Books Do Furnish A Room

Jordan: rags and rocks

In Jordan recently, I was able to buy some fine textiles, and a couple of pieces of jewellry which caught my eye.  First, a fine woollen rug, woven in three long pieces and then stitched together with great heavy ribs - perfect for a wooden floor in the country.  Then some cushion covers, silk embroidery of elegant and charming trees, and a simpler cotton pattern, too.  Then the jewellry, a necklace and a bracelet.

 

 

 

 

 

Strangers and Brothers: The Affair

Like Homecomings, this novel is on the small scale, and Lewis Eliot is personally closely involved, though he is not the main focus of events.  The Affair returns to the small Cambridge college of The Light and The Dark and The Masters, but has no sexual subject: the word “affair” is a reference to the Dreyfus affair, of which this  is a modern reinterpretation on a modest scale.

An unattractive personality, morose and paranoid, Howard is a junior Fellow of the college thrown out for scientific fraud in his research.  Doubts arise about the evidence, and life in college becomes very tense for all, especially as there is another Mastership election in the offing.  Political division deepens between those who believe there has been a miscarriage, and those who feel the whole matter has been looked at thoroughly and should now be allowed to rest – and while the reader’s sympathies in a judicial sense are likely to be with Howard, his ingratitude to those helping, and his general grumpiness and sense of persecution, make this hard to maintain.

Much of the interest centres around the personalities of Howard and his wife Laura, good looking and utterly committed to proving his innocence.  In their pursuit of justice, they are blind to the best way forward, and reluctant to take advice.  They leave Eliot feeling useless and unwanted, exactly at the time he has the ability to really make a difference to their cause: “No one likes to be treated as a vacuum inhabited solely by himself”.

Swift on politics

I have been reading a cheap (and therefore, abandonable) copy of Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels for my trip to Jordan.  It’s a long time since I read it properly, probably at school, and I therefore only remember a few highlights, mainly from his visit to the Lilliputians.  It’s frightfully political, and indeed the first editions were not complete, no publisher daring to produce the whole work, with its criticism of the king (George II) and his ministers.  But for me, all the political references are so much weed on the hull, slowing down the craft; if you get them immediately (and I only get a few), all well and good – if you don’t, just enjoy it for the story, the sense of humour, and the lessons about human behaviour which are perfectly generalisable and need no special knowledge of early eighteenth century England.

For example, in Lilliput, Gulliver hears that the long war with its neighbour is caused by a dispute over which end of the egg should be opened – the little or pointed end, or the big end.  That’s quite silly enough, without references to possible parallels in England or Europe at the time.  Indeed, the whole of the Lilliput adventure is tremendously engaging, partly because it is written with such geniality, and he and his unwilling hosts are (at least at first) immensely cordial and good natured to each other; and perhaps, too, because the joke has had no chance to wear thin!

By the time you come to Brobdingnag, where all the creatures are twelve times Gulliver’s size, rather than one-twelfth, some of the humour is relatively obvious, in that it is the opposite of Lilliput; but it is still interesting to see how he deals with exploitation, and how Glumdalclitch, the daughter of his original finder, takes care of him with genuine affection – though it is the sort of affection you might lavish on a pet, we feel.  But some of his acutest and most penetrating political observations are from this voyage:

The king tells him: “You have clearly proved that ignorance, idleness, and vice, are the proper ingredients for qualifying a legislator ... that laws are best explained, interpreted, and applied by those whose interest and abilities lie in perverting, confounding and eluding them.

“And, he gave it for his opinion; that whoever could make two ears of corn, or two blades of grass, grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before; would deserve better of mankind ... than the whole race of politicians put together.”

And Gulliver refuses to publish his story (though he obviously changes his mind later!): “My answer was, that I thought we were already overstocked with books of travels”.

Sheer joy!  I think I will leave any comments on Laputa and the Houhonyms until a later date, although those are the passages which have traditionally been almost forgotten by modern audiences, in spite of some critical opinion which ranks their political satire as the best of all.

Inventing forms

Over on writonwater, there was an interesting post about a book on different poetic forms - and it's clear that the author knows much more about that than me.  But, by chance, I came across this the other day, culled from the Times Literary Supplement in January 1984.  Peter Reading is a poet who first came to my notice with this poem, and I don't think I have enjoyed anything else of his as much since.

I think it's a satisfying poem in its own right, but there is fun with the forms.  It is a sonnet (you have to put the title with the first block of seven lines to make the octet) with its normal 14 lines, but it is made up of examples of two Japanese forms - the well known haiku, three lines and seventeen syllables, complete in itself; and the less known but older tanka, five lines with 31 syllables in the form 5,7,5,7,7 (forming two groups, kami-no-ku or upper phrase is the first three lines,  and the shimo-no-ku, the lower phrase, is the last two lines).  Not only does Reading manage this, he also tells you about it in the poem, and writes a poem about something else important as well.  Awesome!

So here is Peter Reading's I Have Invented:

 

I have invented

A brand new kind of sonnet

where the octave is

a tanka plus a haiku

and the sestet two haikus.

But is there, today,

one ghastly experience

that vindicates verse?

Outside the chip shop

an ambulance’s blue light

throbs at heartbeat rate.

Someone has dropped dead;

tidily weighted syllables

drip from the draped stiff.

Jordan: Petra

It is hard to say anything new about Petra, it’s just astonishing.  Tombs and other buildings carved out of the rock, some preserved miraculously well, mainly by the Nabatean civilisation, of which we know almost nothing.  The location, too, is fantastic: the town is approached through the Siq, a narrow and winding gorge, and there are several high points to climb to, either just for the view over the Treasury, or in their own right, such as El Deir (Place of Sacrifice) and the Monastery.  And all these buildings are carved from red sandstone, which is full of colour and life – swirling patterns, reds and purples, subtle hues and flaming ones, as if a the architect had been let loose, albeit with a restricted palate, before his taste and care were formed.

These first four photographs are of the so called Pharoah's Treasury - many of the monuments have names which follow wildly inaccurate bedouin guesses as to their origins - there is nothing Egyptian about this, and it is a centaph, not a treasury.  Top is the spectacular first view you get after a mile's walk through the gorge - the Siq - eventually you see this building (actually a facade cut out of the rock) peeping through the crack of the gorge walls.  Look, up early, no people! The second is an almost aerial view from the cliffs above - a strenuous and slightly vertiginous 45 minute walk - or four hours if you get thoroughly lost, as we did.  The third is a detail of the pediment, showing strong Greek influence, either directly or via the Romans.  Finally, your blogger, blowing hard from the climb!

 

 

 

The collage on the left shows a mosaic fish in a church erected on the site later, a carved snake (swallowing an elephant?) in the Snake Tomb, a carved lion from one of the more obscure tombs, and one of many sets of shallow, blind steps on the mountainsides, intended to indicate to the departing soul the direction in which it should ascend to heaven.

 

 

 

On the way up to the monastery (below), a stiff climb through a steeply stepped gorge, we saw these goats crossing a cliff on the most exiguous of ledges.

 

Beolw are more images from around Petra, just to give you a (very feeble) idea of the site.  First is the Urn tomb, with Byzantine colonnades built much later.  Then a general view of some of the tombs in the lower part of the Siq, in sepia but a modern picture!  There are few people in these pictures, but the main part of the site can be very crowded, in contrast to travellers like Paul Gotch before and even during the war, who trekked in by donkey or taxi, had the place to themselves, and slept in one of the thousands of caves!  Finally, a picture of some of the fantastic rock colour - imagine this spread liberally over a site of several square miles, cropping up here and there, gaudy, subdued by turns.

 

 

Strangers and Brothers: Homecomings

After the making of the atomic bomb, the Strangers and Brothers series returns to the more intimate focus in Homecomings, in which Lewis Eliot is the central character (something Nick Jenkins in the Powell sequence never is).  This starts well before the war, and goes on after it has ended – covering several years, then, which have already been the subject of The Light and The Dark and The New Men, but concentrating on a completely different subject, though often touching on key moments in those books.

Lewis Eliot has married out of despair, a beautiful woman he has loved desperately, but whose illnesses and lack of love for him are ruining both their lives.  He tries to leave, but fails.  He sacrifices his career for her, and his spirit is nearly broken.  Eventually, while he is enjoying a cheerful night out with colleagues, she commits suicide.  He is thrown into a form of despair, but there is also much relief mingled in it.  He reduces his life to essentials, work, work, and more work, keeping up a basic social life and living in unattractive digs with a lazy and over-inquisitive landlady.

By chance, two years after Sheila’s death, he meets and gradually falls in love with Margaret, rather younger than him, but intelligent, amusing, and attractive.  The affair develops rapidly, but he is unable to fully enter the relationship, preferring to deal with difficulty – Sheila’s suicide, the death of his friend Roy Calvert – alone, without sharing.  Eventually, she leaves him, marries another man and has a child.  He is cast down once again, the more desperately for having come so close to real happiness – but they meet again, a couple of years later.  The second half of the novel tells how they deal with their reignited love, tempted by infidelity, thinking of a new start, burdened by loyalty to her husband Geoffrey and their son.  It also tells of Lewis’ emotional maturing, and how he copes with the realisation that he cannot always cope alone.

Snow is full of pithy observation, especially about how human beings behave and how they explain and justify their behaviours, but I particularly liked this remark of Margaret’s father, the left wing art critic, Austin Davidson:  “All human relationships are slightly bizarre unless one is taking part”.

Siberian thriller

Although I didn’t enjoy The Chelsea Murders much, I was determined to give Kolymsky Heights a go due to the warmth of its recommendation from Philip Pullman.  Initial impressions emphasise that they are very different books – this is an international thriller, and the style is modern and spare (though slightly self consciously so), a far remove from the florid posturing of the contrived murder mystery.  It is very immediate, though the one word sentence is a device he could have used more sparingly.

I thought this was a bit slow to get going, but I found myself rather suddenly deep in the story and really pretty interested in the outcomes.  Something very odd is happening at a Russian research station in an area remote and inhospitable even by Siberian standards, and a message from a senior scientist there asks that someone from the West makes contact with him – clearly with information of great importance at stake.  At first the resolution of the problem seems to centre on a withdrawn Oxford professor, various British and American intelligence agencies, and a Canadian-Indian with high academic standing but a turbulent and equivocal past politically.

In fact, it is the Canadian, Porter, who becomes the central character, and his attempt to get into – and out of – a top security zone in Russia is well told, although there is a fair amount of “look how much I know detail” along the way, unnecessary for plot or character development.  But the tale moves along briskly (even if some of Porter’s skills seem a liitle unlikely for a man of his past), and there’s a dying man’s pride and a young man’s love at stake to increase the interest of the espionage story.  Davidson is fond of a number of devices which impress at first but become wearisomely obvious after a while: he seems to make a definite statement, which implies that  - for example, no plot spoilers here – that Porter has been captured in a bar, but which proves not to be true a few pages later – and then an ambiguity (sometimes slightly forced) in the original statement becomes clear.

So, I don’t rank this as highly as Pullman did – "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" – but I do think it’s a perfectly good holiday read, or a piece of winter escapism, and the story has plenty of original and intriguing material.  But it’s for those who like the genre already, I wouldn’t argue that it deserves the attention of every reader (as I would with Le Carré, for example).

Jordan: castles and deserts

A recent visit to Jordan inevitably focused on Petra, of which more in a later post, but there were other pleasures too:  castles of Saladin and the Crusaders, exquisite mosaics at Madaba, and the beauty and glory of the landscape, mountains in Dana and the desert at Wadi Rum.

The first few photographs show the wonderful Roman city of Jerash, not yet fully excavated, but with several very well preserved buildings over a huge area - which is being expanded all the time by further work.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The photograph below is a small and charming decoration in one of the two complete theatres which remain at Jerash.

At Madaba, there are very fine mosaics from the 6th century AD, showing Christian and classical motifs.  Remarkably modern looking houses (Dutch, perhaps?) and charming trees.  In the second picture, you can see an ox overlain by a later tree - repair after iconoclastic (Muslim) damage, or possibly a deliberate re-laying to comply with the new regime.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Below, moonrise over the Dana nature reserve - a wonderful place, though the hotels are not quite of the first standard!

 

Finally, the desert in the south, at Wadi Rum - ripples in the sand, an early morning landscape from a hot air balloon, and camels crossing the dunes.

 

Before the Game

The cricket season is just beginning, and here is a poem I found written up in some old notes.  It's by Alan Brownjohn, and was published in the TLS in May 1984.  It describes the moment of the toss before the match, to decide which team will bat first, and the consternation of the twelfth man (the only substitute allowed at cricket is the twelfth man, and even then he can't bat or bowl - normally he just brings on the drinks) when he realises that he may not get his coin back.   (Emperor Paranomasia IV is invented - paranomasia is a form of pun).  Here is Alan Brownjohn's Before the Game:

 

This is the coin

spinning in air

to decide who wins the toss.

This is the hand that flicked the coin

spinning in air

to decide who wins the toss.

This is the hand that owns the thumb

that flicked the coin

spinning in air

to decide who wins the toss.

This is the brain that controls the hand

that owns the thumb

that flicked the coin

spinning in air

to decide who wins the toss.

And this, over here, is the twelfth man,

who lent the coin

as a method of being noticed for something,

if not for his part in the game.

It is the custom here that the loser of the toss

keeps the coin as a consolation

for the brutality of fate.

The owner of this coin did not know of the custom

or he would not have lent for the purpose

a rare doubloon

of the Emperor Paranomasia IV.

As it spins, he watches it, trying to seem

unaffected,

thinking, “Will I ever get it back?”

The situation is complicated by the fact

that the doubloons of the Emperor Paranomasia IV

have two heads.

Der verbranntem Bucher

A chilling article in Tuesday's The Times, a review of a book about the infamous burning of the books under Hitler in 1933, good writers and bad, Jewish and gentile, men of the left and of the right.  And all, complained Stefan Zweig, without writers protestsing.  Volker Weidermann, the young journalist who has written Das Buch der verbranntem Bücher (The Book of the Burning Books), has read many of the banned list, and found some real gems - but lost for a generation, or for two, or for ever.

George Smiley was undercover in Germany in this period and saw the burning of the books, and rejoiced that he knew his enemy.  Mann was among many who faced a new humiliation:

And for those who did survive till 1945, there was one last, bitter pill to swallow: “Many of the famous authors returning to Germany after the war were devastated to find that there was no audience for them,” Weidermann says. “The public that had burnt their books in 1933 still didn't want them! That was utterly humiliating for someone like Thomas Mann, who thought that there was a ‘better Germany' that would welcome him back.”

This is only just published in German, but I hope it is translated soon: it contains a lesson we cannot forget, a lesson which will bear endless retelling.

Fadiman U

Anne Fadiman has written two lovely books of essays, Ex Libris (1998) and At Large And At Small (2007).  The first is basically about books, though books approached from slightly quirky angles; the second is more general – and, I think, slightly less successful.  But in the art of essay writing (which has been dying ever since it was invented, so much so that Fadiman wryly observes that the essay mourning the passing of the essay is an important and vigorous sub-genre!) she is clearly very accomplished, and extremely witty.

In Ex Libris, in Marrying Libraries for example, she deals with the trauma of merging her husband’s and her own libraries, a mere eleven years after they started living together.  Now that is something I can understand; certain books are old friends, and someone else’s copy is just not the same, and other people have such contrary views on classification.  They do merge their books, but it involves long and tortuous negotiations, concessions and reluctant agreements, and it actually begins to unravel in some respects soon afterwards.  And in another essay, Sir, You Must Never Do That To A Book, her brother is rebuked by a note left by the chambermaid in a hotel for leaving a book face down (a crime I acknowledge I very occasionally commit myself), and she uses this as a starting point for discussing how different people treat books.  Some treat their books as sacred objects and insist on cleanliness and purity, while others regard the physical book as nothing, using torn out pages for notes, some even tearing out parts of a book they had read while travelling in order to reduce weight.  I am a man of the middle ground myself, but passions run high.

In The Joy of Sesquipedelians she looks at the joys of precise but unloved and unused words – and finds no less than 22 that she didn’t know in a single book.  O, alright then, they are: monophysite, mephitic, calineries, diapason, grimoire, adapertile, retromingent, perllan, cupellation, adytum, sepoy, subadar, paludal, apozemical, camorra, ithyphallic, alcade, aspergill, agathodemon, kakodeman, goetic, opopanax.  One friend knew no less than nine of these, I managed 4 that I really knew, and another 3 that I’d have recognised in context.  And how I've managed all these years without retromingent - "urinating backwards", I really can't say!  This is only fun, but anyone following me in reading C P Snow will know his predilection for such words, hebephrenia being the most recent example I can recall - "the insanity of pubescence".  My personal favourites are heteroclite and myristicivorous - do have fun with those!

Overall, I’d recommend Ex Libris to any booklover, they’re a joy; the essays in At Large And At Small, however, are of more general interest (coffee, collecting, working at night) but sometimes lack the brilliant spark of the other essays.

The title of this post, incidentally, is the name her family gave to themselves when competing against the television in an American quiz show, the equivalent of the British University Challenge.  They almost always "won"!

Darwin in rhyme

Why does every gentleman not

            become an ornithologist?

Gulls and cormorants take their way home

            at evening on a wild, irregular course.

This question is posed by a childhood vist to the seasisde by the young Darwin (and seems sensible to me, birdwatcher that I am).  Ruth Padel is Charles Darwin’s great-granddaughter, and a very good poet.  In Darwin: A Life In Poems (2009) she has brought together her family history and her muse in the most engaging way.  The whole book is a poetic account of his life, from childhood to death, touching on snall incidents to illustrate major themes - apart from evolution and his natural history studies, there is much on his relationship with his wife Emma (one of the mighty Wedgwood clan), and his views on religion.  But there are also charming and distressing incidents from childhood, seeing slavery at first hand, making his first dscoveries, playing with his children, and the tragic loss of many of them, and so on and so on.  Here is the wonder of the ocean deep on H M S Beagle, after a bout of sea sickness:

 

The deck is dazzle, fish-stink, gauze-covered buckets.

            Gelatinous ingots, rainbows of wet flinching amethyst

            and flubbed, iridescent cream.  All this

mean’s he’s better; and working on a load of lumpen light.

Padel's poems have a vary varied form, but all - or maybe just the mass of them taken together - have a slightly breathless quality which I found enjoyable: no need here to feel guilty about charging on, letting the meaning and the music of the words wash over you.  Indeed, I read it all, enjoying the poems, but reading the whole as if it was a sort of novel.  For those who don't know the detail of Charles darwin's life, there are simple explanatory marginalia, but you can easily ignore these if you wish.  Here Emma sees Down House for the first time:

“Ugly”, she says. “ A desolate air”.  The garden, though,

Makes up for it.  Old trees - purple magnolia, a quince,

a medlar, Spanish chestnut.  A goodish hay-meadow.

In September they’ll move in.  A child will be born,

And buried in the family plot he’ll pick at the west door

of this flint church.  Through briar rose haws, twisting petioles

of clematis will scribble these hedges like the pencil

of a ferocious toddler with glowing, ochre coloured wire.

I loved these poems.  I have always been keen on Darwin, and I feared these poems might be trivial or flubsy, but not a bit of it.  They illuminate, amuse, and tell of a very distrubed and worried man, beset by personal tragedies and religious doubts, as he quietly changed our understanding of the world for all time.

Jeudi Gras

The end of Lent – not that I have kept it in any way at all – maybe a good moment for my first post on food and cooking, especially as it is about fat, and specifically about the virtues of fat.  Jennifer McLagan’s Fat is apparently determined to put the case for fat, and although I haven’t read it, the reviews (eg, one by Alex Renton in The Times recently) were enough to make me want to write something.  (The two photographs are from blogs which know much more about food than this one - follow the links in the next two paragraphs).

The avoidance of fat has always seemed to me a foolishly exaggerated trend; of course, too much of it is both unhealthy and unattractive from a culinary point of view.  But often, fat is where the flavour is; lean meat is dead, tasteless – and therefore often dressed up with salt and flavour enhancing chemicals.  Your succulent restaurant steak is succulent because it has a marbling of fat in the meat.  The best chips are fried in beef fat, so I’m told.  A whole European tradition of charcuterie is testament to this obvious truth which we seem to have wilfully forgotten.

There are some things which have passed away from cooking unmourned because not understood.  My mother used to enjoy bread and dripping (admittedly in the war, when nourishment was harder to come by), which I believe it was a traditional energy rich and very tasty snack.  Certainly the dripping from the joint was saved and used for cooking breakfast.  And if you are so old fashioned as to make steamed puddings, just try making them with the suet freshly broken off from pig’s kidneys from your local butcher, assuming you’re lucky enough to have such a thing: it’s a revelation in taste and texture.  And potatoes roasted in goose fat, not olive oil – aahh!  But one thing is making a comeback – some recent research suggests that butter may not be the instant killer we have feared, which has to be good news, for who could prefer margarine?

And what is Jeudi Gras, or Fat Thursday?  Apparently, it’s an end of Lent festival in Bordeaux, marked by a procession of the fattest cattle, and the eating of the Bazadaise beef, red and yellow with meat and fat.  So, moderation in all things, but try buying the less lean steak or roast, and keep and use the dripping!

On this rock

An odd choice for Good Friday, but as I am fulfilling a long held ambition to travel to Jordan, I fear that meant this week's poem was utterly obvious -so here is John William Burgon's Petra.  He hadn't visited the city when he wrote this, and admitted later that "rose-red" was quite wrong.  Too late - it's on a million souvenirs and photo captions now!

 

It seems no work of Man's creative hand,
By labor wrought as wavering fancy planned;
But from the rock as if by magic grown,
Eternal, silent, beautiful, alone!
Not virgin-white like that old Doric shrine,
Where erst Athena held her rites divine;
Not saintly-grey, like many a minster fane,
That crowns the hill and consecrates the plain;
But rose-red as if the blush of dawn,
That first beheld them were not yet withdrawn;
The hues of youth upon a brow of woe,
Which Man deemed old two thousand years ago.
Match me such marvel save in Eastern clime,
A rose-red city half as old as time.

Floundering among the recipes

Gunter Grass, apart from being a fine novelist of the rumbustious left in post war German – a modern Rabelais, but one concerned about the environment, civil rights, women’s issues, and the political fate of Gdansk (Danzig) – was also fond of his food.  Many of these themes come together in The Flounder, which I read during a period of late teen / early twenties infatuation with Grass (which started with The Tin Drum, which I still think an astonishing book, an energetic fantasy, full of mockery of the Nazis, and stuffed with wonderful images).  The German title apparently means "flatfish" or even "turbot", but the book is known in English as The Flounder, and my photograph is of the eponymous species.  It is a novel rooted in the period - the radicalisation of normal political discourse, the cold war, aggressive feminism - but it is still well worth a read today.  It's full of humour, and full of recipes (and quite a lot of politics, and of sex, too)!

The flounder is male, and he comes out of the sea to lie with his mate, a cook who has many different incarnations over the centuries of North German history - and at the same time, is the nine month story of Ilsebill's (the latest incarnation of his woman, originally called Awa) pregnancy.  If that sounds complex and portentous, I've given quite the wrong impression - it's a very serious novel, but to read, it's actually a bit of a romp.  The flounder is a symbol of male domination, of knowledge used for the sake of his own sex, and Awa (who, in neolithic times, had three breasts) starts as matriarch and leader of a society in which the men were soft, childish and obedient.  She braves the gods to collect fire (in her "pouch" - short detour on the origin and function of the clitoris), which initially reinforces her dominance, but leads to the ability to smelt metal and make weapons - the start of male dominance, war and death.

The recipes are great - and there are dozens of them, and dozens of stories about food, too.  The insemination was preceded by shoulder of mutton with string beans and pears, for example, and similarly robust recipes sprinkle the book, always with some historical or political significance.  A favourite example is from the seventeenth century when Agnes (ie, Awa or Ilsebill) cooked goose giblets with turnips and "barley, caraway seed, marjoram and a little henbane to ward off plague".  You might not want to cook many of these recipes, but I assure you, you'll enjoy reading about them!

 

 

Strangers and Brothers: The New Men

I warned you at the end of The Masters that the scale was about to change, and in The New Men we are back to the large canvas of the novel before The Masters, The Light and the Dark.  But whereas that dealt with the fate of one man, painted against the approach of war and the early years of conflict, with political division at home and horrors abroad, The New Men deals with a new class of frightfulness – the realisation by good, decent scientists that a bomb of unimaginable power could be created.  This is about the dawn of the atomic age, and the pressures on men to make something utterly horrible for what they hoped were good reasons, and the pain and guilt and anger they felt when the bomb was used.  In addition, there are several enthralling human stories, and a significant espionage sub-plot.  All in all, The New Men is a very modern book in terms of content, though its reserved style, and the rawness of war and excitement of scientific discovery, make it old fashioned in feel.

Lewis Eliot, at the beginning of war, is transferred to the Civil Service (as was Snow himself), the highest of all possible callings.  He became a private secretary to a Minister close to scientific research, and was involved very soon with the realisation that making an atomic bomb was possible.  Such efforts were made by most scientists, because they – and only because – they feared Germany would get it first.  Gradually, the truth dawned that Britain, however brilliant, was playing second fiddle to the Americans with their vastly superior resources.  Gradually, it also became clear, to the scientists’ horror, that the bomb might actually be used – The New Men looks at the personal struggles of the scientists, each eager for advancement and fame, and their struggles with their consciences, and their efforts – futile as we all know – to stop it.

As ever, Snow is fascinated by the personalities and the emotions, and the way these men deal with failure, with a spy in their midst, and with the competition for honours – not to mention the danger of radiation sickness when something goes wrong.  In The New Men, they have success, but they come a frustrating second, and they see their genius used in a way which we can all understand all too well.  Later in life, he wrote a very readable popular account of some of the great men in twentieth century physics (he was a physicist himself), called simply The Physicists.  In spite of the horror of the bomb, this was the supreme age of physics, the period when physics became the queen of the sciences, and when it really looked, briefly, as if we might understand everything, even to uttermost depths.  That, of course, was an illusion, but Snow’s scientists in this book are only too well aware of the fragility of their technical and human knowledge.

Birdsong

Two poems of birdsong this month, to mark the emburgeoning spring around us.  First, the blackbird's lovely song is celebrated in William Henley's The Blackbird:

THE nightingale has a lyre of gold,

    The lark's is a clarion call,

And the blackbird plays but a boxwood flute,

    But I love him best of all.

  

For his song is all of the joy of life,

    And we in the mad, spring weather,

We two have listened till he sang

    Our hearts and lips together.

 

 

 

 

And then, more famous still, the thrush's wisdom, in repeating it's song, in Robert Browning's Home Thoughts From Abroad:

   

O, to be in England

Now that April 's there,

And whoever wakes in England

Sees, some morning, unaware,

That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf

Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf,

While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough

In England —now!

  

And after April, when May follows,

And the whitethroat builds, and all the swallows!

Hark, where my blossom'd pear-tree in the hedge

Leans to the field and scatters on the clover

Blossoms and dewdrops—at the bent spray's edge—

That 's the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over,

Lest you should think he never could recapture

The first fine careless rapture!

And though the fields look rough with hoary dew,

All will be gay when noontide wakes anew

The buttercups, the little children's dower

—Far brighter than this gaudy melon-flower!

Women reading: April

The April painting on my Women Reading calendar (see also 1st of each month this year) is Maria Konstantinovna Bashkirtseva's At A Book.  Bashkirtseva was Ukrainian, and lived between 1858-84, dying young of tuberculosis.  Apart from her painting, she also wrote a journal about being a woman artist, called I Am the Most Interesting Book Of All.  The painting is presumably, therefore, to be dated to the late 1870s or early 1880s.  

 

Luckily, I am as much of an expert on Ukrainian literature as I am on Danish, so I am able to suggest that she is reading the first real novel in Ukrainian, written in 1845–6, which was Chorna rada by Panteleimon Kulish (The Black Council - 1846, a bit before the picture), a historical novel influenced by Sir Walter Scott, on the subject of the Cossack past.  But other ideas are welcome!