My Life in Books

Well, not exactly mine, but the lives of the twenty guests who will be interviewed by Anne Robinson over the next fortnight as part of the BBC's run up to World Book Night on March 5th.  This is not a television household.  The radio wakes me up in the morning and goes off when I finally put the light out at night.  I do, however, make an exception for programmes that discuss books and the prospect of this every weekday evening for a fortnight, is tempting indeed.

If there's one thing I love as much as I do reading it is discussing what I've been reading with other likeminded people.  Hence the three book groups to which I belong, not to mention being part of the blogging world.  So, a programme where two guests each brings along five of their favourite books to talk about has to be my idea of heaven.  In fact you can tell how much I'm willing to put up with to listen to a book discussion if I say that two of the three people involved in the first of these programmes are among the broadcasters I would normally go furthest to avoid and yet I still watched it and still enjoyed it.

The format is very simple.  Anne Robinson invites two readers to choose books that mark particular points in their lives and explain why they have been important to them.  It could become extremely formulaic and lifeless and indeed after the first five minutes, especially when Robinson kept jumping in to try and move the proceedings along, I was worried that it wasn't going to work.  However, the two guests, writer P D James and radio presenter, Richard Bacon, suddenly started to interact with each other, ignoring whatever time constraints there may have been, and the programme immediately took off. I hope by the time the second in the series airs this evening Robinson will have relaxed a little and learned to let the discussion flow more easily.  I'm not certain, though, that she does relaxed and it might be necessary for the guests to take over every evening.

Whatever the faults it is just so nice to have a programme that takes reading as a lifelong obsession seriously and I hope that it will be such a success that the BBC will have to think about giving it a regular spot in the schedules rather than just a short term project.  Maybe we should all write and demand a second series.

Some Things Just Never Change

Having discovered during my research on Andrew Marvell that corrupt politicians are not the prerogative of the twenty-first century (OK, so that wasn't really that much of a surprise)  I came across this passage, last night, while reading Daniel Deronda, which shows that the publishing world hasn't changed that much either.

One of the shop-windows he paused before was that of a second-hand book-shop, where, on a narrow table outside, the literature of the ages was represented in judicious mixture, from the immortal verse of Homer to the mortal prose of the railway novel.


Airport novels eat your hearts out.  There is clearly nothing new under the sun.

Andrew Marvell ~ Poet or Politician

You might be forgiven for thinking that there is precious little reading going on in the SCR at the moment, I certainly feel as if that is the case.  I don't seem to be writing much about books and the tbr pile is simply growing by the day.  However, in my defence I do have three quite substantial projects on the go.  My Wednesday evening book group is reading Daniel Deronda for the first week in March and I have to lead the discussion.  Not only is this a substantial read in its own right, but I'm also having to do quite a lot of background reading both on Eliot's own religious position and on the general reception of Jews in England in the period when the novel is set.  I'm thoroughly enjoying the work, but it is taking time.

Then, my Wednesday Shakespeare Group is just about to move on to The Taming of the Shrew and the first of the three sessions is always the most difficult to prepare for as I like to look not only at the major sources for the play but also at the various editions that are available.  In the case of The Shrew, of course, this means reading and comparing the Folio text with the three Quartos of The Taming of A Shrew which were published before the First Folio in 1623 and then taking on board all the arguments as to which, if either, is the original play.  Again, this is fascinating, but it takes time.

Finally, I was suddenly asked to give a talk to our History Group about the seventeenth century poet, Andrew Marvell, on the somewhat shaky grounds that we have now reached that period in our study of English History and I am the literary one.  

Now if push comes to shove, I can talk about any Shakespeare play for an hour or so off the top of my head, and this isn't the first time that I've read Daniel Deronda, but the sum total of my knowledge about Andrew Marvell prior to this request was the first line of the poem To His Coy Mistress.  So, believe me, there has been a great deal of reading going on in the SCR but it's mostly been aimed at finding out more about this remarkable man, who was far better know in his own time as a politician and a writer of tracts designed specifically to get up the noses of the great and the good than he was as a poet.

Marvell was born in Yorkshire in 1621 and the family very soon moved to Hull, a city with which he was associated for the rest of his life.  His father was an Anglican Minister and from what I can discover Marvell himself was solid in that faith throughout his life.  Certainly, he was voluble orally and in writing against both the Catholics and the Episcopalians, and towards the end of his life this would set him at odds with all the major players in the political arena as Charles II moved further and further towards the Catholic church and those who wished to see the power in the hands of the Bishops fought the monarch in the House of Commons.

He was a very well-educated man, attending Cambridge University from before his thirteenth birthday, and using the chance to travel as governor to a young nobleman to learn Dutch, French, Spanish and Italian.  His knowledge of languages was to become well known and he was employed as tutor to a number of well connected teenagers including, for a time, the nephew of a friend of Oliver Cromwell who was intended as husband for Cromwell's youngest daughter.  When he moved into politics as MP for Hull, he was often given secretarial roles that required him to interpret and translate documents for visiting dignitaries and was part of a delegation to Russia when Parliament was trying to renegotiate trading deals that had been cancelled when Charles I was beheaded.  Obviously Tzar Alexis didn't want his own subjects getting any regicidal ideas.

Looking at his time in Parliament you do tend to get the feeling that things were pretty much the same then as they are now.  The Borough of Hull paid Marvell 6s 8d for every day that the House sat as well as expenses and the occasional barrel of ale.  Oh that word expenses.  We all know what that can mean after the scandals of the last year about the monies claimed by our current crop of MPs.  And what about those barrels of ale?  I suppose we can only be glad they weren't Duck Houses! (With apologies to my non UK readers who may not quite understand that last comment.)  However, Marvell did speak out in the Commons against a bill designed to allow MPs to accept public office, a means of bribing politicians to vote in ways favourable to those who held the real power.  In fact, my overall impression of Marvell is that he was his own man.  He had his own ideas of what was right and wrong and he supported whichever grouping he thought was most likely to bring about the effects he thought desirable.  This has led to people looking at him as something of a turncoat, but I think you could rely on him if you relied on him to be true to himself.

And all this time he was writing, but not primarily the poems for which we now remember him.  The works that brought him most notice were the poems and the tracts which either feted or poured scorn on the major players in English government.  His final great piece was An Account of the Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government which opens:

There has now for diverse Years, a design been carried on, to change the Lawfull Government of England into an Absolute Tyrrany, and to convert the established Protestant Religion into down-right Popery

and goes on to trace the conspiracy back to Charles II himself.  A real example of how to win friends and influence people!

Marvell died of the tertian ague (which probably means some form of malarial type illness) in 1678, but even then was hardly able to avoid controversy when his housekeeper claimed to have been secretly married to him and consequently to have rights over his estate.  His poems were published after his death, but for a long time the more political writings were overlooked.  It was really the essay written by T S Eliot for the tercentennial volume of his works, published in 1921, that brought Marvell back to general notice and led to a reassessment of his writings, both poetical and political. 

So, you see there has been some reading going on in the SCR and now I just have to hope that I can satisfy my colleagues when I give the longer version of this paper on Monday.  Fingers crossed.

Recalling Shakespeare

On Monday I went to see a dear friend who is in the process of moving house.  It's a difficult situation because she has lived in the same rather isolated cottage for the past sixty-three years and she is a hoarder.  As you might imagine, given the length of time she's been in her home, she is having to move because of health problems and she is going into much smaller accommodation.  It isn't easy for her, either emotionally or physically.  

I went over on Monday specifically because she wanted me to  have her collection of programmes from the theatre visits she'd made to Stratford over the years to use with the Shakespeare groups I teach.  While I'd seen many of the same productions myself, I don't have the space to be a hoarder and so I haven't kept any but the more recent programmes myself.  I've often regretted this, but a small house is a small house and that's all there is to it.

As you might imagine, I've had the most wonderful time over the past few days going through these programmes and recalling some of the marvellous productions I've had the privilege of seeing since I first started going to Stratford in the early 1960s. They include, for example, the programme for the very first professional Shakespeare I saw, Peter Hall's 1962 production of A Midsummer Night's Dream with Judi Dench as Titania, Diana Rigg as Helena and, I notice, the novelist, Margaret Drabble, tucked away among the fairies.  I knew she had wanted to be an actress, but I hadn't realised I'd been there to see her early attempts.

It is, though, the even earlier programmes that really make you catch your breath and turn green with envy. Here, for example, is the 1959 production of Othello with Sam Wanamaker as Iago and Paul Robeson as The Moor.  What wouldn't I have given to see that.  Or the Cymbeline from two years earlier with Peggy Ashcroft as Imogen and, hidden deep among the Lords, Ladies, Servants and Guards, an as yet unheard of, Eileen Atkins.  And what about a production of Dr Faustus just after the war, in 1947, with Robert Harris as the eponymous scholar and Paul Scofield as the evil Mephistophilis? 

The piece de resistance, however, has to be the 1951 programme for Henry IV Pt I.  The cast list reads like a theatrical who's who of the period; Harry Andrews as King Henry, Anthony Quayle as Falstaff, Michael Redgrave as Hotspur, Hugh Griffiths as Owen Glendower and, of course, Richard Burton as Prince Hal.  I am not old enough to remember Burton as anything other than a film actor.  How I wish I could have seen that production.  The Henry IVs are among my favourite plays anyway, but with a cast like that.......

I'm so sorry for my friend that she has had to give away programmes that are reminders of so many happy memories, but I know she is pleased that they are going to be put to good use and when I talk to her about the memories they have recalled for me as well, we are at least going to have food for hours and hours of theatrical discussion.

The House at Sea's End - Elly Griffiths

The House at Sea's End is the third of Elly Griffiths' crime novels about forensic archeologist, Ruth Galloway. I love Ruth, she is everything a female crime hero 'shouldn't' be, forty, single, overweight and, in this book, the mother of newly born Kate, who promises to be every bit as much of a character as Ruth is.

This time Ruth is called in to examine a burial uncovered by her team beneath a rockfall on an isolated Norfolk beach. As she excavates the bones it becomes apparent that she has not one, but six victims of what appears to be a war-time execution. Inevitably, the police are called in and DCI Nelson is forced to consider the possibility that not only were there war crimes committed in this very small and now rapidly vanishing village seventy years ago, but that there might also still be someone alive who is prepared to kill to make sure that the truth is never revealed.

The theme of war crimes is explored further through the visit of Ruth's old friend of Bosnian extraction, Tatjana. Tatjana is still trying to come to terms with the loss of her own child and his grandparents and in exploring that story Ruth learns more about her own feelings on having become a mother and what Kate's presence is going to mean in her life. The two narrative are woven together very well and complement each other rather than feeling contrived as might so easily be the case.

But then that wouldn't happen with a writer of Griffiths talent, would it? With every novel she becomes more and more adept. Her plots stand up, her characters are wonderful creations and completely real, and above all she has the most original narrative voice I've encountered in years. Writing in third person present tense Griffiths' narrator stands slightly back from the action and offers a wry commentary on everything that is going on. The temptation is to think that it is in some way Ruth's voice, but the narrator is there when she isn't. Whoever it is, I'm rather glad they aren't always around to observe some of my follies. Here is Ruth coming home to Kate and to her friend, Shona, who has been looking after her.

Ruth looks at Shona, who is still holding Kate and looking pleased with herself.


'We've been up for ages,' she says. 'I got Kate dressed and gave her a bottle. We've been playing.'


Of the two, Kate looks the better for the experience. She is bright-eyed and bursting with energy. Shona has, in fact, dressed her in pyjamas and a jumper that is two sizes too big but she is overcoming these sartorial disadvantages with aplomb. She takes Ruth's phone and bites it, experimentally. Shona on the other hand, looks pale and bleary-eyed, her hair is unbrushed and her skirt is on inside out. But she is obviously pleased with herself for having survived the night. Pg 192

And she turns the English language superbly.

'Can I get you a drink?' asks Hastings, shrugging off his coat. 'Tea? Coffee? Something stronger? Keep out the cold?'


'I'm driving.' says Nelson. 'Coffee would be grand.'


Ruth would love 'something stronger' but she feels sure that Nelson would disapprove. Not only will she be driving later but she is also going to be operating a heavy baby. 'Coffee would be lovely,' she says. Pg 69

It is wonderful to watch a writer grow, as Griffiths is doing, book by book in the mastery of her craft. I can't recommend her books too highly, but, as I so often find myself saying, if you haven't read the first two you really ought to go back to the beginning. Once you've read one you're going to want to read the others anyway so save yourself the trouble and begin at the beginning.


Annie

Is There a Comic in the House?

"My problem," I declared to the friend with whom I was lunching yesterday, "is that I was born without the laughter gene."

We were reflecting on the David Lodge lecture to which we had both been on Wednesday and discussing the next speaker in the series, whose name I genuinely can't remember because it is someone of whom I have never heard. The main reason I haven't heard of him is because he is a stand up comedian and I'm afraid I have yet to find a stand up comic who makes me laugh. Everyone around me can be rolling in the aisles but I will just sit there looking bemused. Television sit-com is just as bad. There will be gales of laughter coming from the studio audience (OK, no real indication, I know but someone must find them funny or surely they wouldn't go on making them) while I sit shaking my head in amazement.

Perhaps it is to do with the fact that laughter these days seems so often to revolve around making fun of someone else's misfortune in a way which is frequently, or so it appears to me, to be needlessly cruel. We condemn then playground bully who makes fun of the lonely child who somehow fails to fit in, but it's acceptable if the bully is being paid vast sums of money to humiliate others in a wider public forum.

Anyway, I had decided that I didn't do laughter and that I must be the worst sort of social misfit - and then I read the next segment of Susan Hill's Howards End is on the Landing; the chapter in which she discusses what makes her laugh. Back they came flooding, all those occasions when I've laughed so hard that I cried. Wodehouse never fails whether it be Jeeves or Lord Emsworth, and she also mentions someone who in my mind is one of the great comic writers of all times, Gerald Durrell.

Hill talks of probably Durrell's most famous book, My Family and Other Animals, and I would rank that high up amongst my favourites as well, but for me the really funny books are those which detail his travels in search of rare animals for his conservation programme: Beasts in the Belfry, Catch Me a Colubus and above all The Bafut Beagles. For some reason I read the last of those in a hotel room in Paris and much to the distress of the other guests I was still chuckling as I went down to breakfast. Ah, these mad English!

As Hill says, what distinguishes authors such as Wodehouse and Durrell is their style. These are not writers out for a quick laugh, they are people who have something to say and say it with panache. You would want to read them whatever they were writing about simply because they know how to turn a beautiful sentence. I've spent this afternoon finding cheap copies of the volumes I remember best and in future when I worry about the state of my laughter gene I shall have somewhere to turn for reassurance.


Annie

Reading Experience Database 1450 - 1945

As I'm sure most of you know, The Open University maintains a site which they call The Learning Space where you can access short on-line courses available to the general public without cost.  They can be in any subject, range across the various undergraduate levels and for the most part they are expected to take between one and twenty hours of study.  Whenever they add to these courses they publish the fact on their Open Learn page and I regularly check in on a Saturday morning to see if there's anything new that might appeal.  Well, this morning I hit pay dirt.  There had been not one, but four attractive courses posted during the week, all to do with the history of the reader.

The courses are all related to a database the OU maintains about which I previously knew nothing, the Reading Experience Database 1450 - 1945.  The site explains better than I could what its purpose is:

UK RED is an open-access database housed at The Open University containing over 30,000 easily searchable records documenting the history of reading in Britain from 1450 to 1945. Evidence of reading presented in RED is drawn from published and unpublished sources as diverse as diaries, commonplace books, memoirs, sociological surveys, and criminal court and prison records. In January 2010 the RED project received generous AHRC funding to develop an international digital network for researching the history of reading across borders, in collaboration with partners in Australia, Canada, The Netherlands, and New Zealand.

Each of the four new courses is designed to help the student understand the nature of the material stored on the databased and the potential for its use.

The first course, History of Reading: An introduction to reading in the past, consists of a series of essays, drawn from material referenced in the database, designed to illustrate aspects of reading in the UK during the period from 1450 to 1945.  It contains essays relating to, amongst others, Dickens, Austen, Pepys and Stevenson.

The second, History of Reading Tutorial 1: Finding evidence of reading in the past, is designed to help researchers search, browse and use the resource, exploring the types of evidence historians have uncovered about the history of reading. It has in it, for example, a unit about the way in which material has been drawn from diaries, letters and journals - some of my favourite type of reading.

The third and fourth courses are each illustrative of ways in which researchers might use the database to compile a substantial body of evidence either about the way in which a specific book has been received by readers over the ages or the reading habits of a particular individual.  History of Reading Tutorial 2: The reading and reception of literary texts - a case study of Robinson Crusoe, does just what it says on the tin, it looks at the history of the readers response to Defoe's novel,while  History of Reading Tutorial 3: Famous Writers and their Reading: Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Vernon Lee explores the way in which the reading habits of a writer can then be seen to feed into their own writing.

I've only just begun to look at the first of these and have done little more than scratch the surface of what is actually available in RED itself.  I put in Ben Jonson and discovered that when Virginia Woolf was reading plays from this period she commented:

Tomorrow I go onto Ben Jonson, but I shan't like him as much as Marlowe.

Not exactly groundbreaking information, but it does show the potential.

I hope you enjoy playing with this as much as I know I'm going to.  The trouble is it's something else to take up my time when I ought to be doing the reading myself rather than exploring other people's reading habits.  Oh well!