Jane Austen by Margaret Kennedy

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One day in, and the first book for A Century of Books is completed.  Truth be told, I read the first two-thirds in 2011, but spent this afternoon finishing it off.  It’s a bit of a cheat, because although it was published 1950, it’s one of those not-very-of-its-time books – being Jane Austen by Margaret Kennedy.

I was sorting through my books in Somerset and found a paper bag filled with books from my aunt, which she was either lending or giving to me back in 2004 (Jacq – which was it?!) and discovered this book in it.  I’ve yet to read anything by Margaret Kennedy (despite getting a lovely copy of Together and Apart for Christmas) and I had no idea that she’d written a book about Jane Austen.  Being in the mood for a little quirky non-fiction, I picked it up and thoroughly enjoyed it.

Apparently it was the first in a series called The English Novelists, and it is part-biography, part-criticism.  In fact, it’s mostly an assessment of Austen’s various novels – written by an unashamed fan, but one who is not incapable of pointing out what she believes to be areas for improvement.  Her views are unusual – how many of us would call Mansfield Park ‘the most important of the novels, the most ambitious in theme, and the best example of her powers’? – but it’s a good look through the eyes of an perceptive reader of the 1950s, to see how Austen was estimated sixty years ago.

Jane Austen is scarcely more than a hundred pages long, but Kennedy packs a lot in, with precise organisation.  In fifteen pages she covers ‘The Background’; a wonderfully informative summary of the novels which preceded Austen’s.  Then Kennedy covers ‘The Life’ in fourteen pages, thereby providing as good an overview as you’re likely to encounter in many books ten times that length.  It is a more modern phenomenon to elaborate where details are not known, or invent suppositions where discretion is more flattering.  Austen’s momentary engagement, for example, is not mentioned.  Was it not known in 1950?

The next sections onto ‘The Letters’, which are often held up simply as an example of the biographer’s disappointment.  Kennedy is no different:

To search through these letters for any trace of the novels is a most disheartening task.  It is not merely that the books themselves are scarcely ever mentioned; there is so little trace of the material from which the books were made.  We feel as some archaeologist might, who comes upon some large and promising mass of fragments buried under a lost city once famous for its art, and finds that they are all shards of coarse kitchen ware; that every trace of sculpture, urns, tiles, tablets and inscriptions has been scrupulously removed.  It is with gratitude that we identify a few cooking pots.  There is a Moor Park apricot tree at Chawton; we remember one at Mansfield Parsonage.  Isabella Thorpe advised Catherine Morland to read The Midnight Bell; here is Mr. Austen reading it at an inn.

I do not entirely agree with this estimation of Austen’s extant letters, but I love the image Kennedy devises.  I also love the sensitive way she explores the difference between Austen’s early and later letters.  Like everything else in Kennedy’s book, it’s a speedy but excellent summary and assessment.

And then the chapters for which I was waiting.  ‘The Novels – First Period’ and ‘The Novels – Second Period’; ‘Some Criticisms’ and ‘Jane Austen’s Place in Literature’.  It’s no secret that I love Austen’s novels, and I especially like reading about her novels – an area understandably skirted around by those with a strictly biographical outlook.  In these, Kennedy gives quick outlines of the novels, before delivering her own verdict – always admiring, but never gushing.  She knows Austen’s characters as well as her own friends and family – watching their actions, carefully considering their qualities, and understanding the work of the author all the while.

At twenty-one she has served her term.  She knows what she wants to say.  She has discovered how to say it.  First Impressions, afterwards called Pride and Prejudice, is written with all the fresh exhilaration of that discovery.  It has faults which are to disappear in the later books, but never again is she to write with quite the same vitality and high spirits as she does in this first spring of her powers.  They give it a quality which makes very many of her readers choose it as their favourite.

We are told that it was extensively polished, corrected and revised between 1796 and 1813, when it was published.  But its great merit must have been inherent in the first draft, since characters spring to life at once or never, and truth is one of the things which cannot be “put in afterwards.”I’m not sure I agree with this somewhat whimsical statement, but I would very much like to.  However, what makes Kennedy’s analysis of the novels so worth reading is her own status as a novelist.  She writes of the characters with an authorial eye; she critiques their well-roundedness or believability with the voice of one who has striven at the same tasks and encountered the same obstacles.  I especially liked her imagined scenario of Austen considering Jane Fairfax as a heroine, and being gradually swayed to focus instead upon Emma Woodhouse.

In the final sections of the book, Kennedy considers views of Jane Austen from her death onwards, and is especially good on Charlotte Bronte’s notorious bad-mouthing of Austen (without getting as vicious and biting as I would.)  I’m once again amazed that Kennedy can write so economically – covering such ground in so few words.

I cannot think of a better person to write a book like this.  Being both a novelist and an Austen addict, she has both the authority and the affection to write a book which is knowledgeable and perceptive, but never cold or detached.  Anybody who could write the following wins my approval:

Kitty is better managed; her complete insignificance is so well relieved by the untimeliness of her coughing fits.

Austen isn’t lacking in admirers and there is no shortage of words written about her.  A slim 1950 hardback will probably get lost amidst the Tomalins, Jenkins, Le Fayes etc. – but I would definitely encourage you to seek it out.  As a reader and a writer, Kennedy has written a beautiful little book which is a stone’s-throw away from an appreciation – but with an authorial acumen which prevents it being the enthused ravings of someone like me, who, without Kennedy’s restraint, would doubtless fill all 107 pages with the single sentence I LOVE YOU, JANE AUSTEN, I FLIPPIN’ LOVE YOU.

A Century of Books has got off to a good start!

A Century of Books

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I have set myself the 2012 challenge of reading a book published in every year of the twentieth century… here are the links to all the books I’ve read and reviewed so far!

1900 – Three Men on the Bummel by Jerome K. Jerome
1901 – The Spinster Book by Myrtle Reed
1902 – The Westminster Alice by Saki
1903 – Man and Superman by George Bernard Shaw
1904 – Canon in Residence by V.L. Whitechurch
1905 – Lovers in London by A.A. Milne
1906 – The Railway Children by E. Nesbit
1907 – The Enchanted Castle by E. Nesbit
1908 – The World I Live In by Helen Keller
1909 – The Tale of the Flopsy Bunnies by Beatrix Potter
1910 – Reginald in Russia by Saki
1911 – In A German Pension by Katherine Mansfield
1912 – Daddy Long-legs by Jean Webster
1913 – When William Came by Saki
1914 – What It Means To Marry by Mary Scharlieb
1915 – Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
1916 – Love At Second Sight by Ada Leverson
1917 – Zella Sees Herself by E.M. Delafield
1918 – Married Love by Marie Stopes
1919 – Not That It Matters by A.A. Milne
1920 – The Mysterious Affair at Styles by Agatha Christie
1921 – The Witch-Cult in Western Europe by Margaret Murray
1922 – Spinster of this Parish by W.B. Maxwell
1923 – Uncanny Stories by May Sinclair
1924 – The Rector’s Daughter by F.M. Mayor
1925 – Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loos
1926 – Blindness by Henry Green
1927 – Dusty Answer by Rosamond Lehmann
1928 – Time Importuned by Sylvia Townsend Warner
1929 – A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf
1930 – His Monkey Wife by John Collier
1931 – Opus 7 by Sylvia Townsend Warner
1932 – Green Thoughts by John Collier
1933 – More Women Then Men by Ivy Compton-Burnett
1934 – Right Ho, Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse
1935 – The House in Paris by Elizabeth Bowen
1936 – Summer Will Show by Sylvia Townsend Warner
1937 – The Outward Room by Millen Brand
1938 – Dear Octopus by Dodie Smith
1939 – Three Marriages by E.M. Delafield
1940 – One, Two, Buckle My Shoe by Agatha Christie
1941 – Country Moods and Tenses by Edith Olivier
1942 – The Outsider by Albert Camus
1943 – Talking of Jane Austen by Sheila Kaye-Smith and G.B. Stern
1944 – Elders and Betters by Ivy Compton-Burnett
1945 – At Mrs. Lippincote’s by Elizabeth Taylor
1946 – Mr. Allenby Loses The Way by Frank Baker
1947 – One Fine Day by Mollie Panter-Downes
1948 – The Corner That Held Them by Sylvia Townsend Warner
1949 – Ashcombe: The Story of a Fifteen-Year Lease by Cecil Beaton
1950 – Jane Austen by Margaret Kennedy
1951 – I. Compton-Burnett by Pamela Hansford Johnson
1952 – Miss Hargreaves: the play by Frank Baker
1953 – Guard Your Daughters by Diana Tutton
1954 – M for Mother by Marjorie Riddell
1955 – The Winds of Heaven by Monica Dickens
1956 – All The Books of My Life by Sheila Kaye-Smith
1957 – Raising Demons by Shirley Jackson
1958 – Mrs. Harris Goes To Paris by Paul Gallico
1959 – Miss Plum and Miss Penny by Dorothy Evelyn Smith
1960 – The Ballad of Peckham Rye by Muriel Spark
1961 – A Grief Observed by C.S. Lewis
1962 – Coronation by Paul Gallico
1963 – A Favourite of the Gods by Sybille Bedford
1964 – The Garrick Year by Margaret Drabble
1965 – Moominpappa at Sea by Tove Jansson
1966 – In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
1967 – The Joke by Milan Kundera
1968 – A Cab at the Door by V.S. Pritchett
1969 – Sunlight on Cold Water by Francoise Sagan
1970 – Frederick the Great by Nancy Mitford
1971 – Ivy & Stevie by Kay Dick
1972 – Ivy Compton-Burnett: a memoir by Cecily Greig
1973 – V. Sackville-West by Michael Stevens
1974 – Look Back With Love by Dodie Smith
1975 – Sweet William by Beryl Bainbridge
1976 – The Takeover by Muriel Spark
1977 – Injury Time by Beryl Bainbridge
1978 – Art in Nature by Tove Jansson
1979 – On The Other Side by Mathilde Wolff-Mönckeberg
1980 – The Shooting Party by Isabel Colegate
1981 – Gossip From Thrush Green by Miss Read
1982 – At Freddie’s by Penelope Fitzgerald
1983 – Blue Remembered Hills by Rosemary Sutcliff
1984 – The Only Problem by Muriel Spark
1985 – For Sylvia: An Honest Account by Valentine Ackland
1986 – On Acting by Laurence Olivier
1987 – The Other Garden by Francis Wyndham
1988 – Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga
1989 – Maestro by Peter Goldsworthy
1990 – The Eye of the World by Robert Jordan
1991 – Wise Children by Angela Carter
1992 – Curriculum Vitae by Muriel Spark
1993 – Something Happened Yesterday by Beryl Bainbridge
1994 – Deadline Poet by Calvin Trillin
1995 – The Simmons Papers by Philipp Blom
1996 – Reality and Dreams by Muriel Spark
1997 – The Island of the Colourblind by Oliver Sacks
1998 – The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
1999 – La Grande Thérèse by Hilary Spurling

Books Read 2011

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(an ‘x’ indicates a re-read – thanks, David, for pointing out that I’d forgotten to mention this!)

1. Howards End – E.M. Forster
2. And Furthermore – Judi Dench and John Miller
3. The English – Jeremy Paxman
4. The Skin Chairs – Barbara Comyns
5. Bonjour Tristesse – Francoise Sagan
6. Personal Pleasures – Rose Macaulay
7. A Kind Man – Susan Hill
8. Gay Life – E.M. Delafield
9. William – E.H. Young
10. Gilead – Marilynne Robinson
11. The Machine Stops/The Celestial Omnibus – E.M. Forster
12. At Large and At Small – Anne Fadiman
13. To Tell My Story – Irene Vanbrugh
14. Saplings – Noel Streatfeild
15. The Gingerbread Woman – Jennifer Johnston
16. A House in the Country – Jocelyn Playfair
17. Echo – Violet Trefusis
18. People on a Bridge – Wislawa Szymborska
19. As We Are Now – May Sarton
20. Love of Seven Dolls – Paul Gallico
21. Not to Disturb – Muriel Spark
22. The Return of the Native – Thomas Hardy
23. The Perfect Pest – Adiran Porter
24. Mr. Chartwell – Rebecca Hunt
25. Countess Under the Stairs – Eva Ibbotson
26. The Caravaners – Elizabeth von Arnim
27. Broderie Anglaise – Violet Trefusis
28. The Thought-Reading Machine – Andre Maurois
29. Freakonomics – Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner
30. Going Postal – Terry Pratchett
31. The Unbearable Bassington – Saki
32. Virginia – Jens Christian Grondahl
33. A View From Downshire Hill -Elizabeth Jenkins
34. A Truth Universally Acknowledged – (ed.) Susannah Carson
35. Illyrian Spring – Ann Bridge
36. Jennie – Paul Gallico
x37. Mr. Pim Passes By – A.A. Milne
38. Life Among the Savages – Shirley Jackson
39. How Can You Bear To Be Human? – Nicolas Bentley
40. Fingersmith – Sarah Waters
41. The Slaves of Solitude – Patrick Hamilton
42. The Lady and the Little Fox Fur – Violette Leduc
43. The Lottery and other stories – Shirley Jackson
x44. The Love-Child – Edith Olivier
x45. I Capture the Castle – Dodie Smith
x46. Lady Into Fox – David Garnett
x47. The Taming of the Shrew – William Shakespeare
x48. Lolly Willowes – Sylvia Townsend Warner
49. A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
50. The Element of Lavishness – William Maxwell and Sylvia Townsend Warner
51. The Triumphant Footman – Edith Olivier
52. The Town in Bloom – Dodie Smith
53. Lipstick – Lady Kitty Vincent
54. Sylvia & David – the letters of Sylvia Townsend Warner and David Garnett
55. Gin & Ginger – Lady Kitty Vincent
56. Dearest Jean – Rose Macaulay
57. Hotel du Lac – Anita Brookner
58. A Fairy Leapt Upon My Knee – Bea Howe
59. People Who Say Goodbye – P.Y. Betts
60. Shaving Through the Blitz – G.W. Stonier
61. Exercises in Style – Raymond Queneau
62. Memento Mori – Muriel Spark
63. Red Pottage – Mary Cholmondeley
64. Westwood – Stella Gibbons
65. One Day – David Nicholls
66. Live Alone and Like It – Marjorie Hillis
67. Without Knowing Mr. Walkley – Edith Olivier
68. The Tiny Wife – Andrew Kaufman
69. Prison to Praise – Merlin Carothers
70. Safety Pins – Christopher Morley
71. A Baker’s Dozen – Llewelyn Powys
72. The Earth Hums in B Flat – Mari Strachan
73. The Misses Mallett – E.H. Young
x74. Still-William – Richmal Crompton
75. Common or Garden Crime – Sheila Pim
76. Christopher and Columbus – Elizabeth von Arnim
77. Our Hearts Were Young and Gay – Cornelia Otis Skinner and Emily Kimborough
78. The Love Affairs of a Bibliomania – Eugene Field
79. The Invention of Morel – Adolfo Bioy Casares
x80. William the Good – Richmal Crompton
81. Singled Out – Virginia Nicholson
82. Two Serious Ladies – Jane Bowles
83. Appius and Virginia – G.E. Trevelyan
x84. The Backward Shadow – Lynne Reid Banks
x85. The L-Shaped Room – Lynne Reid Banks
86. Living Alone – Stella Benson
87. Night Thoughts of a Country Landlady – Edith Olivier
88. Here’s How – Virginia Graham
x89. The Venetian Glass Nephew – Elinor Wylie
x90. Two Is Lonely – Lynne Reid Banks
91. The Pearl – John Steinbeck
92. The Man Who Was Thursday – G.K. Chesterton
93. So Long, See You Tomorrow – William Maxwell
94. Up At The Villa – W. Somerset Maugham
95. The Double – Fyodor Dostoevsky
96. The Amorous Bicycle – Mary Essex
97. Wasted Womanhood – Charlotte Cowdroy
x98. Miss Hargreaves – Frank Baker
99. The House – Richmal Crompton
100. Let Not The Waves of the Sea – Simon Stephenson
101. A Streetcar Named Desire – Tennesse Williams
102. Nella Last’s Peace – Nella Last
103. A Covenant With Death – Stephen Becker
104. Stop What You’re Doing and Read This – various
105. Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
106. Eats, Shoots and Leaves – Lynne Truss

“When we lose ourselves in a book…”

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I don’t think I’m going to do a traditional review of the lovely bookish essay collection Stop What You’re Doing And Read This! – I’m just going to continue quoting pieces from it now and then, because there are so many wonderful little snippets from it.  And I’ll try to find nice paintings of readers to accompany them (and do my best not just to copy Harriet’s!) The first post was here; today’s comes from author Nicholas Carr (and the painting is anonymous, unsold at a 2010 auction):

“It is only when we leave behind the incessant busyness of our lives in society that we open ourselves to literature’s transformative emotional power.  That doesn’t mean that reading is antisocial.  The central subject of literature is society, and when we lose ourselves in a book we often receive an education in the subtleties and vagaries of human relations.  Several studies have shown that reading tends to make us more empathetic, more alert to the inner lives of others.  The reader withdraws in order to connect more deeply.”

–Nicholas Carr, ‘The Dreams of Readers’
Stop What You’re Doing And Read This!

End of Year Meme

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Tonight I shall be doing a little variation the meme I’ve done for the last few years – which has been developed and expanded by various other bloggers – and getting a bit more specific.  But quite a few of the same questions will reappear…  (In case you missed my Top 15 Books of 2011, click here.) First, here’s the books and authors I read this year, in a pretty word cloud:

Number of books read:
Only 106, which is the fewest for quite a few years, and doesn’t bode too well for my A Century of Books project… still, it’s not a bad number.  (I wonder how many I bought?)

Male/Female authors ratio:
36 by men, 65 by women, and 5 by both male and female authors.

Fiction and non-fiction ratio:
28 non-fiction, 77 fiction, and one volume of poetry which could be either.

Number of re-reads:
13 – including five in a row at the beginning of June – but it was late April before I re-read anything. 

Shortest book title:
Echo by Violet Trefusis

Oldest book read:
A re-read of The Taming of the Shrew by William Shakespeare – but, the Bard aside, it is Mr. Dosteovsky and his 1846 The Double.

Newest book read:
Is, by the miracle of advance review copies, not published til 2012: Stop What You’re Doing and Read This.

Books in translation:
Ten – which came under the names of Francoise Sagan, Violet Trefusis (x2), Wislawa Szymborska, Andre Maurois, Jens Christian Grondahl, Violette Leduc, Raymond Queneau, Adolfo Bioy Carlos, and Fyodor Dostoevsky. So, thank you Irene Ash, Sian Miles, Adam Czerniawski, James Whitall, Anne Born, Derek Coltman, Barbara Wright, Ruth L.C. Simms, and Constance Garnett for your translations!

Most books read by a single author:
4 by Edith Olivier; 3 by Richmal Crompon; 3 by Lynne Reid Banks.

Best non-blog recommendation:
Rhona, from my online book group, told me about my favourite book of the year, Patrick Hamilton’s The Slaves of Solitude.

Best blog recommendation:
Thank you to Rachel for encouraging me to read Gilead, finally.

Most unexpectedly good book:
A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole, which I thought I’d hate.

Most unexpectedly bad book:
For some reason I was certain I’d love Violette Leduc’s The Lady and the Little Fox Fur, based on the title, blurb, etc.  But, sadly… I didn’t.   And then there was Hotel du Lac, which has put me off Anita Brookner for life.

Generally vilest book:
Wasted Womanhood by Charlotte Cowdroy.  1930s book about single, childless women. Made me want to go back in time and thwack her around her unkind head with her unkind book. 

On the other hand:
Live Alone and Like It by Marjorie Hillis, also from the interwar period and about much the same thing, was a thousand times nicer. 

Best oh-I-didn’t-realise-you-wrote-other-good-books moment:
Who knew Stella Gibbons could write something like Westwood?  Very good, not remotely like Cold Comfort Farm.

Worst oh-I-wish-I’d-stopped-with-the-previous-book moment:
I thought I’d cracked Thomas Hardy last year.  And I drudged my way through The Return of the Native. 

The book which looked like it would be brilliant, but ended up having too many twists:
Fingersmith by Sarah Waters.  Halfway, I thought it was book of the year.  And then the carpet was pulled from under my feet so often that I must have started on a pile a metre high.

I had no clue what was going on:
I love Muriel Spark, but Not To Disturb was incredibly confusing. 

Favourite character encountered this year:
If we’re excluding a re-read of Miss Hargreaves (and we’d better) then it’s got to be a late-comer to my 2011 reads: lovely Joe Gargery in Great Expectations.

Title nearest the beginning of the alphabet:
Articles not included, it’s the wonderfully-titled The Amorous Bicycle by Mary Essex.

Title nearest the end of the alphabet:
Step forward, Without Knowing Mr. Walkley by Edith Olivier.

Misnomer of the year:
Jocelyn Playfair’s A House in the Country does, strictly, include a house in the country, but if you’re expecting a gentle tale of a summer garden party, you’ll be surprised.  I was very pleasantly surprised.  (Yes, The Earth Hums in B Flat by Mari Strachan is also possibly a misnomer.)

Title where I learnt a new word:
Red Pottage by Mary Cholmondeley.  Well, I say ‘learnt’, but I can’t remember what it means.

Books with anthropomorphic animals:
Mr. Chartwell by Rebecca Hunt; Lady Into Fox by David Garnett (re-read); Jennie by Paul Gallico.

Other assorted supernatural/fantastic things which happened in novels this year (ask if you want to know the books!):
A man could miraculously heal people; a machine transcribes people’s thoughts; a post-office filled with millions of letters is guarded by clay golems; a woman became a witch; a captured fairy helped unite an estranged couple; death started phoning the elderly; a wife kept shrinking; an ape learnt to talk; a man built his nephew from glass; a house tormented its occupents; a clerk encountered his doppelganger.  Oh, and Miss Hargreaves came along, of course.

Great Expectations – Charles Dickens

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Doctor Who is on downstairs, and since I am both (a) not a fan of Doctor Who, and (b) a coward, I am sitting in my room and writing a blog post about Great Expectations.  There is something of a link, though, since people in Britain will be able to watch an adaptation of Great Expectations on 27th December – I’m looking forward to it, even with Dickens adaptations being, in general, not so great.  What makes Dickens so brilliant, to my mind, is the way he writes the narrative, and the pacing of the dialogue – which is usually lost on television, for some reason.  More on that later…

I actually started Great Expectations over a year ago – I held off reading it too quickly in the final days of December 2010 lest it unsettle my Top Books of 2010… and yet, the year whirled by, and I finished it after having compiled my Top Books of 2011.  It might have been on there.  Now we’ll never know…

What can I possibly say about Great Expectations (1861) and Charles Dickens?  I suspect the outline of the plot is known to most of us – Pip looks back on his life, starting with a graveyard encounter with a terrifying convict… Miss Havisham… Estella… Jaggers… and Bob’s your uncle.  Because, of course, the plot is too complicated and strange to recount in any detail.  The characters are too many and manifold, some of which (like Miss Havisham) have entered the nation’s consciousness – others, equally wonderful, have not.  Pip’s sister, Mrs. Joe Gargery, who complains at all times of having to ‘bring him up by hand’, is equally wonderful an invention.  Kind, honest Joe Gargery (“Pip – what larks!”), with his twisting attempts at speech, meaning all sentences seem to start with the word ‘which’, is about the loveliest character in any novel I’ve ever read.  Here he is, in conversation with Pip, who has stopped visiting Miss Havisham and is now Joe’s apprentice (the typos are his):

“Here am I, getting on in the first year of my time, and since the day of my being bound I have never thanked Miss Havisham, or asked after her, or shown that I remember her.”
“That’s true, Pip; and unless you was to turn her out a set of shoes all four round – and which I meantersay as even a set of shoes all four round might not act acceptable as a present in a total wacancy of hoofs –“
“I don’t mean that sort of remembrance, Joe; I don’t mean a present.”
But Joe had got the idea of a present in his head and must harp upon it.  “Or even,” said he, “if you was helped to knocking her up a new chain for the front door – or say a gross or two of shark-headed screws for general use – or some light fancy article, such as a toasting-fork when she took her muffins – or a gridiron when she took a sprat or such like —“
“I don’t mean any present at all, Joe,” I interposed.
“Well,” said Joe, still harping on it as though I had particularly pressed it, “if I was yourself, Pip, I wouldn’t.  No, I would not.  For what’s a door-chain when she’s got one always up?  And shark-headers is open to misrepresentations.  And if it was a toasting-fork, you’d go into brass and do yourself no credit.  And the oncommonest workman can’t show himself oncommon in a gridiron – for a gridiron is a gridiron,” said Joe, steadfastly impressing it upon me, as if he were endeavouring to rouse me from a fixed delusion, “and you may haim at what you like, but a gridiron it will come out, either by your leave or again your leave, and you can’t help yourself—“
“My dear Joe,” I cried in desperation, taking hold of his coat, “don’t go on in this way.  I never thought of making Miss Havisham any present.”
“No, Pip,” Joe assented, as if he had been contending for that all along, “and what I say to you is, you are right, Pip.”

Now, you either do or don’t find that incredibly funny.  I do.  I really do.  But what I cannot accept is that it is boring.  How Dickens has got the reputation for being boring, I cannot imagine.  Maybe it’s those TV adaptations, after all?  Because I believe that Dickens is, perhaps after P.G. Wodehouse, the best comedic writer that Britain has ever produced.

Whenever humorous writing is discussed, it’s a matter of course to point out that humour is impossible to explain, and if you don’t find something funny then no amount of argument will change things.  And that’s true.  But I think I can pinpoint what it is I love most about Dickens’ humour – and it’s the verbal tics he gives characters.  I think it’s seen better in Our Mutual Friend, but it’s present in all the Dickens novels I’ve read (which amounts only to four, come to think of it.)  Whether it’s Jaggers’ insistence upon precision or Joe’s ‘larks’ or Wemmick’s ‘portable property’, there is no author, except Patrick Hamilton, who uses repetition so perfectly.  He threads these traits through his novels, always ridiculous but never impossible, and holds together his plots filled by these delightful grotesques.  Grotesque in the sense of odd and exaggerated rather than disgusting.  His characters are not realistic, but, hidden in the surrealism of the stories and their enactors, lie truths and humanity and reality.  Wonderfully sewn up with the absurd.

But Dickens, of course, is not simply a wonderful dance of the ridiculous – the sort which inspires Spark, Comyns, Bowles – but a constant tightrope between the funny and the saccharine.  For while Dickens’ reputation for dullness is unwarranted, there is plenty of evidence to support the stereotype of orphans dying, overpowered by the force of their own virtue, Little Nell, etc. etc.  This is the sort of thing which survives most in film and TV adaptations, with inevitable tinkly piano music, and it is an image which does Dickens a disservice.  This strain is mostly kept at bay in Great Expectations, but does escape a bit in the final third.  I tire of it myself, but if that aspect of Dickens’ writing were not present, he’d probably be even meaner than Evelyn Waugh.  No sadistic writer ever came up with the ogres and tyrants of Dickens – but because they are not realistic, they are not truly terrifying.  They are menacing only encased in the pantomime and carnival of Dickens’ extravagant language.

But it is deservedly Miss Havisham whose light outside Great Expectations has burned brightest.  She is a true original.  Spurned on her wedding day, she lives for years in that moment, in a festering wedding dress.  And she has raised Estella to be cruel and incapable of love, hoping to punish men in revenge for her own broken heart.  Pip is snared.

Then Estella being gone and we two left alone, she turned to me and said in a whisper:
“Is she beautiful, graceful, well-grown?  Do you admire her?”
“Everybody must who sees her, Miss Havisham.”
She drew an arm round my neck, and drew my head close down to hers, as she sat in the chair.  “Love her, love her, love her!  How does she use you?”
Before I could answer (if I could have answered so difficult a question at all), she repeated, “Love her, love her, love her!  If she favours you, love her.  If she wounds you, love her.  If she tears your heart to pieces – and as it gets older and stronger, it will tear deeper – love her, love her, love her!”
Never had I seen such passionate eagerness as was joined to her utterance of these words.  I could feel the muscles of the thin arm round my neck, swell with the vehemence that possessed her.
“Hear me, Pip!  I adopted her to be loved.  I bred her and educated her, to be loved.  I developed her into what she is, that she might be loved.  Love her!”
She said the word often enough, and there could be o doubt that she meant to say it; but if the often repeated word had been hate instead of love – despair – revenge – dire death – it could not have sounded from her lips more than a curse.

As I said earlier, too much happens in Great Expectations to attempt a summary or even an introduction to the plot.  What I really wanted to address is, simply, that Dickens is not dull.  If you’ve got that impression from television or hearsay, please go and pick up Great Expectations or Our Mutual Friend.  I also find Hard Times hilarious, but I recognise that even amongst Dickens-lovers that is rather rare.  I think he is a brilliant comedian, and genuinely unique – although I have mentioned a few other authors in this post by way of comparison, there is really nobody even close to being like him.  You might hate him.  But if you do end up hating Dickens, please hate the real Dickens, and not television’s chocolate-box version of him.

Top 15 of 2011

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I’m going to have a few days’ rest from blogging and celebrate Christmas – let’s face it, there have been plenty of reviews recently for you to get your teeth into!  But I shan’t leave you abandoned, oh no.

I love lists, I really love ’em.   Putting things in order has delighted me ever since Mum used to empty a big tin of buttons on the table for us to sort.  That’s why I don’t make a top-ten-in-no-order list – I rank my most loved books of 2011 in strict order, even when it is a far from exact science.  It’s how much I liked them, how much I admired them, how much I enjoyed reading them (all of which are slightly different) all rolled into one.

Some amazing books have been left out, but it’s still a nice mix of male and female authors (7.5 each), various decades, and… well, three non-fiction books in there.  And a lot of funny books too, or at least books with funny elements (numbers 15, 14, 13, 12, 11, 6, 5, and 1 would all qualify).  Enough jabbering, over the list – do link to your own list, if you’ve made one.

A wonderfully surreal, oddly detached, and brilliantly written novel – which I’d recommend to any fans of Muriel Spark or Barbara Comyns.

The best ending I’ve ever read, and plenty of other good pages before that – an amusing and ultimately heart-breaking view of Edwardian high society.

Further evidence that two lacklustre reads shouldn’t put me off trying a third – hilarious, clever, and deservedly a classic.

This wins the year’s prize for Book I Thought I’d Hate and Ended Up Loving – Ignatius J. Reilly is utterly obnoxious, but tales of his arrogance and verbose ineptitude made for uproarious reading.

To recycle my line, more Provincial Lady than Headless Lady – and utterly delightful.

The second volume of this extraordinary (and yet somehow ordinary) woman’s observant and moving diaries.

The only 2011 book on this list (and one of only three I read this year) this is easily the most moving book I read, but far, far more than a melancholy memoir.

The only novel in translation on the list, this novella is beautiful and a must for any fans of fallible memory narratives.  Better than Atonement.

Such a perceptive, calm take on the infidelity narrative – and one which shows how exceptionally well Young could write about families.

Somehow both cynical and life-affirming – an utterly joyous romp of British-German twins through wartime America.

Comyns never lets me down, and this surreal novel with its utterly matter-of-fact narrator is no exception.  Nobody else could do anything bizarre and brilliant in the same way.

A girl falls in love with the puppets from a puppet theatre?  Sounds enchanting – but Gallico’s novella gets pretty dark, and is an ingenious tale which is too fairy-talesque  ever to be too disturbing.

The best novel I’ve read from the 21st century.  A simple plot of an old minister writing to his young son, Robinson captures a voice in a way which is much more convincing than most autobiographies, let alone novels.  So beautiful, and makes Robinson, from my reading, the greatest prose writer alive.

Only recently reviewed on SiaB, these letters show the best talents of both of these wonderful writers – a collection which I will revisit many times, and the benchmark against which I’ll set all future published volumes of letters.

From the first page onwards, Hamilton’s writing was so good that it left me actually astonished.  How could an author be this talented?  He is the 1940s missing link between writers as disparate as Jane Austen and Charles Dickens.  A shy woman bullied in a boarding house is an unlikely topic for great literature, but this is one of the best novels I’ve ever read – and Hamilton one of the most exceptional writers.

Safety Pins – Christopher Morley

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I seem to write my reviews in protracted parts now – there are the bits I can’t help typing out and posting as soon as I read them, and then, rolling along months later, comes the actual review proper.  The snippets are probably more enjoyable to read, and certainly speedier to write, but I’ll leave that sort of blogging to people like Claire who does it so beautifully.  Me, I like the sound of my own voice.  So not only did I give you Christopher Morley’s delightful, wonderful essay ‘On Visiting Bookshops‘ back in July (go and read it now, if you didn’t then) but I’ll cover the whole collection it came in: Safety Pins (1925).  (I’m pretty sure these essays are collected elsewhere under another name, or scattered through different collections – grab any book of essays with Morley’s name on it!)

Morley was best known to me as the author of Parnassus on Wheels, which I love, and its sequel The Haunted Bookshop, which is a curate’s egg.  I love little literary or personal essays, and was delighted to find that he had written some – doubly delighted when I discovered that it included bibliophilia of that order.  The rest of the collection is something of a mixed bag – brilliant at its best, and humdrum at its worst.  Actually, that assessment isn’t quite fair: I find him fascinating when our interests overlap, and less so when they don’t – only the greatest essayists can make a subject compelling which would otherwise be considered dull.  I don’t even remember the topics of those that I skimmed through, so let’s move on to those I loved?  And when I love Morley’s essays, I really love them.

When he writes about books and writing, I am besotted – ‘The Perfect Reader’ is sweet and sensible; ‘On Unanswering Letters’ is farcical and yet oh-so-true (how letters are accidentally left unanswered for so long that it is impossible to do so, and no greeting works); he even admits to ‘the temptation to try to see what books other people are reading – this innocent curiosity has led me into many rudenesses, for I am short-sighted and have to stare very close to make out the titles.’  But beware the man who falls asleep while reading in a chair:

And here our poor barren clay plays us false, undermining the intellect with many a trick and wile.  “I will sit down for a season in that comfortable chair,” the creature says to himself, “and read this sprightly novel.  That will ease my mind and put me in humour for a continuance of lively thinking.”  And the end of that man is a steady nasal buzz from the bottom of the chair where has collapsed, an unsightly object and a disgrace to humanity.

Not even Shakespeare is safe from Morley’s attentions – in ‘On Making Friends’, he gives his own views on those tenets laid down in Hamlet:

Polonius, too, is another ancient supposed to be an authority on friendship.  The Polonius family must have been a thoroughly dreary one to live with; we ave often thought that Ophelia would have gone mad anyway, even if there had been no Hamlet.  Laertes preaches to Ophelia; Polonius preaches to Laertes.  Laertes escaped by going abroad, but the girl had to stay at home.  Hamlet saw that pithy old Polonius was a preposterous and orotund ass.  Polonius’s doctrine of friendship – “The friends thou hast, and their adoption tried, grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel” – was, we trow, necessary in his case.  It would need a hoop of steel to keep them near such a dismal old sawmonger.

You probably sense Morley’s tone – and have a good idea whether you’ll love him or loathe him.  Some people do have an odd hatred for insouciant humour.  Morley’s essays are like A.A. Milne’s or Stephen Leacock’s or anybody who deals in slightly over-the-top whimsy – but rooted in a love of ideas and a passion for literature.  Morley becomes earnest, when on the track of his hero R.L. Stevenson, but is equally adept at cod-earnestness – for example, in the title essay, in praise of ‘Safety Pins’:

The pin has never been done justice in the world of poetry.  As one might say, the pin has no Pindar.  Of course there is the old saw about see a pin and pick it up, all the day you’ll have good luck.  This couplet, barbarous as it is in its false rhyme, points (as Mother Goose generally does) to a profound truth.  When you see a pin, you must pick it up.  In other words, it is on the floor, where pins generally are.  Their instinctive affinity for terra firma makes one wonder why they, rather than the apple, did not suggest the law of gravitation to some one long before Newton.

Well, quite.  I keep using the word ‘delightful’, but it is the perfect word for Safety Pins.  If he is not entirely consistent, at least that is better than being consistently dull.  There is plenty here for the bibliophile, and plenty more for those who like to laugh at the little things in life.  I love it – I think a lot of you will too.

Other things to get Stuck into:


Once a Week by A.A. Milne – every now and then I eulogise about AAM, and hope that one or two of you will try him and love him.  The review I link to is really more about Punch, but hopefully you’ll be inspired to try Milne’s whimsical, clever essays.


Literary Lapses by Stephen Leacock – the great Canadian humorist deserves a better post than I gave him, but you can at least read one of his pieces there.  His sketches and essays brim over with humour, and he was wonderfully prolific too.

Any other humourous essayists you think I would enjoy?

The Man Who Was Thursday – G.K. Chesterton

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I’ve nearly come to the end of my pile of must-review-before-the-end-of-2011 books (and I really should have spaced them out a bit, perhaps… oh well, we’ll have a bit of a rest after Christmas.  Or an avalanche of my Books of 2011 posts.  We’ll see.)

Now, The Man Who Was Thursday (1908) is a curious little book, not least because the central importance of it doesn’t reveal itself right until the end – at which point the rug is pulled from under your feet, and everything you’ve read takes on something of a new dimension.  Hmm… I don’t think it’ll spoil the book if I tell you the revealed theme, but in case you don’t want to know I’ll hide it in a link.  The Man Who Was Thursday would make an ideal companion read to (spoiler fans click here) this.  Ok, confused?  Good.

The Man Who Was Thursday is subtitled ‘A Nightmare’, which I wasn’t expecting, given that I know Chesterton best as a humorist.  Nor does the subtitle come into play for quite some time.  We start with Gabriel Syme, a member of secret anti-anarchist police, who meets anarchist Lucian Gregory at the party of a poet.  The opening scenes, where these characters debate the structure or chaos of poetry, are as amusing as anything found in this whimsical, witty decade, if a little more philosophical and theoretical than usual.

“The poet delights in disorder only.  If it were not so, the most poetical thing in the world would be the Underground Railway.”
“So it is,” said Mr. Syme.
“Nonsense!” said Gregory, who was very rational when anyone else attempted paradox.

It’s all very jolly and garden-party-esque – cucumber sandwiches all round.  Syme and Gregory exchange verbal quips stridently, but without intending any of their barbs to hit home.  Indeed, far from being offended, Syme agrees to go with Gregory to an underground anarchist meeting, so that Gregory can prove what Syme doubts: that he is serious about anarchism.

What follows is a rather lovely piece of satirical reasoning.  Gregory is a serious anarchist – and had previously asked his leader how he could blend into the world, to perpetrate his ideology:

I said to him “What disguise will hide me from the world?  What can I find more respectable than bishops and majors?”  He looked at me with his large but indecipherable face.  “You want a safe disguise, do you?  You want a dress which will guarantee you harmless; a dress in which no one would ever look for a bomb?”  I nodded.  He suddenly lifted his lion’s voice.  “Why, then, dress up as an anarchist, you fool!”  he roared so that the room shook.  “Nobody will ever expect you to do anything dangerous then.”  And he turned his broad back on me without another word.  I took his advice, and have never regretted it.  I preached blood and murder to these women day and night, and – by God! – they would let me wheel their perambulators.

Clever.  But Syme manages to outwit Gregory, and get himself elected to the central council of anarchists, where each is assigned the name of a day of the week.  Syme, as the novel’s title suggests, is Thursday.  Head of them all is the mysterious Sunday.

That’s as much as I shall reveal of the plot – it becomes something of a intoxicating mix of spy novel, epigrammatical social novel, and even philosophical/theological.  The subtitle ‘nightmare’ is odd, but the style certainly has a dreamlike quality – swirling from one event to another, with twists and surprises along the way.  It’s a little madcap, but never to the extent that you think Chesterton’s been at the opium.

I don’t think it’s the sort of novel that would be published now – it’s too varied and unusual.  Which I think is great, of course, but probably wouldn’t satisfy the demands of a marketing department.  Chesterton still remains a bit of a mystery to me, and The Man Who Was Thursday is intriguing and admirable rather than lovable, but I would recommend it to readers who enjoy satire and surprises, washed down with a bon mot or two.

Others who got Stuck into it:


“Weird. Nightmare-ish. Imaginative. Chestertonian.” – Sherry, Semicolon


“Despite its philosophizing, its humor makes much of it a very light book, and some of the more “adventurous” scenes would make an awfully good film–there’s even a car chase.” – Christopher, 50 Books Project


“To say that the novel develops a nightmarish quality is not to say that it’s scary. I think perhaps most nightmares are only scary to the person who dreams them.” – Teresa, Shelf Love