The fabulous Carnegie public library, still standing but long deserted, and now occluded by towering skyscrapers, was the destination of thousands of readers in our small town in the twentieth century. Here I discovered some of my favorite English books: Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle, Angela Carter’s bafflingly beautiful fairy tales, and Rumer Godden’s lyrical novels. 

Just as the old library building is obsolete, Godden’s books were out-of-print when I decided to reread them in the early 2000’s.  All of her adult books, except An Episode of Sparrows, which was reissued as a children’s book; In This House of Brede, a fascinating nun novel reissued by Loyola Press; and Kingfishers Catch Fire, a pre-hippie novel set in Kahmir, and reissued by Milkweed Editions, had to be hunted down at used bookstores and online bookshops.

 Godden is a complex writer, not given her dues. In some of her novels, she uses modernist techniques to connect scenes.  Her playful temporal jumps recall Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse and The Years. And yet only Godden’s best-selling third novel, Black Narcissus (1938), the story of a convent in the mountains of India, seems to be remembered, perhaps because it was adapted as a film with Deborah Kerr, and more recently, as a TV miniseries.

Godden is a distinctly odd writer, a kind of pop-literary modernist, who breaks up her narratives with temporal antics and intersperses sudden switches to outsiders commenting on the situation.  The opening scene of her fifth novel, Breakfast with the Nikolides (1942), is told from the (third-person) point-of-view of a dog. The plot radiates from the axis of this tormented scene.

Don, a spaniel who spends his days romping with Emily and Binnie, the children who own him, becomes suddenly desperately ill,  befuddled, nervous, and excited. “There was nothing he wanted, but he could not be still, he could not feel or behave quite like himself. He had been a serene and normal dog, quietly engaged in completing himself from a puppy to an adult, but now, and all day, he was like the mirage of a spaniel, lifted out of himself and thrown distorted and heightened on the air.  He had to run and run and run.”

What a sad phrase, “the mirage of a spaniel.” There is nothing sadder than the death of a pet, and I was already crying on the first page. Then Godden switches scenes: she jumps back a few months. And we meet Charles Pool, a college professor and director of the Government Farm in Amorra in India, who has taught Indians to modernize agricultural methods.  Every night he listens to the radio news about the outbreak of World War II, but is surprised when his difficult wife, Louise, who left him eight years ago, writes that she is  returning with the children. Terrified of the war in France, she travels from Paris to India with their two daughters, Emily and Binnie, the latter of whom Charles has never seen, because she was born after the separation.   

Dismayed by the sight and smells of India, Louisa is appalled and remember why she left.  The children, however, love the large house, love being with their father, and especially love their dog, Don, whom Charles gives them against Louise’s wishes. Louise already has two Pekineses, but Emily and Binnie do not think they are “proper” dogs.

As so often happens in Godden’s novels, there is a conflict between man and wife and a tussle over the children.  When the dog gets ill, Louise is hysterically sure that it has rabies and insists that he be put down.  Charles is more sensible:  he sends for the vet, Narayan, who is another of the main characters:  Narayan is unhappily married to a young Indian wife, and is having an affair with a rich, beautiful young man, a college student, Anil.  Charles and Louise hustle the children off for breakfast with their Greek friends, the Nikolides, because they want to protect them from news of the dog’s illness. But Narayan is slow, in coming and Charles must go to work, so he tells Louise that the dog must not be killed before Emily and Binnie have a chance to say good-bye.

You will not be surprised to learn that haughty Louise disobeys:  she immediately orders Narayan to kill the dog.  Narayan is intimidated by this arrogant white woman, but he insists on examining the dog, says it’s too early to tell if it is rabies,  and they should observe him for a few days. Louise commands him to kill the dog – the murder, as Emily says –  and this decision leads to tragedy.  No one gets off unscathed, and Louise’s poor management of the situation has repercussions. Even when Louise is right, her inability to consider other people causes trauma. And, surprisingly, we see parallels between Louise and Anil, Narayan’s boyfriend: both are beautiful, arrogant, and disdainful of other people’s feelings.

One quirk I very much like: Godden inserts bits of remembered dialogue in parentheses. In a conversation between Emily and her father, she is trying to make sense of home.

(“What do you call people who live in a country always, Charles?”)

(“Natives, I suppose.”)

(“No, not natives.  People who come to it and want to belong to it and never go away.”)

(“Domiciled citizens.”)

(“Then Binnie and I should like to be domiciled citizens, Charles.”)

Breakfast with the Nikolides is one of Godden’s best novels, partly because of the ambiguity. White Louise survives while the Indian aristocrat Anil is quelched. Godden, who grew up in India and ran a ballet school there for many years, is aware of the racial issues. I also recommend her autobiographical novel, Kingfishers Catch Fire (1953), the story of a young, impecunious, pre-hippie mother, Sophie, who moves with her two children to a tiny village in Kashmir, having no idea that their presence will upset the alien culture.