a gallimaufry

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?

hello 2020!

Happy New Year (belatedly). I hope that you all had lovely holidays. I did!

I don’t usually make New Year’s Resolutions because in the past I tended to make a massive list which was a complete overhaul of all my foul habits and terrible personality traits, and then after two days I’d have failed massively and would spend the rest of January, generally my least favourite time of year, feeling depressed and frustrated at what a total LOSER I was. (In addition to all my other terrible personality traits.)

However, 2020 seems rather a special moment, perhaps it’s the pleasing rhythm of the digits. It may be counter-intuitive to be cheerful when the year has begun with climate apocalypse, Australia on fire, Iraq and the US squaring off and authoritarianism on the rise around the world, and yet I am. And in this cheerful mood I have made some Resolutions! My cunning plan: to keep them small and on the vague side.

1. give more attention to a gallimaufry

I am going to find more time for this blog. Writing book reviews is very time consuming and I find mine tend to plod rather, and in any case I like the conversational aspect of blogs. So I might change what I write about a bit. (All right, this is VERY vague but I think it’s something that will evolve rather than be imposed.)

I also intend to run Sylvia Townsend Warner Reading Week again – watch this space!

2. read more widely

To break out of my fiction addiction I am going to read one non-fiction book, one long poem or one play a month. (At least one – I can read more.) This month I finally opened Alan Clark’s Diaries, which has been sitting shrink-wrapped on my shelves since 1994. (Alan Clark was a Tory MP who served in Mrs Thatcher’s and John Major’s governments, during which time he kept diaries which he subsequently published, I wouldn’t say they were scandalous but they did ruffle a few feathers as I recall.) I intend to post about this.

Loosely associated with this plan is a resolution to go as long as possible without buying any new books! This is actually Chris’s idea, which I have filched. (I had already bought a book when I read his post, so I am starting now BUT I am not sure I shall publicly announce when I do buy my next book because it might just be too shaming. I am a very weak person.)

3. finish my novel

I’m going to finish writing my second book (I started it in the summer holidays but have had so much work to do I’ve been unable to touch it since). Perhaps it will be better than the first one!

4. have more fun

It occurred to me that I am turning into a boring humourless middle-aged git. Oh no! Therefore, I am going to spend less time obsessively reading and ranting about politics and more time having fun. To this end I have already got drunk on fancy beer (the cats were very lucky that I couldn’t find the Marmite when I got home as I intended to smear them with it, one of my friends told me it was a flea-deterrent, though since then I’ve discovered that the cats are supposed to eat it not wear it) and bought some sheet music so I can start playing the piano again. This has got off to a good start.

What about you? Do you ever make New Year’s Resolutions – or are you already perfect? Heheh. If you’ve made any this year, what are they (or the ones you’ll publicly confess to, anyway)?