A review by Jonty Driver: The Shepherd's Hut, by Tim Winton

I'd like to recommend Tim Winton's latest novel, THE SHEPHERD'S HUT.  Winton is a well-known Australian novelist, often commended by other writers.  This novel is reviewed, very well, in the latest TLS by Jay Griffiths. It's the story, told in the first person, very much in what one assumes is the vernacular of a very difficult young man, constantly and savagely beaten up by his drunken father. After the death of his mother from cancer, and then the accidental death of his father (for which the boy thinks he might be blamed) he flees his home, on foot, and walks into the bush, taking a rifle but forgetting a knife.  There, eventually, just in time to save himself from death by dehydration, he falls into the company of a disgraced Catholic priest exiled to the edge of a salt lake, and there – after the violent intrusion of urban criminals – finds a state of grace, as does the fallen priest.  It's an exciting read, with mythic undertones, and I read it fast, and then re-read parts of it more slowly, which is always (in my experience) a sign of imaginative richness.

July Events

There is no speaker at this month's meeting, which takes the form of the annual Society Summer Party, on Friday 20 July. Details from Hilary Roome, e-mail: roome12hilary@gmail.com

At the Rye Bookshop is an event taking place in July this Saturday 7 July. Author of numerous books, both fiction and non-fiction, John Symons, will be in store signing copies from 11.30am-2pm.

On 15 July, at the Kino Cinema, Rye, arranged by local author Anwesha Arya, is a book launch at 7.15 pm in the Silver Room. This is "The Man who Spoke in Pictures" a biography of one of India's most distinguished film-makers, followed by a  screening in the Red Room of "Do Bigha Zamin". Tickets at £15 (for the benefit of Cancer Research) are available at the Old Grammar School record shop in Rye High Street.

Write us a review of any book, film, TV or radio production with a literary theme that you have enjoyed or hated. A selection of entries will appear on the blog, and a small prize for the best entry will be presented at the Summer Party (see above). Suggested length 200 to 300 words, but longer  contributions are welcome. Send entries to me at lyoulten@aol.com, or post or drop a paper copy through the letter box of Periteau House, High Street, Winchelsea TN36 4EA

About Hymns by Jonty Driver.

“Every person who has attended a church and sung hymns with a proper sense of their importance has assented to a magical act...”  Robin Skelton

I come from a clerical family.  My mother’s grandfather was a Methodist minister, and my grandfather went to a Methodist school, then to a Cambridge college to train as a Methodist minister.  While he was there, he went back to the Anglicanism which Methodism had broken from, and spent the rest of his life as an Anglican priest (being a scholar, he actually called himself “a clerk in holy orders”).  My father was an Anglican priest, too. To my relief, if I ever had a vocation to follow their footsteps, I was too busy to hear it.

Still, I suppose it is hardly surprising I know by heart the words of many of the hymns I’ve sung a good many Sundays throughout my life (given a few years of non-attendance because of rebellious agnosticism). Sometimes, I find myself hardly bothering to open the hymnal.  The words are there, in my head, in my heart, in my imagination, so much a part of me that, at times, I could almost think I wrote them myself.

It helps that, for seven years, I was a treble in the choir of the Cathedral of St Michael & St George in Grahamstown, South Africa, and learned not just to read music but to allow, almost instinctively, my brain to direct my voice to the right notes.  I still remember the surprise I felt when, one Sunday after I had for some reason missed the Wednesday practice, I could nonetheless lead the choir through the treble part of the anthem I didn’t know just by doing what the notes said I had to.

I am not of course the only person to whom this applies. This is the sociologist, David Martin, in his memoir, The Education of David Martin: “My saturation in hymns gave me access to tonal and literary worlds that informed how I thought, felt and expressed myself... The tunes and words of hymns... were my earliest real education.  They ensured I would always respond most intensely to a combination of words and music”. In my case, this was an additional blessing, because the headmaster of the prep. school I went to (an admirable man in many ways) did also think that nothing had ever been said in verse which couldn’t just as well be said in prose;  so we studied hardly a single poem all my early schooldays (though we were allowed to sing folk-songs as well as hymns). It wasn’t until I came into the purview of a genius of an English teacher - when I was about fifteen - that I had confirmed what my maternal grandfather had told me:  the glory of England is its literature, and the most glorious part of that literature is poetry. One of my reasons for exulting in The English Hymnal (almost every version of it, anyway) is how many great poems there are in that book: poems by George Herbert, Samuel Johnson, Milton, Cowper, Christina Rossetti, Henry Vaughan, John Clare...

Some favourites, then:  Samuel Crossman, “My song is love unknown”; John Henry Newman, “Lead, kindly light, amid the encircling gloom” (what a pity some churches think it should be sung only at evening services;  these are metaphors as much as descriptions, and it is perfectly all right to mourn the loss of angel voices at Matins); Bunyan, 218, provided we use his words, including the lion, hobgoblin and foul fiend, not the ghastly bowdlerised version; Cowper, 231, “O for a closer walk with God”; George Herbert, 240, “The Elixir”; Christina Rossetti, 42, “In the bleak mid-winter”.

There are lots more, of course;  and some of my favourite hymns aren’t actually notable poems per se, but may be sung very well. I love G. Duffield’s words, “Stand up, stand up for Jesus”, because it is the battle hymn of the Salvation Army - and can anyone not be moved to tears of admiration by those brave folk in their uniforms, playing away in crowds of shoppers or outside pubs? And doing their good, unfashionable work for those who otherwise have no hope at all? (I did once know a school chaplain, a devout pacifist, who refused point blank to let the school sing “Onward Christian Soldiers”, since he thought it an incitement to war, or at any rate to warlike behaviour.  I never thought to ask him what he made of the Sally Army:  were they an incitement to war? I think it must be very difficult to be a Christian without imagination.)

Of course, there are hymns I loathe - and I confess that, when one of them is announced, I make my own private protest by standing silent, not singing at all, much to my wife’s annoyance: why aren’t you singing, she demands in a whisper? It’s hard to explain to her why I simply won’t sing a hymn which rhymes “magnificat” with “council flat” , or has a meaningless rhyme linking “faction” and “action”.  And consider those lines, “Was not the Church we love / commissioned from above?”  Did F. Pratt Green ever try to sing “commissioned”? I am sometimes nonplussed, too, when a familiar tune is attached to unfamiliar words (oddly enough, the reverse of that I often like, because it helps me look again at what the words actually mean. “Firmly I believe, and truly”, says John Henry Newman;  you need “truly” as well as “firmly”, because that’s doctrine, you see...)

However, despite my occasional grumpy dislike of this hymn or that (“Life is great and life is given; /life is lovely, free and good”... No 482, and no it bloody well isn’t, not if you live in Rwanda or in Syria or in Palestine...), the hymnal is a delight and a joy, as are deeply musical priests who seems to share some at least of my verbal tastes, thank God.

C.J.Driver

P.S.

I suppose we’d better face the fact that quite a few of the hymns are written to sound as if women either don’t exist or don’t matter: “In Jesus all shall find their rest,/ In him the sons of earth be blest...”

The preface of the hymnal we use at St James’s in Ewhurst Green says this: “Unlike many other languages, English has only the one word ‘man’ to carry three distinct meanings:  (a) the human race as a whole, (b) an individual human being,  (c) an adult male as opposed to a woman or a boy.  Some voices of feminine emancipation have come to object to the first two meanings, not to the third.  But we have not thought it right to alter the words of hymns to meet this objection.”  To which I would quietly say Hooray:  but then I have no objection to images like God the Father, or God the Son. Christianity exists in history, not outside it.

Poems of Home and Exile, Mayfield Festival

Poems of Home and Exile

Earlier this month I was lucky enough to visit the Mayfield Festival and attended a wonderful poetry reading given by Jonty Driver and Isobel Dixon.   ‘Poems of Home and Exile’ was the title and it was a timely reminder of the feeling of loss and heartache that exile, from the country of one’s birth, can evoke.

Both Driver and Dixon were born and raised in South Africa.   Listening to their poetry it was easy to realise how much the country meant to both of them and what a wrench it must have been to bid it farewell.   Although Jonty Driver was forced to leave and Isobel Dixon left through choice, the strength of their memories was equally strong and came alive in their readings.   Their tales of family, the karoo and life in South Africa gave a vivid and touching picture of a wide open, beautiful country and a lifestyle slowly slipping into history.

Jonty Driver is on stage again at the Hythe Festival on 11 July (St Michael’s Church, 3.00 pm) reading from his two new books of poetry, ‘Before’ and ‘Still Farther’, currently in preparation.   Definitely a date for your diary.

Linda McCarthy

Events in May

Literary Society May Meeting:

 Good and Bad Hymns: “Poetry of Hymns” Workshop led by Jonty Driver Friday 18 May at 7 for 7:30pm in the Lower Court Hall by kind permission of the Mayor

Mayfield Fesival: 

 (see below) 10 May: Poetry reading by Jonty Driver and Isobel Dixon

Events at Rye Bookshop:

Saturday 5 May: - Author Pamela Holloway will be signing copies of her new novel 'Claire's Story' from 10.30am.

Friday 11 May:- Bronwen Griffiths is giving an evening talk to launch her latest book 'Here Casts No Shadow', from 6pm
.
Saturday 12 May:- Cherry Radford will be signing copies of her novel 'The Lighthouse Keeper's Daughter'. (Time to be confirmed; contact bookshop) 

April Meeting The Romantic Seaside, a talk by Jane Darcy

Lured to the Court Hall, the Lit. Soc.’s  Lonely Hearts assembled to hear a lively discourse from a vivacious, ebullient Jane Darcy on the topic of  “The Romantic Seaside” Lorna Challand’s introduction reviewed the speaker’s oeuvre in which melancholy seemed to feature prominently but the black bile disease and the  attendant humours propounded by the physicians of Antiquity were displaced by a thoroughly modern one which saw the lecture punctuated by frequent bursts of audience laughter. 

The narrative began in the mid-eighteenth century as some doctors deserted their old haunts in spa towns for seaside villages where they became enthusiastic proponents of seabathing. Contemporary cultural influences like Dutch landscape painting, which presented the coast as a liminal space, and the Enlightenment vogue for Natural Theology, which saw the hand of the Creator all-present in Nature, helped turbocharge seabathing’s surging popularity. Medical treatment then was still driven by concepts of correcting imbalances of humours and excretions of toxins which explained the enthusiasm for emetics, purgatives and bloodletting. 

Dr. Richard Russell of Lewes was an early pioneer of therapeutic seabathing at Brighton. Physicians, possibly with an eye to their fee schedule, micromanaged the prescription of the treatment with a Dr. White recommending “the dip” last less than 2 minutes, with the maximum permitted “dosage” being twice a day or 3 times a week. Just as modern sports generate a demand for essential “accoutrements” so Georgian seabathing spawned bathing chariots with awnings, flannel swimsuits, oilskin caps, bathing guides or “dippers”and a macho, extreme-sport fringe of men who swam naked – usually at another part of the beach. In the spirit of Enlightenment empiricism, a Dr. Anderson interviewed experienced bathing assistants before issuing an advisory code for female bathers on what to do if pregnant, menstruating or seeking to cure infertility. Much of the medical advice was devoid of logic and consistency so preliminary “tonics”, alcohol and hearty meals were prescribed on occasion. Male voyeurism, aided by powerful telescopes placed on viewpoints, was a parallel activity recorded in cartoons by Rowlandson – a sort of Donald McGill of the time.  

Seabathing was incorporated into contemporary literature. The speaker described Jane Austen’s Sanditon as the lost novel of seabathing, recounted the bathing misfortunes of Matthew Bramble, the main protagonist in Tobias Smollet’s  Humphrey Clinker, at Scarborough and told of Boswell’s surprise at Brighton to find that Dr. Johnson was a strong swimmer.  

Jane Darcy’s favourite seaside venue was the south coast of the Isle of Wight, visited by a litany of literary luminaries – Darwin, Turgenev, Keats, George Eliot, Karl Marx, Wordsworth, Charles Lamb and Tennyson. Perhaps not surprising that the last left the island complaining of too many tourists! The magnet for the tourists was now sea air and sea views. “Picturesque” travellers cherished rugged vistas marked by variety, singularity and grandeur.

The audience expressed their appreciation of a lecture marked by extensive research, learning lightly worn and an irrepressible, mischievous humour, with a resounding round of applause. 

Bill Doherty