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Episode image is a detail of a photograph taken by Charles Adrian.
With an almost constant background thrum of pages being flicked through and fingered, Charles Adrian begins Page One In Review by talking about the first three books he received from guests on the podcast.
When Charles Adrian talks about a golden condor, he is thinking of the eighties cartoon Mysterious Cities of Gold, which you can watch the opening credits to on YouTube here.
Correction: When Charles Adrian talks about Page One 101, he is in fact thinking about Page One 100, which you can listen to here.
Another book by Carol Shields, Unless, is discussed in Page One 105 and Page One 184.
Books discussed here were previous discussed in Page One 6, Page One 7 and Page One 10.
A transcript of this episode is below.
Episode recorded: 18th March, 2020.
Episode released: 21st April, 2020.
Book listing:
The Human Comedy by William Saroyan (Page One 6)
Larry’s Party by Carol Shields (Page One 7)
Underground Kingdom by Edward Packard (Page One 10)
Links:
Mysterious Cities of Gold opening credits on YouTube
Episode transcript:
Jingle
You're listening to Page One, the book podcast.
Charles Adrian
Hello. Welcome to the 157th Page One. I'm Charles Adrian and I'm alone today for the first time in many, many episodes. If you go to pageonepodcast.com and look back through the series, you'll find that early on I used to do quite a few episodes just me talking about books but in recent series - recent seasons - it's... they've all been interview episodes, where I've been speaking to another person about books that we love.
So... you find me today on the 18th of March, 2020, not quite on lockdown here in London but certainly affected by the global corona virus... the Covid 19 pandemic... thinking to myself: “Well, if not now, then when?” This is an excellent opportunity for me to be doing things on my own, given that I am trying to social distance. I... What I thought... Let me explain. So, for years, I've been doing these episodes where I talk to other people about books, and I give them a book and they give me a book. And I have all of the books - almost all of the books - that I've been given - one or two of them I have given away or given back. And I have them all in a bookshelf and I've been thinking: “Well, I should... I should... I should do something with these books.” I feel like I should report back to anybody who has been listening to the podcast about how I... how I found them... what I thought of them. Some of them I... I don't remember very well. I haven't read them in the order that I was given them but I'm going to review them, as it were... Review is the wrong word. These aren't going to be reviews, they're going to be... just... I'm just going to talk about the books and, as I say, how they struck me, whether I remember anything about them, whether I liked them or not. In any case, I'm going to do that in the order in which I was given the books and some of them I did read an awful long time ago.
The first one that I'm going to talk about today...
[page turning]
... The Human Comedy, which is by William Saroyan, was given to me by my very good friend Vera Chok back in 2012 - I don't remember the date that we actually did the interview - and I must have read it very soon afterwards. And that's... You know, that's eight years ago now. And I don't remember anything about the story. The... The book is so familiar to me - the... you know, the look of it. And as soon as I see it I remember that Vera gave it to me and that we had a wonderful conversation in the Wilton Way Cafe in Hackney, which is where Page One started. You can still find that episode - it's Page One number 6. It's on the website pageonepodcast.com. There is a lot of background noise. The Wilton Way Cafe - which is no longer called that, I think... I can't remember what it's called now... I haven't been there for a while... In any case, it was a very noisy place in those days and probably still is. There is now a transcript for that episode, which might help.
In any case, I'm talking first about the book that Vera Chok gave me in Page One number 6. It's The Human Comedy by William Saroyan. This is a very foxed book - I think that's the word that's used in the... in the book-trading community. It... It was sold, actually, as a “Used Acceptable” book - that's the label that has been stuck on the back - so it was already a second hand book when Vera bought it. I feel very bad because, having transcribed her episode really quite recently, I don't remember anything that she says about this book. I haven't done any due diligence. I haven't, sort of, gone back and specially listened to the episode so... I don't know whether... Perhaps that's a bad thing. Perhaps I should have done. But I also haven't reread the book so this is all very... I don't know... I'm very unprepared for this but I feel as though... I mean, you know, we can... we can all be over-prepared, can't we. It might be good to fly by the seat of one's pants occasionally - as, in fact, I feel like William Saroyan might have put it. [laughs] I have no reason for believing that but it feels like an American expression to me.
Right. So, as I say, it's not a book that I remember the story of. I think it's... I think it's about a little boy called Ulysses. Throughout the book, there are these lovely illustrations, including on the title page. On the title page it says:
WILLIAM SAROYAN
The Human Comedy
and then at the bottom it says:
REVISED BY THE AUTHOR
and then:
LAUREL
who might be the publisher. No, I don't... Oh yes! I think it is. And in the middle... in the middle of the page, there's this lovely drawing. It's a line drawing... a pen drawing of a boy - difficult to estimate his age, isn't it, but six, seven years old - just lying on the ground. He's clearly on the grass and he has something in front of him that looks like a piece of paper. And he has his head in his hands and he looks bored. It's beautiful. And throughout the book there are various pictures. On the contents page there's a picture of - presumably - the same boy on his hands and knees peering fascinatedly at a man in a... in quite a big hat who is milking a cow. And the cow is just as fascinated with the boy as the boy is with the cow. And he's called Ulysses. I don't know if I said that but I'm sure that he is called Ulysses. In fact that's... Yes, on the first page it says:
The little boy named Ulysses Macauley...
And then there are various other characters. There's a chapter called Homer - so presumably Homer is another person - and a chapter called Mrs. Sandoval... I'm just flicking through here... a cap... a chapter called Mrs. Macauley, who is either his mother or grandmother, one assumes... Mr. Grogan... Big Chris... Big Chris seems to have little Ulysses in some kind of contraption. It looks like something that you might use to weigh a small animal. It's a, kind of... It... It looks like a whale... a very small whale carcass. There are three ribs, almost, and then something to join them together and it's got a pulley.
Anyway. I thought I might just read a very tiny bit of this, particularly because I can't remember anything about it. So I don't... I think I enjoyed it. I didn't - with apologies to Vera - I didn't love it. It wasn't... I didn't immediately think: “This is my favourite book in the whole world now.” But I... Yes, I think I... I'm fairly sure I enjoyed it. And perhaps if I read it again, I would enjoy it more. Difficult to know, isn't it. But perhaps if we're all stuck at home for weeks and weeks now I might end up feeling like I want to reread all of these books.
Chapter 4 is called At Home and there's a picture here of... so it's a piano and, standing next to the piano with her elbow on top of it, is a woman who looks quite pleased with herself and... or maybe she's just drawing a breath in preparation to sing something. And at the piano with her hands on the keys, in an apron, is a woman who really looks quite grumpy. She's pictured in profile. Perhaps she's just concentrating. But I like the way this... this chapter starts.
MUSIC CAME from the Macauley house on Santa Clara Avenue. Bess and Mrs. Macauley played All the World Will Be Jealous of Me. They played the song for the soldier Marcus, wherever he happened to be, because it was the song he loved best. Mary Arena came into the parlor from the house next door, and stood beside Bess at the piano...
Okay, so that must be the woman with the... the pleased-looking... I think she looks pleased with herself. Anyway. So that must be Mary Arena.
Mary Arena came into the parlor from the house next door, and stood beside Bess at the piano and soon began to sing. She sang for Marcus, who was all the world to her. The small boy Ulysses listened and watched. Something about everything was mysterious, and he wanted to find out what it was, even though he was half asleep. At last he summoned up enough energy to say:
“Where's Marcus?”
“Marcus is in the Army,” Mrs. Macauley said.
“When is he coming home?”
“When the War is over.”
“Tomorrow?”
“No, not tomorrow.”
“When?”
“We don't know. We're waiting.”
That feels very appropriate for the situation that so many of us are in today.
[page turning]
The second book that I'm going to talk about today is... was given to me... so... on the... in the... during the 7th Page One... seventh episode... by Caroline Kilpatrick. Again, you can find that episode... I'll link... I'll... I will give an individual link to all of these episodes but you can find that episode and all the episodes at pageonepodcast.com if you look up 'Season 1' - I think it's 'Season'... I think I used the word 'Season' rather than 'Series' - Season 1. This is Larry's Party by Carol Shields. Also very foxed. Beautiful green cover showing a formal garden - lots of hedges and some topiary. Very... I was going to say architectural... that's not quite what I mean. Lots of sharp lines. Oh! Geometrical is the word I was looking for. Geometrical. This is described as “Exhilarating” by the Sunday Times. It's the winner of the 1988 Orange Prize - although I never know, when they put... when people put that at the top of books... book covers... front pages or whatever, whether Carol Shields is... or has, at some point, been the winner of the Orange Prize or whether Larry's Party was the winner of the Orange Prize. But, in any case, one or other of those have won the Orange Prize, which is very prestigious.
Carol Shields... I looked up Carol Shields a little while ago... I can't remember... Oh, I wish I had thought to look up the number of this episode. It might have been Page One 101. I think it's very likely Page One 101. I did a survey of all the books that I'd received up until that moment and all of the different nationalities of the different authors and I think Carol Shields was one of the people who has a, kind of, joint... you know, a mixed nationality, as in she's Canadian but I think... Yes, she's lived in... It says here, actually:
Born and brought up in Chicago, Carol Shields has lived in Canada since 1957.
So that much I do remember about Carol Shields and Larry's Party. I remember very little else.
I really... I mean, I just... I have absolutely... It's so strange, isn't it? I know I've read it. And I don't know if I enjoyed it or not, this one. I don't... I have no memory of whether or not I enjoyed it. I think I probably did. But I've just been flicking through it. I have a bookmark, which is definitely mine because it's a... it's a shopping list: porridge oats and Brazil nuts, rice milk, onions, stew stuff - with a question mark - mayonnaise. And then, on the other side, sort of... That's all on the left hand side and then towards the bottom on the right - because it's in a different place in the supermarket or perhaps because I was planning to buy it from a different shop - hand soap and Post Its. Perhaps this was the last Post It of the pack that I had been using. So I... For some reason, that's in... Maybe I just left it at random in this page but it's quite a nice... There's an interesting part... Down on the bottom of page 52 and then the top of page 53 there's a paragraph which is very largely underlined.
When Larry thinks about his folks, this is the piece of their life he can never quite take in: that his father, out of love, out of the wish to protect his wife, would uproot himself, and turn his back on a guaranteed job, a snug house, his weekly gin and tonic, and all that was familiar, that he might have elected freedom or forgetfulness, but instead chose to witness his wife's plodding, painful, affectless search for that thing that would pass as forgiveness. Larry glimpses something heroic at the heart of his obstinate and embarrassing father, who rescued his young wife, who stood by her. Stu Weller is a man who, without a gobbet of doubt, believes in bringing back the death penalty. He rattles on about welfare bums, and sometimes refers to blacks as...
redacted
and maintains, somewhat illogically, that queers ought to be sterilized, the whole lot of them.
I can say ‘queer’ because I'm gay.
Which is why it surprises Larry that his father has committed so manly and self-sacrificing an act, and he asks himself whether he could do the same for his wife Dorrie. Probably not. He admits his love will never be as pure as his father's, and certainly not as good as the scripted golden love in his head.
I really... I just came across that paragraph by chance because of the bookmark but I really like that. I think that's a beautiful... description or evocation of the... the paradox that we're faced with, so many of us, when we love people. There are things that we admire about them and things that we don't admire about them, and perhaps ways in which they're hateful and ways in which they are also deeply admirable at the same time. And it strikes me more and more that that's something that I find very helpful to remember. I find it very easy - especially when I'm scrolling through Twitter, as I have been doing again, much more recently, over the last few days, since the... since I became really very aware of the pandemic... It becomes very ea... It's very easy to put people in the... in the ‘hate’ column and people in the ‘love’ column and... I suppose I like to remember that we are all made up of many aspects. And I like... And also, of course, relationships with... with family are always complicated and, you know, making one's own way and so on. So I like that. I think that's really... I think that's really nice.
I also found a page which... oh, I've just lost... have I? No. Oh, no. Here it is. Sorry. I dog-eared it and then I un-dog-eared it while I was saying that and then I thought I'd lost it again. So, page 139, there's a really nice sentence I came across which has also been underlined, which is why I saw it as I was flicking through.
Beth Prior, Larry's now-wife, likes to claim she's a third-wave feminist, which means she's anxious to understand the mysteries of men as well as women.
That just tickled me. When was this published? This was published in, I'm assuming, 1997? I don't know. It was chosen Book of the Year in 1997. Yes. First published in Great Britain in 1997.
[page turning]
Right. Now, the third book that I'm going to... I can't remember if I explained that I'm planning to do three books an episode for this Page One In Review, partly as a way to keep the... I mean, I could do all of them at once, couldn't I? We could have a mega episode. But I'd probably fall off the... I'm standing on a set of steps to reach the books because they're up at the top of my bookshelf. It's one of those things that you can get from IKEA. I see them all over the place. They're really good. Just... It's a... It's a wooden thing. It acts as a stool and a set of steps. I mean, not to... You know, I'm not paid by IKEA to advertise them but I do find them very useful. I only have one but I've seen them around the place.
Sorry. Underground Kingdom by Edward Packard. What... Did I finish that sentence? The reason that I'm doing three books... Right. Yes. The reason that I'm doing... I thought I'd do three books is because all of the Second Hand Book Factories - or most of... or almost all of them - are also made up of three books. You know, as in, there's a book that my guest likes, there's a book that I think they should have, and there's a book that they think I should have. So I thought it would be nice little... you know, a nice little bit of mirroring or echoing to have three books in each of these episodes. We'll see whether that actually works out numerically when we get much closer to the end of the... of the pile.
So, in Page One 10... So we've had 6, 7... And then Page One 8 was a conversation with Tom Webb, which I very much enjoyed but he didn't give me a book. We did talk about a book... What did we talk about? The Dice Man by... Luke...? No. Luke somebody? But anyway, it's called The Dice Man. Again, I've transcribed that episode recently so I should remember. But he didn't have a copy there and he didn't... so I didn't get that and I haven't gone out and bought it. Page One... So that was Page One 8. Page One 9, I was on my own. And then Page One 10, I spoke to Nathan Pennington, who gave me one of the Choose Your Own Adventure books, which I was very excited about.
And I did... I don't remember the story at all but I remember that I did very much enjoy reading this. This is number 18 in the Chose [sic] Your Own... Choose Your Own Adventure series. It's Underground Kingdom by Edward Packard. Beautiful cover, which we talked about in the episode, I think, with mountains and a river and some forest and some strange... I suppose hominids and somebody... and a person in clothes on a beautiful golden bird. Which reminds me of... There's a cartoon that I used to watch when I was a child and there was a... somewhere in there there was a condor that was, I think, not a real bird, but you had to slot something into some kind of space and then this bird came alive and... What was that called? Anyway. I don't remember what the cartoon was called. But it reminds me of that. This, I... Yes. I love it.
I'm going to read you a little bit from just the very beginning because on the... Nathan read me the first page of the actual story:
You are standing on the Toan Glacier in northern Greenland staring down into the black void of the crevasse…
and so on. So you're right there... you know, from the moment when you actually start on the crevasse and then you discover that you can go down into the Underground Kingdom. But I'm going to read you the... the prev... you know, there are a few pages of warning and explanation. So this one says:
WARNING!!!!
Do not read this book straight through from beginning to end! These pages contain many different adventures you can have as you try to reach the Underground Kingdom. From time to time as you read along, you will be asked to make a choice. Your choice may lead to success or to disaster! The adventures you have will be the result of the decisions you make.
I mean, isn't that the case in so many of our lives?
After you make your choice, follow the instructions to see what happens to you next.
And then a
SPECIAL WARNING!!!!
This the bottom of the page. So, the top half of the page is that WARNING!!!! and then this bottom half the page is SPECIAL WARNING!!!!:
The Underground Kingdom is not easy to reach. Many readers never get there. Others never return.
Before starting out on your journey, you may want to read Professor Bruckner's theory, which is set forth on the pages that follow.
Professor Bruckner is a rather boring writer, and I wouldn't suggest that you bother to read his theory, except that, if you ever get to the Underground Kingdom, it might save your life.
Good luck!
I love that. I love that... I love the idea of writing something that you also describe as boring. I think that's so much fun. Here is Professor Buckner's theory - in case anybody finds themselves at any point in the Underground Kingdom and needs their life saving:
The discovery of the Bottomless Crevasse in Greenland by Dr. Nera Vivaldi supports my theory that the earth is not solid, as had been thought, but that it is hollow. The Bottomless Crevasse is probably the sole route from the earth's surface to a vast “Underground Kingdom.” The only other possible link would be an underground river, flowing in alternating directions in response to the tides, but this seems unlikely.
How, you may ask, was the earth hollowed out? My studies show that more than a billion years ago a tiny black hole collided with our planet and lodged in its center, pulling the whole molten core into an incredibly massive sphere only a few hundred meters across.
If you were to stand on the inner surface of the earth, like a fly on the inner shell of an enormous pumpkin, you would see the black hole directly overhead, like a black sun.
The gravity of the earth's thick shell would hold you to the inner shell of the earth, though you would weigh much less than you would on the outer surface because the mass of the Black Sun would tend to pull you toward it. If there were a very tall mountain in the Underground Kingdom and you were to climb to the top of it, you might be pulled up into the Black Sun because gravity gets stronger as you approach a massive object.
In all other respects, the Black Sun would not be dangerous to any creatures in the Underground Kingdom. On the contrary, the Black Sun would be necessary to life in the underworld, but in the opposite way that the sun is necessary to life on the earth's surface. Our sun gives us heat and keeps us from freezing. The Black Sun absorbs heat. If there is an underground kingdom, it is the Black Sun that keeps its inhabitants from being baked to death by the heat within the earth!
Wonderful. I think that's a great theory. And then there's... On the other... the page before we get to the main story, there is a little diagram showing the earth with New York City, and Greenland, and Mount McKinley, and the Pacific Ocean, and Tokyo, Mount Everest, Moscow, Paris, London - those are the only points which are considered of any interest on the outer surface of the... of the earth - and then you can see the shell. And then very... and then lots of space in there. And then, in the very centre, the Black Sun, which is quite small in relation to the size of the whole earth. Yeah, it's wonderful.
I think I told Nathan during the episode when we were talking - during Page One number 10 - I loved these when I was child. I didn't read a huge number of them - we didn't have that many - but I just... I found them... I think I read them several times, the ones that we had, I found them so exciting. The stories were exciting for me and then I think also the jeopardy - the idea that you might die. You know, and, obviously, they're in the second person so you, the reader, die. I also like the fact that each bit of the story only takes up at most a page. So it's either [a] page or half a page. So it's very clear where you have to go. Each of the pages [are] numbered in big letters - or big numbers, rather - so when it says turn to page 24, you know, it's very clear that 24 is... Oh, in fact... oh dear, you die on page 24. No, you don't... Or do you? No, you don't die. No, it's just that you can't go into the... Anyway. I'm not going to spoil the story for anybody who wants to read it.
That's it. I've enjoyed this more than I expected to. I've got so used to interviewing people recently, and I so love talking to people about books, I wasn't sure that I was going to enjoy talking to myself about books. Obviously, I'm talking to you, notionally, but none of you are here in my flat with me on... you know, today, the 18th of March. So. Yes, anyway, the point is, I have enjoyed this and I hope you have also taken some pleasure from it. It'll come out... This... So this will be coming out... pres... well after Moses's episode. So when does that come out? I think in April. Yes. Who knows what the world will look like when this goes out into the world and who knows what it'll look like when... when you in particular are listening to it. Thank you very much for listening to it. As I say, I'm Charles Adrian.
Any... If you want any more information about the podcast in general, there are now 157 episodes, including this one. They're all archived and some of them will be transcribed at pageonepodcast.com. I hope you're all looking after yourselves as much as you can, and looking after each other. Be well. The next episode of these hopefully will be out very soon. Thanks.
Jingle
Thank you for listening to Page One. For more information about the podcast, please go to pageonepodcast.com.
[Initial transcription by https://otter.ai]