Cornflower Books

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.

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.