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Episode image is a detail of a photo by Charles Adrian
Standing at his bookshelf beneath a large, grey, spreading Nimbostratus cloud, Charles Adrian talks about two books from one guest on the podcast and one from another.
The Cloudspotter’s Guide by Gavin Pretor-Pinney is discussed in Page One 27 and Page One 163.
Sum by David Eagleman is also discussed in Page One 113 and Page One 187.
Charles Adrian forgot to mention that his conversation with Sarah Le Fevre (the one that survives, at least) was recorded at the British Museum in London.
You can buy the Apollo typeface at fontshop.com here.
You can read about the island of Sark on Wikipedia here.
At the time this episode goes out it seems as though the television series based on Mr Pye by Mervyn Peake is available to watch (for UK audiences, at least) on All 4.
Books discussed in this episode were previous discussed in Page One 34 and Page One 36.
A transcript of this episode is below.
Episode recorded: 28th April, 2020.
Episode released: 16th June, 2020.
Book listing:
Sum by David Eagleman (Page One 34, Page One 113 and Page One 187)
Mr Pye by Mervyn Peake (Page One 34)
Ghost Stories Of An Antiquary by M. R. James (Page One 36)
Links:
Episode transcript:
Jingle
You're listening to Page One, the book podcast.
Charles Adrian
Hello and welcome to the 165th Page One. I'm Charles Adrian and this is the 9th Page One In Review.
You join me today on Tuesday the 28th of April, 2020. A grey day. We're sitting underneath what I think is a Nimbostratus cloud. I just looked it up in my Cloudspotters Guide. I'm already... yeah, a little bit hazy about [laughing] the name. I can't... I don't know why I can't keep things like cloud names in my head. I am so interested when I read about them and then they just drop out again. But I'm pretty... I'm pretty sure it is a Nimbostratus cloud. It's that grey, formless, large, spreading rain cloud that just fills the whole sky and drip drip drips for hours and hours. It has stopped raining. There are occasional drips and drops falling in the puddle on the roof that I can see from my window here but it's still grey and...
It's an inside sort of a day, which is what I'm trying to get across, I think. A day for sitting with a book, perhaps. And here I am standing in front of all of the books that I've been given by guests on the podcast over the last eight years and ready to talk to you about three of those books. So, yes, let's get straight on with it.
[page turning]
The first book that I want to talk about - well, let's say the first two books that I want to talk about today were both given to me by Sarah Le Fevre during the 34th Page One. The reason that I got two books from Sarah is that we had to rerun that episode. I think the first time we did it there was a buzz on the recording or something. I don't think it was that I didn't record it. That's a thing that's happened several times over the course of making this podcast - that... you know, that I have just completely failed to record a whole episode - but in this case I think I did record it and it was just unusable. And instead of, you know, doing the whole thing again, as I have done on other occasions, Sarah and I decided that we would just exchange a new set of books. So in the 34th Page One we talk about all of the books that we had previously exchanged.
So I gave Sara two books altogether: The Dirty Havana Trilogy by Pedro Juan Gutiérrez, which she loved, and then I gave her Good Behaviour by Molly Keane, which she didn't like quite so much. She gave me Sum, subtitled 40 Tales From The Afterlives, by David Eagleman, which I enjoyed but not, I think, as much as Sarah did and not as much as I think quite a lot of other people did. Sarah's not the only person to have given me this book. Donna Butlin gave me this book much, much later so I will be talking about it again in a later Page One In Review.
There are... There are some lovely ideas in here. And one... So I'm going to read you a chapter called Metamorphosis. I think it's the... yes, it's the eighth little story. They're very short stories, mostly just a couple of pages long. So this is page 23 of 110 pages. There's a little “Note on the Type” at the back of this book:
The text of this book was composed in Apollo, the first typeface ever originated specifically for film composition. Designed by Adrian Frutiger [/fruːtɪgə/]...
- or Frutiger [/fruːtɪdʒə/] ... Frutiger [/fruːtɪʒeɪ/ said with a more French pronunciation], I don't know -
and issued by the Monotype Corporation of London in 1964...
- Frutiger [/fruːtɪdʒə/] probably -
Apollo is not only a versatile typeface suitable for many uses but also pleasant to read in all of its sizes.
Yeah, I think I would agree with that. It is pleasant to read.
So this is... [laughing] I hope you... it's... I hope it's pleasant to listen to me reading this typeface. This is the chapter called Metamorphosis from the book Sum by David Eagleman:
There are three deaths. The first is when the body ceases to function. The second is when the body is consigned to the grave. The third is that moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time.
So you wait in this lobby until the third death. There are long tables with coffee, tea and cookies; you can help yourself. There are people here from all over [sic] the world, and with a little effort you can strike up convivial small talk. Just be aware that your conversation may be interrupted at any moment by the Callers, who broadcast your new friend's name to indicate that there will never again be another remembrance of him by anyone on the Earth. Your friend slumps, face like a shattered and reglued plate, saddened even though the Callers tell him kindly that he's off to a better place. No one knows where that better place is or what it offers, because no one exiting through that door has returned to tell us. Tragically, many people leave just as their loved ones arrive, since the loved ones were the only ones doing the remembering. We all wag our heads at that typical timing.
The whole place looks like an infinite airport waiting area. There are many famous people from the history books here. If you get bored, you can strike out in any given direction, past aisles and aisles of seats. After many days of walking, you'll start to notice that people look different, and you'll hear the tones of foreign languages. People congregate among their own kind, and one sees the spontaneous emergence of territories that mirror the pattern on the surface of the planet: With the exception of the oceans, you're traversing a map of the Earth. There are no time zones here. No one sleeps, even though they mostly wish they could. The place is evenly lit by fluorescent lights.
Not everyone is sad when the Callers enter the room and shout out the next list of names. On the contrary, some people beg and plead, prostrating themselves at the Callers' feet. These are generally the folks who have been here for [sic] a long time, too long, especially those who are remembered for unfair reasons. For example, take the farmer over there, who drowned in a small river two hundred years ago. Now his farm is the site of a small college, and the tour guides each week tell his story. So he's stuck and he's miserable. The more his story is told, the more the details drift. He is utterly alienated from his name; it is no longer identical with him but continues to bind. The cheerless woman across the way is praised as a saint, even though the roads in her heart were complicated. The gray-haired man at the vending machine was lionized as a war hero, then demonized as a warlord, and finally canonized as a necessary firebrand between two moments in history. He waits with aching heart for his statues to fall. And that is the curse of this room: since we live in the heads of those who remember us, we lose control of our lives and become who they want us to be.
There you go. So I do recommend this book although I'm a little lukewarm in its praise. I think it is a very nice collection of ideas. It's just, I think, not what I'm looking for from images... I want something to surprise me about people's imaginations of the afterlife and these were more... Yeah, my reaction was more “Oh. Oh yeah. Mmm. Nice idea” rather than “Oh wow! Amazing!” There you go. Those are [laughing] my... Those are my feelings.
[page turning]
Okay. So the second book that Sarah gave me was... was the one that I preferred of the two. So she preferred the first book that I gave her - Dirty Havana Trilogy - to the second book - Good Behaviour - and I preferred the second book that she gave me - Mr Pye by Mervyn Peake - to the first book - Sum by David Eagleman.
I've also read Gormenghast by Mervyn Peake - which I think is... if I'm right, is three books; I often think it's four books and I don't know why that is - but Gormenghast is a... I just... I loved it. And it has this huge scope. Mr Pye is very different in that sense. It's a much, much smaller story in a much, much smaller location. It's... It's just lovely. It has the same preoccupation with good and evil that I would say I find in Gormenghast. It doesn't have... You know, the last movement of Gormenghast is about modernity - or the horrors of modernity. This... This doesn't really have any of that.
It's set on the island of Sark, which is one of the Channel Islands. I've never been there. I would like to visit. There was... I had an English teacher when I was at school - a very good English teacher, now I think about it, although I embarrassingly can't remember his name. It might come to me. More likely it won't, unfortunately. But yes, he managed to communicate so effectively his enthusiasm for the things that we studied: Keats and Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights and Shakespeare's King Henry The Fourth Part One - which we didn't want to study, actually. When we were given the choice of Shakespeare plays to study we all chose the other option - I can't remember whether it was Hamlet or King Lear... I think possibly King Lear. We all wanted to study that. And we... we took a vote and our teacher asked us, you know: “Do you want King Henry The Fourth Part One or do you want King Lear?” - or Hamlet or whatever it was. And we voted and most of us voted for, you know, Lear or Hamlet and our teacher said: “Right. Jolly good. David, off you go to the Book Room and pick up fifteen copies of King Henry The Fourth Part One.” And after David had gone - if it was David who went - we all [laughs]... there was a moment of silence, I think, and then some brave soul said: “Didn't we just vote for King Lear?” - or Hamlet. And I think he just so desperately wanted to teach us King Henry The Fourth Part One that he... I think he really did think we had voted for that. And in the event I was very grateful. I don't think I would ever have read King Henry The Fourth Part One. I certainly wouldn't have gone to watch it by choice. And it is a wonderful play. I have so much love for that... for that play. It has... It has so much exciting stuff in it.
Anyway, [laughs] that was... that's kind of a... it was rather a long digression about my English teacher and I didn't tell you why, did I, I was talking about him. I think he wanted to take us on a reading week to Sark - I think it was Sark that he wanted to take us to - during the Easter holidays before we took our A-levels. And we... I think we were half in love with that idea, many of us. It sounded... He made it sound wonderful. But part of it was that we were go... I think the boys were going to bathe naked in the sea from one beach and the girls were going to bathe naked in the sea from another beach and, yeah, needless to say the trip never happened. And perhaps that's for the best. But... Yes. Speaking of a more innocent time, I think he probably came from a more innocent time. I don't think there was anything... I... Really, you know, even now, I don't think there was anything nefarious about his intentions. I... I think he just thought it would be a lovely thing for us to be on an island reading books and away from the pressures of upcoming exams. I think... It still sounds to me like a lovely idea but perhaps some safeguarding measures needed to have been put in place for that to work.
Mr Pye is a book about a man who arrives on the island of Sark. I don't remember all of the details but I remember that he... he transforms into some kind of angel and then he transforms into some kind of devil. He actually does grow wings and then he grows horns on his head and he's very embarrassed both times. And it's... both times it's an immediate consequence of his behaviour: he behaves very nicely to people and becomes an angel and then he starts to behave in a more unpleasant manner and the wings disappear and are replaced by horns. It's a lot of fun. There was a television series that I vaguely remember watching some of many, many years ago. Yeah, so I did... I really enjoyed this book. And it's also... each chapter starts with an illustration by Mervyn Peake, which are all delightful. The chapter that I want to read from, chapter five, starts with an illustration of a very sharp-featured woman looking extremely grumpy and sitting bolt upright in bed. She seems to be called Miss Dredger. So this is page 32 of 254 in this Vintage edition - Vintage Classics edition - of Mr Pye.
Here we go. I'm just going to read it now:
FOR Miss Dredger to find herself in bed at twelve-thirty on a spring morning would have been unthinkable were it not that she could think of nothing else. It was as likely that she should be sitting there, bolt upright with the eiderdown drawn up to her chin, as for her to have suddenly found that she was performing the Dance of the Seven Veils in a Belgian fruit shop.
But to plunge still farther into the nightmare, she was at this very moment having her lunch prepared for her, in her own kitchen, by a man. A man! A stranger whose acquaintance she had made within the last three hours. A man whose avuncular commands and soft admonitions had already undermined the formidable structure of her self-confidence.
The whole affair was monstrous; unthinkable - but she was thinking it. Unbearable - but, in her rigid way, she was bearing it. Un-arguable - perhaps; but she would argue it, if necessary, until her tongue became too hot to hold in her mouth. Oh, she would argue it all right! She would argue it if necessary with a poker in one hand and a meat-knife in the other. She would...
There was a knock at her door. A knock as discreet as the knuckle-tap of a connoisseur with his ear at the rim of a rare ceramic. It was a tap to which there could only be one answer. But she was shocked to realize how quickly she replied: ‘Come in.’
’Come in’, indeed! What had happened to her within the last three hours! Had she forgotten what it was to be a lady? Had she forgotten Tunbridge Wells and the advice of Lady Corkpower?
She began to blush.
Miss Dredger had not blushed for over twenty years; not because she was shameless, for she was manifestly a woman of rectitude, but because her way of life with its code of tough virginity, its insistence upon backbone, its detestation of all that was ‘feeble’, had created within her such an exclusive condition that nothing in the way of an irregular accident had a dog's chance of germination.
But she began to blush, the beetroot stain extending its boundaries every moment; and when the door opened and Mr Pye came in she bowed her gaunt and handsome head in shame.
And yet, at the very moment that she longed to sink into the island earth, never to reappear, she lifted her face at the sound of his voice.
I... I'm not going to give you the sound of his voice. You can imagine it. Lovely.
Right. So that was... those were the two books that Sarah Le Fevre gave me during our two recordings. Page One 35 was my conversation over Skype with Lucy Pawlak. That was my first Skype conversation. It was... I think the quality was all right but there was a little bit of... I don't know... You can hear that I'm on a Skype call. And then the following episode... the next episode, Page One 36, was my conversation with Tim Wells...
[page turning]
... which took place in the Betsey Trotwood pub in Clerkenwell in East-ish London. And that was a... that... yes, lovely place to have a conversation - and a very nice conversation with a very nice man. And he gave me Ghost Stories Of An Antiquary [/æntɪˈkwəri/] - or an Antiquary [/æntɪkweˈri/]? [laughing] I don't know. Antiquary [/æˈntɪkwəri/] probably - by M. R. James, who is one of the classic ghost story writers.
I used to read a lot of ghost stories when I was a teenager - I can't imagine now why. I don't like ghost stories any more. I don't like being scared. I mean, there's an awful lot to be scared of, isn't there, already. But I remember loving the sensation of... yeah, that... that creeping fear when you think something awful is about to be revealed or about to happen to someone in the story. I think I had a particular fondness for religiously-tinged - if that's the right [laughing] way of putting it - stories. There are plenty of ghost stories that have to do with religion. And that's probably because I was a religious teenager and I... you know, I believed in hell and the devil and all this sort of thing so those... those stories had quite a lot of power.
This story that I'm going to read from today for you is called Lost Hearts. It's the second story in this collection. This collection has [counting] one, two, three, four, five, six, seven... eight stories starting with Cannon Alberic's Scrap-book. So there you go, there's a religious story for you. Yes, that's rather a fun... I do remember that story. That's very fun. Lost Hearts, The Mezzotint - I don't know what that was - The Ash Tree, Number 13, Count Magnus. ‘Oh, Whistle, And I'll Come To You, My Lad’, I think, relies on... kind of... ancient things. You know, it's a little bit in the... in the vein of H. P. Lovecraft - the idea that something from an... from a former time comes with its own, kind of, horrors. And then the last story in this collection is The Treasure Of Abbot Thomas. So, again, back to Christianity. I don't remember what the treasure of Abbot Thomas was. But Lost Hearts is... is about a strange old man.
I'm just going to read you from pages 32, 33 and 34. So it's towards the end of this story and contains a lot of the sorts of things that would certainly have made the hair stand up on the back of my neck were I reading this as a fifteen-year-old.
We have now arrived at March 24, 1812. It was a day of curious experiences for Stephen; a windy, noisy day, which filled the house and the gardens with a restless impression. As Stephen stood by the fence of the grounds, and looked out into the park, he felt as if an endless procession of unseen people were sweeping past him on the wind, borne on resistlessly and aimlessly, vainly striving to stop themselves, to catch at something that might arrest their flight and bring them once again into contact with the living world of which they had formed a part. After luncheon that day, Mr Abney said:
’Stephen, my boy, do you think you could manage to come to me tonight as late as eleven o'clock in my study? I shall be busy until that time, and I wish to show you something connected with your future life which it is most important that you should know. You are not to mention this matter to Mrs Bunch nor to anyone else in the house; and you had better go to your room at the usual time.’
Here was a new excitement added to life: Stephen eagerly grasped at the opportunity of sitting up till eleven o'clock. He looked in at the library door on his way upstairs that evening, and saw a brazier, which he had often noticed in the corner of the room, moved out before the fire; an old silver-gilt cup stood on the table, filled with red wine, and some written sheets of paper lay near it. Mr Abney was sprinkling some incense on the brazier from a round silver box as Stephen passed, but did not seem to notice his step.
The wind had fallen, and there was a still night and a full moon. At about ten o'clock Stephen was standing at the open window of his bedroom, looking out over the country. Still as the night was, the mysterious population of the distant moon-lit woods was not yet lulled to rest. From time to time strange cries as of lost and despairing wanderers sounded from across the mere. They might be the notes of owls or water-birds, yet they did not quite resemble either sound. Were not they coming nearer? Now they sounded from the nearer side of the water, and in a few moments they seemed to be floating about among the shrubberies. Then they ceased; but just as Stephen was thinking of shutting the window and resuming his reading of Robinson Crusoe, he caught sight of two figures standing on the gravelled terrace that ran along the garden side of the Hall - the figures of a boy and girl, as it seemed; they stood side by side, looking up at the windows. Something in the form of the girl recalled irresistibly his dream of the figure in the bath. The boy inspired him with more acute fear.
Whilst the girl stood still, half smiling, with her hands clasped over her heart, the boy, a thin shape, with black hair and ragged clothing, raised his arms in the air with an appearance of menace and of unappeasable hunger and longing. The moon shone upon his almost transparent hands, and Stephen saw that the nails were fearfully long and that the light shone through them. As he stood with his arms thus raised, he disclosed a terrifying spectacle. On the left side of his chest there opened a black and gaping rent; and there fell upon Stephen's brain, rather than upon his ear, the impression of one of those hungry and desolate cries that he had heard resounding over the woods of Aswarby all that evening. In another moment this dreadful pair had moved swiftly and noiselessly over the dry gravel, and he saw them no more.
Inexpressibly frightened as he was, he determined to take his candle and go down to Mr Abney's study, for the hour appointed for their meeting was near at hand. The study or library opened out of the front-hall on one side, and Stephen, urged on by his terrors, did not take long in getting there. To effect an entrance was not so easy. It was not locked, he felt sure, for the key was on the outside of the door as usual. His repeated knocks produced no answer. Mr Abney was engaged: he was speaking. What! why did he try to cry out? and why was the cry choked in his throat? Had he, too, seen the mysterious children? But now everything was quiet, and the door yielded to Stephen's terrified and frantic pushing.
You'll have to read Lost Hearts by M. R. James if you want to know what Stephen finds in the study. I'd forgotten that there was a Mrs Bunch in the house. I love the name Mrs Bunch. I think that's a wonderful name for a housekeeper. I'd also forgotten that this, of course - Lost Hearts - is a story about puberty. There are many, many, many of those in the canon of ghost stories and horror stories. [laughing] And I guess stories in general. So many writers seem to be preoccupied by puberty - the... the powers that are unleashed as the hormones start to surge around the adolescent body.
Right. With that slightly uncomfortable image in all of our minds, I'm going to leave you now. This was the 9th Page One In Review. Thank you very much for joining me for this... for this episode. Yeah. It's still... Oh gosh, it's greyer than ever. I've just looked outside the window again. I've been ignoring it. Yes, more drips in the puddle on the roof. But I haven't taken my daily exercise today and I think I probably should. Otherwise I shall succumb to the [laughs]... the mood of the day. Yeah. That's it. Chatter chatter. Okay. I'm going now. Thanks. Thanks. Bye.
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]