I think I read this in my 20s, but I wasn’t the reader then that I am now. It’s a witty, barbed, technically perfect cameo of upper-class Anglo-Irish life in the 1920s. Characters are utterly charming and cruel withal. The unreliable narrator is Aroon, a middle-aged woman whose mother has just died in front of her. Her death was perhaps deliberately brought on by Aroon’s unpalatable rabbit mousse, a punishment for a lifetime of slights: even so, the narrator won’t let the rabbit go to waste and orders Rose to keep it warm for her.
It’s a bizarre world of hard-up gentility, rigidly fixed customs and habits, and silence about the personal costs of maintaining the code of good behaviour. There is tension between Aroon’s (willed/feigned?) ignorance and the lyricism of her words; is she aware of the root of “orchid” here?
The men were the flowers in these mysterious forests, sleek and orchidaceous in their hunt coats, the facings and collars pale, thin gold watch-chains crossing meagre stomachs, white ties as exact as two wings on a small bird’s back . . .
There is no kindness, except during the brief reign of Mrs Brock in the schoolroom. And poor, loving Mrs Brock is driven to suicide by her treatment at the hands of her employers. It’s both a funny and a chilly tale, brilliantly told.
My fourth sojourn in Antarctica. Unsurprisingly Scott’s diaries didn’t have the novelty that Wilson’s had for me, but I was impressed that both men kept their style and their clarity to the end. No complaints, care for everyone, and something that I would call nobility if I could be sure of what it is.
We are all adventurers here, I suppose, and wild doings in wild countries appeal to us as nothing else could do. It is good to know that there remain wild corners in this dreadfully civilised world.
Any humour came from my own levity. How can I not laugh at, “We managed to wedge in all the dog biscuits, the total weight being about 5 tons;”? The Terra Nova at this point sounds more like Noah’s Ark. Anton and Demetri, the two Russians, are “boys”. Cherry-Garrard, whom I got to know so well, barely features, but Ponting is there and well regarded. Favourite words are “gallant” and “cheerful”. (And why not?)
Atkinson has discovered a new tapeworm in the intestines of the Adélie penguin – a very tiny worm one-eighth of an inch in length with a propeller-shaped head.
One thing that this book brought home to me was how public the endeavour was: each sledge, pony or sleeping bag was donated by a school, individual or institution. Interesting to think that even in the days of slow news it was possible for an undertaking like this to be global news. Ponting the publicist realised this, of course.
The third time I’ve read this novel. I still don’t really get its attraction, even though I can see how well it is written. The idea of the American dream has no hold on me, and Gatsby is so obviously a criminal and a fraud that I have no emotional investment when reading it.
But it is interesting nevertheless. This strange, anything-goes society of surfaces (advertisements, films); money either inherited (European fashion) or from crime (Gatsby); the solid, hypocritical values of the mid-west (“sent a substitute to the civil war”) vs the unrooted, self-mythologising opportunities of the east. Nick is a flawed narrator: he seems to fill in so many blanks with his own wistfulness, padding out Gatsby’s story. (One should never trust a narrator who says “I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known”.)
And the betrayal of the American dream (which is, really, the European dream): how humans always fall short of paradise:
. . . gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes . . Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.
Still with the Terra Nova expedition. Ponting’s photographs made a great impression on me when I first came across them: not as poignant as Wilson’s watercolours, but more fascinating. Ponting’s opening paragraph is as contrived as Earthly Powers’:
Before going to the Far South with Captain Scott’s South Pole Expedition, my life – save for six years’ ranching and mining in Western America; a couple of voyages around the world; three years of travel in Japan; some months as war correspondent with the First Japanese Army during the war with Russia; and in the Philippines during the American war with Spain; and save, too, for several years of travel in a score of other lands – had been comparatively uneventful.
Well, that is Ponting in a nutshell: a self-publicist and product-placement expert, with a very readable style and a great sense of adventure. He’s not as endearing a guide as Wilson or Cherry-Garrard – he’s too self-assured, and his prose is too one-paced (and occasionally pompous) to be that – but the book is interesting and well-written. Like the others, he has nothing but good to say of his companions on the expedition. He demonstrates courage, skill and patience in the pursuit of getting the perfect photograph or kinematographic film – and, my goodness, how wonderful they are. He even managed to photograph his companions on their return from the initial depot-laying trip, looking quite as dishevelled and hairy as one might expect after such an effort.
I wonder what else about the Terra Nova expedition I can find in the library?
After a brief spell in the Wodehouse universe (still wonderful after all these years), I decided to enter John le Carré’s world again. He is undoubtedly a brilliant storyteller, but I still occasionally tire of the snobbery – which he only partly undermines by his slyness in puncturing it – and that tone of cleverness-from-on-high. Unfair of me, perhaps: after all, he was undoubtedly clever, and goodness knows I still have plenty to learn.
I read The Honourable Schoolboy, Smiley’s People and A Legacy of Spies. (By the end I was cynically wondering how many more times Smiley – surely ancient by now – could be dragged out of retirement.) Despite my cavilling, I enjoyed all of them; indeed, after so much comfort-reading I rather liked having to read every word to grasp nuance along with plot.
The Honourable Schoolboy was fascinating, roaming across Hong Kong, London, Italy and South East Asia towards the end of the Vietnam war (whose shocks also upended Laos and Cambodia). It has pretty much everything: mystery, thrills, deadly action, bureaucratic deliberations, breadth, moral ambiguity, disillusionment, corruption, and colonial crimes and decay. The incidental descriptions – bars, journalism, fashion shows – were always worth savouring. The tone ranges from club-bore bookending to fast-moving action, blending British and American stereotypes of narration. Everything – with one big exception – is believable and coherent in this world. The exception is the titular character: he comes across as a collection of facets, more like a Cubist painting than a person. His vocabulary (“super”, “sport”, “gosh”) is as stylised as – and a great deal less articulate than – Bertie Wooster’s, and the defining action which sends him completely off piste is just bizarre. He tries to rescue a damsel in distress out of a mixture of chivalry and lechery. Well, OK then. Should I just note her as another example of a le Carré fantasy who falls short of being believable?
Smiley’s People I also enjoyed. A Legacy of Spies was OK, but le Carré’s tics were getting too familiar by then. It raised an interesting question: how culpable should we see those Cold War spies on our side who put people in danger a generation or more ago? The plot re-uses the The Spy who Came in from the Cold, but it creaks a bit. It’s narrated by Peter Guillam, who, like the honourable schoolboy, also seems to be knocked askew by a bit of femininity.
I also watched a couple of BBC interviews with him – one with Malcolm Muggeridge from 1966. (How on earth did Muggeridge get away with such self-indulgent mannerisms BTW?) Le Carré was clever, fluent and always interesting, and by the later interview he was obviously more practised and entertaining at it. Worth reading and worth listening to, which is not a bad epitaph.
Like every other literate person, I imagine, I began lockdown by reaching for the Victorian doorstoppers: Dickens and Eliot.
Of course – like every other literate person – what I actually ended up doing was feasting on all the novelists I loved as a teenager, in much the same way as I used to consume two boxes of Smarties at a sitting. (Bizarre to wish to retreat to those years.) And then – when I had exhausted those writers – I looked round for other authors to gobble up.
My conclusion? Well, of my teenage reads, Georgette Heyer and Mary Stewart are still the business. Excellent craftswomen, fashioning wit, style, plot, adventure, romance and a complicit assumption of readerly intelligence into perfect escapism. (Almost literally in Stewart’s case: she certainly fed my longing to visit southern Europe.) No doubt they fed an awful lot of nonsense to an unformed and impressionable mind – holding out the carrot of impossible adventures and excitement – but, honestly, anything one encounters at that age is likely to leave a lasting impression.
Agatha Christie: well, blah. Her books certainly taught me to gulp down whole pages in seconds. I find her better now as a radio serial to listen to while cooking or cleaning. Patricia Wentworth’s Miss Silver stories, which I only discovered this year, were quite readable – the plots, for me, taking second place to fascinating social and economic details. As I opened yet another of the many, many books that she wrote, I had a vision of the author as a self-employed churner-out of words. Perhaps not quite the pisseur de copie of A Far Cry from Kensington*, but certainly someone with a living to wring out of Miss Silver and yet another pair of sweetly-matched lovers. (The fact that Wentworth used the same paragraphs again and again to describe Miss Silver and her flat suggests that she was keen to keep up her word count with the least possible effort.)
So, lots of comfort-reading (i.e. the books that don’t make it onto this blog). And then I asked the web to find me books similar to Stewart’s: romantic thrillers set in exotic locations. Most of the recommendations were American, which I jettisoned at once because they can’t possible be similar; give me Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Chandler instead. I tried M M Kaye and Jane Aiken Hodge . . . and discovered that Stewart really was sui generis.
Death in Berlin and Death in Cyprus by M M Kaye are basically carbon copies of each other but set in different locations. Perfectly readable and enjoyable, and incidentally interesting about army life and social behaviour of the 1950s, but the romance is straight out of Mills & Boon and the plot and characterisation are that of a puppet-master. Her books are preferable to Jane Aiken Hodge’s, whose thrillers read as if she makes things up as she goes along. Certainly the old put-down of typing, not writing was perfect for her books. She can’t reach a denouement without finding another knot to untangle even though the skein is perfectly smooth. Goodness, but she was trite: Nancy Drew mysteries for grown-ups. Had I, as a teenager, read Strangers in Company instead of My Brother Michael, I doubt that I would ever have uncovered a desire in myself to go to Greece at all.
And, just to illustrate how desperate I have been for comfort reading, I even downloaded Imogen by Jilly Cooper. I had a recollection of her books from my days working Saturdays in W H Smith: a shelf of romances with girls’ names. Yes, well. There was a certain breathless jollity about it, but it was written at the level of a Jackie short story. However, it reminded that “abroad” really was different in the 1970s, and that casual gropiness was perfectly acceptable.
So, an interesting diversion and I’m now back on track. I have downloaded P G Wodehouse, another of my teenage and eternal favourites, and am currently re-reading The Mating Season. I am waiting until I reach the line Dame Daphne (safety first) Winkworth to see if I once again dissolve into tears of laughter.
* It’s true that writing something down helps me to organise and expand my thoughts. I’d quite forgotten Spark until I was roaming around in my mind wondering how to refer to Wentworth’s style.
I now see very plainly that though we achieved a first-rate tragedy, which will never be forgotten just because it was a tragedy, tragedy was not our business.
I continue my travels in Antarctica, out of a surprised fascination and (self-centredly) to remind myself that, with discontent rather than discomfort as my companion, I am actually in clover. How can I possibly read a sentence like:
For sheer downright misery give me a hurricane, not too warm, the yard of a sailing ship, a wet sail and a bout of sea-sickness.
and still take my own moans seriously?
However, I’d be completely misleading if I implied that I am reading this to forget my own complaints. It’s a wonderful book from another world: a gripping account of a group of men who preferred adventure, the pursuit of knowledge, and comradeship – even at the risk of destruction – to staying at home. (Pascal would have despaired of them, and perhaps some of them were regretting their decision by the second winter.) It is is an excellent complement to Wilson’s diary. Cherry’s tone – writing 10 years later – echoes Wilson’s: good-humoured, generous and uncynical, but this time with hindsight and a wish to honour the memory of his old companions. Even allowing for the natural inclination to present the best view of oneself in a written account, Cherry’s qualities and values make him an excellent guide.
One of Herbert Ponting’s photographs. Although it depicts something real (sledge tracks crossing penguin tracks) it’s almost abstract, as if the lines are linking the Victorian world of Wilson and Cherry with the modern world that Ponting personified. Balla or Mondriaan might have been pleased with it as a composition.
Cherry spent 3 years with the Terra Nova expedition, at great cost to his long-term physical and mental health, and as he writes he veers between delight and despair. He talks evocatively of the beauty and purity that he finds in the “Pure South”. (“Purity” is a loaded word now, but I try to imagine the industrialised Edwardian Britain that he left behind.) Nevertheless he is unsparing in describing the hardships, particularly of the winter journey in 1911: 5 weeks and 120 miles in the middle of winter, 24-hour darkness, 3 men dragging/relaying 2 heavy sledges, temperatures down to -70 degrees, clothes frozen to cement, blizzards, losing (then mercifully re-finding) their tent . . . all to bring back some Emperor Penguin eggs. (And even then Cherry broke 2 out of the 5 they collected at great peril to themselves.)
The horror of the nineteen days it took us to travel from Cape Evans to Cape Crozier would have to be re-experienced to be appreciated; and any one would be a fool who went again: it is not possible to describe it. The weeks which followed them were comparative bliss, not because later our conditions were better – they were far worse – but because we were callous. I for one had come to the point of suffering at which I did not really care if only I could die without much pain. They talk of the heroism of the dying – they little know – it would be so easy to die, a dose of morphia, a friendly crevasse, and blissful sleep. The trouble is to go on . . .
Still with that generous spirit:
We did not forget the Please and Thank You, which means much in such circumstances, and all the little links with decent civilization which we could still keep going. I’ll swear there was still a grace about us when we staggered in. And we kept our tempers – even with God.
The generosity is real: despite his admiration for Scott, Cherry acknowledges contradictions and isn’t blind to less heroic qualities:
What pulled Scott through was character, sheer good grain, which ran over and under and through his weaker self and clamped it together. . . .
And notwithstanding the immense fits of depression which attacked him, Scott was the strongest combination of a strong mind in a strong body that I have ever known. And this because he was so weak! Naturally so peevish, highly strung, irritable, depressed and moody. Practically such a conquest of himself, such vitality, such push and determination and withal in himself such personal and magnetic charm.
A very dated way of describing someone, perhaps, but it says something about both Scott and Cherry. Wilson and Bowers, too, were gold, pure shining, unalloyed. Words cannot express how good their companionship was. I suppose it was this kind of rather endearing attitude that Edwardians took to the trenches and left there.
The set-up is “Gentlemen and Players” (i.e. the expedition members and naval officers vs the seamen): Cherry takes it so much for granted that it’s impossible to tell if the comradeship extended to everyone regardless of status. Personally, I think it must have done, but perhaps only to a certain extent. (Maybe deference – like the pleases and thank yous – went too deep to be cast aside entirely.) There are several moments that bring on tears, and one of them is how Cherry introduces Lashly’s (a seaman) account of the return journey of the Last Supporting Party (i.e. the last group to assist Scott and his companions on their attempt on the Pole). There are 3 of them: Lashly and Crean and Mr Evans (the expedition’s second-in-command). Evans suffered badly from scurvy on the return journey and almost died; he told Crean and Lashly to leave him behind, but they disobeyed their officer. Crean set off on a perilous solo march to Hut Point for help (30 miles geographical [with] a little chocolate and biscuits), and Lashly stayed with Evans. It ended well: Crean got through and Evans was saved, but it might so easily have gone the other way.
And this tale of stoicism, courage and self-sacrifice (which still moves me even as I type this) which should surely have been recorded by an “angel writing in a book of gold”? While working on the book, Cherry asked Lashly for an account of the journey:
He was very willing, and added that somewhere or other he had a diary which he had written, perhaps it might be of use? I asked him to send it to me, and was sent some dirty thumbed sheets on paper. And this is what I read . . .
The whole voyage has a feel of both enterprise and amateurism. Innovation was embraced: the expedition took 3 motor sledges (with tracks like tanks): one sank and the two that remained were not particularly useful. Cherry was very short-sighted and unable to wear his glasses in very cold temperatures. He writes – 10 years after the events – how the readiness of him and his companions to volunteer for anything that needed doing (rather than having a routine) wasted the energies of the most willing.
In the final chapter (entitled “Never Again”) he calmly describes how, on 17 January 1913, the 15 men (13 of whom had already been there since the beginning) decided that they could not count on being relieved by the Terra Nova and should prepare for a third winter in Antarctica. And then – as they are killing seals to store for a third, hopeless winter – the Terra Nova sails into McMurdo Sound. Again, Cherry tells it so simply, but by this stage you are sharing everything with him and are overwhelmed with his “immense relief”.
So much to love and consider about this book. Before leaving Antarctica, the expedition members have time to construct a cross on Observation Hill to Scott, Wilson, Oates, Bowers and Evans with the final lines of “Ulysses”:
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
(Obviously not my favourite quote from Ulysses, but the right one here.)
And still so much to find out! I have ordered Ponting’s “With Scott in the Antarctic” from the library, and I am wondering if I can find Raymond Priestley’s account of the Northern Party’s (an expedition within the main expedition) stranded winter in the igloo they built, with dysentery and ptomaine poisoning as their companions.
As I said, a different world. So different are the emphases of our time that I feel almost embarrassed to be moved by what looks to me like heroism. It probably wouldn’t be a comfortable fit in everyday life, though.
Such men may be at a discount in conventional life, but give me a snowy ice-floe waving about on the top of a black swell, a ship thrown aback, a sledge-party almost shattered, or one that has just upset their supper on to the floor cloth of the tent (which is much the same thing), and I will lie down and cry for Bowers to come and lead me to food and safety.
And finally . . . in a week when I read that British ski-tourists have shamefully run away from quarantine in Switzerland (and how did they manage to justify to themselves going there in the first place?), I feel I should quote Scott to show what honourable behaviour looks like:
We took risks, we knew we took them; things have come out against us, and therefore we have no cause for complaint.
I’ve been thinking about Victor Klemperer’s diaries, which I read a few years ago. (I’m really NOT suggesting any equivalence between his time and this.)
Obviously the diaries lack some dramatic tension: the reader knows well enough how the war concluded and that Victor and Eva Klemperer survived. But Klemperer didn’t have a crystal ball as he was writing: he was in the middle of it with no certainty of his immediate fate. The first two volumes span some 12 years, and they begin with the initial restrictions on Jews in Germany in 1933. You follow the gradual diminishing and degradation of Klemperer’s life: the loss of his teaching post, the forced move, the confiscation of enjoyment, the deportation of Jewish friends and acquaintances to Theresienstadt (never truly expecting to return), the forced labour, the meagre diet. There is no respite for pains, toothache, sadnesses. Klemperer sees those around him growing thin and grey and realises that the same is happening to him. At the end of each year, he looks back at the previous 12 months and tots up his losses and (if possible) his gains. And so it goes until 1945, when Victor and Eva are able to flee during the fire bombing of Dresden.
I keep thinking of how many years Klemperer endured this for, aware of how much he was losing but never knowing how much more he had to lose. It continues to resonate with me as I wonder – entirely selfishly and self-centredly, I know – what next year will bring and whether the vaccines will permit me to resume the freedoms and luxuries that I took for granted and/or whether a no-deal Brexit will just prolong my house-arrest.
It hasn’t been all bad, I suppose. If I were to tot up my own balance sheet in 2 weeks’ time I would have to put on the credit side the walking scrapbook and unexpected new interests like Edward Thomas and Antarctic exploration. I’ve been in distanced contact regularly with people I don’t normally see from one year to the next. I’ve survived the curtailment of my travels by a lot of comfort-seeking (and mind-numbing) re-reading and day-dreaming. But on the debit side is an awful lot of tedium, damping-down and frustration.
The necessaries of civilization were luxuries to us: and as Priestley found under circumstances compared to which our life at Hut Point was a Sunday School treat, the luxuries of civilization satisfy only those wants which they themselves create.
I think this is the third time I’ve read this. The first time was in my 20s after watching the BBC adaptation of it: no doubt I missed a great deal, but I found it intriguing, funny, sly and annoying. Even after all this time I still want Miss Callendar to hold fast to her liberal humanist values and accident-prone Henry to remain upright while championing personal decency . . . but the plot never changes. Both succumb to Kirk’s manipulation of the Zeitgeist: Miss Callendar is synthesised into his latest mistress and Henry is trampled underfoot by the onward march of 1970s trends – all in that breathless present-tense where the events are told as they happen.
Bradbury is excellent at describing the “feel” of his world – temporal, intellectual, physical. (I remember those Afghan coats!) He is also very good at critiquing the dead hand that feminism is trying to raise:
‘Your idea of a good party,’ says Barbara, ‘is to invite the universe. And then leave me to wash up after.’
It’s full of clever, funny lines and observations, but it’s also serious about the principles on which one builds one’s life. Having overcome his conformist, respectable background, Kirk has become the quintessential trend-spotter and -setter who triumphs over older habits of thought – except for personal despair, which never quite goes away.
(Update: I see I remembered this novel when I had finished The Serial.)
I’ve just read two of her novels in quick succession: The Matchmaker and The Bachelor. The former is set at the end of the war and the other during the war, and they are romantic and unsentimental at the same time. They were very readable and very similar: centring around a family and their acquaintances, courtship, domestic chores, a concern of how one should live well and kindly, and shifting points of view, so that one minute you are sympathetically inside Sylvia’s head and the next you see her through Alda’s eyes as half-educated and shallow. (And you also see Alda through Sylvia’s eyes as interfering.) The Italian PoWs and the Bairamian (may as well be Ruritanian!) “help” give a flavour of a different culture: very unEnglish and perhaps “not quite the thing”, but attractive and a useful contrasting device. All the characters have their flaws, but they are drawn with a forensic generosity and intelligence. The narrative tone and attitude are of their time: it’s OK to describe Sylvia as vulgar, which is fine by me. Yes, it’s snobbery, but it’s also rooted in something more than disdain. You sense an educated English person’s ineffectual dismay at creeping Hollywoodisation: e.g. Sylvia ignoring Powell & Pressburger’s films in favour of anything with Van Johnson in it. (Not that that stops Alicia and Richard enjoying Casablanca. But they have other interests, and Richard’s socialism is principled rather than strident.)
Like Elizabeth Bowen, Gibbons describes the countryside very lovingly and observantly. Her most attractive characters – for all their faults and sillinesses – have the gift of being willing to be pleased, even while war is raging or austerity is biting:
Ronald Lucie-Browne now entered the room, and went across to the fire, rubbing his hands and appreciating the warmth after a walk home of several miles through cold, foggy, darkened streets. There was a strike of bus and tram drivers in Ironborough and street lighting had been reduced to save coal. He looked amused and tranquil, and in his head there lingered a line of Alfredy de Vigny’s which he had quoted that afternoon during a lecture:
Marche à travers les champs une fleur à la main.
It seemed to him that it was still possible to do this, even during a Time of Troubles. He believed that there must have been many families, unrecorded by history, who had contrived to live happy lives even in the darkest period, until they were finally overwhelmed, and as he gradually reassumed civilian life, he saw more and more plainly that this was what he must lead his own family to do. They were helpless, but they need not be unhappy, for most of the great natural sources of joy were still open to them.
Aides memoires part 2 