Decline and Rise

Evelyn Waugh did not have an overly happy time when he first went down from university. Funds were not overly available, and there were a succession of half hearted attempts to find a direction in life which culminated with a period as a schoolmaster in Wales which culminated in an attempted suicide.

His personal life was also far from secure. After Richard Pares had been spirited away by those who saw clearly his academic potential (and the threat posed to his reaching it by the company he kept), Waugh had fallen into company with Alastair Graham. Somewhat indulged by Graham's mother, the friendship/relationship/affair prospered for a while, and included a period where they shared a caravan on the fringe of Otmoor.....

....which brings us onto the Abingdon Arms, in Beckley. It was in the grounds of this pub, with its commanding views over Otmoor, that the caravan stood. Even after the affair with Graham broke up it continued to be a place that Waugh returned to - he spent the honeymoon of his first marriage to Evelyn Gardner here, and, in much the same way as he would do later in life with Chagford, adopted the pub as a literary retreat. It is believed that he wrote parts of Decline and Fall here, along with elements of other works of the period.

I've always had a soft spot for the Abingdon Arms - tucked away down a narrow lane it is one of those places where time feels like it has been standing still for a few decades. The food and beer hasn't been bad either. However, it has changed hands with alarming frequency over the years - possibly because being so tucked away means it has struggled for passing trade or impulse visitors. Recently it closed completely, and there were fears that it was going to become just another former pub (Oxford has depressingly many of these), whose attractive building will make a fine house for someone with the requisite amount of money.

To their credit, the local community organised themselves to fight this possibility and now we read in the Oxford Mail that their proposals (and more importantly money) have been accepted. The Abingdon Arms is moving into community ownership, and so this little piece of the literary landscape is saved for another wave of people to draw inspiration from its beautiful surroundings.

The caravan's long gone though.

No More Parades

As the summer goes into overdrive just as peoples' thoughts start to turn to going back to work, and the Olympics retreat into what already feels like distant memory, so the TV channels unveil their autumn line-ups.

The most eye-catching of what has been announced so far is undoubtedly the BBC's adaptation of the Parade's End tetralogy, which starts on BBC 2 on Friday.  The Sunday papers have pushed this heaily today, as the BBC's answer to the Downton Abbey behemoth, but I do hope that people aren't going to get too excited, as, unless Tom Stoppard has ripped tha heart out of it, Parade's End is a much more difficult and involving proposition than its ITV rival.  You can almost feel the slight anxiety that this adaptation has caused amongst the litterati in their pre-screening articles.  "Waugh we're ok with, we know where we are with Waugh - 500 words by tomorrow morning?" "Ah yes, Greene again - Catholicism, tortured soul, affairs" "Ford Madox Ford- ???"

Poor old Ford Madox Ford is little read these days, although he really deserves to be more mainstream.  In part, I think it's a question of style.  I've never really gone overboard on modernist writing, but his prose has a far greater clarity than Virginia Woolf, say, and his dialogue is better than Henry Green's (whom I think he probably most resembles). Persevere with the first 50 or so of the well over 800 pages of Parade's End, and once you "get" the narrative voice it's really absorbing stuff.

It would be unfair of me to blow the lid on the plot so I'll restrain myself, but I hope the cast are up to their roles.  Benedict Cumberbatch has a tricky job to pull of as the lead, Tietjens is quite a difficult hero for the early 21st century.  Even in the social milieu of pre Great War England his 18th century Tory attitudes mark him out from the crowd, and there are several occasions when you want to do nothing so much as give him a damn good shake.  The problem of course is that he tends to just roll with whatever punches life throws at him; which, given the scheming of his ludicrous wife, and his (chaste) love for the young suffragette Valentine Wannop, are legion.

Where Ford succeeds is in exposing the destructive effects of the war on the class system and the rigid certainties of the Edwardian age.  By offering Christopher Tietjens up as a saintly every man, we can observe the conflict as it deconstructs his personality and very sense of self, before rebuilding him anew.

I'll withold judgment for now (and the previews of the adaptation have been uniformly positive), but if they get Parade's End right, we could be looking at landmark television that can stand alongside Brideshead Revisited or The Jewel in the Crown.  If they miss the mark, then perhaps the book is truly, as I suspect it might be, unfilmable.

Watch this space.

The Wooden World

I suppose I was always going to join the navy, or do something equally silly in that vein at the very least.  Having been brought up on a diet of Rider Haggard and GA Henty it seemed the most natural thing in the world to go and take the shilling when the time came.  The taste for adventure stories has never really left me, but I keep returning to the sea in fiction, even though I no longer spend my life on it.

I still think that Arthur Ransome has a lot to answer for - how else does one explain this desire to go to sea when being brought up about as far from it as you can be in the UK?  Peter Duck was good, but I was always a big fan of Missee Lee personally.  Hornblower has always left me cold - the battles are good but the whole thing is a little too one-dimensional; Hornblower himself just a little too perfect.  As a child you can identify with his courage and devotion, but at the same time the action never really rises above what the BBFC would no doubt these days classsify as "mild peril.."

Captain Marryatt made a big impression on me when I was ten or so - I could never quite get to grips with The Children of the New Forest, but Mr Midshipman Easy was another story entirely.  Here at last was Hornblower action with character development, and I remember being heartily sorry that it is a standalone book, and that I wasn't going to discover the further adventures of Mr Easy in due course.

Which, of course, leads naturally enough to Patrick O'Brian.  I came to him incredibly late, just a couple of years ago via the second hand bookshop in Burnham Market, but managed to read the whole canon in 2 years.  O'Brian tends to split people down the middle a little bit like Marmite; between those who can't see past the first bit of nautical slang and those for whom he represents near perfection in a writer.  Personally, I think there is a strong case to be made that he is the finest British writer of the 20th century - if the terribly snobbish end of the critical spectrum hadn't ghettoised him for the heinous crime of writing "historical fiction," then he probably would have been recognised as such in his own lifetime.

Indeed, even if we take the literary world's estimation of historical fiction at its face value, then O'Brian is clearly the leader of the field.  One someimes pulls up short when buried deep in the early nineteenth century with the realisation that O'Brian is a contemporary of the 20th century world, not Jane Austen, such is the perfect pitch he reaches in recreating/creating his vanished world.  Anachronisms are conspicuous by their absence, and the whole strata of the eighteenth and nineteen century Royal Navy, and the social round ashore, is perfectly delineated.

Quite apart from anything else, the sequence is a study of a friendship, in some ways an unlikely one, between a seafaring man and a government agent with a sideline in botany.  Over the course of the the novels we see what are initially lightly drawn characters become fully realised, until a point is reached at which it is genuinely difficult to believe that all of this is the product of one man's mind, and we have to remind ourselves that O'Brian is a novelist and not a particularly lucky Boswell who has stumbled upon the cached letters of two real gentlemen.

Aside from achieving a fully realised picture of the Georgian navy, O'Brian frequently employs certain narrative devices which set him apart from his genre near rivals.  Action is described sparingly, and frequently not at all - and is rendered all the more powerful for it.  My favourite novel, Treason's Harbour, describes perfectly the claustrophobic enclosed world of the senior officers waiting in Malta for news, rather than great fleet actions.  Similarly, O'Brian spends a good portion of Desolation Island setting up a pursuit between HMS Leopard and the Dutch Waakzaamheid, only for the incident to be over in a sentence - real blink and you'll miss it stuff which is all the more devastating for it.

The Aubrey-Maturin saga is one of the greatest achievements of British fiction, and deserves a little more respect than that grudgingly granted to other tellers of superior sea tales.  Many have tried to emulate O'Brian since, but Sharpe didn't really work at sea.  The only one to have come really close is Alan Mallinson, whose Hervey novels are perhaps best viewed as sub-Aubrey on land, but who did send him to sea in Man of War, with pretty decent results.  Ultimately though, I don't think that we need another O'Brian - there are more than enough books in the sequence to repay re-reading over a long period, and Jack Aubrey does make a fine shipmate.

Happiness

There's always one book I never go anywhere without - it's not that it's a talisman as such, more that I don't know of a time when I haven't felt better for having it to hand.  It's rather unlikely, being, as it's own author describes it, nothing more than the "annals of an ancient actor."

I first read David Niven's "The Moon's a Balloon" when in the sixth form.  One of the advantages of spending half your life on a train to or from school, as well as being able to read reasonably quickly, was that you certainly got through a lot of lengthy books.  The Crowthers of Bankdam, which would now probably be regarded, if it is remembered at all, as a deeply unfashionable sub-Galsworthy saga, is one that has stayed wih me particularly clearly: the politics of a nineteenth century mill-owning dynasty in northern England is not perhaps obvious reading matter for your average seventeen year old public school boy, but I was never one for convention....

Anyway, back to Mr Niven.  I remember being struck at the time by how much he managed to pack into his life - representing Britain in yachting; war hero; oscar winner; womaniser; Errol Flynn's flatmate.  If you're at an impressionable age, a chap can dream about his future as all of those (except the last one, obviously).  I think I read it in about half a day, and was left slightly bereft at the end of it.  I think the key thing is that Niv was such a good story teller.  I wasn't in the least upset when reading Graham Lord's later biography to discover that some of the anecdotes were "embroidered," there was always enough of the truth in them to mean that you could forgive the exaggerations as just helping to make the smile on your face that bit broader.

I'm not going to give you a great stream of examples, except to say that the story of how he eventually broke into Hollywood, aboard a replica of HMS Bounty into which he had been decanted off the coast of California after a particularly boozy night aboard HMS Norfolk, sets the tone for the whole book - imbued as it is with an utterly infectious joie de vivre.

Since that first reading 13 years ago my battered copy of this great little book has made it's way through my training at Dartmouth; been on deployment to the Red Sea, the Falklands, Antarctica, and, admittedly without me, travelled to the Gambia from Oxford in the back of an ambulance.....  Quite simply, it's a wonderful thing to have around, and there's not much excuse for not reading it as soon as you get a minute.

It will make your life a little bit better.

Happy Birthday Mr Dickens

Blogging is a bit light at the moment, as a result of the twin pressures of work and short story writing  - at the moment if it's not one, it's the other.  Anyway, I thought I ought to acknowledge his 200th birthday  - and look forward to that of Mr Trollope (who was much better) in 2015.  Sadly I missed Surtees' in 2005, as he knocks them both into a cocked hat.... 

There was an interesting discussion on the radio this evening about whether all these anniversaries are simply an excuse for creative laziness - hacks and marketing types simply looking for the next hook to the past, rather than genuinely progressing.  I think there's probably something in that, although it all depends how you do it, and what your take on the continuining relevance of the anniversary being commemorated is.

Dickens of course was the preeminent hack of his time - writing to order and publishing magazines as outlets for his own work.  Unlike Trollope, he never made the mistake of putting down his writing routine in an autobiography (which was the kiss of death for Mr T's reputation amongst those who maintained that the muse doesn't appear to fill a quota).  It's trite to say that the work of either is the nineteenth century equivalent of a soap opera, but it's also true.  The recent BBC adaptations of Bleak House, and more particularly Little Dorrit, show only too well how Dickens was the master of suspense, melodrama, and good plot driven character development.  He deserves his place on the shelves of the 21st century booksellers, even if the educational establishment worries that he's no longer suitable for the A level curriculum.

But, he still didn't write The Way We Live Now....

Coming soon, my Grandfather's journey from Cape Town to Kariba, by tractor, in the 1950s.  I might even get a short story out of that as well - two birds with one stone and all that!

A Dance to the Music of Time

There are some books that you would only want to read once; War and Peace, say, or Jordan’s Autobiography…  Then there are others that you find yourself returning to time and again. I think I’ll leave RF Delderfield for another day, before we get too middlebrow (he’s very good though – never be ashamed to read what you enjoy), so, today we’re going to talk about Anthony Powell’s masterpiece A Dance to the Music of Time.

I touched briefly on the Dance yesterday whilst looking at Julian Maclaren-Ross.  It’s a couple of years since I read it, but just thinking about X Trapnel brought the whole work swimming back t the foreground of my mind.  If you take Patrick O’Brian as Britain’s Homer (don’t panic, I’ll get round to justifying that at some point), then Powell has a fair claim to being our Proust.  The Dance is nothing so much as a conversation sustained over 12 novels.  Plot arcs are leisurely to the point of rendering themselves invisible, characters appear, start to get interesting, then vanish for a couple of books – or occasionally permanently. You could read one constituent volume as a novel in itself, but to be honest I can’t think why you’d want to; the whole thing would be far too confusing.

The sequence takes its name from the painting of the same name by Poussin, which hangs in the Wallace Collection and details the march of time through the seasons of life (if you haven’t been to the Wallace Collection, go immediately – it’s round the back of Selfridges in Manchester Square and is probably the only collection in the world that splits its catalogue down the middle between Old Masters and armour…..).  At one point in the Dance, Powell has his narrator and a colleague looking down from a window at the War Office on some workmen taking a break around a brazier.  Their movements as they circle the fire seem almost choreographed, a though they are taking part unconsciously in some great performance.

Powell’s great achievement then was to replicate the rhythms of life, through the eyes of his narrator, Nick Jenkins.  Jenkins is an odd device, clearly based on Powell himself; we learn very little about his close relationships (his marriage and wife are described very lightly), he simply stumbles through life from school to late middle age whilst things happen around him.  It is the vast supporting cast that repays the effort of reading.

Whole theses could probably be written about the monstrous character of Kenneth Widmerpool – by the end he is almost the star; did Powell intend this from the start? However I must say that I have never been too concerned with the story of his rise and ultimate fall.  The really interesting figures are the composer Hugh Moreland (drawn from Constant Lambert), and the tragicomic figure of Ted Jeavons.

Coming to the sequence for the first time can be pretty daunting – after all, one is essentially signing up for 12 volumes on spec, knowing that if you give up at any point before the end there won’t be any satisfying conclusions.  It’s also not helped by the first novel, “A Question of Upbringing,” is pretty heavy going (and ostensibly a “school story” qua Jennings or Mike and Psmith – if you come to it at the age of, say, 15, you are going to be disappointed).  Indeed, Powell takes a couple of volumes to really hit his stride, but by No3, “The Acceptance World,” it should have become clear to most readers what he is trying to do and they’re likely to want to stick with it.  Books 4-9 , taking Jenkins through the 1930s and the Second World War, are probably the best, but I do have a soft spot for No10, “Books Do Furnish a Room,” which deals with the early post-war period and literary London.

The only let down is the conclusion (no spoilers).  Book 12, “Hearing Secret Harmonies” does rather jar with what has come before.  I think this is because for the first time Powell is not writing about the past – Jenkins has caught him up and he is writing about the contemporary world.  The main characters that sustained the previous eleven volumes are perforce dead/dying off, and their children are carrying more of the action.  Powell unfortunately doesn’t really get the age of Aquarius, and his descriptions of proto-hippies are worryingly off-beam. Particularly hard to grasp is the end of Widmerpool.

Having said all that, the faults must be taken in the context of the whole (“the essence of the all is the god-head of the true,” as Dr Trelawney might have had it), and for the most part what you have got in the Dance is a window into the mind of the mid-20^thcentury man, living with him his loves and friendships, seeing what made him, and how he will continue being made as hid life goes on.

If Powell had been killed in the war (he served with the Welch Regiment and in military intelligence), he would probably have been remembered as an author of “Bright Young Things” fiction, along the lines of early Waugh or Huxley.  That he survived is English fiction’s immense gain – next time you’re in the Wallace Collection, seek out the painting, stand a while, and wonder.

London

London.  Sooner or later we were always going to have to talk about London, that teeming agglomeration of places you wouldn’t want to live that casts its baleful eye over the rest of the country and looks for fresh prey.  It started with Middlesex, most beautiful and unassuming of counties, despoiled beyond recognition – what price Betjeman’s “rural Rayner’s Lane” now? – and then began work on the people and places further afield, sucking talent and opportunity away from the rest of the country in its insatiable lust for commerce.

Of course, there are nicer parts, Wimbledon is generally lovely; Soho has a mystique all its own; but for every place you’d want to live there’re two where you’d only exist.  Most of west London, for example, for which the best that can be said is that the house prices aren’t as bad as Fulham; or Angel/Islington, that weird combination of Guardian reading public school luvvies and Telegraph reading public school lawyers and city types – not that you could put a cigarette paper between them.  Or Stoke Newington: about as “edgy” these days as Bloomsbury was in the 1890s.

London has always been a graveyard of hopes and dreams, but this has occasionally led to great art – as poverty, in a clichéd fashion, sometimes does.  Patrick Hamilton has been experiencing something of a renaissance lately, his chronicles of lower middle and upper working class London life in the interwar period (most notably “Hangover Square” or the trilogy “Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky”) perhaps chiming with the uncertainties and economic hardships of our own time. 

Hamilton, of course, was an uneven writer – his star burned brightly enough to begin with, and reached its zenith with “The Slaves of Solitude,” before beginning the long slide into mediocrity with the Gorse trilogy (the last volume of which, “Unknown Assailant,” is probably only worth reading for the sake of completeness; the reader is long past caring about the story or the character).

Then there’s Julian Maclaren-Ross. You’ve probably come across Maclaren-Ross, even if you haven’t realised it. He was the template for the self destructing idiot writer; a prototype for the sort of chap (other than himself) that Cyril Connolly had in mind when he wrote “Enemies of Promise.” He was also the model for X Trapnel, far and away the most intriguing character in Powell’s “A Dance to the Music of Time.” If you haven’t read this sequence, then go and do so immediately – for Trapnel’s appearances you want volumes 10, 11, and 12, respectively – or, for the York Notes crib, just watch Sean Baker’s brilliant portrayal in the Channel 4 adaptation from the late 1990s.

JM-R was, in truth, a bit of an oddball.  A somewhat peripatetic childhood in France, and broken schooling, eventually saw him washed up in pre-war London.  He didn’t really trouble the literary world over much until towards the end of the Second World War when, managing to extricate himself from the army, who were probably as glad to see the back of him as he was then, he became a fixture of the Soho scene.  Reading his excellent “Memoirs of the Forties” is like having a front row seat in a parade of mid 20^th century British greats.  Waugh is there, as is Betjeman (both of whom were admirers of his prose), Orwell, Tambimuttu, Connolly and Horizon magazine….

Maclaren-Ross completed only one “literary” novel (as opposed to some dreadful penny shockers), 1947’s “Of Love and Hunger,” but this alone would be enough to see him occupying a creditable place in the English novelist’s second XI.  I’ll be honest that it probably doesn’t sound totally promising when I say it’s about a door to door vacuum cleaner salesman in 1930s Brighton, but it speaks eloquently of lost love, drudgery, hardship and heartbreak. Much as with Waugh, the bad end unhappily and the good even more so, but it is crystal clear prose that you can lose yourself in.  Possibly the only comparable prose stylist working today is Edward St Aubyn.

The chief glory of the JM-R oeuvre, however, is the short stories.  You can still pick up first and second editions reasonably cheaply, but they have been collected into a couple of volumes that are easily available on Amazon, notably “Selected Stories” and “Bitten by the Tarantula.” These demonstrate Maclaren-Ross’ pitch perfect ear for dialogue, particularly the army stories, which limn with devastating accuracy the predicament of the over intellectual under achiever conscripted into the machine of total war. Then there’re the peppery ex colonials, the young men on the make, and a cast of grotesque suburbanites and central London bohemians.  He was on to a good thing and, during the war when there was a hunger for reading material of all types, literary magazines were booming in the publishing mainstream, and the short story was enjoying its last hurrah as an artistic form, he made absolute hay.

Maclaren-Ross was however afflicted with Sohoitis in a big way – Tambimuttu’s term for spending all one’s time in the pubs of Soho and never getting any work done. He spent periods of time sleeping rough, suffered psychotic episodes (in the grip of one of which he stalked and plotted to murder George Orwell’s widow Sonia), and died much too young in the 1960s. Paul Willetts did an excellent job of bringing him back to life in his 2005 biography “Fear and Loathing in Fitzrovia,” which is heartily recommended. 

I thought about Maclaren-Ross as I sat in the bar of the Fitzroy Tavern the other week.  Sam Smiths have managed to keep the place looking appropriately unmodernised, and it was easy to imagine the man in the dark glasses and the teddy bear overcoat, wielding his swordstick and knocking back the  drinks as he kept the hordes of hangers on entertained before going home to get on the Benzedrine and write until dawn in his miniscule handwriting.  Essays, reviews, short stories, parodies, begging letters to the Royal Literary Fund….  For a short time London came alive again, and its depressing descent into plastic consumerism was arrested.  The provinces have had their literary hymners too, Priestley say, or Francis Brett-Young.  But it is perhaps appropriate that the chronicler of 20^th century London should have been so heroically underachieving.

Julian Maclaren-Ross, then, in the words of Paul Willetts “a mediocre caretaker of his own immense talent.”