R(alph) H(ale) Mottram | Biography

Ralph Hale Mottram wrote more than sixty books: novels, short stories, poetry, biography, autobiography, history, tour guides, topography, a study of banking--even this list is not exhaustive. However, he is usually remembered for his first three novels, The Spanish Farm (1924), Sixty-four, Ninety-four! (1925), and The Crime at Vanderlynden's (1926), which constitute The Spanish Farm Trilogy, 1914-1918 (1927). In this trilogy the futility and waste of the First World War are depicted from the viewpoints of a young French peasant woman, a Norfolk bank clerk, and an obscure provincial architect--characters whose milieux and values are rarely examined with such depth and sympathy in British fiction.

Mottram's father, like his grandfather and great-grandfather before, was chief clerk of Gurney's Bank in Norwich. Born above the bank, Mottram himself held that position until 1927, when he was led by the success of his trilogy to trust writing as a career. His family was progressive, liberal, and committed to financial stability and what they considered permanent English values. Their influence and the city of Norwich, lovingly shown in Mottram's books as the archetypical provincial town, shaped and eventually sentimentalized his depiction of the changes in English living patterns after the war. His novel Our Mr. Dormer (1927) is a fictionalized history of his family from the eighteenth century to the early twentieth century.

In 1904 Mottram met John Galsworthy, who encouraged him to write. This meeting and the consequent close friendship with Galsworthy were decisive factors in his literary development. That Galsworthy became his mentor suggests something of the ambitions and limitations of Mottram's own work as the central characters of The Spanish Farm Trilogy reappear, aging and changing with England, in several subsequent novels. It is not totally unrealistic to think of Mottram as a minor Galsworthy.

World War I appears directly in much of Mottram's work, and its shadow is over much of the rest. Increasingly, as did so many men of his generation, he saw his prewar childhood as having taken place in a Golden Age. Nostalgia infuses his Autobiography with a Difference (1938) and many other books that followed the trilogy. The dominant theme and major concern of most of his books, whatever the genre, is a search for what is enduring in the English character, coupled with an attempt to define the nature, scope, and meaning of the changes in English life in the decades following the war.

The Spanish Farm and its sequels Sixty-four, Ninety-four! and The Crime at Vanderlynden were, individually and collectively, immediate critical and popular successes. The first novel of the trilogy contained a preface by Galsworthy. It was awarded the Hawthornden Prize for 1924 and was made into a film, Roses of Picardy. The novel centers on Madeleine, a practical young Frenchwoman who struggles to keep her father's farm making a sharp profit despite the successive waves of British troops quartered there. She loses her aristocratic lover to the war and in her blind physical and emotional need has a brief and, for her, almost meaningless affair in Paris with a young officer from Norfolk. As they drift apart it becomes apparent that their inability to communicate has as much to do with their national differences as with their individual ones. Only the war could have brought them together. The farm itself, built by the Spanish centuries before to protect their holdings in Flanders, serves the soldiers as a physical and spiritual respite from the horrors of war, and the novel as an explicitly stated symbol of man's ability to survive.

Sixty-four, Ninety-Four! retells much of the story of the preceding novel from the point of view of Skene, the young British officer who loves Madeleine. Skene considers the war a senseless catastrophe that has befallen his generation. He joined because it was his duty and his destiny, and he sees it through to the end, dismayed by the organizational muddle and the waste of lives. Madeleine, for him, is all that is desirable in "normal" life but elusive in war. Still his English romanticism and her French practicality could never have come together except in the general disruption of war.

In The Crime at Vanderlynden's, Dormer, a Norwich bank clerk, is even more distressed than Skene by the muddle, disorder, bungling, and general bureaucratic mess of the war. He endures by working to insure efficiency in the small areas he can control. The plot centers around a typical foul-up. A wayward British soldier desecrates a previously ignored shrine to the Blessed Virgin on Madeleine Vanderlynden's farm by quartering animals there for the night. French authorities assume on the basis of her intentionally inflated but unintentionally ambiguous damage claim that it is Madeleine herself who has been rudely used. Skene and Dormer share an attitude toward the war that the reader is made to feel is representative of their class and national heritage.

In The Spanish Farm Trilogy, Mottram depicts, with a sympathy that does not hide limitations of his characters, the damage done by the war to three noncombatants who survive because of their allegiance to their values. The style, direct and serviceable, seems right for its subject matter.

Geoffrey Skene, who becomes a municipal architect and genre painter, appears in several subsequent novels. Europa's Beast (1930) centers around the failing marriage of a young man who has been left an emotional adolescent by his war experiences and a young woman who seems to have stepped from an Evelyn Waugh novel leaving all the comedy behind. In Come to the Bower (1949), Skene and his second wife, Olive, adjust to post-World War II provincial life after losing a son and undergoing a temporary separation. The novel is marred by the presence of an American professor studying the English character; he provides Skene with too many opportunities to talk about what has become his (and the reader suspects Mottram's) favorite subject, the English moral heritage. Visit of the Princess (1946) is a humorless comedy set in a future "socialist" England in which mundane economic and social advances are ultimately wed to the "enduring" English values. Mottram's work after the 1920s may be trying to readers not having the great good fortune to have been born English.

Mottram's prolific career was awarded with modest commercial success and recognition. He was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and was made an honorary Doctor of Letters in 1966 by the University of East Anglia. In Autobiography with a Difference he described the skills of a family servant in terms of praise that could be used for his own work: "with much practice, no theory, some insight, ... no panache, just plain hardiness. The English cook for all time." But The Spanish Farm Trilogy is something more than plain English cooking, and it is on this early work that his reputation stands.