Issue 3: spring 2009

MAGAZINE SPRING 2009 / ISSUE 3

£3.50

CARLYLE, KEYNES & KRUGMAN Bill Emmott on the humanisation of economics

BLOOMSBUry REVISITED Anne Chisholm on its legacy

HIDDEN CORNERS Rupert Christiansen on the Library’s music collection

The London Library Magazine / issue 3

10 Alain de Botton selects the books he’s found invaluable while researching his new book The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work

C ontent s 5 Editorial Letter 6 Contributors 9 Over My Shoulder

12 Thomas Carlyle dismissed economics as the ‘dismal science’ in the nineteenth century, reflecting its continuing failure to engage any popular interest. Bill Emmott believes it’s time to reassess economics as a fascinating study of human behaviour

16 Anne Chisholm, whose biography of the diarist Frances Partridge is published this month, considers our ongoing fascination with the lives of the Bloomsbury Group, and the influence their work still wields on the arts today

Lynne Truss on using the London Library for researching her current project

10 Reading List Alain de Botton chooses the books that have inspired him

12 THE CURSE OF CARLYLE Bill Emmott pleads the case for recognising the human side of economics

16 BLOOMSBURY revisited Anne Chisholm on the lasting influence of the group today

20 SAMUEL JOHNSON AND DIARIES Liza Picard discusses Johnson’s life and character, and the value of diaries to posterity

24 HIDDEN CORNERS Rupert Christiansen on the delights of the London Library’s music collection

28 THE GHOST IN THE MACHINE Literary agent David Miller describes his working day

30 MEMBERS’ NEWS 36 special offers

24 From music halls and hymn books to opera and Slavonic folk music, Rupert Christiansen guides us through the treasures of the Library’s music collection

37 Restaurant Listings 38 Diary

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THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 3

EDITORIAL LETTER

FROM THE LIBRARIAN

Perhaps it is the gradual lengthening of daylight hours at this time of year giving us all a sense of having more time, but each spring sees a surge of members visiting the Library and borrowing books. It seems fitting, therefore, that in this issue we cover a range of themes as wide as the Library’s own collections – from music to economics, from diarists to trade and transport. I hope you will find here plenty to trigger new lines of reading and even writing, with insights into the writing habits of Lynne Truss and Nikki Gemmell, and David Miller’s view of the work of the literary agent in bringing writers and readers together.

Cover Image John Maynard Keynes, Baron Keynes, published 1932, after David Low, courtesy National Portrait Gallery, London © Solo Syndication.

Turn to the Members’ News section on pages 30–35 for details of several invitations, including a booking form for our annual lecture, which will take place at the Royal Geographical Society on Wednesday 10 June. This year it will be delivered by Jenny Uglow; tickets are sure to sell fast so do book early if you wish to attend. A speedy RSVP is also recommended for our Open Evening on Thursday 14 May, when members are invited to bring a non-member guest to informal drinks in the Reading Room. Don’t miss this opportunity to introduce a friend or colleague to the Library in a most congenial way.

An invitation of a different sort is extended to all those who might be interested in becoming a trustee of the Library. As a registered charity, the Library depends on finding a succession of volunteers willing to contribute time and skills in this way. Details of the particular areas of expertise needed this year will be found on page 34.

The Members’ News section also carries latest news of the building works in progress and the generous donations that are making it all possible.

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 6 April 2009 © 2009 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 Editor Mary Scott Design and Production Catherine Cartwright Researcher Emma Hughes

Editorial Committee David Breuer Miranda Lewis Harry Mount Peter Parker Christopher Phipps Erica Wagner

Advertising Jane Grylls 020 7300 5661 Kim Jenner 020 7300 5658 Development Office, The London Library Lottie Cole 020 7766 4716 Aimée Heuzenroeder 020 7766 4734

THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 5

CONTRIBUTORS

Anne Chisholm

Member since 1980

Anne Chisholm’s books include a biography of Nancy Cunard and A Storyteller’s Life, the biography of Rumer Godden. Her latest book, Frances Partridge: The Biography, is published this month.

She writes for the Sunday Telegraph and the Times Literary Supplement, and is a Fellow and the current chair of the Royal Society of Literature.

Rupert Christiansen

Member since 1981

Rupert Christiansen has been opera critic of the Daily Telegraph and dance critic of the Mail on Sunday since 1995. Apart from his books on opera, he is the author of Romantic Affinities, Paris Babylon, The Visitors, Arthur Hugh Clough and The Complete Book of Aunts. A frequent broadcaster and lecturer, he is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Alain de Botton

Member since 1994

Alain de Botton has written essays on topics like love, Proust and architecture. His latest book, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, is published this month. Aside from writing, Alain helped to start The School of Life, an educational establishment in London (theschooloflife.com), where he frequently teaches courses.

Bill Emmott

Member since 1998

Bill Emmott’s latest book is Rivals: How the Power Struggle between China, India and Japan will Shape our Next Decade (2008). He worked for twentysix years as a journalist at the Economist, the last thirteen of which as editor-in-chief, until he stepped down in 2006 to become an independent writer.

David Miller

David Miller joined Rogers, Coleridge and White in 1990. His clients include Library members Ferdinand Mount, Peter Parker, Ben Schott and Kate Summerscale, as well as illustrator Martin Rowson. He was voted the 2008 Orion Literary Agent of the Year at the British Book Awards.

Liza Picard

Member since 2006

Liza Picard was called to the Bar by Gray’s Inn but did not practise. She worked in London for many years for the Solicitor of Inland Revenue, until she retired in 1987. Her previous books include Dr Johnson’s London and Restoration London, and she is currently working on a book on Chaucer’s London.

Martin Rowson

Martin Rowson is an award-winning cartoonist whose work appears regularly in the Guardian, the Independent on Sunday, the Daily Mirror and the Morning Star. His books include comic-book versions of The Waste Land and Tristram Shandy, a novel, a memoir and a recent graphic work.

Lynne Truss

Member since 1978

Lynne Truss’s most recent radio projects include two Saturday Plays, Bora Bora (with Derek Jacobi) and Giving Up the Ghost. 2009 will see the third series of her Radio 4 comedy Inspector Steine. She is the author of the bestselling Eats, Shoots and Leaves, and is currently preparing a book about her sportswriting experiences, to be published in 2009.

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Over My

SHOULDER Lynne Truss, author of the bestselling Eats, Shoots and Leaves (Profile Books, 2003), discusses how she uses the Library while researching her latest project What are you working on at the moment?

Are you using any books from the London Library in your research?

I am currently writing the third series of my Radio 4 comedy Inspector Steine, about an incompetent Brighton policeman in the 1950s. Before each series I make notes from books by police commissioners of the period, legal minds and so on. The point about Inspector Steine is that he dislikes anything to do with crime and criminals, but at the same time he loves the law, and broadcasts a talk each week called ‘Law and the Little Man’ on the Home Service, about such matters as whether you can carry a bunch of flowers on a bus. Browsing the law section at the Library always throws up useful Steine-type literature. The books of C.H. Rolph – an ex-policeman who wrote for the New Statesman throughout the 1950s – I have now mostly bought secondhand, but I have just picked up a new essential text, published in 1937, called Hanged By a Comma: The Discovery of the Statute-book by E. Stewart Fay (‘Author of Why Piccadilly?’), which is full of excellent points for Inspector Steine to glory in.

How frequently do you use the Library?

I’ve been a member since 1978, and have been through many phases, but I’ve never been a regular visitor. In some ways I’m a bad Library member, because I generally prefer to buy the books I want. For me, the point of the Library is that it holds

‘ One call to the London Library and two invaluable texts (published around 1870) arrived by post ’ books whose existence would be otherwise unknown to me. A few years ago, I was staying on the Isle of Wight, working on a novel about Alfred Lord Tennyson, and I realised I urgently needed to research midnineteenth-century phrenology. One call to the London Library and two invaluable texts (published around 1870) arrived by post. I will never forget the thrill of the arrival of that priceless package at my humble holiday flat at Freshwater Bay.

CD of The Casebook of Inspector Steine (2009), series 2 of the Radio 4 comedy series.

Lynne Truss.

What is your typical working day?

How do you organise your breaks?

I lead a shocking life, actually. I get up and go straight to the keyboard with a cup of tea (I have a cunning hot-plate device on my desk for keeping tea warm, which is my proudest possession).

Around 11.30 a.m. I realise I am starving, but I don’t do anything about it. Around 1 p.m. I crawl upstairs from my office to the kitchen and deliriously put bread in a toaster but then don’t wait for the toast. At around 3 p.m. I pass out for want of sustenance. It isn’t the way things ought to be, but I’m afraid it’s the way things are.

How do you use the Library? Do you study books there or take them home?

I almost never read at the Library. Even as an undergraduate I would borrow books and read at home. I admire people who can sit quietly at desks while others sit quietly at other desks nearby, but it doesn’t work for me because I have to be free to talk to myself pretty continuously – even if only to say, ‘Heavens, what an interesting point this author of Hanged By a Comma is making. ’ What do you think is special about the Library?

To be honest, I do get a big kick out of seeing Jeremy Paxman on the stairs. But I wonder whether it’s good policy to admit this sort of thing.

THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 9

READING LIST

BehinD The

Book

Alain de Botton, the bestselling author of books on love, travel, architecture and philosophy, chooses the titles he has found invaluable while researching his new work

The author at home, West London, 2008.

Photograph by Vince Starr.

I was inspired by some of the following titles during the writing of my latest book, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, an exploration of the joys and perils of the modern workplace, published by Hamish Hamilton in April 2009.  The Docks of London, from The London Scene by Virginia Woolf (New York 1975). T. London.

Woolf visits the docks of London to watch ships coming in from around the world, and their cargo unloaded. At the time she wrote the piece (1931), London’s docks were still major centres of trade, and Woolf revels in observing the stuff of daily life arriving in gargantuan quantities.

The essay amounts to a hymn of praise to manufacture and what we would now term logistics. My latest book opens with a homage to Woolf, as I make my own way to the London docks – and, in part because of her, learn to be seduced by the charms of cargo.  The Americans by Robert Frank (New York 1959; 50th anniversary edition; on order).

A wonderful photo-essay that inspired me to adopt the same format for my new book, with text on the right-hand page

Quayside scene at Greenland Dock, Rotherhithe, London, 1927.

10 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

and original images on the left. Frank’s book, a photographic record of his trip across the United States, shows how a book of photographs can be a true collection rather than a random set of shots.  Das Kapital by Karl Marx (Hamburg 1872–94). S. Political Economy.

Anyone wanting to understand the world of work can still gain a surprising amount of insight from this often beautifully written book on political economy. Skip the lengthy bits.  Uncommon Carriers by John McPhee (New York 2006). T. America (Gen.).

McPhee has been on the staff of the New Yorker for decades, writing essays on industry and commerce. This book is a collection of essays on people who work in freight transportation; my particular favourite recounts how McPhee spent a night at the FedEx hub in Memphis, watching live Maine lobsters coming down the automated rubber runways.  Vermeer in Bosnia by Lawrence Weschler (New York 2004; on order).

I am often looking for reassurance as to the validity of a certain kind of personal, digressive essayistic writing, and so I was cheered by reading Weschler, another New Yorker writer, who looks with an aesthetic eye at the world of economics and politics. The finest essay in the collection is on Weschler’s visit to the Bosnian war trials in The Hague, where he spends mornings in

the courtroom and afternoons looking at a Jan Vermeer show, and draws fascinating parallels between these two spheres.  The Wealth and Poverty of Nations by David Landes (London 1998). S. Political Economy.

Landes seeks to explain nothing less than the origins of successful capitalist economies and does so brilliantly, without overwhelming bias or jingoism.

He shows the precariousness of the ‘developed’ world’s achievements and, happily, writes with the pace and delight of a detective writer. Whereas some big books on the history of modernity drag a little, Landes is genuinely interesting on every page.  The Needs of Strangers by Michael Ignatieff (London 1984). S. Social Science.

Before Ignatieff tried to become the next Canadian Prime Minister, he was a wonderful essayist and this is by far his best book. It seeks to explain our responsibilities to others within a modern welfare state, and does so by looking back through history at writers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, David Hume and John Locke, the founders of many of our own political assumptions.

I recommend this book to anyone trying to deepen their knowledge of political philosophy; it’s essentially a guide to the contemporary Western mental landscape.

THE CURSE OF

CARLYLE Bill Emmott describes the battle that economics has faced to escape its labelling by Thomas Carlyle as a ‘dismal science’, and argues the case for its reappraisal

A

mid all the bad news in the world, there is one ray of light for economists: bankers are being blamed far more than they are for the mess we are now in. Many economists are even making a good income by being paid to tell people how nasty and long this slump might turn out to be, though as dinner-party companions this gives them roughly the charm and appeal of a Dalek.

They – well, as an amateur economist I suppose I should say we – are back where we were more than a century and a half ago, when the London Library’s founding force, Thomas Carlyle, sneered that economics was ‘the dismal science’ .

No matter that his original target was a clergyman, the Revd Thomas Malthus: the slur has stuck on all economists and all economics, ever since. The relevant point about Malthus ought, in reality, not to have been that he was dismal but that he was wrong, profoundly so. Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population developed in the course of six editions between 1798 and 1826 the idea that population growth would inevitably exceed the supply of Britain’s resources, especially food, with the result that poverty and starvation 12 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

would be permanent features of national life.

This was as mistaken for his century as were, say, the forecasts of imminent resource depletion by the Club of Rome environmental lobby in the early 1970s, or as indeed will be the warnings of ‘peak oil’ and eternal food shortages that have been made in recent years. Man’s

inventiveness will make sure of that, just as it disproved the gloomy prognosis put out by Gunnar Myrdal, a Swedish economist, in his book Asian Drama: An Inquiry into the Poverty of Nations in 1968, which proposed that Asia’s drama over the next half century would be one of wars and constant poverty rather than the dramatic rise in incomes that actually occurred.

Economics still finds itself fighting off the ‘dismal’ label, despite the fact that man’s economic condition keeps on improving (albeit from a low base, as an economist would put it). That belief recurs in the oft-told joke that economists have predicted nine out of the past four recessions. It acts as background to another allegation, of unworldliness: economists know 101 ways to make love, it is said, but have never met anyone of the opposite sex. Or of equivocation: President Harry Truman apparently asked his staff to find him a one-handed economist: all the ones he had met, he said, told him that on the one hand X might work, but on the other hand Y. Most memorably of all, the ‘dismal’ reputation recurs in a rather more vulgar saying attributed to another American

Opposite Title page of Counsel to Ladies and Easy-Going Men (1892).

Far left Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner’s Freakonomics (2005), 2006 edition.

Left Tim Harford’s The Undercover Economist (2005), 2007 edition.

president, Lyndon Johnson. ‘Giving a speech about economics, ’ LBJ is reported to have said, ‘is like peeing down your leg.

It feels hot to you, but not to anyone else. ’ So economists are typecast as dull and dismal, and are now firmly back in their classic role as merchants of doom or, in the put-down by the Labour stalwart Aneurin Bevan of his former Prime Minister Clement Attlee (a lawyer, but also once a lecturer at the London School of Economics) in 1955, as ‘desiccated calculating machines’ . Yet there is an irony here. It is that during the past few years, economists have been working hard, and rather successfully, to prove that both gibes are false. They have been humanising economics – or, rather, proving what should always have been the case, that economics is no more than the study of human behaviour.

It was indeed always the case, but had become rather hidden. In their effort to be taken seriously as scholars, or even as scientists, economists buried themselves and their ideas ever more deeply in mathematics and in the equation-rich modelling known as econometrics. This was facilitated by – and encouraged in its turn – the domination of the discipline

by what is known as ‘neoclassical economics’ .

Almost anything given the prefix ‘neo’ tends to be treated with suspicion, and this form of economics is no exception. It is the discipline’s most pure and rigorous form, but not always the form most closely connected to real life. For its theories and models depend on assumptions about human behaviour that, when described to non-economists, produce an instant curl of the lip.

Most particularly, neoclassical economics assumes that people behave ‘rationally’ , by which economists essentially mean that people are consistent in their tastes and preferences, so that on average they are not biased.

This assumption takes its most extreme form in the so-called ‘rational expectations’ school, which holds, for instance, that if governments run budget deficits their stimulative effect will be neutralised by the fact that consumers will increase their savings in expectation of future tax rises.

Ironically, this sort of approach to the big issues of macroeconomics, which came to dominate public-policy discussions in the 1980s and especially

the 1990s, arose out of the study of how individuals behave, which is otherwise known as microeconomics. Such study is well rooted in real life – indeed that is precisely its subject. Perhaps because the rich economies seemed to be doing rather well, especially at taming the old curse of inflation, or just because of a change of fashion, it is microeconomics that has made a comeback in recent years, not just in the academy but quite spectacularly in popular writing.

Microeconomics came to popular attention in 2005 with two hugely successful books, published on either side of the Atlantic. The biggest seller was Freakonomics, a ghastly title (if less offputting than the word microeconomics itself) for a rather interesting book cowritten by a talented young economist at the University of Chicago, Steven Levitt, and a journalist who had interviewed him for the New York Times and spotted his popular potential, Stephen Dubner. The British equivalent was The Undercover Economist by Tim Harford, an economist who worked at the World Bank before joining the Financial Times. These two books were followed in Britain by Diane Coyle’s The Soulful Science: What THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 13

Left to right Diane Coyle’s The Soulful Science (2007); Tim Harford’s The Logic of Life (2008); and Paul Krugman’s The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008 (2008).

Bottom left John Maynard Keynes, Baron Keynes, c.1908, by Gwen Raverat, © National Portrait Gallery, London.

Opposite Paul Krugman © 2009 University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Economists Really Do and Why It Matters (2007).

What these books had in common was that they used economics to explain all sorts of things in ordinary life with which the discipline was not normally associated. Eyes glaze over at articles about the money supply, or the causes of inflation, or the significance of the balance between investment and savings.

But they brighten when offered chapter titles in Freakonomics such as ‘What do schoolteachers and Sumo wrestlers have in common?’ Or ‘How is the Ku Klux Klan like a group of real-estate agents?’ (The answer to the first, by the way, has to do with incentives and a willingness to cheat; that to the second has to do with the use

14 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

and abuse of information.)

Perhaps the most eye-catching and controversial finding in Levitt’s book arose from something that is pretty basic to the professional practice of economics: trawling through statistics to find correlations and, more particularly, causations. He looked at American crime statistics and pondered the question of why there was a clear decline in the amount of crime being recorded during the late 1980s and 1990s. Was it the result of ‘zero-tolerance’ policies instituted in previously crime-ridden cities such as New York by brave and rather tough mayors such as Rudy Giuliani? That was what the politicians claimed. Or was it just the consequence of a long period of

healthy economic growth and declining unemployment, which reduced the urge to rob and to murder, as sociologists or opposition politicians tended to say?

Levitt found his explanation in a surprising place: the abortion statistics.

The Supreme Court’s landmark decision, in defence of a mother’s right to have an abortion in the case of Roe v Wade in 1973, has caused bitter arguments in American politics ever since – what political commentators call ‘culture wars’ that pit conservatives against liberals, ‘right to lifers’ against ‘right to choosers’ .

What it also did, however, according to Levitt, was to cause a substantial drop in the birth rate among the sort of income groups – generally fairly poor and undereducated – most likely to end up in a life of crime. Those unborn young men would have been in their peak years of criminality, roughly between the ages of 15 and 25, during the period when the crime rate began to drop.

That finding provided what publishers dream of: instant publicity and controversy, providing something columnists, politicians and others could argue about in every possible medium.

But what Freakonomics chiefly provided was a logical way to think about the issues and conundrums of ordinary society.

That is also what Harford offered in The Undercover Economist, and in its sequel in 2008, The Logic of Life. As his second title indicates, he was offering simple ways to think about complex problems, doing for his discipline what Alain de Botton has been doing for philosophy and for Proust: showing its connection to everyday life.

This idea is far from new, but it has rarely struck such a popular chord.

the curse of carlyle

‘

Eyes glaze over at articles about the money supply, or the causes of inflation … But they brighten when offered chapter titles such as “What do schoolteachers and Sumo wrestlers have in common”?

Another Chicago economist, Gary Becker, made his professional name as early as the 1950s (and won a Nobel prize in 1992) by applying economic thought to topics such as marriage, racial discrimination and the queues outside restaurants. Moreover, one of the most famous phrases used by John Maynard Keynes, the Cambridge man who found his biggest moment in the Great Depression of the 1930s, was ‘animal spirits’: the idea that economic growth might depend not just on technical factors such as the money supply or labour costs, but on the psychology of entrepreneurs and of company managers.

Keynes’s most notable book, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936) is no page-turner. But its author pioneered the practice of using vivid, well-written essays and newspaper columns, alongside his more scholarly work, in the hope of influencing public opinion and political debate. The hope was often forlorn: his Economic Consequences of the Peace (1920), a brilliant denunciation of the Treaty of Versailles and the reparations burdens being piled on to Germany, must count as one of the most tragically ignored pieces of writing in history.

The closest modern equivalent to Keynes, in his blend of scholarship and journalism, is the 2008 Nobel prizewinner, Paul Krugman, who practises his scholarship at Princeton University and his journalism at the New York Times. His latest book has a dismal title, to match the dismalness of the period: The Return

’

of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008 (2008). But, like the works by Levitt, Harford and Coyle, it is written in an extremely undismal style, using humour and anecdotes to illustrate broader, even theoretical points.

The nicest example of that style in Krugman’s book comes when he uses the story of a babysitting co-operative on Washington’s Capitol Hill, to show how a slump in demand can occur even when the basic economic (and indeed human) situation appears perfectly healthy.

The babysitting co-op worked by giving couples vouchers every time they sat for other members, which they could in turn ‘spend’ on hiring other members to sit with their babies when they wanted to go

out. What happened was that babysitters began to hoard their vouchers, worried that they might not have enough at some point when they needed them. So demand fell, and the co-op’s system ground to a halt. That is exactly what is happening in many economies now, as households and companies are paying off debt and saving more, in case of rainy days ahead, with the effect that the days are getting rainier anyway.

This was what Keynes called ‘the paradox of thrift’: saving more looks sensible for every individual, but when everyone does it the result is a depression. The babysitting co-op solved its problem by simply printing and distributing more vouchers – which is what central banks are trying to do now.

‘Depression economics’ shows that slumps can, in principle, be cured. Our dismal science need not bring permanently dismal results. That may indeed explain why on the BBC news each night it is not the economics reporter who sounds most gloomy. That role is played by the business editor, Robert Peston, whose tone and style is reminiscent of a Victorian undertaker. The economics editor, Stephanie Flanders, has adopted a more soothing manner, patting us all on the head and assuring us that although our sickness is bad we will eventually get over it. That may well be appropriate as well as justified, since she is the daughter of Michael Flanders, whose duets with Donald Swann cheered up the 1950s and 1960s.

There was nothing dismal about them.

THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 15

BLOOMSBURy revisited Anne Chisholm, whose biography of Frances Partridge is published this month, considers the legacy of the Bloomsbury Group

A

t the end of 1999, as I began work on the biography of Frances Partridge, who to her displeasure was often labelled the last of the Bloomsberries (apart from disliking the cuteness of the term, she would point out that it was inaccurate, given that Angelica Garnett, daughter of Vanessa Bell and

16 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

Duncan Grant, was very much alive), Bloomsbury was in trouble again. The Tate Gallery had chosen to mark the turn of the century with the first major exhibition of Bloomsbury art ever held in this country.

While the paintings and drawings of Bell, Grant and Roger Fry gave pleasure to many, critical reaction was lukewarm, with flashes of surprising hostility. Not

only was the quality of the art called into question; the exhibition stirred up an attack on Bloomsbury in general.

Some critics referred to the failings of the painters to come anywhere near the standard of their admired contemporaries Picasso and Matisse, and to their way of life as that of a smug, privileged elite, implying that they were too cut off from reality and caught up with their inbred love affairs to produce anything of true originality or lasting value.

Frances Partridge had heard all this before, and when rung up by a radio interviewer and asked whether Bloomsbury was not snobbish and elitist she parried the question with ease. There was never any such thing as a group in any serious or exclusive sense, she said, just a number of friends and lovers with different interests and aptitudes; after all, the painters and writers among them had started out, before the First World War, as young artists trying to look at the world around them in a new way. Later she would tell me that, although she had played her part in the rediscovery of Bloomsbury by biographers and filmmakers, she could not help deploring the way that the private lives of the friends of her youth had come to seem the most interesting thing about them. From her

Above The Memoir Club by Vanessa Bell (née Stephen), c.1943. From left to right: Duncan Grant, Leonard Woolf, Vanessa and Clive Bell, David Garnett, John Maynard Keynes and his wife Lydia Lopokova, Desmond and Molly MacCarthy, Quentin Bell (with pipe) and E.M. Forster. © Estate of Vanessa Bell, courtesy Henrietta Garnett.

Opposite Drinks on the lawn at Ham Spray, the Partridges’ home. From left to right: Dora Carrington, Marjorie Strachey, Frances and Ralph Partridge. From Frances Partridge’s photograph album, courtesy of King’s College, Cambridge.

point of view, a crude and distorted picture had been first created, then attacked. She could not really take any of it seriously.

‘Bloomsbury’ , in the sense we now use the term, began in 1904, when Vanessa and Virginia Stephen moved from Kensington to the squares north of the British Museum. It was not until the 1920s, though, that the Bloomsbury label began to be applied, by journalists and other outsiders, to the friends and lovers living in and around Gordon Square. Molly MacCarthy, the humorous wife of the critic Desmond MacCarthy, is credited with coining the term Bloomsberry; her husband had been one of the original young men at Cambridge, along with Lytton Strachey, John Maynard Keynes, Thoby Stephen and Leonard Woolf, whose relationships formed the

group’s foundations, and although the MacCarthys chose to live in Chelsea, they were key members of Bloomsbury themselves. By the 1920s, Lytton Strachey had become rich and famous after publishing Eminent Victorians (1918) and Queen Victoria (1921); he was widely recognised as an iconoclast, but the details of his private life, his ménage with Dora Carrington and his preference for young men, were still very much private.

Bloomsbury was known primarily as a literary and artistic coterie, one among several at the time, along with the Georgians or the Vorticists – sometimes admired, often resented, as all coteries are by outsiders; but only insiders would have been aware of Bloomsbury’s belief in sexual freedom and preference for the ties of love and friendship over conventional marital and family relationships. Some

insiders disapproved: the painter Mark Gertler found Carrington’s decision to live with Lytton Strachey revolting, and D.H. Lawrence begged his young friend David Garnett (the future novelist who was to marry Frances’s sister Ray and later Angelica) to reject Bloomsbury’s values, the cult, as he put it, of ‘little swarming selves’ that reminded him of black beetles.

When Bloomsbury behaviour overlapped with more conventional circles, shock and confusion often ensued. As I researched the background of Ralph Partridge, the young man who was first in love with Dora Carrington, then beloved by Lytton, and eventually married Frances, I discovered that his family to this day deplore the transformation of a straightforward public schoolboy and gallant army officer into a man who discarded convention and tradition, who happily rejected the chance THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 17

Left Charleston, summer 1928. From left to right: Frances Partridge, Quentin and Julian Bell, Duncan Grant, Clive Bell, Bobo Mayor; Roger Fry (with glasses) and Raymond Mortimer at the front of the group.

Photograph from Frances Partridge’s photograph album, courtesy of King’s College, Cambridge.

Below Tidmarsh Mill, 1923. From left to right: Dora Carrington, Ralph Partridge, Lytton and Oliver Strachey and Frances. Photograph from Ottoline Morrell’s collection, National Portrait Gallery, London.

to row for Oxford in the Boat Race to travel abroad with his new friends.

Of course, Bloomsbury was never as tight a group as all that. It overlapped, for instance, with the Bright Young Things; Evelyn Waugh attended the same lunch parties as Lytton Strachey, and Clive Bell, Bloomsbury’s man about town, would take Elizabeth Ponsonby, whose goingson helped to inspire Waugh’s Vile Bodies (1930), to night clubs. The prevailing mood of the 1920s encouraged hedonism and rule-breaking.

By the 1930s, though, post-war euphoria had evaporated under the cloud of the Depression and the ominous advance of fascism in Europe.

As cultural arbiters, Clive Bell, Roger Fry and Desmond MacCarthy began to be overtaken by more rigorous critics, notably F.R. Leavis and his followers, who regarded them as spoiled, snobbish and lacking in rigour. In the new social and political climate, Bloomsbury did not fare well. As the American scholar and editor of Vanessa Bell’s letters Regina Marler, in her stimulating study, Bloomsbury Pie (1997), put it: ‘The homosexuality of many Bloomsberries, their pacifism during 18 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

World War I, their feminism, their private incomes, their championship of French art and literature – all were black marks.

By the early 1930s, “Bloomsbury” had become a term of abuse, suggesting everything from giggling effeminacy to political indifference. ’ In fact, though some of Bloomsbury (including Frances and Ralph Partridge) remained resolutely pacifist and disengaged from politics, several of its leading lights were far from indifferent to events in the real world.

Keynes, Bloomsbury’s representative in government circles, had long been involved with politics and economics at the highest level; Leonard Woolf, the Labour Party’s leading guru, now moved firmly away from pacifism, as did David Garnett, although Clive Bell did not waver in his belief that wars were never worth fighting. But during the Second World War, Bloomsbury was not so much unpopular as irrelevant.

After the war, Bloomsbury reached its lowest ebb. To be associated with it, or even interested in it, was to be out of touch with everything modern, progressive and experimental. Another group, the Angry Young Men, became

the fashionable catchword. Even the sympathetic Noel Annan, in his essay ‘The Intellectual Aristocracy’ (1955), associated Bloomsbury with privilege and an exclusive network. As Marler points out, the very first book on the group, by J.K. Johnstone, published in 1954, was admiring, but ‘did little to dispel the image of a charmed circle, preoccupied with “the inner life of the soul” and the leisurely pursuit of “truth and beauty” ’; and by 1958 the American critic Leslie Fiedler was asserting confidently that ‘What Bloomsbury was historically, even the question of whether it existed at all, does not matter: it has become a myth, a handy label for a hated world’ . Frances Partridge herself noted in her diary, in the spring of 1955, that even the New Statesman, the periodical long dominated culturally by MacCarthy, Garnett and the critic Raymond Mortimer, had turned on its own past, in a furious article attacking Bloomsbury by John Raymond. Setting off for a meeting of the Memoir Club, founded in the 1920s by, again, Molly MacCarthy, in the hope of extracting a book from her husband, and revived after the war to encourage members to exchange reminiscences, Frances wondered whether those present,

bloomsbury REVISITED who included E.M. Forster, Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell, would be feeling rattled by such an attack. ‘Not a bit of it, ’ she wrote afterwards. ‘There was the usual really rather sublime indifference to what the world thinks of them. ’ It was during the 1960s, as another generation discovered the pleasure of liberating itself from parental standards and conventions, that the Bloomsbury revival began. Against this background, Michael Holroyd wrote his groundbreaking biography of Lytton Strachey, in which alongside a reappraisal of his hero’s work he explored Strachey’s sexuality and the tangled love lives of his circle. Holroyd’s work, as he has acknowledged, was greatly facilitated by society’s slowly changing attitude to homosexuality, which became legal between consenting adults in private in 1967, ten years after the Wolfenden Report and the year in which the first volume of Lytton Strachey appeared. Even so, his book caused some alarm among the ranks of Bloomsbury. Frances Partridge, who paid her first visit to the House of Commons to listen to the debate, recorded her surprise that some of her old friends were so nervous of exposure.

Holroyd’s book was recognised from the start as brilliant and a milestone in the art of biography, but not everyone found the revelations about Bloomsbury’s way of life to their taste. There was a predictable moralistic broadside from Malcolm Muggeridge, and disapproval from Geoffrey Grigson; more surprising was Leonard Woolf’s opinion that Holroyd had over-emphasised Strachey’s love life by taking his youthful correspondence too seriously.

When the second volume appeared in 1968, it was Frances’s turn to be

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embarrassed, not so much by what Holroyd wrote about her arrival on the scene in 1923 – she always admired his thorough research and good writing, and approved of his efforts to write the truth – as by the way his book was picked up and presented by the media. The serialisation in the Sunday Times was especially hard to take, with headlines blaring ‘Abode of Love’ above pictures of Ham Spray, her home for almost thirty years after Lytton and Carrington were both dead.

She also minded the way that Ralph, the husband she had loved and admired devotedly, emerged from Holroyd’s account. Rather than the intelligent, forceful man of strong feelings and firm pacifist views she remembered, he came across as a conventional character who until transformed and re-educated by Lytton and his circle remained relatively uncivilised and bemused by Bloomsbury and all it stood for. Frances could never accept that there was some truth in this version of Ralph, and for the rest of her life did everything she could to correct it.

The trouble was that all Bloomsbury’s accomplishments, acknowledged though they continued to be by an interested minority, were not what made the group of keen interest during the years that followed. Somehow the works of Keynes, Forster and Virginia Woolf were celebrated as individual triumphs, achieved in spite of, rather than as part of, Bloomsbury. What kept the group alive and attractive to new generations was the often retold human drama, the story of their personal lives and complicated loves. This never lost its fascination, and even an insider’s critical reappraisal, Angelica Garnett’s remarkable and brave account of her upbringing, Deceived with Kindness (1984), which showed

What kept the group alive and attractive to new generations was the human drama, the story of their personal lives and complicated loves

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the painful human consequences of a Bloomsbury upbringing, only added to the power of the saga. In 1995 Christopher Hampton’s film, Carrington, based on Holroyd’s biography, presented the story of Lytton and Carrington anew; again, although she admired much about the film, Frances protested in vain at the travesty she felt it presented of Ralph. By this time she herself had long been recognised as both a source for and a participant in the reinvention of Bloomsbury, had published her own memoirs and diaries, and had long accepted that it was not in her power to alter misconceptions about the friends of her youth, or to correct what she knew were omissions and mistakes.

Today, with Frances Partridge dead (although Angelica Garnett recently celebrated her ninetieth birthday), how does Bloomsbury stand in public opinion? Certainly the love lives of the group, while continuing to fascinate, no longer have any great power to shock, now that civil partnerships and gay marriages are happily celebrated and ‘living in sin’ , as Frances did with Ralph, is commonplace. Perhaps the group’s writers have fared best: two recent novels, Michael Cunningham’s The Hours (1998), later a successful film, and Zadie Smith’s On Beauty (2005), homages to Virginia Woolf and E.M. Forster respectively, were widely admired and their cultural background acknowledged without condescension. Two recent biographical studies, Alison Light’s Mrs Woolf and the Servants (2007) and Judith Mackrell’s Bloomsbury Ballerina: Lydia Lopokova, Imperial Dancer and Mrs John Maynard Keynes (2008), both dealt calmly and fairly with Bloomsbury’s chief failing, the assumption of class and intellectual superiority.

My own interest in Frances Partridge was not founded in a passion for all things Bloomsbury, although I have learned to respect the characters I have come to know as liberators from repression and convention, as did my subject. Perhaps the time has come when the dust can be allowed to settle and Bloomsbury can be seen for what it was, a disparate group of friends and lovers who in their time stood up for personal and creative freedom, who left their mark, light but significant, on how we live and how we write and think.

THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 19

SAMUEL

JOHNSON AND DIARIES

This year marks the tercentenary of Johnson’s birth. Liza Picard examines his life and work, and considers the literary value of the diaries of Boswell and other writers

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Such was Samuel Johnson, a man whose talents, acquirements and virtues were so extraordinary that the more his character is considered, the more he will be regarded by the present age, and by posterity, with admiration and reverence

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Thus Boswell concluded his monumental Life of Samuel Johnson (1791). But if he could revisit the London literary scene now, he might be disappointed. Although the sheer volume of Johnson’s output must be admired, his style is more measured, his vocabulary more Latinate, than we are used to. Reverence, nowadays, is hard to come by.

He was certainly an extraordinary man. He had to contend with appalling disabilities. One of his eyes was blind, the other short-sighted. His neck was scarred by childhood scrofula. He was deaf. ‘When he walked, it was like the struggling gait of one in fetters’ – Boswell again. Hogarth saw him ‘shaking his head and rolling himself about in a strange ridiculous manner’ , and concluded that he was ‘an idiot’ . When he was not talking he made meaningless clucking noises. With our superior hindsight we can label his strange behaviour as probably a form of Tourette’s syndrome: his contemporaries just had to accept it. As he aged, he suffered from gout, oedema and breathing difficulties. In the Preface to his Dictionary (1755) he referred to the sickness and sorrow in which he wrote it. He may have meant the ‘melancholia’ , the black dog of depression that haunted him all his life.

He was largely self-taught. He read voraciously, but he 20 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

was expelled from two grammar schools. Penury drove him from Oxford University after a year. If he had been able to stay the academic course he could have excelled in so many fields.

Mathematics was a form of relaxation for him. He spoke both classical ‘dead’ languages fluently, and wrote them elegantly.

He interested himself in medical and scientific questions. If all else had failed he might have been a persuasive auctioneer; it was while trying to sell the Thrale brewery after his friend’s death

that he coined his most quoted phrase, ‘we are not here to sell a parcel of boilers and vats, but the potentiality of growing rich beyond the dreams of avarice’ . But after an unsuccessful venture into schoolmastering, he set out for London in 1737, aged twenty-seven, determined to earn a living by his pen.

Boswell, conscious of his status as the Laird of Auchinleck, wrote of Johnson that ‘No man of humble birth, who lived entirely by literature, … ever rose into that personal notice which he did’ . Perhaps it was true at the time, but humble birth has long ceased to be relevant to literary fame. Certainly Johnson achieved ‘personal notice’; no gentleman’s library could be complete without bound volumes of The Gentleman’s Magazine, to which he was a regular contributor, as well as to other periodicals. He covered the political scene with his ‘Debates in the Senate of Lilliput’ , a satire on the debates in the House of Commons that cleverly bypassed the Commons’ dislike of reporters. His name was becoming known in publishing circles. By 1747 there was a growing feeling in those circles that a new dictionary might be a paying proposition, and that Johnson would be the man to undertake it. He set to work, but only spasmodically, so that deadlines came and went. He had to jettison many of his early pages because he found, too late, that his amanuenses couldn’t make his system work. It was not until 1755 that his magnum opus was published.

His private life does not seem to have been happy. ‘It was well known that his amorous inclinations were uncommonly strong and impetuous, ’ wrote Boswell, cautiously. Johnson ‘was sometimes hurried into indulgences which [Johnson] thought criminal’ . At least he avoided any sexually transmitted diseases, unlike his faithful biographer. Before Johnson left Lichfield for London he had married Elizabeth Porter, a widow twenty years older than he. Beauty lies in the eye of the beholder, and perhaps Johnson saw her with his blind eye. Her enemies unkindly described her as having a red face – the more so as she took to drink and rouge – and a large bust. She also had £800. Johnson expressed undying love for her, but they often lived apart, and when success began to come to him he parked her in lodgings in Hampstead, well away from the jolly gatherings of his friends.

When she died, in 1752, he was seemingly inconsolable. Perhaps he had been in love with a fictional portrait of the perfect wife, far removed from actuality.

The other woman famously connected with him, from 1756, was Hester Thrale, the wife – later widow – of a close friend, Henry Thrale. He became a regular guest at their house, Streatham Place. According to Hester, Johnson entrusted to her, three years after they met, fetters and a padlock. If he did, the probable explanation was that he was terrified of going mad, and needed the reassurance that if he descended into mania she would be able to restrain him. But it is a weird story. For one thing, in her words, ‘his stature was remarkably high, and his limbs exceedingly large’ . How could she have managed to chain him up, if he was raving mad? After Johnson’s death Hester alleged that his friendship had imposed on her a constraint that had been ‘terrifying in the first years of our friendship [culminating in the fetters?], and irksome in the last’ . After Henry Thrale’s death in 1781, relations between Johnson and Mrs Thrale continued on a superficially friendly basis, until Johnson was bitterly hurt by her attraction to her children’s music master

Opposite Unfinished portrait of Johnson by James Barry, c.1777–80, National Portrait Gallery, London.

Top Hester Thrale, from a drawing by George Dance in the National Portrait Gallery, London.

Above Johnson in 1777, engraved by Fry after a drawing by Wivell from the bust by Joseph Nollekens.

THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 21

Johnson had finished his meal, ‘ Once he insisted on holding the floor, and he sulked when people wouldn’t listen to him

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Gabriel Piozzi, whom she married in 1784. ‘If you have abandoned your children and your religion, God forgive your wickedness. ’ Not surprisingly, he found himself no longer welcome in her house.

Men posed no such problems. They could meet in clubs, where everyone could enjoy convivial company and conversation and no one minded keeping the servants up late. Johnson could be a bore. His table manners were appalling – he ate fish with his fingers because he couldn’t see the bones – but once he had finished his meal, he insisted on holding the floor, and he sulked when people wouldn’t listen to him. Yet he was much loved by the male friends he gathered round him. James Boswell met Johnson in 1763. Over the years he progressed from Johnson’s admiring disciple to his ‘dear Bozzy’ .

He carefully recorded the great man’s sayings and reminiscences, surely with a view to publication in due course.

As defined in Johnson’s Dictionary, a diary is ‘an account of the transactions, accidents and observations of every day, a journal’ .

Of all Johnson’s writings, his diary of the Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775), with Boswell, is the most beguiling, especially read in conjunction with Boswell’s own Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (1785). The two men set off from Edinburgh in August 1773, Johnson aged sixty-three and Boswell about half his age. Their overnight stays varied from the homes of Boswell’s connections in the aristocracy and gentry, down to a sordid local inn where there was not even straw to lie on. Every evening Boswell had to write up his diary of the day’s events, and show it to his mentor. Johnson did not reciprocate. The journal that Johnson kept, and used when he got home to produce the formal Journey, has been lost. It is amusing 22 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

to compare the two accounts, each edited by the writer. Boswell relates how, when they got back to his home in Edinburgh, his father and Johnson had a furious row over politics and religion: ‘they became exceedingly warm and violent. ’ Johnson discreetly ignores it. His style is disarmingly simple, except just twice. He described the taste of Hebridean whisky as ‘empyreumatick’ , where you and I might have said ‘smoky’ . And a ‘song by which the rowers of gallies [sic] were animated’ was ‘an ancient proceleusmatick song’ . I suspect that he did it on purpose, compelling his readers to reach for a reliable dictionary.

According to Johnson, ‘It is a very good custom to keep a journal for a man’s own use’ – but he added that the writer should entrust to a close friend the task of burning it at his death. He kept various diaries, from aide-memoires of names and places, and cash spent, including his laundry bills, to the kind of intimate diary that he was anxious to destroy in the bonfire he lit a few days before his death.

Fortunately, no one burned Samuel Pepys’s diaries, which he wrote for ‘his own use’ and for posterity. Open the diary that he kept from 1660 to 1669 at any page and there he is, a virile young man with few morals, a gifted pen and an excellent grasp of Shelton’s shorthand. For eighteenthcentury London, read Boswell’s own diaries, as he catches gonorrhoea yet again from un-‘armoured’ sexual intercourse with a prostitute, and haunts the salons of the rich and powerful in the unrealistic hope of landing a commission in the Guards, which he would never have been able to sustain.

In the Victorian age, you have that incomparable pair Arthur Munby and his slave/mistress/wife Hannah Cullwick (see The Diaries of Hannah Cullwick, Victorian Maidservant, ed. Liz Stanley, 1984). No matter what obscure motive made Munby, a civil servant and diarist, insist that Hannah keep a diary as she

SAMUEL johnson and diaries Opposite Johnson, 1773, in the outfit he wore for his Hebridean journey, from an engraving by Charles John Smith after a drawing by T. Trotter.

Far left Johnson in the late 1760s, by Joshua Reynolds, National Portrait Gallery, London.

Left The Streatham Place residence of John and Hester Thrale, where Johnson was a frequent visitor, from a drawing by A.L. Collins.

drudged in Victorian basements and toiled up and down Victorian stairs, the social historian can thank her posthumously for a unique picture of domestic service. At the other end of the social scale, Queen Victoria famously wrote diaries, and even had some of them published. Her style, if you overlook the underlinings and exclamation marks, was delightful. She excelled herself in describing the opening of the Great Exhibition of 1851: ‘This day is one of the greatest and most glorious of our lives … the tremendous cheering … and my beloved Husband the creator of the great “peace Festival” … was [sic] indeed moving. ’ A diary of the same event, this time unpublished (Museum of London archives), was kept meticulously by W.S. Bell, a Newcastle businessman. Not only did he record the sights he saw, the meals he ate and the transport he used, in a handsome volume designed

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According to Johnson, “It is a very good custom to keep a journal for a man’s own use” – but he added that the writer should entrust to a close friend the task of burning it at his death

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to last for posterity, but he also carefully gummed in prints he bought and flyers he picked up and bills he paid. He was clearly looking to enthral his descendants. Poignantly, but fortunately for the social historian, his beautiful book turned up in a sale, where the Museum of London bought it. Another unpublished diary (manuscript in the Wellcome Institute) still wrings the heart. It was kept by a devout young medical student, Henry Vandyke Carter, who was seduced into marrying a harpy, who battened on him.

They eventually parted, she to live in comfort in England, and he to earn a hard livelihood as a doctor in India, remitting most of his salary to her. He was glad to be rid of her, but they had had a daughter, whom he loved, and he never saw again. He recorded his prayers to God, but finally despaired of divine help. His manuscript diary just ends, leaving blank space. Did he lose it? Or give it up?

Or die? The survival of manuscript diaries is so often a matter of chance.

Samuel Pepys took great care that his many volumes should be preserved by Magdalene College, Cambridge, in the cases he had designed for them. Boswell planned for all his papers to be housed in his family archives; it was due to the persistence of the American collector Lt. Col. Ralph H. Isham that cache after cache was discovered elsewhere.

Diaries can be invaluable aids to understanding the writer. We miss Samuel Johnson’s personal diaries. They would have been, without doubt, a keen commentary on current literature and thought, in the London that he knew and loved. They would also have helped us to understand his complex character. Perhaps the truest index of the interior life of a diarist emerges from diaries that were never intended for publication. Diaries written for publication need a cynical eye. Politicians busily scribbling their way through cabinet meetings can hardly be trusted to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 23

HIDDEN CORNERS

MUSICAL

MUSINGS Rupert Christiansen indulges his passion for music among the wealth of titles in the London Library’s collection

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wenty years spent working in arts journalism and opera criticism, as well as researching four books on music – including an opera anthology and a collection of hymns – have led me to all corners of the London Library, and I’ve probably passed as much time, browsing and brooding, in the Opera and Music stacks of the Science and Miscellaneous corridors, as I have in any other spot in central London. Memoirs of great performances like Victor Gollancz’s Journey Towards Music: A Memoir (1964), Benjamin Lumley’s Reminiscences of the Opera (1864) and Vincent Sheean’s First and Last Love: The Life of a Music-Lover (1957) are like my old friends, honorary members of my own book collection – I’ve had them in my possession on and off for years, scrupulously renewed, of course, and instantly returned if ‘required by another reader’ , but very much at home on my shelves.

Yet the first thing to be said is that the London Library only has a collection of books about music. There are a few scores that seem to have slipped into the collection without rhyme or reason – for example, Boris Godunov and Don 24 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

Pasquale, J.S. Bach’s preludes and fugues, Schubert’s song cycles and, oddest of all, the oboe concertos of the astronomer Sir William Herschel – but if you need to see staves full of crochets and quavers, look to the British Library’s or Westminster Public Library’s extensive offerings.

Where the London Library excels musically is in its reference books. I

Cover of Opera magazine, March 2009.

don’t mean only the Reading Room encyclopedias (from the stacks, a complete set of the 1980 edition of The Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians can be borrowed), but also those astonishing works of scholarship that record in pedantically accurate detail names, places and dates. There’s Constant Pierre’s index of Les Hymnes et Chansons de la Révolution (1904), for instance, or the five volumes of A Shakespeare Music Catalogue (1991). Alfred Loewenberg’s Annals of Opera 1597–1940 (1978) is an extraordinary resource, containing the details of thousands of opera premieres in various cities, and I have wasted many happy hours in the minutiae of Chronik der Wiener Staatsoper 1945–2005 (2006), Annals of the Metropolitan Opera (1990) and C. Gatti’s Il Teatro alla Scala (1964) – volumes that send an opera buff salivating with their charting of nightly cast lists.

Opera is my passion, and the Library indulges it handsomely. Here, however, is a heartfelt plea: holdings of the monthly bible of Opera magazine only date back to 1983; if any member happens to have a set of the earlier issues wasted in a cupboard, I know where it would find the happiest of homes. And talking of sets, I am proud

Performance in the Bolshoi Theatre, 1856, by Mihály Zichy, from his Alexander II, Coronation Book (1856).

that during my tenure as chairman of the Books Sub-Committee, the then Librarian Alan Bell was encouraged in his great efforts to secure one of the very few extant complete runs of ENO Opera Guides; edited by the late Nicholas John, they invaluably combine libretti with essays on individual works and information about performance. The Library also holds their precursors, more modest pamphlets that went under the title of the Sadler’s Wells Opera Guides, dating from the austerities of the 1940s. Those with a taste for opera’s splendours should seek out the ravishing Gran Teatro La Fenice (1999) by Graziano Arici and, down in the depths of Folio, Bolshoi Teatr SSSR (1976), which offers superb colour photographs of opera productions of the 1970s. And how can I not mention Brigid Brophy’s Mozart the

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Dramatist (1964), a madly opinionated book that changed my teenage life, and Ken Wlaschin’s compendious Encyclopedia of Opera on Screen (2004), which charts the otherwise hard-to-track history of visual recording of the pre-DVD era?

Wagner looms large – inevitably, since he is rumoured to be the subject of more books than anyone except Byron and Napoleon. A particular treat is Histoire d’un ‘Ring’: Bayreuth 1976–1980 (1980)

by Pierre Boulez et al., a sumptuously illustrated and informative record of Patrice Chéreau’s revolutionary production at Bayreuth in 1976. For its wider context, don’t miss Patrick Carnegy’s authoritative study Wagner and the Art of the Theatre (2006). I am also constantly delighted by an extraordinary

I am constantly delighted by an extraordinary collection of bizarre volumes that chart the fin-de-siècle Edwardian infatuation with Wagnerism

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collection of bizarre volumes that chart the fin-de-siècle Edwardian infatuation with Wagnerism, with Albert Lavignac’s Le Voyage artistique à Bayreuth (1897), David Irvine’s A Wagnerian’s Midsummer Madness (1899) and Mary E. Lewis’s The Ethics of Wagner’s ‘The Ring of the Nibelung’ (1906) being three of its dottier manifestations. For lighter amusement from this era, I recommend Constance Maud’s Wagner’s Heroes (1895) and Wagner’s Heroines (1896), ‘retold for children’ , books very much in the mould of Gladys Davidson’s sternly bowdlerised retelling of opera plots, in which bastard children, that staple of operatic melodrama, are always presented as the result of ‘secret marriages’ .

Following an interesting report written by Library graduate trainee Amelie Roper in 2002, the Library’s core music holdings were extended and strengthened. Although monographs on individual works remain few, the overall range is now immense, spanning crumbling antique volumes such as E. de Coussemaker’s Scriptores de Musica Medii Aevi (1864–76) and H. Anglés’s La Música en la Corte de los Reyes Católicos (1941–51), which expatiate on medieval THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 25

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I’d recommend a look at Music Halls, which ventures into vaudeville and burlesque to offer Rachel Shteir’s “Striptease”

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and Renaissance traditions, to modern academic studies such as Shirli Gilbert’s haunting Music in the Holocaust (2005) and Jennifer Doctor’s brilliant research into The BBC and Ultra-Modern Music, 1922–36 (1999). What else to pick out here? W. Chappell’s Popular Music of the Olden Time (1855–9) and the indefatigable S. Baring Gould’s eight volumes of English Minstrelsie (1895–9) are fascinating evidence of Victorian musical antiquarianism, little known or valued today but predating the more scientific explorations of Ralph Vaughan Williams and Cecil Sharp by half a century; their work is still being furthered today in the excellent Folk Music Journal,

kept in the Reading Room.

Of course, all the standard texts are here – George Bernard Shaw’s gloriously sharp and witty music criticism, Donald Francis Tovey’s analyses, and the works of magisterial musicologists from Charles Burney and Hector Berlioz to Alfred Einstein and Ernest Newman to Charles Rosen and Curtis Price, as well as a good spread of the new generation of feminists and deconstructionists (Susan McClary and Richard Leppert’s 1987 collection Music and Society: The Politics of Composition, Performance and Reception is strongly recommended here). A recent addition is Yale University Press’s magnificent 2007 edition of

Hermann Abert’s monumental 1921 study of Mozart, a superb example of Teutonic thoroughness, fifteen hundred pages long but freshly illuminating and gripping, and elegantly translated and annotated

by Stewart Spencer. A serendipitous trawl as I researched this article also turned up Eton Songs (1891–2) by A.C. Ainger and J. Barnby – ‘What if they sneer and scoff/ The folk from other schools?’ – which turn out to extend far beyond jolly boating weather, and Jean-Louis Tamvaco’s Les Cancans de l’Opéra: Le journal d’une habilleuse 1836–1848 (2000), a delightfully gossipy collection of reviews from Restoration Paris. Amelie Roper’s report notes ‘the possession of some early technical studies of the craft of violin making’ , but this being a subject far off my patch, I can’t say I’ve ever spotted any.

Something I have just discovered is that Science and Miscellaneous doesn’t gather all its music books under two category headings. Dancing has its own shelves, as do Bells and Military Music (seven titles). I’d also recommend a look at Music Halls, which ventures into vaudeville and burlesque to offer Rachel Shteir’s Striptease: The Untold History of the Girlie Show (2004) and Douglas Craggs’ Ventriloquism from A to Z (1969), as well as Colin MacInnes’s lyrical essay Sweet Saturday Night (1967) and Maurice Willson Disher’s irresistible Winkles and Champagne: Comedies and Tragedies of the Music Hall (1974).

Up in Religion, one of the more obscure regions of the Library, is a remarkable selection of hymn books, which must contain some of the oldest books on open access. The edition of Isaac Watts’ Hymns and Spiritual Songs dates from 1720, and John and Charles Wesley’s Hymns and Sacred Poems from 1742.

I’m fascinated by The Gude and Godlie Ballates, a Scottish Lutheran collection that predates Calvinism, dating from 1578 but reprinted in 1868, and J.M. Neale’s Far left Gioseffo Zarlino’s Istitutioni Harmoniche (1573).

Left Thomas Morley’s A Plaine and Easie Introduction to Practicall Musicke (1608).

Opposite, top, left to right Rachel Shteir’s Striptease (2004); Jean-Louis Tamvaco’s Les Cancans de l’Opéra (2000) and the autobiography According to the Rolling Stones (2003).

Opposite, bottom right Bart Plantenga’s Yodel-Ay-Ee-Oooo (2004).

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HIDDEN CORNERS

survey of Byzantine hymnology, Hymns of the Eastern Church, dating from 1882. But even I baulk at the fifty-five volumes of Analecta Hymnica, published in Germany between 1886 and 1922.

When we get to popular music, the collection has much to offer, though inevitably in an area filled with ephemera and downright trash, acquisition has been rigorously selective. There’s plenty of ethnomusicology – right up to Bart Plantenga’s 2004 survey Yodel-Ay-EeOooo: The Secret History of Yodeling Around the World – and I’m told that the coverage of Slavonic folk music is extraordinary. I’m always impressed by the note taken of the byways of ‘folk’ activity nearer home, from playground games and brass bands to barbershop quartets. I’m not a jazz fan, but all the important books by Whitney Balliett, Philip Larkin and other authorities are here. Musical comedy is treated respectfully, including the two weighty tomes of Kurt Gänzl’s British Musical Theatre 1865–1984 (1986), one of those massive works of reference by which I am mesmerised.

But when ‘popular’ shades into pop and rock, things get patchier. Anything by a respectable literary or academic author will be held – Ruth Padel’s Orphic study I’m a Man: Sex, Gods and Rock ‘n’ Roll (2000), for example, or Hanif Kureishi’s and Jon Savage’s anthology The Faber Book of Pop (1995), or John Robb’s oral history Punk Rock (2006). A magnificently

illustrated book of essays and memoirs, According to the Rolling Stones (2003), gets in as a sort of Festschrift. Bob Dylan does well, with six critical studies, a collection of his lyrics and the Chronicles (2004), and there are four books about Elvis Presley, two biographies of John Lennon, and one, quirkily, of The Who’s renegade drummer Keith Moon.

But certain other great names in the field haven’t made it yet: I’ve failed, for example, to find anything monographic on such seminal and influential figures as The Beach Boys, The Doors, David Bowie, Eric Clapton, Joni Mitchell or President Obama’s hero Bruce Springsteen. This saddens me. Badly written biographies of operatic prima donnas abound (Ernest Newman once drily summed them up as ‘they were born, they learned to sing, they made money and bought diamonds, they got Royalties to write in their autograph albums and they died’); I have recently returned to Marilyn Horne’s astonishingly bitchy My Life (1983) with guilty pleasure.

Why should the divas and divos of our own age – undeniably culturally influential and often creators of their own music, even if you hate the noise they make – not be afforded a little more shelf space?

So I shall use this platform as an extension of the Suggestions Book, and end by putting in requests for Peter Gammond’s The Oxford Companion to Popular Music, David Buckley’s Strange Fascination: David Bowie: The Definitive Story, Peter Ames Carlin’s Catch a Wave:

The Rise, Fall and Redemption of The Beach Boys, Jim Cullen’s Born in the USA: Bruce Springsteen and the American Tradition and Eric Clapton: The Autobiography, ghost-written by Christopher Simon Sykes, a Reading Room habitué. It’s my view – shared, I’m sure, by many younger members – that the London Library’s music collection would be enhanced by their inclusion.

THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 27

THE GHOST IN THE MACHINE David Miller, literary agent of many London Library members, describes his working day at Rogers, Coleridge and White Illustration by Martin Rowson

28 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

IllUSTRATION BY MARTIN ROWSON COMING MONDAY 9th caption to come

© Martin Rowson

Part of the wonder of my job is that no day is ever the same. There is the jokey assumption that a literary agent might just manage to struggle into the office by 10.30 a.m., read a few emails, call an editor to extract a large advance for an author before a selfcongratulatory lunch with a client, and come back to the office to check the emails, before nipping off home to dress for an awards dinner somewhere in town.

I reach the office (usually by 8.45 a.m.) to be greeted by forty or so emails (not all of them SPAM) – from authors, editors, publicists and film researchers (usually time-wasters), as well as authors’ fan-mail.

Writing this article made me count my external emails for the first time: in one week (January 2009) an average of eighty a day. They came from Australia, the USA and Canada, and – obviously – the UK, mostly London. Sixty-three per cent of them came from senders I knew. What surprised me was the percentage I didn’t know. In that period (slightly busier than usual), eight novels arrived: over 400,000 words to be read.

It’s a joke at Rogers, Coleridge and White that I have a chaise longue in my office, but it’s never used for reading. I attempt to make the morning mine – a time when I submit material to publishers, call people I need to talk to, be pro-active. These days the morning stops with the post (twenty years ago, it would have stopped at around 9 a.m., but it’s noon now), although the endless churn of email means the morning feels it never ends. Lunch can be a solo event – an hour spent in a pub with a pint of shandy to read a manuscript, or edit several proposals – or a non-event, with a snatched pork-pie from the office kitchen. More often than not it’s spent with an author, an editor or a colleague – a time when you talk through an idea, a book, a synopsis, a problem, or chat about the industry with a publisher or literary journalist. There have been agents

recently who have suggested that we should lunch less but, if we did so, I’d say we’d understand each other much less. Frankly, at the moment, we should lunch more – but cheaply: Pizza Express or the pub, rather than Sheekey’s or the Ivy. I had lunch recently with an editor who was amazed at my suggestion of Pret a Manger, but she quickly got used to it, and one author of mine adores the £4 bacon sandwich at the Metropolitan, a local pub.

The afternoon is usually a time to be reactive – to return calls, go through contracts, call New York (they’re waking up) and plan the next day. I try to ensure I’ve communicated with most of my clients every month, just to check in, see how their research or writing is going – something made easier with modern technology.

There’s an element of hand-holding to be done, especially in a market that is declining and fragmenting, when books are competing with iPods, and authors with websites. The rapid advances in digital and electronic devices seem confusing to most

authors – who knows whether it will be easier for a good literary author to find an audience in the next ten years? Of one thing I’m certain: the book won’t die.

The agent’s life should, and can, be selfless, something I have learned in nearly two decades of working with Deborah Rogers, and from watching the likes of the late Pat Kavanagh, or Mike Shaw, and – now – working alongside Peter Straus and Peter Robinson. If I have learned one thing from Deborah it is that the job is not about me. It’s not a job about being seen at a party, being written about, about what I do. It’s about writing. It may be a job about conveying what I think about writing, but an agent is one ghost in the machine. As an undergraduate, reading theology at Cambridge, I became exasperated by the very late Martin Luther when he claimed: ‘I did nothing: the Word did it all.’ Twenty years on, I know now what he meant. It’s a splendid motto for the literary agent, which I’d update, truthfully, to this: ‘I did nothing: read their book.’

MEMBERS’ News DEVELOPMENT PROJECT: PHASE 2 an update Front Basement move

The Front Basement rolling cases have been emptied and the area was handed over to the construction team on 2 March. Most of the contents has been temporarily redistributed into the new Back Basement rolling cases, into old Art Room shelving re-erected in the front of the former Ground Floor Reading Room, and into the T.S. Eliot House basement, which is now accessible to members for the first time. However, as there is insufficient space to retain everything onsite, some lesser-used material (and some that needs secure housing, such as the Pamphlets collection) is being stored at UCL’s large bookstore at Wickford in Essex. A next-workingday fetching service is provided: members leave requests for offsite material at the Issue Desk and the book(s) are ready to collect from 4 p.m. the following day (Saturdays excepted). We are working hard to ensure signage around the Library to the dispersed collections is as clear as we can make it, and staff are always happy to help when needed.

NEW TIMES ROOM

Construction has started in the T.S. Eliot House basement on a new Times Room. It will have purpose-built shelving for the heavy volumes with much greater ease of access, and improved lecterns and reading areas. Access to the existing Times Room will remain until the move to the new area, which is scheduled to take place during the week beginning 27 April. Once installed in the new shelving the collection will be accessible once again from 11 May.

Art Room move

The transformation of the Art Room has begun. The Art books are now installed in temporary accommodation in new rolling cases in the Back Basement, fully accessible to members, where they will stay until the completion of the project at the end of this year.

advance warning NO LIFT Essential work on the Library lift shaft and construction of the extension to the secondary staircase (from second floor to Basement) is scheduled to begin on 6 April. Thereafter there will be no lift available for members or staff until the completion of the project at the end of the year. Access to all floors in the 1930s building will be maintained, though in some areas by roundabout routes using internal staircases between floors. Minor book moves will be necessary, and again we will make every effort to provide clear signage. Staff will be happy to fetch material for members from upper floors if required.

30 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

CARLYLE EN VACANCES

While the Art Room is being refurbished, J.E. Boehm’s handsome bust of Thomas Carlyle has found a safe refuge at the Charles Dickens Museum in Doughty Street. Carlyle advised Dickens on what books to borrow from the Library while he was working on A Tale of Two Cities. Doughty Street is a particularly appropriate holiday destination for Carlyle this year, as 2009 is not only the 220th anniversary of the fall of the Bastille but also the 150th anniversary of the first publication, in serial form, of Dickens’s great novel. The Dickens Museum is celebrating this event with a special exhibition which will run from the end of July to December, and in which Carlyle will appear. He will return to the Library, to be displayed in a new niche, shortly afterwards.

Charles Dickens Museum, 48 Doughty St, London, WC1 2LX dickensmuseum.com J.E. Boehm’s bust of Thomas Carlyle.

GETTING ABOUT

While core construction work is in progress on the connecting links between the Library and T.S. Eliot House, there will be a period of six weeks (currently scheduled for end of April to the first week in June) when there will be no internal access between the two buildings. Users of the Eliot Reading Room and the T.S. Eliot House basement will need to enter and exit through the Mason’s Yard staff entrance during this period, but full details will be posted on the website and in the Library nearer the time.

Do remember to check the Phase 2 section of the website (londonlibrary.co.uk/phase2) for the latest news on changes and developments, or call the Issue Desk (020 7766 4745) prior to your visit to ensure that any books you need will be easy to access.

MONUMENT TRUST £3M DONATION THE CAPITAL CAMPAIGN’S LARGEST GIFT YET Nicolas BARKER A recent grant of £3m by the Monument Trust to the London Library is the largest it has ever received. It has enabled us to close the funding gap for Phase 2 of the project, transforming the part of the building abutting on the newly opened T.S. Eliot House in Mason’s Yard, and also brought Phase 3 – a further section of new book stacks – that much closer. For all this, the Library’s most profound thanks are due to the Monument Trust, and, posthumously, to its founder, Simon Sainsbury (1930–2006).

Doing good is hard work. Benevolence has to be bestowed where it will do most good. Edward Harkness, he of the scholarships and founder of the Pilgrim Trust, spent a lifetime conscientiously giving away the railroad fortune made by his father, working hard and with no other occupation. Simon Sainsbury, unlike him, shared with his brothers the credit for the great expansion of Sainsbury’s, but also with them the desire to reinvest the proceeds of it in the fabric, material and social, of Britain. He worked hard to ensure that the Monument Trust’s grants were well spent: the National Gallery, other great museums and galleries, the National Theatre and the National Trust, and many smaller bodies have benefited from this.

Social needs, especially unpopular and therefore unsupported causes, like the rehabilitation of prisoners, drug addiction and urban decay, have also been sustained by discriminating Sainsbury support.

All this we admire, and it gives a special cachet to our project that it has attracted so generous a grant, even by Monument Trust standards. Simon Sainsbury was a great reader of books, as much a part of his life as the English furniture and pictures with which he surrounded himself. As in business, so in charity, he took a long view.

The Monument Trust embodies this vision, and it is wholly appropriate that this extraordinary generosity will do so much to ensure the future well-being of the London Library. It is, like many of the Trust’s other beneficiaries, part of the national heritage, and it exists not just for us but also for our successors in generations to come. All libraries are going through a period of change, some of it radical, although none diminishing the need for the provision of books on every imaginable subject, to be read here and at home. This is what the Monument Trust’s £3m will achieve. As tangible as part of the building that it will provide, its real benefit is intangible, in passing on to posterity the ideals for which the Library has always stood.

HAY FESTIVAL Alhambra

7–10 May 2009

Stories, ideas, conversation and song Historias, ideas, conversación y música

www.hayfestival.com/alhambra

ABU DHABI

HAY

19 March 2009

21–31 May 2009

NAIROBI August 2009

SEGOVIA

BEIRUT

CARTAGENA

24–27 September 2009

November 2009

28–31 January 2010

THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 31

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LIBRARY JOY

By Nikki Gemmell

Nikki Gemmell’s new novel, ‘The Book of Rapture’, is published by Fourth Estate in July

‘

I enter and it is like going into a great vault – austere, religious, and full of treasure Edna O’Brien

’

And now to that communal room dedicated to the most viciously solitary of pursuits – writing. A place monk-like in the concentration of its inhabitants, each person absorbed within a world barely a metre square, their tiny microcosm strewn with notebooks and index cards and laptops and towers of books from which entire worlds will eventually emerge, each wondrously different from the other. So to my beloved hive of writers. Where no one speaks. And I am addicted to it.

It began twelve years ago. I couldn’t write where I lived: one tiny room off Fleet Street. The space was dark and cramped, I had to open my windows too wide to feel the day and twist my head to catch the sky. There was the relentless distraction of phone and kettle. And there was the bloke. The television addict.

He informed me, somewhat distressed, that I typed like I was wearing boxing gloves. That jackhammers on the building site nearby had nothing on me. That it was a little traumatic to witness the ferocity in my hands. And so for my birthday I received a gift subscription for a year, or, as he put it: relief.

The Library rescued that relationship. It also gave me some dear friends. For I am an Australian expat who was deeply lonely in this flinty city until I found the magical building on St James’s Square, the London of my imagination. You see, no one may be speaking in the Library’s writing rooms – but then there’s lunch. And after a rousing session on titles and deals and contracts and poverty and yet more poverty (except for the screenwriters among us, but we don’t hold it against them), it’s back to the writing room, to be balmed once again.

‘I am aware of an immediate feeling of well-being as soon as I find myself among those steep shelves’ Anthony Powell It’s a place to breathe out in this city of fractious energy. The Library stills me, gives me serenity and calm and focus, similar to the feeling I get after a lengthy swim or an occasional visit to a choral evensong. I cherish the building above any other in Britain.

‘The extraordinary thing is that you always seem to get lost’ Frances Partridge, a member for seventy years I still get lost, still love getting lost. The Library arrests time, dragging you into its rich, dark depths and holding you there, captive, absorbed, lost. It’s difficult to just ‘pop in’ for five minutes; there are always delightful diversions and rambles that stretch into chapters and twice now an entire book in one golden day.

32 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

I met the television addict there once. Waited in the entrance hall for half an hour before he appeared, slightly dishevelled, with a thin accumulation of dust from the shelves he’d been trying to extricate himself from. ‘Sorry, got lost in Philology,’ he explained, and until that day he hadn’t known what the term meant. Now, ‘getting lost in Philology’ has become a catch phrase between us, meaning ‘to lose one’s way, for some time, in an unfamiliar but deeply endearing place’.

‘The sheer extent of the collection staggered me. I have always had an obsession about books, and in this place I felt like a sex maniac in the middle of a harem’ Colin Wilson God the place is sexy. Even the smell of it, that intoxicating scent of paper and leather, of printed words, waiting. And deeply eccentric.

Once I had to do some research on sex, and asked the Reading Room Librarian, Christopher Phipps, if there were any books on the subject that may be of help. ‘Oh yes,’ he replied enthusiastically. ‘You’ll find them in Science and Miscellany, under two subjects. P for pleasure.’ A pause.

‘And F for flagellation.’ ‘I’ll take pleasure,’ I replied.

‘It is not typically English, it is typically civilised’ E.M. Forster That sense of civilisation is epitomised by the glorious Reading Room that’s joyous with light from tall windows. A room hushed with cerebration, thick with an atmosphere of scholarship – or sleep. I’ve seen a beautifully dressed, elderly gentleman place a white linen handkerchief on a leather seat before taking a very long time to lower himself into it.

I’ve seen a large man asleep, head thrown back, mouth agape, hands crossed protectively over a book on his chest like a dead man’s Bible placed by a widow. There is a deep, deep peace to the place.

The writer John Wells interviewed an elderly Library assistant about the room: ‘Miss Bolton … tiptoed about, approaching Hilaire Belloc when he talked too loudly with a printed notice saying “silence is requested”, and regularly patrolling the armchairs by the fire on winter afternoons, giving the back of the chair a jolt if the snores were disturbing other members. Her most touching memory is of one lady who always used to come in and sit on the floor by the fire and rest her head against a gentleman’s knees. I don’t think they ever spoke.’ There’s a novel in those last two lines.

‘I do not believe that there is another library of this size which contains so many of the books which I might want, and so few of the books which I cannot imagine anyone wanting’ T.S. Eliot I have borrowed A Portrait of a Lady and My Brilliant Career; both, of course, first editions. I have a habit of dog-earing pages but try not to with Library books, mindful of the value of the volumes I’m handling and the gift of trust bequeathed to me as a member. A legendary assistant librarian from early last century, called Mr Cox, apparently waylaid a young borrower who had brought back a dog-eared book. Mr Cox shouted at him, ‘Right, you wait here!’ He then heaved himself off his high stool and returned with a stack of books, all of them with pages turned down. They were banged on the desk with a roar: ‘I’ve been looking for the culprit for some time!’

‘Mr Cox particularly enjoyed humiliating any writers he did not approve of, asking J.B. Priestley, as he leant forward to sign a book out, to repeat his name more loudly. He did so with great embarrassment.

memBers’ neWs “Priestley!” Cox gave him a fishy stare, and asked “initial?”’

John Wells I have read about a communal space for writers in San Francisco called the Writer’s Grotto, a loft space with cubicles. They’re entered by plastic accordion doors. There’s a punch bag and spontaneous rounds of office golf. It all seems so very far removed from the writing spaces of the London Library, which I think I can safely assume will never be introducing office golf. To me, the building’s like a long cool drink after a sweltering day. I can’t quite describe the peculiar little skip of joy inside me whenever I walk through the front door, but I get it every time.

I urge you to take advantage of the upcoming Open Evening (see box, right): share your own skip of Library joy with someone who might themselves be inspired by this wonderful place.

‘To be a subscriber to the London Library and then not to be is like sudden darkness after lovely light’ Sean O’Faolin

THE GLADYS KRIEBLE DELMAS

DONATION During the first phase of the Retrospective Cataloguing Project, from late 1999 to April 2006, the card catalogue containing details of all the publications acquired by the Library between 1950 and 1984 was transferred to the online catalogue.

Now in its second phase the project is tackling the conversion of the printed catalogue, which lists some 300,000 titles (over 500,000 volumes) acquired by the Library between 1841 and 1950.

In May last year we received a donation of $18,000 from the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation towards the conversion of our collection of around 2,500 books printed during the sixteenth century. These include many rare and fascinating works, which tell the story of a Europe in turmoil. All are examples of the evergrowing skill of printers and binders alike. Treasures ‘rediscovered’ through the project so far include: Henry VIII’s Assertio septem sacramentorum adversus Martin.

Lutherum, aedita ab ... Henrico eius nominis octavo. In it the monarch defends the seven sacraments of the Catholic Church and refers to Martin Luther as a ‘wolf of hell’, a ‘poisonous viper’ and a ‘limb of the devil’. Its original sixteenth-century calf binding is intact and bears the royal arms with the Tudor rose, as well as Catherine of Aragon’s emblem, the pomegranate. There are no binders’ initials or trademarks, but the insertion of the city’s arms suggests that the binder was a citizen of London.

Commento di Hierony. B. sopra a piu sue canzone et sonetti dello amore et della belleza divina. Printed in Florence in September 1500, Girolamo Benivieni’s book of ascetic poetry is the earliest printed book found in our collections so far.

Az ket Samuel kônyueinek: es az ket Kirali kôyveknek az sido nielvnek igassabol: es az igaz es bôlcz Magiarazôk forditasabol: igazan valoforditasa Magyar nielure. This is a Hungarian translation of the biblical books of Samuel and Kings

drInKs In tHe readIng room an oPen evenIng For ProsPeCtIve memBers Would you like to introduce someone else to the wonders of the London Library? While we welcome prospective members for a tour of the Library year-round, this informal drinks evening in the Reading Room is an especially civilised way to show an interested friend or colleague what it is to be a London Library member, and to encourage them to join.

DATE: Thursday 14 May TIME: 6 – 8 p.m.

LOCATION: The Reading Room RSVP: rsvp@londonlibrary.co.uk or 020 7766 4719 Please RSVP with your name and the name of your non-member guest by Friday 30 April. There is no cost for this event, but places are limited!

Girolamo Benivieni’s Commento di Hierony. B. sopra a piu sue canzone et sonetti dello amore et della belleza divina (1500).

contra advert

printed at Debrecen, in the northern Great Plain region of Hungary, in 1565. This version is the work of Péter Melius Juhász (c.1536–72), a Calvinist bishop of Debrecen, who had a shrewd understanding of the power of the press. During his lifetime Debrecen, an important crossroads for the major trade routes, became a haven for Protestant printers seeking asylum from religious persecution.

The printer of this Bible, Raphael Hoffhalter, was one of these fugitives. Having escaped from Vienna with his printing types, he settled in Debrecen, probably in 1563.

Omnia D. Basilij Magni archiepiscopi Caesareae Cappadociae, quae ad nos extant, opera, iuxta argumentorum congruentiam in tomos distincta quatuor/ Basileae: Froben [i.e. H. Frobenium], 1552. This edition of the complete works of St Basil (c.329–79), Bishop of Caesarea and an influential theologian, is very rare.

However, its remarkable and rather incongruous binding of leather-covered oak boards depicting semi-naked female figures and scimitar-bearing males is even more unusual. And yet, what makes it truly unique is its dramatic custodial history. The provenance is very well documented all over the book in the form of manuscript annotations, the addition of a votive bone label nailed to the front cover, a bookplate and even correspondence regarding its past tucked into the volume.

This part of the Retrospective Cataloguing Project, due for completion in early 2009, will ensure that the contents of this rich resource are better known and promoted. For a fascinating insight into the Retrospective Cataloguing Project and the history of the Library’s collections and catalogues, see the dedicated pages on our website: londonlibrary.co.uk/ collections/retrospective THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 33

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VOLUNTEERS NEEDED Have you ever considered offering your time, energy and expertise to the Library as a trustee?

Each year a quarter of the trustee board retires at the AGM, so we have a continuing need for fresh volunteers willing to put themselves forward for consideration.

Applications for trustee positions falling vacant in autumn 2009 are now open, and this year members with experience and skills in the following areas are especially keenly sought:

• Finance, e.g. a background in successful business, financial management, investment management or accountancy • Building project management or any aspect of the management and renovation of listed buildings • The world of books and writing, e.g. professional involvement and influence in some aspect of that world • Major donor fundraising in a volunteer capacity, e.g. experience of developing donor contacts and success in the process of asking for major contributions A brief guide explaining the responsibilities and commitments involved in trusteeship and full details of how to apply is available to download from the Status, Governance and Funding section of the Library’s website, under the About us tab; it can also be sent to you by post on request to Sarah Farthing on 020 7766 4712 or by email to librarian@londonlibrary.co.uk. For consideration this year please submit applications for trusteeship no later than 1 May 2009.

WHAT ARE TRuSTEES FOR? Having been a silent member for more than 35 years, Charlotte Nassim noticed a newspaper article about the Library’s major building project and volunteered her experience in design management and procurement of public buildings. She became a Trustee in 2005, and now chairs the Building Project Steering Committee; she retires at the AGM this year. We put some frequently asked questions to her for a personal view: • Why does the Library have trustees – surely the staff run the Library?

Indeed they do! But the Library is a registered charity and the regulations governing charities require a board of trustees to take ultimate responsibility for directing their affairs. Trustees are legally responsible for ensuring that the charity remains solvent, well-run and faithful to its founding aim, maintaining a balance between serving the interests of the present generation and safeguarding the Library for the future. * What happens at trustee meetings?

Trustees debate matters of policy and strategy – such as the annual budget and accounts, marketing plans or major decisions about building development. Sometimes decisions are quite easy; sometimes there is a long discussion and opposing views have to be reconciled. The minutes of the last meeting are approved or amended, the Librarian gives a short report, and the recent work of the sub-committees (Finance, Books, Development, and Building) is explained and discussed as necessary. * How much work is involved?

It’s important to commit to being present at the six two-hour 34 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

meetings (which are set a year in advance). So, with reading the papers for each meeting, about six half-days would be the absolute minimum commitment. However, most trustees are also members of a sub-committee that meets several times a year, and trustees also try to be present as ‘hosts’ at a couple of fundraising or membership events every year. And I’m not counting time spent with staff or fellow trustees over a cuppa or a glass or two …

• do you have to be a vIP? Heavens, no! It’s not a public profile task, although it’s helpful to have one or two well-known names among the trustees when it comes to fundraising and marketing. It’s much more important to bring varied experience and perspective, and the ability to listen.

You certainly don’t have to be a scholar, writer or book expert either, as the desiderata for this year’s recruitment show.

• Why aren’t there more women trustees?

Fewer women volunteer than men: only 28% of applications since 2004, which has been almost exactly reflected in the proportion of women to men on the board, whereas women make up some 47% of the membership. All applications are handled in the same

memBers’ neWs way by the Nominations Committee – there certainly isn’t an ‘old boys’ network’ and we’d like to see more women coming forward.

• Why don’t members have more choice in electing trustees? shouldn’t the elections be contested?

Some members feel strongly about this, and have raised the matter at the AGM. But if trustee elections were contested, then their democratic nature becomes an issue. Obviously, all members would be eligible to vote, but in practice that would mean either a tiny proportion voting at the AGM (attended by fewer than 200 members), or the time and expense of a postal ballot.

Much more serious, in my view, is the fact that most of us have no basis for voting for one candidate rather than another. The Library isn’t a club and we do not get to know everybody and so, as an electorate, we probably wouldn’t be able to ensure a good balance of background knowledge and capabilities on the board.

Candidates don’t have a political agenda to present. As a

trustee, I must be concerned with the long-term interests of the Library itself; I cannot merely represent the current membership, although I bear their interests in mind, of course, because I am myself a member, and because it is in the interests of the Library to satisfy its members.

I suspect that some members think the trustees form a sort of self-perpetuating clique, but I have seen absolutely no sign of that. I didn’t know a single trustee when I started, and that would be true for almost all the new trustees in the last few years. So it’s not perfect, and the trustees recognise that but, under the current system, the trustee pool is continually refreshed, with each new intake bringing experience or skills selected to replace those of retiring trustees, or to meet new requirements.

• How have you found being a trustee?

I’m surprised by how strong the personal commitment has become, and I’m sure I’ll have withdrawal symptoms when I retire in October.

18tH annUaL LeCtUre

Wednesday 10 June 2009

JennY UgLoW The Restoration Decade: Triumph or Disaster?

A nation tired, demoralised, crying for change. A young man is called to power, greeted in the capital by vast cheering crowds. Can he unite the opposing factions and heal the nation, or will he be defeated by vested interests and old prejudices?

In this talk, Jenny Uglow examines a key moment of regime change in Britain – the Restoration of Charles II in May 1660 – and the struggles of the ten years that followed. Certainty had vanished. The divinity of kingship had fled with the execution of Charles I, and ‘Providence’ could no longer be trusted. As the country was rocked by plague, fire and war, people searched for new ideas by which to live. This was a time of experiment: from the BooKIng* science of the Royal Society to the new role of credit, from the InFormatIon Please send your application licence of the court to the failed attempts at religious toleration. Date: Wednesday 10 June 2009 Negotiating these, Charles, the ‘slippery sovereign’, laid odds and Venue: Royal Geographical Society for tickets and remittance of £16 per ticket to: Kensington Gore took chances, dissembling and manipulating his followers. Did London SW7 2AR Lecture Tickets the risks the king took forge the fate of the nation, on the brink The London Library Time: 6.30 p.m. of the modern world?

Jenny Uglow’s books include biographies of Elizabeth Gaskell and William Hogarth, The Lunar Men, a study of the Lunar Society of Birmingham, and Nature’s Engraver: A Life of Thomas Bewick.

Her forthcoming book, A Gambling Man: Charles II and the Restoration, will be published by Faber this autumn.

Doors open at 5.45 p.m. and drinks will be served in the rooms adjacent to the lecture theatre.

14 St James’s Square London SW1Y 4LG

* For further details including availability of tickets please see londonlibrary.co.uk/events or contact us on 020 7766 4789 or membershipassistants@londonlibrary.co.uk

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THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 35

This Season’s LITERARY EVENTS APRIL The Cambridge Wordfest (23–26 April, cambridgewordfest.co.uk) will be laying on another idyllic weekend of literary treats this year. Andrew Motion is going to be spending the last few days of his laureateship there in the company of Joanne Harris, C.J. Sansom, Libby Purves, Nadeem Aslam and Polly Toynbee. New for 2009 is a Book of the Festival award, the first of which has been scooped by The Great Lover, Jill Dawson’s deftly fictionalised account of Rupert Brooke’s life.

MAY David Aaronovitch, winner of the 2001 George Orwell Prize for Political Journalism, will be probing modern conspiracy theories at the Marylebone High St branch of Daunt Books (14 May, dauntbooks.co.uk). His new book, Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History, is designed to provide ammunition for anyone who’s ever found themselves at the losing end of a conversation about the moon landings.

The Charleston Festival (15–24 May, charleston.org.uk) is rumoured to have one of the best tea tents on the circuit.

Tucked away between Brighton and Eastbourne, Charleston was the one-time country home of the Bloomsbury painters Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell, the sister of Virginia Woolf.** In the grounds of the house, Jeremy Paxman* will be turning his attention to the Victorians, Alain de Botton* will be weighing up the pleasures and sorrows of work and A.S. Byatt* will be reading from her latest novel, The Children’s Book.

The London Review Bookshop (lrbshop. co.uk) will be playing host to two bigname writers this month. Rita Dove, the former US Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize-winner, will be reading on 19 May from Sonata Mulattica, a lyric narrative in 38 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

which she imaginatively recreates the life of a nineteenth-century virtuoso violinist. On 27 May, fans of Will Self’s latest works – the full-length The Butt and Liver, a collection of characteristically satirical short stories – will be able to listen to him in conversation about them with Nicholas Blincoe.

To mark the centenary of the publication of Rudyard Kipling’s** science-fiction novel Actions and Reactions, Professor Daniel Karlin is headlining a one-day Kipling Society event, ‘Actions and Reactions’: Kipling’s Edwardian Summer at Sheffield University’s Humanities Research Institute (20 May, D.Karlin@sheffield.ac.uk).

Emma Hughes

it as ‘Our English Watering Place’ in an affectionate piece written after one of his last visits. The Broadstairs Dickens Festival (20–24 June, broadstairsdickensfestival. co.uk) is the seaside town’s way of saying thank you. There’ll be a performance of Hard Times this year, and you’ll also be able to take part in a cricket match, friendly duels and guided walks.

Enthusiastic would-be-writers should head to the Humber Mouth Hull Literature

The Guardian Hay Festival (21–31 May, hayfestival.com) needs no introduction.

The 2009 line-up looks impressive – Sarah Waters will be giving visitors a preview of her brand new novel, The Little Stranger; Henning Mankell, creator of Inspector Kurt Wallander, will be speaking on crime and punishment; and burlesque superstar Miss Immodesty Blaize will be twirling her tassels.

Other confirmed names include Dylan Moran, jazz legend Hugh Masekela and David Simon, creator of The Wire. As ever, Hay Fever – a special programme of cultural events for young people – will be running alongside the main festival.

June Carol Ann Duffy will be making her first visit to the Wordsworth Trust (wordsworth.org. uk) on 2 June as part of their 2009 Poetry Season. St Oswald’s Church in Grasmere will be packed with admirers of Duffy’s playful take on gender politics, so you’ll need to get there early. Why not make a day of it and have a look at the original manuscripts of Tennyson’s** In Memoriam and Wordsworth’s Prelude? Both are on display at the Trust until 31 August.

Charles Dickens wrote David Copperfield in Broadstairs in Kent, and immortalised

Top to bottom The Port Eliot Lit Fest; St Oswald’s Church, Grasmere; and the Broadstairs Dickens Festival.

DIARY Festival (20 June–5 July, humbermouth.org. uk), which offers workshops and open-mic slots a-plenty. As far as speakers go, the focus is on upcoming local talent, and the text-based artwork that will be on display reflects the forward-thinking vision of the organisers.

July The 2009 Ledbury Poetry Festival (3–12 July, poetry-festival.com, 0845 458 1743), has been hailed by Carol Ann Duffy as ‘the best of its kind in England. Without compromise or flashiness, it provides a rare and genuine joining of place, poetry and people.’ This year includes readings, performances, music, talks and workshops

by Benjamin Zephaniah, Alice Oswald, Ben Okri, Richard Mabey, Jocelyn Bell Burnell, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin and many others.

Contact the festival by phone or via the website for a free programme.

Take an area of outstanding natural beauty and add Kate Adie, Joan Bakewell and Julian Fellowes. Throw in a pinch of Donizetti, season with competitively priced tickets and stir well. What do you get? The Buxton Festival (10–28 July, buxtonfestival.co.uk), of course. There’s a definite political feel to this year’s line-up – speakers include two of the Davids (Blunkett and Cameron) and Shirley Williams.

Last year’s groundbreaking Proms Literary Festival (bbc.co.uk/proms) – the well-read little sister of the Proms proper – examined the relationship between writers and composers, as well as showcasing a number of special literary commissions. Word has reached us that the BBC is making plans for a repeat performance (no pun intended) in 2009 from 17 July–12 September.

The Port Eliot Lit Fest (24–26 July, porteliotlitfest.com) is a dream come true for outdoorsy types. You can pitch your tent for free, and the performances by a mix of writers, poets, film-makers and musicians will take place in over 100 magical acres of Cornish parkland. Louis de Bernières has promised to play his mandolin, and Biba’s Barbara Hulanicki will be showing the assembled campers how to breathe new life into vintage clothes. * Current Library member ** Past Library member

Recent Literary Awards Congratulations to the Library members who were nominated for or have won literary awards since September 2008 Sarah Ardizzone, translator of Toby Alone

by Timothée de Fombelle, winner of 2009 Marsh Award for Children’s Literature in Translation John Berger, From A to X: A Story in Letters, longlisted for 2008 Man Booker Prize Andrew Brown, Fishing in Utopia: Sweden and the Future that Disappeared, longlisted for 2009 Orwell Book Prize Michael Bundock, proposal for In Search of Francis Barber, winner of 2008 Biographers’ Club Prize Sabina ffrench Blake, A Life of Henry Tonks, shortlisted for 2008 Biographers’ Club Prize Eva Figes, Journey to Nowhere: One Woman Looks for the Promised Land, longlisted for 2009 Orwell Book Prize Paul Greengrass, director of The Bourne Ultimatum, winner of ITV3 Crime Thriller Awards Film of the Year 2008 Adam Gyngell, ‘Romance and Romanticism: Byron, Keats and the Quest’, second prize in 2008 KeatsShelley Essay Competition Philip Hensher, The Northern Clemency, shortlisted for 2008 Man Booker Prize and on regional shortlist for Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book Rosemary Hill, God’s Architect: Pugin and the Building of Romantic Britain, winner of 2008 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Biography Peter Hitchens, Mail on Sunday, longlisted for 2009 Orwell Journalism Prize Meredith Hooper, The Ferocious Summer, winner of 2008 Nettie Palmer Prize for Non-Fiction Oliver Kamm, Times Online, longlisted for 2009 Orwell Blog Prize David Lodge, Deaf Sentence, on regional shortlist for 2008 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book Andrew Martin, Death on a Branch Line, shortlisted for 2008 Crime Writers’ Association Ellis Peters Historical Crime Award

Mark Mazower, Hitler’s Empire: Nazi Rule in Occupied Europe, longlisted for 2009 Orwell Book Prize Ferdinand Mount, Cold Cream: My Early Life and Other Mistakes, shortlisted for 2008 Duff Cooper Prize Patrick Ness, The Knife of Never Letting Go, winner of 2008 Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize; winner of 2008 Booktrust Teenage Prize for Fiction Thomas Owens, ‘The murderous Shelley: Poetic influence and poetic parricide in “Alastor” and “Mont Blanc”’, third prize in 2008 Keats-Shelley Essay Competition Henry Porter, Observer, longlisted for 2009 Orwell Journalism Prize David Runciman, Political Hypocrisy: The Mask of Power, from Hobbes to Orwell and Beyond, longlisted for 2009 Orwell Book Prize Salman Rushdie, The Enchantress of Florence, longlisted for 2008 Man Booker Prize and on regional shortlist for 2008 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book Andrew Sparrow, Guardian, longlisted for 2009 Orwell Blog Prize Kate Summerscale, The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, winner of 2008 Samuel Johnson Prize and shortlisted for 2008 South Bank Show Awards Literary Category Andrew Taylor, Bleeding Heart Square, shortlisted for 2008 Crime Writers’ Association Ellis Peters Historical Crime Award Katie Waldegrave, In The Light of his Sunset: Poets’ Daughters, shortlisted for 2008 Biographers’ Club Prize A.N. Wilson, Our Times: The Age of Elizabeth II, longlisted for 2009 Orwell Book Prize And not forgetting Rachel Johnson, who won the 2008 Literary Review Bad Sex in Fiction Award with Shire Hell, and Simon Montefiore, whose novel, Sashenka, was shortlisted.

The magazine would welcome any information from members who have won or been nominated for prizes, to be included in future issues; please send details to: development@londonlibrary.co.uk THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 39