{"id":135604,"date":"2019-04-17T09:00:17","date_gmt":"2019-04-17T13:00:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=135604"},"modified":"2019-04-17T12:10:46","modified_gmt":"2019-04-17T16:10:46","slug":"re-visited-saturday-lunch-with-the-brownings","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2019\/04\/17\/re-visited-saturday-lunch-with-the-brownings\/","title":{"rendered":"Re-Covered: Saturday Lunch with the Brownings"},"content":{"rendered":"

In her monthly column,<\/em>\u00a0Re-Covered<\/a>, Lucy Scholes exhumes the out-of-print and forgotten books that shouldn\u2019t be.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Saturday Lunch with the Brownings<\/em>, the 1960 short-story collection by British writer Penelope Mortimer, carries a note of gratitude to the editor of The<\/em> New Yorker<\/em>, \u201cin whose columns the majority of these stories first appeared.\u201d Three years earlier, Mortimer had signed a contract with the magazine for six stories a year, after which she provided them with what she describes as a \u201csteady stream\u201d of pieces drawn from her day-to-day experience. \u201cThere was no need to look for ideas,\u201d she explains in About Time Too <\/em>(1993), her second volume of memoirs. \u201cI mined my life for incidents with a beginning, a middle and an end, finding even the dreariest days contained nuggets of irony, farce, unpredictable behaviour.\u201d Mortimer\u2014who, by the time she died, at the age of eighty-one in 1999, had published nine novels, one short-story collection, two volumes of memoir, a biography of the Queen Mother, screenplays, and an abundant body of journalism\u2014drew more heavily on her lived experience than most, not least because it proved such a reliable source of creative stimulus. \u201cNone of the stories could accurately be described as fiction,\u201d she goes on to confess in About Time Too<\/em>; \u201cthe moment I fabricated or attempted to get away from direct experience The New Yorker<\/em> regretfully turned it down.\u201d<\/p>\n

During the late fifties, when she wrote the twelve stories included in Saturday Lunch with the Brownings<\/em>, Mortimer was famous for being the beautiful, lauded authoress wife of the renowned barrister-cum-writer, John Mortimer. Profiles of the writerly couple ran in magazines ranging from Good Housekeeping <\/em>through Tatler<\/em>, by way of Books and Bookmen.<\/em> There were often photographs of them with their six picture-perfect children. Wife and mother were the identities that defined Mortimer, even as a writer. She had a regular parenting column, \u201cFive Girls and a Boy,\u201d in the Evening Standard <\/em>newspaper, and her fiction dealt predominantly with the subjects of marriage and motherhood. She wasn\u2019t writing twee, cosy tales of domestic bliss though; instead she penned sharp, shrewd portraits of marital infidelity, strained, unhappy housewives and their insensitive husbands, impotently railing against the draining demands of parenthood. Much of this material she drew from her own life: namely the cracks in her and John\u2019s marriage, and the conflicts associated with finding much of her worth and value in the role of caregiver, while feeling stifled by domesticity. Her fourth novel, for example, Daddy\u2019s Gone A-Hunting<\/em> (1958), the book that precedes Saturday Lunch with the Brownings<\/em>, depicts a suburban mother\u2019s attempts to procure an abortion for her student daughter (the situation Mortimer had found herself in the previous year when her eldest daughter, then at university, fell pregnant). It was a daring topic for its day, not least because of the resistance and disgust with which Mortimer\u2019s protagonist Ruth\u2019s attempts are met: \u201cYou would really advise her to do this thing? Your own daughter? Good God Ruth, I\u2019m sorry. You make me sick,\u201d expostulates the family doctor when she turns to him for help. The reviews, however, were excellent. \u201cA remarkable and deeply disturbing achievement,\u201d declared one. By the time Saturday Lunch with the Brownings <\/em>was published, Mortimer had quite the reputation for dismantling the domestic idyll.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a reputation that remains today, even if now it rests almost entirely on Mortimer\u2019s fifth novel, The Pumpkin Eater <\/em>(1962), the book that followed Saturday Lunch with the Brownings<\/em>. The richly autobiographical tale of a middle-class London housewife\u2019s breakdown following the collapse of her marriage, it\u2019s the only one of Mortimer\u2019s works still in print in the U.S. today (and one of only two in the UK, along with Daddy\u2019s Gone A-Hunting<\/em>). If I had my way, I\u2019d see all of her work republished\u2014not least because she\u2019s too long played second fiddle to her more famous husband. But if I could choose only one volume, it would be her short stories. More than just examples of a writer at the top of her game, they\u2019re exemplary specimens of the genre itself. Yet the collection suffered from having been published in-between Daddy\u2019s Gone A-Hunting <\/em>and The Pumpkin Eater<\/em>, her two strongest works; it didn\u2019t live up to the obvious audaciousness of the former, and then was swamped by the formidable success of the latter.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Family life is Mortimer\u2019s subject, and in Saturday Lunch with the Brownings<\/em>, she picks it apart with precise, swift, sharp strokes. A mother finds herself locked out of the house she\u2019s rented for her and her family\u2019s holiday; tensions run high between members of a blended family on a Saturday spent at home; a dinner party careens out of the mousy hostess\u2019s control; a husband and wife quarrel while out with their children on a blustery day; a woman in a nursing home is the only witness to the dark drama unfolding in the bed next to her; another is bossed around by her children and husband, all in the name of \u201crest\u201d on her thirty-ninth birthday; a little girl runs away from boarding school in the middle of the night and home to her beloved father, only to have her faith in him destroyed when he immediately takes her back. \u201cNo one knows better how to catalogue in easy narrative the minutiae of domestic life,\u201d wrote a critic in the Sunday Times<\/em>, \u201cor how to undermine domestic life\u2019s apparent security.\u201d Mortimer has a keen eye for the horror underneath the banality of the everyday, in particular that moment when someone familiar and benign turns monstrous.<\/p>\n

In \u201cLittle Mrs. Perkins,\u201d for example, a seemingly sweet, rather vulnerable young mother-to-be is ensconced in the bed next to the narrator, who\u2019s in a nursing home recovering from the birth of her third child. The roommates don\u2019t speak across the curtain that separates them\u2014\u201ca fixed, insurmountable barrier dividing our two lives\u201d\u2014but the bored narrator watches and listens, first with sympathy, then with morbid fascination and shock as Mrs. Perkins\u2014initially desperate not to lose her baby\u2014is put on strict bed rest and told she won\u2019t be able to take the forthcoming trip to Tenerife she and her husband have scheduled:<\/p>\n

Slowly, cautiously, she was pushing back the blankets with her feet \u2026 Then, very carefully, she raised one leg into the air; its shadow through the curtain was long, thin, wavering. She bent her knee, pushed the leg straight again. Afterwards, still very slowly and carefully, the other leg. She was testing something\u2014but what? One leg. Then the other leg. No noise, no unusual creaking of the bedsprings. Both legs circling, faster and faster. She was trying not to make a noise. She was bicycling.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Powerless protagonists are something of Mortimer\u2019s specialty. After her divorce in 1971, when she was forced to start over, she explored the same agency in her fiction, but even then, her middle-age fictional alter egos struggled with their independence. Despite being \u201cappalled,\u201d the ineffective narrator of \u201cLittle Mrs. Perkins\u201d watches in silence. \u201cI did, I said, nothing,\u201d she shamefully confesses: she and Mrs. Perkins are isolated in their own separate worlds. Each \u201cbreathed secretly,\u201d lying in her own bed, \u201clike children in dormitories pretending to be dead.\u201d<\/p>\n

Equally helpless are Mortimer\u2019s child protagonists. In \u201cThe White Rabbit,\u201d an eleven-year-old child is gifted a bunny by her estranged father, but is so disgusted by what it stands for\u2014a rift in the intimacy between herself, her mother, and her stepfather\u2014that she creeps out of bed during the night and drops the creature over the balcony of their tenth-floor London apartment onto the busy road below. Both here and in \u201cThe King of Kissingdom\u201d\u2014a warped fairy tale of a family romance about the neuroses of a guilt-ridden child of divorced parents\u2014Mortimer demonstrates the keenest understanding of childhood\u2019s interior world. Find a better sketch of sibling rivalry, for example, than the narrator who, looking back on her relationship with her elder brother, describes him as \u201can impression of grey-flannel violence, a pair of stocky knees, a whiplash decapitating nettles.\u201d Mortimer\u2019s empathetic, expert grasp of the child\u2019s perspective has often been overlooked, the emphasis instead on her adult protagonists and the tantalizing insights they offer into her and John\u2019s very public marriage.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Again and again, family life is depicted as a fraught battleground. In \u201cI Told You So,\u201d a husband and wife squabble about their youngest child\u2019s safety while out on a family walk. She urges her daughter to scale the cliffs like her older sisters, fearful that her husband\u2019s trepidation will box their children into living \u201cnarrow lives.\u201d The child does fall, breaking her leg in the tumble, and her father scoops her up into his arms with a smug satisfaction that\u2019s truly chilling. He parades his spoil of war with glee: \u201cHe did not attempt to comfort the child. He allowed her to cry, carrying her with great pride and caution, as though she were a treasure he had won, a rare and valuable hostage.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cSuch a Super Evening,\u201d meanwhile, gives readers a sneak peek behind the front the Mortimers put on for their adoring public. In it, the Mathiesons\u2014both \u201cfantastically successful writers\u201d and the parents of eight children\u2014are invited to dinner by a self-effacing housewife. Over the course of the evening, the housewife is astonished to discover that the famous couple are actually bickering bores. Mortimer\u2019s fictionalization of her own life allowed for some dramatic license, but the underlying principal stands: her and John\u2019s marriage was not as perfect as it looked. Mortimer was struggling with depression\u2014she took an overdose in 1956, and would do so again in 1962. She was worn ragged by motherhood and domesticity, writing in fits and starts between bouts of excruciating writer\u2019s block, her miserableness exacerbated by John\u2019s thoughtless infidelities. Mortimer\u2019s childbearing and rearing years were marked by a keen ambivalence. So much of her identity was caught up in maternity and motherhood, but like many intelligent women, she felt trapped in her role. Nowhere are these contradictions more powerfully explored in Saturday Lunch with the Brownings<\/em> than in the superb opening story, \u201cThe Skylight\u201d.<\/p>\n

A masterclass in tension, it sees an unnamed mother and her five-year-old son arriving alone to their rented holiday home in the middle of the French countryside only to find the house locked and unassailable by any route other than a tiny open skylight in the roof. Despite the heat\u2014which \u201csank with the resonant hum of failing consciousness\u201d\u2014the story is steeped in dread from the start. The house is \u201cgrey\u201d and \u201cmean,\u201d its shutters and doors all \u201cheavy black timber\u201d locked shut with \u201ciron bars,\u201d surrounded by \u201cdead grass\u201d through which slinks a rat the size of a cat. Unable to think of what else to do, the woman lowers her son through the open skylight into the attic, giving him strict instructions to make his way downstairs and unbolt a window, but the little boy disappears into the gloom not to reappear. At the end of the story, after she\u2019s eventually managed to break into the house with the help of some passersby, the woman\u2019s relief at finding her exhausted son curled up on the floor fast asleep is tempered by frustration and rage at the distress he\u2019s caused her: \u201cWith one hand she pushed him upright. With the other, she hit him. She struck him so hard that her palm stung.\u201d Later in her life, Mortimer came to the realization that this story was actually about a miscarriage she\u2019d suffered shortly before writing it in 1959.<\/p>\n

Two years later, in February 1961, Mortimer found herself pregnant again. She initially embraced the idea of a new baby. This was in large part due to the rather lukewarm reviews Saturday Lunch with the Brownings<\/em> had received when it had been published the previous year. One especially hostile critic declared her unhappy couples \u201ctrivially embittered, chronically quarrelling about nothing, filled with a fatigued desperation,\u201d and suggested they should just take fifty aspirin and end it all. Mortimer thought that a new baby might bring her the contentment that the book hadn\u2019t. Instead, however, she had a termination\u2014and a permanent sterilization\u2014at the encouragement of both her doctor (on medical grounds\u2014she was forty-two) and her husband (who argued that their marriage, which was struggling, should come first). Devastatingly, while she was still in the hospital recovering from the surgery, Mortimer discovered that John was having yet another affair, this time with the actor Wendy Craig, who shortly thereafter became pregnant with his child.<\/p>\n

Anyone who\u2019s read The Pumpkin Eater <\/em>will be familiar with these events; when, after months of depression, Mortimer began writing again that November, she poured every last drop of the anguished experience into the novel. The result was raw, vivid, and utterly brilliant. \u201cAlmost every woman I can think of will want to read this book,\u201d raved Edna O\u2019Brien when the novel was published, and it was quickly adapted into a film (the screenplay was written by Harold Pinter, and Anne Bancroft was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress). The Pumpkin Eater<\/em>\u2019s success overshadowed the meager attention given Saturday Lunch with the Brownings. <\/em>And yet, the novel only becomes all the more poignant if one can read the brilliant short stories that precede it.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Lucy Scholes is a critic who lives in London. She writes for the\u00a0<\/em>NYR Daily,<\/em> The Financial Times,<\/em> the<\/em> New York Times Book Review,<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0<\/em>Literary Hub, among other publications.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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