Elizabeth Jenkins’s The Tortoise and the Hare (1954)

Not so clear-cut

Hello,

I hope you had a terrific summer – or winter if you’re south.

Today I look at Elizabeth Jenkins’s The Tortoise and the Hare. If anyone has read any other books by Jenkins, please tell me which one I should read next. (Harriet, Dr Gully and her Jane Austen biography are on the pile.)

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Have a lovely Sunday.

Sam

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In the opening scene of Elizabeth Jenkins’s The Tortoise and the Hare, Imogen Gresham is at an antique shop with her husband Evelyn and their doctor friend Paul, holding a mug – ‘a pure sky blue, decorated with a pattern of raised wheat ears, and of the kind known in country districts as a “harvester”.’¹ Although the narrator doesn’t say it explicitly, Imogen likes this artefact: ‘Her eye absorbed the colour and her fingers the moulding of the wheat.’ Evelyn, however,

saw that there was a chip at the base of the mug, from which cracks meandered up the inside like rivers on a map.

‘You don’t want that, surely,’ he exclaimed. ‘It would come apart in no time.’

It’s hard to think that such a relationship could be anything other than doomed, and indeed this is one of those openings that establishes the essence of what is to follow – a story about the disintegration of the Greshams’ marriage after Imogen discovers that Evelyn has an attachment to another woman.

It also establishes an unsettling narrative impartiality.

We are in the upper echelons of English society just after the war, and Evelyn’s breezy authority steers the reader towards sympathy for Imogen’s inner yearning; towards indignation that she should have to capitulate to the holder of the marital purse strings. His perfectionism can be read as tedious; her silent regard for the mug’s – for life’s – imperfections as touching.

And yet Jenkins’s narrator is unwilling to take sides. Paul has feelings for Imogen, and after the Greshams leave the shop, he notices her eyes ‘smarting with tears.’ He returns to purchase the mug. Ah! we think, we’re right to feel for the sensitive Imogen, just like her sensitive outsider-friend! But Paul’s loyalties are indeterminate. Evelyn has a point:

Paul re-entered the shop and asked again to look at the blue harvester. He turned it about in a careful manner, and as he paid for it, he told himself in parenthesis that Evelyn Gresham was right in thinking it not worth the money.

The Tortoise and the Hare is infused with such exquisite, agonising dissonance. We are in the hands of a magnificent writer.

As the story develops, Jenkins dangles before us the kind of binary suggested by her title. Imogen is rich, youngish, ingenuous, and beautiful. The woman Evelyn falls for, Blanche Silcox, is also rich – but older, worldly, and frumpish.

This is disconcerting to Imogen – how could the fastidious Evelyn love someone middle-aged and inelegant? In a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment, this view of Blanche is evoked when, in the City of London, Imogen skirts the statue of ‘Brandy Nan’ – dowdy, drunk, sexually frustrated, incompetent Queen Anne. It’s a highly effective allusion because it insinuates Imogen’s unspoken prejudice, not the reality. However dowdy Blanche is in comparison with Imogen, she is no Brandy Nan, but a sober, red-blooded heterosexual – a competent and independent woman with an established societal role. She knows answers to Big Questions that the naïve Imogen, dependent on Evelyn in their Berkshire doll’s house, barely thinks to ask.

There are many reasons for Evelyn to love Blanche Silcox.

As in all good novels, then, Jenkins finds riches in tiny details; meaning is stuffed into her text’s incidentals and allusions. In Paul’s parenthesis, in the cracks in Imogen’s mug, in the statue of a blowsy Stuart queen, Jenkins reveals life’s ironies, ambiguities, cruelties, contradictions. Nothing is clear-cut in human relations; rarely are there obvious winners and losers. In the Introduction to my Virago edition, Hilary Mantel reads Blanche as the Tortoise and Imogen as the Hare. In the same edition’s Afterword, Carmen Callil argues the opposite.

I say that Imogen lives in a doll’s house because as I was reading this book, Henrik Ibsen came to mind: the ingenuous wife, condescending husband and congenial and lovelorn doctor-friend could be Nora, Torvald and Dr Rank from A Doll’s House (1879). But I found Jenkins’s novel more troubling than Ibsen’s play, as there’s precious little evidence that Imogen has it in her to tell her husband what’s what and slam the door on him, as Nora does to Torvald.

Evelyn is a particular Establishment type – a cultured, moneyed, entitled barrister. In 2023 it’s hard not to view much of his behaviour, as he allows Blanche incrementally to encroach upon every corner of Imogen’s life (and as he characterises the liaison as harmless), as akin to the husband’s manipulation of the gas lamps in Patrick Hamilton’s play Gas Light (1938).

The consequence of his behaviour is painful: as her marriage disintegrates, so does Imogen. She comes to believe that Evelyn merely tolerates her, that their young son no longer needs her, that Blanche outshines her, that she is, in her own words, valueless, useless.

Yet Jenkins’s narrative neutrality ensures that as angry we get with Evelyn – and it’s fun to read how much Callil, in her egalitarian Australian way, detests him – it’s impossible to brand him as solely a gaslighting Bluebeard. In one fascinating sequence, he demonstrates his intrinsic fair-mindedness when a child asks him what psychiatry is. He can’t quite see, or admit, that his wife needs the talking cure herself, but he’s sympathetic towards the process and explains it to the child (who also needs it) with patience and compassion.

A stereotypical English Bluebeard of this period would dismiss therapy – and stereotypes are beneath Jenkins. She’s not interested in blatant betrayal or bad behaviour for the sake of plot. The most consequential betrayals in life are small, discrete, benign ones – ones that can be perpetrated by either sex. Someone knows something a wife would ordinarily know first. A wife’s particular family responsibility is undermined by the helpful involvement of an outsider. Add one of these benign betrayals to another, to another, the effect becomes malign – and before she knows it, the innocent wife’s dreams have become nightmares, and she is in the midst of a breakdown.

Elizabeth Jenkins (photographer unknown)

In a witty passage in Anita Brookner’s 1984 Booker Prize-winner Hotel du Lac, the protagonist says,

In real life, of course, it is the hare who wins. Every time. Look around you. And in any case it is my contention that Aesop was writing for the tortoise market. […] Hares have no time to read. They are too busy winning the game. The propaganda goes all the other way, but only because it is the tortoise who is in need of consolation.²

I’m with Callil: Imogen is the Tortoise; and I’m also with Brookner: Aesop’s fable is pure disinformation designed to bring consolation to life’s losers.

Nevertheless, there is hope for Imogen. Intriguingly, it rests with the child who asks Evelyn about psychiatry. This little boy is one of the most interesting literary child characters I’ve ever encountered, and the ending, to which he is central, is very moving – and, yes, consoling. (I wonder if David Hare knew this book when he wrote Skylight [1995], as the ending to that play does something similar.)

To look at Virago’s front cover or to read its back-cover blurb is to be told that this superlative novel is about a race between a slender beauty and an overweight frump. But Virago’s Introduction and Afterword know better; Mantel and Callil both write about Jenkins’s superb subtleties and sleights of hand. It’s a book, as Callil says, whose charm ‘lies in what each reader makes of it.’

I wanted to hate Evelyn: I couldn’t.

I wanted to hate Blanche: I couldn’t.

I wanted to tell Imogen to pull herself together, tell Evelyn to bugger off and slam the door of their Berkshire house on him, Nora-style.

I couldn’t – because I understood her predicament. The predicament arises partly because she is a woman of the early 1950s. But so is Blanche, who’s just fine. I recognised Imogen as a human being who can’t quite determine her value or find her place – like so many of us, then, now and forever.

Not an easy book, but a profoundly truthful one.

1. Elizabeth Jenkins, The Tortoise and the Hare (London: Victor Gollancz, 1954; repr. London: Virago, 2008), p. 1. Subsequent quotations are from pp. 3, 103, 230, 268.

2. Anita Brookner, Hotel du Lac (London: Jonathan Cape, 1984; repr. Penguin, 2016), pp. 27-8.