Issue 19: Spring 2013

MAGAZINE SPRING 2013 / ISSUE 19

£3.50

among the quick and the dead Artemis Cooper on writing the lives of Patrick Leigh Fermor and Elizabeth David

literary dynamite The revolutionary beginnings of the Library’s Italian collections, by Lucy Hughes-Hallett

All that sugar!

Andrea Stuart on the fascinating history of the world’s hunger for sugar

travels with my cousin Mark Baczoni looks at the contrasting jungle narratives of Graham and Barbara Greene

The London Library Magazine / issue 19

12

C ontents

Andrea Stuart examines the dark and fascinating story of sugar, from its slave-fuelled intensive production in Barbados, to the hope of an environmentally friendly future

5 FROM THE librarian 6 Contributors 8 BEHIND THE BOOK Sugar bowl, 1820–30, English, probably Bristol.

16 Artemis Cooper realised what an easy job she’d had writing the life of Elizabeth David, no longer alive when the biographer started work, once she started tackling her next subject, in the living form of Patrick Leigh Fermor. His reluctance to reveal details of his private life often led to some necessarily furtive action.

11 bibliotherapy Miranda France finds García Márquez’s eponymous hero in No One Talks to the Colonel an example to us all in how to cope with an impoverished old age

12 All that Sugar!

Elizabeth David. Courtesy of the Elizabeth David Archives.

20

‘Celestial lard’, ‘angelic Adam’s apples’, ‘heaven’s marrow’: Andrea Stuart on the ‘sad and bad story’ of the world’s addiction to sugar

16 AMONG THE QUICK AND THE DEAD Artemis Cooper recounts the challenges she faced when writing the lives of Elizabeth David and Patrick Leigh Fermor

20 travels with my cousin

Graham Greene was determined to test himself by trekking through the uncharted, solid jungle of 1930s Liberia but, unable to face the journey alone, he took his cousin Barbara with him. Mark Baczoni compares their books on the experience.

Mark Baczoni on Graham Greene’s trek through Liberia with his cousin Barbara, and the two strikingly different narratives the fellow travellers produced

24 HIDDEN CORNERS Graham and Barbara Greene, 1935.

Courtesy Daily Mail.

24 The Library’s early Italian collections were formed by Thomas Carlyle with the help of Giuseppe Mazzini, a nationalist who realised that even a dictionary could be a political weapon. Lucy Hughes-Hallett describes the highlights to be found, including works by Gabriele d’Annunzio and 33 shelves of Dante’s La Divina Commedia.

The Library’s Art, Biography and History shelfmarks yielded invaluable research material for Helen Rosslyn

After many hours spent researching in the Library’s Italian collections, Lucy HughesHallett tells the story of their revolutionary beginnings

29 A LIFE IN TWO LIBRARIES Paula Weideger describes the powerful effect of two New York libraries on her as a child and an emerging author

32 MEMBERS’ NEWS 38 EATING OUT

Illustration by Adolfo de Carolis, from Gabriele d’Annunzio’s Francesca da Rimini (1902).

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THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 3

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On the cover

Patrick Leigh Fermor at his desk, c.1950s.

Reproduction by permission of the National Library of Scotland.

FROM THE LIBRARIAN We may be called The London Library, but many of you will be reading this issue of the Magazine some distance from the nation’s capital, whether in remoter corners of the United Kingdom or on other continents. Ours is an institution whose reach extends far beyond England, both geographically and linguistically: one-third of our 7,200-plus members live outside London, and the Library’s collections include volumes in more than 50 languages.

Fittingly, then, our spring issue has something of an international focus, from Miranda France’s Bibliotherapy on an intriguing Colombian character on page 11, to Paula Weideger’s recollections of New York libraries on page 29.

In between we have Andrea Stuart on the global appetite for sugar (page 12), Artemis Cooper spending time with Patrick Leigh Fermor in Greece (page 16), Mark Baczoni following Graham Greene and his cousin through the jungle of Liberia (page 20), and Lucy Hughes-Hallett explaining how the Library’s expansive Italian collections came into being (page 24). Quite a ramble, through a number of warm, exotic climes – we can only hope this presages a sunny spring!

This year’s warmer months will also bring a new chapter in the Library’s ongoing Capital Project, with Phase 3A of our redevelopment starting in June. Happily, this is a far simpler proposal, and a far shorter period of construction, than much of the work that has taken place so far. Where Phase 2 had us creating the Art Room and Lightwell Reading Room from a vast pit of rubble, Phase 3A constitutes a mere refurbishment of the main Reading Room and of the North Bay, which will become known as the Writers’ Room. The work is straightforward, but the benefits to you, our members, will be substantial, with improved reader spaces, and more of them. Whether you are a regular or infrequent Library visitor, Phase 3A will make your time here both more pleasurable and productive; see pages 34–5 for more details.

If the redevelopment of the Library and the finer details of its operation are of particular interest to you, you may well find yourself considering the role of London Library Trustee.

On pages 32 and 33 you will find information on the skills and experience we are looking for this year, as well as a current Trustee’s perspective on the perks of the job. We hope many of you will feel encouraged to apply.

Wherever your reading takes you this season, may it be a journey of discovery.

Inez T.P.A. Lynn Librarian

Published on behalf of The London Library by Royal Academy Enterprises Ltd. Colour reproduction by adtec. Printed by Tradewinds London. Published 15 March 2013 © 2013 The London Library.

The opinions in this particular publication do not necessarily reflect the views of The London Library.

All reasonable attempts have been made to clear copyright before publication.

Editorial Publishers Jane Grylls and Kim Jenner Executive Editor Aimée Heuzenroeder Editor Mary Scott Design and Production Joyce Mason Picture Research/proofreader Sarah Bolwell

Editorial Committee David Breuer Peter Parker Erica Wagner

Advertising Jane Grylls 020 7300 5661 Kim Jenner 020 7300 5658 Hannah Jackson 020 7300 5675 Development Office, The London Library Aimée Heuzenroeder 020 7766 4734

Magazine feedback and editorial enquiries should be addressed to development@londonlibrary.co.uk

THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 5

CONTRIBUTORS

Mark Baczoni

joined the library in 2004

Born in Budapest and raised in London, Mark Baczoni studied History and History of Art at Cambridge. He then joined the rare book trade, working for Christie’s, Simon Finch and others. He is a freelance writer and translator and spends his time between Budapest and London.

Artemis Cooper

joined the library in 2004

After working as a journalist for several years in South America, Miranda France wrote two nonfiction books, Bad Times in Buenos Aires (1998) and Don Quixote’s Delusions (2001). More recently she has published a novel, That Summer at Hill Farm (2011), and is currently writing a second.

Lucy Hughes-Hallett joined the library in 1981

Lucy Hughes-Hallett is the author of The Pike: Gabriele d’Annunzio, Poet, Seducer and Preacher of War (January 2013). She is an award-winning critic and cultural historian, and her previous books are Cleopatra (2006) and Heroes (2004). She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

6 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

joined the library in 2011

Andrea Stuart

joined the library in 1997

Helen Rosslyn is an art historian. She began her career in the Prints & Drawings department at Christie’s. For the last 20 years she has organised the annual London Original Print Fair at the Royal Academy of Arts. In 2010 she presented a documentary on Rosslyn Chapel for BBC Four, Rosslyn Chapel: A Treasure in Stone.

joined the library in 1980

Artemis Cooper’s books include Cairo in the War: 1939–1945 (1989) and Writing at the Kitchen Table: The Authorized Biography of Elizabeth David (1999). She co-authored Paris After the Liberation (2007) with her husband, the historian Antony Beevor. Her latest biography is Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure (2012).

Miranda France

Helen Rosslyn

Andrea Stuart was born and raised in the Caribbean. She studied English at the University of East Anglia and French at the Sorbonne. Her books include Showgirls (1996), The Rose of Martinique: A Biography of Napoleon’s Josephine (2003), which won the Enid McLeod Literary Prize, and Sugar in the Blood: One Family’s Story of Slavery and Empire (2013). She is currently Writer in Residence at Kingston University, in London.

Paula Weideger joined the library in 1992

Paula Weideger is a writer and journalist. Her most recent book is Venetian Dreaming: Finding a Foothold in an Enchanted City (2004). She is currently working on a new book, The Fate of the Golden Lifeboat, which explores the workings of the international art market. Her writing about art appears regularly in the Economist, the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal. She blogs at art-darts.blogspot.com.

BEHIND THE

BOOK

Helen Rosslyn found inspiration for her forthcoming BBC Four series on British art collectors, Bought With Love: The Secret History of Great British Collections, in a book she came across in the Art section of the Library, while many other important titles in the collections aided her subsequent research

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Helen Rosslyn, 2012.

The pleasure afforded by uninterrupted research in the London Library, where one trail can lead effortlessly to another, is immense, and I spent many happy weeks moving between the Art, Biography and Periodical sections in the course of my research for ‘Bought With Love’, which I wrote and presented (forthcoming spring/ summer 2013).

 Treasure Houses of Britain: Five Hundred Years of Private Patronage and Art Collecting, ed. Gervase Jackson-Stops (exh. cat., National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. 1985). A. Art, 4to.

This catalogue for a major exhibition held at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., was the inspiration for the series. It celebrates the huge wealth of art treasures hidden away in country houses across Britain. The essays tell the story of how patrons and collectors have shaped the history of art in this country and paved the way for our national collections.  ‘Aspects of British Collecting’, Parts 1–4,

by Denys Sutton, Apollo (1981–5). Periodicals.

A comprehensive overview of collecting in Britain, which gives a clear inventory of collectors, patrons and their acquisitions.

British collectors through the ages have not only influenced the changing tastes in art, but also the careers of some of Europe’s leading artists, such as the 2nd Duke of Richmond who was an important patron and promoter of Canaletto in England, and the 3rd Earl of Egremont whose patronage of J.M.W. Turner played a major role in establishing his reputation.  The Life, Correspondence and Collections of Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel, by Mary F.S. Hervey (Cambridge 1921). Biog. Arundel.

A pioneer in the history of art collecting,

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Thomas Howard, 14th Earl of Arundel (1585–1646), was known as the ‘Collector Earl’.

He was one of the first people in England to make art collecting his lifelong passion and to combine collecting with travel. He inspired, among others, the young Charles I, who is celebrated as the founder of the Royal Collection. Mary Hervey writes about Arundel’s adventures on the Continent, at a time when foreign travel was relatively unknown. Arundel was also an early patron of Anthony van Dyck and played a major part in bringing him to England.  Anthony Van Dyck (1599–1641) and the Representation of Dress in Seventeenth-Century Portraiture by Emilie Gordenker (Turnhout 2001).

A. Painting, Van Dyck.

Van Dyck changed the course of painting in England in the first half of the seventeenth century and Emilie Gordenker has taken a detailed look at what we can learn about his revolutionary style through his use of costume. By contrast to the sixteenthcentury portrait painters who preceded him, van Dyck’s innovation was to ‘downplay the accessories’ – the jewels and rich fabrics of Tudor portraits – in favour of focusing on the flow of plain silk and satin in his painting, to bring a completely new movement and life to his sitters and place a new emphasis on what was important in painting.

’

 ‘The Executor’s Account Book and the Dispersal of Sir Peter Lely’s Collection’,

by Diana Dethloff, Journal of the History of Collections, vol.8, no.1 (Oxford 1996), pp.15–51. Periodicals.

The Journal of the History of Collections, published by Oxford University Press since 1989, should be read by anyone who needs convincing that Britain is a nation of collectors. Diana Dethloff’s article particularly interested me because there is a long history of artists who were themselves collectors. Sir Peter Lely was one of the first, and his passion for collecting drawings helped to keep many fine examples from leaving the country during the Commonwealth, and the dispersal of the Royal Collection and that of the Earl of Arundel. Many of his drawings are now in the British Museum, with his revered collector’s mark, the initials ‘PL ’.  English Art, 1625–1714 by Margaret Whinney and Oliver Millar (Oxford 1957).

A. Art. The seventeenth century saw the birth of art collecting in Britain, and this account explains how and why this fever took hold in the way it did, bringing the light of the Italian Renaissance into our dark oakpanelled corridors. Whinney and Millar link the development of art inextricably with social history, which is something I have also aimed to do in the series.

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BIBLIOTHERAPY

Miranda France finds the stoic example of one of García Márquez’s most sympathetic characters a helpful corrective whenever she feels worried about her future prospects

NO ONE WRITES TO THE COLONEL GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ Times are tough and many of us face the prospect of a poorer old age, as privatesector cuts and a new state pension scheme take effect. While tightening our belts we can draw comfort from the stoic example of one of literature’s most endearing characters, the septuagenarian hero of No One Writes to the Colonel (1961, translated by J.S. Bernstein in 1968) by Colombian Nobel Prize winner, Gabriel García Márquez. The colonel is a model of resourcefulness in the face of cruel bureaucracy. And – although this may sound callous – there is some consolation in knowing that our own fortunes are unlikely ever to fall as far as his.

Living in an unnamed town on the Colombian coast, the colonel has been waiting most of his life for the pension owed to him as a veteran of the Thousand Days civil war (1899–1902). Our hero knows that he is number 1823 on the list of claimants. He also knows that most of the other claimants died while waiting for their pension. Refusing to concede defeat, every Friday he goes to the docks to watch the post arriving by boat. But there’s never anything for him; only the postmaster’s crushing observation that ‘no one writes to the colonel’ .

That would be punishment enough, but the colonel also has problems with his joints and bowels. Much of his day is spent straining in the privy. And – just like here – it never stops raining. The colonel and his asthmatic wife subsist on scraps of food and small loans. Their only child, Agustín, has been executed for distributing clandestine political literature at a cock-fight. He was a tailor and they have been living off the

proceeds of selling his sewing-machine.

Much else in the house has been sold, but they still have Agustín’s fighting cock, and all hopes are pinned on the animal winning a match several months’ hence.

Until that time their choice is between starving themselves while they pamper the rooster, or selling it and forfeiting the hope of any winnings, not to mention losing the last link to their murdered son.

One of the reasons I love this book is that it was the first novel I read in Spanish (its original title is El coronel no tiene quien le escriba), aged fifteen, and it opened the door on to an intoxicating new world of Spanish, and especially Latin American, literature. Our teacher cleverly spurred us on by hinting at the book’s famous last word – an expletive exclaimed by the colonel after 60 years of rage and humiliation finally prove uncontainable. I tried the same trick with my own son recently, and he was careful to cover up the offending word until he had got to the end of the novel and earned the right to be properly affronted by it. Perhaps more novels should end with swear words.

Even when his subject matter is bitingly sad, García Márquez can’t be matched for warmth and exuberance. Like One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), this story is set during the years of La Violencia in Colombia, a period of civil war and horrifying state repression lasting from 1948 to 1958, and ‘for a long time the town had lain in a kind of stupor’ . Even so, the author finds plenty to laugh about, such as the parish priest who uses church bells

Gabriel García Márquez’s No One Writes to the Colonel (1968), 1982 Picador edition. Courtesy of Helen Barkla.

to announce the moral classification of new films (twelve bells means ‘unfit for everyone’).

A really good novel can burst its bindings and galvanise its readers. In 2004 a group of fans, knowing that the colonel was based on García Márquez’s own grandfather, went to court to have this ancestor posthumously elevated to the rank of general and perhaps even accorded his overdue pension. ‘The colonel should have someone to write to him, even if it is in the 21st century, ’ one of them argued.

I don’t think the case went in their favour, but surely the fictional colonel needs no such elevation; his government may have forgotten him, but readers never will.

THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 11

All that

SUGAR!

Andrea Stuart examines the remarkable history of sugar, tracking the beginnings of its links with labour exploitation to Barbados, and finding that our prodigious consumption of sugar continues to leave a toxic trail of bloodshed, corruption and abuse

Humans have always craved sweetness and sought methods of sweetening their food. The inhabitants of the ancient Middle East used fig and date syrup; the Chinese extracted the sap of sugar palm. Others used grape juice, raisins, honey or manna from branches or leaves. But it is refined sugar that is the most famous sweetener of them all. It is a substance that doesn’t occur in nature, but must be distilled methodically from the juice of sugar cane or, more recently, sugar beet. It is the only chemical substance that is consumed in almost pure form as a staple food.

The rise of sugar has been remarkable.

For many centuries few Europeans even knew it existed, then it metamorphosed into one of the most coveted commodities in the world. Now it is so abundant, cheap and easy to procure that we can barely imagine life without it. Our consumption of sugar is prodigious; its only rival, in both ubiquity and symbolic value, is the substance we often classify as its opposite: salt. But it is sugar that represents tenderness, comfort and love in many languages. It saturates our cultural references, and is invested with a significance far exceeding its innate properties.

More than any other commodity in human history, sugar I would argue has shaped our tastes, transformed the landscape of the countries in which cane was cultivated, and influenced our politics.

Indigenous to the South Pacific, sugar cane is a giant grass, part of the Gramineae 12 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

‘The Barbadoes Mulatto Girl’, 1779, engraving after painting by Agostino Brunias of c.1764. Barbados Museum and Historical Society, Bridgetown, Barbados.

family that includes maize, rice and sorghum.

There are numerous species of cane, but the one that dominated cultivation in the Americas was known as the ‘Creole’ . Sugar cane thrives in hot and humid places, flourishing in a range of soils including the coral limestone of Barbados. It often grows to 12 feet in height, and sometimes exceeds 20 feet. Its stalks can be green, yellow or rust red, and divide into joints or nodes, from which extrude the leaves, long narrow blades of green.

Some of the earliest linguistic records of the word ‘sugar’ can be found in Northern India, where the cultivation of sugar cane is

likely to go back to 500 BC. From there the crop migrated to China some time around 300 BC, when cane juice or ‘sugar liquor’ became a popular fermented drink. By the third century AD, cakes or loaves of hard sugar, made by drying the juice of the cane in the sun and then shaping it into the form of men or animals, became known as ‘stone honey’ . But the Chinese were slow to master the process of sugar manufacture, and in 640 the Tang Dynasty Emperor Tai Tsung sent a mission to Bihar in the Ganges valley to find out more about Indian distilling techniques. The resulting report invigorated the Chinese industry and sugar production flourished there down the years. In the thirteenth century, writing about the region around the mouth of the Yangtze River, the trader and explorer Marco Polo noted that ‘the production of sugar is immense in this province, much greater than all the rest of the world, and it brings in a huge revenue’ .

While sugar-cane production flourished in India and China it was, according to the historian W. Ackroyd, unknown to the ancient Egyptians, Hebrews and Greeks.

There is no mention of sugar in the Bible, the Talmud or the Koran, in contrast to the frequent appearances of honey, and there are only a few vague references to sugar in the classical literature of Greece and Rome. The Arab conquests that followed the death of Mohammad in AD 632 saw the crop travel to Persia, Mesopotamia and the Lower Nile. There are numerous references

Slaves cutting cane on a sugar plantation in the American South, nineteenth-century engraving, artist unknown.

Courtesy of the Granger Collection, New York.

to sugar in the Arabian Nights and, by the fifth century, it was cultivated on a large scale in Baghdad. By the tenth century it was being planted along the coast of East Africa, Zanzibar and Madagascar.

It was in Palestine and Syria, between the thirteen and fifteenth centuries, that the Crusaders developed a taste for sugar and brought it home to Western Europe, where it became a highly prized commodity, in the same category as musk and pearls. Sugar was so precious it was bought by the ounce instead of the pound. It was used as a spice, alongside cinnamon and nutmeg, to enliven savoury dishes, and was also used for medicinal purposes, in preparations to treat diseases from smallpox to the plague. Its value as a drug during this period explains

the proverb ‘An apothecary without sugar, ’ which was a popular way of describing someone who lacked the essential materials for their trade.

In November 1565 a sculpture was unveiled at the wedding in Brussels of Alexander Farnese, Duke of Parma, to Princess Maria of Portugal. It depicted the voyage of the Portuguese princess, and consisted of tableaux of all the cities she passed through, complete with palaces, theatres and ships. Each model was so large that it had to be carried by three or four men. Every part of this extravaganza was made from sugar, one of the great status symbols of the sixteenth century.

As time passed sugar became an increasingly important food commodity.

Although still expensive, it was the crucial ingredient in conserving fruits and making jam, pastimes that became popular with the wives of wealthy merchants. In Portugal and Spain sugar was used to sweeten rice and conserve everything from chestnuts to Brazilian pumpkins. These sweets were given evocative names: ‘celestial lard’; ‘heaven’s marrow’; ‘angelic Adam’s apples’ .

In Europe, sugar also featured in a particular genre of paintings, for example those by Joachim de Beuckelaer, Pieter Aertsen and Georg Flegel, which depicted visions of plenty with sugar as the centrepiece.

Sugar might have remained merely an expensive luxury were it not for the early colonists of the tiny island of Barbados.

Disappointed with their failed experiments with crops such as tobacco, cotton and indigo,

‘

In Portugal and Spain sugar was used for sweets with evocative names: “celestial lard” , “angelic Adam’s apples” , “heaven’s marrow”

’

Still-life with Bread and Confectionery, early seventeenth century, by Georg Flegel.

THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 13

p

Above ‘A Representation of the Sugar-Cane and the Art of Making Sugar’, Universal Magazine, 1749.

Private collection/ Bridgeman Art Library.

Below right ‘Anti-Saccharrites, or John Bull and his Family leaving off the use of Sugar’, 1792, by James Gillray. The print depicts George III and his wife Queen Charlotte drinking tea without sugar and urging their daughters to do the same, and refers to a boycott of sugar organised by abolitionists in 1791.

the island’s planters decided to experiment with sugar, which had previously been grown largely in the Iberian territories such as Brazil and Cuba. After a few years of trial and error, the Barbadians got it right. By the late 1640s the island had become the catalyst for what was known as the ‘sugar revolution’ , and cultivation of the crop spread across the Caribbean. Production stoked desire, desire stoked production, and the popularity of sugar soared. The burgeoning hunger for this new commodity prompted a desperate search for a large enough pool of labourers to farm it. And so the planters of the region – whether they were from the colonies of the English, French, Spanish or Dutch – began the wholesale importation of African slaves. Slavery, the white gold and the black, became inextricably intertwined with sugar; two commodities that would enrich all those who traded in them, except of course the millions of captives who toiled and died in service.

By the middle of the eighteenth century the Caribbean sugar islands were of inestimable value to their colonial masters.

According to one contemporary observer, the French writer Guillaume Thomas Raynal, their riches ‘were the principal cause of the rapid movement which stirs 14 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

the universe’ . In 1763, negotiating a treaty with the British, the French were forced to choose between holding on to Canada (dismissed by Voltaire as ‘a few acres of snow’) or the sugar islands. They chose the latter. It was no wonder that this cluster of small islands had become a magnet for fortune hunters, or that their capacity to generate obscene profits led many to describe them as ‘the best of the West’ .

Sugar was the commodity that drove the geopolitics of the era, just as oil does today.

In the years since it had originally been trialled in Barbados sugar consumption had

grown exponentially, filtering from the upper classes down to those below. The middle classes used sugar in a vast range of foodstuffs: cakes and candies, jams and jellies, pastries and petit-fours, trifles and tansies. As production grew to meet this new demand, so the commodity dropped in price, which allowed the English proletariat to purchase it, thereby creating a further explosion in demand. They used it to sweeten other colonial imports such as coffee and cocoa, but primarily tea. Sugared tea assuaged hunger, provided a vital shot of energy during arduous working days, and added variety to a bland and starchy diet. Sugar was also an aspirational product, an affordable treat that allowed the poor access to a foodstuff that was still associated with their ‘betters’ .

The appetite for sugar was insatiable.

In 1700, England imported 10,000 tons of sugar; by 1800, consumption had increased to 150,000 tons – a rise of 2,500 per cent.

In this period, the saying ‘as wealthy as a West Indian’ became proverbial. Hence the tale of George III, who was driving one day outside London when he encountered a Jamaican planter whose carriage and liveried outriders were even more astounding than his own, and is said to have exclaimed: ‘Sugar, sugar, eh! ... All that sugar!’

As the nineteenth century progressed, however, the image of sugar started to tarnish.

More and more the abolitionist movement targeted the commodity as the reason that

ALL THAT SUGAR! slaves were being so brutally exploited. In one of her pamphlets, Elizabeth Heyrick, one of the forgotten heroines of the abolitionist movement, made explicit the links between the sufferings of the slaves and the consumption of sugar, and called for the nation to stop purchasing it. ‘By buying sugar we participate in the crime,’ she declared. ‘The laws of our country may hold the sugar-cane to our lips, steeped in the blood of our fellow creatures; but they cannot compel us to drink the loathsome potion. ’ The campaign to boycott West Indian sugar was a bold strategy that brought home to people in Britain the fact that slavery was not something that happened over the seas and far away, but was rather a terrible practice they were complicit with almost every day of their lives.

Even after emancipation sugar continued to leave a toxic trail of bloodshed, corruption and abuse. For much of the nineteenth century it was produced at considerable human cost in Cuba and Louisiana. In the following years, sugar continued to propel people across the globe. Workers from China, Japan, Korea and the Philippines were transported to Hawaii to cultivate cane. In Australia indentured Melanesians were imported to do the same. In the West Indies, meanwhile, the demands of sugar attracted a whole new population of workers: hundreds of thousands of Indian and Chinese labourers were transported to the Caribbean to endure a ‘new system of slavery’. Just like the white indentured servants who were originally enticed over to settle the Americas, these new migrants were often deceived about the terms of their indenture and the conditions they would endure on arrival.

In the twentieth century, sugar has also been implicated in a number of

‘

Engraving from Voltaire’s Candide, 1787, depicting the scene when Candide and Cacambo meet a maimed slave from a sugar mill near Surinam, South America.

violent struggles. It played a role in the Bay of Pigs invasion, since it was Fidel Castro’s appropriation of 70,000 acres of US-held sugar territory on the island that, in part, prompted American military action.

And despite legal strictures to eliminate it, child labour continues to thrive in the sugar world, particularly in El Salvador, Dominica and parts of Brazil. In mainland America, the connection between sugar and forced labour did not end with emancipation. Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, workers in the American sugar industry were exploited shamelessly. In 1942 the abuse of local workers was so egregious that the Federal Government indicted the US sugar corporation for ‘peonage’, or involuntary

George III encountered a Jamaican planter whose carriage and liveried outriders were even more astounding than his own, and exclaimed: “Sugar, sugar, eh! … All that sugar!”

’

servitude, arguing that it transgressed the Third Amendment. As a result today, in Florida, American workers have been replaced by a steady stream of temporary Caribbean labourers who are manipulated by their fear of deportation. Paid at rates that would be illegal for American workers, these temporary migrants are forced to subsist on poor food, live in ghastly barrack-style accommodation, and are bullied mercilessly by abusive crew bosses. These terrible conditions have been maintained by the ‘Big Sugar’ lobby, which is as busy as ever, supporting a system of protectionism, grants and quota levies, which effectively pushes foreign-grown sugar out of the US. Sugar and corruption still seem to go hand in hand.

The environmental impact of sugar has been appalling. Just as in Barbados, where the crop destroyed a complete natural ecosystem, in Florida too its legacy is disastrous; it bleeds water from the Everglades subtropical wetlands and pollutes its run-offs. In India, sugar-mill waste has contaminated streams and coastal waters, killing off marine life. Its impact on global health has also been devastating. It is the crucial ingredient in ubiquitous products like Coca-Cola, ice-cream and jelly. It is also the hidden persuader in the most unlikely range of products from soup to ketchup and bread. As a result it is a significant contributor to obesity and to diabetes, a condition that is colloquially known as having ‘sugar in the blood’. As in the past, it is the poor and the disadvantaged who suffer most from the dietary dangers associated with sugar. Indeed the only up-side, in what the sugar historian Elizabeth Abbott calls sugar’s ‘relentlessly sad and bad story’, is its potential to create ethanol, a cane-based, ecologically friendly fuel that might one day replace oil.

.

Blue glass sugar bowl with gilt lettering, 1820–30, English, probably Bristol.

THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 15

AMONG THE QUICK AND THE DEAD Writing two biographies presented Artemis Cooper with very different experiences, not least because Elizabeth David was in her grave whereas Patrick Leigh Fermor was still alive and reluctant to give much away

If you are coming to the end of a celebrated life, chances are that someone has already suggested writing your biography; a thought, as Oscar Wilde pointed out, that lends a new terror to death. The print run will be measured in thousands, and modern readers will feel short-changed unless all is revealed: sex, money, secrets, skeletons and dirty linen.

The prospect is appalling, but once you are dead you probably won’t mind so much.

I was commissioned to write the life of Elizabeth David by her literary executor, Jill Norman, in 1995. By that time Mrs David had been in her grave three years, and her papers had been expertly catalogued by Jill’s partner, the writer and book dealer Paul Breman.

Housed in two long rows of matching box files, the archive marched the entire length of an airy studio in Rosslyn Hill.

Most of the papers were to do with work, but my worries that there might not be enough material to make a good story soon evaporated. Her correspondents included Jane Grigson, Lawrence Durrell and John Lehmann, and in her own letters you can hear the irony in her voice, the salty chuckle.

While her middle years were more sedate than her turbulent youth, what kept the narrative going was that in life Elizabeth was demanding and difficult.

16 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

Above left Elizabeth at her desk, Ministry of Information, Cairo, c.1943. Courtesy of the Elizabeth David Archives.

Above right Major Patrick Leigh Fermor, DSO, c.1946.

Reproduced by permission of the National Library of Scotland.

There was always a spectacular row brewing, with publishers, lovers, friends and family; sooner or later everyone fell foul of her, and a series of blistering letters (she kept copies) were left to tell the tale. When I wasn’t at Rosslyn Hill, sustained by cups of high-octane coffee,

I was out interviewing. Derek Cooper told me how Elizabeth’s reluctance to be interviewed on radio almost wrecked an episode of BBC Radio 4’s The Food Programme devoted to her work, while Sybille Bedford described the way she could suddenly go cold on you from one second to the next. I had lunch with people who knew her and cooked a lot better than I did, and they often made me her favourite dishes. The exception

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What kept the narrative going was that in life Elizabeth was demanding and

difficult. There was always a spectacular

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row brewing, and a series of blistering letters were left to tell the tale

Above left Elizabeth David in her youth. Courtesy of the Elizabeth David Archives.

Left Patrick Leigh Fermor on a boat, photographed by his wife Joan. Reproduced by permission of the National Library of Scotland.

was the novelist Paul Bailey, who looked at what he had just bought for lunch and said, ‘I’m glad I’m cooking this for you and not Liza [as she was known to her friends] … She hated quail, and cauliflower’ .

So I didn’t realise just how easy I’d had it until I began to tackle the life of Patrick Leigh Fermor, in 2001 – while he was still living it. I had known him since I was a child, and had already interviewed him for a previous book about wartime Cairo. He didn’t like the idea of a biography, and neither did his wife Joan.

But friends had persuaded them that, unless Paddy appointed someone to write his life, he might find himself the subject of a book whether he liked it or not. I was told I could go ahead, but I had to promise not to publish anything until after they were both dead, which I thought very sensible. I would be free to write without them looking over my shoulder, and they would never have to wince or groan at what I had written. The disadvantage was that it might be many years before the book saw the light, but that seemed a price worth paying.

Work got off to a slow start. Paddy did not like being interviewed, and would keep my questions at bay with a torrent of dazzling talk. He was very unwilling to let me see many of his papers, though the refusal was always couched in excuses.

‘Oh dear, the Diary … ’ It was the only surviving one from his great walk across Europe, and I was aching to read it. ‘Well, it’s in constant use, you see, as I plug

away at vol.3, ’ he would say. Or, ‘My mother’s letters? Ah yes, why not. But it’s too awful, I simply cannot remember where they’ve got to. ’ It was obvious that he and Joan, while being unfailingly generous, welcoming and hospitable, were determined to reveal as little as possible of their private lives. While they were more than happy to talk about books, travels, friends, Crete, Greece in general, the war, anything – they would not tell me any more than they would have told the average journalist. Oh, to be back with the uncomplicated, properly archived dead!

Please don’t get me wrong; I did not wish Paddy and Joan dead. Far from it, and not least because I realised I was going to need all the years that Providence could spare them just to write the book. I think I must have spent whole months in the doldrums, plodding away with the reading and the research, writing the easy passages, while feeling as if the book would never take off. It felt as heavy as cold dough.

In June 2003 Joan died unexpectedly, leaving Paddy numb with shock and

grief. Joan had never stopped Paddy talking to me, encouraging us both to make the most of my visits to Kardamyli, the house they had built in the southern Peloponnese in the mid-1960s. Yet Paddy’s scruples did ease after her death.

He talked more freely, but he could still wish he hadn’t said things. One afternoon he told me how he had written a long letter to his mother about the first great love of his life, the Rumanian princess Balasha Cantacuzene, soon after they began living together in her family house at Baleni, in eastern Rumania.

He waited eagerly for his mother’s reply but, when it arrived, ‘all I found in the envelope was my own letter, torn to shreds’ . He looked up, and at that moment I suppose he caught a glimpse of his biographer’s cunning eyes, sharp teeth and whiskers. ‘You won’t put that in, will you?’ he said anxiously. ‘Oh no, Paddy, of course not, ’ I said, quickly resuming my expression of calm serenity.

As time went on I told similar fibs.

When I stumbled on the fact that he had not, as he had claimed in Between the Woods and the Water (1986), been on THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 17

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horseback when first setting out on the Great Hungarian Plain (though he was a bit later on the journey), he looked rattled. ‘I thought the reader would be getting bored of me just plodding along on foot. I say, you won’t let on, will you?’

Oh no, Paddy, I won’t let on …

Most curious to me was how reluctant he was for the story of the Cretan vendetta to appear in print. It all began in occupied Crete in May 1943, when Paddy was working as an SOE officer helping the Cretan Resistance. As Paddy was checking a rifle he did not know was loaded, he inadvertently killed

his Cretan guide, Yanni Tsangarakis.

After the war Paddy sought out Yanni’s brother, Kanaki, to try to explain what had happened and beg his forgiveness.

But Kanaki upheld the old Cretan code of honour, which demanded blood for blood. He used to lie in wait ready to shoot Paddy on his regular returns to Crete for reunions with his old brothers-in-arms.

The feud was only dropped in 1972, and culminated with the traditional happy ending: Paddy was asked to baptise one of the Tsangarakis family. He called the little girl Ioanna, after his wife Joan and the friend he had so tragically killed.

Paddy told me the story in great detail, and finished with the dreaded words, ‘You won’t put that in, will you?’

Normally I would have reassured him, but this time I made a stand. ‘Why ever not?’

I asked. ‘Everyone concerned behaved according to their principles, until peace and reconciliation triumphed; who could possibly object to that?’ He replied that the story was still a very sensitive one in Crete. I did not doubt it, but felt that enough time had elapsed for the tale to do no harm. I knew Paddy was still in touch with his goddaughter Ioanna, then a young woman in her thirties, so I suggested we get in touch and ask her.

If she didn’t mind, who else would?

Paddy was not convinced: ‘I’ll have to dig out her address. ’ And that was the last I heard of it, until I got in touch with Ioanna myself. How? By looking her up in his address book when he was taking a nap. Biography is not work for the morally squeamish.

There were certain things he hated talking about, one being his writing: ‘Well, you know, I just scribble away and then of course it has to be gone over quite a bit. ’ Attempting to dig deeper, I once compared his vision of Greece to that of Kevin Andrews, author of a harrowing book that Paddy very much admired, called The Flight of Ikaros: A Journey into Greece (1959). Andrews had much to say about the scars left by the Greek Civil War of the late 1940s, while in Paddy’s books it is scarcely mentioned. ‘His book shows Greece as Goya would have seen it, ’ I went on, ‘whereas your Greece is more like a Claude Lorrain … ’ It was a crude analogy, only made to get him to talk about why he wrote about Greece the way he did.

Paddy looked utterly crestfallen and said, ‘Oh my God, am I that superficial?’

A romantic gallantry meant that he never talked about his girlfriends, either. After much cajoling he told me about Liz Pelly, to whom he lost his virginity, and after a while, I began to pick up the words and phrases he used to hint at his affairs. ‘We were terrific pals, you know, ’ was one of them.

Luckily, there were letters; but I had to be careful there, too. There was an open fireplace in his study, and I never Patrick Leigh-Fermor with Joan on the terrace of their house in Kardamyli, circa late 1960s. Reproduced by permission of the National Library of Scotland.

18 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

wanted him to think of using it for anything other than keeping warm.

For people who went through the two world wars, letters were sacred. Not only did Elizabeth and Paddy keep all their letters, but their correspondents did, too, giving you whole flights of conversation.

Letters are the bedrock on which biography is built, and without their testimony, I don’t think biography as we know it is possible. I doubt that anyone can get under someone else’s skin on the basis of a lifetime’s worth of emails.

If writing lives of subjects in the recent past, the biographer relies on the good will of those who knew the subject best, usually their friends and family. It is they who are going to tell you what you need to know, show you the letters, point to possibilities. I have been blessed in those I have depended on, and have come to feel a great regard for nephews in particular, but I have not had to deal with a subject’s children, because neither Paddy nor Elizabeth had any. Elizabeth always knew she never wanted babies.

Joan yearned for them, but by the time Paddy was ready to face the prospect of paternity, it was too late.

Children must be one of the trickiest challenges one can face. How could they not resent this outsider rooting around? Even the most co-operative and understanding of people bring with them a freight of expectation, illusion, scruple and protectiveness when they think about their parents’ lives.

I often thought about the relationship between Elizabeth David and Patrick Leigh Fermor, when they first knew each other in Cairo towards the end of the war. Being young and attractive, they may well have fallen into bed together at some point. They remained in touch for the rest of their lives, having friends

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and books and tastes in common. They loved long lunches and dinners, too, especially if they stretched on for hours with plenty of talk and wine. Paddy drank for the sheer joy of being alive, and lived to be 96. But after losing the love of her life, Peter Higgins, in her late forties, Elizabeth drank to ease her sorrow. At one point the booze, mixed with sleeping pills, nearly killed her. She died aged 79.

Elizabeth was never in love with Paddy but she admired his books, and invented

Elizabeth admired Paddy’s books, and invented an ice-cream – Glace au Melon de l’île St Jacques – inspired by his only novel

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The loggia at Kardamyli, which Patrick Leigh Fermor described as ‘neolithic … enclosed on three sides by fine arches, the end one four yards in span and a yard thick’. Photograph courtesy John Chapman (maniguide.info).

an ice-cream – Glace au Melon de l’île St Jacques – inspired by his only novel: ‘[This] melon ice has a strange, almost magic flavour and that is why I have called it after that French Caribbean island so unforgettably conjured out of the ocean, only to be once more submerged, by Patrick Leigh Fermor in The Violins of Saint-Jacques, ’ she wrote in French Provincial Cooking (1962).

I made the ice for Paddy and Joan when they came to dinner one night. Paddy was delighted, and began thinking of all the artists, statesmen and writers who have given their name to particular dishes: Melba, Colbert, Demidoff, Rossini, Chateaubriand, Arnold Bennett …

‘I feel I’ve joined a very exclusive club, ’ he mused. ‘An ice-cream – now there’s immortality for you! ’

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THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 19

TRAVELS WITH MY COUSIN One journey, two books: Mark Baczoni compares the disparate accounts of Graham Greene and his cousin Barbara, who accompanied him through the uncharted jungle of Liberia in the 1930s

In January 1935, Graham Greene left Liverpool on a ship bound for Liberia, and a trek of more than 350 miles through solid jungle, much of it uncharted. When he returned later that year, he wrote his first travel book, Journey Without Maps (1936).

But he was not alone. With him was his cousin Barbara, then 27 years old and not an experienced traveller. She also wrote a book about their journey, published in 1938 as Land Benighted (reissued in 1981 as Too Late to Turn Back). The titles speak volumes.

The common conception in England in the 1930s of Liberia was that it was a sort of fascinating oddity in a continent otherwise almost entirely colonised by the European powers, seen in the context of the slavery scandal under President King and as the site of the huge Firestone rubber plantations. The British Government Blue Book on Liberia, which Graham quotes from in his book, discusses the deadly diseases of malaria and yellow fever and the unhealthy atmosphere of the coast, making Liberia sound like an earthly hell of degradation, corruption, sickness and brutality. ‘It really seemed,’ Graham writes, ‘as though you couldn’t go deeper than that; the agony was piled on in the British Government Blue Book with a real effect of grandeur; the little injustices of Kenya became shoddy and suburban beside it’.

When I first started looking for Graham’s book (since both authors are Greenes, 20 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

Left Graham Greene’s Journey Without Maps (1936), first US edition, 1936.

Right Barbara Greene’s Too Late to Turn Back (1981), 1990 Penguin edition, originally called Land Benighted (1938).

I will refer to them by their first names), it took me a while to track it down – but it was in print, and available. Barbara’s, which I wanted to read next, was not. Happily, The London Library is one of the few places that has it (in both its 1938 and 1981 editions). I asked a member of staff if either Greene had ever been a member. I was told that Graham had been, naughtily using his wife’s membership and sending his secretary in to collect the books.

Journey Without Maps is a strange one for Graham. While ostensibly about his journey and mainly observational, it is also psychoanalytical, with a structure that counterpoises otherwise unrelated scenes of England and Graham’s past life, with the characters he meets and places he visits in the African jungle. Graham reflects on the perverse and jaded nature of colonialism elsewhere in Africa, which did not ‘improve’ the lives of the people it came to ‘better’, people he often reflects needed no ‘bettering’. At the same time, it is a rather naive reflection of Greene’s own conception of uncolonised Africa as something

threatening and mysterious, primordial and violent, as embedded in the Western literary imagination of the turn of the century and suggested by writers such as Joseph Conrad: ‘a quality of darkness is needed, of the inexplicable. ’ Journey Without Maps is an unusual travel book because it is so intensely personal. The subject is not entirely the journey the writer purports to remember, but also Graham’s progress into his own interior spaces. He describes his yearning for experience and desire to escape from the sheltered and repressed youth that left him, aged thirty, with a need to test himself, his resources, the limits of his endurance, in this dramatic way: ‘when one sees, ’ Graham writes, ‘to what unhappiness, to what peril of extinction centuries of cerebration have brought us, one sometimes has a curiosity to discover if one can from what we have come, to recall at which point we went astray’ . For someone who had never left Europe before, a 350-mile trek in the jungle on foot with no proper maps

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Left Graham and Barbara Greene about to leave for Africa from Liverpool, photographed for the News Chronicle, January 1935.

Courtesy Daily Mail.

Above The Buzie Devil at Kpangblamai. Photograph Barbara Greene, courtesy Count Rupert Strachwitz.

Graham Greene describes his need to test himself, the limits of his endurance, in this dramatic way

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is certainly a baptism by fire. The book is as personal, observant and finely written as the Polish writer Ryszard Kapuscinski’s ‘literary reportage’ about Africa, but it is also distinctive in another way.

In 1935, Graham was a young writer beginning to make a name for himself and, although he speaks disparagingly of it in the book, his novel Stamboul Train (1932) had been something of a success. He was at the beginning of a long and illustrious career as a writer, but elements of his familiar tone are present in Journey Without Maps: ‘England

slipped away from the porthole, a stone stage, a tarred side, a slap of grey water against the glass. ’ Graham was already in command of his voice.

Travel writing is generally a solitary experience, the author taking us on his journey as our sole and infallible guide, describing both the landscape and the people, and his responses to them. But in this case, we have two guides, two narratives – or rather, two descriptions of the same road. Barbara, a relative Graham was not close to, a socialite with even less experience of travel than Graham himself, went for her own reasons. She had a taste for adventure, and wanted to find out more about the world, rather than herself.

Her own account of their journey, published as Land Benighted, is a more positive, less inward-looking record of the journey than her cousin’s, in which Graham and Barbara’s interaction, the physical and mental challenges of their journey, are more completely described. Barbara is a lighter narrator than Greene, with a sharp, dry wit, and a less introspective person – as the books each took with them indicate: she had a collection of Saki’s short stories, while he took Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621). She walked with Greene most of the way, generally directly behind him, speaking rarely; there were THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 21

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Barbara at one point remarks, “To my great surprise, Graham was not dead in the morning”

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occasions when they were unwell and were carried by hammock. She records in her book the monotonous days of trekking in the jungle that blended one into the other, but she never loses her humour, describing the intense irritation that Graham’s socks, always slipping down, provoked in her: ‘There’s nothing to be done. Every day I shall have to walk behind him. For the first quarter of an hour I shall watch his socks slipping slowly, so very slowly, over his calves and down to his ankle, and there they will lie, useless, in little round wrinkles, like an old concertina. It’s too awful.’

The extraordinary point about this journey, apart from as a detail of Graham’s life, is that it produced two such completely different books: one the story of a heavy, tough, thoughtful journey filled with difficulties, pain and reflections; the other an amusing, sometimes tedious and lonely journey, which is nonetheless a welcome break from the familiar world of London society. This goes to show two things, I think: firstly, that one’s experience of life depends very much on one’s attitude to it, and second that the reason why two people who took the same trip together could write such different books about it, is that the Greenes in the jungle were almost entirely isolated from each other. Paul Theroux, in his introduction to the 2006 Vintage edition of Graham’s book, points out that he hardly mentions his cousin at all. Her narrative also makes clear, without reproaching him explicitly for it, that Graham, being older 22 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

Map showing the route taken by Graham and Barbara Greene, from Barbara Greene’s book Too Late to Turn Back (1981).

and male, side-lined Barbara while making the practical arrangements for the trip.

During the expedition, Graham excluded her from the decision-making and problemsolving, such as organising ‘chop’ (food) and housing for themselves and their carriers, dealing with local chiefs and the sometimes stubborn nature of their retinue. He was trying to test his own self-reliance. This left Barbara with not much to do but walk, and so it is that they walked together, but constructed their own separate narratives.

The weight of responsibility, partly selfimposed, shows heavily on Graham – he is exhausted almost throughout the journey, sick (Barbara at one point matter-of-factly remarks, ‘To my great surprise, Graham Graham Greene on a day trip to the French Republic of West Africa, now Guinea (Conakry), in preparation for the trek through Liberia.

Photograph Barbara Greene, courtesy of Count Rupert Strachwitz.

With thanks to Tim Butcher, author of Chasing the Devil: On Foot Through Africa’s Killing Fields (2011), for his invaluable advice.

was not dead in the morning’) and nervy; while Barbara, who was in practical matters probably tougher than Graham, keeps her health and stamina. But Barbara had no real place in Graham’s game of facing his fears – of challenging his own civilisation, the England that had made him – a boy’s game of daring that he was nonetheless afraid to face alone. Graham, in his journey both to Africa and into himself, wanted to be alone, but could not face the adventure without someone else there; someone who thus became an adjunct, not a companion.

Barbara, thus marginalised, both as travelling companion and as author, has far more pluck than one might expect; she has her own brief but exhilarating brush with adventure in the bush when she becomes separated from Graham and the main body of their party: ‘I was revelling in the relief from the boredom of walking without excitement. Trekking to-day had been an adventure. Circumstances were providing me with plenty to think about.’ Of the two books, Graham’s is the deeper, the more enduring, but Barbara emerges with her own reflections on the journey and her experience as the author – in her late twenties – of a book worth reading in its own right.

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THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 23

HIDDEN CORNERS

LITERARY

DYNAMITE

Lucy Hughes-Hallett explores the Italian books in the Library, and discovers how a revolutionary exiled in London helped Carlyle to establish the remarkable collection

Few of the projects into which Giuseppe Mazzini poured his energies in the six years following his arrival in London in 1837 had much success. Mazzini was the exiled prophet and propagandist of the Risorgimento; his time had yet to come.

The uprisings he plotted in Austrianoccupied regions of Italy were thwarted one after another by the efficiency of Prince Metternich’s spies. His friends were imprisoned. His co-conspirators committed suicide. Giuseppe Garibaldi, the red-shirted guerrilla who would become the figurehead of the nationalist revolution Mazzini was trying to instigate, was in exile too, far away in South America.

Mazzini himself lived hand to mouth near the British Museum (the refuge of a whole generation of European revolutionaries in exile), editing his journal L’Apostolato Popolare. A few copies made their way clandestinely into Italy, but its readers there faced summary execution. There was, though, one thing for Mazzini to celebrate. His new friend Thomas Carlyle was establishing a new library, and was happy to listen to Mazzini’s recommendations, founding what is now The London Library’s remarkable collection of books in Italian.

There was dissension among the 24 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

Engraving of Giuseppe Mazzini (1805–72). Wiki/Commons.

European revolutionaries who congregated in London in the mid-nineteenth century.

Karl Marx – an anti-nationalist – called Mazzini ‘that everlasting old ass’ . But certain tenets they shared. Books were dynamite. Libraries were arsenals. The

development and dissemination of ideas were revolutionary acts. Even a dictionary could be a political weapon.

Niccolò Tommaseo, whose eight-volume Dizionario della Lingua Italiana (1861; 1879 edition) is one of the six shelves-full of Italian dictionaries in The London Library’s Reading Room, was a hero to Mazzini’s followers. The Italian regions, with their myriad mutually incomprehensible dialects, could never rise up as one. A nation was defined and united by a shared language. Tommaseo, punctiliously codifying vocabulary and verbal declensions, was calling Italy into being.

So – more lyrically – were poets, dead and alive. I have spent much of the last eight years browsing through and borrowing from The London Library’s Italian collection, researching The Pike (2013), my book on Gabriele d’Annunzio.

D’Annunzio was a poet, a best-selling novelist, an aviator, a proto-fascist and a serial seducer. His numerous lovers included both Eleonora Duse, one of the two greatest actresses of her generation, and (more fleetingly) the other one, Sarah Bernhardt. He was a bellicose patriot while still in short trousers. In 1876, aged 13, he wrote that his mission was to

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Even in his teens d’Annunzio was writing from his classroom to the printer, specifying exactly which shade of grey he wanted (not cloud-grey, but ash-grey) for end-papers

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teach his fellows ‘to hate the enemies of Italy to the death!’ His way of doing so was to write poetry in verse forms borrowed from Petrarch and Lorenzo de’ Medici, and – going even further back – from St Francis. Writing in medieval style, d’Annunzio liked to think he was bringing back to life the Italy of the condottieri – blood-boltered, virile and bold.

D’Annunzio was a bibliophile.

Although he made huge sums of money from his novels, he always spent more than he earned. He bought suits by the dozen and shirts by the hundred. He surrounded himself with antique bricà-brac he couldn’t afford and placated his unhappy mistresses with emerald jewellery and beds piled high with white rose-petals. He also – despite being almost permanently in debt – bought tens of thousands of books (many of which are still in the Vittoriale degli Italiani, his house overlooking Lake Garda). He wanted his

Illustration by Adolfo de Carolis, from Gabriele d’Annunzio’s Francesca da Rimini (1902).

own writings to be published in editions as beautiful as the works of the Renaissance artists that constituted Italy’s main claim to great-nation status. The London Library’s early editions of his works demonstrate how much trouble he took.

Even in his teens – his first three slim volumes were published while he was still at school – d’Annunzio was writing from his classroom to the printer, specifying exactly which shade of grey (not cloud-grey, but ash-grey) he wanted for end-papers, and the precise font-size for the title page. As an adult he commissioned his artist friends to decorate and illustrate his books. The Library’s first edition of his Francesca da Rimini (1902) is sumptuous. Its cream binding is strapped with green ribbon and stamped with a golden dagger THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 25

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Garibaldi’s

novels were full of voluptuous teenage girls ravished by vile priests; 19 publishers turned him down before he

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could find one ready Photograph from the carte de visite of Giuseppe Garibaldi (1808–82), taken in Naples in 1861. United States Library of Congress.

framed by a laurel wreath. Its title page and chapter headings are decorated with doves and garlands and redprinted mottoes and veritable mazes of art-nouveau curlicues, all designed by d’Annunzio’s friend Adolfo de Carolis.

His poem-cycle Laudi (1903, another first edition on the Library’s shelves) is even more ornately adorned by Giuseppe Cellini, its half-title pages and section endings overgrown by exquisite tangles of flowers and vines and fine geometrical squiggles, all printed on the thick, cream-coloured paper upon which d’Annunzio insisted.

Decadent as all this ornamentation might appear, it was not, to d’Annunzio’s mind, art for art’s sake. His books may look as though they were made for languid aesthetes, but their contents are aimed – even when the ostensible subjects are the erotic carryings-on of nymphs and centaurs – at glorifying the race. Laudi is a celebration of Italy’s landscapes and cities and heroes. His plays evoke Italy’s martial past. The most successful, La Nave (1908), which lasted six hours, and which D.H. Lawrence pronounced ‘bosh’ , is an extravaganza of torture and blindings and eroticised martyrdom commemorating the inception of the Venetian republic.

The Library has a first edition of that as well, its illustrations as gorgeous as the costumes, designed by Mariano Fortuny, 26 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

to oblige

which helped make the first production, in Rome in 1908, a sensation.

It was not only new writers who could serve the cause of what Mazzini called Young Italy, the nation he was hoping to call into being. Six hundred years after he lived and wrote, Dante Alighieri was reinvented by nineteenthcentury nationalists as a propagandist for their cause. Rather as nineteenth-century English writers and artists drew on the Arthurian romances (first written in

Illustration by Giuseppe Cellini, from Gabriele d’Annunzio’s Laudi (1903).

France) and the works of Thomas Malory, to create an idealised ‘Matter of Britain’ , full of gentle damozels and pure-hearted, self-sacrificing warriors, so nineteenthcentury Italians hunted through Dante’s metaphysical cosmos for references to the geography of the real world.

Italian patriots began to use lines from La Divina Commedia (1308–21) as slogans. Holy writ of the Italian nation, it seemed to validate their territorial claims. Dante had said Istria was Italian, so it must be incorporated into the new Italy they were fighting for; Dante said the lakes were in Italy, so they must be wrested from Austria. The Romantic poet Ugo Foscolo – exiled to London, like Mazzini after him – had prepared an edition of the Commedia with commentary before his death in 1827.

(The London Library has the 27-volume edition of Foscolo’s complete works, as well as a pretty little selection of le più belle pagine – the loveliest pages – edited by d’Annunzio’s friend Ugo Ojetti). One of Mazzini’s first tasks on arriving in London was to oversee the publication of Foscolo’s Dante. The London Library acquired it from Pietro Rolandi’s Italian bookshop in Berners Street, a gatheringplace for the Italians in exile.

Generations of grand tourism had made Italophiles of most of the British upper classes, and around the time of the Library’s opening many British people were politically in sympathy with Italian nationalism. In 1851 William Gladstone published shocking reports on the abuse of political prisoners in the jails of the Bourbon King of Naples, stirring British indignation and stimulating support for the Italians who wished to reclaim their country. When Garibaldi took Sicily and all Southern Italy from the Bourbons in 1860, English ladies ordered their coachmen to gallop alongside his volunteers as they marched north to Naples, and the canny manager of the British company Peek Frean began production of the Garibaldi biscuit.

When he came to London in 1864, Garibaldi was given a hero’s welcome, with more people turning out on to the streets to see him than had cheered for the Prince of Wales’s wedding the previous year. After 1870, when the French withdrew from Rome, leaving the way open for Italian unification,

HIDDEN CORNERS

Frontispiece of an 1894 edition of Dante Alighieri’s La Divina Commedia.

Garibaldi retired to his rocky little island off the coast of Sardinia, to hoe his beans and entertain the tourists and gawpers who kept dropping in there, and to write luridly anti-papist novels. Despite the fact that he was one of the most famous people on the planet, these novels were so bad – full of voluptuous teenage girls ravished by vile priests, and thickly sprinkled with exclamation marks – that 19 publishers turned him down before he could find one ready to oblige. The London Library acquired a copy of his Clelia: Il Governo del Monaco (1870). I remember dozing over it in the Reading Room when I was researching my book on heroes (Garibaldi among them). Sad to say, no Library member has taken it out since.

That wouldn’t have surprised Mazzini.

As the brains behind the Risorgimento, Mazzini was glad to make use of the dashing, sexually magnetic Garibaldi as a glamorous front-man for the movement, but had no great regard for his intellect. It was commonplace to compare Garibaldi, with his tawny mane and piercing eyes, to a lion. ‘Have you ever looked at the face of lion?’ wrote Mazzini to a friend. ‘It is a very stupid face. ’ The British, though, continued to eat their Garibaldi biscuits, and to read their

Dante. The London Library’s shelves filled with editions of La Divina Commedia.

Among the Dantean treasures and curiosities is a deliciously pretty grey-and-gold pocket edition of Sonzogno’s annotated edition of 1918, in which Gustave Doré’s justly famous illustrations are reduced to matchbox size. One imagines a young lady from an E.M. Forster novel carrying it in her handbag. There is a commentary by Mrs Russell Gurney (1893), entitled Dante’s Pilgrim’s Progress, with Notes on the Way – an eccentric attempt to claim Dante for English puritanism. There is also an 1894 edition, dedicated to Pope Leo XIII, whose frontispiece shows the entire universe (Heaven and Hell included) in a pink, green and mustard-coloured diagram that could have been dreamt up by Marcel Duchamp. There is a 1900 edition, its spine a riot of gilt flowers and vinetendrils, edited by Paget Toynbee, the Oxford Dante scholar whose donations, along with those of G.M. Trevelyan (Garibaldi’s biographer), greatly swelled the Library’s Italian holdings.

D’Annunzio came to Britain only once, in February 1914, to attend the Waterloo Cup, prime fixture of the greyhound racing

calendar. (He was a keen dog-breeder.)

He stayed at the Savoy, sleeping à trois with his acknowledged mistress – a Russian countess who had posed for Auguste Rodin – and with his Breton housekeeper-cum-concubine. The superfluity of bedfellows didn’t prevent him from appreciating the view from the hotel window, and jotting in his notebook a Whistleresque riverscape in words: ‘A red sun in an opal sky. The bridges are veils of lace – a symphony in grey. ’ They visited the National Gallery before travelling to Lancashire. D’Annunzio made notes about the sodden green landscape, the huge horses dragging carts laden with coal, the Englishmen ‘returning from a day’s sport, red-faced as if varnished’ and the sheep grazing incessantly, like leeches sucking sustenance from the wet ground. He would, surely, have been more impressed with the country had he paid a visit to The London Library, an institution that had no equivalent in Italy, where he could have admired the 33 shelves devoted to Dante’s work, and the not quite so numerous, but rich, collection of his own gorgeously produced books.

.

.

‘Lucifer, King of Hell,’ by Gustave Doré for Dante’s La Divina Commedia (1308–21), from Dante’s ‘The DIvine Comedy’, trans. Francis Cary, with illustrations by Gustave Doré, 1982 edition.

THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 27

28 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

A Life in TWO LIBRARIES Paula Weideger, a writer now living in London, grew up in a house without books.

Here she recalls the New York libraries that made a strong impression on her as a child and burgeoning writer.

‘You will need a card, ’ the librarian explained when I told her I had come to take out books. I nodded. ‘You will have to sign it. ’ I had never written my name for a stranger.

I was six years old.

In a hurry to catch up with my brother Stevie, who was already reading when I was born, I learned to read before I started kindergarten. My mother and I were riding on a bus and I was practising spelling. I repeated each of the square white letters on the dark green, shop-window awning: ‘S-OD-A, ’ I spelled out; then ‘C-A-N-D-Y’ . Out of my mouth came ‘Soda’ , and ‘Candy’ . Just like that. It didn’t take long for me to be as greedy for books as I was for sweets.

A year or two after the candy-store miracle, my mother said I could go with my brother to the Webster Avenue Library. Until then, the longest journey Stevie and I had made, just the two of us without a grownup, was our Saturday morning walk to the movies two blocks away. The library was all the way across the Bronx. To get there we had to take one bus, and then change to another. This alone was an adventure and I must have been busy looking at what passed along the way. But my mind was not on the shops along Fordham Avenue. It was on our destination: books.

Now I was about to get the card that would let me go to the shelves and take home whatever I liked. So I stood on my toes, picked up the pen that was on the wood counter, and pressed hard. (I was used to pencils.) It is a very long name.

I was printing ‘r’ , the thirteenth and last

letter, when Splat. A blob of black ink dropped on to the card.

I didn’t dare look up. I stared at the blot. I was waiting for the librarian to tell me to go home and come back when I could write without making a mess.

But she didn’t. When the ink dried, she handed it to me: my first library card. I was off. For the next seven or eight years, books and libraries were inseparable. We did not have books at home.

I lie. On our living-room shelves there was an assortment of tchotchkes and the complete works of Charles Dickens and Mark Twain. Dickens was bound in dark green with gold lettering; Twain was identical except the main colour was creamy yellow. You might think this was not a bad way to begin. Yes, but only theoretically. In fact, I didn’t think of them as books to read and neither did anybody else in the family.

Like the smoky glass Lalique vase with flatfaced roses carved into its round belly, those books were expensive, not-to-be-touched knick-knacks. Like the vase, they were probably a wedding present.

Sometime before we moved to the suburbs when I was almost ten, I opened one of the untouched books. The print was tiny and pale. But even if it were big and black, I would not have been able to read Dickens and Twain. I was no Samuel Taylor Coleridge who, at six years old, was reading The Arabian Nights, and surely not in a children’s edition.

We did not have books in the house because my parents were not readers. In the Bronx, my mother and father didn’t have money for many luxuries. Probably because they didn’t read, books were on that list. Yet they were not anti-book. The library was free. I was eager to read. Off I was sent. I did not go to improve myself. I went to live.

Elephants. Wolves (wild and the fairytale variety). Pine forests. Snow covered mountains. Lassie. Alternative brothers, ditto mother. A sister, maybe. The jungle.

White Fang. Nice little girls, bad ones.

Climbing roses. Wooden shoes. A hut in the woods with and without wicked witches.

Books took me anywhere I wanted to go and to places I’d never heard nor thought about.

When we moved to Long Island, the local library was much nearer home. I got busy reading my way through it. I had no discrimination. I read without prejudice or The portrait of Frederick Lewis Allen that hangs in the Frederick Lewis Allen Memorial Room.

THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 29

direction. In the Bronx I played jump rope and potsy (hopscotch); in the suburbs I learned to ride a bicycle. Otherwise I was indolent, physically. Whenever possible I was on my bed reading the books I’d signed out of the library.

My life in libraries ended when I went away to school, and the break continued into university. One reason for this was that now I had lots of books. There were the ones required for courses and the others that I bought with my allowance or that, like Salinger and Beckett, got passed around.

I was back in the library again when I started to write books myself. I was living in Manhattan. My friend, Andrea, also a writer, told me about the Frederick Lewis Allen Memorial Room at the New York Public Library on 42nd Street. She was studying and writing there and she thought maybe I would like it, too. You needed a book contract to apply. I had one. I applied and to my surprise was given a key.

The Library, as I still think of the 42nd Street Library, even after years of living in London, looks like a temple from the outside. Inside, too, there is a lot of marble.

There is also dark wood panelling and shiny brass. The ceilings are far away from the floors. It houses magnificent collections of manuscripts, rare books and prints.

Entrance is free to all. The variety of human beings who make use of it take some getting used to, especially to out-of-towners.

Anyone who wants to warm up, cool off or sleep can find a perch in the main reading room or the halls. Advance permission is needed to see manuscripts, prints and special collections, but anyone can request a book to look at for an afternoon. The result was a miscellaneous assortment of off-the- street users and snoozers; round-shouldered students; poets; picture researchers and possibly the odd flea. High society was the one demographic blank spot, although there were rare sightings.

I enjoyed roaming the corridors. I took a mildly perverse pleasure in asking for information about books from those librarians who considered civilians a threat to their beloved charges. The mixed-up democracy of the place made that vast, marble temple of learning feel cosy. I liked it. This was a matter of temperament, not politics. I liked the privileges that came with an Allen Room key, too.

The Frederick Lewis Allen Memorial Room was set up in 1958 with Ford Foundation money. Allen was an editor, writer and library trustee. He died in 1954 30 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

at the age of 63. In the large black-and-white photo portrait of him that hung in the room, Allen is holding a cigarette. Smoking was forbidden in the library – all that paper – but in honour of Allen, writers in the room were allowed to smoke. It was handy that the room had a casement window that swung open on to a large inner courtyard, into which much exhaling was done.

Most mornings, I left my apartment downtown and headed for 5th Avenue and 42nd Street. I would climb the wide steps between those stone pussy-cat lions; clip-clop across the shiny marble floor of the entrance hall and make for the heavy oak door in the left-hand corner. I turned my key. As soon as the door thumped shut behind me, my breathing slowed down.

I had access to hundreds of thousands of books and nobody could reach me.

In those days there were no mobile phones; there was no internet. The Allen Room did not have a telephone.

Friends and family were instructed not to knock at its door. In grave emergencies, a person could ring the administrator’s office and a member of staff would come down and fetch the about-tobe-distraught key-holder. I was six when I got my first library card and found the world in books. Now, to continue the same way, it seemed necessary to keep the world of people away.

The set-up worked peculiarly

‘

well. The Allen Room had eight cubicles. The number of writers who had permission to use it was greater (by how much no one would say). Yet it was rare that more people turned up than there were desks. Those in charge knew that most applicants only thought they wanted to use the place.

‘No talking’ was one of the rules. Sometimes, a short, sharp reminder was necessary. Gossip, power plays and trysts were catered for along with coffee in the downstairs cafeteria.

Three times a day, as if we were patients in the hospital, a staff member wheeled in a wooden trolley. On it were the books we had called for. We had the special privilege of keeping them as long as we liked – or until someone else asked for them. At the end of each day, cubicles were to be cleared.

Our books and papers were to be stored on the shelves along the wall opposite the window. Desks were to be empty for whoever turned up in the morning. This rule was ignored.

Regular users of the Allen Room staked out their territories. It was good to show up early. It was better to have a forceful character or be famous. I was new and unknown but I was wilful. I had my own desk pretty soon. I kept it until my book was done. At more or less the same time, so was my American life in libraries. Very soon after my English one was underway.

.

Cartoon in the New Yorker in 1925, part of a campaign by the magazine to persuade the New York Public Library to allow smoking in its premises. In 1954, the Frederick Lewis Allen Memorial Room was opened there, the only room in the library where smoking was permitted.

Smoking was forbidden in the New York Public Library – all that paper – but in honour of Allen, writers in the Frederick Allen Room were allowed to smoke

’

THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 31

MEMBERS’ News TRUSTEE VOLUNTEERS NEEDED As a registered charity, the Library has a board of trustees who are responsible for the long-term well-being and effectiveness of the Library. Besides thinking about services and facilities, trustees must ensure that the Library safeguards its assets, meets its financial obligations, and functions within the legal framework required of a charity.

If so, we would love to hear from you. Applications for trustee positions falling vacant in autumn 2013 are now open, and we are keen to find members with an open-minded interest in the Library and dedication to its continued success to take up this role.

This year we are particularly keen to hear from members with knowledge and experience of

Could you • Think strategically about the long-term interests of the Library?

• Academic or general publishing • Investment management (especially in connection with charities) • Business planning and the broader financial world

• Listen to others’ views and contribute your own to help reach decisions collectively?

In addition, applicants should be comfortable introducing potential supporters and new members to the Library.

• Collaborate effectively with the Library’s professional staff?

In the past we have not received as many applications from women as from men and would welcome more.

• Promote the Library and help find new members and supporters?

A brief guide explaining the responsibilities and commitments involved and full details of how to apply is available to download from the Vacancies section of the Library’s website.

Please contact the Librarian’s PA (tel. 020 7766 4712; email librarian@londonlibrary.co.uk) if you require any further information.

FOR CONSIDERATION THIS YEAR PLEASE SUBMIT APPLICATIONS NO LATER THAN 17 MAY 2013.

A Current Trustee’s Perspective: Margaret Heffernan All I could think of was Piranesi. As Inez Lynn led me through the back rooms and offices of the Library, spaces and faces I had never seen before suddenly emerged, giving the Library a character and a heartbeat I’d only ever intuited, but never seen. After a decade of emailing ‘Country Orders’, I got to meet Gosia Lawik and Christopher Hurley and to appreciate the seamless but very human effort that gets my books to Somerset so promptly. I sampled (too briefly) the Best Job in the Margaret Heffernan.

World Room, where decisions are made about which books the Library will buy. And I watched Dunia García-Ontiveros supervising her team of cataloguers as they attempt to order and record the books of the past and the books of today. If they are able to complete their mission in my lifetime, it will be due to endless patience, extra staff, and blessed legacies to pay for them.

32 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

The greatest perk (so far) of being a Trustee is Inez’s guided tour and personal introduction to the extraordinary cast of characters who make this institution purr. I’ve been a member since I was 18 and doing my A levels. A decade in Boston temporarily transferred my affection to the Athenaeum, but a very large part of the joy of returning to England was coming back to St James’s Square. Now that I live in the country, I spend less time in the building but appreciate it as a lifeline.

I decided to apply to become a Trustee out of curiosity – how did this place operate? – and a desire to stay connected to the arts. After working with brilliant poets, playwrights, actors and musicians at the BBC, my career had turned towards business, running, buying and selling software in the US. For some reason, once you’re tainted with business (which is how the British view it), you can never be taken seriously in the arts again. So I thought that perhaps as a Trustee I might at least gain access to more philosophical colleagues.

I haven’t been disappointed. My application and subsequent interview were businesslike and so was my first trustees’ meeting.

But it wasn’t only businesslike. My fellow trustees, not one of whom I knew before joining, come from all walks of life and have only a few things in common: strange humour, a passion for the Library and a propensity for wearing spectacles. Underneath all of our discussions is a passionate and common concern: to protect the Library in

all its glory, history and relevance for future generations. We are trustees because we hold the Library in Trust.

The big picture is easy; the detail is harder. Remuneration and appraisal in any organisation are tough topics; just because everyone here loves their job doesn’t mean pay and feedback aren’t sensitive, and staffing issues are always tricky. Risk and governance sound abstract, but sitting with your fellow trustees to try to imagine everything that could go wrong is a grim but essential imaginative stretch.

That said, I’d recommend becoming a Trustee to anyone.

The chief attraction must be Inez’s tour, but there are a few other perks: tea and biscuits at the East India Club, insight into an organisation that really is run for all of its members, and the pleasure of knowing that you’ve done what you could to protect a brilliant institution. There is no absolute requirement to wear glasses and there’s no such thing as the obvious candidate.

To apply, all you need is love.

VALE MRS VALERIE ELIOT The President, trustees, members and staff of The London Library were deeply saddened to learn of the death of Mrs Valerie Eliot in November 2012.

Mrs Eliot had been a Vice-President of the Library since 2009, and was one of the Library’s most generous benefactors, providing funds for the purchase and redevelopment of our newest wing, T.S. Eliot House.

Mrs Eliot was present at the building’s naming on 11 June 2008, where actress Fiona Shaw read T.S. Eliot’s moving poem for Valerie, ‘A Dedication to My Wife’.

The Library’s President, Sir Tom Stoppard, said: ‘Valerie brought unprecedented and long-awaited happiness to her husband, to whom she was passionately devoted. During the long decades of her Above T.S. and Valerie Eliot. Angus widowhood, she was equally McBean Photograph, MS Am 2560 (215). devoted to her custodianship © Harvard Theatre Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard University. of his remarkable work. Her Left Valerie Eliot at the opening of passing severs a vital link with T.S. Eliot House in 2008. our literary past. The London Library will continue to preserve the memories of both T.S. and Valerie Eliot, whose generosity, advocacy and leadership are part of the fabric of this great institution.’

T.S. Eliot was President of The London Library from 1952 to his death in 1965.

On assuming the office of President, he delivered an address at the Library’s Annual General Meeting in which he declared that ‘if this Library disappeared, it would be a disaster to the world of letters, and would leave a vacancy that no other form of library could fill’.

Library members will be familiar with Emma Sergeant’s striking portrait of Mrs Eliot, which hangs near the Art Room, adjacent to the entrance to T.S. Eliot House.

The Library extends its condolences to Mrs Eliot’s family, to the staff and trustees of Old Possum’s Practical Trust, and to all who knew and worked with Mrs Eliot.

tHe LOnDOn LiBrArY AnnuAL LeCture 2013 The Library’s Annual Lecture will again be held at the Hay

The 2013 Hay Festival (hayfestival.com/wales) runs from

Festival this year, as part of its annual feast of literature,

23 May to 2 June. More information on the Annual Lecture

culture and music. This year’s lecturer is historian Tom

will be announced on the Events page of the Library’s

Holland, whose most recent book is In the Shadow of the

website (londonlibrary.co.uk/events) in due course. Look

Sword (2012). His lecture, ‘When Did the Roman Empire

out for further announcements on Twitter, Facebook and in

Really Fall?’, will take place on Friday, 31 May 2013.

the e-newsletter!

THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 33

THE CAPITAL PROJECT: A NEW PHASE BEGINS As we announced in the last issue of the Magazine, the Library is now in a position to embark on the next phase of its 21stCentury Capital Project. The name – Phase 3A – may not be immediately inspiring, but the benefits for members will be many!

With demand for desks in the Library increasing, and the infrastructure of both the main Reading Room and North Bay – including furniture, lighting, ventilation – becoming more outdated, the refurbishment of these older spaces has become an urgent priority. Phase 3A addresses the dual imperative to provide members with more reader spaces and to improve the general environment in which many of you work on a daily basis.

During Phase 3A the Reading Room will be sensitively refurbished and improved, retaining its Victorian elegance but providing members with a room better suited to modern research.

The North Bay – to be renamed the Writers’ Room – will be transformed into a discrete space, separate from the Reading Room and with four additional reader spaces on the new, widened gallery.

2013 PHASE 3A: KEY BENEFITS The Reading Room • 9 additional reader spaces (bringing the total number of reader spaces to 40) • 2 new armchairs (the total number of armchairs will remain 8) • New desks and chairs • New lighting, including task lights • New periodical racks • Improved ventilation • A display case in which to highlight treasures from the collections • Sensitive redecoration and refurbishment of the Victorian interior

The Writers’ Room • 8 additional reader spaces, including 4 new spaces at gallery level (bringing the total number of reader spaces to 25) • New desks and chairs • New lighting, including task lights • Improved ventilation • Interior decoration and refurbishment

34 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

New furniture and lighting, similar to that already enjoyed by members in the Prevost Room – also to be renamed, becoming the Sackler Study – will make both rooms a great deal more comfortable and conducive to work.

The construction period for Phase 3A will be around twelve weeks, beginning this June; we plan to complete work on the main Reading Room within eight weeks, re-opening it while work on the Writers’ Room continues.

We aim to keep member disruption to a minimum; by scheduling construction over the Library’s less busy months, when demand for desk space tends to be much lower, we intend to maintain our usual high standards of service and facilities. Our Reader Services team is already busy creating extra reader spaces throughout the Library to compensate as much as we can for the temporary loss of desks in the Reading Room and North Bay while the work is ongoing. See the ‘How to stay up to date on Phase 3A’ box opposite for guidance on where to find the latest information leading up to and throughout the Phase 3A period, and how to ask us any additional questions you may have.

We look forward to unveiling two very beautiful – and practical – rooms by the end of the summer.

Above The Writers’ Room – formerly the North Bay – will include new reader spaces at gallery level.

Below The reconfigured Writers’ Room.

Opposite Floor plan of the refurbished Reading Room (bottom section of plan) and Writers’ Room (upper section).

HOW TO STAY UP TO DATE ON PHASE 3A We will keep members closely informed on what’s happening throughout the planned 12-week construction period for Phase 3A, to begin in June 2013. We encourage you to check the dedicated web page (londonlibrary.co.uk/phase3) regularly for updates on services, facilities and how the project is progressing; this is where all essential information will be located for members’ convenience.

Ad hoc updates will also be given via Facebook, Twitter, The London Library Blog, our members’ e-newsletter and on signage in the Library itself.

If you have any questions about Phase 3A, please contact the Development Office (tel. (020) 7766 4704; email capitalproject@londonlibrary.co.uk). We will be delighted to give you all the help and information you need.

THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 35

A VITAL LEGACY Mrs BettY D’ALtOn (1920–2011) Legacies are an important source of income for the Library and an opportunity to learn of the role we and our collections have played in the lives of those who choose, with such generosity, to remember the Library in this way.

One recent gift is that of Mrs Betty D’Alton, whose legacy has contributed to the funds needed to proceed Above Mrs Betty D’Alton. with Phase 3A of the Capital Below Chinnery in China (1971) by Mrs Project. At the end of this Betty D’Alton, writing as Kathleen Odell. summer, when the refurbished Reading Room and improved Writers’ Room re-open, current members will enjoy the benefits of Mrs D’Alton’s enduring affection for the Library.

A member from 1944 until her death in 2011, Mrs D’Alton lived an intrepid life in which the Library played an essential part. Working in London during the war, first in the Ministry of Postwar Planning and Reconstruction and then for the Scott Committee on Land Utilisation in Rural Areas, Mrs D’Alton loved St James’s Square. Later in her life she wrote detailed reminiscences of the area, recalling heaped rubble after nights of bombing, the prevailing resilience and cheer of local residents and workers, and her discovery of Christie’s sale room, where she began to acquire small items of china for modest sums (‘for nobody wanted to collect china in wartime’). But it was the Library for which she reserved her highest praise: ‘Perhaps my greatest discovery was The London Library on the side of the Square. I think the first subscription I paid was £4 a year, quite a slice out of £150, but worth every penny of it. This was still the era of the legendary Mr Cox who presided at the issue desk – then on the left of the exit – who strongly disapproved of members who wanted to take books out, telling them that Mr Gladstone never did. I was present also on the occasion of a spirited dispute when Mr Cox refused to recognise a member’s wife, who

happened herself to be a senior Treasury official, as competent to pick up books on behalf of her husband and only acceded after considerable grumbling. He was much missed after he eventually left his post.’

Mrs D’Alton also told her nephew Mr Andrew Baster – himself a Library member – that she remembered going to the Library in her lunch hour during the war and helping to sweep the shattered glass off the books after a bombing raid.

After studying law and being called to the Bar in 1947, Mrs D’Alton sought to escape Britain, travelling to Sarawak, Malaysia, to take up a job in 1953. From there she went to Hong Kong, where she married and worked as a magistrate, an experience which informed her first novel, Chinnery in China, published in 1971 under her chosen nom de plume, Kathleen Odell. A friend remembers Mrs D’Alton telling him that she used the proceeds from the book to become a Life Member of the Library. Two further historical novels, Mission to Circassia (1977) and The Prophecy in the Sand (1978), followed, and Mrs D’Alton was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1979.

Although she returned to Britain in the late 1950s, Mrs D’Alton remained an enthusiastic traveller, both for pleasure and research.

When it wasn’t possible to travel farther afield, she used other libraries, including the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris, which she described as ‘my consolation for being separated from The London Library’.

The Library is enormously grateful for this gift and for all the legacies it receives.

If you would like to know more about how to remember The London Library in your will, please contact Jennifer Black, Head of Development (tel.020 7766 4796; email jennifer.black@londonlibrary. co.uk).

A NEw VICE-PRESIDENT FOR THE LIBRARY We are delighted and honoured that John Julius Cooper, the 2nd Viscount Norwich – best known to most of us as John Julius Norwich – has agreed to become a Vice-President of The London Library.

A member of the Library since 1960, Lord Norwich has been a passionate user of the collections, a regular fixture in the Reading Room and one of the Library’s most steadfast supporters.

In addition to work in radio and television, he has published books on history, travel writing and architecture; his most recent is The Popes: A History (2012). He is currently working on a collection of letters written to him by his mother, to be called Darling Monster, and on a history of Sicily.

Lord Norwich is Chairman of the Venice in Peril Fund, Co-Chairman of the World Monuments Fund and a former member of the Executive Committee of the National Trust. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the Royal Geographical Society and the Society of Antiquaries of London, and a Commendatore of the Ordine al Merito della Repubblica Italiana. He was made a CVO in 1992.

36 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 37

EATING OUT

DINING OUT NEAR THE LONDON LIBRARY This is an advertisement feature.

2

3 4 6

To advertise please call Janet Durbin

1 AL DUCA Serving modern Italian cuisine, Al Duca focuses heavily on bringing out the very best elements of what is one of the most acclaimed gastronomic regions of the world. Simple fresh ingredients are skilfully combined in a wide range of traditional dishes offered both in classic style and with a new twist, all following Pulze’s ethos of reasonably priced good Italian food. Now serving breakfast.

4–5 Duke of York Street, SW1, 020 7839 3090. alduca-restaurant.co.uk

4 THE FOX CLUB Situated a stone’s throw from Green Park and the famous Hyde Park, the club’s Dining Room is one of London’s best-kept secrets and, for those in the know, a lunch-time essential. The modern European menu changes on a weekly basis, offering refined excellence without being pretentious.

The effect is a change from the jaded palate of life. The Fox Club now offers a delightful afternoon tea from 3– 5pm.

46 Clarges St, W1, 020 7495 3656. foxclublondon.com

2 BELLAMY’S RESTAURANT Located in central Mayfair (near New Bond Street), Bellamy’s offers a classic French brasserie menu with an affordable famous-name wine list. The Oyster Bar, among its other dishes, serves Bellamy’s famous ‘open’ sandwiches. Le patron mange ici. Open for lunch Mon–Fri; dinner Mon–Sat. 18–18a Bruton Place, W1, 020 7491 2727. bellamysrestaurant.co.uk

5 GREEN’S Green’s Restaurant and Oyster Bar is a truly British institution that serves world-class food. Simple, well-presented dishes that everyone likes and that allow you to have meaningful conversation.

Fresh fish, meat and seasoned game.

36 Duke Street St James’s, SW1, 020 7930 4566. greens.org.uk

3 CUT AT 45 PARK LANE World-renowned chef and restaurateur Wolfgang Puck’s restaurant debut in Europe, CUT at 45 Park Lane is one of London’s most desirable American steak restaurants, serving prime beef, pan-roasted lobster, sautéed whole fresh fish and salads. The breakfasts and Sunday brunches showcase a twist on the American of some 600 wines features one of the largest selections of American wines in the UK. 45 Park Lane, W1, 020 7493 4554.

6 GUSTOSO RISTORANTE &

38 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

8 5

on 01625 583180.

45parklane.com/CUTat45ParkLane

7

ENOTECA Home-style Italian dining room Ristorante Gustoso is found moments from Westminster Cathedral and Victoria Station. Quietly situated, pleasingly intimate, Gustoso is the ideal place to unwind after work, with friends or to enjoy a little romance.

Cocktails are served from the bar and the menu is based around the Italian classics.

35 Willow Place, SW1, 020 7834 5778. ristorantegustoso.co.uk

7 HIX MAYFAIR This fashionable restaurant offers an outstanding menu of classic British dishes, using local seasonal ingredients. Mark Hix and Lee Streeton offer a full à-la-carte menu alongside a special set-lunch, pre-theatre and dinner menu of £27.50 for 2 courses and £32.50 for 3 courses. Brown’s is also home to the award-winning English Tea Room and the chic Donovan Bar. Brown’s Hotel, Albemarle Street, W1, 020 7518 4004. hixmayfair.co.uk

1

8 WILTONS Established in 1742, Wiltons enjoys a reputation as the epitome of fine English dining in London. The atmosphere is perfectly matched with immaculately prepared fish, shellfish, game and meat. Choose from an exclusive wine list. Open for lunch and dinner, Mon–Fri. To make a reservation, please quote The London Library Magazine.

55 Jermyn Street, SW1, 020 7629 9955. wiltons.co.uk