Letter

Last week we showed the 1964 film of The Pumpkin Eater at the BFI.  Thirty-six awestruck Persephone readers watched what seemed to us to be one of the greatest films we had ever seen. ­The script (by Harold Pinter) was extraordinary, the direction (by Jack Clayton) ditto and it was one of the most profound, and saddest, films I had ever seen about the relations been men and women (in this case the married couple played by Peter Finch and Anne Bancroft). Yet it is very hard to see The Pumpkin Eater unless one is lucky enough to catch it on late night telly.   (However, the book we have just republished by Penelope Mortimer, Daddy’s Gone A-Hunting, will be discussed on Radio 4’s A Good Read this Tuesday afternoon June 17th at 4.30, repeated at 11pm on Friday 20th June).

In July I am going to Enid Bagnold’s The Chalk  Garden at the Donmar Warehouse.  The run is sold out but there will probably be returns; in any case here are three reviews, in the Independent, the Evening  Standard and The Times. There was also an article in the Guardian about Enid Bagnold by Margaret Drabble .  It mentioned The Squire: ‘Imagine To the Lighthouse written by Mrs Ramsay expecting her fifth child, and you get something of the spirit of this intense and passionate novel, which is unlike anything else ever written about pregnancy…a very surprising book for its time, for any time.’ And, yes, it is very much on our longlist if – and it’s a big if ­ – we were to get copyright permission. (Sometimes it is relatively easy to find the copyright holder and we have managed it in every case except one – How to Run Your Home without Help, heirs of Kay Smallwood please step forward.  But sometimes we are refused permission because the agent prefers to place the book with a larger, richer publisher, eg The Group by Mary McCarthy, or because it has now been gobbled up by a print-on-demand programme, or because the original publisher, who is usually larger and richer, does not want to give the book up, eg Virginia Woolf’s A Writer’s Diary, still not in print in Britain.)

For those of you who do not know Peter Boxall’s 1001 Books You Must Read Before you Die, the list is here and Miss Pettigrew is number 601.  The new edition of the book has just appeared ­– with the correct picture of Winifred Watson. Goodness knows where they found the previous picture, of an unknown couple on their wedding day.  Admittedly the couple looks straight out of Miss Pettigrew.  But they are in fact interlopers.

Finally, for anyone interested in the art of biography here is an incredibly interesting piece in the New Statesman by Mark Bostridge. And here is a link to an article by Adam Federman about Patience Gray (co-author of Plats du Jour) and her life in Carrara.

Nicola Beauman
15 June 2008
Lamb’s Conduit Street