The baked mirror hoax

Found in Edmund Gosse’s 1894 edition of Hazlitt’s Conversations with James Northcote R.A. (Bentley, London 1894) this amusing prank. The name MynHeer might have been a warning… This would have been well before the birth of photography – Hazlitt wrote the book in 1830. For more on the great Northcote (self portrait below) see his Wikipedia page.

Northcote told an anecdote of Sir George Beaumont**,

to show the credulity of mankind. When a young man

lie put an advertisement in the papers, to say that a

Mynheer , just come over from Germany, had found out

a method of taking a likeness much superior to any

other by the person’s looking into a mirror and having

the glass heated so as to bake the impression. He stated

this wonderful artist to live at a perfumer’s shop in Bond

Street, opposite to an hotel where he lodged, and amused

himself the next day to see the numbers of people who

flocked to have their likenesses taken in this surprising

manner. At last he went over himself to ask for

Monsieur , and was driven out of the shop by the

perfumer in a rage, who said there was no Monsieur

nor Monsieur Devil lived there.

**’Possibly Sir George Baker, the Devonshire physician, famous for his successful raid against the leaden vessels used for cider-mking’ (Edmund Gosse’s note)

Tenure or no tenure: a case from 1972

‘Publish or perish ‘ has long been an accept truism among academics; those University staff hoping for promotion will only achieve it if they are judged to have published a sufficient amount of published research to justify it. After all, university teachers are expected to researchas well as teach.

There must be many examples of University teachers failing to progress along the road towards a professorship, but your Jotter can think of two glaring cases. At my own University a certain expert in textual criticism, who was taken on by the department of English on the strength of a degree and a B. Litt in English , from Oxford University and who proved to be a popular teacher among his students ( his classes on bibliography and his lectures on Bob Dylan as a poet were highly appreciated) , failed to climb the greasy pole of academic promotion mainly because he published little or anything throughout his forty or so years in the department. He began as a Lecturer and retired (I believe) as one.

Another better known example was Monica Jones, the lover of Philip Larkin, who while a Lecturer in English at the University Of Leicester, failed to publish a single research paper or book, although she was regarded as a well-respected teacher with a particular interest in Sir Walter Scott. While her colleagues were promoted she remained firmly ensconced in the position as Lecturer, and retired holding that post. In her case, it wasn’t a lack of energy or intellectual capabilities that held her back. Like Larkin she left Oxford with a first class degree in English, but like Larkin, who in .’Vers de Societe’ resented having to ask an ‘ ass about his fool research ‘, didn’t see any point in publishing learned papers or books within her field. She preferred teaching, and according to those who attended her lectures and classes, was a gifted communicator. Continue reading →

Michael Tippett as book reviewer

Among the large archive of newspaper clippings from the 1950s collected by the late Patrick O’Donoghue , a former lecturer in English at the University of Manitoba, who ended up teaching in his adopted county of Norfolk, is a review of Richard Ellman’s The Identity of Yeats (1954) by the greatest British composer of the twentieth century, Sir Michael Tippett.

For a British composer to review a book about a poet is unusual to say the least. It is hard to imagine Edward Elgar reviewing a book about, say Tennyson, or Benjamin Britten, despite his association with George Crabbe, finding time in his busy schedule to seriously review a critical work on the Suffolk poet. But Tippett was no ordinary composer. According to his biographer Ian Kemp, Tippett developed a number of non-musical interests from an early age, from poetry and philosophy, spiritual development, and left wing politics. He published two books that had little to do with music. At one point in his life he became very interested in antique furniture and in 1951 moved to Tidebrook Manor, a crumbling mansion in Sussex. While teaching at a private school in Limpsfield, Surrey he bought some land and built a bungalow for himself on it. It was tiny (your Jotter has visited it) and badly designed, so perhaps architecture wasn’t his forte, but one can’t imagine Britten building a bungalow. It could be argued that all these non-musical activities may have distracted Tippett from wholeheartedly pursuing a career as a composer, for unlike the prodigy Britten, he was a notoriously late starter and destroyed all his early work. But there is something rather appealing in a composer interesting himself in a variety of disparate fields besides music, discovering at last what he was placed on this earth to do, while still retaining an interest in some of his earlier passions. In the case of Tippett, all these non-musical activities seemed to have informed his music.

We don’t exactly know how deeply Tippett was influenced by Yeats, but it is obvious in his review of Ellman’s book that he saw a correlation between Yeats’s views on symbolism in poetry and their application in music. Ellman contends that in his youth Yeats was affected

‘ by the practice of his contemporaries , among whom the rose then had the currency which the bone attained in English poetic symbolism during the 1920s ‘

‘ I am sure’, Tippett contends, that ‘ this could be paralleled in music, where certain chords and certain intervals dominate whole periods. Or ideas behind the images can span centuries.’ Continue reading →

Ferlinghetti the Beat is given the Boot

Lawrence Ferlinghetti pic

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who died a few months ago aged 101 was a hero to many in the fifties — as publisher, spokesman, and owner of San Francisco’s City Lights Bookshop, he became the eminence griseof the Beat generation. He was also a best-selling poet with his second collection, A Coney Island of the Mind(1958). It is less well known that in the UK this collection was received far less enthusiastically, to say the least. In fact it was pummelled by fellow poet and critic Al Alvarez, who reviewed regularly for the Observer, where this review appeared in 1958.

Alvarez, like Geoffrey Grigson, who despised him for promoting the ‘ confessional school ‘ and for approving suicide, among other things, had a reputation for physical and mental toughness. A rock-climber and poker-player, who published books on both subjects, he despised Romanticism in poetry, and the genteel perspective of poets like Larkin and Betjeman, preferring the gritty world view of writers such as Lowell and Berryman. And like any tough guy Alvarez spoke his mind. If a poem didn’t measure up he said so without equivocation. And in his view, Ferlinghetti’s A Coney Island of the Mindwas bad. In fact it was ‘extraordinary bad’. Alvarez’s review is worth reading, not only for what he says about Ferlinghetti:

Mr Ferlinghetti’s reputation largely depends on his extra-literary activities; he has stage- managed many of the San Francisco Beatniks; he owns the City Lights Bookshop where they sometimes meet; from it he has published some of their verse. He has also fooled around with that latest sub- literary form of publicity, poetry and jazz…’

But also how he saw the Beatnik movement.

‘ The Beatnik’s pose is one of rejection and eccentricity; they say ‘ no’ to society, daddy and sense, and ‘yea ‘ (Whitman’s word) to the great exploited body of Mother America and to what Jung, had he seen them, might have called ‘ the collective inertness. ‘ None of this, of course, makes up a literary revolution. It is simply a minor revolt, another scrabbling for fame and rewards with different slogans. And Mr Ferlinghetti is, at least, less belligerent than his colleagues. At heart he is nice, sentimental, rather old-fashioned writer who, he admits, ‘ fell in love with unreality’ early and has since developed a penchant for words like ‘ stilly’, ‘shy’, ‘sad’, ‘ mad’, and ‘ ah’. He also has a pleasant little talent for verbal whimsy—‘ eager eagles’, ‘ the cat with future feet ‘, ‘foolybears’ and the like—which no invoking of the usual private parts will change from low-level Edward Lear into tough surrealism.
Continue reading →

Fifty Works of English and American Literature We Could Do Without (2)

Brigid Brophy (right), Michael Levey and Charles Osborne let rip in their iconoclastic 1967 book.

Extracts chosen by publisher Nicholas Parsons in his Book of Literary Lists (1985)

‘ The Hound of Heaven’, Francis Thompson ‘…all the teasing femininity suggested by romantic films, or illustrated by advertisements for high quality soaps and shampoos, is caught in the lines:

With thy young skyey blossoms heap me over

From this tremendous Lover!

Float thy vague veil about me, lest He see.

The History of Mr Polly, H.G.Wells ‘The History of Mr Polly may be Wells’ revenge for having to serve an apprenticeship in a draper’s shop.’

The Forsyte Saga, John Galsworthy ‘…a thoroughly middle-class substitute for real literature.’

South Wind, Norman Douglas ‘A good book is not automatically written by composing a Platonic dialogue of un-Platonic length, spicing it with pastiche history and would-be witty hagiography and assembling a cast of sub-intellectual speakers.’

The Moon and Sixpence, W. Somerset Maugham ‘ One gets from reading this book, not the portrait of a genius but merely a string of theatrically cynical refection on life and human behaviour, tacked onto an unconvincing story. ‘

To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf ‘ We are all conducting Virginia Woolf novels inside ourselves all day long, thinking how sunset clouds look like crumbling cheese, wondering why the dinner party guests don’t go, puzzling about children growing up, noticing for the first time the colour of a bus ticket. This famed sensitivity is everybody’s birthright, and probably Virginia Woolf was applauded first by those who were delighted to find literary expression of their own commonplace sensations. To have those put in a book and called a novel…only dots can do justice to their delight.’ Continue reading →

Conscious and unconscious erotica

Some writers knowingly produced erotica; others unknowingly published smutty material. Here are a few examples

Conscious

Pietro Aretino (1492 – 1556), Sonnetti Lussuriosi(1524)

The Sonnetti Lussuriosiof this poet, gossip and writer of witty plays was a collection of verses and erotic drawings that, like the Kama Sutra, demonstrated positions for sexual intercourse. Though the book proved very popular, it earned the wrath of the Pope, an erstwhile patron of Aretino, along with Emperor Charles V. Aretino lost his papal patronage, but he also was taken to task by the Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral, Dr John Donne, who objected that some of the sexual positions were missing.

Norman Douglas (1868 – 1952), Some Limericks(1928)

The author of Old Calabria and South Wind, also compiled Venus in the Kitchen, a collection of aphrodisiac recipes, and the privately printed Some Limericks. The latter, which has been described as ‘ irreverent, scatological and erotic ‘ , was accompanied by ‘ scholarly ‘ notes that sent up the sort of po-faced critical apparatus so beloved of Ph D candidates.

W S. Gilbert ( 1836-1911) and Arthur Sullivan ( 1842 – 1900) . ‘ The Sod’s Opera’.

The humorous double act that gave us so many wonderful operettas also composed The Sod’s Opera , among the characters of which are Count Tostoff and the Brothers Bollox ( a pair of hangers on) and Scrotum, a wrinkled old retainer. Oddly, there are no records of a public performance, though it would be refreshing if some village Opera society put on their version of it.

Anais Nin ( 1903 -77 ) The Delta of Venus.

The friend of pornographer Henry Miller got together with Nin and an army of hard up writers to form a sort of porn factory which turned out several erotic works, some commissioned by an anonymous tycoon. Ms Nin was also a novelist and a prolific diarist.

Felix Salten aka Siegmund Salzmann ( 1869 – 1949) Josefine Mutzenbacher.

The apparently wholesome author of Bambi(1929), a children’s story which recounted the struggle of an orphaned deer, which was later immortalized by Walt Disney, also penned an extremely well received erotic novel that painted a very accurate picture of the life of a prostitute among the petit bourgeoisie in fin de siecleVienna. Today it is regarded as equal in status in the German-speaking word to our own Fanny Hill. Continue reading →

John Betjeman and a Home Counties Anthology

Home counties anthology cover pic 001 Even today, thirty six years after his death, John Betjeman can still surprise us with his wisdom and original mind. In 1947, less than two years after the end of a war that brought the prospect of a radiation death to the innocent citizens of Great Britain, destroyed some of finest Georgian terraces in London and Bath, that peppered landmark buildings, including St Paul’s Cathedral and the Dulwich Art Gallery with shrapnel, and pock-marked the pastoral landscapes of Surrey, Middlesex and Essex, the editors at Methuen asked the rising poet of the suburbs to provide an Introduction to their new anthology by someone called J. D. Mortimer ( who he?) on the Home Counties.

Betjeman duly obliged and what he wrote is redolent of his unique perspective on southern England. A writer of an earlier generation—a Walter-de-la Mare, a Blunden, a S. P. B.Mais say—would have come up with the usual nostalgic picture of the Home Counties as places of elm-shaded inns, haystacks, cricket on the green and dusty lanes, and left it at that, but Betjeman while regretting that much of Middlesex and parts of Surrey were now unrecognisable from their nineteenth and early twentieth century appearance, thanks to the depredations of the car, , and the presence in the sky of the aeroplane, suggests that the melancholy induced by such realisations could be assuaged by an anthology that celebrates the appeal of the suburbs

The Home Counties of the L.P.T.B. and the Southern Electric and Green Line buses, of Ritz cinemas and multiple stores and trim building estates must have this literature. There has been little poetry of the suburbs, possibly because they are so raw and new. But since the suburbs are there for as long as atomic energy will allow them, and since there are still poets , they will be eventually turned into poetry so that we can enjoy urban Gidea Park as once Hood enjoyed countrified Epping. Already much prose has appeared which has glorified the suburbs into something beautiful—Gissing, Machen, W.B.Maxwell were pioneers of suburban descriptive prose. Suburban social life at the end of the last century has been immortalised by George and Weedon Grossmith in the Diary of a Nobody.
Continue reading →

Fifty Works of English and American Literature We Could Do Without

Brigid Brophy, Michael Levey and Charles Osborne let rip in their iconoclastic 1967 book.

Extracts chosen by publisher Nicholas Parsons in his Book of Literary Lists (1985)

Beowulf ‘Admiring comment on its poetry is about as relevant as praise for the architecture of Stonehenge.’

The York Mystery Plays ‘…The Bach St Matthew Passion, Verdi’s Requiem, the Karlskirche in Vienna, and the sculpture of Michelangelo are ( as religious propaganda) a far cry from the cynically concocted doggerel of a committee of drunken monks at St Mary’s Chapel, York in 1350.

The Faerie Queen, Edmund Spenser ‘…the punishing length, utter confusion and unremitting tedium of Spenser;s contribution serve not only to impress uncreative minds, but to illustrate generally that English literature is not an easy option’.

Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, William Shakespeare ‘…the prototype of Western literature’s most deplorable and most formless form, autobiographical fiction’.

Pilgrim’s Progress, John Bunyan’…it is impossible to rate his naïve and fevered imagination any higher than that of the gentlemen who walk through the West End of London with sandwich –board imploring us to flee from the wrath to come’.

Tom Jones, Henry Fielding’(Tom is ) a tom cat of remarkable passivity who has to be seduced of flattered into his series of love affairs and finishes as a jeune premier in a Doris Day musical , married to the girl next door with full parental blessing.’ Continue reading →

William Barnes Rhodes: the banker as bibliophile

Found among papers at Jot HQ is this distinctly battered copy of volume one of Select Epigrams(1797) by William Barnes Rhodes, a rather interesting writer. Our copy lacks boards, has its title, but lacks one leaf (pages 29 and 30), three leaves (pages 57 – 62 ) , part of page 73 and pages 159 – 188. These omissions don’t exactly add to the appeal of what is left, but the incomplete book is worth reading, not least for its defects.

For one thing, anyone encountering the volume for the first time, as your Jotter did, would assume that the book consisted of one volume only. This is because someone, for whatever reason, has seen fit to erase the words IN TWO VOLUMES and VOLUME ONE from the title page. We know that our copy is the first volume because the contents of volume two from the Bodleian Library, has been digitalised and appears online. It is not known why volume one has not been digitalised in the same way. Incidentally, both volumes of the first edition are currently for sale through abebooks, but the bookseller has erroneously declared that the first edition is the ‘sole edition’, when in fact a second edition, was brought out in 1803 by William Miller, who published Washington Irving’s Sketch Book in 1820.

William Barnes Rhodes, like Charles Lamb, had a full-time job as a clerk while he pursued a literary career, but while Lamb worked at the East India House in the City, Rhodes, who was born in Leeds in 1772, obtained in 1799 a post at the Bank of England, just down the road from Lamb. It is intriguing to speculate whether the two men ever met. It is very likely, given their respective avocations, but Rhodes does not feature in Lamb’s correspondence. Interestingly, in 1823 Rhodes was promoted to the office of Chief Teller at the Bank, just two years before Lamb took early retirement from East India House.

Like Lamb too, Rhodes was interested in the theatre, though we don’t know if he was a great playgoer. He was evidently a well-paid official. At the great Roxburghe sale in 1812, when one of only two copies of Boccaccio’s Decameron dated 1471 fetched well over £2,000, and other fabulous books and manuscripts did equally well, Rhodes made large purchases of theatrical material. It was on the eve of this famous sale that the Roxburghe Club was formed by a group of leading bibliophiles. It is not known if Rhodes became a member, but he would have been interested in the objectives of this coterie. We are not aware of the actual contents of his library, but we do know that it was sold in 1825. Perhaps Rhodes sensed that his demise was near and wanted to provide for his new wife, who he had married that same year. He died a year later aged just 54. Continue reading →

A wartime diary of a Norfolk schoolboy

Found among the papers of the academic and occasional writer Patrick O’Donoghue is this tiny diary covering the first four months of 1944, when, from the style of handwriting and the details of his leisure hours activity, he appears to have been around ten years old. The document is interesting in several respects. Although the entries are often brief and record rather dull events ( I went on a walk’, ‘ Libraries today’ ) they paint a vivid picture of the life of an ordinary schoolboy in wartime, both in the country and in London. But there are puzzles in this split existence. Although he lived near Ayslsham, north of Norwich, over the Christmas holidays of 1943/44, he ‘went back’ on January 8^thto school in London, where he visited Foyles bookshop and viewed the bomb damage done to homes in Thorpedale Road, Crouch Hill ( presumably near to where he lived ). Patrick also recorded an air raid for January 21^st.

London seems to have offered far more entertainment for Patrick than rural Norfolk had ever done. There were films to be seen, and one he particularly anticipated was ‘The Phantom of the Opera ‘ starring Claude Rains and Nelson Eddy (1943), which had eventually reached London by February 11^th, which is when Nora ( possibly his elder sister) saw it with Seymour ( possibly her boyfriend) . The previous evening the couple had seen ‘The Girls he Left Behind’. It is likely that Patrick, as a juvenile was barred from seeing both this ‘ romance ‘ as well as the horror film, though he did see‘ Behind the Rising Sun ‘ at the Astoria. One of the films he intended to see was shown at the library. One wonders if this, like ‘The Battle of Britain ‘, which he was to see in Norfolk in March, was a government propaganda film — actually directed by Frank Capra and made in the USA–of which there were quite a few during the War. There were other forms of entertainment, besides films. On January 29^thPatrick recorded that ‘ Uncle Jim brought a huge load of comics today. I bought 3 comics too. We know that he favoured The Dandy, which had only been published for a few years. And of course, there were books available from the library. Those he borrowed were the usual adventure stories and thrillers ( The City of the Sorcerer and Scouts of the Sky) and T. C. Bridge’s Adventure Omnibus. Then on February 22^ndhe ‘came home’ to Norfolk. Here he bought two books in Norwich and on the 23^rdlistened to the Charlie McCarthy comedy show on radio. Rather alarmingly, he and a friend or two on the following Saturday afternoon made a ‘ bomb ‘, as doubtless many boys did at the time. For every day of the following week he seems to have had a ‘good time‘, with or without his friend Derek. Continue reading →

9 Clues to Racism and Sexism in Children’s Books: a perspective from 42 years ago

Taking into account the current debate on identity politics, and in particular the climate of ‘ wokeness’ regarding racism and sexism, it is interesting to read one of the earliest texts on this subject, Racism and Sexism in Childrens’ Books( Writers’ and Reader’ Publishing Cooperative, 1979). In it Judith Stinton, who edited the book, drew up a list entitled ‘ How to Look for Racism and Sexism in Childrens’ Books: a guideline.

These points seem to have been discussed ever since, often inducing a polarisation of views according to various agendas and prejudices. As the publisher Nicholas Parsons observed in 1985

The Central Committee of Teachers Against Racism complained that ‘black people’ are shown as greedy in Bannerman’s The Story of Little Black Sambo (1899) because Sambo eats 169 pancakes. Right-wing letters to the Times, on the other hand, produced arguments of varying implausibility liberally laced with self-righteousness, to demonstrate the impossible that : The Story of Little Black Sambo does not purvey a view of black people that is at best patronising in the extreme, and at worst unpleasantly racist.’

Who was this would-be censor? The only Judith Stinton we could find online was someone who is currently curating exhibitions on literature for museums. From her photograph she looks too young to be the person responsible for the groundbreaking booklet, but she may have produced it when in her very early twenties. Continue reading →

Selhurst—The Public School that never was

Hoaxes, if done well, often fool people—even those who are generally regarded as reasonably intelligent. One that caught out some Oxbridge educated people who ought to have known better, was the piece of tom foolery dreamt up in 1948 by a twenty-two year old Cambridge undergraduate who later became an MP. His name was Humphry Berkeley and he invented a public school called Selhurst whose head was a certain H. Rochester Sneath.

Berkeley tried an experiment with any undergraduates he came across. Steering the conversation towards the subject of where he went to school, Berkeley, when asked would reply: ‘Well, as a matter of fact I went to a school called Selhurst. The name was brilliant chosen. It had a plausibility about it, unless, of course, you knew that Selhurst Park was the home of Crystal Palace football club. Had you this knowledge you may have asked some probing questions, but doubtless in 1948 most Oxbridge undergraduates would not have been football fans. Anyway, Richard Boston takes up the story:

‘ Registering his questioner’s non-recognition of the name he would follow up with ‘ Haven’t you hard of Selhurst?’ Anxious not to cause offence his acquaintance would reply,’ Of course I’ve heard of it my dear fellow.’ After various such successful experiments Berkeley knew that he had found the perfect name for what he calls a minor public school of ‘ the third degree’.

The next move was to have some letter headings printed with words at the top reading ‘Selhurst School, Near Petworth, Sussex. From the Headmaster H. Rochester Sneath.’ At small expense but with considerable ingenuity, Berkeley was able to make a forwarding arrangement with the Post Office. ( Another ruse was to pretend that he was on staying holiday with an imaginary sister to whom letters should be sent .) Now he was in business.

The first letter was to the Master of Marlborough College. H. Rochester Sneath announced that the three–hundreth anniversary of the foundation of Selhurst was coming up , and that he was anxious to have the opportunity of entertaining Their Majesties on the occasion. ‘Perhaps you would be kind enough to let me know how you managed to engineer a visit recently from the King and Queen’. He also asked for any helpful tips about how to treat royalty. Continue reading →

The worst poets in print

No doubt most Jottists will have their own candidates, some of whom might be a few contemporary ‘poets ‘who have paid to have their own work published by ‘ vanity presses ‘.However, here are some of the lesser known versifiers out of the ten chosen by publisher Nicholas Parsons in his Book of Literary Lists. The divine Amanda McKittrick Ros, arguably the worst poet of all, has been dealt with in an earlier Jot, as has Patience Strong.

Julia A. Moore (1847 – 1920).

Not the best-known of bad poets, but a sure candidate nonetheless. Moore was, according to Parsons, ‘ by general consent the worst American poetess and perhaps the worst in English.’ Mark Twain satirised her in Huckleberry Finn as ‘ Emmeline Grangerford. Twain declared that her debut volume , The Sweet Singer of Michigan Salutes the Public gave him joy for twenty years. One of these little gems was entitled ‘ Byron: A Critical Survey’.

‘Lord Byron;’ was an Englishman

A poet I believe

His first works in old England

Was poorly received.

Perhaps it was ‘Lord Byron’s ‘fault

And perhaps it was not.

Moore seemed to specialise in gruesome deaths. Referring to her debut, one critic, Bill Nye, ‘counted twenty-one killed and nine wounded in the small volume she has given to the public’.

Here is one of them:

While eating dinner this dear little child

Was choked on a piece of beef

Doctors came, tried their skill awhile

But none could give relief…

Her friends and schoolmates will not forget

Little Libbie that is no more;

She is waiting on the shining step

To welcome home friends once more. Continue reading →

Etiquette in 1939

Boy meets girl…

‘ Most of the questions of etiquette so far discussed concern married and unmarried people equally. There are, however, certain formalities which specially concern bachelors and single girls—bachelor girls as the modern phrase has it—particularly those living in apartments…’

A bachelor’s party.

I am a bachelor living in rooms. In acknowledgement of the many invitations I receive to other people’s houses, I would like to hold a little party at my place. Is there any objection to this?

There can be no objection to your giving a party in your rooms provided you ask a lady of your own family, or a married lady friend, to act as hostess. Of course, you will not invite any married lady to attend the part without also inviting her husband. Where an invitation is sent to a single girl it must be accompanied by an invitation to her parents or some other responsible person.

Meeting her people

I have been friendly with a girl and would like to be introduced into her home. May I suggest that I call, or should the invitation come from the girl ?

You shold not ask for an invitation, nor should the girl invite you to call on her own initiative. The invitation should really come from the girl’s mother . An invitation like this generally comes from via the girl; the occasion is not treated as one calling for a formal invitation.

Farewell to True Bookshops

This rather plaintive cri de coeurfrom the pen of someone called John F. X. Harriott (1933 – 90), whose Periscope column was The Tablet’s renowned voice of common-sense’ for many years, is a very slim (just ten pages) pamphlet brought out in 1987 by

the Rocket Press under the aegis of Jonathan Stephenson, a private publisher from Blewbury and Oxford book dealer Robin Waterfield.

When he wrote the original Tablet piece on which he based his booklet Harriott was in his mid-fifties and had evidently been a lover of second hand bookshops for many years, but was becoming aware that the book trade was changing for the worse. His piece is partly a hymn of praise to the old school book dealers he had known and partly a diatribe on new bookshops. He begins by describing an encounter with the kind of bookshop ‘which used to grace every town in the kingdom but is now as rare as a coach and four’.

‘…Rooms of books unfolded one upon another, and staircases of books wound upwards into dark mysterious attics. There was that marvellous smell of cricket bat oil and dusty bacon. …The bookseller…was ancient and sallow and far beyond any human intercourse. We crept about him silently, pulling out handfuls of ripe nineteenth and twentieth century first editions, old childhood favourites, books of Victorian instruction to prospective travellers abroad, and lowering to the floor tremendous theological tomes which took up the challenge at the end of St John’s gospel…’

In contrast, Harriott declares:

‘ the newest of all bookshops…sell nothing but piles of ill-written, ill-spelled, ill-bound non-books from America….They do not invite one to buy good books because they are cheap, but to buy books simply because they are cheap. Such shops have no dark corners, no winding staircases, no smell of antiquity, no ripening booksellers or collectors poring over their catalogues. Instead they have neon lights and rows of paperbacks in alphabetical order and a computer to tell the customer that everything worth reading is out of print. They are savage places where there is always a keening wind and moans of spiritual hunger troubling the air.’

So far, so goodish, but he is not comparing like with like. Second hand bookshops have a place, but new bookshops obviously have a function too. Harriott also doesn’t explain why new bookshops in the UK are importing all their stock from the USA, or why American writers should adopt the Queen’s English. Or why no American book is likely to be worth reading. This is not a very intelligent approach. But then our Catholic friend goes a bit off-track. Continue reading →

The Best of British More choices from The Best (1974)

It’s instructive to get an American view of some British institutions. So here are Peter Passell and Leonard Ross on ‘The Best London Restaurant’.

The trouble with eating in London is that it is like eating in New York. There are vast hordes longing to dine well and dozens of exciting new restaurants longing to fill the void. Yet somehow nothing seems to work out. Perhaps it is only a scarcity of talent—-running a restaurant well demands more than one chef imported from the Continent. More likely it’s incentives. There aren’t enough people who both know good food and are willing to pay for it. Restaurants are made or broken by who shows up, not by what is served. The few establishments that start out with standards find little reason to maintain them. No guidebook inspector will turn the decline into headlines; no army of food pedants will organize a boycott.

Of course, there are a few bright spots. Robert Carrier’s relentless pursuit of the nouveau may irritate the snob, but the fixed menus frequently work well. Inigo Jones’s lovely room can make up for an occasional error in service. The fish is very fresh ( and very expensive) at Wilton’s. The new Capital Hotel dining room produces the best rack of lamb north of Paris. Marynka demonstrates that Polish food is no joke.

But for our money we’ll take London’s Indian/Pakistani restaurants. They tend to be much more sophisticated than the North American version and not nearly so lacking in grace. The best of them, Sri Lanka, is in fact not Indian but Ceylonese, a variant on the national cuisines of the subcontinent. This pretty little restaurant near Earl’s Court ( an unsocial twenty-minute taxi ride west from Mayfair) prepares the predictable curries, flavored rices, and breads as well as well as any other in London and adds a dozen distinguished Ceylonese specialties. Among them, a super-hot tomato broth ( perhaps really a puree of chili peppers), the pleasure of which comes in the vibration of subtler spices in the aftertaste; delicate rice-flour crepes served with fried eggs; chewy fried breads stuffed with egg, vegetables , or meat, and far superior to the usual Indian paratha; a steamed rice-flour cake drowned in coconut milk. With a couple of German lagers, the bill comes to two pounds per person.

Today, the eating scene in London has changed incredibly. Here you can eat around the globe, from Brazil to Russia and Indonesia to California, often from street stalls in Brick Lane and Portobello Road, a development that Passell and Ross could hardly have imagined. The Indian/Pakistani restaurants are still there, of course, and are proliferating day by day. It is odd that our Americans fail to mention the curry houses centered on Brick Lane, and further east, in and around Whitechapel High Street, where the best of them offer high-class ‘ home-cooking ‘ of the kind described by the authors. But it is true that Sri Lankan restaurants are not as common, but are becoming more so and those that flourish today serve some of the dishes described by Passell and Ross. The restaurant selected out for special praise, however, appears to have gone.

As for the other top restaurants mentioned, Wilton’s is still there and is still very expensive. The restaurant at the Capital Hotel is flourishing and is probably still offering its rack of lamb. Unfortunately, the Marynka near Earl’s Court appears to have disappeared, but there are other Polish eateries in the capital, including the rather dowdy Daquise, near the V & A, which seems to have been around since the First World War.[R.M.Healey]

The Gaits of Memory: the way they walked. Part two

carrington In part one we looked at the way John Thaw tried to disguise a leg injury he had sustained as a teenager. Later on in his audition for RADA he had played Richard III with a limp and as Morse he had tried to disguise his limp. But some actors can easily affect a certain gait for dramatic affect. Both Alec Guinness and Laurence Olivier maintained that once they had got the walk right the rest of the role fell into place. In an adaptation of Ivy Compton Burnett’s ‘A Family and a Fortune’ Guinness had to leave a room to get out into the cold. The way he flung a scarf round his neck and trod stutteringly before leaving told you everything you needed to know about the climatic conditions and preparing to brave them.

Gielgud was once seen coming out of L’Etoile in Charlotte Street. His grey Rolls Royce awaited him. He had to cover about three metres. The only word for what he did is ‘process’. There is a funny scene in ‘Cage aux Folles’ ( the American version is better in this instance ) when one of the guys does the ‘John Wayne Walk ‘ in order to appear a proper heterosexual. He does it perfectly—but somehow it is very camp. At least one burglar has been arrested because his distinctive John Wayne style swagger had been caught on CCTV. Cowboys also walked with bow legs, which is obviously an occupational distinction like that of sailors, with their ‘rolling gait’. The TV detective Hercules Poirot, as played by David Suchet, affected a rather silly short-paced walk and we all know how John Cleese played the civil servant at the Ministry of Silly Walks. Saul Berenson (Mandy Patinkin) , CIA head in Homeland affects a memorably fast and determined walk with plenty of arm movement.. The actor Richard Beckinsale, well known for his parts in ‘Rising Damp’ and ‘Porridge ‘, used hardly to pick his feet off the ground. He shuffled.

We’d surely all like to know a little more about how certain writers and artists walked. Unlike most ‘ celebs ‘ they are generally invisible to the public, unless they take part in literary conferences, symposia and arts festivals. Does anyone know how Grayson Perry, Tracey Emin or Martin Amis walk ? The novelist Frederick Raphael is very tall and affects what might be called a don’s stoop, though why fellows of Oxford and Cambridge colleges should be more likely to stoop while walking hasn’t been explained. Perhaps it’s just the tall male ones who stoop. A few writers may have had disabilities which affected the way they walked. Bruce Cummings ( aka ‘W. B. Barbellion’) developed disseminated sclerosis early in his life, so his gait must have been unusual. Alex Pope’s scoliosis must also have been reflected in his walk, though there are few, if any, references to it. As for Charles Dickens, the last five years of his life were blighted by the extreme pain he suffered in his left foot through what Dr Chris McManus describes in a recent article in the Lancetas a ‘right parietal temporal disorder ‘, which might have heralded the stroke which eventually killed him at the age of 58. Many of his friends had diagnosed gout, but the symptoms that affected other parts of his left-hand side, such as his hand and eye, suggest otherwise. The gait of Dickens must have been severely affected by this affliction and indeed those with something similar or who suffered with gout, would have had distinctive ways of walking. Continue reading →

Table manners in 1939

How does one know which knife and fork to use when there is an unusually big array at an important dinner ?

No difficulty arises if one remembers that the various knives, forks and spoons are laid in the order in which they will be required, beginning with those on the outside.

When the dinner starts with hors d’oeuvres—those tasty morsels of smoked salmon and sardine, Russian salad and the like—the appropriate silver knife and fork will be placed on the plate. Similarly a fork will be supplied with the plate, or found on the extreme right of the silver, if oysters come first.

Soup is taken with the large spoon found on the right. Next, to the right and left, you will find the fish knife and fork, then a fork, or knife and fork for the entrée, according to its nature. Following will be the large knife and fork for the meat or poultry course, a spoon and fork for the sweet, and finally a knife for cheese.

When dessert is served a small knife and fork will be handed to you with the dessert plate.

Should you by any mischance pick up the wrong knife or fork—or both—do not feel terribly embarrassed. Just ask the waiter quietly for another set when the course arrives for which the utensils were intended.

The dessert course always worries me at a dinner —and generally on that account I refuse it! How should one deal with apples, pears, bananas and so forth?

Apples and pears are held on the dessert fork and peeled with the dessert knife. Then the fruit is cut into quarters, the core removed and smaller portions cut if desirable.

Peaches and similar fruits are held on the fork and skinned with the knife. The fruit is cut into halves, the stone removed with the aid of the knife and fork. Bananas are peeled with knife, cut into pieces and eaten with the fork. Grapes are squeezed into the mouth singly, the skin being kept in the fingers. The fork should be placed to the lips to receive the seeds.

I have noticed that some people use a fork and spoon for the sweet course in a dinner, while other use a fork only. Which is correct ?

Whenever the nature of a dish permits, a fork only should be used. This applies not only to sweets but also to other courses. When the entree, for instance, is a patty or the like, that should be eaten with a fork. A spoon should never be used alone; always use a fork as well, even for such dishes as custard and milk pudding.

With most of the courses of a dinner the procedure is obvious. Others are not so simple to deal with. How should one eat oysters, for instance, or asparagus? Continue reading →

Did you know that…about writers ?

Advances

Barbara Taylor Bradford received a £17 million advance from Harper Collins in 1992 for her next three novels

Stephen King was offered an advance of £26 million for a three-book deal in 1989

Tom Clancy received $75 million for a two-book deal with Penguin

Reverses

Edgar Allan Poe was offered $14 for Eureka towards the end of his life, with the proviso that if the book didn’t earn that amount, he had to make up the difference to the publisher. In 1846 he offered to sell the copyright of a collection of his short stories for as little as $50. The offer was rejected.

Thomas Wolfe received only $500 for his massive work Look Homeward, Angel, which works out at about 1 of your English pennies for every 100 words.

Jack London got a $2,000 flat fee for The Call of the Wild in 1903. The book sold so well that he lost upwards of $100,000 by giving up the royalties.

Burnt books

After his death Gerard Manly Hopkins’ final poems were burned on the instructions of his religious order

Copies of John Milton’s books were burned publicly in 1660 because he was critical of Charles II. He went on, of course, to write Paradise Lost, but after he died his widow sold the copyright of it for £8.

When Moliere was in the process of translating Lucretius’s On the Nature of Things, one of his servants casually picked up some of the pages and used them as curl papers for Moliere’s wig. So enraged was Moliere that he threw the rest of the manuscript into the fire. Continue reading →

Little known historical facts

(for use in pub quizzes)

Henry the First was drowned in the wreck of the Channel Steamer called the White Star Line

When Englishmen on one side fight Englishmen on the other it is called a General Election.

Another name for Tories is Preservatives.

Karl Marx is a character in “The Third Round “by Sapper

The chief work of the British in Egypt since 1880 has been the extermination of the sphinxes and the evacuation of old caves

When Wolsey was young he was the son of a butcher.

The Battle of Trafalgar was fought on sea, and therefore it is sometimes called Waterloo

“ Bring out your dead”, was what the judges said when a prisoner was brought from his cells for trial.

Childe Harold was defeated at Hastings by William the Conqueror.

Garibaldi was a maker of biscuits

Henry the Seventh did not allow retainers to have livers

William the Second met his death by stepping on a hot coal while riding in the New Forest

Mussolini is a type of material used for ladies’ stockings

James the Fourth of Scotland afterwards became James the Fourth of England because his mother, Margaret of Norway, had died childless.

After the Battle of Worcester, Charles the Second fled disguised as a pheasant

Nelson was born a weak and sickly man. He grew up to be a weak and sickly boy. Unfortunately the had his eye shot out by Napoleon. He is now a statue in Trafalgar Square, and he has his hand out saying, “Lest we forget “. Continue reading →