Rose Tremain – Rosie

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Autobiography, Book Review, Rose Tremain, Rosie

Goodbye Rosie, Hello Rose

I am a huge fan of Rose Tremain. She is an author who always writes and observes beautifully, but does not have just one book within her, regurgitated in different ways. She constantly surprises.

So I was interested to read what looked like a remarkably slim autobiography, Rosie : Scenes From A Vanished Life

That ‘vanished life’ is Rosie herself, as she claimed her true identity as Rose

This is beautifully written, but curiously distanced, distancing.

Born into a rather privileged background, at least in terms of status and finance – her stepfather was after all a ‘Sir’ and her real father’s cousin, her childhood was nonetheless curiously lacking in parental attention, encouragement and warm regard. In fact, her mother, referred to as ‘Jane’ by Tremain, and not by any maternal appellation, had lacked love and affection herself as a child, and had also been called by a name she disliked, rechristening herself as Jane.

Rosie’s First Birthday

Children – and the adults they become, sustain damage from absent affection, they don’t have to be actively ill-treated to bear wounds.

I found myself wondering about the kind of distance with which Rose writes about herself. This isn’t a ‘misery memoir’ but it does have a kind of lack of warmth in it. I found this unsettling because she is a writer whose characters are warmly and fully regarded by her. The reader of a Tremain novel is drawn into feeling that they really know her complex and beautifully rounded characters. Yet, the sense here is that Tremain did not really want the reader to know Rosie. Somehow, the child and the young girl sent off to be ‘finished’ in Switzerland, rather than pursue the academic route she wanted are seen through a screen. Which is a curious place to be writing some kind of autobiography from

Rosie, her loving and beloved Nannie Nan, and her sister Jo

This is rather like picking up a collection of faded snapshots, which have intriguing titles, but they are incomplete, part of a larger collection, which probably were mounted in sequence in an album, and told a larger story, but this is missing.

This is probably one which will be most interesting to those who love and know her writing. As she is at pains to point out, she is not an ‘autobiographical’ novelist per se, but certainly small events make their way into the novels and stories, and she references these.

There was one recounted incident where Rose drew me close to Rosie, and I felt great grief for her. Her inspired music teacher at the boarding school she was sent away to, arranged for a concert to be given by her pupils. A prestigious one, at the Royal Festival Hall. Though open to the public, the majority of the most expensive seats would be bought by proud families. Who would then take their children out for a congratulatory tea. Except Rosie’s mother and stepfather did not come. She wrote to her real father (who had abandoned his family for a liaison with another woman) He was a writer, and also a keen pianist himself. Though he did come, he left at the interval, after Rosie had played, and did not come back to take his daughter for tea

In conclusion, I liked this very much indeed, but remain slightly confused as to the purpose of its writing. There is half the sense of a catharsis (perhaps) for the writer – except that the feeling I was left with was an unresolved, and even covert anger and resentment (completely understandable) still within the child inside the woman.

Here is a wonderful excerpt, a moment of epiphany, an ‘aha’ moment, where the idea of writing, as something profound and meaningful, hit the thirteen year old

The perfume of the day, the heat of my body after the tennis game, the sky the colour of coral, the silence surrounding me – all combined to fill me, suddenly, with a profound feeling of wonder, a fleeting sense of the marvellous, which, in its intensity, was almost a visionary experience.

I told myself that if I continued standing still, this moment would last and might even change me in some way that I couldn’t quite foresee. But I stood there so long that the sun almost disappeared and the field became full of shadows. And with the dusk came a feeling of desolation. The desolation was simply a mundane recognition of the fleeting nature of everything, which even teenagers (or perhaps especially teenagers) understand. A moment of happiness as intense as this slips quickly away with the turning of the earth. So I asked myself, there in the hayfield, with the swear of the tennis game drying down my back and making me shiver: was there any way in which the experiences of my life, like this one, could be captured and locked away, not just in capricious, gradually fading memory, but in some more concrete form

Rosie UK
Rosie USA

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Michael Blakemore – Arguments with England

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Arguments with England, Autobiography, Book Review, Michael Blakemore, Theatre

The play’s the thing…………and how!

I was enthralled by the 2013 Stage Blood, Blakemore’s account of the early days of the National Theatre in its new South Bank home, and the last days of the company at the Old Vic, under, first of all, Sir Laurence Olivier as the Artistic Director, and then, Peter Hall’s first few years of tenure. Blakemore had been invited to join as an Associate director by Olivier, whom he much admired, and had interesting things to say about Hall. As in, ‘may you live in interesting (conflicting/disputatious) times’ He had some prior history with Hall, and resigned (as did some others) not liking the direction Hall was taking.

This book, published some 9 years earlier (2004) is amongst other things, a far more obviously autobiographical book than Stage Blood, though of course Blakemore’s experience of those 5 years at the National, is nonetheless an individual’s account, it is still focused on the history of an organisation in which the author was deeply involved

Arguments with England is Michael Blakemore’s sense of himself, and his personal history which has been lived as an Australian who came to this country to follow a path in theatre, drawn here by the experience of seeing that tradition of classical theatre in Australia, as exemplified by tours from ‘the mother country’ with some towering figures at their helm. Of which one was Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh, on tour with the Old Vic Theatre Company.

Blakemore, arriving in the UK in 1950, though always desirous of directing, started as an actor, auditioning and being accepted at RADA and then following the life of a jobbing, but steadily more successful middle range actor. This book charts that life, and his long start and stop writing of his novel, Next Season. I was fascinated (despite his later disclaimer that he had amalgamated characters and incidents and no specific individual was portrayed) to so clearly be able to identify characters from that novel, in this autobiographical account

There is quite a lot of information about various affairs Blakemore had, plus personal stuff which really belongs to others. I always feel a little uneasy with these revelations – only because I wonder how those various partners might feel about their histories being revealed. I can only hope permission was given. Reading this book, I found myself full of – I’m not sure if I want to write admiration or compassion for his wife, who seems to be a woman of extraordinary – tolerance, or long-standing broadmindedness. Or, perhaps laid unfairly low by her loving heart. The marriage was/is an ‘open’ one, but as often, it seems this means males wanting freedom to roam, and women being dangled. Blakemore expressed, often in this book that he had had no intention of leaving his marriage, and I also felt compassion for the woman with whom he had a long standing affair.

Be that as it is, I hurry along to praise the fascinating writing about the process of acting itself, the details of performances Blakemore saw, with actors he admired hugely, accounts of his own discoveries, anguishes and successes with rehearsals and performance and also the wonderful view of England and English society and culture which is revealed by an outsider’s eye. It always fascinates me, how someone from another culture views ours (and how we view theirs)

If the industrial wasteland I was passing through on my way to Huddersfield spoke of the selective blindness of those fortunate enough to live elsewhere, it also said something about the perverse social obedience of the thousands dumped in the middle of it. Similarly the fondness for secrecy among those who governed….could only be indulged by a constituency happy not to know. I could see that the class system, the acceptance of which was so incomprehensible to an outsider, was shored up most crucially by its victims, a population obsessed with deference…..By the mid-sixties England would be a country in which I felt lucky to have found refuge. By the mid-eighties, as the old heartlessness found new ways to assert itself, I would be less sure

Blakemore had (and has) absolute passion and intelligence for theatre, and whether he is writing about the experience of the audience, exploring acting itself, or directing, or writing for theatre, and the collaborations between director, writer, actors, designers and the technical side of bringing vision to reality, this is an utterly fascinating account.

Up till now I had relied as an actor on my small store of sophistication and assurance, and had got nowhere. Only now, when I was making use of the most vulnerable and naked aspects of myself had I come up with something of real interest….I began to see that notwithstanding its occasional triumphs, its conspicuously public success, there was at the heart of an actor’s life an aspect of public confession, something perplexed and even grieving

It is also, at times, laugh out loud funny. Blakemore is a sharp and funny writer, never more so than when pricking his own balloon
Arguments with England UK
Arguments with England USA

Jeanette Winterson – Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal

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Autobiography, Book Review, Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal

More than an autobiography

It was by some chance or other that I stumbled on Winterson’s Gut Symmetries a month or so ago. She is a marvellous writer – feisty, witty, ferociously intelligent, weaving words, character and narrative like a dream. She reminds me of a Catherine Wheel, spinning out in all directions, but the central core and drive holds everything together

Very quickly after Gut Symmetries I got her autobiography. The complex and challenging events of her early life had formed the first novel, Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit (on my TBR). Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal, something her mother said to Winterson will probably contain some material which surfaced in Oranges, I guess shaped slightly differently for fiction.

Winterson’s deeply unpromising beginnings, an early life deprived of the kind of warmth and nourishment of parental regard and validation of the small child which ought to be a given, reminds me in many ways of the equally, but differently, dysfunctional start of another fine writer of similar vintage – Janice Galloway. Galloway was born in 1955 in Saltcoats, Winterson in 1959 in Manchester. Both were treated unlovingly, were girls and women of extraordinary intelligence, for whom reading, and then writing, became escape, vocation and expression of their unique visions. Both writers rather fought, against the odds, for their own education, without parental encouragement, and both have written autobiographies which, whilst recounting horrible experiences are a million miles away from misery memoirs.There are some parallels between this book and Galloway’s The Trick Is To Keep Breathing in terms of quality, fierce intelligence, authenticity and fabulous expression.

Winterson was adopted by a couple who seemed, particularly the mother, to be hugely dysfunctional. They were Pentecostal Evangelical Christians. Mrs Winterson – and this is how Jeanette refers to her in the book, rarely as ‘my mother’ or ‘mum’ clearly had all sorts of problems – with sex, – she refused her husband conjugal rights – and with an obsessive need to control the lives of all around her. Particularly husband and daughter. Winterson describes her :

She was a big woman, tallish and weighing around twenty stone. Surgical stockings, flat sandals, a Crimplene dress and a nylon headscarf. She would have done her face powder (keep yourself nice), but not lipstick (fast and loose)

Little Jeanette experienced not just lack of warmth and neglect, but also cruelty. She would be locked out of the house, as a child, for minor misdemeanours. Her adoptive father was a shift worker, so if he was on a night shift, she might be locked out all night. Jeanette’s father did not stand up to his wife

Inside our house the light is on. Dad’s on the night shift, so she can go to bed, but she won’t sleep. She’ll read the Bible all night, and when Dad comes home, he’ll let me in, and he’ll say nothing, and she’ll say nothing, and we’’ll act like it’s normal to leave your kind outside all night, and normal never to sleep with your husband. And normal to have two sets of false teeth and a revolver in the duster drawer…..

Young Jeanette’s life was a story of adults who lived in evasion and denial, and where systemic attempts were made to break and negate her. But, she discovered the reality of reading, and the opening of other lives, and discovered also that she could write. Jeanette Winterson is painfully, savagely honest about her own mental, emotional, behavioural challenges – how could she not have been damaged by the childhood she had – but she is a writer who observes and analyses

When we tell a story we exercise control, but in such a way as to leave a gap, an opening. It is a version, but never the final one. And perhaps we hope that the silences will be heard by someone else, and the story can continue, can be retold.

When we write we offer the silence as much as the story. Words are the part of silence that can be spoken

I love the space that is made for the reader, in the above extract

I highlighted line after line and paragraph after paragraph in Winterson’s book – things which made me chuckle, things which made me cry, things which gave much pause for thought – there is a lot of honesty, a lot of reflection, rage, forgiveness, excitement, compassion, forgiveness. And an extraordinary story, which is a true one, albeit one told by a writer, who therefore knows how to leave out the boring bits, and keep the reader on their toes by throwing curve balls :

The one good thing about being shut in a coal-hole is that it prompts reflection.

Read on its own that is an absurd sentence. But as I try and understand how life works – and why some people cope better than others with adversity – I come back to something to do with saying yes to life, which is love of life, however inadequate, and love for the self, however found. Not in the me-first way that is the opposite of life and love, but with a salmon-like determination to swim upstream, however choppy upstream is, because this is your stream…

Highly recommended.

Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal Amazon UK
Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal Amazon USA

Jessica Mitford – Hons and Rebels

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Autobiography, Book Review, Hons and Rebels, Jessica Mitford, The Mitford Sisters

Class dynamics; family dynamics

Jessica Mitford’s 1960 published autobiography of a certain time in her life, which covers mainly her teens to early twenties, has been a thought provoking read.

The Mitford Sisters continue to fascinate many, for a variety of reasons.

As is probably known to most, the family, who were both influential and close to other influential people, was markedly eccentric. And the books written by the book writing sisters, primarily novelist Nancy and journalist and political activist Jessica (Decca) in different ways lift the lid on their bizarre eccentric upbringing and on the unpleasant attitudes of privileged class politics.

What particularly fascinates is the fact that 4 of the 6 daughters had beliefs or behaviours or lifestyles (or all 3) which were deeply shocking not only within their own circles, but within the wider world, and 3 of the 6 (Diana, Unity, Jessica) sought active involvement either in the politics of the times (1930s and beyond) or were close to those who were so involved. The fascination becomes most interesting because Unity developed an obsession with Hitler, and thoroughly absorbed Nazi ideology, Diana also became a fascist and married Oswald Mosley (and was thoroughly shocking to her class and parents not for that eventual marriage, but because she and her first husband, Bryan Guinness, divorced, and Diana became Mosley’s mistress – he was married to someone else). Diana was one of the 1920s hedonistic Bright Young Things. Decca by contrast, became a socialist and then a communist and deeply shocked her class by both her politics AND her personal life. She remained active in left politics all her life, not just in belief, but in action.

Unity, Tom, Deborah, Diana, Jessica, Nancy, Pamela in 1935

Meanwhile, of the remainder of the family, Mother supported her fascist daughters (but of course some of the support would have been supporting daughters, as much as supporting politics), Father was a fascist sympathiser but once war was declared supported his country. Son was a fascist but joined the war effort against Japan, rather than Germany. Anti-Semitism seems quite marked within many of the family – though anti-Semitism also seems to have been a surprising bedrock of wider society before the Second World War gave a very brutal, stark, and dreadful example of what the politics of racial hatred leads to. Novelist Nancy was ‘pink’ and left-leaning. The often forgotten, quieter sister, Pamela, the second born of the older grouping, was not actively involved in politics, and rather shunned the glare of notoriety. The youngest daughter Deborah became the Duchess of Devonshire, was actively involved in opening the family stately home, Chatsworth House, and led an apparently more serene life than any of the rest, in terms of an enduring marriage and unshocking works and causes.

Muv, Nancy, Diana, Tom, Pamela, Farve. Front Row Unity, Decca, Debo

What really fascinated me on this read has really been the family aspects. I knew the political splits, I knew the extreme politically split sister stories Jessica, Diana, Unity, but on this read, thinking about families, their tangled influences, not to mention the wider personal (rather than political) effects of conflict and loyalty within the family were what I have been left musing about.

The two sisters Decca was closest to when she was growing up were firstly the glamorous, arty, shockingly fast-set playgirl Diana, the youngest of the older group, and the weirdest, her older sister of her own, young group, Unity.

Alas for Unity, that first name seems much less prophetic than her second baptismal name of Valkyrie (honestly!) Perhaps this illustrates the importance of not saddling a child with a weighted name……………….Of course, it also occurs to me that Diana (said to be the most beautiful of the sisters) is in classical parlance also a Huntress….indeed the goddess of the chase

Both Unity and Diana were clearly farthest away from Decca in politics, yet her love for Unity is/was clear in her book, an unwavering love despite an even stronger unwavering hate for her politics. Perhaps (I can only surmise) it was the fact of Unity’s far more obviously dysfunctional ‘not fitting in’ personality which excited Decca’s empathy? Unity, as is well known, fiercely loyal to Germany and Hitler, tried to commit suicide by shooting herself in the head when the announcement that Britain is now at war with Germany was made. This was something, as the prospect of war edged closer, which Unity had been planning, the prospect of the conflict between the nations themselves perhaps echoes of divided loyalties within this Englishwoman.

It was however between Diana and Decca that a permanent rift took place. Diana of course was actively promoting fascism. She and her second husband were imprisoned during the war for their fascist activities. Unity’s failed attempt at suicide left her weakened and brain damaged, so perhaps her ‘wrong’ politics were less consciously and rationally chosen, and partly reflective of a kind of odd violence and irrationality of psychology – she had by all accounts been ‘difficult’ from childhood. Diana, by contrast, never wavered in her political allegiances, which must have seemed a far more conscious and unforgiveable choice. As clearly Decca’s choice was, as far as Diana was concerned.

Something which interested and frustrated me very much sprang out of the class and national character of the time – a kind of stiff upper lip-ism, a reserve about the expression of personal emotion.

Tragedies undoubtedly happened in Jessica’s life and a veil is drawn over the emotions of bereavement. Nancy, whose novels clearly used Mitford life, her own, and her sisters’ as their springboard, covers some of this territory, and there is a similar ‘soldiering on, this is not for sharing’ .

Esmond and Decca, in their early twenties in their cocktail bar incarnation

Decca eloped romantically in her teens with Esmond Romilly, her second cousin and Churchill’s nephew. Her husband had joined the International Brigade to fight the fascists in Spain. He had been invalided out, but later went back as a reporter. Decca had become actively interested, (and then involved) in left politics from when she was 13. Esmond was similarly involved, so the two, who did not meet till they were 18, were almost pre-destined for each other. They went to America (this was before the outbreak of war) because they were full of despair at the direction Britain appeared to be taken during Appeasement. Once Britain declared war, Esmond always intended to join up, as he did

During the period between their arriving in America (without much in the way of funds) and Esmond’s join-up the two led quite a hand to mouth existence, taking casual jobs as they could, borrowing from friends (and paying them back when funds were available) but also not slow to pass themselves off as experienced this that and the other with invented cvs. Esmond did a short weekend course in bartending, and then passed himself off as an experience bartender who had worked in one of the ancient, prestigious, glamorous London hotels

Jessica Mitford’s Desert Island Discs

The link is for Jessica’s Desert Island Discs, from 1977 She drawlingly says music doesn’t mean much to her, and the reserve over feeling, and her strong personality saying ‘don’t go there’ can clearly be heard in a kind of steeliness where Diana is mentioned.

As for the book : fascinating, well written, incisive and funny. But also reserved. You will get quite close to Mitford’s thinking; less so to her feeling

Jessica in 1942

Hons and Rebels Amazon UK
Hons and Rebels Amazon USA

Americans have the best option – a version with an introduction by Christopher Hitchens. I didn’t seem to have that as an option this side of the pond. In reverse, I’m not sure whether the BBC archived radio programme will be available outside the UK, or whether it will be one of those ‘not available in your country’ links

Jacqueline Woodson – brown girl dreaming

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Autobiography, Book Review, brown girl dreaming, Children's Book Review, Jacqueline Woodson, Poetry

Absolutely not only for the children

I discovered Jacqueline Woodson’s autobiography-through-poetry book through the excellent Jilanne Hoffmann’s blog, The Writer’s Shadow, and her review of it sent me scurrying to order the book forthwith – do go read her review as there are more quotes from brown girl dreaming, some which are particularly stunning.

Woodson is a black American, and tells her story as a ‘brown girl’ born in 1963, both as her own, individual family story and the wider story of black history from a particular time and place. She is an award winning writer for children and teens, but her reach goes way beyond being confined to appeal ‘only to children’

Jacqueline Woodson, winner of 2012 Anne V. Zarrow Award for Young Readers’ Literature: Tulsa City-County Library, Flicr photostream, commons

In many ways, I think the challenge involved in recognising that children are completely capable of understanding great and subtle complexity of meaning, but that they may not have quite the sophistication of adult vocabulary, is a brilliant discipline for a writer – it hones their craft. Some writing about complexity for adults leads to writing becoming over fussy, even designed to confuse or show off dexterity, but the really excellent writer who chooses to write for a younger audience – like Woodson – somehow keeps all the layers of meaning held within simply arresting, clear images, clear language

I had to take this clear and pared down book extremely slowly and very carefully, anxious not to miss anything.

Woodson’s words are spoken softly, but they are powerful, and her images rolled unstoppably over me, leaving me, many times, breathlessly weeping

The starting point, is a poem by Langston Hughes, the rest of the story is Woodson’s

Hold fast to dreams
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird
That cannot fly

Hold fast to dreams
For when dreams go
Life is a barren field
Frozen with snow

Born in Ohio, but raised also in South Carolina, where her mother and her father’s mother were from, she tells of an experience from the North and the South.

She reminds us that in 1963:

In Birmingham, Alabama, Martin Luther King Jr.
is planning a march on Washington, where
John F. Kennedy is president.
In Harlem, Malcolm X is standing on a soapbox
talking about a revolution

meanwhile :

In Montgomery, only seven years have passed
since Rosa Parks refused
to give up
her seat on a city bus

She recounts the confusing experience of marital break-up, from the child’s viewpoint, and the pain when families are torn apart, the conflicts when the people you love are no longer all living together – a sense that ‘home’ is forever lost because it now belongs in several different places

Our feet are beginning to belong
in two different worlds-Greenville
and New York. We don’t know how to come
home
and leave
home
behind us.

To set against the pain of loss and breakup as relationships end and the older generation who were strong and powerful become frail and the ones to be looked after, is Jacqueline’s secret excitement at beginning to master words, to discover that she is, she will be, a teller of stories

For days and days, I could only sniff the pages
hold the notebook close
listen to the sound the papers made.
Nothing in the world is like this-
a bright white page with
pale blue lines. The smell of a newly sharpened pencil
the soft hush of it
moving finally
one day
into letters

This would indeed be a wonderful book for a child, and probably an even more wonderful one for parents and children to find delight in together.

brown girl dreaming Amazon UK
brown girl dreaming Amazon UK

Helen MacDonald – H is for Hawk

Tags

Autobiography, Birds, Book Review, Books about Books, Falconry, H is for Hawk, Helen MacDonald, The Natural World

Love, death and the wild, wide world

Helen MacDonald’s aching, raw story of loss and relationship speaks so much of longing that reading it is as much about being fed, sustained by grief, as her hawk is fed by the death it has dealt. Indeed the two, love and death, are linked.

We carry the lives we’ve imagined as we carry the lives we have, and sometimes a reckoning comes of all the lives we have lost

We love because we will lose, or be lost to, that which we love. It’s the presence of death which fiercens the love. Mabel, Helen’s hawk, is of course overwhelmingly real – but that reality is thickened by all the metaphors accreting to her. The potency is the potency of what the hawk represents, in history, in literature, in imagination to us.

Wiki Commons, Photographer Steve Garvie

To me she was bright, vital, secure in her place in the world. Every tiny part of her was boiling with life, as if from a distance you could see a plume of steam around her, coiling and ascending and making everything around her slightly blurred, so she stood out in fierce, corporeal detail. The hawk was a fire that burned my hurts away, There could be no regret or mourning in her. No past or future. She lived in the present only, and that was my refuge

There are 3 major strands in this book. The first, which created or re-created all the rest, is the loss of MacDonald’s father, Alisdair MacDonald, the photojournalist, and the bottomless grief that brought a sundering of relationship, an absence.

There is a time in life when you expect the world to be always full of new things. And then comes a day when you realise that is not how it will be at all. You see that life will be a thing made of holes. Absences. Losses. Things that were there and are no longer. And you realise, too, that you have to grow around and between the gaps, though you can put your hand out to where things were and feel that tense, shining dullness of the space where the memories are

As a child, MacDonald had been obsessed, possessed by falcons, birds of prey, and then, specifically, the goshawk. So the second strand is the making of relationship. She returns to everything that initial possession was about, and engages on building a relationship with a goshawk. Which she discovers can only be done by negating herself, becoming an absence, as, initially, in any way, the presence of human is too harsh for the incredibly highly charged, responsive, awareness of a terrified hawk. Human space can only become tolerable to hawk by the patience to not intrude

And, finally, she examines another writer T.H. White. White was also a passionate hawker. He was a man painfully within his challenging contradictions. Like the goshawk, one with a charged, reactive nervous system. White had recorded his own story of relationship with goshawk, The Goshawk. I hope that the success of MacDonald’s book encourages the re-publishing of White’s, as I’m now anxious to read it.

Much of White’s account (there are plenty of extracts in MacDonald’s book) is dark, anguished, irrational. And much of MacDonald’s book is also outside the rational – there are many accounts of her vivid dreams, the boiling of raging emotions, the unendurable overwhelm of feeling. But this is part of the power of this book. We are not creatures of reason alone, reason the visible tip of a fiery iceberg beneath.

MacDonald’s book was another one of those which I read with a sense of some deep value I can’t articulate – through a mist of weeping. The value is that of having, often, no idea at all of the why of that weeping. All I can say is that, for me, weeping without any obvious, recognisable emotion behind the weeping is a way in which my body seems to respond to something being named from a place of authenticity. Reason says ‘I don’t understand’ but, on some deep level, the fabric of my being responded

In my time with Mabel I’ve learned how you feel more human once you have known, even in your imagination, what it is like to be not. And I have learned, too, the danger that comes in mistaking the wildness we give a thing for the wildness that animates it.

A book this raw and personal somehow calls forth the raw and personal response from the reader. I would have liked to have read it slowly and savouringly, and maybe this is what I’ll be able to do, at some point, on a re-read, as I know the writing is very fine, and the information, about hawks, landscapes, T.H. White, and more, of interest. But I was not able to read it like that. Instead, a savage gulping down of chunks of it, thrown this way and that by feeling and sensation. Longing, I suppose. That desire to experience the world through the sinews of some other than human understanding.

H is for Hawk Amazon UK
H is for Hawk Amazon USA

Margaret Forster – My Life In Houses

Tags

Autobiography, Book Review, Margaret Forster, My Life In Houses

A fine sense of place indeed

Margaret Forster has always been a writer of precision about ordinary lives, creating very particular, sharply observed people in particular times and places who, because they are so specifically detailed, can stand for universals also.

Here, she writes her own autobiography, in many ways, but through the lens of her own precise fascination with the nuts and bolts of the material world we live in. Specifically, in this case the nuts and bolts being the houses we live in, the houses which shape, define, stand for and hold our lives in place and time.

The book (which I was very happy to receive as an advance review copy from the publishers) starts with a quote from D.H. Lawrence which outlines the premise:

The house determines the day-to-day, minute-to-minute quality, colour , atmosphere, pace of one’s life; it is the framework of what one does, of what one can do, of one’s relations with people………….looking back on my life, I tend to see it divided into sections which are determined by the houses in which I have lived, not by school, university, work, marriage, death, division, or war.

Forster is very particular and precise about the houses she has lived in, starting from modest origins in the late 1930’s on a council estate in Carlisle, and progressing through lodgings in Oxford, as a student, to renting with her husband Hunter Davies in the Vale of Health, and then, as they both became successful writers, buying their first house (where they have lived for over 50 years) in Kentish Town, and also including a couple of residences in Malta and Portugal, where they decamped with their young family, and then later in a weekend cottage in Caldbeck, and finally once their children had grown, to live for 6 months of the year in isolation in the Lake District and then back to Kentish Town for the autumn and winter

Forster and Davies some years ago in front of their Loweswater Home

Along the way in this fascinating book Forster examines not only her own particular life by reference to the houses she lives in, but changing social mores, trends in the mobility of neighbourhoods, communities and social classes, and the way in which place becomes a repository of a life, rich through the memories accrued in connection with that place.

For example, it was fascinating to read that even so recently as the early 30s, when the social housing estate where she would be born some years later, was being built, in order to ‘clear the slums’ of Caldewgate, Carlisle, budgeting considerations made decisions which a modern reader finds appallingly mean-minded. Very few of the Caldewgate dwellings had an internal water supply, and none had their own lavatory. The new houses built on the Raffles estate, by contrast would have not only their own water supply, but even a bathroom, which contained a bath – but no sink, and more pertinently, no toilet. Cost savings created the decision to give each dwelling its own lavatory – but made this an outhouse.

Jumping much further forward to when Forster and Davies buy their own very ramshackle first house on ‘the wrong side of the Heath’ (all they could afford), in Parliament Hill Fields, this came cheapish because it contained a sitting tenant as a result of the 1957 rent act. Of course, as time wore on, the area became desirable, gentrified and smart, and she details the changing demographics, not to mention the years of pouring money into a house which initially they thought they would live in ‘until they could afford Hampstead’ but still inhabit to this day, their relationship with a house initially dour, depressing and glum having changed, as dwelling and owner ‘connect’

Forster’s Room in Kentish Town, photo by Eamonn McCabe

She also addresses, in a very direct way, the facing of her own mortality, with an as yet unresolved (in the pages of the book) debate on whether to die at home or in a hospice, when the options for ‘managing’ her diagnosis of cancer which has metastasised, run out.

Forster’s narrative voice, her ability to tell a story engagingly, with light touch humour and warmth, make this an engaging as well as a fascinating read. She is a writer who draws the reader in, rather than holds them at bay, creating a feeling of intimacy.

Publication date is November 6th in the UK

My Life In Houses Amazon UK
My Life In Houses Amazon USA

Laurie Lee – Cider With Rosie

Tags

Autobiography, Book Review, Cider With Rosie, Gloucestershire, Laurie Lee

I remember, I remember, the house where I was born………..

Having recently read a couple of house-brick sized tomes which played games with narrative form and structure, blurring the boundaries between truth and fiction, creating book within a book, or using multimedia to enhance the book experience, it is with a real feeling of relief, despite my enjoyment of the house-bricks, that I return to a re-read of a much simpler, tightly crafted, slower-paced, exquisitely crafted piece of writing – Laurie Lee’s well-loved Cider With Rosie, recently re-issued. As no doubt it will be, one hopes, many more times, as writing of this much heart, sensitivity and timelessness, though dealing with a world largely gone, outlasts the fashions of temporary trends.

Laurie Lee was born in Stroud, Gloucestershire, a brief few weeks before the outbreak of the First World War. The family moved to nearby, rural Slad, and it is this boyhood in Slad which is the subject of this first book of an autobiographical trilogy.

He tells of a time long gone, deeply wedded into the landscape and the seasons:

The year revolved around the village, the festivals round the year, the church round the festivals, the Squire around the church, and the village round the Squire. The Squire was our centre, a crumbling moot tree; and few indeed of our local celebrations could take place without his shade

And in that last sentence there is one of those pause-for-thought poetical images which arrestingly scatter through the pages of the book. The Squirearchy already beginning to crumble and decay, a sense of something which has been slow growing, deeply rooted, but that landscape will soon be gone.

Lee tells the story of his own boyhood, his family history – a poor, ordinary family, one of millions, not the story of the movers and shakers of world history, but the story of unique and rich humanity none-the-less. He recounts with great love his sense of place, his life within a small corner of rural Gloucestershire. Not just the landscape, and his own family, but the lives of neighbours are tenderly and precisely recounted.

Steanbridge Mill Pond, Slad. Copyright Ian Hunter, licensed for re-use

Two elderly ladies, enemies for ever, but when one dies, the other follows suddenly within a very small space of time. Enmity was the energy which sustained their lives, and with the death of the first, the point to living had gone for the second.. The sad tale of another elderly couple, united by love and long marriage. When the husband begins to become ill, and they can no longer fend for themselves, they are taken into the Workhouse – where, unfortunately, there are male wards and female wards. Forced apart for the first time for more than 50 years, within a week both have died. Love, not hatred, was their sustaining energy.

Something which began to enthrall and nag at me in the book, was the fact that Lee had had a long early period of profound, recurring, feverish ill health, falling prey to just about every illness going. During many spikes of high fever, visions, nightmares, the uncurling of reality occurred, again and again. Periods of return from near death and fever spikes would leave his senses for a time preternaturally sensitive. It made me ponder the role of childhood illness in developing artistic sensibilities. Not just the fact that illness renders a child more solitary, bed-bound, during their periods of illness, more likely to be reading and imagining than gregarious and doing, but wondering specifically about changes in brain physiology from repeated, prolonged, fever, where the barriers between ‘real’ and imagined, break down, and the imagined becomes real. Illness as a producer of alterations

in consciousness. Lee’s descriptions of the natural world, the closeness and shimmer of his vision, at times reads like writings on experiences with hallucinogens.

I remember, too, the light on the slopes, long shadows in tufts and hollows, with cattle, brilliant as painted china, treading their echoing shapes. Bees blew like cake-crumbs through the golden air, white butterflies like sugared wafers, and when it wasn’t raining a diamond dust took over which veiled and yet magnified all things

I could almost have underlined the whole book as an example of beautiful, attention focusing, arresting, truthful images and observations about place, people and time

A stunning, elegiac, celebratory book. Its all about living within the moment, and really savouring the moment you are in.

And is full of earthy comedy as well as tragedy, dark doings and high fine transcendence

We sit down and eat, and the cousins kick us under the table, from excitement rather than spite. Then we play with their ferrets, spit down their well, have a fight, and break down a wall. Later we are called for and given a beating, then we climb up the tree by the earth closet. Edie climbs highest, till we bite her legs, then she hangs upside down and screams. It has been a full, far-flung and satisfactory day; dusk falls, and we say goodbye

I received this as a digital ARC via the publishers. Charming line drawings by John Ward complete this reissue, in the centenary year of Lee’s birth

Cider With Rosie Amazon UK
Cider With Rosie Amazon USA

Geraldine Brooks – Foreign Correspondence

Tags

Australia, Autobiography, Book Review, Foreign Correspondence, Geraldine Brooks, Pen-Pals

Story of a life, the times, and the cultures

I came to this factual book by Geraldine Brooks hot on the heels of appreciation for her novel, People Of The Book. Brooks, now a Virginia resident novelist, was in a prior existence a globe-trotting, wanderlust-filled journalist originally from Concord, a suburb of Sydney, New South Wales.

Born in the mid-50s, Brooks recounts growing up in a deeply entrenched culture where nothing really happened, Australians felt second-class parochial citizens, looking to the ‘mother country’ with deep blue affiliations under Prime Minister Robert Menzies. The national anthem was even God Save The Queen. An underachieving, ‘don’t be a tall poppy’ syndrome was rife.

Brooks’ parents clearly had wider horizons in their souls, and she and her elder sister were clearly going to be taller poppies.

Desperate to know something of worlds beyond, Brooks began a series of correspondences with pen pals, from before her teens. Fed by initially a fascination with Star Wars, and then later with emerging socialist, internationalist and artistic interests, she had penfriends from firstly, a classier suburb of Sydney, from the States (where she always wanted to be) two pen-pals from Israel, a Christian Arab and a Jew, and a French girl from a tiny village.

Although she stopped writing to all of them bar her fellow Trekkie fan, the American girl, whilst still in her teens, a chance discovery of all the letters some 30 years later, led her to revisit her childhood, the zeitgeist of the times and the place, and trace the development not just of her own identity, life and viewpoints, but also look at how Australia emerged as a taller poppy.

She was also curious to discover what had happened to her several pen-pals, and set out to find them.

The several stories are moving, amusing, heart-breaking, and also surprisingly inspiring, not least for Brooks herself, who discovers that one life, which seemed on the surface to be the farthest away from the life she would want for herself, is one she comes full circle to most appreciate.

She is an excellent raconteur of the various stories and the changing voices from childhood to adult, ranging from Brooks, the budding young teenage scientist with a desire to solve the problem of world hunger through eating weeds – an experiment on mice which goes sadly wrong, to the much later discovery of a sad and long kept secret from her father’s life.

Flicr, Commons, Steve Beger

I can’t resist a little account from the exchanges between Brooks and her fellow Trekkie penpal, Joannie, about the mouse experiment :

I named one of the control mice Joannie, although since all were albinos I had difficulty in telling her apart from the others, Spock Rudolph and Margot (the latter two named for a balletomane phase I was passing through)……………..Unfortunately my Mr Spock met a grisly end, along with the noble attempt to alleviate world hunger…….The project fell apart when my mice – the control group, fed on the gourmet mouse mix – began eating each other. The day we gave away the sole – and very fat – survivor of my doomed experiment was a happy one for my mother. Joannie was consoling “Perhaps you just had paranoid mice.”

A lovely, absorbing read, which gave me some fascinating insights. And not just about cannibal mice.

Foreign Correspondence Amazon UK
Foreign Correspondence Amazon USA

Judith Kerr – A Small Person Far Away

Tags

A Small Person Far Away, Autobiography, Book Review, Judith Kerr

A modest and beautifully crafted finish to Kerr’s trilogy

The final part of Judith Kerr’s Out Of The Hitler Time trilogy, A Small Person Far Away, is as splendid and fascinating a piece of autobiography-turned-into-fiction writing as the previous two, When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit (Essential Modern Classics) and Bombs on Aunt Dainty

Judith Kerr (fictionalised as Anna in the book) is now in her late 20s, happily married to her scriptwriter husband Nigel Kneale, (fictionalised as Richard) and beginning to make her own journey as a writer.

The structure of this third book is particularly satisfying, as various motifs and minor occurrences serve as little memory portals back to the past ( a beautiful rug, finding the receipt for the rug in her coat pocket during a particularly stressful episode, so there is a hook back to the memory, and the simultaneous experience of then and now) This is all done in a very natural, unforced, organic way. She is a remarkably good writer, there is real psychological depth going on, great observation, a really strong sense of narrative – and the ability to offer startling images in an arresting way, that feels very authentic.

As in the previous books, the major events all happened, but she has crafted and tightened and carefully chosen, I guess, central moments, and pared out and removed padding. I have a sense that her artist’s eye for composition has been put to excellent use in her writing. It’s not that she gets involved in a lot of visual description, it’s more a sense of composing the frame and placement of narrative.

Set mainly in Berlin again, where her mother is now living, the narrative superficially inhabits a very short time frame of a few days in 1956. Anna has returned to Berlin because her mother is seriously ill; this itself is quite complex. The few days coincide with both the Hungarian Uprising and the Suez Crisis – so, again, we are in a time when another war, from two directions, seemed like a distinct possibility. Inevitably for those who lived through one devastating war, so very recently, all those old terrors and memories must have been freshly re-awakened. So, over those days, Anna is constantly revisiting her past.

She suddenly remembered that when she was small, too, she had listened to distant trains in bed. Probably it’s the same line, she thought. Sometimes when she had found herself awake when everyone else was asleep, she had been comforted by the sound of a goods train rumbling interminably through the night. After Hitler, of course, goods trains had carried quite different cargoes to quite different destinations. She wondered if other German children had still been comforted by their sound in the might, not knowing what was inside them. She wondered what had happened to the trains afterwards, if they were still in use

Inevitably, this reminded me of Steve Reich’s Different Trains (You Tube has the Kronos Quartet version – The Smith Quartet version, linked here,  is also very fine indeed)

I like the quiet and rather modest way she drops the reader into chasms and intense reflections, without ostentation

I can’t recommend this trilogy highly enough – and I’m amazed that I had never heard of Kerr until so very recently, when these marvellous books have been around for some time (- perhaps because primarily she became known as a writer and illustrator of books for young children.

A Small Person Far Away Amazon UK
A Small Person Far Away Amazon USA