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Episode image is a detail of a photo by Charles Adrian.
During a very hot spell in West London, with a glass of water at his side and a towel draped over his shoulder, Charles Adrian revisits the last three books given to him by guests during the second season of the podcast.
The Cloudspotter’s Guide by Gavin Pretor-Pinney, mentioned briefly here, is discussed more fully in Page One 27 and Page One 163.
Also mentioned in this episode is Les Caves Du Vatican by André Gide.
The Guardian has a nicely out-dated article from 2014 here about subtweeting and vaguebooking that entirely backs up Charles Adrian’s understanding of those terms.
Books discussed here were previously discussed in Page One 87, Page One 88 and Page One 89.
A transcript of this episode is below.
Episode recorded: 11th August, 2020.
Episode released: 15th September, 2020.
Book listing:
Journals 1889-1949 – André Gide (trans. Justin O’Brien) (Page One 87)
Haunted by Chuck Palahniuk (Page One 88)
The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters (Page One 89)
Links:
Subtweeting and Vaguebooking in The Guardian
Episode transcript:
Jingle
You're listening to Page One, the book podcast.
Charles Adrian
Hello and welcome to the 178th Page One. I'm Charles Adrian and this is the 22nd Page One In Review. You join me today on Tuesday the 11th of August.
It is a very hot day here in West London. It's the third, I think, in a series of very hot days. We had one of the hottest days on record here in London a few days ago. It is... Yeah, three or... I don't know... Actually now I don't know how many days it's been this hot. But, anyway, the point is today we are expecting a thunderstorm, which... yeah, it might come at any moment. And I thought that meant that this would be the end of this hot weather but I looked at my weather app on my phone and it looks like we have not only several more days of very hot weather but also several more days of predicted thunderstorms. So I don't know what's going on with that.
From my cloud book, The Cloudspotter's Guide by Gavin Pretor- Pinney, which I've talked about several times before in the... [laughing] during these episodes, these Page One In Review episodes... Gavin Pretor-Pinney describes the process of a cold front being succeeded by a warm front and then a cold front coming again. I think it's what's called a depression in meteorological terms. And in his telling of it... so you get the cold front, which is cold air from the Arctic if you're here in the Northern Hemisphere - so I think this only applies to temperate zones first of all. I know that there are some places where you get almost daily thunderstorms but here in the, sort of, northern temperate zones you get these zones of cold air which come down from the Arctic and zones of hot air which come up from... I don't... the Sahara or somewhere and where they meet - so where the cold is succeeded by the hot - you get a certain kind of, you know, weather - it's, I think, a little bit rainy - and then you get warm weather and it gets more and more humid and then the cold... the next lot of cold comes in - it all... it's all traveling eastwards - and the cold, kind of, undercuts the edge of the hot and that.... so it lifts up the hot, moist air and that's where you get these towering Cumulonimbus clouds and then possibly thunderstorms if there's enough energy in the system. And then usually that's it. Then the thunderstorm passes, the air is cooler and we're back in the... the, you know, the cold air... the cooler air.
And so that's what I assumed would be happening but looking at my weather app we've got... yeah, it looks like we've got several days of hot weather to come and several days of thunderstorms. So I don't know... Either the eastward movement of the air is just stalling at this point or we've got a lot of fronts back to back. I don't know. It's fascinating, isn't it. I don't watch the weather on TV, I just look at my app and, you know, decide based on the pictures whether or not I can risk sleeping outside.
Okay. Let's... Let's get on with today's episode. I'm trying to do it as quickly and as efficiently as possible today because it really is very warm in this room. This is usually the coolest room in the house - and it may still be the coolest room in the house but that's not saying very much today. So I have a glass of water by my side. I have a towel over [laughing] my shoulder. I've had to close the door and the window for sound reasons. I think I'm going to be okay but, yeah, I want to get through this as quickly as possible. I know that I will still stop and repeat things and go back and... you know - just all with a view to, you know, raising the quality of this episode as much as I have it within my power to do - but, yeah, perhaps I will let some things slide that I might not otherwise. [quieter] Yeah. I've got a drip of sweat on my nose.
[at normal volume] Okay. Let's... So, for anybody who's new to the podcast, I usually say that Page One is a book podcast. Oh - hello and welcome. I usually say hello and welcome and then I explain that Page One is a book podcast and that these Page One In Review episodes are episodes in which I'm going through all of the books that I've been given by guests on the podcast.
[page turning]
The first book that I'm going to talk about today was given to me by Alan Cunningham during the 87th Page One. Alan is one of only three people who have been on the podcast more than once. He was also my guest on Page One 39, which was the one and only live edition of the podcast and... So during Page One 39 he gave me a copy of his own book Count From Zero To One Hundred, which we talk about at length in that episode and I thought it might be quite nice to give him a chance to talk about a book that he hadn't written that he nevertheless thought that I should have. And so in the 87th Page One, which we recorded in Hackney, in London - not far from Hackney Town Hall - he gave me André Gide's Journals. It's a Penguin edition in English and it's just called Journals 1889 to 1949.... although... So… although it says it's... it goes up to 1949, the last entry here, on the 764th page of this book, is a facsimile of some handwritten lines which are in French but then, in a note, the translation reads:
‘These insignificant lines date from 12 June 1949. Everything leads me to think that they will be the last of this Journal. - André Gide. - 25 January 1950.’
So it's rather a somber end. So I... Yeah, I don't know why... because that seems to me a journal entry, I don't know why that doesn't count as a journal entry in the... in the eyes of whoever gave this book a title. But in any case, André Gide, he had a long life and a long career and a very successful career - he was a Nobel Prize winner, a very popular novelist. He was very interesting man by the sound of it. I... The only book that I've read that he wrote was Les Caves Du Vatican, which I think is translated as The Vatican Cellars, which I ju... I loved it. I mean, I say this about a lot of books but it is a riot. It's... It's so much fun. Quite shocking, very funny, very surprising. It broke all kinds of rules that I had in my head for... for literature and broke them very successfully and very satisfactorily. Yeah, I absolutely recommend that book. Really, really great.
And so I... yeah, I was interested to read a little bit about the man André Gide. I didn't know a huge amount about him. He... Yeah, you do learn a lot about him from reading his journals. He writes about... He writes about what he's writing. He writes about what he's reading. He writes down thoughts on art, on history, on politics. He writes about how he's feeling. He writes about who he's spending time with, where he's been. He writes about friends, colleagues, lovers. He writes ever so delicately about sex, especially in later journal entries, and much more expansively about emotions - he writes quite a lot about his emotions. Yeah, he's a very, very interesting man.
I'm going to read you two little sections from the journals, one in which he is in a bad mood and one in which he is in a good mood. From the 1928 journal, on page 421, we've got:
Saint-Clair, 3 March
Sudden departure for the Midi...
... which is the south of France, by the way.
I convinced myself that I needed a change of air to cure my grippe...
... which - [laughs] I hope you don't mind me jumping into explain and translate things - “grippe” here... it's a, kind of... it's a cold, I think.
Central heating makes Élizabeth's new house very comfortable; but today, the day after my arrival, I stay in bed all day. Driving rain outside. Tremendous appetite for rest. Yet brain very active, at once receptive and creative. Ah, to be able to begin a new career; start out anew and under another name! How little satisfies those who are succeeding today! Launching a tone of voice, a gait, a bearing, is enough for them. No maturation of thought; no composition. (If ever, later on, someone reads these lines, he will wonder whom I am getting at. ... I am none too sure of it myself.)
So yeah... Oh yes, I'd forgotten that I also wanted to read that because I think it's rather nice that André Gide was vaguebooking or subtweeting back in 1928.
Okay, so some good mood from page 670 now. This is from the 1941 journal:
21 June
The shortest night of the year.
The last four days have been more beautiful than one can say; more beautiful than I could endure. A sort of call to happiness in which all nature conspired in a miraculous swoon, reaching a summit of love and joy in which the human being has nothing further to wish for but death. On such a night one would like to kiss the flowers, caress the tree trunks, embrace any young and ardent body whatever, or prowl in search of it till dawn. Going off to be alone, as I have nevertheless to decide to do, seems impious.
Yeah, quite a transcendent mood there. I'm not sure how long it It lasted. He does... He does go up and down. Although.. yeah:
26 July
I come away delighted from Catherine's dancing class...
And then on the 9th of August he says:
I had never before seen lizard's eggs. Six were brought me. Rather like the snake's eggs I used to dig up as a child in the old sawdust by the Val Richer sawmill.
[laughs] Yeah, isn't it just... It's lovely, isn't it? On the 10th of September:
I am reading with lively interest Bunin's book on Tolstoy.
It really is just whatever is going through his head but... yeah, I found that a pleasure to read.
Okay. But moving on because the heat still oppresses as I stand here on my wooden IKEA steps [laughing] in front of... in front of the books that I've been given...
[page turning]
... the second book that I want to talk to you about today was given to me by Sue Hewlett - or Susanna Hewlett - during the 88th Page One. We recorded that conversation at the Motel de Nowhere which was the studio space that she rented in Bethnal Green, in London.
Oh, by the way, I feel like I should say: I often forget to say “London”. So I talk about places in London like the South Bank or Camden or, I don't know, all kinds of places - the Barbican - and I don't always specify that I mean London so I apologise for that. I live in London and so I have a rather blinkered view of the world. I assume that everybody knows what I'm talking about when I talk about London. It is the... the way Londoner's very often are.
In any case, Susanna Hewlett gave me Haunted, A Novel by Chuck Palahniuk. I'd never read anything by Chuck Palahniuk. I'd certainly heard of him and... had I watched any of the films based on his books? Yes: Fight Club I had watched and very much enjoyed. This book is... oh my word, it's creepy but although it's called Haunted it's not... it's not really ghostly, I wouldn't say. I mean, it's creepy because people are creepy. It's... I think it's a book about decadence. And the twist is chilling because of what it says about people and human nature and our society and, you know, Western culture.
Yeah. I don't know how much I can explain about this. I don't... I don't remember everything in detail but essentially a group of people are going on a writer's retreat and they've given each other nicknames - rather grotesque nicknames - based on some aspect of their appearance or character, I think. And so the book is a series of accounts by each of the people to explain what happened to them which led to them being given the name that they've been given and then in between that is a kind of narration - narrative - explaining the situation at this writers retreat. They've gone for three months, I think, to be completely cut off from the world and they've engineered it in such a way that the people outside will think that they have disappeared. And... yeah, it's... it's gruesome.
The first time I tried to read it, I was reading it on the tube here in London, on the Piccadilly line - on my way to King's Cross, I think - and I had to get off the train. I felt very faint. I thought I was going to collapse. [laughing] I'm quite squeamish and it was just... oh it was... it was really vile. But... yeah, I went back to it. I was very nervous about it for a long time - I didn't want to touch the book - but I did go back to it eventually and read it more slowly and sitting down at home and... yeah, I loved it. There's a real energy to his writing and it's... yeah, it's quite funny and very pointed and... yeah, really... yeah, really good. I do recommend Haunted if you have the stomach for it.
I'm just going to read you a little bit from quite near the beginning of the book where they're still... So they're basically driving around in a minibus picking up the various writers, who have each been told to bring one suitcase each by the organiser, who is Mr. Whittier. He's the only person who gets to keep his real name. So this is an Anchor Books edition of the novel and it is 411 pages in this edition. I'm going to read you from pages 25 and 26:
Our writer's colony, our desert island, should be nicely heated and air-conditioned, or so we've been led to believe. We'll each have our own rooms. Lots of privacy, so we won't need a lot of clothes. Or so we've been told.
We have no reason to expect otherwise.
The borrowed tour bus would be found, but we wouldn't. Not for the three months we'd leave the world. Those three months we'd spend writing and reading our work. Getting our stories perfect.
Last on board, around another block and through another tunnel, waiting at our last pickup spot, was the Duke of Vandals. His fingers smudged and stained from pastel crayons and charcoal pencils. His hands blotched with silk-screen inks, and his clothes stiff with drabs and spatters of dried paint. All these colors still only gray or black, the Duke of Vandals is sitting, waiting there on a metal toolbox heavy with tubes of oil paint, brushes, watercolors, and acrylics.
He stands, making us wait while he shakes back his blond hair and twists a red bandana around to make a ponytail. still standing in the doorway of the bus, the Duke of Vandals looks down the aisle at us all, spotlighted by Agent Tattletale's video camera, he says, “It's about time...”
No, we weren't idiots. We'd never agree to be stranded if we were really going to be cut off. None of us were so bored with this silly, below-average, watered-down, mediocre world that we'd sign our own death wish. Not us.
A living situation like this, of course, we expected fast access to emergency health care, just in case someone stumbled on the stairs or their appendix decided to burst.
So all we had to decide was: What to bring in our one suitcase.
This workshop, it's already supposed to have hot and cold running water. Soap. Toilet paper. Tampax. Toothpaste.
The Duke of Vandals left his landlord a note that said: Screw your lease.
Even more important was what we didn't bring. The Duke of Vandals didn't bring cigarettes, his mouth teeth-grinding wads of nicotine gum. Saint Gut-Free didn't bring pornography. Countess Foresight and the Matchmaker didn't bring their wedding rings.
As Mr. Whittier would say, “What stops you in the outside world, that will stop you in here.”
The rest of the disaster wasn't our fault. We had no reason, none whatsoever, to bring a chainsaw. Or a sledgehammer or a stick of dynamite. Or a gun. No, on this desert island, we'd be completely, completely safe.
Before sunrise on this sweet new day we won't ever see happen
So we'd been led to believe. Maybe too safe.
It's because of all this, we brought nothing that could save us.
So that's Haunted by Chuck Palahniuk.
[page turning]
The last book that I have to talk to you about today is, kind of, a ghost story. This was given to me by Nick Field during the 89th Page One. We sat down to have that conversation somewhere outside a cafe in the street near Victoria in London and... yeah, he gave me The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters.
I had already read The Night Watch by Sarah Waters. I read that several times when I was [laughing] on an... on an artist's retreat, actually, for which I had not brought enough books. It was only seven weeks and we were not that isolated - there was a bus that went through the village to take us to the seaside whenever we had one of our rare days off - but, in any case, I'd only taken with me The Night Watch and Dante's Inferno - which was one of the books that I studied for my languages degree and wanted to reread - and then... what was the...? Oh! And... And The Cloudspotters Guide - which I've already talked about - by Gavin Pretor-Pinney. So I had those three books and I read The Night Watch in the first couple of days, I think, and then, kind of, saw the... the next seven weeks stretching away from me almost book-free. So I read The Night Watch again and then I made, you know, as slow progress as I could through The Cloudspotter's Guide and... and Dante's Inferno, which I could only read slowly.
But, in any case... So I, kind of, [laughs] unfairly felt a little bit bored of Sarah Waters and wasn't that excited about reading The Little Stranger but it's great. I... When I did read it, I loved it. I think she has a really wonderful sense of place. This was... It's so... I want to say redolent, this novel, of rural or semi-rural England in the nineteen-forties. So it's set in and around a manor house in Warwickshire sometime in the late nineteen-forties - I think possibly 1948. In any case, it's just after World War Two. There's... The NHS - the National Health Service - is being created. I think it's in the process of being created when this book is set. The narrator, Dr Faraday, is a GP so he's intimately involved in that process and obviously the way that he works will change as a result of it.
It's a book... I mean it's... [sighs] yeah, it's about so many things. It's about cupidity, insecurity - both personal and financial - it's about class-consciousness, it's about the clash of old and new money, it's about urbanites versus old fashioned county families. And then there's this ghost plot, which is... which... You know, I said Haunted was creepy because people are creepy. This is creepy in a more malign... you know, mysterious, paranormal way. And the ghost part of the story, I think... it comes out of repression. It's a really fundamental aspect of this plot. Repression is an... yeah, so it wasn't in my list just now but repression is super, super important to this story - repression of desire, of grief, of envy, of jealousy, of resentment. And, yeah, one of the things that's so great about this... you know, the ghostliness is that it's a, kind of, subversion of a more traditional poltergeist story. And, yeah, I don't want to say any more about that because I think I would spoil the novel unforgivably if I did.
But the bit that I'm going to read to you... So... [tuts] yeah, I always forget to look up the publisher and the number of pages before I start talking about it. I think it's important to give you a sense of, you know, which actual book I'm reading from. So this is... this is published by Virago Press and it is 499 pages long. I've just seen the word “poltergeist” in the acknowledgments. Okay. Anyway, I'm going to read to you from pages 85, 86 and 87.
So the Ayres are the family that own this manor house, which is called Hundreds Hall, and... yeah, they're, kind of... they're running out of money to keep the house up. Dr Faraday is, as I say, the narrator. He... he visited the house when he was a child. His mother had been a maid, I think, in the house. The Ayres are having a party - a cocktail party, I think - and they've invited Bill and Helen Desmond, and Mr and Mrs Rossiter, and Miss Dabney. They are all, kind of, more or less county families. And then they've also invited the Baker-Hydes and Mrs Baker-Hyde's younger brother Mr Morley who are up from town. I think they're... yeah, from London. And this... yeah, I like this because I think it... it sets off really nicely the class clash and also the clash of, as I said, old money and new money, and urbanites against the old fashioned county families. I think all of that appears very nicely in this passage.
None of the newcomers knew me, in my evening clothes. Rossiter was a retired magistrate, Bill Desmond owned a great deal of land, and they weren't the sort of people I usually mixed with. Desmond's wife was the first to recognise me.
‘Oh!’ she said anxiously. ‘No one's unwell, I hope?’
‘Unwell?’ said Mrs Ayres. Then, with a light society laugh. ‘Ah, no. The doctor's our guest tonight. Mr and Mrs Rossiter, you know Dr Faraday, I expect? And you, Miss Dabney?’
Miss Dabney, as it happened, I had treated once or twice. She was something of a hypochondriac, the sort of patient a doctor could make quite a decent living out of. But she was old-fashioned ‘quality’, with rather a high-handed way with GPs, and I think she was surprised to find me there at Hundreds with a glass of rum in my hand. The surprise, however, was swallowed up in the general stir of arrival, for everyone had something to say about the room; there were drinks to be poured and handed out; and there was Gyp, amiable Gyp, who went nosing his way from person to person, to be fussed over and petted.
Oh, Gyp, by the way, is the... is the dog. I forgot to say that.
Then Caroline offered cigarettes...
Oh, Caroline. [tuts] Yes, Caroline is Caroline Ayres. She's the daughter of the house. Very important character. [clears throat]
Then Caroline offered cigarettes, and the guests got a proper look at her.
‘My word!’ said Mr Rossiter, with heavy gallantry. ‘And who is this young beauty?’
Caroline tilted her head. ‘Only plain old Caroline underneath the lipstick, I'm afraid.’
‘Now don't be silly, my dear,’ said Mrs Rossiter, taking a cigarette from the box. ‘You look charming. You are your father's daughter, and he was a very handsome man.’ She spoke to Mrs Ayres. ‘The Colonel would have liked to see the room like this, wouldn't he, Angela? He so enjoyed a party. A tremendous dancer; tremendous poise. I remember seeing you dancing together once at Warwick. It was a pleasure to watch you; you were like thistledown. The young people today don't seem to know the old dances, and as for the modern dances - well, now I dare say I'm showing my age, but the modern dances always seem to me so vulgar. So much hopping about; like a scene from a mental ward! It can't be good for one. What do you say Dr Faraday?’
I made some anodyne response, and we talked the matter over for a time; but the conversation soon returned to the great parties and balls that the county had hosted in the past, and I had less to contribute. ‘That must have been nineteen twenty-eight or twenty-nine,’ I heard Miss Dabney say of some particularly glittering event; and I was just wryly picturing my life in those years, as a medical student in Birmingham, dead on my feet through overwork, permanently hungry, and living in a Dickensian garret with a hole in its roof, when Gyp began to bark. Caroline caught hold of his collar to keep him from racing from the room. We became aware of voices in the passage, one of them apparently a child's - ‘Is there a dog?’ - and our own voices died away. A group of people appeared in the doorway: two men in lounge suits, a good-looking woman in a vivid cocktail gown, and a pretty little girl of eight or nine.
The girl took us all by surprise. She turned out to be the Baker-Hyde's daughter, Gillian. But the second man had clearly been expected, at least by Mrs Ayres; I'd heard nothing about him myself. He was introduced as Mrs Baker-Hyde's younger brother, Mr Morley.
‘I'm generally up here with Diana and Peter for the weekends, you see,’ he said, as he shook people's hands, ‘so I thought I'd tag along. Not got off to a great start, have we?’ He called to his brother-in-law: ‘Peter! You're going to get thrown out of the county, old man!’
He meant, because of their lounge suits; for Bill Desmond, Mr Rossiter and I were dressed in old-style evening clothes, and Mrs Ayres and the other ladies were all in floor-length gowns. But the Baker-Hyde party seemed ready to laugh off its embarrassment over that; somehow, in fact, it was the rest of us who ended up feeling badly dressed. Not that Mr and Mrs Baker-Hyde were in any way condescending. On the contrary, I have to say I found them perfectly pleasant and polite that night - though with an extraordinary sort of finish to them, so that I could well understand why some local people might have felt them to be out of touch with rural ways. The little girl had some of their poise, clearly ready to chat with the grown-ups on equal terms, but she was still essentially a child. She seemed tickled, for example, by the sight of Betty in her apron and cap, and she made something of a show of being frightened by Gyp. When the drinks were handed round she was given lemonade, but she clamoured so much to be given wine, her father finally tipped some from his glass into hers. The Warwickshire adults looked on in fascinated dismay as the sherry disappeared into her tumbler.
Okay. So... yeah, three books that I would thoroughly recommend rounding off our review or revisiting - “revisiting” is a better word - of the second season of the podcast.
Right. So. Yes, in the next episode I'll be talking about the first three books that I was given by guests during the third season of the podcast. Hopefully, it will be less hot then. Or... at least, I don't mind the heat so much. I don't enjoy sweating particularly. But yeah, I hope you're all surviving whatever temperature it is that you have to deal with. Thank you, as always, for listening to this. Until the next time. 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]