ACOB

Mr. Allenby Loses The Way – Frank Baker

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This is one of those books I probably wouldn’t blog about if it weren’t for A Century of Books.  Under the terms and conditions of this challenge, I promised (er, sort of) to read a book from every year of the 20th century, and post a review of each one.  I didn’t think that would be the tricky part.  The paltry figure I currently have stated as completed is not quite so paltry as it appears, since there are three or four books which I’ve read but have yet to review.

Sorry, side-tracked.  I wouldn’t normally blog about Mr. Allenby Loses the Way by Frank Baker because it is has the two characteristics of many books I read: it’s incredibly difficult to find affordable copies, and it’s not especially good.  If it were scarce but brilliant, I’d be the first to write about it; if it were readily available and mediocre, I’d write that review too.  But since it’s impossible to find (I read it in the Bodleian) and not really worth finding… oh well, rules is rules, and this is my book for 1946.  Plus it’s nice to think that someone will have written about this book on the interwebs, because otherwise a would-be Googler would find nothing.

The name Frank Baker will doubtless ring a bell – it is he who penned one of my all-time faves, Miss Hargreaves, and I keep persevering with his work, in the hope that I find something else as wonderful.  (Miss H, as I blogged recently, even pops up her head in Mr. Allenby Loses The Way.)  But genius seems only to have wandered by once, and the other Baker books I’ve read are rather more pedestrian.  Actually that’s probably not the right term for Mr. Allenby Loses The Way because, in fact, it baffled me utterly in its strangeness.

Sergius Allenby is a diffident newsagent who lives fairly contentedly with his wife and niece.  He’s not unlike Norman, from Miss Hargreaves, in being an unassuming but imaginative man.  The family dynamics aren’t as amusing as the Huntley family’s, but it all seems fairly normal (albeit amidst the air raid sirens and rationings of the time) until a gentlemen turns up wanting to talk to Mr. Allenby.

There was something remarkable about him, thought Sergius, yet he could not easily have described him except to say he was tall, lean-figured, dressed in good but unmemorable dark clothes, with graceful, cat-like movements of the arms.  His dim eyes, blurred by heavy horn spectacles, stared down at his brilliantly polished black shoes as though within those orbs stirred some oracle who guided him.  He was like a shadow, without substance or personality.  When he opened his mouth to speak Sergius expected some extraordinary remark to issue from him.  “There is a basilisk sitting on your right shoulder.”  But he only said, in a persuasive and delicate voice, “You are Mr. Allenby, I believe?”

It turns out that the gentlemen is not, in fact, a gentlemen – but a fairy usurping the body of one.  Sergius is asked whether or not he believes in fairies, and somewhat nervously conceded that he always has done – based on the mysterious and imprecise events surrounding his own birth, abandonment by his mother, and subsequent adoption.  This confession is all that is needed for the fairy-man to grant Sergius five wishes – a transaction done with a businesslike demeanour unbefitting a fairy.

Sergius sat, drumming his fingers on the table-cloth and staring dreamily into space.  The strange referred again to his note-book.  “Hm. Yes,” he murmured, “Sergius Allenby.  To be allowed five wishes with the usual reservations.  Period, one month.  Casual wishes not operative.  No other person to assist.  Allow me to congratulate you, Mr. Allenby.  I might tell you, in confidence, that you are the only person in this area to be granted five wishes.”
“It does seem a lot.” Sergius coughed apologetically.  “It always used to be three in the old tales.”
“Frankly, there’s not much one can do with three; and first wishes are invariably wasted.”

And it is after this that the novel becomes strange.

I imagine quite a lot of you would have stopped listening when I used the word ‘fairy’.  I’ve got to admit, I wasn’t thrilled at the prospect myself.  Even with my love of slightly strange novels, which dabble in the fantastic (like a certain Miss Hargreaves, don’t know if you’ve heard of it) I shudder at the thought of fairies and suchlike appearing in a novel.

Well, you’re in luck.  Turns out he might not be a fairy after all.  Humphrey Nanson occupies the other narrative thread – he is a strange sort of psychologist, who muses a lot on the nature of morality, works in an underground room filled with erotica and children’s books, and seems to be able to possess people.  Told you it became strange.  But he also enjoys toying with other people’s lives, and wielding power over them.

“There is the simple expedient of the telephone directory.  Don’t you
adore the pin of fate?  As for the joke – I would aim merely at the
baffling and bewildering of the chosen victim.  For example, Harold
Finching, warehouse clerk, receives, every Tuesday morning, through the
post, a parcel of boiled cod and bootlaces.  Miss Pennyprim, of Mon
Abri, discovers, every Sunday morning, a pair of bright scarlet bloomers
hanging from her line.  Mr. Allenby, newsagent, is visited by a
business-like fairy and told he may have five wishes.”
Curiouser and curiouser.  Even curiouserer is that Mr. Allenby’s wishes seem to be coming true…

There are some fantastic ideas in this novel.  My favourite conceit within it (which is more or less incidental to the plot) is that of an artist so absorbed in painting the sea scene in front of him that it is not until the picture is completed that he realises he has included a woman drowning herself… as indeed she has.  But good ideas do not a novel make.  Where Miss Hargreaves was insouciant and joyful with an undercurrent of the sinister, Mr. Allenby Loses The Way rather loses the joy.  Instead we have a lot of meanderings about philosophy and morality and psychology which do little other than baffle and skip round in circles.  In the meantime, the plot arcs and interweavings don’t seem to make much sense or maintain much continuity.

Perhaps most importantly, there is no character with the life of Miss Hargreaves.   She is a true one-off, a brilliant invention; I could read her dialogue with delight for months.  There is a vitality in her which spreads through her novel.  Mr. Allenby Loses The Way has no such character; everything is slightly leaden.  The writing is not bad, in and of itself, but neither is it sprightly.  The odd amusing turn of phrase reminds me of Baker at his peak, but only for a moment or two.

After I read Miss Hargreaves I had hoped I had been introduced to a wonderful writer, and could spend many happy years tracking down and loving his novels.  Instead, I am left rather desolate that Miss Hargreaves was the one bright light amidst mediocrity.  But I’ll keep trying his books.  If any of them are half as wonderful as Miss Hargreaves, it’ll have been worth the search.

Have you had that experience with any author – one brilliant book, but only one?  If so, let me know…

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.

Deadline Poet – Calvin Trillin

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When I wrote recently about his disengagement with poetry, and asked for your help (much appreciated!) I didn’t expect my next dalliance with poetry to be something quite like Calvin Trillin’s Deadline Poet.  I have Thomas to thank for introducing me to Trillin, and Nancy to thank for mentioning Deadline Poet on this post back here.  And now it has filled one of the tricky 1990s spots on A Century of Books.

Given my disinclination to read poetry, it was perhaps a surprising choice for me.  Even more surprising is that it’s about Trillin’s time writing weekly ‘doggerel’ (his word) for The Nation about contemporary political figures. Contemporary being, in this case, the 1990s.  Trillin always refers to his boss as ‘the wily and parsimonious Victor S. Navasky’, whose one condition for offering Trillin $100 a week for his verse was: “Don’t tell any of the real poets you’re getting that much.” – “Your secret is safe with me,” I assured him.

Now, I know nothing about politics in 1990s America.  Indeed, I know nothing about politics in any place, at any time, up to and including 2012 Britain…  Thankfully Deadline Poet isn’t simply a collection of verse – Trillin knows that, if a week is a long time in politics, a year is an eternity.  Light verse published in a newspaper necessarily relies upon topicality – so even those who know who Zoe Baird, Clarence Thomas, Robert Penn Warren etc. are (sorry, I don’t) might not remember the intricacies of various campaigns and speeches.  So Trillin prefaces his poems with explanations – or, rather, the poems occupy a lot of a journalist’s memoir.  The poetry and prose take up about equal amounts of page space, so it doesn’t feel like a collection with notes, nor like a traditional memoir, but a really engaging and funny combination of the two.

And the poetry itself?  Well, Trillin probably isn’t being unduly bashful when he calls himself a doggerelist.  There isn’t a lot of it that would make Wordsworth uneasy.  Scanning and syntax tend to fall below rhyming in Trillin’s list of priorities (then again, that never did Tennyson any harm) and even there he prefers an abcb rhyme scheme, rather than abab, which is a little lazy – still, there is plenty of ingenious rhyming and wittiness throughout.  Here’s one I enjoyed.  (I should add, I have no idea who Ross Perot is.  I don’t even know which is Republican and which is Democrat, since the words mean the same thing.  So sorry if Perot is ‘your’ party… you probably know by now that I am not seeking to offend.)

The Ross Perot Guide to Answering Embarrassing Questions

When something in my history is found
Which contradicts the views that I propound,
Or shows that I am surely hardly who
I claim to be, here’s what I usually do:

I lie
I simply, baldly falsify.
I look the fellow in the eye,
And cross my heart and hope to die – 
And lie.

I don t apologize. Not me. Instead,
I say I never said the things I said
Nor did the things that people saw me do.
Confronted with some things they know are true,

I lie.
I offer them no alibi,
Nor say, “You oversimplify.”
I just deny, deny, deny.
I lie.

I hate the weasel words some slickies use
To blur their pasts or muddy up their views.
Not me. I’m blunt. One thing that makes me great
Is that I’ll never dodge nor obfuscate.

I’ll lie.
I imagine those of you who were politically aware in the 1990s will enjoy Deadline Poet greatly (especially if you agree with Trillin’s views, which I think are liberal).  It is testament to Trillin’s humour and drollery that even I, entirely ignorant, found Deadline Poet a really entertaining read.  Perhaps it isn’t quite how I saw myself engaging with poetry, and political verse certainly isn’t an avenue I’ll be exploring further, but as the memoir of a weekly journalist and light verse writer, I found it a whole heap o’ fun.

Blindness by Henry Green

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Normal weekend posts are suspended, since I failed to write my review of Blindness (1926) during weekdays of Henry Green Reading Week (run by Stu) – indeed, I didn’t finish reading the book until last night.  But let’s hope the weekend counts, and get on with the show!  And it’s going to be quite a long show, as I ended up having a lot to say about Mr. Green…

I decided to start with Blindness because it was Green’s first novel, and I’ve never read an author chronologically before.  Blindness was great, and so I’ll be reading the rest of Green’s novels chronologically… over the course of many years, I suspect.  I wasn’t sure I’d like him, based on excerpts I had seen around the blogosphere – perhaps he has to be read in context, rather than piecemeal?  Perhaps the first novel is different from the others?  I don’t know, but I do know that this novel has left me keen to try more.

Blindness starts with the diary of John Haye, a privileged boy at a posh school.  He is something of a dandy and an aesthete, pontificating on art and culture and how to best the boys who try to best him.  He’s not unpleasant, but nor is there much depth to his diary.  Even though orphaned (with an attentive stepmother who has been ‘Mamma’ for nearly all his life) it seems that nothing of great emotional moment has ever affected his life.  Here’s a sample diary entry:

Bell’s, across the way, have bought as many as seven hunting-horns.  Each possessor blows it unceasingly, just when one wants to read.  They don’t do it all together, but take it in turns to keep up one forced note.  Really, it might be Eton.  They can only produce the one note during the whole day.

In addition to this trifling detail, it is “the thing to do” now to throw stones at me as I sit at my window.  However, I have just called E.N. a “milch cow,” and shall on the first opportunity call D.J.B. a “bovine goat,” which generally relieves matter.  These epithets have the real authentic Noat Art Society touch, haven’t they?
Contrast that which the first paragraph of the second section.  In between there is a brief letter, from B.G. to Seymour, which tells the reader what they have suspected from the title onwards: John has been blinded.  I shan’t tell you how (it’s good to have some specifics left for the reading experience) but immediately we drop out of the self-conscious intimacy of John’s diary, and into this paragraph:

Outside it was raining, and through the leaded window panes a grey light came and was lost in the room.  The afternoon was passing wearily, and the soft sound of the rain, never faster, never slower, tired.  A big bed in one corner of the room, opposite a chest of drawers, and on it a few books and a pot of false flowers.  In the grate a weary fire, hissing spitefully when a drop of rain found its way down the chimney.  Below the bed a yellow wardrobe over which large grain marks circled aimlessly, on which there was a full-length glass.  Beyond, the door, green, as were the think embrasures of the two windows green, and the carpet, and the curtains.
The buoyancy has gone; the repeated word ‘weary’, and ‘tired’, drag the writing down with heaviness which doesn’t need to be overstated.  Green is excellent at conveying emotion through simple thoughts, allowing the reader to interpret the characters and their states of mind without giving too much overt direction.

John is at home, now, and the main characters change.  They are too well written to be accurately described in brief, but I’ll give a vague sketch.  John’s stepmother, Mamma, is of huntin’-shootin’ stock, doesn’t understand her arty stepson, but would (and does) do everything for his sake.  Nanny has cared for him from infancy.  And then there is Joan – the daughter of a local defrocked clergyman.  She isn’t particularly intelligent, although she has greater depth than her conversation suggests… and her relationship with John is as awkward as it is enlivening.  This is John’s thoughts after first meeting her:

Voices as become his great interest, voices that surrounded him, that came and went, that slipped from tone to tone, that hid to give away in hiding.  There had been wonder in hers when he had groped into the room upon them both; she had said, “Look.”  But before she had opened her mouth he had known that there was someone new in the room.

Voices had been thickly round him for the past month, all kinds of them.  Mamma extracted them from the neighbourhood, and all had sent out the first note of horror, and some had continued horrified and frightened, while others had grown sympathetic, and these were for the most part the fat voices of mothers, and some had been disgusted.  She had been the first to be almost immediately at her ease, when she spoke it was with an eager note, and there were so few eager people.
It is an interesting coincidence that I am reading this so soon after reading Helen Keller’s The World I Live In.  Of course there are differences (not least fact and fiction) but, although I can’t really know, I think Green writes a plausible narrative of dealing with sudden blindness.  And it certainly gives Green restrictions which he approaches impressively: to use, from John’s perspective, no visual descriptions.  I jotted down a line which I thought summed up much of the novel, and later (because I always read introductions at the end) discovered that Jeremy Treblown had begun his with the same quotation:

It was so easy to see and so hard to feel what was going on, but it was the feeling that mattered.
That’s a pretty good summary of any author’s task.  It’s essentially ‘show: don’t tell’, isn’t it?

Many of the novelists I love from the interwar years have spent the subsequent decades hovering between ‘canon’ and ‘non-canon’.  The Leavises et al may not have welcomed them, but they have been reclaimed by later critics – or left out in the dust.  Ivy Compton-Burnett, Elizabeth Taylor, Elizabeth von Arnim, E.M. Delafield… to my mind, von Arnim is every bit as good as Taylor, but the latter has risen in critical appreciation where the former has not.  These seemingly arbitrary decisions can be found everywhere.

As for Green, he is a curious case.  You’d be hard-pressed to find a literary critic who didn’t think him significant – but equally hard-pressed to find one who’d bothered writing about him.  His style is often compared to Woolf’s or Joyce’s (although I don’t think those two authors should be grouped together) – what struck me is that Henry Green writes like James Joyce would if Joyce were a lot less arrogant, and more concerned with making his prose enjoyable as well as experimental.  There are several pages from Nan’s perspective, meandering hither and thither, reminiscing and wondering, that Joyce would have given his back teeth to be able to write.

Does Henry use stream-of-consciousness?  Yes, I suppose he does.  But whereas Woolf (whom I love) incorporates beautiful imagery and stylistic wanderings like waves on a shore, Green does the opposite.  He never uses a word or a metaphor that the character wouldn’t speak aloud.  It is beautiful, but it is resolutely simple.  And thus probably incredibly difficult to write – especially for a 21 year old.  Yes, Green was 21 when he finished this novel – and at school when he started it.  Sickening, isn’t it?

Blindness isn’t just from John’s perspective, though.  In fact, the perspective is a bit like a butterfly – flying about, settling for a few paragraphs on one person, then moving onto another – dipping in and out of people’s minds, and giving their thoughts, feelings, and worries in an honest, perceptive manner.  Green builds character so well, from the inside out.  Nobody is considered too insignificant for this treatment – the reader hears from the nurse, the cook, even a cockerel, alongside the principal cast.  If that feels dizzying, don’t worry, it is not – simplicity always remains Green’s mantra.  Sometimes this flitting between different consciousnesses does, though, create intriguing uncertainties.  Take this excerpt, during a conversation between John and Joan – Joan is speaking:

“Yes, an’ there’s the chicks that get lost in the grass, I love them, an’ there’s a starling that nests every year in the chimney, and my own mouse which plays about in my room at night, an’…”

G-d, the boredom of this.

“… but sometimes I hate it all.”
With my apparent knack for pre-empting Jeremy Treglown’s introduction, he also quotes this section – although unambiguously attributing the mental interjection to John.  That’s certainly the most likely reading, but I like the ambiguity that Green does incorporate.  It could easily be Joan’s thought (it would certainly match the other thoughts we’ve heard from her in this scene) or even a shared moment of bored despair – connecting mentally where they do not connect verbally.

I daresay I have delighted you long enough, so I will conclude.  Blindness is such an interesting novel, written so well.  As a first novel by a very young man, it demonstrates astonishingly maturity; I’m very excited about reading his later works.  This wouldn’t be a great choice for those who prize plot above character and style, but for anyone who likes the idea of modernism, but struggles to enjoy it in practice, Henry Green’s style (on the basis of Blindness, at least) is perfect for you.

Do head on over to Stu’s blog to see what he and others have read during Henry Green Reading Week.  And thanks, Stu, for giving me the incentive finally to read up my Greens!

The World I Live In – Helen Keller

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I was trying to remember who told me about The World I Live In (1908) by Helen Keller, when I realised that none of you did.  This joins Yellow by Janni Visman and Alva & Irva by Edward Carey (both wonderful novels) in being a book I happened upon at work in the Bodleian, and decided to buy for myself.  And, like them, it turned out to be a good reading experience – although rather different.

I had heard of Helen Keller, of course, although I must confess to having thought her British rather than American.  For those who don’t know the name, Keller lived from 1880-1968 and at 19 months’ old had an illness which left her completely blind and deaf.  She spent seven years with barely any proper communication with others; she describes it as a period during which she was not alive – then, when Keller was seven, 20-year old Anne Sullivan became her teacher.  With Sullivan’s patient assistance, Keller used hand-spelling to communicate, and became rather more eloquent than most other young women.  She wrote The Story of My Life in 1903, which I have not read; the essays collected within The World I Live In were written during Keller’s twenties, and make for fascinating reading – and certainly not for some sort of novelty value, but because Keller is, in her own right, incredibly intelligent, something of a philosopher, and entirely an optimist.  Indeed, the NYRB Classics edition I have includes Optimism: an essay written in 1903, which includes this excerpt:

I, too, can work, and because I love to labour with my head and my hands, I am an optimist in spite of all.  I used to think I should be thwarted in my desire to do something useful. But I have found out that though the ways in which I can make myself useful are few, yet the work open to me is endless.  The gladdest labourer in the vineyard may be a cripple.  Even should the others outstrip him, yet the vineyard ripens in the sun each year, and the full clusters weigh into his hand.  Darwin could work only half an hour at a time; yet in many diligent half-hours he laid anew the foundations of philosophy.  I long to accomplish a great and noble task; but it is my chief duty and joy to accomplish humble tasks as though they were great and noble.  It is my service to think how I can best fulfil the demands that each day makes upon me, and to rejoice that others can do what I cannot.
 When I say that Keller’s worth as an author is not merely as a novelty, I mean that she should not be patronised, nor her writing viewed as some sort of scientific experiment.  She is too good and perceptive a writer for that.  But, of course, Keller offers a different understanding and interaction with the world than most writers would.  The sections I found most fascinating were towards the beginning, where Keller writes about hands.  She divides this into three sections: ‘The Seeing Hand’ (how she uses touch as her primary sense); ‘The Hands of Others’ (how hands reveal character), and ‘The Hands of the Race’ (where the explores hands in history and culture.)  Her perspective is not entirely unique, I daresay, but I certainly haven’t encountered documented elsewhere, nor can I imagine it done more sensitively, or with such a good-humoured demeanour:

It is interesting to observe the differences in the hands of people.  They show all kinds of vitality, energy, stillness, and cordiality.  I never realised how living the hand is until I saw those chill plaster images in Mr. Hutton’s collection of casts.  The hand I know in life has the fullness of blood in its veins, and is elastic with spirit.
[…]
I read that a face is strong, gentle; that it is full of patience, of intellect; that it is fine, sweet, noble, beautiful.  Have I not the same right to use these words in describing what I feel as you have in describing what you see?  They express truly what I feel in the hand.  I am seldom conscious of physical qualities, and I do not remember whether the fingers of a hand are short or long, or the skin is moist or dry. […] Any description I might give would fail to make you acquainted with a friendly hand which my fingers have often folded about, and which my affection translates to my memory.

As I say, it is these early sections which I found most captivating; similarly, the essay on smell gave a wonderful insight.  I hope it is obvious that I intend no offence when I say it reminded me of Flush by Virginia Woolf, where the dog’s primary sense is smell, and the world is focalised through this perspective.  Keller does not feel that her experience of life is any less full than anybody else’s – the senses of touch, smell, and taste give her a vivid comprehension of the world and, what is more, a deep appreciation of it:

Between my experiences and the experiences of others there is no gulf of mute space which I may not bridge.  For I have endlessly varied, instructive contacts with all the world, with life, with the atmosphere whose radiant activity enfolds us all.  The thrilling energy of the all-encasing air is warm and rapturous.  Heat-waves and sound-waves play upon my face in infinite variety and combination, until I am able to surmise what must be the myriad sounds that my senseless ears have not heard.
I have to confess that the second broader section of The World I Live In left me cold.  In it, she describes – at length – her dreams, since it is often ‘assumed that my dreams should have peculiar interest for the man of science.’  Well, perhaps they do.  But I am allergic to people describing their dreams, it is utter anaethema to me (as my housemates now know!) and I skipped past this section.  If you have a greater tolerance for dream-descriptions than I do, perhaps it is just as interesting as the first section.
The final parts of the book were added from elsewhere, for the NYRB edition: the optimism essay, mentioned above, and ‘My Story’, written when she was 12, and quite astonishingly mature for that age – let alone for a girl who had only learnt language from the age of seven.
That is what astounds me most about Helen Keller’s book: that someone who came late to language should progress in it so quickly and maturely.  Regardless of the reasons why she could not speak, read, or listen, the fact that she had seven years without language, overcame this, and wrote so beautifully and intelligently  – well, it’s astonishing.  Keller is wise, sensitive, generous, and philosophically fascinating.  I’m grateful to NYRB for bringing The World I Live In back into print in 2003, and would recommend this to anybody interested in intelligent, lovely writing.  Here’s a wonderfully insightful paragraph from Keller to finish:

It is more difficult to teach ignorance to think than to teach an intelligent blind man to see the grandeur of Niagara.  I have walked with people whose eyes are full of light, but who see nothing in wood, sea, or sky, nothing in city streets, nothing in books.  What a witless masquerade is this seeing!  It were better far to sail forever in the night of blindness, with sense and feeling and mind, than to be thus content with the mere act of seeing.  They have the sunset, the morning skies, the purple of distant hills, yet their souls voyage through this enchanted world with a barren state.

Another book to get Stuck into:

Halfway to Venus by Sarah Anderton
If this were in a thesaurus it would be listed under ‘antonym’ rather than ‘synonym’ – Anderton had one arm amputated early in life, and Halfway to Venus is a very interesting book that combines memoir with an overview of the absence of hands in art, religion, literature, and history.  As such, it makes a fascinating comparison with Keller’s writing on the primacy of hands in the same.

Maestro by Peter Goldsworthy

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I wasn’t intending to join in Australian Literature Month, because I didn’t have any unread Australian novels, nor did any of the suggested titles fill me with longing.  I’m trying to be sensible with money this academic year, since I’m no longer funded, and (believe it or not) I’m even being more circumspect when it comes to book purchases!  (Keep that in your mind when you read the following…)

I bought Maestro (1989) by Peter Goldsworthy because I liked the colour of the spine.  Ok, that’s not quite true – it was the minty-turquoisey colour which made me take it off the shelf; when I discovered that it was Australian, and sounded interesting, I decided it was worth £2 of my money.  I’m glad I did – not just because I get to join in with Kim et al, but because it was rather good.

Although it’s Australian – written by an Australian, set in 1967 Darwin, Australia (the location of choice for characters leaving Neighbours, incidentally, if they’re not going to London) – much of the impetus is tied to Europe.  Eduard Keller is a Viennese refugee who teaches piano to fifteen year old Paul Crabbe (already an experienced pianist) whose family have recently moved from South Australia to the dry heat of Darwin.  Except Keller doesn’t teach piano in any traditional sense – he forbids Paul to use the piano for the first few weeks, instead instructing him in the importance of each individual finger…

Keller waggled a forefinger in front of my nose.  It was our second lesson?  Our third?

“This finger is selfish.  Greedy.  A… a delinquent.  He will steal from his four friends, cheat, lie.”

He sheathed the forefinger in his closed fist as if it were the fleshy blade of a Swiss army knife and released the middle finger.

“Mr. goody-goody,” he said, banging the finger down on middle C repeatedly.  “Teacher’s pet.  Does what he is told.  Our best student.”

Last came the ring finger.

“Likes to follow his best friend,” he told me.  “Likes to… lean on him sometimes.”

He lifted his elbows upwards and outwards.

“Those are the pupils.  This is the teacher.  The elbow…”
I have an ambivalent relationship with novels about music.  I enjoyed The Well-Tempered Clavier by William Coles (although I was glad that Maestro didn’t follow it down the Notes on a Scandal-esque path, not least because of the sixty year gap between Keller and Paul, but also because it’s not a very original course to take.)  I loved The Piano Shop on the Left Bank by Thad Carhart, which is non-fiction.  But novels leave me cold when they rely upon the ethos that music is the highest of all forms.  I played the piano from the age of seven onwards, and although I later became friends with my piano teacher (the lady who first told me of Miss Hargreaves) and eventually grew to like playing the piano, for many years I passionately hated it.  The best feeling in the world (and my brother agrees with me) was when you rang the doorbell for a piano lesson… and the teacher didn’t answer!  The worst feeling was when you thought the piano teacher wasn’t going to answer, and then, after a long gap… she did.  So, anyway, this has given me an odd relationship with stories about learning instruments, and my dislike of elitism comes into play with musical maestros.

I’m sure it’s possible to be a musical expert without being arrogant and rude, of course, but Keller is not one of these.  He is one of the most rude, supercilious characters I’ve ever encountered – but he is battling his own demons, and the love and respect Paul feels towards Keller are contagious.  Even so, I found it arrogant rather than inspiring when he said things like this:

“Perhaps you could play one of the exam pieces, Paul,” my father suggested.  “A private concert for the three of us.”

“The Brahms?”

“The Beethoven,” Keller injected, “might be preferable.”

I played Beethoven that night as well as I had ever played, and turned afterwards, smiling, ready for praise.

“Beautiful,” my mother breathed.  “Don’t you agree, Herr Keller?”

“An excellent forgery,” he said.

“I’m sorry?”

“Technically perfect,” he said.

He drained his wineglass before continuing.  It was to be his longest monologue of the evening:

“At such moments I always remember a forged painting I once saw.  Each violent brushstroke was reproduced was painstaking, non-violent care.  The forgery must have taken many many times longer than the original to complete.  It was technically better than the original.”

He rose from his chair and walked a little unsteadily towards the door: “And yet something was missing.  Not much – but something.“

At the door he paused, and turned: “And that small something may as well have been everything.”

I find music snobbery intensely irritating – no, that’s not quite true, I feel desperately sorry for people who are only content with perfection, in any field.  Doubtless it is a form of discernment, but if your discernment reaches the level that you castigate and despise almost everything you encounter, you’re setting yourself up for a miserable time.

But Keller is miserable for other reasons… it gradually becomes clear that he was more involved in the Second World War than he originally admits.  I shan’t give the game away, although it isn’t a big twist and doesn’t come as much of a surprise to the reader.  If you’re rolling your eyes at yet another long-shadow-of-war novel, then don’t.  It’s only one element in the interesting construction of the interaction between Keller and Paul – which is the really interesting central focus of Maestro.  Their relationship isn’t romantic or fatherly or even particularly close.  Keller resists any sort of emotional connection, and Paul is far too full of youthful insensitivity to do anything but blunder into conversations in which he is too immature to participate, even if Keller were willing.  But what Goldsworthy builds between Keller and the Crabbes is still somehow beautiful.  The connection between people who never open up to one another; the legacies left behind a relationship which could not even be called a friendship.  Goldsworthy has done this beautifully.

One of the things I’m realising, doing A Century of Books and stepping further outside the interwar period, where I am happiest, is the way a decade colours each novel, even without the author intentionally following the zeitgeist.  A bit like people who claim not to follow fashion, until they look back at old photographs and see how much they were unwittingly influenced by the style of the day.  So Maestro is filtered through the lens of the 1980s, whether Goldsworthy likes it or not.  I certainly wouldn’t read that people ‘made slow, muffled, reckless love’ in the pages of an Elizabeth von Arnim novel, for instance.  Indeed, the whole coming-of-age storyline (although much less irritating in Maestro than it is in some book) is very 1980s, and rather incidental to the main thrust of the novel – but perhaps it’s main purpose is to demonstrate that Keller does not completely occupy Paul’s thoughts.  He is not obsessed by Keller, but their relationship will alter a great deal in his life.

Maestro is a difficult little book to write about – it is wise, original, and rather beautiful.  I would love it a great deal more if someone could translate it into the sensitivities of the 1940s, say, but of course that cannot be done.  It reminded me a bit of Hallucinating Foucault by Patricia Duncker and Virginia by Jens Christian Grondahl, but I’m hard-pressed to say quite why – the influence of genius, for the former?  The lifelong effects of a brief connection, for the latter?  Perhaps, truth be told, Maestro isn’t quite like anything else I’ve read before, but does bring together themes and traits I’ve seen in many other authors, writing both before and after Goldsworthy.

As for whether it’s a representative Australian novel – well, of course there’s no such thing.  Goldsworthy conveyed the heat of Darwin very well, but aside from that… I’ll have to see which other novels are picked up across the blogs during what’s left of Australian Literature Month.  Thanks, Kim, for indirectly encouraging to find, buy, and enjoy a novel I would otherwise have left in the shop.  And thanks for helping fill 1989 in A Century of Books!

Time Importuned – Sylvia Townsend Warner; or, Why Do Poetry and I Not Get Along, Wherein our Reader Struggles With Verse

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Well, I can tick off 1928 on A Century of Books, because on Saturday I read Time Importuned by Sylvia Townsend Warner.  This volume of poetry was published two years after Lolly Willowes, an excellent novel about which I’ll soon be writing a chapter of my thesis – but which I only wrote about very briefly on SiaB.  I intended to write another post last year, when I reread it.  I worry that, if I tried, I would end up writing ten thousand words… well, perhaps I’ll give it a go one day, since the review I wrote doesn’t do it justice.

Anyway, I read Time Importuned hoping that there would be something useful to include in that chapter (which, incidentally, there was) but I can’t say I’ve converted to a poetry lover.  This isn’t going to be a proper review, because I don’t really know how to write blog posts about poetry.  I can analyse them in a doing-an-English-degree sort of way, and I used to quite enjoy doing that, but blogs are chiefly about reading for pleasure.  The activities of the student are not those of the ardent reader – I enjoy both aspects, but they are distinct in my head.  You don’t want to know what I think of Warner’s use of syntax.  You might want to know whether or not I enjoyed reading Time Importuned – and the truth is, I don’t know.

Some poetry I hate.  If it doesn’t make sense to me on three readings, I’m not interested.  If the poet name-drops all manner of classical mythology, I raise my eyebrows; if they name-drop 21st century technology, I raise them still more (these were both frequent crimes in the Magdalen poetry society I occasionally visited.)

Some poetry I enjoy.  But mostly comic verse, or things which are probably considered doggerel by those in the know (does Longfellow fall into this category?  Does Walter de la Mare?)

Oddly enough, I enjoy writing poetry – but I’m under no illusion that it’s very good, and I do it entirely for my own amusement or catharsis, as case may be.  Since I rarely read poetry, I feel wholly unqualified to write it, and a little ashamed that I have the audacity to put pen to paper…

Something like Time Importuned… I just don’t know.  The topics covered tend towards hopeless love and countryside matters, often combined, and with an atmosphere almost as though they are old wives’ tales, passed down in small villages for many years.  Which was nice, but I did end up reading the poems mostly as though they were paragraphs of prose laid out in an unorthodox manner.  Perhaps that is a valid way of reading poetry… but perhaps it also misses a lot?  I don’t know how else to benefit from verse.  I deliberately slow myself down, by mouthing the words (I’m quite a fast reader of prose, in a manner which loses poems completely) but I still can’t imagine reading a volume of poetry for pleasure.  It’s not that I need prose, because often I read plays for pleasure – and that’s more or less as unusual a trait as poetry-adoration, so I’m led to understand.

Well, I’m going to type out a couple of the poems which I did quite enjoy, although I am far from the ideal reader for them.  Poetry washes by me, enchanting others who dip in their toes, and merely splashing me slightly.  So, before I get to some excerpts, I have a question… which poet/poetry would you recommend to the prose lover?  How would you go about converting me to the possibilities of poetry?

Over to Warner…

The Tree Unleaved

Day after day melts by, so hushed is the season,
So crystal the mornings are, the evenings so wrapped in haze,
That we do not notice the passage of the days ;
But coming in at the gate to-night I looked up for some reason,
      And saw overhead Time’s theft ;
For behold, not a leaf was left on the tree near by.

So it may chance, the passage of days abetting
My heedless assumption of life, my hands so careless to hold,
That glancing round I shall find myself grown old,
Forgotten my hopes and schemes, my friends forgotten and forgetting ;
      But all I can think of now
Is the pattern of leafless boughs on the windless sky.

Walking and Singing at Night

Darkened the hedge, and dimmed the wold,
We sang then as we trudged along.
The heart grown hot, the heart grown cold,
Are simple things in a song.

The lover comes, the lover goes,
On the same drooping interval,
Easy as from the ripened rose
The loosened petals fall.

Between one stanza and the next
A heart’s unprospered hopes are sighed
To death as lovely and unvexed
As ’twere a swan that died.

Alas, my dear, Farewell’s a word
Pleasant to sing but ill to say,
And Hope a vermin that dies hard ;
As you will find, one day.

Jane Austen by Margaret Kennedy

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One day in, and the first book for A Century of Books is completed.  Truth be told, I read the first two-thirds in 2011, but spent this afternoon finishing it off.  It’s a bit of a cheat, because although it was published 1950, it’s one of those not-very-of-its-time books – being Jane Austen by Margaret Kennedy.

I was sorting through my books in Somerset and found a paper bag filled with books from my aunt, which she was either lending or giving to me back in 2004 (Jacq – which was it?!) and discovered this book in it.  I’ve yet to read anything by Margaret Kennedy (despite getting a lovely copy of Together and Apart for Christmas) and I had no idea that she’d written a book about Jane Austen.  Being in the mood for a little quirky non-fiction, I picked it up and thoroughly enjoyed it.

Apparently it was the first in a series called The English Novelists, and it is part-biography, part-criticism.  In fact, it’s mostly an assessment of Austen’s various novels – written by an unashamed fan, but one who is not incapable of pointing out what she believes to be areas for improvement.  Her views are unusual – how many of us would call Mansfield Park ‘the most important of the novels, the most ambitious in theme, and the best example of her powers’? – but it’s a good look through the eyes of an perceptive reader of the 1950s, to see how Austen was estimated sixty years ago.

Jane Austen is scarcely more than a hundred pages long, but Kennedy packs a lot in, with precise organisation.  In fifteen pages she covers ‘The Background’; a wonderfully informative summary of the novels which preceded Austen’s.  Then Kennedy covers ‘The Life’ in fourteen pages, thereby providing as good an overview as you’re likely to encounter in many books ten times that length.  It is a more modern phenomenon to elaborate where details are not known, or invent suppositions where discretion is more flattering.  Austen’s momentary engagement, for example, is not mentioned.  Was it not known in 1950?

The next sections onto ‘The Letters’, which are often held up simply as an example of the biographer’s disappointment.  Kennedy is no different:

To search through these letters for any trace of the novels is a most disheartening task.  It is not merely that the books themselves are scarcely ever mentioned; there is so little trace of the material from which the books were made.  We feel as some archaeologist might, who comes upon some large and promising mass of fragments buried under a lost city once famous for its art, and finds that they are all shards of coarse kitchen ware; that every trace of sculpture, urns, tiles, tablets and inscriptions has been scrupulously removed.  It is with gratitude that we identify a few cooking pots.  There is a Moor Park apricot tree at Chawton; we remember one at Mansfield Parsonage.  Isabella Thorpe advised Catherine Morland to read The Midnight Bell; here is Mr. Austen reading it at an inn.

I do not entirely agree with this estimation of Austen’s extant letters, but I love the image Kennedy devises.  I also love the sensitive way she explores the difference between Austen’s early and later letters.  Like everything else in Kennedy’s book, it’s a speedy but excellent summary and assessment.

And then the chapters for which I was waiting.  ‘The Novels – First Period’ and ‘The Novels – Second Period’; ‘Some Criticisms’ and ‘Jane Austen’s Place in Literature’.  It’s no secret that I love Austen’s novels, and I especially like reading about her novels – an area understandably skirted around by those with a strictly biographical outlook.  In these, Kennedy gives quick outlines of the novels, before delivering her own verdict – always admiring, but never gushing.  She knows Austen’s characters as well as her own friends and family – watching their actions, carefully considering their qualities, and understanding the work of the author all the while.

At twenty-one she has served her term.  She knows what she wants to say.  She has discovered how to say it.  First Impressions, afterwards called Pride and Prejudice, is written with all the fresh exhilaration of that discovery.  It has faults which are to disappear in the later books, but never again is she to write with quite the same vitality and high spirits as she does in this first spring of her powers.  They give it a quality which makes very many of her readers choose it as their favourite.

We are told that it was extensively polished, corrected and revised between 1796 and 1813, when it was published.  But its great merit must have been inherent in the first draft, since characters spring to life at once or never, and truth is one of the things which cannot be “put in afterwards.”I’m not sure I agree with this somewhat whimsical statement, but I would very much like to.  However, what makes Kennedy’s analysis of the novels so worth reading is her own status as a novelist.  She writes of the characters with an authorial eye; she critiques their well-roundedness or believability with the voice of one who has striven at the same tasks and encountered the same obstacles.  I especially liked her imagined scenario of Austen considering Jane Fairfax as a heroine, and being gradually swayed to focus instead upon Emma Woodhouse.

In the final sections of the book, Kennedy considers views of Jane Austen from her death onwards, and is especially good on Charlotte Bronte’s notorious bad-mouthing of Austen (without getting as vicious and biting as I would.)  I’m once again amazed that Kennedy can write so economically – covering such ground in so few words.

I cannot think of a better person to write a book like this.  Being both a novelist and an Austen addict, she has both the authority and the affection to write a book which is knowledgeable and perceptive, but never cold or detached.  Anybody who could write the following wins my approval:

Kitty is better managed; her complete insignificance is so well relieved by the untimeliness of her coughing fits.

Austen isn’t lacking in admirers and there is no shortage of words written about her.  A slim 1950 hardback will probably get lost amidst the Tomalins, Jenkins, Le Fayes etc. – but I would definitely encourage you to seek it out.  As a reader and a writer, Kennedy has written a beautiful little book which is a stone’s-throw away from an appreciation – but with an authorial acumen which prevents it being the enthused ravings of someone like me, who, without Kennedy’s restraint, would doubtless fill all 107 pages with the single sentence I LOVE YOU, JANE AUSTEN, I FLIPPIN’ LOVE YOU.

A Century of Books has got off to a good start!