Cornflower Books

The biographer in the garden

    An interesting talk by Victoria Glendinning.

March past

    A look back through the reading diary reveals some highlights from Marches past:

    Diaries, 1942-1954, James Lees-Milne

    Cakes and Ale, W. Somerset Maugham

    Waiting for the Albino Dunnock, Rosamond Richardson

    Robertson Davies: Man of Myth, Judith Skelton Grant

    The Warden, Anthony Trollope

    The Dead in their Vaulted Arches, Alan Bradley

    The Nine Tailors, Dorothy L. Sayers

    Kept: A Victorian Mystery, D.J. Taylor

    All Kinds of Magic, Piers Moore Ede

    Tea Time for the Traditionally Built, Alexander McCall Smith

    Mrs. Miniver, Jan Struther

    A Month in the Country, J.L. Carr

    Links are all to posts (of one sort or another), if I have them, and the list does not include anything on the gloomy or distressing side.

What to read next?

    Today's is a 'current reading' post for these troubled times which comes with our hope that wherever you are in the world, all is as well with you as it can be.

    As we carry on as normally but also as prudently as possible, Mr. C. is racing through the charming Miss Buncle's Book with great enthusiasm, so much so that I'm inclined to re-read it when he's done.

   While I wait for him to finish I might turn to Elizabeth Goudge whose wisdom and good heart is never not needed; I have the third volume of her  Eliots of Damerosehay trilogy to look forward to - click through for posts on The Bird in the Tree and The Herb of Grace - and she hasn't failed me yet.

    Then again, Laura Freeman's The Reading Cure might be a book to re-visit, both for its own sake and for the inviting reading trails it opens up, and let's not forget T.H. White's advice which Laura passes on with the suggestion to "plant roses so that thistles may not grow" - I'm sure your shelves are as well-filled with suitable material as are mine.

    Please do share any good reading, if you have a moment, and let's stay connected for moral support. Our best to you.

Friday reads: Chewing the Cud

    I've been reading Dick King-Smith's autobiography Chewing the Cud, a book of great charm and good heart. It's a concise account of his life, with particular emphasis on his years as a farmer - excellent in the care of his animals but, by his own admission, having no head for business. His writing career started late but was nonetheless stellar, culminating in his Guardian Children's Fiction Prize for The Sheep-Pig, the book which became the hit film Babe.

    What is evident on every page of his memoir is Dick King-Smith's amiability, good humour, positive outlook, and joy in small things, and a such it was a great pleasure to read. Also, what dog person could fail to be taken with Dick's dachshund Dodo (above)?

I popped back ...

    ... to Topping & Company this morning, and with fewer customers than on Sunday there was more space to browse (and have coffee by the window in 'Fiction', should you choose). 

    The range of the stock is astonishingly large and good so choosing is hard, but I came away with these two.

To be read - 2

    "A hugely important addition to the literature of what can be done to restore soil and soul," says the Guardian of Isabella Tree's Wilding: The return of nature to a British farm, while Adam Nicolson's verdict is "... truly the most magnificent and inspiring book."

    "Forced to accept that intensive farming of the heavy clay soils of their farm at Knepp in West Sussex was driving it close to bankruptcy, in 2000 Isabella Tree and her husband Charlie Burrell took a spectacular leap of faith and handed their 3,500 acres back to nature. With minimal human intervention, and with herds of free-roaming animals stimulating new habitats, their land is now heaving with life. Rare species such as turtle doves, peregrine falcons and purple emperor butterflies are now breeding at Knepp and biodiversity has rocketed.

    The Knepp project has become a leading light for conservation in the UK, demonstrating how letting nature take the driving seat can restore both the land and its wildlife in a dramatically short space of time, reversing the cataclysmic declines that have affected most species elsewhere in Britain over the past five decades. Part gripping memoir, part fascinating account of Britain's rural ecology, Wilding is, above all, an inspiring story of hope."

    The book was shortlisted for The Wainwright Prize (awarded a couple of days ago to Robert Macfarlane's Underland).

Thought for the day

    "Adults tend to forget - or perhaps never appreciated in the first place if lifelong non-readers themselves - what a vital part of the process rereading is for children. As adults, rereading seems like backtracking at best, self-indulgence at worst. Free time is such a scarce resource that we feel we should be using it only on new things.

    But for children, rereading is absolutely necessary. The act of reading is itself still new. A lot of energy is still going into (not so) simple decoding of words and the assimilation of meaning. Only then do you get to enjoy the plot - to begin to get lost in the story. And only after you are familiar with the plot are you free to enjoy, mull over, break down and digest all the rest. The beauty of a book is that it remains the same for as long as you need it. It's like being able to ask a teacher or parent to repeat again and again some piece of information or point of fact you haven't understood with the absolute security of knowing that he/she will do so infinitely. You can't wear out a book's patience."

    Lucy Mangan, Bookworm: A Memoir of Childhood Reading

Off to a good start

 

     "Was your first crush on Dickon instead of Johnny Depp? Do you still get the urge to tap the back of a wardrobe if you find yourself alone in a strange bedroom, or keep half an ear out at midnight for the sound of Hatty in the garden?

    If so, this is the book for you. But then, most books are. You are, like me, a bookworm."

   

    From Bookworm: A Memoir of Childhood Reading by Lucy Mangan.

This and that

    Carolyne Larrington's interesting talk on The Poetic Edda makes reference to William Morris, Wagner, and Game of Thrones (as yet unread and unwatched by me - anyone here a fan?).

                                                ~~~~~

    Here's an article to add to our occasional writers' notebooks series of posts - Robert Macfarlane on his 'underground' stationery.

                                               ~~~~~

    Sir Tim Waterstone was a recent guest of Georgina Godwin's on Meet the Writers; listen to his interview here.

Beyond the Thirty-Nine Steps

   

 

 

      A while back I mentioned I was looking for a biography of John Buchan; well, seven years on I have one and it's certainly worth the wait.

    In that 2012 post I also said I had not read a word JB had written, and quotations apart that still stands, so why - you might well ask - have I been so keen to learn more about him? That Karsh portrait (you'll find it via the above link) was one thing, the extraordinary CV another, a memory from childhood of the Hitchcock/Donat film, a notion to walk the John Buchan Way  (in lovely country not far from us), a book by his sister and one by his wife; all these fed my curiosity. I was intrigued by this son of the manse, the brilliant scholar who was the bestselling author of his day, the statesman who inspired devotion in his staff and respect in his peers.

    In Beyond the Thirty-Nine Steps, Ursula Buchan has told me all I wanted to know about her remarkable grandfather, but in addition to her eloquent and elegant marshalling of the facts of his life (fascinating in itself), she has given us a picture of the man which fulfils my hope that here was someone truly, personally, special. Throughout the book we are shown JB's "famous courtesy and good nature", his work ethic, loyalty, gift for friendship and capacity for kindness, his modesty and intellect, his "humility, humanity and humour."

    A passage which seems to sum up that character is the following:

    "After JB's death, his son Alastair wrote that his father had developed to a high degree what the Greeks called Sophrosyne, an inner harmony which engendered spiritual restraint. From this 'sprang a force so warm and positive that it charged the air around him. This lack of jealousy and anger, springing not from indifference but conviction, so pervaded the climate of his mind and of his conversation, that in his company one forgot the cheap jibe and the vindictive comment'." 

    Last summer, leaving Oxford for the long drive north, we sought out Elsfield, the village in which John Buchan and his family made a happy home from 1920 to 1935. In the churchyard is his resting place - and that of his wife - marked with a distinctive circular stone on which is inscribed a Latin couplet which translates as "His own earth here holds a man who cultivated the muses, served his country and was loved by countless friends". As good an epitaph as one might wish, and a succinct summing up of a uniquely talented and engaging person, but for the full measure of the man, look to this excellent, clear-sighted biography, of which its subject would, I'm sure, be proud.

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