Taking Chances

Book 226: Virago Modern Classics

by Molly Keane

Genres: General Fiction; Classics; Family Life; Marriage & Divorce; Literary Fiction; Women's Fiction; Romance

Synopsis

Those who suffered because of her might think of Mary that she hurt others, herself she could not hurt; but Jer, knowing her better...knew she hurt herself perhaps most deeply. Since the death of her parents, Roguey, Maeve and Jer have cared for one another and for Sorristown, their elegant home. Together they have fished and hunted, unravelled secrets by bedroom fires and sipped gin cocktails. But this pattern of intimacy is about to be broken by Maeve's marriage to Rowley. A week before the wedding, her bridesmaid Mary arrives. Meeting her for the first time Rowley describes Mary as a 'factor for disturbance', little realising the extent to which his prophecy will prove true for each of them.

Release date: May 2, 2013

Publisher: Virago

Print pages: 163

Sample

Nothing puts history in perspective so firmly as fiction. M. J. Farrell wrote Taking Chances in 1930, a period when women’s lives were so unthinkably complicated and endangered by manners that some still hunted side-saddle. Yet there are two abortion attempts in this ironic study of misplaced passion, and a lot of heavy sexual goings-on, referred to, with no irony at all, as “light behaviour”.

In a recent profile in The New Yorker, the novelist, now revealed as the octogenarian Molly Keane, called herself “a great old breakerawayer”. At twenty six she was already a rebel, cutting her teeth on her own society, the privileged hunting community of the Anglo-Irish landed gentry. Keane showed not just the beauty of their sheltered world of big houses and predatory play, but the riveting selfishness which made their prolonged loyalty the exclusive preserve of their (often unpleasant) pet dogs.

Irish Society and government was, in fact, less narrow half a century ago than it is now. The puritanical Irish Constitution, into which are enshrined legal prohibitions on both divorce and abortion, was not drafted for another seven years, until 1937 (although the cruel Censorship of Publications Act, which virtually exiled writers like Kate O’Brien and later Edna O’Brien, was already a year old). The real difference between then and now is that writers—especially women writers—rarely told all. Keane was the exception. Within her own rarified “divine” world of dainty manners and bloody sports Molly was at the same time an eager participant and a starkly unstockinged camera lens. Rarified living conditions can limit understanding, but for the exceptionally intelligent they sharpen the perceptions and offer rich material to record. The nakedly black humour that delighted a new reading generation in Molly Keane’s Good Behaviour and Time After Time, was, at this early stage, softened by youthful enthusiasm, but already she was so caricaturing her own way of life as to anticipate its decline.

The world so vividly brought to life in Taking Chances (and all the novels of M. J. Farrell/Molly Keane, with the exception of Devoted Ladies), has now almost vanished, though survivors still cling to crumbling manor houses in mounting discomfort and with dwindling funds, eccentric but valiant exiles, like the remnants of the Raj. It was a world where servants were faceless while dogs were “little people”; where a good day’s hunting earned a girl the ultimate accolade: “That girl of Rowley’s is a proper bit of stuff. In fact I think she’s a real live human being.” Molly Keane is adamant about the fact that their world was not based on wealth (her own family, she says, was only moderately funded and the need to augment her dress allowance was her literary spur), but on a knowledge of horses and easy access to cheap land and domestic labour. Whatever the reason, times change and people too, but when a new and very young novelist—Irish and female to boot—pokes her pen so provocatively through the social fabric of her own world, one realises that people do not change with the times: it is people who change the times.

Farrell was not the only outspoken female literary voice of the thirties. What made her place in English literature unique is that her comic tone, nudging delicately between irony and parody, was elsewhere only being employed on stage and screen, and then the writers were always male. It is no surprise to learn that she later turned to stage drama and that subsequent novels (such as Spring Meeting and Treasure Hunt) were first seen as drawing room comedies in the West End. Molly stuck her neck out, not just by placing her support firmly on the side of the “bad” girl, (and allowing her, in spite of flimsy morals and a singular lack of contrition, to more or less have her own way) but with a hard-bitten line in home truths aimed at the most vulnerable parts of society’s sacred institutions:

Your honeymoon—you thought vaguely of your honeymoon all your life: of its joys or horrors, as the mood took you. But what you had never visualised were its dreadful moments of boredom, moments when you delivered yourself of words with travail unmitigated.

Taking Chances is not solely a comedy. It is also a love story which veers between shrewd assessment of the politics of passion and youthful poetic licence. There are also occasional glimpses into the heart’s core, reminiscent of the intense intellectual heart-searching of Rebecca West. As Farrell intuited the vulnerability of her own rarified world, so she observed the integral flaws in the theory of love. Again and again she returns to the incompatabilities of love’s central elements, of intimacy and adulation, of loyalty and passion:

Her love and faith in him were far greater than that evasive trick of intimacy, the secret of which is born between two and is rarely discoverable—especially by the one who loves most.

Stories are not the author’s main concern. Her fiction conforms to a pattern of plot and setting, handled with consummate skill. Her real obsession is with people and places, with location and dislocation. From behind the heavy furniture of behaviour, she retrieves the real meat of literature, the agony and the absurdity, for the entertainment, invigoration and discomfort of the reader.

In the midst of ardour, irony is at hand. The lovers confront one another with violent emotions but the cypher of reality is—their dogs. In Taking Chances Molly’s delightfully naughty heroine, doubting the impact on the man she desires of her risqué wardrobe, confides to her bad-natured little dog: “Squiff, if only he could see me in my just—nothing-at-alls. Squiff, you immoral dog, you can always be seen in your just—nothing-at-alls, that’s why you get off so strong.” She defines the charm of her romantic hero, Rowley, in terms of the fullest range of attraction, offering one of those phrases which have become collectors’ items to her huge number of fans, “dogs gave him the same helpless surrender as women”. In a moment of real pain when the one truly sensitive character discovers that a gesture of friendship is really an invitation to treacherous conspiracy, it is the stoic suffering of his faithful hound we are shown;—“blind victim to his god’s caprice”—when the promised outing is peremptorily reversed.

The storyline of Taking Chances is remarkable mainly as a blueprint for a pattern that Molly Keane has made her own. Most of Keane’s central characters are members of the landed gentry, self-absorbed and taking their superiority and their privileged lives for granted. Into their sealed world comes an outsider, in some cases an innocent who becomes their victim, but in nearly all of her novels, including Taking Chances it’s a survivor who knocks them off balance and exploits their relative naiveté.

Taking Chances, set in the fictitious Irish county of Westcommon, introduces us to the languid Sorriers of Sorristown house—handsome Sir Ralph (Roguey), lovely Maeve and clumsy, stuttering, younger brother, Jer—who have taken their minds off the vital business of hunting to see Maeve spectacularly married to neighbouring squire, Major Rowley Fountain. The year at Sorristown has only as many days at the hunting season, and suffers no interruption of this vital pursuit, even when misery and vengeance rebound from their selfishness as when Roguey’s amusement with a village girl results in unwanted pregnancy and blackmail.

The outsider who arrives to disturb their smug mutuality, is Mary Fuller, heiress, scatterbrain and femme fatale. Mary has arrived from London with a mountain of luggage and her ratty little terrier, as an unlikely bridesmaid for virtuous Maeve. Mary is one of Molly Keane’s dazzling creations, vulnerable and ruthless and with an unsettling appeal. She is shrewd but scatty, devastating though not beautiful—“Mary, whom you looked at once, wondering whether she was pretty, and twice to know that she was so lovely that you must take a third look and love her to distraction and sacrifice ever after.” She has a Raymond Chandler line in dialogue and a sense of survival so imperative as to threaten all with whom she is involved. Keane pits Mary’s animal survival instinct against the elegant self-sufficiency of the Sorriers in a contest of manners and expectations versus emotions and determination. As in most of her emotional confrontations, there are to be no clear winners—but she makes no secret of whose side she is on. Keane rejoices in her naughty heroine, shaping her with a mixture of youthful adulation and witty provocation, and clearly indulging her own “breakerawayer” instincts at the same time.

The glamorous heiress doesn’t just confide in dogs—she has gone to them. Experience has led her to believe that all men want “the same one thing” but she amiably concludes: “Perhaps its just as well when the world’s so hard on sweet young things who can’t pay their poker debts.” She responds to a question on “What’s the divinest thing in life?” with the hoarse and swift response: “The first cigarette of the day!” She is an adventuress, who employs all available assets, especially her dramatic body “being not so much immodest as unselfish on the subject” and she toys not just with love but with its uncertainty:

She knew, they both knew, that there is an utter moment, a brief, lovely interval, which time past, love, no matter how pitifully we bolster up its semblance, trembles and dies. But the utter moment had not come yet. Not just yet, Mary thought, reaching towards it blindly, with her lovely head thrown back bravely; a hell of a rake she was

Molly herself must have been something of a headliner. By the time Taking Chances was published, her literary life was no longer a secret, and its knowledge earned her some disapproval from the stricter brigade of local mothers. Writing novels was bad enough; writing about intimate relationships, and with a sense of humour—“very mal vu”, as Molly puts it. It is probable that this minor notoriety pleased Molly more than it upset her. Two years later she was again to rattle the mothers when she met and fell in love with her future husband, Bobby Keane. She lived with him for five years before they got married. (“In those days it wasn’t done, but of course it was done,” she smiles.)

She was an eager debutante but a reluctant writer. Young Molly Skrine (her maiden name), had first put pen to paper ten years earlier when she wrote a hunting romance for Mills & Boon to boost her dress allowance. “Pure as cocoa,” she says deprecatingly of that literary debut which earned her fifty pounds and was used to pay for a great party in the Shelbourne Hotel and a pair of hunting boots. The same description might apply to pure Maeve, the Irish beauty who suffers a nasty martyrdom at the point of Molly’s caustic pen. Keane manages to make virginity seem a kind of short-sightedness which turns marriage into Blind Man’s Buff.

Soon—in a few hours—they would be together for always, and each day would be a day to love each other more. And the nights? But Maeve’s nice thoughts stopped short there in a mysterious, hallowed glow.

Mills & Boon would never have sponsored Molly’s boots in return for this ironic exercise, for the good girl is destined not for joy unconfined, but for—“the vitriolic, futile importance of a slighted woman”.

As a writer, the young M. J.’s attitude to her own society bore comparison with their view of the fox. There is respect and even affection and indulgence, but he is legitimate prey. She has been described as having a “ruthless affection” for her characters. In Taking Chances we are shown Mary after her first successful Irish hunt: “Nearly crying with excitement … while hounds broke up their well-deserved fox.” The outsider, equally triumphant in romantic pursuit leaves Maeve, “painfully jealous, as all unimaginative women are, and proud as only the pure in heart are proud”.

Molly Keane was, herself, something of an outsider. Although her social credentials were impeccable, her mother, a published poet and “literary recluse”, refused to indulge Molly and her sister with the clothes, lunches and parties necessary to “launch” a girl. Molly believes that her sister Susan’s romantic prospects were permanently damaged by the gown she was compelled to wear to her first dance—“A sort of tennis dress”.

She herself was saved by a friend called Daphne whose mother included her in party invitations. Later she found a livelier life with the Perrys of Woodruff House in County Tipperary and in spite of her parents’ disapproval, she more or less went to live there (returning home only for dull intervals of novel writing). The move proved to be a happily fatal one, for it was there that she met her future husband and became friendly with John Perry, a son of the house, who later collaborated with her on plays. In spite of her mother’s indifference to hospitality her social life progressed “frightfully well” and she became familiar with most of the great Irish houses. One of the great pleasures of her fiction is her vivid evocation of the life in these houses.

Only the recent novels tell the full story, the bitter cold, the horror of the nursery and servants’ quarters, but earlier works stirringly recreate the elegant houses with their magnificent settings and their imprint of unimaginative aristocracy.

Always watching over Sorristown with love and brooding, are the mountains, beautiful with a secrecy like death, and kind as solemn mothers.

All this one saw by turning from the unlovely, orderly chaos of an ugly room …

Molly herself did not fit into the category of “unimaginative aristocracy” and her bright mind was at work not only on the people she knew and the poignant truth of the failure of intimacy in their social skills but on the potential for loveliness in their comfortable surroundings. In Taking Chances she manoeuvre’s Sorristown into stylish Mary’s management and lovingly details its transformation.

Now, under Mary’s guidance, the room, like a girl of accepted ugliness dressed suddenly in the right clothes, had acquired an exciting beauty. To-night, long curtains of wood-smoke blue and rainbow flame swept a chord of rich colour, shutting out the thought of the night… Two wide, low sofas of impossible depths and redundancy flanked the enormous wood fire at the precise angle for warmth and comfort, their hollows wadded by loose cushions covered in silver and blue and flame-clouded silk. The heterogeneous collection of furniture that had been vomited by some god of disorder about the room was gone.

My Ireland was a very different one from Molly Keane’s. I shared with her a fascination with houses, but mine were city terraces with the cinema for social life and respectability as the highest aspiration. We shared also the national characteristic (now fast disappearing) of being inadequately educated. Molly was taught by a series of governesses and then “finished” at a wholly farcical-sounding French boarding school in Bray, County Wicklow. She was a reader “but not in any organised fashion”. This handicap may turn to advantage in the novice writer for it can liberate an early imagination from self-consciousness. There is just one grave error of speech in Taking Chances: the wife of a local tenant farmer makes a reference to “horrid” behaviour—a word never used by the native Irish; the local terminology would be “desperate” behaviour. But a delightful, natural Irishness permeates her perfect prose, giving it texture and a piquant individuality. When Rowley marries Maeve, out of duty more than love “his old stud groom confided afterwards to a friend that marriage had made a great wreck o’ the major; he was as cross now as ye wouldn’t believe”. And when old Aunt Edythe, who rules Sorristown through her weighty purse, encounters Mary in one of her famously shocking outfits (“not so much a dress as an inspired indiscretion”), the visitor is momentarily discomfited by “a look in her eye that would make a quiet cow in a secluded field blush for her forgotten bust-bodice”.

It is not surprising that the disclosure of Molly’s second life as successful novelist caused disquiet among the rural gentry for not only was her material frequently wittily scandalous but her characters were sometimes real and readily identifiable too. She happily claims to have no imagination and says that she has always written about her life. If this is true, then Molly, at twenty six, must have been a disturbing dinner guest, determining the manoeuvres behind the manners.

She also saw the detached manipulations of those distanced by age from sexual engagement. The self-immersed young in Taking Chances barely notice their older and rather more colourful relatives, who plot the lives of the young from a distance and who are as full of lively malice and unhealthy interest as any of Keane’s more recent, splendidly bad old things from Time After Time. The dowager aunt develops a fascination with Mary’s capacity for disturbance: “Aunt Edythe peered greedily over the bannisters at the silver storm of Mary’s flight … Almost, she snuffed the air that youth had breathed.”

Her oblique yet encompassing view of behaviour and intentions also gave Molly Keane a premature wisdom. There is an almost Wildean precocity in romantic judgements such as the following: “There are few lengths short of which a man will stop but a woman’s compliance is as limitless as are her subsequent reproaches.” As in Rodin’s visionary sculpture, “The Gates of Hell”, love’s loss is most imminent when its consummation is at hand. There is a ring of jaundiced truth to this image of Mary victorious in love: “lost in a hopeless void, realising the utter remoteness of passion fulfilled”. Yet to define Molly Keane as cynic would be to grossly underestimate her powers as a novelist. Even the most astutely ironic work suffers a limitation of dimension and is divided from the best of fiction by the latter’s encompassing humanity. Taking Chances is not as great a book as Good Behaviour, but it shows all the promise of a resounding talent and a natural authority in the difficult management of theme and plot.

Farrell set herself a difficult task, to establish a vanished way of life and at the same time to expose it. As Anita Brookner was later so devastatingly to do in a number of her novels and especially, Look At Me, she elected a silent witness, one caught up in, but not involved in, a glittering world. Jer, youngest of the Sorriers, is more sensitive than his brother and more intelligent than his sister. He worships Maeve, who has been a mother to him since his own died, and is in love with Mary, but kindness compels him to cede passion to compassion: “He cared for Mary’s hopeless self that he would never trouble her with the love that was in him for her enthralling body.” In a world where the important things are “having a good leg for a boot” and knowing how to put a horse into its fence, Jer is a foreigner because he is afraid of horses. A plain, almost invisible man, his intelligence is masked by a severe stammer. He sees everything—not just the secret liaisons, but the small gestures, the eye engagements, that signal future entanglements. More painful, he sees beyond the romantic intrigues to “a reality which hurt like a bruise”. Irresistably drawn into the involvements of the beautiful and selfish, he is the disillusioned go-between. Ploddingly clear-sighted, he performs love’s dirtiest labours, while anticipating its loss: “Where is romance? It is where we are not and in all things out of reach.”

Although his affections are unconditional, his perceptions are so acute that he sees right through the handsome heads and. . .