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?

A funny thing happened on the way to the book group...

My mother has just told me a funny incident about her book group. For some reason the library facilitator (or whatever she's called) hadn't managed to get enough books for the whole group and instead had 10 copies of Notes on a Scandal by Zoe Heller and only two of Travels with My Aunt by Graham Greene. Because there were more than 10 groups members, last month she gave out both titles. On the day of the discussion, two group members shared a lift to the venue and discussed the 'book' at length on the way. They didn't actually realise they'd been reading completely different books until they got to the village hall.

It reminds me of that scene in The Third Man when Rollo Martins has been invited by a cultural attache to give a talk about his books in Berlin just after the war. Unfortunately Martins is the author of popular westerns with the pen name Buck Dexter (an author in the style of Zane Grey) but the audience of 'his' admirers is under the impression that he's actually Benjamin Dexter the author of highbrow literary fiction, entitled, for example, The Curved Prow. Martins and the readers talk at cross purposes for quite some time.

'Don't you agree, Mr Dexter, that no one, no one has written about feelings so poetically as Virginia Woolf? In prose, I mean.'


Crabbin (the cultural attache) whispered, ' You might say something about the stream of consciousness.'

'Stream of what?'

This incident is quoted in How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read by Pierre Bayard which is very funny in a rather dry, intellectual French way about ... well, just what it says in the title. (And which is also much better than the pale imitation Who's Afraid of Jane Austen or How to Really Talk about Books you haven't read by Henry Hitchings.)

Has anyone had a similar book group mix-up?


In a head-to-head contest of the two book group titles, I think Travels with My Aunt would be my winner. I think I'd give quite a lot not to have to read Notes on a Scandal again. (Like Nick Hornby, I found I the constant wrongfooting about contemporary Britain jarring.)

Hospice Haul

An unexpected visit to the hospice bookshop this weekend and a modest but decent haul to reinforce my green credentials, i.e. recycling old books. I won't say which hospice bookshop as one of the assistants (and no it wasn't a woman) wouldn't stop talking all the time we were there in a very carrying voice about utter trivia, until I was reduced to muttering Oh, do be quiet, under my breath and contemplating ssshhing loudly like an officious librarian. Even The Good Companion, normally the most patient of people, was annoyed by it.

Anyway, back to the books: two poetry books, The Nation's Favourite Poems of Childhood and A Book of Modern Verse (1942) with a lovely butter-yellow cover with a sun(?) motif on it (for a mere 50p), which, among the usual suspects, includes some more unusual poets in it (Rosenberg, Sorley, Monro?), though only two women, Laura Riding and the amazing H.D. Looking at the list of other titles in the series, I realise I may have another and trawling the shelves find The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, though the cover is not as cheery as the Modern Verse one.

And (yet more verse) an old green-and-white Penguin of The Song of Roland (£1) with, oddly, the former owner's name, E Davies, written at the top of the front cover (maybe he/she had had trouble with losing books). I probably won't be rushing to read this any time soon, but it looks so nice and has a copy of a roundel from Chartres cathedral showing Roland blowing the Olifant (?) and trampling 'dismembered Saracens' on the cover. God's hand is sticking down from heaven to accept Roland's 'token'.

Finally, a selection of Kilvert's Diary (£1.50) for which I have Susan Hill's warm recommendation in the celebrated Howard's End is on the Landing to thank. (I also considered an old hardback Enid Blyton, rather tatty and jacketless - one of the more expensive items at an outrageous £5 - presumably because these are now once again Fashionable, but decided against.)

I also borrowed more from my mother's shelves; The Hill of Devi, E.M. Forster's letters home from India (which links in to my reading of Virginia Woolf's diaries who mentions 'Morgan's' trip to/return from India') and to satisfy my diary longings: Nella Last's War diaries (as brought to the TV by Victoria Wood) and her post-war diaries.

And, absolutely finally, as I keep recommending it, I reborrowed The Diary of a Provincial Lady by E.M. Delafield to dip into. Having recently been to a similar parents' social evening/PTA recruitment event, I find a chord being struck with this:

I sit with several other mothers and we talk about our boys in tones of disparagement, and about one another's boys with great enthusiasm.

Am asked what I think of Harriet Hume but am unable to say, as I have not read it. Have a depressed feeling that this is going to be another case of Orlando about which was perfectly able to talk most intelligently until I read it, and found myself unfortunately unable to understand any of it.

And so back to Virginia ...

Virginia's diaries

Here's a woman after my own heart:

15th Jan 1915

We are dining early, and going to a Hall - an unheard of dissipation - though there was a time when I went out to operas, evenings, concerts &c, at least three times a week. And I know we shall both feel, when it's over, 'really a good read would have been better.'

I love reading diaries though these are sometimes quite allusive and enigmatic and it would probably help to know more about the various members of The Bloomsbury Group.

It goes without saying that VW can really write like an angel, with clear and beautiful descriptions of complex mixed emotions as well as everyday life and scenery. I'm only halfway through (1924) but am already struck by how extremely busy and hardworking VW and her husband Leonard are: writing novels (of course), journalism, politics, reading and reviewing, printing and binding books for their own Hogarth Press, and, despite the comment above, pursuing a hectic social round of concerts, parties, visits to family and friends as well. And VW is frequently too unwell to get out of bed. Maybe she was just driving herself too hard (though of course she did have servants).

Some critics have interpreted Leonard's possibly overzealous care for his wife's health as a way of controlling her:

I could not stay at 46 Gordon Square (her sister Nessa's home) last night, because L. on the telephone expressed displeasure. Late again. Very foolish. Your heart bad - and so my self reliance being sapped, I had no courage to venture against his will.

Elsewhere, however, she says how much she loves and relies on Leonard. It's tempting to try to read between the lines and second-guess people's motivations, but how can we ever really know another person's life, even by reading their personal diaries? The thoughts and feelings expressed in diaries are inconstant, endlessly changing things, which though written, can never really be nailed down exactly. Then another day comes along, the kaleidoscope is shaken up again, the light falls from a new angle and everything seems different.

Reading a diary is almost like living a second life, sometimes feeling envious and sometimes feeling grateful for not having to live the diarist's.

Any recommendations for other good diaries when I've finished these?

Sun, summer, sex and greengages?!

After learning that Mrs B
http://theliterarystew.blogspot.com/ was planning to read a Rumer Godden title for the Women Unbound reading challenge, we discovered a joint love for The Greengage Summer also by RG. So we are inviting anyone who wants to to join in on a group read (or reread) of the book. Do get in touch if you would like to join in with this; we hope to post about it in January.

Rumer Godden wrote a lot of fiction, for both adults and children, and her own life reads a bit like a novel. She spent most of her childhood and a large part of her adult life in India which gave her an observer's eye for people and incident. As a young woman, she ran a dance school in India, but then had to get married when she found herself pregnant. Her first marriage failed and later she lived in Kashmir where her cook tried to poison her and her daughters by mixing ground glass, opium and marijuana with their food.

Unlike many of Godden's books, The Greengage Summer isn't set in India but in France where a family of children (unencumbered by parents) are spending the holidays in a hotel. They are merely tolerated by the staff and the hotel owner, Mademoiselle Zizi, but are then taken under the wing of Mademoiselle Zizi's charming but enigmatic English lover, Eliot, who makes the 'greengage' summer memorable in more ways than one. Simmering away against the atmospheric background of a French heatwave is the sexual tension between several of the older characters, with the narrator, Cecil (a girl) just beginning to understand about adult emotions and desires, particularly those of her older sister, Joss:


Joss and I had always been the Big Ones, as Willmouse and Vicky were the Littles, with Hester in a no-man's-land between. Joss and Cecil, it had been one word though it had meant I had sometimes to be older than I conveniently could; now I was relegated to no-man's land myself. I could see it was inevitable - thirteen is not child, not woman, not .... declared, I thought, as Joss was now - but it hurt.

The Great Western Beach

I read The Great Western Beach by Emma Smith because it has been heavily promoted and heartily recommended, especially in bookshops in Cornwall which I visit regularly, though, despite its current fame (or notoriety), I've never visited Newquay, the specific area featured in the book. This is the story of a childhood in the 1920s and 30s which though there is plenty of justification for it being a misery-memoir, is resolutely not one.

Emma Smith is a warm, engaging narrator, who brilliantly manages to convey the inner voice of a child and a child's-eye view of the adult world, trying to understand and guess at what is going on around her. Her parents are not happy and, unfortunately, her father comes across as an embittered, self-pitying bully who spouts the prejudiced received ideas about class, race and religion common to his time and who is always ready to mete out violent punishment to his children. Emma Smith traces his behaviour both to disappointment at his failure to be a successful artist and, having been 'reduced' to working as a bank clerk, an unsatisfied sense of entitlement to the life and income of a gentleman.

Against this lurking fear of her father's anger, Elspeth (her real name) relies heavily on the companionship of her elder sister Pam and her nanny/housekeeper Lucy. And as a counterweight to her oppressive home-life, always in the background are the beaches of Cornwall, especially the Great Western Beach, an ever-present playground and source of pleasure. Unlike the Cornwall I know, it hardly ever seems to rain, except, with excellent literary timing, at the end of the book, when the family are preparing to leave the town forever.

Smith has amazing recall and there are many amusing anecdotes recounting both the pleasures and the perplexing events of childhood. An aborted one-off visit by Lawrence of Arabia (an old friend of Elspeth's mother) is described from a filmic distance by a confused Elspeth. Having wandered off to play in the sea, the children watch uncomprehendingly as their father (who had been earnestly hoping to make arrangements to paint Lawrence's portrait and at last make his name as an artist) strides off in a huff from the planned beach picnic, followed shortly afterwards by Lawrence roaring off up the cliff on his motorbike (the selfsame bike on which he later suffered a fatal crash).

This is a very good read, though it could have been cut in a few places as there is a fair bit of repetition, but this can sometimes reinforce the authentic feel of a child telling the story. (Also no proofreader? Or proofreader not paid enough [more likely]? Lots of howlers, e.g. sailing in a 'dingy', learning how to 'crotchet' a woollen hat, and 'Anglesea'!)

Deaf sentence

I love David Lodge. No, seriously, I think I love him, not just his books. I want to knit him a jumper or make him a desk tidy out of recycled mouse-mats or something. He just writes so clearly and so brilliantly, whether in a novel or in his literary criticism. And he was so blisteringly honest about his own vulnerabilities and professional vanity in The Year of Henry James (when his novel about HJ was beaten to the bookshops by another much praised novel about the famous author) that I nearly wrote him a fan letter to say that his was the better novel, at least as far as I was concerned.

So, anything by DL usually wins with me. I've just finished reading Deaf Sentence, a novel about a retiried linguistics professor, Desmond Bates, struggling with deafness, which reads very much like DL's own diary, as he was also an academic and is now also pretty deaf. It is written mostly in the form of a journal and, as well as lots of amusing incidents which arise because of Desmond's deafness, there is a lot of general musing on the condition of deafness (compared with, for example, blindness), on famous writers, musicians and artists who were deaf, accompanied by plenty of 'deaf/death' puns. Like many people, I'd assumed that once a hearing aid was acquired, a deaf person's problems were over, but I now realise it is much more complicated than that and as a result the limitations of aids are many and various.

DL does not shy away from using the pantomime staple of the deaf character who comically mishears everything or from taking it to hilarious lengths when Desmond attends a noisy reception party:

'The pastime of the dance went to pot,' Sylvia Cooper seemed to say, 'so we spent most of the time in our shit, the cows' in-laws finding they stuttered.'

'What?' I said.

'I said, the last time we went to France it was so hot we spent most of the time in our gite, cowering indoors behind the shutters.'

In the novel, Desmond finds himself becoming entangled with a mysterious female postgraduate writing a PhD on the language of suicide notes and this plot drives the narrative along, with DL's acute observations on ageing, marriage, sex, death (and deafness) always ringing true. His acerbic account of a visit to a thinly-disguised Center Parcs is deadly accurate.

The novel ends on a sober note with a visit during a Polish lecture tour to the site of Auschwitz-Birkenau and then, on Desmond's return to the UK, the final illness and death of his elderly father. At the beginning of the novel, Desmond states that deafness is comic, blindness tragic, but in the end he changes this to 'death is tragic' because it is 'final, inevitable and inscrutable'. He concludes: 'Better to dwell on life and try to value the passing time.'

What else indeed can we do?

Travels with a Donkey to Longitude

I've just been thinking back to the holidays and some summer reading done in anticipation of a trip to France. We were heading for a gite near the Cevennes, so Brigit said you MUST read Travels with a Donkey by Robert Louis Stevenson, and of course I said 'it's on my TBR list'.

So off the TBR list it had to come, and (to cheapskate reader's satisfaction) I realised that I had two copies, one inherited from the Scottish grandfather-in-law and one bought second-hand (from the excellent Helston Bookworm, I think), both of them with blue covers and gold lettering.

RLS made a walking tour of the Cevennes in the 1870s accompanied by a very reluctant donkey called Modestine to carry his pack and his home-made 'sleeping sack'. His account of trying to get the ambling and recalcitrant Modestine to move at all, let alone at any speed, nor to veer off the path to eat wayside grass and heather are very funny. Pitying locals provide him with various implements to 'encourage' her along, culminating in the most successful, a goad (basically a stick with a pin in the end of it) with which a by now heart-hardened RLS forces Modestine to shift: 'Thenceforward Modestine was my slave,' he finally declares triumphantly.

Stevenson's walk was extremely short compared with modern travel writers' long-haul treks across continents - less than two weeks. But he is a born writer who makes the mountain scenery and the humour of his experiences walking through it zing off the page:

'Why anyone should desire to visit either Luc or Cheylard is more than my much-inventing spirit can suppose. For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move; to feel the needs and hitches of our life more nearly; to come down off this feather-bed of civilisation, and find the globe granite underfoot and strewn with cutting flints ... To hold a pack upon a pack-saddle against a gale out of the freezing north is no high industry, but it is one that serves to occupy and compose the mind. And when the present is so exacting, who can annoy himself about the future?'

Before reading this book, I was completely ignorant of the importance of the Cevennes hills as a refuge for the Protestant minority in eighteenth-century France, and so was surprised at how prominent a role religion plays in Stevenson's account. (His interest in the conflict may even have acted as a motivation for visiting the area in the first place.) RLS imaginatively recounts the persecutions and bloody skirmishes between the Protestant 'Camisards' and the Catholics. Wherever he goes, people ask about his religion and he asks them theirs, and there are frequent heated discussions. Unsurprisingly, when we walked in the Cevennes hills this summer, unaccompanied by either a willing or an unwilling donkey, no one at all asked about our religion. And disappointingly, I didn't see a single donkey, just one roadside sign offering donkey-rides (presumably without the benefit of goads).

As so often happens, reading one book leads me on to another because I come across a reference to my Favouritely Named Character from History, Sir Cloudesley Shovel, who was sent to the Mediterranean to bring aid to the besieged Camisards of the Cevennes. (Anything to spite the dastardly French.) Two years later, Shovel was the admiral whose ship was wrecked on the rocks of the foggy Isles of Scilly when he and his fellow navigators incorrectly calculated their longitude as being west of the Isle d'Ouessant off Brittany. According to Longitude by Dava Sobel, Shovel had discounted the opinion of one of his ordinary crew members who had correctly reckoned the ships' position as being near the Scillies and instead had him hanged for insubordination. Just two men from the four ships that went down survived. Sir Cloudesley himself was washed up alive on a beach but then was murdered for the emerald ring on his finger by a local woman. This famous disaster for the British fleet spurred on attempts to find a way to measure longitude accurately, which leads on to the story of John Harrison told in Longitude. But, typically, I still haven't read the whole book (the rest remains TBR).

Howards End is on the Landing

This latest book by Susan Hill is provoking a lot of comment in the reading blogosphere. The gorgeousness of the cover certainly presses all the book addict's buttons, conjuring up images of cosy fireside reading immersed in long Victorian novels bound in gold-tooled leather. (Just one question though, who is BRRON on the back cover? Byron's long-lost Welsh love-child?)

I love books about books. I have shelves of them - well I would have a shelf of them if I had the space to devote one shelf to one category of books, instead of narrow gaps on top of books in already crammed bookcases. I won't go into my property-envy regarding rambling farmhouses with Agas and views and nooks and crannies (suffice to say SH owns FOUR complete sets of Dickens' novels).

I found much to enjoy here and SH goes into lots of bibliophile topics: titles, bindings, typefaces, whether to write in books (pro), organising/ categorising books (anti), real books v. electronic readers, etc. as well as discussing her own favourite authors and books. The thorny topic of book-lending is not mentioned, interestingly, and as SH says she never writes her name in her books and scorns bookplates, does that mean she never lends any either?

There are many reminiscences about authors (and others such as Benjamin Britten) she has met or corresponded with over the years, so, as she admits, a fair amount of name-dropping crops up. I appreciated in particular her memories of Charles Causley, a poet I admire and one who has never had a very high profile. She also stands up for Enid Blyton whose books I too loved as a child and whose influence on me did not mean I grew up to be an undiscerning reader (IMHO). She is also very honest about books she hasn't read - The Great Gatsby and The Portrait of a Lady among others, which is always encouraging to the rest of us.

Tastes and opinions on books are inevitably individual and sometimes idiosyncratic and SH is no exception, though some of her pronouncements are a bit baffling. At one point she says 'With (Alice) Munro, the problem is Canada. I have a problem with Canadian as I do with Australian writers.' Exactly what this problem is is not explained or expanded upon. And I am pained by her description of the Lord Peter Wimsey-Harriet Vane love story as embarrassing. Unrealistic, maybe, but embarrassing?

A book like this is most successful when it strikes a chord with a reader and sends them off to seek out/reread books the author recommends. And after HEIOTL, I am actively looking out for Kilvert's diary and longing to reread The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald and The Rector's Daughter by F.M.Mayor. To my amazement, I searched the 'inherited' shelves of my Walter Scott-loving grandfather-in-law and found Sir Walter Scott's Journal - one of SH's strongest recommendations. (The full set of novels are in a box under a bed somewhere waiting for Doomsday, I think, as a Scott-loving reader may take longer to find.) 'Never mind the novels,' says SH, 'read the man himself, who speaks plainly yet whose powers of description are mighty, whose great spirit, courage, uprightness, generosity and warm humour leap out of these pages.' Eagerly I set to and start reading and certainly find humour and generosity in Scott's descriptions of the cheerfulness and hospitality of the Irish. But, faced with a national financial crisis that autumn (plus ca change!), he is not so kindly when discussing other races: 'It is hard that vagabond stock-jobbing Jews should, for their own purposes, make such a shake of credit as now exists in London and menace the credit of men trading on sure funds such as H and R.' (November 1825)

Hmmm ... perhaps SH's version of the Journal has had slurs such as this edited out of it.

HEIOTL is not going to displace Anne Fadiman's Ex Libris or Alberto Manguel's A Reading Diary, my own favourite books about books and reading. While I enjoyed parts of it, some of the chapters seem a little dashed off and makeweight and I'd have preferred more about the books themselves and less about unremarkable past encounters with writers (or umming and ahing about which would make the final top forty/thirty-nine. (A contents page and an index wouldn't have gone amiss either.) In brief, this book occasionally lives up to its sumptuous cover, but only occasionally.

Etruscan Places

A long bus ride to the hospital for a blood test this morning. Fifteen or so despondent-looking people ahead of me in the deli-counter-tickets queue, so I spend twenty minutes browsing the charity second-hand bookshelves (I do already have something else to read with me - of course). The shelves appear much sparser than earlier years - is everyone selling their old books for quick cash on e-Bay in these straitened times? Lots of Edna O'Briens for some reason, but several of the more enticing titles do not pass my 'unacceptable brown stains' test and, at 50p per paperback I want something moderately decent for my money. (The school Christmas bazaar only charges 20p for paperbacks after all.) Mills & Boon romances are apparently allowed to go for just 20p each but this bargain price must have started a rush and now there are no Mills & Boons to be had. Displaying my 'Discriminating Reader Who Does Not Live in a Rambling Farmhouse Lined With Bookshelves' persona (for a change), I settle on one very slim (less than 1 cm thick) volume: a 1950 Penguin copy of Etruscan Places by D.H. Lawrence. It bears the beautiful dark red colouring of the Travel and Adventure Penguin strand - strikingly unusual after the more familiar dark green and cream (or is it discoloured white?) and orange and cream of other old Penguins. All I know about the Etruscans is that they were obsessed with death and no one knows exactly what they thought about it because their language remains undeciphered. As a result, probably not much in the way of Adventure in this volume.)

I leaf through the book and on page 29 read about B (B?) who expresses surprise at seeing the phallic stones by the doors of many tombs. 'Why, it's like the Shiva lingam at Benares!' he/she declares.

DHL notes, 'One can live one's life, and read all the books about India or Etruria, and never read a single word about the thing that impresses one in the very first five minutes, in Benares or in an Etruscan necropolis: that is, the phallic symbol. Here it is, in stone, unmistakable, and everywhere, around these tombs. Here it is, big and little, standing by the doors, or inserted, quite small, into the rock: the phallic stone!'

It's good to see Lawrence clearly resisting the self-censoring tendencies of other writers of his time in his travel writing as well as his novels, but the book opening naturally at this particular page is disconcertingly apt. Is some ghostly DHL turning the pages for me?

Lawrence goes on to say that the phallic stones look as though they are part of the rock:
'But no, B. lifts one out. It is cut, and is fitted into a socket, previously cemented in. B puts the phallic stone back into its socket, where it was placed, probably five or six hundred years before Christ was born.'
I wonder if the cement was originally used to foil phallus-stone-collecting souvenir hunters (probably a largish group).

I queue up to pay for Etruscan Places at the WRVS stall where it stands out like an unsore thumb among the coffee-drinking outpatients. On the way home, a fallen leaf on the path exactly matches the autumnal red of the cover and I pick it up and bring it home as a beautiful but rather impractical bookmark.

Abandoning Austerlitz

I have just had to abandon Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald two thirds of the way through. I feel rather pained about this, as it undermines my self-image as a serious reader of literary fiction (especially when I read the list of worthy reviewers who have rated it so highly). But I was so bored, not only was I skimming it, I was falling asleep over it (even more quickly than I already fall asleep while reading in bed anyway). I could cope with the lack of paragraphs and the stream of consciousness style, but the constant description, like an endless loop from a beautiful but uneventful film, combined with the relative lack of strong characters failed to grab me. The flattish prose (which may have lost something in the translation) did not wake me out of my torpor either and its dream-like qualities just ended with me actually dreaming.

I did get more out of Rings of Saturn, if that redeems me in any way. Part travelogue, part reminiscence, part biography/history, this book defies neat categorisation but was fascinating. It is based round a walking tour of East Anglia and includes descriptions of several places I know well combined with riveting stories of people and buildings. Austerlitz too is filled with plenty of important and sombre details about the deportation of the Jews and the Nazi concentration camps but these facts seemed undermined by the vague and dreamy narration of the shadowy not-quite-real Austerlitz himself.

(Anyway, at least Rings of Saturn's spine shows that I read it to the very end, unlike the tell-tale spine of Austerlitz.)

PS Thanks to Susan for recommending Rings of Saturn.