An Awful Lot of Books (17 page)

September 1961

This is the sequel to Mrs. Adamson’s best seller last year about the young lioness who became her friend. One tends to take books that have such universal success for granted, or even to discount them - like good health, when one has it, seems scarcely worthy of remark - but the fact is that books containing such a remarkable story as
Born Free
are best sellers for very good reasons, and the universal appeal can have valuable - and practical - results. Sequels to any such triumphs are regarded with joy by the commercial - they are usually easy to sell - and with suspicion by those who pride themselves on knowing a good book when they read one: is the author or publisher simple cashing in on the earlier phenomenal success? In this case - no, they aren’t; this is another good book - just as worth reading and having as
Born Free
, because it is not a repetition, but a continuation of Mrs. Adamson’s courageous and charming experiment.

It is an account of what happened after their friend had mated with a wild lion and had three cubs by him. In order that Elsa’s natural life should continue and grow, the Adamsons have always risked their private relationship with Elsa: at all times they have been prepared for and even expected her reversion to a totally wild life in which they could take no part. At the same time they never abandoned her when they thought she might need their protection, and it is this kind of intelligent generosity which makes the whole saga unique. Elsa seems always to have repaid this (shamefully rare) example of man’s behaviour to animals not only with extreme trust, but with the most delicate understanding of how it should be expressed. For instance - because it was necessary for the cubs to grow up efficiently wild, Mrs. Adamson resisted all temptation to make pets of them, and when, remaining wild, they grew jealous of their mother’s affection for her, it was Elsa who arranged the situation with great tact and determination. The cubs would be given a carcase, and only when they were really settled at it, would Elsa go and talk to her friend. If she thought that Mrs. Adamson did not understand how the line should be drawn between protection and interference, she would make it very plain: mistakes were made which each side respected, and good behaviour from either was always rewarded with signs of affection. The Adamsons enjoyed the marvellous pleasure of being able to spend much of the cubs’ first year with them; to watch Elsa training them to be sensible, practical lions in between her nights spent on their camp beds or the roof of their Land-Rover.

They all spent a last Christmas together in 1960, and a month later Elsa died from a parasite which destroys the red blood corpuscles, and the cubs were moved to Serengeti National Park. The moral of this story seems to be that if you want a really interesting and good relationship with anyone, you have to put far more into it without expecting any return than most of us realise; a platitude, no doubt, but judging by the state of the world, one which is sharpening to a point.

September 1961

There are clearly going to be many books about this extraordinary man, and these are neither of them in any sense definitive, but they are interesting and enjoyable to be going on with. Both have the double-edged virtue of being written by music critics who knew Beecham, and, in the case of Cardus, came under the spell of his colossal personality. Cardus whose book is more a personal - although informed - recollection than it is anything else, has produced a portrait imbued with his affection. He had his ups and downs with Beecham: but it is clear that they were too much in sympathy for irrevocable hostility. ‘It is time,’ said Beecham after a year’s quarrel, ‘that we buried the hatchet - but let us carefully mark the place.’ From Cardus one gets an impression of the boundless nervous energy which moved the greatest architect of orchestras we are ever likely to hear. Beecham did not simply give performances - he made music (sometimes in the sense that Wagner did not simply write operas, he got them performed), and orchestral music and opera, one might thankfully say, have not yet recovered from his impact. On his seventieth birthday he was given a luncheon at which greetings from eminent musicians were read out with much applause. When it died down he looked up at the chairman with a slightly pained expression and asked: ‘Nothing from Mozart?’

Mr. Cardus’s short book made up of reminiscence and critical appreciation, is pleasant reading and will be of great value to any future biographer.

Mr. Reid’s book - which is a straight - perforce condensed - account of Beecham’s life, adds a good deal of factual information to both Cardus’s memoirs and Beecham’s own admirable autobiography
A Mingled Chime
; but contains false emphases and generally gives the impression of being too hurriedly composed: it has some very good and some much less good writing, but is well worth reading for its anecdotes about someone whose whole life was a performance and whose performance of music was his life.

I
have been asked to introduce myself in the context of books and my intentions towards you about them, and find this an unexpectedly testing invitation; so like people who resort nervously to the weather as a safe gambit, I shall start by taking refuge in the general situation about books.

The situation about books is increasing - there are more and more books. More people read, even if they read less than the fewer people before them, and books have maintained a dignified distance from inflation. Naturally this encourages more and more people to write - about what they have done, or thought, or imagined; about what they believe, or fear, or want; about what annoys them, what makes them laugh, or what causes them to despair … indeed, from another world the sound made by their pens and typewriters must sound rather like bending over a box full of well-grown and ravenous caterpillars crunching leaves. I can no longer ignore these alarming thoughts, because out of these thousands of books, it has become my honour and responsibility to bring a small number of them to your notice every fortnight. How shall they be chosen? And who am I choosing them for?

I can only choose them on the simple basis of their having interested, moved or entertained me for one reason or another. I cannot be anything but subjective, but if this particular helplessness is endowed with honesty, there is some chance of your being able to measure my personal taste and feeling with your own: and that - bounded by a formidable ignorance, years of inexperience, and emotional and intellectual shortcomings - is all I can offer.

I shall write for the people who may want to read these books not for the people who wrote them, as, if they require criticism, they would probably prefer to choose its source (one would not allow anybody, unasked, to cut one’s hair): therefore my function is more in the nature of reviewing than criticism, and reviewing books for the general reader rather than the specialist.

Choosing which books to review is made more difficult by the paradox that in an age straining under a confusion of knowledge and constantly breaking down into specialists’ information, more and more books are being produced ‘for everybody’. ‘This is a book as much for the layman, amateur, or general reader as it is for the serious student, professional or scholar’ is a familiar advertising cry. It is only partially true: if it wasn’t, everybody would read novels, short stories, poetry and drama, since they are primarily concerned with human nature, a subject in which everybody is interested, and on which surprising quantities of people claim to be an authority. But many of these same people would say that reading novels was frivolous, poetry highbrow, and drama affected and unnecessary, although all these forms deal with people, ideas and emotions, and hardly anyone is brave enough to say ‘I’m not really interested in other people’. This may be because, very generally, people have two different standards of what they expect from fiction and non-fiction books. If someone is invited to read a book on Peru, when they have never been there and know nothing about the country, they will, if they read the book at all, approach it with a relatively open mind. The matter of the book is more important to them than the manner in which it is written.

If they are asked to read a new novel, they will reasonably expect it to contain something of human behaviour, a subject which, as we have said, they feel they know something about: therefore they are more likely to be critical of the manner in which it is written - I don’t mean morality or taste, but sheer practical ability to convey character and tell a story. But, conversely, people who write novels have often been deluded into thinking that as their subject matter is common property and requires no special knowledge, the manner in which it is written requires no special attention, and in these cases, although the publisher is unlikely to proclaim that ‘this novel might have been written by anybody’, it is too often true. For every one of those consoling people who say: ‘I would write a novel if only I had time’ there are at least ten people who aren’t saying anything, and one has a strong and uneasy feeling that some of them may have found the time…

Like the little boy about the crows, I am not saying what a lot of awful novels there are, I am only saying that there are an awful lot of novels, and a great deal of something does not necessarily mean that it is all much better of its kind, but it does not mean, either, that the better or best works cease to occur - they may just have to be searched for more carefully. I have concentrated upon novels as distinct from other forms of fiction because so much less poetry and drama is published that the position is a different one. There are some people who go to more than half a dozen operas, and there are some people who buy and read contemporary poetry and plays, and they - like the opera-goers - make it their business to find out what is being produced in their field. I am not cutting out any particular form or subject, however, in selections made for this page, but want to make it clear that there must be a large number of books worth reading for which there will not be room. And I shall try to draw your attention to any novels that have nourished me one way or another without, if possible, being too drearily technical about how they have been made.

A great deal of energy has been spent in talking and writing about ‘the form of the modern novel’, largely, I think, because it has ceased to have a form in close technical terms. In the West it has evolved from being written in the form of letters, and thence widened to various fashionable arrangements - the three-volume novel, the serial novel, the first-person narrative, etc. - but these methods are really only like clothes: their appearance constantly changes, but their aims and functions are the same. At no time have women wanted their clothes to be entirely unattractive; at no time have novelists wanted their novels to be entirely unreadable; the failures in either respect have certainly not been calculated. There have been passing phases which women have wanted to look fecund or consumptive, like lampshades or young boys: there have been equivalent phases when novelists have wanted to preach, to whine, to show off or to argue; but these marks are made on the sand at a low tide of creative energy, and are soon covered by a fresh wave. It is in fact possible to write a book today about almost anything in any manner one pleases; it is as necessary as ever it was to choose the best way of saying whatever it is one wants to say, and sometimes, when this is achieved, the work can surpass fashionable interest and reach points of quality beyond contemporary record. I shall try to confine opinions about form to understanding how far the writer has managed to do what he aimed at. For the rest, like the current Miss Doolittle, I want a book, whatever its kind, to show me something that I haven’t perceived or known or understood before - otherwise it is a mere roughage of words and makes me think of goats chewing up panama hats and tin cans.

Christmas 1959

M
y earliest memory with a book, I am sorry to say, is of sitting on the floor luxuriously tearing every single page of Beatrix Potter’s
Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle
in half. I did not like her prickles sticking out through her clothes, but after this momentary distaste, the sound of the rich art paper tearing was irresistible. The next landmark was when my brother, aged five and a half, wrote and illustrated a racy book called
Percy Rainsbull Edwards, the Adventures of a Pig
. I was admiring, envious, and extremely interested to discover by these means that books were actually written by people and not simple mysterious whole occurrences like boiled eggs or steam rollers. When I was a child it did not occur to me that there was an immense choice of books to read. Books arrived at Christmas and on one’s birthday, and there were a few that one seemed to have been born with - part of the landscape before one ever opened them, but otherwise, that was that. There were bookshops (I never discovered about libraries), but it was years before Woolworth’s, with goldfish at threepence each, and whole packets at one penny of seeds or Japanese flowers - according to one’s impatience - did not seem to provide better value for one’s sixpence a week. One accepted what one got; if one liked a book one came to know it almost by heart; if one disliked it, one never - after the first exploring examination - opened it again. How did one arrive at these lightning judgements, since they were certainly not based on knowledge; one could hardly ever compare anything with something else - supposing it had occurred to one to do so - and any taste one had seemed to originate from some freakish instinct?