Week Thirty-One - Jeanette

Voices Of The Old Sea by Norman Lewis (1984)

Recommended by Mark & Roxy

Mark is this Mark.

I first spoke to Mark via telephone, interviewing him for Seasons They Change. Not only did we talk of 1971’s Dreaming With Alice sessions – constituting some of my favourite of all acid-folk – he told me of the new record he was making with The A. Lords, which turned out to be another masterpiece: 2011’s I Lived In Trees.

I met Mark in person when we both performed at Cecil Sharp House: he with The A. Lords, me in the inaugural reading from Seasons (before the thing was even published and I had to, very glamourously, read from a printed PDF). Mark is modest, charming, and intelligent, as well as an awesomely talented musician and painter. Through Mark, I met Roxy, too. Phenomenally kind, generous, mega-smart, with a whip-fast humour… oh, they’re just two of the best people going.

Mark and Roxy invited me to stay with them, and their pug Missy, in Normandy last year. I could have cried it was so good. Not only was it the beautiful surroundings, it was simply being around them in their home. As they bantered with each other, it was proof positive to me of enduring love.

Their joint recommendation, Voices Of The Old Sea, has been a welcome constant of the past fortnight. For these two weeks have otherwise been engorged with sensation. A writing retreat in Suffolk with Jude, a serious illness in my family (and another upsetting trip back to bloody Norwich), a visitor from Japan, and all capped off by the sheer exhilaration of the Woolf Music festival.

With the pace of a particularly timid glacier, Voices Of The Old Sea tells of the change in (and to) the secluded Spanish village of Farol. As he explains in his foreword, Norman Lewis tackled the subject for psychological (as opposed to anthropological) reasons.

After three war years in the Army overseas I looked for the familiar in England, but found change. Perhaps it was the search for vanished times that drew me back to Spain, which in some ways I knew better than my own country – a second homeland to be revisited when I could. Here the past, I suspected, would have been embalmed, and outside influence held at bay.

When Lewis first takes us to Farol, in the middle of the twentieth century, he is correct. This tiny community is wholly reliant on fishing and wits for its economic and social survival. The currency of the village is of and for itself, with barely a by-your-leave to anything other than its immediate neighbours.

What was I doing here? he asked, and I told him I was on holiday. In a place like this? He looked through the window at the vacant beach. The fishermen were sleeping off the exhaustion of the previous day and had pulled the boats out of the water and gone off without bothering to clean up the mess. A number of cats like mangy little grey tigers were doing what they could to remedy this.

               […]

               ‘Nobody comes to a place like this unless they have to.’

Lewis’s prose, as he writes of his first summer in Farol, reflects the village’s everyday rhythms. His words undulate like waves gently rocking the fishing boats. Farol, with its stalwart rituals, customs, melancholia, and flat sea mist, is the book’s main character; everyone else (Lewis included) forms the supporting cast.

Farol had been like this for decades, centuries; wider forces might have nudged it (the Spanish civil war and Franco were not renowned for leaving people to their own devices) but the people there remained largely untouched. They felt the outside world at best as an irrelevance and at worst as a malevolent spirit, yet they could brush off any attempted incursions by it as easily as hanging up on a salesman.

Until that incursion was a salesman, or a salesman of sorts. Farol may have resisted fascism but it could not last against tourism. At first, the presence of outsiders (and, lest we forget, Lewis himself is one such beast) is greeted with bemusement.

There was a great increase of amateurs from Sort trying their hand at fishing. In the autumn the men had come down and fished with rods using the wrong bait, at the wrong time of day, and usually there were no fish to be caught anyway.

An entrepreneur named Jaime Muga arrives. He turns the local fonda (a basic tavern) into the Hotel Brisas del Mar, increasing the price from 8 to 50 pesetas a day (‘causing the locals to burst into peals of disbelieving laughter’), and encourages the shop to stock cheap carvings of Don Quixote. The villagers roundly mock Muga’s paying guests, just as they mock the useless fishermen.

But such laughs are hollow. For Farol is part of what we now know as the Costa Brava.

When I cleared out my dad’s stuff after his death, I found that he had not cleared out my mum’s stuff after her death. Thus, I was treated to a whole wealth of crazy crap like quilted flamenco postcards hoarded from her cheap holiday to the Costa in the late 1960s. Although I don’t know for sure, I’m betting that my mother wasn’t concerned with appreciating local untouched culture. Her life was hard enough and she didn’t want to spend her week off on a scabby cat-strewn beach. Rather, she did what thousands of other young working class Brits of the time also did: she drank sangria, she made eyes at Sergio, and she came home with a tan.

As slowly as he writes of Farol’s traditional life in his first season in the village, Lewis now tells us of the rise of Costa Brava tourism. Yet, now, Lewis’s stately pace is not relaxing, but deeply sinister. Its languor is like that of the zombies in Night Of The Living Dead. The tourists will overwhelm with sheer mass even if, individually, they’re easy to deal with.

The butcher’s had undergone a spectacular facelift. Gone were the bloodstains, the flowers stuck into jam jars, the artistic display of giblets, the beribboned tripes, and the severed heads presented on paper ruffs. The shop was as impersonal as a tax office.

Voices Of The Old Sea is a beautiful and often upsetting elegy. I believe that we shouldn’t, by rote, weep for the past. That’s the thing with the old days: they’re the old days. One also shouldn't forget people like my mother, for whom affordable tourism represented a much-needed escape from factory or domestic drudgery. But we do need works like Voices Of The Old Sea. Such stories may speak to us softly, but they can still, sometimes, be heard over modernity’s din.

Week Sixteen - Jeanette

The Art Of Travel by Alain de Botton (2002)

Recommended by Mark

Hello from LEAGRAVE!

Leagrave sounds nice, doesn’t it? Perhaps you’re thinking it's a small fishing port on the west coast of Scotland, or a quaint Cornish hamlet accessible only via a meandering B road.

It is neither. It is a soulless Luton suburb, and I am in the bar of a chain hotel, having paid £3.80 for an indifferent (small) glass of red wine and a flickering internet connection.

I’m not finding much artistry in this particular travel experience.

I know that a lot of people don’t like Alain de Botton. His detractors see him as some kind of intellectual parasite who condenses and over-simplifies the ideas of eminent minds for the lumpen proletariat. He doesn’t do much to deflect this reputation. Look at this recent article, 'Ten Commandments for Atheists': who’d ever have thought that being polite was a nice thing to do? Thanks, Alain!

However, I’ve never personally read any of his work; and I do know that de Botton’s recommender Mark needs no commandments (from de Botton or anyone else) to be polite, empathetic or funny. He is one of the two people I’ve known longest on this list. I find that quite upsetting; only two people from my home city that I wanted to get something as simple as a book recommendation from. (Well, there were three, but one didn’t recommend).

Mark used to work on Saturdays at the bread shop down the road (note, ‘bread shop’, that’s the Norwich way. ‘Bakeries’ are for people from Guildford). He was a little bit older, he was in a band, he went to indie gigs at the UEA. I was a young teen, with puppy fat and emotions written all over my face. I loved talking to him, and of course I had a little crush on him. It was one of those early pure crushes: he was way above me and there was no hope of fulfillment, and that was its point. Given that my next crush was to be serious, complex and painful, well, I appreciate those innocent earlier feelings even more.

He even got on TV! Look at this (Mark’s the guitarist with the Mr. Bubbles (??) t-shirt):

Real Universal - Magic Scenes

He left school, and left the bread shop; eventually he left Norwich too, and went on to have lovely children and a gorgeous wife. It was ace to get back in touch a few years ago, and particularly ace to know that he still made music. Now Mark is better known as the subtle and brilliant electronic pop project Mono Life.

Anyway: the past is another country. Here I am, in the Leagrave present with Mr. de Botton. Can he help me find the pearls among the suburban swine?

The Art Of Travel encourages reflection. Why go away in the first place, and how might we get the best from travel? Too often, de Botton says, we simply assume we’ll have a good time on our holidays, and we don’t. He relates his experience of Barbados.

My body and mind were to prove temperamental accomplices in the mission of appreciating my destination. The body found it hard to sleep, it complained of heat, flies and difficulties digesting hotel meals. The mind meanwhile revealed a commitment to anxiety, boredom, free-floating sadness and financial alarm.

He’s in Barbados and I am in Leagrave. It’s tempting to shout: down a couple of rums, and shut up.

But de Botton’s point is important (even if he expresses it in an irritating manner). We want travel and holiday to be entirely transcendental, to take us away from our problems and our normal selves. When we find our normal selves along for the ride – and usually our problems don’t take the hint to stay at home either – it doesn’t matter what the surroundings are.

How do we square this particular circle? De Botton ‘asks’ artists, writers and thinkers. He surveys how great men (and it is only men that de Botton consults) have looked at the foreign and the native alike, and then connects their words and art with various aspects of the travel experience: anticipation, arrival, sightseeing, return. When de Botton concentrates on those he admires, his style transforms. He no longer moans about non-existent problems. He’s enthusiastic about the ideas of those he writes of, and wants his readers to be so, too. It doesn’t come across as cynical or exploitative. And far from being obvious, de Botton uses a wide variety of carefully chosen source material: he’ll quote from correspondence, speeches and minor works as well as the well-known.

If it is de Botton’s aim to open up minds, then I have two words for you: Gustave Flaubert.

The chapter ‘On The Exotic’, where de Botton discusses the work of Flaubert – in particular, Flaubert’s ambivalence towards France and his attraction to the Middle East – left me wanting to abandon the rest of the Two Readers project and immediately read every scribble Flaubert has ever written. How, how, have I never read this man before? My God! He’s hardly Johnny Nobody. On the basis of the material in The Art Of Travel, Flaubert could easily be my favourite all-time writer.

My life, which I dream will be so beautiful, so poetic, so vast, so filled with love, will turn out to be like everyone else’s – monotonous, sensible, stupid.

                                          (Letter to schoolfriend)

I was really taken, not only with Flaubert’s style, but also with his more general thoughts on life. And this is where credit must go to de Botton for interpreting them in an attention-grabbing and direct way.

[Flaubert] proposed a new way of ascribing nationality: not according to the country one was born in or to which one’s family belonged, but according to the places to which one was attracted. It was only logical for him to extend this more flexible concept of identity to gender and species and for him to declare on occasion that, contrary to appearances, he was in truth a woman, a camel, and a bear.

     

I’ve Madame Bovary sitting on my shelf at home. I’m now so anxious to read it that I’m physically shaking with excitement.

The other ‘guide’ de Botton follows who especially affected me was John Ruskin. The fearlessly sharp tongue this man had! This from his speech to a group of wealthy holidaymakers in 1864:

The Alps themselves you look upon as soaped poles in a bear-garden, which you set yourselves to climb, and slide down again, with ‘shrieks of delight’.

Ruskin was not just being obnoxious (although he clearly relished being so). He was keen to shake people from their apathy, to get them to really, truly, see – not to merely glance, and not to simply understand things as they related to their own egos. And this is what de Botton is trying to do, too; he ends the book by travelling ‘at home’: around Hammersmith, peering at gravy adverts and nosing into office windows.

So let’s have another look at Leagrave.

Nope.

But I’ll have another glass of wine, and shut up.

Weeks Eleven and Twelve - Jude

Coasting by Jonathan Raban (1986)
Recommended by Richard Thackeray

I've read this book slowly over the last fortnight, dipping in and out, like a ship on the waves, like I think you should. (Yes, I'm still behind, but I'm getting better, and I've got a few clearer weeks coming up, all the better to help catching-up.)

There could've been no better book for me this last couple of weeks, or no better experience for me to plunge into than this one. Welcome to a strange, sleepy world with a lovely salty guide - one man, Jonathan Raban, who bought a ramshackle boat, a vehicle he'd never captained before, and took it to sea.

I'd never heard of Jonathan Raban before, and I'm mad that I hadn't, because this book is fantastic. Good old Richard Thackeray recommended it to me, another of life's lovely, salty travellers, and - lucky me - my sort-of brother-in-law (or to give him the full family tree treatment, my husband's sister's husband). Richard is fantastic too. Always on hand with a shockingly placed euphemism or plain old-fashioned rude joke, he is also a thoughtful, clever soul under the salvo of fart gags. A consultant by trade, he's also training to become a ranger, and likes nothing better than yomping up the great Yorkshire hills with the lovely Hannah. He also loves music and books, and has a big old curious brain. He picked this one out for me on mine and Dan's recent trip up North, about a bloke travelling around the whole blustery, briny coast of the UK. Thanks, Thackers. It's the book I've loved most this year.

Jonathan Raban is that rare kind of writer: someone who can do funny as well as he can do melancholy. When Coasting begins, you expect the latter tone to prevail. Here's an opening segment about his late father, a man who came to represent the idea of 'old England' to his son, suggesting we're in the company of a solitary soul bob-bob-bobbing along. There's a particularly incredible passage about the moment Raban realises, as an adult, how young his father had actually been when he was a boy, which I'm going to quote in full, as I dream of writing stuff as good as this:

"At thirteen, I was easily fooled by clothes, and this aged cassock made my father himself seem like a very old man to me, a tall and shaggy Abraham whose presence in a room was enough to make any child shiver a little in awe at a famous patriarch. He was thirty-six. Sitting now in another dusty room, its air thickened with pipe smoke of the same brand, I find myself staring back puzzledly at a man much younger than myself - a man with a pained boy's face, his own hurt showing, as if it was himself and not his son who was being dressed-down by schoolmasters.  His hair is black and thick, his skin unlined. His preposterously old clothes only serve to underline his youth as he returns my gaze - astonished to find himself the father to this bulky balding fellow in his forties."

Raban's lovely, dry humour is hinted at as this paragraph comes to a close, but it really flourishes soonafter. Raban talks of his desire to coast as an adult, of it being "only a matter of time before the metaphor insisted on making itself actual".  He gives us hilarious outlines of the other mad sods who had done the same: the "crashingly hearty" John MacGregor, the "mortally bruised" Empson Edward Middleton, the Mussolini-loving "rambling" Hilaire Belloc, and the "testy" R.T.  McMullen, who died of a heart attack as he was at the ship's wheel, "his limbs locked in rigor mortis, [still] keeping a firm grip on the tiller".

And then we're off, joining a "moon-faced gang" of divorcees and lost men on various English quaysides, before finding Raban's new home: the abandoned Gosfield Maid at Fowey. (Raban renames it in an anagrammatic fashion: Die, Dismal Fog.) The journey that follows is not chronological, but scattershot, and oh, the writing's wonderful. We find the Irish Sea like "an upturned pudding basin". We navigate the difficult waters off Portland Bill, "a pendulous dew-drop hanging from Dorset's nose". We skim the gentle waters of Lyme Bay "as sedately as a tram", we encounter the shallows of the Thames "glossy with oil".

We also wonder what happened to the South Stack, which appeared, like people do sometimes, without trace. "First you are steaming along under a blue sky, and then you are sunk. For a few minutes you leave a trail of bursting bubbles - then nothing. Not even bubbles." A few lines to jolt the senses, there.

Sometimes we have to head for land. We get marooned for a bit on the Isle Of Man among accents that Raban writes out in musical notation, and are entertained by tax-dodging businessmen in casinos that use pre-decimal currency. We gatecrash Scottish country house parties. We even meet men who navigate the seas on maps that are crumbling to dust.

But the quality that makes this book really majestic is its anger. It is set in 1982, during the Falklands War. The other role the sea takes - in the romantic, dramatic narrative of conflict - is the unnegotiable current that tugs this book along. Raban sees the new armada leave for South America on his boat's rigged-up TV, and acknowledges the yank of patriotism that he feels, which is firmly against his nature. He mention letters written by Welsh Guards on their way across the Atlantic, and picks apart how antiquated their tone is, how very "new Elizabethan". He also notes how The Sun newspaper is "squealing with infantile excitement" as his boat makes a journey so many men, over so many centuries, have made before.

More than anything, Raban shows us how his feelings of wanting to coast, to escape, have always been there, just like others' desire to conquer distant lands, and prove one's might and mettle, have too. I'm with his side of things. His journey seems all the more human to this particular soul in watery London, bob-bob-bobbing along. And I know this a book I'll return to again and again, like the sailors, with the tides, and with the bubbles.