Letters from England – Karel Čapek

When Claire recommended Letters from England (1924, translated by Paul Selver 1925) by Karel Čapek it was one of those very welcome recommendations - being for a book that I already had on my shelves.  Usually I note when and where I buy books, but this time I didn't - I can only assume it was because the name rang a bell, the physical book is quintessentially 1920s, and I have a soft spot for books about England. And, oh, how fun this book is.

It doesn't that Čapek shares my feelings about the relative merits of London and the rest of the country. It is amusing, in the 1920s, to hear him complaining about grim housing and traffic (goodness knows what he'd think if he visited it today), but I entirely agree with him about the ferocious busyness of the place.  It is rather easier to be funny when one is criticising than when one is praising, of course, and Čapek is very amusing in these early chapters.

These houses look rather like family vaults; I tried to make a drawing of them, but do what I would, I was unable to obtain a sufficiently hopeless appearance; besides, I have no grey paint to smear over them.

Oh, yes, he includes plenty of pen and ink illustrations, of the variety that are deceptively simplistic.  He is particularly good at animals, despite what he says in the text.

But - thankfully for the self esteem of the nation - he doesn't just stay in London and criticise it.  Instead, he travels around the countryside and (belying his title) pays visits to Scotland and Wales, and writes about Ireland without actually going there.

Where are you to pick words fine enough to portray the quiet and verdant charms of the English countryside? I have been down in Surrey, and up in Essex; I have wandered along roads lined with quickset hedges, sheer quickset hedges which make England the real England, for they enclose, but do not oppress; half-opened gates lead you to ancient avenues of a park deeper than a forest; and here is a red house with high chimneys, a church-tower among the trees, a meadow with flocks of cows, a flock of horses which turn their beautiful and solemn eyes upon you; a pathway that seems to be swept as clean as a new pin, velvety pools with nenuphars and sword-lilies, parks, mansions, meadows, and meadows, no fields, nothing that might be a shrill reminder of human drudgery; a paradise where the Lord God Himself made paths of asphalt and sand, planted old trees and entwined ivy coverlets for the red houses.

You see his way with words, and his fondness for the long sentence.  We will forgive him referring to any group of animals as a flock, and believeing Essex to be 'up', because he is so expressive and enthusiastic an appreciator of the English countryside - which means so much to me too, in a way which transcends expression.  The countryside is the only place where I feel properly alive, and I would love to have accompanied Čapek on his travels, gasping at the beauty of the Lake District, admiring the simple aesthetic pleasure of a thatched cottage, and (for we are not perfect human beings) sharing eye-rolls at the sort of person who bustles hither and thither in a city all year, and never ventures out to visit a sheep.

Ordering Winnie et al

I was listening to the latest podcast from The Readers, and being reminded that Thomas doesn't like Winnie the Pooh.  Now, of course, he's crazy.  I choose to believe he's having a temporary mental block or something, because we all know what a wonderful, unparalleled gem of a book it is (well, paralleled only by The House at Pooh Corner), and Thomas is a great guy.  To understand is to forgive, and all that.  But, as A.A. Milne once wrote of The Wind in the Willows, 'When you sit down to it, don't be so ridiculous as to suppose that you are sitting in judgment on my taste, or on the art of Kenneth Grahame A.A. Milne. You are merely sitting in judgment on yourself.'

Ok, tongue in cheek, but it did lead me to a fun discussion with some friends - if you had to, how would you rank the characters in your esteem?

It was hard. I love them all. But I do not love them all equally.  From first to last, here is the order I came up with (which might change tomorrow, but would always have the same two at the top):

Eeyore, Pooh, Roo, Piglet, Tigger, Owl, Kanga, Rabbit, Christopher Robin

Take your time over a decision as important as this.  And if you've not read the books yet, or - Heaven forfend - have only watched the Disney adaptations, then familiarise yourself with A.A. Milne's words and E.H. Shepard's perfect illustrations.  Unless you are experiencing Thomas's temporary glitch, then you'll love them all.

Boy, Snow, Bird - Helen Oyeyemi

One of the nice things about doing Shiny New Books is that I feel I have more of a grasp on what's happening in publishing at the moment - as you doubtless know by now, modern novels are seldom my go-to.  Having said that, there is a tiny handful of living authors whose careers I follow and whose books I await - and one of those is Helen Oyeyemi (even with a couple of her books unread on my shelf).  Well - and you've guessed this by now - I reviewed her latest, Boy, Snow, Bird, for Shiny New Books, and flipping good it was too.  You can read my review here, and (exciting!) the Q&A I did with Helen Oyeyemi too.

Have you read... Nancy Spain?

Apologies to Karen/Cornflower for borrowing her 'Have you read?' title, but I need to crowdsource this one.  I was recently re-reading Ann Thwaite's biography of A.A. Milne, and towards the end she writes about a meeting between AAM and Nancy Spain, as Spain wrote about it at length in her autobiography.  So I went hunting to learn more about her... and, by a lovely coincidence, that fantastic Invisible Ink column in The Independent did a piece on Nancy Spain this week. (That link isn't working for me at the mo, so if you're having trouble then maybe Google it... and it might only work in the UK?)

She sounds a fascinating woman.  Apparently she was once famous on panel shows and the like, but - of more interest to me - she wrote detective novels in the 1940s and '50s. And they have brilliant titles (Death Before Wicket; Out, Damned Tot; Murder, Bless It and so forth) - not to mention that several are set in a girls' school called Radcliffe Hall. Ahem, if I may.

What really intrigues me is that (as I found out here) she was turned down from the Detection Club as her detective novels were considered too funny. I want in.

Many of the series are incredibly expensive and scarce, but - matching up with the gaps in my Century of Books - I have bought Cinderella Goes to the Morgue... so I'll report back soon.  But does anybody already know her novels?  Are they due a reprint?

The Pumpkin Eater - Penelope Mortimer

Sorry to disappear suddenly - I went off to Somerset for an Easter weekend (the most dramatic moment: Sherpa getting stuck on the roof; eventually I pulled her through the bathroom window, with Our Vicar on a ladder and Our Vicar's Wife & Colin holding a tarpaulin like a firefighters' blanket).  Now I'm back in Oxford, and eyeing up the growing pile of books I've got waiting to review for you.  First up - one of those pesky Penelopes.

I had intended to read Daddy's Gone A-Hunting, as part of my vague project to read more of my unread Persephones, but it clashed with another title on my Century of Books - so instead I picked up The Pumpkin Eater (1962) in this beautiful NYRB Classics edition.  But, oh, aren't they always beautiful?

I thought the image on the front was simply abstract, until I realised that it was a pram full of faces - Downhill in a Pram by Susan Bower, to be precise.  And that is apt for the recurring theme of The Pumpkin Eater (and possibly my favourite thing about the book) - the number of children the unnamed narrator has.  Cleverly, Mortimer gives us a heroine who has a lot of children - but by never specifying quite how many, we get the impression that they are numbered in their dozens.  People are always shocked by how many there are; her various husbands (she's not short of them, but at least the number is given: four) baulk at them, and only one name is vouchsafed to us: Dinah.

The novel starts with the narrator in a therapy session.  These recur throughout the novel, and are very amusing (in a dark way), mostly because of the lack of progress that is made in them.  The therapist follows the narrator around in circles, expecting her to feel something about her husbands and children - but she is steadfastly stony-faced.

"And then?" he asked coldly.

"Then?  Well, then I married the Major, but since he was going overseas we went back to live with my parents.  I had Dinah there.  Of course he was dead by then."

"And did that upset you?"

"Yes.  Yes, I suppose it did.  Naturally.  It must have done."

He slumped in his chair.  He seemed tired out.  I said, "Look, need we go on with this?  I find it tremendously boring, and it's not what I'm thinking about at all.  I just don't think about those husbands except..."

"Except when?"

"I never think about them."

She has something of a Barbara Comyns heroine about her - that undaunted matter-of-factness - but Mortimer does reveal some of her emotional fragility as the novel progresses, and Jake the current husband is knocked from whatever pedestal her might have briefly mounted.  "One's past grows to a point where it is longer than one's future, and then it can become too great a burden," as she says in the narrative, towards the end.

And then there is the enormous glass tower Jack is building for them in the middle of the countryside.  It's a curious part of the novel, and I don't know how we are supposed to interpret it - as Freud would? As Ibsen would in The Master Builder? Or is a tower sometimes just a tower?

But, as with many of my favourite novels, the important feature is voice.  Mortimer does this brilliantly.  We are immersed in the worldview and experience of the unnamed narrator, even without for a moment believing that she could plausibly exist in the way she is presented.  Her upsets and anxieties are certainly real, but the character is more than that - the centrepiece of a black comedy with only a toe in reality.  And, designed that way, it is a glorious novel.

Tove Jansson

You probably know that one of my very favourite authors is Tove Jansson - but I didn't know very much about her beyond what she'd put of herself in her fiction. So I was thrilled to learn that a biography of her was going to be published by Sort Of Books - indeed, translated (by Silvester Mazzarella) as, unbeknown to me, it was actually published in 2007.

And you guessed it - I'm pointing you towards my Shiny New Books review of Boel Westin's biography of Tove Jansson!  Not only that, though - Silvester Mazzarella very kindly agreed to write a brilliant piece about translating the book.  It's a long and interesting book that I don't feel I entirely did justice to in my review, written when cold-ridden, but I always think it's difficult to write properly about a biography - because, almost by definition, they have so much, and so much variety, in them.

Confession time...

I have a number of books to review, a play to talk about, a haul to reveal, and plenty of Shiny New Books links to give... but I couldn't resist doing as Susan D suggests and putting up a post about confusing authors.

Not as in I-find-Gertrude-Stein-confusing-to-read, but as in I-get-Gertrude-Stein-mixed-up-with-Gertrude-Jekyll (as it may be).

We had a nice cathartic, collective confession of confusion when it came to the many and various Penelopes, and I'd love to know who else has caused you angst in this way.  Almost invariably, I find, it all becomes clear once I've read one or both (or all) of the authors in question, but beforehand all is lost.  For instance, I used to be unable to disentangle George Orwell and H.G. Wells (that 'well' in both their names threw me) until I started reading them.

Well, I confessed some yesterday, but didn't mention these, whom I used to get confused:

• Anita Brookner / Anita Shreve

• Naomi Mitchison / Naomi Jacob

• Edith Wharton / Eudora Welty

Over to you... c'mon, don't be shy. And remember, this is a safe space... so confess, don't judge ;)