StreetBooks stand at the Book Fair

This is a short blog about the Saturday book fair in Cowley Road.
Frank Egerton set up the Streetbooks stall very attractively, with the two novels currently on sale sharing the space. An informative piece - a kind of expansion of the blurb - was easy to read and made it possible for people to know more about what they were getting.

I'd printed a free sheet of three Edward Thomas poems - Adlestrop inevitably, which most people knew, The Owl and Thaw. It's reproduced below. And of course we had Marc's May Hill picture too.

Most sales were to people I knew as they had used the opportunity to buy a copy, very kindly, but there were half-a-dozen or so to people I didn't know and that was particularly gratifying.

The fair itself was almost entirely book-related with local publishers chiefly selling non-fiction works, some local, some not. David Fickling was selling their fairly new children's comic Phoenix - I bought one for the grandchildren; interesting to see what they make of it. Korky Paul was there too.

I spoke to someone who had self-published, using a professional type-setter but doing everything else herself. We were both aware that fiction by an unknown author is more difficult to sell than non-fiction, and that endorsements will be very important.

Three Poems
I like Edna Longley's comment on our old friend Adlestrop:
''The double off-rhyme 'mistier'/'Gloucestershire' , the repeated 'farther' and  'shire',  make the poem's echoes linger beyond its last words."

Adlestrop

Yes. I remember Adlestrop—

The name, because one afternoon
Of heat the express-train drew up there
Unwontedly. It was late June.

The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat.

No one left and no one came
On the bare platform. What I saw
Was Adlestrop—only the name

And willows, willow-herb, and grass,

And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry,
No whit less still and lonely fair
Than the high cloudlets in the sky.

And for that minute a blackbird sang
Close by, and round him, mistier,
Farther and farther, all the birds
Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.º

The Owl   Downhill I came, hungry, and yet not starved; Cold, yet had heat within me that was proof Against the North wind; tired, yet so that rest Had seemed the sweetest thing under a roof. Then at the inn I had food, fire, and rest, Knowing how hungry, cold, and tired was I. All of the night was quite barred out except An owl's cry, a most melancholy cry Shaken out long and clear upon the hill, No merry note, nor cause of merriment, But one telling me plain what I escaped And others could not, that night, as in I went. And salted was my food, and my repose, Salted and sobered, too, by the bird's voice Speaking for all who lay under the stars, Soldiers and poor, unable to rejoice.

Thaw

Over the land freckled with snow half-thawed
The speculating rooks at their nests cawed
And saw from elm-tops, delicate as flowers of grass,
What we below could not see, Winter pass.

Edward Thomas and Three Women, Edna, Eleanor and Helen.

Eleanor Farjeon

'Morning has broken Like the first morning...'

Eleanor's best known work is the hymn 'Morning Has Broken' but I wonder how many people are aware that she was its author. It was written in 1931, is entitled 'Morning Song for the first day of Spring' and is sung to an old Scottish tune.
 I can never remember not knowing it and I have in fact known of Eleanor since the age of eleven: at my school, Stafford Girls High School (also C-A Duffy's as I say at every opportunity) we had elocution lessons with a flamboyant speech and drama teacher, Eleanora Fenn. Mrs Fenn knew Eleanor and dropped her name all the time. We had to learn a poem a week; often they were Eleanor's and very enjoyable and memorable they were.

Eleanor's Story
    
Eleanor Farjeon was born in London on 13 February 1881. Her family was literary, father a popular novelist, two brothers became writers and another a composer. "Nellie", was a small timid child, who had poor eyesight and suffered from ill-health throughout her childhood. She was shy and not a pretty child as she wore thick glasses - as a result she was sensitive and empathic towards children, qualities which show in her writing for them.
She was educated at home, spending much of her time in the attic, surrounded by books. Her father encouraged her writing from the age of five. She describes her family and her childhood in the autobiographical, A Nursery in the Nineties (1935).
She lived much of her life among the literary and theatrical circles of London.
A holiday in France in 1907 was to inspire her to create a story of a troubadour, later refashioned as the wandering minstrel of her most famous book, Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard. Among her earliest publications is a volume of poems called Pan Worship, published in 1908, and Nursery Rhymes of London Town from 1916, one of the manuscripts she sent to Edward for comment.
                                                                               *
  From A Conscious Englishman:

'When she’d met Edward almost two years before, she was overwhelmed by him. So beautiful - his face, and his voice. And his mind, she felt sure.

 ‘He was so kind to me,’ she’d said to her brother. ‘He asked to see some of my writing. Do you think he meant it?’

‘I’m sure Edward doesn’t say anything unless he means it.’

       So she wrote him a friendly note, rather a witty one, and he replied in the same vein. After that they wrote and met often. She knew that he was habitually melancholic – after all, their circle of friends thought of him as ‘The Patient’ by reputation before they knew him. They’d been quite cross at the way this mysterious ‘patient’ absorbed the time of their doctor friend, Godwin Baynes.

         She fell in love and she continued to love him when that first ‘in love’ phase passed. He knew, of course, but she sensed that she must never speak about her love for him. Bertie and a few close friends knew – and her mother, who was dismayed and disapproving.

On the first occasion that she went to visit the Thomases at Steep, Helen realised it at once. Seeing that Eleanor loved her husband, her response, her strategy perhaps, was to make sure that she became Eleanor’s loving friend too.'

                                                                                              * 

During World War I, the family spent time in Flansham in Sussex where the landscape, villages and local traditions were to have a profound effect upon her later writing.  It was in Sussex that the Martin Pippin stories were eventually to be located and in the novel I have her visit Edward's printer near Flansham.

 

Eleanor aged 21

 

At only eighteen Eleanor wrote the libretto  Floretta, to music by her brother Harry. She also collaborated with her youngest brother, Bertie, Edward's friend, a  Shakespearian scholar and dramatic critic. Their later productions include Kings and Queens (1932), The Two Bouquets (1938), An Elephant in Arcady (1939), and The Glass Slipper (1944).
Eleanor had a wide range of friends with great literary talents including D. H. Lawrence, Walter de la Mare and of course Edward Thomas. After Thomas's death in April 1917 she remained close to his wife, Helen. She later published much of their correspondence, and gave her account of their relationship in Edward Thomas: The Last Four Years  in 1958. On holiday in Norfolk
                                                 with her brother Bertie, Clifford Bax and Edward.

 

After Edward

After World War I Eleanor earned a living as a poet, journalist and broadcaster.  Her topical work for the Labour-supporting paper The Herald, Reynolds News and New Leader was the perhaps the most accomplished of any socialist poet of the 1920s and 30s.( I'm proud to say that my parents took the Herald.)

 

 Eleanor never married, but had a thirty-year friendship with George Earle, an English teacher. After his death in 1949, she had a long friendship with the actor Denys Blakelock who wrote of it in the book, Eleanor, Portrait of a Farjeon (1966).
During the 1950s she won three major literary awards: the annual Carnegie Medal for British children's books;^[ the inaugural, international Hans Christian Andersen Award for career contribution to children's literature; and the Regina Medal of the American Catholic Library Association. (An agnostic from childhood, in her later years she converted to Catholicism.)
She died in Hampstead, London on 5 June 1965 and  is buried in the churchyard of St John-at-Hampstead.
The Children's Book Circle, a society of publishers, present the Eleanor Farjeon Award annually in her memory.

Christmas

Eleanor loved Christmas - her family Christmases had been lavish Dickensian - style events with entertainments by their writer father and the four children - Eleanor wrote a version of Snow White when she was seven for the family to perform. It had a very succint opening -

The Queen, embroidering, pricks her finger.
QUEEN: I wish I had a little dauter with her skin as white as snow her lips and cheaks as red  as blod and her hair and eyes as black as my en-broadeere frame.

QUEEN dies. Enter KING.

KING: She's dead. I must marry agayne.
(Exsite KING and QUEEN. KING MARRYS)



1927 - Cyder Press facsimile

She was always very generous with her  presents to the Thomas family. Here is Edward's poignant 'thank you' note, of 27th December 1916:

 

My dear Eleanor, I am bloated with your presents. But that is not their fault. The apples were delicious and the poem is.  (Eleanor had sent another London Town poem).....It has been another entirely lovely day of melting snow and we have been out in it half the time in batches, I in each batch. If you had been here we should have been more Christmassy.  Goodbye. I hope we shall meet next Christmas time.

             Yours ever

                          Edward Thomas.

 The Poem: one of Eleanor's.



 http://.streetbooks.co.uk   Contact Frank Egerton (email:info@streetbooks.co.uk, Phone 07967 246482)  Pre-publication copies available at £2.00 discount.

Art and Book Fair, East Oxford on Sat 15th December

 

I will be on the StreetBooks stall with Frank Egerton who is selling his own novel,' Invisible', too. I'm  distinctly nervous and hope to see lots of friendly faces even if they don't buy the novel. It's a first for me.
 'A Conscious Englishman' will cost £7.99 -discount of £2.00. We will have Marc's picture there of course, and some cards.

My reading group read ' Invisible' and had Frank come to discuss it with us - we really enjoyed it. It's quite a complex novel with several themes - one that has proved very popular is its treatment of eating disorders, which is very acute and insightful.

Frank has been really busy sending review copies to media and to individuals. He - and I - had a lovely message from David Constantine about the quality of the production and saying he would make it his Christmas reading, and Lucy Newlyn was similarly friendly.

I am going to ask Frank to do a guest blog on all this shortly as I know it will be of interest to writers.

Poem:  Birds' Nests. December 1914. An example of Thomas's  careful observation and recollection, and a cheerful poem.

Birds' Nests

The summer nests uncovered by autumn wind,
Some torn, others dislodged, all dark,
Everyone sees them: low or high in tree,
Or hedge, or single bush, they hang like a mark.

Since there's no need of eyes to see them with
I cannot help a little shame
That I missed most, even at eye's level, till
The leaves blew off and made the seeing no game.

'Tis a light pang. I like to see the nests
Still in their places, now first known,
At home and by far roads. Boys knew them not,
Whatever jays and squirrels may have done.

And most I like the winter nests deep-hid
That leaves and berries fell into:
Once a dormouse dined there on hazel-nuts,
And grass and goose-grass seeds found soil and grew.

Edward Thomas and three women, Edna, Eleanor and Helen

 

 

Still Life, Basket on Chair

                   Edna Clarke Hall



A blog-reader commented that I had left hanging a reference to Edna and my discomfort about what I've made of her in the novel.
It's true that the Edna episodes are by far the most speculative, based chiefly on poems of Edward and Edna. Then belatedly my speculations were to some extent confirmed by Matthew Hollis who had access to Edna's journals of the period. But whether she actively tried to seduce Edward - well, I can only say I think it quite likely, and likely that she would not have succeeded.

Edna's Story:

Edna – slender, extraordinarily beautiful, with a mass of chestnut hair and expressive eyes, was so talented an artist that she was accepted at the Slade at fourteen. She didn’t need to attend drawing class – there was nothing she needed to learn – so she developed her own way as a painter, especially as a water-colourist.  

It was William Clarke-Hall, a lawyer friend of her father’s, who had persuaded her parents to send her to the Slade. In her mind Willie was of their generation, twice her age. She was grateful to him but she’d never regarded him as a lover. When he proposed marriage she was too young to know herself, her feelings, and his nature. The marriage was unhappy from the beginning. Edna was nineteen, Willie thirty-two, she was open, honest and forthright with her feelings, he was reserved and formal, but he had been, for a time, overwhelmed by Edna’s beauty.

Edward had been in his last year at Oxford, already a father at twenty-one and married, though not yet living with Helen. A close friend of his, a law student, knew William and liked to talk about legal matters with him. Edward went on these visits, but spent the time talking to Edna. It was ‘them and us’, as Edward said – the lawyers and the artists.

Edna was glad to have someone who understood her, because already her new husband constantly criticised her behaviour and indeed her thoughts; he blamed her for her introspection or what he called self-absorption. Worse, she was young and wild, wanting to sleep out under the stars and climb the high elms around their house. She went out barefoot in simple cotton dresses and Willie said she looked like a gypsy.

Along with her wildness was the problem, for Willie, of the informality and spontaneity of her painting. Her art suffered; she managed to exhibit once in a group with some old Slade friends, but nothing more. All her promise seemed to have disappeared. She found what inspiration she could in Wuthering Heights, identifying herself with Catherine and her yearning for passionate love, something that she felt was cruelly denied her. She’d said a little, even at that early time, to Edward to hint at her unhappiness but she’d restrained herself from too much complaint then. 

After Oxford and a year in London the Thomases’ life took them away into the country, to Kent and Hampshire, and the friendship faded. Fifteen years passed. Edna had two children. Her old teacher from the Slade persuaded her to exhibit in a one-woman show early in 1914, and in the Saturday Review she was described as a sensitive and expressive draughtswoman. Her sense of colour, the reviewer said, was individual and instinctive. 

None of this altered Willie’s attitude towards his wife. 

 

In 1915 Edward's posting at Hare Hall camp, Romford, meant that he was near enough the Clarke- Hall home, Great House, Upminster, to visit and renew the friendship with Edna.

 

What 'happened' then between them we don't know, but Edward's poems of the period tell us that a real woman  or 'Woman' preoccupied his thoughts.
I have a book of Edna's poems kindly sent to me by Alison Thomas, a scientist at Cambridge who, for reasons I've never sought out, knows about Edna and other artists of the period. 'Portraits of Women', Alison Thomas.
The poems - well, I do wonder whether Edward was asked to read them and if so what he would have said. They are almost all full of pain, all about Love, Desire or Death.

The poems were published in 1926 and none are dated.

Edna hated the war and was in effect a pacifist - she painted very little during the war years. Somewhere around 1918 she had a serious mental breakdown. Her therapist persuaded Willie, her husband, to  respect her and her art more.
 She had a studio and gallery in London and continued to paint.

Love said unto my soul.   1930

In 1930 (aged 51) she was drawn by Augustus John.

Her gallery, studio and most of her extant work was destroyed in a bombing raid in WW Two, and she ceased painting. Edna lived till she was a hundred, dying in 1979.

   Thomas's poem, written 4th March 1916

Celandine

Thinking of her had saddened me at first,
Until I saw the sun on the celandines lie
Redoubled, and she stood up like a flame,
A living thing, not what before I nursed,
The shadow I was growing to love almost,
The phantom, not the creature with bright eye
That I had thought never to see, once lost.

She found the celandines of February
Always before us all. Her nature and name
Were like those flowers, and now immediately
For a short swift eternity back she came,
Beautiful, happy, simply as when she wore
Her brightest bloom among the winter hues
Of all the world; and I was happy too,
Seeing the blossoms and the maiden who
Had seen them with me Februarys before,
Bending to them as in and out she trod
And laughed, with locks sweeping the mossy sod.

But this was a dream; the flowers were not true,
Until I stooped to pluck from the grass there
One of five petals and I smelt the juice
Which made me sigh, remembering she was no more,
Gone like a never perfectly recalled air.      

The Page is Printed

All 286 pages in fact, and it looks beautiful. StreetBooks is the best!

Frank Egerton of StreetBooks and me.

Photos by Rosie Wharton, my first reader and critic.

 

 

 



The publication date proper is 7th February 2013 so they are available for  a discount of £2.00 at £7.99 before then, through info@streetbooks.co.uk

 

 Frank Egerton and I will be here, in East Oxford, selling at the price above, and I will have a mock-up of the plaque I hope to have erected on Thomas's student lodgings, 113 Cowley Road, and perhaps a petition:

East Oxford Xmas Art and Book Fair

The fair will take place at the Cowley Road Methodist Church, opposite the Ultimate Picture Palace cinema, OX4 1BZ, on Saturday, 15 December, from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Brian Aldiss will open the Fair officially at 11.30am.

Things are hotting up

At last the novel is going to print! I'm not sure I thought this day would ever come. There will be a limited  pre-publication number, for reviewers in the main.

These are the fliers which will go to journals -the Edward Thomas Fellowship and Friends of the Dymock Poets: (with cover picture too)

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Did anyone ever begin to be a poet at thirty-six in the shade?’ Edward Thomas asks.

Following the outbreak of the First World War he does begin to write poetry after a lifetime of prose and his self-doubt and melancholy start to lift, helped by his close friendship with the American poet, Robert Frost.

This poignant novel tells the story of the last years of the poet’s life. Told from the point of view of both Edward and his loyal wife Helen, it shows him wrestling with words along with marriage, children, the perpetual lack of money, and eventually with his conscience.

Inspired by Edward and Helen’s writings, the novel is set against the beautifully evoked landscapes of Gloucestershire and Hampshire that offer the couple only partial peace.

A Conscious Englishman by Margaret Keeping will be published by StreetBooks on Thursday 7th February 2013

ISBN 978-0-9564242-3-5 £9.99
For pre-publication discount (£2 off cover price + free UK delivery), please contact Frank Egerton (email: info@streetbooks.co.uk, mobile: 07967 246482) quoting CODE NEWS271112


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Creative Writing Courses.

I think fewer people are sceptical about these courses than used to be the case; even if they are there are more than enough enthusiasts to make up for the doubters.



Little Clarendon Street

Ten of my group - 2006 -2008 Creative Writing  Diploma at  the University of Oxford - met last night for a meal at Al - Andalus, Little Clarendon Street.

We all agreed that  the course had been a life-transforming experience and that we  go on gaining from it. Five of  us there and one other  have gone on to take Masters since and most are on the way to being published.

 Someone is now in a motorhome around Europe, another, a lawyer, has given up law to write drama. Another has been twice short-listed for the Bridport Poetry prize - and hadn't even let on , Neville! Liz Gifford 's novel  is to be published in September and another accepted. Brian moved nearer London and is taking a great Masters on 'Writing the City'.

So if you can, and are hesitating, our recommendation would be  - go for it!
                                                                         -----------------------

Ambition

Like Health and The Glory it dramatises  -  'the gap between aspiration and or desire and its realisation; between the speaker's capacity and high possibilities symbolised by early morning or early spring or both.' (Longley)

Unless it was that day I never knew
Ambition. After a night of frost, before
The March sun brightened and the South-west blew,
Jackdaws began to shout and float and soar
Already, and one was racing straight and high
Alone, shouting like a black warrior
Challenges and menaces to the wide sky.
With loud long laughter then a woodpecker
Ridiculed the sadness of the owl's last cry.
And through the valley where all the folk astir
Made only plumes of pearly smoke to tower
Over dark trees and white meadows happier
Than was Elysium in that happy hour,
A train that roared along raised after it
And carried with it a motionless white bower
Of purest cloud, from end to end close-knit,
So fair it touched the roar with silence. Time
Was powerless while that lasted. I could sit
And think I had made the loveliness of prime,
Breathed its life into it and were its lord,
And no mind lived save this 'twixt clouds and rime.
Omnipotent was I, nor even deplored
That I did nothing. But the end fell like a bell:
The bower was scattered; far off the train roared.
But if this was ambition I cannot tell.
What 'twas ambition for I know not well.

Biographical fiction, HG Wells and David Lodge

Ultimate biog fiction?

HG Wells

Anthony Beevor - an historian's objections to 'faction.'

Yesterday in Oxford  I met Linda Hart, my Robert Frost guru, for the first time, though I had seen her on stage at the Malvern Coach House Theatre ( for the production on Frost featured in an early blog.)
 We met at the English Faculty Library, St Cross and sat over a long lunch at the cafe on its St Catherine's side - worth finding, in the Politics section - and talked.

Linda seems to have come round to accepting that biographical fiction is not all bad. She told me that David  Lodge recently talked about the 'Year of Henry James' - see last blog- and then more generally about the use of real figures in fiction.
He has a recent novel on HG Wells, 'A Man of Parts' published, which I have just ordered. With that and the Jude Morgan on Shakespeare I'm about to start,  I'm heavily  into biographical fiction.
As the 'Conscious Englishman' is now being printed I'm thinking about reviewers and wondering about David Lodge himself - rather a cheek, but nothing venture...

Anthony Beevor wrote  a Guardian  article - also called  'Author, Author'( 19 February 2011) on  the perils of faction, and Lodge referred to his views.  It's very well worth reading if you are interested in this subject. Beevor  is a historian and his argument is essentially that truth is lost or blurred by these works, even though immaculately researched, like Hilary Mantel's Cromwell.

Mantel says,
'Unlike the historian the novelist doesn't operate through hindsight. She lives inside the consciousness of her characters for whom the future is a blank.'
 Beevor comments that the historian should do both, seeing things as the protagonist did at the time, then analysing.

'But the key fact is that when a novelist uses a major historical character the reader has no idea what he or she has taken from recorded fact  and what has been invented in their re-creation of events.
Restorers of paintings and pottery follow a code of conduct in their work  to distinguish the original material from what they are adding later.'

I believe Lodge added that maybe Beevor wanted  the made-up bits, or else  the 'real' bits,  in bold! (But isn't it rather dated to be adamant that we are sure of 'real'?)

Here Beevor speculates about its popularity:

A blend of fact and fiction has been used in various forms since the dawn of creative writing, starting with sagas and epic poems. Yet the appeal of faction to writers and readers has recently increased in a dramatic way. Is this due to a poverty of imagination, as some critics argue? Is it a marketing-driven phenomenon, perhaps catering to the modern desire in a fast-moving world to learn and to be entertained at the same time? Is it influenced by a curious need for authenticity, even in works of fiction? Is there a prurient compulsion to fill in those gaps in our knowledge about the private lives of great figures, which history has failed to cover? Movies and TV now revel in the speculative biopic.

I think there is some truth  in all those factors if I'm honest - on the first,  like Jean Rhys on writing the Wide Sargasso Sea,  'I cannot invent, but I can imagine.'

Poem of Edward Thomas - because  I feel he is getting lost in  all this

First Known When Lost

I never had noticed it until
'Twas gone,---the narrow copse
Where now the woodman lops
The last of the willows with his bill.

It was not more than a hedge o'ergrown.
One meadow's breadth away
I passed it day by day.
Now the soil is bare as a bone,

And black betwixt two meadows green,
Though fresh-cut faggot ends
Of hazel made some amends
With a gleam as if flowers they had been.

Strange it could have hidden so near!
And now I see as I look
That the small winding brook,
A tributary's tributary rises there.


Has anyone noticed that on copying from Oxford's digital 1st WW site the enjambents are lost? It's like one of those exercises in a poetry writing class where you have to guess where they should be. I quite enjoy putting it right really, and am almost tempted to try it without checking Edna Longley - but no, the capital letters give it away.

'First Known When Lost' is the title of a rather wonderful blog, by the way.