a gallimaufry

Zuleika Dobson, by Max Beerbohm

Zuleika Dobson or An Oxford Love Story is a novel that has hovered on the periphery of my reading attention for about a thousand years. It’s only the fact that it is being reissued in a very pretty edition by Michael Walmer books that I finally got round to reading it. Not knowing much about it before I started, I read it in a genuine state of suspense: however, I want to include spoilers in my discussion of it, so if you would like a similar experience to me, click away now!

Zuleika (pronounced, so I read after I’d finished it, Zu-LEE-ka) is an orphan, abandoned by her grandfather, the Warden of Judas College, Oxford, because he disapproved of her parents’ marriage. She has to earn her living as a governess, a post she is unfit for, being herself ignorant of what she is supposed to teach and – perhaps more importantly – being devastatingly attractive. Having been shunted from school-room to school-room, she learns some fairly basic magic tricks and sets herself up as a ‘prestidigitator’. To stupendous success. While her abilities are mediocre, her beauty and allure catapult her to fame and wealth. Belatedly, her grandfather invites her to stay with him in Oxford, where she exerts her femme fatale charms with – well – fatal results.

Zuleika’s great problem is that in a world where all young men fall in love with her, she can only love a man who remains impervious to her. This man is the Duke of Dorset, a man perfect in every ability but who, like Zuleika, has never been in love.

The Duke had an intense horror of unmarried girls. [...] That he should be confronted with one of them – with such an one of them! – in Oxford, seemed to be sheer violation of sanctuary.

Zuleika is thrilled – but unfortunately the Duke has fallen for her after all. She rejects him, and so he vows to kill himself. This inspires all the other undergraduates in Oxford, similarly smitten, to swear they will die for Zuleika too. But will they?

(Illustration by George Him for the 1960 Heritage edition of Zuleika Dobson, found here; if you click on the link you can see more!)

What makes this novel so unsettling is its blend of light social comedy and really dark themes. And it is funny and well observed. Oxford is mockingly but affectionately portrayed in its traditions and eccentrics. The fellows of Judas College are happiest when all the undergraduates have gone, and they can jeer at Pedby’s bungled reading of the Latin grace for years without end. The Duke belongs to a club so exclusive that during his second year he is the only member. Realising that this is unsustainable for a club he, ‘not without reluctance, but unanimously’, elects a few new members. When Zuleika complains that the Second Division boats row before the First, the Duke tells her that ‘Oxford never pretended to be strong in mathematics.’

But into this charming comedy are woven strands of delusion and cruelty. Everyone falls in love and often out of love again very easily. In the case of the mass of students, it is a form of hysteria – most of them have barely glimpsed the woman for whom they pledge to die. What then is the value of love? Is it just a trick, like Zuleika’s sleights of hand?

Zuleika and the Duke are powerful and careless of their power. Zuleika enjoys the tribute of men falling in love with her and doesn’t care what becomes of them. The Duke is so self-regarding and narcissistic he takes it as his due that the other students revere him. When he decides to kill himself, they emulate him. The deaths are not directly the fault of Zuleika or the Duke, because the undergraduates have after all freely chosen to give them their power and influence. Indeed, once the die is cast, the Duke attempts to prevent the tragedy. Zuleika, however, comes to desire it and revels in it; truly disturbing.

Zuleika Dobson was first published in 1911 and it is hard now to look back at the futile deaths of a large number of young men without the shadow of the First World War looming into mind, especially when Beerbohm describes the stormy moment before the Duke’s plunge thus:

A sudden white vertical streak slid down the sky. Then there was consonance to split the drums of the world’s ears, followed by a horrific rattling as of actual artillery – tens of thousands of gun-carriages simultaneously at the gallop, colliding, crashing, heeling over in the blackness.
Then, and yet more awful, silence; the little earth cowering voiceless under the heavens’ menace.

I don’t think it is a stretch to link the Oxford students’ mindless romanticism, faux chivalry and death wish with an attitude that romanticised war and honour and brought its sons to the trenches. Furthermore, the Duke’s ridiculous notion of honour traps him into going ahead with his stupid suicide. The poisonous destructiveness of this veneration of honour and death is most clearly and horribly shown in the scene of Noaks’s death. Noaks has been too cowardly to drown himself with the other young men; he is goaded to fling himself to his death by Zuleika and the Batch family in a scene which switches rapidly from comedy to horror and is surely echoed by the later practice of women sending white feathers to men who did not want to fight.

(Max Beerbohm by himself; found here)

The Duke seems to die for love of Zuleika; actually, he hates her. Seeming and being are all too often distinct in this novel. For fun and also to reinforce this idea of delusion, Beerbohm frames his novel with classical motifs. There is a comic chorus, of sorts: the ‘high grim busts’ of the Roman emperors which decorate the Sheldonian theatre and watch over the drama that plays out. On seeing Zuleika when she arrives in Oxford:

sweat started from the brows of the Emperors. They at least saw the peril that was overhanging Oxford, and they gave such warning as they could. Let that be remembered to their credit. Let that incline us to think more gently of them. [...] Here in Oxford, exposed eternally and inexorably to heat and frost, to the four winds that lash them and the rains that wear them away, they are expiating, in effigy, the abominations of their pride and cruelty and lust. Who were lechers, they are without bodies; who were tyrants, they are crowned never but with crowns of snow; who made themselves even with the gods, they are by American visitors frequently mistaken for the Twelve Apostles.

The novel’s narrator claims to be ‘Clio’s servant’ – the servant of the Muse of history (although he fears that to be so is to be ‘not quite a gentleman’). Thus he pretends that his fiction is ‘true’. He pre-empts the reader’s disbelief in his ability to record all these conversations and even thoughts accurately, by spinning a tale of being given special powers by Zeus to travel invisibly and enter minds. It is typical of the novel that he lays claim to truthfulness with an outrageous explanation, and that he plays further with the difference between seeming and being that threads through this story of delusion.

It is a book quite unlike any other that I’ve read. It is delightful and cruel by turn, both frivolous and tragic. It ends with a surprising twist on the exhortation that you be true to yourself – given by the Warden to Zuleika. Apparently, a spoof sequel was written in which Zuleika goes to Cambridge. I can’t help wondering what that might be like...

(I was sent a copy of this book to review: you can order a copy from Michael Walmer books.)

 

T.H. White: A Biography by Sylvia Townsend Warner

Over at Shiny New Books my review of Sylvia Townsend Warner’s splendid biography of T.H. White is now up!

Long-time readers of this blog will know of my love for STW’s writing. I had always wanted to read this biography but the prices of second-hand copies were too high (added now to the extra costs from Brexit of importing books to the EU gripe gripe).

Now Handheld Press has republished the book in a lovely new edition with an introduction by Gill Davies. I couldn’t crowbar much about the introduction into the review (which is already too long really, I can never stop myself), but it makes this edition far, far more valuable than the original. Davies discusses how STW researched and wrote the biography, how her talent for fiction inflected her writing, how she dealt with THW’s very dark side.

Thus it frames book very nicely and reminds us that it is a written and created artefact, the product of years of work and thought. It also, interestingly, centres STW rather than THW; I think it’s true to say that many if not most people who read the book now will read it because of their interest in her work rather than his, an unusual shift.

(Photograph of Sylvia Townsend Warner at Frome Vauchurch, undated; from the Sylvia Townsend Warner website here)

 

 

 

Happy 2023!

A belated Happy New Year! I hope you all enjoyed the holidays and have started 2023 in the nicest ways possible.

For me, one of the highlights of Christmas this year was going to see the Royal Ballet’s production of The Nutcracker in London with my mother and daughter. It was everything you would want a ballet to be: beautiful music, expertly played by the orchestra; lovely sets and costumes, and, most important of all, exquisite dancing. Not that I am an expert, but I actually cried a bit while watching it, and more than once too. The audience was filled with little girls in sparkly velvet and net dresses and it was one wonderful, happy experience. It’s shown every year and I thoroughly recommend it.

After a frantically busy couple of months, I finally and tardily finished reading Brian Attebery’s absolutely brilliant new book, Fantasy: How it Works, which I reviewed for Shiny New Books. If you don’t have time to wade through my turgid prose, just go out and buy/borrow it. It explains why fantasy isn’t just childish escapism, and analyses lots of books to discuss how it works and what it does. All in a very readable, chatty style.

(And look at that gorgeous cover!)

For the rest of the holidays, I enjoyed lounging about reading both in the UK and here in Belgium. In fact, I have rearranged a corner of the sitting-room for maximal reading and lounging pleasure. It’s also easier for me to write there, for I have been writing (just not here).

I spent September to the endish of December following the Golden Egg Academy 12-week Write Your Successful Children’s Novel course. It was brilliant and if you are thinking of writing for children, I highly recommend it. There are no entry requirements, and week by week you learn how you actually put a book together, what to think about, what to develop and how to structure it. It is really practical, and handily it’s distance learning so you can do it at your own pace. Pretty much every week there is a Zoom or FaceBook meeting with the course leader, Imogen Cooper, who is just the nicest person as well as hugely experienced, and you can ask questions and get advice. At the end you can send in your first 2000 words plus a synopsis for one of the Golden Egg editors to evaluate. I have to say that the feedback was very helpful and perceptive.

After another busy few weeks at work I am keen to get back to work on my book. One of the elements I hadn’t been sure about was having a dual narrative, and the editor suggested that sticking to one viewpoint would be better. My book’s other massive weakness, caused by my tendency to plot as I go along rather than before I start, is that there is too much going on and not enough focus on the main theme. So it’s time to prune and plan (at least a bit) before getting back down to writing. The feedback has really enthused me to carry on. I hope to have a reasonable first draft ready by the end of the summer, so that I can re-apply for the 12-month course on developing your children’s novel.

Because of all this I have mainly been reading children’s novels, especially recently published ones. Here are some of them, in short!

The Poisoned Pie Mystery, by Nicki Thornton  

A boy to whom accidents just keep on happening, a talking cat who is also a master detective and a lot of cake… This is a brisk and chirpy novel for children of about 9+. The author does something quite daring with the parents, which I did not see coming.

The Hounds of the Mórrigan, by Pat O’Shea

An older work but a wonderful immersion into Irish mythology, as Pidge and Brigit journey through a magical landscape in search of a drop of the Mórrigan’s blood. Truly magical, the many joys of this book include the characterisation of the children, who act and speak like real children, and the creatures they encounter.

Children of Blood and Bone, Tomi Adeyemi

In a mythical sort-of version of Nigeria called Orïsha, the maji are people who used to have magical powers but lost them suddenly twelve years ago. Now they are oppressed and enslaved by the majority kosídan and their cruel king, but maybe there is a way for teenaged Zélie and her friends to restore magic and end the tyranny. This is the first YA novel I have ever read and my was it bloodthirsty! But the story is compelling and I loved the setting.

The Scandalous Sisterhood of Prickwillow Place, by Julie Berry

I don’t think this book is very well known outside the US? But it should be. An exciting opportunity is delivered to the students of St Etheldreda’s School for Young Ladies in nineteenth-century Ely, when their horrid headmistress and her brother both drop dead: poisoned. Rather than informing the authorities, the girls decide to continue as usual and enjoy their freedom, pretending that the two victims are still alive. Of course, this becomes increasingly farcical and meanwhile the murderer is still lurking about. A bouncy entertaining read and the American author gets pretty much everything British spot on and believe me that is high praise.

 

High Windows, by Philip Larkin

(Photograph of Philip Larkin found here)

To be absolutely honest, I was a bit disappointed when I first read this. Although I knew of Larkin’s reputation and had read a few of his more famous poems, I didn’t really know his work and was expecting great things. I loved some of the poems in this collection (‘The Trees’, ‘Solar’, ‘To the Sea’, for instance), but others struck me as just a bit – banal. It took me a little while to appreciate him.

By way of example, here is one of the less-famous poems, an ekphrastic piece (I love the word ekphrastic!) inspired by one of those Dutch Old Master genre paintings. You can hear Larkin reading it out himself here.

The Card-Players

Jan van Hogspeuw staggers to the door
And pisses at the dark. Outside, the rain
Courses in cart-ruts down the deep mud lane.
Inside, Dirk Dogstoerd pours himself some more,
And holds a cinder to his clay with tongs,
Belching out smoke. Old Prijck snores with the gale,
His skull face firelit; someone behind drinks ale,
And opens mussels, and croaks scraps of songs
Towards the ham-hung rafters about love.
Dirk deals the cards. Wet century-wide trees
Clash in surrounding starlessness above
This lamplit cave, where Jan turns back and farts,
Gobs at the grate, and hits the queen of hearts.

Rain, wind and fire! The secret, bestial peace!

I initially found the crude humour – ooh look, rude names! – childish. There are bodily functions: pissing, belching, snoring, farting and gobbing. There is mud and ale. But there is something more than basic physicality too. The rafters are ‘ham-hung’, evoking meaty buttocks (hams), yet garlanded with croaked-out scraps of songs ‘about love’, aspiring to something more transcendent. The ‘lamplit cave’, in which the four card-players booze away, holds the ‘secret, bestial peace’ of their existence. Outside, however, are gales and ‘starlessness’, fresh rain falling and, most beautifully of all, ‘wet century-wide trees’ clashing above the tavern. Human existence, in the tavern, is brutish, but beyond and all around lies a wild and pitiless world. ‘Rain, wind and fire!’ – there is a glory in it and even in the sottish defiance of the drunken men (Jan van Hogespeuw pisses ‘at’ the dark, as if taunting it).

(Adriaen Brouwer, Kaartspelers en Brassers [Card Players and Drinkers], oil on panel, seventeenth century; Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Antwerp; found here)

I cannot find a painting which actually resembles the one in ‘The Card Players’ in every detail. (Does that mean it’s not truly ekphrastic?) There was of course a genre of Flemish and Dutch painting showing interior scenes, and a subgenre of that showing taverns. Artists like David Teniers the Younger and Adriaen Brouwer tended to show the interior of the tavern and not the countryside without, which Larkin includes in his vision. Perhaps Larkin imagined the picture in his poem, combining works he had seen.

To me, his poem works like those pictures. Teniers and Brouwer turned commonplace, even ugly scenes, into fit subjects for art through their perceptiveness and skilful brushwork. Larkin describes a vulgar scene similar to theirs and similarly turns it into art.

(Aert van der Neer, Moonlit Landscape with Bridge, oil on panel, probably between 1648 and 1650; National Gallery of Art, Washington DC; found here)

The rest of the collection High Windows echoes the juxtaposition of human degradation and natural beauty in ‘The Card Players’. ‘The Trees’ and ‘Solar’ are joyful celebrations of life. On the other hand, lighted rooms, in hotels, hospitals and homes, evoke loneliness and isolation with great power. Buildings are usually dreary and functional. ‘Going, Going’ laments the loss of countryside to urban encroachment and pollution. (Though I think poems like ‘Going, Going’ and ‘Posterity’ remain a bit one-note, the language unallusive.)

‘Friday Night in the Royal Station Hotel’, however, is beautiful because the way he describes the empty hotel – without guests, it has no meaning – brilliantly suggests loneliness and death, a spirit-fled corpse. This is done through the specific details of light and dark, silence, ash, ‘shoeless’ corridors, lack of home, ‘Night comes on’.

Light spreads darkly downwards from the high
Clusters of lights over empty chairs
That face each other, coloured differently.
Through open doors, the dining-room declares
A larger loneliness of knives and glass
And silence laid like carpet. A porter reads
An unsold evening paper. Hours pass,
And all the salesmen have gone back to Leeds,
Leaving full ashtrays in the Conference Room.

In shoeless corridors, the lights burn. How
Isolated, like a fort, it is –
The headed paper, made for writing home
(If home existed) letters of exile: Now
Night comes on. Waves fold behind villages.

In ‘Sad Steps’ the poet himself, like Jan van Hogespeuw, has a nocturnal piss on a stormy night. He draws the curtain to see ‘the wind-picked sky’. For him, unlike Jan, ‘There’s something laughable’ about the night scene and about the way humans have projected romantic notions onto moonlit skies. He feels that:

The hardness and the brightness and the plain
Far-reaching singleness of that wide stare

is a reminder of his lost youth. In the titular poem, he imagines looking through other, ‘high windows’ to the endless nothingness beyond.

So, I am converted to Philip Larkin after all.

 

Square Haunting: Five Women, Freedom and London Between the Wars, by Francesca Wade

Glossing over my long absence from the Internet, I am back to enthuse about a book that most of you have already heard of and maybe read. (If you have read it, write your Thoughts in the comment section below this post!) I shall have to write about it from memory, because I do not actually have a copy, I borrowed my mother’s while I was in Britain. Perhaps this is no bad thing, it will curb my propensity to ramble on. (Or will it?)

Quite by chance, Francesca Wade discovered that between the two world wars five women writers lived in Mecklenburgh Square in London: HD, Dorothy L. Sayers, Jane Ellen Harrison, Eileen Power and Virginia Woolf. (I hadn’t ever heard of Harrison and Power: Harrison was a brilliant classical scholar who left Cambridge University in her seventies to set up house with Hope Mirrlees and translate and promote Russian literature; Power was a distinguished mediaeval historian who argued the importance of economic and social history, as well as being a Sinophile, prominent socialist and pacifist, and holder of wild parties.) At that time, Mecklenburgh Square was a place where a middle-class woman of modest means could rent a room of her own, alongside artists, radicals and poor families; a little rackety and Bohemian though not too much, certainly quite cheap and in close proximity to the British Library and University College, London.

A group biography of this sort explores the ways in which five women found, and then fought to keep, their rooms of their own. Not all of the women lived in Mecklenburgh Square very long – Woolf hardly at all – so Wade explores her five lives by moving back and forth in time around their sojourns there. She also uses the geographical centre of Mecklenburgh Square to pull together numerous threads of cultural life between the wars. Certain preoccupations absorbed all five. How did talented, curious and clever women navigate a world which denied them equality? Harrison and Power had to work for an institution, Cambridge University, which refused to award degrees to women; Woolf wasn’t even permitted a proper education and had to teach herself. Was it possible to marry – or have a fulfilling relationship – without sacrificing one’s work, if one was a woman? For HD and Sayers, pregnant outside wedlock, this involved particularly painful choices.

Shaping one’s own story was also important. HD wrote and rewrote versions of her autobiography many times over her life, as if trying on different dresses; Woolf skived off labouring away on her biography of Roger Fry to dash out ‘A Sketch of the Past’, scatterings of childhood memories. During the Blitz she watched London’s physical past being bombed to smithereens; eventually her own home and many of her possessions were also obliterated, tangible links with her youth and family gone for ever. Harrison and Power both destroyed their papers (Harrison burnt hers almost gleefully when she left Newnham), with terrible consequences for their posthumous reputations, their radical contributions to history forgotten or reattributed to men.

(Photograph of Mecklenburgh Square, ca 1930; Camden Local Studies and Archives, found here)

Other interests were more particular. Power was a socialist and her story encompasses developments in socialist thought as well as the rise of the League of Nations Union, pacifism and internationalism, all of which shaped post-WWI society. Both Power and Woolf became increasingly uncomfortable with the knowledge of their privileges and their reliance on the labour of working-class women. Through Harrison, we learn about the Russian diaspora and its influence on western European culture. Through HD, we learn about the Imagists and the difficulty of living a truly Bohemian life. (Also: that HD was a total slob who never emptied her ashtrays or washed up her wine glasses.)

Square Haunting is a book which has deservedly won a lot of praise. It is a marvellous group biography, full of detail and perceptiveness. It not only brings to life five women and their era; it also reminds us of the importance of taking the time and having the space to think, as imperative now as it was one hundred years ago.

 

From Spare Oom to War Drobe: Travels in Narnia with my Nine-Year-Old Self, by Katherine Langrish

When I was nine years old I wrote a book called Tales of Narnia, and I still have it. In spiky blue ink, written in my best handwriting with only occasional crossings-out and spelling mistakes, it runs for eighty-six numbered pages and fills an old hard-covered notebook from front to back. [...] I covered the notebook with a paper wrapper which I painted dark blue, and stuck a poster-paint picture I’d made of Aslan on the front. He looks very stiff, very yellow and rather cross.

So begins this lovely ramble through C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia. It is really for people who, like Langrish, adored the books when they read them as a child but perhaps have not revisited them since. So a chapter is devoted to each book, including a detailed retelling each story and extensive quotes. As we explore, Langrish considers how Lewis’s personal beliefs, the historical situation (shortly after the Second World War and during the Cold War) and literary and folkloric works contributed to each book. Her knowledge is impressive but lightly worn, so that it’s like reading along with a good friend whose ideas you mostly but not completely agree with.

Langrish is even-handed, although she admits she likes some books more than others (and does anyone truly love The Last Battle?), she is alert to beautiful writing wherever she finds it. She considers the darker side of the books: racism? Yes, definitely. Misogyny? More mixed. There are strong girls in every book, and some great villainesses; but on the other side there is the Susan problem and, though I don’t think Langrish mentions it, no strong and likeable adult females. Do these problems mean that we shouldn’t read the books any more? Of course not!

And I had not realised it, until Langrish pointed it out, how thoroughly Lewis loathed schools. There are plenty of references to them in the books and they are always awful places.

I was impressed by Langrish’s tracing of motifs and plots to their source material. This includes Victorian and Edwardian children’s books and fantasy literature, Mediaeval and Renaissance poetry, fairy tales, Greek, Roman and Norse myths, the Arabian Nights, Christian theology and of course the Bible. Lewis’s uses of these gives different flavours to the books: for instance, there is a strong debt to E. Nesbit in much of The Magician’s Nephew, but more of a Mediaeval romance feeling to The Silver Chair. Langrish also argues persuasively for the influence of more recent history on some of the books. So Maugrim’s secret police surely draws on the Cheka and the Stasi, Nickabrick on the struggles of Irish revolutionaries, and the silver chair on the horrors of trench warfare.It is all very illuminating and gave me a new respect for Lewis’s skills as a children’s writer and as someone who understood children. (The only real remaining mystery: why did Edmund love Turkish Delight so much?) Langrish’s emphasis on her own responses to the books keeps it from ever threatening to become dry. Passages such as Aslan’s death and rebirth, or the creation of Narnia, still move and delight her; Caspian’s lengthy back story bores her.  A particular joy is how she contrasts her adult reactions with her child ones. At the end of The Silver Chair, grown-up liberal Langrish disapproves of the way Jill and Eustace deal with the bullies but nine-year-old Katherine loved it.

This is the kind of book to read on a rainy Sunday afternoon with the kind of tea and toasted muffins you would eat in a faun’s cave in Narnia. Although you will then spend your Sunday evening grubbing about in the attic looking for your battered Puffin paperbacks...

(All the illustrations on this page are by Pauline Baynes; this last one is the cover illustration for The Last Battle - rather different from the one on my Puffin edition!)

Into Egypt, by Rosalind Brackenbury

Into Egypt is the third of Rosalind Brackenbury’s novels to be re-published by Walmer Books, and if you haven’t yet discovered her writing you are in for a treat. Her first novel, A Day to Remember to Forget, depicts a family coming together for a Sunday birthday lunch, evoked from different viewpoints. Her second, A Virtual Image, follows an Englishwoman driving through France in pursuit of her friend. Into Egypt, first published in 1973, centres around a young English girl who travels out to Israel in 1962 to ‘find herself’. It is written in the prose that I love, Brackenbury’s long, flowing sentences which are flexible enough to contain great subtlety and nuance, to chart shifts in characters’ thoughts and feelings with delicacy. The world that we perceive through those characters is described with careful, almost overwhelming detail; it is sensuous and heightened, as if we are experiencing everything in High Definition, and infused with the characters’ emotions. Here the main character, Jo, has been struggling with her unhappy boyfriend, Francis; the way that her view out of their London flat is described reveals the misery and the fleeting beauties of their relationship:

The chill settles upon me, the cold breath of a late May morning with no sun beyond the panes of glass. From our kitchen window we can see one tree in the small back garden of a house below our flat, one lilac tree with its white trumpet blooms dingy and its leaves matt with dust; and the smell of the lilac still rises to our window when we open it on fine nights, when we lean out and see the glow over the river, the sun setting on the pink chimneys of the power station, the clouds trawling the windy sky.

Into Egypt has two epigraphs. The first is from T.S. Eliot’s ‘Burnt Norton’:

Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.

Time is treated in a structurally complex way in the novel, which chops between Jo travelling in Israel in 1962, incidents in Jo’s childhood, Gilbert’s earlier life, Jo in London five years later, and Jo on a second trip to Israel in 1972. In terms of the novel, it means that sometimes we are experiencing events as they happen and sometimes we are looking back or already know something in advance. We learn early on, for example, that the young kibbutznik Gilbert, whom Jo meets on the boat out to Haifa and becomes close to, will be killed a few  years later, giving his plans for the future, the descriptions of his vigorous, strong body, a ghostlike quality.

(Students working in a kibbutz garden; found here)

Israel’s history marks the present wherever you look. Jo looks at the Mount of Olives, the Wailing Wall, Mount Zion, the past is everywhere visible and loaded with symbolism. The dreams of the kibbutzniks are based on the ancient idea of the Promised Land, the place where their ancestors lived. They have plans for the future but are rooted in what has come before. More recent history is just as prominent: the bullet holes in walls, the no-man’s land in Jerusalem. As the sun sets in Safad, Jo sees:

below there are the abandoned Arab houses set upon the slopes, that change from honey white and lose the light from their windows and turn blind black eyes down the valley, further still.

For Zvi Mosseri, the historian Jo meets in Jerusalem, the past is a trap, the old dreams need to be tempered and Israelis and Arabs must work together, overcome the fears and hatreds of the entrapping past. Clever, tormented Francis in London would agree: complaining about Freud, he says:

‘All this stuff about one’s childhood, when what one’s supposed to do nowadays is to face the existential reality of the present moment. [...] The present makes the past irrelevant. For the purposes of therapy, anyway. Don’t you see that using the past as the only explanation of the present denies any play of free will?’

And so, perhaps, the gaps in the narrative and the shifts back and forth in time force us to focus on the moment being told to us.

(Jaffa Road in Jerusalem, 1962; from here)

The second epigraph is from Exodus:

Fear not to go into Egypt.

You can see into Egypt from the kibbutz at Gan Hagar, on the border ‘the huts and the United Nations men playing cards, and the guns laid in readiness against the wooden walls, and the flags marking the boundary line’. Gilbert tells Jo:

‘It’s the same earth, you know. Same land, same farmers. Only we can never go into Egypt, and they can never come over to us.’

Where you work the land, you belong, in Gilbert’s mind. Visiting London, he is lost in its ‘insubstantial charade’. The only English person he considers ‘real’ is a cowherd he meets out in the countryside: ‘It was true: work was the universal reality.’ This clear vision, this kibbutz life of hard work which totally absorbs you, appeals to Jo too. There is a part of her that craves certainty and hopes that Israel will provide exactly that:

And I stand apart, I listen, I judge, I am looking for right and wrong, black and white, the absolutes which I must have come here to find.

It is the same part that, years later, drives her to visit her boyfriend’s therapist for an ‘explanation’ of what has happened to him. Yet she also suspects these certainties. One of her childhood memories is of arranging her crayons in order of the colours of the spectrum:

but when the arrangement is finished there are two pencils left, the white and the black [...] To put one at each end seems to mock the gradations of subtle colour within, for they are too extreme, too absolute; they are not a part of the rainbow but something exterior and hard to place; perhaps they are not even colours. To avoid the decision she puts them separately in her satchel.

For this reason, she is also attracted to the ambiguities and complexities Zvi offers her. Moderation makes sense to her, though it is more difficult than black-and-white.

Exodus is about a journey; Into Egypt is full of journeys, interior and exterior. In the end, there are no answers and no final destinations, the point is to fear not to go into Egypt, to take the risk and keep moving.

‘Out in the dark’, by Edward Thomas

Out in the dark over the snow
The fallow fawns invisible go
With the fallow doe;
And the winds blow
Fast as the stars are slow.

Stealthily the dark haunts round
And, when a lamp goes, without sound
At a swifter bound
Than the swiftest hound,
Arrives, and all else is drowned;

And I and star and wind and deer
Are in the dark together,—near,
Yet far,—and fear
Drums on my ear
In that sage company drear.

How weak and little is the light,
All the universe of sight,
Love and delight,
Before the might,
If you love it not, of night.

(Edward Thomas, from Collected Poems, Oxford University Press)

Today is a terrible day. Thinking of everyone in Ukraine.

 

Storm Jameson Reading Week cancelled

I am really sorry, but I am not going to run Storm Jameson Reading Week this year. Although I should be absolutely delighted if someone else would like to take it on?

Why am I ditching it? Well, ’tis a mixture of Covid and Brexit, the gift that just keeps on giving. The reason I chose Storm Jameson for a reading week was that she is so neglected and her work is out of print. This has also turned out to be my undoing, because I only actually own one book by her. And since last summer, obtaining anything from the UK if you live in Europe, has become more difficult.

Because I am an idiot I didn’t realise this until I ordered a second-hand copy of Barchester Towers as I am on a bit of a Trollope jag. The book and postage cost me about £6, I think. The import duties? €19. So that is the end of international second-hand book-shopping for me.

Plan B was to stock up on books during visits at Christmas and Easter. Alas! I had to cancel my Christmas visit when the risks from Covid (too boring to go into) rendered it unwise. Now I only have one trip before Storm Jameson Reading Week, and I have to carry back a load of Christmas presents as well… All in all, it has tipped over from Something Fun into Something that is Giving Me Disproportionate Levels of Worry.

Obviously this is very disappointing. I still would like to host a reading week for someone, but it seems most sensible to limit myself to someone whose books I already possess. I’ve been pondering this for a while and the other day my eye lighted upon … Isak Dinesen (or Karen Blixen).

Now, I appreciate she is considerably better known than Storm Jameson, and her work is in print and easily  available. But she has a substantial and varied body of work, encompassing short stories, memoir and one novel, and I think she is worthy of greater attention. I did hesitate because I remember her being a frightful snob and almost certainly racist, a contentious figure and rather a particular taste. Still, I am queen of this here blog and ultimately my word goes. Let it be done!

I shall put together a post about her in the next few days, and I hope very much that you will join me!

 

The Pendragon Legend, by Antal Szerb; translated by Len Rix

For weeks Belgium has lain under a thick grey cloud, our lives occasionally enlivened by a few hours of rain, no sunshine, no snow, just greyness. At such a time, what could be better than The Pendragon Legend, the first novel of the Hungarian writer Antal Szerb, published in 1934. It is gothic, comic, romantic, mysterious and utterly charming. It would be satirical, if satire was too strong a word for its affectionate, gentle mockery: it loves what it laughs at. It includes a ghost, ancient books, the Rosicrucians, north Wales, a ruined castle, a disputed inheritance and sinister goings-on. I love it and re-reading it has cheered me up no end.

Perhaps you too recognise the feeling that is described here? It is the moment when our narrator, János Bátky, first claps eyes on the precious Pendragon library:

I was filled with the tenderness I always feel – and which nothing can match – when I encounter so many books together. At moments like these I long to wallow, to bathe in them, to savour their wonderful, dusty, old-book odours, to inhale them through my very pores.

János Bátky is a Hungarian scholar with an interest in the esoteric. At a party he falls into conversation with the Earl of Gwynedd, a recluse who shares his enthusiasm for Robert Fludd, and is invited to stay with him at Llanvygan Castle and examine his library of priceless manuscripts. Reading up about the Pendragon family (who are the earls of Gwynedd), Bátky befriends an Irish adventurer and fantasist named Maloney who, coincidentally, is also bound for Llanvygan in the company of Osborne Pendragon, the Earl’s nephew. But before they leave, a mysterious telephone caller warns Bátky to stay away.

At Llanvygan Bátky accidentally offends the Earl and so does not see much of him. Most of the Earl’s time is devoted to experiments with some gigantic axolotls he has bred and through whom he hopes to find the secret of the resurrection of the body and eternal life. Bátky enjoys his days in the library, especially when accompanied by the beautiful Cynthia, Osborne’s sister, but his nights are considerably less enjoyable, interrupted by a midnight rider with a flaming torch charging around the castle. Someone is trying to murder the Earl, there is a crazed prophet in the village, and the ruins of Pendragon Castle on the hill above hold a secret that may shed light on the mysteries, if only Bátky, Osborne and Maloney can find it.

So, melodrama, mystery and eccentrics a-plenty, all spiced with lashings of humour. It’s a book that doesn’t take itself seriously, like its narrator. As the quote about his feelings for libraries suggests, Bátky is sensual as well as scholarly, easily distracted by a beautiful woman. He is clever and curious but weedy, given to experiencing life through books and ill-equipped to face the more physical dangers the situation in Llanvygan foments. The telephone call almost puts him off even starting for Wales, and it is only academic vanity that spurs him on. He struggles to climb a cliff during a nocturnal escapade with Maloney and Osborne, and at a crucial point gets lost on a Welsh mountain because he cannot tell the difference between beech, birch and oak trees. He is a frightful snob and romantic and it is these qualities that support him and drive him on rather than any nobler attributes. He is somewhat in love with the idea of the British aristocracy, to put it mildly.

Here he is, experiencing that mainstay of gothic fiction, an eerie noise at night in a castle:

Anyway, I switched the light on. The room was now at least two hundred years more historic than when I had gone to bed. I had seen rooms like it in London museums and French chateaux, but then there had been guides and written inscriptions to direct one as to what to imagine [..] But none of the elaborately carved wardrobes in this room carried any such source of enlightenment. Nothing tied the imagination to what was merely informative and comforting. For all I knew, some ancestor might have died in here, repenting his unspeakable crimes amid horrific visions ... And all the while, there came this unceasing sound: tap, tree-ee, and the terrible sigh. [...]
Of course, I realised it must be a window, or something of that kind, producing the noise. On many a windy night the same battle had been waged between an unsecured window and my fevered imagination.
I knew that, whether I wanted to or not, I would have to go and investigate. I knew my habits of mind: until I did that, I would have no rest.
I got out of bed, donned my dressing gown and quietly drew back the door.

There is a clever balance here between self-deprecating humour and true creepiness, no mean feat to achieve. For underneath the jolly japes, the endearing eccentrics and the madcap pace, we glimpse a darkness: besides the horror of banal, lucre-worshipping criminality there arises the horror of an evil less easy to comprehend, and one which speaks to ancient terrors. Where does legitimate pursuit of truth end, and obsession and madness begin? At what point does the past grip the present too tightly? Dreams, prophesies, stories, lies, all have their own truths. The novel plays delicately too on bodily and literary immortality; it concludes with a sense that there are indeed mysteries that can never fully be understood.

The Pushkin Press edition which I read was translated by Len Rix so beautifully that not only does it flow as easily as if it had been written in 1930s English, it also captures Bátky’s personality and dry wit perfectly. The whole book is an absolute joy.

(Portrait of Antal Szerb, from the Pushkin Press website; Szerb was a Hungarian Jew and so his literary career was destroyed and he was murdered in a forced labour camp in 1945)