Experts and Old Dears

Here we go again - the expert professionals are finally discovering what is perfectly obvious to everyone else. You have to be very expert and very professional indeed not to realise that nursing is about caring for people as if they were, uh, people. This is obvious enough to the non-expert, non-professional cleaners who on some wards are the only people who do treat elderly patients as their fellow human beings. But not obvious, it seems, to the expert professionals, to whom it has come as a revelation. I suppose the upside of this is that it might mean that nursing finds its way back the values that used to prevail before it became a profession and a sub-academic discipline, rather than a vocation involving essentially practical expertise. Back to the future again?
I see that one of the report's recommendations is to bar the use of patronising language, such as 'old dear'. Enuff you sla me, as Molesworth would say. Once again they're missing the blindingly obvious - that the routine hospital practice of calling old people by their first names, uninvited, is the ultimate in patronising language, infantilising them and stripping them of their adult identity and dignity (and often adding to their confusion, as many people are not actually known by their first name). Simply changing to 'Mr' and 'Mrs' as the standard form of address would do more to change the ethos of hospital wards than any other single measure. And if it encouraged a wider return from first names to honorifics, that would be no bad thing.

Spellcheck

As ever at this time of year, I've been enjoying the blue wood anemones in Kensington Gardens. This year my enjoyment is tempered by my recent mortifying discovery that for many years - probably my whole literate life - I have been misspelling anemone, rendering it 'anenome' (as a quick search of this blog will confirm). I was absolutely convinced that 'anenome' was the right spelling, and was only shaken out of my certainty when Nige Jr presented me with incontrovertible proof that for all these years I had been wrong. This is, I suppose, what might be called a blind spot, and it makes me wonder how many more I have... I remember once, many years ago (student days), getting into a big stand-off with Appleyard over the spelling of a word - I can't remember what the word was, but we were both equally, unshakably convinced we had the right spelling. Soon an unfeasibly large (and therefore notional) sum of money was riding on the outcome, and at last the dictionary was consulted. On that occasion, it turned out I was right, but it could have gone either way. Nowadays I wouldn't bet on being right about anything.

Back to Bland - and Beyond!

I didn't see our new national newspaper yesterday - the Sunday Sun or whatever it's called (I suspect my man kept it back to enjoy in the pantry) - but I understand the consensus view among the pundits is that it was 'bland'. This is excellent news. It may only be a blip, or Rupert Murdoch trying to present a squeaky-clean image to the world (and Leveson) - or it might be a sign of a more general movement back from the excesses of recent times towards something gentler, more in tune with the fundamental English character. This, you might remember, was until very recently marked by reticence, good manners, a sense of decency and fair play, a preference for muddling through (and grumbling), a distrust of innovation and excess - in a word, a tendency to something rather like blandness.
If the new Sun is looking back to the past, it is not alone, as this year's Oscars confirm, dominated as they are by the silent masterpiece The Artist, a return to the very beginnings of cinema in Hugo, and a portrayal of that now historic figure Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady. Even the recent Brit Awards were more retro than they have ever before been, more like an old boys' and girls' reunion than a celebration of a supposedly innovative, cutting-edge music. Could it be that we are seeing the dawn of a new Retroprogressive Age? Forward to the Past! You have nothing to lose but your News of the World (and you've already lost that).

Birthday Betty

Betty Marsden(that's her between Hugh Paddick and Kenneth Horne in this jolly Beyond Our Ken photo)was born on this day in 1919. Radio listeners of a certain age would still instantly recognise her range of 'voices' - from Fanny Haddock (a barely exaggerated version of the the appalling celebrity cook Fanny Cradock) to the husky Daphne Whitethigh, the ancient actress Bea Clissold ('many, many, many times'), the Celia Johnson soundalike Dame Celia Molestrangler, Aussie ultra-feminist Judy Coolibar (no doubt an early role model for Germaine Greer), Buttercup Gruntfuttock (wife of J. Peasemold Gruntfuttock, the world's dirtiest dirty old man) and more...
Apparently Betty once told her fellow actress Dilys Laye that she wanted to die with a glass of gin in her hand - and she managed just that, one day after moving in to a home for elderly thespians. She died in the bar after subsiding into a chair so gracefully that she didn't spill a drop. What artistry!

Mark the sequel...

So, having completed Dolores, Ivy sent the manuscript to Blackwood's, who promptly rejected it. Undeterred, she passed it on to her brother Noel (the first time he'd seen it), who enlisted the help of his friend and mentor, Oscar Browning ('a man of bad character and European fame,' according to Rupert Brooke), to get it published. But even O.B. failed to interest his publisher in Ivy's manuscript. In the end, it seems that a slightly revised version of the novel was offered to Blackie's, who were not keen, but agreed to print a run of 1,050 copies if £150 was paid by way of subsidy. This was duly agreed, and the book came out in February 1911. But here's the surprising thing - it received some very good reviews. Walter de la Mare, writing anonymously in the TLS, was encouraging, and predicted 'something really striking from the young author' in future - he was right there, but probably not in the way he envisaged, and it would be 14 years before it happened. Still more gratifying to ICB was an almost effusive review in the Daily Mail, which ended with the assertion that 'Dolores is literature; of that no competent critic can have any doubt'. By the end of the year, the edition had all but sold out, Blackie's was clearing its warehouse, and Ivy was offered the hundred or so remaindered copies. According to Olivia Manning, she bought them all and kept them locked up in a cupboard for the rest of her life. Whether this is true or not, no one knows.

Over on The Dabbler...

I see I'm commemorating Keats.

'This oft-lived heart-throb'

Reading Ivy When Young, Hilary Spurling's superb (and, unlike many a biography, necessary) 1974 account of Ivy Compton-Burnett's early years, I am discovering much. Not least that, a full 14 years before her acknowledged canon began with Pastors and Masters (1925), she wrote a first novel called Dolores, which is not only wholly unlike her later work but, by the sound it, pretty well unreadably awful. It's the story of a young woman's strenuous self-abnegation for the sake of 'service to her kin', with much clenching of hands, trembling of limbs, whitening of lips and furrowing of brow as Dolores wrestles endlessly with her conscience. This kind of thing derives from the novels of such now all but forgotten writers as Charlotte M. Yonge and Mrs Humphry Ward. But, as Hilary Spurling demonstrates at length, it is the baleful influence of George Eliot that hangs heaviest over the novel, some passages seeming so close as to be almost plagiarised. Both George Eliot and the ICB of Dolores 'assume the same stiffish intimacy with the reader, and alternate between lugubrious solemnity and a vivid, mocking, generally patronising gaiety at the expense of the lower orders'. But Ivy adopts novelettish turns of phrase that Eliot would have sniffed at - 'this oft-lived heart-throb', 'the prime knit with a nobler soul' - and 'the book reads at times as though she were alternately translating from the Latin... and coining her own Homeric epithets'. Well, I certainly feel no desire to read Dolores, a book disowned and suppressed by its author (though if I came across it in a charity shop, I'd snap it up - it's quite a rarity) - but I do have a strong urge to read on in Hilary Spurling's biography, and discover how Ivy Compton-Burnett got from writing the dire Dolores to being the author of her later, so wholly different works. What happened?