Susan’s Bookshelves: Barchester Towers by Anthony Trollope

Having discovered Rebecca in my mid-teens I then went on to gobble up everything else Daphne du Maurier had ever written.  And since she lived on until 1989 I also had over twenty years of reading her new work as it was published. Unusually, but like Dickens and AS Byatt, she could write arresting short stories as well as she could novels. The Blue Lenses and other Stories was originally published in 1959 and later in Penguin. I remember first reading them – no could possibly forget the title story – in the 1960s although the Penguin copy on my bookshelves dates from the 1980s.

The stories are now republished afresh by Virago under the title The Breaking Point and other stories which is a bit misleading because there is no story with that title. It’s the same eight as before – all substantial 30-40 pagers, most of them subdivided into chapters. And I’m struck afresh by just how versatile Du Maurier was and how far her imagination ranged.

‘The Blue Lenses’ is about a woman who has surgery to save her sight through the application of, well –  blue lenses. It is very successful except that when the bandages are eventually removed she finds that she has a different sort of sight. Let’s call it insight because I don’t want to give too much away. It’s weird, otherworldly and disturbing. It’s interesting that two very successful  films  Hitchcok’s The Birds and Nicholas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now were based on Du Maurier short stories published in other collections. Hitch could have done something pretty alarming with ‘The Blue Lenses’. I wonder why he didn’t.

There’s absolutely no sameiness in these stories. Deborah  in ‘The Pool’ is a prepubescent girl  staying for the summer (with her younger brother) at her grandparents’ country house. She dreams, imagines, explores the grounds and disappears from reality. I actually worked out where it was going but I’m not sure if I had vaguely remembered it from years ago or whether I anticipated the end then too. ‘The Archduchess’ reminded me both of Animal Farm and The Gondoliers and ‘The Menace’ is  a very funny story about a sexy, world famous Holloywood film star  who came from Herne Bay, wants only porridge to eat and is actually as unsexy as could be –  apparently.

Then there’s a deeply chilling account of a hideously abused child in ‘The Lordly Ones’ and a sensitive (think Death in Venice) story about an ageing gay man who gets exploited by the family of the young man he takes a fancy to.

I’m really glad to have rediscovered these stories. Sadly my old Penguin copy didn’t survive the re-reading and fell apart as ancient paperbacks are inclined to. Worst of all was that the final page of the last story was missing so I had to download the Virago version. Good. That comes with a useful introduction by Sally Beaumann and means that I shall have to read them all again.

When I first heard the name Arthur Sullivan he’d been dead barely half a century and the famous operettas he wrote with WS GIlbert were all still firmly in copyright. I was five years old when I was taken to see a production of The Mikado (“by kind permission of Bridget D’Oyly Carte”) at the school where my father taught. Thus began a lifelong love affair.

I was brought up to believe that Sullivan would have been a nonentity without Gilbert and that nothing else – apart from the tune (called St Gertrude) for the hymn Onward Christian Soldiers – he wrote was any good.  This is definitely not true and Radio 3 has played a lot of Sullivan’s music lately to prove it.  I now understand, though, how my father had come to believe that. Thanks to Ian Bradley’s new book I realise for the first time just how much Sir Arthur was trounced by the snobbier end of the musical establishment who found his music far too “vulgar” and not in tune (literally) with the earnest seriousness of the so called late nineteenth century “English Musical Renaissance.” And the mud stuck.

In fact Sullivan was steeped in church music from boyhood – and wrote dozens of hymns as well as anthems and oratorios most of which were well received at the time. He conducted the Leeds Festival for a number of years and became founder principal of Royal College of Music. Almost composer laureate, he composed much music for state occasions. His “grand” opera Ivanhoe opened at what is now The Palace Theatre in 1891 and ran for 150 performances – hardly a failure by any standards. The Gondoliers was running at The Savoy at the same time and on 28 February his oratorio The Golden Legend was performed in Covent Garden. Never before had three works by one composer been performed in central London on the same night – although, of course, other composers such as Andrew Lloyd Webber have achieved that since.

Bradley’s purpose is to demonstrate that Sullivan was driven all his life by simple, unshowy religious belief, the book’s subtitle is “a life of divine emollient” an unlikely reference to a line in the The Pirates of Penzance. Sullivan, who became very wealthy was also an enthusiastic hedonist who loved wine, women, song (obviously) and gambling. Moreover,  he was  genial, good company and very generous.  And I’m fascinated by his lasting close friendship with George Grove who lived in Sydenham and ran the Crystal Palace as well as writing Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (1878) which is still extant. Sullivan often stayed in Sydenham and appeared at Crystal Palace – very much my neck of the woods. I often pass the blue plaque marking the site of Grove’s house on my walks.

It’s a fascinating and plausible thesis from a man who probably knows more about Sullivan (and Gilbert) than anyone else on the planet. Rev Ian Bradley (with whom I’ve corresponded and met a couple of times over the years) is Emeritus Professor of Cultural and Spiritual History at the University of St Andrews. He has also written fine books about hymns There are at least three copies of his The Complete Annonated Gilbert & Sullivan (1996, OUP) in my G&S-loving family. If any us has a question such as “Who were those politicians obliquely hinted at in the Lord Chancellor’s song?” or “Which year did Utopia Limited premiere?” someone will simply say: “It will be in Bradley” and reach for the nearest well thumbed copy.

Meanwhile read this new biography for a pretty balanced attempt to place Arthur Sullivan in context – although I think Ian Bradley’s argument that the comic opera patter songs have their origins in plainsong may be pushing it a bit.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: The Blue Lenses and Other Stories by Daphne du Maurier

People often say “Oh, I love Brideshead” or “It was all a bit Brideshead”. I suspect most of them are referring to the hugely successful 1981 Granada Television adaptation rather than to Evelyn Waugh’s wistful 1945 novel.

I missed the TV version (although there was a 2008 film directed by Julian Jarrold which I did see) because it clashed with my weekly choir rehearsal. And convenient catch-up lay a long way into the future. Of course, I’ve seen bits of it since with glorious Castle Howard and Jeremy Irons looking very young. I read it for the first time then because everyone was talking about it and have come back to it now because they still are.

I think the first thing to remember is that this isn’t just a nostalgic look back to the heyday of the great country house. Almost no one in this novel is happy – or not for long. And of course the titular word “revisited” is crucial. The framing prologue and epilogue take Charles Ryder as narrator back to Brideshead as a serving officer during the second World War.. It is now a military training base and house and grounds are not being treated with respect, care or veneration. It’s a metaphor for the decline of aristocratic life.

In short – in case you’ve been on another planet for the last forty years  – Charles Ryder meets louche, lost, hedonistic, teddy bear-clutching Sebastian Flyte at Oxford in the 1920s and becomes involved with the rest of the Flyte family, who are Catholics, through visiting their ancestral home, Brideshead. “Dysfunctional” is putting it mildly. The head of the family, Lord Marchmain, is living in Venice with his mistress. Lady Marchmain is brittle and difficult. The heir, Brideshead, whom they call “Bridey” is reclusive while the daughters Julia (wildly attractive, married shallowly and adored by Charles) and Cordelia (at first a knowing child and later a stolid adult) are frothy and anxious – although they eventually find vocations of a sort. The most stable person at Brideshead is Nanny Hawkins who looked after them all and lives contentedly in the attic. Behind all this the house is the constant through the twenty years or so the book covers although country life as people like this knew it, is disappearing fast.

Rereading in 2021, I was surprised by the overt and obvious homosexuality given that this novel was written 22 years before the legalisation in 1967. There is clearly a sparky warmth between Sebastian and Charles which, whether it ever becomes physical or not, goes beyond ordinary friendship. And Anthony Blanche is a delicious character – camp, colourful and bitchy – who at one point spirits Charles off for a chat in what the latter later refers to as a “pansy bar”.

The tortured anguish of inherited Catholicism is fascinating too. If you are indoctrinated in childhood you are conditioned for life – as any Jesuit will tell you.  Waugh (Catholic himself) understands so well that common sense and science will never quite prevail. However much Julia wants and tries to lapse she is haunted by self-destructive guilt. Even Lord Marchmain, who has loudly rejected it all and, while he still can, refuses to see a priest, crosses himself on his deathbed. The structure of the novel gives us Charles, a non-Catholic rationalist, as the commentator on all the agony which residual faith –  however wavery – imposes on those who were born to it.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say “I love Brideshead” although Castle Howard which stood for it in the TV series is pretty scenic. I do think, though that it’s a thoughtful novel. And, as Waugh wrote in a 1959 preface he assumed, back in 1945, that country houses were doomed to disappear as monasteries had in the sixteenth century. He failed to forsee what he calls “the present cult of the English country house” adding that “Brideshead today would be open to trippers, its treasures rearranged by expert hands and the fabric better maintained than it was by Lord Marchmain”.

There are rumours of a new BBC dramatisation in the pipeline. A 21^st century take on it could pose new questions and introduce a new generation to a good novel. But as nearly always, I’d rather read than watch.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: Arthur Sullivan by Ian Bradley

It’s Dickens at his angriest –  at least in the first half of the novel. He is relentlessly (excessively?) sardonic and the wry wit barely covers his outrage that innocent children should be treated as Oliver is in the workhouse and until he “escapes” to Fagin’s hell hole in London. Frying pans and fires come to mind. The “message” is pretty transparent.

This is an early work, published in serial form in 1937/9. Its author was only 25 at the outset. That accounts partly for the rawness – later novels such as Great Expectations and David Copperfield are better constructed and more measured. Oliver Twist isn’t even, technically, a Victorian novel. The first section was published in February 1837, four months before Victoria’s accession. At one point there are fears amongst Fagin’s lot that Noah Claypole will turn “king’s evidence” which makes you jump until you recall that we’re still in William IV’s reign.

Of course I’ve read Oliver Twist several times before – but not lately. As a theatre critic, however, I’ve seen numerous stage and TV adaptations and more  performances of Lionel Bart’s Oliver! over the years than you could shake a stick at. Inevitably such images are inclined to overlay  one’s memories of what Dickens actually wrote.

So it’s very enlightening to come back to it now and I tried very hard to put images of Harry Secombe, Ron Moody and Oliver Reed out of my head. Actually, entertaining and tuneful as Oliver! is, it’s a sanitised, over simplified, truncated travesty of the Dickens which inspired it.  It omits half the novel.

For a start both Fagin and Sikes, as Dickens created them, are utterly appalling men with few redeeming features: some of the nastiest villains in fiction. There’s nothing charismatic about either of them. Fagin, in particular, has no loyalty at all to anyone except himself and to a modern reader the idea of his living with and exploiting boys has sinister undertones which presumably couldn’t be made much of in 1837. Yet, how well Dickens understands human psychology. Being condemned to death by hanging finally costs Fagin his sanity as he sits in prison for those last few days – which I imagine was quite common. It’s actually pitiful, despite the revulsion we feel for him.  Sikes is haunted by Nancy as he tries to escape the consequences of murdering her – which makes him slightly more rounded because there is a shred of remorse in there somewhere.

Of course there are plot-holes. Although Oliver eventually gets some help from a tutor with reading and writing, he is already literate when he arrives in London. How come? No one has taught him and he hasn’t been to school. Then there are the usual Dickensian co-incidences. How likely is it that the house to which Sikes takes Oliver to burgle is the home of a young woman, Rose Maylie, who turns out to be his aunt? Or that she has an indirect connection with Mr Brownlow who just happens to be the victim of the first pocket  picking excursion Oliver is taken on? And just fancy Noah Claypole and Charlotte coming to London and immediately happening on the same gang which tried to absorb Oliver. And so it goes on. With Dickens, that’s the deal.

The casual anti-semitism grates. Of course a sensitive, sensible reader makes allowances for different cultural attitudes nearly two centuries ago but Fagin is strongly characterised for his Jewishness and frequently referred to as “The Jew” thus conflating his race with his villainy. Surely Dickens wasn’t trying to imply that all Jews are evil?

It’s a meaty novel and I’m really glad that I’ve reread it. What inspired me? It was the usual serendipity. I was preparing a talk about dogs in literature and wanted to check some references to Sikes and Bulls-Eye. That meant a thorough flick through. Within minutes, I was marvelling and resolved to read it properly – again. This happens to me a lot.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: Ex Libris by Anne Fadiman

It has long been my contention – and I always stressed it to students – that the best way of acquiring eclectic general knowledge is to read lots of fiction. Every story has to have a setting and a background and there are bound to be things therein that you didn’t know. You, the reader, absorb facts unconsciously and without effort. Or to put that more succinctly just go with what my students used to call Mrs Elkin’s Mantra: “People who read books know things”.

Well I knew nothing whatever about the eighteenth century Huguenot silk weaving community in and around Spitalfields in London but I certainly do now thanks to Sonia Velton’s warming entertaining novel (2019) about two women who get caught up in it.

Esther is the non-Huguenot wife of a stern, unappealing – and ultimately hypocritical and vengeful –  third generation silk producer who now employs journeymen to weave for him. She is a secret artist who would desperately like to design silks but, conventionally, women are precluded from such work. The title refers to one of her designs, painstakingly mapped in squares for transfer to the loom.

Sara, daughter of a cook, is sent to London to employment but is intercepted by a ruthless female brothel keeper and works for some years as a prostitute. Then, for various reasons, she is enabled to move to Esther’s household as a maid. The tense relationship between these two very different women runs through the novel like a thread in one of the woven silks it describes.

As the plot unfolds we get, along with other things, the early days of trade unionism amongst bitter and belligerent weavers, several irregular liaisons, a horrifying account of childbirth and a great deal of corruption and self-interestedness. With one tragic exception the men do not, on the whole, come out of this story very well.

It’s a good read with lots of strong characters and I emerged reeling with what I’d learned. I’d never even thought about, for example, about what soon challenged this skill and craft of these workers – cheap imports of cloth like calico from India. Neither had I realised what a huge step it was for a man to complete his master piece and be accepted as member of a livery company rather than spending all his life doing piece work for someone else. And I certainly didn’t know that “cutting the silk” on the loom – vandalising the work to make a political point – was a hanging offence.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens