dovegreyreader scribbles

On W.G.Sebald

2009-11-09T00:15:00+00:00

Once I'd read Rings of Saturn I bought all of W.G.Sebald's books. I then read Austerlitz and The Emigrants and still have Campo Santo and Vertigo left unread, saved as you do (well as I do) when I discover a writer and know that what I have is all there is.
But On the Natural History of Destruction has always felt like a challenge too far, especially if read out of context and it has been down to Mathilde Wolff - Monckeberg to offer me that context with her book, On the Other Side : Letters to My Children from Germany 1940-1946.
To be honest, it would have been much easier to avoid both of these and just stick to books about evacuated children in Cornwall (which I've loved too), somehow skirt around and evade the whole tragedy or else read it slant, but there is something extraordinarily compelling about Mathilde's letters and I felt I owed it to her courage to explore further.
Born in the Allgau Alps in May 1944, W.G.Sebald argues that he inherited a silence, a sense of a collective amnesia, an aura of something forbidden, a war that wasn't talked about and in particular a series of events which he examines in the first of four essays contained in this slim but incredibly hard-hitting volume.
One of the most controversial campaigns of the Second World War was the carpet bombing and destruction of many German cities by the RAF in the latter years of the war. The figures advanced by Sebald, even if guesstimates, are staggering; a million tons of bombs dropped, 131 towns and cities attacked, 600,000 German civilians 'fell victim' as Sebald puts it, 42.8 cubic metres of rubble for every inhabitant of Dresden.
Mathilde Wolff - Monckeberg wrote letters to her children from Hamburg, a city decimated in air raids during a long heat wave in July 1943.
The details of those raids are out there for anyone to read up on and Christopher Beauman in his excellent afterword to On the Other Side suggests three outstanding volumes which address the history and the morality of the strategy. I don't want to be drawn into the whys and wherefores because I think everyone has to reach their own personal understanding of it all.
Sebald proceeds to explore and prosecute his case with no small degree of disbelief verging on disdain in an attempt to identify exactly why so little of this punishing devastation had found its way into post-war German literature. Sensing feelings of a shared guilt, few writers seem to have fulfilled what Sebald sees as the writer's task,

'to keep the nation's collective memory alive.'

Sebald's inherited silence is one also identified in reality by Janet Flanner, wartime writer for the New Yorker, and visiting Cologne after the bombing. Janet Flanner observed and reported first-hand the death throes of a once glorious city which now

'lay by its riverbanks...recumbent, without beauty, shapeless in the rubble of loneliness of complete physical defeat. Through its clogged streets trickles what is left of its life, a dwindled population in black and with bundles - the silent German people appropriate to the silent city.'

I'm very much a two-sides-of-the-story person and plenty in W.G.Sebald's book troubled me. Being aware of the storm of controversy On the Natural History of Destruction had stirred up on publication, I turned to The Emergence of Memory - Conversations with W.G.Sebald to explore this further.
I needed some balance to Sebald's anxieties because something within me was uncomfortable with his insistence, his expectation, that those who had lived through this devastation somehow had a duty to find the words to describe it, as Ruth Franklin suggests in this book, the need

'To resurrect a memory he never experienced.'

Surely this is about saying the unsayable and Ruth Franklin quotes German writer Dieter Forte's response to On the Natural History of Destruction which seems to confirm that,

'there is horror that exists beyond language...He overlooks my generation, the generation of the children in the big cities, who can remember, when they are able, when they can find words for it - and for that one must wait an entire lifetime.'

In three further essays Sebald examines the work of three German writers and it quickly becomes apparent which of them merits his respect and which his barely disguised disgust.
On the Natural History of Destruction has been one of those astonishingly powerful reads for where it has led my thinking, and though I know it might seem mystifying... a bit like taking myself off and rolling in barbed wire for fun...somehow I don't want to shy away from the more challenging reads.
This, another quote found at the Imperial War Museum, seemed to encompass all my thoughts about this book and Mathilde's, more of which soon,

'I pray on you to believe what I have said.
I reported what I saw and heard, but only part of it.
For most of it I have no words.'

Ed Murrow Buchenwald 1945

Remembrance...

2009-11-08T00:15:00+00:00

'They buried him among the kings because he had done good toward God and toward his house'

I shall do a further Remembrance post on Wednesday but I recently looked into the history of the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior thanks to Richard Jenkyns' book Westminster Abbey published by Profile. This one of course made me realise that I haven't been to Westminster Abbey in years either, but how interesting to note that whilst you may walk around the Abbey and tread on the memorials of who knows who underfoot, no one steps on the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior. It's in a central entry spot too, blocking the path to the West door, but all processions, no matter how regal or solemn, must walk around it.
As Richard Jenkyns points out,

'the pain of war properly interrupts the smoothness of pageantry. And the commonplace lettering is humanising in its ordinariness, the sort of thing you might find on the grave of your own loved one.'

Imitated across the world but never quite with the significance that is created by burying 'everyman among the mighty', the body of the unknown soldier killed in the Great War was laid in the nave on November 11th 1920 and I had no idea that the grave was then filled with a hundred bags of soil brought from the battlefield. In the ensuing week that the grave was kept open, one and a quarter million people filed past it, how many must have hoped and imagined that it was their missing loved one lying there?

Inner Child - November

2009-11-07T00:15:00+00:00

What day is it?
Where am I?
Amazing how a trip to London throws the usual weekly routine and more disruption next week with a work-related excursion to Oxford...it's always cold in Oxford, or perhaps that's because I always seem to go at this time of year.
But lest we forget, it's Inner Child weekend.
Now, I have to own up that last month's choice The Silver Blade, in fact the entire French Revolution has gone on hold. Wouldn't they just have given their last sou to do that back in 1789, but needs must I wanted to steal a march on the November reading so I'll be back with the guillotine soon.
But whilst I was in London I had a few hours twixt this

and that and off I went here.

The Imperial War Museum in Lambeth, nicely on the Bakerloo line so I could stay until closing time and then just whizz up to Paddington and the train home.
But what a very amazing place The Imperial War Museum is, and can I now confess my ignorance?
I had heard of 15" guns but had never really given it much thought, beyond them perhaps being something just over a foot long.
Wrong.

So this is the old Bedlam mental hospital transformed, but if you've ever worked in an old hospital building, those echoes remain in the corridors, the wide staircases, the windows even the smell and what on earth would they have made of it now.
Walking into that entrance and then to be met by this aerial display is quite breathtaking.

I did at least think I knew this was a Spitfire and that has been confirmed by Bookhound who certainly knew his Airfix kits.
I moved on around the exhibitions and headed straight to The Children's War.

"Cast of part of a bronze sculpture commemorating more than 4,000 people of Liverpool and Bootle who lost their lives during air raids from 1940-1942. The youngest victim was a day old and the oldest over 90. The sculpture was made by Tom Murphy and was unveiled at Liverpool Parish Church, Our Lady and St Nicholas, in July 2000." Lent by Tom Murphy

A child's eye view of the Second World War and this beautifully evocative bronze is the first thing you see as you walk in, somehow it set the tone perfectly for what followed, more of which when I've had a chance to think about the exhibition, it was all very moving.
I have been looking at that child's eye view through this year's November reading but some of the books had proved just more than I could manage. Inevitably traumatic and tragic, just too painful to read this time round, so I quietly closed The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (thank you for it Margaret, there will be a right time) and Morris Gleitzman's Once & Then and settled on a few children's books.

Robert Westall's Blitzcat and The Machine Gunners and A Candle in the Dark by Adele Geras and Judith Kerr's When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit, some old favourites, some new reads.
Currently The Machine Gunners is winning my heart for Nan's dire warnings about Hilter [sic] and the Jarmans.

The Professor's House by Willa Cather

2009-11-06T00:15:00+00:00

I'm so delighted that The Reader magazine in cahouts with Oxford University Press made me read My Antonia (Anto-nee-a...have I got that right?) last month because it's started something that I know won't stop now.
I had promised myself that foray into US women writers with Elaine Showalter's book A Jury of Her Peers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx glowing bright orange at me from the little shelf on my desk and now I've got...well at this point I was about to do my usual medical thing and 'itis' it, but Catheritis sounds a bit too uncomfortably like a real condition for my liking so suffice to say I'm hooked.
Thanks to Virago I have a pile of Willa's books ready and waiting and it was just a case of which to pick up next, so I decided to let Elaine Showalter do the choosing,

' In her greatest novel, The Professor's House...'

That was easy, The Professor's House it was, except I have a feeling each successive Willa Cather novel I read might become my favourite, until the next one that is.
Professor Godfrey St Peter must be the fairest man in all of Christendom, often 'amiable but quiet' according to Willa Cather and displaying not only the patience of a saint with the demands of his family but also taking the time and effort to be a fair and non-judgemental listener to many others. Having been there for all and sundry, the Professor approaches his own mid-life crisis with few people there ready and willing to listen to him. Wife Lillian, preoccupied with the family, somehow knows him too well to be objective and young Tom Outland, who would doubtless have been his close confidante has tragically died on the battlefields of Flanders.It is Tom's legacy to the family that is causing so much heartache and conflict.
Tom's vacuum gas invention, patented and willed to his fiancee - the Professor's elder daughter, has now become a veritable mint of money, providing luxurious living and an enviable standard of life for Rosamund. With the funeral baked meats hardly cooled Rosamund announces her engagement to the enthusiastic but rather insensitive Louie Marsellus,

, 'a mackerel-tinted man' ...

and yet again, how wonderfully Willa Cather conjures up the imagery with such small detail. Louie busies himself with the money and commissions the building of a country house in the Norwegian manorial style with all the finest trimmings,

'We got our wonderful wrought iron door fittings from Chicago...none of your colonial glass knobs for us.'

Meanwhile younger sister Kathleen, with veiled hints of a love of her own for Tom, has to make do with a bungalow just 'glass-knobbed throughout' and the lesser Scott McGregor,

'Scott had a usual sort of mind, and Kitty had flashes of something quite different. Her father had thought a more interesting man would make her happier.'

The Professor, a lover of the familiar and the comfortable, introspective, astute and perceptive, a man who is, according to A.S.Byatt's introduction,

'both intensely drawn to civilized family life, and intensely drawn to fierce solitary contemplation'

is further disturbed by a new house of his own, having been dubiously blessed with the financial success of a vast academic work now in print. But his life is happy where it is, the change feels too great and he decides to sit out the summer recess in the study of his old house.

'The world was sad to St Peter as he looked about him; the lake-shore country flat and heavy, Hamilton small, tight and airless. The university, his new house, his old house, everything around him seemed insupportable, as the boat on which he is imprisoned seems to a sea-sick man.'

and his mid-life crisis ensues.
Tom Outland's story of adventure and his discovery of an ancient cliff-side civilization on the Blue Mesa of New Mexico breaks into the book halfway through providing some respite from the Professor's reflections on his life, as well as offering a bridge between the material and the primitive worlds. A return to the professor's house is inevitable before the end of the novel, and I was holding my breath for good outcomes.
Willa Cather creates differing landscapes both of place and of the mind in The Professor's House and I was willingly drawn into them all but most especially the cliff-side civilization. A picture had fixed firmly in my mind which I just couldn't shift, of an old card I knew I had somewhere.

Found eventually, long after I had finished the book.
So long afterwards that I could quite easily have forgotten but you don't forget Willa Cather in a hurry and as I've sat to write my thoughts on the book that atmosphere rushes back into my mind. My apologies, I have no idea of artist or source (hopefully someone will know) and though I feel sure this is grander in scale and more utopian and classic in design to Tom's discovery on the Blue Mesa, somehow Willa Cather's descriptions still fitted my memory of it perfectly,

'Far above me...I saw a little city of stone, asleep. It was a still as sculpture..it all hung together, seemed to have a kind of composition: pale little houses nestling close to one another, perched on top of each other, with flat roofs, narrow windows, straight walls, and in the middle of the group, a round tower.'

So much more that I could say about this book but hopefully that's sufficient to tell you it's been another of my favourite reads of the year...sorry did I say that about My Antonia too...and... and

Today I will be...

2009-11-05T00:15:00+00:00

here...

recording something for BBC Radio 4 for an edition of Off the Page with Dominic Arkwright, and then doing an interview for The Bookseller, more of which when it's all in the can, as they say.
There's many a slip twixt Devon and London so let's hope

The alarm goes off at 5am
We get to Exeter station in time
The train appears and works...all the way to London
I have time to go to Daunt's Bookshop first
I don't start getting palpitations when I walk into the building
The presenter doesn't seem to be speaking in Swahili
My tickly cough doesn't happen...it will, I know it will.
I've remembered to take the 400 words that I have to read out with me
My mind doesn't go blank
I understand the questions
I can think of answers
I see someone famous so I can crow to Rhys (we have an ongoing competition and I have to top his David Beckham sighting)
I have time to go in another bookshop
I have time to see an exhibition
I get back to Paddington in time for my train home
Bookhound is back and waiting at Exeter station at the end of the day

High Wages by Dorothy Whipple

2009-11-04T00:15:00+00:00

'But there was a point below which Carmen and her colleagues would not go: they referred to this as 'the Whipple line', after Dorothy Whipple, a writer of popular fiction in the Thirties and Forties.'

A quote from Carmen Calill in 'that' 2008 Guardian interview with Rachel Cooke, discussing the history behind Virago books and a quote which we should probably address before embarking on any thought-sharing here about High Wages, the latest Dorothy Whipple book to be republished by Persephone Books and with an excellent introduction by Jane Brocket...except to tell you there's a wonderful tea over at Cornflower to day too.
Oh yes and this book has a lovely Crysede fabric print on the endpapers of which there is a fine display in the Penlee Museum in Penzance because much of it was hand-blocked in Cornwall in the 1930s.

Carmen Callil's mother had read all of Dorothy Richardson's books, I think in contrast my mum might have read all of Dorothy Whipple's and how I wish she was alive now for me to ask her, but I suspect these were the books for the likes of my mum.
Thirteen, and from a working class family living in Liverpool 8, the Dingle, when the Second World War broke out. My grandmother had been in service, my grandfather worked on the docks where he was tragically killed in 1949 and I love this picture of them.
My mum Vera had been evacuated to Chester but was brought back to Liverpool by her father at the height of the bombing because he had been sent to fetch her by my grandmother. Vera was far too happy in her home in Chester, was adored by a childless couple and had settled into a lovely school, she might never want to come back, my grandmother couldn't bear it. Just like the plot of another Persephone book, Doreen by Barbara Noble.
So for me, to read a Dorothy Whipple is to feel a connection with my mum and the world she grew up in, the difficulties she faced with an education interrupted by the war, and I wouldn't have been any the wiser but for these reissues.
There is something comforting about sneaking off for an afternoon read with a pot of a tea and a Dorothy Whipple but for all that I read so widely, why am I never disappointed by Dorothy?
Jane Carter is Lancashire born and bred (as was Dorothy Whipple), a shop assistant in that twilight world of the drapers' shops those little emporiums that existed before the arrival of ready-mades. The window displays designed to seduce those with money through the doors, and here you bought your fabric and had your dress made-to-measure, there was haberdashery from which to choose your trimmings and it would be 'a fine thing' if Jane could work in Chadwick's in Tidsley, a step up from Commins' drapers in nearby, and considerably inferior, Elton.
Employment for women remained severely limited in the 1920s and 1930s, it was housemaids or shop work, perhaps some menial office work but not a lot in between and little thought given that women might have ambitions for anything more fulfilling.
Spotting the advert in Chadwicks' window, Jane dons her gloves 'dazzlingly white, fluffy enormous' and proceeds to try and pick the white fluffy bits off her black coat (a hopeless task) before going in to ask about 'the place.'
Jane is successful and ten days later moves in, as was customary, to share the shop-worker's accommodation above the store.
This is the world of fabric unfurled across the counter, the thud of the bolt as it unrolls and if you enjoyed Emile Zola's The Ladies' Paradise, here's another utterly worthy 'shop' novel to add to the shelf. Moleskin shoulder capes and underwear called 'neathies', bolts of flannelette, crepe duchine, gaberdine, alpaca, foulard and eolian all vie for madam's attention, most noticeably Mrs Greenwood who has married into the lucrative mill business and is always accompanied by her spoiled-rotten daughter Sylvia.
I quite thought fascinators were a 21st century invention, how wrong I was, but I do wonder quite what this one looked like,

'Jane went out to find Mrs Chadwick's head draped in a woollen fascinator, with blue and white bobs around the face.'

The social hierarchy that Dorothy Whipple always exposes so well is clearly evident, there's an inter-war years' pecking order to be observed amongst the women of Tidsley and when Mrs Briggs, married to the other partner in the Greenwood mill empire, confesses to Jane that she feels out of her depth in those remote and chilly social waters, a friendship develops that will most certainly do no harm to Jane's career development.
There's plenty of town romance going on and themes of class, fashion, change and resistance to it prevail, and all beautifully crafted by Dorothy Whipple's pen, this was a world she knew and it's a little bit of a world that I knew too.
My mum was a great needlewoman and I still have her school needlework book from 1939, complete with a few working samples. She was taught the meticulous approach and she never lost it, we tacked to within an inch of there being no point in sewing the thing together, but it always fitted first time.
My eyes were forever peeking over the top of the counter in Allders or Kennards in Croydon as yards of fabric were rolled out and the Butterick paper pattern consulted. Then we'd match up the cotton and it would be home to the pinning and the cutting out and then out came the Singer treadle sewing machine and we were away. Tacking and darts, tucks, gathers and pleats and eventually a frock.
So jolting myself out of that bout of nostalgic reverie I think it's quite easy to see why I enjoyed High Wages so much and why I'll always happily traverse that Whipple line and read her, though just one very minor worry.
When love interest Wilfred loses an arm in the war and comes back with his sleeve flapping and all much to Jane's distress, I was a bit bemused to find him some time later leaning on his elbows (plural) on a gate...Bookhound says not to be so pernickety, he'd probably only lost a hand really, but no matter, it's a lovely book and don't miss a lovely tea over at Cornflower's today, you've earned a treat if you've read this far.

To Trollope or not to Trollope?

2009-11-03T00:15:00+00:00

Do you ever ask yourself this because 'To Trollope or not to Trollope' is a question I often ask myself and I wonder if others see Trollope as I do?
Susan Hill has not one but two of the great man's novels in her list of 40 books so I don't think she'd know about this at all.
For some inexplicable reason a read of an Anthony Trollope novel rarely seems to come to fruition unless I'm in search of a long seasonal read and want to set aside all else and dive into one book over a long holiday week.
Then somehow I seem to talk myself right out of it again and remain un-Trolloped until the next time.
I don't quite know what the problem is, perhaps I've come to it all too late in life. I've dabbled in the first three Barsetshires and done a bit of Pallisering in recent years, but sadly my heart doesn't do that little leap of joy at the sight or thought of a Trollope.
So when a big fat package arrived from The Reader magazine containing my next surprise classic read for their Readers Connect page, (last time My Antonia by Willa Cather) I spent a fair bit of time wondering if I was in for a Dickens or a Dostoevsky when to my surprise out fell a Trollope...I won't reveal which one, but to my un-Trolloped mind it's less well-known. I can always be won over by a new volume of anything if I'm honest, who can dislike the arrival of a brand new book with an invitation to read it, rate it and comment accordingly. So despite the book's deceptive weight (hefty) I was pleasantly surprised on turning to the final page to discover it was a mere 400 or so pages long...how odd that it felt so much heavier than that.
So I was quite relieved for about two minutes or so as I flicked through, except hold on what's this, halfway through another p400 quickly followed by another p1?
Yes I'd been duped, it's that Trollopian classic, a book of two halves, 800 + pages and eek, I gulped.
All was not lost because has anyone else been listening to Radio 4's Open Book and the Neglected Classics?
Well-known writers have set off for the hustings, climbing onto their literary soapboxes to try and convince us why their choice of a Neglected Classic should win our vote. The result will be announced on November 7th, so still time to choose your favourite.
I caught it on one of my Completer-Finisher afternoons and JoanneTrollope waved the family flag and advanced good, solid reasons for reading a lesser known Trollope novel, Miss Mackenzie (not the one I've been sent) and she sold it, and Anthony, to me most persuasively, hook, line etc. Duty-bound to read her illustrious ancestor as a child, Joanna Trollope cited this as one of the treat novels after a wade through some of the mightier tomes. The gold-diggers arriving to court Miss Mackenzie, the on-the-shelf spinster who suddenly finds herself in possession of wealth and in unaccustomed demand; a novel that Joanna Trollope argued would be eminently well-suited to the serialisation which will be the final accolade for the winner of the public vote.
The suggestions have been varied and unusual but bless Michael Morpurgo for his choice, a favourite here too, The Snow Goose by Paul Gallico. Radio mention of each seems to have sent sales whizzing up the Amazon charts, I know those sales figures can be deceptive but Miss Mackenzie can't have been anywhere near the 485 it seems to be as I write this, with Susan Hill's choice The Rector's Daughter by F.M.Mayor, likewise now hovering at 294 and Colm Toibin's selection, Esther Waters by George Moore at 963. I feel sure they would all have been languishing down in the six figure doldrums for years until now.
So I felt comforted, and thanks to Joanna, Trollopely re-energised and once I emerge from this year's Remembrance reading and get back into the groove I shall pick up...no, can't tell you what it is, with the same enthusiasm I always have for this little collaboration with The Reader magazine, and we'll see what happens next.