Clearclassicsblog: The Fountain Overflows.

The Fountain Overflows by Rebecca West (London: Macmillan 1957)

This story of the Aubrey family – three girls and a boy – growing up in early twentieth-century London is one of my top five favourite books of all time (see end of this blog for the other four.)

The family’s story is told by Rose, one of the younger daughters, and it unfolds slowly. The brilliant, irresponsible and often absent father Piers, the apparently impractical but deeply responsible mother, Clare, and the social isolation in which the girls grow up, take shape gradually. The family is ‘poor’ by the standards of the upper-middle class from the parents have fallen; they have one highly-respected servant, Kate, and they rent a small, comfortable lodge-style house (set in its own grounds) in a fictional south London suburb, Lovegrove. But their clothes are shabby and their food scanty, and they have all kinds of contrivances to save money. The girls are Cordelia, who persists in playing the violin without any talent, the narrator Rose and her twin Mary, who are training to be concert pianists like their mother, and their plausibly adorable little brother, Richard Quin. He is called ‘Quin’ after Piers’s brother, who was called that to distinguish him from another Richard in the family. It is typical of West to expect us to accept this strange naming, but we do, just as we believe in the family’s encounter with a poltergeist, its close involvement with the family of a neighbouring murderer, Piers’s instrumentality in establishing the Court of Criminal Appeal, and other aspects of the story that might seem implausible in the hands of a less persuasive storyteller.

The family’s isolation is lessened somewhat early on in the story, when Clare and Rose accept an invitation to visit cousin Jock’s wife Constance and their little girl, Rosamund, in another, shabbier part of south London. Constance is kind but austere, Rosamund, serene and placid, will quickly become a fourth sister, but Jock, who comes home from work as the visit is drawing to a close, is awful. He is instantly recognisable to anyone of my generation as the kind of adult who delights in putting children in the wrong and mocking them. He says crude and vulgar things in an exaggerated Scottish dialect so as to irritate those he considers ‘too refined’ and too Anglicised. (Also, alas, a familiar type to anyone who grew up in 1950s and 60s Ireland). However, as Rosamund points out later in the book, when Rose is seething with anger at Jock, there is little to choose between the two fathers – Piers might be more charming, but both men divert resources away from their families without a second thought, and create considerable hardship for them. Elsewhere, when Rosamund and Richard Quin laugh about the difference between ‘nice nothing’ and ‘nasty nothing’, the reference to the two papas is implicit.

Rosamund seems easy-going; she endures adversity without railing against it, and sometimes gets what she wants by subversion rather than confrontation. But what she wants is always something good, because she is good. West commented that the book was about the difficulty of leading the artist’s life, but it’s also about the struggle between good and evil. Good people come in all shapes and sizes – the hapless Miss Beevor, who teaches Cordelia to play the violin badly, their friend Nancy’s Aunt Lily, a voluble Cockney, Mr Morpurgo, Papa’s gloomy associate who is a bit of a fairy godfather, and of course Kate, tall and imposing, like a sailor in skirts West tells us, who can threaten to box Rose’s ears if she doesn’t behave. Richard Quin is lazy and funny and bright, very slow to learn an instrument, the peacemaker among his quarrelling sisters and instantly beloved by all who engage with the family. He has that apparently effortless goodness that Rosamund has, which puzzles Rose, who (like most of us) finds virtue much more of a struggle. As to who the evil characters are, determining this is left up to the reader.

However, this reader believes that even Cordelia is ultimately good, in this book. Self-righteous and domineering, she is resented and almost hated by her sisters, but loved by Rosamund and Richard Quin and of course by her parents and Kate. Towards the end Cordelia reveals that she wanted to become a famous violinist to get away from the shame of their father, and Rose and Mary think of this as a terrible betrayal. (Richard Quin and Rosamund kind of understand it). But Cordelia is redeemed towards the end, even Rose grudgingly accepting that she is all right really.

What I love most about this book, though – apart from the utterly believable characters, we’ve all known (or been!) a Cordelia, a Rose/Mary, even a Rosamund and a Richard Quin – are the details of everyday life in the Edwardian era. When Piers is leaving their holiday house in Scotland at the beginning of the book, the boy driving him to the station goes fast so as to get the best out of his horse; ‘people always showed off in front of Papa.’ On the train journey to London, the veil covering Clare’s hat and face is so shabby that her nose sometimes pokes through a hole in it. For Christmas the girls give Kate hat-pins with sealing-wax heads and she is delighted, because like all women of that era she wore hats as big as cartwheels. When Rose and her mother visit Constance and Rosamond for the first time in the days between Christmas and the New Year – their suburban rail journey is described in vivid detail – she gives them hot oatmeal scones spread with butter and golden syrup, and fried Christmas pudding. Hair-washing is a rare ritual, accompanied by treats. And tall women who wear dark colours in pre-Raphaelite styles (like poor Miss Beevor) are a ‘massively depressing’ sight. The story is related in a retrospective way – in the opening paragraphs we are told that ‘this happened almost fifty years ago’; the house they move into in London was, we are told, destroyed by a bomb in the Second World War, and the words ‘in those days’ are used more than once.

I came across this book first as a teenager when it was lent to me by my Speech and Drama teacher in Limerick, Patsy Brosnan, and I didn’t appreciate it at all. Thirteen years later I borrowed it from Inchicore Library and it enthralled me. Then I bought the Virago paperback and loved it and lent it until it literally fell apart. Eventually I picked up a first edition of it (hardback of course) for E1 in Charlie Byrne’s in Galway about ten years ago, and I saw several like it in Chapters in Dublin for E3.99 in recent years. They are probably still there, if anybody wants a rare treat. There are also quite a few of the Virago editions to be found.

About the sequels:

The Fountain Overflows is very loosely based on West’s own family of origin, the Fairfields (her real name was Cicely or Sissy; Rebecca West was a nom-de-plume), although her sister Winifred Fairfield commented that the truth was far sadder and, one imagines, less coherent and luminous. I haven’t gone into all that in my discussion of the book, because I want to appreciate it as a stand-alone good story. West’s lifelong, childish spite against her sister Laetitia (the model for Cordelia), must be understood before the sequels are read. In the sequels, published after West’s death, Cordelia becomes a hopelessly malevolent figure, who is even barred by her own mother from her death-bed. Although I devoured them eagerly when they came out first, the sequels are (despite West’s characteristically glorious descriptive writing) like bad fan fiction. The characters have all become caricatures of themselves – even Rose and Mary. Apparently West planned a four-volume series that she wanted to call A Saga of The Twentieth Century. I am glad she never got around to Volume 4.

Rebecca West, The Fountain Overflows (London: Macmillan 1957: Virago 1981).

————————–This Real Night (London: Virago 1984).

————————–Cousin Rosamund (London: Virago 1985).

—————————-Family Memories (London:Lime Tree 1987). Introduced and edited by Faith Evans.

Victoria Glendinning, Rebecca West: a life (London: Fawcett 1987).

CLEAR CLASSICS BLOG: If you are new to Clear Classics, here is where I write about books I like and believe to be classics. Most belong to the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, but I write about more recent fiction too.

Mar eolas, of my five favourite books of all time, my other top four are:

Edwin O’Connor, The Edge of Sadness (1961 – see earlier blog)

Kate O’Brien, The Land of Spices (1941, ditto)

Maura Laverty, Never No More: the story of a lost village (London: Longmans, Green 1942)

Alice MacDermott, Charming Billy (N.Y. 1998: London: Bloomsbury 1999).

…….but there are lots, lots more jostling for top position, and something I read tomorrow or next year could dislodge one of these favourites.