More from Books

Saturday

Ian Thomson

Out of joint

At a Clapham dinner party recently I was offered marijuana. Nothing unusual in that, only the joint took me to a far continent of anxiety; I had been inhaling skunk, a modern Special Brew strain of marijuana and about as beneficial. Next morning, still mildly hallucinating, I craved to reread T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. Time was literally out of joint, but Eliot’s mystico-religious reflections on the nature of the universe might leave me feeling bright and beatifically attuned. I began to read ‘Burnt Norton’, and waited for the visionary moment. It never arrived; instead I was struck by how pretentious the poetry was. Craig Raine, in this pungent critical essay on Eliot, concedes that Four Quartets ‘has it faults’.

Frederic Raphael

The poetry of panic

Tenn — as friends and sycophants called him — Williams was one more of those American writers whose lives have spectacular first acts, but dwindle away, more or less slowly, into repetition, sterility and self-pity eased (and exacerbated) by sex, alcohol and drugs (‘Way to go’, some might say). Williams was born in 1911, in Mississippi; if he had died 45 years later, admirers would be wondering what masterpieces he might have written, had he survived into maturity. In fact he did survive, but he did not mature: he lasted till 1982, his small body and fragile genius having endured as much punishment as its owner could inflict. He choked finally on a pill-bottle top, in a hurry for nirvana: a melodramatic final curtain worthy of his better days.

Anna Vaux

Not quite as we like it

‘What you will’ has a Shakespearean ring to it. It is, after all, the second part of the title of Shakespeare’s play Twelfth Night. It suggests romance. And comedy; a little mayhem, girls dressing up as boys, and vice versa. Possibly on an island. Alas there are no cakes and ale in What You Will, Katherine Bucknell’s third novel, set mainly in Hamersmith, W14. More  sackcloth and ashes. Recalling her days at Oxford, American Gwen pictures people fondly, ‘toiling towards some unspecified advancement in their woollen suits, woollen skirts, woollen tights, and over the top their black gowns’. She ‘relished the atmosphere of difficulty, of chill, of foreboding’.

Allan Massie

First person singular

The young Evelyn Waugh, it’s said, once declared in a newspaper article that the writing of novels in the first person was a contemptible practice. One would like to think he gave his reasons, but, according to Somerset Maugham, ‘he threw out the statement with just the same take-it-or-leave-it casualness as Euclid used when he made his celebrated observation about parallel straight lines.’ Subsequently Waugh would write his most popular novel, Brideshead Revisited, in that despicable first person. It would have been a poorer novel if he hadn’t shown the glamorous Flyte family through the eyes of his narrator, dazzled (if also dull) Charles Ryder.

Saturday

Geoffrey Wheatcroft

A tale of treachery

When The Spectator recently said goodbye to 56 Doughty Street, we said goodbye to more than three decades of memories. Whatever else we were any good at under Alexander Chancellor’s editorship, we knew how to throw a party, from the great sesquicentennial ball in 1978 to the summer garden parties to the Thursday lunches. Among other happy moments in that dining room perched giddily at the top of the building I remember a ludicrous exchange on biblical topography between Enoch Powell and Auberon Waugh; or Richard Cobb, the great historian of France, waking from a post-prandial nap with the words that he must get the 3.

Charles Chadwick

Hospital Music

In the square at St Bartholomew’s hospital,Crates of flowers are stacked for bedding outRound the plane trees. Patients with paper cups sit aboutIn wheelchairs or under the shelters. Above, in the hall,An orchestra is rehearsing: a Mozart piano concerto,The Bach double, some Handel — clearly audible outsideThrough the fountain’s splash, as if filling a tideOr a sound the wind makes. Nobody seems to knowIt is there. A youth with a reconstructed faceGlares at a girl, grey-lidded, lip-white, drip-fedWho stares at a scabbed tree permanently disfigured,While nurses, a doctor, go by at a determined pace.Either the sound is of all things the most naturalOr there is no connction of any kind, none at all.

Philip Hensher

The greatest honour of all

The Order of Merit is the only honour which almost everyone would like to possess. The Garter is picturesque but would be felt by some to be anachronistic and somewhat pompous. Gs, Ks, Cs, Os and Ms are handed out with the rations and can anyway probably be bought. Companions of Hon- our are respectable enough but unequivocally second eleven. The OM is tops. For one thing, it is in the gift of the sovereign and so comes without any taint of party favour. ‘His Majesty entirely disregards the question of the political opinions of anyone who may be suitable for an honour,’ wrote Stamfordham loftily when Gilbert Murray’s candidature was in question.

John Michell

The lunatic space race

The 1960s brought in the Beatles, drugs, long hair, hippy communes, eastern gurus and the alternative culture, so called. Against all this was the ‘straight’ world whose denizens were short-haired Frank Sinatra fans in suits. The two types seemed quite different from each other, but one thing they had in common was their obsession with fanatastical notions. The alternatives were into UFOs, ley lines, psychic healing and whatnot, while the straights believed in flying to the moon and founding colonies or military bases in outer space. And since the men in suits had the power and the money, they were in a position to realise their fantasies. In 1969 an American rocket deposited two men on the moon’s surface.

Andrew Taylor

The longest day

As Hitchcock knew, the best thrillers use the very simplest materials to achieve their sinister purpose of enthralling and terrifying their audience. Nicci French’s previous novels have shown an impressive ability to dramatise the darkest concerns of her readers. Her latest book taps into the universal fear of parents: what do you do when your child goes missing? It sounds a simple formula, and it is. But getting it right is extraordinarily difficult. Saturday 18 December is Nina Landry’s 40th birthday. She and her children — 15- year-old Charlotte and 12-year-old Jackson — are off to Florida for Christmas with Nina’s boyfriend. The Landrys live on Sandling Island off the Essex coast.

Grey Gowrie

Bells to St Wystan

This week sees the centenary of the birth in York of W. H. Auden. All over the world this season, Audenites should at 1755 hours precisely prepare a very cold, very dry Martini and at 1800 hours, six o’clock, again precisely, down it in praise and memory of a giant of English letters. Vital to be meticulous about the hour. As he said of himself in an autobiographical sketch: So obsessive a ritualista pleasant surprisemakes him cross.Without a watchhe would never know whento feel hungry or horny. Like many Oxford undergraduates of my generation (he was Professor of Poetry when I went up), I knew Auden slightly and dined with him a few times. He had aged prematurely, become repetitive and, away from the page, fairly boring.

Saturday

Charlotte Hobson

A genius for living

Perhaps the only drawback to this highly enjoyable biography is the shadow of utter banality that it throws over one’s own life by comparison. Princess Sofka Dolgorouky, the author’s grandmother and namesake, began life as scion of one of the great ruling families of Russia and a playmate of the Tsarevich. She was brought up by her grandmother, a figure reminiscent of the Countess in Pushkin’s The Queen of Spades who did not know how to dress herself. Her mother, meanwhile, astonished Petersburg society by becoming a surgeon, flying her own plane, and receiving not one but two Crosses of St George for her bravery as a doctor during the first world war; her father occasioned less surprise but no less scandal by marrying his gypsy mistress.

Robert Stewart

When tobacco worked wonders

The British empire in North America was not founded in a fit of absence of mind, though it might be said, in its beginnings at least, to have represented the triumph of hope over experience. From the outset, King James I and his chief minister, Robert Cecil, the Earl of Salisbury, were sceptical. A royal charter was granted to the London Virginia Company in 1606 and a Royal Council appointed to oversee the trans-Atlantic adventure, but the king was interested only in grabbing the lion’s share of the profits that might accrue. Otherwise, as Cecil put it, the colonists were to be left on their own ‘unto the peril which they incur’. The omens were bad.

Mary Sheepshanks

Painting with the Winds

What colour is the wind today,that Boreas shimmers from the north?White and blue and shivery grey,ice and gentians on his breathto fan the ashes in my hearth. Does Notus burnish southern windsto drift bright dreams through summer treesin opal shades of sea and sand,gilding with sunflower-tinted breezethe silver-fingered olive leaves? Bleak Eurus’ eastern palette’s darkwith gloomy greens as sour as bilesince Poseidon, churlish, stuck his forkto churn the ocean’s lurching swellinto a surly, heaving pool. Zephyrus, swaggering from the west —before whose rage leaf-armies fled —daubs flaming orange, autumn-dressed:Sienna browns and clashing redsspark bonfire music in my head.

Eric Weinberger

Funny peculiar and ha-ha

Rumours and published reviews to one side, the new novel by Norman Mailer, called The Castle in the Forest, is not the ‘biography’ of Adolf Hitler or even the story of his youth so much as it is the life of his father Alois Schicklgruber, or Hiedler, finally Hitler. He turns out to be an unusually interesting man, or perhaps a merely ordinary man who, because he is rendered by Mailer’s hand, becomes far more: dangerous, daunting, dutiful (an ever ascendant and honest customs official), sexually rampant and obsessed with bees and bee-keeping. Possibly a product of incest, he continues the family tradition.

Cressida Connolly

Sins of the father

Memoirs about bad or dotty fathers — from J. R. Ackerley’s (and the brilliant companion piece by his secret half-sister, Diana Petre) to Lorna Sage’s to Blake Morrison’s — exert a special fascination. A small subdivision of the form are those accounts featuring not only a father who is mad, bad or dangerous to know, but a big house. Of these, the Mitfords’ father is probably the most exasperating and lovable. Last year’s Title Deeds by Lisa Campbell, whose father was Thane of Cawdor, was a notable addition. Miranda Seymour’s is the latest gem. George FitzRoy Seymour was a pedant, a bully and a snob. He wrote unsolicited letters to duchesses, and boasted about being descended from Charles II.

William Waldegrave

The tricky world of faction

There is something odd about a roman à clef which has the key attached. Justin Cartwright’s latest novel tells the story of ‘legendary Oxford professor’ Elya Mendel of All Souls and his relationship with German Rhodes Scholar Axel von Gottberg, who is hanged in Plotzensee on 26 August 1944 after the failure of the July Plot. In case we miss the clues (Isaiah Berlin’s father was called Mendel; Adam von Trott was hanged on that day and in that prison) there is an afterword saying that the book is based ‘in part’ on the friendship between von Trott and Berlin, and on ‘the ‘repudiation’ of that friendship by Berlin. Others in the story, such as Stauffenberg himself, are given their real names.

John Mole

Children at a Daffodil Planting

They dibble the turf with fork and trowel eagerly, eagerly going to it, each whiskery bulb unclutched and buried as we their assistants kneel beside them. Ours is the knowledge, the choice of season, the nurturing landfill, the bedding down, but theirs the trust in a world new-minted, like prospectors for the future’s gold.

Ben Wilson

Policies of masterly inactivity

In December 1743 George Bickham produced a caricature, The Late P-m-r M-n-r showing the face of the recently departed premier contorted into a great monstrous yawn — a yawn seemingly stretched to the limits of human endurance. The caption begins with an adaptation of lines from The Dunciad, which come just after the Empress of Dullness has conferred powers on a prime minister to extend the realm of boredom: ‘More she had said, but yawn’d — All Nature nods:/ What Mortal can resist the Yawns of Gods?’ Waiting for a long-serving prime minister to go is rarely a merry business, and Robert Walpole’s enemies had to suffer 21 years.

Allan Massie

The double nature of romance

The word ‘romance’ has come down in the world, and the romantic novel is one in which the love-interest predominates. A romance used to be more spirited, a tale of adventure in which the events are striking and come perilously close to being improbable. That scene in my favourite Dumas novel, Le Vicomte de Bragelonne, in which d’Artagnan kidnaps General Monck, puts him in a box and transports him across the sea to meet the exiled Charles II and be persuaded to restore him to the throne, is highly improbable but a splendid invention. Dumas is the master of this sort of thing.

Saturday

Sam Leith

Intensity, not force

Charles Richter, born in 1900, was, in the words of his biographer, ‘a nerd among nerds: regarded as peculiar and intensely private even by scientists’ standards. And we’re talking about people who put red-and-white bumper stickers on their cars that read, “If this sticker is blue, you’re driving too fast”.’ The only seismologist most of us will ever have heard of was a crumpled, driven, disorganised figure, sometimes kindly and sometimes cantankerous — just as one wants one’s batty scientists to be. He conducted long, cheerful conversations with himself. He was prone to turn up to work wearing two ties at once.