Swallows and Amazons

Well, I ought to write a little about this, but only for five minutes. It really is incredibly impressive because it was so original. It's obvious Alan Garner learnt from Arthur Ransome some of his most important techniques: painstakingly complete realization of physical action - I'm thinking specifically of the classic underground tunnel chapter in The Weirdstone of Brisengamen - and making character live through dialogue in action - the technique that leads eventually to Red Shift. Though that, of course, seems a shocking distance from Ransome's vision.

Imagine a book with six characters in which there is no change in their relationships, and you cannot say of any one character that they are the particular friend, still less the enemy, of any other at any stage. Imagine a book in which the terms of adventure are essentially and watchfully guarded, as in fact is usually the case for children. And yet, because of the realism, this is exciting and feels dangerous: the dangers are those of nature, e.g. the tremendous storm or the night-sailing among the islands, which nearly goes so wrong.

Here, they are bringing firewood from the mainland:


....

"It's a good thing it's so calm," said the mate, looking at the water, which was not very far below the gunwale.

Sculling over the stern is slower than rowing, but in the dead calm Swallow moved easily, heavily loaded though she was, and no water came aboard, though some nearly did when Roger suddenly changed his mind about the side of the boat he liked best.

"We'll take her to the old landing-place," said Captain John. "That's a good place for landing a cargo, and we want the wood handy for the camp."

"It would be a dreadful business carrying it all the way from the harbour," said the mate.

.....

dear diary

A tree shattered on the ground, from yesterday's stormy winds: horse-chestnut I think. I was out driving late last night. I listened to Exile on Main Street, and decided that maybe it wasn't so very like Villette, after all. Then I listened to a country compilation, which happened to include someone's rendering of the Patsy Cline song I Fall To Pieces - or rather, the first verse of it - (this is one of those country compilations that costs £1 in Dr Barnardos, so you don't ask too many questions) - but of course that made me want to hear Michael Nesmith sing it, and I remembered I had Loose Salute in the car, so I listened to it for the millionth time, and after that I couldn't help going back to Magnetic South for the two millionth time. I compared my experience of this brace of albums with Exile on Main Street (from around the same period) and wondered if an album I was discovering so late in the day could ever acquire - for my brain - the ineffable burnish, the singular communicativeness, of these albums that I'd known for thirty years. [They should have been the first two vols in an extraordinary Star Wars-style triple trilogy, but it foundered after four volumes. The others were Nevada Fighter, the last of the First National Band trilogy, and Tantamount To Treason (the only release with the 2nd National Band). Since I seem to be in a senile phase of picking up my early life's dropped stitches, perhaps it's time I went in search of the never-heard-by-me Pretty Much Your Standard Ranch Stash.

Then I listened to Joan Davis' Promiseland, and even after all this it still sounded fantastic.

I've now remembered that the first trilogy was meant to represent tradition, the second trilogy the present-day and the third trilogy futuristic. This was one of those impossibly grandiose schemes that artists love to project, like Spenser's 24-book Faerie Queene, Wordsworth's Recluse, etc. They remind me of the usually-sensational unbuilt buildings that form such a large part of most architects' legacies. I'm waiting, not very stoically, to find out if Catherine Daly's and Richard Makin's trilogies end up being composed partly in the irrealis.

Of course most people find lost works, like lost sheep, unreasonably intriguing. (Who ever bothers to talk about Smile now?) That was why one of my regular conversations with Mutti was about the Swallows & Amazons books that WEREN'T on her shelf, The Picts and the Martyrs, and Great Northern?. I think perhaps she hadn't cared for them as much as the others, but anyway she didn't mind responding to my irritating questions.

close on me now.

Bit of a hiatus, but not of deep artistic, or any other, significance. It's been Christmas, and then before that it was moving home, back from the leafy walks of 2.4 West Swindon to the steeps of Frome (or as I prefer to think of it in limestone terms, from the Upper Jurassic to the Carboniferous).

Somewhere in the middle of this, I finished my essay about Harry Martinson and Chickweed Wintergreen and Karin Boye and Swedish popular song, and put it on Intercapillary Space (in a rudimentary form, it has been coming to birth here on this blog since August). I think I've managed to blend enough matters of acute personal interest into this essay to more or less defeat the well-intentioned interest of any other person on the planet.

Another great blog has come to an end, or to put it another way (because I'd like to see this in a celebratory rather than elegiac spirit), has been triumphantly completed. This is Chris Goode's Thomson's Bank of Communicable Desire. Does anyone ever read completed blogs, though? You should read this one. In principle, I am against blogs coming to an end. Death comes soon enough, so why forestall it? That's why I don't like themed blogs. Let your blog be anything, let it change and grow.

I am reading something you might not expect (or might you?): Arthur Ransome's Swallows and Amazons, the first of a long sequence of books for children written in the 1930s. Since I'm being opinionated, let me say that it usually makes me sad to see grown-ups reading books for children. The reason I got to this place was that I accidentally discovered that these books had been read not only by my grandmother (who lovingly collected them all), but then by my father and his brother, and then by my sister. As for me, I remember the books very well, as impressive physical objects (they are early, though not first, editions). As a child staying at my grandmother's house, I often used to linger over the maps in the endpapers, and I used to ask Mutti what the stories were about and I enjoyed her telling me and talking about which ones were her favourites. But I'm now certain that I never read them myself; the only page I recognized was the first one. I liked books, I was a bookish child, but it turns out that often I only dreamed over these family treasures. (In the same way I recently discovered that I never had read the whole of Selma Lagerlöf's Wonderful Adventures of Nils.) To read these books now is to be re-admitted to secrets of my own family history. I discover, for example, where my father learnt to fill a kettle from a lake; Ransome is very informative about sailing and camping. And I discover one constituent of the ideal of a family that my father had in his head; he had to find it where he could. I asked him if he and his brother ever got the chance to make use of all this sailing lore. He laughed wryly. Of course there was no possibility of that, there was no money at all. (But at some stage the boys found out that their estranged father, Mutti's ex-husband, had gone and bought himself a boat; it rankled.)

Around Christmas I also finished Villette, one of the few nineteenth-century classic English novels that for some reason I've missed out on up until now (most of the others I read in university days). - Perhaps I should qualify this by saying that I'm referring to the acknowledged list of classic novels as represented by the Penguin English Library, circa 1977. And even so, I can think of quite a few others: Adam Bede, Daniel Deronda, anything by Thackeray or Disraeli or Reade, Wives and Daughters, Jude the Obscure... But anyway, Villette's reputation was HUGE, even though a lot of people hadn't actually read it. Anyway I'm fitfully writing about Villette for the Brief Hist. (And, thanks to my other sister, finally listening to Exile On Main Street in the car, another masterpiece that I missed first time around and that I somewhat associate with Villette in terms of reputation, obscurity, sprawl, over-ripeness and a feeling about it that is half awed and half queasy.)