Another Kind of Library

I'm reading another Elizabeth Jenkins novel, Brightness - of which, no doubt, more in due course. A copy of this elusive item turned up on, I think, eBay at a reasonable price, and when it arrived I was delighted to discover that it bore the green shield of the Boots Booklovers Library (overprinted with a dark cross to identify it as withdrawn from stock).
 I am just old enough to have faint vestigial memories of the days when Boots - and W.H. Smith - ran commercial circulating libraries from many of their high-street premises. The libraries were in decline by then, but in the early years of the 20th century and on through the interwar period, they were a major presence, a huge influence - not necessarily for the better - on the nation's reading habits and on the commercial decision-making of the publishing industry.
 The Boots library had a business model that was bound to appeal to the English middle-class (and would-be middle-class) public. It offered a Class A subscription (relatively expensive and with various extras) and a Class B subscription (relatively inexpensive with no frills), thereby providing each group of subscribers with another group to look down on or look up to - perfect. There was even an On Demand subscription - more expensive then Class A - for the truly aspirational. What's more, Boots provided tasteful, even elegant surroundings for its library users, lending tone to what might otherwise have been a vulgar pharmaceutical bazaar.
 It was the perfect package, but it was doomed to fail, along with the other commercial circulating libraries, as public lending libraries took off in the postwar period and became acceptable even to the middle classes. The last Boots Booklovers Library closed in 1966 - just three years after Brightness was published.

He takes the bins out

By chance (presumably), the BBC's bizarre interview with Arthur Askey lookalike Philip May, the UK's First Gentleman, took place on the eve of the great Denis Thatcher's birthday (he'd have been 102 today).
 Denis, the only other man ever to have found himself in the unfortunate position of being married to the PM, gave but one public interview, and that long after the fall of Mrs T. It was released after his death as a DVD, Married to Maggie - available on Amazon and even eBay, if you're interested (unlikely, I know).
 How often will we hear from Mr May over the coming years, I wonder? I'd hate to think it's now become part of the job. Good to know he takes the bins out, though.

Plus Ca Change

Alors, c'est fait. Macron, inevitably, won, and France, we can be sure, will continue to play a leading role in the ongoing suicide of Western Europe. As I always say, never underestimate the delusional folly of the French, at least in political matters. A nation dazzled by Ideas is rarely going to produce good governance.
 Still, it could be worse. On this date in 1794, Antoine Lavoisier, the 'father of modern chemistry', the man who named both oxygen and hydrogen, was tried, convicted as a traitor and guillotined. Among the crimes he was charged with was adulterating the nation's tobacco with water.
 A year and a half after his death, he was exonerated and his belongings were delivered to his widow with a curt note. A century later, a statue was erected in Paris in his memory, but it turned out that, to save effort, the sculptor had welded a spare head he had lying around - that of the Marquis de Condorcet - onto the body of his Lavoisier. The statue was melted down during the Second World War and has not been replaced.

Chez Fothergill

To the agreeable Oxfordshire town of Thame on Friday evening, for a family occasion the next day. We stayed in the Spreadeagle, on the High Street, a hotel famous for having been run in the Twenties by the 'legendary' John Fothergill, who wrote a bestselling book, An Innkeeper's Diary, about the experience. A minor literary and artistic figure who liked to mingle with artists and writers, Fothergill was a friend and correspondent of Evelyn Waugh, who got to know Fothergill's Spreadeagle in his Oxford days. But he owed his fame - or notoriety - largely to the firm line he took with guests he did not consider worthy of his hotel, usually on grounds of bad manners.
 Like many a publican before and since, he took particular exception to visitors who made use of his sanitary facilities without bothering to buy a drink. Such offenders would be unlikely to make the same mistake twice. Fothergill was not really in the great British tradition of hoteliers and restaurateurs who are clearly in the wrong line of work and who take out their unhappiness on their unfortunate clientele. He was undoubtedly a snob, but not a boor; he was trying to ensure that his guests proved worthy of his hospitality and the very fine surroundings that he had created at the Spreadeagle. For those he approved of, he created a most agreeable kind of private club, over which he presided with charm, wit and generosity. At a time when English hotels were dreary places offering bad food and wine in a dismal environment, Fothergill created something more like a pleasant, artistically decorated country house, with good food and wine. He didn't want 'riffraff' (Basil Fawlty's term - 'vulgarians, bounders and coxcombs' Fothergill would have called them) spoiling the atmosphere of his inn.
  The Spreadeagle gets a mention in Waugh's Brideshead Revisited, when Anthony Blanche takes Charles Ryder to dinner:
'We are going to Thame,' he said. 'There's a delightful hotel there, which luckily doesn't appeal to the Bullingdon [the notorious Oxford drinking club].'
  The Spreadeagle's glory days are long behind it, but it's a pleasant enough hotel. And when I stepped out to take a turn before dinner, I looked up and found the sky alive with swifts - my first of the year! Circling, swooping, chasing and screaming, they were in high spirits and losing no time in getting their short season under way.
 Back home, only a few wary pioneers have so far braved the cold and cloud, but at least they are here and, despite appearances, the summer has begun.

Trout Again: The Carshalton Dodge

An article titled 'The Hampshire Fly Fisher' in the Dcember 17th, 1853, issue of The Field contains this startling sentence [my italics]:
'On the other hand, as far as fly fishing is concerned, fishing upstream, unless you are trying the Carshalton dodge and fishing with a dry fly, is very awkward.'
 As regular readers will know, I have lived in the suburban demiparadise of Carshalton for the best part of sixty years, man and boy - but that is the first I've ever heard of 'the Carshalton dodge'. It dates back to the days when Carshalton's river, the Wandle, was famous in angling circles as a crystal-clear chalk stream rich in trout. The implication seems to be that the 'dodge' of luring the wary trout with a dry fly delicately skimming the surface of the water originated in Carshalton, which can thereby claim an honoured place in the history of fly fishing.
 There were even two flies named for the demiparadise - the Carshalton Cocktail and the Carshalton Dun. If the regeneration of the Wandle continues on its present hopeful course, the Carshalton dodgers might yet be back in business, playing their wily Cocktails and Duns over the sparkling, trout-rich waters.

'The secret, bestial peace!'

The other night I caught a programme on BBC4 called Amsterdam: An Art Lover's Guide - rather good it was, and very watchable. At one point, the presenter Alastair Sooke, touring the Rijksmuseum, briefly admired the Vermeers, then noted that they shared the room with works by another Dutch painter, one who, he seemed to suggest, was seriously underrated outside his native Holland. This was Jan Steen, painter of innumerable genre scenes, many of them portraying drunkenness and cheerful depravity in taverns. A Man Blowing Smoke at a Drunken Woman - the National Gallery's one Steen - is typical, though Steen's canvases tend to be more densely populated with drunks and revellers.
 The Dutch affection for Jan Steen's works is probably, well, a Dutch thing, and his loud, rambunctious works certainly have almost nothing in common with Vermeer's enigmatic masterpieces. It was surely the likes of Jan Steen that Larkin had in mind when he wrote his 1970 sonnet The Card Players, a crudely comic evocation of the 17th-century Dutch tavern world, and a kind of celebration of shameless maleness and hog-whimpering drunkenness...

Jan van Hogspuew staggers to the door
And pisses at the dark. Outside, the rain
Courses in cart-ruts down the deep mud lane.
Inside, Dirk Dogstoerd pours himself some more,
And holds a cinder to his clay with tongs,
Belching out smoke. Old Prijck snores with the gale,
His skull face firelit; someone behind drinks ale,
And opens mussels, and croaks scraps of songs
Towards the ham-hung rafters about love.
Dirk deals the cards. Wet century-wide trees
Clash in surrounding starlessness above
This lamplit cave, where Jan turns back and farts,
Gobs at the grate, and hits the queen of hearts.

Rain, wind and fire! The secret, bestial peace! 

Writer's Tears

Here it is, the perfect gift for the writer in your life - and a very welcome present to me from my beloved daughter, who, sadly, is flying back to the Antipodes tomorrow.

Talking of daughters, and writers - and tears - here's Richard Wilbur:

The Writer

In her room at the prow of the house
Where light breaks, and the windows are tossed with linden,
My daughter is writing a story.

I pause in the stairwell, hearing
From her shut door a commotion of typewriter-keys
Like a chain hauled over a gunwale.

Young as she is, the stuff
Of her life is a great cargo, and some of it heavy:
I wish her a lucky passage.

But now it is she who pauses,
As if to reject my thought and its easy figure.
A stillness greatens, in which

The whole house seems to be thinking,
And then she is at it again with a bunched clamor
Of strokes, and again is silent.

I remember the dazed starling
Which was trapped in that very room, two years ago;
How we stole in, lifted a sash

And retreated, not to affright it;
And how for a helpless hour, through the crack of the door,
We watched the sleek, wild, dark

And iridescent creature
Batter against the brilliance, drop like a glove
To the hard floor, or the desk-top,

And wait then, humped and bloody,
For the wits to try it again; and how our spirits
Rose when, suddenly sure,

It lifted off from a chair-back,
Beating a smooth course for the right window
And clearing the sill of the world.

It is always a matter, my darling,
Of life or death, as I had forgotten. I wish
What I wished you before, but harder.