Why Barbara Comyns is the best English novelist you’ve never heard of

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The novels of Barbara Comyns draw you in from their unusual, beguiling first sentences. Take 1954’s Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead, for instance, which begins: “The ducks swam through the windows.” Or 1950’s Our Spoons Came From Woolworths: “I told Helen my story and she went home and cried.” Her wartime dispatch Mr Fox, written in the Nineteen Forties however printed in 1987, begins: “The other people in the house where I lived didn’t like me. I expect it was because I was living with a man I wasn’t married to.” And The Vet’s Daughter (1959), her very best novel, begins: “A man with small eyes and a ginger moustache came and spoke to me when I was thinking of something else.” I imply, come on. Don’t you simply need to learn all of them proper now?

Before that, although, you is likely to be considering: however… I don’t have the faintest concept who Barbara Comyns is. Writing at the identical time as the likes of Elizabeth Jane Howard, Daphne du Maurier, Elizabeth Taylor, Iris Murdoch and Stella Gibbons, she is one of the most thrillingly distinctive mid-century English novelists. But in some way, she cuts a lonely determine – not half of any explicit literary scene, her works criminally under-recognised right this moment, her title little identified. When I have a look at the Comyns’ novels on my bookshelves, they’re from a clutch of unbiased presses – Virago, Daunt, Turnpike, New York Books – with no explicit dwelling.

Gothic, macabre, witty and unpredictable, novels like hers are the motive you go right into a secondhand bookshop and shelf-dive; they’re the dream end result of paying £2 for an obscure guide since you like the bizarre title. Of course, we’re used to listening to about uncared for literary gems, salvaged from obscurity to be republished in shiny new editions. Yet Comyns has been found, misplaced, rediscovered and misplaced once more, repeatedly. A brand new biography launched this month, by Avril Horner, a specialist in girls writers and the gothic, could assist her lastly stick. But even that guide was in the stability – Barbara Comyns: A Savage Innocence took three years to discover a writer.

“My sense was she was too risky, because she wasn’t well known,” Horner tells me. “Yet as a writer she has the extraordinary capacity to bring you up short. I don’t see it in any other British writer before her – this ability to shift in tone from something very melancholy to a sudden joke, and vice versa.”

Barbara Comyns was born in 1907 in the sleepy village of Bidford-on-Avon. Before she was a novelist, she was, variously, a painter, sculptor, poodle breeder, piano restorer, artist’s mannequin, and housekeeper. She grew up in a crumbling manor surrounded by a river, her father a tyrannical brewer, her mom eliminated, and she or he had the form of semi-feral middle-class childhood that appears to have colored her method to residing: resilient, self-sufficient, at all times barely wild. All her life, she was surrounded by animals, from the peacock that stalked the lawns of her first dwelling to the newt she carried round as a younger lady.

Her adolescence with John Pemberton, husband primary (feckless) and father to son Julian, was marked by poverty. Later, she had a messy affair with married artwork critic Rupert Lee with whom she had her second youngster, Caroline. Life together with her second husband Richard Comyns Carr (light, devoted), was happier, with a few years spent in Spain – however he was later to lose his job with MI6, in all probability as a result of he was a good friend of infamous British spy Kim Philby.

Having began writing about her uncommon upbringing as a way to amuse her youngsters, these unselfconscious vignettes turned Comyns first guide, the autobiographical Sisters by a River, which was printed to acclaim – and a few bewilderment. “Pray form your own opinion of this unique work,” wrote Elizabeth Bowen. That remark captured the common consensus in the direction of her work all through her life: many critics had been captivated, some had been confused, and a few had been each at the identical time.

The best place to begin for curious readers is The Vet’s Daughter, which tells the story of a younger lady in south London who discovers she will levitate when horrible issues occur, like a bohemian Matilda Wormwood or a genteel Carrie White. With its darkish environment, grotesque characters and handbrake-turn twist, it’s a crash course in Comyns, was made right into a musical in 1978, and has seen varied – failed – makes an attempt to show it right into a TV drama (please BBC, it might be the excellent 90-minute Christmas particular). Her work falls into two camps – realist home tales and gothic tales – however amongst their frank prose and sharp wit, they discover darkish topics, together with abortion, sexual assault, racism, motherhood, and ranging levels of psychological disintegration.

Perhaps she fell away periodically as a result of these matters had been an excessive amount of for readers at the time, or handled too bluntly. In sensible phrases, it was possible as a result of her writing was properly acquired however never a serious vendor. Not till she was rediscovered by Carmen Callil at feminist writer Virago in the Nineteen Eighties, the place her work was republished as half of its Modern Classics lists, did her work promote greater than modestly. Prompted by a brand new urge for food for her work, that decade she printed the novels Mr Fox and The House of Dolls – each introduced as “new” Comyns novels, however truly plucked from the backside of drawers, having been rejected by publishers a pair of a long time earlier.

Comyns knew that her readership hung in the stability as she went out and in of vogue. After one other rejection letter for the unpublished-to-this-day Waiting in 1979, she instructed her agent that she’d never write once more (though she did – her nice ultimate novel The Juniper Tree, printed in 1985) and speculated that maybe sooner or later she’d see a revival. “Remember Barbara Pym!”

Horner first turned excited by Comyns when she and a colleague had been requested to contribute to an educational journal about the feminine gothic, and her colleague recommended that fairly than specializing in Mary Shelley and the standard suspects, they have a look at Comyns. The extra Horner learn, the extra intrigued she turned – and promised herself that when she had time, she’d write extra about Comyns. It wasn’t till she retired that she may write the biography she’d lengthy hoped to creator. It’s a guide that can delight Comyns devotees. It brings to life many of the incidents that clearly knowledgeable the novels, and divulges the depth of feeling lurking beneath that clear, measured prose. Comyns’s naive, child-like heroines have led to some categorising her work as nearer to “outsider art”, however Horner discovered that, “behind all those naive young women is a very knowledgeable author, drawing on her own experience in a very thoughtful, knowing way.”

But uncovering the information of her life wasn’t simple. When Horner went to go to Comyns’ granddaughter Nuria Leighton, she found Comyns’ papers in disarray. “They were in no order, which Nuria freely admits,” Horner tells me. “She doesn’t want to part with any of them, but they were in carrier bags, boxes, things stuffed in envelopes, under the bed.” But nestled inside them had been treasures: a correspondence with Graham Greene, for instance, that confirmed the creator to have been a lifelong champion of Comyns’ work.

Horner’s guide is an vital intervention, making certain Barbara Comyns’ title is not forgotten. But it’s additionally a reminder that writers’ legacies want cautious stewarding and are never assured. Her guide is printed in the identical month as Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s “lost” novel Until August, the latter feted as one of the literary occasions of the 12 months. Yet that unpublished Comyns novel Waiting – about an previous individuals’s dwelling the place the residents are “waiting to die but things keep happening”, the place they “feel even more intensely than when they were young” – actually is misplaced. Some of her books stay out of print (her ickily titled The Skin Chairs is “almost impossible to get hold of unless you pay a lot of money,” Horner says.)

Although Comyns has been in comparison with Nancy Mitford, Angela Carter and Jean Rhys, and referred to as “Beryl Bainbridge on acid”, she stays unimaginable to classify. “She’ll be writing in a rather comical way and then suddenly – bang – you’re in a different emotional world,” says Horner. “She manages to harness the uncanny in a new way for women writers.”

She’s additionally, Horner admits, “like marmite”. And she’s proper – I’ve sometimes felt self-conscious about recommending her too fervidly to the uninitiated, given the grand guignol scenes of horror in some of her works (a lot of villagers sensationally kill themselves in Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead). I wrestle with the deliberate, affected spelling errors in Sisters by the River, and I can’t deal with her grotesque descriptions of animal deaths.

But half of Comyns’ brilliance is that she attracts from an unlimited palette of tough, generally insufferable experiences, in a approach that feels earlier than her time. When she printed Our Spoons Came From Woolworths, she included the disclaimer, “The only things that are true in this story are the wedding, chapters 10, 11 and 12, and the poverty.” The chapters she mentions comprise some of the most visceral, horrifying descriptions of childbirth that you’ll learn.

A Savage Innocence is prefaced with a quote from Mr Fox: “In the back of my mind I was always sure that wonderful things were waiting for me, but I’d got to get through a lot of horrors first.” It’s poignantly applicable. Certainly Horner’s biography reveals the ache and frustration she felt at her years in the wilderness, and made me unhappy for all the Comyns books we would have gotten had she been higher championed in her later profession. Horner’s descriptions of her ultimate years, widowed and succumbing to dementia, are exhausting to learn. Having beforehand labored on an version of the letters of Iris Murdoch, who was additionally struck by dementia in later life, as certainly was Marquez, the biographer believes it is at all times an moral determination as to how a lot materials from that point needs to be used. “Reading her scribbled bits of paper – she wasn’t the same woman that she was. I found it very sad,” Horner says.

When Comyns died in 1992, the author Ursula Holden’s obituary for The Independent referred to as her “a true original… her death marks a loss to English writing”. Her household marked her loss of life, Horner reveals, by every pouring a gin and tonic on her grave, one thing they repeat each time they discover themselves again at the churchyard the place she is buried. A real unique certainly – unusual and beguiling to the finish.

‘Barbara Comyns: A Savage Innocence’ is printed by Manchester University Press on 19 March