How Should One Read A Book? – Virginia Woolf

Extract from her essay of the same name.

Suppose we were to go into a library and ask ourselves, how am I to read these books? What is the right way to set about it? There are so many and so various. My appetite is so fitful and so capricious. What am I to do to get the most pleasure out of them? And is it pleasure or profit or what is it that I seek? 

No one is going to lay down the laws about reading. Here in this room full of books, if nowhere else, we breathe the air of freedom. Here, simple and learned man and woman are alike. Reading is so simple, a mere matter of knowing the alphabet, yet so difficult that it is doubtful whether anybody knows anything about it. Paris is the capital of France; King John signed the Magna Carta. Those area facts, those can be taught. But how are we to teach people so to read Paradise Lost as to see that it is a great poem. or Tess of the D’ Urbervilles to see that it is a good novel? How are we to learn the art of reading for ourselves? 

Directly we begin to think how one should read a book, we are faced by the fact that books differ. There are poems, novels, biographies on the bookshelf. Each different from the other as a tiger from the tortoise, a tortoise from an elephant. Our attitude must always be changing, it is clear. From different books we must ask different qualities. But if we remember, as we turned to the bookcase, that each of these books was written by a pen which consciously or unconsciously tried to trace out a design, avoiding this, accepting that and venturing the other. If we try to follow the writer in this experiment from the first word to the last without imposing our design upon him then we should have a good chance of getting hold of the right end of the string.

To read a book well, one should read it as if one were writing it. Begin not by sitting on the bench among the judges, but by standing in the dock with the criminal. Be his fellow worker; become his accomplice. Even if you wish merely to read books, begin by writing them.

Woolf speculates how Daniel Defoe, Jane Austen and Thomas Hardy might approach writing about meeting a beggar in the street. 

Where Jane Austen describes manners, Hardy describes nature. Where she is matter of fact, he is romantic and poetical ... Some may complain Jane Austen is too prosaic or Thomas Hardy too melodramatic, but we have to remind ourselves it is necessary to approach every writer differently in order to get from him or her all they can give us. … Great writers often require us to make heroic efforts in order to read them rightly. They bend us and break us. To go from Jane Austen to Hardy, is to be wrenched and distorted this way then that. 

Everyone is born with a natural bias of his own, in one direction rather than another. One will instinctively accepted Hardy’s vision rather than Jane Austen's. And reading with the current and not against it, is carried on easily and swiftly by the impetus of his own bent to the heart of this author’s genius. But then, Jane Austen is repulsive to him. He can scarcely stagger through the desert of her novels. Sometimes this natural antagonism is too great to be overcome, but the trial is always worth making.

If then this is true, that books are of very different types and to read them rightly we have to bend our imaginative powers, first this one way, then another, it's clear that reading is one of the most arduous and exhausting occupations.

Reading is not merely sympathising and understanding, it is also criticising and judging. When the book is finished, the reader must leave the dock and mount the bench. He must cease to be the friend. He must become the judge. So we ask, is it good or bad? What kind of book is it? How good a book is it? … If we're asked our opinion, we cannot give it. Parts of the book seem to have sunk away, others to be starting out in undue prominence. Then perhaps it is better to take up some different pursuit, to walk, to talk, to dig, to listen to music. If we distract ourselves by some other occupation or just go about our daily business, the whole book floats to the top of the mind complete. Some process seems to have been finished without once being aware of it. The different details which accumulated in reading assemble themselves in their proper places. The book takes on a definite shape. It becomes a castle, a cow shed, a gothic ruin, as the case may be. 

Now one can think of the book as a whole, and the book as a whole is different. And gives one a different emotion. … Holding this complete shape in mind, it now becomes necessary to arrive at some opinion of the book's merits. For though it is possible to receive the greatest pleasure and excitement from reading, it is not so profound or so lasting as the pleasure we get when the second process, the after reading is finished and we hold the book clear, secure, and to the best of our powers, complete in our minds.

But how, we may ask, are we to decide any of these questions? Is it good or bad? How good is it? How bad is it? Not much help can be looked for from outside. We cannot go to the critics. There is nothing more disastrous and to crush one’s own foot into another person's shoe. It is not by reading critics, but by realising our own impression as acutely as possible and referring this to the judgments which we have formulated in the past – the books we have read and the opinions we have formed.

So then, to sum up, have we found any answer to our question? How should we read a book? Clearly no answer will do for everyone, but perhaps a few suggestions. 

In the first place, a good reader will give the writer the benefit of every doubt; the help of all his imagination; will follow as closely, interpret as intelligently as he can. 

In the next place he will judge with the upmost severity. Every book he will remember as a right to be judged by the best of its kind. He will be adventurous, broad in his choice, true to his own instincts, yet ready to consider those of other people.

It is true that we get nothing whatsoever except pleasure from reading. It is true that the wisest of us is unable to say what the pleasure maybe. But that pleasure, mysterious, unknown, useless as it is, is enough. 

That pleasure is so curious, so complex, so immensely fertilising the mind of anyone who enjoys it, and so wide in its effects that it would not be in the least surprising to discover on the Day of Judgement, when secrets are revealed and the obscure is made plain, that the reason we have grown from pigs to men and women, come out from our caves and dropped our bows and arrows, and sat around the fire and talked and drunk and made merry, and given to the poor and helped the sick, and made pavements and houses, and erected some sort of shelter and society on the waste of the world, is nothing but this: we have loved reading. 

The only important thing in a book, is the meaning it has for you.

Somerset Maugham

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Nature Writing - Birds

From The Peregrine by J A Baker

A swallow flits past, purple against the roaring whiteness of the weir, blue over the green smoothness of the river. As so often on spring evenings, no birds sing near me, while all the distant trees and bushes ring with song. Like all human beings, I seemed to walk within a hoop of red-hot iron, a hundred yards across that sears away all life. When I stand still, it cools and slowly disappears. Seven o’clock, under elms and hawthorns it is already dusk. 

A bird flies low across the field, coming straight toward me. It skims over the long grass like an owl. The deep keel of his breastbone actually touches and parts the grass as it comes. Its wings beat easily, fanning high, their tips almost meeting above its back. His head is broad and owl like. There is a wonderfully exciting softness and silent stealth in its fast approach across the shadowed field. It's just looking down into grass and only occasionally glancing up to see where it is going. As it comes nearer. I can see that it is a hunting peregrine, a tiercel trying to flush partridges by flying very low.

He sees me and swerves to his right, swings up to a perch in a big wych elm. The last pale sunlight shines on his broad back, which gleams like a cloth of gold. He is alert, avid, never still. Soon he dives smoothly down and flickers erratically away to the northeast. He lands on an overhead cable out in the open fields and stays there for fifteen minutes. He’s very upright and watchful, a bulk of silhouette in the fading light looking back over his left shoulder. Then he flies low and fast across ploughland and behind trees. Accelerating with long cleaving wing-strokes.

Spring dusk; creak of bat’s wings over the steel river; curlew-call of the lemuring owls.

The Living Mountain by Nan Shepherd

I was startled by a whizzing sound behind me. Something dark swished past the side of my head at a speed that made me giddy. Hardly had I got back my balance when it came again whistling through the windless air, which eddied round me with the motion. This time my eyes were ready, and I realised that a Swift was sweeping in mighty curves over the edge of the plateau, plunging down the face of the rock and rising again like a jet of water. No one had told me I should find Swifts on the mountain, Eagles and ptarmigan, yes, but that first sight of the mad, joyous, abandon of the Swift over and over the very edge of the precipice shocked me with the thrill of elation. All that volley of speed, those convolutions of delight to catch a few flies. The discrepancy between purpose and performance made me laugh out loud. A laugh that gave the same feeling of release, as though I've been dancing for a long time.

It seems odd that merely to watch the motion of flight should give the body not only vicarious exhilaration, but release. So urgent is the rhythm that it invades the blood. This power of flight to take us into itself through the eyes as though we had actually shared in the motion, I've never felt so strongly as when watching Swifts on the mountain top. Their headlong rush, each curve of which is at the same time a miracle of grace, the swishing sound of their cleavage of the air, and the occasional high-pitched cry that is hardly like the note of an earthly bird, seemed to make visible and audible some essence of the free wild spirit of the mountain.

H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald

Grief had spurred me to fly the hawk, but now my grief was gone. Everything was gone except this quiet sylvan scene into which I intended to let slip havoc and murder. I'd stalked round the edge of the wood, crouching low, holding my breath. My attention was microscopically fierce. I become a thing of eyes and will alone. Mabel held her wings out from her sides, her head snaking, reptilian eyes glowing. It felt like I was holding the bastard offspring of a flaming torch and an assault rifle. Soft grass under foot. One hand out to steady myself, we picked our way round to the final corner. And then I slowly extended my gloved fist out from the screen of brush.

The hawk left the fist with the recoil of a .303 rifle. I stepped out to watch. Saw a chain of events so fast they snapped into a comic strip: frame, frame, frame. Frame one: goshawk spluttering from the fist in bars and pinions and talons. Frame two: Goshawk low to the ground, grass streaking along under her. Chocolate wings beating strongly, hump-backed. Frame three: rabbits running. Frame four: the pheasant too crouching and running into the wood’s safe margin.

But it wasn't safe. Split-second instant decisions in the hawk’s tactile computer. She slewed round slingshot style, heel-bow, soaking up g-force like a sponge, closed her wings and was gone. Sucked into the black hole of the wood beneath a low hanging larch branch. Everything disappeared. No rabbits, no pheasant, no hawk. Just a black hole in the woods edge. It had gone very quiet. ….

It had been a long while since I hunted with the hawk. But I don't remember it being like this. I was sure to never been like this. I was astounded by the radical change in subjectivity. Is it instilled? How the world dissolved into nothing. It was so real and tangible it almost hurt. How every passing second slowed and stretched, catching us out of time. When I stepped back into road to walk home, I was astounded how the sun had fallen. We've been out less than the hour, but it felt like years.

The Hawk In The Rain by Ted Hughes

I drown in the drumming ploughland, I drag up
Heel after heel from the swallowing of the earth’s mouth,
From clay that clutches my each step to the ankle
With the habit of the dogged grave, but the hawk

Effortlessly at height hangs his still eye.
His wings hold all creation in a weightless quiet,
Steady as a hallucination in the streaming air.
While banging wind kills these stubborn hedges,

Thumbs my eyes, throws my breath, tackles my heart,
And rain hacks my head to the bone, the hawk hangs
The diamond point of will that polestars
The sea drowner’s endurance: and I,

Bloodily grabbed dazed last-moment-counting
Morsel in the earth’s mouth, strain towards the master-
Fulcrum of violence where the hawk hangs still,
That maybe in his own time meets the weather

Coming from the wrong way, suffers the air, hurled upside down,
Fall from his eye, the ponderous shires crash on him,
The horizon traps him; the round angelic eye
Smashed, mix his heart’s blood with the mire of the land.


The Windhover by Gerard Manley Hopkins

I caught this morning morning's minion,
kingdom of daylight's dauphin,
dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird, – the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!
No wonder of it: sheer plód makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.

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The Peregrine By J A Baker

I lived the first nine years of my life in a hamlet in rural Lincolnshire. The outdoors and countryside are in my bones. My most enjoyable experiences have been off the beaten track, mountain camping, climbing and walking. My teaching career has been in small town schools in the Southwest with Exmoor and rural Devon on my doorstep. After retirement, walking, running and cycling through the countryside have been balm to the soul.

I used to walk with  friend who knew every plant in every hedgerow. He would name five different ferns on a bank and point out a wild flower growing in an unexpected place. He made me realise I was ignorant of the language of the natural world. I could not identify beyond the everyday, birds, trees, plants and insects; I was ignorant of the variations in geology and habitat. I was like a child who enjoys pictures in a book but is ignorant of the words on the page.

I am also a romantic, trying to free himself from the prison of a logical, science-orientated mind. I cling, almost in desperation, to the hope there is a hidden, mystical something beyond an indifferent, physical universe. A favourite poem is Emily Dickinson’s, This world Is Not Conclusion which finishes with – “narcotics cannot still the tooth that nibbles at the soul.”

So, to The Peregrine by J A Baker. For this romantic, countryboy it was a magical, inspirational and even spiritual read. It scratches where I itch. Baker uses language like an artist, dipping his pen into the lexicon as a painter dips his brush into the spectrum. The intense prose-poetry of The Peregrine, creates images that stop you in your tracks, some so surreal that they make no sense – like standing in front of a cubist painting. 

Baker became obsessed with the peregrine. For 10 years he followed it through the coastal countryside of Essex, writing his observations in journals he later condensed into to the book, written as diary entries beween Autumn and Spring.

“Wherever he goes, this winter, I will follow him. I will share the fear, and the exaltation, and the boredom, of the hunting life. I will follow him till my predatory human shape no longer darkens in terror the shaken kaleidoscope of colour that stains the deep fovea of his brilliant eye. My pagan head shall sink into the winter land, and there be purified.”

Autumn rises into the bright sky. Corn is down. Fields shine after the harvest…. Sunlight glints…. The Heron blinds the white river cornea with the spear of his bill. ….The hawk flies quickly upward to the breaking clouds. Swerving and twisting away from the misty lower air, he rises to the first faint warmth of the sun. feels delicately fore wing-hold in the sheer fall of the sky. He is a tiercel lean and long and supple-winged the first of the year.

High tide was at three o’clock, lifting along the southern shore of the estuary. Snipe shuddering from the dykes. White glinting water welling in, mouthing the stones of the seawall. Moored boats pecking at the water. Dark red glasswort shining like drowned blood.

Fact & Fantasy

A criticism of The Peregrine from birdwatchers is that many of Baker's descriptions run counter to the facts. Discussing this issue, Conor Mark Jameson, a feature writer, author and conservationist, writes this in his blog "Finding J A Baker":

Baker saw unusual things, in unusual ways. He describes Peregrines as ‘yellower’ than Kestrels. If that’s how he saw the world, then that’s how he saw it. I believe these lines from The Peregrine contains the key to his modus operandi:

“Everything I describe took place while I was watching it, but I do not believe that honest observation is enough. The emotions and behaviour of the watcher are also facts, and they must be truthfully recorded.”

Jameson also writes the Forward to 50th anniversary edition of The Peregrine in which he again considers the objections to the book. His defense of Baker is robust; he calls the charges of deception and fraud "irrelevant" to Baker's project. He says. "The whole of Baker's work is shot through with an almost forensic concern for truthfulness about his encounters with birds, nature and landscape.."

In her essay "The New Biography", Virginia Woolf discusses how the desire for factual truth can squeeze the life out of it's subject. She says the biographer Sir Sidney Lee's life of Shakespeare is dull and his life of Edward the 7th is unreadable because they are both stuffed with truth. But Lee has failed to choose those truths which transmit personality. She wonders if the granite-like solidity of truth and the rainbow-like intangibility of personality can really be welded together into a seamless whole. The Peregrine seeks to make this difficult synthesis, mixing the granite of factual observation with the intangebility of Baker's rainbow vision.

Werner Herzog, the film director, speaking about The Peregrine, says, facts do not consitute truth. Truth is something deeper that awakens a feeling of ecstasy. He says, "The Peregrine is not a book about watching a bird, it's a book about becoming a bird." (part of this discussion below)

Baker is reaching for a language beyond observation.  He writes with an almost religious fervour, as though the Essex landscape is a place of worship and he needs to forge a litany of praise to the bird he so reveres. As he strives to capture what amounts to a spiritual devotion, he bends language, stretches meaning and crafts vivid images that do not just beguile and assault the mind of the reader but also enrich the soul. He invites us to stand with him in a muddy field, crouch behind a frosty hedge, gaze out over a marsh, search the sky and see deeper and know more profoundly the elusive world of the Peregrine.

YouTube review: YouTube Better Than Food (well worth a watch)

JA Baker Website

Werner Herzog in discussion with the writer Robert Pogue Harrison at Stanford University

WH: He writes in the prose which we have not seen since Joseph Conrad's short stories. We have not seen anything like that and that's why I find this a very, very decisive book for anyone who wants to make films. By the way, for anyone who is becoming a writer, you have to read it, learn it, learn the whole book by heart. 

RPH: When you open that book you ask what is? What is going on? What passion is he bringing to bear? I think he falls in love with a Peregrine; he is infatuated.

 

WH: Yes, it's an ecstasy; that's one of the things that really caught my attention because, there's always a question particularly in documentary filmmaking, of what constitutes a deeper truth? Sometimes in poetry you have the instant sense that there's a deep truth. Don't, don't analyse it and dissect it in academic terms with the tools of literary theory. Just don't do that. Same thing with films. 

Because today what you see, and in what I hear constantly from colleagues is they believe wrongly that facts constitute truth and they do not. Facts at best create norms but only truth is something that illuminates us, that carries us into some sort of an ecstasy. That is something which I find in every second page in in the Peregrine, and there is a quasi-religious quality in his evocation of the peregrine falcon. 

RPH: The question is of course is how much is factual. Is the book full of factual inaccuracies? 

WH: Maybe a few, but what I keep saying in movie making. if it’s the accountant’s truth you're after, you'll get a straight “A” - you idiot! In the very intelligent, beautiful forward, it says this is irrelevant for The Peregrine is not a book about watching a bird, it's a book about becoming a bird.

You see this quite often in the book. He writes how the Peregrine is soaring higher and higher and becomes a dot in this incredible sky. And then he writes: “then we swooped down”. We swooped down as if he had become a peregrine himself. Sure, it's a factual inaccuracy and yes, count it, become an accountant. That's where you should be. 

The ornithologist should be denied to read this book. 

RPH. Alright, I have to make a case for facts and. A quote from Henry David Thoreau, in a passage from Walden he says:

"If you stand right fronting and face to face to a fact, you will see the sun glimmer on both its surfaces, as if it were a scimitar, and feel its sweet edge dividing you through the heart and marrow, and so you will happily conclude your mortal career."  Be it life or death, we crave only reality.”

WH: No, I crave many other things beyond reality. It's a very impoverished life if we go only for that. …. Its truth that gives you illumination and transports you into a state where you step outside of your own existence into an ecstasy. You can for example find it in the writings of late mediaeval mystics. That's a beauty of this book. 

Cythnia Raven wrote a report on this dicussion. 

She is not convinced by Herzog's argument. Nevertheless she writes:

The Peregrine is undeniably a masterpiece, but it raises questions about artistic truth, “real” truth, and what, exactly, Baker was doing. ...... I’m convinced that these issues make the book more, not less, interesting, and raise fascinating questions about the process of creation.

From the Afterword to 50th anniversary edition,  by Robert Macfarlane

The story of the Peregrine's writing is remarkable and has a mystery at its heart. For around a decade, from 1954 to 1964, a myopic, arthritic office worker from Essex called John Alec Baker tracked the peregrine falcons that hunted over the landscape of his county. He pursued them on bicycle and on foot, watching through binoculars as they bathed, flew, stooped, killed and roosted.

A bird’s jizz is its gist and vibe, the aggregation of its particulars into a compound signature of life. Baker's style has its own jizz. I think I could encounter the sentence of his prose anywhere and identify it immediately as his.

Adjectives and nouns wrenched into verbs, surreal similes, flaring adverbs. These are among the specifics that make up its unique gestalt.

• 5000 Dunlin rained away inland like a horde of beetles, gleamed with golden chitin.
• The north wind brittled icily in the pleached lattice of the hedges.
• Four short-eared owls soothed out of the gorse.
• A wood pigeon dead on a winters field glows purple and grey like broccoli.

His Essex is landscape on acid: supersaturations of colour, wheeling phantasmagoria, dimensions blown out and falling away, nature as hyper-nature.

Early in The Peregrine, Baker describes a dunlin being taken by a falcon that approaches it from behind at greater speed. “The dunlin”, he writes, “seemed to come slowly back to the hawk. It passed into his dark outline and did not reappear.” The image is space operatic, a small craft caught in a larger craft’s tractor beam and drawn relentlessly in.

Baker’s book possesses a compatible traction. It hooks into its readers, and they pass involuntarily into it. It is one of the few books I know that leaves no one indifferent. By no means everyone likes it.

But no one doubts the book's bleak bite. The Peregrine cannot be passively consumed. It sticks in the craw, rapes the mind.

Hertzog was asked about making a feature film of The Peregrine and he said, “A feature film would be very wrong. There are texts that should never be touched. In fact, whoever tries to make a feature film of The Peregrine should be shot without trial.”

I wrote a preface to a 2004 edition of the book and described it, not as a book about watching a bird, but a book about becoming a bird. However, I no longer believe that. It is more accurate to say it is a book about failing to become a bird. It is true that Baker longs for the deterritorialised experience of falcons, wishing as they do, to live in a pouring away world of no attachment, and there are numerous moments of extreme identification, such as when he finds himself crouching over a kill like a mantling hawk.

But these ecstatic moments are always followed by Baker’s wounding awareness of his anchorage in a crabbed human body. Again and again, subject object distance is almost closed, only to yawn wide again. The books desolation arises in part from this futile longing for a magical metamorphosis.

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Our Mutual Friend - Charles Dickens

I had a friend who was an avid reader. Whenever I asked him what he was reading, very often it was a re-read of a Dickens novel. Having only read Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby and Great Expectations, he has been my inspiration to read more Dickens. Claire Tomalin's excellent biography was a further spur. So, this year it was the turn of Our Mutual Friend which for some is Dickens' greatest novel. It was published in 19 monthly installments in 1864–65 and is his last completed novel.

Where Bleak House is centred on the judicial system, Our Mutual Friend is a dark  satire, focusing on wealth, greed, social ambition in Victorian society.

The story begins with the sun setting over the river Thames. Gaffer Hexam, rowed by his daughter Lizzie, is searching for floating bodies in order to rob them of any valuables, before dragging them to the shore. He finds a body which is duly identified as John Harmon, the estranged son and heir of a wealthy businessman, recently deceased. The body and the father's Will are the centre of the main mystery of the novel.  

The inheritance due to John Harmon passes on to Mr Boffin, a genial employee of old Harmon who had made his money from dust heaps - a Victorian re-cyling industry. Newly rich, Mr & Mrs Boffin move from their lowly house near the dust heaps into a mansion. They take into their care Bella Wilfer, a beautiful young woman who had been named in the Will as the father's intended bride for John Harmon - the son would only inherit his father's fortune if he married Bella. The Boffins did not want her to miss out on a wealthy future so they invite her to live with them.

Mr Boffin employs John Rokesmith, Our Mutal Friend of the title, as his secretary and Silas Wegg, a one-leggged ballad seller, as the caretaker of the dust mounds. 

We are introduced to the social climbing Veneerings and their circle of middle-class, money-obsessed friends:

Mr and Mrs Veneering were bran-new people in a bran-new house in a bran-new quarter of London. Everything about the Veneerings was spick and span new. All their furniture was new, all their friends were new, all their servants were new, their plate was new, their carriage was new, their harness was new, thorses were new, their pictures were new, they themselves were new, they were as newly married as was lawfully compatible with their having a bran-new baby, and if they had set up a great-grandfather, he would haeir hve come home in matting from the Pantechnicon, without a scratch upon him, French polished to the crown of his head.

For, in the Veneering establishment, from the hall-chairs with the new coat of arms, to the grand pianoforte with the new action, and upstairs again to the new fire-escape, all things were in a state of high varnish and polish. And what was observable in the furniture, was observable in the Veneerings - the surface smelt a little too much of the workshop and was a trifle sticky.

A main theme of the novel is the moral corruption of money. Those who have it lose their generosity and become miserly; they seek status and desire to mix in the best company; they are not content with their place on the social ladder but wish to climb higher. Dickens satirises the shallow lives of those who simply use money to make more money:

As is well known to the wise in their generation, traffic in Shares is the one thing to have to do with in this world. Have no antecedents, no established character, no cultivation, no ideas, no manners; have Shares. Have Shares enough to be on Boards of Direction in capital letters, oscillate on mysterious business between London and Paris, and be great. Where does he come from? Shares. Where is he going to? Shares. What are his tastes? Shares. Has he any principles? Shares. What squeezes him into Parliament? Shares. Perhaps he never of himself achieved success in anything, never originated anything, never produced anything? Sufficient answer to all; Shares. O mighty Shares! To set those blaring images so high, and to cause us smaller vermin, as under the influence of henbane or opium, to cry out, night and day, ‘Relieve us of our money, scatter it for us, buy us and sell us, ruin us, only we beseech ye take rank among the powers of the earth, and fatten on us’!

In contrast we have Lizzie Hexam who works hard to live independently, Jenny Wren a crippled doll's dress maker who has to support a drunken father, and old Betty Higden, a foster mother with indomitable will and pride, who would rather die than go to the Poor House:

‘The Poor-house?’ said the Secretary.
Mrs Higden set that resolute old face of hers, and darkly nodded yes.
‘You dislike the mention of it.’
‘Dislike the mention of it?’ answered the old woman. ‘Kill me sooner than take me there. Throw this pretty child under cart-horses feet and a loaded waggon, sooner than take him there. Come to us and find us all a-dying, and set a light to us all where we lie and let us all blaze away with the house into a heap of cinders sooner than move a corpse of us there!’
...
‘Do I never read in the newspapers,’ said the dame, fondling the child—‘God help me and the like of me!—how the worn-out people that do come down to that, get driven from post to pillar and pillar to post, a-purpose to tire them out! Do I never read how they are put off, put off, put off—how they are grudged, grudged, grudged, the shelter, or the doctor, or the drop of physic, or the bit of bread? Do I never read how they grow heartsick of it and give it up, after having let themselves drop so low, and how they after all die out for want of help? Then I say, I hope I can die as well as another, and I’ll die without that disgrace.’

When a second version of the Harmon Will is discovered by Silas Wegg he sees a way to make himself rich and enlists the help of Mr Venus a taxidermist. Rogue Ridehood an old partner of Gaffer Hexam is also on the make. He resents Gaffer Hexam shutting him out of  a share in profits from the drowned bodies and accuses him of murdering John Harmon. 

Meanwhile Lizzie Hexam has attracted the attention of a lazy lawyer and the schoolmaster friend of her brother. Their rivalry and obsession play out in dramatic and deadly fashion towards the end of the novel. 

Wealthy Bella Wilfer is also the object of unrequited love but is determined that only a rich man is worthy of her hand. 

‘I fear, Bella dear,’ said Mrs Lammle one day in the chariot, ‘that you will be very hard to please.’
‘I don’t expect to be pleased, dear,’ said Bella, with a languid turn of her eyes.
‘Truly, my love,’ returned Sophronia, shaking her head, and smiling her best smile, ‘it would not be very easy to find a man worthy of your attractions.’
‘The question is not a man, my dear,’ said Bella, coolly, ‘but an establishment.’

Bella's hopes do not turn out as she planned. 

One of my dislikes of Dickens is his sentimental depiction of young women, but in Bella Wilfer he has created an interesting character who is self-aware, stands up for herself, is tested in an unusal way, passes the test and takes command of her own destiny.

Lizzie Hexam is also determined to plot her own course and resists demands made by her brother that her life should be conducted to further his ambitions rather than her own.

Although this is a dark novel in some ways, Dickens always has a sharp eye for satire and the novel is shot through with humour:

The Six Jolly Fellowship Porters, already mentioned as a tavern of a dropsical appearance, had long settled down into a state of hale infirmity. In its whole constitution it had not a straight floor, and hardly a straight line; but it had outlasted, and clearly would yet outlast, many a better-trimmed building, many a sprucer public-house. Externally, it was a narrow lopsided wooden jumble of corpulent windows heaped one upon another as you might heap as many toppling oranges, with a crazy wooden veranda impending over the water; indeed the whole house, inclusive of the complaining flag-staff on the roof, impended over the water, but seemed to have got into the condition of a faint-hearted diver who has paused so long on the brink that he will never go in at all.

Dickens' novels are complicated for the reader by the numerous characters and sub-plots, togther with his love of using twenty words instead of two. This can be frustrating, especially if you have to read a pargraph two or three times to make sense of it. Our Mutual Friend has been criticised for the lack of clarity in the plotting and for some very unlikely coincidences. Nevertheless, I enjoyed being immersed again in Dickens' world and his exuberant prose. 

Next Dickens? The Old Curiosity Shop.

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The Garden of Evening Mists by Tan Twan Eng

Teoh Yun Ling, a retired Chinese judge narrates the novel as she looks back over her life in Malaya before, during and after WWII. The historical events of those years, the Japanese invasion, the brutal jungle prison camps, and the post-war Chinese communist insurgency in Malaya are the backdrop, but the main focus of the novel is on the culture and philosophy of  the Japanese garden. 

Yun Ling's sister loved Japanese gardens but died in a Japanese prison camp. Despite her own traumatic time as a prisoner and her hatred of the Japanese, Yun Ling seeks out the elusive Aritomo, one-time gardner to the Emperor of Japan, to design a garden in her sister's memory. He had moved to Malaya and was creating a garden in the Cameron Highlands called Yugiri - The Garden of Evening Mists. He refuses the commision but agrees to teach her so she can create a garden herself. She becomes his apprentice and begins to learn the artistic and mystical processes inherant in making a Japanese garden. Over time the suspicion and reserve between master and apprentice break down and their relationship changes.

Across the valley from  Aritomo's garden is a tea planation where Yun Ling stays. The lives of the tea planters interweave the story and there are flash backs to Yun Lings childhod and the Japanese occupation. She wants to find the site of the jungle camp where she and her sister were imprisoned so that she can lay her sister's memory to rest but there is a mystery surrounding it. No one knows where it is. Adding to the tension of the novel are Chinese communist fighters hiding in the mountains who raid villages and plantations for supplies, killing occupants and informers.

For Arimoto the spiritual is the ground of his existence. Each day involves ritual, tea drinking, archery, meditation. Yun Ling, full of anger and remorse begins to absorb his teaching and understand how the garden emerges from the soul of the designer. She participates in the rituals and her eyes open to the mystical world. Her final act of renuncation is to allow Arimoto to create a special tattoo, a horinomo, on her back.

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The Reason Why - Cecil Woodham-Smith

I gave up history at school - Clive and the battle of Plassey, who cares? Then in my twenties I went with a friend to see the film, "The Charge of The Light Brigade". Chatting about it afterwards he said, "You need to read, The Reason Why". He lent me a copy, and I found myself immersed in the arrogant, privileged lives of 19th Century English aristocrats, amateur soldiers with delusions of grandeur who were at the head of the British army. History came alive; it wasn't about dates and events, it was about people, their character, their lives and their ambitions and I've been hooked on history ever since. 

The 25th of October 1854 saw one of the most foolish and disgraceful actions ever seen on a battlefield. About 700 mounted men of the British Light Brigade attacked a Russian army positioned at the end of a shallow valley in Crimea. 

The order to attack, written on a piece of paper, was short, ambiguous and misunderstood. Despite knowing it was against all rules of war, the Light Brigade trotted into the valley and into a cauldron of cannon fire. Shells hurtled down from the sides of the valley and from the Russian guns ahead, bursting among the men and horses. The slaughter was terrible. Yet many still reached the Russian guns and attacked the gunners, but as they passed through the smoke beyond the guns they met the massed ranks of Russian cavalry. They had no option but to retreat and run the gauntlet of the shells once again. It was worse than the advance. Only 195 of the 700 returned to safety.

When the poet Tennyson read the report of the charge in The Times he wrote his well-known poem which contains these lines: 

“Forward, the Light Brigade!”

Was there a man dismayed?

Not though the soldier knew

Someone had blundered.

Theirs not to make reply,

Theirs not to reason why,

Theirs but to do and die.

Into the valley of Death

Rode the six hundred.

"Someone had blundered" but what was the reason why? Cecil Woodham Smith answers the question by diving deep into the organisation of the British Army and the background of the three main personalities, Lords Raglan, Lucan and Cardigan.

The highest ranks in the army were held by aristocrats, and these ranks were obtained by purchase. This bizarre system was supposed to prevent a revolution. The army  would not be turned on King and parliament if it was commanded by Lords and Dukes. This resulted in experienced lower ranked officers who had seen action under Wellington or who had served in India and who knew their craft, being subordinate to amateurs who had never led troops in battle. 

"The unpleasant truth was that they were completely ignorant of the art of war, they had no experience, no education and no ability."

The ill-fated Charge of The Light Brigade was just one of a long catalogue of blunders in the Crimean campaign.

Woodham Smith has this to say about Lord Cardigan, who led the charge:

He was completely absorbed in one object himself. It was not, as one realised when one became familiar with him, that he deliberately disregarded other man's opinions and feelings, they simply did not exist for him. Like a child playing in a corner of a nursery with his toys, he was wholly absorbed in himself. The rest of the world was an irrelevance. Nor did he ever attempt to conceal his absorption. ... Like a child, however, he found opposition intolerable, and surprise was swiftly succeeded by furious indignation…….. The truth rushed in on him, there was a conspiracy against him.

Cardigan was under the command of Lord Lucan, the head of the cavalry. The two men were brothers-in-law, yet they despised each other, and Cardigan had no intention of being commanded by Lucan, a man of extreme stubbornness, and irritability, always certain that he was in the right. 

Lucan had estates in Ireland at the time when most of the population survived on potatoes grown on land they rented. Lucan was determined to bring in agricultural reform which he did with ruthlessness, driving tenants off his land with little regard to their suffering. When potato blight struck and the people began to starve, Lucan became an object of hatred. However, it seems this ruthless quality was the reason he was given command of the cavalry in the Crimea.

The third main character, Lord Raglan was Commander in Chief of the army. For forty years he had been the Duke of Wellington's right-hand man but had never himself conceived plans or taken decisions. He was a staff officer and had never led men in battle. He was absolutely unfit to command the army in the Crimea.

"The Reason Why" has 14 chapters with the charge of the Light Brigade coming at chapter 12. In the previous 11 chapters, Woodham Smith builds up to this debacle like a barrister presenting the case for the prosecution. She does this with skill and energy and a compelling style. The Reader takes in the evidence and sits as Judge and Jury. So what is my verdict?

Raglan, looking down into the valley from his command post on the heights above, and seeing the Russians removing British guns from southern ridge, issued this ambiguous order: 

Lord Raglan's  Original Order

"Lord Raglan wishes the cavalry to advance rapidly to the front, follow the enemy & try to prevent the enemy carrying away the guns. Troop Horse Artillery may accompany. French cavalry is on your left. Immediate."

Lucan, down on the vally floor, reads the order but the only guns he can see are the Russian guns at the head of the valley. He is a man of rigid mind-set, incapable of questioning an order. Cardigan has been irritated throughout the day because his Light Brigade has not been used, which he blames on Lucan, so he is eager for action.  Their arrogance, ambition, and mutual contempt prevent any rational discussion of what they clearly see is an act of suicide.

So who was at fault? A case can be made against all these foolish men, the product of a rigid class system that placed title, privilege and wealth above ability and intelligence. So the final verdict must be against the system itself. Unfortunately, the system changed too slowly to prevent further disasters in the Zulu & Boer wars a few years later.

Cannon balls  litter the valley. Photograph taken after the charge.

The Charge of the Light Brigade

By Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Half a league, half a league,

Half a league onward,

All in the valley of Death

Rode the six hundred.

“Forward, the Light Brigade!

Charge for the guns!” he said.

Into the valley of Death

Rode the six hundred.

“Forward, the Light Brigade!”

Was there a man dismayed?

Not though the soldier knew

Someone had blundered.

Theirs not to make reply,

Theirs not to reason why,

Theirs but to do and die.

Into the valley of Death

Rode the six hundred.

Cannon to right of them,

Cannon to left of them,

Cannon in front of them

Volleyed and thundered;

Stormed at with shot and shell,

Boldly they rode and well,

Into the jaws of Death,

Into the mouth of hell

Rode the six hundred.

Flashed all their sabres bare,

Flashed as they turned in air

Sabring the gunners there,

Charging an army, while

All the world wondered.

Plunged in the battery-smoke

Right through the line they broke;

Cossack and Russian

Reeled from the sabre stroke

Shattered and sundered.

Then they rode back, but not

Not the six hundred.

Cannon to right of them,

Cannon to left of them,

Cannon behind them

Volleyed and thundered;

Stormed at with shot and shell,

While horse and hero fell.

They that had fought so well

Came through the jaws of Death,

Back from the mouth of hell,

All that was left of them,

Left of six hundred.

When can their glory fade?

O the wild charge they made!

All the world wondered.

Honour the charge they made!

Honour the Light Brigade,

Noble six hundred!

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Old Filth By Jane Gardam

A good read that explores the life of a distinguished judge Edward Feathers from his birth in Malaya to his death at the age of ninety. In the legal profession he is known as Old Filth because he spent his career in Hong Kong rather than London - Failed In London Try Hong Kong.

Now retired, Old Filth lives in Dorset with his long-suffering wife Betty. The novel switches to and fro between his life in retirement and the years of his childhood, school days and early adulthood. It is left to the reader to piece together his life out of all the memories as they are delivered piecemeal chapter by chapter.

Things are never fully explained. Why is there a headless chicken? What is the tragedy the children have experienced? Why does the author drop in this sentence? - "Eddie would finish her as he once finished a woman". Why is Betty so affected by a phone call, "Harry my boy is dead"? Why does she keep this from her husband?

Various objects are mentioned in passing then reappear later – ivy, pearl necklaces, an address book, a hairbrush. The reader is intrigued and reads on wanting solutions. It reminded me of Behind The Scenes At The Museum where artifacts illuminate the story. You get a hint here, a hint there, of events and relationships. As the book says, the memories are layered like Filo pastry.

Jane Gardam makes the case that the set of a person's life is determined by their childhood. Certainly this seems true of Eddie. "I was not loved after the age of four and half", he says. “I’ve no background. I’ve been peeled off my background and attached to another like a cardboard cut out". His Father, young, handsome, admired, is distant and indifferent, destroyed by shell-shock in WWI. His mother dies at his birth. Then a dreadful foster home with other children of the Empire adds to his trauma. No wonder Eddie didn’t want children.

Despite his introverted nature, women fall for Eddie. Isobel comes to his boyhood bedroom but he throws her out. Claire asks him to come to bed with her but he pleads a train to catch. Even in old age. Vanessa says to herself, "Why is he so attractive? He scares me.". He has sexual feelings but cannot deal with his emotions. 

Looking back on his life Old Filth is full of regret but this general feeling of loss is levened by the humour Jane Gardham weaves into the book. There are lots of little asides. The conversation that he has with the headmaster when he's pleading to go and see Pat Inglesby in the Sanatorium could be out of Wodehouse. Sir's short, no nonsense chats raise a smile. 14 year-old card-sharp Albert Ross is a wordly-wise polar opposite to Eddie and greets him with, "OK, how's that? Find the lady".

Betty and the law had been Old Filth's anchors. But in retirement with no cases to try and Betty dead, he's adrift and all at sea. He's lost his bearings and buffeted by memories, full of regret and remorse. In Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, Fowler feels guilty that his actions caused the death of Pyle. He says, “How I wished there existed someone to whom I could say that I was sorry.” Old Filth too wants absolution. He is not religious but near the end of the novel he asks for a priest and the final pieces of his story come together.

He makes a final journey back to the East, his true home, but dies when he arrives.

The last words of the novel are given to two judges sitting in the garden of The Inner Temple. One asks "Was he travelling alone, d'you know?" The other replies, "Oh, yes. Travelling alone. Quite alone"

But then, aren't we all?

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Thomas Hardy - The Thrush

Thomas Hardy had no particular religious faith. He was raised in the Church of England and went through an evangelical phase in hs youth but later his rational mind rejected Christian dogma. However, in the heart of his emotions he was still drawn to some unknown and unknowable other. His early allegiance and knowledge of the bible surface in both his novels and poems.

These two poems feature the thrush. 

In Reminder, Hardy in the midst of his Christmas warmth and plenty sees a thrush out in the frost desperately searching for food. His conscience is jerked awake. He feels guilty. How many are cold and hungry while he enjoys his Christmas? Perhaps the story Jesus told of the rich man enjoying plenty while a beggar starves at his gate comes to Hardy's mind. 

. 

The Reminder

While I watch the Christmas blaze

Paint the room with ruddy rays,

Something makes my vision glide

To the frosty scene outside.

There, to reach a rotting berry,

Toils a thrush, -- constrained to very

Dregs of food by sharp distress,

Taking such with thankfulness.

Why, O starving bird, when I

One day's joy would justify,

And put misery out of view,

Do you make me notice you!

The Darkling Thrush, one of his best known poems is an inverse of The Reminder. Now it is the man who is out in the cold, seeing a bleak winter landscape before him. The 19th century is over like a dead corpse, the future seems shrunken hard and dry. He has lost hope. Then a thrush bursts into "full hearted evensong". Hardy is thinking of the church service and perhaps the words of the Nunc Dimittis:

Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace 

according to thy word.

For mine eyes have seen thy salvation;

The thrush in the simplicity of its nature sings out a "blessed hope". Winter will pass, Spring will come and with it new life.

For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone;

The flowers appear on the earth; 

the time of the singing of birds is come, 

and the voice of the turtledove is heard in our land;

(Song of Solomon 12:11-12)

The Darkling Thrush

I leant upon a coppice gate

When Frost was spectre-grey,

And Winter's dregs made desolate

The weakening eye of day.

The tangled bine-stems scored the sky

Like strings of broken lyres,

And all mankind that haunted nigh

Had sought their household fires.

The land's sharp features seemed to be

The Century's corpse outleant,

His crypt the cloudy canopy,

The wind his death-lament.

The ancient pulse of germ and birth

Was shrunken hard and dry,

And every spirit upon earth

Seemed fervourless as I.

At once a voice arose among

The bleak twigs overhead

In a full-hearted evensong

Of joy illimited;

An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,

In blast-beruffled plume,

Had chosen thus to fling his soul

Upon the growing gloom.

So little cause for carolings

Of such ecstatic sound

Was written on terrestrial things

Afar or nigh around,

That I could think there trembled through

His happy good-night air

Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew

And I was unaware.

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Between River and Sea by Dervla Murphy

Between 2008 and 2011 Dervla Murphy, an Irish travel writer of 26 books and aged 77 & 80, visited Israel/Palestine, the most conflicted area of land in the world. This, her last book, is a record of conversations, observations, and reflections from visiting many places and talking with many people from all sides of the political and religious divides.

Her goal was to understand everyday life and political realities so she spent time in villages, refugee camps, and ordinary homes, listening to the personal stories of her Israeli and Palestinian hosts and recording everything in her journal. The result is a book which pulls you along with her narrative skill then stops you in your tracks as she gives yet another another example of man's inhumanity to man. It is both immensely readable and profoundly disturbing.

Despite the fraught relationships, restrictions and many frustrations Murphy insists on seeing both Israelis and Palestinians as human beings. She condemns dehumanisation on both sides and tries to find areas of mutual understanding.

"One has to rage against the cruel absurdity of it all, the calculated dehumanising of people, categorising them into oppressed and oppressors, depriving ordinary Palestinians and Israelis of the right to relate to one another as individuals."

Much of the book focuses on life under Israeli occupation in the West Bank and Gaza. She documents restrictions on movement, checkpoints, settlement expansion, and home demolitions. Murphy sees these as daily expressions of systemic injustice that crush Palestinian dignity.

On the other side she also meets Israeli peace activists, ex-soldiers, and settlers and finds some Israelis deeply conflicted — aware of the moral toll of occupation but trapped by security fears and political conformity.

She also argues that Western governments, particularly the UK, EU, and US, have enabled the continuation of the conflict by failing to hold Israel to account for its breeches of international agreements. But she also condemns the suicide campaign of the 2nd Intifada that produced a powerful Israeli reaction and has had a huge impact on Palestinian society.

She meets people who despite the strong antagonism and even hatred on both sides who are trying to live normal lives and courageous members of both communities who seek to cross the divides and work for peace.

Murphy is clearly very sympathetic to the Palestinian experience and sharply critical of Israeli state policy, but she distinguishes between Israeli government actions and individual Israelis. Her resolution of the conflict at the time of writing was for a single democratic state involving all sides – now clearly out of the question.

Between River and Sea gives a grass roots perspective on perhaps the most intractable of all conflicts. Dervla Murphy is a great storyteller. The reader is carried along by her observations of people and places, the setting of context from history, ancient and modern, her persistence in going places and meeting people, her beer drinking and her ability to cut through the complexities of religion and politics to reveal the real lives of real people.

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Stephen Fry: The Lure of Language

Visiting Professor of Creative Media at Oxford University 

Peroration 

Horticulturally, we are encouraged to rewild our gardens and fields, dig up the lawns, sow wildflowers, to let our hedges go without haircuts and to encourage the bursting forth of colour and growth. So let's set our word gardens free too.

Did I really say, 'word gardens'? I'm so sorry.

But truly, let's reclaim the fun and frolic of language. Let's release it from the lantern-jawed severity and affectless restraint, from austere solemnity.

Here's to an individual way with language: embarrassing, overdone, over seasoned, over spiced, borrowed, cannibalised, veneered, finessed, faked and finagled as it may be.

Let there be freedom in your utterance and let there be delight. Let there be textural pleasure. Let there be silken words and flinty words and sodden speeches and soaking speeches, crackling utterance and utterance that quivers and wobbles like rennet.

Let there be rapid firecracker phrases and words that ooze like a lake of lava. Don't rein it in. Don't fear it. Don't believe it belongs to anybody else.

Don't let anyone bully you into believing that there are rules and secrets of grammar and verbal deployment to which you are not privy. Just let the words fly from your lips and your pen. Make up silly nicknames for those you love and those you despise. Devise nonsense words and mad melodious mantras. Don't sing in the shower, try out accents, argots, nonsense, Tommy-rotten gibberish.

Give your words rhythm and depth and height and silliness. Give them filth and form and majestic stupidity. Mix the slangy with the grand, the noble with the naughty.

Swear sweetly and curse caressingly. Truth is constructed, aesthetes, teachers, through artifice.

We can believe in the truth of masks - reality cannot be trusted, appearances can. Reality is shifting, obscure and unreliable. Building palaces of gorgeous, coloured words is an act of belief, a gift that proclaims us all worthy of palaces.

Towers of grey breeze-block words, insult our capacity for language and deny us the thrones in the realm of language that are our birthright.

Demagogues use words to blame, enrage, divide and inflame. Can we not venture to use them to enchant, connect, solace and inspire?

Words are free and all words, light and frothy, dour and dappled, firm and sculpted as they may be, bear the history of their passage from lip to lip over thousands of years. Words are weaponry and witchcraft.

They are pedigrees and passports, crowns and costume, and they are ours.

Succumb to their lure. Buff their current dullness to a dazzling new shine, sheen and gleam.

Play gracefully, disport yourselves disgracefully and make Oscar proud.

Thank you.

Full lecture here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q62eoxOXHpo

 

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