DISCUSSION NOTES

on

Penelope Lively's

Passing On
© 1994











BRIAN ELKNER

THE NOTEWRITER

Brian Elkner is a freelance writer and literary critic who has
produced over eighty discussion articles for the CAE's Dialogue series. Brian's interests range over a wide area which includes
literature, philosophy, art, politics and cinema. One of his particular
enthusiasms, however, lies in the various attempts made by critics
and literary theorists to explain (or even to describe]) the literary
text. When he is not producing discussion articles for the CAE,
Brian works as a project co-ordinator at TAFE Off-Campus, RMIT.



THE TEXT

References in these notes are to Penelope Lively, Passing On, Penguin, London, 1990. First published in 1989.
















This booklet is Number 1347 in the series of Book Discussion
Notes produced for the Book Discussion Groups of the Council of
Adult Education.


© Council of Adult Education, 1994
256 Flinders Street, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
And Edward, not unfeeling, not impervious, began presently
to howl within. Nothing lasts, he wept, everything goes. My
mother is dead, who had always been there, for better and for
worse. Mostly for worse. And I am forty-nine and getting old
and soon it will be too late for all the things I know nothing of
but which torment me in the middle of the night and here now
in this place which is supposed to be a comfort and a solace. I
am lonely and hungry and I have never breathed a word of this
to anyone.
--Passing On, p.57

Passing On is about choice and change in middle age. The death of
Dorothy Glover has left her three children (now in their late forties
and early fifties) free to pursue their own lives. And yet this
'freedom' seems pointless and illusory, for Dorothy's influence has
been such (especially in the cases of Helen and Edward) that there
appears little prospect of change, and little opportunity for real
choice.

Helen and Edward missed their chance long ago, having somehow
got on the slide from indecision to an inevitable self-perpetuating
arrangement (p.25). Neither managed to break free from Dorothy's
influence and control, and even Louise's 'escape' (marriage,
children, career) does not seem to have made her happy. Dorothy's
'passing on' means that the three Glover children must now come to
terms with the past in order to move confidently towards the future.
They too need to 'pass on', to let their past selves die. But this is not
an easy matter, as Penelope Lively demonstrates in a prose which is
elegant and clear, balanced nicely between gentle humour, hard
edged observation and a kind of muted celebration of the life process
itself.


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Indeed, there is a strong sense, in Passing On, that the change
process (which humans seem to find so uncomfortable) is simply a
part of the broader scheme of things. Tout passe, tout casse, tout
lasse (Everything passes, breaks, tires us out) is not just a world
weary French proverb for people who are tired of their marriage (see
p.58); it is also a formula for the natural world, which contains (and
constrains?) humans and animals alike, together with the birds,
insects and plants.

This sense of the rhythms and requirements of the 'natural' (non
human) world is brought out in the novel through Edward's
commitment to the cause of conservation. This commitment is
shown to be suspect, to be somehow connected with Edward's
personal problems, with his unwillingness to let go of the past and
to enter joyfully into the present. The idea of conservation has an
echo of conservatism, of reluctance to face the dynamic world of
change and impermanence. Both conservationists and conservatives
have a deep suspicion of change and progress, and this suspicion
usually has a rational grounding (developers, for instance, may be
promoting change for purely selfish and anti-social reasons); but a
refusal to accept change can also spring from a refusal to grow, to
accept the changes which are present in oneself.

Both Edward and Helen come to be aware, during the course of the
novel, that the unchanging nature of their lives has an 'unhealthy'
tinge to it and represents a failure to come to terms with something
within themselves. The television program on the barnacle geese,
for example (see pp.38-9) leaves Edward in a state of confusion,
anger and helplessness:

Edward, after that, found it difficult to sleep. In his head, the
goslings churned around with other, more personal, matters.
The peculiar savage twist to the distress he felt about the
goslings was that there was nowhere to direct one's outrage. It
was easier, in a way, to lie awake boiling about the barbarities
of Canadian seal-slaughterers or the ecological insensitivity of
English farmers. There was no one and nothing to blame for
the goslings. There was nothing to join, no one to whom to
send a contribution, no letter to be written to a newspaper.
(P-39)
The adult barnacle geese sacrifice fifty percent of their offspring to
the foxes who wait below the cliffs in a ritual which seems both
natural and appalling. But is the human process of parenting any
better? Helen and Edward have not been killed, but in many ways
their lives have been 'sacrificed' by a parent and there does not seem
any prospect of real growth. Penelope Lively focusses our attention
on the ways in which parents may cripple their children beyond
mending, leaving them ill-prepared to fend for themselves in the
dangerous world. But the novelist does much more than this. She
also brings us to see that there are important differences between
human beings and barnacle geese and she leads us, together with her
characters, towards a realisation that change is not only possible, but
inevitable.

In the following pages I would like to discuss the novel's
opposition between Sameness and Change and the fundamental optimism which emerges from what seems at times to be a bleak and
dour view of human affairs. But first, let's put a few questions
down in case you want to pause here and consider your own
reactions to this quiet and luminous text.



QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

1.	"Mother was not a nice woman..." (p.3): Helen's judgement
is not contradicted at any point, or by any other character.
What do you make of Dorothy Glover? Did she have any good
points at all? What, in your view, was her 'problem'?

2.	The Glovers have never fitted well into the community of
Greystones. Why is this so? What makes the family so
'eccentric'? Is their dotty rejection of contemporary life quite
sensible, even admirable? Give examples. In what senses (if
any) is their refusal to adapt to the modern world a sign of
deeper, more personal, problems?

3.	What are the immediately memorable features of Penelope
Lively's style of writing? Keen observation of detail?
Psychological acuity? Gentle humour? Economy of effort?

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Find examples of the features you admire (or detest!) about
her prose.


I. Sameness and Change

'Lovely place, this. Of course it's bound to get out of hand,
you've neither of you got the time to give it. You know, if it
was me I'd have a patio. Cut down on some of the grass--
give you an area for sitting out--York stone paving, swing
seat with an awning, very nice.' (pp.44-5)

Ron Paget is, course, the epitome of change. He has grown richer
and richer, drives a succession of late model cars, has acquired a
new (younger) wife, and so on. And the battle between Ron and
Dorothy about 'developing' the Britches goes on after Dorothy's
death, as both Helen and Edward resist their neighbour's
suggestions (see pp.75-6, for example). But their motives for
keeping the Britches 'unspoiled' are by no means clear. Dorothy
was not motivated by conservationist sympathies or by the desire to
hold on to the land until prices rose (p. 12); and perhaps it is not
altogether true, as Helen puts it, that Dorothy 'just liked saying no to
people' (p.34).

It is interesting to reflect on Dorothy's motives for leaving the
house to her grandson Phil while bequeathing the Britches to
Edward and Helen. One might impute a motive of concern, a
recognition that Edward and Helen would protect the land from
rapacious developers, or even that Dorothy knew her children would
continue the personal feud with Ron Paget. But there is also a sense
in which the Britches represents all that has been left unresolved in
the family's deeper life. Dorothy's bequest suggests to me that this
ungoverned tangle somehow lies outside the legal, economic and
social framework, that it has a special meaning for the family which
must not be disturbed. And the bequest also implies a strong belief
on the part of Dorothy that neither Edward nor Helen would dare to
change anything about their past lives, which seem to have been
completely dominated and shaped by their awful mother.

And yet, of course, the task of 'conserving' the Britches is just as
difficult as the decision to put the land on the market. The peace of

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the woodland is an illusion (Ron Paget's chainsaw screeches just
outside, and American F11s roar overhead!--p.56). Edward's
main activity is a constant war against nettles and brambles (pp.
118-9) and this activity is more of a social/human/personal
phenomenon than it is the work of a 'nature lover'. Helen notices,
for example, that Edward's work in the Britches is not so much a
matter of keeping everything 'natural', but of imposing his own
views of what nature should be:

. . . she noted Edward's recent efforts at clearance and
control. Left alone, the place would rapidly choke itself to
death, it seemed. Edward's interference in fact made
adjustments that favoured his own view of the direction nature
ought to take; nature itself generated a free for all. And in a
free for all there are those who survive and those who perish.
(p. 148)

The maintenance of the tangled and overgrown world of the
Britches represents less a desire to conserve the natural world
against predatory developers and more a refusal to come to terms
with the dynamism of life. Just as Edward occupies himself in
'protecting' the environment, so Helen becomes aware of her own
age-old practice of 'protecting' Edward, thereby martyring herself
and denying her essential freedom:

Protective. That, yes. One had no choice, really. Given
mother. Given Edward. (P-36)

And just as Edward's attempts to protect the Britches are finally
shown to be ineffectual, connected somehow to deep personal
problems rather than with matters of social principle, so Helen's
efforts on behalf of her brother are finally to no avail. Edward's
feelings are coming to the surface, now that his mother is no longer
alive and Helen is beginning to look for a more independent life
(more about her in a moment).

Edward endangers his teaching career at Croxford House with an
indiscreet remark about God (p.66) and a refusal to endorse the
school's competitive ethic (p. 139), and his diary entries change
from being 'scientific' to intensely personal, now that his mother
can no longer pry. Instead of annotations about migratory birds,

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botanical specimens and the effects of weather on the Britches
Edward begins to record his feelings and his growing conviction
that the world of nature is not really much of a comfort:

Neither spurge, cuckoo-pint nor woodpeckers will feel
satisfaction at this, of course, not indeed anything at all; they
exist, simply, and that is that. Exist, replicate	if
circumstances permit, and expire. The entire wood does that
and nothing else, year after year--the dominant emotion is
fear. When it sings and blossoms in the spring it is not happy;
it merely does what its genes tell it to do. Such subtleties as
happiness and misery are contributed by me, along with
satisfaction at increase of cuckoo-pint and survival of
woodpeckers. The point of all this being that...' (p. 163)

As his personal crisis deepens and his feelings emerge more
powerfully, Edward succumbs to the impulse to touch Ron Paget's
son Gary, who has been employed (significantly, perhaps) to clear
out the weeds and to plant a garden. Edward's bungling and panicky
'assault' threatens to wreck the family's fragile existence: Ron Paget
is keen to use the incident as a bargaining chip to obtain the Britches
(pp. 194-5) and Edward makes a pathetic attempt at suicide, which
Helen sheets home to her mother:

Phil nodded. They got Edward up again and slung him
between them. They trundled him up and down. Look, Helen
said to her mother: your son, your grandson. Now what have
you got to say? But Dorothy was nowhere, today; nowhere at
all. (p.201)

The efforts to keep everything 'under control' finally fail. The
disorder is irrepressible, the tendency to act out one's impulses
becomes almost as imperative as it seems in the world of nature and
the conservationist suddenly finds himself at odds with morality,
and with himself.

But if Edward's attempts to resist change do not come to anything,
what can we say about Helen's attempts to alter her life? On the
surface, she is the one who denied herself while at the same time
resenting the barriers (put up by her mother, extended by Edward)
between herself and a more spontaneous, self-actualising life. After

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her mother's death, it is Helen who shows the strongest signs of
wanting change. She buys a colourful sweater against the advice of
her mother's 'ghost' (pp.20-1), hires Ron Paget to make some
repairs to the house (pp:44-5), tries to introduce detergent to the
household washing-up (p.81), throws out the 'dead rabbits' (p. 134)
and (most radical of all) toys with the idea of a love affair:

She was immensely conscious of him. When his leg brushed
against her it seemed to burn her. I'm not sure how much of
this I can endure, she thought. She glanced at Giles; she had
no idea if he felt anything, or nothing. He was sipping wine
and talking about dogs. He had seen a sheepdog trial in
Cumbria: amazing creatures. It seemed to Helen that they
might sit there thus for ever. All my life, she thought, I have
let things pass me by.	(p. 154)

Neither Helen's efforts towards change, nor Edward's attempts to
preserve sameness, have any effect. Both remain locked in an
existence which promises little in the way of relief but which has,
nevertheless, changed in one obvious way (Dorothy is dead) and in
many subtle ways. However, despite the small changes taking
place, Helen fails in her desire for a love affair with Giles, and
Edward's efforts to suppress his homosexual urges do not succeed.
At the end of the novel, however, all is still not lost:

The Glovers sat opposite one another, silent, and pursued,
independently, the same theme. They saw that there is nothing
to be done, but that something can be retrieved. Both sniffed
the air; each, gingerly, made resolutions. (p.210)

Despite the failures of Edward and Helen, Passing On is an
optimistic book, (or at least I felt so) almost all the way through.
Before we look at the reasons why this should be the case, let us
pause again for a few questions.








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QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

4.	Why do you think Dorothy arranged her will in the way she
did? Is Louise right when she describes the whole process as
'a blatant piece of anti-feminism' (p.26)? Is there any sense in
which the division between the house and the Britches is a
'wise' one?

5.	Why doesn't the 'affair' between Helen and Giles come to any
satisfactory conclusion? Is it because Helen has failed to keep
abreast of the 'social etiquette' between men and women (see
pp. 105-6), or is it simply a matter of bad luck, of having
chosen the wrong kind of person?

6.	And what about Helen and Edward's encounter with the
finance people in London (pp.90-4)? Isn't there a sense (in
the world beyond the Crash of 1987) that their negative
approach to investment is sane and healthy, rather than quaint?
Is Edward right when he describes himself and his sister as
'not interested in surplus' (p.96)? What do you think Penelope
Lively is inviting us to think about the Glovers' whole
approach to finance (compared perhaps to the attitude of Ron
Paget)?



II. A Qualified Kind of Optimism?

Helen sat for a while in the kitchen and watched the rain. It
drove across the garden in white curtains. If it had rained
yesterday Gary Paget would not have come; what happened
would not have happened. Thus does the world dispose. Except, Helen thought, that it would probably have happened
at some other point, or differently and maybe worse--it was
part of a programme whose flexibility is maverick and
unpredictable. She thought again of genes, simmering away in
the body like invisible volcanoes, harbouring intelligence and
irascibility and shape of nose and the tendency to particular
diseases.


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It will pass. It may pass without further ado. Leaving damage
but not destruction. She wandered into the sitting room where
the rain still lashed the windows. The dark mass of the
Britches heaved and shuddered (p.191)

Where does our unhappiness come from? Is it programmed in us at
conception, 'simmering' away in our genes, or is it merely a matter
of upbringing, of the damage done to our psyche by a parent (like
Dorothy) who is herself un-loved, afraid of love, unable to offer
love? The emotional suffocation of the three Glover 'children', and
especially Edward and Helen, is almost a cause for despair. They
are such likeable people! And yet they seem to be able to do nothing
about their unhappiness, their sense of entrapment, their feeling that
life has passed them by. Edward and Helen are witty, cultivated,
intelligent, socially responsible, eminently sensible . . . and
doomed!

Nevertheless, the novel does not leave us with a sense of doom, of
fates which can never be changed, of lives which must inevitably
unwind towards continuing pain and frustration. It might be
interesting for you and your group to search out the 'positives' of Passing On and to pinpoint what it is that makes Penelope Lively's
novel so 'hopeful', even inspiring!

First of all, it seems to me, the sharp description of both the natural
and social world around the Glovers provides an additional
framework, a world beyond introspection and subjective misery and
which comes to life through the people who observe it. Passing On develops as a third person narrative, but the narrator is constantly
popping into the mind of Helen and Edward in order to let us see the
world as they see it, their gaze lighting gently and lovingly on the
objects and people around them:

Helen looked down. The water was a greyish green, streaked
with gold by the sun, and above it wheeled and drifted
numbers of birds. Others floated slowly downstream, sitting
upright like bathtoys amid a flotsam of bottles and skeins of
plastic and what seemed to be sandwiches, while several more
patrolled a little shingly beach almost beneath the piers of the
bridge.


9

'I thought they were just gulls at first,' said Edward. 'I could
see them from the windows in that place. Then I realised they
were terns.'
'I thought terns liked coasts and estuaries, not the middle of
cities?'
They do. That's the point.' (p.93)

This simple dialogue fits neatly with the narrative, placing the
observations within the characters themselves and not as extraneous
details provided by an omniscient narrator who sees so much more
than the characters do. The very real attachment to the natural world
is felt, not so much in the utterances of Edward and Helen as in the
way the text conveys their thoughts and observations to us. And
their capacity to bring the outside world to life is itself a kind of
value, a 'positive' which leaves the reader feeling optimistic about
the outcome of the changes which both characters are painfully
undergoing.

A second source of optimism is in the minor character of Phil, in
his cheerfulness, his youthful clarity of sight, his acceptance of
those things which the older generation are so appalled by. Phil (and
to a lesser extent Suzanne and Gary Paget?) represent the chaotic
and disordered aspect of nature (their 'rebelliousness', their studied
contempt for the problems of older people). But Phil in particular
also represents a hopeful view that The Kids Are OK, that the
younger generation is, if anything, less neurotic and more inclined
to human generosity than our own:

... Phil picked up a spoon and began to slurp tinned tomato
soup with relish. 'S' good, this. You had a nice day, Helen?'
She murmured something noncommittal. Phil continued to
radiate well-being. 'I been lookin' round Spaxton. S'a funny
little place, innit? I mean, it's got really stupid shops and
there's nowhere you could hang out with your friends, but
you can't help quite liking it. But I should think people would
get pissed off if they got to live there.'
Helen said, with an effort, 'Actually it's rather sought after.
People retire to it, or commute to London from it.'
'I mean people like me,' said Phil kindly.	(p. 187)



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This kind of relaxed (and utterly convincing) dialogue easily
establishes a kind of value in the young, respects their right to be
dogmatic and point up their essential fairness (look at Phil's reaction
to the news of Edward's homosexual preferences--p.201). And the
older people in the novel endorse this view (it is not a matter of the
omniscient writer telling us what she thinks!), dealing with their
younger relatives with a mixture of pettishness and good-humoured
acknowledgement. Just as the Glovers are sensitive to the natural
world around them, so are they also tolerant and understanding with
regard to those human beings who are, by the tenderness of their
years, still closer to nature than to society.

And I suppose the other important 'redeeming' feature of Passing
On is, for me, the gentle humour. This is an amusing book, full of
quiet wit and wisdom, looking in a mocking but kindly way at the
muddles in which people seem constantly to find (and lose!)
themselves. Think of Helen's reply to Joyce's remark about people
thinking that libraries are a free education service (p.65), or the bald
description of the two financiers (Striped Shirt and Pink Tie--
pp.92-3), or Helen's shrewd duelling with the rapacious Ron Paget
('Or I could put an advertisement in the Morris Minor Owners' Club
magazine...'--p.17). The very wit of the dialogue and the humour
of the narrative draw our attention to the life process itself, to the
rich and entertaining diversity in the midst of which we all live. The
decision of the Glovers to continue their steady path (insofar as it is
a 'decision') is perfectly in keeping with the vision of life made real
in the novel, a vision which is able to encompass pain and suffering
and frustration without forgetting to smell the flowers along the
way.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book and I hope that you did too.











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QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

7.	On the face of it, this is a bleak book, a book about loss and
failure. And yet it does not leave us feeling depressed (or does
it?). How does the writer achieve this paradoxical effect
(assuming that you agree with the notewriter that this is how
the novel works!)?

8.	What do you make of Phil? Is he a bit of a stereotype, or is he
a good portrayal of the conformism of his contemporaries?
How does Penelope Lively let us guess that there are deeper
qualities in this young person?

9.	And what about Louise? The novel does not spend a lot of
time on her experiences, but we still have the impression that
she also is unhappy, unfulfilled, and that her rebellion against
Dorothy left her no better off than her brother and sister.
Discuss her character with members of your group.

10.	Why does the attempted love affair with Giles not proceed
further? Do you think that Edward's 'lapse' might be an
unconscious act of sabotage, making sure that Helen would
remain with him as Protector? Look closely at Helen's sexual
dream (pp. 167-8), which is not about Giles. What is going on
here?

11.	If you had to find reasons to urge that a friend read Passing
On, what would you say to her/him in support of Penelope
Lively's novel?












12

PENELOPE LIVELY



Penelope Lively was born in 1933 in Egypt, where her father was a
manager in the National Bank of Egypt in Cairo. At the age of
twelve, not having so far received any formal schooling, she was
sent away to an English boarding school where she shared the
experience of so many others: 'five wretched years' in which she
learned little 'except endurance'.

At Oxford she studied modern history, worked as a research
assistant and in 1957 married Jack Lively, a research fellow.

Penelope Lively's earlier books were for children, and a number
were highly acclaimed. The Ghost of Thomas Kempe (1973) was
awarded the Carnegie Medal, Britain's highest award for children's
literature. In her writing for children and for adults Lively explores
her preoccupation with the passage of time. Her books for children
and young people often concern the past and aspects of English
history, whereas her novels for adults usually explore the pervasive
force of memory in our lives:

The one thing we all share is the capacity to remember; the
novelist tries to convey the significance and power of that
capacity in fictional terms, to make universal stories out of the
particular story that we each carry in our head. At its grandest,
this theme is the most compelling in all literature.
--Penelope Lively quoted in The Dictionary of Literary Biography, v. 14

The Children's Librarian at a local public library can help you to find
fiction titles written by Lively for children or young people. Her
novels for adults include:

The Road to Lichfield, 1977
Nothing Missing But the Samovar, 1978
Treasures of Time, 1979
Judgement Day, 1980
Next to Nature, Art, 1982

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Perfect Happiness, 1983 Corruption and Other Stories, 1984 According to Mark, 1984 Pack of Cards : Stories 1978-1986,1986 Moon Tiger, 1987 Passing On, 1989
City of the Mind, 1991
Compiled by Anne Stokes

Sources
Contemporary Authors, v.41-44 (1974), 381 Contemporary Literary Criticism, v. 50 (11987), 200-206 Dictionary of Literary Biography, v. 14: British Novelists Since
1960, Part 2: HZ (1983), 463-9 The Writers Directory 1988-90


























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