Alexander Cruden in Islington

A Mexican restaurant at 45 Camden Passage, Islington.

 

And on the wall:

 

'ALEXANDER CRUDEN 1699–1770

HUMANIST SCHOLAR AND INTELLECTUAL
BORN ABERDEEN EDUCATED MARISCHAL COLLEGE
CAME TO LONDON 1719 AS TUTOR APPOINTED
BOOKSELLER TO QUEEN CAROLINE IN 1737
COMPILED THE CONCORDANCE TO THE BIBLE
DIED HERE IN CAMDEN PASSAGE NOVEMBER 1st

Whom niether [sic] infirmity not neglect could debase Nelson 1811'

I can't claim to know much about Alexander Cruden at all, although if there is a great deal of truth in Wikipedia's present representation of him (accessed the same date as this post) then he was a very interesting person indeed:

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Alexander Cruden

Barbara Pym: An Academic Question (1984)

An Academic Question (originally untitled) is what Barbara Pym called her 'Academic Novel' according to Pym's biographer Hazel Holt (A Lot to Ask: A Life of Barbara Pym (1990)), who also edited this novel written in the beginning of the 1970s. This Virago Modern Classics edition, narrated in the first person, is essentially an amalgamated version of Pym's original first-person novel, and a re-write that Holt says Pym wanted to make, er, 'sharp' and 'swinging'.

 

Certainly this is far removed from the earlier novels by Pym that I've read, Some Tame Gazelle and Excellent Women. There are, for instance, no church jumble sales, garden parties, dinners with curates, and above all no mention of (obvious) spinsters; instead, abortion, contraception, extra-marital sex, and student rebellion – the last largely inspired by correspondence from Philip Larkin about Hull University – are on the menu. But does this represent such an enormous departure from Pym's novels?

 

I would argue not. Hazel Holt calls it a 'transitional novel', and that seems a fair assessment of a person apparently trying to adjust to a post-sexual revolution mentality. In the novel, Iris asks Caro Grimstone, the wife of lecturer Alan, what her friend Coco is 'exactly? – I mean, sexually', meaning hetero or homo. In answer, Caro says 'Well, nothing, really', adding:

 

'We've never really talked about it. In any case, are people to be classified as simply as that? Some people just love themselves.'

 

It's clear here that Caro isn't talking about onanism, but rather asexuality, the great unmentionable.

 

In her 2012 Introduction to this edition Kate Saunders says that this might not be a major Pym novel, although I'm not so sure. It would have been very interesting to see the original draft and the updated, 'swinging' version, though – just to make comparisons.

Gillian Flynn: Gone Girl (2012)

Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl isn't normally the kind of book I read, although reviews of it intrigued me to such an extent that I felt obliged to do so. I wasn't disappointed.

Thirtysomething Brooklyn couple Nick Dunne and his wife Amy, due to the ever-powerful internet and the recession, have lost their jobs as writers for traditional hard copy publications. Nick's mother is dying so they move to his native New Carthage, Missouri, into a rented McMansion. The story begins with the strange disappearance of Amy on their fifth wedding anniversary. It is told throughout by one section from Nick followed (in the first half) by a shorter section from Amy's diary, whereas in the second half Nick and the 'real' Amy (explanation below) speak. The problem is that they are both (to very varying degrees) unreliable narrators and the reader is very unclear about what has actually happened until the beginning of the second half.

From the the first paragraph the reader suspects there's something odd about Nick because he begins by talking about Amy's head, mentioning the word 'skull', and certainly the police suspect him of foul play. The suspicions grow, although some of the sympathy the reader may have developed for Nick begins to disappear when he suddenly reveals he has a lover. But it's almost all downhill in the first half for Nick in any case: the upturned ottoman in their house looks like an attempt at faked kidnapping, a lot of blood has been wiped from the kitchen floor, he has taken out death insurance on her, etc. By the end of the Part One, though, Nick learns that this is all part of a highly elaborate plan to frame him for her murder. And she's still making a very good job of it.

So Amy is indeed alive, and in the second half the 'real' Amy tells us that her diary was a pack of lies which she has left as written 'evidence' for the police to find and add to the incriminating 'evidence' rapidly building around Nick: as her husband now realises, he is being punished (with the possible threat of death sentence in Missouri) for his infidelity.

And as Nick will soon learn from other men that Amy has falsely incriminated in the past, she doesn't like men to give their attentions to other women: she's a highly dangerous psychopath.* After she has fled to a crumby cabin in the Ozarks and been robbed of her remaining money, in desperation she takes refuge in the mansion belonging to the creepy stalker Dezi, whom she briefly knew twenty years before and who continues to be obsessed with her. And then she watches Nick emoting on television, believes he's changed and therefore wants him back, but how can she return without anyone discovering she's framed him? Oh yeah, have sex with Dezi, drug him, stab him to death, then go back and tell the cops she's been abducted and raped. Simple.

Well, the cops seem to think so, and (with a notable but in the end irrelevant exception) they accept her story and Amy the murderer is free to return to her husband. Just like that: the frame-up is forgotten, the mysterious appearance of her purse in Hannibal isn't investigated, and nor is the murdered man's body (for drugs). As for Nick, well, he is sufficiently crazy/masochistic/foolhardy that he'll have to live the rest of his life in fear that his crazy wife may murder him. Besides, how can he not live with her – she's having his baby? Well, the reader has already learned that there are a number of unbelievable, even cartoonish, things in this novel anyway (take Nick's lawyer and his wife, for instance) that disbelief shouldn't be too difficult to suspend.

Through all this, there are what appear to be some very serious points being made about the nature of technology in the modern world: the dumbing-down and stage-management of the truth by television; the distortion of justice by online social networks; and the warping of reality by the cinema. Existential confusion rules, but that of course should in no way exculpate Amy.

This has a very leaky plot, but is highly readable for all that.

 

*Rather oddly, Gillian Flynn has stated that she doesn't write about 'psycho bitches', and yet this is very much how Amy – in spite of her many likable characteristics – comes across to me.

My other Flynn post is below:

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Gillian Flynn: Sharp Objects (2006)

Alexander Pope in Stanton Harcourt, Oxfordshire

Pope's Tower is where Alexander Pope, who was a friend of Simon Harcourt, finished his translation of Homer's Iliad in 1718.

On the outside church wall is a plaque on which Pope detailed the unfortunate accident that befell two lovers from the parish who were fatally struck by lightning:

'NEAR THIS PLACE LIE THE BODIES
OF JOHN HEWET AND SARAH DREW
AN INDUSTRIOUS YOUNG MAN
AND VIRTUOUS YOUNG MAIDEN OF THIS PARISH
CONTRACTED IN MARRIAGE.
WHO BEING WITH MANY OTHERS AT HARVEST
WORK, WERE BOTH IN ONE INSTANT KILLED
BY LIGHTNING ON THE LAST DAY OF JULY
1718.

Think not by rigorous judgment seiz'd
A pair so faithful could expire;
Victims so pure Heav'n saw well pleaſd
And snatch'd them in cœlestial fire.

Live well & fear no sudden fate,
When God calls Virtue to the grave,
Alike 'tis juſtice soon or late,
Mercy alike to kill or save.

Virtue unmov'd can hear the call
And face the flaſh that melts the ball.'
 

Inside the church on the north wall is a memorial to Robert Huntington and his son (also Robert), on which is inscribed an epitaph by the playwright William Congreve:

'This peacefull Tomb does now contain
Father and Son together laid,
Whoſe liveing vertues shall remain,
When they and this are quite decay'd.

What man should be to ripeneſs grown.
And finiſh'd worth should do or shun
At full was in the Father shown
What Youth could promote in the Son.

But Death obdurate, both destroy'd
The perfect fruit and opening bud,
First seiz'd thoſe fruits we had enjoy'd
Then robb'd us of the comeing good.'

My earlier Pope posts are linked below:
 

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Anthony Beckles Willson: Mr Pope & Others at Cross Deep
Alexander Pope in St Marys Church, Twickenham
Alexander Pope's Grotto in Twickenham
Alexander Pope in Chiswick

Alfred Williams in South Marston, Wiltshire

'ALFRED WILLIAMS

HAMMERMAN POET

BORN IN

CAMBRIA COTTAGE 1877.'

 

After Richard Jefferies, Alfred Williams is probably the most well known Wiltshire writer. Cambria Cottage was built for Alfred's parents, Elias and Elizabeth (née Hughes), although they shared it with George Ockwell's family. Elias had taken out a second mortgage to finance a business in Swindon in which he was described as a 'joiner, carpenter and builder'. But the business folded in 1882, bailiffs threatened, and Elias fled, leaving Elizabeth to support her children.

 

 

'ROSE

COTTAGE

1865'

 

'POET AND WRITER

ALFRED WILLIAMS

LIVED HERE

1881 – 1903'

 

The Williams family, then, moved next door to Rose Cottage, which was built by Elizabeth's father Joshua Hughes, and this is where Elizabeth had met Elias when he and his father David lodged here as travelling carpenters. Alfred stayed here until he married Mary Peck in 1903.

 

Dryden Cottage in South Marston, where Alfred Williams and his wife Mary lived for fifteen years.

 

I was unable to find Alfred's grave in the church cemetery, although I discovered the grave of his mother and his brother Henry. Elizabeth Williams died in October 1917 at the age of 68. Her epitaph is from Matthew 11:28: 'Come unto me all ye who are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest'. Her son Henry Oliver Williams died less than two years later, in May 1919, at the age of 43.

 

In the parlour of the Richard Jefferies Museum at Coate there is a small bust of Alfred Williams, although I know nothing of its history.

 

Much of the above material was culled from the Alfred Williams Heritage Society website, which is very informative and linked below:

 

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Alfred Williams Heritage Society

Three Mitford Sisters in Swinbrook, Oxfordshire

The graves of three Mitford sisters in a row in Swinbrook, Oxfordshire, which was their family home.

 

'NANCY

MITFORD

Authoress

wife of

Peter Rodd

1904–1973'

 

Despite what the gravestone says, Nancy Mitford was divorced from Rodd in 1959. She was noted for her novels, particularly The Pursuit of Love (1945) and Love in a Cold Climate (1949). She also popularised the whimsical expressions 'U' and 'non-U' in an essay in Noblesse Oblige: An Enquiry Into the Identifiable Characteristics of the English Aristocracy (1956).

 

'UNITY VALKYRIE

MITFORD

Born 8th Aug 1914

Died 28th May 1948

Say not the struggle

naught availeth'

 

Now we come to the notorious two sisters. Unity Mitford is famous for her obsession with Adolf Hitler, for stalking him and greatly impressing him with her Ayrian looks (and her middle name).  And after Britain declared war on Germany she shot herself in the head, although it took nearly nine years for the bullet still lodged there to kill her.

 

'DIANA

MOSLEY

née

MITFORD

1910

2004'

 

Notorious for – among other things – leaving her husband Bryan Guinness for the fascist leader Oswald Mosley, having her second marriage at Goebbels's house with Hitler as guest of honour, etc. Some called her the most hated woman in the country: it wasn't exactly surprising that her appearance on Desert Island Discs in 1989 should have received so many complaints.

Arturo Barea and Other Spanish Writers in Oxfordshire

The Times Literary Supplement's 26 April 2013 issue contains a fascinating article by Martin Murphy titled 'Pub Poets: The Exiles of Eaton Hastings'. In 1934 the socialist and pacifist Gavin Henderson inherited the Buscot estates in Oxfordshire from his grandfather Alexander Henderson, the first Lord Faringdon. Gavin Faringdon was a founder of the National Council for Spanish Relief during the Spanish Civil War, which commissioned a ship to transport four thousand refugee Basque children following the siege of Bilbao. Some of the young exiles were housed at a lodge of Faringdon's (still called Basque House) in the hamlet of Eaton Hastings, and the death of one of them in an Oxford infirmary led the poet Luis Cernuda – who witnessed the death – to write a poem: 'Elegía a un muchacho vasco muerte en Inglattera'.

In 1939 a group of adult Spanish exiles came to Basque House, among them the poets Domènec Perramon and Pedro Garfias, and the journalists Eduardo de Ontañon and Fermí Vergés. Most of them moved on to Mexico, although Perramon stayed in England and became a translator of Spanish.

Arturo Barea was the son of a washerwoman and was very proud of his working-class roots. He left Spain in 1938 but didn't arrive at Eaton Hastings until 1947, where he spent his last ten years at Gavin Faringdon's Middle Lodge. He had married the Austrian journalist Ilsa Kulcshar, née Pollak. As 'Juan de Castilla', Barea broadcast eight hundred programmes for the BBC's Spanish American service, from 1940 until the year of his death. He is most noted for his autobiographical trilogy La forja de un rebelde, which his wife (as Ilsa Barea) translated as The Forging of a Rebel (1946).

 

Barea's ashes were strewn over his garden at Eaton Hastings, and Ilsa returned to Austria, although their friend Olive Renier erected a memorial to them in the cemetery on Coach Lane, Faringdon, behind Ilsa's parents' grave above.

 

'POR ARTURO BAREA
BORN MADRID 20^TH SEPT 1897.
DIED BUSCOT 24^TH DEC 1957.
AND HIS WIFE
ILSE BAREA POLLAK
BORN VIENNA 20^TH SEP^T 1902
AND DIED THERE
1^ST JANUARY 1973.'

William Morris in Kelmscott, Oxfordshire

St George's Church, Kelmscott.

 

Buried in the graveyard are William Morris (1834–1896) and his wife Jane Morris (1839–1914). Morris's friend Philip Webb designed the simple but attractive tombstone, although this side is barely legible now due to weathering.

 

Also buried here are their two daughters, May (1862–1938) and Jane Alice (1861–1935). May edited her father's Collected Works.

 

Only their initials 'JAM' and 'MM' appear on these stones.

Barbara Pym in Finstock, Oxfordshire

Barn Cottage, Finstock, Oxfordshire.

 

'BARBARA PYM
1913–1980

 

Writer

 

lived here

1972–1980' 

Following Barbara's sister Hilary's retirement from the BBC they bought Barn Cottage in Finstock, actually a converted wheelwright's shop. As Barbara was still working at the International African Institute in London she found cheap accommodation there and rejoined Hilary at weekends until her retirement in 1974. (My information above was gleaned from Hazel Holt's excellent book A Lot to Ask: A Life of Barbara Pym (1990).)

Holy Trinity, the church the sisters attended. (This is also where T. S. Eliot joined the Anglican Church in a secret ceremony in 1927.)

'BARBARA PYM
WRITER
1913–1980
WORSHIPPED
HERE'

'THIS LECTERN, DEDICATED ON THE 3RD JUNE 1984,
HAS BEEN GIVEN IN MEMORY OF THE WRITER
BARBARA PYM, WHO ORGANISED THE READING OF
THE EPISTLE DURING THE TIME SHE LIVED IN
FINSTOCK, 1972–1980.'

'BARBARA PYM
Writer
2nd June 1913–11th Jan. 1980
HILARY WALTON
née PYM
13th Jan. 1916–7th Feb. 2004'

I didn't know where Pym's grave was, so I asked a couple of elderly locals tending a grave if they knew. They had no idea, although in fairness one of them did know she was a writer.

Links to my other Pym posts:

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Barbara Pym: Some Tame Gazelle (1950)
Barbara Pym: Excellent Women (1952)

Arkell's Brewery Mural, Swindon, Wiltshire

Arkell's Brewery was established in Swindon in 1843 and moved to Kingsdown, Swindon in 1861. It remains an independent family brewery. The above mural, completed in 1985, is in County Road and is by Sarah Faulkner.

Richard Jefferies in Coate, Swindon, Wiltshire

 

The Richard Jefferies Museum is the only literary museum in Wiltshire, and is on the Marlborough Road a few yards from Coate Water Country Park and next to the Sun Inn.

 

Coate is only about two miles from central Swindon, although this photo deceptively looks deep in the countryside.

 

'RICHARD JEFFERIES MUSEUM

––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

BIRTHPLACE OF THE

NATURE WRITER AND NOVELIST

RICHARD JEFFERIES

(1848–1887)

 

Open 1st and 3rd Sunday

in each month

May–September 2–5pm

Admission Free'

 

'BIRTHPLACE

OF

RICHARD JEFFERIES

BORN

NOVEMBER 6^TH 1848

 

Coate Farm, originally known as Jefferies Farm, was bought by Richard's great-grandfather, a baker and miller, in 1800. Richard's grandfather John was also (reluctantly) the principal miller and baker in Old Town, Swindon, and his father James Luckett Jefferies was a farmer here.

 

Richard had no interest in farming. He went to school in Swindon, began working for the North Wiltshire Herald at seventeen, and remained in journalism the whole of his short life. In 1874 he married Jessie Baden who lived nearby, and the couple went to live in Swindon. Jefferies wrote a large number of books largely filled with his observations of nature culled from his childhood in and around Coate, and he is perhaps best known for the autobiographical novel Bevis (1882).

 

He died in Goring at the age of 38 and was buried in Broadwater and Worthing Cemetery, West Sussex.

 

And this is the entrance door to the museum.

 

In the sitting room is a replica of a bust sculpted by Margaret Thomas. The original was unveiled in Salisbury Cathedral in 1892.

 

In the parlour and on the stairs are paintings of 'Jefferies's Land' by Kate Tryon (1864–1952), an artist from Massachusetts who was a very keen enthusiast of Jefferies's work, who visited Wiltshire six times and produced 230 Jefferies-themed works. The above painting is of Upham House (1910).

 

The interior of Upham House.

 

At the top of the stairs is another bust, this time by K. M. Harwood, dating from 1948.

 

The room on this floor was a bedroom but now contains exhibits. This plaque, a memorial to Jefferies and the Wiltshire poet Alfred Williams, was salvaged from Liddington Hill after it had been used for target practice by troops during World War II. Shame about the reflection.

 

A manuscript page of Jefferies's children's novel Wood Magic (1881) with a few emendations.

 

Jefferies's study is in the attic.

 

A closer view of that representation of Jefferies as a child.

 

Jefferies's original writing desk.

 

A first edition of the triple-decker Bevis: The Story of a Boy.

 

And a first of the two-volume Wood Magic.

 

The rear of the property.

 

'THIS TREE WAS PLANTED BY THE

CHILDREN OF THE SWINDON BRANCH

OF THE WORKERS EDUCATIONAL ASSOCIATION

AND DEDICATED BY THE

R^T REV THE LORD BISHOP OF MADRAS

TO

RICHARD JEFFERIES

NATURES GREAT PROSE WRITER

SEPTEMBER 21^ST 1921.'

 

Penny and I really enjoyed our visit to Richard Jefferies Museum, and it's evident that a great deal of excellent volunteer work is being done here. My thanks to all involved, particularly to the chair of the Richard Jefferies Society, John Price, with whom I had a brief conversation about Jefferies.

 

As far as obscurity goes this museum is nothing like as little known as some authors' house we've visited – such as Lillian Smith's place halfway up Old Screamer mountain in Clayton, Georgia; or Frank Sargeson's rebuilt bach in Takapuna, New Zealand – but perhaps it could do with a little more publicity.

 

Linked below is an excellent, well illustrated 28-page guide to the museum by the Richard Jefferies Society, and I'd recommend that anyone going there read it first.

 

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
In the Footsteps of Richard Jefferies: A Guide to Coate Farm