Too Dear for my Possessing

Helena #1

by Pamela Hansford Johnson

Bruges, bedecked with stiff Madonnas . . . London, going wild in the Twenties . . . Paris, where white powdered faces gleam from cafe tables . . .

Against these backdrops unfolds the life of Claud Pickering as he describes his boyhood, dominated by his step-mother Helena, and the complications and compromises, the yearnings and expectations of young adulthood. It is the story of his failed marriage, and it is the story of his passion for Cecil, a singer, who haunts Claud with all the elusiveness — and the destructiveness — of a dream.

Too Dear For My Possessing is the first volume in the ‘Helena’ trilogy, in which Pamela Hansford Johnson demonstrates superbly her considerable powers as a novelist. The story continues in An Avenue of Stone and concludes in A Summer To Decide.

Pamela Hansford Johnson wrote 27 novels across genres as diverse as romance, comedy and tragedy. An incredibly readable and literary author, who deserves to be rediscovered by a new generation, Bello has brought 18 of Johnson’s books back into print.

Genres: Fiction

315 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1940

About the author

Pamela Hansford Johnson was born in 1912 and gained recognition with her first novel, This Bed Thy Centre, published in 1935. She wrote 27 novels. Her themes centred on the moral responsibility of the individual in their personal and social relations. The fictional genres she used ranged from romantic comedy (Night and Silence, Who Is Here?) and high comedy (The Unspeakable Skipton) to tragedy (The Holiday Friend) and the psychological study of cruelty (An Error of Judgement). Her last novel, A Bonfire, was published in the year of her death, 1981.

She was a critic as well as a novelist and wrote books on Thomas Wolfe and Ivy Compton-Burnett; Six Proust Reconstructions (1958) confirmed her reputation as a leading Proustian scholar. She also wrote a play, Corinth House (1954), a work of social criticism arising out of the Moors Trial, On Iniquity (1967), and a book of essays, Important to Me (1974). She received honorary degrees from six universities and was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She was awarded the C.B.E. in 1975.

Pamela Hansford Johnson, who had two children by her first marriage with journalist Gordon Neil Stewart, later married C. P. Snow. Their son Philip was born in 1952.

Reviews

[Sherry · Rating 5 out of 5]

My first Pamela Hansford Johnson novel (but certainly not my last!), "Too Dear for My Possessing" is an engrossing tale of a young man's life in Europe during the age of innocence preceding World War II. Claud, the son of a writer, moves with his father to Bruges while he is a boy, after his mother and father divorce. Accompanying them is Helena, the flamboyant, beautiful, and intimidating dancer with whom Claud's father has fallen passionately in love. Claud grows up, becomes an art critic and bank clerk, and falls in with a fashionable crowd first in Paris and then in London, and he marries a lovely and sweet co-worker, Meg -- but he cannot forget Cecil Archer, the precocious, red-haired girl with whom he danced as a child one afternoon and who accompanies him as an imaginary friend from time to time. Cecil becomes a famous performer but the connection between her and Claud only grows as the years go by. Claud's struggle to do the right thing by Meg and to not repeat his father's "mistakes" mean he must forsake true love for the duty's sake -- or must he?

"Too Dear for My Possessing" isn't an action-packed page turner, but a thoughtful reflection on reason and passion, on the meaning of love, and on being true to oneself, written in gorgeous prose that is never overwrought and which brings its characters to vivid life. Readers will especially love the snarky, audacious stepmother Helena and the charismatic Cecil, women who challenge and enthrall the hero Claud and shape him into the man he becomes.

I discovered this book via the blog "Frisbee: A Book Journal," one of my favorite book blogs for the very reason that Frisbee routinely introduces me to books and authors unfamiliar to me. "Too Dear for My Possessing" is the first novel in a trilogy, and you can bet that I will be tracking down the next installment. I need to know what becomes of Claud!

[Gareth Evans · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very well-constructed and well-written between-the-wars novel. Somerset Maughm like in scope and style. It's great to see Bello republishing Hansford Johnson's novels. She really is sadly neglected.

[Ali · Rating 4 out of 5]

oo Dear for my Possessing is the first book in Pamela Hansford Johnson’s Helena trilogy. Published in 1940 – the setting is Bruges, London and Paris in the 1920’s and 1930’s.

Helena – the character for whom this trilogy has been named, is naturally at the heart of this novel – but she isn’t the main character. Claud Pickering is the narrator of this novel (and I believe the two which follow it). As the novel opens he is thirteen, living happily in Bruges with his father and his mistress Helena who is around forty. Separated from his wife, who is still in England and unable to get a divorce, Claud’s father maintains the fiction that Helena is his housekeeper.

“In her middle forties, though, she was a stock for staring. I remember her striding among the stalls on market days, clattering off her meagre store of Flemish, her face dark and swollen under the burning bush of hair dyed yellow as broom. She was queer and handsome in her black way, her eyes black, bold and choleric, her lips blood-black, her chin rounded as a Roman emperor’s. A true dark Celt, Father called her, and he could never stop being surprised that in dyeing her black hair yellow she had made herself, not hideous, but barbaric and magnificent.”

brugesIn these early years Claude and Helena have a turbulent relationship – the two coming to blows on several occasions, Claud daring to defy her when his father is away from home. Claud’s life is a charmed one, although struggling with his French a little he enjoys going to school at the Lycée. He has a wonderful amount of freedom – running around with a couple of local boys, but Claud’s great and unparalleled joy is in his boat. Sailing his small boat along the narrow strip of river that runs through Bruges Claud knows extraordinary happiness.

full review: https://heavenali.wordpress.com/2016/...

[Dave Appleby · Rating 3 out of 5]

The first of a trilogy, this book is a bildungsroman following Claud, whom we first encounter as a young English boy living in Bruges just after the first world war with his father, an author of cheap detective fiction and his father's mistress, the wonderful Helena. In four almost equally long parts, he moves to London, then to Paris and finally to Bruges again, falling in unrequited and requited love.

It is written in the past tense till the last chapter which is framed by the present tense.

The story is a chronicle of the time, It reflects on the roaring 20s and the ominous 30s: Claud is a part-time art critic for fringe and later more mainstream magazines: as such he is on the fringes of an artistic set whilst being firmly grounded by his full-time occupation as an officer of an insurance and banking company. This semi-outsider status is tweaked by his being the childhood friend of a singer and dancer who becomes a star. It is an interesting perspective, the middle-class lad who needs to work for his living: he has a degree of independent income thanks to his legacy, his schooling moves from independent school to grammar school, he has to work for his living but in a respectable job, he lives in London flats.

I think its fundamental purpose is as a portrait of a society in which divorce was essentially unacceptable forcing some people to live unconventional lives and others to be unhappy.

The plot is conventional and predictable. Unlike Claud's father's books there is little excitement. The saving grace is the wonderful character of Helena: a passionate mistress and temperamental step-mother but even she matures and mellows into a something quite conventional.

It is well written and there are some great moments:

"I had possessed one of those frightening sopranos that most people admire and I detest, a voice pure enough, high enough, inhuman enough to crack a tumbler." (1.1)
"There was one girl without eyebrows who looked as if she would dance, were she not at death’s door" (1.4)
“'I’m glad to do anything for Richard’s wife,' said Uncle as if it were a one-line part in a play and he were having difficulty with it." (2.1)
"Till 1930 people talked about the last war; after 1930 they talked about the next." (3.1)
"We may say that we are not wasted utterly, because our flesh and bones fertilize new soil; but good God, is that all man is fitted for? To be manure?" (4.3)

I suppose it is valuable as a picture of the interwar years but this novel didn't enthral and I doubt I shall attempt the others in the trilogy. If you want to read PHJ at her best, try The Unspeakable Skipton, a much livelier story.