I shall share my favourite lines from a carol, as I believe I have done before:
Oh hush the noise, ye men of strife
And hear the angels sing!
A very wonderful Christmas Day to you and yours – may your stockings be filled with books!
Happy Christmas Eve! It seems the right time for a Slightly Foxed memoir – and another Reading Presently candidate, since this book was a birthday present from Mum and Dad.
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| This was supposed to look festive… …not like I’m about to burn it. |
Slightly Foxed are, as I’ve mentioned before, utterly dependable when it comes to insightful, moving, and often rather laced with nostalgia – albeit invariably for a past I have not myself experienced. The two-for-one set of memoirs by Denis Constanduros gives an interesting spectrum of childhood experience and reflections – although also something of a self-contradictory portrait.
When the good people of Slightly Foxed were sorting out a reprinting of Constanduros’s My Grandfather (first published in 1948) they discovered that there was an unpublished sequel of sorts – yes, you’ve guessed it, Father, Dear Father – both of which were read on the radio in the 1980s. They are very different creatures.
My Grandfather is, as it sounds, a depiction of Denis’s grandfather – centre of his home, where myriad women (his wife, sisters-in-law, maid, housekeeper, cook, and daughter) fit in with his ideal of the home – the only other male being Denis. In the hands of a tyrant, this household would have been miserable – but Grandfather could scarcely be less of a tyrant, at least through the eyes and memory of Denis. Through this lens, Grandfather is the jolliest, most amenable man imaginable. Good-nature and kindness line his every thought, as do childlike delight – even if it is for hunting. He is a creature of routine, and Denis’s documenting of Grandfather’s weekly meetings with a lifelong friend, and the conversations they repeat every time, is really rather lovely.
It was lashings of cosiness and niceness, filled with character and vim (it is no coincidence, surely, that Grandfather loved Dickens dearly). And then everything changes when we get onto Father, Dear Father. Unlike the first memoir, it isn’t really a portrait of a single man – indeed, I came away from reading it with very little idea what Father was like, except that he liked sports and thin-lipped masculinity.
The book is quite sad and sombre, even when describing eventful days and happy occasions – you can tell, throughout, that Constanduros did not have an easy relationship with his father, and it didn’t come as a great surprise when it was revealed, towards the end, that he didn’t see his father after he was a boy – at least not until shortly before Father died. The most curious scene is the one shortly before Constanduros’s parents get divorced – he seems to believe, still, that it was related to a practical joke that went awry. The scene is given – seemingly unintentionally – through the uncertain and fragile eyes of a child who mixes up causality and thinks himself in some way to blame for his parents’ incompatibility.
I still enjoyed reading Father, Dear Father, because Constanduros is a good writer – but I can’t feel the affection for it that I feel for My Grandfather. It is as though they were two different childhoods – and, indeed, I cannot understand how they fit together, since it seems throughout My Grandfather that Constanduros and his brother live in the grandfather’s house, yet it clearly isn’t the case when you read Father, Dear Father. Would I be too much of an amateur psychologist to think that he compartmentalised his memories of childhood into the happy and the sad, aligning each with a different home and household?
Having not quoted from the book(s) yet, I will end with a lovely passage which is relevant to almost every book I read, and which I think will bring nods of agreement from most of you:
Sometimes it seems that only the tremendous is worth writing about, that everything one reads or writes should be full of mighty catastrophes or upheavals and that nothing less is worthwhile. Earthquakes, wars, tragedies and triumphs have stretched our compass to such an extent that the sheer ordinariness of ordinary people and their lives seems absurdly trivial by comparison. But there is a virtue in triviality. I remember looking into a dog’s eye when I was a child and being surprised to see reflected, not only myself, but the whole garden. There it all was, complete and exact, in brilliant miniature.
I think I’ve mentioned the blog Hyperbole and a Half a few times over the years, and it is certainly very popular – it gets millions of views, even though it has slowed down a great deal over the past couple of years, as its author (Allie Brosh) has dealt with depression. (She has written movingly and rather brilliantly about depression here.) But generally it is an extremely light-hearted and irreverent blog, detailing Allie’s life through naive MS Paint pictures and snarky, self-deprecating humour. I love it.
And its success means that Brosh was asked to write a book – which my brother Colin kindly gave me for my birthday. It’s about half new content and half things which have appeared on her blog before (including my favourite, the story about trying to train her very stupid dog.)
Brosh’s drawings are deliberately made to look amateur, but I think she must actually be quite talented at drawing – it’s the sort of amateur which needs a professional.
I prefer her stories when they are stories – quite a few are more general reflections on her personality, or things of that ilk. My favourites are those which do just narrate something which happened – getting lost in the woods as a child, wanting to go to a party despite being recovering from a general anaesthetic, moving house with two anxious dogs – because these reveal as much about her personality without losing a narrative momentum.
It’s not very similar to all the other books I review on Stuck-in-a-Book – it’s not even similar to the odd graphic novel I occasionally read – but it is very funny, occasionally incredibly insightful (when she chooses to be in that mood), and a brilliant dip-in-and-out-of book.
It’s been a good year for finishing books about books. There was the wonderful Phantoms on the Bookshelves by Jacques Bonnet, which is one of my books of the year and which I read over the course of a couple of days – there was Alberto Manguel’s The Library at Night, and there was his A Reader on Reading. The Manguels I dipped in and out of contentedly for years – my lovely friend Lorna bought me A Reader on Reading back in 2010 – and it was with a happy sigh that I finally closed its pages a month or so ago.
It’s the sort of book that one inevitably reads with a pencil in hand, wanting to make little notes of agreement in the margins – or at least jot down page numbers to read again later. Manguel’s work is a touch more high-flown than bookish books I adore (like Jacques Bonnet’s, or Susan Hill’s Howards End is on the Landing) but even when he is discoursing on Argentinian highbrows I’ve never read of, I can’t help loving him – because, at heart, he is simply a passionate reader.
I believe that we are, at the core, reading animals and that the art of reading, in its broadest sense, defines our species.
I had to give up making notes quite early on, because I knew that I’d essentially want to write down every page. There are literary truths known only to the ardent reader on almost every page. My head nodded in happy agreement so often that I’ve probably got whiplash (NB, I probably haven’t). Check out these two:
Like so many other readers, I have always felt that the edition in which I read a book for the first time remains, for the rest of my life, the original one.
(That’s how I feel about I Capture the Castle and the curious 1970s edition I read.)
The experience may come first and, many years later, the reader will find the name to call it in the pages of King Lear. Or it may come at the end, and a glimmer of memory will throw up a page we had thought forgotten in a battered copy of Treasure Island.
Of course, having read it over so long a period, I can’t remember all that much apart from the things I jotted down… I know that I ended up skimming some of the stuff on Borges, and was surprised by how interesting I found a political section towards the end. When he wrote about individual authors and books, I tended only to be riveted when I knew the books myself (and I love that he uses Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland for the source of every chapter’s epigraph) but I was most delighted when he wrote about reading or writing in general.
I realised that if reading is a contented, sensuous occupation whose intensity and rhythm are agreed upon between the reader and the chosen book, writing instead is a strict, plodding, physically demanding task in which the pleasures of inspiration are all well and good, but are only what hunger and taste are to a cook: a starting point and a measuring rod, not the main occupation. Long hours, stiff joints, sore feet, cramped hands, the heat or cold of the workplace, the anguish of missing ingredients and the humiliation owing to the lack of knowhow, onions that make you cry, and sharp knives that slice your fingers are what is in store for anyone who wants to prepare a good meal or write a good book.
Yes, this post is fast becoming simply a list of quotations, rather than a review, but I think that’s the best way to entice you to read Manguel. (Plus, I’ve just come off the stage for the village’s Christmas show, and this is the best you can get out of me…!) And with that in mind, I’ll end with the longest quotation yet – about anonymous authors.
The history of writing, of which the history of reading is its first and last chapter, has among its many fantastical creations one that seems to me peculiar among all: that of the authorless text for which an author must be invented. Anonymity has its attraction, and Anonymous is one of the major figures of every one of our literatures. But sometimes, perhaps when the depth and reverberations of a text seem almost too universal to belong on an individual reader’s bookshelf, we have tried to imagine for that text a poet of flesh and blood, capable of being Everyman. It is as if, in recognizing in a work the expression in words of a private, wordless experience hidden deep within us, we wished to satisfy ourselves in the belief that this too was the creation of human hands and a human mind, that a man or woman like us was once able to tell for us that which we, younger siblings, merely glimpse or intuit. In order to achieve this, the critical sciences come to our aid and do their detective work to rescue from discretion the nebulous author behind the Epic of Gilgamesh or La Vie devant soi, but their laborus are merely confirmation. In the minds of their readers, the secret authors have already acquired a congenial familiarity, an almost physical presence, lacking nothing except a name.
Thankfully Manguel isn’t anonymous, so I can go out and buy other books by him – and the hardback editions of his essays are simply beautiful. Despite being a die-hard fiction lover, I think my dream books are non-fiction literary essays – which are essentially what blogs are, of course. My little shelf of books-about-books may not be as extensive or as personal as the wide (and widening) blogosphere, but it holds almost as special place in my heart, and I long to find well-crafted examples to add to it.
Ok, confession time. I’ve often seen David Sedaris’s book Me Talk Pretty One Day in bookshops, and thought it was a good title. At some point along the way, this noticing must have developed into delusion, because for some reason I was sure it was a novel about a girl with mental development problems. Erm… nope. Turns out it’s memoir.
A similar thing happened with Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim (2004) which I received from my friend Laura in a book group Secret Santa in 2011. I took it up to the Lake District with me, thinking it was a novel. Indeed, I was about thirty pages into it before someone referred to the narrator as David, and I suddenly realised that (a) the narrator wasn’t a woman, and (b) it was autobiographical. I felt somewhat justified in my false assumption, though, scouring the blurb, because nowhere does it say that it’s autobiographical. Lots of talking about him being a humorist par excellence (more on that anon), comparing him to Woody Allen and Oscar Wilde (because they have so much in common…), and talking about ‘his world’, which I suppose is a clue, but could equally apply to the world created by a novelist. Eventually, in tiny letters by the barcode, I found the word ‘autobiography’, and all was solved.
As when I read Ali Shaw’s The Girl With Glass Feet and only discovered halfway through that Ali was a man, it was an instructive lesson in how such things influence my reading. When I thought it was a novel, I was quite enjoying it; when I discovered it was a sequence of autobiographical essays, I started to really like it. And I wouldn’t be able to tell you quite why that was, except that true events don’t need to be as sparklingly innovative or well-structured – they have the virtue, instead, of being true.
Many of the anecdotes do have the ring of fiction, though – truth stranger than fiction and all that. I found the tales of Sedaris’s life in his first apartment away from home rather unnerving, with the kleptomaniac young girl next door – then there is the time he is mistaken for an erotic cleaner. As you are. But the word ‘family’ is in the title for a reason, and it is Sedaris’s vivid depiction of his family which makes this book so extraordinary (and, one presumes, the same is true of his other memoirs – indeed, I don’t know how he had this many stories left to tell after publishing all those other essay collections).
Don’t go thinking this is Swiss Family Robinson or Little Women, though – Sedaris’s family is a pretty bizarre bunch, with many unpleasant elements. And Sedaris doesn’t sugar coat. His sporty, brash, vulgar brother is no treat; there is more affection when he discusses his sister Lisa, and her feelings about potentially being portrayed in a film of his books. There is, of course, an irony in publishing an essay about choosing to shield his family from intrusion, but it is still a beautiful moment nonetheless.
There are a couple of misfires in the collection. I could have done without his story of manipulating children to undress and sit on his knee – not (to my mind) wholly redeemed by the fact that he was also a child at the time. The vignette of house-hunting and finding the ideal home in Anne Frank’s attic was a one-line dark joke which didn’t work as an essay. But that is not a bad hit rate, out of 22 essays.
What makes these essays special, and wonderfully readable, is Sedaris’s eye. He lets us into his family circle – with every blemish well known, and every annoying trait magnified through repetition, but also with a glow of affection – sometimes, for Sedaris, reluctant – which cannot truly evaporate. How he gets this into words, and through the most eccentric anecdotes, I have no idea. But it works brilliantly. I am far from the first to discover the wonder of Sedaris’s tone, but perhaps I am not the last – and I want to encourage you, particularly if you are in the US where his books are everywhere (why didn’t I buy any when I was there?!) to pick this up and see what you think. The good personal essay, the expertly wry memoir, are seldom found. My thanks are due to Laura, for giving me a copy of this at a Secret Santa and giving me a chance to find an excellent practitioner of that rare form!
Back when I discovered Edith Olivier’s brilliant novel The Love-Child in a charity shop, I started raving about it to my friends in the dovegreybooks online book email list. Little did I know that The Love-Child would go on to play an important role in my DPhil thesis, and that I’d present a few papers on it, but I did know that it was a really special book. And so I very gratefully accepted the kind offer of a lady called Jane to send me a copy of The Underground River (1929) by Olivier. That was in 2007 – and I finally got around to reading it in spring this year, while doing extra bits and pieces of research for my Olivier chapter. And here’s a quick little post about it…
It’s a children’s book, about Tony and Dinda who escape from their terrifying great-aunt by going underground and (you guessed it) finding a river. Many are the adventures they find there… Surprisingly large numbers of people live alongside the river, lit only by candles in the gloom – and some of them are pretty terrifying. Along the way are men who ask young ladies to dance… who can then never leave them (Dinda manages to avoid this fate). There are smugglers, kindly magical folk, adventure, peril… it’s the standard fare that I’ve come to expect from a childhood reared on Enid Blyton. And some self-aware humour at times, maybe?
After a time they felt hungry, but they found it was very difficult to eat their meal in the dark. They each had a knife and fork, but they had never guessed how hard it would be to cut slices for themselves off a sirloin of beef, with no butler to carve, no carving-knife and fork to carve with, and no light to carve by.
My favourite passage, of course, had to be the following – it’s nice to know that we twins are up there with magical creatures in terms of wonderment.
Tony and Dinda were really delighted. They had never seen twins before, and they had always longed to know some. In vain had they begged their mother to give them twin brothers or sisters. She had always refused, and now here was a family entirely consisting of twins. It seemed too amusing to be true.
There are nice illustrations by Margaret Forbes throughout, and the edition itself is rather charming – part of ‘The Enchantment Series’, whatever that was, and it is indeed enchanting.
I’ve read quite a few of Olivier’s novels (as always, you can see them all by selecting her from the author drop-down menu in the left-hand column) and none have lived up to the wonder of The Love-Child, but that is hardly surprising. Whilst Googling The Underground River, though, I stumbled across someone else who has read her obscure books – Scott, of The Furrowed Middlebrow (that link will take you to all his Edith Olivier posts). There is a coda to this gift-giving; I spotted that The Underground River was one of the few Olivier books Scott hadn’t managed to get hold of, so thought I’d ‘pay it forward’ (if you will) – and now this little book is on its way across the Atlantic…
I wouldn’t normally count a book from the author as a Reading Presently candidate, but in the case of The Compleat Mrs. Elton (2004) by Diana Birchall (consisting of The Courtship of Mrs. Elton, A Defence of Mrs. Elton, and Mrs. Elton in America) things are different – because Diana is a friend of mine, and you may know her blog. We first met online – through a book discussion email list – but have now met at least three times in person, and Diana gave me a present of this book (and the biography she wrote of her grandmother Onoto Wantana) at a lovely riverside tearoom in Oxfordshire. Photographic evidence…
I suspect most of you will already have worked out what the book is about, if you do not know already, for – yes- it is Mrs. Elton from Emma, once Augusta Hawkins, the fairly ghastly woman who ends up marrying the vicar. If any of Austen’s characters ever needed a defence, it is she, with her ‘caro sposo’ and ‘Mr. K’ and vulgarities here and there.
At least, that is the generally agreed line. Diana disagrees. Of the three, I found the Defence of Mrs. Elton both the most intriguing and the most controversial – but I will come to that in time, starting at the beginning with Augusta’s courtship.
Firstly, I should say that Diana writes Austen beautifully. A long time ago I wrote about Diana’s sequel to Pride and Prejudice, Mrs. Darcy’s Dilemma (which is brilliant) and there is no doubt in my mind that Diana is among Jane’s most faithful imitators – and it is a joy to read her taking on Austen’s mantle. The courtship between Mr. Elton and Augusta Hawkins shows the future Mrs. Elton to be as aware of her age and singleness as Austen’s better-loved heroines… it’s a nice tale, and starts the defence:
If our lovers were in fact a venial pair, marrying only in a spirit of self-seeking, how much worse were they than half the world? It was such a perfect case of like marrying like, that the most elevated love between two pure souls could be no more perfectly matched. With a strong mutual wish for matrimony, and for each finding a partner who could bring benefits to the other, and a determination and resolve to be bettering themselves, Mr. Elton and Miss Hakwins stood a great chance of finding as lasting a happiness as exists in this mutable world.
Which leads me onto In Defence of Mrs. Elton. Scenes from Emma, from Mrs. Elton’s arrival onwards, are shown again from that lady’s perspective, away from the satirical and subjective slant of the narrator. In my opinion (and I would love to enter into a debate), Diana doesn’t so much defend Mrs. Elton’s character as give her a different one…
Augusta knew, even as she was speaking, that everything she was saying was wrong […]
Did she? Hmm… of course, people often say one thing and mean another, or don’t come across in the way they intend, but it is perhaps too easy a defence to take a character’s objectionable qualities and say they were not really there. Diana does, however, is more convincing and does a very good job when attacking the other characters – I hadn’t really noticed quite how awful Emma et al are to the newcomer, and Augusta’s plea swayed me…
They were all her enemies, yet what had she done to any of them? Her ways, her manners, were not like theirs; she knew that well enough. She was not capable of their sort of superior insolence, the exquisite politeness that only pointed up the disdain beneath: when she thought a thing, she said it. If they were so pretty and exacting as to mind such a difference in her, and disapprove of the manner when the heart was right, what hope had she of ever living in harmony with any of them.
Onto the next and final story – whizzing through these, but hard to write about three novellas in one post! Well, it’s the one where things go a bit mad, and it’s great fun. Not only does Mrs. Elton go – with husband and children – to America, they travel among the Native Americans. There is scalping… From anybody who loved Austen less, I might not have forgiven the narrative world Diana takes her characters to, away from the English village life they call home, but I know that Diana would fall down dead rather than be disrespectful to Jane Austen. The writing is good enough to support the scenario. There is even much discussion of slavery – a wry comment on those who see slavery hidden behind Mansfield Park, I wonder?
“Yes – it is very painful,” agreed her husband, shaking his head. “We cannot be glad enough that there is not such an evil institution in England as slavery; and hope that it can be removed from this country in the natural operations of time, so that America may one day be as fair and untainted a land as ours.”
From an English writer, this might come across as snobbery – but Diana is an American gal born and bred, which makes her tour of early America through the Eltons’ eyes particularly intriguing. It’s a crazy idea, but it somehow works – and is a darn sight more entertaining than the next Lizzie-and-Darcy bonkfest penned by every author fixated with the 2005 film…
So, there you have it! For those of us who adore Austen’s novels and are on the look-out for intelligent, sensitive, and adventurous explorations of her characters – look no further. Now, in the comments… thoughts on Mrs. Elton?
As you see from this post’s title, I didn’t read Faulks on Fiction (2011) in the traditional sense, but rather I listened to it on audiobook. This was something of a novel (ho ho) experience for me, as I haven’t listened to an audiobook all the way through for more than a decade, perhaps nearer 20 years. Indeed, for me – when I had trouble sleeping as an undergraduate – audiobooks were basically lullabies. I’d stick Diary of a Provincial Lady, or Felicity’s Kendal’s White Cargo, or the letters of Joyce Grenfell and Virginia Graham in the cassette player, and go to sleep to the sound of their voices. Those were the only cassettes I owned, so I got very familiar with first ten minutes of each side…
But I asked for the CD (how times have changed) of Faulks on Fiction for Christmas a couple of years ago, and my parents kindly gave it to me. I listened to it gradually, mostly last winter on my iPod, because I had daily walks into town of 45 minutes each way (and couldn’t afford to get the bus all the time). Then I got the job at OUP, could afford to take the bus, and somehow left the final CD of ten until last week…
I haven’t even properly mentioned the author yet, although you’ll have worked it out. Sebastian Faulks (known for his novels, particularly Birdsong, none of which I have read) presented a TV series looking at selected novels in the history of British literature, and this was the tie-in book. I only actually watched one of the episodes – on heroes – and didn’t bother with the rest, because it all seemed a bit dumbed down. Someone told me that the book was better (well, duh) and they weren’t wrong.
Faulks addresses various ‘categories’ – heroes, villains, lovers, and snobs – and tracks each through the history of literature. So he’ll start with a Defoe or a Swift, moving on through Austens, Eliots, Brontes, via Woolf, Lawrence et al, and finally an Amis or an Ali. It is of course a subjective overview of literature, and the four categories we suggests could only ever be a necessary structuring device (arguably all four appear in most of the novels Faulks chooses), but I liked the idea of picking out these motifs. With only one or two examples per century for each category, it could hardly be considered comprehensive, and I baulked a bit when Faulks attempted to draw wider conclusions from his chosen examples – but no matter, I suppose it is what is expected of anything with so broad a title.
There is always that main problem with books which summarise books: that you’ve either read the book being summarised or you haven’t. If you have, you don’t need to be given the outline of the plot (although I found it did often help my faulty memory), and if you haven’t, you don’t want spoilers. I appreciated the run-through on books I never intend to read, but did end up fast-forwarding through sections on tbr pile candidates. Having said that, I listened to his thoughts on The End of the Affair by Graham Greene before I read it, and had still fortunately forgotten everything he said.
In either case, my favourite moments were when Faulks was talking about the books, rather than giving summaries. I didn’t always agree with him – see my post on Faulks and Pride and Prejudice – but I’m a sucker for intelligent, accessible discussion of great liteature. His groupings are intriguing and his discussion is warm, witty, and well thought-through. Of course, it’s been so long since I listened to most of it that I can’t really recall what he said, but the CD I listened to last covered Notes on a Scandal by Zoe Heller, and I enjoyed hearing what he had to say about the creation of Barbara, and how the novel differed from the film.
As for how the format affected my listening… Well, I found it impossible to separate the speaker from Faulks, even though they were definitely different people (the narrator, incidentally, is James Wilby). I could definitely have done without his attempts at accents – I can understand the eager actor relishing the opportunity to wander from Russia to Yorkshire and back again, but it was rather distracting. But, aside from that, I quite enjoyed listening to an audiobook. There were times when skipping would have been easier than fast-forwarding, or skimming backwards easier than rewinding, but Wilby has an engaging voice and it was the perfect entertainment for walking to and from town, as it could be listened to in discrete bursts without much being lost.
My friend Clare has struck gold again with Phantoms on the Bookshelves by Jacques Bonnet, which she got me for my birthday a month ago. Admittedly it was on my Amazon wishlist (and thus must have been mentioned by someone in the blogosphere… was it you?) but girl still done good. I’ve added it to my 50 Books You Must Read About not simply because it’s wonderful, but because it is so perfect a book for the bibliophile blogger.
Published in 2008 in French, and translated by Siân Reynolds in 2010, Phantoms on the Bookshelves is a sort of memoir and sort of essay collection about what it is like to live with and love books – but on a scale few of us can imagine. Bonnet is the proud owner of several tens of thousands of books – about 40,000, if memory serves – and talks about people with similar numbers of books as though they were in secret fraternity, which is rather adorable. Better yet, he is first and foremost a reader, and his books reflect that:
I’m talking about a working library, the kind where you don’t hesitate to write on your books, or read them in the bath; a library that results from keeping everything you have ever read – including paperbacks and perhaps several editions of the same title – as well as the ones you mean to read one day. A non-specialist library, or rather one specialized in so many areas that it becomes a general one.
People who collect books primarily for their value, or who think a first edition is infinitely preferable to a tenth, are anathema to the whole-hearted lover of reading – I could empathise so much with Bonnet, although I have no plans to have a library quite as large as his. I can see myself getting to ten thousand, though, especially if I use Bonnet as my conscience – he has the delightful habit of many bloggers I know; being able to justify any and all book purchases. I’m sure some of you are longing to write in the comments about betraying libraries or cutting down trees or the lust of avarice, but Phantoms on the Bookshelves is not a book for common sense responses, it is a book for illogical aspiration and unashamed book-adoration.
But practicality is certainly not left behind. I love reading about the ways in which people organise their bookshelves, and this is all the more important if books are likely to disappear forever if disorganised. Bonnet writes fascinatingly about finding space for big collections, and about the various schemes he has considered for his own collection – which reveals it to be far broader than I can boast. He worries about where to put authors born in Yugoslavia, now that it no longer exists, what to do with his Frisian books, and all sorts of other considerations which my largely-British largely-literary library has never really had to worry about.
His chapters on not just on organising bookshelves, of course. He writes wonderfully about reading itself (‘every time you open a book for the first time, there is something akin to safe-breaking about it’), about diaries, dictionaries, destitute authors, and – heartbreakingly – those libraries lost to destruction. Not just Alexandria and the like, but personal libraries lost to fire, and what the possessors did afterwards. Bonnet also suggests – another way in which these bookshelves are filled with phantoms – that the enormous library is possibly a doomed creature:
we may be pretty sure that vast and unwieldy personal collections of a few tens of thousands of books are likely to disappear, taking their phantoms with them. This little book is being written from a continent which is about to be lost forever
He blames e-readers, I think, but perhaps the premium of space will also play its part. But I can’t see why there wouldn’t still be just as many people who can afford to have this luxury as there were before…
The mark of a great book about books is whether or not familiarity with the titles mentioned matters. One of the reasons I love and cherish Susan Hill’s Howards End is on the Landing is because so many of the authors she writes about mean something to me, either through having read or meaning to read. I love Alberto Manguel’s books on reading, but tend to skim bits about Borges (and love the bits about Lewis Carroll). Well, Jacques Bonnet mentioned maybe one book I’d read, and another couple I’d heard of, and it didn’t matter at all. Even though a sizeable portion of the books mentioned have never been translated out of French, I still loved reading about them. That’s impressive work, Monsieur Bonnet.
I name-checked Manguel there (and a review of A Reader on Reading is forthcoming) – I love his books, but not in the same way that I love Phantoms on the Bookshelves. Manguel is a great reader, of course, but he is almost always scholarly at the same time – Jacques Bonnet is more like the friendly face at your book group who will enthuse about managing to squeeze another bookcase into the corner of the living room. More of a bibliophile friend, in general. Phantoms on the Bookshelves certainly isn’t a philistines’ book by any means, but nor does it alienate with erudition. It would be another perfect Christmas gift for the bibliophile in your life (or to drop heavy hints about) – it was the perfect birthday gift for me.
Somehow I’d forgotten, when noting down books to read for my Reading Presently project, that quite a few of my unread Persephones had originally been gifts. So there might be a little flurry of them as I come to the end of the year… and first up is the shortest, which accompanied me on my trip to the Lake District (and which I read in its entirety on the train): Hetty Dorval (1947) by Ethel Wilson. (Thanks, Becca!)
Hetty Dorval isn’t really the heroine of the book, and she certainly isn’t its narrator – that title goes to Frankie (Frances) Burnaby – but she is perhaps its leading figure. Frankie first sees her on her arrival in their small British Columbian community, and is enchanted (and a little intimidated) by Hetty’s beauty and lack of convention:
We walked our horses side by side, I feeling at the same time diffident and important. Mrs. Dorval did not ‘make conversation’. I discovered that she never did. It began to seem so easy and natural riding beside her there and no one making an effort at conversation that I was able to steal a few looks at her side face. This was especially easy because she hardly seemed to know that I was beside her; she just took me for granted in a natural fashion. Through the years in the various times and places in which I came to know Mrs. Dorval, I never failed to have the same faint shock of delight as I saw her profile in repose, as it nearly always was. I can only describe it by saying that it was very pure. Pure is perhaps the best word, or spiritual, shall I say, and I came to think that what gave her profile this touching purity was just the soft curve of her high cheek-bone, and the faint hollow below it.
Frankie is only a child, and does not understand the mystery of the woman – but agrees to keep coming to visit her secretly, flattered because Hetty Dorval refuses to have any other people call. And, of course, it all ends rather calamitously.
The novel follows the various different times that the paths of Frankie and Hetty overlap, as the narrator realises and mentions, when she is a young adult:
But this is not a story of me […] but of the places and ways known to me in which Hetty Dorval has appeared. It is not even Hetty Dorval’s whole story because to this day I do not know Hetty’s whole story and she does not tell. I only knew the story of Hetty by inference and by strange chance. Circumstances sometimes make it possible to know people with sureness and therefore with joy or some other emotion, because continuous association with them makes them as known and predictable as the familiar beloved contours of home, or else the place where one merely waits for the street car, or else the dentist’s drill. Take your choice. But one cannot invade and discover the closed or hidden places of a person like Hetty Dorval with whom one’s associations, though significant, are fragmentary, and for the added reason that Hetty does not speak – of herself. And therefore her gently impervious and deliberately concealing exterior does not permit her to be known.
It is a curious and interesting way to structure a novel, because it leaves the reader with a sense of incompleteness and an obviously skewed sequence of events. Both factors enhance the mystery and complexity of Hetty, seen through the narrator’s evolving eyes. The early enchantment becomes, inevitably, disenchantment – as Hetty’s past is revealed to show her not only disliked, but dislikeable. Hetty Dorval is a intriguing counterpart to another Persephone book, Susan Glaspell’s Fidelity, and all others of its reactionary ilk which sought, George Bernard Shaw style, to show that the fallen woman need not be immoral. That was so much the dominant narrative of interwar fiction that a ‘conservative’ viewpoint would be more revolutionary than a liberal one – or so it seems to me.
Not that Wilson is making any grandiose point about sexual morality – rather, she is depicting one woman’s sexual morality, and the impact this has on another young girl growing up. Hetty Dorval is psychologically so subtle that the narrative can read deceptively simply – but it is an impressively measured and restrained portrait of two women. Well, restrained, that is, until the final section where things get suddenly melodramatic – but somehow it doesn’t feel out of place; it is as though emotion had been repressed or held back for so much of the novel, that it has to burst out at some point.
The Persephone edition has an afterword by Northrop Frye, of all people, and an amusing and interesting letter from Ethel Wilson to her publisher, obviously in response to various corrections and suggestions – largely asking for them all to revert to her initial wording. It’s always great to see ‘behind the scenes’, and this is the sort of thing to which the reader all too seldom has access.
Others who got Stuck into this Book:
“This is a “small” story of ordinary dramas, but it illustrates a big truth that is easy to forget in a world that prizes the independent spirit.” – Teresa, Shelf Love
“This is a book definitely worthy of its dove-grey cover and beautiful endpapers!” – Jane, Fleur in Her World
“This small book so captures the wild joy I feel in the wind, in nature, in prairies, hills and mountains.” – Carolyn, A Few of My Favourite Books