Hannah Stoneham's Book Blog

Once on a blog on fire

2011-12-30T11:00:00.000+01:00

In about 2000 Once In A House On Fire was everywhere, like a track that everyone was listening to except me. In book shops and coffee shops and on buses, the lot. I was working like a maniac for my A Levels at that time, on the final straight to my long time ambition, to get into Oxford. What with Chaucer and John Donne and Suetonius and John Stuart Mill and all the rest, a passing interest in Andrea Ashworth’s memoir, available in all good book shops and not the subject of an imminent examination, was put on the deal-with-me-another-day shelf.

That “other day” has just come to pass, and 12 years after first deciding upon it, I have read Once in a house on fire. It has set me on fire too. It is a candid, monstrous and poetic source of truth and light and I am amazed by it.

Andrea Ashworth’ story begins when she is 5 years old and her painter and decorator father dies in a freak accident, leaving her young mother a widow with two little girls to look after alone. There then follows a tale of two step-fathers, of beatings and punchings and unending anxiety. In addition to the violence, there is sexual abuse, although this is less serious and shorter in duration. It feels wrong to be calibrating such things but there you are. Andrea’s mother shrinks from a nice looking good time girl to a bruised and emaciated desperate heap of whom even kindly relations despair. All of this takes place against a backdrop of grinding poverty, potato dinners and periodical homelessness.

Most of us can remember things from childhood, but Ashworth seems able to remember things as they happened. Her memories do not have the feeling of having been re-processed and squished into convenient shapes and sizes. They are what they are. They are both real and urgent.

Like that other memoir of domestic warfare Chelsea Child, there is a mismatch between the deprived circumstances of the writer in childhood and her ability to write so fluently in adulthood: one is left wondering how she managed it. The big difference is that in the case of Once In A House On Fire, we know from the inside flap that Ashworth is (or at any rate was) a junior research fellow at Oxford. Therefore, we know that despite it all, somehow, she must find a means of escape. As a result, I for one raced through the narrative, looking for where the road out must be.

Truth, it turns out is stranger than fiction, and Ashworth was never on the receiving end of a “big break”. There were no towering intellectuals in the family or the neighbourhood, no amazingly inspirational teachers. She did get a scholarship, but could not take it up. So, she went to a bog standard school like all of her neighbours. Hers was the triumph of an outstanding mind against a sea of troubles and the terrible truth is that it must have been in some way attributable to those troubles. She is not too shy to acknowledge that.

The strange love and attachment which the abused feels for the abuser is dealt with – both in the person of Ashworth’s mother, and in the child herself who admits to remember the pulls of love towards men who beat her up and treated her as a household slave. There is nothing shy or pedestrian about this novel, and I find that I can’t say more than that.

Curiouser and curiouser: A Book of Secrets by Michael Holroyd

2011-12-02T11:00:00.000+01:00

I have always deeply loved the work of Michael Holroyd. On this blog, I have reviewed Basil Street Blues, and I have also enjoyed, but in a non-blogging way, his biographies of Augustus John, Lytton Strachey and his “group” biography of Ellen Terry, Henry Irving and their families. All of this Holroyd mania is based on something more than the simple fact that I enjoy reading about the people and periods that this writer addresses. I also find his narrative voice funny and intelligent and humane. But, even beyond that, the work of Michael Holroyd brings out some secret childhood part of me that does not otherwise get much of an airing. The reality is that if life had been different, I would vey much have liked to be a private detective.

I imagine myself, possibly in the 1920s or ‘30s with a flat in London, armed only with an A to Z, a good knowledge of Somerset House and an ability to get chatting to anyone. Like all romantic detectives, I believe that most of the time, things are traceable, and one discovery leads to another. If it doesn’t, then I am content to consign it to history. That appears to be how Michael Holroyd gathers information. He never seems to be in an awful hurry and he accepts, as all thinking biographers must, that there will be gaps, probably better described as gaping chasms, in his knowledge.

The reason for this gushing introduction is the enormous sense of sadness I felt, in reading the final chapter of his latest offering A Book of Secrets; Illegitimate Daughters, Absent Fathers, in which he describes it as “my last book”.

A Book of Secrets is about a collection of women, books and a place, that all connect to Ernest Beckett, second Baron Grimthorne, a 19th Century banker and have-a-go politician. Beckett had a wife and children and he also had mistresses and they had children. Holroyd focuses on those who resided and were born on the wrong side of the blanket. He alights first on Beckett’s mistress, Eve Fairfax whose bust was modelled by Rodin during her glory days and sold to a museum in Johannesburg in more straightened times. Then he moves to the potential offspring of a liaison between Beckett’s son and a married woman (whom he later married himself). From this his focus falls on Beckett’s most famous illegitimate daughter, Violet Trefusis nee Keppel. His adventures weave in and around the lovely Villa Cimbrone, near Ravello and take in the modern day survivors of his protagonists, both biological and emotional.

The story of Alice Keppel and her daughter Violet Trefeusis is well known already, as is the affair between Violet and Vita Sackville-West.

Really, I was most interested in Eve Fairfax. She fascinated me because I had never heard of her, and she seemed to sit on the edge of so many things. She appears to have suffered greatly for the fact that Beckett never married her and nor did anyone else. As a result, she ended her life destitute and rightly described as a “genteel tragedy”. She was positionless and that was her problem. Her contribution to history appears to have been an enormous scrap book, in which the great and the good were encouraged to write and stick things. We must assume that many of them did so under duress and with a degree of embarrassment. By the time Eve dies, she is 106 years old, and I almost wept for the sadness of her life. I felt that Holroyd was completely right in his comment that although she lived in Victorian and Modern times, she seemed to belong to neither.

A Book of Secrets is exactly that. It is by no means all worked out, but the mysteries are there, as is the desperate desire to know about oneself and others. It has been a pleasure reading it and I recommend it warmly.

Will anyone called VESEY please stand up?

2011-11-30T12:39:00.007+01:00

As some readers of this blog may have picked up, I really love names. I like to know why names were given to people and where they come from. If you had occassion (and I don’t suggest that you would) to give me a cheque, I would almost certainly take the opportunity to ask you what your middle names are.

Thus, in reading Elizabeth Taylor’s 1951 novel Hide and Seek, I spent a good deal of time pondering on the main male character’s name. Who ever heard of a man called Vesey? I certainly haven’t. I don’t even know how to say it. I wonder whether it is “vee-see” or “ve-see” or what. The name, although it is not really important speaks of the authenticity of the book. The characters are not made to please you, but readin of them one gets a powerful sense that they are real.

The novel concerns the love between Harriet and Vesey. Harriet and Vesey belong to the generation of people born in the early 1920s. In both cases, their parents were both more revolutionary and more conservative than they themselves were. Harriet’s mother was a suffragette and is appalled at the lack of ambition and idealism exhibited by her daughter. At the same time, she is a social conservative, desperate for Harriet to be settled. Vesey’s mother is a much more louche character but is not really interested in him at all. His aunt, who is to an extent in loco parentis to him, looks upon him as a dangerously radical person in the house and a hopeless layabout outside of it. Harriet and Vesey, for their part are twice embarrassed, first by parental exhibitionism and second by their own failure to really “do” anything.

Vesey seems confident, but he isn’t really. He talks a pretty big game, but in reality he lets himself and other people down on most, if not all, occasions. Harriet doesn’t seem confident and she isn’t confident. They are both crying out for a normal life, preferably in one another’s arms. Their chances seem to die on the alter of pride and repression and because neither is bold enough.

Thus, like many ladies before and since, Harriet marries another, less for love and more because nobody else has turned up. Her husband, Charles pursues her slowly and tenaciously. Rather than seducing her, he persuades her, and she is persuaded because she believes that Vesey is gone for ever.

In fact, he is not gone, but I will not spoil the book for those who have not yet been delighted by it. It develops into a beautifully balanced study on marriage and fidelity and love and I enjoyed it very much. It is all the more powerful as Elizabeth Taylor had a passionate affair during her own marriage (described by Nicola Beauman in her excellent biography The Other Elizabeth Taylor).

It is unquestionably well written and well constructed. I found myself caring about the characters. As a study on the nature of marriage, its powers and its frailties, I must say that it has not knocked the wonderful Someone at a Distance off my top spot.

Other excellent opinions can be found at Frisbee, Daydreams and Delights, Harriet Devine and Book Group of One.

Norwegian Wood: too much sex, not enough cats

2011-11-18T11:00:00.000+01:00

Last year a truly lovely Japanese lady, who I now miss very much, introduced me to the work of Haruki Murakami. She recommended Kafka on the Shore which I read slowly but with great enjoyment. It is the kind of book that surprises you at every turn but not in the usual way. It is not a case of dramatic “you-didn’t-see-me-did-you” twists. Rather, it is like stepping through a series of new paradigms, each slightly stranger than the last. Just the sort of thing I like. And there are talking cats, so you can’t ask more than that.

Because it is all so odd, I decided not to jump into Murakami feet first. I thought that he is probably the mind of writer who repays careful and considered consumption.

Thus I find myself, well over a year after Kafka, having read my second Murakami, Norwegian Wood.

As you may be able to guess from the title, this novel has its feet planted firmly in the 1960s. It is the nostalgic memoir of an enigmatic student in Tokyo, Toru, who is up to his ears in free love and student protests. He is smart and interesting and as his girlfriends comment, he does have a funny, spare kind of way of talking. His problem is that his best friend has committed suicide and Toru has responded by, essentially falling in love with the best friend’s girlfriend.

It does not take long to work out that the girlfriend is none too well either. Through her Toru meets a kindly middle age woman whose life as a mildly unhappy provincial piano teacher has been destroyed by false accusations of sexual assault from an adolescent girl.

At the same time, Toru starts seeing another girl who accosts him as he eats alone in a restaurant. Midori is vibrant and funny and seems very real. She talks about sex incessantly and in great detail. If she were a modern day girl, she would definitely be a text-pest. Apart from the girls, and Toru’s conservatively minded room mate, whom he names “storm trooper” to amuse others, Toru only really has one friend. That friend is an almost pneumatically promiscuous clever clogs called Nagasawa. Nagasawa has the sweetest girl in town and cheats on her all the while, except that he doesn’t really see it as cheating.

As I read, I imagined Toru as a young man, good looking but not extremely so, ordinarily dressed. He is standing up and surrounded by the girls and the dead friend and Nagasawa and they are all prodding him, trying to push him their way. He has before him the living and the dead and the nearly dead as well as the pursuit of love and the pursuit of non stop you know what.

I enjoyed his tale and thought it was good. I am not sure that I thought it was more than good though. I was surprised that it was a straight story, albeit quite a poetic one. I am ultimately saddened by the lack of talking cats.
For many, Norwegian Wood is their favourite Murakami and there are plenty of other, differing opinions to be found. Some of them can be seen at: Katie’s Book Blog, Steve Reads and Middlebrow Magazine.

Good morning, Mexico City

2011-11-16T11:00:00.000+01:00

OK - so I am not actually there now, and this picture is about 3 weeks old. Still cool though...

Made in Chelsea circa. 1930

2011-11-14T11:00:00.000+01:00

I ordered Chelsea Child by Rose Gamble from Amazon and, to be honest, I was a bit surprised when it turned up. It had been recommended by a friend but I didn’t know anything about it. I do however live quite near to Chelsea, so I do know about that. But when this book rocked up I was stumped. The battered dust jacket spoke of a family of 7 living in 1 room and scraping a living on the wages of a char. I knew that Chelsea, now pad of choice to the super rich, had once been popular with artists. However, Chelsea’s history as a slum town was a complete revelation to me.

But that history is here, between the covers of an almost completely forgotten and certainly out of print memoir. Reading it has been like discovering an extra blanket on the bed during a cold night.

The Chelsea Child in question is Rose Naylor, or Rowie as she is know in her family. Rowie is one of 7 children who live with their parents in 1 room of a structurally unsound shack in circumstances of staggering privation. They eat scraps, sleep on tables and wash in the water used to prepare their dinner. As I read, I squirmed at the thought but also at the knowledge of my own softness.

Each child exhibits an iron loyalty to their Mother who slaves to feed cloth and care for them. She works all hours and runs home in her lunch break to cook dinner for her family. Their Father is a different kettle of fish altogether. He is a domestic monster. Frustrated by his own unemployment and emasculated by his wife’s industry and hard work, he lingers around the inadequate home, bubbling with rage. There is, in consequence domestic violence which is terrible to read. Almost worse however, is the constant threat of temper. His disposition sits in the corner of the room like a dirty bomb that may be set off at any time by some unwitting word or action, wholly innocent and unremarkable to any other living soul.

But if I have given the impression that this is some sort of misery memoir, then I have done it wrong. It is funny, well written and wholly without self pity. Rowie and her sisters are funny, clever and enterprising, sometimes in surprising ways. When the hospital in which they are each treated demands contributions, they stage a street version of “Little Women”, with the Naylors in the title roles. Rowie describes the production thus:

“We swept the yard and tried to board up the chickens. Geogie ad Lu humped the junk from the shed back to clear a space for the stage and hung the green curtain from Lu’s bed over a washing line in front of it. Ethel lent a couple of kitchen chairs in case there were any adults – everyone else would have to sit o the ground. Advertising was by word of mouth, with threatened bashings from Lu and Georgie if any of their own particular mates failed to turn up. But a concert was rare and our neighbours knew us, and they came. The yard was packed and some had to hang out of the scullery window. The play was unrecognisable and the audience totally baffled by the plot, but it was all made worthwhile by the deathbed scene”.

These children are literate and imaginative and industrious. In their own day they would have been known as “slum children” but they give the lie to the idea that the poor are or ever were, stupid. They survive on their wits, their humour and their hard work and they are a challenge to us all for it. Rowie is charming and confident and self-reliant and she gets that from her family. Her mother, her siblings and her neighbours are the source of her wonder. She values herself and so came to be valued by me, one of her readers.

In addition to being a touching family and individual story – the book is a disquisition on history and the little life. The family is plagued with illness. They suffer Diphtheria and Meningitis. They live on a diet which would shock a church mouse. But at the same time, they are fit as fiddles and would put my flabby frame to shame. They are of their age. History is the thing that sweeps them up and moves them on, and in a way, they don’t have much to do with it. Thus, they are transported around the city in the pre-war slum clearance and housed in a flat so spacious and luxurious that Rowie cannot sleep. After that the war comes and scatters them for good.

There is a constant tension to this memoir. The children speak cockney but the prose is perfect received English and there is no real explanation as to why that would be. Rowie is clever, and goes to a posh school, where she struggles in a good natured but very obvious way to adapt to a radically different society. She is a bright girl, but she doesn’t cover herself in glory academically and I find myself wondering desperately – what happened to her? I know that she wrote her memoir and that she read it on Radio 4 but other than that her destiny a delicious mystery.

Slightly below the Whipple line

2011-10-07T11:00:00.001+02:00

I have been on trains a lot recently, and apart from explorations with my new iphone (how did I not realise that I needed one before?), I have mostly been reading The Priory by Dorothy Whipple. I liked it. It was fun. It was good company. That said, a corner of my soul was a bit disappointed. The reasons are firstly that I loved loved loved Someone at a Distance, and so I had extremely high expectations. Secondly, I think that in reading this book, I have finally understood what Carmen Calil meant by “below the Whipple line”. It has plenty of good features. Like all Persephones, it is well-written. The problem that it is just not a satisfactory novel.

Let’s start with the good bits. The Priory is Saunby Priory, which we are given to believe is somewhere in the Midlands. Its days as a priory are well over by the opening of the novel and it has been, for generations in the hands of the Marwood family, who live there. Its owner is Major Marwood, and because he cannot afford to fix everything, he chooses to fix nothing. Basically, it is going to rack and ruin. The novel follows the travails of Major Marwood, his family and others who know them. All of the characters are in some way linked to the Priory itself.

The emphasis of the novel shifts around like a searchlight in a forest. For the first few chapters, the focus is very much on Anthea, the big-boned, middle-aged lady whom Major Marwood chooses for his second wife. He hopes for administrative assistance rather than romance and Anthea’s struggles to get it right and to be loved are touching and convincing. From Anthea, the spotlight switches to a below-stairs love triangle between two of the Priory’s maids and Major Marwood’s most ridiculous extravagance: Thornton, his paid, live-in cricketer. In its final sequence, the stage is dominated by Major Marwood’s two daughters, Christine and Penelope, and in particular by Christine.

If the novel has a heroine, then it is Christine. Christine is the person who realises and gives voice to the fact that they are all inextricably linked to the house, but also that the house, and its lack of usefulness is the problem. Not only is it too big to house a clutch of unproductive plonkers who can’t afford it. It is not what it was meant for. It was built to house a community, and it has been diverted from its purpose, to everybody’s detriment.

History looms large but subtly over this novel. It is set in the late 1930s, and with varying levels of consciousness, all of these characters are under the shadow of the coming war. The resolution of the novel (which is an ecstatically, nay, ludicrously happy one), coincides with the Munich crisis. The novel ends with its characters, like almost everyone else in Britain at the time, believing that war had been averted. As readers, we know different. Saunby is exactly the sort of house that was either sold or given to the National Trust after the war and this provides an interesting side conceit to the whole thing.

So what’s the problem? Well, there are a few. Firstly, in order to resolve the seemingly intractable problems of the characters, Whipple sacrifices convincingness. It just isn’t credible that the novel would be resolved as it is. The characters change their positions like weather vanes. Those who have rebelled, retract their rebellions. Walls that have been built are knocked down. Themes which have been carefully developed are dropped like stones. It reads like it was finished in a desperate hurry.

One of the main themes of the novel is how people deal with infidelity. This is a theme shared with Someone at a Distance, and it is one which Whipple takes seriously and does well. In The Priory, responses to infidelity are dealt with together with parenting. Some characters are pretty much neglected. Others are stifled with care and love and attention. Others are stifled with material comforts by their parents, and as a result are profoundly unhappy. They are unable to do anything or be anyone because they, even in adulthood, are so dependant on their parents. This theme was powerfully developed throughout the novel, but when it came to the ending, Dorothy Whipple pretty much ignores it. She rides roughshod over all of the well constructed themes that she has worked through the narrative.

I am tempted to sign myself: Disappointed, of London town.

There are other opinions to be found at My Porch and A Book A Week.

Mostly being modern and romantic

2011-10-03T10:00:00.000+02:00

I have discovered this week, just as I am closing the back cover on Alexandra Harris’ Romantic Moderns, that she has now published another book – this time on Virginia Woolf. It is better to come to something a little late than not at all. Romantic Moderns is a book which I have had for yonks, but which I have enjoyed eating slowly and out-of-order. It is as broad as it is long, and being a history of the English imagination in the 1930s and 1940s, it is given to such staggered consumption.

The central thesis is that the English were not, as previously believed, excluded from modernism. The orthodox view is that artistically and imaginatively, the English were and are a pastorally minded lot, a nation of romantics whose art is figurative and whose literature is linear. The struggles of artistic abstraction and surrealism to take off here are often called as witnesses to this phenomenon.

For what it is worth, I have never thought that it is quite right. There isn’t a line with modernists on one side and traditionalists on the other. What Harris does is examine this issue from all sorts of angles including art, literature, food, church and village. She says again and again that English artists and writers of this period were modernists whose explorations borrowed from and were informed by the more traditional past. They were not making the world afresh; their modernism had to do with re-interpretation.

She focuses on a group of well-chosen “Romantic Moderns” who individually and collectively illustrate her point – such as John Piper, Virginia Woolf and Bill Brandt. The passage in which she talks about the paintings in Berwick Church by Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell is excellent and took me right back to that wonderful church (discussed on this blog back in January).

It would be an impossible task to catalogue all of the “Romantic Moderns” of the period, but one of the best things about this book is that it feels like it is the tip of the iceberg.

The discussion of the ungodly Bloomsbury bunch using a church for a gallery, and being used themselves as the organs of religious expression put me in mind of Rupert Lee, an artist of the same period (and a friend of Bell and Grant), who has featured on this blog before. Lee, who was 10 years the president of the avant-garde London Group of Artists, and who was at the forefront of British surrealism, also produced religious art, which I discovered myself at St Mary the Less in Cambridge and at the nearby Foxton Parish Church. He was not religious himself, but this art formed a part of his cultural world. His modernism was complex and there was more than one colour in his pallet.

The same can be said of the English writer, Barbara Comyns whose writing borrows from the pastoral and the traditional but seems to write it afresh with a different eye and a different voice. Her writing has been called English magical realism, by which I think is meant that it is not full blown magical realism, but it feels magic all the same.

I particularly thought of Comyns when reading Harris’ chapter on village life. Almost all of Comyns’ adult life was lived in cities, but her writing was heavily influenced by her childhood in the Warwickshire village of Bidford-on-Avon. She focuses on village life to an extent which was common amongst writers and artists of the period, and she plainly felt that it was not an unviable mode of living, killed off by modernism. That having been said, she was not a proselytiser. Much of her work, especially the recently re-published Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead emphasises that the smallest communities can be the cruellest.

The division between the city and the country, the modern world and the old one was not and is not straight forward, and long may it continue.

And they all rolled over and one fell out: Wait for Me!

2011-09-30T10:00:00.000+02:00

When I first read that Deborah Devonshire AKA the Dowager Duchess of Devonshire; Deborah Mitford; Debo; Stubby; Stublow etc was publishing memoirs my first thought was how can the world possibly need more Mitford porn? For 6 posh sisters from Oxfordshire of whom only 1 survives, they have sure generated a lot of literature. Maybe a little too much. There are endless collections of letters and biographies and collective biographies and so on. All except Pamela (who was famously private) and Unity Mitford (who died in 1948 after attempting suicide at the outbreak of war) contributed to the oeuvre from their own pens. So how can another one possibly be worth reading?

Well, somehow it is. It is quick, sure footed, funny, unsentimental writing. As usual, I find myself rather in love with Farve: “Occasionally Farve gave Muv a night off [from chaperoning Debo to balls during her first season]. He refused to take part in the festivities and never penetrated as far as the ballroom, but sat o one of those rickety hall chairs common to all big London houses, still in his evening cloak. One distraught hostess approached him and asked “Lord Redesdale, would you take the French Ambassadress into supper?” … “NO” he said furiously, “I’m waiting for Stubby” . It must be the Telegraph reader in me.

Debo deals with the tragedy and infamy of which everyone knows, but somehow, with new eyes. The passages in which she writes about the death of her sister Unity, the separation of her parents, the re-connection with her runaway sister Decca and the betrayal of her sister Diana by her sister Nancy have a strange, restrained flatness about them. She makes it clear that these events were enormously painful, without going on about it. That is what I like so much. She doesn’t really “go on” about anything (except perhaps the foundation of the Chatsworth shop, but then everyone has their foibles). She is plainly disinclined to peer into the private lives of others and more than once comments of some famous person in her history with the words: “his private life was his own”.

My revised opinion on Mitfordia is not that there should be no more books, but that all secondary commentary ought to be banned. This is a case where the horse’s mouth is preferable and since there is plenty of it about, that is all that Mitford lovers need. On that note, I shall stop typing now, except to say that there are other interesting reviews at Book Group of One, Savidge Reads and Amused, Bemused and Confused.

A visit to Cookham

2011-09-26T11:00:00.000+02:00

When he was s student at the Slade, the visionary painter Stanley Spencer, who regular readers of this blog will know is one of my all time favourites, was known by the name of his home village, the Berkshire then-hamlet of Cookham. This is a mere glimpse of the sights that we saw on a recent trundle there.

And if this scene looks familiar.....

This is probably why...

OK, maybe it wasn't familiar, but it *is* the same place.

I am glad that I don't live in Cotter's England

2011-09-23T11:39:00.008+02:00

I am sitting here of a sunny September morning wondering what on earth to make of Christina Stead’s 1966 novel, Cotter’s England. On one level reading it was a bloody awful experience. In fact, Reading it reminded me of a recent visit to the Dartmoor Prison museum during which I was saying t myself “OK so this is all very interesting but how do I get out of here?”. The book is a shapeless rambling shamble of hopelessness. Its characters are either actively hideous or weak of will. Watching the nice ones amble through their disastrous lives manipulated and tortured by the very worst is right up there with A Handful of Dust for frustrating literary experiences. But then, I guess, that is kind of the point. Cotter’s England is a discursive, experimental disquisition on its subject – the radical fringe of the post-war working-class left-wing in England.

Its main character is Nellie Clark nee Cotter, and Nellie is proper-horrific. She is a morally repugnant, intellectually incoherent manipulative piece, and if you ever had the misfortune to meet her, you would give her a wide berth. She is tea-drenched, whisky-sodden and when she is not pontificating she is coughing her guts up. She feigns a cloying familiarity with everyone and is close to no one. She prays on the dispossessed and under the auspices of caring for them, drives them into depression and one case, an early grave.

The drama ricochets between grimy London and grimy “Bridgehead” (aka Gateshead). In Bridgehead we are introduced to the Cotter clan, the drunken father, the cloying mother, the frustrated sister Peggy and the butt of all sorts of abuse; poor Uncle Simon. I don’t consider myself to be a feint hearted reader (although it would not surprise me if other disagreed!), but the constant mean acts of domestic violence against this helpless old fool left me feeling drained of strength myself. A case in point: “the next day things were much worse. Tom came downstairs at one moment in time to see Uncle Simon shrink back and Peggy strike him on the temple with a greasy saucepan”.

The reason that this book feels like a creature from another planet is that people don’t really write books like this anymore. It is a political novel, a story about a class of people in politics and about politics and class. It addresses the tension between the advancement of the individual and that of the community and tries to set its characters in the context of communities that both inspire them and also shackle them down. I do not know, and I cannot decide from my reading of the novel, whether Stead is trying to make general comments about the corruption of the far left in the ‘50s, or whether she is trying to suggest that the left somehow can’t accommodate these personalities without them deserting the cause before they have actually achieved anything for the generality of people. A taster, to show what I mean:

“What do you mean by Cotter’s England?” she cried out. “What’s wrong with my England?”
“The England of the depressed that starved you all to wraiths, gave Eliza TB, sent your sister into the Home, got your old mother into bed with malnutrition, ad is trying it on with me, too, getting at my health. I never had an ache or pain in my life: I beat their England. I lived through the unemployment, the starvation, the war, I knocked out a few bloody eyes and I got me fists skinned a few times, that’s all I ever got: and now I’m going to live for my country. You stay here and die in it. Don’t you want to change it? Or is it only the beer-soaked sawdust of Bohemia that you love? The dirt and sweat of the tear-stained bachelor’s bedroom; Bridgehead in all its glory? You don’t know what you’re fighting for. To change Cotters’ England. Wasn’t that what drove you on? Or just ragged rebellion?”

Sobering stuff, and powerful, if a little toe-curling.

I have included a picture of the author and the two Virago covers (of which the one I have is of the lady standing). I have also included another book cover that I found and which I think “gets” the book rather more exactly than the Virago choices.

The Hare with Amber Eyes: a world where only the smallest survive

2011-08-23T10:30:00.000+02:00

It would be nice to think that when I finally get around to chasing down my family history, that it will be pan-global rags to riches to rags tale of glamorous balls, old master acquisition and commercial trailblazing, but I kind of doubt it. I also doubt that there is any single object that has traversed the narratives of any more than 3 generations of my family. Edmund de Waal does not have these problems, and that is why his book, The Hare with Amber Eyes is so wondorous.

The eponymous hare is a tiny smooth toggly object which you can hold in your hand and slip in to your pocket. It is one of 264 Japanese “netsuke” which were carved in wood and ivory in the 18th Century and found their way into the ownership of the Ephrussi family in 19th Century Paris. The Ephrussi were a Jewish banking family whose ascendency had begun with trading grain in their native Odessa, then part of Russia. They became rich, very rich. They spread out to Vienna and Paris and London. They founded a bank. They were a Jewish family and their sons and daughters married the children of other wealthy Jewish families. They numbered workers and shirkers and scholars and lovers among them.

The netsuke collection was stroked by Renoir and Proust in Paris. From them and there it progressed to Vienna when it was stored in the dressing room of a wealthy banker’s wife, held only by her and her children and servants. When the Nazis stormed into requisition everything in sight, the size of the netsuke, which is what makes them so curious, became the reason for their survival. Being tiny was their defence against plunder. They were squashed into a mattress upon which a lady slept and they were carried to Tunbridge Wells in a small attaché case. Not to be bound to one continent, they were displayed for many years in an idyllic house in Tokyo.

Is this a history through objects or a study of objects through history?

I was being my hasty self when I suggested that this story was wholly extraordinary. Of course, it is quite extraordinary, but it is also like many others. How many people find themselves on the wrong side of history? How many people can predict the events of their own epoch? Can know when the bastards are coming for them, and get away in time? Not many, that’s how many. The feet of history march hard and march fast. Most of the Ephrussi fortune was lost when they found themselves on the wrong side at the end of the First World War. The holocaust did for the rest. The netsuke are the legacy of the Ephrussi’s moment in the sun. They represent and illustrate loss and survival.

Now, there is a netsuke shaped hole in my life. Maybe a toggle will have to do….

For those who are interested, a gallery of the netuke can be seen here.

The hand that first held mine: am I the last person here to read this book?

2011-06-23T10:30:00.000+02:00

Mystery, family secrets and bohemian London are three of my favourite things and I am fairly well chuffed to have discovered them, in combination in Maggie O’Farrell’s The Hand that First Held Mine. I know that everyone else in the English speaking world read this ages ago, but there you are.

This is a story of two halves with elements of interplay and a last minute link that I will not spoil for those who have not yet had the pleasure. The first half is the story of Lexie Sinclair, convention-challenger and independent spirit of the 1950s. The second half belongs to Elina, young artist and new mother, and her boyfriend Ted who live in modern day Hampstead.

Books are often described as “cinematic” and most of the time I find myself thinking “well, feels more like a story in a book to me…” but not this time. The Hand that First Held Mine feels quite a lot like a film. The hoving in on the subject at the beginning swoops accurately like a camera: “Listen. The trees in this story are stirring, trembling, readjusting themselves. A breeze is coming in gusts off the sea, and its almost as if the trees know, in their restlessness, in their head-tossing impatience, that something is about to happen”. There are strange and unexpected flashes forward and flashes back. Very early in the book we are instructed to visualise the following: “Watch. Innes sucks in a nimbus of smoke, lifts a cigarette stub from the ashtray, appears to envelop Lexie in a shirt and push her across the room, the pillows jump on to the bed and they are both naked and, goodness, doesn’t sex look oddly the same in reverse”. Geddit? O’Farrell has a wonderful sense of people as actors, of life as reel.

There is a family mystery in this book which is not explained until then
end although I suspect that most readers will guess and get it roughly right. It is not an impenetrable puzzle but that makes it all the better. It speaks to me of how many little mysteries there must be, not all as dramatic as this one, in all families and under all noses. It also speaks of something that I for one find rather tantalising – the idea that places somehow “remember” events and that people can retrieve the long buried treasure of their memories by visiting them. This happens to Ted, subtly at first, and then dramatically. I wonder whether O’Farrell is suggesting that it is the place, or the action that has left the mark on the individual memory?

The book could easily be sub-titled “a disquisition on motherhood”, although this may not have encouraged sales. The actual title is a reference to the overwhelming power of the mother-child connection – a theme which is amply developed in the novel itself, and which I can readily recognise myself. A splendid read.

There are other opinions to be found at Harriet Devine’s Blog, Leafing through Life and The Sleepless Reader. Pictures are the book cover, the author and a random picture taken in Soho in the 1950s. If you feel a sense of recognition, there might just be a reason…

Don't say "what", say "pardon" darling, and do as the Provincial Lady tells you....

2011-05-27T12:13:00.008+02:00

Finally reading E. M. Delafield’s Diary of a Provincial Lady has been a proper homey sort of pleasure, and not just because I am now able to fully understand Simon at Stuck in a Book’s shorthand …. It is a funny and engaging read although, and I am wondering quite how to put this, it didn’t set me on fire if you know what I mean.

The Provincial Lady, or PL as she is known to those who love her is the married Bridget Jones of the 1930s. Now, before you all cry in protest, there are more than a few similarities. Both PL and BJ are profoundly English, profoundly middle class characters who harbour slightly lefty views without knowing quite how to express them. They both recognise the absurdities of the narrow world they live in, but in a kindly way, and knowing that they are an inextricable part of it. Neither of them know how to get out of situations they don’t want to be in. They both write a not quite daily diary, not least because they are both quite funny and intelligent and life just doesn’t offer sufficient opportunities for them to show it. Which brings me to my last, resounding similarity: these are two girls who are really of their ages.

PL is a married lady of the home counties with a husband glued to the Times, a demanding French nanny, a son at a school she can’t afford and a daughter begging to be sent to any school, a woeful lack of servants and a constantly mounting overdraft. Because she is actually rather lovely, she is much in demand. There is Our Vicar, Our Vicar’s Wife, Lady B and numerous others constantly chasing her tail. PL is a dreamer after literary recognition and an imaginer of glamour and society. She lacks social assertiveness, but maybe she would not be as nice if she had it. She is a shopper and a luncher and a reader of novels over cups of tea. She is a mum who wants to be a star, and who can blame her. I loved the slight decadence of her character.

There is another side to all the spending and the dreaming of course and that is a lack of consideration for those who are less fortunate. I see this but it does not diminish the book for me. Books, like life, are not full of perfect people. E. M. Delafield, who I suspect was writing from experience has captured perfectly the displaced arrogance of the English upper middle classes in the interwar years, when they could still recall a luxury life but could no longer afford it. I am not weeping for them, but it is good to hear the story from the horses’ mouth.

So why the lack of fire? Well, I suppose that after a while, I found it a tiny bit boring. Once I had met Our Vicar’s Wife a few times, and realised that PL’s husband Robert was never going to put down the Times and come over all Don Juan and that PL probably didn’t want him to anyway, I felt that I had got the gist. Some have loved this book more and some a lot less. There are interesting opinions to be found at Serendipity, My Porch, A Good Stopping Point, Behind the Curtain and Pining for the West. I have included pictures of book covers and of the author.

The return of the weekly portrait: Christina Stead

2011-05-24T10:00:00.000+02:00

I am enjoying Cotter's England so much, there is simply nothing else for it. Here is a picture of its author, Christina Stead. More of it and her later ...

Vivia Ibiza! (and Formentera...)

2011-05-18T10:00:00.000+02:00

I wish I could say that the reason my blog has been a bit of a wasteland recently is because I have been in Ibiza in manner of hippy ex-pat. Sadly, this is not true, but I have been there for a week, and these are some of the sights seen:

Not so meek: the People’s Act of Love

2011-05-16T10:00:00.000+02:00

The People’s Act of Love by James Meek is one of those books that I have been carting about, unread for years. Well, those years were wasted years, because it is brilliant. Although, it has to be said that it is not exactly gentle. It is a story about cannibalism, terrorism, castration, starvation, mutilation and general brutality. It abounds with ice, blood, isolation and fear. Its people are people who, in their various ways, are not fully human. When their humanity does show, it is all the more marvellous for it.

The stage is a town deep in Siberia in 1919, under shaky military rule. The temporary governors are regiment of Czechs longing for home but knowing that it is far away and will probably never come. They sit at the end of the Trans-Siberia railway, like ducks, waiting for their Bolshevik attackers. The town subject to their rule is home to a collective of castrates, Christians of a sort who worship sexlessness and separateness.

I can’t decide whether The People’s Act of Love works best as a novel of groups or a novel of individuals, but I think that is partly the point, because this is a book about the tension between collective and individual values. On the one hand, the entrapment of the Czechs is perfectly rendered. On the other hand, the portrait of its leader, Matula, who is a vicious petty-tyrant trapped at the head of a paper army in a town of castrates, held in place by a circle of muscle and weakness, is one of the best elements of the novel. He is every inch as rotten as any other character.

There is an end of the world feeling about The People’s Act of Love. By that, I don’t mean that it is apocalyptic. I did not feel that there was a sense that this world was heading for disaster; but rather that when disaster happened, nobody would know or care apart from those present and that were it not for the hidden eye of the novelist, history would never know. That makes it sound more depressing than it is. There is a touching love story here, between the Jewish Czech army officer, Mutz, the gentle castrate Balashov and widowed mother, Anna, whose destructive, voracious promiscuity makes her the subject of unwarranted disgust in this tiny town. They are outsiders all. What is it which holds all of these people together? Is it love, and if it is, is their love different to other people’s loves? Is there a difference between loving a person and loving an idea?

All these questions; and I haven’t even got on to the cannibal yet. The presence of a man who kills and feeds on man and is of super human strength and stamina somewhere in or around the town is the dramatic centre point of this novel. It is terrifying, not in a cheap way, but in a precise, chilling savage way. It holds so much in its focus, and asks so many questions, without becoming cluttered. It is a perfect horror. Hang on to your hats, and trust your instincts say I!

Plenty of ink has been spilt about this book, and I have enjoyed this piece in The Guardian by Irvine Welsh, as well as blog posts by Booklit, Keep the Wisdom and Gibberish.

Someone at a distance: the book that nearly broke my heart

2011-03-23T10:00:00.000+01:00

I started reading this book on the district line in snatched moments; I took it to Rome with me and read a bit there and on the plane. I am not sure when it was that this book started to grip me. At first I was thinking – ok so this is a domestic novel; like lots of Persephones it is almost achingly well written; there is a strong sense of the 1950s; it is very English; it is very restrained.

But somehow, somewhere, it transformed into a heart breaking work of staggering understated power. I cannot believe that when it was published it did not get a single review. It really did nearly break my heart. It also took me rather by surprise.

Its focus is the marriage of Ellen and Avery, an upper middle class, middle aged couple of the Home Counties in the early 1950s. It tells you straight on the back cover, and I am not really giving anything away when I say that their comfortable life is pretty much destroyed by the arrival of Louise; a French lady’s companion. Louise is a sort of serpent character. She is a truly horrible, self serving piece of bitterness and I can’t imagine that she has many fans amongst the reading public. Through her extraordinary personality she provides a relief, against which Avery and Ellen’s marriage is destroyed and then re-made in a tiny way.

Marriage as an idea emerges from the novel in an odd way. I think that Dorothy Whipple must have rather believed in it, without romanticising it at all. In the end, the marriage is destroyed but the underlying relationship is still there, albeit damaged. Whipple manages to keep in focus the true happiness of youth and at the same time, the rubble of separation. This is never clearer than in the following description of old ladies in a rest home: “In the dining room, where the shutters were closed against the night and the lamps on the tables lit under rosy shades, the old ladies waited to be served. They had read the paper, but Ellen couldn’t have come into gentler company. There was no avid curiosity, no malicious speculation, no self congratulation that such a thing couldn’t happen to them, as there might have been amongst younger women. These women were old, time had softened them, they had learnt something from loss, helplessness, loneliness; they knew that almost anything can happen to anybody. They were kinder than when they were young”.

I wonder if women like Ellen still exist? There were moments when I thought her rather timeless, and saw shades of people I know in her incredible reserve. At other times I thought – you know Ellen, there are times for dignity and times for fighting and if you want your husband back, however awful he has been, you should run after him. That however, would not have been “Ellen” at all. She is a real period piece. She is not a doormat; she is an old fashioned wife. As the character Mrs Beard memorably says to Ellen: “We’re not the new sort of women, with University degrees in Economics, like those women who speak on the radio nowadays, girls who can do anything. We’re ordinary women, who married to young to get a training, and we’ve spent the best years of our lives keeping house for our husbands”.

Other opinions can be found at A Striped Armchair, Stuck in a book and Fig and Thistle. The pictures are the Persephone Classic edition, the Persephone endpaper and the author.

Spring is sprung (I think); and this blog is back!

2011-03-22T10:30:00.000+01:00

Good morning folks. I have had a bit of a break from blogging recently, basically due to being buried in work, and I can honestly say that I have missed it dreadfully. So here is a celebratory picture and now I will get on with some proper posts...

Images from a bloggy holiday: Rome

2011-02-15T10:00:00.000+01:00

Have Book. Can Travel.

2011-02-10T10:00:00.000+01:00

Here I am off to the wonderful ROME for a few days of bloggy holiday and some quality time with Dorothy Whipple's Someone at a Distance. What could be nicer?

Wandering with Wordsworth, Dorothy, that is

2011-02-09T10:00:00.000+01:00

I can’t remember when or how biographies came to be a major meal in my reading menu, but I know that I love them. I acknowledge that behind every biography there lurks a nosey parker but at the same time, I frequently find them stark and true windows through which to view wider pictures. Most biographies try to tread the path between a person’s inner and outer life; between what they were thinking and feeling and the world around them. The wider picture that they seek to show is often the proverbial “times” of the soul in the spotlight.

The wonderful, slightly odd but ultimately rather liberating thing about Frances Wilson’s book The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth is that it bothers not with such conventions. It sort of says hang the need to provide social and historical context; never mind what people were wearing and how rich they were compared to others; who cares about the wars, the battles, the headlines. It seeks to engage completely with and to gut out every aspect of the inner world of Dorothy Wordsworth. If you are unfamiliar with her, suffice to say that she was a gifted writer and daring thinker who was not an easy woman to live with. She is better known as the sister whom William Wordsworth may have slept with, or at any rate, done something other than simply written poetry with.

There is in this book, an extreme concern with the details of a life that I found surprising and extremely moving. I am a great lover of walking for example, and although I cannot claim to have undertaken the major yomps that Dorothy and William did up hill and down dale in all weathers, there was something about the pattern of their early life – of walking huge distances and being thought strange that really touched me. They walked, according to Wilson because they were defiant and restless and felt homeless, although this was something that they never were. By fetching out the walking in this way, the reader is left with a real sense of the wildness of these two, and especially of Dorothy. This is not a domestic story; there are no interiors; it all seems to take place on a wind smashed moor.

Illness is not an occasional inconvenience. It is a member of the family; a character at the table in the Wordsworth household. The siblings and their circle are cursed with ill health, with the need to go to bed for days at a time, with debilitating headaches. Wilson puts William’s ailments down to his being a hypochondriac opium addict, but for Dorothy, she reserves really enquiring and thoroughgoing treatment. What were Dorothy’s headaches like? Was she anorexic? What exactly was wrong with her oft lamented bowls? Was it mostly her mind which had the problem? It is the historian of footnotes and the collector of tiny details in me that is so excited by this.

All this illness and wandering however, has, over time, added to the impression that there was something flagrantly odd about the household of William and Dorothy. Historians and literary academics have looked at William’s mysterious “Lucy” poems and at Dorothy’s journal in which she describes an odd scene between them on the morning of William’s wedding, and they have concluded that brother and sister were lovers. Wilson approaches this narrative with both incredible depth of research, in so far as that is possible, and also with real imagination. In fact, she brings out and acknowledges the significance of the imagination of others in the whole idea. Not a usual approach for a biographer, but an excellent and a memorable one.

A happy country trundle

2011-02-02T10:00:00.000+01:00

The Weekly Portrait: Winter in Berwick Church

2011-01-28T10:30:00.000+01:00

Still reeling from our visit to Berwick Church, this week's portrait is the lovely "winter" from Duncan Grant's Four Seasons mural which can be found on the chancel screen where it was painted on in 1944. I wonder which local people posed for this?

Capuchin and Comyns in concert!

2011-01-24T10:00:00.000+01:00

This post is brought to you by a very excited blogger. Excited because one of my favourite books, The Juniper Tree, by one of my favourite authors, Barbara Comyns, is being republished by one of my favourite publishers, the excellent Capuchin Classics Press. With a foreword by Margaret Drabble and a cover illustrated with an intriguing image redolent of the tale (and surely partly based on Barbara Comyns’ own image), I can hardly contain myself. Only 9 months to wait...

Celebrating my bloggy birthday: a shortish and fumbling speech and a giveaway of My Cousin Rachel

2011-01-22T11:26:00.000+01:00

It is one year to the day that I sat down at my computer in France and posted on my blog for the first time. I had been umming and arring and generally procrastinating about it for ages but finally did it and pressed “post” on my review of George Eliot’s novella The Lifted Veil. How glad I am that I did. Since then, we have travelled about a bit and moved back to London. I have written half a book and gone back to work. I have read and posted reviews of 52 books together with ramblings about my travels and images that take my fancy. I have found other blogs which I love and read everyday. The thoughts of other bloggers and of people who read my blog have come into my life and become a rich part of it. I have even had the great pleasure to meet other bloggers. In short this blog, other blogs and their authors and readers have become a constant in my life and a source of inspiration and joy. So, basically, thank you.

Now for the celebration bit: I have a brand spanking new copy of Daphne Du Maurier’s My Cousin Rachel (read and reviewed by moi back in November) to give away to a lucky reader in celebration of a year of happy blogging. If you would like a chance to win just leave a comment and I will find a hat and draw a name from it. This is a blog without borders and this contest is open to all.

Mars and Venus... according to Fanny by Gaslight

2011-01-19T10:29:00.001+01:00

Although I did not give Michael Sadleir’s 1940 novel Fanny by Gaslight the most glowing review, it does have its moments. The following is one of my favourites. Step forward Fanny Hooper, woman of the world:

“This experience of males in the rough taught me an invaluable lesson, thanks to which I have always been able to make friends with any man I have wanted to be friends with. It taught me never to disapprove on principle, and to prefer a man to behave in my presence as he naturally behaves when he is happy. If that involves swearing and getting drunk, then let him swear and drink. You can always tell when a man is talking dirt and drinking too much in order to show off, or to nerve himself for something, or because he despises you and is purposely bad-mannered in order to underline his contempt. I have known that sort of thing only too often, and very disagreeable it is. But most men have some genuine and individual line of relaxation, and a woman, if she likes a man well enough, does well to let him follow it”.

(From Part 1 Chapter 3)

Berwick Church: Bloomsbury Baby!

2011-01-17T10:30:00.000+01:00

If any readers of this blog ever find themselves meandering about in East Sussex they could do a lot worse than to visit the wonderful Bloomsburyfied church at Berwick. This is where we were only last week and as well as having splendid views of the South Downs, the inside of the church is literally plastered in the bold, beautiful and thoughtful work of Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant and Quentin Bell.

Like nearby Charleston House, where the artists lived, there is hardly a scrap of blank space that goes unpainted. Regular readers may remember that I am fascinated by the so-called Bloomsbury interiors – that is to say the unconventional things which members of the Bloomsbury group did with the inside of their houses. This is also a Bloomsbury interior – but a public one and a religious one which shows these artists to be even more inventive and remarkable than I thought before. Grant and Bell were not at all religious, of course, but they did not belittle their religious subjects. They really knew how to use space and how to adapt and co-exist with the world around them.

As far as I can tell, Duncan Grant did most of the painting and in particular, he is the creator of the depiction of “Christ in Glory” on the chancel arch. He combined religious images with local landscapes to powerful effect. Thus, below Christ and the angels rolls the Sussex countryside and the scenes and faces of local life are all around the church. The murals were painted during World War II and below Christ and the angels sit, on the left three local servicemen in their uniforms (one of whom died before the war was out), and on the right the Bishop and the Rector who commissioned and supported the murals. Painting patrons into pictures was of course a strong feature of Italian renaissance art and the Italian influence on these murals was what struck me immediately. They feature so much that is English but in some ways, they are very foreign. They seem to be two things at once, without losing the essence of either.

Vanessa Bell followed Duncan Grant’s lead in her depiction of the Annunciation in which Mary and the angel Gabriel (posed, incidentally by the writer Angelica Garnett and Chattie Salaman) sit against a backdrop inspired by the gardens at Charleston House. Again, the familiar and the foreign, the sacred and profane, the timeless and the contemporary are placed within one frame and the result is startling. As you will see from this post, I got a bit overexcited with my picture taking....

And if that was not enough excitement for one day, my husband (who is himself becoming something of a master grave-finder having, only last year found Diana, Unity, P amela and Nancy Mitford) spotted the grave of Cyril Connolly, which rather inspires me to finally read his book Enemies of Promise, itself a long term resident of my TBR pile. For another, more misanthropic day methinks...

The Weekly Portrait: Golden Face

2011-01-14T10:55:00.001+01:00

Because I am still pondering our lovely visit to Hampton Court Palace, and because sometimes, you can't beat a bit of bling.

A paperback in the family

2011-01-12T10:30:00.000+01:00

There is much excitement here at Stoneham Towers and hearty congratulations are due to my very clever mother in law Eleanor Stoneham whose first book, Healing this Wounded Earth with Compassion, Spirit and the Power of Hope, has just been published by O Books. A powerful foreword is written by Dr Iain McGilchrist, author of The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. This is a handbook for the restoration of the earth and society to sustainable health and a brave response to environmental damage, violence and reckless profit seeking. Eleanor examines the strength giving elements of vulnerability and the possibilities of personal responsibility and new ways of living in society, economy, medicine, art and faith.

For those who look at the world and find it wanting but who are not hidebound by cynicism, this may be just the read for you. It can be found on Amazon or at O Books. Eleanor’s website can be found here and her excellent blog is here.

Fanny by Gaslight: enough said.

2011-01-10T10:30:00.000+01:00

The booky detective in me has been on fire of late. It all started when I was re-reading Barbara Comyns’ almost completely forgotten memoir Out of the Red into the Blue and found the following passage about the author’s arrival in Ibiza in 1956:

“among them I saw something that I couldn’t believe was true. It was a little girl of about ten dressed like a woman, her face heavily made-up. She was walking with some respectable looking black-clad women. Then I distinctly saw a little boy of about the same age dressed as a woman. His cheeks were all rouged and he was holding a parasol over his head, while a stout pair of boots were showing below his flounced skirt. I wished I had never read Michael Dadler’s Forlorn Sunset, and turned to my companion in horror”.

I had never heard of Forlorn Sunset but that was nothing that a quick google could not cure and I soon discovered that the author was in fact called Michael Sadler. If there was some confusion about his name, he had only him self to blame, since he had apparently changed it from Sadler to Sadleir in order to distinguish himself from his father, who was also an author. As regular readers of this blog may remember, I sought out Forlorn Sunset and raved at length about it.

The preface to Forlorn Sunset mentioned another book by the same author, the amusingly titled Fanny by Gaslight and so my Michael Sadleir mission continued. A quick spot of research reveals that Fanny was first published in 1940, made into a film in 1944 and enjoyed a renaissance in 1981 when it was the subject of a TV miniseries starring Chloe Salaman in the title role.

The cannon of popular and remembered literature is a funny old thing. Both of these novels are now almost completely lost to the reading public but I think that of the two, it was Fanny by Gaslight rather than Forlorn Sunset which has enjoyed the most acclaim and publicity in the past. The reason that I think this odd is that Forlorn Sunset is a much better novel than Fanny.

Fanny by Gaslight is the tragic life story of a young girl born to two lovers and brought up in the seediest possible corner of Victorian London. Her early life as well as her adulthood is littered with pimps, prostitutes, drunkards and schemers but she herself stands apart from the degeneracy around her. She does not judge but she is very separate. Sadleir has set up a series of binary opposites which he explores in the story. Firstly, and most prominently, there is the opposition between honesty and hypocrisy. Fanny is an honest girl as are both of her parents and all of the various allies she picks up in her life. However “low” they may seem to the outside world, they are honest about themselves and to others. They contrast sharply and are oft injured by the battalion of hypocrites in the tale. The aristocratic drunkard who dabbles in paedophilia; the glamorous society lady who meets her lovers in a high class brothel; the list is endless.

In this polarised world “sex” is part of the “honest” section and “marriage” is presented as a deeply hypocritical state. As Fanny’s father comments: “I have some reason for not regarding marriage as the element of a love affair that is made in heaven. Heaven comes at an earlier stage if it comes at all”. Fanny herself identifies with this non conformity and refuses to marry the man that she loves, a steadfastness for which she pays in heavy coin. I understood her best when she says to her lover: “I am an outside person. I always have been, and I am too proud to come inside – at any rate at present”.

It is all very anti-Victorian to an extent which I find rather patronising and simplified and somehow imbued with snobbery. Fanny is dated without being charming and I think that maybe my Sadleir sojourn ends here.

Happy new year Hampton Courting

2011-01-07T10:30:00.001+01:00

It turns out that Hampton Court Palace is the place to be on the first Sunday of the year. We were caught somewhere in the post-Christmas, post-New Year, pre-going-back-to-work and not quite knowing what to do with oneself slumber familiar to many and decided to tackle the problem in time honoured fashion: by wandering around an old building and talking about history. On this occassion, I was chief talker, as although my husband knows more about most subjects that I do, I am our resident Tudor specialist owing to an obsession for the six wives of Henry VIII which I developed in primary school. Not having forgotten absolutely everything and still retaining some of my old enthusiasm, I was off. A perfectly sound basis for a tour guide I am sure you will agree. Fortunately I did not spend the whole time gabbling but also took some pictures, and here they are:

And a Merry Christmas to all you book lovers

2010-12-24T10:00:00.000+01:00

This post is exactly what it says on the tin. It is Christmas Eve and we are just preparing to head off to Norfolk for a few days of over indulgence. Wish me luck... I have a couple of books packed (War on the margins by Libby Cone and the splendidly titled Fanny by gaslight by Michael Sadleir) and would not be too surprised if I return a book or too richer after Santa has done his stuff.

Where ever you are in the world, thank you for reading my blog and (whether you are celebrating it or not) have a warm, safe and joyful Christmas/time.

Snow City (inexperienced style)

2010-12-22T10:00:00.000+01:00

Now, I know that there are many of you will not be impressed with what must look like a "mere sprinkling" but the truth is that it doesn't usually snow like this in London, so it is worthy of comment, or if not comment, then certainly a few pictures. So here they are...

Pottering with Pym: Excellency amongst women and novelists

2010-12-20T10:00:00.000+01:00

I have just finished Barbara Pym’s novel Excellent Women over a cup of tea, in somebody else’s home whilst marooned in London due to snow, and just for a moment, albeit a short one, I identified with its heroine, the inestimable Mildred Lathbury. I am happy, but not quite settled. I take the view that a cup of tea solves most problems but I know that it doesn’t solve them all. I am looking around at the snow caked city and thinking – well – let’s just wait and see.

Mildred is a bit like that. She is the narrator of this excellent novel in which she reveals her character and her place in the world by gentle turns and subtle humour. Mildred is a clergyman’s daughter who has found herself over 30 and unmarried in an age when that usually meant that you could forget your chances in the marriage market. She is not at all rich but she is firmly middle class. She lives in a flat which shares its bathroom with others. She is extremely churchy – her closest friends being the local vicar and his spinster sister. Mildred volunteers and helps and sorts and mucks in and is generally a self contained, self sufficient woman upon whom everyone seems to depend.

Enter stage right a considerable amount of disturbance in the form of Mildred’s new neighbours, Rockingham “Rocky” and Helena Napier. Helena is a spirited anthropologist who is more interested in the origins of civilisation than in being a “proper” wife 1950s style. This state of affairs has poor Mildred completely flummoxed, not least because Mrs Napier’s husband Rocky is rather lovely. He has spent the war in Italy – Mildred imagines charming Wrens.

This book is largely about the distinction – now very little but then a vast chasm – between married and unmarried women. At the beginning of the book, Mildred comments disarmingly “Let me hasten to add that I am not at all like Jane Eyre, who must have given hope to so many plain women, who tell their stories in the first person”. That is to say - reader don’t expect an “I married him” moment.

The distinctions which Pym illustrates have mostly to do with status and position. One that really fascinates is the dividing of the married and the unmarried between the passive observers and the active non-observers. According to one of her fellow unmarrieds: “We, my dear Mildred, are the observers of life. Let other people get married by all means, the more the merrier”. He lifted the bottle, judged the amount left in it and refilled his own glass but not mine. “Let Dora marry if she likes. She hasn’t your talent for observation”.

Other excellent opinions are to be found at Dovegreyreader, the Red Room library and the wonderful My Porch. I have included a picture of the front cover of the latest Virago edition, and the lady herself, together with a slightly grumpy looking cat.

Treasures of the bedside Lilliput – part 1 (Nancy Mitford’s Christmas)

2010-12-17T10:00:00.000+01:00

Regular readers may remember that although I am not a worshipper, I am definitely an admirer at the book shelf of the legendary Nancy Mitford. I think that she is funny, and it is as simple as that. So, I was thrilled to settle down with my Bedside Lilliput and discover that a short and festive tale from the comic Nancy was first behind the cover.

This short story is called Aunt Melita’s Christmas Party and it is classic Mitford – all dysfunctional families and acerbic comments. Aunt Melita likes to think of herself as the Queen Bee of her family Christmastide and although they don’t declare themselves to be willing, they all seem to comply. Even her husband, who is nobody’s idea of a natural Father Christmas. It captures beautifully how we all end up doing things at Christmas without being at all sure why.

Not reading, but wrapping!

2010-12-15T10:30:00.000+01:00

Singled Out!

2010-12-13T10:00:00.000+01:00

I am a silly one. All that rambling back in October about G. C. Pain’s novel Surplus Women and I didn’t realise that the phrase “surplus women” was common currency in the years after the first world war. I spent the first few chapters of the novel wondering slightly when it was supposed to be set and of course had I done my research or been of an older generation, I would have known that Pain had announced the period setting in the very title itself. Maybe I should have read Virginia Nicholson’s excellent Singled Out – How Two Million Women Survived Without Men after the First World War, before. Oh well, you can’t have it all. Suffice to say that this is a super social history that will no doubt inform my reading for many years to come.

Who was changed and who was dead: a case of Comyns fever

2010-12-10T10:00:00.000+01:00

In celebration of the publication by Dorothy of a new edition of Barbara Comyns’ wonderful novel Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead, I have posted below a review of this novel which I wrote earlier this year for Pattinase’s feature “Forgotten Book Friday”. My copy of the new edition has arrived all the way from the US and I can’t wait to re read it. The cover is just as good in real life and Brian Evenson’s new introduction is excellent. So, here are my thoughts…

Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead is the story of a family, a household and a village in a time of flood, plague and savagery. The year is 1914 and the family is that of widower Ebin Willoweed. Ebin is the lethargic home tutor to his three motherless children – Emma, Dennis and Hattie. He is also the dependent and resentful son of the rich forbidding matriarch – Grandmother Willoweed. Grandmother Willoweed is an old tyrant with a forked tongue who refuses to step upon land that she does not own. The wider household includes their tender maids – the sisters Norah and Eunice – and their gardener – the frank speaking, keeper of traditions – Old Ives. Beyond the gates of their manorial home sits a community wider still; the doctor, the baker, the farmer, the miller, the rector, the idiot; their wives, their lovers, their children. As the novel opens the river has burst its banks and flooded the house and the village. Ducks swim through windows and Ebin rows his daughters around the garden in a small boat. Everything is displaced. But soon it will be worse – for plague follows flood and madness follows hard behind. Who will be changed by it, and who will be dead?

The tone of this tale is surreal and slightly magical – but it is not meaninglessly strange. Rather – bizarre happenings and peculiar interludes are used to illustrate themes that are close to us all. Barbara Comyns explores snobbery and insecurity alongside kindness and understanding. She explores the casual cruelties of family life, the odd traps of domesticity, the secrets and lies that lurk in every household. She shows how people can become displaced – by their own attitudes and the mentalities of others. The characters that she creates are powerful because they are candid. Although the moral compass is stronger in some than it is in others, everyone in this stricken village has more than one side – there are no pantomime villains or heroes beyond reproach. Barbara Comyns builds a topsy-turvy world and uses it to illustrate a landscape of great familiarity.

This is not a story without horror. Indeed, the grotesque descriptions of the damage caused by the flood led to the book being banned in Ireland when it was published in 1954. Barbara Comyns was not a user of the euphemism. She wrote frankly and unapologetically. But if a history of censorship suggests to you that this book might be gratuitously unpleasant – then her history of censorship has done Barbara Comyns wrong. In Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead there is an overwhelming feeling for the profound and confusing oddness of everyday life. The true horrors of the novel are the ease with which people will turn to violence – the speed with which they will lose compassion – the comfort which they will take from prejudice. Alongside this disturbing narrative – there are also the unexpected new beginnings that emerge from chaos – the happier, surer future beyond the disaster. This is a lyrical and humane book which ought not to be forgotten.

Nanny's orchid: good huh? Mine always die

2010-12-08T11:00:00.000+01:00

More competitive dabbling, this time with a festive flavour

2010-12-06T10:00:00.000+01:00

Those wonderful people over at The Dabbler are running another promising competition in association with the brilliant Slightly Foxed. Some of you may recall my feverish discovery of Slightly Foxed this summer, and I have also dabbled with The Dabbler’s 1p book review.

Now, the snow has fallen, the winter is not exactly drawing in, but jolly well here already and it is time for us all to try to win something...

And what, I ask you, could be more attractive than a Christmas Fox. Christmas Foxes are Slightly Foxed’s special seasonal editions. Beautifully-bound and compact, they make an ideal stocking-filler, or a literary alternative to a Christmas card.

This year’s edition features a delightful short story by author Linda Leatherbarrow.

Slightly Foxed are giving away a whopping THREE Christmas Foxes to lucky Dabbler readers. There is a little bit of skill involved as competitive foxers need to identify the illustrator of a picture that can be found on The Dabbler....

Go on, you know you want to. Click here to see details and bon chance!

Introducing The Bedside Lilliput….

2010-12-03T10:00:00.000+01:00

Along with many odd interests, I have for some time, had a lingering fascination in the history and content of a little and long since deceased literary magazine called Lilliput.

Lilliput was founded in 1937 and was dedicated to humour, short stories and little pieces on art and literature and so on. I first became aware of it because it was Lilliput that first published Sisters by a River, the first novel (maybe you can’t quite call it a novel, but that is another blog post) by one of my favourite writers, Barbara Comyns. The novel was published in instalments under the title “The Novel Nobody Will Publish” and that rather acted as a catalyst for somebody to publish it.

When I took a closer look at the annals of Lilliput, I discovered that Barbara Comyns was very much at the non famous end of its contributors. Here was a magazine which regularly featured the work of Nancy Mitford, Monica Dickens, V. S. Pritchett, Robert Graves and Patrick Campbell to name just a clutch.

My “Lilliput project” has been a casually looking out for information and references kind of affair – rather than a fiendishly searching and hunting down every tiny clue mission. Maybe that is why it has taken me so long to find that which I now proudly hold in my hands: a lovely volume called The Bedside Lilliput.

The Bedside Lilliput was published in 1950 and draws together short stories and other snippets that appeared in the magazine between 1937 and 1949. In his foreword the editor Richard Bennett wrote:

“There is always the possibility that Bedside Books may actually be placed beside beds. If this should happen to the Lilliput Bedside Book, may I wish the reader a good bedside lamp and pleasant dreams?”.

I know that it is 60 years since publication, but yes, Mr Bennett, you can, and thank you very much. It is right by my bed, and I hope to blog about its contents as I go along.

The weekly portrait: Harold Monro

2010-12-01T10:30:00.001+01:00

I have searched and searched and I cannot find a portrait of the poet Harold Monro (1879-1932) other than this which is, as you can see, that featured on the cover of his biography. I was tickled to find out a bit about him after reading the following in Marjorie Todd's memoir Snakes and Ladders:

"Most of the young men did actually work at one thing or another, I think, though there were always a few playboys among them. I once overheard a conversation between two of them, and so did the poet Harold Monro who was sitting next to me, leaning blindly forward with both hands on his stick.

After a while he asked them quietly, "what do you do?"

"Oh" one of the young men answered airily, "I drink you know, and I fornicate."

"For which firm do you fornicate?" asked Harold Monro."

So, on that note, I may have to find out more about him.

Page-turning with Pears: “Stone’s Fall” and its mysteries

2010-11-29T10:30:00.000+01:00

As regular readers of this blog know, I am not generally one for popular contemporary fiction and generally prefer to sequester in the “forgotten” section of the library getting all dusty and reading books that nobody has heard of. Not quite all the time though… Since reading An Instance of the Fingerpost I have been a declared Iain Pears fan and not ashamed to say so. When I saw his new novel Stone’s Fall on 3 for 2 at Hatchards, I thought – well; go on – you know that you like a bit of costumed mystery and mayhem. That is exactly what you get here, and it is jolly good too.

I don’t think that I would be giving too much away if I said that Stone’s Fall is about a wealthy Victorian financier who falls to his death from the first floor window of his London town house at a time when his labyrinthine businesses are not doing at all well and he and his glamorous wife Elizabeth have become embroiled in an anarchist group which is, on any reckoning, quite contrary to their interests.

Just like An Instance of the Fingerpost – Stone’s Fall is a revelation in three parts. Three different narrators focus on the same object. That object is actually a woman – the beguiling Elizabeth. She is rich and beautiful and graceful and lovely but who is she and where does she come from? When the dark and ruthless underbelly of her personality manifests itself, as it occasionally does, how can it be explained? I rather get the impression that Iain Pears must be one of those people who loves to chew over things and analyse them again and again. So – he sets about revealing Elizabeth by degrees through the eyes of men who in differing ways and to varying extents adore her.

The first part is the bewildering and at times hilarious adventures of Matthew Braddock. Braddock is a Fleet Street hack (in the days when that meant that he was a journalist, not a lawyer or an investment banker) whose career in crime writing has done little more than keep him in gin. He has a few pals to go to for advice and he has a journalist’s nose for a story but other than that he is hopelessly unsuitable for the role which is inflicted upon him in this novel. He is hired by the mysterious and rather sexy widow Elizabeth to unravel a bizarre clause in her husband’s will. He is not quite up to the task but he does know when there are forces at work which he doesn’t understand. The reader emerges from his chapters with a real affection for him but with far more questions than answers about the mystery in hand.

Part the second is the contribution of the banker turned proto spook Henry Cort. This part of the book is intricate and exquisite – it is by far and away my favourite section. The man who emerges from the pages is clever, urbane and self reliant. He is also arrogant and hubristic. At the dramatic climax of his story, he commits an act of dreadful, spine chilling betrayal, which had me reeling in my chair, shocked to my core. Pears plays a clever game with his readers when it comes to Cort. He gives you enough information to be attracted and repelled. For those who are attracted, he gives enough history for an excuse (did I say excuse, I meant explanation…) Cort has more than a bit of the Michael Corleone about him, and I declare here and now that I rather fancied him.

The final third is told by John Stone himself and will, needless to say, answer most of the questions (of which there are many) thrown up by the preceding pages.

This is a superb historical mystery with wonderful characters and twists. There is an extra big twist at the end which I was happy with but which I understand other readers have felt was “twisting for twistings sake”. You will have to read for yourself to see what I mean.

There is an excellent review by Clare Clark in the Guardian and another by Jake Kerridge in the Telegraph. In the blogosphere Farm Lane Books, My Blank Thoughts, and MJ’s Literary Odyssey also have something to say. I have featured here a picture of the front cover, a picture of Pears himself and also, for fun, the site of the novel’s opening, and a place I love, the church of St-Germain des Pres in Paris.

The Weekly Portrait: Nina Hamnett by Roger Fry

2010-11-26T10:30:00.000+01:00

This painting is called "Woman" but the model is Nina Hamnett, who has appeared in this blog more than once (infact, at least twice) and it was painted in 1915.

Some years later, in her wonderful autobiography Snakes and Ladders, Marjory Todd describes how Hamnett introduced her to her mentor C. K. Ogden:

""This is C. K. Ogden, my dear. Ogden, this is Blackie".... "very rich man, my dear! He is going to give me a marvellous dinner!"

But a little later Ogden said to me "You are dining with me" and bore me off to the Etoile. Nina never showed the slightest resentment about this sort of thing. She always brought a most unfemenineblandness into everything, and yet, I am afraid, in those days as in later years, she often ended the evening alone".

Why you cannot beat a cream tea and a bunch of bloggers

2010-11-24T10:30:00.000+01:00

This post is a quick and inadequate eulogy to a wonderful afternoon spent with the authors of some of my favourite blogs; Simon, Claire, Hayley, Miranda, Donna and Polly. Blogger of honour was of course the inimitable Thomas, owner, author and decorator of My Porch. We all met up at the one and only Persephone Book Shop in Lambs Conduit Street and then repaired to the British Museum for afternoon tea. I am so looking forward to the book that Thomas gave me – The Professor’s House by Willa Cather – which I *think* is my first foray into American literature since childhood. Stateside, here I come....

A “lost life” available for discovery: Marjory Todd and her game of snakes and ladders

2010-11-22T10:00:00.000+01:00

When I read Jonathan Rose’s landmark social history The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, I didn’t have either a blog or the words to say how good I thought it was. Amongst other achievements, he has trudged around otherwise unvisited accounts of working class life in the 20th century. A lady called Marjory Todd and her autobiography Snakes and Ladders are among his footnotes.

Marjory Todd was born in the 1900s. She was part of the generation for whom the First World War was a childhood memory; who grew to maturity in the late ‘20s and ‘30s and who were pretty hardened by the time the Second World War came along. She was one of five children born to a gentle former teacher and a hard drinking and maudlin cabinet maker. When their mother dies they are exposed to the caprices of their father who is as ridiculous as he is cruel. He is soon joined by a vulgar sailor’s wife whom his children label “the woman” in a domestic set up which is never quite clear to anyone.

Marjory is clever but she is poor and without her mother’s influence it rather shows. She meets snobbery at school and resentment at home and so jumps the education ship in favour of work at 14. There begins a catalogue of different jobs as lady’s maid, children’s nanny, civil servant, employment exchange operative during the 1926 General Strike, broadcaster and probation officer. Geographically, she treks up hill and down dale to earn a living and in pursuit of her dream – of going to university.

Snakes and Ladders is human and humorous and a staggering account of self reliance. Its voice is charming and self possessed. The book is also a splendid period piece. Being rather fashion conscious, I am drawn to the passages which touch on clothes. This (circa. 1925) is one of my favourites:

“I only had a jersey and a skirt; these were all my clothes. The jersey was a sort of Fair Isle I had knitted out of oddments, including, I remember, some unpicked brown woollen stockings. It was really rather gay. The skirt had been given my by a neighbour. I had no hat. I had had one; I had made it out of the raided cuffs of an old coat of my mother’s, but it had blown into the river a few weeks before. Since then, I had been going about feeling eccentric and rather brazen”.

Here is a woman of her age. A woman whose belongings can be packed into a single case; who earns her own money; and for whom “living in digs” was the final emancipation.

Her gift for giving a flavour is not the end of Todd’s historical value – for she finds herself on the spot at significant moments in history.

Firstly, this is an account of pre war labour politics, as viewed intelligently from the margins. Her account of the left wing in London in the ‘20s and ‘30s is philosophic and engaging. What is more – this is an account of the development of her ideas. Like many working class people she was educated voluntarily and in the evenings at the WEA (Workers’ Education Association) which hosted lectures and classes in chilly communal halls. She speaks for many when she writes: “we really did believe in perfectibility”. She is a thinking woman with an independent mind; idealistic but not blind to absurdities. I was particularly tickled by her brush with the Fabian Society: “The few I knew talked a lot about the working classes and seemed interested to hear that I lived in Limehouse”. She provides little further comment and I rather think she doesn’t need to.

Secondly, her life was touched by the great and the good (and the interesting). At Toynbee Hall, Todd was tutored by Cyril Joad, the intellectual and broadcaster who it seems to me, rather fancied her. He certainly provided her with mentoring and assistance in the world which few of her background could hope for. Nina Hamnett, the famously dissolute and rather interesting painter introduced Todd (whom she called “Blackie”) to C. K. Ogden, the eccentric philosopher who also became a great friend. Of all the strange and unexpected people to wander across the stage of a working class memoir; even Lady Ottoline Morrell, scary sight and patroness of all things bohemian, puts in an appearance.

What is probably most brilliant about Snakes and Ladders is that Todd deals with the business of being working class in the first half of the twentieth century. This is a voice which is not often heard and it is a voice that may sound strange to some. There is a constant need to deal with the snobberies of others; their misunderstanding of working class mores and their sense of entitlement. Todd is what my father in law would call “grafter”. She worked hard from girlhood onwards and she was given nothing. This created in her a kind of work mania and an interest in earning money which confounded her middle class friends. When she had to leave a boyfriend with whom she was in love because of work he challenged her “Why must you go? Why must you always be so working class?”

Snakes and Ladders is a kaleidoscope of the personal, the political and the historical – of those things within the mind and the most pressing needs of the body. It is not a “let it all hang out” sort of memoir. Todd hints at her personal life but she does not feel obliged to explain it. Snakes and Ladders certainly does not want for the lack of this; there is more than enough here, to be getting on with.

This is not the sort of book (more is the pity) that can be picked up in Waterstones – but I got mine inexpensively on amazon. I have included a picture of the book itself and to try to make up for the fact that I cannot find an image of Margory Todd – I have included some of the people with whom she was friends: Cyril Joad, C. K. Ogden, Nina Hamnett and Ottoline Morrell.

A Daunt Books treat on a hideous November morning

2010-11-19T11:00:00.000+01:00

There is nothing like discovering a new Daunt Books whilst trudging through the wind and rain on the way to work. It is lucky that I had my camera with me... Here it is, large as life and twice as bookish on Cheapside. Workers of the city do not despair!

Portrait of the Week: John and Myfanwy Piper

2010-11-17T10:00:00.000+01:00

Partly because I loved Frances Spalding's double biography but never got around to reviewing it and partly in anticipation of reading Alexandra Harris's Romantic Moderns; here are this fascinating twosome.

Thomas Cromwell: be thou my vision (oh, you already are): Wolf Hall my lovelies

2010-11-15T10:30:00.002+01:00

It is nice to know that sometimes, things are all that they are cracked up to be. Viva Wolf Hall is what I say, although I do, as you might suspect, have more to say than that. For those of you who have somehow avoided it, Wolf Hall is Hilary Mantel’s prize winning, literary talk inspiring doorstep of a novel about the life of Thomas Cromwell, right hand man to Henry VIII in the small matter of his divorce from Catherine of Aragon and his establishment as head of the Church in England.

And it is fair to say that Thomas Cromwell has never had it so good than he has between the covers of this book (apart from possibly in life, of which, more later). Rather than a distasteful politico and Machiavellian schemer who stabbed his boss in the back and connived at the brutal murders of numerous principled old people eventually to die himself at the axe by which he had lived, he is, well, something rather different. Here, in Wolf Hall, he is a trailblazer of humble origin; the king’s fixer; an intellectual man of humanity; a foot soldier in the army of Christ. We are always hearing about the Renaissance man, here is a modern man; a thinker and an advocate; person of reason who we can all understand. Historically, Thomas Cromwell has never known promotion like it.

An outrage on history you might think. On the other hand, you might think that this is a brave new account. I would probably plump for something betwixt. I do wonder if this elevation of Cromwell smacks a bit of the anti Catholicism which is all to familiar in English historiography. At the same time, the Thomas Cromwell of legend is clearly far too much of a pantomime villain. What is brave about Wolf Hall, and what I love about it is how Mantel picks apart the pantomime elements of Henry VIII’s court – the subterfuges which have been all too easy to believe in.

Thomas More – the “man for all seasons” – she picks apart as a sort of counter point to Thomas Cromwell. To history Thomas More is a principled man of intellect; a crusader against the wind of power and a renaissance man of the family: he respected his daughter you know, so he must have been modern. Mantel wonders about this, and she sort of sets up the idea of the More family as a historical truth that might not be true. Maybe he was a principled man but a shocking husband? Who knows; I think that might be the point. She talks about “the family on the wall” as depicted by Hans Holbein and invites the reader to disbelieve in its unity. How inviting that is.

One of my favourite elements of the novel is the rather exhilarating and wholly historically unjustified elevation of Mary Boleyn. In addition to being an adorable whore with a heart of gold and a good-time-girl trapped in the wrong era, Mary fixes her sights upon Cromwell. What an odd thing for Mantel to have imagined. I wonder if the idea is that Mary and Cromwell were both inveterate outsiders; she the Queen’s trial run sister; he the boot boy made good – why should they not be interested in one another?

In other aspects, Wolf Hall is none too revolutionary in its historical view. Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk is played as an upper class thug with a brain that you could lose on your way to the bus stop; Charles Brandon is a sex and status obsessed thickie; Anne Boleyn is a bit on the self regarding side. Of Henry VIII, maybe the less said, the better. A wonderful summary runs as follows: “he needs to be on the side of the light. He is not a man like you, who can just pack his sins in his saddlebags and carry them from country to country, and when they grow too heavy whistles up a mule or two, and soon commands a train of them and a troop of muleteers”.

Although Wolf Hall is called a historical novel, I would call it a psychological one. Cromwell is a narrator haunted by visions and memories and motivated by deprivations and abuses. He seems to be pondering (for 650 pages, but then again, it could have been more), the nature of submission and the trap that guilt and collusion with corruption creates for the soul. A candid moment in the narrative runs thus: “one fear creates a dereliction, the offence brings on a greater fear, and there comes a point where the fear is too great and the human spirit just gives up and a child wanders off numb and directionless and ends up following a crowd and watching a killing”.

As usual, there are lots of interesting opinions, including at Books Please, Babbette’s Book Blog, Vulpes Libris, the fabulous 3:17am and one of my favourite favourite internet places: Harriet Devine’s Blog. I have included pictures of the tome itself (at Hever Castle, no less), Thomas Cromwell, Thomas More (and family – for this is all about “the family on the wall”) – and to link one advocate to another – Hilary Mantel.

Strange things spotted

2010-11-12T10:30:00.000+01:00

This one from Serbia circa. May. What do you make of it?

(Group) Portrait of the Week: gas masks!

2010-11-10T10:00:00.000+01:00

This was, needless to say, not the standard issue!

“Baby I’m home!”: the lives of Lee Miller in our church hall (which is the last place you would expect to find her)

2010-11-08T10:30:00.002+01:00

Who would think that the life of the legendary muse artist and subversive Lee Miller could fill a church hall in Surrey a good 30 years after her death. Well, it did – the week before last, and I was one of the congregation of listeners when her son Anthony Penrose gave an illustrated and candid discussion of his mother’s life. I have read quite a lot about Lee Miller and I guess that the number of people should have come as no surprise to me: she always did know how to pull a crowd.

Here was a lady who has gone down in history as a staggering beauty and a muse who utterly obsessed the artists who immortalised her. By far the most famous images of Lee are those photographs of her taken by her lover Man Ray and it was together that they discovered the process of solarisation. As a result of an unplanned encounter with a rat in the dark room, a photograph was exposed to some light during development such that its tones were reversed and a strange line appeared around its object. This odd beautiful effect became entirely associated with Miller and Ray.

And there is one of the main points that Penrose made about his mother: she was not just an beauty to be brushed on canvases and pictured and objectified; she had her own work. Miller’s photography abounds with images of freedom and escape and like many surrealists – she was fascinated by the idea of the “found object”. That is to say that she looked for the marvellous in the ordinary and she, as Penrose put it – used her camera like a cookie cutter to chop out bits of everyday life. Intellectually she railed against being objectified. Here was a woman who served a severed breast up on a plate with a knife and fork to make a point. She was pretty subversive and she was pretty brave.

Which she needed to be when she went into occupied with the allied troops at the end of the Second World War. She was there as a war correspondent and the photographs that she took and the words that she wrote were the first that many people knew of the horrors of life under the Nazis. She took the most harrowing pictures of concentration camp interiors and they were not taken from a distance: they were right close up. She was able to flash her camera while men around her were vomiting into the bushes. Famously her companion took a picture of her having a lounge in Hitler’s bath, her muddy boots, fresh from the camps on the dictator’s bathmat.

Miller only left Europe because she was told, none too subtly, that her English husband wanted her back and was not content for her to roam around with the army forever. I got the impression from Penrose that his mother would never have come home of her own volition. When she did come home she suffered badly from having nothing important to do. She became extremely depressed, hit the bottle and there is no doubt a lot in her son’s suggestion that she was suffering from post traumatic stress disorder. For those of you (and there are quite a few I think) who excel in the domestic arts, it will be heartening to know that her life was practically saved by the restorative powers of cookery. That having been said, Miller was no Delia – she was a surrealist in all things and her meals reflected her love for the unpredictable and the outrageously coloured.

One of the most touching aspects of Penrose’s talk is that he was utterly candid about his own dreadful relationship with her mother while she was alive. It sounds as though they argued like cat and dog. Miller did not have the normal maternal feelings towards her child and he was embarrassed and no doubt deeply hurt by her. The experiences of the children of avant-garde families in the twentieth century is a pet interest of mine and I think that Penrose would have quite a bit to say on the subject. He described himself as having met his mother through her work and through the work of others who knew and loved her.

The public face of Lee Miller is available for everyone to discover and the archives of her life are kept at her former home Farley Farm House in Sussex. I feel a trip coming on.

Brrrrr.... postal bounty in the garden

2010-11-05T11:00:00.001+01:00

The Persephone Biannually is much nicer than the bills that usually come through the letter box, and since it comes but twice a year, I like to read it slowly. I started mine today in the garden, wrapped up warm with a cup of a coffee. Recent acquisitions which I can’t wait to get into are Virginia Nicholson’s Singled Out (regular readers may recall how head over heels I was about her book Among the Bohemians back in April), and the intriguing Romantic Moderns by Alexandra Harris.

The Weekly Portrait: Lee Miller, by Man Ray

2010-11-03T10:30:00.002+01:00

For more on this legendary lady, watch this blog....

Further adventures in total obscurity: Surplus Women by G. C. Pain

2010-11-01T10:30:00.000+01:00

OK so this one is a forgotten novel, even by my standards. A couple of months ago I read a reference to Surplus Women by G. C. Pain in Nick Turner’s excellent study Post-War British Women Novelists and the Canon. Being a bit of a frustrated detective, I found the book cheap on amazon and clicked “buy”. What rocked up in the post a week or so later was this, rather shabby, jacketless, watermarked 1943 edition, printed by a publisher called The Woman’s Book Club (in 1943...? *radical*). And I must say, that I am glad that it did. Surplus Women is an intriguing little book.

It is the story of Kay Burns, a lower middle class young woman of the 1930s or as she puts it, one of “two million surplus women in the country that nobody wants”. Her world is that of the sparsely furnished parlour and the gas-lit suburban street. She is an orphan, brought up by her grandmother, with whom she has little in common. Her inclinations are against convention but her surroundings are stultifying normal. Rather than being embraced by family life, she is suffocated by it. The world of her community is even worse; all dismal interiors and gossip and disapproval. In revolt Kay moves away and boards in a house of unmarried ladies where she is at first liberated and then horrified by the spectre of aging a single woman. She marries in haste and repents in the time honoured way. Not really surprising when at the point of proposal, the groom comments that “I don’t say I go into raptures at the thought of holding you in my arms. I expect it will be quite nice”. Despair not however – those of you who like a bit of real love in your reading - because it does eventually come to Kay, although I cannot promise that it will not be a bitter sweet business.

This book is a well written testimony of its time. It is a swift, focussed and touching glimpse of the clash between individuality and community; between compliance and subversion; between men and women in the interwar years. Kay is an odd kind of heroine. At first, when she is young and raring to go, she is a hard and unsympathetic girl. Her rebelliousness is turned inwards and she is what my grandmother would have called a scowler. As she develops she rather grows up and love certainly changes her into a softer being – in a way which is, I suppose, rather conventional. Hers is a realistic and moving narrative of subversion. She is not a firebrand rebel but a girl of ordinary circumstances who wishes to live differently in a deeply restrictive society. Thus, she dances between the outrageous and the conventional; between what people expect and what she really wants. In the end, I rather loved her, and I recognised her too, as a woman who must, in some way have reflected many of her generation.

I have deliberately not spoilt this book, as I hope that some of you may enjoy discovering it yourselves. I wonder whether Virginia Nicholson read it when she was researching her book, Singled Out? Try as I might, I am still in the dark about G. C. Pain so if anyone knows *anything* about her, I am all ears....

A spot of autumn colour

2010-10-29T11:00:00.000+02:00

So autumn is well under way, and getting rather chilly. We do still have some colour in garden though, and here it is.

Dabbling; Foxing; Foxing; Dabbling

2010-10-28T16:00:00.001+02:00

Some readers may recall my delight in July at discovering the wonderful Slightly Foxed and also writing for the 1p book review which is a feature of The Dabbler (a culture blog no less wonderful)... So imagine my pleasure when I discovered that the two have now teamed up for a competition in which a lucky person stands to win an annual subscription to the Slightly Foxed Quarterly. All you have to do is answer a simple(ish) literary question.

Although I do not have a good record with competitions I think I will try my luck here.... The contest closes on Monday 1 November so if you would like to join me you had better get started. Click here to read all about it.

The Weekly Portrait: Anne Boleyn

2010-10-27T10:30:00.000+02:00

Because I am so enjoying Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel, for more on which, watch this space...

Hi – Ho! Hever Castle (with Wolf Hall in tow)

2010-10-25T11:00:00.000+02:00

Saturday was a sharp clear coldish day and what better circumstances for going around the wonderful Hever Castle with my half read copy of Wolf Hall under my arm? For those of you who are not regular Hever-beavors – Hever Castle is a 14th century moated castle in Kent, in the south of England and it was the childhood home of Anne Boleyn, the second queen of Henry VIII who, as we all know, met a sticky end in the tower of London. I went there for the first time when I was a little girl and as a grown up I have visited in all moods and weathers. The thing which struck me on my last visit also struck me on my first, when I myself was quite small: it is tiny. It feels like a toy castle. That is not to say that there is no menace in its dingy doorways and narrow passages. Actually, the whole place reminds me slightly of this eerie line from Wolf Hall: “Every journey ends; terminates, at some pier, some mist-shrouded wharf, where torches are waiting”.

Here is a bit of a taster

For those who prefer a vintage table....

2010-10-22T11:00:00.000+02:00

and because we all know that "the old ones are the best", I thought that readers of my blog might enjoy browsing the website of The Vintage Table - a new crockery supplier which a friend told me about recently. If I was planning a wedding or something like that I would be looking to have crockery like this. Lovely.

LIGHTS, CAMERA, ACTION: and the winner is....

2010-10-20T10:00:00.000+02:00

Sasha. My copy of Daphne du Maurier's classic novel Rebecca is now yours.

Thank you to all who entered. As you can see, I plumped for a small chamber pot - not - as far as I am aware ever used for the purpose for which it was designed.

Sasha - if you send me an email with your name and address, I package the book off to you. My email address is hannah [at] hannahstoneham [dot] [com].

The Guernsey Spud Book

2010-10-18T10:30:00.000+02:00

I cannot claim credit for the title of this post, which I first heard from the lips of dovegreyreader at the recent Everyone’s a Critic event in London, but you all know what I am talking about. It is the book that is everywhere; the international best seller; the enticingly titled: The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows. This is the story of how a sophisticated London journalist – the disarming Juliet Ashton - fell in love with and became irreparably entangled with the natives of Guernsey in the period immediately after the Second World War.

It is told entirely through the medium of letters to and from Juliet proves to be a simple and effective way of telling a tale. The characters bubble through the text of their correspondence wonderfully and there is a lot of humour, a lot of lovely touches. That is not to say that it is all froth. The book deals with ideas of occupation and empire, with obedience and rebellion. The Channel Islands were effectively not defended and were occupied by Germany for almost the whole war. They were tiny little rocks in the ocean which most Britons did not give much of a thought to and yet they were uncomfortable little symbols of defeat; stages for brutality and theatres for quiet subversion.

By a strange coincidence a book previously belonging to Juliet rocks up on Guernsey and an enthusiastic native into whose hands it falls writes to her, using the recently restored postal service to the mainland. At first she is attracted to the quirkiness of what his letters contain and before too long she realises that there is a profound comment on occupation underpinning them. Behind this still there are the universal human concerns of love and friendship and loyalty. Unable to resist, soon there are letters flying about across the channel between all sorts of people and a hidden story of the conflict emerges; a story of defiance and forbidden associations. What on earth was the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society and what crimes against convention did it conceal?

My two favourite things about this book are firstly that it is about the power of books themselves and secondly that it celebrates what in my view is the original human virtue: disobedience. Hurrah for that!

The characters of the island and those who touch Juliet’s life in London are, as has been widely commented upon, most charming. Sometimes I found them a little too charming – and their quirkiness strayed into twee-ness. They looked a little bit too much like rural folk as seen by urban sophisticates. In the same way, I found that the story was rather saccharine and almost laughably predictable. The wonderful thing about the book is that it is a fabulous idea, not that it is a fabulous novel. It is about a neglected cranny of history and it is a neatly written, good book. Personally, I would rather plump for an authentic voice from the same period such as Mollie Panter Downes. But then, Mollie Panter Downes never, as far as I know, made it to Guernsey. Maybe this is sort of what she would have made of it had she done so.

Other opinions can be found at Harriet Devine’s Blog, Vulpes Libris, Bianca’s Book Blog and the lovely Stuck in a Book.

The (bookish) pleasures of home

2010-10-13T11:00:00.001+02:00

So there are some good things about coming back to England, and many of them are books. Here in particular are what has recently floated to the top of my TBR…

The Booker prize winning best seller Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel, Iain Pears’ latest offering Stone’s Fall (I couldn’t help it, I loved An Instance of the Fingerpost) and the absurdly titled Fanny by Gaslight by Michael Sadleir. At the less well known end of the spectrum, I have Clare Cameron’s Rustle of Spring, Snakes and Ladders by Marjory Todd and the wonderfully titled Surplus Women by G. C. Pain….

More Du Maurier: this time My Cousin Rachel

2010-10-11T10:00:00.001+02:00

My Cousin Rachel commences with the mouldering corpse of a murderer swinging from a gibbet and although, I don’t think I would call it cheerful, I would certainly call it brilliant. I am weighing up whether it may even be better than Du Maurier’s acknowledged masterpiece Rebecca. Who can say? I certainly reckon that it is as good, and you don’t need a PhD to see that they are of the same pen.

The novel is narrated by Philip Ashley, a young old man, a reclusive Cornish landowner with a past, and a distruster of women and society. His tale is retrospectively told, and of course, the story of his life explains his rather sour demeanour at the beginning of the book. He is an orphan who has been brought up by his wealthy cousin Ambrose. There are no women in their world and they seem quite pleased about it. Philip is a capable man and I took away the impression that he is good looking in a beefy English sort of way. For all of this, he is not really interested in the world beyond his gates. As he grows older, his cousin-father-friend Ambrose becomes unable to cope with the bitter Cornish winter and like so many people in literature begins “wintering” in warmer climes. One such winter takes him to Florence and there he does the unthinkable – meets his cousin Rachel for the first time, and marries her.

Poor Ambrose goes from Bridegroom to dead man with staggering speed and before the distraught Philip knows where he is, his cousin Rachel is knocking on the door of his remote Cornish home. It is the strange clash of loyalties and the nature of the bond between Philip and Rachel that invigorates this book: they are what it is about. I suspect that I have stated this too confidently, because, My Cousin Rachel is mysterious in every way. It is dark and atmospheric and what it is really about seems to shift and change shape throughout. It is love story, feminist fable and morality tale, all in one and Du Maurier manages all of this through the ingenious voice of Philip Ashley.

Some people find Philip annoying. I have to say that I rather loved him and wanted him to be happy, although I suspected that that was not possible. Maybe I am drawn to cranks, or even worse, misogynists. He is a hopelessly flawed narrator of his own story. He fears Rachel and hates her, he loves her unreservedly, he lusts for her and is utterly beguiled. He ricochets between being uncritical and being paranoid. Is she an angel who has had a hard life? Is she a loyal widow or a scheming money grabbing manipulator? Is she an ordinary woman with a little charm and a weakness for wealth? Is she worse than any of these things and even if she is, does she deserve the fate that awaits her?

Thinking about it long and hard, I have decided that the two main things I love about Daphne Du Maurier are her treatment of names and sex.

Firstly, I have always been fascinated by names. I look up what they mean, I ask people what their middle initials stand for when they give me cheques; I will be a nightmare if I ever have a child. There is something of the same going on in the novels of Daphne Du Maurier. Her most famous book takes a woman’s name as its title, but of course that woman is an off stage character, whilst the narrator herself is left nameless. Here the opposite is almost true. The eponymous Rachel is named but never explained. Her character is shrouded in mystery and we can only see her through Philip’s eyes. Readers may well put down the finished book and think that they never really knew Rachel at all.

And then of course there is the thorny issue of sex. Du Maurier writes about sex with power and subtlety and considerable beauty. By way of contrast, I almost died of embarrassment reading the sex scenes in The Children’s Book recently. The problem with bad sex is that it seems to capture so little of what it describes and I can’t be doing with that. Of course, I would not wish to bring back the censorship laws and cultural mores which meant that in 1951 authors like Du Maurier had to be “subtle” if they did not want their books to be banned. As my mother would say, I guess that it is a case of swings and roundabouts

There are other lovely reviews of this book at Coffee Stained Pages, She Reads Novels and the wonderful Harriet Devine’s Blog. I cannot recommend them or it enough. Here you see a picture of the Virago edition that I read, a photograph of the author and the poster of the 1952 film.

The (return of the) Weekly Portrait: Adam and Eve

2010-10-08T10:00:00.000+02:00

A slightly perculiar image, courtesy of a house in Moret sur Loing, Ile de France.

Bon weekend!

Au revoir la France: 10 things I miss about you

2010-10-06T10:00:00.001+02:00

This post is a bit of a eulogy, mainly in picture form, to our time, now over, in France. So, without further ado - things which I am missing already ...

Signs that we don't understand, even when they appear to be in English

The view from my study

Carrying a shopping basket in a nonchalant fashion

Book club feasting

A nice potter around the market

No shortage of flowers

Preparing huge dinner parties in a tiny kitchen

That post dinner party feeling

Always being close to a Paris-fix

Our local car park horses

The World That Was Hers: Hilda Bernstein, my teacher in South African history

2010-10-04T10:00:00.000+02:00

When Nelson Mandela walked out of prison after 27 years of incarceration in 1990, I was 7 years old and on the other side of the world. I do remember it though. It was one of those events that was covered in every country and talked of in every place. People of my generation recall the campaign against Apartheid in South Africa, but only in its twilight days – when most of the argument had been won internationally. As a child, political ideas seemed to come to me through a glass darkly, and were formed slightly skew-whiff. Often I had an idea about how I felt about things, but there was a bit of a knowledge gap, particularly in relation to distant lands and afar away cultures.

So, the Persephone Classic, The World That Was Ours by Hilda Bernstein has been a powerful read both emotionally and intellectually – I finally know something about Apartheid South Africa. Hilda Bernstein was a communist and a passionate campaigner against racial segregation. She was born in Britain but her heart seems to have been in Africa. She was white but she rejected her privileged status. She and her husband, Lionel “Rusty” Bernstein were active political dissidents in Johannesburg at a point in its history when dissent was decidedly not allowed.

The World That Was Ours is her memoir of the early 1960s, a period when the Nationalist government in South Africa was at its most Orwellian and rapacious. The Bernstein home is watched day and night, invaded frequently but policemen with seemingly endless arbitrary powers. The Bernsteins are firmly and surely marginalised by legislation; it becomes illegal for them to speak to their closest friends and even at times, each other. Rusty is kept in solitary confinement and put on trial alongside other ANC men, including Nelson Mandela in the kangaroo court of the Rivonia Trial. Miraculously, when the other defendants are sent down for life, Rusty is acquitted and the final act of this memoir is played out. Husband and wife escape South Africa, where they are both hunted people, in a nail biting chase across a barren landscape. They walk across the wilderness until they can hardly move for exhaustion; they are nearly attacked by dogs; they have no idea whom to trust and whom to fear.

The memoir of Hilda Bernstein is far from impartial, but it is a living breathing and extremely chilling window onto her world. I would not call this a political memoir but a personal memoir with a powerful political dimension. Bernstein self defines as a communist and her main reason is that in South Africa the communist party were the only party who were not racist. Bernstein’s communism seems to have been a rather different fish from that considered by another recent read, The Book and the Brotherhood by Iris Murdoch. For Bernstein, being a communist was about being a humanitarian and her memoir testifies to how easily ideas can mutate across borders and continents. The woman who emerges from these pages is a true idealist. She never, until very near the end, does what is practical. Instead, she does what she thinks is right. Readers may find themselves with mixed feelings at times, because of course; her political life restricted her family life dreadfully. They could not take holidays, they could not go out with their children of an evening, school friends invited for supper would arrive with the police on their tails. Ultimately however, the power of the narrative voice both justifies and fully explains Bernstein. What emerges is a picture of a deeply admirable woman. I fear that I would have strapped on my sandals and run for my life a long time before she did.

The political is knitted together with the domestic and the public, and provides a personal close up on persecution. In this history, coping with challenges strengthens people but also makes them hard and puts them beyond the reach of readjustment. Bernstein deals with this implicitly throughout the book and with remarkable candour in her “afterword”. Her writing is good. She has the confidence of a woman who knows that she can write and is not afraid to break a few rules. The prose is lyrical and almost cinematic. The final sequence in particular, in which Hilda and Rusty fly to safety after a perilous journey is so vivid, that I could almost imagine myself there.

I have peppered this review with pictures of the Persephone edition of the book, the Persephone end paper, and a photograph of the author. Interested readers may also enjoy this excellent review at Books and Chocolate.

Homecoming celebration: international giveaway of Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier

2010-10-01T10:00:00.000+02:00

Some of you may recall that the Business School Wives Book Club enjoyed a Rebecca-fest some time ago. For newer visitors to this blog suffice to say, that I think it is a super book. For my ruminations on the subject in full, please click here.

The Business School Wives Book Club has now sadly dispersed and is no more. For reasons which I am not clear on and which no doubt have something to do with “high mobility living”, I find that I have rocked up back in the UK with two copies of Rebecca... which is one more than anyone needs.

So, there is a lovely, almost new edition of this classic novel up for grabs. All you need to do is leave a comment. I will then draw a name from a hat (or cup or bowl or other receptacle) at random. The party is open to everyone, so do not worry about where you live.

Bon weekend!

Everyone needs an Albanian in their life...

2010-09-30T10:00:00.000+02:00

And if you don't believe me, have a read of any of Ismail Kadare's novels. My favourite is Broken April which I read last summer whilst travelling in Albania's Thethi national park, one of the most remote parts of Europe and the setting for this haunting novel. Feast your eyes on this picture, which I took at the bottom of the Thethi valley.

Those of you who live within a reasonable distance of London may be interested in an event being hosted by English PEN as part of FLOW the free word festival on Tuesday next week (5th October). It is billed as The Accident: Ismail Kadare in conversation with Julian Evans. What more could any person want? All the information you could possibly need is here. It looks good. If I can tear myself away from the office (which is by no means certain), I will be there....

The Passion of New Eve: Abandon hope all ye who enter here (or just abandon the book...)

2010-09-29T10:00:00.000+02:00

I normally love Angela Carter. I reviewed Several Perceptions earlier this year, enjoyed Nights at the Circus and Wise Children is one of my all time favourite books. But with The Passion of New Eve, I have absolutely had it.

OK so imagine a dystopian New York City with an unappealing chap called Evelyn who wanders around observing mutant rats devouring dogs. He pursues an increasingly naked erotic dancer (who puts purple lipstick on her nipples) through the streets. He is horrified by depravity but tempted by it too. In fact, he is just like the biblical Eve, but he’s a guy, geddit? Give. Me. Strength. In fact, give me something cheerful to read. That would do just as well.

Everyone's a critic?

2010-09-28T11:24:00.003+02:00

How slack I have been on reporting back from last Thursday’s excellent PEN event Everyone’s a critic. Well, the upshot was that yes, everyone is a critic, yes review culture in the UK is changing, but with a few old certainties thrown in. The discussion was led by Erica Wagner, the literary editor of the Times, Sam Leith, the ex-literary editor of the Telegraph, John Mullan, an academic, journalist and judge for the 2009 Man Booker Prize and of course the wonderful Lynne Hatwell AKA Dovegreyreader. There was more consensus that I was expecting, but then, as I walked home in the drizzly night I took to wondering why I had not expected consensus.

Basically reviewing culture has been changed by an increasingly pluralist body of critical voices. There are more critics from more places and they, unsurprisingly have a greater selection of comments to make. One of the “new voices” is the voice of the blogger and the panel spent quite a lot of time talking about the thorny question of what separates the blogger from a newspaper reviewer.... Sam Leith pointed out that reviewing even in newspapers had always been an amateur activity and that the real difference was one of format rather than substance. That having been said, one major difference in approach seems to be in relation to negative reviews. Lynne only posts positive reviews as she (like me!) rarely finishes a book she really dislikes. Also, and very laudably she aims to create a critical but kind space for thinking about books in. This is in contrast to point widely accepted amongst the journalists present that stinking reviews make good copy. Of course, as Lynne pointed out bloggers do it for free where as journalists get paid, however pitifully.

John Mullan really made me think about what academics add to reviewing culture. I have never been a great fan of critical theory and find that it can ruin a perfectly good book in acres of arcane and generic nonsense. He inspired me to realise that academics are useful in this area because they provide context and a meta narrative to read books inside. They can help you to understand why a book is good, sort of.

Print media reviews are more hidebound by fashion, public interest and “significance” in publishing than blogs. They are often deluged with review copies (Erica Wagner reported receiving a stonking 150 books per day). If an “important” book comes out there is an expectation that the major newspapers will review it and what is more, they may look to a particular writer to review it for historical or personal reasons. This is in contrast to the happy go lucky blogger who can review whatever they damn well like (such as something as unknown as Forlorn Sunset for example). But then the Times is read by rather more people than your average blog.... so I suppose you could say it is a case of swings and roundabouts.

Personally, I love the flexibility of the blog format, but that maybe because I have odd tastes. So, for the sake of “pluralism” and ignoring the fact that there is likely to be bias here, I am throwing this one open to the floor. Whose reviews do you read and trust the most? What or who really influences your reading?

Now for a bit of a dabble

2010-09-22T17:00:00.000+02:00

"The Dabbler" is a great name and a great blog and one of its features which is close to my heart is the "1 penny book review" in which various contributors review the many obscure and half forgotten books which can be bought on Amazon for 1p or 1c.

I was most flattered to be asked for a review and did not hesitate in singing the praises of forgotten novel Our Spoons Came From Woolworths by Barbara Comyns. To read the review click here. To buy one of the 1p copies on Amazon click here.

If the promise of a penny book is not enough, I have attached a picture of Comyns to tempt you. May the rediscovery begin!

Charles Dickens, Sarah Waters, Daniel Defoe and Dan Brown combined: Forlorn Sunset by Michael Sadleir: one of the best books you have never heard of

2010-09-22T10:00:00.000+02:00

Readers may recall that Michael Sadleir’s Forlorn Sunset was the mystery read on my recent bloggy holiday. That is to say that I dragged it from London to Beirut and from Beirut to Paris, in a suitcase that was already dangerously close to its weight limit, despite not knowing one single thing about it. As you can see from the picture, it doesn’t even have a front cover to give a hint. Inside the cover, there sits a rather suggestive ink and wash drawing by John Piper. I say “suggestive” because John Piper was an eminent artist of the mid 20th century, and so I wonder whether this book was rather better known when it was first published in 1947. It certainly can hardy be less well known that it is today. I have searched far and wide and can find only the briefest of mentions in the most obscure of sources. There isn’t even a consensus on how to spell the guy’s name: some, including the excellent art historian and biographer Frances Spalding, go in for “Sadler”, but my copy of the book definitely says “Sadleir”.

Oh well. That’s enough wallowing in obscurity. Now for why it is probably one of the best books you have never heard of. This is a novel of the Victorian underworld. It is a gallop through London, but not a London that most Londoners would recognise. This is an organised-crime riddled, iniquitous den awash with the most awful examples of lives wasted and cruelly exploited.

The story knits together the fates of a group of disparate people, high and low, rich and poor, kind and wicked, who are connected by the chance rescue of a child from a mysterious house of abuse in the 1860s. That child is Lottie Heape and it is she, as much as anyone, who forms the centre of this novel. Tangled up in her life there are Vicars and pimps, journalists and soaks, industrialists and pornographers, social reformers and campaigning ladies, brave boys and more than enough nasty pieces of work.

I feel that I should explain the title of this post. Forlorn Sunset is like Charles Dickens because it is a “cast-of-thousands” “portrait-of-a-city” sort of novel. Every character has a history, and what a history that it. I was reminded also of Sarah Waters because Sadleir looks under the carpet of his chosen society – into areas neglected by history. Daniel Defoe gets a mention because there is more than a passing resemblance between his famous lady of the night M oll Flanders (as Nicola Lacey has written “my kind of heroine”) and Lottie Heape. I have mentioned Dan Brown, not because I want to put you off, but because here we have a fast paced muddle to work out with a cliff hanger at the end of every chapter.

This is a cracking story of sin and redemption. It addresses, in a story which never drags and never feels slow, the idea of social evil and individual evil. Sadleir shows in the panorama of his story how hard it is for a person to fight against the circumstances of their birth and how when a society is rotten to the core, it can pull all sorts of unlikely people within the ambit of its rot.

If you are thinking that it sounds a bit gloomy then fear not. For in this book is a clarion call for personal bravery in the face of social convention and what can I say but “hurrah” to that.

Michael Sadleir is also the author of a book entitled Fanny by Gaslight, but don’t let that put you off.

Everyone’s a critic? Calling all readers, writers, thinkers and bloggers for a real live event, feat. DOVEGREYREADER…

2010-09-20T10:00:00.000+02:00

There has been a change of timetable for the Stoneham Travelling Circus and come Wednesday night, we will be sitting on the eurostar drinking mini bottles of red wine and trying to get into a London mood. Goodbye French countryside, hello grubby monolith, which we know so well.

The huge advantage of coming home earlier than planned is that I will now be able to attend the Everyone’s A Critic night on Thursday 23rd September. The event is organised by the laudable English PEN in association wth FLOW – the Free Word Festival. It takes place in the easy-to-get –to and not a little trendy Farringdon Road.

The discussion will focus on the future of the professional literary critic. Whose recommendations really influence reading habits? Is the book blogosphere a shot in the arm for reviewing culture or does it represent a lamentable dumbing down?

Leading the discussion will be Sam Leith, former literary editor of The Daily Telegraph, Erica Wagner, literary editor of The Times, and in a rare public appearance, the book blogosphere’s very own Lynne Hatwell, AKA, Dovegreyreader.

Tickets are a snip at £6 or £3 for concessions and PEN members, and all the details anyone could need are here. It is probably best to book ahead. I hope to meet some of you there.

The Weekly Portrait: Isadora Duncan; dancer, lover, femme fatale

2010-09-17T10:00:00.000+02:00

The products of a bloggy holiday: images from the Lebanon - Part 2

2010-09-15T10:00:00.000+02:00

Seriously swash buckling: A High Wind in Jamaica by Richard Hughes

2010-09-13T10:00:00.002+02:00

My father in law does not recommend books lightly or very often, so when he does, you take him a bit seriously, if you know what I mean. This was the thought with which I opened his latest recommendation, A High Wind in Jamaica by Richard Hughes. This is a book which subsumes its reader. It does its work rapidly and it is as disorderly as it is delightful. It is easily one of the most remarkable books that I have read. Its power rests on the twin pillars of staggering descriptions and the slightly scary and wholly unsentimental nature of its message.

First for those descriptions. Hughes is seriously good at the pithy, skin touching, tongue tasting descriptions. The novel is set first in Jamaica and then upon the high seas of the Caribbean and is so perfect in its description of that landscape. I used to live in Trinidad and maybe I still miss the hot sweet air and the bewildering lushness; the idea that the land is so fertile that its vegetation might reclaim the space that the buildings stand on at any moment. Unlike the children in the story, I have never been in a hurricane or an earth quake, but I know the feeling of living where the elements are not meek or placid. The extent of the sense of place in A High Wind in Jamaica is astounding and it is worth reading for that reason alone.

But this book is not just one of those “you could almost feel as though you were there...” reads; it is much more memorable than that. It is the story of six children who survive a hurricane in Jamaica and who, on the journey to supposed safety in England, fall into the hands of a band of pirates. They are not the nastiest pirates you ever did see and nor are they great big teddy bears really. The truth is that they are rather down on their luck and are not too sure what to make of it when one of their exploits lands them with six infants to do what they will with.

The children themselves are the core of this novel and they are not virtuous little adults of the Victorian idyll but are savage survival machines. Far from adoring their parents they have startlingly little attachment to them and their love for one another, such as it is, seems far more based on a shared dilemma than on anything more profound. When one of them disappears to a fate unknown, but inevitably guessable, the others forget him with a ruthless and casual cruelty that chills to the bone. Under threat, they see only the make believe, they easily turn on one another and they resort to unexpected acts of violence. But before we get too shocked or too puffed up with righteous indignation, we must pause to wonder how differently adults would behave in the same circumstances: does adulthood civilise the savage in us that much?

The adventure of the children is largely seen through the eyes of one of the older girls. Emily Bas-Thornton is a canny enterprising character, but ultimately she is a child at sea. She detects a soft spot in the pirate Captain and tries to respond to it but really she is as confused as she is intuitive. Is her Captain screaming out from a lifetime of brigandary for some semblance of family life or is he a would-be child molester? Whatever the facts, Richard Hughes will not always sort them out for his reader. This is a book which is about ambiguity and the lack of understanding that exists between adults and children. I could not have been more enraptured.

There are excellent and interesting reviews of this book at Shelf Love and The Mumpsimus. I have featured a picture of my copy of the novel, on the beach and a couple of stills from the 1965 film of the novel starring, of all people, Martin Amis. I feel a book/movie night special coming on.

The Weekly Portrait: Virginia Woolf by Vanessa Bell (1912)

2010-09-10T10:00:00.000+02:00

This week, a portrait, without a face:

The products of a bloggy holiday: images from the Lebanon - Part 1

2010-09-08T10:00:00.000+02:00

Meandering with Murdoch: The Book and the Brotherhood

2010-09-06T10:00:00.001+02:00

What a lucky person I am, not only to have been given Iris Murdoch’s 23rd novel (yes, *23rd*) The Book and the Brotherhood by the lovely Bloomsbury Bell, but to have read it, mostly on a beach at Byblos in the eastern Mediterranean. Not necessarily a natural consumption spot for a book which is largely based in chilly London town houses and narrow country lanes and summer evenings in Oxford when one needs a shawl. Yes readers, this is a profoundly English book with English landscapes and peculiar mores and very English characters.

Of those characters there are certainly plenty. Murdoch is fond of large casts and this book is no exception. The “brotherhood” of friends who form the central focus of the story are a gaggle of late middle aged Oxford graduates who met at university. Their ties are not those of polite friendship but full blooded commitment, even love. The acknowledged leader of the pack is the patrician and rather controlling Gerard, whose great true love, we learn has died years earlier in a freak accident. His juniors are his dear friend Rose, the sister of his deceased love, and the measured and intelligent schoolmaster, Jenkin. Their circle also includes the drunken shadow of a man, Duncan Cambus and his wealthy, restless, aimless wife Jean. Via Gerard’s family the central group also takes in vindictive Violet, a character as pitiful as she is unpleasant, her impressionable daughter Tamar, a rather silly man called Guilliver, and, needless to say, a whole host of others.

If the book can be said to have a central character, then that character would be the man who is not a member of the “brotherhood”, but who is bound to it in ways that are strange and unbreakable and just a bit scary. David Crimond is a monomaniacal, ascetic Marxist who has an apparent death wish. I think that the idea is that he lives as purely as he thinks – and as such is cut away from normal mores when it comes to friends and lovers. He certainly causes chaos among the other protagonists. He causes them intellectual chaos by consistently extracting support from them for something – a book - which they do not agree with. He causes moral chaos by spotting the weakest of their relationships and breaking it up. He causes chaos of the most heart rending kind as the novel reaches its climax. He is able to do this not simply as a result of frightening charisma, but because he is simply far more incisive than anyone else around him.

The cast is rich and colourful, without being especially likable. Murdoch does a good job of keeping them all in good focus while life plays a pretty tragic game with them. That is the true value of this novel: it is a modern day tragedy without seeming too ostentatiously to be one. Each of the characters seems locked into a date with fate. Each of the women in particular are fated to “fall” for things, whether they be men or religion or a combination of the two. The women are so old fashioned – they seem to be crying out for domination and constantly turning down the opportunity to author their own histories. At the climax of the novel, an important character will die, but the person who actually kills them is the character who feels the least guilt. There is a strange disconnection between the characters as moral actors and what happens to them: they are somehow out of the world and there is nothing that they can do.

The truth is that behind each sorry love in this story lies a lie or a betrayal. There are emotional betrayals but there is one which is much greater. This book is about the generation of thinkers who were let down by Marxism. Those for whom communism began as a hopeful idea and ended as a demonstrable disaster to which no thinking person could subscribe. What the book deals with is the nuclear waste ground that is left behind when flimsy loves and discredited ideas have broken down. Fortunately for the would-be reader, Murdoch seems to have believed in regeneration after both.

There is an excellent review by Paul Gray online at Time. I have included a picture of the Vintage cover and the author, as well as evidence of my beach side reading....

The Weekly Portrait: Mary Stuart, Queen of France, Queen of Scots, in the Jardin de Luxembourg, Paris

2010-09-03T10:00:00.000+02:00

Because portraits are not all about paint on canvas

Emily Berry’s Autobiografiction – answers on a postcard please!

2010-09-01T16:25:00.001+02:00

I first discovered the splendid Pen Pusher Magazine when I was living in Budapest a few years ago. Like many a secondee I found myself pacing out the day on the internet and good that I did for I happened upon a literary rag that combines quirk and style and substance and fun. There are always gems between its covers, but I thought that Emily Berry’s poem Autobigraphication, which is published in the current edition, deserves a special mention, and a bit of a plug, so here it is:

We always breakfast with the biographer.
On day one I showed him my grapefruit spoon;
it has a serrated edge. My father gave him
a Mont Blanc fountain pen as a welcome gift,
but I think he was more impressed by the spoon.
‘It’s almost like a knife!’ he said. The biographer
is a coffee nut and I use this fact to bond with him.
‘Oh, Robusta,’ I say dramatically when I know
he’s listening. ‘You inferior bean!’ When we pass
in the hall I fling my arm back and say things like
‘Am I strung out or what! Time for another
caffeine fix, methinks!’ I am not allowed coffee
because of my nerves, but the biographer doesn’t
know this. Sometimes we sit up in bed comparing
moans. Mine are always loudest. The biographer’s
are hampered by his boarding school education
and the British flair for embarrassment. Sometimes
the publishers call. When he gets on the phone,
he sweats; afterwards the right side of his face is damp.
I like to monitor these subtle changes. Last night
my father found us touching legs. ‘Go to your room!’
he shouted. ‘You shabby daughter.’ ‘You worthless
excuse for a story,’ the biographer added. They played
cards to settle a debt. That day my mouth felt wetter
than usual. I asked the biographer to check. He used
his tongue. ‘This may affect the results,’ he said.

Summer of Love: Will she? Won’t she? in Julia Strachey’s Cheerful Weather for the Wedding

2010-08-31T10:00:00.002+02:00

Who remembers the moment in Four Weddings and a Funeral when Hugh Grant rolls over in bed and asks “who is it this week?” Because as we enter this, the end of the summer, that is how we feel. In a good way, of course. I love weddings. Which is just as well, because we have been to one almost every weekend of the summer and still have one to go. We have been to Serbia (twice), Russia, the Lebanon, Hampshire, London (more than twice) and Oxford. Honourable mention must also be made of one further “not married party” which was no less a meeting of old friends and a celebration of love and commitment (you know who you are)...

And so it was as a self appointed expert, a connoisseur of nuptials, that I picked up the Persephone Classic, Cheerful Weather for the Wedding by Julia Strachey.

Cheerful Weather for the Wedding is short, funny and worth-it. It is the narrative of a single day – the wedding day – of Dolly, a middle-class girl of the early 1930s. The action takes place entirely in her family home, which one presumes to be a medium sized manor house or something of that sort. The house is teeming with comic characters – the status conscious, conventionally minded mother of the bride, Mrs Thatcham, to whom appearances mean a lot; The Bridesmaids – clumsy Kitty who is beset with adolescent insecurities and elegant Evelyn who is worried about being cold in church; School boy cousins Tom and Robert, who are locked into a ceaseless argument about emerald green socks (“Go and put your head in a bag” sticks in the mind); The dour anthropologist Joseph Patten, who moons about the house having tense conversations with everyone and trying to find the bride, for what purpose, the reader must enquire on their own account.... There are numerous others; mad old aunts; domestic helps; a Canon, and they all rumble around the place in a sort of country house comedy way – with people walking out of rooms just as others walk in looking for them and so on.

At the heart of this novella there is a rich and slightly painful vein of social satire. Some characters seem to care more about what things look like than how they really are. Others respond to such hypocrisy with savagery - saying things which are designed to shock and upset. This seems to me to be not just the age old clash between the old and the young but also the clash between the conservative, the traditional and the more socially liberated approaches to life which were emerging in the 1920s and 30s. There is a thick layer of repression veiling most of the main characters and there is a lot of swigging from the bottle in dark corners as well.

Which brings me to another theme which seemed to sing out loud and clear, one to which any wedding goer is familiar: continuity. When Dolly fortifies herself with a bottle of rum and faces the music, she does what many women, possibly even her much maligned mother, have done before her. There were times when I felt that Cheerful Weather for the Wedding was like a form of social archaeology. If you remove the top soil of propriety the first layer you come to is rebellion but underneath that runs a thick course of convention and a willingness to do things the way that they have always been done.

The characters are not as whole or as touching as they could be and I did not find myself rooting for anyone but the book is thought provoking. Other opinions can be found at Stuck in a Book, Vintage Reads, Fernham, Nonsuch Book, Novel Insights, The Green Room, My Porch and the marvellously named What We Have Here is a Failure to Communicate.

I have included pictures of the (predictably lovely) Persephone cover and end paper and a portrait of the author by Dora Carrington.

Social Networking: The Way of All Flesh AND a Bloggy holiday

2010-08-20T10:00:00.001+02:00

I am now terrorising the cyber community through not one but three channels. To make it easier for readers to get in contact I am now a fully paid up tweeter – and have set up a facebook group for readers of my blog. So, if you are a reader and or a tweeter or a person of the book, I would love you to join up.

Right now, I am off to the Lebanon for a week and so shall be on a bloggy holiday. I am taking such gems as Iris Murdoch’s The Book and the Brotherhood, A High Wind in Jamaica by Richard Hughes, VMC At the Still Point by Mary Benson, Hilda Bernstein’s The World That Was Ours and a book of which I know absolutely nothing: Forlorn Sunset by Michael Sadleir…. So let the sunbathing begin!

Bon weekend

The Weekly Portrait: Gwen John (self portrait)

2010-08-19T10:15:00.000+02:00

Here comes Holden: Further adventures in forgotten books

2010-08-17T17:16:00.001+02:00

I hate reading books in the wrong order. I am a tidy girl who irons her bed sheets and has a neat sock drawer. I like things to be in their proper place and that includes books. Regular readers of this blog may recall my joy at discovering the work of Ursula Holden back in April when I reviewed her novel Unicorn Sisters. Well, drunk on discovery, reckless in pursuit of more, I ordered another of her little novels: Tin Toys on Amazon. It was a good read which I do not regret at all, but for anyone who may like to try it – it should be read before reading Unicorn Sisters. That’s right folks: there is, emerging from my Ursula Holden detective work, evidence of a trilogy of books, starting with Tin Toys then Unicorn Sisters and finally A Bubble Garden. So bare that in mind all ye who enter here.

Tin Toys is an odd and disquieting little book. It is the story of Ula – a little girl in the 1930s whose father has died, whose mother is woefully negligent and whose two older sisters have built a protective world for themselves, from which she is excluded. The household is riven with divisions of age and class and nationality and gender and for the most part, the segregation reinforces and breeds an atmosphere of dark loves and lonely prejudice. This is not a kind home in which to grow up and so it is no real shock that Ula herself is a peculiar child who struggles to connect with others. She is at once too cagey and also too candid.

When tragedy strikes the household Ula is packed off to Ireland and it is there that she will encounter the shock of cruelty and the web of deceptions and half truths that make up adult mores. Ula is a child and her judgement is both infant and flawed. She does not know whom to trust nor whom to love. She reaches out to several people but many of them will prove to be sorry friends. Maggie, the Irish cook/cleaner impresses Ula with her warmth and cosy tales of her homeland. Lucy, the child whom Ula meets at ballet class bewitches her with her wedgewood blue eyes and air of confidence. In Tin Toys, Ula learns the hard lesson of childhood; that adults can be as cruel and deluded and children.

It is the style and atmosphere of Tin Toys that really causes one to remember it. It is clipped and savage as a fairy tale. Things happen and they cannot be stopped or even explained. It is like all the world is locked into a fast train rattling who knows where with no hope of escape. Which brings me neatly to the front cover. The Methuen Modern Fiction paperback that I have is illustrated with Mark Gertler’s famous first world war painting Merry-Go-Round. The Merry-Go-Round is a frightening response to the mechanisation and horror of warfare in black, white and blood red. At first I thought it was an odd choice for the front cover of this book, but now I understand.

If pushed, I would have to say that Tin Toys did not quite have the emotional power of Unicorn Sisters, but it is still very good and they are so clearly from the same pen. Ula’s development is not necessarily an easy watch – but it is extremely well written and deserves not to be forgotten.

I have included a picture of the book and also (by popular acclamation!) pictures from our garden.

The (slightly scary) Weekly Portrait: Le departs des fruits et legumes du coeur de Paris le 28 Fevrier 1969 by Raymond Mason

2010-08-13T10:20:00.000+02:00

It is Friday 13th and I am feeling a bit silly, so what is there to do apart from post odd pictures on the internet?

The book bloggy detective strikes in Oxfordshire: Swinbrook church and the grave of Nancy Mitford

2010-08-11T11:04:00.000+02:00

1 August 2010 was the day that I ceased to be a bride. That’s right folks; it was our first wedding anniversary. For a bit of a break from London and in recognition of the fact that we are still speaking to each other, we decided that a weekend in Woodstock was in order. We went on walks, ate pies, drank wine, talked, got squashed by tourists in Blenheim Palace and got chased by wasps in Blenheim Palace gardens. Finally, on the way home, we were terribly English and decided to go “the scenic way”. When we drove past the SWINBROOK sign, we both said that we thought that it was significant in some way; where had we heard of it before?

I am grateful for a well read husband and have to admit to the world here and now that he remembered before I did: Swinbrook was the childhood home of the Mitford sisters and is the resting place of quite a few of them.

And so, to our list of first anniversary activities, we added grave hunting. The results are here for you to see. If anyone knows why there is a small mole carved on Nancy Mitford’s grave, you will have my undying gratitude.

Anne Chisholm’s Frances Partridge: A Woman who surely loved in a straight line

2010-08-02T13:20:00.000+02:00

I hesitate to commence a review by saying “it makes you think” but actually, Anne Chisholm’s biography of Frances Partridge really does. For those who have not overdosed as I have on the annals of the Bloomsbury group, a little introduction may be useful. Frances Partridge was a woman whose life spanned the twentieth century. She was a pacifist and a diarist and a graduate of Newnham College. She is most famous for having been the second wife of Ralph Partridge and the “fly in the ointment” of his delicate manage a trois with his first wife Dora Carrington, always known as Carrington, and the love of her life, Lytton Strachey. Somebody once commented of the Bloomsbury group that they “lived in squares and loved in triangles”, and that was certainly true of the situation in which Frances became embroiled in the mid 1920s.

What is wonderful about Anne Chisholm’s biography is that it skilfully extracts Frances from the welter of Bloomsbury-abilia whilst also recognising how important that set of ideas was in the shaping of her life. Of course, the book covers the uncommon arrangement at the Strachey/Carrington/Partridge home Ham Spray; the passionate and abiding love of the artist Carrington for the homosexual writer Lytton Strachey; the powerful love that he in turn felt for the man that they both called “the Major” – Ralph Partridge; Ralph’s own place in the jigsaw where he is married to Carrington, but seems to love his housemates in equal measure and knows himself to be the lynchpin that holds them together; the entrance of the beautiful young baggage-less Frances who, despite other offers, throws her lot in with Ralph and by extension his strange compromise of a household; the sudden death of Lytton Strachey and the horrific suicide of Carrington. It would be a strange biography of Frances Partridge if it did not take its reader through these aspects of her story. But, it does not feel to dwell on them too much and it always looks to them as a means of learning about Frances. Its focus is always bringing Frances to the centre of the stage.

Frances Partridge outlived all of the most significant people in her life by a long way, but she was very much still alive when the biographers picked up their pens. It is perhaps to be expected that she was a woman of firm ideas when it came to life writing. Intellectually she believed in truthfulness and one of the reasons that as a young woman she was drawn to the slightly older Bloomsbury group was that they had a powerful commitment to living honestly. On the other hand, she was also fiercely loyal to the memory of her husband Ralph and there were times when assessments of his character, which appear reasonable based on all of the evidence, were unpalatable to her. She had an idea in her head of what he was like and what he was about and she found it hard to cope with conflicting views. One of Anne Chisholm’s achievements is that she holds in focus the opinions of Frances whilst also being kindly critical of them. Frances always maintained for example that Ralph’s love for Lytton was always purely platonic whilst Chisholm acknowledges the possibility that she may have been wrong. When Ralph was characterised after his death as a bullying, braying, bed-hopping parasite, it is easy to see why Frances was upset. Chisholm highlights how Ralph’s historical reputation has been unfairly tainted by the views of some of his influential contemporaries whilst also acknowledging that there is truth in the myth. In considering Frances’s view of life writing so carefully, Chisholm examines the very morality of biography and causes me to think, for the first time, how very strange it must be to be written about. It is of course impossible to know what Frances Partridge would have thought of this book because she died before it was published, but I can’t help but think that the balance and the slightly polite honesty would have been right up her street.

The Weekly Portrait: Lytton Strachey, reading by (Dora) Carrington, 1916

2010-07-29T10:12:00.000+02:00

For this portrait - a quotation from my current read Frances Partridge, the biography by Anne Chisholm

“Their sexual relationship, hardly surprisingly, did not endure; but the intimacy and affection between them was to grow. Lytton was a natural teacher, and Carrington became his devoted and enthusiastic pupil. Together they read English and French history, Shakespeare, the metaphysical poets; above all, she loved to listen to him read his own writing. He encouraged her to work; during 1916 she painted his portrait lying back on a cushion, reading. It is an image of reverence for an intellectual, a bearded, bespectacled man deep in his book; his skin glows and his beautiful translucent hands with their slender fingers are painted with veneration as well as skill”

For more on Anne Chisholm’s excellent writing... watch this blog.

Slightly foxed that I haven’t discovered this before

2010-07-26T10:46:00.000+02:00

The reason that I love London is that you can never quite conquer it. There will always be an undiscovered park, a lovely shop, a really cheeky short cut that you don’t know about, no matter how hard you try. But – book shops – now that is an area where I thought I had a basic to strong handle on things. So the discovery of the wonderful Slightly Foxed in the sunshine at the end of last week was a surprise. The shop contained a large collection of fascinating second hand titles (with a particularly huge biography section which kept me a happy browser for ages) and a smattering of well chosen new books. What is more – the Slightly Foxed reader’s quarterly is worth a trip to the shop for alone. It is packed with insightful essays on slightly obscure things, of which, of course, there can never be enough.

The Weekly Portrait: Nancy Mitford by Mogens Tvede

2010-07-23T10:28:00.000+02:00

Going bananas on Nancy Mitford. Well, only for this week.

Mooching with Mitford

2010-07-21T13:28:00.000+02:00

I have been reading Love in a Cold Climate in rather warm circumstances. Firstly, in unseasonably steamy St. Petersburg and secondly, in an only slightly cooler London, where I now sit and reflect on what is basically a fun read.

Nancy Mitford’s Love in a Cold Climate is the follow on from her classic In Pursuit of Love and is narrated by the familiar Fanny Logan – a thinly fictionalised version of Mitford herself. Fanny is an unmistakably upper class girl, but her status as the abandoned child of the bolter - a notorious society floozy allows her to stand both at the heart of and also slightly outside the society which she describes.

This time, Fanny’s tale is that of Lord and Lady Montdore and their adored daughter and prize possession Polly. Lord and Lady Montdore are immensely wealthy and an oddly matched pair. He is a grand patrician gentleman and ex Viceroy of India and she is a grasping, vain, self regarding social climber who carries a bit too much weight. Their daughter Polly, born in the twilight of her mother’s child bearing years is an acknowledged astounding beauty but a bit of a wet fish socially, which, with a mother like that, is hardly surprising. The matching of Polly to a man of suitable wealth, status and standing is her mother’s life work, tacitly supported by her father. However, the machinations of human nature, the downright contrariness of the younger generation and the urge to rebel will all unite to give the Montdore’s something that they are not expecting.

I should probably be straight and say that I do not think that Nancy Mitford is really a great writer. I think that her dialogue is fun and characterful but her prose does not match it, and underneath her satire of the upper classes is a rich vain of showing off that she was one of them. The customary groan having been got out of the way however, there are two, really super things about Nancy Mitford’s novels and Love in a Cold Climate is no exception.

Firstly, they are side-splitting, floor-rolling, handbag-dropping funny. I even laughed on the tube, and that is not something that one sees often. For me, the most comic character is the mouth frothing Uncle Matthew who only comes into Love in a Cold Climate a few times, but always to great effect. Mitford had a great talent for laughing at those she knew and making them look ridiculous. Uncle Matthew is a pastiche of her father, Lord Reedsdale, who was, by all accounts (although, admittedly, hers is the main one...) every inch as potty as his literary incarnation.

Secondly, they are fascinating period pieces, which open a window on a world long lost and strangely contorted by the events of the 1940s. The Montdores and their crew represent a form of old world splendour which even at the time Nancy Mitford put pen to paper, was ebbing away. She was not a writer who tried to write about things she did not know about – this world of country house weekends and bridge parties and debutante balls was her world and it really shows in the way that she wrote.

Other opinions that I have enjoyed can be found at Bianca’s Book Blog, Life in a Pink Fibro and Vulpes Libris. The pictures are my own, rather battered copy of the novel, a lovely shot of the lady herself and a picture of Nancy Mitford and her famous sisters.

St. Petersburg in a Nancy Mitford frame of mind

2010-07-19T09:49:00.000+02:00

I was properly mortified on Thursday evening when I opened an email from Frances at Heywood Hill inviting me to the launch of the new Capuchin Classic, Nancy Mitford's Highland Fling. Regular readers of this blog will know that I am a great fan of the mint green voyage of rediscovery that is Capuchin. The reason for the mortification is two fold. Firstly, by the time I opened the email, the party had practically already started, and secondly, I couldn't go in any case, as I was already on my way to St. Petersburg.

It was our first time in the "Venice of the north" and in Russia and what a time it was. We had a wonderful taste of Russian culture at the wedding of dear friends and topped it off with a splendid tour of some of the city's sights before dragging out weary and sleep-deprived bodies back home last night.

How much reading did I do? Well, not as much as planned. I spent most of the flight out sad about having missed the Capuchin bash, and most of the flight home, fast asleep. I feel like a very naughty book blogger. The book that I had with me, and which I did read a bit of was Nancy Mitford's Love in a Cold Climate - the lovely, if slightly dilapidated copy that you see here. More reflections on that; later.

The Weekly Portrait: Ellen Terry by George Frederick Watts

2010-07-15T10:29:00.000+02:00

Welcome to this, the first of what I hope will be a regular feature: the weekly portrait, in which I share images of and by people who interest me and most of whom reflect some of my reading. Here we have a youthful Ellen Terry painted by her first husband, George Frederick Watts in circa. 1864

Little, Odd, Excellent: The Victorian Chaise-Longue by Maghanita Laski

2010-07-12T14:02:00.001+02:00

Marghanita Laski’s strange little book The Victoria Chaise-Longue has got me thinking about eras and about links and divides between generations. Before I even started to read, I noticed that it was first published in 1953, the year that the Queen was crowned and my mother was born. How long ago that sounds. The book itself explores how social mores and the place of women had changed between the Victorian age and the modern world of the early ‘50s. I am thankful to Richard at Richard’s Books for recommending such a muse worthy novella to me.

With only 99 pages, The Victorian Chaise-Longue must surely be the tiniest Persephone there is. I think that I will take a risk and say that it is the most interesting Persephone book that I have read so far. It is a domestic novel but it is not pedestrian. Its a little bit odd, but whatever is wrong with that?

The story focuses on a few hours in the life of Melanie Langdon. Melanie is a young barrister’s wife and she is pretty, spoilt and makes a profession out of being helpless. She is the kind of girl who is always being looked after by somebody, and as the book opens she is in the care of her patrician GP, the mildly lascivious Dr. Gregory. We soon learn that Melanie is recovering from TB, an illness which almost terminated her recent pregnancy and which has kept her apart from her baby son from the moment that he was born.

All very straight forward, or so I thought. Before long, the book changes direction entirely and with the assistance of an antique chaise-longue, Melanie is transported to the Victorian age in which she has become somebody else – a Milly Baines. The reader experiences with Melanie the claustrophobia of entrapment – the prison of knowing oneself to be one person while all others believe one to be somebody else. Gradually, the sorry tale of Milly Baines begins to unravel. Melanie learns, like a detective in a story what her own character has done and how she has been punished.

I never fully understood whether we are to believe that Melanie has become a time traveller, or has been reincarnated and is recalling her previous life, but I don’t think that this matters too much. Now that I have turned the last page, I understand why Richard recommended this book, and why he mentioned it in the same breathe as The Vet’s Daughter by Barbara Comyns. Like The Vet’s Daughter, it is not a book about the paranormal, but it uses paranormal ideas to explore very real issues; morality, identity, entrapment, mystery. It borrows from the thriller genre but it s not a thriller – it is suspenseful and dark, but it is not frightening. It is a domestic novel, but it is not an aimless one. Laski uses domestic images to sign post the most powerful of human fears and links. She is not simply a chronicler of days gone by, she seems to raising objections about them too.

Melanie finds her life as Milly impossibly restrictive and frustrating. Milly has advanced TB and can barely move. She is kept in a stuffy airless room and is subject to the care of characters bound to her by duty rather than love. Melanie, whose pre illness days were filled with furniture shopping and relation visiting is horrified that she has somehow been stolen away from her own era and condemned in this way. She comes to realise, as does the reader, that the life paths of Melanie and Milly have not been so very different but that the strictures of their respective societies are. Melanie’s ordinary life events are Milly’s dreadful transgressions and the life of punishment which is so awful for Melanie to experience, is usual for Milly. Will Melanie ever escape? Well, I can’t give that one away; interested parties must read for themselves and I hope that they enjoy it as much as I did.

The illustrations are the rather beautiful Persephone edition and endpaper and the even more beautiful Marghanita Laski. Other opinions can be found at Serendipity; Booksnob; Things mean a lot; A Book a week; Novel Insights; Farm Lane Books; The Genteel Arsenal; Green Road Books; and Fleur Fisher.

An oppressive heat, a bit of rain and a lot of A. S. Byatt

2010-07-08T11:49:00.000+02:00

It is my last couple of days in France until September and it is seriously steamy here. Boiling hot days and nights have given way to the odd few hours of torrential rain and for what seems like moments we have been cooled slightly before the sun re asserts itself. It is the kind of weather that makes you slow. On the whole, the last week has been a good time to read A. S. Byatt’s doorstop The Children’s Book. Its long, its complicated, its detailed, it should possibly have been short listed for the bad sex award as well as the booker, but at the end of the long hot day, I think I liked it.

The Children’s Book is a sort of fictional collective biography which starts in the late Victorian age and ends in the trenches of the Somme over 20 years later. It weaves together the lives of three interlinked families together with a host of other associates and the outcome is a cast of what feels like thousands. One of Byatt’s greatest achievements in this book is that she keeps each of these characters in focus and well defined whilst also creating the feel of a community. And what a community they are; we have artists, craftsmen; writers; thinkers; Fabians; revolutionaries; poets; female doctors; suffragettes; museum keepers; rational dressers; nudists; feminists. They are linked by ties of blood, sex, childhood and the powerful ideas of the Victorian and Edwardian avant garde.

If there is a centre to this intricate and disparate tale then that centre is Olive Wellwood. Olive is a writer of children’s stories, an expert on fairy tales, the chatelaine of a ramshackle rural family home, a philanderer’s wife and a working class refugee in an upper middle class world. More than anything, she is an emotional but disengaged mother to 7 children. For each of those children she writes a story that is constantly embellished and enriched with re-writings and new elements. The length and complexity of each story reflects the grossly variable love that she feels for each of her children and as the reader will see, the dark corners of her family history and her marriage.

One of Byatt’s chief concerns is the tension between domesticity and art and this is explored in several characters. Olive is a woman who chooses art. Her sister keeps house for her and cares for the children day to day and the two women are as co-dependent as they are resentful of one another. Her children underpin and inspire her best work, but she fails to engage with any of them on a non-fictional level. Byatt’s comment here on the home lives of artists would feel hackneyed if it were not so well documented. Olive is partly based on E. Nesbitt and of course there are many other examples of the same phenomenon.

Fans of Possession will know how much Byatt loves to write of worlds within worlds and The Children’s Book is no exception. The novel is littered with Olive’s stories, plays, puppet shows, museums, craft fairs and general symposiums in which our characters perform. More than this, there is an inside-outness about childhood and adulthood. So many of the adults in the story are childish – they decline to take on adult responsibilities; they do not demand adult behaviour from their children, even when they are adult. At the same time, the children respond to the chaos of the family life with a sort of desperate maturity.

This is a novel with a powerful sense of history and a feeling for the history of ideas. Byatt captures how ideas can fire people and lead them to new vistas. She seems to hold in easy reach both the idealism of early free thinkers and the absurdity of people who talked always of sexual freedom but did not think to educate their daughters.

So why do I only think I like it? Well, Byatt’s fine tale of artists within families almost dies under a welter of detail and digression. Byatt is a self consciously intellectual writer and as well as weaving complex plots she likes to digress into cultural soliloquies. In Possession, I loved this and was happy to sit back and be taught, but I felt that The Children’s Book went a lecture too far. With endless digressions on social movements and moments of history, there was a lot of showing off in this particular education. There was an over reliance on the already well documented life stories of various artists and writers. Olive is based on E. Nesbitt while her near neighbour, the demented and depressive potter Benedict Fludd is manifestly based on Eric Gill. The spindly-fingered sexual predator Herbert Methley is an almost straight incarnation of D. H. Lawrence. Fictionalisation can be a brilliant way of telling life stories, but not this time. For me the presence of these real lives made the book feel too predictable; reading certain passages was like reading yesterday’s newspapers.

The Children’s Book completely divides opinion, so a potential reader may enjoy consulting a few more. There are excellent reviews at Dovegrey Reader; Farm Lane Books; Random Jottings; ANZ Litlovers Lit Blog; Things mean a lot; The Indextrious Reader; Alone with each other; Maud Newton; Medieval Bookworm; Passionate Booklover; and finally the splendid Booksnob.

I have included a picture of the beautiful front cover as well a pictures of A. S. Byatt and her muses Edith Nesbit, Eric Gill and D. H. Lawrence.