At the Swan River Press blog, a conversation with writer and editor John
Kenny about my latest short story collection, Lost Estates. Our
conversation touches on borderland and otherworld fiction, the art of
wandering, General Gordon, how history and legends intertwine, landscape mysteries, inn signs, wild topiary and much else. Thanks to John for his enjoyable
questions. John has also reviewed the book at his personal blog.
(Mark Valentine)
Quite a lot of those I find are books I didn’t know I wanted until I saw them. That is one of the great joys of real bookshops: serendipity. The ability to take a book out from its niche, beguiled by the title, or the author’s name, or the publisher, or some aspect of the spine design, look through it and say to yourself ‘Aha!’
I have lots of favourite books I knew nothing about until they called to me from dusty shelves and dim corners. To the pleasure of the book itself is added the pleasure of discovery. This is enhanced further when the book is not where you would expect it to be, and there is an element of oblique chance to the find. And that is where real bookshops still score against online bookshops.
Serendipity of a sort is still possible online, but not to anywhere near the same extent, and it is a more sterile experience. The touch of the plastic key is not the same as the touch of the book. The finding of books in real bookshops is tactile: indeed, some collectors have claimed that their fingers seemed drawn to particular titles, as the noted bibliophile John Gawsworth described in his essay ‘Magnetic Fingers’.
But there is another reason why real bookshops are a much greater attraction than online ones. The art of browsing may be arduous, mysterious and tangential. But the art of buying isn’t. In a real bookshop, I select the book I want (or more often books in the plural, indeed the highly plural), take it to the counter, pay, exchange a few words with the more sociable of the booksellers, and walk out. That’s it: the simple art of buying books.
Not so online. I no longer buy books if I can at all avoid it from the three main purveyors, ABE, Amazon and Ebay, because I’ve had irksome experiences with sellers on all three, and their resolution procedures are now opaque, mostly automated, and ponderous. It’s too much trouble. There are, of course, still many entirely decent, professional booksellers working through these organisations. But they now jostle with many other, often highly industrialised, outfits who are quite the reverse.
But even buying from better, smaller firms has its trials. I recently tried to buy a book from a small press, an independent publisher: not, I hasten to add, one of the fine presses in our fantastic literature field. I wanted to get it direct from the press so they had the full benefit. I went to their website, and navigated through the usual several pop-ups. I located the book, I filled in my contact details, pausing a bit at the request for my phone number: I wasn’t intending to have a chat with them about the book, charming though it would no doubt be.
Then I came to the tick box asking me to confirm I had read and agreed to their terms and conditions. A sigh of exasperation escaped me. I was just buying a book, not taking out a one hundred and one year lease on a dilapidated mansion in the Grampians, nor negotiating a treaty about pudding-bowl navigation in international waters. But dutifully I consulted the terms and conditions. They went on and on, and were of course written in impenetrable legalese. For all I knew I could be signing up for an expedition to outermost Patagonia or agreeing to write a sequel to The Pickwick Papers in Esperanto. At this point I gave up.
Well, it is true that there can be setbacks even with real bookshops. They may prove to be not open when they are said to be, or even not to exist when they are said to. The proprietor may give every appearance of resenting the incursion of a customer. The books may be piled up so perilously that a sneeze seems likely to cause consternation on the Richter scale. The shop may have a miasma suggesting it is situated above the subterranean recesses of a hitherto unknown marsh gas.
Yet nevertheless and withal these are at least real experiences, adding to the adventures of book-collecting. They are part of the human lot in a way that online interactions are not. And at least there are no ‘terms and conditions’. Here’s the book: here’s the money. Thanks. Bye. The bell on the door peals and out we go, into the sunshine or the storm. The simple art of buying books.
(Mark Valentine)
Image: Three Wise Men of Gotham by Charles Folkard, via Jonkers Rare Books.
There is a new C S Lewis exhibition at The Old Library, Magadelen College, Oxford, until 11 September 2024. Words & Worlds 'examines his Oxford life as teacher, scholar, writer, administrator and
broadcaster, and his extensive involvement in various societies,
including the Socratic Club and the Inklings.' The exhibition includes 'original manuscripts, books, letters, illustrations, audio
recordings and photographs' and 'personal
objects, including Lewis’s pipe, tobacco jar and pen.' It is open on Wednesday afternoons from 2pm to 4.30pm and entrance is free, though the College itself charges an entrance fee to some visitors. An exhibition catalogue is planned.
Surely there is a tale to be written about the talismanic properties of C S Lewis' tobacco jar . . .
Design: Toucan Tango
There are novels which, from the opening sentence, immediately draw in the reader, starting them on a journey. Sometimes this can be a rather solitary expedition, while in other cases the reading traveller finds themselves in the company of someone who, by the end, has possibly become somewhat less of a stranger. The traveller may have learned something too. One such novel is The Rector’s Daughter by F.M. Mayor, first published in May one hundred years ago by Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press. Although Flora Macdonald Mayor (1872-1932) published several other books, including a volume of ghost stories, today she is almost certainly only remembered for this one novel.
‘Dedmayne is an insignificant village in the Eastern counties.’ The first two chapters of The Rector’s Daughter are an intense Impressionist portrait painted with economy and poise. The reader is introduced to Dedmayne and its society (or lack of it). We see the Rector himself, Canon Jocelyn, who has been in charge of the parish for forty-three years and at eighty-two still cuts a ‘thin, stately figure’. The Rector is a literary man, scholar and author, expert in classical and theological subjects: when not undertaking his few liturgical and pastoral duties, he keeps to his study. His intellect and cool objectivity make him a figure of some authority for the clerical colleagues and young curates who seek his counsel.
The Rector’s daughter is Mary, who at thirty-five has remained at home with her father, a widower. She cares for Ruth, her ‘imbecile’ sister. The two Jocelyn sons have long since married and moved away. Over the years the Rector has become distant from Mary: ‘he became occupied with St Augustine, and had no leisure for her’ (10). She now occupies a role in a world of duties and responsibilities, both at home and in the parish and village: ordered and reasonably secure, but at times confining and stifling. ‘Such was Mary’s life. […] Sometimes she felt the neighbourhood, the village, even her father, becoming like shadows. On the whole she was happy. She did not question the destiny life brought her. People spoke pityingly of her, but she did not feel she required pity’ (17).
Into this life of quiet desperation comes Robert Herbert, the clergyman son of Canon Jocelyn’s closest friend, who is appointed to a nearby village. Friends and servants speculate on the possibilities. Mary realises that her life could be about to change: she ‘felt less solitary; she knew not why’ (28). The two are attracted to each other: each seems to be able to supply something currently missing in their lives. ‘They were silent; soon they were again opening their hearts to one another’ (79). They understand each other, but neither can ever quite say what they feel, so strong are the codes of custom and reticence they cannot bring themselves to breach. Herbert goes to stay with a friend at Buxton, and – predictably – falls in love with the much younger Kathy Hollings. They become engaged. Back at the Rectory, Mary wanders into the old Nursery, which she would not now have the opportunity to restore to use. ‘It seemed a room of the dead. […] I may go on fifty years’ (88).
A year later, the Herberts’ marriage falls under strain as Herbert’s infatuation with Kathy has worn off and he realises their basic incompatibility. Mrs Herbert retreats to the French Riviera with her hedonistic friends. When Mary meets him again and they finally acknowledge what they mean to each other, there is nothing to be done. In her misery Mary translates a poem whose final lines she renders as: ‘For thee I am outcast from God, / I have forfeited Heaven for thee’ (129). Neither Mary nor her father are able to take the steps that would most help the other: they have grown too far apart. Yet after the Rector’s death, when Mary is forced to move to Croydon to live with her aunt, in the crudely-built ‘red-villa road’ she achieves a sort of freedom, as ‘her natural tenderness found many outlets’ (208).
As an aside, it is intriguing to speculate on when The Rector’s Daughter is set. At first it seems most likely to be contemporary, as Cubism and Metroland are mentioned and the forays into artistic London life and the Riviera fast set evoke the period; yet it is as if the Great War has never happened. It is not spoken of and has had no discernible effect. There is, rather, a late Victorian or Edwardian sensibility throughout, especially evident in the chapters set in the eastern county, which have a greater depth of reality than those which take place elsewhere. F.M. Mayor’s England seems a stolid and serene one for its time, its ancient institutions and rural counties at least only overlayed by as much change as the railways brought.
Perhaps the key is Mary Jocelyn herself. The confusion and turbulence of change, the collision of overlapping outlooks and worlds, is summarised and symbolised in and through her. The novel is titled for her – although only in terms of relationship and position. She exemplifies the inherent conflict between duty and freedom, friendship and renunciation, providing insight through her developing self-knowledge and the self-examinations which grow increasingly intimate and rejecting of illusion. Nevertheless, as Rosamond Lehmann commented: ‘[Mary] is herself an individual, to an extraordinary degree. At the same time she becomes, to me at least, a kind of symbol or touchstone for feminine dignity, intelligence and truthfulness.’
(John Howard)
