A Wreath for the Enemy

Well. That was something.

There’s something odd about it, too.

Long-time readers know that I am fairly random about my reading selections. Just one more expression of that random, reactive INFP personality, I suppose. Or, if you like, Spirit-led. Yeah, that’s the ticket: Spirit-led.

I browse the “new release” shelves – both fiction and non-fiction – in the library. I do make note of new books I’m interested in and look for them – and even buy them sometimes – like I’ll be buying the new Franzen novel coming this fall – but mostly I browse.

I also browse various websites dedicated to “forgotten” or neglected fiction. Sites like this and this. It was through the latter I took note of a novel called A Wreath for the Enemy by one Pamela Frankau, a British author of whom I’d never heard. Why did I note it? Because this blogger raved about the book and ranked it highly among one year’s reads. I thought – well, huh. I’ll just see if it’s available online anywhere, read a bit, and if I don’t like it, I’ll move on.

Which I did, and not only did I like it very much and keep on reading until the end, I discovered, once again  – that a book I’d randomly pulled off a website had very strong Catholic content – which wasn’t noted in the review.

(You can find the book here – and it’s also at archive.org. It was republished by Virago in 1988, but copies of even that – a not-expensive edition – are available for, oh, around 900 bucks right now. It’s ridiculous that books like this have become so hard to purchase, even used. As the Furrowed Middlebrow blogger says: “Admittedly, I’m surprised that most of the novels on this list aren’t in print, but in this case I’m downright amazed that A Wreath for the Enemy isn’t considered a classic and read in high schools alongside Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. It’s a gorgeous novel about a young girl’s life-altering experiences one summer in the bohemian Riviera hotel owned by her parents.”)

Anyway, I’m going to enthuse about this book for a bit here in this post and the next. It’s not perfect, because nothing is, but it’s…fascinating and in some aspects, captivating, with marvelous characters. Made for the movies, really. It’s intriguingly composed, as well, told from various perspectives. I am so glad I read it, and am immediately moving on to another of Frankau’s novels.

Let’s just begin with the beginning, and perhaps you will see why I got hooked:

I sat still at the table, with the blank paper before me. I went back; I remembered; I thought my way in. It was the sensation of pulling on a diver’s helmet and going down deep.

Presently, on the sea-floor, I began to find lost things; to raise the moods that were mine when I was fourteen years old, sitting in this garden, writing my Anthology of Hates.

I would begin there.

********

There had been two crises already that day before the cook’s husband called to assassinate the cook. The stove caught fire in my presence; the postman had fallen off his bicycle at the gate and been bitten by Charlemagne, our sheep-dog, whose policy it was to attack people only when they were down.

Whenever there were two crises my stepmother Jeanne said, “Jamais deux sans trois.” This morning she and Francis (my father) had debated whether the two things happening to the postman could be counted as two separate crises and might therefore be said to have cleared matters up. I thought that they were wasting their time. In our household things went on and on and on happening. It was an hotel, which made the doom worse: it would have been remarkable to have two days without a crisis and even if we did, I doubted whether the rule would apply in reverse, so that we could augur a third. I was very fond of the word augur.

I was not very fond of the cook. But when I was sitting on the terrace in the shade working on my Anthology of Hates, and a man with a bristled chin told me in patois that he had come to kill her, I thought it just as well for her, though obviously disappointing for her husband, that she was off for the afternoon. He carried a knife that did not look particularly sharp; he smelt of liquorice, which meant that he had been drinking Pernod. He stamped up and down, making speeches about his wife and Laurent the waiter, whom he called a salaud and many other words new to me and quite difficult to understand.

I said at last, “Look, you can’t do it now, because she has gone over to St. Raphael in the bus. But if you wait I will fetch my father.” I took the Anthology with me in case he started cutting it up.

I went down the red rock steps that sloped from the garden to the pool. The garden looked the way it always looked, almost as brightly coloured as the postcards of it that you could buy at the desk. There was purple bougainvillæa splashing down the white walls of the hotel; there were hydrangeas of the exact shade of pink blotting-paper; there were huge silver-grey cacti and green umbrella pines against a sky that was darker blue than the sky in England.

I could not love this garden. Always it seemed to me artificial, spiky with colour, not quite true. My idea of a garden was a green lawn and a little apple orchard behind a grey stone house in the Cotswolds. It was my Aunt Anne’s house in the village of Whiteford. I saw that garden only once a year, in September. I could conjure it by repeating inside my head—

‘And autumn leaves of blood and gold

That strew a Gloucester lane.’

Then the homesickness for the place that was not my home would make a sharp pain under my ribs. I was ashamed to feel so; I could not talk about it; not even to Francis, with whom I could talk about most things.

The plot? The narrator (for this and most of the novel) is Penelope Wells, whose home when she is not in school back in England  is the small Riviera hotel owned by her father and her stepmother. Penelope is a marvelous character, the acerbic girl writer-in-process like Harriet of Harriet the Spy or even the unnamed protagonist of O’Connor’s “A Temple of the Holy Ghost” – and a character with whom many of us can probably identify, for even if we didn’t write it down, we were, indeed the type carrying about our own Anthology of Hates. Admit it.

In the villa next door, as it were, during this summer, is an English family who on the one hand is quite ordinary (and scorned by Penelope’s poet father because of it), but an object of fascination for Penelope – and once an acquaintance is made with the twin brother and sister of the family, that fascination becomes mutual. Penelope fixated on the Brody family’s predictable, calm life, and of course the other children enchanted by the exotic life in the hotel. The grass being greener, as it always is.

You will not be surprised to learn that things don’t end well, exactly, but the culminating problematic incident is not only touchingly portrayed but significant in the lives of all the children, especially Penelope and Don, who are thrust through a door and forced to face aspects of life and themselves in a challenging way.

From there we skip a few years, and the narrative centers on Don Bradley, in school in England, feeling somewhat oppressed by the school atmosphere and to some extent by his family. Don finds freedom in a friendship with a local estate owner who gives Don access to his horses – Crusoe Raines, who is wheelchair bound, brilliant and acerbic. More tragedy, more self-knowledge.

Finally, we skip a few more years forward, back to Penelope, now a student at Oxford, but of course back at the hotel on her vacation. More characters appear – lives intertwined with people she knew when she was young as well as those Don knows – and while I could detail the plot, to do so would spoil the book, I think.

If I had to characterize the Big Ideas in this novel – aside from it being simply a decent coming-of-age story – it would be to say that it is more specifically about the necessary movement one makes as one grows older from the stage of life (obvious in the excerpt) in which we think we are in perfect command of life, and see everything and everyon so clearly, and as a consequence are terribly judgmental of them, then move through dashed illusions of all types – to a point at which we understand how little we actually understand, how what we experience is just a small piece of the mystery, and what is required to get through it all is, most of all, mercy.

“You couldn’t,” I said, “tell me how it happened to you? Conversion—in your mind? I need it, very much. Law and order. God’s design. If only I could have them. . . . But chaos always seems to win . . . to be the only visible thing.”

He looked at me thoughtfully, medically. “You’re right there. It is the only visible thing—most of the time. But you can bring yourself to a thundering philosophical halt by asking ‘How do we know that it’s chaos? Why aren’t we all quite happily mistaking it for Law and Order?’ We’re dissatisfied with the incompleteness of everything in sight, we say. Well, all that means is there must be completeness somewhere. Where? Eh? By what light do we recognise chaos?”

Next post: about the author, Pamela Frankau, with her intriguing life – and more of the Catholic-themed content of the novel.