The Case Is Altered

by William Plomer

344 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1932

About the author

William Charles Franklyn Plomer CBE (he pronounced the surname as ploomer) was a South African and British author, known as a novelist, poet and literary editor. He was educated mostly in the United Kingdom, but described himself as an "Anglo-African-Asian".

He became famous in the Union of South Africa with his first novel, Turbott Wolfe, which had inter-racial love and marriage as a theme. He was co-founder of the short-lived literary magazine Voorslag ("Whiplash") with two other South African rebels, Roy Campbell and Laurens van der Post; it promoted a racially equal South Africa.

He spent the period from October 1926 to March 1929 in Japan, where he was friendly with Sherard Vines. There, according to biographers, he was in a same-sex relationship with a Japanese man. He was never openly gay during his lifetime; at most he alluded to the subject.

He then moved to England, and through his friendship with his publisher Virginia Woolf, entered the London literary circles. He became a literary editor, for Faber and Faber, and was a reader and literary adviser to Jonathan Cape, where he edited a number of Ian Fleming's James Bond series. Fleming dedicated Goldfinger to Plomer. He was active as a librettist, with Gloriana, Curlew River, The Burning Fiery Furnace and The Prodigal Son for Benjamin Britten.

Reviews

[Lucy Fisher · Rating 3 out of 5]

The novel is set in a boarding house in London, and was published in 1932. It was a genre – see Craven House by Patrick Hamilton (earlier) and London Belongs to Me by Norman Collins (later). Tenants are served meals in their rooms, or cook for themselves on a gas-ring.

Friends Mrs Gambitt and Mrs Fernandez run the place. Mrs G supplies the funds, Mrs F does the work, not helped by her husband the ill and sinister Mr Fernandez. Tenants arrive: the ladylike Miss Brixworth, fallen on hard times. The good-looking Mr Alston, who works in a greengrocer's. The unremarkable Rudds. Mrs Petherton-Porter, who gets "into" spiritualism. Empringham the straight-faced manservant is replaced by stage Irishman Mr Carol.

The characters meet and interact, and not much happens. Some seem there to make up the numbers. There is no single viewpoint unless it's the gentle mind of Miss Brixworth, whose only friend is a forthright lady explorer, Miss Haymer, also come down in the world.

Plomer manages to get a lot off his chest about London, its people and life in general. "I wish they'd stop teaching children to say 'I'm British and proud of it'," opines Miss Haymer.

Mrs Fernandez is Jewish, and though Plomer admires her, he talks about her as if Jews were a different species. "Don't forget she's a Jewess – it saves thinking," says Miss Haymer, wondering why Mrs F doesn't leave her jealous husband. We get a bit too much of the jealousy, but the spiritualism is briskly dealt with. Plomer quotes the uplifting language of the spiritualist pamphlet ("beyond the veil") but then dismisses the activity as "the dubious thrills of suburban witchcraft".

The casts' lives may lack incident, but they are fond of homespun philosophy. Mr Carol: "People that's always grumbling about the times, these hard times, and what a terrible age we live in, and all that - they're mostly people that a bit too sorry for themselves, and don't know a good thing when they've got it."

Plomer was gay, and there is a subtext. Alston has a girlfriend who works in a nearby upmarket dress shop (sadly we don't see inside it). But then he meets the girl's brother and - does he end up with both of them, speeding off in a borrowed car to those 30s working-class amuseuments that the bien pensant so despised: the seaside, dog-racing?

[Paolo · Rating 5 out of 5]

So ironic in choosing "queer" Eric Alston as the catalyst for demented marital jealousy. The climax is one of the best written scene in the genre I have ever read or "seen"-