It’s a big year for literary centenaries. This month is the 100th anniversary of the publication of F Scott Fitzgerald’s masterpiece The Great Gatsby. Its story of the corruption of the American dream could hardly be more relevant today. Fitzgerald writes, “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy — they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness … and let other people clean up the mess they had made.” Remind you of anyone?
And next month marks the centenary of Virginia Woolf’s most perfectly achieved novel Mrs Dalloway, a book whose innovative blend of narrative, lyricism, internal monologue and contemporary issues — one main character is traumatised by the war — makes it even more influential than Gatsby.
But besides these two cornerstones of modern fiction, in 1925 there were published many more books that have stood the test of time and shine as brightly now as they did 100 years ago. Here’s my selection of the best.
1. Pastors and Masters by Ivy Compton-Burnett
“I have been writing a little book lately,” says a character here. “I don’t know why I should say little, except that it is short.” Ivy Compton-Burnett’s novels are short, but not little: told mostly in mannered, witty dialogue, they compress much into a small space. You need to take them slowly. This, her first mature novel, is set in a boys’ school and is largely about how appearances can successfully fool us — sometimes. “How good we all are at talking without ever saying anything we think!” says one character. Compton-Burnett was as waspish in life as she was in her fiction. Speaking about a new
novel by her friend Olivia Manning, she said, “It really is full of very good descriptions. Quite excellent descriptions. I don’t know if you care for descriptions? I don’t.”
2. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loos
As valuable a portrait of the fizz-headed jazz age as Fitzgerald’s work, this is the diary of the girl-about-town Lorelei Lee. Her breathless style (most sentences begin “So…” or “I mean…”) and cute misspellings add to the charm as we flit from New York to London and Paris, with Lorelei’s bitchy friend Dorothy in tow. Discussing perfume brands, she tells us, “So then Dorothy said that she supposed Mr Coty came to Paris and smelled Paris and he realised that something had to be done.” Lorelei is taken advantage of by the wealthy men she’s attracted to, but gets her own back in the end. “I mean [Dorothy] said my brains reminded her of a radio because you listen to it for days and days and you get discouradged [sic] and just when you are getting ready to smash it, something comes out that is a masterpiece.”
3. A Country Doctor’s Notebook by Mikhail Bulgakov
Mikhail Bulgakov is best known for his fantastical novel The Master and Margarita, but these autobiographical sketches of his time as a young doctor (which were made into the TV series A Young Doctor’s Notebook in 2012) are raw, action-packed and brilliant. Bulgakov is assigned to a rural constituency, where he becomes the force of science and reason battling local superstitions. He’s thrown in at the deep end because his first case requires him to amputate a woman’s mangled leg (“We left a third of her body on the operating table”). Quickly he progresses from a naive doctor who doesn’t even know what all his instruments are for to a man who can shoot at attacking wolves in a blizzard on his way home. It’s all so high-tension that when we learn that his predecessor became a morphine addict we’re not a bit surprised.
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4. Manhattan Transfer by John Dos Passos
New York City, with its “sky of beaten lead that never snows”, is the star of this Ulysses-influenced novel that shakes down the residents of Manhattan over the early years of the 20th century and releases their stories. All human life, from a budding actress to an ambulance-chasing lawyer, is represented in a city where street gambling takes place next to the “glittering white tables” of a high-end restaurant and all its excesses. “In the hall they came upon a young man vomiting quietly into a fire bucket.” John Dos Passos drops in on his characters in short scenes, like a movie camera roaming the streets. “How do I get to Broadway?” asks one man. “I want to get to the centre of things.” Start here.
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5. The Professor’s House by Willa Cather
Unlike some other books on the list, there’s nothing modern or showy about this quiet character study of a rebellious academic — indeed, it’s a story about holding on to the past while other people move on. Professor Godfrey St Peter’s publishing success has allowed him to buy a new house for his family, but he is drawn back to his old familiar study — it’s work that gives him happiness, not money. The story goes backward and forward through family arguments and memories of his daughter’s fiancé who died in the First World War. It’s a book full of rich symbolism and dialogue for the reader to luxuriate in. It has drama too, in a near-death experience and the conflict between what we want and what we think is expected of us. “I wakened with the feeling that I had found everything, instead of having lost everything.”
6. The Painted Veil by W Somerset Maugham
For my money this is the best novel by Somerset Maugham, a writer now considered a bit old-fashioned, but one who really knew how to tell an engaging, melodramatic story. It’s about Kitty Fane, the wife of a government scientist in Hong Kong, and her affair with a more exciting man. Maugham is brilliant at outlining his characters colourfully (Kitty’s mother is “hard, cruel, managing, ambitious, parsimonious and stupid”), delivering scenes of explosive conflict and exploring social status and the purpose of life without love. So convincing is the story that Maugham was sued by a couple who thought Kitty and her husband were based on them, and he had to change the characters’ names.
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7. In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway
It’s a shame that Ernest Hemingway became such a macho self-parody because in his early writing he was a genius, creating a new way of telling stories: a spare, plain style that cut out everything unnecessary and made him the most influential writer on this list. His efficiency in this series of linked stories is unparalleled: the first, Indian Camp, takes in birth, death, innocence and
experience in five pages. The seemingly effortless brilliance came from obsessive rewriting — “Wearing down seven pencils is a good day’s work,” Hemingway said — and he also had the best advice anyone has ever given to other novelists. “Always stop when you know what is going to happen next.”
8. Carry On, Jeeves by PG Wodehouse
The 1920s and 1930s were PG Wodehouse’s peak period, and this collection of Jeeves and Wooster stories is one of his best. Many are set in New York, where Bertie is exiled on Aunt Agatha’s orders, and feature the usual line-up of chumps, including “Bicky” Bickersteth, “one of the most pronounced fatheads that ever pulled on a suit of gents’ underwear”. There’s also — uniquely in the Wooster chronicles — a story from Jeeves’s viewpoint, where we see his shrewd machinations (“Employers are like horses. They require managing”) as he protects his own comfortable life from the “mentally negligible” Bertie’s desire to settle down. And for contemporary relevance, one story even talks about the high price of eggs in America. “You can get anything you like for [them].” Coincidence? Yes, but what fun.
