84, CHARING CROSS ROAD by HELENE HANFF

Helene Hanff's 1970 book, 84, Charing Cross Road is an epistolary gem.  The correspondence, which has since formed the basis of a film, is largely between the acerbic Hanff, a struggling and periodically successful scriptwriter (usually for TV) based in New York and Frank Doel, one of the senior employees of a bookshop, Marks & Co., of the Charing Cross Road.

Hanff is remarkably literate enjoying, indeed needing, those books that would have appeared on a list of the 100 books one should have read, a century ago.  She also wants good copies and as each appears, throws out books she perceives as either poor or worthless never, apparently, expanding her collection beyond the one set of bookshelves she has in her apartment.

The story is lifted by three elements - the jokey, aggressive style that Miss Hanff employs when writing to Marks & Co. and the slow development of confidence in reply that the naturally polite and somewhat nervous Doel adopts; the building of the transAtlantic friendship, still by letter, between Hanff and members of Doel's family as well as other inmates of the bookshop; and, over this, the background of America and England just after the Second World War epitomized by the plenty enjoyed by the former and the still rationed restrictions afflicting the latter - these are brought into sharp focus by the food parcels (and nylons) that Hanff sends across either as a thank you for a first edition John Henry Newman, or for birthdays, Christmas or to help celebrate the coronation of Queen Elizabeth.

84 Charing Cross Road is very short and though I've read it at least four times, it was only on the last occasion that I genuinely understood the timescale it covers.  Hanff sends her first letter on 5th October, 1949 and receives her last, twenty years later as London has moved into the Swinging Sixties.  Also a lot of the correspondence is missing, lost or has been edited out to create pace and, if the latter, very successfully.

A continuing theme is the often long gaps between Hanff's request for specific books and the ability of Marks & Co to supply them.  These result in some sharp rebukes from the New York side of the relationship:

"SLOTH:  i could ROT over here before you'd send me anything to read. i oughta run straight down to brentano's which i would if anything i wanted was in print."

or

"Dear Speed - You dizzy me rushing Leigh Hunt and the Vulgate over here whizbang like that. You probably don't realize it, but it's hardly more than two years since I ordered them. You keep going at this rate and you're gonna give yourself a heart attack."

on the other hand, when something fine turns up, the pleasure is palpable:

"The Newman arrived almost a week ago and I'm just beginning to recover. I keep it on the table with me all day, every now and then I stop typing and reach over and touch it. Not because it's a first edition; I just never saw a book so beautiful. I feel vaguely guilty about owning it."

But woe betide Marks & Co if an edition is not up to scratch:

"WHAT KIND OF A PEPYS' DIARY DO YOU CALL THIS?  this is not pepys' diary, this is some busybody editor's miserable collection of EXCERPTS from pepys' diary may he rot.  i could just spit."

Only Hanff appears in the inverted commas above primarily because her prose is that much more quotable.  The English side of the equation, however, does supply a fine balance and one which is accented by the building desire that Hanff has to visit Charing Cross Road and to see literary London, and of the Marks & Co. family to accommodate her.

The visit never takes place - there's always some reason, a move to a new apartment, the cost of dentistry - but, in reality one begins to get the impression that Hanff is fearful of having her illusions broken. Friends of hers visit, and report back with enthusiasm, but never the lady herself.  And then it's too late:

"Dear Miss.  I have just come across the letter you wrote to Mr Doel on the 30th of September last, and it is with great regret that I have to tell you that he passed away on Sunday the 22nd of December [1968]. ... He had been with the firm for over forty years and his passing came as a very great shock to Mr Cohen, particularly coming so soon after the death of Mr Marks. ... Do you still wish us to try to obtain the Austens for you?"

I'll leave the last words (coming from the book's penultimate letter), to Helene Hanff writing to an American friend of hers about to embark for London. For me, at least, this is tear-jerking stuff:

"But I don't know, maybe it's just as well I never got there. I dreamed about it for so many years. I used to go to English movies just to look at the streets. I remember years ago a guy I knew told me that people going to England find exactly what they go looking for. I said I'd go looking for the England of English literature, and he nodded and said: 'It's there'.

"Maybe it is, and maybe it isn't. Looking around the rug one thing's for sure: it's here.

"The blessed man who sold me all my books died a few months ago. And Mr Marks who owned the shop is dead. But Marks & Co. is still there. If you  happen to pass by 84 Charing Cross Road, kiss it for me? I owe it so much."

So do I.




84 Charing Cross Road, originally pub by Grossman, 1970.  My copy pub by Penguin, 97pp.
   

JOHN WENTLEY INVESTIGATES by JFC WESTERMAN

John Wentley Investigates (1939) is the second of three John Wentley tales written by boys' adventure writer, John Francis Cyril Westerman.  I have only read the one.

JFC Westerman is, these days, an unknown story-teller but, looking at the British Library catalogue, he published around 30 books primarily in the 30s and early 1940s and in so doing was for twenty years or so, actively writing at the same time as his father - also a teller of adventures - the more familiar Percy Westerman whose total output was at least five times his son's.

The narrative in this book is linear and trite.  The storyline concerns a global aeroplane-based conspiracy (don't be confused by the racer on the dust wrapper) stealing not only gold and specie but also the 'planes and pilots to undertake this nefarious business. Wentley's former employer has lost a couple of 'planes and their crews and pilot John, accompanied by the somewhat hapless George is sent to sort out the mess. Which he does.

Without spoiling the plot (as if you care), a key element of the criminal gang's success (the gang is called the 'Hovering Eagle', incidentally) is the possession of a device capable of projecting a tractor beam which draws aeroplanes to it.  (The existence of mysterious rays operated by crooks is also a common theme in Percy's books).

I've read a lot of Percy and even from this single incursion into the son's oeuvre I can see two stylistic differences between the pair.  The first is that Percy commonly uses boys or very young men as his central characters - directly associating the target reader with the fiction.  John Wentley, however, is older - mid to late 20s and is, in fact, rather a pale shadow of the younger Biggles.  Unfortunately he's not supported by the cast of characters - Algy, Bertie and Ginger - that WE Johns created.  George, sadly, is just not very interesting and also has an annoying habit of doing himself down despite being an accomplished pilot.

The second difference is in the dialogue.  Where Percy uses (somewhat dated) slang phrases: 'My festive' comes to mind, JFC uses none - at least not in this book - and so there's none of the dashing raffish airman, merely a clever young man sorting things out.

From the number of pages, 256, one would not immediately say John Wentley Investigates is short enough to qualify for this blog.  But the type is large and the line spacing significant so it takes no time to read.




John Wentley Investigates - 256pp.  My copy published by The Children's Press (London and Glasgow).



       

MONSIEUR PAIN by ROBERTO BALAÑO

Even the title of this novel is uncertain if not surreal.  In the author's 'Preliminary Note', Bolaño tells us the following: "Many years ago, in 1981 or 1982, I wrote Monsieur Pain.  Its fate has been haphazard and erratic.  Under the title The Elephant Path it won the Felix Urubayen prize for a short novel awarded by Toledo City Council.  Not long before it had been shortlisted in another provincial competition under a different title."

If this information is true it is at best confusing since, at least to my reading, there is no reason whatsoever why this story set in Paris at the time of the Spanish Civil War but harking back to events 10 or 15 years earlier, should ever have been called The Elephant Path or, indeed The Elephant Track (although this may be a translation issue) which is the title of the so-called 'Epilogue for Voices' which closes the book .

I say "if it is true" without wishing to doubt Bolaño, but he does use three first person characters.  The first, as quoted, presumably his own voice; the second through the main body of the narrative, the eponymous Monsieur Pain a survivor of the First World War horrors of Verdun and an amateur practitioner of 'animal magnetism'; and then an unknown 'I' in the Epilogue who provides brief biographical notes on some of the characters - I'm tempted to call them 'inmates' - of the story.

For example (from the Epilogue) and talking of how, post World War II, Monsieur Pain came to work at a cabaret: "How did Monsieur Pain come to work there? I guess it was after he lost his war veteran's pension at the beginning of the Occupation.  So it must have been in September, October or November of 1940 that he turned up at the House of the Old Companions looking absolutely pitiful, as if he'd gone for a month without eating so much as a mouthful of bread; Gandhi was plump by comparison.  I was fifteen at the time and working as the cabaret's errand boy."

Other reviewers have described Monsieur Pain as containing elements of Poe, Borges and even Chandler.  Borges, certainly, but I failed to find the horrors Poe would have imposed and there is none of the pace nor humour of Chandler in this story of an lone 48 year-old tangentially involved in the death, either by natural causes or as the result of a conspiracy, of Monsieur Vallejo - a poor poet.  Characters shift in an out of vision.  At one point Pierre Pain declares his love for Madame Reynaud, the widow of a man whose life Pain failed to save on his first and only attempt (prior to Vallejo) to use Mesmeric forces to save life in terminal decline. 

But Pain does not declare his love to Madame Reynaud but does so when talking to Monsieur Rivette, an aging sage who may, or may not know what's going on but is certainly not party to the suspicions that Pierre Curie, Marie Curie's husband, was killed by intent rather than by accident when run over by a carriage on the rue Dauphine in 1906.  These are told to Pain by the enigmatic Aloysius Pleumeur-Bodou (a.k.a. Maurice Feval) when talking about a friend, Terzeff, film footage of whom, working in a laboratory, has been grafted into a later movie, Actualité, that Pleumeur-Bodou has seen many times but still includes sections, he says, that he may never understand.    

At its best, Monsieur Pain occupies the interstices between sleeping and waking or between sanity and madness.  Pain dreams frequently and bizarrely; much of the conversation between Pain and Pleumeur-Bodu takes place in a cinema where Actualité is playing and is intercut with descriptions of, and dialogue from, the movie; the Clinique Arago, where Vallejo is dying, is a Escher construction of irrelevant staircases and half-finished rooms with non-sequential numbering; a warehouse where Pain spends the night in near total darkness is an unexplained repository "full of useless junk, but at first I couldn't determine the nature of the objects or the uses they might once have had."  And then we have the two half-described Spaniards who threaten Pain, bribe him (to stop treating Vallejo) and are then relegated to walk-on parts never again fully spotlit. Underlying all this are recurrent themes of drunkeness, rain, darkness and shadows.

The book that this story most strongly brought to my mind is Ishiguro's, The Unconsoled  which itself was, as I recall, described by The Times as a work of either genius or madness.  Exactly.

Monsieur Pain, first published 2010.  2011 UK edition by Picador 134pp. 

TENNIS AND THE MASAI by NICHOLAS BEST

Nicholas Best's short novel about a young schoolmaster and wannabe soldier, coming of age at a prep school in post-Independence Kenya's Masai country, is no masterpiece but it is a fine light comedy and should be better known.

The book's strength lies with its cast of eccentric characters including the headmaster of Haggard Hall, Desmond Gale, an ex-army man and former adventurer, "of a type well known in Kenya", the Padre with his enthusiasm for racing pigeons (notably 'Siege of Paris'), Gentleman's Relish and cricket, Lady Bullivant a brook-no-nonsense, riding-to-hounds colonial of a type familiar to viewers of the TV series 'Two Fat Ladies', and the regularly absconding pupil, Smith-Baggot, who through the book's pages seems to spend as much time in the bush as he does in the classroom (but nonetheless, with a certain amount of 'help' does get a Common Entrance to King's School, Canterbury).

I have yet to mention the book's principal figure, Martin Riddle - the young schoolmaster - whose move from Purley Way in Surrey to Haggard Hall (and back again) creates the framework which supports the text.  Riddle is perhaps a little obvious, a mummy's boy who fails his Army entrance tests primarily because of a lack of self-confidence but who, responding to the force of circumstance, does rather well in Kenya and is thus set up for the future.

But I should include, primarily for the joy of the succinct introductory description of her, the school's matron Mrs Fisk, a former air stewardess. "She was in her early thirties, heavily made-up, with a hairstyle that spoke of private fantasy."

And I should also include at least one of the school's retainers, Mogadishu, an anti-Catholic and the only one of the Africans who knows how to roll the cricket pitch properly.  

Thoroughly enjoyable.  While not in the league of school novels by Waugh or, indeed, Huxley, Tennis and the Masai certainly lives with Ellis's AJ Wentworth BA and benefits immeasurably in being set far beyond England.

Tennis and the Masai by Nicholas Best, Hutchinson, 1986 176pp.    

CAMPBELL-BANNERMAN by ROY HATTERSLEY

Campbell-Bannerman is one of a series of books, published by Haus Publishing, focused on 'The 20 British Prime Ministers of the 20th Century'.  It has at its subject, arguably, the most obscure member of this elite group.

Henry Campbell-Bannerman (originally just Campbell but latterly known to all as 'CB') was Prime Minster for less than three years - from December 1905 when the Liberals won by a landslide, to April 1908 when ill health forced him to resign in favour of Asquith.  He died that same April and in so doing became the only Prime Minister to die at 10 Downing Street.

Another factoid was that he was the first Prime Minster formally to be designated with that title, (some) predecessors may have been called PM informally but in official terms were in fact First Lords of the Treasury.

The foregoing is trivia but as Hattersley succinctly and clearly describes, CB scored some notable triumphs during his short tenure in the highest elected office.  He was, for example, responsible for a more generous settlement than many advocated, via the Vereeniging Treaty, with the Boers after the Boer War - generosity which led to the formation, for good or bad, of 20th century South Africa.  

CB was also directly responsible for removing liability from Trades Unions for damage caused by strike action; and thirdly, perhaps most consequentially, he began the process which removed the real veto the House of Lords had over any Commons legislation changing it, in time, merely to a right to suggest amendments or to delay.  In so doing CB was at the beginning of the movement to establish the House of Commons as the supreme legislator in Great Britain.

Hattersley clearly likes CB.  He is impressed by his radicalism and the fact that before and during his term as Prime Minister, he entered meetings with an open mind rather than a pre-set position.  This did not, on occasion, contribute to his political potency but it did, over time, increase his standing in the eyes of his colleagues, his political opponents and the country at large who all came to recognize they were dealing with a thoroughly decent man albeit one without the normal style and flash of the politicians we know today.

This is the first of the Haus Publishing series I have read and I have to wonder, given they all seem to be more or less the same length, how much more compression is required in, say, the  books about Lloyd George or, indeed Churchill than appears here.  As I said, Hattersley is succinct and he expects his reader to know something of late 19th and early 20th century British politics and of domestic and Imperial history.  But he is also straightforward and frequently, if gently, entertaining.

In the spirit of the latter comes the newly elected CB's response, to the former Tory PM Arthur Balfour who "returned to Parliament in a contrived byelection [and] attempted to win over the House with an exhibition of elegant wit and contrived classical reflections - a technique which had made him the darling of the late Victorian Tory benches.  In two dismissive sentences the new Prime Minister destroyed him.  Enough of this tomfoolery.  It might have answered very well in the last Parliament, but it is altogether out of place in this ... 


Campbell-Bannerman by Roy Hattersley, published in 2006 (paperback) by Haus Publishing. 161pp.


  

THE DROWNED SON by DAVID GUTERSON

People like to talk about the calm before a storm, and that is true, there is a close stillness in the air and the sensation of hanging in limbo, the potential electricity crackling loudly in its absence. People rarely talk about the calm after a storm. The washed-out feeling, the silence when the rain finally stops.  Alaska comes from the Aleut word for ‘the place against which the sea breaks.’ Off the coast of Alaska, a storm hits the fishing boat on which the son is serving. He dies with vomit on his lips and a flashlight in his hand. The sea breaks against his family too, his mother and father blaming each other and feeling no forgiveness and living in the silence after the storm.

There is bitterness here, there are the angry words of those who no longer understand why they ever loved each other. There is the selfishness of grief, the recognition that it makes people ugly and the hatred of ugliness in someone you used to find beautiful. There is the man who survived the fishing boat, who brings ugliness into the memory of their son, by disclosing his imperfect past and undignified death. There is an internal and external despair at the self.

It is a book without hope. The father’s personality, his hardened stance against cowardice, his only comments about his wife and daughter being their unattractiveness, seems more deep rooted than a reaction to grief. The mother’s icily stiff words and refusal to blame herself even slightly shut her off from sympathy. For the son, with his dreams of reading psychology and opening a pizza parlour, hope is futile for he is dead within the first sentence. Alaska is wild and open and beautiful, yet the novel is claustrophobic and dark. It is a book for the beginning of winter, and it is as perfect a tragedy as one could hope to read. 

The Drowned Son, Bloomsbury Birthday Quids

THE BRIDGE OF SAN LUIS REY by THORNTON WILDER

To what extent is life governed by external forces? Everyone who has caught the eye of a stranger in a crowd must surely wonder what their life story is, how they came to be standing opposite you at this precise moment, and whether you have anything in common with them. Then you pass on your way, and forget their face, for meetings of this nature are fleeting and private, and not really meetings at all. When the Inca rope bridge collapses, killing those standing upon it, Brother Juniper observes and collects the life histories of the dead, trying to find a pattern and to make sense of the apparent chaos.

            The dead are tangentially connected, primarily through questions of familial loyalty, love, and geography. The Marquesa de Montemayor, a great writer of letters, whose ugliness led to isolation in high society, dies with nothing but love for her indifferent daughter. Her companion, a young girl raised in a convent, feels lonely but cannot express her misery through letters, and the two realise that they share a life of cowardice. The twins, Esteban and Manuel, were raised in the same convent as the companion of the Marquesa, and have the closeness that only twins can obtain. Love for a actress drives them apart, and the blood tie is strained to breaking point. The casual nature of disease kills one, and the bridge the other. The actress’ valet is also on the bridge, pained from the realisation that his protégé has become the mask that she donned to fit into the high society shunned by the Marquesa for being superficial.

            The empty vanity of the actress, the Gatsby-esque dream of raising oneself, forces her away from those she loved. Yet the ephemeral nature of her beauty is shadowed by the fate of the ugly Marquesa; society has many barriers outside birth and status, and those rules shape the lives of the people who fleetingly touch that world whether they understand them or not. The twins and the Marquesa’s companion are drawn from the opposite end of society yet they cannot escape the slow destruction of mutual relationships any more than those with money and power.

            Brother Juniper’s collection of work on the destruction of the bridge is considered heretical, and he dies in the name of knowledge and truth. Those on the bridge die as their love dies, as their families fall apart, as consistency and justice and loyalty collapse just as the ropes under their feet collapse. There is no peace for those who crossed the Bridge of San Luis Rey, it is not a punishment from God nor a release from their shattered lives. The book is neither sorrowful nor joyful in its conclusion, but it is as delicately written as the lives of those within it. 

The Bridge of San Luis Rey, paperback Penguin Modern Classics, 124pp