Various

I’ve been attending my very first book launch! Not for my book, you understand, but for The Lost College & other Oxford stories, a collection by OxPens, a group of writers in Oxford. Last year they very successfully published The Sixpenny Debt & other Oxford stories, which I’ve read *almost* all of, and most of the authors make a repeat performance the second time around – and, what’s more, have secured the approval of Colin Dexter. He, who indirectly provides most of the University’s funding through Morse filming, was at the launch, and gave a kind, unassuming and funny talk. Also suggested that a potential future short story title could be ‘The Identity of the Second Dog Handler’…

Keen followers of Stuck-in-a-Book will recognise a few names from OxPens – Mary Cavanagh (The Crowded Bed), Margaret Pelling (Work For Four Hands… still haven’t reviewed this, but it’s very readable!) and Jane Gordon-Cumming (A Proper Family Christmas – now back in print! ) It was very nice to meet Jane and Margaret, and to see Mary again – this blog really has given me all sorts of lovely opportunities.

I can’t review The Lost College etc. because I only bought it a few hours ago, but there were some very promising readings from the authors included. I especially like the sound of Sheila Costello’s ‘Rabbit Fenley and The Body in the Garden’. Having read The Sixpenny Debt etc., though, I’ll chat about that, in the hope that I’ll have read The Lost College etc. by the time the next anthology comes out… I always find it so difficult to find anything unifying to say about short story collections, so it is a blessing that OxPens have done this for me – all the stories in both collections are connected with Oxford. That can be quite far-ranging, I’ll admit – from Tchiakovsky’s posthumous visit to the Sheldonian through to the accidental stealing of a library book in the distant past, from the confusion arising when a child understands everything adults say entirely literally, to the dangers of cycling in Port Meadow. My two favourite stories, though, are both connected with the middle classes committing murder… what does that say about me? Jane Gordon-Cumming’s Education in Action opens: ‘Dulcie was the scourge of the evening class. Which one? No, I don’t mean any class in particular. Dulcie was the Scourge of the Evening Class, generic. And I use the term loosely, to include day-time classes, weekend courses, summer schools – Dulcie was the scourge of the lot.’ You know the sort… The Rising Price of Property by Laura King contains an ingenious motive for murder, and is wonderfully cynical.

For a taste of Oxford from its real residents, though with real life being something usually foreign to these collections, do seek out The Sixpenny Debt & other Oxford stories or, I’m sure, The Lost College & other Oxford stories. Me, I’m just excited about having been to a book launch.

In case you were worried I’d gone all 21st century, this post will reassure you. Recent novels may be brimming with topicality, but they don’t compare with the charm and appeal of the book I picked up today in Oxfam. Not sure how discernible the picture is, so I’ll tell you about it.

Man Proposes does sound a little like the least complex novel ever written, but it is in fact not a novel, it is an anthology. I mentioned Katharine Moore’s Cordial Relations: The Maiden Aunt in Fact and Fiction as exemplifying an unusual and intriguing premise for a book of analysis. Man Proposes is another – Agnes Furlong has collected many incidents of proposals, mostly from literature, and published them together, with some rather oddly beguiling illustrations by Olive M. Simpson. You know how I love oddly beguiling illustrations…

How do people think of things like this? And what a lot of work must have gone into it. Equally, how could I leave it on the shelf? £1.99 in the Oxfam till, and this book accompanied me home. Published in 1948, Man Proposes is divided into nine sections, though I’ve yet to quite determine the significance of these divisions. Cited authors include Austen, Dickens, Shakespeare, Alcott, Tennyson, Daisy Ashford (hilarious), E.M. Delafield, Hardy, Trollope, Laski (for Persephone fans), J. M. Barrie, Wilde, Lear, Leacock (love him), Shaw… oh, there are dozens of them. The comedic is alongside the touching; the famous with the obscure. While I wouldn’t offer this as a Users’ Guide (though I read the first one to two friends, both of whom went slightly weak at the knees) it provides an interesting and amusing insight into authors’ dealing with this climactic moment for centuries of literature. And it wouldn’t have a hope of being published now.

I don’t know about you, but I always feel in some sort of quandry when reading someone else’s diaries. I mean published ones, of course – I would never commit such a violation as to read a friend’s diary or journal… but why do we make the distinction here? Because the author is dead? Because they are a stranger? Because they are famous? Hmm… You see, the difficult thing is, I love reading diaries of people – and letters, especially if a book has the correspondence between both, er, correspondents. For some in this ilk, look out for the letters of Joyce Grenfell and Virginia Graham; or Nancy Mitford and Heywood Hill. You see, there I go already, recommending things I’m not *quite* sure I feel comfortable reading.

I’ve kept a journal since 2001 – they are all spread out in that picture up there. Now, I would hate, hate, hate for anyone to read them – and I imagine anyone else would hate, hate, hate to be put through the experience. I was 15 when I started writing them, remember. I love this quotation from Richmal Crompton’s novel ‘The Gypsy’s Baby’, she even got the name right: “Simon was at the age when he imagined that everyone around him took an intense and generally malevolent interest in his doings.” Well, that was me, I daresay.

So why am I content to read the diaries of, say, Virginia Woolf? Partly because they’re brilliant pieces of writing, but what IS it that makes the diaires of lesser beings so interesting? Just curiosity? A couple of years ago an Oxfam worker discovered the diary of Ilene Powell, from 1925, and published it (see pic). It was incredibly mundane, with tiny scraps of entries – about two days’ output for a regular, angsty teenager. So why was it so interesting?

Well, all of this soul-searching had to be followed with some sort of book recommendation, didn’t it? Having questioned the practice of reading diaries, I am going to flag up The Assassin’s Cloak (not to be confused with Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin, as I did for a while). For every day of the year, the editors have selected entries from ‘the world’s greatest diarists’. All the invasive fun of diary-reading, plus the excitement of serendipity, as you see that Pepys was eating an egg on the same day as Vita Sackville-West centuries later. Ok, I made that one up – but there are all sorts of interesting comparisons. The usual suspects, such as Pepys, are featured – but all periods are covered, and The Provincial Lady even gets a look-in. The only dull ones are those from self-important politicians and/or celebrities, publishing their own highly-edited diaries, citing how many famous people they have met. I’m a few weeks behind, but this is an ideal day-by-day companion, but also good to flick through. For instance, on my birthday Maurice Collis was listening to Lady Astor talk about Stalin; Anthony Powell was assuring Frank Longford that he wasn’t used in A Dance To The Music of Time; Jean Cocteau was musing upon the lure of the radio.

I suppose blogging is the new diary-writing – though they should retain their very different approaches. Unless you fancy a list of famous people I have met…

Oh yes… any recommendations?
Hypocrite, me!?