The Good Listener by Pamela Hansford Johnson

The Good Listener by Pamela Hansford Johnson

published 1975

 

‘That’s a pretty dress,’ he said. It was made of a soft muted tartan wool. Had it cost a lot? He knew little about clothes.

‘It’s almost too warm for an Indian summer’

 

Pamela Hansford Johnson had a long career as a novelist – this one, The Good Listener, was published 40 years after her first one. It’s readable in its old-fashioned way, but has ups and downs.

On the back of my copy (published 1982) it says ‘Toby is a very plausible young scoundrel’: I have little use for blurbs at the best of times, but this is a ridiculous description. He is a sneaky chap, he is the good listener of the title, and sometimes he is up to no good, but scoundrel suggests something quite other. He is on the make, in a modest way, and he doesn’t want to commit to a future without being sure it is best for him. He behaves in a tiresome way to young women in his company, but they are right back at him. I mean, he doesn’t burn down an orphanage. We’ve all met more scoundrelly types on a regular basis (fiction and real life).

The trouble is, I think that makes Toby rather dull. You aren’t cheering for him, and he is only moderately entertaining company for the reader. 

The book takes him from his last year at Cambridge, in 1950, through to 1955. He is very taken with a young woman called Maisie, a fellow-undergraduate, but not quite ready to commit. 

She comes from an upmarket arty-bohemian family, and Toby very much enjoys going to the family house and meeting writers and musicians. His own background is modest by comparison, and this tension is a feature of many a similar book, from Brideshead Revisited on, and still going strong – see the recent film Saltburn, and my take on Brideshead in the Guardian. It is very well done here – Toby is not ashamed and doesn’t try to hide anything, but

He could not help it – every time he returned to [his parents’ house] he felt like Fanny Price making a family visit after a long spell at [Jane Austen's] Mansfield Park.

For example, Toby uses the word ‘pariah’ but ‘pronounced it to rhyme with Maria’. Maisie’s mother corrects him in a matter-of-fact way, but it is seen as only slightly embarrassing.

Unexpectedly, Toby's mother, Dora, is an amateur painter who turns out to be prodigiously accomplished in her self-taught way: Maisie recognizes her talent, gives her a helping hand, and launches her on a glittering career. This is a wholly unbelievable element, but it cheers the book up enormously, and gives the author a wide range of events and moments to go through, and means the different social strata meet up frequently and enjoyably.

Meanwhile, Toby’s great mates Adrian and Bob follow their very different paths. Bob is a scientist, very clever, and should have an assured future – but he gets a local girl into trouble, and has to work hard to salvage his prospects.

Adrian is very good-looking, and is set on a career as a celibate clergyman.

‘I expect to have a decent curacy, with some prospects’ he says.

‘Spike, certainly,’ Toby teased him.

‘What you call spike, yes. The ritual has meaning for me.’

I have no idea what spike means in this context, and have been unable to find an explanation online. Anyone?

Toby takes up most of the action, but we follow the other careers – it’s somewhat formulaic but enjoyable. There is an interesting discussion of domestic violence - attitudes vary, but aren’t that different from now. And Adrian’s church goings-on venture almost into Barbara Pym territory. Being a good-looking curate can have its disadvantages.

One thing that puzzled me very much is that none of these young men seems to do National Service, and it is never mentioned. PHJ is quite specific about ages and dates, so it is not that they have done it before university, and my understanding is that they would all three have had to do it during the 1950s. But they don’t. Is this because she is writing 20+ years later?

[To lay it out: the action is from 1950 to 1955. PHJ was born 1912, so in her 60s when she wrote it, and looking back to when she was 40-ish]

She tells us what the women are wearing, simply but sufficiently, so I strongly approve.

She took off her coat to reveal a dress of white tweed. Toby, accustomed still to count the pennies, wondered what the costs of it would be at the cleaner’s.

Maisie is described as looking like Frieda Lawrence in a tam o’shanter:

Everyone is well-dressed – this is Maisie’s mother:

She was wearing a bright red, fur-collared suit and a debauched-looking hat to match.

Suit from Clover Vintage. Hat (I couldn’t find one picture to combine suit and hat) same source.

 

A second young woman attracts Toby’s attention: Claire, who is also from a posh, moneyed background, and who is ‘good-looking in a big sort of way.’ She is in contrast with Maisie, who is more dainty but delicate, but PHJ avoids the tired tropes of the hearty blustering girl and the quiet charming one. An older literary man says of Claire ‘You’re too young to have heard of a character called Lummox. But that’s what she pretends to be half the time, and it’s all nonsense.’

I too was too young to have heard of Lummox – so I looked her up, and it was fascinating: a novel (by Fanny Hurst) and film of the 1920s/30s, well worth reading about.

At a luncheon for a 50th birthday, both Maisie and Claire wear slacks, which does surprise me.

This book has a sequel, The Good Husband, so I think we can safely assume that Toby will get married. I will be reading the book and posting on it, so will leave the story here for now…

And an unlikely connection: at first Toby thinks of an academic career, and wants to write about Saint-Just a figure in the French Revolution. I am a Great Expert on this  matter these days (ie read a lot of novels recently) and could vaguely remember who he was. But I went back to Hilary Mantel’s A Place of Greater Safety to refresh my memory, and had to work at it: the vagaries of Kindle meant I couldn’t search for Saint-Just, I had to search on ‘just’ – for which there were more than 500 entries (the search engine ran out at 500) mostly not him at all. So I had to scroll through this list endlessly to establish who Saint-Just was: an enemy of the likeable Desmoulins, and perhaps not a favourite of Hilary Mantel’s either. I loved this:

He affects a single earring, but he resembles less a corsair than a slightly deranged merchant banker.

The Wikipedia entry on him says that he has been re-assessed, but in the past ‘he was perceived as cruel, bloodthirsty, and having a wild and violent sexuality’. Now that’s a scoundrel – he sounds nothing like Toby.

I recently used a picture by John Verney, a magazine cover, and this is another one. This post explains more about Verney, and about the pictures. It seemed to me to be the kind of painting that Toby’s mother had such success with.