Serving Tea and Neuroses
BOLGER, EUGENIE
Serving Tea and Neuroses The Honours Board By Pamela Hansford Johnson Scribners. 316 pp. $6.95. Reviewed by Eugenie Bolger Before her first novel appeared, Pamela Hansford Johnson had already...
...Along with Dylan Thomas and Theodore Roethke, she was a frequent contributor to the Poet's Corner of the Sunday Referee, and in 1933 won the Referee's poetry prize...
...To enter a boy for Eton, Winchester or Westminster would have seemed to him like calling without introduction at the stately home of someone unknown to him and demanding tea...
...Her poetic sensibility is evident in the novels that followed, revealing itself in the kind of precise observation that characterizes small, 17th-century genre paintings...
...The author darts in and out of her characters' minds with omniscient ease...
...Miss Hansford Johnson's latest novel, The Honours Board, offers a generous sampling of this poetically compressed observation...
...The capacity for empathetic feeling is lost in the gossipy busy-ness of the school...
...Against better judgment, against individual interest, people do stay on...
...There is, for example, the matter of the school's academic standing...
...The same gentle irony that animates an account of Parents' Day festivities informs a scene of willing rape or lesbian frustration...
...the prose is lucid, unaffected, even chatty...
...In the isolation of Downs Park, small events are exaggerated to provide interest and larger one are inevitably shrunk to size, bringing both to the same mean level...
...Unquestionably a good headmaster, Annick has an instinct for working with boys and for balancing the diverse gifts and temperaments of his staff...
...Murray...
...everyone can, and does, shrug off the pain of others...
...The customary neuroses, too, flourish in the quiet of Downs Park...
...And the school is so grievously understaffed that the departure of cook, matron, teacher, or master could bring the whole edifice crashing down, for who can be found to work at Downs Park wages, yet how can Annick afford to pay more...
...The best prospects are winnowed out...
...Worse, I daresay we shan't think about them, either...
...Any more than we think much of poor Mrs...
...forsaking epic themes, they record the charming minutiae and careful detail that lend substance to setting and character...
...A sky is "the color of peeled grapes," a classroom is "scratched and scribbled...
...But then Downs Park does not enroll the kind of student likely to win honors at the more prestigious schools...
...Part of its strength and value derives from the Annicks, whose deep affection for the school and for each other wins willing adherents...
...The rest of its strength comes from inertia...
...The Honours Board on the stairway is a list of scholarships won by stolid boys to equally stolid upper schools...
...Both the novels and paintings depict ordinary events with affection and irony...
...Despite the ritual mumblings about "finding a place" proffered at every interview, Downs Park is never without vacancies...
...Rickety as it seems, however, Downs Park is able to withstand considerable buffeting...
...Satyriasis, lesbianism, kleptomania, alcoholism, suicide, even a hint of flagellation--all are here...
...Appropriately, there is something old-fashioned in the style and structure of the novel itself...
...Miss Hansford Johnson handles this material with the gracious equanimity of a hostess serving tea, making everything seem as ordinary as cucumber sandwiches...
...The school is populated with the ordinary offspring of the decent, amiable parents Annick prefers...
...While the school secretary worries about the growing deficit, Cyril and his wife Grace insist upon keeping the lawns well-watered and the flower beds stocked...
...Annick is not one to push his boys for the better places...
...The Honours Board is set in Downs Park, a small English boarding school for boys where the headmaster, Cyril Annick, struggles against insolvency and sundry other ills...
...Although Miss Hansford Johnson has assembled the expected characters--the aggressive, red-faced games master, the incompetent cook, the middle-aged French teacher who weeps easily--they assume, in her hands, a vulnerable, crotchety, altogether human dimension...
...This is more than a matter of style or viewpoint...
...When the second master and his wife depart, Grace Annick remarks: "He will take that awful broken life of his away somewhere, and I daresay we shall never hear of either of them again...
...As in those 17th-century paintings, though, a source of light is clearly visible...
...the author's wit and humanity supply the glow...
...Reviewed by Eugenie Bolger Before her first novel appeared, Pamela Hansford Johnson had already earned recognition as a poet...
...There is an old-fashioned quality to this celebration of what is, after all, a vestigial institution...
...That the school at last acquires an outstanding scholar is due in no small measure to the boy's possession of a reassuringly mediocre mother...
...A few umbrellas jolted by...
...Minor characters are sketched in with a few deft strokes: ". . . floral mothers and military-looking fathers descended upon him fluting and bellowing...
...Wet boys in tails quickened pace up the High Street...
...The willows hung despondently...
...There is something rueful in this little novel--so much of value is threatened, so much emotion washed away...
...The reader sits back, comfortable in the conviction that he knows exactly where he is...
...A short paragraph evokes Eton on a rainy morning: "Morning came in a grey drizzle and there was no light upon the river which had a solid look, as if it might be grey macadam...
...Some are inevitably lost during the ordeal of the parental interview, a joust in which poor Annick is either overwhelmed by brilliant fathers or overawed by titled ones...
...The suicide of a woman teacher, shocking as much for its threat to Downs Park as for its revelation of personal tragedy, is soon forgotten...
...Yet he suffers from innate timidity and lacks a hard eye for practical matters...
...the narrative moves forward in a clean, straight line...
Vol. 53 • November 1970 • No. 22
