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Will I ever get enough of London? (yes… that’s enough now)

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(Thanks to those of you who expressed interest in receiving a copy of my paper – I’m not ignoring you, will email off Thurs evening!)

Wow, if you thought I bought a lot of books at the weekend, wait til you see how many I got on Wednesday with Claire (who, remembering her luggage allowance, was rather more circumspect).  That’s for another day, though.  For today I’ll just show off this photo of me meeting Claire (taken by Darlene – who joined us for dinner, giving me the delight of seeing her twice in one week.)

Tonight, tired, and having succumbed to the inevitable cold (all my housemates have it – it was only a matter of time) I just wanted to write a quick question…

This is to all the bloggers who have met other bloggers in person.  I can say, without hesitation, that all the bloggers I’ve met have been lovely, Claire being (of course) no exception.  But what does change quite a lot is how similar or different they are to/from how I imagined them.  Some bloggers – perhaps especially Karen and Thomas – were exactly how I’d envisioned them.  Others, while lovely, were lovely in a whole other way that I’d anticipated.

I’ve been lucky – I’ve met probably 30-35 bloggers in person (I’ll have to do a proper count sometime) so I can make these sorts of statements – but I’d love for you to answer, if you can!  How have your face-to-face blogger-to-blogger meetings gone?

And, for an even smaller group of respondents… was I how you imagined I’d be, when you met me?!

Londoning (the books)

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Time to share with you the books I bought in London!  Blogger has a new interface thingummy, so I’m hoping things will go to plan… if I press the wrong buttons and everything turns out enormous or slanting to the right or something, then forgive me.  (Is the font still a readable size?)

First up are the two books I bought at the conference.  My heart more or less stopped beating when I walked into the conference hall on the second day – there was the most middlebrow bookstall in front of me.  Elizabeth von Arnim, E.M. Delafield, Viragos everywhere… Not the cheapest selection in the world, but I did manage to pick up a couple of gems:

 

Opus 7 by Sylvia Townsend Warner: the first book she published, this is a book-length poem and thus not my normal cup of tea, but I’ll give it a go.  Plus… beautiful, no?

Novels and Novelists by Katherine Mansfield: a collection of her reviews, which is rather wonderful.  Lots of unfamiliar names in the index, and thus probably a more accurate representation of the period.  It does, serendipitously, include a review of Elizabeth von Arnim’s Christopher and Columbus, which I was reading the day I bought this.

Off I trotted during some free time, and down to Judd Books, wherein I bought these:

 

At Freddie’s and Innocence by Penelope Fitzgerald.  There are plenty of Penelope Fitzgerald novels around, but I fell in love with this series of editions from Flamingo – another incentive to explore more PF territory.

The rest of the weekend’s purchases are shown, colour-coded…

 

Blow on a Dead Man’s Embers by Mari Strachan: I recently loved Strachan’s first novel, so was delighted to pick her second up for £1.

Loitering With Intent by Muriel Spark: it’s no secret that I adore this novel, but the copy I read was from the library – I’ve been on the look-out for a cheap copy for a while.

The Towers of Trebizond by Rose Macaulay: somehow this was not amongst my Macaulay collection, despite being perhaps her most famous.  Thanks to Mary for spotting this outside the bookshop!

 

Epigraph on George Moore by Charles Morgan: I love authors writing about other authors, and although I’ve only read one book by Morgan, and none by Moore, this seemed like one I rather wanted to own…

Plagued by the Nightingale by Kay Boyle: between recognising Boyle’s name, an instinctive covetousness for any Virago Modern Classic, and the cover painting, I couldn’t leave this behind.  The cover is ‘Portrait of a Young Woman’ by Meredith Frampton, one of my favourite paintings in the Tate Gallery.

The Old Maid by Edith Wharton: I’ve been wanting to read more Wharton, and this is perfect for my research into 1920s spinsters – not to mention a rather lovely copy.

T.H. White: A Biography by Sylvia Townsend Warner: another one I should probably have on hand for my research – making this book buying haul, on the whole, an academic excursion… no?

Londoning (a many varied post…)

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I’m back to what will hopefully become normal schedule now – and several busy days in London to report! This picture is a sneak preview of what I will talk about…


As I mentioned in my last post, I’ve been attending a Middlebrow Conference called The Popular Imagination and the Dawn of Modernism, and very enjoyable it was too. (Hello to the people I met there, if you’re now reading this!) Well, it was enjoyable tinged with nerves, unsurprisingly, since this was my first time presenting outside of a graduate conference in Oxford. My paper was called (laboured pun alert) The Love Child, The Witch and The Spinster: The Fantastic Middlebrow in Two 1920s Novels. Those novels were The Love Child by Edith Olivier and Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner – both, incidentally, very good indeed – although even at a Middlebrow Conference, where names like E.M. Delafield, Elizabeth von Arnim, and E.H. Young were thrown around confidently, nobody had read The Love Child…

I was on a wonderfully cohesive panel, all of talking about 1920s spinsters, including a paper on E.H. Young’s Miss Mole and The Missess Mallett, which delighted me. In the interests of keeping their research private, I’d better not share too much – and, indeed, with some vague notion of Intellectual Property I shan’t post my paper on here, but I’m happy to email it to anybody who fancies reading 3000 words on those novels. Just email me, or mention it in the comments. Oh, and while I was there I had the very great pleasure of meeting Tanya – we’d pre-arranged to meet up, and it was so lovely to have someone I ‘knew’ at the event.

Rather than any intellectual recap here, then, I shall instead relate the hilarious train journey I had on the Thursday, sitting opposite a delightful mother-and-daughter pair. The daughter, I quickly learnt, was almost seven years old, and called Megan. They were on their way to Disneyland – accompanied, I should add, by a singing Zac Efron doll (‘Can I Have This Dance?’ from High School Musical 3, since you ask) and a non-singing Justin Bieber doll. Megan was convinced that Justin had cellulitis (how on EARTH does she know this word?) and ignored her mother’s correction that she meant laryngitis. After a while of silently laughing to myself, I started to scribble down their conversation… it makes the mother sound a bit mean, but you should know that she was clearly joking throughout. It was evident that they had an amazing mother/daughter relationship, and just being near them brightened up my day. And it might brighten up yours…

Megan: What are you getting me for my birthday, Mum?

Mum: The trip to Disneyland is for your birthday! What more do you want from me, blood?

Megan: Daddy’s getting me a necklace, and Nanna’s giving me money. Will Auntie Michelle get me Barbies?

Mum: No love, honestly, she won’t get you Barbies, I promise you.

Megan: Why not?

Mum: She hates them, love. She thinks Barbies oppress women.

Megan: [pause] I want a Barbie!

Mum: You can buy one with your own money, I’m not buying you one. Seven year olds don’t need Barbies.

Megan: I love Barbies! I’d play with them more, only I’ve got all my homework to do.

Mum: Oh yes! Is that before or after I make you scrub the kitchen floor? And clean the toilet with a toothbrush?
And on it went, putting me into a great frame of mind for the conference. But my three days of conferencing did not lead to a well-earned rest in Oxford on Sunday. No, it saw me back on the good old Oxford-to-Paddington train. This time with unadulterated bookish fun in mind…


I met up with not one, not two, but three delightful bloggers on Sunday. Guest of honour was Darlene, over from Canada, and also very honourable were Mary and Rachel. (Mary isn’t fond of being in photographs, so she was chief-in-charge photographer.) I arrived shortly after them at the cafe of the National Gallery, and from then on we spent the next five or so hours chatting nineteen-to-the-dozen, buying armfuls of books, eating quantities of cake, and following the Virginia Woolf Guided Walk (before sloping off to, er, eat cake).


I’ll devote another post to the books I bought, but they were several – from the shops on Charing Cross Road. In Henry Porde Books there were dozens of our-sort-of-novels (Delafield, Arnim, and Young all featured here too) most of which had one lady’s name inside them. I can’t remember it now… Muriel Nicholas, maybe? Sadly my tastes were rather *too* close to this fine lady’s, since our libraries overlapped somewhat too much. I rather riled Rachel by the number of times my response, to proffered books, was “I’ve got it.” Not, of course “I’ve read it”…

When I meet up with bloggers, it never feels like I’m meeting a stranger. I know their voices so well from their blogs, and (especially with people like Darlene) feel a very real warmth and affection from them – even when I have never heard their voice or seen their face. As we traipsed through bookshops and along streets, Darlene and I bonded over our shared inability to navigate ourselves out of a dead-end street. Darlene also brought us all some lovely maple Canadian candies in a Canadian tin – I love tins and boxes for stationery and so forth, and (it goes without saying) I love sweets. Serendipitously, Rachel and Darlene had won my giveaway of As It Was by Helen Thomas, so I was able to hand out those too. I just felt bad not to have anything to press into Mary’s hands!

It was such a wonderful day. Really one to remember. Here’s a final picture, us showing off our spoils from Bea’s of Bloomsbury – and Rachel looking sad because she’d bravely decided to save her cupcakes for her mum and sister, and couldn’t join in our icing-consumption. Oh, how I do love all the joys of blogging!

Shaving Through The Blitz

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I believe, when I told you about my purchases in Hay-on-Wye, I advertised Shaving Through the Blitz (1943) by G.W. Stonier as being akin to ‘Mr. Miniver’, had that book ever existed. Which probably got quite a few of you interested.


Well, it isn’t anything like that, really. About all is has in common is that is was evidently once columns in a paper. But it’s still really good. Keep reading…

I was expecting whimsy and cosiness and a general determination to ignore the more brutal aspects of war in favour of bottling pears and entering flower shows – that sort of thing. And I was prepared to devour it in the same spirit. But Stonier’s book – and his narrator Mr. Fanfarlo – is of a rather different temperament. It’s quite lyrical, in a semi-experimental manner, moving through the sights, sounds, and feelings of wartime London, rather than narrating them in a straightforward manner. Fanfarlo is also proudly aesthetic, and is given to this sort of moral dilemma:

Suppose during an air raid I held Botticelli’s Venus under one arm and an old woman unknown to me under the other, with the chance of saving one but not both, which should I choose? Immortal painting or crumbling flesh and blood? The first! As an artist, I claim that right.

I say moral dilemma, but he is not unduly given to morals. Shaving Through the Blitz was surprisingly ‘progressive’ – Fanfarlo lives with a woman called Lizzie, who would quite like him to propose, but doesn’t intend to force the matter. He works, in a fairly dispassionate way, at the Ministry to ‘provide slogans that shall be breezy and full of dare-and-do’. There were definite overtones of Evelyn Waugh’s Put Out More Flags. Which is a hint that Stonier can be very funny at times, even while being aesthetic and high-falutin’. I particularly liked a little conversation about a young man writing for the Mass Observation project. A lady comments:

“That’s bad. Can’t you break him of it? My little nephew was a terrible mass-observer, too, before he got married.”

That puts Nella Last et al in their place, doesn’t it?

As always, it is deeply interesting to read about the war from those who experienced it. I feel like I have a fairly informed awareness of the (upper)middle-class housewife’s view of war, from various contemporary novels, but Stonier provides a viewpoint I hadn’t really encountered before. All the pieces slotting together is satisfying, to create a portrait of how wartime Britain would have felt. And this (lengthy) excerpt, below, made the book worth finding, all by itself. I think it a really moving, unusual angle upon the way the war changed, and how people at home changed their responses to it. I’m going to finish off this post with it, and encourage you to track down a copy of Shaving Through The Blitz if you can. Not the most whimsical of wartime books, but perhaps one of the more unusual.

How it has changed in the last eighteen months! Do you (who does not?) remember the carefree evenings when we all used to go for strolls in the new-found dark? It was a spree then, to walk to a theatre, or merely to walk, to stumble over sandbags and cross the road by others’ lights. “Sandbags!” we would exclaim as we picked ourselves up and went on to discover lamp-posts. Friendliness displayed itself in many ways, in a noisy jostling, in such illumination as was allowed. Torches stared at one another, cigarettes flickered a dialogue on street corners. Along Tottenham Court Road gaiety had lost nothing with the lights down, and a bubbling trail of voices down each pavement drew whisperers out of side-streets and brought even the sedentary to their doors. A gross amiability, the adolescent pleasure of being heard but not seen, infected every one who was being nudged, shoved, swept along and held back by the stream. A match would flare nearby, thrillingly, in the darkness, to reveal a face lit from below: a girl’s sucked-in cheeks over a cigarette, a beaming negro, perhaps, delighted with hours when others were as black and easily tickled as himself.

All that has disappeared – the lingering, the voices, the cigarette dream; and now with darkness falls the hush. Emptiness, but with every cranny filled. London has been given over to a monstrous drama, an act of darkness from which ordinary people, you and I as individuals, shut ourselves away. Earth and sky contract to form the arena; the city puts up its searchlights, a beetle laid on its back and helplessly wavering its legs, while the hornet drones overheard; night after night the assailant returns, the victim quivers with upturned belly. “A very bad night,” says Mrs. Greenbaum, heaving over in the morning to probe her fatness with an indignant finger, “an awful bad time it was last night, sure.” The rest of us, having shared the same delirium, with the same hornet boring down to a point in our bellies, nod stoically and blink at our silly nightlight.

Inscriptions

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Do keep your blog nominations coming on yesterday’s post. One thing Book Blogger Appreciation Week is showing me is how many new blogs there are! The old faithfuls – the blogs I’ve been reading for three or four years – feel to me a bit like we’re a huddle of parents at the schoolgates. Proud parents, of course. I just hope Stuck-in-a-Book can keep up, despite steadfastly refusing to have too drastic a face-lift! I’m always a little wary asking for feedback on the general direction of my blog, because I’m so overly-sensitive about creative things, but… well, I’m not going to make this a navel-gazing post!

Instead, let’s gaze at title-pages, and endpapers, and all those bits of a book which a previous owner might have scrawled on. Oddly enough, although I could never bring myself to write in a book (except in pencil) I love buying secondhand books with these inscriptions. Now and then I have vague intentions to collate all the inscriptions I have found in various books, but, of course, I haven’t done anything of the kind. And most of them simply say ‘To Margaret, love Elspeth’ or similar – a lovely memento of an unknown friendship, but perhaps not worth noting down at length.

But I couldn’t help sharing this one with you all. It’s in Llewelyn Powys’ A Baker’s Dozen, which I read and enjoyed recently, and will write more on later. That review may well descend (or, indeed, ascend) into a paean to the countryside. For now, we won’t go past the first page – on which, on the 15th July 1941, Peter (I think) wrote this:


“Sun! Sun! Sun! Oh Summer
dancing Sun! Sink slowly down into
the West. Let the hours
of happy freedom be long and longer.”

To Swithin on his 26th birthday, from Peter

15.7.41

I assumed it was a quotation, but Google brings up no results. So, unless any of you can tell me differently, I think I must assume this was Peter’s own, rather lovely, little verse for the enchantingly-named Swithin. As my housemate Mel pointed out – his birthday is St. Swithin’s Day. Nickname or were his parents opportunists? And was he off fighting the war?

I’ve found lots of inscriptions in books before, but I think this one might just be my favourite. Any wonderful examples you’d got to share?

Book Bloggers Appreciation Week

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I’ve spotted a few bloggers celebrating Book Bloggers Appreciation Week, which has rather taken me unawares this year. I wasn’t sure how I would celebrate it – I hope that Stuck-in-a-Book is a fairly frequent supporter of other bloggers, old and new, since the community aspect of blogging is one of my very favourite things.

So, I could pick out some of my favourite blogs and bloggers this week… but, instead, I’m going to ask you to do it. And it comes with a prize. Whilst I was at lunch with my friend Andrea today, I spotted two lovely 1931 copies of Helen Thomas’ wonderful biography As It Was. She was the wife of poet Edward Thomas, but you don’t have to know anything about him to enjoy this book and its sequel World Without End (which sadly wasn’t in the shop) – I certainly didn’t know anything about him before reading this. Anybody with an interest in early twentieth century Britain will love this memoir. For a full review of the book, which is on my list of 50 Books You Must Read, click here. To find out how to win a copy, keep reading…


I had thought about simply having a draw and offering two copies – but I’ve decided to do things a bit differently. I’d like you to tell me about a blogger you love. They can be one you’ve been following for years, or only discovered this week. Perhaps they’re simply somebody you think would appreciate the book. The winning entry will secure a copy of As It Was for you, and for the blogger you nominated! And it’s open worldwide.

If you to participate but don’t fancy the book, that’s fine, of course – just say so in your comment. Let’s spread the blogging appreciation, everyone!

Early Young

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One of the best books I’ve read this year was William by E.H. Young – a few of us did a joint read back in February, and I became a confirmed fan of Emily Hilda’s, after having previously enjoyed Miss Mole. In a manner not unknown to me, I had stockpiled EHY novels long before I knew whether or not I would like her, and so when I saw that someone at the conference I’m attending this week would be discussing The Misses Mallett (1922), I was able to prepare.

My received understanding about EH Young, from various reviews and from Virago’s judicious selection of novels to reprint in the 1980s and 1990s, was that her first three novels were rather mediocre and that The Misses Mallett (also published as The Bridge Dividing) was something of a momentous turning point. After that (so I understood) she wrote nothing but gems. After all, nothing separates those early rural novels from the sophistication of William except one novel: yes, The Misses Mallett.

I had great expectations. And, I’m sorry to say, they rather faltered. The topic showed such promise, especially given my predisposition towards spinster novels of the 1920s. And there are plenty of spinsters around – let me hand you over to my favourite one, Caroline:
“The Malletts don’t marry, Henrietta. Look at us, as happy as the day is long, with all the fun and none of the trouble. We’ve been terrible flirts, Sophia and I. Rose is different, but at least she hasn’t married. The three Miss Malletts of Nelson Lodge! Now there are four of us, and you must keep up our reputation.”Caroline, Sophia, and Rose are sisters, Rose being rather younger than the first two – who are drawn rather two-dimensionally, if amusingly. Caroline is fairly feisty, and spends her autumnal years reliving imagined conquests of her youth, and alluding to improprieties which she, in fact, has never had the opportunity to commit. Sophia is mousy and quiet and traipses after Caroline, excusing, correcting, and loving her. They have their own touching dynamic, even if their characters aren’t hugely evolved. It is with Rose, and later their feckless brother’s daughter Henrietta, that the reader is supposed to sympathise. They are from the same mould – affected intensely by their emotions, but compelled by society to quash their wilder affections, etc. etc. And they’re both tangled up with love for the (to my mind) wholly unattractive Francis Sales. He’s off the market anyway, married to an invalid wife of the variety who alternates catty remarks with lunges after her smelling salts.

To be honest, much of this plot reminded me of the most unlikely excesses of Thomas Hardy. People fall in love from distances of a hundred metres, flash their eyes all over the place, and emote wildly through woodland and over moors. Here’s an excerpt:
She did not love him – how could she? – but he belonged to her; and now, if this piece of gossip turned out to be true, she must share him with another. Jealousy, in its usual sense, she had none as yet, but she forged a chain she was to find herself unable to break. It was her pride to consider herself a hard young person, without spirituality, without sentiment, yet all her personal relationships were to be of the fantastic kind she now experienced, all her obligations such as others would have ignored.I haven’t read anything by Mary Webb et al, but this has to be the sort of thing Stella Gibbons was parodying in Cold Comfort Farm, no? (Which reminds me – review of Stella Gibbons’ Westwood coming soon, promise.) I’m being a little cruel to EHY here, perhaps, but only because her later novels are so brilliant. It’s somewhat reassuring that she wasn’t born with inherent subtlety and style.

I’m skimming over the plot rather, because it’s a bit predictable. I’ve watched enough corny films to know that the Rugged Hero will eventually be passed over for the Male Best Friend. In Henrietta’s case, the latter appears in the wonderful character of Charles. He is like a lump of real gold amidst fool’s gold – when EH Young went on to write better, much better, novels, she need not have been ashamed of creating Charles. He is a wonderful mixture of the aesthetic and inept. He lives for beauty in music, much in the way that characters in EM Forster might, but he also lacks confidence and is unnervingly self-aware.
Charles blinked, his sign of agitation, but Henrietta did not see. “He’s good to look at,” Charles muttered. “He knows how to wear his clothes.”

“That doesn’t matter.”

Charles heaved a sigh. “One never knows what matters.”As a hero he defies cliche, and thus is a nod towards the sort of complex characters which Young would later form. It’s just a shame that the Misses Mallett themselves, inoffensive though they might be, never really reveal any inspiration on Young’s part. A novel about 1920s spinster sisters living together could have been deliciously fun or painfully poignant, or even both, but there are only brief moments when The Misses Mallett could be said to be either. A serviceable novel, certainly, and good enough to pass the time – but unworthy of the pen which would later create William and Miss Mole, and goodness knows whatever other sparkling or clever works.

I’m very glad that this wasn’t my first encounter with EH Young, as it might well have also been my last. Instead, I shall chalk this up to experience – and go foraging for one of her later novels next time. Can anybody at all step forward to defend Young and, equally importantly, those Misses Mallett?

Song for a Sunday

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Somehow the 10th anniversary of September 11th feels more poignant than other anniversaries, and today comes with extremely sad memories for a lot of you, I’m sure, whether or not you knew people directly affected.

I had thought about putting up something sombre for today’s song, but – I do believe that joy and light are the most effective ways to combat violence and darkness. And so I’ve taken the recommendation of Tom, and chosen an infectious and happy song called Hey Mama by Mat Kearney. I hope you don’t mind – and that this puts a smile on everyone’s face.

If the title fits…

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Firstly, I am told that Better World Books are celebrating International Literacy Day by having 20% off three-or-more books. Time differences confuse me, but I think, if you spot this soon after I post it, some of that day is left in America.

Secondly, a meme. I love this meme, which I’ve been stealing from other sources for the past couple of years – this year Jane reminded me of it here. Basically, answer a set of questions from the titles of books you’ve read so far in 2011. I should probably wait until December to do it, but can never resist once I’ve spotted that the blogosphere has started on it. Oh, and I’ve anglicised it here and there.

Do join in – on your own blogs, or in the comments.

One time on holiday: The Caravaners (Elizabeth von Arnim)

Weekends at my house are: The Element of Lavishness (William Maxwell & Sylvia Townsend Warner)

My neighbour is: Not To Disturb (Muriel Spark)

My boss is: At Large and at Small (Anne Fadiman)

My superhero secret identity is: A Kind Man (Susan Hill)

You wouldn’t like me when I’m angry because: Bonjour Tristesse (Francoise Sagan)

I’d win a gold medal in: Exercises in Style (Raymond Queneau)

I’d pay good money for: A House in the Country (Jocelyn Playfair)

If I were Prime Minister I would: Live Alone and Like It (Marjorie Hillis)

When I don’t have good books, I: am The Perfect Pest (Adrian Porter)

Loud talkers at the cinema should be: People Who Say Goodbye (P.Y. Betts)