Human Voices by Penelope Fitzgerald - the BBC in the War

When you read a novel like this it reminds you that a novel can do all sorts of things. It consists of characters interacting, usually. Usually, there is a main character whose sensibility is made clear to the reader or several such characters, and things happen to the characters and they change, possibly.

I am not sure this book is about any of the characters, who are employed by the BBC in the war. There are young women who act as assistants in the department of a middle-aged man, Sam, who is brilliant but not aware as he is obsessed with the technical difficulties of recording outside broadcasts. He never seems to go home. "Pacing to and fro like a bear astray, in a grove of the BBC's pale furniture... He wore a tweed jacket, grey trousers and one of the BBC's frightful house ties... Much of the room was taken up with a bank of turntables and a cupboard full of clean shirts." He likes holding the hands of the female assistants and telling them his troubles (his obsession with recording the life of the nation, the human voice) and he goes to sleep with his head on Vi's shoulder. Vi is the most reliable of the young girl assistants.

 He has a friend, Jeff, who is the Director of programme planning and is under terrible stress. We first meet him drinking double whiskies in the BBC canteen. He is described like this: "His face, with its dark eyebrows, like a comedian's but one who had to be taken seriously, was the best known in the BBC... DPP was homeless, in the sense of having several homes, none of which he cared about more than the others. There was a room he could use at the Langham, and then there were two or three women with whom his relationship was quite unsentimental, but who were not sorry to see him when he came. He never went to his house, because his third wife was still in it."

There is a war on, London is very hazardous, and someone gets pregnant. There are young female employees worried about boyfriends in the forces, and male employees waiting to be called up. They spend the day chatting, of course they do, and gossiping.

Broadcasting House in Langham Place

The BBC, in this novel, is sometimes a single entity. "The BBC knew that for a fact." It is housed in a building that looks like a ship, a great cruise liner.

Jeff, early in the novel, finds that his place at the BBC is liable to a re-shuffle, and he may be sent out of London, because he is invited to welcome a French general who wants to address the British nation, and surmising that the General wants to tell Britain to give up fighting the Germans, pulls the plugs on him, so the nation hears 10 minutes of silence instead. In a way, his action is entirely admirable, and if the Ministry of Information or the War Office had heard the French General's address they might well have stepped in to control the BBC themselves, which they never did.

"The BBC, in the face of the grave doubts of the Services, persisted obstinately in telling the truth in their own way."

But the Ministries want to blame Jeff for stepping in and pulling the plugs without any consultation with anyone.

"The BBC loyally defended their own. As a cross between a civil service, a powerful moral force, and an amateur theatrical company that wasn't too sure where next week's money was coming from, they had several different kinds of language, and could guarantee to come out best from almost any discussion. Determined to go on doing what they thought best without official interference, ..."

The Assistant Deputy Director-General feels that Jeff's nerves have been strained by planning the whole of the Home and the Forces Programming, and suggests he reads Cranford to soothe himself to sleep every night. "The whole notion was comforting, but in fact Jeff had never been nervous and was now arguably the calmest person in the whole building."

(It's strange to think that Hyde Park was full of young people lounging about, (as usual) specifically the Free French, who came in two groups which fought with each other, and at the same time there was an anti-aircraft battery there.)

Sam is furious with Jeff for not getting a recording of the General for the archives. All the political stuff passes him by. He's worried about the Archives - they have no recordings of Stukas, for example. Jeff has no secretary which allows him to ignore half his correspondence as not worth a reply.

I found myself researching to find out who might have been the original for "Jeff", but I found nothing. 

On the trail, in "Broadcasts from the Blitz" I find: 

"On the afternoon of September 7, 1940, nearly a thousand German planes, bombers escorted by fighters, darkened the skies over London. After a two-hour attack, another wave arrived. The principal targets were the docks along the Thames, and the Ministry of Home Security reported that 430 persons were killed and 1,600 were badly injured...

...For the next fifty-seven nights, London was hit again and again. For a while, the bombers came by day as well, but the Royal Air Force destroyed so many planes by daytime that by October a day-time raid was a rarity. When darkness fell, however, London was blasted. London had been heavily bombed earlier,...It was the relentlessness of the blitz that set it apart. It was the real test of Britain's ability to stand alone and survive. An estimated 20,000 tons of high explosive were dropped on London within nine months."

Quantities of metal beds are brought into the concert hall, which becomes a dormitory for staff who never go home, and tickets are issued to staff who need a bed for the night. People of all grades climb on each other's bunks. The snoring echoes off the walls.

You find first-hand descriptions of this here.

Here is the most beautiful paragraph in the novel, and indeed, in most books there are no paragraphs as beautiful.

As an institution that could not tell a lie, they were unique in the contrivances of gods and men since the Oracle of Delphi. As office managers, they were no more than adequate, but now, as autumn approached, with the exiles [the French, the Poles, the Czechs etc] crowded awkwardly into their new sections, they were broadcasting in the strictest sense of the word, scattering human voices into the darkness of Europe, in the certainty that more than half must be lost, some for the rook, some for the crow, for the sake of a few that made their mark. And everyone who worked there, bitterly complaining about the short-sightedness of their colleagues, the vanity of the newsreaders, the remoteness of the Controllers and the restrictive nature of the canteen's one teaspoon, felt a certain pride which they had no way to express, either then or since.

This comes about halfway through the novel. After this, a new character is introduced, and there is a romance. But before this romance, the novel is about a lowly BBC employee's view of London in wartime and it is a portrait of an organisation, which is unusual for a novel, and has that light, masterly touch one sometimes finds in Graham Greene or Muriel Spark.

There are two literary allusions which come to the surface right at the end of the novel. One is about Shakespeare's The Tempest, which had me casting about trying to see the novel as a reworking of the story of Prospero and Aerial, and the other is an allusion to T.S. Eliot - the main character says that Eliot (he knows him by sight) walks "in measure, like a dancer" and the title  of the book is from one of his great poems:

I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each

I do not think they will sing to me

I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

In 1945 it had been bombed a few times and patched up.

There is also an American character called Mac, who broadcasts to the US, telling the Amercians how the English behave in the Blitz, and it is possible to cast him as Aerial, because of the way he magically turns up scattering oranges and cheeses amongst the staff, going on air to evoke the scenes of ravaged London, even broadcasting the sound of the bombing from the roof of the BBC, and breezes out again - and this made me research the BBC during the war. There was a famous young US broadcaster called Ed Murrow, who played this role in the Blitz, but he wasn't the only one, and Murrow actually lived in London for a couple of years before the war, so he didn't "fly in" the way this character does.
You can hear one of Ed Murrow's broadcasts on the BBC page here
Another possibility for the original of Mac is Quentin Reynolds.

Big Sky a novel by Kate Atkinson

These novels are like boxes of chocolates for me - I consume them horribly quickly but I enjoy them so much!

Kate is still torturing Jackson Bodie (her fictional protagonist). Reasons Jackson (a private detective) has to be not at all cheerful:

• When he was a child his beloved older sister was murdered.
• When he was a child his older brother killed himself (hanging) and Jackson found the body.
• His parents were quite grim, one gathers. He had a spartan upbringing. (only two outfits, one his school uniform). Actually, he sounds contemporary with Alan Bennet and he is supposed to be younger. I don't know how old he's meant to be.
• He was in the army which one supposes was not all roses but where did he go? Northern Ireland? Kosovo? Iraq?
• He was in the police and no doubt dealt with horrible accidents and people not at their very best.
• His first wife left him and took their daughter, whom Jackson loves, to New Zealand. I think it was NZ. In Kate's books people are always hiving off to New Zealand as though it is a pleasant limbo she can park them in.
• His first wife was very critical of Jackson and it is hard to tell why.
• He met and loved a witty actress called Julia. She got pregnant with his baby and didn't tell him until the baby was a child, so he missed out on a lot of years with this boy. I have no idea why Julia is so rotten to Jackson and why he forgives her. 
• He was in a train crash and died, but was resuscitated.
• He suddenly got rich, but was briefly married to a woman who stole all his money and scarpered. He must be a really hopeless detective otherwise he'd have been wise to her.
• In one book he was beaten up and put into a dustbin.
• He loved a Scottish policewoman called Louise, but because Jackson operates quite obliquely to the law - he's more of a vigilante though he'd hate you for saying so - he felt they had no future, because he wouldn't have been able to tell her all the things he does. But he still thinks about her.
• Julia is endlessly sarcastic to Jackson and he has internalised her mocking voice, so he mocks himself all the time. Never has a moment to feel content or manly pride. 
• Jackson's son is fifteen, terribly boring and terribly bored. Jackson loves him.
• Just as Julia takes over control of Nathan the son, paying for his education, she also takes a large stake in the dog! Jackson isn't even top dog with the dog. 

So I worry about Jackson Brodie as a man who is honest, does manly things and loves his children and saves lives, but no-one appreciates him at all. Even when he saves a boy from drowning the boy is too gauche to say thanks. His main hope is to protect the people he loves, and his secondary hope is to protect complete strangers from disaster. He survives alone but he'd much rather be with Julia or Louise, so from that point of view he's incomplete - lonely.

You wonder, if men are so stoical and unappreciated, (and Jackson is not the only one in the book, there is also a character called Vince whose wife chucks him out, claiming the marital home) how long can we carry on with a society that isn't delivering fulfilment for so many of its people? These men are lost.

The plot is really good in this book, and there are plenty of interesting characters, and lots of amusement to be had from them. I also like the setting in the North East of England, by the coast there, although it's not an area I'm in any hurry to go back to but my mum loved it and went on many a coach trip from Harrogate.

The plot concerns sex trafficking and child abuse. There are a few survivors of child abuse in the book, and they are not unmarked by it, I am sure, but only one of them looks like a victim. The other two are resilient, which is not to say that they aren't damaged, but they are not defined by their histories. It reminded me that I saw an interview with Germaine Greer where she describes how she was raped back in the day in Australia, and she says, yes, it's bad, but it won't ruin your life unless you let it, you have to be resilient. I liked that.

As well as some creeps in the trafficking trade and some paedophiles, and the luckless Jackson and the luckless Vince... there is a male character who seems good, resourceful and sensitive. He is a schoolboy. I think the character of Harry is the light of hope in the very dark story. Meanwhile, his kid sister is kitted out in sugar pink and Disney outfits, and it makes you think, why have we dreamed up this ridiculous travesty of femininity? Is this a fetish? While the child's mother, in her kit, goes for the whole Love Island look, it's just a kind of disguise. Underneath, she is practising martial arts, clean eating and keeping her secrets.

At one point though, Kate Atkinson goes partisan for remain. It's quite near the end of the book where she sizes up a character and says I bet he/or she voted leave, and it's someone quite horrible, and I thought, ooooh, you're alienating some of your audience there probably. I mean, not everyone who reads K.A. voted remain, surely? You just can't tell who voted leave. What a terrible divisive sword it has been.

P.s. In last week's Times Saturday Magazine there was this rather idiotic American man who made a big fetish of his fitness and his "biohacks" - even injecting stem cells into his penis and trying to lift weights with his manly thing. But right at the end of the article, just as you were despairing of the sheer narcissism and waste of it all, he said that his fans are starting to ask him advice about life rather than fitness. They ask him "How do I pray?" How do I have meals with my family?" and "What is all this for?" And he wonders, maybe fitness is something you concentrate on to block the fact that your life has no meaning. I was stunned that he had mentioned this because it was not in his interests at all: but he just offered it up as a possibility. But yeah.

Jackson Brodie goes running, and he quite enjoys it. He puts his music in his ears and runs into the wind. There's not so much narcissism in that.

Alan Bennett - Untold Stories

I have read this book before but I think I skipped the diaries as they made me feel so cast down. There is a downbeat note to them. A dying fall. I love his writing in that it's well structured and elegant, I seem to agree with his sentiments quite consistently, but the way he writes is not cheering. I feel as though my head has been buried in a vat of mud. He is brave though, in that he confronts, amongst other things, the awfulness of our old people's homes. His latest play is set in such a home and I think I should go and see it. Perhaps he has changed his mind about such places.

Untold Stories begins with an account of Bennett's mother's mental illness - delusions caused by depression. I suppose such a frank account is rare. My daughter is about to spend a year studying psychiatric illness and medicine and it is on the reading list supplied by the medical school. I think it will also help her to understand what kind of mindset older people may have: that is: they may not have travelled much, have very modest aspirations, be very suspicious of new and foreign things, and yet make a big deal of themselves, express strong pride in their family, their hometown, the people they know.

Earthly Possessions by Anne Tyler

I particularly liked this novel when I first read it, and it has stayed with me for thirty years, and I have just re-read it - it is sparser than I remembered it. It seems to me to have some messages. 

First, there's the folly of having fixed ideas about people. The mother in the book has such fixed ideas about her own child that she thinks that she's taken the wrong baby home from the hospital. I am not sure whether we are to believe that the main character, Charlotte, is the wrong child. She is tall, thin and dark haired, and her mother is blond and very, very fat. Her mother tells her that her own baby just slipped out, whereas Charlotte had a forceps mark on her face. Yet Charlotte knows that her parents love her. All her childhood she believes that she is the wrong child in the unhappy house, living the wrong life. She wants to get away; to escape.

Charlotte wants to be able to be sure that her own child is her own.

Our daughter was born June2 1961, and the Clarion County Hospital, where I refused all anaesthesia including aspirin so I could be absolutely sure nobody mixed her up with any other baby. We named her Catherine. She had fair skin and light brown hair, but her face was Saul's.

From the first, it was clear she was bright. She did everything early: sitting, crawling, walking. She put short words together before she was one, and not much later began to tell herself long secret stories at Bedtime. When she was two, she invented a playmate named Selinda. I knew that was normal, and didn't worry about it. I apologized when I stepped on Selinda's toes, and set a place for her at every meal. But after a while, Catherine moved to Selinda's place and left her own place empty. She said she had a friend called Catherine none of us could see. Eventually she stopped talking about Catherine. We seemed to be left with Selinda. We have had Selinda with us ever since. Now that I think of it, I might as well have taken that anaesthesia after all. 

Now, you might think that is just how it is, but actually it is one of the themes of the book - people from the very start are invested with a feeling about their own character, and they make themselves up, often in ways that startle or disappoint their parents.

But while I am thinking about it, parents also make themselves up, invent themselves in ways that startle and disappoint their children! One crucial character is Charlotte's mother-in-law, Alberta. As a child, Charlotte loves the way that Alberta invests her life with drama. Eventually, Alberta runs away with her own father-in-law, and the family next door - four wayward boys - breaks up. When one of the boys, Saul, comes back, he rents a room with Charlotte and her mama. And falls in love with, and marries Charlotte. They live in Charlotte's huge childhood home, with Alberta's furniture as well as their own. Saul forbids Charlotte to get rid of his mother's furniture. One after another, his brothers come back, and live with them, they have Selinda, and then they have a baby orphan to stay. Charlotte does not expect to hang onto Jiggs (the child) but she loves him unreservedly.

These are the Earthly Possessions of the title. Things we hang onto, ideas we hang onto. Our children are not our possessions. They are ours to love as long as they want to stay. The theme of adoption - either formal or informal - usually informal - is one of Anne Tyler's strongest - her struggle to understand it.

Charlotte retains the idea that she might run away for far too long. But she doesn't try to hang onto other things - she lets Catherine become Selinda. She lets Saul become a preacher, although she doesn't believe in religion. She lets other people come and stay in their home. They see her smiling, as though amused. She's holding on lightly to this life that she believes isn't really hers.

Charlotte has these special circumstances - the chances are good that she was the wrong child - but her attitude is rather like a model for us all. She accepts - perhaps welcomes - the people who come and go, she doesn't try to hang onto them. Her childhood had been lonely and unhappy, but her adulthood is not. Other reviewers think she is unhappy with Saul, because she doesn't understand him, but I think she isn't. I think she doesn't mind the distance between them. 

The story of Charlotte's life alternates with scenes in which she is riding along in a stolen car with a bank robber - she's the hostage. But of course, it's not that simple. The bank robber isn't all that clever, and is very unsuccessful at his criminal career, and the traveling Charlotte does, in the end, is at gun point through areas that are depressed and out of the way. Like all the other people in her life but one, he seems to end up needing her. 

John Updike reviewed the novel in The New Yorker: "Anne Tyler, in her seventh novel, 'Earthly Possessions', continues to demonstrate a remarkable talent and, for a writer of her acuity, an unusual temperament....Small towns and pinched minds hold room enough for her; she is at peace in the semi-countrified, semi-plasticized northern-Southern America where she and her characters live. Out of this peace flow her unmistakable strengths—serene firm tone; her smoothly spun plots; her apparently inexhaustible access to the personalities of her imagining; her infectious delight in “the smell of beautiful, everyday life”; her lack of any trace of intellectual or political condescension—and her one possible weakness: a tendency to leave the reader just where she found him....Charlotte Emory...belongs to what is becoming a familiar class of Anne Tyler heroines: women admirably active in the details of living yet alarmingly passive in the large curve of their lives—riders on male-generated events, who nevertheless give those events a certain blessing, a certain feasibility."^[3]

Yes, Charlotte is passive, but she makes a reasonable contribution to the town of Clarion. One of the things she does is continue her father's business of portrait photography. 

She takes pictures of people without seeming to care how they sit or how they look and she captures some quality of drama or self-realisation in the moment of improvising something, that her father couldn't, because his ideas of photography and how people wanted to be represented, were very fixed. Charlotte says she sees them upside-down in the old camera lens - she sees them wrongly, and she knows it, and she doesn't care too much. One feels, without being told, that some of her pictures are masterpieces, artistic in a non-artistic way, a complete collaboration between sitter and photographer.

Passivity is not her trait only - the kidnapper also quotes his old friend:

"Like I told Oliver: I don't plan it like this. Events get out of my control. But Oliver, oh, he could be such a smart-ass. "Your whole life is out of your control", that's what Oliver said. "Your whole life." Smart-ass."

Now, how many people can say they have their whole life under their control? That they are never going to wake up and find they have been laid-off, or that their spouse has got Parkinson's, that their child has had an accident in a car, or that their best friend is suffering from a crippling depression? Well, I don't think anyone can say that.  Some of your life is under your control - that's all that you can say. 

Then there's that fact that in our actions and our choices, we respond to the events and the personalities of our childhood. Is that having control of your life? You don't even know you're doing it until some psychologist points it out to you.

(Anne Tyler makes you think.)

But in the book, Jake, the robber, is very little in control of his life, so you could say he is just as passive as the female protagonist, Charlotte. She is tied to her father and her mother by bonds of love, then tied to her husband and children by the same.  This is what holds societies together, but out of his far-seeing masculinity John Updike judges her harshly for this. Saul doesn't, though. He knows Charlotte. When interviewed he says, "My wife is a good woman." What confuses him is that she is not a Christian. She hasn't handed her life over to Christ. Her love is acted in the here and now, for her fat fat helpless mother, (acting mother) her picky father so set in his ways, and all the other people who fall into her life and need some nourishment. Even Saul himself. His need of her is (in part) what she responds to. (She also fancies him crazily.) He needs her because his mother ran away. Amos gets his revenge by being the one who always leaves. Saul re-runs his childhood life as an adult with Charlotte and with her help, tries to make it work out better this time. 

So I have read a load of responses to this novel on Amazon, for example, saying: "I didn't like the people. They were old-fashioned." 2 stars. "This isn't one of her best". And I think - actually, this is the most boiled down of her books, it tells all her themes quite brilliantly. 

But I found Jake and Mindy quite dull. Poor old Charlotte having to go on a trip with such a hopeless pair!! But the people who travel don't have all the stories, nor the best stories, maybe.

And remember, "We are travelling, travelling, all our lives. We couldn't stop if we tried."

Do No Harm by Henry Marsh

Impossible not to read this book at a canter. Each chapter is headed by a different kind of tumour or other trouble that the surgeon might have to deal with - including hubris!

Some of the chapters are about operations that go fairly well, and Marsh describes the miroscopic equipment he uses and how he uses it, but they are also about the patients and their expectations and the medical team and the relationship they have with the senior surgeon - the teaching Q and A. He describes the catastrophic results of a brain bleed or a careless cut. He describes risky operations that can only add a few weeks or months to patients lives, because brain tumours grow back.

In this book we understand that Marsh is highly skilled and has a good reputation, but he also tells us that he has wrecked people, who remain alive in a vegatative state. Knowing this must be terrible, and he prefers not to remember and yet he writes it. Which is brave and remarkable.

He is very critical of the modern NHS which is run by managers who are quite blind to the ridiculous things they do - like sending Henry Marsh on a course to learn what empathy means. (He also had to learn about fire extinguishers, which just might be important one day). A hospital protocol on dress instructs him to remove his watch and tie, although there is no evidence that wearing these items spreads infection. It is simply undressing those self-important doctors, isn't it, to make them kowtow to the management! Because doctors used to run hospitals, and that was probably better. Now they still have a load of paperwork but probably just an audit trail. Like teachers. 


(I met a teacher at a party the other day who complained about getting all the students to write what they had done in the lesson that day and date and sign it - the dreaded diary page. We had to stop the lesson early to do that.  This teacher (also in adult ed) said she had got her students to fill the whole thing in on day one. All twelve entries, pre-signed and dated, saving time to actually teach them in the lessons thereafter. She left adult education and set up privately as the whole thing was ridiculous.)

When the doctors and nurses ran the hospitals they knew the patients on their wards. Now, it seems, the surgeon simply doesn't know where his patients are and has to go from ward to ward tracking them down. The problem is the lack of beds but the truth is that we need a huge number of beds - almost an infinity of beds because every damn person is ill with something or other* and we are all going to die. Tackling the NHS is difficult - I would start reducing the number of operations and procedures carried out on old people and I know that's controversial, but hey, we need to do that. We also ought to allow assisted dying. I digress - these are my opinions not his.

Marsh also questions how greed drives some consultants to carry out unnecessary private operations. Yet the biggest questions he raises are whether we need to perform many treatments that keep people alive, especially when it is just for a few miserable months or with extreme brain damage. He shows operations can take place because doctors and families are afraid to confront reality or hold painful discussions, and says what may seem a “successful” operation can look more like “a human disaster” several years down the line.

Henry Marsh is horribly honest about his bad temper and nasty hissy fits. He almost dares us to like him. OK, I don't like him, but I can see why he has to be that way. What he does is extraordinary. 

And Marsh, at the apotheosis of his career, writes in Admissions: “Each time I scrub up, I am frightened. Why am I continuing to inflict this on myself, when I know I can abandon neurosurgery at any time? Part of me wants to run away, but I scrub up nonetheless … I sit on a stool and lean the back of my head against the wall. I keep my gloved hands in front of my chest with palms pressed together, as though I were praying – the pose of the surgeon, waiting to operate.” Despite the astonishing, near-unimaginable nature of their job, there is evidence from the books they are now writing that surgeons experience – as the glittering career progresses and the life-prolonging operations mount up – a growing sense of humility, a particular amalgam of wonder at what they do and modesty about their achievements.

There, it is hard and frightening but he does it. And he doesn't want to stop.

*I am not ill. However, today I realised that I have recently lost my sense of smell. I couldn't even smell the Jeyes fluid I used on the plant pots today. I could sense it in the back of my throat, only. I couldn't smell roses, lavender, mint or basil. Such lovely smells! Why has it gone?

The Prometheans by Max Adams

The book is about two generations who made a huge impact on Britain. Max Adams calls them "Prometheans" on the grounds that they stole the future from the gods, as Prometheus stole fire from the gods. That's as far as the analogy goes - the men of the early 18th C were not punished for their presumptions. Both the Stephensons were remarkably gifted, so were Humphrey Davy and Michael Faraday. So were both the Brunels, although the father had the edge as he was a true visionary. Charles Babbage was a visionary too, (he is mainly famous for inventing the "difference engine" or mechanical calculator), and wrote about how industry is organised and managed, and was sociable as well as inventive. John Martin, the massively talented painter of enormous dramatic scenes, wanted to join the practical activities of the scientific community with which he mixed by improving the drains and taking away the dreadful sewage of London, and even envisaged the Underground railway (circle line). 

One of the threads of this history is a biography of the Martin brothers, of whom the youngest, John, was (as mentioned above) a painter of apocalyptic landscapes of the early nineteenth century. Some of his works can be seen in the Tate gallery and they are still thrilling to look at, with lightning, explosions, fires and huge mountains! You can buy reproductions of them at All posters and Wayfair; so I suppose he is still popular although you would need to buy a really large poster to get the full effect of his works.

Like the German Caspar Friedrich, he painted marvellous scenes of nature, but man's place amongst it is not contemplative or inspired, but afraid, or awed, and helpless. His scenes have inspired the apocalyptic effects in a number of films. He came from a poor Northern background (the same town as my mother; I wish I had told her that when we first saw his pictures in the Tate) and his mother held frightening religious beliefs, which particularly affected his brother Jonathan, who was on the edge of crazy all his life.

Whether Martin was a millenarian or not is still the subject of dispute. Certainly his eccentric brothers – collectively known as the “Mad Martins” – were, and indeed his older brother Jonathan was also genuinely mad, setting fire to York Minster and subsequently being institutionalised in St Luke’s Hospital for Lunatics. Ruthven Todd, Martin’s biographer, unearthed an advertisement from 1848 for a book on the British Israelites (a fringe group of millenarians) “with designs by John Martin”, though neither the book nor any other link has been found. On the other hand, Martin’s friend Ralph Thomas described him as a “thorough Deist” – that is someone who saw proof of God’s existence not in scripture, but in the marvellous workings of the natural world. Martin also devoted the majority of the last two decades of his life to schemes for the betterment of London, particularly its smelly and polluted river;  he made no connection in these projects to his own religious beliefs. Nor, apparently, did he disapprove of London’s industrial modernity, but thought it “the most wealthy, civilised, and enterprising city in the world”.

Whatever Martin’s private convictions – or lack of them – there was undoubtedly something in the air. Random occurrences took on portentous significance. When, in 1815, a giant volcano erupted in Indonesia, the dust cloud obliterated the following year’s entire summer, and street hawkers sold pamphlets announcing the death of the sun. Percy Bysshe Shelley and his teenage mistress Mary fled London for Geneva where they stayed with Byron (much of Mary’s novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus was written there). Also, in 1816, Martin exhibited Joshua commanding the sun to stand still upon Gibeon at the Royal Academy. Although received dubiously by the Academy’s members, the painting was a hit among the viewing public, perhaps because its depiction of the prophet, marshalling with raised arms the elemental forces that swirled about him, was a tonic for the helplessness most people felt at the time. Martin became renowned for giving his public what they wanted, and was often derided because of it. He was an accomplished printmaker, and his affordable mezzotints hung in homes all around the world. But he was never elected as a Royal Academician, and was condescended to by the artistic establishment. (John Constable called him a “painter of pantomimes”.) By and large, he rose above such sneers. There is evidence, however, that the ambitious working-class artist was conflicted about his social standing: some, such as the painter Charles Leslie whom Martin once embarrassed at a concert by hissing throughout the National Anthem, saw him as something of a radical. This was despite Martin’s close friendship with Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha and even Prince Albert, whom he reportedly received at his house in dressing gown and slippers.

Have to interrupt here and say Martin probably didn't want to sing "God save the King" because there was nothing good to say about George IV, who was vain and silly, but the  Saxe-Coburg-Gothas mentioned were men of sense. Prince Leopold was planted on the throne of Belgium and made a success of it.

Part of his popularity might be attributed to his skill at sanitising the decadent and raw products of Romantic culture. He absorbed Edmund Burke’s theory of the Sublime – that sensation of delightful terror elicited by vast, rugged vistas – and tailored it for mainstream tastes. J.M.W. Turner, fourteen years Martin’s senior and an acquaintance, though hardly a friend, achieved the critical recognition that the younger artist craved. The two men were markedly different: Martin was, by all accounts, a charismatic conversationalist and a snappy dresser; the reclusive Turner, according to Martin’s son Leopold, was “untidy; a sloven and unwashed”. 

 http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/articles/aaaargh

Another of John Martin's brother's was called William, and he was an inventor, but being a dfficult character he never received credit for any of his inventions, although one was a miners' safety lamp much better than Davy's. 

In London, John Martin and his wife Susan made friends with all the notable scientists of the time: Humphrey Davy, Michael Faraday, Wollaston, Babbage, and Marc Brunel, Isambard's father. Charles Wheatstone, who eventually invented the electric telegraph (but not Morse code) was one of the friends. I don't know if they knew other notable engineers, for example, John Rennie. They held parties and loved conversation, chess and cards. 

Here I am, thinking still about the Brunels and the tunnel under the Thames. In the National Archives at Kew I found the responses to Isambard's invitation to dinner in the tunnel in November 1827. It must have been cold! Oh well, perhaps they all had woolly underwear and good coats on. Amongst those who wrote apologies were Michael Faraday and John Martin. Faraday said he was away and never got the invitation but he would have loved to have gone. Martin said a friend arrived and he couldn't come. I should have got those letters copied because it's remarkable to see the writing. Strange to think that Brunel kept those letters somewhere in his files all his life. The occasion was his first formal dinner, and the friends he invited included these notables. He was delighted that Admiral Codrington's son - also a naval officer - accepted his invitation. Isambard had a bit of a crush on the navy, although when you think of the size and the importance of the navy at that time, perhaps that's the wrong way of describing it. Isambard was impressed by the navy. That's better. 

Other Prometheans whose activities are described are Shelley, Caroline Norton, William Godwin, (Shelley's father-in-law), Henry Brougham and the Hunts - political radicals who spoke in favour of universal manhood suffrage - these were also John Martin's politics. Marc Brunel, for one, would not have agreed with this radical stance in politics, as he had a fear of mob violence that came from his experience of the French revolution. Isambard was instrumental in putting down the Bristol riots of 1831 - he had himself enrolled as a temporary constable.

The trouble is, none of these people considered themselves Promethean, this is a theme that the author has hit upon, and the book becomes somewhat ridiculous when the author suggests that Prometheanism was a conscious choice or even a religious sect. Adams tells the story of the Swing Riots of 1830 thus:

 "At the end of August threshing machines, always seen as a threat to employment in the southern counties, began to be destroyed. It was the start of what became known as the Swing Riots, a wave of incendiary attacks and riots across southern England lasting almost until the end of the year, in which the burning of hayricks was an iconic feature. [what does iconic mean in that sentence?] The unrest led to 19 hangings, more than six hundred gaol terms and five hundred sentences of transportation. The use of arson as a weapon of protest, symbolic of revenge, destruction and cleansing, had been psychotically perfected by Jonathan Martin. [i.e. when he set York Minster on fire. Arson, apparently, is a crime than can be perfected, psychotically.] Its deliberate employment to terrorize the government  during the Swing uprising seemed now to fulfil Mary Wollstonecraft's dire prediction of the potential evils of the Promethean myth." [I think he is talking about Frankenstein's monster in the book by Mary Shelley]. 

Then "The opening of 15 September 1830 of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway was an event almost impossibly overloaded with symbolism." 

This grand opening was marred by the awful accident of Huskisson being knocked down by the Rocket, his leg severed, and dying of the injuries. What does Huskisson symbolise in that scene? The Rocket might symbolise the future power of the common man (having the freedom to travel further) and Huskisson a privileged and landed Tory, but that is rather complicated because Huskisson was on the more progressive wing of the Tory party and was in favour of Free Trade - which theoretically made food cheaper. The political power of his class wasn't knocked down by democratic forces until the next century.


Isn't this a peculiar way of writing history? It sounds as though Wellington might have remarked to George Stephenson, "I say, my man, there's too much symbolism in the air today!" and Stephenson might have said, "Aye, right enough bonnie lad. There's that mooch meaning in ut steam engine as ud turn us all into representations of oor classes."


There were amazing changes going on at that time, in science, art and politics, however, by lumping a load of different men of talent together and labelling them Promethean merely makes the story more dramatic.

"The perfection of his usefulness" - how beautiful

However, the science is well-explained by Max Adams, I think.

Eddie Izzard autobiography

I read this some time ago. But I didn't write it up because ... I think I found it very moving. I felt there was a message in it for me. 

Eddie's mother died when he was very young, which was very hard on him, and he and his brother were sent to boarding school, which was possibly very difficult at the time but also perhaps quite a blessing. I think it was harder when his father started a relationship with Kate. 

Initially, having a new stepmother who wanted things done her way was horrible and I did a lot of disagreeing. As a teenager, it certainly was not easy to follow new sets of rules, especially during holidays when my brother and I came home from school for our breaks. Dad would be at work and we would be at home, all trying to get along.

During my brother's eighteenth birthday, Kate said roughly this to us: "You've got to understand that you are a cog in the machine. As soon as you understand that, you can fit in and get on with life."

Now, that is an opinion, but there is no way that I agree with it. You could argue that some people in life end up being cogs in the machine, but I would wish them not to feel like that and not to have to live thinking that way. Lots of people work for companies, and I suppose if you are in a company, you are part of a machine. Maybe that's what she was talking about. But I was of the opinion that you should never feel like just a cog in a machine, you should always go for your dreams.

I would have said that even if I were a cog in the machine, I would like to see myself as a cog who is shooting for the stars and could go into any machine I want to and become a bigger cog or a cog shaped like a different cog. I would redefine the whole cog argument, that's what I'd do...

Kate wanted me to be an accountant. When I dropped out of university, she felt I should repay my father the money he'd spent on my education. You can see the logic behind this: so many parents tell their children, "Get a proper job, have a backup career, become an accountant, do something professional. It's too difficult being actor, or a performer, or a musician." But as I hadn't asked to go to a boarding school in the first place, I felt different.

I have a real fellow-feeling here because my father, at one time, seemed to ask that I repay him for the school fees that he paid for my junior school, which is really ridiculous.  But he thought that anyone who loved him should give him money. He had always asked his mother for money and she had nearly always come good.  But after he left us he couldn't manage to send us any money. He hadn't grown up properly. He was irresponsible and had a most convenient memory, that soon forgot how he had left us without a penny. Instead it told him that we had somehow inveigled school fees out of him.

Anyway I have told my son about the cog thing, because he may well become a cog, but I should like him to go for his dreams and I should like him to respect other people who go for their dreams, even if they don't seem to be having much success.

I am going for my dreams but I am also full of self-doubt at present - doubt about my Brunel script, whether the story is strong - like a detective I go in search of the truth, and I find the truth interesting because it is true, but does that mean it is a good story? I can only try to make it fun and interesting and dramatic and hope I have done it. And all writing is re-writing, so I must prepare for a re-write.

People who say Goodbye by P Y Betts, and Hilary Mantel

I was looking for Victorian memoirs and couldn't find any; Perhaps Edwardian memoirs are just more popular? I ordered this one as it said it was funny; I do love a funny book. This one does not disappoint. P. Y. Betts was an indecently intelligent child who never had her originality knocked out of her which is rather surprising, but perhaps this was because her mother was the same. Throughout the book this is the central relationship - mother and daughter sizing each other up through narrowed eyes, and the mother keeping her knives very, very sharp.

Phyllis asks "What happens to you after you die?"
Mother replies "You rot."

We see the neighbourhood of Wandsworth through Phyllis's eyes. How extraordinary; there were fields at the bottom of their garden! It sounds idyllic. But up the road there's a hospital for the war wounded, across the road there's an undertaker and regular funerals, close by there's a lunatic asylum (with joyful loonies). There are sudden attacks of possibly fatal illness, an incompetent doctor, but also some relatives who are made of very stern stuff and seem capable of living for ever. I wish Phyllis had written more.

Another review here

I have also just read Hilary Mantel's book "Giving up the Ghost" which is also a memoir but poles apart in a way. Hilary was also a clever and spirited girl, who would have liked to have been a boy, and enjoyed her grandfather's company. Her parents' troubled marriage is sensed and not explained to the child. Really, their lack of explanations is everything that's wrong with being a child. Then her school is the most backward type of provincial Catholic school which at times employed cruel and stupid teachers. I too, went to a convent school, and was so much luckier because I loved and respected my nuns, which is terribly unfashionable to say these days. Some of them were, I think, thoughtful and disciplined in a good way. Hilary concludes that being a child didn't suit her personality, and I think, yes, I understand, I was rather similar, and as I grew older I grew more able to draw the lines under and move on, which is what Hilary does. But Hilary has a medical condition which must have been such a terrible drawback to her life, as to say, my life is fine, I have a good brain and a strong spirit but I AM IN TERRIBLE PAIN IN ALL MY BODY except, she says, her ankles and feet. She even has to diagnose her own condition. She seems not to meet a single intelligent doctor, or even a concerned and caring one. The insensitivity she encounters in the medical profession is pretty appalling.

I can say that doctors have improved, even in women's medicine, and I am pretty sure that teachers have improved and are no longer allowed to do the stupid things they used to do. Although, when my neighbour was a teaching assistant, she used to tell me about young teachers who would stand up and gabble at the children without pause, not realising that the children had withdrawn their attention after the first couple of incomprehensible sentences. Young people, pah. (I don't mean this, some of you are great, but listen to yourselves!)

Hilary's book is far more ambitious, in a literary sense, she knows how to create effects that will intrigue a reader. There is a strange intuition that I get from reading Mantel's work that she thinks she knows better than we do - your "mother" is feeding you the ideas/information she thinks are suitable for you, carefully knitted into a shape which she thinks is suitable for you. PY Betts has also shaped her information into a story, but she hasn't made it to suit anyone but herself or used fancy stitches that show her knitting skills; it's just what it is, funny and sharp, and smack, there you are. They are both well worth reading. 5 stars.

Howards End: long spoiler

So if you have no idea what happens in Howards End you shouldn't read this.

I wrote this after reading the book, not watching the programme.

I am completely mystified by how Helen Schlegel and Leonard Bast had sex. One tries to figure out his attitude - did he seduce her to punish her because she had ruined his chances in life and made him look foolish? And did she go along with this because she felt guilty and wanted to give him what he wanted?

Did she take the initiative because she had always found him attractive and wanted to show him that he still had value? Did neither of them, at any point say, "hang on, this isn't a good idea."? I think she was an impulsive person, and inexperienced, but he was an experienced man and could have used caution.

Was it a rape? But if it was a rape why didn't she say so?

Anyway, in the introduction to this old Penguin edition I find that I am by no means the first in finding this very unbelievable.  The first reader was the publisher (or the publisher's reader) who said that this "episode" was "unconvincing". Forster said, "I agree with you about Helen...I hope however the public may find the book convincing on other counts."

From the intro to the Penguin: "Reader after reader, however, has expressed plain incredulity." In a long-ago Spectator review it was referred to as "Helen's extraordinary act of self-sacrifice". Percy Lubbock [who he?] thought it "rather steep". Katherine Mansfield was uncertain "whether Helen was got with child by Leonard Bast or by his fatal forgotten umbrella".

Forster said: "I did it like that out of a wish to have surprises. It has to be a surprise for Margaret, and this was best done by making it a surprise for the reader too. Too much may have been sacrificed to this."

So he could have told us that the two were attracted to each other and a romantic affair became possible (but how, really, in two people so separated by fortune and class?) but he didn't because he wanted it to be a surprise.

This seems to me to ruin the book and so I wouldn't have given it a place in the canon.  I remember thinking "The Longest Journey" was a very good book. Forster himself wrote in later life that he didn't actually care for Howards End; "not a single character in it for whom I care ... I feel pride in the achievement but cannot love it..."

He didn't enjoy writing novels: " am grinding out my novel into a contrast between money and death - the latter is truly an ally of the personal against the mechanical."
"Thought my novel very bad, but though it is pumped [sic] it's not quite as bad as I thought for the characters are conceived sincerely. Will it ever be done? A fortnight ago I should have said not, but am hopeful now... But take it all round, I've lost inspiration, and not adequately replaced it by solidity. Words are more in the foreground than they were: even these I seem writing for an audience".

The TV programme ended on a note I missed in the book. A kind of triumphant feminism - "we women are so nice; we have fixed our lives so it's all pretty and fertile and looking to the future..."  Helen wearing her hair down. Looking thrilled to have got rid of Bast (dead) and Charles (prison) so they could have a lovely time at "Howards End" rejoicing about the greenness of the hay.

My Friend Muriel by Jane Duncan

This book was first published in 1959 and it is a terrific book about sundry British people both before and after the war, and it is very romantic. There are snobbish people (of course) and spivvy untrustworthy people and solid reliable people from Scotland, Scottish being the nationality of the proudly biased writer. OK, the past was not always better, and there were clearly dark times, but it is a great book to go back to for a cheery comfort read. The books (the My Friends series) interconnect with each other, so there is some repetition, but each story focuses on a character who is different, as in, odd or strange or gifted, as though Duncan had the idea for "diversity" long before the rest of the world.

Jane Duncan wrote a fictionalised account of her own life and as such, it is particularly valuable as a record of the time she lived in.

Duncan, being meta before her time, also wrote and published books as_ Janet Sandison -- the very books that much later in the 'My Friends' series her fictionalised self writes.

In 1959, the London publishing house of MacMillan was besieged by reporters interested in a new Scottish writer. Jane Duncan was making publishing history: MacMillan had bought no less than seven of her titles in one go. Duncan had been writing for years, burning many of her efforts before anyone read them, hiding others in desk drawers and knitting baskets in her linen cupboard. Set in her childhood haunts on the Black Isle, the first of her books, My Friends The Miss Boyds, depicted Highland life at the close of the Great War. It was the first of a series of 19 Friends titles. Duncan wrote 32 books in total, including eight for children. Not one remains in print but that is about to change. Millrace Publishing, a small, independent, English publisher, is to reissue My Friends The Miss Boyds next month to mark the centenary of Duncan's birth. The story is told through the curious eyes of nine-year-old Janet Sandison, who is sharp and observant but basically ignorant of, and confused by, strange adult ways. But this is no fey depiction of Highland life. There is warmth and humour but the themes are poignant and, for their time, surprisingly frank. Duncan writes of mental illness, of sexual relationships and illegitimacy, but also of a changing world shadowed by war. There is that tinge of darkness that often marks the best of writing, a hint of fear and impermanency, a present shivering in the shadow of an uncertain future.Her books were semi-autobiographical, drawing on the places and faces of her childhood, particularly The Colony, her grandparents' home in the hills above Jemimaville, which became Reachfar in her novels. Duncan spent much of her childhood there. Her father had moved to Glasgow to become a policeman when there was not enough work on the family croft, but he retired to Jemimaville and Duncan, too, chose to spend her final years on the shores of Udale Bay. Her grave is not hard to find at Kirkmichael, where the silence is broken only by birdsong and the mournful call of distant sheep. "In memory of Jane Duncan (Elizabeth Jane Cameron). Author. Died October 1976, aged 66 years." You would think it would be the other way round, that her nom de plume, Jane Duncan, would be in brackets rather than her real name. It suggests that "author" was the dominant part of her. Death silences us all, of course. But how poignant that a woman who wrote so prolifically, in whom there was such pride, should, less than 40 years later, not have a single book left in print. Only now is she to be given another hearing.

Read more at: http://www.scotsman.com/lifestyle/culture/books/jane-duncan-may-be-out-of-print-for-40-years-but-she-is-about-to-be-heard-again-1-475990

Search for Jane Duncan's voice and what rings out clearly is how far ahead of her time she was, how she forged a strong, independent life at a time when women were not encouraged to do so. Her mother died of Asian flu when she was ten and her younger brother Jock was an infant. Jock was sent to his grandparents at The Colony but Duncan attended Lenzie Academy and stayed with her father, who policed the Renton and Alexandria areas. Her father had a housekeeper whom he would go on to marry and Duncan was very unhappy about the relationship. "She didn't like her, to the point that she wouldn't go home if this woman was there," explains Neil. "I think she would have gone to university, got away from home, as quickly as possible. "There weren't many female graduates in the 1930s. "She was a very clever woman," says Neil. "Very strong. She was very pro women and pro women fighting as equals in a man's world. A pretty indomitable character. If she got patronised, she would really go for people." 

Sadly, Clapperton [her husband] became ill with heart disease in Jamaica. Ironically, it was this that catapulted Duncan to literary fame. Worried about the cost of medical bills, she took a manuscript from the linen cupboard and sent it to a London agent. Clapperton died just after she signed her first contract and she came home to Scotland alone to face a new life. "I think she was at a low ebb when she lost Sandy," says Neil. "She was 49 and had no idea how to make a living." Materially, she had nothing. "She wasn't married and obviously had nothing to show for the relationship other than a few pieces of furniture," says Donald. Writing gave her confidence. "I think she had been quite lacking in self-esteem about her writing at the start," says Neil. "But the early ones were best sellers and I think a lot of her character came out then.  

"In terms of social issues, she did not flinch from difficult themes. When the Cameron children demanded to know why Auntie Bet didn't write a book about them, she began her series for children based on an essay they gave her. The youngest Cameron child, Ian, who was born with Down's syndrome, was a special character in these books. We take such a thing for granted now, but at that time, it was a condition people preferred not to talk about. Duncan described Ian as one of the best things to happen to their family. Seonaid remembers that, when Ian was born, her mother was very upset. Duncan came to the rescue. "My parents were told they should send Ian away, that he would hold the other three children back. It was very difficult for them to bring him up but Auntie Bet was very, very supportive and I know she helped financially so mum could get someone in to help in the house. She was very close to Ian really. She was a bit fascinated by him." Neil agrees. "She felt very strongly that Ian's life was at least as valuable as the rest of us – which it is."

She also wrote about lesbians, homosexuals, people with Asperger's or autism, and those disabled by the war. She loved the differences in people and described them in detail, with curiosity and a longing to understand.

It is here that the value of Jane Duncan's voice is underlined. You stand on the remoteness of this hill and wonder how people ever eked out a living here. "I didn't realise until I went back to read the Miss Boyds," says Donald, "what a fascinating historical document it is." There was, perhaps, a certain stiff sensitivity locally at times about the fact that Duncan's work was semi-autobiographical and some characters were recognisable. But to read of those characters now is to bring a generation back to life. "When we look for a picture of Highland life that has now gone, she presents that picture," says writer and broadcaster Carl MacDougall, author of Writing Scotland. She may have been too popular to have attracted many serious literary critics (though she was not without admirers) but, says MacDougall, "what can be overlooked in a writer like Jane Duncan is the actual craft. These novels are well written and very entertaining. I am surprised she hasn't been picked up again before now."

Read more at: http://www.scotsman.com/lifestyle/culture/books/jane-duncan-may-be-out-of-print-for-40-years-but-she-is-about-to-be-heard-again-1-475990

H G Wells - A Modern Utopia

Wells' Utopia is an alternative world but serves as an imagined future for our world. I have reached the chapter where his Utopian counterpart takes him to London. I was in the same part of London last week (Millbank) and I am able to compare what Wells wanted with what we have.

We have pleasant avenues by the sides of the Thames, but we have too many cars, and Wells didn't mention those.

London's air is dirty, which would have disappointed Wells, but the river is clean and the streets are fairly clean. We would disappoint Wells by our propensity to wear black instead of gay colours. Although you don't generally see people who are ragged or dirty, you do see some. Busking on the bridge, for example. He imagined we would wear woollen robes. It would be lovely to have woollen robes, but few people wear wool at all. Clothes now are very cheaply produced and not expected to last, so making them of wool would be a terrible waste. He imagined that in the clean air, people would often wear white.

Wells imagined that Utopian London would be heated by electricity, which is largely true, although there are also gas boilers, and the roads are sealed, which they are, and there are hardly any dogs or horses, which again is true. So he thought the city would be clean - where did he think the electricity would come from? Had he not seen a power station, burning coal?  No.

He thought everyone would be healthy, walk well, and have clear eyes and shapely bodies. Ah, well, they're not too bad, the Londoners, and in winter many of the office workers go running about in their lunch break displaying fit bodies. (In summer there are too many tourists in the way.)  However, they are all shapes and sizes, and I can't say that Londoners have good complexions, but they are not too noticeably spotty either. He thought that the Utopians would put off the years of decay. Well, that is true, in that some lucky people remain healthy until very old age, but I am beginning to see that as a matter of luck. It is true that we have learned to look after our teeth, on the whole, but having said that I heard something awful on the radio this morning  about children's teeth. - From today's Guardian -

The number of tooth extractions on children aged four and under in English hospitals has risen by almost a quarter over the past decade.

NHS data obtained by the faculty of dental surgery at the Royal College of Surgeons (RCS) shows there were 9,206 extractions within the age group in 2015-16 compared with 7,444 in 2006-07 – a 24% rise.

He said 90% of tooth decay is preventable through reducing sugar consumption, regular brushing with fluoride toothpaste and routine dental visits, but that 42% of children did not see a dentist in 2015-16 despite treatment being free for under-18s.

 So 42% of children have parents who neglect their well-being. Not much of a Utopia, is it?

Wells says - "they have extended the level years far into the seventies, and age, when it comes, comes swiftly and easily." Hahaha. Old age never comes swiftly and easily. The quicker it comes, I would judge, the more of a shock it is.

However, he does talk about "a ripe, prolonged maturity. .. a grave deliberation, to a fuller and more powerful emotion, to a broader handling of life. " This is not the case at all. The drive for novelties is something Wells never anticipated.

He says that education and training in Utopia lasts until the student is twenty years old - 18 is normal in this country although some of the courses are of questionable value. He predicts the Gap year - "then comes the travel year" "and many are still students until 24 or 25." But he concedes that at this stage young adults need to take some responsibility for themselves, but says that their lives don't start in good earnest until the age of 30.  He sees the Utopians settling down to marry at about this time, and before that they fool around with love "play", he calls it.

This is nice - "my eye is caught at once by a young negro, carrying books in his hand, a prosperous-looking, self-respecting young negro, in a trimly-cut coat of purple-blue and silver." Wells was really very unusual for his time in that he wasn't a racist but an internationalist who believed that all races would work together in one world.

He really fulminates against all the nonsense of racism, but is very longwinded.
Then he asks what other alternatives there are to his idea of synthesis of all nations to the World State. "Synthesis... does not necessarily mean fusion, nor does it mean uniformity." As one of his ironically outlined alternatives he predicts mass killings of foreign races, "race-destroying fumigations". He points out the process could go on over and over again.

Howard Jacobson - Whatever It Is, I Don't Like It, part 2, Ideas in art

In fact, I did like it, although with some reservations. This is a collection of essays written for the Observer, so they are all exactly the same length, which is long enough to allow for some anecdotes, illuminations and digressions, and they are serious in a mildly amusing way.

My main gripe is that each essay lacks a date, and a preface, explaining the circumstances that inspired it. Was Jacobson asked to write a preface (or an afterword) with the above, and any thoughts he may have had on re-reading the piece? If he wasn't asked then this failing is the publisher's fault, and if he didn't offer, or if he refused to do it, then it is his fault.

Included is a good essay called "What Things Are For" which was a response to something Tom Stoppard (the famous playwright) had said, and I had to have recourse to the Internet to find what Tom Stoppard had said, and when, in response to what. Credit to Jacobson because he does quote the nub of the argument, and goes forward to explain it and help us to see.

Stoppard made a critical speech about the Turner shortlist in 2001 - that information should have been in the non-existent preface - in which he said: "The term artist isn't intelligible to me if it doesn't entail making." Jacobson explains Stoppard isn't referring to craft and honest labour but....

******

A work not made is a work not undergone, a process of discovery and change not submitted to, revelations not revealed. Every good writer and artist will tell you that the most productive days are those which begin in ignorance and confusion, the tunnel ahead black, and not an idea in your head. Strictly speaking, ideas are your enemy. Ideas are what you had before, not where you might end up. "Never trust the artist, trust the tale," D.H. Lawrence famously wrote, meaning that an achieved work is another thing entirely from anything the artist merely wanted it to be.
The conceptual artist reverses Lawrence's dictum, in effect saying, "Never trust the art, trust the artist's intention."
In art we get beyond ourselves; here is part of the reason we value it. Marooned in the sterility of his will ... the conceptual artist fears the process of change and contradiction which is art's justification. Hence the inertness of his work when we stand before it - no trace anywhere of what else it might have been or any argument it might be having with itself. Mere insistence. Which isn't, as Stoppard reminded us, what art is for.


*******

So what did Stoppard say art is for? Can't find that. But the BBC News site says:

Stoppard made a link between the work of such artists and Marcel Duchamp, who exhibited a urinal in 1917 under the title Fountain.

He said that Duchamp's gesture had been a valid attack on the orthodoxies of the time, but that now conceptual artists were themselves an orthodoxy, championed and supported by the establishment.

Books, and Howard Jacobson

The main problem I have with Howard Jacobson is that he doesn't make me laugh, even when his books are endorsed all over with words like "hilarious" "wit" and plain "funny". This is not problem for him because lots of people find him amusing, but it is for me because I love to laugh and I feel sad about missing the joke.

 

I think it is because there is a male sense of humour that I have no access to; a snorty sort of humour based on a feeling of power and superiority, and I have never had that. Anyway, at present I am reading the collection of his column in the Independent and I knew I liked that - I like his writing. One feels he showcases his skill in the newspaper.

I am particularly taken by a column about books. What to do about one's possessions is a problem that perplexes me. If your possessions are just for you to enjoy right now, you shouldn't worry, but if you are thinking of some future time when you will enjoy your possessions you are probably barking up the wrong tree because many of your things will have deteriorated in condition - the yellowed, fading postcards or pictures, for example, and if you are thinking someone else, in future, will enjoy your possessions when you decide to pass them on, you are also barking up the wrong tree because that other person will not share your taste and will probably only take a mild and passing interest in the things you treasure so much. I am thinking about this particularly in the case of books, because of having to dispose of my mother's possessions and this included a long period of re-reading her books to see if I should keep those by a certain author, and because, although I said that my collection of books would get no bigger and I have imposed a limit, which is the number of bookshelves I already have, I have just authorized the building of three more shelves. The thing is: I have a Kindle. I do not need to buy books unless there is no electronic equivalent and by the way, I have joined The Open Library which is a library online where you can get books that are way out of date, of the kind which previously I had to order through the public library system. One does not need to go out anymore!!

So Jacobson starts by pondering a Montreux prize for a television programme displaying the strongest "human values". He wonders what these are and whether "Getting em off in Ibiza" does not show even more human values? Then he wonders if perhaps we are trying to dignify ourselves but we actually mean something more like spiritual values, or God, even. But if we say spiritual values the words are too light to actually mean anything.

So he's pondering on this while packing up his books; he's moving house. Ah, but his actual words are "relocating his library". That's how many books he has - a library, and he started collecting them from second-hand book stalls when a mere slip of a boy. And people say to you - as his father said to him "How many of those have you read?" They always say that. I remember showing someone who asked me that question a couple of books that I hadn't read. But really I was mystified by the question because I have read more books that I possess, far more. Howard says:

"How do you explain to somebody who doesn't understand that you don't build a library to read. A library is a resource. Something you go to for reference, as and when. But also somethings you simply look at, because it gives you succour, answers to some idea of who you are, or more to the point, who you would like to be, who you will be once you own every book you need to own."

That's neat, it covers the accusation of being pretentious.

He says: "... books worth owning speak to us of our humanity as vexedly as the drunk returning to his own vomit in Ibiza. [OK this is a bit stupid as no-one ever returns to their own vomit, only dogs, in the proverb. But give him some poetic licence.] It's trouble, being human. It's bad for us."

Then he says "books made a bastard out of me, as they are meant to."

Very puzzled about this as it doesn't sound like much of a claim for literature. This very much depends on the books you choose. I know Howard J loves Middlemarch but I can't really see how reading Middlemarch can make a bastard out of anyone. I will have to think about it. However, literature is full of everything you need to know, or think about, and I didn't know that for a very long time, but I was able to tell a young friend of mine, who loved literature but was thinking of studying History and Politics, - don't. Because I did exactly that. The part of politics you love is probably Political Theory and if you study Politics you have to do Comparative Government and things like that which are as boring as can be - leave it to the lawyers - and everything you want to know about is covered in Literature. So she went to the University of Durham and did well in Literature and now she is working in publishing in London. Which was my dream when I was young. So I feel my experience was not in vain.

I think where Howard went wrong is that he didn't try to name the values that he thinks are meant by "human values". The ones I believe form a bridge between man and God are courage, compassion, honesty and humility. These didn't just come into my head. They came from studying art in art galleries. If you get them all in roughly equal quantities you have an awe-inspiring piece of art. But they are not all four displayed together, usually one quality is pre-eminent. But of human values, these, I believe, are the most important.

Charles Dickens - a life by Claire Tomalin

I took up this book after watching "The Invisible Woman" which I found a really terrible film. There is hardly any dialogue and lots of shots of women staring miserably out of the window, or at each other. It's by Abi Morgan, but it is no good at all. But it did make me curious about Dickens (who was played in the film by Ralph Fiennes (very good)).

This is a terrific life of Dickens which goes some way to evaluating his works as well as telling the story of what he did. His childhood was blighted by having vey irresponsible parents. But he took to journalism and then to writing stories that would sell magazines. He was a very adventurous traveller.  He loved putting on plays and he loved the theatre and the people of the theatre. He loved excursions, booze and parties, and had some great friends whom he loved. He had a great need to walk for 8 miles or so around London every day, or further - sometimes much further. And he was a great worker. When he really needed to work, he worked extremely hard.

Some of this endless action must have come from great sexual energy, and he kept his wife pregnant most of the time. She had 10 children who lived, and one baby died in infancy. Dickens seems not to have loved these children very much. He sent the boys to France to school all except the eldest, who was educated at Eton, where he didn't shine. Dickens could see the need for education but he couldn't find the kind that would be useful to his sons and daughters. Only one son seemed bright, and that was the youngest, called Henry, who went to Oxford, and became a lawyer. Dickens was really proud of him, and taught him shorthand, which he thought would be useful to him at lectures. The rest of his family was a flock of dependents. He had dependent parents, (his father was a scoundrel). dependent brothers and sisters, and a dependent wife and sister-in-law, and a huge brood of non-earning children.

On top of these, Dickens took on the care of fallen women, in a fallen women's home. He did this with a rich friend of his, Miss Coutts, and there was always a manager of the home too. The aim of the enterprise was to reform the fallen women, and teach them wifely skills and habits, so that they could go out to the colonies (including South Africa) and marry men who needed them. Claire Tomalin estimates that this was a very successful enterprise. Not all the women stayed to be reformed, and if they broke the rules they were forced to go, but the attempt at reform succeeded in many cases and the home did very useful work.

All this ended when Dickens was a rich and famous man in his fifties. Suddenly, he wanted more out of his sex life than his habitual life with Catherine. When he met the Ternan sisters - an acting family - but respectable - he changed his whole life. He left his wife. He risked becoming an outcast, and indeed, by the standards of the day he should have become an outcast. He blamed his wife for the ending of the marriage and he was very secretive about the exact nature of his relationship with Nelly Ternan.

The poor girl! She was 18 when she met the great man and clearly she wanted very much to say "No" to him. But he was so persistent and got the whole family so much in his debt by doing them all favours (especially having her sister's voice trained) that I suppose she felt that she must say Yes. So Dickens hid her away in France for a while (he loved France) and then he set her up in a house in Peckham. And she was his mistress for a few days a week until he died.

(She was then 32. Luckily she looked much younger, So she pretended she was much younger, and that she had known Dickens when she was a child (I suppose the whole family had to join in this deception) and she married a man 12 years younger than herself who didn't know her history of consorting with Dickens. He was a clergyman. )

So, Dickens. He was a great man. He was an extraordinary man. But at some point he decided he could have whatever he wanted, and therefore he behaved abominably to a young girl who had no man to defend her. Yes, in later years they must have had some happiness. But it involved him being intensely cruel to a wife who had done nothing whatever wrong, except bore him and grow quite fat. He made his cruel reasons for leaving her very public. He was also very heartless to his sons.

Fascinating man, and in many ways a very good one.