Swanvale Halt Book Club: "Gaudy Night" by Dorothy L Sayers (Gollancz, 1935)

A friend may be leaving Oxford, a city she loves, after more than two decades. The 1930s is not her favoured period, but having heard Dorothy L Sayers’s Gaudy Night described as ‘a love letter to Oxford disguised as a mystery novel’, I thought I’d buy an appropriately elderly copy as a present. I felt I should read it first, never having done any Sayers. 

Good heavens, it was hard going. The action focuses on a fictional women’s college based on Somerville, the author’s alma mater, located somewhere off Jowett’s Walk where the modern Balliol housing now stands; and many of the characters, and suspects in the crime, are the college’s academic staff, a parade of virtually-indistinguishable Misses This or That, occasionally and even more confusingly referred to by their title instead of their name. They engage in bouts of verbal sparring of the kind I thought I might encounter myself in Oxford, but never did: perhaps such displays of intellectual prowess had died out long before I arrived, around the time fluency in Latin stopped being an entry exam requirement.

And at the heart of that is Lord Peter Wimsey, quite the most loathsomely annoying character I have ever read presented as a hero. Any such person you might meet in real life, whose every other sentence is a recondite quotation and who politely refrains from making his intellectual superiority over everyone else around them too apparent except obliquely, would be an individual you would quickly learn to avoid. The romance between Wimsey and Harriet Vane is part of the story, and you cannot help feeling she has been absolutely correct to repel his matrimonial suggestions for five years and should very much carry on doing so. At one point Harriet has discovered that the antique chess pieces he has bought for her from an Oxford antiques shop have been violently smashed by the unknown miscreant causing havoc to the College’s wellbeing. One pawn has survived:

“My dear girl [counsels Wimsey], don’t cry about it. What the hell does it matter?”

“I loved them”, said Harriet, “and you gave them to me.”

He shook his head.

“It’s a pity it’s that way round. ‘You gave them to me, and I loved them’ is all right, but ‘I loved them and you gave them to me’ is irreparable …”

A quotation, with grim inevitability, follows. At this point, were I Miss Vane, the antiquity and belovedness of the chess-set notwithstanding, I would have found a use for that surviving pawn that His Lordship might have been surprised by.

Allied to the maddening quality of Peter Wimsey is the tendency of this novel – as so many of the mid-twentieth century – to drew conclusions about its characters from their physical appearance. Harriet notes that Lord Peter’s nephew, a student at Christ Church who falls a bit in love with her, has similar features to Peter’s but ‘with a certain weakness about the jaw’. Of course the dashing aristocratic detective is a master at this dubious neo-phrenological analysis, but everyone in the book whose inner thoughts we know does it, and it’s a feature you simply cannot imagine emerging in fiction now. How did it come to an end?

This all adds up to a high price for a spot of Oxford romanticism. But as the narrative builds towards the climactic unmasking of the villain, there is a certain cathartic violence which culminates in the speech that villain gives to the assembled members of the College, an attack on both academic culture and first-wave feminism so daring, violent, and all-encompassing, that it almost justifies the time you have spent reading so far: regardless of whether you agree with the character in question, which Sayers certainly does not. Whether I will in fact pass Gaudy Night on as planned having experienced it, I am not decided!

[The picture shows 'the first cheap edition' of 1936, a copy of which I purchased at a very modest price. The presence of the original dust jacket would have raised it to £200 or more.]

Swanvale Halt Book Club: The Towers of Trebizond, by Rose Macaulay (1956)

I read Rose Macaulay's The Pleasure of Ruins many years ago, but it has taken me until now to get around to her final and most celebrated novel. It's a book you couldn't write now, if only because nobody would understand all the stuff about Anglicanism, as the narrator Laurie makes her way across Turkey with her Anglo-Catholic Aunt Dot and priest friend Fr Hugh Chantry-Pigg who aim to establish an Anglican school. Just occasionally Laurie's guileless and lengthy sentences of linked clauses come close to wearing out their welcome, and I wasn't quite sure what to make of her taking home an ape she bought from a Greek sailor and teaches to drive (only round the estate, obviously), but I looked forward to reading it each night and finding out what becomes of the characters. 

The Towers of Trebizond is usually described as comic, understandably so when the famous first line is '"Take my camel, dear", said my Aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass'. She and Fr Pigg wander over the border into the Soviet Union to look at a lake and disappear, only to be 'escorted' to an interrogation when they return to Britain. Laurie takes back her aunt's bad-tempered camel (along with the ape), unsure what she will do with it. Yet, not only does the book contain perhaps the best and most humane account of how religion goes wrong, and right, in a couple of pages that I've ever read, serious moments emerge through the silliness and become ever more prominent as time goes on. We learn in passing that Laurie is in an adulterous relationship which complicates how she relates to the Church she can't help being attracted to; we meet David and Charles (surely a gay couple) who fall out while writing books about Turkey, and, after Charles gets eaten by sharks, David takes to passing his work off as his own. Everyone is engaged in some sort of deception or self-deception, Dot and Fr Pigg's plans as illusory as David's reputation or Laurie's scheme of primate education. Trebizond itself, the famed capital of a tiny, dream-like Byzantine offshoot empire, exists only in the imagination, now being represented by quotidian Turkish Trabzon. 

Finally an incident so terrible, violent and unexpected turns the novel into a tragedy and shows that a work can be both frivolous and profound. Any book whose narrator says at the end 'I now live in two hells, for I have lost God and live also without love', can only be overwhelmingly sad. Dreams, the dreams of Trebizond and its towers, are what power us poor human beings, and yet sometimes - often - dreams can't be reconciled.

Goth on a (Large) Budget: 'How to be a Goth' by Tish Weinstock (Octopus Books, 2024)

This is a book I wouldn’t have bought but for my vague sense of being honour-bound to cast an eye over anything about the Goth world that emerges into print, and this isn’t so much a review (theblogginggoth did a fuller one a few weeks ago) as a reflection. I will say that it can’t have been a hard book to write, whatever experience a reader of it might have: Ms Weinstock delivers her authorised lists of books, movies and clothing items in a series of short paragraphs which anyone could have come up with internet assistance. The second point is that the book offers a very narrow vision of ‘how to be a Goth’, driven by an unusual personal experience. This is Goth as it appears to an ennobled, wealthy industrialist’s granddaughter who becomes beauty editor of Vogue and marries a Guinness, a background Ms Weinstock never mentions beyond alluding to growing up in a ‘house full of precious antiques’ and her father’s death when she was five. When they aren’t long-dead actresses or fictional characters, her list of role models for young Goth women is heavy with fashion designers and artists; her roll of clothing retailers includes outlets in New York and LA, which is fine for anyone who casually jets across the Atlantic. This is a world most of us come nowhere near.

In such a world, when the rich adhere to the markers of revolt, what does Goth mean? For the author her ‘dark’ enthusiasms clearly became a means of negotiating a sense of alienation, but in circumstances of relative privilege – very different from so many first-generation Goths’ experience of suburban emptiness, as outlined by Cathi Unsworth – what’s in the darkness? Ms Weinstock praises her arty heroines for their ‘rebellion’ and ‘individuality’, but these instincts are pursued primarily through consumer choices which aren’t going to frighten anyone, no matter how edgy you regard yourself. Capitalism doesn’t care how you express your individual identity, provided you hand over cash for it; you can have any colour, including black.

In 1993, when Tish Weinstock was all of two, one of her suggested idols, Christina Ricci, played Wednesday Addams in Addams Family Values. In the movie, Wednesday gets packed off to summer camp, that particularly American childhood horror that features so largely in the narratives of alienated US children, and naturally does all she can to obstruct the compulsory wholesomeness inflicted on the youngsters there. Traditionally, that’s what all Goths have felt they’re doing: resisting the mindlessly sunny and optimistic. But 2024 isn’t 1993. This is an age of individualism, in which the ideals Goths say they stand for are precisely those that wider society claims it values too; and one of anxiety, where sunny optimism might come as relief. How To Be A Goth unwittingly contributes to the sort of debate that writing on Goth has grappled with for about a decade, for instance in Catherine Spooner’s speculations about ‘happy Gothic’ and the Spracklens’ rage about Goth going consumerist. Has it become nothing more than a vacuous style choice? This book poses the question in an acute form. The answer is, Not quite, I think.

Conformity and adherence to a common, all-embracing narrative are not what our society values now, but the urge to demand such obedience – not just to an outward standard of appearance, but an inner submission of the soul – is an abiding part of human thinking, one of our instinctive survival mechanisms. It’s easy to reach for such narratives when the times are anxious, and when malign parties are there to exploit the instinct. Goth, on the other hand, always says, No, it’s not that simple; no, I will not do as you tell me; I will not tell your story; I will tell my own.

Maybe Goth’s committed to deathliness isn’t about deathliness, but about what can’t be accommodated in univocal statements of identity and purpose, about what can’t be digested and understood. It points towards the truth that there is always more, always something else, in the same way that the priest’s black garb signposts beyond this world and therefore always unsettles by suggesting there might be another scale of value than our own. The deathliness stands not for itself, but for irreducible complexity, and the critique of any grand narrative other than ruin. Beware, it says. In that sense, we can’t tame it, no matter whether we’re onlookers or adherents – and no matter how much or how little privilege we enjoy. In that way, even a Goth on a trust fund can think of themselves as an eternal outsider. But they should beware, too: there is a subtle enemy who can buy off the Church, and it can buy them off as well.

Strain on the Bookshelf

One thing among many that happens when you are an ordained member of the Body of Christ is that you acquire other people’s cast-off books. Sometimes they are very useful. Over recent weeks, for instance, Il Rettore has given me copies of Mitri Raheb’s Faith in the Face of Empire, a profound examination on what it means to be a Palestinian Christian and why, in Dr Raheb’s view, God chose to be incarnate in this scarred region contended between global powers; and Monica Furlong’s biography of St Therese of Lisieux, an account of how God took a near-pathological personality and made holiness out of it. Again, occasionally an elderly book proves valuable when it might not have seemed so when you got it, like Agnes Sanford’s Sealed Orders which I almost randomly plucked out of a box at the home of a parishioner at Goremead when called on to do so without knowing who Agnes Sanford was and how illuminating the book would be.

Some older religious books remain worthwhile. Not long ago I mentioned Catherine de Houeck Doherty’s Poustinia; once St Therese is out of the way I will probably begin The Enduring Melody, the late Dean of Westminster Michael Mayne’s thoughts on his terminal cancer, and CS Lewis’s essay collection Christian Reflections: Lewis’s originality is always good value even if I find him a bit smug now and again. These works aren’t that affected by the passage of time.

But the truth is that few genres of literature age more rapidly than religious books. From Biblical exegesis to prophetic declarations about ‘the Church of the Future’, their outlooks and concerns – and even graphic design, I find – fall behind the times horribly quickly. This may be partly a reflection of the anxious state of the Western Church in the last sixty years (always seeking ways to keep up with the contemporary world, and never quite managing it), but looking into the past it seems that there has always been a vast ocean of religious books that is doomed to become forgotten and sargassum-covered. I think it’s more to do with the openness of the subject: everyone with a clerical collar and very many of those without one thinks their opinions are worth other people’s time, if they can get someone to publish them. The result is that the bookshelves of lots of good churchgoers are clogged with these flotsam of past spiritual thought, and, stricken by the kind of guilt that leads people to dump stuff outside charity shops so they can take it to the tip rather than face doing it themselves, they give them to the nearest clergyperson.

And, when I retire and have to strip my bookshelves, children, I WILL DO THE SAME. 

Swanvale Halt Book Club: Guy & Catharine English, 'Holy Wells Cornwall, Odyssey & Memorial' (Culture & Democracy Press 2024)

In 2014 Guy and Catharine English began a retirement project of visiting the holy wells of Cornwall. They acquired copies of the books that have surveyed them and started listing, cross-checking, and trudging around lanes and across muddy fields to find out what was there. Sometimes they discovered an entirely unlisted ancient well, which was a special excitement. Then came the covid year of 2020, which separated the couple from the wells and ultimately from each other after fifty years of marriage – not a direct result of the pandemic, but of Catharine’s cancer which they thought had been dealt with. Once the world reopened, and Guy could bear to do so, he carried on their mission – as the book’s title suggests, an ‘odyssey’, which had become a memorial. He acquired a new travelling companion in the form of holy wells photographer and author Phil Cope, who would help pull the book together.

For holy well hunters the corrected map references and descriptions of wells’ current conditions in this book are useful, even if some of the directions are a bit indistinct; necessarily so in the case of St Michael’s Well at Roughtor which, according to Guy English, mysteriously appeared and then was unfindable again from visit to visit. You have to squint a bit at some of the smaller photographs. But, in any case, this isn’t a book to go to for a lot of information as such. Instead it’s an account of Guy and Catharine’s pilgrimage, and together they make it easily the most moving description not just of Cornish holy wells, but sacred waters anywhere. They battle with the weather, sit in the car and eat a pasty, visit a friend while out looking for this or that site, and dry off in a tea room or a pub. Described in very few and unflamboyant words – as is Catharine’s illness and departure from their shared odyssey to go on one of her own – this is the kind of thing we all do when going well-hunting: ordinary, small actions, contained and framed within the very extraordinary action of looking for holy wells, engaging with their deep and powerful history, and moving through their landscapes. Yet nobody has ever thought to describe them in print before.

Captured almost unawares by the strange magic of the wells, Guy and Catharine English are all of us. How gracious of them to share with us their gentle, hopeful journey.

Book website here. 

Shades of Netley Abbey

Here's a tangled story. My investigations of the holy wells of Glastonbury led me to the history of the town published in 1826 by the Revd Richard Warner, a great partisan of the claims to sanctity of the well in the Abbey crypt, which he seems to have been the first person to have recorded as 'St Joseph's Well'. He was a remarkable character whose father had kept a delicatessen in Marylebone, and who might have had a Naval career before becoming curate to the travel writer William Gilpin and eventually attracting controversy for preaching pacifist sermons during the Napoleonic wars, finishing as the pluralist incumbent of Great Chalfield in Wiltshire and Timberscombe in Somerset. Gilpin - an important figure in early Picturesque travel writing and therefore in the history of the Gothic Garden - was a strong influence on Richard Warner who ended up writing accounts of his own walking tours. Another friend was John Losh, uncle of Wreay church's singular architect Sarah Losh. Warner's extensive literary output (his clerical duties clearly left him plenty of time for this) included reissuing historic cookbooks and antiquarian works as well as gossipy fiction about Bath society. But the work of his that I've just finished reading is his Gothic novel from 1795, Netley Abbey. 

I was intrigued enough by the mention of the novel in Richard Warner's Wikipedia entry to look it up and then buy it. Obviously I knew that what would arrive would not be a pair of 18th-century volumes with thick board covers and marbled endpapers, but I wasn't quite expecting an absolute facsimile, complete with long 's's that look like 'f's, contained in floppy covers and printed so badly that in places the reader has to reconstruct the text. In fact, that, and the inevitable temptation to read it to oneself like Nigel Molesworth's take on Shakespeare ("Fie, fir, if I may fa fo"), are the main pleasures to be derived, because it is difficult to express how bad this book is. The majority of the story is reported speech as characters relate to others what has happened to them in very unlikely prose. There is an impoverished good baron and a very wicked one, dashing knights and an evil abbot presiding over a monastery where a maiden in a white dress (very flimsy, one imagines) is confined to a subterranean chamber. (I know, spoilers, but you're not likely to venture further into this text anyway). This could all be exciting or at least camp fun, but most of the first volume is irrelevant and you virtually know what's going to happen before the plot starts. The main benefit is to get something of a feel for what the book's original 18th-century readers might have experienced: the facsimile reproduction, however faulty, does replicate the typesetting with on average no more than 100 words to each of its 390-odd pages. It does make me appreciate far more the last initial-wave Gothic novel I read, Charlotte Dacre's Zofloya: or, The Moor from 1806, which is itself no great shakes as literature, but at least has some flair to it.

And there is also this question that occurs to me. Although the setting of Netley Abbey is medieval, the world it depicts is, of course, nothing like the actual Middle Ages at all. Neither the castle of good Baron de Villars nor that of dastardly Sir Hildebrand de Warren function anything like a medieval household: they are 18th-century aristocratic establishments projected into the past. The hero young Edward de Villars sniffs at the superstitious monuments of the umbrageous Abbey like a rational Georgian Protestant. Now, given that this book was written by someone who fancied himself as a historian, what did Revd Warner believe the past was actually like? His account of St Joseph's Well in his History of the Abbey of Glaston is highly romantic and coloured, and hardly unsympathetic to the Age of Faith and its monastic institutions which he criticises as a Gothic novelist. It's interesting that the same person can adopt both variant modes when writing in different genres.

Poustinia Practice

My spiritual reading at the moment is Catherine de Hueck Doherty's Poustinia from 1977, an examination of the Orthodox Christian conception of physical withdrawal to a particular place from which distractions are banished in order more effectively to encounter God, and how it might work in a Western context. Typically I had never heard of it until very recently but discover it as a 'spiritual classic'. When something is written exceedingly simply but those simple sentences are dense with power it's a good sign. 

I'm not called to be a poustinik, at least I don't think I am. I gib a little at Bd Catherine's injunction that the bed in the poustinia should be 'a board, with a blanket if necessary', as someone who currently has three blankets on their bed as well as a duvet and a top sheet (the weight helps me sleep). But basically she is outlining how the whole of the Christian spiritual life works, for every Christian, in concentrated form, and so there are lessons to be drawn even for a poor secular priest like me.

The lesson I'm thinking about most is the idea that 'the poustinia has three walls'. In the classic Russian model, the poustinik who takes this on as a long-term vocation rather than an exercise for a day or two, is always available to whoever wants their help, and that help might be spiritual or very practical. Someone might come and seek the poustinik out and say 'Friend, I need some help putting up a fence' and the poustinik must leave their prayers and do as they are bidden. That's the point. To a person willing to exploit, they're free labour. Yet they mustn't complain or resist, but leave it to God to deal with. 

One of my Minor Patron Saints (as opposed to my Major Patron, Great-Martyr Catherine) is St Serafim of Sarov, the very doyen of poustiniks, who was wont to greet anyone who turned up at his hut with a beaming smile, outstretched arms, and the words 'My joy! Christ is risen!' I could do with a little more of that spirit, so I am trying to offer thanks to God when the phone rings or the doorbell sounds, treating interruptions as the work of the Spirit. Who knows? I might be entertaining angels unawares. I confess, friends, that I am not there yet!

Swanvale Halt Book Club: 'Goth: A History' by Lol Tolhurst (Quercus, 2023)

It’s only at the very end of his second book – his first, Cured (2016), described how The Cure came into being, what he did in the band, and how he crashed out of it – that Lol Tolhurst lets us in on the plan. At first he thought of writing an encyclopaedia, he says, before concluding that he wasn’t up to it and that nobody would be satisfied by anything he might produce, and so, instead, he wrote a memoir. But its subject isn’t ‘my time in The Cure’ – the earlier volume covered that – rather it tells how music, literature and aesthetics have fed into Mr Tolhurst’s sense of who he is and how he looks at the world. You do get a thirty-page account of the life and times of The Cure, but you also get encounters with other great names in the post-punk and Goth world, the bands Messrs Smith, Tolhurst et al saw perform, met, or worked with. Sometimes the connection is a bit oblique: a discussion of Depeche Mode begins with the author describing how he bumped into Andy Fletcher when they were both being treated at The Priory, and I can’t see any overlap that justifies two pages on the Sisters of Mercy at all, but along the way Mr Tolhurst addresses exactly the kind of questions other works haven't tackled. What was it like being a teenage music fan in the 1970s? He outlines the importance of John Peel, the music press and local record shops. What led proto-Goth young people to start playing music in the first place? He describes the drabness of his and Robert Smith’s Crawley surroundings and how their first visit to Salford revealed exactly why Joy Division sounded like they did; he relates Julianne Regan of All About Eve’s similar feelings about the landscape she grew up in, and David J of Bauhaus’s about Northampton. During an account of The Cure’s tour supporting the Banshees in 1979, he ponders the differences between London and the suburbs, laments the grotty venues they often played, and marvels at Siouxsie’s brisk methods of dealing with the unenlightened males who gave her grief at concerts. Why did musicians keep going? Mr Tolhurst tells us how making new music with French group The Bonapartes made him feel better after the stresses of his own band; David J describes performing as ‘an exorcism’ of negative feelings; Julianne Regan confesses that making music was a compensation for a decidedly unromantic existence. The chapter on the poetry that’s meant something to the author, and the concluding section on wider Goth culture, are there, again, to stress his sense of being part of something bigger than just one Goth band at one moment, something that ultimately brought him meaning.

You will look in vain here for Lol Tolhurst saying a single bad word about anyone. The closest he gets to being personally critical is in an account of The Cure’s first trip to California in 1981 when they find themselves staying in the same ‘kitschy motel’ as Joe Jackson: ‘Joe represented the new wave movement. Oh dear’. And that’s it. For all the gloomth of the Goth world, this book is overwhelmingly positive. It’s kind, humane and humble, conversationally-written and easy to read, and there is nothing else like it at the moment. Take off the odd paper half-jacket around the cover, and it’s even rather beautiful, bearing an embossed black raven against a cloud on the front and a feather on the back, with a neutral grey background, a bit like a children’s adventure book from the 1950s. Lol Tolhurst’s girlfriend in 1977, when the book starts, was a black-clad girl with straight black hair he calls The Raven; and we know that, in the dark, All Cats Are Grey.

Where Coincidence Leads

‘There is no coincidence in this world, only inevitability’, insisted Yuuko Ichihara of xxxHolic, and the transdimensional witch’s words are apposite today. My god-daughter Katrin has just been on holiday in Japan; a card from her has arrived today showing one of her destinations, the Kinkakuji temple in Kyoto. Is that not, I thought, the building whose burning Yukio Mishima wrote about in The Temple of the Golden Pavilion? So it was - very oddly, as a stray reference somewhere today had made me think about Mishima an hour or so before I picked the card from the doormat. These days I am more and more inclined to agree with Yuuko-san, and see time as folded and coiled, touching on itself at points that produce resonances, echoes, and bleed-throughs, that we, encased in chronology as we are, call coincidence.

In my teens I was rather captivated by the melodramatic extremity of Yukio Mishima’s life, culminating in a ritual suicide that ended his derisory, doomed-to-fail would-be military coup on November 25^th 1970 (St Catherine’s Day, you may note). ‘The compromise climate of today, when one can neither live beautifully nor die horribly’, he wrote in On Hagakure, his paean to the old samurai ethic: now there’s a creed for an adolescent who’s done little living and has never seen anyone die. I bought all the books, at least the ones readily available in mid-to-late 1980s Bournemouth, of which The Temple of the Golden Pavilion was one.

But it was Mishima’s final work, The Sea of Fertility, I found myself thumbing through again today. This stretching novel – 800-odd pages in the Penguin – is four books bolted together like fate, and is the bleakest, bitterest thing you will ever read. Notwithstanding some readings, which glimpse in its conclusion what a Westerner might call redemption, I think that overarching title expresses nothing more, or less, than an irony so dark and hopeless that it becomes almost unbearable, like the fire consuming the Kinkakuji.

Apart from the climactic, disorientating and beautiful scene in the nunnery garden, I was always most drawn to the episode in the final part of The Sea of Fertility, The Decay of the Angel, where Keiko, the protagonist Honda’s oldest friend, dolls herself up to confront his adopted son Toru with the truth over Christmas dinner. She doesn’t believe, as Honda does, that Toru is the reincarnation of a doomed young lover from the 1910s; a right-wing idealist who killed himself between the wars after assassinating a banker; or a ludicrously beautiful Thai princess who died of a cobra bite. She’s convinced he’s just a nasty, clever, manipulative boy. He’s not pure enough, even pure evil enough, as he might imagine. Keiko is the murderer of all illusions: an ‘angel-killer’, Toru thinks. ‘We are two bored, cynical old people’, she tells him, ‘Can your pride really permit you to call us destiny? A nasty old man and woman? An old voyeur and an old lesbian?’ I rather wanted to be Keiko, telling horrible truths to horrible people. God forgive me, but part of me still does.

Forty years later or nearly, I look at Mishima’s life and I read a story of thorough falsehood, but even if his writing always centres on unbalanced, deluded, and unpleasant people, he almost could not help himself but be truthful there. In The Sea of Fertility’s second instalment, Runaway Horses, Isao Iinuma wants to restore the values of old Japan with a cathartic act of violence, but new Japan continues undisturbed, and that was the fate of Mishima himself. Both fictional revolutionary and real-life rebel sacrificed themselves to an ideal which was, like all political ideals enacted in any real context, compromised with money, desire, and power. Surely someone as clearsighted as Mishima couldn’t have believed in that nonsense? Was that final act not just a way of escaping the consequences of what he had written?

“And the Golden Temple grew until it consumed the entire world; it became sufficient to consume the entire meaning of the world”

Book Night

A little while ago I reported on Cathi Unsworth's fantastic epic on Goth In The Time Of Thatcher, Season of the Witch, and on Wednesday managed to catch a date in her tour promoting it. The Dublin Castle in Camden, along the road towards Regents Park, I discovered, doesn't serve wine, so I opted for a half of Camden Pale and took it through the swinging doors that led to the music area at the back of the pub. There were about thirty of us listening not just to Ms Unsworth but also to writer Richard Cabut, a gentleman more central to the historiography of Goth than I realised, reading from his novel Looking For A Kiss. Both painted a picture of this particular part of London as a psychogeography of the marginal and the uneasy, which Goth, or Positive Punk, or whatever you might want to call it, fitted into. The authors answered some questions from compere Travis Elborough and from the floor - always a hit-and-miss business, that, but it gave some opportunity to reflect on the debatable politics of Goth.

While I was waiting for the doors to open I wandered down to Gloucester Gate and came across this incredible fountain from 1878 in the form of a Coad-stone folly by the side of the road, looking like a grotto or tiny cave incongruously topped by a bronze milkmaid. I couldn't remember seeing mention of it before, but to my relief it's in Philip Davies's Troughs and Drinking Fountains. He rejoices that Camden Council has been persuaded to restore it. That was in 1989: it could do with a tidy-up again. 

Quantum of Thought

The BBC can be forgiven for saving money by rebroadcasting programmes when they suddenly become relevant again, and when I heard Sarah Montague and Brian Cox discussing Robert Oppenheimer’s 1953 Reith Lectures a few days ago in a show which first appeared in 2017, I assumed that was just what the Radio 4 authorities were up to – linking the discussion to the recent movie about the physicist. But in fact Reith Revisited is being repeated as a series wholesale over August. This means it was a coincidence, and it was an equal coincidence that I’d just finished reading a book that covered the same subject at the time.

According to the presenters, one of Oppenheimer’s points was to make suggestions about how quantum mechanics might affect not just the approach of scientists to their own endeavours, but also have implications for society more widely. Sometimes, he argued, you have to treat light as though it’s a particle, and sometimes you have to treat it like a wave. Neither sort of measurement comprehensively defines the observed phenomenon: you need both. If this is the case with something as ubiquitous and obvious as light, with the absolute basics of physics, surely it is just so with the scientific project as a whole, and even more with the complex and subtle matters of human social organisation, of politics and economics. No one single viewpoint can manage alone. It’s a prescription for pluralism.

The book was Danah Zohar and Ian Marshall’s The Quantum Society from 1993, which, according to the price label, I bought from a branch of Oxfam at some unknown date. It was (apparently) one of a trio of books examining essentially the same theme at rather greater length than Robert Oppenheimer’s Reith Lecture. Dr Zohar essentially wrote the text to which her husband Ian Marshall then contributed ideas, and she doesn’t refer to Oppenheimer at all so we have to assume that she came up with her concept independently. She treats the quantum model of the universe as a ‘metaphor’ for understanding society, but also regards it as affecting reality very concretely. So the shift she’s suggesting is from an individualistic, ‘Newtonian’ culture in which people regard themselves as tightly bounded beings like atomic particles, to a ‘quantum’ world in which we see ourselves as simultaneously particles and waves, overlapping and interacting, and building something different as a result of our interactions that we could not have otherwise; but she also suggests that this model has a basis not just in the concept of the quantum but in the actual mechanisms of brain function which seem to obey the quantum rules of superposition and indeterminacy. I don’t swallow this all wholesale, but you can see the point.

Dr Zohar stresses that her vision for human social organisation along ‘quantum’ lines is not in any way relativistic – it assumes there is a real truth to be discovered, even if we rely on each others’ conflicting approaches and viewpoints to get there. Just as well, because the great point I would feel compelled to make (though we know anyway that Schrodinger’s great thought-experiment was devised to ridicule the idea that observation determines reality) is that God can already see inside the box, and is well aware what’s happened to the cat.

'Season of the Witch', Cathi Unsworth (Nine Eight Books, 2023)

When it’s worth reading a book’s Acknowledgments because of their wit and warmth, that volume deserves high praise. Such is Cathi Unsworth’s Season of the Witch – very possibly the best book about the early years of Goth yet produced.

Ms Unsworth starts with four late-1970s bands which defined what turned into Goth – Joy Division, Magazine, the Banshees, and the Cure – and includes virtually everyone else you might have heard of over the course of the next near-400 pages, but Season of the Witch isn’t a catalogue of What Robert Smith Did Next and Where Nick Cave Got His Ideas. Serious-minded students of the post-punk will get the information they might want (and will also, on p.277, find the best explanation of what ‘subcultural capital’ means in a single paragraph where Paul Hodkinson once took a whole book), but the pieces are scattered and woven into something grander. This book is a single, unfolding story (the author uses that word repeatedly) of how a subculture emerged in response to the state of a nation which seemed to be in decline and whose revival took a malign and darkened form.

In 1979 young Cathi Unsworth was the eleven-year-old daughter of middle-class liberal Christian parents in a Norfolk village, reading Dennis Wheatley under the bedclothes with a torch. There are two ‘witches’ who frame her narrative: the Wicked one, Margaret Hilda Thatcher, who her parents raged against as ‘a traitor to her class, her sex and her country’; and the Good, a stranger figure she became aware of at the same time and who her adolescent mind wondered might be riding out at night to save Britain from the Satanic influence of the Iron Lady – a figure with electric raven hair, black lipstick, and torn fishnets on her arms, who went by the name of Siouxsie Sioux. The proto-Goth pre-teen emerged from beneath her blankets to find her way, eventually, to the handful of East Anglian venues that might play the music that spoke to her, to London to find kindred souls and finally, at 19, to write for Sounds and share what she felt about those songs, albums, and bands.

But she is not the focus of her own narrative: she observes from a distance the interactions of the artists who express the malaise of Thatcher’s Britain in their work, their combinations, fallings-out and dramas, heard far off in Norfolk like armies clashing by night. Eventually, as she says, they all knew one another, these often fractured souls, a sort of cosmic kaleidoscope shifting and moving the individuals around like shards of sparkling glass to channel the stream of Goth in new directions. But whereas histories of Goth tend to organise themselves around the bands, thriller-writer Ms Unsworth turns these eleven years, bookended by Mrs Thatcher’s ascension and then downfall, into something like a myth – a blackly comic one, shot through with true tragedy. We range from Siouxsie running through a train in a blind rage to hunt the band members who’d abandoned her mid-tour, to the blanching realisation that Elizabeth Fraser of the Cocteau Twins was working through her abusive relationship with bandmate Robin Guthrie in music everyone else thought was ‘the voice of God’, mainly because they couldn’t understand the lyrics. Wire called Season of the Witch Goth as ‘Dickensian epic’; I think of it as a classical historical drama with added backcombing: ‘Eyeliner Claudius’, if you will.

Where Art of Darkness is a stiff-legged Frankensteinian stumble through the Goth past, Season of the Witch gambols like a lambkin across a meadow scattered with Spring flowers. That’s not the mood, of course, but you get my drift. It would be hard not to enjoy it even if you had little interest in the subject as the narrative continually pulls back and zooms in filmically, delineates the peculiar local horrors that inspired Gothic souls from Melbourne to Morecambe, and offers us historical scope not just in the political landscape of the time, but in the subcultural forebears Unsworth points to at the end of each chapter. These ‘gothfathers and gothmothers’ (as well as the pointers to books and films the Gothic-curious might like to consult) are not always the obvious ones: as well as Poe and the Brontes we are also given Maria Callas and, most wondrously, Fenella bloody Fielding. I am an almost-exact contemporary of Ms Unsworth and can testify, as she does, to the formative influence of what Mark Kermode called the greatest movie ever made, Dougal and the Blue Cat, and Fielding’s eerily prophetic, Thatcher-prefiguring performance as the Blue Voice who wants to eliminate all other colours: ‘Blue is beautiful, Blue is best. I’m Blue, I’m beautiful, I’m best!’

This marvellous volume is not a textbook – it is a soap-opera of both a grand and an intricate kind. But it is also a triumphant justification of a way of being. Ms Unsworth titles her first chapter ‘The Rebel Alliance’, insisting that ‘Goth in the time of Thatcher was a form of resistance against stupidity and ignorance’, elitist but also meritocratic: ‘Those who created the best music of the 80s came from all backgrounds and many of them overcame all manner of abuse, poverty and neglect’. Her final paragraph is like the raising of a banner on a battlefield:

 … So if anyone picks on you for being different in any way, please use this book to hit them about the head with the facts and rest assured, you are in good company. Goth has been ridiculed and derided for decades as being miserable, morose and moronic … [but] it stands for all the essential forces of creativity, friendship and vision, not to mention humour … Forty years on, it’s time for the curse to lifted and the words spoken in darkness to be heard in the light. I am a Goth. 

So much for the second work on its subject published this year. What former Cure member Lol Tolhurst’s in September will bring, we wait to see.

'Art of Darkness', by John Robb (Louder Than War, 2023)

It is not, I think, an easy matter to write well about popular music. It is often very, very hard to account for the appeal of a particular artist, album or track, even if you feel it yourself. You’re tempted to grandiloquise, or you find yourself falling back on clichés and, if you have even the remotest degree of self-awareness, you then try to avoid those clichés and end up producing text that reads like a thesaurus. What you write stands in constant danger of collapse into meaningless sentences, pretentious metaphors, and, if you don’t check back properly, repetition.

Art of Darkness drops straight into all these traps and rarely clambers out, to the extent that I find a lot of it actually hard to read. The Blogging Goth has already given this long-awaited and much-heralded book a detailed and dreadful review, so I won’t dwell on the typos, maladroit expressions and strange lacunae which scatter almost every page, mainly because a reader can also easily appreciate the colossal work and commitment the author has put into it. Instead, there are deeper problems which relate to Art of Darkness’s aims and methods, and I will talk about them.

The Blogging Goth takes Mr Robb to task for, to all appearances, having no awareness of the extensive academic work on Goth culture and subculture, and he is right: the early chapters of the book unnecessarily rehearse what is now a very familiar story of Gothic art across the centuries. But it is a different book which haunts Art of Darkness, one more directly relevant to the subject: Simon Reynolds’s Rip It Up and Start Again, the 2005 history of post-punk which, for all its controversies, still stands as the baseline for anyone wanting to tackle the topic. Reynolds’s chapter on early Goth in Rip It Up tells the same story in twenty pages that John Robb covers in 530; it’s an account with plenty to contest or at least expand on, so the point must be whether Art of Darkness answers any of the questions Reynolds skates past in his breezy and vigorous prose. I would expect any ‘history of Goth’, especially one claiming to be ‘The history of Goth’, to have a go; but a passing reference in an interview with Andrew Eldritch is the only sign that Rip It Up or the questions it begs features at all in Mr Robb’s mental landscape. The biggest of those questions is how is it that we recognise as ‘Goth’ all these completely disparate forms of music?

Chapters 6 to 12 are intended to highlight the ‘dark’ elements of glam, mainstream rock, and the like which helped to produce what we know think of as ‘Goth’, but only occasionally do we get any insight into how this happened. Interviewees in the book repeatedly state that the importance of David Bowie, for instance, to the post-punks who started bands lay less in anything he wrote as such, but in his presentation of possibility, of non-mainstream models of sexuality, of drama and pretence; and that the role of punk was to open up a space in which young musicians felt they could create with minimal resources. We don’t actually need lots of information about Bowie, glam, or punk, to make any of these points. Once we pass beyond the early Goth bands whose members Mr Robb has interviewed so diligently we are promised an account of ‘How dark energy infected Indie’ (chapter 33), but what we get is a list of Goth-ish artists, not an examination of how this came about. Incidentally, you would expect me to look for a mention of PJ Harvey, and here she is, featured in three paragraphs across which Mr Robb manages to get wrong the year when she got going as an independent artist, mangles the title of her breakthrough album, and adapts his most striking statement, unacknowledged, from Andrew Collins’s famous NME review of Dry in 1992. If that’s the case with an artist I know something about, what reliance can I place on the rest?

The substantial worth of Art of Darkness lies in its interviews with musicians, but even more with the accounts of clubs, retailers and Goth experience beyond the membership of bands. The first chapter begins with a nice re-imagining of a night at an alternative club; there’s a breathless list of regional clubs on p.11, any and each of which could do with a write-up of its own; and the descriptions of venues across the country in chapters 19, 25 and 28, of the way they focused musical life, of what it was like to attend them and the risks you took to do so – club manager Doreen Allen eventually provided a bus so her clientele at Planet X in Liverpool could get home without being beaten up – are easily the most valuable elements of the book. They’re also some of the easier to read: the description of Pete Burns holding court at Probe Records in Liverpool during the late ‘70s is a hoot (p.399).

And it’s in the experience of these early Goth clubbers that we might find the beginnings of an answer to the question of how all this stuff comes to be thought of as Goth at all: that certainly can’t come from the interviewees, who, almost to a soul, scorn the word. There’s a ‘history of Goth’ to be told that wrests itself free from bands and is instead organised around the consumers of Goth culture: it’s their active filtering and processing of the fare offered to them that actually settles what is or is not Goth. John Robb continually approaches this idea and then backs away from it, but his book does provide lots of material for anyone who might want to pursue it in the future.

Art of Darkness’s last few pages enter very interesting territory, though it’s mainly through the words of the Goth academics Mr Robb has asked for help, Claire Nally of Northumbria University and freelancer Kate Cherrell, and the passionate paragraph by Kai Asmaa from Morocco describing being a Gothic person in a conservative Muslim culture. There are books waiting to be written around Nally and Cherrell’s suggestions about the interaction between Goth online and in real life: perhaps they will do so. It’s on the very penultimate page that John Robb suggests he might actually understand more than he seems to, with the statement that ‘Goth itself had no manifesto. It was … a retrospective term for something already happening’. That’s the key to its history which, for the most part, he has left unused.

Poetry Reading

A little while ago Lady Arlen was kind enough to send me a copy of her first proper volume of poetry, Shouting at Crows. I put it in the lavatory. This is not a statement about its quality, because I make a habit of having one book of poetry there and consulting it each day. I've always enjoyed poetry, and have produced the odd lyric now and again which has even appeared here, but I generally think there is too much writing of poetry and not enough reading of it so I don't regard that as something I should spend time on.

The predecessor of Shouting at Crows in this respect was Colin Simms's Goshawk Poems, which I bought at the Post Office in Garrigill while I was on holiday last Autumn: it was one of a set of volumes in the window wrapped in cellophane to protect them from the damp. I boggled at the sheer amount Mr Simms has apparently managed to write over his career as a biologist and an observer of birds: this book alone runs to about 140 pages, and his oeuvre includes dozens of similar volumes. And I did find it quite hard to batter my way through: it strikes me, dreadful though it might be to someone who spends a lot of time watching them, that there's only so much you can say about goshawks, and I would really rather read about people. Lately, in fact, leaving PJ Harvey's baleful Orlam to one side, my poetic excursions have been a bit unsatisfying. The Collected Poems of Arthur Hugh Clough, which Lady Arlen herself bought me years and years ago, was shocking old tripe and it was no surprise so little of it was ever published. Mary Barnard's lucid, Sappho-like lyrics were enjoyable but not quite as sparkling as I expected. I found Bedouin of the London Evening by the mythical Rosemary Tonks almost impenetrable. Revisiting Thomas Hardy increased my respect for his industry and inventiveness but I felt little warmer towards his work. My favourites remain Geoffrey Hill, who you may well have heard of, and Elisabeth Bletsoe, who you almost certainly haven't.

In this company, I rather liked Shouting at Crows, with its meditations on pain and loss in the small, domestic, hidden, and unstated. I wonder whether the next adventure, Jeremy Reed's Patron Saint of Eyeliner, will be as worthwhile?

Swanvale Halt Book Club: 'Villager', by Tom Cox (2022)

You might remember me writing about Emma Tennant’s novel Queen of Stones, the feminisation of Lord of the Flies that culminates bloodily on the Isle of Portland. I’d been led to that in the first place by Lady Arlen recommending Tom Cox’s novel Villager, via his evocation of the weirdness of the Portland landscape on his website. He’s been around for ages, but Her Ladyship’s tip was the first I’d heard of him.

You often hear it stated that in this or that book ‘the landscape is itself a character’, and in Villager that is quite literally the case, so if you can’t swallow that device you’re not going to get very far. This would be a shame, as the chapters where the moorland that shadows Underhill – a place which, if it were real, would just be on the edge of Dartmoor – speaks for itself are short and self-contained, while the rest is an emotional and psychological tonic for the jaded 21^st-century. Mr Cox’s other fiction has been in short-story form and this book builds a novel out of a collection of linked stories, zipping backward and forward from the present to the near-past and the near-future. Some of the characters know one another, and a person mentioned in one chapter might get their chance to be the centre of attention in another, set in another time; so by the end you have built up a patchwork portrait of this place and the individuals within it. One episode is told via messages posted to a village Whatsapp group, while another (set the farthest in the future) is related through the protagonist’s conversation with an AI search engine, so I suspect this book would be called ‘experimental’ if it was about horrible happenings done by dreadful people, but it’s not: most of the characters we meet are pleasantly ordinary, there is a good deal of generous humour, and even if there are deaths and floods they are no more than most of us might expect to encounter from time to time. This concentration on the small and undramatic means almost certainly that Villager is destined to be treated as less clever and accomplished than it is. It is humane and kind and other things that critics don’t rate that highly, but anyone else can read it and be a little uplifted by finding the human spirit, and its place in the creation, affirmed.

'To Bring You My Love' at 28

A nicer anniversary falling today (as well as being Lady Arlen and Madame Morbidfrog's birthdays) is that PJ Harvey's To Bring You My Love was released on February 27th in 1995. Many moons ago now I told you about my first encounter with it. For lots of souls it was the moment they first met the Corscombe conjuror-of-storms, wrapped in red silk or her shocking-pink catsuit or whatever costume she might have been wearing at the time, and it has lost none of its haunting power over subsequent years. At the time, reviewers gulped at the inconceivable about-face the album represented, as its author seemed completely to junk everything she'd done up to that point; some hated it, Time awarding it their title of worst recording of the year, a 'hopelessly mannered CD' produced by an 'utterly graceless singer'. Nicholas Barber for The Independent, though, thought he could sum it up in six inspired words: 'imagine "Siouxsie and the Bad Seeds"'. 

In view of subsequent events, TBYML did seem a bit like PJH's audition for the job of Nick Cave's girlfriend, and many commentators were keen to draw the comparison at the time. But though it and the output of the Bad Seeds at the time seem to share an imaginative universe, they aren't very close together in it. If we think of TBYML as pastiche Americana, we are reading into it settings that aren't there, as its lyrics are marked by distinct unspecificity; and, with the possible exception of 'Working For the Man', Harvey sings for women characters, while the women on Cave's records are usually the victims of the characters he voices. And it was a good dozen years after the album was released that the maestra told Gary Crowley on BBC Radio London about a much more important consideration in her mind at the time, the writing of Flannery O'Connor. In 2020 she posted a picture on Instagram showing her with a copy of O'Connor's Wise Blood, taken, she said, around the time TBYML was being composed - though more recently she told Rolling Stone that she was already reading the American's work in her late teens (I'm not sure she isn't misremembering that, she is not always careful about dates).

Flannery O'Connor was an artist thought little of for many years, who seems to have ascended to general acclaim just at the point that aspects of her work - and, even more, her person, if the two can be separated - start to become unacceptable to those who decide what to celebrate and what to denigrate, aspects which shouldn't really be news. O'Connor was only 39 when she died in 1964 of systemic lupus, the same disabling disease that killed her father - a sardonic, thoughtful writer of morality tales with a taste for the violent, her attitudes drawn deep from Catholic Christianity, and yet an author who refused to proselytise, instead depicting her characters engaged almost unawares in the battle for goodness and transcendence the Faith outlined; and one who also resisted any attempt to locate good and evil in simple, obvious places. O'Connor's is a fallen world penetrated with grace. 

Harvey says that O'Connor's work taught her about storytelling: it 'was also shaping the way that my third-person narrative was becoming in the whole record'. Now, the curious thing about this is that, like most of her music, TBYML's songs don't embody stories. It's only really on her subsequent record, 1998's Is This Desire?, that she turns to such structures, and some of the tracks on that record do have specific lift-off points in tales by O'Connor. The protagonists of TBYML give you glimpses into their history - the obsessive of the title track who was born in the desert and has crossed wasted landscapes to meet the listener, the murderous mother of 'Down By the Water', 'The Dancer's' desperate abandoned lover on her deathbed. But each is speaking from a single moment, rather than laying out a narrative as Nick Cave's characters from around the same time do.

If Flannery O'Connor has sketched the landscape TBYML inhabits, what it takes from her writing isn't the third-person device which Harvey doesn't adopt until a few years later; and, while you can see the same interests in both artists, Harvey's music dealt with religion, violence, and extremity right from the start. Instead, what O'Connor seems to have provided her with is the permission to bolt them all together, to imagine characters whose lives move around religion and sometimes lead them in violent directions. And, as always, Harvey's imagination takes her deeper and wilder than virtually anyone else.

A Reward for Patience

My last two attempts to get to the Surrey History Centre in Woking were stymied by the fact that the heating there had broken down. I might be happy enough to sit in the cold in my William Hartnell fingerless gloves but I suppose it would be cruel to demand the staff turn up to supply me with documents. But I made it today.

My visits to record offices are another thing that's changed over the years. Once upon a time I would mainly be investigating maps looking for holy wells: I remember doing Leicestershire in the cramped old Leicester County Record Office and filling order slip after order slip which I placed into a little wooden tray in front of the member of staff on duty who sat on a high chair like a Victorian clerk. When I did the same for Surrey the number of documents I could order had gone down to three at a time and that was painfully slow. Now, at least, you can order up to ten documents in advance, and potentially call up more when you actually visit. It's the burden on the staff that has multiplied: documents aren't just handed over, they all seem to be signed in and out using multiple forms, and I noticed the archivist was weighing some folders of material before giving them to me, recording the weight of each one on the form. The only explanation was that it was to make sure I didn't pinch a leaflet for the St Augustine's Addlestone Garden Fete for 1963, and so it turned out. The poor staff must be nearly driven crazy.

This visit brought to light some interesting insights into the way St Augustine's Aldershot thought of itself; the interior arrangements and fixtures of the Addlestone churches; and some frankly disagreeable memories shared by a former pupil of the Song School of St Mary of the Angels ('I couldn't possibly have stood a second term under such a regime'). But I hadn't thought of the History Centre as a place to buy secondhand books. Yet I came away with three, and a map!

Swanvale Halt Book Club: 'Tess' by Emma Tennant (1994)

When Emma Tennant’s Tess went into shops in 1994, I hope nobody bought it looking for a light bit of romantic fiction with a happy ending. That’s what you might conclude it was, based on the cover, but if so you’d be sadly disappointed. I thought I had to read it after tackling Queen of Stones earlier in the year, and anticipated it would be a baleful piece of work to judge by its predecessor. I hadn’t expected my initial confusion: Tess is the title, and there are three Tesses – it’s a theme of the book that the fate of women repeats in successive generations, ‘the ballad is played and played again’ – the fictional one imagined by Thomas Hardy, the narrator Liza-Lu’s sister, and the baby to whom the story is being told. There are also two Marys, the narrator’s mother, and her niece. Deft writer as she is, Tennant keeps pointing out in the text who is being referred to, but it takes a while to get your head around the repetitions. There are other aspects of the book that you might struggle to get your head around: it’s moving towards the revelation of a secret, repeatedly signalled by the narrator in case we forget it’s coming, which might have seemed shocking in 1994 but now feels predictable; and the narrative is broken up by wodges of a feminist manifesto which may, or may not, be the author’s own. It might have been better to let the story make the point.

And the point is pointed enough, and well enough made, when the tale gets the chance to: that females are the raw material of the fantasies of males, and suffer for it. Baby Tess, granddaughter of Liza-Lu’s sister Tess, represents the generation who might break the cycle and begin the healing of both humanity and the earth (the novel’s environmental urgency was unusual for the time). Part of Tennant’s programme is to wrest control of the Dorset landscape from Thomas Hardy, and she never misses an opportunity to insult or malign him: in this novel he becomes not a complex and divided man with deep flaws, but an unmitigated monster, so captivated by the imaginary woman he creates that he manipulates and damages every real one he  has anything to do with. The action takes place between Abbotsbury, West Bay and Beaminster, the landscape spared the phantasmagoric treatment evident in Queen of Stones so that Tennant’s characters can realistically inhabit it. She imagines the eagles on the gateposts at Mapperton House coming alive, and mentions in passing the old nightclub that ran on the coast road out of Bridport near Burton Bradstock, and you have to be fairly familiar with the history of Dorset to know about that. Casterbridge seems a long way away.

Tess is ambitious and extreme, but not so complex that you can’t look past its flaws. It’s never going to displace the ‘real’ Tess, but it does enough to stake a place in Hardy’s shadow, insisting that his vision isn’t the only way of looking at Dorset, and at humanity.

On the Shoulders of Architectural Giants

Fr Jeremy, the Roman Catholic parish priest, used to sit on the board of the Surrey Churches Preservation Trust and suggested we go to a Trust lecture at Merrow yesterday on the revision of Pevsner's Buildings of England volume for Surrey. It's seventy years since the first edition and forty years since the last revision carried out by Bridget Cherry, and now Charles O'Brien has revisited the whole county to complete the latest one. The talk gave a bit of background to the Buildings series - I hadn't realised that Pevsner got the idea from an earlier series of architectural monographs covering German regions, or how much of a popular audience the volumes were pitched at when first released; Penguin Books produced posters announcing 'The only comprehensive book about the buildings of your county', for instance. We had a whistlestop tour of Surrey churches and discovered that the original house in Stanwell where Dr Pevsner first sat at a table with Allen Lane from Penguin and conceived the idea for the series still exists. We learned how Pevsner's collaborator Ian Nairn wrote far more of the Surrey volume than anyone has tended to realise. I was delighted to learn that some omissions have been made good: St Mark's Hale with its fantastic wall paintings is in the revised volume, when the existing one not only overlooked it completely but called the other church in Hale, St John's, by the wrong name. 

Fr Jeremy has long had a responsibility for the fabric of Roman Catholic churches across the Arundel diocese and some of these are quite recent in date, as former bishop Cormac O'Connor insisted that each deanery should have one major church in it, which often meant building new ones: he asked Mr O'Brien whether he could think of particularly good churches built in the 21st century, or failing that good secular buildings. The author was forced to admit a little shame-facedly that the new Guildford Crematorium chapel wasn't in the revised book, as he was familiar with the old one and hadn't thought it worth while to go and check its replacement, 'and actually it's quite good. But it can go in the next edition'. We were all encouraged to get the new book, and if you order through the Yale University Press and quote PEV22 you can get a discount. There was one copy there at the lecture, and so many people crowded round it to look I didn't get to check whether Swanvale Halt church's entry was any improvement on the old one, which amounted to three words: 'dull lancet chapel'.

Intimations of Mortality in a Leading London Gallery

The idea was that I would meet S.D. at Tate Britain, but at first we managed to miss one another – I had, inexplicably, the wrong time and the wrong entrance, and at one stage we were both waiting for one another in different places. Neither of us had a mobile number for the other! But we did coincide eventually, and began our lunch in the Tate café rather hungrier than we intended to be. S.D. had a triple-bypass operation earlier in the year and two cataract removals, so feels a bit fragile and is having to get used to pacing himself rather more than usual. ‘I’ve reached the point where getting through each day, and then waking up in the morning, counts as a success’. I admitted I already felt like that, and that it would be better to leave something to look forward to in the future.

S.D. is covering for one of the Canons at Westminster Abbey as Canon in Residence (‘I only have to  read the first lesson at Mattins and Evensong, and be on hand in case the place burns down’), so as he left I looked round the shop. On the way we passed the Tate’s monumental current installation, ‘Procession’ by Hew Locke, a witty and thoroughly scary investigation of politics and social identity through something that looks like a religious event (‘Just like St Mary’s Bourne Street’ – that’s S.D., not Hew Locke) but with no liturgical content.

Usually I can be relied on to leave a gallery or museum shop with a handful of postcards but I thought 85p was a bit cheeky. I looked at the books. At the moment, as far as books are concerned, I am battling my way through three: Andrew Hickey’s The Mind Robber (one of Obverse Books’ ‘Black Archive’ volumes about individual Dr Who stories), Brian Bailey’s Great British Ruins from 1984 (a nice easy come-down bedtime read), and Airhead by Emily Maitlis, recounting the real experience of being a leading BBC news interviewer. I only got hold of that because there was a pile of copies in one of the churches I visited recently, with the instruction to take one away for free, but it has nice, short chapters and is physically light, making it an ideal train read – and very revealing of Maitlis and her interviewees. In the Tate shop there were hundreds of fascinating titles I would like to read, but I know I never would (I congratulated myself for owning a couple already). Analyses of colonialism and feminist art, of cultural trends and social phenomena: some of these are important, and in fact they might change the way you look at the world. Most of them will have been laboured over with commitment and dedication. But who will read them? Will they happen to find their way into the mind of someone who might have their worldview shifted by them, might as a result go on to do something which would affect their own life and others’?

It is no surprise that at my time of life I might think about what I have done with it. I know I’ve wasted a lot of time, but am I wasting it now? I’m not necessarily haunted by the thought that I might not have gone to the right places, had the most worthwhile experiences, or read the most enjoyable books from the Tate shop: that’s a consumerist approach to life I don’t endorse. But have I produced the most worthwhile things? Who will have listened to all my sermons, or read all the things I have written? I know what Father Somerset Ward would say, which is that our main concern should be to pray, so that our minds can be shaped after the mind of Christ: that there is no other way of pouring our own contribution into the life of the world that goes with the flow of the heavenly will. One can hope!