Books Do Furnish A Room

In praise of islands: Sunday Salon

A number of books about islands on the go or in mind today.  I read Swallows and Amazons recently - or rather listened to it on CD in the car - and noted the sense of privacy and independence that comes with an island - the territory is clearly demarcated and their are the obvious problems about getting there which emphasise whose it is! 

More recently, following a couple of interesting articles in Slightly Foxed, I have been looking at A New Voyage Round the World by William Dampier; the voyage lasted many years, from 1679 to 1691, and the book, an immediate success, was published in 1697.  Heh, they got decent holidays in those days!  Dampier was an interesting man, half traveller, half pirate, he had all sorts of adventures, but was also an acute observer and keen diarist, and has a fine straightforward way with words - so "The Lime is a sort of bastard or Crab-limon".  His comments cover social customs, agriculture, wildlife, landscape, history, and he spends much of his time on and around the islands of the Caribbean and of the South Pacific.  Well worth a browse - and when I've finished my browsing, I'll probably post again.

Another book I wanted to read was Raymond Firth's We, The Tikopia, an account of his anthropological explorations among the Tikopia, who inhabit a small, very isolated island in the Solomons Islands.  Firth published this "well known classic of the genre" (the " marks indicate that I'd never heard of it, I fear) in 1936, after decades of living there.  However, I found a copy and blanched at its length, technicality and denseness, so have taken up his much smaller History and Traditions of Tikopia.  Another, very accessible, book about this area is Arthur Grimble on the Gilbert (and Ellice) Islands, which I read as a boy.

Other island books come to mind - Stevenson's Treasure Island, of course, and Ballantyne's tiresomely moral but still exciting Coral Island.  And Joe Coomer's Pocketful of Names, off the New England coast, which I read with pleasure a few months ago. And Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, of course, off the coast of Chile, and .. but I could go on for ever - and no doubt you will anyway point out the favourite island books I have missed!

Enjoy your Sunday - I'm about to cycle out in pouring rain to give a tour at a wildlife centre - and in this weather I have a strong hunch there will be no customers!

Here, by this brook, we parted

Last week, I gave you Tennyson's The Brook, a fantastically accomplished piece of verbal music, without any deeper significance, but gorgeously liquid on the tongue.  And I said I would try and convince you that it was serious poetry.  To do that, I shall put the poem in context - it is not meant to be a poem by itself at all - it is a poem within a poem, it is the song of the brook itself, talking to an old man dreaming - and the "outside poem" (properly called The Brook) is a masterpiece of observation and feeling.  It's quite a long poem, so here is just the first third or so: here is one of the great technical masters of English poetry in all his emotional and verbal pomp - Tennyson's The Brook:

Here, by this brook, we parted; I to the East

  And he for Italy - too late, too late;

  One whom the strong sons of the world despise;

  For lucky rhymes to him were scrip and share,

  And mellow metres more than cent for cent;

  Nor could he understand how money breeds;

  Thought it a dead thing; yet himself could make

  The thing that is not as the thing that is.

  O had he lived!  In our schoolbooks we say,

  Of those that held their heads above the crowd,   

  They flourish'd then or then; but life in him

  Could scarce be said to flourish, only touch'd

  On such a time as goes before the leaf,

  When all the wood stands in a mist of green,

  And nothing perfect: yet the brook he loved,

  For which, in branding summers of Bengal,

Or ev'n the sweet half-English Neilgherry air

  I panted, seems; as I re-listen to it,

  Prattling the primrose fancies of the boy,

  To me that loved him; for 'O brook,' he says,    

  'O babbling brook,' says Edmund in his rhyme,

  'Whence come you?' and the brook, why not? replies:

  I come from haunts of coot and hern,

    I make a sudden sally,

  And sparkle out among the fern,    

    To bicker down a valley.

  By thirty hills I hurry down,

    Or slip between the ridges,

  By twenty thorps, a little town,

    And half a hundred bridges.  

  Till last by Philip's farm I flow

    To join the brimming river,

  For men may come and men may go,

    But I go on for ever.

  'Poor lad, he died at Florence, quite worn out,

Travelling to Naples.  There is Darnley bridge, 

It has more ivy; there the river; and there

  Stands Philip's farm where brook and river meet.

  I chatter over stony ways,

    In little sharps and trebles,  

  I bubble into eddying bays,

    I babble on the pebbles.

  With many a curve my banks I fret

    By many a field and fallow,

  And many a fairy foreland set    

    With willow-weed and mallow.

  I chatter, chatter, as I flow

    To join the brimming river,

  For men may come and men may go,

    But I go on for ever.        

…….

  Yes, men may come and go; and these are gone,

  All gone.  My dearest brother, Edmund, sleeps,

  Not by the well-known stream and rustic spire,

  But unfamiliar Arno, and the dome

 Of Brunelleschi; sleeps in peace: and he,    

  Poor Philip, of all his lavish waste of words

  Remains the lean P. W. on his tomb:

  I scraped the lichen from it: Katie walks

  By the long wash of Australasian seas

  Far off, and holds her head to other stars,   

  And breathes in April autumns.  All are gone.'

  So Lawrence Aylmer, seated on a stile

  In the long hedge, and rolling in his mind

  Old waifs of rhyme, and bowing o'er the brook

  A tonsured head in middle age forlorn,    

  Mused and was mute.  ……

A view of the sea

I have never agreed with the artist Mr Deacon, who did not want to see the sea because it disturbed him - a nervousness for which Freudian analysis would now certainly be available (however meaningless that might be).  But since childhood, when I lived only half a mile or so from a major estuary, and walked there everyday with the dogs, I have never actually lived all that close to the sea.  I miss it, and go to rivers and the sea as often as I can, but two recent purchases for my wall have compensated slightly!

They are completely different, but have a superficial unity; they are both monochrome prints, both of the wild west coast of the British Isles - but one is full of soft tones and large views of sea and sky; the other is harder, more severely black and white, but more intimate in scale and subject.

The first is Judith Lockie's Drawing In The Hebrides, a detail of which is at the head of this post, and a complete version is below.  It's an idiosyncratic shape, reflecting the rocks of the subject, and it has a childlike quality which I rather like - particularly the boat and birds in the mouth of the bay.  It is notable than the severer colour pattern is of the softer, more human subject.  Judith is based in Suffolk, a world away from this violent, rocky coast - her own seas will be larger, softer, flatter and mudier - though no less violent in poor weather.  I bought this at the Royal Academy this year, but there is little of her work on the web that I can see, though you'll find a few things here.  There seem to be some Japanese influences, and a hint of something more modern and more continental in the handling of the figure?

The second print is by Norman Ackroyd whose large body of work you can see on the website - great stuff from all over England, but also the fierce coasts of Ireland and Scotland.  This is Blasket Islands, County Kerry, and I love the space and the softness, combined with the very edgy sea.  I haven't been to the Blaskets, but I know the coast pretty well, and its wonderfully atmospheric.

He creates a quite different feel - one which is modern, but seems to recall nineteenth century models.  Whereas the sea in Lockie's print is homely, human, and a friend or partner in the business of life, the Ackroyd seems to emphasise impersonal scale and remoteness.  Far from no man being an island, Arnold has a harsher view:

And bade betwixt their shores to be
The unplumb'd, salt, estranging sea.

Quiet immorality

Andre Gidé’s The Immoralist (L’Immoraliste, 1902) is a slight book, both physically and in subject matter – no, that is wrong, in its treatment of the weighty subject.  I picked it up in the bookshop on a whim, knowing him only by reputation – E M Forster called him “the humanist of our age” – and was slightly disappointed, though the prose in the Penguin Classics edition, translated by David Watson, is always readable and often compelling.  Disaster looms over this tale, the plot is pregnant with appalling betrayal, loss, failure and despair, but somehow, for me at least, the catastrophe never comes to pass.  Somehow, everything passes on by – the failure undiminished, certainly, but unnoticed or at least unpunished.

The story is, at heart, a simple one.  Michel, a young Frenchman living abroad – probably in North Africa or the Near East – summons three old friends to help in his hour of need.  Whether they succeed in helping him or not, you never know, because the novel is in the form of a letter from one of them asking a third party to find him job in France; they are trying to help, they stay with him, but all the reader has is this letter, which in turn is mainly Michel’s account of his recent life (the three years since he was married) as he tells it to them after dinner one evening.

He married without love, to please his father and friends, and then goes abroad – becomes very ill – is nursed back to health by his wife Marceline and local boys in North Africa, and then returns to his family estate in France and later to Paris.  He never settles anywhere, finds his work – historical research – difficult to return to and gets into a variety of unsuitable relationships with tenants and staff, among others, neglecting his wife (with whom he has a genuine and loving, although late consummated, relationship).  She becomes ill in her turn, they travel for her health, but after many twists and turns, she dies – and he goes on, not knowing whether he is free or bereft.  His life is without moral compass or purpose, but you feel strongly that it need not be so.  His sins are hinted at and guessed at - the title doesn’t promise salaciousness or open scandal but homosexuality in the mind or the body is clearly hinted at – and you are never sure how much he is to blame and how much he is the plaything of fate.  I found this slightly unsatisfactory, and was always waiting for some resolution or clarification which never comes.

But Gide would have found the concept of blame a wrong one:  in the preface, he says:

But I no more wanted this book to be an accusation than an apology.  I refrained from passing judgement ... It is not that I wish to claim that neutrality (I was going to say indecision) is a sure indicator of a superior intelligence, but I believe many great minds have refused to draw conclusions – and that posing a problem is not the same is presupposing its resolution.

I use the word ‘problem’ with some reluctance.  In truth, in art there are no problems, none to which the work itself is not an adequate solution. ... Whether Michel prevails or not, the ‘problem’ continues to exist, and does not in the author’s view terminate in triumph or defeat.

So, a compelling tale, but one with no ending or judgement.  A very moody, emotional and engaging tale, but you will be the only judge of the sole protagonist. Only you can judge whether Michel is right to follow his instincts at the expense of his studies, his wife, and the conventions of the society in which he was brought up.

Accidental enjoyment: Sunday Salon

A couple of weeks ago, I posted about the 10 free Penguins I had received from my subscription toThe Times; well, over the Bank Holiday weekend, I have finished the first of them, Ali Smith's The Accidental.  This was a prime example of a pleasant serendipity - this is "not the kind of book I read", yet I was glad to have the chance to read it, and I thoroughly - or at least, substantially - enjoyed it.  It has the common modern menu of a lot of unattractive literature - a broken family, clever silly writing, a child's viewpoint, and a spooky almost supernatural element amidst all the grime and grief.  It would have stayed firmly on the shelf of any bookshop I visited, but that would have been a mistake.

The story is simple - a normal family is on holiday in a grotty Norfolk House, and they're having no fun at all.  All four members are in trouble - he is too clever in a trivial kind of way, sexually unhappy, and has lots of affairs with students at the university where he teaches - and this is about to smash his career; she is a well known writer but actually a fraud, and has a bad knee which her husband of twenty years has never noticed; a prank of the son's has caused a suicide at school, and he (not having owned up) is haunted by fear and has become withdrawn and alien to his family; and the youngest, Astrid, is a silly girl with no purpose or love in her life, who obsesses about film making.  It sounds a very un-fun couple of weeks until Amber arrives.

 

None of the family knows who Amber is (and nor do you) - though some of them think they do; she is enigmatic, mysterious and attractive.  She is half bitch goddess and half angel, and she reminds me sharply of the three year old Oskar in Grass's Tin Drum.  She loves them all, helps them all, and challenges them ruthlessly and painfully; some wonderful things happen to them while she's around, but there is a price to be paid.  Whether that is the dissolution of everything, or just another start for all of them without baggage - a phrase which is loaded with meaning in one of the many heavily symbolic events of the book - only the reader can decide.  Eve, the mother in the family, has a particular apotheosis which may haunt the frustrated housewives among you!

I enjoyed reading this, but the story is very fractured and takes a little bit of concentration; the prose style is fragmentary, childlike and disconnected, which is sometimes extremely appropriate and illuminating and sometimes just a bit irritating.  You will need your wits about you, but on the whole, I think it's worthwhile!

But I go on for ever

When I was very young, I thought Tennyson's The Brook was wonderful; and, indeed, it is.  I memorised it all, loved its cadence and its easy rhyme, and thought myself no end of a cleverer for knowing it.  And it came to my mind, and my lips, down by a Hampshire chalk stream recently - a bit obvious, but there you are.  But you couldn't call it serious poetry, could you?  Well here is the poem everyone knows - and next week I will try and convince you that this has greatness, is not merely immensely accomplished babbling!

I come from haunts of coot and hern,
   I make a sudden sally
And sparkle out among the fern,
   To bicker down a valley.

By thirty hills I hurry down,
   Or slip between the ridges,
By twenty thorpes, a little town,
   And half a hundred bridges.

Till last by Philip's farm I flow
   To join the brimming river,
For men may come and men may go,
   But I go on for ever.

I chatter over stony ways,
   In little sharps and trebles,
I bubble into eddying bays,
   I babble on the pebbles.

With many a curve my banks I fret
   By many a field and fallow,
And many a fairy foreland set
   With willow-weed and mallow.

I chatter, chatter, as I flow
   To join the brimming river,
For men may come and men may go,
   But I go on for ever.

I wind about, and in and out,
   With here a blossom sailing,
And here and there a lusty trout,
   And here and there a grayling,

And here and there a foamy flake
   Upon me, as I travel
With many a silvery waterbreak
   Above the golden gravel,

And draw them all along, and flow
   To join the brimming river
For men may come and men may go,
   But I go on for ever.

I steal by lawns and grassy plots,
   I slide by hazel covers;
I move the sweet forget-me-nots
   That grow for happy lovers.

I slip, I slide, I gloom, I glance,
   Among my skimming swallows;
I make the netted sunbeam dance
   Against my sandy shallows.

I murmur under moon and stars
   In brambly wildernesses;
I linger by my shingly bars;
   I loiter round my cresses;

And out again I curve and flow
   To join the brimming river,
For men may come and men may go,
   But I go on for ever.

They order this matter better in France

My eye was caught, while scanning the new acquisitions shelves in the London Library by Lana Asfour’s Laurence Sterne in France.  I was immediately entranced – whilst I have never read Tristram Shandy, I read and loved A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy in 1978, just after leaving university.  It is a slight, but utterly delightful book, the first sentence of which I often quote – but it had never occurred to me to wonder what the French made of it.  I suppose I had thought Sterne too English, too eccentric, too parochial even, for the French to be interested – but Asfour tells me how wrong I am.

Sentimental Journey was published at the very end of Sterne’s life, in 1768, dying just a few weeks afterwards.  It purported to be by Mr Yorick – so no heavy associations there, then – and was an immediate success, and spawned both imitators and, perhaps, a whole new way of looking at the world, in a sentimental way – though that word does not quite mean what we use it for now, meaning more a concentration on the feelings and motivations of individuals.  The work of Sterne did not, perhaps, set the pattern for the English novel on its long journey of greatness, but it may have enriched the mixture greatly.  But back to that famous first sentence, and its consequences:

“They order”, said I, “this matter better in France.”

“You have been in France?” said my gentleman, turning quick upon me with the most civil triumph in the world.  “Strange!”, quoth I, debating the matter with myself, “That one and twenty miles sailing, for ‘tis absolutely no further from Dover to Calais, should give a man these rights – I’ll look into them” : so giving up the argument  - I went straight back to my lodgings, put up half a dozen shirts and a black pair of silk breeches – “the coat I have on”, said I, looking at the sleeve, “will do” – took a place in the Dover stage ; and the packet sailing at nine the next morning  - by three I had got sat down to my dinner upon a fricaseed chicken, so incontestably in France, that had I died that night of an indigestion, the whole world could not have suspended the effects of droits d’aubaine[i].

Now that is how to travel – a dozen shirts and no planning.  And he has lots of fun adventures, many of a slightly hilarious and farcical sort, with occasional Pickwickian overtones (Dickens must, surely, have known and loved this book?), but often with a very serious discussion under the élan and the laughter.  The whole is written in a light, easy style, in the first person and with much dialogue and soliloquy, and being (unlike Tristram Shandy) a notably slight work of only 120 pages or so, is well worth anyone’s attention. 

I would draw to your attention his classification of travellers – the idle, the inquisitive, the lying, the proud, the vain, and the splenetic – and the idle travellers (are we not all idle travellers?) he says travel from inevitable necessity, infirmity of body, or imbecility of mind.  Take your choice!  And before I leave Sterne himself,  let me quote his reaction on meeting a fellow countryman in an inn:

As an Englishman does not travel to see Englishmen, I retired to my room.

So what did the French make of Sterne?  Well, after a difficult start – Tristram Shandy was harshly criticised by French intellectuals – they seem to have taken him to their hearts, in both a literary and a personal sense.  Sentimental Journey was praised for its cultural sympathy – and (my free translation of some eighteenth century French):

Sterne’s humour does not affect his ability to consider all that wounds humanity, and to show the most tender sensibilities.

Asfour claims that the word sentimental did not previously exist in French, but was introduced in an early translation by Frénais, and the word and the attribute provided to at least one French critic “the moral structure of the work, holding together an otherwise disordered narrative and compensating for its irregularities”.  Sterne was well known in France, and his many idiosyncrasies much loved, but perhaps the greatest compliments paid were the many other ‘sentimental journeys’ that appeared in French, including a false posthumous continuation, an equally spurious volume by his nephew, Yorick, and even a musical comedy, Sterne à Paris in 1799!  I wonder if there has been an example of a French author so taken into English literary life?

---

[i] The law provided for all the effects of foreigners who died in France – save the Swiss and the Scotch – to pass to the King of France.

Calves-foot jelly

Readers of novels older than the readers themselves often struggle with words and phrases which would have been so well known to the original audience as to excite no comment at all.  So dozens of novels refer to calves-foot jelly and to negus.  I knew that one was a common food for invalids, and that the other was a drink much served at balls in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but my knowledge went no deeper. So I was intrigued by an excellent article in Intelligent Life about calves-foot jelly - which has a sweet and a savoury form.  To my surprise, the sweet form is the classic English one, including cinnamon, citrus fruit or juice, and Madeira or brandy. 

I hadn't realised how long calves-foot jelly lasted in literature.  Here it is, in Aldous Huxley's Crome Yellow - a fine shot at the fads and fashions of the day, in 1921, by an author quite unjustly neglected nowadays (Read After The Fireworks or Brief Candles for shorter tales, or Eyeless in Gaza for a major novel - not to mention Brave New World for an early view of a technical elysium which is in fact hell).

[Earlier that day, George had caught the sisters scoffing in secret] ... At luncheon it was noticed that the sisters ate a little more than usual. Georgiana toyed with some French beans and a spoonful of calves’-foot jelly. "I feel a little stronger today", she said to Lord Timpany, when he congratulated her on this increase of appetite; "a little more material", she added, with a nervous laugh. Looking up, she caught George’s eye; a blush suffused her cheeks and she looked hastily away.

In the garden that afternoon they found themselves for a moment alone.

"You won’t tell anyone, George? Promise you won’t tell anyone", she implored.

"It would make us look so ridiculous. And besides, eating IS unspiritual, isn’t it? Say you won’t tell anyone."

"I will", said George brutally. "I’ll tell everyone, unless...[you marry me.]"

"It’s blackmail."

"I don’t care, said George. ’I’ll give you twenty-four hours to decide."

And, of course, she does marry him.  The thought of being outed as a girl who enjoyed her food was just too much to bear.

And negus is made with  - among other things - calves-foot jelly.  Odd to the modern taste to have a sweet thing and an alcoholic drink based on meat.  I know that Cornflower will look up a recipe and make calves-foot jelly, and I look forward to her report.

Summer heat

Over recent weeks, it has been hot and sultry in London: not, most of the time, too unbearable in the open air, but a refined and desperate torture on the Tube.  The one relief has been the occasional thunderstorms - so while I share the pleasure in the autumn of the mother in this poem, I also love the breaking heat and startling flashes of energy across the teeming rains of night.  This is Philip Larkin's Mother, Summer, I.

 

My mother, who hates thunder storms,

Holds up each summer day and shakes

It out suspiciously, lest swarms

Of grape-dark clouds are lurking there;

But when the August weather breaks

And rains begin, and brittle frost

Sharpens the bird-abandoned air,

Her worried summer look is lost,

And I her son, though summer-born

And summer-loving, none the less

Am easier when the leaves are gone

Too often summer days appear

Emblems of perfect happiness

I can't confront: I must await

A time less bold, less rich, less clear:

An autumn more appropriate.

 

Lighthousekeeping

Jeanette Winterson’s  Lighthousekeeping is a delightful book, quite stunning at different moments, though not perhaps as satisfying a whole as The Passion.  It is a web of stories, of several generations, creating identity of places and people.  The main characters, an orphan girl called Silver, and a blind lighthouse keeper called Pew, tell stories as a way of understanding the world and themselves.  The story moves back and forwards in time, from Jonah Dark and his some Babel in the early nineteenth century, to the end of the twentieth when the lighthouse is automated and Pew put out upon the world.  But the stories never cease, not are the threads of continuity and causation broken by time or generations.

When Silver is orphaned, Pew offers to look after her and her dog, DogJim, and so begins a childhood and adolescence of storytelling.  The stories are of the present, of the Jonah Dark who built the lighthouse two hundred years ago, of his son Babel who was the local minister, with a dark secret – and of Robert Louis Stevenson who visited him.  But all the stories entwine, and through light on each other.  You can clearly discern different temporal narratives, but they make a kind of entrancing continuous whole, more like a web than a thread.  Stories are infinitely modulated, organic and personal – in answer to a question, Pew says “You could say yes and you could say no” – “Could you” – “It would depend what story you were telling”.  And stories are what gives them – Pew particularly – their identity.  He is one of a long line of lighthouse keepers, and his memory and experience is not personal, it is familial.  For example, Pew says he has witnessed something two hundred years ago:

“Pew, you weren’t born then”  -  “The Pew that was born then was”.

And his blindness gives him Tiresian qualities too, as Silver finds out:

“What can you see with your Second Sight?”  -  “The past and the future.  Only the present is dark.”  -  “But that’s where we live.”  -  “Not Pew, child.  A  wave breaks, another follows.”

The story is about love – two stories about love, stories without end, love without end.  And love, of course, is about women:

“Tell me the story, Pew”  -  “What story, child?”  -  “The story of Dark Babel’s secret”  -  “It was a woman”  -  “You always say that”  -  “There’s always a woman somewhere, child; a princess, a witch, a stepmother, a mermaid, a fairy godmother, or one as wicked as she is beautiful, or as beautiful as she is good.”  -  “Is that the complete list?”  -  “Then there is the woman you love”  -  “Who’s she?”  -  “That’s another story”.

I loved much of this book – the taste of the salt sea in a storm, the gossamer threads of stories half told and told again, the portraits of fierce, sad characters of past and present – but in the end it didn’t quite work for me as a complete whole.  It wasn’t, by any means, disappointing, it just seemed to be too hard to pull all the different strands of narrative into a single whole without forcing them, and the end of the book, though suitably dramatic in a quiet way – a Quest and a finding – doesn’t quite live up to the promise of the rest.  But I wouldn’t want to put you off reading it, it can be very satisfying; in fact, thinking about it to write this post, the book is growing on me – perhaps its stories are becoming my stories!

Mind reading: Sunday Salon

Lots of fairly serious reading going on at the moment, but I always keep some lighter stuff on the go at the same time (I am always reading two books at a time, often five or six, I find this refreshing and enriching).  So at the moment, I am enjoying Margery Allingham's The Mind Readers as a respite from The Revenge of Gaia by James Lovelock and a number of other worthy but demanding books. Sunday Salon readers will, I am sure, all share this habit - what's the good of reading just one book at a time!?

Allingham is really a very fine writer, with a marvellous command of language, and a real feel for the psychological realities of daily life; but she also has a powerful dramatic feel and an ability to carry off the preposterous or unlikely when needed.  This gives her detective novels, mostly featuring Albert Campion, an occasionally fantastical feel but also a real and impelling grasp of reality - even if it is sometimes only the reality in people's minds.  Considered purely as a writer of prose, she is the best of the women mystery mongers between the wars - a cut above Sayers, several steps clear of Ngaio Marsh (whose prose is clunky and whose affected social constructs and cardboard characterisations, while amusing, have dated badly), and in a different world to the incompetent Agatha Christie.  Only Josephine Tey at her best (The Franchise Affair, Daughter of Time) can really bear the comparison. 

This book features two young boys who have invented or stumbled across a mind reading device, which is powerful but which is (thank God) difficult to control and use properly.  They are caught up in family strife as well as industrial and international espionage, and there is a good dash of old fashioned detective thriller, finally overcoming villainy in an exciting show-down.  She captures the incredulity of the adults, and the naive but intelligent self absorption of the children brilliantly, and the plot never flags.  Among other treats is the elderly Canon Avril, who played a heroic role in Tiger in the Smoke (Allingham's masterpiece) and whose innate goodness gives him courage and insight well beyond his knowledge and his naivety.  A wonderful, clean, thrilling read.

It reminded me slightly of John Buchan's Gap in the Curtain, in which a group of guests at a weekend party are shown how to see into the future  - in a very limited way, by seeing just a few lines of The Times a year into the future.  Each of them sees something exciting, true, and really relevant to their futures: but again, the knowledge is much less useful than it would seem.  Not in the same class as the Allingham, and some of the denouements and explanations are no doubt more obvious than they seemed to me, reading it for the first time as a teenager, but well worth picking up from the cheap barrow outside the local second hand bookshop.

Impossible love

I know the anonymous Scarborough Fair, as I'm sure you do, from immemorial time past, from primary school singing lessons round the class radio (remember those lessons, anybody?) - and also from Simon and Garfunkel (the link is to the famous concert in Central Park), Carly Simon, and no doubt many others.   And I thought I'd like to look at the words by themselves, in a quiet moment.  They're nothing special, but they've caught the imagination of many generations, as the girl is set a series of impossible tasks to prove that "she shall be a true lover of mine".  It's reminiscent of Ben Jonson (in The Devil Is An Ass):

........put me
  To yoking foxes, milking of he-goats,
  Pounding of water in a mortar, laving
  The sea dry with a nutshell, gathering all
  The leaves are fallen this autumn—making ropes of sand,
  Catching the winds together in a net,
  Mustering of ants, and numbering atoms ... there is no hell to a lady of fashion

But on to the main course, all the parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme you could desire - a longer version than I have ever heard sung:

Where are you going? To Scarborough Fair?
Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme.
Remember me to a bonny lass there
For once she was a true lover of mine.

Tell her to make me a cambric shirt,
Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme.
Without any needles or thread work'd in it,
And she shall be a true lover of mine.

Tell her to wash it in yonder well,
Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme.
Where water ne'er sprung nor drop of rain fell,
And she shall be a true lover of mine.

Tell her to plough me an acre of land,
Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme.
Between the sea and the salt sea strand,
And she shall be a true lover of mine.

Tell her to plough it with one ram's horn,
Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme.
And sow it all over with one peppercorn,
And she shall be a true lover of mine.

Tell her to reap it with a sickle of leather,
Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme.
And tie it all up with a tom tit's feather,
And she shall be a true lover of mine.

Tell her to gather it all in a sack,
Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme.
And carry it home on a butterfly's back,
And then she shall be a true lover of mine.

Chesil Beach

When Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach came out last year, I was immediately put off by a review which gave an impression of uncontrolled and frequent sexual detail which didn’t seem at all attractive; this feeling of disinterest was compounded by my recently having read Amsterdam, which was intermittently convincing but which left me feeling unsatisfied. 

So why did I read it last week?  Well, I found an abandoned copy on a late night train and, picking it up rather disdainfully, I noticed that the critical scene – by no means the whole book, but absolutely the pivot of the whole plot – was set in a fictitious hotel near Abbotsbury in Dorset.  And only a week ago, I had been at Abbotsbury, more famous for its swannery, and walked painfully along Chesil Beach (with fine views of Little Egret, a lovely white bird with yellow feet, a dainty heron which has recently started to thrive in Britain).  This seemed to be a sign, so I did my duty, pocketed the book, and read it in almost a single sitting on a later railway journey.

In fact, I loved it.  I thought it was carefully and delicately written, a fact which “sex shocker” reviews had completely obscured for me, and which made the occasional explicit passages more forceful.  And though they are explicit, they are much more embarrassing and explanatory of Florence's horror than they are titillating.  I guess everyone knows the story now: two nice young people, Edward and Florence, from different social backgrounds but sharing virginity and not noticing the increasing permissiveness of the fifties they were living in and the sixties burgeoning ahead, become engaged.  They have a blameless period of love and dalliance, with walks and music, although he is increasingly frustrated by the lack of sex, while she is repulsed by the prospect of it.

On their wedding night, it all goes horribly wrong, through inexperience and ignorance, and a terrible humiliation for them both escalates into cruel and bitter words, and then into a rupture which never heals.  You share their love and their joy in each other, and you know that what is coming is difficult and awkward, but the final horror is postponed by a series of gestures which inflame his desire, but which are largely neutral or even negative on her part.  The train crash is coming, it is inevitable, and yet could so easily be avoided with honesty, patience, tenderness.  Indeed, for one tantalising moment, you think it is going to be averted, but he misses a faint signal which she is too proud to mention.

The title, On Chesil Beach, is if taken literally, only an accurate description of a few pages’ action, but the wearisome trudging along the beach, with its energy sapping shingle, feeling of getting nowhere, is a powerful metaphor for the feeling of entrapment they both feel.  At the end, they try and find a key back into their secret garden, but almost wilfully turn the chance away.  Both their lives are unutterably, tragically different, although they both appear to achieve fulfilment of sorts in other ways.  I am left with the impression that Edward’s wounds, though just as deep, healed more quickly and more thoroughly than hers; she – although well into the twentieth century, she may stand for whole generations of women for some of whom at least, sex was a nameless horror which brought no joy.  I am reminded of the Count in Lampedusa’s Il Gattopardo, who complains to the priest that although he has been married for decades, he has never even seen his wife’s navel!  But the opening sentence of On Chesil Beach can stand as an epigraph for the whole book, and all those women:

They were young, educated, and both virgins on this, their wedding night, and ... a conversation about sexual difficulties was plainly impossible.  But it is never easy.

Poodle round America

Like many others, I responded to the recent Penguin promotion - get a free book, and review it on your blog and on the Blog A Penguin page - and I was pleased to be told I had been allocated John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men, which I have never read.  However, when the book arrived, after a few weeks, it was by Steinbeck, but it was Travels with Charley: in Search of America!  I was very happy with that, too, and read it on my recent flights to and from Chile.

In 1960, accompanied only by his French poodle Charley (he leaves his wife at home), Steinbeck sets off to drive round America and get to know his own country again. He is away four months, and while he cannot see all of the United States in that time, the variety is amazing, from New England to Texas, and from the North Atlantic to the Californian coast. This is a wonderful book, full of beautiful writing and great stories, all conveyed with the voice of an experienced, surprisingly humble man, who draws much from the wisdom – and occasionally folly – of others.

His truck was custom made, with toughness to go anywhere, and with neat and quite spacious living quarters; he called it, with obvious affection, Rocinante.  He notes that in four months, no one asked him about the name, and no one recognised him (or at least, no one said so).  He writes engagingly of the trip, and stresses that although he was doing the driving, he was not in total charge.  First, like all travellers he suffers vicissitudes which change his route; second, he consulted Charley; third, as he explains, “a journey is a person in itself ... we do not take a trip, a trip takes us ... a journey is like marriage; the certain way to be wrong is to think you control it”.

He writes, amusingly and well, clear and with great affection, of the things he sees and the people he meets – people who farm remote area, those who live in the new trailer parks, a naval submariner.  He describes how, even to an American, Texas is intimidatingly large and unavoidable; how the great plains stretch endless in front of your tired eyes for days; about getting lost – and getting lost again; how a garage mechanic in the middle of nowhere works magic to get him new tyres on a Sunday; and how Canadian authorities were happy to let him cross the border, but explained the US wouldn’t let Charley back in (even though he was “an American dog”) and why the American border still wanted to exclude him even though he had followed this advice and not gone into Canada, and why a farmer who sees him returning hadn’t warned him of the problem – “because nobody believes me”!

You really ought to read this treasure trove of 1960 for yourself, and I find it difficult to pick items out of such a rich brew. But here are two, neither typical, but both very poignant.

On the road, Charley becomes ill. Steinbeck takes him to a vet in Spokane, who is completely uninterested: he was “if not elderly, pushing his luck, but who I am to say he had a hangover?” He doesn’t know what is wrong with the dog, and doesn’t want to: "“Look here. He’s an old dog. Old dogs get aches and pains." .. "So do old men [says Steinbeck] – that doesn’t keep them from doing something about it”". Eventually, he gets some pills, but is scathing about the vet. The pills do no good, and a few days later, in Amarillo, Charley is really bad, with a distended abdomen and a lot of pain. Steinbeck calls a different vet – and there is an instant rapport – Charley heaves a sigh and wags his tail as he is being examined, he trusts this man. And he is right, there is a serious prostate problem, and Charley is kept back from the trip for four days – but then “he looked half his age and felt wonderful, and to prove it he ran and rolled and laughed and gave little yips of pure joy". This is a good moment, because Steinbeck is fond of Charley and knows he has a real responsibility to him, and their mutual pleasure is infectious throughout – there is a lot of Charley in this book!

Texas he describes as “a state of mind … an obsession  … a nation in every sense of the word”.  And there, among some very good times, he has a much less pleasant episode.  “The Cheerleaders” protest against mixed race schooling, middle aged women abusing black parents and their children, but reserving their main anger for a white man who dared to bring his daughter to a black school:  Steinbeck is clearly shocked and horrified beyond any measure he had expected: the words were “bestial and filthy and degenerate” in “a kind of frightening witches’ Sabbath”.  And later he gives a man a lift, only to hear him praise the Cheerleaders for “doing their duty”, then loses his temper and orders him out of the truck.

This last episode is very much the exception, but it makes the serenity and the ease of almost all the rest of the book seem especially worth cherishing and preserving; anyone interested in America, and anyone interested in journeying, will love this marvellous book.

Tell me a story

To go with the latest addition to Quotidian, here is a poem about telling stories.  Many of us have seldom been outside in the dark, there is always the glow of a town in the distance, or a car's headlights.  But it is the most magical place in the world - and I like to imagine this little boy in the dark, hearing the geese, and needing no story - the stories are inside him - but asking just the same.  I have been there in Scotland, hearing nothing, or in Africa, hearing and fearing the rustling in the grass.  But this boy is safe in Kentucky, in Robert Penn Warren's Tell Me a Story.

Long ago, in Kentucky, I, a boy, stood

By a dirt road, in first dark, and heard

The great geese hoot northward.

I could not see them, there being no moon

And the stars sparse.  I heard them.

I did not know what was happening in my heart.

It was the season before the elderberry blooms,

Therefore they were going north.

The sound was passing northward.

 

 

 

Tell me a story.

In this century, and moment, of mania,

Tell me a story.

Make it a story of great distances, and starlight.

The name of the story will be Time,

But you must not pronounce its name.

Tell me a story of deep delight.