Week 7: Waugh and Peace

It’s always a bit concerning when they dramatise one of your favourite books.  Sometimes – the BBC Pride and Prejudice for example – they get it spot on.  At other times – the film of Pride and Prejudice for example­ – they incite the throwing of heavy objects at the screen.  Radio at least has the advantage of not showing you the physical inappropriateness of the casting, but you are still left with the minefields of voice to negotiate: and with the huge question of dramatization.  How are they going to cram a 400-page novel into three half-hour episodes?  Pretty much the last time they triumphed on television was the Granada production of Brideshead Revisited, when, in a move that poignantly captures a lost world of the complete absence of accountants, they creased the spine of the paperback edition to hold it open at page one and began filming.  And that golden age of believing that the audience might have a greater attention span than that of a crisp packet was, I hate to tell you, thirty two years ago.

Radio 4 is broadcasting a dramatization of Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy.  If you were to ask me (and you know you want to), I would say its only competitor for the title, Best Trilogy about a War, is Olivia Manning’s Balkan Trilogy, with her Levant Trilogy coming in at a close second.  So I’m nervous about listening (incidentally I’ve just discovered that there is a ‘TV Movie’ (not sure what that means) from 2001 starring Daniel Craig, which I just might have to watch – for research purposes, you understand).  What if they’ve gone overboard for the comedy at the expense of the tragedy?  Heartbreaking irony reduced to slapstick might be a bit hard to take.

Waugh seems good on – well, war.  As you know, the whole elegiac tone of Brideshead  is set by the framing narrative in which the war-time Captain Charles Ryder finds himself posted to the house he had known in the golden years of his youth.  Not for him the Great Depression or the rise of political extremism  that we who were not there see as the defining tone of the inter-war years: Waugh looks back to a personal paradise lost. The Sword of Honour  books are, in a way, even better. Written with more detachment (not least because they are the products of the Fifties rather than the immediate end-of-war period), they avoid  the swooning love-affair with the old English Catholic  families that can push Brideshead over the edge into a sticky, sycophantic snobbery.  In the Sword of Honour books (Men at Arms, Officers and Gentlemen and Unconditional Surrender), his hero Guy Crouchback is in truth another Charles, going forward without hope but trying not to lose a moral code.  But Waugh always seems to capture the numbing sense of endurance, the day-to-day tininess of achievement despite the pettiness of military bureaucracy that somehow, somewhere, might add up to a triumph of good over evil.

Elsewhere, Waugh’s heroes – if that’s the word we are looking for: certainly none of his characters are swash-buckling – are engaged in the private warfare of the heart.  The most heart-breaking ending of any book, anywhere, ever (and coincidentally this is also a title for which the runner-up is Olivia Manning: in this instance, The Rain Forest), is A Handful of Dust.  If you have read it, you’ll remember, and shudder, and find yourself strangely sleepless tonight: if you haven’t, well, do, but brace yourself.  Be consoled by the assurance that A Handful of Dust is also one of the best of Waugh’s books and therefore one of the best books of the twentieth century.

If we need to look elsewhere for Second World War fiction, then Alexander Baron’s From the City, From the Plough is a lesser-known, utterly compelling, account.  It is particularly striking for coming from the ranks: we are, when you stop to think about it, nearly always expected to want to hear from the officers.  For the devastation wrought on those who remain at home, particularly on women who love brave men, Jocelyn Playfair’s A House in the Country will make you weep, and Nancy Mitford’s Fabrice (The Pursuit of Love) will break your heart, especially when you contrast his passion for Linda with the far less ardent (and less heroic) behaviour of his real-life model, Colonel Gaston Palewski, whom Nancy loved, and who  drifted off after the war to marry someone else.  He may not have been the inspiration for Auden’s ‘If equal affection cannot be/ Let the more loving one/ Be me’.  But he could have been.

Evelyn Waugh was undoubtedly over-pleased with the aristocratic and famous friends he made.  He held political views that place him comfortably to the right of Genghis Khan.  He wallowed in a romanticised idea of Roman Catholicism with all the silly sentimentality of a convert. And yet, and yet: the greatest prose stylist of the twentieth century not to go to Dulwich College, brave, contrary, funny, satirical, and poetic.  A lot to live up to for a radio dramatization.  Perhaps I’ll just go and fetch Men at Arms from the shelf.  I can always read it aloud.

Week 6: Through the Plashy Fen

Ah, the country.  John Julius Norwich has been known to sing, to the tune of Beethoven’s Sixth:  ‘The country, the country, it always gets me down/ The country, the country, I’d rather be in town.’  Foolish boy (only in this: in all other ways, he is a thoroughly good thing, not least for coming up with the phrase (when asked about his father’s serial adultery), ‘ah, yes, well, he made friends terribly easily’). Today, we went for a walk by the North Tyne.  The sun glinted on the river, a salmon leapt with a splash like a hippo dropping her soap in the bath, and a kingfisher caught the light as he swooped just above the clear waters.  And we picked blackberries.  We will not have bread and milk and blackberries for supper, even though we have undoubtedly been good little rabbits (reference too obvious to give you: if you don’t recognise it, I despair), but we shall have the first crumble of the autumn.

It’s not always an easy thing to write about, the countryside.  Shades of purple prose hover uncomfortably over too many earnest attempts.  Better than Mary Webb’s Precious Bane, then, read Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons.  And watch the completely perfect film version starring Kate Beckinsale with pretty much everyone in it (Judi Dench seems to be unaccountably missing but otherwise the band’s all there: and rather gloriously, it is directed by John Schlesinger). The ‘Miss Read’ books remain incomparable in capturing a way of life in the countryside in mid-twentieth century England.  Flora Thompson’s  Lark Rise to Candleford  novels, now hugely prettified and soaped for television, are in fact quite clear-sighted memoirs of impoverished rural life at the end of the nineteenth century.  Like so much writing about life in the country, they strike an elegiac note for a world that has gone or is on the brink of going.

Children’s books tended to hover around the countryside until the fashion for gritty urban realism overcame them.  In real life a loather of camping or indeed of any physical discomfort, no matter how minor, I adored all the Arthur Ransome sagas and also the lesser-known (and now I re-read them, much more pedestrian) Fell Farm books by Marjorie Lloyd.  Anthropomorphic books about animals tend, for obvious reasons, to have rural settings, which can present some difficulties, as anyone who has read Dick King-Smith’s The Sheep Pig will testify (if you haven’t read it, do: there is more to Babe than Babe).  Life in the wild can be scary.  If you don’t believe me, ask Mole about the Wild Wood.  Life on the farm hasn’t always had a good press, either: George Orwell, anyone?  You will be pleased to hear that you can introduce your offspring to the delights of the socialist parable (for or against? You decide) at a very early age by virtue of the wonderfully concise Farmer Duck by Martin Waddell, beautifully illustrated by Helen Oxenbury.

Sometimes we need books to tell us what the hell we’re looking at (yes I know I should now be relying on an app to do this but I have some shreds of dignity left and I am not going to start tramping the fells peering at a microcosmic screen which I can’t see anyway because (a) it is raining or (b) the sun is shining).  I inherited several sets of very worthy books about birds: in fact I think I may have been the fourth generation to have not opened one particular set.  You know the sort of thing: fancy spines (the books not the birds, sadly), very small print and rather muddy reproductions of monochrome photographs of – let’s be honest here – birds that were only ever some sort of little brown job to begin with.  I think I’d rather have ‘Nature Notes’ by William Boot (you’re going to love Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop if you haven’t already read it) or – o yes please! –  Alexander Worple’s American Birds and More American Birds (I could explain, but I won’t: you’ll have so much more fun finding out for yourself with the help of PG Wodehouse in Leave It to Jeeves).  Meanwhile, Simon Barnes’s Bad Birdwatcher books will help me tell a hawk from a handsaw (which, as we all know, is a heron and things were clearly coming to a pretty pass in Elsinore if there was any danger of confusing the two).

Still, John Julius Norwich does have a point.  Literature is awash with heroines (it is usually the female of the species) who tramp about in the countryside a great deal to show how emotionally over-wrought they are and who don’t have the sense to come in out of the rain.  Yes, Cathy Earnshaw, I’m looking at you.  There is such a thing as taking the pathetic fallacy too far, you know.  It’s why Jane Austen is such fun: she’s so nasty about all that sort of self-conscious pretension.  Not a Romantic, it would be fair to say, and without a sentimental bone in her body (praise indeed from your correspondent).

But fiction is the thing. Two books, both called A House in the Country, both set during the Second World War, both quietly marvellous.  I have seen Ruth Adams’s lightly-disguised memoir of the attempt she and her husband made to set up a commune in the English countryside described as a comic novel.  Well, so is Bleak House.  Jocelyn Playfair’s novel has a wryly comedic tone, too: but it also, effortlessly, breaks your heart.  Read it.  Persephone Books have reprinted it (and also a different title by Ruth Adams), which is a good indication in its own right that this is a book worth reading.

Proof of Persephone Books’ invincibility (as if you needed one)?  They have reprinted The Children Who Lived in a Barn.  It’s by Eleanor Graham, who by being Editor at Puffin Books did more for launching children into a world of reading than probably anyone else, and it’s wonderful, and you can see the rather splendid Puffin front cover from the 1950s  thanks to our friends at Google so you don’t even have to miss out on that.  And now, having read it – possibly a tiny bit obsessively – in childhood, live in a barn is exactly what I do.  So be careful what you read.

Week 2: a new term starts here

Ah, back to school. Strange what time does.  As a child, probably the most revolting words in the English language are, ‘Well, off to school bright and early tomorrow morning’.  For a parent, the unarguable awfulness of a return to getting up in the dark, finding socks and gym kit (which, it is a well-known fact, has its own private alternative universe where it is much happier than in your house) while simultaneously making a packed lunch out of the three things your child will eat and listening to a stumbling rendition of  Biff Chip and Kipper (Oxford Reading Tree and highly recommended, by the way, on the scale of learning-to-read series that won’t make the parents cry with boredom), is more than made up for by the wonderful realisation that the little poppets are going to be out of the house for five days a week between now and Christmas. And even more oddly, when adults look back on their own childhoods, it is often through a fog of sentiment out of which phrases such as ‘best days of our lives’ loom.

Well, I loathed school on the whole. But I did enjoy reading about people who didn’t, especially in the really rather splendid Malory Towers series by (whisper her name) Enid Blyton.  Actually, no, let’s not whisper her name: let’s shout it from the rooftops.  Enid Blyton gets a lot of children reading.  I think it’s the heady mixture of simple and repetitive text and the delicious aura of disapproval with which she is shrouded in the middle-class home.  Aah, forbidden fruits.  Anyway, Malory Towers made me (briefly and spasmodically) yearn to go to boarding-school.  It also, equally briefly, led me to believe that Darrell was a cool name.  Which, of course, if that is your name, it is.  But for the rest of us ….

School tends to get a cheeringly bad press in fiction.  Dotheboys Hall, anyone?  Or, indeed, any of the refreshingly unsentimental establishments whose alumni include David Copperfield, Jane Eyre or Billy Bunter.

You’ll notice I haven’t mentioned H. Potter.  This is partly because I suspect you may have heard of the saga already, but mostly because the Northern Reader household lost the will to live somewhere in the middle of volume 2.  Much more fun, and – crucially in this part of the forest – much shorter, are Jill Murphy’s splendid Worst Witch books.  Mildred Hubble is a considerably more down to earth (apart from the broomstick, obviously) character than Harry, and a lot less given to going everywhere with an implied soundtrack of dah-dah DAAH.  This seems as good a place as any to come out as allergic to Tolkien while I’m at it.  No, come back ….

After school, university.  Dear first-year undergraduate, here is your reading list.  You will learn – or you will if you are on a humanities course of any description and if it is any good – that reading lists are neither prescriptive nor proscriptive.  But try some of these on for size:

Malcolm Bradbury The History Man.  It really was like this, then.  Exactly like this.

David Lodge  Changing Places.  The scene in which academics play ‘Humiliation’ by trading lists of books they haven’t read is painfully funny (especially if it could – so easily –   be you).

Evelyn Waugh Brideshead Revisited.  It probably wasn’t much like this, even then.  But it is wonderful.  And, unusually, the TV adaptation is every bit as fabulous.  Do not, under any circumstances, watch the film.  You have better things to do.  Knitting, for example.  Or cleaning someone else’s oven.

The fictional university that sounds the most fun is in Ankh-Morpork.  Unseen University has featured in some thirteen Discworld novels in Terry Pratchett’s startlingly long oeuvre.  A splendid mix of anarchy and bureaucracy, it features the best university librarian you will ever encounter.  Eat your heart out, Umberto Eco: this knocks spots off The Name of the Rose as a seat of learning (but read The Name of the Rose as well: and anything you can get your hands on by Umberto Eco.  We’ll talk about reading books in translation another day.  Try and stop me).

You’ll have noticed that I haven’t mentioned Zuleika Dobson.  That’s because I haven’t read it.  We’d better talk about books we haven’t read another day too. Anyway, ZD may be wonderful – do drop me a line and let me know – although I have to confess to a suspicion that she, and it, may be a trifle tiresome.

For an education of a different sort, read Flaubert’s L’Education Sentimentale (yes I can, so I do, but there is no reason why we shouldn’t read it in English, in which case it is, of course, Sentimental Education).  I offer you two reasons for reading this: one is that Henry James thought it a bore, and the other is that Woody Allen doesn’t. You decide.