Friday, 4 February 2011
The operation of grace
I was very struck by a sentence in a fellow-blogger's post today, about Brideshead Revisited: ‘the religious theme drove me nuts with its ending of ultimate conservatism, propping up the past, the sterile old British way of life’. Evelyn Waugh explained in his introduction to Brideshead that it is about ‘the operation of grace’ – neither an easy concept nor a banal escapist theme for a novel. It is striking that men capable of such unflinching vision and insights into the human condition – to take just three – as Waugh, Graham Greene and T S Eliot were Christian converts (as for that matter were Boris Pasternak -’zhivago’ is church slavonic for ‘the living God’- and Alexander Solzhenitsyn). I was at a tribute concert by Patti Smith to the late W G Sebald in Aldeburgh on Saturday evening (Jan 29) where every single one of the items had a Christian theme. Sterile? Conservative? These thoughts are to the forefront because of the discussion evening yesterday at St Dunstan's in the West, on the life and work of Father Alexander Men. Someone asked me: why did they need to kill him? The answer given at the time by friends whose opinions I respect was always 'because he was free'. ps How about this for synchronicity: Thought for the Day on BBCR4 today was by Richard Harries who wrote the introductions to both Awake to Life, the cycle of 18 pre-and post-Easter sermons by Father Alexander Men, and the US and UK editions of Christianity for the Twentyfirst Century the collection of FAM's interviews, talks and essays with a short biographical note - contact me for one of the few copies remaining.
Thursday, 3 February 2011
A trip down memory lane
This evening I am leading a discussion at St Dunstan's in the West on the life and work of Father Alexander Men. What happened is this: William Gulliford, the vicar, asked me if I would like to choose a topic for one of his Thursday evening supper meetings. He leads 6pm vespers, then the five or six people who turn up go through to his little dining room/vestry with a kitchen, make supper (baked spuds, cold meat, fruit, cheese etc) and then go through to his cosy study for a sort of seminar.
First of all I suggested Dr Zhivago, some passages in Chapter One The Five O Clock Express but he talked me into Fr A Men. I have sent down to the church a box of the US Continuum edition of Christianity for the Twentyfirst Century - the Life and Work of Alexander Men (a book I co-edited with my friend Ann Shukman) which I rescued from being pulped at a few days’ notice, so that everyone can have a copy to take away.
When I was at my mother's house on Friday, I remembered that I had given a copy to her when it came out and searched high and low for it with no success. But what I did find was a copy of Awake to Life a cycle of Easter sermons given by Fr Alexander and published by my friend Robert Dudley's Bowerdean Press, which I have been reading. A card fell out, a colourful very retro Russian Easter card of two chicks pulling an Easter-egg shaped cart, with a note I had written when I gave it to her.
Finding Awake to Life brought back to me how Rob was involved, and so I will give him full credit for being the first to take up the torch, as it were. I should explain that Fr Alexander was the parish priest of Novaya Derevnya (in English 'New Village') northeast of Moscow on the road to Sergiev Posad the monastery town seat of the Patriarch so equivalent in that sense to Canterbury. Fr Alexander was in every way remarkable: he embodied the message of Christ, that true freedom is love. The 18 sermons often mention death, and he was murdered not long after he had baptised my elder daughter Abi, by dark forces of church and state analogous to those who cut down Thomas Beckett. At the suggestion of the Rev Chad Coussmaker, chaplain of our Embassy in Moscow and with the encouragement - in the shape of a commission promising a run at his theatre - of Dr Donald Smith,the Director of the Netherbow Theatre in Edinburgh, I adapted T S Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral with Mark Rozovsky, director of Moscow theatre At The Nikitsky Gates. Our version was entitled Murder in the Cathedral - a Russian Rehearsal. It was a great success and has toured Russia ever since, winning prizes. Mrs Valerie Eliot, T S's widow who owns the rights does not, however permit any use of her late husband's original material to be co-opted in this way, so this powerful telling of the murder of Fr Alexander has not been performed outside Russia. It is the birthday today of Gertrude Stein who once said: I am going to read what I have written to read, because in a general way it is easier even if it is not better and in a general way it is better even if it is not easier to read what has been written than to say what has not been written.'
First of all I suggested Dr Zhivago, some passages in Chapter One The Five O Clock Express but he talked me into Fr A Men. I have sent down to the church a box of the US Continuum edition of Christianity for the Twentyfirst Century - the Life and Work of Alexander Men (a book I co-edited with my friend Ann Shukman) which I rescued from being pulped at a few days’ notice, so that everyone can have a copy to take away.
When I was at my mother's house on Friday, I remembered that I had given a copy to her when it came out and searched high and low for it with no success. But what I did find was a copy of Awake to Life a cycle of Easter sermons given by Fr Alexander and published by my friend Robert Dudley's Bowerdean Press, which I have been reading. A card fell out, a colourful very retro Russian Easter card of two chicks pulling an Easter-egg shaped cart, with a note I had written when I gave it to her.
Finding Awake to Life brought back to me how Rob was involved, and so I will give him full credit for being the first to take up the torch, as it were. I should explain that Fr Alexander was the parish priest of Novaya Derevnya (in English 'New Village') northeast of Moscow on the road to Sergiev Posad the monastery town seat of the Patriarch so equivalent in that sense to Canterbury. Fr Alexander was in every way remarkable: he embodied the message of Christ, that true freedom is love. The 18 sermons often mention death, and he was murdered not long after he had baptised my elder daughter Abi, by dark forces of church and state analogous to those who cut down Thomas Beckett. At the suggestion of the Rev Chad Coussmaker, chaplain of our Embassy in Moscow and with the encouragement - in the shape of a commission promising a run at his theatre - of Dr Donald Smith,the Director of the Netherbow Theatre in Edinburgh, I adapted T S Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral with Mark Rozovsky, director of Moscow theatre At The Nikitsky Gates. Our version was entitled Murder in the Cathedral - a Russian Rehearsal. It was a great success and has toured Russia ever since, winning prizes. Mrs Valerie Eliot, T S's widow who owns the rights does not, however permit any use of her late husband's original material to be co-opted in this way, so this powerful telling of the murder of Fr Alexander has not been performed outside Russia. It is the birthday today of Gertrude Stein who once said: I am going to read what I have written to read, because in a general way it is easier even if it is not better and in a general way it is better even if it is not easier to read what has been written than to say what has not been written.'
Wednesday, 2 February 2011
A case of mistaken identity
Lunch today with a distinguished former journalist and foreign correspondent at Tom's Kitchen, where the proprietor himself was to be seen bustling about behind the counter for all the world like a common or garden non-celebrity chef. The talk turned to the situation in Egypt, and my friend recalled being wrong-footed by the revolution forty years ago in Iran, when she had not foreseen the Islamist crackdown. We exchanged notes on the books we are reading. She recommended A Woman Unknown, a memoir by Robert Graves' daughter Lucia. The mention of Robert Graves' name evoked a memory linked to Benjamin Britten, as follows: when I was a teenager, I decided to see if I could get up a party to go to hear Britten's War Requiem at the Royal Festival Hall. I knew very few people likely to be willing to go, but thought I would try Martin Tallents who lived nearby. Martin was a cabinet maker, about to move to Majorca to live and work with Robert Graves. I rang the house, and a baritone voice answered. Nervously I plunged ahead and explained the plan. ' I would be delighted' boomed Lady Tallents, Martin's mother, to my utter dismay. So it was that I went to hear the Requiem in company with an elderly woman clad if I remember right in voluminous black bombazine, like Queen Victoria only a good deal taller. Talking of tall women, I swear I passed Naomi Campbell yesterday in Waitrose, in characteristic catwalk stride, holding a jar of something triumphantly aloft as she swept past the fish counter heading towards the cheese.
The Aldeburgh Bookshop
I did manage to dash in to the excellent double-fronted Aldeburgh Bookshop on Monday morning to touch base with John and Mary the proprietors who run the annual Aldeburgh literary festival (this year March 4-6). I went in, and in an extreme parody of the booksellers' worst nightmare, asked for a book I couldn't remember the name of by an author ditto. They did try to find it, and now they do know what the book was - The Possessed by (no not the one by Dostoievsky) but the memorably -named Elif Batuman. It is a comic book for grownups, about Russian literature. I haven't got it yet but it's on Amazon and the web. I also asked for W G Sebald's After Nature, the long poem that Patti Smith based her programme on at the Maltings last Saturday night - sold out. Ditto the winner of this year's Costa prize, Of Mutability by Jo Shapcott. So I bought Maggie Hambling's beautiful book about the making of, and controversy surrounding, her Scallop sculpture to honour Benjamin Britten on the beach at Aldeburgh, with an introduction by Stephen Fry. Here I can smuggle in the boast that the last time I was in Aldeburgh it was as a guest (with John) of Slava Rostropovich and Galina Vishnevskaya. We had taken Yury Liubimov down to discuss how to get out of the Soviet Union. Yury and Slava sat in the sauna for hours while we pottered around the Red House where the Rostropoviches were staying. Slava told us how when B Britten and Peter Pears came to Russia, they had been giving a concert of songs set by Britten to poems by Pushkin. As Galina sang the last line of one which mentioned a bell, the bell in the clock tower at the venue chimed in at exactly the right moment.
Dash for growth
We are aiming to add 50 names to the 'members welcome' box on the Moffat Book Events website (go to www.moffatbookevents.co.uk, click on 'About' and scroll down past my entry to see what it will look like). We do it for you - email me or info@moffatbookevents.co.uk
Tuesday, 1 February 2011
Spooky
As publishers of John le Carre’s novels, Penguin/Viking may be amused to learn that I have been chosen by the organisers of World Book Night (March 5) as a successful applicant to distribute 48 copies of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. John (David Cornwell) made his first trip to Moscow as a direct result of something I said on a visit to Moscow myself in the late 1980’s.
At the time of the remark which brought about David’s visit, my then (now ex) husband John C Q Roberts was the Director of the Foreign Office-funded Great Britain-USSR Association, charged with making meaningful contacts with individuals and organisations in the Soviet Union on a non-political basis and in opposition to two other, then communist-oriented, British organisations with apparently similar aims in the field.
I myself am a Russianist ie I gained my UK BA Hons degree in Russian, speak Russian etc. We were having lunch at a restaurant in Moscow with one of John’s Russian counterparts, ostensibly discussing forthcoming cultural exchanges, when the Russian suddenly – and presumably for the entertainment of colleagues listening in to our conversation - proposed that the GB-USSR Association should join in a celebration of the life and work of ‘the patriot Kim Philby’. There was a stunned silence , then, inspired perhaps by the vodka, I said: ‘What a brilliant idea!’ The blood drained from John’s face. ‘And we, for our part, could put on a celebration of the life and work of the patriot Colonel Oleg Penkovsky’. John relaxed. The Russian changed the subject.
Later at our customary farewell visit to our then Ambassador at the Embassy, John told the story and our Ambassador said: ‘What an extraordinary coincidence’... That morning, he had received a request from David Cornwell (aka John le Carre) whom the Ambassador said he knew ‘from National Service days in the army’ asking for advice about coming to Moscow for the first time to research a book.
Thus,John and I came to meet David and his wife Jane and John took David to Russia to meet the real life people and places that were later to figure, transformed, in The Russia House – his story of a publisher who becomes embroiled in the world of espionage at the Moscow Book Fair.
We came to meet Fred Schepisi and Michelle Pfeiffer that way too, but that is another story.
At the time of the remark which brought about David’s visit, my then (now ex) husband John C Q Roberts was the Director of the Foreign Office-funded Great Britain-USSR Association, charged with making meaningful contacts with individuals and organisations in the Soviet Union on a non-political basis and in opposition to two other, then communist-oriented, British organisations with apparently similar aims in the field.
I myself am a Russianist ie I gained my UK BA Hons degree in Russian, speak Russian etc. We were having lunch at a restaurant in Moscow with one of John’s Russian counterparts, ostensibly discussing forthcoming cultural exchanges, when the Russian suddenly – and presumably for the entertainment of colleagues listening in to our conversation - proposed that the GB-USSR Association should join in a celebration of the life and work of ‘the patriot Kim Philby’. There was a stunned silence , then, inspired perhaps by the vodka, I said: ‘What a brilliant idea!’ The blood drained from John’s face. ‘And we, for our part, could put on a celebration of the life and work of the patriot Colonel Oleg Penkovsky’. John relaxed. The Russian changed the subject.
Later at our customary farewell visit to our then Ambassador at the Embassy, John told the story and our Ambassador said: ‘What an extraordinary coincidence’... That morning, he had received a request from David Cornwell (aka John le Carre) whom the Ambassador said he knew ‘from National Service days in the army’ asking for advice about coming to Moscow for the first time to research a book.
Thus,John and I came to meet David and his wife Jane and John took David to Russia to meet the real life people and places that were later to figure, transformed, in The Russia House – his story of a publisher who becomes embroiled in the world of espionage at the Moscow Book Fair.
We came to meet Fred Schepisi and Michelle Pfeiffer that way too, but that is another story.
Chosen!
I have been chosen by the organisers of World Book Night to distribute 48 copies of The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, my nominated book from their short list. My idea on the night (March 5) is to give them to long distance lorry drivers in Crawford, a village on the A74M much favoured for overnight stops. I will be picking the books up from Atkinson-Pryce Books in Biggar. Anyone want to join me?
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