I have decided Moving Toyshop needs to move! Although this site will remain open and all the archived posts accessible all new blogs will be at.....

http://movingtoyshop.wordpress.com/

 

My thanks to everyone who has visited, read and commented here - I hope to see you at my new home.

Delayed due to illness but here it is.

My reviewing for rte means that I can for the first time provide a reasonably contemporary list of the 'top 5' new mysteries which I read in 2008 - and as I love a list here goes.....

1) Reginald Hill - A Cure for All Diseases

2) Laura Wilson - Stratton's War

3) Andrew Taylor - Bleeding Heart Square

4) R T Raichev - Assassins at Ospreys

5) Robert Barnard - Last Post

I can also cheat by having a special award for Debut Novel of the Year which goes to Aly Monroe's Maze of Cadiz. Just falling outside the top 5 was Ann Cleeves's White Nights.

A few comments. The number one is no surprise! A new Dalziel and Pascoe is pretty well guaranteed to be number one for me and A Cure for All Diseases is an absolute classic. However the rest of the list is generally a lot more surprising. Laura Wilson's Stratton's War came as a real discovery to me as I had not liked the previous book of her's that I read; interestingly both it and Bleeding Heart Square are 'revisionist' approaches to the Golden Age mystery era of the 1930's and 40's. Both are excellent. R.T. Raichev, a writer wholly new to me, on the other hand produces a contemporary homage to the Golden Age mystery and does so with wit, erudition and brio. Robert Barnard, a true living great, produced in Last Post a highly enjoyable book but one which would not have made this list were it not for the remarkable and shocking twist which he pulls out of the hat in, literally, the book's last paragraph; something only a thorough master of the craft of writing mysteries could do. Aly Monroe's Maze of Cadiz is a 'stunning debut' combining charm and fascinating historical detail.

There have been a couple of Horizon programmes over the past 2 weeks (11th and 18th November 2008) revolving around an 'experiment' with mental health issues. I have written about them on the Mental Health Forum and reproduce a version of my thoughts here.

WEEK ONE

First let me try and describe the programme . 10 'volunteers' are taking part; 5 are 'normal' and 5 have a history of psychiatric illness (OCD, Depression, Bi-polar, Schizophrenic, Anorexia and Social Anxiety). 3 Professionals (a Psychiatrist, Psychiatric Nurse and Clinical Psychologist) observe the volunteers undertake a number of tasks and then have to identify who has or does not have a history of psychiatric illness.

In the first programme, last night, the tasks were performing a stand-up comedy routine in a pub, a psychiatric 'card test', cleaning up a cow shed, paintballing and another psychiatric test. At the end they correctly identified the person with OCD, but then identified someone as normal who in fact had a psychiatric history.

I have to admit that in the early stages I came very near to turning this programme off I was getting so  and I still have a lot of problems with it - but to some extent the volunteers are making it all worthwhile. Of course in addition to the problems it is also fundamentally silly - when I am well (and obviously all the volunteers are currently well!) I am completely confident that I could either convince anyone that I have never been depressed, or indeed that I am currently depressed if I wanted too. Any of us who have been through years of psychiatry, psychology, thought and read about our condition could do this. Not that I would want to! And that was my first big problem...

1.) The programme seemed to be suggesting that Mental Illness was something which should be regarded as something to be conquered and hidden. Obviously none of the volunteers was allowed to discuss their condition. Well everything which I want to fight towards in terms of stigma is to be able to say 'I'm a depressive live with it' - not of course happy to be so but accepting and yes, even in a way proud of it. Certainly not something to be hidden. It took me a long, long time to find the personal strength for doing this. But the OCD guy at the end of the programme when he had been 'outed' made exactly this point - he was OCD and out and said he had come on the programme to make that point.

2.) The approach is very behaviourist. This is obvious - the volunteers are watched sweeping up cow-shit or paintballing and their behaviour is observed by the professionals who make a diagnosis on the basis of their observations. The tasks are what makes it good television but also exploitative. Well I would hate both sweeping up cow-shit and paintballing but that has bugger all to do with my depression. It emphasises the external and overlooks what really matters which is what happens inside your head. It is about MENTAL Health after all.

Against this it was fascinating to see how the professionals judgements moved between vapidly conventional social commentary and psychiatric judgement. A person was suspicious if they did not display leadership qualities or become part of the team. But these things have nothing to do with psychiatric illness other than where that is used as a means of social control. This programme would give plenty of ammunition to those who believe psychiatry is a method of social control.

  My basic conclusion is is put the programme makers and the 'professionals' in a pretty bad light but was redeemed by the volunteers. The sheer glee of the woman who was identified by the professionals as having had no psychiatric problems and retorted 'you're wrong' was a joy to behold.

WEEK TWO

I'll try now to get my thoughts into some sort of order having seen the second programme. It seemed to me that there were 3 reasons for making the programme...

1.) To get ratings, as entertainment. This has to be nowadays, as even the BBC is ratings driven. If the programme hadn't sold itself as such it wouldn't have been made. This is is why there was, however they tried to disguise it, a 'game show' aspect to all of it (remember that Big Brother was originally sold as a psychological experiment). I am not necessarily condemning the programme because of that, but it does need to be borne in mind, and there were times when I felt really uncomfortable with this aspect of it, particularly in tasks which were designed to bring out a particular MH issue such as sweeping up the cow-shit or the body image one last night.
The justification for the programme lay however in the following two reasons.

2.) To show that it was perfectly possible for psychiatrists (I am now using the term generically as in fact the 'panel' was 1 psychiatrist, 1 psychiatric nurse and 1 psychologist) to diagnose 'normal' people as 'ill' on the basis of their observed behaviour and to stress the fact, which the psychologist stressed, of there being a continuum of mental health rather than some sharp divide. In this aim the programme succeeded admirably as 2 of the 5 people selected as 'ill' had in fact no mental illness at all. The basis on which these people was selected was wholly behaviourist - how people had reacted to certain tests and social situations. It was an approach which would tend to confirm (it certainly did with me) the worst expectations of psychiatry - that it reinforces and proceeds along very conventional lines of thought as to what is 'correct' social behaviour in terms of things like leadership, teamwork, bonding and so on. So that 'incorrect' social behaviour such as tending to be solitary, nervous of social situations etc. is interpreted as an illness. This is psychiatry as a social tool, a validator and policeman of social norms and has nothing to do with illness. If we flip it we may consider how certain forms of psychiatric treatment may not be designed to help a person reach a situation where they are able to cope with their illness, but to turn them into functioning members of society as conventionally perceived.

3.) To show that it was possible for people to 'recover' from mental illness and live a 'normal' life. In this the programme was much less successful. I know that the participants with a history of anorexia and OCD were successfully diagnosed (given their performance in tests which were very obviously designed to reveal those problems) and both participants spoke as to how they lived a 'normal' life now as did the people with social anxiety, bipolar and depression (a side-note that the programme cheated on schizophrenia, as it said that was one of the conditions but in fact there was no participant with a history of schizophrenia). Certainly the participants themselves were a delight to watch. But obvious questions immediately arose. First the participants were very obviously currently in remission! But beyond this I would imagine (and indeed hope) that the psychiatric screening for the programme was pretty rigorous and so the participants had been carefully checked as to whether their involvement was likely to lead to any problems (if not and anyone does have a problem I hope they sue the a%$e off the BBC). This means that the participants were a fairly carefully selected group.

But the second and bigger problem is conceptual and revolves around the concept of 'cure'. The programme tended to suggest that the way out of mental illness was a 'cure' which would leave the person 'normal'. No details were given as to what continuing medication, psychological help or coping strategies the people were living on and with. Now it is certainly true that for some people a mental illness is an isolated episode which, once 'cured', will never recur. The psychologist in the programme had himself had such an episode. But for others, and numbers of us here, there is no permanent 'cure' in this sense; rather than is the evolution of a coping and containment strategy which may involve many elements of medication, psychological therapy, alternative therapies, but perhaps above all a lifestyle which will avoid situations which would tend to make us ill (not that such situations do not still occur, nor to say that this is ever easy and it is an endless struggle to try and balance having a life with not becoming ill). All of this on-going and permanent struggle with Mental Health issues tended to be avoided by the programme.

In addition there was in the premise of the programme a suggestion that mental illness is something to be concealed. Now I must be fair here. The OCD man, as I commented last week, was magnificent on this - he spoke up for the fact that he would not conceal his OCD. But in general because the programme's premise was that it was possible to 'hide' mental illness the implicit suggestion was that this was the right thing. This goes right against all anti-stigma and discrimination work which is centred on NOT having to hide; to be able to admit to mental illness in the way that one would admit to a physical condition.

Beyond even this there is something else which is a personal belief. A serious bout of depression is absolute hell which I would not wish on my worst enemy; I have lost long periods of my life to it and done and achieved a fraction of what I might if I had not been depressive. But despite all this there are some positives for me - I am a more empathic and sympathetic person, less judgemental; I am, when well, more self-contained, happier with my own company, more contented, more likely to challenge social norms and conventions. All these are gains. I am not saying I would not rather not have depression!!!! But one of the reasons I don't hide it is precisely because I think there are positives. The programme never started to examine these ideas but held a very socially rigid and conventional behaviour as normative and fulfilling.

In some senses I have been overly critical. I am pleased that there was a major programme, whatever its failings about Mental Health. But in another sense I have not been critical enough. Because the big lie of the programme was utterly unsaid or unexamined. This of course was the availability of services. Anyone who comes to this Forum and starts to read a small selection of posts will know just how hard it often is to get decent psychiatric assistance in the UK. The programme's implication was that people just had to walk into a GP and they would get all the help they needed on tap. As if! A balance would be provided by a programme examining some of the many thousands who are desperate for help and unable to access it. The programme's biggest lie of all was entirely off-screen.

It was back in March that we went to hear Sara Paretsky speak in the somewhat unlikely surroundings of Sandwell Town Hall (it was Sandwell Libraries, who have an excellent writer's programme, who had arranged the visit). Paretsky was speaking as part of a promotional tour for Bleeding Kansas (which I still haven't read) and she started by explaining some of the background to the book. She herself moved from Kansas to Chicago when was 19 in the year that Martin Luther King came to Chicago to organise against social injustice there; it was a violent but enormously optimistic time and Paretsky stayed and created VI (Warshawski) who is a quintessentially urban detective.

But Paretsky had always wanted to set a book in Kansas, the scene of her childhood and adolescence. Her family had moved there in the 50's, her father was the first Jew hired by Kansas University. At the time there were unwritten zoning laws about where African-Americans/Hispanics/Jews could live and P's parents decided to buy an isolated house. When they had to move back to the city they sold their house to a couple of Wiccans who thought they would have privacy for their ceremonies - but they were very wrong. Their nearest neighbour, a redneck sheriff, embarked on a campaign of harassment. It was this that gave Paretsky the idea for the story some 8 or 9 years ago.

She also wanted to use the physical landscape - prairies, extraordinary blue of sky. Kansas, Paretsky said, is both funny peculiar and funny ha-ha (as a side-note P. noted that the biggest obstacle she had in first getting published was that she was considered 'regional'; US publishing utterly dominated by NY and LA, the rest is 'regional' - and what applies in this way to Chicago would go doubly so for Kansas). But Kansas has been crucial at many critical moments in US history - 'Bleeding Kansas' is a Civil War description. In the 60s/70s liberation struggles there was lot of violence and the same is true today; opinions and outlooks really come together and clash in Kansas.

P. then laid the book aside for a while [my notes lose track here!] but when the US invaded Iraq she heard from a friend of the funeral of the first soldier killed where it was said that it was a consolation that the parents believed in the cause. P. wanted to ask how it would have been if parents did not. She wrote a lot of historical stuff, the 1850's and anti-slavery and contemplated a trilogy  - 1850's/1960's/present but ran out of energy. She did a lot of research into farming of which she was very ignorant.

There followed a QandA session. On influences she said there many writers she liked but not sure she would call them influences. She did mention her pleasure in Margery Allingham's idiosyncrasy. On Chandler's sexism she said she always felt a desire to reply and riposte but even so felt she wrote within the noir tradition.

On VI's identity P. said that when she was a secretary at the Univ of Chicago she became very aware of the depth of Chicagoans national identities, and then sub-national (South Side Irish v West Side Irish) so to be authentically Chicagoan VI had to have a national perspective; P. felt there was no way she could write African-American or Hispanic so plumped for Polish - and to make her warmer added Italian mother [perhaps a rather simple view of national 'traits'? :)].

VI was not in Bleeding Kansas because she would have been too much of an outsider. Important to P. that VI always walks away with a certain amount of triumph - P. wants to be merciful/optimistic at the end of her books (she mentioned that she found Sarah Waters' Night Watch too bleak).

On Total Recall P. said that Holocaust had a very personal meaning for her as 2 grandmothers had died during it and she feels that there are really difficult problems in writing about it but still felt it was something she had to do and hence the book.

On Blacklist P. said that issues of blacklisting and McCarthyism were also woven into family history but the book rose more immediately out of The Patriot Act and the post 9/11 atmosphere; P. said there are parallels between McCarthy era and today but actually today is worse because of the levels of acquiescence.

As usual these are just the result of rough notes and in no sense an accurate transcript. It was a fascinating and inspiring talk which went way beyond the promotional.

At the conclusion there was the usual book-signing and I rather impudently asked if she would dedicate my copy to Albert Campion - she laughed and I am now the proud possessor of a copy of Bleeding Kansas with the following inscription 'Albert Campion. May your free spirit live forever Sara N. Paretsky'.

 

 We went to hear A C Grayling at the Birmingham Book Festival on 23rd October; he was giving a talk on Reading. In strong comparison with his talk of 2007 on Liberty I found some of his central contentions this time highly questionable. This is not to say that there was not much fascinating and stimulating material.

Grayling started by claiming that the practise of what he termed 'private intensive reading' (for the purpose of this article I will use the acronym PIR for this concept which is central to Grayling's argument) is both a minority pastime and historically recent. Books in other eras were precious items, as witness a medieval chained library. Grayling postulated that there are 4 elements or aspects of language - Reading, Writing, Talking and Listening. You might be a writer without being a reader at all - Grayling suggested this might have been the case with monastic copyists. Going back to the very first writing, in Ancient Egypt, we find an enormously high value attached to writers/scribes.

Turning to reading Grayling postulated the existence of many types of 'reading' - the reading of pictures, of signs, of the weather, of animal tracks; it is necessary to distinguish this from literacy. And the non-existence of anything which might truly be called in however limited a sense a literary culture remains true for an enormous period of human history - say 5000BC to around 16thc (for Western culture anyway). We telescope history.

Gutenberg did lead to a total revolution. The genie was out of the bag and could not be put back despite efforts to do so. Books started to be read - vernacular Bibles and the Classics. Read both individually and in familial/communal groups. The great hero of the Renaissance was Cicero because of his style; Ovid, Catullus, Horace also. The Calvinists wanted pure Latin without the naughty bits so they translated the NT into Ciceronian Latin.

Following Gutenberg people also started to own books and it became possible to 'read' a person from their books.

Crucially as books became more numerous there was a shift away from their form (consider the medieval illuminated manuscript) to their content. And by the 18thC the Enlightenment sees the book and the reading of books as a central act. Social readings continued but they tended to be lighter where intensive reading became private and PIR is born. In 18th and 19th centuries the essay and poetry were considered pre-eminent and novels were not encouraged and to some extent denigrated. This may have been in order to preserve reading as an elite activity. Grayling then shifted back and noted that the mid-17thC revolutionaries were literate - they could both read and use their reading.

The second half of the 19thC sees a huge explosion of auto-didacticism because of the expansion of mass literacy; a much, much broader reading class, enormous expansion of libraries and a much greater emphasis on the importance of reading.

Grayling then argued that it is from this historical background that one infers much about the importance of reading and its future. He then started to separate PIR from other types of reading, in particular what he calls 'passive' reading where one just lets the book wash over one. In PIR the reading experience is very active, critical. Grayling exemplified from his own experience the case of being a Booker Prize judge. He claimed that 'passive' and 'active (PIR)' reading are very different. Passive reading is centred around the human need for stories but is different to intensive reading. 120,000 books are published in UK every year but many are discarded. The question of how you read is a question of how much one will get from reading. Grayling then claimed that Trollope is an example of someone who was normally read passively and produced formulaic love stories, but in The Little (sic) House at Allington provoked and upset his readers by not having a happy ending (ie: Lily Dale marrying Johnny Eames).

Grayling argued that it was an imperative we should read intensively ; PIR is essential to the 'good life'. In a similar way to hear a lecture is passive, to think about it and react is active.

Grayling turned finally to the future of reading and remarked that while what he called the 'cultural minority' remains static in percentage terms it is now bigger than ever in human history because of the size of populations. He was therefore confident about the future of culture and reading (he told an amusing story about China, demolishing that wretched and intellectually threadbare argument about ageing audiences; he was in China some 30 years ago at a classical opera and was told by those attending that it was sad that the audience was so old. Then he went back 30 years later and the opera was just as well attended and the audience just the same age - around 60!).

I did miss some of the latter parts of the lecture because I was scribbling my own notes. I raised my hand to protest at the treatment of Trollope but was not called. However a woman did make the point that she found this divide between active and passive rather stark and suggested there might be a continuum.

On reflection I am more and more convinced that Grayling is wrong about this question of PIR as against passive reading. I certainly do not question that such a divide exists, but it can only be located in the mind of the reader not in the particular material or book. Trollope is of course a classic example for me, in that I spend a great deal of time reading him both intensively and actively. Clearly Grayling has not done this; he would not then get the title of the book wrong (it is The Small House at Allington), and he would certainly not reduce Trollope to love stories - his books are about how people should live, about politics and power (he is by far the greatest directly political novelist England has produced), and yes about the relationships between men and women. Of course you could read Trollope passively in merely narrative terms but you can also read him extremely actively and intensively (if anyone wants further proof of this they should see previous blogs here on the Exeter Trollope Conference).

But the argument is much wider than Trollope. Let me take an example of an author I read both actively and passively - Agatha Christie. Of course one can read Christie passively just for pleasure and escape. But one can also close read her and attempt to study her techniques, her attitudes, her ideology and so on (as will be demonstrated in my blog on Alison Light's writing about Christie if I ever finish it). On the other hand it is quite possible to read, let us say, Homer or Gibbon for their narrative skills and do so in an entirely passive manner.  The source of any distinction between passive and acting reading cannot lie in the material.

However I believe there are considerable further problems and objections. Grayling's definition of 'intensive' seems to an intellectual one; one might almost call it scientific, and one can certainly suggest that it is gendered. A different definition might call attention to the emotional or psychological 'intensity' with which we read. For a particular example let us return to his 18th/early19thC period and the issue of the novel. It was often the case that it was male critics who put down female novelists, including criticism of the Gothic genre. But this genre was a vital outlet for women to convey emotional and psychological truths; we should not argue that they were not read intensively merely because they were not read as intellectual essays. Fiction allows for the conveyance of truths which may not be available in other forms and this takes a gendered aspect in a patriarchal society (I am not here arguing from personal experience because the Gothic is one genre I find unreadable but I accept this is because I do not bring the right emotional and psychological equipment. However I can read let us say Tolkien with great emotional intensity to the extent that I weep).

My argument is that there are different ways of reading intensively. The intellectual is certainly one, and one which we should defend, guard, protect and proselytise for. But there is reading with psychological and emotional intensity as well and this is just as valid a form.

Nor, ultimately, am I as critical of 'passive' reading as Grayling. When I am depressed I am certainly only capable of passive reading, but I do a great deal of it and it is a source of great solace and comfort. If books have this therapeutic function why should be critical of it?

So overall while I found, as always, much of interest and much to stimulate in Grayling's talk, I believe his central contention to be fatally flawed.

 

 It is obvious that Book Reviews are subjective, biased and ideological. I certainly would not claim to be free from any of these faults when reviewing for Reviewing the Evidence. But once in a while one comes across a case where there are two reviews of the same book which not only come across as being reviews of different books, but take a completely opposed view of their subjects. This has happened recently and dramatically in the case of a new book about Hester Thrale by Ian McIntyre (Hester: The Remarkable Life of Dr Johnson's ‘Dear Mistress').

The first review by Anne Sebba appeared in The Times Books section on October 24th 2008...

>>Hester Thrale was a political wife before the term was invented, a
landowner at a time when wives could not own land in their own name and, above all, a diarist and author. Her ambitious final book, Retrospection,
was the first attempt by an Englishwoman to write a history of the world.

Hester Salusbury married Henry Thrale in October 1763, shortly after her
father's death had severely reduced her options. Eleven months later she
gave birth to their first child and from then on was pregnant almost yearly
during her marriage to Thrale. He forbad her from riding - too masculine;
and from entering the kitchen - too smelly. She was saved from a life of
stultifying boredom by the arrival for dinner in 1764 of Samuel Johnson,
then 55, widowed, living in squalor and close to a mental breakdown. Yet, in
spite of his dirty appearance, scrofula and scarring, Hester and Johnson
took to each other. He soon considered the Thrale home his own and
encouraged her to write more poetry.

How this young woman came to rescue Johnson and in turn find her own strong
literary voice forms the core of this biography. For 16 years she provided
him with endless cups of tea and stimulation as they debated politics, child
rearing, world affairs and literature. But the book's interest goes far
beyond the deep friendship between Hester and Johnson. Hester Thrale,
bluestocking and wit, was a remarkable woman imbued with deep intellectual
curiosity revealed in six leather-bound volumes now housed in the Huntington
Library in California, known as Thraliana. The blank books, a gift to her
(and posterity) from her husband on their 13th wedding anniversary, were
eventually filled with detailed accounts of domestic politics, the French
Revolution, cameo portraits of friends and enemies as well as Latin
epigrams, gossip, poetry and such fascinating details as the price of a
shirt in 1801, shedding a powerful beam of light on the life and culture of
Georgian England.

She put up with death, illness and her husband's frequent infidelities in a
way that indicates that this was nothing more than the age expected. Aged
38, after a stillbirth that nearly killed her, Hester nonetheless hoped that
a visit to his mistress might "dissipate" her husband's gloom.

By contrast, some of her preoccupations seem very modern, especially her
desire to find emotional satisfaction through romantic love. Her second
marriage, to her daughter's Italian music master, Gabriel Piozzo, gave her
renewed enthusiasm for writing but lost her Johnson's admiration and
blighted relations with her daughters for the rest of her life. McIntyre's
detailed account of their shabby treatment of Hester makes painful reading.

This entertaining book brings her out of the Johnsonian shadow at last and
Hester is revealed: a heroine for any age. <<

The second by Frances Wilson appeared in The Sunday Times on November 2nd...

>>Hester Thrale was Dr Johnson's “Dear Mistress” for 16 years. The period of their friendship saw the melancholic lexicographer reach his full gargantuan stature as a writer, while Hester, who did not discover her own literary voice until after his death, bloomed in the light of his admiration. For Johnson's biographer James Boswell, who remained immune to Hester's charms, she was “a little artful impudent malignant devil”. Johnson would eventually agree with him.

Hester's genius was her ability to inspire in others either great love or great hate, and what is striking in her character is how little she apparently minded, or seemed to notice, which was which. Boswell's loathing reached its peak when, in her hugely popular Anecdotes of the late Samuel Johnson (1786), Hester referred only once to a certain “Mr B-”. The revenge of Mr B was to trash Mrs T in his own Life of Johnson (1791), whose success would eventually erase her book altogether.

Born in 1741 the only child of adoring parents, Hester wrote juvenile ditties that were treated as works of incipient genius; she never doubted that she was, indeed, remarkable. That her life would also be remarkable, however, could not have been predicted. To please her rich uncle, whose estate she expected to inherit, she married in 1763 a rich brewer called Henry Thrale - or, as she put it in her diary, Thraliana, “I was sold to a man I did not like for a barrel of porter.” Mr Thrale did not speak and Mrs Thrale did not stop; she was settling down to a life of annual pregnancies (for six months of every year, as she put it, she had her head over a bowl) when a friend of her husband brought Johnson to sup at their house by the brewery in Deadman's Place in Southwark.

Had Johnson not been delighted by her, it is unlikely that Hester would have had an outlet for her intelligence and wit. Johnson liked Henry, too, and he loved a good dinner: so successful was the meeting that soon the 55-year-old widower was installed in the Thrales' country mansion in Streatham, where he slept until noon, ate peaches before breakfast and gnawed on chicken bones to his heart's content. Hester gave Johnson his first feeling of family, and he gave her a padlock in the event that he go mad and should need locking up. The Thrale children regarded him, in the memorable phrase of Johnson's biographer Walter Jackson Bate, “as a combination of friend and a sort of toy elephant”. The animal Hester resembled, Johnson remarked, was the rattlesnake.  

Was Johnson in love with Hester? He seems hardly to have known the answer himself. His feelings towards her, McIntyre suggests in his marvellously rich biography, were undoubtedly erotic, while any fondness she had for him was the result of flattery, boredom and the drag of 12 consecutive pregnancies.

Only four of her dozen children - all girls - made it to adulthood, by which point they had each disowned their mother. Distance was Hester's preferred maternal mode: of her two-year-old daughter, Susanna, she noted that she was “small, ugly & lean as ever; her Colour like that of an ill painted Wall grown dirty”. A year later, the child's colour had become “like that of a Clorotic Virgin at 15”. McIntyre, who admits to finding Hester at times baffling, suggests that such detachment must be understood in the context of the high infant-mortality rate of the 18th century. But it should also be remembered that Hester was someone who happily lived with a husband she didn't like and a house guest she found “irksome”; when she left to embark on a two-and-a-half-year honeymoon with Piozzi, she found the protests of her abandoned children an inconvenience. “In a later age,” McIntyre comments with characteristic wryness, “Hester might well have fallen foul of some of the more intrusive legislation that would find its way onto the statute book in such areas as childcare and health and safety. But then is not now.”

The problem for Hester's biographer is that Johnson's exit from her life was followed so swiftly by the happy-ever-after of her second marriage; and while she lived a further 40 years, during which time she published her letters to and from Johnson, her Anecdotes and an extraordinary dictionary of Synonyms, whose quality McIntyre is right to perceive, her life was never to be so remarkable again. There is never much to say about a happy marriage, and six weeks into her honeymoon Hester would write that, “I have experienced greater and longer felicity than I ever yet experienced.” It is hard to know, however, in what her felicity lay: she did not share her husband's love of music, and he struggled with the language she was so adept at using.

Can we forgive Hester her treatment of Johnson and her daughters? Despite McIntyre's apologies on her behalf, I am not sure that I can. In this, the best account we have of the life of Mrs Thrale-Piozzi, her supreme self-confidence seems the result of shallowness; her coldness the result of self-regard. As Mrs Thrale, she was a bearer of yokes; as Mrs Piozzi, she became, to her children at least, something of a yoke herself.<<

I wrote on ECW...

>>It is very well worth while indeed to read both reviews.
They are utterly different in both their portrayal of the
book and of Hester Thrale herself. Wilson seems to
almost ignore the fact that Thrale was a writer and indeed
a person in her own right and considers her solely in
relation to Johnson; Sebba on the other hand centres
on Thrale as a writer and person for herself. Is it a book
about Johnson or about Thrale? But for a case-study
in how differing ideological perspectives inform reviewing
this is a classic example!

It would be interesting to read the book and form
one's own judgement!<<

On further consideration it is striking how Wilson basically sees Thrale only in relation to Johnson - the 40 years which she lived after his death are just a 'problem' for the biographer. For Sebba her relationship to Johnson is merely one aspect, albeit a fascinating one, of a rich and fruitful life. Wilson's review  appears mean-spirited and dismissive in comparison to Sebba.

As an object lesson in how careful one must be with reviews it might be hard to find a better example. 

 

 

 

Very strange! My main - desktop - computer has just been taken away; it has been misbehaving for some time. I suspected that this was due to its' insides being absolutely filthy and therefore getting too hot and this is exactly what the technician diagnosed. He looked at its' innards with horror and remarked that people don't ever consider having their computer's serviced and are then surprised when they go wrong; this is wholly true as far as I am concerned. Anyway he has taken it away to the shop and to be cleaned, as apparently it is such a filthy process that it cannot be done in people's houses. I feel utterly bereft. Happily though we do now have this back-up lap-top who's function is I suppose for precisely such emergencies.  Except that I can't be bothered to reconnect the printer and can't use Outlook Express because I save so much there. All of which is a long lead in as to why I thought hmmmmm I'll sit down and write a blog entry!

  I have not written a proper personal blog entry since last December so the whole of 2008 seems to have been uncovered. It is hard to say exactly why this should be. The obvious answer is that I have been 'doing' a great deal more ; going to meetings, becoming involved with the Mental Health Forum, reviewing mysteries for Reviewing the Evidence,going out more. It is also true that I have had a lengthier and deeper spell of illness than any for at least 3 years. Looked at in terms of my mood chart 2008 is not going to be a good year. Set against this is the fact that however modestly I have contributed more to the world than for many years. How does one assess that; how do I judge whether this is a fair exchange? It is a perennial and unanswerable problem for depressives I imagine, certainly for me. Whatever the answer I intend to carry on engaging with 'real-life' in the way I have been. The events of the summer which led to my last 'episode' were unfortunate but looking back it is hard to see what I could have done differently even though I was treading on thin ice - what I did not know was how deep the waters were beneath the ice. It is a considerable number of years since I have had such a lengthy and deep period of depression to which I had not myself substantially contributed.

 The salutary features of this bout, if such they can be termed, were in the first place to remind me - if I needed it - of the depths which depression brings and why it is right to campaign around MH issues; at a more personal level, because I was at most semi-well when we went to Galloway in September I have not suffered my usual October dip which is how I come to be writing this now!

 Well that is enough of the self-indulgence for now. At least the desktop being hauled off for renovation has led to a blog entry!!

 

 

 

  

 

 

Although my blog has almost fallen into desuetude I just want to commemorate that on 4th June 2008 I saw, nay witnessed, Liza Minnelli in concert for the second time in my life; and, as with the first time, this was one of the great events of my life.

I know that I am not writing anything myself but...

a.) I haven't been very well for the past couple of weeks

b.) this is another of those essays - in this case a very short one - which demands to be reproduced everywhere.

Now one does have to point out the irony that Parris was a Tory MP when Thatcher destroyed the coal and steel industries. But that does not detract from the quality of this little gem of an essay. It seems to me to be near perfect prose, leaving one with an indelible image. And there is that central point about the fact that politics matter.

>>Matthew Parris

Chesterfield was hit very hard by Eighties Thatcherism. A few miles down the railway from Sheffield, the Derbyshire town depended directly and indirectly on a regional economy rooted in steel and coal. When such jobs disappeared, many youths without much academic qualification joined the Army. Today the deaths in Afghanistan of soldiers from Chesterfield and nearby towns such as Mansfield and Ilkeston appear regularly on the front pages of local papers.

Here's a snapshot from last Sunday, outside Chesterfield station. It is early afternoon. In the driving, freezing January rain stands a young serviceman, in full, neatly pressed, new-looking desert kit, taking a drag on a cigarette. He is standing in the rain because station and platforms have become, by law, smoke-free. He is waiting for the Virgin Cross-Country train.

Thatcher, Major, Blair, Brown. Pit closures, private rail companies, foreign wars, and a ban on smoking. People tell you politics make no difference, but - for good or ill - every element in this snapshot was placed there by politicians. Boy in uniform smoking in the rain. Chesterfield, 15.30, 20/01/08. I wish I'd had a camera. <<

from The Times 24/01/08.

 A wonderful column by Mick Hume from The Times of 4.1.08. Hume once again presents some of my own thoughts in a much more compelling and entertaining fashion; of course this is polemic - but what is wrong with polemic?