Showing posts with label Enid Bagnold. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Enid Bagnold. Show all posts

Wednesday, February 18, 2009

Enid Bagnold - A Diary Without Dates

A Diary Without Dates, by Enid Bagnold, is an odd little book that I very much enjoyed. I read it back in December but got sidetracked as I started writing about it. But I still think it is worth talking about.

In her Preface, Bagnold explains:

This book was written when I was nineteen. I was sent away from a vast, weary military hospital for having written it, - because (a) to publish it was a breach of military discipline (at that date, and at the beginning of the war; afterwards everybody turned author); and (b) the breach was glaring because antagonism to the sisters showed through what I wrote.

The war was World War I and the hospital was the Royal Herbert Hospital Woolwich, although neither of those facts is disclosed in the book. Sisters were the "real" nurses (the equivalent of an RN) while others who were called "nurse" were at a lower training level. Bagnold was a VAD - a member of the Voluntary Aid Detachment through which girls volunteered for the war effort. They, in effect, took the place of the male orderlies who would have been sent to the Front.

The book does read like excerpts of a diary and in her Preface Bagnold says that she "wrote my little nightly letter to myself, which is this book." She doesn't make clear how she was able to get it published at the age of nineteen in the middle of a war.

There are, as the title indicates, no dates to the entries. It isn't clear to me that the entries are necessarily chronological although the book is divided into three parts: "Outside the Glass Doors", "Inside the Glass Doors" and "The Boys ..." which segregate the book into the various jobs that Bagnold did in the hospital. At first she laid trays and delivered meals. Then she begins to work in a ward of officers. In the final section she works in a ward of enlisted men (the "boys"). But although she sometimes goes into detail on what she is doing and about the men in the hospital, it is really a book of "impressions" and, among other things, she writes beautiful, serene, impressions of her walks home from the hospital through the countryside. But her impressions of the men in the hospital and her reactions to them are what makes this book stand out.

From the first part where she carries trays of food:

Pain ...

To stand up straight on one's feet, strong, easy, without the surging of any physical sensation, by a bedside whose coverings are flung here and there by the quivering nerves beneath it ... there is a sort of shame in such strength.

"What can I do for you?" my eyes cry dumbly into his crowded brown pupils.

I was told to carry trays from a ward where I had never been before - just to carry trays, orderly's work, no more.

No. 22 was lying flat on his back, his knees drawn up under him, the sheets up to his chin; his flat, chalk-white face tilted at the ceiling. As I bent over to get his untouched tray his tortured brown eyes fell on me.

"I'm in pain, Sister," he said.

No one has ever said that to me in that tone.

From Part II where she is in the officer's ward watching the patients interact with each other:

They know so little about each other, and they don't ask. It is only I who wonder - I, a woman, and therefore of the old, burnt-out world. These men watch without curiosity, speak no personalities, form no sets, express no likings, analyze nothing. They are new-born; they have as yet no standards and do not look for any.

Ah, to have had that experience too. ... I am of the old world

Again and again I realize, "A nation in arms . . . "

Watchmakers, jewelers, station masters, dress-designers, actors, travelers in underwear, bank clerks ... they come here in uniforms and we put them into pyjamas and nurse them; and they lie in bed or hobble about the ward, watching us as we move, accepting each other with the unquestioning faith of children.

The entire book is disjointed little passages like this, like what you would write in your diary. Where there is a narrative, it peters out. We hear from time to time of the attentions of Mr. Pettitt, the patient who has a crush on her, who she is kind to but gives no encouragement to. There is the mysterious patient who is never identified to whom she grows too close, a relationship of which the administration disapproves and whom they finally move to a different hospital. There are sections where "convoys" arrive with new deliveries from the Front in which she describes how the old patients take in the new arrivals. They are noted but not in any direct narrative form. And interspersed are brief aching little entries like this:

Can one grow used to death? It is unsafe to think of this ...

For if death becomes cheap it is the watcher, not the dying, who is poisoned.

I suspect that one of the things that got her into trouble was her view of the difference between being on an officer's ward and a ward with "the boys".

It is a queer place, the "Tommies" ward. It makes me nervous. I'm not simple enough; they make me shy. I can't think of them as the others do, as "the boys"; they seem to me fully grown men.

When a nursing Sister orders a series of injections, Bagnold asks if the man has symptoms and notes "In a Tommies ward one dare ask anything; there isn't that mystery that used to surround the officer's illnesses." And in her descriptions you see that the men receive care but there is a certain callousness towards them, as if they are not capable of understanding what is happening to them. But then, Bagnold, finally realizes, no one can really understand the pain of another human being. She notes this as she listens to a Sister complain about her own earache one day and she thinks about how that woman listens day after day to men who tell her that they are in pain and yet, when she herself is in pain she is astonished at the pain of .... pain. And Bagnold notes the dilemma. One human being cannot imagine the pain of another. And yet "It is almost impossible to nurse a man well whose pain you do not imagine."

Tuesday, December 16, 2008

Enid Bagnold - The Chalk Garden

I finished reading The Chalk Garden and A Diary Without Dates and I'm pleased I spent the time, although for different reasons.

The Chalk Garden in play form is slightly different than the movie version (and I did go back and watch the movie).   Maitland, the manservant played by John Mills in the movie version, is less of a stable character than he is in the film.  In the movie version he is a voice of reason who we think is concerned for the best interests of Laurel but who doesn't have the power to do much more than he does.  His only quirk is his interest in criminal trials.

In the play, he's more quirky, just as caught up in the psychological games that the household is caught up in as the rest of them and with the same touch of instability.  Where there is a hint of romance between Maitland and Madrigal in the film version, I caught no hint in the play.  Maitland is portrayed as one of those sexless characters who is vaguely camp. 

Mrs. St. Maugham is also more batty than she is in the movie; we meet her as she shouts from the garden wondering where she has left her false teeth.   But the biggest difference is the presence of two more characters who are not in the movie version - Mr. Pinkbell the butler (who is an invisible character and hovers unseen over the cast sending directions down from his bedroom where he is dying) and his nurse who delivers his directions when he isn't directing things personally over the house telephone.:

Mrs. St. Maugham:  You made me jump.  He's my butler. Forty years my butler.  Now he's had a stroke but he keeps his finger on things.  (Rings handbell. Keeps bell)

Madrigal:  He carries on at death's door.

Mrs. St. Maugham: His standards rule this house.

Madrigal: (absently) You must be fond of him.

Mrs. St. Maugham: Alas no.

More so than the movie, this is a play about the death of a way of life.  Mrs. St. Maugham is living by the standards of the butler, the standards of another age, and the tension is whether she will ever have to acknowledge that, in the modern age, things may be done differently.

The most obvious tension over this is over the handling of the garden.  Pinkbell directs the gardening from his window and the garden is dying.  Madrigal brings her own knowledge in and the garden begins to thrive. 

This is also seen in the tension between Mrs. St. Maugham and her daughter.  In the movie there is an allegation that is never really rebutted that the first marriage of her daughter, Olivia, might have been caused by Olivia's unfaithfulness.  Olivia is certainly portrayed as a glamorous figure in the movie.  In the play it is clear that Olivia was a quiet girl who had no wish to "marry into society" and did so on the arrangement of her mother.  The marriage was a failure for reasons other than any unfaithfulness.  And the husband appears to have died long before Olivia met her new husband.

(Olivia enters from front door.  Madrigal rises)

Olivia:  (shakes hands) Judge!  I remember you! You used to be so kind to me when I was little!  What was that odd name Mother had for you? Puppy?  I used to wonder at it.

Judge: (Smiling, taking her hand) You were that silent little girl.

(Madrigal crosses down right)

Olivia:  Yes. I was silent.

As in the film version, the dramatic tension comes to a crisis when Olivia arrives to take Laurel away and when Madrigal's past is revealed and she sets herself in opposition to Mrs. St. Maugham over Laurel.  But the key moment of the play, the moment of the butler's death, comes immediately after Mrs. St. Maugham discovers who Madrigal really is, realizes that under the butler's rules Madrigal would be unacceptable in her household and would be a scandal and yet the Judge does not seem concerned, Olivia is not concerned, and Maitland is in awe of the fact that a real convicted murderess is among them. 

Mrs. St. Maugham:  Heavens!  What an anti-climax! What veneration!  One would think the woman was an actress!

This moment when celebrity outweighs propriety is the very moment when the Butler dies.  We have entered the modern age.

I enjoyed reading this play as much as I can enjoy reading plays.  I'm not very visual, my mind doesn't work that way, so the stage direction didn't give me a clear idea of the action.  Just reading the description of the set confused me and the stage directions (moves down right) meant nothing to me.  My imagination just isn't that specific. So even though I love going to plays, I don't think I'm going to spend my time reading a lot of plays.

Oh.  One last thing.  I particularly enjoyed this note at the beginning of the script:

By the Lord Chamberlain's wish, and in all places within his jurisdiction, the word "violated" on p. 24  Act One, must be played as "ravished," though it should remain "violated" on the printed page.

Showing that, even in 1953, things weren't quite as modern  as they could be.

Sunday, December 7, 2008

Enid Bagnold

A week or so ago, on a Sunday morning, I was catching up on my book blogging reading and I came across a reference to The Chalk Garden and it's author, Enid Bagnold.  I remembered The Chalk Garden as a movie, made in the 1960's, starring one of my favorite actresses, Deborah Kerr.  In my memory it was vaguely Hitchcockian in style.  It also starred a teenaged Hayley Mills and her own real life father John Mills.  It never occurred to me that it started out as a play, I'm not sure why, and it had never occurred to me to wonder who wrote it.

The brief reference aroused my curiosity so I checked my local library on-line catalogue to see if there was a copy of the play and to see what else she had written.  Her name rang a bell with me, but I wasn't sure why, until I saw the library catalogue listings.  Enid Bagnold wrote National Velvet.

What an odd combination:  National Velvet and The Chalk Garden. One a beloved children's book that is still in print and the other a strange psychological drama about three generations of women bridging the gap between Edwardian and modern times and the mysterious governess who assists them.  Granted, each of them has a young girl in it. But, although it has been years since I read (or saw) National Velvet, I don't recall Velvet Brown as being psychologically disturbed, as Laurel is in The Chalk Garden.  Although perhaps wanting to dress up like a boy to compete in a horse race would have been seen as an issue back in the 1930's.

Curious, I ordered the play from the library and the only other book (besides National Velvet) that they had:  A Diary Without Dates, which is a memoir of her time working in a hospital during World War I based on diaries she kept during the time.

Then I googled her.  She seemed like an interesting woman.  Born in England in 1889 to an army family, spending a few years in Jamaica when her father was stationed there.  She returned to be educated in Europe, studying art.  When World War I broke out she volunteered through the Volunteer Aid Detachment (VAD's) and worked as a nurse at the Royal Herbert Hospital in Woolwich.  While there she published A Diary Without Dates, which was very critical of hospital administration.  So critical, in fact that the military arranged for her to be dismissed.  Well ... this made me a bit more excited about receiving my book from the library!

She moved on to being a volunteer driver in France and from that came her book A Happy Foreigner.  (I checked, the library does not have it.)

She apparently lived a "bohemian" lifestyle and had a number of affairs but in 1920 at the age of 31 she married Sir Roderick Jones, the head of the Reuters news agency and became Lady Jones. They purchased a country home in Rottingdean, East Surrey, where she spent much of the rest of her life.  It had formerly been owned by the artist Edward Burne-Jones and its garden is the inspiration for The Chalk Garden.

She, of course (of course because we can see the result not because it was necessarily natural for women at the time) continued to write and in 1924 published her first novel The Difficulty of Getting Married. In 1935 she published National Velvet, which was probably based on a horse that her children had. She also published a few additional novels as well as a number of plays.

None of this explained how she wrote two such different works. 

I picked my books up yesterday and the book is one of those small, 4x6 sized, books that probably had a dust cover at one time but is now just blue faced cardboard binding with yellow crumbling pages within.  It is a United States edition published in 1935, after National Velvet became a hit (because on the title page it says "by Enid Bagnold, author of "National Velvet").  It does not smell musty but it looks as if it should.

Opening it, I read the inscription: 

TO THAT FRIEND OF MINE WHO,  WHEN I WROTE HIM ENDLESS LETTERS, SAID COLDLY, "WHY NOT KEEP SOMETHING FOR YOURSELF!"

This is followed by another page with the following:

I apologize to those whom I may hurt.

Can I soothe them by pleading that one may only write what is true for oneself?

E.B.

I found this very encouraging. I haven't started the book yet, but I'm looking forward to reading this woman and seeing what she had to say.

In my Googling, I found that The Chalk Garden was revived in London this year for the first time since 1971.  If it makes it across the Atlantic to New York I would be tempted to make a trip to see it.  And in the review is some information from the production notes that does explain a few things:

The programme has a fascinating description as to how the play came about. Enid has inherited a prior family from her husband Sir Roderick Jones, a war wounded son, a young daughter in law and a three year old granddaughter for whom she engaged a nanny. It was when a friend, a judge, came to lunch that she noticed the strange and uncharacteristic reaction of the nanny which started Enid thinking. Enid loved words and she stuffed the witty expressions which she'd been collecting into her play, making it rather heavy going. London impresario Binkie Beaumont turned it down but Enid's agent Harold Freedman sent the play to Irene Selznick, daughter of Louis B Mayer. Selznick worked on the script with Enid, "to pull the threads straight" and curtailing Bagnold's excess of expression. The result was marvellously successful.

Here is a scene from the movie - it is a scene near the beginning in which the mysterious Miss Madrigal is applying for the job of governess to Laurel.  I think I may just have to rent the movie and watch it through again.  After I read the play.

Beowulf, translated by Maria Dahvana Headley

I never intended to read yet another epic poem immediately after finishing The Iliad .  But I subscribe to the Poetry Unbound podcast and in...