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Letters to Max Beerbohm by Siegfried Sassoon

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Max B Siegfriend SOne of the nicest bookish finds is when you discover that two authors you like kept a correspondence. Sylvia Townsend Warner and David Garnett; William Maxwell and Eudora Welty; Sylvia Townsend Warner and William Maxwell. When people you like independently turn out to have connections, it’s like discovering two of your friends actually went to uni together. So imagine my happiness when I found a book of letters between Siegfried Sassoon and Max Beerbohm!

Granted, I haven’t actually read anything by Sassoon, but I grew very fond of him when I read another book of unexpected connections – Anna Thomasson’s A Curious Friendship, about Rex Whistler and Edith Olivier, but featuring a fair dose of Sassoon.

The full title of this collection, edited by Rupert Hart-Davis, is Letters to Max Beerbohm & A Few Answers (1986). There are few answers not because they’ve been lost, but because Beerbohm was famously bad at writing them. His friends seem to have been pretty tolerant about this, and his letters (when he does write them) are friendly, fluid, and charming – but Sassoon bears the lion’s share of this exchange. Even this doesn’t quite make up enough for a book, and Hart-Davis has rifled through Sassoon’s diaries for more information to set the scene. (Hart-Davis’ footnotes are also occasionally rather amusing – for instance, he describes Sibyl Colefax as ‘relentless society hostess’.)

Who comes off the page? I got the impression that Sassoon was much younger than Beerbohm – each letter is soaked with a sort of affectionate awe. It turns out that, for the bulk of their correspondence (in the 1930s), Beerbohm was in his 60s and Sassoon was in his late 40s and early 50s. A difference, yes, but not as much a one as comes across.

They both write letters that speak of deep friendship (and a curious resentment of Yeats). They are witty, thoughtful, and show a closeness and respect that you wouldn’t be able to get except through reading a book of this sort. They also have sketches and jottings by Siegfried, which are great fun, as well as verse that he throws into the letters – presumably fairly off the cuff.

The diary entries are well chosen, giving context to their friendship, and the mix of diary and letters works well. I enjoyed this description of their friendship, from Sassoon:

Conversing with Max, everything turns to entertainment and delectable humour and evocation of the past. […] Not a thousandth part can be recorded. But I feel that these talks with Max permanently enrich my mind, and no doubt much of it will recur spontaneously in future memories; he is like travelling abroad – one feels the benefit afterwards.

Well, we have certainly benefit afterwards. This is a slight book, and I certainly wish they had written to each other more prolifically. If they had, this might have been up there with the William Maxwell/Sylvia Townsend Warner collection of letters (The Element of Lavishness) as one of the great literary correspondences. As it is, it is a brief and brilliant gem that will enhance an appreciation of either Sassoon or Beerbohm.

Ian and Felicity by Denis Mackail

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Ian and FelicityFans of Greenery Street – one of the loveliest of Persephone Book’s novels, about a young married couple being happy – may not know that there were a couple of sequels. One is a collection of short stories that I haven’t read, and I have an inkling that not all of them feature Ian and Felicity Foster; one of them features them SO much that they’re right there in the title. Ian and Felicity was published in 1932, seven years after Greenery Street. That doesn’t sound that long, but prolific Mr Mackail had published eight books (!!) in between – and so it is with a sense of nostalgia that we head back to the young couple to find out how they’re getting on down the line.

I should add at this point that Ian and Felicity is extremely difficult to track down, and the copy I read belongs to my friend Kirsty (who somehow managed to find a copy on ebay). I borrowed it approximately a zillion years ago, but finally got around to reading it a little while ago.

In America, the novel was called Peninsula Place – and that gives you a clue that the setting has changed a little. Ian and Felicity have outgrown their Greenery Street flat, and now have two children and a bigger town house a little way away from their first marital home and another step up the property ladder. They look back fondly (as the reader must) on that happy place – but this replacement is no less happy. Mackail (thank goodness!) has not started writing a gritty novel or a miserable one. Things continue in much the same tone – though with added parental anxieties, and the occasional wondering (often quickly quashed in slightly over the top internal self-reflection) whether life wasn’t all a bit simpler back in the Greenery Street days.

I loved reading Ian and Felicity. It was light and fun and an antidote to the unhappy marriages that populate so many novels – even those that are otherwise not unhappy books. My main qualm with it was the complete and utter lack of plot. I don’t need a lot to happen, but I would have liked more structure to the novel – it’s so episodic that it feels more like a series of notes, or loosely linked vignettes, than a novel. It wasn’t a big obstacle, but I don’t think it would have taken much to give this more of an overarching structure, and it would have lifted the novel into a whole new territory. (My only other qualm was how much Ian seems to loathe spending even a moment with his children, and how normal and admirable we’re supposed to think this; different times, of course, but this is not a model of every 1930s fictional father.)

But, as I say, it was still a lot of fun. Here’s a bit of the opening, to give you a taste:

“Dinner!” said Felicity, as she passed the open drawing-room door. “Come along, darling!”

“What’s that?” said her husband’s voice.

“Dinner, darling.”

“Supper, you mean,” said Ian’s voice; but he was coming. “Don’t exaggerate,” he said, actually appearing. “I’ve been in to look once, and I know just what we’ve got. Blancmange, again.”

“Well, darling, you know it’s Sunday.”

“As if I could forget it,” said Mr. Foster. But he smiled as he pulled down the front of his waistcoat, and he would certainly have pinched his wife’s arm with his other hand, if she hadn’t dodged him and gone through into the dining-room.

Harmless fun, isn’t it? Impossible to find a copy, but if you badger your local library, they might find one in the stacks. Or you might strike it lucky like Kirsty – keep an eye out on ebay!

 

The Sack of Bath by Adam Fergusson

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One of the more surprising choices for Persephone Books over the past few years has been The Sack of Bath (1973) by Adam Fergusson. While they have a range of titles and topics, usually they tick at least one of the boxes from ‘written by a woman’, ‘published in the first half of the 20th century’, and ‘fiction’. The Sack of Bath is none of these things – but what it is is fascinating. And – for those who care about this sort of thing – it has one of my very favourite Persephone endpapers:

Sack-of-Bath

The book was written in the 1970s as a rallying cry – it must almost immediately have become a historical piece instead – about the destruction of Bath’s beautiful Georgian architecture. The book is short in length and in its message: stop demolishing original architecture and replacing it with hideous buildings. The council of the time apparently were all about knocking stuff down if it was – or might be – in places where they wanted to put roads or businesses or anything whatsoever. Fergusson writes about it rather eloquently:

The set pieces – Royal Crescent, the Circus, Milsom Street, the Pump Room, and so on – stand glorious and glistening (some have been restored and cleaned) for tourists to come and see in their thousands every year. But now, more and more because the devastation goes on, they have become like mountains without foothills, like Old Masters without frames. The Bath of the working classes, the Bath which made Beau Nash’s fashionable resort possible, has been bodily swept away. Irreplaceable, unreproducible, serendipitous Bath, the city of period architectural vignettes with a myriad tiny alleys and corners and doorways, is either being wrenched out pocket by pocket or bulldozed in its entirety.

Isn’t ‘like Old Masters without frames’ brilliant? The initial purpose of Fergusson’s book may be over (and was, I believe, more successful than he could have hoped), but it is still extremely interesting to read. It’s hard not to get worked up and cross when one reads the nonsense that the vandal council and architects said – and see the before-and-after pictures of streets which were knocked down and replaced with architectural horrors. Indeed, much of this short book is photos – and while 21st-century books would be better produced, there is a certain poignancy to seeing 1970s photography at work.

Fergusson is not afraid to get his gloves off. This is not an academic’s careful analysis – this is impassioned. One photo caption reads ‘The redevelopment below Sion Place lurches inelegantly down the slope, like a juggernaut with a flat tyre’. All in all, it fills one with a slightly fruitless rage – because the fight has completely changed since the 70s, but also because so much of the damage had already been done. Thank goodness Fergusson wrote this book, helping stem the tide of wanton destruction – and, now, it’s a really engaging cultural document.

 

Hackenfeller’s Ape by Brigid Brophy

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Hackenfeller's ApeAs you may have heard mentioned in the latest episode of ‘Tea or Books?’, should you listen to that, I’ve recently read Hackenfeller’s Ape (1953) by Brigid Brophy – inspired by listening to a ‘Backlisted’ episode on one of her novels, and hearing her daughter speak at a conference. I think I’d bought the novel (novella?) some time before that, based entirely on the fact that short Virago Modern Classics are often interesting – and it proved to be really rather good.

I’ve read a couple of books about monkeys and humans relating one way or another – though they were both written a little earlier; Appius and Virginia by G.E. Trevelyan is about a woman trying to teach a monkey as though he were a child, while His Monkey Wife by John Collier is… well, what it sounds like. Hackenfeller’s Ape is less adventurous in its premise: the ape remains firmly an ape, and nobody is trying to get him to be anything else.

Professor Darrelhyde is (as the Virago blurb informs me) ‘a diffident bachelor’, and he’s been stationed at London Zoo to observe the mating practices of Hackenfeller’s ape – more particularly, that of Percy and Edwina. In the world of the novel (look, I don’t know if this ape even exists), the mating has never been observed, and it will be a service to science for the Professor to make notes. Only it seems the Percy isn’t keen. Edwina keeps making approaches that he refuses – and Brophy judges brilliantly the amount that we should be let into his perspective, with a certain haziness where Percy can’t quite understand his own ape-motivations.

Halfway through, things change a bit – as the Professor (and a would-be pickpocket who reluctantly joins forces with him) tries to rescue Percy from being sent into space. Bear with me – it sounds absurd, but it works.

What makes Hackenfeller’s Ape so good is Brophy’s writing. She balances light, insouciant dialogue with pretty elaborate and philosophical prose. It shouldn’t work properly together, but it really does – it makes for an intoxicatingly good mix. Here’s an example of her writing from near the beginning – where she describes the humans who have set up the zoo:

These were the young of a species which had laid out the Park with an ingenuity that outstripped the beaver’s; which, already the most dextrous of the land animals, had acquired greater endurance under the sea than the whale and in the air had a lower casualty rate for its journeys than migrating birds. This was, moreover, the only species which imprisoned other species not for any motive of economic parasitism but for the dispassionate parasitism of indulging its curiosity.

She also has a knack for wry observation that was a pleasure to read – not that dissimilar to Elizabeth Taylor, thinking about it. I can imagine either of them penning this line (which is Brophy’s): ‘He smiled in a way which, in the middle-aged man, was boyish. In a boy it would have been sinister.’

It continues, with drama and pathos, poignant and action-packed in turn. And all – may I remind you – in hardly more than a hundred pages.

My conclusions, after finishing this novella, are that I’d read Brophy writing anything. She handles this frankly bizarre premise, and mix of styles, with excellent adeptness – and it gives me great hope for diving into more of her novels in future. It will be intriguing to see how her writing works over a broader canvas.

A Wreath of Roses by Elizabeth Taylor

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Roses

I recently went to a brilliant conference in Chichester called ‘Undervalued British Women Writers 1930-1960’. I mean, the only way this could have been more perfect for me is if they’d shifted those dates back to 1920-1950 – but I overlooked that, because there were papers on beloved authors including E.M. Delafield, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Barbara Comyns, Muriel Spark, Elizabeth Taylor, Marghanita Laski, and more. My paper was on Rachel Ferguson’s The Brontes Went to Woolworths, which was great fun to talk about.

Once the conference programme came out, I did a bit of homework – reading Laski’s To Bed With Grand Music (review forthcoming) and Taylor’s A Wreath of Roses. I didn’t quite finish A Wreath of Roses (1949) in time to hear the excellent paper about it on my panel, but I’ve finished it now and it’s excellent. It’s vying with At Mrs Lippincote’s for my all-time fave Taylor novel.

It certainly starts more dramatically than most Taylor novels. I’m not going to spoil what happens in the opening pages, because it came as a very effective shock to me, but it’s something that Camilla witnesses as she is about to go and visit her friend Liz and Liz’s old governess. The moment is dramatic, but Taylor cleverly leaves the details undeveloped and the effect unspoken – it just quietly haunts both Camilla and the reader for the rest of the novel.

Like many Taylor heroines, Camilla is intelligent, literary, sensitive, and slightly wary of her way in the world. On the train, on the way to her friend, she meets Richard Elton – it is, she muses, the sort of name that an author would make up for a hero – and the meeting is not an immediate success. He is handsome and mysterious, but he also rebuffs her reference to Emily Bronte, and she ‘felt she had sacrificed Emily Bronte, throwing her in as a spur to conversation, uselessly’. There’s a great bit (not least for my conference paper) on how she and her childhood friend Liz had imaginary childhood tea parties for various literary luminaries – identified only as Emily, Charlotte, Jane, Ivy, and… Katie? Not sure who the last is.

When she arrives with Liz (and the slightly cranky ex-governess), she falls into trying to resurrect a friendship that has the significant obstacle of Liz having married a man (a vicar, no less) who Camilla intensely dislikes. He isn’t there, for the most part, but it colours their friendship – as does Liz’s baby boy, though that is a more nuanced obstacle, being chiefly a path down which Camilla cannot follow her friend. Oh, and the governess – Frances – is no stock character. I don’t think Taylor would know how to wrote one of those. She is a painter who, in her final years, is branching out into a whole new style of painting. In the midst of all this, two men arrive – one, a correspondent Frances has had for many years and never met; the other, Richard Elton back on the scene, darkly mysterious and intriguing.

There’s no author quite like Taylor for depending on my mood. Sometimes I love reading her beautiful writing; sometimes I find her writing impenetrable – and I think it must depend on how I’m feeling, rather than her writing. I’ll have to go back to A Wreath of Roses another time to see if I find it more of an obstacle then (though why would I put that to the test?) – this time, I was just able to soak in how good the prose was. Here’s the opening paragraph, to give you a flavour:

Afternoons seem unending on branch-line stations in England in summer time. The spiked shelter prints an unmoving shadow on the platform, geraniums blaze, whitewashed stones assault the eye. Such trains as come only add to the air of fantasy, to the idea of the scene being symbolic, or encountered at one level while suggesting another even more alienating. 

She is even better when she is writing about people. Time and again, Taylor shows everyday thoughts and moments in a nuanced, clear light. While A Wreath of Roses includes events that are much less ‘everyday’ than those in most of her other novels, and is certainly darker and more gothic, she still excels are crystallising the slippery truths behind friendships, enmities, uncertainties and identities.

I read bits of this in a graveyard next to a half-ruined priory, which was a pretty ideal place to read it – though the weather was warm and lovely, rather than hauntingly gothic. Context – my mood, the weather, font size, whatever – may have a lot to do with it – but I’m still going to say that this is one of the best Taylor novels I’ve read so far, and one I would certainly re-read.

 

Others who got Stuck into it:

“The characters are brilliantly observed, and this novel is a wonderful exploration of friendships.” – Heavenali

“It’s not all cozy rooms with lace curtains, plants in pots, ticking clocks, ornaments and coronation mugs, the wireless playing, and tabby cats waiting.” – Buried in Print

“One of the most moving and valuable studies of human isolation ever committed to print.” – Bentley Rumble

 

StuckinaBook’s Weekend Miscellany

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Hiya everyone – hope you’re having a good weekend. It’s finally summer, so obviously I’ve got a cold. I’m surrounded by tissues and lemsip and cups of tea and whatnot – and a pile of books, which I am alternating with Netflix.  I’ll kick off your weekend with a book, link, and blog post…

My Life With Bob1.) The book – I really want to read My Life With Bob by Pamela Paul. ‘Bob’ is a journal of the books that Paul reads. Yes, it’s a book about books. A book about reading. I want it so much. I have so many books about reading that I haven’t read. (I want it so muuuuuch.)

2.) The link – is one of my favourite Instagram accounts. If you’re on Instagram, you probably already follow most of the book accounts I follow – but I wanted to highlight Maren’s. Her wildlife and nature photography is just so stunning. And, yes, I first met Maren through Virago Books – so books lead to all sorts of delights!

3.) The blog post – is a giveaway of Elizabeth Taylor novels over at Ali’s. I haven’t seen this lovely new Virago editions before – a definite improvement on the previous incarnation (though not, of course, as perfect as the bottle green Viragos that surely will come back around one day). And one of those Taylor novels will be getting a StuckinaBook review next week…

Guest post: Linda Gillard picks her 10 books

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In the comments for my last post, author (and friend) Linda Gillard mentioned that she’d like to take part but doesn’t have a blog – so, of course, I said I’d be more than happy to host her selection here. Over to you, Linda…

I’ve moved house a lot, often to a smaller property, so I’ve had to downsize my book collection. I performed another cull when I was recovering from cancer and decided to get rid of all the books I knew I’d never read. So what I have now is a modest but meaningful collection of books, all of which I’ve read and wish to keep or I intend to read.

So here’s my 10 book “biography”…

Linda1

The oldest book I own is The Christmas Carol illustrated by Ronald Searle. I bought this on holiday in Margate in the 1960s at The Albion Bookshop. I think I was about 12. It cost 21/- (£1.05) which must have cleared me out of pocket money. This is also my most read book because for many years I read it every Christmas. If there’s a better opening paragraph in the whole of English fiction, I don’t know what it is.

Linda2

I started collecting children’s books for my grandchildren before they were even conceived. I now have a grandson who will inherit some magnificent Folio editions of children’s classics. He’ll also get this 50th anniversary edition of Tom’s Midnight Garden by Philippa Pearce. My first encounter with this book was at primary school. A beloved teacher called Mrs Sharp used to read it to us at the end of the day, perched on her desk. I remember the bell going for end of school and asking her if we could please stay and hear a bit more before going home. She didn’t oblige. I expect she wanted to get home.

Linda3

I’m on to my second copy of Mary Berry’s Fast Cakes. The first one fell to pieces. The second copy is going the same way and its pages are stained and a bit sticky. I was a fan of Mary’s long before she was a TV celebrity. My waistline will attest to the fact that these cakes are fast, easy and delicious.

Linda4

I have a complete set of Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin historical novels that I’ve collected in second hand editions. I’ve read 15 of the 20-book series. I discovered him many years ago, travelling on the ferry from Skye to North Uist, one of the Western Isles. My fellow passengers included a family of two adults and two teenagers, all of whom were engrossed in a different O’Brian novel. This was an impressive advert for the books. I was also very taken with the atmospheric cover artwork by Geoff Hunt. This is a series I might have collected just for the covers, but the books are superbly written and the characters just jump off the page.

Linda5

I have an almost complete collection of Georgette Heyer’s historical fiction which I’ve read and re-read for over 50 years. I bought Georgette Heyer: Biography of a Bestseller by Jennifer Kloester, but haven’t read it yet. I was put off by some reviews which said Heyer came across as rather unpleasant – rude, snobbish and casually racist as people so often were in those days. I can’t decide whether to read the book or if I’d rather preserve my fantasy that if we’d ever met, she and I would have got on famously.

Linda6

I’ve acquired a lot of books for research purposes on subjects that have featured in my novels. Some topics I’ve re-visited so I tend to keep all research books in case I need them again. I have a motley selection of books on ghosts and the paranormal, including The Stately Ghosts of England by Diana Norman, an account of the tour she made with a psychic round the “haunted” stately homes of England.

I’ve never seen a ghost myself and remain a sceptic, but the real-life stories fascinate me. I’m not sure why I became interested in writing ghost stories, but it could be connected to my father’s death. He died in 2005 but I still struggle to accept his absence. I might have turned to writing ghost stories because I can’t accept that the dead are gone for good.

Someone said, “Grief is love that has nowhere to go”, an idea that has comforted me.

Linda7

I own all the romantic  suspense fiction of Mary Stewart which I’ve read and re-read since my teens. Two of her novels are set on Scottish islands but they aren’t among her best. Stormy Petrel earns its place on my shelves for its gorgeous wrap-around dust jacket. The story is predictable but Stewart’s writing about landscape and wildlife is unsurpassed. I suspect this is where her real interest lay in this book.

I’ve lived on the islands of Skye, Harris and Arran. If someone asked me what it’s like to live on a Hebridean island, I’d suggest they read Stormy Petrel, but with low expectations of the plot.

Linda8

Another island cover… Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book. I believe I bought this because Simon and some other bloggers raved about it. It’s about an elderly artist and her 6-year old grand-daughter spending a summer on a Finnish island. I haven’t read this one yet, but I really should as I’m now a grandmother myself and love anything set on islands.

Linda9

Will I ever read Christopher Booker’s The Seven Basic Plots? I’ve dipped in many times but I haven’t made much headway with its 700+ pages.  The seven basic plots are Overcoming the Monster, Rags to Riches, The Quest, Voyage and Return, Comedy, Tragedy and Re-birth. Booker believes the success of Lord of the Rings can be attributed to the fact that Tolkien’s tale included all seven plot elements.

Linda10

I have a small collection of art books. Victoria Crowe: Painted Insights is one I acquired as an impulse buy. In 2001 I was taken by a quilting friend to an exhibition in Inverness of Victoria Crowe’s paintings. She’s a well-known Scottish artist but I didn’t know her work. I was stunned by the beauty of her paintings and felt I had to own some, so I forked out £20 for a signed hardback book on the spot. I never regretted my extravagance.

Don’t you find, it’s never the books you buy that you regret, it’s the ones that got away.

Linda Gillard

Linda Gillard lives in Ayrshire, Scotland. She’s the author of eight novels, including Star Gazing, short-listed in 2009 for Romantic Novel of the Year and the Robin Jenkins Literary Award. Her Kindle bestseller House of Silence was selected for Amazon UK’s Top Ten “Best of 2011” in the Indie Author category.

Author website: www.lindagillard.co.uk

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/LindaGillardAuthor

 

10 random books to tell us about yourself

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I happened to stumble across one of my old blog posts the other day, while searching for something else, and I thought it would be fun to resurrect a meme I made up in 2010. I love the idea of getting to know people by looking at their bookshelves – and this meme was a microcosm of that, picking 10 books to tell about a reader.

Here are the rules I set out last time…

1.) Go to your bookshelves…
2.) Close your eyes. If you’re feeling really committed, blindfold yourself.
3.) Select ten books at random. Use more than one bookcase, if you have them, or piles by the bed, or… basically, wherever you keep books.
4.) Use these books to tell us about yourself – where and when you got them, who got them for you, what the book says about you, etc. etc…..
5.) Have fun! Be imaginative. Doesn’t matter if you’ve read them or not – be creative. It might not seem easy to start off with, and the links might be a little tenuous, but I think this is a fun way to do this sort of meme.
6.) Feel free to cheat a bit, if you need to…

I decided to do it a bit differently this time – in order to include all the books I have in Somerset, I used my LibraryThing catalogue and a random number generator to come up with ten of my books – here they are, in the order they came out.

Please do have a go at this meme! I won’t tag anybody this time – but I’d love to see which ten books other people come up with. You can write much less or much more than I have – basically, make this meme fit whatever you’d like to do.

Good Wives

1. Good Wives? by Margaret Forster

I haven’t read this, or anything by Forster, but this book is testament to my willingness to stock my shelves with recommendations that I hear about from dovegreybooks, the Yahoo Group I’ve been in since I was 18, and which has helped shape my literary taste so much.

The Aloe

2. The Aloe by Katherine Mansfield

This is working out roughly chronologically so far, as I first discovered Mansfield while attending lecture days run by Oxford University, when I was about 17 or 18. Most of the people there were retired or heading that way; I was an eager young man who knew very little about literature, had never heard of Mansfield, and was struck by the astonishing writing I’d stumbled upon. I have read this one, though rather later.

Lettice delmer

3. Lettice Delmer by Susan Miles

Oh, Persephone Books! How you have also shaped me as a reader. I found out about them through their reprint of Richmal Crompton – and they led me to dovegreybooks. I can’t imagine a time when I shan’t have my Persephone books on proud display – and I have read this verse novel, which I really liked.

About Alice cover

4. About Alice by Calvin Trillin

I’m trying to use these selections to tell you a bit about myself, where relevant, and About Alice is testament to my outsider’s fascination with grief. It is such a fundamental human emotion but, having never lost anybody close to me, it is one I don’t really understand. I found Trillin’s beautiful book about his late wife remarkable.

A Genius for Living

5. A Genius for Living by Janet Byrne

This is a biography of Frieda Lawrence (D.H. Lawrence’s wife) that turned up in my LibraryThing, though I have an inkling that I’ve actually sent it, unread, to a charity shop… which (super tangentially!) can be the link to my first sort-of job, which was volunteering for Oxfam. I sorted and priced clothes, and was grateful not to have to do anything with books – because throwing them away was too horrible a thought.

Country Housewife's Book

6. The Country Housewife’s Book by Lucy H Yates

I haven’t read this Persephone Book yet – indeed, it’s more of a dip-in then I read-all-the-way-through. So I’m going to use this pick to tell you about my irrational loathing of authors who use their middle initial. Actually, it’s not quite irrational. It’s because every American literary critic seems to do it, and I did NOT have that sort of wordcount to spare in my doctoral thesis. Scarred, that’s what I am.

WTP

7. Winnie the Pooh by A.A. Milne

I’m delighted this one came up! A.A. Milne was my first love, in developing my own taste for obscure and out of print literature, and an abiding one. Winnie the Pooh isn’t obscure, of course, so this can also stand for my love of woodland, which I’ve had all my life. And in about 2003 I was lucky enough to go to the Hundred Acre Wood (which, psst, is not really 100 acres).

When I was Otherwise

8. When I Was Otherwise by Stephen Benatar

I don’t recall where I bought many of the books on this list – but this one I do (I think!). It was one of the books I picked up at Barter Books in Alnwick, in 2012, though I haven’t read it yet. That trip was a weird time. I was giving a conference paper at Newcastle University, and then travelling down to Worcester to go to my best friend’s wedding. It was also a time that I was terrified, waiting for an examination to rule out cancer (which was very much ruled out!) that was taking ages to arrive. So the little haul of books comes with a real medley of memories.

Making Love

9. Making Love by Jean Toussaint

I haven’t read this, and I can’t remember quite where I bought it, but it is part of my usually-failing attempt to find books I like translated from French. I’ve enjoyed a handful (including, yes Peter, Colette) but there’s still something of a barrier there. Maybe one to take when I go to France this summer? As for a fact about myself associated with this book – France is my most-visited country by far, outside of the UK: I’ve been there five times. My French is still beyond abysmal.

One Pair of Hands

10. One Pair of Hands by Monica Dickens

Lovely to finish with a hilarious memoir, on my list of 50 Books You Must Read But May Not Have Heard About. I don’t remember where I picked this up, but it was one of the few recreational books I managed to read during my (intense!) undergraduate English Literature degree. And, well, I love baking – but this book reinforces that I tend towards the tried-and-tested when it comes to cooking. Read this and you’ll want to do the same…

Over to you! Put a link in the comments if you do (a version of) this meme yourself.

At the Jerusalem by Paul Bailey

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At the JerusalemIn a recent episode of ‘Tea or Books?’, Rachel and I pitted Elizabeth Taylor’s Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont against Paul Bailey’s At the Jerusalem. While we both preferred Taylor’s novel, I also thought Bailey’s slightly earlier novel (1967) was fantastic – really unusual, and possibly even an inspiration for Mrs Palfrey (c.f. Bailey’s introduction to the Virago reprint).

Bailey’s novel (which I have in a very sweet pocket-sized edition, apparently part of a Bloomsbury series in the 1990s) is about an old people’s home – called the Jerusalem – where Faith Gadny has been dispatched by her stepson Henry and his brightly indifferent wife Thelma. Here, she is torn from a comfortable world that has started to close in on her with its new discomforts – and placed, instead, in a world of interfering and disturbed women on a communal ward that she cannot escape.

Faith does not try to ingratiate herself. She is unresponsive to overtures of friendship, says few words to anybody, and is pretty closed off. This has the effect of making her closed off to the reader too – unlike Mrs Palfrey, this is not a book to turn to for a warm or empathetic character. But it is, perhaps, for a sympathetic character – for who would wish themselves in her position, at a place as steriley unpleasant as the Jerusalem? Other residents have either lost their faculties or are far too keen to make friendships that Faith does not want – and there is always, always the recurring motif of the woman who once hanged herself in the toilets.

Stylistically, At the Jerusalem will either impress or irk. Rachel was irked; I was impressed. A lot of the novel is in sparse dialogue – often crossing over each other as several conversations whirl around. The talent of Bailey is that it’s always obvious what’s going on, though at first glance it doesn’t seem like it (and you might need some context!) – and I found it darkly funny, even with hardly any words on the page. For example…

Another page. “More relations. That one there with the eyes is Cousin Charlie. He ended up in Africa. Nothing more was heard.”

“Who’s a good girl? Who’s finished her junket?”

“He could have been eaten, for all anybody knew. Stewed in a pot.”

When did Miss Burns sleep?

“He had enough meat on him.”

At every hour of the day she sat upright, staring.

“My wedding.”

Wouldn’t a meal have made her sleepy?

“My wedding, Faith?”

“Oh?”

“My wedding. Don’t I look fetching?”

“You do.”

“I was thirty.”

“Thirty.”

“He was a fair bit older. Harry Capes. Handsome Harry.” She laughed, winked. “Oh, he was too. And I loved him. At the time.” She paused. “It was on a Sunday, it was the June of 1921; he’d been in the war, he’d come out of it in one piece.”

Tom had a scar to show.

The novel starts in the home, flashes back to Henry and Thelma’s house for the second section, and returns to the Jerusalem in the third. In each, the coherence of the writing echoes the stage of Faith’s mind – getting more traditional in the flashback section. It’s never unreadable or even particularly experimental, but Bailey cleverly puts enough fragility into his prose that you can see the patterns.

Overall, what impressed me with Bailey was the sparseness of his writing, and how much he conveys with so little. Quite a few of the minor characters aren’t well delineated, and I had a tendency to get them a bit confused, but there are four or five at the forefront of the novel (including Faith) who are incredibly nuanced, given how little we hear from or about them. And there are a couple pivotal moments which are handled very well – without being unduly sensationalist. It’s certainly not a harrowing book, but it is often poignant in a slightly dark way – while also being amusing. I liked this moment in which Bailey mocks the redundancy of much speech – but it is a melancholy humour:

“Her Majesty sends telegrams to all her centenarians. The Mayor and Mayoress sent a very thoughtful message today.”

“Did they, Matron?”

“Shall I read it out?”

“Yes, please.”

“What one is it? Ah, yes. ‘Mrs Hibbs, The Jerusalem Home. Greetings on reaching your great age. Mayor and Mayoress Ernest and Sylvia Marsh.'”

“It is thoughtful.”

“Thoughtful.”

“Thoughtful. As Matron says.”

At The Jerusalem isn’t the achievement that Mrs Palfrey is, but it’s astonishing for a debut novel by a 30 year old. And, I learned after I finished it, Bailey is still alive and possibly still writing. I can see that I’ve got some catching up to do!