Actually, books don't always smell nice

Monday's Guardian had a thoughtful and fairly objective article by Sam Leith about the relative virtues of books and electronic books. Most comment on this topic is special pleading of one kind or another: Ebook Sceptic, for example, is written by a bookseller (Tom Campbell) and unsurprisingly presents few arguments in favour of reading off an electronic device; Kindle-Schmindle describes Campbell's piece as "collating scientific research which adds rational support to his - our - instinctual [sic: he means instinctive] rejection of this new technology", but in fact it is cherry-picking: proper research should not merely set out to justify views already held.

I could set out the many advantages of reading devices (such as the fact that some books - and all thick paperbacks - have to be held open with both hands, which is uncomfortable) but this would be special pleading; I am biased because I love reading but a combination of arthritis and sensorimotor axonal polyneuropathy made it difficult until I discovered the iPad; now it is once again a joy.

More NS competitions

Writing a post the other day about the famous New Statesman competitions, I recalled some of the prizewinning entries in (much) earlier years. Not the long ones; I imagine there have been anthologies of winning entries, though I haven't been able to find one, in which I could have looked up such things as the winning entry for An Imaginary Discussion between Oswald Mosley and Ian Paisley Written in the Style of Hemingway. (I often wondered why anyone would expend the huge effort needed to write things like this in the hope of winning a small book token.)

No, it was the one-liners that stuck in my memory, such as:

Great Boasts:
At the wedding: "Yes, charming couple, I've slept with both of them."

or
Irregular Verbs, along the lines of I am firm/ you are obstinate/ he is a pig-headed fool:
"I am Oxford/ you are Cambridge/ he is London School of Economics."
"I like boys/ you are a scoutmaster/ he is in prison."

or
Announcements which make the experienced party-goer/ diner-out wish he had stayed at home:
"This is something rather special: we trod the grapes ourselves."
"And now, who's for some mead?"
"Oh goodie, Deirdrie's brought her zither!"

I wish I had made a note of some of the others; I could have made fifty posts out of them.

She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed

This is how Horace Rumpole referred to his wife (she called him 'Rumpole'); John Mortimer took the title from H. Rider Haggard's She, serialized in The Graphic magazine from 1886 to 1887 and then published as a novel in various revisions up to 1896. With over 83 million copies sold in 44 different languages it is one of the best-selling books of all time.

[*By the way, why was Rider Haggard?]

I have a copy of the 1888 New Edition. I do not know how I came by it, but I must have been quite young because I remember being very impressed by some of Maurice Greiffen's 32 illustrations; Ayesha, as She was known to her friends, was a great unveiler and the pictures were mostly Victorian soft porn.

It was pretty good value for 3s 6p, with 277 closely printed pages, some featuring translations of the inscription on a fictional Sherd of Amenartas into Greek, both uncial and cursive, mediaeval black-letter Latin and black-letter English, as well as the thirty-two illustrations. It's a great story, and you can download the whole text from Project Gutenberg here, sadly without the illustrations but with the translations; some modern readers may want to skip these.

It has a tremendously plotty and complicated plot with some splendid passages: my favourite describes Ayesha's sad end. She was two thousand years old, you see, but having bathed in the flames of the Fountain of Life back then her appearance has never changed.

When a young Cambridge man, Leo Vincey, arrives with a friend in the African kingdom she has been ruling, Ayesha believes him , probably mistakenly, to be the reincarnation of her prehistoric lover Kallikrates (I said it was complicated) and urges him to to bathe himself in the flames so that he can join her in eternal bliss. Understandably nervous, he is persuaded to do so only when she demonstrates that it is really fun and quite harmless by bathing again herself. This turns out to be a very bad idea, for a second flamebath reverses the effect of the first so that, like Dorian Gray, the years catch up with her.

After much unveiling, "...she stood before us as Eve might have stood before Adam, clad in nothing but her abundant locks...". The flames envelope her, discreetly arranged, and then—ah, then (I abbreviate):
"The smile vanished, and in its place there came a hard dry look.....she stepped forward to Leo's side and stretched out her hand to lay it on his shoulder... Where was its wonderful roundness and beauty? It was getting thin and angular. And her face—by Heaven!—her face was growing old before my eyes! ...She put her hand to her hair and oh, horror of horrors! it all fell to the floor".
And so it went on.... "skin turned dirty brown and yellow", "... no larger than a big monkey...", "shapeless face with the stamp of unutterable age..." The fearful spectacle is described with a wealth of detail: no wonder the whole party swooned (the Victorians were great swooners) as the poor old thing died. Their servant Job also dies, of a fit brought on by terror, but the other two shake his cold, dead hands and then, understandably a bit fed up, strike out for the Zambesi and home, which they reach eighteen months later after incredible privations and suffering.

No wonder She hasn't been out of print since it was first published. The novel—or something like it—has been filmed at least nine times; the first version was in 1899. In 1965 Hammer Horror had Ursula Andress in the role.

[* Because he couldn't Marie Corelli, of course.]
.

Return of Pooh

...to the Hundred Acre Wood. Well, he never went away, really: the last line of The House at Pooh Corner is : "... in that enchanted place on the top of the Forest a little boy and his Bear will always be playing".

Anyway, the title of a book being published tomorrow suggests that there has been at least a temporary (well, eighty-one years, actually) absence. The Milne estate has authorised a lifelong fan, David Benedictus, to write a new series of short stories. The cover adds to his name to those of A.A. Milne, E.H. Shepard, and Mark Burgess; happily, from the cover illustration it looks as if the latter's drawings, pastiche though they may be, pay proper homage to Shepard's originals, and we may hope that the text is no less admiring of Milne. Certainly, neither will owe any debt to Disney's charmless fat yellow blob in a red T-shirt.

E.H. Shepard's Pooh Bear at ease in the Hundred Acre Wood.

[Note: Since I wrote the above, the book has been published and reviewed to general acclaim. The US initial print alone is 300,000]

Brideshead Revisited, revisited

I was not greatly impressed by Evelyn Waugh's 1945 novel, which is not surprising as it "deals with the unmerited and unilateral act of love by which God continually calls souls to himself", which only a Catholic convert would find a fruitful subject for a novel. When he re-read it five years later he was appalled, excusing it as the result of the difficult wartime days and subsequently finding its attitudes distasteful.

But the 1981 TV serial does stick in my memory, if only because of the beauty of Castle Howard, which stood in for Brideshead, and the mournful trumpet which sounded in each episode, giving a worthy air to this glamorous tosh. The series was re-broadcast recently at six in the morning over eleven days, a desperate piece of summer scheduling, but I did record it and watched the lot. It was no less repellent than the novel but a lot more entertaining; none of the characters is remotely likeable and only the fact that most the actors playing them had enormous charm made the thing watchable.

I don't remember how Charles Ryder (Jeremy Irons) came across in the book, but in watching the series I was struck by his silence throughout. The part cannot have taken long to learn because he has practically nothing to say, merely listening and somehow projecting sympathy and understanding, with a cigarette or a disgusting yellow pipe in his mouth, as the others go on about their problems; in real life people would get fed up with this and demand some sort of response from time to time, but almost everyone he meets falls about with admiration for him, especially the Marchmains who welcome him into the bosom of their awful family.

Typically, he and Julia sit by the fountain one night while she excitedly holds forth on her concerns about Sin, with interludes of sobbing. Throughout this long scene he says absolutely nothing and merely sits there looking glum. It seemed to me that each party had reason for giving the other a good clout, but at the end they inexplicably just walk away, without exchanging a word.

And another thing: Cordelia goes to Spain to tend the wounded in the civil war, but no details are given and which side she was supporting is not clear. By the time the novel was written Waugh wouldn't have wanted to show her as one of Franco's Fascists, but it is unlikely that Lady Cordelia would have been keen to change the dressings of a bunch of communist riff-raff.

Nowadays Waugh's snobbery and his veneration of the idle and pious rich no longer have the power to offend us; we can only marvel at his sincere and deeply felt regret that their days have passed.

Squirrels in waistcoats and all that

Winnie-the-Pooh and Wind in the Willows aside, I never cared much for anthropomorphic children's stories, and I had heard only vaguely of Alison Uttley until I read in the Guardian recently about the publication of her diaries. Her creations strike me as singularly charmless and she herself sounds rather unpleasant, but I much enjoyed this story, also in the Guardian, by Gwyn Headley:

The private diaries of Alison Uttley, creator of the timeless children's characters Little Grey Rabbit and Sam Pig, edited by the author's biographer Professor Denis Judd, are published this month. She was apparently jealous of Enid Blyton's success - calling her "the Blyton", and describing her as boastful and a "vulgar, curled woman". Margaret Tempest, her own illustrator, received equally short shrift as "a humourless bore ... absolutely awful".

When I worked for Collins (the predecessor of HarperCollins) I was asked to accompany Uttley to the Children's Book Fair at the Royal Horticultural Halls in Westminster. I found her a sour little old woman, with no small talk, and I was clearly merely a minion.

But I was quite good at publicity, and I'd arranged for everyone attending the fair to be invited to come and meet Alison Uttley. At half-hourly intervals the PA system hollered out "ALISON UTTLEY! LITTLE GREY RABBIT AUTHOR! HERE AT 12!"

Teachers were whipping their charges into a state of frenzy. I just wanted to sell some books. We'd placed Uttley on a curtained dais, and on the dot of 12 the curtain rose. A howling crowd of excited children stormed the stage.

As Uttley hadn't bothered to listen to a word I'd told her, she was completely unprepared for this. Dimly, she perceived an overwhelming mob running at her and with British pluck she unhesitatingly grabbed her duck-handled umbrella and waded into the attack, felling infants right and left. The kiddies paused, briefly regrouped, then broke up and ran off, screaming in terror. Uttley strode among them, lashing out freely.

The Meet the Author session was abandoned, and I was asked to escort Miss Uttley out of the fair. She was perplexed and indignant, and ready to ask some questions. But I had told her the answers before we arrived at the venue. She simply hadn't cared to listen.

Books for children

Every two years the UK publishing industry chooses a distinguished writer or illustrator of children's books as Children's Laureate, and a £10,000 bursary is provided. To mark the tenth anniversary of the laureateship, the first Laureate (Quentin Blake) and his four successors have each chosen their seven favourite children's books.

Here they are; I have arranged them in the order in which they were written:

Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens (1838)
A Book of Nonsense by Edward Lear (1846)

Little Women by Louisa May Alcott (1868-9)

What Katy Did by Susan Coolidge (1872)

Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson (1883)

A Child's Garden of Verses by Robert Louis Stevenson (1885)

The Happy Prince by Oscar Wilde (1888)

Five Children and It by E. Nesbit (1902)

Just So Stories by Rudyard Kipling (1902)

A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett (1905)

The Railway Children by E. Nesbit (1906)

Just William by Richmal Crompton (1922)
Emil and the Detectives by Erich Kästner (1928)

Mary Poppins by P.L. Travers (1934)

The Box of Delights by John Masefield (1935)

Little Tim and the Brave Sea Captain by Edward Ardizzone (1936)

Ballet Shoes by Noel Streatfeild (1936)

The Family From One End Street by Eve Garnett (1937)

Sword in the Stone by T.H. White (1938)

Mike Mulligan and his Steam Shovel by Virginia Lee Burton (1939)

Stuart Little by E.B. White (1945)

Five Go to Smuggler's Top by Enid Blyton (1945)

The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank (1947)

Lavender's Blue by Kathleen Lines (1954)

The Wolves of Willoughby Chase by Joan Aiken (1963)

Absolute Zero by Helen Cresswell (1978)

Not Now, Bernard by David McKee (1980)

Fairy Tales by Terry Jones (1981)

Rose Blanche by Ian McEwan and Roberto Innocenti (1985)

Daz 4 Zoe by Robert Swindells (1990)

Snow White by Josephine Poole (1991)

Clown by Quentin Blake (1995)

Queenie the Bantam by Bob Graham (1997)

Journey to the River Sea by Iva Ibbotson (2001)

Mr Gum and the Dancing Bear by Andy Stanton (2008)

• I find this list rather cheering, but it will probably be described as "worthy" (i.e. dull). It is sadly true that a selection made by children would not include many of these, but this is not so much because they would not appeal to today's children but because few of them have had the opportunity of reading many of them, and the power of marketing drives them (or their parents) to thinner fare: but the choice was made by authors who have demonstrated that they understand very well indeed what children like.

• There are probably hardly any books on the list which no adult could read with pleasure (Blyton, certainly and a few more), and several were not even written for children.

• Beatrix Potter, Milne and Grahame are absent; there is generally very little anthropomorphism.

• Nor is there much fantasy or magic: no Rowling, Tolkien or C S Lewis; most of these books are about real people doing real things. This does not mean that they all feature familiar backgrounds or characters with whom modern children can identify: there are some exotic situations and unimaginable people here.

• Not all is sugar and spice: Mary Poppins and the Famous Five are there but not typical, and there are plenty of dark themes.

• Imperialism is clearly dead: no Henty or Buchan, and Kipling is represented only by his (anthropomorphic) fables.

• I have read only about half a dozen on the list; I probably didn't have the time, because in my early teens I was busy reading around thirty of Richmal Crompton's books about William Brown. This shows that brilliant writing and characterisation can bring alive scenes and characters quite foreign to the readers experience: the books deal with affluent middle class life in a semi-rural setting in the 1920s and 30s—William's parents had a cook!—though Crompton went on writing them up to the 40s. All this was very far from anything familiar to me, and yet I could appreciate his eleven-year-old view of life and share wholeheartedly in his concerns.

Victor's chef-d'oeuvre and mine

This week, Other Men's Flowers enters its sixth year and passes the quarter-million word mark.

Les Misérables has more than twice as many words and these were all written by Hugo, whereas only about 40% (at a guess) of the words in OMF are mine, and the remainder are other men's (or women's). Another difference between the two works which critics have noted is that OMF is mostly in English, unlike LM, which is virtually all in French; the latter has been translated into English seven times and into many other languages, while translations of OMF have been made only by Google and are totally incomprehensible.

OMF is divided into 881 posts, while LM comes in 5 volumes, 48 books and 577 chapters; no editions of it contain, as OMF does, 1,291 comments, 883 hyperlinks and 466 pictures. However, the picture reproduced here, Cosette by Emile Bayard, also appeared in the original edition of LM and is thus common to both.

Hugo's great novel tells an epic story and covers an enormous canvas; OMF is less ambitious, consisting as it does of little snippets of this and that, most of which exhibit a facetious banality—or, as some critics maintain—a vapid flippancy; LM is noted for its total lack of flippancy. It is widely considered that both works contain some passages of memorable prose and many long and tedious sections which are totally unreadable and quite irrelevant to the main theme.

LM features characters called Marius Pontmercy and Ultime Fauchelevent, a.k.a. Urbain Fabre or Jean Valjean; these people have never been mentioned at all in OMF until today.

Since 1907, there have been about fifty film adaptations of Les Misérables and so far none at all of Other Men's Flowers, but it is early days yet.

A man of letters

Max Beerbohm describes in a 1910 essay his pleasure in finding on a station bookstall a book entitled How Shall I Word It? and sub-entitled A Complete Letter Writer for Men and Women:

“I had never read one of these manuals, but had often heard that there was a great and constant demand for them. So I demanded this one. It is no great fun in itself. The writer is no fool. He has evidently a natural talent for writing letters. His style is, for the most part, discreet and easy. If you were a Young man writing to Father of Girl he wishes to Marry or Thanking Fiancée for Present or Reproaching Fiancée for being a Flirt, or if you were a Mother replying to Undesirable Invitation for her Child, or indeed if you were in any other one of the crises which this book is designed to alleviate, you might copy out and post the specially-provided letter without making yourself ridiculous in the eyes of its receiver—unless, of course, he or she also possessed a copy of the book.”

But Beerbohm notes that “the author's style of letter-writing is informed as much by a desire to give his public what it needs, and will pay for, as by his own beautiful nature; and in the course of all the letters that he dictates you will find not one harsh word, not one ignoble thought or unkind insinuation. In all of them—though so many are for the use of persons placed in the most trying circumstances, and some of them are for persons writhing under a sense of intolerable injury—sweetness and light do ever reign.”

So he suggests to the author that he should sprinkle his next edition with a few examples of letters that make their point in a less kindly and more effective way:

LETTER FROM POOR MAN TO OBTAIN MONEY FROM RICH ONE.
[The English law is particularly hard on what is called blackmail. It is therefore essential that the applicant should write nothing that might afterwards be twisted to incriminate him.]

Dear Sir
To-day, as I was turning out a drawer in my attic, I came across a letter which by a curious chance fell into my hands some years ago, and which, in the stress of grave pecuniary embarrassment, had escaped my memory. It is a letter written by yourself to a lady, and the date shows it to have been written shortly after your marriage. It is of a confidential nature, and might, I fear, if it fell into the wrong hands, be cruelly misconstrued. I would wish you to have the satisfaction of destroying it in person. At first I thought of sending it on to you by post. But I know how happy you are in your domestic life; and probably your wife and you, in your perfect mutual trust, are in the habit of opening each other's letters. Therefore, to avoid risk, I would prefer to hand the document to you personally. I will not ask you to come to my attic, where I could not offer you such hospitality as is due to a man of your wealth and position. You will be so good as to meet me at 3.0 A.M. (sharp) to-morrow (Thursday) beside the tenth lamp-post to the left on the Surrey side of Waterloo Bridge; at which hour and place we shall not be disturbed. I am, dear Sir,
Yours respectfully,
JAMES GRIDGE.


LETTER TO MEMBER OF PARLIAMENT UNSEATED AT GENERAL ELECTION.

Dear Mr Pobsby-Burford,
Though I am myself an ardent Tory, I cannot but rejoice in the crushing defeat you have just suffered in West Odgetown. There are moments when political conviction is overborne by personal sentiment; and this is one of them.
The great bulk of the newspaper-reading public will be puzzled by your extinction in the midst of our party's triumph. But then, the great mass of the newspaper-reading public has not met you. I have. You will probably not remember me. You are the sort of man who would not remember anybody who might not be of some definite use to him. Such, at least, was one of the impressions you made on me when I met you last summer at a dinner given by our friends the Pelhams. Among the other things in you that struck me were the blatant pomposity of your manner, your appalling flow of cheap platitudes, and your hoggish lack of ideas. It is such men as you that lower the tone of public life. And I am sure that in writing to you thus I am but expressing what is felt, without distinction of party, by all who sat with you in the late Parliament.
The one person in whose behalf I regret your withdrawal into private life is your wife, whom I had the pleasure of taking in to the aforesaid dinner. It was evident to me that she was a woman whose spirit was well-nigh broken by her conjunction with you. Such remnants of cheerfulness as were in her I attributed to the Parliamentary duties which kept you out of her sight for so very many hours daily. I do not like to think of the fate to which the free and independent electors of West Odgetown have just condemned her. Only, remember this: chattel of yours though she is, and timid and humble, she despises you in her heart.
I am, dear Mr. Pobsby-Burford,
Yours very truly,
HAROLD THISTLAKE.


LETTER IN ACKNOWLEDGEMENT OF WEDDING PRESENT.

Dear Lady Amblesham,
Who gives quickly, says the old proverb, gives twice. For this reason I have purposely delayed writing to you, lest I should appear to thank you more than once for the small, cheap, hideous present you sent me on the occasion of my recent wedding. Were you a poor woman, that little bowl of ill-imitated Dresden china would convict you of tastelessness merely; were you a blind woman, of nothing but an odious parsimony. As you have normal eyesight and more than normal wealth, your gift to me proclaims you at once a Philistine and a miser (or rather did so proclaim you until, less than ten seconds after I had unpacked it from its wrappings of tissue paper, I took it to the open window and had the satisfaction of seeing it shattered to atoms on the pavement). But stay! I perceive a possible flaw in my argument. Perhaps you were guided in your choice by a definite wish to insult me. I am sure, on reflection, that this was so. I shall not forget.
Yours, etc.,
CYNTHIA BEAUMARSH.
PS. My husband asks me to tell you to warn Lord Amblesham to keep out of his way or to assume some disguise so complete that he will not be recognised by him and horsewhipped.

[You can read the full version of this essay and others HERE, enjoying the peerless elegance and clarity of all Beerbohm's prose.]

Voices from beyond the grave

Andrew O’Hagan in this month's issue of The London Review of Books looks at some compilations of recordings by writers issued by the British Library, one 3-CD set for 30 British writers and one for 27 Americans. He notes that hearing the actual voices of dead writers can come as a shock:

....The British one gets off to a startling beginning by bodying forth the ghostly voice of Arthur Conan Doyle, whom one expects to sound like Basil Rathbone. In actual fact he sounds like Gordon Brown. It’s somehow easy to forget that Conan Doyle was born in Edinburgh, and his voice, recorded in 1930, is here filled with lilting plangencies about the age of materialism and the fact that death is not the end.

The conversation of writers can often seem so unbearably silly in the light of our expectations. We think Virginia Woolf should sound like her style, but she doesn’t: in her British Library recording (the only one in existence), she sounds like a person imprisoned by her sensibility and her class as opposed to someone who floats somewhere above it. Woolf was recorded in 1937 and we listen for the sound of her prose and find instead a person fast in the grip of banality.

Some of the recordings take the form of interviews, and the presenters don’t make matters any easier; John Lehmann, for example, speaks to Aldous Huxley as if he were questioning him with a view to offering him something at the Foreign Office. None of the English writers on the British Library CD has a regional accent: Joe Orton doesn’t sound like a boy from Leicester, but like someone from RADA, which claimed only a few years of his life but all of his voice.

Thankfully, some of the writers do sound as we might wish them to: like their style or like one of their characters. Among the British contingent, none is more satisfying in this way than Noel Coward, who was caught at Heathrow. It is 6 a.m., but it is not too early in the morning for Coward to have a pop at both theatre critics and Angry Young Men. ‘Propaganda is death in the theatre,’ he says. But the viry viry wonderful Gertrude Lawrence is lovely.

Listening to these recordings, we learn that writing words and speaking them are distinct businesses. It’s not just about accent, but also about inflection, pace and the degrees of excitement or reticence that ground the talking. James Baldwin tells us he’s a blues singer but he sounds like Prince Charles. Raymond Chandler sounds like someone who had recently downed a quart of bourbon (he had) and Saul Bellow’s voice is nearly musical (in the way of an advertising jingle) with self-belief. Henry Miller sounds like a longshoreman ordering his breakfast.

But the overall prize goes to Nabokov, whose voice can be described as one might describe a mysterious and expensive perfume: it is limpid and exotic and crazy, with a definite touch of Ninotchka. Of all the writers on these CDs, he is the one who sounds most like his prose, beautiful but also completely unreal, like a figment of his own imagination.

Don't read it, just read all about it

I don't read very many books nowadays (TV, shortened attention span, laziness, etc.) but I do read a lot of reviews. This gives me the feeling that I am not completely out of the cultural swim (I was going to say zeitgeist, but thought I'd better check, and found that I have used it five times in the last four years: that is already too many), and enables me to avoid feeling ignorant when people are talking about books.

Not that I pretend to have read books that I haven't (except sometimes when I know that everyone else in the conversation is doing it); it's merely that being able to quote from something I have read about a book, with or without attribution, stops me from being thought a complete stranger to modern literature.

And, of course reading a book review can often provide a better experience than its subject ever could; a perceptive and witty review of a rubbishy biography of a rubbishy person can be thoroughly enjoyable. Here are some snippets from Catherine Bennett's delicious review of Snowdon: The Biography, by Anne De Courcy, which tell you all you could possibly want to know about the book and the man:

What has worked for Lord Snowdon all his life almost works in this hagiography. In a little world populated by England's most ghastly and dim, he again appears to enormous advantage: abrim with style (of a sort), charm (if you like that kind of thing) and energy (mainly for sex). It is worth remembering, of course, that in this context the same would apply to the average tomcat.
....When, to his enormous satisfaction, the priapic photographer (then called Antony Armstrong-Jones) made it into the royal family, it was easy for this spoiled little pixie, with his extra-tight drainpipes and mesmerising bouffant, to be mistaken for a much-needed corrective to the snobbery, stupidity, and stolid sybaritism of the nation's top inbreds. Simply by being a society photographer, as opposed to a titled nothing, Snowdon was able to portray himself as an arty free spirit, almost an intellectual, under whose tonic tutelage, it was imagined, the Windsor troupe might evolve into a more acceptable, near-human subspecies.
...The most iconoclastic thing he ever did, as a royal, was to wear polo necks instead of ties, a level of democratic endeavour that proved eminently acceptable to his in-laws, who soon discovered that they preferred the dashing, yet reliably subservient, Tony to foul-tempered Princess Margaret.
...The exact nature of the qualities that captivated Princess Margaret, her family, Snowdon's legions of ill-treated lovers and, most recently, the author of this dazzled tribute, remains, even after 400 pages, obscure. Loyal De Courcy passes on reports of an extremely large penis, but that can hardly account for Snowdon's effect on Prince Philip. Or, later, on Christopher Frayling, rector of the Royal College of Art, who said Snowdon was "the best provost we ever had".
Was it wit? None is recorded here. Young Snowdon's speciality was nasty practical jokes, such as putting dead fish in girls' beds. It was the grown-up Snowdon's, too: "they would sortie out to the houses of neighbours they knew to be out or away", De Courcy hilariously reports, of the earl and his chums, "and rearrange all the furniture".
...Looks, then? As irresistible as Snowdon may have been in the 50s and 60s, and even the 70s and 80s, it hardly accounts for the posh old shagger's continuing appeal, not only to the author of this homage, but, incredibly, to an attractive young journalist, Melanie Cable-Alexander (by whom he fathered a child)
....Although De Courcy tries valiantly to generate admiration for various artistic and charitable triumphs, her efforts are continually nullified, not by her obvious partiality, but by yet more evidence of Snowdon's awfulness, as volunteered to her, exclusively, by himself. There are reasons, De Courcy shows, why Snowdon should have emerged so deceitful, manipulative and cruel; so mean, boastful and silly. His father sounds silly too. His mother more or less ignored him until he bagged Margaret. He had polio as a child, leaving him with a dodgy leg. Then again, you'd think that half a century of adulation, plus a family, experience and a bit of maturity would eventually even things out. On the contrary. It is only, one suspects, because he is using a wheelchair that Snowdon does not, even now, creep out of a night to plant dead fish or rearrange people's furniture.

I suppose I've taken rather more than snippets, but it's still worth following the link and reading the article, if only to learn about the wedding present for him and Margaret for which British servicemen's pay was docked by sixpence apiece, and why his mother was called Tugboat Annie. It was published in the Guardian, which tells you, perhaps rather optimistically, that you can buy De Courcy's drivel from their book service for £18 with free UK p&p.

Strong women and grim years

Went to Charleston Farmhouse the other day; this is the Sussex retreat where the Bloomsbury group hung out during and after the First World War, and is maintained as a sort of shrine to them. We have little interest in this bunch of posturing ninnies, but there is an annual festival there, now in its 19th year, featuring writers, performers and artists in debates, interviews, discussions, readings, illustrated talks and dramatisations in a marquee in the grounds.

This year we wanted to go when Tony Benn or Polly Toynbee were there but were too late for these stars and settled for biographer Virginia Nicholson, daughter and grand-daughter respectively of Quentin and Vanessa Bell, and historian David Kynaston, talking about books they have recently published: both were fascinating, perhaps more so than Tony or Polly would have been.

Nicholson's examination of the way in which two million women survived without men after the First World War showed that they did not merely cope courageously with poverty, childlessness and frustration, but challenged conventions, campaigned to better their lot, proved that there is more to life than men and helped to change our society. I asked her whether she had any knowledge of how the achievements of the 'surplus women' in, for example, France and Germany, where the losses were even greater, compared with those of the British women she had written about; her answer, quite reasonably, was 'No'—she had decided not to write the much longer book that wider coverage would have entailed. As it is, Singled Out fills an absorbing and inspiring 272 pages.

We bought the paperback and got her to sign it, but when it came to David Kynaston's mammoth and equally absorbing Austerity Britain 1945-1951 we thought we had spent enough on the evening, and I only hope that Kynaston gets some benefit because I got his book out of the library—the Public Lending Right's website doesn't tell you what the current pence-per-loan rate is. Anyway, two weeks later I have reached page 106 out of 633, and have already found on page 19 something worth quoting in the next post, on Friday.

Overdue biography

I see that a book about Fazab al-Basry Hashid is being published in the autumn. I was surprised to find that not only is this apparently the first time that anything about him will be published in Europe, but that there does not seem to be a reference to him anywhere on the internet. Many other major Sufi writers and poets, such as Jalalud'din Rumi, Al-Ghazali and Mahmud Shabistari are widely known, but there is nothing to be found about Fazab al-Basry, although in some ways he was one of the most eminent.

I have always admired his writing, though I have only read translated snippets of it in anthologies. He was of course a mystic, though what kind of a mystic he was remains a mystery. However, he may have been one of the most influential men in the Islamic world in the early part of the thirteenth century, and it will be fascinating to learn the story of his life—though in fact very little is known about him—when the biography comes out. I suppose I shall have to buy it, for I doubt if it will be serialised in any of the Sunday papers.

Speak roughly to your little boy...

...And beat him when he sneezes
He only does it to annoy
Because he knows it teases

James Thurber was once asked by a publisher to provide the illustrations for a new edition of Alice in Wonderland, but he knew where his talent lay. 'No,' he said, 'keep the Tenniel drawings and I'll re-write the text'.

The real Professor de Worms

In G K Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday an actor successfully takes on the identity of a distinguished academic. He tells how this came about:

"When I was on the stage I mixed with all sorts of Bohemian and blackguard company. In some den of exiled dreamers I was introduced to the great German Nihilist philosopher, Professor de Worms. I did not gather much about him beyond his appearance, which was disgusting, and which I studied carefully. He was lame, shortsighted, and partially paralytic.
When I met him I was in a frivolous mood, and I disliked him so much that I resolved to imitate him. If I had been a draughtsman I would have drawn a caricature. I was only an actor, I could only act a caricature. I made myself up into what was meant for a wild exaggeration of the Professor's dirty old self.
When I went into the room full of his supporters I expected to be received with a roar of laughter, or (if they were too far gone) with a roar of indignation at the insult. I cannot describe the surprise I felt when my entrance was received with a respectful silence, followed (when I had first opened my lips) with a murmur of admiration. The curse of the perfect artist had fallen upon me. I had been too subtle, I had been too true. They thought I really was the great Nihilist Professor. I was a healthy-minded young man at the time, and I confess that it was a blow.
Before I could fully recover, however, two or three of these admirers ran up to me radiating indignation, and told me that a public insult had been put upon me in the next room. I inquired its nature. It seemed that an impertinent fellow had dressed himself up as a preposterous parody of myself.
I had drunk more champagne than was good for me, and in a flash of folly I decided to see the situation through. Consequently it was to meet the glare of the company and my own lifted eyebrows and freezing eyes that the real Professor came into the room.
I need hardly say there was a collision. Those all round me looked anxiously from one Professor to the other Professor to see which was really the more feeble. But I won. An old man in poor health, like my rival, could not be expected to be so impressively feeble as a young actor in the prime of life. You see, he really had paralysis, and working within this definite limitation, he couldn't be so jolly paralytic as I was.
Then he tried to blast my claims intellectually. I countered that by a very simple dodge. Whenever he said something that nobody but he could understand, I replied with something which I could not even understand myself.
'I don't fancy,' he said, 'that you could have worked out the principle that evolution is only negation, since there inheres in it the introduction of lacuna, which are an essential of differentiation.'
I replied quite scornfully, 'You read all that up in Pinckwerts; the notion that involution functioned eugenically was exposed long ago by Glumpe.'
It is unnecessary for me to say that there never were such people as Pinckwerts and Glumpe.
But the people all round (rather to my surprise) seemed to remember them quite well, and the Professor, finding that the learned and mysterious method left him rather at the mercy of an enemy slightly deficient in scruples, fell back upon a more popular form of wit.
'I see,' he sneered, 'you prevail like the false pig in Aesop.'
'And you fail,' I answered, smiling, 'like the hedgehog in Montaigne.'
Need I say that there is no hedgehog in Montaigne?
'Your claptrap comes off,' he said; 'so would your beard.'
I had no intelligent answer to this, which was quite true and rather witty.
But I laughed heartily, answered, 'Like the Pantheist's boots,' at random, and turned on my heel with all the honours of victory.
The real Professor was thrown out, but not with violence, though one man tried very patiently to pull off his nose. He is now, I believe, received everywhere in Europe as a delightful impostor. His apparent earnestness and anger, you see, make him all the more entertaining."

Curious creatures

In James Thurber's The Beast in Me and Other Animals, published in 1948, there was a collection of drawings which he called A New Natural History, featuring such creatures as the Hopeless Quandary.....

...the Whitefaced Rage and the Blind Rage.

I wonder whether Thurber got the idea from A Phenomenal Fauna by Carolyn Wells, with pictures by Oliver Hereford, which came out in 1901. I discovered this charming old children's picture book today in Project Gutenberg, where it was posted this week as an addition to its library of 100,000 free downloadable books. Here is the Brick Bat and its accompanying verse:

Oft through the stillness of the summer night

We see the Brick Bat take his rapid flight.

And, with unerring aim, descending straight,

He meets a cat on the back garden gate.

The little Brick Bat could not fly alone,—

Oh, no; there is a power behind the thrown.

Two days to go

Deck the halls with boughs of holly
Tralalalala la la la la
Let us all be frightfully jolly
Tralalalala la la la la

Or not, if you’d rather not. As Eeyore said in a different context: Gaiety. Song-and-dance. Here we go round the mulberry bush. We can’t all, and some of us don’t. That’s all there is to it.

In eight days time Other Men's Flowers (the blog, not Wavell's anthology) will be four years old, and now contains more than one third as many words as War and Peace. There has been much controversy over the relative merits of the two works, but actually they have very little in common: there is practically no reference to the retreat from Moscow in OMF (though there are two fascinating notes on Napoleon’s hat), and no-one is going to film it with either Henry Fonda or Anthony Hopkins, because Pierre Bezukhov hardly figures in it at all. On the other hand, W&P is not made up of over 700 posts and does not contain 1100 comments, 360 pictures and 670 hyperlinks. Above all, Other Men's Flowers reproduces no less than SEVEN cartoons by James Thurber and THERE ARE NONE in Tolstoy’s great novel. I think the conclusion is obvious.

The day after tomorrow is the First Day of Christmas. For that day and every day until Epiphany I have sought the help of John Julius Cooper, 2nd Viscount Norwich CVO, an English historian, travel writer and television personality known as John Julius Norwich: posts on those days will be entirely his work.

So until 7th January 2008, toodle-pip and A Happy New Year to everyone .

In the bleak midwinter

So farewell then, Alan Coren, the funniest and most stylish of columnists. It was a surprise to learn that he was so prudish that he would not have as dinner guests any couple who were living together but not married, but this was reported some years ago and he may have mellowed later.

We shall miss him, but happily his short pieces have been comprehensively anthologised; they do not date and the collections will be readable for years to come.

Here he is in Bethlehem, in the year BC (and AD) 0. The star has arrived overhead and the ox and the ass have been arguing about which of them is to be the Messiah, when a ram turns up:

‘Anyone seen three wise sheep?’
“What?” snapped the ass.
‘Three wise sheep,’ repeated the ram, ‘They’re due here any minute now, bearing gifts.’
‘Gifts?’ lowed the ox.
‘Yes,' said the ram, confidently. ‘It is traditional, I gather. Three wise sheep come from the East, bearing gifts for the Messiah. Grass, grass and grass, as I understand it.’
‘Messiah?’ croaked the ass, ‘What Messiah?.’
‘You’re looking at him’, said the ram. ‘Or rather, Him. It is customary at this point to fall down and praise my name, but as my three wise sheep are still en route we might as well hang on till they get here and I can do you all at the same time. Makes sense.’
‘I don’t understand,’ said the ass, ‘The star is hanging bang over the stable, the Messiah is either me or the ox, there are no sheep on these premises, you are well out of order!’
The ram tutted, as only rams can.
‘Never mind hanging over the stable’, it said sharply, ‘we have had an angel up our field, sunshine, there is no question but that I have been singled out, it is all over bar the paperwork’.
‘Hail the King of the Ewes!’ cried an invisible chorus.
‘See?’ said the ram.
The ass and the ox peered out into the night.
‘Stone me!’ cried the ox. ‘Who are they?’
‘Ewes,’ replied the ram. ‘My followers. You got to have followers, if you’re a Messiah. It is doubtless why He chose a sheep. It is one of the main things sheep do, follow’.
There was a long uneasy silence. Finally, the ass said:
‘What did this angel say, exactly?’
‘Hard to tell, replied the ram. ‘There’s the hell of a wind up there and I got all this wool in my ears, but the gist was unto us a something something and follow the star, and then He give me this Look’.
The ox shrugged.
‘Well, that’s it, then,’ it said, ‘Can’t say I’m sorry, it’s a big responsibility redeeming mankind, never mind not liking ‘em much to start with, if they’re not eating you they’re turning you into bloody suitcases.’
‘Good point,’ said the ram, nodding. ‘One of the first things on my agenda will be the commandment Love Thy Sheep. You’ve no idea what it’s like, having them shears running over you, I go all funny just thinking about it. My millennium will spell the end of the pullover, as we know it, and not before time. Also collies. I am not having the disciples rounded up and put in pens just so’s some nerd in moleskin trousers can go home with a silver cup.’
The ass cleared its throat.
‘That could explain it,’ it said.
‘What could explain what?’ enquired the ram.
‘The non-arrival of your three wise sheep. You got to go through Turkey, if you’re coming from the East. They are probably a gross of shish kebabs by now’.
‘Careful, son,’ said the ram. ‘When they get here with the documents, I shall be able to do miracles, e.g. turning donkeys into frogs.’
‘Possibly, possibly’, said the ass. ‘However, I remain to be convinced that the Almighty would entrust the salvation of mankind to something on which mankind has been putting mint sauce all these years.’
The ram narrowed its eyes.
‘Listen,’ it said. ‘it may interest….’

But at this point there is another arrival at the inn, and of course in the end all three creatures are disappointed.

Misunderstanding

I had intended to write for today’s post a rather critical review of Hey there, Ludwig!, Hans Thielemann’s new best-seller—over-praised, in my opinion—analysing Wittgenstein’s seminal 1921 treatise Logisch-philosophische Abhandlung, but halfway through I got bogged down in trying to unravel the morphological and semantic confusions which are so often apparent in Thielemann’s recent work. So I decided to chuck it, retaining only this photograph of dear old LW looking rather cross.

Instead, I shall recount an incident which occurred, or rather, didn't occur, the other day in my local butcher’s shop.

The butcher was joking with a woman standing next to me at the counter, saying that clearly she liked her bacon as she liked her men. I had not heard what prompted his cheeky remark and later I discovered that it was because she had asked for half a dozen rashers of something really tasty, unsmoked and not thick, but for one delirious moment I imagined that perhaps, aware I was within earshot, she had made an oblique pass at me, saying she fancied something crinkly at the edges and with plenty of fat.

A literary partnership, almost

I had not known, until I read it in a book review the other day, that Prosper Merimée once proposed marriage to Mary Shelley; she was presumably a Miss Wolstencroft at the time. Odd, because she eloped with Percy Bysshe in 1814, when she would have been 17 and Prosper only 11. Perhaps this was just a giggle between a couple of teenagers.

Anyway, it is interesting to speculate how, if the proposal had been accepted, it would have affected 19th century literature. Would they have discussed their work together and influenced each other so that Frankenstein would have made his experiments in Seville and Carmen would have worked in the Ingolstadt cigar factory?

Or would the marriage have been such a jolly one that neither of them would ever write anything? That would have been a pity.