Savage Innocences
Why Barbara Comyns is Polish to the core
My wife is an illustrator. Among many things that she can observe and capture particularly well is childhood, especially Millennial childhood: children playing on the beater, riding bikes, before smartphones ruined everything (or not).
I tend to annoy her with my suggestion of creating a series of drawings named Polish Childhood, or something to that effect, that would dig deeper into what it means to grow up in the eighties and nineties in Poland. My idea goes like this: foreground doesn’t differ from her normal drawings; children play in the backyard, ride bikes, play football and quarrel. But another, darker layer of reality lurks in the background: on the walls of buildings, on concrete posts there are memorials: stone crosses and plaques, saying: this place is sanctified by the blood of that many Poles killed on this day by those Germans (or other nations, for that matter). On every picture in. the series the number of killed Poles is getting bigger and bigger; but even when it reaches thousands of thousands, the tranquillity of the foreground remains undisturbed.
Warsaw is full of such places (so-called Tchorek plaques), and variations of these can be found everywhere. But this reality exists, probably even more vivid, in our minds, implanted there by stories of our parents and grandparents: stories about bombs, executions, death camps and exiles. We were breathing with this reality since we were able to comprehend - when, at the same time, it was beyond comprehension. We learned to look at it with childish naivety; it was something obvious, like rain or toothache, but so vast that the only way to deal with it was to sublimate it into campfire stories and dark jokes. My colleague from Chile told me once that Polish humour seems to him at the same time dark and naive, and I think it captures very well many aspects of our minds.
And this is the part of my mind that immediately responded to the prose of Barbara Comyns after the first paragraph: yes, this is it, I thought, it is exactly how reality looks like.
I stumbled upon her almost by coincidence, signing to a short-lived project of Virago Press Book Club. The first book read there was Comyns’ Sisters by a River, a novel about six sisters growing up at the beginning of the XX century in a manor at the river Avon in Warwickshire.
There is a large family, a large house, many animals and the river - something that could amount to a happy childhood. And it is happy, to some extent:
We got more happiness from the river than anything. We all learnt how to row in a big flat bottomed boat and by the time I was six I could row in the ordinary rowing boat, we never had a skif but could go quite fast in the canoe if we used the double paddles.
But there is more: there is horror and violence. Horrors may come from nature:
When the village people saw a dead goat or pig floating in the river looking pretty old, they would draw it onto the bank and all eels would come squirming out, they would take them home and stew them for supper, we didn’t, but we did something nearly as bad, we would hit their swollen bellys with a boat hook and paddle away as fast as possible to excape the spout to putred smelling water that shot up in a castrade.
Or from people:
A man called Monkeybrand used to look after it, he was great and hairy, once I found a large and beautiful spider with a lot of babies having a ride on its back, while I was looking at it, he came up behind me and suddenly put his great hand out and squashed them, they had looked so happy, but all that was left of them was a dark mess that smelt
Horrors and violence here are something beyond control, something as natural as weather; and the narrator looks at everything with a childlike naivety and detachment. That sounded familiar and, at the same time, unlike-anything-else. I was unsettling, and I wanted more.
One could tentatively divide her novels into two groups. One group would contain her Gothic, tale-like, slightly surreal novels, and the second one - largely autobiographical novels about women struggling with life, poverty and unhappy relationships. But, as in the case of every categorization attempt, barriers between those are fluid: there are many autobiographical tropes in her Gothic novels, and there is surrealism in those of her books that are largely based on her life.
The second one I read was The Vet’s Daughter, often claimed to be the best of her novels. It is a story about a girl named Alice Rowlands; she lives in a house full of animals (her father, as you may have guessed, is a veterinarian): dogs howl, and parrot screeches. But the novel is much darker than Sisters by the River, and everything here is sinister: among voices of animals soon another voice emerges: moans of her dying mother. And soon it stops, for her husband puts her down, just like one of the animals under his care.
Father is the main figure of evil. Violent, brutal and devoid of any empathy: he hates Alice. The only support she can find is a housekeeper and her father’s assistant. But any good in this novel is fragile; the world is cruel. Its cruelty and its horror are treated as a given: there is not much one can do about it, so we look at it through Alice’s eyes like through the eyes of a child. This is a vivid example, a story of a house fire Alice hears from the owner:
My husband was still alive when the house was gutted by fire. I’ll never forget old Floss howling. But we couldn’t reach her: there we were trapped in in this very room, and smoke pouring under the door […] poor Floss has died - and the little maid we had then […], her charred body was crouching on the landing. I thought she’d be black like burnt paper - she was a dreadful reddish-brown. Poor girl!
The only way is to dissociate: after a rape attempt by her father’s lover friend, Alice discovers that she can levitate. She rises above the bed: and soon it becomes her only mean of escape, her only source of pride. And yet it also will be used against her.
It requires a special power from the writer to be able to hold the weight of cruelty and horror. It is easy to fall into the pornography of violence (like Yanagihara in Small Life), or turn the story into a grotesque, monotonous litany of horrendous scenes. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, goes so-called Sagan standard. It applies to science, but can be easily paraphrased for the use of art: extraordinary solutions require extraordinary justification; with every element that is out of the ordinary, writers indebt themselves to us; and they have to pay out finally.
In Comyns’ writing, this justification emerges from the unexpected contrast of horror and naivety; that in her work ceases to be a contrast at all. This unexpectedness, or eeriness, which is in my opinion the reason why her prose is said to be unlike anything else, somehow overcomes our defences and makes us believe in what Alice Rowlands tells us about the world. My Polish mind is especially easily tricked and says again: yes, it is exactly how reality looks like.
This is true of all her novels. In Who was Changed and Who Was Dead we observe inhabitants of a small English town that falls victim to ergot poisoning. People descend into madness, die in unimaginable suffering and are burned alive by crowd seeking scapegoats. In this chaos some people die, and some people are changed; it is what it is.
You can feel that Comyns lack formal training: her novels are often written in a way that takes us by surprise, be it in the layer of language (just like in a childlike spelling of words in Sisters) or in the way the stories are composed: she introduces scenes that seem out of the blue. And yet, and yet - they work, they affect us, and it seems like she has, independently, invented her own way of writing, as sometimes lack of formal education is the way to invent something new.
And then we have her -partially- autobiographical novels. For a long time, though, we lacked a proper biography of Comyns and it was impossible to separate the fiction from truth. But in March Manchester University Press published a long-awaited biography, written by Avril Horney, under a fantastically accurate title, A Savage Innocence. I would risk saying that a biography of a writer (or any famous person) is only really good when it captures the mundane and the daily, things that form the greatest part of any life. A Savage Innocence is a really good biography.
For it shows what Comyns’ life was for most of the time: a struggle against poverty. Devoid of any formal education, after moving from Warwickshire at the beginning of thirties, she enrolled on the famous Heatherley School of Fine Art in London. It could have been a great beginning for a career of a talented painter (in fact, she perceived herself as a painter for a long time) if it weren’t for her deteriorating economic situation that made her leave the school after a short time. She soon married a painter, John Pemberton, and had a son with him. John was an egocentric, careless husband and parent: Barbara had to work hard to sustain the household. Her art suffered; she suffered as well.
Mariage broke soon; she started an affair with another artist, Rupert Lee, and a daughter was born from this relationship. The relationship was short and mostly one-sided: Lee came back to his long-term lover, Diana, leaving Barbara alone with two children and almost no means to live. She attempted suicide from despair; an unexpected, and partly manipulative financial help from Diana helped her survive. Over the next years, she worked as a commercial painter, housewife, antics seller, piano renovator, poodle breeder and car seller, to a large extent in cooperation with Arthur Price, a black market trader and her partner during the time of the Second World War.
She moved from house to house, barely having time for herself. Her frustration grew. But during the war, she started to write. In the beginning, she wrote short scenes from her childhood, scenes that formed the basis of Sistsers by a River.
After the war, she married MI6 agent, Richard Comyns Carr. Her life became more stable since then, even though poverty was threatening her almost till the end of her life. But from that point on she started to publish novels regularly.
The Touch of Mistletoe is a novel about a woman living in London from thirties to time after WWII. Heroine, just like Barbara, comes to London to study art, has to resign from school, marries a poor painter and soon has a baby, and soon enters into poverty, changing flats and jobs, taking care of a child and a husband that develops schizophrenia. Then comes the war, then binge-drinking partner: what we see is a creative life broken by poverty - and expectations of other people. American biologist, Stephen Jay-Gould once said about the (quite absurd) discussions on the relationship between Einstein’s brain folding and his genius that he is somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops. But Comyns shows in this book that you can say the same thing about poor people - especially women - in Europe in the XX century. Poverty robs people of their dreams and wastes their talents.
This is a novel about the life of an ordinary person, but Comyns’ ability to capture the horrors of life is probably even more striking here. This is a fragment about her second husband’s colleague from work:
The man he used to share an office with had been killed by a flying bomb and his black umbrella hung from a hook on the wall like a sleeping bat and after a few days of looking at it, Tony threw it from the window. It caught in a tree, still looking like a great bat.
The darkness of it! Its simplicity!
But despite descriptions of hardships suffered by the heroine, The Touch of Mistletoe manages to capture what was so perfectly captured in Williams’ Stoner, or books of Barbara Pym: that most things in our lives are inconsequential, that tragedies, just like triumphs, wane with time, and most of them are not able to break us.
And Comyns seemed never to be broken. in 1955 her husband was finally sacked from MI6: being a close friend of Kim Philby, he was put under suspicion. Having to fight poverty once again, the couple decided to leave for Ibiza; then they settled in Barcelona. Their situation was always unstable; they moved from house to house, supported by Richard’s meagre income from journalism and Barbara’s book revenues.
There were important successes in this time: the 1959 publication of The Vet’s Daughter, and almost uniformly positive reviews. Skin Chairs, another Gothic novel, published in 1962 was also rather warmly reviewed. But the books didn’t sell well.
In 1968 her book, The House of Dolls, was rejected by publishers. The late sixties and seventies turned out to be the times not really conductive to her art. She was not, for sure, a feminist writer in a traditional sense. Her books show the cruelty of men towards women, and how society - more generally - robs them of their chances, but heroines in Comyns’ novels respond with passive acceptance. There is no fight for liberty, no standing up to oppression: the main character in Touch of the Mistletoe doesn’t question the fact that she needs to provide for a living while her husband paints; Alice in The Vet’s Daughter can only try to escape, but is - at the end - powerless.
Things changed when Barbara and Richard came back to England in 1974. Her agent has sent The Vet’s Daughter to Carmen Callil, the founder of Virago Press. Virago was launching its Virago Modern Classics series'; the goal of the endeavour was to rediscover and promote female writers. In 1979 the contract was signed and the book was published again in 1981: and met with a great success. Soon other books followed, she republished Sisters by the River and published books previously rejected. Her financial situation was better, but she was still haunted by economical instability. In 1981 she wrote in her diary:
The future looks worse and worse. I don’t want to take an overdose of valium or something in case they bring me round again and I hate blood. I’d like something that makes me vanish completely.
But her probably most interesting book of this time is The Juniper Tree, published in 1985. It is based on a Grimm’s tale of the same title. In the original story, a man marries again after his wife gives birth to a boy; he soon has a daughter named Marlinchen with her. His new wife is cruel to the boy; she finally decapitates him with a chest’s lid, cooks and gives the soup to her unexacting husband. Then the bones of their boy are buried under the Juniper tree, and, in the end, the evil wife is punished. What a Comynsian story!
But in her book, everything is flipped. The heroine, Belle, is a single mother of a daughter named Marline (you see). She meets a couple - Bernard and Gertrude; they are expecting a child. But Gertrude dies at childbirth, and Belle becomes Bernard’s second wife, and his son’s stepmother. The trap of the tale is being set.
Bella is slowly being ensnared by Bernard, who treats her more and more as an unpaid housewife. He is patronizing her, and soon starts affairs with other women. Everything heads into a disaster.
And disaster happens: just like in a tale. But it is a Comynsian tale. In her novels people are powerless against other people or against the world. In The Juniper Tree the force that Bella fights with is the inexorable logic of the tale. We know Grimm’s story, and with increasing horror we see Bella getting deeper and deeper into the abyss of the story we know in advance. And she almost falls in. But then she doesn’t.
The novel’s finale is probably one of the most striking ones in her writing, even if it is definitely perfectly done. We see Bella escaping from the tale’s scythe at the last moment, almost unscathed. And she does so not thanks to others, not by luck, but by herself. This is the moment when Comyns’ heroine finally overcomes the external powers of the world.
And the same could be said about Comyns. She died in 1992 as an acknowledged author and a relatively well-off person.
Most things in our life we cannot control. Our dreams can be easily broken, by illness, poverty or other people. We have obligations to other people and we cannot easily get rid of them. And often the valid response to it is not to struggle against it, but to accept the odds and try to withstand it. And look at the cruelty of the world we have absolutely no control over with a childlike naivety - and wonder.
This worldview can be born out of a life that leaves a person out of control of themselves and exposes them to traumatic events that they cannot control. It can be also born out of history that exposes people to events that they cannot control. Here is the point where what is Comynsian and what is Polish converge.
It’s not a worldview that is easy to embrace.
We seem to be obsessed with agency. For some time therapeutic culture was telling us that we can change, we can overcome our traumas and start a better life. Now we are moving from a self-centered view to a more community-oriented one, but the message we get seems to be again the message about action: we should act together to make a change, not in our lives, but in our societies.
It’s not what Comyns’ characters (usually) do, and it can bother a modern reader. But, rephrased, it can be liberating: sometimes you just cannot act; the whole system of institutions, other people, luck or health, the global and political situation often trap us, and you shouldn’t feel guilty.
Just like you shouldn’t feel guilty when it rains.