Stuck-in-a-Book's Weekend Miscellany

It's all rather damp and miserable chez Stuck-in-a-Book at the moment.  Damp house, damp streets, even a book gone mouldy because I foolishly left it on the window sill (sorry, The Haunted Woman by David Lindsay, mea culpa.)  But by next weekend I'll be back home - with family, cat, log fire, and such.  So, my final damp weekend miscellany of 2012, and possibly my final weekend miscellany of 2012, damp or otherwise.

1.) The book - stuck for something to give a bibliophile under the Christmas tree?  I was recently sent 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die by Octopus Publishing.  I'm sure a lot of us love these sorts of lists, and this book is far more than just lists, of course.  Lots of info by well-informed people (including my supervisor, I noticed!) as well as lovely pictures etc.  Since I've only read 80 or 90 of 'em, I've got plenty to go before I die.  More info here.  It's a really nicely produced book, and I think it would make for great discussion on Boxing Day.

2.) The link - will go over (or perhaps under) the heads of most, but I think some of you in your 20s will appreciate this... I was obsessed with R.L. Stine's Goosebumps books when I was about 10.  I'm sure OV and OVW can attest to my need to read them ALL, and they generously identified (and encouraged) the love of reading rather than my deplorable lack of taste.  For those not in the know, Goosebumps are 'horror' books for young children, with cliffhangers every few pages, utterly unconvincing characters, and always a huge, often nonsensical, twist at the end.  I loved 'em.  Well, some brave soul has re-read them all as an adult, and written hilarious reviews at Blogger Beware.  I've spent hours there.  Enjoy!

3.) The blog post - while quite a few bloggers do the TBR Challenge in the early months of the year, where they only read unread books from their shelves, Ali is spearheading A Month of Re-reading in January.  More info here, but the gist is pretty obvious - a month of re-reading books!  Lots of us who have 1001 books we want to read before we die (or before book group next Wednesday, as it may be) may feel like we never have time to re-read, so it's nice to set aside time to do it.  It wouldn't really work with my Reading Presently project, so I shan't be joining in this year, but it's something I'll definitely keep in mind for the future.

By the way, out of interest, are there many of you using the subscribe-by-email option?

On Acting - Laurence Olivier

As if to act as an antidote to Emma's disdain for the theatre, in Margaret Drabble's The Garrick Year, I have just finished reading Laurence Olivier's On Acting (1986), lent to me by my friend Andrea.  Nobody could accuse Olivier of disdaining the theatre - indeed, his adulation for it far exceeds mine, and he has (of course) a much more experienced and wise eye to cast over it.

I was a little unsure about reading On Acting, because I'm not a huge fan of Olivier (he falls into the Kenneth Branagh category of just-too-actory for me) and thought it was his autobiography - but it turns out that he'd already published his autobiography, Confessions of an Actor, and this volume instead focused on the craft of the actor, particularly on playing Shakespeare on stage and screen.  Perfect!

Olivier starts off with a brief history of great actors of the past - Burbage, Kean et al - which isn't a very auspicious start to the book.  As I discovered throughout the book, Olivier delivers anecdotes appallingly.  In this section, he often suffixes them with the acknowledgement that they're probably false - and somehow he mismanages each anecdote so that it falls oddly flat.  I began to worry.  But once Olivier started writing about the craftsmanship of acting, he got much, much better.  The largest section of On Acting concerns various significant roles in Shakespeare, devoting a chapter to each.  Olivier writes of Hamlet, Othello, Richard III and more, with firsthand insight into playing the roles, and explaining how he developed and discovered the characters.  This stuff is like catnip to me.  Olivier's exploration of these characters is attached to specific performances and is very personal, it cannot and does not claim to be objective literary criticism, but it's fascinating.

How I love to read actors' theories about the theatre!  Olivier does not skimp on this.  Here's an excerpt I loved:

To achieve true theatre, you can't have one man up front and the acolytes with their backs to the audience feeding the great star with lines as dull as dishwater.  What you must have is every character believing in himself and, therefore, contributing to the piece as a whole, placing and pushing the play in the right direction.  The third spear carrier on the left should believe that the play is all about the third spear carrier on the left.  I've always believed that.  If the character is nameless, the actor should give himself a name.  He should give himself a family, a background, a past.  Where was he born, what did he have for breakfast?  Perhaps he had troubles at home, perhaps his wife has left him, perhaps his wife has just presented him with a new baby, perhaps he is saving for something - and so on.  If the actor brings on with him a true belief in himself, we should be able to look at him at any moment during the action and see a complete three-dimensional figure and not a cardboard cut-out.  To transport an audience, they must see life and not paste.

It is, though, one of the few times that he acknowledges the need for a united company.  One of the things that did irk me in On Acting is the isolation in which Olivier prepares his roles - there seemed no sense that other actors' decision might affect his performances, or even that he was aware of them.  He is also monumentally egotistical (he claims all actors must be) and often congratulates himself on brilliant work - which is perhaps the prerogative of the aging actor, looking back over a long and successful career.  When writing about film, he is a little less self-confident, and I gained a lot of respect for Olivier when he acknowledged the failings of his version of Pride and Prejudice:

I was very unhappy with the picture.  It was difficult to make Darcy into anything more than an unattractive-looking prig, and darling Greer seemed to me all wrong as Elizabeth.  To me, Jane Austen had made Elizabeth different from her affected, idiotic sister; she was the only down-to-earth one, but Greer played her as the most affected and silly of the lot.  I also thought that the best points in the book were missed, although apparently no one else did.

You're not alone, Olivier!  I didn't think it worked at all...

This isn't the place to come if you want gossip about Olivier's life.  Perhaps Confessions of an Actor has that, but I rather imagine it doesn't.  On Acting isn't just for the aspiring actor, either - goodness knows I have no ambitions in that direction - but it is a fascinating look behind the red curtain, and an authoritative examination of the acting profession.  Coming at it from another direction, it has unusual and interesting readings of Shakespeare's plays.  Olivier is not a very gifted writer, although a mostly competent one, but his acting talent and vast experience excuse his mediocrity in that regard - and make On Acting a very engaging read.  It would seem an inexcusable boast from most actors, to cover so broad a topic as acting, but somehow Laurence Olivier seems (and certainly believes himself to be) the man allowed to do it.

1909

I started the year resisting any sort of organisation to A Century of Books - I didn't want to decide my books in advance, as that would remove the spontaneity which is the cornerstone of my love of reading.  But, as 2012 creeps away, I have pencilled in the books I will read for the remaining 10 years - spending quite some time opening books on my bookshelf to look at the publication date, and being frustrated by how many of the books I want to read fall in the 1920-1950 category (quelle surprise!)  But I have my list, and there are nine wonderful books waiting on it, all of which I'm excited to read... but only nine.

What on earth was published in 1909?

photo source

I've consulted Wikipedia, and a very useful Chronology of Literature reference book that my Dad gave me, so it's not quite true that I've found no books for 1909.  I just haven't found any books that I have - except Ann Veronica by H.G. Wells, which is on the maybe list (but quite long to fit in alongside all the rest, and one or two people have told me that it's not great.)

So I don't really want suggestions for books simply published in 1909 - I also want them to appear in My Library, which you can search here.  So if any of you fancy doing some homework... let me know your ideas!  You see, sometimes I delude myself into thinking that I'm Mildly Internet Famous, and that Blog Readers will run around being my minions... so if you want me to come back to reality, then ignore me ;)

Three Men on the Bummel - Jerome K. Jerome

Jerome K. Jerome has been on my radar recently, since Catherine at Victorian Secrets sent me a new biography of him - Below the Fairy City: A Life of Jerome K. Jerome by Carolyn W. de la L. Oulton - which I hope to read soon.  More on that from the publisher's website here.  But before I got Catherine's message, and subsequently the book, I was already thinking about Jerome - because I've recently finished Three Men on the Bummel, the sequel to his very well-known novel Three Men on a Boat, which I reviewed here.  It also takes the coveted 1900 place on my Century of Books.

George and Harris rejoin Jerome (our narrator) as they go off on the bummel.  What is a bummel, you ask?  Well, Jerome answers the question for us, but not until the final page.  I'm going to save you the mystery:

"A 'Bummel'," I explained, "I should describe as a journey, long or short, without an end; the only thing regulating it being the necessity of getting back within a given time to the point from which one started. Sometimes it is through busy streets, and sometimes through the fields and lanes; sometimes we can be spared for a few hours, and sometimes for a few days. But long or short, but here or there, our thoughts are ever on the running of the sand. We nod and smile to many as we pass; with some we stop and talk awhile; and with a few we walk a little way. We have been much interested, and often a little tired. But on the whole we have had a pleasant time, and are sorry when 'tis over."

Theirs takes the form of cycling through Germany, and commenting on the things that happen there.  Cycling holidays were rather the craze, and travel guides for Europe were equally popular, but the narrator is keen to correct the reader who might have picked up the book for the wrong reason:

I wish to be equally frank with the reader of this book.  I wish here conscientiously to let forth its shortcomings.  I wish no one to read this book under a misapprehension. 

There will be no useful information in this book. 

Anyone who should think that with the aid of this book he would be able to make a tour through Germany and the Black Forest would probably lose himself before he got to the Nore.  That, at all events, would be the best thing that could happen to him.  The farther away from home he got, the greater only would be his difficulties. 

I do not regard the conveyance of useful information as my forte.  This belief was not inborn with me; it has been driven home upon me by experience.

Well, he's not wrong there!  If you thought Three Men on a Boat went off on a lot of tangents, then you'd have to psyche yourself up to read this - there isn't really anything but tangents.  They'd cycle for a bit (well, it took some time to get even as far as the holiday itself) and something would remind the narrator of a past event, or he'd wander off on a pages-long anecdote about something that happened earlier in the week, etc. etc.  It was often difficult to work out what was past and what was present, so tenuous was any attempt at linear narrative.  But did that matter?  No, of course not.  Not in the slightest.  Jerome K. Jerome is a hilarious writer, and that is the point of Three Men on the Bummel.

The anecdotes interweave and overlap, and are so long, that it's difficult to give you a flavour of his writing - but I did find one excerpt which was short enough to type out and shows you how funny Jerome can be:

He handed me a small book bound in red cloth.  It was a travel guide to English conversation for the use of German travellers.  It commenced "On a Steamboat," and terminated "At the Doctor's"; its longest chapter being devoted to conversation in a railway carriage, among, apparently, a compartment load full of quarrelsome and ill-mannered lunatics: "Can you not get further away from me, sir?" - "It is impossible, madam; my neighbour, here, is very stout" - "Shall we not endeavour to arrange our legs?" - "Please have the goodness to keep your elbows down" - "Pray do not inconvenience yourself, madam, if my shoulder is of any accommodation to you," whether intended to be said sarcastically or not, there was nothing to indicate - "I really must request you to move a little, madam, I can hardly breathe," the author's idea being, presumably, that by this time the whole party was mixed up together on the floor.  The chapter concluded with the phrase, "Here we are at our destination, God be thanked!" (Gott sei dank!)" a pious exclamation, which under the circumstances must have taken the form of a chorus.

Quite a lot of the novel's humour comes from the stereotype that Germanic cultures are organised, regimented, and orderly.  Any humour depending on national archetypes is apt to make us feel a little uncomfortable, but hopefully that wouldn't ruin the book for you.  The narrator is, any how, greatly admiring of this trait - and if we were to ignore any British novel which cast Germany in a negative light, it would wipe out most of the first half of the 20th century.  I'm sure most of us are willing to accept a book as being from the time it was written.

Three Men on the Bummel was read while I was myself 'on the bummel' - through the Lake District - and I was able to smile wryly at the humorous misadventures the heroes experienced at the hands of transport and weather, and was only too grateful that I haven't ridden a bicycle since I was 14.  It's been so long since I read Three Men on a Boat that I'd be hard pressed to compare them minutely, or choose a favourite, but this certainly isn't a poor relation - it's very, very funny and one of the silliest books I've read in years.

A few little reviews...

It has come to my notice that it is December, and there are only 27 days left this year.  I have almost 20 reviews to write for A Century of Books... oops, didn't work this out very well, did I?  (Well, I still have 10 books to read - but I have 4 of them on the go already.)  So I'm going to rush through five of them today - books that, for one reason or another, I didn't want to write whole posts about.  But do still free to comment on them!

Daddy Long-Legs (1912) by Jean Webster
An orphaned girl is given a scholarship by a mysterious, anonymous man - she has only seen his back - and one of the conditions is that she must write updates to him, without getting any replies.  She nicknames him Daddy Long-Legs.  Can you guess what happens?  Well, I shan't give away the ending.  I was mostly surprised at how modern this children's book felt, despite being a hundred years old - a lot of it would have been at home in a Jacqueline Wilson story.  I enjoyed it, but did find it a little creepy, and rather repetitive, but these are probably signs of not having read it when I was the target age.

Metamorphosis (1915) by Franz Kafka
Gregor Samsa wakes up one morning to discover that he is an enormous bug.  Which is going to make his job as a salesman somewhat difficult.  The reason I'm not giving this novella/short story its own review is that I don't feel I have anything new to say about it.  Kafka is famed for his matter-of-fact approach to the surreality in this story, and rightly so.  What surprised me here was how middlebrow it all felt.  It is definitely comparable to David Garnett's Lady Into Fox - which actually seems to have greater pretensions to literariness.

Married Love (1918) by Marie Stopes
Another one which surprised me - I'd always heard that Marie Stopes started a sexual revolution in the UK, offering knowledge about sex to the everywoman for the first time.  Turns out she is much more conservative, and less revelatory, than a lot of the other guides written around the same time, and earlier.  I read these guides for my current DPhil chapter, by the way - my favourite so far being the person who argued that sexual intercourse and reproduction were acceptable as separate impulses, because protozoa separated them.  Sure, why not?  (I wonder if I've just made all sorts of inappropriate search terms for this blog now...)

Miss Hargreaves: the play (1952) by Frank Hargreaves
This is something of a cheat, since it was never published - but it was performed, with Margaret Rutherford in the lead role.  Tanya tipped me off that copies of all performed plays were in the Lord Chamberlain's archives in the British Library - so I had the great privilege and pleasure of reading the play, with Baker's own penned changes.  It's pretty similar to the novel, only with the action restricted to a few settings.  Such fun!

V. Sackville West (1973) by Michael Stevens
I'm a sucker for a short biography, and I hadn't read one of VSW before, so I gave this one a whirl.  It's a critical biography, so Stevens discusses and analyses the work while giving an outline of VSW's life.  About halfway through I thought, "this feels way too much like a doctoral dissertation."  Turns out it was a doctoral dissertation.  I think I'll be turning to a more charismatic writer for my next biography of Vita, as this one was rather prosaic and charmless, although very thoroughly researched.

Right, well that's five down!  How are the other Century of Bookers getting on?

Elders and Betters - Ivy Compton-Burnett

"Dear, dear, what clever talk it all is!"
"It sounds so," said Jenney, on a puzzled note.  "And yet it is all about nothing, isn't it?"

It's canny of Ivy Compton-Burnett to incorporate into Elders and Betters (1944) the main criticism aimed at her novels - it shows a self-awareness, but somehow also deflates the common argument (from those who have read her unadmiringly) that her work is all surface and no depth.  I'm going to do my best to defend her, but... I do have to concede that a lot of what I love about Ivy Compton-Burnett's exceptional writing is the surface wit.  A lot, but not all.  

Elders and Betters starts off on moving day for the Donne family.  Anna has chosen a house for them, and the various members of the family are moving in, in dribs and drabs.  Since we started off with only three, I thought that Ivy Compton-Burnett had been uncharacteristically frugal with her cast - but more and more arrived, and then we were introduced to a second family.  I'll save you some time, and rattle through them.  Skip the next paragraph if you want to - it's deathly dull, but needs must.  Here goes.

Father: Benjamin, children: Bernard, Esmond, Anna, Reuben (ages about 30 to 13, in that order). Benjamin's cousin Clara Bell 'known as Claribel to the family, and to as many people outside it as she could contrive'; housekeeper Maria Jennings (Jenney to all), Cook (nobody seems to know her name) and Ethel, the maid.  Benjamin's sister Jessica lives nearby, along with her husband Thomas, adult children Terence and Tullia, and young children Dora and Julius. Benjamin's other sister, Sukey, also lives there - and is dying of a vague heart condition, without any apparent time-limit on its fatal nature.  Finishing things off are Miss Lacy (the young children's teacher) and her niece Florence.

Phew!  At one point I did sketch out a family tree, but they actually all have quite distinct personalities and affinities, and it wasn't too tricky to keep them all sorted in my mind.  Back to the plot.  As I say, we start with visiting a new house - the sort of scene I always warm too, especially when one character is trying to convince others that it's a great choice, and they remain firmly unconvinced.

"The drawing-room and dining-room are what we should expect," said Anna, throwing open the doors.  "The kitchens are below them.  The staircase leads to those above."

"A natural use for a staircase," murmured Claribel to Jenney, as she set foot upon it.  "I am glad we are to be allowed to put it to its purpose."

Oh, how I adore the witty pedantry which informs so much of Ivy Compton-Burnett's writing.  And the backtracks and change of tempo brought about by her authorial asides.  How can you not adore a writer who constructs so perfect a sentence as this? :

Ethel tried not to smile and entirely succeeded.

Round and round the conversations go, seemingly to lead nowhere, but actually forming brilliant portraits of family dynamics, and exposing the barbs and bitternesses behind people's facades - as well their occasional generosity or kindness.  For her characters so rarely have facades - they say what they think, or (more often) contradict what others think.  There is one utterly wonderful scene where nothing more complex happens than someone notices there are thirteen sitting down to dinner - and they deliberate who shall sit down first (or last; they cannot recall the superstition correctly.)  It is a scene which should be anthologised time and again.

But Elders and Betters is not a novel where nothing happens.  Ivy Compton-Burnett was always keen to stress that novels must have plots, and hated those which seemed not to.  In Elders and Betters, the pivotal point could be borrowed from any detective novelist, even if the treatment could not.  Aunt Sukey has written two wills - one inheriting her sister Jessica, one her niece Anna. She asks Anna to destroy the will which would benefit her; Anna destroys the other.  Sukey, of course, dies shortly afterwards of her heart condition.  And this propels the happenings, and (more importantly) the conversations, for the rest of the novel.

Recently, on my very positive review of Elizabeth Bowen's The House in Paris, Rachel commented "I'm sure you'll entice some more people to read Bowen - she's streets ahead of ICB!!!"  Those exclamation marks show me that she was teasing, but I do have to say - I still think Ivy Compton-Burnett is a better and more important writer than Elizabeth Bowen.  These author-vs.-author battles are probably rather silly, and will end up going in circles, but the reason I think ICB is more important is that Elizabeth Bowen does, very well, what a lot of other authors try to do; Ivy Compton-Burnett does brilliantly what nobody has really tried to imitate.

"It is a modest but pleasant house," said Reuben's voice, "and a home is where a family is gathered together."

"That is what makes family problems," said Bernard.

"We have none of those," said Benjamin, in a tone that defied contradiction.

"None," muttered Esmond. "Problems imply a solution."

"Jenney is proud of me for being able to talk like other people, though I cannot walk like them," said Reuben, rightly interpreting the expression on Jenney's face.

It is not true that Ivy Compton-Burnett's narrative voice is absent - although her novels are mostly dialogue, she very often gives speech this sting in the tail, offering a flash of insight into a character's mind, and darting away again just as quickly.  Hopefully I have given some examples of what makes her so special, so different, so important a novelist.

But, while musing about Ivy Compton-Burnett on the bus (for such is my glamorous life), I wondered why I believed her to be such a significant author, considering she seemed to inspire no one and take inspiration from no one.  There appears to be no distinct literary tradition that she adapted or futhered, besides the vague quantities of the domestic novel.  And then it struck me, the author she most reminded me of - which is, curiously perhaps, Shakespeare.

Characters who speak as no person would ever speak (for who ever spoke in blank verse?) but who perfectly represent how people feel and think.  Characters engaged in large-scale comedy and tragedy, but bound by the familial ties, and rarely missing the opportunity to philosophise in the midst of anguish or (more rarely) joy.  And of course, with all that dialogue, Ivy Compton-Burnett's books are as much plays as they are novels.  The deal was sealed when, in the final act (if you will) a flurry of unexpected engagements occurred.  Perhaps with these criteria I could compare Ivy Compton-Burnett to any playwright in a Shakespearean tradition, but it seemed to me that it was William S's particular mantle that Dame Ivy was seeking to inherit.  This only struck me towards the end - with my next venture in Ivy Compton-Burnett's novels, I shall keep it in mind from the outset, and see what it brings out of the text and reading experience.  Elders and Betters, to conclude, is not my favourite of the Ivy Compton-Burnett novels I've read (More Women Than Men retains that crown), nor is it in the top half, but she seems incapable of writing a novel that I will not thrive upon and relish - Elders and Betters is no exception.

Song for a Sunday

Compare and contrast this week, ladies and gentlemen.  I was browsing through various nations' The Voice videos (as you do) and really enjoyed the winner of Australian The Voice - Karise Eden.  Unlike the winners of the US and UK series, she actually seems to have become a success after the show - and she has a really great voice.  Her first single was 'You Won't Let Me' - and I was delighted that they'd chosen a cover of an artist I love, Rachael Yamagata.  So here is Rachael Yamagata's version (first), and Karise Eden's version.  Which do you prefer?