Slightly unusual choice today, but I thought I’d share a clip someone uploaded to Youtube. Sian Reese Williams is an actress in a soap opera I watch called Emmerdale, and in fact her character Gennie (short for Genesis) is one of my favourites. But I didn’t realise she could sing too – here she is, performing The First Cut is the Deepest.
I have just been to see a film which is relevant to Youtube… will reveal all tomorrow.
Happy weekend everyone, hope you’ve got something fun planned – and that you’re reading something good. It’s been a while since I did a Weekend Miscellany, and there’s no time like the present.
1.) The book – is A William Maxwell Portrait – a collection of personal essays written about William Maxwell and his writings. It was published in 2004, but arrived at my house this week. Does anybody know anything else about this?
2.) The link – is an amusing video called ‘book librarian’ sent to me by a colleague – enjoy!
3.) The blog posts – are a few book reviews you’ll probably want to see, if you haven’t already: Lyn on Fanny Burney’s Evelina, Nicola on Rebecca West’s The Fountain Overflows, and Tanya on Nicola Humble’s Culinary Pleasures.
Proper reviewy-type post soon, promise, but I had to share this. I ordered some books from Better World Books, and this is the confirmation email I got. I love it!
Hello Simon,
(Your book(s) asked to write you a personal note – it seemed unusual, but who are we to say no?)
Holy canasta! It’s me… it’s me! I can’t believe it is actually me! You could have picked any of over 2 million books but you picked me! I’ve got to get packed! How is the weather where you live? Will I need a dust jacket? I can’t believe I’m leaving Mishawaka, Indiana already – the friendly people, the Hummer plant, the Linebacker Lounge – so many memories. I don’t have much time to say goodbye to everyone, but it’s time to see the world!
I can’t wait to meet you! You sound like such a well read person. Although, I have to say, it sure has taken you a while! I don’t mean to sound ungrateful, but how would you like to spend five months sandwiched between Jane Eyre (drama queen) and Fundamentals of Thermodynamics (pyromaniac)? At least Jane was an upgrade from that stupid book on brewing beer. How many times did the ol’ brewmaster have one too many and topple off our shelf at 2am?
I know the trip to meet you will be long and fraught with peril, but after the close calls I’ve had, I’m ready for anything (besides, some of my best friends are suspense novels). Just five months ago, I thought I was a goner. My owner was moving and couldn’t take me with her. I was sure I was landfill bait until I ended up in a Better World Books book drive bin. Thanks to your socially conscious book shopping, I’ve found a new home. Even better, your book buying dollars are helping kids read from Brazil to Botswana.
I meant to mention this earlier, but better late than never – lovely Kim has very kindly invited me to take part in Triple Choice Tuesday – click here for more info, and my choices. Not a huge surprise to anyone familiar with my favourite books, but good fun nonetheless – while you’re there, check out previous Triple Choice Tuesdays – they include Stuck-in-a-Book favourites such as Danielle, Sakura, Annabel, Jackie, Lizzy, Kirsty, Claire, Simon S, Teresa, Stu, Kim herself, and loads of others too.
As I predicted, I dove straight into the books by Kitty Vincent – I’ll write about them properly soon, maybe tomorrow, but I don’t think I can really do so without giving you a taste of her writing. So I thought I’d copy out the piece I love most so far – ‘Patricia Takes a Bus Ride’ from Gin & Ginger.
Patricia’s companion said something to the lady seated next him in the bus, but she regarded him with an icy stare. When they reached Patricia’s flat, and she was pouring out tea, she remonstrated with him.
“I shan’t take you out again,” she said, “if you don’t observe the proper etiquette. It has taken me years to learn it, but I am absolutely infallible now. I believe I could write a book on how to be a perfect lady in a bus.
“If you are travelling on top it is quite in order, I might almost say desirable, to enter into conversation with your neighbour. If it should happen to be raining a little light badinage is allowable as you snuggle beneath the cover, so thoughtfully provided by the company.
“If you are a woman you begin (I beg your pardon, you commence) the conversation by hoping that your umbrella is not objectionable, and the correct retort is, ‘Some weather for the ducks, what!’ Then you discuss the latest murder, or some interesting trifle of the description, being careful to keep the conversation within strictly suitable limits. It is advisable to preface your remarks with, ‘Well, what I always say is —‘ and you finish up by observing that ‘Murder is always a mistake; it comes out in the end.’
“You must never be original, because it may lead you into being daring, and to be daring on a bus is not good form.
“When you or he come to the parting of the ways, I advise you to murmur, ‘So long,’ or ‘Well, ta, awfully.’ I know that the latter remark is frightfully ‘bon ton’ because the most immaculate young man bade farewell to me in these terms, and he was so marvellously dressed that I am sure he was a dancing, partner or something really smart of that description.
“You should never speak to anyone inside a bus, as it violates every canon of deportment. If you should be forced to speak – if, for instance, you want to leap across the body of the person next you – you merely ejaculate ‘Pardon!’ This will have the desired effect.
“When the conductor asks for your fare, do, please, not enter into a long description of where you are going, it sounds excessively vulgar, and shows that you are not conversant with your world. If, for instance, you desire to alight at South Kensington, merely hold up one finger, and mutter, ‘South Ken.’ This places you, at once, as being ‘all right,’ while if you explain that you want to get to a square somewhere near the Underground, you are making yourself conspicuous.
“Many contretemps may occur in buses, and the way in which you meet them places you at once. If you are seated opposite a child who appears to be rapidly growing more and more ashen, you may assume that it is suffering from mal de bus. You must either pretend that, although you took a ticket to Piccadilly Circus, you recollect that you have pressing business at Hyde Park, and leap from the bus, or you must accept the consequences with sang-froid.
“Bus laws lay down that a child who is violently sick is ‘a poor little dear,’ and you are expected to behave accordingly, although in your heart of hearts you know that it is a gluttonous little pig. But if you so much as lift an eyebrow, child-lovers glare at you with muttered expressions of, ‘Well, I suppose she as a child once.’ It is useless and exhausting to explain that, although you were once a child, you were not a sick-in-a-bus one, and you merely become an object of universal execration.
“As one spends so many hours in buses, it is so important to learn how to behave,” Patricia said a little plaintively.
I occasionally have idle thoughts. And today’s idle thought was ‘I wonder if I can think of an author’s name of every length from 1 to 20 letters.’ Using the names under which they published, this is what I’ve come up with… fancy having a go? Can you fill in my gaps?
1. Q
2.
3.
4. Saki
5. Ouida
6. Sapper
7. A. A. Milne
8. E. F. Benson
9. Roald Dahl
10. Enid Blyton
11. E. M. Delafield
12. Lewis Carroll
13. Frances Burney
14. Charles Dickens
15. Richmal Crompton
16. Arthur Conan Doyle
17. Ivy Compton-Burnett
18. William Shakespeare
19.
20. Sylvia Townsend Warner
Well, that was worthwhile, wasn’t? Happy Monday!
I’ve spent the past couple of days visiting Ludlow and Hay-on-Wye (the latter with my friend from Ludlow). The visit was a little spoilt by a (non-dangerous) car-related thing which was my fault, and very annoying. I tried not to let me stupidity cast a cloud over a day of book-filled fun, and it certainly didn’t diminish my book-buying capabilities: I came back 19 books the richer, and it includes some choices which are endearing eccentric, even for me. (Yes, I tend to be called eccentric on this blog, but I thought I’d throw in ‘endearing’ too… let’s run with it.) This photo is in Richard Booth Books – I want to move into their shop, please.
Jenny Wren – E.H. Young
The Vicar’s Daughter – E.H. Young
I’ve been very fortunate with stumbling across Young novels, and must have nearly all of them by now… I even aided and abetted Young novel buying – my friend bought William and The Misses Mallett.
Through a Glass Darkly: the life of Patrick Hamilton – Nigel Jones
A biography of my favourite author du jour, for when I finally get around reading the other Hamilton novels I’ve been hoarding.
The Letters of Evelyn Waugh – ed. Mark Amory
Had my eye of this book for a while, and it was less than a third of the cover price – hurrah!
The Corner That Held Them – Sylvia Townsend Warner
I was hoping to find some STW short stories in Hay, and although I didn’t manage to, I did manage to get another of her novels.
Jill – Philip Larkin
My friend Clare loves this, so I’ve kept an eye out for a while. Plus it has a nice cover of someone on a bicycle.
The Second Mrs. Tanqueray – Arthur Wing Pinero
Pinero’s plays are bizarrely difficult to find in bookshops, given how influential he was, so I snapped up this one.
The Victorian Chaise-Longue – Marghanita Laski
Not the Persephone edition (which I read from the library a while ago) but an old Penguin – fancied having this on the shelf.
The Swan in the Evening – Rosamond Lehmann
Autobiographical fragment of an author I really *will* read one day…
Safety Pins – Christopher Morley
A hopefully amusing collection of essays by the author of Parnassus on Wheels – my housemate Debs has already stolen it from me, and read out excerpts which made me guffaw.
Shaving Through The Blitz – G.W. Stonier
Great title! This looks like it might be akin to ‘Mr. Miniver’, had that book existed.
The Ballad of Peckham Rye – Muriel Spark
I just keep buying those Spark books… this one has the advantage that my supervisor told me to read it, and fools me into thinking that the trip to Hay was essentially study.
A Reckoning – May Sarton
Blame Thomas.
Messages from My Father – Calvin Trillin
See above.
A Baker’s Dozen – Llewelyn Powys
I have read around the Powys family, and thought I’d read a little more – Llewelyn Powys’ father (and thus presumably Littelton’s, T.F.’s and John Cowper’s) was a vicar in Montacute – a beautiful village near our home in Somerset – and this little book is a collection of essay memories about his childhood.
The Shakespeare Wallah – Geoffrey Kendal
I didn’t realise Felicity Kendal’s father had written this book – I loved her autobiography/biography of him White Cargo, and this book will be a fantastic complementary read.
The Island of the Colorblind – Oliver Sacks
The other day I asked people on Facebook to recommend Oliver Sacks titles, since I found The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat fascinating. I don’t think anyone mentioned this, but it looks really interesting… does what it says on the tin.
…and now for my favourite two finds of the day…
Gin & Ginger – Lady Kitty Vincent
Lipstick – Lady Kitty Vincent
These books, from 1927 and 1925, are silly, comic sketches in the vein of Joyce Dennys’ lighter books – illustrated with fun pictures by ‘Fish’. I’d never heard of them before, but they’re irresistible. Exactly the sort of thing I lap up. Lipstick starts “No, my dear, I cannot say that I really know the Bishop of Runnymede”. I think these will go straight to the top of my pile… can’t wait.
Following your recent advice and comments, tonight I’m going to blog about a novel which is very difficult to find at an affordable price, or indeed to find at all. Having re-read I Capture the Castle a while ago, I was intrigued to see what else Dodie Smith had to offer. I asked around, and general consensus was to look out for The New Moon with the Old or, failing that, The Town in Bloom. I can’t afford £20-£30 for novels I know nothing about, and Oxfordshire libraries didn’t have The New Moon with the Old, so I went for The Town in Bloom (1965).
The novel kicks off with a reunion between friends known as the Mouse, Moll Byblow, Madam Lily de Luxe and Zelle, reminiscing about their days living in a ‘club’ together in the 1920s, going through turbulent youthful events and trying to find work in the theatre. It’s now over four decades later. But… Zelle is absent, as she has been at all their five-yearly reunions. But is the shabby old woman across the road, who reminds ‘Mouse’ (the otherwise unnamed narrator) ‘of the crones said to have sat knitting round the guillotine during the Reign of Terror’, actually Zelle? And, if so, has she donned a disguise, or have 45 years apart led her to destitution?
And suddenly the novel flings us back those 45 years, to Mouse leaving her aunt’s house and arriving in London, at that club. We see her first experiences through the lens of her journal, which feels like we’re in familiar I Capture the Castle territory…
I am here at last! I arrived this afternoon, at Marylebone Station so I only had a short taxi drive – I wished it could have been longer as it was thrilling to be driving through London on my own. And it was such a lovely day. The trees here are further out than they are at home. Home! I haven’t one any more. That thought doesn’t make me feel sad. It makes me feel wonderfully free.Mouse, despite her nickname, isn’t particularly timid, and isn’t all that different from Cassandra of Smith’s more famous novel. Both are young and inexperienced, but oddly confident and more worldly than they seem. Both are incredibly introspective, yet manage not to be annoyingly so – although Mouse gets rather closer to ‘annoying’ than Cassandra does. But while Cassandra is isolated in a highly romanticised setting in rural Suffolk, Mouse is flung into the maelstrom of the theatre. Oh, and the journal fades away after a few pages – being replaced with first-person narrative (so she is hardly ever called ‘Mouse’ in the book) but from the distance of 45 years.
I love books about the theatre, fact or fiction, especially if it’s about theatre of the 1920s or 1930s. So I lapped up the first half of The Town in Bloom – which is set in a theatre run by actor-manager Rex Crossway, last in a line of theatrical Crossways. Dodie Smith was herself both an actress and playwright (it was as pseudonymous playwright C. L. Anthony that she first found fame) so she writes this section in an informed and entertaining manner. Mouse launches herself into his world through an impromptu audition for The School for Scandal, playing both Sir Peter and Lady Teazle.
I played both of them. First, as Sir Peter, I looked to my right and used a deep, rich voice. Then, looking left, I became Lazy Teazle and used a lighter voice than was natural to me. Backwards and forwards from right to left I went, speaking fast because I feared Mr. Crossway would stop me. I particularly wanted to reach what was, for me, the high moment of the scene, when Sir Peter tells Lady Teazle she had no taste when she married him. Lady T. then goes into fits of laughter – that is, she did in my interpretation. And never had I laughed better, louder or longer than I did for Mr. Crossway. I checked my laughter with some very amusing gasps and continued the scene. Still Mr. Crossway did not interrupt me. So I went on until Lady Teazle’s exit when I sketched a pert curtsy to Sir Peter – and then made a very deep one to Mr. Crossway.It was a brave, and a delicious, decision on Dodie Smith’s part to make Mouse no prodigy – she is an appalling actress, and no amount of advice from Crossway can make her anything else. So, instead, she starts working in one of the theatre offices with Eve Lester, a kind, sensible, and wise woman in an environment of those who are often kind, but rarely the rest.
The backstage goings-on of a theatre fascinate me, and I loved all the minutiae of rehearsals, editing, understudies etc. – and a very amusing scene where Mouse takes it upon herself to replace the ill leading lady halfway through a play, completely changing the interpretation, and rather ruining the whole affair. All written rather cleverly, and Mouse’s combination of naivety and knowingness make for a fun read.
But then…
Yes, Mouse falls in love with Mr. Crossway. Of course she does. At which point The Town in Bloom becomes significantly less interesting, while she repeatedly tries to seduce Mr. Crossway into an affair. I know there are plenty of real life relationships with big age gaps which work well, but I find them almost universally disturbing in novels – even up to and including Emma and Mr. Knightley. This is the sort of affair where Mr. Crossway laughingly calls her ‘my dear’ a lot, and she pontificates on how she will never love anybody else, not as long as she lives. And so on and so forth.
There are a few more twists to the tale, and her flatmates do play more significant roles than this review suggests, but I’m afraid The Town in Bloom turned into a rather tedious novel. There is enough momentum from the first half – and the lingering question from the prologue of what happened to Zelle – but the re-focus upon a rather tawdry romantic storyline is significantly duller than the theatrical focus of the earlier section to the novel.
In this respect, as in several others, The Town in Bloom is something of a pale shadow of I Capture the Castle, and I can quite see why nobody has bothered to reprint it for a while. I wish Smith had had the courage to leave out the romance/affair/adultery storyline altogether – this would have been an infinitely better novel without it, and would also have been rather further away from I Capture the Castle territory, and thus easier to appraise on its merits, not judged on its comparative demerits.
And not a dalmatian in sight.
I’m currently reading two different volumes of letters, and have recently finished another – Sylvia & David: The Townsend Warner/Garnett Letters edited by Richard Garnett; Dearest Jean: Rose Macaulay’s Letters to a Cousin edited by Martin Ferguson Smith; The Element of Lavishness: The Letters of William Maxwell and Sylvia Townsend Warner edited by Michael Steinman. Gosh, writing out titles, subtitles, authors, and editors is quite a lengthy process.
Anyway, it got me thinking about footnotes. Never let be said that I avoid the high-octane topics here at Stuck-in-a-Book. I have a love/hate relationship with footnotes and endnotes. If they’re not there – as they weren’t in the otherwise wonderful A Truth Universally Acknowledged collection of essays about Jane Austen – then I get frustrated. If they are there, I get easily annoyed. Something like Hermione Lee’s biography Virginia Woolf went so hugely over the top with footnotes that reading it was exhausting. For scholarly works, they are essential. But often biographies or collections of letters have both scholarly potential and the possibility of being read for pleasure – so, what to do with the paraphenalia of academia?
(you might have to click on the sketch and enlarge it, to read it all!)I’ll write proper reviews of all those letter collections at some point, probably after I’ve actually read them, but I’ve been intrigued by the way they’ve approached footnotes. The Garnett/Warner letters have very few, and those only when significant reference is made to someone so vaguely that a footnote is absolutely necessary to make sense of an anecdote or opinion. The Maxwell/Warner letters had scarcely more, although they did often fill in the gap when a story was being discussed. Martin Ferguson Smith, on the other hand, has so many footnotes – and such thorough footnotes – in his collection of Rose Macaulay’s letters that he actually has written more than Macaulay has in the book.
I suppose they’re not actually footnotes – not sure what the correct terminology is, but his notes come after each individual letter. Macaulay will write 1.5 pages to Ferguson Smith’s 2, perhaps. Which I thoguht would irritate me, but actually – and unusually for me – I love it! I am not reading them all; I just read the letters as though there were no footnotes – and if I’m interested or intrigued or confused by one of Macaulay’s comments, then I’ll look at the footnote. Which is a much more liberating reading experience than feeling obliged to read each note laboriously – I think I’ve found the perfect reading compromise.
Perhaps notes feel more helpful here because only one half of the correspondence is present? Or perhaps Macaulay is just more off-at-tangents than Maxwell, Warner, or Garnett in her writing, and needs Ferguson Smith’s guiding hand. Either way, he has done an astonishing amount of research. Every reference is tracked down; often he doesn’t merely give the details of a mentioned book, but an outline of the plot – or, rather than just fill in the name of a figure alluded to, he will pop in an anecdote or two. It’s a truly humbling amount of research – and I love it when Ferguson Smith’s personality sneaks into the footnotes, usually in the form of an exclamation mark in brackets; which is one of my own favourite modes of punctuation(!)
Over to you. Do you like editorial notes to abound or, erm, not abound? Footnotes, endnotes, or end-of-section notes? I know it’s a small thing, but I bet quite a few of you have opinions on the topic. In fact, I know Lyn does, for a start…
I thought I’d pop out a quick post, to test your knowledge (/actually I have no idea, and hoped someone else would.) I’ve been reading a bit about Sylvia Townsend Warner of late, mostly letters, and footnotes in a couple of different volumes have mentioned Whether a Dove or a Seagull. It’s a poetry collection she published in 1934 with her partner Valentine Ackland – a joint-collection, but none of the poems were signed, so the authorship of each was left unknown. Which is an intriguing thought – and a brilliant title.
But in the footnotes it has simply said ‘This experiment was not a success’. And no more info. Does anybody know any more about the collection, and in what manner it failed to succeed? Simply in terms of sales? Or was it critically panned? Or was one poet so evidently inferior to the other that anonymity was pointless? Anybody in the know, do shout!
