31/3/11 “SCOOP” by EVELYN WAUGH

Arthur Evelyn St. John Waugh (28 October 1903 – 10 April 1966) was an English writer of novels, travel books and biographies. He was also a prolific journalist and reviewer. His best-known works include his early satires Decline and Fall (1928) and A Handful of Dust (1934), his novel Brideshead Revisited (1945) and his trilogy of Second World War novels collectively known as Sword of Honour (1952–61). Waugh, a conservative Roman Catholic whose views were often trenchantly expressed, is widely recognised as one of the great prose stylists of the 20th century.

OXFORD

The son of a publisher, Waugh born in 1903 was educated at Lancing College and Hertford College, Oxford. Waugh arrived in Oxford in January 1922. The arrival in Oxford in October 1922 of the sophisticated Etonians Harold Acton and Brian Howard changed Waugh's Oxford life. Acton and Howard rapidly became the centre of an avant-garde circle known as the Hypocrites, whose artistic, social and homosexual values Waugh adopted enthusiastically; he later wrote: "It was the stamping ground of half my Oxford life". He began drinking heavily, and embarked on the first of several homosexual relationships. He continued to write reviews and short stories for the university journals, and developed a reputation as a talented graphic artist, but formal study largely ceased. He did just enough work to pass his final examinations in the summer of 1924 with a third class degree.

EARLY CAREER

As a young man he acquired many fashionable and aristocratic friends, and developed a taste for country house society that never left him. After leaving Oxford Waugh spent weeks partying in London and Oxford before the overriding need for money led him to apply through an agency for a teaching job.

He also began working on a comic novel; after several temporary working titles this became Decline and Fall. Having given up teaching, he had no regular employment except for a short, unsuccessful stint as a reporter on the Daily Express in April–May 1927.Waugh was at this time dependent on a £4-a-week allowance from his father, and the small sums he could earn from book reviewing and journalism.

In September 1928 Decline and Fall was published to almost unanimous praise. By December the book was into its third printing, and the American publishing rights had been sold for $500.

Vile Bodies, a satire on the Bright Young People of the 1920s, was published on 19 January 1930 and was Waugh's first major commercial success. Despite its quasi-biblical title, the book is dark, bitter, "a manifesto of disillusionment". As a best-selling author Waugh could now command larger fees for his journalism.

On 29 September 1930 Waugh was received into the Roman Catholic Church. This shocked his family and surprised some of his friends, but the step had been contemplated for some time.

In 10 October 1930 Waugh, representing several newspapers, departed for Abyssinia to cover the coronation of Haile Selassie. He reported the event as "an elaborate propaganda effort" to convince the world that Abyssinia was a civilised nation, concealing the truth that the emperor had achieved power through barbarous means. A subsequent journey through the British East Africa colonies and the Belgian Congo formed the basis of two books; the travelogue Remote People (1931) and the comic novel Black Mischief (1932). His various adventures and encounters found their way into two further books: his travel account Ninety-two days, and the novel A Handful of Dust, both published in 1934.

He returned to Abyssinia in August 1935, to report the opening stages of the Second Italo-Abyssinian War for the Daily Mail. Waugh, on the basis of his earlier visit, considered Abyssinia "a savage place which Mussolini was doing well to tame", according to his fellow-reporter William Deedes. Waugh saw little action, and was not wholly serious in his role as a war correspondent. Deedes remarks on the older writer's snobbery: "None of us quite measured up to the company he liked to keep back at home". However, in the face of imminent Italian air attacks, Deedes found Waugh's courage "deeply reassuring". Waugh wrote up his Abyssinian experiences in a book, Waugh in Abyssinia (1936). A better-known account is his novel Scoop (1938).

WWII

At the outbreak of the war in September 1939 sought military employment. In December Waugh was commissioned into the Royal Marines and began training at Chatham naval base. In April he was promoted temporarily to captain and given command of a company. Waugh's inability to adapt to regimental life meant that he soon lost his command and became the battalion's Intelligence Officer. In this role he finally saw action, as part of the force sent in August 1940 to Dakar in Western Africa to support an attempt by Free French troops to install General de Gaulle as leader there. Hampered by fog, and misinformed about the extent of the town's defences, the mission was a failure, and on 26 September the British forces withdrew. Waugh commented that "Bloodshed has been avoided at the cost of honour."

In November 1940 Waugh was posted to a commando unit and after further training became a member of "Layforce" under Brigadier Robert Laycock. In February 1941 the unit sailed to the Mediterranean, where it participated in an unsuccessful attempt to recapture Bardia, on the Libyan coast. In May the force was required to assist in the evacuation of Crete; Waugh was shocked by the disorder, loss of discipline and, as he saw it, cowardice of the departing troops. On the roundabout journey home in July by troopship he wrote Put Out More Flags, a novel of the early months of the war written in Waugh's familiar 1930s style. Back in England, more training and waiting followed, until in May 1942 Waugh was transferred, on Laycock's recommendation, to the Royal Horse Guards.

Waugh's elation at his transfer soon descended into disillusion as he failed to find opportunities for active service. Despite his undoubted courage, his unmilitary and insubordinate character was making him effectively unemployable. After spells of idleness at the regimental depot in Windsor, Waugh began parachute training at Tatton Park, landed awkwardly and fractured a fibula. Recovering at Windsor, he applied for three months' unpaid leave to write the novel that was forming in his mind. His request was granted. The result of his labours was Brideshead Revisited, the first of Waugh's explicitly "Catholic" novels and, biographer Douglas Lane Patey observes, "the book that seemed to confirm his new sense of his writerly vocation".

Brideshead Revisited was published in London in May 1945. Waugh had been convinced of the book's qualities, "my first novel rather than my last". It was a tremendous success, bringing its author fame, fortune and literary status. In February 1947 he made the first of several trips to the United States, in the first instance to discuss filming of Brideshead. This project collapsed, but Waugh used his time in Hollywood to visit the Forest Lawn cemetery, which provided the basis for his satire on American perspectives on death, The Loved One. Waugh also worked intermittently on Helena, a long-planned novel about the discoverer of the True Cross, "far the best book I have ever written or ever will write". Its success with the public was limited. In 1952 Waugh published Men at Arms, the first of his semi-autobiographical war trilogy, in which he depicted many of his personal experiences and encounters from the early stages of the war. At 50, Waugh was old for his years, "selectively deaf, rheumatic, irascible", increasingly dependent on alcohol and on drugs to relieve his insomnia and depression.

By 1953 Waugh's popularity as a writer was declining. As he approached his sixties, Waugh was in poor health, prematurely aged, "fat, deaf, short of breath, "an exhausted rogue jollied up by drink". He described himself as "toothless, deaf, melancholic, shaky on my pins, unable to eat, full of dope, quite idle" and expressed the belief that "all fates were worse than death". In 1965 the three war novels edited into a single volume were published as Sword of Honour.

On Easter Day, 10 April 1966, after attending a Latin Mass in a neighbouring village with members of his family, Waugh died suddenly of heart failure at his Combe Florey home.

ASSESSMENT

In the course of his lifetime Waugh made enemies, and offended many people; writer James Lees-Milne asserted that he was "the nastiest-tempered man in England". He had been a bully at school, and retained an intimidating presence throughout his life; his son Auberon remarked that the force of his father's personality was such that, despite his lack of height, "generals and chancellors of the exchequer, six foot six and exuding self-importance from every pore, quail[ed] in front of him."
However, the common view of Waugh as a "snobbish misanthrope" is a caricature. How would a man who was so unpleasant be so beloved by such a wide circle of friends? He was generous to individuals and causes, particularly Catholic causes. His belligerence to strangers was not entirely serious but, rather, an attempt at "finding a sparring partner worthy of his own wit and ingenuity". He mocked himself as well as others. The elderly buffer, "crusty colonel" image he presented in his later life was a comic impersonation, rather than his real self.

Waugh's Catholicism was fundamental: "The Church ... is the normal state of man from which men have disastrously exiled themselves." Strictly observant, he admitted to Diana Cooper that his most difficult task was how to square the obligations of his faith with his indifference to his fellow men. When asked by Nancy Mitford how he reconciled his often objectionable conduct with being a Christian, he replied that "were he not a Christian he would be even more horrible".

WRITING

THEMES AND STYLE

Waugh's novels reprise and fictionalise the main events of his life, although in an early essay Waugh declares that "Nothing is more insulting to a novelist than to assume that he is incapable of anything but the mere transcription of what he observes". Nor, Waugh emphasises, should it be taken that the author agreed with the opinions expressed by his characters.

Waugh is widely regarded as a master of style. In the view of critic Clive James, "Nobody ever wrote a more unaffectedly elegant English ... its hundreds of years of steady development culminate in him". As his talent developed and matured he maintained "an exquisite sense of the ludicrous, and a fine aptitude for exposing false attitudes". In the first stages of his 40-year writing career, before his conversion to Catholicism in 1930, Waugh was the novelist of the Bright Young People generation. His first two novels, Decline and Fall and Vile Bodies, comically reflect a society of utter futility, peopled by two-dimensional, basically unbelievable characters in circumstances too fantastic to evoke the reader's emotions. Much use is made of what Slater describes as a typical Waugh trademark: rapid, unattributed dialogue in which the participants can still be easily identified. Alongside these works Waugh mixed into his journalism a few serious essays, such as "The War and the Younger Generation", in which he castigates his own "crazy and sterile" generation.
Waugh's conversion did not significantly change the nature of his next two novels, Black Mischief and A Handful of Dust although, in the latter at least, the farcical elements are muted. From the mid 1930s his journalism and non-fiction writings were increasingly concerned with Catholicism and conservative politics, before he reverted to his former manner with Scoop, published in 1939.

Brideshead, which questions the meaning of human existence without God, is the first of Waugh's novels in which his political and religious views come clearly into view. His next novel was Helena, the most uncompromisingly Christian of his books.
In Brideshead, through the person of the proletarian junior officer Hooper, Waugh introduces a further theme that persists in his post-war fiction: the rise of mediocrity in the Age of the Common Man. In the Sword of Honour trilogy this process is depicted through the semi-comical figure of Trimmer, a sloven and fraud who through contrivance emerges triumphant.

RECEPTION

Of Waugh's early books, Decline and Fall was hailed by Arnold Bennett in the Evening Standard as "an uncompromising and brilliantly malicious satire". The critical reception of Vile Bodies two years later was even more enthusiastic, with Rebecca West predicting that Waugh was "destined to be the dazzling figure of his age". However, A Handful of Dust, later widely regarded as Waugh's masterpiece, received a more muted welcome from critics, despite Waugh's own high estimation of the work.

In the latter 1930s Waugh's inclination to Catholic and conservative polemics affected his standing with the general reading public. The pro-fascist tone in parts of Waugh in Abyssinia offended readers and critics, and prevented its publication in America. There was general relief among critics when Scoop, in 1939, indicated a return to Waugh's earlier comic style; critics had begun to think that his wit had been displaced by partisanship and propaganda.

Waugh maintained his reputation in 1942 with Put Out More Flags, which sold well, despite wartime restrictions on paper and printing. Its public reception, however, did not compare with that accorded to Brideshead Revisited three years later, on both sides of the Atlantic. Brideshead's selection as the American Book of the Month swelled its US sales to an extent that dwarfed those in Britain, which was affected by paper shortages. Despite the public's enthusiasm, critical opinion was split. Brideshead's Catholic standpoint offended some critics who had greeted Waugh’s earlier novels with warm praise Its perceived snobbery and its deference to the aristocracy were attacked by, among others, Conor Cruise O'Brien who, in the Irish literary magazine The Bell, wrote of Waugh's "almost mystical veneration" for the upper classes. Fellow-writer Rose Macaulay believed that Waugh's genius had been adversely affected by the intrusion of his right-wing partisan alter ego, and that he had lost his detachment. Conversely, the book was praised by Graham Greene, and in glowing terms by Harold Acton, who was particularly impressed by its evocation of 1920s Oxford. In 1959, at the request of publishers Chapman and Hall and in some deference to his critics, Waugh revised the book and wrote in a preface: "I have modified the grosser passages but not obliterated them because they are an essential part of the book".

In "Fan Fare", Waugh forecasts that his future books will be unpopular because of their religious theme. On publication in 1950, Helena was received indifferently by the public and by critics, who disparaged the awkward mixing of 20th-century schoolgirl slang with otherwise reverential prose. Otherwise, Waugh's prediction proved unfounded; all the fiction remained in print and sales stayed healthy. Men at Arms, the first volume of his war trilogy, won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1953; initial critical comment was lukewarm, with Connolly likening Men at Arms to beer rather than champagne. Connolly changed his view later, calling the completed trilogy "the finest novel to come out of the war".

REPUTATION

In 1973 Waugh's diaries were serialised in The Observer, prior to publication in book form in 1976. The revelations on his private life, thoughts and attitudes created controversy. Although Waugh had removed embarrassing entries relating to his Oxford years and his first marriage, there was sufficient left on the record to enable enemies to project a negative image of the writer as intolerant, snobbish and sadistic, with pronounced fascist leanings. Some of this picture, it was maintained by Waugh's supporters, arose from poor editing of the diaries, and a desire to transform Waugh from a writer to a "character". Nevertheless, a popular conception developed of Waugh as a monster When, in 1980, a selection of his letters was published, his reputation became the subject of further discussion.

The publication of the diaries and letters promoted increased interest in Waugh and his works, and the publication of much new material. Christopher Sykes's biography had appeared in 1975; between 1980 and 1998 three more full biographies were issued, and other biographical and critical studies have continued to be produced. A collection of Waugh's journalism and reviews was published in 1983, revealing a fuller range of his ideas and beliefs. This new material provided further grounds for debate between Waugh's supporters and detractors. The 1982 Granada Television adaptation of Brideshead Revisited introduced a new generation to Waugh's works, in Britain and in America. There had been earlier television treatment of Waugh's fiction—Sword of Honour had been serialised by the BBC in 1967—but the impact of Granada's Brideshead was much wider. Its nostalgic depiction of a vanished form of Englishness appealed to the American mass market; Time magazine's TV critic described the series as "a novel ... made into a poem", and listed it among the "100 Best TV Shows of All Time". There have been further cinematic Waugh adaptations: A Handful of Dust in 1988, Vile Bodies (filmed as Bright Young Things) in 2003 and Brideshead again in 2008. These popular treatments have maintained the public's appetite for Waugh's novels, all of which remain in print and continue to sell. Several have been listed among various compiled lists of the world's greatest novels.

Beneath his public mask, Stannard concludes, Waugh was "a dedicated artist and a man of earnest faith, struggling against the dryness of his soul." Graham Greene, in a letter to The Times shortly after Waugh's death, acknowledged him as "the greatest novelist of my generation" while Time magazine's obituarist called him "the grand old mandarin of modern British prose", and asserted that his novels "will continue to survive as long as there are readers who can savor what critic V. S. Pritchett calls 'the beauty of his malice' ". Nancy Mitford said of him in a television interview; "What nobody remembers about Evelyn is that everything with him was jokes. Everything. That's what none of the people who wrote about him seem to have taken into account at all."

SCOOP

The novel is partly based on Waugh's own experience working for the Daily Mail, when he was sent to cover Benito Mussolini's expected invasion of Abyssinia - what was later known as the Second Italo-Abyssinian War. When he got his own scoop on the invasion he telegraphed the story back in Latin for secrecy, but they discarded it. Waugh wrote up his travels more factually in Waugh in Abyssinia (1936), which complements Scoop.

Lord Copper, the newspaper magnate, has been said to be based on an amalgam of Lord Northcliffe and Lord Beaverbrook: a character so fearsome that his obsequious foreign editor, Mr Salter, can never openly disagree with any statement he makes, answering "Definitely, Lord Copper" and 'Up to a point, Lord Copper" in place of "yes" or "no". Lord Copper's idea of the lowliest of his employees is a book reviewer. The historian A.J.P. Taylor, however, writes: "I have Evelyn Waugh's authority for stating that Lord Beaverbrook was not the original of Lord Copper." Bill Deedes thought the portrait of Copper exhibited the folie de grandeur of both Rothermere and Beaverbrook and included " the ghost of Rothermere's elder brother, Lord Northcliffe. Before he died tragically, mentally deranged and attended by nurses, Northcliffe was already exhibiting some of Copper's eccentricities - his megalomania, his habit of giving ridiculous orders to underlings."

It is widely believed that Waugh based his hapless protagonist, William Boot, on Bill Deedes, a junior reporter who arrived in Addis Ababa aged 22 with "quarter of a ton of baggage". In his memoir At War with Waugh, Deedes wrote that; "Waugh like most good novelists drew on more than one person for each of his characters. He drew on me for my excessive baggage - and perhaps for my naivety.." He further observed that Waugh was reluctant to acknowledge real life models , so that with Black Mischiefs portrait of a young ruler, "Waugh insisted, as he usually did, that his portrait of Seth, Emperor of Azania, was not drawn from any real person such as Haile Selassie." According to Peter Stothard, a more direct model for Boot may have been William Beach Thomas , "a quietly successful countryside columnist and literary gent who became a calamitous Daily Mail war correspondent".

The novel is full of all but identical opposites: Lord Copper of the Daily Beast, Lord Zinc of the Daily Brute (the Daily Mail and Daily Express); the CumReds and the White Shirts, parodies of Communists (comrades) and Black Shirts (fascists) etc.
Other real life models for characters (again, according to Deedes): "Jakes is drawn from John Gunther of the Chicago Daily News - In [one] excerpt, Jakes is found writing, 'The Archbishop of Canterbury who, it is well known, is behind Imperial Chemicals..' Authentic Gunther." The most recognizable figure from Fleet Street is Sir Jocelyn Hitchcock, Waugh's portrait of Sir Percival Phillips, working then for the Daily Telegraph.

"Feather-footed through the plashy fen passes the questing vole", a line from one of Boot's countryside columns, has become a famous comic example of overblown prose style. It inspired the name of the environmentalist magazine Vole, which was originally titled The Questing Vole.

One of the points of the novel is that even if there is little news happening, the world's media descending upon a place requires that something happen to please their editors and owners back home, and so they will create news.

RECEPTION

Christopher Hitchens, introducing the 2000 Penguin Classics edition of Scoop, said "In the pages of Scoop we encounter Waugh at the mid-season point of his perfect pitch; youthful and limber and light as a feather", and noted: "The manners and mores of the press, are the recurrent motif of the book and the chief reason for its enduring magic...this world of callousness and vulgarity and philistinism...Scoop endures because it is a novel of pitiless realism; the mirror of satire held up to catch the Caliban of the press corps, as no other narrative has ever done save Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur's The Front Page."

Scoop was included in The Observer's list of the 100 greatest novels of all time. In 1998, the Modern Library ranked Scoop #75 on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century.

MONTHLY BOOK GROUP DISCUSSION 31 March 2011

The reaction to the book was most positive. It was acclaimed as very funny and well constructed with some most amusing characters. One participant described Scoop as the funniest novel he had read. Waugh’s mastery of language was praised though some argued that the language might appear dated particularly to the younger generation.

Waugh’s use of satire, farce, irony and caricature were widely praised. He was clearly writing in the tradition of the great English comic novel- from Fielding and Smollet through Dickens. His satire seemed to have little overt political purpose, unlike Dickens. Newspapers were seen as beyond reform, as did the characters. They were simply absurd or ridiculous but treated affectionately and uncritically. This perhaps reflected Waugh’s pessimistic conservatism about the improvement of human nature. There was no sense of impending World War for a novel written in 1939, unlike say The Mask of Dimitrios.

Scoop was a good example of a plot that changed direction shortly after a good opening - as with Psycho. The structure looked odd at first but worked well when completed. The only criticism was that the English sections were better than the African.
The proposer of Scoop had chosen it as a good representative of Waugh’s ouvre but also because it was highly topical particularly in the context of Libya and the Arab spring. There was wide agreement to this proposition. How little had changed re the media with over mighty newspaper proprietors such as Murdoch and the BBC sending too many journalists to natural and war disaster zones using up scarce food and travel resources. And how little had changed with western countries wading in and stirring up problems in African and Muslim countries. The clash between such different cultures added to the humour in Scoop.

With so much agreement about the merits of the book discussion ranged more widely. One of our number told an amusing anecdote about a stay at Waugh’s house in Combe Florey which included a walk along a plank across the stairwell to ascertain if one was sober enough for another drink.

There was also a discussion about the role of humour in British (or should that be English) life and literature. People racked their brains for great Scottish as opposed to English humorous writers. Irvine Welsh was not remembered until afterwards. There was some self satisfaction that our book group had chosen a series of humorous books unlike, we thought, most book groups.

24/2/11 “ON CHESIL BEACH” by IAN McEWAN

Alas the regular scribe was in Australia, and the poor apprentice arrived late, having gone to the ‘Avenue’ instead of the ‘Gardens’. He caught his breath, poured and took a sip of Black Sheep Ale (wot, no claret?), recovered his poise and tried to catch the ongoing discussion. Fortunately, this had focused on the venue and menu for the upcoming fifth anniversary dinner in March. What was most important, the location, the food or the wine? Should the menu have literary associations? Suggestions of the popular previous reads, ‘Hunger’ and last month’s austerity cooking of ‘Nella Last's War’ did not find favour among the gourmet subset. The decision was made, and we proceeded to Chesil beach.

The proposer introduced Ian Russell McEwan, born in 1948 and a contemporary of some of the group. Much of his childhood was spent abroad, before studying at Sussex under Malcolm Bradbury and Angus Wilson, among others. Married twice, he had received many literary fellowships, was awarded the CBE in 2000. The proposer recounted many family anecdotes, including a reunion with an unknown (till 2002) elder brother, a bricklayer, who was handed over for adoption in 1942 in a ‘brief encounter’ with another adopting family.

McEwan's works have earned him worldwide critical acclaim, since his first book of short stories, ‘First Love, Last Rites’ (1975). Many short stories and novels have followed with recurring themes dealing with family life, childhood, deviant sexuality, disjointed family life, and the consequences of seemingly insignificant actions.

The proposer considered McEwan to be among the first rank of contemporary British authors of literary fiction. His favourite was ‘Saturday’, but as there were several medical allusions including the name of the neurosurgeon which made reference to a bent penis, he decided that the medically challenged audience might not appreciate the subtleties entailed. Turning specifically to Chesil Beach, a book that concentrates two lifetimes into a single night of sexual dysfunction, the proposer recalled how he had first listened to the book on an audio tape while driving through Spain and France with his wife. He found the book amusing and captivating. Then, a first for the book group! He played the first few sentences of the audio recording; the phrasing was impressive, and one commented how well it sounded, a book that was meant to be read aloud.

To open the discussion of the read text, one said that the book was painfully reminiscent of his own first sexual experience. The others examined their shoes, tried to recall their own first experience, ‘old age doesn't come on its own’. Continuing the travel theme, of young courtship and thwarted love, another described a trip to Switzerland, arrival at the hotel at 3am, and the discovery that the anticipated room was occupied. The less than happy couple had to drink coffee in the lounge till breakfast the next morning. Did this save them from similar embarrassment to Edward and Florence? We daren’t ask.

Gradually turning from personal experiences another speaker discussed the charming way the meeting and courtship of the couple were described, leading to the problems of the virginal wedding night. The structure of the book was universally admired, describing the pivotal anti-climax, or climax, in the context of all that come before, and the subsequent development of the couple’s lives following the debacle. Was it a missed opportunity for a less conventional marriage?

How relevant was the book, written in 2007, but describing events in 1962, to today? One of the group doubted that many married as virgins, even in 1962. In one sense the year may have been pivotal as the pill became available in 1963. Was a reluctance to engage in premarital sex a matter of religion, a matter of shyness, or a matter of practicality? Philip Larkin was quoted.

'Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
(which was rather late for me) –
Between the end of the Chatterley ban
And the Beatles first LP’

As Florence never said in the book,

‘Please please me, whoa yeah,
Like I please you’

Again, the company reminisced.

Perhaps uncomfortable with such thoughts, a member suggested a historical inaccuracy. The idea that an Englsh hotel would have a good selection of malts in 1962 was preposterous. There was brief discussion of the relative merits of ‘Laphroaig’ and ‘Springbank’. Your scribe is not sure of the majority verdict. He was too young in 1962 to sample malts, and inhabited B&Bs rather than hotels, so the matter is unresolved. The group turned away from the discussion of malts to the sexual themes of the book.

Florence's relationship with her father was considered a key factor in her sexual frigidity. Quoting from the text:'Perhaps what I really need to do is kill my mother and marry my father'. Someone who is sexually abused often has a fear of intimate sex. At one stage, during the initial stages of the virginal fumbling, she seemed to experience sexual arousal, but the moment was lost. What further evidence exists of sexual abuse? The father poured lots of favours on her daughter, and took her on business trips, which was considered rather odd. Again quoting from the text:

'father and daughter rarely spoke, except in company, and then inconsequentially, he thought they were intensely aware of each other though, and had the impression they exchanged glances when other people were talking , although sharing a secure criticism'.

There are several oblique references to probable father-daughter sexual experience on pages 49 and 50 in the paperback edition.

As the inevitable moment approaches, the author builds the scene:

'The two waiters disappear, they were on their own. Difficulties are anticipated'.

These are two children, of middle class families, intelligent, apparently well matched, though with different incomes and mores. At last Edward thinks that maybe he never had anyone whom he loved as much, with so much seriousness. There is also the sense of a Hardy-like coincidence; if only he had called her back on the eponymous beach it may well have been different. They had such wonderful shared experiences. Alas, these platonic moments were destroyed by the basic desire.

There was some disagreement on how well-matched the couple was. One referred to the hints of danger throughout the story. Edward had a previous history of fights and brawls, and he may not yet have fully put this behind him in spite of the previous loss of friendship when defending a friend. Latterly:

‘He walked up and down on the exhausting shingle, hurling stones at the sea and shouting obscenities’.

He still retained the violent streak. Yet, all had felt sympathy for the two characters.

We concluded that the book was well crafted. There was discussion of the beauty of the prose. We wondered whether this was effortless, or the result of considerable re-writing. Was it pornographic? No, but painfully true. One attendee had to admit a sense of wishing the couple would 'just get on with it', and another confessed to experiencing certain longeurs in the mid section. The tone was lowered; reference was made to knickers and gravitational force. Ooh! Aah! Missus!

One key aspect of the book was the history-induced attitude of Florence to sexual words which were considered by the group to be male-dominated, e.g. ‘penetration’. The significance of the music was discussed. Was it an escape from love, from sex, and a protective mechanism? On page 80, Florence uses the music as a distraction to take her mind off the sex to come. On page 162, there is an almost sexual intensity in the criticism of the quartet's playing. However, as another stated, it was not really fear on Flo's part - rather disgust and shame of the animal instinct. The contractual issues were discussed, 'in deciding to be married she had agreed to exactly this.' Reference was made to the ‘droit de seigneur' implied in the marriage contract, and of course this marriage was never consummated.

Considering the author is male, a member thought that he had a very good grasp of the female psyche, credible to a male-dominated book group at least. The characterisations of both Edward and Florence were equally convincing. Many books deal with the coming of age and have descriptions of a first sexual encounter. To the audience, this treatment was original in focusing so exclusively on the sexual act, working backward and forward to explain the reasons and consequences of the act. Their whole lives were encompassed in that moment. That is the strength of the book's structure.

The group thought about love, communication between the couple, and the act of sex. Did they communicate, or not? Did they understand the other's point of view? She acknowledges her failures, she agrees she is frigid, she suggests the compromise that Edward could go with other women. Edward is appalled; he suggests it is contrary to the wedding vows. He loses it, he calls her a bitch. A man is scorned.

At last one of the company read or recalled his own instruction manual. Take it gently, don't jump in, he had been advised. Maybe Edward should not have stopped masturbating for a week with the inevitable result, however well meant. Another talked of a book picked up (I think) from a dodgy bookshop in Nairn, or maybe just published in Nairn in the 1900's. Then at least, masturbation made you blind. Yet another quoted from his Encyclopedia of Sexual Knowledge, hidden in the linen cupboard in his youth, where presumably it came in handy for Nairn activities. Yet another talked of the Kama Sutra and his father in the Indian army. Apparently it was not to be read by Indians, according to army instructions. Your scribe wondered why he read Ian Fleming as a teenager.

So far all had been very complimentary. What was the weakest thing about the book? There is a lot of loss of face, the premature ejaculation, the frigid reaction, but surely the public admission of failure is actually more serious. All the wedding presents were returned. Is this plausible? How do they bear the humiliation? Edward does not explain himself and his family quietly dissolves the marriage. The scribe thought Florence wholly unconventional, not at all concerned about what others think - her disgust should not be interpreted as worry about 'what people think'.

The conversation turned back to the thoughts of Florence as the moment approached. She thinks of her shoes, her dress as Edward struggles to remove it. The discussion went off at a tangent, from women's shoes to handbags, to sexual objects, to Margaret Thatcher. Was she sexually attractive? Alan Clark, whom dedicated readers will recall was the author of a previous selection, 'Barbarossa', thought so. Florence's concentration on shoes and dresses displaced the thoughts of the sexual act. Extrapolating further from shoes and handbags, the description of the food on pages 119 and 120 suggests a wealth of new experiences including not just the food but the subsequent musical ecstasy - 'they came to a ragged halt and let the music swirl around them as they embraced'.

Suddenly the conversation changed to cappuccino makers, tampers, thermometers, the need to make a perfect cup of coffee. Oh how sexual encounters are replaced by prosaic activities. At this point there was another tangential foray into cappuccino makers and coffee plungers. Do keep up!

Why are Ian McEwan's books generally short? One who had heard him interviewed pondered that he likes to make the point with brevity. He considers many other books padded with too much waffle, concentrating on quantity rather than quality. He made reference to the fact that the author liked books to be read as a whole in one sitting, the length of time of a film of a play or a film for example. One member thought that £7.99 was a bit steep for such a short book. War and Peace, anyone?

It was getting late, and your scribe had to be awake at 5.45am the next day. We concluded. Unusually, there was unanimous agreement on the excellence of the book, which had generated excellent discussion. Often diverging opinions create the most interesting discussions, but not this time. The book was superbly structured, painfully accurate, and the writing of such a high standard. McEwan is popular; he deals with subjects that everyone can identify with.

We thanked the host and walked into the night, reflecting.

27/1/11 “NELLA LAST’S WAR” by NELLA LAST

Introducing “Nella Last’s War: The Second World War Diaries of ‘Housewife 49’”, the proposer said that “Mass-Observation” was a United Kingdom social research organisation founded in 1937 by anthropologist Tom Harrisson, poet Charles Madge and film-maker Humphrey Jennings. Their work ended in the mid 1960s, but was revived in 1981. The Archive was now housed at the University of Sussex.

Mass-Observation began after King Edward VIII's abdication in 1936 to marry Wallis Simpson. Dissatisfied with the pronouncements of the newspapers about the public mood, the founders initiated a nationwide effort to document the feelings of the people. In August 1939 Mass-Observation invited members of the public to record and send them a day-to-day account of their lives in the form of a diary. They gave no special instructions to these diarists, so the diaries vary greatly in their style, content and length. 480 people responded to this invitation, one of whom was Nella Last (1889 –1968).

Nella Last was a housewife who lived in Barrow-in-Furness. An edited version of the two million words or so she wrote during World War II was originally published in 1981 as "Nella Last's War: A Mother's Diary, 1939-45" and republished as "Nella Last's War: The Second World War Diaries of 'Housewife 49'" in 2006. A second volume of her diaries, "Nella Last's Peace: The Post-war Diaries of Housewife 49", was published in October 2008 and a third volume "Nella Last in the 1950s" appeared in October 2010. Some critics see in her diaries a proto-feminism that anticipates the post-war women's movement in her account of her own marriage and her liberation from housewifery through her war work.

The daughter of local railway clerk John Lord, Nella was married, on 17 May 1911, to William Last, a shopfitter, and had two sons, Arthur and Cliff. During the war she worked for the Women's Voluntary Service (W.V.S) and the Red Cross. The wartime diaries were dramatised by Victoria Wood for ITV in 2006 as Housewife, 49, which is how she headed her first entry at the age of 49. Her son Clifford Last (1918–1991) emigrated to Australia following the war and went on to become a noted sculptor, with works displayed at the Ballarat Fine Art Gallery.

So how did the Group feel about Nella Last’s diaries? Most – though not all – had very much enjoyed the book. There were many dimensions to it, and different dimensions appealed particularly to different people.

One was that of her relationship with her husband. It was a remarkable record of a woman living in close proximity with a husband for whom she felt, if you believed her, nothing other than resentment. The ebb and flow of their daily exchanges was carefully charted, and her relief at being able to sleep in a separate room. It was funny, sad and very honest. According to her internal narrative of her life, his lack of support - plus the disapproval of his family - had caused her to have a breakdown. She even drew a comparison between her “subjection” and political subjection. He had been an aggressor, perhaps not unlike Hitler, and she had colluded in her subjection. Her extensive voluntary work during the War, plus perhaps the process of reflection encouraged by the diary writing, had allowed her to break away from her “slavery”, and this had led to her being held up as an example of a proto-feminist.

“But why this ‘Lords of Creation’ attitude on men’s part?....A growing contempt for men in general creeps over me….I’m beginning to see I’m a really clever woman in my own line…”

Similarly there was the close-up view of her relationship with her two sons. Particularly early on in the book, it was clear that the relationship with her sons was providing her with the affection denied in her marriage. That with Cliff, the son who went to war, was particularly intense (“Cliff’s signet ring was pushed on to my third finger”), and it soon becomes apparent to the modern reader that Cliff must be homosexual. Although the family is introduced to his “very close friend”, who is later killed in the war, Cliff is unable to come out. Nor do his parents suspect. This appears to be a considerable tragedy of misunderstanding, one that must have been repeated many times in the era. Cliff goes off abroad at the end of the War to become a sculptor in Australia, and only returns for a period when his parents are near death.

Cliff’s “Afterword” - written in 1989, eight years after the publication of “Nella Last’s War” and two years before his death - is fairly wry and detached. It must have been particularly difficult for him to read the diaries (his brother had predeceased his mother and was dead before the diaries were published). For example, there are passages such as this from 10 May 1945:

“I’ve begun to take a ‘so far and no further’ attitude with that crab of a Cliff. He must not let illness be an excuse to be rude, discourteous and downright disagreeable. I’ve told him so very plainly – and a few other things. I had one of my ‘soap-box’ fits on V.E. Day. Perhaps I was a little bit unstrung, but I could see little reason for Cliff’s attitude. I tore the rosy rags he had draped around a few of his illusions…..He was not at all pleased, but the little storm passed in laughter. He said I was a ‘queer little bugger’, and I said, ‘I resent that. A childish vision of a bugger was of a thing with one leg that went bump in the night…”

We were struck and surprised by the fact that Nella did not “self-censor” her diaries in the way that most people of her generation would have done. Perhaps she was unaware that they would ever be published? Or did it fit with her personality not to care what people would think if she by that time would be dead?

The War itself, as experienced on the Home Front, intrigued most of us. True, there was little new in the way of factual information about what happened, but for most of us it was new to get a sense of how it felt to live through that period. One surprise was how little celebration and what a sense of anti-climax there was on VE and VJ Days (“I opened a tin of pears”).

It was also striking how often Nella referred back to her experience of the First World War:

“How swiftly time has flown since the first Armistice. I stood talking to my next-door neighbour, in a garden in the Hampshire cottage where I lived for two years during the last war. I felt so dreadfully weary and ill, for it was only a month before Cliff was born. I admired a lovely bush of yellow roses, which my old neighbour covered each night with an old lace curtain, to try and keep them nice so that I could have them when I was ill. Suddenly, across Southampton water, every ship's siren hooted and bells sounded, and we knew the rumours that had been going round were true - the war was over. I stood before that lovely bush of yellow roses, and a feeling of dread I could not explain shook me. I felt the tears roll down my cheeks, no wild joy, little thankfulness...”

This was a salutary reminder that someone of her generation – aged 49 going into the Second World War – had already had to live through another World War. She would have been 24 at the beginning of the First War.

The sheer normality of much of the life that was going on – the strikes and the unemployment – was surprising. Once the Blitz with its bombing of Barrow had stopped, and the threat of an invasion had thus faded, there did not seem to be much fear amongst people that the Allies would lose the War.

However, the sense of scrimping, saving and making do to continue to eat and to live was forcibly depicted throughout the book. Nella’s pride in putting together dishes from very limited ingredients was also of interest to those of us who cooked (but less so to those who retained slaves to perform this function).

We were struck by Nella’s efforts to empathise with those afflicted by bombing and starvation in other countries, and she showed remarkable imagination in doing so. Even her applauding early on of Hitler’s gassing of lunatics – which shocks a modern reader who has the benefit of hindsight, and which would have been edited out of any other diary – seems to be little more than support for euthanasia.

It was intriguing to watch how easily she could move from the mundane to the philosophical and back again. Her thoughts on the discovery of Belsen show both her capacity for empathy and for a sophistication of thought surprising in a largely self-taught woman from Barrow:

“Did their minds go first, I wonder, their reasoning, leaving nothing but the shell to perish slowly, like a house untenanted? Did their pitiful cries and prayers rise into the night to a God who seemed as deaf and pitiless as their cruel jailers? I’ve a deep aversion to interference, having suffered from it all my life till recent years. I’ve always said, ‘Let every country govern itself, according to its own ways of thought and living. Let them develop their own way and not have standards forced upon them’…Now I see it would not do. This horror is not just one of war. No power can be left so alone that, behind, a veil of secrecy, anything can happen.”

There was unanimity in applauding Nella’s prose style, for example:

“The garden is wakening rapidly, and I can see signs of blossom buds on my three little apple-trees… A blackbird seems to be building nearby – she has been busy with straw all day today – and now the old tree at the bottom of the next-door garden shows buds against the blue sky. My husband had a night off work and said he really must get another row of peas and potatoes in…The moon swam slim serene among the one-way pointing, silvered barrage balloons – I thought it dreadful when I once saw a Zeppelin against the moon. As I stood gazing up at the sky, I wondered if she had ever looked on so strange a sky occupant before…I do so dread these next few nights till the full moon. Tonight, with a slim crescent, it was clear and bright. Some poor city will suffer.”

She could pen surprisingly fine lyrical passages of natural description, particularly when visiting the Lake District, which is her escape from urban Barrow and the War. It was difficult to imagine she had any time to polish any such prose, but that left it with a fresh, natural quality. She also had a fine ear for speech, and peppered the diaries with lively phrases that she had heard that day.

Another dimension of interest in the book Nella’s development: how Nella grows in self-confidence and initiative as the War proceeds and she throws herself into supporting the war effort. She starts with the WVS Centre, takes on more with the canteen, and finally sets up a shop to help the Prisoners of War Fund. She clearly had entrepreneurial skills, which in different circumstances might have been very important to the shape of her life.

The book was also not without humour – for example in her account of the baby that arrived in a brown paper bag, or in her response to the request to write about the sexual mores of the time (“do you want me before I get dressed?”)

So…Nella Last, creative, witty, altruistic,energetic, beautiful writer, enchained by a man…a downtrodden Saint?

Well, not for all. A minority voice did not entirely take to Nella as a person (while still very keen on the book). Always a victim, always right. Insecurely recording every compliment. A rather spiky person, disparaging her colleagues – and look at the Ena Sharples body language in some of the photos. No wonder her husband kept taking her off to the Lake District to calm her down.

Well, steady on, she does show some self–awareness – e.g. “I had one of my soap-box fits” and her imaginative empathy of the plight of other people in the War is quite exceptional….

Good at empathising with people in other countries, indeed, but no empathy whatsoever with her husband, and no understanding of her favourite son when he comes back shot in the groin…

And would a man’s diary ever be published if he were so consistently dismissive of his wife? Or if he accused her of not understanding the offside rule....?

(Well, I never! So unreconstructed some people are! Let’s leave them debating, crack open the St Emilion, and continue reading some more Nella... She’s my favourite)….

“This morning I lingered over my breakfast, reading and re-reading the accounts of the Dunkirk evacuation. I felt as if deep inside me was a harp that vibrated and sang - like the feeling on a hillside of gorse in the hot bright sun, or seeing suddenly, as you walked through a park, a big bed of clear, thin red poppies in all their brave splendour. I forgot I was a middle-aged woman who often got up tired and who had backache. The story made me feel part of something that was undying and never old...”

25/11/10 “BLINDNESS” by JOSE SARAMAGO

Introducing “Blindness” (1995), the proposer said a Portuguese friend had recommended Saramago to him. He had then picked up a copy of “Blindness” at an airport in Canada, and, finding it gripping, had read the whole book on the return flight.

José Saramago (1922 - 2010) was Portugal’s most famous modern novelist. He had been born into a poor peasant family in the north of Portugal, shortly before his family moved to Lisbon. With his family unable to afford a grammar school, he had gone via technical school into a job as a car mechanic. He then worked as a translator and a journalist. His first novel was published in 1947, but he did not gain widespread recognition as a novelist until he was sixty. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1998. He had been billed to appear at the Edinburgh Book Festival in August 2010, but unfortunately had died in June.

He was noted for his left-wing politics, being a communist, an anarchist and an atheist. He fell out with the Portuguese Government, who removed a book of his from the 1992 European Literary prize shortlist on the grounds that it was religiously offensive. It might seem rather difficult to reconcile being an anarchist (no state) with a communist (all-powerful state) but Saramago was a "libertarian communist"*. Because of his political engagement with the authorities, he was sometimes compared to George Orwell, with opposition to the role of the British Empire replaced by opposition to globalization.

A feature of Saramago was that he was rather depressive in his outlook. Indeed, that was a feature of the Portuguese as a whole, as was revealed in the Fado, their melancholy music. Portugal was an Atlantic rather than Mediterranean culture, and perhaps the people had more in common in outlook with other melancholics such as the Scots and the Scandinavians than with the Mediterranean peoples.

The proposer felt that what the book was really about was what happened when you stripped away all the structures of society, and took away all the rules. Then you were left with true human nature.

So what did the group make of “Blindness”? Did it open up new vistas, new insights? Did the scales fall from our eyes? …. Or did we see through a glass, darkly?

One reader had started off by assuming the book was intended as an allegory and that the blindness was some sort of metaphor about the state of society, the idea that the human race was blind. The absence of names for characters was perhaps intended to suggest the universality of the story. It was a clever touch to centre the story on the optician’s so as to give the characters sight related names – eg the girl with the black glasses, the boy with the squint etc – and end with the man with the eye-patch blind because of the growth of his cataract.

However, the further he read the less convincing such an interpretation became, and he began to view the book more simply as a sort of science fiction story. While it was quite good as science fiction, the basic plot was hardly original – there were a large number of science fiction stories where a society was struck down by a mystery virus. And while the book started well, it then fell away. There were also a number of implausibilities– why for example did the sighted doctor’s wife not make use of a motor car, or of a torch? What was the explanation of the blindness? Why was there so little reference to the experience of blind people prior to the epidemic, or to the fact that, if blind, other senses developed more?

Perhaps the book should be viewed as partly allegory and partly science fiction. However, reference to the internet suggested Saramago had not started from an allegorical premise – an idea had simply come to him, and he had followed it through.

Another reader was reminded of HG Wells' " The Country of the Blind" where a sighted man stumbles across a remote tribe who are all blind. Far from "In the Country of the Blind the One-Eyed Man is King", the sighted stranger was considered to be a delusional lunatic who was imagining what he saw. Others were reminded of Orwell’s “1984” dystopia. “The Day of the Triffids” (1951) was a particularly close precedent, a novel in which most of society is struck down by an epidemic of blindness, but the hero is saved by a sighted woman.

One reader found it a very powerful, intense work, which had an upsetting effect – in both senses - partly because of a personal dislike and fear of blindness, which the book fed. Such a fear was not uncommon, however irrational. Other writers had exploited this – such as Stevenson with Blind Pew in Treasure Island. Another who had enjoyed the book felt it flowed well, and perhaps had some poetic intent in the original. It did not read like a translation.

For another the book was laboured, and he got bogged down in it. He found the writer rather arrogant - what was there here that was different from “Lord of the Flies” or “Animal Farm” and all the other similar books? And he particularly disliked the writer’s obsession with excrement. However, he had felt after a period of reflection that it was of value to identify a disaster scenario which completely disarmed the state and for which no provision would be made.

For one reader the book was challenging and tough to read, partly because it was so unhappy. He found the book a trifle verbose, and doubted if it added much to our knowledge of society, but liked the touches of humour. Another found it a pretty damning indictment of human nature, and thus depressing. The ending was disappointing. Sexual issues – including much brutal sex, and some gentle – were a pervasive theme.

Another liked the way Saramago followed through the logic of his thesis, and showed the fragility of human organisation. The book had a sort of attractive grimness, with some vividly imagined scenes such as the rape scenes. There was some good use of irony, and some good word play around the notion of eyes and sight – noting for example how proverbs would have to change as society had lost its sight.

On the other hand, this reader found that there was nothing to lift the book out of the category of a compelling if rather familiar dystopia about the fragility of civilisation. There was no wider allegory or sustained theme of substance, although the author kept introducing little philosophical homilies in an effort to suggest there were. Similarly the stylistic experimentation seemed to be an attempt to lift the book into a higher category, but he felt that the stylistic tricks added nothing to the book, and were somewhat pretentious. It seemed to be a way of trying to signal that the book was “intellectual”, much in the way that some writers took to wearing an “I-am-clever” style of spectacles, an example of which could be found on the dust-jacket of the book…

(At this point your eagle-eyed correspondent polished his spectacles with care and scrutinised them with a fresh eye. Hmmm…maybe of the “I-am-shortsighted” variety...)

The style of the book - it being written without quotation marks or names and with little else in the way of conventional paragraphs and punctuation - attracted much other comment. For some this was a considerable irritant and it made the book more difficult to read. Would the story lose anything if you broke up the prose in a more conventional way? Was it simply a lazy way of writing?

Others found the style did not make the book more difficult to read, and did give it a certain rhythm. Perhaps, speculated one, the style reflected normal Portuguese speech and writing? But, no, suggested another – Portuguese language was very precisely punctuated. Perhaps it reflected the way in which blind people would hear speech? But they would quickly be able to differentiate voices. Or did it help you to feel depressed, given the depressive nature of the book? Wait a minute – I found it optimistic, countered another, as some people behaved well and showed true altruism. Or was the purpose of the style to distance the reader from the action and make it less voyeuristic, more didactic?

Or – suggested one who had been researching on the internet – the book was a “tonal poem”. It was difficult to comment on this without reading the book in the original, as poetry is what gets lost in translation. The consensus was that Saramago was probably following the lead of modernist writers who had experimented with dropping conventional punctuation, an approach which the Group had already encountered in Knut Hamsun’s “Hunger” and Beckett’s “Molloy”.

(A “tonal poem”?! Struth!! Pass me that bottle of red…)

Perhaps, suggested one, the book was not so much an allegory as a parable. Heads nodded sagely at this. But if so what was the moral point of the parable? Well…how about “I don’t think we did go blind, we are blind. Blind but seeing. Blind people who can see, but do not see.” And thus perhaps the passage about looking into someone’s eyes and seeing their soul. So…..the moral was that we should go about our lives looking at things more carefully…...But if so was that not rather trite? Or did we need to read the sequel “Seeing” (2004) to find out what the parable was? Or perhaps the book was simply too vague to leave scope for any interpretation of this kind.

One reader thought the nub was the passage “Before, when we could see, there were also blind people, Few in comparison, the feelings in use were those of someone who could see, therefore blind people felt with the feelings of others, not as the blind people they were, now, certainly, what is emerging are the real feelings of the blind, and we’re still only at the beginning…”? This led on to the revealing of the feelings between the working girl with dark glasses and the old man with the eye patch, a love not based on looks…..But wasn’t this just a reworking of the tart with a heart, not the most original of story lines?

(Oh dear, not much common ground here, thought yours truly, time for another calming sip of red…)

And what was really the role of the Doctor’s wife? Why was she the only one sighted? Well… isn’t it just for the purposes of the plot and moving things along? Or did Saramago already have in mind the sequel in which she is viewed with great suspicion by the government because she did not lose her sight?

We also debated whether the whole world had been affected or just Portugal, concluding it was just Portugal. The fact that the rest of the world did not enter the story perhaps reflected the sense of a parable or fable.

Well, perhaps this extract from the citation for the Nobel Prize would help to clarify things, then?

“Its omniscient narrator [of Blindness] takes us on a horrific journey through the interface created by individual human perceptions and the spiritual accretions of civilisation. Saramago's exuberant imagination, capriciousness and clear-sightedness find full expression in this irrationally engaging work……For all his independence, Saramago invokes tradition in a way that in the current state of things can be described as radical. His oeuvre resembles a series of projects, with each one more or less disavowing the others but all involving a new attempt to come to grips with an elusory reality.”

Geddit now??

(GOOD LORD!!! Pass me that second bottle!!!!)

and what then about all the excrement, wasn’t it quite excessive reflecting some personal obsession a bit like Beckett, oh no I think it would have been just like that in reality and I really liked this description, The rubbish on the streets, which appears to be twice as much as yesterday, the human excrement, that from before semi-liquefied by the torrential downpour of rain, mushy or runny, the excrement being evacuated at this very minute by these men and women as we pass, fills the air with the most awful stench, like a dense mist through which it is only possible to advance with enormous effort, yes it is so important to be able to describe sh*t accurately for example for nurses and parents trying to diagnose illness through its colour, well I have often described books as containing a load of cr*p but never realised that this was a term of praise, indeed I think you could say the book falls between two stools, ok just having a little fun trying out the Saramago mode of punctuation-light prose on you, was what we were meant to see through our blindness the overwhelming case for anarchist communism, if so the picture of social collapse the fragility of civilization and unbridled selfishness was hardly an advertisement for anarchy but that picture was unrealistic because natural organisers would have emerged more quickly, well some did no they didn’t yes they did no they didn’t yes they did no they didn’t, well they started talking about it and the group of seven worked together well and showed there is some good in human nature, well yes when not indulging in group sex and murder, and his characters were pretty flat with little depth or development, but surely the doctor’s wife develops well yes if you mean it is a development that she is content to look on and do and think and feel nothing while her husband gets in to bed with the girl with dark glasses and isn’t the man with the eye patch a self portrait of the author, probably yes if he ends up with the beauty, perhaps the dog with tears is really the best character, but a weakness was that the novel lacked logic, no the logic was overwhelming, no it wasn’t yes it was no it wasn’t yes it was, yes this punctuation-light prose is a lot easier than doing the structured stuff and don’t you think it makes this blog seem even more irrationally engaging exuberant and capricious than usual as it takes you on a horrific journey through the interface between individual contributors and the spiritual accretions of your truly, well thank you very much so it’s a happy christmas and new year to all our readers and don’t miss the next instalment from your myopic correspondent…






*Learned footnote. “Anarchist communism (also known as anarcho-communism or libertarian communism) is a theory of anarchism which advocates the abolition of the state, private property, and capitalism in favour of common ownership of the means of production, direct democracy and a horizontal network of voluntary associations and workers' councils with production and consumption based on the guiding principle: "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need". So bear that in mind as a handy short slogan if you’re out trashing stuff on a cuts demo.

28/10/2010 “THE MASK OF DIMITRIOS” by ERIC AMBLER


The proposer had been drawn to reading “The Mask of Dimitrios” by Eric Ambler through seeing the 1944 film version. The film starred Sydney Greenstreet (perfect as Peters) and, less plausibly, Peter Lorre as the hero Latimer.

Latimer was perhaps intended to be relatively insignificant by Ambler, and other Ambler books similarly had anti-heroes. Ambler disliked the swashbuckling heroes of John Buchan thrillers, and had intended his first novel “The Dark Frontier” to be a satire on this type of thriller. Nobody had noticed, and the book was taken at face value and was successful. He thus joined a number of other novelists – Fielding and Austen being other examples – whose first work was a satire of current fashion.

Eric Ambler (1908-1998) came from a theatrical family. Despite training in engineering, he soon turned to writing. After selling film rights to supplement the proceeds of his novels, he moved to France to continue writing, possessing only a suitcase and a bank account. He married there in 1937. The outbreak of war saw him serve initially in an anti-aircraft battery protecting Churchill, and then in a film unit. After the war he was attracted to writing film scripts in Holywood, and did not resume writing novels until 1951.

In becoming a writer in Hollywood after the war he followed a road also followed by Fitzgerald and Chandler, which may have helped their bank balances but not their output as novelists. We noted that – generally – the artistic plaudits for great films went firstly to the director and secondly to the actors. The writer’s role was supporting, and was often highly frustrating for them as they lost control of their screenplay. Some exceptional film-makers were both scriptwriter and director, but there were examples (such as Dennis Potter) where allowing the scriptwriter to act also as director was notably unsuccessful.

Unfortunately there was nowadays only limited interest in Ambler. Five of his early books were considered to be classic thrillers, and “The Mask of Dimitrios” (1939 - originally named “A Coffin for Dimitrios”) was the best known of these. It was much applauded from the outset, and the film rights had earned Ambler 20,000 dollars. For the proposer it was a fascinating book, and a superb example of thriller writing. Both the dialogues and the descriptions (which could be savoured more on a second reading) were brilliant. Other thrillers he had read by Ambler were constructed in a similar way, but less rich in texture and detail.

The Group had much enjoyed the book. It was well crafted and well researched, and you could pick it up and read it straight through or read it in segments with equal pleasure. Some of the issues – such as his account of drug crime and the effect of different drugs – were surprisingly modern in feel. It provided a fine tour of Europe, despite the remarkable fact that Ambler had not visited the Balkans at the time of writing. He picked up his information through a Turkish expatriate group he met in the South of France, and through reading.

The quality of Ambler’s prose came in for particular praise. It was taut and sparse, but capable of poetic rhythm and of evoking a scene, a character or a situation through a few telling details. Again such prose had a modern feel to it.

The book was essentially a thriller. We were not persuaded by the view in Mazower’s introduction to the Penguin Classic edition that the book was a manifesto for a new kind of crime novel, intended to blow up the vicarage whodunit. That was more the objective of Hammett and Chandler.

Some found the structure, with a series of interviews about the past of Dimitrios, lacked real tension and “page-turner” quality” until it emerged that Dimitrios was not in fact dead. Even if that had been predictable, Ambler generated great fear and tension in the last section of the book.

Others did find it a page-turner from the beginning, and were reminded of the structure of Citizen Kane with a picture of the central character emerging slowly through a series of people commenting on him. This was not the only time Orson Welles was to feature in our discussion, as the atmosphere of the book reminded some of “The Third Man”, and Welles did indeed direct the film version of another of Ambler’s books. Both Greene and Le Carré, noted one, had acknowledged Ambler’s influence, although he felt Ambler was perhaps not in their class.

Another note of reservation concerned the “hero” Latimer, writer of conventional detective stories and wanting, like Ambler himself, to do his writing abroad. The plot device of having him decide to explore the past of a real criminal, and criss-crossing Europe to do so, was implausible. Ambler, in the opening passage of the book, was careful to distance himself from his antihero “The choice of Latimer [as an instrument of Providence] could only have been made by an idiot” and he was probably satirising himself to some extent.

Latimer is priggishly old-fashioned. He is not interested in money or women, with his only vice being an interest in drink – provided it is French and expensive. An amusing example of his priggishness was his judgement on La Prevenza:

“Her figure was full but good and she held herself well; her dress was probably expensive….Yet she remained, unmistakably and irrevocably, a slattern.”

Mr Peters comments: “I have read one of your books. It terrified me. There was about it an atmosphere of intolerance, of prejudice, of ferocious moral rectitude that I found quite unnerving…”

However, suggested one, was not Latimer’s “ferocious moral rectitude” in deliberate counterpoint to the moral chaos that Ambler is depicting on the European continent? Ambler shows Europe lurching from the First World War (and its chaotic aftermath – such as the Greco-Turkish War of 1919–1922) into the next European War. The Balkans teem with all sorts of peoples. For this reader, that sense of Europe in turmoil and the sense of impending war was the most intriguing aspect of the book.

“Nonsense” returned another “it’s simply a thriller written in the thirties!”

But didn’t the writer try to identify Dimitrios specifically with the collapse of the moral order in Europe, with ruthless greed and increasing aggression? Dimitrios’ criminal career as exposed in the book runs from 1922 to 1939, embracing theft, murder, spying, drugs, white slavery, financial chicanery, political assassination and possibly military provocation. He is thus the embodiment of everything that has gone wrong in Europe in the inter-war period.

Latimer reflects towards the end of the book:

“But it was useless trying to explain [Dimitrios] in terms of Good and Evil. They were no more than baroque abstractions. Good Business and Bad Business were the elements of the new theology. Dimitrios was not evil. He was logical and consistent; as logical and consistent in the European jungle as the poison gas called Lewisite and the shattered bodies of children killed in the bombardment of an open town. The logic of Michelangelo’s David, Beethoven’s quartets and Einstein’s physics had been replaced by that of the Stock Exchange Year Book and Hitler’s Mein Kampf…”

And the book ends on a similar note with Marukakis reflecting from Bulgaria on recent border incidents created by agents provocateurs:

“Special sorts of conditions must exist for the creation of the special sort of criminal that [Dimitrios] typified…all I know is that while might is right, while chaos and anarchy masquerade as order and enlightenment, those conditions will prevail……My latest information is that war will not break out until the spring, so there will be time for some skiing…”

And wasn’t it the case that genre novels of this kind tend to be at their best, and of most literary value, when struggling to escape the bounds of their genre?

“Hmmm…..well, we can at least agree that the Second World War was essentially a continuation of the First World War, which never really finished…”

The proposer, who had had the advantage of reading Ambler’s autobiography, shed some further light. Ambler had taken unusual care in writing this novel, and other novels of his revealed a particular concern about Germany’s aggression. His brother had married a German, and had had to prove his Aryan purity before being allowed into Germany. Ambler was also a “Communist Fellow Traveller” at this stage, and particularly critical of the role of international finance, where he thought Germany played a dangerous role.

And what of Mr Peters? For some he was the best character in the book. He was richly amusing with his endless self-justification, for example claiming the Great One had seen it fit to make him a criminal. However, one reader was certain that Mr Peters would turn out to be Dimitrios. There were clues that suggested he was Dimitrios, and indeed he would surely have made a better Dimitrios!

(Your correspondent was thoroughly confused. Firstly, it was suggested this straightforward thriller was some sort of morality tract, and now that Mr Peters was Dimitrios).

“Err…” … “So who killed Mr Peters???” (I essayed to clarify matters. But on they sailed, ignoring this razor-sharp intervention …)

“No”, asserted another, “I quickly rejected the hint that Mr Peters might be Dimitrios, because he obviously didn’t have the seductive brown eyes attributed to Dimitrios…” (still confused, because weren’t the eyes of Dimitrios meant to look like those of a doctor about to do something unpleasant to you? I looked cautiously at our medical representative) …But the author was unfairly misleading at the outset in implying that the first dead body was Dimitrios, as opposed to the second dead body ….

These notes are getting too difficult to make much sense out of. Reader, you perhaps think that these discussions follow a neat logical order and that your correspondent merely has to act as amanuensis. To disabuse you of this misunderstanding, and demonstrate the Herculean task your intrepid reporter fearlessly tackles each month, here is an accurate fragment from my verbatim notes prior to processing, a little piece of literary archaeology:


“Ambler’s description of the little-known Greco-Turkish war was gripping ……My uncle was on a boat at the time of the Greco-Turkish war, and tried to separate an Egyptian from his harem……the German definition of nationality by blood not residence is the source of problems…..EU resolves? …..So did Communism - no, not voluntary……any need for aircraft carriers or tanks?.....what about the Russian solution of inflatable tanks?.….off to Argentina, staying in the Belgrano hotel..…a friend’s son picked up all his girlfriends bar one from tango clubs…..all about agreeing to dance by sign language from the back…...not unlike Edinburgh Union dances…..what does “Belgrano” mean?.....beautiful grain….. or beautiful pimple…..did I tell you the one about my water treatment at the hands of two square-headed women in Bulgaria?…..my Aberdonian headmaster said you should select a woman based on the price of the drink she is holding (go for the cheapest!)…..you should have heard what my mother got up to in Warrender baths……young Scots are all sounding their “S”s as “Sh”s, it’s the Sean Connery factor..…yes, some of the novel did remind me of a James Bond novel…..”

Basta!

The surreal quality of the discussion was further emphasised on the way home when the taxi driver claimed just to have been made an Emeritus Professor. Shurely shome mistake?

30/9/2010 “ NO WAY DOWN – LIFE AND DEATH ON K2” by GRAHAM BOWLEY

Winter had arrived early on the highest slopes of Edinburgh as the host introduced “No Way Down” (2010). He had bought the book because attracted by the tag “An ‘Into Thin Air’ for the new century”, and felt it would to provide a change for the Group by offering a new book on a new subject.

The author Graham Bowley was – as noted on the dust jacket – a journalist for the New York Times. More surprising was that he was a financial journalist. He continued to write financial/economic articles, together with a smattering of mountaineering pieces. As Bowley acknowledged in his preface, he had no prior interest in mountaineering before being drawn into writing first an article and then a book about K2. His subject was the 1 August 2008 tragedy where eleven of the world’s top climbers had died.

The Group had much enjoyed the book. Bowley told a gripping and dramatic story. The drama was enhanced by the use of dialogue and of a time sequence for the successive “scenes”. The reader was drawn on by wondering which of the climbers would live and which would die. The sense of impending tragedy was heightened by the symbolism of the yak’s throat being slit and his head stuck outside the tent, plus the superstitions of the porters, eager to propitiate the gods of the mountain and avoid bad luck.

Because Bowley did not have a mountaineering background, and had not been present at the events, the book did not reach the literary heights of some mountaineering classics. The group particularly favoured Jon Krakauer’s “Into Thin Air” (about the 1996 Everest disaster), Joe Simpson’s “Touching the Void” (cutting the rope in the Andes) and Heinreich Harrer’s “The White Spider” (about the north face of Eiger).

However, simply because Bowley did not have such a background, he was able to give a dispassionate account of the human failings of organisation and personality which had contributed to the tragedy, in a way that a passionate mountaineer could not. That made the book both unusual and valuable.

Bowley, however – unlike Krakauer - was not able to give great insight into what motivated people to climb. He makes some attempt at the end of his “Epilogue”:

“K2 was terrifically beautiful…yet…why had they come? Why had I come? For me their story possessed an archetypal force…basic and timeless…They had confronted their mortality, immediately and up close. Some had even come back to K2 after serious injury in earlier years attracted like flies to the light to some deeper meaning about themselves, human experience, and human achievement…Some had emerged from the ordeal; others had perished. All had burned brightly in their lives…”

This passage tries hard but is conventional, vague and unconvincing. We suspected that Bowley’s real views were better recorded in his earlier statement:

“The truth was that climbing attracted strong characters, egos, oddballs, and they rubbed up against one another”

and in his summation “K2 had required from them heroism and selflessness and responsibility. It had also laid bare fatal flaws and staggering errors”.

So what did we think motivated such climbers? Some suggested that risk-taking was a normal aspect of human life - even in crossing the road. High-risk mountaineering was simply at the far end of this scale, exciting and fuelled by testosterone. Males were normally the risk-takers, but that monopoly was going in today’s society.

Others felt that K2 mountaineering was in a category all by itself. The pleasures of normal hill-walking were obvious enough, at least to people living in Scotland. The adrenalin rush of extreme rock-climbing could also be comprehended, even if few of us were attracted to it. However, tackling K2 – an activity with a one in four mortality rate – was something quite different, more akin to Russian roulette.

Was it fuelled by a compulsion to find value in one’s life by being part of a tiny group of high achieving heroes? Only 277 people had successfully climbed K2 so far. So was it a craving for status, even if only in the climbing community? If so, it must have been quite a blow to arrive on K2 in 2008 and find over twenty other climbers trying to reach the top on the same day (or trying to “summit”, in the ugly neologism picked up by Bowley).

One of the attractions of the book was that Bowley rightly resisted the temptation to be judgemental in his writing, given the scope for adding to the grief of the bereaved. He was convincing in arguing that a kind of “groupthink” had taken over and allowed them collectively to make the error of pressing on to the summit too late in the day. Similarly he was not dogmatic in trying to resolve some of the riddles of exactly who had done what in the descent, noting that he had expected to establish a clear narrative but instead found himself “in some post-modern fractured tale”.

Occasionally, however, Bowley’s cloven hoof of judgement peeped out from under his toga of objectivity. The South Koreans did not get a very good press, suggested one reader, who suspected Bowley bought into the view that their large-scale nationalistic expedition was one of the root causes of the tragedy. Comparatively little effort had gone into recording the Koreans’ perspective or differentiating them as individuals, although that might reflect cost constraints. That Bowley did not think too much of the Dutchman Van Rooijen was also not very hard to work out, felt another. He thought it confirmed by the superbly deadpan comment that – Bowley having crossed the Atlantic to record the Dutchman’s viewpoint – Van Rooijen then sold rather than gave him a copy of his book.

By contrast, one member felt that Gerard McDonnell was eulogised to an extent that seemed implausible, which perhaps reflected American sentimentality about the Irish. And, felt another, it was perhaps surprising that Cecilie Skog attracted praise for being pretty but no comment for pressing single-mindedly on to the summit despite having been instrumental in precipitating the first death.

There were clearly difficult moral judgements that the climbers had to make about the extent to which they were willing to compromise their own safety – and their own chance of “summiting” - by trying to help others. It was perhaps unsurprising that some, having got this far, were very ruthless, and remarkable that others were altruistic to the point of losing their own life. However, the fact that we felt equipped to venture judgments that the author did not was a tribute to the extent his story had brought the individuals alive (and to our presumption).

The mistakes made by some of the climbers in terms of not taking basic survival kit such as a GPS or sufficient oxygen bottles to accommodate a delay (there were porters to carry them) struck us as extraordinary. Given the odds of dying on K2, you would need to be a reckless risk-taker to undertake the climb, and perhaps that trait - that conviction of your own immortality - would inevitably be associated with a degree of carelessness and lack of realism about safety requirements.

It was a savage irony, noted one member, that effective co-operation between individuals and groups was at a premium in the situation they faced. Yet the type of ego-driven personality attracted to such a climb was liable to be the least adept at such co-operative activity. It was perhaps surprising that the groups had achieved even their initial degree of agreement.

In the book we discussed in May (Haidt’s “Happiness Hypothesis) the author observed that obtaining a long sought goal does not give more than temporary happiness. Soon it is on to the next goal, and making the journey gives more happiness than reaching the destination.

The truth of this was demonstrated in the compulsion that the K2 climbers felt to set out to risk their lives again, despite the horrors they had encountered on 1 August 2008. Thus Cecilie Skog was ice-climbing in the Rockies sixteen weeks after the death of her husband on K2. And Go Mi-sun, the star-climber in the South Korean team (and also female), died a year later on another mountain in northern Pakistan.

Sobering stuff, noted your correspondent. Meanwhile he observed a bottle of Ledaig malt from Tobermory being steadily drained by a fellow member, who claimed to be using it as a cold remedy.

Hmmm….he must have been born on the same day as me…..

26/8/10 “TO KILL A MOCKING BIRD” by HARPER LEE

It was the annual outing to Portie again. Your assiduous correspondent arrived to find the early arrivers in full flow on the topic of why there might be astragals on one side of the house and not the other (answers on a postcard) and sampling a fine Bourgeuil - Les Cent Boisselées 2003 (just send us a crate if you feel so inclined. Or two…).

Moving on to introducing “To Kill a Mockingbird”, the proposer said that he had been encouraged to read it by his wife and daughters, and had bought the 50th anniversary edition. However, he had subsequently found a copy given to him for his 21st birthday, and thought, but could not be certain, that he had read it in the past! The book linked with last month’s “The Color of Water” in its examination of race relations, and had received a fair degree of recent attention because of the 50th anniversary and because of Rich Hall’s programme “The Dirty South”.

Harper Lee (1926- ) was born Nelle Harper Lee in Monroeville, Alabama. She was the daughter of a civil lawyer, who had on one occasion defended two negros in a murder trial and lost. Her sister Alice was a lawyer. Harper herself had studied some law at university, but did not like it. She found little in common with her fellow female students. She spent a summer at Oxford, but dropped out of her law studies on return, feeling that she wanted to be a writer. She struggled in New York for some years, working as a reservations clerk.

However, she had made friends with the composer Michael Martin Brown and his wife, and they made her the remarkable Xmas present in 1956 of a year’s wages to allow her to concentrate on writing, and also helped to find her an agent. This allowed her to finish the manuscript by 1959, and the book was published in July 1960. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1961, and was adapted into the Oscar-winning film starring Gregory Peck in 1962. Lee described the film as “one of the best translations of a book to film ever made”. Peck’s grandson was named after her, and she remains close to Peck’s family.

When a child her next door neighbours were the aunt and uncle of Truman Capote, and he spent a lot of time there. Capote became her best friend, and the character of Dill in her book was modelled on him. One of them was gifted a Remington typewriter, and they wrote stories together. There were not many other examples in literary history of two such major writers being childhood friends.

She renewed her friendship with Capote when she went to work in New York. In Capote’s first novel “Other Voices, Other Rooms” (1948) there is a tomboy girl character, based on Harper Lee. Capote also said that in the first draft of his novel he had a character who, like Boo Radley, was a neighbour who left things in trees. This character, according to Capote, was based on a real life figure from their childhood.

After completing her novel, Lee helped Capote with writing “In Cold Blood”. She was one of two people that the book was dedicated to, but she was hurt that no recognition was given to the part she had played in contributing to the book. Despite that, their friendship continued to the end of Capote’s life. But while he revelled in the limelight, she shunned it.

Despite carrying out some work on a second novel and on a non-fiction book, Lee had not published another book, and continued to live a quiet private life in New York and Monroeville.

The group were unanimous in their praise of their book. One survey had judged this was the best novel of the last century. While not perhaps going that far, we agreed this was a true classic - beautifully written, and also enjoyable despite its disconcerting subject matter. Her wry humour and good use of dialect also illuminated the novel with a warm tone. And what a brilliant title she had chosen.

The main theme was of course race, but it was by no means the only theme. Another was that of a child coming to terms with the realities of the adult world. Also explored was the issue of how Atticus brought up his children as a single parent. And more broadly Lee was portraying the breadth of society in a small rural town in the South.

The device of telling the story through the eyes of a six year old (even if one who seems knowing beyond her years) was brilliantly successful. It allowed a portrait to emerge of Atticus as a hero - a man of great integrity - with little sentimentality, as it also depicted his foibles from a child’s perspective. An interesting comment on Atticus from Rich Hall was that in reality he probably would have been lynched in the South of the fifties.

The device of using the child narrator also effectively conveyed the view that racism was learnt from culture and not innate, and that children start with a sense of fair play. One of us remembered being brought up in a village where half the children were gypsies, and thinking nothing of playing with them all the time.

Another attractive feature of the novel was that Lee showed a capacity to understand why people in her small town behaved as they did. She was unreserved in condemning racism, but she showed the capacity for empathy of the great novelist in appreciating how it evolved.

However, there was no ambiguity about her moral judgements:

“As you grow older, you’ll see white men cheat black men every day of your life, but let me tell you something and don’t forget it – whenever a white man does that to a Blackman, no matter who he is, or how a fine family he comes from, that white man is trash.”

Part of the force of that statement by Atticus comes from taking the phrase “white trash” and turning it from its normal derogatory connotations of poverty and class into a term of moral judgement.

(Well indeed, I ventured, didn’t the Country and Western song also play on the meaning of “trash” in the line “I like my women just a little on the trashy side”? Alas this scintillating piece of linguistic criticism was left withering on the vine…).

Although, continued another, there was a degree of inconsistency in Atticus insisting that Jem should have to face a trial but not Boo Radley.

What about the structure of the novel? The line of plot certainly misled some, as they had feared a rather sentimental court victory for Atticus in defence of his black client, Tom Robinson, and that realism of the court outcome was appropriate. An early comment from a publisher had been that the draft book was more a collection of short stories than a novel, and one member felt that there was still an element of truth in this, in particular in not integrating the Boo Radley sub-plot with the themes of the rest of the novel. On the other hand, suggested one, the Boo Radley story also showed how it is possible to make quite unrealistic assumptions about other people.

We were greatly intrigued by the fact that Harper Lee had only published one book, and had dropped unpublished her subsequent efforts. Why should that be? Was she one of those writers who only really had one book in her, such as Margaret Mitchell? Or did she recognise that she was one of those writers whose first book was always going to be the best (in which class we identified various writers ranging from Salinger to Colin Currie)?

Or was she simply too much of a perfectionist? After all in 1958 she had thrown five years of work on “To Kill a Mockingbird” into the snow until a call from her editor persuaded her to rescue the manuscript. And perhaps if she had published other less good novels set in New York she would have lost the identification with the South that was central to her persona as a writer. Indeed, speculated one (who claimed to have been a model for a character in a play), once someone was identified as a writer they might find people were unwilling to open up in front of them, which would limit their raw material.

In any event, we hoped that she had not destroyed all her other manuscripts or left instructions for them to be destroyed on her death. But we feared she would have.

Lee had wanted to be the “Jane Austen of the South”, and she had succeeded very well in this ambition. There were also strong echoes of Mark Twain in the novel. But despite these nineteenth century echoes, the approach to racial issues was surprisingly modern for a book published in 1960. It had to be remembered that the book was written before JFK had come to power, and before Martin Luther King had made his “I have a dream” speech. The book’s depiction of racism and of sex could when necessary be brutally realistic in its language.

The book was also prescient. Thus Atticus said:

“There’s nothing more sickening to me than a low-grade white man who’ll take advantage of a Negro’s ignorance. Don’t fool yourselves – it’s all adding up, and one of these days we’re going to pay the bill for it. I hope it’s not in your children’s time.”

Was this, I ventured, a simple black and white tale?

When those who had fallen off their chairs recovered from this minor faux pas, the view was that, at its heart, the book was indeed a kind of fable, which might help to account for its appeal to younger readers. However, there were elements of complexity too, such as in the character of Miss Maudie.

Would the book have had any success in changing attitudes to racism? Probably not, we feared, with adult readers whose attitudes had already been formed, but it must be a powerful force for good with young readers, and was therefore a popular pedagogic tool.

And were we being complacent in assuming we were all non-racists now? Some claimed everybody had a degree of racism within them. Or was that simply the thought police, and there was no satisfying them?

Well at least, we congratulated ourselves, we weren’t in the racist category of the Airdrie fan who turned up at matches in Nazi uniform, thereby attracting the first ASBO issued to a football fan in the UK.

But steady on, riposted one, whose sympathies perhaps lay with the Diamonds, it’s not as if the whole club is like that! It’s not as if Airdrie United F.C. are putting pictures of the Wehrmacht on the front of their Matchday Programme!

Oh, indeed not…

29/7/10 “THE COLOR OF WATER” by JAMES MCBRIDE

Your correspondent had arrived post-haste from another function (though only slightly the worse for wear, in his opinion) and had been rewarded for being last to arrive with the least comfortable chair. It backed on to an aspidistra, which did at least serve to keep him awake for some of the time. It was quickly apparent that another member had been sampling a bottle or two of Kiwi Pinot Noir, lending a remarkable vigour to his contributions…

Introducing the “The Color of Water” (1996) the proposer said he had been reorganising the books in his house when he had come across this one, which he had much enjoyed at the time of its publication. Re-reading it he had remained impressed, but new issues emerged. It was remarkable how different your perspective could be on re-reading a book.

The book was written in a simple, easy style. It dealt with interesting aspects of US life, and in particular of US minorities – such as life in the Jewish community and the difficulties and dangers that Ruth faced in having relationships with a black man. It described very well how the family worked with its amazing twelve children and the poverty they had to overcome.

The device of interweaving the author’s own story with that of his mother was very effective. But, on re-reading, he was struck by the fact that the mother that was portrayed was fairly cold – there was little warmth or love – although it was an impressive account of an impressive woman. And he was also now struck by the fact that the book told us little about the dynamics of the relationships between the twelve children. It was a factual, clinical account of how life moved on, with only a limited sense of love or protection. He had still enjoyed it on a second reading, but felt a degree of disappointment that the book was perhaps overly analytical.

Much of the discussion that followed was of the characters, the problems they faced, and their possible motivations, and relatively little was about the book per se, suggesting that McBride had done a good job of making his characters come alive.

One reader had found the interweaving of the two stories clumsy, and had subsequently re-read the mother’s story by itself, which he found much more satisfactory. Others, however, felt that the structure was well-crafted, and admired how McBride sometimes brought the stories together in time, then let them drift apart and come together again. One found that the style of modern American prose-writing tended to grate. Thus McBride telling his own story grated on him, but it did not grate when he was reading the story of his mother.

Some felt the characters were not very sympathetic, and it was difficult to empathise with them. Others, however, felt they could empathise with the mother in her battle to keep her vast family together with little support after her two husbands had died, and empathise with the author as he struggled with being a black man with a white Jewish mother. Both the story of McBride and the story of his mother had elements of the “misery memoir” formula, which had proved so popular in recent years.

One reader had not realised for a while that the story was autobiographical, but on doing so found the book – and the jaw-dropping problems the characters faced – much more compelling. Some were pleased to find humour in the book, such as Ruth avoiding traffic lights in Harlem after being told to avoid red light areas.

For some the fact that the author was a journalist had helped him deal with the very difficult subject of writing about his own mother and childhood. The book did teeter at times on the verge of sentimentality, and also on the verge of the Bible Belt confessional, but generally managed to avoid the traps. The device of putting the mother’s story in her own words helped to distance the author from it. McBride’s journalistic skills made the book readable and kept sentimentality under check. However, his journalistic approach equally limited the book in terms of its depth and ability to create empathy.

The character of Ruth the mother provoked much debate. Was she really a loving mother? When you had twelve children there would be little time for demonstrations of affection given the over-riding priority of keeping the family fed, clothed and going to school. For some her drive to get her children to go to university was the way in which she expressed her love. Others felt Ruth drove her children to university without consideration of what might suit them as individuals.

Where did the drive for education come from? Was it simply cultural, reflecting her Jewish and/or immigrant belief in the power of education? Or was it also a feeling that she needed to prove that – having married a black man – her children were in no sense inferior or disadvantaged? President Obama’s white mother – who had also married a black man – had similarly driven him very hard to succeed at university. And was another motivator for Ruth the feeling that her own mother, disabled and abused by her husband, had failed? The proud way in which McBride sets out a table detailing the qualifications gained by each of the siblings suggests that, for him too, university qualifications were a key measure of success.

His mother had been lucky in the quality of the two husbands she had found, but unlucky in the ruthless way she had been cast aside by her original family. They, by saying the prayer of Kaddish, had indicated she was dead to them. Some of us were shocked by this ruthlessness. Others pointed out that casting out those who strayed from the norms was how a group – in this case the Jewish people – could retain a coherent identity. And his mother could show ruthlessness too – in not returning to see her dying mother, and in failing to keep her promise to her sister to stay. Perhaps Ruth had inherited more of her personality from her father than she would have liked to acknowledge.

Ruth had only died in January 2010. It was intriguing, and pleasing, that the sales of the book must have meant her latter years had been spent in much greater material comfort than in any other part of her life, and allowed her to travel widely.

Ruth was characterised as an extremely private person. We were told it had been very difficult to get her to open up, but were given no other information on the writing process. The reader did not know the extent to which her story reflected what she had actually said – presumably in taped interviews – or to what extent it reflected her son’s imaginings of how she would have felt. Had she actually read the draft book and exercised a right of veto? One of us, at any rate, thought he could detect the rhythms of a black person’s speech in her story, which might imply that the speech of her husbands had influenced her and that much of the wording was verbatim.

What then of the twelve siblings, and the lack of information about how they interacted? The probable explanation was that McBride still had to live with his siblings, and relationships might have been badly damaged by too candid an exposition. Would there be a pecking order between the siblings based on degrees of darkness of skin, wondered one? Not with the mother’s system of the oldest child being her deputy as “king” or “queen”, so that age, not colour, would determine the pecking order.

What of McBride himself? He sketched out an intriguing account of his rebellion against authority – perhaps exacerbated by the difficult family background – and subsequent recovery. He was clearly very able in both the writing and musical worlds, but found it difficult to sustain any job for long. As with his mother the Christian religion had become a big part of his life. And it was very impressive that his father had set up a church that started simply as a table in his house. It was of interest that that the Church had played the major role if providing leaders for the Civil Rights movement in the U.S., reflecting the Church’s importance for the black community.

The success of the book must have been of life-changing importance to McBride, as it was to his mother. He had said of his book: "I thought it would be received well in the black community but it's sold much better in the white Jewish community," he said. "Most of my readers are middle-age, white, Jewish women....". The memoir spent over two years on The New York Times bestseller list, and is said now to appear on high school and university course lists across America. In 2003, he published a novel, “Miracle at St. Anna”, drawing on the history of the overwhelmingly African American 92nd Infantry Division in the Italian campaign from mid-1944 to April 1945. The book was adapted into the movie “Miracle at St. Anna”, directed by Spike Lee, in 2008…

At this point your amanuensis must have dozed off despite the attentions of the aspidistra, because I have no idea what was said until I woke to a Pinot Noir infused cry aimed at me:

“Like a hippo and a giraffe, and DON’T put that in the blog!”

Don’t ask me what that was about, but the temperature had become distinctly hot. Political Correctness had retired for the night, and the conversational ball was whizzing back and forwards as if in a tennis match…

“ Such waste in the NHS! All the hip replacement aids never need be returned…” …“The private sector controls costs much better – why they even halve – or quarter – the incontinence pads!”

“And homeopathy deserves no public support!”… “But it cured both my daughter and a cat!!”

“It’s not surprising that all twelve children did so well, because they were the product of mixed race marriages, who are likely to be better looking, stronger and more clever through the mixing of the genes….”

“Ah yes, that’s well known in science – ‘hybrid vigour’ – look at Obama. And Tiger Woods ”….. “Oh nonsense… there are lots of great golfers who are not hybrids like….err…err… Phil Mickelson….”…

“But maybe too much hybrid vigour in Tiger?”

“East Africans produce great distance athletes, while West Africans are the sprinters and footballers”… “Is that why Hibs have just signed an East African?”

“Immigrants are always among the most enterprising and able members of their population , which is one of the reasons they attach such importance to education on arrival”…. “Nonsense, it’s having to struggle hard that makes them successful, not being immigrants…”

“If Scotland has lost its most enterprising for generations, are we now a dysgenic society?”

“Fruitcakes, I tell you! Fruitcakes!” (the Pinot Noir was talking again…)








LEARNED FOOTNOTES


1. One of our number was, coincidentally, involved in sending a Home Secretary to visit the Red Hook Housing Projects in Brooklyn, which feature in the book. His interest was in their community justice system, and the visit was instrumental in leading to a community court experiment in the North West of England.

2. HYBRID VIGOUR. Wikipedia: “Heterosis is a term used in genetics and selective breeding. Heterosis, or hybrid vigour or outbreeding enhancement, is the increased function of any biological quality in a hybrid offspring. It is the occurrence of a genetically superior offspring from mixing the genes of its parents. Heterosis is the opposite of inbreeding depression, which occurs with increasing homozygosity. The term often causes controversy, particularly in terms of the selective breeding of domestic animals, because it is sometimes believed that all crossbred plants or animals are genetically superior to their parents; this is true only in certain circumstances: when a hybrid is seen to be superior to its parents, this is known as hybrid vigour. When the opposite happens, and a hybrid inherits traits from its parents that makes it unfit for survival, the result is referred to as outbreeding depression. Typical examples of this are crosses between wild and hatchery fish that have incompatible adaptations…. (not to be confused with Heterotic string theory)”.

All quite clear, then?

3. DYSGENICS. Wikipedia: “Dysgenics (also known as cacogenics) is the study of factors producing the accumulation and perpetuation of defective or disadvantageous genes and traits in offspring of a particular population or species. The term dysgenics was first used as an antonym of eugenics — the social philosophy of improving human hereditary qualities by social programs and government intervention. The word "dysgenic" was first used, as an adjective, about 1915, by David Starr Jordan, describing the "dysgenic effect" of World War I. Jordan believed that healthy men were as likely to die in modern warfare as anyone else, and that war killed only the physically healthy men of the populace whilst preserving the disabled at home. Dysgenic mutations have been studied in animals such as the mouse and the fruit fly”.

But not the giraffe or the hippo?

24/610 “ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT” by ERICH MARIA REMARQUE, plus “DULCE ET DECORUM EST” by WILFRED OWEN, and “FALL-IN” by HAROLD BEGBIE

On a hot summer’s night in southern Edinburgh (so hot that one member arrived with white wine in a cooler) the proposer introduced “All Quiet On The Western Front” by Erich Maria Remarque. He said that, given the current debate about Britain’s involvement in the Afghan War, it seemed appropriate to revisit a book about “the war to end all wars” which had made a great impact on him. On his second reading of the book he still found it engaging and moving.

Remarque was conscripted in late 1916 at the age of 18. After training he was posted to the Arras front on 12 June 1917. On 31 July 1917 during the Battle of Passchendaele he was wounded by shrapnel in the leg, arm and neck, and was repatriated to an army hospital in Germany. He had only returned to training when the war ended. This – probably the most famous of all World War One novels - was therefore based on only just over seven weeks of experience in the front line.

The novel was first published in November and December 1928 in a German newspaper Vossische Zeitung and in book form in January 1929. He wrote a sequel, “The Road Back” (1931), which one of our number reported was also good but not quite as powerful. Both were among the books banned and burned in Nazi Germany.

“All Quiet On The Western Front” sold 2.5 million copies in twenty-five languages in its first eighteen months in print. Indeed one of our number was sporting an American First Edition complete with cuttings of contemporary reviews, which, surprisingly, referred to unnecessary censorship in the American edition on “moral” grounds. In 1930, the book was adapted as an Oscar-winning film of the same name.

Surprisingly, although one or two members of the group had an interest in military matters, no-one in the group other than the proposer had read the book before. Without exception, they were extremely positive about the book. “Absolutely marvellous”. “Great pace – I couldn’t put it down”. “Have read nothing approaching this, other than possibly Owen’s ‘Dulce et Decorum est’ ”. “Beautifully constructed, so that his anti-war messages are put over without interrupting the narrative flow and without preaching”. “Engaging variety of humour”. “Totally compelling”.

Looking at in more detail, one reader was struck by the way Remarque could venture into quite poetic uses of language – for example on the subject of earth - without any sense of inappropriateness, despite the generally grim subject matter.

Another was struck by the ability of his characters to joke in the direst of situations, such as the description of roasting pork in a ruined house despite the fact that the smoke from the fire was attracting increasingly heavy artillery fire. The very first episode – about double rations for the troops – was laced with irony as the cause was that half the company had been killed.

His writing was particularly powerful - short and too the point. He could bring a scene to life or create a character with just a couple of brush-strokes, just a telling detail or two. Remarque’s descriptive ability could be measured by seeing how much more gripping his work was than the now widely-published recollections of former World War One soldiers describing similar events. Two particularly powerful scenes were that of the hero’s isolation on returning home on leave and that of his surreal experiences trapped in a shell crater.

The scenes set in hospital – with the ghastly range of injuries, the frequency of death, and the sense of the hospital’s limited resources being overwhelmed by demand – were perhaps the most potent of the many anti-war elements of the book.

The novel, which exposed us to the elemental in the trenches, made one reflect that our generation had been a very sheltered one. It was terrible that a teacher – presumably with no experience of war – could persuade a class of schoolchildren to volunteer.

It was intriguing that 1929 saw the publication of this classic in Germany and in the same year two other World War One classics: “Goodbye to All That” by Robert Graves and “A Farewell to Arms” by Ernest Hemingway. This coincidence might reflect a desire by publishers to publish anti-war books. However, the great majority of German war literature in the twenties and thirties was nationalistic and pro-war, and some of it glorified death for one’s country in almost mystical terms. The Hemingway book included a lot of material other than the War, but Hemingway’s ability to conjure up moving descriptions with simple short sentences and a few lucid details was similar to that of Remarque’s.

One notable difference was that Graves and Hemingway were writing from an individual perspective, whereas Remarque’s hero characteristically wrote about “we” rather than “I”. The “we” often refers primarily to his group of school friends, but more widely it can be taken to echo the idea of a lost generation set out in his preface:

“This book is intended to neither as an accusation nor as a confession, but simply as an attempt to give an account of a generation that was destroyed by the war – even those of it who survived the shelling.”

This striking theme was developed as he observes that older soldiers had jobs and families to return to, while the next generation had escaped military service. It was his generation that was left in limbo. The theme was deepened further in the painful scenes where he returns home and is unable to connect properly with his family and neighbours.

(Perhaps, ventured your scribe, Remarque’s emphasis on “we” also reflected the remarkable German capacity for organisation, which would shortly be demonstrated against England in the next round of the World Cup? This was swiftly silenced by a few anti-racist glares from those unaware that your correspondent could rival an octopus for powers of prediction).

One note of reservation was about the very brief ending, in which we discover from a new narrator that the original narrator Paul Bäumer was killed right at the end of the War. For some this was rather perfunctory and had little dramatic impact. Perhaps the real function of the ending was to underscore that Remarque was writing a novel and reserved the right to produce further novels about other World War One characters. The ending was, however, tied in to the title - in German “Im Westen nichts Neues”, with the English paraphrase “All Quiet on the Western Front” introduced by the first translator A.W. Wheen and entering the language. The title also reflected the gulf between the experience of the participants at the front and the understanding of civilians at home.


Remarque was very observant about the detail of warfare, such as how soldiers could spot the different types of artillery shell from the sound of its flight (artillery being the major cause of death in the First World War, as in most wars). He noted how the Germans had started to use entrenching tools as weapons in preference to bayonets, and how fragments of frozen ground thrown up by shells could cause as many injuries as shrapnel.

Remarque’s lack of nationalism was one of the most attractive features of the book, and must have contributed to its international success. He for one did not subscribe to the “myth of total evil” (see our discussion of Jonathan Haidt last month). Perhaps that was why he had dropped the “Remark” spelling of his name and reverted to that of his French ancestors. However, he did reproduce the widely held German view that they had not really been defeated on the Western Front in 1918. He argued that they were the better soldiers and had lost only because they lacked food and replacement artillery, and had been overwhelmed by greater numbers.

Every war sowed the seeds of the next war, and the view that the Germans had not in reality been defeated, combined with the severity of the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, had combined to provide fertile ground for the development of the Second World War.

Finally we briefly considered two World War One poems. One was Owen’s iconic “Dulce et Decorum Est”. The proposer noted that it followed on from the description of a gas attack in the Remarque book. He found Owen’s work very powerful. It built up a vivid picture in your head with its simple but imaginative language and compelling rhythms.

It was remarkable that such a hideous war should have produced so much memorable poetry, and we could not think of a war before or since that had seen such a flowering of poetry. (It was pointed out, however, that revisionist historians felt that the poignancy of the poetry had contributed to misconceptions about the competence and integrity of the British military effort).

In this poem Owen set out to shock, and he succeeded:

“If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud…”

Shock also came from the incongruously erotic undertones of :

“Gas! GAS! Quick, boys! -- An ecstasy of fumbling…”

Some of the power came from onomatopoeia, as in the hard work getting through the consonantal mud of

“Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge..”

but with alliteration pulling the reader on. The language’s energy also came from the use of a high proportion of nouns and verbs rather than adjectives, as in the use of gerunds in:

“As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams before my helpless sight
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams…”.

It was pointed out that there is a permanent exhibition to the War Poets at Craiglockhart that anyone can visit, and before long we were off on to a debate about shell-shock.

A brave soldier set off over the top armed only with the argument that we all suffered from a degree of shell-shock, simply from living long enough to be disillusioned by our inability to change things. He was mercilessly gunned down by a machine-gun nest spitting out bullets such as “unable to cope with everyday life!”, “post-traumatic stress!”, and “nonsense!” and left bleeding in no-man’s land.

Harold Begbie’s “Fall-In” (1914) was very different to Owen’s poem: aimed, like a white feather, at shaming young men into volunteering.

"What will you lack, sonny, what will you lack,
When the girls line up the street
Shouting their love to the lads to come back
From the foe they rushed to beat?...

But what will you lack when your mate goes by
With a girl who cuts you dead?”

Remarque would have hated this manipulative piece as much as his hero hates the schoolmaster who had persuaded his class to volunteer.

In printing this poem from the internet one member had inadvertently also printed a series of posts from schoolchildren who had been given the poem as a set text, along the lines of:

“I'm doing this poem for my interim assesment and I really like it but I don't get some of the meaning behind the words. Can anyone help”

“I'm doing the yr 10 coursework, we're doing this poem as one of our pro-war choices i like it, altho i hate the idea of war i really like this jingoistic poem”; and

“I have to do this poem for coursework for english , and i need to give a summary about what it is about , would anyone like to help”

All of which suggested that exposing the young to war literature might not have quite the impact we fondly hope for.

Inculcating post-war generations of British schoolchildren with First World War poetry did not stop a British Prime Minster from that generation leading Britain into five wars.

And Remarque’s “All Quiet on the Western Front” – which we were unanimous in hailing as a brilliantly powerful anti-war novel, probably the best of all - had not been enough to stem the pressures building up in Germany that would lead to the outbreak of the Second World War ten years later.