This article was published in the Cambridge Evening News on 5 August 1976.
OCCASIONALLY in second hand book shops you will find middle-aged men, I count myself among them, staring with a faraway look in their eyes at shelves, and usually the bottom shelves, marked Fiction W to Z.
They are either searching for early editions of Carry On, Jeeves or more likely for the works of Dornford Yates. They seldom find them.
Second hand copies of Berry and Co., Jonah and Co. and Adele and Co. are not easy to come by. They remain on the shelves of those who bought them as they came out or were reissued in the 30s and 40s, reminders of the great escapes they provided in the years of the Depression and the war.
And Dornford Yates was the master of escapism. In my own mind he is associated with the mock Tudor and the green-tiled houses that began to sprawl south of Croydon where I lived before the war.
The houses themselves harked back to the past or to the romance of haciendas and faraway places: They were tailored to meet the needs of a gently disillusioned middle-class for whom the memory of the Great War was best forgotten and who could see little future in a world which offered no better choices than appeasement to Hitler, the decline of the British Empire or the arrival of the Bolsheviks doubtless with blood still on their boots.
Mock Tudor and Dornford Yates were substitutes for that view of the future. Pick up Berry and Co. and you were in a world of Rolls-Royces, servants with wash leathers who cleaned cars every evening, of great houses, of that leisured class to which you aspired and you were sharing the life of the Pleydell family who, when they weren’t being witty with one another, were busy outwriting villians.
Badinage was their strong point with Berry as the butt. Jonah with his limp from an old war wound was the hard man who could be relied on in a pinch to thrash the living daylights out a dago.
Boy was the one with a way with women. And finally there were the women… I beg their pardon… the ladies.
Dornford Yates’ ladies were sylph-like creatures who managed to combine educational sub-normality with sophistication. When they weren’t mentally retarded they were brilliant motorists or fawning in the forest over fauna.
Jill must rank with Jenny of She Fell Among Thieves as the strongest female emetic in English literature. “The gorge rises,” is one of Berry’s favourite expressions and it is appropriate for Jill. But these faults apart, and I haven’t mentioned Dornford Yates’ strangely archaic style, the Berry books have something. For one thing they have pace.
They tell a good story, most of them short stories, though Adele and Co. is a full-length yarn in which the Pleydells recover the jewels that have been stolen from them after they have been drugged by Count Plaza and the infamous Casca de Palk.
And this brings us to Dornford Yates’ foreigners. By and large to be foreign was to be guilty until you proved yourself innocent.
Americans were the exception but the rest were scum. There is of course Piers, Duke of Padua, but as his aunt says: “The blood is pure English although the title’s Italian,” so that’s all right, he can marry Jill. After a few years married to her he dies in an air crash. I have always suspected suicide. Jill in the forest is bad enough, in bed… yes the gorge rises.
Having said so many derogatory things about the Berry books why is it that I have read them all and can read them again? And why will you find his devotees in second hand bookshops looking hopefully under Y?
Ward Lock, his publishers, are re-issuing his books in response to public demand. Nostalgia is not the only answer. It is too easy. The truth is that Dornford Yates for all his faults took immense pains to write readable books.
Escapist, sentimental, snobridden, sickly, implausible. He had every fault in the book and the one great virtue, the magic ability to hold his reader’s attention in spite of himself.