Deborah Harried

The collected letters of the Mitford sisters, which I raved about here, is still my favourite book read this year - and so it was with delight that I discovered Deborah Mitford (or Deborah Devonshire - or perhaps m'lady) would be having more letters published this year. In Tearing Haste is the letters between Debo and Patrick Leigh Fermor, who share the unusual trait of being alive whilst having their letters published. I imagine they are writing some amusing letters to each other about it already.

What makes this new book even more exciting is that Charlotte Mosley is editing it - how she found the time after The Mitfords is beyond me, but I'm very glad she did. With so much material, especially for that previous volume, the task of the editor is (I should imagine) incredibly difficult and incredibly skilled. I even wrote to Charlotte Mosley to say how much I enjoyed (nay, loved) her work on The Mitfords, and got a nice note back.

I have only just bought it - rather quailed at the price (£25, down to £20 at Blackwells and probably discounted in a lot of places) but an online friend, Sherry, and I made a cunning plan. We both have November birthdays, so we're buying In Tearing Haste for each other - but since I live in England and she lives in the US, we'll collect our presents from the local bookshop. Plus, I have Blackwells vouchers from Magdalen... down to my last £10 there, actually - expect a full run-through of how I spent Magdalen's money soon. And this book will be very useful for my writing on the middlebrow, I daresay, and thus qualifies as an 'academic text' (on which the vouchers had to be spent). One of the great things about studying 20th Century Lit is that fun books are also work books!

I've not read anything by Patrick Leigh Fermor before, but apparently his style is the opposite of Debo's avowedly philistine writing. Will just share the opening to the first letter from the book, and you'll understand why I love her:

Dear Paddy Leigh Fermor,
I'm beginning like that chiefly because Nancy [Mitford] says one mustn't, but as she says I'm mental age of 9 it doesn't signify how one begins. I'm ever so excited about you coming to Ireland. Do really come & don't just say you are.

The Mitfords, in some circles, had become bywords for the affluent and senseless - hopefully the recent succession of published letters, and Debo's unavoidable charm, will lead the next generation of the Mitford-curious to a different conclusion.

Challenging

I don't usually go in for reading challenges, because I have enough demand on my reading time as it is and deadlines make me panic, but I loved one I saw on Books Please so much that I had to join in. I rather anticipate that I won't *actually* read the books in 2009, but the fun will be choosing books to fit the categories...

The challenge is What's In A Name (2) - (2) because a successful challenge was run last year with different categories. I'm going to go through my unread-but-owned books and see where I can fit them in...

A book with a “profession” in its title.

The Professor - Charlotte Bronte

The Calligrapher's Night - Yasmine Ghata

The Sailor's Return - David Garnett

A book with a “time of day” in its title.

Endless Night - Agatha Christie

As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning - Laurie Lee

A Clear Dawn - Winifred Peck

A book with a “relative” in its title.

Daddy's Gone A-Hunting - Penelope Mortimer

Good Wives? - Margaret Forster

Miss Linsey and Pa - Stella Gibbons

A book with a “body part” in its title.

The Eaten Heart - Giovanni Boccaccio

By The Pricking of My Thumbs - Agatha Christie

The Heel of Achilles - EM Delafield

A book with a “building” in its title.

The Orchid House - Phyllis Shand Allfrey

Hotel du Lac - Anita Brookner

The House of Dolls - Barbara Comyns

A book with a “medical condition” in its title.

The Blind Assassin - Margaret Atwood

I don't think I have any others for this category... I don't own Love in a Time of Cholera... does 'Death' count as a "medical condition"...?

Even if you don't intend to carry out the challenge, have a think of books on your shelves which might slot in... we'll see next year how many of these I've read.

Happy Birthday To Me!

I had coffee with Becca (aka Oxford Reader) today, and she pointed out that I hadn't put any new sketches up on here for ages... and she is right. That was one of the things I wanted to do from the beginning, to make my blog a little different, and I apologise for the slackness. I shall use today (November 7th, although this post will claim to have been published in the final minutes of November 6th), as the birthday of me and the Carbon Copy, to put up a new one. If you want to know how old I am, just count the candles...

Homage to Catalonia

As promised, today I'm going to write about Homage to Catalonia. Perhaps I should start by acknowledging Obama and everything - but since I know less than nothing about the whole thing, I'll just say that I was rather hoping he'd win (in an unfounded sort of way) and always imagined he would.

Right. To the Spanish Civil War. Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell was one of two works (the other being an Auden poem) which were chosen by our tutor to represent 'Literature of the 1930s'. If I had to choose a decade about which I knew the most, I'd plump for the 1930s, but nothing like either of these texts. My knowledge centres around the novel, perhaps with a little drama thrown in - I'd hoped to do my presentation this week (I'm now doing Theatre and Revolution next week) and I'm quite glad I was too late. Interesting as I found Homage to Catalonia, I feel completely unqualified to present a paper on it.


For those who don't know - and I'd like to point out that Our Vicar did know - Homage to Catalonia is non-fiction. It's more or less autobiography, military autobiography if you will, of George Orwell's experiences fighting in the Spanish Civil War. It's one of those events which wasn't taught much in school - it was wheeled in every now and then to explain certain reactions towards World War Two, but has been rather overshadowed by it. The only thing I knew about it, really, was that Julian Bell (Virginia Woolf's nephew) died there, bombed whilst in an ambulance. So Orwell's text really informed me, and what is more it was written in the six months after he returned to England. WW2 hadn't started, and all the events were fresh in his mind.

Despite not being hugley interested in military history, I found Homage to Catalonia absolutely fascinating and incredibly engagingly written. My only experiences with Orwell before were, like a lot of people, 1984 and Animal Farm. Although they both have evident left-wing morals, I hadn't realised quite how active Orwell had been for the left-wing cause - and the same great writing that he uses in these novels is transferred to discussing life 'at the front'.

I say 'at the front'. Some of it is, and he describes the unreality, frequent tedium, and unexpected priorities: 'In trench warfare five things are important: firewood, food, tobacco candles and the enemy. In winter on the Saragossa front they were important in that order, with the enemy a bad last.' After a spate there, he is back in Barcelona, once more faced with frustrating inactivity and boredom. And later he is shocked by the fact that the voluntary militia he joined, the POUM, is being used as a scapegoat by the government to blame for all ills - even while they are fighting for the cause.

Perhaps I should pin my colours to the mast. I am more or less a pacifist, probably through inclination as much as ideology; I find the concept of warfare sickening, and also find it unfathomable that Orwell cannot connect the danger, indignity and pain he experiences with that of the men on the other side of No Man's Land. I recommend Homage to Catalonia - and I certainly recommend it - for Orwell's exceptional writing and for interest, definitely not as a how-to manual or political treatise!

My copy is from the 1986 Complete Works - most editions after this have moved two chapters to be appendices, supposedly based on notes Orwell left - these are the two most overly political chapters, and what is left is more his personal experience. The tutor leading discussion was rather scandalised by this, but it makes the book much more captivating for me. And captivating it certainly is - if you're intrigued to find out more about the Spanish Civil War, or if you are simply interested by the 1930s as a period, I think Homage to Catalonia would be an excellent starting point.

Sleep, perchance to dream...

I was going to write about George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia this evening, but I'm just too sleepy... something to do with an enormous fancy dinner at Magdalen, I think. So those who've read it can hurriedly gather their thoughts to throw in opinions when I (hopefully) write about the book tomorrow!

Will also be discussing my dissertation title for Literatures of Empire and Nation course, so might be able to give you a nearly-final idea about what that will be...

A Book by any other name...

The book I want to write about today isn't one I'd necessarily recommend that you rush out and buy, but more of an interesting look at what the book can now be. A lot of people say that the book is dead, or will be in a decade or two - of course, people have been saying things like that more or less since the book was invented. Whilst I don't believe there is any truth in that prophecy, I do believe that the range of possibilities for the book might well expand. Step forward Mistakes in the Background by Laura Dockrill, which was sent to me by Rachael, who works for Borders books, to review. See their page about it here.

The publishing information in the back of Mistakes in the Background describes it as a novel, but it's difficult to see how it could be called that - it is basically a scrapbook. Laura Dockrill's blurb says: 'I draw like a left-handed baby, I can hardly spell my own name and watching me use a gluestick is a bit like watching a large bear trying to ram his own head into a pocket-sized cat flap... no, really.' She's not far wrong - the sketches (which appear throughout) are pretty amateur and look like they were done in haste, but with an enthusiasm and sprightliness which is what Dockrill is going for, I imagine.


There is no continuity in the book, really - a page will have a little story about ice skaters, or a cartoon of a snail, or bits and pieces stuck in with sellotape. There's the typewritten sheets of a Rolf Harris obsessive; footprints, stickers. None of the book is typed, it's all in the scrawl of Laura Dockrill. I must confess I found the whole book rather self-indulgent, and already feel too old for it... but I was born 70 years too late anyway.


And this is where a segment of the book market is heading - it won't replace traditional novels, of course, but - though it might not be everyone's cup of tea - it will bring the book form to more people. That's got to be a good thing.

Heart of Darkness

Apologies for the lack of content here in the past few days - as I rather anticipated, my degree has been taking up quite a lot of my time! It's not so much that I have a huge workload, but more the fact that I don't have designated leisure time... and so no time to assign especially for this blog. But fear not, I shall continue apace!

Not a very enthused review today, however, and one I hope won't upset my tutor if she comes across it... we read Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness for the course on Empire Writing. I think a few of you expressed distaste for the book when I mentioned it a while ago - and I have to say I agree. Not distaste, actually, just a complete indifference. I sat and read the novella (if such it is) in one sitting, and just couldn't bring myself to care about any of it - certainly some is well written. The final scene, and 'the horror the horror' demonstrate an interesting dabbling in Modernisty writing, but in general... well, let's just say I finished it with only a minimal idea of what it was about, having already forgotten all the details. Which is quite shameful.

I'd be very happy for someone to offer a counter-argument... please step forward if you love Heart of Darkness, I'd love to here the case for the defence.

But, this possibility aside for now, I'm intrigued - how on earth did Conrad's book become so renowned? As far as I can tell, from my fairly early copy, it was initially only a subsidiary to the story 'Youth' (my copy is in a volume called Youth and Two Other Stories), which is in itself a rather underwhelming story. Perhaps Heart of Darkness revolutionised narrative or something, and I daresay I should appreciate it as a benchmark of literature, but... well, people my age have a little expression which goes like this: "meuh". That about sums up my feelings for this novella.

Those of you who aren't tutting in disgust - which 'classics' leave you feeling "meuh"? Not hatred, or even dislike, just indifference....?