There is a literary genre of which I am particularly fond; books about books. Two examples I have were both presents to me from Andrew Ritchie.
First, The Unexpected Professor by Oxford don, John Carey. Curiously, his mother lived as a child in the same street as me, six doors along. It is partly an autobiography but there is a lot of emphasis on books that he enjoys and it earns its subtitle, An Oxford Life in Books. I like the book without liking the man. He is basically a boastful Leftie; but then he does have a lot to boast about. His discourse on literature and poetry is serious and thought-provoking. He identifies the best three novelists of the 20th century as DH Lawrence, George Orwell and Joseph Conrad. They’d be on my long list.
Secondly, Latest Readings, by Clive James. He admires Conrad too but his reading is less academic and more populist, encompassing Patrick O’Brian, Osbert Lancaster and books about film and history. I find myself almost always agreeing with him. He praises Olivia Manning’s two trilogies: Balkan and Levant. I have just ordered the boxed set of the 1987 BBC adaptation, Fortunes of War, starring Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson. James thought that the film version would satisfy him but then reads the novels and comes to see them as masterpieces.
I have read Susan Hill’s, Howards End is on the Landing: a Year of Reading from Home. I must have lent it or lost it, as I can’t find it. My memory is that it is wishy-washy, sentimental nonsense. If Madeline Bassett had put pen to paper this is the sort of tripe that she would have produced. The books are for ever talking to Hill, and, worse, to each other. She is not catering for real readers. Incidentally, she wrote The Woman in Black, which I have seen on the stage but never read.
Don’t let’s end on a sour note. This is not really a book about books. It’s a collection of amusing letters well worth dipping into. I was in Heywood Hill last week hoping to buy one of Olivia Manning’s trilogies but no cigar. She has gone right out of fashion so be one-up, buy a secondhand copy, flaunt it, or even read it.
May I add another title to the list? John Baxter’s “A Pound of Paper”. Currently in my top ten books to save when the house burns down. Wonderful book, which, apparently weighs exactly…one pound.
Rick Gekoski’s various books also well worth buying. I’ve learnt much.
By the way, have you had a rummage in that second hand bookshop on the kink at the bottom of the King’s Road? As much as I love the ambience of Heywood Hill, the mark-ups there on their second hand stock is, how can I put it…bullish. Not that I blame them, of course, overheads and all that, still…
Both authors are new to me; thank you for putting them my way.
Other books about books that are worth looking at
Ex Libris – Anne Fadiman. An entertaining collection of essays
84 Charing Cross Road – Helen Hanff – which I am sure we have all read
The Uncommon Reader – Alan Bennett – Ditto
Books, Baguettes and Bedbugs – Jeremy Mercer- more about a bookshop (Shakespeare and Company in Paris) than about books
Anne Fadiman and Jeremy Mercer are both new to me. I will add them to my wish list.
The Road to Middlemarch; my life with George Eliot by Rebecca Mead?
“A hit, a very palpable hit”
The Unexpected Professor contains a description of John Carey’s invitation to “dessert” with John Mabbott, vice President of St. John’s, Oxford, whom he describes as a “prim, fidgety philosopher with the most humourless laugh I have ever heard”. Carey returned to the college as a fellow when Mabbott, as President, apparently sabotaged his proposal to make Robert Graves an honorary fellow. While his description of Mabbott and the “dessert” is highly entertaining I do not think he was quite fair. I remember Mabbott as a decent if remote figure. His obituary in the Times said he had great charm of manner and his lectures “drew large audiences which were held spellbound by the lucidity of his arguments”. Mabbott, incidentally, wrote his own memoirs “Oxford Memories” (1986).
Re-reading Carey’s description of his excruciating party at St John’s, I wonder that alcohol is not mentioned. When I dined at University College (Robin Butler was Master) we moved to a different dining room for dessert. Port and Maderia were offered and accepted. I found, as it flowed, so did my conversation with the Master.
The HH/Nancy letters give one of the very best pictures of that remarkable set. HH’s letter of 21/6/66 gives the detail of my grandfather’s death. Coming from a family where these things were never discussed, I had thought that the road accident had been after dinner at Trinity high table. Instead it was driving from his home on the edge of Cambridge to the Aldeburgh festival after lunch. He was a very entertaining man but with a slightly sharp tongue. Most unusual in our family. I have by my desk a box of his letters including correspondence with both HH and Nancy.
At the end of this letter is an exquisitely written paragraph telling Nancy that some low life had written up the story about the customer at HH who says to Nancy ” a little less DARLING and a little more ATTENTION please”
Ned York has sent me this article about Heywood Hill from the New York Times.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/02/t-magazine/london-heywood-hill-bookstore-custom-libraries.html?emc=eta1
#1 One of the very best books of literary criticism – of a kind which is larky but mixes the “higher journalism” and a seriousness worthy of the Oxford professor, let alone an Old Etonian – is John Bayley’s The Power of Delight. I have seen it sneered at (by James Wood of Harvard), but still it seems to me to writing on books by a proper book-lover.
#2 Sorry to be greedy of your space… But as a person who is revisiting his parents’ bookshelves, and finding great interest in the writing of the first half of their 20th C, and earlier stuff they loved, I wanted to flag up the remarkable My Father’s Bookcase, by Lincoln Allison. It’s an excursion in revisionism; a discussion of shifting tastes.