The Helena Trilogy

Pamela Hansford Johnson’s Helena trilogy, of which An Avenue of Stone is the brilliant centerpiece, is a masterly blend of Johnson’s confident voice and integration of psychological insights into well-drawn characters, precisely connected to time-frames and places - 1920s to late ‘40s in Bruges, London, and Paris.


To read the second novel first, An Avenue of Stone (1947), is both an advantage and a liability. Each novel is self-contained, so it is not necessary to read them in order. An Avenue of Stone is a tour de force, much more compelling than the other two, though it rather satirically portrays Helena, and one needs the first novel to understand her background. As Johnson says in the introduction to the 1972 edition of the first book, Too Dear for My Possessing, she was learning her craft when it was published in 1940, as opposed to the maturity of the second and the third novels, published in 1947 and 1948 respectively: “So, between books 1 and 2, I had seven years of learning to write: which is why I’ have decided not to revise Too Dear for My Possessing, but to leave it as it stands.”


Too Dear for My Possessing is a sprawling bildungsroman, following the fortunes of the narrator, Claud, a writer’s son, from age 13 to 30. Growing up in Bruges, he has an almost perfect childhood, tainted by occasional violent quarrels with his moody stepmother, Helena, a former chorus girl who bursts into spontaneous comic song or despairing tirades, depending on her quickly shifting moods. After Claud is sent to London to attend school, he adapts quickly to life with a kind, Dickensian uncle, but after his father’s death, he forms an obsessive Oedipal bond with Helena. At 15, he moves in with her and his half-sister, Charmian, and, at 17 gets a job as an insurance clerk. He is possessive and furious when Helena takes in a boarder.

It was because I felt myself a bread-winner that I so deeply resented Helena’s tenant.

“What the hell do we want with a lodger?” I demanded.

She stared belligerently at the space between my eyes. “He’s not a lodger, and I didn’t see why we should have that top back room doing nothing when we could make fifteen bob out of it.”

“But we’ve managed all right before! And now I’m earning we need money even less. Father would have had a fit. Have you been putting a card up?”

Her face was brick red. I noticed that she had dabbed fresh dye upon the widening parting of her hair. “No, I didn’t.”

“Well, then, how did you get him?”

“I met him.”

Claud becomes an art critic, has girlfriends, and marries a woman as a reaction to the news of a girlfriend's marriage. He is in love with a cabaret actress, Cecil Archer, who is obviously connected in his mind with Helena,r: he is too proud to follow her and settles for second-best. The Cecil sections are, to my mind, the dullest of the novel. But Claud is a fascinating character, and I enjoyed this very much.

I’m still reading A Summer to Decide. More on that later!

An Avenue of Stone

We drove 200 miles to our favorite town of bookstores, hoping it had recovered from last year’s flood. The first thing we did was walk along the river. The river is usually the scene of readers, ducks, dogs playing frisbee, canoeists, runners, artists, strolling lovers, and workers rejuvenating themselves on their lunch breaks. Now much of the riverbank is fenced off, and we walked quite a way to find access. Cranes and bulldozers stand minatory among the sandbags, defacing the landscape with their crude reds and yellows. The flood destroyed several buildings, among them the Art Museum, and, since FEMA money can't be used to rebuild on a floodplain, we suppose they're working on a new levee. The river is very high, even with the bank, as you can see from the photo above.

The rising water also threatened the library last summer. Employees and volunteers saved rare books by passing them from hand to hand up the stairs. The library survived.

We sat down to admire the blue water and beautiful spring sunlight. I finished Pamela Hansford Johnson’s An Avenue of Stone; this unforgettable novel is a masterpiece, the second of a trilogy, which can stand alone. In this brilliant novel, set at the end of World War II, the narrator, Major Claud Pickering, an art historian and writer, describes the volatile relationships of his stepmother, Helena, amidst the deprivations of rationing and the disintegrating class boundaries of the postwar society.


The novel begins with Helena's ramblings about class.

“As a class,” Helena said, “we are doomed...”

Helena, a former chorus girl who married into the upper class and has established herself as a glittering hostess, loves to talk about the rebellion of the proles. As the novel begins, the sixty-something Helena is entertaining guests with outrageous complaints about the collapse of society, illustrated by exaggerated anecdotes about rude bus conductors and insolent shop girls. After her second husband, Lord Archer, dies, leaving the majority of his money to Helena’s daughter, Charmian, and, shockingly, to his former lovers, Helena can no longer live on the grand scale to which she is accustomed. She is persuaded to let her hunky chauffeur go and move into an apartment with Claud and Charmian. Helena, unused to living without admiration, becomes vulnerable to a kind of asexual love affair with Johnny Field, an irritatingly self-denigrating young man, whom Claud introduces into the household, assuring her that Johnny needs rest and “does nothing but read.”

At first she uses Johnny as a lackey to pass appetizers at parties and install linoleum at her cottage , but later she is fascinated by him and insists that she can't live without him. Claud and Charmian can't bear the situation and move out. Johnny the unlikely gigolo, is, surprisingly, a magnet to older women. One of Lord Archer’s former lovers, Mrs. Olney, a lamp shade maker, also tries to lure him to live with her.

Claud’s observations of this unlikely triangle are the center of the novel. But his wry observations keep him in the forefront, and it is for his voice that we read. This very slightly reminds me of Anthony Powell's novels.