Two Mendip Stories

I have always been partial to what are, often disparagingly, called 'Regional Novels' - more particularly rural regional novels.  Hence my liking for Trollope's Barchester tales and for Thomas Hardy; while my Collection fields include Constance Holme (Westmorland), Mary Webb (Shropshire), early John Buchan (the Scottish Lowlands) and, more recently and increasingly, Scottish nineteenth century fiction. Every so often, I get down one of my 'Bibles' from an upper shelf - Ernest Baker's A Guide to Historical Fiction (George Routledge, 1914). I have mined it heavily for long-forgotten nuggets, usually relating to the Anarchy (1135-1154) and the 14th and 15th centuries.  Knowing I am soon to embark on a mammoth Scottish reading journey, I turned to possible English-based scenarios. I found two books which fitted the bill for a couple of reasons: firstly, they are based in one of my favourite periods, the 19th century; and, secondly, they are set in the Mendips of Somerset. Both of my parents came from the area, and I lived there for three years in my early teens.

I alighted on two books, which I purchased in first edition. Walter Raymond's Two Men o' Mendip (Longmans, Green, 1899) and Under Cheddar Cliffs (Seeley, 1903) by Edith Seeley. Baker summarised the first as: Lawless and uncivilized character, and strong, elemental passion, are the basis of this tragedy of country life. It represents a state of things that actually existed a century ago among the lead-miners near Cheddar and their unfriendly neighbours, the farmers. The picturesque scenery of the Mendip Hills, and the traits of speech and manners, are depicted with familiar knowledge.

Walter Raymond (1852-1931)

Raymond was born in Yeovil and remained a Somerset man all his life. His novels, written between 1888 and 1928, were based on Somerset rural life and they were praised by contemporary critics for their ‘simplicity and wholesomeness’. One recent commentator remarks that the books were very simply written with no convoluted plots or wordy descriptions. Nevertheless, his spontaneous and charming style was well suited to Somerset country life, the chief subject of his writing, and garnered him much critical acclaim. He also wrote under the pseudonym Tom Cobbleigh.

First edition - 1899

Now to Two Men o' Mendip. I must admit, I did not take heed of Baker's phrase this tragedy of country life. Tragedy there certainly is, as the tale contains two murders, two hangings (one for a murder, the other for sheep stealing) and a death through a broken heart. I was not really prepared for three of them. The story is set over exactly one year, from April 1813 to April 1814 (with ne'er a squeak about the Napoleonic War!) It concerns Little Patty Winterhead, short in stature, slight in figure, and little in limb. She lives with her father, John - a man every inch of him, in the very prime of life, and firm and sound as an oak tree - in Charterhouse Farm nigh on Cheddar Gorge. Aged 20, coming on 21, she has never had a boyfriend or been in love.  Her emotions are all bound up with her Vather, who was so fond o' me as ever his heart can hold. All is set to change. She finds love with young Giles Standerwick, a groover (lead miner) and the unfolding tragedy pits father against lover - the Two Men o' Mendip - towards a grim conclusion.

Other well-drawn characters include Solomon Moggridge, the constable, whom Nature had blessed with a good disposition and a flat fallow-field of a face, which art had fenced around with a hedgerow of ragged whisker; Sophia Pierce, as tall as a maypole and hard as a nail...her long face was thin and sharp as a hatchet, with a prominent chin and a nose like a reaping hook; Aunt Maria who was really a-most as big as a house; 

There's more than a sprinkling of Zummerzet phrases and words, but not overbearingly so. Such as Let's go up along the road an' zee if anybeddy is a-coming.  There's plenty of humour in the exchanges: "'Tes," "Iss 'tes." "Zo 'tes." I had to look up a few words in my two-volumed Dictionary of Obsolete and Provincial English, compiled by Thomas Wright (Bohn, 1857)

e.g. stumpole - thick head; dough-fig - turkey ; gilauffers - sweet williams;  caddle - scolding; libbets - rags in strips; dimmet - twilight; tutty - nosegay.

The very last paragraph in the novel, as well as the feeling of cruel nature's law, reminds one to a certain extent of Thomas Hardy: And still the ancient, weather-beaten rocks look down, cold and unchangeable, as if human love and passion, sorrow and tears, are all too brief to be of moment in the vast immensity of time. Poor Tess; poor Little Patty Winterhead.

Baker has this to say about the second Somerset novel, Under Cheddar Cliffs: Life among the ignorant and brutal lead-miners, farmers, and village-folk of the Mendip Hills in Somerset. Hannah More (1745-1833) is introduced, with her efforts to reform them; and William Wilberforce (1759-1833) just appears.

First edition - 1903

Although the topographical area is exactly the same, with several hamlets appearing in both novels, Edith Seeley has a very different thrust (purpose?) to Raymond's book. The latter is what might be portrayed as being entirely 'secular' in outlook and narrative, with tragedy looming over its ending; this, while not exactly didactic, is framed on an evangelical  canvas: William Wilberforce starts the story, Hannah More and her sister prod it along and it ends with a paean to 'the Master' as 'tis the way the best work is done. On two counts it comes across as quite natural: the story is, after all, accurate as to how two real sisters brought the Christian message to the uncouth miners and, to a lesser extent, farmers of the Cheddar area; moreover, one hundred years later Seeley represented a still strongish strain of fervour in the 'church militant' Occasionally, the piety grates, but that's as much the fault of the 21st century reprobate reader!

As with Raymond, Seeley can draw realistic characters from the inhabitants of the farming and mining communities. Here she is on the latter: they were a savage and benighted race, and if report speaks truly, the money earned underground by day was for the most part squandered at night in orgies of a disgusting description. Such had been the traditional custom for many generations; and ass the grimy, savage-looking company crept forth like rabbits from their burrows, and their uncouth figures threw strange and weird shadows along the ground, the repulsive sight made the spectator long for the quiet and more lonely landscape of the working hours. The former are well described in the various members of the Westover family: 23 year-old Lawrence, the eldest son back from a ten year escape to the sea, now to settle on the old family farm; ousting Noll (Oliver), who had expected the inheritance and who was more a chip off the recently dead brute of a father; the widowed mother, with plenty of steel in her backbone and deep knowledge of the individual members of her large brood; Dorcas, the sister who was not a soft and delicate maiden, and hysteria was a word and a complaint of which she knew nothing. Lawrence found that many of the Cheddar folks held him in suspicion and doubt, and were apt to seem averse to taking him into their confidence. His ways were not their ways...his walk, his talk, and his notions astonished them; they had yet to learn whether he was not a secret emissary of those dreaded powers, the justices and the constables, or a spy of the Government. 

Then there are (very) old Jacob Carson, deaf as a post, who lives with his son (just) old Joe, a thieving rogue whose wife had been hanged and whose daughter had drowned herself; and equally old  Nancy Sponge, who lived in an even more tumbledown cottage hidden away from society, with her little wizen face, burnt almost to a cinder, her sharp little eyes, and her toothless mouth which had a weird but not altogether repellant effect on those who met her; and her lodgers, Carrol Sandford, a young reprobate gone to the dogs, and his sister Joyce, who a decade previously had sworn eternal friendship with Lawrence. The love story, as there must be, rises above the brutality and coarseness of others' lives and above the rather treacly evangelical tinge (especially in the final few pages - the last chapter is entitled A Holy Day), and comes to a happy ending (unlike Raymond's tale) after much trial and tribulation.

Both Raymond and Seeley are good at narrative, have created realistic characters and set them in well described scenery. They have tempted me to buy yet another book soon, Under the Mendips by Emma Marshall (1889). We shall see!

'The whole wide beauty' by Emily Woof

Reading this novel was a departure from my usual fare - it deals with familial life and an extra-marital affair in our contemporary world. I found the book by 'lateral' decisions rather than lateral thinking. Having read Thomas Hardy's The Woodlanders, I recalled the DVD I had bought a few years previously and promptly watched it - with considerable enjoyment. The part of Grace Melbury was played by Emily Woof. I dimly recalled her name from somewhere else so, as is my wont, I looked her up on Wikipedia. By now the 26 year-old was married, with children and had reached 53!

Woof has written well (she studied English at Oxford University) about the effect on her life of being cast in the film. I survived on the dole and the small income from performing my shows, so immersed in my work that I was oblivious to other ways of living. I was 26 and everything was about to change. Knowing nothing of film acting, she watched Michael Caine's video about the craft and tried to remember one piece of advice not to look at the camera. She got the role. I was not so much pretending to be Grace Melbury as pretending to be an actor altogether. From shooting The Woodlanders, she got the role of Robert Carlyle's wife in The Full Monty. The film world, she says had seduced her; she might become rich, even very rich. But the parts she got were nice girls. I was asked to play good girls, girl-next-door girls and girlfriend girls. She did publicity shots and adverts, but realised she wasn't happy. She felt she had lost her creativity, she felt unsettled and even depressed. She missed the enjoyment of language, the gathering of thoughts and material.

This all leads up to her first novel: It is not surprising that Katherine, the main character in my first novel, The Whole Wide Beauty, is adrift in her life, alienated from some deeper part of herself. In some senses, this is what it was like for me in the world of movies.

1st American edition 2010

It is often assumed that all first novels are to some extent autobiographical and the realism - and intensity - of Woof's feels just that. It is essentially the story of a father and a daughter: David Freeman is the charismatic director  of the Broughton Poetry Foundation, a driven man with an intense passion for his work. Emily's father, Robert Woof (1931-2005) was the charismatic, and first,  director of the Wordsworth Trust and Museums Director of the Wordsworth Museum at Dove Cottage in Grasmere. Broughton is in Northumberland, not Cumbria, but the achievements and dedication of both men, fictitious and real, are remarkably aligned. Both even came from Lancashire! 

The daughter, Katherine, has a fraught relationship with her father, feeling neglected from an early age. As the synopsis on the book's wrapper says, she had abandoned her career as a dancer, and she is muffled by motherhood and a conventional marriage. She embarks on a passionate affair with one of her father's poets, Stephen Jericho. Both their marriages start to creak but it is Katherine who finally questions the depth of the illicit romance. Towards the end of the novel, she goes on an emotional journey - her father is now dying of cancer (as did Robert Woof) - back to the north, to her family and a final rapprochement with her father. Emily Woof admits that she reworked part of her life story and bereavement for her father into the novel. I think it was a way of continuing the conversation with my father, initially...I found it so liberating...I seemed almost to embody him, to feel him, and a character came out of that process. The novel is dedicated to her (late) father.

Near the end of the book, Katherine's lover Stephen recites part of his latest poem at a Broughton Event. Katherine's father feels the poem held a new intelligence... It was the raw excavation of the human need for love and the struggle to sustain it. I felt that this was the key to the book. In an interview related to her second novel, The Lightning Tree (2015), Woof says, I think how we calibrate different kinds of love in our lives is probably the question I am most intrigued by. She certainly explores, and effectively so, the 'loves' between daughter and father, husbands and wives, brothers-in-law, carnal and spiritual love, even bringing in David's inner turmoil over his love that dared not speak its name, except in his very private poetry.  But the book is not just about human love for each other, but the love of poetry and life itself. I am glad I read it, even if Emily Woof is still Grace Melbury in my mind!

   

Emily Woof (1967-    )

   

'Decision at Delphi' and 'The Venetian Affair' by Helen MacInnes

With these two books, written at the beginning of the 1960s, Helen MacInnes is really back on form. North to Rome was better than Pray for a Brave Heart, but Decision at Delphi (1960/1) and The Venetian Affair (1963/4) mark another step up. The length of the novels allow her to give the characters more individuality and substance, whilst painting in even more realistic backgrounds - much, much more than just a travelogue. What hasn't changed is her anger at, and despising of, totalitarianism; in the Delphi novel it is Nihilism, in Venice we are back to the evils of Communism.

First edition - 1961 in Britain

Kenneth Strang, Macinnes's typical 'amateur but with a background', is sent on a magazine assignment to Sicily then Greece. The sudden disappearance of the photographer, Steve Kladas, and the appearance of an old acquaintance, Alexander Christophorou, from when Ken was in Athens in 1944, starts a series of baffling events. These come together slowly under the umbrella of a dangerous conspiracy, which allows MacInnes full rein to express her hatred for the various totalitarian "isms". Not before, however, he is sent another photographer C. L. Hillard, aka the young, serenely beautiful, quietly elegant... 27-year-old Cecilia Loveday Hilliard...with wide-set dark-blue eyes. When they meet up in Athens, Strang notices her warm smile, gentle and generous, making the pretty lips prettier. There were such other details as flawless skin, alive and glowing, smooth over finely proportioned bones, crowned by a shining cap of dark silken hair. No wonder he falls in love with her. Increasingly drawn to each other, they are involved in dangerous action which moves from Athens to Sparta to a climax among the ruins of Delphi.

Fontana paperback edition 1967

4th impression 1970

MacInnes is very good at recalling the conditions which allowed Greece to fall into civil war after finally ridding itself of the Nazis - how communist guerrillas had the early march on the Allies and how they destroyed other partisan groups on their way to hoped-for total control. Even  now they are returning secretly after spending the last ten years or so in special training schools and camps in Bulgaria and Albania.The story is well mapped out and sustained by descriptions of 'real' characters trying to cope with real events, such as Petros, one of the Greek partisans; Caroline Ottway, a young American airhead; Colonel Zafiris, much clever than he appeared; the elderly Englishman 'Tommy' Thompson, who had hidden during the Nazi occupation of Greece and was a fund of stories; Myrrha Kladas, Steve's sister, who lives in near poverty near Sparta, still young but prematurely aged, her skin, tanned into wrinkled leather by sun and wind, the lines at the sad mouth, the gaunt cheeks, the coarsened hair, the veined hands...; and the little Katherini Roilos, one of those marked to die.

This time the 'evil' is Nihilism, with the communists as much dupes as the capitalists. When Strang  says he's damned glad there are not many nihilists around, the 'baddie's' response is: There do not need to be many. They have no armies, but what is they think they can use other people's armies?...by several well-timed assassinations.  Strang (i.e. MacInnes) counters with: A nihilist believes in nothing. A man who believes in nothing cannot build anything. Therefore, a nihilist can reduce everything to chaos, but he can only keep living in chaos.

First edition - 1964 in Britain

Once again, the plot is based round current history and politics - Algeria and the Generals' Revolt (so well teased out in Frederick Forsyth's later novel). This time the hero American is Bill Fenner, the theatre critic of the New York Chronicle. Sent to Paris to interview people about the French theatre he gets caught up in yet another dastardly plot. Again the central plot is an assassination - in Decision at Delphi it was to be Marshal Tito of Yugoslavia; here, it is to be General de Gaulle. Again, both young American women, who fall for the hero-amateur are kidnapped and both are rescued after thrilling finales. The novel is peopled with the usual MacInnes-type supporting characters: Mike Ballard, the Paris-based Chronicle editor, who fears Fenner is in line to replace him; Professor Pierre Vaugiraud and Henri Roussin (now a cafe owner)  once members of the Free French resistance in the War, but who were betrayed; Neil Carlson, the American security officer attached to NATO and a possible rival for the affections of the heroine; Frank Rosenfeld the CIA agent;   and Sandra Fane, once Fenner's wife but always a Russian agent. Then there are the collection of baddies, this time nearly all Russian communists but with a sprinkling of Frenchmen, including the one who betrayed Vaugiraud and Roussin, then known only as Comrade Jacques, now established as Fernand Lenoir.

Fontana paperback edition - 1966

5th impression 1969

The plot gives MacInnes her chance to roll out her deeply held view: The Communists think far ahead. The dream of a United States of Europe is a nightmare of the Communist world. They have preached that Western capitalism is doomed, ready for burial; a system breeding wars and economic cannibalism A collection of prosperous and peaceful nations in Western Europe would be the complete rebuttal of all Communist theories.  And later: Communists are cleverer than Nazis. Hitler's patience was too easily exhausted. He wanted everything all at once: a thousand-year Reich in ten years. But Communists think of politics as the art of the impossible: just take everything in thin slices, little by little.  Later still: Fenner says to Claire, "Communists are people - a pretty mean type of people at that, unless one admires liars and traitors, or the kind of man who keeps silent when his neighbours or family are carted off to torture or execution. As has happened. By the millions."

The Communist Evil One here is Kalganov, aka Robert Wahl, masquerading as a film producer, who always happens to be there or thereabouts when bombs go off or disturbances occur. In 1946, he boasted he had killed 2,029 people! These included anarchists and socialists in Catalonia, Free French and, later, Ukrainians and Poles. Here, he is supported by the sinister Jan Arvan, who keeps dying his hair different colours.

The complementary love story, as always, is neatly fitted around the political/thriller content. Claire Connor is blonde, close up, her skin was as flawless as he had thought, with a touch of colour in her cheeks to give it life. The eyes were large, darkly lashed, warm. Chin and nose and cheek and brow were all moulded by some master hand. Fair hair had been piled high to crown her finely shaped head. Her lips - yes, pretty lips that knew how to smile. Oh dear, I have fallen again. The scenes in Venice were particularly realistic - on the Lido, in St Mark's Square and wandering round the little dark passages and squares. It made me want to return, after so many years.

Addendum

I have just watched the film (1966) based on The Venetian Affair; well, it retained the main characters' names - Fenner, Sandra Fane, Rosenberg - and it was set in Venice. Apart from that, it turned out to be quite a different, and less exciting, story. The acting, by Robert Vaughn (in an audition for his Man from U.N.C.L.E role), Elke Sommer and Karl Boehm, was mediocre; Boris Karloff did a reasonable turn as an old professor-type; but the only winner was Venice itself. One can hardly make a film about that city and not come up trumps. I can only wonder what Helen MacInnes must have thought of the travesty.

Sir Walter Scott's 'Rob Roy'

Well - another Sir Walter under my reading belt. I had never read Rob Roy and the story wasn't quite what I had expected. I haven't seen the Liam Neeson (1995) film either, so that didn't influence me. Apparently, it was the favourite Scott novel of both Lord Rosebery and Robert Louis Stevenson. It is the story of the tension, the conflict even, between commerce and adventure. Between Glasgow and the Highlands? Although Rob himself does appear in volumes one and two of the three-decker, it is not until volume three that he really bestrides the stage. One of Scott's 'faults' is that he takes a long time to get going and then appears to rush the ending. Rob Roy is no exception  - the disposal of uncle Hildebrand and all his sons in the last few pages, and Diana's availability to marry Francis only three pages from the end, is too far-fetched. However, there are plenty of plus marks: amongst other characters, at last a feisty heroine, a nasty 'baddy' and some fascinating side-kicks - the pathetic Mr. Morris; Justice Inglewood; Jobson the attorney (whom John Buchan maintains is one of Scott's best legal comic figures); Mrs Rob Roy, that terrible spectre by the loch shore; Baillie Jarvie (with his pride in his father, the worthy deacon), a triumphant bourgeois, honest and kind, conscientious and moral; and Andrew Fairservice,  Frank's Sancho Panza, whose 'service' is entirely focused on himself.

First edition -  1818

Once more, it is Scott's marvellous depiction of character with overrides any creakiness, or absence, of plot. Here is Francis Osbaldistone's uncle, Sir Hildebrand: [who] notwithstanding his rusticity... retained much of the exterior of a gentleman, and appeared among his sons as the remains of a Corinthian pillar, defaced and overgrown with moss and lichen, might have looked, if contrasted with the rough, unhewn masses of upright stones in Stonhenge [sic]...the sons were, indeed, heavy unadorned blocks as the eye would desire to look upon. There, does the reader need more?! Yes, there is the arch-villain and youngest son Rashleigh, in whose eyes an expression of art and design, and, on provocation, a ferocity tempered by caution, which nature had made obvious to the most ordinary physiognomist, perhaps with the same intention that she has given the rattle to the poisonous snake.

Scott's introduction to Diana Vernon is worth a second reading. Francis has just appeared in Osbaldistone territory and watches a fox being pursued by huntsmen. A vision that passed me interrupted these reflections. It was a young lady, the loveliness of whose very striking features was enhanced by the animation of the chase and the glow of the exercise, mounted on a beautiful horse...her long black hair streamed on the breeze, having in the hurry of the chase escaped from the ribbon that bound it...I had a full view of her uncommonly fine face and person, to which an inexpressible charm was added by the wild gaiety of the scene, and the romance of her singular dress and unexpected appearance...there was a mixture of boldness, satire, and simplicity in the manner...

Diana Vernon cleared the obstruction at a flying leap...

Certainly, to me, it is Diana who dominates the first volume. The fluctuating emotional relationship between her and Francis is well-drawn - "Silly, romping, incorrigible girl!" said I to myself... Although it is really Scott, rather than a young girl, who can discourse in this way about Diana's feelings towards Rashleigh: We are still allies...bound, like other confederate powers, by circumstances of mutual interest; but I am afraid, as will happen in other cases, the treaty of alliance has survived the amicable dispositions in which it had its origin. Hmnn! Even Rob Roy has a grudging respect for her: "...she was a daft hempie [hedge-sparrow] - But she's a mettle quean." She is certainly a brighter spark than the 'hero' Francis, who does not tumble to the Jacobitism involved in her doings until page 194 of the third volume! She may well have been linked in Scott's memory to his own first love. As John Buchan remarks, We learn from her the kind of woman that Scott most admired, for no other of his own class is so lovingly drawn. He had little liking for foolish sylphs.

Frank and Diana

Osbaldistone Hall, or Cub Castle as Diana calls it, is well described with its various architecture... with their stone-shafted latticed windows, projecting turrets, and massive architraves...it reminded me of Scott's own Abbotsford and elements of Janathan Oldbuck's pile in The Antiquary. I pass over the 'gardener', Andrew Fairservice, as, to tell the truth, he rather wearied me (as he did the Baillie), as some of Scott's salt-of-the-earth characters tend to do. Buchan suggests he is one of Scott's foremost creations. Perhaps his self-centredness and cowardice are so well delineated by Scott that I just found his 'type' repugnant.

The love/despair relationship between the distant relatives Baillie Jarvie and Rob Roy is well documented and sustained in the latter two volumes. As Rob says to Baillie: "The only drap o' gentle bluid in your body was our great-grand uncle's that was justified at Dunbarton..." The scene at the Aberfoyle inn allows Scott some of his best descriptive writing, both of character and surroundings.

As an aside, I had to chuckle at Scott's comments at the start of Chapter III in Volume I. Nearly all, if not all, his chapters commence with an extract from a poem of few lines from another author - in this case Gay's Fables. He writes: I have tagged with rhyme and blank verse the subdivisions of this important narrative, in order to seduce your continued attention by powers of composition of stronger attraction than my own., Well, Sir Walter, it has usually failed with me, as I tend to skip those lines more often than not. I did not skip Sir Walter's own prose, though; finding, once again, a delight in his story-telling and character-drawing. Next, it looks like the 4-volumes of The Fair Maid of Perth. Again, it will be the first time of reading.

I have just had a quick look at Hesketh Pearson's biography of Scott (1954), to read his comments on Rob Roy. He calls it the most readable of all Scott's stories, but also explains that the author was experiencing one of his bouts of ill health, often being in excruciating pain with 'stomach cramps', brought on by gallstones. James Ballantyne, asking for more sheets one day, was told " 'tis easy for you to bid me get on, but how the deuce can I make Rob Roy's wife speak with such a curmurring in my guts?" It explains the somewhat hasty ending.

I have sensibly purchased the Chambers Scots Dictionary - compiled by Alexander Warrack - which has been invaluable to me whenever Baillie Jarvie or Andrew Fairservice gave utterance. Although I guessed at many of the Scotch words (in Guy Mannering and The Antiquary, for instance), some of them are nothing like their English counterparts.

Yet more Helen MacInnes - 'Pray for a Brave Heart' and 'North From Rome'

I have just polished off two more Helen MacInnes 'thrillers' in a row - a marked change from my last two reads - Arnold Bennett and Jan Needle. I bypassed her previous three (after Friends and Lovers) - Rest and be Thankful, Neither Five nor Three and I and my True Love, as they were set in contemporary America and that background didn't appeal to me. These two, Pray for a Brave Heart (1955) and North from Rome (1958) return to Europe and both are enmeshed in the Cold War. MacInnes's world is invariably black and white: Communists have taken over from the Nazis as the baddies, while the good old U.S. of A is the white knight; or, rather, 'amateur, good-at-heart' Americans, of both sexes help to thwart the evil machinations of the Russians.
                    First edition 1955
Pray for the Brave Heart is set is Switzerland in Bern (although it starts in Berlin, where Bill Denning, an American, is returning to the USA).

             

Fontana paperback - 5th imp. 1969

An old colleague from the Army days, Max Meyer, persuades him to divert to Bern instead - he needs help with uncovering a huge illegal jewel transaction, the Herz Collection. The sting in the tail is that the money raised by the sale will be used to further the communist cause. I must admit, this wouldn't be one of my top MacInnes novels; I didn't particularly warm to any of the characters, several being only briefly sketched in. The tense atmosphere is well drawn, as are (what one critic called) the 'travelogue' bits. MacInnes, like many other thriller writers (Scott Mariani these days, Colin Forbes back-a-day) tends to use her holiday venues a bit too obviously sometimes. To another criticism - that MacInnes is 'dated', I would respond, of course she is. It is a contemporary thriller, about the growing menace of drug dealing, the historic menace of gem stealing, the actual menace of Communism, very much in the forefront of people's minds in the 1950s. Most authors are 'dated' - that is why I retreat to them, finding the present day (not just this menace of coronavirus) as pretty awful.

Communism and communists are 'uniformly evil' to MacInnes, seeing men and women not as human beings but as instruments. Luckily for Denning and his friends, Where there was courage, there was a chance. "There's a point of no retreat for all of us", he said at last. "When you reached that, you turned, and fought back." Which is what they did, and they triumphed over the jewel thief, the stupid 'neutrals' (Richard van Meeren Broach in this novel and Bertrand Whitelaw in North from Rome: both have to die!), and the communist gang members.

First edition - 1958

I enjoyed North From Rome more; perhaps it is because it is one of my favourite cities and I could follow the movements of the characters around the thoroughfares. One of the greatest charms of Rome is the fact that it is still a living city - not just a collection of office buildings, business headquarters, and stores which all close down at night, leaving bleak lights in their windows for cleaners and watchmen....there, the people not only work but live.

The characters (such as Joe/Giuseppe Rocco, the undercover Italian policeman; Tony Brewster, the drunk English reporter; the American Professor Ferris - surely a sketch of MacInnes's own husband!; and the 'sleeper' communist, Salvatore Sabatini) were more alive and interesting, more deeply sketched than the previous book's. The love story intertwined with the thriller and, inevitable, anti-communist plot, worked quite well. The 'villain', Luigi Pirotta, was more finely drawn and believable; there were different shades of evil to the 'baddies'. Rather like Rebecca and Rowena in Scott's Ivanhoe, I was drawn to the dark-haired Rosana Di Feo rather than to  Eleanor, the American off/on girlfriend of the 'hero' Lammiter. But with MacInnes, the Americans, particularly the amateur, has to win! Although there is a tinge of anti-Fascist material (Mussolini is recalled as rather a joke than anything else), it is Russia that gets both barrels: "Everyone knows that there are still some hidden drug rings. And with Communists running them, I hear. It's one of the under-surface battles that Russia has been waging since the end of the war." When Whitelaw, the 'neutral', expostulates "you can't be afraid of you Communists in Italy...they're such delightful people", the old, ageing beauty Principessa (who once smacked Mussolini when he tried it on with her), replies,"I did not mean our nice Communists, who want to help the workers. I meant the real Communists - who shoot the workers. As in Poznan last month." 

Fontana paperback -  6th imp. 1970

The evil 'Mr. Evans' is another Burgess or Maclean - a traitor working for the Russians. The scene moves to Montescecco then Perugia, both convincingly described, for the denouement and communists' comeuppance. Jacopone, the old gamekeeper at the Principessa's villa in the former town, is convincingly drawn, especially when Lammiter says farewell with "Viva Garibaldi!" A wide grin broke across the wrinkled face. "Evviva!" Jacapone said heartily. "Viva Garibaldi!"

As a minor aside: I hadn't realised how often MacInnes uses the innocent, usually young, bystander as a way to solve problems or advance the plot: the English schoolgirl Emily in Pray for a Brave Heart; Sally Maguire, the American student from Burbank, California in North from Rome. Well, it will be two more MacInnes - Decision at Delphi (1961) and The Venetian Affair (1964), after I have read another Sir Walter Scott - Rob Roy (1818).


PS There has been a time 'gap' in Blogging, as I have been rearranging all my Victorian/Edwardian books, having added three extra shelves (all my own work!). Now all my Sir Walter Scott novels and books about him are together, as are all my Robert Louis Stevenson works. On a lower level (in all senses) my Emily Sarah Holt and Evelyn Everett-Green now have shelves to themselves; while G. A. Henry and Charlotte Yonge share a shelf. The changes have left a space for the only 'growing' section - my Scottish novels - from both ends of the 19th century: Galt, Ferrier, Brunton to the left and the Kailyard School to the right. My updated digital catalogue now details each book: date of publication, author, title, edition, quality and cost. Surprisingly, there are very few where I have not recorded the purchase price. Many, many bargains, but also one or two excessive spendings.

                                              Three of the four Bays                  Scott etc.

Downstairs (apart from my mammoth John Buchan and his family Collection) are mainly 20th century authors - Daphne du Maurier, Maurice Walsh, Gordon Daviot/Josephine Tey, Constance Holme, Mary Webb, Stanley Weyman, R. H. Forster, Helen MacInnes; as well as literary biographies. Much to do!                                   

Arnold Bennett's 'The Old Wives' Tale'

Arnold Bennett (1867-1931)

I have just finished this 'blockbuster' - even the postman staggered under the weight of The Folio Society's edition (2004) of Bennett's The Old Wives' Tale. It stands at 546 pages and I took several days to read it. This is not meant as a criticism, but it is certainly not a book you can just dash off.

As the title suggests, it the story of womankind, but not just of old wives. It follows the lives of two sisters, Constance and Sophia Baines, who live above the family shop in the central square in Burslem, from their teenage years to their deaths in their sixties. Along the way Bennett creates some true-to-life, memorable characters.

Their dominating mother - Mrs Baines: though intensely proud and fond of her daughters, had justifiably preserved  a certain condescension towards them. She honestly doubted whether either of them would develop into the equal of their mother. who believed a dose of castor oil would cure obstinacy and yearnings for a freer life (in Sophia)

The father, bed-ridden Mr John Baines: had belonged to the past, to the age when men really did think of their souls...when the sole beauty of life resided in its inflexible and slow dignity, when hell really had no bottom, and a gilt-clasped Bible really was the secret of England's greatness. The Baines grew up in an age when the Wesleyan  Methodist Chapel, for example, instead of a sparse handful of persons disturbingly conscious of being in a minority, as now, a magnificent and proud majority had collected, deeply aware of its rightness and its correctness.

At 15 years old Sophia was as tall as her mother, and as imperious, as crested, and proud; and in spite of the pigtail, the girlish semicircular comb, and the loose foal-like limbs, she could support as well as her mother the majesty of the gimp-embroidered dress. She is attracted to the travelling salesman Gerald Scales (a serpentine surname); they meet illicitly; they agree about the navvies on the railway construction: dangerous beasts of prey in their yellow corduroys and their open shirts revealing hairy chests. No doubt they both thought how inconvenient it was that railways could not be brought into existence without the aid of such revolting and swinish animals.  Sophia flees, aged 19, with Gerald to London, then Paris. It was a mistake that cost her dear. Very quickly, the scales fall from her eyes: she had recognised her marriage for what it was...she saw again that he was irreclaimably a fool and a prodigy of irreponsibleness...she was ready to pay the price of pride and of a moment's imbecility with a lifetime of self-repression...they hated each other, but in different ways. She loathed him, and he resented her. He races through a large inheritance, fails to get her to ask for money from home, and absconds. When Sophia sees Gerald for the last time, he is over 70 and dead: a withered face, with the shiny skin all drawn into wrinkles! The stretched skin under the jaw was like the skin of a plucked fowl. The cheekbones stood up, and below them were deep hollows, almost like eggcups...  

Back in Burslem, Samuel Povey: the fount and radiating centre of order and discipline in the shop; a quiet, diffident, secretive, tedious, and obstinate youngish man, absolutely faithful, absolutely efficient in his sphere; without brilliance, without distinction; perhaps rather little-minded, certainly narrow-minded, but what a force in the shop!...outwardly insignificant, possessing a mind as little as his body, easily abashed, he was none the less a very susceptible young man, soon offended, proud, vain, and obscurely passionate. He marries Constance, much to Mrs Baines's disapproval, and makes a real go of the business. Bennett skilfully ages him as the book progresses: a spectacled man of fifty, short and stoutish, with grey hair and a small beard half-grey and half-black. When he dies, of toxaemia, the narrator summed him up: Samuel Povey never could impose himself on the burgesses. He lacked individuality. He was little. I have often laughed at Samuel Povey. But I liked and respected him. He was a very honest man...

Constance and Samuel have a son, Cyril Povey: Cyril was the pivot of the house; every desire ended somewhere in Cyril. The shop existed now solely for him.   The usually one-sided relationship between Constance and her son is tragic. Bennett clearly recognised and pointed out the dangers of an only child being indulged by well-off and doting parents, which led to idleness and uncaring adulthood. The fraught relationship brings out some fine writing from Bennett.

The shop assistant Miss Insull, who becomes Mrs Critchlow, is also finely drawn: for twenty-five years she served in the shop...in the eternal fusty dusk of the shop she had gradually lost such sexual characteristics and charms as she had once possessed. She was as thin and flat as Charles Critchlow himself. It was as though her bosom had suffered from a prolonged drought at a susceptible period of development, and had never recovered...

In Sophia's Paris, at the time of the Prussian bombardment and subsequent Commune, there are vividly drawn characters, such as Madame Foucault, the pathetic, ageing courtesan - over forty, fat, creased and worn out; Chirac, painfully in love with Sophia, who finally flees from the besieged city in a balloon and is never heard of again; M. Niepce, the 'siege-widower' and local grocer, who lodged at Sophia's pension, gave her discounts and wanted more in return.

Cyril Povey's friend, Matthew Peel-Swynnerton, comes across Sophia over twenty years later, when he stays at her Hotel: Undoubtedly she was a handsome woman. Her hair was greying at the temples, and the skin was withered and crossed with lines She was one of those women of whom to their last on earth the stranger will say: 'When she was young she must have been worth looking at! - with a little transient regret that beautiful women cannot remain for ever young. Her voice was firm and even, sweet in tone, and yet morally harsh from incessant traffic with all varieties of human nature. Her eyes were the impartial eyes of one who is always judging...her eyes announced that she had lived and learnt...

The last of the four sections - What Life Is - contains some of the novel's most powerful and tragic writing. The two sisters meet again, and Sophia returns to her old home. 'What Life Is' has an awful, downbeat tone to it. The sisters tolerate each other's differences: Sophia saw in Constance the quality of an honest and naive goodwill, of powerful simplicity...she knew that she had a stronger individuality than Constance's. When they go to stay at the Rutland Hotel in Buxton, other guests saw them arrive: The shorter and stouter of the two ladies did not impose herself with much force on the collective vision of the Rutland; she was dressed in black, not fashionably, though with a certain unpretending richness; her gestures were timid and nervous; evidently she relied upon her tall companion to shield her in the first trying contacts of hotel life. The tall lady was a different stamp. Handsome, stately, deliberate, and handsomely dressed in colours, she had the assured hard gaze of a person who is thoroughly habituated to the inspection of strangers.

The end, when it comes for them both is not morbid, but definitely moving. Sophia goes first, after visiting her dead husband in Manchester, of a fatal stroke. When Constance gazes on Sophia's dead body, it is tragic: What a career! A brief passion, and then nearly thirty years in a boarding-house! And Sophia had never had a child; had never known either the joy or the pain of maternity. She had never even had a true home till, in all her sterile splendour, she came to Bursley...Hers had not been a life at all. Constance, the child of her parents, can't help but think: Sophia had sinned. It was therefore inevitable that she should suffer. Constance does not last much longer, dying of rheumatic fever in her one and only home.

The First Edition - 1908

I had never read a single book of Bennett's before this - he is almost forgotten these days and rarely read; yet he was a 'literary dreadnought' from the 1900s to the 1930s. The Old Wives' Tale shows tremendous insight into the vicissitudes of trade, of small town businesses and its social intercourse, and of the struggles of women to engage successfully in the commercial world. In Bennett's novel, the women are really the ones in charge, first Mrs Baines and then the two daughters in their respective spheres. As one critic has said, Bennett may be an unfashionable writer but this novel is a work of real genius. The narrative touches on alcoholism, murder, mental illness, prostitution, death, disease, and marital strife...and yet, through it all, Bennett never loses sight of the individuals that he is describing. It never seems less than real.

A final point. In 1998, the Modern Library ranked The Old Wives' Tale No. 87 on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century.

What about a Scotch Novel of Manners?

Tucked inside my most recent purchase - a first edition of John Galt's The Annals of the Parish (1821) - was a newspaper cutting. It is from The Glasgow Herald, Saturday, March 9, 1895, written in the middle of the Kailyard School phenomenon. It is too long to reproduce in full on this Blog, but I will copy a fair amount below, as it revealingly links Galt and Scott with Ian MacLaren, Crockett and Barrie.

The Glasgow Herald - Saturday, March 9, 1895

The greatest of recent successes on the stage is "Charley's Aunt". The greatest of recent successes in fiction is "Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush"...It is to the credit of "Ian MacLaren" that he has not attempted to reach such a depth of maudlin emotion  as Dickens has descended to in "The Old Curiosity Shop". It would appear from one of the innumerable interview with him that have been published within the past few weeks, that it is men rather than women who are moved to the melting mood by the martyrdom of the young scholar of Drumtochty, and the self-sacrifice of the old doctor...When he has exhausted Drumtochty - and he says he will have exhausted it when he publishes his next volume - he informs us that he will proceed to deal with some aspects of English life with which he happens, as in the case of Drumtochty, to be familiar. And it may be assumed that his second success will be equal to his first, if like that it be a transcript of experiences with a background of "types" rather than individuals. Meanwhile Mr Watson appears to be enamoured of "locality" in fiction and of "variety" in character. He is satisfied with the extent to which decentralisation in fiction has gone so far as the provinces are concerned, but he would like to see more of it in London. "What we want to see", he says, "is the small grocer, the petit bourgeois, treated somewhat as Balzac treated him. The business is to show the human heart beneath a possibly squalid exterior, to get at its aspirations, its hopes, its aims".

...But is there not a very great danger lest, in the positive passion for minute psychological analysis, and for the reduction of fiction to moral and intellectual map-making, the novel of manners and of people whose manners are worth reproducing be left out of consideration altogether?...it does not necessarily follow that the future Scotch novel of manners would concern itself solely with manners in the grand style. Among the good things which have come in the train of the successes of the new Scotch writers - Mr Barrie, Mr Watson, and Mr Crockett - is a revival of interest in the works of John Galt...Perhaps after a surfeit of self-consciousness and self-sacrifice - of Dr Maclure and Hendry M'Quhumpha - a little of the worldly, but not at all sensual or devilish, wisdom of the Rev. Mr Balwhidder or Provost Pawkie may be welcomed...Balwhidder is an admirable specimen of the minister of the old school, who took life very much as he found it...One feels that he is a reality - much more of a reality, it is to be feared - than Ian MacLaren's Dr Maclure...Or take the central figure in "The Provost", who to me is quite as interesting as the central figure in "Annals of the Parish". "The Provost" is almost perfect, I should say, as a Scotch novel of manners - of the manners to be found in a small country town not so very many years ago... 

The Provost

Provost Pawkie may not be so lovable a character as the heroes of the Scottish school, but he is probably much truer to life...our great municipalities have been built up and (which is more important) have been reformed and improved by men whose morality is much nearer that of Balwhidder and Pawkie than that of M'Quhumpha and M'Clure...

But a greater though not a minuter or more careful artist in the novel of Scotch manners than Galt was Scott. That novel indeed reached perfection in "The Antiquary", in the light-comedy portions of "St Ronan's Well", in the Bailie Nicol Jarvie section of "Rob Roy". It is in this connection that Stevenson is almost immeasurably Scott's inferior...Scott's method as the Homer of citizen life is of the simplest - so very simple as to encourage the belief that ere long there must be a revival of the northern novel of manners. The prattle of the barber, the gossip of the postmistress and her friends, in a small town, the humours of a spa, the self-revelations of a Glasgow magistrate, of the hostess of a country inn, or of a returned Indian nabob - it is out of such materials that Scott has made those stories which constitute his chief claim to gratitude at the hands and hearts of his countrymen. And - one cannot help asking - does not our modern life in Scotland, so much fuller, richer, more varied, alike in pleasure and avocation, than that which yielded such a treasure to a Galt, lend itself readily to the artist in manners?...the appetite for a generous meal must return, and with it the desire for the novel of manners, which is besides the best antidote to "the erotic, the neurotic, and the Tommyrotic", that infest literature at the present time.

Unfortunately, the article is by an anonymous writer. He/she has made me even more keen to start on Galt's novels as well as to continue with Scott's.

The 'Wild Wood' of Jan Needle

Jan Needle (1943-    )

Jan Needle's Wild Wood (André Deutsch, 1981 - I have the 1993 Scholastic Publications paperback edition) could be subtitled The Reminiscences (or Confessions) of  Baxter Ferret.

1993 paperback edition

The terrors of the Wild Wood of Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows; and the greedy weasels and acquisitive stoats of William Horwood's The Willows in Winter - his Water Rat regards them as miserable, conniving animals - are now centre stage. Needle essentially is putting forward a critique of the politically conservative message of Grahame's classic novel.

The tale is kick-started by the human Willoughby - a journalist, broadcaster, and lover of ancient motor cars. A hopeless navigator, he not only gets lost in his splendid Armstrong Hardcastle Mouton Special Eight 1907 model on a London to Brighton Rally, but appears to have knocked down an old figure. The latter turns out to be the hero and narrator of the main story - Baxter Ferret. Although Willoughby spends a few days and nights with Baxter, he can never find him again and, sinking into a deep depression (which led to a deeper one still, in the ground), he leaves a manuscript with Baxter's tale to Needle. What follows is that story.

Baxter Ferret and Willoughby

The whole book is laced with humour which tempers the socialistic approach which is deliberately in contrast to Grahame's ordered world of privilege and class awareness, even idleness. Here, whatever sympathy there is rests with the underprivileged, who have no job security and whose lives are desperately hard during the winter. There is wonderful comedy in the descriptions of Baxter's ferret family, particularly his mother Daisy, whose Brewdays were renowned - barley wine and nutty ale for all. The depiction of the various animals' characters are superb: O.B. Weasel, the part-time teacher in the little local school and soon to become Chief Weasel (also mentioned by Grahame);  the wayfarer Rat in Grahame's chapter Wayfarers All, and who was told by Water Rat, You are not one of us, appears as Wilson a seafaring rat who'd swallowed the anchor and set up as a tobacconist and grocer in Wild Wood. A strange old fellow, lean and rangy, with a fund of marvellous stories and tales; and the outsider agitator, Boddington Stoat, a key and marvellously drawn figure. A committed, and humourless revolutionary (how like some modern political figures!), who is peculiarly yellow, lacking in body, extremely bitter, but one of the best! (and his boots squeaked!). No wonder Baxter gets tired of the grey and bilious Boddington at one stage. Moreover, his mother adds her pennyworth: that scrawney stoat fellow...that scruffy, grey-faced little runt from across the river...

One recalls Mole's frightening trek through the Wild Wood to meet Badger in The Wind in the Willows - then the faces began...a little evil wedge-shaped face, looking out at him from a hole...then there were hundreds of them...all fixing on him glances of malice and hatred: all hard-eyed and evil and sharp.,,then the whistling began...then the pattering began...the Terror of the Wild Wood! In Needle's account, we hear of his adventure through the weasels', ferrets' and stoats' eyes. The older ones are appalled at his rough treatment, whereas O.B. spoke for the more radical, young ones: that Mole bloke should never have come here on his own, and he deserved what he got - which wasn't much, in any case. All right, so some of us chivvied him up a bit - .Even the two respectful hedgehogs referred to briefly in Grahame's chapter Mr Badger are used by Needle to report on the subsequent meeting of Badger, Rat, Otter and Mole to the Wild Wooders. Boddington argues that them overfed animals have got something afoot and we should be on our guard. All the signs is there! They'm getting ready to make trouble.

There's a lovely little cameo, when O.B's ailing father, the then Chief Weasel, tries to douse the flames of insurrection: It (the frightening of Mole) was, not to mince words, a disgusting display of rudeness, bad-manners, hooliganism and oafishness directed at a harmless, reasonable, well-meaning animal. Boddington will have none of it and turns his broadside against Badger: what about that silly old mujjen Badger being turned against his fellow Wild Wooders? Whose side is he on, eh? Not ours, for sure. He's a traitor! And so, Wilson, O.B. and others are persuaded to fall in line with Boddington, even if Baxter threatens to punch his silly head if he tries anything on with his sister Dolly!

The Volunteers drill

The drilling starts: three Volunteer columns/units are drawn up and trained - Boddington's stoats, O.B's weasels, and Baxter's ferrets. Needle's account of all this is very funny. What about old Wilson, who as you know was a rat so could hardly join the Stoat Battalion. There were motleys, like Wilson; there were old-timers who couldn't shoot straight, etc. Dolly, thanks to Boddington, becomes one of the general staff. The aim? - to attack and take over Toad Hall. The chance comes with Toad's arrest. The Wild Wooders attack and successfully overpower Badger and Mole and chuck them out. Boddington changes the mansion's name to Brotherhood Hall, for ain't we all brothers, and ain't we took it, eh? It's ours. All the wealth, all the food and drink, all the rooms for homeless animals. Animalkind in this tale proves to be no different, or better, than humankind. The Wild Wooders soon succumb to the good living that the Hall can provide: wines from the cellars, quality food.

Bring on the Banquet

There follows a convoluted escape plan, to spring Toad from gaol (far too convoluted for a Blog), and his  subsequent various escapades. This essentially is the tale told in Grahame's chapter The Further Adventures of Toad. I hadn't remembered the young yellow ferret with a gun, who accosted, and then shot at, Toad when he tried to return to Toad Hall in Grahame's story. Needle weaves this incident into his alternative story. There are parallels with Animal Farm, in that O.B's behaviour is suspiciously like Napoleon's: Boddington shrieks at him, You're like Toad! You're just like Toad! You're worse than Toad! O.B. simply wanted a planned banquet to go ahead at Brotherhood Hall. Well into the festive board, the River Bankers attack, as in Grahame's book, and Brotherhood Hall, after a few glorious weeks, belonged once more to its master. Toad. What did occur, apparently was a lot of the injustices of life between the River Bankers and the Wild Wooders was ironed out. Some of Toad's surplus wealth went to providing more and better jobs like, and he introduced pensions and so on... Boddington emigrated to Manchester to help the animals there in the depressed industrial zones to fight for their liberty and suchlike. And Dolly, Baxter's sister, went with him.

Needle has written an excellent book: punctuated throughout with humour, closely following the original Kenneth Grahame novel (more closely than I originally thought, until I checked several passages again); and being very 'fair' in his treatment of the various political views. His narrator, Baxter the ferret, is an inspired casting. I noticed that nearly all other reviewers praised Willie Rushton's (knowing who he was will date you) illustrations. They are not 'my cup of tea', but I can quite see how they 'fit' Needle's humour.

ADDENDUM

This morning, I was looking through one of the copies I have of The English Illustrated Magazine - this one for 1883-1884 (Macmillan, 1884) and stopped at an article on The Weasel and his Family by Benjamin Scott. It is a detailed description of the little animal and his tribe. Scott includes an extract from Dr. Johnson's Dictionary, which Baxter and friends would not like reading:

"Weasel, a small animal that eats corn and kills mice."
"Stoat, a small, stinking animal."
"Fitchew, } a stinking little beast, that robs
"Fitcher  } the hen-roost and warren."
"Polecat, the fitchew, a stinking animal."
"Ferret, A KIND OF RAT, with red eyes and a long snout, used to kill rabbits."
"Fulimart, a kind of stinking ferret." 

A Scottish Journey

I have gradually been collecting nineteenth century Scottish authors, all in first edition bar two. The two main stimuli have been building on my reading and knowledge of Sir Walter Scott's works, then branching out to encompass his contemporaries such as Susan Ferrier, John Galt and Mary Brunton; and, secondly, at the other end of the century, widening my knowledge of the so-called Kailyard School - leading from my collection of Ian McLaren's works (and taking in the 'counter-attack' of George Brown) to encompass some minor authors I have never heard of.

Over the next few months, I hope to read all the works listed below (those in red I have not got 1st ed. copies of). I have already read Scott's Guy Mannering and The Antiquary; all three Susan Ferrier novels; Ian McLaren's Beside the Bonny Brier Bush; and Brown's The House with the Green Shutters. My own ideas/comments will undoubtedly be bolstered by some very useful critics:

1951    George Blake - Barrie and the Kailyard School

1965    W. M. Parker - Susan Ferrier and John Galt

1972    Ian A. Gordon - John Galt: The Life of a Writer
1979    Ian Campbell ed. - Nineteenth Century Scottish Fiction

1981    Ian Campbell - Kailyard: A New Assessment

1984    Mary Cullinan - Susan Ferrier

1989    John MacQueen - The Rise of the Historical Novel: The Enlightenment and Scottish                                                Literature

2001    Mary McKerrow - Mary Brunton: The Forgotten Scottish Novelist

2006    Andrew Nash - Kailyard and Scottish Literature

1808 - 1831

Elizabeth Hamilton   The Cottagers of Glenburnie   (Manners & Miller, 1808)

Mary Brunton   Self-Control   (Manners & Miller 1811)

Mary Brunton   Discipline   (Manners & Miller, 1814)                                                                                                                        (Henry Colburn & Richard Bentley, 1832 ed.)

Sir Walter Scott   Guy Mannering   (3 vols.)   (Archibald Constable, 1815)

Sir Walter Scott   The Antiquary   (3 vols.)   (Archibald Constable, 1816)

Sir Walter Scott   The Heart of Mid-Lothian   (3 vols.)   (Archibald Constable, 1818)

[Susan Ferrier]   Marriage: A novel   (3 vols.)   (William Blackwood, 1818; 2^nd ed. 1819)
Mary Brunton   Emmeline and some other pieces   (Archibald Constable, 1819)

John Galt   Annals of the Parish   (William Blackwood, 1821)

John Galt   The Ayrshire Legatees   (William Blackwood, 1821)

John Galt   The Provost   (William Blackwood, 1822)                     

J.G. Lockhart   Adam Blair (William Blackwood, 1822) 
John Galt    The Entail or The Lairds of Grippy   (3 vols.)   (William Blackwood, 1823)
[Susan Ferrier]   The Inheritance   (3 vols.)   (William Blackwood, 1824)
[Susan Ferrier]   Destiny: or The Chief’s Daughter   (3 vols.)   (Robert Cadell, 1831)

 1886-1901

Sigma   Heather Belles: A Modern Highland Story   (W.P. Nimmo, Hay, & Mitchell, 1886)

Henry Johnston   Chronicles of Glenbuckie   (David Douglas, 1889)

Alexander Gordon   The Folks O’ Carglen   (T. Fisher Unwin, 1891)

Gabriel Setoun   Barncraig   (John Murray, 1893)

Alexander Gordon   Northwood Ho!   (Isbister & Co., 1894)

Ian Maclaren   Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush   (Hodder and Stoughton, 1894)

Gabriel Setoun   Sunshine and Haar’   (John Murray, 1895)   

Ian Maclaren   The Days of Auld Lang Syne   (Hodder and Stoughton, 1895)

S. Rutherford Crockett   The Grey Man   (T. Fisher Unwin, 1896)

Ian Maclaren   Kate Carnegie and those Ministers   (Hodder and Stoughton, 1896)

Henry Ochiltree   Out of her Shroud   (Adam & Charles Black, 1897)

Ian Maclaren   Afterwards and Other Stories   (Hodder and Stoughton, 1898)

Ian Maclaren   Young Barbarians   (Hodder and Stoughton, 1901)

Ian Maclaren   His Majesty’s Baby and some Common People   (H & S, 1902)

Ian Maclaren   St. Jude’s   (The Religious Tract Society, 1907)

S. Rutherford Crockett   The Black Douglas   (Smith, Elder, 1899)   

George Douglas   The House with the Green Shutters   (John MacQueen, 1901)

I will, of course, take breaks from my study of Scottish Literature. Other 'must reads' are piling up - Arnold Bennett's The Old Wives' Tale; Alain-Fournier's Le Grand Meaulnes (The Lost Domain); A. J. Cronin's Hatter's Castle (yes, I know he was a Scot); and a return to Stanley Weyman and Constance Holme. I also have a mind to purchase Sheila Kaye-Smith's The Tramping Methodist (1908) and two interesting-looking 19th century novels on the miners in the Mendips. When will it ever end?!

Sir Walter Scott's 'The Antiquary'

However unfashionable it is to say so, I do enjoy reading Sir Walter Scott. Prolixity is not a sin, if the content is warm and humane and, especially, if one is to make productive use of our present 'lock-down'.

    

  

There is a wonderful opening, where Jonathan Oldbuck of Monkbarns  (The Antiquary) tackles Mrs. Macleuchar, that sharp-looking old dame, who inhabited and dispensed the tickets for the Queensferry Diligence, or Hawes Fly, and castigates her as an old doited hag...abominable woman.. (and a member of the ) trollopping sex for the failure of the coach to be on time - Diligence, quoth I? Thou should have called it the Sloth - Fly! Mrs Macleuchar and, later, Mackitchinson, mine host at  the Hawes Inn, give as good as they get in some cracking exchanges. And then, with his companion  22 year-old William Lovel, we are away to Monkbarns itself, to meet Oldbuck's maiden sister, Miss Grizzy (a superlative description again) and his orphan niece Maria Mcintyre.

The description of the old house at Monkbarns, in particular Oldbuck's study, with a chaos of maps, engravings, scraps of parchment, bundles of papers, pieces of old armour, swords, dirks, helmets, and highland targets, is Scott at his most Scottian! When the John Buchan Society members were shown round Abbotsford a year ago, our attention was drawn by our excellent guide to Scott's own cabinet of curiosities. Several items' provenance were very much allegedly - rather like Oldbuck's revered pieces!  I had absolute empathy with Scott's description of Oldbuck's foraging for volumes for his library, often resulting in the white moments of life. I thought again: this is why I read and love Sir Walter! Has there ever been a truer word spoken than that by Monkbarns -  the clergy live by our sins, the medical faculty by our diseases, and the law gentry by our misfortunes?

A classic piece of comedy writing occurs in Chapter IV, when Oldbuck tries to convince Lovel that a recently purchased plot of land (which he exchanged for an acre of the laigh crofts, good corn land) held the remnants of an ancient Roman camp. A voice from behind interrupted his extatic description - "Praetorian here, Praetorian there, I mind the bigging o't."  Worse, the letter A.D.L.L. on a stone found by Oldbuck there prove not to stand for Agricola Dicavit Libens Lubens but Aiken Drum's Land Ladle. Wonderful! Scott here introduces one of his hall-mark characters - Edie Ochiltree, the mendicant, a physiognomist by profession. To Oldbuck, he is a sort of privileged nuisance. I found the Scots hard to understand at times, but Edie's refusal of money from Lovel, occasions a marvellous self-cameo: "a' the siller I need is just to buy tobacco and sneeshin, and maybe a dram at a time in a cauld day, though I am nae dram-drinker to be a gaberlunzie [licensed beggar] - Sae take back your notes, and just gie me a lily-white shilling."  Halfway through Volume III, there is an accurate summary of Edie by Oldbuck: he is, to a certain extent, the oracle of the district through which he travels - their genealogist, their newsman, their master of the revels, their doctor at a pinch, or their divine... We also meet Sir Arthur Wardour, of Knockwinnock, Bart., (a joint, and similarly testy,  labourer with Oldbuck in his antiquarian pursuits) and his daughter, Isabella; and, much later, Captain Hector M'Intyre, Oldbuck's nephew, who admits he has something of Hotspur in me. 

Luckie Mucklebacket (Scott's names can jar, as can Charles Dickens's, on occasion), the fishwife, is another well-drawn character: fisher-wives ken better - they keep the man, and keep the house, and keep the siller too... them that sell the goods guide the purse - them that guide the purse rule the house.

  

                              Edie Ochiltree                                    Waiting for rescue

The descriptions of the dreadful sea-storm and subsequent rescue of Lovel and the Wardours from the hair-raising cliffs; Lovel's night in the ghost-ridden Green Room at Monkbarns;  the discussion between Mrs. Mailsetter, Mrs. Shortcake and Mrs. Heukbane about 'opening' others' mail in the Post Office; Edie Ochiltree's midnight gulling of the dastard Dunstandsnivel at the ruined monastery of St. Ruth; the funeral gathering for Steenie at the Mucklebackets' cottage in Mussel-crag; these are all worthy of positive comment.

The bursts of verse, the regular inserts of Latin all jar with a typical 21st century reader. Both Lovel/Major Neville and Miss Wardour are colourless characters, compared with Oldbuck, Edie Ochiltree, Sir Arthur Wardour, even Glenallen and Dousterswivel; while minor characters such as Lieutenant Taffril and and Captain Wardour are only lightly pencilled in. The plot, as the critic John Lauber has said, is 'chaotic'; the story is really a series of miscellaneous occurrences, with loose ends and irrelevances; the love story is insipid (Lovel disappears for 200 pages!); Scott's verbosity gets the better of him, and the tale, too often; and the wrapping up of the story of the 'lost heir' is perfunctory. However, one finishes the reading with the characters of Oldbuck and Ochiltree, of Sir Arthur and Glenallan, firmly etched in one's memory. So much so, that I will be choosing another of Sir Walter's books to while 'lock down' away e'er long.

According to his son-in-law, Lockhart, The Antiquary was Scott's favourite among his works. As John Buchan says, It is primarily a comedy of Scottish country life, and the main characters , though carefully and truthfully drawn, are all given their "humours" - fantastic traits several degrees above reality - Oldbuck's pedantry, his sister's notableness, Sir Arthur's pride of race, Hector MacIntyre's inflammable conceit. The comedy key is perfectly maintained...the book is richer perhaps than any of the others in cunning detail, for Scott wrote of a world which he knew intimately...and it is inspired throughout by the spirit of a large and sympathetic understanding.

I never 'cheat', by looking to the end of a book, but I wish I had this time. There is a 16 page Glossary of the Scottish words requiring explanation in the Novels of Waverley, Guy Mannering, and the Antiquary. I would have used it, had I known earlier.

ADDENDUM (2nd May)

I add an interesting 'take' on the novel - from an article by Ian Duncan: Scotland and the novel

Conservative skepticism Scotland and the novel receives Scott’s most exuberant treatment in The Antiquary (1816), a metaWaverley Novel or Shandification of historical romance in which, despite the invocation of an unusually intricate plot, nothing happens: or rather, sensational events – manslaughter, infanticide, incest, a discovery of buried treasure, a French invasion, the repulse of a Roman invasion, the writing of an epic poem – turn out not to have happened, covering the one big event that must on no account be admitted to constitute the plot of the present: revolution.

I must admit, I hadn't picked up on the sizeable list of what hadn't actually occurred!