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British Library Women Writers #8: Tension by E.M. Delafield

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Tension by E. M. Delafield, Simon Thomas | WaterstonesIf you click on the tag above, you’ll be able to see my posts about all the British Library Women Writers books as they come out – or, more often, some time after they come out. But Tension by E.M. Delafield only came out a couple of weeks ago – and I’m delighted, as Delafield was definitely one of the authors I was really hoping would get onto the list. But when she wrote so many books, so many of which aren’t in print (or are only POD and ebook), how would I choose?

I’m hoping this won’t be the last EMD title in the series, but I chose Tension for the simple reason that I think it’s one of her best – and I’ve read about 30 of her books now. Apparently I read it in 2004, but I didn’t remember anything about it and loved my re-read for the 1920 Club about a year ago. I’m recycling much of that review here.

The main characters are Lady Rossiter and Sir Julian Rossiter, and when Delafield created them I suspect she had half an eye on Mr and Mrs Bennet from Pride and Prejudice. They have very little fondness for each other, though Sir Julian usually restricts himself to silently laughing at Lady Rossiter’s nonsensical sayings and gossip. Where she differs from Mrs Bennet is that Lady R is also hypocritical and a little cruel – though she would always see it as doing her duty. That is one of the main tensions of Tension.

But all starts off very amusingly – here’s the opening of the novel:

“Auntie Iris has written a book!”

“A book!” echoed both auditors of the announcement, in keys varying between astonishment and dismay.

“Yes, and it’s going to be published, and put into a blue cover, and sold, and Auntie Iris is going to make heaps and heaps of money!”

“What is it to be called?” said Lady Rossiter rather gloomily, fixing an apprehensive eye on the exuberant niece of the authoress.

“It’s called ‘Why, Ben!’ and it’s a Story of the Sexes,” glibly quoted the young lady, unaware of the shock inflicted by this brazen announcement, delivered at the top of her squeaky, nine-year-old voice.

Could there be a better fake title than Why, Ben! – I love it, and all the comedy around how horrified everyone is by the idea of this book is glorious. Delafield might also have Austen in mind with her style in this novel – she does lots of sentences with the balance and irony of an Austen sentence, laughing at everyone involved and never saying quite everything – leaving the reader to fill in the gaps and thus feel on the side of the author.

The children (whom the Rossiters unite in loathing, though Lady R would not admit it openly) are neighbours, and the offspring of harassed, jovial Mark. Their mother is (whisper it) a ‘dypsomaniac’, shut away but very much not dead. And that is why Lady Rossiter takes an officious concern when a young woman moves to the area and starts working with Mark – because, surely, it is the same Miss Marchrose who once broke off an engagement when her fiance became disabled…

Delafield often enjoys poking fun at people who ‘Don’t want to gossip, but…’ – and sometimes she shows the dark side of it too. Tension is always an extremely funny book, particularly if you like dry, character-based, and dialogue-heavy comedy (which I definitely do), but it gets darker as it goes on. Lady Rossiter is ruthlessly determined to ruin Miss Marchrose, all in the name of protecting those around her and not wanting to gossip. She never does anything outright. She just quietly and subtly makes the situation impossible for Miss Marchrose. And Delafield is so clever at not making Lady Rossiter a deceitful character – she genuinely does believe she is doing what is right, and has an answer for every exasperated accusation Sir Julian makes. Which isn’t that many, because he follows the path of least resistance.

Delafield is brilliant when she unites comedy and tragedy, and I think Tension is one of her best books. It’s certainly stylised, but it’s a style I loved.

And I think it makes such a great addition to the Women Writers series because it is so centred on how rumours and reputation devastatingly affect women – whether the rumours are founded or not – while men are scarcely impacted. By making a woman the nemesis too, Delafield resists a black and white reading of who hurts whom – though arguably Lady Rossiter is as much a product of a patriarchal society as anybody else.

My sweet spot is books that are funny AND poignant, and this is up there with earlier British Library Women Writers titles Father by Elizabeth von Arnim and Dangerous Ages by Rose Macaulay in doing just that.

The Butterfly Lampshade by Aimee Bender

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The Butterfly Lampshade by Aimee BenderMy dear friend Lorna got me The Butterfly Lampshade (2020) for my birthday last year, after the bookseller in Kramer Books, Washington DC, told her it was similar to our beloved Marilynne Robinson. Having finished it, I am not sure that is true – but the novel is nevertheless excellent, and I can sort of see where he/she was coming from…

The novel is about Francie – looking back on her childhood as someone in her late 20s. Her mother has had repeated psychotic episodes, and the last of these means she cannot care for Francie anymore. On that particular night, Francie is eight and has started staying with a babysitter as she prepares to travel to Los Angeles to stay with an aunt and uncle and their new child. In the midst of an episode, Francie’s mum has told her that there is a bug inside her.

But it turned out that my mother was right about the bug. She was several days too early, and mine had not been crawling, but there would end up being a bug in me after all, just a few days after she checked into the hospital, my fated bug, a butterfly I’d found at the babysitter’s apartment, floating like a red and gold leaf so prettily on the top of a tall glass of water. I did not have any other way to hold on to it, and I could not possibly leave it in the babysitter’s apartment, and the only contained handy was myself. Time was short. I drank it down because I had to.

This butterfly exactly matches the one on the titular lampshade – and this is the first of three instances of something emerging from its background. Though Francie never sees the moment at which the thing emerges from 2D to 3D, and nobody else ever sees the aftermath. There is the butterfly from the pattern of butterflies on a lampshade, the beetle from the picture of a beetle, and roses that have fallen out of a curtain patterned with roses. As the narrator looking back, Francie often lists these three events together as a sort of mantra – the lampshade, beetle, and roses are an iterative pattern long before we hear about the second and third events in detail. Initially, indeed, I thought I’d somehow missed these events being described. That’s just one of the ways that Bender’s narrative disconcerts the reader. She doesn’t give us all the information, or let us settle in one spot for too long.

In the present, Francie makes her living by buying objects at garage sales, cleaning them up, and selling them online. It sounds like one of those careers that people only have in sitcoms, but that sort of suits the uneasy relationship with reality that The Butterfly Lampshade has. The novel is not going to come out on either side of the ‘is this really happening?’ debate, when it comes to butterflies, beetles, and roses. It feels like that is somehow the least interesting question to ask. Instead, it asks questions like why does Francie fixate on it so much, or what does it mean about her relationship with her mother.

Francie is still in touch with her mother – mostly by phone, but sometimes in person. Her aunt and cousin have become more like mother and sister – just another way in which truth and fiction are intertwining entities. The same thing comes through in Bender’s writing, casually laden with metaphors and other imagery. I love this idea of ‘bumped around our sentences’ here:

It was awkward without my aunt there; we bumped around our sentences as if we’d just met, and when my mother asked again about the flight I told her every detail I could think of, hanging on to the tiny pieces of information like they were stepping-stones between us, which they were, including telling her my drink choice, and information about my seat companion, and how long I had waited for the bus (twenty minutes) while she listened with her large and hungry eyes.

For a novel with a fantastic premise, The Butterfly Lampshade is not really interested in plot. It is a slow-paced, thoughtful, and moving examination of family relationships and mental illness – as well as how memory does or doesn’t work, and how we form our own senses of identity.

In fact, the more I describe it, the more I can see what the bookseller was saying. While the writing style is nothing like Robinson’s, it suits similar reading moods – where you want something to read slowly and almost meditatively, to explore the depths and details of human relationships. It was a very good book – and I can sense that it would be even better a second time around.

StuckinaBook’s Weekend Miscellany

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It’s been a while since I did one of these miscellanies, I think. In the UK, pandemic restrictions start to lift in a couple of days, so it’s quite an exciting feeling – on the edge of being able to go inside friends’ homes and hug them etc! (My least favourite kind of tweet is the “Weren’t we all doing this anyway?” variety. No, most of us were doing all we could to stop the spread of the virus.) Of course, we shan’t all be dashing back to normal life on Monday, but this weekend does feel like the end of something.

I’m still waiting for my first vaccination, though it should only be a few weeks now. And hoping my current spate of dizziness/eye soreness goes away – it’s now a year since all my health stuff started, and I’m no closer to a diagnosis, but generally it is all very, very slowly improving. Praise God, there were only a couple weeks where I couldn’t read at all – at the moment, I just have to steer clear of small print.

ANYWAY, that’s a whistle-stop update. Let’s get onto the book, the blog post, and the link:

1.) The blog post – It’s a vlog post, but I wanted to share a review of O, The Brave Music from Lil’s Vintage World – one of my favourite Booktubers. I so love seeing people discover this book, particularly, from all the British Library Women Writers series.

2.) The link – On Twitter, Marina Sofia shared an excellent article by Alexander Larman in The Critic: ‘A Radical Proposal: Book reviews should review books‘. It has always irked me that broadsheet reviews, especially of non-fiction, scarcely engage with the quality of the book in question. One of the many reasons I prefer reading bloggers – though the bloggers vs newspaper reviewers debate has died down a little of late, hasn’t it?

3.) The book – One of the few still-publishing novelists I love is Jenn Ashworth. I still have a couple of her back catalogue unread on my shelves, but that doesn’t stop me being excited about Ghosted, coming out in June. Find out more at Jenn’s website.

Not After Midnight and Other Stories by Daphne du Maurier – #DDMReadingWeek

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I’ve read quite a few of Daphne du Maurier’s novels, but I don’t think I’d previously read any of her short stories – some of which are, of course, very famous from the film adaptations that were made of them. Last year I was toying between reading Not After Midnight and Other Stories and Don’t Look Now and other stories – both of which I owned – before I opened them and discovered they were the same collection under different names. One went to a charity shop and I read neither – but now I’ve finally read it.

In this collection, Daphne du Maurier’s tackles what I think is the hardest form: the long short story. I’m not usually a fan of short stories that go beyond 20 or so pages, because it feels like they are wasting the unique attributes of the form. But in Not After Midnight, du Maurier writes five long short stories – and I may as well take them in turn.

Don’t Look Now

The famous one! I’ve never seen the film, but I’m certainly aware of it – but we’ll be considering the story, of course. It opens:

“Don’t look now,” John said to this wife, “but there are a couple of old girls two tables away who are trying to hypnotise me.”

It’s a good start. John and Laura are on holiday in Venice, grieving the loss of their young daughter Christine – she has recently died of meningitis. The holiday is marred a little by news of seemingly random murders – somebody is roaming the streets with a knife. The couple get talking to this ‘couple of old girls’, one of whom tells John that he has second sight. When he sees a small girl wearing a pixie hood running in fear down a street, the lady tells him that Christine is trying to warn of danger in Venice.

When their son is taken ill at school, Laura flies home. John is going to drive home, but a mysterious incident makes him remain – and leads to a very dramatic and spooky ending.

This is an excellent story, deservedly renowned for its tension and creepiness, as well as a very good depiction of a British holiday in Italy. My main reservation with it is that du Maurier seems to think grieving a dead child is something only a mother would do. John tends to his wife, but doesn’t seem particularly bothered that Christine has died. But, that detail aside, a marvellous story.

Not After Midnight

Timothy Grey is a schoolteacher on holiday on Crete, suffering from some unspecified illness – possibly a nervous breakdown. He demands a chalet near the sea, because he intends to paint – the hotel staff are reluctant, because somebody staying there recently died…

The other notable guests are the Stolls – Mr Stoll is rude, loud, and drunk; his wife is silent and possibly deaf.

The title of this story is excellent, and for much of it du Maurier sustains the same tension and intrigue as ‘Don’t Look Now’ – but I found the ending rather unsatisfying and quite plebian.

A Border-Line Case

Shelagh is an aspiring actor who finds impelled to go off to Ireland to find a man called Nick, once close friends with her father. On her father’s deathbed, he has reminisced about Nick – and, in his dying moment, looks at Shelagh with fear and horror. Shelagh hopes for answers, or at least some attempt of posthumous reconciliation, by finding Nick. But when she identifies where he lives, she is ambushed and kidnapped by Nick’s accomplices, and forced to stay on his island.

Rather unsettlingly, they start that of charming, flirty conversation that sometimes happens between kidnappers and kidnappees in films, and presumably never in real life. This isn’t Stockholm Syndrome; it is instant.

There are a couple of revelatory twists in this story – one of which is to do with contemporary politics, and one of which is pretty horrifying. More something from Greek myth than life. Anyway, this was another story that started really interestingly and couldn’t sustain that intrigue satisfactorily, in my opinion.

The Way of the Cross

The only story in the collection without any sort of horror element, this is another tale of Brits abroad – in this case, Jerusalem. A group led by a stand-in vicar are touring the Holy Land, each with their own anxieties and reasons for being there. Perhaps the most memorable of the group is nine-year-old Robin – the only person there who seems to have read the gospels – who leads them in a chaotic attempt to find the Garden of Gethsemane.

This is a really good and unusual story, though one that doesn’t fit the feel of the collection at all. It is quite poignant, as the group face humiliations and failures – realising the trip is not the once-in-a-lifetime experience they’d hoped for, and finding out things about themselves and others that they’d rather not know. As I say, this isn’t horror – there is nothing creepy about it – but there is an underlying sense of lives being sadly changed, which is perhaps more horrifying than the jump scares of the earlier stories.

The Breakthrough

Some sci-fi thing about capturing essences that I didn’t enjoy at all, but that’s probably because I find sci-fi rather tedious at the best of times.

Ok, overall rather a mixed reception from me. ‘Don’t Look Now’ is brilliant, and ‘The Way of the Cross’ is great in a very different way. The other stories are largely readable, but all could have done with some rethinking and editing. Du Maurier is exceptional at premises and settings, but doesn’t always know how to keep those things going for the length of a long short story.

Should offensive books be republished?

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When I reviewed Miss Linsey and Pa by Stella Gibbons earlier in the year, I said that it was one of my favourite reads of 2021 so far – but that I couldn’t recommend it to the British Library for republishing, because there are racist elements to it that couldn’t easily be excised. They weren’t the main gist of the novel, by any means, and some of the antisemitism could probably be neatly cut away – but there is one secondary character whose racism towards another secondary character is tangled up in the plot.

I mentioned in that review that I might try to write more about the ethics of reprinting racist and other discriminatory works from the past, and a couple of people said they’d be interested in that discussion – and quite a few people said they thought any novel from the past should be eligible to be reprinted, with caveats in an introduction if necessary.

I want to give my own two caveats at the beginning: firstly, I am a white man and thus certainly not the person to be talking about how racism and sexism affect individuals, and I won’t be trying to do that today. If this becomes mansplaining or whitesplaining, please shout me down. Secondly, I think we should all have an awareness that there are opinions we all unthinkingly hold today that will be considered appalling by future generations. We don’t know what those opinions are, and that’s kind of the point.

Books that have been turned down

This hasn’t been something I’ve had to think about until relatively recently – in my very privileged position of being able to recommend books for the British Library Women Writers series. I emphasise that I am recommending rather than deciding, and they can say (and have said) no to my suggestions. (A third caveat: I am, of course, speaking for myself in this post – not for the British Library.)

They’ve turned down books for several reasons. Some simply didn’t fit the criteria of the series – I really wanted to include an Ivy Compton-Burnett, but all her novels are set in some fanciful past, and so don’t comment on life for women of the decade they’re published. I tried to emphasise the ‘fictionalised’ half of ‘fictionalised autobiography” for Our Hearts Were Young and Gay by Corneila Otis Skinner and Emily Kimbrough, deep down knowing it was really just autobiography. One novel the editor at the British Library simply didn’t like, which is fair enough. Another novel was really promising throughout, but had a bad, confusing, and sudden ending – and we agreed that, sadly, this ruled it out. And a final novel couldn’t be used because of an aspect of it that, while not overt racism, would be uncomfortable to read. It’s by an author who has recently been republished by more than one reprint publisher – but, notably, they haven’t included this particular book of hers either.

That’s not a bad batting average, considering how many of my recommendations have been accepted and are coming out in the future – and, of course, that’s why the editor is there (and she’s wonderful). But it’s that last one that particularly ties into the question of ‘should we reprint questionable books’.

Argument 1: We shouldn’t erase the past

A lot of people come from the position that the past is the past, and we shouldn’t try to doctor it to make it palatable for modern eyes. And this is largely what happens when books are reprinted. I know that sometimes offensive words are changed (the reprint of O, The Brave Music takes out an n-word, for instance, without changing the overall meaning of the scene), but broadly the world of Bowdlerised editions is a thing of the past. I don’t know how long that will last – Bowdler and his ilk changed things to make them fit with the morals and sensitivities of his age, and I can envisage 2021 doing the same. But it hasn’t happened yet.

I am generally pro the idea of not editing the past – whether that is from prudery or from being woke (and I don’t use the term disparagingly). But sometimes that means not publishing at all.

Argument 2: The past can still hurt people

BUT not wanting to erase the past isn’t the same as insisting that it is glorified and sustained. We’ve seen that recently with statues. It seems a farcical argument to me that we shouldn’t remove statues because that is destroying history – as though the only way that we have ever learned about the past is by reading statues.

I am firmly against destroying existing books – burning books has never been a good look for any movement – but that’s not to say the content is innocuous. Again, I am keen not to Whitesplain, so I will just say this: racism in books makes me feel uncomfortable and unhappy, but it doesn’t chime with racism I have personally faced – which is, of course, none. I cannot speak for people who read (say) the n-word in a novel and have to re-live all the times they’ve had that word used at them. But it’s worth remembering that books from the past still have the power to cause pain to readers in the present.

Argument 3: Publishing is a commercial venture

Acknowledging this pain – if a book shouldn’t be extensively edited to fit modern views (and I think it shouldn’t) then what next?

Many argue that books should just come out as is, and there are certain authors who are treated just like that. Joseph Conrad has a novel with the n-word in the title and, as far as I know, it’s still republished with that title. It certainly was in the English faculty under that title when I studied there, though perhaps it’s just called Narcissus now. Anyway, I shan’t be reading any more Conrad because I find him deathly dull, but there is certainly an echelon of writers who are so canonical that publishers have to make decisions about how they present them. There are words, themes, and perspectives in Wuthering Heights, To Kill a Mockingbird, Othello, and any number of other classic texts that wouldn’t be published as new books now – but these authors and books are too renowned to ignore.

The same is not true of reprint publishing. I think Miss Linsey and Pa is largely brilliant, but the cultural world will not notice if it never comes back into print. And publishers will only reprint a book if they think it will sell, and won’t damage their reputation or open them up to legal battles. These are all different variables, of course. But if you say ‘We should bring back books as they are’, you are also saying ‘This publisher should take a commercial and reputational risk on this product’. And, honestly, why should they?

Conclusion: it’s a moral and practical decision…

It’s not a surprising conclusion, but I do think the commercial/practical element is surprisingly often left out of conversations on this topic. Whatever my opinion of reprinting a book is, the ultimate opinion that matters is people with the capital and sway to bring a book back into print. I personally believe we shouldn’t reprint books that will damage others (and I am not qualified, as a white man, to determine what those things are – listening is always key), and that we shouldn’t extensively edit books to make them fit our sensibilities (though I think removing the odd word is fine), but my opinion is pretty meaningless on its own because nobody is asking me to put my money and name on the line.

And, again, it’s always worth remembering – lest we feel the temptation to be self-righteous against past writers and readers – that there are plenty of novels coming out at the moment that will be considered anathema to a future generation.

This post has felt rather a ramble, but hopefully some of it makes sense! I would love to know your thoughts on the topic…

The Privet Hedge by J.E. Buckrose

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A few weeks ago, I decided to do a mystery book haul – picking four books I knew absolutely nothing about, from mid-century female authors I’d never heard of, to see if I could find some hidden gems. It’s all part of scoping out for future British Library Women Writers titles – hard work, but someone has to do it(!!) If I were canny, I’d find a way to write these off in my taxes, but I don’t understand at all what that means. It is embarrassing how financially illiterate I am.

ANYWAY. Of the four, I decided to start with The Privet Hedge by J.E Buckrose, from 1922, depending whom you ask. The reason I chose this one to start with is because it opens with a description of a house, and books-about-houses are among my favourite things. Here’s the first paragraph:

At the far end of Thorhaven towards the north was a little square house surrounded by a privet hedge. It had a green door under a sort of wooden canopy with two flat windows on either side, and seemed to stand there defying the rows and rows of terraces, avenues and meanish semi-detached villas which were creeping up to it. Behind lay the flat fields under a wide sky just as they had lain for centuries, with the gulls screaming across them inland from the mud cliffs, and so the cottage formed a sort of outpost, facing along the hordes of jerry-built houses which threatened to sweep on and surround it.

In this house live Miss Ethel and Mrs Bradford, as the narrative tends to refer to them. They are sisters, past middle age, who have always lived with each other except for the brief two years while Mrs Bradford was married. Quickly widowed, she returned to their life together – and, though a gentler soul than her sister in many ways, also always makes clear her sense of superiority from having once been married. She gives the impression of having lived an awful lot of life in those couple of years, and it is a superiority that Miss Ethel recognises and accepts.

Those ‘jerry-built houses’ of the opening paragraph are causing a change. A distant relative of theirs owns the land separating their little house from the encroaching housing estates – and he has just sold it for development. Swathes of housing estates on greenbelt land in villages feels like a very contemporary concern, but it was clearly equally pressing in the 1920s. The sisters, particularly Miss Ethel, are horrified that new houses might crowd in the other side of their privacy-ensuring privet hedge – blocking out the view and destroying their tranquillity.

If that weren’t all, their maid has also just left to get married. Luckily her younger relative Caroline has been put up for the role. She is a teenager, recently out of school, and has been ‘promised’ to Miss Ethel and Mrs Bradford ever since their maid announced she was leaving. But Caroline has a last-minute change of heart. Like many young women of her generation and class, domestic service no longer looked so promising. “I’d starve before I’d ask permission to go to the pillar-box, and spend my nights in that old kitchen by myself,” she says. Instead, she can earn money by manning the box on the promenade – for Thorhaven is a seaside town.

In the end she compromises by working there and helping out the sisters, though not as a live-in maid. It’s a really interesting look at the new job prospects of the 1920s for a certain type of young woman – and I particularly enjoyed all the details of life by the coast, and the society that lives there together out of season (and moves out of their house during season, to get some tourist income). Caroline’s main story is something of a love triangle, though, between the reliable but dull Wilf – and a man who is engaged to another woman. I tend not to find romance storylines very interesting in books, and this one did lean a bit into love-at-first-sight territory. It isn’t badly handled, but for me it was the least interesting element of an otherwise very interesting novel.

What helps The Privet Hedge rise above other novels of its type is Buckroses’s writing. The initial scene-setting paragraphs are rather lovely, showing a good eye for detail that brings the town and its inhabitants alive. Here is a dance scene, for instance:

Still the evening came with no sign of rain; the band stationed at the edge of the green played cheerful dances with a will, and it was no fault of theirs that the music sounded so lost and futile amid the roaring of the sea – rather as if a penny whistle were to be played in a cathedral while the organ was bombing out solemn music among the springing arches. Perhaps the visitors and the Thorhaven people felt something of this themselves, for they put no real zest into their attempts at carnival, but they danced rather grimly in the cold wind, with little tussocks in the grass catching their toes and the fairy lamps which edged the lawn blowing out one after the other.

Overall, I really liked The Privet Hedge. If it had predominantly been about Miss Ethel and Mrs Bradford, I would have wholeheartedly loved it – but as the novel progresses, their story becomes less prominent than Caroline’s. I suppose that was the market for this sort of book at the time – and it’s certainly enjoyable. But the older couple of sisters, anxiously watching modernity come literally and figuratively closer to their door, is what really sold this novel to me – and they are its greatest success.

I went back to a bookshop!

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Since the pandemic hit the UK, I have only been in one bookshop – a quick look around Barter Books in Alnwick, as I was there for a wedding and couldn’t miss the opportunity. Other than that, I didn’t want to risk it – knowing I could buy books online. Obviously this is very small fry in the things that people have experienced this past year, but I have really missed being in one.

And yesterday, I went to Waterstones in Oxford! I was spending a day with a friend, and decided it was time to brave it. Mostly because I have yet to see the British Library Women Writers series in a bookshop, and I was very excited to see them ‘in the flesh’ – you can probably see how delighted I was, even behind a mask:

As series consultant, I get copies of these – so I didn’t need to buy any. But I did buy a small handful of books to celebrate being back in a bookshop…

The Bear by Marian Engel

If you follow Dorian of Eiger, Mönch and Jungfrau on Twitter, chances are you’ve heard about The Bear by Marian Engel. It has recently been republished by the ever-reliable Daunt Books, so I’ve decided to give it a go – despite being called ‘the most controversial novel ever published in Canada'(!) I probably won’t actually read it for a few months – because it was published in 1976, making it perfect for October’s 1976 Club.

Flight Behaviour by Barbara Kingsolver

A couple of years ago I loved Pigs in Heaven by Kingsolver so much that it made me want to read much more by her. It was actually the third of her books that I’d read, but far and away my favourite. She does tend to write enormous books, and we all know how I feel about them – but now it’s on the shelf, it’s more of a possibility.

In Memory of Memory by Maria Stepanova

There is a definite irony that I can never remember the author’s name of a book called In Memory of Memory… this is a Fitzcarraldo Edition from their non-fiction series, and I cannot resist those. I’ve had a slightly mixed success with them, as some are a bit too clever for me, but at their best they are incredible. And their best is This Little Art by Kate Briggs, FYI.

There you go – a mini haul, because I tend to go bigger in secondhand bookshops where the books are cheaper. And, let’s face it, months spent surrounded by my unread books has reminded me that I don’t really need to buy more. But it felt so good to be back, supporting a bookshop and having a browse.

The Unexpected Professor by John Carey

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My friends Lorna and Will gave me a copy of The Unexpected Professor by John Carey in 2014, the year it came out – fast forward seven years and its time has finally come. I took it away on holiday with me, and it was somehow the perfect read – such a wonderful book.

It’s an autobiography, I suppose, but the subtitle tells you what the main gist of The Unexpected Professor is about – ‘An Oxford life in books’. He does talk a bit about his childhood, and a bit more about his time in the army, but those are not the selling point of the book for me. I couldn’t wait to get to Oxford with him – and even though that doesn’t happen for about a hundred pages, please excuse me glossing over the first chunk of the book to get to the bit that I loved most. (I should say – he writes very well about school life and various experiences during national service in the army, including wondering whether he’d accidentally shot a fellow soldier during an ill-advised demonstration with a gun – an incident that clearly stayed with him vividly. But naturally Oxford and books won me over more.)

Carey goes to Oxford as an undergraduate in the ’50s – following his stint of national service, as was expected then. Despite studying English literature, his interview had involved Latin, Greek, and French – and the course he was set to study ended somewhere before the Victorian period. He would later be instrumental in extending the course to include Victorian and 20th-century literature, and making Old English optional – by the time I arrived as an undergraduate in 2004, we spent a term on ‘1900-present’, though very few people chose to do anything after mid-century. And Old English was technically optional, but nobody ever seemed to present me with the option not to.

Much of what I enjoyed about reading about Carey’s time as a student was comparing what it was like for me, fifty years later. Some of it hadn’t changed at all. He defines things like ‘collections’ – when you sit with the head of your college and he/she talks to you about your studies and your future – which is still exactly the same, subfusc and all. On the other hand, there were no male-only colleges by the time I was studying, and only one female-only college – which is now also mixed.

Carey was at St. John’s College, which is where one of my two closest friends at uni was, so I spent a lot of time there. She lived in a building that is described as a beautiful garden in The Unexpected Professor – for it didn’t exist at the time. He glosses over the ’50s and ’60s desecration of colleges, building hideous concrete blocks in almost all of the beautiful college settings.

What he doesn’t gloss over at all, thankfully, is reading and writing. While he doesn’t mention a female author in any depth under towards the end of the book, Carey does write insightfully and engagingly about many different authors – Milton, Wordsworth, Browning, Orwell. When they come up, he spends pages and pages analysing, exploring, talking about their shifting critical reception and the passages that most interest him. It would all be very self-indulgent if it weren’t also so enthralling for the reader. In these sections, autobiography fades away and literary criticism comes in – though in a style different from most books in that genre, which Carey openly derides. More on that shortly…

Carey seems to have lived a very charmed academic life in the next half century in Oxford. Time after time, he was given multiple job offers or funding pots. He even gets offered a job as a Fellow at Keble before he has finished his DPhil! I’m not sure if this is a sign of times changing or Carey’s particular talent, but it is unheard of now for an English academic to walk into a job – or even, for most of us, to get any funding. Carey misses out the years of scarcely-paid part-time work, scrabbling for any chance of a permanent gig. While he and his wife – their romance is dwelt on briefly but touchingly – aren’t exactly rich, they are certainly doing better than most of my academic contemporaries were at that stage. They also got to live on St John’s Street, one of the most lovely streets in Oxford – though apparently rather run-down at the time. His various academic posts and involvement with the English department are a fascinating overview of the changing ethos, and I found his genuine engagement with his students’ work, undergraduate and postgraduate, very admirable.

While teaching, Carey was also writing. Some of his best-received books were anthologies – the Faber Book of Reportage and the Faber Book of Science, the latter of which my father loves. To get his head around centuries and centuries of thought in these areas, and selecting innovative and compelling examples, sounds like a daunting task – but he makes it sound almost a pleasure. He also writes some literary criticism and other cultural texts, including the only one I’d previously read: The Intellectuals and the Masses. It is while compiling critical thought on Milton that Carey realises he thinks most literary criticism is drivel – not quite his word, but not far off.

I’m sure he’s right, but I am coming onto my only qualm about this book. He is very disparaging about his colleagues in the literary field, and not particularly gracious when they don’t like his work. I suppose that’s understandable – but it definitely became clear that when he is critical of someone, their book is bad; when someone is critical of his book, they are wrong – and probably histrionic. Sadly, this does become very sexist at one point – he writes of his former supervisor’s review of his book: ‘when I dipped into Helen’s Encounter review its bossy tone reminded me so forcibly of my mother’s shrill, bigoted denunciations of my teenage relationship with Heather that I never finished it’. Setting aside the fact that he definitely finished reading it, calling a woman’s review ‘bossy’ and ‘shrill’ is not a good look, and I wish his editor had spoken to him about it. Perhaps they did.

It’s a small quibble in a book I otherwise totally loved and relished reading. I might have suggested cutting off the beginning and making this entirely a book about Oxford and books, but also recognise that is because I love those things myself. Part of my pleasure was in thinking of the streets and remembering my time as an undergraduate and postgraduate at Oxford – but I think The Unexpected Professor would delight you even if you’ve never stepped foot in Oxford. Because we all, after all, love books.

BookTube Spin #2: My List

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You might remember Rick MacDonnell’s BookTube Spin earlier in the year – in brief, make a list of 20 books you want to read – he’ll get a random number from one to twenty, and you have a couple months to read the book. The first one went really well for me, and I thought Helen Oyeyemi’s The Opposite House was really good. The spin is happening every few months, and it’s time for round two…

This time, I’ve gone through my unread books list on LibraryThing, picking the first book from each page of titles… Now, I have 83 pages of unread books, so I allowed myself to skip to the ones I particularly wanted to read. Here’s the list…

1. The Adventures of Elizabeth in Ruegen by Elizabeth von Arnim

2. The Enchanter by Lila Azam Zanganeh

3. The Brandon Papers by Quentin Bell

4. An Autumn Sowing by E.F. Benson

5. Caroline by Richmal Crompton

6. The Drunken Forest by Gerald Durrell

7. Doctor’s Children by Josephine Elder

8. Innocence by Penelope Fitzgerald

9. Three Things You Need to Know About Rockets by Jessica Fox

10. The Familiar Faces by David Garnett

11. Don’t Open the Door by Anthony Gilbert

12. The Brickfield by L.P. Hartley

13. Sun City by Tove Jansson

14. Ignorance by Milan Kundera

15. My Remarkable Uncle by Stephen Leacock

16. Free Air by Sinclair Lewis

17. The Folded Leaf by William Maxwell

18. Mr Beluncle by V.S. Pritchett

19. The White Shield by Myrtle Reed

20. Migraine by Oliver Sacks

 

Announcing the next club!

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What a fun week it has been! The 1936 Club has been so fruitful – fascinating to see what the world was reading on the cusp of war, and what variety there is, as always.

For the next club in October, we’re jumping forward a few decades. Get searching your bookshelves – and here is your six-month warning for the 1976 Club!