Hallowe'en Hill

Hallowe'en seems to have cast its dark shadow before it this year: the last three charity-shop books I've bought were Susan Hill's The Woman in Black, Jeanette Winterson's The Daylight Gate (a novella inspired by the Pendle Witch Trials) and Henry James's The Jolly Corner, in a handsome edition with suitably eerie etchings by Peter Milton (Terra Nova Editions, 1979).
 I've just read The Woman in Black, which is commendably short and very readable. A first-person narrative, it's essentially a pastiche of a golden age ghost story - the period is vague but the feel is  Edwardian/Twenties - and it's very expertly done, as you'd expect with Susan Hill, the location and atmosphere skilfully and convincingly evoked. The narrative is cleverly paced, but it's a mostly predictable and well worn storyline that promises more than it delivers in terms of chills and thrills. More overtly Gothic in style than M.R. James's stories, it has none of the genuinely creepy and unsettling effects that James achieves - but then, very few ghost stories come anywhere near his. But The Woman in Black is a rattling good read and, if I wasn't chilled, at least I was entertained and kept turning the pages. I've never been able to resist a story that starts, as this does, with a train journey (steam of course) to a remote and mysterious location.
 And now I'm reading The Daylight Gate, which is a very different kettle of fish...

Ms Munt's Warning

Life goes on, I see, in all its radiant absurdity - and what could be more radiantly absurd than an obscure Lib-Dem MP getting her name in the headlines by warning of  'the end of the British breakfast as we know it'? What has prompted this rallying cry to the plain people of Britain? Why, the government's iniquitous proposal to cut the minimum (note, minimum) sugar content of jams and marmalades. Yes, there's a real risk that honest, breakfast-loving British folk might be exposed to jams and marmalades that actually taste of fruit. At present, as Ms Munt notes, 'we know exactly what to expect' when we buy jam or marmalade. Indeed we do - a mighty sugar hit with little evidence of fruit - which is why many of us buy lower-sugar, higher-fruit continental preserves instead. Funny old world.

Hiatus

Apologies for the blog hiatus; normal service will, I am sure, be resumed very soon.
My hitherto indestructible mother finally succumbed, in the early hours of this morning, to her 92 years. It was a calm and peaceful death - a good death, ending a good life, one that, until very recently, had been rich, active, happy and fulfilled. She was (as she frequently professed) more than ready to go; she had had her life and was impatient with the tedious coda. Requiem aeternam...

Bitters: Fashion catches up with Nige and HM

Once again, it seems, the world scampers along in the trend-setting footsteps of this blog - not to mention those of HM the Queen. A characteristically encyclopaedic item on the BBC News website informs us that all the bright young things nowadays are turning their backs on the sweet stuff and knocking back the bitters. I was at it myself in Venice recently, enjoying many an Aperol spritz and Campari, but I've always been up for any bitters going, from Dubonnet to Suze and anything I can get my hands on that delivers that bitter medicinal hit. A few years ago, as the BBC News piece reminds us (to save you the effort, it's right near the bottom), the Queen's taste for Dubonnet seemed outlandish. Not now - it's bitters all round. Cheers! Mine's a Cynar with a Fernet chaser...

Marianne North: 'A very wild bird'

Born on this day in 1830 was the brilliant flower painter and tireless traveller Marianne North, who, even by the standards of intrepid, globetrotting Victorian spinsters, was pretty extraordinary. In an age before jet travel and motorways (or indeed motor transport), she travelled and lived in Jamaica, Canada, the United States, Brazil, Tenerife, Japan, Ceylon, India, Borneo, Java, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, the Seychelles and Chile - all in the space of a decade and a half. And wherever she went, she painted her astonishing, botanically accurate, vividly coloured oil paintings of the exotic plant life she found. What's more, she painted these plants not as specimens in isolation but as organisms in an ecosystem, creating pictures that are beautifully composed and richly detailed as well as precisely descriptive.
  Born into a wealthy and well connected family, Marianne shared her father's passion for travel and botany and, when she found herself alone and free following his death (in 1869), she decided to indulge them both, along with her new-found love of oil painting - which she described as 'a vice like dram-drinking, almost impossible to leave off once it gets possession of one'. She abhorred marriage - 'a terrible experiment', in her view, that turned women into 'a sort of upper servant' - and disliked company, so most of the time she lived, travelled and painted alone. 'I am a very wild bird,' she declared, 'and like liberty.'
  She became a reluctant celebrity in her own lifetime and the crowds flocked to an exhibition of her work in London in 1879 - a success from which she shrank, but which gave her an idea:  to give all her paintings as a gift to the Royal Botanical Society at Kew, and to build a gallery at her own expense to display them to the public. The gift was rather reluctantly accepted, and the gallery - a temple-like building in a corner of the Gardens - is still there. It was recently restored, and is quite unlike anything of its kind - indeed Kew claims it is the only gallery devoted to a single female artist, with full public access, anywhere in the UK.
 The effect of Miss North's paintings en masse is somewhat concussing - those colours! Her palette was certainly well adapted to the tropics. But then, if she hadn't painted in vivid oils, but in the more usual delicate watercolours, little or nothing of her work would have survived. You can view the gallery online here...

Zane

My deathday post for (Pearl) Zane Grey is on the Dabbler today...

Horrors

In yesterday's Dabbler, Brit was recalling the grim experience of walking through the first 20th Century British gallery in the Tate. I too was making my flinching, wincing way through that gallery on Sunday, immediately after enjoying the little connecting room that contains Georgiana's Dead Bird - not to mention a fine Ruskin drawing of a corner of the facade of San Marco, and Arthur Melville's stunning The Blue Night, Venice.
What is it with British art of the past century or so that it is so fixated with the grotesque, the repulsive, the ugly and horrific? Surely no other culture has ever put such high value (and sky-high prices) on art that no sane person could bear to live with - fancy a Bacon on the wall, anyone? A Lucian Freud nude? How about some nice Chapman Brothers mutilations or Gilbert and George coprophilia? Call me old-fashioned and simplistic, but surely art should be (or attempt to be) beautiful and give pleasure. But maybe this kind of grotesquerie does give pleasure of a sort - something akin to what the French call nostalgie de la boue, a yearning for degradation. There is a very strong strain in our culture that regards the ugly and brutal as essentially more 'authentic' than the beautiful and pleasing - despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that most of us live lives of such comfort, peace and ease as past generations could only dream of. It's akin to the curious predilection for violence, dark secrets, corruption and conspiracies in TV drama (British and Scandinavian - i.e. the least violent and corrupt societies on Earth, more or less). This is the spurious glamour and cost-free thrill of  'authenticity', a kind of inverse sentimentality. In the world of the visual arts, our preoccupation with the dark side might come to seem as baffling to future generations as the overt sentimentality of the Victorians, and ugliness might again be recognised for what it is. Ugly.