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Saturday

Gary Dexter

Surprising literary ventures | 8 October 2005

Oriri (1940) Marie Stopes Marie Stopes, the birth control campaigner and author of Married Love, was notoriously plain-speaking (‘Never put in your vagina anything that you would not put in your mouth,’ she told the bemused, mainly male readers of The Lancet in 1938). Her sexual frankness was central to her campaigning success — but it had its origins in a notably idealised view of sex as the supreme spiritual experience, imbued with ‘holiness and divine beauty’. Nowhere is this idealism more apparent than in her unsuccessful career as a great poet.

Saturday

Bevis Hillier

The case for the defence

A few years back, Harper’s & Queen magazine asked me to write an article in a series entitled ‘Something I have never done before’. (No, it was not: Write a short book review.) The piece that appeared in the month before mine was Norman Lamont on falconry — a hard pterodact to follow. I decided I would stand on a soapbox at Speakers’ Corner in London (well, actually it was a plastic milk-crate pinched from my milkman) and hold forth. I thought religion and royalty were two subjects that would get the crowd going, and launched into religion first. People began to cluster round me. I had not been speaking for more than two minutes when a little man shouted out, ‘Do you believe in the Ten Commandments?

Penelope Lively

As entertaining as ever

Fifty-two-year-old Alan Mackenzie has been in severe and unrelenting pain for 16 months, having slipped a disc during a game of volleyball. No one has been able to alleviate his condition, not ‘four physical therapists, three ortho-paedic surgeons, two neurologists and an acupuncturist in a pear tree’. He no longer expects to get better, and lives amid a welter of medication and cumbersome aids; his wife Jane has become effectively his attendant, suppressing her guilty resentment. At this point, sufferers from acute back pain may wish to stop reading. Actually, they would do well to continue, with relish, for we are in an Alison Lurie novel, where deft irony will illuminate the most apparently dire situation.

Susan Hill

The pleasure of guessing wrong

The closed-circle Agatha Christieian detective story has rather fallen out of fashion in favour of the ‘crime novel’, the essential difference being that while every detective story is a crime novel the reverse is not necessarily the case. As the doyenne of the detective story P. D. James rarely strays far from home and The Lighthouse represents the form at its purest. First, we need the right, closed setting. It used to be a remote country house which a snowfall has cut off from the outside world, isolating the dozen people suspected of murdering the colonel. P. D. James has gone one better and invented her own island, Combe, off the Cornish coast, a windswept fortress to which Significant People needing privacy in secure surroundings go for a period of rest and re-charging.

Jonathan Keates

The style is the man

‘Is your autobiography really necessary?’ Something along the lines of that war poster which asked a similar question about railway journeys should be tacked up above the desk of every self-respecting author. Edmund White is one such, and we are already entitled to feel that we know an awful lot about him. He has skilfully fictionalised episodes from his youth and mature adulthood in A Boy’s Own Story and The Married Man, he has made hay with characters based on his friends in Caracole and mapped out his socio-sexual milieu as a gay American during the 1970s in States of Desire. What more can he possibly have to disclose? My Lives, as it turns out, is hardly full-on autobiography. Readers wanting the total balance sheet of successes and failures will be disappointed.

Interconnect

An infinite capacity for enjoyment

Nearly 30 years ago I asked Rupert Hart-Davis, nephew and literary executor of Duff Cooper, whether I could see these diaries for a biography I was writing of Duff’s wife, Diana. ‘Not the slightest point, dear boy,’ he replied. ‘They are no more than a chronicle of unbridled extravagance, drunkenness and lechery.’ Eventually he relented and I discovered how wrong he was. There is, indeed, an inordinate amount of wine and women in these diaries, little song (Duff was tone-deaf) but much baccarat or bridge and backgammon for high stakes at White’s. Rupert’s error lay in the ‘no more’.

M R-D-Foot

The Marlborough touch

Geoffrey Best has written a formidably good book about Churchill’s military core. He begins with the hussar sub- altern, as well as the great Duke of Marlborough his ancestor, before he goes near politics. He reconstructs the standards of conduct that were common form among the aristocracy and the officer class with whom the young Winston Churchill grew up, and explains how they continued to guide him all through his military and political life. There were things one did not do; no gentleman would do them. There were accepted laws and customs of war, universally respected by civilised states, even if they were not yet enshrined in print. Churchill went on record himself that he would never wish to do anything that was dishonourable.

Ferdinand Mount

A carefully constructed person

The Americans come off the boat. They may come singly, or in couples or even in a threesome, but there is no safety in numbers, for their fate is sealed the moment they step down the gangplank. The Americans are innocent of course, but they are not very nice. As a rule in the world of Paul Bowles, they tend to be mean-spirited and tight-fisted, and there is also a kind of eerie blankness about them. They think of themselves — Porter Moresby in The Sheltering Sky for example — as travellers, not tourists, belonging no more to one place than another and moving slowly from one part of the earth to another, taking no account of time.

William Waldegrave

Before the mast was rigged

There are three possible reasons for republishing forgotten books by writers who have achieved subsequent fame. The first and best is that they may have been unjustly forgotten. The second is that they are of interest to fans looking for hints of the future. The third is that early novels in particular often contain autobiography, more or less disguised; and in the case of a life as strange as Patrick O’Brian’s they may therefore be of interest to literary detectives. Only one of these novels really passes the first test; both pass the second and third. The Catalans is a well-crafted story of love and betrayal in the French Catalonia to which Patrick and Mary O’Brian had moved not long before.

Eric Christiansen

A dreadful victory

The trouble with great historical narratives is the volume of detail they demand: tidal waves of personal and place names, of dates and sums of money, of CVs, menus, fashion notes, light brown hair and glacial moraines, which after 25 pages remind the untrained reader of the showing and telling of holiday snaps. Yet history without detail is worse than hot air, just a deflated party balloon caught on a hawthorn tree. Details have not merely to be included, but used as crampons up the rock-face of past time. Ways and means to ration and present them exist, and the most convenient is the footnote; it is a pity that Dr Barker’s publishers do not seem to have heard of it.

Gary Dexter

Surprising literary ventures | 1 October 2005

The Big Green Book (1962) by Robert Graves The Big Green Book (1962) by Robert Graves The Big Green Book, a children’s story illustrated by Maurice Sendak (before he won fame with Where the Wild Things Are), contains some familiar Gravesian themes. Jack, an orphan, finds a big green book of magic in the attic and uses it to transform himself into a druidic-looking little old man with a knee-length beard. He then begins to torment his elders. To his uncle, he says, ‘You see these three peas? Put them in a row in the middle of your hand, and see if you can blow away the middle one without blowing away the outside ones.’ The uncle tries, but can’t. Then Jack covers up the two outside ones with his fingers and blows the central one away.

Saturday

Raymond Carr

Once upon a time there was . . .

E. H. Gombrich was born in Vienna in 1909. As a boy he had seen the Emperor Franz Joseph walking in his garden. As a young man, himself a Jew, he had watched Jewish students being beaten up in the streets by Nazi thugs. In January 1936, two years before Hitler’s troops marched into Vienna in triumph, he arrived as an exile in London, to work as a research fellow at the Warburg Institute of which he became director in 1959. When he died, loaded with honours in 2001, the huge sales of his book The Story of Art, published in 1950, had made him the best known and most acclaimed art historian in the world. But he had done more than write a bestselling blockbuster. Art history in Austria and Germany had developed on different lines from the professional connoisseurship of Berenson.

Ian Mcintyre

The case of the lurking paradigm

The gung-ho photo on the dust jacket — battle fatigues, the red beret of the Paras, eyes narrowed to determined slits — suggests a touch of the Paddy Ashdowns. But that is at odds with the picture of the author that emerges from this his first book: ‘For my part, I do not think I have been in action in the broadest sense for more than about six of my 37 years of commissioned service.’ Yet as military careers go in an age of peace-keeping and humanitarian intervention, General Sir Rupert Smith’s has not been exactly uneventful.

Sandy Balfour

Tips for technique and tactics

In 1994 the membership of the American Contract Bridge League voted S. J. Simon’s 1946 classic, Why You Lose at Bridge, the best bridge book ever. To that extent, all bridge books live in its considerable shadow. According to Simon you lose at bridge for two reasons: lack of skill and losing tactics. He doesn’t plan to do much about the first. ‘You’ve been making the same mistakes for years and you have every intention of going on making them.’ But he thinks he can, perhaps, help with the second. You lose, he says, not because you can’t play difficult hands (of which there are in any case relatively few) but because you make a mess of the many simple ones that come your way.

Nicholas Harman

Anyone for dunnocks?

As soon as the British had pretty much done for their larger mammals, they took up birds. The ones you shoot or eat had been protected from time immemorial, and in the 1880s people began to look after the ones that it was just nice to have around. Parliament began passing protective laws, lobbied by the forerunner of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, which now claims a million members and owns vast tracts of land. The publishing business followed the action; the shelves in rustic bourgeois households like mine are bent down with bird books, which have to earn their shelf-space. The fattest fledgling in this new nestful demands not a shelf but a sturdy coffee-table.

Charlotte Hobson

A cross-cultural crisis

If you were a Martian, whiling away the time on an intergalactic beach holiday by reading an account of the Cuban missile crisis, you could be forgiven for dismissing it as wildly implausible fiction. All the blockbuster ingredients are there: the clash of superpowers, one led by the clean-cut American hero, the other by the fat Ukrainian with bad teeth, the military hardware amassing in the Caribbean (nice location), the split-second timing, not to mention the prospect of the end of the world. As a setting for a novel it’s worthy of a Robert Harris-style humdinger, called, no doubt, Cuba, or Missile, or even just Crisis. Instead, rather surprisingly, here we find Katherine Bucknell taking up the challenge in this novel set in Moscow, October 1962.

Jane Ridley

Servants who were masters

It is a remarkable but little known fact that in 1901 the entire Indian subcontinent with a population totalling 300 million was administered by a British ruling elite which consisted of no more than 1,000 men. Still more extraordinary, their rule rested neither on military force nor on terror or corruption. On the contrary, the rulers of the British Raj were renowned for being impartial, high-minded, conscientious and incorruptible. Yet this astonishing British success story has been largely ignored. Historians have got their knickers in such a twist over the whole embarrassing business of imperialism that they have been blind to its strengths.

Anne Chisholm

A bad judge, except of art

According to this new biography by an earnest, academically inclined American, Peggy Guggenheim deserves to be given a respected place in the history of modern art and not dismissed as a poor little rich girl with more money than sense. In fact, Peggy Guggenheim’s reputation was well earned, not to say established early on by her own memoir, Out of This Century, published in 1949, which proudly proclaimed the haphazard nature of her activities, both artistic and sexual. By the time she was in her early twenties Peggy, born in 1898, had abandoned New York, where she was surrounded by stuffy rich Jewish relations, for Paris and the bohemian life, where she was soon surrounded by drunken spongers.

Robert Stewart

Pinning down the king

While well-heeled, self-preserving lawyers of eminence and rank fled to London to avoid a perilous undertaking, John Cooke, a low-born Puritan of great courage, submitting himself to God’s purposes and remaining true to his Roundhead convictions, accepted the brief to prosecute Charles I in the High Court established by an act of parliament for the purpose. In telling his story Geoffrey Robertson has redeemed from obscurity an unsung hero of true greatness, a selfless champion of the poor and a law reformer of rare distinction. More important, he has shed invigorating light on the course of the English Civil War, especially on its legal aspects and consequences.

Gary Dexter

Surprising literary ventures

War With Honour (1940) by A. A. Milne Alan Milne rather resented being known only as the author of Winnie-the-Pooh. As he liked to point out, he had also written plays, novels and non-fiction. Among his works in the latter category was Peace with Honour (1934), which called on Britain to avoid war with Germany at all costs (Milne had first-hand experience of the first world war, having served in the Royal Warwickshire Regiment as a signals officer and seen action on the Somme, so perhaps this was understandable). But War with Honour was his thoroughgoing retraction of Peace with Honour. Piglet had spoken; now it was Eeyore’s turn.