dovegreyreader scribbles

Thanksgiving

I had planned to write a post about Thanksgiving today and the search for pictures revealed an oddly similar theme to this one, people looking fondly and adoringly at turkeys. So I hope all U.S. visitors have got the feathers off them and have them roasting nicely in the oven this minute and a Happy and Peaceful Thanksgiving to you all, have a wonderful day.
Then I'm sorry but I'm going to be shallow and give thanks for a book which has arrived this week.
That might be against the rules. However it's such a covetously wonderful book, one that I have been yearning for so I'm hoping you can see it in your hearts to forgive my fickle nature. I doubt this day is about giving thanks for material possessions but a book like this is hardly so easily categorized.
The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield  Volume 5 1922-1923 edited by Vincent O'Sullivan and Margaret Scott and published by Oxford University Press.
I go a bit woozy round the edges just looking at them.
I bought Volumes I & 2 in this series at a book sale several years ago, 3 & 4 are on their way to me but meanwhile 5 has arrived.
There is of course a Janet Frame connection to Katherine Mansfield too, apart from the obvious New Zealander one. Janet's mother Lottie worked as a maid servant for Mrs Mary Beauchamp, Katherine's grandmother in New Zealand and Janet also benefited from a year-long bursary from the Katherine Mansfield Memorial Fellowship which enabled her to travel abroad for the first time.
Then there's the Elizabeth von Arnim connection to Katherine as cousins, and so there are some obvious watering holes ahead for this particular reading journey.
I've been dipping into Katherine Mansfield's short stories again with a certain amount of awe and wonder, and reading the volumes of letters is a perfect route into reading the stories almost contemporaneously as she mentions their progress in letters to friends,

' Im deadly tired tonight. I wrote & finished a story for The Sketch. The day after that happens is always a day when one feels like a leaf on the ground - one can't even flutter. At the same time there is a feeling of joy that another story is finished. I put it in such a lovely place, too, the grounds of a Convent in spring with pigeons flying up in the blue and big bees climbing in and out of the freezias below.'

The story was Taking the Veil.

'A big bee, a golden furry fellow, crept into a freesia, and the delicate flower leaned over, swung, shook; and when the bee flew away it fluttered still as though it were laughing. Happy, careless flower! '

Unsurprisingly, being terminally ill with pulmonary tuberculosis seems to have offered an extraordinary focus to Katherine Mansfield's writing. This letter to Elizabeth von Arnim, written in January 1922, in what would prove to be the final year of her life, reveals the depths of her incapacity,

' And the idea of being well - haunts me. Ever since I have realised this possibility I dream of it at night - dream I am alone - crossing streams or climbing hills or just walking. To be alone again. That is what health means to me; that is freedom. To be invisible, not to be offered chairs or given arms! '

In her quest for health Katherine Mansfield is about to embark on what will prove to be a futile and expensive year of dubious and very uncomfortable treatments. First stop from Chalet des Sapins at Montana Crans in Switzerland to Paris, where Katherine will live an invalid's life in a hotel whilst placing her faith in seances. It will all culminate in her tragic and horrific death a year later and much of it likely to be conveyed in this final volume of letters. I think I have a truly memorable reading experience ahead.
And finally, on reflection, I think there's a great deal of genuine Counting Blessings and Thanksgiving to extract from all that.

Letters from Menabilly : Portrait of a Friendship

My Daphne du Maurier readathon has been long overdue but felt essential before I take us all off to the du Maurier Literary Festival in Fowey next weekend. It seemed like too good an opportunity to pass up,  the chance to reread some favourites and tuck in a few I've missed, but time has ticked on and not a lot to show for it.
The arrival of Letters From Menabilly, Portrait of a Friendship edited by Oriel Malet and published in 1993, added to my new window ledge conglomeration and kick-started the reading as I was quickly steeped in Daphne's life. I have temporarily suspended all other reading to focus my thoughts on Daphne and nought else this coming week.
These are the letters spanning a friendship of some forty years and I was advised by 'them as know' that this book would give me the truest overview of Daphne's later life.
Intriguingly I see that Margaret Forster's biography of Daphne du Maurier, also published in 1993, ( which means I read it fifteen years ago) makes scant reference to Oriel Malet and no reference to these letters.The collection presumably being simultaneously collated by Oriel Malet for this biography of her own and hardly surprising that she didn't want to share this treasure trove of delights with anyone else, because it is Oriel who has shone the light into the darkest recesses of Daphne's life most effectively for me. By using Daphne's own words and then adding her own perceptions, Oriel Malet has unwittingly revealed to me the Daphne du Maurier I felt sure I knew and have often defended from that very first day I read Rebecca and knew I was a grown-up.
Letters can justifiably be criticised on many counts.
Perhaps never written with publication in mind, or perhaps they were?
It could be argued that there may have been great swathes of her life which Daphne failed to reveal in these letters, but that is difficult to believe when you read the frequently unguarded and candid nature of the thoughts and events in her life which Daphne shares with this most trusted of friends. To keep up any pretence consistently for forty years surely nigh on impossible?
Could publication of letters in this way therefore be considered unseemly? The ultimate betrayal?
Somehow I sense not in this unique set of circumstances because this book offers checks and balances to the biographies out there. The Daphne portrayed here in her own words comes across as a caring and forthright correspondent, as human as you and I and acutely aware of her own frailties, beset by an inborn shyness which frequently resembled diffidence and often hid behind mockery, blessed with a gloriously vivid imagination yet a constant sense of inadequacy and low-self esteem prevailed, never very strong or robust but not a scrap of arrogance or self-importance to be found. Humility declares itself at every turn alongside the pressures of life lived with a depressive husband which involved much personal sacrifice. You sense that underneath it all Daphne was indeed a repressed fun-loving person who subjugated it all to continue writing often under the most trying of circumstances, not only because she loved to write but also to keep the home fires burning.

'That's the awful bitter thing, I have provided for all of them, and have no capital myself.'

As Oriel Malet elaborates,

'...Daphne was the chief breadwinner of a family with expensive tastes...her peaceful life at Mena was a necessity for her if she was to continue to lay the golden eggs with which to satisfy her family's demands, and with her generous nature she could deny them nothing.'

It's difficult to begin to imagine the impact on Daphne's writing heart when she chooses to live with husband Tommy for a while in London to support him through his depressive episodes, while her soul yearned for the peace and solitude of Cornwall (this picture is of the North coast) and Menabilly which so enabled and empowered her writing self. Thankfully we don't have to imagine because Daphne tells it like it was to Oriel but never descending into vitriol or nastiness.
Life is one long interruption, The Flat becomes The Rat Trap and the  'clash of mutual guilts' evident as Tommy when not depressed becomes prone to nursing his liver from the comfort of his bed. Daphne often portrayed as a recluse when in fact she guarded her privacy and needed solitude to write and found it hard to surrender this when mid-book, even to go by Royal invite to Balmoral, though she found the Queen Mother great company.
To Oriel Malet Daphne was not only a dear friend but also an encouraging mentor and helpfully constructive critic of Oriel's own writing and over forty years they developed a friendship which is remarkable both for its longevity, its depth and sincerity and the scope of its reach.
Daphne the first to admit she lacked an outward elegance and poise and liked her country clothes above all else, but what radiates from the pages of these letters is that she took on huge responsibility for her family whilst possessing a clear insight into her own failings and more,

'It's the things we don't know about ourselves that are the nuisance.'

Letters of Ted Hughes

I'm sure A.N.Wilson didn't lose any sleep over my failings with Winnie and Wolf, probably lost far more over being told in error by his publisher that he'd made the Booker short list when he hadn't, but anyway I'm delighted to find that he and I are completely in step over another recent publication so perhaps we can be friends after all.
Letters of Ted Hughes has arrived and the clocks must stop, the world must stand still, which here means the kitchen floor must go unwashed and the washing is many days in arrears.
A.N.Wilson was so engrossed he missed his bus stop.
It's a quiet and closely guarded secret no more that I adore anything remotely connected to the late and much lamented Poet Laureate Ted Hughes.It all started one very late night back in 2000 when I was sitting writing an OU assignment to this rubric

"Nostalgia for an imperial past may be mediated in a very oblique way in literature, oblique not only in subject matter but in the form and style that is its embodiment" Discuss this statement with reference to the work of any two writers.

Never let anyone suggest that six years of studying with the Open University is an easy route to a degree.
I'd flogged my way through a day of home visits and a never-ending baby clinic, come home to the family, done the usual evening things with them and they had all headed off to bed, leaving me sweating blood over my now seemingly unwise decision to try and use the poetry of Philip Larkin and Ted Hughes in response.
It was late and getting later and a vast and disparate amount of information was not flowing creatively and intelligently into an essay worthy of submission, in fact it was all a congealed heap.
In desperation I switched on a tape Ted Hughes Reading his poetry.
I'd never heard his voice before, but having got me into this mess perhaps the man himself could inspire 3000 words?
I jumped a mile because, completely unexpectedly, out poured this deeply resonant Yorkshire bass voice, wrapping itself immaculately around the words of The Thought Fox.

I imagine this midnight moment's forest:
Something else is alive
Beside the clock's loneliness
And this blank page where my fingers move.

Through the window I see no star:
Something more near
Though deeper within darkness
Is entering the loneliness:

It all echoed and disappeared into the dark silence of a Tamar Valley night, and I was done for.
Since then I have acquired, in that bibliomanic fashion I can be prone to, just about every book ever written, by or about Ted Hughes and so when Letters of Ted Hughes selected and edited by Christopher Reid and published by Faber arrived from Amazon this week I was beyond a little over-excited.
The book was already on its way when I read A.N.Wilson's review in the Daily Mail last week but I loved the man for admitting,

"he comes before us in his prose letters, stretching across his entire writing life and he emerges as an overpoweringly interesting and impressive person...I was transported instantaneously into a vision of life which was so much more interesting than my own."

There's the essence of this book, because you don't need to be an admirer of the poetry of Ted Hughes to discover the man beneath and it is all revealed in this utterly readable volume. Through his mountains of correspondence shines the figure so cruelly and unfairly vilified throughout his life and there are moments of huge emotion lurking therein.
Ted Hughes was an old-fashioned letter writer, perhaps one of the last of the breed, but he considered a hand-written letter as worthy of literary excellence as any poetry or prose for publication, making this volume one great big reading treat.Be prepared to weep early on over something as simple as his account of a hedgehog trapped indoors because in the words of Ted Hughes it becomes so much more, as does everything he turns his eye and then his pen to.
Unusually I started at page one and have carried on in this fashion because I can't bear to miss a word. Looking ahead for a sneak preview I've read one of the most moving letters a father could ever write to help a son whose mother has so famously commited suicide.The revelations around the cathartic publication of Birthday Letters make for very emotional reading indeed. I don't know if A.N.Wilson cried on the bus but I'd have been blubbing enough to close the Thames Barrier.
And what of that essay?
Well it seemed to write itself in the end thanks to that voice and this gift of a quote from Ted Hughes which I used for the final lines. It had cleverly pointed me in the right direction from the start and two poems, The Horses and Wodwo then served me well,

"Maybe all poetry...is revealing of something that the writer doesn't actually want to say, but desperately needs to communicate, to be delivered of. The writer daren't actually put it into words, so it leaks out obliquely, smuggled through analogies".

That and so much more is communicated and delivered in this volume of selected letters and in the end Ted and I earned a respectable 88%, but this book is worth far far more, in fact impossible to place a value on it and I will treasure my copy forever.