Cornflower Books

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.

Did not finish

    I can't remember when I last abandoned a book - it is very rare for me not to finish - but I have re-shelved Long Live Great Bardfield having reached the halfway mark. 

   Horses for courses, as they say.

This week's acquisitions

    Where has the time gone? 

    I am way behind with everything, it seems, not least responding to your recommendations on last Friday's post, all of them much appreciated.

    In the end I decided on Tirzah Garwood's autobiography Long Live Great Bardfield as my next book, and 150 pages in I've got very mixed feelings about it, but perhaps she's just about to get into her stride and my reservations will fade away. We shall see.

    In other reading, the rest of the pile above arrived this week: plenty to enjoy there.

Life's work

 

    

    To the book festival again, to hear Hilary Spurling and Jenny Uglow discuss the art of biography with reference to their latest books, Anthony Powell: Dancing to the Music of Time and Mr. Lear: A Life of Art and Nonsense.

    "Are the best biographies written by women?" asked chairman Richard Holloway. "It takes a man to point that out," said Hilary Spurling. The ladies agreed that the modern 'trend' in biography of "books you want to read" was largely started by Michael Holroyd, with similar freshness in the works of Richard Holmes*, Claire Tomalin, Victoria Glendinning, and Hermione Lee. Broadly speaking, though, men tended to concentrate on the lives of military leaders and statesmen (i.e. on power) while women inclined more to examine writers and artists. Hilary Spurling declared an extreme interest in other people, and this nosiness, as she called it, which Jenny Uglow shares, makes them adept at picking up information which someone more interested in a subject's work rather than their private life - as was the emphasis in the past - might not pick up.

    Could the ladies write about someone they didn't like? "In the same way an actor can play an unpleasant character", said Hilary Spurling, while Jenny Uglow added that loving the subject's work was the more important thing: "exploring the person who made X".

    On to specifics, and a brief overview of the books under discussion. Jenny Uglow was in the happy position of being asked by her publisher what she'd like to do next, and in feeling a personal involvement with Edward Lear was quick to claim him, as she put it. Born in 1812, the 17th of 19 children, Lear was brought up by an older sister in the manner of a Regency girl, occupied with sketching, the piano, and botany. He was an outsider, always felt his nonsense was unimportant and wanted to be known first and foremost as an artist - David Attenborough considers him the greatest natural history painter of his age and collects his work. It is the tension between the different sides of the man which fascinates, she says.

    Hilary Spurling first met Anthony Powell when she was 24, literary editor of The Spectator, and invited him to lunch. They later became close friends, and her biography of him has given her more pleasure to write than any other book. Powell's 12-part A Dance to the Music of Time "changed the novel in a way no-one else has done", and in its vision, depth and breadth puts him alongside the likes of Kafka, Balzac, and Stendhal. His dislocated youth, tyrannical father, rackety early adulthood, and wartime experiences enriched his life in biographical terms, and Jenny Uglow commented that Hilary Spurling's book conveys the "texture" of the world in which Powell and friends were living.

    Asked about the scope of their writing, per book, both ladies agreed there must be no "fenced-off areas" - "you go as deep into your subject as you can", said Hilary Spurling, "and it's the biographer, not the subject, who makes the book interesting or not." Jenny Uglow put it thus: "You delve, and ask, and open, and that's the magic of it."

    As to the impact of the digital world on future biography, "There may be deletion and obsolescence, but the past won't escape us," they said with heartening assurance.

    

*Mr. C. warmly recommends Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer.

Skymeadow: Notes from an English Gardener

    Observational, philosophical, romantic, optimistic, grounded, organic ... some of my notes on Charlie Hart's Skymeadow, a worthy addition to the shelf of gardening memoirs. Charlie's book is not a 'how to', or a straightforward 'what I did', but rather an account of the creation of a garden and the fledging of a career at a period of life marked by both grief and joy.

    Charlie explores territory that is deeper and wider than his seven acre hillside plot in rural Essex as he describes how the death of his father and then the illness and passing of his mother coloured his engagement with the land and inspired his prodigious efforts at shaping a garden which was a product of his idealism yet rooted in practicality. As he learns to face anxiety and emotional pain, to somehow reach an accommodation with feelings which can so easily blight growth, he discovers the link between horticulture and healing, gains the confidence to be at ease with himself, and settles with his family into a new life in a place "whose essential character is cheeriness".

    I found Charlie's efforts admirable. The energy - both physical and emotional - which he invests in his garden is enormous. Yes, he's a dreamer (and here's to us!) and he often bites off more than he can chew, but he's resourceful, positive, sensitive - in the best way, open and honest, generous of spirit, modest and frank. It's an appealing combination of traits and tendencies, especially when applied to the art and craft of garden making, and the result is a book both heartening and uplifting. I enjoyed it greatly.

Now, where were we?

    I'll spare you all the dramatic details, but my absence over the last few weeks has been down to Mr. C's having double pneumonia requiring hospitalisation. I'm glad to say that he is now much recovered and back at work, and life is returning to normal*.

    Posts may still be sporadic though, as when things were at their worst I couldn't read at all - I began three or four books (by reliable authors) and found I simply couldn't engage with them. As the patient improved I turned to Will Schwalbe who, in Books for Living: A Reader's Guide to Life, provided the warm, intelligent, naturally comfortable voice I needed. More on it soon, I hope, as I pick up the Cornflower reins again.

 

*Even when 'normal' equates to 'a bit dull', there is a lot to be said for it!

The Slightly Foxed Best First Biography Prize

   It's entirely by chance that we've had a flurry of Slightly Foxed posts in the last few days - I am not affiliated to the Fox in any way, purely a fan - but having flagged up the SF Best First Biography Prize a little while ago it would be remiss of me not to mention the winner which was announced last night and is, as you see above, Edmund Gordon's The Invention of Angela Carter.*

    Just by the way, six years on from this post I am still no further forward Carter-wise. 'Twas ever thus.

 

*It also won the Somerset Maugham Award.

On my desk today

   

    -    The Illustrated Dust Jacket 1920-1970 by Martin Salisbury - such delights here! More on it soon.

    -    Significant Others: Creativity & Intimate Partnership edited by Whitney Chadwick & Isabelle de Courtivron. "An original and revealing series of essays on artist and writer couples whose literary and artistic renown has been compounded by the fame - or notoriety - of their relationships." This looks fascinating,

    -    as does A Secret Sisterhood: The hidden friendships of Austen, Bronte, Eliot and Woolf by Emily Midorikawa and Emma Claire Sweeney. Examining creative connections, this book "offers a new perspective on established literary figures" (Tracy Chevalier).

If you're on Instagram ...

    ... pop over to @cornflowerbooks and you'll see that in conjunction with Slightly Foxed, I'm giving away a copy of The Real Reader's Quarterly, issue 21, as part of their #getfoxed60 celebrations.

    Full details are on the post for the above picture.

    If you're interested in books published by Slightly Foxed, I have recent posts on two of them, Rosemary Sutcliff's Blue Remembered Hills, and I was a Stranger by John Hackett, and a snippet from Richard Hillyer's Country Boy.