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Museum Pieces
Susannah Mountfaucon and Toby d'Arfey are 'museum pieces' because neither in the 1920s nor in the 1930s nor during the Second World War will they adapt themselves to change. They are still Edwardian in spirit and extravagance.
Their life and that of the extraordinary people around themis described by a young widow who comes to know and love them.
Their life and that of the extraordinary people around themis described by a young widow who comes to know and love them.
Hardcover
First published January 1, 1952
10 people want to read
About the author
William Plomer
73 books8 followersWilliam 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.
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.
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
March 17, 2017
I quite enjoy finding novels by those who may be described as forgotten authors, and my copy of 'Museum Pieces' came from a secondhand bookshop. Hitherto, William Plomer has been known to me only as the author of a satirical poem titled 'The Dorking Thigh' which concerns the reaction of the nouveau riche buyers of a post-war housing estate half-timbered new build to finding a human thigh in the airing cupboard. 'Museum Pieces' also has elements of satire and comedy of manners to it, but what I suspected was going to be an acerbic, rather unpleasant dissection of upper class idleness became (unless I missed something or misjudged Plomer's tone) an understanding assessment of two Edwardian figures whose time has passed.
Not that the narrative is without bite. It is often snipingly wicked, and I imagined Plomer was keeping himself under control through the persona of his narrator, Jane Valance, a young widow making a reasonable living as a freelance archivist. For example, towards the end of the novel Jane is visiting the polo ground where Susannah Mountfaucon was wooed by her second husband, Morven, and she observes, amid the allotments that wartime has had created there, a woman she describes as 'a tired slut in a dirty cardigan...grubbing among pea-sticks and cabbage stalks to help feed her perhaps equally unlovely and unnecessary young'. The observation is not uncharacteristic of some of Plomer's descriptive detailing throughout the novel: he is, after all, examining, through his leading figures, Mrs Mountfaucon and her son by her first husband, Toby d'Arfey, a social class in which casual snobbishness is normal. But the remark is tempered by his narrator's habit of watchful self-chastisement and accommodating tolerance of others: 'Unlovely? Unnecessary? Who on earth was I to judge?'
This moment serves to highlight the way Plomer combines incisive and cutting personal social judgments with a tempering voice he has built in to the narrative. In this way he avoids the nastiness of tone that might otherwise have dominated the novel in a way that would almost certainly have made me feel taken aback by the cruelty of it. I have recorded elsewhere my difficulty with Patrick Hamilton's relentless scalpel in 'Mr Stimpson and Mr Gorse', and with Evelyn Waugh with whom I used to have the same trouble. In this respect, the tone of 'Museum Pieces' is more 'Brideshead' than 'A Handful of Dust', and, to me, more acceptable. Toby d'Arfey and his mother are depicted as what used to be called 'distressed gentlefolk', a term which, when I was younger, I despised with the vigour of a socialist conscience: having had it so good for so long, why should they not learn to live in the manner to which their reduced circumstances have placed them? Now that I'm older, my judgmental habits are more moderate. Most people are deserving at least of common compassion, especially when depicted, as Mrs Mountfaucon is, as so unself-pitying and, as Toby is, as spirited, vivacious and, beneath the blase manner, sensitive and not inconsiderate. (Though the reader may, like the narrator, weary of his inability ever - till the end - to complete the talented paintings he starts, and may well wonder how many bills he leaves behind unpaid. But then Mallory, when his body was discovered on Everest, had on him, I understand, an unpaid bill for the shop from which he bought his gloves.)
Like 'Brideshead', 'Museum Pieces' has an elegiac tone to it. The Edwardian age with its ease and glamour, the Twenties and Thirties, with their excitement and possibilities (if you had the money), are depicted through Toby and his mother as passing: 'now they had faded from view, and there would never be anything like them again.' The new age, as represented by the working woman narrator - self-supporting, practically-minded archivist with clerking wartime duties in a ministry - seems one that promises little in comparison with the past. In this sense, Plomer was probably representing the mood in a country recovering from the bleak years of the war, where rationing was still in operation and hope perhaps was not providing the spring in the step that people may have anticipated.
For the most part, the novel protects the reader from that background, holding fast to its upperclass and upper middleclass milieu in which budgets may be tight, but manners and attitudes have not deteriorated. In spite of the accommodating view of Toby and his mother that Plomer offers, he is less restrained when it comes to judging some of his other characters. Mr Basingfield, the Mountfaucon trustee, clearly embezzles the estate and, it is given to the reader to understand, spends it on his mistress, Lilac 'Butterball' Evans, editor of 'Style' magazine. Even Mrs Bunstable (aka Bella Mestiza), Toby's mistress whom he is fiercely jealous of, never questions whether he can actually afford to keep her, which clearly he can't. One suspects Lydia Delap, another of Toby's travelling companions, is of the same ilk.
Not that Toby is without fault. He has a sharp tongue, and is consistently intolerant of and cruel to Mildred Purblind, a very distant relative who is 'not quite top drawer'. He treats his mother dismissively and is unfailingly sarcastic to her. She is dotingly tolerant, and we see her by the time Toby has, as he says, trained her to keep her nose out of his affairs (though he acknowledges that she probably knows a lot about him through her ability to make deductions from tiny fragments of information).
Yet both Toby and Mrs Mountfaucon, when they discover that their Rembrandt will have to be sold for a song and that they have been ruined by Mr Basingfield, display a sense of realism, and when he is in a nursing home, Toby is desperately anxious about his mother's finances that are paying for him. They display old-fashioned 'noblesse', I guess, and are strengthened by the habits of their manners. The manners, of course, are easy to mock or despise; they are easy to criticise for obscuring honesty or kindness; and it is easy to respond to them as discourteously condescending. But Mrs Mountfaucon in particular seems to have the common touch and her mannerliness is in some ways what holds her lonely and anxious life together.
There is a lot to enjoy in this novel; the characterisation, the descriptive and dialogic detail, the elegiac tone, the clarity of style and the ear for upper middleclass language and speech rhythms, the steadily-moving story, the comedy and the pathos, and, perhaps most of all, the effervescence and energy of Toby. I'll be searching out some more secondhand Plomer.
Not that the narrative is without bite. It is often snipingly wicked, and I imagined Plomer was keeping himself under control through the persona of his narrator, Jane Valance, a young widow making a reasonable living as a freelance archivist. For example, towards the end of the novel Jane is visiting the polo ground where Susannah Mountfaucon was wooed by her second husband, Morven, and she observes, amid the allotments that wartime has had created there, a woman she describes as 'a tired slut in a dirty cardigan...grubbing among pea-sticks and cabbage stalks to help feed her perhaps equally unlovely and unnecessary young'. The observation is not uncharacteristic of some of Plomer's descriptive detailing throughout the novel: he is, after all, examining, through his leading figures, Mrs Mountfaucon and her son by her first husband, Toby d'Arfey, a social class in which casual snobbishness is normal. But the remark is tempered by his narrator's habit of watchful self-chastisement and accommodating tolerance of others: 'Unlovely? Unnecessary? Who on earth was I to judge?'
This moment serves to highlight the way Plomer combines incisive and cutting personal social judgments with a tempering voice he has built in to the narrative. In this way he avoids the nastiness of tone that might otherwise have dominated the novel in a way that would almost certainly have made me feel taken aback by the cruelty of it. I have recorded elsewhere my difficulty with Patrick Hamilton's relentless scalpel in 'Mr Stimpson and Mr Gorse', and with Evelyn Waugh with whom I used to have the same trouble. In this respect, the tone of 'Museum Pieces' is more 'Brideshead' than 'A Handful of Dust', and, to me, more acceptable. Toby d'Arfey and his mother are depicted as what used to be called 'distressed gentlefolk', a term which, when I was younger, I despised with the vigour of a socialist conscience: having had it so good for so long, why should they not learn to live in the manner to which their reduced circumstances have placed them? Now that I'm older, my judgmental habits are more moderate. Most people are deserving at least of common compassion, especially when depicted, as Mrs Mountfaucon is, as so unself-pitying and, as Toby is, as spirited, vivacious and, beneath the blase manner, sensitive and not inconsiderate. (Though the reader may, like the narrator, weary of his inability ever - till the end - to complete the talented paintings he starts, and may well wonder how many bills he leaves behind unpaid. But then Mallory, when his body was discovered on Everest, had on him, I understand, an unpaid bill for the shop from which he bought his gloves.)
Like 'Brideshead', 'Museum Pieces' has an elegiac tone to it. The Edwardian age with its ease and glamour, the Twenties and Thirties, with their excitement and possibilities (if you had the money), are depicted through Toby and his mother as passing: 'now they had faded from view, and there would never be anything like them again.' The new age, as represented by the working woman narrator - self-supporting, practically-minded archivist with clerking wartime duties in a ministry - seems one that promises little in comparison with the past. In this sense, Plomer was probably representing the mood in a country recovering from the bleak years of the war, where rationing was still in operation and hope perhaps was not providing the spring in the step that people may have anticipated.
For the most part, the novel protects the reader from that background, holding fast to its upperclass and upper middleclass milieu in which budgets may be tight, but manners and attitudes have not deteriorated. In spite of the accommodating view of Toby and his mother that Plomer offers, he is less restrained when it comes to judging some of his other characters. Mr Basingfield, the Mountfaucon trustee, clearly embezzles the estate and, it is given to the reader to understand, spends it on his mistress, Lilac 'Butterball' Evans, editor of 'Style' magazine. Even Mrs Bunstable (aka Bella Mestiza), Toby's mistress whom he is fiercely jealous of, never questions whether he can actually afford to keep her, which clearly he can't. One suspects Lydia Delap, another of Toby's travelling companions, is of the same ilk.
Not that Toby is without fault. He has a sharp tongue, and is consistently intolerant of and cruel to Mildred Purblind, a very distant relative who is 'not quite top drawer'. He treats his mother dismissively and is unfailingly sarcastic to her. She is dotingly tolerant, and we see her by the time Toby has, as he says, trained her to keep her nose out of his affairs (though he acknowledges that she probably knows a lot about him through her ability to make deductions from tiny fragments of information).
Yet both Toby and Mrs Mountfaucon, when they discover that their Rembrandt will have to be sold for a song and that they have been ruined by Mr Basingfield, display a sense of realism, and when he is in a nursing home, Toby is desperately anxious about his mother's finances that are paying for him. They display old-fashioned 'noblesse', I guess, and are strengthened by the habits of their manners. The manners, of course, are easy to mock or despise; they are easy to criticise for obscuring honesty or kindness; and it is easy to respond to them as discourteously condescending. But Mrs Mountfaucon in particular seems to have the common touch and her mannerliness is in some ways what holds her lonely and anxious life together.
There is a lot to enjoy in this novel; the characterisation, the descriptive and dialogic detail, the elegiac tone, the clarity of style and the ear for upper middleclass language and speech rhythms, the steadily-moving story, the comedy and the pathos, and, perhaps most of all, the effervescence and energy of Toby. I'll be searching out some more secondhand Plomer.
Displaying 1 of 1 review