Bookmark of the Week: No. 10

Kingsley Amis was born on this day in 1922, and died at the relatively early age of 73 in 1995. Robert Conquest (pseudonym of George Robert Acworth) was working for the Foreign Office when Kingsley met him and they became friends due to their mutual interest in, among other things, science fiction. In his Memoirs (Hutchinson, 1991) Kingsley Amis devotes a chapter to Robert Conquest and the following passage is drawn from it:

He was one of the first members of the British Interplanetary Society, and published a novel in the genre, A World of Difference, in 1955. It featured a verse-writing computer, with profuse specimens given, and of course a 'Poet' class of space cruisers that included the Jennings, Larkin, Enright, Amis, Gunn and Holloway. From 1961 to 1966 Bob and I collaborated on the editing of five science-fiction anthologies, Spectrum - Spectrum V, and in 1965 on a straight novel, The Egyptologists, which greatly annoyed some women with its battle-of-the-sexes plot (in fact the women came out of it one up on the men) and amused others, recently the great Ruth Rendell. [p.147]

In the anthology The New Oxford Book of Light Verse (1978) edited by Amis, there are a number of entries written by Robert Conquest but given under the pseudonyms of Victor Gray, Stuart Howard-Jones, and I believe also Ted Pauker. Quite the wit. Amis includes additional limericks in his memoirs, ones perhaps too profane for the anthology, and perhaps too informal, or is it thersitical, for this bookmark number. I leave them to you.

A Song of Truth

I just happened upon a piece by Alberto Manguel which made me feel like I've been slouching in my seat and not paying attention.

Bookmark of the Week: No. 9

I pulled this bookmarker out of the box at random. This bookmark has probably travelled further than I have. No doubt a common one in Australia, but a tad unusual this way. Dymocks has some history behind it, and seems to be making it still. Can't you just hear the great Aussie accent saying "Darling Harbour."

"It deepens like a coastal shelf": On Chesil Beach

Reading Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach is rather like listening to chamber music on a Sunday afternoon, it seems at first that nothing too dramatic is to occur. The five chapters, or movements, whose muted themes are gradually and ineluctably unfolded, are meticulously and evenly constructed in spare clean prose. We, the readers, begin to piece together the clues and narrow down the period to a particular year and feel buoyed by having chosen(I was thinking 1960) a year close to the actual year of 1962, as the two newly-weds, Edward Mayhew and Florence Ponting celebrate their first night at a hotel on the Dorset coast. At this moment, sombre notes from the cello and viola bring up the ghost of Philip Larkin. And yet, though lines from Annus Mirabilis arise briefly like the flotsam of our memory, they subside and settle once more like the stones on Chesil beach to the broader order that the author wishes us to attend.

Ian McEwan explores Edward and Florence's background with equanimity and we begin to see how the trajectories of these two restless lives have come to interact. I have always found it fascinating how people's lives come together and this short novel does not disappoint. Edward thinks the turning point of his life was in 1954, when, aged 14, his father took him to the bottom of the garden and told him that Edward's mum was in fact brain-damaged:

all the tiny shifts and realignments in his life seemed crystallised in this new knowledge.(p.74)

A figure out of the past, a "distinguished-looking city gent in his sixties with bowler, rolled umbrella and newspaper" had negligently handled the door of a train carriage and upon a hard braking it had swung loose and struck Edward's mother in the head. And this gent "scuttled away from the scene" like some great man of history leaving victims in his wake. One could possibly see the beginnings of Edward's life trajectory taking shape from this very moment.

And Florence's life is seemingly altered irrevocably by her father while her mother, a rather distant and cool intellectual professor, has provided little solace and Florence seeks out an intellectualized warmth of spirit in her violin playing.

It is a novel that the reader can turn over again and again in their thoughts like the waves washing and sorting the stones on Chesil beach. The muted themes take on greater context. The respective influences of their parents in their own family triangles, and the randomness of their quite different lives intersecting on a day they were both restless and wanting to break away, leads to their own decisions and indecisions taking on greater weight as they begin their slow courtship.

There is that decisive scene on the beach near the end of the book, where Edward castigates Florence by saying that she was acting as if it was 1862 and not 1962. For us the readers, we can possibly invest this with irony. As A. N. Wilson in his interesting book, God's Funeral, has suggested, the 1860s were equally revolutionary in how the young began to slough off the strictures of the past. At this moment I thought of The French Lieutenant's Woman by John Fowles. It was set in 1867 and written during the 1960s and published in 1969, and the setting is that other Dorset coastal site, the city of Lyme Regis. I have just started to reread this novel and it feels like a good shift in perspective.

Although On Chesil Beach does show us a picture of a certain period on the brink of change, we can also see the perennial and universal themes of relationships in all their variations and see how fragile and difficult they can be. We can only hope that in 2060 there will be such perennial themes to explore. We can only hope that the stones on Chesil Beach will still exist to be sorted and washed by a tidal flow.

A Stray Impressionist Finds his Home

Lafcadio Hearn (1850-1904) had travelled and wandered far in his life, and though he thought the tropics would keep him, it was in the far east that he discovered home. In the fall of 1889, he was unhappy and staying in New York when an art editor at Harper's suggested he write a book on Japan. While Hearn worked on his book proposal for Harper's, the art editor travelled to Montreal to talk with Sir William Van Horne to see if he could provide passage across Canada for Hearn and an artist. Sir William agreed and offered $250 upon Hearn's arrival in Montreal. The requirement was for Lafcadio Hearn to write an article about the trip across Canada on one of Sir William's Canadian Pacific Railway trains.

On March 8th, 1890, Hearn and C. D. Weldon, the artist, left New York by train and arrived in Montreal greeted by the cold and ice:

Ice, many inches thick, sheets the pavements; and lines of sleighs, instead of lines of hacks, wait before the station for passengers. No wheeled vehicles are visible,--except one hotel omnibus: only sleighs are passing. They have for me quite an unfamiliar picturesqueness.

Hearn's glimpse of Montreal was unfortunately short. It would have been interesting to read of his impressions from a longer stay in Montreal, but he did leave a short description:

The city is very solid and very gray--a limestone city largely: comfortable, conservative looking. Nothing that strikes the eyes has a foreign aspect, --except a few old French houses recalling memories of New Orleans: the newer and larger buildings awake remembrances of New York and Philadelphia in their less modern quarters.

These excerpts are from the "required" article published in Harper's New Monthly Magazine in 1890; in the article Hearn also reflects on the nature of modern travel. He sees that a circuit of the world was possible, according to his calculations, in 35 days and six hours. He outlines the various stages and durations. It was on his mind. He was fondly attracted to Elizabeth Bisland, a fellow journalist, who had left New York on a race to be the first to circumnavigate the world in the shortest time. Bisland was playing catch-up with Nellie Bly who had already left on her trip around the world. It was the attempt of the owner of the Cosmopolitan Magazine's to compete with Bly and The World. Nellie Bly won.

Hearn's article continues with wonderful descriptions of Canadian scenery for many pages; just what Sir William Van Horne was looking for I am sure. They arrived at Vancouver where they boarded the Abysinnia which departed on March 17th.

It was on this day, the 4th of April, 1890, when Lafcadio Hearn first glimpsed Japan, the country that this "civilized nomad" could at last call home:

Then with a delicious shock of surprise I see something for which I had been looking, --far exceeding all anticipation --but so ghostly, so dream white against the morning blue, that I did not observe it at the first glance: an exquisite snowy cone towering above all other visible things--Fujiyama! Its base, the same tint as the distances, I cannot see--only the perfect crown, seeming to hang in the sky like a delicate film,--a phantom.

Dark Knowledge: Banville's Black Cloak

Christine Falls / Benjamin Black
There is little pretense, or is it little faith, or perhaps both, in the fact that the rear dustwrapper flap of the American edition of Christine Falls reveals quite plainly that Benjamin Black is John Banville. (I assume it is the same with the British edition pictured here, a cover which captures, unlike the American cover art, the atmosphere of the setting.) Was this the forthrightness of Banville himself not wanting to pull the wool over our eyes? Unlikely. The publishers? Most likely. They must have weighed the readership of a new crime series with the known factor of Banville followers, Ban's Fans so to speak, and after a little mathematical work realised there would be good sales all round with the combination.
Banville's choice of pseudonym is of interest for anything Banville creates is so. The surname "Black" is self-evidently appropriate for the "noir" crime novel. The given name, "Benjamin", translates as "son of the right hand." If Banville is left-handed then it would be seen as the work of the other. But if John Banville is right-handed then it is even more interesting for it would be the mirrored reflection of the author, a sinistral performance is delivered by his reflected self. His dark double. A rather Nabokovian conceit.

There have been some authors who, perhaps eyeing retirement in the south of France, have tried to forge a new identity and leave their long list of under appreciated, though critically acclaimed, literary novels behind like a wardrobe that is no longer working for them. I think of the Canadian novelist, Trevor Ferguson, whose alter-ego, John Farrow, has provided some interest in the battle against crime. But Banville is at the top of the heap and has done well financially, so unless he likes the horses too much, we can assume he has always found this genre appealing and is looking for a challenge. But though to write pseudonymously is possible, to write anonymously is difficult. We live in times of book signings, author tours, trade shows and book expos, and interviews across the gamut. What is an author to do? Perhaps he could sport a mustache, or don Simenon-like spectacles and smoke a pipe, and say, "Yes, people often say I look like John Banville the literary author." No, it won't do. One cannot lie. One must leave those to ones characters.

And lie they do. Falsehoods are the very supports holding their lives in place. Indeed, It seems that place and period are the very inspirations for the novel, a time when lies and religious sins were abundant. Dublin in the 1950s is a darkly etched cityscape. The ghosts of LeFanu and Wilde would find their old Merrion Street haunts to have frightfully changed. His main protagonist, Quirke, the pathologist who prefers his drapes drawn, and the dead to the living, wanders within a rather small circumference of south east central Dublin, but one gets a feel for the wet streets and rank odors, and one can almost smell the omniscient cigarette smoke. He paints his characters with quick flourishes of the brush, like an Augustus John with a two foot brush at arms length, and we wonder at the skilled use of colour. Minor characters come alive with a few deft strokes. I rather like Poole in chapter one, Quirke's neighbour who Black/Banville describes thus:

Poole stood sideways in the barely open doorway of his flat, neither in nor out, his accustomed stance, with an expression at once truculent and timid. He was an early riser, if indeed he ever slept. He wore a sleeveless pullover and a dicky-bow, twill trousers sharply creased, gray carpet slippers. He looked, Quirke always thought, like the father of a fighter pilot in one of those Battle of Britain films, or better still, the father of the fighter pilot's girlfriend.

Another character who seems to pass through doorways sideways is the young protestant admirer of Phoebe with an Irish given name, Conor Carrington:

Conor Carrington was, Quirke noted, the kind of person who enters sideways through a doorway, slipping rather than stepping in. He was tall and sinuous with a long, pale face and the hands, slender and pliant and white. . . . he had the look, Quirke thought, of a man arriving unwillingly at the wake of someone with whom he had been barely acquainted.

These descriptions carry much other information and colour the backcloth of the period; the protestant and catholic issues loom over the stage like blasted trees bereft of leaf pointing sharp fingered branches at each other.
I won't detail the plot. Only say that by the last quarter of the novel I felt I was reading a book by Benjamin Black. But that may have been the shift of place, a shift to Boston, and the fact that the finish line was in view, the dust having settled from the revelations so to speak.

Will life prevail? If, in the equation a lie takes the "f" out of life, then the "f" must represent truth, and the "f" will try to prevail. But there is always a cost. The book ends in the spring with the hope of renewal and change, warm soft breezes and the hint of justice. But one can only imagine the foggy autumn rounds, the slippery way along the tow path, the smokey pubs and clouds lowering over Merrion Street. A place where justice is thwarted by the powers in high places using sinister information and brute force. I already anticipate the next Benjamin Black crime novel, but I do hope Banville will return as well. Even if he is sporting a mustache.

Bookmark of the Week: No. 8

With all the information gleaned from a recent blog of the TLS editor, I decided to bring out this bookmarker. It was a time when Halley's Comet was perhaps, for the average citizen, the only well-known periodic event in the sky besides the Pleiades. Twenty years later and the changes have been immense. It does seem a golden age of information exchange. Technology and the internet have given us access to so much information it is truly astonishing. I receive regular updates from the Cassini-Huygens mission and I really only have a passing curiosity in it all, but it is always fascinating to learn of the latest developments such as the lakes found on Saturn's Titan, just as it is likewise fascinating to learn of the latest developments in Tony Blair's political orbit. Well, almost.

As to the 1985-86 comet pass, living in downtown Montreal at the time rather precluded any viewing, but I am quite sure I saw it in a magazine. At least I think I did.

This bookmark was issued by Sky & Telescope magazine.

Swans in Spring

Spring truly arrives here only when the swans appear. After wintering over in their special swan house, they make their way down to the river with great pomp and circumstance in the wake of the Perth County Pipe Band. The swans are accompanied by two Canada Geese, two Chinese Geese and other assorted geese and they are followed by their keepers and the dignitaries. This year was special since Robert J. Miller, the swan keeper of many years has passed away and his family was representing his memory. The crowds of loyal swanophiles -us included- gathered to be a part of this traditional parade. You can watch a video of a past swan parade at this link. It is just one of many events that makes this city very special. Now the nesting season begins, and soon enough we shall be counting cygnets and ducklings.

The photograph above is from a previous year and you can just make out Mr. Miller in the white hat behind the swans.

Author, Author: a Bookstore Story

One day at our small second-hand bookshop, a quiet day per usual, the phone rang, unusual in itself, and it was one of my bookclub members, an owner of one of the independent retail bookshops in town. A customer of his was looking for a certain title which seemed to be out of print. It was a pleasant feeling to know that I did in fact have a copy, a very nice trade paper reprint. He said that was wonderful, he would send his customer over. 

Just before my anticipation began to wane and just before my mind returned to its maunderings, a woman quietly slipped into the shop. The effect of her silent arrival, startling me just at the point of my falling into dreamy bookish preoccupations, must have shown on my expression, and in my voice as I greeted her in a rather hesitant and stilted fashion, the blood rushing to my face. For the woman who had entered was a rather famous Canadian author. Should I rise from my desk and become exceedingly gracious? No, that would just scare her. Somehow I managed to remain calm, but I think it was shock. She approached the desk and very kindly inquired about the book being held for her. I duly handed it to her and she said it was excellent, she would buy it, but she would browse the shelves for a bit as well. 

At this point, I hadn't broached the subject of her identity, not knowing quite how to do so. I didn't possess the charm of my brother-in-law, an actor, and on top of it all, I was having a bad hair day and I was feeling much like Dylan Moran's Bernard Black. Well, she started to look at the fiction and I saw her work her way down to where her books would be. My eyes followed her hand which reached out to gently pull a volume off the shelf before saying "I see you have one of my books."

Now, at this point I may have been seen as daft for not knowing a famous Canadian author, so I tried to salvage my self-respect by saying how nice it was to have Alice Munro in our little bookshop, and would she like to sign the book for me. She brightened up at this request and sat down on the chair in front of my desk and I handed her my pen and she very kindly signed her name on the title page. I asked her if she was in town for the theatre, but she said she dropped into town from time to time. Then she told me that she used to run a small bookshop. I was quite ignorant of this fact. Yes, she and her first husband started a little bookshop in Victoria, B. C. and it specialized in paperbacks. This was the early 1960s. She said she did all the jobs from running it to cleaning it too. Of course, it dawned on me, Munro's Books in Victoria. It has evolved. And so has she. I can't remember the rest of the conversation, but I do recall how pleasant and kind she was. A very nice person. 

On another occasion, my wife was at the shop when Alice Munro was looking for an older classic, but together they couldn't find a copy. When I arrived she had just left. I said I could have sworn we had a copy of that title. I scanned the shelf, then the shelves around and yes there it was, hidden behind other books on the wrong shelf altogether. My wife, a librarian, is the Queen of finding mis-shelved books but somehow this one had eluded her keen eye.

I ran to the window. No one to be seen. To the door but no, she had vanished. I descended the stairs and looked up and down the street and I saw her walking at a jaunty stride with her husband, and off I went clutching the inexpensive paperback in my hand like it was forgotten medicine. Shuffling before the sprint I realised I would actually have to run and not jog. 

I discovered not only was I out of shape, but how difficult it was,  for an untrained voice facing a head wind, to call out to someone far ahead. But somehow I managed to reach them at the corner and she thanked me for the effort. My ability to respond adequately was of course countered by the fact that I could hardly breathe, but somehow this too I managed. And off they went, and off I went with the price of the paperback in my hand.

As I walked back to the shop, I did try to regain some poise.

Only later, in the calm of the empty shop, did it occur to me, that a strange young man running after them waving a paperback in the air must have been a startling sight, certainly to her husband who'd never laid eyes on me before.  Some raving fan with a book for her to sign? A talker perhaps? A follower even. Someone to avoid. Excuses forming. Late for a play, must dash . . . .

Such was the day's excitement.

 

 

It is a Maxim of the Book Business

Stephen Leacock (1869-1941), pictured here in a youthful pose, wrote a very good book on Mark Twain (1932), and he begins this biography with two forceful truths of the time: "The name of Mark Twain stands for American humour. More than that of any other writer, more than all names together, his name conveys the idea of American humour." These statements of fact could equally be used for Stephen Leacock in relation to Canadian humour of the period. But like Twain, Leacock's seasoned wit can still make us laugh; can still make us see the bubbles he is trying to pop, and the human frailty and weakness too. One of my favourite stories is perhaps less known and perhaps on the silly side, but it deals with the book world: The Reading Public: a Book Store Study, found in his Moonbeams from the Larger Lunacy (1915). Here he lightly sends up the booksellers and readers of the day. When I read this piece I hear the voice of John Gielgud as the bookseller strangely enough. Such is the effect of his extraordinary performance as Charles Ryder's father in the BBC adaptation of Waugh's Brideshead Revisited which has stayed with me for so many years. It just seems to fit the character.

Not wanting to ruin it for anyone I shall hold my tongue, but early in this Leacock story his character, a professor, reflects that: "it is a maxim of the book business that a professor standing up in a corner buried in a book looks well in a store. The real customers like it." This story feels very much drawn from personal experience and I wonder, even though the story seems to be set in New York, which bookstore managers in Montreal during the early part of the last century may have seen themselves, or others, as the original of Mr. Sellyer the "sales manager"? The bookshops in Montreal during this period included The Montreal Book Room, A. T. Chapman, F. E. Phelan, the book department of Henry Morgan & Co. Ltd. and W. H. Scroggie Ltd. among many others. Perhaps there are descendants of these booksellers who still bring out the old story at family get-togethers of how their relative was the real Mr. Sellyer.

Stephen Leacock was born in Swanmore, Hamshire, England on December 30, 1869. In May of 1970, a commemorative plaque was placed on the house in Swanmore where he was born.

Stephen Leacock died on this date, March 28, 1941.

Bookmark of the Week: No. 7

It was about five years ago that the venerable Scottish bookstore chain, James Thin, Booksellers was sold to Blackwells. James Thin (1824-1915) began in the book business as an apprentice (1836-1841) before taking over another bookstore's lease and stock in 1848, and developing it into one of the most important bookshops in Scotland. James Thin was interested in hymnology and his collection of 2,500 hymn books went to the University of Edinburgh at his death.

Terence Hearsay; or, the Benefits of a Friend's Discerning Eye

When at St. John's College, Oxford, in the 1870s, A. E. Housman became friends with Alfred W. Pollard and eventually, in their fourth year, shared five rooms with another student in an old house near the College. Their friendship continued though they both went their separate and successful ways. Pollard went on to become a well-known bibliographer and scholar, employee of the British Museum, and editor of the journal The Library for many years. While Housman eventually found his place with a slim volume of verse and a position as a scholar. That slim volume of verse that A. E. Housman had prepared for publication was initially entitled The Poems of Terence Hearsay. Alfred W. Pollard modestly recalled the event for a publication of reminiscences of Housman published in 1937:

Housman knew that books of mine had been published by Messrs. Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner and Co., who had gained rather a special reputation for bringing out prettily printed volumes of verse, and asked me to arrange with them for its publication at his expense. Of course there was no difficulty as to this (I think Housman put down 30 pounds and got it back with a small profit), but my being entrusted with the manuscript led me to suggest that Terence was not an attractive title, and that in the phrase "A Shropshire Lad," which he had used in the poem, he had much a better one. He agreed at once, and I think the change helped.

Pollard was correct in seeing Terence as a tentative title, a pretense on the part of the poet, and thankfully provided that necessary discerning viewpoint for for his friend when it was most needed. The Shropshire Lad was indeed published in 1896, the same year as the photograph of Housman (above) was taken in London. The print run was 500 copies, of which 150 were shipped to the United States. Only 381 copies were sold by the end of the first year. A. E. Housman's brother, Laurence, author and playwright, recalled how he purchased the remaining 6 copies of the first edition two and a half years after publication, and then thirty years later, when he started Housmans Bookshop, he began to sell them at 12, 20, 30 and then 70 pounds for a signed copy. Checking values in today's market, it seems a signed copy of A Shropshire Lad is somewhere in the $25,000.00 + range.

The Housman brothers were on occasion mistaken for each other; The Dean of Westminister mistook A. E. for Laurence, and once the Headmaster of Westminister mistook Laurence for A. E. In the year before A. E. Housman's death, his brother told him of another occasion:

I had been giving a lecture--not on poetry; at the end a man came up to me and asked if I was the author of A Shropshire Lad. I said, "No." "Any relation?" "Yes, I am his brother." "Ah, well," was the kind reply, "that's something to be proud of. I, too, have a brother who is the better man."

A. E. Housman was born on this date, March 26, 1859.

And since to look at things in bloom

Fifty springs are little room,

About the woodlands I will go

To see the cherry hung with snow.