O, To Be In England..., BookMarks Update, March, 2024

Friends:

Robert Browning wrote, "O, to be in England/Now that April's there.", and we took his advice, spending the last month in London, Somerset, Yorkshire---all quite grand. Whilst (pardon, my English!) here, I read only British authors and quickly discovered that years, not weeks or months would be required to read everything on my wish list. But, soldiering on with a stiff upper lip, I read these books in March:

I chose a mixture of old favorites to re-read (Sebald, Woolf, Shakespeare, Pinter, Forster), new books by favorite authors (Wodehouse, Christie), three books by brand new authors (Sherriff, Duffy, and Bowen), and one non-fiction book----all quite deliciously British.

The re-reads proved to be a delightful return to great works. 'Macbeth' (currently playing in the West End starring Ralph Fiennes) hasn't lost its powerful condemnation of ambition and moral decay after 400 years while also reminding us of the importance of being careful in choosing a spouse. Woolf, Forster, and Sebald each approached fiction in a different and creative fashion. With 'Mrs. Dalloway', Woolf launched the Modernist 'stream of consciousness' novel, writing complex, page-long sentences to reflect the conflicts and complexities of her characters' thoughts. In 'A Passage to India,' Forster, demonstrates the aspects of the novel that he described in his eponymous classic, focusing on setting and character to develop the pattern and rhythm in this story about the tragedy and shame of colonialism. Finally, Sebald uses the photograph as an essential element in 'The Rings of Saturn', a mysterious and rambling explication of a random set of historical vignettes stimulated by a walk along the East Anglia shore. If you don't know Sebald ('The Emigrants', 'Austerlitz', and 'Vertigo'), you should read this outstanding writer who likely would have won the Nobel Prize had he not died so young.

Re-reading Pinter, who did win the Nobel Prize, proved to be just as painful as my initial experience. Referred to as a writer of 'comedies of menace', his 'The Homecoming' is not a joyous event. Pinter is a fascinating and important presence in the English theater as playwright, actor, director, and supporter, so reading this play or seeing it on stage is well worth the effort, but don't expect to leave your couch or the theater humming and tapping your toe.

Agatha Christie never disappoints, at least if you're a fan of the 'locked door, British murder mystery'. Her play, 'The Mousetrap' which we saw when we lived in London as students in 1971, is still selling out every performance in the West End; so she has proven to have staying power. Poor Roger Ackroyd would probably agree. It takes a while, but good old Hercule Poirot eventually figures out who stuck a knife in Ackroyd's neck. This is a good read for a stormy night when the house is creaking and the shadows are stealing around the drawing room.

P.G. Wodehouse (1881-1975) wrote 15 books, including 'Right Ho, Jeeves', about the feather-brained aristocrat, Bertie Wooster, and his brilliant, self-effacing valet, Jeeves. While Wooster does his fumbling best to save two faltering engagements at his Aunt Dahlia's country house, Jeeves quietly intervenes to save the day. This is not great literature, but does provide smiles, chuckles, and even a hearty laugh, all of which are desperately needed these days.

That brings us to Duffy, Sherriff, and Bowen. Duffy was the first Scot and first woman to be named Poet Laureate of England in 2009, a post first occupied in 1668 by John Dryden. She has written a book of poems about our need for nature, its beauty, its gifts, and its tragic destruction by modern man. This book is one of those poetry collections that requires a handy piece of paper and pencil while reading so as to jot down the memorable phrase, the special word, and 'the best words in the best order' to quote Coleridge.

R.C. Sherriff (1896-1976) is a name I didn't know until his 'The Fortnight in September' was recommended by our guide, an erudite and sophisticated Londoner who led us on a tour of the City of London's architecture. For some unclear reason, his recommendation vaulted Sherriff's book ahead of the several dozen on my 'to be read list,' and I'm thrilled that it did so. It's a story about a middle class family of five who leave London to go to Bognor on England's southern shore for their annual two week vacation. Nothing happens and everything happens. I loved its evocation of the tension between the sometimes forced or false contentment with the quotidian and the lurking disaster of the unknown that this family embodied. I think you will love it as well.

Elizabeth Bowen (1899-1973) was an Irish-British writer of short stories and novels who was a peripheral member of the Bloomsbury group and was much read in the mid-20th C. One of her books was among the 40 Best Books Susan Hill chose to take to a desert island in 'Howards End is on the Landing'. Bowen was greatly interested in "life with the lid on and what happens when the lid comes off, in the innocence of orderly life, and in the eventual, irrepressible forces that transform experience." 'The Heat of the Day' is considered one of the best depictions of London's atmosphere during the bombing raids of World War II. While the plot and the characters were brilliantly conceived and realized, I found it to be too long and struggled a bit to finish it.

I usually read several works of non-fiction during a month, but 'The Bloomsbury Group' by Frances Spalding, was the only one in March. It's a slim, beautifully constructed volume with an excellent introduction. Its splendid reproductions of paintings and photographs accompany the well-written, informative bios of 20 writers, painters, philosophers, critics, and intellectuals who lived or visited in Gordon Square, Bloomsbury or Charleston in Sussex. Led by Virginia and Leonard Woolf, Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell, Lytton Strachey, and others, their influence on post-impressionist art, modernist literature, and intellectual ferment from 1906 to the mid-20th C. continues to be felt. This book is a fine introduction to the period and the individuals.

The Poetry Tree on the Charles this month features poems by England's current Poet Laureate, the Yorkshire-born Simon Armitage. I discovered Armitage when I read his delicious book, 'Walking Home: A Poet's Journey.' Written in 2012, it's the story of his 256 mile walk along the Pennine Way from the Scottish border to the national park in Yorkshire which we recently visited. Armitage is the Professor of Poetry at Leeds and has been a visiting professor at Oxford and Princeton, as well. The first three poems were written by him as part of his duties as Poet Laureate during the COVID pandemic. More somber and longer than the usual Poetry Tree offerings, they provide a look at the simple heroism of regular people and the heartbreak of loss under those terrible conditions. The last two poems are more fanciful, fun, and characteristic of his earlier, pre-COVID work.

You may have noticed that instead of the usual practice of introducing BookMarks with book covers, I have presented images of this month's authors from sources ranging from the National Portrait Gallery to Wikipedia. Try to match them up. The answers are listed below after the quotes.

Since collecting books, arranging them on shelves and in piles, and even reading them, are such a central part of my life, I'm always drawn to quotations from writers about reading. Here are three of my favorites that touched a chord in me:

From Jess Walter, author of 'The Cold Millions' in response to Sunday New York Times Book Review By the Book's question about 'what books are you embarrassed not to have read yet? "Oh, pretty much all of them. Classics and best sellers, thrillers and books by writers' writers, poems and essays and books by friends and books that friends recommend. After 40 years of trying to catch up, I still live in a state of behind-on-my-homework anxiety, which is maybe natural for the autodidact, the fear that at any moment someone might ask me about Proust and I will say how much I enjoyed 'The Shipping News'.

And this one from Mildred Jefferson, Pulitzer Prize winning literary critic who when asked by By the Book "what books are on your night stand?" replied in part: "There's also a pile of magazines and newspapers. At night I choose which to read by asking myself: Can you risk having this in your dreams?"

And finally, from a NYT book review of Harold Blooms' posthumously published 'The Bright Book of Life' by a favorite editor/writer/critic, the late Robert Gottlieb: "If you suffer from what Bloom calls the 'rage for reading and rereading', you're on a never-pausing treadmill---no sooner have you consumed, yet again, "War and Peace" and "Middlemarch" and "The Charterhouse of Parma" and all of Jane Austen, but it's time to return to them once more: to have one final go before (as the ever morbid Bloom reminds us) it's too late."

From left to right:

Row 1: P.G. Wodehouse, Harold Pinter, W.G. Sebald (top), E.M Forster

Row 2: Virginia Woolf, William Shakespeare, R.C. Sherriff

Row 3: Agatha Christie, Carol Ann Duffy (top), Elizabeth Bowen, Simon Armitage

Good reading and good travelling!