Amit Chaudhuri quotes

It was before history was born, and he himself became who he was, studying in a city that is always pre-natal, pre-nascent....It is as if my father came into being from fantasy, like an image, in 1923. Yet it is an image full of truth, to think of him studying in Calcutta, or taking a tram-ride, one of the marginal, anonymous people who were neighbours with history, one of millions, studying, discussing politics, listening to songs, living in hostel rooms, eating in the 'cabins' of North Calcuttam who were bypassed and yet changed, without their names or the quality of those moments ever being known, by independence and partition. So India took on a new shape, and another story began, with homelands becoming fantasies, never to be returned to or remembered. 

Afternoon Raag (1993)

History is not the annals; it's what happens around us when we're unaware it's history.

Calcutta: Two Years in the City (2013) 

Joseph Roth quote

...I believe that my observations have always led me to find that the so-called realist moves about the world with a closed mind, ringed as it were with concrete and cement, and that the so-called romantic is like an unfenced garden in and out of which truth can wander at will...

Joseph Roth, The Emperor's Tomb 

P.G. Wodehouse quote

The Grammar School at Market Snodsbury had, I understood, been built somewhere in the year 1416, and, as with so many of these ancient foundations, there still seemed to brood over its Great Hall, where the afternoon's festivities were to take place not a little of the fug of centuries. It was the hottest day of the summer, and though somebody had opened a tentative window or two, the atmosphere remained distinctive and individual. 

In this hall the youth of Market Snodsbury had been eating its daily lunch for a matter of five hundred years, and the flavour lingered. The air was sort of heavy and languorous, if you know what I mean, with the scent of young England and boiled beef and carrots.

P.G. Wodehouse, Right Ho, Jeeves

A minor play?

Another review originally written for amazon. Bennett is something of a hero:

Alan Bennett, The History Boys

A minor play?

Not quite forty years on from Forty Years On, Alan Bennett returned to the subject of a school and education in a play that seems to have acquired a great deal of affection from its audience. Where the school in his earlier play was an unreal place, a model for the wider English society Bennett was mocking, The History Boys takes a more realistic approach to its subject(s). Personally, I’ve always regarded The History Boys as a minor work. Against that, I must admit that I also believe the strength and emotional power of much of Alan Bennett’s work derives from the fact that it is so often in a minor key, frequently focussing on apparently mundane and constricted lives. In contrast, the film of The History Boys (which I enjoyed) seems all to ready to settle for sentimentality. Bennett’s wit and humanity is much in evidence, as in all his work, but it seems marred by a sentimentality he avoids elsewhere. This might in part be simply down to the mechanics of film. Matched with appropriately wistful music, Richard Griffiths’ delivery of the line “Pass it on, boys, pass it on” can’t help but raise a tear. And the central argument around which the narrative is constructed, that the kindness and teaching methods represented by Hector are under threat from the more utilitarian and aggressive approach favoured by Irwin and the Headmaster is a difficult one to make in terms of a play without falling prey to sentimentality, for all that Bennett consciously avows any nostalgia for his own schooldays in his typically lengthy introduction to the playtext.

Reading the play text, it’s particularly interesting to see what was cut, and what was changed. The film elides the flash forwards to Irwin’s later career, leaving it as simply a rueful acknowledgement of where he went after his teaching, which is probably a change for the better. Also improved is (ironically, given my comments about the sentimentality of the film) the happier ending granted to Posner. The play is harsher, but oddly less convincing. It’s also a very gay play, which is again slightly unconvincing, but also rather sweet. It doesn’t quite ring true for me. Dakin seems largely unconcerned about Posner’s obvious desire for him, whilst they all seem to regard Hector’s indiscretions as little more than a minor inconvenience. I went to a relatively liberal school in the 1990s, and I don’t believe the sixth formers I knew would have been so accepting of either an obviously gay teacher or homosexuality in general. On the other hand, an American friend has described his own school experiences to me as “We were a very gay year!”, so who knows. In the context of the work of a writer who, on the evidence of his autobiographical writing and occasional public remarks has apparently struggled somewhat with publicly acknowledging his sexuality, now appears happy to write a play which is so openly concerned with both a gay man and a gay teenager is rather moving. The play’s treatment of some of its homosexual characters feels freer and more open than any of his past work.

Is it a bad play? I find that I don’t care. Whatever its faults of sentimentality and nostalgia, the play is still angry about many of the right things, funny, and despite it all, intensely moving. Minor work or not, I love this play.

Lorna Sage, again

Lorna Sage, Good As Her Word: Selected Journalism (ed. Sharon Sage & Vic Sage)

Can a collection of book reviews ever be moving? Obviously, I don't mean to doubt that an individual piece can't be moving in it's own particular way, but can the book as a whole? In any case, corralling a series of ephemeral reviews into a coherent book is already a somewhat quixotic task to start with, made doubly so if, as in this case, it's posthumous. Since it's the person of the author which is the only thing which conveys any kind of coherence on the book in the first place. It's for this very reason, I imagine, that so many such collections subdivide their reviews into sections organised by theme. We have six sections here, but since they included the dates of original publication I decided to read the book against itself, starting in the early 70s and finishing with the final few posthumously published reviews. Whichever way you read it, there's a sense of anticlimax involved. It's just another review, the author cut off in mid flow.

The only collection of this sort which I can remember working as a coherent book is Salman Rushdie's Imaginary Homelands, which works by placing his initial reactions to the fatwa in the final section. In this way it creates a sense of narrative, the fatwa marking an end to a particular period in both Rushdie's life and the wider culture of which he was a part. Which, in retrospect, it clearly did.

There's a few book reviews, a few encounters with the canon, but most of Lorna Sage's reviews were of academic works, or else, particularly later in her life, obituaries. Her attention, consequently, is often focused on ideas and theory. Reading it in chronological order, you do get a sense of the change and shifts in academic fashions, particularly in regards to feminist theory. If I find the book moving, it's probably because of this partly hidden narrative that I found within the text. Because it does chart a movement away from the certainties of the world of post-war England that Lorna Sage memorialised so eloquently in Bad Blood. A considerable amount of her work was on Angela Carter's writing. Like her, Lorna Sage died too young (57 to Carter's 52), and their reviews share a sense of humour. Humour used strategically, to make an important point.

*

So it's also a narrative that I'm imposing on the text from without. Post-war England, I'm coming to realise, really is my personal land of lost content. The arcadia I only just missed out on through the misfortune to have been born just a little too late. Of course I might know intellectually that it was far from a perfect moment in our history, as no era is ever perfect, and in any case it contained within it the seeds for it's own dissolution. This is a wholly emotional pull, although the recent documentary The Spirit of '45 (which I've not actually seen) perhaps shows that I'm not alone in feeling this.

Mount Olympus

'From here issue the only known infallible bulls for the guidance of British souls and bodies. This little court is the Vatican of England. Here reigns a pope, self-nominated, self-consecrated - ay, and much stranger too - self-believing! - a pope whom, if you cannot obey him, I would advise you to disobey as silently as possible; a pope hitherto afraid of no Luther; a pope who manages his own inquisition, who punishes unbelievers as no most skillful inquisitor of Spain ever dreamt of doing - one who can excomunicate thoroughly, fearfully, radically; put you beyond the pale of men's charity; make you odious to your dearest friends, and turn you into a monster to be pointed at by the finger!' 

Oh heavens! and this is Mount Olympus!

Anthony Trollope, The Warden

A rather naughty book cover...

Is it wrong for me to like this cover as much as I do? Yes, I know that it's objectifying the girl in the picture, but something about the way in which she's looking back at us over her shoulder with a little half smile cuts against that somewhat. Whilst the story which the cover explicitly illustrates, 'Love, Your Magic Spell is Everywhere' is hardly free from such issues, it's conclusion does at least undercut some of the narrator's assumptions. The girl with the most attractive figure is, predictably perhaps, the one who cares least about her appearance, and who finally catches him with a geniune love potion to match his X-Ray Specs.

Really, whatever issues I might have with the gender relations present in Finney's stories, they seem so much of the time in which they were written, as to feel almost harmless. Boyish, really. And the most problematic story in this respect, 'The Coin Collector', contains something which is certainly relevant to my suposedly more enlightened self, with it's narrator whose wife complains that he enjoys reading rather too much. Redolent of a nostalgia that I recognise from Ray Bradbury as well as from the author of Time and Again, Finney finds a number of variations on the idea of travelling through time, with the 1880s appearing most frequently as the Eden that his characters most long for. Other stories feature a prisoner on death row managing to free himself through the magic of painting an opening door on his cell wall ('Prison Legend'), or a mysterious balloon ride through night time San Francisco which unleashes something hidden within the two protagonists ('The Intrepid Aeronaut'). The most moving story is probably the last, 'The Love Letter', in which lovers communicate across time through letters, but are never able to meet until the modern New Yorker finds the grave of the women from 1882 he fell in love with through a few letters.

I remember that day and all those long ago, deep-summer days in Galesburg, Illinois, with a terrible nostalgia. Already the sky was a hard hot blue, the air shimmering with sun. The grass under our bare feet was faded and dry and the tree locusts were sawing their wings for yards and blocks and miles around us.

'A Possible Candidate for the Presidency'