A last look at May Sinclair's Flaw in the Crystal

This article highlights some unconvincing elements in May Sinclair's The Flaw in the Crystal and lists some similarities between The Parasite by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and May Sinclair's novella. These similarities and some other connections I noticed make the effort needed to decode the obscurities in The Flaw in the Crystal seem worthwhile. 

First, two extracts that seem significant to me:

Playing the 'as if' game

There is no humour in The Flaw in the Crystal, but I find this passage where Milly Powell writes to Agatha about her husband Harding both interesting and amusing:

“She wrote as if it was Agatha's fault that he had become dependent; as if Agatha had nothing, had nobody in the world to think of but Harding; as if nobody, as if nothing in the world beside Harding mattered. And Agatha found herself resenting Milly's view. As if to her anything in the world mattered beside Rodney Lanyon.“

Off-the-mark, 'as if' messages are a special interest of mine. It was an unexpected treat to come across such a good specimen in a story written in 1912. 

It is a pity that the whole story is not written in the  straightforward style that we see in this passage.

Intention is everything 

Just as many other people involved with unseen influences have done, Agatha Verrall realises that there is a dimension where thoughts have power. There, the wish or intention to do something is at least as effective as actually doing it in the real world:

“...that world where to think was to will, and to will was to create.“

“For thought went wider and deeper than any deed; it was of the very order of the Powers intangible wherewith she had worked. Why, thoughts unborn and shapeless, that ran under the threshold and hid there, counted more in that world where It, the Unuttered, the Hidden and the Secret, reigned.”

Despite what Agatha Verrall believes, this dimension, this world, is not necessarily a good place and the Powers that can be contacted there are not necessarily benevolent.

A last look at Stella Gibbons's My American

This final article in the series inspired by Stella Gibbons’s novel My American features a major influence that I detected.  

First, a few comments about the construction and content of My American. I suspect that some of this book was written with the cooperation of what Rudyard Kipling would call a daemon and much of it without.

Up to the point where Amy Lee takes a trip to America, London scenes are alternated with US scenes; from then on most of the action takes place in the U.S. This construction seems bizarre, as though two separate novels have been merged.

The scenes involving guns, gangsters, bootleggers and violence do not inspire commentary, and unlike the descriptions of north London and its people are obviously not based on personal experience. 

I think that Stella Gibbons embarrasses herself when she writes about people, settings and activities that she has not seen for herself. She is not the sort of writer who can get away with relying entirely on research, her imagination and the media.

The inspiration for My American

My American was obviously partly based on Stella Gibbons's early life. However, just as I am certain that some elements in John Christopher’s Guardians were inspired by a book that he had read, I am sure that parts of My American were inspired by a book that Stella Gibbons had read. As with John Christopher, I am talking about being inspired to produce something with a similar theme rather than plagiarism. 

My American has some elements and settings in common with J. B. Priestley’s best-selling novel Angel Pavement, which was first published nine years earlier in 1930. 

I think that Stella Gibbons would not have written My American if she had not read Priestley's book, which is about ordinary people and their lives in London in the late 1920s. Perhaps she found Angel Pavement particularly interesting because many of the characters live in areas of north London that she knew well.

Stella Gibbons’s young writer Amy Lee

The writer Amy Lee is the main character and main person of interest in Stella Gibbons’s novel My American (1939).

This is not a book that I enjoy reading for the story - I am not too wild about the title either! The plot is rather contrived, and I don't find the American scenes and characters very convincing; they don’t hold my attention at all and I have nothing to say about them. Amy Lee herself becomes much less interesting once she grows up and moves to the USA too.

The many references to parts of north London in the early chapters of the book are another matter; I love to read about places that I know very well. 

Just as Michael de Larrabeiti’s detailed descriptions of Battersea and Wandsworth came from personal experience, so did Stella Gibbons’s descriptions of places such as Highbury and the Holloway Road.

My American opens with a description of the beauties of Hampstead’s Kenwood House and its grounds, which Stella Gibbons obviously liked very much as she mentions Kenwood in several of her other novels.

The most relevant and significant aspect is what this book says about the personality, outlook, behaviour, problems and experiences of a developing young writer and about writers and writing in general. Stella Gibbons makes some very insightful comments from time to time. Some of this material may be autobiographical; some of it may be wishful thinking!

I detect a few more examples of Stella Gibbons’s white magic too.

While most of Stella Gibbons’s other books - apart from The Shadow of a Sorcerer - inspire little or no commentary, My American is full of relevant and quotable material, some of which comes very close to home. 

It is a book that is partly boring, partly annoying, partly painful and partly fascinating to read. 

It even contains a few amusing passages.

Stella Gibbons, white magic and balancing the books

Feelings of depression and of being psychically poisoned are not the only problems faced by suggestible and impressionable readers.

When reading the previously mentioned biographical material, I have often felt exasperated by the subjects’ negativity, melodramatic outbursts and self-indulgent behaviour, lack of common sense and blindness to the cause of some of their problems.

Some writers’ chronic money troubles for example could often have been avoided. As for the messy relationships, why did they get involved with such awful people in the first place? Why did they never learn from experience? Why couldn’t they see that they were their own worst enemies! 

Reading other books just for their uplifting effect is not enough here: something more is needed. So what are the best solutions?

Stella Gibbons’s solution
Stella Gibbons became so exasperated by the doomy and dismal books of Mary Webb and similar writers that she wrote Cold Comfort Farm both as a parody of rural melodramas and a remedy for the plight of the characters. 

She transmuted tragedies into comedies and showed how common sense, determination, good advice and a positive approach could be used to produce solutions for the problems of many miserable and apparently doomed people, transform unsatisfactory lives and bring order out of chaos. 

White magic and black magic and the books of Stella Gibbons

My first encounter with the books of Stella Gibbons
It was my stepmother who introduced me to many of the works of Stella Gibbons. I have never much liked romance novels nor books that are primarily about personal relationships, but my stepmother was so enthusiastic about the books that I decided to give them a try.  

I felt an attraction that I could not have put into words at the time. I found them civilised, elegant, witty and interesting; I liked the glimpses they gave me into other people’s lives: this expanded my horizons. I liked the descriptions of London and the natural world. I was only ten years old at the time, so I was too young to understand the undercurrents and subtle references to dark topics. This was the stage when a foundation was laid and seeds were sown for the future. 

My second encounter with the books of Stella Gibbons
A time came much later in my life when I decided to return to the past and salvage some good things I remembered. This operation included renewing my acquaintance with books I had enjoyed reading many years earlier.  I re-read many of Stella Gibbons’s novels and short stories. I also found some of her books that I had never read before in second-hand bookshops.

I got much more out of reading them as an adult with some experience of life than I had in the past as a child – the reverse was true for some of the other authors I re-visited.