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Down the Kitchen Sink by Beverley Nichols

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The official author of my quarantine has been Beverley Nichols. Some have been great and others not-so-great – and then there’s Down the Kitchen Sink (1974), which combines high highs and – well, no lows, but definitely things I had less interest in. Its title is an homage to his famous book Down the Garden Path – and it is subtitled ‘a memoir’, but it is really only half that.

The opening is a typically Beverley concoction of nostalgia, dry wit, and whimsy:

It was an evening in early spring and underneath the Eros statue the steps were piled high with the gold of primroses and the purple of violets, which the flower-girls were selling at tuppence a bunch. In and out of the traffic, like figures in a ballet, darted the newspaper boys. selling sheets which have long since fluttered into oblivion – the Westminster Gazette, which printed on green paper and The Globe which was printed on pink; and The Star, whose pages needed no colour, for they sparkled and crackled with the brilliance of its prose. All at a penny a piece.

[…]

I strolled thoughtfully across Piccadilly Circus – (in those days, the early twenties, one could still wander about London like a gentleman, without courting the risk of instant death) – counting my blessings. They were many. I was twenty-five, and almost aggressively healthy. I was wearing a new suit in the latest fashion, with very wide trousers, which were flatteringly reflected in the plate glass windows. I was glowing with the fires of the latest thing in cocktails – the ‘Sidecar’. I had consumed it in the long bar of the Trocadero – an enchanting grotto of delight, all gold mosaics and nouveau art, which should have been painted by Sickert, but never was. And only that morning I had corrected the proofs of my first entry in Who’s Who. Not a very long entry, merely a couple of lines. But something inside me, probably the ‘Sidecar’, which was made of equal quantities of brandy, Cointreau and lemon juice, persuaded me that as the year went by, it would grow considerably longer. Which it did.

Yes, I should have been very happy, but I was not. For at home somebody was waiting for me whom I dreaded to meet.

The person whom Nichols was waiting to meet was Gaskin – the man-servant that Nichols had just installed into his small house in a backstreet of central London, which he almost convinces us was not a sign of affluence at the time. Gaskin was only a few years younger than Nichols, and recently removed from his upbringing in Norfolk to this situation. But he is entirely at ease, in a way that Nichols is not – or professes not to be, at several decades’ distance. Gaskin seems to know what is expected in the master/servant relationship, and gives subtle approval when Nichols gets it right (and censure when he gets it wrong). He is preparing the first meal – having rejected the fish at Fortnum and Mason, he has found a good fish shop down the road. The proprietor came from Norfolk. Nichols quickly learns that, wherever they go, Gaskin will find a network of people who are from Norfolk, and trusts them.

This first half of the book was lovely. Nichols talks about the wonderful meals that Gaskin has produced at different times, and writes about them with a dizzying rapture. I enjoy that when it was about paradise-like desserts, say, but there was rather too much about meat and fish for this vegetarian to enjoy reading it. No, what makes the first half of Down the Kitchen Sink so wonderful is the portrait of Gaskin. As Nichols and Gaskin spent several decades together, their relationship was one of the most long-lasting in Nichols’ life. Gaskin emerges from these pages as a wonder in the kitchen, but also a delightful mixture of competence and wonder. The way in which he inveigles a kitten into the house filled my heart with joy.

The portrait ends, alas, with Gaskin’s death. And the pages where Beverley Nichols describes discovering that Gaskin has long hidden his alcoholism are beautifully, thoughtfully written. It’s wonderfully done, and I have seldom been as moved by the testament to a friendship – which was never an equal friendship but, in Nichols’ eyes at least, no less to be treasured for that.

The second half of Down the Kitchen Sink is less enjoyable, for me. It purports to be Nichols learning to cook for himself – and I thought it might be the sort of funny, self-deprecating narrative that Nichols is so good at. There are moments of that, and understandably, because Nichols is shockingly ignorant about everything in the kitchen. But before long it becomes more of a collection of recipes. Perhaps that is what Nichols had been commissioned to do, and he twisted it away from that commission into something more enjoyable. But by the final sections, it’s just him describing recipes – with a little context, but not much more.

If I wanted to recreate any of these dishes, then it would perhaps be a delight – but the 1970s are not renowned for their culinary excellence in the UK, and Beverley Nichols doesn’t seem to have opted for vegetarian dishes for very long. I wanted humour or poignancy, not instruction.

So, very much a book of two halves. And I shan’t re-read the second half. But I feel like I may well go back to that funny, touching delight of a first half.

Isolarion by James Attlee

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I joined my village book club at exactly the wrong time. I did make it for their annual meal (which was a slightly odd way to meet those I’d not previously met) but the next meeting came after the pandemic hit and we decided not to go ahead. A few days later, we were in lockdown. I still haven’t written about The Citadel by AJ Cronin that we read for that, but I loved it.

This was before libraries shut, so we were able to get our next book: Isolarion: A Different Oxford Journey by James Attlee, published in 2007. As you find out in an epigraph – isolarion is ‘the term for 15th-century maps that describe specific areas in detail, but that do not provide a clarifying overview of how these places are related to each other’. It’s a pretty self-indulgent title, since nobody will know what it means without opening it, but authors often seem to lose their heads when it comes to a title. The ‘specific area in detail’ in question is Cowley Road, Oxford. It’s a long road that goes straight through East Oxford – the less affluent area of Oxford. (It’s an intriguing phenomenon that you will hear people talk about North Oxford and East Oxford, but never about South or West.)

From the events mentioned, Attlee was researching this around 2002-2004. I moved to Oxford in 2004 – to a big, ugly student accommodation block next to the Plain Roundabout, which divides East Oxford from Central Oxford. I could see Cowley Road from the kitchen window. I lived in Oxford for 15 years, and before I finally managed to move out to a little village, I lived in East Oxford again for a few years. I never lived on Cowley Road itself – this country boy could not have coped with living on a busy road – but I lived around it off and on for quite a while. So I definitely had a personal interest in seeing what Attlee would make of it – I don’t know if it would have the same appeal for people who’ve never been there. Who knows.

The beginning of this book starts a trend that was also my favourite element of Isolarion – going into the different shops, pubs, restaurants etc of the street, and learning about them from their owners. Learning what it was like to have a business there, and how the proprietors ended up there. Because East Oxford is easily the most multicultural part of the city, and that’s reflected in the range of shops there: Brazilian art gallery, Chinese medicine, Polish food, Lebanese food, Indian food… there are a lot of food shops there. My favourite to walk past, though I never went in, was a robemakers – because the mannequins in the window wore clerical robes that reminded me of life in a vicarage. Some of the places Attlee mentioned had disappeared before I moved a little while later – some are still in situ, though you’ll also find Sainsbury’s, Costa, and other signs of gentrification there now.

All of this was wonderful – building up the sense of recent history and community, talking to people who’ve been there all of their lives. It certainly isn’t romanticised – he also talks about the churchyard where people get drunk, the levels of homelessness, the mentally unwell people who pace the street (I recognised the people he spoke about). He talks about the porn shop – that, no, I have never been in. It’s called ‘Private Shop’ – when Attlee wrote about it, and when I moved to the area, it was a blue shop with a discreet sign. Now it’s still called ‘Private Shop’ but the ‘A’ is silhouette of a naked woman… some discretion has been lost.

Alongside this, Attlee documents his attempts to guide the local planning committee about how best to celebrate the area – he is very anti having a gateway arch at the beginning of the street. It was a little off-putting how certain he was that he was right and other locals were wrong, but it was an enjoyably immersive sense of living in the community.

So, there were the makings of a book I really loved. I could even forgive his casual dismissing of students as being part of East Oxford life, though I’d point out that they (we) spent a lot more time there each week than people like Attlee, who commute to London. But he rather lost me when he got abstract.

Increasingly, Isolarion turns to philosophical tangents. He gives overviews of various religions, and has some platitudes to share about them. The concrete gives way to his musings about them, and I didn’t find his musings particularly exciting. He quotes Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy a bizarre amount that an editor should have cut down on – it reminded me of another book about Oxford that kept going on about Isaiah Berlin. Stick to the topic on the table, folks, and don’t let your personal obsessions take over!

So, if this was edited down to the concrete – and if Attlee had interviewed more people – it would have been a truly wonderful book. As it was, I still loved reading it – paradoxically, I enjoyed it more than the sum of its parts. But I do wish he’d been stricter with himself about what made Isolarion great and what was interesting just to him.

All Among the Barley by Melissa Harrison: EUPL Giveaway!

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The European Prize for Literature (EUPL) is an annual prize that awards emerging authors from across 41 countries in Europe – and, because of lockdown making promotion of the prize more difficult, I’m one of the bloggers who has been asked to help raise awareness of the prize and of the UK winner – Melissa Harrison, with All Among the Barley. I’ll get onto that, but first here’s a quick video explaining what the prize is… (I’ll also be doing a giveaway – check out the bottom of the post for that.)

I’m all for prizes that raise awareness of authors we wouldn’t otherwise hear of, and my reading of non-British European writers is pretty lamentable. It’s even more lamentable when it comes to those writing now. And I’m afraid that hasn’t changed with the 2019 winner I’m writing about, because she’s British, but at least I can go and look at the others among the 13 winners awarded in 2019.

I had heard of All Among the Barley before I was sent it to review, but I think only because I’d been so drawn to that beautiful cover. The ploughed fields, the swallows (maybe; look, I don’t know anything about birds). I am in danger of being like the townies who wander through the setting of 1930s Suffolk, seeing only the idyllic and not noticing the hard work, the striving for modernity, and the real lives behind the thatched cottages – particularly during a year apparently famous for drought. Except I grew up in the countryside, so I know it can be beautiful and difficult simultaneously.

My name is Edith June Mather and I was born not long after the end of the Great War. My father, George Mather, had sixty acres of arable land known as Wych Farm; it is somewhere not far from here, I believe. Before him my grandfather Albert farmed the same fields, and his father before him, who ploughed with a team of oxen and sowed by hand. I would like to think that my brother Frank, or perhaps one of his sons, has the living of it now; but a lifetime has passed since I was last on its acres, and because of everything that happened I have been prevented from finding out.

This is the opening page – well, the opening after a quick preface – and it quickly immerses us in the world she lived in. That ‘I would like to think’ sentence gives the reader a sense of mystery, but we forget it (I forgot it) as we are swept into her world. Edie is a young 13-year-old, a little more innocent than the other children in the community, a little less prepared for the outside world. At the same time, she fully knows difficulties. Her father drinks too much. Her mother has to make up for his shortcomings. She sees poverty, vice, brokenness. But she also sees the beauty of the world around her – and Harrison is wonderful at natural descriptions, giving not just the aesthetics of the stunning countryside but also its practicalities.

In October, Wych Farm’s trees turned quickly and all at once, blazing into oranges and reds and burnished golds; with little wind to strip them the woods and spinneys lay on our land like treasure, the massy hedgerows filigreed with old-man’s-beard and enamelled with rosehips and black sloes. Along the winding course of the River Stound the alder carrs were studded with earthstars and chanterelles and dense with the rich, autumnal stink of rot; but crossing Long Piece towards The Lottens the sky opened into austere, equinoctial blue, where flocks of peewits wheeled and turned, flashing their broad wings black and white. At dawn, dew silvered the spiders’ silk strung between the grass blades in our pastures so that the horses left trails where they walked, like the wakes of slow vessels in still water. 

Into this world comes Constance FitzAllen. She shocks the locals by wearing trousers, and is there to document the old rural ways of life, and is keen to preserve it. I was initially reminded of Valentine Ackland, Sylvia Townsend Warner’s partner, who made similar investigations in similar trousers – but her resulting book, Country Conditions, was about the importance of good plumbing and hygiene in rural communities. Connie is much more concerned with setting rural life in amber – writing for a journal, but also lamenting any developments. Edie’s family don’t take kindly to this at first – they want machines that do the work faster; why would they roast food on an open fire if a modern oven is superior? – but they are won over by her charm and enthusiasm.

And Connie does come across as a delightful character. I was fully charmed by her. Which… well, I shan’t say more on that front.

Edie is certainly charmed by her, and sees her as a gateway into a new way of thinking – London, confidence, and adulthood. I find coming-of-age novels tricky sometimes, but I thought Harrison did a great job of showing the development of a teenage, torn between the dual wishes to enter adulthood and to remain in the safety of childhood.

And now the elephant in the room for anyone who knows my taste well: historical fiction. We know I’m not a fan. I have read so very many novels written in the 1930s that I did wonder why I’d need someone writing in the 2010s to tell me about that world. Sometimes it didn’t quite work – Harrison was very obviously writing from 80+ years’ distance, and the mores and morals of the 21st century seeped between the cracks of the world she was depicting. There was the implicit value system of a later day – but this was ok because Edie was also looking back, if not from 2019 then from many decades after the fact.

And there are twists and developments, which I shan’t spoil, that nobody writing in 1933 would have included.

All in all, I was impressed by Harrison’s writing style and descriptive abilities, fond of Edie, and startled by my own earlier reactions when more details of this world emerge…

* * Giveaway time! * *

EUPL are offering up a free copy – if you’d like one, please tell me your favourite rural novel (or novel with a rural setting) in the comments. I’ll pick a winner on Sunday 17 May 2020. It’s open anywhere in the world (though lockdown may mean it’s an ebook, depending who wins. We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it!)

And head over to the European Prize for Literature site to learn more about them.

Stuck in a Book’s Weekend Miscellany

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It’s been a while since I did one of these – but also, time no longer has any meaning. April has finished, apparently? What a strange, strange year. I am grateful that my reading abilities came back, though, and I certainly got through a lot of books in April – though I’m not doing so well at writing about them.

I hope you and the people you love are doing well. Stay safe, and enjoy a book, a blog post, and a link.

1.) The book – Chatteron Square by E.H. Young is now out in the British Library Women Writers series! It’s the first one that I chose myself, and it’s great. I had fun reading about 1930s divorce law while writing the afterword, which hopefully adds a layer of interest to the novel – but obviously it’s a wonderful novel without a word from me alongside it.

2.) The link – if you’re in the UK and looking for vegan and gluten-free cakes during the lockdown, I can recommend my friend Amy’s bakery. I’ve received, given, and bought for myself boxes from them during quarantine – check out Brutally Honest Bakery.

3.) The blog post – I always love when Claire at The Captive Reader reads A.A. Milne, it fills me with such joy – and she has made me want to go back and re-read The Romantic Age soon.

The Vanishing Celebrities by Adrian Alington

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I picked up The Vanishing Celebrities (1947) by Adrian Alington in Oxford a couple of years ago, partly because the title sounded fun, partly because I love the look of Albatross paperbacks and partly because I thought it would be a Golden Age detective novel. As it turned out, it was a lot more than that – and a total delight that sadly seems to have become almost completely forgotten. [Sidenote: this is number 5364 in the Albatross paperback series. Who knew they had so many, and how come I so seldom find them?]

The setting is Spindlesby Castle, and the opening chapter has ghostly figures from different periods of the castle’s past congregating – they know something is about to happen, but don’t know what. These ghosts only appear at the beginning and end of the novel and were rather a distraction than anything else – I’d have cut them, though they may have been a satire on something I don’t know about.

Because most of the other characters are clearly satires – either of real people or of types; I don’t know enough of popular culture from 1947 to be certain. But present at the houseparty, organised by the Duchess of the castle and reluctantly permitted by her husband, are…

  • Trackless Butterworth, an explorer
  • Olivia Hitchforth, an actress and Trackless’s wife
  • Aurora Fairground, a tennis player, and her mother
  • Carlotta Trott, a detective novelist who invented Sir Cecil Sweetlip and who is in a bitter rivalry with Fay Peabody, inventor of the detective Aristede Foufoupou
  • Viola Ramshott, MP
  • Virgil D. Schrenkenkraut, an American film magnate
  • The Ambassador of Strubania
  • Len Trooper, a handsome singer
  • Mr Titterways, who is not famous but somehow always turns up where famous people are

You see that Alington has a way with names. Carlotta Trott and Fay Peabody are obviously spins on Dorothy L Sayers and Agatha Christie, and there’s a later reference to Tenderly Jones, ‘the man who writes whimsically about gardens’, who I think must be Beverley Nichols. Whether the others are types or real people, they are a delight. My favourite to read was perhaps Aurora Fairground, whose reputation her mother is keen to preserve – whenever anybody asks her about her tennis career, she says that she would rather have babies of her own, and is just a girl who loves England and happens to be good at tennis.

An alternative title for The Vanishing Celebrities in some editions was The Room in the West Tower – put those two together, and you’ll work out happens. There are rumours that anybody who slept in a room in the West Tower disappeared by morning. Viola Ramshott, MP, has no time for such nonsense and says she’s will sleep there to no ill effect – and by morning, of course, she is gone.

In the silence which seemed inevitably to follow any observation put forward by Aurora, Carlotta Trott made her first contribution to the discussion. She had been listening to the others with a somewhat cynical smile. Now, thinking that a suitable moment had arrived for the kind of sensational intervention which Sir Cecil enjoyed, she said, adopting her best Sir Cecil drawl, ‘Have you tried draggin’ the lake?’

‘Er – no,’ said the Duke.

Carlotta’s smile became still more cynical.

‘Not a bad idea, what?’

‘A very interesting idea,’ replied the Duke, ‘really a very interesting idea indeed. But as a matter of fact, Miss Trott, there is no lake.

A succession of these celebrities decide to sleep in the room for increasingly unlikely reasons, and they disappear. Various policemen turn up, including people from Scotland Yard with ridiculous nicknames – my favourite was ‘What’s More You’ll Be A Man My Son’ Darby. Fay Peabody pops up to score one over her novelist nemesis.

As a detective novel, it’s not the most impressive. The solution is pretty laughable – but in the good sense as well as the bad. The whole thing is really funny. Alington has a great ear for witty dialogue and, having established the ludicrous characters, frequently made me laugh by dropping in just a few representative words from them. We don’t even have the usual straight man, watching on and being the reader’s perspective on the zany world. Everyone is absurd. It’s a delight.

I suppose the danger in any novel that draws on figures of the period, or even on types of the period, is that they are less relevant when those figures and types have faded. But I loved this even when I wasn’t sure who Alington was drawing on, and the whole thing was a total joy. If you can get your hands on a copy, do – otherwise I hope that it might catch the eye of the British Library Crime Classics series at some point…

Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession by Janet Malcolm

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As part of my DPhil, I did quite a lot of research into Freud and his disciples. I sat and read the Journal of Psychoanalysis from the 1920s, and wrote about how the language of Freudianism helped inspire the language of the fantastic (and vice versa). It was fascinating, and I was able to use some of this research in the forthcoming afterword to the British Library’s reprint of Rose Macaulay’s Dangerous Ages. But I signed out of psychoanalysis in about 1935, and know very little about what followed.

That’s where Janet Malcolm comes in. I became besotted with her after reading Two Lives, the book she wrote about Gertrude Stein and Alice B Toklas, and have been steadily reading her others since. I’ve previously read In the Freud Archives, which did include a lot of modern Freudians and their in-fighting, but Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession looks more closely and what psychoanalysis means today – or at least the ‘today’ of 1981, when the book was published. The title comes from a quote by Freud: ”It almost looks as if analysis were the third of those ‘impossible’ professions in which one can be sure beforehand of achieving unsatisfying results. The other two, which have been known much longer, are education and government.’

When Freud was about, psychoanalysis was usually seen as a short-term treatment to cure extreme symptoms – people went for a few weeks or months. By the time Malcolm explored the profession, it was anticipated that treatment would last many years – of going every day to spend an ‘analysis hour’ (50 minutes) with the analyst. Indeed, as Malcolm explains:

Cases that formally terminate – i.e. end by mutual agreement of analyst and patient – are relatively rare. The majority of analytic cases end because the patient moves to another city, or runs out of money, or impulsively quits the analysis, or agrees with the analyst that stalemate has been reached. Even the most experienced and successful analysts acknowledge at least as many cases that run afoul or end prematurely or inconclusively as those that properly terminate.

Much of the book is based upon interviews Malcolm does with ‘Aaron Green’ (a pseudonym), a 46-year-old analyst whom Malcolm describes on the first page as ‘a slight man, with a vivid, impatient, unsmiling face’. That description is quintessentially Malcolm and shows her unabashed style as a journalist/writer – she writes as though her subjects will never read what is written; as though she can be as blunt on the page as she is in her head. But never with a sense of righting a wrong, or finding personal enjoyment in describing the people she interviews. It’s just a summing up.

I loved all the sections where she relays her interviews with Green – whether establishing his dissatisfaction with his career or looking at the wider scope of psychoanalysis and the arguments and factions that exist within it. Malcolm is brilliant at interviews that reveal the whole of the person often, you imagine, slightly against their better judgement. She is something of an analyst herself in these sections and is brilliant at getting under the skin of a close-knit, often warring fraternity.

The things that analysts warred over in this period are relatively niche. Should an analyst offer sympathy to a grieving patient? Is it ever acceptable for a patient and an analyst to date after their professional relationship has ended? It’s intriguing that all the big Freudian ideas – the Oedipus complex, sublimation, the death drive etc. – are not disputed internally. They are no longer the big headline-grabbing discoveries. Analysts are left to dispute the lesser corners of their profession – even while it remains a collection of absurdities to a large percentage of the world.

Where I found Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession less successful was, ironically, where it did what it purported to do. The book sort of claims to be an introduction to psychoanalysis, and I suppose that’s the way it would be marketed – but I found it quite dry when Malcolm was tracing the history of the profession and its various key areas. Whenever she removed herself from the narrative, basically. She is one of those rare writers that you want to intrude into her topic more, rather than less.

And it seems that, much like when I read Two Lives to find out about Gertrude Stein and ended up more interested in Janet Malcolm, I am always going to read her books wanting to spend more time when her intriguing personality – her way of reporting and interviewing, and her unique take on writing and the world.

Inferno by Catherine Cho

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I’ll be honest, I first came across Catherine Cho while looking for literary agents to send my novel to. That hasn’t come to anything, but it did mean that I came across her memoir Inferno – and I was so intrigued that I bought it, and I read it within a couple days of it arriving. (NB I ought it directly from Bloomsbury, which seemed like a good way to support an independent bookshop at this time.)

Inferno is one of those zeitgeisty books – a memoir of extraordinary things happening to ordinary people. And I love them. Cho’s is about post-partum psychosis – not an easy topic, but Cho writes about it so stunningly.

According to Korean tradition, after a baby is born, mother and baby do not leave the house for the first twenty-one days. There are long cords of peppers and charcoal hung in the doorway to ward away guests and evil spirits. At the end of the twenty-one days, a prayer is given over white rice cakes. After 100 days, there is a large celebration, a celebration of survival, with pyramids of fruit and lengths of thread for long life.

[…]

My son was two months old when we embarked from London on an extended trip across the US. I had come up with a plan to use our shared parental leave to do a cross-country tour of family and friends and introduce them to our son. I didn’t see why we had to pay attention to Korean traditions – or superstitions, as I thought of them. As Korean Americans born and raised in the US, my husband and I had never paid much attention to the rules, and I had always thought our families didn’t either. Except that suddenly, with the birth of a baby, the rules seemed to matter.

We had avoided any evil spirits from California to Virginia, but perhaps we’d just been running away from them, because they found us at last at my in-laws’ house in New Jersey. My son was eight days shy of his 100-day celebration when I started to see devils in his eyes.

That’s the opening of Inferno – minus a paragraph I cut for space – and I think you’ll agree it’s pretty striking. But one of the many great things about this memoir is that it isn’t sensationalist. If you’ve ever come across post-partum psychosis, it’s probably from the shrieking headlines of tabloids. Or potentially from EastEnders. Cho’s experience was every bit as shocking as those scare stories – but she contextualises it in the reality of life before this illness struck her and her family.

Structurally, Inferno moves between two periods. The days that she spent involuntarily sectioned – and the life that led to that point. In between is woven folklore and history from Korea, moving elegantly from beliefs that have been passed through many generations to the reality of Cho’s life, finding unexpected connections or juxtapositions. It means that the hours where psychosis first hit are kept until towards the end of the book – by the time we read her description of the initial experience and the days she spent in hospital afterwards, we know Cho and her history with a sort of intimacy. It means that, when we read about Cho seeing devil eyes in her son Cato’s eyes, it is not simply the shock of a psychotic episode – it is the shock of seeing a friend at her darkest moment.

Cho grew up in Kentucky, in a house that was oddly silent. Her father required silence, and had a section of the house to himself for this purpose. Cho describes his moments of anger, and the way she and her brother Teddy tried to manage them. If Inferno was nothing but the description of growing up, it would be a vivid and faintly unsettling memoir – Cho writes with an intense honesty about all the people in her life, to the extent that I sometimes wondered what it was like to sit around the table at Thanksgiving now. She and Teddy were ‘foxhole buddies’ – in it together.

Her first significant escape from the world she grew up in is to Hong Kong – spontaneously following Drew (I assume a pseudonym?). She and he had started dating not long before, and Cho was attracted because he ‘represented possibility. A dare against what was certain’. In one of the most shocking openings to a section, later in the book, Cho is naked on a Hong Kong balcony – having been forced there by Drew, who has been consistently, horrifyingly violent to her. She is living in a foreign country with an abusive partner, unsupported by his mother – who knows what he is like but insists he can change, and wants Cho to stay. It’s hard to read, and I think it’s included to show the difficult periods of Cho’s life – that left their residue of uncertainty, fear and darkness that threatened to reappear in moments of intense stress.

If Cho writes astonishingly about violence and fear, she is equally good at the arguably more difficult: writing about falling in love. Her descriptions of meeting James, and her understandable reluctance to follow another man across the world when he invites her to move to London, are beguiling and like a lungful of fresh air in contrast to the other oppressive relationships she has withstood. She is able to do that rare thing for anyone: show you why the person they love is so lovable.

I’m at risk of rewriting the whole memoir, so I won’t say more about these sections – except that Cho recreates brilliantly the nuance of each relationship she has – with relatives, in-laws, James. With the prospective baby, when she is pregnant.

And when she gets to the day her psychosis hit, her writing is truly extraordinary. She and James have been staying with his parents – talkative, anxious, kind but interfering parents. Cho needs to escape. They go to stay in a nearby hotel. And Cho can’t stop seeing devils eyes when she looks at her son Cato.

As she relates that night, and the days in an emergency ward, Cho manages to give an astonishingly vivid account of psychosis. That sounds like a paradox, and perhaps it is – but she manages to recreate the distorted logic of the time in such a way that we understand how she perceived the world – but also how those around her must have perceived the experience. The horror of her psychosis isn’t that she is uncertain about reality – it is the certainty she has. That she is in Hell. That she needs to restart the simulation. That the cameras are watching. That the nurses outside are really her brother. I recommend reading the excerpt published in the Guardian, which touches on various parts of this.

I haven’t talked much about the parallel narrative – of life while sectioned, not knowing how she is able to secure release, not knowing if she is back to normal yet or how she would know if she were. Not thinking much about Cato, and being numbed to any reflections about that. These sections are a compelling insight to the American heath system – but they are necessarily less vivid. Cho’s time there was slow and uncertain. These pages counterbalance the dimensions she gives to her life history and to the immediacy and drama of her illness – because they are the gradual re-emergence to life.

I think Cho could write an engaging and beautiful memoir about anything at all, having read Inferno. The fact that she has undergone all she has lived gives her rich material – but few people would be able to create the tapestry she does of experience, reflection, philosophy, and the weaving in of American and Korean cultures. However horribly unlucky Cho was to have post-partum psychosis, and the horrendous depression that followed, I ended up thinking that other sufferers of this mental illness had one sliver of luck in the hand they have been dealt: to have someone as eloquent, wise and thoughtful as Cho as some kind of spokesperson.

 

 

Announcing the next club!

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As promised, Karen and I have decided on the next club year – for October, which will come around quickly, I’m sure. After some suggestions and some discussion, we’ve decided to go for… 1956!

Obviously we’ll give you lots of reminders nearer the time, but I’m excited already!

For Adults Only by Beverley Nichols

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Sorry to go absent after #1920Club – my internet died! I was still able to use my phone data, but it wasn’t great for writing blog posts. And goodness knows the internet is vital at the moment. Thanks so much to everyone who joined in the 1920 Club – there were loads of reviews I haven’t managed to read properly yet, what with the internet giving up, but I will at some point. (And my comments were getting spammed on WordPress blogs for a while, so maybe check your spam comments folder too…)

Karen and I have come up with the next club year for October, and I’m already excited about it. We’ll be sharing it soon – watch this space!

We’ve all been reading what works best in this challenging time – and I have turned to quite a lot of Beverley Nichols, and will no doubt indulge in some more. One of the books I’ve read is the inauspiciously titled For Adults Only, from 1932. It’s nowhere near as salacious as it sounds – rather, it is a series of dialogues between parent and child, intended to satirise parenting manuals of the time, but also rather like a catechism. For example – this, from ‘A Child’s Guide to the Customs’:

Q. (In tones of piercing clarity.) Mother, what is that lovely smell?

A. Smell?

Q. Yes. Coming out of your fur coat?

A. Heavens! It’s broken.

Q. (With even more piercing clarity.) What’s broken?

A. Ssh! People will hear you.

Q. Why shouldn’t they hear me, mummy?

A. It was a bottle of scent.

Q. Why shouldn’t they hear that you’d broken a bottle of scent?

A. Be quiet, or I shall take away your lemon.

(There is a moment’s pause, during which the unfortunate parent disposes of the glass, and sponges her coat with a handkerchief, which she eventually throws overboard. Then she returns to the cross-examination.)

Q. You still smell lovely, mummy.

A. It will wear off.

Q. You smell like the lady who comes to supper with daddy when you go away for week-ends.

And so on and so forth. We get similar child’s guides to theatre, opera, sun bathing, packing, women motorists, bridge, and all sorts. It’s all good fun. The downside is that they are basically all the same – the child tends to have been party to secrets, while also being very literal and rather clueless. They are insistent in the search for truth, and generally the parent seems to loathe them. I don’t know where they appeared originally, but I imagine it was in a weekly magazine or something – and it would be a delight like that. Like a reliable sketch comedy character, appearing to do their bit. Read all in one go, it is rather repetitive.

What is an endless delight, though, is the illustrations – done by Joyce Dennys, of Henrietta’s War fame. I always love seeing her illustrations – they have a vitality and comedy that felt fresh even when Nichols’ bit was beginning to wear a little.

So, highly recommend – but maybe just read one a week! And it’s interesting to see Nichols doing something a little different from the other books I’ve read by him.

#NotTheWellcomePrize

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When Rebecca asked if I had anything to contribute to the Not The Wellcome Trust blog tour, celebrating health-related books published in 2019 while the official prize is on hiatus, I wasn’t sure. It’s not my usual jam. Luckily between us we remembered to excellent books I’d reviewed that fit the bill – Notes Made While Falling by Jenn Ashworth and The Remarkable Life of the Skin by Monty Lyman. They’re very different and both excellent. I’ve reprinted the two reviews below – and you can see where the blog tour is going next from this banner…

Notes Made While Falling by Jenn Ashworth

Image result for notes made while fallingSometimes you read a book so unusual, so defying of genre, that it’s hard to know what to write about it. Something that is experimental with language and format without ever losing its tethering to the ground. All I can say is that Notes Made While Falling (2019) is special, and reading was an extraordinary experience.

Well, that’s not all I can say, because I’m going to keep writing this. Notes Made While Falling is non-fiction, and that’s about as comfortable as I feel putting it into a box – and even that might be too confining. It is memoir and essay and literary criticism and everything in between.

At its starting point, and the point to which it always returns, is a traumatic childbirth. Ashworth started haemorrhaging during a caesarean and was conscious but immobile for part of the operation. She heard her own blood falling onto the floor. This is an image that recurs throughout the book and with which she was clearly obsessed – it haunted her sleepless, alcohol-filled nights; it became all sorts of other images of falling. The first section of this book is a vivid, vicious, vital exploration of her own illness – a dizzying mix of clear-eyed retrospective and blurred lack of self-awareness, somehow coming together into a brilliantly written whole. She uses ‘/’ mid sentence to give two alternative sections of sentences – places where both versions are true at the same time, and a single sentence can’t hold the multiplicity of reality. I think the whole book, but especially this part, is about the fragility of narrative and the inevitability of narrative.

From here, Notes Made While Falling is a wide-ranging journey. Ashworth writes a lot about her upbringing in a strict Mormon church. (My own upbringing in a faith-filled household was nothing but a blessing, and I thought I might be irritated by another memoir that refuses to see any good in people of faith, but her church was certainly not my church, and her life had many more restrictions.) She writes about her confusing, violent father, and the time she spent in care. A lot of this comes in the form of a short story that she once wrote and which she is now elucidating and critiquing. Again, the outlines are blurred. Certainty is always something Ashworth resists, or cannot pin-point.

It’s all so original. A chapter ostensibly on why she doesn’t like King Lear is really about fathers and memories. Elsewhere she takes us from Agatha Christie to Freud to the Bulger trial to Astrid Lingren and every step makes sense, so we only know how strange the journey has been when we get to the end.

Writing about illness naturally makes the Woolf fan think about On Being Ill, and Woolf is certainly in the mix. This section is about her, and shows the sort of fluid, thought-provoking style that Ashworth brings to the book.

It is significant that Woolf foregrounds the difficulties experienced by the woman writer. The wounded woman writer, which of course she was. It is significant because wounded is a tricky thing for any woman to admit to being. Not least because any time a woman utters a sentence about her own experience, she becomes a kind of terrorist and there’s an army out there waiting to strike her down. Some days it feels like writing truthfully about her own life is the most subversive thing a woman can do. But more specifically there is also the sense that in uttering the truth of painful experience she is letting the side down and embracing the straightjacket [sic] and the hysteric’s sickbed a little too easily. That she is first with her body then again with her writing (that is, with her hands) providing hysterical ladies (the story railroads us all towards it conclusion: all they need is a good fucking, even when they’ve already been fucked). More nicely: women writing about illness risk equating womanhood itself with illness.

It’s such a rich passage, and practically every page is as rich. Incidentally, I’ve put ‘[sic]’ in there but I’m very ready to believe that the misspelling ‘straightjacket’ was intentional.

I’ve read a couple of Ashworth’s novels, and was particularly impressed by her most recent, Fell. This feels in some ways like a logical step from that, since Fell was also about illness and uncertainty and all sorts of other things. But this is a different creature, and – excellent novelist though she is – it feels like Ashworth has found her metier with Notes Made While Falling. It was a privilege to read it.

The Remarkable Life of the Skin by Monty Lyman

The number of science books I’ve read can be numbered on my fingers, and number of science books I’ve read that weren’t written by Oliver Sacks is nil. Until now! Full disclosure, Monty Lyman is a friend of mine – and that was why I picked up The Remarkable Life of the Skin. But I’m very glad I did, and would definitely recommend it to anybody who doesn’t have the privilege of being Monty’s friend.

Lyman (let’s keep this review professional) is a doctor in Oxford, and his research has specialised in dermatology. That interest has taken him around the world, and the book reports on interesting cases from most of the planet’s continents – with an especial interest in Tanzania. The real marvel of The Remarkable Life of the Skinis how much content it packs into relatively short space.

It’s obvious from the outset that Lyman is super excited about skin – or the ‘swiss army organ’, as he labels it. He quotes censoriously a surgeon colleague who calls it “the wrapping paper that hides the presents”, and spends a little time in talking about what a fantastic job it does. Not just at keeping the organs in (thanks skin!) but in all manner of other ways relating to its neurology, temperature control, and response to infection, to name but a few.

For those of us who have always rather taken the skin for granted, this might be the ideal book. As I say, my knowledge of science is very, very beginner – and this book is accessible for novice. Indeed, I would imagine any medical doctor might know quite a lot of what is in here already. Me? I knew nothing.

The bit that caught the attention of newspapers was about sunburn. How even one severe sunburn as a child can drastically increase the chance of skin cancer later in life. And how we should all be slathering on protection much more often than we think. Being a doctor, he’s also able to give the reasons for all of this, in a fairly indisputable way.

That may be the headline-grabbing bit, but I was most interested in the areas where Lyman looks at more sociological factors. I was astonished by how many people with acne have attempted suicide – it is not a trivial thing. More light-heartedly, the section on blushing was informative and intriguing. The links between mind and skin are still to be fully explored, but the different possibilities that Lyman raises made me want to learn more. And his experiences as a medic in remote areas of Africa made for interesting and occasionally sobering reading – such as the community where children with albinism have to be schooled in a secure building, to prevent them being killed for superstitious medicine.

Look, yes, I skimmed over some of the more nitty-gritty bits. I’m pretty squeamish and I’m happy to leave my skin mites in peace if they’ll return the favour. But there is a lot in The Remarkable Life of the Skin for even the most squeamish – and Lyman writes extremely well. He treads the line between anecdotal and informational brilliantly. It probably helps that I already know he’s a lovely chap, but I think that does also come across in his writing. He has humanity and empathy alongside knowledge, and that brings the book alive.

I think this will solve a lot of “what should we get Dad for Christmas?” quandaries, but I also think it’ll appeal to people who don’t imagine they’d want to pick up a book about the skin. Like me, for example!