All Among the Barley by Melissa Harrison

 

Set in 1930s Suffolk, Melissa Harrison’s All Among the Barley is an atmospheric evocation of an English way of life which was constantly evolving but which would change beyond recognition in a few short years. The community it describes – farmers who have farmed the land for generations – is rooted in tradition, the old ways, even witchcraft, but it is also pragmatic. Farming is a way of life, a vocation, but above all it is a business, and one that must change and adapt in order to survive. At first All Among the Barley appears to be a subtle and seemingly mellow novel, but its undercurrents grow gradually darker as the story unfolds.

We are in a time before industrialisation, when the land was managed by hand, with horses and only the most rudimentary equipment. The pain of the First World War is still being felt, even sixteen years on, with a lack of manpower and an economic hardship that steadily built through those inter-war years. In the middle of this is the novel’s narrator, Edie Mather, fourteen at the time the action unfolds and an ingenue who much prefers her own company to anyone else’s, a clever girl who lives in her own head and in the countryside which she describes in exquisite detail. The evocation of rural life is truly beautiful.

This is not some bucolic idyll, however. We see the story through Edie’s uncomprehending eyes, and we can discern what she cannot, the casual racism and anti-semitism and petty nationalism and grinding poverty which were used by Oswald Mosley and his British Union of Fascists in the 1930s to seed their repellent worldview in unsophisticated and vulnerable communities. We see the superstition that clings to rural life. We see the hardship which, at times, trumps community, where the consequences of accidents are measured not in human terms but in economic, and where compassion can become a rare commodity.

And through it all, Edie battles her own demons, oblivious that there is anything wrong with her, blaming herself for every mishap, misinterpreting everything around her. She places herself at the centre of events which unfold only in her own mind. Meanwhile, real life grips its claws ever more tightly around her, until we reach a climax which is truly shocking.

All Among the Barley is a very fine novel, thought –provoking and memorable. Edie Mather, seemingly insignificant in her own community, is a compelling and tragic sister to Sylvia Plath’s Esther Greenwood or Carson McCullers’s Mick Kelly or Frankie Addams. Like those young women, you wish them well while fearing the worst.

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

The Bell Jar is, along with Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping and Carson McCullers’s The Member of the Wedding, my favourite novel. These three novels have forced me to think about literature and about life in a different way and they have transformed my own writing.

The Bell Jar is a novel that quietly and beautifully portrays a woman’s emotional descent into darkness. That may sound grim, but the way Sylvia Plath melds humour and pain is remarkable: the unfolding of Esther Greenwood’s emotional crisis is perfectly handled, and the balance of laughter and tears is superbly controlled, the former sliding inexorably into the latter, but with faint echoes remaining throughout, the tracks of hope in a landscape growing increasingly darker. I suspect it is impossible, now, to extricate the novel from the history and Esther Greenwood from Sylvia Plath. After all, it is so autobiographical that Plath originally felt the need to publish it under a pseudonym and it didn’t appear under her own name until three years after her suicide. But it is unfortunate, really, if the novel is submerged beneath the myth of its author, because it needs no external pathos to give it power.

When we first meet Esther Greenwood, an ingenue from Boston, she is working as an intern in New York, working on a successful magazine. This is not her milieu, and while she is not exactly gauche, she is far from assimilated into New York life. We first get a hint of her dissociation from the activity around her in the novel’s famous opening line: “It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York.” That the Rosenbergs’ electrocution is barely mentioned again in the novel further establishes her disconnection from reality (although, of course, this high-tech execution acts as an ominous foreshadow of Esther’s subsequent, highly traumatic electroconvulsive therapy).

Initially, though, one has little inkling of what will follow. The early passages, even the darker ones, are shot through with humour. There is a deftness and lightness to them that is, in retrospect, extraordinarily skillful. One often hears people say of those around them who attempt suicide that they had no idea, and this is the case with Esther. She appears a complicated young woman, certainly, not entirely comfortable in her skin or her surroundings, but her breakdown, which is precipitated when she returns home to provincial Massachussetts and is overlooked for a writing course on which she had set her heart, nonetheless comes as something of a surprise. And just as people will do in similar circumstances in real life, one retrospectively picks over the evidence of the past for clues of her distress and indeed they are there, submerged in the minutiae of daily life.

 

Esther’s decent into depression and suicidal tendencies progresses through the summer. Even now, though, there is a lightness to it that beguiles the readers, lulls them into a false sense of hope. It seems at first like depression-lite, the manufactured sort of emotions you might get in a soap opera when a major character’s flirting with the blues is scheduled to last for so many episodes, after which she will snap out of it and return to normal. Or perhaps we see Esther as a female McMurphy, the sane one in the asylum ward, and hope, like we do with McMurphy, that she will prevail against the system. But we know that McMurphy doesn’t prevail and, in The Bell Jar, we come to realise that Plath’s lightness of tone masks the growing distress in Esther’s mind, and her depression is far from superficial. She is a deeply troubled woman and, finally, we begin to seriously fear for her.

She comes to feel as though she is trapped beneath a bell jar. This is a horrifying image: trapped, suffocating, no prospect of release, everything outside, visible but not touchable, out of reach, beyond your world of confinement and gloom, a distorted vision of normality in which you cannot share. Her suicide attempts grow more serious. Her first experience of ECT is horrific. Her second, for entirely different reasons, is more so. The woman she trusts, her therapist, Dr Nolan, promises her that she will not subject her to further ECT without warning her. Dr Nolan is true to her word, but it doesn’t feel like it to the distraught Esther. This scene has a terrible emotional power: if you want to know how to write, this is a good starting point; and if you want to understand other human beings, in their distress and fear and hope and need, likewise this is a piece of emotional treasure trove. Be warned, though: Esther’s terror is contagious.

The novel grows darker yet, and then lighter. It ends on a note of hope. All the same, it ends without resolution, as befits the life of a woman in torment. After all, as we know from the life of the author of this novel, the only feasible resolution is likely to be the wrong one. But in The Bell Jar, at least, the reader can imagine, believe, hope that Esther Greenwood lives on and finds happiness.

Sylvia Plath and Carson McCullers

I think I'm right in saying that Sylvia Plath is on record as being a great admirer of Carson McCullers. Wikipedia notes, in its article on McCullers's The Member of the Wedding:

The poet Sylvia Plath was known to admire McCullers' work, and the unusual phrase "silver and exact", used by McCullers to describe a set of train tracks in the novel, is the first line of Plath's poem "Mirror".

I think the opening of Plath's novel The Bell Jar also offers a deliberate echo of The Member of the Wedding. This is The Bell Jar:

It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York. I'm stupid about executions.

And this is The Member of the Wedding:

It happened that green and crazy summer when Frankie was twelve years old. This was the summer when for a long time she had not been a member. She belonged to no club and was a member of nothing in the world. Frankie had become an unjoined person who hung around in doorways, and she was afraid.

In both novels, the fact it is summer is a bold, declaratory statement. Both Esther and Frankie are depicted as outsiders: Esther doesn't know what she's doing in New York, while Frankie is an unjoined person belonging to no group. Esther describes herself, pejoratively, as stupid; Frankie is afraid: negative emotions are attached to each of them.

Moreover, Plath's use of "queer" in the opening line mirrors McCullers's use of the word on the first page of The Member of the Wedding, when Frankie's first words in the novel are: "It is so very queer... The way it all just happened."

It seems to me that Esther, created in 1963, is a deliberate echo of Frankie, written in 1946. At the very least, these remarkable young women would surely have found some affinity. If only one could have known the other.