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Episode image is a detail of a photograph taken by Charles Adrian.
Blue sky from Charles Adrian’s rooftop.
Talking about two ghost books and artefacts from Page One’s first two outside recordings, Charles Adrian continues his trip down memory (lapse) lane.
Another book by Aminatta Forna, Ancestor Stones, is discussed in Page One 138.
Books discussed in this episode were previously discussed in Page One 30, Page One 31 and Page One 32.
A transcript of this episode is below.
Episode recorded: 22nd April, 2020
Episode released: 9th June, 2020
Book listing:
Memoir From Antproof Case by Mark Helprin (Page One 30)
Solar Storms by Linda Hogan (Page One 31)
A Time Of Gifts by Patrick Leigh Furmor (Page One 32)
The Memory Of Love by Aminatta Forna (Page One 32)
Links:
Episode transcript:
Jingle
You're listening to Page One, the book podcast.
Charles Adrian
Hello and welcome to the 164th Page One. I'm Charles Adrian and this is the 8th Page One In Review.
I'm recording this on Wednesday the 22nd of April, 2020, which just happens to be the day after the first of these Page One In Reviews went out into the world. And so I listened to that yesterday - I listen to all the episodes that I put out, partly because I enjoy the sound of my own voice but mostly because I need to check that I have in fact put the right episode out... or the right audio file... But, yeah, listening to yesterday's episode... because that was recorded on the 18th of March, 2020, which is just over a month ago now - and, you know, in today's months, that's a long time - it made me think about... There are a few things that I wanted to tell you about.
First thing, I wanted to come clean about, you know, the episodes that I'm recording in advance because I... although we are being encouraged not to stockpile flour and milk and pasta and loo roll and so on, I do tend to stockpile podcast episodes. And that's really because I'm, you know, worried that at some point in the future all the enthusiasm that I have for this project will drain out of me and I'll be left without the emotional wherewithal to get up on these IKEA steps and... and record more episodes - and now that I've decided that these are going to be going out weekly, I don't want to break that continuity. But obviously, you know, as soon as I start talking about current affairs, they... you know, they go out of date very qui... You know, I'm... In the... You know, in the first Page One In Review I'm talking about things that happened over a month ago. It's not at all appropriate for... for now. And that won't matter... You know, as time goes past it will matter less and less. But it was strange to listen to it on the day that went out.
This episode, of course, will be going out in... oh I don't know... over a month's time. You know, this is... So if they're going out weekly, this will be the eighth week of the episodes. So just... you know, nearly two months'... [laughing] two months' time! Gosh, it's difficult to imagine two months into the future. But... So... And one of the things that I think that does is that it breaks the... [sighs] I'm going to say the illusion of liveness. I know that... You know, everybody knows that once you download a podcast episode, it's not live, it can't be. If I wanted to broadcast live, I would have to use a different medium. And there are lots of things about podcasts, you know, that... that are wonderful that don't have to do with liveness. But, you know, when I was growing up, I listened to a lot of live radio and one of the things that I loved about it was the knowledge that, as I was listening, somebody was talking; that, you know, it was happening at the same time; that I was being accompanied by this person. And, you know, particularly if I... you know, if I couldn't sleep, for example - and, you know, sometimes I used to feel as though I was the only person awake in the whole world and I would switch on the radio and immediately know that I wasn't. There was somebody else... Somebody else was there, awake, in the studio, standing - or sitting - in front of the microphone talking to me, sharing thoughts, ideas... sharing themself with me. And I suppose, in some way, I've always wanted to create something of that illusion myself - that, even though this can't be live, and we all know that, that, you know, perhaps you have the possibility - or the opportunity - to imagine that, as you listen to this, I am speaking to you; that I am in some way - you know, in some very safe way - with you while you listen. And, of course, yeah, as I say, as soon as I start talking about current affairs that illusion is broken in a very obvious way.
And that... And I suppose I ought to say that the reason that I'm... have been... that I have been talking about current affairs is only that it feels very strange not to acknowledge the situation that we're all in - you know, all of us having different experience of that situation but nevertheless we are all in that situation as I record these episodes.
The third thing that I wanted to say is also a confession. In the previous Page One In Review, the 7th Page One In Review, I talked about clouds and... so if you've listened to that you may remember that I said very confidently that there just aren't cloudless days in London. I can't remember exactly how I put it but... You know, I may have hedged a little bit - I may have said there are almost no cloudless days - but I think I was pretty categorical about it. And since recording that I've been more vigilant than usual about the sky and the cloud situation and there've just been... it's just been cloudless day after cloudless day. It's been quite extraordinary. I've been really peering... you know, trying to discern a haze because I did say that, you know, even... you know, even when there's blue sky, there is haze. And yeah, at the horizon it's a bit whiter but it's been extraordinarily cloudless. So I felt as though I should come clean about that.
Okay. That's enough small talk. Let's get on with the... Let's get on with today's episode. This is... It's going to be a fun episode today, I think, because it's... it's... there are going to be two ghost books and also artifacts from Page One's first two outside recordings.
So, for anybody who is listening for the first time, in these Page One In Review episodes, I'm going through all of the books that I've been given by guests on the podcast over the last eight years. And generally... So up until now all of those conversations with guests have happened in the Wilton Way Cafe in Hackney. When I...
[page turning]
Charles Adrian
... spoke to Ted Schmitz for the 30th Page One we sat down at the Royal Festival Hall on the South Bank of the Thames here in London. I don't remember why I decided to do an outside recording rather than drag Ted to Hackney. I... Yeah, I don't remember. I mean it is... Anyone who's been listening to these Page One In Reviews will know that I don't remember an awful lot. That's a... That's a feature of these episodes. But nevertheless, I did sit down with Ted at the Royal Festival Hall. I had a small digital microphone which I plugged into a dictaphone and the sound quality is quite abysmal. I mean, it's always difficult to hear the conversation during the first season because... I mean, the... the episodes recorded in the Wilton Way Cafe are difficult because there's so much background noise. The same is true of a lot of the outside recordings. I... It took me a long time to realise that you just can't sit down in a place that has music playing, for example, and expect to be able to record clear dialogue with inadequate equipment. But... Or... You know, or to sit in a place where there are lots of people chatting [laughing] round about. But there we go. You know. You have to make mistakes to learn, don't you? Eventually all of these episodes will have transcripts, I hope, so that will help a little bit if you want to go back and listen to them.
But, in any case, what I want to talk about today is the book that Ted gave me, which is Memoir From Antproof Case by Mark Helprin. Again, I don't remember anything about this book. I think I enjoyed it. It's quite a large paperback book. Very soft. You know, the... It feels as though it's been well read. The pages are not stiff and neither is the cover. It's published by Perennial, which is an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, apparently. It's 514 pages long. And in the very back, in pencil, there is the draft of a letter or an email - probably an email - to a Mr Shoveller:
Dear Mr. Shoveller, I have already written to you twice this week regarding my nightmarish journies to and from work in London on Monday. As per my e-mail below, I wrote to Michael Gove, MP for Surrey Heath, David Powell of the Camberley Society and Mr Pitt, not realising that you had replaced him there.
Wonderful! No information about who wrote this message. It's signed: “Thank you. Yours sincerely” and then a blank - presumably because the person who wrote it knew who they were and they weren't... this isn't... they weren't planning to give this book to Mr Shoveller. This wasn't the message that they were passing on. As I say, they were drafting it.
Inside the book, talking of messages left, I found a message from Ted. And again, I wouldn't have remembered that he didn't give this book to me at the time that we'd had our conversation. It says:
ADRIAN! SORRY IT’S TAKEN AGES TO GET THIS TO YOU. AT LAST, HERE IT IS! ENJOY. - TED.
So I don't know how long... I wonder how long it took him to get it to me. Nice that he did eventually get it to me. I'm grateful for that.
And then alongside that note is a message from an admirer - and I'm sorry to blow my own trumpet here but this is... I found this very exciting. This was a very exciting discovery. I'd forgotten this. And [laughing] I still don't remember who gave it to me. This isn't something that's happened very often in my life. I think there's every chance this was the only time that this... that it has ever happened in my life.
So it seems that while I was performing in a production called Sei Nicht Du Selbst, which means Don't Be Yourself, at the Kaserne, which is a wonderful performance space in Basel in Switzerland, somebody handed me her ticket on which she had written:
Wenn du wirklich aufs [sic]... Wenn... Wenn du wirklich aus London kommst und im märz da vorzufinden bist, wird ich gerne in meinem ferienbesuch in London mit dir cafe trinken gehen.
I think that's just lovely. That means: If you really come from London and... are there in March, basically, I would love to come and drink coffee with you during my holidays. And then on the back there's an email address. I'm pretty sure that we didn't drink coffee together but, yeah, I'm very... very flattered to have received that. I mean, who knows what her intentions were - perhaps it was just coffee and conversation.
I want to read you, essentially, the... the pages that these messages were were marking. So it's... it seems that the character or characters is or are - yeah, “we” so they are - going on horseback from Jackson to Denver. Here we go. So, starting on page... the bottom of page 203 if you'd like to read along.
I didn't think at the beginning of the trip or in planning it that I would shoot game. I have killed men, but in almost every case they were heavily armed and about to kill me. And although to me it appears to be morally reprehensible, I bow to the necessity of eating animals. Nonetheless, I don't like killing them. The evisceration, skinning, and removal of head and extremities, all of which can leave you covered with blood in nightmarish fashion, is not my cup of, well, tea.
But the horses forced me into a different frame of mind. They were very stupid about snakes, of which, in the seven hundred miles on our twisting backtracking route from Jackson to Denver, we encountered many. We surprised them sunning themselves on the far sides of rolling hillocks or coiled like buffalo offal baking on flat rocks upon the snow.
The snakes, who had been sleeping at the switch, would make a big thing about being caught off guard - rattling, hissing, and posing like politicians. In a ceremony undoubtedly several million years old and inherited from their eohippine ancestors, the horses were never content with changing their path and leaving the danger behind. Instead, they went up on their hind legs, their flaming eyes riveted upon the disgusting adversary.
Physically it made sense. A snake couldn't reach them if they were eight feet in the air, and dared not strike at their hind legs as long as the windmilling hooves and the head - shaking in negation, teeth exposed - remained cantilevered over the base. For the rider, however, it was hell.
I learned rather quickly to take my rifle from its scabbard, work the lever as I aimed, and blow the snake to oblivion. I could do this because the man at the store where we bought our equipment insisted that we take two boxes of birdshot. I had been fixed on long range, high velocity, Winchester loads, but he had directed my attention to snakes and birds.
The horses expected me to make the snakes as limp as an old couch in a dump, and as I did this it put me in the habit of killing. When eventually we ran out of mutton, I felled game birds. During our six weeks en route we ate sparingly and lost weight, but we ate well. Our hunger, primed sometimes for twenty hours or more, never fully satisfied, and driven by days of hard riding, was a far greater chef than any that Paris has ever produced.
In all that time, we never surfaced. It was a matter of honor. Never once did we sleep indoors or seek either town or restaurant. For a month and a half we had no newspapers, and it was quite a shock when we rode into Denver on the 26th of June, which was, I believe, a Monday, and saw huge headlines proclaiming that North Korea had invaded the South. We knew that some of our relatives and friends would be going to war, and that I would sit it out, being finally too old and not wanting to push my geometrically extrapolated luck.
There you go.
[page turning]
The second book that I want to talk about is... is the first of the ghost books that I mentioned. It's Solar Storms by Linda Hogan, which was given to me by Carly McLaughlin in the... during the 31st Page One, which we recorded back in the Wilton Way Cafe in Hackney. I... Again, I don't know why I returned to the Wilton Way Cafe but... In any case, she gave me a book called Solar Storms. And I've given that away. I have a vague memory of giving that away, unusually. I think I know who I gave that to.
That was a wonderful book - very beautiful setting, a really interesting read about ancestry, in a way, and belonging and... belonging in... in terms of, you know, belonging to one's family, to one's tribe, to one's history and also belonging to the land where one's family, one's tribe and so on live or have traditionally lived. It's set in the north of Canada among First Nations people. Yeah. Very, very beautiful. I really enjoyed that book. I don't remember an awful lot of the... of the story but I remember... I remember loving it. And that's why... it's why I gave it away. I enjoyed it so much that I... that I knew my friend would enjoy it too.
So, not very much to say about Solar Storms and I'm going to pass straight on to the next ghost book, which was given to me by Miriam Ross during the 32nd Page One and that's... it... and is A Time Of Gifts by Patrick Leigh Fermor. I hadn't heard of Patrick Leigh Fermor. In fact, in a strange coincidence, the person who I think I gave Solar Storms to... her father told me once that he had known Patrick Leigh Fermor and I... I was talking to him about A Time Of Gifts and I was saying: “It's a wonderful book. I love it! And I can't believe he remembers so much about his journey.”
The story of A Time Of Gifts, in case you haven't read it, is that in 1932, I think... 19... or 33... it might be 1933, Patrick Leigh Fermor, who is, I think, eighteen - certainly young - leaves England, he leaves London in the rain by taxi - it's a wonderful description of leaving London - crosses the channel and then walks from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople. And in that first... There are three books which recount his journey and they get more and more, kind of... there are... there are more and more holes in the... in the narrative. In that first book there seems to be a very complete account of his journey from the... from London to... where does he get to? I think the border of Austria and Hungary, possibly. I think the second book is largely about Hungary and Romania. Although, I mean, these... you know, the country names are anachronistic at this point because the map was redrawn so often in the second half of the twentieth century. But, in any case, so mostly through... so through Holland and then Germany - a lot of his journey through Germany - and then Austria. And reflection on what was happening in Germany and Austria as he was going along. It's just fantastic.
So I said to my friend's father: “I can't believe he remembers so much about his journey.” And he just laughed and he said [speaking quietly]: “He doesn't remember. He made it up!” So I report that without giving the names of [laughing] the people involved in case there are any... I don't know what the libel laws are. I don't... I don't have an opinion one way or the other about whether or not Patrick Leigh Fermor made up much of his story but it is... whether or not he did it's a wonderful, wonderful story. Beautifully written. And a beautiful book as well. I'm sad that I don't have that any more. I don't know who... I don't know who I gave that one to.
So. But what I do have...
[page turning]
... in front of me now is the other book that Miriam read from, which was The Memory Of Love by Aminata Forna. This was the first of two books that I read by Aminatta Forna. I also read Ancestor Stones which... oh I never remember to look these things up. I did talk about Ancestors Stones in another episode of Page One. If you go to pageonepodcast.com and look under books - look for Aminatta Forna - you will find... you can find the episode where I talked about Ancestor Stones. But Miriam and I talked about The Memory Of Love in the 32nd Page One which was another outside recording in a very, very noisy pub. Much learning was done by me as a result of that conversation. It's really very difficult to hear what Miriam and I said - which is a shame. It was a wonderful conversation. Or... I certainly enjoyed it.
This is a beautiful book. Again, there's a lot of the story that I don't remember. But what I remember is that... I'd remembered the... the character Kai, who is not the main character. The main character's in fact called Adrian, which I hadn't remembered, bizarrely. One would think that... You know, you'd think I'd remember that there is a character with the same name as me in this book. Especially because Adrian's one of those names that, although people are very familiar with it in English-speaking countries, there aren't that many people called Adrian - or at least I haven't come across that many. But that's... you know, that aside... there's another character... I don't remember anything about Adrian's journey in this book but another character called Kai, who is either a nurse or a doctor in a hospital in Freetown in Sierra Leone and... The... The action of the novel takes place after devastating war in Sierra Leone and Kai is repressing, I think, memories that come from that time. And towards the end of the book those memories start to come back and it's... it... it's very... I was just rereading some passages yesterday and it's very... it's beautifully written and really sad and painful to read.
The... I suppose part of what I find beautiful and painful together is the description of, not just the... not just the events, not just the horrific things that people have to live through, but... but the living with the trauma of those events, the... the... the continuing to live despite these things having happened to you. I think Aminatta Forna does a... does a beautiful job of describing that. Yeah.
I don't want to read any of the... I don't want to read any of those passages. It would... It would be too much of a spoiler and also I would have to read too much. So instead I'm going to read a rather random... I've just... I flicked through and found this page. It's on page 402 and 403 of this 445 page edition. It's published by Bloomsbury. Yeah. This is just... Adrian and somebody called Mamakay go to look for bats. Adrian is drawing Mamakay and then she says:
‘If you like bats so much, I can take you somewhere.’
He'd thought her asleep, she'd lain so still.Where are they? Adrian has no idea. He turns to see the canoe, steered by the old fisherman with his single, narrow paddle, head back into the waves. A cannon lies half submerged. A small jetty reaches to the sea. A fort, ruined stone, thickly veined with creepers, stands above them. Mamakay's stride is shorter now than before, her breathing labours slightly. It is already late, perhaps six o'clock.
A path leads away from the small, gritty beach towards the interior of the island, past a graveyard in which stand half a dozen headstones. Adrian stops to read the names upon them and wonders what it took, all those years ago, to have words carved upon Scottish granite and brought back to be laid upon the tomb of a sailor whose own life-span upon this island had lasted only a matter of months. A row of undulating mounds stands almost as tall as Adrian. Hills of oyster shells, thousands upon thousands, marking long-ago years, when the men who lived here dined on oysters and rum; the bottles lie upon the beach, are wedged between the boulders, rock back and forth upon the sea bed.
They are walking downhill now, away from the oyster hills, a narrow path around the edge of a disintegrating wall.
’Here.’ Mamakay stops and turns [sic]. They are in front of a doorway, or perhaps it is the mouth of a cave. Adrian leans into the narrow portal. A colossal, crowded darkness, seething with life, the sound of a billion beating hearts. To Adrian it feels as if the island itself is a living creature, whose centre the two of them have penetrated.
Outside, in front of the cave opening, they wait for night. As the darkness outside deepens, they hear inside the cave a stirring, awakenings. The first bat emerges, noiselessly, and is gone. It is followed by other bats, singly and then in twos and threes, leaving slipstreams of wind, treacle-soft and warm. Now in tens and twenties, finally in their hundreds, bats fly past them. Adrian stands unmoving, holds his breath for the minutes it takes for the bats to leave the cave. The air is turbulent with wings, dense with bodies. Threads of wind trail across his face and arms, seem to cling to him. The wind brings the tears to his eyes and he closes them. They are everywhere, above him, around him, though they never touch him. Their numbers seem unending, until suddenly everything comes to a halt. Adrian finds himself standing holding Mamakay in his arms. The breath comes fast and hard from their lips, their bodies tremble. They are holding each other, laughing.
I love that. I feel as though I can imagine that experience in my body. That tingling that would come after the flight of the bats.
Just before I finish today I wanted to say that in the front of this book there is a message from somebody who owned the book at some point. I think it may have been... who knows, perhaps it was the person who gave it to Miriam. It's not Miriam, apparently. But this person says:
There is a lovely phrase in this book about a car being swallowed up in the darkness - if you find it please let me know (about 2/3 of the way through!)
I'm afraid I don't know whether or not I found it but certainly I don't remember it now. I wish I did. It sounds wonderful. “A lovely phrase about a car being swallowed up in the darkness.” I can imagine that Aminatta Forna would have written that beautifully.
Thank you very much for being with me here today [laughing] as I... as I go through some of my old books. This has been the 8th Page One In Review. I've been Charles Adrian and, yeah, with any luck I will speak to you again 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]