Rumer Godden: International and Intermodern Storyteller (review)

In her mid-eighties, Rumer Godden declared in an interview "I'm not a clever writer. If you were to ask me who I'd rather be, Robert Louis Stevenson or Proust, I'd say Robert Louis Stevenson every time. Why? Because he's a story teller. And I was born with a gift for telling stories." By identifying herself with Stevenson rather than Proust, it seems to me that Godden was thereby making it clear that she was deliberately aligning her own work with middlebrow, populist novel writing in mid-twentieth century culture, thus disavowing any connection or affinity at all with what she may have perceived as elitist high modernism. This disavowal is used fruitfully by many of the essayists in Rumer Godden: International and Intermodern Storyteller—scholarly work arising from a centenary conference on Rumer Godden in 2007 at Cambridge—and, overall, these critics establish a multi-layered, illuminating critical framework for her work. This new volume of essays is innovative in its exploration of the impact of modernism on the popular or middlebrow novel. The excellent, comprehensive introduction makes a good case for Godden's re-evaluation and critical consideration and gives an excellent account of the range of Godden's oeuvre. It is worth remembering that, in a busy and productive career, she produced fifty works of fiction—twenty-six of them children's books—five poetry collections, and thirteen works of non-fiction. In addition, seven of her books have been adapted for film, most famously her 1939 novel Black Narcissus, made into a celebrated movie starring Deborah Kerr in 1947 and her 1946 novel The River, directed by Jean Renoir in 1951. (Interestingly, Godden preferred the Renoir film but Black Narcissus remains more celebrated.) The editors situate Godden within the expanding field of post-colonial and transnational studies, appropriately, given that she was born in India but educated in England and that, as an adult, she did a great deal of her writing in India. Her novel Black Narcissus made her a critical and commercial success at the age of thirty-one. From her late thirties until her death at ninety in 1998, Godden remained living in England. In the lively introduction, editors Lucy Le-Guilcher and Phyllis B. Lassner make a strong argument for Godden's significance and importance as a writer. As they describe their aim in this collection, "The comparative studies of our contributors demonstrate Godden's critical search for narrative techniques that would engage and express the changing social, cultural and political issues in the course of her long career" (2–3). What struck me as the most useful aspect of this approach to Godden was the re-evaluation of the idea of the middlebrow. Instead of viewing it as conservative and politically inert, the editors instead consider that Godden deployed the form of the popular, accessible novel to represent a more nuanced understanding of the ambivalent nature of the culturally liminal. This understanding was, of course, informed by her Indian upbringing and her understanding of the colonial world at a time of crisis and disintegration. Crucial to this argument is the idea that she can be considered as an intermodern—a term coined by Kristin Bluemel to describe those writers who don't share the "values that shaped the dominant English literary culture of their time because they have the 'wrong' sex, class, or colonial status. As adults they remain on the margins of celebrated literary groups" (8). Bluemel goes on to argue that intermodern writers identified with a continuing realist tradition rather than with modernist ideas of formal experimentation, mystic epiphany, or mythic allusion. Godden was clearly intermediary by this definition and Le-Guilcher and Lassner argue that Godden is thus a "vital example of the political and critical dynamism of mid-twentieth-century British culture, a period that has all too often been dismissed or disparaged for its alleged retreat from modernism's sense of narrative adventure...