Backlisted - Archive Books Special

Episode Date: March 21, 2023

Welcome to the third Backlisted Special. John and Nicky are joined by literary agents Becky Brown and Norah Perkins returning for their third appearance, having previously discussed the work of Barbara Pym and Dorothy B. Hughes. Becky and Norah are joint custodians of the Curtis Brown Heritage list of literary estates, so they have selected seven books from the archive – by women novelists, queer gardeners and anti-fascists - that they feel should be better known and more widely read and discussed. The timings may differ due to adverts: 10'50 One Fine Day - Mollie Panter-Downes 18'38 Mistletoe Malice - Kathleen Farrell 27'51 The Charioteer - Mary Renault 36'03 The Land and The Garden - Vita Sackville-West 43'11 Merry Hall - Beverley Nichols. 50'08 Conversations in Sicily - Elio Vittorini 57'30 The Light and the Dark - C.P. Snow These specials are designed to fill the gap before the main show returns later in the Spring and feature guests discussing books drawn from an area they know and care about. * To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops. * For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm * If you'd like to support the show, receive the show early and get extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a Patreon at www.patreon.com/backlisted Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Unique New York. Right. Hello and welcome to our third Backlisted Special. I'm John Mitchinson, publisher of Unbound, a platform where readers crowdfund books they really want to read. And although my colleague Andy Miller remains in deep sabbatical mode, I'm delighted to welcome two good friends of the show, literary agents Becky Brown and Nora Perkins. Becky and Nora, hello. Hi. Hello, Becky. Hi, Nora. Nice to be back. Hello. And that's Nikki as well. Nikki is here. I'm just lurking.

Most of the team. So you're returning for your third appearance after joining us for episode 109, where we discussed Excellent Women by Barbara Pym, and episode 142, dedicated to In a Lonely Place by Dorothy B. Hughes. Becky and Nora, as you'd remember, are joint custodians of the Curtis Brown Heritage List of Literary Estates, where they look after the works and legacies of over 150 writers, including Iris Murdoch, Stella Gibbons, Douglas Adams, Elizabeth Bowen, Gerald and Lawrence Durrell, Ian Banks and Laurie Lee. They have been friends for 10 years and colleagues for five. Becky Moonlights is an anthologist in her latest books.

Her latest book, Blitz Spirit, Voices of Britain Living Through Crisis, mapped the arc of the Second World War by the Diaries of Mass Observation Contributors and was published by Hodder in 2020. In her spare time, Nora runs The Pearl Press, a letterpress printing and bookbinding workshop in Deal. We've often seen that press behind you, Nora. Not today, though, right? Not today.

No, sadly not. It's a bit echoey in my workshop. Is it? Yeah. How amazing. And do you do small runs of books by people you actually are running the estates for? I have to admit, I actually do my most recent book.

And they're chapbooks, really. They're very short. So I hand set all the type, which is long and finicky. So I do very, very short books as a result. But I did a selection of Lawrence Durrell's extracts from his book on Greece. And it was beautiful. And my husband drew a drawing for the cover, which I turned into a printing plate and printed the cover. And it was actually really beautiful.

If I say so myself, it was lovely. Amazing. And can you sell these or are they just done for sort of billet du for friends and relatives? A bit of both. This one I sold. We actually spend part of every year on Idra in Greece. And because it was on Greece, there's a lovely man there. He's kind of an American who lives in Paris, who spends half his time on Idra. And he runs the most incredible bookshop on Idra.

It's called the Idra Bookshop. And he sells just a mix of books about Idra, about Greece, people who have inspired and lived there. And of course, Lawrence Darrell is one of them. And so I sold it at his bookshop in Greece last fall. Can I ask an ignoramus question? Yeah. About the printing press. Do you have to, by hand, put each letter in? I do. Wow. And so is that like, instead of knitting of an evening, is that what you're doing? Absolutely. So you put it in and you do it. You have these beautiful, you've seen the type trays. They usually are sold for like 25 quid at secondhand shops to put on your wall. But actually

I have stacks and stacks of them and they're all filled with tiny, dusty, often, which they shouldn't be, little bits of metal type. And you pick them out. You have the tray in front of you. And a good typesetter doesn't even need to look at the map of where every letter is. None of them are labeled. And you just pick them and set them. And you get faster. But the real struggle is what's called dissing,

which is putting them all back in their little boxes again once you're finished printing. And I only have a certain amount of type. So when I print a book, I have to do it page by page and there's only so much type to just sort of do one page at a time to set one page at a time so I have to set it all print it diss it and then set the next page and really hope that I haven't messed it up because I'd have to reset the whole thing again and how long how long does it take you to do a page? Well, this is why I do very short books.

Like a two-page book. Literally. So, well, this book was sort of maybe one or two, maybe 100 words on each page. So it was short. And so it was sort of fragments of his writing. And it probably took, it doesn't take that long to set it, but it's actually kind of getting it all lined up and you have to do,

you know, uh, all the proof you have to proof it and work out what, you know, it's, it's just like in, um, just like in publishing nowadays, you get, you take a proof of the, of the page and then you look at it, you put it up in front of you and you look at where you've got your ease upside down and your eyes are actually J's and you've misspelled something or whatever it is, or you've, you know, or you've put the wrong letter in or you've managed to turn it, put the whole thing backwards, um, for whatever reason, cause you're doing it upside down and backwards. So, so then you fix them very neatly. Can you imagine that that was how newspapers were done as well, Nikki? I mean, it's just phenomenal. You're not tempted, Becky, you're never tempted to to invest in your own no I mean I feel what is it about this

this is not tempting I feel like this actually is a very good because like you know Nora and I work as a team on a kind of you know like literally nine to five every single day. Literally tag team. Double headed, you know, agent monster. And there are some ways in which we supremely differ. And I think this is one of them. But also, you know, Nora is much more cultured and classy than I am. And like, you know, for example, when she started talking about, you know, setting bits of Larry Durrell and selling them on Idra, I googled Idra and realised about six months after Nora had talked about it

that it is what I would call Hydra as someone really un-party. I feel like it's a nice epitome of what's flowing through our veins. I actually think there's a nicer analogy there, Becky Brown, who is the most cultured person I know. If I'm picking out individual little letters and putting them all together in the most finicky way, I mean, there is a real, I think what it does do, and analogy coming, but it makes me pay really close attention to every word, which I love. And you learn to read in a very different way.

And I'm a gobbler. I read things in great sort of like vacuum, you know, cleaner reading. And so it makes me really slow down. And I think that Becky does when she anthologizes, when she pulls together these extraordinary books and it's, I mean, Blitz Spirits, but one of them is actually paying attention to those words in a really interesting way and knitting them together and thinking about them more deeply. And I think, you know, I don't know. I think there's a, is there an analogy? Or just two really interesting things that we each do?

Maybe it's the latter. Well, we are obviously here to mine the interesting things that you do, as it were, as your day job, which is, as you know, these specials differ from the main show in that they feature guests or a guest or guests choosing a number of books in an area that they know and care about. So today, Nora and Becky have selected six books from their archive. And I'm guessing that these are books that you all feel should be better known, more widely discussed, more widely read anyway. Everybody who has listened to the previous appearances

of Nora and Becky will know that they are the mistresses of the pitch. So this show will mostly be you pitching these six books, which I'm going to come up straight away at the top of the show and say, I have not read any of them. I have, as they say, done my homework. But given that this came together in the happy way that so many of these shows came together, and there simply wasn't time for me to read six books in anticipation. Should we say that there are three areas? You're plucking from this rich orchard of archive that you've got.

There are three thematic areas that we're going to look at. One is, hey, guess what? Everybody is backlisted and we're looking at women writers who aren't as well-known as they should be. A.k.a. neglected lady novelists there we go um queer gardening i don't think we've done that before what are we what are we calling the last section is it sort of kind of anti-fascism crypto anti-fur definitely the anti-fur list so there will be a lot in the 20th century, let me just say that, unsurprisingly, I suppose, given the archive. And are you happy with,

are you kind of relaxed at being described as archive moles? This Lucy Sculls in her really good piece for Prospect has sort of coined this phrase now. And I noticed actually even being used on Twitter and people who follow us on Patreon also seem to like it. I really like that moles rhymes with skulls. And actually Lucy and I have known each other for a long time. And when I started talking about her at home, my husband started singing little songs where all the words were into skulls at the end of it.

So he was delighted by that piece. But I think actually, you know, we should credit the image to Ella Griffiths, who is the great mind behind Faber Editions and in some ways the great mole behind Faber Editions. And, you know, has I think now a kind of like, you know, Leonardo DiCaprio-esque stature in that she, you know, has never been on Backlisted, but is in some way this great kind of figurehead of an incredible amount of burrowing.

Yeah, and that may well be about to end. Who knows? The new series. Don't moles keep worms in their larders under the earth? They do, yeah. Do you think Ella has a sort of literary worm stacked in her larders? I've seen some of the worms. I think actually we have a couple of the worms on this list anyway let's what's what's the first worm on our hook today

molly panter downs a name that backlisted fans will probably remember from at least one show where andy talked about her blitz writings but But I think she also came up, interestingly, in the Maeve Brennan show, because she was a colleague of Maeve Brennan's at the New Yorker during the sort of the golden age of the middle of the century. But what's the book that you've chosen by her? The book is One Fine Day, which is published by Virago now, and I think is probably her best known novel. And I mean, Becky, you can fill in some of the more precise detail, but I think this book is the one that's compared to Mrs. Dalloway. you know, a world in miniature, a day that opens the window onto a wider life. And so it generally bears comparison to Mrs. Dalloway. And it is, it's set in sort of the home counties, I guess. But it reminds me very much, I love it particularly because it feels like home to me or my adopted home, which is the Kentish Weald.

I think it probably is set near you because it's called Wealding, isn't it? The town. It is called Wealding, yeah. She lived in Hazelmere, So it's not that dissimilar. It's still, it's that sort of, you know, southeast or southwest comfortable, comfortable area below London. But it feels like home. She can see the sea from a hill and there's a barrow down. We have a barrow down just up the road from where we are. And so it feels like the deepest of summer days. It's a hot, hot day. And she is in her garden.

It's a hot day just after the war. I think it's published in 1947. It is. But set in the summer of 1946. And so it's just that year later that the war wasn't lost and that she is still upper middle class, comfortable life, living in a big house that they used to have lots of servants in. And her husband works in the city. middle class, comfortable life, living in a big house that they used to have lots of servants in.

And her husband works in the city. And it's her story of, I guess, coming to terms with, or not, a world that's changing around her and very quickly changing around her. And nothing really happens. It's one of those novels where you sort of wander with her through the day. And sometimes you diverge off into her daughter's point of view or her husband's point of view, or even the point of view of the cleaning lady who is a local villager who pops by on her bicycle now and then. So it sort of drifts around. And yet somehow just, I don't know, culminates, brings you into this intense experience. This is a sort of humming, intense, incantatory piece of writing. incantatory piece of writing. And it's the one book that I've had to recently, that I've had to sort of dole out to myself in a few pages at a time to really slow myself down, to just live

with the language in it. Becky, when did you first read the book? It's interesting because when we were discussing, you know, how to winnow down our hordes of books around the theme archives and and you know talk about something we we were thinking quite a lot about you know how do we find these things like you know how do you navigate that sort of mold tunnel like which books do you bring up to the surface and why and I think for me one fine day I I bought it it was in that kind of outside the old cinema bookshop in Hay there you know all these kind of um sort of open-air bookcases and a lot of the things in there are a pound and it was there and I saw it and it you know I'd read about it I think in a Persephone blog I'd read about it on Twitter with

numerous people sort of saying oh this is great and it was back probably in 2011 or 2012 and to me it's one of those great kind of mole community books you know it's one of those books that so many people have read and that so many people want to kind of press into your hands to read it in the wake of the pandemic was fascinating because it is about it I mean obviously for us now it's infused with another layer of the past because it was written 80 years ago but even then it's this kind of wonderful uh sort of back and forth of memory and the present in these kind of imagined hot summers before the war and this hot summer after the war and and Nora's right everything vibrates and it kind of hums

it's about you know the scent of pollen and the noise of insects and the mind that is occupying that space, and the great catastrophe it is trying to come to terms with. And it's just wonderful. Sounds great. I mean, also that sense of the end of the war, reading around it and reading reviews of it, there is this, I mean, it might sound comical to us, but the doing without servants thing was like, that was a big thing,

wasn't it? A big social change that happened. You know, suddenly you've got to try and make a relationship with your partner that isn't based on other people clearing up and looking after you. Well, there are these wonderful scenes, and this happens throughout the novel, where she and her husband have to wash the dishes together. And it's a thing. And their friends come around for dinner. And you can feel them being slightly appalled at the fact that there's nobody picking up the dishes. Laura, the woman at the heart of it, gets up and clears the table and says, we'll leave it for later, just like we would.

I mean, for us, it feels completely natural. That's what we do. But we are the product of that change. We do our own dishes. You talk about the language a little bit, and you've mentioned Virginia Woolf. I mean, I'm guessing from what snatches I've read, it doesn't quite have that intensity,

sort of modernist intensity of a Virginia Woolf. But I mean, other writers that you would kind of compare her to. The novel that I think it makes me think most about is a novel by R.C. Sherriff, which we probably mentioned before, The Fortnight September, which has just that same sense of both change, impending change, and in that case,

that was published in the late 30s, so that was impending change. And in that case, that was published in the late 30s. So that was impending change. They were moving towards the war and knew something was changing. And this one is just after the war and something has, they're in the middle of that change. It has changed. But they have that same sense of a combination

of a very unaffected, unsaccharine nostalgia, a profound, humane nostalgia for the way that our lives shift around us and how, you know, how the world, we have to react to the world around us. And that that is actually not all bad. There are, you know, there are good things that come out of it too, but all of the people in those books are sort of subject to the great, you know, sort of, I don't know, geological force of history altering them. you know, sort of, I don't know, geological force of history altering them. Brilliant. So that's a pretty good pitch for our first book. One Fine Day, a 1947 novel by Molly Pantadans. As I think we said, it's published by Virago and still, I think, in print,

as far as I can see. It is indeed. Which is great. And the book that Andy talked about was, I think, based on her New Yorker columns, which is still in print by London Warnock. It's published by the excellent Persephone Books. Are all the books you're talking about, are they all in print today? Not quite. Not quite. Okay. People love that.

They can hunt them down. They do love that, yeah. That's what we said. Get your library cards out now, guys. Did you see that Janetet street porter was recommending um the bloater by rosemary tongs this lunch time yeah you've got nothing well it's great one of the things that at some point i am fascinated by but maybe we'll do in a couple of books first, is what is it that

people are enjoying about going back and rediscovering old stuff, given that there is, let's be honest, there is no shortage of new stuff being written. I'll hang that there to come back to later. Let's do the next book. And the next book is called, and this sounds, I have to say, this sounds completely up my pitted, overgrown, hollow way. Mistletoe Malice by Kathleen Farrell. Yes. It's a Christmas book. You know how I love a Christmas book. We all love a Christmas book,

for very sort of unromantic commercial reasons. We all love a Christmas book, you know, for very sort of unromantic commercial reasons. We all love a Christmas book. But this one, one of the reasons we chose this, and I feel like we should put a disclaimer in front of anything that we also represent. This is a book that we look after. And just, you know, so take everything I say with a pinch of salt. Sure. Well, I think that's fine. I just want yeah but um whereas we're disinterested in molly panter downs that is pure love um but yes so i mean this book is

one of the reasons we chose it is that the story behind it is quite extraordinary so when um when they by k dick which is another one of those kind of you you know, zeitgeisty rediscoveries like The Blaser. Your famous rediscovery, was it like kind of the discovery of the fact that Darwin and Alfred P. Wallace both hit upon the same idea or Leibniz and Newton both discovering calculus? Yeah. You were discovering K. Dick's them at the same time that somebody else was yes we were both playing bassoon in different bookshops and it just wiggled out of the um out of the shelves but no it's um so what was fascinating was obviously there was there was quite a lot of publicity around the uh the re-release of they and uh Kathleen Farrell who wrote Mistletoe Malice

uh was Kaye's very long-term partner they lived together for over 20 years and even after they separated they still sent each other notes every day that seemed to have had varying degrees of kind of passive aggressiveness but um you know they were devoted to one another and you know it was a very very long-term relationship and um someone who knew Kathleen in her very old age when she moved to Brighton wrote to Faber, to Ella Griffiths at Faber, who published They, and said, I have Kathleen's books, which are exceptionally scarce. And I think they're just as good. She wrote five novels.

Yeah, and actually they're really good. Yeah, and he sent, his name is Rob Cochran, and he is such an amazing man. And I mean, just an absolute font of knowledge about 20th century women writers the kind of person I'm just like want to sort of capture him and bring him home and just get him to tell me things but um yeah he posted these immaculate first editions and amongst them was Mistletoe Malice and um Faber enlisted us to help track you know the actual rights holder down and it's coming out this Christmas which is very

exciting and it's just it's like complete like festive catnip it's wonderful it it's sort of I was rereading it for this and it it's like a standalone saga like there are no five more books but you're in this kind of crucible of someone's absolutely appalling Christmas with all these different agendas and manipulators and innocents and villains and and you're just there in this kind of post-war sort of seaside cottage with the wind and the rain and the sea outside while people just tweak each other to pieces it's oh it's wonderful it just I couldn't recommend it more highly it's an exceptionally good novel and she sounds like great fun i was just reading a thing about her saying that she liked to drink in the morning and uh that she was she's she turned to a phallic novelist

she's awaiting her first vodka of the day that her medication said do not take with alcohol but i find they go rather well together i my my problem with that problem, I mean, I haven't read the book and as far as I can tell, I'm going to absolutely love it because it does. I mean, Festive Catnip, number one, is the best pitch for anything I've ever heard in my life. But I'm slightly nervous about her. And this is a sort of Nora looking around online thinking about Kathleen Farrell, but it turns out that she was a founding member of something called the Lady Novelist's Anti-Elizabeth Lee. And as an Elizabeth Taylor, great Elizabeth Taylor, the writer fan, I immediately take against Kathleen Farrell for founding this. One of our patron saints. I didn't even know this existed.

Along with Olivia Manning and Pamela Hampstead-Johnson. I know. And Kay Dick. And Kay Dick. And Kate O'Brien. And Kate O'Brien. And I just think that they were wrong, you know. What do you think?

I mean, I was going to ask you this. What do you think they took again in Elizabeth Taylor's? Her middle brownness. I think that's the idea of it. took again in Elizabeth Taylor's... Her middle brownness. I think that's the idea of it. I think they mixed up their Elizabeth Taylors. I think they were anti the other Elizabeth Taylor. Actually, I would really recommend reading Nicola Bowman of Persephone Books

wrote an excellent biography of Elizabeth Taylor called, I think, The Other Elizabeth Taylor. And that does cover the anti-Elizabeth League, which is fascinating. Not just that, it's the lady novelist. Yes, which is so... Which says everything, well, which says exactly what they think about Elizabeth Taylor, you know?

Poor, catty. But this is basically a dysfunctional family at Christmas novel, which, come on. I mean, it's very very very difficult from sort of you know Dickens onwards not to not to want a bit of that when you're when your turkey is overcooking or you're uh drinking too much in the pub when you should be back at home so it's great and it was it was a it was 1951 Rupert Hart Davis. And can we ask who it's coming out from? It is from Faber. It is from Faber.

And it has a flaming Christmas tree on the cover. And it's not a metaphor. There is a literal scene where the Christmas tree catches fire. That is Mistletoe Malice by Catherine Farrell. That will be available from Faber later on this year. I'm intrigued. We've had two novels, both from the middle of the 20th century, both reasonably, I mean, neither of these books are in any sense kind of, you know, stretching the formal envelope of the novel. envelope of the novel um is there something about the the the act of rediscovering something that people thought was previously lost i mean i couldn't have been more surprised as by the

the uh the the bloater story because that is quite an odd those are quite odd books but people do seem to there does seem to be a bit of a thing going on um and you guys are in the vanguard of that uh leading from the front i think it's a delight in recognizing yourself in books written you know 50 60 70 years ago and and recognizing that you know part of the rediscovery for me is is rediscovering bits of bits of myself bits of my own you know world view that that it turns out I haven't had those views first they were written before and I think a good rediscovery answers that question which we get asked all the time by film producers and by publishers and by everyone readers why now why is this why do we want to read this now and the books that the

rediscoveries that work are the ones that can answer that. I do think there's, there's a romance to like the blowing the dust off of something, you know, feeling like you're a connoisseur, you know, like you found this and not many people did. And also if someone missed it last time, but you found it this time and I'm not being, you know, I'm not being cruel about that because that's literally the juice that goes into my engine every day like I love that feeling um you know and I don't kind of want to be dismissive of it because I think it's magic I think it sort of sends people into record shops to look for you know to in the hope that in that vinyl box there's something really thrilling um and I think as well there's I do think there's

something almost slightly anti-mainstream culture about it it's saying I know I don't want what I'm fed I want something else some people like to discover things from record shops or from bookstores and keep it to themselves and say I know about this I'm special because it's mine and nobody else knows about it and I think what I hope we do and and and you know, Ella does and Lucy does and all of these people around us who are part of the community of moles are, I hope we're being generous with it. The community of moles, right? I know it's adorable, but I think that sense of wanting to tell other people about why it's extraordinary and wanting to share that, like the tortoise and the hare say i see myself i see the

world i i you know and other people will see this too and and and you know we're lucky enough to be able to work at publishers and agencies where that's what we do is share it but it's the most exciting thing in the world do you think it has to be a woman because i heard the collective noun for moles is labor labor so that must be why it's all women god well we're not it's not all going to be women today by the way the next one happens to be should we talk about mary reynolds and the charioteer definitely sometimes you read a book and you know and you've got your agent hat on and the pitch is just like there it's like this big beautiful shining it's there in neon you know it's like on the it's on Times Square and when when I first read the charity it I was kind of just sat there thinking is this is this gay atonement or is this World War II call me by your name and I don't know which

one it is and it neither quite gets it but also both would work in an elevator with a publisher I mean not that it needs to because we're all going to publish it beautifully and have for a long time but um uh it is I mean I think it is an absolutely immaculate romance novel you know of the kind of um just of the most just the most perfect kind recently there was a lovely um I think it was Jenny Colgan who was writing about Eva Ibbotson. And she said that Eva Ibbotson said that she wrote novels for very clever women who have the flu. And what I think that was, that captures so wonderfully is that sometimes you want to be whisked away on an absolute tide of emotion, ideally perfect love, but you also want to think about stuff. And for me, the charity and Mary Reynolds in general,

it is just a perfect version of that because you have, it's essentially, it's about a love triangle between a young man called Laurie or Spud, as his friends call him, who has been injured at Dunkirk and is recuperating in a military hospital. And a young conscientious objector called Andrew, who is nursing him because he won't go to the front. And a very glamorous, almost kind of piratical older boy from school, who's now in his kind of early 20s, whereas Laurie's in his kind of late teens, early 20s whereas Laurie's in his kind of late teens uh who has lost a bit of his hand in a naval battle and is kind of sailing handsomely and and immaculately around this sort of very small very protective gay scene in London and Laurie is torn between them and it is just it's a perfect

love story it's also an absolutely extraordinary insight into what it was like to not love the people you were allowed to love in that period of time against a historical background that we all know it's just a remarkable piece of fiction that everyone should read I agree I think and I think it's also an absolute classic and if you think about the sort of the novels that described gay relationships at a time when that was not, you know, like let alone OK, but legal. You know, you have like Christopher Isherwood and his Berlin stories. You have Gore Vidal writing The Pillar in the Temple. You have Stephen Spender, you know, writing what he does.

And people and the extraordinary thing about this is that Mary Reynolds, who is writing it, is a woman writing about these relationships. And I can't remember, I'm not going to remember now who it was that I read, who said they started this thinking that, well, what would she know about any of this? And as they read it, you know, it was, you know, they realized that, you know, she was describing it impeccably. Did get a very, very poor review from Noel Coward. Have you heard that? No, no. Oh, I do, do wish well-intentioned ladies would not write books about homosexuality. This one is turgid, unreal, and so ghastly earnest. It takes the hero, soi-disant, 300 pages to reconcile himself to being queer as a coot and his soul searching in deep deep introspection is truly awful there are queer parties in which everyone calls everyone my dear

a good deal and over the whole book is a shimmering lack of understanding of the subject i'm sure the poor woman meant well but i wish she'd stick to recreating the glory it was greece and not fuck about with dear old modern homos a very particular view from from from from the great noel coward but this made me think perhaps a lot of her her latest stuff which i have read a couple of a couple of the greek novels maybe it was she just felt freer to write about her and there's a lot of homosexuality in her books and she wrote at least one lesbian novel as well i think i think that was what she but what she sort of wanted to do she she she went turned to writing historical novels i mean you know as a way of being much freer and writing about it in a world where that was part of the fabric of the

world she was writing into she she you know you could just have these shining beautiful men um and that was a natural part of the literature and art and understanding of the ancient world. I wonder if it might... I have a reading. Can I do a reading? Yeah, let's do that. I want to challenge... I love Noel Coward, but I think he is utterly wrong about this. And I think one of the joys of this book is that the writing is just so bloody good and so humane and so delicate. And anyway, so I hope my reading gets this across. And this is the second interaction that Laurie has with Andrew, who is the young nurse on the ward that he's in after coming over on a small boat from Dunkirk. And it's evening and Andrew is just turned up with the trolley to serve the men in the ward some water.

The forms, the shadows, the colours in the ward magically regrouped and changed. The pool of light on the sisters' table had for the first time mystery beyond its rim. Andrew pushed the trolley up quietly. He was wearing old white tennis shoes. The light shining sideways on his hair made it look fairer and brighter than in the day. Shadow made the structure of his face emphatic, the eyes deeper set, the mouth firmer. He looked more resolute, and at the same time, younger. When he smiled, as he did immediately he saw who it was that had spoken, it seemed to Laurie almost frighteningly dramatic and beautiful.

Whispering, as everyone did after lights out, he said, Now I know where to find you. Did you think I was going to leave you out? Then he came with a mug and stood it on the locker, pausing, his fingers around the handle. What are you doing here so late? I've just gone on night duty, general orderly. But have you had any sleep? Oh, one hardly would the first day. He lingered, with a curious lack of awkwardness, like a well-mannered child who assumes that, if unwanted at present, he will be dismissed without ill-feeling. Laurie at once found his mind a helpless blank.

What about the man next to you, Andrew said. He'd like some water, wouldn't he? Yes, please. In a moment he would be gone. Laurie saw goodnight forming already on his face. Ah, that's Reg Barker's bed. We came off the beach together. Have you heard what happened tonight? No. Andrew came back easily. There was a kind of trust behind the surface attention in his face. Laurie saw suddenly that it wasn't the

too easy trust of people to whom everything has always been kind. Thankful that whispering would hide anything odd in his voice, he told the story. Andrew said, his eyes looking grave under their shadowy lids. Well, if he loves her. After that, like someone touching the edge of a sleeve by stealth, he said, could you? I expect you know, said Andrew. He only had room for just the one thing. And I just love that piece. The story that Laurie tells is about Reg,

whose wife has cheated on him and then come back and and i i think just that touching that just as if touching his sleeve by stealth that sense of just reaching out and trying to communicate something to somebody where you don't know the words you don't know even the ground on which you're speaking into whether it's safe or stable anything is so beautiful well it's parquet Noel Coward. It was apparently a massively popular book in the gay community in the 1950s. And it's in print by, still with Virago, and a new introduction, Simon Russell Beale. So it's a book that has kind of lasted. Discover more value than ever at Loblaws. Like Fresh Promise.

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Conditions may apply. See in-store for details. Great. Now we're going to change pace. We're going into the garden with Vita Sackville-West. These are two long pastoral poems. One called The Land, published in 1926, and the other called The Garden a few years later.

From what I can gather and what little I've read of them, they're sort of like anti-waste lands. Yeah. They're not experimental, but they are beautiful and lyrical and have been kind of, I mean, obviously, Vita Sackville-West, known as a gardener as much as a writer. But she was actually a considerable poet. I read recently her translations of Ruka's Duino Elegies, which are really bloody good. Yeah, beautiful.

Written with her uncle, Edward Sackville-West. They did those translations together and there's a lovely that book is extraordinary um which was beautifully done by by by pushkin last year exactly and they're in that conversation with the duinu elegies are um are by rilke rainer maria rilke they're they're a sort of series of poems. And Vita and her uncle Edward translated them together. And so within Rilke's verse, Vita and her uncle are having the most wonderful conversation. She did it when she was quite young. And it was as though she was exploring her poetic voice

and in conversation with her uncle, who also had a sort of different, they echoed each other. And you're never quite sure which is Vita and which is Edward although they do say at the bottom of the poems who did which I think that it's much more of a conversation and they would have passed them back and forth and and written them together it's a beautiful book um highly recommend that one but that one is this is all Vita right the land and the garden is all the land and the garden and the land and the garden, I think, are the two pieces which are not in print at the moment.

And I have, I mean, partly again, I'm sorry to bang on about Kent, which is where I live, but this is another piece, these two poems, which are not quite book-length, maybe, well, novella length, maybe. They're long, but not too long. They're absolutely deeply rooted in the land, in Kent specifically. And Vita herself, her family was deeply rooted. I mean, where she was born was Knoll.

And sadly, she had to leave. So she went and found another place to sort of transplant herself to at Sissinghurst and created a garden there. And so Vita was, she'd spent a lifetime, all of her life, watching the landscape around her, watching, being, you know, she was about as aristocratic as you can get. But somehow I think she saw the people around her, the people who worked the land, the craftsmen who, you know, who worked on the estate, whatever it is. And she describes them in the land, which is the first of the poems in beautiful detail. And the whole framework of the land is interesting. It's based on the, I mean, I don't really know sort of Latin poetry that well, but the Georgics, and I think I'm saying it right, is a kind of very traditional form, which is what Vita is catching up here, a kind of great turning of the year, a seasonal meditation.

And, you know, she starts the poem with this kind of like, you know, I sing the cycle of my country's year. It's that sort of sense of, you know, Roman poetry. You can hear that echoed in it. And then, you know, and it all feels a bit sort of over the top, but the whole poem, rather than being a kind of over the top sort of, you know, Roman pastiche, immediately roots itself in the Kentish wield, in the clay earth, in the sort of great Saxon words that we have, you know, English words and, and the English earth. And there is something just, I mean, it is a very traditional poem. It's conservative, I think, in a lot of ways, which is not very popular. I think that's why people call it the anti-wasteland. It's, it's, it's going, it's going back to the

farm and the land and the landscape and the people who work it. And that, and I kind of, you know, estate landed, you know, ownership of the land and the people who work it. And a kind of, you know, estate landed, you know, ownership of the land and the people who work it attitude. And I understand why that feels conservative, but it is a beautiful poem nonetheless. And she was, you know, she was a pretty extraordinary, I mean, it's an extraordinary life. I wasn't aware of it.

And I think you can probably find it online in various forms. If not, would you consider printing it, Nora? It is about 100 pages long. Funny you should ask, because I did, in fact, print one piece of it. And if you would like another reading, I will give you another reading and you can choose to keep it in the show or not, as you wish. Maybe you could take a picture of the prints and we could post it. Yeah, we could stick that up as well. I would love to.

Let's do that. But I'll just read the little bit of it. And I've got to just find the bit that I actually printed. Vita divides her poem, The Land, into sort of different parts. Not only is it seasonal, you start from winter and move through to spring, summer and ending in autumn. She also sort of subtitles bits of it. And so this is from the bit that's titled Craftsman. And this is a bit that I printed. It's just short. Tools have their own integrity. The sneath of scythe curves rightly to the hand. The hammer knows its balance, knife its edge.

All tools inevitably planned, stout friends, with pledge of service, but they're crotchets too, that masters understand, and proper character, and separate heart, but always to their chosen temper true. And that's just lovely. And then she goes on to make the analogy with the tools that craftsmen use with writers and how they use writing. You also have tools that you pull to hand and use them. And it is just absolutely the most wonderful meditation on writing and how that relates to craftsmanship as well.

And why do you think it's sort of fallen from favor? Just think it because it's kind of because there's nothing particularly edgy. The pastoral is difficult. The pastoral is sort of less cool. It's not an edgy poem at all, except that we live in a world where lots of us are returning to live in the country and gardening, but also farming. I have a lot of friends who are making cheese and living on land in some way

and returning to a world in which we, you know, bring things to market. And we actually are learning trades again in an interesting way. It feels like a very millennial, middle class thing to do at some level. And, you know, this is a different world that Vita's writing about. I think there is something edgy in recognizing the world of the countryside, and not just the countryside in a postural, charming way, but this poem is full of the clay and the difficulty and the kind of trying to earn out of the land some kind of value of some harvest, some produce,

and it's a difficult life. We've got another gardener now, in our queer, very short queer gardening series. And that is Beverly Nichols. Again, someone I was not aware of, but drawn to because apparently he was, he had, I mean,

it's one of those extraordinary lives. You know, he kind of was born in the 19th century and died in the 1980s, 85. Apparently had an affair with Siegfried Sassoon when he was at college and wrote a series of books about gardens. And Mary Hall is the beginning of the second trilogy of documenting his travails in a garden.

So which one of you is going to pitch Mary Hall? Well, I'll give it a go. But I think one of the things you need to know is that Mary Hall starts a trilogy in a trilogy of trilogies. So it's funny. I was thinking about this the other day that how you know if you go on Instagram you can very often find people you know they have an Instagram and it's called something like uh the Smith's house and it's them doing up their house uh and kind of cataloging it visually for you and Beverly Nichols did that three times but in in the first trilogy he uh

takes over a kind of a Tudor house. And over the course of three books, he renovates the house and the gardens and brings in this astonishing cast of kind of Woodhouse-ian characters. And then there's a second trilogy of which Mary Hall is the first book where he goes on to rather grander things and takes over a sort of Georgian manor in Surrey. onto rather grander things and takes over a sort of a georgian manor uh in surrey and then the third trilogy he goes to i think he buys like a little house in uh near ham house so richmond um and again document and clearly it was a winning formula and i mean they are just warm bars they are wonderful um and they're kind of they're a man in his element it's sort of surrounded by these kind of completely Dickensian characters you know real kind of there's Oldfield his gardener who's just a complete curmudgeon and a sort of you know green-fingered genius and who's always honestly do you know what

I'm going to do I'm going to open my copy to a random page I'm just going to read you some because I guarantee you there isn't a page in here that isn't just brilliant and funny. For a garden is a mistress and gardening is a blend of all the arts. And if it is not the death of me sooner or later, I shall be much surprised. A pleasant sort of death, I venture to suggest, which runs in the family. One of my grandfathers died of a clump of iris delosa. It enticed him from a sickbed on an angry evening in January, luring him through the snowdrifts of its blue and silver flames. He died of double pneumonia a few days later.

It was probably worth it. Then there was a great uncle who expired because of his passion for pears, not the fruit, but the blossom. He could not quite rightly have enough pear blossom. He wanted to hug it, bees and all, as a nice old gentleman should. So he took to climbing up into the branches and sitting among the wild white spray of the flowers for hours on end with none but the bees for company. And one day a branch broke and they found him out there in the orchard, lying on his back, staring up to the April sky with an expression on his face of the greatest serenity. staring up to the April sky with an expression on his face of the greatest serenity.

The eccentricity is great. Again, my cursory research into Beverly Nichols is, when he was in his 70s, he wrote a book in 1972 called Father Figure, in which he described how he tried to murder his alcoholic abusive father, which caused uproar and quarrels for his prosecution. That is one of the most babbliness. The next question, the next non-secretary is, he was disappointed by the reception of a book of his about spiritualism. Eccentric, right?

I mean, this is great english eccentricity and uh and the eccentricity and the love of the garden it just sounds and is he in is he in print i i believe so i think so in some sort of way i think so um but i think what what really interested us and we have you know we have a kind of little cluster of garden writers. So Vita is one of them. And we also look after the estate of Christopher Lloyd, of Great Dixter, and a few others. And I think it's just so interesting that kind of,

there's a real, it's not a movement, but this sort of sense of these people at a very specific time with the means to build a world around them and to, you know, just to frolic and find joy in it. And like Beverly Nichols to me is the ultimate example of that. Like he built the world he wanted to live in and I think the freedom of self that that gave him, and I think it was the same for Chris O'Lloyd at Great Dixit, that sense of just ownership of yourself and your space. And, you know, that did. And you only need to go back and look at the ordinary men in Mary Reynolds writing to see that that's not, you know, that's a luxury. That's a privilege. But it's such the way those, you know, sexuality and gardening come together in that moment is really interesting.

really interesting and if I had another hour I'd also bang on about Jocelyn Brooke who everyone should read who wrote the extraordinary kind of auto-fictive memoir that intertwines his love of bossany and kind of traipsing around looking for orchids with you know a kind of very gentle and honest in a way that still somehow looks away but this this kind of method of, of self-discovery through almost not looking at himself at all. I know I find that era absolutely fascinating. I think they're all good places to start. Beverly Nichols was also, I think almost brought Becky and I almost, I think I'm almost to the point of divorce because he famously,

the first thing that Becky ever told me about Beverly Nichols, because you've been talking about Beverly Nichols for absolutely forever, was that, and you quoted this to me early on in our relationship, Becky, and you said, long experience, this is Beverly talking, long experience has taught me that people who do not like geraniums have something morally unsound about them. And I was always worried that that would be the end of heritage because Becky loves geraniums. And I have a totally unfounded and enduring dislike of geraniums. Not even the red ones?

Come on. Especially not the red ones. My whole flat is geraniums. Every window sill. Do you mix red and pink? I mix them all. All. I buy specialist geraniums from the National Pelargonium Collection.

This is our second Idris. This is a great schism through the heart of our working model. But I think it makes us stronger. Let's move on from pelargoniums to

anti-fascism. Our last two books. So we've got a bit of Elio Vittarini, who was a famous anti-fascist writer in the 19th. I mean, he lived right through, didn't he? He was a mentor to Calvino, but he was, I suppose, best known for this book, Conversation in Sicily. Hit the pitch button.

Well, I mean, Italo Covino is the man who described this book in the most profound way. He called it the book Guernica, which I think is everything you need to know in some ways about conversations in Sicily. And so this book, I mean, I have to give all credit to this book, to my brother, Addy, who thrust it into my hands a few years ago and said, this is,

this is the book. This is, this is a single book. I think probably because it combines two of his absolutely favorite things, which are trains, train journeys, and Sicily, where he spends quite a lot of time also. And so I read it thinking, what is this? I don't know anything about it. And after having read it, you just enter this state of complete absorption. It is a book that, it is hard to describe how much this book sort of changed my thinking about the war. I mean, it is the most profound anti-war, anti-fascist book. It's done in such a subtle way. So when Elio Vittorini was writing, he was a typesetter. And he was, I know, which is another-

No wonder. No wonder I liked it. But he actually got lead poisoning from the work he did as a typesetter. So that's a bit nervous making. I hope you wear gloves. I don't. I also spend a lot of time licking your fingers. And anyways, never mind. But he wrote all the way through the run up to the war.

And he was living in an Italy that was growing more and more fascist and more and more uncomfortable for people who were left wing, who were possibly communist interested. He ended up leaving the idea of communism as well because he also saw that was going nowhere fast. And so he was writing in very coded ways. So this was being published all the way through the rise of fascism in Italy and the censors weren't seeing it. He was serializing this book to begin with. And because it is not overtly anything but a story of a young man who is from the south,

from Sicily, who leaves at the age of 15 and moves up to Milan, moves north to the rain soaked dark north of the country. And he doesn't go back. And one day he's walking to work and it's raining and it's miserable. And he walks into the train station and all around him, there are great sort of propaganda posters, you know, massacres all over the world, things happening, politics happening around him. And he just is overwhelmed. And he sees among these posters, a train advertisement saying cheap trips to Sicily on the train, cheap journeys. And he

stands there with his pay in his pocket and a birthday card for his mother, who still lives in Sicily, in his hand that he's going to post. And he turns around and he buys a ticket for Sicily and he steps onto the train and takes this long train journey down through Italy, down and then goes to Syracuse. And he makes it, there's no purpose for him going. He just steps onto a train and goes. And he turns up in Syracuse and he's in the train station there and he's holding his mother's birthday card in his hand. And he says, oh, if I post this now and get there in time, so I better go to my mother's house. And so he gets on another train and journeys into the hills. And it's not, again, this is a book where nothing really happens. He goes to see with his mother. He eats some herring

with his mother, who's glad to see him after so long. He has, you know, hasn't been seeing her for years and years. And he goes with her on her rounds. She's a midwife. She walks around the village and tends to people. And everybody is desperately poor. Everybody has TB or malaria. This is Italy where the government has abandoned its working classes, abandoned its people. And everybody is just at, you know, there's no food. People are eating, you know, they talk about in the past also having just eaten chicory, wild chicory and nothing else and not having enough oil because there's no oil anyways. So she walks around the village and then he meets some knife grinders and gets drunk with them. And then he meets the ghost of his brother in a graveyard and then he leaves and he goes back to Milan. It's really just a sort of, just a book of echoes

in some way. Stephen Spender wrote an introduction to the book. This gets to the idea of what Vittorini is trying to do with it, which is that he's trying to say, I'm not a character. This is not a modernist book where he's kind of like you know, joyous and, you know, hero,

anti-hero. He's just becoming a listening piece to the world around him he says i it's not a book about me it's a book about the people that i meet and see and stephen spender writes that vittorini's method is not at all that of the wireless microphone shoved into the village pub with the bbc chap there to draw out the villagers this hero is a man who has made himself into the instrument which records the lives of others and which excludes even the interest of his own personality for a reason and the reason has something to do with our time, with fascism if you like, but equally one might say today with the atom bombs and the parade of

all the arguments leading to future destruction or to peace conferences. In such a world, all the writer can do is to listen and watch and be a voice. His protest against fascism is to lay his magnifying instrument against the chest of the victim of these times and show that the heart is beating. Yes, you gentlemen at Rome, you inventors of the atom bomb, you makers of treaties, the victim for whom you are preparing these graves is still alive.

Listen to his heart. It is still beating. Indeed, the pulsation is a roar. It's as loud as a drum, universal as a Niagara fall, filling the universe, the whole of humanity. He's he's just trying to like talk. It's amazing. And that Spender, who's also an amazing writer, talking about, you know, Elio Vittorini.

But it is that sense of holding a microphone to the beating heart of humanity and saying you are abandoning this humanity and it's still alive. I'm getting strong Natalia Ginsberg vibes as well. Absolutely. It's a way of telling a historical story without telling the historical story. Yeah, absolutely. Right. Last one. We've got to squeeze one last.

I've got my verbal running shoes on. I'm going to, we're going to go. This is, so this is interesting, right? This is a book that is the fourth in a series of, well, there were like 12 novels by C.P. Snow called Strangers and Brothers. And interesting, again, a long sequence that perhaps hasn't fared as well with the reading public as Dance to the Music of Time or Arms Through Oblivion, the Simon Raven series.

But you're going to make a pitch maybe for the series, but certainly for the fourth book in the series, which is called The Light in the Dark. Yeah, I always feel like I'm the one person in the CP Snow shirt with the CP Snow flag, like in the stadium, that's just full of Anthony Pohl readers. But I think it's very unfair not that i'd recommend reading the whole sequence because you know it's long and it's ponderous um but it's it's interesting okay because nora and i when we when we branded this third section anti-fascism we basically just picked two books that we each

really loved and we were like oh there's the link they're both anti-fascist and we both want to talk about them but actually in a way what snow is doing in each of the novels in that sequence it is a sort of incredibly slow journalism that and i really i feel i'm over egging how slow these books are but actually you can't be too prepared for how long it's going to take you to read each of them and the kind of stately pace at which they move forward. But The Light in the Dark is about a young man called Roy Calvert, or Calvair, who is a brilliant scholar at the same college

as the protagonist, Lewis Elliot, through whose eyes you you travel that entire sequence essentially from birth to death and um roy has a wonderful future ahead of him but also deals with what what is not explicitly called uh bipolar in or manic depression then but it is one of the most extraordinary portraits of mental illness and it is hidden in this sequence where if anyone does try to borrow their way and they normally go in via the masters which I frankly wouldn't recommend it's interesting I think a lot about books that are lost and I think when we think about why something is lost it is

usually that the author is forgotten or that it has been out of print for a long time and this book is lost amongst the other books which I think is in some ways quite unique but it if I may I'm going to read you just a very very small amount from it that I think really sums up how this sequence works and then I will very briefly tell you why I think it's so important and why you should all read it. I will very briefly tell you why I think it's so important and why you should all read it. When he next spoke, his tone had changed. Lewis, why are you so unhappy? There's nothing the matter.

Why are you unhappy? It's nothing. Not true, he said. I can't get you to smile. Then I did smile to put him off. I asked about a predicament of his own, which I had heard about week by week for some time past. Roy shook his head and smiled. No, he said, you mustn't escape by talking about me. It's very like you. It's the way you protect yourself, old boy. You mustn't. You need to talk. I was 29 and Roy five years younger. I was fond of

him in a casual protective fashion and I expected to be told of his adventures and have him seek me out when he was despondent. I knew a great deal of his life and he very little of mine. This was the habit I had formed, not only with him, but with most people that I cared for. It had become second nature to listen to confidences and not to offer them. And I think in a way, what to me is quite remarkable about the whole of the strangers and brothers sequence but it is crystallized with the unique brilliance in the light and the dark is that is that what snow is doing is he is making a character study but he's not making it through his own eyes he's making it through the eyes of a character he knows intimately already and so you're kind of it's

like double filtered and it's extraordinary and in in this instance, Roy dallies with fascism and eventually effectively commits suicide by becoming an Air Force pilot in the Second World War. And that kind of, that noble death is the death he always wanted, but he achieves it in a way that is societally acceptable and and the whole from the moment you meet him and that's very early in the book and you know they're walking through the quad of a Cambridge college together until the moment he dies you are just in the inner turmoil of a man who is both remarkable and everybody um and it really makes me sad sometimes to think how few people will read that book because I think if it were a standalone novel, it would be regarded as one of the great works of that period of time. That's wonderful. And, you know, it was adapted for television in the early 70s, a great cast with Peter Salas and Anthony Hopkins and various characters. But I'm intrigued now. I mean, you know, like I need another long sequence of mid-20th century novels to lose myself into.

But Snow's an interesting guy. I mean, the two cultures, it seems to have polarised now that in his day he was attacking education for too much humanities and not enough science. And now it's all STEM and no humanities. But look, what an incredible, we've got to stop now, but thank you both for this extraordinary groaning platter of books that you have provided with. Oh, Backlisted, you do make me spend lots of money. I'm so glad you brought that up anyway thank you thank

you for doing that thank you for taking the time and to choosing them so carefully our larders our larders are full of the most delicious fat juicy worms now um but that's what we've got to stop and thank you to you both thank you to nikki for making us sound better than we even are normal service of the podcast will be resumed at some point in april but in the meantime there's nothing to stop you downloading all 176 of the canonical episodes or better still you can support us directly on patreon at patreon.com forward slash backlisted. For a modest sum, patrons get to hear backlisted episodes early and entirely ad-free. And those who subscribe to the Lock Listener level

get two extra podcasts every month. It's called Lock Listed. They do. And it features me and Andy and Nikki talking over books, films, and music we've enjoyed in the previous fortnight. Anyway, from all of us, thank you. See you next month. We're probably all going to have another one of these specials, aren't we?

I think we might do, yeah. They're great. We like them. We enjoy them. And before we go, Nora, Becky, anything you wanted to add? Anything you wanted to lob in at the last moment? Oh, my goodness. Well, I should say that Conversations in Sicily is published by Canongate,

so that is available. It is available. Well, I should say that Conversations in Sicily is published by Canongate, so that is available. It is available. Yeah, absolutely. But otherwise, no, just thank you so much for having us. And Becky, is The Light in the Dark available from anybody? Yeah, it is available in print on demand format and an e-book from Macmillan. And funnily, actually uh the only reason that it is is that when I worked there I bought it from me from me from me I liked it so much I bought it I did I also like the idea of you saying I just can't bear this that's sort of the poor puppy on its own it's

lying unread and unregarded on the shelf i feel like i'm going to go up and give that puppy a good home at some point in the next week i should i just just just to say also and on the subject of of that like weird thing that becky bought it for me and here we all are they're not the the true joy of this job and i think we've said it already, but it bears saying again, is the community of people who do this job. And it's Lucy Scholes and Ella Griffiths and all the wonderful people at Vintage and at Penguin and all around and daunt.

People who just love these books and who dig around in them and are backlisted are kind of presiding genius of the whole community of us. But we couldn't do it without everybody who's in that community it's true it is it is a community and a very and a very nice one too thank you um and thank you for listening and we'll be back soon bye © BF-WATCH TV 2021