Books Do Furnish A Room

Jeder Engel ist shrecklich

I have long been a fervent admirer of Rilke, a taste in which I don't find many companions in England - though Sonnets to Orpheus seem slightly known.  My favourite work is Duino Elegies, and my translation is wonderful, made in the 1930s by J B Leishmann and Stephen Spender no less ("now dated", Amazon says - how dare they?), and it's in a parallel text, so I can read the German aloud, savouring the strength, the music and the rhythm of it (one example below).  It's quite wonderful - but it's also about 50 pages long without the orignal text, so tiny extracts are all I can manage today.  This is not - quite - a German Waste Land, but it was published in the same year, 1922, and it's in the same sort of country, but less concrete, more philosophical, troubled in the eternal rather than the diurnal.  My post title is not in today's examples, but is the first line of the second elegy - Every angel is terrible.  Here then are three extracts from Rainer Maria Rilke's Duino Elegies.  (The translations are, in these extracts, by A S Kline, whose complete translation is freely available).

(from the start of the first elegy ... )

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the Angelic

Orders? And even if one were to suddenly

take me to its heart, I would vanish into its

stronger existence. For beauty is nothing but

the beginning of terror, that we are still able to bear,

and we revere it so, because it calmly disdains

to destroy us. Every Angel is terror.

And so I hold myself back and swallow the cry

of a darkened sobbing. Ah, who then can

we make use of? Not Angels: not men,

and the resourceful creatures see clearly

that we are not really at home

in the interpreted world. Perhaps there remains

some tree on a slope, that we can see

again each day: there remains to us yesterday’s street,

and the thinned-out loyalty of a habit

that liked us, and so stayed, and never departed.

(and the start of the fourth …)

O trees of life, O when are you wintering?

We are not unified. We have no instincts

like those of migratory birds. Useless, and late,

we force ourselves, suddenly, onto the wind,

and fall down to an indifferent lake.

We realise flowering and fading together.

And somewhere lions still roam. Never knowing,

as long as they have their splendour, of any weakness.

(and a passage from the fifth elegy, in German first, then in translation … )

Du dann, Liebliche,
du, von den reizendsten Freuden
stumm Übersprungne. Vielleicht sind
deine Fransen glücklich für dich -,
oder über den jungen
prallen Brüsten die grüne metallene Seide
fühlt sich unendlich verwöhnt und entbehrt nichts.
Du,
immerfort anders auf alle des Gleichgewichts schwankende Waagen
hingelegte Marktfrucht des Gleichmuts,
öffentlich unter den Schultern.

You, then, beloved,

you, that the loveliest delights

silently over-leapt. Perhaps

your frills are happy for you –

or the green metallic silk,

over your firm young breasts,

feels itself endlessly pampered, and needing nothing.

You, market fruit of serenity

laid out, endlessly, on all the quivering balance scales,

publicly, beneath the shoulders.

Bang, bang, bang, goes the farmer's gun

I have long resisted reading John Updike's Rabbit books, I know not why, because I have greatly admired other books of his - notably Memories of the Ford Administration.  But I was persuaded by a chance sighting of Rabbit, Run in a bookshop, and I was part way though it when he died a few weeks ago.  This meant there was a lot of critical and adulatory writing around, which was both helpful and a little off-putting:  I felt I really had to like him, now that he had died and everyone was saying how wonderful he was.  He claims the echo of the traditional English song was accidental, but it's so appropriate, I include a link so you can hear it.

"Rabbit" is the nickname of Harry Angstrom, high school hero for his basketball skills, but an aimless small town misfit once he leaves school - but one with a wife (bored and alcoholic), child, a low boredom threshold and high sexual needs.  He walks out, and the great ignominy of his flight is the fact that he gets lost, retraces his tracks and goes to earth not in the sunny south, but in his own town in Pennsylvania.  He's not an inspiring character, and throughout the book he shows a propensity to run away from his responsibilities, repent without quite knowing what that means, and run away again -sometimes literally, sometimes figuratively.

Set in the spring of 1959, you think at first it's going to be a road movie, so to speak, but when he gets back to his home town, Rabbit stays there - but just not with his wife.  He makes a profession of running away - originally from wife, children and home (more than once), then from a prostitute he's been living with, then later from his parents and parents in law, and indeed from anyone who he has a duty to or could help him.  He runs from a job, from responsibility, from boredom, from almost anything that might tie him down - but when he's free, he doesn't know what to with his freedom, and creates another trap for himself.

Two minor figures became important to me: first, the pastor Eccles, who really does try to help him, and with whom Harry (Rabbit) has some great conversations, often, bizarrely enough, on the golf course.  The other great character is the acerbic Mrs Smith, a widow for whom Harry does gardening for a while.  She has a stimulating, amusing, malicious take on the world, and she hates - but really hates - rhododendrons (which makes her my friend, for sure).  The book ends on an indeterminate note, with more running, and rejection; the message seems to be that Rabbit has irretrievably lost his way, just like middle America as a whole.  I don't buy that, of course, and nor does Updike, as I think we'll find out in future Rabbit books!

Updike famously said:  "The United States, democratic and various though it is, is not an easy country for a fiction-writer to enter: the slot between the fantastic and the drab seems too narrow.  An outsiderish literary stance is traditional ... ".  I don't know exactly what that means, but I intuit something of it; in any event, it's clear to me that Updike, who takes a very "insiderish" stance, succeeds with aplomb.  Rabbit, Run was not always a comfortable read, but I'll be back in due course for Rabbit Redux.

The Eye In The Door

Pat Barker's  The Eye In The Door is the second novel in her Regeneration trilogy, the first volume of which, Regeneration, I found very impressive - it's reviewed here.  The fact that five months have passed tell you something - that I was just nervous that the second novel wouldn't maintain the standard, perhaps, or just that I've  read more than I want about the 1914-18 war.  And I was slightly disappointed, I'm afraid, although it's clear this is still a very accomplished novel, and one which has moments of great intensity and a visceral, physical quality - and moments, too, of febrile social madness.

So what disappointed me?  Well, for a start, it opens with a not very graphic but sordid and unpleasant episode of sodomy between two officers, and I didn't find that a welcoming theme!  Then, there is much less of Sassoon and Owen, two of the major characters of Regeneration - and men in whom, both as characters and as real poets, I can feel real interest.  The leading characters of The Eye In The Door are less attractive and less absorbing - and one of the main characters, Billy Prior, is a poor thing, unhappy, torn between loyalties, following his insatiable and wide ranging sexual appetites while progressively falling apart psychologically.  Army psychiatrist, William Rivers, is here again, and he is again impressive and compelling - and his conversations with his patients are, as in Regeneration, marvellous pieces of writing: probably in both books the main joy of the writing.

But in spite of my doubts, this is still well worth reading.  Apart from Rivers, who is enough to justify reading this novel, there are convincing accounts of the tense local relations between patriots and conscientious objectors, of paranoid and shrill upper- and middle-class patriots who saw treason and corruption everywhere, and a major theme of injustice and false imprisonment of a woman who had allegedly, and ridiculously, been accused of plotting to assassinate Lloyd-George.  There's plenty of narrative interest, some fine writing, and a compelling picture of a stressed and insecure society at a turning point in its fortunes, and even some resolution for those who like their stories to have endings!  I will probably read the third novel, The Ghost Road, because some say it is the best of the trilogy - but again, I don't feel ready yet.

Two cultures - Snow

As a talk on Radio 3 reminded me recently, it is now just fifty years since C P Snow gave the Rede lecture, The Two Cultures, and a phrase entered the language; more than just a phrase, actually, it is still a powerful meme. I am reading Snow's major novel series at the moment, and it is fascinating to see the physicist and the writer in one image, in one incarnation. Snow's basic argument, which he admitted was not an original one, was that the arts and the sciences had drifted apart to the point where the adherents of the two muses could not communicate with each other, often saw no value in the other, and were unable to cooperate and reinforce each other.  I shall let him explain in his own words, starting with why the issue interested him:

It was a problem I could not avoid just because of the circumstances of my life. The only credentials I had to ruminate on the subject at all came through those circumstances, through nothing more than a set of chances. Anyone with similar experience would have seen much the same things and I think made very much the same comments about them. It just happened to be an unusual experience. By training I was a scientist: by vocation I was a writer. That was all. It was a piece of luck, if you like, that arose through coming from a poor home.

Then the standard demonstration of incomprehension:

A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare's? I now believe that if I had asked an even simpler question — such as, What do you mean by mass, or acceleration, which is the scientific equivalent of saying, Can you read? — not more than one in ten of the highly educated would have felt that I was speaking the same language. So the great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight into it as their neolithic ancestors would have had.

And a failure to understand, on the part of the arts men, that the first half of the twentieth century was a unique flowering of science and physics, unique in all recorded history:

Literary intellectuals at one pole - at the other scientists, and as the most representative, the physical scientists. Between the two a gulf of mutual incomprehension - sometimes (particularly among the young) hostility and dislike, but most of all lack of understanding. ... Non-scientists tend to think of scientists as brash and boastful. They hear Mr T. S. Eliot … the tone, restricted and constrained, with which literary intellectuals are at home: it is the subdued voice of their culture. Then they hear a much louder voice, that of another archetypal figure, Rutherford, trumpeting: 'This is the heroic age of science! This is the Elizabethan age!' Many of us heard that … and we weren't left in any doubt whom Rutherford was casting for the role of Shakespeare. What is hard for the literary intellectuals to understand, imaginatively or intellectually, is that he was absolutely right.

And finally, a comment about the frequent (then, perhaps not now) accusation that scientists are ridiculously optimistic - they can solve the world's problems, they even sometimes think they will have a theory of everything, that there will be nothing more to be discovered.  Snow has a more measured approach, and the novelist in him reminds us of some deep truths:

This is an accusation which has been made so often that it has become a platitude. ... Most of the scientists I have known well have felt - just as deeply as the non-scientists I have known well - that the individual condition of each of us is tragic. Each of us is alone: sometimes we escape from solitariness, through love or affection or perhaps creative moments, but those triumphs of life are pools of light we make for ourselves while the edge of the road is black: each of us dies alone.

Of course, it is easy to forget that for many people, neither culture is of any significance at all.  But for those of us who care about either Austen or Galileo, either music or relativity, it is always worth trying to care about both.  In reading Snow's essay, I was reminded of Jacob Bronowski's writings.  Bronowski was one of the great bridges across this arts-science divide, and you can read him on computing and physics and painting and music.  In his Origins of Knowledge and Imagination and The Visionary Eye, he deals with some of the exciting similarities, the need for creativity and imagination in both.  I would speak of his ideas more, but space forbids - but I will return to this subject in another post.

Lotus eating in the sunburned country

This week's poem is something of a nostalgia trip for me, harking back to poems I read in the 1980s, and to the period I lived in Australia around the same time.  It's a celebration of still beauty, in the rain on a dam (a "dam" in Australia is the lake itself, not just the retaining structure as it would be in England) - a lovely contrast to the tragedy of drought and bushfires in Victoria recently.  Les Murray is a fine poet, but I find much of his work obscure, as it relies on Australian terms and slang that are not immediately familiar to most readers.  But there are wonderful exceptions, and I've chosen one today from his 1987 collection Daylight Moon - this is Les Murray's Lotus Dam, (the wonderful photograph is taken from Josie Keys' website) and you can read more short poems here.

Lotus leaves, standing feet above the water

Collect at their centre a perfect lens of rain

And heel, and tip it back into the water.

 

Their baby leaves are feet again, or slant lips

Scrolled in decoration; pointed at toe and heel

They echo an unwalked sole in their pale green crinkles

 

And under blown and picket blooms, the floor

Of floating leaves rolls light rainwater marbles

Back and forth on sharkskins of anchored rippling.

 

Each speculum, pearl and pebble  of the first water

Rides, sprung with weight, on its live mirroring skin

Tipped green and loganberry, till one or other sky

 

Redeems it, beneath bent foils and ferruled canes

Where cupped pink bursts all day, above riddled water.

Miss Dobson

Courtesy - as is often the case nowadays - of 99 pence of expenditure at the local Oxfam, I have just re-read "the incomparable Max"'s only novel, the 1911 frivolity Zuleika Dobson.  And if Max Beerbohm can be called just "Max", I can call the lovely Zuleika (a tautology, that's what the name means) just "Miss Dobson".  This is a book I first read when probably rather drunk with the idea of Oxford, and his is certainly a book to get drunk on.  It is a fantasy, set in the mythical Oxford college of Judas (I wonder how many made up Oxford colleges there are in popular literature?), of a second rate female conjurer who is utterly bewitching and utterly heartless.

She turns the heads of everybody in the university, most notably that of the nonpareil Duke of Dorset, who is ineffably conceited, rich and talented, and who is the social mark af all the university.  I don't suppose there is anybody who doesn't know the plot, so I won't be spoiling it if I tell you he determines to sacrifice himself in the Isis during eights week (translation, in the River Thames where it runs through Oxford, after the summer inter-college rowing races).  His suicide is followed by hundreds of others, and Oxford is deserted as a result - she takes a few hours to reflect and regret, and sets out for Cambridge.

I loved this thirty years ago, and I could love it still now, it is written with such panache, such confidence, and such imagination - except that it is really a little long.  The idea is marvellous, but a hundred or so pages would have done nicely, and it is well over twice that length. But if you don't know it, it's well worth a look, although you mustn't think that Oxford was ever at all like this!  But the scenes in which the gods rather regret releasing the two black owls which presage the death of a member of the Duke's family, and so grant his every whim in recompense, are masterly; he only thinks that a certain cloud would be a little further left to be placed to best advantage, and lo!, it is so.  And the sangfroid with which the Duke, only an hour before his suicide, orders the family tomb made ready and pays his landlady's bill, stopping to check most carefully before he hurls himself to his death, is tremendous.

In fact, the only thing I can't really forgive either Max or the Duke is that, thanks to his ill-timed plunge into the Isis, Magdalen (my own college, as you may have guessed) were bumped by Judas and ceased to be head of the river.  This is unthinkable - Magdalen was the power on the river at that time - the 1908 Olympic coxless four was entirely drawn from Magdalen and won gold; and 8 of the 9 members of the Gold medal winning 1912 Olympic Eight were also from Magdalen - and the idea that they were deposed by a fictional college is plain silly!

Strangers and Brothers - order, order

There has been some confusion over the C P Snow Strangers and Brothers sequence, as they appear in different orders (only the early ones) in different places.  So, for the record, here is the full list in the order I find most satisfying, with the date of publication in brackets, and the dates of the action following (my estimates, I think, I've taken them from an old notebook (1982) and didn't note a source).  You can see that the first four all overlap to some degree, but that thereafter a number of others overlap slightly. 

Someone has asked me about getting hold of these books.  There should be no problem at all - there are lots in print, and there are literally thousands of Snow's books on Abebooks - and five of the series at 99 pence in my local Oxfam shop! 

Time of Hope (1949)  1914 - 33

George Passant (aka Strangers and Brothers) (1949)  1925 - 33

The Conscience of the Rich (1958)  1927 - 33

The Light and the Dark (1947)  1935 - 43

The Masters (1951)  1937

The New Men (1954)  1939 - 47

Homecomings (1958)  1938 - 51

The Affair (1960)  1953 - 54

Corridors of Power (1964)  1955 - 59

The Sleep of Reason (1968)  1963 - 64

Last Things (1970)  1964 - 68

When I've finished the entire sequence, later in the year, I'll briefly review his entire writings, and suggest some other reading.  I'm taking it slowly, and have only read four so far this year, so the eleventh will probably be somewhere around April, or even May.

Strangers and Brothers: Conscience of the Rich

The Conscience of the Rich is the third book in C P Snow's Strangers and Brothers sequence, and is an illuminating and moving one.  Published in 1958, it looks back at London in the late 1920s and early 1930s.  Lewis Eliot is trying to work out a career in London as a barrister, amid many distractions, including a painful love, severe poverty, and friends in trouble in his home town, Leicester.  He makes friends with Charles March, another young barrister, proud hope of a rich Jewish family with strong traditions.

There are many delightful things in this book, but few can match the dazzling skill with which Snow portrays Charles' father, Leonard March; he is a proud, sometimes irascible man, deeply fond of his two children, but completely out of touch with their aspirations in politics, in careers, and in love.  And he is given to great rambling stories of the family, where non-sequitur is piled upon irrelevance until he triumphantly brings the tale - amongst the laughter of his children and friends - to a glorious conclusion.  And Lewis notices wealth and what it can do - the Marches have a man in to wind the clocks once a week - and starts as a junior figure who, because of his personal qualities and later his professional skill, becomes central to the March family.

For these are times of turmoil.  A whiff of political scandal touches a connection of the family, and the left, to which Lewis, Charles and his sister and others are passionately devoted, forces a conflict with the family.  And events in Germany mean that being Jewish is suddenly a burden, suddenly it is something that the Marches and families like them have to be measured against, have to take account of; to use a word which would achieve a terrible significance after the war, they cannot be unbelastet or unencumbered any longer.  And both the children, Charles and his sister Katherine, break away from the family in ways which Leonard and his peers find very difficult, difficult even unto the death of the spirit.

The politics of the inter-war period is the scourging, ripping tide of this book, but the young men and women are several boats afloat, swirling wildly, trying to steer a course but not wholly in control - and unable, unwilling to stay in safe harbour - but deeply hurt by the places they end up.  Careers, marriages, politics, personal relationships of all kinds, that is the heady mix of this book.  It's a fine read, although not entirely a comfortable one.  The final words, as Mr March sees off guests from a dinner party in which all the pain of his family problems has been apparent, are as much about the European situation as they are about a lonely and sad old man:

Standing at the corners. I stamped my feet, waiting for a taxi.  Through the bare trees of the garden, I could see a beam of light, as the door of Mr March's house opened, letting out some more of his guests.  Soon the party would be over.  He would test the latches and switch off the lights: then he would be left in his own company.

Dust and dreams

Here is a wonderful poem by two men who are hardly read nowadays - Horace and his translator, Housman.  A E Housman was a classical scholar, and in Tom Stoppard's marvellous Invention of Love (read it immediately if you don't know every line!), he has Housman lecture on Horace:  "Diffugere nives goes through me like a spear.  Nobody makes it stick like Horace that you’re a long time dead – dust and shadow, and no good deeds, no eloquence, will bring you back.  I think it’s the most beautiful poem in Latin or Greek there ever was.”   The poem is simple in form, describing the renewal of life in the spring, and lamenting that we cannot share in it, that our decay is for ever (where "Tullus and Ancus are" in the extract below, that is, dead and in Hades).  Finally, it describes Theseus’ failed attempts to free his lover Pirithous from the chains of hell.

I have regretted, in an earlier post, that Horace is so little read now the classic tradition in education is almost dead.  But this poem, Ode 7 from Book 4, will surely reaffirm the value of reading him.  The fourth stanza by itself is vaut le voyage! This is the stunning translation by A E Housman of Horace's Diffugere nives.

The snows are fled away, leaves on the shaws

   And grasses in the mead renew their birth,

The river to the river-bed withdraws,

   And altered is the fashion of the earth.

The Nymphs and Graces three put off their fear

   And unapparelled in the woodland play.

The swift hour and the brief prime of the year

   Say to the soul, Thou wast not born for aye.

Thaw follows frost; hard on the heel of spring

   Treads summer sure to die, for hard on hers

Comes autumn with his apples scattering;

   Then back to wintertide, when nothing stirs.

But oh, whate'er the sky-led seasons mar,

   Moon upon moon rebuilds it with her beams;

Come we where Tullus and where Ancus are

   And good Aeneas, we are dust and dreams.

Torquatus, if the gods in heaven shall add

   The morrow to the day, what tongue has told?

Feast then thy heart, for what thy heart has had

   The fingers of no heir will ever hold.

When thou descendest once the shades among,

   The stern assize and equal judgment o'er,

Not thy long lineage nor thy golden tongue,

   No, nor thy righteousness, shall friend thee more.

Night holds Hippolytus the pure of stain,

   Diana steads him nothing, he must stay;

And Theseus leaves Pirithous in the chain

   The love of comrades cannot take away.

Birthday Boys

Beryl Bainbridge is not a novelist I often read, in spite of her obvious quality, and even though I read An Awfully Big Adventure with great delight when it came out.  But Sara Wheeler mentioned her book about the Scott expedition several times in her book on Antarctica, and I determined to read it.  The Birthday Boys is well worth seeking out; it’s small but perfectly formed.  In fewer than 200 pages, she tells the story of the Scott expedition all the way from the UK and the voyage south, to the Pole and disaster.  She does this in five episodes, temporally distinct, and each narrated by a different member of the team – Taff Evans, scientist Edward Wilson, Scott himself, Birdie Bowers, who hardly felt the cold, and ‘Titus’ Oates.

She captures brilliantly the foibles and strengths of each, and has a wealth of learning lightly worn to illustrate their role in the human drama they enacted; each sheds light on himself, and on the others.  ‘Taff’ Evans is a hero to himself and Scott, but unloved by the others, and Birdie and Scott himself both rouse very real ambivalence in other members of the party.  You cannot read much about Antarctica without feeling pressure to take sides between Scott and Shackleton  - Scott the heroic failure, who came second in the race to the Pole he affected to despise and failed to get himself or his team home; Shackleton, whose explorations did not get him near the Pole or across the continent as he dreamed, but whose concern for his men and whose brilliant leadership and physical and mental resilience kept every single man alive.  Me, I’m a Shackleton man: the trip across the ocean in an open boat, and the crossing of the South Georgia mountains, is one of the great achievements – and I cannot forgive Scott his decision to rely on ponies and tractors, not dogs, against all advice, to add an extra man to the Pole party when the logistics – already stretched enough – were designed for four.  He was, no doubt, by the standards of his time, a great man, and his wish for his brilliant son  – “Make the boy interested in natural history; it is better than games” – bore remarkable fruit.

But back to the novel!  The five voices are all subtly different, and each contributes to your understanding of the others, and of the party as a whole.  In particular, Scott himself and Birdie Bowers become etched clearly – though I cannot really tell how fairly – Scott declining in esteem as the whole picture becomes available, and Bowers – rather criticised by the first narrator, Taff Evans - growing in stature all the time.  I enjoyed this aspect of the book, but two other characters were also very attractive – Wilson the scholar (Uncle Bill), and Apsley Cherry-Garrard (a minor figure in this book, but the subject of a whole book, much admired, by Sara Wheeler – Cherry). 

 

There is inevitably much description of hardship and the cold, but also much of the stoical and understated way in which these extraordinary men approached the task – especially their self deprecation and humour.  A highlight is the description – in the voice of Lt Birdie Bowers – of the expedition by three men (himself, Wilson and Cherry) to the rookery of the Emperor penguins, a tale of hardship, sacrifice and discomfort that can hardly be imagined – and all not in self preservation, or for glory, or the search for a Grail, but a desire to collect – for good scientific reasons – the eggs of this remarkable bird (which was wrongly thought at the time to be particularly primitive and therefore something of a link between reptiles and birds)!  (The penguins in the picture are king penguins - I didn't get anywhere near an emperor!) The other passage which deserves particular note – mainly because it was touching when I had feared it might be maudlin or ridiculous – was Oates’ tragic and heroic end; the last words of his tale are the last in the book: “And, oh, how warm it was.”

A wonderful novel in its own right – well worth reading, with or without an interest in Antarctica.

Simply Niko

From the early days (1950s and 1960s) of scientific, experiment based animal behaviour study, two names stand out: Konrad Lorenz and Niko Tinbergen.  I read Lorenz's On Aggression years ago, and was suitably impressed, and everyone knows of his pioneering work with geese.  But I had never read anything about Tinbergen, so finding a copy of Curious Naturalists was too good an opportunity to miss.

This is very much a book for the interested amateur, and it covers the ground in an engaging, anecdotal style, with a lot of variety in the material used.  But it was published in 1958, and it bears all the hallmarks of that in its style - very slightly patronising on occasion, and jolly enthusiastic in a chap like way on others.  There is little human warmth in it, but a lot of interesting natural history - ranging from bee hunting wasps (top picture, the so called "bee wolf wasp") in the Netherlands, to snow buntings and phalaropes in Greenland, and various studies of birds, butterflies and other insects  which use either camouflage or distraction colours and patterns.  Camouflage in peppered moths, and how it can be affected by industrialisation, was a famous study at the time, illustrated below - in a staged photograph for a text book (staged for practical reasons - the difficulty of taking this for real with the equipment of the 1950s can be imagined; its not meant to deceive, because the moths' wings are spread out, which is unnatural; but they illustrate the point, in spite of later criticism of the method).  For me, perhaps the most chapters were those in which he described his famous work on the behaviours of black-headed gulls, and on how birds learn to find camouflaged caterpillars.

The other very striking thing about the science Tinbergen describes is how manual it is.  There are no computers, and a lot of the techniques were in their infancy, so the researchers were making it up as they went along, with an approach to making things which would have done Blue Peter proud - including constructing fake trees (to test wasps' navigational skills),  building a frame in which you can move a wasps' nest in loose sand, and many other models of birds, insects et cetera.  They had a fairly robust attitude to their subjects, not hesitating to capture them and mark them with ink, or to make them look in vain for their nests for an extended period, or even temporarily blinding them (don't ask how you do this to a wasp!).  In the most impressive feat of all, his researchers wanted to find out exactly which part of a distasteful caterpillar was unpleasant to birds - so they offered them a puree of its insides, without the skin - they liked that, whereas they couldn't abide the whole animal; so they took the caterpillars and shaved them (!), to see if it ws the skin or the hairs that were unpleasant (it was the hairs).  That's what I call dedication to duty.

More old fashioned crime: Sunday salon

A couple of weeks ago, I reviewed two old fashioned murder mysteries or thrillers; I enjoyed Creasey's The Enemy Within, but didn't have a lot of time for Underwood's Crooked Wood.  A little later, and after an exploration of abebooks and the Oxfam bookshop, I have  read three more: J J Marric's Gideon's Day, Lionel Davidson's The Chelsea Murders, and Freeman Wills Crofts Fatal Venture.  They are a varied collection, of different moods and qualities, and I enjoyed two but found the third a great disappointment.

I read The Chelsea Murders because I couldn't immediately find Kolymsky Heights, of which Philip Pullman said -  "The best thriller I've ever read, and I've read plenty. A solidly researched and bone-chilling adventure in a savage setting, with a superb hero."  Sadly, I can't say The Chelsea Murders deserves that sort of praise.  It was written in 1978, and is self-consciously modern, but with a rather old fashioned approach.  There is a serial killer addicted to tipping off the police in advance with a piece of poetry, and numerous rather unattractive bohemians and students.  In the end, it gets so confusing, that it was very difficult to follow the individuals and the plot.  But there was something there, a kind of raw passion for the story, and a number of goodish devices - so while I wouldn't recommend this particular book, I won't be put off following up Mr Pullman's recommendation in due season.

Freeman Wills Crofts is an older vintage altogether, writing elegant but rather artificial mysteries in the first half of the last century - most famous, probably for Inspector French's Greatest Case.  Before he committed himself to writing full time, he was a railway engineer, something you can detect in some of his books.  Inspector French is in Fatal Venture, too, cruising round the British Isles on a well appointed gambling ship (to check that it is not breaching British law by allowing gambling in territorial waters) when the owner of the ship is found murdered ashore in Northern Ireland.  The story up to the that point is a tale of commercial derring do, with plenty of rather shady practice to assist a vigorously entrepreneurial eye for the main chance, which was exciting enough in a restrained sort of way - but which will outrage anyone studying (as I am at the moment) the law on the duties and responsibilities of directors!  But it is an essential prequel, and engaging enough one, to the main story.  The prose is calm, violence is emphatically off-stage, and the sensibilities of ladies young and not so young are carefully consulted.  French and a Northern Irish colleague investigate the crime with various false trails en route, but come to the correct conclusion after tumbling to an ingenious piece of trickery with a ******** and an alibi.  It won't get the blood racing round your heart, and you'll sleep fine, but it's an elegant piece of work from a fully paid up member of the old school of crime writing.

My third book was the first of the Gideon series by J J Marric (John Creasey), Gideon's Day.  George Gideon ("GG") is a Superintendent at Scotland Yard, and this book, published in 1955, is a strikingly modern approach: it's driven by police procedure and a realistic approach - though not a particularly violent one - to murder, child molesting and drugs.  The story, unusually for the genre, keeps several different plots going forward at the same time, and the action takes place within the span of a single day - just slightly less than 24 hours.  It's traditional enough in some ways - the villains are caught and the main police character is decidedly attractive  - but it pays real attention to some of the less attractive truths, such as a disrupted personal life, police corruption, and the hard facts of detectives failing as well as succeeding.  It feels more modern than the 1950s, and I enjoyed it, and look forward to digging out more of the series in due course.  If you enjoy the crime novel without too much blood and gore, but pretty realistic, you might well find these books worth a look.
 

Kisses

They say that kissing's in season when the gorse is in bloom - that is, all year round.  So here are two slight poems, neither great works, but touching both.  First is Sara Teasdale's The Look (she was born in 1884 in Missouri, and died in 1933):

Strephon kissed me in the spring,

      Robin in the fall,

But Colin only looked at me

      And never kissed at all.

 

Strephon's kiss was lost in jest,

    Robin's lost in play,

But the kiss in Colin's eyes

   Haunts me night and day.

 

And the other is another piece of trivial Victoriana, Leigh Hunt's Jenny Kiss'd Me:

Jenny kiss’d me when we met,
Jumping from the chair she sat in;
Time, you thief, who love to get
Sweets into your list, put that in!
Say I'm weary, say I'm sad,
Say that health and wealth have miss’d me;
Say I'm growing old, but add,

     Jenny kiss'd me.

White desert

Sara Wheeler’s Terra Incognita : Travels in Antarctica is an engaging book about this most endlessly fascinating of all the continents – difficult of access, extreme of conditions, and full of contradictions.  While researching her book on Chile, Travels in a Thin Country, she had reached Tierra del Fuego in the extreme south, and then decided that she should visit the Chilean presence on Antarctica itself.  Although brief, that visit awakened her to the majesty and excitement of the continent, and she immediately made arrangements to spend more time there.  She made two long trips, visiting many bases, the Pole itself, and travelling in both winter and summer. 

I have been lucky enough to travel in both the Arctic and the Antarctic, briefly on both occasions, and enjoyed extraordinary scenery, stunning wildlife and a very modest degree of adventure (the photographs in this post – and a forthcoming one on Beryl Bainbridge’s novel about Scott’s polar expedition of 1911-12 – are from my own brief visit in 2002).  But Sara Wheeler’s book reminds me how little I have seen of this continent – most travellers from the South American side get no further south than  about 65 degrees, not even in the Antarctic Circle, and about as far from the South Pole as Iceland or Trondheim in Norway is from the Northern one. By contrast, in the Arctic, it is relatively easy to get to 80 degrees north, and not at all impossible to go to the Pole by ship. 

  

Sara went with the Americans to their main base at McMurdo, and from there made a variety of trips out, with naturalists, geologists, meteorologists and many other -ists.  She visited the Pole, making friends and puddings along the way - her recipe for Antarctic bread and butter pudding suggest they ate some fairly extraordinary concoctions at times, when key ingredients were missing!  She went from the American base to the British base on the Antarctic peninsula, where she found them much less welcoming to strangers, especially a woman (with some honourable exceptions).  She met a whole cast of eccentrics, put up with some pretty horrendous living conditions, and seems to have had a great time.  She loved it so much, she returned in the winter, to the continent in its garb of permanent darkness, and she survived that, too - for a couple of weeks alone in a remote hut with an American writer.

This is a very entertaining book, humorous and deadly serious, which captures much of the history and modern human drama of Antarctica, and the beauty, too.

Strangers and Brothers: George Passant

This novel, George Passant, was originally known as Strangers and Brothers, a title that was later appropriated for the whole series.  And although now regarded as second in the sequence, in many ways it sets the scene for the themes that were to develop over the twelve novels – interpersonal relationships developing in the context of complex social, economic and political developments  - developments which engaged the interest and the passion of the young people in both Leicester and London with a passionate intensity that remains unmatched in modern times, in terms both of its sophistication and energy. 

The novel is set in the period 1925-33, a small period within the wider scope of Time of Hope.  Most young people were, of course, on the left, though this ranged from a mild desire to relax social relations and move towards more distributive economic policies all the way to Communism and the desire for revolution, violent if necessary.  At the same time, people remained as concerned as ever with status, getting on, and finding partners for life and for work.  This is the backdrop to George Passant; the eponymous hero is energetic, committed to social and political change, and working towards it through working with young people to help them, first through education (classes at night school) and then in a looser social grouping which talks and dreams, but which may have a harder core of political toughness – and certainly serves as the recruiting ground to satisfy some of George’s more conventional appetites – sex and money.

The idealism of George and some of the others comes into conflict with the local authorities, and also within the group with the harder headed and more cynical aspirations of men like Jack Cotery.  There is the whiff of scandal, of fraud, and eventually a court case.  Throughout, Lewis Eliot is moving away yet remaining strongly tied to “the group”.  He moves away to London, his career begins to develop, and he is growing physically and emotionally distant; but he owes much early support to George, and to his friends, and cannot break.  He has love troubles of his own, and a growing distaste for the way some people in George’s group are behaving – but he has to support them, a support which is deep in his heart but which is in tension with new loyalties and new demands in London.  Even after all his troubles, George is an inspiration: "He could still warm himself and everyone around him with his own hope."

This is not my favourite novel of the sequence, but it is very good, especially on the stultifying small town dogmatism and closeness of the 1920s, and it paints warm and realistic portraits of men and women on both sides of the debate.  Snow has a warm understanding of what motivates and drives his characters, and is there in their minds.  Here themes are developed which will carry through all the novels, leading up to arguments about the war with Germany, the use of the bomb, and the failure to build a new Jerusalem in the 1950s and 60s – and about people’s continuous attempts  - often futile or thwarted – to be happy or at least at ease with their lives. 

Strangers and Brothers gave Philip Snow the title for his engaging biography of C P Snow, which is called Stranger and Brother, well worth a read if you enjoy the novels.

Women reading: February - Sunday Salon

The February painting on my Women Reading calendar  (see also 1st of each month since) is Robert Hope's The Yellow Silk Dress.  Hope was British (Scottish, I think), and lived between 1869-1936.

 

This has a lazy, slightly sensual air, without the exoticism of the January reader.  She is less a serious reader, one suspects, than a woman merely whiling away an hour or so with a fashionable magazine - for that is what she seems to be reading.  It's a large format, certainly, and appears to be mainly full of illustrations: assuming that the painting dates from around the turn of the century, could it be the famous Yellow Book of the 1890s, daring literary and artistic magazine of some decadence?  The echo of "yellow" is alluring, and the idea that this woman is looking at sketches by Aubrey Beardsley is a charmingly risque one!