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A review by absolutive
Good Evening, Mrs Craven: The Wartime Stories of Mollie Panter-Downes by Mollie Panter-Downes
emotional
informative
reflective
tense
medium-paced
5.0
This is a wonderful collection of the stories Mollie Panter-Downes published between September 1939 and December 1944 in The New Yorker. It is book-ended by her journalism: London Notes, one from 3 September 1939 as the war begins, and one from 11 June 1944, describing London on and after D-Day. The stories are full of wartime England from the perspective of upper and upper-middle class women with all the usual suspects: gas masks, women in trousers (!), the town and country, the desire for but challenges of obtaining war work, rationing, housing refugees, housing and living with evacuees from London, billeting soldiers, men from the previous war hoping to do their duty but not being wanted, the increase in income tax, the challenges of keeping servants, the change of society, both with more freedom for women and with the decline of the upper class and increasing equality.
Mollie Panter-Downes brings to these stories, as she does to her post-war collection, Minnie's Room: The Peacetime Stories of Mollie Panter-Downes, empathy compressed into such a few pages, as few other writers do. When the class boundaries are most pronounced, friendship, understanding, and mutual affection emerge, if for a time. When Nativism wafts through a provincial drawing room over tea, it is snipped out, like stray yarn knit for a soldier. As the war continues into its later stages before D-Day, the stories get better and deeper, elegant and touching, haunting and simple at the same time. They are little masterpieces. A mistress calls the wife of her lover, worried about him at the front, and calmed to hear the children and clock and family gifts she has picked out, imagined for years--reassured by the woman she is betraying; a hungry school teacher "carried a wolf around with her under the neat waistband of her tweed skirt"; a woman thinks hopelessly that she will have a nice quiet evening, wistful for the camaraderie and kindness, sense of purpose and little intimacies with others, like seeing them in their pajamas and talking to them about books as they roll out their sleeping mats in the bomb shelter, she knew during the Blitz; a man with a boring job in a ministry wishes he could jump into the action and regrets that his former school friend dies in the war while he remains at home. These are perfect gems of concision, what people claim Chekhov accomplishes, and they are written with kindness and honesty, not cynicism.
Mollie Panter-Downes brings to these stories, as she does to her post-war collection, Minnie's Room: The Peacetime Stories of Mollie Panter-Downes, empathy compressed into such a few pages, as few other writers do. When the class boundaries are most pronounced, friendship, understanding, and mutual affection emerge, if for a time. When Nativism wafts through a provincial drawing room over tea, it is snipped out, like stray yarn knit for a soldier. As the war continues into its later stages before D-Day, the stories get better and deeper, elegant and touching, haunting and simple at the same time. They are little masterpieces. A mistress calls the wife of her lover, worried about him at the front, and calmed to hear the children and clock and family gifts she has picked out, imagined for years--reassured by the woman she is betraying; a hungry school teacher "carried a wolf around with her under the neat waistband of her tweed skirt"; a woman thinks hopelessly that she will have a nice quiet evening, wistful for the camaraderie and kindness, sense of purpose and little intimacies with others, like seeing them in their pajamas and talking to them about books as they roll out their sleeping mats in the bomb shelter, she knew during the Blitz; a man with a boring job in a ministry wishes he could jump into the action and regrets that his former school friend dies in the war while he remains at home. These are perfect gems of concision, what people claim Chekhov accomplishes, and they are written with kindness and honesty, not cynicism.