It reminds me a little of Sebald, though I read it long before I had heard of him, because it is set mainly in a small village in East Anglia, the sort of uninteresting, unprepossessing village which has neither beauty, character nor charm and which would probably have held great appeal to him for those very reasons. Dedmayne is a place he might have walked through on one of his long tramps.
There was no great house with park or garden to give character to the village. Progress had laid hold of it fifty years before and pulled down and rebuilt the church, the rectory and most of the cottages. Part of Dedmayne was even ugly; there was a bit of straight flat road near the church, with low dusty hedges, treeless turnip fields, and corrugated iron roofs of barns which might rank with Canada. Dedmayne was on the road to nowhere … the grimy Blue Boar did not induce anyone to stop for tea. Still, being damp it was bound to have certain charms.
In the rectory lives Canon Jocelyn, parson and classical scholar, an old-fashioned, reserved but not cold man whose beloved wife died many years before and whose sons have both long left home and never returned. He has one mentally handicapped daughter who dies early in the novel, and Mary. It is Mary on whom the novel focuses, and Mary’s circumscribed spinster life, good works in the parish, secret poetry-writing, occasional moments of furious frustration and passionate desire to escape, soon quashed. Into Dedmayne, and this bleak but calm and not unhappy life, comes the Reverend Herbert, son of an old friend of Canon Jocelyn and newly appointed to a nearby parish. Mary and Robert Herbert become friends, then close friends, with so much to say to one another, so much in common, so many lonely years to make up for. Of course, Mary falls in love, a love so profound it is almost frightening, and also so open and vulnerable, so hopeful and innocent, and all the more so for being a first love come late. Robert Herbert loves Mary, too, cautiously and silently though he is never, at least at this point, as deeply in love as she is, but they are perfectly suited and seem destined for marriage. And then the blow falls.
The author of The Rector’s Daughter, Flora Mayor, was an unusual woman, the daughter of a clergyman who held the chairs first of classics, then of moral philosophy, at King’s College, London. Before turning her full attention to writing she spent some unlikely years pursuing a career on the stage. She did not live in a bleak vicarage in flat East Anglia but in a cheerful suburban household in Surrey. But the novel is at least emotionally autobiographical. Flora Mayor became engaged to a young architect, who travelled to India to take up a post – she was to join him – and died there of typhoid and her hopes for marriage, children and a happy future were at an end. Unfulfilled, if not unrequited, love was something about which Flora Mayor knew much. I feel a closeness to her whenever I come upon her book. Flora Mayor’s niece, Tess, was a friend, and one of the oldest friends of Dadie Rylands. She was also mother of Victoria Rothschild, who married Simon Gray, whose diaries have brought so much delight.
Sebald. East Anglia. F.M. Mayor. Tess. Victoria. Simon. My own chain of lighted rooms, I suppose.
One thing leading to another takes me down a different route to East Anglia and three shelves of books always kept together.
But I am not quite ready yet to open the door that leads to Benjamin Britten.
Collection, Compilation, Miscellany, Omnibus, Anthology
IN THE UGLY oak bookcase at home was a book bound in maroon called The Anthology of World Literature, well over 1500 pages of the semi-transparent India paper you mainly find now in bibles and prayer books.
It opened, so far as I remember, with a selection of poems and wise sayings from the Ancient Chinese and then from the literature of Persia and Arabia. How romantic those names were. They still are. Persia. Arabia. Transylvania.
I inherited the anthology but I have failed to find it now. It will come to light, propping up some wonky chair. It’s that sort of book.
I loved it as a child for the very reason that one does come to love anthologies – they are puddings full of plums. You open at random, dip, read, open again, dip, read, open … You can spend twenty minutes and find nothing of interest and the next day open it and fall upon something that leads into new worlds or which stays in your mind for the rest of your life.
I can never decide if anthologies are best compiled haphazardly or given a structure. The Rattle Bag, intended for school children but enjoyable at any age, is deliberately haphazard and its editors, Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney, make a good case for that in their introduction.
That is the poetry collection I would rescue if the house were on fire, but there is a lot to be said for an anthology whose contents are like beads on a chain, placed with care, the chain itself forming the common thread.
The Anthology of World Literature did not tell me anything about the mind of the compiler, but that particular dimension is one of the most valuable things about some of the best anthologies. I wish I had been taught by David Cecil. A friend of mine was, and said that, although he enjoyed his tutorials at the time, he did not realise quite what a remarkable experience they had been until much later in life: memorable, enriching, eccentric but never wayward. Contact with a mind as well-stocked as that, and an academic and critical skill so refined, is worth everything. It is also one of the greatest benefits of the Oxbridge one-to-one tutorial system. At King’s, we had tutorials for two, and as people were sometimes ill the two could easily become one, which could be alarming. Oxbridge, however, has always had one-to-one tutorials. Long may they continue (though the present-day financial situation of universities will probably ensure that they do not). Nothing helps focus the attention and train the critical faculties of an undergraduate, perhaps even a first-year aged eighteen and scarcely out of school, better than spending an hour discussing their subject with one of its world experts. And that was the way of it: professors did tutor students in their first term. Having David Cecil’s Library Looking Glass: A Personal Anthology to hand is the next best thing to being his student. He shaped it (loosely) by following the alphabet, but you scarcely notice that and do not really need to. It is not only an extraordinarily wide-ranging, surprising, varied and thought-provoking selection of extracts from prose and verse, it has David Cecil’s comments, observations, explanations, insights, too. Wherever you land in Library Looking Glass you learn something or take away an idea or a nugget of understanding. I have opened it at random on four lines from Herrick’s poem ‘To the Water Nymphs, Drinking at the Fountain’.
Reach, with your whiter hands, to me
Some crystal of the spring;
And I about the cup shall see
Fresh lilies flourishing.
That is charming, but I don’t think it would strike me as much more without Cecil’s comment:
If Herrick had said ‘white’ instead of ‘whiter’ the charm of the first line would be lost. It is the use – now an obsolete use – of the comparative which makes this charm so compelling. It is an ambiguous charm; for, I suppose, that Herrick simply meant that the hands of the water nymphs were whiter than lilies. But the fact that this is only stated implicitly and elliptically suggests that they possess some supreme ultimate radiancy of whiteness, that they are whiter than anything else in the whole world.
Time and again Cecil illuminates a passage in this way, or makes a pertinent suggestion as to an additional meaning.
Whenever I need to remind myself of the aim, object and function of literary criticism, I come to his crystal-clear, succinct summary. Has it ever been bettered?
… [the literary critic’s] aim should be to interpret the work they are writing about and to help readers to appreciate it, by defining and analysing those qualities that make it precious and by indicating the angle of vision from which its beauties are visible.
But many critics do not realise their function. They aim not to appreciate but to judge; they seek first to draw up laws about literature and then to bully readers into accepting these laws … [but] you cannot force a taste on someone else, you cannot argue people in
to enjoyment.
I keep meaning to get that by heart but at least I have the page in which it appears (under C for Criticism) firmly turned-down.
Lord David’s insights are not only literary. He quotes from George Savile, the Marquess of Halifax, the somewhat sobering line, ‘Men must be saved in this world by their want of faith.’
His expansion of this seems very pertinent in years when fundamentalism and the extremes of belief are still in alliance with the forces of darkness and wreaking havoc around the world.
A profound truth though seldom recognised. It is often said that mankind needs a faith if the world is to be improved. In fact, unless the faith is vigilantly and regularly checked by a sense of man’s fallibility, it is likely to make the world worse. From Torquemada to Robespierre and Hitler the men who have made mankind suffer the most have been inspired to do so by a strong faith; so strong that it led them to think their crimes were acts of virtue necessary to help them achieve their aim, which was to build some sort of an ideal kingdom on earth.
But as we have been told on very good authority, the Kingdom of Heaven is not of this world. Those who think they can establish it here are more likely to create a hell on earth.
Some of the alphabetical entries are predictable – Beginnings, Beauty, Humour, Food and Drink – but others are more unusual and give rise to more recondite and provocative entries. I like, under R, The Right Place for Reading, which begins with Lytton Strachey, who says ‘Pope is doubtless at his best in the middle of a formal garden, Herrick in an orchard and Shelley in a boat at sea. Sir Thomas Browne demands, perhaps, a more exotic atmosphere.’
A typical Strachey passage and David Cecil remarks wryly that it is ‘not very practical’. But he agrees that the ‘art of reading does include choosing the right place to read in’. He then describes how he read Turgenev’s House of Gentlefolk: ‘in the front hall of a Munich hotel with people coming and going all round me and the place full of the noise of doors swinging open and shut and visitors giving orders about their luggage’. My eyes opened wider as I read this. I wonder if the Munich hotel was the Four Seasons. If so, I identify with him entirely, as I sat in the foyer there for an hour waiting for a taxi to the airport reading George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, a novel which was my good companion on a dull European book tour and staved off the tedium of many a hotel foyer and departure lounge.
I once had to spend an entire day, from just after seven in the morning until nine at night, on Milan station waiting for a night sleeper, and Graham Greene’s The Quiet American and The End of the Affair are forever associated with that strange, lonely day among the marbled magnificence, echoing waiting rooms, and noisy arrivals and departures. For David Cecil, the foyer of the Munich hotel had such an impact because he had never been abroad before and, he remembers, ‘my new and foreign situation made my imagination receptive to what was to me a new and foreign book’. He adds that ‘It is a pleasure to read The Aspern Papers anywhere. It is an especial pleasure to read it in Venice, its home town.’
Indeed. The books may gain an extra dimension, one may understand something more. But for the most part, does it really matter what book is read where? I have read, or do read, on trains and boats and planes, in bed, on a sofa, in a window seat or a decckhair in the garden, in hotel lounges, on benches, even in queues. Not in cars. But I am puzzled by Strachey’s linking authors to special places in which they are best read. Every linguistic nuance of a complex late Henry James novel might not be fully grasped standing on a crowded commuter train or in a room of noisy schoolchildren – on the other hand, concentration might effectively blot out the outside world and be every bit as intense as in a silent library. I have seen people on the underground reading extremely difficult books as well as the sort that glide over you, leaving no trace. Perhaps a ghost story is enhanced by fireside reading at night with the wind rattling the casement. Perhaps Wuthering Heights might do well under those circumstances, but it doesn’t follow that other, very different, books would not work there.
Is it better to read books about England when abroad, or accounts of travel to far-flung exotic places when safely in a suburban living room? Won’t either do? I think this is a false trail. But if so, it’s one of the very few in David Cecil’s satisfying anthology. It is quite idiosyncratic and reveals not only Cecil himself, teacher, reader, scholar, but is a mirror of his times, although it was published only in 1975, for it is full of authors known intimately to him and his generation of well-educated, civilised men. Of course, he knew well, and quotes in it, many authors who are still read and studied today: Shakespeare and Wordsworth, Dickens and Dostoevsky, Jane Austen, Lewis Carroll, Henry James, Thackeray. But how many now read and are intimate with Hazlitt, Lamb, Matthew Arnold, Chesterton, Izaak Walton, Horace Walpole, Ruskin, Spenser, Robert Bridges or Sir Thomas Browne, outside small corners of academia? It would have been taken for granted that an educated man like David Cecil would know them all. I wonder when that ceased to be the case.
A Book by its Cover
MY HUSBAND WAS once given the most extraordinary – I cannot really say book, it was more an artefact or a piece of sculpture. It did contain print on paper and it was bound, but any resemblance to what you would usually think of when you use the word ‘book’ ended there.
It was a copy of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. It was a couple of feet tall and the front was made of stone or possibly marble, with a bas-relief sculpture of the artist’s vision of the play’s inner meaning. It weighed several pounds, it came from Italy, and there were only a handful like it; all were to be given to libraries except for one, which was a gift to the actor Sir John Gielgud, and this, which sat on our kitchen table looking impressive, important and odd. We had no idea what to do with it because it was not a book that could be read nor was it, to our eyes, an attractive object. It was a hybrid thing and it was eventually presented to some library. I wonder if they were glad of it. Books like that are collector’s pieces, bought for their bindings alone. They often have little to do with reading and nor do leather bindings, however beautifully tooled in pretty colours. Some of the people who have row upon row of leatherbound books are owners of ancestral libraries in stately homes, but, although they can be very impressive to look at, those rooms of towering shelves always seem dead. Nobody would dare turn down a corner of a page or make a mark in any margin.
The Folio Society’s raison d’être is fine binding, though of a mass-produced kind. The books are beautifully printed on good quality paper, illustrated by specially commissioned contemporary artists, and the bindings are always striking, never fuddy-duddy, and each one comes in a stout slip case. They look good on the shelves, and the older ones were covered in real cloth which is more pleasing to handle than the synthetic of more recent titles. Yet there is something dead about them, too, something too perfect, produced for display rather than use. There are perhaps a couple of dozen of them scattered about the house, mainly odd volumes of Trollope, with a copy of Cranford and an Edgar Allen Poe thrown in, but these have been parted from their slip cases, read, handled. They would not pass muster among people who dust their books every week but they give pleasure nevertheless. But I would suspect anyone who had shelf after shelf of them, probably in alphabetical order, of not being a proper reader.
Dust jackets are another matter. To publishers, jackets are second only to content in importance – in some cases they may even come first. ‘A good selling cover’ is a thing to be desired in the trade and many a book has sold fewer copies than it deserved because of the wrong jacket. They should not have the power and influence they do – but they do.
I do cherish some of my books for their covers – Virginia Woolf with the Vanessa Bell covers, the Nonesuch Dickens with the original illustrations on the front, the early Ian Flemings.
I have occasionally bought a book as an investment because I would rather put my money into them than into stocks and shares and, just as you can always drink a cellar of fine wine if the bo
ttom drops out of the market, you can always read a book (and read it again and again, which is more than can be said of the wine).
Some years ago a friend had a salutary lesson in the importance of dust jackets which has made me take more care of those I know to be of some value. He had a serious collection of first editions of twentieth-century poetry, including all of T.S. Eliot, and of first editions of E.M. Forster, D.H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf and some others of equal rank. He also owned some fine private press books – The Chaucer Head, Kelmscott. He liked to look, to handle and to read his books but he was always careful not to mark or damage them. He did, however, have a dislike of dust jackets which he regarded rather like brown paper bags for groceries or envelopes containing letters. He thought they were of no interest or significance and he preferred the bindings they concealed. So he simply tore them off as soon as he bought his books and threw them away.
Then he came to me for advice. He needed money to help pay for his youngest son’s education and proposed to sell some of his book collection. Did I know of a good dealer who would give him a fair price? I did. My friend compiled a list of what he wished to sell and sent it down. The dealer proposed an immediate visit. First editions of The Four Quartets, The Waste Land, A Passage to India, A Room with a View, To the Lighthouse, as well as a juicy selection of private press volumes, do not come the way of an antiquarian bookseller every day of the week.
He arrived and was shown the private press books first. He named a good price. Then they crossed the room to the Modern Firsts.
When he saw the rows of them, immaculate and in near-fine condition but every single one without its dust jacket, he wept, and when he heard that these had been torn off and thrown away, he wept again. The books were worth something, of course, but with their original near-mint dust jackets they would have been worth ten times as much. My friend was flabbergasted – indeed, for a while, he was disbelieving, so that the dealer suggested he ask a colleague to reinforce what he had said. They contacted him by phone and my friend spoke to him, only to hear the same story. The rest of the money for his son’s education had to be found some other way.