The Life and Sleeping Partners of Cecil Aldin (1870 - 1935)

The chances of Cecil Aldin opting to earn a living as anything OTHER than an artist could be categorized as ’slim to non-existent’.

His father had been a keen amateur artist and Cecil himself started drawing as a child. He initially studied under Albert Moore, then at the National Art Training School (which later became the Royal College of Art) before spending a summer with the renowned animal artist Frank Calderon.

The years of study may have refined his technique and deepened his understanding of his craft, but his talent was innate and informed by his great affinity with animals - most especially dogs. He drew from life and his ability to catch the essence of an animal in a rapid sketch, (to be refined later at his leisure) was almost uncanny.

As an enthusiastic twenty-something, his determination to make his way as an artist led to him inundating The Illustrated London News with his work. His persistence paid off, and by the turn of the century his sporting prints and book illustrations had won him a substantial public following - which increased after an exhibition in Paris in 1909. Marriage and two children resulted in the addition of nursery pictures to his rapidly growing repertoire.

During the First World War - too old for active service - he was major in charge of the remount depot at Calcot near Reading, a task which must have grieved the animal-loving man deeply because it involved dealing with the horses that were being sent out to almost certain death on the Western Front. In 1917, he lost his only son in the action on Vimy Ridge.

After the war he turned his attention once again to the perennially popular hunting scenes, but in addition he also produced a superb set of nostalgic prints of old coaching inns, cathedrals and manor houses, many of which continue to be reproduced on endless Christmas and greetings cards.

It is, however, for his love affair with dogs that Cecil Aldin is best remembered today. Towards the end of his life, increasingly troubled by arthritis, he concentrated on them almost exclusively, sketching his own (whom he called ‘The Professionals’) and those of visitors (’The Amateurs’) over and over again. He would let them loose in the 60 foot long ex-army barracks that was his studio and wait patiently - often for hours on end - for them to settle in the right pose.

An early best seller was A Dog Day in 1902. Aldin provided the illustrations for the whimsical narrative of Walter Emanuel. The little book - much reprinted - tells the story of one enterprising terrier’s typical day in an Edwardian household.

5.15: Awakened by a bad attack of eczema.

5.20 to 5.30: Slept again.

5.30: Awakened again by eczema. Caught one.

His favourite model was his ebullient bull terrier Cracker who - thanks to dozens of magazine and newspaper illustrations plus a series of hugely popular books - became one of the most famous dogs in the world. Cracker was almost pure white, with a jaunty black patch above one eye, giving him a rakish appearance which he fully lived up to. His straight man was a simply enormous Irish Wolfhound called Micky, usually to be found lounging full length on an old sofa. As is often the case with very large dogs, Micky was phenomenally good natured and literally allowed Cracker to walk all over him.

One of Aldin’s most successful books was Sleeping Partners, which consisted of nothing more than 20 pastel studies of Cracker’s attempts to claim some of the sofa for himself. To thumb through it is to understand why it was said that Aldin captured the very soul of a dog.

When his health began to decline, Aldin and his wife Rita moved to Majorca, taking Cracker and Micky with them. There, he continued to produce books and features about them for The Illustrated London News, the New York Times and The Sketch. The two dogs were so popular they even received their own fan mail.

Unfortunately, Micky never really acclimatized to his new surroundings. He died from heart failure just a year after the move to Majorca.

In January 1935 while Aldin was away on a visit to London, Cracker - back home in Majorca - started to howl in a most extraordinary and unprecedented fashion. It was several hours later that the news reached Rita Aldin that her husband had died from a heart attack in the London Clinic. She could not ascribe the terrier’s behaviour to anything other than a reaction to the severing of a psychic link between the man and the dog.

Following Aldin’s death Rita wanted to return to England, but that would have entailed putting the 10 year old Cracker into quarantine. She wouldn’t desert him, and so she stayed in Majorca with him until his death in 1937. Such was his fame that he received his own obituary notice in The Times:

Cracker, the bull terrier, for many years the beloved companion and favourite model of the late Cecil Aldin, died July 31st, Mallorca. Deeply mourned.

—:oOo:—

The books that Cecil Aldin illustrated are too numerous to list in their totality, and many are now out of print (and changing hands for small fortunes) - but the ‘classics’ are reprinted and still readily available:

Sleeping Partners - A Dog Day - Puppy Dogs’ Tales

Cecil Aldin’s long out of print autobiography, Time I Was Dead: Pages from My Autobiography (1934) is now a collectible, currently selling for three figures - as does Roy Heron’s 1981 biography Cecil Aldin, the Story of a Sporting Artist (which is really ironic considering that it when it was published, it was quickly remaindered).

Thursday Soapbox. Catherine Jones: Pride in the Face of Prejudice

On the Soapbox this week we have Catherine Jones, Chair of the Romantic Novelists’ Association (a.k.a writer Kate Lace) about assumptions and prejudices towards romantic novelists.

*I actually had to raid my own Flickr account for this rather strange picture of a foxy-looking beast alongside a heart and some flowers.

Pride in the Face of Prejudice by Catherine Jones

There is a story, probably apocryphal, that most authors have heard about a very famous female writer at a party. (The story has been attributed to both Beryl Bainbridge and Margaret Atwood.) She is introduced to a man and they chat. After a few minutes she asks him what he does and it transpires he’s a brain surgeon. In return he asks her how she earns her living. On hearing that she’s a novelist he replies, ‘I’ve often thought I ought to write a book when I retire.’ Quick as a flash she retorts, ‘How amazing. I’ve always planned to take up brain surgery when I retire.’

It is a truth universally acknowledged that writing a book requires no skill and no talent whatsoever. Obviously it takes a bit of time and effort but nothing more than that. As a result, it seems everyone thinks that knocking out a novel is something you do if you have a bit of spare time. I have been told on countless occasions that the person to whom I am talking is planning on writing a novel when they’ve ‘got a bit more time’. When I wrote my first book I was in the middle of moving house six times in five years (my husband was in the army) and giving birth to my three children. Time was an unheard of luxury but I still managed to squirrel away enough precious minutes each day to get the job done.

I think that some people will accept grudgingly that writing a heavy non-fiction work will require some research and that the authors of some of the more obscure literary novels have a handle on the English language which is enviable. However, the ability to write a page-turner … Well, where’s the skill in that? Anything that is easy to read must, by definition, be easy to write - and obviously any woman with an IQ slightly higher than that of a budgie can write a romance.

Myths and Assumptions

The assumption that causes me the most amusement is that when I’m not writing I’m indulging in rampant sex with all and sundry in the most unlikely of locations by way of research.

Being chairman of the Romantic Novelists’ Association means I have any number of friends and acquaintances who write every sort of romantic fiction imaginable. Without exception they are bright, funny, witty women (or men) with busy lives, often juggling a day job (and no, to dispel another myth, not all advances run into telephone numbers so writing probably won’t earn you a living wage, so you can’t give up that) a family, elderly parents, outside commitments…. One of my friends is an ex-bank regulator, another an ex-treasury official, a third a magistrate and librarian, a fourth won Mastermind and a fifth is head of English at a very smart independent school. All of them write for Mills and Boon and darned successfully too.

The trouble is that most people who knock romantic fiction and its authors haven’t encountered either properly. People make assumptions about our books and us. The assumption that causes me the most amusement is that when I’m not writing I’m indulging in rampant sex with all and sundry in the most unlikely of locations by way of research. I wish! No one assumes that Baroness James of Holland Park nips out at night, armed with an axe to bump off an unsuspecting passer-by to research her next crime novel. They know she relies on her imagination. But obviously romantic novelists are too thick to be able to draw on theirs. Hurumph!

The other assumption about romantic fiction that gets my goat (and no this isn’t a goat I use for other bizarre practices for my novels) is that women who read romantic fiction never read anything else because they don’t have sufficient brain cells to cope with long words or deep plots. Tosh! I have never come across anyone who reads just one type of book. Readers read. It’s what they do and they’ll read anything they can lay their hands on that they feel will give them that escapist buzz for a few wonderful hours or days. Readers want to be swept away, to be entertained and to be given some sort of vicarious experience by someone who knows how to tell a fantastic yarn.

Books as Entertainment

Reading should make your brain ache. Why?

Okay, I’m not a huge fan of sci-fi, or westerns or thrillers. Sorry folks but there it is. But I love historicals, crime, some fantasy (Philip Pullman and Terry Pratchett inter alia) and anything that’ll make me laugh and/or cry – so that’s most romantic fiction covered. But I’ve read most of the classics, a lot of Booker winners, poetry, Shakespeare…. I just like to read and as long as it entertains me I’m happy.

However, it seems to me that, amongst those who like to class themselves as intellectuals, reading shouldn’t be used for entertainment. Reading should make your brain ache. Why? When was the last time you went to an art house to see a film? (Okay, there’s bound to be some cleverclogs reading this who went only last week but for the vast majority the answer will be either ‘never’ or ‘ages ago’.) Let’s face it most of us go to the cinema to be entertained; we want to laugh or cry or have the bejaysus scared out of us but we don’t go to have our minds improved. We all accept that and that’s fine and dandy. Going to see ‘Calendar Girls’ or ‘Notting Hill’ or ‘I am Legend’ won’t raise a single eyebrow of surprise or derision. In fact, missing out on seeing the most recent blockbusting movie is a far more likely cause for comment.

Why is it okay to be entertained when it’s a film and rubbish if it’s a book?

I have a theory… It’s because MEN run the film industry and publishing is dominated by women. And the two most successful brands of genre fiction – crime and romance – have a huge number of female authors.

So, is it all just a filthy plot to keep us women in our place? Probably not. However, I take great comfort from the fact some of my best friends are published in 26 languages and in 126 countries.

Smoke that Martin Amis!

Other Links on Vulpes

Interview with Catherine Jones
Our Review of The Chalet Girl by Catherine’s alter-ego, Kate Lace
Interview with fellow RNA member, Phillipa Ashley

For more rants from the Soapbox click here.

Suite Française by Irène Némirovsky

It is impossible to read Suite Française without being strongly influenced by the context in which it was written and by the subsequent fate of its author.

Irène Némirovsky was from a wealthy Russian Jewish family who fled Russia to escape the Bolshevik revolution. (Interesting that Kirsty’s piece yesterday dealt with the other side of this revolution.) The family arrived in France in 1919 when Irène was 16 although she had had a French education until then and spoke French perfectly. The Némirovskys quickly integrated into the wealthy upper-class society of Paris. Irène’s first novella was published in 1927 and was followed by several novels which built her reputation as a well-known, feted author.

With the outbreak of the war and the defeat of France her situation changed dramatically. She, her husband, and two daughters evacuated to Issy-l’Evêque, a small town in occupied France where most of Suite Française was written. A year later, Irène was arrested and sent to the French concentration camp of Pithiviers from which she was transferred to Auschwitz. She died within ten days of arriving there. Some months later her husband (also a Russian Jew) was arrested and send directly to the gas chamber in Auschwitz. Their two girls managed to escape under the care of their nanny and spent the war in hiding. Over 60 years later, Denise, the elder girl, examined in detail the leather-bound notebooks filled with her mother’s tiny handwriting that she had taken with her when they left Issy-l’Evêque. She discovered the first two parts of an unfinished novel along with notes her mother had made for the rest. These two parts were published in 2004 in French and in 2006 in English to tremendous acclaim.

Irène intended this to be a 1000 page epic composed of five parts, drawing inspiration from the great symphonies and Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Although this is an unfinished novel and would surely have evolved as she progressed, the prose is surprisingly smooth and the fictional situation she depicts feels startlingly immediate and real. This is a study of a society in the midst of war. The main concerns of the novel are the daily trials and tribulations of individuals coping with occupation and war and the larger context which imposed them is outside of its scope.

The first part of the novel, ‘Storm in June’ describes a large number of unrelated characters from a variety of walks of life rushing to escape Paris in June 1940 as it falls to the Germans. Némirovsky captures the foibles of human nature with an accurate, merciless eye. Most of the characters, particularly the wealthy, are selfish, materialistic and thoughtless, totally lacking in concern for others around them. Her sharp wit as she lampoons the escaping French is often very funny.

‘He and his wife had had a painful row: in the chaos of the hurried departure, or perhaps out of malice, the chambermaid had put a small framed picture belonging to Monsieur Corbin in Madame Corbin’s bag; it contained a photograph of Arlette, [his mistress] stark naked. The nudity itself might not have offended his wife — she was a person with a great deal of common sense — but the dancer was wearing a magnificent necklace.’

The elderly member of another household, the Péricards, “only truly returned to his right mind when discussing his fortune, which was considerable”.

Irène Némirovsky’s portrayal is full of understanding and accuracy which brings an immediacy to the flight but somehow there is a distinct lack of compassion. The only people who show any sign of honour and courage are the Michauds, a simple, not very well-off couple whose only son is missing in action. In her notes which are included as an appendix, Némirovsky writes: ‘Stress the Michauds. People who always pay the price and the only ones who are truly noble. Odd that the majority of the masses, the detestable masses, are made up of these courageous types. The majority doesn’t get better because of them nor do they [the courageous types] get worse.’

In the second novella, Dolce, the setting is a small town south of Paris in the occupied zone. Lucile Angellier lives with her mother-in-law (her husband, whom she doesn’t love, is a prisoner of war) and when a handsome, civilised and romantic German officer moves in with them, an attraction develops between the two young people. Some characters from the first novella appear in minor roles but it seems from Némirovsky’s notes that she had planned to develop the connections between the two in the following parts.

She depicts well the strained relationships between the French and Germans in this small town. The French have little principles, mingling easily with the Germans when it suits them or when they have something to sell. But among themselves there is little solidarity. Even the mayor and his wife, the Vicount and Vicountess of Montmort, will not sell their food to the people of the town.

‘People had come to the château to ask for feed, but the Montmorts were hoarding it, mainly for themselves but also for all their friends and acquaintances in the area. The farmers were angry…They could tell they were up against a kind of brotherhood, like the Freemasons, a closing of the ranks that meant that they and their money were insignificant compared with the satisfaction the Montmorts got from doing a favour for the Baron de Montrefaut or the Countess de Pignepoule.’

On the other hand, the Germans soldiers are shown as being polite (almost incredibly so), civilised, calm and respectful, always paying well for everything they need and this is when my niggling doubts about Irène Némirovsky’s world became even stronger. Given what Irène and her family had already endured as a result of German decrees, I was surprised that she could be so tolerant and positive about them as individuals. Another surprising element is that there is no reference in the novel to the Jews and their suffering although they were already excluded from public office, forced to wear the Star of David and concentration camps were already in place.

Irène Némirovsky is most scathing of the upper class, the class she knew best and was a part of, while holding more positive opinions of the poorer classes (of which she writes with much less authority). So too is she much harsher with the French whom she knew very well, France having been her adopted country for over twenty years at that time, than with the Germans. It seems to me that her default position was that she didn’t like people and the better she knew them the less she liked them. But even if this is the case, is this a flaw in an otherwise good novel which might have become a great novel if the author had been allowed to mould it into what she wanted it to be?

Finally, in the second appendix, it is heartbreaking to read copies of the correspondence by Irène’s husband, Michel, to anyone in a position to help him to have his wife released after her deportation to Pithiviers. His desperation to save her culminates in his magnificent but ultimately pathetic offer to take her place in the camp or even to join her in order to make her life there more bearable.

Vintage (1 Feb 2007), 416 pages, ISBN-10: 0099488787

Vladimir Mayakovsky: Poet, Hooligan, Bolshevik

Mayakovsky is closer to the dynamic quality of the Revolution and to its stern courage than to the mass character of its heroism, deeds and experiences. Just as the ancient Greek was an anthropomorphist and naively thought of the forces of nature as resembling himself, so our poet is a Mayako-morphist and fills the squares, the streets and fields of the Revolution with his own personality.

- Trotsky, Literature and Revolution

Vladimir Mayakovsky was a young man of the old guard. Born in Bagdadi, Georgia in 1893, he joined the Bolsheviks at age 15 and was sent to Butyrki prison at 16, after his third arrest for subversive political activity. He remained proudly and thoroughly Bolshevik until his suicide in 1930 (some say from a broken heart, some say from disappointment with the mutating political order, while some cry conspiracy). But his was very much the Bolshevism of the first generation of revolutionaries; the Bolshevism at the heart of the social, legislative and artistic innovations of the early 1920s. It seems highly unlikely that, had he lived, he would have had any place in the Stalinist society of the 1930s. The old trope rings true: had he not died in 1930, he would have had to die in 1937. But as it was he was never officially disavowed. In fact, he was subsequently canonised as a great Soviet poet and his work - severely edited - became required reading for every schoolchild. There are a lot of grown-ups in the former Soviet Union who cannot abide Mayakovsky for this very reason.

As Trotsky observed - and it takes one to know one - Mayakovsky was a big personality; he came to the Revolution because it suited his temperament, rather than the other way around. Political art often has the reputation of being rigid and artificial; but Mayakovsky’s poetry, even on political themes, is often impressionistic rather than didactic. It irritated Trotsky, who disliked unruly, sentimental art and would have preferred something more organised, but who was compelled to acknowledge Mayakovsky’s talent. This is why Mayakovsky is possibly the only author mentioned in Literature and Revolution to be treated with less than total scorn.

Trotsky’s understanding of Mayakovsky is limited, however; possibly by a lack of distance but more probably because his own immense ego got in the way. He is absolutely right about Mayakovsky’s self-dramatisation, but he only sees one Mayakovsky at the centre of the action. He misses out on the intense struggle between Mayakovsky the lyricist, who wrote from the heart and the gut, and Mayakovsky the arbiter, the strict Marxist who did not on any account want to write “useless” poetry. It was the latter Mayakovsky who wrote in 1930 (note: all translations from Mayakovsky are my own):

But I

calmed

myself,

by stepping

on the throat

of my own song.

All the tension between Mayakovsky and Mayakovsky can be felt in this one image: cold and deliberate, violent and full of pathos. It seems clear despite the poet’s protestations that the “problem” of Mayakovsky’s lyricism was never solved. Personally, I am glad it wasn’t; Mayakovsky is far more interesting to me when he’s being passionate or playful. Much as I like this kind of thing (warning: silly rhyming translation):

Eat your pineapples

Chew your quail’s eggs

Be warned, bourgeois,

You’re on your last legs.

And this kind of thing (non silly, non rhyming translation):

Will the eagle’s eye grow dim?

Will we start to stare into the past?

Tighten

the proletariat’s fingers

on the world’s throat!

Brave chest forward!

Paper the sky with flags!

Who’s marching there on the right?

Left!

Left!

Left!

I really, really like this kind of thing:

There will be a moon.

There already is

a little

and now the full moon hangs in the air.

It must be God,

with his divine

silver spoon

stirring the stew of the stars.

Or this:

Apart from your love

I have

no sun,

and I don’t know where you are and with whom.

Lili Brik, who inspired the last lines quoted here, was Mayakovsky’s great love and the focus for his outpourings. His love, expressed in letters and poems, has a childlike, dependent quality that oddly complements his exaggerated confidence in other walks of life, as if such a vast personality could only operate in extremes. When writing about Lili, or to Lili (during a period of separation he sent her several letters a day), Mayakovsky is obsessive, hyperbolic, visceral. He does not limit the expression of his feelings, nor does he apparently see any reason to do so. This is love in its wild state. I wonder if everyone would love like this, if it was allowed.

By this point you have probably gathered that Mayakovsky is a complex beast, and too massive a figure to cram into one blog post; rather like Pushkin, only louder. For this reason I will be coming back to Mayakovsky in a few weeks’ time to look more closely at his love poetry, and then later in the series to talk about his plays; I’ll also be playing with some of his verse in my role as a translator, over on Revisiting Russia. I hope that in this first piece, I have given you some idea of the central conflict in Mayakovsky’s poetry and the contradictions that make his work so compelling. It is also my quiet hope that - given the current mania for making every damn thing about Stalin and forcing works of art created well before 1929 to somehow account for the phenomena of twentieth century dictatorships - people who have not previously encountered Mayakovsky will be open to a Bolshevik poet who represents another, perhaps less familiar face of a familiar epoch. The Russian revolution was not a simple matter, and neither was it monolithic. And neither, for all his monumental stature, was Mayakovsky.

Kirsty’s Russian series runs every second Tuesday. The other posts in Kirsty’s Russian Series, including pieces on Pushkin, Tolstoy, Lermontov and Gorky, are listed under Kirsty’s Posts here. (Watch out for a certain post dated April 1st…)

The Private Lives of the Impressionists by Sue Roe

There have been dozens of books about The Impressionists, but none so vividly transports you to the France of the late 1800’s as Sue Roe’s masterpiece. Her rich tapestry dispels the stereotype of the isolated artist sitting at the café table before grabbing his smock and rushing to his easel in a frenzy. Instead, we see an entire country in turmoil; not just the art world, but the government, economy and social structure. The very streets were being uprooted in Haussmann’s grand remodeling of Paris. Through all of this, was a group of artists who were dealing with families, lovers and causes, while conveying a new vision of the world.
One of the most surprising things was the realization that all of the Impressionists came from well-to-do families. Merchants, bankers, a judge, a politician, they provided an allowance for the artists when they were starting out, but the funds were often jeopardized if the parents didn’t approve of their women or lifestyle, leaving some of them quite poor as they tried desperately to market their art.
Several of the Impressionists volunteered to serve in the army during the Franco-Prussian war of 1870, even participating in the 4 month siege of Paris. “Terrible cries of the wounded having limbs amputated could be heard from the Palais de l’Industrie, where only six months ago crowds had gathered in the sunshine for the opening of the Salon.” In the end, France surrendered to Prussia, with only Bazille, an early member of the group, killed, providing one of the most poignant stories in the book. In all of the fighting, not only were homes destroyed, but many early paintings as well. Pissaro’s home was turned into an abattoir, his canvases used to catch the blood of butchered animals.
The ‘private lives’ in the title is not to titillate, but rather a reference to the interactions of the group with each other and their peers.They provided moral and sometimes financial support to each other in very difficult times. In one instance, when one of Berthe Morisot’s paintings came up at an auction, a spectator shouted nasty insults about her. Pissaro, also attending, went over and punched the man in the face.There was also the romantic attractions between some of the members, such as Morisot and Manet, Degas and Cassatt. It’s details like these, along with vivid descriptions of the settings and atmosphere that make this book sparkle. It’s a joy to read. In this engaging way, we get to know the very real people behind those glorious paintings.

HarperCollins 2006 356 pp. (extensive index and references) ISBN-10 0-06-54558-5

On Vulpes This Week

Well, usually we’d be putting up a nice “What’s Coming Up” post now, complete with picture of attentive-looking fox flicking eagerly through a dictionary…but there’s no point in repetition so I’m just going to direct you to the box on the right hand side of the screen under Bookfox (you might have to scroll down a bit), which will remain all week to tell you what’s coming up.

Check it out.

Our Longest Days edited by Sandra Koa Wing

Looking back on anything from a distance - especially through the lens of ‘history’ - all too often gives us a false perspective. When, for instance, we read about the Second World War, we tend to think of it in terms of vignettes … critical moments that were the highs, lows and turning points: the Phoney War, Dunkirk, The Blitz, The Battle of Britain, the Fall of Paris, Stalingrad, D-Day, Hiroshima.

It runs through our brains like a newsreel … like a compilation of every war film we’ve ever seen, with the ordinary people affected by it just bit part players, flitting around in the background somewhere, like so much moving scenery.

Our Longest Days, published by Profile Books, is a superb corrective. In it, we see the war through the eyes of ordinary British citizens - housewives, civil servants, a teenage land girl, a conscientious objector, a member of the Home Guard, a retired electricity board inspector …

They were actually writing for the Mass Observation project, which recorded the views and opinions of the ‘Man in the Street’. Tom Harrisson (described by Philip Ziegler in his foreword as ‘a turbulent amateur anthropologist’) became incensed by Fleet Street’s regular pronouncements on what the Great British Public thought about this, that and the other. His contention was that they couldn’t possibly actually know what the public thought … so in 1936 he set about finding out. The result was Mass Observation - diaries kept by men and women as they went about their daily lives.

For Our Longest Days the late Sandra Koa Wing chose to follow just over a dozen of the 500 or so people who wrote for Mass Observation. Some we meet in 1939 and stay with them for the duration. Others disappear part way through, to be replaced by new names and voices.

George Springett was a (rather pompous) conscientious objector, absolutely determined to avoid conscription. Kenneth Redmond a civil servant who was an active communist party member. His brother Tom died in the war, and Kenneth’s entries are soaked in grief and anger. Edie Rutherford was a South African living in Sheffield with her husband and family. She worked in the Ministry of Labour and wasn’t shy about sharing her socialist opinions … many of which (with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight) were remarkably shrewd.

For me, though, two voices stand out above the others: Muriel Green and Nella Last.

Muriel was 18 at the outbreak of war - naive, frightened, excited - she eventually becomes a Land Girl and we travel with her from 1939 to 1945 as she grows up in a world at war. By 1945, she’s an adult, and she knows it. Along the line, she managed to enjoy herself but the change in her ‘voice’ over the years is quite marked. On VE Day the girl who had earlier admitted to getting herself into a bit of a mess dating two airmen at once was writing:

All the flag-waving and dancing will not bring alive the dead to their homes … Life will always be the sadder for those of us who think.

Nella Last was one of the best known of Mass Observation’s contributors. She achieved a posthumous fame of her own as “Housewife, 49″. An articulate middle-aged woman living in Barrow-in-Furness, she had already been through one world war - and it showed. She knew how to make do and mend, and shook her head disbelievingly at the foolishness of others. She was an intelligent, literate women who in another age would have had an independent career. Her marriage was far from perfect … and by the end of Our Longest Days she makes no secret of it:

I looked at my husband’s placid face blank face critically, thinking with a slight sickness, how dreadfully like his family he was growing, their utter ‘mindlessness’, their fear of anything different in any way. I marvelled at the way he had managed to so dominate me for all our married life, when to avoid ‘hurting’ him, I tried to keep him in a good mood - when a smacked head would have been the best treatment … I know I’m not the ’sweet woman’ I used to be, but then I never was.

Of the men, 70 year old Herbert Brush, Digging for Victory with a vengeance, comes across as the most likeable, taking even the accidental destruction of his allotment in his philosophical stride. When reporting on the terrible damaged inflicted by the Luftwaffe on the city and people of Norwich, he can’t resist commenting wryly:

Jerry did not hit the castle or the town hall or the cathedral, mostly shops and small houses. The ugliest town hall in the kingdom: a bomb would have made it look more interesting.

Peter Baxter, a Cambridge graduate, became a corporal at RAF Padgate where he trained recruits. He is one of the most clear-sighted diarists - a humane man who had never learned to hate in plurals. On hearing of the bombing of the Ruhr dams, his first thought was for the ordinary German people caught in the flood waters. He wrote:

I know this is Total War, but are we to abandon all standards of mercy and humanity? An act like this makes us all barbarians. I’m sorry to say that I haven’t yet found anybody to agree with me. The other fellows say, ‘The more Jerries we wipe out the better’ … It’s very saddening. When one’s fellow countrymen are so callous, one can’t feel over-confident about the chances of getting a peaceful civilised world in the future.

What comes over most strongly throughout the book, however, is the way that people - all of them - just ‘got on with it’. Even in the midst of the Blitz, they did their level best to go about their normal lives. They also complained incessantly about food shortages, petty bureaucracy, greedy neighbours, black marketeers, the shoddy standards of utility clothing, pettifogging civil servants … and class prejudice was alive and well and thriving amidst the air raid sirens. The human need to whine remains constant, apparently.

There IS however, in nearly all the diarists, a realization that they can never go back to being the way they were. The peace may have been won, but it wasn’t simply going to be a case of picking up where they left off … like Nella Last, they and the world had changed forever.

The book closes, quietly and fittingly, with dear old Herbert Brush. It is Monday, the 3rd of September, 1945 - a month after the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima and six years to the day after war was declared:

I wonder what I was doing six years ago: it’s too much trouble to look for my diary of that date, but I remember Chamberlain’s lugubrious tones when he said, ‘We are at war with Germany’.

A dull morning; looks like rain, Barometer 29.74.

—:oOo:—

Each new year’s entries are prefaced by a short explanation of the main events of that year and the endnotes provide details on any comments that need further elucidation, so no in depth knowledge of the war is necessary - although it certainly helps. The book also contains a selection of well-chosen photographs, a short biography of each diarist and a short section on the Mass Observation, which I was very surprised to learn was alive and well and apparently thriving.

Profile Books. Paperback. 2008. ISBN: 978-84668-088-5. 320pp.

Thursday Soapbox. Rosy Thornton: Books Should be Books!

On the Soapbox this week, writer of the political romantic comedy More Than Love Letters and campus novel Hearts and Minds, Rosy Thornton, looks at the way we categorise books.

*Thanks to Natmandu on Flickr for this picture of a beautifully wrapped book, from the Slightly Foxed Bookshop in New Zealand.

Books Should Be Books! by Rosy Thornton

A large, independent bookshop near where I live (which shall remain discreetly nameless) used until recently to categorise its books - of the made-up variety - into two distinct sections: Literature and Fiction.

Before I ever thought about writing novels myself and merely read them by the rucksackful, the distinction used to mystify me. In fact, I experienced it more as an irritating inconvenience than anything else. My reading tastes were – and are – eclectic, and since I could discern no obvious reason why some made-up stories should be located on one side of the shop and some on the other, I generally had to check both sets of shelves before locating the author or work that I was seeking.

Then I began writing my own stuff, and sending it out to agents. On opening the Writers and Artists Yearbook I found the same baffling dichotomy. In order to know which agencies to approach, I had to decide: was I ‘literary’ or was I ‘commercial’?

Literary or Commercial: All that Glisters is not Golding.

Aside from the virtual impossibility of having any objective perspective on one’s own work, the question was an impossible one to answer, because I had never really grasped where the difference might lie. So I went back to my local bookshop and began my investigation. At this point I should perhaps confess that, when I’m not getting up at dawn to write novels, I am a lawyer - and lawyers love to categorise. We define and taxonomise and distinguish: it’s what we’re conditioned to do. We are, in many senses, simply a subspecies of librarian, analysing stories (except ours are of the non-made-up variety, as found in the law reports) and putting them into tidy boxes according to made-up rules. But I digress.

What, I asked myself was the ratio decidendi: the reason or reasons for placing a book on one side of the shop as opposed to the other? In Literature, with its resonances of Eng Lit, of the academy, of giants’ shoulders and the power of the written word - or in Fiction, with its suggestions of storytelling, of unreliability and untruth?

The main criterion for being shelved in Literature, I discovered, was being dead. Not merely the long-dead, like Austen and Dickens and Eliot and Hardy – survivors of the test of centuries – but the more recently deceased were located here, too. I found not only the William Goldings and the Muriel Sparks but also Nevil Shute: a favourite of mine, in fact, but surely only a good, old-fashioned storyteller, who if he were starting out today would be submitting his work to agents handling ‘commercial’ fiction? Yes, being dead for a couple of decades was definitely your best bet.

For the living, the key thing seemed to be to get on to a GCSE or A level syllabus. Any author routinely read in a schoolroom seemed to qualify as Literature. This is the point at which I shall not name names, for fear that any examples I choose - in either direction - might prove invidious. But I will say that the dividing line did not seem to relate to genre in any simplistic way. Dorothy L Sayers (dead) was Literature; PD James (happily very much alive) was Fiction.

Off the Shelf Solution

There, then, is the difficulty: so what, you ask, is my solution? Well, let me take you for a moment to the Cambridge University Library. There the books are classed and shelved according to an idiosyncratic variant of the Dewey Decimal system. The number which indicates a book’s subject matter is followed by a letter, which classifies the volume according to its approximate height. (I know, I know. But even though this means books about the same thing being located inconveniently in four different places depending on how big they are, it apparently maximises efficient use of shelf space.) A version of the same system should, I believe, be mandatorily adopted by all libraries and book stores. The books should not be classified as Literature or Fiction, they should simply be allocated to shelves according to size. (Think how handy it would be if you were looking for something small to slip in your aircraft hand luggage.) Stephen Fry’s QI empire, I understand, runs a bookshop in Oxford which is a pioneer of a similar kind of iconoclasm. There, apparently, the stock is ‘arranged thematically so that a novel might end up next to a work of popular science or a reference book’. Mr Fry, I salute you.

Books Under Cover

Covers, of course, would remain an obstacle. Cover design is the enemy of the level playing field: the insidious perpetuator of stereotypical assumptions. Look at that figure-in-a-landscape in oils: Literature. Look at that soft focus photograph of a child’s feet: Fiction. In my brave new world (Aldous Huxley: Literature) all publishers would be obliged to turn out novels in plain brown covers, bearing only the title and the author’s name – rather like those lovely old orange Penguin paperbacks which filled my parents’ bookshelves.

Did I say the title and the author’s name? That would be no good, either. Beatrice’s Betrayal by Belinda Blacklace: most decidedly Fiction. Titles, therefore, would be replaced by the ISBN number alone, and covers would have the author’s name removed and a code number substituted - much as we have with anonymised examination scripts, to prevent examiners from subliminally awarding higher marks to Steve than to Stephanie, to Ms Singer than to Ms Singh.

Problem solved. In my Utopian future book world, the text would stand alone; the author’s voice would speak for itself. I’m neither Literature nor Fiction, I just write books, OK? Now pigeonhole me, if you dare!

More on Rosy Thornton

Rosy Thornton’s Writewords page

Reviews of Hearts and Minds

Vulpes Review
Tales from the Reading Room
Of Books and Bikes
Reading Matters
Other Stories

More rants from the Thursday Soapbox here.

Here Lies Arthur by Philip Reeve

Adapted from my Chicklish review.

Here Lies Arthur is a look at the legendary Arthur, but not as we know him. Arthur is no king, instead he’s a sixth century leader of a rag tag band of fighters, all pretty merciless, with the exception of Arthur’s most loyal employee, the harp-twanging storyteller, Myrddin. Myrddin makes his living spreading heroic tales about Arthur’s exploits up and down the Westcountry, and the suggestion is that we have Myrddin to thank for everything we think we’ve heard about his master.

This novel, although ostensibly aimed at children/young adults, is gritty, realistic and often gory. Arthur is portrayed as a brute of a man. He’s not a cold-hearted schemer, but he has a nasty temper and he murders those standing in his way without a second thought.

However, Arthur isn’t the main character: Here lies Arthur is the story of Gwyna, a girl in the service of Myrddin. Gwyna spends half of the novel dressed as a boy*, pretending to be ‘Gwyn’, since the war band is apparently no place for a girl, and Myrddin is only allowed to employ male servants.

Gwyna learns to be male, she speaks up and laughs loud. Instead of the girl who went unnoticed by everyone, she learns to walk tall and make her presence felt. Gwyna only regrets her ‘boyhood’ when she is forced to go to war. The battle scenes she witnesses are frightening - Phillip Reeve does not pull any punches. Yet despite her aversion to the violence in the lives of men, when Gwyna is required to become a girl again - thanks to adolescence - she finds it very difficult to acclimatise to the quiet (and as she sees it boring) ways of women. The brilliance of having Gwyna as the main character is that she is uniquely placed to observe both the male and female spheres of sixth century society, which makes her tale even more fascinating.

There is also an interesting message about stories. Gwyna sees Myrddin’s myth-making first hand and she comes to understand how people want to make sense of the world around them, even when they know the tall tales aren’t really true. Gwyna herself becomes part of certain legends, simply by participating in Myrddin’s tricks. The power of stories is an important idea and I found myself remembering all of the legends and myths that were told to me as a child, as well as questioning many of the notions that are ’spun’ even in the twenty-first century.

The style of writing is lyrical and beautiful, but quite ‘literary’, although I must admit I loved that element.

And I sat on the wet grass and watched that hand beckon to me from the shining middle of the mere. White as a stripped twig.

I was already wet as I could be, so I went down to the shallows and waded in. My torn skirts flowered out round me. The water was clear. There was grass on the bottom, neat and green and standing up on end, like it was startled to find itself under water.

Gwenhwyfar lay on the drowned grass.

If I had any criticism it is that I couldn’t always suspend my disbelief. I was so in awe of Reeve’s irreverent rewriting of the Arthur myth that I kept cross-referencing things in my own mind and contrasting Here Lies Arthur with what I thought I knew, which got a little in the way of me enjoying this purely as a story. In terms of characterisation, however, the book is brilliant and Philip Reeve establishes himself here as an exceptional, risk-taking writer.

Scholastic. ISBN-13: 978-0439955331. 304 pages. Hardback. £12.99.

For the Guardian review of Here Lies Arthur, click here

For my original Chicklish review, click here

* It is interesting that Gwyna, while female, spends much of the book appearing and acting like a boy - one way to get around the problem of YA novels allegedly requiring a male lead character in order to appeal to young male readers?

The Known World by Edward P Jones

The Known World opens in the years before the American Civil War with the death of Henry Townsend, a freed slave who, at the time of his death at 31 years of age, was the owner of a significant landholding and 33 slaves. Henry is probably the book’s central character although the narrative rambles across a wide cast of up to one hundred characters all touched in some way by the effects of slavery.

It is a surprising fact that some slaveowners were black although most of those listed in official records technically owned members of their own family; their wives, children, relatives. Henry Townsend is one of the exceptions who operated similarly to a white landowner. ‘Henry had always said that he wanted to be a better master than any white man he had ever known. He did not understand that the kind of world he wanted to create was doomed before he had even spoken the first syllable of the word master.’

Henry’s father, Augustus, a talented woodcarver who bought his own way to freedom and then bought his wife’s and son’s freedom, is at odds with his son’s choice of life.

‘“I ain’t done nothin I ain’t a right to. I ain’t done nothin no white man wouldn’t do.”…

Augustus took down a stick, one with an array of squirrels chasing each other, head to tail, tail to head, a line of sleek creatures going around and around the stick all the way to the top where a perfect acorn was waiting, stem and all. Augustus slammed the stick down across Henry’s shoulders and Henry crumpled to the ground. “Augustus, stop now!” Mildred shouted and knelt to her son. “Thas how a slave feel!’ Augustus called down to him. “Thas just how every slave every day be feelin.”

Henry squirmed out of his mother’s arms and managed to get to his feet. He took the stick from his father. “Henry, no!” Mildred said. Henry, with two tries, broke the stick over his knee. “Thas how a master feels,” he said and went out the door.’

Another fact that comes through clearly - one I’m not sure I understood fully before - is how the relatively high monetary value of the slaves influenced all dealings to do with them. A slaveowner who killed his own slave tended not to be punished by the law as ‘the loss of his property was considered punishment enough’. Setting a slave free was a costly thing to do and even those who, on principle, rejected slavery thought twice before doing so.

The tone of the novel is distinctive and takes a little getting used to at first. It is a curious mix of journalistic, detached reporting and confidential, almost gossipy, asides such as when the author breaks away from the current moment when Elias, one of Henry’s slaves, is carving a wooden doll for his six-year-old daughter to tell us that she would live until she was ninety-six years of age and would ask for the doll on her deathbed. Often we are made privy to information about what will happen to a character in years to come even while we are unsure about how he will survive the next twenty-four hours or the narrative might suddenly follow another seemingly incidental character in another direction. There is a certain omniscient distance created between the reader and the characters which is unusual in today’s fiction but for me it worked well in the end as it reinforced the idea that each person is the lead actor in his own life and follows his own destiny.

Edward P. Jones explores the moral complexities of slavery through the eyes of many without judgment or condemnation but what becomes clear through the mosaic of accounts is that this system is corrupt and that it corrupts utterly, even those who start out with relatively pure intentions. For example, Skiffington, the sheriff, a devout Christian who personally wants no part of slavery, is given a wedding gift of an eight-year-old girl, who he keeps because he doesn’t know what else to do with her. Initially, he acts to protect her but the purity of his relationship with her wavers over the years. Also, he has the responsibility of patrolling the slaves and ensuring that they don’t run away but even his relatively good intentions have tragic consequences as he fails to control his deputies and to understand the fragility of life for the black people in his territory, even the free men and women.

This is a very different but complementary approach to Toni Morrisson’s Beloved. Where Beloved plumbs the depths of slavery in one woman’s psyche, The Known World has a breadth of vision which shows its impact not only on a wide range of individuals but on society itself. Both approaches give us other valuable perspectives on a situation whose existence most of us now have difficulty imagining.

HarperPerennial (5 Jul 2004), 400 pages, ISBN-10: 0007195303

Articles and Interviews
The Guardian on The Known World
Interview with Edward P Jones from IdentityTheory.com