More - Max Beerbohm

Max Beerbohm is an acquired taste. He has that witty, fin-de-siècle style reminiscent of the authors of the 1890s - Oscar Wilde & the writers at The Yellow Book are probably the best-known examples. Beerbohm's essays remind me of the languid figures in Aubrey Beardsley's drawings. I'm never quite sure when he's being serious but then, that's half the fun of reading his essays.

The only other book by Beerbohm that I've read is Zuleika Dobson, a complete fantasy about a girl so beautiful that whole groups of Oxford undergraduates fall into the river while gazing at her. Complete nonsense but a lot of fun to read. I felt a little like that about the essays collected in More. This book was published in 1899, when Beerbohm was only in his late 20s. It was his second book of essays (hence the title) & I think the best way to read them is to read one or two at a time. That's what I did, I read one nearly every night & although I'm sure I didn't always catch the irony, I did enjoy reading Beerbohm's opinions on the many subjects he pokes fun at here.

Maybe the best way to decide if you're going to enjoy Beerbohm's style is to read a few examples. In "The Sea-side in Winter", he enjoys his melancholy,

After the first day or so, my melancholy leaves me.The very loneliness of the place does but accentuate my proprietary sense. From the midst of all this lifeless monotony I stand out, a dominant and most romantic personage. Were I in London, who would notice me, no prince there? Even here, in the Season, I had but a slight pre-eminence over other visitors. But now I need but show myself to create a glow of interest and wonder. The blind man, standing by his telescope, knows my tread and tries, I think, to picture my appearance. The old gentlemen see in me the incarnation of splendid youth; the shop people, a dispenser of great riches; the school-girls, a prodigy of joyous freedom from French verbs. I could not have levied these tributes in the month of August.

On trying to convince shopkeepers that their window displays are so much less effective that the traditional sign-boards of the past,

Are you a jeweller? You fill your window with a garish and unseemly chaos of all you have : bracelets, sleeve-links, penknives, tiaras - toute la boutique. Your rival in Paris, even in New York, is much wiser. He understands the value of a reticent symbolism. Very little he puts into his window. What he puts is good. Men and women, beholding, praise it. Their imagination has been stirred, their appetite whetted from the things that are withheld, and they long to enter in at the door. Last winter, in the Rue de la Paix, I saw a jewel-window, sir, that should serve for an example to you. It was lined with scarlet velvet and illustrious with electric light. In the very middle of it, lay, like a bomb in a palace, one beautiful black pearl. Had I been rich, I must have entered.

He manages to insult the local jeweller, give a back-handed compliment to New York & exult himself as an arbiter of good taste while also admitting that he hasn't the money to afford the beautiful things he craves.

In an essay on Going Back to School, he remembers the awfulness of the journey to the station at the end of the holidays, counting down the hours & minutes until he arrived (even paying for a first-class seat himself so as to avoid his companions for as long as possible,

Not that I had any special reason for hating school! Strange as it may seem to my readers, I was not unpopular there. I was a modest, good-humoured boy. It is Oxford that has made me insufferable. At school, my character remained in a state of undevelopment. I had a few misgivings, perhaps. In some respects I was always too young, in others, too old, for a perfect relish of the convention. As I hovered, in grey knickerbockers, on a cold and muddy field, round the outskirts of a crowd that was tearing itself from limb to limb for the sake of a leathern bladder, I would often wish for a nice, warm room and a good game of hunt-the-slipper. And, when we sallied forth, after dark, in the frost, to the swimming-bath, my heart would steal back to the fireside in Writing Home and the plot of Miss Braddon's latest novel.

I can't disagree with him there! I have to believe that he was joking when he deplores the Fire Brigade's habit of putting out fires & thereby saving ugly buildings from destruction. That's surely taking aestheticism too far. Some of his essays are still relevant today. A Cloud of Pinafores is about the cult of the child, "But, now that children are booming, the publishers and reviewers are all agog." I loved the observation that children could now be as impertinent as they liked without being told to mind their manners. In Victorian times, the nursery was a stern place, full of discipline & cautionary verses to keep a child on the straight & narrow. Now, children have such absolute freedom that they are shocked by real life when they leave the nursery,

Finding no pleasure in a freedom which they have always had, incapable of that self-control which long discipline produces, they will become neurotic, ineffectual men and women. In the old days, there could have been no reaction of this kind. The strange sense of freedom was a recompense for less happiness of heart. Children were fit for life.

What would Beerbohm have thought about children's fashion labels, babycinos & the abolition of prize-giving at sports days because "everyone's a winner"?

Other essays on the state of the music hall, the novels of Ouida & Madame Tussaud's waxworks are equally entertaining. You probably know by now whether or not Max Beerbohm is for you. Simon has also reviewed More in the latest issue of Shiny New Books.

The publisher, Mike Walmer, kindly sent me a copy of More for review.

The Letters of Lord Byron - selected by R G Howarth

Lord Byron is one of the most famous literary figures the world has ever known. Whether his fame is due to his romantically early death in the cause of Greek independence or because of his scandalous private life, Byron was famous amongst his contemporaries & remains famous today. His fame should rest on his wonderful poetry & his letters, which I've been reading over the last month, rather than speculation about whether he had an affair with his half-sister or what he could possibly have done to make his wife leave him only a year after their marriage. The letters are full of fun & wit. I laughed out loud often but Byron also writes of his misery over the death of friends; his despair at his famously unhappy marriage & the aftermath of his separation from Annabella. He tells a fantastically good story & often skewers an opponent (often his much-loathed mother-in-law, Lady Noel) with a witty phrase.

His correspondents include his half-sister, Augusta, his friends, Thomas Moore & John Cam Hobhouse, & his publisher, John Murray. The letters to Murray are my favourites. In between instructions for the publication of his latest work, he implores Murray to send him supplies of magnesia, corn plasters & tooth powder. Quotations from Shakespeare (particularly Macbeth), Scott & other favourite authors are just dropped in everywhere, in the middle of sentences, as if his thoughts were a mixture of  his reading & his own experience.

Most of the letters were written in his self-imposed exile in Italy, where he went to escape the gossip surrounding the end of his marriage. Byron was already famous for his poetry by this time, especially Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, which drew on his experiences travelling in Greece & the Middle East. His style is so readable, racy & colloquial, like a novel in verse, giving the impression that it was just dashed off, written as quickly as it can be read. The public confused the man with his creations & the image of the Byronic hero was an amalgam of Byron himself & his characters. His relationships, most notoriously with Lady Caroline Lamb, who called him "mad, bad and dangerous to know" & wrote a novel, Glenarvon, about their affair, added to the mystique surrounding him.

As you can see, I kept putting sticky notes in my copy as I read & I'd much rather share some of my favourite passages so you can hear the man himself rather than me trying to describe him.

To Anne Isabella Milbanke, after their engagement,

I did not believe such a woman existed - at least for me,- and I sometimes fear I ought to wish that she had not. I must turn from the subject.
My love, do forgive me if I have written in a spirit that renders you uncomfortable. I cannot embody my feelings in words. I have nothing to desire - nothing I would see altered in you - but so much in myself. I can conceive no misery equal to mine, if I failed in making you happy,- and yet how can I hope to do justice to those merits from whose praise there is not a dissentient voice?
14 October 1814

To his sister, Augusta,

I heard the other day that she (Annabella) was very unwell. I was shocked enough - and sorry enough, God knows, but never mind; H (Hobhouse) tells me however that she is not ill; that she had been indisposed, but is better and well to do - This is a relief. As for me I am in good health, and fair, though very unequal spirits; but for all that - she - or rather the Separation - has broken my heart. I feel as if an Elephant had trodden on it. I am convinced that I shall never get over it - but I try.
8 September 1816

To Thomas Moore,

I rejoice to hear of your forthcoming in February - though I tremble for the 'magnificence' which you attribute to the new Childe Harold. I am glad you like it; it is a fine indistinct piece of poetical desolation, and my favourite. I was half mad during the time of its composition, between metaphysics, mountains, lakes, love unextinguishable, thoughts unutterable, and the nightmare of my own delinquencies. I should, many a good day, have blown my brains out, but for the recollection that it would have given pleasure to my mother-in-law; and, even then, if I could have been certain to haunt her - but I won't dwell upon these trifling family matters.
28 January 1817

To John Murray,

The story of Shelley's agitation (on the famous night when Byron, the Shelleys & Dr Polidori told each other ghost stories & Mary Shelley had the nightmare that resulted in her writing Frankenstein) is true. I can't tell what seized him for he don't want courage. He was once with me in a gale of Wind, in a small boat, right under the rocks between Meillerie and St Gingo. ... The sail was mismanaged, and the boat was filling fast. He can't swim. I stripped off my coat - made him strip off his and take hold of an oar, telling him that I thought (being an expert swimmer) I could save him, if he would not struggle when I took hold of him ... He answered me with the greatest coolness, that 'he had no notion of being saved, and that I would have enough to do to save myself, and begged not to trouble me.' Luckily, the boat righted, and, baling, we got round a point into St Gingo ... 
And yet the same Shelley, who was as cool as it was possible to be in such circumstances ... certainly had the fit of phantasy which Polidori describes, though not exactly as he describes it.
15 May 1819

To John Murray,

Dear Murray,
I have been thinking over our late correspondence, and wish to propose to you the following articles for our future:-
1stly That you shall write to me of yourself, of the health, wealth, and welfare of all friends; but of me (quoad me) little or nothing.
2dly That you shall send me Soda powders, tooth-powder, tooth-brushes, or any such anti-odontalgic or chemical articles, as heretofore, ad libitum, upon being re-imbursed for the same.
3dly that you shall not send me any modern, or (as they are called) new, publications in English whatsoever, save and excepting any writing, prose or verse, of (or reasonably presumed to be of) Walter Scott, Crabbe, Moore ... or any especial single work of fancy, which is thought to be of considerable merit. ...
5thly That you send me no opinions whatsoever, whether good, bad, or indifferent, of yourself, or your friends, or others, concerning any work, or works, of mine, past, present, or to come.
24 September 1821

This edition is a reprint of the 1933 selection of the Letters by R G Howarth. Byron's Letters were originally collected & published by Thomas Moore, who deleted some material considered too shocking or embarrassing for publication, replacing the offending words with asterisks. It wasn't until Leslie Marchand's 12 volume Collected Letters was published in the 1970s, that an unexpurgated edition was available.

Thank you to Mike Walmer for sending me a review copy.

Letters to a Friend - Winifred Holtby

Winifred Holtby is mostly known these days for her final novel, South Riding, which was adapted for television a few years ago. Building on the success of the series, Virago have also reprinted several of her novels, including Anderby Wold. Another novel, The Crowded Street, is in print from Persephone. Thirty years ago, Holtby was probably best known as the friend of Vera Brittain. She featured in Brittain's memoir, Testament of Youth (also adapted for television) & Vera wrote a biography of Winifred, Testament of Friendship, after her early death in 1935 at the age of only 37. Letters to a Friend was first published in 1937 & comprises the letters Winifred wrote to her friend, Jean McWilliam, headmistress of a school in Pretoria.

Winifred Holtby joined the WAAC, the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps in 1918. She was posted to Huchenneville in France as hostel forewoman of a Signals unit. There she met Jean McWilliam, who was the Administrator of the unit & the two became friends. They referred to each other as Rosalind (Jean) & Celia (Winifred) after the cousins in Shakespeare's As You Like It & the correspondence begins in 1920 when Winifred is at Somerville College, Oxford & Jean is teaching in South Africa.

After leaving Oxford, Winifred & Vera Brittain decide to live in London & make a living as writers & teachers. They are also both members of the League of Nations Union (the precursor to the United Nations) & do a lot of unpaid lecturing for the cause. Gradually, Winifred becomes sought after as a teacher & as a journalist. Teaching is a way to pay the bills & she never commits herself to a full time post. Writing is her first love, even when she's discouraged by the difficulties of writing fiction compared to the realities. Her first novel, Anderby Wold, is published but she suffers from the feeling that the book isn't nearly as good as her imaginings while she was writing it. This is a theme of her work as a novelist. Her journalism is published in leading newspapers, including the Manchester Guardian & periodicals such as the feminist weekly, Time and Tide.

Winifred's letters are full of her busy professional life but the overwhelming theme to me was her generosity. She never seems to say no to sitting on a committee, tutoring young women wanting to go to Oxford, doing endless unpaid work for the League of Nations Union & helping anyone in need, from a young returned soldier needing money for his apprenticeship, to a young woman who came to visit her asking for advice because she identified so strongly with Muriel, the protagonist of The Crowded Street . Her family were in Yorkshire & several times she goes home to help in a crisis. Her formidable mother, Alice, was elected as the first woman alderman in Yorkshire & was the model for Mrs Beddows in South Riding.

Above all, the letters are funny. I have post-it notes sticking out all over my copy with passages I want to quote but I don't want this review to be almost as long as the book so I'll just mention a few. This scene is straight out of Barbara Pym's novel, Excellent Women. Doesn't it remind you of the scene when Mildred goes to hear Everard & Helena lecture to the Learned Society?

The Royal Asiatic Society has At Homes in a big library, where you stand round a table in company with scholars and missionaries, and nice, brainless-looking peers who have been to India, and their wives and daughters and sisters. And nobody knows anybody else very well, and everybody seems to cherish a secret suspicion that somebody else is going to eat all the tea first, which would make them inclined to be rude and snatch seed cake from their neighbours, if they weren't at the same time aware that their neighbour might be a celebrity. As an audience, it is sticky. As a tea-fight, it is greedy, unsociable, and a little more undecorative than usual.
January 21st, 1923

Planning a trip to South Africa to visit Jean, Winifred's constant contriving about clothes (one of the delights of the letters) threatens to derail the whole trip.

But I had a horrid shock the other day, reading in the Lady or something an article about South African fashions. ... ' We dress for eleven o'clock tea as for a garden party, and wear full evening dress for dinner every night.' For the Lord's sake, Rosalind, tell me it isn't true. I have exactly one evening dress.It has been dyed and twice renovated. It's already in pieces and I'm spending my autumn dress money on going to the Assembly (of the League of Nations Union) in Geneva again. I thought it might be more useful. This is horrible. Do write and reassure me or I shall paint myself with woad and wear nothing but your feather stole.
August 5th, 1925

Here she's working on her novel, The Land of Green Ginger.

It is queer how one goes on making the better acquaintance with one's characters, just as though they were people. I could no more make mine do what I want them to do, once I have created them, than I could make you do something. They seem to have a complete individual life, and I could follow every word and action and thought of theirs during a whole day if that were artistically possible. The only difficulty is to know what bits to choose and what to leave out. Novel-writing is not creation, it is selection.
October 6th, 1926

The letters were mostly written from 1920-1926. They continue sporadically for the last years of Winifred's life but the friendship seemed to peter out as Winifred grew busier & the sympathy between them lessened. In Marion Shaw's biography of Winifred, The Clear Stream, it's suggested that this volume, edited by Jean & Alice Holtby, was an attempt to regain some control of Winifred's memory from Vera Brittain. Vera had seen South Riding through the press after Winifred's death, against Mrs Holtby's wishes as she was unhappy with her portrayal as Mrs Beddows &, of course, Vera was writing her own account of Winifred's life. No matter how it came about, Letters to a Friend is an absorbing account of a young woman working in London in the 1920s. I loved all the domestic details of Winifred's life as well as the journeys she took & the funny stories she tells of her adventures in the schoolroom & on the lecture platform. I'm so pleased that it has been reprinted.

Mike Walmer kindly sent me Letters to a Friend for review. It's the first in his Belles-Lettres series & I'm looking forward to seeing what other gems he includes in the list.

I Pose - Stella Benson

I Pose was Stella Benson's first novel & it was reviewed with great acclaim when it was published in 1915. Posing is one of the main themes of the novel. The two main characters, known only as the gardener & the suffragette, spend most of the novel striking different poses. The narrator often interjects to point out these poses & to tell the reader not to take it all too seriously. I found it an odd book but I could not stop reading it. I became very fond of both the gardener & the suffragette & I wanted to find out what happened to them.

The gardener lives in a boarding house. He has very little money, doesn't seem to have a job & carries around a nasturtium called Hilda. He speaks in riddles & tries on different poses but is easily nonplussed by Courtesy, a confident young woman who lives in the same boarding house & can show him how to retie a broken bootlace. One day the gardener sets out to walk with no real destination in mind. As he grandly says to his landlady, Miss Shakespeare, who asks him for his rent,

"I have left everything I have as hostages with fate," said the gardener. "When I get tired of Paradise, I'll come back."

He meets Samuel Rust, who owns the Red Place, a hotel in the middle of nowhere. The hotel hasn't been much of a success because Mr Rust needs a little capital for advertising. His mother has capital but won't give it to him. Mr Rust asks the gardener to go on the same cruise as his mother & convince her to give him the money he needs. As the gardener has no money & no prospects, he agrees. He first meets the suffragette as she plans to burn down the Red Place as a publicity stunt for the Cause. She hopes that a Cabinet Minister may be staying there but she will burn it down anyway.

The gardener is determined to stop her & ends by practically kidnapping her & taking her on board the Caribbeania, where he is to meet Mrs Rust, & telling everyone she's his wife. Courtesy is also on board, reluctantly being sent out to the Trinity Islands on a husband-hunting expedition. On the voyage, it soon becomes apparent that the gardener & the suffragette are not married (mostly because the suffragette refuses to lie) & they are shunned by the more easily shockable passengers, including a priest who tries to save the suffragette. Unfortunately he's self-serving & hypocritical & the suffragette shocks him every time she opens her mouth as she prides herself on only speaking the truth (another pose).

The gardener becomes acquainted with Mrs Rust, a peculiar woman with bright red hair who is contradictory for the sake of it. I love this scene between Mrs Rust & the priest.

"Have you made the acquaintance of that dark young man who acts as the ship's gardener?" he asked.
"An excellent young man," said Mrs Rust, immediately divining that the priest did not approve of him.
"Yerce, yerce, no doubt an excellent young man," agreed the priest mechanically. "But I have reason to believe that his morals are not satisfactory."
"Good." said Mrs Rust.
"I do not think he is really married to that aggressive young woman he calls his wife."
"Good." said Mrs Rust. She did not approve of such irregularities any more than the priest did, but she disapproved of disapprobation.

The gardener soon has Mrs Rust's measure & plays her at her own game, contradicting her so that she will decide to do the opposite of what she intended. When Mrs Rust's companion throws herself overboard, Courtesy is employed as her companion & they have quite a battle of wills. When they arrive on the Islands, they become involved in local life. The gardener saves a couple of children from death in an earthquake & the suffragette becomes involved with a precocious little boy called Albert & his prim aunt. All this time, the gardener is falling in love with the suffragette but she has decided that love is not for her & she keeps up her pose of self-sufficiency & devotion to the cause. Eventually they sail back to England with their relationship still undefined & the reader is left in doubt until the end as to what will happen. It seems odd to care about two characters with no names but I did care what happened to them both which is a testament to Stella Benson's skill at creating characters that, for all their poses, are very sympathetic. They're not the stereotypes they could have been, especially the suffragette, who could have been a cardboard cutout of the militant suffragette but is much more nuanced than that.

Benson obviously enjoyed playing with the structure of the novel when she wrote I Pose. Apart from not naming her principal characters, the first chapter is 300pp long. The second (& final) chapter is 8pp long. The narrator interjects into the narrative all the time, explaining the odd time shifts of her world, reassuring the reader that she understands their frustration with this character or that, making snide comments about the less sympathetic characters, especially the priest who is the most unchristian priest I've encountered in a novel since Trollope, I think.

Some readers will be offended by the treatment of the Trinity Islanders which is condescending & quite racist. I found it made uncomfortable reading but it was in keeping with the times in which the novel was written. I was also confused as to where the Trinity Islands were. In a sense, it doesn't matter because the whole novel is a fantasy but I felt the Islanders were West Indian or Caribbean (maybe I was influenced by the name of the ship) but their voyage home takes them though Suez & past the Azores so I suppose they must be in the Indian or Pacific Oceans. This is a minor point but I was confused. Then again, geography is not my strong point.

I enjoyed I Pose very much as an unusual, witty novel that has been out of print for far too long. It was sent to me by Michael Walmer, who is reprinting some fascinating novels, mostly of the late Victorian & Edwardian periods. I reviewed Ada Leverson's The Twelfth Hour a few months ago & I'm very excited about Mike's new series of letters, diaries, journals & essays. The first to be published is Winifred Holtby's Letters to a Friend. Holtby's letters to Jean McWilliam, who she met when they both served in the WAAC at the end of WWI. My review copy is on its way!

More new arrivals

More lovely books have arrived in the last couple of weeks. Lots of preorders coming home to roost as well as some surprises that I had no intention of buying but I couldn't resist such bargains. With Christmas just around the corner, I had to have this lovely anthology from Vintage, Round the Christmas Fire. There are some lovely treats such as ghost stories by Edith Wharton & M R James, diary entries from Francis Kilvert & Adrian Mole, extracts from Nancy Mitford's Christmas Pudding & Jeeves & the Yuletide spirit by P G Wodehouse. I've decided to make it my Advent treat & read one story every day. A lot less fattening than chocolate.
Period Piece by Gwen Raverat is the latest memoir to get the gorgeous Slightly Foxed treatment & the binding is a beautifully Christmassy red. I love the Slightly Foxed Editions & have collected them all. I read Period Piece many years ago & loved it. Raverat was a member of the lovably eccentric Darwin family & this recollection of a Cambridge childhood is just glorious. Funny, witty & illustrated by the author. If you've never read it, you're in for a treat, perfect Christmas holiday reading.

Virago have been adding to their Modern Classics with the Emily books by L M Montgomery. I've only read the first Anne book but these looked so lovely & many people prefer the Emily books to Anne so I'm looking forward to reading them.

Angela Thirkell is another new addition to the VMC list & I love the beautiful covers of these reprints. Pomfret Towers & Christmas at High Rising have just been published & there are three more to look forward to next year. Desperate Reader has devoured them already & you can read her enthusiastic reviews here & here.

Lucinda Hawksley's new biography of Princess Louise, daughter of Queen Victoria, has received some press coverage due to the scandalous revelations of illegitimate births & love affairs. I've always been interested in Louise who seems to have been quite the rebel, an artist & sculptor who seems to have led a life far removed from that of most royal women. Lucinda Hawksley's previous biographies of Lizzie Siddal & Katey Dickens were excellent & I can't wait to read this one.

I was contacted by Michael Walmer, a publisher who is reprinting late Victorian/Edwardian books that have been overlooked by the other reprint houses. Simon at Stuck in a Book thought I might be interested as Michael is based in South Australia. Well, I was interested & Michael has kindly sent me two books for review, I Pose by Stella Benson, which Simon has been enjoying & The Twelfth Hour, Ada Leverson's first novel. The books are POD but are excellent quality. The covers are attractive & the fonts look like the originals. I'm looking forward to reading them both.

Now, the books I couldn't resist. My favourite remainders bookshop, Clouston & Hall, had a Special Selection of OUP World's Classics. At about $8 each, I wasn't going to refuse to look through the list, obviously. I've read the Willa Cathers before but it was many years ago & I'd like to reread them & I can't do that if I don't own copies, can I? I also bought The Paston Letters (I have Helen Castor's book on the Pastons, Blood & Roses, on the tbr shelves so this is an essential companion read), The Italian by Ann Radcliffe, A Sentimental Journey by Laurence Sterne, Gwyn Jones's History of the Vikings, Polidori's The Vampyre, & Dickens's Sketches of Young Gentlemen & Young Couples which is an early work reprinted last year for the Bicentenary. Luckily I'd read lots of the books on offer or I could have spent much more!