Lost Books – Providings

The cover of the John Calder edition of Elspeth Davie’s 1965 debut novel, Providings, features a photograph of jars of homemade marmalade and raspberry jam, provisions (which the title deconstructs into a verb before adding an ‘s’ to create a noun again, focusing on the action rather than the object) that the novel will, indeed, focus on with the same unhealthy fixation as its protagonist, Peter Beck. Beck is a young man who has recently left home and is lodging with a Mrs Tullit and her family, who finds himself inundated with packages of homemade jam sent by his mother. The accumulation of jars has already put on hold his plan to change his lodgings frequently in an attempt to escape the constraints of the life he led at home:

“When two of his cupboard shelves were filled, he knew that he would not realise his freedom by moving in six weeks or so to other rooms.”

Davie even manages to make his mother’s gifts feel threatening by describing the occasional broken jar and Beck’s attempts to pick out the shards of glass from the jam. Beck’s efforts to rid himself of this burden (as he tells anyone who will listen, he does not particularly like jam) begin with his landlady (who already makes her own jam), and his work colleagues at the furniture shop, who each receive a jar. These exchanges are described at length as Beck’s connections with others become increasing centred on ridding himself of the jars:

“He left the shop as soon as he could, lightened of the heavy load he had brought with him in the morning, but at the same time a little oppressed by the contacts he had made through his gifts.”

Next, he offloads further jars by donating them to a jumble sale, only to turn up and be disappointed not to see them for sale but being used in the tearoom. His inquiries discomfit the woman he is asking – “Uneasiness had gradually stiffened the plump woman’s still kindly smile.” This is one of a number of examples of Beck’s awkwardness in conversation and reluctance to develop friendships. He often accidentally offends others, as when, on a rare day off at the seaside, he points out to the landlady of a guesthouse that the sea cannot be seen when the tide is out, or when he asks Mrs Tullit what “the essentials… of a room which you yourself would enjoy living in” are, which she interprets as an insult. In fact, Beck has been tasked at work with fitting out model rooms for the furniture shop. He is eventually inspired by a young woman, Clara, who comes to the shop, in which he perhaps finds a kindred spirit, showing interest in the rooms:

“Simply to get away. To escape up any flight of stairs, down any side lane. It’s all the same – a way out, even for a moment or two.”

Both Beck and Clara are searching for a freedom that remains elusive, but for Clara this lies outside a house:

“When I’m finished she’ll have given up any idea she’s ever had about tents, caravans, ships’ cabins and the like. What’s more, my place will have an air of freedom those other hideouts could never even touch!”

A house represents constraint for Clara in the way the jam jars do for Beck. “Walls are an anathema to her at the moment,” Beck tells the liftboy, Lukin, who is helping him construct his rooms, “To her four walls are a prison.” The jam continues to cause him anxiety as barrier to his, and her, freedom:

“Her mind is set on all the usual ideas of freedom. She wants to travel light… How will she manage that attached to a chap weighed down by dozens and dozens of pots of jam.”

She, too, has objects which weigh her down – a rug made out of the skin of dog, a wardrobe filled with the shoes of the dead. Davie is a very physical writer – though the question here is metaphysical – how can we be free? – in her novel it is acted out using the most deliberately banal objects – so banal, in fact, the novel almost veers into the absurd at times (for example when Beck spots a missing letter on a caravan’s sign which reads ‘Pearly hell’ instead of ‘Pearly Shell’ and he goes to a hardware store to buy a letter ‘S’, paint and brush). Providings is an early example of Davie’s skill at synthesising character and environment, where it feels as if the physical landscape the characters inhabit is as important as anything we discover of their internal life.

Tags: Elspeth Davie, providings