The copy that I recently made such an audacious swoop for in the transfer market doesn't look like this. If you want the dust jacket with its illustration, it looks like it will cost you another hundred pounds on top of what I paid. But I'm not a 'book collector' in the sense of wanting 'fine', 'first edition' or 'collectable', it's about the words and the copy I now have has all the words and that's good enough for me.Following on so soon from The Halt During the Chase, it's not always wise to go straight into the same author immediately. Sometimes the books can overlap or interfere with each other. My George Eliot year became like that and the Julian Barnes back catalogue was a bit like it, too. But, on the other hand, I'm like a three year old at Christmas and I can hardly wait.
The first signs are it's a masterclass. 'Two young women, Mimi and Caroline, travel south through the French Revolution of 1968 on their way to the Italian island of Livone', and it begins with the sort of understated decorum that one thinks of with all those great first sentences, or two, in Salinger, in Lady Chatterley, 1984, Tale of Two Cities or Pride and Prejudice, except it is more nonchalant and disarming,
There is a train that shunts around Paris from the Gare du Nord to the Gare de Lyons. If you've just crossed the Channel and you're going straight on to Italy, you have to sit in it while it does this.
It might be making claims for Rosemary to say she's eschewing the grandeur of Caesar's opening to De Bello Gallico, while going in the opposite direction, but she's got the precise ennui of someone who is on their way to somewhere they think is more glamorous and has to sit and suffer the inconvenient details of getting there.
I read this over two days with immense pleasure on the first day to halfway and then wondered where it went on day two in the second half. And now, in that quick calculation of counting 10 words in a line, let's give it 25 lines to a page and multiply by 150 pages, I'm not sure it's 50 thousand words. I don't mind what it is because, as ever, 'all you have to be is any good' but I spent the winter before the winter before last making sure I'd done 50 thousand words so I could call it a novel. And now I find I either wasted a few weeks or Rosemary wrote 'novellas'.
The first half is joyous with its cast of ex-pats and continental types, satires one dare say now but in 1969 not everybody thought Peter Sarstedt's Where Do You Go To, My Lovely was funny. Christine Keeler, so much in our thoughts at the moment, hadn't been that long ago and sex, as even Larkin knew, appeared to be some kind of novelty nobody had thought of before and had become as much a currency as Bitcoin now claims to be.
Of her mother, Mimi says,
She looked over her life carefully and, not finding enough of the things she considered necessary for a life, decided to die.
Sir Rupert Monkhouse is an archaeologist, and as such we might now retrospectively compare him with Casaubon from Middlemarch as fossilised and 'past it' at 59. I take no offence, reading this aged 60 in the last days of 2019, at young Rosemary, publishing this at the age of 37 in the age of Simon Dee, the E-type Jaguar, a couple of years before the Rolling Stones recorded their best LP, because it is a period piece and, unimpeachable as she is, she later repudiated all her work.
It is entirely my fault I want to read as much of her as I can. She'd prefer I didn't, was her stated intention.
Rupert,
instantly puts on his archaeological knighthood, which he does by becoming tense, clever and remote.
La Prostitutess is Sir Rupert's 'elegant mistress', and their relationship is what the slight plot depends on, which is a surprising happy ever after, that sex isn't just for young people.
It ought to be beneath Rosemary's dignity to be quite so didactic because didactic is the last thing that literarure should ever be but perhaps in 1969, when Donovan was still in places thought to be the English Bob Dylan, it might still have been like that.
In the meantime, Rosemary has hung a lot of acute observation on the fragile structure of this story,
I plait my hairpiece, and it comes out very thickly and gives me an interesting fat head. I suddenly look prim and good at chess.
It's unlikely Victoria Coren-Mitchell has read this book and it was published after Dorothy Parker died but either of them would have been glad of that.
Few opportunities are missed to celebrate the, then, clear advantages of Italy and its weather, and men, compared to England. London was then,
People being lived by their lives,
and might be much more so now but I'm not there often enough to say. It could be more pandemic than epidemic. Until Caroline's Persian is,
exquisitely dressed. Dark grey sea-island cotton shirt, lighter grey silk tie and handkerchief with the sheen of good gin.
Never less than percipient with her metaphors, Rosemary's novels add depth to the themes of her poems and there is huge amounts to be enjoyed in them. Whether or not Businessmen as Lovers is as good as The Halt During the Chase or quite worth the cash per se remains to be seen because it will need reading again in the not-too-distant future but you never know if you don't try to find out and I'm glad I know, or am in a position to.
Way Out of Berkkeley Square is up next, currently languishing somewhere between the seller's done business and my letter box, in a jiffy bag. By all means tune in soon to find out what that's all about.
