Out of Sheer Rage by Geoff Dyer

This is a book about how not to do things: how not to write a book, how not to live abroad, how not to work, how not to have a holiday, how not to be relaxed and how not to read effectively. As a result, it strikes a painful but amusing chord with most of us who read and write.

Geoff Dyer (himself, a successful writer, though he keeps this fact well hidden here) decides to write a book about D H Lawrence, one of his long-time literary heroes. Like Lawrence, GD lives abroad most of the time and dislikes England all of the time. Like DHL, he is restless, dissastisfied, and prone to irritability with the ceaseless minor inconveniences of life. As he dislikes most foreign food, extremes of hot/cold weather, and suffers badly from hypochondria, these irritations are many and he appears never to be at ease:

I am always on the edge of what I am doing. I do everything badly, sloppily, to get it over with so that I can get on to the next thing that I will do badly and sloppily so that I can then do nothing - which I do anxiously, distractedly, wondering all the time if there isn't something else I should be getting on with. ... When I'm working, I'm wishing I was doing nothing and when I'm doing nothing I'm wondering if I should be working. I hurry through what I've got to do and then, when I've got nothing to do, I keep glancing at the clock, wishing it was time to go out. Then, when I'm out, I'm wondering how long it will be before I'm back home.

To prepare for writing the DHL book, Dyer resolves to read all of Lawrence's collected letters, but, instead of working systematically through them, making notes, he finds himself devouring them all in one great reading binge (also in the wrong order because the volumes are not available sequentially from the library). Later, he goes, armed with many books, for an extended holiday to a quiet Greek island - ideal for concentrated study of Lawrence's work, or so he believes. But infinite time and opportunity manage to defeat him and he can settle to neither serious reading nor writing, and, after a scooter accident, he and his girlfriend Laura return home early and empty-handed. Later or earlier than this, he does manage visits to Lawrence's birthplace as well as to his homes in Sicily and Mexico, but still the book refuses to actually be written.

Anyone who has tried to study at length or write a book will recognise the self-imposed delaying strategies and obstacles that come between the writer and their work. Dyer is brilliant at pinpointing feelings of regret, inertia, lack of self-organisation and endless vacillations about where to begin.

Despite not perhaps being the book he intended, Out of Sheer Rage is full of genuine observation and truth about the bitty, unsatisfactory reality of life and work, as well as information and observations on Lawrence and his writing. In the end, this has become Dyer's book about DHL - really a book about how he did not write a book about DHL, but one still full of perception and wit.

While I was reading this book, I experienced a typically Dyerian moment. Browsing in my local Oxfam shop, I glanced through a nice old hardback copy of Twilight in Italy but, for some inexplicable reason, decided not to buy it, something I regretted as soon as I got home, especially when I read a little later that Geoff Dyer considers it his second favourite DHL after Sea and Sardinia.

Here is GD on exactly this kind of experience:

Looking back, the tiniest regrets weigh heavily with me: the time I bought a Weekly Travel Pass and fell fifty pence short of breaking even; the day in February when I was too miserly to pay 79 francs for a rare Yma Sumac CD which, when I went back to buy it two days later, had disappeared. Even now, ten months later, I can't stop thinking about that Yma Sumac CD: I wish I'd bought it when I had the chance but since I didn't buy it when I had the chance I wish I'd never seen it in the first place because then I wouldn't be tormented by the thought that I could have bought it .... Looking back through my diary is like reading a vast anthology of regret and squandered opportunity. Oh well, I find myself thinking, life is there to be wasted.

Angel by Elizabeth Taylor

Anyone reading this probably doesn't need reminding that Elizabeth Taylor (not the film star) was a great writer of fiction. I have just finished Angel which is supposed to be very different from her other work, though I've only read some short stories. This is an imagined version of the life of a prolific and eccentric writer of romances early in the last century, someone like Marie Corelli or Ethel M. Dell.

Angel Deverell is a spoilt, self-absorbed and eccentric teenager who fantasises about a life of wealth and glamour. To escape her mother's grocery shop and dreary school in depressing Norley, Angel feigns illness and, deprived of books, begins to write her own romantic fiction based on her fantasies. Her aunt's account of the seemingly enchanted life of the gentry at nearby Paradise House helps to fuel these. Angel leaves school, but refuses to follow her aunt into a career in service and doggedly sends off her novels to publishers and continues to write. Astonishingly, her first novel is accepted, even though the publishers can see that her writing style is overblown and risible. Then, as probably now, there is potential profit in a teenager writing something unusual and potentially shocking.

Angel eventually becomes a wealthy best-selling author who removes her long-suffering mother from her comfortable milieu and friends and installs her in a luxury villa surrounded by servants in the posh part of town. Her mother's isolation and unaccustomed idleness are beautifully described:

It seemed to her that she had wasted her years acquiring a skill which in the end was to be of no use to her; her weather-eye for a good drying day; her careful ear for judging the gentle singing sound of meat roasting in the oven; her touch for the freshness of bacon; and how, by smelling a cake, she could tell if it were baked: arts, which had taken so long to perfect, fell now into disuse. She would never again, she grieved, gather up a great fragrant line of washing in her arms to carry indoors.

Mrs Deverell sickens and dies just as Angel is moving into higher society. She falls for and marries a charming but wayward artist Esme (thought this was a girl's name?), who is unfaithful to her. She surrounds herself with animals, and eventually buys the legendary Paradise House. Eventually she squanders her money, Esme dies and her house falls into decay, but she carries on writing even when her books fall out of fashion, remaining as full of delusions about herself and her life as ever.

Because the story is really a biography of a life, the lack of a gripping plot make the later sections of the book less compelling than the first , but Taylor skilfully and ironically analyses Angel and a range of other brilliantly drawn characters. She is sharp as a needle on the subtle feelings of those who, for various reasons, hover round Angel, falling in with or pandering to her often childish whims.

The book also features an (unusually?) sympathetic account of a publisher, Theo Gilbright, who feels compelled from the start to be sympathetic to Angel, despite her strange coldness and indifference to others. He relies on the wonderful and curmudgeonly Mr Delbanco, a completely fictional senior partner in the firm, to insist on Angel's correcting the multiple errors of fact in her preposterous books. Theo's wife, Hermione, is my favourite character, and her irritated but suppressed thoughts about Angel provide a lot of delicious humour in the first half of the book.

Curiosities of Literature

I love John Sutherland's books about books. He is so knowledgeable, erudite and at the same time, witty and irreverent. My favourites are Can Jane Eyre Be Happy?, Is Heathcliff A Murderer? and Who Betrays Elizabeth Bennett? where he investigates the back stories of literary characters and poses probing questions about how exactly characters manage to carry out certain plot requirements, some of which would frankly be impossible in the 'meat world'. My favourites include his question about A Pair of Blue Eyes by Thomas Hardy: 'What is Elfride's rope made of?' (her underwear, I recall) and Lucy Snowe, Cement Mixer (about Villette).

Curiosities of Literature is more general in scope, but filled with nuggets of fascinating information about writers (their physical ailments, sex lives, typewriters, drug abuse, deaths, etc.), as well as book 'records' and other curiosities. Sutherland is brilliant at ferreting out parallels and links between the unlikeliest books.

My favourite real-life 'villain' from the book is probably Cobweb the cat, who may, or may not, have eaten Thomas Hardy's heart. And how many shots of whisky really killed Dylan Thomas? (Estimates are various and extremely wild, but was there a more mundane, but ultimately more sinister, cause?) Other questions Sutherland deals with are: Why is no one else ever called 'Bronte'? And why was the appallingly bad European summer of 1816 so productive for literature? (On this basis, we should probably expect to see some wonderful novels coming out in a few years' time, especially in the UK.)

Here's a challenge for anyone reading this:

What do the following famous novels have in common?

The Lord of the Flies

The Heart of Darkness

The Naked Lunch

(Answers on a blogcard.)

Nella Last was an ordinary woman living in the north of England who began to write a diary in 1939 as part of the Mass Observation project. This meant she sent it in every week to be kept with other diaries for posterity. Nella's diaries became particularly famous when Victoria Wood portrayed her in a TV drama, Housewife, 49.

Two volumes have recently been re-published, Nella Last's War and Nella Last's Peace and they deserve to be read and reread, partly because they are an authentic and detailed account of what life (air raids, rationing, fear about sons serving abroad, as well as the more tedious day-to-day stuff) was like during and just after World War II and partly because, as she had dreamt as a child, she became a very good writer.

My balloons (= barrage balloons) swam like silver fish in a blue-grey bowl, and then as the sun sank, they turned to a faint bluish-pink. So odd how one changes ... Always I have loved the moon - tonight I felt a detachment, a sense of menace. No 'peaceful, 'benign', 'serene', 'kindly' moon, as she rose to point the way for devil-bombers, but a sneering, detached Puck who delighted in holding a burglar's lantern.

Nella keeps very busy with a lot of voluntary work, for the WVS, helping run emergency canteens, the hospital committee and organising a Red Cross shop. (After the war, she keenly feels a lack of purpose and a sense of no longer being useful, when these voluntary activities cease.) She is also keen on crafts, making lots of rag-dolls to sell for charity, and is proud of her ability to make varied meals from the meagre food rations of the time. (She lists practically every meal she makes in detail.) Now that her two sons are grown up (either working at a distance or serving in the forces), she sees her main role as the traditional one of a homemaker who looks after after her husband. Unfortunately, she finds this very limiting, and Will, her husband, comes across as rather a reclusive anxious man, who often becomes peevish when Nella wants to go out.

I was surprised at how different Nella appears from Victoria Wood's portrayal in Housewife, 49. More confident and outspoken, at least as she describes herself in the diaries, and certainly better off. The cover of Nella Last's Peace misleadingly shows a street of basic terrace houses, but in fact Nella lived in a large semi and for much of the war and just after it, she and her husband owned a car (very unusual at the time) and made frequent trips to her beloved Lake District (unless petrol rationing made this impossible).

Now that I've finished the diaries I really miss Nella's company and her 'voice' (as so often happens when I read diaries, the diary 'life' seems to run alongside my own). Although the original diaries were written very rapidly in a slightly slapdash stream of consciousness style, Nella has a turn of phrase and narrative voice than really holds the reader's attention. She uses lots of choice words and phrases: 'monkey-shines' for silly, irritating behaviour by others, 'soul-case' meaning 'body', and she often 'gets on her top-note' when arguing with her husband. As in real life, humour, dreary day-to-day routine and tragedy live side-by-side.

Of the two volumes, the war diary has the most impact, simply because of the haunting and inescapable background of war and loss:

The face of a little boy I saw the other day came to me. He is here from Liverpool. He saw his mother and two sisters killed, spent seven nights in a shelter - before and after his home was shattered in Liverpool - and finally was trapped with an elder sister and lay on her dead arm for hours before rescue - and he is seven. His eyes are frenzied and he talks in stutters. If he falls asleep, he wakes in a lather of fright, shaking and screaming. He is lucky - he has come to a kind, understanding aunt - but what of the others? Singing 'Tipperary' in shelters is all right for the BBC but what of all the silent ones?

Thursday, 17 December 1942

I passed the table where Mrs Hockey sits. (Her son was killed in the Middle East in November.) I've thought sometimes, 'Poor darling, how brave she is, she can still smile,' but today I noticed the smile was as forced as that of a painted clown. She caught my overall as I passed, and I bent down while she whispered in a flat tone, 'I got Michael's Christmas card today, Mrs Last'. He said, "Who knows where I'll be at Christmas, Mom",' No tears were in her eyes; the light seems to have faded. I felt pity burn like a flame in me - but I could only hold her hand tightly for a second, and get on with my work.

The Greengage Summer

I only read this by chance because I picked it up second-hand at a church booksale on a birthday visit to The (incomparable and wonderful) Wivenhoe Bookshop. (The church which is almost opposite the bookshop and its booksale were an unexpected bonus.) I had vague memories of seeing the film of this book as a child and remembered little but a faint awareness of dimly understood sexual tension and one character throwing champagne all over someone else. I was hopeful about reading the book but was delighted when I actually did.

In the nineteen fifties, a virtually single mother of five children (husband usually absent in Tibet studying the local botany, though clearly not that absent if he managed to father five kids) decides to take her spoilt brats to see the war graves of the Champagne region of France during the summer holidays so that they can witness what others have sacrificed. However, she ends up in hospital laid low by an infected horse-fly bite and the children are reluctantly allowed to stay at their hotel, Les Oeillets, unsupervised. The eldest girl, Joss, aged sixteen and on the brink of womanhood, is also confined to her room for some time with a stress-related affliction, so the younger ones, including the narrator, thirteen-year-old Cecil, are left to roam freely in the Eden-like orchard and surroundings of the hotel. Mlle Zizi and her hotel manager Madame Corbet are not keen to accept unchaperoned children, but they are persuaded by the enigmatic Eliot, an Englishman, seemingly Mlle Zizi's boyfriend, who takes the children under his wing.

The dull greyness of England, home and school as impoverished dependents of stolid but bossy Uncle William are contrasted with the summer heat of the green-gold orchards and river near Les Oeillets. The unleashed children make friends with the hotel staff, including the roguish, slovenly, exploited Paul, and become aware of new, sophisticated and exciting ways of life.

But this lotos-eating idyll is not all it seems and the charming and cosmopolitan Eliot is alternately warm and friendly to the children, then disconcertingly cold and distant. The first part of the book ranges back and forth in time and retrospective observations by Cecil, Joss and the prosaic but sharp Uncle William signpost a darker underlying truth which eventually has tragic consequences.

Eliot takes on the role of the children's protector 'as camouflage' : 'The children will give me a reason for being here,' he tells Mlle Zizi. And Uncle William (later) questions Eliot's choice of car, a blue and silver Rolls: 'Why choose one that stood out? Unless he wanted to stand out.'

When, after nearly two weeks, Joss eventually emerges from her room like a butterfly from a chrysalis, it becomes clear to everyone, and especially Mlle Zizi and Eliot, that Joss is not one of the children after all but a lovely nubile young woman who makes Mlle Zizi appear ageing and artificial. Eliot's interest in the family now has an added strand which creates a complicated tangle of attraction, jealousy and frustrated desire between the main characters.

Ambiguity pervades the book. Is Eliot good or bad? the children wonder. He's good fun and kind but he uses and manipulates them and Mlle Zizi shamelessly. However, he too is misled into thinking that the children will shield him, forgetting that they are also nosey and sharp-eyed, and in the end they are his undoing.

There is further ambiguity about who is a child and who is a grown-up. Mrs Grey, the children's mother is described as being like a child and she signally fails to fulfil her role as a parent. In her school uniform at the beginning of the novel, Joss appears to be a child, but later, to Mlle Zizi's dismay, she is a self-aware adult, learning to manipulate her new status with devastating consequences. Eliot appears paternal but is not. Both Cecil and Joss are at the in-between stage and they think that as they grow older they will lose their childish faults, such as gluttony for greengages, but they find that yet more failings arrive with adulthood.


The Greengage Summer is a blissful escapist read and although the subplot about Eliot's secret activities is a little bit Enid Blytonish, the child/adult relationships and underlying sexual tensions are brilliantly observed. Cecil is a wonderful narrator, herself growing up during the action of the novel and finding out just how complicated life and grown-ups can be.

I also owe thanks to this book on a practical level because it taught me the French word for greengages (Reine Claudes) and on holiday in France last summer, I found piles of green-gold greengages on sale in markets, often just brought from ordinary people's gardens. I'd always thought greeengages a rather sour green plum, but French greengages are just as Rumer Godden describes them:

'The greengages had a pale-blue bloom, especially in the shade, but in the sun the flesh showed amber through the clear-green skin; if it were cracked the juice was doubly warm and sweet.'

It must be something to do with France ... . See also Mrs B's post about this lovely book at the Literary Stew.

Some books I didn't read in 2009 and some sunshine reading for 2010

Am up to my eyes in work hence the small number of posts recently. And just don't mention Christmas.

Anyway, just a reminder about the joint read of The Greengage Summer with Mrs B at The Literary Stew. We hope to post about it in the first week of January. Some of you might be thinking about summer holidays then and this book is suffused with heat and sunshine, so is a real anti-SAD remedy for dark mid-winter days.

Looking back at my reading during 2009, I am ashamed once again at how few books I have actually read. Probably fewer than the books I've actually acquired, though some have been weeded out and sent to other readers (or to moulder overwinter in PTA store cupboards where they will probably die an ignominious death).
Even worse is the number of books I have abandoned (What I loved by Siri Hustvedt [disappointed she didn't write like her husband Paul Auster though why I thought she should I don't know], Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler [too depressing], The Stuff of Thought by Steven Pinker [too verbose], At-Swim Two Birds by Flann O'Brien [too rich] and The Diary of Anne Frank [well, this was a reread and I did read most of it, I just couldn't face rereading the last 50 or so pages for obvious reasons])

Oh dear, this is turning into a blog about books I haven't read (now there's a promising title). So I will quickly turn to my favourite read of this year (excepting The Greengage Summer) which is also France-related: The Discovery of France by Graham Robb. Forget the uninspiring title and the odd-looking cover, this is packed with fascinating stuff. Unfortunately, I can't quote directly from it because I have lent my copy to Clare (who was on holiday with me in France when I started it and got bored with me constantly reading out fascinating bits so probably doesn't need to actually read it herself).

It's a wonderful unofficial history of mainly rural France. Its main premise is the vastness of France and how little contact with the main centres most people had. How until relatively recently most people in France didn't actually speak French and didn't think of themselves as French. It is full of anecdotes about warring villages, odd customs and habits, superstitions and beliefs. One area used to make so much money from one annual two-week fair, that they would take the rest of the year off. Villagers at one hamlet high in the Pyrenees just used to sleep all winter, hardly eating at all, like hibernating bears. One village took up their pitchforks against another village because they'd put up a statue of the Virgin with her back(side) facing in their direction. But my favourites have to be the smuggler dogs who used to carry packages of salt between different administrative areas (only one of which had a salt tax). They were trained to hide in ditches whenever they saw a stranger.
So if you're not afraid of getting on your family and friends' nerves , I really recommend this.

On Saturday it was the school Christmas Fair. Had done my bit making lop-sided biscuits and cakes with wonky chocolate icing slapped on at top speed when my son mentioned (rather belatedly) that he had to be at school at 12 o'clock in order to perform carols with the rest of the choir. Chocolate cake looked seriously deformed but may just have tasted okay.

Anyway, there was a very large bookstall where I spent a happy 45 minutes before my own volunteering stint clearing tables and washing up. First find was a Virago edition of Angel by Elizabeth Taylor which I clutched (appropriately enough) while listening to the choirboys singing The First Nowell. Also found: Back When We Were Grownups by Anne Tyler (which I think I have read before), Shadow of the Silk Road by Colin Thurbron and a lovely emerald-green hardback of After Julius by Elizabeth Jane Howard, a much under-rated writer. Also, SS-GB by Len Deighton, simply because I love his spy fiction. Well, I love any spy fiction really .

The Good Companion picked up a Charles Handy book, The Empty Raincoat, and said, 'Oh, I remember this, it's good, I wouldn't mind reading this again. Haven't we got a copy?'

'That is our copy,' I muttered, out of the side of my mouth, and smiled ingratiatingly.

'Ah.'

'Shall I buy it back for you? It's only 20p, I think I can manage it.'

'No, no, it's okay.'

After that, the afternoon became a case of spot the give-away.

'And is this ours? And was this ours? ... And this?'

Well, I have to clear the shelves and donate in order to make room for new stuff, don't I?