Ralph Hale Mottram

Ralph Hale "RH" Mottram FRSL (born October 30, 1883 in Norwich ; † April 16, 1971 in King's Lynn , Norfolk ) was a British writer who wrote more than 60 books including novels , short stories , poems , biographies , autobiographies , history books, Wrote travel reports as well as a study on the banking system . He was best known through The Spanish Farm Trilogy, 1914–1918 , which was first published as a trilogy in 1927 and was made up of the individual volumes The Spanish Farm (1924), Sixty-four, Ninety-four! (1925) and The Crime at Vanderlynden’s (1926), and for the first volume of which he was awarded the Hawthornden Prize in 1924 . Some of his works have appeared under the pseudonym J. Marjoram.

Life

Friendship with Galsworthy and The Spanish Farm Trilogy, 1914–1918

Mottram came from a progressive, liberal family committed to their own financial stability. Like his grandfather and great-grandfather, his father was Chief Clerk at Gurney's Bank in Norwich. He himself also took over the position of office manager at Gurney's Bank until 1927 and then devoted himself to writing after his book successes.

In 1904 Mottram met John Galsworthy , who encouraged him to write. This meeting and the subsequent close friendship with Galsworthy were the decisive factors for his writing development. The fact that Galsworthy ultimately became his mentor suggests something of the ambitions, but also limits of his own work, as they appear again and again as central characters in The Spanish Farm Trilogy , aging and changing with England, as in later books. As a result, Mottram appeared from a literary critical point of view as "little Galsworthy".

The influence of his family and his hometown, which is described in his books lovingly as archetypal provincial city, formed and ultimately changed his account of the change in the English way of life after the First World War . The First World War appeared immediately in many of his works, and the shadow and aftermath of that war also lay over most of his books. Like most men of his generation, he saw his pre-war childhood and adolescence as part of a “golden age”.

The Spanish Farm (1924) and its follow-up novels Sixty-four, Ninety-four! (1925) and The Crime at Vanderlynden (1926) were both individually and collectively successful in literary criticism, but also with readers.

The Spanish Farm , which contained a foreword by Galsworthy, was honored in 1924 with the Hawthornden Prize and later under the title Roses of Picardy filmed . The focus of the novel is Madeleine, a practical young French woman who is struggling to manage her father's farm despite the British army units that have been housed there again and again. During the war she lost her aristocratic lover and, because of her blind physical and emotional needs, she has a brief and almost meaningless affair in Paris with a young officer from Norfolk . As they split up, it becomes clear that their inability to communicate has as much to do with their national differences as they do with their individual differences, and ultimately only the war brought them together. The farm itself, which the Spaniards built centuries ago to protect their possessions in Flanders , serves the soldiers as a physical and mental respite from the horrors of war, and thus becomes an express symbol of human survival in the novel.

Sixty-four, ninety-four! repeats much of the previous novel, but from the point of view of Geoffrey Skene, the young British officer who is in love with Madeleine. Skene sees the war as a pointless catastrophe that befell his generation. He only goes to war because it is his duty and fate, and sees it that way until the end, when he is dismayed by the organizational mess and the waste of life. For him, Madeleine is everything that is desirable in so-called normal life, but made more difficult by the war. His English sense of romanticism and their French practical disposition would never have come together except through the general convulsions of the war.

In the third volume of the Spanish Farm trilogy, The Crime at Vanderlynden’s , Dormer, a bank clerk in Norwich, is even more saddened than Skene by the confusion, disorder, sloppiness and general bureaucratic chaos caused by the war. He endures the work trying to ensure efficiency in the small area that he can control. The focus of the plot is on the typical mess: a stubborn British soldier desecrates a previously ignored shrine of the Blessed Virgin on Madeleine Vanderlynden 'farm by housing animals for the night. The French authorities believe, based on their intentionally inflated but unintentionally ambiguous claim for damages, that Madeleine has previously used the shrine for other purposes. Skene and Dormer share a view of war that would lead the reader to believe that it is representative of their class and national heritage.

In the Spanish Farm trilogy, Mottram shows, with a sympathy that does not hide the limitations of his characters, the destruction wrought by the war on three non-combatants who survive because of their loyalty to their values. The straightforward, heavy-duty style seemed just right for the subject.

Later works and autobiography

The novel Our Mr. Dormer (1927), again with Norwich bank clerk Dormer as the main character, was a fictionalized story of his own family from the 18th century to the early 20th century . Geoffrey Skene, who meanwhile worked as a city architect and genre painter , also appeared in some novels . Europa's Beast (1930) is about the unsuccessful wedding of a young man who has remained behind as an emotional adolescent due to his war experiences, and a young man who seems to have stepped out of a novel by Evelyn Waugh , but has left the comedy behind.

The nostalgic influence of his own experiences shaped his memoir Autobiography with a Difference , published in 1938, like other works previously published after the Spanish Trilogy. The predominant theme and most important component of these books, regardless of the literary genre, is the search for what remains in the English character, coupled with an attempt to determine the nature, scope and significance of the changes in English life in the decades after the First World War.

In 1946, Visit of the Princess was a humorless comedy set in a future socialist England in which everyday economic and social benefits are ultimately linked to the continued existence of English values.

In Come to the Bower (1949), Skene and his second wife, Olive, adapt to provincial life after World War II after losing a son and undergoing a temporary separation. However, the novel is tarnished by the presence of an American professor exploring the English character; it gives Skene too many opportunities to talk about what his (and Mottram's idea of, the reader's) favorite subject is: the English moral heritage.

Due to his literary merits not only was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature , but also received an honorary doctorate in literature from the University of East Anglia in Norwich in 1966 .

More fonts

Mottram's numerous other publications include:

• Repose and Other Verses by J. Marjoram. 1907.
• New poems. 1909.
• Ten years ago; armistice & other memories, forming a pendant to The Spanish farm trilogy. 1928.
• The Apple Disdained: a Story. 1928.
• The Borough Monger. 1929.
• Home for the Holidays. 1932.
• The lame dog. 1934.
• Noah. Biblical Biographies Series, 1937.
• Traders Dream: The Romance of the East India Company. 1939.
• The Corbells at War. 1943.
• Buxton the Liberator. 1946.
• John Galsworthy. 1953.

in German language

• Nature and history of financial speculation. Original title History of financial Speculation. 1931.

Web links

• Biography (bookrags.com)
• Biography (literarynorfolk.co.uk)
• Biography (jrank.org)
• Biography (Wissen.de)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Der Literatur Brockhaus in 8 volumes, Volume 5, Leipzig 1995, ISBN 3-411-11800-8 , p. 292.
2. ↑ (abebooks.de)