Barbara Comyns’s The Vet’s Daughter (1959)
If he had been a horse ... if she had been a dog ...
I’m a playwright who writes about twentieth-century novels and other literary/theatrical matters. Subscribe to The Essence of the Thing with your email address to have my newsletter delivered to your inbox. It’s free.
Hello,
This week I look at Barbara Comyns’s The Vet’s Daughter.
If you haven’t read it, there are no major spoilers below – that said, the less you know about it the better.
Lucy Scholes has lots of fascinating points to make about Comyns’s waxing and waning reputation here. I’ll be reading more of her novels; if anyone has any thoughts on which one I should look at next, please let me know.
Many thanks to Lyn Haill for recommending Comyns to me.
Thanks for reading/subscribing! Enjoy the rest of the weekend.
Sam
The opening of Barbara Comyns’s unpromisingly titled The Vet’s Daughter is an object lesson in how to grab readers’ attention. In the first paragraph, Alice, the narrator, describes a stranger she meets in an Edwardian London street:
He told me his wife belonged to the Plymouth Brethren, and I said I was sorry because that is what he seemed to need me to say and I saw he was a poor broken-down sort of creature. If he had been a horse, he would have most likely worn kneecaps.1
As I read this, I found it on the one hand vivid and winning. Here was a girl who was observant, wry, instinctively kind and compassionate, not quite at one with her world. On the other hand, given Comyns’s title, the zoomorphism – ‘creature’, ‘horse’, ‘kneecaps’ – seemed to me so laboured that I considered abandoning the novel. Was the entire thing going to be about a child who assigns animal-like qualities to everything she sees in order to make sense of life? Did I really have time for some quaint Edwardian pastoral romance about a vet’s daughter?
At the end of the first paragraph, Alice and the stranger come to a railway arch, near to which ‘was a vet’s house with a lamp outside’. Alice excuses herself from the ‘poor man’, and enters the house: ‘It was my home and it smelt of animals’.
Now I was intrigued. By calling it ‘a vet’s house’ – not ‘my father’s house’ or even ‘the vet’s house’ – Alice had separated herself from her own world, as if she didn’t want to be the vet’s daughter. That most important of dramatic questions Why? rang out, the tweeness of Comyns’s title was destabilised, and I had to read on.
In the second paragraph, Alice’s diction is again zoomorphic:
In the brown hall my mother was standing; and she looked at me with her sad eyes half-covered by their heavy lids, but did not speak. She just stood there. Her bones were small and her shoulders sloped; her teeth were not straight either; so, if she had been a dog, my father would have destroyed her.
Now I was hooked, and I knew that I’d get to the book’s end. Here was the vet of the title, and because I already knew that his clever, watchful daughter was instinctively solicitous to humanity’s ‘broken-down sort of creatures’, something as casually savage, as verbally unadorned, as free from childish illusion as ‘if she had been a dog, my father would have destroyed her’ could only be the truth. The vet wasn’t some James Herriot, but a monster. This was a house of violence. And sure enough, by paragraph four there was ‘a rug made from a skinned Great Dane dog’ before the fireplace and ‘a monkey’s skull’ on the mantelpiece; and by paragraph eleven the vet was not putting down ‘animals that no one wanted’ but selling them to a vivisectionist.
The dramatic Why? had become insistent.
It’s a skilful, strange, alarming opening to a skilful, strange, alarming book, and when I revisited it to write this newsletter, I noticed other literary tricks I’d missed. Those ‘not straight’ teeth belonging to Alice’s mother, for example, are a sly foreshadowing: later we learn why they are crooked.
Never judge a book by its title.
I don’t want to give too much more away about The Vet’s Daughter: The Essence of the Thing is Alice’s quest for identity in a world of men who are either monsters, milksops or cads. In Jane Gardam’s words, ‘Without being specifically feminist it describes the evil treatment of powerless Edwardian wives and daughters – a theme in several of [Comyns’s] other novels – not as satire, like Stella Gibbons’ Cold Comfort Farm, not meant to be funny or portentous but as a statement of fact’.
These women are wonderfully drawn. There’s Alice’s moribund mother who animates when she remembers her childhood in Wales. There’s a kindly and misandrist housekeeper. There’s a ‘strumpet’ who has a relationship with Alice’s father (a disturbing study in blowsiness; echoes of Angus Wilson’s Mrs Curry). Some of the women are monsters like the men, enemies to goodness/children straight out of Oliver Twist; and there are other Dickensian references. One woman lives in a home not so different from Great Expectations’s Satis House, and her life story is a little like Miss Havisham’s, though more psychologically truthful and more poignant.
And then there’s Alice – who is, perhaps, a kind of Pip, without his great expectations, but as compelling as he is for her straightforwardness, complexity, priggishness, generosity, knowingness, and naivety. Eventually, she sees her violent father for what he is, ‘just a buckled-up old man’, and on the whole her perspicacity – her sense of justice and moral rightness – saves her from injury. But the novel, Gothic in tone, is concerned with the grotesqueness of human self-interest. Many of Alice’s macabre antagonists are, in the words of one character, ‘absolutely sinister’.
Last week, in relation to Elizabeth Harrower’s The Watch Tower, I mentioned that subject of a million Masters’ dissertations, Angela Carter. Carter often came to mind as I read The Vet’s Daughter. Alice is that paradoxical archetype, a ‘wise child’, just like the children in The Bloody Chamber.2 The South London setting – ‘cross[ing] the water’ from Battersea to ‘a place called Earl’s Court’ is like taking a trip to the moon – reminded me of Wise Children and its opening joke: ‘Why is London like Budapest? A. Because it is two cities divided by a river’.3 And perhaps there is something of Alice in Fevvers from Nights at the Circus – but to explore this would be to give something away. The (proto)feminism; the singular viewpoint of the central female; the Gothic touches; the debts to fairy tale, Grand Guignol, music hall and ghost stories; the subversion of pastoral and romantic modes; the magic realism – it’s all here as it is in Carter.4
This is ultimately a novel about cruelty, and there’s a deep yearning at the heart of its heroine, who, despite her gifts, discovers her sex and, in one heart-rending sequence, her class, are impediments to her rite of passage. The ending is unforgettable. Even if it is a kind of red herring, I still don’t think The Vet’s Daughter is much of a title (when my partner saw my old Virago edition of another Comyns, he quipped, ‘with that title no wonder it’s out of print’ – though it’s not, and I think Our Spoons Came From Woolworths is a wonderful title). But days after finishing it, I kept thinking about it.
If you’re a fan of Dickens, or of Carter – or, perhaps, of Jean Rhys and her lonely, resilient heroines in books like Voyage in the Dark – this could be a story for you.
Till next time.
Sam
Barbara Comyns, The Vet’s Daughter (London: William Heinemann, 1959; repr. London: Virago, 2014, Introduction by Jane Gardam), p. 1. Subsequent quotations are from pp. v-vi, 2, 5, 38, 80, 90, 141.
Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber (London: Victor Gollancz, 1979; repr. London: Vintage, 2006), pp. 138, 143.
Carter, Wise Children (London: Chatto & Windus, 1991; repr. London: Vintage, 2006), p. 1.
Edmund Gordon’s excellent biography of Carter doesn’t mention Comyns except to say (quoting Scholes): ‘fleetingly popular in the 1950s, [Comyns is] now best remembered as “a precursor to Angela Carter”’. Edmund Gordon, The Invention of Angela Carter (London: Chatto & Windus, 2016), p. 91.
Great review; as usual, I come away with books to add to my tbr pile ('Our Spoons Came From Woolworths' has to be hands down my favourite title ever!)
Fantastic review, thank you. And, like Kate, another author to read. Also trying to think of other great book titles.