Authors on Authors (Part 3)

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A lot of books I’m mentioning this year seem either to be about Jane Austen or by Sylvia Townsend Warner… so it is appropriate that one of them is Jane Austen by Sylvia Townsend Warner!  It’s in the same Writers and Their Work series as Pamela Hansford Johnson’s pamphlet, mentioned yesterday, and I’ll write a similarly swift post about it.

PHJ on ICB nabbed the Century of Books slot for 1951, so STW on JA will just have to wait on the sidelines… but I rather suspect it will appeal to more of you.  Austen has more adoring fans than Dame Ivy, but are also significantly more spoilt for choice… This is, perhaps, hardly the only or foremost resource for information about Austen’s life and work, but I am a sucker (as this mini-series demonstrates) for authors talking about authors.  The combination of Warner and Austen is my favourite yet, and I loved reading Warner’s thoughts on the various novels.  She more or less bypasses biographical detail, which was fine by me – there are plenty of other places to go for that.  Instead we get to read Warner’s insightful responses to Austen’s work.  She doesn’t propose dramatic or revisionist readings of the novels, but there are lots of gems along the way.  I loved this:

though
sense distinguishes Elinor Dashwood and sensibility her sister
Marianne, the contrast is between two ways of behaving rather than
between two ways of feeling

and, a bit longer, this:

Of all Jane Austen’s novels, Emma must fully conveys the exhiliration of a happy writer. As the arabesques of the plot curl more intricately, as the characters emerge and display themselves, and say the very things they would naturally say, the reader – better still, the re-reader – feels a collaborating glow.  Above all, it excels in dialogue: not only in such tours de force as Miss Bates being grateful for apples, Mrs. Elton establishing her importance when she pays her call at Hartfield, but in the management of dialogue to reveal the unsaid; as when Mr. John Knightley’s short-tempered good sense insinuates a comparison with his brother’s drier wit and deeper tolerance; or as in the conversation between Mr. Knightley and Emma about Frank Churchill, whom neither of them know except by repute: Emma is sure he will be all that he should be, Mr. Knightley’s best expectation is “well grown and good-looing, with smooth, plausible maners” – and by the time they have done, it is plain that Emma is not prepared to fall in love with Frank Churchill, and that Mr. Knightley has been, for a long time, deeply and uncomfortably in love with Emma.

It is a shame, given Warner’s sensitive and alert
reading of Austen’s writing, that she does not recognise the irony
dripping when Austen wrote about her ‘little bit (two Inches long) of
Ivory on which I work with so fine a brush, as produces little effect
after much labour.’  Read in context – or even out of context –  it is clear that Austen has tongue firmly in cheek, and it’s curious that Warner (herself so often ironic) does not spot this.  Never mind.

What I think I love most about Warner’s writing in any context – her novels, letters, this pamphlet – is her exuberant use of imagery.  I probably mention it every time I review something by her, but it is delicious – usually quite surreal, but somehow fitting, and often animalistic.  She writes extensively about Austen’s juvenilia, and says that they ‘have a ringing brilliancy, like the song of a wren’.  Lovely!  And later she writes:

G.H. Lewes, when he recommended Charlotte Bronte to “follow the counsel which shines out of Miss Austen’s mild eyes”, was unaware of Lady Susan, where Miss Austen’s eyes are those of a hunting cat. 

Oh, Warner – you and cats!  She can turn anything around to cats, given enough time – and is thus, in my eyes, a kindred spirit.

As I said earlier, there are many other places to read about Austen.  This pamphlet was issued at a time when a more or less complete bibliography could still be compiled (and one is included – with less than three pages of critical material) but now it proliferates.  The reason I would recommend Jane Austen by Sylvia Townsend Warner amongst this extensive canon is for the particular insight one excellent novelist is able to shed upon another.  STW and JA have been perfectly matched.

Authors on Authors (Part 2)

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A series of pamphlets called Writers and Their Work was issued by British Book News in the early 1950s, and I happen to have got my hands on two of them.  In fact, they were amongst the books I bought during Project 24.  As you’ll be gathering from this week (as if you didn’t already know) I love authors writing about authors – especially when both sides of the equation are authors whom I love.  I. Compton Burnett by Pamela Hansford Johnson was a no-brainer for me – I love ICB, and I like PHJ, so I had to get hold of this.  Plus it ticks off 1951 on A Century of Books in under fifty pages.  I’ll try to make my post appropriately brief.

I bang on about Dame Ivy quite a bit here – basically, I want everyone to try her, and I’ve resigned myself to the fact that at least four-fifths of those who give Ivy a whirl will be unimpressed.  But the final fifth… oh, boy, we love her!  As Hansford Johnson writes, ‘She is not to be mildly liked or disliked.  She is a writer to be left alone, or else to be made into an addiction.’  Reading this pamphlet has made this addict desperate to read another ICB novel, and I imagine it won’t be long before I’m writing about one.  I love reading another author’s enthusiasm for ICB, especially when she describes so perfectly what it is that I love about the Ivester.  (Sorry.  That won’t happen again.)

The peculiar charm of Miss Compton-Burnett’s novels, the charm that has won her not merely admirers but addicts, lies in her speaking of home-truths.  She achieves this by a certain fixed method.  One character propounds some ordinary, homely hypocrisy, the kind of phrase from which mankind for centuries has had his comfort and his peace of mind.  Immediately another character shows it up for the fraud it is, and does it in so plain and so frightful a fashion that one feels the sky is far more likely to fall upon the truth-teller than the hypocrite.  In these books there is always someone to lie and someone to tell the truth; the power of light and the power of darkness speaking antiphonally, with a dispassionate mutual understanding.
I can’t add much to that, except ‘agreed!’  A perceptive reader is always such a joy to read – that’s why we love blogs, isn’t it? – and Hansford Johnson writes as a reader, rather than a critic.  She shares the joy of the ICB addict; she recommends which novel to start with, and which to save for later; she even writes what amount to mini blog reviews of each novel – and, be warned, she gives away most of the plot, although plot is easily the least essential ingredient of a Compton-Burnett novel.  Drastic and shocking events occur, but only incidental to a lengthy discussion about grammar or, as PHJ points out above, the hypocrisy of a common phrase.  There is the occasional sense that PHJ wrote this quickly and could have done with editing a bit – one particular sentiment about service being unpleasant is repeated three times in 43 pages – but we can forgive her that.

What makes this pamphlet even more intriguing is that it was written in the middle of Ivy Compton-Burnett’s career.  In 1951 she still had seven novels yet to write, including my introduction to her, Mother and Son.  So this is not the place to go for the final say on Dame Ivy’s work, but it is fascinating to read a response in media res, as it were.

There is one description in this pamphlet which I will cherish – which so perfectly sums up ICB’s peculiar genius, and which I will finish on.  (Come back tomorrow for the final in this mini-series of Authors on Authors – and one which is rather less niche.)

This is why Miss Compton-Burnett’s writing appears so strange to the reader who comes upon it without warning, a gentle tea-cosy madness, a coil of vipers in a sewing-basket.

Authors on Authors (Part 1)

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I’m away this week, off up to Newcastle to give a conference paper, then to one of very my best friends’ wedding in Worcester at the weekend (very exciting!) so I’ve prepared a mini-series of posts to appear in my absence.  It’s not another lot of My Life in Books, I’m afraid, but it isn’t too far away… the next three posts will be on books about books.  Or, more precisely, authors discussing authors: each of the three books/pamphlets are about famous authors, by our sort of middlebrow authors.  Fun!

First up, and taking the spot for 1943 in A Century of Books, is Talking of Jane Austen by Sheila Kaye-Smith and G.B. Stern.  My housemate Mel gave this to me for my birthday in 2010 (thanks, Mel!) knowing how much I’d enjoyed its sequel, More Talk Of Jane Austen.  Yes, I’m doing these things the wrong way around, but it doesn’t much matter which order you read these books in – except that I would argue Talking of Jane Austen is even better.

The book is divided into fifteen essays, alternatively by Kaye-Smith and Stern.  Proceedings kick off with ‘Introducing Sheila Kaye-Smith to Jane Austen’ and ‘Introducing G.B. Stern to Jane Austen’, where our esteemed authoresses recount how they first came to read Austen – sheepishly admitting their early disregard of her, and triumphantly rejoicing in the moments (both with Emma, incidentally) where they discovered their lasting affinity with Jane.  Their love of Jane shines through every paragraph – this is an appreciation, but one from calm hearts and careful minds.  They do not run mad nor faint, rather they love both wisely and well.

To enter that world is to visit a congenial set of friends, and I still find that in their company I lose my own cares, much as I lost them on my first visit, thirty years ago.  Jane Austen is the perfect novelist of escape – of legitimate escape, such as are our holidays.  She does not transport one into fantasy but simply into another, less urgent, set of facts.  She tells no fairy-tale which might send us back dazzled and reeling to our contacts with normal life, but diverts us from our preoccupations with another set of problems no less real than our own, but making no personal demands upon us.  In fact it is her realism which provides the escape, for the fantastic and improbable only irritate certain minds and send them hurrying back unrefreshed to their own business.

Amongst the topics addressed are the education of female characters; a re-evaluation (now a fairly standard argument) or Henry and Maria Crawford; dress and food in the novels; the device of letter-writing… a wide-ranging group of intriguing minutiae.

Perhaps the bravest section is where Stern and Kaye-Smith turn their attention to characters which they consider failed.  Avert your eyes if you consider St. Jane to be infallible.  Even more bravely, this is how Stern prefixes the discussion:

When an author fails with one of her characters, it must, I think, be defined as a lack of perception, a certain bluntness of outlook where this particular character is concerned.  For where the author is aware she has failed, she will be compelled to do something about it: alter it, cut it, add to it, so that it will remain an uneven lop-sided conception with some irrelevant good scenes and some hopeless; showing traces of exasperated tinkering.  Where a character is a plain failure, evenly spread, we can usually detect some slight complacency in its creator.

And whose names are suggested?  Well, Stern and Kaye-Smith cannot agree on some of them, but amongst their nominations are Colonel Brandon, Eleanor Tilney, Lady Russell, Mr. and Mrs. Palmer, and Lady Catherine de Bourgh.  Since those final three characters are amongst my favourite in all the novels, I shall maintain a dignified silence on the topic.  (How could they!)  Ahem.

Perhaps the most fun section is at the end, where is all becomes something of a miscellany.  There are twenty pages of incidental comments and observations, or thoughts which were not quite sufficient to be developed into a whole chapter.  Here’s just one of ’em, courtesy of Sheila Kaye-Smith:

No two authors, you might think, would be less likely to have their work mistaken for each other’s than Jane Austen and Aldous Huxley.  Nevertheless I have recently seen a quotation from the author of Pride and Prejudice attributed to the author of Eyeless in Gaza.  It was in a review of the screen version of Pride and Prejudice, for the script of which Hollywood, with its fine sense of fitness, had made Mr. Huxley responsible.  The critic, having congratulated him on the complete suppression of his literary personality in this task, goes on to say that one piece of dialogue, however, stands out unmistakably as his own.  He then quotes Sir William Lucas’s commendation of dancing as “one of the first refinements of polished society”, with Darcy’s reply: “Certainly, sir; and it has the advantage also of being in vogue amongst the less polished societies of the world – every savage can dance.”

If you’re not already a Janeite, this probably isn’t a good place to start.   Indeed, you should probably have read all of Austen’s books at least once before you even consider reading Talking of Jane Austen.  The authors are contentedly aware of this themselves, and welcome anyone (is it you?) who fits the description below:

We are not prowling round, my collaborator and myself, searching for converts; only for those insatiable legions who find the same mysterious pleasure as we do in talking Jane, discovering Jane, arguing Jane, quoting Jane, listing Jane, and for ever and ever marvelling at Jane and grateful for her legacy.
And so say all of us!

Half a Decade!

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That’s right – today Stuck-in-a-Book is five years old!

(photo source)

Thanks everyone who has made this such a fun and valuable part of my life over that time, whether you’ve been with me since day one or discovered me last week.  And, of course, thank you for making the whole bookish blogosphere such a joy, whether as bloggers or commenters or publishers.  To quote Miranda’s Mum – such fun!

The Wrong Place – Brecht Evens

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I’m on some pretty heavy-duty painkillers at the moment, having managed to damage a muscle in my chest (by the extreme sport of sleeping, it seems) so I’m not up for reading anything particularly complex at the moment.  So it was in this mental state that I decided – as I mentioned yesterday – to read my first graphic novel: The Wrong Place by Belgian writer/artist Brecht Evens, sent to me for review by Jonathan Cape months ago.  By the by, I’m not suggesting that graphic novels are less intellectually valid than traditional fiction (although that could be a point of discussion?) but they certainly use fewer clauses, and that was what my brain needed.

Colour me surprised, I absolutely loved it.

What has put me off graphic novels in the past?  Well, initially it was because I thought it meant the other kind of graphic, and was fairly shocked that the bookish types I knew were willingly discussing them.  (And, fair warning, there are a couple of pages in The Wrong Place which could be described under either definition of the word.)  Once I’d realised what they were, it was the aesthetic which alienated me.  Most of the graphic novels I saw in bookshops were stylised like superhero comics, using harsh block colours or manga, which simply didn’t appeal.  What drew me to The Wrong Place, and a strong contributory factor in my enjoyment of it, was the aesthetic.  It is created with watercolours, with colours swirling and overlapping.  As the blurb notes, ‘parquet floors and patterned dresses morph together’ – there is a (presumably deliberate) imprecision to each image which I loved, which helped give the narrative an almost Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland surrealism.

The narrative itself is quite simple – it is about charismatic Robbie, with whom everyone wishes to spend time, and his dreary childhood friend Gary.  The book opens with Gary holding a party which Robbie is supposed to attend – everyone asks after him, and waits for him, but he does not come… and then we see him on a night out, exploring secret hallways, dancing in a surreal nightclub… even queuing for his coat is depicted with such energy and colour that it was wholly engaging.

This is a new reading experience for me, and I don’t really know the right words to convey it.  Scenes and characters are, naturally, portrayed differently than they would be in a prose novel.  The visual and the verbal work together – and while I have had a lot of practice at describing the effect of words, I wouldn’t know where to start with appreciating how a swirl of a paintbrush, or choice of hue, help build up Robbie, Gary, and the others.  Without any narrative voice, the only verbal sections are dialogue – so in some ways it is quite play-like.  I admired this page, which seems perfectly and succinctly to encapsulate an awkward conversation, where someone joins the joke after everyone else, but still wants to prove they understood it, and dominate (I hope this is readable if you click to enlarge it):

So, this ‘review’ is really just a gesture of enthusiasm, without any real ability to justify that enthusiasm.  I know if I’d read a blog post about a graphic novel, I’d skim straight past it… but I hope you stop and check your local library, and give this a whirl.  Like me, you might well be surprised.

Dali and Alliteration

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I’m away for most of next week, so I should be spending my time writing up posts to appear in that time.  Instead, I’ve been playing Scrabble (won by one point – woo!), reading my first ever graphic novel, watching Neighbours, and coming up with chapter outlines for my thesis.  It’s fun trying to summarise the argument for a chapter I wrote two years ago…

So no proper post today, but (for no real reason) a Salvador Dali painting by way of a reminder about my old post about Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland illustrators…

…and one of those little questions which is a great way to add to my ever-growing list of books to read, and to get your brains working a bit.

I’d like to know a recommendation (so it has to be good!) for a book where the title (not including A/The etc.) and the author’s surname begin with the same letter.  Because… well, why not?  It’s trickier than it sounds.  I’m going to suggest a few to get you started…

The Diary of a Provincial Lady – E.M. Delafield
Literary Lapses – Stephen Leacock
Howards End is on the Landing – Susan Hill

Have fun!

Enthusiasms – Mark Girouard

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Frances Lincoln Ltd. kindly sent me a copy of Enthusiasms (2011) by Mark Girouard after I spotted it in their catalogue and thought it looked really interesting – I read it; it was, and somehow I never got around to blogging about it.  Better late than never, of course, and here we are!

Enthusiasms is not unlike a literary blog – especially one as would be written by a mixture of Sherlock Holmes and Stephen Fry in QI-mode.  Girouard works his way through a disparate series of literary folk, debunking myths and investigating minutiae – and it’s a great journey to take with him.  I’m not going to give away all his discoveries, since you read the collection yourself, but the topics addressed are many and various, and of differing significance.  The dating of Jane Austen’s Catherine is an issue which would probably attract quite a lot of debate; fewer people would mind which castle Charlotte Mew is referring to in her poem ‘Ken’.  Other topics include the extent of Oscar Wilde’s poverty; the disinheritance of Tennyson; Vita Sackville-West’s novel Pepita and its historical influences… P.G. Wodehouse crops up, as does Evelyn Waugh, Nancy Mitford, and John Masefield, not to mention an anonymous pornographer.

But the essay where Girouard lets himself go most amusingly is in ‘Drooling Victorians: the strange story of Pet Marjorie’, about Marjorie Fleming – the topic, you may remember, of Oriel Malet’s biography, republished by Persephone.  Girouard’s summary of her writing career is (like that career) quite brief, but I did love his scathing overview of Victorian sentimentality – especially on the topic of Dr. John Brown’s Marjorie Fleming: A Sketch:

The existence of an inscribed copy of Maria Edgeworth’s Rosamund and Harry and Lucy given to her by Walter Scott encouraged him to invent several pages of nauseating twaddle about the two of them: “Marjorie!  Marjorie!” shouted her friend, “where are ye, my bonnie wee croodlin doo,” and so on. He quoted copiously from her work, not hesitating to, in his view, improve it where necessary, and provided the essential end, a tear-jerking death-bed.
The final three chapters of Enthusiasms turn their attention to Girouard’s own family – discussing his grandparents, Aunt Evie, and The Solomons.  To be quite honest, my interest palled and I skim-read these chapters.  It’s his book, and he has every right to write about his family if he so wishes, but I was much more interested by his investigations into literary trivia – and I rather suspect that most of you would be too.

For a bedside book, to flick through, I thoroughly recommend Enthusiasms.  You’ll learn a fair bit about literary figures major and minor, but mostly it awakens deeper curiosity about literary ‘facts’ we take at face value – and one cannot help but wonder what would find its way into a sequel.

Quarter of a Century of Books

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Since the first quarter of 2012 has finished, I thought I’d check in with A Century of Books, and see how you’re doing if you’re playing along.

According to the badge on the side of my blog, I’ve read 20 – but I have, in fact, read another five which I’ve yet to blog about.  Making me exactly on track (hurrah!) unless you think for a moment, and realise that the likelihood of overlapping years increases throughout 2012 (boo…)  But I’m quite pleased with that.

You can see all the titles reviewed here; I shan’t list all the unreviewed titles, but here are the current totals per decade:

1900s: 1
1910s: 0
1920s: 5
1930s: 3
1940s: 5
1950s: 3
1960s: 2
1970s: 2
1980s: 2
1990s: 2

So, that’s not badly spread out – although there is (surprise surprise) a definite interwar concentration, and neglect in the earliest part of the century.  Hmm.  I thought post-1950 would be tricky, but apparently it’s pre-1920 which is going to be the sticking point.  Suggestions?

How are you getting on with yours?