A new Mapp of the south coast
Christopher Hawtree
LUCIA TRIUMPHANT by Tom Holt
Macmillan, f9.95
`Lubbock, Mr Percy . Lucia of Riseholme; Luxmore, Mr H.E.; Lyttleton, Dr Edward . . . Mackenzie, Mr Compton; Mallory, George; Manners, Lady Diana; Mansfield, Hon J.W.; Mapp, Elizabeth; Marsh, Mr; Mary, H.R.H. Princess of Teck: afterwards H.M. Queen Mary; Mel- ba, Dame Nellie.' An ignorant browser through the index of E.F. Benson's post- humous 'informal autobiography', Final Edition, might assume that all these people are real; others, better informed, have a tendency to do the same. While so many, vivid enough to their contemporaries, have lost all trace of earthly glory in the 46 years since Benson's death, his two duelling ladies of Tilling have acquired a fame similar to that which has readers addres- sing letters to a Baker Street detective and receiving replies from the building society which now occupies his premises.
The Benson case has been a gradual one. The series began quietly enough with Queen Lucia and some unpublished plays. As early as 1905 his sister Maggie had exclaimed, 'some of the family really must emigrate, or English literature will be flooded', and by 1920 readers, weary of those once-popular, increasingly dull and even silly society comedies of the pre-war years, could be excused for not realising that this novel heralded a new, more pungent Benson. It had been anticipated in 1916 by a little-known collection of sketch- es, The Freaks of Mayfair, one of which features the dextrous needle of 'Aunt Georgie' and for the next 20 years Ben- son's work — fiction, memoirs and biog- raphies — stands in relation to that of his Edwardian period in much the same way as the later poetry of Yeats and Hardy. Although the flood was scarcely abated, English literature, not that it realised, was beginning to benefit: given fresh impetus by the Great War, Benson's work became largely eclipsed in the world which emerged from Hitler's onslaught, only the ghost stories making an appearance from time to time in various anthologies. By the late Sixties the series began to arouse new interest when some of the titles were reissued at the urging of Michael Mac- Liammoir and Nancy Mitford (whose re- view is reprinted in the irritatingly-titled A Talent to Annoy). Penguin, and later Cor- gi, duly managed three of them; then another, inexplicable lull, until now, with only four years' copyright left, all six are in print as Black Swans and successful enough not only for other — sometimes even better — books to appear from the Hogarth Press (Dodo, however, requires some stamina), but also for addicts to seize with delight upon Tom Holt's continuation of the series.
While Benson claimed to have got through his Cambridge finals only by dint of last-minute cramming, Mr Holt appears to have displayed sufficient diligence at Oxford to be currently engaged on post- graduate work there. Whatever the differ- ence in temperament this suggests, a com- mon interest in Ancient Greek History lies somewhere beneath their depiction of life on the south coast during the Thirties.
Although even the spectacle of an out- raged, speechless Elizabeth Mapp could not quite compensate for the extravagant notion of three world leaders enjoying lobster at the rival establishment, last year's Lucia in Wartime left one eager for the pair to struggle with the iniquities of the Welfare State. Mr Holt must be draw- ing breath before he ventures such a leap, but in Lucia Triumphant, which moves back to the Thirties, he is not merely marking time.
Doubtless, if one were to resort to those computers which can collate texts with a fraction of the effort that resulted in Caroline Spurgeon's Shakespeare's Imag- ery, recurring linguistic differences would be revealed — Mr Holt perhaps a little free with the classical allusions in the early stages of this one, and certainly too young to remember the colour of early Monopoly boxes. Such quibbles belong to machines; for all human purposes, the sewing of a tapestry, the temporary ousting of bridge by Monopoly, a three-wheel motor-car, a putative noble line and a visit by a photo- grapher from Country Life might have been dreamt up by Benson. 'Small beer,' as he put it in his memoirs, tut one could get a head upon it of jealousies and malignities and devouring inquisitiveness.' Indulgent as he was to the characters in his earlier novels, he did not make the con- trary mistake of merely subjecting these later creations to scorn. Lucia Triumphant, too, is poised between ridicule and sym- pathy, so that one can feel both others' horror at the prospect of Elizabeth Mapp's `coining money with her head on it' and her own agony on discovering the rest of the name of a well-known firm of silversmiths on her alleged heirloom. One might have thought the appearance of ghosts a good idea, but then realises that Benson was right to keep them away from Tilling. And, again, Mr Holt introduces an extraneous figure: if the former Princess of Teck is not here as real as she was in James Pope- Hennessy's pages, the acrimony which follows her visit is Benson at his finest. `Like Moses on Pisgah I saw a wide prospect, a Promised Land, a Saga inde- finitely unveiling itself' ; Tom Holt, far from slaughtering the first-born, has pro- vided manna, something which cannot be said of his mother, who, as Barbara Pym's executrix, has recently 'smoothed over' two versions of a genuine, shameful novel and foisted them upon a saddened public.
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