Booktime

There was an article in The Times this week about a government initiative to give a free book to young children; Allan Ahlberg was writing about the fact that one of his books is to be given to 700,000 children who are starting school this year (for which this wonderful man waived his fee). The government does not often get praise in this house, but this is a really good idea and one I'm very happy my taxes are paying for.
Thinking about this scheme this week has made me realise how lucky I was as a child. I was brought up by parents who were both avid readers and took it for granted that everyone's home would be full of books, and that you would naturally always be reading something.
We would go regularly every four weeks to the library, and reading and books were a huge part of my childhood. My parents like to tell the story of how once, when I was very small, on a trip home from the library they put the books they had just borrowed in the bottom of my pram. One of the books was War and Peace, which I proceeded to prop up on the edge of the pram and then began to turn the pages moving my head as if I was reading it!
It took many years before I realised that a life centred around books in this way is not necessarily the norm, and that some people don't read much at all. I always feel a little shocked if I visit a friend's house and see that the collection of books they have amassed in a lifetime barely covers more than a shelf or two.
I think it is the early influences that are vital and to give every child a book of their own at that very important age is a wonderful idea. I hope the scheme develops.

A short interruption for a bit of gore

I am really enjoying reading Bertrand Russell's essays. They are intelligent and thought-provoking, but written so that they are easily understood even if you haven't got a degree in philosophy. I am currently reading one where he traces how fascism developed through the philosophy of the eighteenth century onwards.
However, last night, about halfway through QI, I began to have a yearning for something that I could romp through without having to ponder over every paragraph, perhaps something with a bit of blood and gore in it. When I received my new books last weekend, I had had a sneaking feeling Sweeney Todd would be the first one I read.
Sweeney Todd is curious, as I suspect that although most people will know who the demon barber of Fleet Street is, very few will have read the story, much less so even than other great villains like Dracula or Edward Hyde because of the manner in which it was published. Where I used to live some years ago there were at least two hairdressers called Sweeney Todd's. As I didn't fancy being made into a meat pie, I didn't go into them. I can't help feeling that the owners should perhaps have thought a bit more about what the name implied.
Sweeney Todd was released as a 'Penny Dreadful', a weekly paper that was sold, according to Dick Collins' introduction, to 'the working boys and girls of London, children often as young as eight or ten. What these youngsters wanted was blood and gore and plenty of it, and Lloyd and his team never let them down, providing all the horror that eager young minds could want at a penny a go.'
I have read the first chapter and a bit, and will be going back for more as soon as I post this. It is, perhaps surprisingly, well written, with a good story that has already drawn me in (the first murder has already been committed), as it is designed to. I suppose a modern equivalent might be a film like Saw, or video games like the Grand Theft Autos, very bloody but with a good story behind them. I wonder if the Penny Dreadfuls were blamed for encouraging violence in youngsters?
The development of the Penny Dreadfuls by publisher Edward Lloyd is fascinating in itself. He began by pirating famous books; a writer called Thomas Prest who could really churn them out was often the one penning the stories. He produced plagiarisms like Oliver Twiss, and Nickelas Nickleberry, which is really funny. I'd love to see what they're like.
After the 1842 Copyright Act they started producing original stories of horror and were joined by another writer called James Rymer who was also capable of producing work at great speed. A story from an unknown author would be bought by Lloyd and then the writing team would fashion it into the type of story that sold well. This means that Sweeney Todd will have been created by a number of people. When it came out it was so successful that it spawned a play before the story was even finished! Lloyd then re-published it in 1850 but got his writers to keep adding chapters for as long as it was still selling; it went from the original version of eighteen parts to over a hundred and seventy!
Todd is a good villain, the description of him is vivid and I can see him clearly:
'The barber himself was a long, low-jointed, ill-put together sort of fellow, with an immense mouth, and such huge hands and feet, that he was, in his way, quite a natural curiosity; and, what was more wonderful, considering his trade, there never was seen such a head of hair as Sweeney Todd's. We know not what to compare it to: probably it came nearest to what one might suppose to be the appearance of a thickset hedge, in which a quantity of small wire had got entangled. In truth it was a most terrific head of hair; and as Sweeney Todd kept all his combs in it - some said his scissors likewise -when he put his head out of the shop-door to see what sort of weather it was, he might have been mistaken for some Indian warrior with a very remarkable headdress.'
I hope Wordsworth print a number of the best of the Penny Dreadfuls - some of the titles mentioned in the introduction sound fantastic, like The Maniac Father or the Victim of Seduction, or Anselmo the Accursed! or The Skeleton Hand.

Kimbooktu's bookish meme

Eva of A Striped Armchair kindly tagged me for a meme yesterday, created by Kimbooktu.
I've never done a meme before but have read them on other people's sites with interest; I've been thinking hard about this all day, these are great questions.
The only problem is, as a newcomer to the blog world, I'm a bit shy about tagging other bloggers, so if you would like to be tagged please let me know!

Hardcover or paperback? Why?
For the shelves, hardback, preferably Everyman editions from about 1900 with the titles picked out in gold leaf as they are beautiful. For practical reading purposes though, paperback as it's light (I always carry a book in my bag so weight is important) and it won't matter so much when I clumsily bash it around or the cat sits on it.

If I were to own a book shop I would call it...
This is tough. Owning a second hand bookshop is my dream and although I know exactly what sort of bookshop owner I'd be, lurking behind the counter in a ratty old cardigan giving people who have the audacity to want to buy one of my books the evil eye, the name is more problematic. I'd probably call it something trite like Black and White Cat books, after my little treasure.

My favourite quote from a book (name it) is...
It's the one at the top of this blog from M R James' story A Neighbour's Landmark; it sums up being a book obsessive for me. I love looking at people's book shelves, and feel actual pain if I have to pass a second hand bookshop without going in.

The author (alive or deceased) I would love to have lunch with would be...
The author who, from biographies I've read, seems most normal and probably quite fun in an unthreatening way is Jane Austen. She wrote some of the most important books in English literature but yet seemed far more bothered about going to parties and having a good time in her personal life; that's the impression I got from David Nokes' biography anyway. I think she'd have some good gossip and not be too full of her own self-importance.

If I was going to a deserted island and could only bring one book, except from the SAS survival guide, it would be...
An easy one, M R James' Collected Ghost Stories, a book I know I can read again and again without getting tired of it.

I would love someone to invent a bookish gadget that...
Would hold up my book at just the right angle when I am lying all cozy in bed and turn the pages so I don't have to get cold fingers.

The smell of an old book reminds me of...
A deep armchair, feet warming by the fire, and peace and quiet to just read.

If I could be the lead character in a book (mention the title), it would be...
How sad is this: I always wanted to be Nancy Drew when I was little and I think I still do. I've been trying to think of someone more grown up and intellectual all day, but just keep coming back to Nancy. There was no mystery that girl couldn't solve.

The most overestimated book of all time is...
Many will disagree with this and it is just personal gut reaction, but I think maybe Lolita; although I can readily agree Nabokov wrote brilliant and beautiful prose, the subject matter was something I was unable to get over when reading this book and I'm not sure that it should be got over.

I hate it when a book...
Takes a character that you have grown fond of and for no seemingly valid reason other than to defy the reader's expectations of a happy ending either kills them or has other horrible and depressing things happen to them. Jude the Obscure is a prime example.

The Haunting of Toby Jugg by Dennis Wheatley

I cannot wholeheartedly recommend this book, and I'll get the reason why out of the way first, then you can decide if you want to read it. As a satanic thriller, it is brilliant. Unfortunately, though, writing in 1948 Dennis Wheatley has Toby Jugg expressing some unpleasant opinions. When he is lecturing about the evils of socialism it is quite quaintly out-dated, and after a while a bit boring. However, Toby has some offensively racist and classist views as well. I'm sure this will reflect the views of a number of people at the time, but it's a shame that Wheatley marred his otherwise intelligent writing in this way.
The beginning is very creepy. An airforce pilot, Toby was shot down and broke his back losing the use of his legs. He was invalided out of the Services and in 1942 is recuperating in one of his country houses, this one in the middle of nowhere in Wales, as this was considered to be the safest place away from Geman bombs. He is under the care of a nurse, a local lad and Helmuth, one of his old school teachers who has moved into the position of mentor to Toby and a trustee of Toby's estate. Sir Toby is twenty years old and at twenty-one will inherit millions left to him by his industrialist grandfather.
Jugg's parents died when he was young and he was raised by his aunt and uncle; at ten they sent him to an unusual school where there are few rules and children are brought up to be independent and not tied down by Christian morals. The first suspicion that this school may be more than it seems is raised with its motto, 'Do what thou will shall be the whole of the law', which is from Aleister Crowley's The Book of the Law. The fact that the children are also taught not to be tied down by Christianity by wiping their feet on doormats where a crucifix has been woven into the matting is another clue, as desecration of Christian symbols is a part of the Black Mass. It all seems very suspicious.
The school teaches the children to be atheists, however, so when Toby begins to believe that he is being persecuted by a demonic presence he is understandably confused and the first part of the book has him debating with himself about the possibility of the existence of the devil and human souls.
The evil presence is round-bodied with a number of tentacle-like legs; he sees the shadow of it in the moonlight that creeps under his black-out curtains as it dances around the outside of his window, apparently attempting to find a way into his room. As he is paralysed, Toby is helpless in his bed and forced to spend the nights watching in terror as the presence moves, dreading that it may find a way into the room.
Despite frequent pleas for the curtains to be lengthened or for him to be moved to another room Helmuth refuses to humour him, and Toby soon begins to suspect that he is the victim of more than a random haunting, but that there is some sort of satanic conspiracy against him led by his fiercely intelligent and cold mentor.
The persecution of Toby who, because of his paralysis, is dependent on others, his attempts to escape and gradual uncovering of the depth of the plot against him is very well done. It is all told via Toby's journals which he began in an attempt to keep his sanity and this is a powerful way of telling the story as the reader knows only as much as Toby and shares in his distress; to a large extent he is helpless, slowly realising that he can trust no one around him and fearing that they are all in on the conspiracy which is going to leave him in the clutches of the terrible thing that haunts the outside of his window.
The issue about Toby's unpleasant opinions meant that he was not a particularly sympathetic character for me, but those against him are even less so, so I just about kept on his side throughout the story. The one that I felt most sympathy for was his Uncle Paul who is weak, not too bright, overly fond of drink and completely led by his beautiful young wife Julia, whom Toby worships. The book is excitingly written, with lots of ups and downs as Toby has successes and failures in his battle for survival and the retention of his sanity; there is a grand and satisfying ending to the story, and I really enjoyed the occult parts of it, if not the politics.

Forensics for Dummies

J, the husband, is currently reading a book which makes me a little uneasy, Forensics for Dummies by D P Lyle, especially when he says darkly with a pointed look in my direction that he needs to learn how to get away with it - I'm pretty sure he's joking.

I must admit, though, it is a really interesting book, full of fascinating little nuggets. I pick it up every now and again to read a couple of pages and find out something new, like how to recognise when a 'perp' is lying: look for signs of nervousness, read body language such as hand wringing, slouching, finger tapping or fidgeting (although that is me in every meeting I attend at the moment), or use the more scientific Neuro-Linguistic Programming 'a technique of reading a person's eye movements to determine his or her mental state.'

I have also learnt about exactly what a forensic psychiatrist is; in contrast to a psychiatrist that one would visit for treatment the relationship between forensic psychiatrist and 'patient' (suspect) is combative, with the suspect sometimes trying to convince them that they have a disorder to promote an insanity plea, or lying to convince the psychiatrist that they are not the sort of person that would commit the crime in question. As a CSI-addict (proper CSI that is, not Miami or New York) this is all very interesting.

More mundanely, there is a threat of frost tonight so we have decided to bring in most of the tomatoes and attempt to ripen them indoors.

As you can see there are a few varieties, all at various stages of green-ness. My vegetable book says that they will ripen if kept in the dark between sheets of newspaper. Ripen or rot, anyway, but at least they'll be safe from the slugs and snails.

Teenage reading

It's funny how ideas can stick in your head. A few years ago I read an article, I can't remember where or who it was by, where the writer talked about how much they had loved Virginia Woolf as a teenager. When they had tried to read Woolf as an adult they found it too adolescent, and said that Woolf was a writer you can only read in your teens.
I had read a bit of Virginia Woolf as a teenager, although to be honest I had found it quite hard work, but as a result of this article, and despite loving Orlando which I first read in my mid-twenties, I got it into my head that Woolf was not a writer for adults and thought Orlando must just be an exception.
Then, about eighteen months ago, for some reason I picked up Jacob's Room from the bookshelf, blew away the dust, and re-read it. It is an amazing book; the story is incredibly moving and brought home to me the loss that the Great War brought to so many people in a much stronger fashion than any number of war stories could have done.
I recognised the characters in the book, and was reminded of my own life in my early twenties, as a new adult with the freedom to do whatever I wanted but without yet having gathered responsibilities, feeling my way into life and my adult personality. When I read Jacob's Room in my mid-teens I could not have identified with the story in this way, as I hadn't lived any adult life at that point. It's no wonder I found it hard work.
Earlier this year I read Mrs Dalloway, which is even better than Jacob's Room. I hadn't read this as a teenager and I'm very glad of that; there is no way I could have understood what the story is about. Now, as a woman who is settled but lives, as I'm sure we all do, with the past constantly with her, I can easily relate to Clarissa Dalloway as the memories of her youth float through her mind during the day.
So, all in all, I have to profoundly disagree with that article writer; for me Virginia Woolf is most definitely a writer you should only read as an adult.
I do agree with the general point of the article, though, that authors who mean so much to us as teenagers may not be ones that we can continue to appreciate as we mature and value different things.
This is certainly true of my favourite writer at that point of my life, Jack Kerouac. At sixteen/ seventeen, when I was itching to be allowed to get on with my life as an adult but still officially a child, going to school and living in my parents' house, I lived through Kerouac. I looked out for fires with him on mountain tops, hiked with him along trails and, of course, went on the road with him and Neal Cassady. I worshipped Kerouac and his writing.
A few years ago I picked up The Vanity of Duluoz and thought I'd relive that feeling, but I couldn't get past the first few pages. The story didn't engage me, and the writing style grated to such an extent that I couldn't continue. I was quite devastated, to think that a writer who had once meant so much to me was now unreadable.
I'm not saying Kerouac is just a writer for teenagers, that would be blatant rubbish, but Kerouac is a writer just for the teenaged-me, and one who, although I keep fond memories of him, will never again have that incredible effect on me.

Idleness with Bertrand

This will be short. Yesterday while walking back from the shops I twisted my ankle a little and almost went flying. Although I managed to save myself from landing in an undignified heap on the ground, in the process I wrenched my neck and shoulder and was in agony for the rest of the day. I'm still quite sore today, and after somehow getting through work I'm going to rest as much as possible tonight.
Quite aptly, I am currently reading Bertrand Russell's collection of essays In Praise of Idleness. I have just read the title essay and am completely convinced by his point of view, a four hour working day would be wonderful!
More seriously, though, I do agree with the view that too much emphasis is put on work, to the detriment of our lives and happiness. Russell argues that there is no need for everyone to work long hours, especially as more and more machines are developed to allow the same work to be done in less time. This was written the the 1930s, and is even more true today with the development of computing.
He suggests that the work ethic is immoral, and that people should be given more leisure time. As people would have more time for themselves and be less exhausted, they would as a result feel more able to undertake activities that require them to think and participate rather than just engaging in passive activities such as watching films or sport. (My Sunday evenings in front of tv programmes like Girls of the Playboy Mansion are a case in point; ironically because I don't have much free time and get very tired, I squander a chunk of the little time I have away from work because I just need to switch my brain off, when I could be doing much more interesting and fulfilling things.)
However, the work ethic is so deeply engrained in our culture that even when a machine is developed which can double the production of a person, rather than halving the amount of time that each person spends working, the number of people employed is halved, so 'half the men are totally idle while half are still overworked. In this way, it is insured that the unavoidable leisure shall cause misery all round instead of being a univeral source of happiness. Can anything more insane be imagined?'
It is a utopian ideal, certainly, but one that I find very appealing.

Book Parcel

I collected my parcel of books last night; it contained some really good ones. It had been so long since I ordered them I had forgotten what was coming, so looking through it was even more fun than usual.

First, there is a beautiful Hesperus Press edition of A Rogue's Life by Wilkie Collins. These paperbacks are so pretty, I love them.

Then a selection from the Wordsworth Mystery and Supernatural list, including a collection of ghost stories by May Sinclair, Uncanny Stories. She was writing at the beginning of the twentieth century; I always enjoy discovering new female writers, and, as I think I've mentioned before, there were a lot of women writing ghost stories in the late nineteenth, early twentieth century. I'm glad Wordsworth is making them available again.

To make a change from my usual creepy short story collections, I have bought two novels from the list. First Sweeney Todd, or The String of Pearls by an anonymous author. This is going to be everywhere once Tim Burton's film, starring Johnny Depp, is out. I thought I'd buy it now to be sure that I am reading the Victorian original, and not a 'based on the film' version.

Then there was Wagner the Werewolf by George W M Reynolds. Reynolds was the 'Master of the Penny Dreadful', according to the blurb, which sold it to me. This novel was first published in 1847 and is one of the earliest books in English literature about a werewolf. Add in the fact that Wagner becomes a werewolf through a Faustian pact and this was a must-have.

Finally I have two books relating to reading challenges. The Worm Ouroboros by E R Eddison is being read by Becky for the Outmoded Authors challenge. It sounds great, although I have to admit the name alone was enough for me to order this.

I am very excited about the addition to my challenge list for the Index Librorum Liberorum challenge, The History of the Devil: Ancient and Modern in two parts by Daniel Defoe. It is published by Kessinger Publishing; the text is a facsimile of an 1814 edition. This publishing house digitally preserve rare and out of print books and they say on their website that once a book is in print on their list it stays there. I can see I'm going to be spending some time on their website, they have published some fascinating titles.

Getting out of hand - update

Okay, so the 'not read yet' tag is now at 435. I have no will power.
On Wednesday Dovegreyreader wrote about Roald Dahl's Collected Stories, and reminded me how much I had also enjoyed Dahl's stories when a teenager. Some, like Pig, made a lasting impression on me.
So, as I looked for books for my father, when I noticed a paperback edition of Dahl's Collected Short Stories it had to be bought.
Looking through it quite a number of the titles ring a bell, I'm looking forward to reacquainting myself with them.

Getting out of hand

I've just noticed that my Librarything tag 'not read yet' has reached it's highest ever, of 434. I had been trying to get it to under 400 but a number of things have pushed it the other way.
Firstly I've had a stressful few weeks at work, and retail therapy has been a way of escaping it. However, over the past few years I have lost all enjoyment for clothes shopping, which is now just a chore, and it is only book shopping that I enjoy. So I have bought quite a lot of books, as you may have noticed as I've written about them here.
Secondly, blogging itself has taken some reading time away - not just writing mine, but reading others which has become a daily necessity. I really enjoy both writing this blog and reading the many other brilliant book blogs out there so I don't begrudge the time, but it does mean that that tag is reducing more slowly than perhaps it might have.
And, of course, as I mentioned a couple of days ago, other blogs are pointing me to new authors, leading to more book buying and an ever-increasing 'to read' pile (I dread to think how high it would be if I actually did pile all those 434 books up).
It's only going to get worse today, as my Amazon order has finally arrived; I had to get it delivered to my parents because the courier only delivered during working hours, so I will be collecting another little pile tonight to add to the list. We are going to my parents to celebrate my father's birthday, but it's nice to know there will be a lovely present waiting there for me too.
So, all in all, I would guess I've probably bought about five books for every one I've read over the past few weeks. This is getting out of hand and I need to slow it down a bit and give myself a chance to actually look at the books I have waiting to be read, so - no more book buying this week.
I should think this resolution will last for, at most, an hour, until I go into town to see if I can pick up another present or two for my father; I will be looking for books for him, I wonder if I'll be able to resist temptation to pick up some for me?

M R James Part 2

Another couple of stories from M R James' Collected Ghost Stories.

The Ash-Tree
This is a curious, rambling story which begins with James discussing his love of country houses in the East of England. From this, admitted, digression, James moves to a specific country house, Castringham Hall in Suffolk.
This house built in the late seventeenth century, was in an area where witch trials were held; one trial was of a woman from the village of Castringham, Mrs Mothersole, whose fate was sealed by the owner of Castringham Hall, Sir Matthew Fell. She was hanged but did not go to her fate peacefully.
'Her "poysonous Rage", as a reporter of the time puts it, "did so work upon the Bystanders - yea, even upon the Hangman - that it was constantly affirmed of all that saw her that she presented the living Aspect of a mad Divell. Yet she offer'd no Resistance to the officers of the Law; onlly she looked upon those that laid Hands upon her with so Direfull and venomous an Aspect that - as one of them afterwards assured me - the meer Thought of it preyed inwardly upon his mind for six Months after."'
She promises that 'There will be guests at the Hall'. The nature of these guests, and how they afflict Sir Matthew Fell and his heirs, all of whom sleep in a room directly opposite the Ash-Tree of the title, is described in the rest of the story.
This story has a definite 'ugh' factor when all is revealed at the end.

Number 13
This is most definitely my desert island book, and, of them all, this story is my favourite. I absolutely love it, the whole idea behind the story is wonderful.
Mr Anderson visits Viborg to study the Church history of Denmark, and takes a room at the Golden Lion; he picks room number 12. That night he almost enters the wrong room, accidentally trying the door of number 13.
His study next day uncovers the history of a bishop, Jorges Friis, who was said to practise 'secret and wicked arts'; at night he is surprised by how much smaller his room seems than during the day.
He also misses his portmanteau which had been standing against the wall. However the next morning, as he tackles the maid about it, it is back.
Outside of the room he can no longer find the number 13 he saw previously, the room next to his is number 14.
At night his next door neighbour, a staid lawyer that Anderson had noticed at meals, becomes troublesome. He begins:
'to sing, and to sing in a manner which could leave no doubt in any one's mind that he was either exceedingly drunk or raving mad. It was a high, thin voice they heard, and it seemed dry, as if from long disuse. Of words or tune there was no question. It went sailing up to a surprising height, and was carried down with a despairing moan as of a winter wind in a hollow chimney, or an organ whose wind fails suddenly.'
It is only when the lawyer comes to Anderson's room to complain about Anderson's singing that they realise that there is now a number 13 between their rooms; they then attempt to investigate who or what it is that this mysterious room contains.
I think my favourite part of this story is when the portmanteau is missing; the idea of part of your room being taken over by some devilish visitor every night attracts me.
This is one of those stories that takes something incredibly familiar, staying in an ordinary hotel, and introduces the fantastic and supernatural into it. It makes it very easy to imagine, and I will always be wary of staying in room 12 or 14 in any hotel after reading this!

Discovering Authors

I have found discovering the book-blogging community to be a happy replacement for my days of wandering around the many second hand bookshops in the area, which are now reduced to just one that I can easily get to, where I would have the opportunity to discover authors just by picking up volumes and looking through them, authors who had long ago been abandoned by the world of publishing and were pretty much unobtainable in chain bookstores.
I had felt a bit lost as the bookstores sadly disappeared one by one; I know online bookbuying is great and innovations like AbeBooks have enabled me to get hold of books I would never before have had the chance to find in local shops, but you generally have to know what you're looking for. But now other book blogs and the members of Librarything are introducing me to authors I haven't previously heard of; I can then use the internet to track them down, or pick them up if I do come across them instead of passing them by unnoticed.
For instance, I have noticed posts about the author Elizabeth Taylor on a few blogs - I must admit I didn't know that there was an Elizabeth Taylor that wrote books and didn't frequently marry Richard Burton but I was intrigued, which meant she stuck in my mind.
A Thursday afternoon off today meant that I could walk through the flea market and check out the boxes of books; there wasn't much to be found but then I came across a box of old Virago Modern Classics for a pound each; serendipitously two of them were by Elizabeth Taylor. I'm sure I would not have glanced at them twice without having read about her in blogs. So I have bought At Mrs Lippincote's and Angel and am looking forward to discovering for myself what this new (to me) author is like.
I also picked up a copy of Elizabeth Von Arnim's Elizabeth and her German Garden, a book that every now and then I want to read but have never got round to buying. All in all I am feeling pretty pleased with these finds.

A little bit of Shelley

I've been reading Shelley today.

For some reason I didn't like the Romantic poets when I was a teenager, but luckily got over that when I hit twenty and discovered how wonderful Byron was, quickly followed by Shelley and Coleridge, and I have fallen more and more in love with them as the years have gone by.

Now, at long last I am warming to Wordsworth (mainly due to Horace Rumpole's influence), and may even try Keats again, after being put off at sixteen by English lessons. In fact that is probably the root of my teenage aversion.

Today, however, I particularly enjoyed this beautiful little poem of Shelley's.

To ___

Music, when soft voices die,
Vibrates in the memory -
Odours, when sweet violets sicken,
Live within the sense they quicken.

Rose leaves, when the rose is dead,
Are heaped for the belovèd's bed;
And so thy thoughts, when thou art gone,
Love itself shall slumber on.

Collected Ghost Stories by M. R. James, pt. 1

I've realised that I can't really write about my collections of ghost stories and not write about the Master, M.R. James.
For James, though, a quick run through the book mentioning the one or two best titles will not do. All of his stories deserve attention, so this is the first in a mini-series where I will look at a few stories at a time.
Having picked up my battered old Collected Ghost Stories, a Wordsworth Classics edition that cost me a pound- one of the best pounds I ever spent- and re-read the introduction I realise there are still three M.R. James stories that I haven't read, as they were written after this collection was first published in 1931. So I have a new goal in life: to track down these missing James stories!
The first eight stories of this collection were published as Ghost Stories of an Antiquary in 1904.

Canon Alberic's Scrapbook
A Cambridge man called Dennistoun arrives at the church in St Bertrand de Comminges to spend the day noting and photographing it. The verger insists on accompanying him around the church, much to the Englishman's annoyance; the Frenchman is tense and nervous, and several strange noises occur in the church.
'"Once" Dennistoun said to me, "I could have sworn I heard a thin metallic voice laughing high up in the tower. I darted an inquiring glance at my sacristan. He was white to the lips. 'It is he- that is- it is no one; the door is locked,' was all he said and we looked at each other for a full minute."'
This is a very good story; the tension builds up slowly to the climax, as the creepy atmosphere of the church combines with the fear of the verger and then of his daughter to create the sense that all is really not well, and that Dennistoun may not be wise to purchase the Canon's scrapbook.
This story has some typical James elements: an academic and heartily sceptical protagonist getting the fright of his life, and misdoings of the past leaching into the present.
As always with James, the story is well-written in clear and intelligent prose. Although obviously written by a highly educated man, the text is not self-conscious; there are no attempts to force facts or allusions into the text, but they are used when it is necessary to set the scene or build characters that convince the reader, such as when Dennistoun excitedly peruses the Canon's book and realises what a treasure he has.

Lost Hearts
If the first story is in familiar James territory, the second is more unusual. Firstly, it is set in the early years of the nineteenth century, whereas most James stories are set roughly around when he wrote them.
Secondly, the protagonist is a child, a boy of eleven. The orphaned Stephen Elliott arrives at the house of his distant cousin Mr Abney who has kindly invited him to live with him. Mr Abney has taken in two children in past years, a girl and a young foreign boy, both of whom are said to have run away.
As he settles in to the house, Stephen has a strange dream about a corpse-like figure in the bathroom:
'A figure inexpressibly thin and pathetic, of a dusty leaden colour, enveloped in a shroud-like garment, the thin lips crooked into a faint and dreadful smile, the hands pressed tightly over the region of the heart.'
This is the first of a number of strange occurrences during the lead up to Stephen's twelfth birthday, an event his elderly cousin is very interested in.
Lost Hearts is one of the scariest of James' stories and one of my favourites. The BBC dramatised it in the seventies, and over the past couple of Christmases have been showing them again late at night.
This was one I managed to stay up for, when J was out at a Christmas work do; I was alone with the cat at close to midnight on a cold, dark December night watching this very scary ghost story. It was wonderful.

The Mezzotint
Occasionally James uses similar story lines in more than one story and this is one of those occasions. James later expands the idea in The Haunted Dolls' House which is, I think, slightly better.
This story begins by reminding the reader of Dennistoun from Canon Alberic's Scrapbook, to establish that we are dealing with the same kind of man here, a University man called Williams. This particular scholar receives a mezzotint of a manor house on approval; it was recommended as being interesting but with a high price, so he expects much from it. On receiving it, however, he is not impressed. It is just an ordinary engraving of a house.
When he examines it later with a friend they notice a figure in the corner of the engraving that they did not notice there before. Then, later still:
'It was indubitable - rankly impossible, no doubt, but absolutely certain. In the middle of the lawn in front of the unknown house there was a figure where no figure had been at five o'clock that afternoon. It was crawling on all fours towards the house, and it was muffled in a strange black garment with a white cross on the back.'
This grotesque figure then continues its progress towards the house whenever the picture is unwatched - what does it intend to do there? This is a nice story but quite light, especially in comparison with Lost Hearts.

Dennis Wheatley and Montague Summers

I quite often decide what I'm going to read next before I've finished, or sometime even begun, my next book and this was the case on Saturday. I was definitely going to move on to Somerset Maugham after Kafka. Then I heard the siren call of Dennis Wheatley and I'm now knee deep in the satanic persecution of Toby Jugg.

I attempted to justify it to myself that it is one of my RIP reads, so at least I'm reading for one of my challenges, but to be honest it was a self-indulgent Sunday and Wheatley fitted my mood, followed by Columbo in the afternoon (the classic Candidate for Crime from the third season), and an evening of Fabulous Life of..., my favourite trashy tv.

I would not want to suggest, however, that Wheatley is trashy reading, far from it, although he often gets put into the pulp fiction category. Wheatley takes his subject seriously, and has obviously deeply researched and thought about the occult; this is the main reason I love his books so much.

The Haunting of Toby Jugg is written as Jugg's diary, and begins with an exploration of Jugg's own religious thoughts and the state of belief in the devil in modern times, and the existence of the soul. Jugg does this as he is in the difficult position of being an atheist who is certain that he is being persecuted by a demonic entity. It is intelligent and, if you are fascinated by these subjects as I am, very interesting. It is also, in the little bit I have read so far, pretty scary.

Today on a Waterstones wander, Wheatley called again. They had a table of the Wordsworth Mystery and Supernatural books and I would have picked up every one of them I haven't yet bought, if only I could have remembered which ones I ordered from Amazon the other week. However, I am pretty certain that I didn't order To the Devil a Daughter.

I am a little disappointed that they haven't included Wheatley's warning about the occult in this edition, which I assume he will have included in the original edition. I love the little warning pieces that begin my copies of The Devil Rides Out and The Haunting of Toby Jugg, where Wheatley states very firmly that he has never had anything to do with black magic, but that he knows people who have and from whom he has gathered a lot of his information. He then firmly warns the reader who may meet any 'man or woman of power' not to begin to practise the 'Secret Art', as they could be in real danger. One of the men of power that Wheatley knew was Aleister Crowley, on whom he based Mocata in The Devil Rides Out; that's a relationship I would like to learn more about.

I have briefly glanced at the introduction of To the Devil a Daughter and it says that the main character is based on Montague Summers and that, while Wheatley got on quite well with Crowley, his relationship with Summers became 'positively alarming'.

Montague Summers is someone who has fascinated me for years. I first came across him during my Theatre Studies degree when I wrote my thesis on two female playwrights of the Restoration period, Aphra Behn and Susannah Centlivre. Summers produced the first collected edition of Behn's works and therefore is responsible for attempting to restore her reputation after she was unjustly damned by Victorian (male) critics because she wrote plays that were as bawdy as those written by male playwrights of the era. As a result I had quite fond feelings for him.

When I found a copy of his History of Witchcraft and Demonology some years ago I realised he had another side to his interests, and I have since read about his mysterious life and bizarre habit of dressing like a priest.

He also wrote ghost stories, I would love to find them. I suspect they will be very creepy.

I also bought a collection of Oriental Ghost Stories and Nature's Engraver: A Life of Thomas Bewick by Jenny Uglow, both of which look interesting in their different ways.

Letter to Father by Franz Kafka

Letter to Father (published by Vitalis ISBN 80-85938-29-4, http://www.vitalis-verlag.com/) is an interesting, but not an easy, read. It is a short book, long letter, where Kafka describes how he feels he has been influenced by his father's personality and manner of bringing him up; reading it feels like eavesdropping on an intensely personal and difficult conversation.

'Dearest Father,

You once asked me why I claim to be afraid of you. I did not know as usual, what to answer, partly out of my fear of you and partly because the cause of this fear consists of too many details for me to put even halfway into words. And if I try to answer you in writing here, it will be only very incomplete anyway, because even in writing my fear and its consequences inhibit me toward you, and because the magnitude of the material far exceeds my memory and my understanding.'

The 'fear' Kafka talks of here is not physical, his father is not violent. It is, rather, fear engendered by two very different personalities attempting to live in close proximity; a father who is loud, self-confident and domineering and a son who feels he is weak in comparison. He sees his father as a tyrant, but is constantly comparing himself with him and coming up short.
Despite the fact that Kafka was in his thirties when he wrote this, at times it takes on the tone of a bit of a teenage whine; he notes the hypocrisy his father showed towards him, criticising him but not then living up to the standards he set for his son, without any comprehension that his father may be exhibiting understandable human frailties. However, it appears that he is unable to see his father as just a human being; he is always the overwhelming presence to him that he was during childhood.
His father attempted to bring his son up to be strong, and believed he could do this by bullying, and in this way force him to stand up to him. Instead, Franz turned in on himself and felt unable to escape from his father's influence, apart from, to a small extent, through his writing. He discusses his various attempts at marriage, at how he saw this as a way for him to escape the tyranny of this relationship, but that in the end he could not, because marriage was his father's territory, and therefore not for him.
It is a sad document in many ways, Kafka and his father's relationship does not seem to have matured into a relationship between two adults; he is constantly the child, with his father still attempting to bring him up.
I felt a little sorry for his father if he had read this letter and its accusations, because it is apparent from Kafka's desriptions that it was not malice that drove him to dominate his son so but his personality and a belief that he was bringing his children up correctly, but apparently he never did read it. The letter was not published until after Kafka's death. It appears to be a way of dealing with the relationship and his guilt, to put it on paper perhaps in an attempt to exorcise the influence his father had over him.

Does this gives any insights into Kafka as a writer? Maybe a little. When he writes of people who are ordinary participants in communities of one kind or another who are then for some reason alienated from it, for instance Josef K in The Trial, or Gregor Samsa who wakes up one morning in his family home to find he is a huge insect (The Metamorphosis), perhaps this was in part a reflection of his feeling as a part of his family.

His friend and biographer Max Brod points out that the Kafka from this letter is not the Kafka he knew, though; the man he knew was bright and fun. This short book shows just one side of him, a side that was not meant for public view.

Kafka at home

I was about to start Cakes and Ale for the Outmoded Authors challenge but on reading the blurb I felt it had too many similarities with Jayber Crow for them to be read comfortably together. So to break things up I plumped for something serious, but short, Kafka's Letter to Father.

I got my copy of this work from the bookshop of Prague Castle; J and I honeymooned in Prague a couple of years ago, and what could be more romantic than looking for volumes of Kafka on your honeymoon!

The castle itself is a beautiful part of Prague and well worth seeing, but a bit of a strange experience; to get into the areas you want to see you have to go to an office near the entrance, but not so near as to be convenient, and buy tickets for the right parts of the castle. And if you change your mind halfway through (and bear in mind that it is really a small town, not just one building) then you have to go back to the beginning and buy a ticket there, as you aren't allowed to buy tickets at the door of any part.

I had to justify to the young woman selling the tickets why I wanted to see the armoury, she obviously thought I was a bit mad. But J likes looking at such boy-things, and I had an ulterior motive: the armoury used to be Rudolph II's alchemy lab. I was hoping that there would be some vestiges of it left in the small round building, or maybe some little exhibit about this fascinating piece of the building's history but there wasn't, it was just an armoury.

Another part of the castle that I was determined to see was an area along the wall where jewellers used to live, if memory serves me correctly, in tiny colourful houses. The houses are like little dolls houses, very pretty. As you can see from this picture though, to get to any of them you had to negotiate a sea of fellow sightseers.

I waded in determined, leaving J behind to play with the video camera, because I had an ulterior motive for wanting to see this area too: Franz Kafka lived in one of these small houses for a few months with his sister.

I fought my way to the house in question, I think there is some sort of shop in it now. I am the sort of person who enjoys seeing where authors I love lived, treading the same floorboards they will have trodden. It may seem a little pointless to some, I know, but I enjoy it so I don't care. I have squeezed in pilgrimages to Johnson's and Dickens' houses while on work trips to London, and I wasn't going to miss the chance to see where Kafka stayed, even if only for a few months. However, my main thought once in the house was 'I wouldn't want to live here with my brother!' It was tiny, just two rooms, one on top of the other. I can't imagine they had any privacy. I don't think I got any great insight into how Kafka lived and thought from this house but I hope to have better luck with the book.

Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry

The book begins with the following warning, in the style of Huckleberry Finn:

'NOTICE
Persons attempting to find a 'text' in this book will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a 'subtext' in it will be banished; persons attempting to explain, interpret, explicate, analyse, deconstruct, or otherwise 'understand' it will be exiled to a desert island in the company of only other explainers.
BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR'

So there will be no attempt to explain Jayber Crow, Jayber Crow just is, and I am very glad it is.
I can honestly say I loved every minute of reading this book. I have travelled with Jayber from his childhood to his declining years and now I have finished the book I feel somewhat bereaved. I have enjoyed having his gentle voice in my head, and sharing his experiences of life and the changes that occurred to his small part of Kentucky from the 1930s to the 1980s.
It begins with a wonderfully funny chapter as Jayber introduces us to the inhabitants of Port William with some vignettes of his experiences as the town's barber.

'One hot summer afternoon, for instance, I saw Grover Gibbs passing along in front of Mr Settle's garage with a plumber's helper over his shoulder. He saw, sticking out from beneath an automobile, Portly Jones's sweat-shiny big bald head, on the top of which, with a smooth and forceful underhanded thrust, he affixed the suction cup. Portly then enacted a sort of seizure in which, with his feet and left hand, he tried to hurry out from under the car, while with his right hand he tried unsuccessfully to detach the plumber's helper. It appeared he was trying to drag himself out by the head. He didn't get out very fast. Meanwhile his assailant walked up on the street a ways and then turned and walked casually back to see the results of his inspiration. He walked with his hands innocently folded behind the bib of his overalls, a disinterested look in his eyes, his face rather tensely drawn around a small hole between his lips, through which he was whistling a tune. He allowed himself to be confronted by Portly, looking perhaps like a unicorn with a red face.'

Then he begins to retell his life, his few memories of his parents, his idyllic childhood years with his old Aunt Cordie and Uncle Othy and the cold change in his life at age ten as he is sent to an orphanage after they die. After twelve years in institutions and out making his own way, he realises that he wants to go home and returns to Port William.
On his return he meets up with Burley Coulter, a man he vaguely remembers from his childhood who also remembers him as a small child. This relationship is one of the most important to Jayber:
'I knew him for forty years about, and saw him endure the times and suffer the changes, and we were always friends.'
Burley is a free spirit, wandering where he wants and living life the way he thinks he should be lived. It is Burley who takes Jayber to the small barber shop which has just become vacant, taking great pleasure in setting him up in a place where his work and his home are together.
Jayber settles into Port William life, as its ineligible-bachelor barber, and is gradually accepted by the other townsfolk. He describes the people, and the different events that occur either in the town or in the wider world that seem distant but nevertheless have an impact on the town, such as the Second World War, changes in the economy, Korea and Vietnam; he also talks of his constant struggle with his religious beliefs (he originally feels he might be called to be a preacher but cannot reconcile a preacher's duties with the realisation that once you have prayed 'thy will be done' to God, there's not much more to be said, if you really mean it) and his love for Mattie Chatham, née Keith.
There are many moving episodes in the book, especially as Jayber's sideline as gravedigger for the community places him where he witnesses loss and grief close up, and emphasises the changes in the community as time passes.
There are also a number of very funny episodes; Port William is full of characters that you grow to love as the book unfolds. One particularly funny episode occurs soon after Jayber moves to Port William when he is invited to a 'worter dranking' event, where the water can be diluted with whatever other liquid is desired; the desired dilution is whiskey, usually to the exclusion of any 'worter'.
The event takes place in a clearing in the woods where Jayber and some others fall asleep; next morning he wakes to see the other three men sneak across the ground and quietly climb a tree. Seconds later he realises why, as Cecilia Overhold, wife of one of the tree-climbers, arrives, 'walking like the Divine Wrath itself' destroying everything she can get her hands on, including Jayber's lip when she throws a rock at him.
This book is beautifully written by Wendell Berry; Jayber comes completely alive through the narration, as do the other characters from the town. It is delicate, with no need for the explicit sex scenes that ruin so many modern books for me. That's not to say that the characters are unrealistically virtuous, far from it, but Wendell Berry's writing implies enough without the need for embarrassing gratuity, an old-fashioned skill that I had begun to think had died out.
There are sections in the later parts of the book where Jayber describes the idyllic scenes of nature that he experiences in his cabin by the river that did what I was sorry Walden didn't really do for me, they made me want to go and live in a cabin in the woods. Richard Platt, who wrote the article in Slightly Foxed that introduced me to Jayber Crow, calls Wendell Berry a 'kinder, gentler Thoreau' and he's right.
I can't recommend this book highly enough. It is not that easily available in the UK as I discovered, but it was definitely worth the effort of hunting it out. I will certainly be trying to get more of Wendell Berry's writing, and more Port William stories.

O. Douglas

Continuing the theme of my guilty reading pleasures, I am going to write about O. Douglas today.
I first came across one of her books at a jumble sale run by a local church about 12 years ago. It was a friend of mine's church and she had roped me in to help, which was quite a terrifying experience as hordes of women who ran stalls at local flea markets streamed in to haggle over the clothes.
No one was bothered about the books; there was only one box of mostly religious works that I sifted through and grabbed anything that looked interesting, including a small volume called The Proper Place by O. Douglas.
I had never heard of O. Douglas at the time, she is no longer in print as far as I know. I have since managed to read two other volumes of hers, The Setons and The Day of Small Things, which happily turned out to be a sequel to The Proper Place.
I don't really understand the hold that these books have over me. The main female characters are so good they would probably make you want to push them under a bus if you met them: they are loved by everyone; they are relatively rich in the parts of Scotland they live in and regularly do good works, visiting the poor who love them too; they are intelligent, bright and infinitely attractive.
And to top it all, the main character in The Proper Place and The Day of Small Things worships Mary Queen of Scots and reviles Elizabeth I, and Elizabeth I is one of my heroes. But, still, I love them.
O. Douglas was a pen name for Anna Masterton Buchan; she was John Buchan's sister but has not had his enduring reputation. Her stories are, I suppose, intensely unfashionable. They are tales of ordinary people and their lives where little happens, but they are well written and the characters are engaging, even if I can't really identify with the main characters. It's a shame she's no longer in print, the stories are a escape to simplicity from a fraught world.
I suspect that was probably part of the appeal at the time they were written. The Setons, the earliest book of hers I have, was written just after the First World War [EDIT: during the First World War I should have said, 1917]. The shadow of the war hangs over all the books, although it is rarely explicitly referred to. The world described in the books is one of women. Men are present, but they are often old, and there is little happiness in romance for anyone young, a reflection of the reality for many women at that time.
One of the most moving and likeable characters is a woman in The Day of Small Things who has moved to the village and befriends the main character. She is a young English widow in her thirties, whose husband went to the war almost as soon as they were married. He was injured terribly and she spent her entire married life with him nursing him until he died. This is not described in detail in the book, but it is a constant memory for her as she cheerfully gets on with life, attempting to fit her English ways into the small Scottish village and survive battles with her surly old gardener over her new ideas.
O. Douglas wrote an autobiography which I would like to find; I imagine her experience of the war was unhappy, she captures the pain that women were going through and the resilience with which they deal with it so well, without resorting to melodrama or becoming maudlin.

Augustus Carp and a House-Boat Holiday

I had a weary, eye-ball burning day at work today, so I broke it up with a look around the bookshelves of a charity shop and found three new books to join the many others in the various piles.

First was the serious-reading purchase, A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies by Las Casas. This work from 1542 argued against the methods of the Conquistadores and for basic human rights for the Indians of the New World, and sounds like an interesting contemporary view. The previous owner has highlighted several passages in orange, which make me think it was probably bought for academic purposes and then merrily shunted off to the charity shop. I don't understand people who get rid of textbooks; I know a number of people who did law courses when I did mine over the past few years who have since sold their textbooks. I'm never parting with mine whether I ever think about law again or not, and I have dozens of books on theatre from my first degree that have been lumped from home to home since leaving University.

The second book is Augustus Carp Esq - By Himself. It is a comic book in a similar vein to the Diary of a Nobody, but with less sympathetic main characters, at least according to the introduction by Robert Robinson, which I have glanced at. He loves it and Anthony Burgess loved it; he called it 'one of the great comic novels of the twentieth century'. It was published in the 1920s anonymously by a doctor who by the end of his career was George VI's Honorary Physician but when he wrote this was just a doctor and family man. The Diary of a Nobody is one of my favourite books, so it has a lot to live up to. The bits I have looked at seem quite wickedly funny; I don't think I'm going to love the Carps the way I love the Pooters, but I think I'm going to thoroughly enjoy spending a bit of time with them.

Finally, I picked up an example of one of my guilty reading pleasures. We all have them, books that are read purely for fun: for some it will be thick 'holiday reading' thrillers, others will lose themselves in romances, but for me it is stories about jolly young people in the early twentieth century having adventures or just being generally nice. This one is called House-boat Holiday; it's by Garry Hogg and was published in the mid-'40s, so you know they're going to be very polite but brave young scamps in this adventure, and this picture from the frontispiece seems to suggest there will be some criminal thwarting involved, wonderful!

I can't resist, I love this sort of book, they make me feel warm and cosy inside. Maybe it's because I was a teenager in the 1980s; I yearn for a youth that was more innocent and less money-obsessed. From the phenomenal success of Harry Potter these days, perhaps I'm not alone?

An idle hour with the Devil's Dictionary

I've just whiled away an hour flicking through Ambrose Bierce's The Devil's Dictionary. Despite just having read a collection of his short stories, I can't get enough of him! One day I will read this beautifully written, wickedly funny and cynical book of alternative definitions cover to cover, as it is some of the longer pieces that are the most interesting.
For instance, in the amusing definition of 'ghosts' he discusses how strange it is that ghosts always appear either in their shroud or fully dressed, and wonders if this means that clothes also have ghosts. If they do, however, why do we never see the spirit of a suit of clothes on its own without a body inside?
Bierce's misanthropy and cynicism appeals to me greatly, as I am often similarly unimpressed with many of the other inhabitants of this planet. Here are a few of my favourite definitions from the past hour; I particularly like the definition of the telephone.

Antipathy: the sentiment inspired by one's friend's friend.


Consolation: The knowledge that a better man is more unfortunate than yourself.


Habeus Corpus (Latin): A writ by which a man may be taken out of jail when confined for the wrong crime.


Quixotic: Absurdly chivalric, like Don Quixote. An insight into the beauty and excellence of this incomparable adjective is unhappily denied to him who has the misfortune to know that the gentleman's name is pronounced Ke-ho-tay.


Telephone: An invention of the devil which abrogates some of the advantages of making a disagreeable person keep his distance.

'Underwear was important'

That's a great title, and it's from the autumn Slightly Foxed that fell through the letter box at the weekend before I'd even finished the Summer one, which was delightful. I know that it's just an accident of the point in the quarter when I subscribed and unlikely to happen again; in the future there will be at least two months of Foxed-lessness to endure. I will have to draw out the reading of them.

I have now finished the summer edition, which ended with an interesting piece by Nicholas Clee who interviewed authors for the Bookseller magazine. He described some of his experiences with authors and how, as an interviewer, he was almost always anonymous to them. He described at length a meeting with Kingsley Amis, who was charming and did his best to put his interviewer at his ease, but then had no recollection of him shortly afterwards when they met elsewhere. Reading this piece has reminded me that I have a huge volume of Amis' letters supporting one of my larger book piles that I would love to read. It will take some planning, I think, firstly to extricate it and, secondly, for when to read it. Ideally I will need a week off with no other responsibilities, which is unlikely to happen soon.

The autumn edition begins with a piece about Posy Simmonds' cartoons; she created a character called Gemma Bovery who had two lovers and therefore 'underwear was important' when drawing her. It was interesting, I knew the name of the cartoonist but am not a Guardian reader so don't know her creations well. I may pick up some of her books if I come across them.

In fact, I'm sure this edition will make me want as many books as the last; there's a piece on a biography of the Pre-Raphaelites quite near the beginning which I'm particularly looking forward to. It's especially nice to know that these books are genuinely ones that the authors of the pieces love, not just ones that are currently being pushed by a publishing company; indeed half the time they aren't even in print anymore, but are books that the article writers feel deserve to be read.

This is why I love reading this quarterly. The editorial mentions the practice of large publishing companies, recently highlighted in The Times, of paying bookstore chains to promote certain books over others, putting them in the window or saying they are the bookstore's 'choice', and says it is iniquitous:

'It misleads the public, it doesn't give smaller publishers a chance, and it effectively restricts choice.'

Hear hear.

In love with Jayber

I'm about a third of the way through Jayber Crow and am still loving every word. It is beautifully written, gentle and absorbing. I think I'm going to have to expand my list of 'I don't read modern authors except...' to include Wendell Berry.
I am currently with Jayber at a point where he is still known as J Crow, rather than Jayber (a corruption of 'Jaybird' his first nickname as the people of Port William accepted him); he is a young man trying to find his way through life and about to return to Port William.
To give a flavour of what I am so in love with, here are a couple of passages; first one with which I suspect all book lovers will empathise:

'Pigeonville College had a much better library than The Good Shepherd, of course, and I spent a lot of my time there, reading in books and magazines. I'd had the idea, once, that if I could get the chance before I died I would read all the good books there were. Now I began to see that I wasn't apt to make it. This disappointed me, for I really wanted to read them all. But it consoled me in a way too; I could see that if I got them all read and had no more surprises in that line, I would have been sorry.'

Part of the book describes a terrible flood, which, with the floods we experienced in this area just a couple of months ago, struck a chord with me.

'When I got out about to the middle of the span, I stopped and looked upstream over the rail. A strengthless, shapeless cloud of light that in the daytime would have seemed a shadow hovered over the river. Without trying exactly to see anything, but sort of just letting myself see, I could make out the troubled surface of the water and the shape of things moving swiftly down - great rafts of drift, barrels, bottles, sawlogs, whole trees, pieces of furniture. I even saw what looked to be the gable of a house, with what might have been a cat perched on top. Everything came turning in the currents, into sight and then out of sight almost faster than I could believe. Along what had been the shores I could see the trees shaking and battering their limbs together. And the waves and swirls of the water caught the human lights of the town and flung them hither and yon.'

I could quite happily have spent all day reading this book, but had to help clear a room for J to pull the floorboards up; it will all be worth it when the house is perfect. Now, however, I'm going to take advantage of a quiet house before the husband and cat wake up to spend some more time with Jayber.

Aylmer Vance: Ghost Seer by Alice and Claude Askew

This is a small collection of Edwardian stories, connected by the characters of the 'ghost-seer' Vance and his narrator side-kick Dexter. They are examples of the many imitative stories that were written after the success of Sherlock Holmes, and contain a similar relationship between Vance and Dexter as that of Holmes and Watson, but rather than investigating crime they investigate hauntings.
They begin with Dexter running into Vance at an inn and staying a few days longer than intended specifically to get to know the famous investigator of the paranormal. Vance relates some of his ghostly adventures to his new friend, including a romantic story of a young female ghost Vance once fell in love with, which at least answers any questions about the relationship between the two that might have risen in the reader's mind as Dexter leaves his legal career to move in with Vance and investigate spirits full time.
In the last story at the inn Vance had given Dexter a handwritten book of poems with a tragic story behind it, as he suspected that Dexter had psychic powers. Thereafter, Dexter's visions help the investigations by filling in the details and motivations of some of the spirits, a useful device that gives the stories more substance.
The stories when they leave the inn and begin investigating together are better, and a couple are very good. The Vampire tells of a young man who is fading away from loss of blood unexplainable by doctors but whose wife begged him not to marry her as she was descended from a line of vampires. She appears to have been possessed by her ancestral home and Vance engages in a battle of wills with the vampire.
The Indissoluble Bond is a curious story of obsession and questions about the nature of the souls and how they can diverge from the physical; a young woman is inexplicably called by the music of an ill-favoured organist. While not a scary story, it is one of the more interesting of the collection.
The last story, The Fear, is the most scary. They investigate a house where people are affected by terror, a certainty that something awful is about to happen to them. It is so strong that the house is uninhabitable. The description of the build-up of the fear as Dexter and Vance attempt to trace it to its source, and the additional details of the horrific events behind the fear that Dexter's psychic powers are able to discern, make this genuinely tense. It is certainly the best story in the collection.
Don't come to Aylmer Vance looking for Sherlock Holmes, or you will be disappointed. The character of Vance is quite one-dimensional and although we are told that he has a great intellect, we are given little evidence. It would have been better if he could have shared some of his great knowledge of the paranormal to convince us, as de Richleau does in The Devil Rides Out, for instance, where, via Dennis Wheatley's research, you readily appreciate that the main character is a man well versed in the occult. Also, Dexter's adoration of Vance is a little irritating; he attaches himself to Vance like a school girl with a crush.
Despite this, however, it is a nice collection of ghost stories (from the Wordsworth Editions Tales of Mystery and the Supernatural [ISBN: 1840225394]), interesting as specimens from the Edwardian period, easy to read and a pleasant way to spend an hour or two.

A Local Ghost

First, a little rant: we were watching a DVD last night, a hired one which forces you to sit through the trailers, and saw a trailer for a Nicholas Cage film, which is 'From the author of The Minority Report'.
Both J and I found this quite offensive; either the studio do not think Philip K Dick important enough to put his name to the film, or we, the great film-viewing public, are too stupid to know or care who he is. Could they not at least have done him the courtesy of 'From Philip K Dick, author of The Minority Report'?

I have a book of local ghost stories, Ghost-Hunter's Guide to Sheffield by Valerie Salim (ISBN-10:1850480206/ ISBN-13:978-1850480204), which goes around the city listing the various hauntings and strange experiences that people have reported. I think there is probably one for every town and city in the country.
It has been fascinating to read of hauntings in places I am so familiar with, and of tunnels and graveyards that I never suspected in the city centre where I walk every lunch hour. It is also very good for small pieces of history about local buildings and areas. There is an old Georgian house in the centre of Sheffield near to the Millenium Galleries called Leader House that I have wondered about for years, it seems so out of place where it is. The book gives its history, and it is called Leader House because a silversmith called Thomas Leader leased it from the Duke of Norfolk in 1777. It is now listed, the administrative headquarters of the gallery, and reputedly haunted by a servant girl who doesn't seem to do much other than cause a bit of a spooky atmosphere.
I must get a similar book for my own town; indeed, I may start collecting them for the whole country - a sort of alternative Pevsner!
Anyway, I have the book perched on the top of a large pile of books next to my computer chair and often pick it up for a browse while my computer is busy, and the other day I came across this brilliant example of Yorkshire under-statement. Mrs Peacock from Parsons Cross is describing the ghostly events that occurred at her home:

'"Just some incidents, a rumbling, shaking staircase, heavy footsteps in the hall. An entity complete with chains, coming out of the back bedroom and across the landing. This was witnessed by our visitors, not just family."'

Jacob Marley's living in the spare bedroom but it's just an incident, nothing to fuss about. For some reason she had trouble getting an exchange for her house!

Crow and Herzen

Well, it's finally dawned on me that from 1st September to October 31st is two months, not one, so there's not such a rush for the RIP II challenge. I just got a month stuck in my head for some reason. But this means that I can sprinkle some other books among the gothic and ghostly, which is good, as I don't like to read books of a similar type too close together. I start to feel a bit sickly, like when you eat too much of the same food at once. Variety is much healthier.

And this is also good news, as Jayber Crow, which I couldn't help but start last night, is entrancing.

The text is soft and melodic; I can almost hear the small town barber talking to me, and his voice stayed in my head after I put the book down. It's the sort of book where you can't help but read paragraphs twice in case you missed anything, and because you want to prolong the enjoyment. I'm loving it, in case you haven't guessed, and unless it all goes sour after the first few pages I think I will be hunting out more Wendell Berry.

I am going to finish the Aylmer Vance stories I am reading quickly for the RIP challenge, I've only got a couple of stories left; they're quite nice little ghost stories although I'm not that taken with the character of Vance himself. Then this weekend I will lose myself in Port William and give Jayber the attention he deserves.
I found an interesting book in my lunch hour today on the 50 pence table outside a charity shop: My Past and Thoughts, the memoirs of Alexander Herzen. It's not exactly lightweight, as my aching shoulder proved after carting it home, but looks like it could be good. After having a quick flick through the pages on the train on the way home, it seems to be written in an informal novel-style, with whole conversations given. I lighted on a page where he and a friend were trying to defend a can-can dancer who had attracted the attention of the law by not wearing her corset - from what I've heard of can-can dancers in nineteenth century Paris that seems quite respectable! I like this sort of memoir, one where you feel like you really get to know the author.

I have to admit I had no idea who Alexander Herzen was, but having Wikipedia-ed him he sounds like an interesting figure: a Russian father of socialism who seemed to constantly, but not too seriously, get on the wrong side of the Tzar's temper and be moved around the country, until he left Russia for various places including Paris and London.
This book is supposed to be one of the best memoirs of its type. I find descriptions of Tzarist Russia fascinating; I used to have the notion that the secret police and things like censorship, restricting movement around the country, etc. started after the revolution until I read about Pushkin's life. He suffered from having his letters read and was told where he could travel to.
I have read a fair bit of nineteenth century Russian literature, but very few non-fiction books about the time, especially contemporary; this will be a good complement to Chekov and Dostoevsky and help to fill out the picture I have of pre-revolution Russia.

Pre-Raphaelites, and Jayber Crow at last!

Yesterday evening, after a fraught day, I decided to leave work a little early and go to the exhibition of Pre-Raphaelite drawings at the Graves Art Gallery in Sheffield city centre. If you are anywhere near Sheffield this week I can recommend it, it's a small but lovely exhibition that ends on the 8th September.
The drawings are mainly sketches that were done in preparation for familiar works by artists such as Edward Coley Burne Jones, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and John Everett Millais; they show how they worked out the composition for larger paintings, which I find very interesting. I like to see the thought processes behind works of art, and always tend to imagine that artists are just driven by blind inspiration, throwing the paint on the canvas in exactly the right place, probably because I can't paint or draw myself. It is reassuring to see that these artists, whose work I love, planned out their pieces as much as many writers plan their stories.
The sketches also give a slight insight into some of their preoccupations. There were a lot of drawings of children's and babies' heads by Ford Madox Brown, where his own children were the models, and numerous sketches and drawings by Rossetti of Jane Morris, his favourite model whom he had an affair with.
My favourite from the exhibition was a pencil drawing of a girl's head by Burne Jones. She is looking over her shoulder, just an anonymous woman, but the sketch has so much life in it that I almost felt that I knew her.
Alongside this one, there was a tiny exhibition of engravings: one set by Goya, which were disturbing and dark, and some amusing little engravings by an Italian artist whose name escapes me; he worked for Cosimo II de Medici, and his job was to draw everything that happened at the Medici court. Most of the engravings were from a series of drawings of little hunchback figures - some in costumes, with swords or playing instruments; they are very sweet and funny, and apparently were portraits of a juggling troop that visited the court.
It was a peaceful way to end a busy day; my calm state was then shattered by the stress of trying to find a birthday card for a friend that did not have some fatuous message in it.
Today I arrived home after another fraught day to find that Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry has arrived, hooray! I had started to get worried but I have it sat on my lap at this very moment; the cat is not impressed.

I rarely read books as soon as I get them, but I think I might be breaking my usual pattern for this. I hope I'm not disappointed: the Chicago Tribune says 'it's about the redemptive power of love and the community' which made my heart sink, to be honest. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer makes it sound better: 'By the end, youll feel you spent your life in Port William, too.' I think I'll read that quotation about the mosquito again, to regain my excitement. If there are half a dozen lines as good as that in the book it will be more than worth it.

Changes to travel

On finishing Alan Sillitoe's Leading the Blind, which continued to be fascinating, especially the last two chapters which looked at Britain through the guidebook descriptions, it started me thinking about how much we take travel for granted today.
As I read parts of the book, the dizzy bit of me thought 'why do they visit such awful places?' at the descriptions of dirty brigand-filled villages with one inn, where visitors had to share a room with strangers and the sheets were changed once a year if they were lucky. But of course they had to stay there; if it takes six or seven days to get to a city over land you have to stop on the way. Over the past couple of years J and I have visited some fantastic cities, Prague, Paris, and Reykjavik, and the longest time we spent travelling was the three hour flight to Iceland.
We generally take holidays that last less than a week; this would not be practical if travelling over land by horse, as it would take longer than this to reach the destination. Travel in the past had to be exclusively the right of the leisured classes with time to spare, rather than working drones like us.
Wherever we go we expect that hotels will be comfortable, have clean sheets and a room just for us. The Victorian traveller could not take these things for granted. One of the things that sticks in my memory most from reading Dickens' American Notes was that, when travelling on a paddle steamer, the male passengers all used the communal comb; Dickens was very pleased that he had his own brushes with him to be able to avoid this horror. Although I will often say that I love the Victorian age I'll stick with modern hygiene, thank you.
Apologies for this rambling, but I am having a day of appreciating how lucky and privileged we are to live in the twenty-first century.

Terror By Night by Ambrose Bierce

Any introduction to work by Ambrose Bierce will not fail to point out his misanthropy; it will probably also describe how he was one of thirteen children all of whom his father decided to call by names beginning with 'A' (Ambrose was the tenth), how he hated his childhood, and quote the first line of An Imperfect Conflagration:

'Early in 1872 I murdered my father - an act that made a deep impression on me at the time.'

It is a brilliantly dry and witty opening to a story, but there is more to Bierce than just a parent-hating misanthropist; although contempt for his fellow man is often evident in his work (especially in The Devil's Dictionary, a caustic collection of alternative definitions that I often enjoy dipping into), he writes stories that contain a variety of moods and emotions. His characters often display fortitude in the face of difficulty or horror, or at times are overwhelmed by great sorrow. He can be bitterly funny, as in the opening line quoted above, or gently amusing; in The Secret of Macarger's Gulch, Morgan, who has unwittingly proved to his dinner guest Elderson that the latter recently experienced a ghostly re-enactment of a murder, dryly comments to his wife on the startled reactions of his guest to the story: Elderson drops his wine, puts bones in his finger bowl, and after the final revelation about the murder, on responding to his host's query about his interest in the Gulch that he lost a mule there-

'My dear,' said Mr Morgan, with the mechanical intonation of an interpreter translating, 'the loss of Mr Elderson's mule has peppered his coffee.'

This collection of Bierce, Terror by Night (ISBN: 1 84022 534 3), is from the Wordsworth Editions 'Mystery and Supernatural' list. This list contains some neglected treasures, of which this volume is certainly one. This quite slim book contains fifty-one stories, some of which are little more than a page or two but they are all beautifully written. Bierce is a master story-teller, who chose the short story form as the perfect medium to convey his thoughts, never wanting to write a novel. The setting and tone of his descriptions convey particular atmospheres to the reader, depending on the genre in which he is working. For example, a number of the supernatural stories are set on the prairie, a place of desolation and hardship, perfect for scenes of tragedy that in time lead to the hauntings of lone hunters.
He writes some superb spinechillers: in The Middle Toe of the Right Foot two men duel in a haunted house - one flees with the seconds, the other remains to be terrified to death; or A Watcher by the Dead in which a man wagers he can spend the night with a corpse and is frightened out of his wits. The stories build slowly to the denouement, often with an unexpected twist at the end.
Bierce uses language superbly; he is not sparing with the length of his sentences but I enjoy his verbosity, the rhythms and images he creates, the wry points that he injects into the paragraphs. As this, for instance, from The Death of Halpin Frayser:

'Frayser had already attained the age of thirty-two. There are persons in this world, millions of persons, and far and away the best persons, who regard that as a very advanced age. They are the children. To those who view the voyage of life from the port of departure the bark that has accomplished any considerable distance appears already in close approach to the farther shore.'

The introduction to this volume advises people who do not find a natural affinity with his prose to persevere, as they will be well rewarded, but how can anyone not have an affinity for writing as wonderful as this?
This excerpt also illustrates a gentler side of Bierce; his descriptions of children are generally indulgent, but realistic. A haunted house in a Bierce story will always have had its windows put out by the local boys, who see it as their right and duty to throw stones at it.
Not all of the stories in this collection deal with supernatural horror; some of his most memorable stories deal with the Civil War, in which Bierce fought; the experience had a profound effect upon him. The war stories often have a theme of families torn apart: husbands against wives, fathers against sons, all destroying each other through futile conflict. It is in these stories that perhaps we see most clearly where Bierce's contempt for his fellow man derives, although this contempt is not evident in the text where the protagonists are often his noblest, such as in The Affair at Coulter's Notch. The absence of the dry humour that accompanies many of his other stories is often notable in the Civil War stories; this is not a laughing matter.
The stories are so varied that they do not get tedious, although I feel that a collection of his war stories alone might be too much to take in one go. There are several that have stayed with me after reading the whole and I will willingly re-read them all in the future when they appear in anthologies.

Switching off with Bond

My first ever reading challenge book is done. I sat down and began Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde thinking I'd just read a few pages and read the whole thing, not that great an achievement, as it's very short. What I found disturbing though, about myself and not the book, was that I suddenly found myself with a notepad and pen at my side noting points I wanted to include in the review. I had gone straight into essay-mode.
Last October I finished a six year law degree with the Open University and my main feeling at the end was, rather than a great sense of achievement, relief; I had my weekends back to read and do what I wanted. Obviously a small part of my brain still craves that structure and pressure, though; I will try and switch it off for the next reading challenge book, it distracted me from the story.
In the end I didn't include most of the points I noted as I tried to write the review so that if, by some small chance, someone read it who did not know the story it wouldn't give away the ending. A small chance, I know, in a world of book-bloggers but I didn't want to be the one to ruin it; I hope I didn't.
Last night I cooked a sumptuous feast - which J said had enough garlic in it to knock out a horse, so no vampires round our way last night - and we finally managed to watch Casino Royale after twice hiring it on DVD but then not getting round to it. It wasn't bad. J said it was the best Bond film for at least a decade, and he's probably right, but I could have done without it turning into a chick-flick after an hour and a half. Daniel Craig is a good Bond, but he was no Roger Moore (which shows which era I grew up in: Moore is Bond, and Tom Baker is Doctor Who and that's that). The problem I have with new Bond films is that the Jason Bourne films are so good I'm not really interested. Still, it switched my brain off for a bit, which is all I ask most Saturday nights.

Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson

I'd forgotten how short The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is, only about seventy pages, so even someone normally shy of Victorian literature should not find it too intimidating. It starts benignly, with a description of the lawyer Mr Utterson walking with his cousin and friend, Mr Enfield. Stevenson's beginning describes comfortable people going about their business in London; it is pleasant and familiar.
The first discordant note sounds as they approach a dingy, neglected building two storeys high that has no windows facing the street. This is wrong, buildings should have windows to let in the light; almost at once Stevenson has created a feeling of misgiving. The out of place building sparks a memory for Enfield who tells the horrific story of a scene he recently witnessed nearby, when a man deliberately knocked down and trampled over a small girl; this is our introduction to Mr Hyde.
The details of the story are well known, but it is well worth reading the original for the simple clear prose of Stevenson and the deft manner in which he builds up the suspense as Utterson attempts to unravel the mystery of Mr Hyde's identity, and the unnatural hold he appears to have over his friend, Dr Jekyll.
We meet Jekyll himself in the third chapter. In Stevenson's original draft Jekyll was written as an evil character but he burnt the manuscript after his wife told him he had written a sensation novel when he should have written an allegorical masterpiece. He began again, thankfully changing the character of Jekyll, as the power of the story lies in the contrast between the natures of Jekyll and Hyde. While Jekyll is portayed as the genial host of pleasant dinners for his friends, the description of Hyde is often bestial; he hisses when Utterson comes upon him unawares, and murders with an 'ape-like fury'. No one who comes across him is untouched by the sense of his evil.
Stevenson stacks up small chapters that each provide a different piece of the puzzle, culminating in the final, longer chapter that explains all from the point of view of Jekyll, following the shocking revelation of the connection between the two men and the origin of the evil that drives Hyde.
I greatly enjoyed reading it, although I can't help wishing that I could have read it without knowing the substance of the story, to fully experience the suspense and the shock of the denouement. That is unlikely to happen with a story that has become such an established part of our culture but it is worth reading despite this; it is a great story, excellently told.

September 1st!

Today is the day the reading challenges begin, and I am really excited. Priority has to go to the RIP II, as there is only a month for those then it will be on to Outmoded Authors as soon as possible. I am planning to begin with Cakes and Ale by Maugham for that, though I may change my mind.
But today I will try and find time to begin Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. I am a little daunted about writing about it afterwards, as I have just read an essay by Vladimir Nabokov on The Books of My Numberless Dreams that discussed it. Obviously what I write will be a more simplistic 'I liked/ didn't like this' sort of review, there's no point in trying to write like Nabokov; if I jump off the roof trying to fly like Superman, I will just break my neck. However, I enjoyed reading this thought-provoking essay which has spurred me to seek out more of Nabokov's literary criticism, my thanks go to Imani for posting it.
Rather than thinking too deeply about it today, though, I'm going to read J&H in the spirit that I suspect it was intended, as a damned good story!