All

Cold, Cosy, Cat

StuckinaBook All 22 Comments

I’m not going to be very wordy today, as I have a cold and a late night… but I just wanted to post you in the direction of a new blog!  A new blog, but not a new blogger… lovely Darlene, who we once knew as Roses Over a Cottage Door, is now blogging at Cosy Books.  Pop by and say hello – because the first book she’s written about there is brilliant.

And, because this post feels absurdly short, here is a little photo diary of what happened when Sherpa spotted my camera cord…

Hopefully more posts this week, depending on how beleaguered I’m feeling!  But they may be short…

Rethinking Darcy

StuckinaBook All 41 Comments

At present, I am in the midst of listening to Sebastian Faulks’ Faulks on Fiction, which I intend to write about more fully when I’ve finished – not least because it is the first audiobook I’ve listened to properly since I was about 11 – but I thought I’d respond to something he said about Pride and Prejudice. He divides the book into thematic sections, and Darcy & Elizabeth take their place in the Lovers portion of the book (alongside such luminaries as Tess Durbeyfield and Lady Constance Chatterley.)

Faulks mostly gives plots and some gentle, often personal, analysis, but he takes rather a brave leap with Darcy – suggesting that he suffers from intense depression, and wants Elizabeth almost wholly as ‘lifelong Prozac’, replacing Mr. Bingley in this function. And Darcy definitely comes in for the worst of Faulks’ censure where the proposal scene is concerned. The first one, that is (er, spoilers alert.) Faulks think he is utterly wrong, in everything he says – not just the way he says it.  Here are a couple of examples of how it has been done on film – I shan’t be sullying my blog with the ridiculous travesty that is the proposal scene in Joe Wright’s 2005 Pride and Prejudice. Rarely has a scene been so misjudged from page to screen… mini-rant over.

As you see – and as I’m sure most of us are familiar – Darcy is usually depicted in this proposal scene as having reached the very nadir of his arrogance, pride, and rudeness. That’s certainly the way it has been acted (except, I should add, by Laurence Olivier), and it’s how Sebastian Faulks interprets the book. But… I wonder.

I’m sure I’m not the first to say this, and I’d cite my sources if I could remember any, but… Darcy’s proposal is super-genuine! He really is being astonishingly sacrifical. Let’s not forget that he is willing to marry beneath him – an act which Lizzie herself dismisses, having been cautioned against it by Aunt Gardiner, when she considers Wickham. He is throwing away all manner of things, all for the love of Elizabeth.

What does he say in the proposal that is not true? What does he say, in its aftermath, which is not justifiable (to his period, not to our 21st century sensibilities, that is)? Could she expect him to rejoice in the inferiority of her connections? Would it have been better if Darcy had, in the manner of most romantic heroes of the time, lied through his teeth during proposal, or at least exaggerated every virtue and sidelined every qualm to the extent that he might as well be lying? Elizabeth is entirely justified to reject him on the basis of his treatment of Jane – but this, too, is really the misreading of her intentions, and thus an act of kindness to his best friend. Certainly not, as Faulks suggests, simply to keep Bingley to himself.

I think film and television adaptations have tended towards seeing Darcy as the villain-made-good, and Elizabeth as the woman who makes him good. She may be a bit impetuous (this line of thought goes), but essentially she is the one in the right, and he comes to realise this. I think Jane Austen is much cleverer than this. Elizabeth’s shortcomings are not incidental or irrelevant – she really has as far to travel as Darcy, in terms of her character, before the match is equal. Yes, she is always a delight to the reader – but that is neither here nor there, in terms of morality or character defects. Which of us does not adore Emma? Yet which of us would say she needs no reforming?

There is a common acknowledgement that Lizzie needs to reform her character defects – that she can be proud and she can be prejudiced – but, in practice, or at least in adaptation, interpretations of her encounters with Darcy all suggest otherwise. And most especially the proposal. His bluff manner does not make him wrong; her eloquent outrage does not make her right. If we allow ourselves to think only in the context of the period – how generous Darcy is! How ungrateful, Elizabeth! And how wonderfully both reflect upon the scene, and – accordingly – change themselves for the better, and for each other. But let’s recognise that Darcy’s change is not a 360 reversal, and Elizabeth’s, on the other hand, is not inconsiderable.

Yours Sincerely – Monica Dickens & Beverley Nichols

StuckinaBook All , , , 29 Comments

When my e-friend Sarah mentioned that Monica Dickens and Beverley Nichols had co-authored a selection of light essays called Yours Sincerely (1949), can you really imagine me not immediately buying a copy?  If you answered ‘yes’ then you’re either new around these parts, or you have a stronger sense of my self-control than is just.

So, back in autumn, it arrived – and I started reading it in a gradual way, such as befits this sort of book.  It is great fun.  I don’t know quite where the articles came from – they’re quite varying lengths, and don’t seem to have been written specially for this volume, but cover topics in the same line as Rose Macaulay’s Personal Pleasures.   Everything from ‘Planting Bulbs’ (reminiscent of Provincial Lady, no?) to ‘Sensuality’; ‘Talkative Women’ to ‘Coddled Men’; ‘Losing Your Temper’ to ‘Brides in White.’  All the sort of topics of middle-class chatter in the 1940s – but feeling, somehow, old-fashioned even for the 1940s.

Indeed, Beverley Nichols has no qualms in describing himself as ‘old-fashioned, out-of-date, and generally encrusted in lichen’.  Even when I agree with him, he’s so curmudgeonly that I felt like I wanted to distance myself from him…  it’s enjoyable to read, but not quite the laugh-out-loud, self-deprecating whimsy that I’d expected – and which Monica Dickens delivers in spades.  Sometimes he was just too saccharine and worthy for my taste…

You can’t bruise a plant and feel aggrieved because it grows up stunted or deformed or “odd.”  The slightest twist or wound, in it infancy, grows and swells, till in the end the plant is an ugly wretched thing that you have to throw onto the rubbish heap.

It is the same with children.  A lie, an injustice, a cruelty – these get under the skin.  And they too grow and swell, till at last a miserable man or a wretched woman is rejected by society.
Undeniably true, but… am I bad person for wishing that he’d been jollier?  I still haven’t read any of his books, and now I’ll be rushing towards them a little less eagerly.

Whereas Monica Dickens, after getting all serious in The Winds of Heaven, is on fine form in Yours Sincerely.  Lots of smiles all round, and never too earnest.  Just the sort of light essay which I adore, and which doesn’t seem to happen any more.  Here she is on proposing…

We’ve all dreamed much the same dreams, I expect.  You know – you’re in a diaphanous evening dress of unearthly beauty.  You’re the belle of the ball.  You’ve danced like a disembodied fairy and now you drift out on to a moonlit terrace, mysterious with the scent of gardenias. 

He follows, in faultless evening dress, no doubt (mine sometimes used to be in white monkey jackets), and says – IT.

Or, he says IT on the boat-deck of a liner gliding through phosphorescent tropic seas, or on a Riviera beach, or sometimes at the crisis of some highly improbable adventure.  He’s just rescued you – or you him – from a fire.  You’re besieged in an attic firing your last round at the enemy now battering at the door below.  You’re a beautiful nurse and he’s a dying soldier – but not irretrievably dying.

There are endless variations but always the same theme song : “Will you marry me?”  The implication is that when one is very young the actual moment of proposal is one of the high-spots of marriage.

I used to pester my mother over and over again to tell me how my father proposed.  I couldn’t believe she wasn’t holding out on me when she swore that he never really had.  She couldn’t remember when he started saying and writing : “When we’re married we’ll do so and so.”
I have a small section of a shelf devoted to light essays – it is only a small section, because I haven’t managed to find very many.  Alongside this and some by Rose Macaulay are Angela Milne’s Jame and Genius, A.A. Milne’s various offerings in this genre, J.B. Priestley’s Delight, Anne Fadiman’s Ex Libris, Christopher Morley’s Safety Pins, and probably one or two others which have slipped my mind.  Any suggestions?

In the meantime, Yours Sincerely isn’t groundbreaking or even exceptionally good, but it’s a jolly, enjoyable contribution to that often-overlooked form of the familiar essay, and so steeped in the mores of the early 20th century that a flick through fills me with nostalgia for an age in which I never lived.

Stuck-in-a-Book’s Weekend Miscellany

StuckinaBook All 12 Comments

Happy weekend y’all!  Hope everyone is very well.  I spent my Friday evening watching a great 1945 film I Live in Grosvenor Square with Rex Harrison and Anna Neagle – and, the reason I watched it, Dame Irene Vanbrugh!  It was the inaugural film in Andrea & Simon’s Film Club (basically a fancy name for my friend Andrea and I taking it in turns to choose films) – I’ll keep you posted if we watch anything really great.  And maybe I’ll do a proper post on I Live in Grosvenor Square one day.

1.) The book – could have your name in it!  A youtuber I was watching mention U*Novels (‘you star novels’) which allows you to have specially printed editions of classic novels where you choose the names of the cast.  This could make a really fun gift.  Want to put your husband in as Mr. Darcy?  Fancy taking a trip to Wonderland and having your friends appear as the caterpillar or Chesire Cat?  It sounds silly and fun to me.

2.) The blog post – Melwyk over at The Indextrious Reader has started up a really interesting Postal Reading Challenge – reading books with postal themes (e.g. collections of letters – those of you who got excited about Maxwell/Welty or Maxwell/Warner collections could jump on board!)  Head over here to find out more.

3.) The link – I just wanted to remind you to WATCH THE LIZZIE BENNET DIARIES if you’re not already.  (A re-telling of Pride and Prejudice through vlogs – I first wrote about here.) It’s got so good recently – and Lydia Bennet’s channel is also brilliant.  Mary Kate Wiles (along with the writers) has really fleshed out Lydia to be a very sympathetic, thorough character, rather than the silly, flighty girl that Lizzie sees (and thus that we see in the novel.)   Lydia’s channel is here, and Lizzie’s is here.   There are quite a lot of videos to watch, but I’ll make it easy for you to start – here is ep.1 of Lizzie’s channel.

What There Is To Say We Have Said: The Correspondence of Eudora Welty & William Maxwell

StuckinaBook All , , , , 24 Comments

The third Reading Presently book was a really lovely surprise gift from Heather, who reads my blog (but doesn’t, I’m pretty sure, have one herself.)  She saw how much I’d loved the letters of William Maxwell and Sylvia Townsend Warner, and decided (quite rightly) that I should also have the opportunity to read William Maxwell’s letters to another doyenne of the printed word – Eudora Welty.

Although no collection of letters is likely to compare to The Element of Lavishness in my mind, this is still a really wonderful book.  The dynamics are a little different – both are on the same side of the Atlantic (Maxwell can write to Welty ‘And warm though the British are, one needs to have them explained to one, and everything is through the looking glass’) ; both go more or less through the same stages of their careers – with Warner, Maxwell was always the young enthusiast, even when he was essentially her boss.  Here is more a meeting of equals, sharing some literary friends (especially Elizabeth Bowen) and loving and respecting each other without the need to impress (which brought out the very finest of Maxwell’s writing, to Warner.)

It was a delight to ‘meet’ Maxwell’s wife and children again, and to see the girls grow up once more – and fascinating to see how this is framed a little differently in the different books.  For her part, Welty’s relationship with her homeland (Jackson, Mississippi) is really interesting – a definitely conflicted relationship, cross with the attitudes of her neighbourhood, but loving home.  It’s pretty rare that ‘place’ makes an impact on me, let alone somebody’s engagement with their individual city, but this was certainly one of those occasions.

Just as Warner’s letters stood out more for me in The Element of Lavishness, it was Maxwell’s turn to take the foreground in What There Is To Say We Have Said (which is a lovely title, incidentally – a quotation from the penultimate letter Maxwell sent.)  So I jotted down a few Maxwell excerpts, but nothing from Welty – who, though wonderful, turned out to be less quoteworthy.  I love this from Maxwell, about wishing for a Virginia Woolf audiobook:

What wouldn’t you give for a recording of her reading “To the Lighthouse,” on one side and “The Waves” on the other.  It’s enough to unsettle my reason, just having imagined it.  I’ll try not think about it any more.
I mostly love how impassioned (and funny) he is – and I’m probably going to be peppering my conversation with ‘it’s enough to unsettle my reason’.  It rivals that immortal line from the TV adaptation of Cranford: “Put not another dainty to your lips, for you will choke when you hear what I have to say!”  (Note to Self: I must watch Cranford again…)

Maxwell is, of course, a great novelist on his own account – but I think one of his most significant contributions to literature is his panache as an appreciator.  Even when he was turning down Warner’s stories for the New Yorker, he managed to do so with admiration dripping from every penstroke of the rejection.  He so perfectly (and honestly) identifies what the author was hoping would be praised, and describes the raptures of an avid reader.  Here is his beautiful response to Eudora Welty’s The Golden Apples:

At one point I was aware that I was holding my breath, a thing I don’t ever remember doing before,  while reading, and what I was holding my breath for is lest I might disturb something in nature, a leaf that was about to move, a bird, a wasp, a blade of grass caught between other blades of grass and about to set itself free.  And then farther on I said to myself, this writing is corrective, meaning of course for myself and all other writers, and almost at the end I said reverently This is how one feels in the presence of a work of art, and finally, in the last paragraph, when the face came through, there was nothing to say.  You had gone as far as there is to go and then taken one step further.
Which author would not thrill to this letter?  Can a better response be imagined?  There is never any sense, in his praise to Welty or Warner, that he is exaggerating or being sycophantic – he simply expresses the joy he feels, unabashed, and the women he writes to are sensible enough to accept his praise without undue modesty.  Welty returns compliments on Maxwell’s writing more than Warner ever did – c.f. again the youthful admirer / fond sage dynamic which was going on there.

If this collection does not match up to The Element of Lavishness, it is because it does not have the magic of Warner’s letter writing.  But to criticise it for that would be like criticising chocolate cake because it wasn’t double chocolate cake.  This is a wonderful, decades-long account of a friendship between literary greats – and is equally marvellous for both the literary interest and the testament (if I may) of friendship.  Thank you, Heather, I’m so grateful for this joy of a book  it, and they, will stay with me for a while.  Now, did William Maxwell write to anyone else…

The Sea, The Sea, THE BLINKING SEA.

StuckinaBook All 80 Comments

This innocent little picture from the back of my diary reveals so little of the anguish and torment which it represents…

When someone suggested The Sea, The Sea for my book group last September, my initial thought was “Oh, good.  I wasn’t sure whether or not I liked The Sandcastle, and now I’ll be able to have another try with Iris Murdoch.”

And then I saw how long it was.

Well, nothing daunted (ok, a little bit daunted), I started to read it.  And it’s really beautifully written.  It all starts off with a retired theatre director in his new house by the sea, discussing his hectic past and his embrace of solitude.  And his meals.  Always his meals.

(This, incidentally, will not be a review of the book.  I don’t have the stamina.)

My experience – nay, my journey – with The Sea, The Sea was very strange.  I started off thinking I’d cracked Murdoch.  All those unread novels by her, sitting on my shelf, could now be read.

And then…

Well, that beautiful prose got rather cloying after a while.  There is almost no dialogue, because Charles Arrowby lives alone.  Even at the best of times, I prefer well-written dialogue to well-written narrative – one of the reasons I love Ivy Compton-Burnett so much – and I felt rather beleaguered by it all after a while.

And then…

Then it got mad.  By a series of bizarre coincidences, every woman Charles has ever romanced ends up in the same village – including the love of his youth, now a dowdy old woman.  He is still bewitched by her, or the memory of her, and is determined to ‘free’ her from her cruel husband.  She admits that he has been cruel… and changes her mind a bit about it… so Charles (great sage that he is) decides the best thing to do is kidnap her, hold her against her will in a locked bedroom, and tell her how much she loves him.  He wants to free her, by imprisoning her.

Ok, so Charles is insane.  But nobody else much seems to mind.  The husband busies himself with gardening, various other people have highly-detailed lunches and bathe in the sea.  There’s even a half-hearted murder plot thrown in for good measure.

Most bizarre of all, once the woman is finally let out of her locked room (Charles still determined that they love one another), she goes back home and nobody seems to mind either.  She even lets him come to tea.  IT ALL MAKES NO SENSE.

I finished reading it.  I was hoping there would be some big pay-off.  It’s a first-person narrative, so I was expecting a big unreliable-narrator twist – did any of it happen?  Is Charles insane?  But, instead, it just petered out.  There was no indication that the events were only in his mind – which is the only way that the novel would make any sort of sense.  I even wondered if The Sea, The Sea held the first clues of Iris Murdoch’s dementia, but she wrote quite a few after this, so I suspect not.

Rarely have I been so cross with a book.  Yes, any individual sentence or paragraph was beautifully written – but a series of beautiful sentences do not a novel make.  And nobody at book group could explain it to me either.

So… I’m willing to give respected or recommended authors three attempts.  That’s how I came to love books by Muriel Spark, Evelyn Waugh, and E.M. Forster.  Iris Murdoch – you’ve had two swings and two misses.  Third strike, and you’re out.  We’ll see, we’ll see…

The Young Ardizzone

StuckinaBook All , , , 17 Comments

As I mentioned before Christmas (in the post from which I swiped this photo) I got a lovely Slightly Foxed edition of Edward Ardizzone’s The Young Ardizzone (1970) from my Virago Secret Santa, and I took it away with me for my few days of indulgent reading at the end of 2012.  It was the first book I finished in 2013, and it amuses me that the year I found most elusive for A Century of Books was the first one I completed in 2013 – not that I’m doing that project this year.  BUT it is going on Reading Presently.  And what a lovely gift it was!  It is – but of course – wonderful.

There are lots of teenage girls out there who go mad for Justin Bieber, or young boys who idolise football players (I’m afraid I can’t name any who weren’t playing back in 1998).  In my own off-kilter way, I’m in danger of becoming a total fanboy for Slightly Foxed Editions.  They’re just all good.  There are other reprint publishers I love, as you know, but I think these are the most consistently wonderful offerings.  No duds.  Excuse me while I put a photo of the editorial team on my wall.  Ahem.

Edward Ardizzone’s childhood seems to have been rather unusual, where parenting is concerned.  He was born in 1900, in Tonkin, Vietnam, but moved to Suffolk, England when only five.  His father, however, stayed behind, moving around Asia – visiting England at intervals, moving his family around the country (for he was certainly still married to Ardizzone’s mother, who spent four years out in Asia with him when Ardizzone was at boarding school) but playing minimal part in Ardizzone’s childhood.  The chief figure was his tempestuous grandmother – Ardizzone often describes her going ‘black in the face with rage’, but adds that she ‘was normally gay, witty and affectionate’.  More diverting relatives!  Lucky Ed.

I always love reading about people’s childhoods, but I loved Ardizzone’s more than most, because it   took place in East Bergholt.  I’d initially thought, flicking through the book, that only a chapter or two took place in East Bergholt – but he is, in fact, there for a few years.  It’s the village where my grandparents lived for about 40 years, and Our Vicar’s Wife was there for her final teenage years, so I know it pretty well.  I even recognise the house Ardizzone lived in from this little sketch.

A very lovely village it is too.  Here are some of his recollections:

Yet certain memories are with me still.  A particular picnic in a hayfield during haymaking; a fine summer afternoon in a cornfield when the stooks of corn became our wigwams.  A certain rutted lane with oak tree arching overhead and hedges so high that the lane looked like a green tunnel leading to the flats below.[…]Not far from the old parish church, with its strange bell cage planted down among the tombstones, was a round bounded on one side by a very high red brick wall.  Set in this wall was a small gothic door.  It was of wood and decorated with heavy iron studs.  Beside this door was a wrought-iron bell pull.
It’s all quite simply told, but works well with the simple pictures.  The name Ardizzone meant nothing to me when I received the book, but I did recognise his illustrations – although I don’t know where I encountered them – which are throughout the book as a delightful accompaniment.  I must confess, to my unlearned eyes his draughtsmanship is not the very finest, and the comparisons Huon Mallalieu’s Preface makes with E.H. Shepard and Beatrix Potter seem a trifle generous.  But, even with those reservations, his illustrations enhance the memoir no end.  It is almost all done with lines and crosshatching, just a dot or two to suggest facial expressions.

Ardizzone didn’t enjoy school greatly – there are some incidents of bullying which seem to me quite shocking, but he only really mentions them in passing, without any suggestion that they have scarred him for life.  And, indeed, his various school exploits take up most of the book – with plenty of cheerful moments, especially when describing respected schoolteachers.

I only wish Ardizzone hadn’t whipped quite so quickly through the final section of his autobiography – where he explains (in three or four pages) his progression from being shown by the London Group, favourably reviewed at the Bloomsbury Gallery, commissioned to illustrate a Le Fanu collection, and finally a successful children’s author/illustrator.  He rattles through it all at breakneck speed, which is a shame, as it sounds a fascinating period in his life.  So many autobiographers find their own childhood much more interesting than the rest of their life, and many of their readers would find everything interesting.  Oh well.  Mustn’t grumble; I’ll accept what Ardizzone has given us.  And what he is given us is rather lovely.

Stuck-in-a-Book’s Weekend Miscellany

StuckinaBook All 20 Comments

Welcome to the first Weekend Miscellany of 2013!  I hope you had a lovely Christmas and New Year, whoever you were with.  As of Thursday, I’m back in Oxford, having refuelled on cat, countryside, and family.

1.) The blog post – lovely Thomas at My Porch has had a clear-out, and (as well as admiring his lovely shelves) you can put your name in the draw for his duplicate Dorothy Whipple books.  US residents only, though, since he wanted to keep the Whipples in a country where they’re difficult to find.  It’s open til 31st January.

2.) The link – I’ve yet to listen to it, but Mary has passed on the info about a Radio 4 programme on the incredible Margaret Rutherford.  Click here for it.  If I had a time machine, I’d probably (mis)use it just to go and see her on the stage as Miss Hargreaves.  What bliss that would be…

3.) The book – I really loved The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets by Eva Rice (it was in my top books of 2008), so I was very excited to receive a review copy of her new book, The Misinterpretation of Tara Jupp – with a lovely note from Eva too.  My reading will be taken up by Vanity Fair for the foreseeable future, but Eva Rice’s is one of many 21st century books I’ve been holding off until A Century of Books was finished.  If it’s half as good as The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets, then I’ll adore it!

And not forgetting… the readalong of Cheerful Weather for the Wedding is coming up soon!  A lovely lot of people seemed keen – see here for details – I suggest we post reviews sometime in the week beginning Monday 28th January, and I’ll post links and have a discussion here.  Fun fun!