Lucienne Boyce's Blog

A Savage End

2012-01-14T12:22:00.000Z

I’ve just read two fascinating works by Cicely Hamilton, actress, writer and suffragette and one of my feminist heroes. Hamilton (1872–1952) wrote the words to the suffragette anthem, The March of the Women, as well as a number of sharp, funny suffragette plays. She also wrote Diana of Dobson’s, a play about a shop girl who comes into some money, and Marriage as a Trade which railed against the Edwardian women’s enforced inability to support themselves in any other way but marriage.

The books are Theodore Savage, a novel published in 1922, and a play, The Old Adam, which had its first performance (as The Human Factor) at Birmingham Repertory Theatre in 1924, and later played at Kingsway, London. Like her 1919 novel, William: an Englishman both are concerned with war and man’s destructive, violent nature. Both could also be described as science fiction for the prominent role of technology in them.

In The Old Adam, two neighbouring fictional states are on the brink of war. Desperate to avert a conflict for which it is ill-prepared, the government of Paphlagonia accepts the help of a scientist who has invented a ray which will paralyse the enemy Ruritania’s machines. “Its lights will go out and its trains will stop short. Its factories will be idle…its new pattern electric rifles won’t go off”, gloats General Cunliffe. Panic will set in and the enemy will capitulate.

Unfortunately, the Government has not taken into account people’s enthusiasm for war. Inventors, moral campaigners, and women surgeons are eager to volunteer their help. Young men are keen to enlist. Even pacifists will feel cheated if the war is won peaceably by men they vilify. As Barton-Phipps, the Minister for War, remarks: “What they want is not only victory – they want a good fight for it first”. And, when the ray is switched on, they discover that Ruritania has the same technology. Both sides are paralysed. Undeterred, they improvise. Communication and transport systems are established: seaside donkeys and circus elephants are requisitioned. Battles are fought hand to hand with whatever is to hand: bayonets, spanners...After all, says Cunliffe, “Hannibal managed without motor cars and Scipio had never heard of high explosives”. And so the war goes ahead.

In the dystopian Theodore Savage there are no miraculous rays to stop the war caused by one belligerent state that a league of nations is powerless to control. This is a total war, waged not on army fronts but against civilians. Cities are bombed mercilessly. Both sides wait for the other to collapse but as every infrastructure breaks down and government fails there is no one left to negotiate peace. The war grinds to a halt, leaving only a displaced, wandering populace dying of starvation and disease, or slaughtering one another in fierce fights over dwindling food supplies. Mankind becomes feral and Theodore Savage, “with a thoughtful taste in socks and ties”, a collector of Hepplewhite furniture, colour prints and English glass, who is engaged to a dainty “porcelain girl”, ends his days as “a coarse-fingered labourer” living in a cabin.

The problem is, explains Markham a scientist, that people in the mass are destructive. “Almost any man, taken by himself is reasonable…so long as he stands outside a crowd”. Then he “is the instrument of instinctive emotion…man, as a herd, does not think…the crowd-life is still at the elementary, the animal stage”. It is the “human constitution…the periodic need of the human herd for something to break and for something to break itself against,” for a “periodic blood-letting”.

A bleak vision of humanity indeed – and perhaps it is true. In her books Hamilton raises questions about the uses of science, the nature of man and woman (women are not necessarily peaceable creatures), the dehumanising effect of suffering and the fragility and value of civilisation. Remarkable themes for remarkable works, delivered with Hamilton’s usual wit and passion.

Prose and Propaganda

2011-11-12T16:47:00.003Z

Those marvellous chapettes at Persephone Books have done it again with the re-publication of Constance Maud’s 1911 suffragette novel No Surrender. It tells the story of a group of suffragettes, particularly Jenny Clegg, Lancashire mill girl, and aristocratic Mary O’Neill. It’s unashamedly a propaganda novel, but that’s not to say it isn’t a fascinating read. Maud has a wonderful ability to move between varied scenes: cotton mills, the gardens of a country house, a London dinner party, a prison cell. If you’re looking for an invaluable insight to what it was like to be a suffragette as well as an enjoyable read, this is it. Indeed, it is the book’s ability to tell it like it was that makes it so compelling. It is, as the blurb notes, “faithful to real events”.

But is it? Or should it, like any propaganda, be approached with caution? Are Maud’s “noble” and “unswerving” suffragettes as much products of the idealist’s imagination as is Mrs Humphrey Ward’s (president of the Anti-Suffrage League) rather unhinged militant, Gertrude Marvell, in Delia Blanchflower?

Take, for example, the events described in Chapter IX where Jenny, Hilda Smith and Nurse Dodds attempt to deliver a petition to three cabinet ministers during a service in a country church; the ministers are weekending at a nearby country house. It’s an amusing, farcical scene. The first minister to spy the women bolts out of the door. The next to spot them sneaks into the vestry and squeezes out through a tiny window: “Fear makes you grow thin,” comments Lady Thistlewaite wryly.

Only Mr Horace Boulder “remained courageously to face the music”. As he leaves at the end of the service, Jenny and Hilda take his arm and “walked beside him in friendly fashion”, with Nurse Dodds bringing up the rear. He blusters and tries to shake them off, and finally stuffs their petition in his pocket, escaping with nothing worse than embarrassment. However, the suffragettes have not done yet. When the house party wakes in the morning they discover the garden festooned with ribbons and banners bearing suffragette slogans.

There was a real incident when prime minister Asquith was accosted during a weekend, at Lympne Castle in Kent on 5 September 1909. The actual events were somewhat less benign than the fictional ones. Elsie Howey, Vera Wentworth and Jessie Kenney surrounded the prime minister as he left the church. According to a statement issued by the Home Office, Asquith was “struck repeatedly”. Later that day he was molested in the club house of a local golf club, and that evening while he was at dinner with his wife and other guests stones were thrown through the window.

It was, according to Batheaston supporter Mrs Blathwayt, “a regular raid on Mr Asquith, breaking a window and using personal violence”. She refers to a letter from Vera Howey in which Vera “hopes [Colonel Blathwayt] was not shocked at their punching Asquith’s head”. Vera later declared, however, that if Asquith continued to refuse deputations “they will pummel him again”. Indeed, so shocked was Mrs Blathwayt that she resigned from the WSPU, protesting at the use of personal violence and “an attack on one undefended man by three women”.

Now, I don’t know if Maud had this incident in mind when she wrote her novel. Perhaps there is another minister-accosting-at-church incident I don’t know about. (If anyone does, I’d love to hear about it.) The point is that what took place in reality at Lympne was much more violent than the gently amusing incident Maud presents in her story. Of course, she is writing fiction, and it is the role of fiction to express other and possibly deeper truths than mere “facts”. It does suggest, however, that whatever our sympathies we should always approach propaganda in art with caution, and we should always be wary of taking fiction as fact.

There’s a nice review of No Surrender at
http://desperatereader.blogspot.com/2011/10/no-surrender-constance-maud-persephone.html

For more information from Persephone Books about No Surrender - http://www.persephonebooks.co.uk/pages/titles/index.asp?id=149

Not Just William

2011-10-19T12:18:00.000+01:00

How peculiar to discover Richmal Crompton (1890-1969) included in The Independent Forgotten Author’s series in an article dated 23 May 2010. William Brown has hardly been forgotten if the over 8,000 results for books, CDs and DVDs that came up on Amazon today is anything to go by. Since their debut in 1919, the Just William stories have been translated into 28 languages and have spawned numerous radio and TV spin offs, the best of which to my mind are the BBC audiobooks read by the fabulous Martin Jarvis.

If anything has been forgotten about Richmal Crompton, it’s the fact that she actually wrote books for adults. Even Christopher Fowler, the author of Forgotten Authors No 54, only mentions this in passing: “Crompton wrote for adults too”. That’s all he has to say on the subject. But for Crompton it was a source of regret that her 41 novels and 9 short story collections were overshadowed by her children’s books. Yes, 41 novels. I had no idea either but now, thanks to Persephone Books, I have discovered and read a Richmal Crompton novel – and it was very good.

Family Roundabout (1948) is a family saga centring around the figures of two widowed matriarchs, Mrs Fowler and Mrs Willoughby, each with five children. Mrs Fowler is “down at heel gentry” and lives in a beautiful but shabby house; Mrs Willoughby is new, commercial money (the Willoughby wealth comes from a hideous paper mill which spoils the Fowlers’ view) and her house is expensive and ugly. Mrs Willoughby keeps a tight grip on her family, expecting and getting “implicit obedience”. Mrs Fowler is “the quiet, beneficent ruler of the household…tranquil and unchanging, in the background of [her children’s] lives”. While the patriarchs lived the families met at public functions but “did not visit each other”. Gradually, though, they have begun to mix: Judy Fowler and Cynthia Willoughby are school friends, Helen Fowler plays tennis with Max Willoughby at the Bellington Tennis Club. When Helen and Max marry the families are drawn closer together, and the novel follows the familys' mingled fortunes up to 1939.

It’s a wonderfully readable book, with a terrible sense of disappointment and disillusion running through it. “But then, have any of us got what we wanted from life?” muses Judy Fowler towards the end. For all that, there are flashes of humour and some witty social observation as the two families interact. In particular, writers come in for deliciously satirical treatment. Would-be author Oliver Willoughby characterising a wedding as a “senseless parade of fashion and snobbery to mark the mating of a couple of animals” congratulates himself on his “rather daring sentiment that he hoped to develop later into a piece of vers libre and send to one of the more advanced literary weeklies”. In the end he can’t cope with rejections and setbacks and gets stuck at the research stage of his historical novel. Successful novelist Arnold Palmer on the other hand is vain and self-obsessed, carelessly scattering favourable book reviews about the room before a party and formulaically writing the same book over and over again.

Crompton made enough money from the William stories to build herself a house in Bromley – there’s a blue plaque commemorating her on The Glebe, Oakley Road, Bromley Common. Really, though, according to Juliet Ackroyd in the preface to Family Roundabout, she regretted “that her ‘Frankenstein’s monster’ had ambushed recognition she would have welcomed for her serious fiction”. Having read the book, I couldn’t agree more and I’m on the lookout for more of her wonderful, witty novels. Thanks to Persephone for publishing Family Roundabout – who knows, perhaps there’ll be some more novels forthcoming soon?

Forgotten Authors No 54 – Richmal Crompton, The Independent, 23 May 2010 http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/forgotten-authors-no-54-richmal-crompton-1977358.html

Persephone Books - http://www.persephonebooks.co.uk/index.asp

The Doctor Dances

2011-08-24T12:52:00.000+01:00

When husband Gerard rang up for tickets on the day booking opened for Much Ado About Nothing at the Wyndham, they had all sold out! This was deeply disappointing – until the booking clerk said “hang on – as we were talking two returns came in; the stalls, seven rows from the front. Do you want them?” The stalls – seven rows from the front? Well, alright then.

So on Saturday (20 August) we took our seats in the stalls seven rows from the front for a fantastic production of a favourite play. I’d never been to this lovely theatre before. It was established in 1899 by actor manager and former surgeon in the Union Army (under his own name of Culverwell) during the American Civil War, Charles Wyndham. According to his Oxford DNB entry, he was regarded as the “ideal comedy actor” by Wilde and Shaw and “His stage persona was the model for John Worthing in Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest”.

Wyndham clearly had stage presence; the same must be said of David Tennant and Catherine Tate. But this production of Much Ado did not rely merely on the presence of its two stars. The production was witty, original, exuberant, and the entire cast was faultless. It was set in the aftermath of the Falklands conflict, complete with 80s costumes and music – and the setting really worked. This isn’t always the case: if I see one more Mussolini/Richard III for example I think I will scream. But it’s marvellous to see Shakespeare given a modern touch without robbing the language of its power and beauty, or the story of its impact, and that’s exactly what this production achieved.

One thing did puzzle me and that was the inclusion of Leonata’s wife Innogen and the omission of his brother Antonio. Perhaps the idea was to give a more authoritative female voice to a play in which men have a great deal to say about controlling female sexuality. In the 1600 edition of the play Innogen is listed as Leonata’s wife and enters on stage in Act 1 Scene 1 and Act II Scene 2, but she never speaks and her role is never developed; she is not even present at her daughter Hero’s wedding. Subsequent editors, the first being one Theobold in 1733, have regarded her inclusion as an error and deleted her from the text. It is possible, however, argues Michael D Friedman, to imagine that she was intended as a non-speaking part whose role was to embody the virtues of the ideal Elizabethan wife: “chastity, obedience and silence”.

Nevertheless it was, like so much in the production, an interesting innovation. The scenes where Benedick and Beatrice overhear their friends describing their love for one another are made for theatrical flights of fancy. But no spoilers: I will not reveal the setting and choreography in this version, only say that the stage business was hilarious, wild, sheer joy. Tennant and Tate as Benedick and Beatrice were perfect. Their awareness of the audience really drew you in; I shall carry with me for a long time the image of Tennant standing at the front of the stage holding us in the palm of his hand.

As we left the theatre, Gerard remarked that their performances were “real eye-openers.” “Well,” said I, “if they are good enough for Doctor Who they are good enough for Shakespeare. And David Tennant can really dance!”

For information about the play, which sadly is sold out, see the Wyndham Theatre Website - http://www.boxoffice.co.uk/Arts-and-Theatre-Tickets/Plays/Much-Ado-About-Nothing-Tickets.aspx

Michael D Friedman, “Hush’d on Purpose to Grace Harmony”: Wives and Silence in “Much Ado About Nothing”, Theatre Journal, Vol 42, No. 3, Women and/in Drama (Oct., 1990); pp. 350-363

Allison Gaw, Is Shakespeare’s Much Ado a Revised Earlier Play?, PMLA, Vol. 50, No.3 (Sep., 1935), pp. 715-738

Michael Read, ‘Wyndham, Sir Charles (1837–1919)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Jan 2011

Coleridge and the Female Muse

2011-07-06T10:58:00.000+01:00

I’ve recently finished reading Richard Holme’s splendid two volume biography of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and topped it off with Adam Sisman’s equally splendid Wordsworth and Coleridge: A Friendship.

Coleridge’s was not a happy life, what with the failure of his marriage and the opium addiction that caused him such terrible physical and mental suffering. Much as I admire what I know of his work, I’m left with a mix of sympathy and irritation for the man. There’s no doubt that the problems within his marriage caused him much suffering, but I can’t help thinking that this was in large part because his wife Sara did not nurture his creativity. She does not seem to have been his intellectual or creative equal – Dorothy Wordsworth (not an objective witness) called her “the lightest weakest silliest woman” who lacked “sensibility”. Clearly a most unsuitable wife for a poet. She was not his muse, and she was too busy looking after his children, cooking, cleaning, and washing to act as his amanuensis.

So it was that while her husband was swanning around London, the Lakes and Germany, swooning over Sara Hutchinson, and making unfavourable comparisons of her intellect with Dorothy Wordsworth's, she was left to cope on her own. She frequently had to borrow money when he was away, especially as he often delayed his return beyond the expected date. Nor were her troubles merely financial: while Coleridge was in Germany their son died and she was forced to get through the burden of her grief unsupported. And when he was at home he spent days in a stupor of opium and drink, lay in bed until noon, and threw the house into confusion with demands for meals at odd and inconvenient times. Meanwhile the debts piled up.

By contrast, Coleridge’s friend William Wordsworth had all the support an artist could need with his coterie of female admirers. In Dorothy his sister, Mary his wife, and Sara Hutchinson his sister-in-law he had a circle devoted to his care and comfort. Coleridge noted that he lived “wholly among Devotees – having every the minutest Thing, almost his very Eating & Drinking, done for him by his Sister, or Wife”. But what they offered went beyond mere domestic comfort: it was the continual affirmation of the greatness of his talent and the importance of his life’s work. That work may have been hard at times, but it would have been a great deal harder if there had been no one but himself to believe in it.

It’s not an appealing model of creativity, the male artist supported by female labour, both practical and emotional. The old trap of woman as muse, as artist’s model, as servant and secretary, promoter and defender of the male endeavour has blighted too much female creativity to win much sympathy from me. I’m sure that Coleridge would have been happier and more productive if his home had been run entirely to suit his own chaotic habits (wouldn’t we all?); if his wife hadn’t expected him to bring in some money; if she’d written furious letters to anyone who dared criticise his work, as Dorothy did for William. But it is also true that it is hard sometimes for artists to find the strength within themselves to carry on, and the saddest aspects of Coleridge’s situation are the sense of his isolation and the corresponding loss of creative confidence. He and his wife Sara were victims of the very same distorting gender expectations that were so beneficial to Wordsworth. I think some of the saddest lines ever written are these of Coleridge’s:

“I have altogether abandoned it [poetry] being convinced that I never had the essentials of poetic Genius, & that I mistook a strong desire for original power.”

Whatever brought him to such a pass, it was a tragic defeat.

The Buddha and Books Part 1

2011-05-16T15:11:00.002+01:00

I’ve just finished reading The Lacquer Lady by F Tennyson Jesse (first published in 1929). The novel is set in Mandalay in the 1880s and charts the fall of the Burmese royal dynasty and the annexation of Lower Burma by England. Jesse visited Burma in the 1920s, where she learned about the downfall of the kingdom and something of the people involved in those events. The book is beautifully written, and a profound study of passion and politics. There’s much in it that’s ripe for discussion, but one of the things that struck a particular chord with me was the way in which the Buddha and his followers are described.

In Jesse’s book the Burmese in general, and the Burmese royal family in particular, are characterized as children: “a nursery of vicious children…playing with toy soldiers, but with real lives, had become so vicious that the grown-ups had to step in and take charge”. The grown-ups are, of course, the British with their “bloodless conquest”. The Buddhists’ “religion of pessimism and humility” is juxtaposed with the “muscular” Christianity of the British missionaries. Buddhism is “a selfish creed. The good Samaritan might have passed on with a reflection on the transitoriness of human happiness had he been a follower of Gautama”. Their kindness is passive, not active and in fact leads to cruelty: injured animals are left to die in agony because “Buddhism forbade the merciful taking of their tortured lives”. On the other hand, it has “high ideals”. The Buddhists are not idolaters: they do not worship the Buddha and the images of him are only “to help the devout mind to concentrate on the idea of the Buddha, the just man made perfect.” But while the Buddha is “the just man made perfect” he is in Nirvana “wrapped away from the cries of suffering mortals”.

The depiction of the Buddha in British fiction is a subject that has interested me for many years, and in particular in what I call “early encounter” fiction, that is Victorian/Edwardian. Though there are earlier references (for example in Marco Polo or Daniel Defoe’s work), widespread interest in the Buddha coincided with the British occupation of India. It was the builders of Empire, the traders, explorers, soldiers and administrators, who brought back the first tales of the East; and the writers and artists who followed in their wake who translated these new experiences into art.

Indeed, the Buddha found his way into best-selling fiction. Mark M Hennelly has suggested that in The Moonstone Wilkie Collins uses the stolen gem to make a connection with The Diamond Sutra and oppose “Indian and Hindu transcendental values” against “the more materialistic and rational Victorian temper”. Mary Braddon, another sensation novelist, in her three-volume Vixen introduced the incomparable Miss Skipwith who is writing a book about the Buddha. This is “a tremendous manuscript on blue foolscap, a work whose outward semblance would have been enough to frighten and deter any publisher in his right mind”.

Grant Allen’s 1899 novel Hilda Wade: A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose tells the tale of a group of British tourists in the Himalayas. Their Buddhist guide – villainous, sullen, furtive, scowling, shifty, cruel, sensuous and a half-caste into the bargain – leads them into Tibet to betray them to “Buddhist inquisitors”. Since “No Eulopean” is allowed into Tibet, these “Tibetan fanatics” sentence them to death. Luckily Miss Wade has studied Buddhism and despite some misgiving about idolatry her companions save themselves by following her lead and joining in the lamas’ “half magical ceremonies”: knocking their heads ostentatiously in the dust, “doing poojah, before the ever-smiling Buddha” and, since they don’t know any mantras, making up their own: “Hokey - pokey –winky - wum”. Having thus persuaded the Tibetan monks that they are Buddhists, their lives are spared.

From what I’ve read so far it seems there is reason to think that the earliest references to Buddhism in British literature betray, at best, fascination with the exotic and, at worse, hostility. There may have been a shift to a more sympathetic portrayal by the end of the nineteenth century, marked by works like The Light of Asia by Edwin Arnold – which I’ll be looking at in Books and the Buddha Part 2.

Reading:-

Hilda Wade: A Woman with Tenacity of Purpose by Grant Allen (London, G P Putnam, 1899) (available on Project Gutenberg)

Vixen by Mary Elizabeth Braddon (London, 1879, John and Robert Maxwell) (available on Project Gutenberg)

The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins (first published 1868) (London, Penguin Classics, 1981)

Detecting Collins’ Diamond: From Serpentstone to Moonstone by Mark M Hennelly Jr, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Vol 39, No 1 (Jun 1984) pp 25-47

The Lacquer Lady by F Tennyson Jesse (first published 1929) (London, Virago, 1979)

Old Excesses

2011-05-02T12:49:00.004+01:00

In April 2011 literary agent Carole Blake tweeted a link to a blog by US agent Josh Gertler about authors waiting to hear from publishers. The piece was on the deliciously named “Hey, There’s a Dead Guy in the Living Room” blog – to read it see http://tinyurl.com/3nm8qxx. (Carole Blake’s tweet was on 21 April – a very long time ago in Twitterland.)

Josh Gertler’s piece (“No News”) was a lively – and ultimately reassuring – treatment of the agony of waiting to hear from publishers and agents. The waiting is, as Mr Gertler says, “excruciating”. Of course, whether you’re a writer or not waiting is never fun, as anyone who’s ever sat an exam or applied for a job knows. In publishing, though, there’s an extra dimension of awfulness in that you don’t know when you’re going to hear – it could be a week, three months, six months, even longer – and in some (thankfully rare) cases it’s never. All unavoidable of course: no one’s to blame, though I know from some other comments I’ve read that there are people who do seem to think that the Publishing Industry is in cahoots against them. It’s a situation that at its worst can cause ill feeling on both sides. However, as Mr Gertler points out, no news really is no news.

In fact, it seems that the long wait is a tradition stretching back to publishing’s early days if the case of poet John Clare is anything to go by. According to the splendid biography of Clare by Jonathan Bate, Clare’s second collection of poetry was advertised in November 1820, but did not appear until September 1821. Understandably, Clare found the waiting difficult. In his case it wasn’t helped by a friend who helpfully told him that his London publishers, John Taylor and James Hessey, “had been sitting on a set of proofs for a month, without bothering to send them to Clare”.

Another helpful friend told John Taylor in August 1820 that the poet was so upset by the delay he had taken up drinking again. Taylor was hurt. He had a heavy workload and his own health problems, on top of which Clare’s work was a struggle to edit because of his poor handwriting, spelling and grammar. The publisher wrote to the poet: “I had thought you felt more Regard for me than to plunge into old Excesses and lay the Sin at my Door.” Then, Bate tells us, “Clare, in turn, was upset at the accusation that he had been complaining about Taylor. He would sooner the volumes were delayed till the Christmas after next than have anyone other than Taylor himself do the editing”.

Clearly, it was a difficult situation for both Clare and Taylor, exacerbated by the facts that the economy was in recession, and the bottom had dropped out of the poetry market. That sounds familiar too. Perhaps, despite the huge differences between publishing then and now, the basics haven’t changed all that much. Authors still get anxious over delays and publishers and agents still get exasperated at their lack of commercial sense. At least we can comfort ourselves with the thought that we are part of a great literary heritage - while being careful of course not to blame agents and publishers for driving us to drink!

Hey, There’s a Dead Guy in the Living Room –the blog has lots of other interesting and entertaining articles for authors - http://heydeadguy.typepad.com/heydeadguy/

John Clare: A Biography, by Jonathan Bate, is published in the US by Farrar, Straus and Giroux and in the UK by Picador – and it’s a fantastic read.

Did Wordsworth like gingerbread?

2011-04-19T17:26:00.004+01:00

I’ve just spent a few days in the Lake District, staying only a few doors away from the Wordsworth House in Cockermouth, where Richard, William, Dorothy, John and Christopher Wordsworth were born. In 1937 the house was due to be demolished to make way for a bus station, but luckily it was rescued from the clutches of the bus company when the Wordsworth Memorial Fund bought it and gave it to the National Trust. The NT have done a good job of recreating a 1770s style house, complete with costumed servants. In 2009 it was rescued from yet another peril when Cockermouth was hit by floods, when its dedicated staff moved the house’s contents to safety on the upper floors and afterwards cleaned up the debris and floodwater (a horrible mucky job judging by the photographs).

I also went to Grasmere and visited the Wordsworth graves; my thoughts were with John particularly who died in a shipwreck only three days out from Portsmouth en route to India and China. The tragic story is well-told in Alethea Hayter’s The Wreck of the Abergavenny. While in Grasmere I bought some of its world-famous gingerbread. At the same time I carried away with me a leaflet about the shop and its sweet product which led me to wonder: did William Wordsworth like gingerbread?

The leaflet doesn’t say as much, which is hardly surprising because he was dead before Sarah Nelson’s gingerbread recipe was invented. Even so, it doesn’t miss an opportunity to associate the poet with the bread. We are told that Sarah Nelson worked in a house overlooking Ullswater “the lake beside which WILLIAM WORDSWORTH wrote his famous poem ‘Daffodils’”. Like the poet she was “inspired”; he wrote about daffs, she invented a cake. Sarah’s business was associated with him from the start, her earliest customers being Victorian pilgrims to Wordsworth's grave, which is only yards away from her shop. The current manager’s great great grandparents “entertained the Wordsworths for tea”, though they could not of course have given William Sarah Nelson’s gingerbread with his cuppa. Still, “Like the great Romantic poems, Sarah Nelson’s Grasmere Gingerbread has stood the test of time”.

So did William like gingerbread? Well, yes, it seems he did. His sister Dorothy mentions in her Grasmere journal going out to buy gingerbread and I’m allowing myself to speculate that she wouldn’t have bought anything William didn’t like. I haven’t been able to find the reference in her journal myself, so can’t tell you what type of gingerbread he liked to tuck into: there was more than one variety available in Grasmere. Nor can I tell you if he ever offered it to Coleridge when he called into Dove Cottage after a tramp from his house, Greta Hall, in Keswick. If he had perhaps Coleridge would have recorded somewhere in his journals, “Goes well with opium”.

Greta Hall was originally built as an astronomical observatory and converted into a three storey house by its owner Mr Jackson, who lived in the back of the house and let the front rooms to Coleridge and family. From his study windows Coleridge could see “Mountains & Lakes & Woods & Vales” across which “mists, & Clouds, & Sunshine make endless combinations, as if heaven & Earth were forever talking to each other”. (Quoted in Richard Holmes, Coleridge: Early Visions.) It was really Greta Hall that I wanted to see, although the house is not open to visitors (no costumed servants here). According to Richard Holmes:-

“To this day its white façade can be seen shining out of Keswick from almost every peak of the encircling fells – most impressively perhaps from Cat Bells across Derwent Water – a sort of landlocked lighthouse, upon which the lonely fell-walker can always get an accurate compass fix in his wanderings.”

Fell-walking might have been lonely in Coleridge’s day; I don’t suppose that is so much the case now in so busy a district as the Lakes. But the white façade of the house with its curiously curved wings can be seen from Cat Bells, and a wonderful sight it is on a brilliant sunny day with the blue beneath and above filled with shredding clouds and the sense that, just for a moment, you are gazing through a poet’s eyes.

You can make your own Grasmere-style gingerbread by following BBC Good Food’s recipe at http://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/10774/grasmere-gingerbread-style

And Jamie Oliver has a go with his modestly-named “Ultimate Gingerbread” at http://www.jamieoliver.com/recipes/bread-recipes/ultimate-gingerbread

There’s a nice 2005 article (with two gingerbread recipes) at the Baking For Britain blog – see http://bakingforbritain.blogspot.com/2005/11/grasmere-gingerbread-from-cumbria.html

Quintessential British Novels

2011-04-06T11:11:00.006+01:00

Emma Taylor of Accreditedonlinecolleges.com has drawn my attention to a blog on their website (16 March 2011) listing 50 Quintessential British Novels. I know nothing about accredited on line colleges, but I did enjoy reading the list which includes many of my own favourites, and one book that I had never heard of but now plan to read – Flatland by Edwin A Abbott. I particularly enjoyed the breezy outlines – Darcy’s “legions of screaming fangirls” in Pride and Prejudice especially springs to mind. If you want to compare it to your own list of Quintessential British Novels the blog is at

http://www.accreditedonlinecolleges.com/blog/2011/50-quintessential-british-novels/

With thanks to Emma for taking an interest in my literary ramblings!

Refusing to be counted

2011-04-03T17:37:00.005+01:00

Yesterday (2 April 2011) was the anniversary of the women’s boycott of the 1911 Census and I marked the event by joining historians Jill Liddington and Tara Morton on their “Artists and Evaders” walk around Kensington. As a suffrage demonstration, the refusal of many militant and non-militant suffrage campaigners to fill in their Census forms was far from being the most spectacular or successful of the protests made by disenfranchised women. According to the Registrar in a letter to The Times on 1 April 1911, if the suffragists hoped that the Census would be seriously affected they would be proved wrong. Even if 100,000 women were “bold enough to defy the law”, he said, in an overall population which “will no doubt be found to exceed 40 millions” (in fact he overestimated by half a million) their absence would make little difference. In the event, many evasion attempts simply did not work: women were counted anyway.

Even so, Christabel Pankhurst hailed the demonstration as a success, and in one way at least it was: it gained publicity for the cause. “Until women count as people for the purpose of representation…as well as for purposes of taxation, we shall refuse to be numbered”, said Mrs Pankhurst. It was this message that the Census protest managed to convey to the public in newspaper articles, speeches, posters and gatherings such as that held in Trafalgar Square on Census night. As Jill Liddington and Tara Morton explained during our walk though Kensington’s magnolia-scented streets, the Census evasion had its origins in Kensington, since it was the brain child of artist and women’s suffrage supporter Laurence Housman who lived with his sister Clemence at 1 Pembroke Gardens, Edwardes Square.

Laurence Housman was a founder member of the Men’s League for Women’s Suffrage and with his sister Clemence Housman a co-founder in 1909 of the Suffrage Atelier. This was a group of artists whose aim was to use their work to support the campaign for the women’s vote. The Atelier was based in the studio at the bottom of the Housman’s garden, where they produced banners, postcards, cartoons, and posters. Kensington was home to a number of artists and suffragists, many of whom produced art for the cause either independently or within the Atelier. They included jeweller Ernestine Mills who designed badges for the Women’s Social and Political Union; artist Olive Hockin whose studio equipment included hammers, paraffin, stones, and wire cutters for use in militant attacks; and Louise Joplin Rowe who let the Atelier use her studio at 7 Pembroke Gardens for exhibitions. Writer May Sinclair was Olive Hockin’s neighbour in Edwardes Square Studios, and novelist Evelyn Sharp, who was the Kensington WSPU Branch Secretary, lived in a flat in Duke’s Lane.

We had a lovely day: the weather was kind and never have the streets and squares of London looked so lovely. We stood on the corner of Phillimore Gardens and Kensington High Street with the Kensington contingent of the great suffragette procession on 21 June 1908. We wore white dresses and sashes in the colours and in front of us fluttered the banner designed by Laurence Housman and embroidered under Clemence’s direction: From Prison to Citizenship. In Pembroke Gardens we listened to the “ker chunk ker chunk” of the Atelier’s printing press as it churned out caricatures of the Liberal politicians responsible for the imprisonment and torture of unenfranchised women. Rather than stay at home and be counted on the night of 2 April, we knocked at the door of Number 1 and spent the night with other evaders while Laurence gallantly slept in the studio (though we were disappointed that only three other women joined us). And we sat on the floor of the studio labouring from dawn to dusk with Clemence, embroidering those beautiful banners behind which so many women marched in order to win for us our right to vote.

Read Sonia Lambert’s article about the Census boycott in The Guardian, 1 April 2011 -
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2011/apr/01/suffragettes-census-1911-boycott

Visit the 1911 Census site - http://www.1911census.co.uk/

See some of the beautiful suffrage banners and designs from the Women’s Library collection on line at VADS: the online resource for the visual arts - http://tinyurl.com/3nh643a

See Laurence Housman’s From Prison to Citizenship banner - http://tinyurl.com/4ynmlxr

The Hollow Crown

2011-03-14T16:40:00.002Z

As in a theatre the eyes of men,
After a well-grac’d actor leaves the stage,
Are idly bent on him that enters next,
Thinking his prattle to be tedious;
Even so, or with much more contempt, men’s eyes
Did scowl on Richard.

Richard II, Act V, Scene II

Thus the Duke of York describes Bolingbroke’s triumphant entry into London with the deposed King Richard riding in his train. This is a playful inversion of the drama for me for, as far as I am concerned, the play is dominated by Richard, not Bolingbroke. It’s Richard my gaze is fixed on when he’s on the stage; when he leaves it my interest takes a little dip. Of course, I soon ascend from the dip: this is my favourite Shakespeare play. It’s fair to say, though, that for this play-goer if Richard isn’t up to the job the rest might as well not bother.

I’ve seen Fiona Shaw’s Richard, Kevin Spacey’s Richard, and a couple of other unfortunately unmemorable Richards. Now I’ve seen John Heffernan take on the role in a production by Shakespeare at the Tobacco Factory (SATTF) in Bristol (8 March 2011) and have no hesitation in entering him into a trinity of sublime Richards with Shaw and Spacey. Heffernan played Richard like a king and like a man. Here was the anointed sovereign who thought himself guarded by angels, God’s representative on earth, something higher than mortals who “was not born to sue, but to command”. Here too was the defeated and deserted man, a mere mortal after all: “I live with bread like you, feel want,/Taste grief, need friends”. There was a wonderful clarity to Heffernan’s portrayal. You saw Richard in all his moods: cruel and capricious, haughty and humbled, raving against his fate and philosophising bleakly about the human condition.

SATTF have reinstated Shakespeare’s spelling and pronunciation of "Bullingbrooke" for the eighteenth century “Bolingbroke”. This gives, according to the programme, the twin sounds of “bull” and a running stream. These are, no doubt, metaphors one can make much of in relation to the usurping Duke of Lancaster. I, however, hear the word “bully” (“They well deserve to have/That know the strong’st and surest way to get”). He is marvellously played by Matthew Thomas, particularly after his success when he begins to realise that kingship might not be all it’s cracked up to be. He can no more get his quarrelling nobles to make up than Richard could; nor trust their oaths of loyalty any further than could the ousted king; his son is cavorting in the London brothels; and to top it all his carefully constructed façade of the legality of his reign is destroyed by Richard’s murder.

Seeds are, of course, sown for the wonderful plays that follow, but for me Richard II stands alone as one of Shakespeare’s most beautiful and profound works. I’ve never thought of it as a history play: it’s a poet’s play. The marvellous cast of SATTF brought out the poetry in every truly-spoken line, and with it the play’s psychological and spiritual depths. This fantastic production runs until 19 March 2011.

Richard II at Shakespeare at the Tobacco Factory http://sattf.org.uk/index.php?id=164 (includes links to reviews).

The Guardian Review http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2011/feb/22/richard-ii-bristol-review

The British Theatre Guide http://www.britishtheatreguide.info/reviews/SATTFrichardii-rev.htm

The Stage http://www.thestage.co.uk/reviews/review.php/31314/richard-ii

Elms and Bees

2011-03-07T14:39:00.004Z

I had another wonderful evening in Chepstow’s Drill Hall on Saturday (5 March 2011) at a Poetry on the Border event. This time I went to see Carol Ann Duffy and Gillian Clarke: a tremendous double bill. William Ayot, who organises PotB, introduced them as two “great” poets, reflecting on the fact that “great” is a word he often uses of poets, but is particularly applicable to these two. He’s right of course.

Duffy offered us a range of poems, many of which touched on things we are losing, precious things that are slipping away. Elm trees, decimated by disease, and now the survival of the remaining few threatened by government spending cuts which decrees no more research into its cause. Old pub names full of meaning - local, historical, agricultural - replaced by rootless, manufactured nonsenses. Bees, gone with disastrous consequences for every growing thing. County names: this last a protest against Royal Mail’s instruction that we no longer need to include the county in addresses. But I want to speak to the Lincolnshire Poacher, protests Duffy, in a wonderful evoking and naming of place.

She speaks of personal loss too, such as that of her mother. She imagines getting to know her mother from the time of her death, going back in time and calling up memories that are more like meetings. Another verse records her mother’s last word, a request for water, and recalls how as a child she called for water in the night, and how as a mother herself she took water to her own children when they called out for thirst in the night.

Gillian Clarke too used a backward-looking vision in a poem about her mother’s childhood, looking at how the child still exists inside the old person. Her mother was one of ten, five boys and five girls. The poem was inspired by a letter received from a woman who as an only child played with her mother; it enabled the poet to approach her mother's childhood. These beautiful verses of Duffy’s and Clarke’s made me think of my own mother and what her life has been, now she is wandering and weeping in the darkness of dementia.

Clarke’s latest obsession, she told us, is ice – cold - snow. She described the River Ely beneath her Cardiff flat, frozen and refrozen until it looked like a zebra. As a child she loved a polar bear skin on the floor of the house she lived in, and her poem imagines a time in which we had not melted the ice cap or shot the bear. The evening ended with her poem about a swan in winter. She had watched a pair of swans nesting in a lake formed by a curve of the river for years. This year the male came back but the female did not. He is waiting for her still. I left the Drill Hall with tears blurring my eyes for this and the many other beautiful, heart-touching verses I’d heard that evening.

For this is what the power of words is. Real, true poetry said out loud. Stories told and insights shared. This is when words and meaning become music so that like music you play them over in your head, driving home through the drizzle. Ideas and words, words and ideas, singing.

William Ayot announced at the end of the evening a plan – a dream – to establish a Centre for the Oral Tradition in Chepstow, a place for poetry, storytelling, oratory. It’s a fantastic dream and one that I for one hope is realised. If you do too send money! Contact William Ayot – he’s got a website and he’s on Facebook. Let’s not allow our great traditions of poem and storytelling to slip away with the elms and the bees.

For information on future events at Poetry on the Border - http://www.poetryontheborder.org/

Carol Ann Duffy - http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/singlePoet.do?poetId=11468

Gillian Clarke - http://www.gillianclarke.co.uk/home.htm

William Ayot - http://www.williamayot.com/

Saki in Singapore

2011-02-23T17:22:00.002Z

The obvious choice of reading for a trip to Singapore must be Rudyard Kipling, one of the writers associated with Raffles Hotel which is named after Britain’s colonial administrator par excellence and founder of Singapore, Sir Stamford Raffles. I hadn’t got any Kipling with me, but I had got some Saki (Hector Hugh Munro). This seemed to me a decent substitute as both authors are associated with British colonialism. They were contemporaries; both were born in British colonies - Munro in Burma and Kipling in India; both endured unhappy English childhoods away from their parents; both returned to the land of their birth when they were adults; and both wrote original and exotic short stories – though only one of them was brilliant, and that was Kipling.

However, it was Saki’s stories I had with me: The Chronicles of Clovis (1911) and Beasts and Super-Beasts (1914). The tales are often cruel, and not only because they are set in a world insensitive to the suffering of other creatures where cub hunting and kitten drowning pass without comment. Dreadful things happen to possibly but not necessarily dreadful people: a gypsy child is eaten by a hyena, a woman is blinded, another is gored to death. They are wonderful exercises in table turning and hypocrisy exposing, often by the use of practical jokes played on the foolish or greedy. As is the way of practical jokes, the ruses are often nasty.

Saki is a dab hand at overthrowing expectations: although the stories are located in the most civilised settings imaginable – clubs and drawing rooms - there is an undertone of savagery. Many have magical or supernatural elements: politicians are replaced by angels, animals talk, Pan plays his pipes. At their best the stories are very funny. In Tobermory, Lady Blemley’s cat learns to talk, with embarrassing consequences for the household for he is not a discreet cat. His favourite promenade is “a narrow ornamental balustrade…in front of most of the bedroom windows…whence he could watch the pigeons - and heaven knew what else besides” .

Practical jokes – talking cats – angels: there’s the spirit of a child in Saki’s stories, but it’s not a charming one. The boy who points out the Emperor’s nakedness is an innocent, but the child in Saki is a mean little beast. You could imagine him pulling the legs off spiders. His stories are irreverent, witty, satirical; they are also nasty, spiteful, insensitive (see, for instance, the treatment of the Jewish couple in A Touch of Realism). No kindness tempers Saki’s vision; he is a compassionless recorder of human folly. Of course, writers don’t have to have bleeding hearts: too much sympathy and you end up with sentimental mush.

The western front was no place for sentimental mush and it was perhaps here that Saki’s literary ruthlessness came into its own in his exquisite description of birds on the battle ground. The prose is precise, the observation sharp, the refusal to privilege the merely human typical of a writer whose urbane settings are constantly threatened by wild beasts, pagan gods, inhuman forces. Yet the effect is deeply moving.

“At the corner of a stricken wood (which has had a name made for it in history, but shall be nameless here), at a moment when lyddite and shrapnel and machine-gun fire swept and raked and bespattered that devoted spot as though the artillery of an entire Division had suddenly concentrated on it, a wee hen-chaffinch flitted wistfully to and fro, amid splintered and falling branches that had never a green bough left on them. The wounded lying there, if any of them noticed the small bird, may well have wondered why anything having wings and no pressing reason for remaining should have chosen to stay in such a place. There was a battered orchard alongside the stricken wood, and the probable explanation of the bird’s presence was that it had a nest of young ones whom it was too scared to feed, too loyal to desert.”

(From The Bedside Book of Birds: An Avian Miscellany, Graeme Gibson.)

Munro welcomed the war, and had nothing good to say for pacifists. He enlisted although he did not have to (he was 43). He was shot dead by a sniper in 1916.

The Chronicles of Clovis (1911) and Beasts and Super-Beasts (1914) are available from Project Gutenberg http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page

Read The Guardian blog on Saki http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2009/sep/14/short-story-saki-hh-munro

And Neil Clark in The Telegraph http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/fictionreviews/3656595/The-short-story-king-with-a-sting.html

Eminent Victorian

2011-02-03T18:22:00.003Z

For they stood in one of the famous wood and common lands of Southern England – great beeches towering overhead – glades opening to right and left – ferny paths over green turf-tracks, and avenues of immemorial age, the highways of a vanished life – old earth-works, overgrown – lanes deep-sunk in the chalk where the pack horses once made their way – gnarled thorns, bent with years, yet still white-mantled in the spring: a wild, enchanted no-man’s country, owned it seemed by rabbits and birds, solitary, lovely and barren – yet from its furthest edge, the high spectator, looking eastward, on a clear night, might see on the horizon the dim flare of London.

I think this is a lovely description. I particularly like the sense of history on the landscape, the “old earth-works, overgrown” and “avenues of immemorial age”. It evokes for me coming across the grassy remains of mine shafts or pits for washing ore in the lead lands near Charterhouse in the Mendips, or stumbling on the embankment of a long-gone tramway that once served the Somerset Coal Canal. There’s a fine, ghostly feeling about walking through “ferny paths” that once rang with industry, the clatter of trams, the cries of workers. You can go further back too, to other vanished lives: tramping along sections of the Fosseway near Radstock; standing on the edge of an iron-age hill fort at Cadbury Camp.

The description is from Mrs Humphry Ward’s novel The Testing of Diana Mallory (1908). John Sutherland thinks the novel marks a “distinct decline in the quality of her writing”, and it certainly isn’t the best novel in the world. But it’s far from being the worst, and I think it’s a shame that Mrs Ward is not more widely read. Her authorial name is enough to put off the modern reader: a woman who doesn’t even have her own identity but hides – or is hidden – behind her husband. And of course she made the huge mistake of backing the reactionaries in the struggle for women’s suffrage, being a firm “anti” even when other opponents of votes for women had begun to accept the inevitable.

Her views did, of course, permeate her novels. In Diana Mallory suffragist Isabel is a most unpleasant woman who would in other times “have been a religious bigot of the first water”. But I don’t think Mrs Ward can be too glibly dismissed as a bigot herself for creating such a monstrous feminist. In the same novel socialist Marion, challenging Diana’s opposition to votes for women (it would unsex us) utters the “very same ideas which Isabel Fotheringham made hateful, clothed in light, speaking from the rugged or noble faces of men and women who saw in them the salvation of their kind”. (Elaine Showalter includes a brief discussion of the tensions in Ward’s views – a woman who campaigned for education for women and the disabled and whose books show sympathy between and for women yet who opposed the female franchise – in A Literature of Their Own.)

Mrs Ward may have been old fashioned in her own time – Virginia Woolf thought so – but her books are still worth reading. Diana Mallory has a page-turning melodramatic mystery at its heart and if the paeans to “England” do not sit well with us these days, nor the earnest political discussions, there’s still much to enjoy. Indeed, I’m fascinated as much by these elements of the novel as the story and characters. It seems odd to me to read a Victorian or Edwardian novel while at the same time wanting to discount its “Victorianism” or “Edwardianism”; they are as much a part of the book as plot and setting. So, on to my next Mrs Humphry Ward – her anti-suffrage novel Delia Blanchflower! And I’m putting John Sutherland’s Mrs Humphry Ward: Eminent Victorian, Pre-eminent Edwardian on my reading list.

Treasured Possessions

2011-01-19T14:31:00.003Z

“March 3rd 83

Dear Sir

Thanks for your note; the gout sticks to me so that I am still unable to make any appointment, but I will come on the very first opportunity. Yours faithfully.”

“March 20th .83

Dear Sir

I have just received your note as I am setting off for the country till Easter is over: I have sent it on to our works & will see on my return that the sketch is done and all estimates duly made. I am Dear Sir Yours Faithfully”

They’re not much for two of my most treasured possessions, are they? Two short notes, business-like, hurried, revealing little of the writer. The reason they are treasured is that they were written by William Morris. Morris is a great hero of mine; one of the chief deities of my personal pantheon; a genius. I love him for his art, his poetry, his politics, and his novels. The Well at the World’s End is one of the loveliest books I’ve ever read, and as a devotee of narrative verse I’m bowled over by epics like The Earthly Paradise and The Life and Death of Jason.

These inconsequential notes, written when Morris was 49, have been glued into two books in the eighth, four-volume edition of Morris’s poem The Earthly Paradise, published by Ellis and White in 1880. The note dated March 20 1883 is in Part II and the note dated 3 March 1883 is in Part I. They have both been awkwardly folded and badly trimmed; some of the lettering in the note of March 20 1883 has even been cut off.

Whoever did the glueing was a great lover of paste. At the front of Part I they also affixed a short newspaper biography of Morris, who “lives, with his wife and two daughters, in a pleasant house near the Thames at Hammersmith”. (Reassuringly, the author adds “The socialism of his later days has scarcely alienated any of his older friends”.) This is the address from which Morris wrote the notes I have – Kelmscott House, Upper Mall, Hammersmith, and now home to the William Morris Society. The biography is signed The Prompter and – more careless work from our gluer – the date of the cutting and the title of the publication have been removed by the scissors.

But how much is suggested by these little scraps of paper – how many stories could we make from them! Clearly Morris meant something to our scrappy scrap collector. Were the notes addressed to him? Why else would he be in possession of them? But then how did he know Morris? Was he a client? A friend? An importunate acquaintance? (Cue stalker novel.) A gay man in love? (Cue gay history novel.) Or was he obsessed by hatred for Morris? (Cue Victorian serial killer novel.)

Really, though, spinning tales about the letters doesn’t really add to their value for me (and these are all terrible ideas!). They are by William Morris, they are in my study, I can see the books when I’m sitting here writing and feel brushed by the spirit of that great, gouty artist who wrote two ordinary letters in March 1883.

NB Unfortunately I was unable to include images of either note; one was simply illegible when scanned and the other is too fragile to scan.

For more information about Morris see The William Morris Society - http://www.morrissociety.org/index.html

Creating a monster

2011-01-10T10:12:00.002Z

To Oxford last week to see the Bodleian Library’s exhibition Shelley’s Ghost: Reshaping the Image of a Literary Family. The exhibition looks at the way in which Shelley’s posthumous image was created by the careful control of how documents about and by Shelley and his circle were published – in edited form, not at all, or with restricted access. Shelley’s son, Sir Percy Florence Shelley, had no interest in literature and it was his wife Jane who was the main architect of the Shelley image. She even set up a shrine to Shelley in her house, which contained items such as his watch, a plate from which he ate, and a collection of locks of hair from Percy and Mary Shelley and their friends. These people were big on collecting hair: there is an entire necklace made from Mary Wollstonecraft’s tresses from which hang two lockets containing more hair.

Shelley’s reputation certainly needed protecting. There was and still is an unsavoury air to him, even if some of the scandals don’t bother us so much these days: atheism, illegitimacy and infidelity do not perhaps cause so much shock as they once did. It’s easy to rake up the dirt on him, and covering it up was quite a feat. Another generation might broadcast the particulars of his life in order to depict him as a pioneer of sexual or spiritual freedom. But no matter how you judge his behaviour – if indeed you think it relevant to judge it at all - the exhibition cannot fail to move.

It’s quite interesting to see the plate Shelley ate his raisins from, but nothing like so fascinating as his notebooks full of doodles and scribbles, or the much-crossed out and reworked drafts of Ozymandias, Ode to the West Wind, or Queen Mab. Shelley and his circle lived for and by their writing. The only reason we pore over their lives at all is because they were poets, novelists, essayists. So it’s the pages that matter, the product of the moving hand, the living mind, that connects us to their lives. The exhibition’s many treasures enables many such connections. There are pages from Mary Shelley’s draft of Frankenstein showing some of her husband’s amendments: a disquieting object, given the lingering assumption that the book’s real author was Percy Bysshe Shelley. Mary Shelley’s transcriptions of her dead husband’s poems bear witness to her editorial effort, and make you wonder if she got her own back with a few subtle changes to his work here and there.

For me the exhibition’s greatest treasures are contained in one page and three small notes. The page is from the manuscript of Mary Wollstonecraft’s essay On Poetry, and the three small notes are the last she wrote to Godwin while she was awaiting the birth of her daughter, Fanny. It’s exciting enough to see work in a writer’s own hand; when that writer is a hero of yours it’s incredibly moving.

The exhibition runs until 27 March 2011 and admission is free, but if you can’t get to Oxford you can view it on line at http://shelleysghost.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/

Read Germaine Greer on the argument about who wrote Frankenstein in The Guardian, Monday 9 April 2007: Yes, Frankenstein really was written by Mary Shelley. It's obvious - because the book is so bad http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/apr/09/gender.books

Bostin books

2010-12-30T13:03:00.006Z

Santa’s been and gone and I hope he has left everyone something they wanted, particularly in books. As usual, the old fellow has come up with the literary goods for me, as well as delivering some surprises. Biggest surprise of all has been a signed copy of Michael Moorcock’s Doctor Who novel The Coming of the Terraphiles. I never saw this one coming!

The only TV spin off novels I’ve ever read were about Stingray when I was a child; it’s not a genre I’ve ever explored as an adult. The rather ugly name for books based on stories that first appear in film or TV form is “novelisation”. According to the BBC’s h2g2 site, Doctor Who is the most novelised programme in history, with only five episodes not transformed to book form. Doctor Who script editor Terrance Dicks alone wrote over 60 of them. Other famous novelisations are Star Trek, Blake’s 7 and the original Battlestar Galactica (I am currently rewatching the superb remake with Edward James Olmos). Comments the author of the h2g2 entry, “Novelisations are often looked down on as a literary form, being considered commercial rather than art”.

I’ll confess that if you’d asked me to read a novelisation before I got this book I would have turned my nose up at it, so it will be interesting to see just how fair the judgement is, at least in relation to The Coming of the Terraphiles. It won’t be the first Michael Moorcock book I’ve read: I read some of his books many years ago and remember enjoying them (though I can’t now, alas, remember what they were). At least I know he can write!

Small connections: The Coming of the Terraphiles features a pirate called Captain Cornelius, who shares his name with Moorcock’s character Jerry Cornelius. M John Harrison wrote a number of stories about Jerry Cornelius which were published in Moorcock’s The New Nature of the Catastrophe. I’m currently reading M John Harrison’s unspeakably brilliant Viriconium stories in the Orion Fantasy Masterworks edition. In one of the stories Harrison refers to places called “Shifnal” and “the Wergs”. This made me laugh. Only someone from the Black Country could have heard of the Wergs, I thought. I looked Harrison up and discovered he was born in Rugby, Warwicks. Close enough! Then I came across this verse: “We are the Barley brothers./Ousted out of Birmingham and Wolverhampton”. I was born and brought up in Wolves, and I’m still chuckling at the thought of the town finding its way into any literary creation, let alone one as exotic as Viriconium. It’s just bostin’.

Science Fiction Novelisations, http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A65947909

Beaus in tight breeches

2010-12-11T15:09:00.004Z

A few days ago I went to the Thomas Lawrence exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery. I was especially interested in Lawrence, many of whose paintings I had seen in books on the eighteenth century. It was Lawrence who captured a moment of radical history in his chalk sketch of William Godwin and Thomas Holcroft at their friend John Thelwall’s trial for treason in 1794. I had also read about the artist in his friend Joseph Farington’s diary, where (as I mentioned previously) he is described as “a male coquet”.

Lawrence was born in Bristol in 1769. The family moved to Devizes in 1773 and he was brought up in the coaching inn The Black Bear. Lacking formal education and training, he was something of a child prodigy who sketched and charmed many of the inn’s visitors, Frances Burney amongst them. When his father was declared bankrupt the family settled in Bath, where young Lawrence began his career as a portraitist. In 1787 he went to London and joined the Royal Academy schools, but did not stay there long. He went on to be an enormous success, the portrait painter of his age whose subjects included royalty, actors, bankers, soldiers, and even the Pope.

Despite his professional achievements, like many artists Lawrence suffered from the frustration of achieving success in one area while longing to shine in another. He wanted to be a painter of classical or historical subjects but attempts in the genre, such as Satan Summoning his Legions, were not well received. He was, he felt, “shackled” to the business of portrait painting.

Yet the paintings are marvellous. Standing in one of the exhibition rooms looking from paintings of wriggling children on one wall to stiff-fronted generals on the other I was filled with a sense of the painter’s tremendous empathy for his sitters. Every individual is vivid with his or her own life. The presence of Lawrence’s sitters is so intense I could imagine myself in the middle of an eighteenth-century crowd. I have always found paintings and photographs to be fantastic sources for characters in my stories. It’s not, usually, that I look at a painting and think “he will do as so-and-so” but more often that I see a painting and think “that is so-and-so” as I had already imagined them.

Perhaps I’d seen Lawrence’s painting somewhere and stored it up in my subconscious. I don’t know, but the thrill of recognition was intense. There was Charles Richmond, the London radical who is the main male character in the novel I am currently working on. To Lawrence he manifested himself as the Earl of Aberdeen. If anyone ever reads the novel who has also seen this painting, they will know exactly what Charles looks like.

I have not, however, found anyone I recognise in the quite startling painting of John, Lord Mountstuart, wearing some very tight trousers.

The National Portrait Gallery, Thomas Lawrence: Regency Power and Brilliance http://www.npg.org.uk/whatson/exhibitions/2010/thomas-lawrence-regency-power-and-brilliance-minisite.php

Information on Thomas Lawrence from the National Gallery website - http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/artists/sir-thomas-lawrence

The sketch of Godwin and Holcroft http://www.npgprints.com/image.php?imgref=194672

National Portrait Gallery shines light on forgotten artist Thomas Lawrence, The Guardian 4 August 2010 http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/aug/04/national-portrait-gallery-thomas-lawrence

Thomas Lawrence: Regency Power and Brilliance, National Portrait Gallery, The Daily Telegraph 18 October 2010 http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/artists/sir-thomas-lawrence

Gainsborough's forgotten rival Thomas Lawrence is recognised at last, The Independent 5 August 2010 http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/news/gainsboroughs-forgotten-rival-thomas-lawrence-is-recognised-at-last-2043649.html

The Little Sprite

2010-11-30T16:39:00.002Z

I’ve just finished reading Janet Todd’s marvellous Death and the Maidens. The story of Mary Wollstonecraft’s daughter Fanny is one of the saddest I have ever come across.

Fanny seems to have been one of those people who everyone took advantage of and no one cared for. When, at the age of 19 she committed suicide in an inn in Swansea, her body was unclaimed by the Shelleys or Godwins and she was given a pauper’s burial. Her relatives persisted in lying about her death – and indeed her existence – for years after. It was six weeks before her aunts in Ireland were informed of her passing. Godwin claimed that she had gone to visit friends in Wales and died of a cold. Her step brother Charles received a letter from his sister Claire a few weeks after Fanny’s death which did not mention it. Ten months later he wrote asking after her, and a year after that he had still not been told she was dead. In a memoir of Godwin her sister Mary (Shelley) left Fanny out of their father’s story, implying that she was his only daughter. Each had his or her own interests at heart; none it seems had Fanny’s.

It was a tragic outcome for the mother’s “little darling” who “grows every day more dear”, the “sweet child”, the “little sprite” who was “all life and motion, and her eyes are not the eyes of a fool – I will swear”. But Fanny’s mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, died giving birth to Mary and was not there when Fanny needed her.

I was staying in Bloomsbury while I was reading Todd’s book, only a ten minute walk from Somers Town where Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin lived during their short marriage. I walked where Mary and Fanny had walked; passed the church where Godwin and Wollstonecraft married; the churchyard where Wollstonecraft was buried (her remains have since been moved to Bournemouth), and where Shelley and Mary met to plan their elopement. Their ghosts clutched at me as I hurried to and from Euston, so much so that one afternoon I decided to walk to Somers Town and see the wraiths close up.

I already knew that the terrace of eighteenth-century dwellings known as the Polygon had been demolished long since, remaining like a ghost of itself only in a street name. Gone, too, were the two fields across which the family would see their home drawing closer as they came home from an outing. On the council flats at Oakshott Court there is a brown, circular plaque recording that Mary Wollstonecraft lived in a house near the site. I don’t recall seeing any mention of Godwin. There is nothing here that Mary and Fanny set eyes on, except perhaps the sky, and no doubt that has changed as the quality of air pollutants has altered.

Even so, Mary Wollstonecraft was a vivid presence to me. I wondered how differently things might have turned out for Fanny, for all of the people at 29 Polygon, if Mary Wollstonecraft had lived. I wondered what, as a grand old dame of letters, she would have thought of having Charles Dickens for a neighbour when his family lodged at No 17. I wondered how she would have felt if she had been able to look back from the afterlife and watch her sweet child’s struggles. I wondered what she might make of the paths women have taken if she could see the sex shops and lap dancing clubs, the raucous, plaid-skirted girls tumbling out of school, the bag lady shuffling up the steps of St Pancras Church.

There are as many stories as there are people, and more, for lives are retold as the present requires, or as memories change, or as others bend them to their own will. Todd suggests that none of the people who surrounded Fanny were altogether innocent of her death. I am sure there are others who will not agree with her portrayals of Shelley, Godwin, Mary, or Claire. But it was not their stories I was thinking of last weekend. It was a memory of Mary and Fanny Wollstonecraft, mother and daughter, I carried with me along those Somers Town streets.

Death and the Maidens: Fanny Wollstonecraft and the Shelley Circle, Janet Todd, Profile Books 2007

Mary Wollstonecraft: The Collected Letters, ed Janet Todd, Penguin Classics, 2004

Shelley: poet, predator and prey – review of Death and the Maidens, The Observer, 1 July 2007 - http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2007/jul/01/poetry.features

Writing for Nobody

2010-11-22T12:44:00.005Z

I love reading other people’s diaries. Obviously I mean the historical ones, which makes it alright to pry. Or, if I was interested in the living, then it would be fine to read a diary intended for publication by its author – which raises the question about how far any diarist intends his or work for an audience. Did Pepys, as he scratched the smutty bits in his secret shorthand, really hope that no one would ever read them? Did Frances Burney when she addressed her diary to “Nobody” really accept that only Nobody would read it?

I don’t know, but I do know that both diaries are terrific reads. Diaries are wonderful for all sorts of reasons. They are great for historians. They’re great for historical fiction writers. And they have a meaning all of their own, though what that meaning is is hard to define.

I’ve been reading the diary of Joseph Farington RA (1747 to 1821) for the years 1796 to 1798. Farington was a landscape painter, an active member of the Royal Academy, a husband, a member of the Society of Antiquaries, and an avid gossip. You follow him as he deals with artists whinging about where their paintings should hang in the Exhibition; lobbying the Treasury for tax breaks for artists; studying the reviews of his own work – which he has pasted into his diary; doling out charity to impoverished artists and their families. You follow him to friends’ weddings, to club meetings, to election meetings, to dinner after dinner – the last so important to him that he usually draws a little diagram of the table and marks where everyone was sitting. You listen to the advice he gives to his pupils, younger artists, women artists.

And above all you listen to his gossip. And how he loved to gossip! Hearsay was the ink he dipped his pen in, and nothing he heard was unworthy to be recorded. Thus you learn from him that: “Fox rises a little after 8 – breakfast at 1/2 past 9 – dines at 4 – Coffee & Tea at 6 – light supper at 10 – bed at 11 – drinks about a pint of Port at 9 after dinner – reads aloud 3 hours every evening after tea – a translation from Livy.”

What people earn and how they spend it fascinates him. “Emanuel the drawing master at Lynn asked…25 gns a quarter for 2 lessons a day”. Lady Mansfield “had £5000 a yr left her as a jointure by Mansfield part of which was to go away if she married again”. Two new swords cost “12 guineas”. Romney got “300 gs for a picture”. “Two fowls sell for Sixpence” on the Isle of Man. Slaves in Demerary fetch on average “abt £50 a head”.

You learn that Lawrence is “a male coquet”, that Fox and Mrs Armstead are inseparable, of Opie’s divorce and remarriage, Sir Brooke and Lady Boothby’s separation. You listen to Sam Lysons tell Farington that he heard at dinner last night that Mrs Dunnage’s brother-in law-found her in bed with Sir Thomas Turton, who is married and has five children. Later you follow the court case with all the interest of any Hallo magazine reader.

Farington chatters about royalty, politicians, artists, actors. He obsesses about his and his friends’ health. He enthuses about the discovery of a top-secret painting “process”, a technique supposed to have been employed by Titian. And on and on: there’s so much here it’s impossible to do it justice.

Marvellous stuff for anyone interested in the eighteenth century, but as I hinted earlier, far more than that. But what? What is it about diaries that is so gripping? What is this glamour that the dead exercise over our minds? Is it that their lives are done, their perplexities resolved, so that we who come after have the comfort of seeing, or imposing, patterns that they could not have seen when they lived? That in seeing how their suspense ended – that greatest suspense of all: how and when will I die? – we can for a while forget our own? That we can enjoy with them a special kind of relationship, one we cannot get through the exchange of words with the living where egos clash and muddy everything?

Then there’s the miracle of their survival: how many documents do not survive, how many stories are never heard? There’s the thought of that other person’s long-dead hand moving across the page, recording his or her thoughts and feelings so that we can discover them today and think and wonder. And there’s the past, that strange, unknowable, unfathomable past that for all the research in the world (and all the cant of “historical accuracy” in historical fiction) breaks like a bubble the minute we think we’ve grasped it.

Perhaps diaries exercise such a fascination because they are ghosts, and ghosts are marvellous things.

Free at Last

2010-11-13T12:32:00.004Z

One thing I saved up from my mini account of what I saw of the Historical Novel Society’s Conference in Manchester in October was the workshop Creative Writing, Creative Reading: Bringing the Past to Life. What, I thought as I pondered the programme, is that about? I had no idea. So I went.

The session was run by Orna Ross, an Irish novelist and teacher of Creative Intelligence. Creative Intelligence: right. Well, Orna defines it as “the ability to own and hone our innate creative potential…by understanding how the creative process works and learning to apply it.” She believes that our formal schooling, with its obsession with measurement, analysis and efficiency, has stifled our creative intelligence. I picture this as the Gradgrindian world that Dickens described so wonderfully in Hard Times: the world where innocents are murdered by facts, by rules, by a pair of scales. I don’t think anyone has exposed this outlook any better than Dickens.

But doing is always better than talking about doing, so Orna set us an exercise which was an introduction to the technique of FREE Writing. She gave us a topic “money” and three minutes to write about it. We were to write as fast as we could, without worrying about the niceties (punctuation, spelling etc), and without stopping. The idea is that the technique allows you to resist the inner censor – you know, the one who’s always telling you to be sensible and get a proper job, not pretend you’re a writer. The benefits of the technique are numerous, for example it helps you connect both to your inner self and with the world around you.

After about a week or so of FREE Writing you take two coloured pens and you read over what you’ve written, and you highlight insights in one colour and actions with the other. You don’t have to translate the actions into a to do list; just recognise them. Eventually you will find yourself doing them, because intention and attention work together.

Orna’s work looks back to the earlier work of writers like Dorothea Brande and Julia Cameron. Brande’s Becoming a Writer is almost required reading and if you’ve got a copy it’s probably as well-thumbed as mine! The technique of FREE Writing is very similar to Cameron’s “morning pages”, when you sit down every day and write in the same uncensored, stream-of-consciousness way. The difference, Orna explained, is that Cameron hasn’t focussed on the “speed” aspect of this kind of exercise. But both techniques are a kind of meditation, a “meditation on the page”.

If my Brande is well-thumbed, I’ve already had to buy another copy of Cameron’s The Artist’s Way as my first one fell apart. I’ve used it for years and I go back to it again and again. I don’t do morning pages daily but I do use them during difficult periods or just whenever I feel the need. The FREE Writing technique is another tool to add to my creative armoury, and I’m grateful to Orna to introducing it to me.

If you want to find out more about Creative Intelligence visit Orna’s website
Orna Ross - http://www.ornaross.com/

For more on Julia Cameron's The Artist’s Way see http://www.theartistsway.com/

Catching Up Part 2

2010-11-04T16:09:00.001Z

I’m gradually catching up with life! Here’s Part 2 to prove it.

Mary Sharratt, Historical Novel Society Conference, 17 October – I knew nothing about Mary or her book Daughters of the Witching Hill, but she gave such an interesting and engaging talk about the history behind the novel that I have added it to my reading list. Memorable moment: listening to her read – she has a lovely accent!

Manda Scott, HNS Conference, 17 November – Manda was supposed to be talking about author/publisher relationships with her publisher Selina Walker, but unfortunately Ms Walker could not make it. Instead, she gave us some wonderful – and funny - insights into how her writing career got started. Memorable moments: actually there are so many that I’m cheating and picking three. Manda said the f word. Thank god: it made me feel more at home. Manda told us how the gods told her to write her Boudica novels when she was on a vision quest. Manda told us how Christianity came into being and showed up Paul as the villain. Wild language, wild theories, wild woman – what’s not to like?

Hilary Green, HNS Conference, 17 November – Hilary was talking about love and war. Not big topics then, and all fiction can be fitted into them – there’s always love of someone or something, and there’s always conflict, if not actual war. Her books are set in WW2. Memorable moment: offering to sell us 4 paperbacks for £20 or 4 hardbacks for £25.

Jean Fullerton, HNS Conference, 17 November – East Ender Jean gave a talk about doing historical research. There wasn’t much I didn’t know already but it was well presented by a likeable speaker, and there’s never any harm in being reminded of things. Memorable moment: Jean showed us some old photographs of the streets where her stories are set and talked about how she sees her characters going about them. As a writer who also sees her characters moving about before her very eyes it was encouraging to see that you can appear perfectly sane and sensible (for so Jean struck me) while doing this.

Sarah Dunant, University of Bristol, 26 October – Sarah Dunant gave a wonderful lecture on how she used Renaissance art in her work and talked about the links between art and literature. She’s a great speaker, fabulously erudite, and is absolutely brilliant at giving a fascinating response to even the most unpromising questions. Memorable moment: Sarah included my favourite painting in her presentation – The Doge of Venice by Bellini. The hours I’ve spent in front of this sublime canvas!

Manda Scott on Rome, Boudica and shamanic dreaming - http://www.mandascott.co.uk/about.aspx

Love and war - Hilary Green explains her theories and the history behind her books - http://www.hilarygreen.co.uk/

Visit the East End with Jean Fullerton - http://www.jeanfullerton.com/

Sarah Dunant - http://www.sarahdunant.com/

The Doge of Venice - http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/giovanni-bellini-doge-leonardo-loredan

Catching Up Part 1

2010-11-02T15:39:00.003Z

My poor old blog has been neglected lately. I’ve been horribly busy and struggling to keep on top of things, but now the house has been excavated from under tons of dust I can look about me and reflect on what I’ve been doing. Or, more accurately, who I’ve been seeing – and I’ve been very busy indeed seeing other writers! So, as I can’t write about every event in great detail I shall recall one memorable moment from each. Here’s Part 1; Part 2 to follow!

Howard Jacobson, Topping & Co Bookstore, Bath, 13 September – the author pre-Booker prize making us laugh in Topping’s much-loved (by me) book store. Memorable moment: Jacobson suggests that all novels should be comic novels.

Martin Jarvis, Cheltenham, 10 October – a reading of two Jeeves and Wooster stories under the gaze of the angels of the Everyman Theatre. Memorable moment: listening to his “out takes” as he read the same sentence two or three times to satisfy his Radio 4 producer, each time with a slightly different inflection, and realising what a jolly skilled reader the blathering blighter is.

Stephen Fry, The Forum, Bath, 15 October – an event organised by Toppings in the fabulous art deco former cinema. Fry and the building matched one another perfectly: stylish, classy, and bordering on national treasure status. Memorable moment: Stephen telling us how he fell in love with words when he was ten, watching a film version of The Important of Being Earnest and hearing “you are the visible personification of absolute perfection”. Well who wouldn’t fall in love with that?

Maria McCann, The Mechanics Institute, Manchester 16 October – the event was Pages Ago: Historical Readers’ Day, part of the Manchester Literature Festival, and a taster for the Historical Novel Society Conference at the same venue the following day. Memorable moment: Maria told us she still has a day job and writes on her days at home.

Andrew Martin, The Mechanics Institute, Manchester 16 October – still in Pages Ago, Andrew talked about how to create atmosphere in historical fiction. An intelligent speaker who’d prepared his material and talked to the point, with a great many interesting things to say about creating atmosphere using nature, weather, and darkness. Memorable moment: Andrew telling us “I like the crepuscular mode”. Crepuscular: one of my favourite words.

Howard Jacobson on how all novels should be comic - http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/oct/09/howard-jacobson-comic-novels

Martin Jarvis on reading Jeeves and Wooster in 2007 - http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article2551936.ece

The Forum, Bath - http://www.bathforum.co.uk/1/history.html

Topping & Company Books - http://www.toppingbooks.co.uk/

More on Andrew Martin - http://www.jimstringernovels.com/

e-Make it so

2010-10-15T08:59:00.004+01:00

E-readers do get a lot of publicity, don’t they? Virtually every Bookseller news round up has at least one article about them. There are websites and blogs devoted to them. Print journals carry articles about them. They’re big on the agenda at the Frankfurt Book Fair. Perhaps it’s hardly surprising when you think that e-readers are in the hands of some of the most powerful technology and communications firms in the commercial world.

One wouldn’t like to accuse e-reader manufacturers of having a vested interest of course, but sometimes it does feel like a conspiracy to shove the things down your throat. Amazon can’t do enough to push its Kindle. They even have a link to the publisher on the webpage of books that are not available as an e-book so you can tell them you want to read it on a Kindle. That’s consumer power for you, isn’t it? Or perhaps it would be if the button also gave you the option to ask the publisher to drop the price, or to publish more books like this and less like that – or even to ask Amazon to shut the f up about its Kindle.

E-readers, we are told, are far superior to the printed book. The same size and weight as a paperback, but one e-reader contains scores of books. How great is that? Very convenient if I’m going on holiday; saves having to pack half a dozen bulky books. Unless I’m driving, in which case it doesn’t matter how many books I shove in the car. I don’t know about you, but I don’t go on holiday that often. The bulk of my reading-on-the-go is done on train or bus journeys, at lunchtimes, in waiting rooms, and I usually find one book in my bag is enough. I haven’t yet mastered the knack of reading more than one at a time.

Still if persuasion doesn’t work, then perhaps fear will. E-readers are making the printed book obsolete, along with newspapers and magazines. If I don’t buy an e-reader I won’t be able to read at all! In the United States one in ten Americans owns an e-reader and e-books already account for 15% of the books market. E-book sales are estimated to account for between 2-5% of total UK book sales. One estimate is that this will increase to 10% within the next four or five years.

Hang on. If one in ten Americans own an e-reader, doesn’t that mean that nine in ten don’t? If 15% of books currently sold in America are e-books, doesn’t that mean that 85% aren’t? And if the UK e-book market is going to expand at such a heady rate that 90% of books sold will be traditional print books, do I really need to rush out and buy an e-reader?

Well, perhaps I do if I want choices. It might be nice to have the option of buying a book in hard copy or e-copy. E-readers are funky machines and they’re getting better – and cheaper - all the time. So I’ve bought a Sony e-reader: it’s light, pretty, has a nice screen and supports a number of formats including pdf and word documents.

For therein lies the rub of the e-reader. Far from increasing my choices, it limits them. If I want to buy an e-book I’m restricted to a particular format. That means that many books just aren’t available to me. I can’t shop on Amazon as I don’t have a Kindle. The Sony comes with a list of bookshops I can shop at though, bizarrely, I’ve discovered that the Sony e-book store, with its hundreds of titles, is only available in Canada and the US. I don’t like being told where I can and can’t shop. If I want to buy a printed book I can go into any bookshop in the world – or on line - and end up with a product that is formatted and ready to use (with no risk that the batteries might run out while I’m reading it).

The retailer I can shop with is Waterstones, but they don’t go out of their way to make e-book shopping easy. The website is a horror: on one pc I can’t complete a sale because the “submit” button doesn’t show. This, they tell me, is because of my pc security settings. I change them. No improvement. On another pc I can complete the sale – but I can’t view the website properly; it comes out as a list and I have to scroll acres of white space to find any information. My husband reports the same viewing problem on another pc. So that’s 3 pcs on which I can’t both see and buy. But come on Waterstones: if every other e-retailer can manage to provide me with a useable website and working checkout why can’t you? Do I have this problem at John Lewis, Hawkshead, White Company, Amazon, et al?

And, friendly though my local bookseller is, I’ve never been asked to provide my name, address, job title, business address, and telephone numbers before I’m allowed to buy a book. If you shop for an e-book with Waterstones, you will be as you’ll also have to create yet another account and password (in addition to the one with the retailer) with Adobe Digital Editions before you can download your purchase. Once upon a time you could define people by the books they collected: in the future I suspect it will be by the log ins and passwords they collect.

Maybe I’m beginning to wonder if I should have bought a Kindle...or maybe I should just stick to what’s easy, convenient and readable. A book.

Stephen Fry has suggested that because of e-books bookshops could go the way that blacksmiths’ did when cars came in; their numbers will reduce, perhaps drastically. Maybe so; but we all know that horses didn’t disappear and that some people still ride for pleasure though it’s not a necessity any more. Thousands of people are still buying typewriters in preference to computers. Perhaps it’s true that in future more people will read on e-readers than will read printed books (though looking at the figures I can’t feel quite the same excitement as the e-reader manufacturers do – and if my experiences to date are anything to go by the e-reader really has nothing better to offer me than does a book). Captain Jean-Luc Picard often relaxed at the end of a long day on the Enterprise with a real, bound, copy of The Complete Works of Shakespeare in preference to reading it digitally. And if it’s good enough for Captain Picard, it’s good enough for me.

Stephen Fry says Bookshops could go way of blacksmiths 16 September 2010 - http://www.thebookseller.com/news/128629-fry-says-bookshops-could-go-the-way-of-blacksmiths.html

…but he also says the “paper book is not dead” Sky News 13 September 2010 – http://tinyurl.com/33dl324

E-books: the end of the word as we know it, The Independent 7 October 2010 - http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/ebooks-the-end-of-the-word-as-we-know-it-2099796.html

Why typewriters beat computers, BBC, 30 May 2008 - http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/7427237.stm

See also No typewriter for old men: Cormac McCarthy to part with beloved Olivetti - http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/dec/01/cormac-mccarthy-auctions-typewriter

Unreadable books

2010-09-25T12:10:00.004+01:00

One night when I was very young I was crossing a bit of wasteland in Sheffield when I said to my companion, “I never leave a book unfinished.” Struggling to explain myself, I added, “The author has gone out of their way to try and tell me something –to express something – it seems wrong not to read their book.” “That’s as deep,” returned my companion in broad Scouse, “as a muddy puddle.” For these were the sort of young men I went to university with.

Since then I have discovered, sadly, that there are unreadable books. It isn’t necessarily that the books are “bad”, though it might be. Occasionally a book is so bad I’ve flung it against a wall; once I even trampled on one. (And no, I won’t tell you which it was. It might be your favourite.) To qualify for this thankfully rare treatment a book must exhibit something cynical in the workmanship. It will be a smug, complacent, passionless piece characterised by sloppy thinking and lazy writing.

But most books have something to offer and I’m prepared to accept that even if I don’t like them, someone else will. This can be disconcerting, especially if I’ve just lobbed the latest big thing across the room, the books everyone’s reading, the Bookers and Oranges, the reviewers’ darlings, the book club choices. At times like this I doubt my literary sanity: What am I missing? Why can’t I see it? Is it me that’s mad or everyone else? In these cases it’s best to quietly slip the book into the Amnesty International pile and say nothing. Never, ever, criticise a popular book, my friend! It will only bring down wrath upon your head.

Badly written books aren’t necessarily unreadable books. In fact, a book by someone who hasn’t the least feel for language and only the weakest hold on grammar can be perfectly readable. Its badness might even be part of the pleasure of reading it. What a relief not to have to attend to the quality of the writing and just get on with enjoying a good story! (And if it is a good story is it a ‘bad’ book at all…?) A book may survive a preposterous plot, silly characters, and dialogue like this:-

“You’re just in time,” said Chloe, “we’re giving a dance next week.”
“A dance! How peerless! But I’ve nothing to wear.”
“Oh, that’s all right. It’s a ‘drency’.”
“That means fancy dress,” I explained to Peter. “When we all lurked together as students we had a lot of portmanteau words. ‘Prill’ means ‘pretty foul’, and it is a nice crinkle-your-nose-in-disgust word, isn’t it?”
“Ah, but our most useful word was ‘cuxt’,” said Jo.

F Tennyson Jesse’s The Milky Way (1913), scoring high in all three categories. In spite of it, I read the book. Fey, gushing, and downright daft, yet something in it appealed to me: the otherness of the lives and people, their passion for art, even its outmoded style. And tucked away amongst all the nonsense is some beautiful prose: descriptions of the sea, the south of France, sunlight on water. Of course, I know no one reads books for description these days. Words only exist to rush us through the plot or convey information; why waste time on seeing beauty in them as well?

Books I have no intention of reading may, for all I know, be quite readable. I read scores of book reviews but I buy only a fraction of the books mentioned. It’s just that the setting, story, characters, style, or genre of the rest simply don’t appeal to me. And there are already so many waiting on the shelves! On the other hand, an unreadable book is necessarily one I am drawn to.

Take Thomas Hardy’s The Dynasts. Here is a book I have wanted to read for years, Hardy’s retelling of the Napoleonic Wars written as an epic-drama meant for reading, not performance, intended says Hardy, “for mental performance, and not for the stage”. What an intriguing idea - what an exciting experiment – what a stirring subject! While Hardy is not one of my favourite writers I have enjoyed many of his novels and found his work and ideas interesting. Then, too, The Dynasts was a challenge. I’d heard that no one reads it. Ah hah! thought I, Bet I can.

I opened the book with excited anticipation. I began to read. I began to wonder. I began to realize. It is an unreadable book.

Yet how can this be? Here are passion, ideas, theories, vision, interesting characters, daring devices, and crafted writing. But what is one to make of this:-

Hold what ye list, fond unbelieving Sprites,
You cannot serve the pulsion of the Byss,
Which thinking on, yet weighting not Its thought,
Unchecks Its clock-like laws.

Or this speech from a Lady:-

Something uncanny’s in it all, if true.
Good Lord, the thought gives me a sudden sweat,
That fairly makes my linen stick to me!

Or

These are the Prime Volitions, - fibrils, veins,
Will-tissues, nerves, and pulses of the Cause,
That heave throughout the Earth’s compositure.

If you want to explore Hardy’s philosophy then you must study this book. If you’re looking for a topic for a dissertation this is dripping with them. If you admire Hardy you will not cease until you have got yourself a copy and devoured every word. But it’s unreadable.

Or perhaps it’s my literary sanity that’s at stake. Michael Millgate in his entry on Hardy in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography comments that although “The verse of The Dynasts has come to seem flaccid, its structure ponderous, and the cosmic apparatus of the Spirits perhaps a little absurd” yet “at the same time, it remains highly readable”. Flaccid – ponderous – absurd. It all adds up to unreadable for me I’m afraid.

And so ends my unreadable blog.

Playing Away

2010-09-09T14:08:00.004+01:00

Last Saturday I enjoyed seven plays, four of them at the Orange Tree Theatre, Richmond and three in the London Library.

The Orange Tree – a wonderful theatre I’ve mentioned before – had put on another staged reading of suffragette plays. This time we were treated to Edith by Elizabeth Baker, The Surprise of His Life by Jess Dorynne, and The Pot and the Kettle by Cicely Hamilton and Chris St John. In Edith a family gather to discuss the terms of the father’s will: to their surprise and horror he has left his retail business to his daughter rather than his son. In Edith’s absence they decide to sell the shop – but when Edith arrives she has other ideas. The Surprise of His Life tells the story of a young working class woman who is pregnant and has been deserted by the father: her father struggles to persuade the young man to marry her though he is a horrible piece of work.

Both had comic moments but the second was moving too as the girl faced her father’s wrath, confronted the ghastly young man, and learned of her mother’s and aunt’s experiences. The best for me though was reserved to last, with another delight from Hamilton and St John. A young respectable woman is charged with assault after attending an anti-suffrage meeting – only it turns out that she is an anti and her victim a suffragette!

Then off to the London Library for an afternoon in the reading room. I am very irritated by (mostly male I think) critics and writers who treat women’s fiction as if it is no more than a precursor to the superior and fully realised work of male authors. I am thinking, for example, of Eliza Heywood and Samuel Richardson. Having recently seen Sheridan’s The Critic I had Sheridan on the brain, and in particular his Mrs Malaprop in The Rivals. It’s often said that while he may have got the idea for a character who misuses words to comic effect from his mother, Frances – a successful writer in her own right – he vastly improved on it. Frances Sheridan’s prototype is Mrs Tryfort in her unpublished play A Journey to Bath. It was in order to read this play that I went to the London Library, finding it in an edition of Sheridan’s plays published by David Nutt in 1902 (edited by W Fraser Rae).

Well, dear sweet honied reader, I have to report that it is perfectly true that Richard Brinsley Sheridan took what was in his mother’s drama nothing more than the germ of an idea and made it into the glorious Mrs Malaprop of The Rivals. I had time to read two more of his plays: St Patrick’s Day which was laugh-out loud funny, and The Duenna, a droll and well-plotted piece in the tradition of Behn’s The Rover with closeted ladies, fiercesome duennas, Don Pedros galore, and some very comic songs.

Back then to the Orange Tree for the evening’s performance of Arthur Wing Pinero’s The Thunderbolt. I’d read two plays of Pinero previously, and admired them enormously: The Second Mrs Tanquerary and The Notorious Mrs Ebbsmith. I didn’t think I’d ever get the chance to see one of his plays performed but, once again thanks to the Orange Tree, here was another well-deserved revival. I’d tried to find a copy at the Library, thinking to read it before the performance, and I’m glad they didn’t have one. I was on the edge of my seat as events unfolded: discovery and counter-discovery as an unpleasant, greedy clan vulturise over the estate of their brother who has died intestate. The situation seems clear cut: the wealth will be divided amongst them. Then they learn that there is someone else with a right to the property. What follows is a most satisfying satire on greed and family relationships.

I love a good story, and The Thunderbolt certainly delivered that. There’s nothing like a will to get the fiction flowing. I hope to read some more Pinero in the coming months, and of course any more suffragette drama that comes my way.

The Thunderbolt by Arthur Wing Pinero at the Orange Tree Theatre – http://www.orangetreetheatre.co.uk/The-Thunderbolt/

Speculating Other Lives

2010-08-31T15:56:00.006+01:00

I’ve been reading two biographies of Mary Wollstonecraft: Janet Todd’s Mary Wollstonecraft: A Revolutionary Life, and Lyndall Gordon’s Mary Wollstonecraft: A New Genus (which I have only recently started). I do love a good biography and both books are enjoyable, painting very different pictures of Wollstonecraft (Todd’s unsympathetic portrayal of a moaning, nagging, inconsistent woman; Gordon’s “pioneer of character” scarred by her background of domestic violence).

I’m intrigued, though, by the way biography so very quickly moves into speculation, often on the slenderest grounds. Take Gordon’s theorising about Miss Mason, one of the teachers at the Wollstonecraft sisters’ school at Newington Green. Mary Wollstonecraft, Gordon writes, often referred to her as “‘poor Mason’, as though some misfortune were common knowledge”. Gordon informs us that “in most such cases the parents had lost their fortune, so that instead of fulfilling her destiny as a marriageable ‘lady’ the daughter was compelled to work as teacher or governess”. Miss Mason, we are led to suppose, is one such bereft marriageable.

Now, Gordon is perfectly right to mention that this was an all too common situation for poor daughters in the eighteenth, and indeed the nineteenth and early twentieth, century. However, touching though the image is, on what grounds is it the most likely explanation of poor Miss Mason’s condition? For all we know poor Mason may have walked with a limp, had a wall eye, or given birth to an illegitimate child and been abandoned by the father (another horribly common occurrence and one Mary Wollstonecraft herself suffered at the hands of Gilbert Imlay). Of course, in the last case it is unlikely that Miss Mason would obtain employment in a school, even given Wollstonecraft’s advanced views – she had a living to make after all - so we can probably rule it out. Even so, there are any number of explanations for the epithet “poor” that are just as likely as the one Gordon suggests.

Still, it’s a minor point about a minor figure in Wollstonecraft’s life (though no doubt what happened to Miss Mason was not a matter of minor significance to her). Things get a little bit more complicated in Todd, who speculates to such an extent that I began to think that “perhaps” was the most commonly used word in her book. Let’s look at the case of Mary Wollstonecraft’s brother Henry, indexed “Henry, uncertain fate of”. Henry, having been apprenticed in Beverley, suddenly disappears from the family correspondence. He may, Todd proposes, have run away from a harsh master. She doesn’t, however, think this accounts for the “complete silence [which] suggests something more extreme”.

A little consideration and she hits on the theory that Henry had gone insane, perhaps even tried to kill himself - “a common reason for incarceration”. This opens up the way to a page about the treatment of the insane in the eighteenth century, the number of asylums in Hull, York, and Hoxton, and madness in the Austen family. The fact that the Wollstonecrafts moved to Hoxton, where London’s major asylums were located, strengthens the case. We are therefore to believe that a family who out of embarrassment never again refer amongst themselves to their afflicted brother took enough interest in his fate to move to Hoxton with him. Unless they intended to visit him regularly this seems odd, particularly as Todd informs us that families “usually disposed of the defective very thoroughly”. If that were so, surely the best thing to have done with mad Henry would have been to leave him well out of the way in Yorkshire.

Well, of course Henry's insanity is perfectly possible. It’s also possible that the family letters referring to Henry, mad or sane, have been lost or destroyed. Perhaps the letters were burned because, along with news of Henry, they contained derogatory remarks about the drunken, impecunious head of the family. Or perhaps they were torn up (and Henry cut off by his relatives) because they referred to unspeakable acts carried out by the missing brother: he had contracted syphilis, or been seen going into a molly club.

The point is that there appears to be no evidence whatsoever to support the theory that Henry went insane and was put into an asylum. Even so, the theory is the foundation of a later speculation, when we learn that Wollstonecraft, Godwin and Joseph Johnson visited Bedlam in 1797 “perhaps to see an old friend or relative – possible even her brother Henry – or to provide Wollstonecraft with some background for her writing”.

There’s no harm in speculating, of course. It’s good to throw out ideas, provided it is perfectly clear that they are only ideas. Neither of these writers can be accused of trying to pass off theory as fact. Even so, some suggestions do seem to be based on the most flimsy reasoning, a sort of a + b = c where a = slender evidence, b = one of a number of possibilities, and c = conclusion. Dynasties have been founded on this kind of argument. Take Joan of Arc. Here we have:-

The woman who was burned at the stake in the Rouen marketplace on May 30 1431 was entirely covered by a penitent’s robe and hood (a – slender evidence).

The woman was not Joan of Arc but someone else in disguise (b – one of a number of possibilities). (She may have been swamped by the clothes because they were too big for her; she may have been badly beaten and her captors wished to disguise the fact.)

Therefore Joan of Arc survived the flames and went on to marry and have children (c – conclusion). Flimsy? I should say so. You’ll find more like it in Pierre de Sermoise’s Joan of Arc and Her Secret Missions.

But let’s be serious again. Todd and Gordon do not deserve to be mentioned in the same context as such crackpot theorising. It’s one thing to explore possible explanations of puzzling circumstances (why poor Mason? why no mention of Henry?) but quite another to invent puzzles and triumphantly solve them by rewriting the records.

These musings do make me wonder, though, about the role of speculation. Without it would biography be possible? If biographies confined themselves entirely to the known or recorded would they be very short and very dull? Would we miss opportunities to engage with the life and times of our subjects? Are biographers who speculate really historical novelists manqué? Like historical fiction writers they “fill in the gaps” and they imagine what people may have thought or felt in certain situations. The difference is they lack the skill to know what to put in and what to leave out (look, I’ve done this research on the treatment of the insane and I’m damned well going to include it). Should the skills of the novelist have any place in biography? What is the difference between fiction and history? What, for example, makes Tom Stoppard’s play Travesties fiction when it is just as possible that James Joyce, Tristan Tzara and Lenin met in Zurich as that Henry Wollstonecraft became a Bedlamite? Must we stray into the fog of authorial intention? Can we only assess a text if we have the author’s (or someone’s) assurance of what it is (this is biography, this is drama)?

Yes, it certainly is fun to speculate. I haven’t any answers – but I shall be thinking about these issues as I continue with Gordon’s book and any biographies I read in the future.

Puffing

2010-08-21T13:22:00.005+01:00

I am sorry to say it, people seem to go to the theatre principally for their entertainment!

So complains Sneer in Sheridan’s The Critic, and if that’s what people want that’s what they’ll get if they hurry down to the Chichester Festival Theatre and catch the double bill of Tom Stoppard’s The Real Inspector Hound and Sheridan’s The Critic. Since the National put the plays together in 1985, they’ve been widely recognised as a couple, and have even been taught as a pairing in schools. In some ways that’s a shame as it’s too easy to fall into the “compare and contrast” approach to literature (the characters of Richard vs Bolingbroke, images of war in the poetry of Brooke and Owen, etc, etc). They do make for an entertaining three hours, however.

I didn’t know the Stoppard play and I was surprised at how funny it was; the parody of the country house murder is wonderfully done. The comedy is spiked by a disturbing edge when the barrier between performance and spectator, here the critics Moon and Birdboot, breaks down. It’s a deliciously dizzying sensation to be an audience watching a play about an audience watching a play, especially when that play rounds on its audience and swallows them up. It made me think of the way many of us shuffle away from the front row whenever we go to a performance for fear of being picked on, of being sucked into the event and out of ourselves. It’s the terror of the child at the pantomime who dreads being called onto stage by some fearsome dame and made a fool of in some way she cannot understand.

I did, however, reread The Critic beforehand. This is a play in which the author hands it on a plate to the company. It’s funny on the page with, in the first act, some fantastic dialogue and even more fantastic characters. Who couldn’t make much of Sir Fretful Plagiary who, worse than a bad notice hates no notice; or Mr and Mrs Dangle, a couple who are weary of one another in private but pretend to be “loving and affectionate” in public for fear of being hitched into a story. Then there’s Mr Puff, who with shameless glee reveals the secrets of his profession, from the “puff direct” to the “puff by implication”. Lovely stuff, but the act is little more than the preliminary – the puff – for the main business of the piece, which is the rehearsal of Puff’s tragedy The Spanish Armada.

If the cast made great work of Act I, they really went to town for Acts 2 and 3. Puff’s dreadful play, made more dreadful because the actors have been given carte blanche to cut “whatever they found heavy or unnecessary to the plot” – which is just about most of the script – is hilarious. It’s rendered even more so by the mess the performers make of it. While Puff is lost in admiration of his work, the actors have nothing but contempt for it, “cutting and slashing” until not even Puff knows what’s going on. Who wouldn’t relish the role of the captive Spaniard Don Whiskerandos, who takes so long expiring that eventually the actor gets bored and stomps off grumbling “I can’t stay here dying all night”. Joe Dixon really does give the Don everything in a side-splitting performance – and yes, Joe, I did see you laughing beneath your comedy whiskers and I admire you all the more for it. Then there’s Tilburina who goes mad in white satin because that, says Puff, is the theatrical rule, with her confidante who goes mad in sympathy and is ordered by Puff to keep her “madness in the background”. Both were beautifully played by Hermione Gulliford and Una Stubbs.

It’s all there in the text and this wonderful production made the most of it. But Sheridan gave the best last. The stage directions ordain that the play ends with a battle between the Spanish and British fleets followed by a triumphal masque. The directions (I’m looking at the 1988 Penguin Classics edition, ed Eric Rump) are minimal: “Flourish of drums – trumpets – cannon, etc, etc…the fleets engage…music plays Rule Britannia…The procession of all the English rivers and their tributaries…etc begins with Handel’s water music – ends with a chorus”. What a gift: cannon – music – costume – marches – and etceteras! What follows is the most wonderful, barmy, chaotic, noisy, disastrous, and exuberant bit of madness I’ve ever seen on stage. I laughed until there were tears in my eyes.

I could tell you what I laughed at, but I don’t want to do spoilers. All I will say is that if I get a chance to see this production again, I’m booking front row seats (again: by a strange fate we were in the front row, and yes we were almost sucked into the performance when Mrs Dangle (Una Stubbs) asked Gerard to hold her champagne glass for her while she was dancing).

The two plays wonderfully parody their target genres: Stoppard and Christie’s The Mousetrap, Sheridan and the bombast of the eighteenth century tragedy. It’s a strange thing though, parody. We laugh at what we love: I did at any rate, for mock it how you will I still love a good fop, a witty woman, and a country house full of toffs bumping one another off. I never miss a Poirot (David Suchet’s marvellous creation), I wish they’d made more Inspector Alleyn, and I am an avid reader of eighteenth century drama. The affection shone through at Chichester, and especially in Puff, who the outstanding Richard McCabe made the butt of an affectionate fun. I love Puff: there’s a charm in his vanity, his enthusiasm, his pride and pleasure in what he has written, and the way he submits to the depredations of the actors while comforting himself with the thought that lop and top how they will, he will print every word. He is truly unaware of the awfulness of the piece: there’s a prelapsarian innocence in his complete lack of critical knowledge. Puff cares about his play, delights in his “trope, figure, and metaphor”, and it’s for that I love him.

For details of the production at the Chichester Festival theatre see - http://www.cft.org.uk/cft-productions_details.asp?pid=372

In St James’s Square

2010-08-08T12:53:00.004+01:00

What makes the perfect library? Is it one that still spends money on books, not just computers and DVDs? One that nevertheless uses modern technology to its fullest extent to make the best research tools available to its readers? One that never throws out books? One that has reading rooms that are genuinely quiet enough to work in? One that lets you borrow books for as long as you need them? One that offers you access to on-line catalogues and research databases from your own home? One with membership open to all?

They’re certainly the things I look for in a library. Not one that periodically throws out books and journals. Not one where you’re trying to work against a background of chatter, the rustling of food packets, the blare of mobile phones. Not one that culls its reference sections and moves the much reduced collections into tiny corners of its premises. Not one that thinks the bulk of its budget is best spent on computers. Not one that has bought into some Gradgrindian ideal of providing “information” and thinks it’s done its duty when people can Google. A good library is unashamedly intellectual. That’s why I’ve decided to splash out on a subscription to the London Library in St James’s Square.

The Library was founded in 1841 after a successful campaign by Thomas Carlyle and others to establish a library in the capital from which books could be borrowed, a service which was not provided by the British Museum. Carlyle was sick of the “importunate distraction” of the public reading room: the “buzz and bustle…waste of time in coming and going; waste of patience in waiting; add discomfort, perturbation, headache, waste of health.” The issue of libraries and health was clearly one that haunted the Victorian mind: in 1891 an advocate for free public libraries described a method of vaporising books with carbolic acid to disinfect them. As far as I know the London Library hasn’t introduced any such scheme, although the books are housed in stainless steel stacks on grilled shelves which no doubt allows for the bracing circulation of air.

Carlyle himself, after passionately pleading the cause of a city that was worse off than “the wretched fishy village of Reykiavik” which had a “Public Lending Library, free to all Icelanders”, resigned from the Committee and in the main kept out of the business of running the Library once it was established. He was, however, a great borrower. He took out the novels of Balzac and George Sand, the Latin chronicle of a monk at Bury St Edmunds by Jocelin de Brakelonda, while his wife Jane borrowed Currer Bell’s Shirley because some people thought she herself had written the Jane Eyre books and she “was curious to know whether the new one was up to my reputation”.

The Library is undergoing a major redevelopment, some phases of which are already completed. It seems to me, however, that the spirit of the place can’t have changed all that much. For all the computer terminals, photocopiers, and modern lighting, it’s still the books that dominate. I feel that if I went looking for Shirley I’d find the very copy Jane Carlyle read all those years ago. In the London Library I’ll be walking in the footsteps of Charles Dickens, Rudyard Kipling, George Eliot and Virginia Woolf; maybe sitting at a desk recently vacated by Tom Stoppard or Peter Ackroyd. Perhaps their shades will guide my pen, or at the least nudge my elbow when I’m typing. The London Library is not only a place to go and look up a few things or get a bit of today’s favourite commodity, information. It’s an inspirational place, and that is what makes a perfect library.

You can get some idea of what the London Library looks like by visiting http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_8743000/8743878.stm

The London Library website is at - http://www.londonlibrary.co.uk/index.htm

And finally - and absolutely unconnected - who wants to see something amazing? One of the highlights of our recent holiday in Scotland was a visit to Loch of the Lowes where we watched nesting ospreys via a live webcam in the visitors’ centre, before going out to the hide to see the birds with our own eyes. It was an experience not to be missed. You can visit the Scottish Wildlife Trust’s website now and watch live footage of these beautiful birds - http://www.thewebbroadcastingcorporation.com/swt/swt.php.

Abbotsford

2010-07-22T09:59:00.004+01:00

More poking about the homes of the literary great and the good this week with a visit to Walter Scott’s home, Abbotsford. Reminiscent of Walpole’s project, here is another attempt to recreate a Medieval atmosphere, this time by a man who fancied himself as a Scottish laird. It’s a lovely house on the banks of the River Tweed, which flows by wide and fast at the bottom of walled gardens. Inside is a harmony of stained glass, carved wood, bosses, finials, marble, ebony, swords and armour. There’s also a display of items Scott – rather gruesomely - picked up on the battlefield of Waterloo including a French eagle, a Polish shako, cuirasses. Tacky souvenir collecting is clearly not a new invention.

When I went to Monk’s House recently I was struck by a reference in the guidebook to Virginia Woolf’s light wearing of the mantle of literary greatness. This kind of hyperbole makes you shudder, but I suppose people do get carried away, especially when talking about their friends. (The remark was made by one of the Woolfs’ guests.) Imagine how much I quaked over the Abbotsford guide. Here I read of Scott’s “literary career without parallel”, learned that he is “the greatest of Scotland’s sons”, that his fiction was not only “to change the world’s fiction” but “transformed the way all subsequent novelists viewed the world”, and was told that he “pioneered both the historical and psychological novel”.

Now, I’m all for recognising genius where I see it but this seems to be doing it strong. Scott’s reading as a young man included Richardson and Burney. Are these novelists who had no grasp of the psychological? He also read the classics, including the Aeneid, which does not strike me as a text entirely devoid in understanding of the wellsprings of human behaviour. Perhaps Scott had not heard of fellow-Scot’s Joanna Baillie’s Plays on the Passions, published in 1798, in which she “attempted to delineate the stronger passions of the mind, each passion being the subject of a tragedy and a comedy”. It seems strange considering that he wrote the prologue to her play The Family Legend and that they corresponded for years. Baillie was as well-regarded as Scott, to whom she was compared by contemporaries. My guide book suggests that Scott “produced work on a scale far beyond that of...any... Scottish or British writer bar Shakespeare”. Baillie’s name too has been linked with Shakespeare. Harriet Martineau commented that Baillie had been told “every day for years...that she was second only to Shakespeare”. And if Scott invented the historical novel, what did Sophia Lee think she was doing in 1785 with The Recess, set in the reign of Elizabeth I?

I do not doubt that Scott was a great novelist and in fact I admire his work, having read a great deal of it over the years, and The Antiquarian in the last few months. What I object to is the idea of the Original Genius, the innovator who comes from nowhere and achieves wonderful things without any reference to the work of predecessors or contemporaries. Scott did not invent the historical novel, although he may, arguably (and I only say arguably mind; not having investigated the matter I cannot draw any firm conclusion) have extended its boundaries, or he may have pioneered a certain type of historical novel. Nor did he invent the psychological novel, whatever that may be. The term seems to me to be redundant: I have yet to read any novel that lacked any sense of the psychological. Nor (referring back to my guidebook) did he invent pathetic fallacy: since The Epic of Gilgamesh natural phenomena have mirrored and symbolised human crises. Nor was he the first writer in whom romance gave way to realism. Early women’s fiction is littered with romances in which the heroine ends up ruined, dead, or both and we are reminded that, dress it up how you will, love was a dangerous game for women. I’ll mention only Eliza Heywood, who (if we are to play the pioneer game) beat Richardson to it at “writing to the moment”.

I admit that this kind of gush is easy to mock, and of course I don’t expect a literary treatise in a guidebook. An enthusiast must praise his hero. But isn’t being appreciated for what one has achieved rather than what one has not the best form of tribute? Tell me that Scott took the historical novel in new directions, that he brought a particular insight to his delineation of character, that he described the interaction between humanity and landscape with a sensitivity all his own, and his stature as a novelist will make much more sense to me than that he is the greatest this or the pioneering that when I know perfectly well that such statements are either meaningless or not quite accurate.

For information on Abbotsford see http://www.scottsabbotsford.co.uk/

Happy Birthday Penguin

2010-07-09T14:17:00.003+01:00

I had a fascinating day and a half last week looking at penguins. I wasn’t at the zoo, but attending as much as I could of the University of Bristol’s three day conference celebrating Penguin’s 75th birthday. Bristol, the birthplace of Allen Lane, is home to the Penguin Archive, which contains editorial files, correspondence, photographs, papers from the Chatterley trial, and a collection of Penguin books from 1935 to date.

It was an Aladdin’s Cave of bookery. I started with the Reading Penguin 1 panel. George Donaldson, of the University of Bristol, talked about the clash of academic and commercial interests between David Daiches, general editor of the Penguin English Library (also known as the Penguin Classics Library), and the company. Penguin wanted introductions that addressed the “general reader” rather than academics and students, whereas Daiches felt that it was important that the introductions were academic and authoritative. Daiches eventually resigned over the issue. An amazing history, which caused me to wonder who was this “general reader”? Penguin must have wondered too, for they soon left this elusive figure to his own devices and aimed the Classics at sixth formers and under graduates.

Andrew Sanders of the University of Durham, who edited a Penguin Classics Romola, characterised the Penguin English Library as a “golden age”, which he took to be aimed at the “intelligent educated reader”. The list shaped what he read, and covered a range of literature ranging from classics, gospels, histories, novels, and from the 80s more modern novels. He praised Penguin for bringing out texts such as Clarissa and Scot’s Waverley. In a later talk someone commented that the Penguin Clarissa was not a comfortable read because it was so big! I read the Penguin edition for my MA and remember getting looks of amazement in cafes and waiting rooms when I hauled it out of my bag – but it was a marvellous read and I’m grateful to Penguin for making this and other wonderful texts easily available to this particular reader.

The highlight of the day for me was Simon Eliot of the University of London who took us back to the time when the general reader might be an Amenhotep or Tutankhamun with their noses buried in a “parchment back”. For all book history, said Eliot, begins with a reader – “a real reader”. He went on to set Penguin in a long history of flimsy, cheap texts ranging from pro-forma style Books of the Dead, an attempt to mass produce Martial’s work, chapbooks, ballads, serial publishing, and lurid thrillers on cheap paper with floppy covers.

Eliot may have been my highlight – I’m fascinated by the history of the book – but Christopher Ricks wasn’t far behind in the beaming stakes. He gave a witty, learned talk touching on the theme of patronage, and described his time as an editor of some of the Penguin Classics. Add to this talks on poetry, and a Q and A panel of Penguin people and you can imagine what a day I had!

I was back in the morning for the Penguin Marketing Panel. John Hitchin, Penguin’s first Marketing Director, told us abut Penguin in the 60s, when they launched Laurie Lee, Edna O’Brien’s second novel, Keith Waterhouse’s Billy Liar, the Penguin Poets series, and a host of other great works.

Dr Samantha Rayner, Senior Lecturer in Publishing at Anglia Ruskin University, gave an absorbing talk False Colours: Pan, Penguin and the Challenges of Marketing Historical Fiction. False Colours is the title of a Georgette Heyer novel, as if you didn’t know. (Actually, I didn’t.) Heyer, who was originally published by Pan, had strong views about her book covers. In the 50s the covers reflected the film genre, which was popular at the time. Covers in the 70s and 80s were more restrained with images in medallions, but incorporated contemporary hairstyles and makeup. Heyer herself liked the covers designed by Artur Barbosa – you can see examples of his work at several fan websites
( http://www.lesleyannemcleod.com/rw_art.html#barbosa has quite a few images). When in 1966 Penguin took on False Colours Heyer was not impressed; she thought their first design was cheap and nasty. An abstract effort failed to win her approval; she objected that it gave no idea of what the book was about. (You can see more Heyer covers including Penguin’s 1966 effort at http://teachmetonight.blogspot.com/2009/11/heyer-2009-sam-rayner-publishing-heyer.html, which is a précis of an earlier talk by Dr Rayner.) Eventually Heyer went back to Pan.

Dr Rayner’s talk was followed by Shanyn Altman on The Hayseed Chronicles, a book which was the doubtful beneficiary of what seems to me the weirdest marketing campaign any publisher has ever launched. It included spoof newspaper items and a website full of fake information, which apparently fooled even a BBC presenter. Unfortunately the campaign flopped and the book has not sold well. I can’t think of a publicity stunt more likely to put me off a book than this one. Did Penguin really think that making a fool of its readers was the best way to make them feel well-disposed towards the book? However, mine is not a view shared by Shanyn Altman, who thought the campaign was “brilliant”.

The morning ended with the Reading Penguin 2 panel, which ranged across issues around paratext, censorship, and a look at the first ten Penguin titles, known as the First Batch. Then off for a tour of the Penguin Archive at the University, and into the heart of Aladdin’s Cave. I’ve been told that lists are an absolute no-no in prose. It’s a view with which I happen to disagree, and in the case of the Penguin Archive I don’t think anything I could say could convey the wonder of the collection. There’s only one way to share the magic and that is simply to list some of the things I saw.

Signed copies of the First Batch including books by Dorothy L Sayers and Agatha Christie.

Grumpy letters from George Bernard Shaw.

A letter from Enid Blyton refusing to appear at the trial in defence of Lady Chatterley’s Lover because she didn’t think it appropriate for a children’s author – and her husband wouldn’t allow it.

A photograph of newly-weds Allen and Lettice Lane coming out of the church onto a path lined with Penguins.

A poem by Teddy Robinson in a book celebrating a Puffin anniversary.

Early copies of Worzel Gummidge and Barbara Euphan Todd’s editorial file.

John Lennon’s signature on a book of poetry.

For information on the Penguin Archive and the Penguin Archive Project see http://www.bristol.ac.uk/penguinarchiveproject/

For information on Artur Barbosa - http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/obituary-artur-barbosa-1577369.html

For information on Teddy Robinson (because - shamefully - none of the people I mentioned him to had heard of him!) http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/may/02/childrens-books-recommendation-lucy-mangan

Votes for Women

2010-07-03T12:00:00.003+01:00

The play is clever and witty, and it kept the audiences brimming with excitement and in roars of laughter.

So said the Pall Mall Gazette in 1909 of Cicely Hamilton’s and Chris St John’s How the Vote Was Won performed at the Royalty Theatre in London, and so say I of the same play given in a performed reading at the Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond in June 2010. The one act play is funny on the page, even funnier on the stage. I read it years ago in a collection of suffragette plays edited by Dale Spender and Carole Hayman, and I never thought I’d see it acted.

How the Vote Was Won is a very funny piece and, with Hamilton’s Pageant of Great Women, one of the most successful suffragette plays. Amongst the many feeble arguments put up against enfranchising women was the proposition that women did not need the vote because they had men to look after them. In the play women take men at their word, giving up their jobs and homes and turning to their nearest male relatives for support. Poor old Horace Cole, a clerk on £3 a week, finds himself with a houseful of female dependents – and they are funnier, smarter, and richer than him!

The play was put on in association with an exhibition at the Museum of Richmond, in collaboration with Aurora Metro Arts and Media. How the Vote Was Won, curated by Irene Cockcroft and Susan Croft, focuses on the role of the theatre in the suffrage campaign. The exhibition is on until 4 September 2010, and Aurora Metro will shortly be publishing the curators’ linked book Art, Theatre and Women’s Suffrage. (See http://www.aurorametro.com/March_10_Version/index.html).

After a sparkling reading/performance Irene Cockcroft and Susan Croft spoke about the background to the play and answered questions and comments from the audience. It was a rare pleasure to engage in a discussion conducted in such a good natured and cooperative manner. The afternoon was pretty much crowned when the first person in the audience to speak told us that the Pankhursts and others had been frequent visitors to her childhood home: her mother was a suffragette. It was a salutary reminder of how recent our franchise is, and lest anyone is under any misapprehension about this we should remember that it was not until 1928 that the suffragette demand for votes for women on the same terms as it is or will be granted to men was actually achieved. (Personally I think the limited 1918 franchise was an insult: but that’s another story.)

One thing does puzzle me though. On a leaflet advertising the How the Vote Was Won reading we are told that it has been put on “to celebrate the original performance at Twickenham Town Hall in 1910”. According to Hamilton’s biographer, Lis Whitelaw, the play was first performed by the Actresses’ Franchise League in a matinee at the Royalty Theatre, London on 13 April 1909. Susan Croft repeats this date in a 2009 collection of suffragette plays published by Aurora Metro. A brief trawl of the internet suggests that there were two Royalty Theatres in London, one of which may have been called the New Royalty Theatre in 1909. So, I wonder, when and where was the play’s “original performance”? Or does the reference to its “original performance” here mean the first performance of many which took place at Twickenham in 1910? If that is the case, the wording is rather misleading.

This confusion didn’t detract from my enjoyment of the play, of course. If I were to write my own Pageant of Great Women Cicely Hamilton, actress, writer, suffragette, would be one of its leading characters. Sadly, Hamilton’s novels are not easily available, except for William: An Englishman, published by Persephone Books, who specialise in reprinting neglected classics, mostly by women, in beautifully designed paperbacks. It is an astonishing book about a young couple caught up in the outbreak of the First World War; their situation seems humorous at first but becomes increasingly nightmarish. I’ve only managed to read a reference library copy of Life Errant, Cicely Hamilton’s autobiography, but what a story was hers! She served with the Scottish women’s ambulance unit during the First World War, and after the war worked on The Englishwoman and Time and Tide. As well as novels, plays, and the feminist classic Marriage as a Trade, she co-wrote, with Lilian Baylis, a history of the Old Vic, edited the press bulletin of the British League for European Freedom, and never stopped campaigning for women’s rights. I wish more of her work was available.

It’s certainly time that the theatre woke up to the fact that George Bernard Shaw and Oscar Wilde (wonderful as their plays are) are not the only playwrights whose dated plays are still worthy of performance and have resonance for us today. The Orange Tree Theatre deserves the highest praise for its support of a play that is only the tip of the iceberg of women’s theatrical legacy (and for many other reasons too – it’s a fantastic theatre). I only wish I’d seen their 2007 production of Hamilton’s Diana of Dobson’s; I hope it will one day make another appearance on their stage. There’s a chance that in autumn Orange Tree will put on a reading of another Hamilton one-acter, The Pot and the Kettle, which pokes fun at the “antis”. I shan’t miss it if they do.

You can read Hamilton’s and St John’s play How the Vote was Won in
How the Vote was Won and Other Suffragette Plays, ed Dale Spender and Carole Hayman, Methuen 1985
or
Votes for Women and Other Plays, ed Susan Croft, Aurora Metro 2009

Diana of Dobson’s is in New Woman Plays, ed Linda Fitzsimmons and Viv Gardner, Methuen 1991

Lis Whitelaw’s biography is The Life and Rebellious Times of Cicely Hamilton, Virago 1990

The Orange Tree Theatre - http://www.orangetreetheatre.co.uk/
Aurora Metro - http://www.aurorametro.com/
Persephone Books - http://www.persephonebooks.co.uk/index.asp
Museum of Richmond - http://www.museumofrichmond.com/

Slumming in Sussex

2010-06-24T17:38:00.003+01:00

I had a splendid day last Wednesday (16 June 2010) popping my proletarian nose into the houses and lives of the Bloomsbury Group. A fascinating programme of visits started at Berwick Church to see the Murals, then to Charleston, and on to Monk’s House. The outing was organised by the Friends of the Women’s Library. If you don’t know about the Women’s Library you are missing a national treasure. Situated in Old Castle Street, London E1 and now part of London Metropolitan University, it is a marvellous resource for women’s history. And – mark this all you university libraries whose mission seems to be to keep out as many people as possible – it is open to all. It’s an art gallery too and puts on some wonderful displays, including the most memorable exhibition Art for Vote’s Sake in 2003 which featured some of the beautiful embroidered banners used in women’s marches.

I’ve never been a huge fan of Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell’s work but I enjoyed the Berwick murals. The tradition of painting Biblical scenes in one’s own time and place is a time-honoured one, and it was fascinating to see Christ in Sussex. Naturally, the artists’ friends and family posed for the figures. The murals were done in war time and include figures of a soldier, airman, and sailor kneeling before Bishop Bell, who commissioned the murals, which rather depressingly reflect the link between church, state, and war. I thought it very forgiving of the church to turn to Grant, whose private life was not exactly orthodox, to do the work.

Charleston is a lovely house and, again, while I don’t have much feeling for the art I love the idea of it, the way that art and house are inextricably linked. This is a philosophy I associate with William Morris, who I love as artist and poet, and admire for his political commitment. It’s intriguing to see how the Bloomsbury artists used and re-used objects: an old beer crate, painted, becomes a box for logs, old blouses become lampshade covers. I must add that a most important aspect of any successful day out was provided for by the café which serves great lunches and wonderful cakes.

I suppose these houses are remarkable because of their art, but I suspect that many visitors go because of the people who once lived in them. It’s very odd, this rummaging around the lives of others. A friend of mine once remarked, when we were discussing the Pre-Raphaelites, that we know almost too much about them. I think the same could be said of the Woolfs and Bells. All those books by and about them, paintings by and of them, letters to and from them, the diaries written in the unshakable faith that their least thought or action is of infinite interest. I think of Leonard Woolf noting the gramophone records he and Virginia listened to after supper. Is dancing around the kitchen to the Four Tops worthy of such solemn commemoration I wonder?

How seriously they took themselves! How sure they were, too, of their privileges. We are told they lived a frugal life at Charleston, and of the discomforts of Monk’s House - guests complain of the cold. But it is the cold of the Big House, the frugality of wealth. I find this effort to underplay their privilege baffling. By what stretch of the imagination do country retreats, servants, and belonging to the society of lords and ladies, not count as privilege? I imagine what it must be like being able to get up in the morning and go straight to your desk, your easel. It is not only that your time and your energy are reserved for your art; it is the spiritual, the psychological, effect of knowing that art is your business. Let charladies and miners scrub and delve: you have your book to write, your painting to paint. You may struggle with your art, but you never doubt its seriousness. And this is part of their privilege too.

While the Woolfs were sitting in their sitting room at Monk’s House diligently recording their listening pleasures, Robert Lyon was putting paintbrushes into the hands of a group of Newcastle miners who were to become known as The Pitman Painters. Like Leonard Woolf, these men made records of their lives. They painted racing pigeons, their mates down the mines, their allotments, their wives making bread. But not for them getting up in the morning and going straight to desk or easel. They were working men with livings to make.

Now, I do not say that one mode of living is morally or artistically superior to the other. My personal preference would be for the life the Woolfs led: it sounds like heaven on earth, and like all earthly heavens it costs money. There are, on the other hand, artists who are happy to combine paid employment and art; for some of us this has not only practical benefits (we can afford to buy bread and roses) but artistic ones too (it feeds into our art; it gives us a break from our work; by concentrating on other tasks that mysterious creative bit of our brains is free to get on with having ideas).

There may have been Pitmen Painters who dreamed of devoting their lives to art. Others may have wanted to stay rooted in the lives they already had. There may have been people in the Bloomsbury Set who struggled to make ends meet: so-called genteel poverty (so movingly described by George Gissing in his novels, particularly The Odd Women) was a dreadful thing. Life - any life – is not easily reduced to a question of money or not money. It doesn’t matter whether someone is privileged or not, whether she’s Rosamund Lehmann or Ellen Wilkinson, Edith Wharton or Agnes Smedley. It isn’t being either rich or poor that makes an artist - which is not to say that being rich or poor doesn’t shape one’s art, and either state can stunt an artist’s growth. But I can see no point in pretending that one or the other condition does not exist - though in my experience it’s usually privilege that is downplayed. I really cannot listen with a straight face to talk of the Woolfs’ frugality!

For information on Bloomsbury in Sussex see http://www.bloomsburyinsussex.org.uk/

For Berwick Church Murals see http://www.berwickchurch.org.uk/page4.html

For the Women’s Library see http://www.londonmet.ac.uk/thewomenslibrary/

For Votes for Art’s Sake see http://www.culture24.org.uk/art/live+%2526+public+art/art18363

For the Pitman Painters see http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2009/jan/24/pitmen-painters-national-theatre

Topping times

2010-06-06T11:46:00.004+01:00

David Mitchell: what’s not to like? He’s intelligent, critically acclaimed, charming, self-effacing, courteous, and if Cloud Atlas (the only of his books I’ve read so far) is anything to go by, an interesting and talented writer – and he watches Dr Who. He proved all this and more on Friday 28 May in Bath at an event organised by Topping and Company.

I’ve referred briefly to Topping’s before. I hope that when I die I go to Topping’s: it’s heaven. The independent book shop in Bath has got hand crafted bookshelves, probably more signed books than you’ll see in any other bookshop, and friendly and knowledgeable staff. If you go for a browse they’ll make you a pot of coffee served in pretty blue cups and saucers. If you go to an event they’ll pour you a decent glass of wine. If you tell them you’re looking for a book by what’s-his-name and you can’t remember what it’s about but it’s got scholars in it and you think the author’s Canadian they’ll tell you it’s the Cornish Trilogy and take you straight to the shelf where it stands.

No day out in Bath is complete without a visit to Toppings. In fact, we often go to Bath just to go to Toppings. And they put on the most fantastic programme of events. Just look who’s coming: Simon Callow, Christopher Ricks, Emma Donoghue, and the frabjously wonderful Stephen Fry. Sometimes you are squeezed into the bookshop for cosy readings, sometimes you’re literary lunching in St Michael’s Church, but for David Mitchell we were in the lovely church of St Swithin’s in the Walcot Parish.

This eighteenth century church is special to me because of its connection with my literary heroine, Frances Burney. She is buried here with her son Alexander, and her husband, le Comte D’Arblay, both of whom predeceased her. The church also has a connection with Jane Austen, whose parents were married here. William Wilberforce married here too. So David Mitchell was amongst very friendly ghosts.

Mitchell never stops wanting to improve his work. Even as he read on Friday he stopped to remark that this didn’t sound quite right, or he’d rewrite that if he could. He was particularly worried about “the guard stood by the garden gate”, muttering something about repetition, though personally I thought it worked quite well. He said that his latest book, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, had been conceived in 1994, but he’d had to wait until he was a better writer before he could tackle it. Finishing the book had almost finished him! He talked about clichés (not necessarily a bad thing and at least a marker of what not to write about: a book set in Nagasaki mustn’t have a geisha falling in love with a handsome American), the transmigration of souls, death. Death worries him more the older he gets, he told us, and referred to the Dr Who episode where Queen Victoria says that ghost stories are not meant to frighten us but to reassure us that there is continued existence after death.

But I won’t go on about what David Mitchell said when you can much more interestingly hear the man himself talk about his new book on the Guardian Books Podcast - http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/series/books

You can also read the discussion of Cloud Atlas which is currently the Guardian Book Club’s choice at http://www.guardian.co.uk/books.

And for more on Topping & Co (who also have a shop in Ely) and their events see http://www.toppingbooks.co.uk/

For more on the history of St Swithin’s see http://www.walcotchurch.org.uk/history.php

Stockingers and Croppers

2010-05-24T11:41:00.004+01:00

The only good thing about having a fluey-throaty-coldy thing is that when you have gone past the unable-to-lift-aching-head-from-pillow-stage you can take advantage of the strangely emptied hours to read Very Long Books that under other circumstances might take months to finish. I’ve taken advantage of my not-yet-done-with-me cold to read several books connected with a novel I’m working on, and in particular the work of E P Thompson. I’ve galloped through Whigs and Hunters and enjoyed it enormously, and now I’m on Customs in Common, a collection of studies looking at how the customs and culture of working people resisted the march of what the ruling elite – and later historians - liked to give such names as enlightenment, reform, or progress.

I find Thompson a very refreshing read. It’s partly because it’s an antidote to the thing called Social and Economic History I was taught at school. It was not merely that this was dull – all those spinning jennies, mechanical threshers, and fattening pigs – but that I was troubled by some vague feeling that the whole thing was somehow fraudulent. In this history (as I remember it) everything was subsumed into the great scheme “progress”. Luddites and other rioters throughout the eighteenth century were silly fellows with no grasp of the significance of the events in which they were caught up. They rose up in the text books, burly chaps in corduroy trousers and big boots who moved and spoke very slowly. They pounded away ineffectually at the magnificent machines their superiors and betters had introduced and when they had done their backwards, blinkered worst those S and B, with patient benevolence, picked up the pieces and pressed on with their reforms.

It just didn’t ring true. I’d already done Roundheads and Cavaliers and the Battle of Blenheim. I knew there was always another side to the story. But not in the tale of Progress. Something was being left out.

It is thanks to historians like Thompson that that something has been put back in. His aim, he said, was “to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the ‘obsolete’ hand-loom weaver, the ‘utopian’ artisan, even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of posterity”. In his marvellous, passionate, often satirical, sometimes angry prose he demands that we look a bit closer, dig a bit deeper, ask a few more questions. Ask: is that the whole story?

Take the case of Mary Houghton, wife of John, who in 1788 was prosecuted for trespass when she entered a farmer’s fields to exercise gleaners’ rights. The lawyers argued about property rights, Mosaic law, the limits of charity, and she lost the case. Yawn. But Thompson wasn’t convinced. He suspected there was a lot more going on than simple trespass on a farmer’s land. He dug a bit deeper and a complex and fascinating story emerged, a tangle of relationships and interests, power and vulnerability, loss and gain, a story that takes us from Timworth to Bengal. And if that sounds like the blurb on the back of a novel, it’s deliberate.

Historian Peter King took up Thompson’s tale and dug deeper still. Between them they pieced together something of Mary Houghton’s life. She lived in the parish of Timworth, Suffolk, which was almost entirely owned by Earl Cornwallis. She was the daughter of a local husbandman. In 1762 she had an illegitimate daughter. Two months later she married John Houghton, a shoemaker with dissenting connections from a neighbouring village. Through a small property owned by Mary’s father the couple had access to a number of common rights, such as pasture. They must have made enough to live on as they paid at least one rate and did not draw parish funds.

Then they made the fatal mistake of blocking Cornwallis’s enclosure plans. The court case followed; the legal costs ruined them. They fell into debt and were forced to sell their property. It was purchased by Cornwallis. The Houghtons lost everything: their land, their common rights and their home, which Cornwallis demolished as part of his enclosing programme. The last we hear of Mary is that she is a widow living on the parish. As for Cornwallis, as Governor General of Bengal he went on to impose on India the same pattern of property rights and ownership that resulted in the ruin of the Houghtons with, in Sir Charles Metcalfe’s words, the destruction of “hundreds and thousands of proprietors”.

Mary Houghton. What couldn’t an artist make of her! The novelist could give her madness, genius, illness, lovers, disappointing sons or beautiful daughters (though I don’t think such wild embellishments necessary). The painter could portray her as the Amazonian leader of rebellion marching at the head of her sisters to assert their rights in the land. The quilt maker could pay tribute with an ear of corn on a square tucked away in a harvest pattern. For Mary Houghton’s is a great story, and it is thanks to E P Thompson that we have it.

Horace and Selima

2010-05-14T14:10:00.004+01:00

On 6 May 2007 Professor Sir Christopher Frayling unveiled a blue plaque at the London home of illustrator Edward Ardizzone. He spoke of his “passion for illustrated books”, which he also described as “an under-rated art”. Almost to the day three years later in Bristol he proved with his latest book, Horace Walpole’s Cat, that if it is true that illustration is an under-rated art, it is unjustly so.

Frayling was speaking on 7 May 2010 at an event which was part of the Bristol Festival of Ideas. This intellectual bash had been long overdue for Bristol. Cheltenham has its festival, Bath has its festival, but until 2005 Bristol had nothing comparable. Now we do, and it really is worth having. Topics to come this year include religious faith, art in the First World War, feminism, capitalism and lying (I wonder if the last two go together?), and you can be sure that I’ll be going to as many talks as I can. Though, just to prove how highbrow I really am, my favourite event so far is still Gerry Anderson on Thunderbirds in 2008. I loved Thunderbirds (and Fireball XL5 and Stingray) when I was a child. They seemed to me like the first programmes that actually told children proper stories with goodies, baddies, danger, suspense, and explosions.

But back to Horace Walpole and his cat.

Horace Walpole’s Cat tells the story – or several stories – of Thomas Gray’s Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat, Drowned in a Tub of Gold Fishes. It’s a wonderful exercise in connections, criss-crossing the threads between Johnson, Gray, and Walpole; cats, dogs and fishes; Gothic design, Chinoiserie, and Georgian interiors; society, art and pornography. Frayling pounces now on one connection, now another, with gleeful, gossipy relish, the breathless did you know? of the enthusiast. Did you know that Hodge was a name typically applied to an English countryman? Did you know oysters were cheap in Johnson’s day? Did you know that tabby was originally a kind of silk?

What’s particularly charming about it all is that Frayling also makes connections with the personal. In his prologue he tells us how his own goldfish, leaving Walpole out of his thesis, and a college cat called Hodge are interwoven with the goldfish, Walpole and cats in the book.

Published by Thames & Hudson, it’s a beautifully produced book. The paper is pale cream and carries the aptly chosen illustrations well. The book reproduces illustrations to the poem by Richard Bentley, William Blake and Kathleen Hale, together with Frayling’s commentaries on these wonderful and very different responses to the text. (There’s a brilliantly weird drawing by Bentley, by the way, in the Victoria and Albert’s Horace Walpole and Strawberry Hill exhibition which I wrote about last time – A Prospect of Vapourland – get a glimpse of it here - http://lwlimages.library.yale.edu/strawberryhill/oneitem.asp?id=484.)

After the event I asked Sir Christopher Frayling to sign my copy of the book and we chatted about Walpole, as you do. He’s a very entertaining speaker and if you get the chance to see him, take it. Failing that, buy the book and enjoy!

For the Bristol Festival of Ideas see website http://www.ideasfestival.co.uk/

For Sir Christopher Frayling on Edward Ardizzone see http://www.edwardardizzone.org.uk/christopher-frayling

Strawberry Hill for ever

2010-05-03T11:59:00.003+01:00

Last week I went to London for a day to look at a couple of exhibitions connected with the eighteenth century. My morning was spent at the Victoria and Albert Museum in the Horace Walpole and Strawberry Hill exhibition. This was a wonderful display of objects from the Thames-side house, as well as fascinating drawings and plans of the property showing not only how it was designed but something of what it looked like when Walpole lived in it.

What struck me was the number of objects in Walpole’s collection that were wrongly attributed. Francis I’s gilt suit of armour was never worn by the French king; a painting of the children of Henry VIII actually depicts three children of Christian II of Denmark; a portrait of Frances Duchess of Suffolk and Adrian Stokes shows Lady Dacre and her son Gregory Fiennes; early sixteenth century ebony furniture dates from some 150 years later; and coins from the reign of Elizabeth I are fake.

Of course, Walpole didn’t have access to modern scientific methods and scholarship, and like modern collectors he could be taken in by dodgy dealers. An inscription on a medieval comb linking it to Saxon St Bertha, for example, was added in the seventeenth century. Still, the errors were curious. Walpole had an enormous library – 7,000 books – yet in spite of this resource he was still unable to date and identify many of the items in his collection.

I like to think that he simply preferred his own, more colourful descriptions. I imagine that Frances Duchess of Suffolk was a much more racy prospect than Lady Dacre. Mother of Lady Jane Grey, she married a man who was not only 16 years younger but was her master of horse into the bargain. Mind you, Lady Dacre’s husband was hanged for murder so maybe there wouldn’t have been much in it…

Walpole didn’t get everything wrong, of course. The black mirror that Dr Dee used to summon spirits did belong to the good doctor. It’s a fascinating object and there’s something genuinely disconcerting about it: when you look into it you see your own ghost. What Walpole didn’t know was that it was Aztec. I suspect he would have found the idea that it had belonged to an Aztec priest much more exciting than that an Elizabethan necromancer once owned it.

There are many other wonderful things to see – paintings by Hogarth and Peter Lely, miniatures by Nicholas Hilliard, Cardinal Wolsey’s hat. I loved the Rowlandson prints, especially the antiquarian starting in amazement at Strawberry House – or the two maids peeping over the wall. If you can’t get to the V & A to see the print you can look at it on line – see http://images.library.yale.edu/strawberryhill/oneitem.asp?id=208. You can view many other items in this on-line catalogue of the Strawberry Hill Collection – this fantastic website has already been added to my favourites!

I watched a short video about the restoration work at the mansion, which reopens this autumn. I’m looking forward to visiting it, and will be keeping an eye on the Friends of Strawberry Hill website (http://www.friendsofstrawberryhill.org/) for updates. In the meantime, curbing my impatience, I pottered over to Lincoln’s Inn Fields and the home of another renowned collector, Sir John Soane.

The particular attraction was their exhibition Mrs Delany and her Circle. Mrs Delany was a great friend of my literary heroine, Frances Burney. Miss Burney (as she then was) described her meeting with the old lady on 19 January 1783, when she was shown the “new art which she had invented”. This was the “staining paper of all possible colours, and then cutting it out, so finely and delicately, that when it is pasted on paper or vellum, it has all the appearance of being pencilled, except that by being raised, it has still a richer and more natural look. The effect is extremely beautiful. She invented it at seventy-five!”. Miss Burney adds “They are all from nature, and consist of the most curious flowers, plants, and weeds, that are to be found. She has been supplied with patterns from all the great gardens, and all the great florists in the kingdom.”

Beautiful indeed is the effect, and something more besides. Mrs Delany’s “paper mosaicks” as she called them are noted not only for their beauty but for their botanical accuracy. No longer regarded as a leisured lady’s time-filling pursuit, they are recognised as accurate studies, many of which were based on the dissection of specimens and the meticulous reproduction of their constituent parts. She annotated the pictures using the Linnaean classification. Sir Joseph Banks, who sent her plants from Kew Gardens, paid tribute to their accuracy when he said that he could learn exactly what a plant looked like from looking at Mrs Delany’s flowers.

The exhibition in the Soane Gallery sought to bring out this aspect of Mrs Delany’s work by placing her in a botanical tradition and allowing her work to transcend the level of feminine accomplishments. Truly, the works are striking and yet…I couldn’t help being a little dismayed by the image of a woman fussing with bits of paper, scissors, and glue, nor stop myself wondering why botanical paintings and sketches weren’t accurate enough depictions of plants without all this tiddling about. Heaven knows women’s art has been insulted enough, but if this “new art” was indeed meant as a serious botanical exercise I couldn’t see what advantage it had over pre-existing methods. Perhaps I’ll understand it if I read the book that accompanies the exhibition, Mrs Delany and Her Circle by Mark Laird and Alicia Weisberg-Roberts. One more to add to the reading list!

I have to confess, though, that I found it all a bit too prissy for my taste. By way of redressing the balance I went to have a look at the Hogarths. A Rake’s Progress and the wonderfully topical An Election soon restored my equilibrium. This done, I went to the Wallace Collection restaurant and treated myself to afternoon tea.

Horace Walpole and Strawberry Hill is on until 4 July 2010 – see http://www.vam.ac.uk/exhibitions/future_exhibs/walpole/index.html

Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill Collection – on line catalogue –http://images.library.yale.edu/strawberryhill/oneitem.asp?id=208

For news about the restoration of Strawberry Hill see http://www.friendsofstrawberryhill.org/

Mrs Delany and Her Circle is on at The John Soane Museum until 1 May 2010 – see http://www.soane.org/next.html

Mrs Delany’s flower pictures were bequeathed to the British Museum in 1897 and you can see them on line – though flat images can’t convey the full effect – at http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/search_the_collection_database/search_results.aspx?searchText=Mary+delany&fromADBC=ad&toADBC=ad&numpages=10&orig=%2fresearch%2fsearch_the_collection_database.aspx¤tPage=2

London Book Fair

2010-04-30T13:22:00.001+01:00

I’ve received two comments about my blog about the London Book Fair published on 21 April 2010, both taking me to task for misquoting Isobel Dixon. It’s clear that I missed or misunderstood that part of the discussion concerning Foyles and its promotion policies, and I apologise unreservedly to all interested parties for getting this so wrong. It was certainly not my intention to cause embarrassment to or misrepresent any speaker, and I am very grateful to Isobel (and also to Eva) for taking the time to respond to my piece and not only put the record straight but give this insight into what are very complex issues.

Risky Literature

2010-04-21T10:06:00.004+01:00

I’ve been at the London Book Fair for the last couple of days. It’s disorientating to go from a quiet little room of one’s own to a vast hangar full of noise and people, from writing books to the world of selling them, to a place about books where you rarely see anyone reading one. It’s all talk, and fascinating talk at that.

Amongst the many interesting events – Kate Adie interviewing Hilary Mantel, the launch of the Orange Prize short list, the Author’s Lounge, a talk on selling books and organising events – the one I enjoyed the most was a debate entitled “Not to Dare: Has British Literature become risk-averse?” Chaired by Antonia Byatt, on the panel were agent Isobel Dixon of Blake Friedmann Agency, best-selling author and co-founder of the Orange Prize Kate Mosse, and recently retired Chatto editor Alison Samuel standing in for Robert McCrum, who had been stranded by the volcano.

Antonia Byatt introduced the session by describing the work of the Arts Council in supporting literature regarded as a market risk, such as poetry. 80% of published poetry is subsidised, and the Council also fund translation.

Isobel Dixon said that the publishing industry has a lot of optimists and gamblers, but the nature of risk has changed. People are more cautious, there is more conglemerisation, and books can fail because Sales and Marketing departments won’t take them. Independent publishers have the advantage of being able to move quickly and take risks, but larger publishers have to answer to parent companies and shareholders. She also commented that the trade is driven by the front list, so that risks are taken on new authors who may not even produce a second novel, and few authors get mid-list support – support for their second and third novels. More is at stake than money – there’s reputation too. Editors have to be passionate about the books they represent as they will do a lot of work for nothing before a book succeeds. It is hard to predict sales, so every book is a risk.

‘Has British Literature become risk averse?’ asked Kate Mosse. ‘No. Has British publishing? Yes.’ She agreed with Isobel Dixon that passion is vital. If an author writes a book only because she thinks it will sell it will have no integrity, and in any event she may be chasing a market that doesn’t exist by the time the book is ready. She defined literary fiction as fiction where language and ideas are a greater priority than plot and character, and felt that the gap between commercial and literary fiction has widened. For this reason any prize committed to the quality of text and the range of voices has a vital role to play. Without prizes a lot of literary fiction would have no market. She felt that while there are passionate editors in every publishing company, it is the independents who are reclaiming what publishing is about.

Alison Samuel took a different line. She had worked for a publisher that was originally an independent but was taken over by a conglomerate. If they had not been, they would not have survived. She insisted that publishing is an industry, a business, people have to make money. It is a gamble. They all agreed that British literature is not risk averse, but she challenged the implication that publishing should not be risk averse because it’s “literature” or “art”, and made an ominous reference to bankers. Editors have large egos because they have to back their judgements, they have to know they are right, but often they aren’t right and the Sales and Marketing people are not solely to blame. She described herself as “constitutionally risk-averse”, yet increasingly her career involved gambling with other people’s money; publishers gamble all the time with other people’s money. It is a strange business, but how different is it from being a banker? Publishers and editors are encouraged to have large egos, to insist they are right, but they need checks and balances.

Antonia Byatt commented that literary publishing is a long term investment, and asked if publishers are less willing to pick up authors. Isobel Dixon said she had seen authors turned down after their second or third book, and whereas previously a third book might have been bought on outline and chapter, increasingly authors were told to complete the book before it would be considered. She had recently read an article which said that all the risk is with publishers but the writer with low or no income also takes a risk (the average income of authors is around £7,000 pa). She also felt there is an obsession with youth. She questioned the way that authors are supported at the start of their careers, but dropped in the middle, although they have proved they can write and can only get better.

Kate Mosse pointed out that the point of prize money was to provide writers with a salary. It is much harder now to support people, and she felt the end of the Net Book Agreement had contributed to this. Yet she felt that authors now expect to make a living from writing, whereas when she started this was not the case. Alison Samuel responded that there are a lot of bad books, a lot of books that shouldn’t be published. She used to feel guilty about telling people in the slush pile their books were bad, but eventually she told herself that for these writers it was a hobby, they didn’t have to do it. She disagreed that publishers only wanted young writers, but reiterated that the whole thing is a gamble.

The debate continued by way of Katie Jordan and ghost writing, publicity by endorsement and word of mouth, and the role that writers, particularly best-selling authors, can play in supporting other writers, to consider the risks readers and booksellers are prepared to take. Alison Samuel felt that readers are risk averse, so three for two offers are a good way of encouraging them to try something new – they buy one they know and one or two they don’t. She also felt that retailers are definitely risk averse. Isobel Dixon considered how good booksellers are at promoting literature. Foyles, for example, do no promotion at all. (Note: Isobel Dixon has corrected this statement, please see her comments below.) People might regret the closure of some independents, but many closed because they were more expensive and never organised events. She felt that Amazon is the place for the second/third and mid list books that are not being promoted.

The debate ended and I left musing on the perennial tension between money and art. For me, one of the best confrontations with this issue is George Gissing’s New Grub Street. Gissing portrays the struggle between capital and creativity as a matter of life and death, as indeed it is. These days few writers can rely on their writing alone for their living; most of us have other jobs and we die a little every day when we go to them and not to our writing. Living in two worlds creates for some of us an uncomfortable dualism: you are writer and not-writer. You doubt your own commitment for surely if you were serious you would move to that garret? You get sucked into that other world, you succumb to other people’s agendas, you find yourself getting swept along in corporate excitement. On the other hand, you’re a writer even when you don’t have a pen in your hand, a keyboard beneath your fingertips; put crudely it’s all material, all transmutable experience. Besides, you’ve got to pay for the ink and the paper somehow.

I get home and reach for New Grub Street.

He's here!

2010-04-08T18:31:00.003+01:00

The last half of March was an anxious time. He was due to arrive on Saturday 3 April, but I was going to be in Italy and I’d miss him. We had a wonderful time visiting the Colosseum, the Forum and Castel Sant Angelo. A morning in Ostia was lovely. We went early, before the crowds, and found ourselves sharing the ruins with birds and lizards. Then on to Sorrento by way of Monte Cassino, where we visited the Polish Cemetery. I happened to be reading Richard Holmes on Wellington during the journey. The visit and the book brought back all my loathing of war, of the pomp and ceremony and cool language behind which this most dreadful of human failings is cloaked.

From these saddening thoughts on to Sorrento where as we sat carelessly eating and drinking a procession of cloaked and hooded penitents passed by. To terrible Vesuvius next and a hot walk to the top of the crater, climbing up from the ordure that infests the area around the ticket office: the dog shit and litter, dust and fume-belching cars and coaches, the reeking toilets with no running water. Even more offensive to the senses was the volcanic tat on sale from listing stalls.

On to the tragedy of Pompeii. I wondered about the sort of world that was where people sold food, made clothes, sat in beautiful gardens, while others suffered, the soldiers and slaves, prostitutes and gladiators, beasts and birds. Not much different from our own. Is everything human built on blood?

And often pausing to think: he will have arrived by now. I wonder what he will be like. Will he spoil everything? Will he change it all so much that you will no longer recognise it? Is he too young? What will he wear? Will the wonder abandon you and nothing remain?

I’d recorded it, of course, and as soon as I could after we got home I sat down to watch it. Oh, the fluttering of those final few moments before it started! The introduction…the new credits…the re-arranged music...and there he was. The new Doctor Who. And he was fantastic.

I’ve grown up with Doctor Who and (to quote Charlie Brooker) I bloody love him. I know people who think it’s something that is left behind with childhood. I disagree. Good stories, good characters, wit, humour, and a sense of something greater than we are: why would we want to lose these things? As the Doctor said to Amy when she protested that she had grown up, “I’ll fix that”. And he did.

Read Charlie Brooker on Doctor Who at http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2006/apr/15/tvandradio.theguide

The White Guard

2010-03-29T10:45:00.004+01:00

Whenever I try to talk about Mikhail Bulgakov I go all spluttery and purple-faced, my eyes water, I choke and gasp, and I might after a few minutes’ gibbering manage to squeak “bloody genius” – and that doesn’t express a fraction of the regard I have for his work. Mention The Master and Margarita and I fall apart completely. Refer to his novel The White Guard and I may just about manage to convey that it’s got the best ending of any book anywhere in the universe at any time.

Imagine, then, how much I was looking forward to seeing The White Guard at the Lyttelton Theatre last Saturday (20 March), in Andrew Upton’s “new version”. I read the novel in readiness, spent the afternoon at the splendid Wallace Collection, and then went to the theatre. The performance surprised me. The play was funny – and I hadn’t expected that. Yes, I expected humour – this is Bulgakov – but I suppose I had something darker in mind.

I was frustrated by not knowing how much of a new version Upton’s rewrite is. I rushed to Amazon on Monday morning, bought Six Plays edited by Lesley Milne, and raced through The White Guard wondering: what had been changed? An odd question perhaps, since this is a play which had the filthy hands of the censors all over it. Bulgakov was compelled to make many changes before it was finally passed for performance, and then only in the Moscow Art Theatre. The text I have is the 1926 censor-approved version. I spot some differences: Alexei doesn’t make a speech about the coming of the modern man, it’s the coming of the Bolsheviks that is the threat. The deserter with frost bitten feet isn’t shot, and the second scene of Act Two doesn’t seem quite so comic as Bolbotun’s repeated cries to the telephonist “don’t lose that connection” make it. Lena isn’t proposed to by all the men in her life, so Shervinsky’s comic response to her “boys” doesn’t feature.

But the humour is there: this is Bulgakov. Larion does walk dog shit on the carpet, spill red wine on the tablecloth, and get drunk. The scene when the Hetman flees is funny - and beautifully played by Anthony Calf. But once or twice the exchanges in the Turbins’ flat felt a bit too much like drawing-room comedy with their witty repartee, and the scene with Bolbotun could with just a little push have featured a Comrade Blackadderski. If Upton’s version of the play is a restoration of Bulgakov’s earlier version, it too seems to have left out some of the darker elements removed by the censors, for example a torture scene.

I don’t have - I wish I did – any of the pre-censorship versions, if they still exist, so I can’t say how Upton’s version fits with any other Bulgakovian vision of the work. But in the end the play works. It’s yet another of the many wonders of theatre, that there are so many different ways of approaching the same work. I would have played it more sombrely perhaps, but it doesn’t matter. It’s a great work, a great production, and if you can see it I say go. The laughter fades, but not the truth. And that’s pure Bulgakov.

And if anyone is thinking of making a film of The Master and Margarita then Terry Gilliam is the man to do it. Luckily he isn’t going to – read why at
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/book_extracts/article7013658.ece?token=null&offset=0&page=1

Booking information for The White Guard at the National - http://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/54551/productions/the-white-guard.html

The Wallace Collection - http://www.wallacecollection.org/

Quidve petunt animae?

2010-03-23T18:26:00.004Z

You may have noticed that a blog or two ago I used a Latin quotation. Perhaps you wondered why. The fact is, I’m hopelessly addicted to being hopeless at Latin. I started learning it about three years ago. After two terms of a beginner’s course (now cut, along with a host of other wonderful adult education courses like art and archaeology), and armed only with a dictionary and grammar I am travelling through the underworld with Aeneas. Very slowly.

Why am I learning Latin? Because I’m a writer.

Let me explain.

The novel I am currently working on has as one of its main characters an eighteenth century classicist. I wanted to understand what it was he loved and why, know a little of what he knew. The other main character is the Roman who haunts him, and to get to know him I had to learn about Roman history. Without Latin what can you know of that? I did the same thing when I wrote a novella set in Wales. I taught myself some Welsh (forgotten now, alas). So I am learning Latin because I am a writer.

There are enormous advantages to a writer in learning another language, especially one that feels very different from English. It makes you pay more attention to your own language, its words and meanings, why and how we name objects, how our concepts are defined and contained by our language, and leads us on to contemplation of the ideas we live by and our perceptions of the world. It makes you think about tone and rhythm; it helps you to hear voices. It improves your grammar. So I am learning Latin because I am a writer.

In the eighteenth century Latin was ianitor antro: the doorkeeper of the gates, the gates to knowledge, university, the professions. Women couldn’t study it, the lower classes couldn’t study it, and when I was at school I couldn’t study it either though I wanted to. Perhaps this was a wise decision from the point of view of a school concerned with its examination results. I was dreadful at languages. Of course there was no question of learning for pleasure, self-development, or the mere appreciation of beauty. But that’s all changed now. Surely. We aren’t letting subjects like Latin die out are we? We aren’t favouring league tables over knowledge?

Latin is challenging, difficult, and beautiful. Just hearing it read out loud makes me shiver. It is elegant, sonorous, allusive. It has become one of the loves of my life. I think I shall struggle on with it even when this novel is finished. Don’t worry - my characters won’t be spouting Latin in the book. Well, maybe once or twice, for veracity’s sake.

And you can read Will Self on learning French in today’s Guardian – though of course his is a live language! See http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2010/mar/23/will-self-learns-french

Merrily Merrily

2010-03-19T12:17:00.003Z

So it’s a capital offence to use adverbs? It is, according to Elmore Leonard, who lays down the law in his book 10 Rules of Writing, to be published shortly. If you haven’t seen the Guardian’s Leonard-inspired article Ten Rules for Writing Fiction, in which a number of authors share their dos and don’ts, you should. It’s packed full of advice: useful, funny, exasperating, gnomic, silly…see http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/feb/20/ten-rules-for-writing-fiction-part-one.

But the poor old adverb. Why such animosity? I think there can be few words as wonderful as an adverb when it’s used in the right place. I remember the first time I came across “friendlily” many years ago, in a novel by Kate O’Brien. I’d never thought you could make an adverb of friendly and it stopped me dead in my reading tracks.

Hang on – isn’t that what good writing is not supposed to do, interrupt the flow, introduce a bit of rough with the smooth? Well, no, not really. The occasional jolt or jar can work wonders. I stopped at “friendlily” and I read the sentence again and I said the word to myself a few times: friend – li – ly. I said it quickly, I said it slowly, relishing the sound of it, the sense of it. Then I reread the sentence and I thought, yes, that works.

A couple of days ago I came across "premonishingly" in Mikhail Bulgakov’s Diaboliad. I had to look it up. What a lovely word! Pre – mon – ish – ing – ly. Say it quickly, say it slowly…I don’t even agree that it’s a bad thing when a reader has to go to a dictionary (another bugbear of Elmore Leonard’s). Can you imagine anything more dreary than being stuck with just the words you know? Being deprived of the excitement of discovering a new word?

When I was a child I read a bowdlerised version of Gulliver’s Travels long before I was old enough to understand it. I didn’t know half the words, but I loved the sight and what I thought was the sound of them. I copied some of the best into a little notebook, long, multi-syllabled words, they looked so good on the page, so packed with significance. I didn’t know what they meant, but I loved them. (OK, I was a weird child.) I remember reading somewhere of one writer – I think it was Will Self – who said he collects words. I know what he means. Words are beautiful things. Even adverbs.

So enjoy your adverbs, I say.

A mote will turn the balance

2010-03-10T18:29:00.003Z

When I was at school I had problems with A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It wasn’t just the dull way it was taught in my school back in the day. Students nowadays have much livelier texts to read from; many don’t even have to read a whole Shakespeare play any more but can get by with extracts. (Though how deciding half the school population are too stupid to read Shakespeare and thus denying them access to a hugely important element of our culture fits into the brave new widening participation world is beyond me. Still, it keeps the school exam results looking good.)

The real issue for me was the play’s violence. This is a work that is often played as if it’s sweet and light, a bit of a romp, an easy confection. It’s got fairies, hasn’t it? But for me from the very start it was the violence that struck and disturbed me. A play that opens with a father threatening his daughter with death if she doesn’t marry the man of his choice, and that daughter being told that her father should be as a god to her, filled me with horror. The funny thing was that no one else in the classroom, least of all the teacher, seemed to notice. Nor did the sexuality of the play bother them, the hints of bestiality (“lion, bear, or wolf, or bull…she shall pursue it with the soul of love”), of rape (Hippolyta “wooed with my sword”, Demetrius’s veiled threat to Helena who risks “the rich worth of her virginity” by putting herself into his power), and of domestic violence. “The more you beat me I will fawn on you” declares Helena, as forgiving as any battered wife. And I always, always, felt sorry for poor Bottom, who was made such a dreadful fool of though he didn’t seem such a bad sort to me. I always thought it was Theseus who deserved a lot more than he got.

So for many years I didn’t go near the play. I didn’t read it, and I didn’t go to see it performed. I managed to enjoy Mendelssohn but that was as far as I got. Then Gerard persuaded me to go to a production by Shakespeare at the Tobacco Factory (SATTF) (on 1 March). I’d seen their fabulous Much Ado About Nothing and thought I’d give A Midsummer Night’s Dream a chance. The Tobacco Factory is a theatre carved out of a section of the abandoned Imperial Tobacco factory that once dominated Bristol, and SATTF is an unsubsidised theatre company who produce Shakespeare, and you will know all you need to know about them if you read their artistic policy at http://www.sattf.org.uk/index.php?id=9. (Which is a far cry from the brave new widening participation world of teaching Shakespeare in bits.)

That did it for me. SATTF showed me, first of all, what a brilliantly constructed play it is. Then they drew my attention to the wonder of the language, to its bucolic madness, its primrose beds, oxlips, and eglantine, and the love-wounded flower which is the instrument of the human madness. They showed me the mundane world where magic dwells: anarchic, challenging magic that makes the butter fail and old dames fall onto their bums. They evoked the figure of Silvanus, god of the wild woods that encroach with exuberant power on our feeble constructions of reality, and inflict us with such blessed, blessed madness. And then, when they’d pulled out all sorts of spiritual rugs, made men into beasts, scarified young women with lovers’ scorn and tangled briars, destroyed childhood friendships, and made parents the objects of terror for their children, everything was restored. The protagonists were left loving and sleeping safely in their palace, though the screeching owls and howling wolves were still outside.

For that is one aspect of the play’s power and magic. The darkness is always there, the violence that I so feared as a young girl, the suffering, the anarchic forces of Faerie. But in the end, after all the pain and confusion, it is a fundamentally good world. The fairies come to challenge; they also come to bless.

A wonderful production, filled with wonderful things amongst which I recall Jay Villiers’s Theseus and Oberon, Christopher Staines’s Puck, Rebecca Pownall’s towering Helena, Jonathan Nibb’s gloriously absurd Bottom, and above all Felix Hayes’s Wall. If you get the chance, go and see SATTF do anything. As for me, I’m half way through reading A Midsummer Night’s Dream and haven’t time to linger in this dream world.

For Shakespeare at the Tobacco Factory see http://www.sattf.org.uk
For the Tobacco Factory see http://www.tobaccofactory.com/

Missing Simon Armitage

2010-03-07T10:44:00.004Z

Last Sunday (28 February) we (husband Gerard and I) went to see Simon Armitage at Bath Literary Festival, reading from the anthology he and bird enthusiast Tim Dee have put together: The Poetry of Birds. I love birds and I love Simon Armitage’s poetry and I’m sure I’d have loved Tim Dee too except that when we got there Simon Armitage was cancelled. That is, he was unable to be with us but lovely Helen Dunmore took his place. Lovely she is, but we had our hearts set on Simon Armitage so we got our money back and then looked for ways to redeem the morning. We quickly found them in coffee and cake followed by a joyous half hour in that book paradise which is Topping & Co Booksellers.

I first encountered Mr Armitage at On the Border, a series of poetry readings which take place in the Drill Hall, Chepstow. He was appearing with Owen Sheers, and if I am honest – though at the risk of hurting Mr Armitage’s feelings – it was Owen Sheers I wanted to see. (If you want to know why read Resistance.) I didn’t know anything about Simon Armitage save that Gerard owns every book he has published and never misses a chance to hear him read from them and get them signed.

We set off for Chepstow by way of Cheltenham’s shops which were full of rubbish, it being just before Christmas. The rain poured down bringing darkness with it. The drive alongside the Severn was a lovely, eerie, ghostly experience. The river was on our sinister side, and I knew that gleaming amongst the debris at its lapping edge were the bones of river pilots, mariners, and ferrymen. From those bones their forms would rise to prowl the misty littoral, the between-life-and-death, like the souls Aeneas saw pleading and wailing on the bank of the Styx: huc omnes turba ad ripas effusa ruebat.

Chepstow was a bit like that too, caught between life and death. The streets were empty except for a group of rugby-drunk youth who staggered out of the darkness, shouted, and disappeared into the icy rain. We walked up the shuttered high street and down the shuttered high street looking for somewhere to eat. We were in despair until on the downward turn we discovered a congenial bar where our spirits were raised by veggie burger and chips.

The Drill Hall was much bigger than we expected. We were very early and the first of the audience to arrive. The helpers were still setting everything up but put the kettle on and sold us coffee and bottles of water at rip off prices of around 50p an item. The hall was ferociously heated by radiators suspended from the ceiling; I’d never seen a heating system like it and very welcome it was. On the stage was a painted backdrop of Chepstow, its bridge and castle and so on. We walked around the echoing hall looking at old photographs of the same and whispering: it’s far too big, they’ll never fill it, we’ll be sitting in the front two rows with vacancy pressing against our backs and our faces pink with embarrassment for the poor poets.

By the time the readings began the place was packed. Our poets arrived, girls (and perhaps a few boys) swooning as Owen Sheers passed like (as Rosamund Lehmann said of her baby brother John) young Mithras. Owen Sheers read and was wonderful. There was an auction of hand written and original poems donated by poets who had previously appeared On the Border. After an interval, during which Gerard apologised in advance for inflicting his favourite on me, Simon Armitage stood up.

And I was hooked. He gave us poem after poem, poems beating with life, with meaning, with form and sound and voice. And what a range of structure, of subject! To be honest, and at the risk of hurting Mr Sheers’s feelings, I fell for Simon Armitage’s poetry like a red kite falling from the sky to feed.

I hope Mr Armitage has recovered from whatever it was that prevented him from appearing in Bath last Sunday. I shall certainly be on the look out for the chance to hear him read again. In the meantime, there’s more poetry on the border to look forward to. You can see the programme at http://www.poetryontheborder.org/

For more on Simon Armitage see http://www.simonarmitage.com/ - look out for details of his Pennine Way adventure this summer, when he will be walking by day and reading by night.

Good things come

2010-03-06T10:51:00.003Z

Fill in the missing word:-

They also serve who stand and -
Good things come to those who -
- in the wings

I’ll accept “wait” but the word I was looking for was “write”. I know, you won’t find “write” listed under “wait” in your thesaurus but that’s Roget’s oversight, not mine. I’m convinced that writing and waiting are synonymous. Not in the sense of sitting down and waiting for inspiration. Who needs to wait for words who is a writer? But if you write you do wait. I think that what you need to be a writer is masses of patience and faith in your own longevity.

It seems to take ages to finish your book because you want to wait until it’s as good as you can make it before you send it out. So you leave it to one side, a few weeks here, a few weeks there (while you start the next one of course). When you think it’s had long enough you read it and wait for the despair to pass. This happens after nail-gnawing days and teeth-grinding nights when you suddenly realise what’s wrong with it and what you can do to put it right. You start again. You do this several times.

At last the book seems as ready as it will ever be and you submit it to an agent or publisher. You wait three to six months for a response. It comes back; the agents are encouraging but it’s not for them. So you send it out again and wait…and again…until at last you get a publishing deal. The long wait is over! Life can begin! You are a writer at last!

Then you wait. A year passes. A year and a half. (Though of course you have nearly finished the other novel and you’re thinking about the one after that.) But good things do come to those who. Lovely Myrmidon Books are going to publish my novel, To The Fair Land. It’s set in the eighteenth century and is about a voyage of discovery to a mythical Fair Land rivalling Captain Cook’s.

I can’t wait! But while I do maybe you would like to wait with me. Think of this blog as rifling through a tatty old magazine in a dentist’s waiting room and reading little snippets about books and writing and reading. After all, when you go to the dentist the waiting is usually the best bit.