An Alfred Hitchcock Top Ten

Between 4th April 2015 and 5th February 2016, I watched all of Alfred Hitchcock's (talkie) films - from The Man who knew too Much (1934) to Family Plot (1976); that is, apart from Lifeboat (1934). Although, like all the rest, I have it on DVD, I just didn't fancy it, thinking it too claustrophobic (the same reason I have never watched Das Boot). Perhaps I should try it; I would love to be proved wrong.
It was the second or third time I had viewed most of the films, but a few I had never watched before. A friend of mine is also a fan of Hitchcock's movies and we each drew up a list of our Top Ten; fiendishly hard when you get down to it.

   

    My Top Ten                                                     Friend's Top Ten

Notorious                                                              Strangers on a Train
North by Northwest                                              Shadow of a Doubt
Strangers on a Train                                            North by Northwest
Shadow of a Doubt                                               Rebecca
Vertigo                                                                  Rear Window
Rebecca                                                                Vertigo 
Rear Window                                                        The Thirty-Nine Steps
Dial 'M' for Murder                                                Spellbound
The Thirty-Nine Steps                                           Dial 'M' for Murder
Frenzy                                                                   The Birds

It is interesting that eight of the films appear on both lists and two of the top three are the same but in a different order.

I notice that I also wrote down the films I thought 'okay': Spellbound (1945); Rope (1948); Psycho (1960); The Birds (1963); Topaz (1969) and Family Plot (1976). Partly this was due to 'wooden' acting or mis-casting.
I disliked Mr and Mrs Smith (1941); The Trouble with Harry (1956); and Torn Curtain (1966).  The first was just silly/slapstick; the second, quite simply boring; the third, poor casting and acting by Paul Newman and Julie Andrews. Secret Agent (1936) was also poor - bad sets, wooden acting by John Gielgud and over-the-top by Peter Lorre. Jamaica Inn (1939) was ruined for me by bringing in the character of Squire Humphrey Pengallen (not in du Maurier's book) and the - usual - over-ripe, ham acting by Charles Laughton in the part. *
I did enjoy Young and Innocent (1937); I Confess (1952) - but Montgomery Clift seemed so uncomfortable in his role; and To Catch a Thief (1955), a typical light caper for Cary Grant.

Looking again at my list, I realise the films I liked best were where the story line - not necessarily strength of plot - the directing (camera angles etc.) and the acting created a quality experience. Grant and Bergman and Rains in Notorious; Grant again and Mason in North by Northwest; Walker and Granger in Strangers on a Train; Cotten and Teresa Wright  in Shadow of a Doubt; Stewart and Novak in Vertigo; and so on.

As for Hitchcock's Silent Movies - I watched the twelve available on DVD between 29th July 2019 and 29th August 2019. Again, a little bit of a switchback ride. I found nearly all of them 'interesting'; I wasn't that keen on Juno and the Paycock (1930) or Rich and Strange (1932); but favoured The Lodger (1926), Blackmail (1929) and the two Lillian Hall-Davies (who tragically died by her own hand, aged 35 in 1933) films - The Ring (1927) and The Farmer's Wife (1928).

                                                  Lillian Hall-Davies (1898-1933)

Yes, I know cinema leads us into the land of make-believe. However, Hitchcock's unrealistic backcloths and questionable sets; the unnatural acting; a few banal scripts do not spoil the memory of some quality hours spent away from 'real' life.  Moreover, I still can't warm to CGI.

Useful books I have on Hitchcock are:

Donald Spoto - The Art of Alfred Hitchcock (W.H. Allen, 1977)
John Russell Taylor - Hitch: The Life and Works of Alfred Hitchcock (Faber and Faber, 1978)
Charlotte Chandler - It's Only a Movie: Alfred Hitchcock (Simon and Schuster, 2005)
Quentin Falk - Mr. Hitchcock (Haus Publishing, 2007)
Peter Ackroyd - Alfred Hitchcock (Chatto & Windus (2015)

* A good line from Quentin Folk about Jamaica Inn: 'There's so much ripe ham on display - especially when Laughton, as the duplicitous squire, and younger co-star Robert Newton are in full flow - it's like indulging in an extremely tasty pig roast.'

Iris Murdoch's 'The Bell'

On a January visit to Oxford in my Upper Sixth Form year, I purchased two of Iris Murdoch's novels in Penguin paperback - The Sandcastle (1957) and A Severed Head (1961); nearly two years later, at the start of my second year at University, I  bought The Flight from the Enchanter (1956). Re-reading the blurb on the backs of these Penguins, I dimly recall the story line of The Sandcastle, but not much else.


However, it was Murdoch's fourth novel, The Bell (1958) which I remembered (I thought) most clearly. I recently purchased a lovely dust-wrappered copy of the first edition and have just finished re-reading it.

Love, all kinds of love, is a constant and integral theme running through the novel. The Abbess, not encountered until towards the end of book, counsels Michael: 'Good is an overflow. Where we generously and sincerely intend it, we are engaged in a work of creation which may be mysterious even to ourselves - and because it is mysterious we may be afraid of it...we can only learn to love by loving. Remember that all our failures are ultimate failures in love. Imperfect love must not be condemned and rejected, but made perfect. The way is forward, never back'. There is a wide variety of love on display in the book: Peter Topglass's love for flora and fauna -  'he was a person who, like Chaucer's gentle knight, was remarkable for harming no one'; Paul's controlling 'love' for his wife; Mrs Mark's love of rules; Patchway's love for his garden; On Catherine, I was at one with Michael: 'he had never guessed, or tried to guess, what really went on in Catherine's mind'.  Her 'love' for him came out of the blue for me too! Is that my fault, or that of the novelist? Then, the kernel of the book, Michael's spiritual, and also carnal love (desire?) for Nick Fawley and, more fleetingly, for Toby Gashe.

Among other issues, The Bell addresses the religious and moral implications of homosexuality. Every novel Murdoch wrote after The Bell had at least one homosexual character. I hadn't realised, until many years later, that Iris Murdoch was bisexual, with several male and female affairs. Does this give verisimilitude to the descriptions of Michael's 'journey' - 'his belief that 'his religion and his passions sprang from the same source'? I found Chapter Seven (Michael's back-story) the most deeply felt of the book. Murdoch once told a friend that she inwardly identified with male homosexuals. Secondly, I had not grasped the historical context in which the novel was written. The Wolfenden Report was published in 1957; it concluded that criminalisation of homosexuality was an impingement on civil liberty. It also revealed the vocational tendencies of criminalised homosexuals to seek refuge through clerical and teaching positions. So very apt for Michael's career.

Bound up with love is power - the control exercised by Paul over Dora - 'his will arched over Dora like a canopy'; by both Nick and Toby ('for all his distaste for the situation he was sensible of a sort of pleasure in having gained power over Michael...') over Michael

The novel is book-ended by Dora Greenfield, a character I never warmed to; in fact, rather than feel compassion towards her, I felt irritated by her! whilst in no way excusing her vile husband, Paul.  Dora's view of marriage was, unsurprisingly, 'to be enclosed in the aims of another'. Says Noel Spens, her lover: 'you're unreliable and untidy and ignorant and totally exasperating...'. Maybe, at the end, 'Dora had survived. She had fed like a glutton upon the catastrophes at Imber and they had increased her substance.../', More substantial or not, I wanted to shake her throughout the book!

In Oxfam yesterday, I spotted (was it 'meant'?) and bought Peter Conradi's doorstop of a biography on Murdoch (2001) for a mere £3.99. I shouldn't have, but I did, read the pages relevant to The Bell. One should write one's own thoughts, however banal/commonplace. Still, there were some very helpful contextual points, which I didn't otherwise know. 'Michael, first of many muddled gay male 'seekers', is animated wonderfully from within: Iris's own search for peace of mind at Malling [Abbey]  from 1946 to 1949 lay behind the troubled quests of her leading characters.' Murdoch later admitted to identifying 'a little', with the Abbess, who, in the novel calls the Imber Court inmates a '"'kind of sick people disturbed and hunted by God", who can live neither in the world nor out of it.'

'Imber had retired from the world, but the world could still come to Imber to pry and mock and judge.' And a pretty harsh (but accurate?) judgement came from Noel Spens (who could not 'stand complacent swine who go around judging other people and making them feel cheap'): 'I don't think these people are consciously insincere, but they're just born to be charlatans malgré eux. I am sure there are all sorts of little feuds and delusions in this crackpot community...If people want to stop being ordinary useful members of society and take their neuroses to some remote spot to have what they imagine are spiritual experiences I'm certain they should be tolerated but I see no reason why they should be revered'. Earlier, Murdoch argues, 'Those who hope, by retiring from the world, to earn a holiday from human frailty, in themselves and others, are usually disappointed'. One feels this is the novelist's own credo. I think it is mine. Imber lasted just over a year.

There is much more that can be said; many more thoughts that I had as I read the book - on Nick Fawley; on James Tayper Pace; on the irony of reversal of roles - 'in the old days the Abbey used to be a curiosity in the grounds of the Court. Now the Court will be a curiosity in the grounds of the Abbey'. But already this Blog is too long.

Iris Murdoch (1919-1999)

My present view of Iris Murdoch has, alas, been coloured by two issues: the increasingly silly novels of her later years and the remorseless decline into Alzeimer's. For the former, I have to hand Christopher Hawtree's acerbic review of one of her last books, The Message to the Planet.(1989): 'Its themes are stated in [an] opening passage: silly names, dialogue never heard on the lips of one's acqaintance, possible lunacy... [a] torrent of twaddle'. I must admit, I had given up reading her, long before the 1980s, tiring of increasingly unrealistic characters. But I found The Bell well worth reading again.

Nostalgia over my Sixth Form years

I have kept two pages, torn from a Desk Diary, of a long list of Books read during (from January) my first Year Sixth (now Y12) and up to December of my second Year Sixth (Y13). Whether I read them all or not I am not sure; but nearly all of them have a tick besides their title.

Some I remember well (I have many of the books now); of others only a dim recollection remains.

1.   Tess of the D’Urbervilles (sad, V,G.)                 Thomas Hardy  

2.   Voss  (didn’t like it)                                            Patrick White       

3.   The Abbot                                                           Sir Walter Scott   

4.   Inspector West Cries Wolf  (Good)                     John Creasey       

5.   The Splendid Fairing  (Good)                             Constance Holme   

6.   Taras Bulba                                                          Nikolai Gogol       

7.   The Betrothed  (V. Good)                                    Alessandro Manzoni  
8.   Persuasion                                                            Jane Austen         

9.   The Old Road From Spain                                   Constance Holme  

10. A Farewell to Arms (Good)                                 Ernest Hemingway 

11. Inspector West Alone  (Good)                             John Creasey       

12. The Infamous Army  (Good)                               Georgette Heyer    

13. The Lost King  (Good)                                         Rafael Sabatini     

14. Sir Francis Drake                                                  J.A. Williamson       

15. The Private Life of Charles II                               Barbara Cartland                

16. Local Government                                                L. Golding              

17. The Reluctant Widow  (Good)                             Georgette Heyer

18. The Hermit of Ivry  (Fairly Good)                        M.R. H---                

19. Kenilworth                                                            Sir Walter Scott   

20. The Bright Sword  (Good)                                    Donald Chidsay   

21. Leopards and Lilies  (Very Good)                        Alfred Duggan     

22. John Burnet of Barns  (V.V. Good)                       John Buchan         

23. The Lady For Ransom  (Good)                             Alfred Duggan     

24. Flight to Arras  (Complex)                                    A de St. Exupery              

25. The Abbess of Vlaye                                             Stanley Weyman    

26. Geoffrey the Lollard                                              Frances Eastwood  

27. A Gentleman of France                                         Stanley Weyman    

28. Knight with Armour                                              Alfred Duggan  

29. Gentlemen in Black  (Poor)                                   Stanley Weyman

30. Katherine  (Extremely Good)                                Anya Seton

31. The Silver Chalice  (Very Good)                           Thomas Costain

32. A Prince for Inspector West                                   John Creasey

33. Ninety-three  (Good)                                              Victor Hugo

34. To Let  (Dull but Good)                                          John Galsworthy

35. Loving                                                                     Henry Greene

36. Cranmer & the Eng. Reformation                           F. Hutchinson

37. A Scholar of Lindisfarne                                         Gertrude Hollis

38. The Bishop’s Jaegers                                              Thorne Smith

39. John Knox                                                               Edwin Muir

40. My Lady Rotha                                                       Stanley Weyman

41. Under the Red Robe                                               Stanley Weyman

42. St. George For England                                          G.A. Henty

43. Diamonds are Forever                                             Ian Fleming

44. Richelieu                                                                 Richard Lodge

45. Gustavus Adolphus                                                 Cyril Fletcher

46. Long Will                                                                Florence Converse

47. Frenchman’s Creek                                                 Daphne du Maurier

48. The King’s General                                                 Daphne du Maurier

49. Barchester Towers                                                  Anthony Trollope

50. Hard Times                                                             Charles Dickens

51. Wuthering Heights                                                  Emily Brontë

52. Fortune’s Fool                                                         Rafael Sabatini

53. Midwinter                                                                John Buchan

54. The Greatness of Oliver Cromwell                         Maurice Ashley

55. Hatter’s Castle                                                         A.J. Cronin

56. Montrose                                                                 C.V. Wedgwood

John Creasey and Georgette Heyer were still regulars; Sir Walter Scott, Constance Holme, Alfred Duggan, Stanley Weyman and John Buchan were later to become authors I would collect in earnest.  I remember I hated Voss and found Galsworthy tedious. 

  

I shall be blogging about several of them during this year (Hard Times already). Others I have re-read in the last couple of years are the two Constance Holme novels The Splendid Fairing and The Old Road from Spain; Manzoni's The Betrothed;  Trollope's Barchester Towers; and John Buchan's Midwinter. 

Another taste of Shute

Most Secret:(written in 1942, but published in 1945) tells the story of four British officers, who take part in three raids off the Breton coast around Douarnenez. Nearly half of the book is taken up with the back-stories to the four main characters, each with good reason to hate the Germans. At first, I thought it was slowing the story down, with too much extraneous information. However, it meant you understood them, felt for them, by the time the actual raids took place. Shute had made them 'live', in that the reader felt part of the mission.

Charles Simon, half French and half English, but passionately fond of England, having been to public school there; desperate to be an English officer. Charles worked in ferro-concrete, whose focus on his work meant his marriage to an English girl lasted less than a year. Witnessing German brutality at first hand in France, he is a willing listener to an old French priest who talks to him: The Germans are not people like ourselves. They are creatures of the Devil, vowed to idolatry, and followers of Mithras...Lies and deceit in every form...and all the petty minor sins that weaken character these are the things that Germany has sown in Frenchmen... these are the weapons with which Germany fights wars. First they destroy the souls of men and then they occupy the country... they come from Satan and his messenger at Berchtesgaden. Charles' back-story takes up 50 pages. Towards the end of the novel, before giving himself up to the Germans, Charles says to the priest: We are lonely people, father, without homes or wives or families - not quite like other men.

Oliver Boden, son of a wool spinner in Bradford, spends most of his young life with Marjorie, whom he marries in October 1938. Two years later, she is killed in London during the Blitz. He was terribly, terribly bitter after the raid. His mission from then on is to kill Germans, depth charging U-boats, picturing how the hull would split, the lights go out, and the air pressure rise intolerably round trapped and drowning men. That was the line of thought that gave him most real pleasure at that time.

Michael Rhodes, son of a doctor in Derby, who died when he was fifteen. Shy and awkward with women, colour blind, and bitter at having to put down a faithful dog, Ernest, in order, as he thought, to join the RNVR. Later he cares for a rabbit, Geoffrey, which is killed in another German air raid; the body was unmarked, the fur unruffled... it was just another little drop to swell the flood of misery that comes from war. 

The Wren, Barbara Wright, whom Rhodes gets close to (and later engaged to) poignantly muses: I suppose someday there'll be a world again where people can live quietly, and fall in love, and get married, and have fun. Where you can keep a rabbit or a dog - or a husband, and not have to stand by and see them killed. Where you can think of other things than burning oil, and rain, and darkness and black bitter hate.

Lieutenant John Colvin, older than the others, married five or six times, with a marine career that had taken in Chile, Panama, the West Indies, and whose one link with his most recent 'wife' was a watch with her name on the back. He brought to the plan his story of a flame thrower used by a rum-runner during Prohibition off Cape Cod, back in 1927.

Each man brings different and very relevant skills. Not until page 147 (out of 287) does the first of the raids take place, using the French tug-boat Geneviève, equipped with a very nasty flame-thrower to destroy German Raumboots. Thanks to our, by now, deep knowledge of the four men - their characters, their bitterness, what made them 'tick' - it feels as if we are with them through all the vicissitudes of the next few dangerous months. The reader suffers with them, understands the virtual martyrdoms of, first Oliver Boden, then Charles Simon; and shares the hopes of Rhodes and Barbara, Colvin and Junie for whatever the future might hold 

It is a book very much of its times - in 1941, when the action is set, it was not certain that the Allies would win the war; but the tide was slowly turning. Ordinary men and women, like those portrayed in the novel, were able to demonstrate, by psychological as well as military means, that the Germans would one day be beaten back. At one point, Shute writes, Bitterness had warped most of the rest of them. The novel does not paste in cardboard characters but portrays 'real' people.The reader can totally understand their pain as well as their bravery.

A rash of Nevil Shute

It's like a garden, this place, he said sullenly, It all runs that smooth and rich. An' up there [the North], where Ah come from, there's the workers sweating in the factories. In the half-dark and the rain, and never to see the sun clear, for the sky's that mucky. He eyed me dourly. Conditions what you've never dreamed of. You come up north, and Ah'll show you something.

No. it's not another extract from Hard Times, but from a very different novel: Nevil Shute's So Disdained (1928).    

                                 Nevil Shute (1899-1960)

I had a rash of collecting Shute's books, in Pan paperbacks, in the late 1960s and early 1970s. I have ten of them, seven of them written prior to 1950, when the Shute family moved to Australia. Although I have Slide Rule (1954) - his autobiography; The Rainbow and the Rose (1958) and Trustee from the Toolroom (1960); I did not purchase, and have never read, perhaps his most famous novels - A Town Like Alice (1950), On the Beach (1957) or Requiem for a Wren (1953), the former two being made into highly regarded movie films. Nearly fifty years have passed since I read those ten, but I recall enjoying the narrative drive of a good story-teller. 

So Disdained was written before the rise of Hitler and when the major threat to Britain appeared to come from the Soviet Union. Moreover, the General Strike had occurred only a couple of years before and there were suspicions about the infiltration of socialist groups by the Russians. Years later in his The Far Country (1952) and In the Wet (1953), Shute makes clear his dislike of Socialism, which is bleeding England dry. The Nitter brothers, both Communists from Bradford, in So Disdained, are in fact rather different from each other. John, who keeps the hairdressing establishment had been 'softened' by living in the south for a decade, whereas his clever brother, Stephen - all edges and rough corners - was succinctly summed up in the quotation at the top of this blog. Stephen fits naturally into the main theme of the novel - the development of secret weaponry, political and social subversion, espionage and counter espionage.

Peter Moran (who narrates the story), who had flown in the Great War, is now an agent  caring for the estate of Under in West Sussex. One wet night, he picks up a fellow pilot, Maurice Lenden, who is a mercenary who has forced landed his plane nearby. He had taken photographs of a naval construction in Portsmouth Harbour. Moran shelters Lenden and hides his plane. The quandry facing Moran is that which E.M. Forster expressed: If I had to choose between my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.  Lenden is not a friend, but he is part of that comradeship of the skies. Moran, in some ways, betrays both Lenden and his country: he does not report the man but secretly exposes the photographic plates to render them useless.

The story builds to a climax. When Lenden pursues Stephen Nitter and another Communist to Italy, Moran uses the former's aeroplane  to follow. The final scene - an attack on the communists' lair, with the support of local Italian fascists, leads to Lenden's death. He redeems himself by smashing the plates just before dying, not knowing they were already useless. It is telling that, whereas the communists are definitely the 'baddies', the fascists are pictured in a positive light. Winston Churchill was an admirer of Fascism until quite late in the day, as were many other high-ranking British politicians.

Sheila Darle, niece of the owner of the estate, provides what little romance is in the book. However, again, the issue of loyalty is posed. She chooses to support Moran's actions, even though she is soon aware of everything. By the end of the novel, their mutual love declared, it is clear she and Moran will get married. Lady Arner and Mollie, Lenden's wife, play but bit parts. 

The story is quite a slight, simple tale (perhaps spoiled on a couple of occasions by too detailed an account of aircraft engines, for the average reader); but its setting is a very realistic one for 1928. It poses questions about honour, loyalty, friendship and love. Shute is still finding his feet as a novelist, but the story line flows well and coherently.

Charles Hamilton Sorley and Marlborough

Whereas few will not have heard of Rupert Brooke (I am afraid the more books I have read about him, the less I like him), the name Charles Hamilton Sorley may not 'ring many bells'. He was born in Old Aberdeen on 19th May 1895, but from 1900 onwards his home was in Cambridge. He was a schoolboy at Marlborough College from September 1908 until December 1913. Although he was elected to a scholarship at University College, Oxford University, the outbreak of the Great War put paid to that. Like so many others of his generation, he gave his life for his country: gazetted a Second Lieutenant in the Suffolk Regiment in August 1914, Lieutenant in November and Captain in August 1915, he was killed in action (shot by a sniper when leading his platoon near Loos) on the Western Front on 13th October of that year. The 'long littleness of life' applied to him, too.

I have a copy of the third edition of Marlborough and other Poems, published with illustrations in prose in October 1916 (the first edition was January 1916) by his father W.R. Sorley. I also have a paperback edition, published by Yogh & Thorn Books in August 2010, entitled Death and the Downs. And it is to those Downs that I go, rather than to Sorley's war poetry (perhaps they are for another time). Having once lived in Marlborough for over a decade and retaining familial links with it for sixty years - I was there again yesterday - it is natural that his early poems resonate with me the most. He, like John Meade Falkner, Anthony Hope Hawkins and other literary lights, revelled in the chalk downland that lay to the north of the college and Savernake Forest immediately to the South. I too, spent hours exploring, tramping that countryside, returning home exhausted (often drenched) but in seventh heaven.
Here is an extract Sawley's poem of 1st March 1914, simply entitled Marlborough.

Crouched where the open upland billows down
      Into the valley where the river flows,
She is as any other country town,
      That little lives or marks or hears or knows...

I, who have walked along her downs in dreams,
      And known her tenderness, and felt her might,
And sometimes by her meadows and her streams
      Have drunk deep-storied secrets of delight,...

I, who have lived, and trod her lovely earth,
      Raced with her winds and listened to her birds,
Have cared but little for their worldly worth
      Nor sought to put my passions into words.   

Marlborough High Street

And, an untitled poem, from the Western Front on 12 July 1915,

And soon, O soon, I do not doubt it,
With the body or without it,
We shall all come tumbling down
To our old wrinkled red-capped town.
Perhaps the road up Ilsley way,
The old ridge-track, will be my way.
High up among the sheep and sky,
Look down on Wantage, passing by,
And see the smoke from Swindon town;
And then full left at Liddington,
Where the four winds of heaven meet
The earth-blest traveller to greet.
And then my face is toward the south,
There is a singing on my mouth:
Away to rightward I descry
My Barbury ensconced in sky,
Far underneath the Ogbourne twins,
And at my feet the thyme and whins,
The grasses with their little crowns
Of gold, the lovely Aldbourne downs,
And that old signpost (well I knew
That crazy signpost, arms askew,
Old mother of the four grass ways).
And then my mouth is dumb with praise,
For, past the wood and chalkpit tiny,

A glimpse of Marlborough ερατεινή !

So I descend beneath the rail
To warmth and welcome and wassail.

So, so poignant.

Note: I must look again at Richard Jefferies' work (Sorley admired him greatly); also at Edward Thomas, W.H. Hudson and Alfred Williams.

 

Sissy's triumph: Charles Dickens's 'Hard Times'

I finished Dickens' Hard Times a couple of hours ago, and I am still not entirely sure what to write about it or, even, think about it. On the one hand its didactic pummeling of the reader, the polemical stance it takes can grind one down. It appears the work of a journalist rather than a novel writer. And yet, why shouldn't it react to, and portray, the 'town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it; but, as matters stood, it was a town of unnatural red and black, like the painted face of a savage'; a town which could only offer 'all the year round, from the dawn of Monday to the night of Saturday, the whirr of shafts and wheels' - there were hundred such conurbations in 1850s England; why shouldn't the author reveal 'one of the many small streets for which the favourite undertaker (who turned a handsome sum out of the one poor ghastly pomp of the neighbourhood) kept a black ladder, in order that those who had done their daily groping up and down the narrow stairs, might slide out of this working world by the windows', when there were thousands suchlike streets in reality; and why shouldn't the pudding be slightly over-egged by describing Mr. Gradgrind - a man of facts and calculations - as seeming 'like a kind of cannon loaded to the muzzle with facts, and prepared to blow them (the boys and girls in his school) clean out of the regions of childhood at one discharge.' Many Gradgrinds existed in Victorian England.

      

   

                       Charles Dickens (1812-1870)                  Gradgrind and children

The unrelenting perfidy of young Thomas Gradgrind; Bitzer's 'unwholesomely deficient [skin] in the natural tinge, that he looked as though, if he were cut, he would bleed white'; that 'ill-made, high-shouldered [Slackbridge] with lowering brows, and his features crushed into an habitually sour expression' who is to destroy, with Bounderby, Stephen Blackpool's life (yes, too idealised, too sentimentalised, too much of a martyr - Trollope's Dickens as Mr Popular Sentiment hits home here); all these images crowd our minds as we read on into an evermore depressing story.

Bounderby? what a man! 'It was one of the most exasperating attributes of Bounderby that he not only sang his own praises, but stimulated other men to sing them. There was a moral infection of clap-trap in him.' Lucy changes; Mr Gradgrind changes; one could argue Harthouse, however reluctantly, changes. Bounderby does not - dying of a fit in the Coketown street five years after the novel ends. Bitzer does not change, well-schooled as he was in Gradgrind's classroom; young Tom does not, until, dying thousands of miles away, 'writing, on paper blotted with tears, that [Louisa's] words had too soon come true...'.

And yet - there is Sissy (Cecilia to Gradgrind) Jupe. Thankfully, she does not change. She refuses to be, and is not, cowed by Gradgrind, Facts or Coketown. From our meeting of her in Gradgrind's classroom, 'so dark-eyed and dark-haired that she seemed to receive a deeper and more lustrous colour from the sun when it shone upon her' to the book's conclusion where 'happy Sissy's happy children loving her [Louisa]; ..' She is, in some ways the one positive thread throughout the narrative: she sustains Rachel, she transforms Lucy; she mellows Gradgrind; she transports Hartshorne.

George Bernard Shaw wrote, in his introduction to a 1912 edition of the novel - '[it] was written to make you uncomfortable...'          It has certainly done that.

Just the one Jarndyce

There are two stimuli to this post: firstly, I am reading Dickens' Hard Times, for the first time since studying it for 'A' level; secondly, I heard last year that another splendid antiquarian bookshop has closed - Colin Page in Brighton (with its wonderful 'batcave' in the back yard, where I found and bought the six Folio Society volumes of Trollope's Barchester series for £24.00)). Oh for the time when one could spend a day, not just in Hay-on-Wye, but in Bath, Edinburgh or York, going from one Aladdin's Cave to another. Those were the days of Driff's self-published, and very successful, guide to All The Secondhand and Antiquarian Bookshops in Britain. Witty, with a huge dollop of sarcasm, there were at least five editions, dated 1984, 1987, 1991, 1992 and 1995. For a while, it became my pocket 'Bible'. Now, what the Internet did not destroy, pernicious Business Rates have virtually finished. It means that one has to frequent PBFA and ABA book fairs, where one often feels like a scavenger at stalls rather than a privileged and valued customer, even a 'friend'.

Thank goodness for Cecil Court and Charing Cross Road and, yes, much of Hay-on-Wye - and for the last bastians (fortalices?!) in York, Eastbourne (dear Camilla with her pink plastic bags) and Edinburgh; and, above all for Jarndyce, since 1969 selling books and publishing catalogues (they are treasured on a bookshelf here) on 18th and 19th century English Literature and History. They have furnished me with some wonderful hours of reading material: in the last few years I have purchased from them

Major Michel's Trevor Hastings (1842); Lady Georgiana Fullerton's A Stormy Life (Tauchnitz ed. 1867); Rev. Francis Paget's Milford Malvoisin (2nd. ed. 1842); Emily Holt's At Ye Grene Griffin (1882); Charlotte Yonge's Two Penniless Princesses (1891); Rev. Morgan's Raymond de Monthault (1853); Miss Sandham's The History of Elizabeth Woodville (1822); Susan Ferrier's Marriage (2nd. ed. 1819).

Great Russell Street may well hold the British Museum; but I turn right more often than I do left, when I approach from Tottenham Court Road.

London it is, then, in early March. Meanwhile, back to finishing Hard Times. 

Confessions of a Buchan Bibliophile

                I confess. When other boys at my boarding school were reading Lady Chatterley’s Lover by torchlight under the bed clothes, I was devouring The Island of Sheep. Perhaps The Blanket of the Dark would have been more appropriate. I still have those dozen Buchan Penguins; little did they realise what eggs they hatched. Apparently, I was one of the 130,000 who had bought Greenmantle by June 1964. I wonder how many of those readers have since also succumbed to the seductions of Bibliomania.

           

            It’s a disease that can lie relatively dormant for years, then creep up on you and finally take remorseless hold - rather like baldness. I know. Buchan once shared equal shelf space with Weyman and Meade Falkner, Robert Louis Stevenson and Sir Walter; even, and I blush to admit it, Georgette Heyer. But in the space of two years, I moved to the Midlands, I married, and I started to collect Buchan with vigour. Perhaps this was my mid-life crisis. 

           

            Those early years were in some ways the most exciting - I was just ahead of the field. I picked up first editions of The Thirty-Nine Steps and Greenmantle for ten pounds and one pound respectively. I visited Aladdin’s caves that have long since been walled in, like Voltaire & Rousseau in Glasgow.  I discovered, literally on my hands and knees in the gloomiest corner of McCutcheon’s bookshop in Stirling, J.B’s first major work in print - his edited Essays and Apothegms of Francis, Lord Bacon - for 50p. Montrose I found in Newbury, Raleigh in Burton-on-Trent, Lord Minto in Bristol and Augustus in Altrincham. I made acquaintance with some of the ‘characters’ of the book trade - Michael Moon, just starting out in Beckermet [before opening his emporium in Whitehaven], who provided me with the first edition of The Watcher by the Threshold for a mere three pounds; Alex Frizzel of West Linton, who could always be relied on to produce the rare pamphlet or the unusual title; and the Taubenheims of Burford, who had a whole shelf of JB and who kindly acted as intermediaries when I wanted all my Alice Buchan books signed. I have searched in a converted chapel in Inverness, a redundant school in Hastings and a country house in Weedon; descended cellars in Edinburgh and Charing Cross Road and attics in Kendal and Brighton; turned a blind eye to the glories of Bath, York and Edinburgh as I raced from one bibliopole to another. I have criss-crossed Britain for Buchan.

           

            There have been troughs and peaks. One erudite bookseller, on Primrose Hill I recall, when asked if he had any Buchan replied in a stentorian voice: “We tend not to stock schoolboy fiction”, much to my wife’s and other browsers’ amusement and my chagrin. Another maintained never to have heard of him and suggested I might have mistaken the name for Buchanan. One book selling buffer - I can see him now athwart his stock in Belsize Park - claimed when asked for any title, that it was “in the cellar”, but he never had the key on him. My spirits were moderately lifted in Oakham, when after the inevitable request, the bookseller replied: “Buchan? No, we only deal with the sewage end of the market in here”. He had evacuated when I next passed through.

           

            Collecting Buchan has introduced me to Roy Court of Bannatyne Books, Michael Ross of Avonworld Books, John Smith (of Second Edition) and Andrew Pringle in Edinburgh; it has taken me to mere sheds in Kirkwall and Braithwaite and converted cinemas in Hay-on-Wye and Crieff. I have learned the present names behind 'John Updike' of Edinburgh and 'Maurice Dodd' of Carlisle; I have mixed with the famous at Sotherans and Maggs Bros., Bertram Rota and Blackwell’s; consumed coffee in Uppingham and taken tea in the wilds of Buckinghamshire.

           

            Now, the internet courses through my bibliophile veins: from New Zealand and South Africa, from Australia and Canada, and, above all, from the USA, have come padded packets, large and small, usually squirreled away before the rest of the household has awoken. Few postmen earn their Christmas bonus more deservedly.    

           

            Andrew Lang’s cautionary tale - A Bookman’s Purgatory - in Longman’s Magazine for September 1883, has an awful resonance for me. Lang’s Thomas Blinton 'was a book-hunter. He had always been a book-hunter, ever since, at an extremely early age, he had awakened to the errors of his ways as a collector of stamps and monograms'.  Blinton walked from the City to West Kensington every day, to beat the covers of the bookstalls, while other men travelled in the expensive cab or the unwholesome Metropolitan Railway. As some plots have an anti-hero, so Lang’s tale has an anti-moral. Shocked by a nightmare where his books are all sold cheaply, Blinton awakes to a repentance that lasted but a week - 'when he was discovered marking a catalogue, surreptitiously before breakfast'.

           

            Once a collector, always a collector. Like Blinton, like Lang, I have sinned, and struggled, and fallen. I have thrown catalogues, unopened, into the waste bin. I have driven past Hay-on-Wye without stopping. I have ignored Bookfinder, AddAll and the Clique on the Internet for at least two days. But then the fatal moment of temptation: Hermes arrives hotfoot in the guise of an innocuous e-mail, Mercury is on the telephone - “We don’t think you have this Buchan....”  apage Satanas? No - beati possidentes.

Musings on my 'A' Level English: Paper IV (The Novel)

I still have all my 'A' Level Examination papers and have extracted my English Paper IV (The Novel) from my 'archives'. There were twelve books listed for study, but our English teacher sensibly cut the number in half: those chosen were Dickens Hard Times; Emily Brontë Wuthering Heights; Trollope Barchester Towers; Hardy Tess of the D'Urbervilles; E.M. Forster Room with a View; and Virginia Woolf To the Lighthouse.

   

                   A Level English Classroom                                  Sixth Former

The course essays I wrote are before me now:
Varieties of power seeking form an important element in Trollope's entertainment, but they are not the whole. Discuss.
By what means does Hardy make the particular fate of Tess appear an organic part of the universal he is describing?
Room with a View supports and shows the victory of Emerson's values. Discuss.
What is remarkable about Wuthering Heights is its unity. Discuss.
The whole of Hard Times is directed to the rebuttal of all that Bounderby stands for. Discuss.

The questions on the actual Examination Paper were, of course, different:
3. What theme or themes do you think that Dickens was presenting in Hard Times, and with what success?
4. 'The method of narration is clumsy; both characters and episodes are often melodramatically unreal; the style is often atrocious.' Examine one or more of these strictures on Wuthering Heights, and explain how for most readers the greatness of the book as a whole triumphs over its alleged defects.
5. What are the attractions of Barchester Towers for readers of today?
8. 'Hardy was a countryman of genius, who both thought and felt always with all the countryman's strength and some of his limitations.' Does your reading of Tess of the D'Urbervilles incline you to agree with this judgement?
10. 'But the book doesn't get anywhere.' Explain to the complainant what he is missing in A Room with A View, or, if you agree with him, explain why.
11. Write a letter to someone who finds it hard to appreciate Virginia Woolf, trying to make appreciation easier.
13. 'It makes keener the enjoyment of a novel if we can imagine ourselves into the "climate", intellectual and social, in which the characters are moving.' Discuss.

I tackled numbers 3, 10 and 13. As for Virginia, my stream of consciousness was never more than a trickle; and Hard Times in class was with her novel. On the other hand, I recall those two years (also studying Chaucer's  The Franklin's Tale; Milton's Paradise Lost IX and X; and Shakespeare's King Lear and King John) with nostalgic affection. Happy days.

Sir Walter Scott's 'Guy Mannering'

I finished reading Scott's Guy Mannering late this morning - real 'meat' betwixt breakfast and a scanty lunch. Such a book warms the cockles of one's heart.
(As an aside, apparently the phrase dates back to the mid-1600s, a time when scientific texts were often written in Latin. The Latin term cochleae cordis means ventricles of the heart, and most probably, the word cochleae was corrupted as cockles. This may have been a mistake made by the less learned, or a deliberate joke. Add in the fact that the bivalve mollusk known as a cockle is shaped somewhat like a heart, and the idea of the phrase cockles of one’s heart being more or less a joke gains credence. Believe this as you may.)

   

                        First Edition -1815                             Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832)

John Buchan, in his magisterial biography of Sir Walter (March 1932) argues that Lovers of Scott will always dispute which is his best novel, but all will put Guy Mannering among the first three. Apparently, it was written in six weeks and there are certainly blemishes: the hero may inspire other characters in the tale, but hardly the reader; Julia Mannering and Lucy Bertram fail to raise the pulse; and Dominie Sampson, whilst an 'original', can bore with his repetition. For me, Meg Merrilies lingers long after one has put the novel away: she flits between the pages and on her deathbed inscribes her epitaph: When I was in life, I was the mad randy gypsey, that had been hounded like a stray tyke from parish to parish - wha would hae minded her word? - But now I am a dying woman, and my words will not fall to the ground, and more than the earth will cover my blood! 
The lawyer Pleydell is a fascinating character and the scenes in Edinburgh - at Clerihugh's tavern, where he held his hebdomadal carousals; and at the reading of old Miss Margaret Bertram's will, where a lugubrious company of cousins in the third, fourth, fifth , and sixth degree stood in hope... (the principal expectants), and the subsequent  cortege - six starved horses, themselves the very emblems of mortality, well cloaked and plumed, lugging along the hearse with its dismal emblazonry -  are comic masterpieces. Scott has his fun with the law and lawyers, too: Law's like laudanum; it's much more easy to use it as a quack does, than to learn to apply it like a physician.
Dandie Dinmont rivals Pleydell as a round and believable figure. As Buchan says - wherever he appears he humanizes the scene, for he is triumphant humanity...when he appears we feel a sense of security...

Scott's narrative drive is first-rate; his cast of minor characters - Sir Robert Hazelwood, Macmorlan, the Mac-Guffogs, Mrs MacCandlish - are believable and add to the story-line. Glossin and Dirk Hatteraick fulfil their roles as villains splendidly. The various descriptions of the landscape in the Lake District and the coastal south-west of Scotland provide powerful backcloths to the tale.

I finished the novel all the better for having read it - a true romance.

A tiny footnote: I was surprised to read the following: ...a frolicksome humour much cherished by the whiskey which in Scotland is always put in circulation upon such occasions.  Whisky is the anglicised form of the Gaelic word uisge beatha (pronounced “oosh-kie bah”). Gaelic is native to both Ireland and Scotland, so it's hard to say where the E came from, but one now associates it with the Irish (and Americans) rather than the Scots.

Susan Hill - an Inspiration

Wednesday, 12th February 2020

My daughter gave me Susan Hill's Howards End is on the Landing (Profile Books, 2010 pbk.) for Christmas. I read it over a couple of evenings and was empathetically (?!) inspired by its first four paragraphs:

It began like this. I went to the shelves on the landing to look for a book I knew was there. It was not. But plenty of others were and among them I noticed at least a dozen I realised I had never read.
I pursued the elusive book through several rooms and did not find it in any of them, but each time I did find at least a dozen, perhaps two dozen, perhaps two hundred, that I had never read.
And then I picked out a book I had read but had forgotten I owned. And another and another. After that came the books I had read, knew I owned and realised that I wanted to read again.
I found the book I was looking for in the end, but by then it had become far more than a book. It marked the start of a journey through my own library.

  

Susan Hill (1942-       )

Like Susan Hill, I want real books, printed on paper and bound in board and covered in cloth.

Susan Hill ended her book with The Final Forty - I assume her 'top' books, the most beloved, inspirational, 'important'? There are many I haven't read, let alone own; others which are/would be on my own list; only a few I have read and disliked, one intensely. It led to me compiling my Forty (actually, only thirty-five so far) and I intend to read as many of them again as I can.

Towards the end of the last century, I had a period of collecting Sir Walter Scott's novels in first edition (don't three-deckers take up shelf room!). None cost me over much. I read, with actual enjoyment, several of the less-regarded ones - The Abbot, The Monastery, The Betrothed, The Talisman, The Fortunes of Nigel - as well as Quentin Durward, Ann of Geierstein, Woodstock. Strangely, only Ivanhoe defeated me - I got as far as midway through the first volume. This century, I added The Antiquary and Guy Mannering. Now, I only need the first series of Tales of My Landlord and Waverley (too expensive for me) to complete my set of first editions.

I have just read the first two volumes of Guy Mannering and will commence the final volume this evening. One needs time to savour Scott - preferably with a wee dram of single malt Scotch. I shall report anon on Guy and the other characters.