Issue 46

1st June 2015

Slightly Foxed Issue 46: From the Editors

Now the long summer days are here we like to get out of the city, to meet subscribers and get to know some of the many independent local bookshops which, in spite of difficult times, are still very much alive and kicking. On 11 June we’ll be in Suffolk at just such a shop, Harris & Harris in the pretty old wool town of Clare, to launch the summer issue and the latest of the Slightly Foxed Editions, Adrian Bell’s Silver Ley (see p.13).
- Gail Pirkis & Hazel Wood
From the editors
Mustapha’s Room

Mustapha’s Room

I had been book-starved for some years. It didn’t help that I was a literary snob and this was the pre-digital age. Earning a living by travelling around the world was extraordinary but I had forfeited good novels for this two-and-a-half-year experience. Sometimes I was lent books by clients but they weren’t always to my taste; I bought the odd second-hand novel from Aboudi’s bookshop in Luxor but they were hideously overpriced; and sometimes I was given a gem. Towards the end of my time in Egypt, another tour leader handed me Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible through a window of the departing Cairo-Aswan sleeper train with a shouted promise that I wouldn’t be able to put it down. She was right and I stayed up too late for several nights to finish this beautiful story of another part of Africa and overactive imaginations. Such finds were rare, sadly, and I ‘made do’, a state I didn’t much care for.
SF magazine subscribers only
Waugh on the Warpath

Waugh on the Warpath

Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One is not one of his ‘big name’ books. It doesn’t rank with, say, Scoop, Vile Bodies or Brideshead Revisited in the reading consciousness. I came across it only by dint of having a father who had read everything, usually as soon as it came out, and who had a first edition of the Penguin on his shelf. ‘If you like Decline and Fall,’ he would say, ‘you should read The Loved One,’ but for some reason I never did. Not until the other day, when it successfully got me through two dismal coach journeys. That is what Waugh specializes in, of course: a book to read which is like eating a longdrawn- out tea at Fortnum’s, but one you can leave and return to at your leisure – not that leaving it is all that easy.
SF magazine subscribers only

A Man and His Donkey

The name Platero in Spanish means ‘silversmith’ and is frequently given to grey-coloured donkeys. The relationship between Platero and the ‘I’ of the book is evoked with extraordinary tenderness. This book about a man and his donkey – an animal we humans often grant little dignity – is a love story of heartbreaking beauty and grace, a book about nature and our relationship with it, but also about imagination, the ‘clatter of fancy’ that enlivens our lives.
SF magazine subscribers only
In Search of the Biographer

In Search of the Biographer

The pioneering work in question, The Quest for Corvo (1934), was written by an author who published little else of note. It broke all the rules but established a literary sub-genre of its own by revealing the working of the biographer’s mind as he struggles to uncover and make sense of the scattered fragments of a life. This experimental work demonstrates how the image of any figure portrayed in a biography is not so much a photograph as a portrait in mosaic, reflecting within it something of the portraitist’s own personality and predispositions. As Julian Symons, the crime writer and brother of its author wrote, it blew the gaff on the genre ‘by refusing for a moment to make the customary pretence of detachment’.
SF magazine subscribers only

A Dream of Boyhood

The novel has sometimes been compared to James Barrie’s Peter Pan, and there are obvious parallels; in both books there are boys who are either unwilling or unable fully to grow up. However, this is not a book for children: far from it. The magic here lies in the narrative and its setting, the lyricism of the writing, and the delicate relationship of aspirations to actuality. The fabulous fête, as its author explained, is set within ‘a really quite simple story which could very well be my own’. Like Seurel, he grew up in a small country school run by his father. Like Meaulnes, he rebelled against the boredom of learning by rote, the endless preparation for tests and exams. Like Frantz, he was impetuous and romantic, having many short-lived affairs before being reported missing while on patrol near Verdun.
SF magazine subscribers only

A Bonza Town

I first heard of Nevil Shute’s A Town like Alice (1950) when I was a schoolboy, and long before I read it I was fascinated by the title. How, I wondered, could a town possibly be like a person? When I eventually discovered that ‘Alice’ was short for Alice Springs, a remote settlement in the Australian Outback, I was still baffled – for from what I knew of the plot, the novel’s main focus was wartime Malaya. And though I have now read it half a dozen times, and come to love its combination of far-flung romance, desperate endurance and old-fashioned stoicism, there remains a conundrum at the heart of it which continues to tantalize me, like a stubborn morsel of crabmeat wedged in the corner of a claw.
SF magazine subscribers only

Last of the Old Guard

Many years ago the novelist Alison Lurie assured me that while there was an upper class in the United States, it played very little part in the lives of most Americans: that was why Louis Auchincloss (1917–2010), the prolific author of novels about New York’s WASP ascendancy, remained an acquired taste over there. Or as an American critic once put it, ‘For all its merits, [his work] is out of context today.’ What nonsense! growled Auchincloss’s distant kinsman, Gore Vidal, when I mentioned this to him shortly afterwards. The caste to which ‘cousin Louis’ belonged, and about which he wrote so perceptively, was still firmly in the saddle, so he was doing Americans a favour by showing how their rulers behaved ‘in their banks and their boardrooms, their law offices and their clubs’.
SF magazine subscribers only
The Semi-invisible Man

The Semi-invisible Man

Published in 1952, Golden Earth remains one of the most timeless guides to Burma. It is classic Lewis, crammed with incident, humour, observation and detail. There is no mistaking the poise of his prose (Luigi Barzini likened reading it to ‘eating cherries’), nor the empathy that characterizes his dealings with everyone he meets, from monks and policemen to businessmen and lorry drivers. Both Golden Earth and its immediate predecessor, A Dragon Apparent (1951), based on his travels in Indochina, are much more than very fine examples of twentieth-century travel literature. This is profoundly civilized writing in defence of ancient civilizations under imminent threat.
SF magazine subscribers only

Having the Last Laugh

‘Infinity is no big deal, my friend; it’s a matter of writing. The universe only exists on paper,’ said Paul Valéry. I first found this ironic phrase as the epigraph to Historia abreviada de la literatura portátil (1985), or A Concise History of Portable Literature, by the Catalan author Enrique Vila-Matas. Vila-Matas is a brilliantly playful writer, an ironist himself, who toys with the parameters between reality and fiction and most usually elides them. His narrators are generally men a little like Vila-Matas himself; his novels discuss real and unreal authors with equal earnestness and the overall effect is both funny and poignant. For are we all not slightly unreal, or on the cusp of unreality, at any given moment, or if we feel fairly real this morning then might we not be unreal tomorrow, or in the near future?
SF magazine subscribers only
Fired by a Canon

Fired by a Canon

This unlikely clergyman turned out to be an ideal biographical subject. But it took Pearson seven difficult years to find him and then write The Smith of Smiths. It was published in 1934 when he was in his early forties. He had discovered an occupation that would absorb him for the remaining thirty years of his life. The book was soundly based on fact rather than guesswork and contained many quotations from the subject’s hitherto unpublished letters. It reads in places like an anthology of wit, but its true merit lies in the congenial atmosphere Pearson created and the perfect way in which he and his subject were attuned. Sydney Smith was a happy man and Pearson was to write a happy book. In the opinion of Richard Ingrams, who contributed an introduction to the Hogarth Press edition in 1984, ‘it is probably his masterpiece’. Certainly it turned out to be his most durable work.
SF magazine subscribers only
Grecian Hours

Grecian Hours

Published in 1854, it’s the world’s first guidebook to Greece, by which its author, the mysterious GFB, meant classical and historical Greece, many of these places ‘not yet reunited to Christendom’. Admittedly Pausanius produced ten topographical volumes back in the second century ad, and footnotes to Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage describe how to visit places mentioned in his topographical poem, but this was the first informative, practical guide. Suggested routes around Greece accompany essays on language, government, character, soil, the justice system, the economy, history, architecture, religion, plus tips on how and when to go. It’s a good read too. GFB was determined that it should be enjoyed as much beside the fire at home as it was on the road.
SF magazine subscribers only

Amber Hits Back

I came to A Lady and Her Husband via H. G. Wells, which is all the wrong way round. I’d been seeking suffragettes. I wanted some fictional feminists in my life. Already on my team I had Mira Ward, from Marilyn French’s consciousness-raising epic The Women’s Room, and Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying sexual adventuress Isadora Wing. But the Seventies feminists were so bleak. And post-feminists were so muddled. I wanted inspiration. I wanted clarity. I thought about the suffragettes. They’d had clear battle lines and actual victories; might their novels be more heartening?
SF magazine subscribers only
Great Scott!

Great Scott!

There is a greater accretion of literary anecdote attached to the old John Murray premises at No. 50 Albemarle Street than perhaps to any other building. At times, when working there in the 1970s and ’80s, I felt the place might finally disappear beneath these parasitic lianas and leaves, with me buried inside, but among them there was always one orchid which I treasured, dating from April 1815, when Scott and Byron met there for the first time. A very young John Murray III was a witness and recalled much later how ‘It was a curious sight to see the two greatest poets of the age – both lame – stumping downstairs side by side.’
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