction by the age of three. There was a maybe-baby coming.
But yes, absolutely, re: imprisonment.
It's a good argument and unexpected in the book!
"All in favour of imprisonment?" said the Squire sadly.
All the hands were held up.
"And what's more," said Thomas Trecarrel, "I've been speaking to one and another through the day, and we think it had better be the safest kind of imprisonment we can think of. His Reverence's suggestion was the best—lock him up in the Church tower."
"Who's in favour of the Church tower?" asked the Squire.
All the hands were held up.
"You've made a very cruel decision," said the Squire. "Just think what it will be like for the poor wretch to spend his life shut within four stone walls, with only a little narrow window to look out of."
"There's a beautiful view of woods and hills from the window," said John Treguddick.
"With nothing to do," said the Squire.
"He's going to peal the bells for me," said the Parson.
"He'll have a better fate than he deserves," said Thomas Trecarrel.
"He'll have a horrid fate," said the Squire. "Just think. What greater torment can there be than looking out of a narrow window at green hills that you can't walk over, and flower-filled woods that you can't ramble through? It's like setting a pitcher of water where a thirsty man can't reach it. And what comfort will there be in ringing bells that only tell him how slowly the hours pass?"
"There's nothing like bells to make you feel soft-hearted," said the Parson. "I shouldn't wonder if they brought him to repentance."
"I should wonder very much," said the Squire. "I've never known bells make people sorry for their sins, though I have known kindness make them sorry. Think again, gentlemen, think again."
(The Squire loses the vote, but wins the argument, since it is kindness that does make a change without even trying imprisonment first, I said elliptically about a book I am not even actively attempting to persuade anyone to read.)
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"I've never known bells make people sorry for their sins, though I have known kindness make them sorry. Think again, gentlemen, think again."
I need a T-shirt that says, "Think again, gentlemen, think again."
Or at least, I *would* need it if I didn't have an unpleasant sense that messages about kindness have been coopted in much the way that messages about civility have. I DO believe in the universal good of kindness (whereas I find civility a kind of empty term), but I DON'T believe in kindness as a panacea, and I see people sometimes talking about being kind in much the same way that I see them offering hopes and prayers. Kindness is good, but it needs substance.
--sorry: totally irrelevant rant that I put myself up to thinking about the hypothetical T-shirt. In the end, I think the T-shirt may be worth it anyway.
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I think it would make a great T-shirt and I would understand the spirit in which you wore it was very far from thoughts and prayers.
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I think Joan Aiken said something once about her children’s books and her adult books becoming more like each other over the years as she got less afraid of the children not being able to cope with the material-- though given that she killed off Dido Twite in the first novel in which she appeared, and only brought her back after receiving a letter from a young fan, I don’t believe she could have been *too* worried, even in the early days, about traumatizing younger readers.
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Now that makes me sorry she didn't write more deranged Arthuriana for adults.
Ironically, I realized last night that Goudge averts something in Smoky House which annoys me in at least two of her adult novels, although mostly I wish she just hadn't committed it at all.
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Having lived in the West Country (long ago), I have to say that this is spot-on!
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I appreciate the authenticity check! Goudge was herself from Somerset.
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I only picked up on her at all thanks to random adult books in charity shops that I must have liked the look of, and I love several of those very much indeed. She's actually quite hard to find over here and has been for some decades.
It doesn't sound like this would be the one to start with, anyway! But I'm glad it turned up so you could see what it was like, because that kind of thing is important, obv. <3
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I grew up with a chunk of first editions that belonged to my mother, mostly adult novels—The Valley of Song famously came from the Cambridge Public Library, where I treasured it all through elementary school until one year some miserable twerp who wasn't me stole it. It's my favorite of anything she wrote, although I have good memories of A City of Bells (1936) and The Dean's Watch (1960) in particular, and have re-read The Little White Horse (1946) and Linnets and Valerians (1964) recently enough to know I still like them. The Child from the Sea (1970) features technically an ancestor of mine in a position of extreme romantic angst that in real life was a lot more casually poly—I was able to read some of the relevant letters in grad school—which makes it impossible for me to regard the book as anything other than crackfic, but its author loved it.
It doesn't sound like this would be the one to start with, anyway! But I'm glad it turned up so you could see what it was like, because that kind of thing is important, obv.
Thank you! I was glad to have the chance, too. Would definitely not recommend starting with it. But if you ever see a copy of The Valley of Song in a charity shop, pounce.
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Of those I've read, those are the two that have stood up the most for me as well. I think there are still a couple I haven't actually read though.
The Child from the Sea (1970) features technically an ancestor of mine in a position of extreme romantic angst that in real life was a lot more casually poly—I was able to read some of the relevant letters in grad school—which makes it impossible for me to regard the book as anything other than crackfic, but its author loved it.
I had a copy of this for a long time, but I never read it because of being ill and eventually gave it up because I despaired of ever having brain. I probably do, just, now, but OTOH it was tiny writing in that copy, so I may have been correct. But ahahaha, how strange and cool. And cracky, indeed.
But if you ever see a copy of The Valley of Song in a charity shop, pounce.
I will!
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I'm glad to hear they hold up! I'll return to them. I have definitely not read all of her novels for any age. Green Dolphin Country (1944) is the famous one in the U.S. and I did enjoy it, although its film incarnation as Green Dolphin Street (1947) is flawed in just about every way possible for a Hollywood gloss. (But it contains Van Heflin as my favorite character from the novel, so of course I watched it.) The only one I can remember actively disliking is The Heart of the Matter (1953), which goes fine right until the ending and then I want to drop-kick it out a window. The White Witch (1958) disappointed me as a young reader by containing more romance than magic.
But ahahaha, how strange and cool. And cracky, indeed.
He isn't even mentioned in the jacket copy! I wasn't expecting him! I remain unconvinced of her historical characterization but very entertained!
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Oh, Green Dolphin Country was the one I had for ages and didn't read; the other was one I had for less time and didn't read (for the same reason, though.) I didn't know any of them had been filmed.
The Heart of the Matter (1953), which goes fine right until the ending and then I want to drop-kick it out a window.
I can't remember why now, but I know that I agreed with this, enough that I couldn't, in the end, even keep The Bird in the Tree, which I had loved until that one spoiled things.
The White Witch (1958) disappointed me as a young reader by containing more romance than magic.
I don't recognise that title at all, but I definitely had the same reaction to one of them! Or, indeed, to any book that had titles suggesting magic and then didn't deliver. False advertising and worse! XD
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It's the only one of her adult novels that I know to have been! I wrote minimally about it in 2016. The Little White Horse was read by Daphne Slater for Jackanory in 1967, dramatized as a miniseries by the BBC in 1994, and filmed in 2009. I have no information about the fidelity of any of these versions to their novel, although since the miniseries contains Jean Anderson, Iain Cuthbertson, Philip Madoc, and Miriam Margolyes, I am biased in the direction of hoping it doesn't suck. That's it. I'm not sure why none of the others. Linnets and Valerians would also have adapted just fine as a serial. (It's set in Edwardian-era Devonshire! It stars four chaotic siblings and several eccentric adults! It's full of black and white folk magic! There are mysteries to solve! There's an apparition of Pan! It should have been a shoo-in in the '70's.)
I can't remember why now, but I know that I agreed with this, enough that I couldn't, in the end, even keep The Bird in the Tree, which I had loved until that one spoiled things.
I'm so sorry. I never actually read the other Eliot novels, so was spared the contamination. *hugs*
I don't recognise that title at all, but I definitely had the same reaction to one of them! Or, indeed, to any book that had titles suggesting magic and then didn't deliver. False advertising and worse!
You get it! It took me a long time to come to terms with any book whose dragon in the title turned out to be a metaphor.
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Yes, that does sound like something the 1970s really did adapt in another universe if not in this one. :-)
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I don't see what it could hurt to follow, if you have gifts in your immediate future.