Harriet Devine's Blog

The Other Elizabeth Taylor

I wandered into my little local library the other day and there was this on a shelf. Everyone but me seemed to be reading it a while ago but, though I am a great admirer of the work of this most excellent novelist, I had not felt particularly impelled to get hold of it. Partly I think this was because I'd read so many reviews, all of which made much of the book's supposedly startling revelation -- that ET, apparently a contented suburban housewife, had a love affair which lasted throughout the first twelve years of her marriage -- that I thought it would hold no surprises. In a sense that was true, but it didn't detract from my enjoyment of this very impressively researched biography.

I fairly recently re-read ET's Angel, thought by many people to be her masterpiece. This brilliant, funny, disturbing novel is about a young girl from a suburban home who has a passionate desire to write. She churns out novel after novel, all pretty ghastly, but becomes a huge success for a time though she is quite unable to see that her work is viewed as trashy and absurd. Angel is a tragic figure, with no self-knowledge and no irony, so quite unlike her creator in that way. Nevertheless, her childhood obsession with writing, and her endless production of novels and stories, clearly owes a lot to ET herself, who wrote and wrote and wrote, stories and novels, for over ten years before getting anything accepted for publication. This in itself makes really remarkable reading -- to be so completely driven, so sure that you had something to say, that you were able to persist in the face of endless rejection, is a most extraordinary trait. Why and how ET came by it is anybody's guess -- nothing in her family background would seem to have prepared her for it. Add to that her early and long-standing membership of the communist party, and her long and passionate affair with Ray Russell, both carried on while she was, on the surface, living the life of a totally conventional small town wife and mother, and you have a most intriguing story. In the end I thought it was rather sad. Though ET did finally get published and was recognised after a fashion in her own day, she was certainly a victim of the male-dominated literary establishment who viewed her books as low-brow women's fiction. In fact, as Nicola Beauman points out, ET was a ground-breaker both in style and content, a true modernist following in the footsteps of Virginia Woolf.

Reading this I realised there are a number of ET's novels I have not yet read, something I mean to put right as soon as possible. So watch this space!

Corduroy Mansions

Being not very well -- happily, a situation now mostly in the past -- I've had more time than usual to read books. This is one of the great unsung benefits of having flu, though of course when it's at its height you can't read much. The last few days, though, I've been slowly on the mend and have been doing a good deal of reading, including starting, and finishing, this novel in the last twenty-four hours. I've been reading the sequel, The Dog Who Came in From the Cold which, as I'm sure you know , is being serialised online in the Daily Telegraph. So I thought this would be a good opportunity of catching up with what I suppose in my case I'd have to call the prequel. Having done so I can absolutely see why some people, though not usually myself, insist on reading books in the order in which they were written. It's strange, really, as I have been enjoying the second one enormously, but reading the first one has given a sort of extra depth to the whole thing, if depth is the right word the use in relation to something so fundamentally light-hearted.

Corduroy Mansions, the location of both books, is in Pimlico. For those readers to whom this means less than nothing, I can tell you that this is a rather well-heeled area of west London, bordering on Chelsea, Westminster and Belgravia. Knowing this, you will expect the characters in the novels to be generally of the well-heeled variety, and so they are. William, who I suppose is really the central character, is a wine-merchant; Caroline is doing an MA in Art History at Sotheby's and has had her photo in a posh magazine, Rural Living; Berthea Snark is a psychologist; Marcia has her own catering company. If this all sounds rather elitist, well, I suppose it is. William thinks nothing of spending £175 on a pair of Belgian shoes, and when they are chewed up by his dog, Freddie de la Hay, admits to having another pair that cost over £2000. When Berthea's unworldly brother Terence acquires a Porsche (having nearly died after attempting to charge the battery of his thirty-year-old Morris Minor by plugging it directly into the mains) he is able to pay for it in cash out of his current account. But though people like this do inhabit the real world, and we may envy or despise them depending on our perspective, it is impossible not to warm to these fictional ones. Why is this? I suppose because everyone here, with one or two exceptions, lives in a sort of rather innocent dream. Problems of course crop up for all of them from time to time. William is desperate to get rid of his grown-up son Eddie, who refuses to fly the coop and treats his father with contempt; Caroline has fallen in love with her fellow student James but fears that he doesn't really care for girls despite his protestations to the contrary; the successful publisher Barbara Ragg is involved in a miserable relationship with the horrible Oedipus Snark (Berthea's son, and the only unpleasant Liberal Democrat MP in the country); Marcia loves William but fears he does not love her back; and so on. But this is comedy and so, one way or another, all these problems get resolved, at least to an extent, though of course now that I am reading the second book I can see that some of them do not have neat conclusions.

So how would we describe this genre? Is there a term for gentle comedy, a little social observation, a little mild philosophy, psychology and art criticism, an almost soap-opera-ish fascination with the lives of others? McCall Smith describes the books as "upbeat and affirmative" and so indeed they are, and that's a great part of their charm. As for the style, I find I am sometimes reminded of the great Barbara Pym, one of the few writers who makes me laugh aloud. Incidentally, she too lived in Pimlico. Corduroy Mansions has made me smile a lot and that must be good.

Police at the Funeral

"It is a model detective story, elegantly written, cunningly wrought, and rich in character and atmosphere.... Nothing in the earlier books suggests the range and intensity of characterisation which the author now reveals".

Not my words, but taken from the Margery Allingham website, where you can find a wealth of information about this excellent writer. If you know me at all you will have realised that I am a great lover of classic detective fiction, and I would rate Margery Allingham somewhere at the top of the pile, a pile which includes Sayers, Marsh, Christie, Innes among other distinguished writers. I started reading her novels when I was about thirteen and have loved them ever since. Some I have re-read several times but occasionally I encounter one that I have never read, and this proved to be one such. The swine flu prevented me from reading more than a chapter at a time for several days, but now I am slowly crawling back to the land of the living I have finished it with the greatest enjoyment.

The central protagonist here, as in all Allingham's best novels, is Albert Campion. Not a detective in any conventional sense, Campion is a young man of who is descended from an aristocratic family, the details of which he chooses to conceal. He also conceals his sharp intelligence and impressive powers of observation and deduction behind a rather foolish and vacant exterior. Modest and unassuming, he nevertheless solves mysteries that have defeated the police force, who are led here, as in many of the books he appears in, by his friend Stanislaus Oates. Here, the action takes place in a grand old house in Cambridge, presided over by an extraordinarily strong-minded old lady, Caroline Faraday. The widow of a distinguished man of letters, she rules the household with a rod of iron, despite the grumblings of her aging dependents. When first one and then a second of these is murdered, Campion is summoned and asked to solve the mystery. It soon becomes clear that these crimes could only have been committed by someone within this small household, but none of the surviving candidates appears to have had the ability or the opportunity. The final solution, when Campion arrives at it, is astonishing, and extraordinarily original -- I don't recall anything quite like it in any detective fiction I have read. 

There are some wonderful characters here -- 84 year old Mrs Faraday, a tiny, elegant, but indomitable relic of the Victorian era (the book was written in 1931), only too aware of the follies, failings and vices of her descendents -- her loyal maid Alice, a great giant of a woman, who is fiercely protective of her beloved mistress -- appalling Cousin George, drunken and abusive, whose unforgiveable behaviour is partly explained towards the end by the revelation of a (highy politically incorrect) family secret -- and above all Uncle William, a wonderfully comic and touching figure who Campion begins by mistrusting and ends by admiring.

Allingham is a highly intelligent, thoughtful, and thought-provoking writer. Having read, or re-read, a number of her books in the last few years I would say that one of her major preoccupations was the nature and existence of evil, which certainly figures largely in this novel. Excellent and highly recommended.

New Colour

That purple at the top was too much for me in my delicate state so I've changed it to blue.

Sickbed games

Yes, sadly I am on my sickbed getting over a very unpleasant flu -- whether of the swine variety I know not, but certainly it knocked me clean off my feet last Monday and I am still far from well. As a result I have read only one book in a week, and will blog about it separately if I can muster the strength. In the meantime here is a bit of fun which I saw on Stuck in a Book -- this is, in fact, an image of my own blog, created on an enjoyably time-wasting programme called Wordle. Try it.

Found Wanting

A few years ago I happened on a Robert Goddard novel in someone else's house and was very struck by it. I can't now remember which one it was, and in any case I then read as many as I could lay my hands on over the next few months. I don't think I've read all twenty by any means, but I've got through a good few. And, of course, at some point I realised there was a very definite formula at work. It is a pretty good formula, but once you recognise it, a bit of the shine wears off the reading experience. Nevertheless I will still give him a whirl if I spot one I haven't read, and such was my experience last week at the local library. I thought this was the latest but no, there's been another since.

So - here we have a fairly typical Goddard hero, a rather ordinary, fallible chap -- this one, Richard Eusden, works for the Foreign Office, is divorced, and lives a rather dull life. Not for long, though. A surprise meeting with his ex, Gemma, sends him off to Brussels to take a mysterious package to his oldest friend Marty, now dying of cancer. And Brussels is only the beginning. Before long he is in Hamburg, then Denmark, then Finland, sometimes with Marty, sometimes without. As for the package, its contents are of great interest to an enormous number of people from crooked lawyers to dodgy journalists to violent Hymen to cold-hearted millionaires. Of course along the way he meets a beautiful woman, dark haired and elfin faced, and the two of them develop a close, though unspoken, bond pretty fast, I thought. And of course we learn a great deal of history along the way. This time it is the history of the Romanovs, Russia's royal family, and in particular the famous case of Anna Anderson, who claimed to be the Tsar's youngest daughter Anastasia. Everything moves very fast, and things look pretty black for Richard from time to time... Well, it wouldn't be a thriller if they didn't, would it.

Goddard specialises in history and he does it very well. And he knows how to keep up the pace. He kept me reading, but I would not say this was his best, by any means. However I'd rather read him than many another contemporary writer in this genre. A while ago Goddard won the WH Smith "Thumping Good Read Award". I had no idea such a thing existed (and it no longer does, apparently), but I think it just about sums up the pleasures of this writer's work.

The Music Room

Well, so much for resisting temptation. I planned to read a couple of other authors before I returned to William Fiennes but nothing seemed to hit the spot. And there was The Music Room sitting by my bed all the while, calling out "read me, read me". So I did. I started it last night and I finished it...last night. I read till 2.30 am, which is something I almost never do, being someone who loves early nights and really needs their sleep. But I simply could not put it down.

In my review of The Snow Geese I talked about William Fiennes suffering from homesickness. When you read this, his more recent book, that fact gains another dimension. Of course any of us can be homesick, and probably most of us have been at times, whether we live in a council house, a semi, a flat, a farmhouse, a mansion... but few of us live in a castle, I'm guessing. William Fiennes does, or did, though. The place that, in The Snow Geese, he refers to as 'the ironstone house' is in fact (though he does not actually name it in this book either) Broughton Castle in Oxfordshire. I have many years ago visited this glorious place, which is seven hundred years old and as you can see quite stunning. But as a little boy William had no idea how special it was, or that it was any different from anybody else's home.

  So this, in part, is the story of what it was like to grow up in such a remarkable place, and the book is full of the most delightful details -- William's mother polishing the suits of armour with WD40, and touching up the faded wallpaper with poster paints, the little boy fishing for pike in the moat and the agonies of swimming in it  (even in high summer a thin layer of warm water covered icy and murky depths), sitting in the kitchen with the cleaning ladies --  the frequent invasion of film companies, the endless streams of tourists. For this is a childhood memoir, a genre I have a soft spot for having written one myself*.  I love the way he has told the story in a series of snapshots, because of course that's how we all remember our childhoods, and the book would be worth reading just for that. But there's more to The Music Room than this, a lot more. Above all this is the story of William's brother Richard, eleven years his senior and a severe epileptic. This is a difficult enough state of affairs, but a particularly severe attack leaves Rich with brain damage, and this affects his behaviour. As well as being badly affected by the drugs he has to take, which make him groggy and sleepy for much of the time, he now is prone to sudden rages, often directed against his amazingly patient and loving parents. William watches all this as he grows older, at first simply accepting it as a fact of life but later coming to question it, and to investigate the history, the psychology and the physiology of epilepsy, on all of which the book is a fascinating source of information.

What is so moving about this book is the fact that, despite Rich's strangeness, and his often violent and hurtful outbursts, everyone in this really remarkable family simply continues to love and accept him unconditionally. Truly this is indeed a love story, and a tragic one in the end as Rich does not survive beyond the age of forty one. I was completely taken over by it and it would have been impossible to stop reading, hence my unusual wakefulness in the small hours. Highly highly recommended.

* I just saw on Amazon that my book is on offer at £26.80! Something has gone wrong here as it should be £9.99. I'm querying this but if anyone should by chance want a copy, I will sell it to them at a knockdown price -- just email me!

Coming Out of the Tunnel

  As you probably know I moved to Oxford five weeks ago. But since then I have felt a bit like I was living in a tunnel. My life has consisted of a) keeping the builders happy with tea and feedback b) writing articles about Christina Rossetti and WB Yeats and c) stripping wallpaper, filling holes, sanding, undercoating, topcoating, and making endless associated trips to B&Q (builders merchants that is for you non-Brits). Also almost all my belongings are still in store, so I'm living a curious almost nun-like life -- I only have one saucepan, 2 plates, 2 knives/forks/spoons -- had to go next door yesterday to borrow a tin opener. I'm writing this sitting on a plastic garden chair with the computer on an ancient table that was in the house when I bought it. The walls are half painted, the floor needs sanding, the ceiling is going to be plasterboarded. I only have about a quarter of my clothes, and two pairs of shoes. And of course all my books are in boxes in the storage depot. But in a curious way it has been very good for me, so that I've started to wonder if I really need any of that stuff which, in a week or two, will be coming here to fill this house to bursting point. I'm certainly going to get rid of some of it, which will be a good feeling.

Yesterday, though, I felt as if I'd reached a sort of turning point, and begun to emerge from the tunnel. I went into town in the morning -- I can ride in on my bike, mostly through parkland -- and, just about on the spot where this picture was taken, met, for the first time, Simon of Stuck in a Book. That was fun, as you can imagine. Then in the evening I went along to one of the reading groups he belongs to and listened to everyone discussing Miss Hargreaves (what else)? I also rejoined an online reading group I'd lapsed from, got someone to come in and dig me a nice flower bed, arranged to go out to lunch with some old friends who live nearby, who I haven't seen for years, and generally felt like I was back in the real world again. Oh yes and I went to the library and brought back three books so I hope to have something to report before too long.

The Snow Geese

There are many ways of acquiring books, from the sublime (finding them in jumble sales for 10p) to the ridiculous (paying full price in a bookshop?). Very high on the sublimity scale is winning them in a draw -- after all, you not only get the book but also a warm sense that someone or something in the universe is on your side for a change. Anyway, leaving the metaphysics aside, I did win not one but two books in a draw on the blog of the wonderful dovegreyreader, and this was one of them. I knew almost nothing about either the book or its author but I was willing to give it a go. I'm so pleased I did. This is a very special book. It is, I suppose, a travel book, but if you are like me and think that sounds a little boring -- it's certainly not my genre of choice, anyway -- please think again. It is certainly a book about a journey, which William Fiennes made in about 2002. He'd just recovered from a serious illness and decided he wanted to go on a quest. Having developed an interest in birds, he had the rather amazing idea of following flocks of snow geese from their winter quarters in Texas to their summer breeding grounds in the Canadian Arctic, a journey of over four thousand miles. And so, indeed, he does. The geese have several regular stopping places on the way and he stops there too, sometimes ahead of the geese so that he is actually there to see them arrive. He travels by bus and by train, the entire length of north America, extraordinarily long and exhausting journeys. On the way he meets people, gets invited to stay in houses and cabins, hears a number of often bizarre but equally often touching life stories. And he gets terribly lonely and homesick. His thoughts, or perhaps that should be meditations, on this subject are fascinating. He researches it, as indeed he researches birds and their habits, and anything else that catches his attention, sitting in tacky hotel bedrooms. (I was forced to wonder how many books he actually carried around with him). Of course the birds are going home, and he is increasingly longing, too, to go home. But towards the end of his journey he concludes that he must fight against the sense that he can only achieve a sense of belonging by returning to his childhood home.

Somehow I had to turn my sense of nostalgia inside out, so that my love for the house, for the sense of belonging I experienced there, instilled not a constant desire to go back but a desire to find that sense of belonging , that security and happiness, in some other place, with some other person, or in some other mode of being. The yearning had to be forward-looking. You had to be homesick for somewhere you had not yet seen, nostalgic for things that had not yet happened.

My lucky draw included another William Fiennes book, The Music Room, but I haven't started this yet. I'm saving it up because I know I'm going to love it so much. Does that make sense?

William Butler Yeats

When I was living in Oxford in the 1980s I was once asked if I would like to teach some tutorials on Yeats and Eliot, and rather shocked the distinguished don who had asked me by saying that what I knew about Yeats and Eliot could be written on the back of a postage stamp. Despite more than twenty years of teaching Eng Lit since then, this has, perhaps rather shamefully, remained more or less true. But I was recently asked to write some essays for a 'Students Guide' type publication in America and one of the ones I agreed to do was on a poem by Yeats called 'The Stolen Child'. So I thought I'd better bone up on WBY and among other things have been reading this big fat biography. I'm only about halfway through and don't intend to give you a blow by blow account of it all, but I have very much warmed to the man. Brought up in genteel but very real poverty in Ireland and London, caught up in all kinds of strange occult practices, passionately in love with Ireland and its heritage, and even more passionately, and unrequitedly, in love with Maud Gonne for much of his adult life, he did indeed write some really remarkable poetry. One of his poems appears today on Books Do Furnish a Room and here is another, very famous, and my favorite so far. I hope you like it as much as I do:

He Wishes For The Cloths Of Heaven 

Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.