William Booth Birthplace Museum, Sneinton, Nottingham

William Booth (1829–1912), the founder of the Salvation Army, was born in this house in Notintone Place, Nottingham. This is now a museum not open at specific times, so I took advantage of the Heritage Open Day last week to visit it for the first time. 

This bust of William Booth is the first thing that greets the visitor in the entrance hall.

 

This room was perhaps the parlour, and, like several other rooms, has been furnished to give an idea of how a lower middle class household such that of Samuel and Mary's – the parents of William – would have looked. Here, guests would have been entertained and games played.

 

The kitchen.

 

Perhaps this would have been the nursery, the bedroom and playroom for the Booth children.

 

Perhaps the bedroom where William Booth was born.

 

In William's childhood his father Samuel was downwardly mobile and bankrupt by 1842. At 13 (two years before his conversion to Methodism) William was obliged to begin earning a living, and started by working for the pawnbroker Francis Eames.

 

William married Catherine Mumford (1829–90), who was to be known as 'mother of the Army', in 1855.

 

In a display cabinet in the museum is William's influential book In Darkest England and The Way Out (1890), which compared the social situation of industrial Britain to Africa.

 

In London, on a central reservation in Mile End Road near the Blind Beggar pub in Whitechapel, there are two monuments to Booth within less than 200 yards of each other.

 

'WILLIAM BOOTH

FOUNDER

AND

FIRST GENERAL

OF

THE SALVATION ARMY

 

COMMENCED THE WORK

OF

THE SALVATION ARMY

ON MILE END WASTE

JULY 1895.'

 

 

'HERE

WILLIAM BOOTH

COMMENCED THE WORK OF THE SALVATION ARMY

JULY 1865.'

 

 'THIS STATUE WAS UNVEILED BY

GENERAL ARNOLD BROWN L. H. D.

ON 10th APRIL 1979, IN WHICH

YEAR THE 150th BIRTHDAY

OF WILLIAM BOOTH WAS

INTERNATIONALLY CELEBRATED.'

 

Below are two more posts of mine on William Booth.

 

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William Booth in Sneinton, Nottingham, England

William Booth in Abney Park Cemetery, Stoke Newington

Richard Ayodade's Submarine (2010), Joe Dunthorne, and an Oulipian digression

Submarine is a coming-of-age story set in 1980s Swansea, Wales, and the socially inept 15-year-old Oliver Tate (Craig Roberts) wants to lose his virginity to his girlfriend Jordana (Yasmin Paige), although he's also very concerned that the marriage of his parents – the extremely constipated Lloyd (Noah Taylor) and Jill (a slightly exaggerating Sally Hawkins) – is threatened by Jill's relationship with her old flame Graham (Paddy Considine), a new age performer.

With parents like these, Oliver can perhaps be excused the problems he has communicating, excused his self-absorption, and even excused his hopelessly misguided attempts to solve problems.

The obvious references have been made by critics – Nouvelle Vague cinema influence, Catcher in the Rye, Woody Allen, Roeg's evil dwarf in Don't Look Now, Adrian Mole, etc. The film works because it's (sometimes rather blackly) funny, because it's well acted (especially by Roberts and Paige), because Ayodade is so assured (occasionally too much so), and because Alex Turner's music is wistful and in keeping with the period.

Now, who's Joe Dunthorne? He wrote the novel (his first) on which this movie is based, which was published in 2008, and as far as I can tell (not having read it) the movie seems to be faithful to it. Dunthorne was a contributor to a collection of poems published under the title Generation txt, and he now has a new novel, Wild Abandon, which is set in the early 1990s, and apparently also has two suberb young people. I'll look out for that.

Interestingly, Dunthorne is also an admirer of Georges Perec, and his short article in the Guardian on three Perec translations is here. However – and coming a little later is one of my grouses that I may have made before but if so it bears repeating – Dunthorne calls Gilbert Adair's A Void (an attempted translation of Perec's La Disparition) a 'virtuoso translation'. I assume that Dunthorne has read both the original and the translation, otherwise his statement wouldn't make sense. One of the other translations he mentions is Ian Monk's The Exeter Text, which Monk translates from Perec's Les Revenentes. Monk, like Perec, belongs to Oulipo (which Perec still does, even though he's dead), but his verdict on Adair's translation is very different: he says that he 'found it an amusing work in its own right but, as a translation, frankly disappointing'. And he goes on to state his reasons for this, which are very interesting, particularly (for me) the fact that Adair missed the French pangram, and his 'translation' of it renders the sentence meaningless as such. You'll have to scroll a little, but any reader of Adair's book should read this. Rant over, and yes, I know I've highjacked my own post.

Gilbert Adair's Buenas Noches Buenos Aires

I saw a copy of Gilbert Adair's Buenas Noches Buenos Aires in an Oxfam bookshop this weekend, and I'm glad I didn't pay the full price: it's now in the trash can.

The book is almost a disaster. It’s a coming-of-age novel from a gay perspective, concerning a shy young Englishman (Gideon) who teaches EFL in Paris in the early 1980s; he is also the (possibly unreliable) narrator. The reader could expect a novel of this nature to be obsessed with the sexuality described, but unfortunately this is almost all that is described: the overwhelming emphasis is on appearances, and the internal life of Gideon is preoccupied with agonising over how he looks to others. His sex life consists almost entirely of masturbation, so to save face in the predominantly homosexual staff room he invents a wild sex life and so (sort of) becomes one of the superficial lads. Unfortunately, the book is equally superficial.

The French language and explanations thereof are a major problem. Like many cookery articles, Adair liberally sprinkles his novel with French phrases and sentences, often translating even quite simple things. And, OK, it’s perhaps amusing for non-French speakers to learn what ‘bite’ means in French: I once taught English in France for a few years and well remember a large group of French teenagers I took on holiday to England rolling about the coach with laughter on seeing a billboard which called a Mars bar (or something similar) ‘The Big Bite’. But then why doesn’t Adair also translate ‘mes semblables, mes frères’ on the final page of the novel? Perhaps because Gideon/Gilbert would then have to explain that this is a slight mis-quotation from Baudelaire and… No, that would be advertising one’s cleverness, pasting it on the wall for all to see.

In the end, it’s the tedious (and very unfunny) jokes that destroy the book: if we generously suggest that they come from the timid Gideon himself, desperate to impress with his perceived sparkling wit, then one or two jokes would have been enough; but as I feel that it’s Adair’s sense of humour we’re reading, this is a more serious matter. What kind of readership is Adair aiming at with this novel? One of the jokes that, er, stands out for me is the gay club called 'The 400 Blow Jobs', a pun on Truffaut's famous New Wave film The 400 Blows. Tee-hee, snigger, but surely he wasn't imagining that early adolescents would read this? And presumably he didn't give the French because the joke doesn't work in translation: an example of what Gideon would perhaps have called 'having your gâteau and eating it'. As another example, an encounter with a short-tongued beau is pondered on afterwards: ‘Was I sexy, though? Wath I theckthy?' This is just one of a number of 'witticisms' based on the way people pronounce words, and the novel would not so much better – but less bad – for their omission.