Stella Gibbons’s Amy Lee and the nightmare journey

Stella Gibbons lived her entire life in the Hampstead and Highgate area of London; she displays her great knowledge of and love for ‘Ham & High’ and other areas of north London in many of her books. 

Stella Gibbons was surely also familiar from personal experience with the sort of nightmare journeys that are mentioned in several other articles on here; there is a similar but much smaller-scale nightmare episode in her novel My American. 

My American opens with a description of 12-year-old Amy Lee’s visit to Kenwood House in Hampstead on a beautiful autumn day in 1928. Exploring the house and grounds is a wonderful way to spend her birthday, but Amy's journey home is something of an endurance test. 

The nightmare is very short-lived; Amy gets just a tiny taste of what people in other articles got in huge doses, and she soon recovers.

There are some very familiar elements in the account of the return journey: bad decisions, wasted effort, unexpected setbacks, 'difficult' people and being cold, tired, hungry, alone and penniless with darkness coming on. It is these familiar features make her ordeal worth commenting on.

The end of the visit to Kenwood

Amy enjoys her visit to Kenwood very much. However, the day is very cold and when dusk is imminent she decides it is time to go home. 

She now has to face a reality that is full of problems.

She is sick with hunger as she has had nothing to eat since early morning.  

She spent her birthday shilling on a packet of postcards as a souvenir of her visit; now she has almost no money left. Buying something for her collection of mementos rather than saving her money for the practicalities reminds me of Antonia White, whose purchase of an expensive handbag in Vienna left her very short of money for her return journey. 

Context and the total picture: Part III

The previous article in the series describes how some people who for better or worse put painful personal experiences into the context of a few other, often well-known, people’s lives decide to leave it at that.  They go just as far as they want or are able to go.

Now it is time to say something about the next steps on the path to detecting and understanding the unseen influences that appear to be at work in certain people’s lives.

Up to this point, candidates for moving on may have come across some interesting information incidentally and in small amounts; now they change their approach and do some investigations - actively looking for writers with Celtic connections after coming across one or two with Scottish ancestry for example. This involves a top-down rather than a bottom-up approach. 

This stage also involves putting aside the personal approach in favour of thinking objectively and analytically about various patterns and common elements in the lives of many people of interest. These may or may not be elements that the investigator shares with them. 

Investigators may then move on to a stage where they start to wonder what, if anything, might be behind the patterns they detect. They start to think about the What, the Who, the How and the Why.

For example, I have experienced some unexpected, unwelcome and unsettling encounters  with people from the past. Recently I discovered that this also happened to the novelist Antonia White.  These encounters are not just random painful personal experiences shared with one or two others: looked at objectively and summarised, they are typical of the unpleasant incidents that certain selected people endure when, for example, they are at a low ebb, have received a jarring shock or had an encounter with an energy vampire.

This leads to speculation about orchestration, distress signals, telepathy and people who are remotely controlled by puppet masters behind the scenes! What forces are in operation? How does it all work? Who or what is behind it?

More about Stella Gibbons’s young writer Amy Lee

Stella Gibbons's My American is described as a romance. As mentioned in the first article, the main aspect of interest in the book is not the story itself but what Stella Gibbons has to say about writers and writing. 

The young writer Amy Lee may be a fictional character, but she is in many ways a classic, textbook case. She shares many attributes and experiences with people featured on here. She needs solitude; she lives to read and write. 

A new life for the young orphan Amy Lee
Luckily for Amy her father has left a small amount of money, enough to cover her expenses until she leaves school. 

She moves downstairs to live with her landlady Mrs Beeding, a tough but kindly Yorkshirewoman, and the rest of the Beeding family:

“Their only fault as a family was their inability to imagine a human being who might sometimes wish to be alone; and in this they were not unique.”

Amy has to share a bedroom with one of the Beeding girls; luckily it is not that dreadful young drama queen Mona, who is always poking into Amy’s affairs!

Family life benefits Amy in some ways. She is well fed, well clothed and well treated. Her worst fears are not realised: she even manages to get some time to herself and a place to read:

“For a week after Tim’s funeral Amy was able to escape for a little while every evening up to the flat and read or dream (she did not dare to write, for fear of interruption and consequent discovery)..."

Amy starts to resettle herself into her secret world:

“The Beedings were used to her ways and left her in peace except for an occasional friendly shriek up the stairs, explaining her taste for solitude to one another by saying that Aime was a great reader, for none of them knew that she was also a great writer.”

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.