A friend is in the process of moving house and has a massive clearcut. She took photos of her bookshelves and let me pick whatever I wanted! What a lucky girl I am. It was better than a sweet shop. So all the books in this post are secondhand books and these are not even everything I got from her. I’m going to show you five titles from the 20th Century. Three out of the five authors I’ve never read before. They are Graham Greene, L. P. Hartley and Evelyn Waugh. And two authors I have read their works before, Jerome K Jerome and D. H. Lawrence.
The Go-Between
Among the five titles, the one I’m most excited about is The Go-Between by L. P. Hartley. I’ve never heard of The Go-Between or L. P. Hartley until I read Mad about Shakespeare by Jonathan Bate last year. If you’re new here, I awarded this book my favourite non-fiction, favourite teacher, favourite audiobook and Book of the Year from 2022. I’ve been very curious about the novel The Go-Between which played a crucial role in Jonathan Bate’s life. He said
I loved the book so much that until recently I dared not return to it, for fear of disappointment… And I am thankful that by being forced to study it at the age of fifteen I was relaunched into a life of reading.
That’s like a trusted and respected teacher saying that’s one of his favourite books and I want to go read it immediately. Jonathan Bate wrote about his encounter with the novel at O-Level when he was a teenager. I will quote one paragraph in full because I love Jonathan Bate’s writing. I cannot do it justice by summarising it.
In the fifth form, there was no choice but to read all the way through to the end of The Go-Between: it was O-Level year and this was one of the set texts.
The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.
That, I liked. The past which was opened up seemed both familiar and strange. Many elements of the book transcended time: a boy who is bullied, but who outwits his rivals through clever use of language; shyness and embarrassment; long, slow, summer days; the outsider peering into a world of beauty and elegance that may not be as happy or desirable a place as he imagines; the trauma of the climax (a suicide, a child’s nervous breakdown, a mother dispatched to a mental institution); the onset of teenage years bringing a reckoning with the body, with sex and sexuality. The confusion of young Leo Colston as he falls in love with both the lovers he goes between, ethereal, blonde, upper-class Marion — the Virgo who proves not to be — and farmer Ted, ripped and tanned, was presumably a projection of L. P. Hartley’s experience of being stifled in the closet. Other elements, meanwhile — the manners, dialogue, dress and customs of the characters — transported me to a lost time, the Edwardian summer of my grandparents.
Back to the novel itself. L. P. Hartley was a British novelist and short story writer. he was born at the end of the 19th century and died in the 1970s. The Go-Between was published after the Second World War. The story is set at the end of the Victorian era and it looks at society through the eyes of a naïve schoolboy outsider. The blurb on the back cover says,
“In his delicate and perceptive study of early adolescence, L. P. Hartley evokes a young boy’s traumatic initiation into the adult world of passion, deception and hypocrisy.
A man in his sixties looks back on his boyhood for the first time in fifty years, recalling events that took place on a summer visit to a Norfolk country house at the turn of the century.”
“Cautiously he unearths painful memories that have been ‘buried for all these years, but they were there, I knew, the more complete, the more unforgettable, for being carefully embalmed…’
It is the story of the loss of innocence, a loss so shattering and profound that it breeds a lasting mistrust of life.”
It sounds deliciously exciting. I need to push it all the way up my reading queue.
Brideshead Revisited
I’ll carry on with authors that I’ve never tried before. Evelyn Waugh was a 20th-century English writer. Brideshead Revisited is probably one of his most famous works. I never knew this, the full title of the novel is Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred & Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder. The title itself is already very intriguing. It was first published in 1945. It follows, from the 1920s to the early 1940s, the life and romances of the protagonist Charles Ryder, most especially his friendship with a wealthy English family, who live in a mansion called Brideshead Castle.
I heard about the novel in one of the Great Courses called The Art of Reading. Apparently, it’s a book that continues to provoke widely varied readings.
For some, it is a brilliant and affecting work of art, but for other readers, the book is vulgar and even schlocky. This novel is loved because of its aristocratic settings and characters; its nostalgic, even elegiac tone [elegy is a poem of serious reflection, typically a lament for the dead]; and its subtle treatment of Charles’s conversion experience. This novel is hated because for some readers it is an expression of snobbery, the nostalgia for youth is hopelessly sentimental, and Charles’s conversion is unconvincing.
It sounds like the perfect kind of book to get my brain excited about subtext, filling in the gaps, and the interpretation of unsaid things.
Travels with My Aunt
According to Wikipedia, Graham Greene was an English writer and journalist regarded by many as one of the leading English novelists of the 20th century. He lived through most of the 20th Century. Imagine being born four years after Queen Victoria died and living through the first world war as a teenager and the second world war in your 40s, and growing old listening to the Beatles and watching James Bond and the early Star Wars! Evelyn Waugh was born just one year before Graham Greene but he died a lot earlier so he didn’t get to watch Star Wars but he would have watched James Bond too!
Travels with My Aunt is a novel about the travel of Henry Pulling, a retired bank manager, and his eccentric Aunt Augusta as they find their way across Europe. “Through Aunt Augusta, a veteran of Europe’s hotel bedrooms, Henry joins a shiftless, twilight society: mixing with hippies, war criminals, CIA men; smoking pot, breaking all the currency regulations… coming alive after a dull suburban lifetime.”
It sounds like the type of book that makes you re-evaluate your boring everyday life and makes you want to go and do something adventurous today.
The Princess and Other Stories
The next one is The Princess and Other Stories by D. H. Lawrence. I’ve so far read his novel the Rainbow and a short story called The Prussian Officer. This is a collection of 12 short stories. 6 published in the 1920s. Lawrence died in March 1930 so everything else was published after he died. 4 in the 1930s, one in the 1950s and one called ‘The Wilful Woman’ published here for the first time in 1971.
By the sound of the blurb, the collection might be a bit different to the usual Lawrence, by ‘usual’ I mean, a lot of sex explicitly or implicitly.
Three Men on the Bummel
If you read my December and January wrap up post, you might remember I loved reading Three Men in a Boat over the Christmas holiday, so I was delighted to find this on her shelf.
Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog) was a hilarious Victorian book by English writer Jerome K. Jerome, about a two-week boating holiday on the Thames. It was so successful and popular, Jerome published a sequel 11 years later, in 1900, about a cycling tour in Germany, called Three Men on the Bummel, where the same three companions cycled through the Black Forest. It says something about the Victorian-era bicycle craze, just like the first book reflects the popularity of the boating holiday at the time. Just like I did some camping trips and could well relate to the stories in the first book, I also do a lot of cycling. So I look forward to their shenanigans. Goodreads labels both books as fiction. But I’m not sure Three Men in a Boat is purely fictional, I think they did go for boat trips, although apparently the dog was fictional. I don’t know if they also actually went to Germany. But it doesn’t matter – I expect some refreshing and witty silliness!
A Day of Small Things 