Dame Margaret Drabble and Sir Michael Holroyd (by Richard Thomas)

Margaret Drabble and Michael Holroyd will feature as a double bill at our meeting on Friday 15 May.  They are husband and wife, but appear together at literary events only rarely, so we are doubly lucky.  The title of their joint talk, “Facts and Fictions”, is a nod towards the main drift of their respective oeuvres, as Dame Margaret is best known as a novelist, while Sir Michael is probably the doyen of the country’s literary biographers. But in fact both of them have written books outside their main fields.  As well as her eighteen novels, Drabble has written biographies of Arnold Bennett and Angus Wilson, critical studies of Wordsworth and Hardy, a volume of short stories, a memoir incorporating a history of jigsaws, a geographic account of literary Britain, and many other works.  And of course she has edited two editions of The Oxford Companion to English Literature, and in doing so brought that venerable work of reference back to life.

Holroyd is best known, and deservedly so, for his biographies, on Lytton Strachey, Augustus John, George Bernard Shaw, and one jointly on Ellen Terry and Henry Irving.  His first biography was on a “local boy”, the critic Hugh Kingsmill, who lived much of his life in Hastings.  He has also written a loosely connected series of three semi-autobiographical memoirs, Basil Street Blues, Mosaic and A Book of Secrets, as well as a fond memoir about a number of cars and their owners, On Wheels.  For years it was assumed that he was not a novelist, and never would be.  But this was not in fact so.  He did in fact publish a novel, A Dog’s Life, in the Sixties, but it appeared only in the USA until, at long last, it came out in the UK a few months ago.  Holroyd had shown the manuscript to his father, who had taken exception to it, so publication in the UK, planned also for the Sixties, was suspended.

Drabble was educated at The Mount, the venerable Quaker school in York, before Cambridge, where she took a starred First, before embarking on a career as an actress, during which she met and married the actor Clive Swift.  They had three children: Oxford academic Adam, TV gardening guru Joe, and literary consultant Rebecca.  The marriage was dissolved, and she married Holroyd in 1982.  She wrote her first novel, A Summer Birdcage, while she was pregnant.  It was a great success, so she forsook the theatre for a full time writing career.  She has two sisters, the novelist  A S Byatt and the art historian Helen Langdon.  Her brother Richard is a leading QC.

Holroyd claims the Maidenhead Public Library as his alma mater, after schooling at Eton.  His father was the head of Lalique Glass’s British operations, and his mother, many times married, was Swedish.

Both Holroyd and Drabble are much involved in literary organisations, including PEN, the Society of Authors, and the RSL, all three of which Holroyd has chaired.  They have both been awarded a number of major literary prizes.  They live in London and Somerset.      

Akenfield, by Ronald Blythe (Book Club 20 April 2015)

At the Book Club meeting on 20th April Peter Southgate introduced ‘Akenfield’ by Ronald Blythe. The author was born into a Suffolk farming family near Sudbury, and had associations with John Nash and his wife, Benjamin Britten and the artists’ colony set up in Hadleigh by Cedric Morris and Arthur Lett-Haines. He loved their bohemian life-style and said he wanted to be a painter instead of a poet. In 1977, Nash left his house, Bottongoms Farm, just into Essex, to Blythe, where he has lived ever since. He has published and edited a number of books, fiction and non-fiction, and writes a regular column in the Church Times called ‘Word from Wormingford’. He is a Lay Preacher in the Church of England and a Lay Canon at St Edmundsbury Cathedral in Bury St Edmunds.

‘Akenfield’ was a best seller and has been translated into 20 languages. In 1974 Peter Hall – also from Suffolk - produced a film called ‘Akenfield’, using amateur actors, including Ronald Blythe himself. It’s a fiction, drawn from the book, focussing on a young man and his grandfather who experienced the agricultural depression of the early 20^th century and the First World War. 

The book was based on interviews conducted in and around the village of Charsfield in 1966-7, and provides a series of personal accounts of life and change in the area, both at the time and in retrospect over the previous decades. It is essentially a piece of oral history:  a collection of short autobiographies narrated to Ronald Blythe by local people. Some he tape-recorded and some he wrote up from memory.

The book is a series of often unrelated anecdotes, but these stories include serious social and personal observations and implications. To these Blythe added his own comments which, along with the introductory chapter, are some of the best parts of the book. The personal accounts that follow are varied, and readers will all have their favourites. Some of the most insightful are those from people like the clergy, the blacksmith, the gardener and the teachers: people relatively detached from life on the farms and more objective about the place and the other people there.  The idea is to let the stories speak for themselves, and there’s only a limited attempt to systematically interpret, analyse and draw conclusions from what people said, so the book is not really the rigorous sociological study that some people have described it as. Nevertheless, the introduction gives a good summary of what Blythe discovered.

After WW2 the mechanisation of farming was having a major impact, and this comes out in ‘Akenfield’ and in other books of the time. It meant that there was no longer a need for cooperative working by large numbers of people and this, in turn, was destroying traditional community links. Until then harvesting, for example, employed dozens of men, but now the whole process could be done by one man in a combine harvester and another man who drove the grain away in a lorry. Employment in farming fell because of mechanisation. Ironically, as Blythe points out, many of these machines were being manufactured very near to Akenfield, in Ipswich and in Leiston, near Aldeburgh.

The book contains a number of severely critical comments about the way farmers treated their labourers. In the late 19^th century there had been attempts by farm workers to unionise, which led to a lock-out by the farmers in the 1870s and bad feeling thereafter. Farmers ignored the law and took young boys out of school when they needed labour, but families were so poor they had to go along with this to stay alive. The only ways out of the trap for a young man were to join the forces, or the railways or to emigrate, and from the 1880s the Union helped thousands of farm labourers to emigrate, while acres of arable land returned to pasture.

Some of the interviewees tell how broken down and lacking in spirit Suffolk farm labourers had become as a result of their treatment; how there is still ‘a legacy of beaten men’ in Suffolk villages. One says that ‘something happened to the East Anglian people during the great Depression. They lost their staunchness and independence. They were made to fear. They won’t talk freely.’

The book was written nearly 50 years in the past and much has changed again since then, with developments like the EU, foot and mouth, the drift of country people to the towns and town people moving to the country, rural shops closing down and the importing of immigrant labour. All these have helped further destroy rural life and its traditions.

‘Akenfield’ was a popular choice with the Group and the meeting was very well attended. It generated a lot of discussion and reflection on rural change. Some members found it very ‘political’, and felt that many of the stories in it were quite depressing. At the same time there were more hopeful and entertaining sections, and Ronald Blythe himself appears to take a positive view of life in the country today. Interviewed for a 2004 follow-up entitled ‘Return to Akenfield’, by Craig Taylor, he said that life has become more comfortable and convenient for those living in the country, though many such people were urban incomers who find country life more to their taste. Others have said that the mechanisation of farming has not totally destroyed the beauty of the countryside, and that farming methods have become a little more eco-friendly in recent years.

Meeting on Friday, Milton by Lorna Challand

Lorna is a retired teacher of English and has taught “Paradise Lost” by John Milton many times for A Level English. She kindly provided the following introduction:

"Milton  lived from 1608 to 1674, a turbulent time in English history, and was both a poet and  revolutionary. He was a Parliamentarian and a Puritan who supported Cromwell. He wrote a pamphlet “The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates”, after the execution of Charles I, which argued that a king was as much subject to the law of the land as any of his subjects. He became a member of Cromwell's government during The Commonwealth and continued his work even after losing his sight.

Although disillusioned after the Reformation he began writing “Paradise Lost”, his greatest work, an epic poem about the fall of man which was published in 1667."

Thanks to Cindi Cogswell for the following, which appeared in the Rye Observer's Winchelsea "Village Voice" column:

"Milton’s epic:  The Literary Society met last Friday evening to
hear Lorna Challand’s talk on Paradise Lost, the epic poem which dramatised the fall of man and the removal of Satan from Heaven. Lorna introduced Milton’s work as, in the genre of an epic poem having many of the components such as the influence of the gods, fate of mortals and visits to theunderworld and likened it to Homer’s Iliad and Virgil’s Aeneid.  Milton was also a person
of his time and his epic style was unique in its combination of the poetic, political and biblical contexts.  He wrote in the 17th century at a time of social and political turmoil during the English Civil War.  In 1649 King Charles I, who believed in the: ‘divine right of kings’ was executed for treason by Parliament.  Milton’s political writings favoured Puritan reformation in the church and the replacement of the monarchy with a free commonwealth. His support for Cromwell led to his appointment in 1649 as Secretary for Foreign Languages and in that time he wrote with great passion and dispute.   Although Paradise Lost can be read as a political allegory the basis of this writing overshadows the fleeting events of the time.   The substance of this poem begins with man’s disobedience in the Garden of Eden through Satan’s deception, who with his rebel angels was cast by God into Hell.  It is a remarkable and familiar account in highly descriptivelanguage but the poem can be challenging.  Before her retirement Lornadescribed a situation when she was teaching Paradise Lost to her A Level students.  It became clear that their difficulty with the poem was due to agreat lack of knowledge of the Bible.  Despite having been taught otherreligions in the past, most of which they had forgotten, they had notreceived a sufficient grounding in their Christian heritage.  In response tothis Lorna gave them a detailed explanation of the events of Creation in thebook of Genesis which clarified the matter and proved beneficial in their exams."