Belated Birthday!

Oops... I forgot my own blog birthday. On 10th April I got to my second year of blogging - how time does fly.

To celebrate, I'll be giving away a copy of a book I loved last year - Yellow by Janni Visman. It was in my top reads of 2008, and I first chatted about it here.

Stella is agoraphobic and neurotic and jealous - Yellow is a sparse, taut narrative which is psychologically clever without being scary (why does 'psychological' always come with 'thriller'? Not in this case, really). And there's a cat. Ideal. For a more lucid discussion of the book, see that first review.

Pop your name in the hat, as it were, and I'll do a draw on Sunday.

Put Out More Flags

I've always vaguely connected Evelyn Waugh and E.M. Forster in my mind - not sure why, other than that 'E', since they didn't really overlap in their writing periods. Having quite liked A Passage to India (which would have been better as a short story, I think) and A Room With A View, but failed to be overwhelmed by them, I'd also placed Mr. Waugh on the backburner. Which, I discovered as I read Put Out More Flags on the train journey down to Somerset, was a mistake. The writers have more or less nothing in common, and whilst I could read Forster for months without any danger of laughter lines, Waugh is really rather funny.

I don't really know how popular Put Out More Flags is - certainly not one of Waugh's more famous novels, and I hadn't heard of it until someone mentioned it a few months ago. I found the title irresistible. It just sums up the earnest patriotism with no outlet for full venting - how shall we solve it? Put out more flags. Reminds me of a car Colin and I saw during the last World Cup, where someone had stuck seven British flags on their car. You could just imagine looking critically at their car festooned with six flags, and thinking "But will people realise that I love Britain?" Mentioning Colin gives me opportunity to shame him - when he found out I was reading Evelyn Waugh, his faux-intellectual response was "Evelyn Waugh? I love all her books."

Put Out More Flags was published in 1942 and is about the phoney war which preceded the war proper. The central character is Basil Seal - and, through him, his mother, mistress and sister. We see the interior, informal and jokily malevolent workings of the war offices (who continually send all the volunteers and insane visitors to other departments), the recruitment and training of soldiers, responses of the rich and elderly, the bohemian socialists, the unfit, unlikely soldiers. Basically the upper-middle and upper-classes dealing with a strange situation. Barbara (Basil's sister) features in my favourite part of the novel, and a central focus, placing evacuees:

Evacuation to Malfrey had followed much the same course as it had in other parts of the country and had not only kept Barbara, as billeting officer, constantly busy, but had transformed her, in four months, from one of the most popular women in the countryside into a figure of fear. When her car was seen approaching people fled through covered lines of retreat, through side doors and stable yards, into the snow, anywhere to avoid her persuasive, 'But surely you could manage one more. He's a boy this time and a very well-behaved little fellow.'

There are touches of EM Delafield - especially, unsurprisingly, The Provincial Lady in Wartime, which also features the War Office and its internal 'workings' - but where Waugh diverges from Delafield territory is where I had problem with Put Out More Flags. I found Basil Seal one of the most repugnant, malicious and dislikeable characters I've encountered since Heathcliff. Throughout the novel there were punches of nasty, unkind humour which laughed at ruining the treasured home of an elderly couple, sending an innocent man in exile to Ireland for Basil's own ends, betraying friends for the sake of promotion. Whilst we probably aren't supposed to see Basil Seal as a moral guide, it did seem that we were supposed to be fond of him, look on the character as something of an amusing rascal - whilst in fact he is selfish, vicious and cruel. Give me the self-deprecating humour of EM Delafield, or the affectionate, harmless fun-poking in Mapp and Lucia - Waugh's idea of humour is mostly on the mark, and he uses comic language superbly (I laughed out loud several times) but too often the undercurrent was too nasty for me. I need to read a Wodehouse or two as an antidote.

Happy Easter

Hallelujah, He is Risen!

A very happy Easter to everyone.

Not only the most exciting day in the Christian calendar, but now Lent is over I can buy books again.

Two People - Another Person

Just a quick one this evening; on the off chance that anybody missed this post on Random Jottings/Elaine's blog, do go and read what she has to say about Two People by A.A. Milne, which I also reviewed recently. Like me, she was pretty impressed - but her take is slightly different, and very enticing - makes me want to re-read it all over again!

Badly done, Emma?

This might be old news, but I've just found out about the casting for BBC's Emma, so perhaps others haven't heard. I think this is the last Austen-or-Dickens-or-Hardy etc. costume drama the BBC are planning on for the time being, and hopefully they'll put on something special. I'm very pleased with all the names I've seen mentioned - mostly with Romola Garai as Emma Woodhouse. Romola Garai stars in one of my favourite films, I Capture the Castle, as Cassandra - she's also been Angel in the adaptation of Elizabeth Taylor's novel Angel, Briony in Atonement during her nursing stage, and the lead woman in Amazing Grace. I'm sure she's done lots of other things as well, but those are the films I own with her in them. She's a fantastic actress, though I haven't seen her do something as funny as Emma before... we'll see.

An actress who definitely does have comic ability is Tamsin Greig, and she'll be playing Miss Bates. I saw her play Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing at the RSC in London a while ago, and it was both the funniest and the best Shakespeare performance I've seen (she won the Olivier too). You might know her from sitcoms like Black Books and Green Wing, or perhaps as Debbie Archer on The Archers. She was also in the recent, very good, Anne Frank series on BBC. Who else... Michael Gambon, fresh from brevity but successful brevity in Cranford will be Mr. Woodhouse, and Jonny Lee Miller is becoming Jane Austen's creepiest hero (in my opinion) Mr. Knightley. I'd vaguely heard of JLM, and a quick trip to IMDB.com tells me that not only was he Edmund Bertram in 1999 Mansfield Park, but Charles Price in 1983 Mansfield Park. What credentials.

As usual, I don't think a new Jane Austen adaptation is really *essential* (there are so many books out there which haven't had the costume drama treatment) but it is comforting and familiar and the cast looks impressive enough that it might be quite fun. But, as the BBC decide to focus instead on twentieth-century drama, I really hope that they mean all of the twentieth-century, and not just the bit Irvine Welsh was fond of. More 1920s, 1930s, 1940s drama please - and why not look through some Persephone Books for inspiration?

Which book - not necessarily Persephone, of course - would you love to see adapated?

I have two which spring to mind. One, of course, is Frank Baker's Miss Hargreaves (have I mentioned that Bloomsbury will be publishing it?) with Dame Maggie Smith in the lead role - the other, perhaps more likely, is Eva Rice's The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets. With dashes of Nancy Mitford and Dodie Smith, that novel would lend itself so well to filming. Watch this space...

Love Leonard

I always have a collection of the letters on the go, usually several, and the other day I finished Love Letters: Leonard Woolf and Trekkie Ritchie Parsons 1941-1968, edited by Judith Adamson. (Which, incidentally, was on my list of books I intended to read soon, back in April 2007. After two years I've read... 12 out of 17, having started and given up on another one. Not bad.) It was catapaulted to the top of my reading pile when my friend Phoebe gave me a second copy of it.

My interest in all things Bloomsbury, especially all things Virginia Woolf, presents something of a quandry - yes, I want to find out more about their lives, but reading Leonard professing love for someone who isn't Ginny - 'To know you and to love you has been the best thing in my life' - is a little disconcerting. True, this started a while after Virginia's death - but not that long.

Leonard's met Ian Parsons through publishing, they were colleagues somewhere or other, and through Ian met his wife Trekkie, a painter. And they fell in love. Being the wacky world of Bloomsbury, none of the three seemed to think it particularly odd to carry on as they were - eventually Leonard moved in next door to the Parsons, and Trekkie would spend some holidays with Ian, some with Leonard - basically living two separate, but close, lives.

These letters, then, made slightly odd reading. By the second half they were the sweet, attached letters of two people who loved each other going about everyday life (with Ian usually quietly not mentioned) but the first half was quite awkward - Leonard professing his love in flowery, lengthy descriptions and Trekkie replying about her vegetable patch or latest clothing purchase. Really quite embarrassing how ardent he was and how cool she is in comparison - but obviously he wore her down.

They do make a slightly odd pair, and one with some connection with Two People - Leonard being both older and more intelligent than Trekkie - though she was an independently creative person, which Sylvia was not. She doesn't come across as being remotely like Virginia, which is probably why Leonard's relationship with Trekkie worked and Virginia is so seldom mentioned in these letters - but, for me, her absence spoke volumes over the entire, ahem, volume. Though interesting, this collection of letters really demonstrated to me how central Virginia Woolf is to my interest in Bloomsbury, and how bizarre I found the idea that it all carried on without her.

Puds and Psychoanalysts

Having attempted a Apricot Roulade a while ago, with fairly disastrous results (albeit very tasty ones) yesterday I returned to the Afternoon Teas recipe book. My friend Lou had half a carton of double cream which didn't have long left to live, and thought we might be able to use it... and I knew there was a recipe that I wanted to use involving double cream. Not only that, but 'double (heavy) cream' - do they intentionally include the inevitable result upon the consumer?

That recipe was for Chocolate Torte. Mmmmm. As you can see from the picture, it turned out pretty well - and tastes amazing. But when the main ingredients are cream and chocolate, you can't go far wrong. We didn't have any liqueur, so that couldn't go in. Being this recipe book, though, everything was slightly over-complicated. They kept wanting me to leave the pastry to rest for an hour, and thought I should use an electric mixer to make flour and fat into breadcrumbs... tsk. But it was worth all the labour, and I can feel myself getting larger just looking at it.

What else has happened lately... Today I read my first Freud! 'Femininity' (1933). I'm really interested in the reception to Freud, especially in middlebrow literature of the 1920s and '30s - it's amazing how pervasive his theories, or vague outlines of them, were - but I hadn't ever got around to reading anything he'd actually written. Somehow it *felt* like I'd read it before... and that must be more or less how these interwar novelists dealt with Freud. I'd go so far as to say most of the novels I've read from the period make glancing mentions of him - for example, EM Delafield's The Way Things Are, as quoted in Nicola Beauman's A Very Great Profession:

'Well,' said Christine kindly, 'I can't say that I believe you. And any decent analyst would tell you that you're doing yourself a great deal of harm by this constant pretence. It's bound to create the most frightful repressions. What sort of dreams do you have?'

But Laura, even though she did live in the country, knew all about Herr Freud and his theories, and declined to commit herself in any way upon the subject of dreams.'

In fact, I've proposed a section of my doctorate on the influence of, and response to, Freud - so if ever you find a comment about Freud in an interwar novel, do let me know!