Gearing up for the Ivy Compton-Burnett experience: 'PG Wodehouse rewritten by Patricia Highsmith'

I have mentioned before my epiphany, about 40 years ago, that reading novels for pleasure might be a good thing - both intellectually improving and enjoyable. At the time I cast around for guidance on what I should read, with the aim of becoming WELL READ.

Among my discoveries was a short volume by Anthony Burgess, 99 novels: the best in English since 1939, a personal choice. Given that Burgess was a famous novelist and respected critic, I figured he should know what he was talking about and resolved to work my way through his list. I learned later that it had been produced in a fit of pique after none of his works made it onto a list published by the Book Marketing Council of the 12 'best novels of our time' (in English). Burgess described that list as 'execrable' and his decision to choose 99 novels came with the suggestion that the reader could decide on the hundredth and might choose one of his own novels.

In 1984 I might have hoped that 40 years later I might have read at least a majority of the recommendations, possibly nearly all of them. I was probably never much up for Finnegans wake and never much liked the sound of the 15-volume A chronicle of ancient sunlight by Henry Williamson, the dreadful fascist who is most famous for Tarka the Otter. 

Much of the list was predictable, the familiar roster of Waugh, Greene, Spark, Murdoch, Amis etc. that I would probably have added to my list anyway. But it introduced me to many authors and books I hadn't heard of, whether John Kennedy Toole's marvellous picaresque A confederacy of dunces, Richard Hughes' The fox in the attic, which is not as well-known as it should be, and Mervyn Peake's Titus Groan.

For a while I seemed to be working through the list, but then somehow became parted from the book and ceased to use it as a guide. Also I began to read more history and less fiction and hopes of achieving well-read status diminished. But recently I was given a new second-hand copy and looked with curiosity to see how I was doing. Not good – 28 out of 99, which means I've been going at a rate of not much more than one every two years. I could make myself feel better by noting that my list disproportionately included the multi-volume novels like A dance to the music of time, The sword of honour and the Balkan trilogy.

It's true that I have read other good or great books from the same period that aren't on the list. Among them are, Elizabeth Bowen's The death of the heart and Brian Moore's Cold heaven, both of which I could have sworn Burgess included but are clearly not there. I can see a few more that I really don't want to read. Maybe one should have a go at Norman Mailer's The naked and the dead, but Ancient evenings – I don't think so. And having listened to a radio adaptation of CP Snow's Strangers and brothers, I think I can spare myself its 10 volumes - even if part of me feels I should read a classic novel sequence by a  a fellow University of Leicester alumnus. By all accounts it is a stodgy old read.

Others I thought it best not to bother with because I had not heard of the author let alone the book, but on closer inspection Pavane by Keith Roberts and The disenchanted by Budd Schulberg look quite interesting. I might give them to go.

The ambition remains to get to 50, and to make progress I should target shorter ones that I actually want to read. To that end I have lighted on one of Burgess's recommendations that I haven't read and which isn't that long, Ivy Compton Burnett's The mighty and their fall. Compton-Burnett has long been in the same category for me as BS Johnson, about whom I wrote last year - intriguing enough to want to read, but with a sense that it's a bit daunting so not quite what I want to pick up just now.

There are a few reasons for this, starting with the author's rather scary appearance. Next, the forbidding appearance of hardback versions of her books lined up in public libraries when I was younger, with the yellow Gollancz covers offering no pictorial enticement. In paperback they appeared in the somewhat austere Penguin Classics range with their white and orange spines, implying seriousness rather than fun.

Then there were the titles with their consistent 'and' format starting with Pastors and Masters (1925) through to The Last and the First (posthumous (1971). And then there are the distinctive features that the books are all written almost entirely in dialogue and all set in Edwardian country houses even through to those written in the 1960s. Their themes of claustrophobic family (occasionally institutional, such as a school) life seemed rather daunting too. It all sounds like a kind of Kafkaesque ghost story.

Yet there have always been reasons not to be put off. I remember seeing an edition of the South Bank Show in 1984 on the centenary of Compton-Burnett's birth presented by Melvyn Bragg and featuring a dramatisation of scenes from Elders and betters, which if I remember rightly is about an elderly relative using her debilitating illness and the prospect of inheritance to manipulate her family. I seem to remember it concluding with a haunting scene showing leaves being blown about in the wind. That was what first intrigued me about her work.

In addition, the books are supposed to be funny, which is always an attraction to me. So is the unconventional format and style (see BS Johnson again). They were read and popular in their time and Compton-Burnett was well-known enough to have a damehood conferred on her. They can't be that difficult.

So my Dame Ivy moment has almost arrived. I've done a bit of preparation, listening to an edition of the Unburied Books podcast, focsuing on Dame Ivy's A house and its head, featuring John Darnielle, the lead singer out of the wonderful Mountain Goats, who I'm somehow not surprised to find is a Compton-Burnett fan. I've listened to a dramatisation of another novel, A family and a fortune and read this article by Stuart Jeffries on the Royal Literature Fund website, arguing that on the 140th anniversary of her birth Compton-Burnett's novels are ripe for rediscovery, although it's debatable whether his description of her novels as 'PG Wodehouse rewritten by Patricia Highsmith' will encourage this or not.

While I continue to prefer hard-copies to e-books, it has been hard to find The mighty and their fall in decent condition so Kindle it is then. I hope to report back here on what I find.

Leicester revisited and rediscovered

Somewhere I have made it to recently is Leicester, a city where I studied as an undergraduate and became a political activist, and which thus had a defining influence on my life.

My appetite for election campaigning was much influenced by Chris Rennard, who at that time was East Midlands Area Agent and a rising star of the then Liberal party, and my political thinking by the late Professor Robert Pritchard, a polymath who led the Genetics Department that developed DNA fingerprinting and who then became leader of the Liberal Democrat group on Leicester City and then Leicestershire County Council.

While I can’t claim to have been that assiduous in my studies, I got my act together to earn a decent enough degree thanks in great part to the wise guidance of Dr (now Professor) Stuart Ball, the distinguished historian of the Conservative party. That encouraged me to engage in postgraduate study in later life.

For a few years after I returned to live in Watford, I continued to visit Leicester, still having Lib Dem friends there. But over the years I lost touch with people and didn’t go back for over two decades apart from a brief and sad visit in 2015 for Bob Pritchard’s funeral.

This year, though, has taken me back twice, once for sightseeing as we were staying nearby and most recently to watch rugby, of which more later. While I hope I wasn’t a total philistine when I was a student and do remember going to the Newarke Houses and New Walk Museums, somehow I never made it to the cathedral, nor to the greater architectural gem of St Mary de Castro parish church. I’m sure I intended to visit but never quite got round to it before leaving.

This year I was able to put that right and indeed that whole part Leicester was quite a revelation and I wish I had discovered it when I lived in the city, including the medieval Guildhall. The cathedral itself while II* listed, would be quite low down the English rankings, although it has received a boost in from the reburial there of Richard III, something they certainly make the most of. At St Mary de Castro, however, the volunteer on duty is keen to assert that it is in a completely different league from the cathedral. Boasting elements of all eras of English architecture, from Norman to Gothic Revival, its highlight is the triple-arched Norman sedilia. It is really two churches in one, a collegiate and a parish church and thus has two naves. It is evidently very high church, being full of icons and making more of its Marian affiliation than one expects in an Anglican church.

The more recent visit took in rather less distinguished elements of Leicester’s architecture and skyline. With an hour or two to spare before heading to watch rugby at Welford Road (sorry, Mattioli Woods Welford Road Stadium), we dropped in at the University of Leicester campus. There were various reasons why I chose Leicester back then, but aesthetic considerations were not really among them, although there have been significant changes and new building since I was there, and these are mostly positive additions.

I knew that the famous paternoster in the otherwise undistinguished Attenborough tower, where we humanities students were based,  had been taken out of action in 2017, as it became increasingly difficult to get parts to repair it, but I had a vision of it still being in place, perhaps with the platforms permanently suspended between floors. Alas, it has been replaced by an ordinary lift.

The more famous tower on the campus is the Engineering Building, indeed this is the feature that people most often mention if I tell them I went to Leicester University. Designed by the famous modernist architect James Stirling and his colleague James Gowan, it was a notoriously terrible environment to study in, notorious for leaking water and unpopular with students and staff alike. It was one of Stirling’s Red Trilogy, another one of which, the History Faculty Building at Cambridge University, was reputedly the subject of the following parody by Tom Sharpe in his novel Ancestral vices:

“… thanks to the architect’s obsession with the idea of advanced technology and his consummate ignorance of its practical application, a slight spell of bright weather followed by a small cloud could threaten students who had been sunbathing one moment with frostbite the next.”

The Students Union building had had a serious makeover since I was there, but it was nice to see my friend Neil Fawcett’s name on the honours board of past office holders from when the Lib Dems seized power for a few years there in the early 1990s.

Then it was on to Welford Road to watch Leicester versus Coventry, the club representing the city of my birth and which I have supported since childhood. This was once one of the great rugby rivalries, but in the 1980s Leicester secured their place among the elite clubs while Cov slid into the doldrums. It was painful to be a Coventry supporter living in Leicester at the time, and seeing players who actually came from Coventry and its environs, such as Neil Back and Darren Garforth, lining up for the Tigers.

So for the last 35 years the two clubs have been in different leagues and games between them few. But the need for some kind of cup competition during the international break had led the Premiership clubs to condescend to play teams from the league below and thus Cov had a rare competitive away fixture at Welford Road. And they won, 33–19,  cheered on by a large and vocal contingent of away support. Admittedly the Leicester team was largely composed of academy players, while Cov had a full-strength team out, but I suspect the Tigers would still be better paid than their second tier counterparts. So it was a happy outcome to the day and a visit that brought back mostly fond memories.

If the silly rules that still make it almost impossible for tier 2 teams to get promoted are ever changed, perhaps I will yet get to see a Leicester v Cov league match, and indeed visit Leicester more often.

On not seeing Bob Dylan play at the Albert Hall this week

By the time this post goes up, Bob Dylan will have played his the last of his tour dates at the Royal Albert Hall. As he is 83 years old this could yet be his last live appearance in Britain. I am a little disappointed and wistful not to have there, given that I am a fan of more than 40 years and virtually a Dylan completist in terms of recorded music.

In truth, though, only a little disappointed. I didn’t try that hard to get tickets. Although I had recently sort of made my mind up to go and see Dylan again if he toured Britain, I took no steps to find out when shows would be announced or tickets go on sale and it was all sold out by the time I cottoned on. In truth, I wasn’t sure I really wanted to go. As his Bobness has a reputation as at best an inconsistent live performer, and as on the two occasions I did see him, in 1981 and 1989, he was excellent, I almost subconsciously decided back then to quit while I was ahead.

Also as the years have gone on he seemed less and less likely to play songs from the era I like best, namely those from about 1978 (Street-Legal) to 1990 (Under the Red Sky). This is not quite so eccentric a view as it might once have been considered. There was a conventional wisdom that Dylan’s great period was the 1960s and this just about continued up to Blood on the Tracks and Desire before a serious loss of form that continued until 1997’s Time Out Of Mind which was seen as a return to greatness and his subsequent work has been met with a succession of five-star reviews.

I started listening to Dylan, though, in the late 1970s after my Dad borrowed Street-Legal off a colleague at work who was a real obsessive. This was the time of the 1978 tour, Dylan’s first visit to Britain for several years. So his stock seemed quite high, but it then took a nosedive after his conversion to Christianity, leading to the ‘Jesus Trilogy’ of Slow Train Coming, Saved and Shot of Love over the subsequent three years.

While I had managed to hear the sixties classics and become a Dylan fan, it was a bit awkward when these new albums came out with their decidedly uncool and untrendy Christian message. I still bought them (or received them as presents) but it didn’t do to be too enthusiastic. Even Dylan enthusiasts didn’t like the new stuff and longed for a return to secular material. If you wanted raspy-voiced harmonica-playing American singer-songwriters you listened to Bruce Springsteen and bought The River not Saved.

So I went along with this, all the while thinking that the Christian albums actually sounded rather good. After all Mark Knopfler, who it was OK to like, played some mean guitar on Slow Train Coming, the tunes were memorable, Dylan’s singing and backing group were as good as they every had been and the words were at least interesting. Maybe there was a bit too much Jesus, even for someone with my mild Christian sympathies. But you didn’t have to agree with it to like it. For me, 1981’s Shot of Love album was a happy compromise, one or two overtly religious songs, some with Christian themes but less overt proselytising and some straightforwardly secular material.

At this point I had my first experience of seeing Dylan live, at Earls Court in 1981. The good news was that unlike in his North American concerts of a year previously he was now playing some of the old stuff, not just Christian material. But tickets didn’t sell all that well and I can remember hearing an impromptu interview with Dylan on Capital Radio after he rang the station, presumably to drum up sales. In the end it was a great night, with a slug of some of the better recent material and a good smattering of his 1960s classics, which took up more than half the setlist. It was only slightly marred by missing my train home and getting in big trouble (it was my 15th birthday and one of the first times I was allowed out into London for the evening without adult supervision). Anyone who wants confirmation of how good he sounded during this tour should listen to the live tracks from the previous and following evening on the Trouble No More official bootleg album. Great voice, great band, great choice of songs!

At this stage I expected Dylan to continue the move towards more secular themes tinged with Christian sensibilities. In fact his career took another strange twist. There were stories that he had abandoned his Christian faith and returned to Judaism. With the moralising certainty of a teenager (‘I was so much older then’) I felt a sense of betrayal, not because I shared his version of Christian faith (which I didn’t) but because I had persevered with him through these difficult years and this new departure made his Christianity seem insincere and superficial – like a career move gone wrong.

Anyway, when the first ‘post-Christian’ album Infidels came out in 1983, it was touted as a return to secular Dylan and those who refused to listen to the Jesus trilogy seemed to love it. This seemed odd to me since, as the title suggests, it was if anything more preachy than Shot of Love and more like the fire and brimstone of Slow Train Coming, even if the biblical references were now to the Old Testament not the New, it seemed to include warnings about false prophets, and odd negative references to moon travel. If the outtakes Death is not The End, Lord Protect My Child and Foot of Pride had been included it could have passed for being the fourth instalment of Dylan’s God Quartet rather than a step away from religious material. I was interested to hear an edition of the Jokermen podcast that referred to Dylan having a long Christian period lasting from Street-Legal to Infidels, which has some validity especially given the former’s references to Lucifer, Armageddon and St John.

In the intervening decades Dylan’s Jesus years have had enjoyed some sort of rehabilitation, perhaps aided by their being long in the past, a relatively short episode in a long career and capable of being regarded as Dylan’s take on gospel the way Nashville Skyline is his take on country. This was helped by the Trouble No More box set that came out in 2017, featuring outtakes and live performances from the 1979–81 years. To the uninitiated or the gospel refuseniks it gave a new sense of the power and excitement of his performances in these years. Whichever way, even though none of the albums of the time quite warrant the title masterpiece, partly due to Dylan making poor choices of which tracks to include and to omit, this remains my favourite period of his music.

So in thinking about whether to see him live this year I was initially encouraged by seeing that Dylan is regularly concluding his set with my favourite of his songs, Every grain of sand, which is surely the greatest one from the Christian years. Even then I had mixed feelings. He has developed this way of growling out songs as if reciting a shopping list. With its profound lyrics that dwell on on faith and doubt, life and mortality, Every grain of sand is a song for the ages. I feared he would ruin it, and indeed I found at least one version on Youtube where that was the case. Yet I also found this version (linked to in the picture above) which is powerful, haunting and profound. Maybe the possibility of hearing such a performance should have made me make more of an effort to go this time. I can but hope that he will come round again, he will keep the song in his set, that I can get a ticket and that he will deliver a good rendition.