Poor Caroline Read online

  WINIFRED HOLTBY

  (1898-1935) was born in Rudston, Yorkshire. In the First World War she was a member of the Women's Auxiliary Army Corps, and then went to Somerville College, Oxford where she met Vera Brittain. After graduating, these two friends shared a flat in London where both embarked upon their respective literary careers. Winifred Holtby was a prolific journalist, writing for the Manchester Guardian, the J^'ews Chronicle and Time and Tide of which she became a director in 1926. She also travelled all over Europe as a lecturer for the League of Nations Union.

  Her first novel, Anderby Wold, was published in 1923, followed, in 1924, by The Crowded Street. She wrote five other novels: The Land of Green Ginger (1927), Poor Caroline (1931), Mandoa, Mandoa! (1933) and South Riding (1936), published posthumously after her tragic death from kidney disease at the age of thirty-seven. She was awarded the James Tail Black prize for this, her most famous novel.

  She also published two volumes of short stories, Truth is Not Sober (1934) and Pavements at Anderby (1937); a satirical work, The Astonishing Island (1933); two volumes of poetry; My Garden (1911) and The Frozen Earth (1935); a critical work, Virginia Woolf (1932); a study of the position of women, Women and a Changing Civilisation (1934), and numerous essays.

  Winifred Holtby's remarkable and courageous life is movingly recorded in Vera Brittain's biography, Testament of Friendship, published by Virago.

  WINIFRED HOLTBY

  POOR CAROLINE

  With a New Introduction by GEORGE DAVIDSON

  PENGUIN BOOKS —VIRAGO PRESS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Viking Penguin Inc., 40 West 23rd Street,

  New York, New York 10010, U.S.A.

  Penguin Books Ltd, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England

  Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood, Victoria, Australia

  Penguin Books Canada Limited, 2801 John Street,

  Markham, Ontario, Canada L3R 1B4

  Penguin Books (N.Z.) Ltd, 182-190 Wairau Road,

  Auckland 10, New Zealand

  Eirst published in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape Limited 1931 First published in the United States of America by

  Robert M. McBride & Co. 1931 This edition first published in Great Britain byVirago Press Ltd. 1985 Published in Penguin Books 1986

  Copyright Robert M. McBride & Co., 1931

  Introduction copyright © George Davidson, 1985

  All rights reserved

  Printed in the Linked States of America by

  R. R. Donnelley & Sons Company, Harrisonburg, Virginia

  Set in Baskerville

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, bv way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on

  In Piam Memoriam M.C.H.

  Author's Note

  So far as my knowledge extends, there has never been a Christian Cinema Company formed for the Purification of the British Film, there has never been an Anglo-American School of Scenario Writing, nor a Metropolitan and Provincial Correspondence College for the teaching of Journalism. But my ignorance is wide. These institutions may have an existence outside my own imagination. If so, I beg to inform their promoters and organizers that I forgive them their plagiarism in advance, and wish them the success that they deserve.

  Winifred Holtby.

  Contents

  OPENING CHORUS

  I BASIL REGINALD ANTHONY ST. DENIS

  II JOSEPH ISENBAUM

  IIIELEANOR DE LA ROUX

  IVHUGH ANGUS MACAFEE

  V ROGER AINTREE MORTIMER

  VI CLIFTON RODERICK JOHNSON

  VH CAROLINE AUDREY DENTON-SMYTH

  FINAL CHORUS

  Introduction

  Poor Caroline was hailed as 'easily the wittiest novel of the season' upon its appearance in 1931. This represented a watershed in Winifred Holtby's career as a novelist, since her previous three novels had more or less dissatisfied her, and been commercially unsuccessful. At the time of writing her fourth novel she was well-known as a radical campaigner and journalist. But it was with Poor Caroline that her fortunes as a novelist changed: it was favourably reviewed and sold well. Sadly, this was also the year which saw the onset of the kidney failure that was to drastically reduce her wide-ranging literary and polemical output.

  Although Poor Caroline was received as a tragi-comedy, its overall tone is consciously comic. Despite a strong love element and gradual pathos, the author's perception is satirical, in the same mould she was to use in her next novel, Mandoa, Mandoa! One contemporary criticism of Poor Caroline as suffering 'from excess of cleverness' reinforces the impression of Winifred's increased self-assurance. 'All the characters are drawn in a few strokes with a deft touch', approved one reviewer. The author was praised for appearing 'intelligent, unsentimental yet benign', particularly in respect of the eponymous heroine, Caroline Denton-Smyth. This old maid, with her vision of perfect movies, is the improbable thread holding together her society for the moral purification of British cinema, the 'Christian Cinema Company'. Winifred had tried to elevate from literary obscurity another traditionally unpersonable, depressing subject, the home-ridden young anti-heroine of The Crowded Street. As The Yorkshire Post critic, Alice Herbert, observed of Caroline: 'Altogether, she has pulled the comic spinster out of her rut, which fiction has made wearisome ...

  Miss Holtby's gift lies partly in taking a type that many novelists accept as ready-made, and in showing its enormously varied and complicated humanity.'

  What immediately distinguishes Poor Caroline from Winifred Holtby's 'Yorkshire' novels is its setting in London. In so far as all the other novels are designated by location - albeit metaphorically in two instances, the very title announces a different flavour to Poor Caroline. Otherwise only in Mandoa, Mandoa.', Winifred's exotic treatment of colonialism in Africa, is the main action centred elsewhere than in the rural East Riding she knew and loved, or the small-town north of England she despised and avoided. With the exception, therefore, of the 'Opening Chorus' (a sharp stab at the complacent, provincial middle class) and two scenes, including the balancing 'Final Chorus', in Monte Carlo (where Winifred holidayed during the writing of the novel and was fascinated by the loose-living gossipy circles of artists), the events of Poor Caroline take place in London in the twenties. The metropolis excited Winifred right from the initial prospect of coming down from Oxford in 1921. But although she spent the greatest and most active part of her working life in the city, her only other sizeable fictional use of London is Book One of Mandoa, Mandoa! This apparent imbalance in favour of her childhood home is accounted for by Winifred's idyllic upbringing under a remarkable mother. The author is pinpointing a home truth in the passage describing Caroline's reflections on her own life: 'It was strange, but that child's life at Denton now seemed more vivid to her than all her subsequent adventures.'

  Winifred's years in London were spent at a scarcely credible pace of production. She lectured on Pacifism and campaigned for Feminism, revelling in the atmosphere like Eleanor De La Roux, for whom 'London hummed with the activities of propaganda and reform'. Although she was generally engaged upon the writing of her next novel or short story, her lifestyle was, as we know from Vera Brittain's biography of her flatmate in Testament of Friendship, rarely tranquil enough to allow sustained periods of creativity. For instance, she sat on numerous committees, believing avidly in decision-making and progress by means of discussion and debate. Hence the detail and insight, in this work and in South Riding, with which she evokes such formal meetings. She also saw the dramatic potentia
l of such gatherings as choice battle-grounds for the antagonistic interaction of characters.

  Poor Caroline originated in a family connection. Mary Home was an aunt of one of Winifred's early governesses, who, like so many hangers-on to the Holtby family, drew on the patient favours and hospitality of Winifred or her mother. Caroline is evidently directly based upon this Mary Home, since Vera Brittain describes how the idea for the novel came to a regretful Winifred after the death of this tiresome, yet likeable, old eccentric, who must have impinged upon Winifred's acute conscience. Hence the dedication 'In piam memoriam M.C.H.', and the fact that one reviewer unwittingly complimented Miss Holtby upon her 'ability to create characters who are so real one suspects her of knowing them'.

  Caroline's lead-part as the founding organiser of the ill-fated Christian Cinema Company is unquestioned, but her primacy among the female characters is to a degree challenged by the naturally intelligent Eleanor with her wide-eyed idealism and straightforward aspirations. Eleanor is Winifred's archetypal modern woman in the making, and as such the oracle for feminism in Poor Caroline. Eleanor is half South African to allow Winifred to recall her favourite foreign land, the only country outside Europe she visited, and a place to which she could remain closely attached because of her friendship with Jean McWilliam (of Letters To a Friend) in Pretoria. There she espoused the plight of the natives, a cause with which she became closely associated after her tour of 1926. The heroine of The Land of Green Ginger, who dreams constantly of far-off places, is also half South African. She came to England as an infant after the death of her non-Afrikaans father. Eleanor leaves South Africafollowing the same bereavement, but is an adult newcomer to England.

  If Winifred's letters had been lost, or her biography not written by her closest friend, we could still glean from Eleanor a central obsession of her creator; namely, in Eleanor's words, 'this intolerable burden of immunity'. In order to overcome this inverted inferiority complex, the rich but orphaned young lady seeks out suffering and struggle, hardship and adversity: 'I have capital behind me, and education, and opportunities. All this ugliness and poverty can't really hurt me.' Winifred likewise bore the hang-ups of privilege and wealth, which her talent exacerbated. In marked contrast to Vera Brittain, she was also unscathed by the bereavements of the Great War. 'I always feel when I take my pleasures that I have snatched them in the face of fortune,' she wrote. 'But I am glad when I take them, all the same' she concluded, for she was, like Caroline, with her penchant for sweet foods, beautiful flowers and pretty clothes, no ascetic, but someone who took pleasure in rare luxuries. Winifred's nature was happy and optimistic. Believing she had no real problems, she deliberately put herself out for others in an almost self-sacrificial way to atone for being among those 'who have been gifted by fortune, we who are rich and healthy and unbound'. Overworking herself to pay back the debt she felt she owed to life, this sense of immunity was clearly cauterised by her collapse into virtually constant ill-health, which this personal complex must ironically have helped bring on.

  If Eleanor voices Winifred's horror of immunity, the Anglo-Catholic curate, Roger Mortimer, represents the author's connected religious leanings. Religion, which, she once admitted, was one of the chief reasons for unhappiness in her life, was not prominent in her public utterings, but is a more obtrusive feature of her stories - Winifred had undergone a period of theological crisis, just about resolving her beliefs in an experience similar, it seems, to Roger's call to the Church one night in France. Eleanor's uncertainty about contributing to the ChristianCinema Company is also suddenly clarified as a result of listening to Roger's sermon condemning compromise. Roger's wavering between Catholicism and Protestantism, as between the demands of his vocation and the temptation of earthly love, recalls Winifred's earlier portrayal of Wyclif in The Runners, her only full-length prose work never published. Roger's dilemma also foreshadows the serious mess the endearingly sensual lay preacher, Huggins, creates for himself in South Riding. Vulnerable vicars, whether venal or virginal, thus crop up regularly in Winifred Holtby's novels. But churchmen are not exclusively ogres or figures of fun. Roger, initially timid, develops into one of Winifred's nobler male characters, overcoming his image to Eleanor of 'a comic curate, praying among the buns'.

  Love scenes, Winifred freely admitted, were difficult passages for her to write. Her own love life involved one spasmodic and unsatisfactory relationship. She wrote of 'being disappointed if I go through life without once being properly in love. As a writer, I feel it my duty to my work, but they [men] are all so helpless and such children'. Along with so many women of her generation she was affected by the dearth of adequate men after the Great War, which does to some extent account for the rarity of strong male characters in her novels and the frequency of listless survivors, either physically or psychologically crippled. Nevertheless, Roger Mortimer, despite being manipulated by Caroline and besotted with Eleanor, is healthy and shows moral strength as well as progressive views on love and marriage. Equally, Eleanor is independent and direct. Indeed, she represents a new departure in Winifred's attitude towards women's self-determination. The earlier heroines are shackled by domestic ties of one form or another. Mary Robson and Joanna Leigh, farmer's wives, are spirited individuals circumscribed by the restraints of their position in the family and in the community.

  Poor Caroline is about the divergent tendencies of philanthropy and exploitation, and the humour, tinged with sadness, arising from their clash in an oddly constituted Company, bringingtogether incompatible people. The Jewish merchant, Isenbaum, and the dilettante, St Basil, scratch each other's backs. Johnson and Macafee are out solely for themselves. Roger and Eleanor have more palatable ulterior motives, but they too use Caroline. Eleanor is no impressionable altruist, but entertains self-professed business ambitions and involves herself in her relative's project for the sake of being associated with an apparently good cause. Even Caroline, the only true believer in her brain-child for the actual spiritual benefits she intends it to bring, is perhaps merely trying to justify herself when society has no real further need of her. Although Vera Brittain accurately described her as 'a self-deceived optimist with an unbalanced devotion to hopeless projects', Caroline is so observed as to be likeable despite her absurdity. Her world of 'uplift, good works and propaganda' was very much her creator's sphere as a fervent believer in education and the benefits of religion. Winifred, however, was no unrealistic idealist like Caroline. Her optimistic canvassing on behalf of the League of Nations or South African Trades Unions was not so earnestly self-important as to be above self-mockery - there could be an element of self-parody in her Caroline, despite Winifred assuring Lady Rhondda: 'Caroline is not a symbol of me, but an expression of herself... I meant to leave the impression of someone silly but vital, directly futile but indirectly triumphant.'

  Caroline's demise is not treated tragically, because it leads to the prospect of future benefit. Parallel with this undefeated attitude lies a positive view of progress, both moral and technical. Poor Caroline may not be most memorable as a discussion of the ethics of scientific progress, but the issue is not raised lightly, and admonitions concerning society's future are deliberately made. The Christian Cinema Company falls between two stools not just for lack of a unified commitment, but also, it is suggested, because the twin aims of the Company may be contradictory in practice. In Mandoa, Mandoa! Bill Durrant comes to a conclusion about colonial development in termswhich apply to Caroline's contusion of commerce and morality: 'You can either make a profit out of people or you can lecture them for their own good. But you can't do both with any effect at the same time.' If this is a truism, Poor Caroline's message would be 'to distribute uplift' rather 'than dividends among mankind. It was easier to Do Good than to Make Money.' The personal motives affecting a decision about how best to utilise a technological breakthrough show how the issue has even gained in relevance in the last half century. Johnson's every word deserves suspicious scrutiny, but amidst the regu
rgitated verbiage we find some valid, if gratuitous, observations, for instance when he chastises Macafee as a lover of science for science's sake: 'Ah, you scientists, who pursue the means an' despise the ends, take care.'

  A fine writer's themes and obsessions continually engage important issues with a perspicacity which remains modern and pertinent over and beyond the particular fictional and historical context. Winifred Holtby was a flash of brilliant dynamism, who threw herself with a combined sense of duty and conviction into the burning issues of her day, hoping to help improve society. Her texts and speeches were persuasive in the twenties and thirties and, fortunately, she left an artistic testament which enriches posterity. For despite her dichotomy she was able to combine her dual instincts as writer and reformer without making Caroline's alleged sacrifice of one for the other: 'If I'd had more time I could have been a poet ... only between the claims of art and science I had to choose, being by nature a pioneer and fighter.' If Winifred Holtby was by nature a writer, then appropriately it is her novels which fight on as the lasting vehicle for her pioneering beliefs.