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Do You Want to be a Librarian?

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Don’t forget to put your name in the draw to win a copy of Miss Hargreaves – I’ll do the draw on Friday – but for now there is something rather wonderful to watch… (see above)
Isn’t this fantastic? Don’t you all want to be librarians now? As a Bodleian employee (now and then) I only wish that Oxford’s premier library would get film something similar. I especially love how the people on telephones don’t answer the questions asked, or show any sign that they’ve heard the questions at all.

Life and Death of Harriett Frean

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Today we’re headed to more Stuck-in-a-Book familiar territory – good old Virago Modern Classics.

I’ve heard quite a bit about May Sinclair (she first used the phrase ‘stream of consciousness’, doncha know) but not read anything by her – in Thame I came across Life and Death of Harriett Frean, and, being so short, it leapt immediately to the top of my tbr pile. And I read it in a morning – it’s got 184 pages but there’s so little text on each one that it’s more like 90 pages of an average book. And somehow, in this tiny amount of space, May Sinclair manages to include an entire, long life.

There aren’t many incidents in Harriett Frean’s life, at least not significant ones. She lives her life as a spinster, in the benevolent shadow of her parents – to the end of her days, she proudly and frequently announces ‘I’m Hilton Frean’s daughter’. The one event of note is a tangled love triangle (doesn’t that sound very like Hollyoaks? Obviously it’s nothing of the sort.) Her close friend Priscilla always protests that she will never be married, and forces Harriett to pledge the same vow… when Robin comes along, both their resolves are tested. The novel becomes a ‘what might have been’ – questioning whether moral choices are black and white, and what happens to those who choose the path not labelled ‘happy ever after.’

The thread I found most interesting (and one familiar from other Virago Modern Classics such as The Love Child by Edith Olivier, and The Third Miss Symons by F. M. Mayor, as well as Persephone Books’ Alas, Poor Lady by Rachel Ferguson which I must write about soon) is the life of a spinster with her mother. Or, more importantly, the life of a spinster once her mother has died. These paragraphs are subtly rather clever:

Next spring, a year after her mother’s death, she felt the vague stirring of her individual soul. She was free to choose her own vicar; she left her mother’s Dr. Braithwaite who was broad and twice married, and went to Canon Wrench, who was unmarried and high. There was something stimulating in the short, happy service, the rich music, the incense, and the processions. She made new covers for the drawing-room, in cretonne, a gay pattern of pomegranate and blue-green leaves. And as she had always had the cutlets broiled plain because her mother liked them that way, now she had them breaded.

And Mrs. Hancock wanted to know why Harriett has forsaken her dear mother’s church; and when Connie Pennefeather saw the covers she told Harriett she was lucky to be able to afford new cretonne. It was more than she could; she seemed to think Harriett had no business to afford it. As for the breaded cutlets, Hannah opened her eyes and said, ‘That was how the mistress always had them, ma’am, when you was away.’
Lives of mutual self-sacrifice have, in the end, benefited neither of them. Sometimes May Sinclair seems to be dragging her novel into polemic territory – not necessarily a bad thing, but I’d question some of Sinclair’s advertised morals on occasion – but that aside, Life and Death of Harriett Frean is a slight, sharp view of so many women’s situations in the early twentieth century. Not particularly cheerful, it must be said, but very powerful – the blurb compares it to Woolf, and others which I forget, but they’re right – if this novel doesn’t quite deserve to be considered a classic of Modernism, it’s not very far off. What’s more, it’s in print from Virago – though if I know you, and I think I do, you’ll be hunting for the proper green VMC edition…

Miss Hargreaves Prize Draw

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Just to point out, in case you haven’t managed to get all the way through the previous post – two copies of Miss Hargreaves by Frank Baker are up for grabs – just comment on the post below. A runner-up will get a set of Bloomsbury Group bookmarks, matching Miss Hargreaves and four of the others in the series – if you already have the novel, just say, and I’ll only put you in for the bookmarks.

“I abominate fuss…” Miss Hargreaves and Me

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I’ve already written about Miss Hargreaves before on Stuck-in-a-Book, but I felt that a new edition warranted a new review. I’ve just finished reading the novel for the fifth time since 2003… and I love it all over again.

Just to say at the beginning – this review doubles as a prize draw. I have two copies of Miss Hargreaves to give away, and a set of Bloomsbury bookmarks for a runner up. Of course, if you already have a copy of Miss H and would prefer the bookmarks, just say that in the comments.

I usually try to put a positive spin on the books I read, so there is a real danger that I’m going to go wildly overboard with superlatives on Miss H, because – along with Diary of a Provincial Lady and Pride and Prejudice – it is the novel I could happily read over and over again, starting as soon as I’d finished.

Norman Huntley and his friend Henry are on holiday in Ireland, when they wander into a hideous church, led by a sexton with a squint.

I turned to the chancel, hoping to find something – however slight – that I could praise. But it was worse up there. Seaweed green altar frontal; dead flowers; lichenous-looking brass candlesticks; pitch-pine organ with a pyramid of dumb pipes soaring over a candle-greased console; ‘Sanctus, Sanctus, Sanctus,’ splashed in chrome Gothic lettering over the choir walls; mural cherubim reminding you of cotton-wool chicks from Easter eggs; very stained glass; tattered hymn books, tattered hassocks – it was a horrible church. But there were, mercifully, two redeeming features; those were the dust sheets spread over lectern and pulpit. Somehow you felt a little safer with those dust sheets.
Meanwhile, Squint was rhapsodizing.
“I beg you to observe the beautiful lettering and decoration on the chancel wall. ‘I saw the Lord sitting upon a Throne.’ You like it?”

He had a habit of hissing like a goose, particularly when he was eager about something.

“Very pretty indeed,” I said.
“Original,” said Henry.
“Unusual, in a sense.”
“Full of feeling.”
“Filthy,” I said.

The awkwardness of the subsequent conversation forces Norman, on the Spur of the Moment, to make up a mutual acquaintance with a previous clergyman – that acquaintance is Miss Hargreaves.

‘And this lady, this Miss Hargreaves, she is still alive?’

‘Ten minutes old, precisely,’ said Henry.

I trod on his toe brutally.

‘The soul of youth,’ I said. ‘She is a poet,’ I added dreamily.

‘She would be an old lady,’ said Squint. ‘Over eighty.’

‘Nearer ninety,’ said Henry.

‘A touch of rheumatoid arthritis,’ I said, ‘but no more than a touch.’

Having left the church, Norman and Henry continue to embellish Miss Hargreaves’ character. A keen musician, she is the niece of the Duke of Grovesnor, has a cockatoo called Dr. Pepusch and a dog called Sarah. Perhaps most wonderful of all, she travels with her own hip bath. Proud of their creation, they continue the joke by sending her a letter, inviting her to visit Cornford…

… and she does.

A telegram arrives, telling them to expect her. Disbelievingly, they wait at the train station:

Limping slowly along the platform and chatting amiably to the porter, came – well, Miss Hargreaves. Quite obviously it couldn’t be anyone else.

‘At Oakham station,’ we heard her saying, ‘we have exquisitely pretty flowers. The station-master is quite an expert horticulturist. Oh, yes, indeed!’

‘Shall I have all your luggage put on a taxi, Mum?’

‘Just wait! Kindly stay! A moment. Accept this shilling, I beg of you. I am a trifle short-sighted, porter – oh, did I give you a halfpenny? Here you are, then. Can you see a young gentleman anywhere about? If so, no doubt but it would be my friend Mr. Norman Huntley.’

I flopped weakly on to a chair.

‘Can’t see no one, Mum,’ I could hear the porter saying.

‘Then let us wait! Do not go. What a handsome train – what a most handsome train! I wrote a sonnet to a railway train once. In my lighter moments, porter; in my more exuberant moments. My Uncle Grovesnor was good enough to say it recalled Wordsworth to him. Do you read at all, porter? Tell me. Tell me frankly.’

Isn’t she simply wonderful? Frank Baker has given her a voice so unmistakably hers, she is a unique creation and every word she says is a pleasure to read. To have seen Margaret Rutherford play her on stage and screen! I have hopes of the 1960 film turning up one day. Or Maggie Smith to play her now – she would be perfect. And, oh, Miss Hargreaves’ poetry! It is as strange and unique as she is, yet has undeniable panache.

Oh why must I go with my green tender grace
To lay all my eggs in one basket?
If I were a mayor I could carry a mace;
My card and address in a casket.

[…]

All this goeth on and my mind is a blank,
A capriciously prodigal hostage.
What care I when comforters tell me the Bank
Will pay death-duties, homage and postage?

But Miss Hargreaves is not all frothy excitement and delight – she “abominates fuss”, wants things to be just-so, and is unlikely to let decorum of convention prevent her from carrying out her good intentions. ‘She had the gift of being able to do unconventional things in the most casual manner, never losing her dignity thereby.’ As the novel progresses, while she may retain her dignity, Miss H manages to cause all sorts of trouble for Norman, with his family, his girlfriend, and his colleagues and acquaintances at the Cathedral where he plays the organ. (Music is a hugely important element of the novel – anybody who loves the organ, harp, or violin will find plenty to enjoy here.) She becomes something of a Frankenstein’s monster – as Norman’s mother says, ‘I think one would get quite fond of her, and yet never want to set eyes on her again.’

Miss Hargreaves may be the most extraordinary inhabitant of Cornford, but the others are by no means normal. Frank Baker is not satisfied with the creation of one exceptional character – he has made another, in the form of Norman’s father. Constantly talking at cross-purposes to everyone around him, and utterly absent-minded, he throws the most deliciously irrelevant things into conversation: ‘”Parrots are intelligent birds,” said father. “Knew one once that could recite a Shakespeare sonnet. All except for the last line.”‘ He gets irrationally worked-up about a new teapot, uses Browning as firewood in the bookshop he erratically runs, but is also the only person in Cornford who really believe Norman’s tales, and, in his own bizarre way, comforts him. ‘”Get it off your chest, boy. I may not listen, but I shall gather the trend of it.”‘

I have probably written far too much, and quoted at length, but I just love this novel so, so much. My quotation on the back of the Bloomsbury edition says ‘Witty, joyful, and moving but above all an extraordinary work of the imagination’ – and indeed it is. Endlessly surprising and captivating, Baker keeps the novel pacy all the way through. The idea could have grown stale, but there are enough twists and turns to keep you hooked. Sometimes sinister, sometimes sad, sometimes hilariously funny – Miss Hargreaves covers more or less all the bases, always written in the sort of delicious writing which is hardly found anymore. Miss H is one of the best characters of the twentieth century, in my opinion, and I really cannot encourage you enough to find this extraordinary book.

Don’t forget, for a copy of this wonderful novel – pop your name in the comments. Two winners will be announced later in the week, and a runner-up will get the bookmarks. If you’d prefer the bookmarks to the novel, just say.

Links to other reviews of Miss Hargreaves:
Cornflower
Random Jottings (warning: a lovely review, but gives away quite a lot)
Oxford Reader
Harriet Devine
Fancy Day

Stuck-in-a-Book’s Weekend Miscellany

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Happy weekend, all. Next week I will, honest, promise, definitely be putting up my review of Miss Hargreaves, and a giveaway to go along with it – so watch this space. I’m trying to re-read it first… not much time at the moment.

1) The link – is a rather fun, bookish competition from The Big Green Bookshop. I saw about this at Chasing Bawa‘s blog – basically tell this bookshop (in email, post, ‘phone or person) your five favourite books (in no order). You have until November 22nd to do so – after that somebody clever with a spreadsheet will compile a Top 50. And one lucky person, randomly selected, will win 20 books of their choice from that 50. What’s not to like? Click here for all their info, or here for their blog, or just email enquiries@biggreenbookshop.com.
My top five? Well the first three are always there, in some order or other, but after that I improvise based on my feelings for that day.

1. Miss Hargreaves – Frank Baker
2. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
3. Diary of a Provincial Lady – EM Delafield
4. Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne
5. Family Roundabout – Richmal Crompton

And whilst I’m at it, I found this name-the-book-from-the-photo competition in their archives… it’s hilarious, and groan-inducing. Go and have a try, you’ll love it. I got none of ’em.

2) The book is in fact books. At the Kisses on a Postcard launch the other day, Alexandra Pringle was saying how jealous she felt of those who hadn’t read Barbara Trapido before, because of all the bookish pleasures ahead of them… at which point I raised my hand and confessed my sins of omission. And so the lovely people of Bloomsbury have sent me their new editions of her novels… any Barbara Trapido fans out there, and if so, where should I start? So far I’m hearing ‘start at the beginning’ with Brother of the More Famous Jack, a fantastic title.

3) And for the blog post this week, I really enjoyed Rachel’s (aka Book Snob) tales of recent buying. The first line will make you realise what an affinity Rachel is: I went out on my lunch break today to Brompton Road, ostensibly to buy a dress for a wedding I am going to on Saturday, but somehow I returned back to my office with no dress and a bag full of books.Now it’s true that I’ve never set out to buy a dress, but most of my errands turn into impromptu book buying trips. You can read more about it here, and find out what she bought. (Rachel, if you’d like me to post you the sketch as a souvenir of sorts, just email me your address!)

Katherine Mansfield – Selected Stories

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Thanks so much for your response yesterday, everyone, that was really interesting – and lovely to have comments from new people. I have to check these things sometimes – doing an English degree tends to make one a bit blinkered, in terms of which authors are well-known and which aren’t. I usually ask Colin – he knows rather more about literature than most, but isn’t as obsessed, and he assured me that nobody at his office would have heard of Katherine Mansfield. I knew the literary-blog-reading-and-writing world would be rather more keyed up, but wasn’t sure where our Kath featured on the scale of things. So, whilst more or less all of you have heard of Katherine Mansfield, she remains an untapped mine for many – and so I shall put her into my ongoing list of 50 Books You Must Read etc. etc….


27. Katherine Mansfield – Selected Stories

Katherine Mansfield only wrote for a few years, in the 1910s and ’20s. She was on the outskirts of the Bloomsbury Group, in an ambivalent friendship with Virginia Woolf. Born in New Zealand, her stories are set in both NZ and England, but also often an indeterminate mixture of the two. I wrote about Claire Tomalin’s biography of KM a couple of years ago, if you’re interested… but onto her writing.

Though you can read anything by KM – I recommend buying her collections as they were published, especially The Garden Party and Bliss, as well as various others – the Selected Stories is an excellent place to start. Plus Oxford University Press just sent me their latest World’s Classics edition of it, and it’s rather beautiful – as well as including nearly all of my favourite stories. But – and this might be make or break in terms of appreciating KM – don’t start at the beginning. This Selected Stories, perhaps unsurprisingly, lists her stories chronologically. KM’s writing got better and better, most of her best work appearing in the two years before she died, age 34, of TB. Who knows what she’d have gone onto achieve had she lived – or perhaps it was facing her death which drew such genius out of her?

If you do get this collection, which I’d encourage – or indeed any collection – then start with something from The Garden Party. ‘The Garden Party’, for example. Other favourites from around this period include ‘Miss Brill’; ‘Bliss’; ‘The Daughters of the Colonel’; ‘Her First Ball’; ‘A Cup of Tea’. All of these are included in the OUP selection. Others prefer her longer stories, ‘Prelude’ and ‘At the Bay’, but I think her craft and talent are shown best in the short, short stories.

What is it that makes KM so very, very good? It is this ability to demonstrate so much in such short works – to capture entire lives in mere sentences. Even if you don’t usually like short stories, I can’t imagine anybody not appreciating these. They manage to show everyday events, which at the same time completely turn people’s lives upside down. They are about people dealing with grief, or change, or power shifts, or the strange. ‘The Garden Party’ is all about class, on one level, but also a girl’s first encounter with death. And her writing – it is absolutely sublime. Virginia Woolf said ‘I was jealous of her writing. The only writing I was ever jealous of.’ It transports you to another world when you’re reading it – everything delicate and observant without being cloying or obtrusive. A quiet modernist, her stories owe as much to Chekhov as to any later writers.

I don’t want to give away the plots of these stories, because quite often only one significant event happens, and it is the stunning crux of the story. Like ‘Bliss’ – incredible story – to give away the ending would be treason! But when the pivots take place, they are not sensational – they are life, and KM’s talent is in sensitively showing how people respond to events which are externally almost insignificant, but of huge personal enormity. And, because it’s impossible to judge a writing style without evidence, here’s a link to ‘The Garden Party’, and here is one to ‘Bliss’ (note the significance of the first word, in conjunction with the title). Do go and read them, slowly, and see if you wouldn’t like to read more. I do hope you’ll give KM a try, if you haven’t before – and if you’ve not read her for years, why not get a copy and read one story a night for a few weeks? Just remember, contrary to everything we learnt in The Sound of Music, don’t start at the beginning, it’s not a very good place to start.

Katherine Mansfield

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I’m going to be writing about Katherine Mansfield later in the week, inspired by Danielle recently getting her selected works, and I just wanted to do a straw poll today… so if you’re popping by for the first or the hundredth time, just let me know:

a) whether or not you’ve heard of Katherine Mansfield?

if yes…

b) whether or not you’ve read anything by KM?

if yes…

c) what your favourite story by KM is?

Kisses on a Postcard

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As promised, tonight I’m going to chat about Terence Frisby’s Kisses on a Postcard, and there isn’t really a better way to begin than the way in which Elaine started her review – ‘Gosh what a lovely lovely book.’ (She also has a draw to win copies, do go and enter). But I’m going to start by mentioning how Terence Frisby had arrived on my horizons before – in the revue with Prunella Scales, Tim West, and Sam West, which I saw back in July. They performed an excerpt from It’s All Right If I Do It which was hilarious, and I’ve requested a copy of the play to the Bodleian to read.

But back to Kisses on a Postcard. This is an autobiographical book about Frisby’s years as a ‘vackie’, evacuee to you and me, sent to Cornwall with his older brother Jack in 1940. This tale has previously made appearances as a play, Just Remember Two Things: It’s Not Fair and Don’t Be Late, and then as a stage musical from that play. The musical hopefully being staged in London at some point… watch this space. Frisby warns in his Foreword ‘What memoir of childhood could be entirely true?’ Kisses on a Postcard combines all the facts of his experiences with the elaborations playwriting brought, as well as being seen through the wrong end of the telescope. But no matter – this book is true, in spirit if not in dialogue.

Like Emma Smith’s wonderful The Great Western Beach, Frisby’s book is an antidote to those misery memoirs which crop up everywhere. With MisMems (as they are apparently called – what you do learn at a book launch) I always say: I understand why people write them, but not why people read them. Thankfully Frisby, and Smith, take situations which could have been horrific, and write lively, joyful, invigorating books about them. Kisses on a Postcard even opens ‘I was the luckiest of children: I had two childhoods’. What a wonderful way to see a potentially heartbreaking event.

The beginning of the book looks at his first childhood, at home in London – his tough-but-sensitive father, his loving, well-educated mother who had perhaps come down in the world a little. Her background of suffragettes and society became one of marriage to a railway man – but a contentedly proud one. The Frisby neighbourhood and friendships sets the tone for a cheerful, resilient upbringing.

And then, of course, September 3rd 1939 arrived. And, more significantly for Terry and Jack Frisby, June 13th 1940 – when they were sent off to Cornwall. Mrs. Frisby devised the code from which the title comes – a number of ‘x’ kisses on their first postcard home, dependent upon how much they liked their evacuation home – three kisses if they were very happy; two if it was ok; one kiss and she would come straight there to collect them. What a remarkable woman. The parents who had to say goodbye to their children, knowing it could be forever – they are the unsung heroes of the war.

I don’t remember seeing any tears on that platform [when Terry and Jack left for Cornwall] but there must have been plenty. Jack and I stood at a window, waving and shouting at Mum, who stood in a crowd of waving, smiling mums. She mouthed, ‘Don’t forget the code,’ as though we could have. She told me years later that she went home and sobbed. Like all the other mums, I expect. I still cannot think of her inventiveness and bravery, even now nearly seventy years later, without my eyes filling.
You and me both, Terry. You can mark Kisses on a Postcard by the places it makes you cry – this was Tears No.1 for me, with plenty more to come. But thankfully, Terry and Jack were very fortunate with their host and hostess – known as Uncle Jack and Auntie Rose by everyone, regardless of generation, they lived in a tiny terraced cottage by the railway. Of all the lovely, lively characters in this book, it is Auntie Rose whom I shall remember most. Endlessly kind, honest, and selfless, she makes the boys welcome – acts as wise disciplinarian when needed, but never tries to replace their absent mother. It was a great privilege that Rose and Jack’s granddaughter was at the launch yesterday – now she will have to share fond memories of Auntie Rose with thousands of others now.

Terence Frisby relates so many things in this book that it would be impossible to list them all – we see a village community undergoing great changes, but also keeping true to a village spirit which with wider travel, communication, and resources has now all but disappeared. Kisses on a Postcard is a paean to rural life, to all the discoveries an urban child had to make – it makes me grieve for the generations since, including my own, who know so little about the natural world. (I blame electricity!) There are so many vivid characters portrayed – I was left feeling desperately sorry for Miss Polmanor, an ardent Methodist, but lonely lady, to whom Uncle Jack was often unkind. She could be interfering, perhaps, but… These were the only bits of the book which left me a little uncomfortable – Uncle Jack’s fairly constant, strident bellows of atheism, and his consequent unkindness to the attendants of Church and Chapel. But he had been through trench warfare, and was inevitably damaged by his experiences, despite being able to overcome this most of the time.

And on the tears front… when you’ve read Kisses on a Postcard, simply the names ‘Teddy Camberwall’ and ‘Gwyn’ will be enough to make you blink furiously, and pretend you’ve got an eyelash in your eye.

Perhaps Kisses on a Postcard is open to accusations of cosiness or even (a word I can never understand, or view as censure) tweeness. Well, it ought not be thought ‘cosy’ to commemorate acts of great human kindness, nor twee to rejoice in the possibilities of happiness amongst widespread sadness and turmoil. What Terence Frisby has done so excellently is write an honest account, with moments of desperation, which avoids misery without being falsely cheerful.

Sadly there cannot be many more decades of first-hand experiences of WW2, and those which we get now must be from the child’s viewpoint. All the more reason to treasure something as special as Kisses on a Postcard – I predict a classic, and one which can be enjoyed with joyfulness, thankfully, and not solely sympathy.

Launch Pad

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I’ve just been at the launch of Terence Frisby’s Kisses on a Postcard in London, to which the lovely people of Bloomsbury invited me. I haven’t mentioned the book on here yet because I only finished it on the coach to London – and now I’m far too tired – but suffice to say it had me (discretely) weeping on the Oxford Tube, and is a wonderful autobiographical account of being an evacuee to Cornwall. More very soon…

But I couldn’t let the day end without saying what a joy and a pleasure it was to attend the launch, with Elaine from Random Jottings, and everybody I met was so lovely, welcoming, and uniting in praise of Terry Frisby’s book. I can’t remember everyone’s names, so I shan’t mention any of them, but everyone at Bloomsbury – I loved meeting you, and had a great evening! And now I want to come and work with you all. I will mention *one* name, actually, and say how nice it was to meet Penelope Beech, the talented artist behind the covers of the Bloomsbury Group series. Oh, but everyone else too – perhaps you might break anonymity and say hello in the comments?

More about Kisses on a Postcard as soon as my brain is alert (isn’t this just the journalistic fervour so needed in this day and age? Ahem.)

BBAW Shortlists

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Well, the Book Blogger Appreciation Week shortlists are out here, and I must say I’m pretty disappointed. Not because I wasn’t shortlisted for anything (I was only a little hopeful) but because, out of the nearly 200 shortlist spots, only two have gone to blogs I’ve ever read – well-deserved congratulations to Danielle of A Work in Progress, and the good people at Shelf Love! But how many great blogs have sadly been missed… and is the UK represented at all?

I’ve voted for the two I’ve heard of, and also felt qualified to vote in the ‘Best Blog Title’ round, but otherwise I’ve had to leave things blank… Maybe there’s room for a British Book Bloggers Appreciation Week?!