The Road to Oxiana by Robert Byron

I spotted this in a secondhand bookshop, and was inspired to give it a try because a) Nancy Mitford was in love with Robert Byron, and I thought there was a good chance that it might be amusing; and b) because Bruce Chatwin was inspired by Byron's writing. This book describes, in diary form, a haphazard journey through and around Persia and into Afghanistan. Byron and his travelling companion, Christopher Sykes, struggle against authoritarian bureacracy in imperial Persia, and no less effective state control in Afghanistan; permits are capriciously issued and withdrawn, they acquire endless state escorts who attempt to prevent them drawing, taking photographs, or indeed noticing anything that might lead to criticism of the Shah, Islam, the government. Byron is a wily traveller, however, and knows both when to accept these constraints and how to outwit them. His encounter with Herzfeld at Persepolis, during which he flouts, flagrantly, the prohibition on photography there, is typical of one of his ways of dealing with authority: ignore it and do whatever you want.

Byron is immensely knowledgable about Islamic architecture, and much of the text is given over to mouthwatering descriptions of mosques and palaces, their tiles, domes, minarets and squinches. Interestingly, he visits the massive statues of Buddha since destroyed by the Taliban; he doesn't care for them, or for Buddhist art in general. Added to the varied, beautiful but often harsh landscapes he describes, this makes the book something of a feast for the inner eye. This is contrasted with the comic encounters with minor potentates, ambassadors, the military and servants. Byron's attitudes to the locals are fairly typical of the time, and can be uncomfortable for the modern reader, but his genuine respect for some, especially their guide and chauffeur Seyid Jemal, tempers this a little. Compared to Chatwin, this is a traveller less anxious to be liked, more purposeful and less haphazard, but his abilities to take pleasure where it may be found certainly seem to have been taken as a model.

Peter Grimes by Benjamin Britten

No, it’s not a book, but it is definitely twentieth century and worth writing about. I was lucky enough to see the last performance of the current ENO production of Peter Grimes on Saturday. I didn’t know the piece at all, but was intrigued enough by Alex Ross’s chapter on the opera and Britten in The Rest is Noise to ask for tickets as a birthday present. I’m enormously glad that I did, because it was the best production of an opera that I have ever seen.

Director David Alden sets the opera in post-war austerity Britain; clothes are drab and grey and uniform, literally in a few cases, and the sets are austere, apparently made from cheap materials like corrugated iron. The lighting is remarkable, making expressionistic shadowplay that sometimes emphasises and sometimes subverts the action; Ellen Orford’s shadow, for example, sometimes dominates those of the chiding townspeople, while at the very end she has no shadow at all. The faces of the chorus gleam out from grey hats and coats like the glitter of the sea or of a shoal of mackerel, and sometimes they drift in and out of the stage like waves. While Mrs Sedley rouses the mob that will drive Peter Grimes to his death, they are constrained by the set in a wedge of stage, and sway and roll like a rough sea, equating the mob with other unstoppable forces of nature.

The austerity setting gave the opera an extra twist; after years of pulling together as part of the war effort, the tensions between the individual and the collective may now be at such a pitch that rupture and trauma are inevitable. This version of the opera is sympathetic to Grimes, while not masking the violent and aggressive aspects of his character; there is genuine regret and emotion as he recounts the death of his first apprentice, and John’s death is clearly indicated as an accident, caused in part by Grimes’s fright at being persecuted by the Borough. The choral repetition of “he who despises us we’ll destroy” emphasises that Grimes’s separation from his community is his crime, rather than his involvement in the death of two children. The portrayal of Auntie as a lesbian of the Radclyffe Hall type, in a rather elegant pinstriped man’s suit, problematises this. One critic suggests that her wardrobe may be due to her role as a businesswoman in a man’s world, but her rejection of one woman, and leading of another off on a lead, during the dance scene suggest to me that she’s not just coded as lesbian. A lesbian can be as antithetical to small-town life as an uppity fisherman, but Auntie is not harried to her suicide.

Perhaps this is because she knows where the bodies are buried. Auntie’s nieces, dressed most of the time in identical schoolgirl uniform, moving in a disturbed and disturbing robotic way, are harassed and assaulted by Swallow, although their status as prostitutes (which I understand is the usual interpretation) is unclear. But Auntie the innkeeper sees and knows the licentious behaviour of otherwise respectable townspeople; she helps to focus the hypocrisy of those who judge Grimes, as does the girlishness of the nieces, who can be equated with the young and vulnerable apprentice. If Grimes is an exploiter of children, he is not the only one in the Borough. Auntie is a fascinating counterpart to Grimes: both are complicit and stigmatised, but she is more powerful because of her inside knowledge and her ability to accept the townspeople.

Other commentators have seen the Ellen of this production as not caring particularly for Grimes, over-ready to reject him when she suspects he has beaten John, and suggest that this emphasises her own complicity in the eventual tragedy. I didn’t read it like this – and indeed thought she was remarkably sympathetic to Peter after he clouted her – but this idea gives another twist to her grief in the final moments. Is she crying for Grimes, or because of her own guilt and its implications for her future in the Borough? I thought the former at the time, and found Amanda Roocroft's performance very moving, but now I wonder ...

So – a hugely fascinating and thought-provoking opera. I’m not enough of an expert to criticise the singing, but I will say that I thought the choral work was excellent, although I was pleased to notice that even the ENO chorus has the same problems sounding a simultaneous final “s” as any other choir. Gerald Finley as Balstrode was particularly fine, and I feel very guilty for having failed to spot from the upper circle that he was playing the part as an amputee, with one arm strapped down. I did wonder why he always had his overcoat thrown over his shoulders. The orchestra seemed utterly marvellous to me and, judging by the applause, to the rest of the audience. The piece was recorded for broadcast on Radio 3, so those not lucky enough to make one of the nine performances can enjoy at least part of the experience.

Sea Legs: hitching alone around the coast of Ireland by Rosita Boland

I read, a few years ago, Rosita Boland's A Secret Map of Ireland, in which she visits a monument, oddity or spurious magical place in each county of Ireland. This is her first book, and describes a journey chosen following the purchase of a map of Ireland in Stanfords. Boland was born in Ennis, County Clare, but has lived away for enough time for the Irish people she meets on her journey to ask her where in England she is from. The real draw of the journey for Boland seems to be a need to reconnect with her Irish roots, to understand the country better, and perhaps, through her act of circumnavigation, to encircle and possess it. Lack of money makes hitching the only way to travel, and a B&B is an occasional luxury, most nights being spent in hostels of variable quality. Travelling in autumn and winter, she meets relatively few tourists, and has ample opportunities to enjoy the melancholy of off-season resorts. This is a looser, baggier book than A Secret Map; the contained nature of her individual journeys to castles and fairy trees in the latter book make for tighter, more focused writing. The pace of Sea Legs drifts and then hurries, replicating the nature of her slow-quick-slow journey rather well.

Body Parts: essays on life-writing by Hermione Lee

This is a collection of essays, mainly on the nature of biographical writing but also including some short biographical sketches. Lee discusses the biographer's approach, the relationship of the biography to history and to fiction, and emphasises the need for the biographer to
convey the physical presence of the subject, hence the title. Her essay on Shelley analyses the different descriptions of his cremation, the varying ways in which those present are said to have participated, and the adventures of his heart (or perhaps his liver), removed from his burning corpse by Trelawney. This relic symbolises the need for those who write, or attempt to control, biographies to relate their work to sensual experience, in order to establish a physical connection for the writer and reader with a subject who may be long dead. Her piece on The Hours, both book and film, their relation with the life of Virginia Woolf and Mrs Dalloway, is amusing and trenchant, showing how the film's portrayal can distort the biographical image of Woolf, and questioning whether it matters. There are enlightening essays on Rosamund Lehmann, Penelope Fitzgerald and Jane Austen, although even Lee's entertaining piece on Angela Thirkell hasn't made me want to read Thirkell's work.

The book ends with a fascinating survey on how biographers deal with death. Do you record your subject's death as a simple fact, unrelated to his or her life? Or do you make the death symbolic of the life? Do you make use of the convention of a summary of the life in the closing paragraphs, allowing the subject's life to flash before the reader's eyes? Most biographers cannot simply allow death to happen without further interpretation, without connecting it somehow to the subject; Lee has rarely found it treated as a simple inevitability, although I can think of one or two examples from my reading (Claire Harman's biography of Sylvia Townsend Warner, for example). I think this question relates back to biography's relationship to either fiction or history. In both forms (if indeed they are separate forms) it is hard for events to be random and without significance. Everything, including death, must have meaning that relates to the whole subject.

Our Hidden Lives edited by Simon Garfield

Derived from Mass-Observation diaries, this book comprises entries from five writers in post-war Britain, and records their thoughts and reactions to the protracted end of the war, the Labour landslide, the beginnings of the welfare state, and to the austerity period. Having recently read Austerity Britain, I was prepared for negative views on Atlee's government, Utility furniture and continued rationing. However, the vigorous antisemitism expressed or recorded by the correspondents was surprising for a group of people who must all have seen the newsreels of the death camps. One correspondent's husband only regrets that the "Nuremburg thugs were not able to finish the job". This prejudice, and other illiberal tendencies, can make some of the authors hard to like. However, they remain fascinating. B Charles, a gay antiques dealer and superlative snob, gives glimpses of the lives of gay men in provincial cities; his opaque tone when discussing sexuality and attraction to others (the latest object of desire is always described as having "possibilities") is evocative of a strictly closeted life. We never learn his first name. Maggie Joy Blunt is a more attractive character and her diaries explore the opportunities and risks for a single woman trying to make a living as a writer. Best of all is pensioner Herbert Brush, labouring on his allotment, creosoting his fence, tolerating neighbourhood bores and composing really awful poetry to amuse the Mass-Observation readers.

I was interested in the number of Germans, mainly refugees or former prisoners of war, that several of the correspondents seemed to know and like; one correspondent seems to have many German neighbours and records their efforts to trace their relatives. She meets the mother of a German friend, miraculously retrieved from post-war Berlin and brought to Sheffield. These encounters seem to be without rancour, and POWs are received sympathetically. I have Don't Mention the War in my to-be-read pile, and hope that this will provide more insight into this facet of post-war life.

Fun Home by Alison Bechdel

I'm a longstanding fan of Bechdel's Dykes to Watch Out For, and a regular reader of her blog. I'd been meaning to read this for ages, and finally treated myself to a copy from Amazon Marketplace. Needless to say, when it arrived I gulped it down in a matter of hours.

Fun Home (the title is derived from the family abbreviation for Funeral Home, Bechdel's father being a part-time funeral director as well as an English teacher) is a memoir, examining Bechdel's childhood and adolescence and in particular her relationship with her father, who died when Bechdel was 19. Bechdel presents his death first as a suicide, then as an accident, and the evidence for either is inconclusive. His death follows swiftly after Alison comes out to her parents as lesbian; before he dies, she learns from her mother that her father has had affairs from men. The memoir, then, deals lucidly with issues of sexuality, of what might be viewed as her father's expression of a gay persona through gardening and obsessive interior design, and with her father's (and her own) relationships with literature, especially the works of Proust, Joyce and F Scott Fitzgerald.

In a fairly short book, Bechdel achieves an astonishing compression of detail, complex ideas, doubt and family history. This is supported by the wonderful drawings, which fill in the backstory and the period detail, but cannot be separated from the narrative itself. This is a rich, satisfying first read and I can see it's going to be an addictive re-read, as the detail will yield new rewards each time. I think I'm about to spend an Amazon voucher on Essential Dykes to Watch Out For.

Edith Craig (1869-1947): Dramatic Lives by Katharine Cockin

Edith Craig was one of the two children of the actress Ellen Terry and the architect William Godwin. Terry never married Godwin, and decided on the surname Craig for her children. Edith was known by her middle name, Ailsa, in her childhood and it was her stage name for her brief career as an actress. Looking at the real Ailsa Craig, you have to wonder what Terry was about in naming her daughter.

Both Edith and her brother Edward Gordon Craig went on to work in the theatre, both mainly offstage in the role of director or producer. Edward Gordon Craig became immensely celebrated, his innovations in staging and lighting making him a familiar figure in the history of modernist theatre. Terry, of course, was one of the most famous actresses and the most famous women of her generation. Edith, although probably equally talented and innovative, has been rather eclipsed by her mother and brother, and this book seeks to reclaim her life and restore her reputation.

Craig's story is interesting: she was an eminent director of pageants, that forgotten art form; she campaigned for women's suffrage and lent her skills to this campaign; she developed private theatre societies that were able to evade the censor; and she worked for many years to develop amateur theatre to a high standard. She lived for many years in a lesbian menage à trois with Tony (or Clare) Atwood and Christopher St John; the success of this relationship is not much explored by Cockin, who focuses more on Craig's career and its limitations. There is some effort to consider whether Edith's career was limited because she was a woman, or a lesbian, or a lesbian in a complex three-way relationship; personally I wondered if her (admittedly limited) private income meant that she did not have to press for professional, paid work. There's considerable food for thought in Craig's choice of artistic medium, her work in middlebrow genres such as amateur theatre, pageants and nativity plays.

Cockin has, however, set herself a hard task. Original archival material is limited, having been selectively destroyed. Consequently, the history and impact of Edith's career have to be reconstructed from other contemporary sources and press archives. This leads to a slight surfeit of biographer's tricks, the "must haves" and "may haves" that allow a narrative to be constructed out of a small amount of evidence, and gives the book a strenuous quality that doesn't make for easy reading. There's a also quite a significant amount of repetition; we're told twice in the space of ten pages, for example, that Craig's arthritis in later life meant that she sometimes used a wheelchair. This gave the impression that the book wasn't really meant to be read, but used as a reference tool, and that Cockin has tried to make sure the facts are available to the casual browser of the index. Nevertheless, there is no doubt that this book is the result of commendable scholarship and its efforts to retrieve Craig from historical oblivion, existing only as a footnote in biographies of her mother and brother, are laudable.