Novel on Yellow Paper (1936)

aimless not really a novel about young woman going about English society between wars. I read this because Jane Duncan mentioned that a publisher's reader had compared her work to it.

Bought this for the cover picture - on my copy detail from 'Woman in Yellow' by Tamara de Lempicka. This is Catherine Carrington by Dora Carrington - and just as enticing! Well done Virago. Neither Stevie Smith nor Pompey Casmilus is to be summed up by the likes of me. Finishing it sent me to the poetry books and I can find only one book in the house with any of her poems - British Poetry since 1945 - so these three poems are possibly the only I have ever read. Easy to read but hard hitting on the heart and brain - no book at bedtime as I had to take up another book before I could sleep..... ( )

The voice of Pompey Casmilus is one of the most unique narrative voices I’ve read in a long time. A personal secretary working for Sir Phoebus Ullwater, Pompey throws her thoughts down on yellow paper “because often sometimes I am typing it in my room at my office, and the paper I use for Sir Phoebus’s letters is blue paper with his name across the the corner ‘Sir Phoebus Ullwater, Bt.’ and those letters of Sir Phoebus’s go out to all over the world.” So behind the stream of consciousness babble and flow that is Pompey’s voice, we divine that there is a very smart and sensible young woman at work. And indeed, there is.

Pompey writes, one suspects, much as she thinks. She will pivot on an interjected “oh” and take off in what seems another direction altogether but will pivot again to take us right back to her original thought (and original they are), finishing the subject off neatly. She talks with a fake German accent when in Germany, throws in frequent interjections in German, French and Latin without translations (sink or swim, reader).

But the pure delight of the novel is what Pompey thinks about and how she thinks about whatever it is, whether Jews, Nazis, her friends, her aunt, sex, her love(s), her acquaintances. Whether she is defending the English to her German lover, Karl, or talking about a play she has seen or the drawing rooms of the upper crust or a Pomeranian named Fifi with broken knees, Pompey had me enchanted from start to finish. She is pure delight talking about her aunt “the Lion” and just extraordinary talking about her broken heart after her dear Freddy broke it off with her. She is a “feet off the ground person” and yet one with a broad streak of self awareness, knowing her own needs and limitations. A typical Pompeyism, summing up the conversation of a Frau K.:
“There you are you see, quite simple. If you cannot have your dear husband for a comfort and a delight, for a breadwinner and a cross patch, for a sofa, a chair or a hot-water bottle, one can use him as a Cross to be Borne.”

A loamish read, as Pompey herself would say.

Not as much a novel as extended musings, from a young woman's point of view, on life death and relationships. Interesting if somewhat breathless use of language that managed to keep me engaged, even without a plot, up to the last few pages.
Good but just a tad too long. ( )