Missippi thump

Radio 4 is running a serialization of The Help by Kathryn Stockett, which takes place in Jackson, Mississippi. I have never lived long anywhere to the east of Texas, but there's something about the state, where my family comes from, that's like an invitation to fade away there, when the time comes. When in the serialization I hear a kid being corrected for "sass-mouthin'", I get homesick.

One of the best utterances so far was by a woman who had to run hide in the guest bathroom, because she wasn't supposed to visiting the house. She said: "I crouched on the toilet lid, my heart thumpin' like a cat caught in a clothes-dryer".

The Complete Smiley

Radio 4 is continuing its series of dramatizations of John le Carré's spy novels with George Smiley. This Sunday, July 4, brings "The Spy Who Came In From the Cold". The first two, "Call For the Dead" and "A Murder of Quality", were excellently done: in particular, for those who remember the novels, Smiley's imaginary conversations with his estranged (divorced?) wife Lady Ann.

In the late 70s and early 80s, I read all of le Carré up to and including "The Little Drummer Girl". I read a lot of "complete works in progress" back then, as well as "complete works" where death had conveniently drawn the line. Those in English were my only respite from 24/7 German. I read everything I could get my hands on by Eric Ambler, Dorothy Sayers, Barbara Pym, Raymond Chandler, Saul Bellow, Elizabeth Bowen, Margaret Drabble, Beckett, Trollope, Thackeray, Nietzsche (the lot), Dickens ...

Later, in the 80s and 90s, it was Max Frisch, Fay Weldon, Thomas Bernhard (alles), Schopenhauer, Sloterdijk, Robert Walser, Heinrich and Thomas Mann, Eudora Welty, Margaret Atwood, Barbara Gowdy, Fontane, Alice Munro, Barbara Kingsolver ...

While reading each writer, I was in a special mood and atmosphere that I can still remember. The Radio 4 series brought that back for le Carré.

There are plenty of lady writers in those reading lists, and not by accident. Too often I would become fascinated with a writer like Bellow, Thomas Mann or Frisch, then suddenly be fed up with the smug, intelligent-adolescent personalities of their main characters. Great prose, of course, but populated by predatory, self-pitying intellectuals. I meantersay, no self-respecting man can spend much time in front of a mirror, reading such stuff. So depressing.

Novel therapy

I see that Claire Tomalin has recently written a book on Thomas Hardy. I had been looking on the net for a sentence that has stuck in my mind since I read it more than 40 years ago. I found it in a piece by John Sutherland in the Telegraph:

'What has Providence done to Mr Hardy, that he should rise up in the arable land of Wessex and shake his fist at his Creator?' asked Edmund Gosse, in his review of that grimmest of novels, Jude the Obscure.

My nerves are all a-jangle from the heady stuff in Atlan and Morin. Being reminded of Hardy has sent me off to the bookstore. I want to get back to reading British novels again, particularly from the 19th century into the 20th. "Again" means for the n-th time in some cases, such as Trollope, Dickens and Eliot. I'm glad I haven't read much Hardy yet.