Peter Brooke By Any Other Name

When I find a book by an author I am unfamiliar with, it is a good thing.  A chance to fill in the blank space of my seemingly ever increasing ignorance.  A Rose by Any Other Name by Anthony Carson (Penguin Books No. 1847, published in 1962, originally Methuen, 1960).  Who in the world is Anthony Carson I wondered?  The cover art was by the familiar and ever whimsical Quentin Blake.  Perhaps the only cover of a Penguin Book that extends over the edges of the center panel (prior to the Marber grid), but then again, my knowledge of Penguin covers is of course not complete.  Quentin Blake has drawn a circle around the Publisher's device and made radiating lines outward to suggest a sun.  Brilliant.  The Penguin looks rather surprised, is brought into the drawing and confronted with a mad poet on a bicycle.  It suits the text very well.  Short chapters of humorous autobiographical tales involving much travel and experience.  Experience with a capital "E" perhaps.

Anthony Carson, Anthony Carson?  I couldn't place the name.  It is a good feeling to find something new, but the other side of the coin--there's generally one--is that I felt at once rather shaky in my knowledge. Luckily no one in the past has ever asked me whether I liked the work of Anthony Carson.  "Anthony who?" I would have replied honestly; or if I was dishonest, which I'm not, I could have faked my way saying "Oh, yes, wonderful stuff.  Didn't like his last book though.  Losing it mate, losing it," and then changed the subject to an author I did know something about.

His real name was Peter Brooke.  Well, it was the name given to him by his 'preparatory school headmaster' when, at the age of seven, during the WWI, his family name of 'von Bohr' was deemed rather inconvenient as the other children began to accuse him of being a German spy.  Peter Brooke it was.  Such is the past. During the twenties he was a sort of remittance man in New Zealand and Australia where many of his tales of vagabondage are derived.  His days as a swagman in the outback, and trying to shear sheep as a pseudo-Kiwi, and that sort of thing.  Experience with a capital "E." Truly.

It seems he was a denizen of Fitzrovia and Soho, raising elbows at the The Wheatsheaf pub with Dylan Thomas, Julian Maclaren-Ross, George Barker, Peter Vansittart, Mulk Raj Anand, Fred Urquhart, the Canadian poet Paul Potts, Meary Tambimuttu, and later, Quentin Crisp, who were all perhaps trying to live up to the earlier denizens of the Fitzroy Tavern, Roy Campbell, Anthony Powell, Jack Lindsay and Patrick Hamilton.

Peter Brooke published his first novel, Our Lady of the Earthquakes (London: Cresset Press, 1940), but it was not successful.  He did achieve some financial success co-writing a song however: Violin: Sweet and Low Played the Bow written by Allan Gray and Peter Brooke, (Sydney: J. Albert and Son, 1941.) After WWII, he was involved in various jobs and began to write humorous travel books under the name "Anthony Carson."  I don't know how he came to choose this name.  Another blank space. Perhaps it came to him on an index card as he worked at the Income Tax Office.  Possible.

The author, Rupert Croft-Cooke--another author I am less than familiar with, though under his pseudonym, Leo Bruce, he wrote many an interesting mystery--was extremely prolific, and wrote over 20 autobiographical works known as 'The Sensual World Series,' and in The Wintry Sea (1964) he wrote of his meetings with Peter Brooke:

I used to meet him at a pub called Wheatsheaf in the 1940s. Solemn, dedicated and ponderous, he hungered after two things--publication and food.  .  .  He talked of 'experience' as though it were a commodity in which he had invested, of which he now held a large stock ready to put on the market.  .  .  Nearly everyone who came to the Wheatsheaf in those days had an inkling that he himself and the rest of us were somewhat laughable figures, even Julian Maclaren-Ross who wore a disintegrating teddy-bear coat, carried an ornate walking-stick and bagged the corner place at the bar so that he could lecture the rest of us from a vantage point....But not Peter Brooke.  He could see nothing funny in himself, or in not being able to get his work published when it was so full of experience, and nothing funny at all in having a perpetually unassuaged appetite.

Croft-Cooke later wondered over the transformation of Peter Brooke, the serious writer, into the comic writer Anthony Carson, whom Colin MacInnes described in the Observer as 'one of the few great English humorous writers of the century.'

It appears that all of Brooke's 'experience' was well exploited for the humor rather than for the drama.  Whatever works.  Each short chapter of A Rose by Any Other Name shows the signs of having debuted in Punch or the New Statesman with their sharp wit and comic hook at the end. I imagine he is better known in England and Europe than here in Canada. His popular humorous travel works have perhaps dated and time has faded the spines of his works into dusty obscurity (though all are available on those obscure hidden shelves of on-line book sellers). Still, a light read and enjoyable.  Nice cover art too.

His other works under Anthony Carson are:

A Train to Tarragona (Methuen, 1957)
On to Timbuctoo (Methuen, 1958)

Looking For A Bandit (Methuen, 1961)
Poor Man's Mimosa (Methuen, 1962)
Carson Was Here (Methuen, 1963)
The Sin of Summer (Methuen 1965)
The Golden Kiss (Methuen, 1966)
Any More for the Gondola (Hurst & Blackett, ?)

I imagine there may be others...

P.S.  I believe there is a photograph of  Anthony Carson / Peter Brooke in a new exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in London, Famous in the Fifties: Photographs by Daniel Farson

In for a Penny, In for a Powell

I know very little about Anthony Powell.  Although, I do believe he was rather tall and possibly forbidding.  Well, I guess I am being disingenuous for I do know a bit more about him than that.  I know he was fond of figs.  No, I am just making that up.  From his pictures he doesn't look like a fig fancier.  More a Banbury cake fancier I think. Although he may not have wanted anyone to know of his predilection for pastry.  

I am sorry, I must be in a whimsical mood, or perhaps merely hungry, or both. I am sure I know what anyone can know about Anthony Powell by looking up his information on wikipedia, reading an obituary or two, a few critical works and essays.  Or best of all, perhaps, by reading his Memoirs (4 vols.), his Journals (3 vols.) and his Novels (20 vols.) and miscellaneous plays and essays. I am not, however, a Powellite or whatever the followers and devotees of the man and his work call themselves, but I have read a few of his novels. 

Faced with the stack of Anthony Powell's  Dance to the Music of Time does seem a rather forbidding reading task (although, perhaps not as forbidding as the seemingly forgotten ten volumes of Romain Rolland's Jean-Christophe.)  All that clever wit and subtle satire in volume after volume after volume. To be a reader in 1951, and pick up the first novel in the sequence, A Question of Upbringing, would be the easier task. To read one Anthony Powell book every odd year or so, and enjoy the anticipation and uncertainty of when the next one would arrive in the bookshops, would be the ideal reading pattern.  I imagine even the author himself would find the complete sequence to be a daunting challenge to read all at one go. To see and hear through the eyes of Nicholas Jenkins for so many pages would likely drive one to read a Ross Macdonald hard-boiled mystery, an Alice Munro short story collection or a Samuel Beckett novel (in French) for a change of style and subject matter. Reading one a month would be more feasible. Such a schedule would likely save one's sanity and would limit the influence of his style--enjoyable though it is--from seeping too deeply into one's conversation and letter writing.

The different cover art for his novels over the years can be a source of interest. The original illustrator for his twelve volume sequence published by William Heinemann was James Broom-Lynne, who was certainly a talented and prolific (a word that is beginning to loose its power, shall we say, fecund, creative, cornucopian, yes cornucopian seems apt for his dustjackets, illustrations, novels and plays) artist and writer.  His covers are heraldic in design with the use of a rather dour grey punctuated by various bright colours with the details hinting at, in a general way, the content. The size of the books, crown octavo, small by today's standards, make them easy to read and the original red cloth bindings and gilt titles make them handsome enough books. It is an achievement in design continuity since the first book was published in 1951, and the last in the series, in 1975.  Broom-Lynne also designed the four volume set by Heinemann using the lower portion of the painting by Poussin and overlaying vertical colour strips, a design which was then modified by the American edition published by Little, Brown and Co., and more recently by the University of Chicago Press.

The Penguin Books paperback editions which came out in the 1960s sported cover art by Osbert Lancaster and they were a mix of finely detailed exterior architecture, like Casanova's Chinese Restaurant, and finely detailed interiors, such as A Question of Upbringing. Some of the covers featured interiors or exteriors with groups of people but without a defining representation of any one character. There is a lightness that reflects Lancaster's style and to a certain extent, the satire and situations within the novels.

Berkley Books issued a series of paperbacks with odd covers which were still-lifes with objects that reflected the content, including a small pocket watch being one object that appeared in each design.

Fontana Books first issued a series in the late 1960s with rather stilted paintings of characters from the novel.  The effect is weak.  They followed this up in the early 1970s with richly defined photographs of still-lifes reflecting the subject matter within.  Then in the late 1970s they brought out a new series with cover art by Mark Boxer.  These depicted characters from the novels in a more idiosyncratic manner, being essentially caricatures. Boxer's black ink sketches with a colour wash to various details are certainly interesting, and although they represent specific characters in the books, they don't subvert the reader's own imagination of what the characters may look like.  The caricatures evoke character rather than define their appearance. (Although I have to admit that the caricature for Temporary Kings makes me think of Martin Amis in his mod, long-hair years--the image on the back of his novel The Rachel Papers for instance. Martin Amis was friends with Boxer and their lifestyles did have a certain resonance with the books. It is just that the caricature on this book is of a woman, Pamela Widmerpool. My perception only I am sure.)

The paperback covers, in tending to represent the time of the novels, also reflect their own time in their style of illustration or design. If someone were to redesign the covers for the 21st Century, I wonder what they would come up with.  There is a modern tendency to have the art work span all the spines in a multi-volume work to create one visual image. That could be one possibility. Using the painting by Poussin seems too easy. Something fresh would be needed.  I wonder what.

Nabokov Covers

I am in the midst of reading Haruki Murakami's 1Q84, and the latest warm-hearted offering by Alexander McCall Smith, but I now find myself 90 pages into The Gift by Vladimir Nabokov.

I blame housecleaning.

In a moment of vacuous calm after a bout of dusting and vacuuming, I happened to be staring at bookshelves, no doubt through the rise and fall of imperceptible dust motes, when I noticed how very plain the dustwrappers of the Nabokov hardcovers issued by Putnam in the 1960s were in comparison to the surrounding books. My initial reaction to the covers was to wonder why they were so drab. Was there a lack of direction in the art direction department? Was there a lack of funds? Was it a style of the period? Was it due to the sophisticated nature of the text that made them avoid putting a foot wrong, and resort to plain typographic design with a wash of backcloth colour? The contrast with contemporary designs for Murakami's works by Chipp Kidd made these covers seem exceedingly plain.

While these questions settled in my mind, I looked at some of the paperbacks of his work for which I have a fondness. The vintage illustrations for the Popular Library editions issued in the late 1950s and early 1960s do not tend to correspond to the text within but at least they are on the conservative side of the lurid illustrations of the day, when sex was used to sell paperbacks. These latter covers generally remind me of the 1955 film, The Seven Year Itch, where the actor Tom Ewell, portrays a character who is overseeing a manuscript by a pyschiatrist, and the cover art designs for this non-fiction work are luridly ridiculous.

My first encounter with Nabokov's work was with Nabokov's Dozen (Popular Library, 1958), a paperback I picked up secondhand. I still return to this slim volume to reread Spring in Fialta and other short stories, sporting my pencil marks, signposts of a youthful passage. These illustrations are by the talented and prolific illustrator Stanley Zuckerberg (1919-1995), a New Yorker who illustrated many paperback covers during the 1950s and 60s, and according to Classics Illustrated: A Cultural History by William B. Jones, Jr., he illustrated two Classics Comics, A Tale of Two Cities (1942) and Robinson Crusoe (1943). He married a fellow artist, Lillian Chestney who also had a long and prolific career as an illustrator, and she also illustrated two Classics Comics, Arabian Nights (1943) and Gulliver's Travels (1943).

I cannot find a reference by Nabokov to this specific cover art for Nabokov's Dozen, nor to The Gift, but I gather from reading his selected letters, that he was adamant about what he did and did not want, and was often provided with cover art that was not to his liking in the extreme. The cover for Nabokov's Dozen does seem more like an advertisement for hair styles, but as a reader, I am rather fond of the volume.

The one-line blurbs on the back of the Popular Library edition of my 1963 copy of The Gift pictured here, are rather amusing: "A bizarre and special romp" (St. Louis Globe-Democrat), "A powerful kick" (Associated Press), "An occasion of delight" (Commonweal). On the back of my 1964 Popular Library copy of The Defense is the following hyperbolic purchase-motivating blurb: "Superior to Lolita and, in its way, as much of a shocker" (W. G. Rogers, Saturday Review Syndicate). Anything to sell a book.

In the late 1960s, Nabokov's son Dimitri provided paperback cover art sketches for a number of his father's works, The Defense being one. When it was to be reissued in the early 1970s, Nabokov was unhappy with the new cover. Writing to Rosa Montague of Wiedenfeld and Nicolson, the author wrote :

I do not wish to appear choosy, but the new cover design won't do. The banal pop-arty combination of a broken chessboard inserted between Siamese twins (identical except for the forlock on one brow) is meaningless and repulsive. I do not insist on cover designs illustrating a novel realistically, but I do object to a pseudo-realism unconnected with anything in the book. It is a great pity Panther does not wish to use the 1967 cover-design, but if so, let us have some purely ornamental pattern without eyes, noses, or hands. -September 9, 1970. (Vladimir Nabokov Selected Letters 1940-1977, HBJ, 1989, p.472.)

Dimitri Nabokov also provided the cover art for The Gift issued by Panther in 1967, one that his father approved of fully, referring to it as a "subtle and intelligent sketch. . . with the keys on the floor of the hall."

It seems if the art departments of publishers could not figure out a proper concept for his covers, large black lettering on a pale background was preferable. I gather that is what helped sway the decision process at Putnam's when they issued his books in hardcover with similar dustwrapper designs with the only variation being the subtle colour shadows to the titles.

Much more could be written about Nabokov covers, especially the wonderful book, Pnin, but I will leave that to another day, or to another altogether. I really should get back to 1Q84, but I so enjoy the rich textured prose of The Gift that I forget I have already been there before, walking beside Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev listening to his thoughts.

Morbid Callaghan and Earle Turvey

A recent post at the interesting blog The Dusty Bookcase concerning the New Canadian Library series reminded me of an incident only last week. My wife was telling me she wanted to reread the novel Earth and High Heaven by Gwethalyn Graham and wondered if we had a copy. I believed I had two hardcover copies somewhere, but I knew I had a paperback copy in the New Canadian Library series and knew precisely where it was. A little while later she called me and asked me to look at the cover of this paperback issue. I duly looked at the cover but couldn't see anything unusual other than the drab brown abstract image. Look at her name, she prompted. Again, I didn't see anything unusual. Look at the spelling, she added. Then I understood. The author's first name was spelled "Gwenthalyn."

My wife has a keen eye when it comes to misspellings, typos and such. She constantly finds them in newspapers, magazines, and perhaps most often in restaurant menus. Some of them can be fairly amusing. To get an author's name wrong on the cover of a book, however, doesn't seem amusing. You have to wonder how many copies were printed with that error. This printing is the 4th, dated 1970. Perhaps this error is well-known to collectors of the series.

Who knows, there may be a plethora of misspellings out there. Maybe I should be looking for The Nymph and the Lamb by Thomas H. Raddall, Birney by Earle Turvey, As For Me and My Mouse by Sinclair Ross, or Such is My Beloved by Morbid Callaghan. I sort of like that last one.

Making an Elephant: Writing From Within by Graham Swift

Making an Elephant: Writing From Within by Graham Swift (Random House of Canada, 2009) 401pp.: ill.

I clearly remember first coming across Graham Swift: it was a Montreal Bookshop, early 1984, a damp winter day. A stack of books at my feet as if brought in by the tide and I were at the seaside, and on top, Waterland (Heinemann, 1983). The dustwrapper cover image was very striking and certainly made me pick it up, while the back panel of the dustwrapper was an expanse of black water-beaded mystery. The picture on the rear flap revealed a young author seemingly with an expression of having seen someone in the distance and wondering whether to proceed or change direction. I read, with a slight feeling of frustration of not having heard of him, that it was not his first book, but his fourth.

The confidence of the plain back panel was impressive.

After reading the flap cover, the first lines, and glancing here and there, I bought the book--without a blurb in sight. As I hurried to the metro station where no doubt Bowie's Let's Dance or The Police's Every Breath You Take penned by Sting, emanated from the little shops trying to catch commuters as they passed, I was fueled with that sense of excitement of having come across a new author, a new voice; and each time a new book by Graham Swift was issued, that initial sense of excitement was recalled like the scent of sand and salt water. And so it did when I heard that Graham Swift had a new book out, Making an Elephant: Writing from Within, a collection of non-fiction pieces.

There is an alternating flow, or tidal rhythm within the structure of this collection. The tide is out, and the book opens with childhood memories, then moves on to the story of his becoming a writer while in Greece ostensibly working on his graduate degree. Then the tide rolls in and we are provided with memories of good literary friends and occasions in the public domain: there is the Booker Prize evening; an interview by Patrick McGrath concerning Waterland; Swift's interview with Kazuo Ishiguro, and with Caryl Phillips; an interesting long piece about seeking out Jiri Wolf in Prague; and then his experiences of the filming of Waterland where a good writer friend of his who had experience in the film business told him he liked movie people, "They stab you in the front." The tide shifts out and we are back in the very personal with a memoir of his father which gives the title to the collection; then a selection of his poetry and an interesting insight before we find the tide coming in and we have his short piece about Salman Rushdie coming to visit, followed by a short piece of journalism about reading aloud, and a longer lecture on the spirit of place in fiction, specifically the Fens (Waterland), the West Country (Ever After) and the Garden of England, Kent (Last Orders). There is a poignant memoir of fly fishing with Ted Hughes, his piscatorial acquaintance on the Torridge River in Devon, and then another piece about film, this time Fred Schepisi and his take on Last Orders. The tide shifts out again and we have an unusual essay concerning the local history of Wandsworth and an interview with himself concerning his methods of writing. It is rounded off by his introduction to a collection of essays of Montaigne, a favourite of Swift and appropriate, for after finishing Making an Elephant: Writing from Within, I have a greater sense of the man, the writer, and his world.

All things Graham Swift at the Guardian.

I is for Inevitable (give or take a day)

C. S. Richardson The End of the Alphabet

Perhaps "I" should be for "Impossible." The impossibility of escape (ultimately at least). A Simenon-like conceit. The protagonist finds that he has a month to live, give or take a day. A contrived, clichéd conceit? Perhaps.

The author is a highly accomplished book designer. The publisher, the Random House group, is the company he works for. One of his book design team designed the little volume. Cozy. A small press feel. The copyright is held not in the name of the author but by the Kiplingesque Dravot & Carnehan Inc, which happens to be the name of the advertising firm that the protagonist, the ever-dying Ambrose Zephyr, a creative type with a fascination with typefaces and travel brochures, has found employment with for many years.

{ Ironic that. Ambrose: Ambrosia, elixir of life. And Zephyr, the good old west wind, Shelley's vehicle for a spiritual rebirth. }

It's first incarnation in print for me was as an excerpt. It was published, if memory serves me, in the spring of 2006 with the then title The Grand Tour of Ambrose Zephyr. A small, slim paper covered edition of 35 pages (give or take a page), the alphabet running down the narrow spine in tiny typeface, the upper cover sporting an image of a vintage suitcase. Very much a promotional teaser. I read it and was hooked. Wanted to read more. Felt right. Sounded good. (Probably worth something if signed.) And then, eventually, I forgot about it. That is, until the day my wife the librarian who gave me the said teaser dropped the first trade edition in my lap, retitled and ready to go. A bit of a memory jog, but it started to come back to me.

The finished product is designed to resemble a leather journal, much like the Chatwinian Moleskin journals that have become fashionable. It sports two camels on the dustwrapper, a one-humped Arabian Dromedary facing the upper cover (west?), and a shorter legged two-humped Asiatic, or Bactrian camel facing the rear cover (east?). ('Bactrian' conjures up images of Alexander the Great . . . .) Chocolate-brown cloth-covered boards with a small, neat typeface in gilt upon the spine. For a dustwrapper designer it must have been a difficult decision to choose from so many images offered up by the text: a statue of Peter Pan (apt that) in Kensington Gardens, a painting by Rembrandt, the labyrinth of Chartres, antiquarian books, the pyramids of Giza, the Rokeby Venus, travel brochures, type blocks, the Hagia Sofia, Venice. . . perhaps tempting for a collage, or shadow-box a là Nick Bantock, but I guess that's been done. So, it is the moleskin journal and camels. The journal is important for it is the framing device of the very novel itself, and the camels are symbolic of Ambrose's imagination. As a youth with a fascination with typefaces, he would copy the lettering on cigarette packages, packages sporting images of camels, a source of imaginative escape and dreams. {Faint trade winds, the Peter Pan image hovers. . .} Ambrose Zephyr retains his youthful imagination, retains his ability to see the past, retains the ability to see far distant shores, conjuring history before his eyes while looking into the past. Ambrose, as adult, is perhaps a representative modern type, reflecting western traits of modernity: a professional nearing 50 years of age, married to a professional, childless, holding onto youthful imagination.

A. Z. over Z. A. These initials appear upon the spine of the dustwrapper. Ambrose Zephyr, and Zappora "Zipper" Ashkenazi, his wife. They reflect high-end fashion and design lifestyles. A childless professional couple living in fashionable London. Their emotions seem refracted, or cooly faceted, condensed within this grand melodrama. Two introverts who, though different (Wuthering Heights is the dullest of books to Ambrose, yet Zipper has lost count how many times she has read the novel), seem to fit like two letters in a devoted space. There is a yin and yang quality to them; a love story, muted in the silences of each other's quiet imaginations. Ambrose has thirty days to live and Zipper has thirty days to die, symbolically that is. Ambrose desires the movement of the old fashioned Grand Tour guided by the 26 letters of the western alphabet, a last chance to visit and revisit the locales of his imagination and his past, A is for Amsterdam, B is for Berlin, C is for Chartres. . . .

Minor characters are gently drawn, like Mr. Umtata, Ambrose's tailor, and an aged Florentine man with failing sight, perhaps the ghost of Ambrose's unattainable senescence.

It is a clever, well-constructed, laconically written novel, and upon finishing, one naturally returns to the beginning for in the end is the beginning.

The typeface chosen for the book is Filosofia, a typeface designed in 1996 by Zuzana Licko (yes, two z's and two a's). A typeface described as being able to provide "good readability in smaller text sizes." Seems apt for the novel itself.

After Dark with Murakami

Our viewpoint is from above, like a camera, our vision pans down to the rectangular structure lying upon the highly polished veneered tabletop, the subtly coloured dustwrapper of the book intrigues our eyes as the light from the window glints off the lettering, H a r u k i M u r a k a m i. Our left hand--or our right--reaches out and lifts the book closer to our vision and we see the title of the book is called: a f t e r d a r k; these letters are artificially superimposed on an image of thin vertical blinds over a photograph of what appears to be an urban night scene. We turn it over and scan the blurbs of acclaim for the author's Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman: 24 Stories, and our eyes rest upon the bottom edge of the dustwrapper where the image of colourful Japanese drink bottles nestle against one another, like bottles nestling against one other. We open the rear board and the photograph of the author instills us with a sense of anxiety, his expression is one of distant perplexity. We look down and see that Chip Kidd was responsible for the jacket photography and design. We nod. Our eyes notice the small print near the author's photo and we zoom in to see that it is not Jerry Bauer but Elena Siebert, photographer. We nod again.

Slipping the dustwrapper off the hardcover, our eyes widen with the colours displayed: pink on the spine, purple on the boards, with special ribbed paper for both. Spine title in gilt stamp. Our vision blurs as our hands feel the tactile qualities of the ribbed paper covered boards, the ribs echoing the vertical blinds of the cover image in a nuanced dance of sight and touch.

Opening the book to the title page our vision takes in the typeface used for the title and author, something modern, something different; a resemblance to a stamped name, a stamped title. Then, a fleeting image in our imaginations comes up, of a vast floor of workers, each sitting at a desk, each stamping books on title pages, the sound, a loud musical counterpoint to the unheard rhythms of their hearts. . . .

We turn to the first page and observe a stylised image of a clock showing just before midnight. We hear an old Pet Shop Boys song on the radio, in the distance. Our eyes scan down and we begin to read:

"Eyes mark the shape of the city. . . ."


-for a review of Murakami's After Dark, millions has an interesting one, or perhaps this review at Christian Science Monitor or here at the L. A. newspaper.