Good Behaviour: A BBC 2 Between the Covers Book Club Pick – Booker Prize Gems (Virago Modern Classics)

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This review is from Diana Athill. She was an editor for the publisher Andre Deutsch, and she was responsible for approving that the publishing house accept and publish the book…this is at the end of a review of the book written by Athill: “Not long before she died in 1996, when guiding a pen over paper had become difficult, she wrote me a little goodbye letter. In it she thanked me for publishing Good Behaviour, with the most emphatic declaration of how much it had meant to her – how it had given her a new life. It was a deeply sad letter, being such a clear indication that the end was near, but it was also a wonderfully generous gift. I am not a letter-keeper. But nothing would have made me throw that one away.” https://www.theguardian.com/books/201... She must have noticed my bosoms, swinging like jelly bags, bouncing from side to side; without words she conveyed the impression of what she had seen as unseemly- the Fat Lady in the peepshow. So why did I finally and despite everything like this book? The fault lies with the great writer Molly Keane: her writing is a marvel of distilled subtleties, of seemingly harmless reflections that say so much.

Simultaneously light and dark, pleasurable and harrowing, Good Behaviour may appeal chiefly to readers drawn to characters who are a mixture of well-meaning and hilariously vile, victimizer and victim. . . . Aroon St. Charles is Molly Keane’s great creation, Good Behaviour her masterpiece.” So there is sex, murder, suicide, pregnancy, masturbation, nannies, class, queer characters and much more. But nothing is directly named. The satire is sharp as is the dissection of emotional relationships: Impossible not to feel sympathy at moments like this for a girl who has only wanted ever to love and to be loved but whose soul has been suppressed through neglect and a lifetime of required good behaviour. We adored Papa, and his hopeless disapproval paralysed any scrap of confidence or pleasure we had ever had in ourselves or our ponies. Birdie deserves her escape with Walter, a visiting manservant, and just as she is lost to Angel, so are both Angel’s children. Unpredictably, Oliver departs with Julian’s fiancée, Sally. The novel’s dramatic conclusion, when each couple sails away, maroons and unmothers Angel. Julian’s leave-taking stopped me short: ‘You were quite perfect till I was twelve’. She has the wit to counter: ‘I liked you best at two.’

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But too soon the dream falls apart. Hubert is killed in a motoring accident and Richard disappears to Kenya. The death of son and heir and the earlier tragedy when Papa lost a leg in the battle fields of World War 1 barely disrupt the routine. For this is a house where every mishap or tragedy is shaken off, never spoken of and never allowed to interrupt the gardening or hunting. “Our good behaviour went on and on. . . no one spoke of the pain.” says Aroon after Hubert’s funeral. “ We exchanged cool, warning looks – which of us could behave the best: which of us could be least embarrassing…” Keane was part of the decaying Anglo-Irish aristocracy/middle class. She wrote until 1946 when her husband died, and didn’t start again until 1981 when this novel was published and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. The book opens up to the present day of the life of Aroon St. Charles, 57 years of age. Her mother has just died from eating a rabbit mousse. She is deathly allergic to rabbit. Well, she is dead, so I guess the proof is in the pudding…oops, I meant mousse! 😝 It was through the Perry family that Molly met Bobby Keane, whom she married in 1938. [2] He belonged to a Waterford landed gentry family, the Keane baronets. [1] The couple went on to have two daughters, Sally and Virginia. [2] After the death of her husband in 1946, Molly moved to Ardmore, County Waterford, a place she knew well, and lived there with her two daughters. She died on 22 April 1996 in her Cliffside home in Ardmore. She was 91. She is buried beside the Church of Ireland church, near the centre of the village. [10] Critical reception [ edit ] Like Good Behaviour, the novel proceeds in a series of intense domestic scenes and results in a series of pairings which leave Angel alone, ‘as sad as a French cemetery’. Her housekeeper, Birdie, is brilliantly described:

Then, as the reading progresses, as it is well done and well written, I end up letting myself go, although the characters remain bogged down in their inactive miserableness: I've put 'good' in inverted commas, because it's behaviour but the 'good' part is certainly in question as we follow their shenanigans playing musical beds, drama with the governess and the neighbours etcetera etcetera all under the 'innocent' eyes of Aroon, born and well bred with the 'stiff upper lip' culture. Uneducated in what she is seeing she puts everything as she's told under 'good' manners, you can do anything if you say please and thankyou and not moan about. Even kill your mother. It is a finely tuned performance, allowing Aroon, by turns pitiable and laughable, to expose Mummie’s hypocrisy which cannot admit her son Hubert’s homosexuality or her husband’s philandering with the servants and which prefers to ignore debt and progeny in favour of gardening. Yet Mummie, along with many of Molly Keane’s protagonists, is no caricature. She is unremittingly foul to Aroon and compellingly plausible. It all makes for an unsettling read, not knowing who has the strongest grasp on reality – the socially functioning, the serving Irish or perhaps the eccentric and the deluded? Moments hang poised between tragedy and farce. Aroon persuades herself that allowing her beloved Richard to rest his head, fleetingly, on her pendulous bosom is a seduction and to be prized. To Richard, Hubert’s lover, it is to be endured until it becomes ‘a bit hot’ and he flees. From here it only needs a short step to see how, by a cruel kind of natural selection, the breed became extinct.

Keane’s publisher of nearly fifty years rejected it, saying it was too nasty and suggesting she write at least one “nice” character. She refused. It sat in a drawer for years until her friend the actor Peggy Ashcroft read it during a visit and urged Keane to try again. Published to instant acclaim in 1981, it was nominated for the Booker Prize but lost to Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. She was nearly eighty years old. It was her first book published under her real name. The Keane family were Anglo-Irish, Protestants among Catholics, whose ongoing political conflicts boiled over in the War of Irish Independence during Keane’s childhood. (Her father, an Englishman, stubbornly resisted those who urged him to move his family to his homeland to avoid the violence.) Here, to my delight , Hubert and Richard danced with me in turn. I almost preferred dancing with Hubert because I loved showing off to Richard…I was fulfilled by them. I felt complete. There was no more to ask. I have read and re-read Molly Keane more, I think, than any other writer. Nobody else can touch her as a satirist, tragedian, and dissector of human behaviour. I love all her books, but Good Behaviour and Loving and Giving are the ones I return to most.

Animals, food and her brother are her consolation, her mother rarely responds even when Aroon reports that she thinks her baby brother is dead, she enquires where the staff are. Her father responds and inspires hope. She seeks out his company, a kind word, favour, he seeks comfort elsewhere.

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A clever, poisonous novel about largely unclever, poisonous people, a snobbish, financially distressed Anglo-Irish family. They do no work, and are contemptuous of anyone who does, horrified by the effrontery of tradespeople and staffers who expect to be paid for their services. Their home is in a state of decay and their sense of entitlement is endless. Aroon is so naive, so deluded and so utterly alone. She is written brilliantly and heartbreakingly, a portrait of a woman who life just keeps shitting on. And most of the time she doesn’t even fully realise. I cringed at her cluelessness, her unfounded hope for love with Richard, her belief that they’d been ‘lovers’ after her climbed into bed with her for a minute once and did exactly nothing before leaving her again. It didn’t occur to her that he preferred her brother Hubert. I wanted to cry for her longing for love from her Papa, which came in the tiniest little scraps over her life. Her Mummie was the mother from hell, what chance did Aroon have. And all the while, everyone is so utterly repressed - the necessity of “Good Behaviour” means grief is dealt with by pretending everything is fine, nothing difficult is ever discussed, no true emotions are ever expressed. What an absolute mess the St Charles family is. Poor Aroon with her hot-to-trot daddy and ice queen mummy. The story begins with Rose, the family retainer, accusing Aroon of having deliberately poisoned her mother; if so, brava! She and another Anglo Lady are portrayed as almost being allergic to the locals. Mummy hides the bills in a drawer, focusing on what she might get with the money to beautify her own life instead. While it may appear that there is little to like or admire among the book’s characters—including Richard, Hubert’s intimate friend, with whom Aroon falls hopelessly and eternally in love, against all odds—Keane supplies a cast of supporting players who give us hope for humanity. Take Rose, the redoubtable housemaid-turned-cook-turned nurse, who tirelessly cared for Aroon’s father, bedridden (minus one leg) and virtually helpless after a stroke, and who was not above giving him a bit of sexual relief under the blankets. She has enough generosity and humanity to ward off the icy breezes generated by most every other character. The subject matter has been written of many times but Molly Keane adds another dimension with her razor sharp writing and presentation of her characters. The mother, all too absorbed in "good behaviour" shows not an ounce of emotion and even in the face of terrible tragedy remains cool and distant. The father has much more warmth and understanding but his days are occupied with his hunting...... pheasants and foxes and women. Hubert is the good looking heir, whose intimate is his friend Richard with whom Aroon imagines a romantic bond of some sort. It is Aroon who relates the story and to whom all our feelings are directed. She is "a large girl...with enormous bosoms" and yearns for love and recognition. I felt deeply for Aroon. She is without guile and one must sympathise with her lot in life. Molly Keane creates a character in Aroon St. Charles who will be difficult to forget. I didn't find the book "sad" at all as some reviewers did...but I delighted in the characters and laughed out loud more than a few times.