Category: Non-fiction

Laurie Lee

Published on by Margaret3 Comments

Laurie Lee was born in Stroud in Gloucestershire and moved to Slad when he was three in 1917. He died there in 1997. His best known book is Cider With Rosie (1959) which I loved. It covers his childhood years in Slad and it is absolutely fascinating. He was also a poet and this book reads like a prose poem throughout – I wrote about it here.

I’ve recently read another two of Laurie Lee’s books – As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning (1969), which is about his life after he left his home in Slad, and A Rose for Winter (1955), which is a record of his travels in Andalusia 15 years after he first went there.

 As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning is the second of his autobiographical trilogy which began with Cider With Rosie followed by A Moment of War (1991). It begins in 1934 when Laurie Lee left his home in the Cotswolds and set out ‘to discover the world’. First he walked to London where he got a job on a building site and supplemented his income by playing the violin. He left for Spain a year later, landing at Vigo and then making his way on foot through to Castillo on the south coast, playing his violin in exchange for food and a bed for the night. Then the Spanish Civil War began in earnest and he came home on a Royal Navy destroyer that had been sent from Gibraltar to rescue any ‘British subjects who might be marooned on the coast.’ In an Epilogue he explains how he had shameful doubts about leaving Spain and so he returned to join the Republicans.

Lee writes vivid, lyrical prose with beautiful descriptions of the countryside, the scorching heat, the poverty and the people, so although I haven’t been to any of the places he describes it was easy to visualise the scenes. It’s not just the scenery he captures, but also the atmosphere, the splendour and squalor, and the desperation and also the love and enthusiasm for life.

In A Rose in Winter Lee writes about his travels in Andalusia which he visited with his wife fifteen years after his last time there during the Spanish Civil War. Again, he describes the towns and countryside beautifully, portraying the poverty, the hospitality and the changes the Civil War had inflicted. He takes part in religious processions, goes to a bull fight and watches the ‘most fundamental, most mysterious of all encounters in Andalusian folk-music – the cante flamenco’, a most dramatic and erotic performance.

Reading them one after the other I was struck by his descriptions of the towns – Seville, for example, in As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning was

… dazzling – a creamy crustation of flower-banked houses fanning out from each bank of the river. The Moorish occupation had bequeathed the affection for water around which so many of even the poorest dwellings were built – a thousand miniature patios set with inexhaustible fountains which fell trickling upon ferns and leaves, each a nest of green repeated in endless variations around this theme of domestic oasis. (page 126)

and in A Rose for Winter

So Seville remains, favoured and sensual, exuding from the banks of its golden river a miasma of perpetual excitement, compounded of those appetites that are most particularly Spanish – chivalry, bloodshed, poetry and religious mortification. (page 34)

Katrina commented on my previous post about As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning that she was disappointed to read that Laurie Lee’s Spanish experiences were almost all fiction. I tried to find out more about this. There are doubts that Lee falsified and embellished his involvement in the Spanish Civil War in A Moment of War (which I haven’t read). However, his widow denied this. In an interview recorded in The New York Times, 24 February 1985, Lee, talking about Cider With Rosie said  “… it is not so much about me as about the world that I observed from my earliest years. It was a world that I wanted to record because it was such a miracle visitation to me. I wanted to communicate what I had seen, so that others could see it.”

Whether his books are fictionalised accounts of his life or not, I like them. They evoke the past – a world long gone – and give a sense of what life was like. I like to think they portray truth, even if all the facts may not be strictly accurate.

From the Archives: Biographies

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This is a second post in which I’m following Simon’s example at Stuck in a Book of posts in which he revisits his old reviews. I’ve been looking back into my archives at biographies ‘“ triggered by Katrina’s post on Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca Notebook, which I’ve also read and written about in 2010.

So here’s a list of some of my posts on biographies of authors – with links to the posts, a short summary and a quotation from my review.

First of all two from 2007:

  • Daphne by Margaret Forster – a biography of Daphne Du Maurier, the author of Rebecca etc

From my post: There is too much I could say about ‘Daphne’, not least that it is a candid account of her relationships, eg her troubled married life; wartime love affair; and friendships with Gertrude Lawrence and Ellen Doubleday, as well as an excellent source of information on Du Maurier’s method of writing and views on life.

  • Lewis Carroll by Morton N Cohen – a biography of Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) a long post  which has a somewhat controversial interpretation of some aspects of Dodgson’s life.

From my post: his account of Charles Dodgson’s life is basically chronological, but because he also looks at different aspects of Charles’s life it is a bit repetitive. As biographies go this is not one of the most straightforward or readable. It’s extremely detailed and at nearly 600 pages it is not a quick read.

One from 2008:

  • Dear Dodie by Valerie Grove – biography of Dodie Smith, the author of I Capture the Castle etc.

From my post: It is very readable and gives a very full picture of Dodie’s life, and it has an excellent index (always a plus for me). 

And two from 2009:

  • Wild Mary by Patrick Marnham – biography of Mary Wesley, the author of Camomile Lawn and other books.

From my post:  … I certainly wouldn’t like to have met Mary. She seems to have been a difficult and determined woman who aroused strong passions in those who knew and loved her.

From my post: My outstanding impression of the book is how amazingly detailed it is given the fact that few records of her life have survived.

Teaser Tuesday: Laurie Lee

Published on by Margaret8 Comments

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of ‘˜Should Be Reading’.

I’m currently reading As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning by Laurie Lee, his autobiographical account of what he did after he left home in the Cotswolds in 1934 and walked through Spain. (He tells the story of his early years in Cider With Rosie, which I read and wrote about over three years ago.) Initially he had travelled to London, where he worked as a labourer on a building site, then knowing just one Spanish phrase for ‘Will you please give me a glass of water?’, he decided to go to Spain.

This passage shows how that phrase came in useful in one of the hottest days of that Spanish summer when he set out in the morning to walk to Valladolid:

After a while, being out-doors became a hallucination, and I felt there was no longer any air to breathe, only clinkered fumes and blasts of sulphur that seemed to rise through cracks in the ground. I remember stopping for water at silent farms where even the dogs were too exhausted to snarl, and where the water was scooped up from wells and irrigation  ditches and handed to me warm and green.

…

By mid-morning I was in a state of developing madness, possessed by deliriums of thirst, my brain running and reeling through all the usual obsessions that are said to accompany the man in the desert. Fantasies of water rose up and wrapped me in cool wet leaves, or pressed the thought of cucumber peel across my stinging eyes and filled my mouth with dripping moss. (page 72)

Just like Cider With Rosie, this book is beautifully written, lyrical and poetic capturing Spain as it was in the 1930s before the Civil War, beautiful countryside, both dazzling and squalid.

A book to savour.

A Card From Angela Carter by Susannah Clapp: Book Notes

Published on by Margaret4 Comments

I liked the look of A Card from Angela Carter when I saw it in the library. It’s a small book that slots easily into a pocket or handbag and is very short – just 103 pages. I thought it would be a nice change after some of the very long books I’ve been reading recently.

I also liked the concept – a study of Angela Carter using the postcards she had sent to Susannah Clapp, who is the literary executor of Angela Carter as well as being a publisher’s reader, editor and critic. She and Angela had been friends for a number of years.

Now, Angela Carter is one of those writers whose books I’ve been meaning to read and have never got round to them, so I thought this book, which forms a sort of biography would give me at least an elementary picture  of her life and work. And that’s just what it did. Now I really do want to read some of her books – Angela Carter’s Book of Fairy Tales and Nights at the Circus, for example. I really find it hard to realise that it is twenty years ago now since she died at the age of 51 from lung cancer.  The fact that she had never made the shortlists of the Booker Prize led to the foundation of the Orange Prize, but this book, slight as it is, is the only biographical work to have been published.

Susannah Clapp uses the postcards Angela had sent to her ‘form a paper trail through her life.’ Sent from various places around the world some have a full message, some only a few words, which Susannah uses to paint a picture of what Angela was like, a ‘great curser’, capable of the sharpest of remarks, clever, unpredictable, quirky, and funny. She laughed and talked a lot. Using the postcards as a trigger, the book is mainly Susannah’s recollections of Angela, full of stories of her family life, her political views and what the critics made of her work. There’s also a considerable amount, considering the length of the book, about her physical appearance.

As for the postcards, I was disappointed at the black and white reproductions. I was also disappointed that as she was a cat lover, Angela had not sent her any cards featuring felines, although she did send them to her friend and publisher Carmen Callil. Angela herself loved cats and her first book written at the age of six was called ‘Tom Cat Goes to Market’, which her mother eventually threw away!

Susannah Clapp, whilst allowing that Angela’s fiction and prose did not go unacknowledged while she was alive, considers that her work did not receive the acclamation it deserved because:

She was ten years too old and entirely too female to be mentioned routinely alongside Martin Amis,  Julian Barnes and Ian McEwan as being a young pillar of British fiction. She was twenty years too young to belong to what she considered the ‘alternate pantheon’ of Iris Murdoch, Doris Lessing and Muriel Spark in the forties, when ‘in a curious way, women formed the ascendancy.’ (page 3)

This is an entertaining and vivid account in miniature which left me wanting to know more and to read Angela Carter’s books for myself.

Library Loot

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It’s been ages since I did a Library Loot post. These reflect the variety of books that I enjoy. For more details about the books click on the links which take you to Amazon UK:

  • D H Lawrence – Daughters of the Vicar. This is a novella written in 1911. I’d never come across this before and thought it looked interesting. It has a foreword by Anita Desai – she writes that ‘here in the little story, Daughters of the Vicar (could any title be more redolent of the England of its time?) we have the essential D H Lawrence – the little contained world in a mossy valley of coal-veined hills from which that D H Lawrence grew’.
  • Kate Atkinson – Started Early, Took My Dog. This is the fourth Jackson Brodie book, described by The Times as ‘A comic novel of great wit and virtuosity.’ I’ve been meaning to get this since it came out a couple of years ago.
  • Edna O’Brien – The Country Girls. This was first published in 1960 and it’s set in a country village in Ireland in the early 1960s – a period piece now. Her books then were both successful and scandalous. In her native Ireland she was considered irreligious.
  • Guilty Consciences: a Crime Writers’ Association Anthology, edited by Martin Edwards (himself a successful crime fiction writer and blogger). I had to borrow this collection of short stories from some of my favourite crime fiction authors.
  • Peter James – Looking Good Dead. Even though I’ve had a couple of Peter James’s books for a few years I’d never read them, until I started Dead Simple (the first Detective Superintendent Grace book) this week. I’m hooked – it’s really good. So when I saw this in the library today I was delighted – it’s the second of his Roy Grace books!
  • M R Hall – The Flight. Another series of crime fiction that I like – this is the fourth in Hall’s Coroner Jenny Cooper series. I’ve read the first and the third – Jenny Cooper is a coroner who acts as a detective. Again, another series that has me captivated.

And finally, two books on a subject that is equally as absorbing as reading and blogging – painting:

Both books include demonstrations and advice on techniques, types of paint and pastels, and composition. I just need to get painting – and reading!

Books of the Month: April

Published on by Margaret4 Comments

I’ve finished reading 8 books this month, 7 of them fiction and 1 non-fiction. Three of them are books from my to-be-read shelves (TBR), one is a library book, one borrowed from a friend and one is an e-book.
They are (listed in the order I finished them), with links to my posts:
  1. My Cousin Rachel by Daphne du Maurier 4/5 (from TBR bks)
  2. The Murder on the Links by Agatha Christie 3/5 (Poirot)
  3. Agnes Grey by Anne Bronte 3/5 (Kindle)
  4. The Hanging Valley by Peter Robinson 3/5 (from TBR books)
  5. The Village by Marghanita Laski 5/5 (borrowed from a friend)
  6. Daphne du Maurier: a Daughter’s Memoir by Flavia Leng (library book) 3.5/5
  7. Ninepins by Rosy Thornton (author review copy) 4.5/5
  8. A Place of Greater Safety by Hilary Mantel 4/5 (post to follow)

So, going off my ratings (which are purely subjective) my pick of the month is The Village by Marghanita Laski, with Ninepins by Rosy Thornton a close second.

Kerrie at Mysteries in Paradise is hosting the Crime Fiction Pick of the Month. My crime fiction reading this month has been less than usual, with just two books:

The Murder on the Links by Agatha Christie and The Hanging Valley by Peter Robinson

and I’ve rated them both 3/5 – so a dead heat.