Letter

I took the car down to Bloomsbury today because I wasn’t feeling amazing, and on the way listened to Desert Island Discs. The castaway was Oleg Gordievsky and it was one of the most astonishing Desert Island Discs I have ever heard (this was the repeat and alas they don’t put it on line).  First of all I felt incredibly moved and upset by the horrors of the twentieth century and all that happened during the Cold War; then I was moved by Gordievsky’s bravery, although of course that isn’t quite the word (but I’ve no idea what other word to use) to describe what he did; and when he reached his final choice, the Berlin Philharmonic under Daniel Barenboim playing Lincke at the ‘Berliner Luft’ concert – I sat in the car park and cried.  This was not displaying the stiff upper lip Gordievsky talked about admiringly.

Anyway, a coffee bag later (is there anyone else in the world who has these? I have never met them and yet they are sold at Waitrose, so someone must like them too; they are like tea bags and you have to leave them in the cup for five minutes or they are horribly weak; I love coffee bags because they are like a faint breath of real coffee without the accompanying headache), anyway a coffee bag and a large slice of bread and butter later (from Kennards next door, naturally) I felt a whole load better, but still cannot get that music, and that audience participation, out of my head…

It has been royalty statement week; there is a lot going on to do with the film of Miss Pettigrew; the three April books are being printed; the shelves have been built at the new shop (it’s a second shop, we are not moving); and we are choosing paint, lighting, flooring etc.

If you live in West London do try and get to the Susan Glaspell plays that are forthcoming at the Orange Tree Theatre. First there is the British premiere of a full-length play called ‘Chains of Dew’ , produced in 1922 by the Provincetown Players.  It is billed as ‘a witty and surprising comedy by the author of The Verge and Inheritors’ (and, of course, of Fidelity and Brook Evans), ‘a tale of poetry, birth control and bobbed hair by one of America's finest writers. Will the liberal intelligentsia of New York manage to lure Seymore Standish, poet, away from his boring Banking life in Bluff City, where bridge and golf hold sway and where the League for Birth Control has not even a foothold?’ Then, in April, there are three short plays, ‘Trifles’, ‘perhaps, Glaspell's masterpiece [I would dispute that but then I would, wouldn’t I]: in the aftermath of a death, possibly a murder, the authorities of law and order investigate, but it is the two wives, accompanying their husbands, who deduce the most from the trifles in the kitchen as their men go about their important business. This play is a gem. One of the best short plays ever written’; ‘Suppressed Desires’, written with Susan Glaspell’s husband George Cram Cook, ‘takes a very funny look at the then new vogue of Freudian analysis with hilarious results’; and ‘The Outside’, which is ‘set in a disused life-saving station now belonging to Mrs Patrick as a refuge from life, a sanctuary on the edge of existence. But when the former life-savers return with a body to be revived, the owner and her companion are forced to re-assess life on the edge.’

The last Reading Group in the shop was about Consider the Years and Anne Harvey, who wrote the Preface, led an animated discussion.  This is what Time Out said when our edition was published: the poems ‘have a charm and wit that is irresistible – if you haven’t come across Virginia Graham, think Hillaire Belloc meets an English Ogden Nash by way of Noel Coward.  Light, deft, funny and embedded in suburban England, these are stories of aunts, crumpets and idyllic England – even though many were written during wartime.’

And in the February Literary Review Fred Taylor reviewed On the Other Side.  I hope it isn’t boastful to say that he concluded that ‘Persephone Books has yet again performed a great service in publishing a handsome new edition of a neglected treasure’ and that the Afterword ‘is a model of concise and erudite contextualisation that makes clear how urgently we need to read and reread such revealing tales from “the other side”.’

Nicola Beauman
59 Lamb’s Conduit Street
15th February 2008