Crewe Train

Book 16: Virago Modern Classics

by Rose Macaulay

Genres: General Fiction; Action & Adventure; Classics; Humor & Satire; Satire; Women's Fiction

Synopsis

Denham Dobie has been brought up in Andorra by her father, a retired clergyman. On his death, she is snatched from this reclusive life and thrown into the social whirl of London by her sophisticated relatives. Denham, however, provides a candid response to the niceties of 'civilised' behaviour. Crewe Train is Macaulay's wittiest social satire. The reactions of Denham to the manners and modes of the highbrow circle in which she finds herself provide a devastating - and very funny - social commentary as well as a moving story. This bitingly funny, elegantly written comedy of manners is as absorbing and entertaining today as on the book's first publication in 1926.

Release date: February 8, 2018

Publisher: Virago

Print pages: 256

Sample

Rose Macaulay was fond of her fictional character, Rome Garden. This empathy is not surprising, for although the insouciant and ever-inquiring Miss Garden of Told by an Idiot (1923) and Crewe Train (1926) is not a fully rounded self-portrait, in picturing her Rose Macaulay drew a sharply outlined sketch of herself as a figure in the London literary life of the Twenties. Describing the manner and mind of Rome Garden at thirty-one, she openly refers to their affinities:

 

She was a woman of the world, a known diner out, a good talker, something of a wit, so that her presence was sought by hostesses as that of an amusing bachelor is sought. She had elegance, distinction, brain, a light and cool touch on the topics of her world, a calm, mocking, sceptical detachment, a fastidious taste in letters and persons. She knew her way about as the phrase goes, and could be relied upon to be socially adequate, in spite of a dangerous distaste for fools, and in spite of the ‘dancing and destructive eye’ (to use a phrase long afterwards applied to one whose mentality perhaps a little resembled hers) which she turned on all aspects of life around her.

Like Rose Macaulay, Rome Garden rarely loses her aplomb. Although in the last chapter of Told by an Idiot she is knowingly headed, at sixty-three, towards death within the year, she maintains her smiling distance from life’s ‘queer, absurd show’ and the cool sense of her own relative unimportance as a player on its stage. The tone of her thoughts at the end of her life is not that of tragedy but of comic irony, the consistent tone of Rose Macaulay’s most popular light novels.

Despite her prophesied demise, Rome Garden proved to be too valuable a witness of folly to disappear from Rose Macaulay’s fiction. Three years after her gallant farewell soliloquy the nonchalant and stoic Miss Garden is resurrected in Crewe Train as an attractive middle-aged country house guest, and she once more casts on the scene her ‘enigmatic regard (was it amused, ironic, or merely expectant?)’ Although she plays only a cameo role in this satire of literary society, her candour and sanity remain in our consciousness throughout Crewe Train, for the narrative voice of the novel is that of just such a quizzical observer as Rome. The first paragraph reminds us of Jane Austen, the last line recalls Evelyn Waugh. Both passages are vintage Rose Macaulay.

And the reader is grateful for that authorial voice, for the keenest pleasure of reading Rose Macaulay’s writing comes from her wry commentary on ‘all aspects of life around her’. Why, then, we may well ask, did she choose to use as the leading character of Crewe Train, a novel about the talky, sophisticated milieu she knew so well, not Rome Garden but a young woman who seems to be an anti-self? Denham Dobie is gauche, silent, non-social, ‘an untutored savage’ who goes unwillingly to literary parties, made miserable by the strain of inventing small talk for the entertainment of her egocentric, bookish dinner partners. She prefers swimming and pottering about the seacoast alone in a small boat.

Harold Nicolson suggests an answer. He begins his Rose Macaulay obituary essay, ‘One of the many things that we shall all remember about Rose was her combination of opposites.’ Denham Dobie, the very centre of Crewe Train, seems to be the social and intellectual obverse of gregarious and scholarly Rose Macaulay; she visits the Zoo to escape talkers and those who would civilise her. She muses, ‘There would always be a part of you, a secret, hidden part which would never put on anything, but would stay as it was born, naked, savage, sceptical, and untutored.’ Rose Macaulay was mostly Rome Garden, but (although far from untutored) partly her opposite, Denham Dobie. ‘Nobody ever zigzagged more,’ said Alan Pryce-Jones of her.

Her idyllic childhood on northern Italy’s Mediterranean coast, in the midst of a large, well-educated English family had created at least two selves – both the serious young book-lover who perched in the orange trees in the Villa Macolai garden to read, and the daring amphibious tomboy Rose never wholly outgrew. In addition to praising Rose as a cultivated guest, Harold Nicolson offers a hilarious example of her passion for spontaneous lone bathing under any conditions of weather or risk, in oceans, pools and ponds, wherever she travelled. She was known throughout her long life for her impulsive and intrepid deeds as well as for her wise and witty words. Her daring as a driver was notorious; in her sixties she drove an ambulance in the worst havoc of the London Blitz.

In part, Rose Macaulay created Denham Dobie to fit the plot of Crewe Train – the adventures of the barbarian who goes to the city, a classic form of satire. In addition, she was at ease describing both Denham’s adventurous outdoor pleasures and her plight as an outsider entering a small, self-absorbed and self-satisfied community. Young Denham, orphan and expatriate, arriving in bustling London from isolated Andorra, is puzzled by the lives of book-mad, gossipy writers, publishers and reviewers, and asks disconcerting, literal questions, seeking the reasons for their frenetic schedules and their time-wasting social customs, domestic arrangements and dress codes.

When, at forty-five, as an increasingly successful London writer, Rose Macaulay published Crewe Train, she herself could look back on having adjusted to a number of identities and milieux, beginning as a Somerville student doing Modern History Honours at Oxford, and later a published neophyte poet and novelist from the provinces who occasionally came down to London as what she called ‘an innocent from the Cam’. Then during the First World War, she took on new roles, serving first as an ineffectual V.A.D. nurse in a military hospital, then as a Landgirl (more to her taste) working on a Cambridgeshire farm. From 1916 on she had lived less happily with her widowed mother in Hedgerley as a commuting suburbanite and, until the war’s end, as a civil servant in the new Ministry of Information. (She was sometimes unable to keep a brisk individual comment out of her official memos.) In 1922 she became a Londoner and an active, successful member of the literary establishment.

These worlds appear in her novels, and in each Rose Macaulay surveys the scene and records her perceptive views. In all she published thirty-six books; twenty-three were works of fiction, and fourteen of these, like Crewe Train, were social comedies and high-spirited novels of ideas which became increasingly popular with her upper-middle-class liberal audience. Three of her first five novels were conventional, rather moral in the Victorian mode, yet, not surprisingly, the heroine of her first book, published in 1906, is a young woman who looks around her with ‘quizzical, comprehending eyes’.

Many found Rose Macaulay’s enigmatic gaze formidable, but Harold Nicolson said, ‘She amused everybody and offended no one. There was an acid element in her intelligence, but it was citrous merely and never poisoned.’ As book after book appeared, her lively intelligence and joie de vivre gradually lightened and brightened – but did not entirely obscure – her underlying ethical seriousness. In 1920 Potterism, her murder mystery-cum-satire on the sensationalised postwar British press and its corruption of thought and language, was a bestseller in England and America.

In 1926 when her fifteenth novel, Crewe Train, was published, Rose Macaulay was at the height of her popularity as a writer and a celebrity dinner guest. She was to become known as a woman of letters: a novelist, a biographer, a literary critic, a literary and social historian, a political commentator, a reviewer of books, films and radio programs, an essayist, columnist, anthologist, travel writer, and a star of the BBC wireless quiz programme, The Brains Trust. But in the midst of this intellectually sophisticated, hard-working, and fast-moving life, the memory and influence of the outdoor freedom and joyful reading of her childhood remained alive. Her characteristic libertarian individualism, comically represented in the behaviour of Denham Dobie, was foreshadowed by her ancestry and had been nurtured by her childhood.

In 1881 Emilie Rose Macaulay was born at Rugby where her father, a former Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, was a schoolmaster. She was the second child and the second girl in what was to become a family of nine. (Rose’s mother Grace longed for sons and her first three children, all daughters, knew from early childhood that they should have been boys.) When Rose was six, her mother’s ill health prompted the dramatic move of the whole ménage, servants and all, from damp, grey England to warm, golden Italy where they were the only English residents in the fishing village of Varazze, southwest of Genoa. The children’s lives at once moved out of doors, and, fortunately, Grace Macaulay’s admiration for male bravery and sportsmanship encouraged Rose’s natural delight in dauntless physical freedom. For seven years she played, in and out of the sea, like a young apprentice pirate or fisherman.

But she was a more complicated tomboy than Denham Dobie. Rose Macaulay’s paternal grandfather was the first cousin of Thomas Babington Macaulay, a descendant of what Noel Annan calls England’s ‘intellectual aristocracy’, generations of upper-middle-class clerics and dons who educated their daughters as well as their sons. And Rose’s mother, from the same admirable stock of Macaulays, Coneybeares, Darwins, Trevelyans, Huxleys and Vaughans, was an educated woman for her day. Tutored by both parents, Rose began her schooling early, and as an adult she could be described as learned – but never as pedantic.

Grace Macaulay gave her children their elementary lessons and instruction in poetry, Italian, and the Book of Common Prayer as well. The donnish George Macaulay daily read classics aloud to them and told them the stories of old myths and legends. But although they loved hearing of the voyage of Jason and his Argonauts in search of the Golden Fleece, the tales most prized by what Rose called ‘our savage tribe’ were from boys’ adventure books like Treasure Island, The Swiss Family Robinson, The Prisoner of Zenda, and Masterman Ready. ‘The Five’, as the Macaulay children nearest in age called themselves, spent their mornings in study and their afternoons on the shore with their canoe, the Argo, acting out the quests and encounters in those pages. In later life Rose kept all these cherished childhood volumes on her top bookshelf, until years later when, along with her irreplaceable antiquarian library, they were destroyed in the London Blitz. Denham’s excited discovery of ‘the useful hideaway’, the secret passage in Crewe Train, recalls an episode in one of the clan’s favourite tales, The Coral Island by R.M. Ballantyne.

But this prelapsarian bliss ended when the family moved back to England in 1895 to settle in Oxford. Rose was fourteen and loath to become a proper young lady. She wrote of that mandatory transformation with comic melancholy, reminiscent of Denham’s dismay in contemplating convention-bound town life:

 

Later they took us to England and school, and we lived in a University town, where we wore shoes and stockings all day, and where, did we lapse (and we did), in the streets from respectable behaviour, a schoolfellow from the girls’ High School or the boys’ Preparatory was sure to pass and put us to shame. We could, and we did, be Sherlock Holmes and track criminals unobtrusively (or so we hoped), but it was a poor kind of life.

Only the double shock of the Oxford High School’s rules of decorum and her father’s lecture on the necessity of acknowledging the undeniable fact of her gender at last awakened Rose from the dream that she would some day become a naval lieutenant. In Told by an Idiot she describes the adolescence of Imogen Garden, a character much like her young self, who ‘had always meant to be a sailor, and who even now blindly hoped that somehow, before she reached the age for Osborne, a way would be made for her (either she would become a boy or dress up as a boy, or the rule excluding girls from the senior service would be relaxed)’. Shamed by her relatives for playing Indians in the woods, Imogen thought, ‘A tomboy. Imbecile word. As if girls didn’t like doing nice things as well as boys… Oh, it was rotten being grown-up. Grown-ups had such a hideous time. They became so queer, wanting to go to parties, and even meetings, and all kinds of rotten shows.’

Almost all of the heroines in Rose Macaulay’s books have androgynous Christian names, and more than one resists maturity. The waif Barbary, in Rose Macaulay’s post-Second World War novel, The World My Wilderness (1950), is a dark version of this puer aeternus; she is an uncivilised child who plays life-and-death games aiding the French Resistance, half adolescent girl and half wild creature.

At school, a bastion of propriety, Rose remained almost as shy and silent as Denham, and only began losing what a friend called an ‘almost intelligible torrent of words’ when, in 1900, she entered Somerville College, Oxford, to become a passionately engaged student, thanks to her wealthy Uncle Regi Macaulay’s generous recognition of her quick mind and her literary talent. He knew the family lore; the first sentence Rose had ever printed was, ‘I CAN WRITE.’

The dedication of Crewe Train – ‘To the Philistines, the Barbarians, the Unsociable’ – although an accurate description of the pleasure-loving, indolent, and awkward Denham, obviously does not apply to the well-educated Rose who ‘knew her way about’ the social scene. But these phrases are followed by another category in smaller type –‘and to those who do not care to take any trouble’, a category which includes both author and character. Both believed that most duties conventionally assigned to women were boring and tiresome.

And so in Crewe Train Rose Macaulay created a near caricature of a young-woman-as-a-twelve-year-old-boy in order to put in Denham Dobie’s mouth and mind words and thoughts echoing her own criticisms of fussily conformist adult society. We find the same complaints in the sprightly, even flippantly exaggerated essays in A Casual Commentary, published a year before Crewe Train appeared. In the essays and in the novel, she mocks herself as well as other Londoners.

She was a great traveller but she often laughs at British tourists; she derides popular novelists and in Crewe Train praises the admirable Rome Garden for being too fastidious to write novels.

Although Crewe Train’s jokey dedication to the happy slacker and the anti-intellectual is clear enough, the book’s title is certainly puzzling to those who do not know the popular ballad of the same name which describes the troubled state of a misdirected traveller:

 

Oh, Mr Porter, whatever shall I do?

I want to go to Birmingham, but they’ve sent me on to Crewe!

Crewe Train plots the adventures of a life traveller who sets off meandering contentedly alone up a mountain path with only mindless pleasure as a destination, and ends dismally in a suburban drawing room into which unwelcome visitors, pointing out tedious social and housekeeping duties, may at any time intrude. It is the story of the trapping of a child of nature by sex, love, marriage, social convention, domesticity, pregnancy, and gossip. But however pathetic are Denham Dobie’s attempts to escape her imprisonment and go her own happy, irresponsible way, until the last chapters the novel never departs very far from comedy, because few readers can wholeheartedly identify with Denham’s childlike behaviour. Her lover and husband, Arnold Gresham, is no domestic tyrant but an intelligent, well-educated, conventional, affectionate, quite reasonable young publisher whose myopic failure to understand what a gypsy life his feckless wife dreams of is understandable. And besides, Rose Macaulay’s comments about the obstacles to women’s freedom are diverting black humour. She is a playful and rueful observer, not a reformer.

As a young woman Rose Macaulay had not joined the suffragettes, for although she thought it absurd that women should be denied the vote, she did not believe that, under the British system, the vote would do them much good. More importantly, she disapproved of the ‘noisy fuss’ the suffragettes made. But she always held a brief for women, knowing them to have been unfairly disadvantaged throughout history; her writings record the injustices. Her central belief about gender was that most men and most women of the same class were more alike than different; she hoped that the reader would not be able to guess whether the sympathetic first-person narrator in her last novel, The Towers of Trebizond, was a man or a woman.

Until the closing chapters of Crewe Train we are really not meant to take Denham very seriously as a representative societal victim; there is, after all, an attractive and successful young career woman in the story, Audrey Gresham, who is not hobbled by the customs, etiquette, and dictates of taste which so irk and puzzle Denham. Denham Dobie’s careless, vagabond ways are not offered as a model for independent young women but as a comic scenario of an attempted escape from female duties unpalatable to Rose Macaulay. Only towards the end of the story do we realise Denham’s pain in being trammelled and thwarted by a loving but incompatible marriage. In the end she discovers the wife’s life is forced to conform to that of the husband.

In Crewe Train Rose took bold risks with the sympathy of her readers. Always seriously interested in religion, she nevertheless showed the non-spiritual and commonsensical Denham’s scepticism about some rules of life prescribed by the Roman Catholic Catechism. Not surprisingly, some Catholics found this tasteless; others were indignantly offended. And in 1926 even more readers were shocked at Denham’s not wanting to have a baby – she thought her dog Jacob was a better companion. (One humourless male reviewer called Denham ‘a mental case’ and expressed his deep disgust at the author’s allusions to morning sickness.) But down-to-earth, literal Denham is completely consistent and, despite occasional jokes at her heroine’s expense, Rose Macaulay clearly believes that Denham’s principle of living without taking too much trouble is a sensible and appealing one.

Today’s women cheer at Rose’s epigram from ‘Problems of a Woman’s Life’: ‘At the worst a house unkept cannot be so distressing as a life unlived’. (She was meticulous about the use of the English language, the state of the cupboards was another matter.) Rose Macaulay was ahead of her time. The rigour of fashion’s dress code for ladies in the Twenties seems as laughable to us as it was to Denham. Rose Macaulay entertained in restaurants, did without live-in servants, was untroubled by the litter of books and papers in her flat, and advised those who lived alone to avoid cooking by foraging for tinned soup and biscuits at home and enjoying party food abroad. Indeed, she made the radical statement, ‘If someone has got to housekeep, there is no reason why it should be a woman rather than a man’.

But the mind-deadening and joy-killing effect of household routine is not Crewe Train’s only satirical target. Denham’s exposure of the narrowness of publishers’ and writers’ lives is wonderfully subversive as she attempts to persuade her young husband that travelling about English coastal villages on a motorcycle and selling books in order to survive would be preferable to a London life spent bringing out such slim volumes as Mildew (someone’s poems) and Maunderings (someone’s essays). And her indifference to the wounds suffered by her husband on reading a tepid review of his first novel provides one of the funniest scenes in the book. The vanity of all writers was one of Rose Macaulay’s favorite subjects.

She also exercised her authorial role as a satirical critic of the publishing world by using Denham to mock the Dorothy Richardson-type stream of consciousness passages in Arnold’s trendy novel. After reading a paragraph of associational gibberish, Denham says doubtfully, ‘I suppose Jane did think like that. I suppose she was a little queer in the head’. And Aunt Evelyn’s lush unconscious parody of the overripe prose of a best-selling romance novel in the late chapters of Crewe Train is one more joke for critics: ‘The youth was handsome, bronzed and brawny; he was a lusty young seagod. The girl was a jocund Chloe. They teased and romped: then bending her face backwards, he crushed her in his arms and kissed her lips.’

However, although witty, the narrator’s world-weary observations on sex, love, and marriage are rather less comical. Denham observes that love is the cheese that baits the marital trap and discovers that ‘the mutual intoxication’ of the honeymoon inevitably wears . . .