I first made contact with Julia Darling (1956-2005) in late 1993 when she was shortlisted for the Panurge Fiction Magazine International Short Story Competition. I had founded the magazine in Cleator Moor, West Cumbria in 1984, edited it till 1987, and then passed it over to David Almond of Skellig fame who ran it till 1993, then passed it back to me. The story competition received a great many entries and Julia won Joint Second Prize. The First Prize winner was the American Richard Zimler (who lives in Portugal) and both Richard and Julia went on to have major careers after their debut novels. His bestselling The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon and Julia’s first novel Crocodile Soup came out in the UK in the same year, 1998. It was partly via the competition that they got to know each other, and in the summer of 1999 there was a major gay litfest in Newcastle, at which Julia was a prominent performer. Richard came over specially from Porto to read there, and my wife Annie and I met up with him for an Indian meal in nearby Corbridge, where the restaurant is picturesquely sited in the railway station’s waiting room and where a waiter in full turbaned regalia leads you off the train. By then I was living in Brampton, North Cumbria which was relatively close to Newcastle where Julia lived.
In March 1994 I had organised a major ceremony in the White Lion, Brampton, where the Panurge competition prizewinners were presented with their cheques by the novelist and Orwell biographer DJ Taylor. Always busy Julia couldn’t make it to the event but sent two women friends to collect her prize. Subsequently we spoke on the phone and by that stage she had an agent who was unable to place a collection of her stories. I asked her to send me the collection, and was so impressed I offered to publish them via the Panurge magazine imprint. There was a precedent, as my own novel Radio Activity had been published the year before by a small literary magazine called Sunk Island, and had managed to gain favourable coverage in the Guardian and Independent.
The story collection was called Bloodlines and was launched in a Newcastle bookshop in the summer of 1995. There was a capacity audience, many of whom obviously knew Julia, as they cheered her throughout, and her endearing and graceful mother was also present. It was my first face to face meeting with Julia in that crowded bookshop. By then she had been diagnosed with serious breast cancer needing strong chemotherapy, and my early memories are of seeing her with a bald head and never looking anything but cheerful, friendly and patient, while quietly determined and resolute about getting on with her busy life.
Bloodlines was favourably reviewed in the Independent and elsewhere and in early 1997 was broadcast on Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour. It was quite a coup for a tiny imprint like Panurge and a first book of fiction, but indicative of the quality and originality of the stories. Her novel Crocodile Soup came out a year later by which time she had a leading agent at Curtis Brown who went in for ruthless competitive bidding. Julia told me that one of the publisher’s offers had been made with a cheque in the mouth of a paper crocodile, and she laughed at the comical flamboyance. I organised a reading for Crocodile Soup in Tullie House, Carlisle which went down very well and another with Solway Arts at Silloth, Cumbria. At the latter there was an irritating question from the floor about the propriety of sexual explicitness in modern fiction which Julia met with her legendary patience and gentleness. A previous author I had taken there had snarled at someone who had asked a similar question, and I was impressed by Julia’s courtesy and respectfulness towards the dogmatic critic.
In the late summer of 2003, Julia and I were both longlisted for the Booker Prize, she with The Taxi Driver’s Daughter and me with Jazz Etc. We met just before the shortlist was announced, when I was teaching an Arvon fiction course at Lumb Bank, Yorkshire, and Julia was my guest author. She looked very well, and of course I had no idea that she would be no longer with us in two years’ time. She had been on medication that she praised to the skies, tamoxifen, and there was a poignant personal connection, as my wife Annie had also been diagnosed with breast cancer back in 1998. Like Julia she had had a mastectomy, lymph node clearance and chemotherapy, and had soldiered on with tamoxifen and regular check-ups. Julia lived some ten years after her initial diagnosis, while Annie lived for eleven years and died at the end of 2009. My wife was extremely upset and clearly felt it very personally when Julia died in 2005.
The last time I saw Julia was in the autumn of 2004 when Annie and I met her at the Literary and Philosophical Society in Newcastle where DJ Taylor was giving a talk. We stayed over with her and Bev, and Julia mentioned that her cancer had returned and the prognosis was not good. I will always remember that she suddenly made an irreverent comical aside about the possibility of losing one’s bearings should the cancer spread all the way to the brain. She clearly wasn’t being frivolous or cynical when she said this, but rather, outstandingly brave as she looked things candidly in the face, just as she did in her remarkable and enduring fiction.
ON REREADING ‘CROCODILE SOUP’ IN 2021
Towards the end of Julia’s 1998 novel the main character Gert Hardcastle, having lost her museum job in the north of England, is working in a steak bar. Despite her lesbian preferences she goes on a date with co-worker Ed Cutler whose hobby is herbal medicine.
‘We went to see The Exorcist. The cinema was so old that a piece of ceiling plaster fell on my head when I sat down…The cinema was full. A large man, eating boiled sweets, was rummaging about on the other side of me. He swallowed the sweets whole…
Ed Cutler’s hand was shaking.
The film started. Ed Cutler reached into the folds of my breasts but I was already too frightened for heavy petting. I grabbed his hand and sucked it nervously. He appeared to find this oddly pleasurable and breathed heavily. He grasped my other hand and plumped it squarely on his audacious belt buckle…A few herbal remedies dropped out of his trouser pockets and he shook them away with exasperation. I fiddled lethargically in his pants. It was like putting my hand into a bowl of warm bananas.’
I quote at length to demonstrate Julia Darling’s remarkable talent for the accretion of deadpan and often dissonant comic detail. Her other two virtuoso skills are banal often seemingly crazy juxtapositions, and the ability to build up to a mad anti-climax or non sequitur, often evident in her dialogue also. No one but Julia Darling would think to put that infamous horror classic next to the Chaplinesque plaster on the head. Then there is the vivid precision of the big man swallowing sweets whole (a narrative clue, as soon after he actually dies in the cinema). We are then startled by the naked fact of Ed’s shaking hands, as any other writer would have described his nervousness in discursive sentences. Next comes the sheer weirdness of hand sucking, followed by more laugh out loud vaudeville with the cascading herbal remedies. There could hardly be more polar opposites than middle class botanical remedies and working-class heavy petting, and only Julia Darling could have playfully set them side by side. Gert’s lethargy and the insipid warmth of the bananas bring all that dissonance and incongruity to a calming if rueful plateau.
When Crocodile Soup was reviewed twenty-three years ago, there was plenty of praise for the debut novelist though not much precision when the critics tried to describe this remarkably vigorous comic writer. The extract above which is typical of the entire book, seems to me very obviously prose of a high order, indicative of a major and enduring comic talent. I would argue that back in 1998, there was no other contemporary writer either here or in the USA, who could have managed that kind of athletic improvisation of comic dissonance and farcical anti-climax, and occasional up front satire (see in Crocodile Soup her chapter on the Lesbian Separatists, every single one of them an unsmiling anthropologist) and I would say that the same holds true these days for writers of both genders.
In my view we have to look well beyond the contemporary scene to major twentieth century comic talents on the lines of Anglo-Irish Molly Keane, aristocratic Violet Trefusis (married but lover of both Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West) and more recently Muriel Spark who born in 1918 was of Julia’s mother’s generation. I believe that at her best Darling is in their prodigious comic league, albeit stylistically she has little in common with any of them. What she has like them is a piercing forensic vision of human nature where she sees the gyrations of her characters’ elemental souls, and renders it as biting comedy. That said, Keane, Trefusis and Spark are all elegant stylists and the prose of their comedy is waspish and decorous, with strict control over every single word and clause and sub clause. Julia too is well in control of her prose, but she also allows herself the option of short and loaded sentences and appropriate sardonic use of the colloquial and contemporary. Let me emphasise I’m not saying that Julia deliberately modelled herself on any of those predecessors, but my guess is that somewhere along the line she concentrated on reading the major female writers as found in Virago Classics and the like. She is simply too gifted a writer to have learnt everything from her contemporaries, for her comic detail is too rich and fertile and stereoscopic to be strictly of her time.To which you might counter that the extreme eccentricity of her plots and her characters, might have been influenced by that celebrated doyenne of the bizarre, Angela Carter (1940-1992). My answer to that would be that Julia’s second book Crocodile Soup is imaginatively streets ahead and far funnier than Carter’s equivalent second fiction, the 1967 The Magic Toyshop. And at the risk of sounding rather too mechanical, there is a simple empirical way of gauging the extraordinary depth of Julia’s talent. Take any longish narrative paragraph in any of her fiction, and read it aloud four times in a row without a pause. Her prose and imagination are so rich and allusive I promise that you will still be enjoying what she is saying after the fourth reading, and nowhere near bored. Sad to say the same is far from true for many successful writers currently reposing on major league fiction lists on both sides of the Atlantic. And to be even more specific, I believe Julia Darling, even though she only published two novels and a story collection, is the most gifted comic Anglophone writer since Muriel Spark.
Crocodile Soup has alternating chapters of Gert’s childhood in an unnamed southern town, and her life in the present as a museum worker in an unnamed northern city. Julia herself grew up in Winchester where her father was a teacher at the famous school, and their house had a plaque commemorating the fact Jane Austen had once lived there. Likewise, in the novel Gert’s childhood house has a plaque to a nineteenth century woman poet, and both in Winchester and here the houses were plagued by clamouring foreign tourists taking photos. Gert believes her childhood bedroom to be haunted, for it has an unpleasant smell and a lurking presence. In due course she is taken to a child psychiatrist who doubles as an exorcist and who gets rid of the ghost. Meanwhile, the Hardcastle family of four is monumentally dysfunctional. The parents Jean and George do not need to work as they live off the dividends of a crocodile farm in Africa, hence the novel’s title. Jean’s favourite activity is listening to her favourite music including blues, and sorting through her silk underwear, preferably with her amiable pal Mabel. George likes playing with complicated navigational knots would you believe, and this signals his ultimate departure on a boat he acquires. Before that he disappears for an unspecified time to visit the crocodile farm, and feckless Jean is left to raise the children alone. Gert is an unhappy child who wants to share a bedroom with her twin Frank, but instead is initially banished to the haunted attic room. Frank is a very strange boy to say the least, a classic loner who at one stage will only face his mother by looking at her through a telescope. He is sent to a posh school where ‘beating is on the syllabus’ but comes home to become a recluse wearing an orange robe and chanting in his bedroom all day. At the end of the novel he commits suicide by flinging himself upon a hurtling train.
Crocodile Soup is full of blackly comic red herrings and the main one is adult Gert’s fixation on beautiful Eva, the coffee maker in the northern museum. Gert is convinced that Eva is gay and presents her with some irises in an embarrassingly awkward scene. Despite little encouragement she persists and:
‘Later, after a strange afternoon at work with a magnifying glass, and a couple of flutters with Eva when I asked for warm milk in my coffee and she said, “How warm?” and I became weak with the possibilities that such a question offered, I went to buy a bottle of Bull’s Blood from Jimmy’s corner shop.’
Let us pause a while to note Darling’s habit of long athletic sentences to achieve her comic bathetic effects, and the pleasingly cracked juxtaposition of warm milk and Bull’s Blood. In many ways she constructs her paragraphs rather like a jazz improviser, who knows exactly what she is doing but insists on the visceral freedom peculiar to jazz rather than polite and more formal composition. Julia at full throttle is rather like John McLaughlin the jazz guitarist doing an impossible virtuoso riff and then going beyond that riff, or perhaps more aptly like the French sax player Celine Bonancina doing exactly the same thing of playfully performing the impossible.
Gert eventually persuades Eva to go for a weekend together to good old Scarborough, where both their absent mothers loom large. Eva has had to make special arrangements as her mum usually has her as a weekend carer, and Gert incredibly hallucinates her mother Jean looming over the pair of them just as she thinks she is about to have her way. She starts screaming and creating an uproar in the genteel B and B, so that Eva puts her to bed as a disturbing invalid rather than a steamy romantic proposition. It all turns out to be a non-starter anyway, as Eva is actually besotted with their museum boss who is married with two kids, and had assumed that the irises proffered at work had been sent by him with Gert as innocent courier.
The gothic paranormal is also prevalent, for as well as the haunted bedroom we have Gert hallucinating Jean at significant moments (e.g. after a serious car crash) plus she and her twin Frank regularly communicate telepathically. It is all done tongue in cheek, needless to add, but there is often a clever blurring of the real and the imaginary, and in these cases, Gert fretfully doubts her own sanity. In the childhood home they acquire a foreign au pair Oona who apparently drowns on a lilo at the seaside, but later Frank tells her by telepathy that that never happened, and Oona was sent packing by Jean as George was attempting an affair with her. Later, up north, Gert happens to live opposite a massive hospital from which two enigmatic figures regularly come and dump rubbish in her garden and which increases Gert’s all-purpose paranoia, as she muses at one point that it might be full of medical radioactive waste.
Perhaps the blackest comedy in this novel is where Darling tackles the unamusing evil of child sexual abuse, and renders some of the dialogue exchanges in the anticlimax typical of Joe Orton or Alan Bennett. Seditious Orton is probably the likelier influence, as he and Julia Darling (who was also a dramatist) always shun any possible sentimentality, whereas Bennett occasionally does not. Here Gert as a young child goes on a school trip to a museum and somehow ends up in a back room with the curator Mr Manners. After giving her an Egyptian bead as a present, he gets her to touch him and rub his trousers, and at the end of the ordeal comes out with the following disclaimer, that might have been a line out of Entertaining Mister Sloane:
‘ “Sorry about that,” he apologised. “No harm meant.” ‘
Finally, let us not only acknowledge that Julia was a comic genius at her best, but she was also a truly adult artist, capable of great wisdom and insight and could express it with remarkable economy at times. Here Gert is musing about the hospital caretaker Harry who works opposite where she lives. Harry is middle aged, misogynistic, misanthropic and foul mouthed, and yet for all that has a friendly and even caring side when it comes to dealing with vulnerable Gert.
‘I liked Harry. I found this surprising, as he was a man with no morals. He seemed lonely as an isolated virus.’
Not one in ten thousand writers could manage those three sentences in that sequence. Note that they constitute a whole theological discourse in themselves. Believe me.
Wild Days in Greece 