Stella Gibbons / Christmas at Cold Comfort Farm / Review

Christmas at Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons – review

The 100 best novels / No 57 / Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons (1932) 

Nicholas Lezard

Tuesday 29 November 2011

T

o be honest, I only picked this book up out of a mixture of curiosity and charity. Everyone loves Cold Comfort Farm, and with very good reason, but even if they know that Stella Gibbons wrote about 30 other novels and umpteen short stories, they don't read them. So although a book with a spin-off CCF story comprising 17 of its 298 pages may look as though it is exploiting a reputation, we should at least honour the creator of the Starkadders.

Patricia Highsmith / Little Tales of Misogyny / Review

Little Tales of Misogyny by Patricia Highsmith review – a mischievous look at the suburban American dream

BIOGRAPHY OF PATRICIA HIGHSMITH

Even the title is not what it seems in these wicked, funny and unsettling stories


Nicholas Lezard
Tuesday 20 January 2015 08.00 GMT

M

y first thought, before I started reading this overlooked collection, was that it would contain examples, informed by second-wave feminism, of men being nasty to women and being punished horribly by Patricia Highsmith. But by the time the 10th little tale rolled around – “The Fully Licensed Whore, or, The Wife” – I had become uncomfortably aware that most of the time it is the women who are ghastly, and often end up being killed off by Highsmith. The book was first published in 1975 in German, under the title Kleine Geschichte für Weiberfeinde, appearing in English two years later. I should have looked closer at that German title: it means, literally, “little tales for misogynists”. This is not a book to teach the misogynists a lesson: it’s something you might give a misogynist on his birthday.

So the wife in the above-mentioned story, who has become pregnant by a man who is not her husband-to-be two months before her wedding, continues having affairs with the gas meter reader (“to limber herself up”), the window cleaner, their lawyer, the doctor, “a couple of maverick husbands in their social circle”, and so on, all the while withholding sexual favours from her own husband, in perpetuity, once the baby has been born. This time, it’s the husband who ends up dead.

As for the other stories, we are given plots resembling twisted fables from Hilaire Belloc, whereby women – who have either too much or too little sex; or are driven mad by religion or the pressures of keeping up with the neighbours or wanting to be creative – come to sticky ends one way or another. In “The Artist”, someone puts a bomb under the School of Arts, in which talentless but eager women are encouraged to indulge their delusions: “A dancer at last made a few complete revolutions without her feet touching the ground, because she was a quarter of a mile high.”

At that point, where I laughed rather loudly, it occurred to me that the best way to appreciate this book would be as a string of extremely black jokes – in which case it works very well. After all, if there is anyone who knows how to jangle our moral nerves, from what often seems like pure authorial mischief, it is Highsmith. The mischief here extends to what at first glance looks like a single-minded assault on her own sex, until it becomes clear that what she is actually attacking is a range of stupid or vicious behaviours; the charge of misogyny is something of a red herring.

When this book first came out, many readers didn’t understand it, or chose not to. However Highsmith, sexually omnivorous, capable of cruelty, was in quite a few ways a character out of a Patricia Highsmith story. She couldn’t have written in any other way, and to criticise her for the well she drew her inspiration from is as unfair as to criticise someone for the face they were born with. This is not to denigrate her skill: every word is chosen with great care; not one is wasted.

Sometimes you need someone with an acidic vision to clear away the grime of familiarity and ease. It is not chance that among her many fans were Graham Greene, Gore Vidal and JG Ballard, or that she was resolutely unappreciated in her native United States. The majority of stories in this volume could be said to be indictments, and utterly merciless ones at that, of the suburban American dream of the mid-20th century. The critic Brigid Brophy called her a Dostoevsky “whose gifts include humour and charm”. I’m not so sure about the charm here, but these stories, once you get the hang of them, are very wicked, very funny and – this being Highsmith’s mission in life, as far as one can tell – very unsettling.

THE GUARDIAN

Short Stories
Little Tales of Misogyny
PATRICIA HIGHSMITH / THE HAND

PATRICIA HIGHSMITH / THE VICTIM

PATRICIA HIGHSMITH / THE MOBILE BED-OBJECT

PATRICIA HIGHSMITH / THE DANCER

PATRICIA HIGHSMITH / OONA, THE JOLLY CAVE WOMAN

PATRICIA HIGHSMITH / THE COQUETTE

PATRICIA HIGHSMITH / THE FEMALE NOVELIST

PATRICIA HIGHSMITH / THE INVALID OR THE BED-RIDDEN

Best British Short Stories 2015 review – Mantel on Thatcher and more

Hilary Mantel’s fantasia about the assassination of Margaret Thatcher leads this year’s collection of familiar and lesser known writers

Nicholas Lezard
Wednesday 8 July 2015 08.00 BST

Y

ou might assume that an anthology with a title like this is going to be a genteel affair, perhaps because when we think of the form we often imagine a sort of archetypal New Yorker short story, which tends to follow the formula of Small and Poignant Domestic Events Hinting at a Dark Truth. Otherwise it’s the kind of magazine competition in, say, Grazia, illustrated by a floaty-dressed model aged about 19 staring into the distance with a typewriter in front of her.

But Nicholas Royle’s book is not a wholly genteel affair; you can tell this from his introduction, which begins with the description of a naughty shelf on which he keeps authors who “don’t get out of bed for less than a grand”, those who write unreasonably bad reviews, either from malice or laziness, and those who cavil about the fees he offers for inclusion in this selection (which has been appearing annually, under his editorship, since 2012, but goes back much further). He goes on to say that he is about to add a shelf for publishers who refuse to allow their authors to appear. This particularly upsets him. “There’s no point in publishing a series called Best British Short Stories if we don’t include what are, in the editor’s opinion, the best British short stories.”

Which neatly brings us, as it does Royle, to Hilary Mantel, and her story “The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher”, which caused a bit of a stink last year. The piece appears in the anthology, which means neither she nor her publisher will be on Royle’s naughty shelf; its inclusion also confers on the collection the kind of legitimacy that rubs off on the lesser-known authors. (The other big name here is Helen Simpson, whose “Strong Man” appeared in the New Statesman last year.) Mantel’s story is very good – “a subtle meditation on possibility and alternate realities”, as Norman Tebbit put it. Oh no, wait, he called it “a sick book from a sick mind”.

There are 21 stories here, or books, if you prefer to use Lord Tebbit’s term, from 20 authors (one writer, Julianne Pachico, makes it in twice). Naturally, this means there are 21 different points of view and at least 20 ways of approaching narrative description; it would be pointless to try to describe or review them all. But I can at least determine the hazy outline of a pattern. It would appear that – going by this collection and scrutinising the author biographies – your chances of appearing in Best British Stories 2016 will be given a boost by (1) being a woman, (2) having a connection with the north west (Royle is a senior lecturer in creative writing at Manchester Metropolitan University and Manchester is currently a good place to get a short story published, thanks to the magazine Cōnfingō), and (3) writing your story in the present tense. The first two things are good, or neutral; the third I’m not so sure about. I wouldn’t want to place a ban on stories that use this perfectly legitimate technique, but I think the novelty has worn off, and sometimes it can be a little irritating once noticed, like when you notice the seat coverings on public transport. Still, on the whole it’s well used here.

Also, (4): be a bit weird, or uncanny. Royle has a soft spot for this, I think, judging from some of his own fiction and general past form, but here it’s behind some of the best work, such as Bee Lewis’s take on the origins of Antony Gormley’s beach-bound iron statues, or the moment of magic in Helen Marshall’s “Secondhand Magic”, which gave me the willies. I won’t pretend that every story is my cup of tea, or guarantee that they will all be yours – but that’s the point of an anthology, after all.

• Best British Short Stories by edited by Nicholas Royle (Salt Publishing, £9.99). 

THE GUARDIAN

A book that changed me / Waiting for Godot taught me the difference between being smart and being intellectual

A book 

that changed

 me 

Waiting for Godot taught me the difference between being smart and being intellectual

Samuel Beckett was irreverent yet profound, and able to sustain my interest despite nothing happening. I was mesmerised

Nicholas Lezard

Sunday 10 August 2014

W

hisk yourself back in time, if you will, to 1978. A young man, fresh from success at his O-levels, has decided he wants to do English at A-level. It should involve, surely, little more strenuous activity than reading books, which he’d be doing anyway; and besides, he knows the language, so it will be a break from the other A-levels he has elected to do, viz French and German. And then, too late for him to back out even if he had wanted to, he is handed a reading list for the summer holidays.

I cannot now remember that whole reading list; as the memory of those days recedes in the distance, I remember only two: Middlemarch and Waiting for Godot. Middlemarch I had vaguely heard of. And there had been a school production of Waiting for Godot a year or two beforehand, with an intriguing-looking poster, but if anyone thought that I, as a 13- or 14-year-old boy, was going to stay after school to watch a play, then they must have been nuts.A couple of years later, that is, by the time of these particular summer holidays, I was coming round slowly to the idea of culture as a desirable thing, despite some concerted efforts by certain teachers to put me off. I was a conscientious young man; but also, unfortunately, an indolent one. (Plus ça change, you might say.) This meant that it took a large part of the summer holidays before I got round to doing any of the reading I was meant to do, although I had spent a lot of them worrying about it. In the end, I had a week left.

Reader, you cannot imagine the effect it has on the adolescent mind of having to read Middlemarch in a week. I thought 120 pages a day would be a doddle; but 120 pages of densely printed Victorian prose, about lives I was not even remotely familiar with, were not. I managed it, but it was a pale, exhausted and trembling hand that picked up the – thankfully – scanty pages of Godot.Almost immediately I felt even more comforted. There were only five characters; and one of them the author hadn’t even bothered to name. This boded well. As did the first line of the stage directions: “A country road. A tree. Evening.” Three words, two words, one, like a countdown; or, if you prefer, a little hint of the way Beckett was to strip down his own works to their bones.

From the first page, I was mesmerised and astonished. Here was a mind that seemingly took everything and nothing seriously at the same time. I can still recall my impressions from the very first page on: the oddness of the name Estragon, yet its strange harmony with Vladimir; the dry wit of the stage directions (“he broods, musing on the struggle”); the strange mixture of comedy and menace – how Vladimir says “(admiringly) A ditch!” when he learns that Estragon slept in one, and then asks “And they didn’t beat you?” “Beat me? Certainly they beat me.” Something in the tone made it clear that this was not to be referred to again – but not to be forgotten either.

The line “Our being born?” as a suggested answer to the proposal “Suppose we repented” struck a chord with the kind of adolescent who considers “I never asked to be born” an acceptable rebuke; as did the breezy evocation of suicide (“Hand in hand from the top of the Eiffel Tower, among the first”); and then the first big belly laugh of the play: “The Bible … I must have taken a look at it.”

In short, I was hooked. Here was an author who was irreverent, scatological, yet profound; and also completely uninterested in the conventions of literature yet able, just through language, to sustain our interest despite nothing actually happening. As I discovered more of Beckett – both through my own efforts and those of the kind of inspirational, sympathetic English teacher you used to get so often (hello, Richard Jacobs, if you’re out there) – I followed him through his own journey, and by the time I was writing about him at university I was reading the texts – Ill Seen Ill Said, Worstward Ho – as they were published. And as I discovered the details of his life, first from the semi-authorised biography by Deirdre Bair, I realised that not only was his work exemplary, so was his life. Here was someone who had purged himself of vanity, both his own and the world’s; a man of unimpeachable integrity in both work and life.

To say Godot changed me is in one sense perhaps not strictly accurate. For it would not have spoken to me so directly if I had not already been in a state to receive it. Beckett is regarded by many as a fiercely intellectual author, but I suspect that is because some people don’t know the difference between being smart and being intellectual. I later discovered that Beckett was indeed fiercely intellectual, but that he had left the academy behind him, loathed the obfuscation of jargon, and was certainly never the kind of posturing intellectual who gets asked their opinions for the television networks. But from my exposure to Beckett at just the right age, I also ended up learning about, and learning to love, Dante, Joyce, Proust, and every conceivable spin-off or tangent from those great authors. And I suppose that it’s because of Godot that I do what I do for a living. And these days, I even like the occasional Victorian novel.

THE GUARDIAN

Berlin Stories by Robert Walser / Review

Berlin Stories by Robert Walser 

Review

Simple things, simply brilliant

• • Nicholas Lezard
  • The Guardian, Tuesday 14 February 2012 
  • 
    

'A delightful and timesless collection' … Walser's Berlin Stories
Photograph: Imagno/Max von Missmann/Getty Images

Those of you compelled to take public transport might find some wisdom in this piece of advice on what to do if the journey goes past the half-hour mark, and is getting tedious: "You look straight ahead. To show by one's ways and gestures that one is finding things a bit tedious fills a person with quite peculiar pleasure. Now you return to studying the face of the conductor on duty, and now you content yourself once more with merely, vacantly staring straight ahead. Isn't that nice? One thing and then another? I must confess: I have achieved a certain technical mastery in the art of staring straight ahead."

Berlin Stories
1. by Robert Walser, translated by Susan Bernofsky
2. 
3. 
   

You may wonder: is the writer of these words perhaps having us on? On the contrary: this is what he's like, pretty much all the time. I think it was Herman Hesse who said that if you can stomach Robert Walser's prose, you can't help but fall in love with it, and I fell in love with it pretty quickly. He's guileless but not stupid, an admiring observer of the inconsequential. "We don't need to see anything out of the ordinary," he once wrote, "we already see so much." Susan Sontag, in a brief but very worthwhile introduction to a collection of his stories published 30-odd years ago, noticed how easy it was to come up with points of comparison: "a Paul Klee in prose ... a cross between Stevie Smith and Beckett ... the missing link between Kleist and Kafka". In fact, as she points out, it was Kafka who was first compared to Walser, rather than the other way round (this is the humorous Kafka, who has disappeared in the contemporary imagination, to be replaced by the Kafka of bad dreams).

Walser was from Switzerland; he followed his brother Karl, a well-known painter and stage designer, to Berlin, tried to stick it a couple of times and on the third attempt, with what I suspect was the realisation that he needn't try so hard, nailed it. He became a chronicler of the ordinary (interestingly, at around the same time Joyce, on the other side of Europe, was doing the same). He was a master flâneur, and if Baudelaire had been driven almost to mania by his cité fourmillante, the swarming anthill, pretty much all Walser had to say on the subject was "isn't that nice?" And the blandness of the question covers up some interesting thoughts. (It's no surprise to learn that Walter Benjamin, who knew a thing or two about walking around cities and writing them up, was an admirer of Walser's – as, indeed, was Kafka.)

You might remember that last week I compared islands to novels. It occurs to me that cities are, by a similar token, collections of short stories, or feuilletons like this. From Walser's "What Became of Me", after a very brief description of his childhood: "After this, harsh Life flung me upon the path of a practising feuilletonist. Oh, if only I had never written a feuilleton."

This modesty is not an affectation. He was, by all accounts, a natural, in both the sense of being able to write at great speed without ever needing to correct himself; and in the old-fashioned sense of being, or appearing to be, a bit simple. He saw himself as a kind of servant, not just in the sense of serving the city by describing it, but literally, too: he went to a college where they taught you how to be a butler. (He was, apparently, unable to master the competencies needed for polishing silver or tending top hats.)

Happily, though, he stayed at his true profession, that of writer. How artless or artful he is is a judgment that each reader can make for him- or herself, and I suspect that much depends on the serenity of one's own disposition. Sontag called him an "anti-gravity" writer, both in that he is against seriousness as well as being unbound to the ground. And in this unbelievably delightful and timeless collection of short pieces, we can recover the delight of ordinary, uncondescending appreciation, places where the vacant-minded stroller can take "peculiar pleasure". The tram, the theatre, the train station, the park ... ("Beautiful park, I think, beautiful park," is how he ends "The Park".) One thing and then another. Isn't that nice?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/feb/14/berlin-stories-robert-walser-review

Sapper / Bulldog Drummond / Daydreams of empire

Bulldog Drummond

Daydreams of empire

Nicholas Lezard
Saturday 6 December 2008 00.01 GMT

T

hey don't really do heroes like Bulldog Drummond any more. After a reverie about his days in the first world war strangling German soldiers behind enemy lines, we are told: "There are in England today quite a number of civilians who acknowledge only two rulers - the King and Hugh Drummond. And they would willingly die for either."

This is just as well, for in this, the first of the hugely successful series of novels (Herman Cyril McNeile adopted the pseudonym "Sapper" because serving officers could not publish under their own names), Bulldog Drummond comes up against as nasty a pair of villains as you could wish to meet, the chief of whom is hell-bent on bringing Britain, whose victorious army has just marched into Cologne, to her knees.

It is odd how books such as these begin with boredom. Carruthers in The Riddle of the Sands (1903) is half out of his mind with boredom; John Buchan's Hannay begins The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915) "pretty well disgusted with life"; the war has yet to begin. When it is over, Bulldog Drummond, "finding peace increasingly tedious", goes so far as to place an advertisement in a newspaper asking for diversion: "legal, if possible; but crime, if of a comparatively humorous description, no objection". Years later, James Bond - who Ian Fleming acknowledged was at least partly based on Drummond - would begin his career nauseated by the smell of a casino at three in the morning. This is because the works are, as a clever colleague of mine pointed out, all daydreams; and indeed one wonders what kind of mind it is that yearns for war as a diversion.

One particularly wonders about "Sapper". His work has been routinely condemned for its xenophobia and antisemitism. But while one should indeed condemn these attitudes, at least this novel is largely free of them (although you will search in vain for anything faintly resembling progressiveness). Antisemitism and other ugly prejudices were, to varying degrees, the order of the day (consider the line in The Thirty-Nine Steps about how "the Jew" now "has his knife in the Empire of the Tsar because his aunt was outraged and his father flogged in some one-horse location on the Volga").

But in this novel, at least, there is not too much to worry about. There is something Arcadian about Drummond. He has a rather familiar kind of innocence. His manservant, his ex-batman, serves him his morning beer loyally and "discreetly" leaves the room when he starts speculating about an encounter with a woman; and Drummond himself can begin a chapter with the line "I almost think, James, that I could toy with another kidney" (for breakfast). Does this remind you of anyone? Of course it does. What we have here is a PG Wodehouse story, almost; a Wodehouse story with master criminals (we also have murderous trained gorillas, acid baths, booby-traps and savages armed with poison darts hiding on the tops of wardrobes) - the kind of story, in fact, that Wodehouse's more impressionable heroes use to fire up their own imaginations. We even have gangs of loyal, tiddly young blades called Algy who call each other priceless asses, or some such.

Drummond himself is unflappable, unambiguously heroic, nonchalantly lighting cigarettes faster than he can smoke them (I could have sworn that at one point he had a pipe in his hand at the same time), making cheeky quips - many of them genuinely amusing - to the villains and getting the girl, despite the honest, ugly features which gave him his nickname. And the chief villain, of course, occasionally expresses regret that he will have to exterminate so worthy an opponent. ("You are meddling in affairs . . . of the danger of which you have no conception.")

So yes, it's an imperial fantasy - just the kind of thing Guardian readers should be shaking their heads and going tut-tut about. But, being Guardian readers, you will know that you are immune from the dangers of such fantasies, and can instead enjoy the work on its simplest, most straightforward level: as a rattling good yarn.

THE GUARDIAN

DRAGON

Sapper / Bulldog Drummond / Daydreams of empire

Classics corner 004 / Bulldog Drummond by Sapper

Sapper / Herman Cyril McNeile / Bulldog Drummond