Slightly Foxed Issue 4 | Articles & Extracts

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Issue 4

1st December 2004

Slightly Foxed Issue 4: From the Editors

Slightly Foxed has now settled comfortably into Clerkenwell. The only drawback of the new office is the spectacular view – we spend far too much time watching the clouds, which at this time of year race over the dome of St Paul’s at a sometimes alarming rate. (If you’d like to come and visit – and don’t mind aged dogs – you’d be most welcome.) We haven’t spotted any Christmas lights going up yet, but it can’t be long.

- Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood

From the editors

O Jackie . . .

It’s 1991 and the recession is beginning to bite. Publishers’ accountants are staring at unearned balances, and reputations – for being artistic, for having introduced a ‘new voice’ or style – are about to be shown up for what they are: froth on the daydream, in the unforgettable (and pretentious) words of the French surrealist writer Boris Vian. Everywhere, writers are talking of TV opportunities – or even, as rumour has it that Paramount are about to open a London office, the true daydream, that of the Hollywood blockbuster.

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A Tuft of a Masterpiece

A Tuft of a Masterpiece

The term ‘masterpiece’ is often used lazily as a bit of instant praise, but the dictionary definition is actually ‘a production surpassing in excellence all others by the same hand’. So, strictly, you can only produce one masterpiece. Cyril Connolly (1903-1974) may have had this on his mind when he began his book The Unquiet Grave: ‘The more books we read, the clearer it becomes that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and no other task is of any consequence.’ He, alas, never produced a major work to earn the distinction himself, and he will mainly be remembered as the founder (with Stephen Spender) of the literary magazine Horizon and as the principal book reviewer of the Sunday Times in the period after the Second World War.

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Unsung Heroes

Unsung Heroes

My first copy of Nicholas Monsarrat’s The Cruel Sea was a twelfth birthday present, given to me in 1956. It was Cassell’s expurgated ‘Cadet Edition’, intended for a generation who knew little about the war during which they had been born. While Monsarrat’s publishers thought we should be acquainted with the Battle of the Atlantic, they clearly considered that we would come in our own time to adultery and what was then breathlessly referred to as ‘premarital sexual intercourse’. What mattered was access to Monsarrat’s brilliant evocation of a grim campaign at sea. I read it as I bumped into school on the Northern Line and have been haunted by it ever since.

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Friends Reunited

Every year as many as eleven thousand novels may be published in Britain, of which only a handful amount to much. So it is all the more surprising to come across a masterpiece. Such is Embers by the Hungarian writer Sándor Márai. I found myself so gripped by this elegiac novel, so seduced by its limpid prose, that when I came to the final page I turned back to the first and began to reread.

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A Matter of Trust

Once Upon Another Time is Jessica Douglas-Home’s account of the part she herself played in an extraordinary private enterprise which came to be known as ‘the Oxford visitors’. The story began with Julius Tomin, a philosophy teacher who had been ejected from his university position in Czechoslovakia. He continued openly, but unofficially, to teach courses for students expelled from Charles University on political grounds. He and his students were subjected to violence and harassment, and the strict control of access to books imposed by the authorities led to their losing touch entirely with the course of learning in the West. In 1979 Tomin wrote a letter to many Western universities, inviting lecturers to visit and speak at his seminars. Oxford was the only university to respond.

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The Price of Addle Tree

Not many pleasures attach to growing old. And as former pleasures pass away one by one, fewer still emerge, new and unrehearsed. Reading, albeit more slowly and through spectacles, remains a source of knowledge and provides the increasingly rare frisson of sheer delight. Most unexpectedly in my perilously lengthening lifetime, however, arrived the spanking new and rejuvenating joy of rereading.

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Hand and Mind Together

Hand and Mind Together

Faced with a new book, an illustrator ponders. Should the illustrations decorate the page or interpret the text? Should they interpret it scene by scene or accompany it at a distance as a visual counterpoint? Will they be simple visualizations, getting the costumes, settings and characters as ‘anyone’ would wish to see them, or a more personal interpretation? Will they be chapter headings, full pages or vignettes? How many have been commissioned, how frequently will they occur? Will their even placing coincide with illustratable moments, or will favourite scenes have to be ditched and minor ones brought forward?

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Voyage in the Dark

Voyage in the Dark

Good Morning, Midnight is in fact the fourth in a series of novels that draw largely on Jean Rhys’s own life. Sasha Jansen is a lonely, ageing alcoholic who, at the instigation of a worried friend, goes to spend a recuperative fortnight in Paris, where she had lived during her brief marriage. Now she wanders the streets, ‘remembering this, remembering that’. She has been so damaged by men that when happiness is within her grasp she is unable to prevent herself seeking revenge with a futile gesture of self-destruction.

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A Passion for Crustaceans

The Longshoreman is the story of an obsession with fish, beginning when, as a boy in the 1940s, Richard Shelton explored the streams around his home in Buckinghamshire, and continuing right through the twenty years he spent as head of the Freshwater Fisheries Laboratory at Pitlochry, in Scotland, from 1982 to 2001.

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My First Gethsemane

My First Gethsemane

Thirty-nine years ago I came to work at Heywood Hill’s bookshop in Curzon Street. Between school and Cambridge, I had worked for three months at Heffers, where Mr Reuben Heffer had cannily put me in the Science Department. It was the only part of the shop where I wouldn’t read the stock. This could hardly be called a preparation for the sophisticated carriage trade in the West End, and I had little inkling of what would be expected of me. At my interview with Handasyde Buchanan, Heywood’s long-term partner and my future boss, it appeared that he considered himself the doyen of London booksellers and that he was pleased that, like him, I had had a Classical education.

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Northern Lights

Arctic Dreams is much more than a travel book; its subtitle is Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape, which causes one to raise an eyebrow. Desire? What does the man mean? To be honest I am still not too sure, but by now I am sufficiently beguiled by its author not to care too much. Suffice it that he takes you on a journey to black seas in which float icebergs the size of cathedrals, to the campsites of Inuit who died fifteen hundred years ago, and to endless plains where snow geese rise like twists of smoke; that he conjures up for you the intimate presence of narwhals, polar bears, seals, whales, muskoxen.

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Ancient Worlds

Ancient Worlds

I was thus apprehensive, for my sake as well as my children’s, when I encouraged them to read Rosemary Sutcliff. I wondered whether I would still be drawn to her ancient worlds, her vanished races among the Caledonian Forest, her harpers and her war hosts, her bonfire festivals of Lammas and Beltane, her mead horns at Saxon feastings, her evocations of the last of Roman Britain. I need not have worried. The magic was still there. In his pantheon of literary heroes and heroines, Giuseppe di Lampedusa reserved the highest places for the authors he called creatori di mondi. Rosemary Sutcliff was such a writer, a creator of worlds, lost worlds, often worlds of lost causes, of the departing legions, of Arthurian Britain, of the last stand of the Lakeland Norsemen against the knights of William Rufus. But they are not simply worlds of battle-axes and war horns. Her imagination encompassed the natural world, a feeling for its rites and a knowledge of its workings. Some of her most beautiful passages describe the changing of seasons, the ways of wolf packs, the flights of wild geese, the solitudes of the east coast marshes. And no one (except perhaps Kipling) has handled the death of a devoted dog better than she did in Dawn Wind.

The Man Who Read the Land

The Man Who Read the Land

When he was asked to update The Making of the English Landscape by W. G. Hoskins, Christopher Taylor described it as ‘one of the greatest history books ever written’. I may not have appreciated that when I bought the original version as a modest Pelican paperback in 1975 but, like any self-absorbed teenager, I was convinced of its importance to me. It was a revelation, confirming and explaining things dimly sensed yet intensely felt, and it settled deeply into my consciousness, permanently altering the way I looked at the world.

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Funny Side of the Street

At some point in the early 1960s Jennings was supplanted in the Observer by someone altogether more bracing: Michael Frayn. It was about the time of That Was the Week That Was and Private Eye, and though as far as I know he never had anything to do with either of them, Frayn was absolutely in tune with the Zeitgeist; in fact I wouldn’t be at all surprised if I first came across the word ‘Zeitgeist’ in one of his columns, probably in the guise of a German art critic called Ludwig von Zeitgeist.

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Orkney’s Prospero

Orkney’s Prospero

Every Thursday morning for twenty years and more, the Orkney writer George Mackay Brown cleared a breakfast-table space among the teacups and the marmalade and, sitting with his elbows among the crumbs, picked up a cheap biro and jotted down 400 words on a notepad. It was a letter to the local newspaper, The Orcadian, for publication the following Thursday, and as such was written to entertain an island community of fewer than 2,000 souls. Through the small window of the simple council house – just a few steps away – the sea glimmered and whispered.

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