Harriet Devine's Blog

Woman Reading Browning

This is William Rothenstein, 'The Browning Readers', painted in 1900. I take the title to mean that these ladies are reading Browning -- perhaps they are members of the Browning Society, which was up and running at that time. Their room is restrained but all the pictures and objects carefully chosen and thoughtfully arranged. Nice.

Garden Meme

I spotted this fill-the-blanks meme first on The Captive Reader though Claire had got it from Cornflower Books where it appears in celebration of the Chelsea Flower Show which has been on in London this week.. Thanks to both of them -- it was fun to do!

Early this morning as I was Untying the Knot, I stepped out of  The Locked Room into the garden and bent down to touch A Wreath of Roses.

    As dawn broke and I took in my surroundings I noticed several things: Sunflower was struggling due to Damage, The Dud Avocado had been dug up beside The Sugar House with A View of the Harbour, but with help from The Laughing Policeman and knowledge gleaned from The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, I was able to bury it with The Necessary Aptitude.

    Later, Roseanna popped in to take a cutting or two; We Have Always Lived in the Castle, she told me, but she pointed out that we were A Far Cry from Kensington.

    Taking a well-earned rest from the weeding and chatting over the wall with The Children Who Lived in a Barn from next door, I mentioned A Stranger in the Family and remarked that he was Kind of Cruel, but then, Careless in Red, we said Farewell Night, Welcome Day, and I went back to do a little light pruning.

    My garden was once The Plains of Cement, but tending it is a joy and a Magnificent Obsession.

Not my garden, sadly, but the Parc Floral de Haute Bretagne, where I went for a picnic yesterday.

Perhaps you might want to do one of these yourself -- you can tweak the text a bit to fit, and, though it's supposed to be books you have read 'this year', I've taken that to mean 'within the last year', which gave me a bit of leeway.

Twenty Thousand Streets Under The Sky

The other day I was telling you about The Midnight Bell, the first novel in this 1930s trilogy by Patrick Hamilton. When I'd written that review I returned to the book and here I am reporting on the other two.

As you'll remember if you read my earlier review, the first novel deals with the very unhappy obsession that Bob, a waiter in a pub, develops with beautiful, heartless Jenny Maple. Well, Hamilton returned to Jenny's story two years later in the form if what I can only, reluctantly, call a prequel, The Siege of Pleasure (1932). Here he describes in vivid and painful detail the evening on which she slides from a tolerable job cooking and cleaning for two elderly ladies into a life of alcohol and prostitution. In this story we see again the traits that will cause Bob so much agony -- Jenny's over-riding desire to please coupled with her inability to care about the devastation that may cause. I had rather expected that she had become like that as a result of her life on the streets, but here she is, a virgin of eighteen, behaving in just the same way. I was slightly disappointed as I'd hoped to find out why she'd turned out this way, but Hamilton doesn't reveal this. Instead he focuses in extremely close detail on the appalling evening she spends in a series of Hammersmith pubs with her common friend Violet and a couple of very dodgy men. Jenny has never been a drinker, and it is alcohol (many many glasses of port) that causes her to lose her inhibitions and allow herself to be seduced, though the seduction itself is glossed over. Told from Jenny's point of view, this short novel (only 100 pages) captures brilliantly the self-deception, the confusion and  the wish not to appear unfamiliar with the manner and ways of her present company which together lead her to abandon both the gentle, shy young man who she has promised to meet in Camden Town and the old ladies who have been so thrilled by the wonderful work she has done for them in their Chiswick villa. 

The final novel in the series is The Plains of Cement (1934). This is the story of Ella, the barmaid at The Midnight Bell, and overlaps in time with the first novel, so that Bob is still in residence at the pub, though his departure, which ends that novel, comes part way through here. Readers of the first novel will already be aware of how much Ella loves Bob, though Bob only thinks of her as a thoroughly good sort. But Ella has an admirer, the elderly (to her, anyway, as he is in his 50s) Mr Eccles. Mr Eccles is foolish and vain -- the first scene shows him turning up in the bar in what is evidently a brand new hat.

You could see at a glance that for the time being the man lived in and through his hat. You could see that it cost him sharp torture even to put it on his head, where he could not see it, and it had to take its chance. You could see him searching incessantly for furtive little glimpses of his hat in mirrors, you could see him pathetically reading the fate of his hat in the eyes of strangers, you could see him adjusting his tie as a sort of salute to his hat, as an attempt to live up to his hat. You could see him striving to do none of these things.

Despite Ella's supposedly plain face, Mr Eccles has clearly fallen for her and the novel tells of her increasingly unsuccesful attempts to escape his advances, her unwilling acceptance of his proposal, and what the final outcome is. This is a particularly touching story and Ella a wonderfully conceived and wholly believable character. 

So I'm recommending these novels wholeheartedly, partly for their perceptive and moving stories and partly because they give such a vivid picture of London and its sad and seedy pub culture. Hamilton was himself an alcoholic and manages to depict in often painful detail the effects of drink and its after-effects. Here's how Bob feels the morning after the night before:

He went to bed with a rich and glorious evening, and he awoke at seven to find that it had gone bad overnight, as it were (like milk), and was in his mouth – bitter and sickly. He had been fooled. He had not, after all, had a great time: he had merely been drinking again.

Girl Reading

This painting is by the British portrait artist Norman Hepple (1908-1994). I think it's called The Letter, but I could be wrong. I like it partly because it reminds me of my best friend Catherine, who looked very much like this in her late teens. We were inseperable for our entire childhood, had our first babies at the same time, laughed ourselves stupid making up poems in Highgate Cemetery. She moved to America but we saw each other from time to time and always picked up just where we'd left off. Then a few years ago I did something by mistake that upset her and she has not spoken to me since. Sad. 

The Midnight Bell

If you're incredibly attentive you may have noticed that over there >> under 'what I'm reading' is listed Patrick Hamilton's Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky. And yes I am reading it, but in fact it is three novels in one, and this one is the first. Published in 1929, it is said to be the most autobiographical of all Hamilton's novels, and I can easily believe it.

Of course I have read Hamilton before -- about this time last year there was a mini-craze among the bloggers for his wonderful wartime novel, The Slaves of Solitude, which I said in my review was my book of the year so far -- and I followed it up with his much earlier Craven House, which I also enjoyed. Then I hit a bad patch because I found I couldn't get on with Hangover Square, which many people think is his best novel. But the other day I came across this one and thought I'd give it a whirl, and how glad I am that I did.

The Midnight Bell takes its name from a pub in London's West End -- not a real one, though there's a very interesting piece here which identifies not only this pub but the whole area and even some of the characters. Be that as it may, this is a terrific story, made a more poignant because the events described so closely mirror Hamilton's own experiences. This is the story of Bob, an attactive, intelligent but wholly uneducated young man who, after a period at sea, is working as a waiter in The Midnight Bell. Bob aspires to be a writer and reads a lot, drinks rather too much, but is careful with his money and has managed to save £80 (quite a lot of money in those days) towards a better future. Despite some pretty awful hangovers from time to time, he is cheerful and fancy free, and enjoys his solitary days off, walking in the park, eating in the Corner House, visiting the bookshops in Shaftesbury Avenue, and going to the pictures. But all this changes when into the pub one days comes Jenny, who is extraordinarily pretty, sweet, and almost childlike. Alas, Jenny is also a prostitute, something which Bob realises straight away. 

Though Bob is neither a virgin nor a prude, he has a natural delicacy and would not normally associate with prostitutes. But this girl is so adorable and seems so innocent, and, after all, she didn't really look like one, as Bob tells himself, and will continue to tell himself over the ensuing days. Somehow, by the end of the evening, he finds himself lending her ten shillings, the first of what will become many "loans', some repaid and some not. For Bob finds he can't help seeking Jenny out, sometimes by trawling the streets where she goes to work, sometimes by ringing the seedy boarding houses where she lives. Appointments are made, and very often broken by Jenny, who is, however, always adorably apologetic afterwards. Occasionally she kisses him, which puts him in heaven. And of course Bob is madly in love with her, though one of the great delights of this novel is how slowly he realises this himself. 

The approach of love is something as stealthy and imperceptible as the catching of a cold. A man of spirit never knows he has it until the last moment. He experiences a little dryness of the throat or a slight thickness in the head, but these symptoms are nothing. They have frequently visited him before without leading to anything more serious. Besides, they seem to be passing off during the day. Dozens of his friends about him have colds, but he, by some special dispensation, is going to escape....Then one night in bed, he realises that his breathing is causing him pain and that he is in something like a fever. He is no worse than he was before, but suddenly he changes his whole attitude. A minute ago he had no cold: this minute he succumbs. He has an appalling cold, and he is one of the poor devils.

So it is that Bob suddenly admits to himself that he loves Jenny. He loves her to distraction, though sometimes he also hates her: Her perfect cruelty and egoism appalled him...He would kill her. But of course he won't, because though there are times when he sees clearly how selfish and thoughtless of him she really is, he is completely in thrall to her: He decided he would really die for such beauty. I don't think I'm giving too much away when I say that this relationship is not going to have a happy ending. Bob truly does hit rock bottom when Jenny betrays him yet again, but his natural spirits start to reassert themselves and his future looks less black than at first appears.  

So yes, this is a novel about infatuation, and it captures brilliantly all the terrible and wonderful aspects of that common state. But it's far more than that. The characters are created in the most beautifully subtle and perceptive way - Bob, of course, with his fine, unrealisable, aspirations and his warm heart, and beautiful, lost Jenny who, despite Bob's final verdict  -- He knew he had never made any impression on her, and never would have done so -- is, I think, more complex and multi-faceted than he, in his disillusionment, gives her credit for. But the novel also gives an extraordinarily rich picture of London pub life, with a gallery of the most bizarre people, often terribly funny and tragic at the same time. Then is is dear, plain Ella, the barmaid, who loves Bob sincerely and silently, and the pub's owners, the Governor and his wife, who were as benign as they were bloated. It was pretty obvious to everybody that they might both burst at any moment. There are many many wonderful moments here, and I actually laughed aloud from time to time. Because, despite what sounds at first as if it might be a rather depressing story, this is a novel full of youth and high spirits and good humour. 

The next novel in the trilogy is called The Siege of Pleasure, and it is Jenny's story. I am going to start reading it tonight and I can't wait. 

Woman Knitting and Reading at the Same Time

It's not very often you see a picture of somebody doing this and I'm not surprised as it looks like a pretty difficult thing to be trying. Perhaps it's a big fat book of knitting patterns? 

The picture is actually called Vienna House Garden and it seems to be by someone called Erasmus of Engarth, whoever he was. My daughter found it here.

Wear Glasses? Read Books? Win Prizes!

I've been asked to post this competition info on the blog and I'm happy to do so because it sounds like fun and the prizes are great. It does seem to suggest you have to wear glasses to enter, but I'm not sure how they will enforce this. Anyway here it is.

To celebrate Glasses Direct's new blog, the online prescription glasses retailer has launched the GD Book Worm Club, an online competition that encourages book readers, whether avid or occasional, to post their reviews so that others can read up on their recommendations on a plethora of reads. Whether it be a good old paperback, a Kindle or Kobo, Glasses Direct want glasses wearers to join the GD Book Worm Club.

Each month, GD Book Worms can submit their reviews on a book they've read, which will then be posted onto the Glasses Direct blog. Whichever review gets the most happy comments wins that months star review.

 Each monthly winner will receive a star prize, as well as a pair of glasses. For April, the winner will receive a Kindle Touch, a pair of Element or London Retro frames with their prescription and one of the Spring Summer 2012 goody bags* from the glasses e-tailer's press event, held at The Soho Hotel this April.

 Email your entries to: gdwin(at)glassesdirect(dot)com

 And don’t forget to include a picture of yourself with the book!

 (If you’re camera shy, just the book will do but we’d rather see your lovely faces)

*Goody Bag Contents:

 1 pair of designer sunglasses (Chloe, Serengeti, Marc Jacobs, Armani etc)

 Handmade speccy cookie from Love Birds

 A gift voucher for a pair of Element or London Retro specs.

 Spectacle necklace

 Retro sweets (no reason, but who doesn’t love sweets?)

 Eco-concious cotton lunch bag

 London Retro/Element USB stick.

Book reviews can be on any subject matter. Here are a few subject examples:

Cooking, Films, Romance, Fiction Books & Literature, Graphic Novels, Horror, Mystery & Crime, Poetry, Science Fiction & Fantasy, Thrillers, Homes & Garden, Humour, Diet & Health, Biographies.

 

Unfair Faces in Art History

zinaida serebriakova / self-portrait

Yes, while we are on the subject of self-portraits (or not - see yesterday's post) I thought you might like to see this, which is indeed one of a series called Unfair Faces in Art History and was reblogged on a blog I follow called Old Paint. Click the link for some more beauties. Who knew how pretty JMW Turner was?

A Wreath of Roses

If I'm reviewing a Virago classic I usually try to find a picture of the original cover as generally I much prefer them. But if you compare this cover, from the recent reprint, with the one Virago used on their first publication of the novel, you will see that on the newer one a very different mood is being evoked --and it's one which is much more in keeping with the tone of this wonderful, rather disturbing, book.

 

Published in 1949, this was ET's fourth novel, and is often described as her darkest. I'm not in a position to judge how true that is because there are several I haven't yet read.  But certainly it touches on difficult and sometimes upsetting aspects of existence.

 The central character here is Camilla, a woman in her late twenties, unmarried, a school secretary. According to Richard, who sees her for the first time on a station platform, she is heedless of her appearance...and the little beauty she possessed could only be in the eyes of few beholders, so much of it was left to fend for itself.

Camilla feels unloved and is deeply conscious of the fact that she is ageing:

She remembered herself as a girl. The sharp white shoulders, the high bosom had so imperceptibly, yet so soon, assumed this heavy golden ripeness, and how much more abruptly would exchange maturity for old age.

All this has become important to her for several reasons. She has returned to the country cottage she has visited regularly every summer for years, together with her oldest friend Liz. But now things have changed, because Liz is married and has a tiny baby who absorbs all her attention, and Frances, their hostess and Liz's old nanny, is visibly ageing and losing the ability to paint which has brought her a certain amount of fame and a great deal of pleasure in recent years. In addition, Camilla is powerfully attracted to Richard, who is extremely good-looking but profoundly untrustworthy, as everyone but Camilla recognises. Her self-deception and its results is part of the story of the novel. But this is also the story of Liz, who is constantly anxious about her baby and is not at all sure whether she really likes her husband, the handsome vicar, who seems to spend most of his time writing charming letters to the titled ladies of his congregation. And it's the story of Frances, who has stopped painting the beautiful, peaceful pictures that have brought her fame and is producing dark, disturbing abstracts which seem to her to be truer to real life. She judges her earlier work harshly now, and thinks it was a result of listening to others:

"Its best to turn to no one, to seek to please no one, as if there were only oneself in the world. The pleasure of others is a by-product after all, and if ever the whispering voices are allowed to crowd out the one voice, the result is this...a sort of high-pitched silliness, a terrible silliness". 

But Frances's painting has brought her one ardent admirer, the film director Morland Beddoes, and as the novel begins he is coming to visit her for the first time, though they have been corresponding for years. Morland, who loves Frances but also comes to love Camilla, is a most wonderfully conceived character. He is an observer, always on the outside but with the keenest, and most uncomfortable, perception of people and their quirks and foibles.

Always, human nature was displayed before him like a dishevelled thing; even in his film work he saw that poise was something put on and taken off like a cloak, never assumed for long...To him, who would have loved the human personality to be as static as a flower on a stalk, unmarred by emotions, unclogged by frustration, the most intimate and disordered side of people was displayed. The foibles, the strange quirks, odd growths, darknesses, contradicitons which novelists care so much for, he found less delightful. Though loving people, he loved stillness more, and visual beauty.

As for Richard -- well, he is something of a mystery, and though the reader learns more about him than Camilla does, his fundamental secret is not revealed until right at the end. I've seen him described as threatening and dangerous and of course in some ways he is, but for me he was rather a tragic figure -- damaged by the war (for this is 1949), ashamed of his humble background, unable to tell the truth.

I won't say more, in case you decide to read this book -- and you really should. I have been a huge admirer of Elizabeth Taylor for some years now, and this novel has really confirmed for me that she is a really important writer. The subtleties of her observation are really remarkable, and not just in the characterisation I've tried to give you some idea of here. There are so many tiny moments which you could almost whizz past, but which made me at least stop in my tracks for a minute. I'll just leave you with one of them, a description of a seedy hotel into which a man carrying a case is seen to disappear. Its shuttered facade

seemed to suggest faded chambermaids sitting lost at the end of dark corridors, commercial travellers sleeping off their midday drink on brass bedsteads, utter silence along all the passages, on all the little flights of stairs.

Heaven. 

 

Andrea del Sarto

Many years ago I went to Florence, my first and last visit there, and in one of the great art galleries I saw this painting, which was labelled 'Andrea del Sarto: Self Portrait'. I stood in front of it for ages, totally transfixed. What a beautiful man. Of course I knew about this painter because of Browning's poem, which tells the sad story of his unhappy marriage and his dissatisfaction with his own work. I was reminded of all this by dovegreyreader's post on Browning, whose 200th birthday it is today, and thought I'd have a look at the painting. But oh dear -- since I was in Florence, it's turned out that this is not a self portrait at all -- it is someone else entirely.  This is what he really looked like and though I'm sure he was a perfectly nice chap. I'm rather disappointed.