The #1952Club and A Forgotten Campus Satire

One of the pleasures of events like the #1952Club is the chance to stumble across something unexpected and delightful – and A Perch in Paradise by Margaret Bullard is exactly that.

Why this deliciously wicked novel has not been reissued by one of those publishing houses that specialize in forgotten gems by women is a mystery. Someone needs to get on that immediately, because this book deserves to be back in print.

A Gallery of the Grotesque

Set in Cambridge just before the outbreak, then during and after, the Second World War, A Perch in Paradise is a clever portrait of academic life that manages to be both satiric and salacious.

It opens with a sherry party hosted by Lucy Davenport (sherry features heavily throughout) and promptly introduces us to a gallery of grotesques: dons, dilettantes, dilettantish dons, disappointed wives, undergraduates in search of love and sex, and German refugees. Throughout the novel, two earnest students come and go, talking of  Wittgenstein and Russell. The book is full of pseudo-intellectual gobbledegook and highly intelligent people who take themselves far too seriously.

The novel caused something of a stir when it was first published, as many of these characters are apparently thinly disguised real-life Cambridge folk who recognized themselves – though probably not with pleasure. The satire is pointed, and there’s barely a relationship in the book that isn’t dysfunctional or quietly desperate. 

Lucy, our not-quite-heroine, is married to George, a brilliant scholar and a thoroughly disappointing husband.

“Do you love me, George?”
“Of course,” and he went back to his newspaper.
“I was having a little argument with Snarp about the college port,” said George suddenly. “I pointed out that it’s his duty as wine steward not to let the supply of port run low. We’re down to fifteen hundred bottles, and if there’s a war and we can’t get any port for years, it’s going to be a poor look-out.”
Lucy yawned. “Fifteen hundred bottles sounds plenty.”
“Ah yes, but there are fourteen fellows of the college, and fourteen fellows soon slip through the port in the Combination Room, you know.”
Of what concern was it to her whether Snarp ordered a plentiful supply of port for the fellows of St. Benet’s?

Lucy yearns for romance and has set her sights on Roland Pennyfeather, who has a hat fetish. His wife Audrey is the town doctor – and George is very taken with her. She has just told George that everyone knows Roland is impotent.

“Cambridge,” went on Audrey, “is an odd place. Everyone knows about everyone else without anyone ever asking questions or volunteering any information. In Cambridge, to quote the collect, ‘all desires are known and no secrets are hid.’”

George has a suggestion:

“What about an experienced tart? I seem to remember a story of Maupassant about an experienced tart.”
“He sees quite a lot of Brunhilda Gottlieb …
“It’s all so queer,” protested George.
“Where can you be queer if you can’t be queer in Cambridge?”

The Bear-Worshipping Hairy Ainus

There’s a gossipy pleasure in watching Bullard skewer her subjects with her satiric eye, even when some of it tends toward the over-the-top or heavy-handed. There’s Bartholomew Wentworth, the anthropologist:

…just returned from spending many years among the Hairy Ainus, the aboriginal bear-worshippers of Japan. During his life among them he had assimilated the customs of this interesting tribe, and had brought back to England with him their totem animal, a small brown bear cub, with which he lived in his college rooms. ‘Bear worship’s as good as any other kind of worship,’ was his reply if anyone questioned the appropriateness of the religion of the Hairy Ainus to the life of a Cambridge college.

And then there’s the vicious college fellow, Mr. Snarp:

The only straightforward thing about Mr. Snarp was his hatred of women. That was perfectly sincere. He would not even allow them into his lectures… Of all the lectures in the university, none were listened to as closely as Snarp’s. It was easy to miss the subtle allusions, the cunning innuendoes, the double meanings; though once you were used to Snarp’s ways, you knew by the quirk of his eyebrows, the tight pursing of his lips, that something nasty was on the way.”

“What do you think of females in the university?’”asked Mr. Snarp … “Not promiscuous enough,” said Bartholomew Wentworth.

Tonsils and Adenoids Twice Removed

While the men manage to run the full gamut from self-involved and narcissistic to full-blown misogynists, the women are not much better. Lucy finds her own children unappealing:

“Why, Lucy asked herself for the thousandth time, was Miles so ugly? His dreadful short sight! Through the thick lenses of his glasses his eyes looked hideously distorted. James was only slightly less ugly. He kept his mouth open all the time, and although he had had his tonsils and adenoids out twice it hadn’t made any difference to that horrible habit. What had she done to deserve such unattractive children?”

An Unwashed Marxist and an American

Undergraduate Antonia is in search of love and sex, and in one afternoon her serial adventures allow for some serious fun at the expense of a humorless, unwashed Marxist true believer and Americans in the shape of Euclid Brope, heir to Brope’s Buttons of Bison City.

“A North American would never dream of kissing the girl he loved without first making sure that his shirt was clean (it was), brushing his hair, cleaning his teeth, cutting his nails, washing his hands, spraying his throat with antiseptic lotion, and taking a clean handkerchief.”

There’s a ne’er-do-well sponging novelist, Julius Canange, who mixes his misogyny with all kinds of other isms and is a thoroughly unappealing character. Pondering the reason so many German refugees have arrived in Cambridge, he asks himself:

“But why,” he thought impatiently, “did they collect in such numbers in Cambridge? If only they would scatter. There was Scotland, for instance, practically Jewless. Nothing would be better for the Scotch than Jews, quite a lot of them.”

Julius is infatuated with the wraithlike Veronica Playfair, whom Brunhilde says looks like a ghost:

A very lovely ghost,” echoed Julius. “I’m all for ghostliness in women, it’s so very rare. Women are far too healthy nowadays – I suppose it’s all the hockey playing they do, and leaving off their corsets. I much prefer languid postures. Perhaps tight lacing will come into fashion again. One can only hope.

Bullard’s ear for pseudo-intellectual babble is pitch-perfect, and her eye for the grotesque never falters.

It’s not just fun and farce, though. A Perch in Paradise is also a fascinating wartime period piece. As the war drags on, the characters—previously animated by gossip, sex, and sherry – begin to weary.  The drear drudgery of war wears them down and things disintegrate. There’s a poignancy that creeps into the humor. Even the most absurd figures are touched by the anxiety and change. As the novel moves on to the post-war period, there is a sense of resolution, restoration, or at least acceptance of a kind of perverse normality.

If this all sounds wonderfully bonkers – it is. But the writing is deft, the characters vivid, and it’s funny. A Perch in Paradise is a wicked, witty, entertaining glimpse into a world of eccentric academics and sexual misadventure.

Virginia Woolf, Bertrand Russell, James Watson and Bed-Hopping Antics

Margaret Bullard herself (née Thomas) is a fascinating figure. As a Girton student in the 1920s, she was one of those responsible for inviting Virginia Woolf to speak at the women’s colleges – talks that would become A Room of One’s Own. She later edited the first anthology of Cambridge women’s poetry, and was memorably savaged with dripping condescension in The Listener for both her preface and her verse. (Who was that reviewer? And is he featured in the novel?) Much later, Arabella Milbank more generously described her as “gutsy”. 

As Bertrand Russell wrote to Bullard after receiving a copy: “If Cambridge is as you represent it, it must have become more amusing since I was an undergraduate… In those days we were all strictly celibate, which cannot be said of your characters.”

Cambridge and celibacy do not go together in this novel. And perhaps that is why it has been so long out of print.

Quite a Stir

There’s an intriguing little reference to the book in the memoir of James D. Watson (of DNA fame), when he comments that A Perch in Paradise caused a minor scandal: “the bed-hopping antics of its main characters were too easily assignable to known Cambridge academics.”

It rather seems like the book was disappeared rather quickly. Hmm.

Margaret Thomas married the eminent geophysicist Sir Edward Bullard. In a memoir, one of his students – Constantine Roman – comments…

A Perch in Paradise is not a great novel but i thoroughly enjoyed it. And what a motherlode of sexual politics! I don’t know who was who in A Perch in Paradise.  Is it still too soon for the beans to be spilled?