Is there anything nicer than finding a book that sets you off down several delightful rabbit holes after reading it?
Nick Fielding’s book is a history of British and French travellers in central Europe over the centuries and has an avowed aim of getting the reader so interested that they want to follow up the letters, memoirs and biographies of several of the travellers mentioned here. It definitely succeeds.
I won’t recap the whole book (tempting as it is, because there are so many good tales in here) but a mention of a few will show you how varied and interesting this history is: the English priest who became the diplomat and spy for Genghis Khan’s grandson in the 1240s (book now bought), the 1840s couple the Atkinsons who named their child Alatau Tchamchiboulac Atkinson after the mountain ranges and river he was born by (subjects of another book by Fielding), Adele Hommaire de Hell who was probably the more indefatigable traveller out of her and her husband, William Bateson’s search for lake snails in the 1880s (book now bought), the lost map of Wroclaw which is like something of the Antiques Roadshow, and finally the 18th century traveller, artist and possible spy John Castle reaching a Kyrghyz camp and finding that his Bernkleder leggings were a cause of great fascination “which they drew off me entirely with the utmost politeness”.
If you’re looking for some armchair travel as the rain sets in and some adventures to fire your spirit, this book is the one for you.
“Another time,” she said and the words were like a promise of meeting again at least one more time. The night of the blitz and the sandwich lunch – they are the closest and the clearest memories I have, cleared even than those of the day when Anna-Luise died.
We finished the sandwiches and I watched her walk out of my sight before I turned back to the office and the five letters in Spanish and the three in Turkish which lay on my desk and were concerned with a new line in milk chocolate flavoured with whiskey. No doubt Dentophil would invent a new toothpaste that would render them harmless to the gums.
First up, go and buy a copy now because you will want to read it, then come back and let’s chat. Princess Sophia Duleep Singh (who my autocorrect pleasingly calls Superpower Singh) was the third daughter of the last ruler of the Punjab, Prince Duleep Singh who was persuaded as an 11 year old to hand over his kingdom and its riches to the British.
The history of Sophia’s father, his regrets and attempts to revisit India and his kingdom are told in this biography too as necessary context for the lives of Sophia and her sisters. The prince was the darling of both Victoria and Albert whilst a child and in both his and his own children’s lives there’s an all too recognisable trend of white people lavishing care and attention on non-white children, only to reject and criticise them when they grow into independent adults with their own opinions and wishes. It’s a variant of the tall poppy syndrome and can be seen today in the sudden vulnerability of black boys when they hit adolescence.
For Sophia, her position was even more precarious as she encountered the triple whammy of misogyny, racism and imperial suspicion in a series of decisions by increasingly less-high-up imperial officials throughout her life. Could she travel, could she become a debutante at Court, could she marry, what was her education, and so on. No wonder that her two elder sisters escaped as soon as they could to India and to Germany. (The princesses were part German through their mother.)
Sophia herself remained in a house on the Hampton Court estate, bizarrely surrounded by the widows and relatives of British officers and diplomats heavily involved in the 1857 uprising. In her 20s she blocked this out with fashion, her dogs and horses and her daring new bike. (One delightful passage quotes the journal “The Wheelwoman” which described the author Arthur Conan Doyle as “a good friend of the wheel”)
By the time her godmother Queen Victoria has died though, Sophia had both toured India and met the key leaders of the early independence movement – much to the nervousness of the British secret services who were trailing her – and also joined the suffragette cause. To her frustration she was never arrested despite being a prominent member and even part of Mrs Pankhurst’s bodyguard at key rallies, but Anita Anand has been able to reconstruct the steps Sophia did take to further the cause.
From there on, Sophia’s life only becomes more interesting. I won’t describe it all but there are Oxford degrees, lesbian relationships, panicked government memos on YMCA fundraisers and suffragette papers, reminders of the colonial administration in India (eg the 1919 Rowlatt Acts which states that Indians could be arrested without a warrant) and the revelation that Queen Victoria was so worried about another Indian war that she forbade Sophia’s brother and his wife to ever have children. Sophia’s English sister in law seems to have obeyed…
Pacily written and deeply researched, I guarantee this book will deliver a raft of facts you never knew, a new look at Britain’s imperialism and deep respect for Sophia and her sisters.
It might only be three weeks since I visited a bookshop but I’m already thinking about the next books I want to buy. One of the things I’ve had a great time finding in lockdown are more indie presses, especially for poetry and memoirs. Here’s a few books I’m contemplating: (Cynthia Miller and Nina Mingya Powles are both poets I’ve already read and am now keen to read more of.)
I have to admit I was pretty cynical when Hadley Freeman’s The House of Glass was nominated for a literary prize recently. Despite being a fan of Hadley’s journalism for some years (I recently realised that as a teenager I’d read one of her Vogue articles about a time when she was flat-sharing with a then unknown actor called Jamie Dornan), it seemed a cliche to have another Holocaust memoir on the list especially after the prize last year went to a very similar tale. However I was curious enough to pick it up when in Foyles recently and realised immediately that the book was so much more than what I’d written it off as.
In part this is because Hadley’s original plan of looking at her grandmother’s identity via clothes had exploded into a much more interesting group biography of 5 siblings and their different lives in 1930s and 40s Europe. Group biographies are on trend at the moment but when well done can be like the most umami history writing there is. In this case the chapters felt well balanced, with no one sibling predominating and in fact the reduced pages for Hadley’s grandmother just provided a better backdrop for understanding her when she did appear.
The other reason was the way in which Freeman drew attention to be parallels between her family’s history and current events, both subtly and overtly. I think it was this that I’d been semi-dreading: do we really need reminding? Apparently we do as only 34% of young Americans say they know about the Holocaust, but still, was it going to feel clunky? In fact it was done so thoughtfully that her comparisons really packed a punch. Here are a few quotes that made me do a double-take in a good way:
“This is why there seems to have been such a flourishing of Jewish productivity in the Austro-Hungarian empire between 1848 and 1916, from people such as Theodor Herzl, Stefan Zweig and Sigmund Freud; it’s not that this generation of Jews was uniquely talented compared with the previous ones, it’s that they were granted a then unique amount of freedom.”
This completely changed the way I thought about female creativity in the 1920s and 30s (aka “why don’t we have so many trailblazers any more” answer – we do, but the contrast of their actions with the shut doors they’ve chopped down is less obvious. NB this is clearly a good thing but we need to find a new way to recognise success…), not to mention being as good a rationale for why BLM / anti-racism work more generally matters so much. Removing barriers has immediate impact.
“A huge amount of Polish identity is based on the idea that Poles were the victims of German occupation, but that doesn’t mean that some them didn’t also perpetrate it. Every country wants to have heroic narratives of the war, and what this all shows is how vulnerable historical truth is.”
If this isn’t Brexit in a nutshell, what is? Hadley also talks about French narratives on the war too very astutely. But what really stood out to me is *every* country. The universal need to have a reassuring national self myth and the inevitable conflict between those different myths…
And finally a quote that will mean I now grab a fistful of salt every time I read some aristocratic memoir chirping about how really forward thinking and modern so and so was. No they weren’t, they just had the cash to live a lifestyle others couldn’t reach for decades:
“These people are merely referred to by history as ‘the poor’, ‘the peasants’, ‘the illiterate’, even though their lives are far more revealing of the times in which they lived than those of the grander families whose lives are faithfully recorded ever after by historians.”
A man and a woman went to see a film one sunny Sunday afternoon…
A prime example of Natalia Ginzburg’s simple style that draws you in and under before you know it. She reminds me of an Italian Virginia Woolf, in that she mastered the stream of consciousness style in fiction and also excelled as a precise, tight essayist.
I don’t terribly like the cover of this edition (NYRB covers look to me like books for people who don’t like books but want to be Intellectual) but the afterword gives you the final words of this short story in the original Italian and I can forgive a lot for that: le voce, il fango, gli ombrelli, la notte.
Sylvia Townsend Warner is one of my favourite writers (as evidenced by the quotes from her diaries here and here) and the fact that I keep pressing her novel Summer Will Show on friends.
I recently came across Handheld Press though and they’ve published a couple of collections of Warner’s short stories set in Elfinland. This is as far away from twee as possible, and I really enjoyed the fairy stories:
Only fairies with a taste for the lowlife, like Puck or the Brownies – who are considered in Elfhane to have exchanged their birthright for a mess of pottage – that make a habit of familiarity [with humans.]
My favourites though were obviously the cat’s cradle collection though, including the fake biography (shades of MR James) that frames the tales. The first one is a couple of pages on Odin’s Ravens:
Two ravens sat on a branch and talked of the old times. Said the raven called Gret to the raven called Knob
“The bodies were frozen so hard that my beak ached for days after. It was really a very disappointing slaughter. Showy, of course, but quite unrewarding.”
“I remember it well”, said Knob “I was there too. Odin was delighted. He said he had never gathered so many hero-souls in the course of a single day.”
“Just what he would say. I’ve never known such an egotistical deity…”
“Nevertheless I wouldn’t object to seeing some of that wastefulness now,” said Knob wistfully, looking over the Yorkshire moors. “It is a very long time since I had a good square meal of hero.”
I won’t spoil the punchline but it’s fantastic in all senses.
As we head to Easter, I’m reading some of my “Christmas” books still, in particular this one about a walk the length and breadth of Japan.
Full of lyrical descriptions of the landscape and pleasure in the ryokans he’s staying in, Alan Booth has a good eye for a scene:
“In the back of one little shop I stopped in there was a woman with a smile so astonishingly lovely it shot off her face like a beam of light. I glimpsed her while I was buying an apple. She was very tiny and had a grotesquely hunched back, and she sat in front of a huge electric knitting machine that someone had bought her as a present… I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone look prouder than that little hunchbacked woman sitting there smiling at me, wanting me to notice her knitting machine.”
Or a jokey anecdote: “the badger is a magical animal in Japan, able to take on human shape. So is the fox, but whereas the fox is malevolent the badger is merely mischievous. He is best known for his phenomenal sake consumption, for the equally phenomenal size of his scrotum, for the nighttime drumming he performs upon his belly, and for his skill in tricking innocents out of their cash.
Did I ever tell you that I sent my jewels and my will away to a safer place some time ago, and that the only other treasure I sent was the manuscript of Orlando?
With the Spring Equinox fast approaching, here’s a look back at the winter’s reading. (Photos of The Island, Love In Colour and Tea at Four O’Clock not mine).
In this latest round of lockdown concentration was often hard and the biggest hits were poetry and art books. Mixed in with these were short books (Diana Athill, the lush but devastating Ana Maria Matute that’s a cross between The garden of the Finzi Continis and The Great Gatsby, Tea at Four O’Clock), short stories – or novels in distinct chapters, like the Italo Calvino – and collections of letters or biographies.
But the two that really grabbed me and pulled me underneath were O The Brave Music and The Anarchy. The first is your quintessential book about a bookish girl and deeply satisfying. I capture the castle, Frances Hodgson Burnett and Our Spoons Came From Woolworths all came to mind at various times. The Anarchy, by contrast, is a gripping story of 18th century India and the rise of the East India Company to a corporate state and owner of the world’s then largest army. Wide ranging and peopled with a cast covering the cat-loving and artistic Aliverdi Khan, the incestuos Governor Drake of Calcutta, the greedy and opportunistic Wellesley brothers and the Saladin-like figure of Tipu Sultan who nearly threw out the English altogether it’s a total pageturner and I imagine would be a cracking audio book too.
theuniversalcabinet 