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Showing posts with label English literature. Show all posts
Showing posts with label English literature. Show all posts
Mary Russell Mitford was a remarkable woman of letters. Her father was a less than admirable character from a Thackeray or Trollope novel. A man who can squander £70,000 in a lifetime in the late eighteenth, early nineteenth century on little more than gambling of various kinds and, of course, personal luxuries must be described as quite remarkable as well.
He was clever, selfish, unprincipled and extravagant, with an unhappy love of speculation, and an equally unfortunate skill at whist. He squandered altogether in his lifetime about £70,000 and, finally, became entirely dependent upon his daughter's literary earnings. William Harness, who knew the family well, and was Miss Mitford's lifelong friend, heartily disliked him and called him "a detestable old humbug" but his many failings never succeeded in alienating the affections of his wife and daughter.It seems his highly talented and very hard working daughter adored him and her invalid mother and, apparently, did not mind wrecking her own health by very hard work, writing for money and running a house that seems to have been quite charming and completely insanitary.
She wrote plays that were produced in London by and with leading actors such as Charles Kemble and dramatic poetry. But the need to earn money with her pen turned her attention to what became her most successful literary output: sketches about village life.
Her inimitable series of country sketches, drawn from her own experiences at Three Mile Cross, entitled 'Our Village,' began to appear in 1819 in the 'Lady's Magazine,' a little-known periodical, whose sale was thereby increased from 250 to 2,000. She had previously offered them to Thomas Campbell for the 'New Monthly Magazine,' but he rejected them as unsuitable for the dignity of his pages. The sketches had enormous success and were collected in five volumes, published respectively every other year from 1824 to 1832. Editions of the whole first appeared in 1843.Miss Mitford and her village became so popular that her house and other landmarks were pointed out by passing coachmen and tours were organized to see Three Mile Cross otherwise known as Our Village. She became part of the literary scene though she stayed in the village with some visits to London. Her health became worse and worse, partly because of overwork, partly because of living conditions and partly because of a series of accidents.
After her parents died she removed to a somewhat more sanitary cottage, owned by her friend Lady Russell of Swallowfield Park and continued writing stories, sketches, letters and several volumes of autobiographical gossip, which I shall find and read. Undoubtedly, it will be entertaining. All this despite being partially paralyzed after yet another carriage accident.
Our Village is enchanting reading. It is not exactly nostalgic in that a good deal of what she describes is hard living and hard working. It is also life that was already disappearing when she wrote about it (as is so often the case) with spreading industrialization and a growing reluctance on the part of the rural population to know its place in life. But the description of various flower, berry and nut collecting, of the games of cricket, the vivid description of the various characters, young and old, will stay with the reader of these sketches and will draw that reader back again and again.
Some years ago I wrote an article about Kipling for the Reputations section of the Salisbury Review but, at the moment, I cannot find it either on the internet or in hard copy, which I do have. As soon as I do so, I shall either link to it or quote from it. I do recall that I referred both to Orwell's and T. S. Eliot's essay on the man and his work. They are both interesting in that they were written at a time when Kipling was seen as something of an embarrassment to the literary establishment and the two critics, approaching the subject from different political perspectives, came to similar conclusions: a very good poet, often a good prose writer, difficult to accept politically but not quite as bad as people make him out.
Times have changed and our attitude to Kipling (give or take idiot students in Oxford, I imagine) has also changed. We still think of hims as a good and accessible poet. If was voted as the nation's favourite poem and I am not surprised. Recessional is not seen as a glorification of imperialism and racism, as it was for many years, by anyone who has actually read it but as a warning against hubris and arrogance. His later poems about the First World War are full of woe, not least because he lost his only son in it and felt guilty about pushing him towards enlistment, despite him being too young.
His children's books are a delight and his Indian stories continue to be popular. He was one of the few authors who understood children and could write about them as well as for them without making one cringe with embarrassment. He also understood and could write about people usually dismissed by the literary establishment, such as ordinary soldiers, the people of India who are between castes and races as well as the lower ranks of the Indian Service.
There are so many things to say about this man who is still underestimated by many but let me just add one highly admirable characteristic: he consistently refused state honours even when George V personally offered him a knighthood. He even declined the Poet Laureateship. A writer and a poet, he thought, should not be accepting such honours. He did accept honorary degrees and, eventually, the Nobel Prize for Literature. How many literary personalities who pretend to be far more radical jump at the chance of a gong, a handle or the ermine?
Meanwhile, here are some links to discussions about Kipling: an OUP blog about what he really wrote about the First World War, an interesting piece about Kipling's birthday being celebrated in India and an excellent piece by Christopher Howse in the Telegraph about Kipling "the misfit poet".
Really, I should not spend so much time on detective stories and matters related but Martin Edwards's recent book on the Detection Club and its denizens is good enough and important enough to merit a long posting on the secondary blog.
The last lines of Mr Edwards’s book are:
The last word belongs to Christie. In 1940, at the height of the Blitz, when she could not know if she or her family and friends would survive for long, she inscribed a copy of Sad Cypress: “Wars may come and wars may go, but MURDER goes on forever!”How right she was. Furthermore, despite all predictions to the contrary, traditional murder and detective fiction go on forever. Nothing could prove that more clearly than the popularity of the British Library series of reprints, first of Victorian but more recently of various half-forgotten Golden Age detective novels and collections of short stories, all of which have been immensely popular.
Martin Edwards’s role in publishing and publicizing the series cannot be overestimated. He has chosen the books, provided highly knowledgeable introductions to a number of them and edited collections of short stories. While doing all that he has been writing his own books and running a blog about detective fiction that is to be recommended to anyone who is even half-way interested in the subject. His greatest achievement to date, however, is this massive volume, a history of the Detection Club in the thirties and forties, a collection of biographies of the extraordinary people who were its members and, incidentally, a history of the genre in the period. That is what I call a useful book.
The rest of this posting is here and the details of the book are:
The rest of this posting is here and the details of the book are:
Martin Edwards: The Golden Age of Murder
The Mystery of the Writers Who Invented the Modern Detective Story
2015 London
HarperCollinsPublishers
And here is Dorothy L. Sayers with Eric the Skull:
There are many interesting things in the book but Tory Historian was particularly taken by some of the figures Mr Stewart gives of book sales in the 1860s, particularly of what was then called with increasing displeasure by critics "sensational literature".
And Mr Wilkie Collins could and did gloat over his receipts. Referring to his income from No Name (1862), he wrote to his mother: '... the amount reaches Four thousand, six hundred. Not so bad for story-telling!' While George Eliot wept: 'I sicken with despondency [she wrote in 1866 to her publisher, Blackwood] ... that the most carefully written books lie .... deep undermost in a heap of trash .... my 6/- editions are never on the railway bookstalls .... They are not so attractive to the majority as "The Trail of the Serpent".' Crocodile tears these, really; in 1863 Romola had brought her a near-record £7,000 with reversion of copyright.Whether George Eliot was really that mean-minded and short-sighted, history does not relate.
But George Eliot was right about the popularity of the author of The Trail of the Serpent (1861) - none other than Miss Braddon, who certainly seems to have deserved her title of 'Queen of the Circulating Libraries'. The Westminster Review was only just guilty of exaggeration in saying that her 'novels must appear in a second edition the very day after [their] first publication and .... a third follow the second before the week is well out.'
Keeping strictly to facts, however, the story of crowds queuing for the Strand with the next Sherlock Holmes story is well-known; less well remembered is the fact that their fathers had done the same for the next episode of The Moonstone, and when published in book form, having already been serialized, the first impression of 1,000 copies of The Woman in White sold in one day.
George Eliot could perhaps draw some consolation from the admission of an American pirate-publisher that he had sold 126,000 copies of the latter book and paid Collins not a penny.
Nevertheless, the figures are impressive when we consider the value of sterling at the time and the fact that the reading public of these books and magazines was limited not by illiteracy (that has been much exaggerated if not invented by advocates of state education) but by the fact that many people could not afford them. They bought and read penny dreadfuls, whose sales vastly exceeded those listed above.
Very remiss of this blog not to note the fiftieth anniversary of the death of the great poet, essayist and conservative thinker, T. S. Eliot yesterday. As it happens, I am writing this in London Library, of which he was President from 1952 to 1964 and which has recently benefited greatly from the generosity of his widow, Valerie Eliot. Indeed, the new section of the library is called after the great man though I should have preferred it to be known as Old Possum House. Ah well, cannot have everything.
A few other links on the subject: the Academy of American Poets, the Poetry Foundation and the Nobel Prize website, which also has his acceptance speech.
And, for conservative thinkers and readers, here is Roger Scruton's brilliant essay on Eliot as a conservative mentor.
T. S. Eliot was indisputably the greatest poet writing in English in the twentieth century. He was also the most revolutionary Anglophone literary critic since Samuel Johnson, and the most influential religious thinker in the Anglican tradition since the Wesleyan movement. His social and political vision is contained in all his writings, and has been absorbed and reabsorbed by generations of English and American readers, upon whom it exerts an almost mystical fascination—even when they are moved, as many are, to reject it. Without Eliot, the philosophy of Toryism would have lost all substance during the last century. And while not explicitly intending it, Eliot set this philosophy on a higher plane, intellectually, spiritually, and stylistically, than has ever been reached by the adherents of the socialist idea.It is very well worth reading in full.
Eliot attempted to shape a philosophy for our times that would be richer and more true to the complexity of human needs than the free-market panaceas that have so often dominated the thinking of conservatives in government. He assigned a central place in his social thinking to high culture. He was a thorough traditionalist in his beliefs but an adventurous modernist in his art, holding artistic modernism and social traditionalism to be different facets of a common enterprise. Modernism in art was, for Eliot, an attempt to salvage and fortify a living artistic tradition in the face of the corruption and decay of popular culture.
When I wrote about the Labour landslide victory in 1945 it was pointed out to me, inter alia, that the Golden Age Detective (GAD) writers did not like the victory or the country it created. They certainly did not. Let me just mention a few.
Cyril Hare's post-war novels are full of sad nostalgia and his non-series book, An English Murder, published in 1951 is not just nostalgic and unhappy but shows real anger towards socialist politicians and their destructive actions. Agatha Christie largely took the changes in her stride and carefully adjusted her description of middle class life (unlike Margery Allingham or Ngaio Marsh, for example, who still produced examples of country houses with grandes dames in them) but even she made disdainful comments.
In Mrs McGinty's Dead (1952) there is a sad acceptance that the government is always sending your forms that you need to fill in, a theme that is repeated in other novels. In A Murder Is Announced (1950), one of Christie's best, there is a clear indication that everybody is involved in the black market because it is the only way to survive. When Inspector Craddock chides the vicar's wife with it being against the law, she spiritedly replies that there should not be such silly laws.
The dislike for the controls, the shortages and, especially, the bureaucracy that seems to have flourished in the war and continued to do so afterwards runs through many novels of the period, such as Michael Gilbert's Smallbone Deceased (1950).
In Duplicate Death (1951) Georgette Heyer makes cutting remarks about the destructively high taxation that makes life difficult for people who want to lead a middle class life.
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One could go on listing novels and, perhaps, quoting from letters for a while but, undoubtedly, the situation was most devastatingly summed up by John Dickson Carr in a letter to Frederic Dannay (one half of Ellery Queen) in mid-1946, as quoted in Douglas G. Greene's biography:
The regulations in this country grow more and more damnable. One more war for liberty and we shall all be slaves.I suspect very many people felt the same way though they might not have been able to express their feelings quite so pithily.
When the TLS asked various people in 1977 to name the most under-rated writer of the twentieth century, two respondents, Philip Larkin and Lord David Cecil named Barbara Pym, born 100 years today. This revived and enhanced the publishers' and the literary world's influence in her clever, witty and rather low-key writing, which reminds one a great deal of Jane Austen's.
Barbara Pym wrote about women of the mid-twentieth century, who had varied lives, often careers though equally often not, an interest in the Church of England and its parish doings and a penchant for unsuitable men (a characteristic they shared with their creator). Though they are not strong on plot, they are beautifully crafted (an old-fashioned virtue in writing, one sometimes feels) and alternately very funny and sadly wistful. They also provide a fascinating picture of certain parts of English life in the two decades after the Second World War.
The DNB entry on her does Miss Pym (she was never a Ms) full justice.
Whenever one reads hyperventilating attacks on present-day politicians and their lack of fiscal probity as compared to past ones, one can be certain they come from people who have no knowledge of history. Let us set aside the particularly notorious cases such as Charles James Fox or David Lloyd George. Let us look at a man who is known for being less than honest in politics but not particularly dishonest in financial matters: Winston S. Churchill.
I have just finished reading Douglas Murray's excellent biography of Lord Alfred Douglas, Bosie (here is an excellent review of it by Miranda Seymour) and Churchill makes several appearances in it.
Oscar Wilde's Hyacinthus and "golden boy" outlived him by forty-five years and had a fascinating if chequered life, clouded by what seems to be hereditary mental problems and, of course, the famous case. Douglas Murray makes an excellent case for Bosie's poetical talent (I, for one, am going to find a collection and read it), for his initial loyalty to Wilde and for the unfairness of De Profundis, which has influenced so many writers in their analysis of the relationship. Wilde, himself, resumed his life with Bosie as soon as he came out of prison. Murray even manages to make sense of the complicated relationship between Bosie and Robbie Ross, usually the hero of the Wilde story (but then, he wrote much of it).
The book details Lord Alfred's "litigious and libellous" career that lasted from 1909 to 1924, the last of these being the case brought against him by Winston Churchill.
In 1921 Douglas
claimed that Winston Churchill was guilty of war profiteering and that while First Lord of the Admiralty he had, with the help of high profile Jews, conspired to murder Lord Kitchener. They had allegedly succeeded in 1916 when Kitchener was on board the Hampshire. The ship had been sailing for Russia where, according to Douglas, Kitchener would have replaced the 'Bolshevik Jews', who were then setting up the revolution that would come in the following y ear, with 'loyal men of British birth', thus 'nipping the Russian revolution in the bud'.Churchill at first ignored this farrago of nonsense, arguing, quite sensibly, that few people read it and by suing he would give unnecessary publicity to a little-known periodical. But in 1923 Douglas went further and publicly accused Churchill of war profiteering by publishing a false report of the Battle of Jutland in order to help some financiers (no doubt of Jewish origin, Bosie having become a virulent anti-Semite) to make money on the New York Stock Exchange and getting paid for this by Sir Ernest Cassel, a well known financier and philanthropist who had, as a matter of fact, converted to Catholicism just as Lord Alfred had done. Churchill's alleged reward was furniture that was worth £40,000.
Furthermore, the accusation about Kitchener's murder was repeated with fanciful details of a time bomb on board of the Hampshire.
This time Churchill had to sue. The case came to court in December 1923 and the first thing to be made clear was that by the time of the Battle of Jutland, Churchill had no connections with the Admiralty (this being post-Dardanelles) and could not have produced the false report.
According to Wikipedia:
As the attorney-general stated in court, on Churchill's behalf, there was no plot, no phoney communiqué, no stock market raid and no present of fine furniture.The phrase is accurate enough in words but not entirely so in reality. As Douglas Murray writes:
When Churchill took the stand he volunteered much information about his private finances so that the defence could not make anything of them. He admitted that Cassel had given him £500 as a wedding present in 1908 and t hat, after the battle of Jutland, Cassel had furnished him with a library. None of this information had come out in the Morning Post case [when Douglas first aired his accusations and was found to have some justification for them] and many members of the public were unaware that such gifts were commonplace for politicians.The truth is that many members of the public and the media are still unaware that such gifts have always been commonplace for politicians.
Lord Alfred Douglas was found guilty of criminal libel and went to prison for six months, another turning point in his life and literary career. While in Wormwood Scrubs he wrote, when his health allowed him, his last major sequence of sonnets, In Excelsis, a defiant response to De Profundis. His career in litigation and libel was over and he started reassessing, yet again, his relationship with Wilde and other people. In particular, he became more sympathetic to Churchill with whom he exchanged a few friendly notes later. The last of this was a letter in December 1944 from a very ill Bosie in which he pleaded with the Prime Minister not to betray the Poles. Churchill reassured him in his reply that he would not do so and added a hand-written note wishing a recovery. Alas, Bosie never really recovered and died in March 1945. Neither did Churchill stand up for the Poles.
Tory Historian has protested before at the Mills and Boonification of Jane Austen and her novels. There is no need to repeat all the arguments. Though a few paragraphs might be worth quoting:
The famous TV series of “Pride and Prejudice” with Jennifer Ehle as Elizabeth Bennet and Colin Firth as Mr Darcy starts with the young men riding into town (Meryton, one assumes). This places them at the centre of the subsequent plot.Miss Austen's novels were about women and their families, usually written from one point of view, that of the heroine. In the first chapter we meet the entire Bennet family but realize very soon that we are not going to know much about four of the sisters. Elizabeth is the one who matters and we see the world, including its male inhabitants through her eyes. It is her fondness for her father, whose favourite she is that prevents her and us from realizing for a long time how inadequate he is in his role.
Nothing could be further from the novel, which is about the Bennet family and, famously, starts with them discussing the recent arrival of Mr Bingley about whom they know very little but whom they suspect to be extremely eligible.
“Pride and Prejudice” is a clever picture of contemporary society. Unlike some Victorian novelists, Jane Austen has a clear idea of money. Mr Bennet has £2,000 a year and has been unable to increase that income or to save money for his daughters, largely because of his abdication of responsibility.
Mr Bingley has £4,000 or £5,000 a year and has not yet settled down. His sisters have an income of their own, so their father must have made quite a fortune in his business in the Midlands, something that they do not want to remember.
Mr Darcy is, of course, the representative of the old aristocracy, related to all sorts of people, the owner of a handsome estate that, unlike Mr Bennet, he pays attention to (though when exactly is hard to tell) and has £10,000 a year. This is to be viewed more like turn-over in a modern business rather than clear profit, as the money has to be used for the upkeep of Pemberley, the household, the estate as well as his lifestyle.
One can go on about Pride and Prejudice for a very long time but the best advice TH can give to those who do not know it is to read it and to those who do is to read it again.
She remains a fascinating and talented lady who has contributed to many aspects of literature. I have just finished reading another book about her, Catherine Kenney's The Remarkable Case of Dorothy L. Sayers, which started too slowly, gathered interest but trailed off again with chapters that were too long for what they said. There were interesting matters discussed, for all of that, even if the author seemed far too enamoured with Gaudy Night and The Documents in the Case.
Early on in the chapter about Sayers's life, Professor Kenney has this to say:
Sayers once said that it is by an author's assumptions, by what he or she takes for granted, that we can really know the writer. In addition to assuming that her readers are familiar with the literature she cherishes, she also assumes that they share a certain sympathy - or at least a tolerance - for her world view, a view that endorses the traditional values of order and civility, as well as the concepts of personal responsibility and justifiable limits to human behaviour. Whilst the great detective, as an amateur generally works outside the law, he does not work against it, or seek to rend the basic social fabric.That is not to say that it is necessary to accept or to endorse every aspect of society as it exists. Very few detective story writers of the Golden Age did that, pace Julian Symons. It is the traditional and orderly values that might have been undermined by the existing society as well as by the criminal that are so important to the whole genre of detective stories.
Tory Historian has no doubt whatsoever that Sherlock Holmes would have hated his birthday mentioned and really we are merely recalling the 125th anniversary of his first appearance in A Study in Scarlet, published in Beeton's Christmas Annual of 1887.
The three obituaries that were found easily, in the Guardian, the Telegraph and the New York Times , all said more or less the same. They praised the novels, their charm, their beautiful style and occasional acerbity; all spoke of "Miss Read's" understanding of the countryside and somewhat rosy view of the people who inhabit it. Much the same is to be found in this article that celebrated the 50th anniversary of the first "Miss Read" novel.
The two British obituaries mention the fact that she was disregarded and somewhat despised by the literary establishment but the consistent refusal to pay attention or to take her work seriously did not prevent it becoming very popular with a following of readership that most literary authors would give their eye-teeth for.
Several of the books were recorded by June Whitfield, another highly popular lady that is not so highly regarded by the artistic establishment but adored by several generations of her public.
Gentle and acerbic, well-written and slightly unreal - these are the words of praise and criticism. But how nostalgic and unreal are those stories? There isn't a great deal there about new housing estates and developments and the social structure of the village remains more or less unchanged. But in at least one book A Year at Thrush Green there is a fairly brash but immensely likeable American character who loves the place but finds it hard to understand why the people cannot solve some of the smaller problems they face. His solution is immediate, practical and completely matter of fact, which the inhabitants of Thrush Green accept after being taken aback by his attitude. That is reality for many places and people.
What about the accusation that people never seem to talk about big events. Such things as the Cuban crisis or the nuclear threat pass them largely by. Well, really. How much time do people spend talking about "big" things as compared to the small change of life, so ably described by "Miss Read": children, schooling, pets, weather, neighbours and their various affairs, and the weather? Highly realistic, TH would suggest. Incidentally, there is a single mother in at least one of the Thrush Green novels and recurring characters of highly unsatisfactory neighbours.
There is, however, one thing missing from those novels or, at least, from the ones TH has come across. Nobody ever seems to watch television or discuss the previous evening's programmes. Now that is completely unrealistic.
Anyway, on to literary insults, which are, TH is happy to say, alive and well though not, perhaps, as interesting as those of the past.
Reading about the literary magazine of the early twentieth century, The New Age and its extraordinary editor, A. R. Orage as well as the highly talented contributors in a period that can, with some justification, be called journalism's greatest, TH came across the name of Beatrice Hastings.
In 1936 her literary career and reputation appeared to be on the wane and she attributed it to the Machiavellian machinations of Orage (by then dead) and the lack of gratitude displayed by various literary luminaries who had preferred to be on the right side of a man whom she compares to various dictators and who, in her opinion, had no creative or editorial talent at all. She poured out her venom in a pamphlet published by the Blue Moon Press of Red Lion Street and entitled The Old "New Age": Orage - and Others.
Her description of Orage's talent or "pen" on page 6 of her pamphlet comes high on the list of serious literary insults:
... and what a flat, ponderous, stilted, maundering, when not coy, conceited and facetious, when not plagiaristic or outright thievish "literary" pen he had ...TH is quite envious of that list of insulting epithets. How long did it take to put them together, one wonders.
Not content with annihilating Orage, Beatrice Hastings (to give her the right pen name) went on to do the same to Richard Aldington, best known as an imagist poet but also a novelist and literary critic. In 1933 he published a novel, entitled All Men Are Enemies: A Romance. Beatrice Hastings maintained that he had appropriated and used a title she had given in 1909 to a polemical publication: Woman's Worst Enemy - Woman.
In a note on page 9 of her pamphlet she writes:
Addington exploits this title [Woman's Worst Enemy - Woman] in one of his books, without naming me. That this silk-fingered, scratch-nailed, sob-stuffing, eaten-brained curate of the feminine soul is accepted by women as a champion shows what enemies to themselves they still are.Ouch!
Finally, Katherine Mansfield, a close friend and lover of Beatrice Hastings's:
I never knew until this month of Jan. 1936, that Katherine Mansfield came back on the paper [The New Age]. The sketches published in 1917 look like the incredibly vulgar stuff I rejected. .... That she must have fancied she was triumphing over me, although I never knew that she was offered to the readers in place of "Alice Morning" [another of Beatrice Hastings's pen-names] is not completely amusing; and it rather gladdens me to reflect that when Francis Carco's terrible study, Les Innocents, showed her that she was detected and classified, she had to reflect that poor Sophie Brzeska .... had been Fate's innocent instrument of revenge. After that book, Katherine began to play saint, prate about God and, as Olive Moore says, "twittered" her way out of a world she had fouled wherever she went.Ah those literary and artistic rows of yesteryear!
Beatrice Hastings's end was tragic but, somehow, appropriately flamboyant. She drank too much, had squandered her inheritance, saw herself as betrayed and spurned by the literary establishment, against which she railed. At the end of October,1943 she
burned her correspondence, stuffed a towel under the door, cradled her little white mouse in her hand and turned the gas on.She had left her possessions to her "devoted friend" Doris Lillian Green and her Literary Estate to the British Museum "or the first public library that puts in a claim". Oh but those letters! What joy it would be to read them. Surely, a woman who can write such elegant literary insults deserves renewed interest.
Dorothy L. Sayers crops up on this blog regularly so readers will not be surprised to learn that Tory Historian is reading another book about the great lady, detective story writer, theologian, literary critic, conservative thinker and all-round good thing (no, that is not a reference to her physical shape). This one is by David Coomes, media executive (not sure how else one can describe him) and erstwhile head of BBC Religious Department, entitled Dorothy L. Sayers - A Careless Rage for Life.
The book has more about Sayers as the writer of religious texts and plays but there is a chapter or two about the detective stories and more than that about the rest of her life. Mr Coomes seems to have been entranced by her personality while reading her huge correspondence, which is being published under Barbara Reynolds's editorship.
What appealed to TH, however, was a paragraph at the end of Chapter 1, a hilarious and terrifying account of the "battle of the scripts" that preceded the creation and broadcasting of Dorothy L. Sayers's famous and notorious sequence of plays The Man Born to be King, about which TH blogged some time ago. (TH remains of the opinion, pace some commenters, that there were better detective story writers than Miss Sayers but few as erudite on other subjects.)
Mr Coomes quotes Miss Sayers's opinion that "What we make is more important than what we are", then goes on:
It is the comment of someone who obsessively guarded her private life. Most people would say:: What we make is because of what we are ... because of we have experienced, endured, wept and laughed over, been defeated by, despaired of, embraced, rejected, come through.That may be true but TH is compelled to agree with Miss Sayers - whatever went into the creation of what one makes, that is what matters most. Furthermore, would it not be wonderful if writers, artists and actors would remember that dictum and talk less about themselves in endless interviews and self-analysis. What we make is more important than what we are. Let that be every writer's motto.
Born on May 29, 1874, he lived through turbulent times (sometimes making them even more turbulent) and died on June 14, 1936, realizing before his death that the casual and often unpleasant anti-Semitism that he indulged in was leading to something far more horrific in Europe.
He has inspired at least two societies, one English and one American, both concentrating on the Catholicism of his writing, something he would have approved of. Looking at all the different sites that deal with the different aspects of Chesterton's life and writings I have found myself being drawn back to his mysteries, a word he used in its many different meanings but, particularly, in connection with detective stories. Elizabeth Foxwell on The Bunburyist links to several of his essays on the subject.
However, John Dickson Carr shows that, in his own way Conan Doyle was a proto-Anglospherist, something that we know from a story that he does not like for reasons TH fails to understand, The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor.
Conan Doyle spent some time in South Africa during the earlier stages of the Boer War, working in a private hospital, treating soldiers who were suffering from the dreadful emetic fever. On his return, he wrote a history of the war up to 1901 and made some trenchant suggestions as to necessary army reforms. Lord Roberts agreed with him but, as Carr says, none of the "military experts" did. Infantry taking cover? Cavalry abandoning swords and lances in favour of guns? Pshaw. What is this "amateur" trying to achieve? Survival and victory? Eventually, of course, all his suggestions were adopted.
In the 1900 election he fought the Edinburgh Central Division constituency and gathered a very respectable vote, considerably reducing the Radical majority. Among all his many other activities he turned his attention to the subject of Anglo-American relations:
As the year drew to a close, he settled down to write a short essay that is almost startling in its prophecy. Entitled An Anglo-American Reunion, it consisted of a trenchant plea for a much closer understanding between the two nations, and he coupled that plea with the warning that, unless this essential relationship was brought about by good will, then it might be forced into existence in some future time as a measure of self preservation against an eventual threat from Russia.This was an interesting take on the subject. This was not the first time Conan Doyle wrote about the closeness between the two countries that was, to him, as real as it was hidden to many on both sides of the Atlantic who looked at immediate developments only. In this 2007 essay on the whole subject of the Anglospere Christopher Hitchens quoted something the great write had said in Detroit in 1895 at the height of anti-British agitation in the United States because of a British-Venezuelan border dispute:
You Americans have lived up to now within your own palings, and know nothing of the real world outside. But now your land is filled up, and you will be compelled to mix more with the other nations. When you do so you will find that there is only one which can at all understand your ways and your aspirations, or will have the least sympathy. That is the mother country which you are now so fond of insulting. She is an Empire, and you will soon be an Empire also, and only then will you understand each other, and you will realize that you have only one real friend in the world.These words must have seemed very strange at the time; they have been proved correct since many times.
Firstly, one of my own favourite writers and historic personalities: Samuel Pepys, born on February 23, 1633 in the heart of London, just off Fleet Street, to real London parents a tailor and the daughter of a Whitechapel butcher. Pepys is known largely these days for his astonishing diaries, now fully in print with excellent and scholarly notes by R. C. Latham and W. Matthews but let us not forget his achievements as a naval administrator, the man who, to some extent, was responsible for the growth of the Royal Navy under Charles II and for reforms that eliminated at least some of the corruption around the building and equipping of ships.
It has been said that were he to live in the early twenty-first century, Pepys would almost certainly have kept a blog. Possibly that is so, though we must not forget that he kept his diary in a short-hand invented by himself. However, there is a blog that produces relevant entries from Sam's own diary for different years and a website that deals with the man as well as his writings.
Someone once asked me whether I'd read the diary right through from beginning to end. No, I replied, it is not something one can do with any pleasure. Those volumes are for dipping in, for leafing back and forth, for getting engrossed and, above all, for quoting on many subjects.
The second birthday is that of George Frideric Handel, born on February 23, 1685 in Halle, the Duchy of Magdeburg to parents who seem to have been completely uninterested in music. Having come to England first in 1710, he decided to settle here in 1712 and proceeded to write a large number of oratorios, operas and other pieces. His influence on English music is almost incalculable and so I shall leave it at that. I am sure many of this blog's readers will know far more on the subject than I do, much though I enjoy Handel's work.
However, I cannot resist two interesting additions. Handel settled down in 1723 at 25 Brook Street in Mayfair and lived there till the end of his life. It is now the home of the Handel Museum. By one of those curious coincidences that history abounds in there is a blue plaque next door to it as well: Jimmi Hendrix lived at 23 Brook Street in 1968 - 69, moving out a year before he died of a drug overdose.
By another coincidence, that is merely personal, I was reading about Rosa Newmarch, in her day and important musicologist but not as well known as she should be these days. She championed Russian music in England, helped to promote Jean Sibelius and later Leoš Janáček, was close to Edward Elgar and Henry Wood as well as many others. In her 1904 book on Henry Wood she wrote of her dislike for the "anaemic" religious music of Britain that flourished throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth century, adding that these pieces were
cuckoo eggs, imported from Germany by Handel and Mendelssohn and hatched in British nests to the detriment of our native singing birds, who might otherwise have developed a distinct note of their own.An interesting theory.
Dickens's novel of the Industrial Revolution, Hard Times, has much to recommend it, but it does not give as true and real a picture as Mrs Gaskell's North and South, the best book on the subject in Tory Historian's opinion and published in exactly the same year as Dickens's novel. Incidentally, neither of those writers was over-impressed by the nascent trade union movement.
Let us move on to the subject of clerks. Who can forget Dickens's miserable, downtrodden clerks who never seem to think of getting another job? Sometimes they break out and become rather eccentric, at other times they become positively villainous. Either way, being a clerk is a terrible fate that ought not to befall anyone.
It is, of course, a fate that befell many and, curiously enough, few people considered it to be the lowest pit of misery. Indeed, it was seen as a good steady employment for many young men who wished to rise in business, earn enough money to marry and have a home. Before that, it was a good steady job for young men who simply wanted to earn money and have a good time. At least three of Jerome K. Jerome's men in a boat and, subsequently, on a bummel are clerks. Mr Pooter is a clerk and so is his son, Lupin, who will go far, having started as a clerk.
Another writer who admired clerks and, generally, people who worked for their living, even women who were acquiring jobs and careers in the 1880s and 1890s was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Tory Historian has been re-reading the Sherlock Holmes short stories, has finished The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and has gone on to The Memoirs, while attempting to keep some sort of track of the dates in which the various stories take place.
The Stockbroker's Clerk was published in the Strand Magazine in 1893 and takes place in 1889, about three months after Dr Watson's marriage. There seems to be some discrepancy as to whether the good doctor continued to visit Holmes regularly after his marriage or stayed away for months on end, working to build up his new practice and happy in his marriage. Some stories say that he was busy and happy but still found time for his old comrade, others imply that the two rarely saw each other. There are further discrepancies as to whether Holmes ever visited the young married couple. Sometimes Dr Watson asserts that nothing would drag Holmes out of his rooms except a case and certainly not the sight of a happy marriage; at other times the story begins with him arriving on the Watsons' doorstep. This is one of them.
TH is not linking to a Wiki account of the story because that is definitely not something that is done. One must not reveal such matters. Suffice it to say that the plot is one used before though with important differences in The Red-Headed League and was to be used again The Three Garridebs. Oh and there were seven illustrations by Sidney Paget, one of which can be seen above.
What struck TH, however, is Doyle's or rather Watson's favourable and very typical description of the young clerk who comes to Holmes for assistance.
The man whom I found myself facing was a well-built, fresh-complexioned young fellow with a frank, honest face and a slight, crisp, yellow moustache. He wore a very shiny top-hat and a neat suit of sober black, which made him look what he was - a smart young City man, of the class who have been labelled Cockneys, but who give us our crack Volunteer regiments, and who turn out more fine athletes and sportsmen than any body of men in these islands.Come to think of it, Dickens would not have liked the crack Volunteer regiments or the fine athletes either.
Tory Historian finds a great deal of C. S. Lewis's writing entertaining and instructive. A copy of Mere Christianity, the published version of Lewis's extremely successful wartime broadcasts on religion and morality has produced many gems.
Lewis says that some people have suggested to him that moral judgement that we all, according to him, have is, perhaps, just an instinct like other instincts. Not so, replies he. Instincts are like the notes in music but it is moral judgement that tells us how to play them. Left to themselves, instincts will not guide us and they never do. Even the best instincts can steer us in the wrong direction.
The most dangerous thing you can do is to take any one impulse of your own nature and set it up as the thing you ought to follow at all costs. There is not one of these that will not make us into devils if we set it up as an absolute guide. You might think love of humanity in general was safe, but it is not. If you leave out justice you will find yourself breaking agreements and faking evidence in trials 'for the sake of humanity', and become in the end a cruel and treacherous man.This is a phenomenon we have all become very familiar.
As it happens there were two events of some importance on that day, both deaths, though the immediate reporting for many days, weeks, months and, it sometimes feels, even years, has concentrated on one: the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
This blog refuses to go into any conspiracy theories, especially as most of them have been disproved by recent re-examination of the evidence, and would merely like to point out that the way political attitudes seemed to be one year before the election, Kennedy seemed reasonably certain to lose. Of course, many things could have happened.
However, there is no question that the assassination of the American President in broad daylight while he was being driven in an official motorcade, shocked the country and the world. It is fair to say that it was not Kennedy's presidency, which had its ups and downs, mostly downs, but his assassination that changed American politics though one hopes only temporarily.
The other event of that day was the death of C. S. Lewis, one of the best known children's writers, literary critics and popular Christian philosophers in the English-speaking world. His death was not dramatic but the outcome of a long illness and even longer refusal to look after himself properly.
This blog may have some reservations about Lewis's writings and even greater reservations about the sentimentalization of his life but has no doubts whatsoever that of the two men who died forty-eight years ago, he is the one whose name will continue to be honoured by people of all ages.
ADDENDUM: It has been pointed out to me that another important writer died on that day: Aldous Huxley of laryngeal cancer and, possibly, drug abuse in Los Angeles.
