Winston Graham’s The Little Walls in the context of Graham’s other novels

Little Walls, an ancient “red light” district of Amsterdam

Dear friends and readers,

I’ve gotten into further into this first phase of my project towards a paper on Winston Graham’s Poldark first 7 novels. I read the plot-design of the first novel, am nearly finished outlining the plot-designs of the next three, and then I can just read the blogs I have on the last three: quartet and trilogy. I reminded myself more accurately about Demelza, ironed out (so to speak) the disposition of the story of Jeremy Poldark, and discovered today that I had a skewed version in my head of Warleggan, so am correcting the blog, but hope my work on the next three is accurate. Surely it is: as they are long enough and move chapter by chapter. I’ve read a number of essays and chapters in books on liberty, especially as regards women and I reread some central sources I had on historical fiction. And I read some sources on liberty (essays and chapters in books).

Meanwhile at night now and again I try a new novel by him: last week I read a relatively short older mystery or detective fiction, The Little Walls, for which he won what is said to be a prestigious award and the first time it was awarded: The Golden Dagger (how silly the nomenclature is). The slender novel is named after the Amsterdam “red light” district (where there is much prostitution, gambling, taverns for getting drunk), whence the photo which heads this blog.

It did differ from all but one of the previous books by him I’ve read: both Cordelia and The Little Walls have no marital rape scene. As the wikipedia article says it opens on the apparent suicide of the hero, Phillip Turner’s brother, Greville; like older mystery fiction, Turner becomes an amateur detective who goes on a quest to find out what happened to his brother. He does not believe his brother killed himself: once a brilliant nuclear physicist who worked on the atom bomb, Greville had become an archeaologist working in Indonesia (the book sometimes reminded me of Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost), a world-travelling and morally courageous man. How could he kill himself for the love of a woman whose note was found in his things, a woman he had hardly known? He was a married man too.

It’s clever because turns out the man of integrity who offers to help Turner, Martin Cox, is John Buckingham, the man who had become Greville’s best friend and sidekick aide, the last man who had seen Greville before he died, who betrayed Greville by stashing drugs in Greville’s luggage as a way of moving them from country to country. I guessed that early on; but what I didn’t fore see is the discovery of Martin Coxon’s identity leads to a second reversal. The young woman, Helen Winter, for love of whom Greville was supposed to have done away with himself, who Turner knows as Leonie and is sexually and emotionally attracted to, is Cox’s wife.  So her letter found in Greville’s suitcase is either hypocritical or to Cox.Turner chases them to Indonesia and then around Italy, from Rome to Naples to Capri. In a climactic scene Turner tries to drown Cox: a scene of rivalry and hatred that recalled to my mind George Warleggan and Ross Poldark’s rivalry and hatred for one another, as well as Ross’s killing of Monk Adderley in a duel in London, incensed at Adderley’s insulting harassment of Demelza and her previous liaison with dead Hugh Armitage.

The denouement was a let-down, a meretricious happy close. We are asked to believe that after all Greville did kill himself in despair for having had his integrity besmirched by Cox and perhaps because he did love Leonie — or yearned for her physically. It’s suggested that Greville did know pessimistic despair. And we are given to surmise that Leonie does not love Cox (never did) and will be taking up with Turner — ridiculous unless you believe widows will take up with anyone. So Little Walls is like the close of The Forgotten Story, Patricia gives in to her husband, Tom Harris, and will become his loving faithful wife in a new life in South Africa. Graham really does like to reward his heroes with his heroines. I’m told that readers of such books expect this “happy ending.”

The plot-design fizzles out.

The book had a few passages of astute perception about life, aphoristic, disillusioned, to my mind accurate, and we experience believably hard situations and treacherous people in amoral circumstances of their own creation that are not resolved. There is a remarkably insightful dialogue on modern amorality and Freudian psychology as justifying horrendous behaviro.  I was amused by the erudite reading (which coheres with my own) of his chief murderer: Buckingham reads AE Housman’s edition of Manilius, and then Cervantes’ exemplary novellas . One of the witnesses to the suicide-murder (somehow I wasn’t quite convinced at the close it was suicide) is a prostitute whose pimp is a man who violently beats her (par for the course we are to understand). There are casual society hostesses and men who float through life as their hangers-on. There is even a post-colonial perspective at least adumbrated (the book was published 1955). The novel thrives on suspense rather than anything thrilling or uncanny-gothic.

I then read an essay on Graham’s mystery novels by Gina MacDonald. She seems to have read the volume in print that I found (with The Forgotten Story, Marnie and Greek Fire) plus those novels which have been filmed for commercial movie-houses (e.g., The Walking Stick) and TV mini-series (e.g., The Forgotten Story, Fortune is a Woman [as She Played with Fire]). Macdonald is right about this one and Marnie (the two I’ve read thus far):

To blackmail, murder, fraud, and theft, Graham has added the mystery of the mind, the exploration of motives and deeds that lie rooted in the past and produce the conflicts, doubts, hesitations, and eccentricities of the present. His power lies in his ability to provide a sense of ordinary people menaced by the sort of trauma and violence that could well occur in the daily lives of his readers. His heroes are not blameless supermen, but guilt-ridden humans touched by the lives of others and forced to make personal decisions about loyalties and values … . Graham’s detective, when there is one, is an amateur, innocently caught up in an unsuspected crime, brought into it by accident, by circumstance, or by concern for another person. He is sometimes, again by misadventure or because of his deep personal involvement with another, the suspect, or accomplice, or intended victim … What are most important to Graham are human relationships

What Macdonald says is true of these non-historical novel heroes is as true of Ross Poldark, Dwight Enys, Drake Carne and the later younger heroes:

Graham’s heroes are normally cautious, pensive characters who take life seriously, who rush into love, but who tend to hesitate and ruminate about all else. They accept the need to test their own assumptions and are willing to experiment, if necessary, to find a workable compromise … men must deal with the disparity of facts and interpretations, and must wade through seeming truths that are at odds with their instinctive feelings.

His heroines reach “love through suffering” and look forward to the future with hope.

This too is very true of all the novels I’ve read thus far: “In most Graham novels the past impinges on the present.” “Memory is central to experience.” “Experience molds and makes or breaks a person and the way individuals act as catalysts in human relationships, transforming themselves and others when confronted with a difficult situation.”

Macdonald offers other insights to other novels I can’t judge as yet, but do know that Ross murders people (to break Enys out of prison) and in a duel. She thinks Graham shows that having murdered someone alters people but not in a cliched way. She does not talk of his villains who I find amoral hard obtuse egoists, wrapped up in their own obsessions (George Warleggan, his henchman, Osborne Whitworth).

It has been helpful to read this book — and more to be able to comprehend some of the criticism of his mystery-suspense novels for the first time. For now I will probably not go on to write more blogs on the Poldark movies, but instead try another of his historical novels that I could find, Groves of Eagles, set in Cornwall in the later 16th century. I have begun this and his straight history, The Spanish Armada and find I like them both: as ever good character portrayals, persuasive, and an incisive living style in both.

The 1955 cover calls attention to the backdrop of a long loving relationship between Phillip and Greville: this made me think of Sam’s love for Drake Carne and how Sam succours Drake; as well as the young boy in The Forgotten Story who will presumably grow up to love the man who marries his cousin and takes them to South Africa. As with other authors, one finds paradigms drawn from the person’s inward life throughout the books.

I conclude with admitting that had this been the first novel by Winston Graham I’d read, I’d never read another :). Ever.  The format and stereotypes of plot-design got in the way of his usual themes which are about liberty for the individual or independence; political ideas about society are nowhere to be found.

It was Ross Poldark confirmed for me by Demelza/Jeremy Poldark that took me into Graham’s work. The same goes for Susan Hill: I’m a continual reader of her novels — or I’ve read many and yearn to read her latest one on reading (A Year of Reading from Home). But had the first book been The Various Haunts of Men and not The Woman in Black confirmed for me by In the Springtime of the Year/The Bird of the Night I’d never have read another. In her gothics, Hill’s quiet originality, intense understanding of distress, loneliness, the breaking of conventional pretenses about family life are (as when an older woman feels happy and freer for the first time in decades when she escapes her daughter to a home for aging people) are all disallowed by the format and plot-design of her anxiety-ridden masculinist mystery series.  They make a lot of money for her.

In Hill’s case all I’ve learned about her as a person makes me dislike her (she’s disingenuous when students contact her; I see how she tries to control information about her titles &c&c); in Graham’s from his autobiography I like him: his politics, his class background, his values which include a certain sincerity. That does make a difference too. I would not do any project on Hill (just assign the one usable book, The Woman in Black to students, using the powerful film of the early 1990s too) nor yearn to write a sequel as I have and do for Graham.

Mysteries as a form finally are so artificial and strongly fantastic; more unreal than historical fiction really; life-writing I value when it’s truthful.

Ellen