Angela Thirkell and John Buchan
Kate Macdonald
Angela Thirkell (1890-1960) was the chronicler of Anthony Trollope's Barsetshire in 29 enormously popular light comedy novels, from High Rising (1933) to Three Score and Ten (1961). She was a friend of John and Susan Buchan, visiting them at Elsfield and at Ottawa in the 1930s. Her biographer, while describing JB as 'a tall, handsome [sic], frosty-eyed Scot' (Strickland 1977, 113), also said that Thirkell 'simply idolized him' (ibid). She made friends with Susan Buchan through her schoolboy character Tony Morland after publishing a collection of short stories based on him, The Demon in the House (1934).
The short stories were not as successful as the novels ... still, she received many admiring letters, particularly from middle-aged women, who were enchanted with 'Tony'. Susan, Lady Tweedsmuir, then Mrs John Buchan, was one of them. She had recently published a children's book called Arabella, and sent Angela a copy of it. (Strickland 1977, 83)
In 1937, while on a tour of the United States, Thirkell visited the Tweedsmuirs at Government House in Ottawa
Angela spent a happy weekend with them, 'gossiping with her Ex[cellency] and talking about Scott, Augustus, the Noctes Ambrosianae, Mrs Simpson and Osbert Sitwell'. Buchan spent the weekend in bed, 'there holding audiences'. Had he been exhausted by Angela? (op cit, 113)
Thirkell chronicled the lives of the country gentry and peasantry in light romantic comedies, over the course of her novels producing a study of social history taken from the life (the village of Beaconsfield was the model for Northbridge in the war, in Northbridge Rectory [1941]). Her characters and stories are entirely focused on the county of Barsetshire and its villages. Romance and adaptation to changing social circumstances are the perpetual themes, and only one novel, so far as I am aware, ends without an engagement (Enter Sir Robert [1955]).The record is four (The Duke's Daughter [1951]). Deaths are few, and when they do occur they are from old age, at home, in bed. All is comfortable, cosy, conventional and predictable.
Her narrative style is wildly discursive, with a great many tangential thoughts interpolated throughout the often very funny and sometimes moving stories. She is also an inveterate quoter, and her characters quote poetry and obscure Victorian children's fiction at each other. Browning and Shakespeare have a good innings here, but so does John Buchan.
In Summer Half (1937), Lydia Keith makes her first appearance. She is a hefty and hearty schoolgirl. Her father brings a visitor, Noel Merton, to stay the night, due to missing the last train back to London, and Lydia attaches herself violently to him, despite his preference for her elder sister Kate, talking enthusiastically and energetically about her latest enthusiasms.
'I'd like to marry someone like Hamlet and Richard the Second and Richard Hannay and Browning.' (Thirkell 1937, 243)
Three years later, when war has broken out, Lydia is only a little less untamed. She depends more and more on Noel, and now Noel has to vanish into the unknown on Intelligence work.
... though Noel was in his own country and among old friends, he felt that a thin sheet of glass was between him and them. There would be much in his new life that he could not share with them and a part of him that would from now on have reticences where had been used to speak very much at his ease. Then he told himself that he was being fanciful, but he knew that he wasn't, and was very glad when Lydia crashed back into the room ...
'Will you vanish into the unknown like Richard Hannay and then turn up at Constantinople or somewhere?' said Lydia. (Thirkell 1941, 117)
By 1949 (despite Thirkell's occasional inconsistency with characters' actions, dates and unnatural ageing), Lydia is married to Noel, with children, a Nurse and a household of her own. That hoyden is more or less tamed but her spirit lives on in the person of Grace Grantly. She, too, loudly attaches herself to stray gentlemen visitors to the house, regardless of whom they might prefer to talk to. This time Colin Keith, Lydia's brother, is the hapless visitor, interested in Grace's elder sister Eleanor.
'I'm going to read John Buchan all over again. I'd like to marry someone like Richard Hannay, only I'd have all the adventures with him, not stay at home with the children ...'
'...I quite agree about Hannay and Mrs Hannay, only I think she's Lady Hannay now.' (Thirkell 1949, 153)
Another hearty and insensitive female, Mrs Bill Marling ('in her cheeriest regimental voice' [Thirkell 1950, 21], 'whose total indifference to the finer shades was sometimes rather restful' [op cit, 31]), is also interested in reading John Buchan.
Mrs Bill did her exercises, brushed her hair with fifty strokes, and went to bed where she read a few pages of a very nice book she found in her room called The Thirty-Nine Steps and went to sleep with the light on. (op cit, 72)
Or perhaps not.
So far Thirkell's pattern has been that only the hearty read JB, and only hearty and spiritually adolescent females at that. In the same novel as Mrs Bill's hairbrushing, an entirely different readership presents itself. Lord Silverbridge, elder son of the Duke of Omnium, publisher's employee and jazz pianist (this was 1950), is extemporising on the piano in preparation for a concert in aid of the Conservative Association while his sister, Lady Cora Palliser, is grilling Bishop Joram about the Mgankamnganka, a dance apparently related to the rumba.
'I should be delighted to teach you,' said the Bishop, 'but it is I fear quite unsuitable I won't say for you, because you are above suspicion ---'
'She can't scare and she can't soil,' sang Lord Silverbridge in an abstracted way but very distinctly, using the romantic words of Richard Hannay (now and forever, we believe Brigadier-General Sir Richard Hannay with many letters after his name), about his future wife. (op cit, 235-6)
Further evidence of this new, male readership crops up in the next novel, The Duke's Daughter (1951). Lady Cora is visiting Philip Winter=s school where he and his wife are found sitting on the lawn.
... for it was their custom to have three of the older boys to supper on a Sunday and to preface the meal by instructive literature. The literature of the moment was John Buchan's The Thirty-Nine Steps and Messrs Dean, Pickering and Addison (alas! in their last term) were the three. Leslie Winter had just come to the delightful part where Richard Hannay (as yet without a commission, a title, or the wife who in his American friend's Mr Blenkinsop's [sic] beautiful words couldn't scare and couldn't soil) is prisoner in the villain's house hidden in a ring of trees on the top of a hill. The boys were rocking backwards and forwards in ecstasy; Pickering and Addison were breathing loudly through their mouths in defiance of hygiene while Dean was following the story with pantomimic gestures, his eyes fixed in vacancy as incident followed incident. (Thirkell 1951, 143)
I am not aware of any further references to JB's fiction in Thirkell's novels, but would be very glad to be corrected.
Thirkell uses her references to JB's stories and characters to make a point. His novels were thrilling, outdoorsy, the stuff for schoolboys and decent middle-class reading. It is not surprsing that she shows a group of schoolboys enthralled by The Thirty-Nine Steps: the surprise is that she hadn't done so before that date, 17 years after she began her Barsetshire Chronicles. The public schoolboys in Summer Half (1937) are either inarticulate or world-weary. Lydia reads Buchan; Swan and Morland discuss the Russian Ballet and Stravinsky.
Thirkell used JB's reputation as a hearty suitable-for-boys novelist to reinforce her hearty female characters, subverting the conventions to comic effect. JB is a foil, but doesn't come off badly: Thirkell has obvious affection for his work, particularly Richard Hannay, and JB rather rises above the use made of his novels.
References
Margot Strickland, 1977 Angela Thirkell: Portrait of a Lady Novelist, Duckworth, London.
Angela Thirkell, 1937 (1988) Summer Half, Hogarth Press, London.
Angela Thirkell, 1941 Cheerfulness Breaks In, Hamish Hamilton, London.
Angela Thirkell, 1949 The Old Bank House, Hamish Hamilton, London.
Angela Thirkell, 1950 County Chronicle, Hamish Hamilton, London.
Angela Thirkell, 1951 The Duke's Daughter, Hamish Hamilton, London.
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