Backlisted - The Snow Ball by Brigid Brophy

Episode Date: March 6, 2017

Novelist, critic & lecturer Jonathan Gibbs (a/k/a @Tiny_Camels) joins John & Andy to discuss The Snow Ball, Brigid Brophy's novel of seduction, aging and Mozart.Timings: (may differ due to adverts)5'15 - A Shepherd's Life - W H Hudson10'31 - Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders19'07 - The Snow Ball by Brigid Bardo* 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, listen without adverts, receive the show early and with 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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Let's go seize the night. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Visit amex.ca slash yamex. Benefits vary by car and other conditions apply. So, it was half term last week. I don't know what arrangements that you had to make in your respective homes these days for half term. But my son...

I just noticed that the children weren't going to school. Legally. Why are you still up here? Why are you not... Oh, it's half term. All right on it. I'm all over it. My son is 13. He had quite a lot of homework to do's half term all right on it i'm all over it my uh my son is 13 so he had he had quite a lot of homework to do after over half term so in the mornings he would do his homework and talk to his friends and read a book while i did my homework for this and read a book and

talk to my friends and then in the afternoon, Miller pair a feast, which would convene for half term film club. So we had like a three. Miller light. Yeah, three. We had a three. Yeah, but that's me.

I'm Miller light. We had like a three o'clock film every day. And so we watched, we did the classic films because these films aren't on TV so much anymore. So we watched The Searchers and we watched The Third Man. We did the classic films, because these films aren't on TV so much anymore. So we watched The Searchers, and we watched The Third Man, and we watched The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, and we watched Die Hard with a Vengeance, all the classics.

The one that he enjoyed most that we watched was Casablanca. Now, it's been a few years since I've seen Casablanca. It's a good movie. The thing about Casablanca is not only is it a good film and not only is it a great piece of art, but because it's a great piece of art, we watched it, and I was saying to him, this is really distressingly relevant to the world that we're actually living in right now.

The extent to which it's about the problem of refugees and immigrants and fascism. There's just elements in the third man as well, that sort of post-war Europe. You sort of feel out of all that kind of Harry Lyme kind of gun-running... I mean, that brilliant scene in the cuckoo clock scene, which was mostly improvised by Wells. Wells it is, yeah, that's right.

And, of course, the marvellous soundtrack. But the film thing was really, it's really great to be watching these things with somebody who, at whatever level you, you know, one is a propagandist for one's own child, of course, all the time, but at some level you think, oh, will they go for this, will they go for it?

Old movies are, I mean, hit and miss, but at some level you think, will they go for this? Will they go for it? We do a thing where we alternate. This weekend was Rory's 15th birthday and he's a massive Japanophile and a huge Hayao Miyazaki film fan. When I watched one of the early ones

he said, what's it like? Is it good for a Saturday evening? He said, oh, it looks like it might be quite sad. Actually, the title gives it away. Grave of the Fireflies. Holy God! Bleak doesn't even begin to... I mean, it's just...

I'm not going to give away any spoilers, but everybody dies. And it was brilliant, but, I mean, God, I'm always curious how far you can push kids. And now on BBC One, the person's Doctor Who, and then Generation Game, and then Saturday Night at the Movies. My neighbour Totoro, it isn't, is it? No, no. Should we? Yeah, let's go on. Hello, and welcome to Backlisted, the podcast that gives new life to old books. You join us as we're all tobbed up in our finest 18th century finery

in a drawing room just off the main ballroom of our sponsors Unbound. These introductions are getting more and more rococo. They're getting rococo. The website which brings authors and readers together to create fabulous books. I'm John Mitchinson, the publisher of Unbound. And I'm Andy Miller, author of The Year of Rean Dangerously. And joining us today is Jonathan Gibbs, aka at Tiny Camels on Twitter. Hello, Jonathan.

Hi there. Jonathan is an author whose debut novel, Randall, was published in 2014, published by our friends at Galley Beggars. And he also writes for The Guardian and the TLS and lectures in creative and professional writing at St Mary's University in Twickenham. The book Jonathan's coming to talk to us about is The Snowball by Brigid Brophy. And about Brigid Brophy in general.

There's so many interesting things to say about her. Another woman from the 20th century who perhaps hasn't had her full due. We will get on to that in a moment. But first of all, I'm turning to my colleague, as is traditional on these occasions, to say, John, what have you been reading this week? Well, I've been reading this week, in fact, I've been re-reading because I got the most delicious thing happen to me this week.

The estimable people at Little Toller Books, who are a terrific publishing house based in the down in the southwest who really totally dominate now the reprints of classic and new indeed books about landscape and the countryside nature sent me a package of books including one of the books that i love most in the whole world which is i know i'm beginning to sound like a bit of a bore about shepherds but this book is a shepherd's life by w.h hudson which i think is i think is my favorite book kind of natural history monograph of all time it's a sort of it's a record of one shepherd but hudson himself is just this kind of extraordinary protean figure he he was born in Buenos Aires to American parents,

so grew up in Argentina on the pampas as farmer and came over here in the late 19th century and kind of carved out a living as a sort of a jobbing writer, but spent quite a bit of time, about a bit of his time in Wiltshire and Salisbury Plain, and this book really is the account of his time there. It follows the life of a shepherd, Caleb Borkham, and it's the whole of a shepherd's life, but it's also the people that he knows and that he meets. And I think people who love Hudson, and they include Conrad and D.H. Lawrence, and I think Adam Thorpe, wonderful novelist,

who wrote the introduction to this Little Toller edition. There's something about him being an outsider, which makes... It's not tinted with nostalgia in the same way that some of those narratives are. Richard Jeffreys was a local boy writing about what was passing. Jeff was passing Jeffries I'll read a tiny little bit in a moment Jeffries does that but he Hudson does that but he does it with a kind of a robustness I mean the language I think Conrad said once he writes like grass grows what it's sort of like you know you've got

to be sympathetic to Conrad he was writing in his third language by this stage, but it couldn't have been easy. But Hudson does have this thing, this amazing kind of... So I'll read you a little passage to get a flavour. This is published about... 1909, yeah. 1909. So it's the classic... What it is is the period, the pre-lapsarian,

before the Great War. Yeah. But also the book is full of poverty. It's full of... There are people still alive who remember the riots in the 1830s over enclosures. It's full of poverty it's full of you know there are people still alive who remember the riots in the 1830s over enclosures it's full of pain it's it's amazingly open-minded about gypsies you get very few writers of this time leaving aside george borrow and the slightly romantic but he writes about all the local kind of communities and he writes amazingly precisely

about wildlife so it's it's a kind of it's a it's the portrait of. So it's the portrait of a community. It's the portrait of one extraordinary man, quite happy man's life. And you get the tremendous sense. Hudson was one of the founders of the Back to Nature movement in the 20s and also the RSPB. So he's kind of an important ecological figure. But really what's great about him, he's just a brilliant, brilliant writer.

And I just, this is a little thing he wrote about, about the marigold, which gives you a sense of his kind of, he turns a meditation on the marigold into an assault on city life. How the townsman, town-born and bred, regards this flower, I do not know. He is, in spite of all the time I've spent in his company,

a comparative stranger to me, the one living creature on the earth who does not greatly interest me. Some overpopulated planet in our system discovered a way to relieve itself by discharging its superfluous millions on our globe, on the earth who does not greatly interest me. Some overpopulated planet in our system discovered a way to relieve itself by discharging its superfluous millions on our globe, a pale people with hurrying feet and eager restless minds who live apart in monstrous crowded camps like wood ants that do not go out to forage for themselves, six millions of them crowded together in one camp

alone. I have lived in these colonies years and years never losing the sense of captivity, of exile ever conscious of my burden taking no interest in the doings of that innumerable multitude its manifold interest, its ideals and philosophy its arts and pleasures what then does it matter how they regard this common orange flower with a strong smell for me it has an atmosphere

a sense or suggestion of something immeasurably remote and very beautiful orange flower with a strong smell. For me, it has an atmosphere, a sense or suggestion of something immeasurably remote and very beautiful, an event, a place, a dream perhaps, which has left no distinct image, but only this feeling, unlike all others, imperishable and not to be described except by the one word, marigold. Mmm. Oh, that's... Isn't that good? It one word, marigold. Mmm. Oh, that's...

Isn't that good? It's just, it's full of that. It's full of... Anyway, it's... So that is available, I should say, in the interests of commercial balance, that although that is available in a handsome edition sent to John Free by Little Taller,

and introduced by Adam Thorpe, you listeners can also acquire this book for free from Project Gutenberg where it can be downloaded. You can. But are the next six, what have you been reading? No, no, no, I'm not going to do that at all. But you know, it's that thing. They're beautiful notebooks and they're very good at what they do.

But it's that thing of finding, and I think it was probably they were spurred into action by the fact that I talked about the LP Jacks book Mad Shepherds a few weeks ago. Mad Shepherds, I was going to say Mad Shepherds, yeah. I think it would be fair to say it's a very different kind of book to the book you've been reading this weekend. Yes. So I have been reading the first novel by the much-praised author George Saunders

called Lincoln in the Bardo and before I say a little bit about the book itself I want to just tell people how I came to read this book. An early copy was sent to me a few months ago and I've had it on the pile to read and I've sort of been looking at it thinking oh I haven't got time, American after. So this weekend I saw somebody raving about it. Someone I find quite irritating raving about it. And then within hours I saw someone else really slagging it off who also I find quite annoying. So I thought, okay, I better read this book now.

If I don't read this book today if I don't start reading this book today by the middle of next week there'll be enough of a dialogue going about it which I feel alienated from that I'll just go I can't bother with that I can't bother with that you know what I mean I'm not being whimsical it's important to say it's slightly our um rubric is that because we've both grown up in this industry and have spent our whole lives being sold to and having to sell and you know the point of Backlisted was that we were trying to do something that wasn't about that

it was disinterested in the original meaning of the term So I'm sort of trying to I thought okay well I'll overcome my own, I'll react to my own reactionary nature and try and just pick, I'll pick this up, I'll read the first few pages and I'll see how I get on

with it. And what happened quite accurately was I started reading it and I read it in a day. It's a 320 page novel albeit fairly, some wide spacing in it. And I genuinely, and

this is an accurate description and I hardly ever say this I couldn't put it down I actually couldn't stop reading it I thought it was so you haven't had that for a while no so magical and so full

of life I'm not going to try other than to say what the premise of the book is, which is that it is an account of the death and imagined afterlife of Abraham Lincoln's young son, Willie, told through the voices, again, some factual, some fictional, of people who were there at the time and the voices of the spirits of people in the graveyard in which Willie is interred.

I don't want to talk too much about it and I don't want to read from it. And there are two reasons why I don't want to read from it. The first is that I sort of feel this is a book... I think this is going to be a really big book. And many of you who are listening to this will probably buy this book in a three-for-two or you might read it when you go on holiday

or the chances are you're going to encounter this book. And what I want to say to you immediately, as quickly as I can, is ignore people like me blaring on about it and try and just get to the book and read it. What's so wonderful about it is it's actually very hard for me to compare it to other writers or other books because it's not much like other writers or other books. Most books are like other books.

Reading this, I kind of thought, well, this seems so natural on the page, yet so hard to actually find a resting place for in the kind of cultural setting. It's funny, it's very moving. To read a novel about an American president right now, right at this minute, seemed very, very stirring, actually. Have you read any of his stories, Saunders' stories, before? No, I had not read any of Saunders' stories before, and we'll come on to that in a minute. The other reason why I didn't want to read anything from Lincoln in the Bardo

is there is an audiobook coming of Lincoln in the Bardo, which has a cast of 166 different readers, including the main trio are played by Nick Offerman, David Sedaris and George Saunders himself. And Saunders gave this brilliant quote when he said to Saunders, he said to Saunders, why didn't you read the whole thing? And he said, well I can only do three voices. I can do like a working class guy,

kind of a woman and a British guy. So they've got those main trio and then they've got Miranda July, they've got Carrie Brownstein, Lena Dunham, Ben Stiller, they've got Jeff Tweedy from Wilco comes in and does one of the voices. They've got Saunders' parents and his wife and his daughter. You had me at Sedaris.

I mean, so I'm going to read this again on audio because the audio seems... But, okay, so I've said all those things. On the way here today, I... On the train. On the train here today, I was reading. I like this book so much that I immediately went out and bought two more by George Saunders. I was

reading his book, 10th of December, his book of stories that won the Folio, and I'm just going to read you this two paragraph story called Sticks. It's a whole story. If you like this, you will love this novel. If you don't like this, try harder.

Alienating everyone listening. It's called Sticks. Every year, Thanksgiving night, we flocked out behind Dad as he dragged the Santa suit to the road and draped it over a kind of crucifix he'd built out of metal pole in the yard. Super Bowl week, the pole was dressed in a jersey and Rod's helmet and Rod had to clear it with dad if he wanted to take the helmet off.

On 4th of July the pole was Uncle Sam. On Veterans Day a soldier, on Halloween a ghost. The pole was dad's one concession to glee. We were allowed a single Crayola from the box at a time. One Christmas Eve, he shrieked at Kimmy for wasting an apple slice. He hovered over us as we poured ketchup, saying, Good enough, good enough, good enough. Birthday parties consisted of cupcakes, no ice cream. The first time I brought a date over, she said, what's with your dad and that pole?

And I sat there blinking. We left home, married, had children of our own, and found the seeds of meanness blooming also within us. Dad began dressing the pole with more complexity and less discernible logic. He draped some kind of fur over it on Groundhog Day and lugged out a floodlight to ensure a shadow. When an earthquake struck Chile, he laid the pole on its side and spray-painted a rift in the earth.

Mom died and he dressed the pole as death and hung from the crossbar photos of mum as a baby. We'd stop by and find odd talismans from his youth arranged around the base. Army medals, theatre tickets, old sweatshirts, tubes of mum's

make-up. One autumn he painted the pole bright yellow. He covered it with cotton swabs that winter for warmth and provided offspring by hammering in six crossed sticks around the yard. He ran lengths of string between the pole and the sticks and taped to the string letters of apology admissions of error pleas for understanding all written in a frantic hand on index cards he painted a sign saying love

and hung it from the pole and another that said forgive and then he died in the hall with the radio on and we sold the house to a young couple who yanked out the pole and left it by the road on garbage day. Brilliant.

That's what fiction's for. In that story, in that two-paragraph story, which is moving and clever and funny, in my opinion, and all those other things, it's one thing to do that in a short story, quite another thing, as we know, to do it in a novel, quite another thing as we know to do it in a novel but that tone, that mixture of things is what in my opinion you find in Lincoln and the Bardo

in a kind of unique combination and also can I just, my final word on Lincoln and the Bardo the early reviews have started coming in, they're very good I would like to draw your attention to the review on the AV Club website, I really like the AV Club and the headline of their review this is not what you would find in the TLS, but is accurate,

is simply, George Saunders' new novel will blow your fucking mind. That's pretty good. So that's my last word on that. We'll be back in just a sec. And so, turning from LinkedIn,

the bardo of George Saunders, some shepherds, to The Snowball by Brigid Brophy. So we all read this this week, right? Yeah, and it's funny you should say that thing about finding it hard to contextualise Lincoln on the Bardo. I found it very difficult to think of anything that The Snowball was like. I was really trying to think, where has anybody taken one art form

and turned it into another in quite the way that this book, it builds up some kind of resonant relationship with Don Giovanni, the opera. I agree with you, John. So, yeah, I mean, it's really interesting to try and, it's very original and very unlike anything else I've been reading for a while. Consequently, it took me a while to sort of settle into its rhythms. But once you do, it's a small, it is a little, small, perfect book.

I agree. I found it rather, I don't know, I was enjoying it, but I was thinking, OK, well, this seems to be holding me at arm's length. I wonder why. Yes. Is it deliberately holding me at arm's length, or am I holding it at arm's length, in fact? And actually, I realised that there's a certain... Artifice.

Artifice and cold, deliberate coldness to it, right, I would say. But actually, I finished reading it, I thought, wow, that was really good. That was really good, and I've thought about it all week. It's really stuck in my brain. It really, really does get in you. Jonathan, when did you... It was your idea that we... It was your idea. get in your head. Jonathan, when did you... It was your idea that we...

It was your idea. It was all your idea. When did you discover... I feel in this discussion, we need to place it in the context of Brophy's life and career, which is why we'll keep coming back to that. When did you first encounter this book and or Bridget Brophy? Well, the first time i encountered bridget brophy

was probably about 20 years ago and i picked that book that you have there hackenfeller's out ape in that virago modern classics edition off a shelf of the flat of my uncle and aunt i was staying with for a weekend and i you know read about a quarter of it or something and thought you know this is pretty good and then i didn't think of her again until I think about five years ago, I saw a different edition of that book in a secondhand shop and liked the cover design. Remembered that I'd enjoyed it, picked it off and read it

and then started getting hold of the other ones. I mean, there's only one of her novels in print. So it is secondhand shops and eBay to get hold of it, to get hold of them um and you know i read i think i read three or four of her other novels over about a year but i read them more than once not all of them but the the ones that i like more than once and i think you do need um it helps to come back to them again i mean it certainly helps to have some context of her yeah for life i mean i started to get interested in her and looked looked into the the background It helps to come back to them again. I mean, it certainly helps to have some context of her life.

I mean, I started to get interested in her and looked into the background, and it is fascinating who she was and all the reasons why she might not be quite so high up in our... or quite so obvious on our radar compared to other people who write at the same time. So her first novel, Hackerfeller's Ape, beat Iris Murdoch's first novel under the net to the cheltenham what was the first novel prize at the cheltenham literary festival

i didn't know i i read it hackenfeller's ape is short it's like 120 pages i read that this week that's that's terrific i have to say that's terrific i don't think it's better than the Snowball but it's more approachable I think. It's funny, it's more of a romp I think than the Snowball. I know nothing about opera, I like going to the opera occasionally and I just feel that a book like this on a second or third reading, I mean it's so simple

it's set at a costume ball at this rich couple's house. An 18th century costume ball so so everyone's wearing the women are wearing there's a brilliant line about the women having huge wigs and it's the first time it's difficult to see the men because the men are all in flat shoes and the women have all got the high wigs and it starts at about 10 to 12 when they're getting ready for auld lang syne and the costume boy is going to enter eight and it's basically the story i mean there's the

blurb will say we'll read it in a sec as far as i'm concerned it's the story of a seduction there's a main the main character anna who's come um as uh as donna anna from don giovanni and by the way how much chutzpah have you got to have to quote yourself can we just tell you for people that. Can we just say for people, could you just read the epigraph of the book? So the epigraph to The Snowball by Bridget Brophy is this. That most fascinating subject for gossip, whether when the opera opens Don Giovanni has seduced

or has just failed to seduce Donna Anna, will no doubt go on being debated for another two centuries. Bridget Brophy, Mozart, the Dramatist, footnote. I mean, how... Your epigraph is a footnote from one of your other books. And it is absolutely. I mean, that in Embryo

is the book. It is about what happened. It's a sort of a... It's a fictional exploration of another work of art, which is the opera. Yes, yes. While that might make it sound incredibly dry and academic, it's absolutely none of those things.

It's a very erotic novel. It's a novel about three things. Sex, death and Mozart. In which one of the characters... Some of other British brofists know it. Which I think were her interests. And also Anna, the main character in the book, says at one point, where she said, I'm interested in Mozart and sex.

And she said, well, I'm interested in Mozart, sex and death. I mean, it's very erotic as long as you find intelligence a turn on. Yeah. Well, I've got a couple. There's a couple. We'll get into that more in a minute. It's also, you said, Jonathan, it's a book about a seduction. It's actually a book about three seductions, isn't it?

Yes. And three sexual relationships contrasted with one another at different points in that sexual relationship. There's a... Three kind of archetypal. The teenage love. Yeah. Middle-aged love. Tom-Tom and Tom-Tom. Indeed. there's a three kind of archetypal the teenage love yeah middle age love

Tom Tom and Tom Tom indeed and sort of grand kind of Amar Amar Fu yeah

you know that sort of what's it called Kuda Teatra where they come together and Kuda Food Kuda Food

that's the one yeah Kuda Food could be a Kuda Teatra but it's such it is distanced and so it is hugely... There's a lot of passion there, but they also hold each other very coldly at a distance. It precedes very slowly that seduction.

Yes, and it appears to be off the cards for quite a considerable chunk of the book. I mean, it's also the teenage bit, which is, I think, really well done through the brilliant device of having a precocious 15-year-old girl writing her diary, absenting herself from the adults' party and writing her diary.

The diary which she says she wants to record everything, just as it happens. Which, you know, as they say, with hilarious consequences later in the book. I will be reading from those hilarious consequences in a short while. You're going for the... Shall I read the blurb now?

Yes. And then maybe, if I read the blurb, and then maybe, Jonathan, you could read a little bit. That would be great. So this blurb is from a paperback edition published by Cardinal, who were part of Sphere, the Picador bit of Sphere. Yeah. This was published in 1990.

This is the... Here is the blurb wealthy seal like and much married anne is giving a glittering new year's eve costume ball the theme is the 18th century in keeping with her elegant house and she is swathed in gold lame a solid gold orb to represent the queen whose name she shares. Her best friend Anna, and there's a bit of chutzpah calling two of your main characters Anne and Anna, who prefers perfection to life and is obsessed by Mozart's Sex and Death, is dressed as Donna Anna from the opera Don Giovanni. Within the shimmering, faded opulence of the great rooms,

an elaborate sequence of events gracefully unfolds. Anna spies a masked man in black, Don Giovanni, the heartless and impious seducer who did, or did he, seduce Donna Anna. Ruth, a young Jewish girl dressed as Cherubino, sees all and frequently escapes to write it in her frenzied diary, yet she still looks an unlikely candidate for divesting a young casanova of his virginity upstairs an act of quotes perfect bad taste unquote is foiled by an act of huge and exotic normality yeah in the warmth of a white boudoir

yet there is a strain as constant as the falling snow outside of unease beneath the glitter. What a great blurb. I think that's a really good blurb. That's a brilliant blurb. Well done, the Cardinal Marketing Department. And then there's a quote from Iris Murdoch here. I'll just read this quote. It says, Very beautiful, brief and taken all together

or line by line, exquisitely decorated. What a pleasure it is to come upon a novel which so palpably enjoys itself. Not only the reader, but the characters savour the deliciousness of the world that surrounds them. Superb sheer artistic insolence and that review is in no way compromised by the knowledge that Iris Murdoch

was in there at the time she wrote it in a relationship with Brigid Brophy. I wonder where that comes it suddenly made me think of The Black Prince which is Murdoch's own kind of fictional kind of attempt

to rewrite Hamlet I think less successfully than Richard Brophy does with Don Giovanni. Brophy got off to a quicker start than Murdoch but by this stage Murdoch was well ahead of her in terms of success and

acclaim. Matt was saying to me earlier, do you think you have to know the opera to enjoy the book? I have to say, this is the second novel I've read in the last year based on Don Giovanni.

Really? What was the other one? The other one is After the Death of Don Juan by Sylvia Townsend Warner, which is a book about sex, death and the Spanish Civil War rather than the sex, death and Mozart. I know nothing about Don Giovanni and I would say,

my own experience, Matt, is no, I think you don't have to know and by the end of either of those books you'll know a lot more about don giovanni than you did at the beginning so what do you think um no i don't think so i think i got more out of it i mean she drove me to listen to mozart bridget brophy did right and you know that you know you have to you can't listen to opera while you're doing the washing up i mean you can once you know it you have to... You can't listen to opera while you're doing the washing up. I mean, you can once you know it.

You have to invest in listening to opera. You have to invest money if you want to go and see it. But you have to invest time and you have to have the libretto and you have to have the translation of the libretto. There's no point just saying, I'm just going to have it on in the background. And I think that applies to Bridget Brophy's books as well. The more close attention you pay to it, the more reward you'll get.

I mean, I don't think it's essential to know the opera, but if you do know it, it's the dark Mozart opera. It's the kind of the one that isn't Mozartian, if what Mozartian means is lovely tunes and kind of happy endings. It's powerful and it's Don Giovanni gets gets you know taken off to hell it's pretty powerful and the music's darker much more dark and so to go back to that question i agree with i mean the thing is what you're talking about there john is very interesting it's of course true it's not how can i put this one doesn't have books on in the background i suppose one could if one has audio

books but one of the things with brophy and I think several actually in fact the book we discussed on the last episode The Horse's Mouth by Joyce Carey which I know Jonathan you are a big fan of that book you can't sort of you can't you won't be carried along by it you need to lean into it and engage

with it and I kind of felt that way was it Max that said slip down like a lozenge was that his line you know you try and treat this book like that you'll choke with it. Was it Max that said slip down like a lozenge? Was that his line? You know, you try and treat this book like that, you'll choke. No, you've got to pay attention because a lot of it is a lot of it is very, very sharply observed dialogue between two highly

intelligent people who do not reveal their identities to one another. It's a sort of, just again, that formal thing, brilliantly done. You don't learn anything much about the characters' actual lives, but you learn what they think about the things that matter most to them, which is sex and death. There's a two-page description of a woman making her face up.

Isn't that extraordinary? There's a two-page description of a woman looking at a little wooden statue of Cupid. Oh, that's incredible. A two-page description and sort of analysing it and picking it apart. And, you know, you've got to pay close attention to those bits. You must read some now. OK, I'd love to.

I'm going to have a go at some of the dialogue. I'm not an actor. So this is... Don Giovanni and Anna are up in the minstrels' gallery while there's the big stuff going on down in the main room, and they're hidden behind a curtain, and they're whispering. And there are some other bits from the younger couple in Disperse which I'm not going to bother with.

Actually, said Don Giovanni, as though it took him an effort to speak, I like Siamese cats rather better than the ordinary kind. I like you, Anna said, without any emphasis or expression at all. Don Giovanni made no reply to what she had said, but after a little she discerned that he was peering through the dimness towards her, towards the place at the rise of her breasts, where a little more to the left than to the right she had stuck a beauty spot.

I like your beauty spot, he said. I've liked it all night. I like you, she repeated, in the same way as before. Yet the curious thing is, he said, that although I like it, I want to take it off. Anna said, that's one of the things I prefer to do for myself. All right, then do. She looked down at her bosom, which in the dimness was a greenish white,

the colour of flesh in an old painting on panel. She put her thumbnail under the edge of the beauty spot. Slowly she peeled it off, held out her hand and let the beauty spot tumble invisibly to the floor. You realise, he said, that you've made me terrified to touch you. Yes, I've been enjoying your terror for some minutes are you cruel he asked she seemed to be breathless for a moment my cruelty is very very delicate she eventually replied slowly that's as though you were going to behead me and promise that no single stroke would be fatal you just do it with hundreds of little ones his voice sounded to her extraordinarily loud and deep but it could not have penetrated

the muffling of the curtain because no one from the ballroom called shush i'd rather thought it was you who are going to execute me she said with a quiver possibly a laugh in the sentence you wear the executioner's mask perhaps both each each she did and said nothing his head bent forward towards her as though for the executioner's stroke and he began very passionately to kiss the place where the beauty spot had been. It's very good. It is great. It is great. I mean, it's very smart people seducing one another.

Yeah. Which is most of the book. And then less smart people or younger people with different... In a car. In a car. I just want to read this little bit from that of the younger people in the car. And I don't think there are any spoilers involved in this. And this is worth reading because it's the counterpoint to that very smart, very sexy dialogue that you just read, Jonathan.

This is a section where I think Ruth, yes, Ruth dressed as Cherubino and Edward dressed as Casanova have, they've had sex in the car, haven't they? Yeah. I believe I'm right in saying. And they've now, subsequently they've had a row and she has kneed him in the groin. So that's what's just happened. Sitting on the running board, Edward became quite numb with cold and knew that, having exaggerated his injury to Ruth, he was now exaggerating it to himself. As a matter of fact, he had been bearing down so hard on her hands

that her legs had not had much freedom of manoeuvre and she had not got in a very forceful blow. Nevertheless, he felt justified in his exaggeration because she might have injured him badly. She was ignorant enough, by which he meant that she needed a lesson. He got up and trudged round in the snow, trying to remember to stamp his feet to warm them up. He didn't stir far from the Blumenbaum's car. It was in his mind that if a policeman should come on him loitering beside the cars of people who did not know him and would not speak up for him, he might be arrested.

the cars of people who did not know him and would not speak up from him, he might be arrested. The back of the Blumenbaum's car rose, and to some height, not quite vertically, but at the statist of inclines, like the back of a spinster on a bicycle. Edward's own taste preferred cars that crouched low, as though over dropped handlebars. That was what he would have bought if he had had the same amount of money to spend on a car as Rudy Blumenbaum had spent on this. But he did not trust his own taste and thought that if he had had the money to spend, he would merely have betrayed the shallowness of his taste. He believed in good and bad taste as absolutes, though not in his own ability to tell them apart. What Rudy had got for his money was not merely luxury, but respectable luxury. The respectability that went with old-fashioned things,

with the look of ancien regime. Edward hated and despised Rudy Blumenbaum's car, but would not for the world have forfeited his connection with it. He half hoped a policeman would challenge him. It was a connection to an object Edward could not have acquired because his taste would not have been elastic enough to let him reach for it. He felt towards the Bloomin' Bound car as a young man might to an elderly spinster distant connection who was tiresome, old-fashioned and tedious in her insistence on discipline. Her hints that young people should be taught to sit up straight

by having boards strapped to their backs, and yet invaluable because she had a title. On the stately sloping back of the car, snow had uncertainly gathered. It might all slide off in a sheet at any moment. It had compiled from the bottom upwards and at the edges and top the stayed dark green paint was still visible. Taking great care not to dislodge the whole sheet, Edward's finger wrote in the snow, Jew boy. And then he went, dew boy and then he went quite happily

back to the ball now first of all there is some I would say in that extract there's some fantastic comic writing there's some very good intellectual metaphorical writing there's also what I love about Brophy and the books I've read by Brophy

and this applies to everything that I've read by her that she had teeth. When she wanted to bite, she actually bites there really quite hard and I think that's a really terrific piece of writing. There's very little bad writing at all

if any. I mean all the sentences I think in this book are you can feel it's that sort of worked over quality that she does. There's nothing slack, nothing loose. And the things that you think are going to be almost... The things that are most difficult to do... I just wanted to read just a very short thing.

And it does give away the fact that Anna and Don Giovanni have had sex. But if you're going to do sex in a book, this is, I think, about as good as it gets. And I this these passages were were in the 60s were pretty controversial but this is post coital in case you hadn't gathered anna lay listening bodily to her after sensations an intense deep buried throbbing shook the lower part of her body a sobbing might have shaken the upper. Indeed, these throbs seemed to her an exact counterpart, an antonym to sobs. They made an outburst, a shower of pleasure,

the opposite of a storm of weeping. In a storm of weeping, there would have been, as in all storms, a wry warmth and happiness, if only for the relief and release, equally in this most intense, least voluntary and therefore most death-imaging of pleasures there was, and also for the release a wry sadness kind of all the themes of the book in one short paragraph

and hard to do that well so that's 1964 1962 you have Flesh which has also got a lot of sex in it 1963 in the middle of those two you've got the finishing touch which is this lesbian colette-ish fantasia with the the head mistress based on Anthony Blunt I read that one of the most peculiar looks I've ever read that's not unreasonable makes Gene Brody look pretty sexy it's funny though it's really funny

she can't finish any of her sentences she says just bring me the and what I love about the thing that I love about Flesh there's a bit of sex in Flesh that I love as well and she writes about sex from a man's point of view I mean heterosexual sex from a man's point of view brilliantly and it came out in

1962 if you look at it closely is the year in which on chesil beach is set so i can't remember their names but that poor couple that poor couple yes yes only they'd read brophy it all would have been okay because flesh is about an experienced woman who uh who marries a man who is a virgin and she brings him out of himself so it's a reverse pygmalion and if only poor old whatever name whatever yes yes awful seaside night yeah you know it just proved yeah yes it was controversial but it shows that people were writing you know intelligently about sex in the early 60s not in a sort of kingsley amos way but in a uh you know

she's definitely she seems to me she's definitely at this sort of Burgess Murdoch end of the highly intellectual game playing. But as you say, what I like is that there is genuine teeth when she goes for it. She was also, as we were saying, I want to do the biography in a moment, but I wanted to play a clip of Brophy because she was quite media savvy. She was on TV a lot in the 1960s.

There is a clip up on YouTube, which, um, we haven't, um, uh, got an excerpt from. I will tell you why in a minute,

but there's a clip of Brophy on a panel discussion about, um, marriage with the none more 1960s line up of Brigid Brophy, Diana Rigg, Cathy McGowan Adrienne Puster and Georgia Brown, the most

amazing clip right and unfortunately they are being interviewed by a now disgraced pop star and dj and pundit who has who has put the thing on his own um youtube channel so it's up to you uh listeners if you if you wish to go and listen to it you can um but also and and brophy brilliantly as it's as one of the youtube comments says bridget for the win first of all she's very funny and so she smokes through the whole thing great

you know but she's very much in that like we saw i mentioned bs johnson she's very much but she's she's she was powerful i mean intellectual sort of socialist public intellectual she was uh she kind of she made the intellectual case for animal rights very strongly. She was vegetarian. I will... Let me just do the bio, because then we must talk about, again, listeners will understand why,

a book 50 works of English literature we could do without. But, OK, so she was born in London in 1929, the daughter of the novelist John Brophy, educated at St Paul's Girls' School and St Hugh's College, Oxford, from where she was sent down, I believe. I'm not saying that right yet. In 1954, she married Michael Levy,

who was director of the National Gallery, from 1972 to 1986. He was knighted in 1981, had a daughter, Kate, hello Kate, and three grandchildren. In 1984 she developed multiple sclerosis, progressive and disabling affliction and she died in 1995. Now most of her novels were written in the 1960s. They were, or we've mentioned most of them, the only ones which weren't were The Adventures of God and His Search for the Black

Girl in 1973. Stories. Is that stories? And Palace Without Chairs in 1978. I haven't read that yet. It's a weird sort of allegory. And also In Transit, which is in print, I think, from Dalkey Archive and that's a very strange sort of post

modern um thing i don't like it very much it would fit into a hundred different um literature courses and the one that's in print is the king of iranian country yeah 1956 which i didn't have time to read i'm still i'm going to read i see lots of people from cedar camp press another um yeah i mean it's worth saying i'm definitely going to read more Brophy. I mean, she's too good a writer not to want to kind of... She also wrote, as we've been discussing, an incredible range of non-fiction. So she wrote books about Mozart, Aubrey Beardsley,

that peculiar book about Furbank, as you said, a book about the rights of animals, a guide to public lending rights. Again, she was instrumental in establishing public lending rights. I just want to read a bit. Her agent was the late Giles Gordon, who is the agent who founded Curtis Brown, I think I'm right in saying. I don't know. But he's certainly...

You might be right. And he... So he wrote her obituary for the Independent. He wrote the funniest book ever about the agent in life called Aren't We Doing a Royalty Statement? Which, if you've never read it, anybody who's ever worked in publishing should read that book.

Well, this is him writing about her. Actionably funny. He said, Bridget Brophy's achievement as patron saint of public lending rights, PLR which is the thing that if somebody borrows your

book from a library you get paid for it. That's thanks to Bridget Brophy. It's all the more remarkable in that writers rarely have the energy or commitment to do anything but write and grumble about how inadequately they have been paid and published she motivated and mobilized hundreds of them whilst for a decade withholding her labor as a book author she had in certain quarters no doubt including whitehall the reputation of being quotes unquote difficult

no one who knew this deeply shy courteous well, she raised the level of the thank you letter to a minor art form, ever found her difficult. And no author was more sensitive, considerate and professional in her dealings with her literary agent or with her publishers. But woe betide the editor who tried to rewrite her fastidious, logical, exact prose, change a colon to a semicolon or vice versa, logical, exact prose, change a colon to a semicolon or vice versa, or try to

spell show, S-H-O-W, other than show, S-H-E-W, slavish shavian that Brophy was. Atheist, vegetarian, socialist, novelist and short story writer, humanist, biographer,

playwright, Freudian promoter of animals' rights, children's author, tennis fanatic, not least Navratilova, and on television football fancier, most loyal of friends, reverer of Jane Austen, lover of Italy, Mozart adorer, aficionado of the English National Opera but not of the Royal Opera House, disliker of Shakespearean performance smoker of cigarettes in a

chic holder, painter of her fingernails purple, mother grandmother, wife feminist, lover of men and women Brigid Brophy was above all an intellectual which British although she was Irish

authors aren't supposed to be. We mistrust logical, rational thoughts in our writers, finding it easier to live with instinct, intuition. Brophy was ever the Aristotelian logician. And actually, I thought that's a brilliantly written, perfect description. And it completely captures... And it, you know, slightly makes you wonder why she hasn't

lasted better. It's always... We were speculating, as we often do, would she have lasted better had she been a man? Don't know. I don't know. I don't know what you think. There's a lot of public intellectuals who are men from the 60s who haven't really... But it strikes me that perhaps

perhaps her fiction seemed like a by-product of her profile. And once the profile had disappeared somewhat, the fiction went the same way. It is unfashionable fiction. It's so complex, but it's very slight at the same time. They're short. It's just set at a party. It's just about a seduction's very slight at the same time. I mean, they're short. It's just set at a party.

You know, it's just about a seduction and a couple of seductions. Not much happens. If you were going to dislike it, if you were going to dislike it, let me put this, the case, as it were, for the prosecution would be this exchange between Anna and Don Giovanni. Had you ever thought about the milkman, she asked sleepily. Did you know about the place he occupies in our civilization?

He's a super parent figure. I can see, Don Giovanni said, that he's a sort of daily Santa Claus. He dates in one's memory, Anna said, from before that awful moment of divorce when one realizes one has to have two parents,

one of each sex. That is, he's a man yet one gets milk from him. That's so absurd, Don Giovanni said. I think it must be true or else I'm very tired. Looking into the ballroom, Anna distinguished among the promenaders the man who looked like a boiled egg.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But yes, she was a devoted Freudian and, you know, that's why the book The Black Ship to Hell is incredible. She's arguing the minutiae of something that we've all absorbed the idiot's guide to. And to be honest, she knows that that's funny. She's writing that. That's funny dialogue between two people who just had a shag. Also, they were saying earlier, this was made into the Wednesday play on the BBC in 1966.

I also found this brilliant... I knew that I liked Brigid Brophy on some instinctive level as a person, and then I worked out why, because also in that obituary, Charles Gordon used the following phrase, an urban soul. Brigid Brophy was not enamoured of the country.

All right, all right, that's what journalism is, yeah. So the last thing we must talk about, and Jonathan I know very kindly thought of Brophy partly for this reason because he knew that I as the author of a book

about 50 books would appreciate a Biblio memoir. Brophy had co-authored similarly a book along with her husband and a man called Charles Osborne called 50 Works of English. Charles was a musicologist

and was long at the Euribus. Yeah, 50 Works of English brackets and American Literature We Could Do Without. Now this book this book is slightly remarkable in that it goes through, it does exactly what it says on the cover.

It goes through 50 great books and it spares no, pulls no punches about saying what's wrong with them. And before I will read a couple of entries from it, maybe Jonathan, you've got one as well, that I assume Brophy wrote this. And I took this as 50 years earlier, a criticism of my own work, and maybe of many people's. She says, we have been pains to indicate which the blooms are for, whose sake we want to clear the weeds. Indeed, if you will go so far as to actually read our text,

you will find that quite a lot of it consists of literary appreciation. In any case, the popular distinction between constructive and destructive criticism is a sentimentality. The mind too weak to perceive in what respects the bad fails is not strong enough to appreciate in what the good succeeds. To be without discrimination is to be unable to praise. The critic who lets you know that he always looks for something to like in works he discusses is not telling you anything about the works or

about art he is merely saying see what a nice person i am so we take that on the chin and then we turn to much to my amusement um so there's a bit in the year of reading dangerously where i read uh of human bondage by of somerset maugham and i didn't much enjoy it and then i i i i read cakes and ale by somerset maugham i really didn't enjoy that and um i tried to express my dislike in a in fairly moderate and reasonable terms. Notwithstanding that fact, some readers of the book have responded, as indeed Nige B, if you are listening to this, did, by being slightly disgruntled that I have been mean about Somerset Maugham.

And I would say, well, I wasn't that mean about Somerset Maugham. There might be another book I'd read that I like more. So then I turned to 50 works of English literature we could do without to find The Moon and Sixpence by Somerset Maugham. I'm just going to read what she says about Somerset Maugham. Brophy says, even those critics who describe the later novels of Maugham as cynical potboiling are likely to be reverent about such early works as Lyser of Lambeth, Of Human Bondage and The Moon and Sixpence. It must be admitted that

they're a worse popular novelist than Moorm. He himself once proclaimed that he considered his chief function as a novelist was to entertain. The remark has a certain air of defiance, but in a sense the first, if not necessarily the prime function of a novelist, any artist is to entertain if the poem painting play or novel does not immediately engage one's surface interest then it has failed whatever else it may be or not may not be art is

also entertainment bad art fails to entertain good art does something in addition morm's limitation as an artist is that he is equipped to do no more than entertain, and that, in consequence, he achieves no more than his immediate aim. He is working always at the frontiers of his meagre imagination, and the talents that he undoubtedly possesses are not in themselves sufficient to sustain one's interest in his narrative. The best that can be said of the moon in Sixpence, and for that matter of Maugham's entire oeuvre,

is that it is admirable middle-brow stuff, ideally geared to the demands of the stockbroker who likes to parade his literacy but has no taste for literature. Whack! Ouch! I mean, here's the thing. I believe this book, when it was published, as no doubt they wished, provoked quite a few people. It was published in the States.

It's journalism, really. But here's the thing about it. Hence its out-of-printness, I should just say. And also, there's a fair number of the books that are treated that aren't even really worth dismissing because nobody reads them anymore. Yeah, yeah, yeah. so good about it and it's worth saying, you know, I enjoy reading this book and reading bits from those books, not simply, not merely because I like being rude about great works of literature, but because

they're written, because they care, you know, they care enough about many of these. It reminds me of the famously kind of splenetic introduction to the Guide to World Literature by Martin Seymour Smith, where he takes about four pages to demolish the critical credentials of the current crop of timeout reviewers. I mean, it's an entirely ridiculous place to settle scores, but it's a fabulous...

I think he says that it's like a football team that goes out onto a field without anybody having informed them of the rules of the game but it's the same thing I mean it's like A.A. Gill at his best but I mean you know I guess the interesting thing is why Tessa the D'Urbervilles is still

taught at schools and is still read. Whereas many of Brophy's novels are not. I say nothing. I think the point about this book that we're discussing, The Snowball, is that it really ought to be read. It's crazy that it isn't in one of the classics. It's a 20th century classic, I think.

Yes, I agree. And I think that, yeah, based on our discussion, Jonathan, and the other books, it seems to me there's probably a core of novels in the 60s novels, which should be treated much more seriously as a body of work. Again, like Johnson, you know,

that idea of six or seven novels. And also dealing with sex in a way that hadn't been dealt with. I think we have a tenuous link, don't we? Yeah, oh, well. And our guest is providing the talk. Yeah, amazing. Okay. I enjoy listening to the podcast, and I wonder if you guys can guess

of the guests that have graced this kitchen table at Unbound, which have I been in a pop band with? Well, we tried Linda Grant earlier. Yeah. We're guessing it wasn't Linda. One guess each. John, you go first. Well, it's true.

I mean, the obvious one would be to say Andrew Mayle. No. Right. It must be something more unusual is what I'm thinking. What instrument did you play? Bass guitar. He played bass guitar. I reckon that you were in a

band with the musician and comedy writer Jason Haisley. Yeah, and I was at school with him and Joel. Ah, there you go. Were you in the band with him or with both of them? Were you all in a band together? We were all in a band together. Were you in the band with him Or with both of them We were all in a band together After a while Jason wasn't in it anymore

He was by far and away the best musician But Joel and I carried on in the band For a couple of years But we rehearsed together What was your sound Can I say indie More important What were you called Oh my god Can I say Indy? Yeah. That's okay. More importantly. Yeah, what were you called?

What were you called? Oh, my God. No, they're not going to forgive me for this, but we were called, I think in homage to the Soup Dragons, we were called the Carved Wooden Bookends. They're not going to forgive me. If I get a call from a lawyer, you're going to have to edit that bit out. The Carved Wood wooden bookends.

Backlisted now has a house ban on everybody. Right, I think that's probably enough. It's a good point to stop. Thanks to Jonathan Gibbs, a.k.a. at tiny underscore camels, to our producer Matt Hall, and thanks once again to our sponsors Unbound. You can get in touch with us on Twitter, BacklistedPod, on Facebook, facebook.com forward slash BacklistedPod, and on our page on the Unbound site at Unbound. You can get in touch with us on Twitter, BacklistedPod on Facebook, facebook.com forward slash BacklistedPod and on our page

on the Unbound site at unbound.com forward slash Backlisted. Thanks for listening. We'll be back with another show in a fortnight. Until then, goodbye from me here's looking at you kids. If you prefer to listen to Backlisted without adverts, you can sign up to our Patreon. It's www.patreon.com forward slash backlisted. As well as getting the show early,

you get a whole two extra episodes of what we call Locklisted, which is Andy, me and Nicky talking about the books, music and films we've enjoyed in the previous fortnight.