TROY CHIMNEYS is a disconcerting novel. It belongs to Margaret Kennedy’s later period, when her plots became more complicated, sometimes excessively so, and her early rebelliousness was becalmed into a quite perceptible longing for goodness and honour in the conduct of life. Both these characteristics are probably carried to their fullest extension in Lucy Carmichael, arguably the most popular of her last works and a book which carries a charge of an ordeal endured and a resolution vindicated which continues to impress even today, when the comparatively pellucid moral climate of the 1950’s has become clouded to the point of obscurity.
For these late novels of Margaret Kennedy, like those which Elizabeth Taylor was writing at the same time and a little later, are about virtue. They are virtuous novels written by essentially right-minded women, and it is a tribute to their sophistication that they are by no means as simple as that point of departure would seem to indicate, for virtue does not triumph, patience is not rewarded, people do not receive from the author their just deserts. One might then quite legitimately ask how these novels are to be perceived as virtuous. The answer, I think, is to be found in the pain the author feels that moral conundrums cannot be resolved and the result presented like a cheap diagnosis of a chronic malady. Margaret Kennedy (and here Elizabeth Taylor resembles her most closely) is a serious woman who is content to translate her concerns lightly into the traditional forms of the English drawingroom novel.
Her distaste for formulae can perhaps be deduced from a remark made by one of the characters in Troy Chimneys about the novels of Jane Austen.
‘That lady’s greatest admirers will always be men, I believe. For, when they have had enough of the parlour, they may walk out, you know, and we cannot.’
The speaker is Caroline Audley, a lonely thoughtful woman of high intelligence and integrity who is in a position to observe that Jane Austen’s life in the parlour concealed a certain abdication of passion and risk, and, more interestingly, a certain collusion with the traditional male activities of getting and spending: her heroines, with their curious appeal, are essentially gamesters for whom everything comes out right in the end. But for the serious woman (and I do not for a moment compare Jane Austen and Margaret Kennedy as writers) the end can be sad or disappointing or merely inconclusive. Mrs Kennedy does not offer nostrums in the form of easy solutions, and in this it can be seen that she has concerns over and above bringing her story to a neat conclusion.
Troy Chimneys is an exercise in all these negative modes, and at the same time it is not what it seems. The title would seem to promise one of those soothing panoramas of English country life in the middle to upper income range, for Troy Chimneys is the name of a house, and a very idyllic house it would appear to be, somewhere in Wiltshire. It is the house that serves as the main vehicle for Margaret Kennedy’s nostalgia, for it represents peace, happiness, withdrawal from the murky concerns of fortune hunters and politicians, and the reward on earth for all the hard work that men have to devote to their careers, sometimes against their better nature. Yet Troy Chimneys also represents an unattainable goal, for the hero of the novel, Miles Lufton, who buys the house as a guarantee of the time when all his conflicts shall be over, dies before he can ever live there. And despite the really quite complicated and occasionally puzzling arrangement of the novel, it is the image of that house, silent, peaceful, and yet eternally out of bounds, that stays with the reader.
Yet Troy Chimneys, the house, is merely a strand in the background of the book. The foreground is occupied by Miles Lufton, the almost self-made politician who labours half-heartedly in the England of the Napoleonic and post-Napoleonic period. Should this promise an agreeable exercise in the higher reaches of Regency tosh, the promise is again unfulfilled and the reader discomposed. For Miles is a very complex character. He has apparently all the gifts, loving and virtuous parents, handsome and agreeable brothers and sisters, a country parsonage for a home, good health, a fine wit, no great fortune but an enlightened perception of where his interest lies and a determination to devote his energies to his own advancement. Indeed this perception strikes him early on in his career as something that might lead him into an inferior mode of behaviour, and he resolves to treat himself as two distinctly separate people: as Miles Lufton, a man whose native goodness has not been finally extinguished by self-interest, and as Pronto, the all too available extra man, diner out, weekend guest and flirt who sees all social gatherings as occasions for advancement and who never refuses an invitation because it might lead to useful contacts. Lufton and Pronto combined add up to an extremely plausible public figure: agreeable, even desirable, company, possessing the instincts of the rat pack, yet with a keen memory of original goodness to temper his appetites.
But the interesting thing about the Lufton/Pronto character is that nothing goes right with him. His generous impulses fall short of effectiveness. His passions can be seen to be all too moderate. He cannot carry anything through to fulfilment. And when he finally considers himself to be in love – with the authentically serious Caroline Audley – he cannot see that he has turned the possibility of loving her over in his mind for far too long, has left her to grow older, has in fact ruined her life, because of some flaw in his nature or his character or his outlook which prevents him from making any clear distinction in the moral order of things between the imperative and the merely beguiling. Even his death is a sort of accident, although the occasion is a duel, the proceedings reported by an interested witness, and a great deal of the evidence suppressed.
The story is an oblique one, and is rendered even more oblique by the manner in which it is told. The main body of the narrative is a limpid memoir which purports to be written by Lufton himself. This memoir is sandwiched between two sets of letters written by descendants of the Lufton family who are initially attracted by this colourful ancestor and then prudishly distressed by his example. It is the method used by Benjamin Constant in Adolphe and it would appear that Margaret Kennedy took it from that source. If it is a method which marries uneasily with the tradition of the English novel as practised half way through the twentieth century, then it must be allowed that Margaret Kennedy cannot be relied upon to give her readers what they think they have been led to expect. She is disconcerting in her preoccupations, disconcerting in her methods, and technically more learned and experimental than many of her successors in the 1980’s.
Anita Brookner
London, 1984