Tuesday, March 26, 2024

Old Otherworld Inns

Anyone travelling through England will be quite likely to encounter a Red Lion, a Unicorn, a White Hart, a Green Dragon, or an Angel. They have not strayed into the realms of a high fantasy novel. These, and many similar strange beings, are to be found on inn signs. But what do they mean? It is a subject that has fascinated me ever since I collected the names as a teenager. Their imagery has, in fact, never been properly explored.

The standard origins given for some of them do not bear much scrutiny, and there is often a richer history and tradition in play. I have explored the origins of The Saracen’s Head sign (in Sphinxes and Obelisks, 2021) and The Red Lion (Echtrai, Vol 1, 2022), in the latter speculating on the possibility of an ‘English Monsterie’, a pattern book of strange beasts.

I have also explored the theme in fiction, in ‘Red Lion Rising’ (The Fig Garden, 2022) and in a fictive talk, ‘The Understanding of the Signs’, given to the Newcastle Literary & Philosophical Society.

For here is a remarkable form of popular heraldry. As the poet Edward Thomas put it, when he was describing a walk through the outskirts of nocturnal London, ‘the names of the inns were as rich as the titles of books in an old library’ (The Heart of England, 1906).

It is, however, a tradition that is rapidly being diminished. Pubs are closing in their hundreds every year and even some of those that survive change their names to suit the corporate identity of chain ownership or other commercial demands. 

The Closed Pubs website records a doleful toll in every county. Some will be remembered fondly, but it can be surprising how soon the memory of pubs, their signs and their history, can vanish. They have nothing like the same attention given to redundant churches, for example, though the church and the inn were once dual stalwarts, and sometimes rivals, of any village or town quarter.

In tribute to the English inn sign tradition, and as a playful experiment, I made a list of the lost pubs of the smallest county, Rutland, then jumbled them up and devised some newly formed names that sound traditional but are not, or certainly not commonly.

This produced some quite plausible and picturesque names that sound as if they might exist, somewhere. The resultant piece, ‘Old Otherworld Inns’, has just been published at The Tuesday Poem edited by Rob Mclennan. 

(Mark Valentine)

Saturday, March 23, 2024

Shadow Lines - Nicholas Royle

In July 2021 we drew attention to Nicholas Royle’s book-collecting memoir White Spines, which chronicles the author’s quest for Picador paperbacks, offering on the way many diverting reflections on second-hand bookshops and their owners, on wandering in back-streets in search of them, on the habits of book-collectors, and on many other matters of interest. Salt have now published Shadow Lines, Searching for the Book Beyond the Shelf, a sort of sequel, in which Nicholas Royle writes in a highly enjoyable way about further aspects of his book-collecting.

Keen book-collectors know that the printed text of a book is not its only attraction: the covers themselves, worn and stained, may have the lure of a work of abstract art; ownership inscriptions may forge a link for us over the years with a former reader; booksellers’ labels may preserve the memory of a long-lost bookshop; marginalia may enhance our appreciation of the text, or simply puzzle us. Sometimes on endpapers there are scribbled figures or characters that look like an elaborate code.  Gift inscriptions make us wonder about the giver and the receiver, and what became of them.

In White Spines, Nicholas Royle drew attention to another source of extra bookish pleasure. He suggested the term “inclusions” for any items found by chance inside books: letters, postcards, tickets, receipts, business cards, advertising ephemera and so on. Such pieces of paper flotsam often have a curious interest, revealing a fleeting moment in a previous reader’s existence, or suggesting a tantalising segment of biography.

The title of Shadow Lines refers to a top tip from the author for collectors of inclusions: look at the top edges of the pages in a closed book: things tucked inside will show as a fine black fissure. Open the book and see what you find. But he carries his fascination several steps further than most idly interested browsers. For example, he buys books he already has because he wants the inclusion: most collectors will understand that. But he also buys books that are of no particular interest to him, including technical works, for the sake of the inclusion. And he follows up the clues offered on these stray scraps, texting, telephoning or messaging numbers he has found, often with surprising results.

Other sorts of encounters happen because he reads while he walks, an occupation, he explains patiently, that may be done perfectly safely and considerately. He finds this leads to conversations with strangers, mostly women, who ask him what he is reading and why. Sometimes it is just a few words of shared interest, but occasionally a wider conversation follows. The sight of a book seems to stimulate curiosity and shared enthusiasms. From the brief, chance contacts formed from following up inclusions or from his ambulatory reading, we are treated to a series of fascinating micro-histories, glimpses of lives, each one of which, like most lives, has implications of enigmatic possibilities.This is a book about books and bookshops that will bring joy to every reader and collector, but it is also about the strangeness and sublimity of individuals, and our tender contacts with each other.

Mr Royle also has the habit of picking up pieces of paper he finds on his walks, typically shopping lists and fragments of flyers, but often of somewhat cryptic text. This led one literary colleague of his to propose that supporters of his work should creep out each morning to scatter mysterious messages along his way, and thus keep him fortified in his quest. It was said in jest, but I now begin to wonder whether some great bibliographical genius may not be sending out agents ahead of him to plant inclusions in the bookshops he visits, and to station well-trained actors on his routes to waylay him with bookish conversation. He thinks this all happens by chance, and celebrates serendipity and the lure of the inconsequential, but really an inscrutable mastermind is choreographing every move, in a work of high art-magic.

Someone—or something— is writing a novel called Nicholas Royle.

(Mark Valentine)

Sunday, March 17, 2024

One Book Leading to Another

I must admit to being an inveterate reader, in most cases, of all parts of a book, including the apparatus, the ‘by the same author’, the footnotes and end-notes, the marginalia and, especially those enticing publishers’ catalogues sometimes printed at the back. Browsing through these, in particular, has led me to some interesting, unsuspected titles. There is something in the description, or in the press opinions, that suggests a glimmer of the fantastical or mystical which must be investigated.

In this way, for example, I was led to Bernadette Murphy’s An Unexpected Guest (1934), a timeslip haunting, to Ivo Pakenham’s Fanfaronade (1934), another enjoyable timeslip tale, and to Herbert Asquith’s Wind’s End (1924), where the description of uncanny happenings in the English countryside didn’t quite work out as I supposed, but was nonetheless of interest.

On the same principle of serendipity, I also look out for any bookish memoirs that might have mentions of otherwise forgotten titles: and recently the £1 shelves outside the Cinema Bookshop, Hay-on-Wye yielded just such a book. I usually browse through these rapidly, picking up anything of potential interest without pausing to deliberate too much, given the asking price. Admittedly, considerations of space ought to enter into my calculations too, but this is a matter no keen book-collector allows to intrude itself.

Here I picked up, among, well, several other things, a publisher’s memoir, Adventures with Authors by S C Roberts (1966), an urbane and ambitious gentleman who made a career in the Cambridge University Press and in due course became its head. He was, in fact, appointed to one of his posts at the press by M R James, who, in his university administrative role, was also on the governing body of the imprint. He reproduces James’ letter offering him the job, which rather sternly reminds him that he is expected to make the press his life’s vocation. Later, on James’ departure from the role, Roberts wrote him a valedictory sonnet, which he also reproduces.

The book was of considerable interest for its discussion of life and business at a great university press, complementing, for example, accounts of Charles Williams and colleagues at Oxford. I wrote about a fictional press at a smaller university in my ‘Masque and Anti-Masque’ (Possessions and Pursuits, a shared volume with John Howard, Sarob Press, 2023).

But I also hoped Roberts' book would have allusions to little-known authors, and so it proved. Two in particular caught my interest. Roberts discusses Susan Hicks-Beach (nee Emily Susan Christian), who sent the press her 200,000 words long A Cardinal of the Medici: being the memoirs of the nameless mother of the Cardinal Ippolito de' Medici (1937), an immensely learned work written in the form of a novel, a somewhat awkward mix: too imaginary for the scholars, too dense for the general reader. But it was impressive, and Roberts took a chance on it. So far as I can see, it remains little-known. Under her maiden name of Susan Christian, she had contributed a story to The Yellow Book in 1895. She was later the model for Britannia on the Edward VII silver florin.

I was sufficiently interested to seek out a copy, and it turns out her book is a highly convincing, picturesque chronicle somewhat reminiscent of Baron Corvo’s historical romances, though without his exotic phraseology. Presented as a memoir of a lady in waiting at the court of an ill-omened Italian duke, it is richly fascinating, a lost romance of the Italian Renaissance, a remarkable achievement, possibly rather long and leisured for current taste, but absorbing and beguiling. The author was evidently steeped in the culture, politics and society of the period, but conveys this through vivid and convincing incidental detail.

Roberts also gives a brief account of the parson and psychic A F Webling, who offered him Something Beyond: A Life Story, an autobiography telling of his journey from his job as a warehouse clerk in London to taking Holy Orders and becoming an Anglo-Catholic priest, then discovering psychic research. He had been Rector at Risby, Suffolk, and later had a success with a historical novel, The Last Abbot, set in nearby Bury St Edmunds. He writes lyrically in his memoir of his childhood apprehension of wonder and mystery in the landscape, and this I think may be more to modern taste than the rather archaic history yarn.

Now admittedly this is an example of one book leading to only two others, or possibly more if I decide to explore the authors’ other works too, but it does not take too much arithmetic to work out that such a proceeding is certain to be cumulative. Indeed, it is the sort of sum that used to be taught in schools, albeit with less interesting objects such as apples. If Mark has one book, and that book leads him to two or more books, and those books in turn each lead him to a further two or more, how many books has Mark now? It is a problem to which the answer is not, and never can be, ‘too many’. Perhaps, on reflection, it would be better taught under the Higher Metaphysics.  

(Mark Valentine)