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Episode image is a detail of a photo by Charles Adrian.
Recording this episode several days after he saw a very early morning full moon like a pale, translucent sticker on the lightening sky, Charles Adrian does not, as he promised he would, get as far as the first book on the second shelf of his bookcase.
The full moon Charles Adrian saw the tail end of turns out to have been the Buck Moon, which you can read about on the NASA website here.
You can find out more about the Almeida Theatre on their website here.
You can read about Blackwell’s Bookshop, which was founded in Oxford in 1879 by Benjamin Henry Blackwell, on Wikipedia here.
You can read about the canal that Charles Adrian might have cycled along on his way to record his conversation with Oscar Rickett on Wikipedia here.
You can read about New Haven, Connecticut on Wikipedia here.
Books discussed in this episode were previously discussed in Page One 66, Page One 67 and Page One 69.
A transcript of this episode is below.
Episode recorded: 10th July, 2020
Episode released: 11th August, 2020
Book listing:
Crime And Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky (trans. Jessie Coulson) (Page One 66)
Josephine: A Woman With A Past from The Lost Decade And Other Stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald (Page One 67)
The Troublesome Offspring Of Cardinal Guzman by Louis de Bernières (Page One 69)
Links:
Episode transcript:
Jingle
You're listening to Page One, the book podcast.
Charles Adrian
Hello and welcome to the 173rd Page One. I'm Charles Adrian and this is the 17th Page One In Review. If I'd been recording this on Monday of this week I could have told you that I got up once again at four o'clock in the morning and went outside and listened to a couple of blackbirds and a magpie and looked at the moon which was still full very early on Monday morning. It was quite close to the western horizon. It was pale and round and translucent. It looked something like a sticker that someone had placed very carefully on the lightening sky. It was beautiful. But I didn't record this on Monday as I had planned to and I didn't record this on Tuesday either or Wednesday or Thursday. Today is Friday the 10th of July and I am now ready to record this. I'm standing on my little wooden steps in front of the bookshelf in which I keep all of the books that I've been given by guests on the podcast.
The podcast, for those of you who are new, is a book podcast and most of the episodes are conversations between me and a guest and generally speaking my guest gives me a book. And so those are the books that I'm talking about in these Page One In Review episodes.
Now, I was wrong in the previous episode when I said that we would reach, today, the first book on the second shelf of the three shelves on which I keep all of these books because I'd forgotten that, in fact, I don't keep all of the books that I've been given on these bookshelves. These shelves are only for the books that I have been given and have read and there are still... I don't know... ten, twelve books that I haven't got round to reading. Two of those books are books that I'm talking about in today's episode. So I was... yeah, I was fooled because I was looking at the books in front of me and I realised that if I counted, you know, the next three books I would arrive [laughs] on the second shelf but there were, yeah, two books elsewhere. Both of those books are, however, books that I have read at some point in my life - I just haven't read the copies that were given to me by a guest - and as a, kind of, compensation for, you know, having not read those books the second book that I'm going to talk to you about today I read at the time - you know, when it was given to me - and I have since reread it. So I don't know whether that makes up for my... inattention? Laziness? I don't know what the appropriate negative attribute would be in this case.
[page turning]
The first book that I want to talk to you about today was given to me by Erik Patterson during the 66th Page One. We had that conversation in the foyer of the Almeida Theatre in Islington. He was going to go and see a show. I don't remember which one now. I don't think I went to see it with him although... I mean, it's possible that I did but I... No, I don't think I... I think I just met him there, we had our conversation and then he went to see the show.
He normally lives in Los Angeles and when he comes to London he spends all his time seeing shows - you know, plays and musicals and anything that he can get a recommendation for and also, obviously, tickets for - and then any time that he's not in the theatre he's generally buying books. He buys just piles and piles of play texts while he's in London and I don't know... I don't know whether, you know, London play texts are better than the kinds of play texts that you [laughing] can get in Los Angeles or whether the selection is different or why it is that he buys so many books while he's in London but... In any case, because he wasn't at home, as it were, I think we did a slightly different version of the podcast from normal. Normally, when I have a guest on the podcast, they talk about two different books - they talk about a book that they like and a book that they think I should have and I think, in this case, although I haven't checked it because it didn't occur to me until I started recording this now and I didn't want to break off to go and check...
And - side note - that's generally the reason why... You know, when I say that I haven't checked something that I could very easily have checked, it's not because I thought about it and then decided not to check it, it's usually because it just didn't occur to me until I start talking about it here. And, yeah, I don't... I mean, I already break off and have to restart enough times that I... you know, at these kind... in these kinds of situations, I generally think: “Well, it's not important enough. I just... I'll just admit that I haven't done the thing.” So all that to say I haven't checked what Erik and I actually did during that episode but I've a feeling we just talked about this book that he gave me and the book that I gave him. I don't remember what I gave him now. Never mind. [laughs]
All these things... You see, they're so easy. I could look them up so easily but to do so I would have to break my conversation [sic] and, again, just to, you know, let you peek behind the veil, I already have enough trouble remembering how I started a sentence by the time I get to the end of it that if I break off and look something up and then come back I generally have to start the whole episode again because otherwise it's an editing nightmare. I don't remember where I finished before I broke off and nothing will make any sense. So. Excuses, excuses.
Erik gave me Crime And Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky. That's all I really need to tell you right now. He bought it at Blackwell's. I don't know whether he bought it in London or Oxford - probably London, although it is very pleasingly an Oxford World's Classic [sic] edition of Crime And Punishment. For those of you who don't know, Blackwell's is the premier Oxford bookshop. So, anyway, the point is, I... this is one of the books that I haven't reread - I haven't read this copy of Crime And Punishment that Erik gave me - but I had previously read Crime And Punishment and that's one of the reasons that I haven't reread it. I just haven't prioritised it.
I remember liking it a lot when I read it, whenever that was - possibly while I was a student, actually. It was one of those books... It was, kind of, on a vague list that I had in my head of books that I ought to have read. I don't think there was any timeline for that but... It may actually have been on a physical list, you know, on a piece of paper that I had from when I was at school. I had an English teacher who gave us a list of books that we ought to have read and it's quite possible that Crime And Punishment was one of those actually. So that's, perhaps, why it was on the [laughing] list in my head.
It's... I... Yeah, I remember... As I say, I remember loving it. It's about a guy - Raskolnikov - who is, I think, himself a student and... I feel as though I can tell you a little bit about the plot of this because it was written so very long ago and has been talked about so much and, you know, films have been made based on this story and... and so on and so forth. Yeah. He decides he's going to kill an old woman and... Obviously, details escape me because that's... that tends to be what happens but I think he decides quite rationally that he's going to kill her as an experiment. He may have other reasons for killing her but I think he's decided that if you're a clever enough criminal there's no reason ever to be punished. And the book is an exploration of what happens to a human being when they have committed a crime. You know, whether or not... I suppose, whether or not the punishment is for the good of society or whether it is in fact for the good of the criminal - I don't really like using the word criminal but given that the book is called Crime And Punishment I think that's appropriate - and Dostoyevsky's thesis here seems to be that in fact... well, that Raskolnikov, at any rate, needs to be punished for what he's done.
I... Yeah, as I say, I don't remember the details but I remember that I loved... I found this very accessible. I loved the story of it, I loved the way that the story was told but, yeah, I was gripped by it. It wasn't hard work to read. It was just a really, really good read. So, yeah, very good book for Erik to have given me.
I thought what I would read you... Yeah, this is a massive spoiler and I'm very sorry about this. And I really don't know how any of you feel about spoilers. I... I'm fairly cavalier about this so apologies to those of you who... I mean, I suppose... I do... I suppose I do feel that, you know, with these classic books that it... I... Well, no... I mean, it's not even... Because, you know, if you haven't read it yet then you maybe don't know... Well, I've told you a lot already and if you don't want to hear this bit just, you know, skip forward five minutes or so. I can't tell you how long it's going to take me to read this until I've done it. But... So this... this Oxford Classics edition is 527 pages long and I want to read you a little bit from the epilogue - so from pages 512 and 513 - and this is... this talks about what happens when... you know, when he has confessed. There's still... there's still a lot to read this book for even if you know that he is going to confess to this murder. Right. Anyway. So this is... this is, as I say, from page 512:
SIBERIA. On the bank of a wide remote river stands a town, one of the administrative centers of Russia; in the town is a fortress, in the fortress is a prison. In the prison Rodion Raskolnikov, second-class convict, had been confined for nine months. It was almost eighteen since the day of the murder.
The legal proceedings had passed off without any great difficulty. The criminal had firmly, exactly, and clearly reaffirmed his statement, neither confusing the circumstances nor extenuating them in his own interest, neither misrepresenting the facts nor forgetting the smallest particular. He described the murder in minute detail, explained the mystery of the pledge (the piece of wood with its strip of metal) which was found in the dead woman's hand, told how he had taken the keys from the body, and gave a description of the keys, the trunk, and its contents; he even enumerated some of the objects which were lying in it. He cleared up the mystery of Lizaveta's murder, and related how Koch arrived and knocked at the door, and how the student came after him, and repeated everything that had passed between them. He told how he afterwards ran downstairs and heard the shouts of Mikolka and Mitka, how he hid in the empty flat and how he then went home. Finally, he directed them to the stone near the gates of the courtyard in Voznesensky Prospect, and the purse and the other things were found under it. In a word, everything was made perfectly clear. The examining magistrates and the judges found it very surprising, among other things, that he had hidden the purse and the other property under the stone without making any use of them, and were most astonished of all that not only did he not remember all the details of the objects he had himself stolen, but he was even uncertain of their number. In particular, the circumstance that he had never once opened the purse and did not know exactly how much it contained seemed incredible. (There were, in fact, three hundred and seventy roubles and sixty copecks in it; from long lying under the stone some of the biggest notes, at the top, had almost perished.) They spent a long time trying to discover why the accused should be lying in this one particular, when he so freely and accurately acknowledged his guilt in every other respect. In the end some of them (especially some who were psychologists) even admitted the possibility that he really did not know what was in the purse because he had hidden it under the stone without looking inside it, but from this they concluded that the crime itself could have been committed only in a state of temporary mental derangement, so to speak, as the result of homicidal mania expressed in murder and robbery for their own sakes, without motive or calculation. This conclusion coincided happily with the latest fashionable theory of temporary insanity, which our contemporaries so often try to apply to various criminals. Besides, Raskolnikov's long-standing hypochondria was testified to by many witnesses, including Dr. Zosimov, his former fellow students, his landlady, and the servant. All this powerfully assisted the conclusion that Raskolnikov was not quite like the ordinary murderer and robber, but that something different was involved here. To the extreme annoyance of those who upheld this opinion, the criminal hardly tried to defend himself; to the crucial questions, what had made him commit murder, and what had prompted him to rob, he replied plainly, with the bluntest accuracy, that the motive of the whole thing lay in his wretched position, his poverty and helplessness, his desire to furnish for the first steps of his career the security of the three thousand roubles, at least, that he counted on finding in his victim's possession. His resolve to murder was the consequence of his unstable and cowardly nature, which was moreover exasperated by privation and failure. When he was asked what had induced him to volunteer a confession, he answered that it was sincere remorse. All this was said almost callously...
There you go. So I hope that hasn't put you off reading it if you were going to. But, of course, on the other hand, if you felt like you ought to have read it and were not looking forward to reading it that may have spared you the task.
[page turning]
The next book that I want to talk to you about today was given to me by Oscar Rickett during the 67th Page One. We recorded that somewhere in London but now I don't remember if it was Camden or Islington. Could have been either. I've a feeling I went there on my bike, cycling along the canal, but I don't remember clearly enough.
This is a collection of short stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald called The Lost Decade And Other Stories. On the front it says:
Six brilliant stories written at the
heroic pitch of desperation in the last twilight
decade of Fitzgerald's life.
I think that's overstating it a little bit. I'm... I don't know. I'm not that crazy about these stories.
I... So this is the book that I read and then have reread. I don't, as I think I've said before, have a huge amount of concentration for reading novels at the moment but I felt like short stories were probably within my capabilities and so last Sunday, taking advantage of the nice weather, I sat outside and reread this collection. I'd half remembered some of it. The story that I really remembered was called Three Hours Between Planes, which was written in 1941, but I want to read you from a story called a Josephine: A Woman With A Past - partly because it's such a great title and partly because it's set in New Haven, Connecticut and I have visited New Haven, Connecticut.
These stories... I think in general I would say these stories are stories of little triumphs and little defeats: A boy at boarding school gets a nickname, a woman leaves her husband to start a career as a ballerina, a man doesn't win back the woman he loves, another man is taken for someone the woman he loves loved better, still another man discovers that the woman he loves loves her husband after all... Yeah, most of them, I suppose, are about men whose feelings for women are not really reciprocated. The last story in this collection, which is called The Lost Decade, is about a man who has been drunk for ten years and that might be the most transparently autobiographical. This one is, I think, the only one with a woman as protagonist - the eponymous Josephine.
So this is, as I say, from Josephine: A Woman With A Past. It's... I'm reading from the beginning of the story. So page 31 and a little bit of page 32 of this Penguin edition of The Lost Decade And Other Stories. Altogether this collection is 125 pages long. So here we go. Josephine: A Woman With A Past from 1930:
I
Driving slowly through New Haven, two of the young girls became alert. Josephine and Lillian darted soft frank glances into strolling groups of three or four undergraduates, into larger groups on corners, which swung about as one man to stare at their receding heads. Believing that they recognized an acquaintance in a solitary loiterer, they waved wildly, whereupon the youth's mouth fell open, and as they turned the next corner he made a dazed dilatory gesture with his hand. They laughed. ‘We'll send him a postcard when we get back to school tonight, to see if it was really [sic] him.’
Adele Craw, sitting on one of the little seats, kept on talking to Miss Chambers, the chaperon. Glancing sideways at her, Lillian winked at Josephine without batting an eye, but Josephine had gone into a reverie.
This was New Haven - city of her adolescent dreams, of glittering proms where she would move on air among men as intangible as the tunes they danced to. City sacred as Mecca, shining as Paris, hidden as Timbuktu. Twice a year the life-blood of Chicago, her home, flowed into it, and twice a year flowed back, bringing Christmas or bringing summer. Bingo, bingo, bingo, that's the lingo; love of mine, I pine for one of your glances; the darling boy on the left there; underneath the stars I wait.
Seeing it for the first time, she found herself surprisingly unmoved - the men they passed seemed young and rather bored with the possibilities of the day, glad of anything to stare at; seemed undynamic and purposeless against the background of bare elms, lakes of dirty snow and buildings crowded together under the February sky. A wisp of hope, a well-turned-out derby-crowned man, hurrying with stick and suitcase towards the station, caught her attention, but his reciprocal glance was too startled, too ingenuous. Josephine wondered at the extent of her own disillusionment.
She was exactly seventeen and she was blasé. Already she had been a sensation and a scandal; she had driven mature men to a state of disequilibrium; she had, it was said, killed her grandfather, but as he was over eighty at the time perhaps he had [sic] just died. Here and there in the Middle West were discouraged little spots which upon inspection turned out to be the youths who had once looked full into her green and wistful eyes. But her love affair of last summer had ruined her faith in the all-sufficiency of men. She had grown bored with the waning September days - and it seemed as though it had happened once too often. Christmas with its provocative shortness, its traveling glee clubs, had brought no one new. They remained to her only a persistent, a physical hope; hope in her stomach that there was someone whom she would love more than he loved her.
Will that happen for her? Read on yourselves in your own copies to find out. I am really caught up on the idea of Lillian winking at Josephine without batting an eye. How? How did she do that? I can't imagine.
[page turning]
The last book that I want to talk to you about today was given to me by Jaya Hartlein during the 69th Page One. We recorded that in her flat which was in Homerton, in Hackney. This was... So she gave me The Troublesome Offspring Of Cardinal Guzman [/gʌzmn̩/] - or Guzman [/gʊzmn̩/] or Guzman [/gʊθmæn/] - by Louis de Bernières. I read the whole trilogy of which this is the last book possibly while I was a teenager. I remember... Oh, no, it would have been a little bit later... because the first... sorry, the first book that I read by Louis de Bernières was Captain Carelli's Mandolin, which was just this huge hit in either 1997 or 1998. I have a feeling my mother sent it to me. She sent me a few books that year and I think Captain Corelli's Mandolin might have been one of them. And, yeah, I loved Captain Corelli's Mandolin - I was one of the many who loved that book - and then went on to read this. So I would have been in either my late teens or my early twenties.
The trilogy, as I remember it - so what are the other books in the trilogy? The War Of Don Emmanuel's Nether Parts and Señor Vivo And The Coca Lord and then... and then this one is The Troublesome Offspring Of Cardinal Guzman [/gʊθmæn/]... So - which is how I've decided to pronounce his name… So altogether the trilogy is about war and religion and corruption and abduction and torture in South America... somewhere in South America - I'm not sure that we ever really get a clear idea of which country they're in and perhaps as far as Louis de Bernières is concerned it doesn't matter. Some of it's brutal and... I mean, I seem to remember there being descriptions of torture that were really grim. Some of it's very funny. It has quite a light tone.
This book is an interesting choice on Jaya's part because this completes the trilogy and we join the characters at a point when, I think, life is going pretty well for them. A... There's been an earthquake and a lake has emptied out and it... a valley has been flooded but it's left this land available to be settled by a whole group of displaced people. And they come together, along with a whole load of jaguars, to this town... this, well, village, I suppose, which they call... let me find it... Cocha... Cochadeba... oh I'm not very good with Spanish pronunciation... Cochadebajo de los Gatos. I don't know. But “los Gatos”, which means cats, refers to the Jaguars, these big cats.
And so I think... I don't remember... So I... Okay. Full disclosure: I had started rereading this book... A few weeks ago, I started rereading this book thinking that by the time I came to talk about it I would have done finished reading it but, as I keep saying, I just... I can't concentrate on reading novels at the moment so I've only got to page 55 of this Minerva edition of the book - 55 of 388, I think it is. Yeah, 388 pages. So, yeah, I haven't got very far and I don't remember if terrible things happen here. But so far what's happened is that somebody has fallen in love with - and got married to - some identical twins, somebody else has done some preaching, and they... they've gone to... as a... as a, kind of... as a... en masse, as it were, they've gone to pick up a huge roll of... I think cable or wire, which they can use... to run a generator? Or to... Oh. You see? My memory is so bad. Anyway, this... this huge... this huge thing, it's some kind of thing which is going to allow them to cultivate this whole bit of land that they can't access on foot, that they're going to have to access... or they can't access very easily on foot so they're going to build this lift. And this is an important part of building the lift.
Yeah. So, anyway. I'm just going [laughing] to read you just a couple of paragraphs - two or three... yeah, three paragraphs - which describes the villagers all setting out to go and get this thing, which has been... it's been delivered but they couldn't get... the transporter couldn't get as far as the village - the pueblito - “because it could not turn the corners”, it says on page 48. So here we are. So from pages 48 and 49:
What followed was the greatest feat of co-operation and determination in the history of the entire department. Almost the whole population trekked out to Santa Maria Virgen, their mochilas bulging with provisions, their eyes steely, their muscles flexing with anticipation. With them went a vast herd containing every mule, every horse, every cow, steer and bull, and, as though impervious to the solemnity of the expedition, a frolicking horde of the pet jaguars of the city. They carpeted the slopes with velvet black, darting after viscachas and birds, perching on the backs of bulls, patting at rocks and starting small avalanches, ambushing each other and rolling away in flurries of dust.
It was a journey as heroic as the original emigration; by day the sierra reverberated to cries of ‘burro, burro’, and ‘vaca, vaca, vamos’; the people encouraged the animals in that soft falsetto beloved of drovers, and the animals lowed in the mildest of protest, resigned to their fate as the willing victims of incomprehension. Their hoofs slipped upon the rocks, and only the mules maintained a sure footing. By night the people bivouacked on the punas, and the hobbled animals ate ichu grass and emptied their minds of memory in order to meet the next day even more like themselves than they had been the day before.
It was on this expedition that Felicidad realised that she was in love with Don Emmanuel, because under the stars, wet with dew upon the blanket and between her thighs, she dreamed repeatedly of the eloquence of his nether parts. She dreamed that his polla, famed charger that it was, leapt out of a cupboard and winked at her. Its eye changed to a mouth and smiled knowingly. It hopped across the floor and sprang into her lap, rubbing itself against her palm as a kitten rubs its ears, and its purring was the same purring as the somnolent snores of the jaguars asleep amongst the people. Then suddenly she was afloat in a creamy sea of vanilla-flavoured sperm with the moon above her transforming the sea to silver, and a dolphin vaulted out of the ocean, changing in mid-arch into Don Emmanuel's pink appendage. There was a moment of terror in case it was a shark, but then she was born aloft upon it and rode towards the gap between the stars that the Indians call ‘the pig’. In the morning, Don Emmanuel approached her and said, ‘I had a dream of you,’ and she knew that when the expedition was concluded she would embark upon a voyage of love ordained.
I think that gives you quite a good sense of the prose of this book [laughing] and the... the tone of it as well.
Okay. I think I've talked more than I intended to, as I so often do. Thank you very much for accompanying me today. Thank you for sticking with this project of mine. In the next episode I will definitely reach the first book on the second shelf of... of my bookshelf here. I will only talk about two books in that episode. That's... Yeah. I may explain more about that when I record that episode and I may not. I may forget that I've mentioned it at all. In any case... yeah, look after yourselves, look after each other, take time to breathe and to stretch and to move around. Thank you so much for listening to this. 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]