Here are four whole long shelves of books by and about Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Set. Now this is difficult. Of course I will keep copies of VW’s novels, her A Writer’s Diary and a couple of biographies – probably the short, succinct one by Quentin Bell, which contains nearly all you need to know, and the long one by Hermione Lee, which brings things up to date – well, up to a decade ago anyway. I doubt if much that is new, except a pencilled shopping list, is likely to come to light now, though occasionally there are surprises in the ‘about’ category. But the Woolf ocean has been pretty well trawled.
Do I keep the complete sets of her letters and diaries? Do I keep the books about VW and someone else – Vita Sackville-West, Lytton Strachey? Do I keep Leonard’s own books?
And then there’s the lit crit. Some of it is very good. Informative. Illuminating. Much is transient – the fashionable gender and LGBT and childhood abuse stuff can go. The Cambridge Companions always stay. But recollections of VW’s great aunts and her housekeepers?
What about the principal figures of ‘Bloomsbury’ – the books about Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, their art and their houses?
The essays by or about other Bloomsbury-ites – John Maynard Keynes, Lytton Strachey again, Dora Carrington, Roger Fry? Even Dame Ethel Smyth?
Oh help.
My Marilyn Monroe obsession is more easily dealt with because these are mainly books of photographs, the same or similar ones endlessly repeated. I pick out the best and most representative. I wonder if almost as many people have jumped on the MM bandwagon as on the Virginia Woolf one.
There really is nothing new on the biography front. I will keep Sarah Churchwell’s very good book about Marilyn but ditch the rest. That reduces about forty books down to four in no time.
Wood engravings. I used to have a passion for them. I still love them. But not three shelves’ worth of love.
Medieval monasticism, with a sub-heading, ‘Cistercians in the Eleventh Century’. Big books. Small books. Academic books. Topographical. Illuminated.
Elizabeth Bowen, all her work and four biographies, plus too much lit crit.
Benjamin Britten and Aldeburgh. Suffolk and the Festival. Shelf after shelf. I doubt if they will be of interest to anyone now. The centenary was the time to dispose of the best. My Britten obsession is long over.
And so it goes on …
People say they can never part with a book. I can. As fast as I get one out of the back door, two new ones come in through the front anyway.
ANY DAY NOW I will look up from my desk and see the woman from up the lane, with her fishing net, peering down our drains. Normal for Norfolk.
The frogs are on the move from wherever they have been for months – under stones, in muddy holes (I don’t know, one never sees them) – along the lane, through the grass and the ditches, making their way to our pond for the mating season. Soon there will be frogspawn, that joy of small children’s nature outings, and then tadpoles in jars on the classroom window ledge. But on their mysterious journeyings, some frogs find their way into our drains and that would be that, were it not for the eccentric neighbour. She comes pottering along and is to be seen lifting grids and manhole covers and, from time to time, plunging her fishing net into them, occasionally to pull it out full of frogs. Well, possibly not ‘full’, but containing the odd one. These she transports lovingly and safely across to the pond and plunges the net in, to release the dear little amphibians. It is a mission of mercy and of conservation, though I wouldn’t bother, the world having as many frogs and toads as it can handle. But there is no arguing with the neighbour, so we let her probe into our drains to her heart’s content.
MARCH
CAME IN LIKE A LION. The first early tulips in our garden are flayed by the wind.
Driving from Salthouse, I was almost hit by a heron lofting up from the marsh to my left, long umbrella legs dangling. Pterodactyl.
Am reading The New Book of Snobs by the versatile D. J. Taylor. It is fairly spot on but makes one or two incorrect assumptions about the aristocracy. The thing about snobbery, surely, is that it is harmless if it means that people look up to others, never when it means that they look down. Andrew, 11th Duke of Devonshire, was the least snobbish man one could meet, and cared greatly for the estate people and those who came to visit Chatsworth and the Park. He never patronised. But he knew his place and his ducal role all right. I daresay he looked up, in the traditional, hierarchical way, to royalty, as forming the only social layer above his own. Some dukes have been – probably still are – absolute shits. But then, so are plenty of other people. It is not a question of their having the money and the land and the houses, it’s what they do with them. Andrew gave away a lot of money, and he also shared widely what he regarded as his only ‘on loan’.
Which brings me to his wife Debo. D. J. Taylor called her ‘the most terrifying woman I have ever met’. She could be, though I didn’t find her so – but then, very few people terrify me in that way. I am not awed by rank as rank.
A friend says that Debo was as hard as nails. Nearly twenty years ago, I enjoyed thinking up, editing (with Sophy Topley, her younger daughter) and publishing Debo’s book, Counting My Chickens … We had massive amounts of fun. Faxes were all the rage in 2002 and Debo never stopped asking questions by fax, demanding daily sales figures and telling jokes. It brightened up the late afternoons considerably. My small publishing company sold many thousands of that book, and it rode high on the bestseller lists for ages. Her dedication reads ‘To the co-editors, with love’. So I must have done something right.
But one day, about a year after it was published, I received a tiny envelope in the post which contained a letter on a tiny sheet of paper. I am not exaggerating. She was given to using very small sheets of headed notepaper inside very small envelopes. In this letter, Debo told me that she had put together a second volume of her pieces – my heart leaped – and that it was to be called Home to Roost. John Murray was to publish it. It was a done deal.
What I did wrong and why she did not think my small publishing house worthy of her any more, I will never know, because we never communicated again. I was deeply hurt and very upset. We had been friends, as I thought, as well as working colleagues. I loved her and I admired her enormously. I put together and had privately printed a book of lovely ‘tributes’ – wrong word – To Debo, on Her 85th Birthday. From Her Friends. So many funny, warm, witty, delightful letters to and about her came in after I requested people to write something about her, and the Prince of Wales wrote a loving foreword. It made her cry when she got her copy.
I loved Debo. I admired her.
So, one never knows. Hey ho.
FUNNY OLD COUNTY, Norfolk, though as I have only lived here for five years I suppose that I am not entitled to comment. And I will never feel ‘Norfolk’ any more than I felt ‘Gloucestershire’. What does this mean? It is a sort of patriotism, of the right kind. It is an instinctive rooted-ness in the corner of the country where one first saw the light of day. It is attachment. Love. Yes. But an adopted county can never be the same. I have lived in other counties for far longer than I lived in Yorkshire, where I was born, but they haven’t left much trace.
Will Norfolk? No. There is a lot of county snobbery here. The ‘royal county’. Lots of deference. Then there is the red-trousered brigade, in August and on fine weekends. There is also a small corner of those aristo-hippies, living in some of the nicest old houses. Posh names and no money. They are Lefties, too, which I think must be a hangover from their Flower Power youth. Otherwise, there are still plenty of Norfolk born-and-bred builders and flint masons and tractor and sugar beet men. You still hear the accent round here. I wish I could do it but I’ll never ‘get’ Norfolk, any more than I can get Liverpool. I can even do Northern Ireland before those. And Edinburgh Morningside.
WE ARE OUT ON A LIMB here, of course. Too far from the train. Too far for anyone to pop over for a night. Bad roads. Awful road accidents. No motorwa
ys. It is not as flat as Noel Coward said – there are hills round this house and within the nearby five square miles. But not hills as in Yorkshire and the Cotswolds. Not serious hills.
I love the skies. The sea. The fact that it is locked off. But if I ever go from Norfolk, I won’t have left any of my heart behind.
Meanwhile, friends have gone to live in Theresa May’s village in Berkshire.
Talking of which, the usual crop of political memoirs bow the legs of the bookshop tables around now. Why do they all think they must write so much? Oh, the money – yes, of course. But if they cut their books down to a manageable size they might sell more copies. And people might read them.
SPRING IS NOT GREEN at all, it’s yellow. Aconites. Crocuses. Daffodils. Gorse. Primroses. Forsythia. Buttercups and dandelions. This year, because the winter has been so mild, the trees are already just brushed with the first leaves. In some lights they look pale pink, in others orange. Then lemony lime.
Last night, I thought there was a tawny owl in the sitting room, its twoo-whit twoo-whoo was so loud and clear and near. Then I realised that it was sitting on the chimney pot and its voice was echoing down into the wood burner, which was out but whose doors were open. Extraordinary sound. I went to look out into the night and heard another, somewhere beyond, answering. Two wagtails were chasing one another over the book store roof, and a female blackbird was scurrying away from a male, but not really, under the hedge.
I ANSWER A LETTER from an aspiring novelist – not one of those who just wants to make ‘as much money as J. K. Rowling’ (which was in a recent message) but who actually wants to write for writing’s sake. To tell stories. To see her name on a book jacket. I am sure that making a living from her writing has indeed entered her thoughts and I could copy out one of those surveys which show what the miserable annual income of 90 per cent of novelists is. But why be a killjoy at this stage? She will find out soon enough.
I was lucky to be mentored and befriended at an early age and stage by the novelist and critic Pamela Hansford Johnson and her husband C. P. Snow. And maybe here I go again, lamenting that ‘nobody reads their books now’. That is almost certainly true. Snow’s novels have dated badly. The eleven-volume Strangers and Brothers sequence, autobiographical, of course – Snow was a recorder, not a man of imagination – trace the life of a young man, Lewis Eliot, from a poor background in Leicester – where Snow himself was born – to the Corridors of Power. So many things have changed in public life and in the sort of career path such a man could have, beginning in the 1920s, that it is inevitable that the series seems somewhat fusty. But there is one outstanding book in the sequence which can be read and re-read today with as much involvement and excitement as when it was first published. That is The Masters.
Any novel has a headstart when the core plot focuses on an election – rather like the contents of a will or the discovery of a body. In this case, the Master of a Cambridge college – not named but modelled on Snow’s own old college, Christ’s – is dying. He has been an exemplary Master and a good man, he has cancer, and his doctors have advised that he should not be told that his illness is terminal, so that he can enjoy his last months in peace and optimism. That, of course, would not happen now, but it was common medical advice up to thirty years ago or so. Naturally, a new Master must be chosen and so factions start to form within the college. There are two stand-out candidates, unless the college ‘looks outside’ – and in those days again, such a thing almost never happened. (Now it is the norm at both Oxford and Cambridge.)
The candidates are Paul Jago, a warm, sympathetic, genuine man who wears his heart on his sleeve, who is liked, even loved, and who would make a good Master in the mould of the current one. He has two major flaws. He is volatile and emotional – not a steady pair of hands. And he has an appalling wife – an uppity, rude, self-absorbed, pompous, snobbish woman. Only he can see her good qualities, such as they are, and then only because he looks with the eyes of love. But in truth Jago knows everything about his wife’s character only too well.
The second candidate is Thomas Crawford, an eminent scientist, important member of the Royal Society, efficient, self-confident and entirely self-blind. He is cold and has few friends and cares not a jot about it. He will make the best Master in many ways, but he has few redeeming qualities and no human warmth.
The college duly divides and the Jago faction seem to have a clear majority, and to go on having it – until one or two un expected events occur. Minds and sides are changed, and the result is no longer a foregone conclusion.
As a novelist, Charles Snow was more interested in character than plot, but in The Masters he engages our passion to know who voted for whom and what the outcome was, as well as the fascinating machinations and plottings of a caucus which is sure it can, and will, get its candidate in. He found the ambitions of men in their spheres of work – academia and politics and world affairs, most of all – of endless interest and he analyses them in each of the novels in the sequence. Business was of lesser importance, but the dynastic sense counted for quite a lot. He also looks into love and marriage but in this area he does not always convince, though he understood hopeless passion very well.
Charles Snow was very like his books. He was generous and kind to me, as a young writer, and those things count, in the end, far more than some quirks of character and behaviour. What survives of his desire to be important in the world, and his ambition to be influential in it, may be precious little, but his novels deserve to be read – and not only as accurate surveys of British life in the twentieth century but as sympathetic and compassionate studies of humanity.
IF I HAD BEEN ASKED who invented writing, I would have replied correctly: the Babylonians. I don’t know how I know this but I do. Yet if I think back to how long ago cave men drew pictures on cave walls, I presume writing must have come later. But maybe not much later, in overall terms. I presume wrong. The Babylonians invented writing only 5400 years ago. That sounds a very long time ago but, after all, Jesus lived 2000 years ago. After writing came alphabets came words came languages came scribes came scrolls came reading …
I have not yet discovered when man discovered numbers, and so mathematics. Or did man ‘discover’ numbers? Did man discover words? Or were they there all the time, like the stars and the planets, waiting to be discovered?
I pick up a book and look at it and then remember how even more recently it was that man invented printing. Pretty much yesterday.
My head buzzes.
TOOK SOME BOOKS to the charity shop. Included a couple of my own, spare paperbacks.
Nice lady serving. ‘Oh, thank you so much. Oh, and a Susan Hill book! She is very popular.’
SH: I’m pleased to hear it.
NLS: Actually – here are two on the shelf that are signed copies.
SH: Wow!
NLS: Oh yes. (Leans over confidentially.) We can get 10p more for them if they are signed.
THE GEESE WENT OVER in one of their magnificent skeins, reminding me that they will be off back to Siberia before long and then we will have to wait a few weeks for the hirundines. It is a strange thing. The skies are full of huge, ungainly, slow-moving geese. I watch them descend, swirling round, lower and lower, until they touch down on the marshes one day, and then the same skies are empty, blank and vast and grey or blue. But anticipation builds again. The first swallow appears, usually on a telegraph wire, the advance party before days, even sometimes a week or two, later, and then another anxious wait for the rest, and then for the house martins to dip towards their old nests in the eaves, vanish, return, swoop fast into them and so start the old dance. The swifts come last and leave first, and so are the most precious. They never land. The only time they are settled and with firm ground, as it were, beneath their feet, is when they are born and brought up in their nest. The second they are fledged, they are airborne for pretty well the rest of their lives. They should be here by the first week in May, but sometimes it is later, and the
n it is a worry that they will not have time to rear a brood. Somehow they always do, and often two. But by the first week in August, they, too, those acrobats of the skies, will be gone thousands of miles just as the geese are thinking of returning across thousands more, from a different direction.
How astonishing it all is. And somehow, very wasteful of energy and time. Yet if they were here all the year round, would we like that? Would there be room? We certainly would not value them so much.
THESE LAST FEW DAYS have been occupied by actors not birds, as I took a trip to London for various meetings, and a visit to the theatre to see An Inspector Calls. Is this the only work by J. B. Priestley that not only has survived, but will go on surviving? When We are Married is an excellent play and I wish someone would revive that in a modern form as striking and fresh as An Inspector. Why don’t they?
Nothing else of his holds up. No one reads his novels now, or his essays or his stories. Although Time and the Conways is put on from time to time.
He would not have been philosophical about this. JB cared dreadfully, painfully, about how his work was perceived and received, just as he cared desperately about his status and how he was seen by the world beyond his study. He longed to be awarded the Order of Merit – the highest honour of all that the Queen can bestow – and eventually, rather too late, he was.
He played the bluff, gruff Yorkshireman – and once he was, but he had moved far away from Bradford in every sense. He liked spacious living, a bit of grandeur, the wine and cigars and staff that money could buy. He could be self-important but he had a good heart, and he was generous with his hospitality.
He and his third wife Jacquetta were an unlikely pair. They had caused a certain amount of scandal by leaving their marriages for each other – scandal which would barely register now. By the time I met them, they were a settled, conventional – and devoted – married couple.