Currently reading....

 

....'The Great Fortune'.

    Since my latest London trip I have been reading 'The Great Fortune' the first book in Olivia Manning's remarkable 'Balkan Trilogy', and, yes, I have read them in reverse order.  My excuse, if excuse I needed, was that I was reading them in the classic penguin orange spine edition, and it was a question of reading them when I found them.

     'The Great Fortune' was published in 1960, it is set in Bucharest, at that most inauspicious time, the outbreak of World War II.  Guy Pringle, who works for the British Council, returns to the city with his new wife Harriet. Through her eyes we watch as the small British community, and their Romanian friends, react to the approaching cataclysm.  Chiefly among them is Yaki, Prince Yakimov, a beguiling, English educated, down-at-heal Russian aristocrat.  His is perhaps the most memorable character in all three novels of the trilogy, and his story - the story of his downfall - forms their main sub-plot.

    At this point I had written, 'Like her contemporaries, Iris Murdoch and Elizabeth Bowen, Olivia Manning was Anglo-Irish'.  She saw herself as participating in that 'usual Anglo-Irish sense of belonging nowhere'.  However I doubt that either statement carries any water, and in any case I don't get the sense it was so important to her or her literary output as it as it was to Elizabeth Bowen.  
     Anyway, back to the 'Balkan Trilogy'; The Spoilt City' appeared in 1962, and 'Heroes and Friends' in 1965.  All three novels are essentially auto-biographical.  As she said to a friend: "I write out of experience, I have no fantasy. I don't think anything I've experienced has ever been wasted."  Indeed not, for nearly two decades later a second trilogy appeared, The Levant Trilogy.

     In 1987 BBC adapted both trilogies for television, producing a series entitled 'Fortunes of War'.  It starred Emma Thompson and Kenneth Brannagh as Harriet and Guy Pringle.  And it was through this adaptation that I discovered the novels.  Both books and series are recommended.  I think you will enjoy them.

English Cottage interiors

     

    This book originally published in 1989 by Weidenfeld and Nicolson in hardback, as part of the 'Country Series' which may eventually have extended to some 46 titles.  The subsequent publishing history is rather complex.  Then W&N was bought by Orion in 1991 the series was then reissued in paperback under the subsidiary imprint of Phoenix Illustrated.  I believe that the numbering of the books was changed, though I may be wrong.  Eventually the publishing of the series passed to another subsidiary imprint 'Seven Dials Publishing'. 

     Anyway, to the volume in question, the paperback edition of 'English Cottage Interiors', published in, I think, 1991.  The author is Hugh Lander and the photographer Peter Rauter.  Actually, it's never explicitly said who the photographer is; it is merely implied.  While the text is copyrighted to the authors, the photos are copyrighted to the publishers.  For me the photographs make the book.  Whenever possible, Mr Lauter used natural lighting; the results are quite atmospheric.
     It really is a lovely thing, a sort of Coffee table book in miniature.  The interiors featured range from the self-conscious to the utilitarian; the urban to the rural.  It is just the sort of thing that, for both financial and cultural reasons, could not be produced today.

'Checkered Past: A Visual Diary of the '60s and '70s'

But I sat back and looking forward

My shoes were high and I had scored

I'd bolted through a closing door

I would never find myself feeling bored

     I've been neglecting the blog of late, certainly neglecting the visual side of things, not being that happy.  It's all become a bit wordy.  Then lunchtime, for some reason, I suddenly thought of Peter Schlesinger's wonderful book 'Checkered Past: A Visual Diary of the '60s and '70s', published 2003 by Vendome Press.  I discovered this book on Ben Pentreath's Inspiration Blog over a decade ago now, and it has been a firm favourite of mine ever since.  It is a book of a slightly melancholic beauty.  Schlesinger's photographs are ravishing, sometimes possessing an ethereal quality, the result I think of the use of film.

     'Checkered Past' documents the American artist's ten years, or so, living in London from the late '60s to the late '70s.  When David Hockney returned to Britain in 1968, Schlesinger - then his lover - followed.  They settled in the then slightly seedy Notting Hill in w London.  In those days those grand stucco houses were subdivided into flats and bedsits.  It was a life poised between the bohemian and the Beau Monde.  A life that included, amongst a cast of seemingly thousands, such 'Somethingofthechamelon' favourites Cecil Beaton, Patrick Proctor, David Hockney, Min Hogg, Gala Mitchell, and Celia Birtwell; the social, the arts, applied arts and the intellectual. Socialites and plutocrats.  A life partially covered in Jack Hazzan's 1973 film 'A Bigger Splash', which purportedly covers the aftermath of the end of Schlesinger's relationship with David Hockney, and the creation of one of Hockney's most well known paintings, 'Portrait of an Artist'.

     It is a world that is slowly slipping from our grasp.  It essentially ended in the mid-70s after the Oil crises.  I think it was Sir Roy Strong, who moved in the same circles, who said that it was the last social great period, or words to that effect.  Certainly a more colourful world both in terms of the visual but also the character of those depicted.  There was definitely more place for the eccentric and the intellectual.

Checkered Past: A Visual Dairy of the 60s & 70s  Peter Schlesinger, Vendome Press, 2003

Watkin's ire: 'Morality and Architecture'

 

   “The one who entirely devotes himself to the Zeitgeist is a poor wretch. The seek of innovation of the everlasting avant-garde has something castrating."

     'Morality and Architecture - The Development of a Theme in Architectural History and Theory from the Gothic Revival to the Modern Movement' is one of those texts, rather like 'Learning from Las Vegas' (1972) that helped break the strangle hold of Modernism on the architectural imagination.  It originated as a lecture given in 1968 to undergraduates at Cambridge by the then young  architectural scholar Dr David Watkin of Peterhouse.  He was 27.  It was first published in book form by the Oxford University Press in 1977.  My edition, by the University of Chicago Press, dates from 1984.

     That 'theme', Watkin argues, that architecture has become, since the 19th century, to be seen merely as a manifestation of 'something else' - e.g. religion or the 'spirit of the age'.  For example Pugin, for whom his preferred style of architecture, Gothic, was a confessional marker.  Not only that but the preferred style, of whatever colour, came to be seen as morally superior thing.  A thing of purity, and to reject that thing was morally reprehensible.

    The book then is rather like a 'Catena Patrum', a chronological catalogue of theorists, historians, and critics, many of whom once held considerable intellectual sway here and abroad but are now, I suspect, barely read. Watkins cast a wide net but the emphasis is upon British intellectuals of the past two centuries.  It commences in the first half of the 19th century with the Gothic architects and theorists, the British Augustus Pugin and the French Eugene Viollet-Le-Duc before passing on to the Arts Crafts architect and theorist, the sometimes esoteric, William Lethaby.  Whereas Pugin and Lethaby were excellent architects, and whose work I greatly admire, (indeed, I really rather like Pugin the polemicist).  The same cannot be said of Viollet-Le-Duc, for though he stands in a long chain of French architectural theorists right back to the late 17th century, some of his buildings, such as the church of Église Saint-Denis de l'Estrée, are execrable.

      So, into the 20th century and the names come thick and fast: Heinrich Wofflin, Bruno Taut, Le Corbusier, Lewis Mumford, Furneaux Jordan, Siegfried Giedion, Anthony Blunt, John Summerson, with their strange - if not overblown - rhetoric and, at times, dubious grip on architectural history.  Take Siegfried Giedion for example, here talking about the Arts and Crafts: 'The circle around William Morris strives for morally pure forms."

     Finally we reach Sir Niklaus Pevsner (1902-1983) - the whole of the penultimate chapter is dedicated to his writing.  It is an audacious act, for Pevsner was Watkin's Ph.D. supervisor.  Was there a personal animus at work?  According to wiki, Reyner Banham, the critic, in a review of 'Morality and Architecture' called it 'offensive'.  Writing Pevsner's obituary in The Spectator, 3rd September 1983, the architectural historian an critic, Gavin Stamp, writes of 'Morality and Architecture' as provoking 'bitter controversy'.

    Watkins shows how the Hegelian idea of the 'geist', the 'spirit', what Hegel referred to as 'Volkgeist' and 'Weltgeist' - usually referred to simply by the pre-Hegelian term 'Zeitgeist'.  Ernst Gombrich, quoted by Watkin, described 'This Hegelian wheel is really a secularized diagram of the divine plan; the search for a centre that determines the total pattern of a civilization is consequently no more, but no less, than the quest for an initiation into god's ways with man.'  It was increasingly used by critics, such as Pevsner, in the 20th century - rather like a priestly cast picking over the entrails of a sacrificial victim - to rather self-consciously promote Modernism.  And a cast they were: Reyner Banham, for instance, had been taught at the Courtauld by the likes of Niklaus Pevsner, Anthony Blunt and Siegfried Giedion, Giedion had in turn been taught by Heinrich Wofflin, who had been taught by Jacob Burckhardt.  Quite the catena.

     

     The literary equivalent of this book is Peter Carey's 1992 book 'The Intellectuals and the Masses'.  I suppose Carey's book can be seen as a repost to F R Leavis.  Both books are iconoclastic and may be considered as attacks on the Post-War settlement.

Further thoughts (04.04.2026):

     In 1961, alarmed at recent trends in British Modernism, Pevsner wrote an article entitled 'The Return of Historicism'.  Modernism of the functionalist variety, he thought, was under threat, things were definitely getting retardaire. (See also his response the construction of New Hall Cambridge by Chamberlain, Powell and Bon.) He was right; the 1950s & 60s, particularly in America (which Pevsner doesn't really mention in his article), saw the advent of an historically informed, poetic Modernism e.g. Louis Kahn (The Trenton Bath House, 1955); John M Johansen (The Bridge House, 1957); Edward Durrell Stone (The American Embassy, New Delhi, 1959), a sort of Postmodernism avant la lettre; the 1970s the emergence of a full blown Postmodernism.  Pevsner's pure Modernism of function had barely survived a generation*.  The Zeitgeist had simply shifted.

*  Not that it's hegemony had ever been total; much to Pevsner's annoyance there had been a number of Traditionally minded architects practicing throughout the post-war period.  In addition there were a similar numbers of interior designers producing traditional interiors that received a much more sympathetic coverage in the relevant press than trad architects did in the architectural press.

Further reading

'Morality and Architecture: The Development of a Theme in Architectural History and Theory from the Gothic Revival to the Modern Movement' David Watkin, Chicago University Press, 1977

'Morality and Architecture Revisited'  David Watkin, John Murray, 2001

'Pevsner: The BBC Years'  Stephen Games, Routledge, 2016

'Pevsner: The Complete Complete Broadcast Talks'   Stephen Games, Routledge, 2016

'The Weirdstone of Brisingamen'

     I've just finished reading Alan Garner's 'The Weirdstone of Brisingamen'.  A bit of a mouthful that.  I remember my brother reading this to me as a child, and I think it was also read to us at school but I have a notion that for some reason it was abandoned.  Either way, I have no idea now how the book ended.  A year ago I dipped into the Granada adaptation of 'The Owl Service'.  And what a strange, baffling thing that is.  Anyway just before Christmas, in the our local bookshop, and looking for something to read, I decided to revisit the Weirdstone, it being the sort of book to have a cult following.  Rather like HTV's 'Children of the Stones', it shares some themes with the wider 'Folk Horror' genre.

    The Weirdstone is Alan Garner's first published novel.  The debt to the Inklings, particular Tolkien, is obvious.*  The novel is populated with dwarves, trolls and wizards. And other beings some of whom are from Norse mythology and others, one suspects, that are Garner's own creation.  (Though none of the names are as easy on the ear as those of Tolkien.) Not only that, but the protagonists embark on two arduous journeys, (one underground), that bear resemblance to the journey of the Fellowship of the Ring.  It is also a conflict for the possession of an object, in this particular case a jewel called the Weirdstone, which amongst other things, like the One Ring, facilitates access to the Unseen. The setting is not however a fictional world but Northern England - the county of Cheshire and that strange outcrop of rock in the midst of the Cheshire Plain known as Alderley Edge.  A place that has given birth to legends** and a place that Garner knew well as a child.  That specificity of geography brings it close to the artist John Piper's definition of Romanticism.

     Like 'The Owl Service', it is a dizzyingly complex novel.  I gave up trying to remember who was who.  Sadly, it suffers from a lack of characterisation.  We know, for instance, next to nothing about the two main protagonists, the children Susan and Colin, but for all of that there are scenes of incredible drive and intensity.  Some of them quite unforgettable; haunting and unsettling. At times I thought it wasn't really for children at all.

     

* I think there is an influence too of Tolkein's fellow Inkling Charles Williams.

** It is said, amongst a number of other locations in the UK, to be the sleeping place of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. 

Last year in reading....

 

'The Enchanted April' by Elizabeth von Arnim

      Just before we went away to Bath, I finished reading Elizabeth von Arnim's 1922 novel 'The Enchanted April'.  This really is a delightful book, full of poise and elegance.  Lotty Watkins, a sort of Holy Fool, despairing of grey and wet London and her equally grey and wet marriage, is suddenly enraptured by a 'small ad' in 'The Times' - castle to rent on the Italian coast.  (In those days such advertisements, and announcements - births, marriages & deaths, etc, were on the front page of the paper.)  She dreams of a month away by the Mediterranean, but money being scarce, she enlists an acquaintance, Rose Arbuthnot, in sharing the cost of the rent, but even combined their meagre resources are not enough.  They take the expedient of sub-renting to two other women: the haughty Mrs. Fisher, and the unhappy socialite Lady Caroline Dester.  A comedy of manners ensues as the genius loci begins to weave its enchantments. A sly, clever novel, well worth reading.

     Currently reading a novel of a rather different stripe, 'The Garrick Year', by Margaret Drabble.  Sharp, witty, acerbic if not downright bitter.

Hay-on-Wye

     A fine day out in Hay-on-Wye Saturday.  Crisp and sunny.  The place humming with locals and late-season tourists.  Breakfast at the Blue Boar Café; lasagne and chips for lunch at the Rose and Crown (very fine those chips).

     A mere three books bought: 'The Garrick Year' by Margaret Drabble; 'Six More English Towns' by Alec Clifton-Taylor, and 'Rutland, a Shell Guide' by W G Hoskins.

     'The Garrick Year' is something I've been looking for for some time - though on Saturday I was actually on the hunt for Storm Jameson's 1966 novel 'The Early Life of Stephen Hind'.  'The Garrick Year', 1964, Drabble's second novel, is an exploration of a decidedly shaky marriage.  It is told from the wife's viewpoint, as she and her husband relocate from London to Hereford, where he is to take part in a theatrical festival.  Apparently satiric.  Could be fun.  Cover artwork by Caroline Smith.

     'Six More English Towns' written as an accompaniment the eponymous BBC television series, broadcast in 1981 on BBC2.  The original series - 'Six English Towns' - had been broadcast in 1978, and a third series - 'Another Six English Towns' aired in 1984.  The towns in this volume are Berwick-upon-Tweed, Beverley, Bradford on Avon, Lewes, Saffron Walden, and Warwick.  He said of these broadcasts, 'I'd like every programme to be an exercise in looking.'  I have mentioned Clifton-Taylor in a number of previous posts before.  He was educated at Queen's College Oxford, the Courtauld Institute, and (I think) the Sorbonne, and was a man of strong opinions.  He was brought to our screens by a man of equal robust opinion, John Drummond.  Clifton-Taylor was a regular contributor to the Buildings of England series, and wrote a number of books, such as 'The Cathedrals of England', and 'English Parish Churches Works of Art'.  As with John Drummond, it is unlikely we will see his sharp, erudite like again, or, for that matter, programmes such as 'Six English Towns'. He deserves a post to himself.

     So does the great WG Hoskins; and the whole phenomena of the remarkable the Shell County Guides. The guides were published by Faber & Faber under the patronage of Shell, and were edited by Sir John Betjeman and the artist John Piper. They were designed to be an alternative to 'The Buildings of England'.  Sadly, the project never reached completion. However the books are rather lovely.  The photography, for instance, is always top notch. In addition to 'Rutland, a Shell guide' of 1963 - one of the smaller and rarer of the series - Hoskins also wrote the Leicestershire volume in 1970, where in the introduction he manages to completely ignore the sw part of the county. No mean feat.

Stephen Calloway in 'English Style'

      I was flicking through 'English Style' by Suzanne Slesin and Stafford Cliff  the other day, and I was left wondering who created the interior below - the text contains no name, but the owner is described as 'a curator at the V&A'.  I was considering if it was the work of Sir Roy Strong - who rarely, if ever, appears in books such as this - when suddenly I had one of those light bulb moments and thought of the historian and curator Stephen Calloway, and whose flat I have posted about here.  Well, sure enough, a quick comparison of images from the original House & Gardens article and these below revealed furniture and other items in common.  It may therefore be safe to assume that these highly sophisticated interiors share the same owner, and is indeed Stephen Calloway.  Whoever the owner, I find these rooms immensely satisfying.  But what of the relationship between both interiors in time?

'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 in 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'.

'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 Britain a more serious approach is exemplified by the rather corporate work Niall McLaughlin, and 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'.

'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 on 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.  The 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 self-fulfilment, which incidentally started off as old-fashioned self-improvement, with the American Dream - 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 out 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 enthral 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 Landsdowne 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 and 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 it just doesn't really stand up to say 'Atomised' of 'Platform'.  An opinion as you can see, that 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.

Last year in reading....

    Happy New Year!   The return of something I last did way back in 2016. I cannot believe it was quite so long ago.  Anyway here is (as far as I can remember) my fiction reading from this last year.  Discoveries were: 'Dr Zhivago', 'The Jewel in the Crown', and 'The Secret Agent'.  'Heretics of Dune', by Frank Herbert was, like 'God Emperor of Dune', was a much more impressive piece of fiction than 'Dune'. Only one real disappointment: 'Heat Wave' by Penelope Lively.

'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 online, 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 encyclopaedic 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 stepdaughter 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 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 'Project Consultant' of 'Terence Conran's 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 i.e. 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.