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Vulgarity in Literature by Aldous Huxley – #1930Club

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I’m sneaking into the final day of the 1930 Club with another 1930 read – albeit a very short one, at 59 pages. It’s one of the Dolphin Books series that I’ve written about before, and which I love. Beautiful little hardbacks covering a wide range of fiction and literary non-fiction. I haven’t been able to find out if they were specially commissioned or what, and I’m sure this essay of Huxley’s will have appeared in other forms, but it’s nice to read it in this original form.

I thought it might be about obscenity in literature, since that was such a raging battle of the period – not long after books like Lady Chatterley’s Lover and The Well of Loneliness had both been banned in the UK. But he quickly dispels this idea, and indeed stands up for writers being able to write about anything:

I myself have frequently been accused, by reviewers in public and by unprofessional readers in private correspondence, both of vulgarity and of wickedness—on the grounds, so far as I have ever been able to discover, that I reported my investigations into certain phenomena in plain English and in a novel. The fact that many people should be shocked by what he writes practically imposes it as a duty upon the writer to go on shocking them. For those who are shocked by truth are not only stupid, but morally reprehensible as well; the stupid should be educated, the wicked punished and reformed.

So, what does he mean by vulgarity? He dances around the topic but is never particularly clear on the point. It can be intellectual, emotional, or spiritual. It seems connected to insincerity or going too far, or misusing form, or… well, Huxley writes well and engagingly, and it is only when you get to the end that you realise it’s all been inconclusive. Fascinating, but inconclusive.

In terms of the ‘in literature’ bit of the title, he only talks in detail about Poe and Balzac, though with references to Dickens, Dostoevsky, and a handful of others. He doesn’t really consider contemporary literature at all, and thus can’t be said to comment on 1930 itself. But it was an enjoyable intellectual exercise, if not the sociological one that I was expecting when I picked it up.

The Secret of High Eldersham by Miles Burton – #1930Club

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The 1930 Club seemed like a great opportunity to take a look at my British Library Crime Classics shelves, which are overflowing with books I’ve not yet read. When they started republishing these intriguing detective novels in beautiful editions, I wanted to get them all. I still want to, if I’m honest, but they stepped up how many they were publishing and I realised it wasn’t very realistic. Still. Plenty there.

And one of them was The Secret of High Eldersham by Miles Burton, reprinted in 2016 and thus maybe one of the earlier reprints. Certainly Martin Edwards’ introduction makes it sound like one of the books he was keenest on getting out to a new public.

High Eldersham is a small and out-of-the-way village. The beautiful cover doesn’t strictly relate to any of the houses in the book, but there are a couple of larger ones – lived in respectively by a doctor and a landowner. Otherwise it’s mostly farm labourers and others that Burton doesn’t seem very interested in telling us about. And there’s a pub about a mile from the village proper, and not on the way to anywhere else. It hasn’t been very profitable for quite a while, because of its distance from anywhere, and the novel starts with the landlord Dunsford asking the brewery owner if he can be moved to a different pub nearby. Off Dunsford goes, with a warning that it might be difficult for the new landlord – not only because of the lack of profit, but because the villagers in High Eldersham are not very accepting of outsiders. Indeed, it almost seems as if ‘foreigners’ – those not born in the village – are cursed when they arrive…

Still, a retired policeman called Whitehead becomes the landlord, and we fast forward a few years. Turns out newbies aren’t very lucky, because he gets stabbed to death. The local policeman feels very ill-equipped to deal with any of this, since he usually just sorts out drunk and disorderlies, and others are brought in. I got a bit confused with who all the police who came are, but the important one is Desmond Merrion – an amateur detective, but with close ties to one of the detectives. And, in turns out, a coincidental relationship with a villager – and a prospective relationship with another…

I spent a while trying to decide whether to include spoilers in this post, and have chosen not to. The thing I was going to write about happens relatively early in the book, and you spend the rest of the novel trying to determine whether or not it actually happened… it plays on themes that were quite big at the time, but also atavistic.

That’s all I’ll say on that, but it is the dominant thread of the novel – and one that makes it an interesting and unusual book to read, but also which separates it from the more down-to-earth books of the Golden Age. Merrion went on to appear in dozens and dozens of other books, and I’d be interested to see how he fares as a detective in more traditional mysteries.

As it is, this one relies heavily on coincidence, and the plotting and detection can be a bit clumsy – but I did read a review that said it was more like a thriller than a detective novel, and I think that’s a good point. What Burton lacks in terms of intricate plotting he makes up for in suspense and excitement – and some engaging distortion of a village idyll. It rattles along and is probably rather sillier than the author intended, but certainly good fun for this year’s club.

Cat’s Company by Michael Joseph – #1930Club

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Firstly, I don’t know who was more self-indulgent – Michael Joseph for writing Cat’s Company, or me for reading it.

This non-fiction book is essentially an ode to how wonderful cats are – both in general and, more specifically, some of Joseph’s favourites. If you’re thinking that this couldn’t fill a whole book then you clearly aren’t the felinophile that I and Joseph are.

(Before I go further, I must also confess that there is some discrepancy with the date, and qualifications for the 1930 Club. My suspicions were first roused when Joseph mentioned the Munich Crisis… it turns out that Cat’s Company was indeed published in 1930, but was edited and updated in 1946. It isn’t at all clear which bits were added – except when they refer to later events, of course.)

How did Michael Joseph get something so self-indulgent published, you might wonder? Well, the answer comes when you see the name of the publishing house… Michael Joseph. I’m very glad he did, because Cat’s Company is a total delight.

In the first chapter, he basically just talks about how great his cats are. Particularly one called Minna, but he has plenty to say in praise of her offspring and for any number of cats past and present – at the time he was writing, he had fourteen in residence.

Other chapters share many anecdotes told to him by friends and strangers about their cats, examine the cat’s intelligence – he puts in a very fine argument about how it is more intelligent to be independent than to be trainable – and famous cat lovers in history. Most controversially, he devotes a chapter to cat vs dog. Joseph is no dog hater, and his household even had one when the book was published, but he recognises the cat’s natural superiority. And adds that not only do cats also know they are superior, dogs seem aware of it too. This cat lover can’t dispute it. This section is from an earlier chapter, because I don’t want to alienate dog fans:

We all like to think our pets exceptionally devoted and intelligent. Every animal lover can tell you, and will tell you if you give him the least encouragement, stories which demonstrate beyond all doubt the sagacity of his animal friends. The innumerable stories told about the loyalty and understanding of the dog have of course overshadowed the claims of puss, who does not parade his qualities for public admiration, and whose wits are generally employed for his private benefit. Only those who have taken the trouble to cultivate and study the cat can realise what an extraordinarily intelligent and responsive creature he is.

In terms of looking at how much this is a portrait of 1930 – well, the cat has not changed. It is amusing when he tries to describe the ‘cat flap’ (a term that didn’t exist until the 50s, according to the OED) and neutering/spaying cats was clearly a lot less common, but otherwise cat behaviour is largely the same, unspoiled by human interaction. And I will always rush towards any writer who is good at writing accurately about cats, in fiction or non-fiction.

Is Joseph biased? Yes, absolutely. He admits basically no faults in cats. Is he right? Absolutely. Am I biased? What do you think… But, yes, any cat lover should get their paws on this one.

 

What was Virginia Woolf up to in 1930?

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Whenever our club years have fallen during Virginia Woolf’s lifetime, I’ve looked into her diaries to share something of her life from the period. And the 1930 Club is no different! Her first entry isn’t very inspiring, but I like this from 11 March. It’s part of the entry, and shows her observational skills and her power with words. And, more sadly, what she thought about her own potential old age – that would never come. Spelling and grammar her own! 

Tuesday 11 March

all because I have to buy myself a dress this afternoon, & cant think what I want, I cannot read. I have written, fairly well – but it is a difficult book – at Waves; but cant keep on after 12; & now shall write here, for 20 minutes.

My impressions of Margaret & Lilian at Monks House were of great lumps of grey coat; straggling wisps of hair; hats floppy & home made; thick woollen stockings; black shoes; many wraps, shabby handbags, & shapelessness, & shabbiness & dreariness & drabness unspeakable. A tragedy in its way. Margaret at any rate deserved better of life than this dishevelled & undistinguished end. They are in lodgings – as usual. Have, as usual, a wonderful Xtian Scientist landlady; are somehow rejected by active life; sit knitting perhaps & smoking cigarettes, in the parlour where they have their meals, where there is always left a diet of oranges & bananas. I doubt if they have enough to eat. They seemed to be flabby & bloodless, spread into rather toneless chunks of flesh; having lost any commerce with looking glasses. So we showed them the garden, gave them tea (& I dont think an iced cake had come Lilian’s way this 6 weeks) & then – oh the dismal sense of people stranded, wanting to be energised; drifting – all woollen & hairy. […] Must old age be so shapeless? The only escape is to work the mind. I shall write a history of English literature, I think, in those days. And I shall walk. And I shall buy clothes, & keep my hair tidy, & make myself dine out.

Turn Back The Leaves by E.M. Delafield – #1930Club

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I hope and suspect that most of us have read one of the books that E.M. Delafield published in 1930 – The Diary of a Provincial Lady. Rather less popular is the title that I picked off my well-stocked Delafield shelves: Turn Back The Leaves. I have quite a few unread Delafields among the many that I have read, and it was good to get one down.

Turn Back The Leaves is a very different novel from The Diary of a Provincial Lady. It is not at all funny, for starters. Often Delafield combines serious topics with some levity, but this is nearly absent in this tangled story of illegitimacy and secrets. And, above all, the tensions of a family maintaining Catholic mores.

The novel starts in 1890 and ends in 1929, though most of it takes place just before and after World War One. But that section needs a bit of back story, and that’s what Delafield starts us with. In brief, a woman with the extraordinary name Edmunda marries a man named Joseph, despite neither of them being enthused by the match. They are both ardent Catholics, and their families are keen for them to marry other upstanding Catholics. It is a loveless match, though neither of them have been and love and don’t particularly miss what they haven’t had. Except then, of course, Edmunda does fall in love with another man – and Stella is born illegitimately. Joseph forgives her; they have four other children; she dies. Stella is left alone in London with a paid governess and nurse, and the others grow up with Joseph and his second wife.

Fast forward a few years – and some rather unnecessarily detailed characterisation of characters we will never see again, along the way – and Stella moves back to live with her half-brother and half-sisters, though none of them know the connection. She is only there as a ‘family friend’. And has been taken in because Joseph and his new wife are keen to give her a ‘good Catholic upbringing’. Only… there are temptations in the way of her and one of her half-sisters. They both fall in love with Protestants. Marrying out of the Catholic church is not forbidden, but it is only allowed if the non-Catholic partner allows their children to be brought up as Catholics – ‘the promises’ – and the prospective husbands won’t allow this.

Delafield’s author’s foreword reads that ‘this book is in no way intended as propaganda either for or against the Roman Catholic faith. It purports only to hold up a mirror to the psychological and religious environment of a little-known section of English society as it has existed for many years, and still exists today’. This is pretty disingenuous. As with quite a lot of Delafield’s novels, particularly the early ones, this is clearly motivated by some distaste for her Catholic upbringing. It isn’t a bitter book, but you never get the sense that the author is ambivalent.

But the Catholic characters are not monsters by any means. Sir Joseph is rather domineering, but others are motivated by their love for their church and their eagerness to do right. And it’s a very engaging, well-written novel, with vivid characters who only slightly lose their vividness by the author’s attempt to have slightly too many focuses. Stella should really be front and centre, but disappears towards the end when Delafield wants us to empathise with the rest of the family too.

I don’t know much about Catholicism, and I don’t know if inter-marrying is still as big a deal, or if the official line is still that no other Christian denomination is properly following Christ. I do know that Protestants still follow the beliefs of the Protestants in this novel – that following Christ is the important bit, not the specific church. As Delafield writes in her foreword, the Catholic angle was a niche point even in 1930 – and many readers might be uncertain that their interest could be sustained in a novel which revolves around the Catholic/non-Catholic angle.

Which would be a pity, because I think Turn Back The Leaves is very good indeed. At her best, Delafield is great at giving a novel momentum as well as psychological complexity and empathetic characters. Her writing is not unduly fancy, nor does it have the hilarious phrasing of the Provincial Lady books, but she does use the quiet, unshowy prose to pull the rug from under our feet. We are suddenly hit by observations and emotional moments, in few and precise words, that we might not be expecting. I think this is the 25th novel I’ve read by Delafield, and it’s up there among the ones I’ve enjoyed most. It feels odd to read one in which she is almost never humorous at all – but perhaps she wanted to make her 1930 output as distinct as possible. And the Provincial Lady this ain’t!

Corduroy by Adrian Bell – #1930Club

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The first book I picked up for the 1930 Club was Adrian Bell’s memoir Corduroy, the first in a trilogy all of which – I think – have now been reprinted in beautiful Slightly Foxed editions. That’s quite hard to track down now, but there are plenty of other editions kicking around – and I’d certainly recommend getting your hands on a copy, because it’s lovely.

The premise is that Bell didn’t really know what to do with his life when was 19 – which was in 1920. Between them, he and his father decided that he might become a farmer – and Corduroy is his account of getting some experience to this end. Before putting all his eggs in one basket, he had to find out how the farming malarkey went.

So off he went to Bradfield St George in Suffolk – known as Benfield St George in Corduroy – accepted by the Colville family. From here, he plays a slightly odd role in the social strata of the farm. He is clearly on the level of the farm owner and family, in terms of accommodation and society, but he is among the working men for the tasks.

The majority of the book is Bell being introduced to a task, doing it badly, and getting better. What makes Corduroy such an enjoyable book is the way he writes about the experience. He is never patronising about the labourers, and nor does he idolise them in with the eye of a Romantic poet. He recognises their expertise, and they recognise his eagerness to learn – not mocking him when he is useless at milking a cow or ploughing a straight furrow or being able to tell one pig from another. At least they don’t in Bell’s memories of his year as a farmhand – it’s worth remembering that their perspectives are, of course, given in Bell’s narrative and not their own.

As with his depictions of the workers, Bell has a great eye for the natural world. Again, it is observational rather than a paean. I enjoyed this vivid description of pigs at feeding time. Don’t say you don’t get variety from Stuck in a Book:

I wandered out again, and watched Jack feeding the pigs, helped him by carrying slopping pails of barley-meal, which gave my boots a less genteel appearance. At the first rattle of a pail the pigs set up a pathetic squealing, and, when one pen was temporarily lulled with a pailful, the laments of the others rose to a hysteria of anxiety at the sight of their brothers being fed before them. By the time we had brought the refilled buckets to the second pen, the first had finished theirs and were wailing for more. Thus the chorus went on, in strophe and anti-strophe, till all were filled and slept.

Fun, no?

I’ve realised what I want in people who write about villages. Either gossipy fun, like Beverley Nichols, or the sort of writing Bell does. People who respect the countryside and village life without romanticising it. And many things haven’t changed – like the sense of community. And many things have, of course. I’ve lived in three different villages all with working farms, but there is no longer any sense that everyone in the community is involved in the life of the farm. Even more than all the mechanisation of farming, I think that’s the thing that’s changed the most. Back in 1920, when Bell started farming and my great-grandad was a farm labourer, it was the whole world for almost everyone who lived nearby. The city was another world. As exemplified when Bell asks a farmhand what his brother does, and is told ‘nothing, just some writing’ – only to learn that he has an office job with the water board!

Corduroy looks at a period a decade before the book was published, so this isn’t an absolutely accurate reflection of 1930 – but I think it gives a good sense of the sort of semi-nostalgic writing that was coming out as the dizzy hope of the 20s started to turn to the nervous misgivings of the 30s… Was war already looming on the horizon? Perhaps not quite, but Bell writes with already a sense of a world that was disappearing.

#1930Club: kicking off!

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For the uninitiated – Karen and I are asking everyone to read books published in 1930, and together we’ll get an overview of the year. It’s the seventh, maybe, year that we’ve done a club for, and they’re always great fun. As for the rules – you can make them up, really, but essentially any sort of book, in any language, is welcome.

Here are the new reviews from this week:

Mystery Mile by Margery Allingham

Typings

Corduroy by Adrian Bell

Stuck in a Book

The Secret of High Eldersham by Miles Burton

Stuck in a Book

It Walks by Night by John Dickson Carr

She Reads Novels
Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings

Enter the Saint by Leslie Charteris

Engineer Guy

The Murder at the Vicarage by Agatha Christie

The Book Trunk
What Me Read

The Mysterious Mr. Quin by Agatha Christie

HeavenAli
Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings

The Shutter of Snow by Emily Holmes Coleman

HeavenAli

The Blank Garden

Venus on Wheels by Maurice Dekobra

Neglected Books

Turn Back the Leaves by E.M. Delafield

Stuck in a Book

The Diary of a Provincial Lady by E.M. Delafield

JacquiWine’s Journal
The Book Trunk
The Captive Reader
Staircase Wit
Madame Bibi Lophile Recommends

42nd Parallel by John Dos Passos

Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings

Ash Wednesday by T.S. Eliot

Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings

As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner

Tredynas Days
Booked For Life
Shoshi’s Book Blog

Civilisation and Its Discontents by Sigmund Freud

Briefer Than Literal Statement

An Evening with Claire by Gaito Gazdanov

1streading’s Blog

Second Harvest by Jean Giono

Intermittencies of the Mind

The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett

ANZ Litlovers LitBlog
Mockingbirds, Looking Glasses, and Prejudices

Narcissus and Goldmund by Hermann Hesse

Bookconscious

Powder and Patch by Georgette Heyer

Desperate Reader

Vulgarity in Literature by Aldous Huxley

Stuck in a Book

Cat’s Company by Michael Joseph

Stuck in a Book

The Secret of the Old Clock by Carolyn Keene

Staircase Wit

The Virgin and the Gypsy by D.H. Lawrence

Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings

The Rebels by Sándor Márai

Winstonsdad’s Blog

Cakes and Ale by W. Somerset Maugham

ANZ Litlovers LitBlog
Harriet Devine’s Blog
What Me Read

Le Bal by Irene Nemirovsky

Annabookbel
Book Jotter

Last Night Of Love, First Night of War by Camil Petrescu

Finding Time to Write

Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome

Just One More Page

After Leaving Mr Mackenzie by Jean Rhys

Bookword

The Edwardians by Vita Sackville-West

The Blank Garden

Strong Poison by Dorothy L. Sayers

The Indextrious Reader
What Me Read

1066 and All That by Sellar and Yeatman

The Book Trunk

The Weatherhouse by Nan Shepherd

Rosemary Kaye
Desperate Reader

Fame by May Sinclair

The Neglected Books Page

Rogue Herries by Hugh Walpole

Beyond Eden Rock

Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh

Winstonsdad’s Blog

High Wages by Dorothy Whipple

Leaping Life

On Being Ill by Virginia Woolf

Adventures in reading, running and working from home
Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings

Not So Quiet by Helen Zenna Smith

Squeak2017
Madame Bibi Lophile Recommends
Tredynas Days

Notes Made While Falling by Jenn Ashworth

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Image result for notes made while fallingSometimes you read a book so unusual, so defying of genre, that it’s hard to know what to write about it. Something that is experimental with language and format without ever losing its tethering to the ground. All I can say is that Notes Made While Falling (2019) is special, and reading was an extraordinary experience.

Well, that’s not all I can say, because I’m going to keep writing this. Notes Made While Falling is non-fiction, and that’s about as comfortable as I feel putting it into a box – and even that might be too confining. It is memoir and essay and literary criticism and everything in between.

At its starting point, and the point to which it always returns, is a traumatic childbirth. Ashworth started haemorrhaging during a caesarean and was conscious but immobile for part of the operation. She heard her own blood falling onto the floor. This is an image that recurs throughout the book and with which she was clearly obsessed – it haunted her sleepless, alcohol-filled nights; it became all sorts of other images of falling. The first section of this book is a vivid, vicious, vital exploration of her own illness – a dizzying mix of clear-eyed retrospective and blurred lack of self-awareness, somehow coming together into a brilliantly written whole. She uses ‘/’ mid sentence to give two alternative sections of sentences – places where both versions are true at the same time, and a single sentence can’t hold the multiplicity of reality. I think the whole book, but especially this part, is about the fragility of narrative and the inevitability of narrative.

From here, Notes Made While Falling is a wide-ranging journey. Ashworth writes a lot about her upbringing in a strict Mormon church. (My own upbringing in a faith-filled household was nothing but a blessing, and I thought I might be irritated by another memoir that refuses to see any good in people of faith, but her church was certainly not my church, and her life had many more restrictions.) She writes about her confusing, violent father, and the time she spent in care. A lot of this comes in the form of a short story that she once wrote and which she is now elucidating and critiquing. Again, the outlines are blurred. Certainty is always something Ashworth resists, or cannot pin-point.

It’s all so original. A chapter ostensibly on why she doesn’t like King Lear is really about fathers and memories. Elsewhere she takes us from Agatha Christie to Freud to the Bulger trial to Astrid Lingren and every step makes sense, so we only know how strange the journey has been when we get to the end.

Writing about illness naturally makes the Woolf fan think about On Being Ill, and Woolf is certainly in the mix. This section is about her, and shows the sort of fluid, thought-provoking style that Ashworth brings to the book.

It is significant that Woolf foregrounds the difficulties experienced by the woman writer. The wounded woman writer, which of course she was. It is significant because wounded is a tricky thing for any woman to admit to being. Not least because any time a woman utters a sentence about her own experience, she becomes a kind of terrorist and there’s an army out there waiting to strike her down. Some days it feels like writing truthfully about her own life is the most subversive thing a woman can do. But more specifically there is also the sense that in uttering the truth of painful experience she is letting the side down and embracing the straightjacket [sic] and the hysteric’s sickbed a little too easily. That she is first with her body then again with her writing (that is, with her hands) providing hysterical ladies (the story railroads us all towards it conclusion: all they need is a good fucking, even when they’ve already been fucked). More nicely: women writing about illness risk equating womanhood itself with illness.

It’s such a rich passage, and practically every page is as rich. Incidentally, I’ve put ‘[sic]’ in there but I’m very ready to believe that the misspelling ‘straightjacket’ was intentional.

I’ve read a couple of Ashworth’s novels, and was particularly impressed by her most recent, Fell. This feels in some ways like a logical step from that, since Fell was also about illness and uncertainty and all sorts of other things. But this is a different creature, and – excellent novelist though she is – it feels like Ashworth has found her metier with Notes Made While Falling. It was a privilege to read it.

Less by Andrew Sean Greer

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Quite a while ago I was asking Twitter what recommendations I could get for funny, well-written, modern fiction. All the modern fiction I read – which is admittedly not much – seems to be quite serious. So I wanted the twenty-first-century equivalent of all those twentieth-century writers who knew how to be funny AND turn their hand to prose.

One of the suggestions that came up more than once was Less (2017) by Andrew Sean Greer, which has the added distinction of having won the Pulitzer Prize. My friend Tom even lent me his copy – and, even better, it turned out to be a surprise entry for Project Names, where I’m reading lots of books with people’s names in the title. Because our main character is one Arthur Less. I never worked out if this was intended to sound like half-or-less, or if it would require a very particular English accent to get that from it.

As it satirised at one point in the novel, Less is a middle-class, middle-aged white man with sorrows. Though undoubtedly living a privileged existence, he is definitely on the unhappy side of things. His writing career is rather lacklustre (“too old to be fresh and too young to be rediscovered, one who never sits next to anyone on a plane who has heard of his books”), he is single, and as the novel opens he is (a) not recognised by the person organising a sci-fi event he is supposed to chair, and (b) receives a wedding invitation from an ex-boyfriend. In order to avoid the wedding and the unacknowledged feelings it would bring, Less decides to accept all the author engagements that he usually ignores. Wherever they are in the world.

As luck would have it, they all neatly line up and take him across the globe. But he is usually not wanted for his own work, but because – in his youth – he was the lover of a revered, older poet. That seems to have secured whatever reputation he does have.

Usually I find this sort of structure to a novel quite annoying – where it’s just a series of events, without a central momentum or the same set of characters to engage with. I don’t know how Greer makes it so compelling, but he certainly does. I thought Less was very good indeed – and, yes, very funny. Part of that humour came from more orchestrated humour, like Less’s belief that he speaks good German (cleverly rendered in an English translation); a lot is a gentle ongoing satire of the life of a very self-conscious, not very happy writer. Even where he is revered, he realises it is because his translator is an excellent writer. He is simply a mediocre man not quite able to accept that mediocrity – for who, after all, accepts their mediocrity.

And despite this, Less is not the butt of all the jokes by any means. The reader becomes very fond of him. I wouldn’t say I was desperate for a happy ending, but I certainly sympathised with him – Greer has the impressive gift of writing warmly about a character without writing dishonestly about him. I don’t know how much is a self-portrait, other than Greer is, like Less, also a gay writer nearing 50 who hadn’t previously had enormous success with his novels.

The things that happen in the different countries, and the transitory other characters who pop up, don’t feel as important as this central portrait. Indeed, I only finished the novel recently and I can’t remember much of the plot. But I do remember the commitment to a character and a lightly satirical style that must have been very difficult to pull off – and I can see why the Pulitzer Prize would want to reward this sort of assured writing.

 

 

Sixpence House by Paul Collins

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Image result for sixpence house paul collinsOne of my favourite places in the world is Hay-on-Wye. Bibliophiles in the UK have probably been there, for it is a town of secondhand bookshops. Some are enormous, some are very niche, and the whole place is nestled in the beautiful Welsh/English border countryside. There’s that famous festival each year, but that doesn’t really hold a candle to the BOOKSHOPS.

I first went around 2003, I think, which is also when Paul Collins published his memoir Sixpence House. I’ve been ten or so times in the intervening years and I still love it, but each time there are fewer bookshops and more non-bookshops. Reading Sixpence House reminds me of its heyday, when there were 40+ bookshops and you couldn’t visit them all in a day.

I’ve seen plenty come and go over the years, with many seeming to last less than a year. I suppose the internet is the culprit, though it gives with one hand and takes with the other, as far as book-lovers are concerned. But it is still a glorious place – and that’s what brought Collins and his wife there in the early 2000s.

They’d been before, but now wanted to move there for good – or at least for a period. Neither of them are particularly drawn towards concrete, long-term plans. In a manner that wouldn’t feel possible were it not true, Collins manages to get a job at Richard Booth’s bookshop ‘sorting American books’, simply by loitering around and being American.

It’s a joy to read Collins’s love of books. He often goes on delightfully bookish tangents related to novels and memoirs he picks up in this job, or stray thoughts leading to other books. I didn’t expect to find two mentions of relatively obscure novels I wrote about in my DPhil – Elinor Wylie’s The Venetian Glass Nephew and David Garnett’s A Man in the Zoo – but they are among the miscellany of titles Collins is reminded of. You get the sense that living in Hay allows you to live in this tapestry of literature past and present – even if most of the booksellers are interlopers, and most of the locals have more down-to-earth jobs. As Collins puts it, the locals are book movers and the foreigners are booksellers.

They start house hunting. The title of the book rather gives away which house they’ll ultimately decide is their ideal home, flooded basement and all, so the reader isn’t super surprised when various other viewings end up in disappointment. But surprise isn’t the point of Sixpence House; it’s about watching a book lover discover his ideal homeland – and then discover that not all that glisters is gold. Not that there’s a dark underbelly to Hay – simply that life doesn’t always work out quite the way one hopes, particularly if you are trying to bring together many disparate threads.

One of those threads is leaving America. Collins has a British passport, but he is American through and through – and this book is clearly aimed at Americans. Occasionally that made it a bit off-putting to read for this Englishman. I don’t need to be introduced to things from my culture like Countdown with the breathless incredulity Collins relays them. I don’t need to be told that our roads are too narrow, our bedrooms too small, and our teeth too bad. (Though I do always welcome an American marvelling at the wonders of the NHS!) On the flip side, he doesn’t explain American cultural references – what on earth is C-SPAN, for example? (I have Googled it now). On yet another flip side, he mentions Lord Archer in a way that assumes the reader knows everything about him – did that news really get across the Atlantic?

As a memoir, it naturally doesn’t have the central narrative-non-fiction of Collins’ excellent book about William Shakespeare that I read earlier in the year, and I suppose Sixpence House is almost entirely a memoir that also looks a little at the life and recent history of a place. It’s nice to learn more about Richard Booth, particularly after his recent death, and there is an engaging ongoing thread of Collins editing his first book about notable losers, but there is a slight caginess – cageyness? – to the storytelling that makes you wonder if Collins felt entirely comfortable about writing a memoir. And it’s also unclear exactly why they decide to leave, in the end, while in the midst of looking to buy houses. He can draw the parameters wherever he wants, naturally, but I was left with quite a few questions.

Despite that, this is a really enjoyable book. As I say, I think it’s primarily targeted at Americans – but it is also special to those of us who know and love Hay. So if you’re an American who loves Hay but has also not picked up too many details about life in the UK, then you might just be the ideal reader for Sixpence House!