Dress Down Sunday: Holy Deadlock by AP Herbert


published 1934


LOOKING AT WHAT GOES ON UNDER THE CLOTHES



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[John is in a hotel room with a young woman who has had too much to drink]

He ought, he thought, to put her to bed. But he shrank from the shocking task…

The stockings intimidated him. Never in his life, even for Mary, had he discharged this service. He knew from music-hall jokes and club anecdotes that to undress a lady was one of the supreme delights of man: and that silk stockings were perhaps the most exciting garment of all: but the thought of removing Miss Myrtle’s stockings only embarrassed him. He knew that they were held up by things called suspenders, but to reach those suspenders would involve, he feared, explorations outrageous to Miss Myrtle’s modesty, and his own, although they were technically engaged in being intimate…. He pulled gently at one of the silk stockings, near the ankle, in the faint hope that some sort of magic would assist him. But, this being vain, he decided that Miss Myrtle would have to sleep in her stockings.



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commentary: This is a book about divorce in England and Wales in the years between the wars, and how difficult it was to achieve, and how ridiculous the rules were. AP Herbert really knew his stuff – and helped to change the law in this area. But he also knew how to write an entertaining and readable novel. He takes a couple, John and Mary, and shows why divorce is a sensible outcome for them, then shows how they are thwarted by the system, and pushed into all kinds of ludicrous situations – including perjury. He tells us that in Brighton hotels at the time
In the winter the business was roughly divided between divorce and tuberculosis: and in late years the consumptives had been dwindling: so the hotel could not afford to drive the gentlemen away.
[Read a lot more about consumptives in last year’s raft of books about sanatoria…]

There’s more about Holy Deadlock in this entry: as I said there, it is compelling, very amusing, but also very sad. What a waste of the potential for happiness.

My one complaint is that John seems rather feeble sometimes, as in the extract above (not as bad as the hideous Tony Last in the same situation in Evelyn Waugh’s Handful of Dust), and that Mary seems to change completely between the two halves of her story. But apart from that, this is a book still worth reading, even though we take a more enlightened view of divorce now.


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Fake adultery not working obviously was a thing – in this book, in Handful of Dust, and in Dorothy L Sayers’ Busman’s Honeymoon, published 1937, where a Countess says:
My idiot great-nephew, Hughie, has bungled matters as usual. Having undertaken to do the thing like a gentleman, he sneaked off to Brighton with a hired nobody, and the Judge wouldn't believe either the hotel bills or the chambermaid—knowing them all too well by sight. So it means starting all over again from the beginning.
And Sarra Manning’s excellent recent novel, The House of Secrets, looks at world of a woman who went on those trips to Brighton for a living…

The sleeping woman, from the Athenaeum, is Saint-Tropez, Marthe Asleep in a Chaise Lounge by Henri Lebasque.

The woman in stockings is an advert from the NYPL – I flipped her through 90 degrees.

The couple sleeping is Toulouse-Lautrec’s In Bed from Wikimedia Commons.



















Comments

  1. What an interesting way to hold up a mirror to society, Moira. And it's an interesting reminder that laws, policies, and so on, can play out in very strange ways. Taking a close look at how that happens really shows the impact of the laws.

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    1. Yes, there's nothing like writing an entertaining fiction to show people what is happening - it sometimes seems to hit home more than fact does. Sounds like a topic for you to cover on your blog sometime....

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  2. What a gorgeous picture of the couple sleeping.
    I was racking my brain as to why I'd heard of Sarra Manning without having read anything of hers, and then the penny dropped - because she's the author of my daughter's one-time favourite book 'Nobody's Girl', and indirectly the reason we went to Paris one holiday! Maybe I should try one of her adult books.

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    1. Isn't it just? and how nice that your daughter found herself a great book and took you all off to Paris. She is a very good author. I very much liked her After the Last Dance, as well as the one I mention above.

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  3. I love that Toulouse-Lautrec picture, Moira. If I remember correctly they are both women and it is one of his brothel pictures - so tender and sympathetic.

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    1. Oh I didn't know that Chrissie, thanks for adding. I found the picture on Wikimedia, which tends to be very skimpy in the info. It's gorgeous, isn't it, I love it.

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  4. "She's something to do with Silkanet Hosiery, isn't she?" Someone rather damningly refers to Miss Dean in Murder Must Advertise.

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    1. That book has the best ever casual comments in it. I love the way it portrays office life so well, in both the ways that would be so different now, and the ways that are exactly the same (snobbery, and arguments about the tea money).

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  5. Divorce is so different now. At the end of Four Frightened People by E Arnot Robertson the protagonist Judy, a doctor, says she'll lose her job if she's involved in her lover's divorce case: "[...] if I'm mentioned as co-respondent. Struck off the register."
    And the poor woman in Wednesday, by Dorothy Whipple, who can only see her children once a week. It makes me have a lot more sympathy with the couple in Brief Encounter deciding to go back to their spouses.
    Though the stigma may have taken longer to go - my mum, teaching in the mid 70s, remembers a parent asking her to make sure her daughter didn't sit next to a girl whose parents were divorcing - as if it were somehow contagious!

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    1. Yes, it is interesting to trace it in books. In another Whipple isn't it taken for granted that it will be much better if the father just disappears from everyone's lives? It's the one where no-one really wants the divorce, but everyone has to do the 'right' thing. I read a couple of those Lawrence Stone books about the history of marriage and divorce through the ages in Britain - immensely readable, full of surprises, but also horrifying, with glimpses of the unhappiness of people's lives. No-one who read them could possibly want to go back to stricter rules...

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  6. Moira: I may have stated the following in a comment some time ago on your blog and, if I have I am sorry for the repetition. In Saskatchewan divorce petitions still have a clause that can be traced back to that old English practice of faking adultery to gain a divorce. Paragraph 7 states:

    7 I have truthfully set out the facts establishing the breakdown of my
    marriage and I have not entered into any agreement, understanding or
    arrangement to make up or hide evidence or to deceive the Court.

    No other court action requires a party to say they are telling the truth but the tradition of the clause still exists in our forms.

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    1. Even if you have mentioned it before Bill, it's worth repeating, as it is most interesting, and surely anything that made (in effect) perjury semi-acceptable or expected must be bad for a nation's morals. Fascinating and telling that the requirement is only made in this case.

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