Review: Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead, by Barbara Comyns

Review: Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead, by Barbara Comyns

by Rich Horton

Barbara Comyns (1907-1992) was born in England, her father a wealthy brewer, maiden name Barbara Irene Veronica Bayley. She married John Pemberton in 1931, and the couple associated with the artistic set -- both were artists -- and had two children, but the marriage quickly collapsed. Barbara had another relationship with Arthur Price, but by the beginning of World War II that was over, and she was poor enough to take a position as a cook. She married Richard Strettell Comyns Carr in 1945, so that by this time her name might have been rendered "Barbara Irene Veronica Bayley [Pemberton] {Price} Comyns Carr" -- no surprise, then, that she chose Barbara Comyns as the name under which her works were published. She had earlier written some fictionalized accounts of her rural childhood, and these were published in a magazine, and soon her first two novels were accepted -- a novelization of her childhood stories (Sisters by the River) and then Our Spoons Came From Woolworths, which may still be her best known novel. She was acquainted with both Kim Philby and Graham Greene due to Richard Comyns Carr's wartime position. Greene, then, helped her writing get published, while the traitor Philby's association with Richard Comyns Carr caused her and her husband to have to move to Spain after Philby fled to the USSR (undoubtedly an unfair guilt by association effect on Richard Comyns Carr.) 

Comyns ended up publishing 11 books. Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead was her third novel, first published in 1954. She published regularly through 1967, but her next book was rejected. She stopped writing until the mid-80s, then published three more novels (including a revised version of the rejected book and another novel written much earlier.) She died in 1992.

My edition of Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead was published in 2010 by Dorothy, a publishing project. Dorothy is based in St. Louis, only a few miles from my house. They are the project of a married couple, Martin Riker and Danielle Dutton, who are professors at Washington University. They began in 2010, in Urbana, IL -- so presumably they were then at the University of Illinois. As I went to Illinois, and live in St. Louis, and have a daughter, son-in-law, and two grandchildren in Urbana, I am naturally well-disposed to them. Their focus is feminist fiction, much of it in translation, some reprints and some new. They had previously worked for the Dalkey Archive, another absolutely fantastic small press with a focus on reprinting great old fiction.

Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead is set in a village in Warwickshire, in 1911, though the book claims, oddly, that the time is "Summer about 70 years ago" -- obviously, it was about 40 years prior to the time of writing, not 70. The village, Comyns claimed, was directly based on her childhood home, Bidford-on-Avon, though the key event in the novel is based on a tragedy that happened in France in 1951.

The book opens with ducks swimming though the drawing room windows of the house where Ebin Willoweed lives, with his three children, his mother, and their servants -- two sisters named Norah and Eunice, and Old Ives, who is a sort of gardener. There has been a flood in the village. All this is described in the most deadpan terms, including all the drowned animals. And we gain a bit of a view of the characters: Ebin is a gossip columnist who was fired after his paper was sued for libel. His oldest daughter, Emma, is 17 and pretty and lonely. His younger children are Dennis and Hattie, and he's convinced that Hattie is the illegitimate daughter of his (now dead) wife and a black man, due to her dark complexion. Ebin is lazy and under the domination of his rather awful mother, who is prone to constantly revise her will. Norah is in love with a local man, Mr. Fig, who lives with his mother, while Eunice is sleeping with a married man in the village. Old Ives and Grandmother Willoweed are each obsessed with outliving the other. Other villagers are important too -- the baker and his promiscuous wife, Dr. Hatt and his sickly wife, the doctor's young assistant. 

It seems at first a comic look at a set of eccentrics -- and in many ways it remains that throughout the novel. We see Ebin and the children boating in the river, Old Ives making his wreaths for the dead, Grandmother Willoweed hosting her yearly "Whist Drive", at which the primary rule is that Grandmother must always win; Grandmother refusing to set foot on any land she does not own, Ebin's desultory tutoring of the children and his sexual misadventures, and so on. But amidst this comic stuff a horrible tragedy intrudes -- the baker tries a new recipe, and unfortunately the grain he uses in contaminated with ergot. And so many of the characters get horribly sick, and many die -- and the rest are changed. Ebin is able to write again, selling accounts of the plague to his old newspaper. Norah and Eunice both see significant developments in their love lives, as does Emma. Grandmother Willoweed changes her will a couple more times. Old Ives has a religious conversion. Some of this is still funny, and some utterly tragic -- and the tragedy is not dodged or laughed at, but life goes on and the comic tone is maintained when appropriate.

It's an involving novel, a curiously affecting novel. The people are variously awful, nice, and delightfully weird; and their fates are not distributed according to their virtue. It just seems like life -- life from a slant perspective, for sure, but real life. It's very well written. A wonderful work by a really original writer.