Cornflower Books

A man o' pairts

   

    "John Buchan's career as a writer, one of the best-selling of his day, would have been remarkable, even in someone who had done nothing else. He wrote more than a hundred books, including twenty-seven novels, six substantial biographies, a monumental twenty-four-volume contemporary account of the First World War, three works of political philosophy and a legal textbook. There were also dozens of poems and short stories, and about a thousand articles for newspapers and periodicals. As well as a writer, he was a scholar and an antiquarian and, at various times, a barrister, colonial administrator, journal editor, publisher, director of wartime propaganda, Member of Parliament, and imperial proconsul. He had been a skilled and intrepid mountaineer in his youth and was always a dedicated fisherman and a prodigious walker. And he did all this while suffering from debilitating illness for most of his adult life."

Ursula Buchan, Beyond the Thirty-Nine Steps: A Life of John Buchan.

Bookshelves and shadows

    A play of light brings the outside in and draws the eye to a couple of the biography shelves. Among the books sits Monty Mouse (NB Rebecca now sells her wares here) and a postcard of the Wenhaston Doom I mentioned the other day.

Lees-Milne on ...

... John Gielgud: "charming but inattentive. In conversation sophisticated remarks patter off him like undirected raindrops."

... Bamber Gascoigne (aged 7): "a sensitive, delicate and adventuresome little boy."

... Ralph Vaughan Williams: "a very sweet man, with an impressive appearance. He is big and broad and has a large head with sharply defined features, and eyes that look far into the distance."

... Beatrix Potter (Mrs. Heelis): "an unbending, masculine, stalwart woman, with an acute business sense. She was rather tart with her dim husband and adored her sheep, not for sentimental Beatrix Potter reasons but for hard-cash Heelis ones."

... T.S. Eliot: "dark, swarthy, professorial, retiring, quizzical, diffident - a medical practitioner or undertaker's clerk."

 

From James Lees-Milne, Diaries, 1942-1954

Oxgodby revisited

   

    J.L. Carr's A Month in the Country is one of today's Kindle deals, and ten years on (almost to the day) from first writing about it I'm reposting my thoughts* for those who haven't already discovered this gem:

  What a beautiful book this is, poignant and touching without being sentimental, matter-of-fact while yet laying bare the author's love of a place and its people, and a character's emotional depth. Its straightforwardness and its economy are striking, but those qualities cost it nothing, and on the contrary, its self-contained, simple and perfectly realised story is enhanced by them.

    J. L. Carr's A Month in the Country is about just that: a summer month spent in rural Yorkshire shortly after the First World War. Tom Birkin, damaged by both his wartime experiences and his wife's faithlessness, comes to Oxgodby to restore a medieval mural in the church. His work absorbs him, going some way to occlude his painful memories (though what's referred to is never laboured), but contrary to expectations he is taken up by the village, finding friends among the local people, and more than the easy feelings of friendship for a young woman.

    Yes, in a way there's an elegiac quality to Tom's remembering - he's looking back from a distance of around sixty years - and the theme of uncovering/discovery finds its statement, exposition and resolution very adeptly played throughout, but there's an appealing self-awareness to Tom and to his story, and the following passage seems to be its key:

"If I'd stayed there, would I always have been happy? No, I suppose not. People move away, grow older, die, and the bright belief that there will be another marvellous thing around the corner fades. It is now or never; we must snatch at happiness as it flies."

    I could read the book all over again now, to savour what I loved, to delight in the foil which the Ellerbecks, Mr. Jagger, Mr. Dowthwaite and their like provide for Alice, Mr. Keach and Moon, to regret Tom's failure of spirit at the crucial moment, and to agree with him that "perhaps you did well to leave early; it may not have lasted".

   There are echoes of Hardy, Housman (and see the epigraphs), H. E. Bates, L.P. Hartley; there's nostalgia and the bruise-ache of recollection. The final passage is saddest of all:

"All this happened so long ago... So, in memory, it stays as I left it, a sealed room furnished by the past, airless, still, ink long dry on a put-down pen.
But this was something I knew nothing of as I closed the gate and set off across the meadow."

 

 

*Where does the time go? Click here for the book group's comments, and here for The Last Englishman, Byron Rogers' excellent biography of J.L. Carr.

War Doctor

 

 

    In her Afterword to War Doctor: Surgery on the Front Line, Eleanor Nott writes eloquently about heroism and our need for heroic stories:

    "[they] give us hope, make us feel better about our sometimes wretched world, and serve as inspiration and aspiration. We may not have those qualities ourselves, but knowing they are out there gives us comfort.

    Society demands heroes, but we don't necessarily want them to be too human. We don't want messiness. To remain pleasing to us they should exist in a sphere of goodness and virtue we ourselves find impossible to attain. At the first hint of failing, the first chink in the armour, the bubble is burst and the search for perfection begins afresh."

    Perceptive words from the wife of a man whose very humanness comes across in his memoir as clearly as does his outstanding heroism, for David Nott's story is one of selfless determination, of skill and dedication in extremis, and of tenacity and a humanitarian impulse so strong that no matter the apparent hopelessness of a situation he never gives up.

    A vascular surgeon based in London, David has for many years taken unpaid leave to go, under the auspices of charities such as MSF and the ICRC, to work in war zones or at sites of natural disasters. Typically operating in what are called 'surgically austere environments', lacking equipment, resources, and often manpower, he has endured extreme personal danger to help both the innocent people caught up in conflict and, on occasion, those committing the violent acts. "It is the vulnerability of human life that makes us all the same," he says, commenting that "you can't take your normal NHS mindset to a war," while discussing the moral conundrum implicit in giving medical care to the patient in front of him, regardless of that person's identity, past, or - likely - future actions.

    David Nott's descriptions of the terrible injuries he treats on his postings make hard reading, but don't shy away from them. You will learn more from this book than from a television news report or a broadsheet article, for dealing as he does with the consequences of terrible violence against civilians, the author shows what it means to live in Aleppo, say, or Gaza, or Darfur, places where his patients' lives and deaths are "synonymous with despair". His concise and graphic accounts of the extraordinarily difficult and distressing conditions in which he and his colleagues work show also the particular characteristics necessary to do the job he does. "You need to radiate serenity," he says of leading an operation, even while under bombardment, but keeping calm under pressure doesn't mean he is unaffected by what he has seen and undergone, and he is candid in describing the effect his work has had on his mental health, something he discusses (as I mentioned recently) on his Desert Island Discs.

    Away from the front line, David Nott teaches other doctors to do what he does, directing The Definitive Surgical Trauma Skills course run by the Royal College of Surgeons in London, extending that into Surgical Training for Austere Environments and the Hostile Environment Surgical Training Course, raising funds through his charity The David Nott Foundation to sponsor attendees. Beyond the operating and lecture theatres, his mission to help those in need led him to seek a ceasefire in Syria in late 2016. His media appearances, advocacy at the highest levels and relentless petitioning of those with the power to direct events eventually resulted in a cessation of hostilities sufficient to evacuate Aleppo's sick, injured, and the medical staff caring for them. He is a hero through and through.

Out in paperback ...

   

     .... The Reading Cure by Laura Freeman.

    One of my two non-fiction books of the year last year, the full post on it is here.

A bucket for the memory well

 

    "This is a book of short pieces in verse or prose, an attempt to recover or otherwise conjure up a particular time (the 1940s), a particular Black Country town (Oldbury) and a particular childhood (mine). There is, I will confess, some unreliability here. I start with good intentions and a true memory - day-old chicks, street lamps, a clip round the ear - but soon, often as not, the fictional habit kicks in and I am led astray. One sentence lures me on to another, has the seeds of another in it, or is a template almost. Like knitting, that first row of stitches which sets up the rest. Or a rhyme reveals, or the need to avoid a rhyme reveals, some possibility. And I follow."

    Allan Ahlberg, The Bucket: Memories of an Inattentive Childhood.    

    That passage, and the book's epigraph (below), seem to link neatly to the final paragraph in yesterday's post.

    "If any part of the following mixture of truth and fiction strikes the reader as unconvincing, he has my permission to disregard it."

    William Maxwell, So Long, See You Tomorrow.

Bella Figura

    Bella Figura: How to Live, Love and Eat the Italian Way is a light-hearted, diverting read, one for those days when you feel like coasting.

    It's an account of a year Kamin Mohammadi spent in Florence, licking her wounds after the loss of a job and the end of a relationship, and yes, there's a degree of transformation as she learns to eat better, feel more comfortable in her own skin, re-establish her sense of self after the bruising events which led up to her move, but beyond a few basic recipes and tips about celebrating beauty in all things, it's less lifestyle manual than 'love in the sun' memoir. Maybe I'm just getting grumpy in my old age but I found the account of an affair with an unsuitable man - to which much space is given - tiresome; others may be more enthralled.

    Pleasant as the book is, I was left wondering how much of its detail is faithful record and how much is 'creative re-enactment', in other words a collage of events, conversations, observations, all based on fact but assembled with artistic licence. It doesn't matter either way, of course, for it's the author's story to tell as she chooses, and she does so nicely, but I sensed a degree of convenient conflation which leads me to think about authenticity in its wider sense in the genre as a whole. 

The Time by the Sea

   

    Ronald Blythe's reminiscences of his time spent in Aldeburgh in the 1950s, helping with the running of the Festival there, reads like a Who's Who of the arts world. The Time by the Sea includes affectionate vignettes of friends such as Benjamin Britten, John Nash, E.M. Forster, but is as good on the 'walk-ons', the people who were not household names but who were nevertheless a grounding or enriching presence among the artists, writers and musicians: " ... Connie Winn who I used to think had escaped from a novel by E.F. Benson," "Millie the housekeeper, a mite unsteady by seven o'clock."

    Cedric Morris is one of those with a chapter to himself, and this line particularly caught my eye: "I was always intrigued by his catlike satisfaction with present time. It caused his days to become so long that, in spite of a stream of visitors, an enormous amount of painting and gardening - and teaching - managed to get done." That's an attribute worth cultivating.

    Ronald Blythe clearly has a gift for friendship, and his intimates and acquaintances - whether direct or at one or two removes - stretch across the years to form a web of connections as distinctive as the East Anglian landscape it overlays, his memories as evocative of person and place as any artist's rendering.

    He has spent most of his life inland, but when he initially went to stay on the coast at Thorpeness it was to get on with a book: "Setting down the first words of a first novel was not unlike putting a toe in the North Sea when the weather warmed up. How far dare I go? There was a page of Quink then a page of Olympia typewriter letters. I saw that I was methodical if nothing [...] I had never slept so near to the sea before, not even in Cornwall. It was marvellously monotonous and apparently safe, unable to make the few yards to where I lay, a sea on a cosmic leash, rushing at me then pulled back. Yet it sucked at my pillow and clinked its shingly trinkets at my ear. It bayed and hissed and implored, and would do so for ever. I felt it dragging my new purpose from me. I told it, 'Wait until after breakfast and then you can have me, gale or no gale.'"

    For more from Ronald Blythe, here's a post on In the Artist's Garden.

Hearing things

 

    

    "Listening has been a large part of my craft. [...] Listening in the strict sense of the word means to hear attentively. Yet literature abounds with remarkable things which the writer heard because he was not paying this kind of classroom attention, and by this I do not mean inner voices and the like, but actual sounds, usually sentences, gloatingly acquired. Those speaking these sentences, did they but know that they were being so effortlessly intercepted, could say, 'I am not talking to you!' But as every writer knows at such a moment, they are! - and in riveting tones. His thoughts build up around these syllables which he could have missed had he been listening 'attentively' and his creativity comes into play."

    Ronald Blythe, The Time by the Sea: Aldeburgh 1955-1958

Listening in

   

    Much of January's Slightly Foxed Podcast is - fascinatingly - about the art of editing, and Diana Athill's Stet: An Editor's Life (from which there's an excerpt here) is discussed. Sue Gee takes part and tantalisingly mentions that she's "about to go with a fourth [publishing house]" so let us hope that means a new novel is not far away. If you haven't already read her, this post covers her most recent book and includes links to take you further; she is too good to miss.

John Sandoe recommends

    John Sandoe have published their selection of books for the new year; here are some that particularly caught my eye:

    Joyride: To a Reunion at Kardamyli, Tony Scotland

    The Man who was Saturday: The Extraordinary Life of Airey Neave, Patrick Bishop

    The Face Pressed against a Window: A Memoir, Tim Waterstone

    Threads of Life: A History of the World though the Eye of a Needle, Clare Hunter

    Season Songs, Ted Hughes

    Clifford Webb: Illustrator and Wood Engraver, Simon Brett

    Japanese Gardens: A Journey, Monty Don

    Copsford, Walter J.C. Murray

    The Well-Gardened Mind, Sue Stuart-Smith

Five favourites

    Looking back at Mrs. Delany prompted me to go through my reading journal to see what I was reading on this day in each of the last ten years. I've chosen five favourites from the ten, and the links below will take you to posts on them, should you not already know the books or want to find out more:

    The Reading Cure by Laura Freeman - a superb debut.

    The Inimitable Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse - there's no post on it, but let this one stand instead.

    Lady Audley's Secret by Mary Elizabeth Braddon - which reminds me I have The Woman in White on the TBR pile.

    The Cunning Man by Robertson Davies (and see also). Must read more of RD!

    The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley - and here's Alan at the writing desk.

Twilight

    "For twilight, the time between times, brings true grey, the colour that exists in its own right. Even the word itself, twilight, carries a gentle and lyrical sound, the time between lights, the greater light of the sun and the lesser light of the moon. Here is the moment of the changing of the guard between these two luminaries. It is a fragile time of transition, half-light and half-dark - it is mysterious, ambiguous. It is the time of uncertainty, given to us daily as a reminder of the reality of the between-time.

    It is an image from which we can learn so much, and it falls to the poet to tell us what this gift can mean. When Andrew Motion, the former Poet Laureate, was asked to turn The Wind in the Willows into a ballet libretto, he discovered an aura of mystery there that finds its way into these lines*, spoken by the actor playing the author Kenneth Grahame as he emerges into the attic and looks around at the audience:

    Here I am, just here. Awake

    But dreaming. In the attic of my home -

    And nothing is quite certain any more.

    Is this grey twilight or the dusty air?

    You see? You can't be sure. And nothing's sure.

    Inside my head. I'm like a ghost that floats

    Between two worlds ..."

 

    Esther de Waal, Living on the Border: Reflections on the Experience of Threshold

 

*See more here.

Cornflower Blues, 2018

    My books of the year list is a shorter one this time (here is last year's for comparison).

    In non-fiction, Henry Marsh makes a reappearance, this time with Admissions his second volume of memoirs, while Laura Freeman - an outstanding newcomer - shares top spot for The Reading Cure.

    In fiction, Dear Mrs. Bird came along at a very difficult time, but A.J. Pearce's perfect pitch helped me through; Anne Youngson, showing that you're never too old to begin a new career, is a worthy Blue with her debut Meet Me at the Museum (which is getting the wider recognition it deserves), and joining them on the podium are two old hands, Kate Atkinson for Transcription, and William Boyd for Love is Blind.

    If you have a moment, perhaps you'd share your reading highlights of the year.

Eternal Boy: The Life of Kenneth Grahame

    I closed Matthew Dennison's biography of Kenneth Grahame with such a strong feeling of 'if only' and 'what might have been', for its subject's life was so sad, so limited in many ways - partly by circumstance, partly by misdirected choice. 

    Born here in Edinburgh in 1859 (delivered by Simpson, coincidentally), Kenneth lost his mother to scarlet fever when he was only five. His father proved unable to cope and eventually fled abroad leaving his children in the care of their grandmother in England. The surroundings of his later childhood in Berkshire may have seemed idyllic to Kenneth, but the emotional landscape was austere. A lack of funds "excluded him from the Oxford of his youthful fantasies"; instead of reading for a degree in the city he loved, he joined the Bank of England as a clerk and spent his entire career there, rising to Secretary. He made a disastrous marriage and lost his only child to suicide. His rich inner life was fully realised only in his writing.

    Those bare bones are given flesh in spare fashion in the book which shows a man forever an escapist, an inhabitant of "imaginary relationships and imaginary worlds", someone capable of achieving an "intense engagement with place", sustained by "a mysticism centred in nature."

    Would Grahame's masterpiece have existed at all or as is had his life been otherwise? Impossible to know, but in The Wind in the Willows his ideas of fellowship, his concepts of home* - and his 'twinning' of escape and homecoming - his conservative ideals of ruralism, all cast in a nostalgic light, were worked out on the page, shaped perhaps but also uncircumscribed by the failings of others and the disappointments of 'real' life.

*See also.

A postscript to ...

... this post:

    "for Nature's particular gift to the walker, through the semi-mechanical act of walking ... is to set the mind jogging, to make it garrulous, exalted ... certainly creative and suprasensitive."

    Kenneth Grahame, quoted by Matthew Dennison in Eternal Boy: The Life of Kenneth Grahame.

Browsing and buying

    Does the fact that the Norrington Room's Philosophy Help Desk was unmanned when I was there the other day suggest that it was the nihilists' shift or perhaps the immaterialists'? "Come back at noon for a platonist, or at 3.00 if it's nominalism you're after..." It reminded me of this.

    Enough nonsense - Blackwell's yielded several books, as the photograph shows. I'm looking to Nigel Warburton's A Little History of Philosophy to fill the (many, large) gaps in my knowledge. Julian Baggini says of it, "Warburton packs a heck of a lot into what is something of a Goldilocks volume: neither too much nor too little, the exegesis neither too thin or too thick and lumpy, his Little History can be consumed as a nourishing treat in its own right or provide the perfect fuel to kickstart anyone's journey into philosophy."

    Matthew Dennison's Eternal Boy: The Life of Kenneth Grahame is, I fear, a very sad tale as the author "charts with consummate poignancy the life of the author of The Wind in the Willows - from bookish bachelorhood to the torment of an emotionally arid marriage touched by tragedy".

    Ronald Blythe's In the Artist's Garden was, as this post shows, among the delights of last year's reading. His The Time by the Sea: Aldeburgh 1955-1958 looks at his involvement in the early years of Benjamin Britten's Festival. "It is a tale of music and painting, creativity and landscape. It describes the first steps of an East Anglian journey, an intimate appraisal of a vivid and memorable time." D.J. Taylor calls it "one of the best thing [Blythe] has written".

    In the bookshop's spirituality section I came upon Living on the Border: Reflections on the Experience of Threshold by Esther de Waal - "There is a traditional saying of ancient wisdom: 'A threshold is a sacred thing.' In some places of the world, in some traditional cultures and in monastic life, this is still remembered. It is something, however, that we often forget today. To take time to pause at a threshold - be it a place, or a moment between one action and the next - is to show reverence for the handling of space and time, and respect for those we meet. Pausing allows us to let go of all the demands and expectations of the previous activity, and to prepare for the encounter with another. In company with the poets and artists of the Welsh border country in which she lives, Esther de Waal explores what this ancient wisdom has to teach us about our public lives in the world today."

Friday reads

   

    Apologies for the rather sporadic posting of late - time and inspiration have been in short supply.

    My reading has been a bit wobbly too, but now I'm in the safe hands of William Boyd, well on with - Love is Blind and happily following the adventures of piano tuner extraordinaire Brodie Moncur in fin de siècle Paris and beyond. So far I very warmly recommend it.

 

   

    Top of the arrivals pile, meanwhile, is a book by Kate Humble; Thinking on my feet: the small joy of putting one foot in front of another "celebrates the simple, fundamental act of walking, the remarkable effect it has on our minds and bodies and the pleasure of moving through the world at walking pace". I opened it at the end just now (looking to see if there was an index) and happened to read the last couple of pages; they contain a touching, charming story which augurs well for the rest of the book.

 

        

     In the 'forthcoming' category, there's Eternal Boy, a biography of Kenneth Grahame by Matthew Dennison due out on 1st. November: "During the week Kenneth Grahame sat behind a mahogany desk as Secretary of the Bank of England; at the weekend he retired to the house in the country he shared with his fanciful wife Elspeth and fragile son Alistair and took lengthy walks along the Thames in Berkshire, 'tempted [by] the treasures of hedge and ditch; the rapt surprise of the first lords-and-ladies, the rustle of a field-mouse, the splash of a frog'.

    The result of these pastoral wanderings was The Wind in the Willows: an enduring classic of children's literature; a cautionary tale for adult readers; a warning of the fragility of the English countryside; and an expression of fear at threatened social changes that, in the aftermath of the World War I, became reality. Like its remarkable author, it balances maverick tendencies with conservatism. Graham was an Edwardian pantheist whose work has a timeless appeal, an escapist whose withdrawal from reality took the form of time travel into his own past."

    Where's your reading taking you just now? Any good books in prospect?

Marsh-lands

 

    Something to look forward to (although as it won't be out until 2021 we'll have a bit of a wait) is a new book from neurosurgeon Henry Marsh*. His next will be 'using neuroscience rather than surgery as a starting point for an exploration of what makes us human. He will reflect on the life of his own brain - having spent a lifetime fixing other people's - and ask what light neuroscience can shed on his past, present and future, blending the latest scientific discoveries with autobiography, storytelling and discussion about modern medicine, to create "a work of science, literature and memoir like no other".'

    If you don't already know Henry Marsh's prize-winning Do No Harm and his equally good second book Admissions, look out for them - I'm sure you won't be disappointed.

*Recently the castaway on Desert Island Discs.