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Letter
This is being written just after Remembrance
Sunday. Nowadays we remember everyone killed
in war but for many people, myself included,
the day, and the two-minute silence, are bound
up with the First World War. If there is anyone
reading this letter who has not read William
- an Englishman, may we urge you to
do so? It is one of the most extraordinary books
ever written about the Great War and will never
date. Our other book about those terrible four
years is Nicholas
Mosley’s Julian
Grenfell, not a book with universal
appeal but inevitably mesmerising to those who
start reading it.
Katherine Mansfield’s Journal and Patience
Gray and Primrose
Boyd’s Plats du
Jour are flying out of the shop, often in multiple copies
as they are such good Christmas presents. Both are to be sold at a
celebratory event at Queen’s College, Harley Street at the end
of this month since Katherine Mansfield and Patience Gray were old
girls. One of the people attending the event is the writer Amy Rosenthal,
who also went there (and has worked at Persephone in the past!); she
has just finished writing a play about Katherine Mansfield.
There are several other events in the near future:
the film of They
Knew Mr Knight (hence the poster below),
Teas in Bath and Chichester (for which there
are still some places left) and a party in the
shop in December (ditto); otherwise Emily and
I and our regular helpers (Tillie, Tudy, Sarah,
Alarys, Jennie, Lisa) are spending the days putting
several hundred books in envelopes each week
until Christmas.
There was a lovely review of the Journal in
the Daily Mail last week, and in the
new Irish glossy called Gloss. And we
were very happy to discover the New
Yorker interview, coinciding with his
recently published Through the Children’s
Gate, with Adam Gopnik. Last year he wrote
the Preface to A
London Child of the 1870s, and in his
book, and in the interview, he refers to his
original, 1987, piece about Molly
Hughes and the way her ‘beautiful memoirs
of Victorian family life’ illuminated his
and his wife’s early experiences of New
York. ‘Now, looking back,’ he says, ‘I
understand much more clearly the real kinship
I had with Molly, who raised a family, and watched
a husband and a beloved child pass away – a
kinship rooted (as I say in the book) in the
permanent precariousness of the professional
classes in a plutocratic society, but also in
the sheer difficulty of life, which I once underestimated.’
We were also delighted to be sent this review
for the Westminster University student newspaper Smoke by
Suneel Mehmi:
‘When I was very much younger, my grandfather
would take me on long walks. Here, in the shaded
fresh air amongst the trees, upon the cool, green
grass, the sprightly old man would entertain
me with stories from India and I would be absolutely
spell-bound.
My grandfather had an art for story-telling
- an elegant, a noble art which I have not often
come across in my adult years. However much the
great authors achieved, it was difficult to see
their talent in the same light as my humble grandfather’s.
Yet the work of Marghanita
Laski does not compare unfavourably with
the spoken magic of my grandfather.
It does not fall into the inferior pool of
literary talent which I have described. Neither
does Little
Boy Lost simply match the narrative
skill of my grandfather’s orations. The
novel, in fact, exceeds his fictional powers,
renewing not just the pleasure and satisfaction
that I have found in the British novel, but also
my faith in this art form.
Much of the excellence of the novel lies in
its timeless emotional immediacy. Published in
1949, it is about a widower’s return to
France in order to trace the son that the war
has lost for him. This widower, Hilary Wainwright
- a rather bitter poet and intellectual - finds
a likely candidate in an orphanage run by Catholic
nuns: the impoverished Jean. This Jean is a most
lovable child. It is impossible not to take him
into one’s heart.
However, for Hilary, who has been ‘cuckolded
by death’, paternal instincts and trust
are things that are difficult to muster. Hilary’s
response to the boy is defensive. The novel follows
the torturous ordeal whereby Hilary must break
down the walls of memory and pain about himself
in order to find love again, to reject his own
tragic fate in such a tragic age and to recapture
his capacity for happiness in the present. Hilary
has to decide if he can accept the boy as his
own and feel again, or whether he must retreat
into a cynical and meretricious numbness.
The subtleties, the flows of this decision and
this tale are engrossing, but these are not the
greatest of the novel’s perfections. Laski
inscribes a matchless evocation of post-war France
through the pure simplicity of her prose and
literally rivets the reader with her control
of emotion and her gift of writing. She discharges
great suspense as to the final decision that
Hilary will take and when one finishes the novel,
there is genuine feeling.
This is a work of quality, even a genius of
our time. It is, in fact, one of those books
that when you start reading you simply can’t
put it down. Mesmerizing and intriguing from
the start to the end. This was my personal experience
when reading Marghanita
Laski’s work.
It is also a work which has the power to enrich
life. As the celebrated novelist Elizabet Bowen
wrote in her review of the novel, ‘to miss
reading Little
Boy Lost would be to by-pass a very
searching and revealing, human experience’.
It is a meticulous attempt to showcase the effect
that this book has on many people’s lives.
This is simply a book that you must read.’
And do also read this brilliant article by John
Humphreys about how his parents were green without
knowing it, and the lessons we can learn from
this: www.timesonline.co.uk
Nicola Beauman
15 November 2006
Lamb’s Conduit Street
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