Reading C. H. B. Kitchin (1895-1967), a neglected 20th-century English writer, is one of the rewards of literary wanderings online and off-. Kitchin wrote brilliant, weird literary novels as well as cozy mysteries. His friend, the writer L. P. Hartley, lauded his work, but the critics were less enthusiastic, often damning him with faint praise.

Here’s some advice to Kitchin novices: don’t read his books in chronological order. Start with Birthday Party (1938), an elegant, suspenseful novel about property and inheritance. It is narrated by the four prospective heirs of Carlice Abbey, a family estate.  And then Dora Carlice raises the question: Did Claude Carlice really commit suicide in the gun room 12 years ago, or was he murdered? This is an awkward question for one of the potential heirs.

On the Fourth of July, I apprehensively sat down to read Kitchin’s modernist debut novel, Streamers Waving, published in 1925, the year Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway was published. I say “apprehensively,” because it did not look promising. The shallow heroine, Lydia, a “spinster” in her thirties, is a kind of third-class socialite who lives from party to party and country weekend to country weekend, Worried about her marital status, she bravely mocks the “spin” word.” She knows that the pool of eligible males is shrinking, and her chances of marriage waning. And so she boldly takes the initiative with men: it doesn’t work, but at least she’s not stuck by the phone like a Dorothy Parker heroine.

The book gets off to a rocky start. The reader’s delight in making Lydia’s acquaintance is delayed by Kitchin’s ill-advised decision to begin the novel with a dream. I do hate dream sequences, and this is no exception. Lydia’s brief account of her dream is unintelligible to her three friends and to this reader.  In the dream, she  gives a funeral oration for her friend Geoffrey.  She says in the dream:  “Underneath that charming and whimsical personality of his, he concealed the man he was.”

She demands, “What did I mean?  The phrase was forced on me.”

When her friends suggest it means that Geoffrey isn’t much of a man, she denies it.  She has a crush on Geoffrey, though later she is shattered when he stands her up to play  cricket.  And then, in a note of apology, he says in the postscript: “If you’re interested you’ll find a report of the match in the Field.  I did pretty badly: took only 2 wickets, made 13 not out in the first innings and 0 in the second.”

Lydia is upset but is well-rid of this cricket fanatic.

Lydia has a minuscule income. She saves money on food by dining at friends’s houses and nibbling at parties. And she ekes out a living by sharing a house with two single women in their thirties, who also mock the “spin” word. She knows that the household will break up if one of them leaves; meanwhile, she is proud of their good address. It is not quite Bloomsbury, but is very near it.

But women of a certain age do wonder about their future, What is there but marriage for an unskilled upper-middle-class woman who has fallen several rungs down the class ladder? Lydia, though a bright conversationalist, is incapable of making a living.  She tried to teach piano, dancing, and art, but her pupils were all “stupid.” And she is unlucky with investments, because she ignores the advice of her trustees.  Her finances crash when her roommates leave.

  And at this point, when Lydia loses her money, Kitchin abandons modernism in favor of Victorian drama.  Desperate Lydia takes a leaf out of a George Eliot novel and jumps in the river.  (Think of  the different water scenes in George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, and you’ll get the idea.) 

If you’re interested in Spinster lit, this is worth a try, but don’t judge Kitchin by this debut.  In retrospect, I do like Lydia, but I am grateful that the book was short.