Performing Fleas - C20 Comic Literature

[french frank]

2 of my 4 are women

I was busy rooting out Straw Without Bricks and you nipped in first!

Ivy Compton-Burnett? I've only read one (Parents and Children?) and have the impression they are all rather the same. Yes, a slightly strange style. I hadn't thought of her as being particularly amusing, but slightly lightish.

[Richard Tarleton]

Another female who whilst not being a comic writer deals in wittily drawn characters and situations is Alison Lurie. And she shares with one of my other favourites, David Lodge, a preference for campus-based novels. DL's Changing Places, Small World and Nice Work are his finest creations. Malcolm Bradbury likewise, though The History Man seems a bit dated in a way Lodge's are not.

[Padraig]

I recognise a few one-time favourites here, aeolium, thank you, and I still have some of them somewhere. Ernest Bramah is one I used to enjoy a lot - a friend and I used to try to converse in the style!!! Remind me, vinteuil, what "the greeting of an equal" was, if you came across that little gem in your diligent perusals.
When at grammar school we were sometimes treated to 'readings' by a teacher who enjoyed the stories of Lynn Doyle.
Who?
Lynn C. Doyle.
Oh that Lynn Doyle! The fellow who took his pen name from the label of a bottle of linseed oil, and who later dropped the C? He was really a bank manager called Leslie Montgomery? No, never heard of him.

[vinteuil]

Ivy Compton-Burnett? I've only read one (Parents and Children?) and have the impression they are all rather the same. Yes, a slightly strange style. I hadn't thought of her as being particularly amusing, but slightly lightish.

... I'm not sure that 'lightish' wd be the first word to come to mind.

As wiki reminds us :

"There has been longstanding appreciation of Compton-Burnett's novels. Of Pastors and Masters the New Statesman wrote: "It is astonishing, amazing. It is like nothing else in the world. It is a work of genius." In her essay collection L'Ère du soupçon (1956), an early manifesto for the French nouveau roman, Nathalie Sarraute hails Compton-Burnett as an "one of the greatest novelists England has ever had". Elizabeth Bowen said of the wartime Parents and Children, "To read in these days a page of Compton-Burnett dialogue is to think of the sound of glass being swept up, one of these London mornings after a blitz." Patrick Lyons wrote over 30 years later, "These are witty and often demanding novels, peopled with alert sceptics who are devoted to epigrammatic talk and edgily precise analysis of talk." "

[french frank]

... I'm not sure that 'lightish' wd be the first word to come to mind.

Patrick Lyons wrote over 30 years later, "These are witty and often demanding novels, peopled with alert sceptics who are devoted to epigrammatic talk and edgily precise analysis of talk." "

Yes, that would be pretty much as I remember them. Very much the educated middle class Englishwoman pre-war. Actually Virginia Woolf has quite a dry wit at times too. e.g. A Room of One's Own.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

James Thurber, anyone?

[amateur51]

Yes, I loved the Hyman Kaplan (and "Mister Pockhill"?) and Kai Lung books.

No women? More gently humorous than comic: I'd suggest Angela Thirkell and Nancy Mitford. Also the author of The Diary of a Provincial Lady, EM Delafield, who also wrote a suprising book (of which I have a slightly mildewy s/h copy, price 25p) called Straw Without Bricks: I visit Soviet Russia.

Both Stella Gibbons and Angela Thirkell are currently enjoying a bit of a revival, with new editions in paperback. I'm pleased to say.

Anyone for Elaine Dundy's The Dud Avocado?

[amateur51]

James Thurber, anyone?

Yes please and his Canadian near-contemporary Stephen Leacock

[amateur51]

... I'm not sure that 'lightish' wd be the first word to come to mind.

As wiki reminds us :

"There has been longstanding appreciation of Compton-Burnett's novels. Of Pastors and Masters the New Statesman wrote: "It is astonishing, amazing. It is like nothing else in the world. It is a work of genius." In her essay collection L'Ère du soupçon (1956), an early manifesto for the French nouveau roman, Nathalie Sarraute hails Compton-Burnett as an "one of the greatest novelists England has ever had". Elizabeth Bowen said of the wartime Parents and Children, "To read in these days a page of Compton-Burnett dialogue is to think of the sound of glass being swept up, one of these London mornings after a blitz." Patrick Lyons wrote over 30 years later, "These are witty and often demanding novels, peopled with alert sceptics who are devoted to epigrammatic talk and edgily precise analysis of talk." "

Dame Ivy's friend Margaret Jourdain once surprised Ivy's publisher by bursting into the outer office and tossing a large bundle of manuscript paper on to the desk, turned on her heel and left saying "Some more of Ivy's rubbish!"

[vinteuil]

... and how cd I have left out Max Beerbohm !

Especially Seven Men and Two Others and the glorious parodies in A Christmas Garland

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Christmas_Garland

.

[Sir Velo]

No one mentioned E F Benson's series of comic oneupmanship: Mapp and Lucia?

The ultimate in elegant, mischievously witty, slyly camp writing ("I'm going to polish my bibelots") from the twenties and thirties. As Nancy Mitford, Noel Coward and Wystan Auden declaimed despairingly at the thought that the series had run its comic course: "We'd give anything for Lucia books!"

[kernelbogey]

Anyone know Joan Butler?

Her(/his) Woodhouse-esque comic novels had me in fits as a teenager: suspect they'd be unreadable now, though.

[amateur51]

Rather superior to Diary of a Nobody but along the same pompous lines, I love Augustus Carp, Esq., By Himself: Being the Autobiography of a Really Good Man

[amateur51]

Anyone know Joan Butler?

Her(/his) Woodhouse-esque comic novels had me in fits as a teenager: suspect they'd be unreadable now, though.

New to me, kernel - many thanks

[amateur51]

No one mentioned E F Benson's series of comic oneupmanship: Mapp and Lucia?

The ultimate in elegant, mischievously witty, slyly camp writing ("I'm going to polish my bibelots") from the twenties and thirties. As Nancy Mitford, Noel Coward and Wystan Auden declaimed despairingly at the thought that the series had run its comic course: "We'd give anything for Lucia books!"

I found that a little goes a long way, but bearing that in mind, they can be a real tonic