NEW AUTHOR

We’re delighted to welcome Peter Tait as a new author. Headmaster of Sherborne Preparatory School, Peter has been a long-time devotee of the writings of Thomas Hardy as well as the Powys brothers. His first novel, FLORENCE Mistress of Max Gate, focuses on the complex relationship between Florence and Thomas Hardy and, in particular, the psychological make-up of Florence, her attitudes, feelings and personality. It is a compelling read and will be published next month by Sundial on 7 November.

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Lesley Chamberlain’s article on David Garnett in the July/August 2011 issue of STANDPOINT prompted the following letter published in the current issue (September/October 2011):

Dear Sir,

In her interesting piece on the young David Garnett as would-be terrorist (July/August 2011), Lesley Chamberlain says none of his later novels stands out like his first published work Lady Into Fox. But The Sailor’s Return, published three years later in 1925 and widely praised by reviewers, surely does – another ‘beautiful piece of English pastoral’ that powerfully weaves fact and fiction and shows Garnett’s continuing interest in the idea of assassination and terrorism. Susceptibility to terrorism may often be, as Chamberlain suggests, the product of parental upbringing, but it also results from unthinking acceptance of prevailing social mores, and this is what The Sailor’s Return – a story of the terrorizing of an African woman and her English husband in a quiet Dorset village in the 19th century – exposes so devastatingly. The point about Garnett not really hating anyone as a possible reason for giving up his terrorist inclinations and the need for parents not to produce haters is well made, yet in The Sailor’s Return Garnett shows that whatever else motivates his villagers in their mob mentality, it isn’t actually hatred. Rather it is the lack of individual courage in going against the grain of a simplistic mass mentality.

 His protagonist, the aptly-named Targett, and his wife Tulip, a princess from Dahomey, both become the object of suspicion and distaste despite their initial popularity and the success they make of running the local pub that gives the novel its title (inspired by the real one of that name in East Chaldon where Garnett used to visit T. F. Powys). Assassination is not necessarily a hit by a single individual, and what Garnett reveals in the novel is the latent collective violence in ‘civilised’ communities – all the more starkly for the story’s sleepy rural setting and the fact that he makes his hero an accomplished pugilist. The extraordinary savagery of Tulip’s own culture is a distant backdrop to a seemingly harmless fondness for fisticuffs, which Garnett seems to be showing as the extent of ‘violence’ acceptable in civilised society (as with today’s media coverage of boxing). But the fight that provides the climax of the novel gets out of hand, with its tragic consequences.

The Sailor’s Return also has claims to be the first modern British novel to have a black heroine, and as with Lady Into Fox it too was danced by the Ballet Rambert (as well as being made into a film). Much of this is expounded on by Prof. J. Lawrence Mitchell in an excellent introduction to a recent edition of the novel by the Sundial Press that also includes as an Appendix one of the variant endings Garnett wrote, which he apparently abandoned because the arrival of prize-fighting damaged the unity of his story. I would recommend this of all Garnett’s novels to anyone interested in his work – not to mention terrorism and assassination.

“It is such a brilliant concept, and the writing luminous.” – Dr Susan Ang Wan-Ling (Department of English Language & Literature, National University of Singapore)

Artist Peter Ursem, with a copy of SORREL BARN by Philippa Powys whose painting provided the striking cover image. 

View further paintings by Peter Ursem.