Sherry And Ghosts

[from inner flap of dj] She must give a sherry party: she owed it to so many clients and friends; but while Charmian was making the list of guests she found herself imagining what a different party she would have if she could only turn back the years, invite the people she had known and loved before she became 'Madame Charmian of The Boutique'. Nostalgically, she called up for her second, fantasy party the ghosts of the attractive young men and the glamorous girls who had been her friends; in whose company she had known all the happiness -- and pain -- of youth.

And even as she dreamed, Fate was arranging a third party for her; neither of the present nor of the past, but of the future.

[from inner flap of Dodd, Mead & Company (1962) edition] This is the story of a woman who, while making a list of guests to be invited to her sherry party, was struck by the thought of what a different list she would have if she could put back Time's clock and invite her friends out of the past. In imagination she called up the attractive young men and the glamorous girls who would have made up that dream party. This is their story -- a story that was to end in still a third party for the hostess, as happy and unexpected as her fondest dreams. Here is Berta Ruck in a gay new novel, with a real golden surprise at the end of the rainbow.

Sherry And Ghosts is one of Berta Ruck's last novels, written, per the dedication, in 1959 when she would have been 81, and published in the UK and US when she was 83 and 84, respectively. Maybe for this reason, it has a more reflective, even melancholy, tone to it than her earlier work. The book's present is one cold, rainy London evening, and Charmian -- successful couture designer and salon owner, "soignée and lovely" having "barely reached the years J. M. Barrie called 'The Long Thirty-Nine'" (14) has "drawn the curtain against the uninspiring panorama of November drizzle" and sits reminiscing. She's just finished planning the "Duty-Party" she's giving for clients at the Boutique and now she sits imagining one "nearer to the heart's desire" -- "Remembered faces rose in the spiral of cigarette-smoke. Half-forgotten names whispered themselves into her mind." (15) The story of her transformation from little Charmian Iles of the rectory to Madame Charmian then unfolds and with it, in a way, the story of 20th-century Britain. And Ruck really casts it as a story, and a century, of loss -- "All, all are gone, the old familiar faces" -- loss of youth, loss to death, loss in war, loss of status, loss of empire. Starting with her friend's older, spinster cousin "engaged to a charming young man who adored her. Killed at Passchendaele. Mouldy for her, wasn't it?" (91) and moving through personal griefs -- young pianist Jeffry with his "velvet Californian accent" dying in a Swiss sanitarium, the brief "years of Peak and Plenty..those last years of Between-the-Wars" (116) and then back to sacrifice, discomfort, death -- and, then, again, the work of chin-up rebuilding it all "'Have some character, woman.' Get on with the job." (7) It's just a light novel and we are still dealing with the fallout of the European empires -- but that these generations suffered, no one can deny, and you feel it in every line.

The central romance is a bit tacked-on, with an unsatisfying misunderstanding and hasty, last page resolution, but there are some fun descriptions of "gilded youth" culture in the 30s -- scavenger hunts, a la My Man Godfrey were, apparently, really a thing -- and the generation gap between them (grown staid) and the 60s "Torrent of Teen-agery". (9) Typical Berta themes, too: fortune-telling and "second sight", Art School antics, and pretty strong and sympathetic LGBTQ vibes from some supporting characters.

Side note: Sherry And Ghosts actually started as a syndicated short (and I mean short -- three columns of one page) story -- it appeared as "The Daily Short Story" in the Philadelphia Inquirer on Monday, Dec 4, 1939 (page 13). (Why don't newspapers still give us short fiction?) Even beyond relative word counts, the differences between the two versions are striking. This earlier stars Mavis Endicott, an actress planning two nights of parties for her 33rd birthday --- the first, for "her bunch of stage friends after the show", the second, for the handsy, divorced "Clutch Harrison" -- he of the "cheery, slightly bibulous voice" on whom she's decided to settle. It's more plausible: instead of being bizarrely ghosted, she and Pat-not-Piet had just mutually broken their engagement when he went "off to some Empire-building job in Africa." It's also zingier: "...his ring in her Georgian bureau. 'Don't let's send things back: so Edwardian.' As Mavis had answered 'Don't let's keep letters: so Victorian'." Whipping up his recipe for stuffed eggs: "Don't make an untouchable memory out of eggs. So whimsy." Written on the eve of cataclysm, it's also so much less sad. An interesting contrast.

Flags: old racial terminology