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Wax Fruit #1
Antimacassar City
This is the first volume in the 'Wax Fruit' trilogy.
'Wzx Fruit' was first published as 'Red Plush'.
'Wzx Fruit' was first published as 'Red Plush'.
- GenresHistorical Fiction
189 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1947
2 people are currently reading
45 people want to read
About the author
Guy McCrone
21 books4 followersGuy Fulton McCrone was born in 1898 in Birkenhead, of Scottish parents.
He was educated at Glasgow and then Cambridge University and after his studies he appears to have gone to Vienna to study singing. He eventually returned to Glasgow where he was very much involved in the musical and theatrical life of the city. He became the first managing director of the Glasgow Citizens' Theatre, which was founded in 1943, and his play Alex Goes to Amulree was first performed at the Rutherglen Repertory Theatre in May 1944.
His 1947 novel Red Plush was a Book of the Month Club selection in New York and his Wax Fruit trilogy, the English title of Red Plush, is probably his best known work. His writings were often inspired by his interest in music and the theatre and they all had a Glasgowesque feel to them. The Glasgow Herald wrote of him "McCrone recaptures the atmosphere of the period most effectively."
He moved to the Lake District in 1968 and died there in 1977.
I tracked down an interview he gave in middle age and it went as follows:-
"I was born in Birkenhead, England, in 1898, of Scottish parents. A temporary job had taken my father there, and the household went with him. But I spent my early childhood running in the woods and farmlands of central Ayrshire. I describe this pleasant countryside in my books. It is the Burns country. Our nearest village was Mauchline, where Robert Burns first took up house with his wife, Jean Armour. The poet's haunts are well known to me and his Aryshire Scots is very familiar in my ears.
"I have no illustrious ancestors. But one of my family interests me. He was my grandfather's cousin, a certain John Macrone (writing the name thus) who went to London, established himself at 3, St James Square, became a publisher, encouraged the young Charles Dickens to collect his first newspaper pen sketches, and published them under the Macrone imprint as 'Sketches by Boz'. [Bettie, I knew I recognised the name from somewhere and when I remembered, that is what made me trace some more.]
"I went to school in Glasgow, passing the entrance examination for Cambridge, England, in the middle of World War I. But being ineligible for the army, I went to scrub floors and sell cigarettes in soldiers' YMCA in Normandy and Paris. When the war was ended, I duly went up to the university, where I took a degree in economics as it was intended I should be a business man.
"I began writing after I married in 1931. I had the good fortune to have the script of my first novel read by Michael Sadleir [another of my favourites], himself a distinguished biographer, novelist and publisher. He invited me to London, then tore my work to pieces, neither showing mercy nor predicting a future for it. It was a shattering experience; but I pulled myself together, came home to Glasgow, rewrote my book and sent it back to him. He replied almost at once that he congratulated me on being able to take instruction, that he was pleased with what I had done and would like to publish. It was on Sadleir's suggestion that I wrote a trilogy, 'Red Plush', which was chosen as Book-of-the-Month in New York for December 1947.
"People have asked me why I continue to write almost exclusively about my own kind of people, my own city of Glasgow and the countryside in which I was reared [shades of John Buchan]. Here is my reason. I had not gone far with the study of the novel before I saw that a novelist, especially if he has a recording talent and not a talent for fantasy, writes best about the place that has been his home; that is, the home of his childhood and adolescence. I found endless examples of this among other writers. I believe in travel and wide horizons, of course. But in the end these mostly serve only to pur the novelist's home background into the right proportion for him. And it is there, I firmly believe, that his creative talent can be used with the greatest forc
He was educated at Glasgow and then Cambridge University and after his studies he appears to have gone to Vienna to study singing. He eventually returned to Glasgow where he was very much involved in the musical and theatrical life of the city. He became the first managing director of the Glasgow Citizens' Theatre, which was founded in 1943, and his play Alex Goes to Amulree was first performed at the Rutherglen Repertory Theatre in May 1944.
His 1947 novel Red Plush was a Book of the Month Club selection in New York and his Wax Fruit trilogy, the English title of Red Plush, is probably his best known work. His writings were often inspired by his interest in music and the theatre and they all had a Glasgowesque feel to them. The Glasgow Herald wrote of him "McCrone recaptures the atmosphere of the period most effectively."
He moved to the Lake District in 1968 and died there in 1977.
I tracked down an interview he gave in middle age and it went as follows:-
"I was born in Birkenhead, England, in 1898, of Scottish parents. A temporary job had taken my father there, and the household went with him. But I spent my early childhood running in the woods and farmlands of central Ayrshire. I describe this pleasant countryside in my books. It is the Burns country. Our nearest village was Mauchline, where Robert Burns first took up house with his wife, Jean Armour. The poet's haunts are well known to me and his Aryshire Scots is very familiar in my ears.
"I have no illustrious ancestors. But one of my family interests me. He was my grandfather's cousin, a certain John Macrone (writing the name thus) who went to London, established himself at 3, St James Square, became a publisher, encouraged the young Charles Dickens to collect his first newspaper pen sketches, and published them under the Macrone imprint as 'Sketches by Boz'. [Bettie, I knew I recognised the name from somewhere and when I remembered, that is what made me trace some more.]
"I went to school in Glasgow, passing the entrance examination for Cambridge, England, in the middle of World War I. But being ineligible for the army, I went to scrub floors and sell cigarettes in soldiers' YMCA in Normandy and Paris. When the war was ended, I duly went up to the university, where I took a degree in economics as it was intended I should be a business man.
"I began writing after I married in 1931. I had the good fortune to have the script of my first novel read by Michael Sadleir [another of my favourites], himself a distinguished biographer, novelist and publisher. He invited me to London, then tore my work to pieces, neither showing mercy nor predicting a future for it. It was a shattering experience; but I pulled myself together, came home to Glasgow, rewrote my book and sent it back to him. He replied almost at once that he congratulated me on being able to take instruction, that he was pleased with what I had done and would like to publish. It was on Sadleir's suggestion that I wrote a trilogy, 'Red Plush', which was chosen as Book-of-the-Month in New York for December 1947.
"People have asked me why I continue to write almost exclusively about my own kind of people, my own city of Glasgow and the countryside in which I was reared [shades of John Buchan]. Here is my reason. I had not gone far with the study of the novel before I saw that a novelist, especially if he has a recording talent and not a talent for fantasy, writes best about the place that has been his home; that is, the home of his childhood and adolescence. I found endless examples of this among other writers. I believe in travel and wide horizons, of course. But in the end these mostly serve only to pur the novelist's home background into the right proportion for him. And it is there, I firmly believe, that his creative talent can be used with the greatest forc
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
July 9, 2023
Here we are dealing with the saga of the Moorhouse family, originating from an Ayrshire farm in the mid-1800s, though the setting is mainly Glasgow in the 1870s. The youngest Moorhouse, Phoebe, is the result of her father’s second marriage, to a Highland woman, and the book’s first scene describes the night she was orphaned by an accident. Phoebe is portrayed as a restrained, self-possessed girl and, later, young woman. Her older (half)-brother Mungo is the only one of the family left at the farm, the others have moved to Glasgow and are going up in the world. Her brother Arthur’s wife Bel determines to take her in, even though she is expecting their first child.
Phoebe takes a sisterly interest in the child, Arthur, when he is born. A few years later a maid, taking a shortcut home from a visit to his grandmother, loses him in a slum area when distracted by her sister’s presence there. On her own initiative and though still a child Phoebe sets out to find him, braving the shocking - and frightening - conditions of the overcrowded slums, and earns Bel’s everlasting gratitude for his rescue. McCrone’s attitude to the slum dwellers, couched through the middle-class values of the upwardly mobile Moorhouses, is disparaging and dismissive. They are depicted as depraved and dissolute; there is, it seems, nothing to redeem them.
The rest of the book deals mainly with Bel’s attempts to persuade her husband to move out of the city centre to the more salubrious West End and Mungo’s surprising attractiveness to Miss Ruanthorpe of Duntrafford, the local Big House in Ayrshire.
Henry Hayburn, tongue-tied except when enthusing about steam engines and engineering and a friend of another of Phoebe’s brothers, develops on sight a yearning for her. She is less enthusiastic but his family’s exposure to ruin in the collapse of the City Bank of Glasgow brings out her protective side.
The prose here is efficient but fails to spark. Elements of this are a bit like the works of Margaret Thompson Davis (though of course McCrone was published much earlier) but Davis’s attitude to the poor was more empathetic. But she was portraying the honourable poor.
As a cursory representation of Glasgow (a certain echelon of Glasgow) in the mid-Victorian age this is a good enough primer. Literature, though, it is not.
I still have two instalments to go. Maybe it will improve.
Phoebe takes a sisterly interest in the child, Arthur, when he is born. A few years later a maid, taking a shortcut home from a visit to his grandmother, loses him in a slum area when distracted by her sister’s presence there. On her own initiative and though still a child Phoebe sets out to find him, braving the shocking - and frightening - conditions of the overcrowded slums, and earns Bel’s everlasting gratitude for his rescue. McCrone’s attitude to the slum dwellers, couched through the middle-class values of the upwardly mobile Moorhouses, is disparaging and dismissive. They are depicted as depraved and dissolute; there is, it seems, nothing to redeem them.
The rest of the book deals mainly with Bel’s attempts to persuade her husband to move out of the city centre to the more salubrious West End and Mungo’s surprising attractiveness to Miss Ruanthorpe of Duntrafford, the local Big House in Ayrshire.
Henry Hayburn, tongue-tied except when enthusing about steam engines and engineering and a friend of another of Phoebe’s brothers, develops on sight a yearning for her. She is less enthusiastic but his family’s exposure to ruin in the collapse of the City Bank of Glasgow brings out her protective side.
The prose here is efficient but fails to spark. Elements of this are a bit like the works of Margaret Thompson Davis (though of course McCrone was published much earlier) but Davis’s attitude to the poor was more empathetic. But she was portraying the honourable poor.
As a cursory representation of Glasgow (a certain echelon of Glasgow) in the mid-Victorian age this is a good enough primer. Literature, though, it is not.
I still have two instalments to go. Maybe it will improve.
May 19, 2018
Read this because I live in Glasgow, but found the narrative unsympathetic and at times dismissive of the time period in which the story is set, which is not immersive. You can't get into a story if the author is explaining the past in relation to the present. Also not overwhelmed by the characters, but will plod through the next book and see if I enjoy it more.
March 6, 2017
Loved it!
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews