Another Challenge Pic, and The Girls of Slender Means

The Girls of Slender Means by Muriel Spark

published 1963

 

She lingered, shivering a little, but with an appealing grace, like a wounded roe deer, in her white petticoat and bare feet. 

 

The book came up in the discussions on my challenge post – where I invited readers to suggest books to match pictures I had in reserve.

The Girls of Slender Means was an early inspiration for the blog: the eponymous girls live in a hostel, and have dealings in a beautiful Schiaparelli evening dress, which can be borrowed from its owner on payment of soap or clothes coupons: “You can't wear it to the Milroy. It's been twice to the Milroy . . . it's been to Quaglino's, Selina wore it to Quags, it's getting known all over London."

So obviously I wanted to illustrate that back in the day, and did so, right-hand picture, although I used what I could find, and the dress was very much in the spirit of the one in the book, but didn’t really fit the description. Eh voila! There are more pictures available these days, and maybe I’m better at finding them: this one (left) does seem more like it in colour, although actually I think my original was better in style.

(they are both sketches of Schiaparelli dresses)

 It was made of taffeta, with small side panniers stuck out with cleverly curved pads over the hips. It was coloured dark blue, green, orange and white in a floral pattern as from the Pacific Islands.

The book also featured in a piece I did for the Guardian, about fictional women sharing accommodation, with an inciting quote from Hilary Mantel.

Two young women move into a student Hall of Residence in London, and have this conversation:

‘It would be nice if we went around and talked like an Edna O’Brien novel. It would suit us.’

‘Yes it would become us’ I said. ‘We haven’t the class for Girls of Slender Means.’

And yes, the Spark girls are meant to be quite upmarket.

It is the ur-novel of women living together: "love and money were the vital themes in all the bedrooms and dormitories" of the May of Teck Club. There are the arguments, the fascination with food and calories, the still-shocking ending: thin women win, in a way you couldn't expect.

On this re-read, I found I had forgotten the frequent snatches of poetry in the book – Cavafy, Wordsworth, Matthew Arnold. Gerard Manley Hopkins’ The Wreck of the Deutschland, much mentioned, is weirdly appropriate.

Some of the girls are trying to achieve Poise via a course that Selina paid good money for. They have to repeat these two sentences twice a day:

Poise is perfect balance, an equanimity of body and mind, complete composure whatever the social scene. Elegant dress, immaculate grooming, and perfect deportment all contribute to the attainment of self-confidence.

Not very catchy. Somewhat reminiscent of the discussion in the comments on this recent post – where we got into ‘I must, I must increase my bust,’ which at least is easy to remember.

I had forgotten that Selina rescues the Schiaparelli dress at the end, and seems to go off with it, although it is not hers.

And the full quote for the top picture (the challenge one): 

 Nicholas was as fleetingly impressed as was possible in the emergency, by the fact that Selina allowed the other girls to take the blankets. She lingered, shivering a little, but with an appealing grace, like a wounded roe deer, in her white petticoat and bare feet. 

You might suspect Selina’s motives; I couldn't possibly comment.

The book flits through chapters which almost could be by someone else (not quite) before heading into the final astonishing and grim incident.

So strange – there’s a woman gets stuck in the window, rather like Winnie the Pooh. Some of the girls need to grease their bodies to get through – is margarine, butter, or cold cream better? There is rationing and coupons to be considered.

Now I actually did some maths regarding the window – Selina climbs out of it in order to sunbathe on the roof and spend time with Nicholas. It is 7 x 14, which means its diagonal is 15.65 ins.

So would you need your max measurement to be less than  twice that (31.3 ins) to be sure of getting out? Well not quite – because the young women’s bodies would have a more-or-less elliptical cross-section. Spark says hips of 36 and a quarter inches or less can squeeze through. My calculation says that the depth of a young woman climbing through (the minor axis of the ellipse) would in that case need to be around 6 and a half inches. (It’s not a measurement that most people ever make, and I cant really guess how that looks, but it sounds OK)

But yes you would have to be small. Are busts more manoeuvrable? It’s all a tremendous joke, although it is going to end badly. The word slender is doing a lot of work here.

In the comments on my recent post on Margery Allingham’s Dancers in Mourning, it was suggested that the main character in the book might have been seen as similar to musical comedy actor Jack Buchanan, and there was some discussion of this now-largely-forgotten figure. So I was delighted that he (almost) turned up here: one of the girls, Pauline Fox, regularly gets very dressed up

she said she was going to dine with the famous actor, Jack Buchanan. No-one disbelieved her outright, and her madness was undetected.

Selina wears

a high hoop-brimmed blue hat and shoes with high block wedges; these fashions from France, it was said, were symbols of the Resistance.

Slightly mysterious, not clear how they were symbols of Resistance. Hoop-brimmed means the brim has been reinforced with wire to keep it fixed and firm rather than wavy and wafty.

I very much enjoyed the contrast between a US officer (Felix) and an English civil servant/poet (Nicholas)  when invited to the hostel canteen:

Whenever one of the girls rose to fetch and carry, Felix Dobell half-rose in his chair, then sat down again, for courtesy. Nicholas lolled like an Englishman possessed of droits de seigneur while the two girls served him.

The main action takes place at the end of WW2, between VE day and VJ day (ie May till August), although there are interspersed paragraphs ‘now’, 1963, where one character brings news to her old friends from the 1940s (this structure resembles The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by the same author)

It is an extraordinary book, which must have raised eyebrows when it was published.

It is still the greatest metaphor in any book for the requirements of women’s shapes – an absolute spine chiller.

 

Bergdorf Goodman sketches : Schiaparelli 1931-1940 - i2079650_215 - Costume Institute - Digital Collections from The Metropolitan Museum of Art Libraries