a gallimaufry

in which I don't get round to the point of the post

It’s Day – what? Ten, Eleven, Twelve? And I’ve already lost count – of self-isolation. We have rolled in jam and feathers and are learning William Byrd’s back catalogue.

I seem unable to find an emotional middle ground between inanely thinking ‘For most of us this won’t be too bad and 95 per cent are likely to recover, focus on the positives’ and catastrophising: ‘Everyone who is over sixty, has a health problem or lives in a developing country is going to DIE and I’ll never see my parents again.’

Then I go outside and the weather is so beautiful, bright spring sunshine in a porcelain blue sky and cherry blossom and wallflowers, and to my astonishment my snakeshead fritillary is thriving, and I can’t believe any of this is really happening.

Yet another part of me seems to be observing events as if I am reading a dystopian novel or watching a film. This is the moment just before apocalypse strikes, right? And this is particularly odd because I almost never read those books (Station Eleven being a notable and brilliant exception) or watch those films, yet they have seeped into my consciousness anyway.

How helpful is this? Dystopian literature gives us markers, a little certainty on our way through this increasingly strange world. And we cling to certainty, we need a guide. But perhaps it also betrays our capacity to experience; it filters what’s happening to us through art so that it’s all second-hand. And are we the heroes, who will survive, or the masses, who will succumb?

Perhaps those narratives which feature heroes struggling alone in contrast to the masses are unhelpful narratives. For this is a crisis that requires us above all to think and act for the good of others, and to see ourselves as part of society, not as loners. Let us read Middlemarch and ignore The Day of the Triffids for now.

Hm, this was going to be a post about Frances Hardinge’s fiction, but I think now I’ll save that for another time. I wish all of you continued health, continued happiness.

day 3 of self-isolating

It’s a quiet Friday here in Belgium. Last Friday, at midnight, moderate measures were put in place for social distancing: schools, restaurants and cafes closed, only certain shops to open at weekends, no large gatherings. On Wednesday, more severe measures were introduced: all shops except food shops, pharmacies, post offices and banks are to close and there are special procedures for visiting those that remain open; you can only go into work if you can remain a certain distance from your colleagues; no gatherings at all, so no more visiting friends. We can go out for walks but playgrounds are closed.

It’s Day Three of the Severe Measures. Is there any effect as yet on our household of three humans, two cats and two hens?

The hens are not visibly bothered since as long as the food keeps coming and it doesn’t rain much, they are happy.

The cats are being a bit needy and already we’ve had one illegal wee and one bird slaying.

The humans are coping well and the stockpile of three bottles of wine has hardly been touched. There has however been a noticeable decline in hair-washing and in gestures towards sartorial elegance. We are still all out of our nighties by lunchtime but I foresee the time when we cease to distinguish between day and night clothing. By contrast, the house is clean and we are even tidying – in stages – the hellhole that is my daughter’s bedroom. Perhaps I’ll also tackle the hellhole that is my study. Of course, since we can’t take any of the discarded clothes, toys and other stuff to relatives with smaller children or the charity shop, we are essentially just moving things around.

Over the next few days we’ll be testing what habits we really need and what we like to do with our time. We are extremely fortunate to be living in a time and a society which allow us a window on the world via the internet, the opportunity to contact other people through telephones and skype, entertainment from television and radio, the ability to shop remotely and have our purchases delivered. But still, I suppose that this will be a time when we learn some truths about ourselves, and explore some new habits and pastimes. It will be testing for all of us.

Similarly, the coronavirus is going to test all our societies. It’s going to test us as social beings – how much do we care about each other? – and it’s going to test the structures on which our societies are founded. Poor health services, poor employment safeguards especially for the lower-waged, poor leadership will all determine in what sort of state we emerge from this pandemic. As well as worrying over the elderly and vulnerable in our societies (and especially those I know and love), I worry for refugees, caught out as borders close, for people in developing countries who don’t have access to health-care provisions and – surprisingly – for people in two of the richest nations on earth, Britain and the United States. Take good care of yourselves, everyone! And of those around you.

plague reading

With the spread of Covid-19 now officially being declared a pandemic, it struck me as time to dust down my copy of the father of plague literature, the Decameron.

It is 1348, and Florence is being ravaged by plague. Ten young aristocrats take refuge in a palace a couple of miles from the city, and to entertain each other take it in turns to tell ten stories. It is twenty-five years since I last read this and I cannot remember much about the stories, but the back cover tells me ‘Ranging from the earthily comic to the profoundly tragic, they encompass marital misunderstanding and thwarted passion, the simple joys of physical love as well as bawdily exuberant tales of deception and hypocrisy shamed.’

For yes, I am stockpiling – books. (I find it fascinating that the British stockpile loo paper of all things, I mean, most of us have hands...) I teach in an adult education centre and many of our students are retired, so it is entirely likely that we’ll be sent home at some point even if I don’t catch coronavirus myself.

The Decameron may prove a little rich and to be honest at the moment, anxious as I am about the elderly and sick, especially my parents, I favour comfort reading. So alongside tales of mediaeval raunch, I am stockpiling:

• Armadale, by Wilkie Collins, to lose myself in (this isn’t truly stockpiling since I borrowed it from my mother when I was last visiting her)
• Two new-to-me Frances Hardinge novels, Twilight Robbery and Gullstruck Island

And I am looking out:

• The Ogre Downstairs and The House of Many Ways by Diana Wynne Jones 
• The Lord Fish by Walter de la Mare
• the Carbonel books by Barbara Sleigh.

In sad times I like reading and rereading children’s books. They satisfy a nostalgic yearning in me for my childhood, which was close to idyllic, and at the same time they soothe and reassure with their happy endings. Even just sorting through them, choosing what I want to read (which of course may have changed by next week) is comforting.

What about you? What books do you turn to when you are anxious or unhappy? Do you have any good recommendations?

Mary Barton, by Elizabeth Gaskell

John Barton’s overpowering thought, which was to work out his fate on earth, was rich and poor; why are they so separate, so distinct, when God has made them all? It is not His will that their interests are so far apart. Whose doing is it?

Mary Barton: A Tale of Manchester Life, published in 1848, was Elizabeth Gaskell’s first novel. That subtitle is telling, for, although the book loosely follows the eponymous heroine’s teenage years and romantic entanglements, perhaps its greatest achievement is its portrayal of working-class life in an industrial town at the time. (Obviously I have no first-hand experience of life as a Victorian weaver but it feels very authentic and reviewers of the time appear to have taken it as such.)

Gaskell was clearly interested in the clash between workers and mill owners (especially the nouveau riche), a subject she was to return to in her better-known North and South. In that novel, the struggles between the classes are filtered through the eyes of Margaret, a member of the southern gentry. In Mary Barton the struggles are not filtered and the suffering of the poor struck me a great deal more directly. I was also surprised by the radicalness of Gaskell’s vision: what sets Mary Barton apart from much other Victorian fiction is its assertion that there are no deserving and undeserving poor, just poor people.

Esther, Mary’s aunt, who hovers like a draggled ghost above the narrative, is a clear example. At the beginning of the novel, when Mary is fourteen and her mother pregnant, pretty and vivacious Esther disappears and it is widely believed she has run off with a mysterious lover. The grief this causes Mary’s mother may contribute to her death in childbirth just a few weeks later. Halfway through the novel, Esther reappears, petitioning Mary’s father John as he walks home one night. She and her little daughter were abandoned by the lover some years ago; when the child became sick poor Esther had no way of earning money for medicine other than prostitution. Now her child is dead, her reputation lost, and she lives a sort of half-life selling herself on the streets and drinking gin. John and other characters disapprove, even despise Esther for what she has become (at first, at least), but her predicament is shown to be entirely derived from desperate poverty and limited options, not vice.

(Engraving of the exterior of a cellar dwelling, 1838; Manchester Libraries; found here. For some reason the pipe-smoking woman is a pleasing sight)

The precariousness of working life is forcefully depicted. When a weaver, Davenport, falls ill with typhus, his family cannot afford coal or food and huddle in a damp, insanitary cellar waiting for death to take them all. If work falls off at the mills, there is simply no money and families starve. If wages are reduced, parents are forced to give what little food they have to their children in the hope of keeping them alive until better times. Child mortality is brisk: no family, not even the very-slightly-better-off ones like the Bartons and the Wilsons, is immune. In the face of this, the workers do their best to support each other. Although Davenport succumbs to his illness, Barton and Wilson give what little money they still have to his family to pay for the burial and feed them. Doors are never locked; the best is always given to visitors; strangers will help each other. (This picture of working-class solidarity is not simplistic: during the strike ‘knobsticks’, or strike breakers, are attacked and even murdered by angry workers.)

(Group of Manchester workers, 1848. James Cox, centre in the front row, surrounded by some of the men he worked with. The photograph was taken circa 1848. James Cox came to Manchester from Ireland in 1846 during the famine years. He first lived near Oxford Road Station, Mary Street, an area known as 'Little Ireland'. He also worked on the Manchester Ship Canal in the later years of the 19th century. Printed on the back: James Whittaker, Fairfield. Manchester Archives; found here)

In contrast, the only wealthy family in the novel – former workers themselves – lives apart from the rest of the town. Their doors are locked and guarded by servants and their hospitality is for their own sort, and by appointment. They are more comfortable, but somehow the way that the weavers drop in on each other, share what they have, invite friends round to tea and then rush to the shops to buy eggs and bacon to serve them is a more appealing way to live. The accumulation of wealth and valuable possessions in comparison is a sort of burden on the rich and dulls their sense of community.

This is demonstrated most clearly when the delegation of striking workers meets the mill owners. The workers represent their community and their demands have moral force: they ask for what is right and just. Most of the mill owners, on the other hand, see their interests as separate from that of the wider society. They do not understand their factories as pooled labour and capital working together, but as their property. While the speech of the workers is impassioned and eloquent, the employers’ words are dry and reveal only their selfishness and fear.

(Manchester in the mid-nineteenth century; found here)

The clash between the classes is reflected more specifically in Mary’s story, her courting by the wealthy Henry Carson and by the foundry worker Jem Wilson, and the brutal murder which is initially believed to be by a rival lover but is in fact politically motivated. The murder and its resolution model Gaskell’s great theme: that we are not so very different and we should trust each other more. In the end, there are two bereaved fathers, each of whom loses a son because of the other’s adherence to class identity over human sympathy.

That class identity is more than politics but also culture is reflected in elements of the novel’s form. As it was intended for a middle-class readership, it contains epigraphs from well-known ‘canonical’ poems alongside the lyrics of Chartist songs, nursery rhymes and working-class ballads. Footnotes explain Lancashire dialect words to a more cosmopolitan audience, often referring to the works of Chaucer as if giving these words a veneer of literary respectability.

Poverty, social injustice and murder are not the cheeriest subjects for fiction and for many of the characters there is to be no conventional happy ending; however, this is a far from nihilistic novel since redemption is available to everyone, even the murderer and the prostitute. And Gaskell’s characters are believable and engaging. If you’d like an alternative to yet another film adaptation of Emma, read this!

The Starless Sea, by Erin Morgenstern

Sometimes I reach the end of a book and really don’t know what to make of it. The Starless Sea has been one of those books.

(Study of an owl, pen and ink, French school, late seventeenth century; found here)

Never having read Morgenstern’s bestselling first novel, The Night Circus, I had no particular expectations of The Starless Sea other than stronger wrists as it is a 500-page tome. However, the promise of a quest inspired by a strange book, a dangerous secret club and a ‘subterranean labyrinth filled with stories’ tempted me to borrow it from the English-language section of my local library. Wouldn’t you?

The principal narrative in the novel follows Zachary Ezra Rawlins, a graduate student writing a thesis on video games who is also a devoted reader, and his discovery of a mis-shelved old book with no publication information. When he starts reading it, he discovers an incident from his own childhood has been printed in it. How could that be possible? The book is decorated with symbols of a sword, a key and a bee, and soon he has left the university campus for New York and a masked ball and adventures. His story is interspersed with stories from the book itself, from other books, from a diary; despite this increasingly complex layered structure it is not difficult to follow what is going on.

For what is remarkable about this novel is its lack of tension and its promotion of symbolism. I know – how can a book including a dangerous secret club lack tension? It does. The club swiftly becomes irrelevant, its leader powerless. The quest plot mainly involves Zachary wondering what the quest is. I too wondered what was going on a lot of the time. The key to the book lies in the juxtaposition of the stories and the repeated use of the symbols, and to be quite honest by the end I was mentally exhausted from the sheer size of the narrative and wanted more help from the author in deciding what was going on. Lazy reader.

There’s a scene early in the book in which a class discusses gaming as part of an Innovations in Storytelling course. They talk about how video games balance the framework of their programmed story (pre-destination, if you will) with giving the gamer the freedom to make their own choices (or exercise some free will. There are options and different possible endings, but all have been foreseen. Now, if only I had ever played a video game I think I would understand this novel a great deal better, because I think that Morgenstern is using video-game conventions to structure her novel, and Zachary – a character who exhibits very little personality and could easily stand as an archetypal reader – is our – the reader-gamer’s – avatar in the story. Morgenstern’s refusal to offer easy explanations of her book’s meaning is part of the idea that we, the reader-gamers, must decide for ourselves. This is made more explicit in the recurring stories about Time and Fate, as well as the ending, which I shall nobly resist giving away.

Another element Morgenstern takes from gaming, though it is common to a lot of fiction too, is immersiveness. I didn’t read The Starless Sea exactly to find out what would happen next, I read it for the pure pleasure of being in the worlds that Morgenstern created. Painted doors which open, precocious cats, strange visitors at a wayside inn, jealous stars. Imagine a library filled with all the books ever and never published, a sea of honey deep in the earth which is actually a sea of stories, a forest of cherry trees blossoming at night, an Owl King. Some of Morgenstern’s ideas have literary antecedents, some seem purely her own invention, all are woven together to form a book-lover’s paradise. Every time I opened The Starless Sea, I wondered what marvel I would read next.

(Still Life with a Snake, Elias Van den Broeck; Belgium, seventeenth century; from here)

For some readers, the lack of tension or character development or explication may be off-putting; for me, some of the gnomic utterances grated, and Morgenstern did not always successfully navigate the line when it came to tweeness. (And the UK cover is hideous!) However, despite all this, how could I not enjoy this beautiful expression of love for stories? I shall definitely be re-reading it as there is a great deal that I missed. (Alas for now I must return it to the library.)

(Images of blocked book covers from here.)

Meanwhile, in ‘not-buying-any-new-books-resolution’ news, I have bought:

• Of Cats and Elfin, by Sylvia Townsend Warner (well, I do have to read it for STW reading week, so that doesn’t really count)
• Glass Town, by Isabel Greenberg (really I bought it for my daughter) (when she’s older) (but I’ll read it in the mean time, silly not to)

and I have pre-ordered:

• Medusa’s Daughters, edited by Theodora Goss (which has led me to covet Handheld Press’s Women’s Weird)
  The Tower of Babel, by Christelle Dabois (it’s the third in the series and I wouldn’t want to forget to read it the very moment it’s available)
• The Pure Heart, by Trudi Tweedie.

So that resolution has proved strong.

But in other news, while excavating a corner of the study I found my copy of Burial Rites by Hannah Kent, which I thought I had rashly given, unread, to a charity shop. It turns out that tidying up occasionally has its uses.

Diaries, by Alan Clark

The PM made a point of seeking me out in the pre-drinks throng before the meal. She thanked me for my help, said she was going to press ahead with the Bruges notes virtually unchanged, in spite of FCO complaints. [...] ‘You and I agree on this, but Douglas Hurd is completely committed.’
‘Bugger Douglas Hurd,’ I said. ‘He’s only the Home Secretary.’
She looked away with that lovely, distant smile she puts on when I ‘go too far’. (16 September 1988)

Perhaps you may remember Alan Clark, son of the art historian Sir Kenneth. Conservative MP for Plymouth (Sutton), for whose inhabitants he reveals a deep loathing, he served in Mrs Thatcher’s government in the 1980s. These Diaries cover that period, from his promotion to ‘Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State at the Department of Employment’, in June 1983, via three years as Minister of Trade, to his apotheosis as Minister of State at the Ministry of Defence. I have had this copy of his Diaries since shortly after their publication in 1993 but it’s only really now, as Britain faces an ever-longer stint of Tory government, that I have felt the urge to read it.

(AC in 1993; from here)

Clark, or AC as he refers to himself, is less than overjoyed by his first appointment in the Department of Employment and he is poorly suited to it. He is contemptuous of the unemployed and indeed struggles to imagine the lives of those below him on the social scale:

I went on a ministerial visit to Wrexham. A pretty, peaceful town, with the sun shining. How fortunate are the contented bourgeoisie in such places – or are they too racked by pressures and frustrations? They certainly didn’t look it. (24 April 1985)

His work (the ‘boxes’) is boring and voluminous. His personal private secretary, Jenny, hates him. Almost his first duty in the Commons is to put through an Order on Equal Pay. Alas! The Order is to be put through after ten o’clock in the evening, and AC pops out for a wine-tasting beforehand and gets sozzled. He stands up in the Commons with the text of his Order in hand:

As I started, the sheer odiousness of the text sank in.[...] I found myself dwelling on, implicitly, it could be said, sneering at, the more cumbrous and unintelligible passages. Elaine Keller-Bowman, who has a very squeaky voice, squeaked, kept squeaking at me, ‘Speed up!’ [...] I did speed up. I gabbled. [...] Sometimes I turned over two pages at once, sometimes three. What did it matter? There was no shape to it.

Challenged over what the last paragraph ‘means’ (‘How the hell did I know what it meant?’ complains AC to his diary), things quickly fall apart. It seems that one MP may not accuse another of being drunk, but Clare Short accuses him of disrespect to the House. AC isn’t sacked over this and is careful not to repeat his mistake, but although he does go on to become a minister he never really achieves the heights that he at least considers himself capable of reaching. Perhaps, if he had, we might not be reading his diaries. In any case, it’s an incident that encapsulates a lot about AC: his appreciation of the fine things in life, his refusal to kowtow and his staggering arrogance.

The entries included in this volume are mainly, of course, concerned with politics. AC is on the right wing of the party; he is gossipy, ambitious, intermittently deceitful and back-stabbing.

One should not take pleasure in the discomfiture of colleagues, I suppose. But without question it is one of the more agreeable bonuses of the sport of politics. (1 February 1990)

He complains and complains about his ministerial work and yet he cannot resist the lure of power. He characterises Tories as ‘mulishly vindictive’ (19 September 1990) and the party that we see through his eyes is factional, power-hungry and treacherous. Mrs T’s greatest threat was always from her colleagues rather than from the Opposition, and of course they do get her in the end. The section of the Diaries that covers her fall from power is pretty exciting, even when you know what’s coming. AC sees himself and a few friends as her ‘Praetorian Guard’; he refers to her occasionally as the PM but mostly as The Lady. He seeks her attention and favour; he deplores her rages and indecisiveness; he notes how she wept when the first casualties of the Falklands were announced. There is a quantity of plotting and lamenting and hating of Michael Heseltine. How AC hated Heseltine!

The cod-chivalry of calling Mrs T ‘The Lady’ is very much of a piece with a rather romantic and nostalgic outlook on life which regrets the decline of the upper classes. How few of them now walk the corridors of power! How poorly educated most people are! How expensive ‘staff’ are these days! AC was a multi-millionaire who lived in a castle (Saltwood, in Kent), yet he constantly moans about his poor finances. In May 1990 he writes:

Poor darling Jane drained and cleaned the pool herself yesterday. Of course she felt utterly exhausted.

I am afraid at this point (as at others) I guffawed unfeelingly. The reason his wife had to clean their own swimming pool is because their 78-year-old man William was too ill to do it for her. Only a couple of weeks earlier AC had noted that he had won £1000 off someone at backgammon...

(AC was a collector of cars; from here)

Of course it is easy to sneer at elements of AC’s character and it’s to his credit that he retained unflattering whinges like this in the published version of his diaries. (If, of course, he recognised them as unflattering whinges...) The flip side, the attractive side, of his romanticism is his love of nature and beauty. He writes an amazing piece about how he becomes enraged by the repeated theft of his fish by a heron, runs out one day and shoots the bird, and then weeps with remorse at having destroyed something so wild and lovely.

He includes an anecdote about a charitable evening to support the Friends of Charleston:

Bloomsbury evening at Saltwood. We entertained the ‘Friends of Charleston’. I don’t know what they charged for tickets, but I hope they made money. [...]
I made a little speech of welcome, fraudulently and bogusly referring to my father’s death as ‘falling from a tree’. What mischievous impulse made me do this? [...]
Olivier Popham [mistress of the artist Graham Bell] materialised; benign and knowledgeable. I remember her, just, at Portland Place. Very sleek and dark like a young seal. She asked to see Graham’s pictures, and chided me gently for selling her portrait which he had painted in 1939, in the great Death Duties sale. I could hardly say, ‘I thought you were dead.’ (21 October 1990)

It’s an interesting experience, reading the diaries of someone who is so utterly alien to oneself in terms of outlook and experience. I finished them aware of AC’s good qualities as I had not been before, but not wildly fond of him. He could be downright nasty (and why did he hate overweight people so much?). Still, politics can be stodgy fare and bitchy as his diaries often may be, there is no denying that they are generally perceptive and entertaining, very much worth reading for a glimpse of government behind the scenes.

ignoring it

Today is, of course, the day that the UK officially leaves the EU.

I don’t wish to say anything other than this is a sad day for us all, and thank you to all our friends in Europe for a rich relationship which I hope will continue.

(Turner’s The ‘Fighting Temeraire’, found here)

sylvia townsend warner reading week 2020, join in, all the best people are!

Cunningly timing my announcement for the later part of January and thus after everyone has already made lots of resolutions and reading plans for the year, I am delighted to tell you that once again I intend to spend the first week in July reading and writing about the work of Sylvia Townsend Warner and I invite you to join me!

As an added lure, a new selection of her short stories has just been published, Of Cats and Elfins, by Handheld Press. The Guardian reviews it briefly here. According to Handheld Press’s website (from which you can order a copy), it brings together four of STW’s Elfin stories that were not published in The Kingdom of Elfin with the collection The Cat’s Cradle Book. It is putting my vow to buy no more books under considerable strain just days after I made it.

Here is a link to my introductory post to last year’s reading week, with a list of her books. And here is a round-up of everyone’s reviews from last year’s reading week, and here are all my STW posts. Here is a link to the Sylvia Townsend Warner Society, which is packed with information about her.

Readers, you have plenty of time to track down one of STW’s books and read it. Last year, many people* wept bitter tears over missing the Reading Week. Don’t let that be you this year! If you have never read her before, this is your moment!  And if you have – well, it’s a FACT that no one has ever disliked anything she ever wrote, so treat yourself to some more time with one of her lovely books.

STW wrote novels and stories that are witty, melancholic, waspish, fantastical and beautiful, and she was also a formidable poet. She wrote about cats, fairies, nuns, revolutionaries, aristocrats and stifled women. Her fans include Sarah Waters and Neil Gaiman. She is the antidote to all that is plodding, dull or hypocritical. She deserves to be wider read, and you deserve to have her in your life. Joining in Sylvia Townsend Warner Reading Week this year is thus a win–win situation for all concerned!

* Actually, no one.

brian wildsmith

One of my very favourite childhood books (admittedly, I have a lot of favourite childhood books) is a picture book called Blue Bird, which my parents gave me for my birthday when I was five. The story is a simplified version of Maurice Maeterlinck’s Blue Bird and is wonderful, but what makes this book special is the beautiful, beautiful pictures. I loved it so much I devoted not one but two Puffin Club bookplates to it.

(Illustration of one of the secret rooms in the Palace of the Night, from Blue Bird, OUP 1976; from here)

(Madam Berlingot, from Blue Bird, from here)

(The Fairy Bérylune, from Blue Bird, from here)

If you are a child of the 1970s like me, you will almost certainly have recognised the unique style of the illustrations even if you don’t remember the name of the artist. He was Brian Wildsmith, and although he died in 2016 today is his birthday and he would have been ninety years old. Tamsin Rosewell (@autumnrosewell) and James Mayhew (@mrjamesmayhew) are organising a Twitter celebration (#wildsmith90) so I thought I’d add something here, as a tribute to one of the greats of illustration. I have drawn on his Wikipedia entry as well as other sites and interviews to which I’ve linked.

Brian Wildsmith was born in 1930 in Penistone, West Riding. He went to school in Sheffield and at seventeen, determined not to follow his father down the mines, studied at the Barnsley School of Art, from where he won a scholarship to the Slade in London. During his time there (1949–52) he was something of an outsider, unable to afford oils and canvas so spending his lunchtimes drawing and studying the Old Masters in the National Gallery. In 1955, after his National Service (he taught music at the Royal Military School of Music), he got married, started teaching art at Selhurst High School and began designing book jackets for John Murray and drawing line illustrations for publishers including Faber and Faber and Oxford University Press.

(Brian Wildsmith at work; photograph from his obituary in the Guardian by Julia Eccleshare)

Wildsmith was foremost a painter and loved colour, and it was his great good fortune that the 1960s saw enormous improvements in colour-printing technology. His other piece of great good fortune was Mabel George, of Oxford University Press, who gave him his first chance to illustrate a children’s book in colour. Mabel George was a brilliant editor who took over the children’s department of OUP in 1956 and also launched the careers of Charles Keeping and Victor Ambrus as well as many writers. As an experiment, she commissioned Wildsmith to illustrate the Arabian Nights (1961). The TLS review savaged it:

‘We now descend to the lowest depths with Brian Wildsmith's vicious attack on the Arabian Nights [...] these pointless scribbles, which do duty for drawings, wander aimlessly about the page[...]’

Mabel responded magnificently:

‘Take no notice, Brian. We make up our own minds here. We’re now going to do an ABC.’

Brian Wildsmith’s ABC went on to win the Kate Greenaway Award in 1962 and his career was made. (I learnt about Mabel George, who was a truly impressive person, here.)

But according to this lovely interview he gave to Joanna Carey in the Guardian, that horrible review remained engraved on Wildsmith’s heart for ever.

(Illustration from Fishes, OUP 1968; from here)

In 1971, Wildsmith and his family – he had four children – emigrated to France with a grand piano and settled in a house in an olive grove in the south. The Blue Bird, my beloved picture book, was published in 1976. It sprang from an invitation Wildsmith received from George Cukor two years earlier: Cukor was going to film Maeterlinck’s play in the first ever US/Soviet co-production in cinema: would Wildsmith like to design the sets and costumes? I had never even heard of this film which apparently was a flop; a pity, but still it gave rise to this marvellous book.

Wildsmith was prolific: he published 82 books, mainly with OUP. Many of them he wrote himself, despite initial reservations which he expressed to Mabel George. In an interview for the Independent, he told Susie Mesure:

‘I said, “But Mabel, my English is terrible. I always got terrible marks at school.” But she said, “Brian, I have editors with inkpots full of full stops and commas. It’s ideas that count and you’ve got them.” And it took off from there.’

I have a couple of other books he illustrated, which I also love very much:

(Illustration of Mother Goose from Mother Goose: A Collection of Nursery Rhymes, OUP 1964; from here)

(Illustration from Mother Goose: A Collection of Nursery Rhymes, from here)

(Illustration from The Oxford Book of Poetry for Children, edited by Edward Blishen, OUP 1963; from here)

Looking at his pictures on the internets, I recognise others that we must have borrowed from the library:

(Birds, OUP 1967; from here)

(The Lazy Bear, OUP 1973; from here)

His use of colour is striking; it can be bold or subtle, but he’s also acutely aware of pattern and uses patchwork a lot in his pictures of houses and landscapes. The colours can be very intense but are often balanced by large areas of white space. You can see the influence of 1960s psychedelia in some of his work too. The other very striking element is the texture of his pictures. They are very painterly, and again vary from thickly laid swirls and dabs to delicate washes and splashes, given extra clarity by the pencil drawing beneath, embellished with waxy strokes of pastel or layers of collate. When you look at his pictures, they are alive and joyful.

As they sing, he is big in Japan, where a museum dedicated to his work was opened in 1994 and in 1996 he illustrated Katie and the Dream Eater, written by Her Imperial Highness Princess Takamodo of the Japanese Imperial Family. But he is not so big in the UK and many of his books remain out of print; perhaps today’s celebration will go some way to rectifying that.

(Illustration from Wild Animals, OUP 1967; from here)

In the Guardian interview with Carey, Wildsmith said this, which seems a good note to end on:

‘Children are all-important, and so is art ... Art is food for the soul. And books are a child's first encounter with art so I felt it was a way I could make a contribution to the world. A drop in the ocean maybe, but picture books offered a chance to communicate the importance of things such as kindness, compassion, friendship, beauty.’

(from The Lion and the Rat, OUP 1963; found here)

EDITED TO ADD: fellow Wildsmith fans, there is a new website devoted to his work here! His son has also set up a Twitter account, @brian_wildsmith, and you can see all the pictures posted by readers in celebration of his birthday if you follow the hashtag #wildsmith90. Joy!

new books in 2020: what are you excited about?

It is only comparatively recently that I have noticed a trend: looking forward to books that are to be published in the near future. Pre-Internet, young Helen would be pleasantly surprised to walk into a bookshop and see a new book by a favourite author. Now the publicity machine never stops grinding on, and every new season brings articles on ‘forthcoming releases’ (which inevitably makes me think of the poor books as prisoners).

Never one to leave a bandwagon in peace, I thought I’d ask you, dear readers, if you pay attention to this advance title information and what books are being published in 2020 you’re feeling excited about.

For me, it’s Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi (currently scheduled for the middle of September which is deeply frustrating as it’s at my annual Peak Busy but I expect I’ll bravely find a way to neglect my paid work and devote myself to it). At last! I have loved everything she has written and I cannot wait to see what she’s done next. Fellow Clarke fans: you can read about it here on the Bloomsbury website. I defy you not to be intrigued.

(Me being excited about Piranesi, not really, a photograph from Dancers Among Us by Jordan Matter, found here and slightly cropped)

What about you? What are you looking forward to this year? Or do you ignore all the advance publicity and prefer to be pleasantly and serendipitously surprised?