More from Books

Saturday

Sheridan Morley

The almost lost art of astonishment

First, the necessary declaration of interest. The author and I were, at the age of five, at nursery school in New York together for a couple of terms. But as in the intervening 60 years I have seen him barely half a dozen times, in crowded rooms, I feel free to say that he is in my view the best drama critic and showbiz profile-writer we have. Partly, I have to add, this is the luck of the draw: at the New Yorker where he now works, he is given a couple of pages a week to expand on a single Broadway first night, and even better, given three or four months to write a profile of several thousand words. Fourteen of these are reprinted here; the author himself calls them ‘mini-biographies’ and he is not far wrong.

Byron Rogers

A Grand Tour of wet Wales

Pennant should have been a publishing sensation, yet how many of you have heard of a book of which within weeks of its appearance all but 12 copies were sold? Not only that, its de luxe version in inlaid leather (at £2,750 a copy) had been sold before it even came out. There will, of course, be no second edition of either, for we are not in the world of conventional publishing. We are in the world of fine art publishing, of hand-made paper and limited editions, where men never read upon the po but put on white gloves just to open the covers of a book, which, given its price, you will not see reviewed elsewhere. But it is still a book. So what do you get for your £750, apart from a thing of beauty in its purple box with the gold lettering?

Saturday

Claire Tomalin

Before we became respectable

Vic Gatrell’s investigation into rude old-fashioned laughter almost bursts out of its covers, with 700 pages and 289 illustrations showing political caricatures and prints ridiculing the fashionable and the badly behaved. Much of the mockery is aimed at the libertine sons of George III and their friends, male and female, but there are also even-handed attacks on radicals, whores and their clients, evangelicals and even the optimistically named but short-lived Society for the Suppression of Vice. Bottoms, nipples, vomit, bloody hands, chamber pots, men and women farting, peeing and shitting, whores merry and dejected, drunkards and fornicating couples crowd the pages.

Philip Hensher

Lecter falling flat

Hannibal Lecter is, surely, a fictional character who needs no introduction. It’s one of the grosser stupidities of this almost limitlessly stupid novel to think that those readers who have enjoyed the grand guignol of Thomas Harris’s other Lecter novels, Red Dragon, The Silence of the Lambs, and Hannibal would welcome an account, even an explanation of his hero’s habits. In theory, one ought to be curious how it is that someone ends up thinking it quite entertaining to cut slices off a human brain (for instance) and sauté them at table before sharing the dish with his girlfriend and the still living victim. In practice, one doesn’t give a toss. Lecter’s an aesthete/psychopath. Who cares how he got that way?

Bevis Hillier

Adages and articles

Long ago (so I have forgotten the precise details) I read one of those books by a British soldier who escaped from a German prisoner-of-war camp in the second world war. He had managed to pinch a German uniform and was making his way across the Fatherland disguised as an Oberleutnant or something. Suddenly he was confronted by a company of the victorious, advancing British troops. How could he instantly convey to them that he was English, and so avoid being shot? He had a brainwave. He shouted out the filthiest English swear-words he could think of. The soldiers lowered their rifles: few Germans would know those words, and the accent was right. Supposing our escaper had had a tender Christian conscience, and had not wanted to besmirch his lips with scatology.

Antonia Fraser

A meditation

I’m at Washington airport on a book tour. My escort, an agreeable man whom I have encountered on several previous occasions, says farewell and then asks, ‘Are you still writing?’ I smile nervously. ‘A few more years left?’ he ventures, either in hope or dread, it doesn’t matter. Still. The ‘still’ word. ‘Are you still playing tennis?’ I’m not but I (still) was when I was first asked the question — in my early sixties from memory. ‘Are you still ...’ well, alive, active? It’s no good replying, ‘See for yourself’ because that’s presumably just what they haven’t been able to see. Still. Such a beautiful word.

Christopher Howse

That old Bethlehem story

If you tell people there was no ox or ass in the stable where Jesus was born, they sometimes become quite irate, especially if they are convinced Christians. They believe in the marvellous Christmas story, and to deny the ox and ass seems tantamount to denying the Babe of Bethlehem. Of course, the ox and ass are not in fact mentioned in the Gospels. The artists painted them in, not just because Jesus lay in a manger, but on account of the words of the prophet Isaiah, ‘The ox knows its owner and the ass its master’s crib.’ Geza Vermes mentions these beasts as examples of extra-evangelical elements, along with the ‘three kings’, who are not called kings in the Gospels, but magi.

Marcus Berkmann

Who said what and when

‘Those who can, write. Those who can’t, quote.’ Well, I’m sure someone has said it, although I have just looked it up in these two vast, baggy new books of quotations and it’s not there. Truth is, the great English tradition of hurling quotations at other people to show how clever you are seems to have disappeared over the past couple of generations. Instead we have books of quotations; indeed I seem to have rather a lot of them, mainly because I have a tendency to wander into bookshops after a long lunch. Surely no one buys a book of quotations when sober. They are books you want but don’t need; later on you realise you need them but shouldn’t have them.

Clive James

Status Quo Vadis

As any good poem is always ending,The fence looks best when it first needs mending.Weathered, it hints it will fall to pieces —One day, not yet, but the chance increasesWith each nail rusting and grey plank bending.It’s not a wonder if it never ceases. In beauty’s bloom you can see time burning:A lesson learned while your guts are churning.Her soft, sweet cheek shows the clear blood flowingTowards the day when her looks are goingSolely to prove there is no returningThe way they came. There’s a trade wind blowing. We know all this yet we love forever.Build her a fence and she’ll think you’re clever.Write her a poem that’s just beginningFrom start to finish.

Alberto Manguel

Swiss master of madness

First, I’d like to put a curse on most editors of ‘Selected Writings’ who, sometimes under the devious word ‘Collected’, serve us cold cuts instead of the whole hog; second, I’d like to congratulate the University of ChicagoPress for allowing us once again to read Friedrich Dürrenmatt in English, thereby restoring to the English-speaking public one of the most important writers of the 20th century. There are certainly authors who deserve or demand a selection, since, like the curate’s egg, they’re excellent only in parts; others, however, should be available in their entirety because each of their writings builds on the rest and no single one affords a full enough picture.

William Waldegrave

The Senior Service to the rescue

There is something unedifying in politicians apologising, without cost to themselves, for the sins of their predecessors while deploying all the black arts of their trade to suppress criticism of their own performance. The same goes for society at large. It would be more admirable for 21st-century Britain to be trying to imagine what our successors will see as incomprehensible moral blindness on our part than to be taking easy shots at the morality of two centuries ago. What will look as foul to Britons of 2306 as slavery does to us now? We don’t really want to know, because the answers might well be inconvenient. Abortion? The eating of animals? It is the people who get it right at the time who deserve celebration.

Miles Kington

Miles Kington on Jean- Jacques Sempé

There is a drawing by Sempé of the Tour de France which is so brilliant that when Geoffrey Wheatcroft first saw it, he just knew he had to have it on the front of his history of the Tour de France. It is an aerial view of a gloomy, grimy French town round the streets of which a stream of dazzingly coloured bicyclists flow like a river of jewels meandering through a rubbish dump. It’s not funny; it’s not pointful; it’s just a lovely counterpoint between the glamour of the big occasion and the banality of the watchers’ lives, exquisitely composed and drawn. The odd thing is that Sempé could never have done that 40, even 20, years ago. He started life as a journeyman cartoonist, drawing single gags.

Jane Ridley

The straight man and the courtier

Gladstone and Disraeli were the Punch and Judy of Victorian politics, and reams have been published about them, but no one has written a book which centres on their relationship. Richard Aldous has had the clever wheeze of charting their rivalry, retelling the story in what he calls a ‘modern way’ for a generation who know little about the past. Actually, the modern way turns out to be remarkably old-fashioned. This book is a romp. Aldous writes fluent, vivid prose and he excels at scene-setting. It’s all very filmic. The book opens with Gladstone at Hawarden Castle, his country home, receiving the telegram announcing the news of Disraeli’s death. Cut to Hughenden Manor, whence Dizzy’s coffin is carried out to the sound of peacocks screeching on the terrace.

William Feaver

Lashings of homely detail

Norman Rockwell’s the name. You’ll know it of course. Rockwell the byword. It wasn’t simply the perpetual air of impending Thanks- giving that gave his Saturday Evening Post covers such appeal. Rockwell covers were cover stories really; that was their distinction. Others, John Falter for example or Steve Dohano, delivered similar eyefuls of graphic cheer to the mass readership but never came near him in popularity. They could ape the manner but not the air. Legend has it that, in his heyday, every time the Post ran a Rockwell, they upped the print order by a quarter of a million. Whether this is true hardly matters: print the legend.

Geoffrey Wheatcroft

Fowler’s ‘Modern English Usage’

When the library of V. S. Pritchett was sold off after his death some years ago, I bought a few books as a mark of homage, among them H. W. Fowler’s A Dictionary of Modern English Usage. I’d possessed other copies, but this was a first edition, and while I was thumbing it idly one day I noticed that it was published in 1926. I then also noticed that The King’s English, which he wrote with his brother F. W. Fowler, was published in 1906, and these anniversaries seem to have passed unnoticed. A hundred years on, and eighty years on, have there been more useful and influential books of their kind in our time?

Alan Dixon

Jackdaws

Happy the jackdaws surrounded by their playmate Boisterous wind with which they wrestle and roll,Diving against it, wings closed; gripped and thrownMany ways, open-winged, spun in it chacking and looping. Easy to envy jackdaws. Even thoseWho never look up, who curse the stopped and creepingTraffic must see their low flight in the distanceAs they descend to towns jackdaws poke fun at,See them in swirling pairs, amused and matedFor life, defeated only when no one knowsAnd never bullied by a wind too gusty. Having lived too long in a town no jackdaw trusted,Where graveyards lacked their disrespectful tread,I spend my careless time airing my head.

Richard Shone

Richard Shone on Leonard Woolf

The large garden at Monk’s House, Rodmell, in Sussex, bounded on one side by the village street, and on the other by gently sloping ground towards the River Ouse, was locally famous for its summer brilliance. In August — the month in which I paid my first visit — when most gardens have a moment of exhaustion, Leonard Woolf had contrived a quilt of dahlias, lilies, purple Jerusalem artichokes, gaillardias and fuchsias in the flowerbeds. A conservatory along the side of the house bristled with cacti. Woolf appeared from a distant corner, secateurs in hand, twine dangling from a jacket pocket, a dog fiercely kept to heel.

Allan Massie

A world of snobs and swindlers

Orwell thought that Mark Twain’s  picture of life on the Mississippi showed ‘how human beings behave when they are not frightened of the sack’ and so are free to develop their personalities Something similar might be said of the rural England portrayed by R. S. Surtees, even if in his novels household servants, grooms and huntsmen may be in danger of being ‘turned off without a character’. Nevertheless Orwell’s observation that in Twain’s Mississippi stories ‘the State hardly existed’ while ‘the churches were weak and spoke with many voices’ might be applied to Surtees’s England too. Reading Mr Sponge’s Sporting Tour again, one is struck by the complete absence of officialdom. There is poverty there.

Saturday

Malcolm Deas

A cold fish in deep water

There are many studies of Tocqueville’s books and writings. The publication of the surviving Oeuvres, papiers et correspondence began in 1951 and still drags on. Yet there have been few biographies. Hugh Brogan, who has edited for the Oeuvres the correspondence and conversations with Tocqueville with the English economist Nassau W. Senior, has now written the most complete life to date. He opens with a coy and whimsical declaration: In recent years, seeing me so preoccupied with Tocqueville, some of my friends took to asking me if I liked him.

Robert Stewart

Heads that wore the crown

David Starkey’s latest book has a Gibbonesque moment. Charles I was undone by ‘his unbending adherence to principle’; ‘in contrast the only rigid thing about Charles II was his male member’. Monarchy also, alas, exhibits some of the pitfalls encountered in turning the script of a television series into a book. Breeziness cohabits with an anxious, repetitive hammering of key points; cliff-hanging intimations of what is to come are overly dramatic; the syntax is frequently sloppy. The prose is disfigured, above all, by the unrelenting use and abuse of the conjunction ‘but’ that is the hallmark of lazy journalism in the present day. Still, Starkey is a fine scholar with the ability to show us the woods, not the trees.