Rosamond Lehmann Reading Week

         

     Following the success of Simon and Harriet‘s Muriel Spark Reading Week in April and the anouncement of a Beryl Bainbridge Reading Week to be hosted by Annabel/Gaskella in June, I thought I’d add another log to the fire and hold a Rosamond Lehmann Reading Week this summer.

     I first discovered Rosamond Lehmann (1901-1990) six years ago, when I was looking for something new to read and picked up Dusty Answer. Quite unexpectedly – for my reading tastes at the time favoured the Victorian – I was engrossed. I had never thought a twentieth-century writer could be so intensely readable. The discovery re-shaped the entire course of my studies, for my Masters dissertations, and now my P.h.D., have been devoted to Lehmann’s work.

     I have naturally been keen to share my enthusiasm. But to my disapppointment, even in academic circles, there are few who have heard her name, let alone read her books. Yet this has not always been the case. Her first novel was a succès de scandale and made her famous practically overnight, and each of her subsequent books was greeted with warm praise both in her native UK and in the States, but also in France, where the first translation of her work appeared as early as 1929.

     Identified by her contemporaries as a member of the Bloomsbury Group, Rosamond Lehmann herself felt a bit of an outsider. She certainly wasn’t as obsessed with Cézanne as Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, as eager as Virginia Woolf to deconstruct the workings of the Victorian plot, or even as keen on raucous drinking parties as the rest of the set, including her own husband. But her personal life was as unconventional, her work as experimental and innovative, as any of the better-known Bloomsberries.

     She is remembered best for her empathetic portrayal of women in love, but to reduce her to that is to overlook the many other wonderful aspects of her writing. She skillfully captures the pain and confusion of growing up in the wake of the Great War, and is an unparalleled chronicler of the changes affecting women’s lives between the wars, dealing with such delicate topics as education, divorce, and illegal abortion. She also paints a vivid portrait of the bohemian and artistic circles she moved in, and when Mayfair meets Bloomsbury, the situation is rife with social comedy. Lehmann’s constant experiments in style and technique make each book different from the last, but each reveals great dramatic power and lyricism, and is a unique and fascinating experience.

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Rosamond Lehmann Reading List:

Dusty Answer (1927)

A Note in Music (1930)

Invitation to the Waltz (1932)

The Weather in the Streets (1936)

The Ballad and the Source (1944)

The Gypsy’s Baby and Other Stories (1946)

The Echoing Grove (1953)

The Swan in the Evening: Fragments of an Inner Life (1967)

A Sea-Grape Tree (1976)

Rosamond Lehmann: A Life, by Selina Hastings (2002)

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     Any and all are welcome to participate in Rosamond Lehmann Reading Week. Those who have a blog and wish to post reviews or discussions, be sure to add your name to the comments box so that I will be able to link back to you when the time comes.

     And happy reading to you all!

© Florence Berlioz 2012

 

Of Books and Gardens

     In honour of the Chelsea Flower Show, which is taking place this week (and oh, how I wish I were there!), Cornflower has launched a new garden-themed meme. All you have to do is complete the sentences with the titles of books you’ve read this year…

April sun shining on the pond garden at home.

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     Early this morning as I was Dancing for Degas, I stepped out of The Castle on the Hill into the garden and bent down to touch The Hermaphrodite.

As dawn broke and I took in my surroundings, I noticed several things: A Sea-Grape Tree was struggling due to Cocaine Blues, The Food of Love had been dug up in The Camomile Lawn under The Golden Bough, but with help from Madame Pamplemousse and her Incredible Edibles and knowledge gleaned from The Four Seasons, I was able to bury it with Songs of Blue and Gold.

     Later, The Real Katie Lavender popped in to take a cutting or two; she told me The Story of a Marriage, but she pointed out that it was a Summer of Love.

     Taking a well-earned rest from the weeding and chatting over the wall with The Uncommon Reader from next door, I mentioned The Peach Keeper and remarked on Anecdotes of Destiny, but then after The Matisse Stories, we said A Little Love Song and I went back to do a little light pruning.

     My garden was once The Lost Garden but tending it is a joy and part of the History of a Pleasure Seeker.

 

© Florence Berlioz 2012

Nothing But Mud

     Tomorrow I am heading back to Paris after a week’s holiday in the country. While it was lovely to see my family, I cannot pretend I was not a little disappointed with the weather. Usually at this time of year we are enjoying lazy breakfasts outside under the sun umbrella and getting our first tan of the year working in the garden. But there has been nothing this April but rain, rain, rain, and travelling south from Paris brought no improvement at all. I am absolutely disgusted at having had to spend my entire week huddling up against a radiator or squelching through the mud after the dogs in my Wellington boots while the rain pelted down on my umbrella. In fact, I fully expect to wake up in the morning to find the garden has become one vast swimming-pool. There is a slightly apocalyptic feel to all this rain – as if it will keep going relentlessly till it has swallowed us all up. I couldn’t help thinking today of Dickens’ description of London in the opening pages of Bleak House, in which the city is so mired in fog and mud that it appears to have reverted to a primitive quagmire – a sort of Lost World crawling with dinosaurs before Conan Doyle ever wrote it. I derived a little amusement this afternoon from comparing the current soggy state of the garden to this passage: there is some comfort, after all, in the thought that one could be living in a Dickens novel…

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     London. The Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snow-flakes – gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, indistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas, in a general infection of ill-temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if the day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest. 

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     Tomorrow, we had originally planned a large family picnic. But if it is as I expect, I will be quoting Steinbeck’s description of a post-deluge world at the end of The Grapes of Wrath instead…

© Florence Berlioz 2012

 

Spring Flowers

     The last thing I felt like doing today was going out to teach. Apart from the fact that my pupil is a spoilt, sullen fourteen-year-old boy who practises insolence far more than he ever does his English conjugations, the weather was wet and raw – April’s spiteful revenge on us for the lovely sunlit days we enjoyed in March. Inevitably, I have caught cold, and have been headachy and snivelly for the past two days. All I wanted was to stay in bed and read.

     On my way back home several hours later, I decided that, what the hell, I deserved a treat, so I stopped off at the fancy florist’s near my bus stop and splurged on a bunch of pink and white lisianthus. There’s nothing like buying flowers to put me in a good mood! I paid the exorbitant price without batting an eyelash and, dodging raindrops, I dashed across the street to catch my bus. Juggling three bags of groceries, my umbrella, and the flowers wasn’t easy but I managed to make it home without dropping anything…

     As I returned my little dog’s enthusiastic greeting (and demands for dinner!) and unpacked my purchases, a ray of evening sun struggled through the clouds and illumined my bouquet, sending me rushing for the camera:

 

     Despite the weather, it seems spring crept into my kitchen after all. My rose-patterned teacup is filled with Dammann’s “Thé Bulgare”, a delectable blend of China and Ceylon teas flavoured with raspberry, sanguinello orange, orange peel, and red rose petals. And near at hand is my book of the week, Helen Humphreys’ The Lost Garden: set in Devon in spring 1941, it features Land Girls, the Royal Horticultural Society, roses, and Virginia Woolf – a combination guaranteed to attract my attention, even without the lovely dust-jacket!

© Florence Berlioz 2012

Book Launch in St Germain

     Lauren Elkin’s debut novel Une année à Venise (English title Floating Cities) is coming out in France today and I’ve been invited to the book launch this evening. As those who have been following my Facebook and Twitter accounts may have guessed, I’m pretty excited! 

     I met Lauren at a conference in London last November and was much taken with her friendly, vivacious manner and fascinating take on Elizabeth Bowen. She was a reassuring figure among the older, more intimidating, academics. Delighted to find in her a fellow writer and Parisian, I was most impressed (and maybe also a trifle envious!) when she mentioned her first book was being published. Here is her own take on this important day, as well as an interview she gave on Bookslut  earlier this month. 

 

The Song of Wandering Aengus, by W. B. Yeats (1899)

     While everybody has been focusing on chocolate these past few days, I confess I was still thinking about apples (that said, there were two large sachets of Easter eggs on my fridge yesterday which are significantly lighter today).

     Saturday night, I was reading Yeats in bed when I came across another mention of apples – which was hardly surprising, for the figure of the apple-bearing temptress is a recurrent one in Irish Celtic mythology. My favourite instance is the tale of Prince Conle, who was out on the Hill of Usnech one day with his father and attendants when a fairy appeared to him. She spoke to him of a land where there was neither death nor want, sorrow nor sin, and promised him love and eternal youth if he would follow her there. Alarmed for his son, the king commanded his druid to sing so as to drown out the fairy’s voice. Before leaving, however, she threw Conle a magical apple, each bite of which increased his longing for the fairy and the land she had spoken of. A month later, the fairy reappeared, and this time Conle followed her onto her ship of crystal and the two sailed away, never to be seen again.

     “The Song of Wandering Aengus”, from Yeats’s 1899 collection of poems The Wind Among the Reeds, features not Conle, but another hero of Irish mythology, the eponymous Aengus. One night, a maiden called Caer appears to Aengus in a dream and, sick with love for her, Aengus travels for many years in search of her. When at last he finds her on the edge of a lake, it is only to discover that she is under an enchantment, forced to live every other year as a swan. (I wonder, could this be the origin of Swan Lake?) Undeterred, Aengus jumps into the lake after her and is also transformed into a swan. Together they sing songs of such beauty that those who hear them are lulled to sleep. For a year they live thus, before regaining their human shape.

     Yeats’ Aengus has not found Caer yet. Like Conle, he is consumed with desire for a woman he has glimpsed only once. Unlike Conle, however, he is condemned to wander eternally in search of the lovely vision, which flits tantalizingly before him, ever just out of reach. The magical apple Conle is given is echoed by the apple-blossom Aengus’ vision wears in her hair, as well as by the last line of the poem. While the Irish apple is far from embodying sin, the way the Christian apple does, it nevertheless does share with it a certain transgressive quality, in that it gives the eater a glimpse of something beyond mortal experience and stirs up within him a deep unrest, an unappeasable dissatisfaction with his lot in life. This longing to transcend human experience will shape his destiny: for ever after, Conle, Aengus, and I would argue, the poet himself, will strain towards that elusive vision of loveliness, whether this last stands for love, immortality, or the poetic ideal. Here too, the apple has a fatal power.

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The Song of Wandering Aengus

 

I went out to the hazel wood,

Because a fire was in my head,

And cut and peeled a hazel wand,

And hooked a berry to a thread;

And when white moths were on the wing,

And moth-like stars were flickering out,

I dropped the berry in a stream

And caught a little silver trout.

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When I had laid it on the floor

I went to blow the fire aflame,

But something rustled on the floor,

And some one called me by my name:

It had become a glimmering girl

With apple blossom in her hair

Who called me by my name and ran

And faded through the brightening air.

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Though I am old with wandering

Through hollow lands and hilly lands,

I will find out where she has gone,

And kiss her lips and take her hands;

And walk among long dappled grass,

And pluck till time and times are done

The silver apples of the moon,

The golden apples of the sun.

 

© Florence Berlioz 2012

 

Did you know… how Adam got his apple?

     Last Saturday evening, as I was sitting in the metro on my way to dinner with friends, a group of teenage boys got into my carriage. Concerned for the box of patisseries balanced on my knee (which a previous passenger had already very nearly sat on), I was at first disposed to regard them with disfavour as they crowded in. In the event, they were pretty harmless, though loud – I was soon trying my best to tune out the boastful banter and profuse bad language that went hand in hand with the air of studied nonchalance and strategically low-slung sweat-pants. But one particular snippet of conversation caught my attention and made me look up in sudden amusement:

     “But what about Eve’s apple?” one boy was saying. “I thought it was her apple, not Adam’s!” The group got off before I could hear what explanation his comrades would offer up, which was probably just as well, as the incongruity of the situation was threatening to overcome me entirely.

     Inevitably, as the metro rattled onwards, I ended up pondering the boy’s question myself. ‘Adam’s apple’ is such a part of everyday language that I do not think I had ever paused before to consider the Biblical meaning of the expression. Religious iconography and literature have focused almost exclusively on the figure of Eve in the Garden of Eden, on her outstretched arm, the bend of her wrist and the curve of her fingers about the apple as she proffers it to her companion. Then comes the well-known sequence of events: the fatal bite, the wrath of God, and the flaming sword barring the couple from Eden. The apple has become so linked with Eve that it requires a moment’s thought to remember how it wound up in Adam’s throat.

     The Bible gives only the bare facts: “[Eve] took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat.” (Genesis 3:6, King James Version). The simplicity of the text inevitably leaves it open to interpretation. The forbidden fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, for example, is not identified as an apple: scholars have argued that it could just as well have been a pomegranate, an orange, or a fig. That early on it came to be assimilated with the apple is the result both of the confusion caused by the Latin word malum in the 4^th century Vulgate, which can be translated either as “evil” or as “apple”, and of the Renaissance conflation of the Biblical fruit and the golden apples of immortality in the Greek myth of the Garden of the Hesperides. The verb “eat” is similarly vague: nowhere does the text specify just how much of the fruit Adam ate – for all we know, he may have guzzled down a dozen of them before his conscience kicked in. However, the single bite and thunderclap version which has taken such firm root in the collective consciousness is infinitely more dramatic.

     So too is the popular addition that depicts Adam so overcome with remorse at that one bite that he actually chokes on it. It remains lodged in his throat, and the tell-tale bulge is passed on to his sons and down through the generations, as an eternal reminder of man’s weakness and guilt. However, one element at the heart of this fable strikes an ambivalent note, which allows for a less pessimistic reading – or, at any rate, enables a glimmer of hope to penetrate the pervading aura of guilt and gloom: whatever it is, something prevents Adam from swallowing that fateful bite; so that weak and sinful though he may be, he is perhaps not wholly corrupt. In this light, the piece of apple stuck in his throat stands not only as a punishment, but also as a promise of redemption – significantly, Christ, too, is often represented with an apple in his hand. The apple’s midway location in Adam’s throat reflects the duality of man’s nature – his “lying in the gutter but looking up at the stars” destiny, to misquote Wilde – and suggests the possibility of his one day being able to cough up the offending mouthful and thus save himself (hello Snow White!).

     The story of Adam’s apple certainly isn’t a scientific way of explaining this particularity of the male physique, yet it is interesting to note how it has persisted through the centuries, despite countless religious, political, and cultural upheavals, becoming an unquestioned fixture of the English (and French) language, to the exclusion of any other terminology. There is only one other way of referring to it, but somehow I cannot imagine anyone saying or writing (with a straight face, at least): “His prominentia laryngea bobbed up and down as he swallowed nervously”…  

© Florence Berlioz 2012