Talking of books
Rounding up
Benny Green
Style in History Peter Gay (Jonathan Cape £6.00) Drawn from Memory Ernest Shepard (Penguin 50p) The Great War and Modern Memory Paul Fussell (Oxford £6.50) The World of Frank Richards Lofts and Adley (Howard Baker £3.20) Gilbert and Sullivan Caryl Brahms (Weidenfeld and Nicolson £5.25) Collapse of Stout Party Ronald Pearsall (Weidenfeld and Nicolson £4.95)
The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes Michael Pointer (David and Charles £4.95)
Adventures of Solar Pons August Derleth (Robson Books £2.90)
Sort of a Cricket Person E. W. Swanton (Fontana 60p)
In the course of the reading year, a certain number of books seem inevitably to be overlooked, relegated to the bottom of the pile; held in reserve, put by for a reviewer's rainy day, until there comes a nebulous point in the process, usually around mid-October, when it becomes all too clear that they no longer possess that topicality which was once their strongest claim for attention. I never fail to experience deep pangs of remorse for them, these forsaken items stuffed away on the ankle-level bookshelf, the one whose contents are barely identifiable without the aid of a torch and a swift preparatory course of press-ups. They are either books I meant to review and didn't, or tried to review and couldn't, or thought I'd reviewed and hadn't.
They deserve a better fate than the silence on my part which has greeted them so far, so before the lists are swamped with the urgent concerns of 1976, a few kind thoughts for some Cinderellas of 1975.
Why I never devoted more attention to Peter Gay's Style in History I cannot imagine, for it is one of those paginated lectures, like J. H. Plumb's "The Death of the Past' and Isaiah Berlin's 'Fathers and Children' which sends the reader sprinting for the sources. Gay's book consists of four essays, on Gibbon, Ranke, Macaulay and Burckhardt, in which he traces the links between literary style and historical interpretation. Gibbon in particular is done with great finesse, and the work as a whole ought not to be allowed to disappear down the maw of remaindered mistakes. History of a very different kind may be found in Ernest H. Shepard's memoir, Drawn from Memory, and although neither Shepard, illustrator of Toad and Pooh, nor his paperback publishers, Penguin, need a push from me, I am inclined to use any excuse to praise the text for its modesty, the illustrations for their charm, and to voice an official request that Penguin now follow up with the seq_uel, Drawn from Life. Now for the best and worst books respectively which I read in 1975 without reviewing them. Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory received a fearful bashing in these columns from John Terraine, and working on the assumption that as Terraine knows more about the great War than I do his opinion must be more valuable than mine, 1 acknowledge that my own deep enjoyment of Fussell's text is not much of a recommendation. However, it is perhaps worth mentioning that on the same premise, Fussell's attitude accords more or less with those of Graves, Blunden and Sassoon, and that as they knew more about the Great War than Terraine does, their opinions are more valuable, etc, etc. Fussell's review of the literature inspired by the war, and his suggestions about the way that the war was anticipated by literature, are, 'I should have thought, of vital interest.
After the Lord Mayor's show comes The World of Frank Richards which was, to judge from its cover, not written at all, but "compiled" by two gentlemen called Lofts and Adley. Having worked my way through the text, I am perfectly ready to believe that the book was indeed never written, because it consists of the most indigestible gobbets of prose which came my way throughout the year. But Frank Richards is one of the most enigmatic literary freaks of the modern era. His own book about himself coyly opens when he is seventeen years old, and the subsequent omissions and evasions are so irritating that any continuity which the text might have had disappears within, the first few chapters. And whatever their failings, Lofts and Adley have at least filled in a few more details. As they say with reference to their hero on page 71, "In such circumstances ordinary standards of criticism have to be suspended". Their book is one of those peculiar items which is both unreadable and indispensable.
An altogether more scholarly and professional showbiz biography is Caryl Brahms's Gilbert and Sullivan, although it adds nothing at all to the pioneering work of Hesketh Pearson and Lesley Baily. Miss Brahms's is one of those handsome books which is too large for a civilised bookshelf and yet too small for a conventional coffee table. A more serious consideration is the fact that Miss Brahms sides with Sullivan against Gilbert, one of those errors of personality-assessment which are more revealing of the judge than of the victim, and especially odd in view of the fact that the authoress is herself a lyricist.
Gilbert turns up again in one of Ronald Pearsall's ingenious compilations of social life in the last hundred years. Pearsall's books on Victorian and Edwardian popular music are priceless works of reference and are, I am afraid, markedly superior to his Collapse of Stout Party, a loose bundle of parodies, puns, nonsense, bon mots and spoonerisms which circulated in grandfather's day. It is reassuring to be told that Phil May had "a nice turn of wit", but as we all know that, and as May is one of those shadow-figures, like Frank Richards, about whom I am burning to know more, I was disappointed in Pearsall's failure ta say anything. Perhaps Col/apse of Stout Party is one of those works which are manufactured with an eye to the Christmas trade, when literary and academic judgments are awash in flat beer and turkey grease, but there is just a shade more substance than that in Pearsall's careful research.
The Sherlock Holmes trade has been brisk again this year, and there are two more works -to be placed in the anteroom, which is, by the way, becoming much better stocked than the library proper. The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes does not profess to be a good read, but a work of reference listing every stage, radio, film and TV adaptation of the Holmes stories ever mounted. I should have thought the Rathbone-Bruce-Holmes-Watson quadrille was worth much more than the book grants, but those Holmesians and Sherlockians who would rather locate the whereabouts of 22113 than sit down and read Conan Doyle will no doubt feel such a work of reference to be indispensable. The Adventures of Solar Pons is utterly different, not only from the works of spoof scholarship, but also from most other works to do with Holmes, for it consists Of short stories which candidly confess the intention to copy Doyle as closely as possible. Holmes and Watson in Baker Street become Pons and Parker of Praed Street, and, as Vincent Starrett says in his preface, it is a clear case of impersonation rather than of parody. The stories are mildly amusing, but as the power of the originals rests in their literary style, and as the creator of Pons doesn't have mcoullcehctoonfit, the appeal of the anthology rather
pe dends on the degree of fanaticism of the
Finally a paperback to beguile the interminable winter darkness. E. W. Swanton 's memoirs possess a kind of rubicund flush' which used to be par for the course in the Fleet Street reminiscences of press-box sportsmen, but which has almost disappeared in these utilitarian times. Swanton has never been a very elegant writer, but he is honest and accurate. What is surprising is the added bouquet of charm which insinuates itself in the mind of the reader. Charm is hardly the word I would have thought of to describe Swanton,s prose, but the narrative is disarming and therefore may confidently be prescribed for those who are chafing under the intolerable restraints of reading about the current Australia-West Indies series without having the BBC's permission to watch any of it.
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