Good News for Retroprogressives

A good day for retroprogressives, with two news items to gladden our reactionary hearts...
  One: Sales of what are now quaintly called 'physical books' have risen again, bringing in five per cent more income. Sales of hardback fiction were up by an eye-popping 31 per cent, while sales of digital books were down by two per cent. All this was supposed to happen the other way round, with e-book sales soaring at the expense of 'physical books'. It's the old story – over-hyping the new and expecting that it will consign the old to oblivion. Things seldom work out that way, as technologies have a habit of co-existing rather than devouring one another.
  Two: After 35 years of huge sales (totalling some 120 million) and competition from all manner of trendier and higher-tech vehicles, that enduring fixture of the album charts, Now That's What I Call Music, has reached its century. Now That's What I Call Music 100 is about to be released. Now that's what I call retroprogressive.

How Not to Leave the EU

Call me a simpleton, but there's something I don't understand about this whole Brexit farrago. Didn't Parliament vote (by a very large majority) to hand over the decision on whether or not to stay in the EU to the people, the electorate, with no comeback and no further process (as per EU law)? In those circumstances, how can it be right that Parliament – which has always been overwhelmingly pro-EU and anti-Brexit (along with the rest of the political, administrative and cultural establishment) – now has a stranglehold on the entire process? This can only lead to a failure to actually leave the EU in any meaningful sense at all. Not that that's a great surprise (at least to the more cynical among us), but surely there was some effective way of getting from A (voting to leave) to B (actually leaving)? Shouldn't it have been an administrative, rather than a party-political, project?
  Never mind – this morning brings news (from arch-Remainer Anna Soubry) that Jacob Rees Mogg is running the country. I do hope she's right.

Blues

Having been, for several days, itching to get out and stroll among the butterflies on the Surrey hills, I finally made it today. Unfortunately I arrived at my destination just as banks of sullen cloud moved into place, completely obscuring the sun. It was decidedly cool too (after days, indeed weeks, of searing heat). However, much to my delight, I soon found a few Adonis Blues flying among the all-weather Meadow Browns and Gatekeepers. When, an hour or two later, the sun finally broke through, the effect was instant: suddenly Chalkhill Blues (milky blue to the Adonis's brilliant near-turquoise) were everywhere, flying along with Adonis and Common Blues galore – a glorious downland spectacle.
 There were more blues – many, many more – as I made my way down the dip slope of Box Hill. Marbled Whites too – and, as I neared the Burford Bridge hotel (where, in 1817,  Keats worked on Endymion), a lordly Dark Green Fritillary was flying along the margin of a copse. A thing of beauty indeed.

Ginger

Born on this day in 1911 was the great danseuse and more than useful actress Ginger Rogers. She was the perfect partner for Astaire, as he was for her, and together they created a particular kind of dance magic that has never been bettered. And, of course, like all the true greats in every field, they made it all look as easy as breathing. Here's a little reminder of her loveliness...

Auberon Waugh, Novelist. 1.

Auberon Waugh, whose diaries I was enjoying recently, was also, for some years, a novelist, publishing five titles before abandoning the form in 1972, ostensibly in disgust at the fact that authors at that time received no money at all from public library loans of their titles (which in those days could run into huge numbers). Perhaps he was also tacitly recognising that he could never escape the shadow of his father's achievements as a novelist and that comparisons were always (and rightly) going to be to Evelyn's advantage. But what were Bron's novels like? I know I read them at the time, but have only the blurriest memories, so I thought I'd have another look, beginning with the first, The Foxglove Saga (1960 – long out of print but easily available from online bookshops).
  The title is misleading, as it's no saga. What it is is an accomplished, often very funny comic novel that at times is well worthy of comparison with Waugh pere's works. Beginning with a wry account of backbiting and petty rivalries among the monastic brothers at a Catholic monastery-cum-public school, it gradually introduces a group of pupils who are to be the central characters in the story that unfolds. Among them is Martin Foxglove, beautiful and charming son of the widely adored and apparently saintly Lady Foxglove. Oddly he does not remain at the centre of the unfolding action, most of which revolves around his school friends and their various misadventures. There is also, early on, a brilliantly managed comedy of confusion involving the elderly and ailing Brother Thomas's stay in an NHS hospital – which he is thoroughly enjoying until the do-gooding Lady Foxglove gets busy...
  The most prominent among Martin Foxglove's old school friends are the hapless Stoat and the reckless O'Connor, whose paths – and sometimes Martin's – repeatedly overlap as life takes them from school to an Army training camp, and into the murky world of trading in stolen goods from a Petticoat Lane stall (with a deeply dodgy character who styles himself Joseba da Farratoga). Again and again, Waugh sets up and executes brilliant comic set pieces involving these three and various authority figures and walk-on characters. Misunderstandings, confusion and crossed signals abound, and there are many laugh-aloud scenes and moments (which is a great deal more than you can say about many supposedly comic novels).
  Up to somewhere near the end, The Foxglove Saga is a joy to read. Then, I think, something goes wrong with the tone, and the latent cruelty in Waugh's (both Waughs') comedy comes too near the surface, in the shape of a monstrous baby, born to Dooley, a hospital doctor turned blackmailing biographer, and his ex-nurse wife, Herring. The farcical climax of the novel reads more like Tom Sharpe than either Waugh, and really doesn't work (at least for me). And then Waugh (A.) rounds things off with a thumbnail sketch of what happens next, over a good many years, to each of the major characters. This is seldom a good idea, especially in a comic novel.
  So, a novel full of promise, which for much of its length is brilliantly achieved and very funny, fails to carry through to the end. Never mind – the best bits are truly comparable to Waugh pere at his funniest, and suggest a great comic novelist in the making.  Bron, incredibly, was only twenty when he wrote this one. What happened next? Well, three years later, he published a second novel, Path of Dalliance. I have a copy, and am going to read it. I'll be reporting back...

Top Marx

I've had this little book for years, and am very fond of it (it's an excellent selection, as well as being a pleasure to handle), but it wasn't until I dropped in on the Enid Marx exhibition at the House of Illustration on Granary Square that I realised the cover design is one of hers. Marx, best known for her classic London Underground textiles, also, among many other things, designed the jackets for Chatto & Windus's Zodiac Books and Phoenix Library (and many another book, including several King Penguins).

  One of the prodigiously talented Royal College of Art generation that included Ravilious and Bawden, she was versatile and prolific as well as gifted. Rather amazingly, at the RCA, Sir Frank Short banned her from his wood engraving classes on the grounds that she couldn't draw, but Ravilious used to let her in to the studio after hours to engrave with him. Marx worked all her long life as painter, printmaker, textile designer and anything else that came her way. She even designed stamps, including a set for Christmas 1976 based on Opus Anglicanum embroideries. All her work has the vigour, exuberance and strong sense of pattern so characteristic of her generation, and she was especially fascinated by animals and fish and by English folk art (she co-created the Batsford volume on English Popular Art). This small but wide-ranging exhibition, full of delightful things, exudes a very English kind of good cheer, and is more than likely to leave you with a smile on your face.

'I Say!'

Born on this day in 1911 was Thomas Terry Hoar Stevens, who changed his name to Terry-Thomas and built a glittering career as a comic actor, playing the archetypal upper-class English cad or bounder. He was, like many actors of his time (e.g. Charles Hawtrey), his own creation, having entirely reinvented himself, name and all. Born to a lower-middle-class family – his father was a merchant at Smithfield meat market – he soon began the process of turning himself into 'Terry-Thomas', beginning by imitating all the posh actors and comedians he saw or heard, and adopting the dandyish style that he was to develop to a high, almost absurd pitch (Beau Brummel would not have approved of his excesses). After his parents had managed to send him to a minor public school for a few years, he made his debut in the world of work at Smithfield, dressed in a taupe double-breasted suit with carnation buttonhole, olive-green pork-pie hat and yellow gloves, and flourishing a long cigarette holder and silver-topped malacca cane. He did not last long at Smithfield, believe it or not, and was soon making his way in show business, becoming, by the Fifties, a star of the silver and the small screens, of cabaret and the comedy circuit.
  One of his stranger film roles was in the dire John Boulting version of Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim. Terry-Thomas was wildly miscast as Bertrand Welch, the most odious and pretentious character in the novel. Amis notes in his memoirs that 'the hash he made of the part was so comic that the result was a large net gain'. The author took an immediate liking to T-T, whom he found to be just the same off-screen as on, and with whom, of course, he shared an avid interest in drinking and womanising. On an epic pub crawl in Edinburgh, they got on like a house on fire.
 And here's a curious footnote. In 1960, when T-T was playing the Liverpool Empire, a prized cigarette holder, decorated with 42 diamonds, disappeared from his changing room, much to his chagrin. The police investigated, and found 40 of the diamonds inside a roll of carpet in the home of a 20-year-old unemployed would-be comedian called James Joseph Tarbuck. Yes, that one – Jimmy Tarbuck (who pleaded guilty and was given two years' probation).