Category: Non-fiction

The Mirror of the Sea by Joseph Conrad

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Most photographs of Conrad show an older man, grave and distinguished. He didn’t become established as a writer until his forties, and it almost comes as a shock to realise that during his twenty-year career as a seaman, on which he drew for inspiration, he was actually quite young.

The Mirror of the Sea, published in 1906, is his non-fiction account of his years afloat. It is subtitled Memories and Impressions and that is a pretty good description of what is contained here. It is a collection of impressions of deep-water sailing ships and the men who sailed them, as well as a meditation on wind, weather and the nature of the sea itself.

The writing is beautiful, as you would expect from Conrad, in places like prose poetry. The book gives a vivid impression of what it was like to serve on a merchant ship during the age of sail. If there is a theme running through these varied, essay-like pieces it is regret for the passing of that era and its replacement by the steam age. “Love and regret go hand in hand in this world of changes swifter than the shifting of the clouds reflected in the mirror of the sea.”

Conrad gives us the benefit of his knowledge gained through many years of experience. He explains how there could be indefinable differences in handling characteristics between one sailing ship and another. The loading of cargo on to a sailing vessel was a fine art, affecting the performance of the ship at sea. An officer who was hard of hearing had great difficulty, because hearing is important in determining the speed and direction of the wind.    

This is the dangerous maritime world before radar or wireless, where a ship posted “overdue” and then “missing” had probably sunk with all hands, its loss never to be explained, as if it had simply vanished.

Much of this is romantic in tone with the west wind personified as a great king and sailing ships regarded as living creatures, but Conrad never loses sight of the complete indifference of nature to human concerns. “The most amazing wonder of the deep is its unfathomable cruelty”.

There is a whole chapter devoted to the Thames estuary and the London docks as they were around the end of the nineteenth century. This is fascinating and was a big influence on Rachel Lichtenstein when she wrote her own book about the estuary in 2016.

There is much here for any admirer of Conrad’s fiction to enjoy. Inevitably in a book like this some parts are more interesting than others. The chapter called The Tremolino is an account of an early Mediterranean voyage made by Conrad. It reads like one of his short stories, making the reader wonder if it is quite as factual as the rest of the book. In the last chapter, Conrad gives us an account of the career of Lord Nelson.

The book is a lament for a lost art, for the days when sailors had to understand and respect the moods of the sea. Who knows, with the way the world is going, sailing ships may yet make a return.                

The Life of Ian Fleming by John Pearson

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This was the first biography of Ian Fleming, published in 1966 two years after his death. Pearson had worked with Fleming at the Sunday Times. The great advantage of this is that Pearson was able to interview in person most of the people who had known Fleming at the various stages of his life. Much of what they said is quoted in direct speech, bringing Fleming vividly to life.

The slight disadvantage is that Fleming’s widow Anne was still alive when Pearson was writing the book and certain details of Fleming’s private life had to be left out.

It is a fast-paced, gripping read and Pearson never gets bogged down in the detail, evoking the various worlds that Fleming moved through without boring the reader. It is not like the modern style of biography, more dependent on archive material, that never quite comes to life.

In proper journalistic fashion he answers the questions that the reader might have about some of the more mysterious episodes in Fleming’s life. For example, just how was it that a former journalist working as a city stockbroker was appointed to a senior position in naval intelligence at the beginning of the second world war? You will find the explanation here. Where did Fleming’s interest in underwater swimming that found its way into the Bond books come from? That, too, is explained.

Pearson takes the view that the Bond Books were a sort of fantasy projection of Fleming’s own character and pre-occupations. It is Fleming’s friend Robert Harling who recalls him saying “I’m going to write the spy novel to end all spy novels.”

The long, slow process of turning the Bond books into best sellers is described, with Anthony Eden’s stay at Goldeneye being a key event that brought Fleming’s name to a wider public. It’s fascinating to learn, by the way, just how primitive the accommodation at Goldeneye actually was.

In the end, the film deal that made Bond a household name came too late as by then Fleming’s health was in decline and he couldn’t really enjoy the success he had worked for.

Pearson looks at Fleming’s attitude to money as the second son of a wealthy family whose widowed mother controlled the purse strings. It is suggested here that M was what the Fleming children called their mother. I would have liked a bit more about Fleming’s relationship with his mother, perhaps the source of his rather odd attitude to women.   

This is not really a critical biography, but what Pearson does have to say about the Bond books is shrewd and interesting. He considers Casino Royale to be the best, but that Fleming put so much of himself into it that he couldn’t repeat it. He suggests that Fleming rather lost interest in the later books and he has less to say about those.

Almost hidden away in here is some fascinating stuff about the origins of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. I didn’t know that Fleming had been a keen skier in his youth and was actually buried in an avalanche in Switzerland. He brought home a Swiss fiancé but his mother vetoed the marriage. Henry Miller is quoted as saying that Fleming wrote quickly like Rider Haggard and with the same direct access to his subconscious. There was a later girlfriend, not named, who was killed in the blitz. Are we looking at the real-life equivalents of Vesper Lynd and Tracy here? Years later the Flemings went on a nostalgic skiing holiday, just before Fleming wrote the book. Perhaps there was as much of Fleming in this book as in Casino Royale.

Despite later biographies, the reputation of this one has remained high. All in all, a fascinating and highly entertaining read for anyone who likes the Bond books.

 

Writers react to the rise of the motor car

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At the end of Patrick Hamilton’s novel Mr Stimpson and Mr Gorse, there is an extraordinary passage in which he depicts the rise of the motorcar as a plague of black beetles spreading out all over England. The beetles have taken over and made human beings their slaves and attendants. The novel was published in 1953 but set in 1928.

Hamilton had his own reasons for disliking cars. He had been badly injured in a hit-and-run incident in the 1930s. To ram the point home, he gave his villainous anti-hero, Gorse, an association with cars and the motor trade. There is something of this idea that cars may not altogether be a good thing in Nicholas Blake’s 1938 novel The Beast Must Die. The hit-and-run driver who kills a young boy and tries to cover it up is a garage owner. This novel was inspired by a “near miss” incident involving the author’s own young son.

In 1927, H V Morton had published an account of his travels round the country, In Search of England. In his foreword, he was much more enthusiastic about the rise of the petrol engine than Hamilton or Blake. He sees the provision of coach services and “the popularity of the cheap motor car” as reviving road travel and making remote areas of the countryside more accessible than they were in the railway age. He laments the “vulgar” behaviour of some visitors, but thinks that in general, the age of the car will lead to a greater understanding and love of the countryside, which will therefore help preserve it. The seaside holiday will go out of fashion, he suggests, to be replaced by the country holiday.

Compare this to a report in the “I” newspaper of 16 November 2019. It is headed “Pay As You Go”, and continues “As UK resorts clog up with traffic, Dean Kirby reports on a plan to charge tourists a congestion fee in the Lake District.” There is now a conflict in many areas between tourist traffic and local road use.

Things have been heading this way for a long time. Some years ago, I went to Lyme Regis in Dorset. From the top of a double-decker bus, I could see the “park and ride” car park, necessary to prevent the town’s high street seizing up completely in the summer. A little further off, was the disused viaduct of the now closed railway line to the town.

We tend to think now of the inter-war years as a “golden age of motoring”, bringing to mind the image of a uniformed AA patrolman saluting a passing sportscar, the only vehicle on an otherwise empty road. We can’t really blame H V Morton for not having a crystal ball, but it’s interesting that he did not seem to have thought out the implications of increased car use.

We see the 1930s as the Shell Guide era of motoring. Paul Nash took the photographs for the Dorset volume. But these detailed descriptions of rural England were sponsored by a petrol company. The original editions were spiral bound so they could be opened flat on a car seat. Admittedly Hamilton was writing with the benefit of hindsight, but he seems to be one of the only writers who saw that Britain would have to change to accommodate the motor revolution.

Of course, it was a fictional character who appeared as early as 1908, who caught the deep appeal of this new form of personal transport. I am thinking of Mr Toad, staring after the speeding car with a gleam in his eye. Despite his string of accidents and fines, Toad could not resist getting into a car again. “Toot Toot!”

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.

Prospero’s Cell by Lawrence Durrell

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This book by Lawrence Durrell was published in 1945. It is an account of his life on Corfu in the years 1937-38. It forms part of a loose “island trilogy” with the later Reflections on a Marine Venus (Rhodes) and Bitter Lemons (Cyprus).

The great strength here is Durrell’s eye for the unusual and his extraordinary descriptive prose. This is a book full of local colour in every sense. It opens with the sentence: “Somewhere between Calabria and Corfu the blue really begins”. He was primarily a poet, after all. He is particularly effective at evoking the maritime world and the sea is a constant presence. There are vivid descriptions of night fishing for squid and octopus by carbide lamp.

The part of the island where Durrell lives is tranquil in 1937: “The silence here is like a discernible pulse – the heart-beat of time itself”.

There is not much narrative to speak of, and it has to be said that some of the philosophical conversations with his Greek friends are a bit tedious. It is one of these friends who claims to have proved that Corfu was Prospero’s island in The Tempest.

There is an extraordinary visionary passage where Durrell, bathing in a rock pool, seems to have become one with the landscape: “One is entangled and suffocated by this sense of physical merging into the elements around one”.

The book is perhaps most effective as an attempt to convey the history, myths and customs of Corfu as revealed in the everyday lives of its inhabitants. He gives us the details about olive gathering and oil manufacture, a village dance in old-fashioned clothing, and a strange pageant dedicated to a mythical figure who embodies the Greek character. Even the brief period of British rule has left its trace in an enthusiasm for cricket. I think of it as a sort of literary cubism, where it does not really seem to be going anywhere, but by the end the reader has gained a complete picture.

Like Kipling, Durrell was born in India and spent his early years there. I have wondered whether his painterly talent for rendering colours and landscape in words derived from this in some way.

This book is connected to the story of the Durrells’ family life on Corfu as told by Gerald elsewhere, although you wouldn’t really know it. There is a fleeting reference to “my brother” and “his guns”, so that must be Leslie. Lawrence was living with his wife Nancy in the White House to the north of the island, while his mother and siblings lived elsewhere, but he doesn’t really mention them much. Nancy is referred to only as “N” here.

Towards the end, the coming war starts to make its ominous presence felt and the final section is an epilogue looking back from Alexandria in 1943. This is pointing towards Durrell’s  later career and the collapse of his marriage to Nancy. She was something of a shadowy figure, but her story has now been told by her daughter Joanna Hodgkin, in Amateurs in Eden. Prospero’s Cell portrays pre-war Corfu as a paradise lost.

This book can be seen as an early example of a sub-genre of writing that became popular in the 1950s, which sought to bring the colour, sunshine and abundance of foreign locations to a Britain still feeling the effects of wartime austerity. Other examples of this are the Mediterranean cookery books of Elizabeth David, with their cover illustrations by the painter John Minton, and the James Bond books.

Fleming kept Bond in England in Moonraker but readers complained so he did not repeat the experiment. Jamaica was Bond’s real home and perhaps the Caribbean was to Fleming what the Mediterranean was to Durrell.

 

All the Devils are Here by David Seabrook

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I bought this when it came out in 2002. I knew at once that it was a book I just had to read, from a very short review that said the author David Seabrook had applied a sort of Iain Sinclair approach to the Medway towns and Thanet area of Kent. It was most definitely one for me.

I couldn’t know then what an influence it was to have on me over so many years.

If I had never read this book, I would probably not have read The Mystery of Edwin Drood by Charles Dickens. And therefore, I would not have had the experience, years later, of feeling that I had stepped into the pages of Drood when I visited the area around Rochester cathedral. Nor would I have stood in front of the house that is believed to have been the inspiration for Satis House in Great Expectations.

In my earlier post Site-specific Reading I describe how I looked for the original thirty nine steps down to the beach at Broadstairs. It was from Seabrook’s writing that I found out about John Buchan’s stay at a house there, on the North Foreland and the origin of his most famous novel’s title. That, in turn, led me to think about Ian Fleming’s connection with Kent in a new way, that inspired my own writing on spy stories with particular reference to Moonraker.

The shelter on the seafront at Margate where T S Eliot wrote part of The Waste Land is a heritage site now, re-painted and well cared for. That too, is largely down to Mr Seabrook and, like so many others, I would probably not have sat there if it were not for him. I suspect that the 2018 exhibition at Turner contemporary, Journeys with the Waste Land, would not have happened had All the Devils are Here not been published.

In a broader way, Seabrook’s knack of making connections between places and writing inspired by them set my mind running down a particular track and that has continued to this day. You can see his influence on my own writing in other pieces on this blog.

Who was this mysterious figure who died at a comparatively young age, after publishing just one more book? He hints at personal tragedy and a difficult private life. Iain Sinclair wrote about him and his work far more eloquently than I am able to.

I was never able to find out if the “Thomas Jerome Seabrook” who wrote Bowie in Berlin was the same person, having a little joke with the name of the character played by Bowie in The Man Who Fell To Earth. So rest in Peace, Mr Seabrook, whoever you were. You inspired me, although it took me years to realise it and you never knew.

And just what is it about this particular corner of England that has made it such fertile ground for literary endeavour? There is that marvellous 1940s landscape mystery, The Image of a Drawn Sword by Jocelyn Brooke. If we look a little further west into Sussex, we find that at one time, Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, Rudyard Kipling, and H G Wells were living not that far from one another. Lamb House in Rye, was home to Henry James, then E F Benson and much later, Rumer Godden. It must be something in the air; or the countryside, perhaps.

The title, by the way, comes from Shakespeare’s Tempest. It’s Ariel who says “Hell is empty and all the devils are here”.

Naples ’44 by Norman Lewis

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Is this a travel book or a war memoir? A bit of both, I would say. It was based on Norman Lewis’ diary of his wartime experiences as an intelligence officer in Naples, but was not published until 1978. It is about a very specific time and place but has a hint of the universal about it. It is subtitled “An Intelligence Officer in the Italian Labyrinth”, which sums up the situation the author found himself in nicely.

Lewis arrived as part of the American invasion of southern Italy. The Italians had switched sides and the Germans retreated northwards, leaving the allies in charge of the civilian population of a bomb-shattered Naples and the surrounding area.

Events of jaw-dropping random cruelty and absurdity are recounted. The occupying forces, whether American, British, or Canadian, do not come out of this well. You can imagine what happens when most of the women in the Naples area are near to starvation and will do anything for a meal. An arbitrary rule bans fishing from boats, so the Neapolitans make improvised rafts from anything they can find. Anything that can be eaten, is eaten, such as the rare fish in the public aquarium.

A booby-trap bomb explodes, killing many civilians and giving rise to a rumour that the whole city is riddled with bombs, set to explode when the electricity is switched back on. The entire population is hurriedly evacuated, but it turns out to be a German ruse to spread chaos.

Mysterious tapping sounds in the catacombs suggest that a squad of German soldiers has remained there, ready to come out and commit acts of sabotage; a search reveals nothing, and Lewis thinks that if they were there, they have been spirited away by collaborators.

The former head of the mafia gains a foothold in the new military government which quickly becomes completely corrupt. The American decision to send officers of American-Italian background looks increasingly daft, as it enables the Italian criminal elements to embed themselves.

Almost every sort of item brought in by the Americans is soon available on the thriving black market. Italians caught with illicit items that are freely available on stalls in the street are given hugely disproportionate jail sentences. The criminal gangs behind it all go free. Meanwhile, Canadian army blankets become a form of currency as they can be skilfully tailored into overcoats.

It gets so bad that essential items such as penicillin are soon more readily available on the black market than they are to the occupying forces.

Lewis witnesses the eruption of Vesuvius: “It was the most majestic and terrible sight I have ever seen, or ever expect to see”. A village is engulfed by a slow-moving column of lava, advancing at walking pace down the main street. Eventually it slows to a halt, seemingly stopped by the power of faith, leaving half the village intact.

Naples has been bombed back to the mediaeval era, thinks Lewis, and consequently old beliefs are revived. There are reports of effigies of saints in churches weeping, bleeding and talking. Is this just mass hysteria on the part of the traumatised population?

An attempt to check the spread of sexually transmitted disease is undermined by a corrupt doctor selling false certificates of health to the girls. Lewis reflects that the Italian system encourages corruption because police pay is so low. When he is posted to a village in the zona camorra he realises that it is a way of life, an established system, not quite corruption as it appears to a Briton. In this lawless region, a group of French colonial troops embark on a rampage of brutal sexual assault against the local women. They are dealt with by the men of the camorra in the time-honoured, equally brutal way.

This might sound like a depressing read, but it is not, partly because it is written in such elegant prose that you read on, fascinated. Lewis takes a slightly detached viewpoint, as his job obliged him to do.

Some of the British troops can’t wait to leave, but by the end of his year in Naples, Lewis has formed a completely different view. He has come round to a great admiration for the humanity and culture of the Italians. So much so that if he could be born again, he tells us, and choose the country of his birth, he would choose Italy.

I must declare an interest. My father was in Italy during the second world war, but a little earlier and a little further south.

I discovered this book via the Italian documentary film, assembled from existing film clips and narrated by Benedict Cumberbatch.

H V Morton: poetic snapshots of a lost London

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The short pieces that make up H V Morton’s The Nights of London were originally published as newspaper columns in the 1920s, but had a long afterlife in book form. My small blue hardback is dated 1948 and it had been reprinted fourteen times by then.

Morton was a star journalist, making his name by being present at the opening of the tomb of Tutankhamun. He went on to become a successful travel writer, the Paul Theroux of the inter-war years.

Here, Morton is our guide on a series of lone, nocturnal tours of London. He was aware that the idea of London by night had already become something of a cliché and he strove to avoid that.

He starts out at two in the morning in front of the Bank, cold, dead and deserted. It’s immediately clear that we are in the company of a sort of poet of London, as he walks on to London Bridge: “No sound, but that of a stray, petulant siren downstream. . . the rush of lit water and a sudden puff of steam from the Cannon Street railway bridge.”

Part of the fascination of this book is reflecting on what has changed and what has not. Morton’s attitude to the Chinese in Limehouse is not that of today; on the other hand he is broadly sympathetic to those struggling to make ends meet.

He visits the Suicide Station under Waterloo Bridge, where the police wait with a small dinghy to fish would-be suicides out of the dark water.

He accompanies the maintenance men on the tube and hopes that the current in the live rail really has been turned off, as they so confidently assure him.

He passes the time in a warm and cosy cabman’s shelter.

When he visits Fleet Street, we feel the journalist’s love for “the astonishing thunder of the press”. There is something of Rudyard Kipling here, as he describes the huge printing machines, “ready to tell today about yesterday”. There is also a reminder in his language that this is London just after the first world war: “In Fleet Street it is zero hour. The first edition is just going over the top into a new day.”

Similarly, the firemen in the station he visits remember dealing with the recent Zeppelin raids.

The pieces on evening classes and hospitals, remind us that we are in a harder world than today, before the expansion of public education and public access to health care.

He spends an evening in the East End, watching boxing bouts in a smoky hall.

The steam engine Sir Percivale pulls the night Continental boat train into Victoria Station, bringing the romance of the Mediterranean into London along with his train of Pullman cars. A touch of Kipling again, as Morton imagines the engines talking to each other in the engine shed.

He reflects on the sad atmosphere in an afterhours club, where people dance on into the small hours, people “who dare not be alone with themselves”.

A long bus ride north takes him to the very edge of London, where a development of new houses is reaching out into the countryside. His young companion proudly shows him the unfinished house, waiting for him and his young bride. On the other hand, a Bloomsbury boarding house straight out of E F Benson or Patrick Hamiliton is inhabited by retired Indian army colonels and shabby-genteel widows.

On a trip down the river on a police launch, time slips away in the dark and Morton sees London looking much as it always has done. This is an experience certainly not available to us today. What would Morton make of the view now?

The penultimate piece is slightly longer and was not previously published. Morton goes to stay in a candle-lit room at The George in Southwark, the coaching inn even then regarded as a miraculous survival from Victorian London. Even more miraculous is that it is still there today, now looked after by the National Trust.

His nocturnal wanderings end with a beautiful evocation of early morning over London: “The feeling of other worldliness has vanished with the dawn light”.

“London in the dawn is a clean, unwritten page”, Morton tells us. What will the new day bring for the millions of Londoners?