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This Golden Fleece: interview with Esther Rutter

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I recently reviewed This Golden Fleece by Esther Rutter – otherwise known as my friend Phoebe – and I really enjoyed reading it. Since she’s a good friend of mine, I did a quick interview with her – asking her a bit about the book and about knitting. The Guardian liked the book, btw, so you should give it a go.

1. What was the genesis of This Golden Fleece?

I’d been a knitter since childhood, but the book started with a present from my Mum – four balls of woollen yarn from Shetland, which she gave me in 2016. At that time, I’d just switched jobs from working in literary heritage and education to being in university administration, and moved to the Fife countryside for my husband’s job, where I was doing a lot of knitting in the dark winter evenings. As an avid reader, I was on the look-out for a history of knitting in Britain, but couldn’t find one in print. So I thought: why not give up this job I really didn’t like and write it myself? Having studied English at Oxford and been a ‘secret writer’ for years meant that I thought I had the research and writing skills to give it a go – and my husband agreed that we would be able to manage on his salary alone for a year, so I handed in my notice and off I went.

I was extremely lucky in that, having given up my job at Christmas, in January I won a Twitter competition called Tweet Your Pitch, where a panel of agents and publishers spend a day reading book pitches on Twitter. From this I secured an agent, who advised me to develop a chapter-by-chapter plan for the book, and write the first two chapters – by early March 2017, so that she could take these to London Book Fair to put them under the nose of interested editors. Fortunately a few publishers were interested in the book, and after a very exciting auction, I signed with Granta.

2. How did you first become interested in knitting and wool?

It was a bit of a circuitous route… I was 5 when my father’s business went bankrupt, we lost our home, and moved from our modern semi-detached house to a tied farm cottage. The best thing about this was that we were now right next door to a working farm, and the farmer – a Mr Walford Arnold Griffiths – was happy to let me and my brothers ‘help’ out with the sheep. So his love of all things sheepy was a strong influence on me, as was my mother’s skill with fibre crafts. She was – and still is – a very accomplished spinner and weaver, and as young children we would pick up all the little grubby bits of wool from around the farm, wash them, and bring them to her to spin. The magic of this transformation never failed to amaze us! But it was my best friend’s mum who taught me knitting: mum’s spinning wheel and weaving loom were a bit too much for my little hands to manage, and so it was Suzanne – who made a lot of my best friend’s clothes – who first placed a pair of knitting needles in my hands. She also taught me to crochet – which I didn’t get on with.  But her daughter is a fantastic crocheter, so I think she’s pleased that we have both continued to develop the craft skills she taught us when we were children.

3. What was the most unusual knitted object you saw on your travels?

Definitely the funeral stockings I found in St Fagans museum in Wales. Very few of these have survived, but they were extremely common and used widely until the middle of the twentieth century. Although this was the first and only time I have seen a pair, I had read about funeral stockings in Bruce Chatwin’s On the Black Hill (1982), his fictional history of a Welsh family and their farm. Funeral stockings were knitted specifically for a person’s laying out, and, alongside a shroud and funeral cap, were laid aside for use after death. The red and cream pair I saw belonged to a woman called Eliza Lewis, and may well have formed part of her wedding trousseau; they were certainly knitted many years before her death, as it was only because she became ill with dropsy in later life that she was not buried in them.

4. Which knitting project are you proudest of?

I think I am most proud of having completed a gansey, a traditional fisherman’s style jumper. To knit it I had to buy specialist steel needles as it was so large and heavy – it weighs over a kilo and used almost kilometres of yarn – and took me pretty much an entire year to finish. But I was very aware of the tradition in which I was working, where generations of women from fishing communities had made these intricate and elaborately patterned garments, often knitting in almost complete darkness, and I was in complete awe of what they were able to make by feel alone.

5. Which celebrity knitters (past and present) might surprise us?

I think a lot of people know that Virginia Woolf was a knitter, but I was surprised to find that both Lytton Strachey and Adrian Stephen also plied their pins! Jean Harlow, Ginger Rogers, Vivien Leigh,– there seems to have hardly been a female star of the silver screen who didn’t wield her needles. And today Meryl Streep, Anjelica Houston, Uma Thurman and even Ryan Gosling all appear to be enthusiastic knitters.

6. What do you think the future of knitting is likely to be?

Hand-knitting is having something of a renaissance; as with the organic and ‘Slow Food’ movements, provenance and sustainability are really important concerns for the international knitting community. Many people are turning away from synthetic fibres because of the microplastics that leech from them, and wool, silk, cotton, linen and other natural fibres are growing in popularity. Racism and white bias is also a big issue in the craft world, and popular fibre website Ravelry has recently taken an important stand in refusing to allow material which promotes the racist politics of Donald Trump. So, like the original Luddites and les tricoteuses, knitters and knitting will continue to be an important and visible force for change in our world.

Why do people care about first editions?

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I went to a couple of bookshops while I was in London last weekend, and they were quite different. About the only thing they had in common was that they are pretty small.

First up was Archive Books, near Marylebone. I thought I hadn’t been there before, but this turned out not to be true. The website said they opened at 10.30am on a Saturday, and I was lurking outside around 10.15. That’s when I spotted a scrap of paper in the window saying that their Saturday opening hours were 11-5, so I sat in a little park around the corner and read a book. I came back at 11.10, when the owner was starting to put some boxes of discounted books.

In I went, and the quiet but friendly owner asked if I needed any help – no, said I, I was happy browsing. Which I was, though I couldn’t see all the shelves. The shop is tiny and the amount of stock is rather larger, so I couldn’t get to all the shelves. But I could get to the fiction and biography, and that’s what I was after really – I picked up R.C. Sherriff’s autobiography, No Leading Lady. Only later did I discover that I’d stumbled across rather a rare book. The cheapest copy online is about £75, and I paid £5 for mine. More importantly, I’m really keen to read it because I love the novels of his that I’ve read.

The copy was in very good condition, with an almost pristine dustjacket. I think it might have been a first edition, because I’m not sure that there was a second edition. It was only when I got home that I discovered I’d torn the back of the dustjacket quite significantly. One clumsy journey in my bag probably knocked off at least half its value. But I was more bothered that it was rather a shame that the dustjacket had survived for decades in the wild and less than a day in my hands. I felt bad. But I didn’t care about the value. I’m not planning on selling it.

Which takes me to the second shop I went to – The Second Shelf. You’ve probably heard about it, if you read some of the same blogs I do. I heard an enjoyable interview with the person who runs it, on The Book Club Review Podcast. In brief, it was set up to combat the marginalisation of women writers in the world of rare books and book collecting. There is a catalogue/periodical, and the bookshop has many fine editions of rare books.

It was a lovely space to be in. And lovely to see beautiful editions of so many authors I love – most of the books were from the 20th century. But I have to admit that I came away from the shelves feeling rather sad. So many wonderful books – probably to end up unread on somebody’s shelf. Because I can’t imagine there are many readers who will settle down with a cuppa and a novel if they’ve just spent £200 on that novel.

There is a small paperback section, including lots of Virago Modern Classics, where you can come away with something for a fiver. That’s brilliant. But the other novels I picked up had to be very carefully put back again. I’d love to try more Nancy Spain, and they had Murder, Bless It that I’ve been intending to read – but I’m not going to spend £400 trying it. I can’t imagine many people are. There was a Rose Macaulay I’d love to read – £250.

To be clear, this is an issue I have with the whole of book collecting and the rules that have arisen around it. Not just The Second Shelf. I think anything that gets equality in any area has to be lauded, and it’s good that the imbalance in the rare books business is being addressed. But I do still have any issue with books as commodities to be sealed away and kept pristine, worth more for their scarcity and condition than for their contents. My collection of books is dear to me because I love the books – but the 3,000 books I own are collectively worth substantially less than £3,000.

The reason it affected me in this shop is because these are the authors I love. I don’t care if a rare edition of Wordsworth is put in a case and never touched, because I don’t particularly want to read him. It feels closer to home if it’s Barbara Comyns or Dorothy Whipple. It’s not even that I want their books on my shelves – I had cheaper, tattier copies of the ones I saw there – but I want someone to be reading them.

Which does also bring me on the title of this blog post. I can understand people paying a lot for a book that is very hard to get hold of. I can even understand spending more for a signed book, because I like the sense of connection with the author. But I’ve never been able to get my head around a first edition being worth more than any other edition. Why does its being the first make it better than the second or seventeenth? The content is the same, and it’s quite possible that the cover art and other aesthetic elements are worse. It seems such an arbitrary way of designating value. I’d take a pretty reprint over an ugly first edition any day.

I suspect most readers of this blog will be readers first and collectors second (if at all). But I would be intrigued to know if there’s anybody who hankers after a first edition – and, if so, why?

And more power to Second Shelf, why not. I only hope that their well-off patrons are also keen readers, and don’t get too precious about damaging the books they buy.

The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg by Louis Bromfield

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I bought The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg (1928) by Louis Bromfield back in 2011, after reading Rachel’s review of his novel Mrs Parkington. I do also own that novel, but had yet to read anything by Bromfield. Both would have qualified for Project Names, but the reason I picked up Annie Spragg was (a) because the title was so intriguing and (b) because I read a review that said it was like reading an Alfred Hitchcock film.

Well. Hmm.

This might be the worst structured novel I’ve ever read. Or cleverly experimental in a way that I really don’t understand. And yet it was sufficiently well written – in its constituent pieces – that I still liked it. All very confusing.

The novel opens with Mr Winnery, who is living in a small town in Italy and slowly, laboriously writing a long book about miracles. He believes there is always a rationale explanation for them, and that is the gist of his book – but it has taken him years, and he doesn’t imagine he’ll ever finish it. Instead, like almost all of the English-speaking society he moves in in Italy, he has stayed in this exile because he can’t afford to leave. The one wealthy woman is the doyenne of the society, Mrs Weatherby, and she has a matriarchly abusive relationship with her companion – who loathes her but cannot leave. Throw in some Roman Catholic colour – nuns, priest – and you have the contemporary set up. Annie Spragg is not part of this set, but she is known to them – an odd, sad older woman.

But when Annie Spragg dies, the nun attending her deathbed finds that stigmata have appeared on her. Her palms and feet bear the scars of nails; her side the sign of having been cut. A miracle has happened – she has the same scars as the resurrected Christ.

I think this is a fascinating set up for a novel, and I was enjoying reading about the group of ex-pats in Italy. There was enough tension for an interesting and moving novel. But instead…

For approximately the next two hundred pages, Bromfield gives us detailed, scattered portraits of other people. We do see a bit of Annie Spragg’s childhood – one of many daughters of the leader of a religious cult. I find this sort of painstaking flashback a little irritating, but worse was when he goes off into detail about characters we’ve not met yet. Often these would end with some tangential connection to the present day events, sometimes impacting them. Occasionally they’d only link to a whole other chapter of back story that would then link to the present – which we didn’t see, we just had to remember it existed.

It’s a patchwork of stories that all feel like they should have been notes he made, to work out a history in his head. But they are compiled in such a disjointed way that we have to wade through many pages that have no emotional connection for the reader, because we don’t have a clue who he’s talking about. Or we get a chapter of back story that could equally well have been achieved with a couple of sentences of context.

It’s frustrating, because his writing is excellent. He manages to get moments of dark humour and observational humour into the scenes, and is incisive about human behaviour. I was really enjoying the beginning – and, indeed, I really enjoyed the end, when we were back in the present. (And all is… sort of explained?) In each chunk, once he’d finally established where we were and what was going on, I enjoyed a lot. But it was all so maddeningly arranged.

Perhaps people had more patience in the 20s, or perhaps this was all a formal experiment in storytelling. It didn’t really pay off for me, not least because I had to wait so long before the characters I was interested turned up again. BUT – because the page-by-page writing was so good, I’m quite likely to give him another go sometime. And Mrs Parkington is still on the shelf.

This Golden Fleece by Esther Rutter

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Do I know anything about knitting? Absolutely not. Actually – caveat, I knew nothing about knitting before I picked up Esther Rutter’s This Golden Fleece. Now I know rather more!

Why did I request this rather off-brand review copy? Well, Esther is a good friend of mine – and if you flick to the acknowledgements, you’ll even find my name there. It seems quite odd to call her Esther, as I know her as Phoebe or Epsie, but I should probably go with what is on the cover.

Esther’s book falls into that genre that has become quite popular since H is for Hawk – of being about a topic, but also about researching that topic. This Golden Fleece is not as deeply confessional or emotional as some in the genre, but we do follow Esther as she travels up and down the country, learning about regional knitting practices, historical details, and other eccentricities in the world of wool devotees. And it’s clear that they do have a world – one that is very welcoming to others, and where strangers will enthuse to each other about their projects and crafty passions.

While this isn’t a deeply emotional book, it is certainly a personal one. Throughout the year, Esther reveals glimpses of her family life, and also discovers that she is pregnant along the way. Her attention turns from knitting a complicated gansey for her dad to creating clothes for her future daughter. Gathering wool for these projects, and covetously looking at expensive varieties, play out alongside visits to craftspeople and collectors who can reveal glimpses into knitting’s past. But there is a feeling that the past is not too far from the present. The world of wool has certainly changed, but not as dramatically as many other worlds. With two pieces of roughly identical wood and part of a sheep, you have something in common with many generations before you. (I use ‘you’ advisedly; I have no idea how to knit, even after reading the knits and purls of This Golden Fleece.)

Some of the most interesting bits include how knitting has been a revolutionary act – e.g. being used to record secrets as part of spying, a la A Tale of Two Cities – and, of course, how knitting came into its own as a method of protest as recently as the ‘pussy hats’ when Trump became President. The stereotype of the passive, harmless knitter-in-the-background looks flimsier and flimsier, doesn’t it?

Most importantly in this book, Esther writes very well. I would expect nothing less, having studied English alongside her – which also helps with the contextualising moments, where unexpected knitters like Virginia Woolf get tangential mentions. The whole thing is very winning and engaging, and Esther’s warm, lovely personality shines through. A wonderful gift for the knitter in your life (or, of course, yourself). And, if nothing else, look how beautiful that cover is!

Tove Jansson: Work and Love by Tuula Karjalainen

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I read a second book for Women in Translation month, but didn’t get around to reviewing it. But here are some quick thoughts about Tove Jansson: Work and Love by Tuula Karjalainen (2013), translated by David McDuff.

I read Boel Westin’s excellent biography of Tove Jansson when it was translated a few years ago. It was one of those times like buses, where you wait ages for a biography to come out and then two come at once. I’m not sure why I leaned towards the Westin – maybe it came out first? It was also the authorised biography, I believe, though I’m not sure I knew that at the time.

Karjalainen certainly didn’t go rogue with her lack-of-authorisation and spread all sorts of salacious rumours. Instead, she takes us on a journey through the work and love of the title. And it’s a steady, methodical journey.

I really enjoyed reading this book, but here is where we come across the main reason that I think Westin’s biography is better. Karjalainen compartmentalises Jansson’s life so thoroughly that it’s as though she were living four or five parallel lives, without overlap. She writes at length and sensitively about Jansson’s relationships with men and women, but at such length that for a while her career disappears completely. The Moomins are cautiously not addressed for half the book, except for an accidental stray mention that doesn’t make sense since she’s given no context. I can understand that this sort of makes sense, but it means jumping back and forth in time, and pretending that Jansson’s love life was completely unrelated to her career, or that her success as a strip cartoonist had little bearing on her painting. And so on and so forth. Then again, when I reviewed Westin’s book, I complained about repetition… maybe there’s no way to deal with the complexity and overlaps of Jansson’s life and career within the confines of a conventional biography.

I will add, in each of her compartmentalised areas Karjalainen writes interestingly – though leaning perhaps a little too much towards the ‘Jansson must have felt…’ school of biography. As with Westin’s, there isn’t as much about the adult books I love so much, but I suppose that’s inevitable. And thankfully, as with Westin’s book, there are lots of beautifully reproduced examples of the paintings being talked about – even if Karjalainen evidently didn’t know which would be there when she was writing it, as the composition of some paintings are described in unnecessary length when we can just looked at them on the page opposite.

Oh, and the book itself – beautiful! I love the design and the solidity of it. Surely one of the nicest-looking and -feeling books I have on my shelves.

Overall – yes, I’d forgotten enough about Jansson’s life since I read Westin’s biography that I enjoyed learning it all again. But for my money, if you only read one biography of Tove Jansson, this should be your second choice.

Some books I’ve bought recently

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Remember early in 2019 when I said I wouldn’t be buying any books this year? Except special occasions? Well, that is increasingly looking stupid. Cos I’ve bought a lot of books this year. I’ve also read a lot, but still…

Anyway, the silver lining to my total lack of self-control is that I get to do a haul blog post! It’s not all from one place, but here are books I’ve bought over the past month or so. Many of them on two trips to a great secondhand bookshop in Wantage.

Here’s some more details, from top to bottom…

This Other Eden by E.V. Knox
I love a collection of essays – to the extent that my essay shelves are bursting. Might need a shelving rethink.

Don’t, Mr Disraeli by Caryl Brahms and S.J. Simon
I’ve not read anything by these two, but I keep seeing A Bullet in the Ballet around. I guess they were good at titles! This mystery novel will tick Project Names anyway, and that’s enough to convince me that it’s a good purchase.

Alexander’s Bridge by Willa Cather
Another that will work for Project Names, and a novel by Cather that I hadn’t even heard of. I think she might now be on my list of “stop buying books by them and actually read one” now.

The Man in the Brown Suit by Agatha Christie
Sad Cypress by Agatha Christie
I haven’t bought a book by Christie for ages – mostly because I bought dozens when I was around 14, and have still not quite made my way through them. But I am coming towards the end of that pile, so picked up some cheaply in a charity shop.

The Reason I Jump by Naoki Higashida
I can’t remember how I came across this book, written by a severely autistic boy about his experience, but I do know that I thought it could be a good way for me to try and understand autism better.

Heat Wave by Penelope Lively
I do have a few unread Livelys, but it was a heat wave when I picked this up, and clearly I’m that suggestible.

Wine of Honour by Barbara Beauchamp
Peace, Perfect Peace by Josephine Kamm
Spam Tomorrow by Verily Anderson
Table Two by Marjorie Wilenski
I’m grouping these because they’re all among the latest reprints from the Furrowed Middlebrow series from Dean Street Press. I got three as review copies, and then bought these four on top – it is such a fascinating looking batch this time around. They’re all connected with WW2. Do check them out!

Sixpence House by Paul Collins
One of my favourite books of the year so far is The Book of William by Collins, all about the First Folio. So it was only a matter of time before I got hold of his book about living in Hay on Wye, and I finally crumbled.

Keep The Home Guard Turning by Compton Mackenzie
Rich Relatives by Compton Mackenzie
Mackenzie is DEFINITELY on the list of authors I should stop buying and start reading – but I’ve made an exception here because the first one was recommended by a couple of people, and because the second is a sequel to Poor Relations, which I loved. At least I think/hope it is.

The Question Mark by Muriel Jaeger
I don’t read a lot of science fiction, but Karen made this one sound so interesting that I went right out and bought the British Library reprint.

There’s a Porpoise Close Behind Us by Noel Langley
I read a fun little book by Langley a while ago, and I couldn’t resist (a) this title, and (b) the fact that it features theatre actors. That’s one of those elements of a novel that I cannot resist.

The Sun in Scorpio by Margery Sharp
The Innocents by Margery Sharp
I am increasingly loving Sharp, and so was delighted to find a couple of her novels in the wild. In Wantage, to be more precise.

Song for a Sunday

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There’s not a lot of Sunday left here, but let’s sneak in a Sunday Song. You might think that I only listen to female singer-songwriters – but sometimes I listen to male singer-songwriters! And James Morrison is up there among my favourites. This song – ‘Power’ – is from his new album.

Madame Verona Comes Down the Hill by Dimitri Verhulst

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Earlier in the year, I experimented with different book recommendation websites – you can read my exploits here. My favourite was Which Book, and I had great fun playing with the different sliders to determine what sort of book would match my mood. The results aren’t the usual fare, and they include a lot of translated fiction. I definitely recommend having a go.

I don’t remember which sliders I used to get the result of Madame Verona Comes Down the Hill (2006) by Dimitri Verhulst, though I’m pretty sure ‘short’ was among them. This novella is only 145 pages and there’s with a big font. Definitely up my street! I think it might also be the first Dutch novel I’ve ever read – with thanks to the translator, David Comer. [A commenter has told me that it’s actually translated from Flemish – be more precise, publisher!]

Madame Verona lives in an isolated house on top of a hill, on the outskirts of a small village. ‘As far as anyone knew, it had always been inhabited by outsiders, people from elsewhere, who came here with a romantic view of isolation and paid for it later with large chunks of their mind.’ But there is no sense that Madame V has particularly suffered from her isolation, even though her husband has been dead for more than twenty years. She has the gift of dogs loving her, as the first chapter dwells upon. They have been a constant, and a dog is accompanying her as she comes down the hill.

In terms of plot in the ‘present day’ section of the novella, the title pretty much sums it up. Snow is thick on the ground, and Madame Verona has slowly made her way down the steep hill. And she knows that she won’t make it back to the top. She is too old and too tired. She has, in essence, come down the hill to die.

We flit to and from this present day, but the novella is really a mixture of memories and reflections – sometimes clearly Madame Verona’s thoughts, and sometimes a broader and more philosophical narrator’s voice. These aspects go together well. We see the specifics of the village and of Madame Verona’s marriage – and we hear more general considerations of time and community and particularly age. Here’s a rather lovely passage I noted down:

Silence is often more intense after its return. When a tree accepts its defeat, creaks and capsizes, all life flies up and off. There’s crowing and cawing, branches crack, it rains feathers and down, rabbits flee to their underground shelters. All things considered, the titan’s contact with the actual ground is quiet; people generally expect it to be louder. It’s mainly the rest of the forest that kicks up a fuss and makes a racket. And once the creatures have assessed the damage, silence comes back. Eyes and leaves turn to the light that has never shone so brightly here. A place has come free, the struggle can begin, because the space will be occupied, by something or someone. It’s like that for trees, it’s like that for people.

I might have appreciated a little more about Madame Verona in the present day, because it is a bit sparse there, but this is a very enjoyable little book. It has aspects of melancholy, but Verhulst’s thoughtful exploration of little facets of life mean it doesn’t feel bleak – helped by the beautiful descriptions of the landscape. There is a lovely tone to it that comes through the translation. That translation can be a little clunky (‘She wasn’t brave enough to go downstairs herself. And what if she did, and found herself eye to eye with a person of bad will, how would that lead to a better outcome?’) but that is the exception rather than the rule.

Thanks, Which Book, my first read based on your recommendations certainly went well!

Eve in Egypt by Stella Tennyson Jesse

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A year ago, Michael Walmer sent me a review copy of Eve in Egypt (1929) by Stella Tennyson Jesse. And look, here I am, I finally read it! It turns out it needed another August before I could turn to so vibrant a cover.

This was Tennyson Jesse’s only book – and, as you may well have surmised, she was the sister of the more-famous F Tennyson Jesse. Her sister wrote novels like A Pin To See The Peepshow and The Lacquer Lady that weren’t connected to her own life. Stella, on the other hand, drew influence straight from her own experiences. I suspect she was not much like Eve, but she certainly went to Egypt. And, boy, you’ll know it by the end!

Here’s how we meet Eve:

The funny thing was that Eve woke up that morning rather depressed than otherwise. “ If,” as she said to herself afterwards, “ I had had that wonderful feeling that something beautiful was going to happen, I could
have understood it; but to think that everything lovely in life began that morning, and that I never guessed it !
I only woke up with that horrid feeling of there being something unpleasant in the background. That does
really seem odd.”

And, after all, the something unpleasant had not been so very bad. To be exact, it was two proposals ; and
though Eve, like all nice-minded young women, deprecated the idea of a proposal that she couldn’t accept,
nevertheless there remained in her mind, as in the mind of every woman similarly situated, a pleasant residue — a sort of nice sugary sediment, as it were. After all, every proposal is a tribute to one’s charms, there’s no
getting away from that.

She is quintessentially 1920s – or at least a certain sort of 1920s. She is quite flighty and superficial, though with a heart under it all. The reason she goes to Egypt is largely to get away from having to respond to those two unwelcome proposals. And so off she goes with her sister Serena (charmingly ignorant), Serena’s husband Hugh, and the knowledgeable Jeremy.

It’s entirely obvious to the reader from the outset that she will fall in love with Jeremy, and this plot chugs along nicely in the background as we take a tour of Egypt. And this is where STJ’s experience certainly comes into play.

I’m always a little reluctant to read The Brits Abroad novels. I would rather read a novel set in Egypt written by an Egyptian (any recommendations?). But I was drawn in by the insouciance of this one, and it does deliver. Tennyson Jesse does an admirable job of making the info-dumps feel like they’re part of the conversation, and even gives humour to them and uses them to develop character. But it’s hard to deny that there are sections that scream “here’s my research!” Yes, Jeremy is educating the party – but perhaps we didn’t need quite as much of an overt history lesson.

Having said that, I was very interested by some temples that were left to flood when a new dam was built. As Jeremy explains, the locals need water and sometimes artefacts have to suffer the consequences. I went to Wikipedia. Turns out the UNESCO came along and thought that maybe the temple shouldn’t suffer the consequences, and dismantled and moved it. If I could remember the name of the temple, I’d put a link…

The experience is enhanced by some photos spread throughout the book, which I’m assuming were taken by Tennyson Jesse. As the back of this new edition says, it’s both ‘Literature – fiction’ and ‘travelogue’. I don’t tend to get on with the latter, but there was enough of the former to beguile me – and this was a fun, delightfully predictable story. And – again – what a stunning and happy cover!

Uncle Samson by Beverley Nichols

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I was looking through my Beverley Nichols books, trying to decide which one to read next – and only one of them was eligible for Project Names. And so that’s the one I chose! Step forward Uncle Samson (1950), which I hadn’t even heard of until I found it in an extremely disorganised bookshop in Cheltenham earlier in the year.

Apparently it is a sequel of sorts to the excellently-titled The Star-spangled Manner and, like that former book (which I have not read), it is Nichols’ impression of America. And those impressions are certainly varied and interesting!

America is, of course, an enormous country. Nichols can’t hope to encapsulate everything there is to say about it, or even a hundredth – but the selection of chapters he writes are certainly fascinating. It’s worth starting by saying that this is not primarily a funny book. Nichols is a delightful humorist, but in Uncle Samson he is much more in journalistic mode. Which isn’t to say that there isn’t the odd moment of levity in his phrasing. I particularly enjoyed this, from when he goes to visit a funeral home of the sort that Evelyn Waugh pastiches in The Loved One:

It would obviously be impossible to encompass all these attractions without exhaustion, so I contented myself with a brief visit to Lullaby Land, and then went on to the “Mysteries of Life” garden, containing a large statue by Ernest Gazzeri, which suggested that though the sculptor might have known a lot about the mysteries of life he knew little about the mysteries of anatomy.

A glance at the American death industry comes after sections on religious cults, including a notable one led by Father Divine (I had to Wikipedia it, but it’s definitely interesting!) and on the horrors of socialism.

The most animated Nichols gets is the section on race. While many of Nichols’ views were not particularly progressive for 1940s/1950s England (particularly as regards class), he was certainly ahead of the curve on racism compared to the lawmakers of 1940s/1950s America.

Every year 30,000 light-skinned [African-Americans] “crossed the colour-line” and began a new life as whites. If we were told that every year 30,000 Americans broke the barbed wire of concentration camps and regained their freedom we might sit up and take notice, for America is a great democracy and does not incarcerate her citizens unless they have committed a crime. Yet America runs the greatest concentration camp the world has ever seen, and the only offence of its occupants is the crime of having been born.

I think he writes more about race than anything else, and he is baffled and angry about it – recounting his own embarrassment that he hadn’t considered the obstacles that would be in the way when he tries to meet up with a black friend. America still has a terrible problem with racism, and a President who is openly racist without seeming to suffer from his voting base – but Uncle Samson does remind us that at least some progress has been made. And I’d have written a rather more hopeful sentence there under the previous President, as opposed to the one who thinks black American women should “go home”.

Let’s move onto cheerier things. He meets Walt Disney! That is rather an enchanting chapter. I don’t know how accurate it is as an overall portrait of Disney, but Nichols certainly seemed won over by him – particularly his childlike enthusiasm for Fantasia – and tells of employees who are similarly devoted. I hadn’t expected an interview with Disney when I started reading Nichols’ work, but why not?

Another surprise, and a fascinating section, is Nichols visiting Alcoholics Anonymous – as an observer rather than a participant. He writes glowingly about what a wonderful initiative it is, and wishes that something similar existed in the UK.

What a curious and beguiling set of topics Nichols addresses! It’s interesting to compare this with modern-day America, and the topics that Nichols would write about now. Race and the movies would both still be there. Funeral homes probably wouldn’t (while guns and the lack of a national health system certainly would). Some things have changed a lot and some things don’t seem to have changed at all.

I was a little disappointed when I started and it wasn’t a comic work, but I was quickly won over. It doesn’t rank up there with Merry Hall, but it’s very good in a different mood. Nichols is a great journalist/essayist – nothing here pretends to be objective, and it’s all the better for it. For a very singular trip to mid-century America, track down a copy now.