a gallimaufry

catching up

Oh dear! Where did the time go? I am almost embarrassed to come back here after so long. How are you all? Did you enjoy the summer?

I have mainly been having a lovely time. International travelling rules were relaxed just in time for me to pop over to the UK in August to see my family. I fell upon the charity bookshops of Ipswich with joy and managed a small but respectable haul (I am limited by what I can carry back on the Eurostar and my suitcase also held the Folio Society edition of The Lord of the Rings which is possibly the heaviest three-volume set ever published, my arms are now six inches longer).

Here is my swag, rounded out with a few books I filched from my mother’s box of books to go to Oxfam:

But! Not a single work by Storm Jameson! It seems my dreams of second-hand bookshops stuffed with her books are indeed dreams with no basis in reality. Bother.

I have mentioned before that I decided to rearrange the majority of my fiction, poetry and plays chronologically. Dear friends, do not do this. In theory it was a wonderful plan which would reveal very clearly the development of (mainly) English literature; in practice it is difficult to sustain because you have to keep checking publication dates every time you want to shelve a book (so you don’t bother and shove books in where there’s space and then everything becomes even more chaotic) – quite apart from what to do about books published many years after they were written, collected works, etc. I had known that it would take longer to find any book I wanted but I thought this would yield pleasant rambles through my books as I sought a particular volume. In fact it’s just annoying. But I am too lazy to re-organise everything again.

Anyway, an unexpected drawback of scattering slender volumes of modern verse among novels is that you can’t really see them any more. So, when we redecorated my daughter’s bedroom and a small bookcase became surplus to requirements, I stole it for them. It’s right beside the door to the kitchen and already I’m reading more poetry than I’ve done for years. Hurrah!

At the moment I am having a Brontë fest. I reread Jane Eyre – it’s so good! And then I read Glass Town: The Imaginary World of the Brontës by Isabel Greenberg, which was fun and led me back to Juliet Barker’s The Brontës. It was abandoned half-read a couple of years ago but I am now fully absorbed in it. It is too unwieldy for the bus, so I am also rereading Wuthering Heights and loving it all over again.

And now, although I ought to be preparing a four-hour English lesson on answering the telephone and takng a message (four hours! I know! my lucky, lucky students), I will leave you with a quick list of books I’ve read recently that I recommend to you!

• The Absolute Book, by Elizabeth Knox. (Whenever I clap eyes on the spine of this novel, in my head I hear a voice saying ‘The absolute BOOK!’ with exactly the emphasis of a Georgette Heyer heroine gasping ‘You absolute SWINE!’) This is a novel which is always changing, never quite what it seems – characters move through different worlds and we move through different genres. A mash-up of Ruth Rendell, The Shadow of the Wind and Graham Joyce’s Some Kind of Fairy Tale, streaked with darkness and splendidly evocative, it is an enjoyable read slightly let down, I felt, by the neat ending.
• The Trick is to Keep Breathing, by Janice Galloway. I’ve had this book for twenty-five years and finally its moment arrived and it was worth it. In it Joy Stone, a drama teacher, chronicles her struggle with grief and mental breakdown; this sounds grim but it is clever and witty and hopeful as well as sad. I want to read more of her work now.
• The Queen of Air and Darkness, by T.H. White. Darker and crueller than The Sword in the Stone, this is an excoriation of the chivalric code with which Arthur’s court has become associated. White depicts it as either violent or ridiculous and the novel lurches between these two extremes. I found it uncomfortable to read, I think that’s the point. Soon: The Ill-Made Knight.

Happy October, everyone!

 

about a book splurge

I think I may have mentioned, ahem, that recently I finally passed the theory test for my driving licence. If you have ever studied the Belgian Highway Code you will know that it is phenomenonally dull and one of the reasons that it took me so long to take the test was there was always something more interesting to do with my time, even cleaning the loo. However, I cunningly motivated myself by imposing a total book-buying ban until I succeeded in passing. Amazing how this concentrated my mind!

It’s not that I am buying insane amounts of books every day, it’s more the thought that I cannot. I hasten to add.

Inevitably, the moment the ban was lifted, a splurge ensued. Faye rashly asked me what I had bought so, since I am hiding indoors from the beautiful weather because of my hay fever, let me show you.

The very day I passed the test I walked into the local charity shop and found these, 50 cents each, I mean, that is the universe basically ordering me to go on a Ruth Rendall reading spree is it not?

If you can’t read the titles they are: A Dark Adapted Eye, A Fatal Inversion, The House of Stairs, Gallowglass and The Chimney Sweeper’s Boy under the name of Barbara Vine, and A Guilty Thing Surprised, The Face of Trespass and Talking to Strange Men under her own name. Although they represent a tiny proportion of her published works, I’m now thinking of a little Ruth Rendall project, reading them all in chronological order. I might write about them here if I do, though don’t hold your breath, my projects are predisposed to failure.

Then I had a little internet dalliance...

John Banville’s The Sea and J.G. Farrell’s Troubles are both to review for Shiny New Books so actually they are necessary and guilt-free purchases. But the Collected Stories of Walter de la Mare is a lovely treat.

I have loved Lucy Wood’s first two books so couldn’t really wait until this second collection of her stories came out in paperback. (I thought I had written about Weathering here but I haven’t; it is a beautiful rain-soaked story of mothers and daughters and ghosts and new beginnings.)

And I saw Year of Wonder by Clemency Burton-Hill recommended on the Twitter feed of the Secret Barrister. It’s the musical equivalent of A Poem a Day. Burton-Hill has chosen a different – and short – piece of classical music for every day of the year and written about it. It’s aimed at people who want to learn more about classical music but don’t really know where to start. I am one of those people who actually ‘knows’ quite a bit of music if you play it to me, but doesn’t actually know what any of it is called and will stare blankly at you if you start talking about Beethoven 5 or Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No. 1. So far I’ve listened to music by Handel, Meredith Monk, Vivaldi and Germaine Tailleferre and I’d never even heard of two of them before; I actually wish that each entry was a little longer but this is after all intended as an introduction and in the age of the internet it’s easy to explore further. It’s fun and I recommend it!

Finally, when I was visiting my parents during the Easter holidays, we went to Sutton Hoo (a favourite Parry family spot: even with the (splendid) visitor’s centre it retains a slightly otherworldly air) where there is a second-hand bookshop run by a very nice man. And it was a good second-hand bookshop, being both reasonably priced and full of unusual books that you didn’t know you needed to read. I’ve always wanted to learn more about Tycho Brahe, so Kitty Ferguson’s The Nobleman and his Housedog: Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler: The Strange Partnership that Revolutionised Science looks like an accessible way to do this. And I came across a thin little hardback priced at only £1 called Madame de and written by Louise de Vilmorin; the illustrations were so charming that I felt the book had to come home with me even though I knew nothing about the writer or the book. And I will write more about this anon.

'Farewell', by Katharine Tynan

(John Atkinson Grimshaw, The Harvest Moon, oil on canvas, found here)

Not soon shall I forget – a sheet
Of golden water, cold and sweet,
The young moon with her head in veils
Of silver, and the nightingales.

A wain of hay came up the lane –
O fields I shall not walk again,
And trees I shall not see, so still
Against a sky of daffodil!

Fields where my happy heart had rest,
And where my heart was heaviest,
I shall remember them at peace
Drenched in moon-silver like a fleece.

The golden water sweet and cold,
The moon of silver and of gold,
The dew upon the gray grass-spears
I shall remember them with tears.

Katharine Tynan was an Irish poet about whom I know no more than Wikipedia tells me.  I found this poem in Walter de la Mare’s lovely anthology Come Hither. It is a bit weepy, but I love its music, and the image of the veiled moon. The first line, ‘Not soon shall I forget’ – but forget I shall, one day – is challenged by the repeated ‘I shall remember’ – and yet what might be several distinct memories (although perhaps not: before I saw the Atkinson Grimshaw painting I could not imagine a yellow sky and silver moonlight at the same time, yet there they are) are already bleeding a little into each other. It reminds me a bit of ‘The Song of Wandering Aengus’.

Does anyone know more about Tynan? Do you like this poem?

The Ride-by-Nights, by Walter de la Mare

(Edward Ardizzone, illustration from Eleanor Estes’ wonderful The Witch Family (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1960); found here)

 

Up on their brooms the Witches stream,
Crooked and black in the crescent’s gleam;
One foot high, and one foot low,
Bearded, cloaked, and cowled they go.
’Neath Charlie’s Wain they twitter and tweet,
And away they swarm ’neath the Dragon’s feet,
With a whoop and a flutter they swing and sway,
And surge pell-mell down the Milky Way.
Between the legs of the glittering Chair
They hover and squeak in the empty air.
Then round they swoop past the glimmering Lion
To where Sirius barks behind huge Orion;
Up, then, and over to wheel amain,
Under the silver, and home again.

(From Peacock Pie: A Book of Rhymes, London: Constable and Co., 1913)

These twittering, squeaking little witches seem more fitting to our modern concept  of Hallowe’en than anything more sinister and warty. I loved this poem as a child, and my ambition was to be a witch when I grew up (I am still disappointed that this isn’t a valid career choice – and I do mean proper witchery, with flying and spells and talking cats, no namby-pamby gentle New Agery for me thank you).

May your night be free of ghosties and ghoulies and long-legged beasties, dear readers!