By the back door

"You won't like that," says VR almost always when I leaf through one of her library books or secondhand paperbacks. Usually she's right but this time there were obscure reasons.

The author, Elizabeth Jane Howard, has a long-nosed patrician face which women tend to regard as beautiful. Men less so. I tried her once but no go. Later she surprised me by marrying Kingsley Amis (author of Lucky Jim; father of Martin) who had a reputation as a toper. Facially they seemed ill-matched. As if Grace Kelly had hooked up with Charles Bronson. I stored that factoid away.

VR's EJH acquisition, The Cazelet Chronicles, consists of five novels, each 400-plus pages. I was taking a risk. If I enjoyed number one, The Light Years, there'd be four more door-stoppers. But for some reason VR had challenged my moxie. Plus the Amis thing.

The Light Years starts with a family tree which includes the servants. Very, very necessary. I was forever querying how Edward was related to Rachel. And who were Brig and Duchy. Yes folks, I’d entered a saga but the reading was easy bar EJH’s repeated finger-nail scraper: "bored of". An account of a  difficult childbirth gripped me and I was away. The Cazelet Chronicles were best-sellers but this was well observed. Not always the case. I’m now into book two.

Big deal. My reading choices are heavily prejudiced but light may shine through. I’m not alone, though true intellectuals are more cautious about such admissions. And then some books we read because we think we should, others arrive more circuitously. A fancy cover, or, say, a recommendation by a soccer player. We can’t read everything. A year ago I’d have said no chance I’d read an EJH novel. But being adamant doesn’t always work. Nor should it.

Nothing to do with EJH. This prunus is the only tree I've ever planted. For
VR's birthday, about fifteen years ago. It has flourished and I'm astonished
 even gratified. It's at its best now, early spring and thus I've marked it

Spine game

I find myself reading Jay Mcinerney’s Bright Precious Days - post-9/11 New Yorkers snorting coke (and worse), fornicating with their best friends’ wives, spending money and setting a bad example to their offspring. More interesting is the way I acquired it.

Recently our supermarket set aside a table for unwanted books. Collection boxes prodded the consciences of those who took away their choices. An optimistic project, I thought. Hereford is notorious for mean-spirited tipping. Happily I was wrong. Quite quickly several thousand pounds were accumulated for local charities and the scheme continues.

Eventually I was drawn in. I say “eventually” because the scheme first needed to pass through its self-purging stage – ridding itself of Da Vinci Codes and of Fifty Shades of Greys. An invasion of Readers Digest collections, bound in shining (ie, unread) false leather, further hindered the commercial flow. Then, predictably, Ian McEwan titles started appearing and I could start playing Spine Game.

How is it one can narrow down second-hand book searches via the meagre information on the spine? Often it may depend on a no-longer-fashionable typeface. Or less lurid colours. Or a more modest rhetoric in the title. Another giveaway is whether the cover is scuffed, for scuffing is a sign of love. No one reads Dan Brown twice.

More important still is the conviction that in swathes of junk treasures will be rare. One must pay attention. My friend the late Joe Hyam was especially good at this. How galling it was to see him picking out a horribly shabby Everyman of Burke’s essays which my eyes had slid over. I mean Everyman spines are immediately identifiable by their poorly conveyed information.

No Everymans at the supermarket. But the first fifty pages of BPD were dense and technically well written. Spine Game continues.

A word about giving

"And the greatest of these is charity."

Yet regular donations to charity can be distinctly unsatisfying, reminding us only of the myriad other charities we not supporting.
 
VR donates to several serious and obvious charities but also to one that seems less serious. Book Aid sends second-hand books to bookless areas in Africa. Very commendable. But here's the bit that caught VR's eye and heart: these books are non-instructional and non-improving, they must be entertaining, fictional obviously, light-hearted.

Yes, yes, a child dead from malnutrition cannot be reached by an adult reading aloud from Where The Wild Things Are. But switching from Book Aid to UNICEF leaves others dead from malaria. One would need the judgment of Solomon and the pockets of Croesus to get it entirely right. Books are a form  of light and that too is in short supply.

Me? I donate, otherwise I pursue my own selfish aims. Viz:
 
Hardline Hope, a novel (8100 words)
... the (wealthy) farmer, besotted by her remote aristocracy, soldiered on, using Remy Martin to ease him through the bad bits. It was only when cuckoldry became continuous and he started driving his giant John Deere with a hip-flask close to hand that resolution loomed. One grim day, typical of the Fens, the tractor lurched over a dyke, shed its driver and then - vindictively it seemed – ran over him as it plunged into Wabberthwaite Drain... Surrounded by acre after acre of the vegetable fields he owned, Greta’s husband, himself reduced to the status of one of his sprout plants, lay in the county hospital sustained by tubing and pumps while his extended family used the courts to (a) have the pumps turned off, and (b) disinherit his widow on the grounds that she rather than the tractor had precipitated his downfall.

Delights of huckstering

Last weekend VR's group showed off its paintings at an exhibition in a village hall off the Abergavenny Road. Since VR had volunteered to man the stand alone on Sunday I kept her company throughout a longish day.

My involvement with the group is normally limited to driving VR to and from the hall on Friday afternoons and attending the Christmas lunch. But since literature is also an art I was encouraged to display my published novels, Gorgon Times and Out Of Arizona. Didn't sell a single copy despite marking them down attractively and letting everyone know they were even cheaper through my blog.

But I did learn something about human behaviour.

I sat distant from my books so I wasn't actually hovering. I could watch  without menace. I'd listed myself as Ewyas Harold Art Group, Chauffeur-Novelist, and that - for a moment - caught their eye, before they passed on, intent unsurprisingly on paintings.

Both books have a plot summary on the back page but that was nearly always ignored. The least-engaged merely stared at the front covers for five or six seconds, trying to work out how the books fitted in with an art exhibition. A small percentage picked up one of the books, flicked pages without stopping, trying to guess the contents through the process of osmosis, then put the book down. A tiny percentage (let’s be honest: three) picked up the book, read the summary, spent between ten and twenty seconds reading. Then put the book down.

I blame myself. Novel writing is a lonely business and this sort of thing makes it even lonelier. But then if I’d wanted company I’d have taken up square-dancing. Or pole squatting.

Only 300 days (approx.) to go

E-MAIL NOSTALGIA
CAST (in order of appearance)
Daniel (Ysabelle's partner)
Occasional Speeder (RR's younger daughter)
Ysabelle/Bella (RR's granddaughter)

--------

Daniel (Famed for fearing "different" food): Remember when I had mussels? Good times.

Occasional Speeder: Yeah – I remember – the “Allo Allo” thing came on – and Bella was like that Peter Kay sketch about the wedding disco DJ: “What’s he saying – eh? Oh he said “mussels” I heard that.”

So off we went to the centre with BG (Big Grandad - ie, RR) and got mussels off a man with no teeth. Then LG (Little Grannie - ie, VR) got involved cleaning them– then I did the stuffing and Bella and LG were sorting stuff – then LG  cooked them but best of all – you tried them. And you ate quite a few. But I think you knocked wine on mine – but it was ok because there were many.

L’Equipe lay on the table, a lilo bobbed on the pool, and wine and cider were distributed. It was warm and lovely and we never wanted to come home.

Don’t miss it at all…

Daniel: Haha, I miss it. lots.

Ysabelle: Me too.

Occasional Speeder (in e-mail to RR): Today we are sad.

PROUST PICKINGS
Another short extract from Swann’s Way:

The hour when an invalid who has been obliged to start on a journey and to sleep in a strange hotel, awakens in a moment of illness and sees with glad relief a streak of daylight shewing under the bedroom door. Oh joy of joys! It is morning…. (But) the ray of light beneath his door is extinguished. It is midnight, someone has turned out the gas, the last servant has gone to bed…

Invisible milestones

ONE OF LIFE'S OBLIGATIONS It's 06.20, nearly time to get up. My Longines sitting on my bedside chest-of-drawers says so and my Longines is never wrong. My Longines cost a fortune, a gift from VR thirty or forty years ago; its clear face and needle-sharp hands tell Swiss truth.

I reach over to put it on and I know - sinkingly - something's wrong. A familiar wrongness which has happened perhaps a dozen times. Sweat from my wrist has rotted the stitching of the strap and the buckle is now detached. The penalty of wearing a leather strap. But, alas, there is no alternative.

Once I substituted a plastic strap which lasted longer. But brother Nick, now in a rest home, his mind adrift with Alzheimer's, told me the watch was too good for plastic and I immediately agreed.

A metal strap? Sixty years ago a sub-editor on the newspaper that employed me as a tea-boy said metal straps were "a mark of the beast". I immediately agreed with him, too.

Leather straps cost £20 a pop. I can afford that and must. VR and Nick deserve it; I'm reminded of them both when I tell the time. Which is now 07.06.

FRENCH BIGGIE Another short extract from Proust's A la Recherche. The key is to read it slowly because it, like the Longines, is concerned with time. Time cannot be hurried.

I would ask myself what o'clock it could be, I could hear the whistling of trains, which, now nearer and now farther off, punctuating the distance like the note of a bird in a forest, shewed me in perspective the deserted countryside through which a traveller would be hurrying towards the nearest station, the path that he followed being fixed for ever...

Who's for new? Not I

Getting older means fewer opportunities to do something new - you've tried most things that tempt you. This isn't necessarily a bad thing.

I recently replaced the seat on the downstairs loo. I've done this before so it wasn't new. But a day later one of the plastic buffers between seat and porcelain detached itself and disappeared. Flushed into oblivion no doubt.

VR complained, Said she felt unsafe, sitting there, rocking.

I improvised with four door-stops. I re-shaped them then needed four washers. Found them - just four! The work took less than an hour. Lav-seat buffers are new to me and, briefly, I was able to give old age the finger.

But you see what I'm reduced to. Lav-seat buffers aren't viable cocktail party chat. Many cocktail drinkers wouldn't admit to sitting on a lav-seat even in their own home.

OK. Old age may deny us the new, but it may also encourage us - beneficially - to distrust it.

Here at Chez Robinson books flow, helping VR to meet her annual target of 230 titles. I read hardly any of them. Yet I still read.

Waiting on my Kindle is a new translation of Proust's A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu and an illustrated (!) version of Joyce's Ulysses. Aha, you say, many people have unread Proust and Joyce on their Kindle. But I've done the former three times and the latter (I think) four times. I look forward to doing both again.

So, you snarl, I’m just boasting. Maybe. My problem is I'm unconvinced anything new will stack up. I lack the energy to waste time on disappointment. Both these books are good - if difficult - reads with more to reveal. Watch as I adopt the foetal position.

Johann via John

With books I am a non-sentimentalist. To hell with incunabula, with morocco-bound spines, with gold-leaf print, with hand-illuminated manuscripts, with silly typefaces. I never fondle books or have orgasms about their jackets. I want to take books with me to the bath and, if disaster occurs (it hasn’t yet), I’ll wring them out and resume reading. The egregious Beatles once hymned the paperback writer; to a harpsichord continuo, and with less fuss, I align myself with the herd - I don't celebrate being a paperback reader, I just get on with it. Talk contents to me, never The Folio Society.

All of which takes me - in a metaphor I am adapting for this post - to the year 1900 or thereabouts. The stirrings of quantum mechanics started about then after which, say the hacks and Grub Street mealie-grubs, Newtonian physics was cast into darkness. Not true, of course. Since few of us are intellectually affected by the concerns of theoretical physics, the Newtonian sort continues to work just fine.

And I too must make room for a special case within my Paperbacks Are Best principle; the 1% exception. Certain books, all non-fiction, deserve their hardback status chez Robinson. They will never be read in the bath because they are too heavy. Their modest sales mean they are unlikely to reappear as paperbacks. I want them around as large visible reminders of what they say

One such arrived at Christmas, a gift from VR. An orchestral conductor, in his prime, still internationally renowned, describes the love of his life. It's longish (628 pp), has footnotes, and, I fear, has an OTT title. But it's factual and relentlessly impassioned. It breaks the general rule about paperbacks. It encourages me to sip. 

Who needs lit.crit?

My tattered Ulysses is now a non-working monument, the words contained slimly in my Kindle, their weightiness (avoirdupois) diminished, their literary weight unaffected. But my re-read, the fourth or fifth, has been delayed. VR is presently following the 22-CD audio integrale. A few minutes ago Private Carr punched Stephen Daedalus's mug and gentle Leopold Bloom picked up the pieces. I came upstairs reluctantly.

Never mind me. Why don't I hand over to John M. Woolsey, US district court judge, who in 1933 lifted the ban on Ulysses, claimed to be too raw for American sensibilities.

Woolsey read Ulysses "once in its entirety" and "the passages of which the Government complains several times." He admits it is not an easy book to read or understand.

"Joyce has attempted - it seems to me with astonishing success - to show how the screen of consciousness with its ever-shifting kaleidoscopic impressions carries... not only what is in the focus of each man's observation of the actual things about him but also... past impressions, some recent and some drawn up by association from the domain of the subconscious."

Woolsey adds that by being loyal to his technique and not funking its implications Joyce has been misunderstood and misrepresented. The "dirty" words are old Saxon words, well-known to men and "I venture to many women."  Nevertheless there is no "dirt for dirt's sake".

Legally, does Ulysses "stir the sex impulses"? Woolsey checked his impressions with two respected friends and they agreed with him. The book is not pornographic and its "net effect on them was only that of a somewhat tragic and very powerful commentary on the inner lives of men and women".

Ulysses is "a sincere attempt to devise a new literary method for the observation and description of mankind". Good on yer, judge.

But let's be original

READING REALITIES Part three:
The Rewards

Let's make one thing absolutely clear. I am trying not to list obvious rewards. Let's assume that moral and intellectual uplift, unexpected insights, rollocking entertainment, novelty, brilliant authorial style, acceptable grammar and punctuation are all givens. Let's look for things that haven't been said before in waffling abstractions,

A book can confirm your prejudices. And the darker and more contemptible such prejudices are, the more thrilling it is to find agreement. One assumes Mein Kampf raced a lot of motors - not mine or yours, perhaps - and a number of readers enjoyed reaching page 720. You may be waiting for a novel which turns dark chocolate into a religious experience; I frankly am not.

Books - often the more rubbishy the better - may separate you from the rest of the human race. Especially in dentists’ waiting rooms. It is not for me to say whether this is a worthy aim. All I can suggest is that recognised masterpieces are less likely to do the job. George Eliot's Romola (definitely not a masterpieces and not fun either) would, for instance, offer little help.

Appearing to read difficult books confers status. Many people holding soft-science degrees, never having got past Northanger Abbey, managed to advance their standing by buying A Brief History of Time. But not for long. A very brief history.

Not all so-called difficult books turn out to be difficult. Proust's opus is comedic. Having cracked this nut you can dine out on the achievement. I know. I have.

Re-reading children's books and talking about the plots in a remote academic way is easy to do and unsettling for those forced to listen. Graham Greene spoke about Beatrix Potter's genius though it's rumoured he did it for the money.

Down there in black and white

READING'S REALITIES. Part two: Delusions

Are book readers entirely aware of their pastime?

I stayed one night at the country cottage of a BBC bigwig. His wife was said to be a great reader and acres of bookshelves reinforced this. Then I noticed something slightly unusual: all the Iris Murdochs clearly bought as new hardbacks, one after the other. Similarly with Drabble, Byatt and others.

I reflected. Realised how rarely I bought fiction in new hardback form. Don't get me wrong. If you've got money and space this is the way to go. No hanging about at the library, no waiting for the paperback. A standing order at the bookshop and bingo, you're up with the critics.

I reflected again. Many readers are prepared to admit loving certain authors. The bond is strong and unashamed. Yet how many are prepared to show their love in practical terns - by buying their favourite's books as hardbacks. As a tribute if you like. How many, like me, practice delay and eventually click on ABE for second-hand versions?

How many say I adore reading, love the feel and smell of books, slaver at the prospect of somehing new by X. And then take the cheapo route?

How well-read are well-read readers? I decided to read all Trollope but stopped halfway - about twenty titles. Trollope isn't difficult, I was wearied. If I were claiming to be well-read (which I'm not) had I met the necessary quota for loquacious Anthony? Only half of Dickens, Meredith, Balzac, Anne Tyler and William Faulkner to go. Do I have time? Did I ever have time? I rode motorbikes, climbed rock faces, drank many pints of ale and fantasised about the unapproachability of women.

Amazingly some people have accused me of being bookish.

By which I was blindsided

Books which, in one way or another, surprised me, some at first reading, some later, some merely via speculation.

NOTE: Authors' names omitted as space saver..

HOTEL DU LAC Claustrophobic account of single womanhood. Not my cup of tea? Quite the reverse. I became a fan.

BY LOVE POSSESSED Proof that literary judgments at age 22 may lack legs. At the time I thought it rolled back the world; now I wouldn't dare open the first page.

THE NARROW CORNER Would I dare read it again? It seemed so wise. Now I may be (marginally) wiser myself.

A MOVEABLE FEAST His lightest, his liveliest, his most informative. Re-read it a few weeks ago and it stands up.

MADAME BOVARY Approached tentatively forty years ago; afterwards wondered if I'd read it in a condensed version. So quick, so factual, so to-the-point. Slower second time around. Slight disappointment.

MY DARK PLACES One of my favourite environments - California noir. Sheesh, this was hard. Other titles got harder. DNF'd one of the latest.

CLIMBS IN THE CANADIAN ROCKIES Read him in my youth because he was honourable, modest and terribly British. Now dull, pedestrian, obvious.

CATCH 22 Unique, uproarious, worth the effort but - make no mistake - it does require effort.

BABBIT Biting satire becomes a distant period piece done in poker-work with embroidery round the sides.

THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES Way above my intellectual level yet I finished it. How? So I could boast about it.

THE ORDEAL OF GILBERT PINFOLD Oh, how I wish he hadn't written this.

THE POODLE SPRINGS MYSTERY He should have finished it himself, not ceded it to an upstart admittedly due to force majeure (ie, death).

ISAIAH Thrilling for teenagers, less so for aged adults.

Is the DNF book a rarity?

It is one thing to read a book and regret it; quite another to fail to finish. Joe Hyam tells me this happens rarely but admits defeat by Moby Dick. I failed five times with The Brothers Karamazov (the fourth time after 150 pages, the fifth, quite recently, after over 300 pages).

My failure is the more condemnable. Both are "classics" but whereas BK is simply hard, MD is whimsically hard. One suspects one is being teased and therefore entitled to give up.

I suspect DNF (Did not finish) is rare with most people who take books seriously. Given a broad panorama one simply avoids books where it's likely. There was no way I was ever going to read George Meredith. That great omnivore, my wife, was discouraged at school by Mrs Gaskell and I simply accepted that view without question.

As to modern books I have convinced myself I can distinguish between wilful and worthwhile complexity. Thus The Cloud Atlas was banged shut after two pages but that, I think, was not DNF. On the other hand I absorbed Gravity's Rainbow and V, both arguably more complex.

Getting older I look instead for junk. But junk can be junk in all senses. If one were able to love the novels of James Paterson there would be thirty or forty titles to go at. But the way they are written grates like a nail on chalkboard. This is not writing as such, merely assembly. I never reached the point at which I could judge his plotting.

Whodunnits have a built-in flaw. All those futile interviews in which alibis are checked and re-checked. No writer has been able to turn such dross into gold.

Have you got a DNF? Was despair the reason?

Stuff your ears, I'm ranting

You have the perfect draining rack? Fibber!

Unless you had it made specially and even then I doubt you.

No kitchen device faces so many conflicting demands, even when you reduce the crockery range to an artificially minimal three: cups (or mugs), side plates, dinner plates.

Take those slots. Plates are thinnish, right? Surely 7 mm is enough? Wrong! Dinner plates have ridges underneath and you need about 12 mm. So, fewer dinner plates can be stored and – worse – the side plates drop through. Then there are plate diameters. The stainless steel rack (above) was bought believing that simpler would be better. But the splayed angle is insufficient to support dinner plates.

Cups/mugs. Four will eat up all your rack space. So add another level (see the white rack). Alas! I notice VR removes her bone-china mug when she sees it on the upper level and surreptitiously dries it with a tea towel. I could go on. But it gets much worse when we consider bowls.

Talk not about dish-washers. Their owners are zealots, ideologues and pedants, quite capable of running blogs entirely devoted to this subject.

BOOKMARKS Both of us use ABE books and VR reads about four library books a week. Thus we are in receipt of lots of un-chosen bookmarks. Some of dubious taste although I hasten to say this doesn’t include Joe né Plutarch’s patented and self-decorated markers, much appreciated.
 

Dubious taste? Surely I’m a grievous offender myself and am disqualified from pontificating on such a matter. But how about the inset? Perhaps you are too young or too forgetful to link the line drawing with one of the words. Does the date November 22, 1963 jog your memory? Wouldn’t buy from this lot. A joke? What’s funny?

 

The anti-incunabulum

Julia writes enthusiastically about Dorothy Sayers’ crime novel Gaudy Night and I hoik out my copy to jog my mind. It’s like a time machine. I’m back in that bleak period after the war (WW2 not those backyard scraps like Korea) when Britain’s deprivations seemed to get worse and worse. Bread rationing, yet.

Plus paper rationing. Books were published but not the sort people moon about romantically these days. Open the cover and you saw the title page, on the back of which was the publishing history plus the copyright line. The next page (in effect p.3) you could start reading. Top, bottom and side margins were about half-an-inch wide and the paper was already turning brown. I had a perfect example, G. W. Stonier’s Shaving Through The Blitz, a collection of New Statesman articles, but it seems it’s disappeared. Stolen, perhaps, after it turned into an antique.

Gaudy Night was published in 1935, my birth year, and my impression is the nineteenth published in 1955. Same narrow margins, same brown pages despite the fact paper was by then freely available. But Victor Gollancz, the publisher, was famously stingy; ten years after WW2 he was still selling economy editions.

A closer glance at the publishing history (You don’t think I just read the story, do you?) reveals the book was re-set in 1948. Which probably means you’d have needed a magnifying glass before then. And look at that dust jacket: a salade of typefaces, unforgivable quotes round Lord Peter, and the word cheap from a guy who thought euphemisms were cheap.

I shouldn’t complain. Sir V (he was later knighted) gave us low cost books from good authors. But so did Penguin yet their books, even though paperback, didn’t look cheap. Am I too picky? Of course I am.