By Han Suyin
160 Pages. McNally Editions. $18.
In my last review, I noted that there were very many well-known novelists of post-War Britain; as the years go by, instead of their number being winnowed down - as is the usual process of literary history - more and more seem to be re-discovered and enter into the literary conversation. The new republication of Han Suyin’s Winter Love, a 1962 novel set in the UK and written in a distinctly British vernacular, would seem to be a part of this trend.
However, if Han Suyin was a British novelist, that was just one small role she played in a multifaceted life. She was born in Xinyang, China, in 1916, and spent her life in many places around the world, residing in London for only a few years in the 1940s. She gained her reputation as a writer of autobiographies and histories of modern China, ones which expressed support for the Chinese communist revolution. The eminent sinologist Simon Leys described her, in his book Chinese Shadows, as the finest of the Maoist writers in the west. That’s even less of a compliment today than it was when Leys wrote it in the 1970s, and so I assumed I would never read anything by Han Suyin.
I was wrong, and in a surprising way: the New York City bookstore McNally Jackson (a favorite of mine) has selected Winter Love as the first book to be published by McNally Editions, which reissues “hidden gems” in sleek new paperbacks.
There is nothing explicitly Maoist about Winter Love. There are no Chinese characters, and few overt references to politics. The novel seems almost quintessentially British, as British as The Snow Ball. But while The Snow Ball took place at an elegant Scottish manor and centered on well-off characters, Winter Love brings us to the natural habitation of the post-war British novel: dusty, weary, grey days occupied on concrete sidewalks and in cramped flats full of tinned beans and coin-op gas meters.
In Winter Love’s opening pages, Suyin sets up a compelling miniature world. It is the start of the fall term at a woman’s veterinary college in 1944 London, on a September day that is “young, not stark cold, but flabby, shiver-making, viscous.” The narrator, Bettina Jones (nicknamed Red), surveys the students, and finds them as drab as the day, with one exception: Mara, a new student who wears “green and blue tweeds” and “smooth suède navy shoes.” Her nails are varnished pink, and she has a platinum wedding ring on. Amid the threadbare home front, she seems to come from a different planet.
Red, tired of her narrow, colorless, cramped world, quickly grows attached to Mara, who seems to promise a different kind of life. Mara is married to Karl, a Swiss man who does business in liberated France. Mara’s husband allows her a material opulence that’s astonishing for Britain’s war time economy - her kitchen is stocked with “Jerusalem artichokes and tinned peaches and tins from Fortnum’s.” Even more telling of Mara’s character is that she has no compunctions about throwing away good food that she just doesn’t want to eat. But her relationship with her husband is very bad, possibly even abusive. Gradually, Red and Mara fall in love.
One of the pleasures of the novel is seeing how Mara and Red’s romance develops from the unthinkable and the unsayable to free and easily acknowledged - they even (surprisingly for a novel of the early 60s) use the word “lesbians” to describe themselves. Quiet moments of intimacy, ones in which Red has to stretch her ordinary language to its limits to describe her strange love, give Winter Love its best passages.
Unfortunately, these pleasures are sporadic and do not compensate for the bigger flaws of the novel. Instead of digging deeper into the contours of this world - the social dynamics of the women’s college, Mara’s unhappy marriage, Red’s desire for something exciting in her dreary, ordinary life - Suyin veers from one melodrama to another. Disastrously, about a third of the way through the novel, Suyin introduces the school teacher with whom Red had her first sexual relationship, creating a backstory where ambiguity would have been more suitable. There is another tiresome plot detour later in the novel involving a visit to the Welsh countryside.
Worst of all, the prose can be excruciatingly dull. Oftentimes, Red’s reflections on her situation are simply hackneyed: “At Mara’s return I tried to hurt her as much as her absence had hurt me. When people suffer they take it out on the object of their love, because the object of their love is in their possession.”
Other times Suyin’s descriptive powers fail her completely: “The young man looked pleased. He stared at Mara as if he was going to eat her up, and I thought: he looks like a dog who’s going to wag his tail and beg at any moment now.” The unnecessary repetition of “look,” the unnecessary reputation of “going to,” the unnecessary and confusing double simile, all for two utterly insipid sentences is enough to give one a headache.
That a novel with such obvious flaws was chosen as the first in the line of McNally Editions does not make me optimistic for this new publishing venture. There are already several other publishers that reissue books that were overlooked in their time, and while I’m naturally always eager for more, I’m not sure what will make McNally Editions distinct. That being said, I’m looking forward to the books by Kay Dick, Margaret Kennedy, and Roy Heath they’re publishing this year. And the third book in the McNally Editions line is by David Foster Wallace - at least they’ll make some money from that.