'Quartet in Autumn' by Barbara Pym

        A week or so ago, I finished Barbara Pym's late novel 'Quartet in Autumn' - a book I have been meaning to read for some time now; a fragment of a wider and perhaps now lost  Anglo-Catholic culture.  (After  dipping into Mervyn Peake's behemoth 'Titus Groan' I am now currently reading the patrician 'The Soldier Philosophers' by Anthony Powell.)
As you may remember I have written about 'Quartet in Autumn' before when I was reviewing Paul Scott's panoramic and intricate 'Jewel in the Crown', set in the final years of the British Raj. 

     Both writers had been shortlisted for the 1977 Booker Prize - Scott for 'Staying On' set in Post-Independence India, and Pym for 'Quartet in Autumn'.  Both writers were deserving of public recognition, but the prize went to Scott who was by then not only an alcoholic but dying of cancer. He was to ill to be present at the award ceremony and died four months later in March 1978. Pym at the time was in remission from breast cancer, but it returned and she died in early 1980.  
      'Quartet in Autumn' was conceived in the wake of her diagnosis and treatment in 1971,  when she was working in the office of the International African Institute in London, and it was the first of novel of hers to be published since 'No Fond Return of Love' in 1961.  Early on in the book, in language that reflects the opinion of various publishers, there is a description of the sort of novel that one of the main characters is looking for: 'She had been an unashamed reader of novels, but if she hoped to find one which reflected her own sort of life she had come to realize that the position of an unmarried, unattached, ageing woman is of no interest whatever to the writer of modern fiction.' 

    All of that changed, however, in the mid '70s when, following an article in 'The Times Literary Supplement', there was a shift critical opinion, with 'Quartet in Autumn' being published in 1977, followed by 'The Sweet Dove Died' in 1978.  Four novels were published posthumously.

      'Quartet in Autumn' is the story of four co-workers who share a single office.  They are all roughly the same age and are all facing retirement. The office is in some un-named and un-described organization in central London, in the early '70s.  Faceless perhaps, I suppose.  I suspect, though, it is some form of institute of higher education, possibly in Bloomsbury. There are two men, Edwin and Norman, and two women, Letty and Marcia, one of whom, Marcia, has, like Barbara Pym herself, undergone a mastectomy. What any of these four does exactly is a mystery, or rather an irrelevance, as this novel is, apart from the impending fear of old age - loneliness, illness, and death, essentially about those bonds that develop between people who have been thrown together in the workplace - people no doubt that wouldn't have naturally formed friendships - and what happens to those relationships where circumstances change, and how much we owe to them.

     Pym is the chronicler of the mundane, of lives that have not been successful according to the world.  The depicter of the precarious life, the life lived in the bedsitter or the rented room, of the small pleasure.  A sense of the inadequate and the failure pervades her work,  of roads un-adopted where 'removed lives, loneliness clarifies'.

The National Gallery: Siena: The Rise of Painting 1300 -1350 Part One

Apologies for the tardiness of this post.  We are still in the midst of family illness.

Introduction

   I feel I should have done some research before going to this exhibition, which is a collaboration between the Metropolitan Museum in New York and The National Gallery in London.  It would certainly have helped, for although filled with beautiful and lustrous images, this is a hard exhibition to take in.  As I said to a friend later that day over lunch, there is a limit to the number of panel paintings one can take in at one sitting, and I write as somebody who usually loves this sort of thing, but something, for me at least, was not quite right.

'The Art that shaped the Future': Art History in the Age of Stupid?

     For the ignorant, and I think I may include myself in that category, Sienese art of the Middle Ages being a bit esoteric, both galleries have produced introductory videos to the exhibition.

    The Met video features the James Pope-Hennessy Curator in Charge of European Painting, Stephan Wolohojian and Caroline Campbell, then Curator of Italian Art at the National Gallery.  At one point Wolohijan said: '[....] in the last years of the 1340s Europe is infested by the Black Death, this great plague that was especially present in Italy, so by the end of our story none of these artists survive."  The implication being they had all died of the plague. This is nonsense. Of the four artists that this exhibition focuses upon, Ambrogio Lorenzetti and his brother Pietro may indeed have died of plague, but Duccio died c1318 and Simone Martini died in Avignon in 1344 at the age of 60.  Towards the end of the video Wolohojian stands in front of the beautiful 'Christ Discovered in the Temple' by Simone Martini with its delicate cusped & subcusped Gothic arch and lilting Gothic folds in the clothing of the three figures and says: "No gable, no Gothic form, a truly kind of framed painting, the way you could see made today...." Why do people make such statements like that, when, in this particular context, the exhibition is filled from beginning to end with panel paintings in square frames without 'no gable, or Gothic form'?
     The National Gallery video, grandiloquently subtitled 'The Art that shaped the Future', features, amongst others, a local Sienese artist Chiara Perinetti Casoni, who has it appears a real downer on Byzantine art. (I hate how in order to re-enforce an argument it is done at the expense of something else.)  She seems to speaking from a place of ignorance and one perhaps tainted by a certain anti-clericalism. In common with the other talking heads she presents a view of Byzantine art that is crude and almost unrecognisable.   She implied, for instance, that Byzantine icons were produced solely by religious ie monks.  However, icons were created both in a monastic and secular milieu.  There were professional secular artists in the Empire creating icons in a workshop system that couldn't have been that different from the one operating in Siena. Too much Vasari, and too much Romanticism.  Certainly this whole exhibition is indebted to Georgio Vasari and his book 'The Lives of the Most Excellent Artists, Sculptors, and Architects' .

     A claim is made in both videos that the icon tradition is 'rigid', 'rote and stale' and yet icons developed over time just like any other pictorial art, for example the introduction of Chrysography or 'striations'.  Contrary to the impression given, the depiction of the Virgin & Child in Orthodox iconography is not tied to the 'Hodegetria' type, which, according to legend, was established by St Luke the Evangelist.  There are other ways depicting the Theotokos and Child eg. 'Panakranta', 'Pelagonitissa' and most importantly in this context the 'Eleusa'.  According to Wiki it is sometimes referred to the in the West as the 'Virgin of Tenderness'.  Perhaps the most famous example of this type is the Vladimirskaya which dates from c 1130.  So claims that the it was the artists of Siena - 'true artists', mind you - those men, 'whose blood boiled' and 'felt strong emotions' who introduced tenderness & emotion into the dead language of Byzantium have to be taken with a pinch of salt.  Italian artists before Duccio were producing art with emotion; for example there is the work of the Florentine artist Meliore di Jacopo (fl 1255-85).  Two of his paintings spring to mind: The Madonna and Child with Two Angels, c 1270-75, and The Enthroned Madonna and Child of the same period.

     But then, sadly, although this exhibition opens movingly with a room of icons from the city, it underplays the role of those images in the religious and civic life of the contemporaneous Italian city: there were, for example, processions of icons in Rome and in the cities of Lazio to the south, and in Siena itself, where in addition the cathedral and San Niccolo al Carmine possessed miracle-working icons of the Virgin Mary.  In researching for this post I soon realised that I knew very little about the cultural spread of Byzantine art in Northern Italy.  The presence of Byzantine culture in Venice I understood, and in southern Italy and Sicily too where there were then still Greek speaking communities worshipping according the Byzantine rite. 

      What, however, was worse about these productions is that virtually no speaker in either video could bring themselves to say 'Byzantine', 'Gothic' or 'International Gothic'.  And these are the categories, the concepts, after all, that exhibition is dealing with. 

     You know, looking at these videos I felt just that bit cheated - I mean, all this people educated - lengthily, expensively, exclusively - talking with all the inanity of a fashion journalist.  PR rules.

    

'Elements of Architecture' by Rob Krier

     Since my trip to London and Cambridge I've been in a bit of a PoMo mood. So a fortnight or so ago I treated myself to this book, 'Elements of Architecture' by Rob Krier, Leon Krier's older brother.  I remember seeing other books by Rob Krier back in the 80s and really I should have bought them at the time, but to my regret I didn't.

     'Elements of Architecture' was first published in 1982, by Academy Editions, and edited by Dr Andreas Papadakis.  I have the 1992 edition.  It quickly established itself as an important text of architectural Post-Modernism, along with 'Learning from Las Vegas' (1972) by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown & Stephen Izenour, and Charles Jenck's 'The Language of Post-Modern Architecture' (1977), becoming a set text in many schools of architecture.  Whereas the other two books are largely are theoretical, 'Elements of Architecture' stands in the tradition of books produced by, say, the likes of James Gibbs and Batty Langley in 18th century England, that engage on both a theoretical and practical level with the reader.  They are meant to be a sourcebook of ideas for the designer, and they are essentially pattern books.  And in that Krier's book is no different.  There is however in contrast to, for example, Gibbs's 'Book of Architecture' Krier presents the reader with a series of ideal, slightly Platonic, types - facades, spaces, plans, stairs, etc.  An attempt, perhaps, to establish new typologies of building.  One is therefore tempted to believe that the work Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand (1760-1834), the French architect and theorist, is a more pertinent comparison here.  For instance, the 'Rudimenta Opera Magnis et Disciplinae' c. 1790, which seems to have least some influence on Krier's graphic presentation and his vigorous drawing style - which is all together engaging.  In fact, one of the delights of this book are the large colour reproductions of Krier's drawings at the beginning.

     But whither Post-Modernism? It was, I suppose, a short efflorescence - lasting - what? - some twenty years or so. In some respects though its presence has remained, and in recent years there has even been a revival of sorts.  In Britain, for example, we have the 'Blue House' by FAT, the 'House for Essex' by FAT and Grayson Perry, the 'Red House, by David Kohn, and the work of Camille Walala, and Adam Nathaniel Furman.  Most of this is toward the playful end of Post-Modernism. In Italy there is the austere work of Paolo Zermani, with its echoes of Robert Venturi, Aldo Rossi and the whole Rationalist and Neo-Rationalist schools, and the Scuola Metafisica.
     Sadly, however, I feel this book's lesson will have to learnt all over again by the professionals.  Really, the architectural profession are like the Bourbons: 'They have learnt nothing and forgotten nothing'.*

Further reading

'Elements of Architecture', Rob Krier, Academy Editions, 1982 &1992

'Rob Krier on Architecture', Rob Krier, Academy Editions, 1982

'Architectural Composition' Rob Krier, Academy Editions, 1988

'Rob Krier: Architecture and Urban Design' (Architectural Monographs No 30), Academy Editions, 1993

'Urban Space, with examples from the city of Stuttgart' Rob Krier, Academy Editions, 1975

*Usually accredited (and wrongly?) to Charles Maurice Talleyrand-Perigord.  Napoleon called Talleyrand 'that turd in a silk stocking'.

Cecil Beaton at The Garden Museum II

 

'We ate breakfast drank hot drinks and enjoyed the spectacle confronting us of the garlanded house, the ilex trees with bird-cages hanging from their dark moss-green branches in the light of the early morning sun.  The windows of the orangery, still lit from within displayed a word of artificially brilliant colours.  I felt that, as ever, Ashcombe had played up to the occasion.'

     And so, finally, to 'Cecil Beaton's Garden Party'.  This small exhibition, which has been curated by Emma House, and designed by the interior designer and illustrator Luke Edward Hall, looks at Beaton as a creator of gardens that act (in a sort Baroque manner) as a unifying element in his life, being not merely the physical backdrop to his rich social life and his photography, but the inspiration to further creativity.  It was perhaps fitting, and purely serendipitous, I hasten to add, that I should have visited the exhibition in Ascot Week.

     Perhaps at this point a little explanation is needed. Cecil Beaton (1904-1980) was one of the most important, and influential, British photographers of the mid 20th century.  He was also a designer for stage and film.  He won an 'Academy Award for Costume Design' for his work on Vincent Minnelli's 1958 adaptation of 'Gigi'; and (more importantly for this exhibition) two further Oscars for Best Costume Design and Best Art Direction for George Cukor's 1964 adaptation of Lerner and Loewe's musical 'My Fair Lady'.*  He has been described as a polymath. Beaton was also a dandy, with amazing personal style. An aesthete. An inhabitant of the Beau Monde. He was a (waspish) diarist, and as this exhibition neatly shows, a very keen gardener.  Piquant and perennially fascinating; perhaps his greatest work of art was himself.

     Beaton created two gardens in his life, both in Wiltshire: Ashcombe and Reddish (actually they sound like a - What? - A solicitors? A department store?).  In the interwar years at Ashcombe (he lived there 1930-45) there were flamboyant fetes - all those 'bright young things' nipping around dressed as nymphs and shepherds, and all that. Life at Reddish, where he lived from 1947 until his death in 1980, was perhaps a bit more sedate, but there was a steady stream of 'the great and the good' including the sort that this blog admires: David Hockney & Peter Schlesinger, Sir Roy Strong & Julia Trevelyan Oman, Patrick Proctor.   

      Luke Edward Hall has decorated the exhibition space - tin foil in the display cases - with a nod to Beaton's early portraiture when he was heavily influenced by Surrealism and did strange things with Edith Sitwell.  The exhibition gives a rounded sense of Beaton the man - of a life, one might say - with paintings, designs and letters and objects.  Of his work for stage and screen the exhibition concentrated on three works: 'The Chalk Garden' (1955), the opera 'Turandot' (1962-3), and 'My Fair Lady' (1964).  There are number of still photographs - studio shots - of the costumes used on the film, including from the famous Ascot scene.  I loved the film poster for 'My Fair Lady' with artwork by Bob Peak - which manages somehow to show Rex Harrison for the randy old goat he was.

 'My garden, is the greatest joy of my life, after my friends.  Both are worth living for.'

    The Garden Museum is, by rights, the sort of place I'd love -  it was in parts fascinating - but in general the place was tired, lost and dirty, in places just downright filthy.   And there there was the 'cooler than thou' attitude of the staff in the café.  It was like intruding upon a private party rather than a public space. 

*  I remember when I first saw 'My Fair Lady'.  It was Christmas Day, BBC1 (they had dropped the Christmas Day circus by then).  It was a minor cultural event, and I was bowled over.

Cecil Beaton at the Garden Museum I

Apologies for the late arrival of this post. Family crisis.

     Wednesday and my first visit to the Garden Museum hard by Lambeth Palace, the London residence of the Archbishop of Canterbury.  I walked from Waterloo Station, where people were gathering in their finery for a day at Ascot, along the Thames to Lambeth. I think that part of the embankment beside St Thomas Hospital is the finest bit of riverside we have in central London. 

     The Garden Museum is housed in the former church of St Mary-at-Lambeth - an ancient site.  The tower is late medieval (c1370, when the rest of the church was rebuilt) but the body of the church is 19th century by Philip Hardwick, replacing a much more picturesque structure, which was, in fact until the 19th century a village church.*  Both tower and church are built of Kentish Rag.  The 'Buildings of England' volume on South London, however, says that the arcades and clearstory are medieval but it all felt Victorian to me.  The Historic England website says the nave and aisles are all 19th century and the Survey of London agrees.  Either way the result of Hardwick's restoration is such that it would be very easy to dismiss the whole building as just another Victorian suburban church.**

      That would be a mistake, as given its location St Mary's is, or was, another example of an Anglican establishment church.  After all the church does contain the graves of some six archbishops of Canterbury, and members of their various households.***  Bishops Tunstall and Thirlby are also buried there, as is Admiral Bligh, the antiquary Elias Ashmole, and (most importantly for the subsequent history of the church) the Tradescant family.  (The church is generally rich in monuments.)  All that being so, it strikes me as odd, to say the least, that the church was allowed to become redundant (1972) in the first place and was scheduled for demolition.  For four years church and churchyard fell into decay as it awaited its fate.  Apparently they were to make way for a coach park for Waterloo Station.  That surely can't be true, can it?  Didn't the Church really not care about its patrimony?  The answer to the latter question is probably 'no it did not', and that remains true today.

     The church may not have cared, but Rosemary and John Nicholson did.  In 1976 they visited the churchyard in search of the Tradescant Tomb.  The scene of desolation they encountered galvanised them into action, and later that year it seems Lambeth council restored the graveyard.  In 1978 the Tradescant Trust was founded with the aim of restoring the church as a 'Museum of the History of the Garden'.  In 1981 the museum held its first exhibition, and two years later the Queen Mother opened the new garden - I think that was the now lost knot-garden designed for the museum by the Marchioness of Salisbury.  The rest, so they say, is history.

 

     

 *  The village has been now largely swept away, to be replaced with commercial properties.  The church and palace, and the former rectory and one side of Pratt St appear to be the only things left.

** I can't help that Hardwick, although faithful to the remaining parts of the Medieval structure, souped things up a bit - possibly heightening the nave and aisles and certainly increasingly the pitch of the roof.  Late Medieval roofs are, as a rule, at a much lower pitch.

*** A cursory look at the List of Vicars shows that many were also domestic chaplains to the Archbishop and were destined for higher things - heads of Oxbridge colleges, deaneries, and bishoprics.

London

       To a sultry London on Sunday for a few days and hefty dose of culture, and (it could be argued) you can't get more cultural or arcane than an exhibition of Medieval Sienese religious art at the National Gallery.  That was Monday morning.  I intended to post everything in order over the next few weeks or so, but I still need time to form a response to the art on display, so I will have to return to this topic at a later date when my thoughts are clearer.  (You may, perhaps, want to read this 'reluctance' on my part as a tacit admission that I wasn't that impressed, but I couldn't possibly comment.)  the two phots below were taken in Covent Garden on the way to the National Gallery.

     It's funny how on these little trips of mine themes sort of emerge from the serendipitous.  On this particular visit three themes emerged.  The first was Post-Modernism.  After the exhibition, and a visit to the remarkable Maison Berteaux on Greek St., I headed into Covent Garden via Seven Dials to buy a new shirt. I couldn't resist, however, popping into the Ching Court.  A triangular public space formed out of a chaos of backyards and sheds in the centre of the urban block created by Monmouth, Mercer and Shelton Streets - the so-called Comyn Ching Triangle. The result is a beautiful, serene piece of urbanism.  It is an early work (1978-86) by the architect Terry Farrell, combining in a Geddesian manner the old (Georgian terrace houses) and the new (three new architectural interventions - one at each corner).  How one felt the optimism of those heady days when it seemed that Modernism was finished!  I particularly like the detailing of the three wooden porches on the w side of the court.

     Afterwards lunch with a friend who now works for another friend Ben Pentreath, at his rather glamorous studio in Lambs Conduit St. We ate at 'La Fromagerie' over the street from Ben's office.  Quite the best gnocchi I have eaten in a long time.  A rushed supper at 'Hare and Tortoise' in Bloomsbury interrupted by extraordinary behaviour of a diner when her child misbehaved and that left the other diners open mouthed in disbelief.  From there to the Art Workers Guild where RIBA TAG was having a symposium and summer party.  I managed to arrive very late, all the chairs were taken, the speeches dull and the heating was on. I lasted half an hour before leaving.

Further Reading

'Terry Farrell' (Architectural Monographs No9), Terry Farrell & Frank Russell, Academy Editions, 1985

'No Country for Old Men' by Cormac McCarthy

      'That is no country for old men'.... so begins one of W B Yeats most famous poems, 'Sailing to Byzantium'.  The country in question here, in this potent novel, is southern Texas on the Mexico border; part of what is often referred to as 'flyover country' that great hinterland of the United States between the east and west coasts, 'that vast obscurity beyond the city where the dark fields of the Republic rolled on under the night', and a place that Cormac McCarthy has visited before in his novels.  It is also his own country for, although born on the East Coast, the majority of his childhood and adolescence was lived in Tennessee.  He is a writer who has only really entered my field of few in the last few years, and this is the first novel of his that I have read.

     'No country for Old Men' is a three way tussle between the Ed Tom Bell the sheriff, Llewelyn Moss the petty criminal, and the psychotic Anton Chirgurh, the hired killer.  The novel opens with the discovery of a sprawl of corpses and abandoned vehicles in the desert.  Moss has stumbled upon some sort altercation between drugs gangs, or some such.  And among the dead and the dying he makes a further discovery, one that drives the narrative.  That fight in the desert is never fully explained, for this is a lean, tense novel, sparse in the way that Jean Pierre Melville's cinematic masterpiece 'Le Cercle Rouge' is sparse. (sparse of punctuation too) Information is withheld from the reader.  In one sense it doesn't matter, the novel is not about Mexican drug cartels as such but a personal conflict between three men. A concentrated affair, that is part thriller, part Western and part meditation.  The result of this economy of information, however, is that the reader is left wandering through, what I can only describe as, a nocturnal battlefield.  A novel of darkness and fire.  And one I would recommend.

The Great Gatsby II

     I have unearthed a review of this wonderful book which I find I wrote, to my consternation nineteen years ago. I find also that what I wrote then and what I wrote this week aren't so very different.  I have largely kept the text as printed, dropping in the odd word or phrase [in square brackets] where they might help the clarity of the text.

     There are certain books, a 'Canon' of texts, that stand out from the others around them and transcend the era in which they are written.  This book is one of them.  'The Great Gatsby' is set in Twenties America.  This is the 'Jazz Age'.  And as expected this is a novel of excess, rather, it is a book that dwells of excess.  The style is in fact succinct and direct, marking a change from his previous two novels which still have a 'nineteenth century' feel to them.  The sentences are crisper, words are not wasted. The plot too is carefully, skillfully put together.  It is simple and clear, a concentrated work.  Jay Gatsby, a mysterious and hugely wealthy young man attempts to get close to a society woman, Daisy, once his lover and now married to plutocrat Tom Buchannan. thse story is narrated by Nick Caraway, a cousin of Daisy, who after the Great War has moved out east to make a fortune on the New York money markets.  renting a house on Long Island he finds himself the neighbour of Gatsby, and his neighbour finds [in Nick] the key that will unlock to him the world which daisy inhabits.  The novel describes, painfully, the results of this.
     Fitzgerald once remarked to Ernest Hemingway the "the rich aren't like you and me."  To which Hemmingway replied; "Yes, they're richer."  To Fitzgerald they were objects of fascination and unease, perhaps even disgust.  To some extent Scott wrote to become rich, and he himself became emblematic of the period [of American history] although his novels are critical of the amorality of twenties America.  This ambivalence is reflected in the book, so that for Marxist theorists Tom and Daisy become ciphers for a whole class, but in the end Hemmingway was right.  Tom is simply a villain and Daisy's motivation is mixed materialism and ordinary fear.  Indeed all the main characters, with the exception of the narrator, are corrupt and corrupting.  Our sympathies though, lie with Gatsby because we have a 'Romantic' view of love, just as he does. Like Gatsby we believe that that people should follow their desires, even though, in his case, they are irrational and obsessive and lead ultimately to his criminality.  In the final pages of the book Scott compares Gatsby's' desire for sel-fullfilment, which incidentally started off as old-fashioned self-improvement, with the American Dram - a passage for me of great emotional intensity - but Gatsby's struggle, perhaps like America's, is ultimately futile because it is based solely on desire.

The Great Gatsby I

It was an age of miracles, it was an age of art, it was an age of excess, and it was an age of satire.

     Today - the 10th of April 2025 - marks the hundredth anniversary of the publication of one of the finest American novels of the 2oth century - perhaps even the finest - 'The Great Gatsby'.  It was F Scott Fitzgerald's 3rd published novel and it seems to me to be the distillation of the art.  The very essence.   The American critic Charles R Jackson called it 'the only flawless novel in the history of American literature.'

    Comparatively short, succinct but not parsimonious in style - to quote T S Eliot:

 where every word is at home,
Taking its place to support the others,
The word neither diffident nor ostentatious,
An easy commerce of the old and the new,
The common word exact without vulgarity,
The formal word precise but not pedantic,
The complete consort dancing together

       - there is something deeply satisfying about this novel.  It is one my favourite books.  It is a book I have returned to time and again.

Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me.

      I suppose the plot is simple enough - it is a small enough tragedy, though scandalous. Yet 'costing not less than everything' - to quote T S Eliot again.  It is the attempt of the narrator to put something right.  The story of Jay Gatsby and his loves, and how he is mastered by them.  The setting is the plutocratic world of Long Island, and New York, but also, fleetingly and movingly, 'the forgotten Swede towns' of the Mid-west. (Both Gatsby and the narrator it turns our are, like Fitzgerald himself, Mid-westerners.) It is the early 1920s and it is the 'Jazz Age'. Gatsby, I think, is rather like Miss Jean Brodie, in that both eminently charismatic but ultimately flawed characters who are unseated by their desire for the absolute.  Both are cultural Romantics of a very 19th century cast and are brought down by an adversary who is more ruthless than they.  And both are characters that enthrall the reader, offering the prospect of a live lived 'purified' of the dross, yet are really morally compromised, and, in the case of Jean Brodie a comic grotesque.  Gatsby is certainly not that. 

     

I'm ready for my close-up now Mr DeMille.

    

     The last time I visited Brighton I stayed the weekend with my friend Richard.  He lived in Brunswick Place in a top floor flat. Unhappily, the weekend did not go well.  However on Sunday we walked into the centre of Brighton the back way, along Landsdown Rd etc., avoiding the vile Western Avenue.  At the far end we paused for me to take some pictures of the somewhat eccentric Gothick Wykeham Terrace - all grey and white stucco and pinnacles - when a first floor window opened and voiced called out 'I'm ready for close-up now, Mr DeMille.'  He, Michael, then invited us in, at one point leaving us - two strangers - alone in his sitting room while he went downstairs to the kitchen.  The sitting-room was 'pure' Late Sixties/Early Seventies - white painted Gothic book shelves and a lime green carpet.  It was all rather stylish.  He returned some minutes later with some headed note paper and an invitation to tea sometime.  I remember him announcing that at one time he 'had Roy Strong on one side of me and Flora Robson and her sisters on the other.'  Or words to that effect.

     Sadly I never returned for tea, and never saw Michael or Richard again.  I wish I had, particularly Michael as he was a hoot and I was keen to record his house, but that weekend spelt the end of my friendship with Richard.  We last spoke at the beginning of lockdown, but alas, I think Richard must of died during those grim months.  

     This has turned out to be a less than cheerful introduction to a post about a couple of books by Sir Roy Strong, or as they used to call him in Private Eye, Dr Strange, than intended. However it is just about the only anecdote I have about the man, so it will have to do.

     Roy Strong is a bit of National Treasure.  Quite the Renaissance man: scholar, curator, writer (Author of some 43 (!) books, some in collaboration with his late wife, the designer Julia Trevelyan Oman), garden designer and maker, aesthete, dandy and habitue of the Beau Monde.  And I must say I'm a fan.  His first volume of published diaries 'The Roy Strong Diaries 1967-1987' is quite one of my favourite books and along with 'A Chequered Past' by Peter Schlesinger opens a window on the fascinating, now long vanished, interlocking worlds of Bohemia and the Beau Monde in Late Sixties/Early Seventies London.  A world essentially ended by the Oil Crisis of 1973.
    Therefore imagine my excitement when the bf announces he's found a cache of Strong's books for sale at Aberglasney.  After some toing and froing I ended up with these five books.  The books that interest me most are the autobiographical 'Roy Strong: Self portrait as a young man', 2013, and the 'The Renaissance Garden in England' 0f 1978 & 1998. (This is the paperback 1998 edition)

     'Roy Strong: Self Portrait as a Young Man' fleshes out part of that period covered in 'The Roy String Diaries'.  It is fascinating, partly because my own background shares some similarities with his - lower middle class and living in a 'semi', though I didn't actually live in suburbia, but (as I've said before) in a small market town in Lincolnshire.  I suspect that our tastes, and attitudes, are pretty much the same: 'a committed Royalist; an Oxford Movement Christian; a lover of Old England, its great houses, churches and landscape; in short, at this stage of my life, a prototype of the later Young Fogeys, conservative by instinct and not at all an Angry Young Man of the Colin Wilson/John Osbourne variety.'  (All that said, I suspect that Osbourne was probably more culturally conservative than assumed at the time.)
   At times this book reads like an Evelyn Waugh novel with our hero ascending the 'greasy pole' from Winchmore Hill in Enfield to Keeper of the National Portrait gallery at 32 and eventually Director of the V&A at 38.  If I remember rightly from the Diaries enjoying some very long lunches in the process and all the while encountering a whole flight personalities and eccentrics in the process, often immensely talented and but tragically flawed: the critic and exhibition maestro Dickie Buckle, and the artist Astrid Zydower spring to mind.  There is wonderful photograph - very 'Sixties' - of Buckle, Strong, and Buckle's assistant, Joe Predera.  They are standing amidst the chaos of the hang for the ground breaking Cecil Beaton exhibition of 1968.  Buckle looks like he's nicked his shirt from a production of Swan Lake, giving him the look a particularly robust but brassy barmaid. It seems to sum up a whole era.

    

     'The Renaissance Garden in England' is one of Strong's more academic works, a very 'Warburg Institute'* book, showing the influence of Strong's Phd tutor at the Warburg, Dame Frances Yates.  Yates (1899-1981) was another of those eccentric figures in Strong's life, a historian whose field of study was the Renaissance esoteric tradition; her published books such as 'Giordano Bruni and the Hermetic Tradition', and 'The Rosicrucian Enlightenment', reflect this.  Rather like the other books I have mentioned in this post it sheds light on a lost world, for very few of the gardens discussed in this book actually survive.  A world of great formal gardens full of symbolism and allegory, of grottos and mechanical wonders, places where the esoteric and the scientific were not yet estranged.
     Given that dearth of source materials ie gardens, Strong relies on written descriptions and contemporaneous paintings, drawings and prints.  Quite fascinating those prints in themselves.  Only one Hollar, but there are a small number taken from the wonderful 'Britannia Illustrata' of 1709.  In addition there is a liberal sprinkling of poetry of the period.  The result of all this is a rich, polymathic, satisfying bricolage of a book, the design of which appears to me, at least, to be heavily influenced by Mark Girouard's books such as 'Robert Smythson and the Elizabethan House' which were designed by Girouard's wife Dorothy.

*  The Warburg Institute is part of the University of London.  It was originally established in Hamburg in 1909.  In 1933, with the rise of the Nazi Party to power in Germany, the Institute was relocated to London. 

'Serotonin'

      Well, I've finally finished reading 'Serotonin' by the French novelist Michel Houellebecq - that's one I was reading concurrently with Joseph Conrad's 'Lord Jim'.  Not a thing I would recommend, reading two novels simultaneously, for like having two masters 'either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other'.  Indeed, 'Serotonin' seemed a bit vapid compared to Conrad. It just doesn't have the heft.  Vapid too, compared to Houellebecq's earlier work.  As I wrote in an earlier post on these two book 'Serotonin' doesn't really stand up to say 'Atomised' of 'Platform'.  An opinion that, as you can see, hasn't changed.  At only one point did the novel hold my attention and that was when its focus shifted from navel-gazing to a putative insurrection by a group of well armed farmers.  It was both engaging and, finally, rather moving.  Alas, in a manner that echoed the half-hearted 'evenements' in 'Submission', neither the insurrection or Houellebecq's interest lasted that long, and the novel limped off to its conclusion.

BBC NOW: Back to the Brangwyn

      I feel I have to tread carefully here, and maybe it would be better if I just didn't bother, but I'm up for a challenge.  In any case I so loved the final piece in last night's concert at the Brangwyn Hall that I fell compelled to mark it in some way.  
     So to the programme - it's a good place to start.  There were three pieces: Higgins's 'A Monstrous Little Suite', Weinberg's Concert for Trumpet & Orchestra, and Shostakovich's 6th Symphony.  The conductor was Ryan Bancroft, and the trumpet soloist, Håkan Hardenberger.  Gavin Higgins was also present and, if I may say so, sporting a rather fine beard.  I suppose what connect these three works is a sense that each is haunted (perhaps too strong a word) by the past.

      'A Monstrous Little Suite' Op is a five movement suite based on Higgins's opera 'The Monstrous Child' of 2019.  It was rather like the 'Curate's Egg'.  There was some wonderful orchestration.  I warmed to the slow movements - an interval canon (?) started the 2nd movement but was quickly dropped.  It was all rather like the score to a 50/60s Hollywood thriller, with all that unease that sadly one all too often associates with contemporary Classical Music, but without the images it was all rather inexplicable.

     So to the Concerto for Trumpet and Orchestra, Op 94, by Mieczyslaw Weinberg (1919-1996).  I like the Violin Concerto (1959), (I'm actually listening to it now) but I think this must be the first time I have attended a concert and actively hated a piece.  The bf wasn't that keen either, but we both opted for the British thing and politely applauded.  Points for 'pushing' the audience, but the first half was pretty much indigestible.

     Things were a good deal more digestible in the second half with Shostakovich 6.  A bit overlooked, I should think, being sandwiched between two mighty works the 5th and 7th symphonies.  The symphony is both, paradoxically, a balanced and unbalanced work.  By which I mean each movement is perfectly balanced of itself, but the entire work is slightly out of kilter, consisting of a mere three movements - adagio, scherzo and presto - of which the first is larger than the other two combined.  In addition the movements seem disconnected - Sibelius inflected Romanticism in the 1st movement to Neo-Classicism in the 3rd. The symphony's brevity, a mere half an hour or so, is not reflected in the music.  Nothing feels rushed; the opening adagio is expansive, solemn and at times mysterious; the other two movements lively, by turns capricious and, sometimes, bombastic.  The whole, for all its 'oddities' is quite compelling. It put a smile on my face.

'Girl Stroke Boy'

      In the last week or so the bf has been watching 'Up Pompeii' and 'Up the Chastity Belt' two films starring Frankie Howerd.  The first is a spin-off from the saucy BBC comedy series (1969-70) and the second is a 'spin-off of a spin-off' being essentially the same as 'Up Pompeii' but set in the Middle Ages.  The cast is largely the same (including several British actors who you might have expected to have known better).  However, I'm not here to be censorious. Both of these films are towards the milder end of the British Sex Comedy of the 1970s - and yes, it is a genre, and yes, we have watched both the 'confessions' series and the 'adventures' series.  I think the worst one we watched was Hazel Adair's 'Keeping it up Downstairs' of 1976. We certainly hit the bottom.*

     Both 'Up Pompeii' and 'Up the Chastity Belt' were directed by Ned Sherrin (1931-2001). Sherrin (aka 'Ned Twinky' re: 'Private Eye') is best remembered for bringing the satire boom of the early 1960s to the small screen with 'That was the Week That Was', and for presenting 'Loose Ends' on BBC Radio4.  His film making tends to be glossed over.  As, maybe, his long standing collaboration with writer and critic Caryl Brahms which resulted in at least nine stage and tv productions.  All of this preamble brings me, in a round about way, to last night's film: 'Girl Stroke Boy' of 1971.  Produced by Ned Sherrin and Terry Glinwood, directed by Bob Kellert.  It is, I suppose, an English version of the 1967 film, 'Guess who's Coming to Dinner'. The cast is pretty special: Joan Greenwood, Michael Horden with Clive Francis and Peter Straker ('Straker' on the publicity etc just to add to the ambiguity). Elizabeth Walsh, Patricia Routledge, Peter Bull, & Rudolph Walker also appear, fleetingly and unexpectedly, in the supporting roles.  It is based on a stage play the 'Girlfriend' written by David Percival.  I have tried, but I can find very little about it or the playwright. It however did not get the critical acclaim claimed on some websites.  It was a flop. Apparently.  Be that as it, may Ned Sherrin and Carol Brahms took it in hand and turned it into a film. One of the changes was to make 'Jo', the girlfriend in question, black.  The plot is simple: young man (Clive Francis) returns home for the weekend with his boyfriend (Straker) who is passed off as his girlfriend.  Chaos ensues.  The result is farcical, bordering on the absurd.  Greenwood and Horden over act wildly.  Sometimes it is very funny, other times cringe inducing.  Some beautiful cinematography, but it cannot quite escape its theatrical origins.  Very much of its time.  The review in 'Gay News', Suki J Pitcher was corrsucating - 'a good idea, which gets swallowed in a mess of theatrical jokes and finally drowns in a confused sea of innuendo.  Why Ned Sherrin thought this script, which flopped on the West End stage, was 'a strange comedy....perfect for the times', remains a mystery....'

     Among the extras on this Indicator cd are a charming interview with Peter Straker and a short film, of 1972, 'A Couple of Beauties' staring Pat Coombs, James Beck, and Bunny Lewis.  Terrible but oddly fascinating. 

Girl Stroke Boy

1971

Director                 Bob Kellat
Cinematogrpahy  Ian Wilson
Producer               Ned Sherrin and Terry Glinwood

*  The spin-off and the sex-comedy are (perhaps) linked phenomena of the 1970s. There is certainly a blurring of the boundaries.  Both were hugely successful: 'On the Buses' was the 2nd most popular film of 1971, and 'Confessions of a Window Cleaner' the top grossing film of 1974.  But then the 1970s were a nadir for the British film industry, and they weren't that good elsewhere.

British Transport Films: Elizabethan Express

At Platform 5, The Elizabethan,

A special express for the holiday season,

Summons its strength.

And the time to depart

Marks an ending for some,

But, for many, a start.

     When I reviewed British Transport Films' production 'Blue Pullman' back in 2021 I mentioned briefly another BTF film, 'Elizabethan Express' of 1954.  And much that I said then about 'Blue Pullman', and indeed 'An Artist looks at Churches' of 1959, could be said of this film.  Apologies in advance, then, if I repeat myself.

     'Elizabethan Express' is a film I've watched many times since I first saw it on C4 - and sometimes, strictly between you and me you understand, with tears in my eyes.  I certainly regard it as a favourite, even if at times it verges on the mawkish.  Whatever its faults, it is, however, a good example of how the BTF could produce a beautifully crafted short film (some 19mins)  'documentary'. I've used inverted commas because this film, like 'Blue Pullman', is really a piece of advertising, of a rather 'Reithian' stripe, making the travelling public aware of a 'new' non-stop express service, 'The Elizabethan', between London King's Cross and Edinburgh Waverley 'over the Tyne'.*  (It was Lord Reith (1887-1971), the first Director General of the BBC,  developed what are often referred to the Reithian Principles - a distillation of the BBC's mission - 'to inform, educate and entertain' the public.  The BTF and the wider Documentary Film Movement in Britain shared those principles, but perhaps not so explicitly.)

     'Elizabethan Express' was also an attempt to show that the newly nationalised rail service had put the War Years behind them - years when the railways were run into the ground by the War effort - eg the barest amount of maintenance and little if any new rolling stock.  Glamour, and comfort, this film announced, had returned. This attempt was made by the use of 'Heroic Materialism' of a much more potent variety than that on display in 'Blue Pullman'; the crossing of the Tweed via the Royal Border Bridge at Berwick is a marvel.  You could say that the train and specifically the engine - a pre-War Class A4 Pacific designed by Sir Nigel Gresley for LNER - is the star.  The narration describes the engine - The Silver Fox - in suitably heroic terms has having 'the speed of a greyhound and strength of a boar'.  Coupled with this celebration of technology is an appeal to the Wartime collective effort of a sort first seen on the big screen in Walter Summers's 'The Battles of Coronel and Falkland Islands' of 1924.  In 'Elizabethan Express' the narrative of the journey is interspersed with sections describing the work of all those toiling 'behind the scenes' to achieve the feat of what was then the longest non-stop passenger service in the world.  A slightly 'elite' train service as collective endeavour.

     The filming was quite an endeavour in and of itself, for unlike 'Night Mail' of 18 years earlier which re-constructed the interior of a night mail train in the studio for filming, 'Elizabethan Express' was filmed entirely on location.  Cameraman (Billy Williams) and assistant shared the footplate with driver and fireman.  Those repeated shots of the flank of the train, and (I think) the external shots of the engine in the water trough sequence, were shot just north of Peterborough where the Peterborough-Leicester line runs parallel to the East Coast Mainline for several miles.  But then the documentary film of this form is essentially a fiction of some sort; John Grierson (father of the British documentary film movement) called it 'dramatised reality'.

     Well, that has dealt with 'inform' and 'educate' and now for the 'entertain'.  This is mainly in the form of the narration written by Paul de Saux in doggerel.  An hommage to 'Nightmail', I presume, which had poetry written for it by W H Auden no less.  No criticism of the actors who voiced the narration, Alan Wheatley & Howard Marion Crawford, but it is, it has to be said, a hit-and-miss affair.  Sometimes clunky: 'Watch them consistently filling the gaps in their faces with food'.  Sometimes rather affecting: 'The loud hiss of steam as the train seems to slow to the pace of a cloud breaks the afternoon task and disperses the dream'.  A quick nod also to the composer Clifton Parker who wrote the, at times Brittenesque, score.

* 'The Elizabethan' ran during the summer months.  It replaced the 'Capitals Limited' express in 1953, the year of the Coronation of Elizabeth II.  The Capitals Limited express, inaugurated in 1949, was a Post-War restoration (of sorts) of the non-stop 'Flying Scotsman' service which by then had been 'reduced' to a stopping service. According to Wiki, the 'Capitals Limited' made the non-stop journey between London and Edinburgh in 8 hours, 'The Elizabethan' in 6 hours 30 mins.  The service was withdrawn in 1963.

 

 Elizabethan Express

1954

Editor                    Tony Thompson
Cinematography  Billy Williams
Producer               Edgar Anstey

Two more Christmas recommendations

      Following on from from my previous post, I'd like to recommend two pieces of Christmas listening, both musical.  Both also very northern.  I'll deal with the simplest first: Vaughan Williams's 'Fantasia on Christmas Carols' of 1912.  I do find this a deeply moving piece.  It is written for baritone soloist, chorus and orchestra.  All the carols are English; the three that are sung are perhaps less well known than the likes of 'O Come all ye faithful' and 'Hark the Herald Angels Sing'.  They are 'The Truth sent from Above', 'Come all ye Worthy Gentleman' and 'On Christmas night all Christians Sing' aka 'The Sussex Carol'.  All had been collected by likes from Vaughan Williams and Cecil Sharp.  The result is the most plangent of my two recommendations.  It has a deep untow of something close to melancholy, conveying the emptiness and biting cold of mid-winter. 

      The second piece is much more complex, being a reconstruction of a Lutheran Mass for Christmas Morning as it would have been celebrated in a north German city just before the Thirty Years War, from the period known as Lutheran Orthodoxy.  It too shares a sense of elusive profound silence and emptiness of Christmas in the north. This album, released (fittingly enough) by 'Deutsche Grammophon' of Hamburg, is the work of Paul McCreesh, the Gabrieli Quartet, the Gabrieli Players, and the Boys Choir & congregation of Roskilde Cathedral, Denmark, and it is an extraordinary endeavour, both in terms of scholarship & musicianship; sung in Latin, German, and a little bit of Greek and taking very nearly 1 hr 20 mins to perform - the Introit alone, sung in both German and Latin, takes 7.29 mins.  As originally celebrated such a service, with sermon and Holy Communion, could possibly have taken 3 hrs - the former apparently lasting an hour.  It really would be wrong to think that at the Reformation the new protestant churches all ditched the Latin.  Latin services in Lutheran Nuremberg, for instance, continued until the 1690s. Martin Luther himself said, "in no wise would I like to discontinue the service in the Latin language." Here in England and Wales services continued to by celebrated in Latin particularly at the Universities, and the schools of Eton and Winchester.  Latin services continued in Oxford cathedral until c.1862; and and Holy Communion is still celebrated in Latin once at term at the University Church in the city.*  Back now to the music.  The album concentrates on the church music of Michael Praetorius (1571-1621) with a couple of additional instrumental pieces by Heinrich Schutz and Samuel Sheidt.  It is difficult to select a favourite piece among an album of such riches; I have already mentioned the Introit 'Puer Natus in Bethlehem', and I should also like to mention the Gradual Hymn 'Von himmel hoch da komm ich her' and the knockout Recessional 'In Dulci Jubilo'.  The crown must however go Praetorius's 1619 setting of the 'German Sanctus' from Luther's 'Deutsche Messe' of 1526.  Extraordinary.

* (6.5.25) As of 28.4.25 latin Communion, according to the Liber Precum Publicarum of 1560 was celebrated at Keble College, Oxford.  Apparently it's going to to be a regular 'thing'. St James Garlickhythe, in the City of London, will be celebrating Latin Communion on Wednesday 21st May 2025.

'A Ghost Story for Christmas'

 

     Well, here in the UK the terrestrial broadcasters, BBC & ITV, have released their Christmas Day schedules and they are quite simply appalling.  Perhaps the worst I have yet seen.*  They have added a little edge to this post which was to be in the way of a celebration of a remarkable, but relatively short lived television tradition from the 1970s, making it somewhat more into a valediction.  If you haven't seen any of the original series, please make the effort to do so. They are excellent.  You may be able to find them on Youtube, but the whole collection is available from the BFI as two box sets.

     In its original iteration, 'A Ghost Story for Christmas' was broadcast at some point during the Christmas period on BBC1 from 1971 until 1978 with a different drama presented each year.  The director was Lawrence Gordon Clarke and the producer (from 1973) was Rosemary Hill.  The first five productions were adaptations of work by that master of the ghost story M R James: 'The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral', 'A Warning to the Curious', 'Lost Hearts', 'The Treasure of Abbott Thomas', and finally in 1975 'The Ash Tree'. In the following year perhaps the most atmospheric of the series was aired, the Dickens short story 'The Signalman' in an adaptation by Andrew Davies.

     The final two dramas in the that first iteration were not literary adaptations but written specifically for the series: 'Stigma' in 1977, by Clive Exton and 'The Ice House', 1978, by John Bowen; the latter not directed by Lawrence Gordon Clarke, who had left the BBC in the previous year, but by Derek Lister.  Both have contemporary settings, and are not really ghost stories as such, and whatever their merits they lack the atmosphere of the previous dramas. 
     Those first six dramas, often cited by critics as examples of so-called 'Folk Horror', are quite remarkable for their ability to conjure up a certain atmosphere, a certain sensibility, and to do so out of limited resources. As Gordon Clarke said of them: the 'focus [was] on suggestion. The aim, they say, is to chill rather than shock. Partly because television is not best suited to carrying off big-screen pyrotechnics, but mainly because they want to keep faith with the notion of a ghost story in its literary rather than cinematic tradition'.  There was, of course, no CGI in those days, and quite frankly they are all the better for it.  All were shot 16mm film on location, at some time in the midst of an English Autumn.  All these things may seem trivial enough, but they really are not.  God, after all, is in the details.  In addition the actors are really top-notch, eg Denholm Elliot and Bernard Lloyd in 'The Signalman', and excellent use is made of Classical music throughout.  In all, considered filmmaking at its best.  And very northern.

     In 1978/79 James Gordon Clarke went to Yorkshire television and made a very atmospheric adaptation of M R James's 'The Casting of the Runes' set in contemporary Leeds.  It starred Jan Francis and Ian Cuthbertson. (We have encountered Cuthbertson before when discussing Nigel Kneale's 'The Stone Tape'.) I believe it can still be found on 'YouTube'.  It too is well worth the watch.

* To clarify, having now seen the Christmas edition of the 'Radio Times' the BBC1 & ITV1 are indeed terrible.  The BBC2 schedule is a much better bet being a mixture of films, ballet and Morecambe & Wise.  What more could one want?

'English Style'

      This book, 'English Style', is to be found nestling in the bibliography at the back of Ben Pentreath's wonderful first book 'English Decoration'.  Although keeping a lazy eye out for other books on the list, I always felt a certain reticence about buying this book.  I think I may have been put off by the images of the book on line, but I must say in the flesh this book is in many ways superb, a real delight.  The photography, by Ken Kirkwood is absolutely spot-on.  There are interiors by likes of David Hicks, Bernard Nevil, Charles Beresford Clarke, and Terence Conran. If I was feeling particularly cynical (which I often am these days) I might say the usual suspects.  Certainly if, like me you have a (small) library of this sort of book, then you can guarantee that certain people, and certain properties, such as The Temple at Stoke-By-Nayland, will reappear with pleasant regularity.  To leaven things there are, however, some new names to conjure with: Priscilla Conran, Piers Gough, Brian Henderson, Lesley Astaire, Tricia Guild, and Susan Collier (of Collier Campbell).  I could go on.  Anyway, in all there are some 58 entries or short chapters - short on text, but rich in photography.  In addition there is both a Forward by Terence Conran and a Preface by Fiona MacCarthy. Both are good, but the latter steals the prize. Although this is a book essentially about the English house, the net is cast wide enough to include a gypsy caravan and a narrow boat. (They are, it has to be remarked, the only working class interiors.) In addition there is even, perhaps oddly, one garden.  The result is an eclectic, seemingly encyclopedic book.  Regardless of any claim to the latter, it is certainly an embarrassment of riches, happily swinging between austerity of Minimalism and over abundant bricolage.  Minimalism apart this is essentially a conservative book, rather like Habitat (for all its vaunted Modernism).  As the Introduction points out the short efflorescence of the Sixties - in its wilder moments - had little lasting influence on English style.  There are no inflatable Italian furniture or Pop Art graphics on view here, and I see nothing necessarily wrong with that.  Not only is there an almost innate conservatism on display but also a certain seriousness, that I suspect could verge on the high minded.  An at times distant echo of 17th century Puritanism, perhaps.

     'English Style', not to be confused with that excellent book of the same name by Mary Gilliatt and Michael Boys*, was first published in the US by Clarkson N Potter Inc of New York, and then in Britain by Thames & Hudson in 1984.  It is the work of Suzanne Slesin and Stafford Cliff, who was also the designer.  The former an American, the latter from Australia.

     Slesin, a grand step-daughter of Helena Rubinstein, is a prolific writer on matters of style and design: she worked at the New York Times as both writer and editor, and is currently design editor of Conde Nast House and Garden, and Editor-in-chief of Homestyle. Among her books is a biography of Helena Rubinstein: 'Over the Top: Helena Rubinstein: Extraordinary Style, Beauty, Art, Fashion and Design'.

     Cliff, as you may well remember from an earlier posts, was the designer of 'The House Book' of 1972 and the Creative Director of the Habitat catalogues in the 1970s.  At time of publication he was 'Creative Director' of the Conran Group, and was the 'Project Consultant' of 'Terence Conran's New House Book' New House Book' of 1985.  Slezin contributed the chapter 'One Room Living', Susan Collier 'A Sure Sense of Style'.  Stafford and Slesin subsequently worked together they worked on a number of books: 'French Style'. 'Greek Style', 'Indian Style', and 'Grimsby Style'.

     So far so good.

     However I have a number of reservations about this book, which in 1984 was subject to a scornful and dismissive review in the December edition of the 'World of Interiors', some less trivial than others.  Firstly the design.  On the whole it is very good.  I particularly like the use of a different textured paper for the 'supporting cast' - the introduction, the 'Catalogue of Sources', and the Index, etc.  There is a logic to it.  However the last two pages of the Introduction are in the same glossy paper as the 'main feature'.  A small point, I know, but some consistency would be preferable.  I suspect a technical explanation, which is fair enough.

     My main reservation however lies with the text of the Introduction and its ambition - and, indeed, the ambition of the whole book.  I realise that all books of this sort are subjective in their choices - the omitted (alas, no Angus McBean) are perhaps as telling as the included - but the authors go further than usual by attempting to cement Habitat and the whole Conran phenomenon in the mainstream of British art and design, as inheritors of the 'great tradition'. There are two problems with this; firstly the writers are too close (being part of the Conran cohort) to be completely objective; and secondly, and I think, shamefully, there is an attempt to do this by denigrating the opposition ie Laura Ashley.  A tame academic from the RCA is even brought in at this point like a hired assassin to wield the knife.  And that, to me at least, all seems a bit unnecessary.  

     Truth is, I suspect, that 'English Style' is in all but name a Conran production - at least a half a dozen of the interiors catalogued here are owned by people closely connected to TC, including the home, 'Old House, Informal Mix', of one of the photographers who worked on the 1985 Habitat catalogue - same furniture in the same positions in both publications etc.  

      The result then is not what you might call objective however it is a thing of beauty, and utility.  A very useful visual and historical reference to an eclectic, and interesting, period in British interior design.

     

* Little in the way of inflatable furniture etc. there either.