The TLS blog

Wait a minute Mr Postman

by Thea Lenarduzzi

 

Ever since my nineteenth birthday card from my Aunty Marie failed to arrive, along with the enclosed £10 note, I have had an uneasy relationship with the postal service. But letters are a source of other forms of riches too, as the Post Office in Pictures exhibition, organized by the British Postal Museum and Archive (BPMA), at the beautiful Lumen URC reminds us.

 

The images on display, drawn mainly from the Post Office Magazine and Courier, document postal history from the 1930s onwards, focusing on the people that take our letters from A to B, come hell or high water – as this image of a mail cart bound for Holy Island in 1938 demonstrates:

 

The “Bucket Bridge” (below), used to cross the River Findhorn in northern Scotland between 1939 and 1960, shows no small initiative.

Beautiful imperfection - Marie Colvin and Cerys Matthews

 

By Alan Jenkins

 

Shortly after Marie Colvin was killed in Homs the Sunday Times called me and asked if I would be trying to write anything for or about her. No, no, I protested, it was far too soon, too early even for grief; I was in shock. In the small hours of that night I woke with a start of deep shame at what Marie would have thought of my maidenly blushes. Over the next few days and nights I wrote a poem I called “Reports of My Survival May be Exaggerated” – Marie’s words on a Facebook update posted a day or so before her death, when, having filed her ST report from Babr Amr and got safely out, she decided to go back in, to witness the next stage of Assad’s war on his own people. Reporting wars was, after all, what she did. Writing poems is, after all, what I am supposed to do.

How to have style

By J. C.

We’re all writers nowadays, living in the era of the blog, the age of anti-elitism, the epoch of self-publishing. Editors at mainstream houses do many things, but editing isn’t always one of them. And yet, and yet . . . a line divides the good writer from the late-night assailant of the defenceless keyboard. To put it another way, what separates writers from people who write is style. A good start in the cultivation of a style would be to avoid phrases such as “and yet, and yet”.

Lewis-Carroll-next-the-Sea

 

By Thea Lenarduzzi

How did you celebrate International Owl and Pussycat Day on Saturday? Across Britain, people gathered to celebrate the 200^th  anniversary of the birth of Edward Lear, with recitals and puppet shows, and, worryingly, “animals and nonsense” promised at Knowsley Safari Park (and entertainment of a safer, academic sort yet to come).

 

Others got their fix of nonsense elsewhere. I found mine in a small community hall in Wells-Next-the-Sea, Norfolk, on the final day of the yearly poetry festival. The occasion was Lewis Carroll’s unbirthday party (as indeed every day of the year, except  January 27, must be), and Dame Gillian Beer led the celebrations with readings from her edition of his collected poems, due to be published in September. (We must speak of the “Collected” rather than “complete” poems, she explains, because “they keep popping up like mushrooms”.) So, while we enjoyed a cup of tea and a biscuit for the wonderfully no-nonsense price of 50p, Beer urged us to look beyond the Alice books, and into the further wilds of Carroll’s – and our – imaginations. 

Pallant House Gallery

by Adrian Tahourdin

 

Pallant House Gallery in Chichester was opened just thirty years ago yet it can rightly claim to be “one of the most important galleries for British modern art in the country”. The bulk of the collection is housed in a discreet and airy modern extension designed by the architects Long and Kentish together with Professor Colin St John Wilson, the subject of one of the portraits on display - by William Coldstream.

 

Pallant House itself, a beautiful Queen Anne town house, sits in the shadow of the cathedral and was built for Henry “Lisbon” Peckham, his nickname alluding to Peckham’s interests in the Portuguese wine trade. One room is given over to eighteenth-century works: porcelain and glass, a couple of works by George Romney. There is also a remarkable bronze bust of Charles I by Hubert Le Sueur, dating from c.1637; the bust was presented to the city during the reign of Charles II “in recognition of its role as a monarchist stronghold during the Civil War”.

 

The glory of the gallery undoubtedly lies in its twentieth-century British collection. Among the artists represented are Walter Sickert, Ivon Hitchens, David Bomberg, Patrick Caulfield, Henry Moore (a sombre 1942 watercolour-and-wax-crayon sketch of two people in a bomb shelter), Peter Blake, Richard Hamilton, Frank Auerbach, Lucian Freud, Peter de Francia, Barbara Hepworth, Mark Gertler, Wyndham Lewis . . . . A portrait by William Coldstream of one of the bishops of Chichester seems almost incongruous, although it’s near to a striking depiction by Eric Gill of “Christ the King” in Portland stone, dated c.1935.

 

A particular incentive to visit the gallery at the moment is the Keith Vaughan exhibition (on until June 10). Vaughan was born in the nearby fishing village of Selsey a hundred years ago. He committed suicide in 1977. Continental influences are palpable in his work, most obviously Cézanne and Picasso, while Cubism is transplanted to a “Village in Ireland”. There is an unsettling quality to it too - one particularly disturbing picture is inspired by Kafka’s The Trial. In the glass cabinets are book cover designs for Rimbaud’s “Season in Hell” among others.

 

The gallery leaflet describes Vaughan as “best known for his painterly depictions of the male nude in the landscape”, which are indeed amply represented in the exhibition. As Richard Dorment wrote, reviewing the show in the Daily Telegraph, the effect is not “overtly homoerotic” as Vaughan was “working at a time when the open expression of homosexuality in art was not possible”. But with hindsight the intentions are clear. Most eye-catching to me was the Redon-meets-de Chirico of the enigmatic “Night in the Streets of the City” (detail below), with its androgynous faces caught in an embrace. 

With rain looking likely for the coming weeks, I can't think of a better interior to take shelter than this wonderful gallery. For good measure there are also small exhibitions on the art of Chichester Fesival Theatre and a photographic display by David Dawson, "Working with Lucian Freud".

 

Monarchy and the Book of Common Prayer

by Rupert Shortt

 

At first sight, the event may seem a little arbitrary: “Royal Devotion: Monarchy and the Book of Common Prayer”, an exhibition being held at Lambeth Palace in London to mark the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee and the 350^th anniversary of the (1662) Book of Common Prayer. The show displays the Palace Library’s collections of items with royal links. But how many British monarchs can be called devout?

The rationale for the venture became clearer to me on second thoughts. For the three centuries between the Restoration of Charles II and the current Queen’s accession, the Book of Common Prayer (BCP) can be said to have encapsulated much of England’s religious life. Monarchs and countless others were at least baptized, married and buried to its words; and “more people heard Morning . . .  and Evening Prayer in weekly services in the words of this book, than listened to the soliloquies of Shakespeare”, as Professor Brian Cummings, a curator of the show and TLS reviewer, puts it.

Madame Woolf

 

By Adrian Tahourdin

 

Virginia Woolf’s work has just appeared in the prestigious Pléiade series in France. She is only the ninth woman writer to be granted this accolade, out of 200 Pléiaded writers. 

The other eight on the list are: Mme de Sévigné, Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, George Sand (whose house at Nohant Woolf visited on a trip to France in May 1937, “avoiding King George’s Coronation, as [she] had avoided the Jubilee”, in the words of Woolf’s biographer Hermione Lee), Colette, Nathalie Sarraute, Marguerite Yourcenar and Marguerite Duras. Surprising not to see Mme de Staël in the pantheon. Marguerite Duras’s own Pléiade Oeuvres, which appeared towards the end of last year, will be reviewed in a future issue of the TLS.

The novelist Virginie Despentes reviewed Woolf's Pléiade Oeuvres in Le Monde des livres last Friday. Despentes is the author of Baise-moi and, most recently, Apocalypse bébé. After sketching the life she discusses Woolf’s death, on which she writes: “Le suicide est à l’écrivain ce que l’overdose est au rocker” (suicide is to the writer what overdose is to the rock star). Later she has a slightly strange riff on how the verb “to sink” is close in sound to “to think” - “Couler, to sink, terme si proche de to think, penser” . And “Ouse” as in the River Ouse is apparently a bit like “house”.

Around the world in one issue

By Thea Lenarduzzi

Readers of this week’s issue of the TLS could be forgiven for thinking, at first glance, that we had forsaken the world in favour of the familiarity of our London home – it is, after all, the city of our birth, 110 years ago. Now, Norma Clarke guides us through the third and final volume of Jerry White’s history of the capital (“bigger, stranger, less graspable than we think”), before entrusting our care to Richard Davenport-Hines in his review of Night’s Out: Life in cosmopolitan London.

Soho in the early 1900s: gone the “Chaos of Dirty Rotten Sheds, always Tumbling or takeing fire, winding Crooked passages . . . Lakes of Mud and Rills of Stinking Mire”, described by Nicholas Hawksmoor in 1715, to be replaced by culinary extravagances, knock-out (and knock-off) sartorial experiments and “racy”  tourism. Welcome to the jazz age! Of sorts . . . .  

“Bright lights, big city, went to my TLS’s head”, you may say, but turn the pages and you will encounter the architecture of modern Russia, where, says Clementine Cecil, “a fondness for old stones has always been the preserve of the dissident voice”.

Literary lawyers

by DAVID HORSPOOL

I have never seen the point of reading an author because it's his anniversary, so I was rather surprised to discover today that it is 100 years since Bram Stoker's death, and it so happens that I am reading Dracula. Not rereading, I'm afraid (it has taken this long to get over a very deep-seated childhood fear of anything vampirish, which developed without a break into a deep-seated adult ennui at most vampire films and tv programmes).

I won't presume to pronounce on the book's virtues (though I will say that it's keeping me awake at night, so something's working), but the character of Jonathan Harker did prompt a thought about something else: sympathetically portrayed lawyers in literature. I suspect Harker isn't going to turn out all good (don't spoil it for me), but he's likeable enough at the beginning, fearlessly plunging deeper into Transylvania while everyone around him makes it achingly clear that it's a very bad idea. I like, too, that he seems genuinely preoccupied with seeking out local recipes (all big on paprika) to bring back to Mina. I realize he isn't the keenest of minds (cautious and risk-averse characters don't make for very good horror set-ups:"Don't go into the attic!" "No, I won't, it sounds absolutely terrifying."). But I can't help liking him.

The TLS in Albert Square

By J. C.

 

The TLS has hit the screen again. Not the big screen this time. Our last outing in moviedom was as an eye-catching extra in the film Iris. Then, the TLS was a folded treasure idling around the Oxford house of Iris Murdoch and John Bayley. Our latest role was just last week, in an episode of the BBC1 drama EastEnders, in which all conversation seems to begin and end as shouting, with a brief interval for screaming in between. In the unlikely event of a victor ever emerging, the series will come to an end.

The rereading habits of the TLS staff

By Rozalind Dineen

In this week’s TLS, Bharat Tandon reviews two books on the subject of rereading. That’s right, rereading; as if the pile of books that we would like a chance to read even once isn’t large enough. 

But rereading, as Tandon reminds us, can be one of life’s particularly rich experiences: it is where the narratives of novels and the narratives of our own lives “can converge meaningfully”.  When we reread we remember where we were the first time, who we were and how we were. We realize how we reacted differently to a text when we were younger, or sicker, or holidaying or studying. “We may try to be semioticians . . . but autobiography is always breaking in.”

An office survey is one way to pass a Friday afternoon. So, do the TLS staff reread?

John Arden and the humbling of the critics

By Michael Caines

In belated tribute to the playwright John Arden, who died last month, here's another word from the TLS archives (located in the vicinity of the basement labyrinth, obviously), from a review of a collection of three plays by the theatre critic Irving Wardle:

"The case of John Arden is one to make theatre critics realize the humble nature of their occupation. . . .

Re-reading Catcher in the Rye

By Michael Caines

Here's an early warning for you: in next week's TLS, Bharat Tandon reviews On Rereading by Patricia Meyer Spacks – a retired professor's "personal experiment" in revisiting everything from childhood favourites to "canonical works of literature she was supposed to have liked but didn’t". Surely you can think of a few of those?

I'm reminded of a TLS review that mischievously began like this:

"Could it be that A Midsummer Night’s Dream is not a very good play? It has three scarcely related actions — the bumpy course of young love, the difficulty (especially if you are an ignorant bumpkin) of staging a play, and a climate-changing stand-off between the King and Queen of the fairies. Its characters are walking contradictions. . . ."

Patricia Meyer Spacks has another supposed classic in her sights – The Catcher in the Rye.

'A Rose is a Christine Brooke-Rose'

 

by J. C.

It has been said before, but now must be said again: A Rose is a Christine Brooke-Rose is a Christine Brooke-Rose. The novelist and essayist, who has died aged eighty-nine, was that rare voice in British fiction, a self-conscious experimentalist. In a sequence of books, beginning with The Languages of Love (1958), she explored avenues more familiar to post-war French authors than to their English counterparts. Brooke-Rose’s novels often had single word titles: Out, Such, Between, Next, Subscript; one that gives the flavour of her writing is Textermination (1991). For almost half a century, she was an occasional contributer to the TLS. In the last essay she wrote for us (December 31, 1999), punctuated by “Narrative Parentheticals” and “Speakerless Sentences”, Brooke-Rose said she had long since retired from the theory wars, but still she felt impelled to add this on behalf of her idol, Alain Robbe-Grillet:

"Innovation has a strange way of surviving. In those distant days (the late 1950s), there was active prejudice in England, led by C. P. Snow, against the new fashion from France. But who even mentions Snow now, or his followers? For if the prejudice against experiment persists, the novel nevertheless has changed, and if Robbe-Grillet himself is also perhaps no longer read, some of his technique has insidiously survived, in a way that Snow’s has not."

In January 1963, her poem “Today the Acupuncturist” appeared in the TLS. Bearing witness to her admiration for Ezra Pound (on whom she wrote a book, A ZBC), it contains the Chinese ideogram (grain + mouth = harmony) which must have given the compositor a headache. These are the opening lines:

"Today the acupuncturist found my Achilles’ heel
above the right fourth toe. His electric pin
sang E sharp minor through my left side in
the mount of Venus to the North Pole gland
below the chin."

The next week, a witty letter in verse appeared, from one Keith Spence of Kent:

"Though mandarins no doubt in China
Intone their songs in E sharp minor,
Here such a key has not been written
From Palestrina down to Britten".

Prosaically put, E sharp minor doesn’t exist (it’s F minor). Brooke-Rose responded in turn, exhibiting her liking for wordplay while she was at it: “That is the point”, she said of the needle’s enharmonic hit.

An excellent account of her work by Ali Smith appeared in our Fiction pages on March 24, 2006. She spoke of Brooke-Rose’s love of punning, and ended with some delightful wordplay of her own: “Rose is the Christine Brooke-Rose is the Christine Brooke-Rose. She’s the definite article”. That would serve as an epitaph, had Brooke-Rose not provided the perfect one herself: “And there I am content to let the Meta rest”.

 

“The art of dining well is no slight art . . . ”

 By Thea Lenarduzzi

After confronting death, few things can be as life affirming as a good meal, and to take it in the stately setting of Sutton House, East London, is especially invigorating. The house was built in 1535 for Sir Ralph Sadleir – protégé of Thomas Cromwell (the relationship is portrayed by Hilary Mantel in Wolf Hall) and Principal Secretary to Henry VIII – who reputedly held lavish banquets to entertain his fellow courtiers.

 

What is the abyss?

 

By THEA LENARDUZZI

 

“What is the abyss?” Well, according to Google it has something to do with these pictures . . . .

 

Sitting on a small stage in the packed Gate Cinema in Notting Hill, about to begin a Q & A with Werner Herzog that was going to be streamed live to over thirty venues  across the UK, the interviewer probably felt like he was teetering on the edge of an abyss all of his own.  So he should be forgiven, perhaps, for opening with an almost exact repetition of an observation often made by the filmmaker himself, most recently, the previous morning on BBC Radio 4’s Start the Week: “It strikes me that all of your films could have been called ‘Into the Abyss’”. It is a good point, though. The abyss could be the Amazonian rainforest, Nosferatu's lair, anywhere Herzog went with his extraordinary leading actor, Klaus Kinski.

 

Cover versions

BY DAVID HORSPOOL

Last week, I was editing a review by James Fergusson on the subject of dust-jackets (it's very good: should be in the TLS shortly). Until relatively recently, it turns out, collectors were pretty sniffy about them. Nowadays, dust-jackets (mustn't call them "wrappers", apparently), are an integral part of the value of modern first editions.

But for those of us who intend merely to read books, rather than trade them, covers, as I propose to call them, are supposed to fulfil their traditional function of drawing the reader in, and giving us an idea of the contents. And as there seems to be no slacking off in the rate of publication, you would have thought that publishers' design departments would make every effort to ensure their product stands out from the rest. 

In fact, the opposite tendency seems to hold sway. It took five minutes of not very systematic searching among the review copies in the TLS offices to discover that three particular themes are currently very popular, or "trending" as I'm learning to call it.

Number one: Legs (see above). The first book I recall with a legs-only cover was Andrea Ashworth's memoir Once in a House on Fire. The most recent book I have actually read whose dust-jacket could have been entered in a knobbly-knees competition was Will Eaves's s splendid This Is Paradise (yes, Will Eaves used to work at the TLS, but the novel really is excellent). Most of the legs belong to girls, and it has been suggested that if the feet are turned in, that means pathos, if not downright misery. One foot kicked up, and you can expect laughs, or at least some bitter-sweetness. As you can see, designers are now branching out into boys' legs, but still no faces.

Camus censored

By ADRIAN TAHOURDIN

Albert Camus cut his journalistic teeth on the Alger Républicain, before switching to the Soir républicain, a two-page daily sheet he set up with his friend Pascal Pia. It first hit the streets in September 1939. He was twenty-six at the time. 

As editor-in-chief, Camus wrote almost the whole paper and, according to his biographer Olivier Todd, signed himself variously “Vincent Capable”, “Demos”, “Irène”, “Nero” and “Cesare Borgia”. Todd describes the sheet as “iconoclastic”. It soon fell victim to the state censor, a certain Col Florit. Todd writes: "Camus and his newspaper accepted censorship about military matters, but 'we do not accept mental censorship'". 

Macha Séry, a journalist on Le Monde, recently uncovered a box in the Archives nationales d’outre-mer in Aix-en-Provence, containing Camus’s unpublished articles from the Soir républicain. She wrote about her discovery in Le Monde of March 17.  Séry's cache includes an eloquent manifesto in defence of press freedom, dated November 25, 1939, which never saw the light of day. It opens “It’s difficult to talk about press freedom today without being accused of being a Mata-Hari, . . . of being Stalin’s nephew”. Camus goes on “We don’t see Hitler . . . using Socratic irony. It remains the case that irony is a weapon without precedent against those with too much power”. 

Later “No one wants, in twenty-five years time, to repeat the experience of 1914 and 1939”. 
On January 10, 1940 Camus was summoned by M Bourrette of the Algiers Special Police and told that publication of the paper would be suspended, after 117 issues. Pascal Pia returned to Paris. Within months Camus would find himself in Paris too.

Re-Joycing in Our Jim

BY J. C.

There has been so much re-joycing going on, since the major works of James Joyce entered the public domain on January 1, that it seems almost permissible to use that irritating coinage. A recent James Joyce Quarterly offered news of a Chinese translation of Finnegans Wake. New Chinese characters will be required, Congrong Dai wrote, “each component indicating one of the possible meanings that Joyce put into his portmanteau words”. A Polish Wake is also in the works.

From the O’Brien Press in Dublin comes an edition of Dubliners with photographs interleaved in the text – infra dig, surely – and a preface recasting Our Jim as just one of us: “rich and poor, old and young, men and women . . . Dubliners is interested in all”.

An actual revision of one of Joyce’s works, unthinkable only a few months ago, has been undertaken by the small French publisher La Nerthe of Toulon, which has issued a bilingual edition of Chamber Music with the thirty-four poems arranged in what is claimed to be Joyce’s preferred sequence.

Best yellow jackets

BY PETER STOTHARD

On Saturday lunchtime at the Bodleian Library we were discussing  the most powerful arguments for financing the humanities.

There are so many well-meant but death-guaranteeing efforts — the jobs provided by the publishing industry, the effectiveness of Latin for the training of a banker’s mind, the export potential of dictionaries.

Anyone who has read a university fund-raising prospectus in these difficult years will be able to add their own dismal examples.

But how can we do better? 

One Oxford luncher mentioned Cicero’s speech Pro Archia, the locus classicus as it were.

It is one of the speeches in the new Folio Society edition for which I wrote the introduction last year.

So this remarkable document was  fresh in my blog and mind.

But a Ciceronian argument for the interconnection of art and other life, while once transformational for Petrarch, will struggle in most places now.

The occasion of Saturday's  lunch, for an enthusiastic  band of bibliophiles and fund-raisers for books, was Thomas Bodley’s birthday, marked this year in the Divinity School.

The theme was Asian. As was the dress code.

Your blogger wore a waistcoat of cream silk elephants, the first such item of clothing he can recall around his body for many decades.

Others, most notably Bodley’s wonderful American librarian, Sarah Thomas, wore chinoiserie of varyingly restrained and exotic sorts. To support them give here.

The greatest commitment to Asian dress came for Oxford’s American Vice-Chancellor, Andrew Hamilton,  who wore a full jacket of bright yellow silk and also made an argument for the humanities that, in my collection of arguments at least, was as fresh as the cloth on his back.

He spoke of the Bodleian’s seventy five years of collecting Chinese manuscripts in the 17th century before anyone in the library, and probably in the whole of England, could read them or had any idea what they meant.

The story of  Shen Fu-Tsung (pictured above) and of the tumultuous time in 1687 when he became the first Chinese scholar to explain the Bodleian collection, is a powerful thing in itself, the subject of our pre-lunch lecture by Jonathan Spence (along the lines of this one).

But even more powerful, argued the man in the yellow jacket, himself a chemist in pre-vice-chancelloring times,  was the earlier commitment of the Bodleian to the unknown, its investment in what might (but only might) turn out to matter, the money spent on humanities because a humanity was what a Chinese collection might (but would not necessarily) be.

The lunch ended with a swing in our silk-clad steps.