Author: The Good Reader

The Shadow Line by Joseph Conrad

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Conrad outlined his artistic intention in an early essay. “My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel – it is, before all, to make you see.” He certainly succeeds in that aim in his short 1916 novel The Shadow Line.

I wrote in an earlier post how I had been re-visiting Conrad’s works, and that he seemed to be the perfect writer for current circumstances and my present mood. Strangely enough, I had forgotten the illness theme in The Shadow Line.

The unnamed narrator leaves a secure berth, almost on a whim. He is then approached to take command of a ship whose captain has died suddenly. The prize of command has fallen to him as if by accident. It appears, though, that there was something strange about the late captain.

The crew start to fall ill, and our narrator assumes that the sickness will stop once the ship puts out to sea, yet more and more of the crew succumb to the fever. Different crew members are affected in different ways.

The weather does not follow any previously known pattern and the wind refuses to blow. The only sailor apart from the captain not to fall ill has a heart problem, restricting his capacity for physical exertion. These two must save the situation.

They are becalmed; time seems to slow down and then stop altogether: “. . .my command seemed to stand as motionless as a model ship set on the gleams and shadows of polished marble.” Has the previous captain exerted some kind of supernatural influence, so that they will all die, leaving a ghost ship? There are echoes of Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner here. This first voyage as captain has turned into a nightmare.

There are descriptive passages of such vividness that I had to read them again: “Here and there in the distance, above the crowded mob of low, brown roof ridges, towered great piles of masonry, king’s palace, temples, gorgeous and dilapidated, crumbling under the vertical sunlight, tremendous, overpowering, almost palpable…”

There is an astonishing scene when the night turns to an inky blackness just before the rain comes, and the sailors have to feel their way around the ship: “The impenetrable blackness beset the ship so close that it seemed that by thrusting one’s hand over the side one could touch some unearthly substance.”

There is also a good deal here about the hidden motives of human behaviour. The odd reasons that some of the characters have for behaving as they do are gradually revealed. The shadow line itself is the line between youth and experience, we are told, but is it something more as well?

I feel that I cannot do justice to the depth and complexity of Conrad’s writing in a short piece like this. That’s not to say it’s a difficult read, though. I found it unputdownable and read it in a single sitting, despite having read it at least once before.

I think it’s a pity that so many people encounter Conrad’s writing first through Heart of Darkness, perhaps on an academic course. It’s not his easiest or most accessible work.

Knowing something of Conrad’s biography and the fact that English was actually his third language, you might think that the plainer style of the later works was a consequence of his becoming more familiar with the language.

Yet the short story An Outpost of Progress, the other fiction that came out of Conrad’s time in the Belgian Congo, was published in 1898, before Heart of Darkness and is written in a much more direct style. It’s certainly a good place to start with this extraordinary writer.

The Way Through the Woods by Rudyard Kipling

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I’m lucky enough to live within ten minutes’ walk of some woods that I’ve known since I was a boy. It’s been a life saver to be able to go there during the lockdown. The place has been transformed, with no planes overhead and much less traffic noise.

Everything smells fresh and the birds all sing at the same time so it’s hard to tell the calls apart. Today we went a little further off the beaten track and surprised a bird in a hole in a tree trunk.

So many trees have grown up since I first knew the place. It’s a nature reserve now and allowed to run wild. It’s hard to pick out the features I knew so long ago and the paths seem to lead in different directions from how I remember them. I found the sunken field with a concrete retaining wall, where they used to race bicycles. It’s completely overgrown now.

As I wander the paths, trying to orientate myself, the opening words of Kipling’s poem come into my mind.

 

The Way Through the Woods

They shut the road through the woods
Seventy years ago.
Weather and rain have undone it again,
And now you would never know
There was once a road through the woods
Before they planted the trees.
It is underneath the coppice and heath,
And the thin anemones.
Only the keeper sees
That, where the ring-dove broods,
And the badgers roll at ease,
There was once a road through the woods.

Yet, if you enter the woods
Of a summer evening late,
When the night-air cools on the trout-ringed pools
Where the otter whistles his mate,
(They fear not men in the woods,
Because they see so few.)
You will hear the beat of a horse’s feet,
And the swish of a skirt in the dew,
Steadily cantering through
The misty solitudes,
As though they perfectly knew
The old lost road through the woods.
But there is no road through the woods.

 

 

 

Unknown Assailant by Patrick Hamilton (#Gorse 3)

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Unknown Assailant (1955) is much shorter than Patrick Hamilton’s other two Gorse books, only some hundred pages in all. It is now 1930 and Gorse is masquerading as “The Honourable Gerald Claridge”. His plan this time is to defraud barmaid Ivy Barton of her savings, as well as relieving her father of a considerable sum of money by persuading him to invest in a musical play. No one is more aware than Gorse of how posing as a theatrical “insider” can awe and dazzle the gullible.

It is a bit like the outline of a story that was not quite finished. It lacks detail. For example we are never told quite how Gorse met Ivy or why he considered her a suitable victim. There are few of the long dialogue scenes that we find in the previous novel and not as much humour (although the scene where Gorse, as Claridge, and Mr Barton call each other “sir” is amusing). We are told about the hostile letters Mr Barton writes but they are not reproduced.

Despite these flaws it is an essential read for admirers of the first two books and contains much of interest. It is the simple-minded Ivy who comes closest to seeing what Gorse is up to and thwarting his plans.

Towards the end of Mr Stimpson and Mr Gorse, Hamilton had compared Gorse to an artist. He suggested that the ease of his success with Mrs Plumleigh-Bruce led Gorse to make the mistake of thinking that there were many other and richer women waiting to be defrauded in the same way. “. . Gorse was one who had to pay for the precocity of his youth in the most distasteful coin of premature middle age”.

Do I detect a sense of Gorse as a self-portrait of Hamilton on some level here? After all, Hamilton hit the jackpot early on in his writing career, with the success of his stage plays Rope and Gaslight, but never quite reached those heights of public acclaim again. Gorse is, after all, the same age that Hamilton would have been at the time the novel is set.

There are references throughout that novel to Gorse’s future. Near the beginning, Hamilton compares Gorse to several notorious English murderers. Although it is not stated directly, the implication is to become a nationally famous killer, ending up being executed. The name “Gorse” suggests that Hamilton may have modelled him on Neville Heath. Gorse’s later military impersonation may also refer to Heath, who did something similar.

Here, that idea is taken further by introducing quotations from two future biographers of Gorse. One of them refers to “his life-long habit of writing filthy anonymous letters and abandoning women with entirely gratuitous cruelty”. The other cites the Gorse cases from the earlier novels, as well as “The Haywards Heath dentist” and “The Rugby watchmaker”, for which Hamilton did not provide any further details.

By the time Hamilton wrote Unknown Assailant, his powers as a writer were on the wane, as a lifetime of excessive drinking caught up with him. It was to be his last published novel and there’s a sense that Gorse’s decline mirrors his own.

It’s as if Hamilton had realised that writing about a serial criminal would involve telling the same story over again. Gorse uses his car in the fraud against Ivy, simply because that is what he always had done, and it goes badly wrong for him.

There was obviously at least one more book about Gorse to be written but sadly Hamilton did not live to take Gorse into this imagined future. He died in 1962.

If you like the Gorse novels you might be interested in Patrick Hamilton’s radio play, Money with Menaces.

 

 

On A Return From Egypt by Keith Douglas

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For obvious reasons, the celebrations for the 75th anniversary of VE day were a rather muted affair. It was a bit sad that the Red Arrows flypast became an event for television, rather than for real-life spectators.

One small gem did go ahead, though, the broadcast last night on Radio 3 of the play Unicorns, Almost by the poet Owen Sheers. It is a one-man piece about the second world war poet, Keith Douglas, played by Dan Krikler.

All the major poems, such as “How to Kill” and “Vergissmeinnicht” were included. If my memory is correct, the main biographical source was Douglas’s wartime memoir Alamein to Zem-Zem, with the words transposed to the present tense.

This had the effect of bringing Keith Douglas vividly to life, on the battlefield and in Alexandria, rather than leaving him as a figure dead on the pages of a history book.

The device of having Douglas speak after his death was very effective. It enabled Sheers to include the anecdote about Douglas’ mother finding all six copies of his Collected Poems unsold and unopened in her local bookshop, ten years after it had been published.

His reputation has risen slowly and steadily since then. References to his work crop up now and again. Alan Judd used a quote from Keith Douglas as the title for his novel A Breed of Heroes, and he appears as a character in Iain Gale’s novel Alamein.

Keith Douglas survived the battle of Alamein but was killed in action three days after D-Day. He was twenty-four years old.

The following poem was written in England before D-Day and published after his death.

 

On A Return From Egypt

To stand here in the wings of Europe
disheartened, I have come away
from the sick land where in the sun lay
the gentle sloe-eyed murderers
of themselves, exquisites under a curse;
here to exercise my depleted fury.

For the heart is a coal, growing colder
when jewelled cerulean seas change
into grey rocks, grey water-fringe,
sea and sky altering like a cloth
till colour and sheen are gone both:
cold is an opiate of the soldier.

And all my endeavours are unlucky explorers
come back, abandoning the expedition;
the specimens, the lilies of ambition
still spring in their climate, still unpicked:
but time, time is all I lacked
to find them, as the great collectors before me.

The next month, then, there is a window
and with a crash I’ll split the glass.
Behind it stands one I must kiss,
person of love or death
a person or a wraith,
I fear what I shall find.

 

 

 

Never a Normal Man by Daniel Farson

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Never a Normal Man is the autobiography of Daniel Farson, published just before his death in 1997 at the age of seventy.

A list of the many different things he did gives something of the flavour of his extraordinary life: Parliamentary reporter; photographer for Picture Post; television presenter; pub owner; author, and chronicler of London.

He is a funny mixture as a writer; a spinner of yarns, yet with an essential honesty, particularly about himself, which makes him an attractive companion on the page.

He is also one of the only people to write about photography in a down-to-earth way, admitting the role of luck in getting a great shot, and acknowledging the help of the darkroom team.

Reading this book, you come away with the impression that Farson had a rare talent for snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, but if anything, he sells himself rather short here. For example, the chapters on his TV career in the early days of independent television stress the weirdness and unreality of sudden fame. In fact, he was a highly successful and well-liked interviewer.

Despite his cut-glass accent, he took a more tolerant and liberal view of the people he met than was the BBC norm at the time. His Anglo-American background and status as a gay man when that was illegal, gave him something of an outsider’s eye. His sympathy for those who do not quite fit in is apparent in programmes about such topics as racially mixed marriages, nudism, the revival of witchcraft and teenage life in Brighton.

Similarly, he rather glosses over the fact that his later writing career was actually quite successful. He was one of the first to attempt to solve the mystery of Jack the Ripper, as well as writing about his great uncle Bram Stoker. Perhaps best of all are the books illustrated with his own photographs. Sacred Monsters (1988) comprises remembrances of famous writers and artists he encountered during his time as a journalist. These include Robert Graves, Somerset Maugham, Henry Williamson and Noel Coward.

He took a similar approach in two more London books. Soho in the Fifties (1987) is the classic account of the Bohemian life of that era. It’s arguable that no-one outside Soho would have heard of the Colony Room Club if it wasn’t for Farson. It’s also probably true that reading Farson’s account is more enjoyable than the reality can have been. His prose has more sparkle than last night’s flat champagne. And with the sheer amount of alcohol being consumed, it’s remarkable that anyone could remember anything about the night before.

Farson might have felt he was something of a Boswell to the Johnsons, but by including photographs by John Deakin, and writing about their relationship, he helped the revival of Deakin’s posthumous reputation. The portrait of Farson on the cover is by Deakin.

Similarly, his long friendship with the painter Francis Bacon meant he was the first to interview Bacon on television, and eventually led to him writing an unauthorised biography after Bacon’s death.

Limehouse Days (1991) is an account of his move to a house by the river there, as well as his attempts to revive music hall entertainment in a pub on the isle of dogs. This is a picture of the East End just before the docks closed, when it was still a foreign country to people from other parts of London.

He recycles material from these books here, making Never a Normal Man a sort of compendium of his writing as well as an autobiography.

Farson chooses to emphasise the difficulties in life that he feels his homosexuality and heavy drinking led him to, even if he glosses over quite a lot in his personal life. He is quite hard on himself about some of his behaviour. He stresses his financial ineptitude. But as he says of the finally unsuccessful pub venture: better to have lost one’s money that way than on the stock exchange.

He was the son of a famous father, the American foreign correspondent and author Negley Farson. There is often a pattern that sons of high-achieving fathers, for whatever reason, don’t achieve very much themselves, or if they do, it is in a completely different field. Despite the impression sometimes given here, Daniel Farson achieved a great deal, leaving a rich legacy of books, photographs and television films.

A Month in the Country by J L Carr

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J L Carr (1912–1994) was definitely not part of the London literary world. In 1967, he retired early from his job as a primary school headteacher and devoted the rest of his life to writing novels, and self-publishing small volumes from his home in Kettering, Northamptonshire.

His 1980 novel A Month in the Country was the nearest he came to mainstream success. It was nominated for the Booker prize and successfully filmed.

It’s an unusual novel by an unusual man. Carr manages to pack more into one hundred or so pages than many novels of twice or three times the length. There are a couple of references to that master of short, intense fiction, Joseph Conrad. It starts quietly but gains in emotional intensity as it proceeds to an ending that may make the reader reflect on their own life.

Set in 1920, it is the story of first world war veteran Tom Birkin’s stay in the Yorkshire village of Oxgodby. He has been hired to restore a fresco in the local church, long hidden under whitewash and the grime of centuries. In the next field, another ex-soldier, Moon, is working on an archaeological enquiry. Both men are damaged by their war experiences.

Birkin is the narrator and we only gradually realise just how damaged he is, both by the war and the problems in his marriage. We also slowly come to realise that he is looking back at the events he describes, and that they are in a distant past. For example, he laments the decline of the local dialect “because of comprehensive schools and the BBC”.

The conversation with Moon about growing old takes on significance as we realise that Birkin must be narrating this in the present day, where he is now quite elderly.

The novel is a portrait of life in the village at that time, with its division between Chapel and Church, as well as Londoner Birkin’s personal story of his stay in the north.

What is unusual is that the golden, long-lost summer is taking place after the great war and not before it. The timeless rhythms of rural life, and Birkin’s acceptance by the people in the village, are restorative for his troubled soul and the novel becomes, among other things, the story of his recovery.

There is a lot more here, though. The vicar’s wife asks Birkin if he believes in hell. Is hell the mediaeval furnace of demons that is revealed on the church wall? Or is it in this life, in the pain of a loveless marriage and the muddy carnage of Passchendaele? The novel rather confirms my mother’s view that the long decline of Christian belief in Britain started with the first world war. That war cast a long shadow.

The preoccupations here are the timeless ones of English poetry: memory, the passage of time, missed opportunity and the fleeting nature of human experience. Looking back, Birkin realises that his pastoral idyll was taking place at the very end of the horse era. A way of life was coming to a close, yet no-one knew it.

Underlying the romanticism is a hard-headed realism: “If I’d stayed there, would I always have been happy? No, I suppose not. People move away, grow older, die, and the bright belief that there will be another marvellous thing around each corner fades. It is now or never; we must snatch at happiness as it flies.”

 

 

What should I read during the lockdown?

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I’ve seen a lot of articles lately, both in print and online, as to what we might read during the lockdown.  A lot of self-improving advice of the “now is the time to tackle Ulysses or In Search of Lost Time” sort. But then I have also seen quite a lot of people saying that, when it all started, they found their concentration affected, particularly when it came to fiction. I had that problem myself. It was as if the events going on in the real world made it impossible to live in an imaginary one.

What could possibly be the right sort of thing to read in these strange times that seem to create such an odd state of mind, I kept asking myself. Should I go for humour and escapism or no-holds-barred realism? In the end I decided I was over-thinking the whole question and stopped agonising about it. I would carry on with my unread pile, as usual. When that was done, I would pick an old favourite off the shelf and just see how I got on.

The unread pile was down to two. First was John Gardner’s James Bond continuation novel, Death is Forever, hugely enjoyable, expertly crafted escapism. Next up was Henry Williamson, and It Was The Nightingale, escapism of a different sort, into the rural North Devon of the 1920s.

Now it was time to look at the shelf. After several false starts, I settled on the Gorse Trilogy by Patrick Hamilton. I have written about these novels in more detail elsewhere. The combination of mordant humour and insights into the darker aspects of human nature seemed to hit exactly the right spot.

Around this time I heard a very interesting podcast on the subject of reading, with American academic Alan Jacobs. His basic idea is “reading by Whim” (note the upper case “W”), which comes from the American poet Randall Jarrell.

Reading should not be about laboriously working one’s way through a list of “great books”. It is not a box-ticking exercise. If one talks about “getting through” a book, one is in fact talking about wanting to have read the book, possibly to impress other people.

An alternative method of finding good books is to read the books that the authors you like had read themselves. This will eventually lead you back to the “great books”, but in a way that means more to you.

He also addressed the vexed question of whether or not you should finish a book if you are not getting much from it. It’s ok not to finish. It probably means that you are simply not the right reader for that book. (That made me feel much better about my inability to finish The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann, despite having tried three times!) I think you could summarise this approach to reading as “one thing leads to another”.

I realised that in my own reading, one thing had been leading to another without my noticing it. The 1920s setting of Henry Williamson had perhaps reminded me of Patrick Hamilton’s rather different view of that same era.

I found myself drawn to a volume of Joseph Conrad’s short stories. Perhaps he popped back into my mind because his death is mentioned by Henry Williamson. Whatever it was that brought me to them, I have to say there is something about the mood and feel of these stories by Conrad that perfectly suits my current state of mind.

The life and death struggle with the ship that is first leaking, then burning in Youth; the decline into madness and death of the two lazy and incompetent traders in An Outpost of Progress; the plight of the central European emigrant, washed up on the beach in Kent to become an alien in a strange land in Amy Foster.

I have read Conrad all my life, but it’s as if I never truly understood what he was trying to tell us until now.

I think I have answered my own question. Conrad’s tales of the extremes of human experience in an indifferent world seem just right for where we find ourselves at the moment.

John le Carré and Nicholas Blake

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David Cornwell was educated in the 1940s at Sherborne, one of the great Public Schools of England, and he didn’t like it very much. Some years later, he took his revenge, when as John le Carré, he published his second novel, A Murder of Quality (1962).

Sherborne became Carne, an unpleasant institution, riddled with snobbery and class prejudice. Those who run the school are not above a bit of blackmail when it comes to getting a teacher in on the cheap.

Unusually for le Carré, this is a detective story rather than a spy novel. It’s actually an extremely good example of a genre with which he is not usually associated. (Although you could argue that Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is really a whodunnit.) Here, a newly retired George Smiley plays detective.

Like all le Carré’s early fiction, this novel has its roots in the second world war. Smiley becomes involved in the mystery because a wartime intelligence colleague contacts him about it. It turns out that one of the masters at the school, and a potential suspect, is the brother of Smiley’s wartime boss. Smiley therefore feels obliged to take the case on.

Oddly enough, le Carré was not the first old boy of Sherborne to write a detective story set in a school. In 1935 Nicholas Blake had published A Question of Proof. This was the penname of the poet Cecil Day Lewis, formerly of Sherborne and like le Carré, a schoolteacher before becoming a full-time writer. I don’t think either of them ever returned to teach at Sherborne, though. Le Carré taught at a prep school and then Eton; Day Lewis taught at several other schools.

Day Lewis had much fonder memories of Sherborne than le Carré. He wrote warmly about his time there in the poems The Chrysanthemum Show and Sketches for a Portrait. Sudeley Hall in A Question of Proof is a prep school in the heart of the country, not a grand institution like Carne. Dark deeds take place against the background of a rural idyll, when the body of the school’s most unpopular boy is found in a haystack on sports day. The climax comes after a second murder a week later, on the day of the parents versus pupils cricket match.

The atmosphere is that of the inter-war years with references to the first world war, the general strike and the scarcity of jobs. It feels like an accurate portrait of life at a school of that type at that time.

The main character, a teacher who comes under suspicion of murder, is having an affair with the headmaster’s wife. I have read that this nearly cost Day Lewis his job at the time, as the chair of governors of the school in which he was then teaching, refused to believe that this was fiction.

A Question of Proof was the first novel to feature the amateur sleuth Nigel Strangeways, who appeared in many more, including The Beast Must Die (1938).  Blake was still publishing in the 1960s, as le Carré was getting started, so the careers of the two writers overlapped.

Carne is not the only school to feature prominently in a le Carré novel. Thursgood’s prep school in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is a rather seedy establishment, named after its owner. He is unaware that Jim Prideaux, last-minute replacement teacher at the beginning of the term, is a retired spy. Buried in the countryside, it’s an ideal place for someone who wants to lie low. Jim seems like a man out of his time, with his Alvis sports car, and fondness for reading Jeffrey Farnol to the boys. In fact, both he and the school belong more to the world of A Question of Proof than the 1970s.

A Wet Night by Thomas Hardy

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In these difficult times, here is a timely poetic reminder from Thomas Hardy, that those who came before us had to endure far worse and did so with stoicism.

 

I pace along, the rain-shafts riddling me,
Mile after mile out by the moorland way,
And up the hill, and through the ewe-leaze gray
Into the lane, and round the corner tree;

Where, as my clothing clams me, mire-bestarred,
And the enfeebled light dies out of day,
Leaving the liquid shades to reign, I say,
“This is a hardship to be calendared!”

Yet sires of mine now perished and forgot,
When worse beset, ere roads were shapen here,
And night and storm were foes indeed to fear,
Times numberless have trudged across this spot
In sturdy muteness on their strenuous lot,
And taking all such toils as trifles mere.

 

 

Mr Stimpson and Mr Gorse by Patrick Hamilton (Gorse #2)

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Mr Stimpson and Mr Gorse (1953) continues the career of Patrick Hamilton’s anti-hero, the coldly malevolent fraudster, Ralph Gorse.

It is 1928 now and Gorse is twenty five. He finds himself house-sitting for a friend in Reading and bumps into fortyish widow, Mrs Joan Plumleigh-Bruce, in the local pub. Having spotted that she is quite well off, Gorse decides to make her his next victim. There is first the small problem of detaching her from her suitor and would-be husband, fifty-something estate agent and widower Donald Stimpson.

Readers of The West Pier will see that Gorse is up to something similar here; the destruction of an existing relationship in order to insinuate himself into his victim’s affections so that he can steal from her. The youthfulness and innocence of the characters in that first book gave the story a sort of poignancy. Here, the people in the circle into which Gorse inserts himself are old enough to know better. They are led astray by Gorse’s air of being a worldly sophisticate from London.

Gorse plays on the vanity, snobbery, and greed of Mrs Plumleigh-Bruce. He uses to the full “his gift of causing and using the emotion of relief in women”.

The tone is darker, more satirical and humorous, than the first novel. In places it is laugh-out-loud funny, particularly the scene where Gorse manipulates Stimpson into getting drunk and visiting a prostitute. Gorse plays on Stimpson’s unease at finding himself in a grander sort of hotel bar than he is used to. Stimpson passes out and the next morning has a horrendous hangover and no memory of what happened. Gorse then plays on Stimpson’s fear of having caught a nasty disease. He has also acquired a nice story to tell Joan to lower her opinion of Donald and drive a wedge between them.

Hamilton goes into great detail about how Gorse carries out his fraud, as well as the snobberies and attitudes of his characters. Much of the novel is told in dialogue. Some of the satire is excruciating, for example the “mock historical” jargon that the men slip into.

A section near the end is presented as Mrs Plumleigh-Bruce’s diary. Hamilton is merciless about her banal thoughts expressed in pretentious language. It’s almost as if he wants to torment his characters in the sadistic manner of Gorse.

All this leads the reader to think that Hamilton’s intention was something more than the story of a crime. The novel is as much about the class structure and attitudes of the 1920s as Gorse’s fraud. Biographies of Hamilton say that he held Marxist views. He certainly had a startingly clear-eyed appreciation of the role of money in people’s lives.

That is a very useful quality for a novelist trying to create a realistic picture of the 1920s. For example, we are told that the collapse of the General Strike and increasing working-class unemployment has led to more women turning to prostitution on the streets of the West End of London.

We never really know why Gorse acts as he does. What we do know is that he is the biggest snob of all, enraged when he reads Joan’s diary and finds that she thinks his accent sometimes slips into the “common”.

Hamilton tells us that “social snobbery  indeed, may conceivably have been his one true passion in life. Probably it far exceeded his love of money, which, perhaps, derived only from his ambition to appease his social aspirations”.