Lives
When I was in my very early twenties, a girl I had had a bit of a crush on, asked if I had read “A Dance to the Music of Time” by Anthony Powell. Gillian Wood, “Gige” in highschool, was sitting in the coffee bar of the Buchanan building at UBC. Possibly wearing a well below-the-knee tweet skirt. Her acne had largely cleared up and I was, as ever, enthralled.
“Anthony Powell? Who’s that?” I managed to cleverly say. I was a bit of a dork.
“You have to read him. He’s us” said Gige. He wasn’t. But Gillian set me off on a forty-five-year ride into the “Dance” and its ramifications. I blame her entirely for my corporal’s guard of a library: all of Powell, a lot of Waugh, Cecil Beaton, Pepys (all thirteen volumes of his diaries popped off Craigslist), Virginia Woolf’s Diaries and her Letters, Isherwood’s and Isaiah Berlin’s. A lot of Bloomsbury, a lot of Fitzrovia and, when it came out, two brilliant volumes of Lucien Freud’s biography. And Chips, whose unexpurgated, three, thousand-page, volumes of Diaries, expertly edited by Simon Heffer, have occupied my winter evenings before the fire.
I currently have a rather small library. Perhaps five hundred books. I have had larger. But, well, divorce, the winds of change, and moving twenty times in twenty-five years, has meant I have cut 4000 books to the bone. Just what I care about. Oddly, I care about a moment in English history from about 1910 to 1980. No idea why.
Well, actually, I have some idea: I love the world where men wore evening clothes and ladies wore gowns, where people wrote for “quarterlies” and you could actually buy real Fabergé gold cigarette cases, where parties might have Cyril Connolly, George Orwell, Malcolm Muggeridge, a Guinness or two, a Duke and Chips. In the immortal words of the Pet Shop Boys, “We were never feeling bored, because we were never being boring.”
Fact is that my favourite novels, aside from the “Dance” are books like Ford Maddox Ford’s Parades End or Paul Scott’s Jewel in the Crown or Olivia Manning’s Fortunes of War. Largely middle-brow books. (I like Mary Manning a lot and have been known to read Penelope Trollope and Susan Howatch…Yoiks.) I’ve read much of the canon, Austen, Elliot, Dickens, …… But I don’t actually like novels all that much. I like the people who write them and the people they write them about.
Thus diaries and letters and biographies, auto-biographies are about sixty per cent of the books on my shelves.
This SubStack will, I hope, be about the vast web of connections my library contains. Or notes for articles. Or the sheer delight of old friends on my bookshelf.
I write it on the suggestion of my sweet Susan who is very patient with me as I draw a line from Chips to Cecil Beaton to Lucien Freud to Freud’s beautiful wife, Lady Carolyn Blackwood. Putting such things in writing will free up hours of cocktail chat time.