dovegreyreader scribbles

The Baroness - The search for Nica, the rebellious Rothschild ~ Hannah Rothschild

So I had met Hannah Rothschild very briefly at Port Eliot festival, and then made the Rothschild-Waddesdon Manor connection, but beyond that nada, so I opened The Baroness- The search for Nica, the rebellious Rothschild with favourable endorsements ringing in my ears but not knowing what to expect.

I am always amazed (though shouldn't be) at the way that a book about a life unknown to me, and a world that hither to may have been of little interest to me, are both brought so dazzlingly to life that I am seeking out more of the same. I also defy anyone reading this book to not seek out a soundtrack for themselves and want to listen to the music of Thelonius Monk and Charlie Parker, Miles Davies and Dizzy Gillespie. Even if you are not a jazz fan I suspect, like me, you may want to at least try and understand exactly what was the magic that caused a woman, with as much money and comfort as the world could buy, to desert her family for a life in New York where she became the patron of many-a drug fuelled, penniless, frequently homeless and down-and-out jazz musician.

'I'd never heard anything remotely like it. I must have played it twenty times in a row. Missed my plane. In fact I never went home. I got the message I belonged where that music was. I was supposed to be involved in some way.'

Pannonica (Nica) Rothschild born in 1913, the fourth child of Nathaniel and Rozsika Rothschild, aptly named after an elusive moth, and a direct descendant of Mayer Amchsel Rothschild who had founded the family banking dynasty in the Frankfurt ghetto, the Judengasse, during the eighteenth century, and very much against all the odds..

' a place of such indescribable squalor that Europeans, including George Eliot, made it a 'must-see' attraction as part of their grand tour.'

Goethe, also visited and wrote...

'The lack of space, the dirt, the throng of people, the disagreeable accents of the voice, altogether it made the most unpleasant impression, even upon the passer-by who merely looked through the gate.'

To his complete surprise, when he plucked up the courage to enter the gates of the Judengasse, the inhabitants were...

' human beings after all, industrious and obliging, and one could not help but admie even the obstinacy with which they adhered to their traditional ways.'

It was Mayer Amschel Rothschild, who in this unlikely setting, established his small coin business using his wife's dowry, eventually becoming one of the richest men in the Judengasse and the father of nineteen children, ten of whom survived childhood, so plenty to carry on the dynasty that the Rothschild banking empire was to become. As Hannah Rothschild points out, centuries of persecution has made the family 'secretive and inward facing' with little trust for outsiders, coupled with the belief that 'only money and power would protect them from anti-Semetism and a return to that early life of misery.' Marriage had to be within the Jewish faith and increasingly within the family. But as far as the bank was concerned it was only men allowed, the women were completely disempowered. Only Rothschild men could inherit and run the business, a principle still in practice today, whilst the women of the family were barred from working or setting foot in the bank, or inheriting shares, which reverted to surviving fathers and brothers in the event of a death. When the Y chromosome starts to diminish within the family and a succession of girls are born it heralds interesting times ahead.

But alongside all this came great business acumen and complete discretion for clients, an ingrained trait that, even today, made the writing of this book something of a challenge within the family for Hannah Rothschild as she attempted to uncover the life of her great-aunt Nica.

And so to Nica, the wonderful, free-spirited rebellious Nica and with a tension built up by Hannah Rothschild as the fate of the women within this patriarchally dominant family is gradually revealed, and to the point where I would have been seriously disappointed if Nica hadn't done a runner, because in the end I was willing her to escape. Suffering a form of de-oxygenated entrapment from real life, and of the highest order, Nica was never cut out for the rarifed atmosphere in which she found herself, something had to give.

It was the Second World War that did it. Nica's life until that one of dependence and moneyed privilege, pampered to the point of infantilism within a rule-bound, class-obsessed society, but with the war came Nica's chance. She took it and capitalised on it, dutifully travelling to the U.S. for the safety of herself and her children, as instructed by her French husband Jules, but then leaving to return to Europe to join the Free French Army. Nica had a busy and exciting war and as I read of her exploits it became obvious that she would never settle back into life as Rothschild woman... there to 'entertain, inform and breed.'

War decimated the family's fortunes and this makes for sombre reading, not only for the stupendous wealth that one family can amass in the shape of no less than forty stately homes across Europe (including Waddesdon Manor), but also for a family's persecution and demise at the hands of the Nazis when houses were ransacked and a known 3978 paintings seized.

It was 1948, perhaps 1949, no one is really sure, when Nica, stopping off on her way to the airport in New York to fly back to her family, hears the music of Thelonious Monk for the first time and changes the course of her life for ever. New York the 'post-war crucible of innovation' and it is to the jazz clubs of 52nd Street that Nica migrates in preference to the rarified world of European aristocracy. That doesn't stop her driving a blue Bentley convertible around the city and taking a suite in a top class hotel from which she organises and frequently bails out the jazz musicians.  

Hannah Rothschild achieves a remarkable even-handedness as she writes of these tumultuous years in Nica's life, at times uncomfortable with Nica's behaviour, frequently suspending disbelief in order to try and understand her great aunt...how could she leave her children as she did... what about the 360 cats that shared the home that Nica was eventually forced to buy when no hotel would accommodate her.

And what of Nica??

Well I loved Nica. Setting aside the qualms I would share with Hannah Rothschild about the children (though they sought their mother out and Nica seems to have been close to some of them), in her New York life here was a woman who was selfless and generously committed to her cause, yes eccentric but accepting of others unconditionally and regardless of race, unflinching in the face of adversity of which there was a great deal. When Nica risks prison by taking the drugs-bust rap for Thelonious Monk in the hope that he will keep his perfoming licence... only to find that he loses it anyway, you want to weep for her.  It all seemed a far cry, a complete repudiation of the social mores instilled in her as a child...or was it. Surely Nica reshaped those values of family loyalty and used them differently, and for the good of others above self and family.

And so the music. Who would have thought I would be seeking out and listening to the music that Nica loved, and then on tenterhooks waiting for the DVD, The Jazz Baroness, to arrive from Lovefilm (don't miss this film if you decide to read the book)

'The music is what moves me. It has something I also hear in the playing of the Hungarian gypsies, something very sad and beautiful. It's everything that really matters, everything worth digging. It's a desire for freedom. And all my life, I've never known any people who have warmed me as much by their friendship as the Jazz musicians I've come to know.'

As Hannah Rothschild suggests in her response to these words of Nica's ...

'Nica had found her calling, her version of paradise.'

and towards the end of the book...

'She made her sliver of a great fortune go a little further. She made a difference. In return she received the one thing she lacked and desperately missed during her childhood: friendship.'

Rumer Godden

'Is there a story that takes you back, that has a permanent place in your heart? One you would wish to pass on to the next generation, and would yourself happily read again now?'

That is the question now being asked by Virago books, and I had no idea I even wanted an armchair trip to India until a divine new hardback series arrived with six books under the heading of A Coming of Age Collection.

'Each has been selected for its striking description of a time, a place, and of a young woman on the cusp of adulthood...' 

Included in this first batch Slammerkin by Emma Donoghue, Invitation to the Waltz by Rosamond Lehman, My Brilliant Career by Miles Franklin, Tipping the Velvet by Sarah Walters, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou. But it was going to have to be an exceptional book that could claim my attention after so much diversion in recent weeks, and the one that lifted me so unexpectedly (and perhaps in that way only a book can) from the midst of London 2012 right into the heart of India, sixth in the series, The River by Rumer Godden. Once opened impossible to close and more about it soon.

It is some years since I have read anything by Rumer Godden but I knew in an instant I had found an author I wanted to catch up with again through this autumn and coming winter. I love being able to choose a writer and then really get stuck in and share the reading here ...last year Elizabeth Taylor, and still in progress A.S.Byatt and Elizabeth Bowen, down the years Virginia Woolf, Daphne du Maurier, Janet Frame, Jean Rhys, Muriel Spark,  Margaret Atwood, Barbara Pym, Irene Nemirovksy, Penelope Fitzgerald to name a few. I have Iris Murdoch in my sights for 2013 but meanwhile plenty of Rumer Godden to come, and so it was then off to the shelves to do a quick inventory.

Bit of a patchy collection, I seem to have several duplicates and some glaring omissions, having felt sure I had a copy of When Kingfishers Catch Fire somewhere. It may yet turn up (it has now) but the good news is that Virago will be publishing many acclaimed novels by Rumer Godden in the months to come, a new and very worthy addition to the Virago Modern Classics list.

I know I have read In This House of Brede and The Black Narcissus, so those will be re-reads, but I'll put money on some of you having Rumer Godden favourites to recommend so please fire away.

And what about the question I started with... is there a story by any author that takes you back?? 

I have had a hankering to re-read National Velvet by Enid Bagnold of late, since finding the copy my brother gave me for one of those early teens birthdays... 

A Game of Hide and Seek ~ Elizabeth Taylor

Elizabeth Taylor's centenary week is upon us (July 3rd the actual day) and having been booked last autumn to take part in the Elizabeth Taylor centenary celebrations at Reading Library I had a plan.

Of course I would re-read ALL the books.

I had made a good start with In a Summer Season followed by The Soul of Kindness and A Wreath of Roses before I realised the event was months away and I would have done a great deal of other reading in the meantime. I was more than likely to end up with a mass muddle in my head ...A Summer Wreath, Mrs Palfrey at the Harbour, A View From the Palladian so I called a halt and re-grouped deciding to focus on the book I would be doing with the reading group, Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont, and the book I would sit in on with the other reading group if I could, At Mrs Lippincote's, both re-reads for me.

Then I would choose one previously unread book and come to it completely anew.

I would hope it wouldn't let me down, but would give me a sort of microcosm of everything that I feel Elizabeth Taylor does so well, a frame of reference that I could use during the panel discussion at the end of the day. I know it has often been the case that every new (to me) book by Elizabeth Taylor I read becomes the 'best' one I have read so far, but this time, honestly, I think I might really mean it.

A Game of Hide and Seek  Elizabeth Taylor's fifth novel published in 1951, and it is about this time that Elizabeth, according to Robert Liddell in his book Elizabeth and Ivy, with her popularity gaining ground, started to experience the malice of the reviewers, the knives were out... it's a funny old world isn't it.

Harriet and Vesey, meet first as eighteen-year-olds and again some twenty years later. Harriet, the daughter of a suffragette and quietly and obsessively in love with Vesey who wants to be a writer and with the world at his feet, whilst Harriet's world will venture no further than marriage. The game of hide and seek is not only the one that Harriet and Vesey play with the children that Harriet is 'minding', they will play a game of hide and seek with each other and their love throughout their lives.

Harriet's eventual marriage to Charles is predictably staid, Vesey's career in writing migrates to the theatre, wanders all over the place and never breeds success, and when they do finally meet again twenty years later and finally dance together, trust Elizabeth Taylor to bypass the waltz and choose a tango for them.

It is a moment of pure Taylor-esque understatement which allows the reader to fill in the gaps...

'He simply did not allow her to falter and her nervousness began to change to elation....Remotely, the figures of other people drifted at the perimeter of their enhanted space of floor. They dictated their own music...'

If we spent the day wondering quite how Elizabeth Taylor achieves what she does with such economy perhaps this moment in this book encapsulates it, especially if the reader may be wondering what Charles, Harriet's husband looking on, makes of it...

'Now they danced with perfect grave precision and in silence. They made some ritual of the dance. some pact as if they were alone; ecstatic, in its true sense. They made an exhibition of themselves, Charles thought.'

There really isn't much more the reader needs to be told is there.

There are moments of great and memorable hilarity in the book too. The scenes where Harriet is working in a department store perhaps the funniest I have read in a very long time as Miss Brimpton, Miss Lazenby and Miss Lovelace initiate Harriet into this peculiar world where the women reign supreme, though of course it is the men who are supposed to be in charge.

'Their hours were long so they spared themselves any hard work, filched what they could; went up to elevenses at ten...set their hair, washed stockings, drank tea. Nothing was done in their own time that could be done in the firm's.'

Home beauty treatments of a depilatory nature are conducted in the staff room with the odd nod to a bit of customer service if they really have to and Miss Lazenby sets the trend..

'She has scarcely any eyebrows left. Just an inflamed expanse.'

That of course only the start and when the sales team move onto facial hair just make sure you are not sipping a drink or eating, or you will choke and need sorting out..

'Miss Lovelace removed her chicken broth from the gas-ring so that Miss Lazenby could heat the little pan of wax...
We spread it on and tear it off, ' Miss Brimpton directed.
'Then we'll have the chicken broth,' Miss Lovelace put the pan back on the gas-ring.
'On the upper lip first dear,' Miss Brimpton advised Harriet, 'Slightly downy if I may say so.'
'Anyone else would be insulted,' Miss Lazenby said dreamily. 'I call mine a bloody moustache.' 
'Well that's up to you dear, what you call it...'
Harriet obediently spread the melting wax around her mouth.
'I'm doing my beard as well,' Miss Lazenby said recklessly...

I wasn't disappointed, A Game of Hide and Seek the perfect book to demonstrate Elizabeth Taylor's skills at populating a novel swiftly and decisively with memorable characters, giving each a recognisable voice. Then establishing and exploring an emotional landscape and mapping it out with all those paths that make up the journey of a good novel, love, boredom, humour, loneliness, lovelessness, longing, parting, loss and ultimately...well I couldn't possibly say. But pinned down and trapped on the page along the way, and often at a slant, the ennui of women's lives, harnessed to convention and gently interrogated for the reader by a writer who is perfectly in command of her material. Characters who we somehow come to know well enough to predict accurately how they may react in any given situation and to the point where the author doesn't need to tell the reader much to set them off on the right trail.

In her introduction to the new Virago edition Elizabeth Jane Howard captures the essence thus....

The subtle and the seldom dealt with paradox of the ordinary and the original, the universal and the unique is something that this novelist really understands; it could indeed be said to be her hallmark. 

So on this her centenary week, my sincere thanks to Elizabeth Taylor for all the reading pleasure she has given and I know will continue to give me. 

 

 

 

The Devastating Boys ~ Elizabeth Taylor

Under embargo until publication on June 21st (words which terrify the living daylights out of me when I see them on a press release,) the forthcoming Virago edition of Elizabeth Taylor's Complete Short Stories is likely to solve all those problems most of us have in accumulating them in different volumes. Or even better, if like me you are convinced you had a copy of The Blush but can't find it anywhere so you order another one, only to find it sitting right next to your desk, well it's going to be good to have them all in one place.

So 'under embargo' means I can't say much about this new volume now, other than that at 626 pages it's big... it contains sixty-five stories and the cover is nice...and it's heavy.. and the lovely introduction is by Joanne Kingham (daughter of,) but I can write about eleven of them in The Devastating Boys, which was my first proper introduction to the short stories of Elizabeth Taylor whilst I made that right royal progress up and down the London to Paddington line a few weeks ago.

I nearly always have a short story collection on the go, sometimes reading over several months but then I often find it inordinately difficult to write about them on here. Trying to pull a collection together into a whole, spread over weeks of dipping in, eludes me and somehow pulling one out and focusing on that seems to do the rest a disservice. Some stay uppermost in my mind, others have faded into obscurity and that clouds my judgement about whether a collection feels worthy or less so.

Jackie Kay in a recent interview suggested this about the workings and the impact of the short story...

'....you can focus on people who are really on the edge, whereas if you did that for the whole length of a novel it might get very tiring. It's like having a malt whisky really, a short story. You can have a wee malt but if you tried to drink a whole pint of whisky you'd be dead, so there's something about the intensity. I like seeing people at a moment of crisis or at a moment in time.'

But even better she says this...

'...I think the short story is perfect for our time, and perfect for people's time," she says. "You can read a short story in your lunch hour or before you go to sleep and it's a complete experience. You can carry the story around with you in your head and if you put it down in a large field it should still glow because of its intensity.'

What a wonderful analogy, I'm keeping that in my mind for ever, and though I should be applying it to Jackie Kay's latest collection, Reality, Reality, and doubtless will eventually, it fits my thinking about The Devastating Boys to perfection.

I wonder if, like me, you read a collection of short stories and may be hard pushed, if I quoted you a title from the collection, to remember what that story was about. I know I usually am, but not so here, and it was one of the details about the recent Elizabeth Taylor day that impressed upon me how, once read, Elizabeth Taylor's stories have real staying power. Philip Hensher mentioned Nods & Becks & Wreathed Smiles... Neil Reeve referred to In and Out the Houses... Diane Freeborn had loved the title story from The Devastating Boys, and each of them outlined the content and some of the detail as I marvelled at their literary recall.

Well I still marvel, clever people all, but I also can now reel off an outline of almost every story that features in The Devastating Boys, and that surprises me...because as you know I can't always remember where I have parked my car quite so clearly. 

The Excursion to the Source..ah yes... Polly's holiday romance in rural France thwarted by her 'minder,' the widowed, older and ever-so slightly possessive and jealous Gwenda and which was to end in... oh dear...

Praises... the retirement of Miss Smythe from the gown department store in which she has worked all her life and whilst we and her colleagues assume that Miss Smyth might be heading for a life of unfulfilled ennui and loneliness, Elizabeth Taylor has lovely little 'something different' waiting for us in the last line.

Flesh...oh yes of course, the hilarious and yet poignant holiday romance between Phyl the blousy London pub landlady 'massive and glittering and sunburnt' and Stanley 'full of alienating information'...yet Phyl is used to listening because for every evening of her married life that is what she has done. And slowly it emerges that Charlie, Phyl's husband stays home to mind the pub so that she can escape for some sun...

And each is still glowing and combusting in my mind with that intensity of which Jackie Kay talks.

Nor can Elizabeth Taylor be accused of staying in her comfort zone because one story blazes rather than glows, perhaps one of the most disturbing and memorable in this collection for me... The Fly Paper. Young Sylvia, orphaned, plain, plump and greasy-haired and being raised by her grandmother, travels by bus to her music lesson 'in Miss Harrison's darkened parlour' but is accosted in conversation by a strange man on the bus who declares himself 'fond of children.' My skin began to crawl so I was as relieved as Sylvia when 'the glaring woman from the bus' catches the man following her and warns him off. Giving Sylvia the stranger-danger talk she invites her into her house for a cup of tea. Not a word more but Elizabeth Taylor cannily lures her reader in ...and think again on that title, expect your mind to come back to this single story time and again once you have read it.

A brilliant collection and one that has sat unread on my shelves for more years than I can remember, my lack is now my gain in spades, and at £6.99 for the Kindle version Elizabeth Taylor's Complete Short Stories, working out at about 10p per story, has to be the very best value going, and I for one will be making sure I have them there and always to hand the minute they are available.

Putting my stickability theory to the test...does anyone else have favourite Elizabeth Taylor short stories to recommend??

 

Mrs Palfrey At The Claremont ~ Elizabeth Taylor

My personal Elizabeth Taylor centenary season continues and I am fast losing count of the number of times I have read Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont and also how many times I have resolutely told myself I absolutely don't want to see the film. 

Sadly the cover on the film tie-in version seems so misleading I can't bear to show it on here, much preferring to stick with my lovely old Virago edition with the painting of Mrs Mabel Whitehead by Margaret Foreman, whose website is well worth a visit for more of her stunning portraits.

Screen writer Jean-Claude Carriere talks interestingly about the whole idea of book into film in his conversation with Umberto Eco in This is Not the End of the Book, suggesting that watching a film adaptation of a book can seriously impair the memory of the book even altering first impressions irrevocably. Often the film experience overlays and muffles the reading one, our own memory blurs and the film maker's interpretation can sometimes replace it completely. The consensus of those present on the Elizabeth Taylor day seemed to be that the film was something of a travesty.

Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont yet another book where Elizabeth Taylor sets her scene and peoples it with seeming consummate ease as Laura Palfrey takes a taxi alone to her new home, the Claremont Hotel in London's Cromwell Road. The 1970s, these are the dying days of the residential hotel where the long-term residents sit at seperate tables and are somehow an encumbrance to the staff. The hotel fulfilling the function of a sort of halfway haven for the elderly in the days when we called them geriatrics when they ended up in hospital, but in the meantime they were still allowed to rub alongside the rest of us. Now of course it is the purpose-built and very expensive residential home, followed by the nursing home 

But after multiple readings how different a book can seem each time, and how well I recall my reactions to old hand Mrs Arbuthnot, with her 'ears sharpened by malice' last time round, and when I may have been about ten years younger.

How much more sympathetic I felt ten years on when it finally becomes apparent that Mrs Arbuthnot can no longer stay at the Claremont and must move onto the next stage...

'There was an indefinable melancholy about Mrs Arbuthnot's departure...'

and I felt it too and more so ....for some reason which I suspect has much to do with Anno Domini.

Slowly the residents sport their true colours which includes an insatiable appetite for everyone else's life, and when Mrs Palfrey, returning from the library, has a fall (having passed the age when you are deemed to have 'fallen over' ) and is rescued by the young and handsome Ludo, how easy it becomes to introduce him as her grandson to the other residents in the absence of the real one who has consistently failed to visit. A web of gentle and harmless deceit becomes as tangled as the knitting as the other residents probe and fret over every last detail.

Every conceivable theme is at play here, loneliness, vulnerability, misapprehension, memory, concepts of home and what home is, and belonging, along with the 'disasters of being old', as so many of the residents valiantly fend off, but eventually have to face up to, their own gradual decline.

'It was hard work being old. It was like being a baby in reverse. Every day for an infant means some new little thing learned; every day for the old means some little thing lost...'

And with that sleight of pen Elizabeth Taylor captures those frequently missed minutiae that contribute so much to the whole...here I was noticing those moments of unspoken and often glossed over awkwardness between two people, and as always her customary nod to the decade in which she is writing. How many writers managed to cover every decade from the 1940s to the 1970s... here it's the words from the Beatles and Sergeant Pepper, 1967 and She's leaving Home.

The group discussion hour at the Elizabeth Taylor celebration day flew by as I pranced around with a microphone and with some wonderful group contributions as we debated the orgins of the book with Joanna Kingham, Elizabeth's daughter. Joanna recounted the tale of Paul Bailey's book At the Jerusalem and how, having been so impressed by it, Elizabeth Taylor secretly sought out the author. At that time he was working in Harrods and Elizabeth proceeded to observe him in some detail for the character of Ludo in the book. And there is a clever circularity to it all as Ludo, writing a book himself jots down every last detail each time he meets Mrs Palfrey, this after he has patched up her leg following her fall ...

'He helped her up the steps and into the taxi and when it had driven off, he returned to his room and leaning over the table, wrote in a notebook 'fluffy grey knickers... elastic ...veins on leg colour of grapes...smell of lavender water (ugh!) ...big spots on back of shiny hands and more veins - horizontal wrinkles across hands.'

I had been blissfully unaware, but had noted in my preparatory reading, that Mrs Burton, the rather glitzy, blousy alcoholic resident was in fact Elizabeth Taylor's own wry concession to the 'other' Elizabeth Taylor, and I was delighted when Joanna Kingham confirmed this, because it adds greater hilarity to a novel that most certainly possesses it, but you are not quite sure whether it is alright to fall off your chair laughing at these poor people...

'Mrs Burton lifted her skirt and tugged at her roll-on,' Well girls, ' she said, 'let's get at it.' 

as she leads the residents into a party.

And on returning to her room one night slightly the worse for that extra whisky...

'Mrs Burton felt as if she were swimming along the corridor towards her bedroom, glancing off the walls like a balloon... she pulled up at number fifty-three, steadied herself, mae a forwards movement with the key. Calmly does it. Miraculously, she hit the keyhole first time...'

And now that I have heard first hand about Elizabeth Taylor's wry and glorious sense of humour I am finding it in each book I read, wonderful juxtapositions of pity and pantomime abound.

The ending is inevitably likely to be sad, but even given that, I am not sure there can be a more devastating final paragraph to a book than the one you will read in Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont. 

So a book I am sure well-known to many of you, and I am trying to think of more books which focus on the elderly in this way. I have come up with Margaret Laurence's The Stone Angel and the feisty Hagar Shipley... but do any others come to mind??

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Thank you for all your suggestions, I'm noting them here...

Rules for Old Men Waiting ~  Peter Pouncey, 

The Enchanted April ~ Elizabeth von Arnim

All Passion Spent ~ Vita Sackville-West,

Quartet in Autumn ~ Barbara Pym 

The Stone Diaries ~ Carol Shields

It So Happens ~ Patricia Ferguson

Sun City ~ Tove Jannson 

How it All Began ~ Penelope Lively

Staying On ~ Paul Scott

Moon Tiger ~ Penelope Lively

Gilead ~ Marilynne Robinson

Noah's Compass ~ Anne Tyler 

East of the Mountains ~ David Guterson 

 

 

 

 

 

Happy St Piran's Day : Vanishing Cornwall ~ Daphne du Maurier

Happy St Piran's Day everyone...

What do you mean 'Who is St Piran??'

St Piran is the patron saint of Cornish tin miners and that, coupled with the fact he allegedly died in Cornwall in 480, has all been enough for the county to adopt him as their saint of favour.

It's all a bit vague in the detail. St Piran probably born in Ireland but legend has it that the heathen Irish tied him to a millstone, rolled it over the cliff into a stormy sea, which immediately became calm. The saint floated safely across to land on the sandy beach of Perranzabuloe in Cornwall, where his first converts to Christianity were....er...animals.

More legend suggests that St Piran lit a fire on his blackstone hearth which, unbeknowest to him was a slab of tin-bearing ore. The heat caused smelting to take place and tin rose to the top in the form of a white cross which explains the Cornish flag (and my thanks to this website for that information) 

No matter the detail the Cornish flag will be flying everywhere today, Trelawney's Army will be out celebrating in force, and I claim an affinity given we are only about a mile from the border and look across to all things Cornwall every time we gaze out of the window.

It therefore seems like the perfect day to salute the Virago reprint of Daphne du Maurier's Vanishing Cornwall published this week. This is a book we have owned but which I hadn't read for years until I settled down with this new edition over the weekend.

First published in 1967, and at a time when the coffee table book was all the rage,Vanishing Cornwall is Daphne du Maurier's tribute to the county she loved and adopted as her own, the place she made her home, and the book itself her answer to the banality of the glossy volumes that were gracing said coffee tables. All showy pictures and little else of substance, Daphne would write the opposite; words that mattered and which would be complemented by her son Christian's photography. Daphne did her research and the two of them criss-crossed the county on the trail of the heart of Cornwall. The landscape that inspired her books with its rugged coastline and expansive beaches, the wild and desolate moorland, the traditions, the legends, the industry, the fishing, the gentry and the working people, all are represented here.

And let's not forget the weather. Cornwall has a climate of its very own, balmy when everywhere else may be icy, drenched in torrents of rain when everywhere else has blazing sunshine. The times we set off from home on what seems like a glorious day to head down into Cornwall for more of the same, only to find it shrouded in mizzly mist from Bodmin down. But since childhood holidays it has always struck me as a place of secret corners, amazing sights tucked away from the rest of the world, and though of course not much of it remains secret now it still has that air of mystery and the unknown about it.

Reading Vanishing Cornwall it is quite apparent that Daphne du Maurier had enormous and ongoing anxieties about the future of the county. How would it fare as its burgeoning popularity as a holiday destination grew, and Daphne equally worried about how she may have influenced that with her writing..

' As a motorist I pass by with some embarrassment, feeling myself to blame, for out of that November evening long ago came a novel which proved popular, passing, as fiction does, into the folklore of the district. As the author I am flattered, but as a one time wanderer dismayed.'

We pass that place of 'folklore' within twenty minutes of leaving home every time we head down into Cornwall too, and reading Vanishing Cornwall some forty-four years after it was first published, and living on the doorstep as we do, I can see that there are some interesting debates to be had about it all.

We also pass the signs to Warleggan  (yes, it is like driving through an episode of Winstons Graham's Poldark ...Demelza isn't that far away either) and now that I have read about the Reverend Frederick Densham, the vicar of Warleggan Parish in the 1920s I really would like to find it. Rev Densham apparently so terrifying and so barking mad that he had no congregation and was forced to make his own out of cardboard cut-outs. A young Daphne and some friends scaled the rectory wall and caught a glimpse of the incumbent pacing in his garden, and Daphne subsequently based a novel on it all... and I can't for the life of me think which it is ... one of you will know.

This is probably also a good time to flag up the 2012 Du Maurier Festival, 9th-20th May, the line-up has been announced and tickets go on sale soon. If I have a favourite and lesser known book of Daphne's it is The Scapegoat, making this event of particular interest...

“A major event of the 2012 Festival is a special advance screening of a new film version of Daphne du Maurier’s story The Scapegoat, commissioned by ITV and starring Matthew Rhys (from the hit US series Brothers & Sisters).  Prior to the showing of the film, a panel of actors and members of the production team will discuss the making of this imaginative re-working of du Maurier’s classic tale.  Joining them on the panel will be Christian Browning, son of Daphne du Maurier.”

For anyone with a day to spare I seem to have written quite a lot about Daphne over the years and have even remembered to tag it, so you will find it all here and including some forays down to the Du Maurier Festival in Fowey in previous years, plus I've had a trawl through the archives for some more Cornish reading, 

The Short Day Dying ~ Peter Hobbs

The Great Western Beach ~ Emma Smith

Held By the Sea ~ Jane Darke

Daphne ~ Justine Picardie
 
If you have any more suggestions please do add them in comments. 

Meanwhile I do hope you will all be tucking into an oggy wherever you are today, god bless St Piran. I expect he thought of those first too, and that thing about the crimped pastry being the bit for the tin miners to hold it with when their hands were dirty is a load of old invented modern-day poppycock.

 

 

 

Sin ~ Josephine Hart

We've been having an interesting conversation about Josephine Hart's novel Damage here recently,and coming up next, what I hope will be a grand hour with the Virago Book Club on Twitter at 2.30 pm today, when all thoughts will have to be condensed into the tweet limit of 140 characters. Meanwhile I have also been reading Sin, and what a great addition these books make to the Virago Modern Classics list.

Sin like Damage, is narrated in the first person though this time through a woman's voice, that of Ruth. A short name, that by her own admission bursts out and in sharp contrast to that of her adopted sister Elizabeth, all together a much gentler, more soothing sound. Ruth's jealousy and hatred of Elizabeth can be traced back to childhood. Elizabeth, meek,compliant, conciliatory in the face of conflict and seemingly subservient to Ruth in all she says and does...'seemingly' is the important word here, expect moments of quiet revelation towards the end.

Ruth meanwhile may be the vilest most hateful woman you are ever likely to trip over in fiction. Cool, calculating, dominant, bullish and malevolant, antagonistic and if evil is to be personified, Ruth's portrayal of herself is it. No shirking on Josephine Hart's part here, she really does go to the edge and look down at the drop with her fiction.

'I believe now that I was exposed too early to goodness and that I never recovered.
    Trapped in the fierce grasp of Elizabeth's kindness, aware constantly of the truthfulness of her gaze, I suffocated on the high thinness of the air around her. The corrosive power of her generosity killed, as they rose in me, my own small instincts towards goodness.' 

Think of the definition of a sociopath (there's a good resume here) and Ruth seems to fit the bill, and that feels like unusual territory for any writer, let alone a woman...to portray another woman in such extremis of personality disorder.

Widowed young it is Elizabeth's second husband Sir Charles Harding who eventually proves to be Ruth's nemesis as the balance of power shifts in the affair that Ruth purposefully steers herself towards. The carefully balanced scales of power find themselves weighted first this way and then that by packages of anger, or conscience, or even hints of remorse. A huge double family tragedy throws the spotlight on every relationship and the fall-out will be...well it will be... I'll say no more.

I am learning that one of the many gifts of Josephine Hart's writing is what she does to the reader.

In a similar way minus the sex, didn't George Eliot do likewise??

Present a character in a certain light...lull the reader into making harsh judgements...and then turn the tables on the reader's own prejudices..

And as Sin progressed, and I loathed Ruth more on every page, I could predict no way that Josephine Hart could possibly pull this round for me, nothing she could write in, no personal tragedy great enough that might redeem Ruth the Rotten in my eyes. All I was hoping for was a hang-drawing and quartering scene that took Ruth to four seperate corners of the world.

Nothing but nothing that Ruth could or might experience in her life would ever make me feel one single ounce of sympathy for her. No way.

Except it suddenly dawns on me that it is Ruth who has been telling me about herself, almost like a confessional....tRuth in other words but Ruthless too...it's all in the name. Deepest feelings and emotions concealed from those around her but her soul bared for me the reader.

So what right do any of us have to judge others at such a personal level??

When the devastation happens I think I was too far gone along the road of hatred to find my way back, virtually impossible to find that ounce of sympathy...much more likely to be heard muttering 'you deserved that' ... and then berating myself for thinking in that way, and contemplating the whole notion of forgiveness and at what point is that merited for one's own salvation.

And then, as if I'm not already done in and feeling wretched, Ruth has the audacity to turn the tables on me her really nice reader in her final summing up...

'We are here to add to the sum of human goodness. To prove the thing exists. And however futile each individual act of courage or generosity, self-sacrifice or grace - it still proves the thing exists. Each act adds to the fund. It needs replenishment. Not only because evil flourishes, and is most indefensibly defended, But because goodness is no longer a respectable aim in life, The hound of hell, envy, has driven it from the house.'

Yes, well Ruth if only you'd listened to what I was trying to tell you...

I suspect Sin is an object lesson in exactly that, sin and all its consequences, and a very powerful one it is too.

I had initially thought that Sin didn't pack quite the punch that Damage had??

Now that I've written this I take it all back.

 

 

 

dovegreyreader takes over Virago Twitter

Well, not for ever, only for an hour this coming Tuesday afternoon, February 14th at 2.30pm, but I am delighted to have been asked to be a guest of @ViragoBooks this month, and to join in with Twitter discussions about the Virago Book Club current reading choice, Damage by Josephine Hart.

Just to recap here's an extract from my thoughts here earlier this month...

'....A man possessed and consumed by obsessive love, the boundaries of power and control blurred and behaviour distorted by a potent and slavish love affair. Lashings (sorry) of rivalry and jealousy and plenty of self-delusion that somehow those involved and bound to be hurt by this will accept and understand when they eventually find out....'

For anyone who tweets there is still plenty of time to read the book if you have it handy, 230 pages of un-put-down-able well-spaced type though do remember to have the de-fib handy for 'that moment'.

In order to be in the zone, and now that I have finished Possession and have that swirling around in my mind waiting for thoughts to gather and surface, I will be doing some more Damage this weekend (re-reading) and have been reading another novel by Josephine Hart. Sin is also republished as a Virago Modern Classic... a woman possessed by an obsessive envy who will stop at nothing to get what she wants and the NY Times blurb is spot on, I am indeed looking on ' with mingled shock and fascination.'

So if you can join us it would be great to see you there, I'll be making a pot of twittertea naturally, there will be virtual tweetcake and the Virago team will be joining in too, just head for @ViragoBooks and use the #VBC hash tag. Now this may make no sense whatsoever to non-twits, so please do e mail me if you'd like me to decipher that for you and do a quick tweetorial.

I'm wondering if anyone has read Damage since I posted about it... if so I'd love to know what you thought.

 

Damage ~ Josephine Hart

'There is an internal landscape, a geography of the soul; we search for its outlines all our lives.
    Those who are lucky enough to find it, ease like water over a stone, on to its fluid contours, and are home.'

Time to launch 2012 properly with a great book and those the opening lines of Damage by Josephine Hart. Now given that this novel was first published in 1990, has sold over a million copies and was made into a very successful film starring Jeremy Irons, Juliette Binoche and Miranda Richardson in 1993, there is every chance that many of you will have read it, seen it and been blown away by it already, but just in case not, here I am rushing in late to the party again.

I'm now trying to think of other books with a true and genuine 'gasp' moment in them akin to the one I have only just lived through in Damage without needing a defibrillator. Other books where what happens next happens so unexpectedly, or you are so deeply involved in the action, that you just didn't see that one coming. The ubiquitous We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver comes to mind, and I'd add in Legend of a Suicide by David Vann and Still Life, the A.S.Byatt book I have just read... but can anyone think of any more??

I'm not exaggerating when I say the shock felt so profound that I swear my heart missed a beat as I recoiled from the words in disbelief, and when but a moment earlier I had innocently turned the page. Or perhaps, in the case of Damage, I just knew this was all going to implode, had initially been on my guard and wondering what and when, but had been so drawn into the book that I had let my guard slip. Suffice to say I stood back and administered a few hundred volts, read on, finished the book and then lay awake half the night thinking about it... seriously it was as if this de-caffeinated light-weight had drunk a double Americano at about 10 pm.

The first person, unnamed narrator is a middle-aged doctor who makes the move into politics and the life of an MP, but a GP first and always, solid, reliable, formal, detached, yet faithful and operating within the parameters of his profession at both work and at play it would seem...

'An efficient dissembler, I gently and silently smoothed the rough edges of my being. I hid the awkwardness and pain with which I inclined towards my chosen outline, and tried to be what those I loved expected of me - a good husband, a good father, and a good son.'

Happily and conservatively married to Ingrid with the regulation two children, the nice house and the comfortable lifestyle, a relatively trauma-free life of service to others until the day his son Martin, a lothario accustomed to working his way through a rapid succession of blondes, announces he will be bringing home his new girlfriend Anna Barton to meet the family. Also a journalist on the newspaper that Martin works for, Anna is an enigma, a dangerous one, and it is at an art gallery that our doctor first hears her name and her voice...

'...deep, clear and unfriendly.'

When Anna finally recounts the story of her troubled past there is a line that sends shivers down the spine..

'Damaged people are dangerous. They know they can survive.'

And Josephine Hart leaves the reader in no doubt as to how damaged Anna is, seeing it and knowing it, Ingrid senses it, our Doctor and his son are blind to it and what follows will be the most spectacular unravelling of lives and family as I have ever read on the page. An instant and fatal attraction tangled in the web of deceit to be woven between a father and his son's girlfriend.

It sounds such a bland and basic premise for a novel doesn't it...forbidden love...yeh yeh, tell me something I don't know, and 'tis true one or two Amazon reviewers took umbrage, Mrs P was not impressed...

"And the girlfriend! well she's a real weirdo she meets her boyfriends dad after several dates with his son and then invites the dad round to her place where they have awful sex within minutes of him getting in the door!(like you would!) But again even the sex is rushed and is written awfully. I have never read a book as vulgar. I would read another book by the auther [sic] if it was nothing like this one!!"

But to my mind that is to miss the point and focus on the wrong things, yes it is the erotic intensity and its forbidden nature that makes Damage so chilling, but there is so much more going on here. A man possessed and consumed by obsessive love, the boundaries of power and control blurred and behaviour distorted by a potent and slavish love affair. Lashings (sorry) of rivalry and jealousy and plenty of self-delusion that somehow those involved and bound to be hurt by this will accept and understand when they eventually find out.

I wrote about my first encounter with Josephine Hart's writing, The Truth About Love at the beginning of last year. Josephine Hart died of cancer in June 2011, an illness she had concealed from all but her most immediate family, but safe in the knowledge, and overwhelmingly honoured that Damage, and another novel Sin, were to be re-published as Virago Modern Classics. And just look at that cover... perfectly conveying what lies beneath. This edition now carries both a moving tribute to Josephine Hart from Lennie Goodings at Virago, and also an introduction from Josephine herself discovered after her death by her husband's secretary.

Lennie Goodings says this...

'She knew instinctively to look to literature, to words, in order to survive...she understood that we are nourished, at an elemental level, by words, by art. I believe that her novels came out of this same visceral understanding of human nature, of what we lack and what we desire...she was unafraid of emotion, of the elemental, real, stripped down stuff of human relationships.'

Josephine Hart knew terrible childhood tragedy in her own life but also knew that she had survived. That survival caused her a separate form of anguish and for various reasons this novel and others remained locked in her imagination until persuaded by those who knew her that 'you have no right not to finish it'... this from her agent after reading the opening chapters of Damage. It was time to release them and in Josephine Hart's own words

'Writes are predatory. They want to possess the minds of their readers...'

Damage has most certainly possessed my mind in the best possible way and if you've read it I'd love to know your thoughts. If you haven't and you decide you will, please please come back and tell me if you too read it long into the night, and also if you nearly keeled over when I did.

 

 

 

The Soul of Kindness ~ Elizabeth Taylor

An Elizabeth Taylor novel is not well-suited to quick call-in visits. I catch myself lingering on each page, stringing out the visit, hoping to be invited to stay for another cup of tea and most reluctant to leave. I end up having to drag myself away from a book where, if I'm honest, not a lot may be happening, but for some reason I'm always mad keen to return to the ordinary lives of these very ordinary people. If you like people-watching as I do, then this is people-watching on the page, and perhaps that may be like watching paint dry for many readers because the most exciting event by page 111 in The Soul of Kindness is that Flora has given birth.

Ah Flora, dear child-like Flora, believing herself to be the soul of kindness, spoiled, cossetted and doted upon, she whom the world must revolve around; like a child she must be cared for, made to feel important at all times and everyone seems to help foster the illusion, often at great expense to their own well-being. And how Elizabeth Taylor excels at the miniscule observations, the superficial details that make up something larger. Life's tiny sadnesses magnified.

Take Mrs Secretan, mother of Flora, gazing out at her garden waiting for her newly-married daughter and son-in-law Richard to arrive for their first visit post-nuptials. The garden says it all...the daisies are withering, the leaves are tattered, a dirty yellow, and the tree limbs move like puppets, with silly erratic gestures, few guesses as to how well this visit will go in that case.

And yet for all that the reader might be expected to despise Flora's self-centred ways somehow I didn't. Flora serially disempowered, kept in her gilded cage by those around her and incapable of breaking out. The cast of characters that Elizabeth Taylor places in orbit around this sun seem to stretch across the social spectrum, the writer Patrick, Richard's rather 'common' father Percy who marries his mistress Barbara, the best friend Meg and her brother the failed actor Kit, and the rather earthy, grubby and Bohemian artist Liz all have their own shifting perspectives on Flora.

'I think loneliness is a theme running through many of my novels and short stories, the different ways in which individuals can be isolated from others - by poverty, old age, eccentricity, living in another country - even by having commited murder...'

A good thought to bear in mind from Elizabeth Taylor herself as I approach my reading, and with which Robert Liddell concurs in one of the only books that offers a glimpse into the real Elizabeth Taylor by someone who knew her well, Elizabeth and Ivy. And after the fact I find that Philip Hensher has also flagged up this book in his excellent introduction (but perhaps don't read it before the book.)

As Robert Liddell is quick to point out, and something else I must bear in mind, because how easy it is to drift into that search for the author themselves in their fiction

'the experiences in the book are theirs and not hers. And I am sure she knew that when the alternative to loneliness is boredom, which is frequently the case, loneliness is much to be preferred.'

I'm intrigued to see that in my well-marked copy of The Other Elizabeth Taylor, Nicola Beauman suggests that The Soul of Kindness, written in 1962, would have made a much better short story but that the market forces of publishing insisted it be spun out. It would seem the critics were divided too, some condemning the book as a failure, others arguing for its splendour, whilst the general sense in the 1960s was that, like her contemporary Barbara Pym, Elizabeth Taylor was old-fashioned and somehow out of step with the zeitgeist.

So how fascinating that almost fifty years on the novel can read for me as a little microcosm of early 1960's married life. Women's lives on the cusp of change as the workplace and a career beckons, and how obvious it is that for many women this would be a step too far. Flora distraught at the fact she may lose her housekeeper and have to do her own ironing, in fact the bigger deal is that without Mrs Lodge's constant presence Flora will be lonely and at sea and yes, bored with her seemingly vacuous life.

I find there is often a little nod to redemption in any novel by Elizabeth Taylor, a tiny escape route that her characters can take if they so choose. The Soul of Kindness is no exception because Flora has her baby,

'The spring came, and Flora all the time was happy. The baby grew, her dark, puckish face delighting her parents, although most other people thought it was a pity 'With those other looks in the family. 'they said...'

Hooray, baby Alice is loved unconditionally, and whilst Flora's ethereal beauty may have ultimately been the millstone around her own neck, perhaps, just perhaps, she can achieve something entirely different and more fulfilling for her own daughter and thereby for herself.

Now I'm moving on to A Wreath of Roses.

Elizabeth Taylor redux

I have been invited to participate in several literary events next year which I am very much looking forward to, though of course I might have guessed that of the 366 days to choose from in 2012 two of the events would be in different cities and on consecutive days.

One is a day conference on the writer Elizabeth Taylor to be held in Reading (more details when I have them). 2012 will be the centenary of Elizabeth Taylor's birth and so I thought I would gently make my way through the books again in preparation. Not as a chore or a challenge, more a pleasurable meander much better suited to a writer whose books I find it impossible to rush, and also because new editions are arriving from Virago with brilliant new introductions.

I'll be sharing my thoughts on the books here as I read them, but it seemed like a good idea to resurrect a piece I wrote about Elizabeth Taylor back in 2006 and make sure it was on here for posterity. It was  pre-dovegreyreader, and published in Newbooks magazine, and I can't do any of this without resurrecting some of the old Virago covers at the same time.

And I'd love to know your thoughts on Elizabeth Taylor too... do you have a favourite novel of hers??

How about the short story collections??

Or perhaps she is unknown to you in which case where would those of us who love her books suggest others make a start??

                         ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“Taylor’s literary reputation is far from what it should be. For every reader who knows and deeply admires her novels there are four or five others who have never heard of her”

Thus spoke The New Statesman in 2001 and I must confess it is within recent memory that I was one of the ‘four or five others’ and I will feel considerably better if I know there are at least one or two reading this and asking themselves as I did just who is this Elizabeth Taylor?

Born Elizabeth Coles on July 3^rd 1912 in Reading, Berkshire, the daughter of an insurance inspector and his wife, the young Elizabeth was educated at The Abbey School in Reading as famously was a young Jane Austen. Austen is the writer that Elizabeth Taylor most admired and the one with whom she is frequently and favourably compared.

Prior to her marriage in 1936 to John William Kendall Taylor, the owner of a confectionary business, Elizabeth worked as a governess and then a librarian. John Taylor served in the RAF during the war and Elizabeth applied herself willingly to motherhood but also very professionally to her writing following the birth of their two children, Renny and Joanna. The family lived in the village of Penn in Buckinghamshire, still a peaceful and elegant setting with houses gathered around a picturesque village green complete with pond (and probably unwittingly known to many as the film location for the TV series Midsomer Murders).

Elizabeth Taylor was an intensely private person who apart from a few very close confidantes shunned the ‘literary’ life and carefully ensured that much of her correspondence was destroyed on her death from cancer in 1975. These days self-publicity is all, reticence just won’t do; we expect to know everything about an author and we expect them to tell us. We have come to believe that we have an unalienable right to the detail and without it we will somehow be a lesser reader and they will be a lesser writer. It was not ever thus.

Elizabeth Jane Howard recounts, in her memoir Slipstream, an enlightening incident where she had to review books and interview novelists on a live TV programme in the early 1960’s. Elizabeth Taylor was the guest and the book in question was In a Summer Season, her eighth novel. Howard had prepared thoroughly, or so she thought, describing the book as one that you enjoy reading very much at the time and one that leaves an impression on you long afterwards, it was funny, sharp and perceptive. Howard concurred with comparisons to Jane Austen and was confidently anticipating a good interview. Elizabeth Taylor invariably described as beautiful and elegant by those who knew her was sitting quietly attentive. As the questions flowed so did her replies, ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to every question that Howard posed, twenty of them covered in less than a minute, five minutes left to fill and little personal information gleaned. By her own admission she felt embarrassed to be asked details of her life suggesting that “nothing sensational thank heavens, has ever happened”. A devotee of routine preferring predictability to uncertainty in her day to day life, Elizabeth Taylor was also notoriously shy, as noted by fellow novelist Barbara Pym in a letter of 1963,

“Elizabeth seemed very bored but knowing her it was her usual manner which conceals her shyness”.

Interestingly many of Elizabeth Taylor’s novels feature women who appear to be shy and retiring on the surface concealing an inner life of great imagination always sympathetically portrayed by an author who clearly understood their predicament. She herself said “I wouldn’t describe anything that was not what I had gone through and understood myself- in my experience or out of my imagination and other people’s words wouldn’t do” and somehow that sense of ‘quietness of self’ adds to the allure of her as a writer for me.

Elizabeth Taylor's first novel At Mrs Lippincote’s was published in 1945 her last Blaming was published posthumously in 1976. In the intervening years and effectively spanning four memorable decades there were ten other novels, four volumes of short stories and a book for children.

So how did I discover this wonderful writer? Well a recommend from a friend left me mystified, I had never heard of this Elizabeth Taylor, and until you know, for some reason, you never notice her books on the shelves; they are almost as quietly shy and retiring as the author herself. Rarely found in ‘new’ bookshops suddenly I was finding them in every second-hand bookshop I searched. I quickly found and read Mrs Palfrey at The Claremont and a serial addiction had begun. When presented with an author’s entire oeuvre, there is a perceptible sadness to know that what you have is all there is. It has been a wonderful reading journey to gradually work my way slowly through Elizabeth Taylor’s writing. Every book I read becomes my favourite and yet I find it impossible to choose one above another. In passing I must pay homage to the early Virago editions, now becoming increasingly difficult to find, which featured some of the most exquisite artwork ever to grace the cover of a book. Several use paintings by the Cookham artist Stanley Spencer and once seen they are instantly memorable.

So how did reading Mrs Palfrey at The Claremont aid and abet my instant conversion? It remains unusual to read a novel like this about old age and this book moved me immensely. It is a difficult subject handled with great sensitivity and not without its humour. The faded gentility of the disparate group of ‘inmates’ in the hotel struggling desperately to avoid the next move in the game that would signal checkmate - removal to the nursing home. Elizabeth Taylor quietly delineates many of the indignities of increasing age and
frailty and by bestowing the most undignified on the character we like the least we are putty in her hands as we examine the limited extent of our sympathies. Then the master stroke, I could have wept for the “indefinable melancholy” of poor, fierce Mrs Arbuthnot’s departure. Her skill here reminds me of George Eliot’s in Middlemarch. Eliot starts to weave the character of Casaubon into one of the most un-likeable and then offers the obverse and visibly takes the reader to task, suitably chastened we react with an outpouring of sympathies and much self –recrimination for being so judgemental. Elizabeth Taylor is subtle and clever and doesn’t need to tell us what she has done or tell us how to find it, we know for ourselves. We are never able to wholly dislike even her worst characters; there is always a little store of redemption, a saving grace in reserve somewhere.

The novelist, Paul Bailey who has written many prefaces to Elizabeth Taylor’s novels sums up her writing succinctly when he refers to it as “her reports from the chintz-bedecked battlefields”. She is at her best when portraying the seemingly ordinary lives of the middle classes, writing about what she knows; however she knows much more than that. In her hands and of course in reality their lives are far from mundane or perfect as we are escorted  far enough below the surface to gaze at the cracks and then safely left there to explore them for ourselves. Elizabeth Taylor describes the difficulties of this process “I shut my eyes and tremble with the effort to get it vividly in my mind. It runs away and I pursue it until I’m worn out and nearly in tears”

As a microcosm of middle class life Elizabeth Taylor’s novels read as a priceless and unwitting social history of several decades of the twentieth century as she applies herself to the issues that arise in each one. In some of the novels of the 1940’s and 50’s she examines the austerity and dilemmas of post-war Britain and all its deprivations, nor does she shy from the issues of the 1960’s; illegitimate pregnancy and birth control (and lack of it) feature strongly. Hers was a remarkable literary voice but to me it is a voice that has endured and still has the power to speak and deserves to be heard.

Elizabeth Taylor’s final illness came as she was writing Blaming and it was a determined effort on her part to see it through to printing whilst facing her own death. As her daughter states in a preface that is a fitting and moving tribute to a wonderful mother, it is a book about so much in life, grief, anger, helplessness, boredom and selfishness; all familiar territory for Elizabeth Taylor in her novels. But she loved life itself, a keen sense of fair play and a sense of humour pervaded her approach but this from her daughter just confirms the Elizabeth Taylor I feel I have come to know through her writing

“It was great fun being her daughter – no one else has been able to reduce me to such a weeping state of giggles over the most ordinary everyday events”

It is the ordinary, everyday events that Elizabeth Taylor illuminates so brilliantly for her readers and thereby so much more about herself. Like Paul Bailey I am now quite envious of any readers approaching her novels for the first time, to discover this writer anew seems like a real gift.

January 2006

 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

 

 

 

 

Black Orchids ~ Gillian Slovo

It's several years since I have read Gillian Slovo's novel Ice Road but I was quite relieved to see that it came under the auspices of 2005, a diligent and feverish year of book journaling that culminated in the abandonment of the hand-written in favour of dovegreyreader scribbles early in 2006, so there was a good chance I had some thoughts recorded and I did, except you'll have to bear in mind these were for my sole amusement...

'I often resist reading books on this subject - once the Leningrad siege victims are boiling up shoe leather to eat I'm feeling too wretched to carry on reading. I don't think we quite reached this level of cuisine in Gillian Slovo's book but the starving were eyeing up the flesh on each other all the same. That said I found this to be a compelling read.

Gillian Slovo has captured the slightly detached narrative style that you associate with the time and the place almost as if you are reading a translation, but you are not...'

What - on - earth- was - I - on - about??

My thinking descended into garble and I can't bear to reveal any more, but I do remember the book for that intense involvement that means you disappear in and forget the time of day. I still have the copy so it was obviously a keeper and I still gaze at that cover and love it for the intensity of the woman's pose.

When I knew there was a chance I would be meeting and chatting with Gillian Slovo (who I'm hoping isn't reading this because she'll probably be worried)  at Port Eliot Festival I dashed to the shelves to see what else I had by her and drew a complete blank, so have had to go on a begging and shopping spree.

 Black Orchids arrived from Virago along with a memoir Every Secret Thing together with a pile of other books from secondhand sellers various, many now out of print, in those distinctive Women's Press editions with the ironing logo. I knew a little about Gillian Slovo's background as the daughter of anti-apartheid activists Joe Slovo and Ruth First but had little idea that she had also been a crime writer with books such as Death Comes Staccato and Death by Analysis.

So I made a start with Black Orchids and was immediately and thankfully transported to the lush green warmth of Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) as it was in 1946, in contrast to the frozen wastes of Ice Road. The Tinker always cites Ceylon, and in particular Trincomalee, as one of his most memorable and beautiful ports of call whilst on board ship during the war. A country rich in both natural beauty and natural mineral deposits and Gillian Slovo explores these assets to the full and to the point where even I fancied the idea of getting soaking wet in a  monsoon (my wish may yet be granted at Port Eliot) or watching the sunrise from Adam's Peak. Clearly sense of place is one of Gillian Slovo's fortes, but so is plot.

Down at heel Evelyn and her mother and sister are having to leave Ceylon and return to England after the death of her father has left the family impoverished and unsupported. This is womens' lives predicated on marriage in order to be 'looked after' and for the provision of financial security, so when Evelyn turns down a proposal from safe, staid, starchy Tommy in favour of  daring charmer Emil, the son of a wealthy Sinhalese rubber baron (that doesn't sound right but you know what I mean) it's clear her life may be about to follow a very interesting path.

The novel is set over a succession of  years from 1946, to 1950, through to 1957, 1963 and ending in 1972 thus embracing the era of seismic shift in attitudes towards mixed marriages. By moving Emil and Evelyn to England Gillian Slovo again maximises her plot potential as she explores discrimination in all its guises, and reader, prepare to squirm with embarrassment at the way things were. I remember the shame I felt when I read Andrea Levy's Small Island, well Gillian Slovo has captured that very same atmosphere. All the money in the world doesn't buy poor Emil assimilation and acceptance, and by association Evelyn is also shunned in her own country. Everyone of course very prepared to take Emils money whilst ridiculing him behind his back and there are some excruciating moments...one in particular will remind you how it may have felt (if this happened to you) to be the last one left when the teacher's pets, the sporty ones were choosing teams. Whoever invented that selection method deserves to be put in goal in hockey for evermore. No one ever wanted me in their netball team, too short when I was twelve, didn't know left from right, rubbish at shooting, always getting whistled up for stepping...the stuff of nightmares so I felt Emil's pain.

Two children are born and whilst sister Vanessa remains rather shadowy it is Milton, the oldest son who is the focus of the hardships that a mixed marriage would have bestowed on children in the 1950s, and it is heart-wrenching so prepare to squirm all over again.

Then prepare to be calmly turning the pages when you will suddenly get a great big huge enormous SHOCK.

I don't know about you but it's rare for an author to pull a gasp moment on me. Lionel Shriver's managed it, so has David Vann, but I often see them telegraphed pages ahead, however I didn't see this one coming at all. So shocked was I that I closed the book and considered the ramifications as if this was real life. How would this impact, were would Gillian Slovo take this one...I couldn't begin to imagine but I also couldn't wait to find out.

I wasn't disappointed.

 

The Doll - Short Stories ~ Daphne du Maurier

The du Maurier literary festival is always a sparkling event, one that lifts the spirits as the first of the season.

Perhaps it's the way the weather often drifts seamlessly from spring to early summer mid-festival, though this year we've been and done that twice and back again already down in the South West, or perhaps it's that welcome glimpse of the sea as you approach the town.

But every so often the festival dazzles a little more with the launch of a new book by or about Daphne du Maurier, a few years ago Justine Picardie's Daphne, this year a new collection of Daphne's short stories The Doll, making the Virago collection of Daphne du Maurier books now in print a sight to gladden the heart.

So getting in the Fowey mood (pronounced Foy for anyone not from these parts) I picked up my copy of The Doll and have been reading several a day for the last week or so in readiness for total du Maurier immersion this weekend.

The story behind this collection has been well-covered in the press here but it is lovely and worth repeating. Every trip to Fowey for us (it's about 45mins away) involves me popping my head around the door for a chat with Ann Willmore who runs Bookends, the town's secondhand bookshop (Mr Ann runs the town's other bookshop, Bookends Too, selling new books.)

I've mentioned Ann here before I know but there is absolutely nothing she doesn't know about Daphne du Maurier having been a collector and diligant researcher of information about her life and work for many years. I'm sure all you indie book owners out there offer a warm welcome to anyone who walks into your shop but there is nothing to beat Ann's open and smiling greeting and we settle down for a natter about the 'latest.' It is Ann who has tracked down some of the stories in this collection, many of them after years of painstaking effort, and discovered in obscure anthologies and magazines. When you are prepared to pay £70 for a 1932 copy of the Illustrated London News because it contains a Daphne story, it's clear you are dedicated to the cause and that astonishing story Happy Valley features on this collection. Read it and think of Daphne's discovery of Menabilly and see the foreshadowing of Manderly and Rebecca, it really is remarkable.

I had quite  forgotten what a brilliant practitioner of the art of the short story Daphne du Maurier is, having focused on catching up with her novels and more biographical books in recent years, but this collection fair took my breath away. All seem to have been written when Daphne was in her very early twenties and living in the 1920s, themes of entrapment and obsession move in tandem with those of vanity and hypocrisy whilst jealousy, infatuation and possession pervade. As I read I sensed a young and very fertile imagination ready and waiting to break through the boundaries that a privileged upbringing had chained so firmly in place around her life. A mind ready to rebel, to break the mould and do things differently.

In the event the young Daphne fought for, and won, a degree of freedom by living when she could in Fowey.

Far from the constraints of life in the Hampstead home and the claustrophobic company of her possessive father Gerald, and the mother with whom she was always at odds Daphne was free to write. Nowhere is that mother-daughter tension clearer than in the short story Tame Cat reminding me of Irene Nemirovsky's themes in Jezebel; the jealous and unforgiving mother with the fading looks and her scheming lover who insinuates his way into the naive and hapless daughter's affections. This is entrapment writ large and, as so often in this collection, a perfect delineation of the limitations set on women's lives, lives circumscribed by tradition and habit and bound by the lack of choice about their own destiny.

But Daphne interestingly walks a mile or two in some very different shoes here as well...who was it who said if you walk a mile in someone's shoes at least you are far enough away when they discover that you've stolen them??

Sorry, that's of no relevance, except the young Daphne transports herself into lives seemingly far removed from hers, there is lust and murder here along with prostitution and then there is the doll of the title story. The constant companion of the gifted female violinist, a male doll whom she introduces as Julius, and which she finds infinitely preferable to the real thing. There is destitution in these stories too, something Daphne can have known little about in her day to day life but in many ways perhaps she was more like her character Mazie than she cared to realize. As Mazie yearns for a different and better life and for freedom from the constraints of the present it's but a short step to understanding that this may have been Daphne's dream too. So a collection that may unwittingly reveal even more about an author I have come to know and love, and a very welcome addition to the oeuvre.

Ann's personal story, recounted in an interview in the Western Morning News recently, is also something of a dream come true... captivated by Daphne du Maurier and a regular visitor to Fowey for many years from the family home in St Albans, Ann and Mr Ann ( he's actually David and he's lovely too) chucked in jobs and sold up, moving down and buying Bookends when the business came up for sale eight years ago. Sadly I've met a lot of very grumpy booksellers in my time but Ann and David are life's happy people who have turned a hobby and a dream into a viable and enjoyable business which you sense gives them much pleasure, and it shows... no wonder Ann always has a beaming smile on her face when you walk in the door.

 

We Had It So Good ~ Linda Grant

The moral of this story... I mean as in the story of my reading of Linda Grant's latest novel We Had It So Good, is don't start reading the proof copy within minutes of its arrival and some three months before publication date because you can't possibly wait any longer.

Next, don't be bowled over by it but somehow not get around to sitting down and writing about it there and then.

So Christmas came and went and I had that piece to do for The Reader, and then it was January and publication date for the novel and I thought, I'll hang on and let the hype subside, it'll be Orange long-listed so I'll jump in then...and to my complete surprise, verging on horror, We Had It So Good, my sure-fire Orange was nowhere to be seen.  And I remain mystified about that omission, but onwards and upwards, it's the du Maurier Festival this week and I'll be in Fowey for Friday and Saturday's events which, if I can get on the road early enough will include Linda Grant talking about her novel at 10am on Friday morning.

The time scale for We Had it So Good is mine, these are the baby-boomers those of us born between 1946 and 1964, the post-war 'demographic bulge' , the supposed 'shockwave' who remodeled society as they moved through it according to that most unreliable of sources Wikipedia. I'm not sure I did a lot of remodelling being more prone to sitting soaking my aching feet whilst everyone else get on with and I did my nurse training, but reading We Had it So Good has been a revelation.

Stephen is a Rhodes scholar, Jewish, a Vietnam draft dodger who works his passage to the UK on board a cruise ship and claims to have met fellow Rhodes scholar Bill Clinton on the way. From a working class family in California, Stephen realises he has landed on another planet, Oxford, a 'private members club' an alien world of which he has little understanding. He somehow falls into a marriage with a fellow student, the very English Andrea, and the novel charts their life together via neatly oscillating perspectives, Stephen's, Andrea's, Grace the university friend with the 'baggage' and the shocking secret. I'm rarely that shocked, but on this occasion, and to Linda Grant's credit, I was...completely.

Grace is she who warns, seeming like a cypher for the ills of the generation. Then there are the children Max and Marianne, well-placed to pass judgement on their parents as they grow into their adult personae, Max as a magician, Marianne as a photographer. Two interestingly juxtaposed professions, one about deception and the trick of the eye, the other a lens focusing on capturing the accuracy and an account of a particular moment, clever vehicles for Linda Grant to explore what pickings may be left for the new generation.

To read We Had it So Good (and I've now read it twice) is to indulge in a sort of retrospective bildungsroman where I could imagine a little part for myself too because I was there. It's a reconcililation of the past and the present, the 'what might have been' with the 'what is' and with wonderfully recognisable archetypes clutching both their inherent and their acquired anxieties. The humble beginnings, the growing and unexpected kudos of the Islington address, though not quite so salubrious when Stephen and Andrea bought in 1981 (still justifiably blue and following on from the Old Kent Road on the Monopoly board in the early 1980s), Stephen's job at the BBC, Andrea's profession as a psychotherapist. The anxieties of expectation frequently unmet and unachieved with a bar set invisibly high by a generation hell-bent on progress. Theories that the evolution of the human brain has wired it to cope more effectively with scarcity  than abundance feel entirely relevant here, and it is the difficulties of dealing with that abundance, coupled with a sense of 'betterness' that creates so much of the angst for Stephen and Andrea, and when it comes to Stephen's final and devastating realisation (which I won't reveal)  I was reminded of April and Frank in Revolutionary Road..

When Stephen's father, at the age of ninety, and wearing a pair of bright orange Crocs, decides to make the trip from the US to Europe and Poland to trace his roots, the anticipated interrogation of the past that Stephen expects and has perhaps been unwittingly seeking (and that I as a reader thought I had readily mapped out in my mind,)  is surprisingly and deftly subverted by Linda Grant, it all defies the predictable and I loved this book for many, many reasons but for that one especially.

There is so much more, but not a word more, because you definitely need to just pick up We Had it So Good and be carried along by it, read it, go with the flow but don't miss it. Every page holds a little gem, a priceless moment in the company of Linda's Grant's wry and witty sense of humour, or an insightful observation and understanding about human nature that makes you sit up and take notice. If you are a baby boomer you will also love this book for the plethora of timely references to things we have all known and loved. I was heard to exclaim things like...

'Blimey loon pants...remember those..'

and

'Oh yes, rent £8 a week.'

and I'll bet some of you will remember doing this...

'While Stephen slept she slit the outside seams of his jeans from hem to the knee and cut triangles from the green velvet dress and sewed them in. His Levis had turned into flares. In the morning he awoke and stumbled into his trousers. He looked down and saw his feet disappearing below the flapping fabric...'

 

 

 

 

The Return of Captain John Emmett ~ Elizabeth Speller

Casting around for suitable book-snapping locations I remembered one of old Rocky's favoured summer's evening perches...


In fact he needed much assistance to assume what we fondly called his Olga Korbut beam pose in his latter years and would sit on the gate like a lemon until someone came to lift him off. So in the absence of our old chum I perched my current reading there instead.


I have had The Return of Captain John Emmett by Elizabeth Speller on the shelf for over a year and when the sequel The Strange Fate of Kitty Easton arrived and then, realising I may be able to catch Elizabeth Speller talking at this year's du Maurier festival, it was high time to get cracking.

You may also see the proof copy of the forthcoming biography of Edward Thomas, Now All Roads Lead to France by Matthew Hollis perched there too... keep your eyes peeled on here next week because I have a very exciting and interesting proposal to put to you about that one.

As alluded to on Monday with reference to Antony Quinn's novel Half of the Human Race, I can only imagine that it must be increasingly difficult to wring much more original fiction from the Great War. Yet still the books keep arriving and still I never tire of the subject, though perhaps the more I read the harder it becomes to impress me, and that may be why I left The Return of Captain John Emmett unread for so long. I wasn't sure this was going to be any different but my mistake and how delighted I am to have been proved wrong so if you are in search of a really good read, want some smooth-flowing writing and a book that looks as if it will be part of a series, you might want to add this one to the list.

The book opens in 1920 with the arrival in the UK, and the train journey from Dover to London, of the coffin bearing the body of the Unknown Warrior to its final resting place in Westminster Abbey... a tomb so much in evidence at last week's Royal Wedding. Looking on as the train passes is war veteran Laurence Bartram, and intentionally or otherwise, a clever choice of name from Elizabeth Speller, because I doubt I'm the only reader who will be subliminally reminded of war poet Laurence Binyon and his poem For the Fallen..

They shall not grow old as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.

Powerful ready-to-think associations.
Laurence's wife and child have died whilst he was away fighting in the trenches and he is now living in a little flat in Gt Ormond Street, leading a lonely, rather melancholy and slightly directionless life as a writer of a book he never seems likely to complete, and with the occasional distraction of the companionship of old schoolfriend and fellow war veteran Charles Carfax

'to whom nothing need be explained.'

It is a letter from Mary, the sister of an old friend, John Emmett, that starts the trail of discovery as Mary recounts John's recent suicide despite surviving the war. Desperate for more details about the brother she has lost, Mary and Laurence meet and it is quickly apparent that events surrounding John's death whilst an in-patient in a nursing home may not be as they seem. What follows rightly lived up to the blurb as a 'gripping mystery and an elegy to the private tragedies of the Great War' as John and friend Charles, in a sort of loosely Holmes and Watson-like pairing, start some sleuthing, uncovering traumatic wartime events surrounding the execution of an officer all leading to feuds and vendettas, as well as the work of a group of wartime poets who have all published under pseudonyms for fear of accusations of treason.

Some of the facts that Elizabeth Speller weaves in were quite startling. For example it had never really occurred to me that the grandfathers of many of those young lads in the trenches would have been veterans of the Crimean and Boer wars. Nor had I realised that of the 340 or more British soliders shot for cowardice or desertion only three were officers, whilst the German army shot less than fifty of their own troops. Incorporating the tragically botched execution of one of those officers into the story and the subsequent distress it caused those involved exemplified yet another new perspective on the Great War for me.

But it was not only those new perspectives that hit the mark because the re-working of the classic themes that emerge in much Great War writing work anew here too and this despite their familiarity. Not least the disparity of justice dependent on social class and those very class inequalities that this war took a good hard swipe at. These in tandem with the deeply traumatizing events, not dwelt on mawkishly by Elizabeth Speller yet evident and ever-present, as were the long term personal sequelae of this war.

There was a revelatory moment too, about the corruption of innocence, the blight and tainted memory that marked all who had knowledge of those traumas and how much of the post-war silence of the veterans was about preserving and protecting the 'innocence' of their families and friends. I'm sure many of you will have had family members like ours... Bookhound's grandfather lived to be over a hundred and yet never spoke another word about the Battle of the Somme which he had fought in with the West Kents.

How much misunderstanding and anguish that silence must have caused in those post-war years can only be imagined, again I hadn't really thought much about it, but Elizabeth Speller illuminates it all in a conversation between Mary and Laurence, as they discuss the gaps and silences between men and women...

'But the price is that you'll always be alone...and a whole generation of women are excluded. Redundant. Irrelevant...perhaps Mrs Byers has lots of things she'd like to tell him. Of fear and loneliness and never knowing who was coming back or in what shape. Sitting. Waiting. Perhaps you should ask us whether we'd like to know. We're women not children.'

The true heartbreak, and the consequences of so much of what with hindsight we now know was a great deal of misunderstanding about the impact of war on the men who fought it, all plays out in the final pages of this very enjoyable read. All enough to send me ferreting to find out what else Elizabeth Speller may have written and I discover a memoir The Sunlight on the Garden, just my sort of read, more about that soon.

Now, since our old prize draw cat has made an appearance today scroll down for gifts.

 

 

 

and while we're on the subject...

...just look at these re-issues of Winifred Holtby's novels that have arrived from Virago. Talking today about the way that a cover can tempt me into a book, add in South Riding and this series feels like a 21st century version of  those 20th century Virago covers we all loved so much.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Paris Wife ~ Paula McClain

I have variable luck with fiction that is based on real lives and can think of some recent notable failures. There's something about feeling a little duped, especially if it's a life I don't know well and the author takes liberties in going off on a frolic of their own with events which never happened, and then I get completely confused and frustrated over the blurred boundaries between fiction and fact. If I know the life well it can be even worse.

The Paris Wife by Paula McClain arrived in proof copy from Virago months ago and I had reluctantly set it to one side to read nearer to the March publication date. I say reluctantly because it came in a really unusual and very appealing proof edition, a facsimile of an aged and well-read book with a couple of postcards inside, but I still had my reservations...

'Hadley Richardson is a quiet twenty-eight year old who has all but given up on love and happiness, until she meets Ernest Hemingway...'

So a fictional account of that doomed marriage and a Big Scary Male Author to boot. A double whammy in that case because I have some Ernest Hemingway reading in my sights this year too,  having always been slightly put off by everyone's else's apparent distaste for a man that many seem to regard as brutish and unpleasant.

It takes me back to the debate about reading authors we have reason to dislike as people, do we read them unfettered by prejudice or do we bring along the baggage?

Can we and should we overlook personal flaws in order to appreciate the writing or are we too influenced by what we know about them?

So I picked up The Paris Wife with some trepidation having only the mere basics about Hemingway's life in place, along the lines of several marriages, not shy of a bit of hunting, shooting, fishing and killing before turning the gun on himself... very basic knowledge indeed, so I hardly needed to fill the gaps with fiction before I know the reality. I turned to the acknowledgements at the back first, just to reassure myself that there might be some factual references and to my delight there were plenty, along with a big reassurance from Paula McClain

'It was important for me to render the particulars of their lives as accurately as possible, and to follow the very well documented historical record. The true story of the Hemingway's marriage is so dramatic and compelling, and has been so beautifully treated by Ernest Hemingway himself, in A Moveable Feast, that my intention became to push deeper into the emotional lives of the characters and bring new insights to historical events, while staying faithful to the facts.'

There follows a detailed selection of other books as well as references to the correspondence between Hadley and Ernest, and Hemingway's original manuscripts all sufficient to allay any fears about being fictionally duped and so I proceeded with confidence.

There be spoilers here because I am assuming you all know the background but The Paris Wife is told through Hadley's first person narrative. Having lived a sheltered, stunted life with low expectations and the grief of a father who has committed suicide by shooting himself, Hadley carries an inherited kernel of anxiety that is buried deep within when she meets and falls in love with the young, unknown writer Ernest Hemingway. Somehow you know that kernel of anxiety sits there unbidden, barely concealed and will eventually surface, but the mere knowledge of its existence offered a useful tool for this reader, a way of interpreting the real anguish of what happens to Hadley versus the painted-on smile at which she is so adept.

In the early days Hadley seems able to cope with all Ernest's flaws, of which there are plenty. Shell-shocked and traumatised by the First World War, Ernest is portrayed as selfish and egocentric, almost child-like in his need for comfort and security, and most essentially for the couple's shared world to revolve around him. Yet he can be charismatic in company, one of those big people who take up all the air in the room, and there are moments when Ernest's brilliance and boyish charm shine through, seemingly dissipating all those flaws as the couple move from America to settle in Paris in order for Ernest to make his name as a writer.

Moving effortlessly into the Parisian cafe culture that would include Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald and a passing acquaintance with Picasso, whilst regularly holidaying in Switzerland but living on greatly reduced finances by comparison to their friends, Hadley holds the marriage together with her devotion to Ernest's cause. Slowly the cracks start to appear, and nowhere more vividly than one horrific moment, brilliantly described by Paula McClain, when Hadley is travelling to meet Ernest and decides at the last minute to take all his manuscripts with her so that he can work on them, perhaps get some published. I think I felt as sick and panicky as Hadley at that moment when she discovers, to her complete horror, that they have been stolen on the train, and equally fearful at arriving at the destination where Ernest would meet Hadley and I off said train and we were going to have to tell him....I'm afraid I hot-footed off to the Ladies to powder my nose and left Hadley to it.

The defining moment when those cracks become a yawning chasm is Hadley's discovery that she is pregnant, and by this time I knew Ernest well enough to know that he wasn't going to be dashing off to Mothercare for babygros and making a start on decorating the nursery. Ernest is the needy, demanding child in this marriage...

'He loved and needed praise. He loved and needed to be loved, and even adored.'

Even as I read of the incongruity of Hadley sitting watching a gruesome bullfight whilst stitching a baby blanket, it's clear no amount of pandering to his whims is going to bring Ernest around. There won't be room for two children and with Ernest's threat systems in overload, Hadley allows him to retreat from her and write (still with little sucess) whilst she literally bears the brunt. As the baby, nicknamed Bumby, makes his presence felt, Hadley valiantly clings to her slowly dissolving essence of self in the face of Ernest's infidelity. The moments of happiness become increasingly fleeting and it is Ernest's slightly unreal insistence that his lover should become a part of the family, living happily ever after as a menage a trois, that finally crumbles the seriously depleted and disempowered Hadley's devotion to shreds. It's more the disturbing nature of Ernest's belief that Hadley, so biddable and controlled and still so in love with him, would actually agree to this and I found myself heaving a huge sigh on her behalf. That moment when 'easier to stay' is transformed into 'essential to leave.'

Hadley's voice throughout is beguilingly simple and easy-going, it's impossible not to warm to her yet somehow nor does Paula McClain cross the perilously tempting divide and villify Ernest, and that must have been seriously difficult not to do. Such authorial restraint offers up an engrossing read, especially for me with so little knowledge of the detail, a refined and beautifully balanced fictional account of a famous marriage and its route to breakdown, and I suspect there will be resurgence of interest in Ernest Hemingway's books from people like me who now definitely want to read more.

 

 

 

South Riding...

...it's taken me months on and off but finished reading in the nick of time, now very much looking forward to tonight's TV adaptation.

I have a feeling Penelope Wilton is going to make a superb Mrs Beddows. Plenty of melodrama but the final pages of South Riding among the most moving I've read in ages, and to think Winifred Holtby only had weeks to live when she finished writing it.

 

Mr. Fortune's Maggot ~ Sylvia Townsend Warner

'Today I heard that one of those little jump-up firms which proliferate like fireweed in the ruins of publishing wants to re-issue Mr Fortune's Maggot...'

Not me but Sylvia Townsend Warner writing to William Maxwell in 1976 about her novel first published in 1927.

It's months since I read Mr Fortune's Maggot, not just a few, we're talking six at least. Then there had been a delay in writing down my initial thoughts and I knew I hadn't quite nailed the book as I wanted to, it had felt slippery and elusive, any vaguely intelligent or original thought evaded me, so I had planned to throw in the towel and let the post slip down the order and on into oblivion.

Except for some reason the book has sat patiently by my desk alongside Lolly Willowes and both refusing to go back on the shelf. Each time I glanced in their direction I got that look of reproach and defeat a book is quite capable of giving. So I pick it up to admire the cover occasionally and recall that it was the writer Salley Vickers who recommended Lolly Willowes at a literary festival some years ago, and I had then scurried off to find it. It was Ruth (who comments here) who found the then lesser known but very delicious looking editions published by the New York Review of Books, and we both succumbed. I only really wanted Lolly Willowes but couldn't resist Mr Fortune's Maggot too, because they looked nice.
Lame but true.


So I have hauled this post blinking up into the daylight because Mr Fortune's Maggot really was a book too good to pass over, and because at the time I was reading the correspondence between William Maxwell and Sylvia Townsend Warner, and alongside that William Maxwell's novels, and then it seemed only right and proper that I read some of Sylvia's and write about them too. The introductions here are from contemporary literary voices, Alison Lurie and Adam Mars-Jones respectively here, and of course being NYRB Classics any boxes about paper quality and production values are firmly ticked.

Having progressed from the life of a bank clerk in Hornsey  the 'tall, raw-boned and rather rummaged -looking' Reverend Timothy Fortune has settled into the life of an island missionary on the Raratongan archipelago in the Pacific. Undaunted, easy-going and seemingly humble in his approach, further isolation beckons and he decides to upsticks and settle on the remote island of Fanua.

Warnings of much singing and dancing and plenty of immorality plus uncertainties about cannibalism don't deter Mr Fortune who, with his housewifely mind and staid and conscientious approach to his mission, somehow seems capable of riding out any storm, whether it be physical or emotional. Armed with a wheezy harmonium and the leaving gift of a very useful silver teapot, his arrival on Fanua is greeted with much excitement by the islanders... I did wonder whether there was enough meat on him for a good dinner.

Mr Fortune makes a rapid convert in the young boy Lueli who quickly becomes his constant companion, though with assurances all round that this is a chaste and uncomplicated friendship. Further converts do not flock in so Mr Fortune focuses all his attention rather single-mindedly on Lueli and his education.
Lueli's conversion is complicated by his worship of a wooden idol and of course the relationship becomes increasingly complex too as Mr Fortune's love for Lueli shifts and deepens, bringing with it come some agonisingly deep realisations for him about love, conversion, faith and idolatory and some mega-tussles with his conscience.

'And because I loved him so for what he was I could not spend a day without trying to alter him. How dreadful it is that because of our wills we can never love anything without messing it about!'

The sense of place is magnificent. Fanua is a volcanic island also prone to earthquakes and I was amazed to  discover that STW had done all her research from a single library book. The eruption, when it happens is likewise going to signal some earth shifting decisions for Mr Fortune too.

... and that was as far as that initial post went.

So without re-reading, I'm thinking back now to my firmest recollections of the book and I realise that I am left with a deep sense of empathy and sadness over it all, it is a book that warns about many things not least the dangers of obssessive love and passing judgement over the faith of others.
Of her own creation, STW said

'I love him with a dreadful uneasy passion which in itself denotes him a cripple...'

and I sense that too having read and reflected on poor old Mr Fortune.

It seems I was sufficiently impressed by Sylvia Townsend Warner's writing back in 2004 to join the STW Society but soon realised that I wasn't keen enough to want to go on rambles around her homeland of Dorset, but she does have a large and loyal following who thankfully do that and much more to keep her name and her literary legacy alive.

I do know that the two books I have read so far have left their mark but in a strange and rather intangible way. Sylvia's writing touches a chord and resonates. I love the way that she snatches those opportunities for wry humour right on the brink of deeply serious moments, whilst placing it all so sensitively in the midst of what can often be described as sad and disempowered lives. In Lolly Willows and now Mr Fortune's Maggot, lives that are about to make some very difficult decisions in order to wrestle that power back from elsewhere. I also know that there is something I can't quite touch and reading back through my one copy of The STW Society Journal  this evening (I went to the society website to find that link, saw the cover on the webpage and remembered mine on the shelf) and I see that Gillian Beer quotes John Updike who feels likewise when reviewing STW's short stories,

'She has the spiritual digestion of a goat. Her stories tend to convince us in process and baffle us in conclusion; they are not rounded with meaning but lift jaggedly toward new and unseen developments.'

Gillian Beer goes on to argue that the novels

'at once baffle and possess the reader. Douce, whimsical and shifting seamlessly across verbal registers, they suddenly expose us to appalling suffering that cannot be set aside. Calamity is simply there, and to be practised. It is shared with the characters. Sometimes it closes up again into comedy.... empathy is encouraged and then rejected.'

I could have done with reading all that months ago, if not earlier this evening as I wrote this as it would have explained something that I couldn't, because I have indeed been oddly baffled.

I'm still not sure I've done the book or Sylvia Townsend Warner justice but it's been good to think out loud with all of you and thank you if you've stayed the course this far. Six months later Mr Fortune's Maggot is still echoing around in my mind very clearly and it has not been difficult to recall it again, but I'm also quite relieved to be putting the book back on the shelf at last too.

Recently I came across The Diaries of Sylvia Townsend Warner £2.50 for an unread 1995 Virago edition and dipping in I feel sure more of the bafflement may be explained, but I'd love to hear your thoughts if you've read this one or any others.

The Truth About Love ~ Josephine Hart

We talked some time ago about books having that little window of publicity before they may pass us readers by, and The Truth About Love by Josephine Hart, published by Virago in early 2009, did sail right on by without my noticing. It was only a half-mention somewhere that had me reading this novel a few months ago and perhaps that all begs the question, why so long before any thoughts have appeared on here?

The Truth About Love has proved to be a book that has revealed its strengths very discreetly because I'm editing this piece two months after I first wrote it and knowing full well that something was eluding me about the novel, but equally confident that the final piece of the jigsaw would pop up somewhere.

Misleadingly I do still have this nostalgic image of Ireland as a wistfully green and pleasant place despite all the years of violence that I have grown up absorbing by osmosis and still reluctantly associate with the country; something delicate, intrinsically soulful, beautiful and fragile about it. Something easily broken, and much less easily put back together, and whilst the troubles are certainly evident in The Truth About Love it is in an oblique and understated way and from a different perspective.

'After a tragedy many survivors are lost ' says one of Josephine Hart's characters and the full import of that will become apparent.

The book opens with a death and the suggestion that Tom and Sissy O'Hara's son has been making a rocket in the garden shed belies the nature of his injuries when he is caught in the blast and, to put it bluntly, scattered to the four corners of the garden. Clearly he is working on something far more sinister. It is the son on his way to hospital and certain death who gets first pickings at the first-person narrative. Grief at this unnamed son's loss and how it impacts on the each member of the family and the wider community will permeate the rest of the book.

That grief may well be symbolic of a nation's grief too. A grief that when walled up and enclosed spills out around the sides and seeps through the cracks, as Josephine Hart cleverly hands the narrative baton from one character to the next thus allowing successive generations to take up the story-telling and lead it into the future. It's like reading a contemporary and written form of the ancient craft of oral story-telling which for some reason sits comfortably with all my pre-conceived notions and expectations of literary Ireland if there can be such a mixed up thing. Now two months after first writing that I read Ann Enright's introduction to The Granta Book of the Irish Short Story and subsequently also in The Guardian here, (accompanied by the usual excoriatingly brutal Graun comments) and realise that I am on the right track.

'...the short story has flourished in those cultures where older, usually oral forms are met head on with the challenge of new literary forms ... the story is born from the fragmentation of old certainties and the absence of any new ones...'

The Truth About Love may not be a short story but I think the same principles will pass muster in this context and we'll just have to hope no Guardian commenters stray over here.

Looking on as the all-seeing observer, who moves on the periphery of Josephine Hart's fictional community, is writer Thomas Middlehoff, 'the German' who potentially carries the unspoken burden of his own nation's post-war guilt on his shoulders and into the midst of this sorrow.
Detached, seemingly unemotional but a pragmatist, and a sensitive one at that.

'My father said there were four things a man or a nation could do with their history, which is after all, their collective memory... a nation could forget, exploit, obscure or live with its history.'

As Tom and his children, Olivia and Daragh, though grieving themselves, pull together to try and contain Sissy's grief at the loss of her son, (and we know she has already lost a daughter,) it's clear they cannot stem the tide of her mental anguish. Tom and Olivia approach Sissy to tell her the awful truth about her son's death from which they have tried to shield her and Tom says to his daughter,

'We'd better face it now Olivia. There is no waiting now. No way out of this one, is there Olivia? Listen child, whatever you're about to see - after all you've seen today - know it can be survived.'

For me it was the rawness and ultimate irresolution of a mother's mourning that seared its mark throughout this book, and it was the debate about John McGahern's The Barracks over on KevinfromCanada, and the trend identified by commenters there that finally helped me to crystallize my thoughts on The Truth About Love....

' Meanwhile, the mothers and wives pick up the pieces, mourn and raise the next generation of “heroes”.'

The suggestion that traditionally, in reality and in much Irish fiction, it is the women who carry the burden and soldier on, yet in Josephine Hart's novel that trend is completely and utterly subverted. How can anyone possibly 'recover' from the loss of a child under any circumstances let alone such brutal ones, and the son's death seemed to become a form of universal allegory for all those individual mournings. Devastated and unhinged there is no consolation capable of  assuaging Sissy's grief, and Josephine Hart's delineation of this is beautifully and deeply perceptive. But then thinking back to that conversation between father and daughter, there it is... that burden subtly still being passed down to her ... this is our expectation of you as a woman.

So, having in my usual fashion written this and then nipped to Amazon to steal the cover image (sorry, but sometimes true) I was very surprised to discover several one and two star reviews, some finding the narrative unconvincing, the dialogue clunky, skims over the facts etc. No, no and thrice no I found myself muttering and all proving there's nowt so different as readers, because there was me weeping and loving every finely nuanced word, and how much this book has continued to give me months after I first read it.

The wisest of those words perhaps uttered by the Bishop, Thomas Middlehoff's unlikely regular chess opponent, famed for being a bit of a talker ...

'His conversational ship has left port. It will take time to anchor him again...'

But once anchored some moments of deep lucidity emerge from the Bishop and herein perhaps lies one answer to so much endless tragedy,

'There's a world of difference between a free nation building its soul on the tales of men who fought hard and long against a ruthless oppressor and breaking young minds with the weight of old sadnesses and burdening young shoulders with an unpayable debt to ghosts.'

Much to think about here, a book that will bear a re-read very soon and if you've read it I'd love to know your thoughts too.

 

More snowreading... South Riding ~ Winifred Holtby

I don't know about you but being a bit traditional I never buy a copy of book when it's serialised on TV in the 'advertising the series' edition, it's against my religion. If I decide to read it I'll hunt out an old edition, so when BBC books very kindly sent me a copy of South Riding by Winifred Holtby I headed straight for my shelves to find the old Virago copy and do a compare and contrast exercise. I know I know, what's to compare, we all love our Viragos but in the wake of a TV series it's obvious which one is going to grab the attention of the viewers, and if that gets more people reading Winifred Holtby then hallelujah.

South Riding is to be serialised early in 2011 and adapted for television by Andrew Davies, so my first thought was an obvious one along the lines of expect sexed-up fireworks that might have made even Winifred sit up and take notice.

Writer Andrew Davies says: "What appealed to me most about South Riding is how fresh and relevant it feels, even though it was written and set in the Thirties. It's a terrific love story but it's also a portrait of a whole community in turmoil, with the country in recession, and bitter struggles between the advocates of change, like our heroine Sarah the new forward-thinking headmistress, and the forces of conservatism embodied in Robert Carne.... It's also full of rich comedy, with some wonderful minor characters, splendidly cast. I feel as if we've rediscovered a forgotten masterpiece."

I hadn't read South Riding but having received the heads-up about the series and now the book, and knowing that I'm a stickler for reading beforehand if I can to get an idea of the characters in my own mind before I see someone else's interpretation, I decided I'd give it a go.

I opened the first page of my nice shiny new BBC edition and a funny thing happened. Apart from the fact that this is proving to be a brilliant read and I can't imagine why I haven't read the book before, I was also trying to place the characters on the cover in parts various and in a way that is, to my surprise, really enhancing the read. Actors we know well Anna Maxwell - Martin (Bleak House) and David Morrissey (everything) star along with Penelope Wilton (most recently Downton Abbey, but for me has the midas touch for any role she plays) and Peter Firth (Harry Pearce in Spooks). Now I'm wondering how they are going to play the parts, which bits will be included, which left out due to time constraints (just three hours in total)  and already I can see that this has the potential to be a great production.

So South Riding my second read for Christmas and though 1930's Yorkshire perhaps slightly far removed from Hilary Mantel's 17th century revolutionary France, yet in other ways perhaps not. Plenty of fermenting discontent evident, class-warfare is rife and skullduggery abounds, just no guillotine as yet.

But what I am also sensing as I read the book is that Winifred Holtby might not have been quite so shocked at an Andrew Davies adaptation (I'm only assuming here based on past Davies form) as I might have first thought. I have always felt huge sympathy for Winifred, no slouch in her own right, but in my mind so often seen as playing second fiddle to Vera Brittain... Bookhound and I came across their shared home in Doughty Street on a recent trip to London..


Yet emerging from that same crucible of the Great War, Winifred Holtby seems to be a fearless writer. One who is completely unafraid of confronting the truth about women's lives along with uncomfortable issues which were doubtless usually confined to hushed whispers, rarely committed to the pages of 'respectable' fiction back in the 1930s. I suspect that Winifred took the word on the page as far as she dare, hoping that one day someone would add in what for her may have been the unsayable... the other bits, and as we know nothing is 'unsayable' for Andrew Davies, the master of those 'other bits'.

Perfect Lives ~ Polly Samson

I am unusually (for me and reading) measured and disciplined with the short story. One a day at most, occasionally two, but one good one will give me enough to think about through the day as a sort of little performance stage to walk onto in my mind. A nice place to visit as I go about the less exciting aspects of life chez dovegrey, where things still need ironing, washing machines need feeding, you spend half your life on this recycling thing and cats still sick up on the kitchen floor, you know the score.
However schedules and discipline were scattered to the west winds when I started reading Polly Samson's new collection, Perfect Lives, recently published by Virago.

Now I'll own up I only picked this up in desperation for a book to take along to the Endsleigh Salon last week for the theme of Music.
How can I have struggled with such an enticing theme and always I promise myself that I'll be organised like Linda and Rebecca, but there I was Mrs Last-Minute.Com again? So I bargained with Polly Samson and said she could come with me if I got the merest hint of music in the first story. Polly squeaked it with a reference to a song playing on the car radio but in fact it wouldn't have mattered because it didn't need a song, I was hooked anyway, and to be honest she was home and dry with her epigraph from Leonard Cohen,

"It's the notion that there is no perfecttion - that this is a broken world and we live with broken hearts and broken lives but still that is no alibi for anything. On the contrary, you have to stand up and say hallelujah under those circumstances."

Dear old Leonard, how we loved him and music surfaces frequently in this collection, in the shape of concert pianists, classical singers and piano tuners, and I felt at times as if I was reading the literary equivalent of a suite or a concerto or a fugue or something. Help me out musical readers...the one where the melody changes and is reshaped a little later on, enough to trigger your memory of what went before.

This musical interest would all have come as no surprise had I done my homework first because Polly Sansom is a pianist and lyricist and the wife of David Gilmour of Pink Floyd fame, so clearly music matters, but as Dave Gilmour has been keen to point out about Polly's book ..."it's not %&*^&% autobiographical." so don't go there. I don't know about you but I rarely make that assumption about fiction these days so no problem. In fact forget autobiographical connections (and what would I know) I was more as sick as a parrot to discover I'd read five stories in one sitting and the remaining six in another which meant I didn't have any left and I wanted many more.

The difference being that in this collection that is Perfect Lives... except you know these are only going to be Perfect-Enough Lives because Leonard has said as much... the stories connect and weave into each other offering differing perspectives on the lives they contain. The web is intricately woven across the whole which made this book read quite differently, unlike a disparate collection here there were connections to hold in mind and make throughout.

This is my favourite sort of writing, events told slant and all off to a riveting start with Celia's discovery of her husband's waywardness and her subsequent coping strategies, and all set against the backdrop of the beach side home, exposed and battered by the weather and the sight of the waves. A home harbouring secrets which are slowly unwrapped, just a few words here, a  few there, enough to help me sniff out the trail and a home offering but limited protection for poor Celia's battered emotions too...amazing what can sneak in through the letter box. And then there are the waves with their potential to be calm and soothing or to hold the power of malevolent forces, and all exploited wonderfully in the telling of this story. The local weather forecast here in Devon always predicts wave conditions for surfers and often the lovely David Brain tells us the waves are 'messy', Celia knows about 'messy' waves.

The stories progress through the connected lives so this is one collection you need to read in the given order, which I often don't, if you are to get to grips with who belongs to who and thus experience the full and very satisfying impact of the slow dawning realisation about those relationships.

It all reminded me of health visiting days and suddenly in mid-home visit someone would say, "Oh you visit my sister" and then you'd place them in a much bigger setting and pull in another raft of background information that informed and expanded on what you already knew. Talking of which, a stout health visitor wearing Hush Puppies features in this book, and doing daily visits too, (neither of those is me in this picture by the way, but I do love it and one of them is a health visitor...your guess) so for all its contemporary setting this bit must have been well before my time.I didn't wear Hush Puppies once in thirty years honest, and daily visits?

Then there are the gaps and silences and how much I appreciate an un-bossy writer who trusts me to fill them as I choose, not as they insist.

Prose described as lyrical switches me off almost as much as limpid, I think we need to draw on a whole new batch of prose-describing adjectives, I just can't think of any at the moment so perhaps decide for yourselves...

'She grew up with the delicate weight of her grandmother's dreams draped around her shoulders like a shawl...'

'That and the way he played Chopin, long strong fingers playing the keys so softly they might have been stroking the cheek of an infant...'

Pulling 'lyrical prose' out of context may do it no favours now I read that back but when you come across moments like this in a book, and in a short story in particular, it really is like finding your favourite chocolate in a box that you are already enjoying gorging on anyway.

Theodora ~ Stella Duffy

I've read and shared thoughts on a several of Stella Duffy's novels here before, including State of Happiness, The Room of Lost Things and Stella very kindly answered the dovegreyreader asks... questions too, so it's clear I'm a fan and a new novel from Stella always a treat, so when a proof copy of Theodora arrived months ago I was all set to jump right in and read that minute.
The first few chapters confirmed I was going to enjoy this...
Then I decided to read nearer publication date in June...
Then summer happened....
And only now when the dust has settled, and the book's supposed moment in the spotlight has been and gone, have I finally settled down to read it.
It must be the publicist's worst nightmare, coping with this supposed tiny window that a book has around publication date, that merest blink of an eye in which to capitalise on reader interest, because we're all apparently fickle in our borrowing or buying and hurrying to rush onto the next best thing.
All in good time I say, us readers is not so green as we is cabbage looking as we says down y'ere.
Theodora is Stella Duffy's first historical novel and issued with a caveat from the author concerning veracity and historical accuracy, frequently sacrificed for 'plot or pace or character' and making no claims to be 'the one true story - just a story.'
I was fine with that, if it's long enough ago then all's fair in truth and fiction, more recent events squeezed into a novel bother me more for some reason. Historical liberties could wash right over me, any semblance of accuracy would pass my scant knowledge of sixth-century Constantinople by. In fact I was hard pushed to think of a single thing I may have known about Constantinople beyond the fact it's now Istanbul, even less about the holy desert retreats of Alexandria, others among you doubtless wiser. So I read  this dazzling story with complete enjoyment... and I think it is sometimes worth remembering that a good story is actually what many of us want from a novel now and again.

The young Theodora, who did exist and did rise from nothing to become the most powerful woman in Byazantine Rome when she married the Emperor Justinian, starts life as the tumbling, dancing daughter of the late chief keeper of the bears, Acacius, recently mauled to death by one of his animals. Thrown into poverty and seemingly at the mercy of the state, Theodora's mother Hypatia and her sisters must beg for charity, and the five year old Theodora soon learns that her likely profession once of age (sadly about twelve) will indeed be that of a whore. Meanwhile she must succumb to the brutal discipline of Menander the eunuch who trains the girls in the stage entertainments they provide each evening for the wealthy patrons.
At this point I think I should put you through Theodora's paces because there is a moment very early in the book, when Menander does just this as a form of punishment but the thought of having you all there in contortions and putting your backs out is not a good one, so I won't.
Theodora will be faced with daunting times and many challenges in a world created by Stella Duffy that seemingly acknowledged the existence of women for one purpose only, but ever the actress Theodora can be whatever she needs to be, morph into any role required, as she attempts to forge a life for herself in a world riven by the factions of an established but diverse Christian church. Feisty, intelligent and ambitious Theodora never loses sight of that independent fighting spirit, and a moment of real shock for me at one point in the novel when her age is revealed... so much had happened I felt she should at least be knocking forty, not a mere twenty-something.
This is a novel brimming with a real circus troupe of characters who most certainly leap off the page as you read, the colourful dwarf Sophia who holds all the trump cards, the duplicitous friend, Chrysomallo, the ambitious Hecebolus who whisks Theodora off into the sunset as his mistress ...I just knew no good could possibly come of someone with a name like a medical condition.
I wasn't wrong and the ever-savvy Theodora knew it too.

'She'd seen far too many other women fall from grace through their dependence on what had once been kind.'

So a hugely enjoyable book; doubtless hours, weeks and months of possibly dry and dusty historical research lived through by Stella Duffy on our behalf in order to grasp the finely-tuned nuances of the era, and yet that research resting lightly on the whole whilst giving sufficient depth to make this a fascinating window on the times and in particular the lives of the women who lived through them.
All injected with Stella's customary passion and colour to bring it to life... and I think I could hear her wonderful laugh in there once or twice too.

Home by Marilynne Robinson

My first read of the new year, a book I always choose carefully and Home by Marilynne Robinson seemed right for 2010 given that I'd started 2009 with Gilead, and though Home had won the Orange prize nothing had induced me to read it to date.

I think I needed a rest from the intensity of Gilead and suspected Home might be more of the same, which it is but in a subtly different way and in the end I've perhaps done myself a disservice by waiting so long.
Home is after all the same story told from a different point of view, moving me across to the Boughton household to witness life there with the return of long lost son Jack who had caused Reverend John Ames so much anguish but which is nought compared to the anguish he has put his own family through.

Interestingly I could barely recall the gentle cut and thrust of Gilead and looking back over my thoughts at the time I think I can see why. It was one of those books that seemed to wash over me in a bit of a post-Christmas euphoric reading haze and I remember now having to constantly reread and backtrack because I kept losing my concentration, would reach the end of a page and not quite know what I'd read. I must have ended up reading the book twice and now I'm going to have to read it again...perhaps my first book of 2011 (dv etc). I'll just go on like this ad infinitum in a sort of circular read of Marilynne Robinson until I've grasped every nuance, because there are far more subtleties than one read of each book can possibly pin down.

In some ways Home was devastating for its honesty as Reverend Ames the Amenable seemed to transmogrify into Ames the Curmudgeon as Jack, returning home after an absence of twenty years, a spell in prison and a deceased illegitimate child to his name, seeks forgiveness at every turn only to seemingly find it denied.

The scenes that almost moved me to tears in Gilead have minimal effect when seen from the other side, those given scant regard in Gilead are lip-biting and chokingly emotional when read in Home.

How often do I read a book and think how much I'd love to know the other side of the story, now I've been presented with it I think it's all left me in a state of emotional turmoil far worse than Jack's or Glory's as I ponder who is the truest of these Christians?

Jack is no prodigal son celebrating a homecoming. He has hit rock bottom, his sense of self-punitive worthlessness is profound and moving. A man replete with regrets and sorrow, tired of himself, in need of constant reassurance and affirmation which he looks to receive from a sister who has a bucket-full of her own troubles and a father living out his last days in infirmity and confusion. Poor Jack seems to have a lifetime of thank yous to catch up on and he wastes no opportunity to say so, his gratitude often far in excess of that required of the moment. A lifetime of misunderstandings and transgressions to be assimilated and forgiven.

As I read more and came to know Jack as the reserved, enigmatic outsider who had grown up feeling on the periphery of this close and loving family I couldn't help but be reminded of Susan Hill's novella, The Beacon. The outsider child who may have a very different story to tell, a very different experience of this family. Without 'home' Jack has been rudderless and displaced, for whatever reason denied access to that supposed haven of comfort and forgiveness so there is much to be explored here and I feel as if I have barely scratched the surface.

There is the same compression and density to Marilynne Robinson's writing in Home as in Gilead, look aside for a moment, let my concentration lapse and so much was missed, no word wasted all making another intense reading experience and to be honest I'm not sure where it's left me.

A bit of me desperately wants to read both books again, the rest of me can't quite summon up the reading energy to do that just yet.

Early signs...

'The inundation of the Spring
Enlarges every Soul -
It sweeps the - tenement - away
But leaves the Water whole -

In which the Soul at first estranged -
Seeks faintly for it's shore -
But acclimatised - pines no more
For that Peninsula.'

Emily Dickinson (No 1423)

One of my favourites and why have I only just noticed that perfectly placed apostrophe and the difference that makes to the meaning?

Just to let you know, early days but it's happening here in the Northern hemisphere because we've just been for a walk and spotted these...

Any early signs where you are?
And early signs on the reading front because you know that feeling when you realise you're reading a winner?
I am really, really, really enjoying the new biography of Emily Dickinson, Lives Like Loaded Guns, Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds by Lyndall Gordon.
I knew only the basics but Lyndall Gordon has made this into something of a page-turner, an honest and astute, gradual delineation of Emily's character which allows me some room for manouevre too. Space to indulge in some of the might-Emily-have-been-like-this-because-of-that thinking and where the biographer has to defer to the evidence-based information and ration their guesses, I can guess and surmise to my heart's content and I am.

I'm sure Virago also realised that this beautiful hardback edition would match my beloved volume of The Poetry of Emily Dickinson to perfection; same size and weight, same superb paper quality, everything about it makes me want to sing, but I think I've done enough of that this weekend.

A Far Cry from Kensington by Muriel Spark

I wonder if anyone else had the chance introduction to the writing of Muriel Spark that I did?
I would have been about fourteen, maybe fifteen and dare I say fed up with a school library that was full of tatty and ancient over-borrowed books. Should anything new arrive, often a gift from a school leaver, I'd borrow it whatever it was, just for the chance to have and to hold a brand new book.
Shallow I know, though I do still have that 'thing' about new books, but occasionally it paid dividends though I must have wondered quite what as I lugged home a hardback copy of the Complete Short Stories of Muriel Spark on the 408 bus from Cheam to Wallington and then walked it home.
One story from that volume has stuck in my mind ever thereafter, The Black Madonna and I then devoured the rest of the book.
I suspect my reading of Muriel Spark, for whatever reason then went the way of all things and I have read her sporadically ever since. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, The Girls of Slender Means but I don't think I have ever read A Far Cry From Kensington until now.
Off the shelf another book, Muriel Spark by Peter Kemp, this one a library reject last borrowed just the once from Cleveland County Libraries and to be returned on 7 Jan 1977, and bought by me years ago for £2.50 should the day ever dawn when I took a shine to Muriel again.
The fact that this was published in 1974 and A Far Cry From Kensington in 1988 confirms what I already knew but hadn't quite appreciated; the depth and longevity of Muriel Sparks' literary career and perhaps how much catching up I have to do.
By 1974 Muriel Spark had already written enough to merit a critical appraisal of her work and the introduction, though doubtless dated, does offer some wonderful anecdotes and insights into her life and writing.

'Fiction to me is a kind of parable. You have got to make up your mind it's not true. Some kind of truth emerges from it, but it's not fact...if fiction is not stranger than truth, it ought to be'

Novelists emerge as professional liars, the art they engage in that of deception and Muriel Sparks' own books declared in her own words to be 'a pack of lies'. I think Fay Weldon said as much of her own writing in her dovegreyreader asks...replies.
Peter Kemp then goes on to elaborate that, in reading the work of Muriel Spark,

'To approach them looking for naturalism, then -- fidelity to the usual, steady reflection of all the probabilities --
is to invite disappointment.'

It was Peter Kemp's suggestion that Muriel Spark's books usually focus on a semi-closed society, a self-contained community, that helped to shape my thinking about A Far Cry From Kensington.

This is 1954 and the world seen through the eyes of young, war widow Mrs Hawkins is the world of publishing and the life in her 'rooming house' populated by a disparate range of highly amusing characters. Mrs Hawkins self-consciously well-proportioned, which, as Ali Smith points out in her introduction to this new Virago edition,

'...literally larger than life. large enough in a post-war time of rationing and utilitarian discomfort to suggest a comforting abundance to everyone who simply looks at her.'

Blessed not plagued by insomnia, an older Mrs Hawkins reflects back with enjoyment on the world that was hers, the people and the events that have shaped the life she lives now adding in some age advice about insomnia too

'Insomnia is not bad in itself. You can lie awake at night and think; the quality of insomnia depends entirely on what you decide to think of. Can you decide to think? - Yes, you can. You can put your mind to anything most of the time...for who lives without problems every day? Why waste the nights on them?'

My favourite housemate needless to say, Kate Parker, the district nurse waging a war of her own on unseen germs 'the work of the devil.'

'She was very thorough and eager about her cleaning, indeed about everyone else's house-cleaning; when she entered anyone else's room , for a cup of tea or to take their temperature, she would often say, politely, 'Your room's nice and clean.' If she failed to say this it meant your room wasn't clean.'

Time's are hard, the working day is long and through the first-person of Mrs Hawkins, an editor for Ullswater Press, Muriel Spark takes an acerbic look at the world of the novelist, satirising the publishing industry in the process and in the way that only an insider can.
This is pure Muriel.
Offering advice to would-be novelists Mrs Hawkins suggests

'You are writing a letter to a friend...write privately not publicly; without fear or timidity, right to the end of the letter, as if it was never going to be published, so that your true friend will read it over and over and want more enchanting letters from you...remember not to think of the reading public, it will put you off.'

Throughout the authorial voice steps back in to remind us this is a novel

'I offer this advice without fee; it is included in the price of this book.'

but of course it might all be 'a pack of lies' too.

A deviously plotted hate-campaign from a writer Mrs Hawkins has called a pisseur de copie leads to tragedy at 14 Church End Villas, South Kensington but Muriel Spark has a way with tragedy. It certainly isn't overwrought and there is always comedy, yet scratch beneath the surface, find the cracks and society's shallowness and prejudices are mercilessly exposed.

In the words of Peter Kemp as he sums up the novels of Muriel Spark,

'The facts to which they insistently return - that men are lonely, divided, prone to deceit and treachery, die and do not want to - are hardly comfortable...These books may be elegant but they are elegant disturbers.'

Excellent Women by Barbara Pym

There's nothing to beat some comfort reading in amongst all this month's wartime reading and mine's been a Pym. I always have trouble typing Barbara...it usually wants to come out barabarabarra for some reason in the same way that I have a list of other words that always type up worngly...excatly.
I have been browsing through A Very Private Eye, Barbara Pym's Autobiography in Letters and Diaries too. I seem to do this each time I read one of her novels, just to gather in some contemporaneous detail about her life and her writing.
It might help if I didn't do this but instead picked the book up one day and just read it cover to cover because I have a completely disjointed, piecemeal collage of Barbara Pym's life with little sequence or order about it. So I was hovering around the wartime years, wondering what Babs was up to and something crops up that is complete news to me because I haven't read the book properly. So I became completely engrossed in her doomed love affair with Gordon because I hit on the news of the sadness that Barbara was feeling in June 1943

'I still love him as much as ever and nothing will alter that except meeting someone else.'

What's all this about then?
All news to me and I had to hastily backtrack to 1942, thought details seemed sparse.
Barbara had fallen for the charms of the writer and broadcaster Gordon Glover and a serious love affair ensued, serious enough at least on Barbara's part for her to burn all her diaries for that year, so little record exists beyond mentions in letters to close friends and occasional diary entries. These entries suggest a lengthy period of tearful sadness with matters complicated by the fact that Barbara was very amicably sharing a house with Gordon's ex-wife Honor and had inevitably became embroiled in the emotional melee.
In July 1943 Barbara decided to make a break and joined the WRNS working in naval censorship. Suddenly, based in Southampton, her life was an unexpected whirl of social opportunities and when she was posted to Naples in 1944 things became even more hectic but Barbara never quite lost that eye for the artificiality of her situation and the rather fraudulent disguise that she felt a uniform offered.
So there I discover the source for one of the threads in Excellent Women and one that weaves in neatly with my recent reading of Alan Allport's Demobbed. I was spoiled for choice because I have this in that perfect Virago birthday edition too, the purists might be relieved to know I've scribbled in the paperback.
Enter the delightful Mildred Lathbury, one of those classic and beloved Pym characters,

'I suppose an unmarried woman just over thirty, who lives alone and has no apparent ties, must expect to find herself involved or interested in other people's business, and if she is a clergyman's daughter then one might really say there is no hope for her.'

and as Mildred prepares to welcome anthropologist Helena Napier, a new tenant to the flat beneath hers, she ponders her methods,

'I don't know whether spinsters are really more inquisitive than married women, though I believe they are thought to be because of the emptiness of their lives, but I could hardly admit to Mrs Napier that at one point during the afternoon I had arranged to be brushing my flight of stairs so that I could peer through the banisters and watch her furniture being brought in.'

These are the post-war years and Helena is awaiting the return of her husband Rockingham's (Rocky to his friends) return from the war. Rockingham has been very busy in the defence of his country...well as much as being the Flag Lieutenant to an Admiral in Italy and living in a luxury villa demands of him,

'Rockingham hasn't had to do anything much but be charming to a lot of dreary Wren officers in ill-fitting white uniforms, as far as I can make out.'

As a regular churchgoer Mildred has another circle of friends which inevitably includes a marriageable vicar for whom she has no intentions, in fact Mildred is almost content with her lot, it is everyone else who assumes she is not. Whilst being a wonderful observer of the emotional mayhem going on around her, Mildred is self-effacing, kindly but firm in her purpose, a lover of her independence and no slouch at spotting when she is being used, 

'Yes, it would make a nice change,' I agreed. And before long I should find myself at his sink peeling his potatoes and washing; that would be a nice change...'

Potential suitors enter stage right and and exit stage left whilst I fell into the same trap as Mildred's friends.  As the mismatched Napiers struggle with Rocky's return to civilian life and Helena's independence, which has grown considerably in his absence, Barbara Pym had me working out who would be the best partner for Mildred too.
Mildred of course, smitten by Rockingham Napier is keeping a very open mind about the whole thing,

'Perhaps long spaghetti is the kind of thing that ought to be eaten quite alone with nobody to watch one's struggles. Surely many a romance must have been nipped in the bud by sitting opposite someone eating spaghetti?'

It was my read of  Excellent Women that sent me scuttling to find this quote again from an insightful piece by Barbara Brothers Living and Loving in the Novels of Barbara Pym and I've read it many times for its analysis of Barbara Pym's depiction of women

'Those who never light a flame in a man's heart... those whose prince is really a frog after all... her 'excellent women' are those 'who can just go home and eat a boiled egg and make a cup of tea and be very splendid.'

Excellent Women, published in 1952, surely demonstrates something emerging in those post war years, those early hints of feminism to come
Another Pymtastic read, every one a gentle winner to my mind and scroll down for gifts.

The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters

I need to confess right away, before I begin.
About halfway through reading I was starting to think The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters at 500 pages was too long for me by quite a few.
No question about it, I hit a wall and almost stalled.
But then something funny happened and I kept reading, suddenly what I'd read had its raison d'etre and I stormed through to the finish, raced across the line but still with a bit of a 'what was that all about' thing going on in my mind.
So a few days later and much thinking along the way, I'd had plenty of time to ponder what malevolent forces were at work in this book and I started to see The Little Stranger much more clearly. It's been a serious temptation, and one resisted, to read the reviews and erudite thinking out there because I really wanted to arrive at my own conclusions about this book and trust that it would happen eventually which it has.
Several weeks on and I think it will be one of the year's great reads for me because this is a book that gives up its secrets slowly and deliberately and at unexpected moments. Suddenly something in the book will flash back into my mind and with it a new revelation dawns. I will probably still be thinking of things come Christmas, but time to share my thoughts and move on with my reading.
I've also scoured and hopefully purged this post of potential spoilers, always a challenge when a book offers so much to talk about.
The setting is the late-1940s, a nation exhausted by conflict and Hundreds Hall a shabby, gentrified rural estate in Warwickshire; one of those that, despite beckoning destitution, is still managing to employ servants in those post-war years of recovery and austerity.
Everyone will have a different vision of Hundreds Hall in their mind's eye, in mine this sad old house, probably considerably smaller, but woven inextricably into my life and my memory.
Back in the 1980s and for fourteen happy years we lived in one of a little row of six Delabole slate-hung, terraced cottages that had at one time been the servants' quarters for this house on the outskirts of Tavistock. Our first home, we looked across to the 'big house' and we loved those links to the past, had we housed the cook or the gardener?
We'd often wonder.
It was heartbreaking to watch its decline.The pillage was horrific on the day the house finally went to auction, land snapped up by developers and the soul of the house, fireplaces, doors and other original features, ripped out and in the hands of London dealers before sunset.
The Ayres family of Hundreds Hall, widowed mother and children Roderick and Caroline are clinging onto the wreckage of the old order for grim death. There are many ghosts to meet throughout this book and this past life of decadence and snobbery is one of them.
Introduced into the milieu is local bachelor GP Dr Faraday who has been known up at the 'big house' since childhood when his mother was a nursemaid there. This of course involves a transition from servant quarters to the minor gentry that GPs are becoming, but with the establishment of the NHS looming it could be a few rungs back down the ladder for Dr Faraday. Accustomed now to a hard-earned private income he fears a forced return to a social order he has done his utmost to escape.
I had never quite realized how threatened GPs had felt about the arrival of the NHS until the 60th anniversary last year revealed the history and the depth of that dissent. Sarah Waters discreetly taps into all this from many angles and it's fascinating.
Another ghost exposed and a deeply intuitive and carefully observed look at the inherent dangers and difficulties of crossing those social boundaries 1940's style.
Dr Faraday ever the realist, the pragmatic medical man not to be fooled by the fanciful carryings-on of  the eccentric upper classes when he has the textbook of psychiatry to hand, and I found myself torn between wanting to believe both what was happening to the residents of Hundreds Hall but also hanging onto his common sense assertions of incredulous disbelief in any remotely paranormal occurrence.
It was all very cleverly created turmoil for this reader.
Sarah Waters builds up layer after layer of narrative with a meticulous attention to minute detail, she is not going to be hurried in the telling of her story and the benefits of this only became apparent to me days and weeks later. The sense of ominous doom rises inexorably with a gathering sense of menace and unease, then, just as you're at screaming pitch, it crescendos, subsides and builds again throughout the book and, as I rounded each bend like a wrung-out dishcloth, I could but wonder what lay in wait.
Without giving too much away, something has to give as the cauldron of fear at Hundreds reaches boiling point and keep an eye out for the mad man in the attic to counter all those mad women we are used to. There's even some peeling yellow wallpaper in the house which Sarah Waters apparently offered as an invocation of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's decorating tastes.
It was with some trepidation that Dr Faraday opened the locked door to the childhood bedroom (with me right behind looking over his shoulder but in a better position to do a runner first if needs be ) where a terrified family have incarcerated one of their equally terrified number, and I could only imagine that Dr Faraday was quite enjoying this wielding of medical power, a moment of social control over those he had always viewed as his betters.
So the little stranger continues to wreak havoc around the household and the mystery is whether this is ...well that's your plot-lot for now.
Layer upon layer of the ghosts of history sealed beneath the decaying walls of this fortress of the aristocracy. As the paint and paper peel away so little gobbets of shame and guilt are released; unpleasant and messy reminders of a past whose cracks have been papered over but are now slowly and cruelly exposed for all to see as the family fall on very hard times indeed. There's a wonderful moment when Caroline tries to patch things up with drawing pins and you just know that no amount of superglue is going to hold back what will out.
The walls of the bastion must tumble in many more ways than one and the masses must effectively storm the ramparts somehow and Sarah Waters' handles this peaceful social revolution with immense and understated control.
If you've read The Little Stranger you will know the significance of this 1980's view of 'our' big house.
As her known world crumbles around her, Mrs Ayres can only look on helplessly and finger the decaying photos, the last remaining ghosts of her past.
The ghosts to be exorcised are many, the means to do so various and in the end I knew that Sarah Waters had done it all differently but with such consummate skill and precision that I can only apologize now for doubting that about half way through the book.

Sunday in Fowey - The Daphne du Maurier Festival

Thank you so much for all your kind wishes, the Tinker sends his gratitude and says how lovely it is to know you are all thinking of him.
Of course if you're going to do anything like this then Friday is not a good day to expect action so we hope for news of procedure schedule tomorrow.
Meanwhile he's been moved to the very swish new cardiac unit where we left him this afternoon inhaling the free oxygen, still talking fondly of the roast beef he'd had for dinner and figuring out his bedside internet and TV console and with that twinkle of nice new gadgetry to play with in his eye.
This morning however we ventured down to Fowey to catch the Virago event at the Du Maurier Literary Festival.
The sun always seems to shine in Fowey, the skies dazzle, the water shimmers and it was lovely to meet up with Justine Picardie again and Stella Duffy for the first time. Lisa Appignanesi author of Mad, Bad and Sad was the other member of the panel and I also met the wondrous Sophie from Virago. Sophie kindly keeps me informed about new books, never refuses my prize draw requests on your behalf and sends out books around the world to the winners.
There was a big hiccup with the book supply (Waterstone's) which sadly meant no copies of Justine's, Stella's or Lisa's books for sale and signing (which is surely the cue for Bookends the local independent bookshop run so diligently by Anne and David Willmore to have a book-selling presence at the event?) so it was a good thing I'd taken my annotated Stellas for a signature or she might just have squeamed 'til she was sthick.
We averted a scene anyway and waved The Room of Lost Things around so people knew what to go looking for (down in Bookends) and of course Stella laughed.
More about the event soon which was a celebration and panel discussion of the recent Virago publication of Breaking Point, a collection of some of Daphne du Maurier's darker short stories.
I hope to be back in Fowey on Friday to meet up with Amanda Craig and hear her talking about Hearts and Minds and Amanda does 'dovegreyreader asks...' this week too.
Meanwhile a few pictures of the day for you, some Cornish bright and light, me waiting for food (ignore my bruised post-op drip hand, and concentrate on catching a glimpse of the completed Noro Kureyon jacket) and what happens when you get home after an exhausting day, fancy eating crumpets and honey (because now you can) put them in the Aga for a few minutes to warm and remember them two hours later.

State of Happiness by Stella Duffy

I've thought so long and hard about this book and how to share my thoughts on it that it's been three weeks between finishing it and posting here.This is challenging reading and I desperately don't want to upset anyone who may be going through serious illness or perhaps acute grief and loss of their own, so if you are and this jars a nerve please just stop reading.
Having discovered an affinity for a writer it always feels incumbent upon me to read the whole lot and so the minute I had turned the final page of Stella Duffy's The Room of Lost Things and I'd let those thoughts settle I immediately picked up State of Happiness. Different yet in some ways not so different as I quickly slipped into Stella's real-time writing. I can't quite describe this but it is as if you live the book minute by minute.
Five years on from an initial meeting that quickly becomes a permanent relationship, Jack and Cindy have relocated to California from New York to enable Jack to grasp a brilliant job-opportunity making his own current events TV programme, whilst Cindy will continue to pursue her own succesful career as a cartographer and author of a best-selling book on map-making. This is a couple who know where they are going and how they will get there, life is good and full of promise and Jack and Cindy embrace it all to the full, until one day just before the move Cindy collapses in excruciating pain whilst lecturing a student class. NAD (Nothing Abnormal Detected) on examination and after a battery of tests and a tentative all-clear it's off to the sunny climes of California and a new life together.
Except it isn't long before Cindy's symptoms recur and this time the news is not so good and this is where Stella Duffy's real-time writing steps up and delivers an extraordinary reading experience. If you've encountered it then you'll know all about the excruciatingly long-drawn out process of tests,scans, biopsies, and the interminable waiting for the results and a diagnosis. I was almost screaming along with Cindy by the time we got  to sit in Dr Neil Austin's office to hear the verdict, in fact I was feeling sick and a bit wobbly along with Cindy truth be told and I was the lucky one.
I could close the book, take a deep breath and go and empty the washing machine.
Cindy and millions like her in life can't do that and Stella Duffy pins this down to perfection as Cindy now has to map a new journey for herself. As Jack and Cindy sat there in front of Neil Austin my anxieties were somehow compounded because Stella never actually gives a named diagnosis, Jack and Cindy know what they are dealing with but we don't. It's almost like a patient confidentiality issue and I was desperate to be told.
I sensed the fear that gripped Jack and Cindy's stomachs
I watched with Cindy as all her healthy parameters were swept to one side and she was imprisoned in that strange, unmapped land of illness.
I listened with them as they weighed up the options, helped them make the percentage treatment decisions about chemotherapy and watched Jack watching his wife as her battle for life begins.
By now I think you'll have gathered that this is a tough read but the repercussions of serious illness are tough, there's no way to avoid that fact and it is with a 'tenderness and unflinching honesty' that Stella Duffy tackles a subject of which she has personal experience.
We're back on the 'witness' trail again and whilst those who may be experiencing anything like this right now might find the book and its outcomes too emotionally demanding, I think this makes State of Happiness one of those books it feels vital to read, but perhaps at a time when you don't have that sort of thing going on in your life or with those close to you.
I'm now reading a book from the Orange longlist, The Household Guide to Dying by Debra Adelaide, same theme, very different approach and in her author interview (you know those things I hate at the back of books, except this one's good) Debra says,

'Fiction is - in part anyway - the place to confront things and explore ideas that in your own life you are too timid to do. Dying tends to confound most of us, frighten us, make us literally lost for words. We have a lot of trouble finding the the right things to say and do when we're required to cope with death'

Serious illness seems almost unavoidable. someone usually knows someone, the degrees of separation are usually very few and though many might not even want to consider it, there seems little point in ducking the issue when you can safely explore the subject third-party and fictionally through a great novel if you choose to.
I've come away richer for the reading of State of Happiness.
I'll never forget Cindy and Jack or how they deal with this, and with that knowledge Stella Duffy conveys a profound understanding of the effects of life-threatening illness.
It's perfectly possible (once you've recovered from the reading) to use this remarkable book as a resource and have some coping strategies in the knowledge store because Stella Duffy made me think quite clearly and lucidly around what would I do, what would I feel, how would I deal with it, would I be like Cindy?
I spent the latter chapters of State of Happiness in my own state of permanent welled-up-ness but ultimately I feel very privileged to have read this book. If that all feels too much to take on board then just shelve the book, it is fiction after all and this is supposed to be good for reducing stress, but don't forget it, save it for another day perhaps.

Just a glimpse...

I think I can be allowed to give you the tiniest glimpse of a book that arrived this morning and which I've been desperate to lay hands on, a thing of beauty indeed.
It's embargoed until the end of May so I'll have to keep it under lock and key and won't be sharing my thoughts before then, just hope I'm not in the Tower by this evening for showing you this much, and if I am that I'll be allowed to take it in my hand luggage.
OK...ready...here it comes...

A Jury of Her Peers

In the end I couldn't wait the fifty-six days.
Fifty-six days before I laid hands on the UK Virago edition of Elaine Showalter's brilliant new magnum opus A Jury of Her Peers American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx ?
I don't think so.
So I trawled around and did some price comparisons for the US Knopf edition published in February and eventually The Book Depository came up as the cheapest option, though £17.79 still doesn't feel cheap for a book, but no matter I have it.
Nor did I do what I did with US edition of Jane Smiley's 13 Ways of Looking at a Novel and send not one but two copies back to Amazon as seconds because, can you believe the shoddiness, the pages edges were all ragged and uncut, missed the guillotine by a mile.
I wasn't having that.
Until of course it dawned with my third copy that this was the intentional and fashionable deckle-edged finish, though by this time Amazon had pulled their entire UK stock as seconds and probably sent the whole lot to a bonfire somewhere.
I felt bad about that for a while but quickly grew to love the quirky deckle-edge.
This the book mentioned by Elaine Showalter at her talk on Susan Glaspell and Dorothy Canfield Fisher which I travelled to London for back in November and finally the first definitive tome on American women writers for me to dip into and read and get ideas for more reading.
I've browsed through and read about the writers I know but my sum total is scant few in fact a bit of a book-famine when you look at the whole.
My old friends Susan and Dorothy of course and Willa Cather, Edith Wharton, Kate Chopin, Louisa May Alcott, and Constance Fenimore Woolson discovered via Elizabeth Maguire's book The Open Door.
Plenty of twentieth century names too but surprisingly no Dawn Powell.
I guess Elaine Showalter's going to get fed up with this because inevitably there must have been some winnowing of the grain from the chaff but still I'm wondering why no Dawn Powell?

"Satire is people as they are; romanticism, people as they would like to be; realism, people as they seem with their insides left out."

That's our Dawn and The Bride's House one of those bleak Ethan Frome-like explorations of the mis-matched marriage as I recall, women's lives and what Tim Page describes as an 'inter-generational stream of consciousness.'
No matter, the introduction to A Jury of Her Peers offers a fine taster of what's to come with Elaine Showalter's eminently readable style and of course the admission that she has inevitably had to make selections, distinctions and judgements and specifically amongst other criteria

'how American women negotiated the act of writing professionally, how they were changed by committing themselves to writing as a vocation, how they reconciled their public selves with their private lives and how changes in the status of women affected their lives and careers'

There is an acknowledgement to the pressures on women to lead private rather than public lives which feels quite relevant to 'that' book I've read this week. Would a man writing about similar themes from a father's point of view have been quite so publically castigated?
I don't know, just a thought and slap me with that wet cod again for even suggesting it, but if Jonathan Myerson had penned The Lost Child might we have been viewing it in a different light ?

The Room of Lost Things by Stella Duffy (and prize draw copies)

So my first 'meeting' with Stella Duffy was the Virago birthday celebration at the du Maurier LitFest last May and I decided that any author who could laugh like that probably wrote good books too and I'd have to read them.
Now I wish I hadn't taken quite so long getting around to it because The Room of Lost Things Stella's latest novel has been such a precious reading experience I now can't wait to read the lot.
This is London in all its twenty-first century glory and I will be interested to hear how non-Londoners react to this book.
You may recall I read the much-vaunted Netherland by Joseph O'Neill and fell flat on my face at all the New Yorkery. I've never been to New York and Netherland for all it's undoubted skill and deftness left me feeling sadly excluded from a city that it must be possible to know something of from the pages of a book. None of which may have been Joseph O'Neill's intention of course so we won't hold that against him.
I am familiar enough with the London of old, far less so with the London of today but I think Stella Duffy has miraculously scraped off the veneer, all the old layers and layers of polish and varnish burrowing beneath the surface to give me the essence of the city through Loughborough Junction. I think the place resounds and echoes with familiarity whether you know London or not.
Robert Sutton has decided the time has come to retire, to hand over the perchlorethylene along with the keys and the premises and move on from the South London dry cleaning business he has run for years inheriting from his mother Alice before him.
Doesnt that sound boring?
Do not be deceived because what plays out is a little microcosm of London lives, ordinary people, many of them from an older generation coping with the influx of the new and holding onto that fading sense of community, lives spread right across the spectrum.
Akeel Khan, the young Muslim who Robert plans to sell the business to, Patricia ageing and coping with her increasing forgetfulness, Dean the wide - boy now feeling the pressures of life flitting 'twixt the Brixton and the Peckham firms, Stefan the dance instructor coping with the homophobic locals, Helen the young Australian Nanny. Then there's the poet come prophet who rides all day on the number 345 bus, Charlie and Dan who live on the old sofa under the arches and wait for it...Marilyn, the HEALTH VISITOR!!!
Not only are health visitors an increasingly endangered species out there in the workplace but they seem to be invisible in fiction too. I only know of two other books with a fully formed health visitor character and not just a bit part, on reflection that literary dearth quite strange because health visitors are actually very interesting people :-)
Robert's shop acting for many as one of the little hubs of day to day life and Robert of course knows and understands far more about his customers than they realise because clothes have pockets and you'd be amazed at what gets left in pockets.
The Room of Lost Things is one of those books to savour not scoff down in a matter of hours and I spent an age reading it knowing full well I didn't want it to end, because the residents of Loughborough Junction had quickly inveigled me into their lives and that old familiar London feeling ruled.
There is a pervading sense of unspoken grief and loss woven into Robert's life, that room of lost things is as much locked inside Robert's mind as it is in reality, the room above the shop where he stores all the pocket finds.
That sense of melancholy barely a fingertip's reach away to me as I read.
The revelation as befits a man who superficially at least appears sanguine and pragmatic was gradual, often unspoken and in the end deeply tragic and on reflection heartbreakingly so, if only for the fact that this was a millstone that Robert had carried around his neck for many years. Stella Duffy handles all this with a precision that quite defies the laws of narrative, that sleight of pen again, you can't quite figure how it's done.
So much more I could say about this wonderful read but you'd be here until tomorrow, though I will add reading it alongside London Belongs to Me by Norman Collins has made for a  brilliant duo, but have no fear, Virago have three copies of The Room of Lost Things ready and waiting to send to three lucky winners here.
Names in comments as usual and Rocky has agreed to be Dick Whittington's cat for the prize draw.
And as if all that wasn't enough, Stella Duffy has very kindly agreed to submit to the penetrating glare of the standard lamp and do 'dovegreyreader asks...' very soon so that's us sorted.

Prize draw entry now closed

Pym-poodleness

I'm still pouring a regular tipple of Pym's into my reading punch and No Fond Return of Love has been my latest Babs read and what can I say beyond, loved, loved, loved it?
Barbara Pym just has the eye to wither and dissect what she sees in front of her, dessicate and then rehydrate to give it all some context within her plot and hey presto, you have life as it was then.
Dulcie, a woman of means and Viola, a woman of pecuniary disadvantage, meet at a conference and I was instantly reminded of similar events I have been to.
You pitch up in your little student cell block bedroom, unpack and then you get that sinking lonely feeling and wonder what on earth you are doing there.
Where has that initial enthusiasm gone, the excitement that induced you to book months ago and then to travel halfway across the country to be there.
You thought you were looking forward to it but all of a sudden you wish you hadn't, or that might just be me?
I do get very homesick when I'm away. Penelope Fitzgerald was the same and wrote about it in House of Air.

'Homesickness is a real illness and that reason has no power against.'

But I digress, this conference is going to be fascinating because it's on the subject of Indexing.
That's right, writing indexes to books. Viola knocks on Dulcie's door in the middle of the night with an acute attack of something akin to homesickness and the seeds of an odd friendship are sown as Dulcie talks Viola out of her slough of despond,

'What a pity we can't make a cup of Ovaltine, was her last conscious thought. Life's problems are often eased by hot milky drinks.'

Pure Pym.
Dulcie and Viola both are unwitting stalkers of men, mostly lecturers and vicars it would seem, there's no two ways about it, as they pursue their prey gently but with resolve half way around the country and somehow cope unashamedly with the unexpected confrontations and meetings as they figure out the romantic course that their lives will take. Viola is the assertive one compared to Dulcie's quiet but dogged approach to life but as they scour cemeteries in the West Country resort of Taviscombe for the grave of the husband of the widow who is the mother of the lecturer whose brother is a vicar, (have you got that?) you can't help but giggle. Barbara Pym is masterly at demonstrating the hold that an inquisitive and largely unrecognised infatuation can have and the lengths her women will go to in achieving their aim.
This was the era of women with blue rinses clutching a matching blue-rinsed poodle which begs the question which I needs must now ask, where have all the poodles gone?
Everyone had a poodle in the 1950s and 60s and now I'm very sorry and can only apologise for taking you along this discussion route, please skip this bit if you want to, but suddenly I need to know; we were always trying to avoid the white poodle poo on the pavements, it used to play havoc with the wheels of my roller skates...did you have this trouble?
Is white poodle poo a figment of my imagination?
Likewise I've been trying to remember when the Dressing Gown became the House Coat because those feature in this book too, and I distinctly remember my transition from red, corded and tasselled robe to a sort of light hyacinth blue with flowers, quilted, nylon affair and I thought I was absolutely the bee's knees and probably wanted to wear it to school (but didn't).
Barbara Pym never fails to delight, even when, as with this book, events take a turn for the farce I was still lapping it all up and laughing because Babs can do very funny too 

'Celibacy so often did stick out a mile, and not only among the clergy.'

Well, I laughed and there is plenty more laughter in No Fond Return of Love, perfect January reading.

The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

The arrival of a new edition of The Yellow Wallpaper and Selected Writings by Charlotte Perkins Gilman before Christmas had me eager to read that familiar story once more and plenty more of interest in this volume too.
I lose count of the number of times I have read The Yellow Wallpaper but every time the effect is the same, it's magnificent, it's utterly tragic and I am left inwardly crying with rage.
For those who may not have read it, and if you haven't it's very short, twenty pages is all it takes to get you to boiling point. The nameless young wife accompanied by her doctor husband John, arrives at a house in the country  for some rest and recuperation from what is clearly a case of post-natal depression and minus the baby who is being cared for elsewhere,
This time round I thought I'd try and read with a difference, suppress the rage and look at the actual condition of Wife of John because post-natal depression is in the news again this week
Nowadays the NICE guidelines require that all women are asked specific questions post-natally in the hope of identifying post-natal depression and  we'd then usually ask anyone who expressed an inkling to complete the Edinburgh Post - Natal Depression scale.
The EPDS is one of those helpful tools made available which, as well as offering a means of quantifiable assessment, also enabled professionals to bring the whole subject of post-natal depression out into the open, permission to express feelings without fear of being judged to have somehow failed at motherhood. Ten questions, three possible answers to each and a maximum score of three for each question, a score higher than thirteen indicating depression and the higher the score out of thirty the more profound that depression.
It has had its critics and needs to be used with care.
There's no point in offering the EPDS without support systems in place to take referrals...a score of 30/30 and you need to move very fast, scores in the twenties and you need to be ensuring adequate services are available as necessary. If you are asking staff to provide regular counselling support then you must provide supervision for them and so it goes on.
Years ago we never really knew what to say or how best to treat post-natal depression and many women suffered in silence thinking they were alone. Today we should be identifying and talking about it openly and honestly and with appropriate follow-up assessment and carefully managed treatment, outcomes are very good. To have a measurable means of initial assessment is invaluable as a starting point and I have used it effectively in the workplace for many years.
I wondered if it was possible to score Wife of John on the EPDS.
If you can bear to do it try reading The Yellow Wallpaper as I did with a copy of the EPDS questions and answers alongside and see for yourself how Wife of John scores even in those first few pages of the story.
I've read the story through very very slowly at least six times now and have been very careful not to take quotes out of context to try and make them fit the questions. It's still a textbook case, Charlotte Perkins Gilman unwittingly answers all the questions and even amid the confusion of John's controlling influence over his wife's thinking it's still possible to pick out the evidence,

1. I have been able to laugh and see the funny side of things
"It does weigh on me so not to do my duty in any way!"

2. I have looked forward with enjoyment to things
" We have been here two weeks, and I haven't felt like writing before, since that first day."

3. I have blamed myself unnecessarily when things went wrong
" I meant to be such a help to John, such a real rest and comfort, and here I am a comparitive burden already"

4.I have been anxious or worried for no good reason
" You see he does not believe I am sick!
And what can one do?"

5. I have felt scared or panicky for no very good reason
"I get unreasonably angry with John sometimes. I'm sure I never used to be so sensitive. I think it is due to this nervous condition"

6. Things have been getting on top of me
"I don't feel as if it was worth my while to turn my hand over for anything, and I am getting dreadfully fretful and querulous"

7.I have been so unhappy, I have had difficulty sleeping
"He thought I was asleep first but I wasn't, and I lay there for hours"

8. I have felt sad and miserable
"These nervous troubles are dreadfully depressing"

9. I have been so unhappy that I have been crying
"I cry at nothing and cry most of the time"

10. The thought of harming myself has occurred to me
"I am getting angry enough to do something desperate. To jump out of the window would be admirable exercise, but the bars are too strong even to try."

Separated from her baby and effectively imprisoned by the constraints of the ghastly rest cure, in the end  Wife of John's condition can only get worse, it's that old battle with the wallpaper because that's all there is to look at. Lonely and isolated from virtually all human contact in an attic room as she yearns for the pretty little chintzy room downstairs, the inconsolable madness is inevitable and utterly tragic to read.
I suspect Wife of John moves from an initial score of 23/30 towards 30/30 in the space of about six pages.
This new reading of The Yellow Wallpaper did however have one interesting outcome.
Feminist readings condition a harsh response to John but I think I have managed to read him slightly differently, not a lot but I've given a bit of ground this time round. Whilst acknowledging that his treatment of his wife undoubtedly made her far worse and many's the time I have wished much evil to befall him, we do only have Wife of John's side to the story...reliable narrator?
Unreliable narrator?
Reliable unreliable narrator?
Whilst the Woman in the Attic has been given a voice how can we possibly interpret that voice accurately?
Wife of John is very unwell, eventually psychotic, at which point I did have to acknowledge that for husbands and partners the whole post-natal depression scenario can be very frightening and very difficult to handle.
But in the end it was only a partial attack of sympathy, my rage over The Yellow Wallpaper still burns strong especially given the very personal context within which Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote it.
To make comparisons with how we aim to handle post-natal depression these days, a non-stigmatised non-judgemental approach, with compassion, empathy, reassurance, drug treatments as necessary, listening and supportive therapies, a containment of anxiety and above all else keeping and building that essential bond between mother and baby, whatever it takes, and  The Yellow Wallpaper then becomes a book that you realise must never be allowed to go out of print.
Just in case we ever need reminding, heaven forbid but just in case.
(If reading this has raised any issues surrounding post-natal depression or you want any further information start here)

The Tortoise and the Hare by Elizabeth Jenkins

Love the old Virago covers as we all do and judge a book by its cover as I do ( and far too often) it serves me well to remember that actually and obviously it's the words that matter, and so I now look on all Virago books as the treasures that I have always known them to be.
The Tortoise and the Hare by Elizabeth Jenkins arrived sporting  a very 'of the moment cover' but lorks, I'd never knowingly heard of Elizabeth Jenkins, not even in the old Virago Modern Classics edition.
But Elizabeth Jenkins has written twenty-three books, was a close friend of Elizabeth Bowen, knew Rosamond Lehmann, Rose Macauley and Rebecca West, won the Femina Vie Heureuse Prize for her novel Harriet in 1934 and lives in Hampstead, London.
A fascinating article written at the time of her hundredth birthday reveals this about a visit the young Elizabeth paid to the home of Virginia and Leonard Woolf,

"On several occasions she would walk from her furnished room in Doughty Street to their flat in Tavistock Square to sit at the feet of the great Mrs Woolf, breathless then at the privilege, but uncompromising today in her condemnation.
She recalls: “She was cruel, appalling. Beautiful, yes – but odd. Leonard was an angel, but it was partly his fault that she was so odious. He spoilt her. I remember one occasion when a young artist dared to correct Virginia about the name of a plant. Leonard took him to one side and said, ‘Don’t contradict Virginia – she can’t take it.’”
The visits ended in tears. At the last tea-party Virginia mocked the young Elizabeth, mercilessly and with contempt.
She never went back, but cherishes the memory of Leonard Woolf, infinitely kind, taking her arm and escorting her downstairs, the gentle antidote to his wife’s cruelty."

Dashing to my shelf of Virginia's diaries, there I find two mentions of Elizabeth, one on the 16th March 1931. Betty Jenkins had indeed visited during the afternoon of March 13th after the Woolf's had partaken of lunch at the Ivy Restaurant with Julian Bell and another friend.
Poor Elizabeth, perhaps we could argue that Virginia had a bad bout of acid indigestion or trapped wind to explain her churlish behaviour ?
Perhaps the lunch-Elizabeth-dyspepsia associations lingered, here's another entry for June 12th 1935,

' I am so glad I am not lunching with Rebecca West to meet Miss E.Jenkins.'

The Tortoise and the Hare is ostensibly a book about a marriage and a family in the 1950s, but as Hilary Mantel artfully suggests in her introduction (and isn't any book worth buying for the Hilary introduction alone, and in this case the added bonus of a Carmen Callil Afterword)

'Apart from a war, what could be more interesting than a marriage...a long campaign, a grand game of strategy involving setbacks, bluff and regroupings - a campaign pursued, sometimes until the parties have forgotten the value of the territory they are are fighting over...'

Poor poor young, self-effacing, subservient Imogen Grisham. Constantly subjected to the critical scrutiny of her older barrister husband Evelyn and rarely seeming to scrub up well in his eyes despite her evident physical attributes,

'Unhappiness and lack of self-confidence would reduce her charms to the condition of some fragile garland, meant to float in the mid-air over a festive scene, blown down and lying rain-soaked on the pavement.'

Then there's Grisham junior, the ghastly Gavin, an Evelyn in the making, whose treatment of his mother ranks almost as harshly as his father's,

'Imogen felt that the emotional condition between them was like nothing so much as an overturned beehive.'

And then there's the wealthy neighbour.
Country woman, knows one end of a shotgun from the other, can take a squirrel out and yes, probably have it casseroled by teatime, tail used to make her own fishing flies, spinster, stout and stern, surely there can be no contest between Blanche Silcox and the slender and radiant Imogen for Evelyn's attentions?

'... her figure with its bloated waist, in contrast to which her small legs and her feet in pointed shoes, looked like the slender forelegs that unexpectedly support a bull..'

Hmm, well you'll have to read to find out but you know men like Evelyn and their cars, and Blanche does drive a purring Rolls Royce whilst he's only got a Bentley.
Books maketh the man and Elizabeth Jenkins scatters literary references throughout as a means of cleverly making astute character assessments.
The robust and domineering Evelyn can't quite grasp how Imogen dislikes reading Conrad, Melville or Disraeli's political novels whilst gentle family friend Paul, a doctor, utilises Imogen's knowledge of the 'densely populated novels' of Charlotte Yonge in his paper on literary evidences for the incidence of tuberculosis in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. Nobody does TB better than Charlotte Yonge apparently and the contrast between Evelyn and Paul couldn't be more obvious.
So which books might we expect to find on Blanche's shelves?
That's easy, a complete set of The Shooter's Magazine for 1884, The Head Hunters of Borneo and The Jack Russell in Health and Sickness.
Elizabeth Jenkins herself describes this novel as one that was autobiographical 'not in fact but in feeling' and in her afterword Carmen Callil suggests that actually initial assumptions about who exactly is the Tortoise of the title and who is the Hare become increasingly blurred. I spent ages trying to decide once I'd closed the book and found in the end the jury was out for me, I'd be interested to know what anyone else thinks, but a book not to miss.

Gilead by Marilynne Robinson

I seem to be on a reading roll at the moment, a determined tackling of some of the books that have defeated me for reasons various in recent years.
My Gilead failure has invariably been received with anguished cries and furrowed brows in that 'But how could you not see it?' mode of shock and horror, almost on a par with the Suite Francaise disaster.
I had initially had my eye on the book long before it appeared here in the UK and was so covetous that I did a Chicago to Devon book exchange with Bluestalking, possibly in pre-blog - online reading group days, who kindly sent me her copy the minute she'd finished it.
I can't begin to describe my disappointment when I went for first summit attempt, full of excited anticipation and failed miserably, second attempt not much better, and in the end I'm flailing around in that old trying-too-hard abyss and the book just has to go back on the shelf and sit forgotten until its moment comes around again. These are the books I don't give up on, somehow I just know there is something in there for me but the reading planet alignment needs to be very exact.
First Booking of the year, as opposed to First Footing, offers a wonderful opportunity for some thoughtful reading, my mind is perfectly attuned and my soul conditioned to something quietly reflective and before I knew it I'd settled very positively on Gilead.
There is of course a balm therein and this time I think I came as close to it as I think is possible on a first read of a book which I suspect requires several readings to secure all the revelations and wisdom. It's a book that does just wash over you and I frequently felt surrounded by words I hadn't quite taken in, so there was a good deal of reversing  and back-tracking to fully grasp the thread. Some of it invested with such an intensity that a few pages at a time was a rich enough feast.
There is an excellent book called When a Doctor Hates a Patient by Richard Peschel which deals with those less-acknowledged moments in the caring professions which happen to us all and amongst them, what happens when you really don't like the person you are supposed to be caring for. It's a book which addresses anxieties and limitations in abundance, gives permission to acknowledge imperfections and relates those incidents to moments in literature as a means of exploring them less painfully and explaining them more fully. It's a good book to have on the shelf regardless of profession because it's littered with valuable and relevant psychological insights on life and people per se and I suppose you could call Gilead the Pastor's equivalent.
Ageing and dying father and preacher John Ames more than faces up to his own inadequacies and anxieties when confronted by demons from his past which seep into the present, and look likely to impact on the future he won't be seeing, as he struggles with one person in particular.
The first person narrative is written by John to his young son, and in a series of advances and retreats his life story slowly unfolds. Sometimes pitched several generations back and laced with overtly religious sentiment which surprisingly didn't cloy, whilst frequently all melting into one single existence, those might have been the moments when, if my concentration lapsed, I lost my bearings and had to retrace my steps and listen more carefully to the words on the page.
The moment of resolution for good or ill, and I won't give that away because if you are one of those who haven't read Gilead, nothing is certain, but it is one of the most profoundly moving scenes I have read since I last mentioned a profoundly moving scene I have read, because you know what I am like about those.
They don't need to be hugely dramatic but they can be the defining moment of a book for me, that moment of complete emotional engagement when the words gently radiate the book's success and the world around you recedes as you are drawn in, and this was certainly the case with Gilead.
In the end it proved itself a very worthy First Booking of 2009 and Ruth at CraftyPeople thought so too, and I love her thought that we were both stumbling along that Gilead reading road at the same time.

The Robber Bride by Margaret Atwood

Geoff Hancock : What do you think your strengths are as a writer?

Margaret Atwood : I used to say in the usual Canadian way, "Well, aw shucks, I don't know." We're trained to be modest. But now that I'm middle-aged I'm going to allow myself to say, "Well, maybe I'm good." Not all the time, but enough times, I can get the words to stretch and do something together that they don't do alone. Expand the possibilities of the language.

Geoff Hancock : And your weaknesses?

Margaret Atwood : Weaknesses? We can't afford to think about those kinds of things. Most writers are tightrope-walking over Niagara Falls all the time. Look down and you've had it.

Margaret Atwood talking in 1983 and all recorded along with many other enlightening interviews she gave in Conversations edited by Earl G Ingersoll, one of those books that sits neglected on the shelf and suddenly yields gold.
My complete read of every single Margaret Atwood novel bar one three years ago, start to finish, in the order they were written, now the stuff of legend here and I'm wondering just how I managed it. One after another, it was a complete addiction and Conversation arrived in the midst of that addiction when I bought an unwanted post-phD box full of books by and about Margaret Atwood on eBay for a mere £16.
But until the last few weeks I hadn't read The Robber Bride.
Love Peggy as I did, and hallowed though the earth she walked on became, suddenly the gorging at the feast had left me feeling slightly sated and a bit on the literary bilious side and I decided to save just one book for a rainy-must-read-Peggy day.
Bit like those days as a child (or this might just have been me) when you went to a friend's house where there was a swing. We didn't have a swing and so I would sit and swing for hours and hours, have to be prised off it for someone else to have a go and then I'd be back on it, but suddenly, and I never knew the moment because it was instant, that was it, I was swung out and never wanted to look at a swing again (well for about a week or so).
So swings aside it was time for The Robber Bride about a month ago.
Things got off to a slowish start and I wasn't in my usual un-putdownable Peggy mode, I could take or leave this book and mostly I left it, took it to London for train reading, read the newspaper instead. But I knew better than to give up and so I soldiered on slowly but quite happily until suddenly it happened, I was on the Peggy swing and nothing but nothing was going to get me off until I had turned the final page.
Zenia, the friend from hell returns, supposedly from the grave, to haunt her student friends, Tony, Ros and Charis in true gothic fashion. Lives she has left precariously in shreds once are threatened yet again and this particular house of fiction is one of those clever constructs where the roof goes on first and then the rest of the house is built from the eaves down as the story stretches further and further back in time, filling in more and more of the cracks and crevices of finer detail as events unfold. Zenia the rather resilient mortar, the common denominator that binds it all together and who had me wondering with a hundred or so pages to go quite what was going to be left of all this by the time we reached the foundations.
Nothing disappointed.
I'm probably one of the few on the planet who hasn't read this one and there can't be much of an original thought left to express about it, but if you are one of the few we'll just have a little conflab amongst ourselves and I'll tell you that it's magnificent Margaret Atwood at her best and also her wittiest with the added bonus of that piercingly searing hot-brand insight for which we hold Peggy up as the exemplar.
Supremely clever writing had me wondering whether this just flows effortlessly off Margaret Atwood's pen or does she sweat and toil to get it just right?
I almost think too much toil and it would never work as well as it does, then I read in Conversations that most of it goes through at least six drafts.
There is not a shred of doubt in my mind, Peggy's right, she's good at this.

Calling New Zealand...I've been Framed again.

Calling New Zealand...are you there New Zealand?
Do you receive me?
I'm just semaphoring across the oceans to let you know that I think you are a very fortunate country indeed to be able to lay claim to an author like Janet Frame. I hope there are trusts and monuments and preserved houses, a Janet Frame national holiday and the rest because what a legacy.
Look, I'm even flying your flag for the day in recognition. I've read through the rules and I think it's allowed.
Having read Towards Another Summer and then The Lagoon a few weeks ago now I've turned the final page of Owls Do Cry after carrying this little Bloomsbury Classics edition of the book around with me for so long. Perfect bag-sized reading and yet another book I didn't want to end.
Janet Frame's first novel, feels semi-autobiographical and to read her really is like luxuriating in a bathful of glorious words and I really didn't want to get out.
The ethereal sense of the world of the child mediated through the child's stream of consciousness is remarkable in so many ways, but mostly because I effectively moved into this childhood world and lived alongside Francie, Daphne, Toby and Chicks and saw through their eyes all those childlike things that an adult misses but Janet doesn't.
Fears, hopes, dreams and that interpretation of the world all piercingly accurate.
This is a book of two halves, childhood and adult life, and woven in amongst it all I spotted the lightly disguised events of Janet's life, and whilst she may have been beset by that ever-present sense of doubt in her own personal worth and the attendant inadequacy and low self-esteem, there is no question that on the page Janet Frame shapes up as one of the most superlatively adequate and exceptional writers that I have come across.
It would seem that Janet never looked on Owls Do Cry as a novel, more a fictional exploration drawing on both personal experience and imagination whilst making no distinction between the two, a writer who in her own typically self-effacing words,

'chose rags from an old bundle, stitched them together, waved a wand, and found herself with a completely new dress...I do collect bundles of rags and I like to sew them together. I suppose I must accept the fact that I have no wand.'

At the same time I'm dipping in and out of An Angel at My Table, Janet's autobiography and Wrestling With the Angel, Michael King's biography and if that wasn't all enough I spent an evening watching the film version of An Angel at My Table directed by Jane Campion (and at £5.98, a cheap-as-chips bargain on Amazon right now)
 

I've been completely and willingly Framed.
It's all left me feeling I have a wealth of differing perspectives from which to read more of her writing.
The film is astonishingly good and worthy of the accolades it has won. Perfectly cast young, teenage and adult Janets and a beautiful voice-over who all convey just the right sense of Janet, painfully shy and nervous in company, completely self-conscious about her appearance and the mass of bright red and uncontrollably frizzy hair.
Add in a family living on the brink of poverty and the associated stigma, family illness, tragic sudden deaths and the mental illness that dogged Janet for years until finally the mis-diagnosis was exposed, and expect to be moved to tears.
Jane Campion beautifully spotlights the vitally important guardian angels who appeared at certain times in Janet's life. The inspiring teacher, the psychiatrist who finally gets it right and gives Janet permission to write, Frank Sargeson the fellow writer who offers her a writing refuge from life at Willowglen and all its attendant miseries and memories when she is discharged from hospital, and we have them all to thank for the existence of Owls Do Cry and all that followed.
I will own up that there were certain moments during the film when I just had to keep my hands busy frantically frogging and skeining the half-knitted Colinette jumper, because some of the scenes in the mental hospital were harrowing even though often just a glimpse. Janet was kept there for eight interminable years and endured over 200 sessions of ECT (the fear of which she likened to facing execution every single time) but all part of her story and therefore essential to the whole.
Much worse for me would be to have never discovered Janet Frame's life and writing at all.

Towards Another Summer by Janet Frame

'I like reading. Once the words are on the page they never change; when you open a book the print never falls out.'

It's official, Janet Frame and I are now friends and it's been a friendship waiting a very long time to be forged.

The Janet Frame Reader has been sitting unread on my shelves for years, patiently trying to catch my eye and I'll own up, it was the cover of that 1995 Women's Press edition that unnerved me slightly. Janet peers at me through half-closed eyes, almost as if she is squinting into the sun, as if looking at another person wide-eyed is almost too dazzling and disconcerting for her to manage, but at the same time it's challenging, direct, almost uncomfortably so, demanding something from me and I was never quite sure what. Corkscrew curly grey hair frames a face that always seemed to me to be etched with past pain and life-experience, it's an uncompromising photograph but one that I'm now beginning to understand.

What little I knew of Janet Frame... from New Zealand, that her autobiography An Angel at My Table was a very rewarding read, a history of mental illness, years in a mental hospital and depression treated with insulin and over two hundred sessions of electro-convulsive therapy, much-loved and respected writer, unbridled elation from Stella Duffy at the Du Maurier festival in Fowey when it was announced, during  the Virago 30th anniversary event that Virago are bringing Janet Frame's books back into print and I made a note to myself, it was time to make her acquaintance.
Well, it's none of these books that have set me on the trail but a novel, recently published by Virago and considered by Janet Frame to be too personal to publish in her own lifetime. Two copies of the typescript of Towards Another Summer were nevertheless left bound and preserved in seperate locations in what has now been deemed an assumption of post-humous publication, and after careful consideration the board of the Janet Frame Literary Trust agreed. I for one am most grateful they did.

Writer Grace Cleave is thirty, unmarried, a native New Zealander, exiled and homesick, living in a cold wintery London and sees herself as a migratory bird 'it is time for me to fly towards another summer',

'How had she ever become used to living in Great Britain, she wondered. How had she ever been able to exchange the sun, the beach, the shimmering tent of light, the dramatic landscape, mountains, rivers, gullies, glaciers, for the brick bleeding wound that seemed so much part of this country.'

Not a difficult sentiment to identify with when you realize this book was written in 1963, the year of Sylvia Plath's death; London hasn't been as cold and wintery since and surely the presence of a Sylvia in the book no coincidence? A bout of writer's block prompts Grace unusually to accept an invitation to stay with friends for the weekend,

'She... was a writer, self-styled, and it was in between the second and third parts of her novel 'in progress' that the weekend intruded itself; it stuck in the gullet of her novel; nothing could move out or in, her book was in danger of becoming a 'foster-child of silence'.

It is the writing of the account of the weekend that Grace feels might 'free her characters for their impelled dance or flight' and what follows is an intricate, part stream-of-consciousness insight into the workings of a mind that is struggling to fit into a world where it feels it just doesn't belong.The perceived awkardness of her every move at Philip and Anne's home honed to a sharpness and vividness of detail by that heightened awareness of the acutely introspective mind.The mind that analyses ever last interaction, every word, every glance, every single moment and considers itself in judgement both wanting and lacking, all so finely pinned down on the page that here is a book that offers real understanding of the tortures and insecurities that can actually stalk anyone who finds themselves in that position of low self-esteem for whatever reason.

The succession of everyday events, so often taken for granted, that ambush unexpectedly and become the stuff of nightmares

'Now journeys were not simple matters for Grace; nothing is simple if your mind is a fetch-and-carry wanderer from sliced perilous outer world to secret safe inner world.'

'It was taking so long to get used to the ways of the world;Grace did not think she would ever learn.'

'Do they mean me to say Yes or No, Grace wondered. I have no social intuition.'

It is too easy to leap to the assumption that this is a purely autobiographical novel, and reading up briefly on Janet Frame's life and her mis-diagnosis of schizophrenia, it's almost inevitable that readers might. Janet Frame avoided a lobotomy only after winning a prestigious literary prize and then spent many years resisting that labelled portrayal of herself as "crazy". She lived the life she chose as a writer not the teacher her family had wanted her to be.

I've gleaned just a fraction of a potted resume which I think only hints at the trauma and I now want to read much more by and about this astonishing writer, but it served me well to remember that Grace Cleave was a fictional character despite the background and even the significance of the name. The multiple interpretations of 'cleave' as both to split asunder and to adhere and attach suggest the dilemmas that beset Grace's mind as she strives both to be herself, an individual with an identity yet to feel she belongs. Very clever, this book is pure poetry and offers rich reading rewards, I have savoured every line, just about every word.

It's interesting to note, there is little as I recall about physical appearance yet Grace's mind and personality are so intricately and carefully fleshed out on the page that Towards Another Summer has survived the first half being read pre-Dartington in July and pre-Booker longlist and the second half afterwards, I don't think many books would have managed that.

Now I discover that Pamela Gordon, Janet's niece and literary executor writes a blog, Slightly Framous and there is a great deal more fascinating primary source information there as well as wonderful photographs.

Thank heavens Janet and I are now friends, I like her a lot.

Virago is 30...again.

I'm not sure why I think a picture of the medieval jousting yard should be appropriate but if it's Friday it's Virago at Ways With Words.
This is the second Virago 30th anniversary event for me this year, same chair, current commisioning editor Donna Coonan, different guests, this time founding editor Carmen Callil and author Michele Roberts.
Good crowd in the Great Hall and Carmen Callil apologised for having 'bored for England' on the subject of the Virago anniversary already this year but we were very happy for her to carry on and 'bore' us some more.
The first Virago writers, Antonia White, Rosamund Lehman,Margaret Atwood, Stevie Smith, Henry Handel Richardson, Christina Stead and many more were the subject of discussion between the members of the panel as we learnt about the early days of Virago and the delight all round at bringing these books back into print. This was an era fed by feminism but as Carmen elaborated, also driven mad by it and Michelle gave a good account of the provocative time that was the late 1960s and early 1970s. This was about not about nostalgia it was about changing the face of literary history.
Talk turned to favourite Virago books and authors so imagine my delight when Carmen Callil then lauded Enid Bagnold's The Squire as one of the best books written on the early days of motherhood.
Michelle Roberts cited her love of the good convent read, and went on to mention the wonderful Sylvia Townsend Warner's The Corner That Held Them, and The Land of Spices by Kate O'Brien as perfect books for accessing her 'inner nun'.
Virago author Elizabeth Taylor gained magnificent plaudits from all three panellists described by Michelle Roberts as the spy in the home where the most dangerous things happen.'The thinking woman's dangerous housewife' in the words of Valerie Martin apparently and I was sitting pondering those chintz-bedecked battlefields so perfectly defined by Paul Bailey in his introductions to some of Elizabeth Taylor's novels.
Yes indeed you could feel the lurve for Elizabeth.
There were good questions, one about chicklit, and Michelle Roberts gave an excellent defence of a genre that enables young women to ask and answer the questions about life and love, the answers are there beneath the froth and then suggested we look at the difference between chicklit and Jane Austen, in fact ask was there a difference?
Why not share your apoplexy or agreement in comments where smelling salts and lavender compresses await those overcome and feeling discomposed with a fit of the vapours, but I'm of the mind that there's a good debate to be had there.
The Orange Prize came up in discussion and Carmen Callil reiterated her refusal to attend the ceremony because of the Taittinger champagne connection and you'll have to read her book Bad Faith to discover exactly why. Michelle Roberts now wants to see men and women competing on the same level literary playing field whilst Carmen would like to see a return of the French Revolutionary spirit, she'd liked writers to object far more, to tackle injustices near to home.
It was all good stirring Virago stuff, vive la Virago.

The Behaviour of Moths by Poppy Adams

Poppy Adams is on the bill to speak about The Behaviour of Moths alongside Rebecca Abrams speaking on Touching Distance at Ways With Words on Monday July 14th at 5pm. Having now read both books I'm intrigued because the common denominator is not there on the surface, but dig a bit deeper and there you find it, the place science and research play in both these excellent novels.
It all leads me to ponder what makes a good novel for me and to be honest I'd probably give a different answer depending on my mood, the day of the week, whether there's an 'r' in the month or whether it's raining or sunny.
It's all quite the moveable definition but both these books did the trick, drew me in and kept me there, plenty of interesting strands to hold my attention and whereas Touching Distance was to a certain extent known territory for me, The Behaviour of Moths was not.
I know as much as would cover about a quarter of a wing of a Feathered Footman but will admit this book made me get The Observer's book down off the shelf and look something up. Mulleins grow in our garden and I know we checked it out years ago when we found huge caterpillers on them, but I couldn't remember the moth. Innovatively they attract Mullein moths and now I'm waiting and watching.
It must be getting increasingly difficult to find unexplored fictional territory these days, I remember Ways With Words a few years ago and by chance two authors had written novels with the central theme of seahorses. Obscure indeed so how galling to find that someone else has done the same as you? They gamely shared the platform and we all emerged completely in the know about the genus hippocampus and all associated metaphors.
Moths feels like a new and original theme, bees and butterflies seem to have been done to death but not moths in my albeit limited knowledge. The literary metaphors and allegory abound now I consider them , pupae and chrysalis, moths to a flame.
Now I expect you all to give me a list of hordes of moth-fiction.

A slowly unravelling thread of mystery is played out throughout the book as a past emerges predominantly through the eyes of a narrator who feels far from reliable. But there is little else to fall back on as the aged Ginny awaits the arrival of her sister Vivien to the crumbling but expansive family mansion. The two sisters haven't seen each other for forty-seven years and you immediately ask yourself why and I carried on asking myself that question right to the end of the novel.
Ginny, obessessive, compulsive, a seemingly poor judge of character, detached from reality and lacking in social skills after living the life of a remote recluse as her father's apprentice in his moth research. It's tempting to place her somewhere on the autistic spectrum but where?

'I'm a scientist and I'm afraid I don't work with intuition...I'm a scientist. I need hard evidence'

says Ginny about herself with her frequently remarkable insight about faculties she doesn't seem to possess.
Vivien the vivacious sociable sister who escaped and has now returned but why?
The book is full of uncertainites and perhaps that's one aspect to pin down about a good novel. I was constantly questioning situations and assumptions because I'd only viewed them through Ginny's eyes and I wasn't altogether sure about Ginny. Ginny's eyes had seen things in Ginny's way, Vivienne would have been wearing a completely different set of spectacles and it is only very latterly that we are allowed to see through them, this gives a book double value as you write the other story yourself.
Ginny by the way is the first to admit her shortcomings.

'I know memory shouldn't be trusted, that two people's recall of the same event can be unbelievably different, that even their perceptions at the time can be paradoxical, so I accept that my own recollection may be heavily distorted.'

Reader sympathies waver all over the place, one minute poor Ginny, the next flashes of sadism in the name of scientific research as moths are trapped and pulled apart at the seams. Is she mad, bad and extremely dangerous? Is she deluded and psychotic or completely in possession of her faculties?
The ending reveals all and it's good. Very good.
Another reason not to miss The Behaviour of Moths is to find how best to capture twenty-five thousand virgin Brimstones, because you never know when you might need them, and the recipe is a tricky treacle mix of wine, fermented banana and rum that will take some practice to get right.

Selective Memory by Katharine Whitehorn

I'm not a huge fan of autobiography given that you know as you read that the content is exactly as Katharine Whitehorn's title suggests, Selective Memory, and the source for her quote from Jim Fiebig is the epigram for the book.

'If you can look back on your life with contentment, you have one of man's most precious gifts - a selective memory.,

It clearly becomes the privilege of the author to tell us as much or as little as they want as honestly or otherwise as they see it and Katharine Whitehorn has done exactly that and in the process has actually told us a great deal.
I think I was part of the post-Whitehorn era or again was so busy trying to sleep after a long shift back in the 1970's or coping with the three-babies-in-four-years in the 1980's that I sort of missed her. I'm beginning to feel a bit of a dullard about the 1970's feminist revolution or was it all being played out on centre court whilst I was involved in a minor match on the outside ?  (Wimbers coming up, time to get tennis-y)
The book is a laugh aloud read as well as offering some serious commentary on the titanic battle being fought on Centre Court and Katharine Whitehorn was most certainly volleying up at the net and sending down those blistering forehand drives as she took on all-comers in Fleet Street, but also embraced a much wider sphere in her quest to get a woman's voice heard and more importantly listened to.
The battle undoubtedly had its casualties and it seems remarkable that through it all Katharine and her husband, the thriller writer Gavin Lyall, sustained a marriage of forty-two years before his death at the age of seventy. This must have been a marriage forged in the maelstrom of change and to their credit they negotiated a path and raised a family which Katharine recounts unflinchingly. Despite a successful writing career, alcohol and the ever-present spectre of failure were Gavin's demons, but Katharine paints layer upon layer, building up a picture of him as a lovely man, not without his faults, but with a wickedly quickfire sense of humour and well able to manage her fiery outbursts. Katharine is no slouch in citing her own faults either and you sense a couple who accepted each other for better for worse and everything else inbetween and honoured it. The book is a tribute to their tenacity and sheer bloody-mindedness and rings true as a consequence because it was most certainly not all a bed of the proverbial roses; on one occasion it was in fact a bed concealing a melon so make of that what you will.
Katharine and I agree about a great deal it would seem. I am of the firm belief, as you know, that canvas is for painting on not sleeping under, Katharine goes a step further pointing out that

'the main point of camping is to remind one why they invented the house.

It could also hardly be imagined that Katharine and I might even vaguely know the same people but a name cropped up in her book, a journalist and editor (and previous girlfriend of Gavin Lyall's) by the name of Suzanne Puddefoot.
Talk about selective memory, I knew this name, it's memorable as were the circumstances.
There followed a fair old rummage around the archives and finally I found it. A very yellowed copy of the Tavistock Times dated February 15th 1980 (told you I never throw anything away) and there it was, me starring in a centre page spread on a day in the life of a health visitor for the local newspaper, and the reporter I took out for the day?
Sue Puddefoot.
Could it be the same one?

More to the point what about that terrible picture of me, twenty six and kneeling by a buggy chooking a baby's chin while a proud mother looks on (I can even remember the baby's name!), I'm looking slightly worrying and even worse I'm wearing, oh good grief, the embarrassment, a tartan-lined duffle coat.
I'm sure there's no way you want to see that picture, but you absolutely do want to read Katharine Whitehorn's book which has much nicer pictures and shares many moments that add up to this poignant one in the final pages,

'What does happen is that the good memories become a source of pleasure and comfort tinged with the same autumnal ache, the same regret one feels about having once been young, of the unreturning years.'

The Loving Spirit by Daphne du Maurier

Confronted with accent and dialect when I open a novel may well be the quickest way to make me put it back on the shelf. I did this with Adam Bede countless times before I got a grip and within a matter of pages I was immersed and helplessly hooked into George Eliot's rural world. Likewise I struggle slightly with Wuthering Heights because of it.
The Colour Purple comes to mind as a modern-day equivalent, where would that book be without it? Then perhaps a lesser known book , Marriage by Susan Ferrier. It's possible to emerge the other end of that as a passable Scot,  and read aloud you will convince all around you of your acquired ancestry. I have a delectable old edition of Susan Ferrier's book along with a matching volume of her letters picked up as cheap as chips in a second hand bookshop but both inscribed by Humbert Wolfe, October 27th 1929
Having tried my hand with a mere morsel of Brin Swll speak a while ago, it's actually very difficult to do but, when written with an unforced ease and proficiency, accent and dialect the very things that pitch a narrative into  the precise territory an author wants it to go; to my mind 50% of the time and place location dilemma is sorted if this all sits comfortably as I read.
If dialect well-done is half the work completed then descriptive sense of place must fulfill the rest, so how does Daphne fare on both counts?
Daphne was legendary for her mastery of the opening and closing lines of her books and when you consider that The Loving Spirit was her first published attempt at fiction in 1931 this all surely bodes well for the future.

'Janet Coombe stood on the hill above Plyn, looking down upon the harbour. Although the sun was already high in the heavens, the little town was still wrapped in an early morning mist. It clung to Plyn like a thin pale blanket, lending to the place a faint whisper of unreality as if the whole had been blessed by ghostly fingers. The tide was ebbing, the quiet waters escaped silently from the harbour and became one with the sea, unruffled and undisturbed.No straggling cloud, no hollow wind broke the calm beauty of the still white sky.'

That feels like a perfect Cornish morning to me and the conversation which follows as Thomas proposes to Janet sets the scene firmly. Daphne had clearly listened carefully because it's littered with West Country-isms
"Where you'm been"..."Where are you to?" the latter an expression used to ask where someone is and heard daily around here. The vernacular sits comfortably within the whole and I was completely at ease and convinced as I read.
Nothing jarred and slowly I also sensed something else, perhaps Daphne's search was on for a style of her own and she explores a great many in this book. In many ways it reads like a potted legacy of all that's gone before, not only George Eliot's Adam Bede and all things Bronte-esque for the dialect and there are definite nods towards Wuthering Heights in the plot. As Michele Roberts elaborates in yet another excellent Virago introduction, Daphne takes up the permission of the gothic to go where angels fear to tread as she endeavours to

'reveal some of the bad things that go on in seemingly respectable houses.'

When the action moves to London there are clear elements of Dickens and then the most Flaubertian - Madame Bovary hansom cab drive around Regent's Park, it's all a wonderful literary rattle bag to tempt in a  Daphne devotee like me.
The book itself is based on the real life of Jane Slade of the Slade ship-building family of Polruan which all adds grist to the narrative mill and I have been reading Jane Doe's book on her family alongside The Loving Spirit and to great atmospheric effect. The carved figurehead of Jane Slade which guided the ship bearing her name across the oceans of the world, and features so strongly in Daphne's book as Janet Coombe, now resides proudly on the wall of Ferryside at Bodinnick, where Daphne wrote the book between October 1929 and January 1930, and is clearly visible to all who use the little ferry across the River Fowey there.
The Loving Spirit has most certainly continued to cast the Daphne spell on me, every one I read becoming a favourite until the next one that is.

The Parasites

All my life I've seen myself as a fan of Daphne du Maurier, based on that seemingly firm foundation of teenage reading, but then I look closely; a read forty years ago of her best known novels and a disgraceful neglect of all the others since.
Things need to sharpen up around here.
The admiration now in need of some substance, reading the whole lot is the only solution and it's proving to be a magnificent endeavour. All helped by the fact that Virago have bought them all back into print of course and ably assisted by that special offer from The Book People which for £9.99 kick-starts any ailing Daphne shelf back into life. Even I couldn't bring myself to write in some of those early and first editions (squashed flies and all) gracing my shelves.
The Parasites written in 1949 comes with an intriguing epigram, 'For Whom the Caps fit' and not difficult to join up the writing and see that the family of children portrayed closely mirror Daphne's own experience of life in a theatrical family.
In particular perhaps Papa.
Delaney, the needy and ego-centric singer and matinee idol with a keen sense of his own requirements to the detriment of all those around him. There's a dancing mother who bears more than a passing resemblance in both life and the loss of same, to Isadora Duncan which deviates from the reality of Daphne's life but it's Julie Myerson in her introduction who confirmed what I thought I was also detecting.
These introductions are best read after the event I find, and it was Julie who identified a central and very Bronte-esque element to The Parasites, specifically a Wuthering Heights element. It was itching away invisibly as I read and suddenly there it was on the surface and ready to be scratched and suddenly a book you've read is exposed in a new light and with whole new layers of meaning.

'...a prime strength of both Bronte and du Maurier is their ability and willingness to imagine and mine the darkest reaches of the human mind, of passion and sexuality (the male and the female side) and of life and death. These are brave writers unafraid to look over the edge into the abyss.'

The big difference also flagged up by Julie is that Wuthering Heights doesn't actually make you laugh out loud, The Parasites most certainly might, not least the scene where Maria Delaney is left alone with her baby for the first time. Nanny has an afternoon off, baby Caroline has not responded to her Gina Ford routine and  wakes screaming hours before she should. The ensuing mayhem, if it wasn't quite so awful, would have you in hysterics and thank goodness good old Woolworths had the answer with a dummy.
A book about the exclusivity of the family, the shared history and, in the case of the Delaneys, rather a patchwork of mixed heritage and pedigree all contributing to a secret world impenetrable to outsiders. Everyone takes a hand in the narrative often individually then merging collectively so the blurring of the family from individuals into one entity is seamless and significant.
If separation is to happen then so be it, but drastic measures will be called for and given the scope of Family Delaney you know that just about anything could happen...and it does.
Such a good read, but another lesser known Daphne perhaps? Thankfully yet another of those brought out of mothballs by Virago and it comes highly recommended here.

A Virago 30th Anniversary Celebration at Fowey

The Celebration of the 30th anniversary of Virago Modern Classics event at the du Maurier Festival brought together Virago editor Donna Coonan, Stella Duffy (left) and Linda Grant (right) staged in a very intimate little offshoot tent so we were all close up and friendly.

The space filled with Stella's fabulous laugh constantly, the best when Linda cited her university lecturer in the early 1970's who had flagged up D.H.Lawrence as the only writer who understood women.
Stella was hard pushed not to fall off her chair laughing as were the rest of us.
There was a general offering of 'what Virago meant to me' and the consensus that Virago had appeared as a life-saving defib to the barely pulsating heart of literature written by women available in print back in the 1970's. Now we're tripping over it every way we turn (though still not enough thinks Stella) but 'twas not ever thus. The significance of the timing and context within which Virago launched with Frost in May by Antonia White (interestingly recommended to Carmen Callil by Michael Holroyd) vitally important as the texts became available to support the arguments of the burgeoning feminist cause.
It seems a lot of reading ago now and I'll be honest I was so busy flogging myself to death and up to my neck in starched uniform, sick babies and towelling nappies on the wards in the 1970's, that the early days of Virago slightly passed me by, so thank goodness there were others out there fighting the cause. There was much nostalgic reminiscing of early meaningful Viragos, Good Behaviour by Molly Keane for Linda reminded me that I have been meaning to read that one for ages.
Then readings from favourites.
Despite a residual native New Zealand (since the age of five) twang Stella does a mean Southern lady and read from Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady by Florence King with much hilarious conviction. I've read bits of this and will now read the rest because it's very funny and Stella did it great justice.
Linda gave possibly the funniest reading I will ever hear of Diary of a Provincial Lady by E.M.Delafield, the March 18th Trip to London and subsequent make-over in preference to visiting an art exhibition. I never stop reading this book, it's perfect for every occasion and this one was no exception.
Donna shared an extract from A Far Cry From Kensington by Muriel Spark and now I most certainly want to read that one again.
Stella did a great promotional job on me to seek out some of Janet Frame's writing. Mea culpa and there is more coming into print from Virago, she didn't just write biography, her novels are fantastic apparently and I want to read them yesterday.
Helen Taylor popped up again, in the audience this time and paid tribute both to Virago but also to the work of Elaine Showalter and her ground-breaking book A Literature of Their Own. Resounding here heres as we all remembered reading that and emerging with great long lists of women writers we'd never heard of.
Some great books in the pipeline too, Daphne du Maurier's short story collection Breaking Point (considered by many to be her strongest) and Nightingale Wood by Stella Gibbon coming soon. Mention also of a book that hasn't done well and Virago can't understand why, Cassandra at the Wedding by Dorothy Baker.
I wonder how many of you know of this book?
I actually hadn't heard of it but no matter I thought, can't know everything as I dashed to Amazon to find it and...well, it's the cover. I know we've all had interesting discussions here and elsewhere about the changing image of Virago covers, the demise of the bottle-green to market them successfully and competitively alongside popular contemporary fiction and I'm trying hard to overcome all my nostalgic prejudices about that now, but if I'd seen this I honestly don't think I would have bought it. A quick glance and it has pastel chick-lit writ large and I feel oddly excluded from the content before I even pick the book up. Or is that just me?
However I think I can forgive in the very big scheme of things. We owe a huge debt to Virago and the vision of that ground-breaking editorial team who have bequeathed us this lasting legacy.
All in all a great session and look out for that fabulous and free little Virago 30th anniversary booklet in a bookshop near you.

The Brontes Went to Woolworths

In amongst last week's Knit-Fest I downed needles occasionally and cast my eyes over The Brontes Went To Woolworths by Rachel Ferguson, published in 1931, another of those books I'd meant to read for years and then a buzz around the blogs drives me to pick it up.

I'm being really restrained because I don't want to overdose on the genre and you know how susceptible I am to gorging, but having read Violet Powell's excellent biography, The Life of a Provincial Lady, A Study of  E.M.Delafield and Her Works and felt none the worse for the experience I decided I could risk another foray.
The Carne family, (digging deep I discover this is a name from the Penzance side of the Brontes, Maria Branwell's mother was a Carne) seemingly eccentric and bohemian have fallen on hard times with the death of Mr Carne and with it comes a freedom of expression that indeed seems quite batty but within the family circle completely normal. Having invented a coterie of imaginary friends and acquaintances based on real-life people, they must then invent everyday lives and personalities for them and it is indeed quite confusing as you read to figure out who exists and who doesn't.
Daphne du Maurier's family would have called this Pegging (investing someone with a romantic glamour) and Gondaling (to make-believe or pretend, after the Brontes invented world of Gondal ) and did it all the time and Daphne used it frequently to help develop her fictional characters.More about Daphne and the Brontes to come, it's all fascinating.
When one notable participant a High-Court judge and his wife do take human form for the Carne family, and play along with their foibles, things become even stranger.
Nicola Humble makes much reference to The Brontes Went to Woolworths in her excellent book The Feminine Middlebrow Novel 1920s to 1950s, Class, Domesticity and Bohemianism and published by Oxford University Press. If you feel the least whim of an addiction to this genre and want to know more, this book alongside Nicola Beauman's A Very Great Profession are probably the books to have on hand.
Nicola Humble elaborates on the overt treatment of class in Rachel Ferguson's book and now I'm thinking it would be interesting to read it again with that in mind, alongside her observations about Woolworths.
Here's the Wallington High Street branch I worked in as a Saturday girl twenty-eight shillings for the day, wooden floors, green overalls and each light bulb tested before it was sold, imagine doing that now?  Woolworths apparently

'captures a key moment of transition in middle-class life and behaviour'

as economic privation hit home. Rachel Ferguson using it in her title as a contrast between the practical and the imaginary as well as a demonstration of the

'dour limitations of the Brontes' nineteenth-century middle-class poverty and the plucky adventuring of contemporary middle-class forays into Woolworths.'

Of course perfectly possible to read the book without any of this background reading and enjoy a window on the quirky and unusual world that was then, but you might not want to miss Nicola Humble's fascinating chapter entitled The Eccentric Family.
The discussion ranges far and wide across Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons, I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith, Guard Your Daughters by Diana Tutton and countless other 'sprawling, dysfunctional middlebrow families' with their 'dramatic unlikeness to the conventional nuclear family' of post-war Britain. The family as both haven and cage, a source of creative energies and destructive neuroses with an identity largely established through private games and invented language.
Then I'm all agog as Nicola Humble starts to analyse the middlebrow use of the Brontes as the perfect example of such a family and the frequent references to them in many of the books and the inferences that can be taken from that.
Books as diverse as E.M. Delafield's Diary of a Provincial Lady, At Mrs Lippincote's by Elizabeth Taylor, I Capture the Castle and Cold Comfort Farm all have their Bronte moments.
Suddenly, as Nicola Humble lists books about large families who thwart the trend, Surfeit of Lampreys by Ngaio Marsh,(six children) The Pursuit of Love by Nancy Mitford (seven children) Antonia Forest's Marlow family series (eight children) my interest is awakened and I see a whole new reading list blossoming before my eyes.
Must pace myself, the food for the feast is far too readily available.