1949

A delightful reread for #ABookADayInMay – Day 4

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I read Ashcombe (1949) by Cecil Beaton back in 2012, sitting in the Bodleian Library. I quickly knew I needed my own copy – and this beautiful edition arrived. Here we are, 12 years later, and I have re-read and re-loved Beaton’s tale of finding, renovating and loving a beautiful countryside home in Wiltshire. Will I still feel the same as when I first wrote about it?

I think I must have been drawn the book initially because of its inclusion of Edith Olivier – I certainly read it during my DPhil, which included a chapter on her novel The Love-Child. It was while staying with Olivier in 1930 that Beaton made the decision to go and visit Ashcombe – a sizeable house left in some disrepair, hidden at near-inaccessible lengths in the depths of the Wiltshire countryside. (It is clearly a mansion, however homely Beaton tries to make it sound.)

I do not know if the others spoke during the trek up the hill. I was perhaps vaguely conscious of their eulogoies, but I was almost numbed by my first encounter with the house. It was as if I had been touched on the head by some magic wand. Some people may grow to love their homes: my reaction was instantaneous. It was love at first sight, and from the moment that I stood under the archway, I knew that this place was destined to be mine. No matter what the difficulites, I would overcome them all; considerations of money, suitability, or availability, were all superficial. This house must belong to me.

As it happened, the house never did belong to Beaton. The subtitle to Ashcombe is ‘the story of a fifteen-year lease’ – and Beaton did indeed lease the house and its significant grounds from its owner, who hadn’t thought it quite habitable. And indeed it wasn’t. The nominal rent of £50 per year was so low because Beaton would spend so much money on restoring the house – and, in the days before listing restrictions (or maybe even planning permission?), he went much further than restoring. Ashcombe has lots of (black and white) photographs included, and some of these are before and after sets – where he’s clearly extended windows, added walls and doors, and knocked things about at whim, as well as extensive landscaping. The landlord certainly got good value, but also seems incredibly tolerant for Beaton to pursue any whim at all. How many of our landlords would let a tenant have every visitor sketch their hand on the bathroom wall?

The photographs also show many of the people who came to stay. While Beaton leased Ashcombe for 15 years, he never lived there full-time. It was a retreat from a week in London, and he was often away abroad for months at a time. But while he was there, he brought packs of the great and the good from London (and even, before he was sure of the cook’s ability, all the catering from London too). We get to sneak into their lives, which seem to be a whirlwind of costume parties, charades, artistry and camaraderie. Quite what the locals thought we never discover – these are privileged, wealthy, often titled men and women who have seemingly endless energy and opportunity for antics. Many are names you’ll probably recoginse – Augustus John, Salvador Dali, Rex Whistler, Siegfried Sassoon. Even Tom Mitford gets a look-in, which he seldom does in books about his sisters. Naturally, I relished the times he spoke of Edith Olivier – older than most of her famous friends, and relatively new to this world, having been oppressively sheltered until her father died when Olivier was already firmly middle-aged, if not old.

Of the neighbours on whom I grew to rely more and more, Edith Olivier was perhaps the most cherished. It was she who, by bringing me into contact with so many new friends, was so largely responsible for my having blossomed into a happy adult life: and it was she who continued, without effort on her part, to discover your people of promise and bring them to her house. So many of the young writers, painters and poets came to her with problems about their work and their life, and they knew that after she had listened intently to their outpourings, her advice would be unprejudiced, wise and Christian. Edith’s youthfulness and spirit were of all time: she had unlimited energy, vitality and zest for life. Interested in every strata of humanity, she had never been known to be bored. After a strenuous day she would retire to bed, not to sleep, but to read at least three books, one of which she was to review, in addition to writing a most detailed journal of all that had happened to her during the previous twenty-four hours.

Having sat in Wiltshire Record Office with volumes of the journal, I can attest that it is ‘most detailed’. She wrote at enormous length and in horrendous handwriting.

So much of Ashcombe is joyful: the joy of home and the joy of friends. Beaton writes brilliantly about the pull of a beautiful place, and about the frenetic happiness that a group of carefree people can bring out of each other. They are unafraid of simple silliness. But the book does have its mournful edge. Nine years after the lease began, the Second World War started.

I remember I was about to step into a hot bath when I was informed that Poland had been invaded. The news was like a death knell. We had to wait one endless day more before we heard, from a calm but tired voice on the radio, that Hitler had refused the last request for a peaceful solution to his demands.

At Ashcombe, as we sat listening to the Prime Minister in the small parlour, my mother wept a little. The speech was soon over. We were now at war.

Beaton writes with sensitivity about the impact on war – mostly on fatalities among his friends, particularly Rex Whistler, since Beaton’s own wartime experience was clearly easier than others. Ashcombe is something of a retreat from the worst of the bombing and devastation in London, but is not left unaffected.

Almost equally sombre is the end of the lease. Beaton hoped to continue living there (at least for some of the year) for the rest of his life – but, after the lease had been extended a few times, I finally came to an end. The landlord wanted it back and there was nothing Beaton could do. Houses are often important in fact and fiction, but I don’t think I’ve ever read a better account of the heartbreak of leaving a home you have truly loved, against your will. It only happened to me once (when all my housemates rather suddenly chose to leave Oxford), but it is devastating and takes a long time to get over.

Beaton may have had other homes and I daresay they were palatial and beautiful – but Ashcombe clearly caught and kept his heart. In this delightful, poignant, effervescent book, he has given the house an excellent tribute.

Because of the Lockwoods by Dorothy Whipple

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I thought I’d read The Priory by Dorothy Whipple quite recently, but apparently it was more than four years ago – so I wasn’t exactly rushing onto my next Whipple when I read Because of the Lockwoods (1949). I’ve had it for goodness knows how long. Certainly I read my first Whipple back in about 2004, so I’m spacing out her novels. And I’m glad I finally picked this one up, because it’s up there among my favourites of her output.

At the heart of the novel are two families: the Lockwoods and the Hunters. They are amiable neighbours living in neighbouring grand houses in the north of England – the Lockwoods’ is a little grander than the Hunters’, but they are in the same echelon of society. It is natural that their offspring should be friends with each other. That’s Martin, Molly, and Thea for the Hunters, and Clare, Muriel, and Bee for the Lockwoods (Muriel and Bee are twins, and Whipple doesn’t care much to distinguish between them.)

Towards the beginning of the novel, all this equilibrium changes when Richard Hunter dies. It is discovered that he has not left his grieving family with much in the way of money. They must sell their house and most of their possessions; they must move to a humble street and move in less heightened circles. It’s the sort of street that would represent the height of some people’s ambitions, and indeed one character does consider it a vast achievement to be there, but it is a fall from grace.

While the Hunters’ social circle changes instantly, the Lockwoods do maintain their friendship. Though it is a friendship warped out of all recognition. They are no longer equals, and so the Lockwoods find every possible method of patronising and belittling the Hunters. Mrs Hunter is a kind, naive woman who sees only attempts at kindness. Martin is too besotted with Clare to put up much of a fight. Thea is really the heroine of the novel, and she sees the Lockwoods for what they are: unkind to the point of cruelty, thriving on their sense of superiority.

What Thea doesn’t know, but the reader learns early on, is that Mr Lockwood has defrauded the widowed Mrs Hunter out of a fairly sizeable amount of money. Not a life-changing amount, but enough that it would have helped prevent the indignities of their fall. It might have helped improve the prospects of the Hunter children, each of whom feels obliged to leave school as soon as possible, to earn money.

And they feel obliged because Mr Lockwood insists. He is not content to commit fraud – he is abrupt, rude, and callous to the Hunters at all time. He continually bemoans that he has to spend time helping the Hunters with financial advice, but he never really goes out of his way to do anything. Whipple has drawn a believably despicably tyrant – though a tyrant only to outsiders. The portrait is sophisticated enough to show that Mr Lockwood is loving to his own children.

The interweaving of the families is the main plot of Because of the Lockwoods, but I have to mention Oliver – a lower-class man that the Hunters initially avoid friendship with, but who helps them more than anybody else. Not least in accepting who they now are, and the position in society they hold.

I really loved reading Because of the Lockwoods. I know Whipple is well-loved in the blogosphere, and often singled out as a stand-out in Persephone’s catalogue – at her best, I think she is brilliant, though some of her novels are rather workmanlike in my opinion (though always enjoyable). This is definitely up there among her best. I only noted down one passage to quote, but it shows some really fine and evocative writing:

The train gathered speed. The town passed before Thea, strung out by streets and squares, embosomed in trees, pierced by spires, spanned by bridges, dominated by the cathedral towers. Then receding, the town drew together, closer, tighter, until it grew so small she could see it no longer.

If you’re a Whipple newbie, I think this would be a brilliant place to start. If you love her but haven’t got to this one yet, don’t wait.

 

Others who got Stuck into this Book:

“It is a wide and dramatic canvas that provides a stark warning to those who value status and material things over all else.” – Rachel, Book Snob

“Although primarily domestic, Dorothy Whipple explores the different sides of human nature.” – HeavenAli

“Once again, Whipple’s characters are brilliantly drawn. I loved Thea and hated the Lockwoods” – Karen’s Books and Chocolate

Brat Farrar by Josephine Tey

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Brat Farrar: Amazon.co.uk: Tey, Josephine: 9780099536840: BooksMy old housemate, and dear friend, Kirsty has three abiding passions: dogs, lexicography, and talking about how great Josephine Tey is. It was she who gave me a copy of Brat Farrar (1949) last year, as part of a lovely package to cheer during lockdown, and I suspect it was me who got my book group to read it. It definitely came up during our discussion of Daphne du Maurier’s brilliant novel The Scapegoat, because the premise is very similar. (In most years, The Scapegoat would have been among my best reads – but 2020 had some truly brilliant reads.)

Brat Farrar is the lead character of the novel – yes, it is a name, and an almost wilfully terrible one. What a bad title! I wonder why she did it? Anyway, he meets a man who tells him he is a doppelganger for a neighbour called Simon Ashby. As it happens, Simon’s twin brother went missing when he was 13, seven years earlier. A suicide note was found, but his body has never been identified – one washed up that was assumed to be him, but it was beyond recognition. So Brat is persuaded to go back and pretend to be the missing Patrick – and, as the older twin by a few minutes, inherit the family wealth. Speaking as an older twin by a few minutes… I wish.

Brat is a nice man, and isn’t particularly swayed by the idea of an inheritance – what really gets him is the idea that he’ll get to work with a whole stableful of premium horses. Brat is an orphan (his name is a corruption of St Bartholomew’s Orphanage) and has made his way in the world through being on a ranch in America. Man, he loves horses almost as much as Josephine Tey thinks the reader loves horses.

It’s an intriguing set up, if one is willing to suspend disbelief, and I always am for some sort of coincidental premise. It’s the less vital parts of the puzzle that left me slightly more incredulous – for instance, Patrick’s family don’t seem that bothered about his return from the dead. They react in the way I might if I saw someone I hadn’t expect to see for another month or two. Patrick’s aunt and guardian, Bea, is a delightful character – wise, kind, very mildly dry – and I loved her, but she is representative of the whole family in her fairly lukewarm response. I suppose one can’t spend half the book with people fainting from surprise, but still. Anyway, they’re all pleased to see him and immediately taken in – except for the twin, Simon, who is rather stand-offish and the last to be convinced that Brat is Patrick.

It’s very interesting to read about, but there isn’t much tension. It suffers from comparison with du Maurier’s The Scapegoat, which is better in many ways but particularly the feeling that everything could crumble at any point. Because we know the truth of his identity from the outset, and never seriously suspect that Brat’s cover will be blown (he has been immaculately coached by the family friend), we aren’t left very gripped. It’s entertaining to read, but bizarrely unsuspenseful for a mystery novelist.

And then, lordy me, the horses. Perhaps the most interesting character is that christened ‘Timber the murder horse’ by my book group – he has killed a man by smacking him into a tree, and his one wish in life is to do it more people. I enjoyed reading about him, and Tey really gets into the limited psyche of a horse. Where I started skimming was at a race or showjumping or something, where there are pages and pages and pages of descriptions of horses and their style and pedigree and all sorts. Just leave horses alone, guys.

Brat Farrar was left me in the strange position of really enjoying reading it, but having piles and piles of caveats. None of those are Tey’s writing style, which is excellent. It’s one of those cases where there is the kernel of a much better book at the heart of a good book. Perhaps that kernel turned into The Scapegoat?

Alice by Elizabeth Eliot

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I’m sure you know about the exciting and excellent Furrowed Middlebrow series from Dean Street Press – if not, hurry to them – and today I’m going to share my post about Alice by Elizabeth Eliot. Below is the beginning of my review – you can read the rest over at Shiny New Books.

Hurrah to Dean Street Press and their continued Furrowed Middlebrow series, bringing back underrated women writers that most of us haven’t heard of before. Elizabeth Eliot certainly fits that category for me, but after reading Alice (1949), I’ll be keen to read more Eliot.

Despite being called Alice, the narrator is Margaret – she first encounters Alice when they are at boarding school together, in the late 1920s. It is immediately clear that Alice has left a significant effect on her schoolfriend, with Alice’s almost artless carefreeness showing options for a bohemian lifestyle that Margaret can’t quite aspire to.

By Auction by Denis Mackail

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Denis Mackail’s 1949 novel By Auction is one I’ve been reading on and off for months, but I finally finished it recently. It’s not his best… it was a little bit of a slog to get through at times, sadly. But I wanted to post a little about it, because there are moments I found brilliant.

The novel is about a young man seeing his ancestral home – or the objects therein – be auctioned off to pay debts and such. As he wakes up for his final morning there, and then sees the auction, it brings back a whirlwind of young memories (particularly of his brother, who died at war) and a series of young women who seem more or less interchangeable to me. The dashes between past and present were slightly confusing, and I couldn’t always work out which young women were where. But, anyway, if I didn’t relish these sections – I loved when Mackail was writing just about the auction. That was captivating, and almost always irrelevant to the plot. And I wanted to share this section on the auction, that I thought was brilliant:

“Going – ” said Mr Murcher, once more. Looked round, but only for an instant, for he knew his own congregation by now; and rapped – for at his desk he no longer just jerked – with the butt-end of his pencil-case. He had now achieved almost his maximum speed.

His skilled, photographic mind knew exactly which members were, except as part of the essential background to this production, no use at all. Which kept their heads. Which could be relied on to lose them. Which wanted larger bits of furniture. Which wanted oddments. Which – very important, this – had a weakness for what in a shop would have been quite unsaleable. Which were quick, which were slow; not always the same thing as which were rash and which were cautious. Which were rich, yet perhaps mean. Which were poorer, yet if led on, and personally addressed – for he would remember all names, too, or get them swiftly from his clerk – might be reckless.

He was a conductor. This was a symphony. Unrehearsed, and in a sense with a new score. But he was attuned to it. One symphony, after all, if you have experience, is much like another. The pencil-case was his baton. It started each theme. It singled out strings, brass, woodwind, or percussion; in other words the various characters gathered round him. Occasionally it combined them, in a great, orchestral swell. Then it paused. “Going – ” he said. The theme was over. He began again.

There was ballet, too; of a somewhat simple yet rhythmic nature. For perpetually, as he spoke, cajoled, jeered – Tod sometimes felt that he went a bit far with his jeering, but had to admit that it often gained its effect – or cracked jokes, the four strong men, singly, in pairs, or once or twice as a trio, came gliding up the gangway or in from the wings, with objects and articles of different sizes.

Always, or almost always, as one object or article was being exhibited and appraised, another was being removed, and yet a third was awaiting its turn. The strong men were quite expressionless. They neither led the laughter – not that Mr Murcher was so inexpert as to crack a joke every time – nor joined in it. Nor, again, did they seem aware of the baton.

Yet their steady, relentless coming and going, and the gradual but incessant redistribution of the goods in the tent, was more than rhythmic; it was slightly hypnotic. At one and the same moment you could see what you had lost or won, what you must instantly decide whether to go for or not, and what was on the point of taking its place.

Past, present, and future, as one might say, formed the basis of this choreography; which as calculated to disturb even the steadiest nerves, for who can bear all three together?

The Boat by L.P. Hartley

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The Boat

When Rachel and I discussed trains and boats in novels in an episode of ‘Tea or Books?’ – you can hear the episode here – David had a few suggestions in the comment section, one of which was The Boat (1949) by L.P. Hartley. I was particularly pleased to see him mention it because it was on my shelves. John Murray kindly sent me all their L.P. Hartley reprints a few years ago, and I’ve been fully intending to get to them – better late than never, as The Boat is brilliant.

Timothy Casson makes his living writing articles, usually travel articles, and has spent happy, carefree years touring Italy and the like. But now he has been requested to write about England, to support the war effort, and it is partly this stricture that finds him renting a house in an English village – having chosen a house next to the river largely because of its boathouse. He has a passion for rowing and for boats, and has proudly brought his boat with him. But he discovers that the local gentry aren’t happy at the idea of disturbing the fishing, and the landowner – who also owns the river – has to decide whether or not to allow him his rowing.

Such is through-thread of this novel, which is over 450 pages long. Such, one might say, is the river running through it – at just the right moments, perfectly judged, Hartley returns us to this theme. A letter may be sent to the old lady whose decision it is, or Timothy might make a bold decision against his plan – it crops up just often enough to remind the reader that it is something of an impetus. And it pays off in a bold climax – but the novel is not really about climaxes. It is slow, observant, gradual – brilliantly paced, while not being remotely pacey.

I talked a bit about this in another podcast episode – it really is one of the most brilliantly structured books I’ve read. I had to read it slowly. It took months, and I read many other books at the same time, but that was how it worked – gradually finding my way through the hundreds of pages, letting this life ebb along beside me.

For it is mostly about Casson’s life – about his relationship with his maid and cook (who are hilarious; I loved every scene in which they appeared, particularly when they considered themselves affronted), about his gardener, about a fledgling romance, about confusing conversations with the vicar’s absent-minded wife, about failures to ingratiate himself with the local landowners. Most touchingly, about a pair of young boys who are briefly evacuated to his house. Hartley puts together a village world – but, unlike most rural novelists, we are not introduced to that world as a whole. We feel our way through it, alongside Timothy, learning more and more about it but feeling forever at a slight distance. He is nobody’s equal in this social hierarchy.

Lest this sound worthy but dull, I must emphasise that The Boat is an extremely funny – often, as I said, through Timothy’s baffled methods of living with servants, but also through Hartley’s dry tone. His observation often has the mildest of barbs, and the balance of his sentences makes them joyful. While this isn’t the most amusing part by any means, it’s a section I noted down as enjoyable…

Mr Kimball was a sweet-pea fancier, and knew more about them than Timothy knew of all of the rest of the world’s flora put together. Like most experts, he had an attitude towards his subject which no amateur could hope to enter into; the beauty of the flowers he took for granted; what interested him was their size, shape, colour, the difficulties attendant on rearing them, their habits of growth and above all their prize-winning capacities. But even this last was devoid of excitement for him; the thrill of the prize was subordinated to and almost lost in the various technical points necessary to secure it. The winning of the award was not so much a crowning glory as the logical outcome of having fulfilled all the conditions, and he expatiated at equal length on Mariposa which had taken several first prizes and on Wolverhampton Wonder which, owing to an exaggeration of certain qualities, attractive to the public but fatal to the true harmony and balance of the bloom, was never more than Highly Commended. Timothy listened, bored as one must be with an accumulation of details outside the grasp of one’s mind, but respectful, because he recognised in Mr Kimball’s dispassionate approach to his hobby the signs of an austere idealism which was lacking in his own art. From time to time Mrs Kimball supplied the personal touch that her husband had left out – “Mr Kimball stayed up until three o’clock the night he thought Bradford Belle had caught cold,” and so on, but he clearly deplored these womanly intrusions, and quickly elbowed them out of the conversation.

You see, perhaps, that Hartley does not rush. Mr and Mrs Kimball aren’t important characters, but nothing is hurried in Hartley’s prose – but it is a wonder to read each unhurried moment. And somehow the more eventful moments didn’t feel out of place, but almost earned by the mellow timbre of the rest of the writing. I could have done without the letters he writes and receives from two off-stage characters (who remain off-stage throughout); I suppose are there to help us work out Timothy’s personality, and give him opportunity to reveal himself in ways that he can’t to these neighbouring strangers. See, I even argue myself out of my criticisms.

This is such a leisurely book, and also an extraordinary one. Thank you for prompting me to read it, David, and I hope that – in turn – I might have prompted some others to do so.

A Wreath of Roses by Elizabeth Taylor

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Roses

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Others who got Stuck into it:

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

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

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

 

Delight – J.B. Priestley

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In 2009 I read a fun book called Modern Delight, in which various authors and others talked about the things that most bring them delight. I mentioned it in a Weekend Miscellany, but don’t think I ever got around to a proper post about it.  It was enjoyable and fun, and for a good cause.  Also published at that point was a reprint of the book that inspired it – Delight (1949) by J.B. Priestley.

Somehow I didn’t get a copy of it then, but when I was in Malvern recently I stumbled across an original edition of Delight and couldn’t resist it – it became my dipping-in-and-out-of book. And (yes, this mini-review writes itself), it was a delight!

I haven’t read any of Priestley’s novels, although I’ve read one play and seen another – and read a fair bit of his journalism as part of my DPhil research. Delight shows quite a different side to him. Basically, it is short pieces on 114 things which delight him. Why this number, I don’t know.

Priestley claims to be an old grumbler (he was actually only in his mid-50s, and would live ’til a month shy of 90) and this was his way of making up to those around him.  And the things that delight him are truly delightful – covering the silly (charades, playing with small children, fantastic theories), the moving (coming home), the scholarly (Shakespeare re-discovered, discovering Vermeer), and the bizarre (mineral water in bedrooms of foreign hotels).  Above all, they are wonderfully engaging, often very amusing, and show a writer who knew how to put together a book that is at once utterly unnecessary and wholly (yes, again) a delight.  Here’s an excerpt from Delight no.1, about fountains:

And I believe my delight in these magical jets of water, the invention of which does credit to our whole species, is shared by ninety-nine persons out of every hundred.  But where are they, these fountains we love?  We hunger for them and are not fed.  A definite issue could be made out of this, beginning with letters to the Times, continuing with meetings and unanimous resolutions and deputations to Downing Street, and ending if necessary with processions and mass demonstrations and some rather ugly scenes.  What is the use of our being told that we live in a democracy if we want fountains and have no fountains?

Well – as someone who once traipsed around Torquay trying to find the precise fountain that my friend had seen in her youth, I can empathise.  But you need not worry about wanting Delight and not finding a copy – there are plenty around, particularly the 2009 reprint.  I can think of a few dozen bloggers and blog readers who would love this… it’s just the sort of gem that deserves to be on a reader’s shelves.

Yours Sincerely – Monica Dickens & Beverley Nichols

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ashcombe – Cecil Beaton

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Firstly, I’m so thrilled about all the response to Muriel Spark Reading Week, which will thus definitely go ahead!  More info on dates etc. when Harriet and I have conferred…

Secondly – I’m a bit wary about putting this blog post up… because I don’t have a copy of the book myself, and it’s so lovely that, if I can convey that even slightly, all the secondhand copies online will disappear.  But I can’t afford the ones that are around now, so… I’ll just have to tell you about it, and cross my fingers that I stumble across an affordable copy somewhere.  Sigh.  Sometimes I love you guys too much for my own good.

Preamble over: the book is Ashcombe: The Story of a Fifteen-Year Lease (1949) by Cecil Beaton.  I wanted to read it because Edith Olivier features a lot (she first told Beaton of the house) and so I sat in the Bodleian and read it.  I also took lots of photos, but then I looked again at the photography permission form, and noticed that I’d promised not to publish any of them anywhere, including online.  Oops.  So I’ll have to see what pictures are available elsewhere.  (This photo comes from here.)

Ashcombe is about a house of that name, inhabited by Cecil Beaton between 1931-1946… actually, shall I let Cecil Beaton explain the book himself?  He kindly does so in a Preface:

My tenure of Ashcombe House began with new year of a new decade – the fatal decade of the nineteen-thirties.  “The thirties”, years marked by economic collapse, the rise of Hitler and the wars in China and in Spain, were essentially different in character from their notorious and carefree predecessors, “the twenties”, but they had one thing in common – living then you could still cherish the illusion that you might go on for ever leading your own private life, undisturbed by the international crises in the newspapers.  This illusion was finally and irrevocably shattered in 1939.

So utterly has the world changed since that summer day, nearly twenty years ago, when I stood for the firs time under the brick archway at Ashcombe, and surveyed my future home, that ways of living and of entertaining which the seemed natural today sound almost eccentric.,  Looking back through old diaries recording some of the parties that took place at Ashcombe in those days, it struck me that for this reason it might be interesting to try to string together in narrative form my recollections of that time.  The shape these recollections have assumed is that of a memoir of the house itself, but thought I see this little book primarily as a tribute of gratitude to Ashcombe, a house I shall never cease to regret, it is also and inevitably a story of the people who came to visit me there.
Someone wrote to him, on the book’s publication, to say how pleased he was that Beaton ‘made clear that we were not a group of delinquent Bright Young Things dressing up’.  And indeed, he introduces all the guests over the fifteen years as friends, rather than celebrities – even though amongst their number were Rex Whistler (who painted the image below), Salvador Dali, Diana Cooper, and other luminaries from the worlds of art, theatre, and literature.

(this picture came from a great blog post on Little Augury, which has several others from the book too)

But for me, there was one stand-out character in the book: Ashcombe House itself.  When Beaton first found it, with the help of Edith Olivier and Stephen Tennant, it was in neglected disrepair.  He eventually managed to negotiate a lease from its owner, Mr. Borley (who seems to have been appositely boorish) at a cheap rate, on the understanding that Beaton would do a great deal of restoration to the property.

And these were the sections I loved.  I’m a sucker for any property programme on television – they can be buying, selling, or building a house, but my favourites are when they transform them.  So it’s my hankering after Changing Rooms scaled up to a majestically bohemian and artistic standard.  There are plenty of photographs throughout, many showing ‘before’ and ‘after’ shots, and although they are (naturally) in black/white, they still give a wonderful picture of the process and the time.  Above all, the pictures and writing together create a three-dimensional picture of what Ashcombe was like to live in.  I love novels where houses play an important role, and it’s even more delightful when the house in question existed, and its effect was real.

Ashcombe, in this century, could be neither a gentleman’s home nor a farmer’s retreat.  It is essentially a artist’s abode; and, under the varying conditions in which I lived there, the house conformed to every change of my temperament and mood, proving as great a solace during the grey years of war as in the now almost forgotten days of gaiety.
Of course, Ashcombe alone might not give this effect.  It has latterly been owned by Madonna, which is rather a ghastly thought.  I doubt she has the same artistic sensitivities of Beaton, if her leotards are anything to go by.  Part of the charm of Beaton’s book is his character, and the friends he had.  I doubt I’d have been entertained by them so much if they were in a London townhouse, but transport them to the idyllic countryside of Wiltshire, and I’m enamoured.  I don’t mean that I was bowled over by the individuals themselves so much as the type of group.  It did make me wish for a moment that my friends were all artists and writers and theatre managers: we could go and paint murals on the walls of our country homes and put on impromptu plays in the garden.  Then I realised that my friends and I do sometimes paint together (albeit on canvas) and have been known to read out an entire Shakespeare play together – so I’m not doing too badly.   But I’ve never had a circus room (how delicious would that be?) and never had call to say “It’s too bad, they’ve broken my best silver bird-cage!”

(A painting of Ashcombe owned by Beaton, c.1770)

Sadly, of course, the years of his lease were not without sadness.  Beaton moves onto the war, and writes movingly of how it affected him and his friends – at least one of whom, Rex Whistler, was killed in action.  While this section was written no less well than the rest, perhaps it is of less especial interest than those parts of the book which focus on Ashcombe House – simply because so many other people have recorded the pain of war.  An anguish, if less extreme then no less real, comes when Beaton must end his lease and say goodbye to Ashcombe.  Or, rather, he is evicted when Borley decides that his son will move in.  Within his rights as a landlord, but still a desperately sad loss for Beaton, who so clearly loves the house.

What I didn’t expect, when I ordered Ashcombe to the library, was Beaton’s talent as a writer.  I knew him as a designer and photographer, but had not expected him to write so beautifully and simply about his house.  Without ever having seen the house, I now know it intimately – not the layout, but the feel of the rooms and the grounds and the surrounding county.

Beaton in the bathroom, surrounded by visitors’ hands(!)

Thinking about it, this might not be the ideal book for the city-lover.  Even though I currently live in a city, my heart is definitely in the fields and woods, and the spirit of the countryside.  The people there are friendlier.  The mix of nature and man and animal is much clearer to see, and beautiful even when at its most practical.  I will devote a post to this at some point, I keep building up to it, and Ashcombe is another piece in the jigsaw of why I love the countryside.  So if you love London (and so many of you seem to) or have never lived in a small village, then I don’t think you’ll be able to love this book in quite the same way that I do.  But, perhaps, as I can read books set in London with the passing interest of a tourist, so you can come on a reading charabanc, have a good look around, and then rush back to your streetlighting and taxis and neatly contained parks.  For people like me, who love villages and villagers and life in the middle of nowhere – who don’t really feel completely alive anywhere else – Ashcombe is not simply an ode to artistry, a toast to happy memories, and a lament against the far-reaching damage done by war; it is a paean to the countryside and to life lived amongst fields, and trees – and happy, playful friends, unaware of what was around the corner.