Jocelyn Playfair (1904–1996)

I have mixed feelings about Jocelyn Playfair’s 1944 novel set in wartime England. Early on in my reading of the book I wondered why the publisher, Persephone, had even decided to give it a second life.

The premise is promising enough: a woman in her thirties (with a young son) whose life was—tragically, according to some—derailed five years earlier by the death of her husband, Simon, is living in Brede, the enchanting manor house of her husband’s best friend, Charles Valery. It’s 1942 and Cressida Chance is making do by providing room and board to a somewhat motley crew of characters, people of different backgrounds and classes, most of them displaced by war. Cressida’s handsome younger brother, Rudolph “Dolphin” Standing, and their aunt, Jessica Ambleside, a slightly irascible Austenesque creation who’s come to Brede from London for a change of air, also figure in the narrative.

Only a couple of Playfair’s characters emerge with any clarity. Two of the males appear to be mouthpieces for the author’s opinions about war, which are inelegantly forced into a novel mainly concerned with romantic relationships. Playfair seems to have been a strong-minded, unconventional woman who could not help but air her views. The insertion of those views into the book turns what might otherwise be dismissed as women’s fiction into a not-entirely-successful novel of ideas and literary seriousness. While not exactly “types”, many of Playfair’s characters are caricatures, none more so than the monkey-faced little European count, Tori. He’s somehow made his way from an unidentified country (possibly Poland) to England. The reader is asked to believe he’s been smuggled out of a concentration camp and that he’s recuperating at Brede before heroically returning to his homeland on a “dangerous mission”, the details of which Playfair can’t be bothered to provide. Not surprisingly, Tori idolizes Cressida, who (the reader is regularly reminded) happens to be a woman of extraordinary beauty and kindness, attractive to men, yet arousing not a single iota of jealousy in women. Tori showers Cressida with affection, praise, and . . . lengthy spiritually instructive lectures intended to illuminate his beloved on the real roots of war. According to him, war is the externalization of the conflict between kindness and cruelty that rages within every human heart. With bated breath, Cressida hangs onto every one of the aristocratic windbag’s impassioned words. For the reader, who is much less virtuous than dear Cressida, the monologues are a trial to be endured.

The conflict in the novel arises from Playfair’s idiosyncratic reworking of “the marriage plot”—the presentation of a youngish woman who must choose between suitors. (It’s the backbone of several Victorian novels, including several by Thomas Hardy). Playfair does something rather different with it. While Cressida’s conflict of the heart eventually includes Tori, the romantic tension initially arises from her love for Brede’s owner, Charles Valery, who disappeared after Simon’s death. Playfair drops crumbs throughout the novel about how Cressida came to live at Brede and what really happened to Simon, including Charles’s role in the death. The two men argued over Cressida while riding in a car. The car crashed, and Charles alone survived. No great loss. Cressida discovered that any love she once had for her spoiled rich-boy husband, handsome as he was, had evaporated anyway.

Playfair provides occasional shifts in point of view—from Cressida’s to that of the man she loves. We learn early on that Charles’s ship, part of a trans-Atlantic convoy, has been torpedoed, that he is the sole survivor of the wreck, and that he’s managed to get himself into the most well-equipped lifeboat you could possibly imagine. Sure there’s the dead body of an acquaintance that has to be disposed of, and there are a few inches of water that must be bailed out of the boat’s bottom, but—not to worry—our hero isn’t too diminished to do the heavy lifting and there’s a dipper handy to remove the excess water. There are also canisters of food and water . . . and even superior navigational charts! Under such circumstances, with the sea “spread around him like a sheet of winking sapphires,” what better use of unplanned downtime for a shipwreck survivor—a “tiny ugly blot, left by carelessness on an otherwise superb arrangement of colour”—than to nobly and philosophically contemplate his existence, and, like Tori, consider the aims and significance of war. Forget such lowly pursuits as actually struggling to survive or get oneself noticed and rescued by a boat or plane. Those challenges don’t come into play until day 14, well after Charles has ironed out his philosophy that war is due to men’s failing to think for themselves, their desire to protect what they see as rightly theirs (regardless of how that impacts the rest of world), and their failure to regard humanity as one.

There are some surprises in how Playfair’s novel ends. Ultimately, the author entirely—but not fully convincingly—subverts the marriage plot. Her two main male characters become warriors, but not in the conventional sense. Both are invested in the idea of taking personal action that will begin to change humanity’s course so that war no longer occurs. As for Cressida: she carries on at Brede, free of some of the traditional constraints on women, contributing in her own way to the making of a new world.

Rating: a solid enough 3.5, which I unfortunately cannot bring myself to round up.… (meer)

'...for themselves, personally, the war seems to mean practically nothing', June 12, 2014

This review is from: A House in the Country (Paperback)
Written in the middle of the Second World War, this is the story of Cressida Chance; living in beautiful Brede Manor, she takes in 'paying guests' - a charitable act rather than a money-spinner when housing was in short supply. Cressida has no time for her neighbours who continue their selfish pre-war lives, arguing with one about paying guests:

"I said did she suppose these nice, shy young men liked walking up to private houses and asking for rooms, and being made to feel like commercial travellers or even confidence men, and did she realise that it might be the only chance some wretched couple might have of living together. I'm afraid I even said it might be the last few weeks of any of their lives."

The most outstanding of the guests is Tori, a central European refugee who has undergone horrors abroad, and who engages Cressida in some noble and idealistic conversations on war and Christianity. In complete contrast is Cressida's utterly self-centred elderly Aunt Jessica, who comes to stay.
Interspersed with their lives, we follow Cressida's long-absent lover, Charles, as he is lost at sea after his ship is torpedoed...

Ms Playfair writes quite beautifully:
'Yes, there are the cabbages, she thought, in neat rows, and a pie in the oven, and a thousand bombers going out in a night; five or six thousand highly trained young men with nervous, useful fingers, good at mending wireless sets, playing the piano, tinkering with cars and leaking roofs, doing endless, fiddling invaluable jobs...'

'Life goes on and on. The cabbages stand in rows and somewhere men are clutching at wreckage in wild seas with oil burning on the water. the trains are full of men reading their newspapers, and somewhere old men and women are being driven in herds away from their homes, sleeping in the cold under trees, hiding in cellars and jungles.'

But I found Cressida - that calm, beautiful, wise 37 year old, beloved by all - somewhat hard to warm to. And the last couple of chapters which contain more splendidly noble sentiment than the rest of the book put together, were just too much and spoilt what had been a fairly good novel.… (meer)