And then there is perhaps the best of all classic children’s stories, The Snow Queen, which C. S. Lewis peered into for his Narnia books, especially The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
A book I have treasured for half a lifetime is Johannes Kepler’s The Six-Cornered Snowflake. Complex and complicated. Simple and clear. Snowflakes, like human fingerprints – no two are alike. But whereas fingerprints are intriguing, they are not mysteriously beautiful like snowflakes.
The cause of the six-sided shape of a snowflake is none other than that of the ordered shapes of plants and of numerical constants; and since in them nothing occurs without supreme reason – not, to be sure, such as discursive reasoning discovers, but such as existed from the first in the Creator’s design and is preserved from that origin to this day in the wonderful nature of animal faculties, I do not believe that even in a snowflake this ordered pattern exists at random.
It was Kepler who said that all he was doing as a scientist and explorer of the natural and mathematical order of things was ‘thinking God’s thoughts, after Him’. But it is woeful to find that, in spite of his genius, his great scientific and linguistic mind, Johannes Kepler was not only an astronomer but the very last of all serious astronomers to be an astrologer, too. He believed that every child was moulded and influenced for the rest of its life by the configuration of stars and planets at the moment of its birth, as do a lot of people now. But I have yet to hear of any scientist who does.
I bet that is because there are none.
SO COLD. The blackbirds have started low-key singing every morning, and a male and a female have been chasing one another round a bush, but the bitter wind from Siberia will put paid to all that. The gangs of long-tailed tits are getting through fat balls at the rate of three a day.
FIVE BOOKS. There is a website someone told me about which has an archive of people who have chosen five books on a theme and been interviewed about their choices. At a decent length, too – so, not just a list. Jay McInerney has five novels of New York – including Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth, I am pleased to see.
Five Books on the History of Christianity (Diarmaid MacCulloch)
Five Books on London (Peter Ackroyd)
Five Books on Religious and Social History in the Ancient World (Robin Lane Fox)
On …
The History of Reading
Eugenics
Divine Women
Aviation History
Revolutionary Russia
Social History of Post-war Britain (David Kynaston)
The Second World War (Anthony Beevor)
Christmas
British Prime Ministers
Royal Biographies
Oliver Cromwell
Chick Lit
Twentieth-century Theatre
Bestsellers (Jeffrey Archer)
It is hard to find a subject that has not been included, so let me try.
Fashion
The 1960s
Political Scandals
Biographies of Horses
A pleasant way to pass an idle half hour. Reading the archive of interviews on the website is absorbing and educative and gives you more ideas for your Must Read list than you could get through in a lifetime. You can only take in three or four at a time if you concentrate on studying the lists properly and include your own Agree or Disagree, Reasons to.
Some give you a whole new way of looking at a subject. I had been working steadily through the new Cambridge Latin series, enjoying it, remembering this, ashamed to have forgotten that, intending to get back up to A Level standard again, but then I read Harry Mount on Five Best Books about Learning Latin only to discover that the Cambridge is apparently despised as ‘soft option teaching’, no rigour, no need to learn the grammar before you can start reading authors. Harry Mount is for the old way of rote learning and I am for that, too, in terms of spellings and times tables, but if a new generation is going to be introduced to the joys and richness of Latin, especially a generation of young people not naturally inclined to the Classics, a new way had to be found and Cambridge has found it. Young people come to Shakespeare now via graphic novel versions of the plays. If they then go on to study the real thing and, even better, see them in the theatre, then that is surely good. Mount is a stickler for the steep and narrow way and of course that was how we all learned Latin and yes, it is the ideal way, the way of the purist. It just doesn’t work for everyone now.
Perhaps the best test of what sort of a reader you are is to try compiling your own Five Best Books on … – and no looking up anything, anywhere, not even on a trip to your own shelves.
I tried it with Five Best Ghost Stories. Five Best Books by and about Edith Wharton, Thomas Hardy and Kitchen Sink writers. And books about Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson.
SNOWDROPS. ACONITES. No crocuses (croci?). Nothing much else, so I spent a fortune on more cut tulips. Orange. Scarlet. Deep red. Plus some pink and white parrot tulips that were twice the price and half the quality. They just flopped over the edge of the vase. You don’t always get what you pay for.
Not the weather for standing around more than two minutes admiring the spring flowers, the weather for clearing out bookshelves. If we ever leave this house, we will not want to start doing it as the removal men are at the door. I thought I had cleared out all the books I would ever need to lose five years ago, but books breed. They beget second copies because you have mislaid the first and buy another, the day before you find the first. They inter-breed, too, so you have The Cambridge Companion to the Bible next to the Oxford ditto, and several copies of Quentin Bell’s biography of Virginia Woolf next to the one by Hermione Lee.
And whenever I go to the shelves to start an hour of de-stocking, I come upon a forgotten treasure. What I found today made me sad.
I have written previously about the last time I met Iris Murdoch, when dementia had taken a pretty strong hold on her but I had forgotten that, only weeks beforehand and not knowing anything about her state, I had sent her my copy of a recently compiled collection of her Occasional Essays, edited by Yozo Muroya and Paul Hullah, and published in Japan by the University Education Press in 1998 in an edition of 500 copies. It is a hardback, without a dustwrapper, but with a photograph on the front of one of Iris’s paintings, of the Royal Oak pub in Steeple Aston, the village in Oxfordshire where she and John Bayley once lived. It has a delightful, unusual colour photograph of Iris on the back, Iris smiling rather mischievously, her badly cut hair (John used to do it with the kitchen scissors and they were probably blunt) raying out with the sun behind it.
I had sent the book to ask Iris if she would sign it, as I had often done with her books in the past. She always obliged and returned them, in previously much-used envelopes or jiffy bags, with several layers of other addresses and franked stamps already there. The book of essays did come back, though it took longer than usual, and the envelope was as pre-loved as ever. I did not know what to make of the inscription, though, and remained puzzled by it until I discovered about her illness.
Clearly, John has put the book in front of her, opened it at the title page and told her what to write. It looks as if it were done by a 3-year-old. It reads SUSAN in primitive wobbly capitals, then there is a vague wandering penline, and then IRIS.
She would not have had any idea what she was writing, or who I was – perhaps even who IRIS was. John must have read it out letter by letter.
Of course, I would never have sent it to her had I known. But I did not know. When I found out, I was horrified, but also did not quite know whether John had tried to be kind to me, and helpful to Iris, in keeping her going, pen to paper, or if he should not have done so but simply sent the book back unsigned, with a line of explanation. I have always felt that, in writing his memoir of her decline and then in allowing it to be filmed – the whole sad, sad detailed saga of it – he had betrayed her and, above all, betrayed her dignity. She had no say, no opportunity to say no – or, of course, to say yes.
/> I look at the handwriting now and I am sad beyond words – yet glad to remember her, too, even in this way, even as I see almost the very last handwriting of that great novelist, powerful thinker. Good friend.
THERE ARE ALWAYS SNOWDROPS for my birthday, and so there are today, a few green spears pushing up. I planted hundreds at the Cotswolds farmhouse over my twenty-five years there and they multiply by themselves as well, so hundreds became thousands. The best display I knew then was in the churchyard at Batsford, near Moreton-in-Marsh. It was worth driving out of one’s way for, and then, if the day was unseasonably warm, sometimes also to see a new foal in the field, nuzzling up to its mother.
No foals here. Norfolk is the least horsey of all the counties I have ever known. I don’t think there is even a hunt. It isn’t much of a sheep place either, though there are a few small flocks round here. No horses. No sheep. Instead, pigs. Pigs and sugar beet. And churches. And the sea. The sea.
I DRIVE OVER TO CLEY and struggle up the shingle bank, one step forward two back, as the heaps of stones shift and slide and re-shape themselves beneath my feet. The sea is roaring. Not even the boldest, hardiest of swimmers today, and no fishermen, no families. Two other people, walking their dogs. I haven’t brought Poppy. Shingle is very unkind to a dog’s feet. I stand and watch the breakers folding over and over and crashing down, sending up creamy spray like massive fireworks bursting open in the sky. Then collapsing before raking and rasping back over the shingle again. As Tennyson said:
Break, break, break
On thy cold grey stones, O sea.
If you have been born and bred by the sea, you can be content watching it for hours. I sit for a while – Walter Benjamin says somewhere that the natural prayer of the soul is attentiveness – but the wind comes off the water, north-easterly, flaying my skin.
I found a great quote for a birthday, too, from May Sarton’s Journal of Solitude: ‘Do not deprive me of my age. I have earned it.’ It gives the lie to all those who want to remain young, and although they surely must know that they cannot do that, they still give it a go, via facelifts and Polyfilla.
INSOMNIA. VERY UNTYPICAL. In the end I start listing all the novels I have read – and when I get desperate, those I mean to read, and, more desperate still, have ever heard of, going through the alphabet. I have no laptop or other e-device in the bedroom, so I cannot cheat via Google and it is far too cold to get out of bed and consult bookshelves. Rule is, as many titles as you like for each letter, but you have to move on after twenty seconds.
A is for … Animal Farm … All Quiet on the Western Front … Alice in …
It is interesting how few new novels leap to my mind whenever I play this game. Everything on my list is either an old favourite or a school or university set text. I suppose that’s because they have been in my memory for so long that they have become embedded, like fossils, and new books are still proving themselves. I should try listing only books published in the last couple of years and see how far I get – not very, is my guess. Or do it with non-fiction. Or children’s books. There would be far fewer titles under each letter, and I would probably fall asleep around G. Which is, after all, the point of the exercise.
FLIPPING THROUGH a couple of books about books, in search of an elusive title I don’t find, I find instead that I can make a pretty decent list of ‘Authors I Have Never Read.’
Sartre. Kafka. Wyndham Lewis. Knausgaard. Italo Svevo. Zane Grey. Orhan Pamuk. Terry Pratchett. Philip K. Dick. Georges Duhamel … and on and on. Interesting how almost all are non-English writers. Of course I have not read every great English novelist or poet, but when I look at a standard chronology I do seem to have covered an awful lot of ground. Of course I have. I read English at a time when one still began with the Anglo-Saxons and moved on down the centuries through Chaucer and Piers Plowman to Shakespeare, the Metaphysical poets and Donne, and so to Dryden and Pope and then, at last, the novel – Richardson, Fielding, Tristram Shandy, the ludicrous Gothic novel … and, the mighty Victorians. English Literature stopped officially at 1880. Then Modern Literature began and that, like American Literature and philology, one could take as a special option, which of course I did.
But I am under-read in whole areas that matter. Or at least I have always understood, aka been told, that they matter. I ought to discover the truth for myself but Kafka never seems to beckon very seductively.
… which hath twenty-eight days clear,
And twenty-nine in each Leap Year.
THE JINGLE WE ALL KNEW and on which I still rely. I must try and pass these on to my grand-daughter. She has been introduced to nursery rhymes and many folk and fairy stories, if only via Disney – and better Disney than not at all.
Time for ‘Thirty days hath September …’
BLOOD-CURDLING LINES. Number 1.
‘Footprints?’
‘Footprints.’
‘A man’s or a woman’s?’
Dr Mortimer looked strangely at us for an instant, and his voice sank almost to a whisper as he answered:
‘Mr Holmes, they were the footprints of a gigantic hound!’
The Hound of the Baskervilles is the best of all Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories. Other people might pick other stories, and it is surprising, given their lasting and worldwide popularity, how few of these there actually are, though Conan Doyle wrote plenty of other things.
Sherlock Holmes has become not just a Victorian detective in a series of short novels and stories, he has become one of those iconic literary figures who take on a life of their own, out of the context of their books. Is 221b Baker Street the best-known fictional address? People visit Haworth Parsonage, Beatrix Potter’s cottage in the Lake District, Dickens’s London house … but how many who visit the commercial museum at 221b Baker Street realise that it is a fabrication?
The nearest book to Conan Doyle’s stories that I can think of which has entered the general public consciousness and has enjoyed as many re-creations in other media by other writers – films, stage plays, television series, new versions simplified for children, and so on – is Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. Scrooge has become a synonym for miser. Even today, millions know who Tiny Tim was. This best known and loved of all Christmas stories, other than the original one in the Bible, this rival to every other ghost story has been re-invented scores of times. And the original novel still comes up as fresh as a daisy.
I wonder if recent TV attempts to tell new Holmes stories, to put him in times, places and situations that would have been alien to him, have brought more sales for the books themselves? I hope so. Because Conan Doyle invented one of the greatest literary characters of all time. The setting, the times, the atmosphere, the detail, but above all the man himself, grab the reader and hold the reader, for life. Close your eyes and picture Holmes’s rooms. You can. See him, his own eyes closed, pipe in mouth, lost to everything around him, while he works out a complicated case which has been brought to him. Hear him play his melancholy violin. Observe him as he leaves the house to get into a hackney cab, deerstalker on head, whistling for the Baker Street irregulars (another version of Fagin’s boys in Oliver Twist). Then see him with magnifying glass in hand, examining a footprint in the soil of a flowerbed beneath a window. See him striding across Dartmoor. See him in disguise, as an old beggar, a cab driver, muffled to the eyes in big coat and scarf … And we can. We do. We could step into his world and be fully familiar with it in a heartbeat. We do not need any film to show us what it looks like.
Holmes preceded many a detective who outstrips PC Plod at every turn, who has a sidekick, who is a loner with a mysterious past, and who has flaws in his character and behaviour. Indeed, most fictional detectives since, private or police, owe a lot to him. It has become part of the template to give them idiosyncrasies, oddities, something that sets them apart from the normal run of men (and they were virtually all men, for a century or more). This, of course, makes for interesting reading and puts them in a class abov
e the average copper, which is as it should be. One can fully understand why the latter got fed up with Sherlock Holmes and his successors, demonstrating their superior brains and powers of deduction.
It is atmosphere as well as the quirkiness of the hero that sets Conan Doyle’s fiction above the rest, and in The Hound of the Baskervilles he excels himself – though what writer could fail, setting his scene on deserted, misty Dartmoor, to which the tree-lined avenue of a lonely house leads?
I have always felt that, although the terrifying, gigantic, baying hound, with its phosphorescent eyes and panting, foggy breath, is a magnificent creation, the murderers, before and after being unmasked, are rather underwhelming, and of course the solution is a cheat. Phosphorous would have half-blinded the dog the second it touched its eyes, and in any case, would never have given off more than a faint gleam. Still, we suspend disbelief and indeed, although once we know explanation and solution we can never unknow them, the story holds up after many a re-reading – which is not the least of its author’s achievements.
A book that cannot be returned to again and again, and still yield fresh entertainment and insights, is only half a book.
De-stocking again. Out go the ephemeral detective stories you will never re-read, and duplicate copies, the books that don’t belong to me, the books that have had coffee or wine spilled over them, been left out in the rain or fallen into the bath and retrieved, more in hope than in expectation of a good outcome.
The most difficult decisions are to do with the small collections I have made. Most people have obsessions and these usually come and go. Once you have fallen out of love with your passion, you do not want books about it to take up several yards of shelf space, though you may feel fond and nostalgic enough to save one. Or perhaps two.