Cornflower Books

Bookshop open!

    Here in Scotland bookshops re-opened this week. We popped up to Topping & Co. this morning and bought the above: the A.J. Ayer is Mr. C's, we'll both read Edmund de Waal's acclaimed Letters to Camondo and Leo Marks's* Between Silk and Cyanide, while the Christopher Lloyd and Paula Byrne's biography of Barbara Pym are for me.

*Leo Marks was the son of Benjamin Marks of Marks & Co, the bookshop at the heart of Helene Hanff's 84, Charing Cross Road.

Spring cannot be cancelled

    This is a delight! 

    Spring cannot be cancelled: David Hockney in Normandy by Martin Gayford is a book of enthusiasm (and enthusiasms) which centres on engagement, so that looking becomes seeing, and listening, hearing. It’s full of insights, discoveries, wisdom, and above all, the joy of living.

    In conversation (by phone or email) with his old friend, art critic Martin Gayford, David Hockney reflects on all manner of things while painting the coming of spring in the Normandy landscape in which he’s made a home. They talk about Hockney's work - of course - but range across the history of art as well. Poetry is quoted, the challenges of painting rain noted, puddles are analysed for their peculiar charm. Both men have so many references at their fingertips, their exchanges could have been pompous or self-satisfied, but there's none of that here. Instead, their easy back-and-forth is - as the jacket copy says - "an uplifting manifesto that affirms art's capacity to divert and inspire".

    I loved Hockney’s freshness, his sense of wonder (still, at 83), his broad knowledge, and the deep pleasure he takes in the natural world. Reading it is like eavesdropping on a fascinating discussion which you hope will go on and on.

    It's a beautifully produced book, and pure pleasure to read.

Books in brief x 3

       You don’t have to be knowledgeable about cricket to enjoy Peter Pan’s First XI. Kevin Telfer’s account of JM Barrie’s extraordinary collection of players - Arthur Conan Doyle, PG Wodehouse, AA Milne, to name a few - evokes an era and a literary milieu as well as showing Barrie through the lens of his sporting obsession.

    Ursula Buchan is to be commended for her research and her writing in A Green and Pleasant Land: How England’s Gardeners Fought the Second World War. Fascinatingly detailed and an excellent read.

    Bizarre but nonetheless compelling, Margery Allingham’s Traitor’s Purse sees Albert Campion save the world in wartime. Very slick, and not a word wasted. More on it here.

Homes and gardens

    John Harris gardens at Tresillian House (you may have seen him recently on Rick Stein's Cornwall) and in The Natural Gardener he combines a lovely chatty memoir with much practical information on his method of gardening which is to utilise the power of the moon - specifically as its phases affect the water table. Lots of good tips and links for further reading combined with the sort of advice you'd get from a highly experienced, wise gardening friend.

    I posted a passage yesterday from Lucy Worsley's Jane Austen at Home. It's a really lively book - written con brio - and I found it fascinating. It makes me want to go back to the novels and re-read now with a much greater understanding of the sub-text. Incidentally, I bought this book (a while ago) because it fell off a high shelf in Blackwell's and landed at my feet. For those who read significance into such things, I've yet to discover its defining purpose - other than to be a jolly good read!

    The World of Elizabeth Goudge by Sylvia Gower is a reprint by Girls Gone By. It's very much 'in the footsteps of' EG, visiting the places in which she lived and which provided inspiration for her books. Again, it will prompt (re-)reading and provide another layer of understanding, and I'm glad to have it alongside the novels.

Worsley on Brontë on Austen

 

    "Jane's fictional world was so perfectly, minutely and solidly constructed that it took another brilliant and unusual writer, Charlotte Brontë, a generation later, to pull it down. Brontë memorably described Pride and Prejudice as 'a carefully-fenced, highly cultivated garden with neat borders and delicate flowers - but no glance of a bright vivid physiognomy - no open country - no fresh air - no blue hill - no bonny beck. I should hardly like to live with her ladies and gentlemen in their elegant but confined houses.' She concludes her demolition job with 'these observations will probably irritate'. Yes, Charlotte Brontë, they do irritate, as you could hardly have written Jane Eyre unless Jane Austen had previously constructed something worthy of demolition."

    From Jane Austen at Home by Lucy Worsley (a most enjoyable read).

Inspiration

 

    "Connie visited [artist and designer] Norman Wilkinson at his riverside home Strawberry House, by Chiswick Mall ... As she explored and admired the house, Connie came across something that suddenly jogged her memory: hanging in the sitting-room was a copy of Richard II Holding the Red Rose of Lancaster, the painting that she had seen as a child in The Studio magazine. She explained how she had been so excited by it, the lavish richness combined with austere formality: 'I remember to this day', she wrote, 'the parterre of delicate, exquisite even strange flowers: flaked and ticked pinks, curious foxgloves, panachée roses ...the minute and elaborate detail of the smallest flower.' She told Wilkinson that this painting had inspired in her a creative interest in all kinds of flowers, whether wild, exotic, rare or commonplace. The artist was pleased when he heard that she had liked it so much because, he told her, it was he who had painted it when he was very young. He quoted some lines of Milton from Lycidas which had inspired him:

    Bring the rathe primrose that forsaken dies,

    The tufted crow-toe, and pale jessamine,

    The white pink, and the pansy freaked with jet,

    The glowing violet,

    The musk rose, and the well-attired woodbine,

    With cowslips wan that hang the pensive head,

    And every flower that sad embroidery wears. "

    From The Surprising Life of Constance Spry by Sue Shephard.

    A lovely example of links in the long chain of inspiration, and if you're interested in flowers and the wider social scene in Britain from the 1930s to the '50s I'd recommend the book warmly.

Diary of a Young Naturalist

   

    "Over the years, a wall of stone and beautiful ivy has grown up around me, and only family and wildlife are allowed in."

    I've been reading Dara McAnulty's Wainright Prize-winning Diary of a Young Naturalist, an account of four seasons of his young life. Still only sixteen but wise beyond those years, Dara's autism informs a deep and sustaining knowledge of and relationship with the natural world in his native Northern Ireland and beyond. Reading his words, you're struck by his intense sensory engagement with weather, flora, fauna; the energetic shifts of land-, sea- and cloud-scapes as backdrops to the flight of birds, the industry of insects, the essence and purpose of a single blade of grass or a giant, ancient oak.

    While the press and pull of people and the manmade world can make it hard for Dara to find his place and point of balance, nature's stimulus opens his heart and mind. Wildlife is his refuge but also his purpose, and capturing his experiences and concerns on the page not only lets him relive them - an important processing function for him - but allows the reader, irrespective of where they live, to see what is around them.

    His depth of feeling comes from a place far beyond 'mere' observation but rather an exquisite and deeply forged connection to the natural world which amounts to almost a symbiotic relationship. As both a loving guardian of our planet and an eloquent advocate for its natural treasure and its necessary protection, Dara's is a voice to heed and his example one worth following.

It was a wonderful room to wake up in ...

    "... Dreamless nights came to an end with no harder shock than that of a boat's keel grounding on a lake shore. Sunlight streamed in through the three tall windows and, as I lay in bed, all I could see was layer on ascending layer of chestnut leaves, like millions of spatulate superimposed green hands, and the crystalline sky of October framed by the thin reflected blue-white, or thick milk-white, or, where the sun struck, white-gold surfaces of the walls and window-arches and embrasures."

    From A Time to Keep Silence by Patrick Leigh Fermor.

Looking forward to re-reading ...

    ... Random Commentary, a compilation of Dorothy Whipple's notes and diaries from the 1920s to the 40s. I found it in the library a few years ago and enjoyed it very much.

Books in brief: Travels on my Elephant

 

    One of those 'Mad dogs and Englishmen ...' memoirs, the late Mark Shand's account of a trek across India with his elephant Tara is vivid, lively, and not without emotion. 

    A man who led a colourful life, Shand turned his adventure into a cause, eventually founding the conservation charity Elephant Family which establishes wildlife corridors, protecting habitats so that animals can thrive.

    I found the book fascinating, for its portrait of India, for what I learned about elephants, and for what it says about how to live.

    Hankies at the ready!

Purchases and presents

    Good reading ahead.

Opening up

    

    "Give people access to books, possibly for effectively the first time in their lives, and many of them will find within themselves an interest and a cultural capacity they perhaps never thought they had."

Tim Waterstone, The Face Pressed Against a Window

Sisters

    See also this post.

Books in brief: The Long Weekend

 

 

    The Observer reviewer of Adrian Tinniswood's The Long Weekend: Life in the English Country House between the Wars found it "fantastically readable and endlessly fascinating", and so did I.

    If you've read Mitford letters and biographies or the works of Anne de Courcy*, say, you'll be familiar with the general milieu described, but this book looks behind the façades - in all senses of the term - and shows you the full picture. I recommend it wholeheartedly.

*See also

Byatt on Heyer

   

    Some years ago A.S. Byatt wrote an article entitled 'Georgette Heyer is a Better Writer Than You Think'.

    " ... it was the first article to offer a serious appraisal of Georgette's novels and to ask: 'Why is she so good?' For Byatt the answer lay

        in the precise balance she achieves between romance and reality, fantastic plot and real detail. Her good taste, her knowledge, and the literary and social conventions of the time she is writing about all contribute to a romanticised anti-romanticism: an impossibly desirable world of prettiness, silliness and ultimate good sense where men and women really talk to each other, know what is going on between them, and plan to spend the rest of their lives together developing the relationship. "

    From Georgette Heyer: The Biography of a Bestseller by Jennifer Kloester.

                                                   ~~~~~

    There's a book group post on Georgette Heyer's A Civil Contract here (preceded by this one), and in the 'did you know...?' camp comes the fact that Booker McConnell were able to fund the Booker Prize from their investment in the copyrights of three authors: Georgette Heyer, Ian Fleming and Agatha Christie, none of whom, as Jennifer Kloester points out, "wrote the sort of fiction likely to be considered for the Booker."

    Another piece of trivia: this was Miss Heyer's favourite holiday destination.

Did you know ...

    ...that Maxim was originally called Henry? 

       And when Daphne du Maurier sent the manuscript of Rebecca to her publisher she said 'the ending is a bit brief and a bit grim ... too grim to be a winner.' Her editor read it in two days and begged to differ: "the book contains everything that the public could want". The rest is history.

Helping hands

 

   Two rather nice anecdotes from current reading:

    Julie Summers's Our Uninvited Guests: The Secret Lives of Britain's Country Houses 1939-1945 includes a chapter on Melford Hall, home to Sir William and Lady Hyde Parker, which was requisitioned by the army on the outbreak of war.

    With a new baby, and her husband recuperating after surgery following a dreadful accident, Lady Hyde Parker knew they must move out of the Hall - now overrun with soldiers - but had nowhere to go. She rang her husband's cousin Beatie who told them to come north to her at once. When they arrived at Beatie's Lake District home, Castle Cottage, so shocked was she at Sir William's condition that instead of putting them in the local inn as planned she handed them the keys to her other house, "the place where she went to be quiet when she needed peace," where they spent the next year "and benefited from the outdoor life in that beautiful corner of Cumbria." Cousin Beatie was none other than Beatrix Potter, and her retreat, Hill Top.

    Mr. C. is reading Pillar of State, the second volume of Elizabeth Longford's biography of the Duke of Wellington. In his 60s, and by then Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports, the Duke had time "to indulge his lifelong affection for children, one of his great charms."

    "Any child in distress could count upon the Duke," Lady Longford writes, "A tearful boy who had to leave his pet toad behind when he was sent away to school received regular notes from Field Marshal the Duke of Wellington to say that the toad was well; a girl despised for snob reasons by her fellow pupils at a smart Kensington day-school was presented with a bouquet of flowers from F.M. the D. of W. who had driven up personally in his carriage to deliver them."

    The Duke delighted in playing with children, and cushion fights, football, or games of chase round the ramparts at Walmer Castle were common pastimes. "You are a very nice little fellow," he said to one child playing in the garden, "when you are old enough I will give you a commission in the Guards." "But I'm a girl, Mr. Dook," replied the future Lady Spencer Walpole."

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.