“Our Spoons Came from Woolworths,” newly reissued as a gorgeous NYRB paperback, may strike Barbara Comyns enthusiasts as rather tame. Those who have been enjoying the American renaissance of this mid-century British original will find in her second novel none of the sudden, sinister breaks with reality that lurk around corners in “The Vet’s Daughter,” an earlier NYRB rerelease, and “Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead,” reprinted by the small press The Dorothy Project in 2010. Yet “Our Spoons” contains one of the best distillations of Comyns’ peculiar style currently available stateside, and is essential for understanding her dark, delightful oeuvre.
Comyns’ life was a series of adventures and misadventures, much of it reworked into fiction. Born in 1907, she was raised on a large, increasingly derelict Warwickshire estate alongside her five siblings, and educated by a series of indifferently qualified governesses. She began writing and drawing around the age of 10 to entertain herself and her siblings and later fictionalized her unorthodox childhood in her first novel, “Sisters By a River.” Upon leaving art school, she married young and divorced after three miserably impoverished years, like the protagonist of “Our Spoons.” Left alone to care for two small children in London, she fended for herself any way possible, living for a time with a con man, about whom she later wrote the novel “Mr. Fox.” She made a living buying and restoring antique pianos, among other things, until the Blitz drove her to the countryside, where she became a cook-housekeeper in a country house and wrote her first two novels to entertain her daughters. Later, she enjoyed a long, happy marriage to Richard Comyns Carr, a close associate of Kim Philby. The couple left the country when Carr was accused of being a Soviet spy.
“Our Spoons,” a fictionalized account of Comyns’ disastrous first marriage, opens with the line, “I told Helen my story and she went home and cried.” The emotional displacement in that line is one of the central facets of Comyns’ style — it is not narrator Sophia Fairclough who cries when telling her story, but the listener, a reader stand-in, who absorbs its emotional impact. Sophia seems uneasy about this reaction: “I wish I hadn’t told Helen so much; it’s brought everything back in a vivid flash … I keep remembering things all the time.”
The frame recedes after a single paragraph, and the early chapters caper lightly enough through the trials and tribulations of two young artists who marry and start a bohemian life together in a London flat on almost no income. Despite their poverty, they have lots of fun scorching pans, making a home for narrator Sophia’s newt Great Warty, and painting cast-off furniture “a pale greenish blue, the kind of colour some swimming-pools are.” Only Sophia’s surprise pregnancy (the only kind for these babes-in-the-woods) gives them pause; Charles exclaims, “How I dislike the idea of being a Daddy and pushing a pram!” prompting Sophia to say, “I don’t want to be a beastly Mummy either; I shall run away.” When she realizes she can’t and starts crying, it’s heartbreaking, but also so comically naive that even a Comyns fan might be seduced into missing the coming horrors.
Those horrors begin in earnest in Chapters 10, 11 and 12, when Sophia gives birth in a state hospital; in a note on the copyright page, Comyns herself claimed that the only “true things” in the book were these three chapters “and the poverty.” The stunningly detailed description of recently medicalized childbirth among the working class is grueling, but worse is yet to come: Poverty begins to take over the narrative as Charles refuses to get a job or make an effort to sell his paintings; illness, disaster and more pregnancies follow, throughout all of which Comyns maintains her trademark disarming combination of dispassion, levity and veiled ferocity.
One lighter moment strikes me as both particularly important, and very likely to be overshadowed by what follows. The ninth chapter, just before the trio of “true” childbirth chapters, opens:
This book does not seem to be growing very large although I have got to Chapter Nine. I think this is partly because there isn’t any conversation. I could just fill pages like this:
‘I am sure it is true,’ said Phyllida.
‘I cannot agree with you,’ answered Norman.
‘Oh, but I know I am right,’ she replied.
‘I beg to differ,’ said Norman sternly. That is the kind of stuff that appears in real people’s books. I know this will never be a real book that business men in trains will read, the kind of business men that wear stiff hats with curly brims and little breathing holes let in the side. I wish I knew more about words. Also I wish so much I had learnt my lessons at school. I never did, and have found this such a disadvantage ever since. All the same, I’m going to go on writing this book even if business men scorn it.
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This winking interlude, inserted just before the narrative begins to show its true colors, is in fact a sly artist’s statement, at once confirming and gently mocking the critical consensus that had already developed around Comyns by the publication of her second novel: “naive,” untutored, primitive, perhaps even “outsider art,” a term Kathryn Davis used in her introduction to the 2003 edition of “The Vet’s Daughter.” This perception dates back to her first novel, “Sisters by a River,” in which her publisher, without her permission and much to her dismay, multiplied and exaggerated the spelling errors in her original manuscript rather than correcting them.
We should always be suspicious of our motives for using “outsider art” as a synonym for “self-taught,” as Davis did in her rhapsodic introduction; it’s a label with an unpleasantly self-congratulatory air: “To read Barbara Comyns is to feel the exquisite thrill of discovery, as well as the pride of the discoverer … You found me, Barbara Comyns says, and I am yours alone.”
That is not what Comyns says to me at all, though I am ready to stand and applaud anyone, including Davis, who helps spread the word about her odd books. The autobiographical nature of Comyns’ work is partly to blame; perhaps that’s why Emily Gould, who has a keen sense for how personal narratives are constructed, fares better in her introduction to “Our Spoons,” noting that “the destabilizing consistency of tone she cultivates to devastating effect in Our Spoons … is entirely deliberate.”
In fact, Comyns walks a tightrope between her narrator’s present and past selves on every page of “Our Spoons,” seamlessly slipping back and forth between perspectives and rarely calling attention to her performance. When Sophia meets a man with the fantastical name of Peregrine Narrow who will later become her lover, her narrator-self kicks in with a wry observation, as if unable to resist: “When I talked he listened most intently to every word I said, as if it was very precious. This had never happened to me before, and gave me great confidence in myself, but now I know from experience a lot of men listen like that, and it doesn’t mean a thing; they are most likely thinking up a new way of getting out of paying their income-tax.”
By contrast, the darker passages typically resist this narrative irony, clinging tightly to the past Sophia’s numbness and denial, and leaving the reader (or Helen, if she’s still listening) to parse the reality: “I was pleased (Peregrine) was going to be away now I felt so unhappy, because I knew men hate women when they are unhappy.” Comyns has an uncanny knack for knowing when to leave this sort of statement hanging, voiding it of sentiment and investing it instead with her narrator’s will to survive a rapidly deteriorating situation. In one of the book’s darkest moments, a back-alley abortion forced on Sophia by her selfish husband, past and present merge as she lapses into near-silence: “I don’t feel much like writing about the actual operation. It was horrible and did not work at all as it should. I couldn’t go to hospital, because we would have all gone to prison if I had.” The final descent must be read to be believed.
Although Comyns’ voice is instantly recognizable and always destabilizing, her eleven novels show her constantly experimenting with new techniques for creating this feeling of disjunction. For example, after “Our Spoons,” her next novel, “Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead,” keeps the reader guessing by freely switching point-of-view characters, flowing in and out of characters’ heads from paragraph to paragraph in a way that makes a small town haunted by mysterious illness feel like one infected organism. (That one begins, “The ducks swam through the drawing-room windows”; Comyns had a way with first lines.) “The Vet’s Daughter” takes a sudden swerve from sordid realism into neo-gothic occultism; “The Juniper Tree” is written as a surrealist fable.
Comyns’ reputation as some kind of overgrown child-writer is, of course, abetted by Comyns herself, whose self-denigrating moments seem alternately earnest and, as in the passage above, tempered by an amused awareness. Some accounts would have it that she never encountered published books until leaving home at 19, but the child characters based on herself always have their noses stuck in a book; it’s more likely that she had only read children’s literature until then, which doesn’t seem so terribly unusual. Neither does her shamefaced decision to destroy all her previous work, something most writers have done in a fit of adolescent gloom. Perhaps Comyns did not take her writing all that seriously; she seems to have considered herself a visual artist first and foremost. Even so, there’s no reason to take her self-deprecating comments about her work at face-value. Women know that negative self-talk is a survival strategy, and no one knew more about surviving strange situations than Comyns.
At any rate, she is at least as serious as other British women writers of her generation born into families of fallen gentry — Barbara Pym, Molly Keane — all calculatedly meek, yet sharp enough to give you paper cuts. If she were born male she might have been something like Roald Dahl, who avoided his own opportunities for a first-rate education at all costs, and instead, like Comyns, chose to channel a child’s cruel wonder into his fiction for both children and adults — often refusing to honor the difference.
Thanks to NYRB and the Dorothy Project, Comyns’ days of being underrated in America are over. Surely there will be a bumper crop of small-press Comyns reprints in years to come. Let’s hope by then the critical conversation has moved away from the embarrassing label of outsider art and toward an appreciation of the precise ways in which Comyns’ eerie voice has wormed its way inside our heads.
Amy Gentry is a freelance writer living in Austin, Texas.
Our Spoons Came From Woolworths””
By Barbara Comyns, NYRB Classics, 224 pages, $14.95