Which Way?, page 16
Alan and his grandfather were great friends, and after tea they retired together to have a treasure hunt in the latter’s bedroom. Claudia sat on in the drawing-room window seat in a mood of idle speculation.
Vaguely, her father often reminded her a little of Hugo. He, and her mother too, were more in his line of country than in hers and Lionel’s. And yet she couldn’t see much wrong with herself and Lionel. They weren’t blind to the responsibility of their good fortune. They were generous both in hospitality and in charity. They were “very good sorts.” Why should he work if he needn’t, and didn’t want to? What could he work at? On the whole, Lionel lived up to his own lights on living. Could she say the same of herself?
Claudia was not given to introspection. Generally she was almost too easy going and unmorbid. But it was, she felt, one thing to know what was wrong and comfortably to ignore it, cheerfully forget it, and quite another to lose the capacity for realising that there was anything wrong at all. She was and would be content, but as a matter of academic interest, as a mental and spiritual exercise, she must be able to put her finger on what was amiss.
It wasn’t really that she never thought of Hugo and Eileen, and never missed them at all. She thought of them from time to time with love, but she was so personal that since they had left her life, all that they had stood for had gone out of it too. Could she be so adaptable that having no one now with whom to share soul experiences she simply ceased to have them?
Dash it all, what was wrong with her? She was a person anyone could tell their troubles or trust their secrets to. And surely it must be right to be contented. With Alan’s crowing laugh coming through the wall, it must be right to be contented. Wasn’t happiness after all the test, the proof, of good heart and good sense as well as good digestion? Nothing was commoner than depression and discontent. Those were bad things and quite too easy. Besides, they befell the Cazlitts and the Joyces, while Reynoldses and Heseltines were happy. Well then? “No, I remember the answer,” she told herself, and getting up she found a volume of Aldous Huxley and turned the leaves till she found a certain paragraph. She read:
“Nemesis isn’t a policewoman. Nemesis isn’t moral. At least she is only incidentally moral, more or less by accident. Nemesis is something like gravitation, indifferent. All that she does is to ensure that you shall reap what you sow. And if you sow self-stultification … you reap grotesque humiliation. But if you’re already reduced by your offences to a subhuman condition, you won’t notice that the grotesque humiliation is a humiliation. That’s your explanation why Nemesis sometimes seems to reward. What she brings is a humiliation only in the absolute sense—for the ideal and complete human being; or at any rate, in practice, for the nearly complete, the approaching-the-ideal human being. For the subhuman specimen it may seem a triumph, a consummation, a fulfilment of the heart’s desire.”
Claudia was pleased with her cleverness—though it was really Mr. Huxley’s—in disposing of her own case. She felt quite happy; happy, as she generally was; happy as she now understood happiness. The sun came out in splendid generosity, flooding over the jars of white and mauve lilac from Chesnor and, which was more to the point, illuming the little ruby ring that Lionel had given her a few days ago for her twenty-eighth birthday. Not that she didn’t care for lilac too: indeed she and Lionel were both very fond of it. And as the sun came, golden and comforting, a barrel organ began to play the “Blue Danube” outside.
“Why worry?” thought Claudia. “It’s all a toss up. One can’t help oneself. With me it was just a matter of which of three week-ends I chanced to choose five years ago. If I had gone to Hugo’s, or to Lalage’s for that matter, he and I would have married, and life would have been one lovely adventure for both of us all in the heights of virtue and pure thought. I might have met an unknown affinity at Lalage’s and made earth heaven. Well it’s no good cursing one’s luck, but they can’t blame me.”
And she asked herself, did it matter that now the countries she had vainly imagined she might penetrate with Hugo must for her remain for ever unexplored? She said, as a solid, practical amende honorable to the Holy Ghost:
“As we’ve got so much money and a happy home, perhaps it’s our duty to have a child every other year.”
Part VI
Which Way?
Room, while I stand outside you in the gloom,
Your tranquil-toned interior, void of me,
Seems part of my own self which I can see.
…
Light, while I stand outside you in the night,
Shutting the door on what has housed so much,
Nor hand, nor eye, nor intellect could touch,—
Cell to whose firelit walls I say farewell,
Could I condense five winters in one thought,
Then might I know my unknown self and tell
What our confederate silences have wrought.
Siegfried Sassoon.
There was no one in the room. Blinds and curtains were closed; the light of the skies, if any, was shut out. There was about the place the curious, expectant air of a stage set for the curtain to rise. For while hill and plain and valley are eternal and care not what fugitive dramas take them for setting, a room exists only for men and women. It is there to hear their many lies and their frightened truths; to shelter their secret thoughts; to look on at their moods of helpless revolt—things can never be the same again … I must do something! … I must do something! … And there is nothing to do but have a bath and go to bed. An empty room is always waiting.
There was a fire in the room; very comforting and gay. It threw a lovely liquid sheet of orange on the big armchairs each side of it. It sent a flickering glow on to the gallery table where lay weekly and daily papers, magazines, a few books lately thrown down. In front of the fire was a low stool, behind that a deep, soft sofa. Against one wall were shelves of books; opposite, a writing-table framed by the dull, peach-coloured curtains of the windows. Branches and trails of flowers stood in great jars, drained of their colour in the shadows but not of their faint sweetness. The cushions were fluffed out, inviting. An antique clock marked time in a hushed monotone. Only the fire was alive, consuming its life—for what? Then the door opened and as Claudia came with hurried steps into the fire’s glow, two open letters in her hand, the telephone began ringing. She shut the door and turned up the lights.
Afterword
In the past two decades or so, the term ‘sliding doors moment’ has been used to describe how seemingly inconsequential instances can greatly alter the course of one’s life, or even of history. The term refers to Peter Howitt’s 1998 film Sliding Doors, which follows two parallel timelines. In one Gwyneth Paltrow’s Helen catches the London Underground train she is running for; while in the other she misses it. One of these leads to catching her boyfriend having sex with another woman; the other does not. Similar to the butterfly effect, a tiny incident causes ripples with much further reaching consequences – and the film plays out the parallel timelines simultaneously.
This central conceit has been linked to J.B. Priestley’s 1932 play Dangerous Corner, in which a chance remark by one of the characters leads to the exposure of affairs and other secrets, and even to suicide. The final scene of the play shows what would have happened if the remark had not been made – leaving a happily-ever-after for all the characters. Only a year earlier, Theodora Benson’s fourth novel, Which Way?, explored the same idea.
Appropriately for a comparison with Priestley, the opening section that establishes ‘the four cross roads’ feels very much like the setting up of a play. The novel’s first words, ‘There was no one in the room. Blinds and curtains were closed’, are like stage directions, and this continues in a description of the fireplace, the book-laden table, the sofa. And then …
The door opened and as Claudia came with hurried steps into the fire’s glow, two open letters in her hand, the telephone began ringing. She shut the door and turned up the lights.
The lights are up and the play is ready to begin. The letters and the telephone call are offering her invitations for an upcoming weekend – and her ‘sliding doors moment’ is choosing which to accept. The course of Claudia’s life will take very different turns, depending on her decision. Ultimately, two lead to marriage and all three lead to romantic unfaithfulness of one sort or another, and her state of mind at the end of each section varies significantly. More than this, though, each path shows Claudia choosing a different way to be a woman in the 1930s.
Before Claudia reaches the crossroads, she muses on her romantic future with her friend Eileen. Together, they sing the refrain from a nineteenth-century folk song, ‘I Know Where I’m Going’: “I know where I’m going / and I know who’s going with me / And I know who I love / but the de’il knows who I’ll marry!” The ballad is about a wealthy young woman who has fallen for Johnny, a man with a bad reputation – like the woman, Claudia doesn’t know whom she’ll marry, though Johnny stand-ins may appear later.
The initial choice between the three paths seems to be between three men: glamorous, married Guy; dependable novelist Hugo; Adonis-but-dim Lionel. But though each invitation does lead to Claudia developing a relationship with these respective men, it is the shifts in Claudia that stand out the most. While recognisably the same person we’ve been introduced to in the opening quarter of the novel, different facets of her character come to the fore.
By ‘turning to the left’ and accepting the invitation to stay with Lalage and encounter Guy again, ‘an ordinary enough man of thirty-seven’, it isn’t long before she is having an affair with him. There is background discussion of a divorce trial, echoing their affair, though ultimately there is no real likelihood that Guy will follow suit. There were only 3,764 divorces in 1931 – a number that wouldn’t significantly jump until the Second World War. Claudia has fallen into becoming ‘the other woman’, as lightly and wittily as she does anything else, and it means that, when their relationship suddenly ends, there is no obligatory drawn-out conclusion.
The end is not on her own terms. Turning to the left has handed most of the power to Guy – even in one of their first meetings, he ‘took her arm in a firm grip and steered her briskly to the house’, dictating her actions while she falls in step with him. So, while she ‘protracted the death agonies of the relationship’, as Benson drily phrases it, Guy makes ‘polite, convincing, regretful excuses’ to all her suggestions for meeting. Claudia believes that she has become an example of a type she despises: ‘difficult women who want to be exacting and make themselves felt instead of being natural.’
The section ends with her doctrine being that she can only find happiness by reconciling two apparent opposites; ‘to be free and not to be lonely’. The narrator quickly rules out two possible stereotypes for Claudia’s future – she will go neither ‘to the good’ or ‘to the bad’; the former being good works like ‘slum visiting’, and the latter not explicitly spelled out. It is the only path of the three that leads to happiness, even though she thinks she has missed
… the sweetest of men to love and be loved by always, an interesting, intellectual life, a house of my own, children to beguile and worry and fill my middle age, perfect happiness—if I hadn’t just happened to go to Farling instead of Gloucestershire for a week-end five years ago.
‘Going straight on’ looks at what happens if she had gone to Farling – and, of course, it is not the idyllic vision that she imagines. She enters marriage with a sense of obligation, and without fully knowing everything it is likely to entail: she avoids hearing ‘various things of vaguely sinister import’ from her mother, though this level of ignorance was far less common by the late 1920s (when the scene is set) than it had been a decade earlier. Marie Stopes’ 1918 work Married Love was the most popular of the many books that explained sex and sexuality to a generation of women – supposedly aimed at married women, as the title suggests, but doubtless read by many others. Married Love had sold 750,000 copies by the time Which Way? was published and spawned a number of imitations. Other guides relating to the infertility issues faced by the couple would also have been available, though with little practicable advice to give other than hoping for the best.
If she was the ‘other woman’ in the first section, she becomes an adulterous wife in the second – again with Guy. Both sections end with some regret at the choice of invitations she made. Here she tells Guy, “If I’d chosen a different week-end visit five years ago, you and I would have been perfectly safe and happy for evermore.” Benson lets the sentence hang heavy with irony; we already know, of course, that this wouldn’t have been the case. But this is no moral tale. It isn’t unfaithfulness that leads to unhappiness – the two may coincide, but without causation. Wider society, in each section of Which Way?, seems equally unfazed by Claudia’s closeness to a man she isn’t married to. In the 1930s, as in many decades, these moral censorships struck more keenly at women from lower classes. While a maid might lose her job for having ‘followers’, a ‘higher-class’ woman of the period could conceivably be viewed simply as bohemian for similar behaviour – as long as nothing sexual was too overt.
The final pathway, to the right, leads Claudia to the opposite of Hugo: Lionel is an ‘astonishingly handsome’ polo player and not at all intelligent or cultured. With him, she quickly becomes the type of 1930s woman whose defence against the ego of an unintelligent man is to quash signs of her own intelligence. She cannot be blamed for the standards of her age, of course; in her early conversations with Lionel, she tells him that a female friend is ‘not very’ clever – an assurance given ‘loyally’, and clearly considered to the friend’s credit. He openly tells Claudia that he wouldn’t love her as much if she weren’t pretty.
The person that Claudia becomes with Hugo and Lionel respectively is subtly shown through the ways that these sections use quotations in the characters’ speech and thought. While the narrative with Lionel often reverts to popular dance-hall music of the period, such as ‘Abdul Abulbul Amir’, Hugo and Claudia covertly quote the Bible to each other. Claudia asks, “How shall they hear without a preacher?”, with reference to Romans 10:14, which exhorts believers to share the good news of Jesus. A couple of pages later Hugo follows suit, when he questions whether he would be willing to “drink of the cup you drank of”, obliquely citing Matthew 20:22, where Jesus rhetorically asks two of His disciples if they would be willing to suffer as He must suffer. Hugo reads her Shakespeare (The Tempest and Cymbeline are quoted) as well as more recent poems by Edna St Vincent Millay and Alfred Noyes. Their shared cultural touchstones are far more elevated.
Indeed, when Claudia first meets Hugo and he introduces himself as the novelist of Paid in Full, The House of the Fool, and Celia Remembered, she rattles off a list of titles he might have written – The Good Companions, Portrait in a Mirror, Brief Candles, and The Edwardians. These books, by J.B. Priestley, Charles Morgan, Aldous Huxley, and Vita Sackville-West respectively, were all published in the couple of years before Which Way?. Both Hugo and the reader are expected to recognise references to recent literary culture, as well as scorning the popular novelists Dornford Yates and E. Phillips Oppenheim as the reading material of a “half-baked nitwit”.
Conversely, when Lionel does read to a pregnant Claudia, ‘badly but not unintelligibly’, he chooses ‘rousing classics of schoolroom, and the Book Society’s novels’. Set up in 1929 with a selection committee including Hugh Walpole and J.B. Priestly, the Book Society was a ‘book-of-the-month’ club which sent subscribers a book and a selection of recommended alternatives if they didn’t want it. Though selections included authors such as Virginia Woolf and D.H. Lawrence, domestic and ‘middlebrow’ fiction were the mainstay and the Society and others like it were frequently disparaged by highbrow authors and critics as commodifying literature and dictating that people should enjoy a mediocre literary diet.
But Claudia is not satisfied with either Hugo or Lionel. It is partly as an escape from Hugo’s intellectualism that Claudia starts to see Guy. One of their outings is to Nervo and Knox – Jimmy Nervo and Teddy Knox – a music-hall double act who combined circus acts with humorous songs and physical comedy. They appeared on stage and screen and, in the year Which Way? was published, were founding members of the popular comedy group the Crazy Gang.
Guy and Claudia return, quoting parts of the act – ‘Cut yourself a piece of throat’, for instance, which appears to be a riff on a popular 1920s tune ‘Cut Yourself a Piece of Cake’ – and other stray lines that suggest Benson may well have attended this or a similar show herself.
They agreed how heavenly it was to be low-brow, how useless it would have been to have gone to this perfect slapstick performance with Hugo. [...] Guy and Claudia exchanged unrepentant glances. He’d have been precious, patronisingly intellectual. He wouldn’t have enjoyed in the right way.
The trend of enjoying ‘bad’ entertainment ironically is clearly not new, and it is something Claudia wishes to resist. But in the final section, where she is married to ‘straightforward, stupid’ Lionel, she goes with Hugo to see Ernest Lotinga, a comic actor known for his character ‘Jimmy Josser’, using a contemporary slang term for an unintelligent person. They love it. She suggests Noel Coward’s 1930 Private Lives “would be a complete flop here” – it was, at that time, a recent play and remains popular to this day, about a divorced couple who find they are honeymooning with their new spouses in adjacent hotel rooms. The comedy of mismatched couples repeating their mistakes might ring true with readers of Which Way?.
