Review: Late Stories, Punch and Powell, by Inez Holden

Review: Late Stories, Punch and Powell, by Inez Holden

by Rich Horton

Here's a curious book by a writer I knew nothing about until a couple of weeks ago. Inez Holden was born in 1903 to Wilfred Holden and Beatrice Paget, both from families that could be considered "landed gentry". That marriage was apparently not a very good one (Inez claimed her first memory was of her father shooting at her mother), and Inez' relationship with her mother was also not very good. (For one thing, her mother did not bother to record her birth in a timely fashion, so that the 1903 birth date is not certain -- she may have been born in 1904.) Apparently her mother spent extravagantly on herself, and nothing on Inez. Inez' first novel, Sweet Charlatan, was published in 1929, and her second, Born Old, Died Young, in 1932. She published a number of short stories and another novel in the 1930s. One of her books is a collection of some of those short stories, rewritten in "Basic English", an 800 word vocabulary that was briefly fashionable as a means of spreading English around the world as a sort of common language. 

Holden is best known nowadays for her writing about the home front of World War II. She spent some time working in, or reporting on, wartime factories. A short novel, Night Shift, and a piece of reportage, It Was Different at the Time has been recently reprinted by Handheld Press (a wonderful enterprise!) as Blitz Writing. Handheld have also reprinted There's No Story There, a sort of novel based on three shorter pieces, which appear to be lightly fictionalized accounts of life and work in a wartime factory. Beside these books, and her '30s novels, she published two in the '50s: The Owner, and The Adults. Besides those novels she published a number of short stories in Punch, during the period that Anthony Powell was working there -- these are perhaps more sketches than stories, and they make up the bulk of this book.

Anthony Powell and Inez Holden met in the '20s, when both were, to some degree or another, part of the "Bright Young Things" set. Holden's first two novels went to Duckworth, where Powell worked, and he recommended against publishing them, but he was overruled by Thomas Balston -- and it is suggested that Holden's "personal charms" paid a role. (She was rather a beauty.) But Powell and she remained friends to some degree, and they lunched with Evelyn Waugh at one point. Holden was a friends with Waugh, and H. G. Wells, and Sidney Smith, and George Orwell (in his case, briefly his lover.) Powell used her as the model for Roberta Payne, a significant character in his last pre-War novel, What's Become of Waring (a novel I like a good deal.) While Powell never seems to have much liked her novels, he tended to praise her style, and I think that contributed to his buying her late stories for Punch.

The book at hand is published by the Anthony Powell Society, and edited by Jeff Manley and Robin Bynoe. As such it leans into Holden's connection to Powell. It includes the Punch stories, 17 in all, that appeared between 1953 and 1958. They are short -- between a few hundred and a couple of thousand words. They are dialogue heavy, arch, somewhat absurd, and quite funny. They don't resolve to much in the way of plot, and, really, that's not the point. The characters include Princesses, kleptomaniacs, quacks, failures, Americans ... all kinds of weirdos! They are never less than readable, and mostly immensely amusing, if in the end rather slight. I liked "Love, Breath, and Circumstances", about an American couple thoroughly misinterpreting a book of instructive love letters; and "The Young Table", in which an American schoolgirl in England has to sit at the table for younger girls, a bit of a problem given her interest in older men; and "Myself as Leader", in which the narrator decides to lead a group of hooligans in their criminal enterprises, while staying quite out of things herself; and "The Age of Innocence", about a rackety bunch of old people mistreating each other. But, really, all the stories are worth reading, partly because they never overstay their welcome -- and Holden's narrative voice is a delight.

In addition to the stories, each of the editors, Jeff Manley and Robin Bynoe, contributes an essay, about Holden's life and work, contextualized by her relationship to Powell. There are also reprints of memorial pieces by Powell, and by Holden's cousin Celia Goodman, on the occasion of Holden's death. A few letters between Powell and Goodman, concerning an abortive attempt at collecting some of Holden's short fiction (presumably including these stories from Punch) are reproduced.

This is really quite a worthwhile project, bringing to attention an intriguing selection of work by a minor but unjustly forgotten 20th Century writer. These are just the sort of stories that are wholly of their time, and wholly of their author's voice, and as such perhaps easy to overlook, but in their small way significant. I for one will be looking for her novels -- particularly the science fictional Born Old, Died Young, and the quite odd-looking The Owners.