Buchan, Barrie, Buncle

Broughton has John Buchan, Kirkcudbright - J.M Barrie. Moffat has Ossian, a glancing blow from Burns and D.E.Stevenson. Plans are afoot for Moffat Book Events to build on the D.E.S. connection, by presenting a rehearsed reading of a version for the theatre of Miss Buncle's Book.

I have opened the first of the 26 boxes of books retrieved from storage on Friday Jan 27th, but did not take any out yet. Instead, I played for time by starting a list of categories for my library: novels; history; biography, poetry, plays, politics, economics etc. I could spin out the whole process by trying to remember where, when and why I bought each book. One of the books on the top layer of the box I opened was a bright yellow paperback of Les Liaisons Dangeureuses, the sort of French book where you had to cut the pages. I probably bought it after seeing the 1959 film by Roger Vadim set in contemporary France with a star-studded cast headed by Jeanne Moreau, Gerard Philipe, and Annette Vadim, and Jean-Louis Trintingant - later to hit the heights with Anouk Aimee in 'Un Homme et Une Femme' in a supporting role. Trintingnant in later life was memorable as the judge in the third film of the Kristow Kieslowski's trilogy 'Three Colours: Blue,White and Red. Gerard Philipe, the greatest classical French actor of his generation, died eight weeks after the film of Les Liaisons was released. I have made inquiries of the firm that makes the 'speaking benches' for the National Trust to make one that plays Gerard Philipe reciting 'Heureux qui, comme Ulysse' to go with the pavement in my garden engraved with the poem which, suitably for Moffat, celebrates the Golden Fleece.

Ghosts

I watched the film The Ghost on TV yesterday evening, and found it as good, if not better, than when I first saw it. It is beautiful as well as neatly gripping, the spare, bleak buildings and wintery landscape mirroring the narrative, adapted from the novel by Robert Harris. All the plot twists are credible, as are the characters (well cast) and the underlying premise: that a UK Prime Minister's policy decisions - always in favour of what the US wished - were down to his wife having been recruited at university by the CIA.

Trailers for another ghost movie soon to be released, The Woman in Black, are also airing on TV, starring Daniel Radcliffe, the erstwhile Harry Potter.

Lastly, I am progressing through The Snow Child, which also has an element of the magical and inexplicable. On page 300 there is a sentence which has connotations in English of which the author may be unaware: 'He had shot her fox'. To shoot someone's fox, a metaphor taken from the hunting field, in parliamentary, legal or City of London terms means to thwart a ploy, snatch the advantage , deprive someone of their quarry.

Arthur Ransome

The epigram or quotation at the beginning of Eowyn Ivey's The Snow Child, set in 1920, is from Arthur Ransome's version of the old Russian folk tale Snegurochka:
'Wife, let us go into the yard behind and make a little snow girl; and perhaps she will come alive and be a little daughter to us.'
'Husband' says the old woman, 'There's no knowing what may be. Let us go into the yard and make a little snow girl'.
Later in the book, Ivey has her protagonist Mabel write to her sister in Philadelphia asking her to send a book of Russian fairy tales that had belonged to their father, a professor of literature at the university of Pennsylvania. In the letter accompanying the book, Mabel's sister explains that the request had come in the nick of time because 'a student from the university, a Mr Arthur Ransome', had been picking through their father's book collection; he was studying Russian folk tales, had told her the story of Snegurochka.
I sort of stubbed my toe on this. I checked in Wikipedia and saw that Arthur Ransome, now mainly famous as the author of Swallows and Amazons, did not go to university for more than a year, and that was in England. (Incidentally, he had had the same room at Rugby school as Lewis Carroll aka Charles Dodgson, the subject of Friday Jan 27th's MBE blog) He knew Russian because he went to Russia in 1913 to study Russian folklore, and in 1914 published 21 Russian folk tales under the title Old Peter's Russian Tales, stayed on as a newspaper correspondent, witnessed the revolution, met the leaders Lenin and Trotsky, and later married Lenin's secretary after divorcing his English wife. There is no mention in the Wikipedia entry of his having visited America, in 1920 0r any other year, in pursuit of knowledge about 'fairy tales of the far north'. In The Snow Child, Mabel's sister describes how she practically had to prise the book from Ransome's ('the young man's) hands - by this time, Ransome was a man of 36 and had already published his version of Russian fairy tales in English seven years before.
I am still enjoying Ivey's novel, though - I am on Chapter 24 and there are still plenty of adventures ahead for Jack, Mabel, their neighbours George and Esther and the mysterious 'snow child' Faina.

Thought for the Day

I have started to read Eowyn Ivey's (sic - have I been mis-spelling it 'Iwey' all along?) The Snow Child. I am delighted to confirm that it is both extremely well written and a gripping story. I am on page 104, about to start on Chapter 13. Ivey fulfills V S Naipaul's self-imposed criterion of always writing about more than one thing. This doesn't mean that Ivey has written a leadenly obvious fable, nudging us irritatingly in the ribs nodding and winking and tapping the side of her nose but that she has succeeded in writing convincingly both about a middle-aged couple struggling with life in Alaska and about much more than that: about ...well you can read it yourselves and then we can discuss.

The free online service The Writer's Almanac reminds that today is the birthday of the comic novelist David Lodge, born in suburban London, England (1935), to a traditional Catholic family. His early novel, The Picturegoers (1960), is about a Catholic family in South London who take in a university student as a lodger. Other early novels draw on Lodge's own life: Ginger, You're Barmy (1962) about compulsory service in the British military, and The British Museum is Falling Down (1970) about a Catholic graduate student working on his thesis.

It's the birthday of novelist Colette, born Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette in a village in France (1873). She's the author of more than 50 novels, including Gigi (1944), which was made into a movie. She died in 1954 at 81 years old, the first woman in the history of France to be given a state funeral -- 6,000 people filed by her casket and covered it in flowers.
Collette said, "Sit down and put down everything that comes into your head and then you're a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff's worth, without pity, and destroy most of it."

A True Story

I went into the information office in Dumfries yesterday and asked the person behind the desk, absorbed in something on her computer screen, where I could find the poems on windows in the town that form part of this year's Burns celebrations. She said she had never heard of the poems on windows scheme. She suggested I try the Burns Centre. 'It's on the other side of the river' she said, gesturing vaguely in the air. There was a tear-off pad of maps on the counter, and I asked her to show me where the Burns Centre was on the map. As I turned to leave, my hand on the door, she shouted after me: 'You could try The Coach and Horses next door'.

Through the Looking Glass

Happy Birthday Lewis Carroll, author of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865). Six years later, he published its sequel, Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There (1871). Not many people (eg me until today) know that the only time Lewis Carroll (real name Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) went abroad was on a two-month trip to Russia July-Sept 1867. The journal Carroll/Dodgson wrote recording his experiences in Russia was only published in 1935. I have ordered a copy from Amazon, and will let you know what he did there. Lewis Carroll was born in Daresbury, Cheshire (1832). He was gifted at mathematics, went to Oxford, graduated with first class honours, and stayed at his college, Christ Church, as a teacher for the rest of his life. Uniquely, for a university tutor at the time, he was excused ordination. He didn't really like teaching. But it earned him a living, and he thought of it as a temporary endeavour while he worked on becoming famous as an artist. Carroll wrote poems and short stories, and took photographs, and then one day in 1856, he took three little girls, Ina, Edith, and Alice on a boating trip down the river, and told them the story that became Alice.

Talking of wonderful worlds removed from reality, I commend resistance to the payment of any bonus to Stephen Hester at RBS and an article by a senior economist formerly at the IMF Europe’s Debt Crisis Is Still Likely to End Badly: Simon Johnson - Bloomberg

An evening with Christopher Hampton

British playwright Christopher Hampton, was born on this day in Faial in the Azores archipelago (1946). His father was an engineer for Cable and Wireless and got sent all over the world. His parents were interested in sports and social events. Hampton said, "I was the odd one out in the family, this small boy with thick glasses who read all the time." He went to Oxford, studied modern languages -- and wrote a play, When Did You Last See My Mother? Which was performed at Oxford and made its way to the West End, and at the age of 20, Hampton was the youngest playwright ever to have a play produced on the West End.
He continued to write plays, including the comedy The Philanthropist when he was 23. Hampton said: "I had a conversation with my agent Peggy Ramsay after The Philanthropist. She said, 'You've got a choice: You can write the same play over and over for the next 30 years, and you'll probably get even better at it, or you can decide to do something completely different every time.' So I said, 'As a matter of fact, I have started writing a play about the extermination of the Brazilian Indians in the 1960s.' And she said, 'Well, that'll do it, dear.'"
He wrote the movie Dangerous Liaisons and co-wrote the book and lyrics for the musical Sunset Boulevard, adapted Chekhov's The Seagull for the stage, wrote the screenplay for the film Atonement (2007), adapted from Ian McEwan's novel; and translated several plays by French playwright Yasmina Reza, including 'Art ' (1994)and God of Carnage (2006).

I spent an evening with Hampton and a visiting Russian playwright Mikhail (Misha) Roshchin at Hampton's Tales From Hollywood when it was playing at London's National Theatre in 1984. Hampton's play relies on witty dialogue which made it a difficult evening for Misha who spoke no English. Every time he asked me what someone on stage had stage a theatregoer behind us said'SShhh' loudly, so eventually we went and stood at the back where we could whisper without causing offence. Roshchin's visit was marked by a spectacular feat of acting by my former husband, a diplomat who had never trodden the boards: he and Roshchin arrived at a dinner party packed with theatrical and other celebrities and managed to pass themselves off as the other (being unknown to all but their hostess, Caroline Blakiston).