Simple Things

the view from my bedroom window

rain and more rain

The lowering gray days of November have been getting me down.

Don't you think that certain words are best suited to an English accent?  Horrid, wretched and dismal, for example.

(To be said in best Mitford tones):  The horrid weather we've been having is unrelentingly dismal . . . and it's making me feel perfectly wretched.

I thought that I was feeling too glum to rejoice in simple things, but a visit to Christina was a good restorative.

There are always some bright spots, really; even if the lamps do come on by mid-afternoon these days.

My list:

a cup of tea in bed

my winter-weight goosedown duvet

homemade minestrone soup for lunch today

tickets for Jane Campion's latest film Bright Star

half of my Christmas list, already wrapped

a new purple cashmere scarf

narcissus in a teacup

Visit Soul Aperture for more simple things to take pleasure in this November.

For my brother

November 8 is my brother’s birthday, and this year, it falls on Remembrance Sunday. Because my brother is currently deployed to Afghanistan, it is particularly poignant that those dates should coincide.

All week long, it seems like Afghanistan has been in the news for tragic reasons – and there have been particularly personal betrayals. I don’t know how distant the war seems to others, but it is never far from my thoughts – although I have never before written about it here. Even the recent horrific events in Fort Hood, Texas are uncomfortably close to home for me; my parents live very near there, and my brother has been stationed there several times.

My brother is a Lt. Colonel, in charge of a large battalion of soldiers. I know his responsibility weighs heavily on him, but he refers, only obliquely, to the terrible mental and emotional stresses of his daily life. I don’t know if his reticence is due to necessities of confidentiality, or the desire to protect his family, or just weariness; perhaps it is a bit of all those things.

Our lives have so little in common now, but we share the same liking for books and games that goes back to earliest childhood. I cannot think of my brother without remembering the marathon games of Monopoly that we played as a child. We would get up early on Sunday mornings to play – always hoping that my parents would oversleep and that we wouldn’t have to go to church. (It rarely happened, but we lived in optimistic expectation.) These days, we play Facebook Scrabble – in the odd moments, once or twice a week, when he can visit an Internet café. He always wins; he always did win.

He likes to read; everyone in our family does. When he was a little boy, he loved the Curious George books by H.A. Rey, and he had a good bit of that curious monkey in him. Like so many young boys, he would pore over the Guinness Book of World Records. I also particularly remember a series of nonfiction books called Tell Me Why that he would read and reread. As he got older, he started to prefer histories – particularly military history. These days, he tells me that he reads lots of thrillers and other “escapist trash.”

As children, we used to construct “ships” by enclosing the sides of the bunk beds with blankets. It was so wonderfully cozy to feel concealed in that space – to lie back on pillows, and read by the light of a lamp. It felt so safe. I doubt that any adult ever feels that safe again, but books can still provide those feelings of an enclosed, complete world far from present realities. As Emily Dickinson wrote: There is no frigate like a book, to take us lands away . . .

After much pondering, I decided to send my brother a birthday package of books. What better escape than humor, I thought? When I googled “funniest ever books” the same titles kept recurring, and these are the three I ended up sending to Afghanistan: Three Men in a Boat, by Jerome K. Jerome; Lucky Jim, by Kingsley Amis, and a P.G. Wodehouse Omnibus. They are all English classics, and although I’ve read them, I don’t think that my brother has done. Although women may read and even like these books, they describe a completely male world. They have some odd similarities, actually: particularly that of the hapless male protagonist who keeps stumbling into scrapes of his own making. There are lots of cups of tea, although it is true that some of them are spilled. Nothing really bad happens, though; foolishness reigns here, never violence or evil.

They make me think of the letter* that Winston Churchill wrote during World War II, when he was confined to bed with illness. He asked for Pride and Prejudice to be read to him, and later commented: What calm lives they had . . . No worries about the French Revolution, or the crushing struggles of the Napoleonic wars. Only manners controlling natural passions as far as they could . . .

I would remind Churchill of this: perhaps Jane Austen knew more about gardens than battlefields, but she also had two brothers in the Navy, and I doubt that the pitched battles between England and France were ever as far out of her mind as her novels might imply.

Happy Birthday, dearest little brother!



* A copy of this letter is in Jane Austen's bedroom at the Jane Austen House in Chawton, Hampshire.

Rupert Brooke: The Great Lover

Last week I was in Cambridge, and a friend took me to The Orchard in Grantchester – self-described as “a corner of England where time stands still as the outside world rushes by.” It is not so much, perhaps: a collection of tables and chairs under fruit trees; a small café where a person might order tea and scones, or sandwiches, or cake. But if you believe in enduring spirits, The Orchard is surely one of the headiest, most glamorous places to take tea in the world. For more than 100 years, poets, intellectuals, princes and wits have sat under those trees and shared the particularly English ritual of breaking bread together.

The village of Grantchester lies just outside of Cambridge, and you can reach The Orchard by punting down the river or walking through the fields. A herd of brown cows stands just outside the clustered fruit trees, and you can imagine that the scene hasn’t changed much since poet Rupert Brooke wrote of dodging frightened cows on his way to bathe in the river at night. Brooke described the place as an “Arcadia” – and reinforced the image of a rustic Eden in poems and letters. “I live on honey, eggs and milk, prepared for me by an old lady like an apple (especially in the face) and sit all day in a rose garden to work.” (letter to Noel Olivier, 1909). Although this idyll only lasted for a few years, for Brooke at least, there is the sense of an eternal summer there. And even though we visited on an autumnal day, the air was unseasonably warm – warm enough to shed jackets and sit outside. I would like to report that I communed with literary ghosts, but lunching with five children tends to keep conversation on an earthly plane. (As far as I can remember, we mostly discussed whether Ben could have cake despite not eating his ham sandwich.)

Brooke died at the age of 27, in the second year of World War I. Although he didn’t die on the battlefield, he has been forever associated with all of the young Apollos, all of the golden young men who died before they were able to fulfill their promise. If I should die, think only this of me: /That there’s some corner of a foreign field /That is forever England.” (The Soldier.) With these famous lines, Brooke became a symbol of the age: forever young, beautiful, noble and patriotic. Winston Churchill eulogized him when he died. He was the ultimate English public school boy: good at sport, gifted with words, charming in manners, attractive to women and men both. Rupert Brooke was in some sense the prototype for the Hugh Grant type familiar to us now – the same charisma and careless beauty, even the same floppy hair – but with more purpose, more idealism to him.

(Virginia Stephen and Rupert Brooke on the right-hand side)

Before I visited The Orchard, I knew these few things about Rupert Brooke. He interested me, vaguely, because of his friendship with Virginia Woolf (née Stephen) and the Bloomsbury Group. This summer, I picked up a copy of The Great Lover, by Jill Dawson – in which Brooke featured. I was intrigued enough to buy it, but not inclined to rush into reading it. Who knows how long it might have sat in my to-read stack if I haven’t visited The Orchard; but I am an incurable student, and a bit of browsing through the Rupert Brooke Museum whetted my appetite for more. There were newspaper articles suggesting that Brooke was a lot more complicated than the fair-haired boy myth. One article even focused on the daughter that he may have fathered when he visited Tahiti the year before his death. Although Brooke is the very symbol of English youth, he spent most of his last years travelling to get away from it. Although he loved England, the things that defined him (education, class, his famous looks) trapped him, too.

Interestingly enough, Dawson begins her fictional narrative with a letter from this daughter. The daughter has a request: to “hear (her father’s) living voice; to know what he smelled like and sounded like.” Surely every biographer has the same goal: to flesh out the evidence and to make a living, breathing person out of it. Dawson isn’t writing biography, though; she is writing fiction. And because fiction is always more elastic than non-fiction, she gets inside of Brooke in a way that may not be entirely accurate – but is entirely compelling.

Dawson tells her story through two alternating voices: that of Brooke’s, and then a fictional character called Nellie Golightly. Nellie is maid at The Orchard – and also a bee-keeper. She is uniquely placed to observe Brooke, and he lets his guard down in front of her – not only because there is an attraction between them, but also because she is in a lower class. She is there to be invisible; to serve him and his friends. Although Nellie is a fictional device, almost every other character in the story is real – and it is obvious that Dawson has supported her creative musings with careful research. Whenever possible, she uses Brooke’s own writing (letters and poems) and others’ recorded observations of him. It is a bit extraordinary to discover so many famous people in this book’s pages, but Brooke’s life was really like that. One day he is punting down the river with Augustus John; on another day, he is having a mental break-down at Lytton Strachey’s house.

This blending of fiction and non-fiction is very fashionable at the moment, but it works well in this story – partly because Dawson is herself a poet, I think. Her fine sense of language allows her to inhabit these two different characters. She gets into Brooke’s tortured head – and there is plenty of evidence to suggest that it was tortured –and she creates a really rich and textured voice. Brooke’s insecurities, obsessions, fears and joys are persuasively described.

W.B. Yeats described Brooke as “the handsomest young man in England,” and the description dogged him ever after. He was confused and guilty about his sexuality, worried that his talent was inadequate, and haunted by the familial strain of mental instability. Although Brooke is always described as a golden boy living in a lost golden age, one of the things that most fascinated me about this novel were the dark undercurrents – not just in Brooke’s own life, but in the society around him. The Edwardian age that Dawson describes is already being shaken up by gender and class wars – long before the upheavals of World War I. Brooke is a member of the Fabian Society, and plays at being a socialist, but Nellie is an effective foil because she fills in the gap between the real and the ideal.

The Great Lover, by the way, is not just Brooke’s mocking estimation of himself; it is also the title of one of best-known poems. In it, Brooke names all of the beautiful things in the world: from “white places and cups, clean-gleaming” to “the strong crust of friendly bread” and the “cool kindliness of sheets.” An eagerness for life, and all of the lovely things in it, counteracts the

perplexed and viewless streams that bear

Our hearts at random down the dark of life.

Each time I’ve read those lines, I’ve gotten more out of them. In some ways, I feel the same about this book. It is dense and beautiful enough to read again.

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@Barrie Summy

Happy Halloween

Happy Halloween

from our (haunted) house to yours

lots of treats at domestic sensualist

and some tricks at The World Examining Works

What kind of book lover are you?

Fellow book lovers,

I have a question for you:

Is your love a courtly or a carnal one?

The other day, Willow was describing a second-hand copy of Charles Simic poems that she had recently purchased from Amazon.  Rather than being in the "very good condition" that it had advertised itself, the book was marred by the intrusive scribblings of a previous owner.  I would have guessed that Willow is a courtly lover of books, but her poem on the subject confirmed the fact.  (I will also venture that Willow dislikes purple prose, but I know that she disdains a purple pen!)

Coincidentally, I had just been rereading an essay called Never Do That To A Book from the brilliant collection titled Ex Libris.  In that essay, author Anne Fadiman classifies two different kinds of book lovers:  those who maintain a courtly and respectful distance in relation to their books, and those whose approach is far more earthy and intimate, perhaps even abusive.

Fadiman describes a courtly lover as one who believes that "a book's physical self (is) sacrosanct."  A courtly lover practices "Platonic adoration" and treads as lightly as possible on the pages of the love object. Such readers do not care to leave mementoes of their presence, and they certainly wouldn't presume to rudely argue in the margins. Courtly lovers use special bookmarks, which they have probably taken great care to match to the book in some way.  Courtly lovers do not eat whilst turning the pages of their book; nor would they dream of taking a book into the bath.  Certainly you wouldn't catch a courtly lover stuffing a book into her handbag or letting it fall onto the floor of her car.  (Not that I would know anything about that.)

Fadiman places her own family firmly in the carnal realm.  "To us, a book's words were holy, but the paper, cloth, cardboard, glue, thread, and ink that contained them were a mere vessel, and it was no sacrilege to treat them as wantonly as desire and pragmatism dictated.  Hard use was a sign not of disrespect but of intimacy."  Happily, she married another writer and reader with carnal tendencies.  (In one of my favorite essays in the book, Fadiman describes "marrying" their libraries.)

I don't know about you, but I tend to fall somewhere between the two book loving modes.

I've never been one for marking up books, much less writing "NO!" or "Idiotic" in the margins -- like one of my best friends does.   In every other regard, though, my habits tend to be more carnal.

Although I have cured myself of splaying books, or dog-earing their pages, I'm not especially fastidious when it comes to marking my place.  I possess many beautiful bookmarks, but more often than not, I will use whatever comes to hand -- a used envelope; a postcard; one of those ubiquitous order forms which constantly fall out of magazines; a square of toilet paper.  (I am fond of reading in the bathroom, whether or not I have business there.  I discovered, long ago, that it is the room in which one is least likely to be disturbed.  Also, our current bathroom has excellent natural light and a good view of the garden.)

I would much rather have a book than be without one -- which means that books are my companions during most activities, and sometimes they cannot help but get a bit roughed up.  I especially love to eat and read at the same time, and no doubt most of my books bear the smudges of not-too-clean fingers.  I will also take a book into the bath, although I do use some discrimination -- and  keep a towel at hand's reach.

Although I agree with Willow about not wanting someone else's dubious or objectionable witterings on the pages, I do like certain traces of former owners.    I especially love bookplates, and I was very tempted to buy a ridiculously expensive copy of Can You Forgive Her? by Anthony Trollope when I was at Jarndyce Booksellers last week.  Although I wanted the book, what really attracted me was the bookplate -- which had belonged to a certain Sir with a wonderfully ornate name.  I really want some bookplates of my own, although I'm about as likely to adorn my thousands of books as I am to organize my photo albums.  (I got behind on that project in 1999, and haven't caught up yet.)

Some kinds of intimacy are better than others: I don't want to find anyone else's crumbs between the pages of my book, but I would love to find a letter -- or even a shopping list.  This summer, I bought a used book primarily because I was dying to have a look at the letter housed within.  (It turned out that the book had been a gift and that the letter wasn't particularly interesting, but it certainly didn't deserve to be callously passed on to the second-hand book stall.)

In general, I would guess that the courtly lover is less likely to be a book-loaner -- mostly out of concern for possible wear and tear.  On the other hand, a carnal type might be more inclined towards jealous possessiveness.  I don't mind lending books -- not much, anyway -- but I've never figured out a good system for getting them back.  (My memory is, unfortunately, a very imperfect system.)  This is exactly why I need bookplates, although my lust for them is more aesthetic than proprietary.

By the way, the book pictured above (with a Dorothy Parker bookmark)  is A Girl of Mettle by Frances West.  I have a first-edition published in 1908, and my copy of it -- unlike Willow's Charles Simic -- is in "very good condition."   Although that makes me happy as the book owner, it makes me rather sad as a book lover.  It makes me think that it hasn't been read over and over, and handed down from daughter to mother.  It makes me think that it hasn't been loved well enough.

Finding treasure at Daunt Books

On Monday, my youngest daughter had to pay a visit to a dentist on Wimpole Street.  These days, the street is lined rather prosaically with the discreet brass plaques of dentists . . . but at various points in time (real and fictional), characters as diverse as Arthur Conan Doyle, Elizabeth Barrett, Professor Henry Higgins and Paul McCartney resided there.  It is one of those London places with a special frisson, at least for me.  All of those layers of history just go straight to my imagination.

Since Wimpole Street is conveniently close to one of my favorite bookstores -- the splendid Daunt Books -- I thought that a bit of book-browsing (buying, too, of course) would happily fill a spare hour or two.

I hadn't ventured far into the store before I was distracted by a display of beautifully bound Virago Modern Classics.  One of the first novels to catch my eye was 84 Charing Cross Road, by Helene Hanff.  Not long ago, my daughter and I had watched this film -- with Anne Bancroft and Anthony Hopkins in the lead roles.  When I randomly opened the book, it fell upon a letter that I remembered well from the film:  Helene is speaking of her desire to visit London:  "to walk up Berkeley Square and down Wimpole Street and stand in St. Paul's where John Donne preached and sit on the step Elizabeth sat on when she refused to enter the tower . . .".  She speaks of her longing "to look for the England of English literature."

Of course I had to buy this lovely book -- which describes, so entertainingly, the transatlantic friendship forged by and through books.  If that wasn't a sign, then Wimpole street was!

Daunt Books is spread out over three floors, and in some ways it feels more like a library than a bookstore.  There are three major sections:  literary fiction, travel books and second-hand books. We were there for more than an hour, and the man with the black braces and the bald head never stirred from his seat.  Perhaps it is all of that polished wood, or the parquet floors, but it has a particular hushed quality that encourages a person not just to browse -- but to delve inside the tempting pages.

When I was browsing the catalog of Jarndyce: The Nineteenth Century Booksellers, I saw this quotation:

I have always imagined that paradise will be a kind of library.  (Jorge Luis Borges)

Absorbed in my own book searches, I didn't notice that my daughter had disappeared; well, except for the vague sense that no one was tugging at my elbow and saying "I'm bored!"

When she finally appeared, her eyes were shining and her hands held a treasure:  a first-edition copy of Yvette in Italy and Titania's Palace, written by Nevile Wilkinson and published in 1922.  As far as I can tell, by examining the bookplates, this edition was specially made for The Children's Union (Waifs and Strays).  Apparently this was a stray copy, as there is still a perforated form in the back of the book for any child who wishes to become a Rose-Maiden of the Order of the Fairy Kiss.  The pristine quality of the copy, not to mention the still attached form, convinces me that my daughter will be the first reader to really know this book. Unfortunately, I doubt that the Order of the Fairy Kiss is still organizationally intact.

So with our bag of books -- several new ones for me, and one special old one for my daughter -- we retreated to Paul for coffee and crepes.

Although we shared occasional discoveries, mostly we sat, and read, in companionable silence.

Despite having visited London many times, my daughter has never liked it much.  Many people are energized by the frenzied activity, but she prefers less crowded places.  Like most London visitors, we have tended to travel the busy streets: Oxford Street, thronged with shoppers, and Piccadilly Circus, choked with tourists. We have pursued loud and expensive entertainments; we have attempted Hamleys during the school holidays and risked Harrods during an annual sale. My daughter has been to museums and the theatre and ice skating at Somerset House, but funnily enough, she has never walked a quiet street as London goes about its everyday business.

Despite all of our efforts to chase it down, sometimes it seems that pleasure is more easily found in a simple moment; at least I have found that to be true.   I've long known where my happiness is likely to be found, but how gratifying to discover that my daughter can find it in the same place!

lost in translation, once again

Although I’ve been married to an English man more than sixteen years now, some aspects of the culture are still as clear as mud to me. A certain kind of humor (or “humour”), for example.

Last weekend we attended the second wedding of a dear friend, and my husband was asked to “speak” on behalf of the bride. It was a very intimate wedding – thirty people, give or take a few, and all of them family or very close friends. Both the bride and groom had difficult first marriages; there’s an example of English understatement for you. Let’s just say that the couple are bringing five children, two volatile ex-spouses, four weary parents and an awful lot of emotional baggage into this new relationship. Nearly everyone in attendance had been to either the bride's or the groom's first marriage.

It was our first “second” marriage, and the tone was less giddy expectation and more sober hopefulness – not to imply that the wedding was a teetotal affair. To the contrary, like marriage itself, it required no small measure of endurance. The bride’s first marriage had been in June, and it seemed like everyone was starting out with their adult lives; this one took place on a rather muted October day, which better suited our middle-aged selves.

We were, in many ways, a gathering of marriage veterans from the same company: all of us scarred to some extent, and most of us aware of the more bruising skirmishes of our fellows. So within this context, I begged my husband to keep his speech short, sweet and sincere. Although inappropriate humor is a typical element of these speeches, off-color jokes are such uncertain missiles. With so many raw nerves, I didn’t think it appropriate to risk hitting any.

Anyone who has seen Four Weddings and a Funeral will be aware of the apparently obligatory mortifications of the best man’s speech. It is more roast than toast, really. In the guise of celebrating the new bride and groom, the best man feels it is his duty to single-handedly lower the tone. The speech is not considered to be a success unless all of the members of the wedding party have been insulted and/or embarrassed in some way. I’ve never really understood this tradition, but perhaps it has something to do with the English fear of being earnest. Any possible flowering of emotion and sincerity really must be squashed.

Although the groom’s speech went a little close to the bone, and I doubt that the new husband of the matron-in-law was very happy about it, he was forgiven a certain amount of plain-speaking. Most people put it down to the fact that he is from Yorkshire. (Jokes about the difference between Northerners and Southerners? Also obligatory.) My husband was up next, and I’m happy to see that his words managed to be gently funny (and true) without actually being hurtful. But then came the best man’s speech . . . and oh my goodness. We talked about it all night, and I’m sure we will talk about it for years to come. I guess, from that point-of-view, it was a kind of success. It was also the most cringe-making speech that I’ve ever heard, with no taboo subject left uncovered. You know, rather vicious cracks about ex-wives really don’t go down that well when their teenage children are there to bear witness. The groom later told us that the best man had rejected a joke that went along these lines: The groom’s first wife (insert real name) was very temperamental. 50% temper and 50% mental. Truly, that would have been preferable to most of what he did include. No one laughed much; of course that was an embarrassment, too.

Not long ago, Dick was speculating about the nature of English humour over at his Patteran Pages.  (I wonder if he could explain the best man's speech?) Dick listed several examples of jokes which really tickle him – and although I could kind of see that they were funny, none of them made me laugh. Not properly laugh, anyway. I was reminded, instead, of the occasion several years ago when we attended a Christmas Pantomime with my parents and my mother-in-law. The panto style of humor is rigorously formulaic: either sexual double-entendre or slapstick silliness. My English husband and his mother howled with laughter throughout the performance, while my parents and I were left stony-faced and slightly embarrassed.

Sometimes, there really is no translation.

Hopefully not lost in translation:  I'm not really a shoe person, but I happily submitted to the "shoe quiz" administered by Dan, from The Man Who Painted Agnieszka's Shoes.  Dan's blog highlights the best of creative Twitter -- but he made an exception for me, as I'm not a Twitterer, either.  You can hear Dan read from his work at The Albion Beatnik Bookshop in Oxford at 6 pm on October 29.