Rewriting History: Yates and Thirkell, 1945–60

Abstract

Yates’s new beginning for the Pleydells, in The House that Berry Built (1945), draws on his own experiences in leaving Britain in the 1920s and building his own house in south-west France, with a perfunctory detective mystery to unravel between construction longueurs. The Berry Scene (1947) delivers new ‘Berry & Co’ short stories set in different periods of their heyday, and his fictionalised memoirs As Berry and I Were Saying (1952) and B-Berry and I Look Back (1958) are denunciations of the changing times. Alternating with these are two thrillers, set before the war. Red in the Morning (1946) is Yates writing on top form, but Cost Price (1949) feels effortful, and the characters are tired. ‘“Tell me, William, why did we take this on?” “God knows,” said I. “I’ve been asking myself for days.”’¹ His historical novel Lower Than Vermin (1950) was a rewriting of the past for conservatives who feel hard-done-by, and was followed by a slight detective novel, Ne’er-Do-Well (1954). However, Yates’s last novel and penultimate work, Wife Apparent (1956), was a triumphant return to his playful and witty style of the 1920s, an emotionally taut comedy of recovery from wartime brain damage, set in an English Arcadia.