October 2018 meeting: Account by Bill Doherty of Richard Ormrod's talk on "Radclyffe Hall and Una Troubridge; A duo to Remember"

The Lit. Soc. welcomed one of its active members, Richard Ormrod, as the October speaker. He had agreed to share the fruits of his earlier labours on a book about Radclyffe Hall and Una Troubridge with the Society. This colourful duo cut an exotic swathe through the London cultural scene in the 1920s and had strong associations with Rye. Even today these associations carry a whiff of sulphur, mainly arising from the scandal which enveloped Hall’s fourth novel, “The Well of Loneliness” narrating an explicitly lesbian love affair in terms which were far from sexually explicit.

After the novel’s publication in 1928 the nation was rescued from the mire of moral turpitude by the editor of the “Sunday Express”. In a quintessentially British fashion his moral outrage infected the higher echelons of the Conservative government and the judiciary through the shared social nexus of the Garrick club whose very walls echoed ricocheting epithets – “corrupt”, “corrosive”, “libidinous”! The book was banned as obscene. 

The wily publisher, Jonathan Cape, had the novel published in Paris where several openly lesbian salons flourished and copies of “The Well” flew off booksellers’ carts at the Gare du Nord where the sex-starved English travellers piled from “the Golden Arrow”. Sylvia Beach, who had published Joyce’s “Ulysses” in 1922 found her shop, Shakespeare & Company in the Rue de l’Odeon, could not keep pace with demand. Not everyone in England could muster the requisite moral fervour and a spoof version, “The Sink of Solitude” appeared. The “Well”  was published unremarked in England in 1949.

Hall cut an extravagant figure and, financially secure from a substantial legacy bequeathed by her grandfather, graduated from lyric poetry to novels. Examining their dust-jackets now, you see a liberal sprinkling of complimentary quotes from reviewers in broadsheet newspapers and literary magazines. She styled herself an “invert” and was convinced she was a man trapped in a woman’s body. No concessions were made to femininity. Her photo in Rye Library reveals a “dark, smouldering gaucho” with a masculine hair cut (barbered fortnightly), tailored lounge suit, bowtie and large signet rings. 

In addition to the notorious Sapphic ode, Hall wrote half a dozen other novels with the titles of the last four being chosen by Una. “The Sixth Beatitude”, (Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God).,   is set in an ” insanitary” town on the edge of Romney Marsh with an ignorant and  “unlettered” populace.  The main protagonist, Hannah Bullen, has three illegitimate children by three different men but passes the pure of heart test in the end. Both Hall and Troubridge were adult converts to Roman Catholicism and Hall’s works have strikingly religious threads running through them.

Una was less flamboyant – diminutive, gaminesque, page boy hair style and, like Hall, a monocle. She had shed her Betjaminesquely banal birth names and styled herself Una Vicenzo , Lady Troubridge. A sculptress, her much older husband Ernest Troubridge found himself enmeshed in a protracted naval court martial for lack of zeal in having the naval squadron he commanded hunt down two German light cruisers in the Adriatic at the outset of the Great War. His enforced absence allowed her liaison with Hall to mature to co-habiting lovers. 

Richard recounted, that although considered eccentric, the pair were favourably regarded in Rye and were associated with a number of properties in the town. After Rye, their domestic arrangements became more complicated when Hall’s last innamorata, a White Russian nurse called Evgenia Souline, joined the household. 

In 1943, Hall succumbed uncomfortably to bowel cancer in what she termed “my Gethsemane” and was buried in Highgate cemetery. Una lived on in Italy and her last wish, to be buried in Highgate also, was thwarted when she was interred in Italy. Richard’s eloquent account of the intriguing pair more than held our attention and from the Q & A at the end some audience members had clearly been stimulated to seek out evidence of the duo’s Rye footprint for themselves.

BEFORE A new collection of poems by Jonty Driver

C.J.(Jonty) Driver's new book of poems was published in South Africa in August:  BEFORE, a sequence of 22 poems, published by Crane River in association with the Africa Sun Press. It was launched at the McGregor Poetry Festival in South Africa in August, and acclaimed. 

The sequence begins:

"Again the dream, or do I call it that?

A memory of other dreams, returned

Like shadows of a long-imagined past –

And so once more I write it down, in hope

That doing so might give it shape or sense -..."

Jon Cook, sometime Dean of Arts at UEA, says this: "There is an unusual honesty and courage about these poems. Beginning in memory or dream, or in the strange terrain between the two, they constitute an autobiography of the poet as a child and a young man. But recollection does not secure either the past or the continuity of the self..."

Vesna Goldsworthy, novelist and academic, says: "His South Africa can equally stand for my Eastern Europe, and so many other troubled parts of the world" and describes BEFORE as a "haunting, virtuoso sequence...woven of unreliable encounters with a lost self."

Copies of the book are available from The Rye Bookshop or for £5-00 + £ 2-00 p&p from jontydriver@hotmail.com  Also, Hilary Roome still has s for sale.

Sarah Moss's new novel "Ghost Wall": review by Richard Thomas

Sarah Moss’s latest book is a miracle of economy and compression.  In its 152 pages she creates a world of emotions that gradually build up into threats, fears, and finally actions, which combine to create a shocking climax, relieved only partially in a morally ambiguous coda.  This all takes place In a few acres of Northumbrian moorland, involves only eight people, and is all over in a couple of hot, summer days.  This suggests more a short story than a novel, but the book’s power belies its brevity.

We are confronted by the conflicting forces of domestic violence and family love, the North-South divide, the posh and the unposh, laddish arrogance and feminine good sense, bullying and submissiveness.  The tale is told by Silvie, the 17 year old daughter of a bus driver with a fanatical and racially chauvinistic obsession with reconstructive archaeology.  Read it, and see whether you agree with the Financial Times’s critic, who detected in it a Brexit parable.  I found it powerful, and disturbingly thought-provoking. RT

The Wastes of Time Talk by Lord Gawain Douglas at September's meeting.

Thanks to Alan McKinna and Jonty Driver for the following appreciations of a memorable meeting:

As We Liked It

On Friday 21st Septmber, Lord Gawain Douglas came to the Court Hall to recite to an audience of WLS members from his capacious memory some of Shakespeare’s sonnets, and to talk about learning, remembering and understanding them.  His recital of the sonnets was enriched by quotation of several of the most famous of the speeches from the plays: the “seven ages” and the “poor player”, for instance, and he sang to us too, “Blow blow thou winter wind” from As You Like It..  Listening to him makes one realise again the advantage of a musician’s training:  the words mean, but they also sing.

Some of us had heard Gawain’s reciting before, as a contributor to the JAM Festival in  past years: the whole of T.S.Eliot’s The Waste Land, and – even more impressively – all of Eliot’s Four Quartets.  Since I am a better reader than listener, I went to the last-named with a text, and can confirm that the Douglas memory is not merely prodigious but very accurate:  in reciting the Four Quartets, he made just one transposition of adjectives, but otherwise was word perfect. Perhaps even more impressively,  this is not just memorised work: this is work memorised and understood.  Similarly with the sonnets: obviously, there was no way he could have managed all 156 in a single session, but he gave us a good selection of some of the famous and some of the less-known, ending as is only proper with perhaps the best-known of all: “Let me not to the marriage of true minds...”

It was a triumphant evening, a tour de force by a talented musician and poet.  CJD

The Wastes of Time

Over the weekend I looked again at “Shakespeare” by Ivor Brown (1949 Collins) in which Chapters 9 and 10 (‘My Lovely Boy’ & ‘Woman Colour’d Ill’) are devoted to The Sonnets. He writes..."The Sonnets are rarely a source of strikingly original opinion or emotion. But thought and feeling, at least in the best of them, have been delivered with such vehemence of spirit as well as such virtuosity of phrase that the reader, mystery or no mystery, must hang on every line, rapt by the splendour of the words and music. A volume which contained only Nos. 18, 87, 94, 97, 98, 116 and 129 would stand on the peak of English poetry. It is surely idle to worry overmuch about the identity of the persons: it is enough that they were the cause of writing which raises language to a higher power...."

A little later he writes... "Like most schoolboys I had been sickened of Shakespeare by education. I was wearied almost to revolt by this examination business of commentating and annotating. All too well did I know and was able to repeat on paper what the Rialto was;.... By the age of eighteen I was allergic to Shakespeare almost beyond hope of therapy. But cure did come...by way of a weekly paper called The New Age in which, under the signature of Jacob Tonson, Arnold Bennett commented on books of the day with a frankness and liveliness unusual at the time. When Frank Harris’s book, The Man Shakespeare and His Tragic Life Story, appeared in 1909 Bennett cried its merits high... as an admirable alternative to Dry-as-dust and professorial or pedagogue's Shakespeare of those days and bored young people into a total hatred of ‘Eng.Lit.’... some teachers of ‘Eng.Lit.’ are now discovered working in theatres and producing his plays with gusto and with excellent results."

Certainly we were privileged to hear Lord Gawain Douglas’s vehemence of spirit and impressive faculty of memory  –  ending as he did with an Ode from Horace to Sussex and Hastings.... how many more such odes has he written, I wonder? 

AMcK

Loitering with a good book, by Robin Whitehead, formerly Rector of Winchelsea

A few years ago when I was about to undergo major surgery and an estimated year of follow-on treatment, I decided, slightly hesitantly, to purchase a Kindle. I was reckoning, I suppose, that mobility or lack of would prevent my perusing in bookshops for some time.

I promised myself I wouldn’t upload or download (not sure what the difference is), non-fiction, as a good solid biography does furnish a room, but merely novels that I might not want to keep. The other day, I was looking with a degree of shock at the many books that I have placed into my eBook library in the intervening years and moreover realising there were still some I hadn’t got around to reading or maybe simply decided not to read at all. Even given the relatively inexpensive price of a book on Kindle, I calculated that I’d spent the equivalent of a few bottles of relatively decent whisky, even at Scottish prices!

I have to confess that I have rather gone off my Kindle these days and would far rather sit with a real book. Mind you, the advantage of the Kindle is that you can try a sample and if you don’t like it, you can quickly erase it. A new book is reviewed in the weekend newspapers, so you try a quick sample. You can see you won’t get far with it. You remove it from the device. Simple as that! My mother would have delighted in that. She was always casting off books that had, in her words, “no style.” But then again she would have had scant time for her favourite authors being redacted to eBook format. Anna Karenina on Kindle?  Never!

Now I don’t want to appear to be grumbling, but the library ordering system in Dumfries and Galloway has left a lot to be desired since we moved up here. The kind and helpful ladies in the Dalbeattie branch have been the first to agree and assure me that at long last a new system, soon to be up and running, may finally remedy the problem. However being an ardent supporter of my local library this has been a source of some frustration to say the least.

Thus, in the absence of the library coming up with the goods, and reluctant to download onto the eBook any further, I have discovered the uncontainable pleasure of rereading the books on my own shelves.

On occasions, I have searched fruitlessly for a book I was convinced I owned, only to recall sadly that we had had a cull during a previous move. At that point I have searched diligently through the Abe Books catalogue for inexpensive copies of favourite books and thus, as it were, “recluttering” the shelves. Ah, what pleasure!

I’m not sure whether I have just reached a certain age (others might advise me on this) but the joy of re-reading books after decades has become an unexpected boon for me.

 In conjunction with good weather and sitting in the garden in the sun, I have wandered back into the delightful lost world of Barbara Pym and given the privilege of time that retirement sometimes affords, I lately devoured the whole of Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour Trilogy.

As always one author leads to another and following a recent television programme, I resolved to delve once more into the novels of the great Muriel Spark, again convinced that a few of them once sat proudly on our shelves.

I admit to “Abe- Booking” a copy of A far cry from Kensington but on a whim, I gave the library another chance and ordered Memento Mori and Loitering with Intent. With the computer still down, the librarian duly wrote the titles on a scrap of paper. I suppose if I had been quick enough, I might have remarked that Memento Mori translates as, “Remember you must die,” so she had better hurry up with the order. I daresay however, I shall be loitering for a good long time.

As I write this I am pondering whether it’s not so much an age thing, rather the state of the world just now that has lead me into an element of escapism. But whatever, I do recommend a little bit of reading nostalgia. I guarantee you’ll lose yourself in another world. If you’re in the garden over the summer with a book and a glass of something, much enjoyment awaits.  So grab that well- worn copy off the shelf or head down to your local library, hoping against hope that the computer is up and running.