History man

NICHOLAS LEZARD One Fine Day

By Ian Marchant

September Publishing £20

Ian Marchant’s books are an utter delight, but I have occasionally wondered how to pigeonhole him. He is sui generis, although you can turn him around and discover different facets.

He would not relish the idea of pigeonholing anyone, especially himself. So his potted biography at the end of One Fine Day begins, ‘Ian Marchant is Reader in the History of Technology and Culture at the Imaginary Free University of Radnorshire.’

This is a whimsical way of putting it, but it will do. In fact, as he puts it himself very early on in this book, ‘whimsical psycho-topography is my genre, after all’.

Alfred Wallis, Christopher Wood and Gaudier their places at Kettle’s Yard. Also, leaf skeletons, 18th-century glass rummers, a Queen Anne silver teapot, flowers and Egyptian beads.

Ede was a fixer and facilitator, a collector and dealer, a curator and – to his slight embarrassment – a critic.

He was also an interpreter and educator, who believed that art should be enjoyed as widely as possible. He had begun, naturally enough, with the early Italian masters. Although contemporary art came to excite him most, he was never proscriptive, mixing old and new art if they were happy together. After all, at Kettle’s Yard he was creating a home with a collection in it, not an art gallery.

He’d had enough of gallery life as an assistant curator at the Tate from 1921 to 1936, where he was frequently at odds with the hierarchy. That was in part because of his campaigns to broaden what was the national collection of British art to include Continentals, such as Picasso, Brancusi and Gaudier.

For all his charm and reputation as the nicest of men, he cannot have been the easiest of colleagues. At one point, he was almost ousted, but was saved through his friendship with Lawrence of Arabia, whom he had dismissed as a warlord before reading Revolt in the Desert and sending him a fan letter.

Friendship is the great theme of this book. As Freeman concludes, ‘Jim’s proudest title wasn’t curator or director or resident, but “friend to artists”.’

I’ll get back to the whimsy later. The bare bones of the book are this.

He discovers that his seven-timesgreat-grandfather was a diarist in the first part of the 18th century. He finds his great-great etc’s diary. And he mines it to discover what he, Ian, can discover about what life in those days, the last before industrialisation, was like – what it was really like, from a quotidian perspective – and how this reflects on our lives, too.

So we learn what it was like to run a farm, vote, feed carp and be married, from a male and a female perspective. And you’ll find out what it was like to be a Christian at a time of religious and political upheaval, watch a cricket match and grow your own underpants from flax.

Marchant uses that last line about underpants himself for effect. He knows how divorced we have now become from the process that surrounds us with the things we have.

His ancestor, Thom Marchant, knew the provenance of his underpants because he grew the plants that, after various time-consuming processes which Ian M guides us through, eventually became the ancestral shreddies.

He asks us to look about ourselves and wonder whether there is anything within our line of vision or indeed memory about which we can say the same. At one point, he makes himself a mug of coffee. How was the mug made? How did he get the coffee? He clicked a link on a website – but how does he have the credit?

How are the glass jars the coffee comes in made? How is the spoon with which he pops the foil lid with made? Who grew the coffee? The blurb on the jar says it comes from the ‘Inca heartland of the PERUVIAN ANDES’. He asks, ‘How in the holy name of Viracocha does it come to be here?’

In the society we now live in, the huge trading machine, we no longer know anything close to the full picture in the way Thom Marchant and his contemporaries knew pretty much all there was to know about what they were putting in their mouths. These days, we may well know about one link in the chain – and that’s it.

For Marchant’s part, he looks at the coffee label, and says, ‘I do know what it’s like to be a penniless hack knocking out nonsensical copy for a pittance.’

There is no limit to Marchant’s curiosity, nor to his ability to engage us with the fruits of his research (and his wife’s: she helped him a lot with the family history).

This is the kind of book of which I can now confidently say, using a word I have never used before and will almost certainly never use again, you will not like this book if you are a strict antidisestablishmentarianist. He can make alive subjects that made generations of schoolchildren, myself included, go boss-eyed with boredom.

And, anyway, you will like this book if you are a strict anti-etc., because this book is too engaging, in both senses of the word, to be anything but loved. I Marchant is inspired by T Marchant to take the long view. This includes contemplating his own mortality, which is brought home sharply to him by a diagnosis of advanced prostate cancer.

He addresses this with honesty and occasional humour (but not so much humour that you think, ‘That’s weird’). Elsewhere, there are many jokes, quite a few of which will have you laughing aloud. He is a master of the deflationary footnote – yet also the instructive footnote and the ‘Blimey, what a coincidence’ footnote.

He throws a rope to the past and lets it teach us things we would do well to remember. Neighbourliness; civic virtue; decency in the form of honesty.

This book is wonderful.

Nicholas Lezard is author of It Gets Worse: Adventures in Love, Loss and Penury