Told By An Idiot

Rose Macaulay's Told By An Idiot was a bit of a disappointment. I had high hopes of it, because I love 'The Towers of Trebizond' so much but, sadly, this wasn't in the same league, and left me feeling depressed, not only about the characters and their lives, but about the human condition in general. I assume Macaulay is intentionally commenting on the futility of life, since her title is from Macbeth:

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

I think, part of my problem with this novel was that the characters never quite come to life. I always felt as if I was viewing them through then wrong end of a telescope, so they appear smaller and more distant than they actually are, and they seemed a little one-dimensional, so it was difficult to engage them. Again, I suspect this is deliberate, since the tale is told largely from the viewpoint of Rome, who is cool, detached, ironic, civilised, and does her best not to do or feel anything.

The novel opens just before Christmas in 1879 as Papa (Mr Aubrey Garden) struggles with yet another crisis of conscience, losing his faith again and adopting yet another set of beliefs. To date, he's been an Anglican clergyman, a Unitarian minister and a Roman Catholic layman; this time around he's set to become an Ethicist (with no creeds, but only conduct), so his devoted wife and six children must prepare themselves for a new home and a new lifestyle.

The children's names reflect their father's changing faith. There's Vicky, named not for the Queen, but her father's victory over unbelief in the year of her birth; Maurice, named in honour of a rationalist friend, and Rome, his second daughter, so called because when she was born he was a member of the Roman Catholic church. Stanley, another daughter, is called after a dean (noit the explorer, as people might assume), while Irving was born during Papa's time as an Irvingite (no, I'd never heard of them either, but they are – or were – a Catholic Apostolic Church). Finally, there is Una, who takes her name from the One Person (in the Trinitarian sense) that Papa believed in at the time.

So far, so quirky, and, as you can see, religion looms large, just as it did for many years in Macaulay's own life. Throughout the novel there are discussions about religious, political and social beliefs, and the right way to live. But the characters who are the happiest seem to be those who think the least about the meaning of life.

Each of the children differ in character, but Macaulay seems to have selected one over-riding characteristic for each, which somehow prevents them emerging as real people, with that mix of good and bad, light and dark, joy and sorrow which makes a character seem human. And, because of that perhaps, they never seem to grow or progress: the novel follows the Garden family over three generations, leaving them in the 1920s, but throughout that period people remain exactly as they were at the outset, almost as if they were different facets of a fragmented personality, or a personification of a particular 'type' or quality.

Pretty, fashionable Victoria is a bit of an airhead, who likes beautiful things, and leads a conventional life, with a nice house, husband and children. Bitter Maurice, the fighter of injustices, trapped in a loveless marriage, becomes a campaigning journalist, and enthusiastic, do-gooder Stanley espouses one radical cause after another. Irving is a financial whizz-kid who makes lots of money and Una is happy to be a farmer's wife, taking life as it comes.

Rome is an enigma. Detached, self-contained, very intelligent, independent, she observes her family, but makes a point of getting through life by never doing anything. “Negligent, foppish and cool, she liked to watch life at its games, be flicked by the edges of its flying skirts.” It's as if she's made a conscious decision to opt out of the messy business of living. “Rome could have done anything, and elected to do nothing. Rome would probably not even marry; her caustic tongue and indifference kept those who admired her at arm's length; she made them feel that any expression of regard was an error in taste; she shrivelled it up by an amused inquiring look through the deadly monocle she placed in one blue-green eye for the purpose.” She's a curiously androgynous figure who rarely shows her feelings, but she falls in love, tragically, with a married man.

Throughout the book, there's a feeling almost of weariness, as one era is superseded by another: Victorian, Edwardian, Georgian. And along the way, key events are charted – the Boer War, Suffragettes, the First World War, and so on. There are interesting references to changing times, ideas and fashions, but that still didn't make the novel or the characters come to life. I always felt as if the ideas were the important thing, pushing plot and character into second place.

I will add here that my 1983 Virago edition has a very erudite introduction by AN Wilson, who hails 'Told By An Idiot' as a 20^th century masterpiece, and compares it to Virginia Woolf's 'Orlando', dealing with themes of sexual politics and marital conventions, so I feel as I've missed the point.

There's More to AA Milne than Pooh and Piglet!

I read this on my Kindle, courtesy of
Project Gutenberg, and have no 'real'
book, so here is a frontispiece from an
edition illustrated by  Charles Robinson,
whose work I love. 

King Merriwig of Euralia sat at breakfast on his castle walls. He lifted the gold cover from the gold dish in front of him, selected a trout and conveyed it carefully to his gold plate. He was a man of simple tastes, but when you have an aunt with the newly acquired gift of turning everything she touches to gold, you must let her practise sometimes. In another age it might have been fretwork.

Into this idyllic setting comes the king of Barodia, blocking the sun as he travels along in his seven-league boots. Since no-one likes their breakfast disturbed (let alone having the sun blotted out, even for a few seconds), Stiff Notes are written, and before you can say Jack Robinson, a petty quarrel has escalated into full-scale war, in which the Barodian ruler's fearsome whiskers (or, to use the modern term, his moustache) take on a great significance, and he admits he never wanted to be a terrifying sovereign.

There, in a nutshell, you have the plot of AA Milne's Once On a Time, which is another of my Great Discoveries, and definitely a Best Book of the Year (and yes, there do seem to be a lot of Best Books, because on the whole I seem to read books I like, but since reading is supposed to be a pleasure, where's the harm in that?).

Anyway, this fairy tale for adults is one of the most delightful stories you could wish to read, and shows that there is more to Milne than Pooh and Piglet. It has a suitably happy ending, although it may not be what you would expect from a more conventional fairy tale. Milne avoids the trap of falling into tweeness (I apologise if that's not a word, but it should be)  by writing in wonderfully chatty, matter-of-fact style, which includes asides explaining his differences of opinion with 'historian' Roger Scurvilegs, who penned the monumental work 'Euralia Past and Present', in seventeen volumes! 

Princess Hyacinth, by Charles Robinson.

To return to the story, King Merriwig marches off to war, leaving the kingdom in the charge of his inexperienced daughter Hyacinth. And, since the Princess lacks a mother's guiding hand (her mother was carried off by a dragon) the king appoints the Countess Belvane (for whom he has a soft spot) as chief advisor. But the Countess has her own agenda and is not to be trusted...

The Countess Belvane! What can I say which will bring home to you that wonderful, terrible, fascinating woman? Mastered as she was by overweening ambition, utterly unscrupulous in her methods of achieving her purpose, none the less her adorable humanity betrayed itself in a passion for diary-keeping and a devotion to the simpler forms of lyrical verse. That she is the villain of the piece I know well; in his 'Euralia Past and Present' the eminent historian, Roger Scurvilegs, does not spare her; but that she had her great qualities I should be the last to deny.

She is by far the most interesting – and the most clever - character and, despite her scheming its hard to dislike her because she's not malevolent or evil like Snow White's Stepmother. Mind you, she's not kindly or well-meaning either, just very self-interested and self-promotional. How could you dislike anyone who writes 'Became bad' in her diary on Monday, June 1^st, followed at a later date by the entry 'Became good'? And her badness is very ingenious. When the Princess asks to review the brave Women Defenders of the Home Defence Army, Belvane has a problem, because there is no such military unit, and she has taken the money allocated for paying the non-existent soldiers and flung it to the populace to boost her popularity. A lesser woman might have been worried, but Belvane rises to the occasion quite magnificently and persuades Woggs to march round and round and round a tree!

However, it has to be admitted that she is not at all nice to Prince Udo of Araby when Hyacinth, desperate to exert her own authority, asks for help. Using a magic wish stolen from Wiggs, Belvane calls for 'something humorous' happen to Udo, and manages to turn him into a strange creature with rabbit's ears, a woolly body and a lion's tail. Speaking in her defence I would have to say that Udo is a pompous ass, who is much nicer in animal form, and I would have left him like that, which probably makes me bad as well.

By the way, in case you're wondering, there is a hero with whom the Princess falls in love: Coronel, the Prince's friend, is good-looking, quick-witted, very capable, and not at all loyal to his Royal master. When it comes to getting what he wants he's quite as devious as Belvane, and uses guile and cunning to gain Hyacinth's hand and half her father's kingdom.

'Once On A Time' is absolutely enchanting, and has many of the ingredients of traditional fairy tales – cloaks of darkness, a magic ring, swineherds, spells, fairies, swords which may (or may not) be magical – but nothing happens quite as you expect. Written in 1915, and first published in 1917, it could easily be seen as a satire on events in Europe at that time, but Milne always denied this, claiming it was written 'for the amusement of my wife and myself at a time when life was not very amusing'. And he said: “But, as you see, I am still finding it difficult to explain just what sort of book it is. Perhaps no explanation is necessary. Read in it what you like; read it to whomever you like; be of what age you like; it can only fall into one of two classes. Either you will enjoy it, or you won't. It is that sort of book.”

It is that sort of book, and I am one of those who enjoyed it, and I can only hope that others read it with just as much pleasure.

A Tale of WW2 That Will Break Your Heart

If you're the kind of person who cries over books, make sure you've got a large hanky ready and waiting when you read Alison Pick's Far To Go, because it's beautifully written, totally gripping – and very, very sad. Set in Czechoslovakia in the final few months before the outbreak of the Second World War, it describes how the comfortable life of a wealthy Jewish couple begins to fall apart under the growing threat of Nazism, and how they secure their young son's safety by bribing a place for him on one of the trains which took children to foster families in Britain. The story of the Kindertransport is now forgotten by many, but it followed in the wake of Chamberlain's triumphant 'Peace for our time' speech, made after Britain agreed that Hitler could take over the part of Czechoslovakia known as Sudetenland. It's against this background that Pick's novel is played out, and consequently we are aware, as she herself tells us, that this cannot be a happy story, and there can be no happy ending, for we know the outcome, and history cannot be changed, however terrible it may be.

'Far To Go' is inspired, in part, by the experiences of the author's grandparents, but is not biographical. The tale unfurls through letters, lists, official notes and straight narrative, introducing us to factory owner Pavel Bauer, his wife Anneliese, their son Pepik, who is six years old, and his non-Jewish nanny, Marta, and it is through her eyes that we see much of the action. Bit by bit public feeling against the Jews is cranked up into a frenzied hysteria, some of it so seemingly silly that you wonder, just as Marta does, how people were ever persuaded to believe such nonsense. But believe it they did, and Marta watches in horror as a gang of young Nazi thugs kill an old man, and is distraught when Pepik is forced to sit on his own in school, and can no longer play with other children.

Gradually new rules prevent the Jews leading anything like a normal life, and when Pavel is no longer allowed inside his own factory, the Bauers flee to Prague, but there will be no escape, despite their forlorn hope that this terror is only temporary, and that something will happen to halt Hitler. The Bauers, urbane, sophisticated, educated and cultured are secular Jews, who do not follow their faith but, strangely perhaps, persecution gives Pavel a clearer sense of his cultural and religious heritage, and he is determined that his son will know about Judaism. His wife, however, sees things differently. She wants to survive, and even has little Pepik baptised by a Christian priest, in the hopes that it may protect him from what is to come. 

Marta herself grows in understanding as the novel progresses, ending her affair with Nazi Ernst (who works in Pavel's factory, and has been a long-standing friend with his boss) to throw in her lot with the Bauers, who have given her the only happy home she has known.

Alison Pick, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Set against the events of the 1930s is the story told by a Canadian academic, who works with the children – now grown to adulthood – who escaped on the Kindertransport, recording their lives, and how they were affected by the past, by separation from their families, and by survival when so many others died. The time shift, coupled with the variation of style between narrative and letters, does mean the novel jumps around a little, but I thought it worked well in this particular context, as the link between past and present is revealed.

And there are themes which which link past and present, with the motif of a train running through the novel taking us on a journey of discovery. There is the toy train which the child Pepik loves so much, and the train the family cannot board because their attempted escape has been betrayed. Then there is the train that takes Pepik to his new life, swallowing him and his old life in a disturbingly sinister way.

The train was long and black, and entering it was like being swallowed by a snake. The snake had dislocated its jaw to take Pepik in, and now he was being worked down deep into its body, deep to the tip of its tail. Pepik made a little slithering motion; he put his hands on his stomach and imagined the way the snake felt, all the little bodies tumbling around inside it. There were so many children. His eyelashes were wet but he blinked and swallowed, swallowing himself, letting himself be swallowed.

Then there's the way the Canadian academic (you'll have to read the book to find out more) describes memory.

The train of memory sleeps on its tracks. At night, in the station, the shadows gather round it, reaching out to touch its cool black sides. The train stretches back, far out of eyesight. Where it comes from is anyone's guess.

Reading this through I see that as usual, there are all sorts of things I haven't mentioned, like the emotions felt by the characters: love, fear, confusion, hope and the betrayal of trust between people on a national as well as a personal level. The passing of the years does nothing to lessen the impact of the horrendous treatment meted out to the Jews by the Nazis, and this novel personalises one aspect of what happened, taking an imaginary family as the central point, and ascribing to them things that really did happen.

I read this as part of the Canadian Book Challenge (Pick is a Canadian author) and I really enjoyed it, even though it was so heartbreakingly sad. Pick was a new author for me, and I was interested to read the copious notes explaining how the story came about, and giving details about her own family, her discovery of her Czech-Jewish background, and her conversion to Judaism. However, I'm not sure whether quite so much information was really necessary.

Saturday Snapshots of a Garden Where Monks Prayed

The Friary Gardens in Lichfield mark the spot where monks
once prayed.

Stepping stones in a small park in Lichfield will lead you on a 800-year journey back in time. At first glance the paving slabs laid out in the grass alongside a busy road look as if they've been set there in random fashion – for some kind of children's game perhaps. But look again, and you realise they represent the lines of a building, and the name of the road provides a clue about its identity. For this street is The Friary, and the building which stood here was the church which served the huge friary established by Franciscan monks way back in 1237.

Paving slabs show the layout of the church.

Part of the wall at one end of the garden dates back to the Medieval period, and the little patch of 'public space' has been planted with sweet smelling flowers and shrubs. There's seating where you sit and think of the friars in their grey habits, kneeling and praying here all those years ago. And – oh joy of joys – there is an excellent information board, so full marks to Lichfield City Council for preserving the area and telling people about it.

The Bishop's Lodging - the only building left from Lichfield's
old Friary. The extension on the left-hand side of the photo is
the school built in the 1920s.

I assume the land must have belonged to the Cathedral (which is only a few minutes walk away) because Bishop Stavenby gave it to the Franciscans; the Sheriff of Lichfield was authorised to clothe them, and Henry III helped with building costs by giving them money, and trees from his forests in the area. The friars continued to enjoy royal patronage, for in 1281 Edward I donated eight trees from nearby Cannock Chase, for new buildings. In 1291 the friary, together with many other buildings in Lichfield, was destroyed by fire, but was rebuilt – this time in stone.

The gable end of the Bishop's Lodging. Where that strange little
window  came from I have no idea - I guess it was put there
 before modern planning laws were introduced.

According to the Rule of St Francis, the friars were supposed to follow a life of poverty, chastity and obedience, and to focus on preaching and looking after the poor and sick of Lichfield. But over the centuries they amassed a fortune in gifts from benefactors, which must have made them a prime target during the Dissolution of the Monasteries. The Friary closed its doors for the last time in 1538, and most of the buildings were pulled down. Glass, tiles, stone and timber from the demolished buildings were sold to raise cash for the royal coffers, alongside furniture, the monks' vestments, and even a mass book, which went for 4d (we are talking old money here, remember). The land, and those buildings which were still left were also sold – though purchasers were told to 'deface' various parts of the church.

They did try to create the 'new' school (now a library) in a period
style, with matching red brick and carvings above a bay window.

After that things become more confusing, but in 1920 Sir Richard Ashmole Cooper (MP for Walsall) bought the estate and what was left of the buildings and gave it to the City of Lichfield – for a new road to ease traffic problems. So The Friary was built across the site of the friary and the last few buildings were pulled down – with the exception of the Bishop's Lodging, which was built in 1295, and can be seen on the opposite side of the road to the little garden. The medieval house, altered over the centuries, was incorporated into a new school, but today the Bishop's Lodging, with its large 1920s extension, has become the city's library.

This ruined arch is by the carpark at Lichfield College, next to
the Bishop's Lodging, but there is no sign to indicate whether
it is part of the old Friary that once stood on the site.

All traces of the church could have been lost to development, but the fragments which lie beneath the ground became a Scheduled Ancient Monument following an archaeological dig in the 1930s, and the garden was created, with paving slabs above the cloister and parts of the north wall of the nave. There's a neo-classical portico is obviously nothing to do with the friary, but creates an imposing entrance. 

Parts of the original Friary wall can still be seen in Upper St
John Street (just around the corner from The Friary). There
are  quite large sections, which look as if generations of
builders have patched the wall up.

The Friary may have virtually vanished, but its name lives on in Lichfield: there are roads, shops, a school, sports clubs and businesses all called after it. Remnants of the friary wall can still be seen in the area, as successive generations just seem to have covered or repaired them with modern bricks. And there's a ruined arch, quite close to the Bishop's Lodging, which is generally thought to be part of the old Friary, but could be a Victorian folly. Information in this post is largely taken from the Victoria County History.   For more Saturday Snapshots see  Alice's blog at http://athomewithbooks.net/

A sign in the gardenss has a diagram and picture showing how the site would have looked. The odd blob at the bottom is my hands holding the camera - the board was a bit high for anyone who is five foot nothing to take a successful picture!

Their Eyes Were Watching God

There I was, sitting on the floor in the backroom of the Oxfam shop, sorting and pricing books, when I came across a well-thumbed copy of Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston. I'd never come across the author before, but it was a Virago Modern Classic, with an eye-catching painting on the front showing a woman in a red dress standing in a doorway, with an empty road running past her, and a brilliant blue sky above (taken from Edward Hopper's 'Carolina Morning'. So I started reading, just to see what it was about, and had to tear myself away because I was supposed to be working.

After that, of course, I had to buy it, and found it was totally unlike anything else I have read. The third sentence in tells us:

So the beginning of this was a woman and she had come back from burying the dead. Not the dead of the sick and ailing with friends at the pillow and the feet. She had come back from the sodden and the bloated; the sudden dead, their eyes flung wide open in judgement.

It's not only the dead whose eyes are are flung wide open, for folk in the small all-black town, deep in the American south, are scandalised by the re-appearance of this woman in their lives. She is Janie, aged 40, unsuitably clad in overalls instead of dress, with her long hair 'swingin' down her back lak some young gal'. Worse still, the last time they saw her she left with a younger man...

Gradually Janie's story comes to light as she tells a friend about her life. Raised by her grandmother, a former slave, she is married at 16 to farmer Logan Killicks, who is much older than she is, because Nanny believes it will protect her, and give her a better life. She tells Janie:

You know, honey, us coloured folk is branches without roots and that makes things come round in queer ways. Ah was born back due in slavery so it wasn't for me to fulfill my dreams of what a woman oughta be and do. Dat's one of de hold-backs of slavery. But nothing can't stop you from wishin'.

And wishing is what Janie does. She wishes love would bloom like the flowers on the pear tree, delicate and beautiful, but her husband is unlovable, and she finds he expects her to help on the farm. So when Joe Starks walks past, with money in his pocket and a smart line in chatter, she is smitten, and she walks out of her old life and into a new one with Joe in a new town. On the face of it things are good. Joe opens a store and becomes Mayor – but Janie is no happier than she was before, and is treated like a possession rather than a person. She's given no life outside her home, and is not even allowed to sit in the porch gossiping with other women, because it's not fitting to Joe's position.

Then, when Joe dies, she meets Vergible Woods, known to one and all as Tea Cake, and discovers what she has been searching for all her life. Tea Cake is younger than Janie, and lower down the social scale, but he loves her, and she loves him. They get married and work alongside each other 'on the muck' (a farm) in the Everglades. They are equals, and Tea Cake is the only man who lets Janie be herself, and doesn't try to force into a role she doesn't want. She has fun with him. He talks with her, and laughs with her.

The novel was written in 1937, in dialect, and is often very poetic, and very moving, but it's Janie's determination to live life on her own terms, and not to settle for second best, which shines out. And the fact that this novel is written by a black woman, about a black woman, is immaterial. Janie's search for a relationship on equal terms, and to be accepted for who is she is, rather than what someone wants her to be, applies to any woman, whatever her colour or creed.

Zora Neale Hurston

Hurston seems to have been forgotten for a good many years, but apparently Alice Walker, Toni Morrison and Maya Angelou have all cited her influence on their writing. According to Holly Eley, who wrote the introduction to my edition, Hurston was one of the first African American women writers. Believed to have been born round about 1891 – she herself gave different dates on different occasions - she was brought up in Eatonville, Florida, the first black town in the United States, and held down various jobs before she enrolled at college and began to write. She was in involved in black and white literary communities, and went on to study cultural anthropology, and her work in this field took her all over the world.

She was a well known and somewhat controversial figure, but in the last years of her life (she died in 1960) she alienated the Civil Rights movement because she believed the campaign for integration did not acknowledge the value of segregated black institutions, and she claimed African Americans could be live as they wanted in their own autonomous communities, independent of white society. In a period when African American literature reflected the growing struggle for equality her work fell out of favour. People didn't like her use of dialect, and accused her of writing what white people expected.