The never-land of P. G. Wodehouse

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My lovely assistant shows off my Overlook Press editions.

Perhaps I haven’t read enough of Wodehouse to be able to claim a favourite — but I will anyway. It’s probably Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves. It’s true that What Ho, Jeeves is excellent (all that wonderful discussion of newts), and Pigs Have Wings is lovely, despite being a non-Jeeves-and-Wooster story. But the Lord Emsworth & Blandings Castle tales are very much in the style of the Wooster stories, unlike earlier works by Wodehouse, which read to me more like apprentice efforts, even though they were part of his early — and ongoing — success. If the Psmith character is of his time, it’s the subsequent characters that seem both endlessly Edwardian and timeless. And of course what we all love, apart from the fabulous metaphors and narrative absurdities, is the characters’ names. Stilton Cheesewright, for one. The Reverend ‘Stinker’ Pinker, for another. And Plank, of the empire, who was bitten by a crocodile on the Zambesi river — or was that his departed friend? Plank, as in ‘thick as two planks’. Plank, who like most of the characters except the hilariously diabolical Spode, we end up feeling a sort of daffy affection for. There is no humour quite like Wodehouse’s — even though I did enjoy Sebastian Faulks’s 2013 pastiche, Jeeves And The Wedding Bells.

The lost world (somewhat) of Josephine Tey

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I’ve read every Josephine Tey mystery, and the ones I like best are The Singing Sands, The Franchise Affair, and Miss Pym Disposes, with my greatest fondness reserved for the first. It’s not just the story — it’s not even the story: it’s the storytelling. It’s the loving economy of language (I’m big on that: the right words said at the right time, like Goldilocks writing poetry).

It would be easy for modern critics to find fault, and the late Robert Barnard in his introduction to my editions does so, with some overlap in his criticism of Agatha Christie. But these were Golden Age writers, and in many ways they are both ‘of’ and ‘out of’ our time. One reads them (or at least I do, when I do) in part for the nostalgia of the atmosphere — the world of telegrams, train travel, motor cars that did 50 miles per hour top speed (in the 1920s), service revolvers left over from ‘the war’ conveniently to hand in suspects’ desk drawers. It’s true that Tey’s books are more mid-century (she died early in 1952, and The Singing Sands was published posthumously), but her books still have an away-feel, an enjoyable sense of another era. Indeed, the premise of The Franchise Affair derives from an actual criminal case of 1753! That sort of borrowing would, I suspect, be much harder for an author of our time. Our world is so transfigured that the distant past is not, as it was for Tey, readily translatable to the present.

But whatever the cultural atmosphere, the greater pull is Tey’s landscapes and characters: Inspector Grant in Scotland, in The Singing Sands, for instance. Grant’s Scottish cousin Laura, and her son Pat: now there is a beautifully rendered, carefully observed and winning portrait of a boy between the knowingness of childhood and the innocence of adolescence (however knowing the latter may consider itself to be). If the poet William Logan is right that ‘[t]he believable children in literature are rarely interesting, and the interesting rarely believable,’ then Tey is unusual in achieving both. There is a sense of fun, of the vividness of life in these books: just for a day, I feel I wouldn’t mind being Lucy Pym, for instance. Tey holds some strange opinions about what one can surmise from people’s physiognomy — she believed in it so much that an entire novel, The Daughter Of Time, is founded on it — but when she says in Sands that ‘eyebrows are the keynote of the face’, you’re struck by the truth of the fact that most of us would do almost anything to avoid losing them. Those paired strips of hair, registering with great subtlety our tiniest reactions and deepest emotions, do seem to bear a vast weight of character.

The 1930s modern British home

The best thing about this book, naturally enough, are the designs here showcased. The reproduction quality is excellent, and the format is appealing. The text is very plain-Jane and straightforward, though sometimes baffling and with occasional typos, which seems odd in a book of this minimal length. We are told in one explanation that a 'Cactus' design of wallpaper 'is described as having "a hint of freakishness".' The author had apparently mislaid her glasses: the actual advert, which is reproduced here, says quite clearly: 'Sheer delight in wallpaper decoration -- where originality of motif comes without a hint of freakishness'. That’s without, not with. Then we are told, over and over, that various items for the 1930s house were 'on sale'. I don't know about the idiom of the author's own locale, but wherever I've lived in the English-speaking countries, 'on sale' means 'at a reduced price'. What the author clearly means instead is 'for sale' -- meaning, available for purchase. These blemishes apart, this book is a lovely glimpse into the happier aspects of the 1930s.

Archaeology Is Absolutely Not Rubbish

Outstanding -- and frequently amusing -- step-by-step introduction to field archaeology, timescales, and the basics of digging, with many less obvious or less well-known facts about the nature of British finds, archaeology as a career, and the rights and wrongs of snooping in the earth. Loaded with diagrams, it seems greedy to say that I could even have benefitted from a few more. Tons of photos, not so much for beauty as for pertinent illustrations. All-round, a terrific book and I would love to see one day a new edition, brought up to date. (Archaeology is these days a rapidly developing discipline.) The late Mick Aston is missed! And the current (now Sir) Tony Robinson is much appreciated.

One other thing: when I finished the book, the sense of beauty and grace was so strong that I actually shed a tear. This book doesn’t just show you how to do archaeology. It shows you why it matters.

Never A Dull Moment in 1971

As a walk down the memory lane of rock ‘n roll and daily life in 1971, this book proves that a blast from the past can be highly, if lightly, entertaining. Did you know that The Tonight Show was the last TV-program appearance of a commercial for cigarettes? (New Year’s Day, and it was Virginia Slims, according to journalist-author David Hepworth.) This book, proceeding through each month of the year 1971, also goes to show that household-name entertainers operate under tremendous stress — their own lives a rollercoaster of thrills, desperation, recognition, luxury, doubt, and hard times. Did I mention also technology problems and harrowing, life-threatening travel? The book has a lot of variety, and the narrative is a bit like the weather in Wales: if you don’t know or don’t care much about anyone he mentions, just wait a moment and he’ll offer you a riveting insight on someone else. A book to enjoy, forget in detail, and then enjoy some time later, all over again.

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

This new translation by John Ridland is a triumph. An often difficult yet charming and morally serious poem, it is written in a Middle English midlands dialect that is even more inaccessible for the modern speaker than is Chaucer's dialect. Not only that, the squat scribal hand is very difficult to make out: I imagine that frequent breaks must be required, even for experienced philological eyes! But back to John Ridland's translation: what's good about it?

In the first place, Ridland sees himself in this project as a translator -- and by definition he is thereby tasked with rendering accurately the poem that the late-14th-century (1370s? 1380s?) poet wrought. Just because we do not know the poet's name, it is not on that account a vehicle for the poetry version of a 'starchitect' (yes, Mr Armitage: I'm looking at you). In the second place, he strikes exactly the right balance in diction (word choice) such that the poem seems neither stilted and artificially quaint nor off-puttingly adolescent and aggressively unacademic. It is a mistake to suppose that readers cannot be taken into an enchantment that is not of their own time -- and an even worse mistake to suppose that readers don't even want that. The promise of history and of literature from the past is precisely that it shows us what is timeless and what is also, often gloriously, profoundly rooted in a time and place, simultaneously. The time-bound and the timeless: that is what the sensitive reader of any poem can be expected to want. When the translator appreciates this, the result has every chance to be excellent, as this one is. Only in one place did I feel that his choice of wording was slightly off. And other readers won't think so at all.

Eureka! All about the ancient Greeks

This very enjoyable book presents its information in short entries for the modern distracted and highly distractible reader. Let's face it, we are not the sort of people who, like the Germans once upon a time, positively pride themselves on reading long and difficult academic books. We are will o' the wisps, chasing after other shiny lights as they flash in the near and far distance.

I do have a few minor criticisms. Despite what looks like an extensive index, it isn’t extensive enough, while the internal cross-referencing ('see p. —') is occasionally overdone (in one case we are asked to refer to the page we’re actually looking at: it’s just an editorial slip: the page we are meant to see is nowhere in the vicinity, as the index confirms). At times, despite the breezy tour-guide treatment, I felt that more precision was warranted. For instance, in the entry entitled 'An Actor's Lot', we're told that 'Playwrights were allowed only three actors (all males)...'. The obvious question is Why? (and By Whom?), but no reason is given or suggested. For another example, the Dardanelles are mentioned several times, but never once does Dr Jones take the opportunity to tell us that the straits used to be called the Hellespont (‘Greek sea’, in essence) from one mass of water (the Aegean) to another (the Black Sea). A strange omission. Given that many readers will have heard of the Hellespont, this can be somewhat confusing. ('Where does the Hellespont we heard about fit in?’). But unless you're an expert on all things ancient Greek, I'd go ahead and buy the book anyway.

The Twelve Dancing Princesses

It's tempting, when praising a fairytale book, to rave about the painting but ignore the writing. In this case, despite the exquisite oil paintings by the author, the writing must also be given its due. The story is beautifully, flowingly, evocatively told. Ruth Sanderson is one talented lady.

What can you say about the illustrations, having gawped at them happily, page after page? I did have doubts, at first, about the half-short half-long hairdo of the Lad in this story (his name is Michael): the look of a 70s boyband idol? But I got over that. The people in this book are represented as individuals, but not overly so: I actually prefer slightly idealized faces in fairytales (think, for instances, of the faces in Arthur Rackham's work). Everyone is given real expressiveness, genuinely expressing what we can imagine, as told by the text, are their thoughts. The only time that I thought this failed to happen was when the princess is telling the Lad her real thoughts, and she looks as if she's reaching out for a beloved dog or child rather than crying out to intervene. Also -- and this is a quibble but as an artist I think it's worth mentioning -- the dancing shoes are supposed to be worn out. We see these worn-out shoes, as motifs, on page after page. But the shoes are represented as having become unstitched from their soles: gaping open at the toe and beyond. Now, I know that this is fantasy, so anything can happen. But surely the important sign of a worn-out shoe is that the heels are worn (and the toes are scuffed). Hence the term for a poor person -- 'down at heel'. Worn heels. (My husband doesn't agree with me, by the way. He thinks that in this fantasy world, the shoes fall apart structurally even if they don't degrade mechanically. He may be right, but I'm not convinced.) Otherwise, Ms Sanderson doesn't miss a trick.

Vampies, Burial & Death

Fascinating and unexpected; wholly original research; entirely free of fantasy but sympathetic to the human capacity for creating it. Nice clear prose, without padding. (This edition has a new preface.) I give it five stars because, apart from any other consideration, there is no book I know of that is even remotely like this. It is path-breaking and stands by itself.

Barber's book is a rational investigation into the claims made by Eastern European folklore -- its witnesses and spectators -- who often observed the processes of decay but did not understand what they were seeing and therefore came up with what seemed like plausible explanations for them. Barber expertly separates fact from folklore but also shows how they intertwine, in ways that uneducated locals were unaware of. Their account of the often bizarre mysteries of death makes sense when you understand, as Barber shows us, that they believed Nature to have will and personal agency. We moderns are still free to examine their accounts for truthful clues about the reality of nature contained within them.

I always enjoy learning new words, and this book taught me 'apotropaic', which means 'methods of turning evil away' -- see chapters 7 & 8. Many apotropaics were applied to decomposing bodies not properly settled in their graves, since the pre-scientific peoples were not familiar with the facts of decomposition (but only with rigor mortis, which they expected to last).

The Strange Last Voyage Of Donald Crowhurst

I can't say enough good things about this book, which I've read three times and which is a desert-island treasure for me, along with only a handful of others. It is massively moving -- the poetry written by Crowhurst, found in his trimaran's logbook, is not only affecting (which is more important in poetry (like singing) than any kind of technical perfection), but is also especially important in revealing yet another facet of this riveting and beautifully told real-life drama. Crowhurst's moral dilemma is the dilemma of an essentially fine man, but a man that is not particularly privileged and finds himself hard up against certain realities: I like him. Very much. And I love the details, the by-now period feel of the time and of the book, and the 'players' that reacted to him and tried, with varying success, to bolster him up. Once met, never forgotten.... He was not your ordinary sort of man, and this is not an ordinary sort of book.Note about the co-authors: Ron Hall was directly involved in the Golden Globe single-handed sailboat circumnavigation race that led to Crowhurst's trouble; Nicholas Tomalin was a journalist, killed by a missile while covering the Yom Kippur War in 1973. His widow, Claire Tomalin, is also a writer, and has written a biography of Jane Austen.

Stitches (Literally) In Time

One of the great things about being an expert is that you don't have to look things up in the manual or the recipe book every time you want to thread the sewing machine or cook a tasty meal. Another example, shared by most people, is the ability to drive: you do it more or less automatically: you don't have to think every movement through. On the other hand, the drawback of being an expert is that you're not necessarily thinking it all through. How many of us would pass a driving test tomorrow if we didn't brush up on the protocols and standards of correct driving? The problem also for experts is that a) they sometimes don't remember or grasp what the non-expert won't understand, and b) they rely a lot on memory, and sometimes their encyclopaedic memory lets them down.

I mention all this because I've been enjoying Stitches In Time, the 2015 book by Lucy Adlington about costume history. It is a brisk read, and the author has a good succinct style that whisks you from one 'data point' to another in a remarkably smooth fashion (so to speak). It should be noted that 'costume' isn't just 'fancy dress': costume is any clothing worn at any period. What you are wearing right now is a form of costume of the early 21st century. Yes, dear reader, you are a historical actor even though you are living right now! A few times in this enjoyable survey of various parts of dress -- underwear of all kinds, dresses, suits, trousers, and so forth -- I've been brought up short by a questionable presentation that I feel only an expert such as Ms Adlington would give us. 

For instance, in the first chapter we are told: 'Children might even be sewn into their underwear over winter, purportedly to protect them from chest infections' (p. 12). One wonders what that could possibly mean. It raises a gruesome image of needles weaving in and out of flesh. Probably it simply means that underwear was sewn on tightly once the child was dressed in it, so that he or she couldn't remove it without a pair of scissors or seam-rippers. For readers unfamiliar with such a practice, it might have been helpful to state this. To an expert: an obvious fact; to a non-expert, something that had to be thought about. 

Then there is the explanation of the origin of the word 'crinoline'. Because experts know things, they sometimes don't realize what they forget and what needs checking on (this is where the editor ought to be doing his or her job). Every source I have checked, including my various dictionaries, agree that the word has two parts which both derive ultimately from Latin -- via French and Italian: 'crino' (Latin 'crinis') meaning horsehair, and 'lino' meaning flax and therefore linen. Adlington, by contrast, tells us that 'crinoline' is a 'distortion'* of French words, the second part coming from 'laine', which is French for 'wool' (p. 124). It's a completely plausible explanation, as crinoline was often made with wool in the weave, and horsehair was eventually dropped -- but plausible as it is, no one else mentions wool. The 'line' part refers to flax. So the question now is whether Adlington knows this etymology and disagrees with it, as a scholar of the subject, or whether (as seems more likely), she is such an expert that she declined to look it up, and has therefore passed on an error.

We are also told that crinoline steel cages -- the understorey infrastructure of a bell-shaped skirt -- could be collapsed by the wearer even while she was wearing it. This again is hard to imagine unless you've actually seen one. Apparently it could be removed and hung up on hooks while a lady took public transport: again, hard to imagine. For one thing, were there private crinoline-quashing booths where her under-supports could be removed? It all sounds so impractical. This is why more illustrations would have been useful, even though the book has many of them (mainly line drawings, with some black-and-white photos sprinkled throughout, and a central section of colour plates). Some things need to be seen to be really understood.

Returning to underwear, and in particular, women's knickers: we remain in the dark after reading this chapter about what women's 'split drawers' were actually meant to do. After much mention of 'prudery', we never do come to learn how women with gussetless and indeed wide-open underpants actually dealt with the facts of a woman's existence. Presumably -- though this is not suggested by the author -- women used disposable wads or even something resembling a gusseted thong, which they wore between the drawers and replaced on a daily basis. But that's just supposition to account for the obvious fact that drawers without a contact point in the middle don't actually seem to protect anything. Perhaps the drawers were meant to be a further barrier to the basic central fabric that really did the business -- to hide in yet more layers the brutish facts of human biology. But then you would expect that the drawers, in performing this function, if they did it at all well, would sometimes have caught stains themselves. Which, apart from their basic and intimate nature, explains why so few drawers have come down to us. 

Onward with my reading!

*'Distortion' is a word that Adlington uses often for terms that I would instead call an anglicization, as with Spanish 'veruga' transformed into 'farthingale', an Elizabeth hooped skirt.  

author: Lucy Adlington

The Walking Whales

author: Hans Thewissen

This book is so worthy of praise that it's hard to know where to begin. The writing is beautiful, easy except where one must pay attention to understand the science if -- like me -- you are new to certain concepts. The narrative makes sense, and gives you an understanding not only of the fossils and their context *then* but also of the fossil-hunters and the context *now* (which is to say, in the present world and not some 48 million years ago). The author explains beautifully (there's that word again) everything that you need to know, in chapters well thought-out, often in the first person, which keeps things fresh and you-are-there. The writing is sometimes lyrical but never pretentious or apart from the need-to-know information. The illustrations are copious and invaluable. They are well explained.* Every sentence is important. Every page is an education. This is an important but also a wonderfully engaging book. The author is clearly a man of great gifts. One of my favourite natural history books ever.

* Please note: I bought this in both the hardcover and the Kindle edition. The Kindle tends to cut off the right side of diagrams and illustrations, which can be thwarting. Also, the diagrams are very small and it's difficult to make out the text in that case. The print book does not share any of these defects.

A Shed Of One's Own

This book is the A - Z, the Hope to Despair to Beyond Caring of men's middle age, or really, human middle age in the Anglosphere. Someone apparently doesn't understand this: his review on Amazon UK complains, without any hint of a joke, that there's not enough in it about sheds.

The book is seething and teeming with insights, wittily or even hilariously expressed and also clearly representing original thought about the subject matter. There is nothing of the borrowed or much-trodden in the book. Its subject is both researched and known intimately, inside out -- for the author was 50 while writing it: what might be called young middle age. But then again, as he explains, nobody can really agree on which age range qualifies as 'middle'.

There are infelicities, some of which bothered me more than they bother others, I expect. There was too much of the S word and the F word, for one thing. (Does anybody actually say or think 'you bag of f----?' I'm glad to say I've never heard the expression.) His rendering (p. 118) of a 'well-established American campus joke' substitutes 'mother------' at the punchline, which not only doesn't square with the vintage of the joke, but more to the point, puts a sour lemon in your mouth at the precise moment when you should have laughed. I know this because a very eminent American academic told me his version of the joke many years ago. His version wasn't prissy: the last word was 'asshole' (though 'jerk' would have done the job). The 'senior' student of Berkmann's version was a professor in my professor's, and the joke's professor added 'young man' at the end of his comments. Princeton wasn't mentioned. The joke I know comes across as less crass and belligerent. It's how you tell 'em.

It is also curious that none of Berkmann's editors or proofreaders was aware of the difference between 'margherita', which is a style of pizza, and 'margarita', which is a cocktail. So we have this sentence:

When we complete our long years of toil, we shall gain entry to a quiet, prosperous, pastel world of golfing holidays and Caribbean cruises, resting our weary limbs on padded deckchairs while sexually ambiguous serving staff mix our margheritas and massage our aching feet. (p. 53)

The idea of torture as a condign punishment, however unreal the context, appears twice in the book, which to my mind is two times too many. And no, my second thought on seeing rioters on TV is not that it 'looks as though it might be fun' (p. 21). And no, reading the obituary of someone younger than I whose life has been cut short gives me no joy whatsoever (p. 242). Witness the case of Charlotte Furness-Smith, a serving Navy veteran and prep-school math teacher (and a beautiful girl) who drowned recently in a Dorset sea cave. I've thought about it several times with a sense of the waste and the loss, not only to herself but to all that knew or could have known her. But that's reality. Sometimes Berkmann gets carried away with the need to keep a jolly detachment from it.

Still, the man can write, and what's more he gets his teeth right in, without worrying about whether he might be going too far into truth about life, aging, and death for today's therapeutic Oprahmatic sensibilities.

The book is packed with goodies, nooks, corners, angles, and spider's webs: all the sorts of things you'd expect to find in a man's shed, in fact. No review, without regurgitating the whole book, could do its scope and curiosity about everything full justice. Some of it is rather profound. Much of it is quirky. It is hardly ever anything less than fascinating. Berkmann talks about the difference between ambition in youth, which is understandable and laudable, if perhaps in some way doomed, and the ambition of middle age, at which point one is 'driven'. But perhaps it is right to be driven still in middle age, since another word for that is 'desiring'. And what is life but desiring? Much later, he writes about parents and our tendency to throw their baggage out, and then to reclaim bits of this and that as we get older. My own feeling about my parents is ambivalent. In some ways I appreciate the freedom they gave me, the lack of nagging; on the other hand, looking back from mature adulthood, I wish they'd pushed me. Not just harder, but at all. We had very little money, but we did have a piano in the house. Why did no one ever sit me down as a small child at the piano? (I have since discovered, in adulthood, a music-writing capability). But I know the answer. They were too busy trying to stay afloat in their own lives.

At one point the author asks, 'Does a gentleman trim his pubic hair?' (p. 38). My spontaneous answer was 'Yes, if his lady does and he wants to match her, stylistically'. The unexpectedness of the book is one of its charms.