All these extra hours and days that many of us have had over the past few weeks and indeed months, should have been an absolute gift to anyone who loved reading. However, for many it seems, this has been a slightly bewildering time.
I have read of serious readers who cannot for the life of them settle to a book, Melvyn Bragg and Nigella Lawson among others. The author Susan Hill commented that whereas she can usually get through a novel in a day, at this time she finds herself reading the same paragraph over and over again. And, for me too, my reading has been strange. In ‘normal’ times my reading would almost wholly be fiction but of the 30 odd books I have consumed during the lockdown, fiction has hardly appeared on the list. I tried new treats and old favourites but nothing really worked. Instead I avidly worked my way through history, travel, memoir, biography, landscape and natural history as well as venturing into several volumes of essays. Why should this be? Did I not want the emotional involvement, and attachment to character that story reading would require? I suspect I won’t come to a conclusion about that one but it has been comforting to find that others have been affected (afflicted?!) in a similar fashion.
So, the first book I would like to share with you is the story of the publishing house Faber and Faber, written by Toby Faber, the grandson of the founder. Titled: Faber and Faber, the Untold Story, the author draws upon the considerable archive of the firm to weave together a wealth of previously unpublished letters, diary entries and memoir material that bring to life the curious progress of this firm. The book showed me in no uncertain terms how precarious the publishing business is and how very unusual that this particular house avoided on several occasions being gobbled up by large corporate publishers. They survived on the whole because of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s show Cats. Yes, I know, how can this be? Well, TS Eliot was an important and influential editor of the firm and brought cachet to the house when they published his play, Murder in the Cathedral, about Thomas Becket being murdered in Canterbury Cathedral. They also published his Old Possums Book of Practical Cats. (When I searched, I was very pleased to find a slim Faber paperback of this on my poetry shelves.) Years later when TS Eliot was long gone, Andrew Lloyd Webber visited his widow Valerie to ask for permission to use the poems as the basis for a musical. Permission was obviously given, but in such a way that everything to do with the show that required publishing had to be done through Faber and Faber, who by this time also had a flourishing music company, thereby giving a large amount of financial security, still ongoing to this day.
Another jolly that I had half planned for this summer was a visit to the Aldeburgh festival in Suffolk. Obviously this didn’t happen but I have thoroughly enjoyed reading a book by Ronald Blythe: The Time by the Sea, which is concerned with the very start of the festival in the mid-fifties. Ronald Blythe, he of Akenfield, was actually there, in the middle of it all; Ben Britten, Peter Pears and Imogen Holst having lunch together and discussing which churches or halls might be available and suitable as concert venues; Peter Hall offering London film premiere money to bolster the Snape Maltings foundation and put it on a better financial foundation. Working as a librarian before he could afford to be a full time writer, Ronald Blythe observed all the artistic and musical goings on and took part in the often anguished discussions about backing, sponsorship and money in general. Well, not as good as a visit to Suffolk but fascinating cultural reminiscences nonetheless.
Have you ever read a graphic novel? My favourites are by Posy Simmonds but this one by Raymond Briggs, he of Snowman fame, is in a way an illustrated biography of the lives of his parents. It is called: Ethel and Ernest and moves from the late 1920s when Ethel is in service as a housemaid and Ernest is a milkman, through their early marriage and the birth of Raymond. It shows with affection and sometimes sadness how people coped with the onset and privations of war, with quickly changing attitudes and social mores and how Raymond often feels his parents were being left behind, inadvertently or stubbornly; sometimes he isn’t sure. I found this very moving, even more so because it is the retelling of real lives. It has been made into an animated film, but the book is better.
Happy reading.