Lilith Saintcrow: avoid

[mme_hardy]

For the last week or so I have been reading Lilith Saintcrow's The Hedgewitch Queen, while composing in my head the Dreamwidth post about how most writers don't know enough to compose languages. (Characters use both "m'chri" (ma cherie) and "summat". IJS.)

Then I reached the sequel, and early on the hero rapes his wife, the hedgewitch queen, with description of her struggles, and says at the end he'd do it again. Oh, hell, no.

So I put the Kindle forcefully aside and picked up A Thatched Roof, by the English writer Beverley Nichols. It's a description of his beloved weekend cottage and the process of remodeling it to his tastes. A perfect cozy, in short.

Then Nichols's friend John shops up for a second visit. On the first visit he was a Socialist; this visit he is a Fascist, complete with black shirt. This is treated as a humorous eccentricity. The book was written in 1933. So much for cozy. (I am very fond of the book and will finish it; it was a jarring note.)

Comments

[thistleingrey]

Might "m'chri" be nearer Scots mo chridhe / Irish mo chroí, given "summat"? I haven't read the books--good to know about the sequel's rape; that's a pass.

[mme_hardy]

No, it's a mix of fake-French and fake-Italian with Yorkshire mixed in for some reason.

[rachelmanija]

LOLOLOLOLOL.

[oursin]

Am currently reading The Adventures of Miss Barbare Pym and honestly. She was still moseying off to Germany, where she had a romantic interest who was actually a Nazi, as late as 1938, even though she had Jewish friends and acquaintances. Naive? In denial that he was really into it? Beglamoured? Not as though she appears to have been involved in British Fascism.

She had form for falling for awful men, but that was really over the top.

[mme_hardy]

Yeah, ouch. A lot of people were pro-Fascist in the '30s, goddamnit, but '38 is pretty late to be dating a Nazi.

[legionseagle]

I still think sending formal state condolences to Berlin on the death of Hitler remains the high water mark of Not Having Spotted Things Were Up.

[mme_hardy]

... who? Why?

[legionseagle]

Eamonn de Valera.

[sovay]

She was still moseying off to Germany, where she had a romantic interest who was actually a Nazi, as late as 1938, even though she had Jewish friends and acquaintances.

Did she break it off with him or did it just become impossible to keep moseying off?

[oursin]

Historical events pretty much caught up with her with the Munich crisis while she was actually - I think in Austria rather than Germany at the time, but had to leave precipitiously.

[movingfinger]

Beverley Nichols has not aged well, which would elicit many snippy remarks from him were he here to hear it.

My impression on reading about the 1930s in England and even the war period is that class solidarity was more important than fretting about fascism, at least if one was the right sort of people, because of course the fascists would never bother the right sort of people and the communists were far more alarming. Nichols strived to be the right sort of people.

We discussed him in email years ago, and in looking up those messages I found the DNB for W Somerset Maugham---they used to send the full text of the entry, much more interesting than a website---according to which, Nichols was one of those who outed Maugham after his death in revenge for Maugham's catty memoir (possibly not written by M). Claustrophobia sets in, with these people.

[oursin]

In one of Angela Thirkell's early non-Barsetshire novels - O, These Men, These Men (1935) - she has a Thirkelly upper-middle sort of family in which there are two sons, one a blackshirt, the other a pinko balletomane, all entirely for comic effect.

Nichols was rather more interesting and complex - he was a fairly militant pacifist of the period though the ODNB entry does suggest that his political positions were rather all over the place, except for his 'pleas for sexual tolerance [which] were unusually vocal for the period'. The current ODNB version also suggests that his vitriolic account of Maugham and Haxton was due to his sympathy for the mistreatment of Syrie Maugham.

[rachelmanija]

Get your fascists out of my cozy cottages!

Grrr. That book otherwise sounds so good!

[cofax7]

reminds me a bit of how Wodehouse used the black shirts to comic effect... wouldn't go over so well now, one assumes.

[mme_hardy]

Except that Wodehouse created the Brown Shorts to mock the black shirts, and the person who founded them is absolutely an object of derision and disdain.

[legionseagle]

So effectively that I saw some absolute wart on the current political scene (Gove? Rees-Mogg?) being compared to Roderick Spode not all that long ago.

[cofax7]

yes but I guess I'm worried that derision isn't sufficient, you know? Making fun of our homegrown nazis doesn't appear to have helped much, you know?

[sovay]

On the first visit he was a Socialist; this visit he is a Fascist, complete with black shirt. This is treated as a humorous eccentricity.

Well, I've already noped out of this book and I hadn't even heard of it.

[sabotabby]

Then Nichols's friend John shops up for a second visit. On the first visit he was a Socialist; this visit he is a Fascist, complete with black shirt. This is treated as a humorous eccentricity. The book was written in 1933. So much for cozy. (I am very fond of the book and will finish it; it was a jarring note.)

This reads very historically accurate tbh. Even Mussolini started as a socialist.

[oursin]

Ditto Oswald Mosley - he and Cynthia were apparently 'committed Fabians' in the 20s and he had crossed the floor to become a Labour MP and close to Ramsay MacDonald. Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster in the 1929 Labour Govt before seceding once more to found his own 'New Party'.