Friday, June 24, 2011

Tell me, my dear: is it good?

For one reason or another I'm still lying around reading and to stave off boredom I've been trawling my library, finding treasures I hardly remembered I had and, besides, buying a couple of eBooks.

I downloaded the Kindle app and found books on Amazon I'd not found on iBooks - not that really is of any significance. Interestingly, from both Kindle and iBooks I found I been given free books for signing up - Winnie the Pooh on one, and Aesop's Fables, Pride and Prejudice, and Treasure Island on the other. I cannot grasp quite what the marketing decision was behind those choices, but in the case of that insufferable bear and his dumbass cute friends I find I cannot delete the book from my digital library as I'd very much like to. Pride and Prejudice is a book I reread at least once a year so to have it on my iPad is a marvel, but it isn't likely I'll ever read Aesop's Fables again and as for Treasure Island ... well, I just wonder who makes these choices!


I thoroughly enjoyed William Shawcross' Queen Elizabeth, though it borders on hagiography and omits any real historical analysis - but, nonetheless, I found it heartwarming and humane and precisely what a very creaky grump needed whilst awaiting his niceness medication to put latent anti-monarchical tendencies in abeyance. It's not the book's most salient point, but who can't admire a woman who was £4,000,000 in the red at the bank and yet bought a castle - and come to think of it who couldn't admire the bank that could allow it? Needless to say, it is not my bank.

The next book at bedtime is about Queen Elizabeth's father-in-law's father, Edward VII, eldest son of Queen Victoria and a friend of the man who was David Hicks' wife's grandfather, and whose desk and leather cushion from his automobile Hicks had in his library. I'm tempted, a little, by Deborah Devonshire's Wait For Me because she writes about her favorite sister, Diana, about whose house, the Temple de la Gloire, I wrote a yet-to-be published post, but In Tearing Haste: Letters Between Deborah Devonshire and Patrick Leigh Fermor could be the better book for me. Dip in, dip out, as it were.

I reread both of Mark Hampton's books and relished again the civility and erudition of the man who, according to his daughter, called chartreuse "cat piss green." There are not many of the good and the great I would like to meet, but Mr Hampton was one of them. Not so with his erstwhile employer, David Hicks, yet his book David Hicks Living with Design which the Celt bought for me has provided many a moment of pleasure and an occasional raised eyebrow.


In one of his books, Mark Hampton mentions a room done by George Geffroy that led me to seek but not find it in Les réussites de la décoration française, 1950 - 1960, thence to Jansen, and eventually and circuitously to Edith Wharton, whose books - totally not to the point - are downloadable for free. Shamefacedly, I admit the only book of hers I've read is The Decoration of Houses. However, she's now on my list despite my aeons-long prejudice that Wharton was the American equivalent of Thomas Hardy, whose doom and gloomth scarred me deeply when in high school. If there's one literary device I don't like it's a sustained, slow seepage into ignominy and loneliness. Gives me the willies, this traipsing through a barren inner landscape, and being the armchair-socialist-with-centrist-leanings that I am, I prefer the slap and tickle of detective stories - an engrossing beginning, a rip-roaring middle and a proper ending with all loose ends tied up and justice done. Now, that's how to spend a few hours! However, discursive as I seem to be ... back to Edith Wharton and the reason why I'll now give myself another chance with her books.


The passage below I found quoted in part in Therese Craig's excellent book about Wharton, and it was reading that passage that sent me seeking the book, A Backward Glance, which I eventually found on Project Gutenberg Australia. Oh, and what riches I found!

"When I first knew it, the salon in question looked out on the mossy turf and trees of an eighteenth-century hôtel standing between court and garden in the Rue de Grenelle. A few years later it was transferred to a modern building in the Place des Invalides to which Madame de Fitz-James had moved her fine collection of eighteenth-century furniture and pictures at the suggestion of her old friends, the Comte and Comtesse d"Haussonville, who lived on the floor above. The Rue de Grenelle apartment, which had much character, faced north, and her Anglo-Saxon friends thought she had left in search of sunlight, and congratulated her on the change. But she looked suprised, and said: "Oh, no; I hate the sun; it's such a bore always having to keep the blinds down." To regard the sun as the housewife's enemy, fader of hangings and devourer of olds stuffs, is common on the continent, and Madame de Fitz-James cream-coloured silk blinds were lowered, even in winter, whenever the sun became intrusive. The three drawing rooms, which opened into one another, were as commonplace as rooms can be in which every piece of furniture, every picture and every ornament is in itself a beautiful thing, yet the whole reveals no trace of the owner's personality. In the first drawing room, a small room hung with red damask, Madame de Fitz-James, seated by the fire, her lame leg supported on a foot-rest, received her intimates. Beyond was the big drawing-room, with pictures by Ingres and David on the pale walls, and tapestry sofas and armchairs; it was there that the dinner guests assembled. Opening out of it was another small room, lined with ornate Louis XV bookcases in which rows of rare books in precious bindings stood in undisturbed order - for Madame de Fitz-James was a book collector not a reader. She made no secret of this - or indeed of any of her idiosyncrasies - for she was one of the most honest women I have ever known, and genuinely and unaffectedly modest. Her books were an ornament and an investment; she never pretended that they were anything else. If one of her guests was raised to Academic honours she bought his last work and tried to read it - usually with negative results; and her intimates were all familiar with the confidential question: "I've just read So-and-So's new book. TELL ME MY DEAR: IS IT GOOD?"


I mentioned above that I'd found treasures in Edith Wharton's memoir and certainly some that connect with what I had intended to write about today - Emilio Terry's silver melon - but that will be for another occasion.


The photograph of our library, my reading room, taken with the iPad, and the black-and-white images of Edith Wharton's library and reading room at Ste. Claire, credited to the Lilly Library, Indiana University, are from Edith Wharton, A House Full of Rooms: Architecture, Interiors, and Gardens, Theresa Graig, The Monacelli Press, Inc., New York 1996.

23 comments:

  1. It's good!

    You are priceless, my dear chap. After days of sobriety, this and the second cocktail make for a pleasant evening. I'd better stop and go and tend to the shepherd's pie I made earlier, avoiding the temptation to make a third libation.

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  2. I think I need a dose of that niceness medication myself! I highly recommend 'wait for me' -it was a charming, easy to read book and definitely in her voice.

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  3. I also read Wait for me and liked it. I have not read any of her other books perhaps the main reason I didn't find it boring. In James Lees Milne's diaries there is much about her and the Duke as he was a good friend of the Mitford girls and visited Chatsworth quite often.

    If you want to read something different but engrossing, Berlin 1961, Kennedy, Kruschev & the most Dangerous Place On Earth. Frederick Kempe.

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  4. I found Mark Hampton to be very charming and with a great sense of humor; Mrs. Parish was delighted by his drag impersonation of her. David Hicks was a "character", however.

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  5. Columnist, thank you very much. A third libation after a period sobriety would surely count as mere reconditioning - I would think. I limit my Manhattans (at present the lighter Perfect Manhattan) to the weekends with a good malbec at dinner.

    Shepherd's pie! How good that sounds. I haven't made one in years but fish pie .. another matter altogether.

    Edith Wharton's A Backward Glance was a fascinating read.

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  6. ArchitectDesign, thank you. If you don't mind me saying so I cannot imagine anyone less in need of niceness medication than you! On your recommendation I shall try Wait for Me.

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  7. The Devoted Classicist, thank you. What a delightful image: Mr Hampton in drag as Mrs Parrish! I met and talked with his daughter a few weeks ago and was absolutely charmed by her, her intelligence and sense of humor - much as I think I would have been by Mark Hampton.

    It's an unfortunate reputation, that of David Hicks. If find his work some of the 20th-century's best but yet would never have wanted to meet him. An English class-thing, I suppose. I remember years ago standing outside his store and knowing my regional accent, as it did those days, would immediately have put me in a class category, I did not go in. I thought of that situation again when I read the interview with Charles Gandee in a back issue of H&G in which Hicks was quoted as being sarcastic and patronizing to the waitress serving them at lunch.

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  8. Lindaraxa, thank you. I shall try both of the books - the Berlin book looks especially interesting. Meat loaf, by the way, was excellent!

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  9. Blue, I have been thinking of you this weekend wishing you were here in Blighty. But oh what a good mood you have managed considering the sometime grumpy old bugger you can be, darling. This is a sizzlingly good post and cheered me up in your absence. Look forward to more of the same.

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  10. Rose, darling, thank you. I've not been called a grumpy old bugger in a long while and I'm preening a bit! You made my day.

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  11. I agree, Dilettante. Simple, workmanlike and very elegant.

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  12. Sounds as though Kindle is appealing to the parents of younger readers. I do love Wharton's work. I don't know if she would have selected Treasure Island for Kindle but she did admire Stevenson!

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  13. Sometimes I reread Wharton just for the room descriptions. I feel guilty about this. I can see my English professor's face grimacing and looking most disgusted. I think rooms as revealers of character are sorely overlooked in literature. Hope that back is feeling better, Mr. Blue.

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  14. Le style et la matiere, thank you. I've just finished Wharton's A Backward Glance and I'm very glad I did. I intend to read more of her work and I might - might - tackle Henry James. I like the idea of carrying multiple books with me for the same weight as an iPad but the more ebooks I read the more I see that graphic design and typography is not a strong point.

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  15. Home before dark, thank you. I look for room descriptions in any novel I read and, to a degree, explored the connection between rooms and character when I first began blogging - probably too early for people to know about it.

    I am doing better, thank you. I appreciate the thought!

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  16. Interesting that it came with Treasure Island. I found a very old copy in a a second hand bookshop recently, and was delighted, remembering it from my childhood as a book of great adventure, so I happily bought it, to give to my son to read - telling him it was brilliant.
    And after he had valiantly struggled through half he confessed it was most unenjoyable, to which I thought well I better read it again myself. Oh dear it was dreadful! So very slow moving, patronising and just generally clumsy! A fascinating poignant reminder of how our tastes have changed - and how only the very best books should survive.

    Hope you will be much better shortly - although you seem to be accepting this temporary setback with much humour.

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  17. I do hope you are feeling better, Blue. When it comes to reading however, too much of a good thing is, well, a good thing. Love this bookish path. . .

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  18. Wonderful post. I am going to red Wait for Me.
    I do hope you are feeling better.
    Loved the prior post as well!
    Enjoy the rest of the weekend!
    Jamie Herzlinger

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  19. Jamie Herzlinger, thank you. For some reason I had to upload your comment as one of mine but, nonetheless, thank you.

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  20. Blue Fruit, thank you. Sorry for the delay replying, I agree with your son -as a child, it scared me stiff.

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  21. Janet, thank you. Books, as you so rightly say, can never be too much of a bad thing. For me, recently, they have been a refuge and one for which I've been thankful - when I'm able to sit again I'll write more.

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  22. dear blue,

    You're the top, you're a Berlin ballad-
    You're the nimble tread of the feet of Fred Astaire-

    & thanks. xo. etc...

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