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Episode image is a detail from a photo by Charles Adrian.
Taking the time to indulge in some discussion of both the Gunpowder Plot and the differences between climbing and bouldering, Charles Adrian starts off the UK’s second national lockdown with three more books from guests on the podcast.
An account of the Gunpowder Plot and its aftermath can be found on Wikipedia here and a round-up of the differences between climbing and bouldering can be found on the Guardian here.
Arlie Adlington is featured in Page One 148, which you can listen to here.
Another book by Robert Louis Stevenson, Kidnapped, is discussed in Page One 16, which features Isbel’s sister Cat James, and in Page One 159, which doesn’t.
A Time Of Gifts by Patrick Leigh Furmor is discussed in Page One 32 and Page One 164.
Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov is also discussed in Page One 151 (and particularly in the unedited version of that episode). Other books by Vladimir Nabokov discussed on the podcast are Lolita (Page One 71) and Collected Stories (Page One 162).
Also mentioned in this episode is The Prisoner Of Zenda by Anthony Hope.
Another book by W. Somerset Maugham, The Narrow Corner, is discussed in Page One 66.
The Selected Short Stories Of “Saki” by “Saki” is discussed in Page One 12 and Page One 158.
You can read about the trials of Oscar Wilde for gross indecency on Famous Trials here.
Books discussed in this episode were previously discussed in Page One 118, Page One 119 and Page One 120.
A transcript of this episode is below.
Episode recorded: 5th November, 2020.
Episode released: 1st December, 2020.
Book listing:
Travels With A Donkey In The Cévennes and The Amateur Emigrant by Robert Louis Stevenson (Page One 118)
Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov (Page One 119 and Page One 151)
The Razor’s Edge by W. Somerset Maugham (Page One 120)
Links:
Oscar Wilde gross indecency trials
Episode transcript:
Jingle
You're listening to Page One, the book podcast.
Charles Adrian
Hello and welcome to the 189th Page One. I'm Charles Adrian and this is the 31st Page One In Review. Today is Thursday the 5th of November, 2020.
Remember, remember the fifth of November,
Gunpowder, treason and plot!
And, yeah, something like four hundred years of anti-Catholic sentiment in the United Kingdom. Yeah. Even... I mean, it's interesting to think about that. There was a... There was an exhibition about the Gunpowder Plot when... I suppose during the four hundredth anniversary year, which I saw, I think, at the Houses of Parliament - I think it might have been even in Westminster Hall, which is the oldest surviving part of the Houses of Parliament - and, yeah, there was some information about all of the anti-Catholic laws that were either brought in or ramped up following the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot. And, yeah, it sounds like something that would be ancient history but not very long ago when Tony Blair was Prime Minister there was a certain amount of panicked commentary about his closeness to Roman Catholicism. Cherie Blair, I think, was Roman Catholic - I think a practicing Roman Catholic - and Tony Blair visited the Pope and... and I... and, I think, converted to Roman Catholicism after he ceased to be Prime Minister but was nominally an Anglican during his time in office. And the fact that that was still important - or, you know, still considered important by at least some people who live in the United Kingdom - is extraordinary to me. But there it is. It is the case.
In any case, more relevant history would be that today is the first day of the second national lockdown here in the United Kingdom. The rules are pretty much the same as the first time we did this. Some things are different. I think it's... So schools are open for a start and I think it's easier to organise childcare if you need it - in your home or your child, I think, can go and be in somebody else's home - which I think was not the case during the first lockdown, which was, of course, Dominic Cummings's justification for driving up to Durham when he and his wife became ill with COVID-19.
What else? Oh, yeah, so... And then.... So restaurants are closed but can be open for takeaway - you can't eat in, in other words, but you can take out. Restaurants, cafes, that would apply to... Bars, I think. Theatres are closed, cinemas are closed. I saw that climbing walls are closed. I hadn't really been aware that they were open again. Climbing was something that I started doing perhaps a year ago, perhaps more than a year ago, I don't remember. Well, I say “climbing”, I learned how to boulder. There's a bouldering wall in Acton where I live. And I have a bottle of liquid chalk in my hallway that's been sitting there reminding me that I haven't been bouldering for months and months and months and months.
I started doing it because of my friend Arlie, who was a guest on one of the episodes in the 5th season [of] the podcast. We'll get to the book that Arlie gave to me in a future Page One In Review. But, in any case, Arlie became a very enthusiastic climber and inspired me to start trying it out. And we don't have a climbing wall here in Acton but we have a bouldering wall. I did go to the climbing centre that Arlie goes to once and the climbing wall... So bouldering... In case you don't know, bouldering is... you do it without ropes and harnesses and you don't climb all that high. It's a few metres - I don't know how many meters now - and it's... yeah, it's a, kind of, puzzle. Depending on your proficiency, you know, you choose a particular route up the wall. The handholds have different colours and different shapes, you know, according to their level of difficulty. But climbing... so climbing involves ropes and harnesses and walls that are just terrifyingly high, it seems to me.
So I never did the the harness initiation, which you have to do if you want to go climbing as opposed to bouldering - so Arlie and I bouldered when we went to the climbing wall that he tends to go to - but I did have this ambition to learn how to manage ropes and harnesses so that we could climb together, which I think would be really fun. But, yeah, so that's been put on hold for the whole of this year. I didn't realise that at some point the climbing walls... yeah, may well have been open but they certainly closed during the first lockdown and they are now closed again, I saw this morning when I was reading through the regulations.
But, yeah, so that's... that's all just stuff that was in my brain and I wanted to get out [laughing] this afternoon. Hello! In case you're new to the podcast, this is a book podcast. Thank you very much for joining me. So normally in these episodes I do talk a little bit about something that's on my mind and then the meat of the episode, which we'll get on to now, is me talking about books that I've been given by guests on my podcast during the last eight years of doing the podcast. We've got to books that guests gave me towards the end of the 4th season of the podcast. So these episodes went out sometime in 2016 - I haven't looked up the dates.
But the first book that I have to talk to you about today was given to me by Isbel James during the 118th Page One. We had that conversation in the flat that she was living in in Brixton - or near Brixton.
[page turning]
So Isbel gave me Travels With A Donkey In The Cévennes and The Amateur Emigrant, which is a collection of two books by Robert Louis Stevenson - both accounts of journeys that he took. So these aren't novels, they are... they're travel writing, I suppose, or memoir or... I mean, yeah, The Amateur Emigrant is a description of a journey across the sea to America in very uncomfortable conditions. That's a... Yeah, that's a fascinating read. But the book that Isbel, I think, mainly wanted to give me it was the first of these two, Travels With A Donkey In The Cévennes, which is the account of a holiday that Robert Louis Stevenson took in the Cévennes region of France. He went for a long walk with a donkey.
It's very funny. It's very beautifully written. Robert Louis Stevenson here shows that he can be both funny and elegiac, I think. And he's a very good chronicler of what is basically a ramble around a bit of pretty sparsely inhabited French countryside. I would say someone like Patrick Leigh Fermor, who I've talked about in a previous Page One In Review... yeah, he's... he's a, kind of, spiritual successor of this strand of Robert Louis Stevenson's writing but he doesn't have the wit that Robert Louis Stevenson has.
Yeah, Stevenson writes very funnily about the more uncomfortable parts of the journey, he writes very funnily about his very difficult relationship with this donkey who he does [laughing] not get on with, and also about, yeah, encounters with slightly grumpy French people, bad weather that he experiences and the general discomforts of the... of this walking trip. And then alongside that he writes about the beauty of the countryside, and the more... the more pleasurable encounters with French people and the moments when he and his donkey, Mirabelle, are getting on better.
I'm going to read you a little bit, which is just... it's about the end of a day - I think it might be the end of the second day of his walk - and he's... he's looking for a town where he can - or a village - where he can spend the night and it's getting very dark and he doesn't know where he is and the weather is not so good. And, yeah, he's had several encounters with both adults and children who have given him either good instructions or bad instructions or haven't helped him at all and he's just been going round and round in circles in the rain with this donkey, who [laughing] doesn't particularly want to go anywhere most of the time. And so he... yeah, he finds some... some trees, basically - a bit of woodland - where he's going to spend the night and that's what he describes in the passage I'm going to read to you.
So this is on pages 30, 31, 32 and 33 of this Penguin Classics edition of Travels With A Donkey In The Cévennes. So this book all together - including The Amateur Emigrant but not including the notes - is 227 pages long. So, yeah, this, starting on page 30:
At last black trees began to show on [sic] my left, and, suddenly crossing the road, made a cave of unmitigated blackness right in front. I call it a cave without exaggeration; to pass below that arch of leaves was like entering a dungeon. I felt about until my hand encountered a stout branch, and to this I tied Modestine...
Oh, Modestine not Mirabelle. Sorry. [laughs] I got the name of the donkey wrong. The donkey's called Modestine, which is a... yeah, a wonderful name for anybody but also for a donkey. Okay. Sorry.
I felt about until my hand encountered a stout branch, and to this I tied Modestine, a haggard, drenched, desponding donkey. Then I lowered my pack, laid it along the wall on the margin of the road, and unbuckled the straps. I knew well enough where the lantern was, but where were the candles? I groped and groped among the tumbled articles, and, while I was thus groping, suddenly I touched the spirit-lamp. Salvation! This would serve my turn as well. The wind roared unwearyingly among the trees; I could hear the boughs tossing and the leaves churning through half a mile of forest; yet the scene of my encampment was not only as black as the pit, but admirably sheltered. At the second match the wick caught flame. The light was both livid and shifting; but it cut me off from the universe, and doubled the darkness of the surrounding night.
I tied Modestine more conveniently for herself, and broke up half the black bread for her supper, reserving the other half against the morning. Then I gathered what I should want within reach, took off my wet boots and gaiters, which I wrapped in my waterproof, arranged my knapsack for a pillow under the flap of my sleeping-bag, insinuated my limbs into the interior, and buckled myself in like a bambino. I opened a tin of Bologna sausage and broke a cake of chocolate, and that was all I had to eat. It may sound offensive, but I ate them together, bite by bite, by way of bread and meat. All I had to wash down this revolting mixture was neat brandy: a revolting beverage in itself. But I was rare and hungry; ate well, and smoked one of the best cigarettes in my experience. Then I put a stone in my straw hat, pulled the flap of my fur cap over my neck and eyes, put my revolver ready to my hand, and snuggled well down among the sheepskins.
I questioned at first if I were sleepy, for I felt my heart beating faster than usual, as if with an agreeable excitement to which my mind remained a stranger. But as soon as my eyelids touched, that subtle glue leaped between them, and they would no more come separate.
The wind among the trees was my lullaby. Sometimes it sounded for minutes together with a steady even rush, not rising nor abating; and again it would swell and burst like a great crashing breaker, and the trees would patter me all over with big drops from the rain of the afternoon. Night after night, in my own bedroom in the country, I have given ear to this perturbing concert of the wind among the woods; but whether it was a difference in the trees, or the lie of the ground, or because I was myself outside and in the midst of it, the fact remains that the wind sang to me [sic] a different tune among these woods of Gévaudan, I hearkened and hearkened; and meanwhile sleep took gradual possession of my body and subdued my thoughts and senses; but still my last waking effort was to listen and distinguish, and my last conscious state was one of wonder at the foreign clamour in my ears.
Twice in the course of the dark hours - once when a stone galled me underneath the sack, and again when the poor patient Modestine, growing angry, pawed and stamped upon the road - I was recalled for a brief while to consciousness, and saw a star or two overhead, and the lace-like edge of the foliage against the sky. When I awoke for the third time (Wednesday, September 25th), the world was flooded with a blue light, the mother of the dawn. I saw the leaves labouring in the wind and the ribbon of the road; and, on turning my head, there was Modestine tied to a beech, and standing half across the path in an attitude of inimitable patience. I closed my eyes again, and set to thinking over the experience of the night. I was surprised to find how easy and pleasant it had been, even in this tempestuous weather. The stone which annoyed me would not have been there, had I not been forced to camp blindfold in the opaque night; and I had felt no other inconvenience, except when my feet encountered the lantern or the second volume of Peyrat's Pastors of the Desert among the mixed contents of my sleeping-bag; nay, more, I had felt not a touch of cold, and awakened with unusually lightsome and clear sensations.
With that, I shook myself, got once more into my boots and gaiters, and, breaking up the rest of the bread for Modestine, strolled about to see in what part of the world I had awakened. Ulysses, left on Ithaca, and with a mind unsettled by the goddess, was not more pleasantly astray. I have been after an adventure all my life, a pure dispassionate adventure, such as befell early and heroic voyagers; and thus to be found by morning in a random woodside nook in Gévaudan - not knowing north from south, as strange to my surroundings as the first man upon the earth, an inland castaway - was to find a fraction of my day-dreams realised. I was on the skirts of a little wood of birch, sprinkled with a few beeches; behind, it adjoined another word of fir; and in front, it broke up and went down in open order into a shallow and meadowy dale. All around there were bare hill-tops, some near, some far away, as the perspective closed or opened, but none apparently much higher than the rest. The wind huddled the trees. The golden specks of autumn in the birches tossed shiveringly. Overhead the sky was full of strings and shreds of vapour, flying, vanishing, reappearing, and turning about an axis like tumblers, as the wind hounded them through heaven. It was wild weather and famishing cold. I ate some chocolate, swallowed a mouthful of brandy, and smoked a cigarette before the cold should have time to disable my fingers. And by the time I had got all this done, and had made my pack and bound it on the pack-saddle, the day was tiptoe on the threshold of the east. We had not gone many steps along the lane, before the sun still invisible to me, sent a glow of gold over some cloud mountains that lay ranged along the eastern sky.
The wind had us on the stern, and hurried us bitingly forward. I buttoned myself into my coat, and walked on in a pleasant frame of mind with all men, when suddenly, at a corner, there was Fouzilhic once more in front of me. Not [sic] only that, but there was the old gentleman who had escorted me so far the night before, running out of his house at sight of me, with hands upraised in horror.
‘My poor boy!’ he cried, ‘what does this mean?’
I told him what had happened. He beat his old hands like clappers in a mill, to think how lightly he had let me go; but when he heard of the man of Fouzilhac, anger and depression seized upon his mind.
‘This time, at least,’ said he, ‘there shall be no mistake.’
And he limped along, for he was very rheumatic, for about half a mile, and until I was almost within sight of Cheylard, the destination I had hunted for so long.
And then the next little section is titled Cheylard and Luc and it starts:
Candidly, it seemed little worthy of all this searching.
[laughs] I really like that. Yeah, so that's quite a long passage from Travels With A Donkey In This Cévennnes by Robert Louis Stevenson but, as I think I said when I was talking about Kidnapped - which, quite by rather strange coincidence, Isbel's sister Cat James gave me very early on in this Page One adventure - I... I really like Robert Louis Stevenson's voice. I like his writing. I like... I... Yeah, I find him very, very easy to read and I just want to continue reading once I've started. So, yeah, I recommend Travels With A Donkey In The Cévennes. It's a really wonderful narrative and a, yeah, beautiful piece of travel writing.
[page turning]
Okay. The second book that I have to talk to you about today is Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov. This was given to me by Katherine Leedale during the 119th Page One. It was also very nearly given to me by Tim Spooner during the... oh what was that... 151st Page One? Oh, I haven't looked that up. I don't know. In any case... Yeah, it's either the 151st or the 152nd, I think, and we talked about it quite a lot then, Tim and I - and especially in the unedited version of that episode. I don't have an awful lot more to say about it. I had read it very recently when Tim Spooner and I had our conversation and, yeah, I haven't reread it since. And it is a very complex and confusing novel. I did very much enjoy it, though. I... yeah. I've talked about Vladimir Nabokov before several times on the podcast and, yeah, about how much I enjoy his writing - or the bits of his writing that I've come across. This is... Yeah, this is very different from any of the other things that I've read by him - those being Lolita and some short stories. It's... [laughs] Yeah, it's just... I don't... Yeah, I know what to say about it really.
To describe it briefly, it's a poem called Pale Fire, which is supposed to be by an American poet called John Shade, and then notes written about that poem by somebody called Charles Kinbote, who claims to be a Zemblan king in exile. I would say there are three strands to this novel: there's the poem, which I read as being about grief and loss, there's the apparent entanglement of John Shade and his neighbour and commentator Charles Kinbote - aka Charles the Beloved - and then there's the story of the flight of this Charles from the kingdom of Zembla in... somewhere in Northern Europe to America. And that's... So that story - the... the... [musing] hmm... the... the story of... well, anything relating to Charles Kinbote - is told in the foreword and in the notes to the poem and they take up by far the largest amount of space in this novel. The poem itself is a relatively slim thing. Yeah, it stretches from pages 29 to 58 in this edition of Pale Fire, which is 236 pages long altogether and is published also by Penguin Classics.
I'm... Yeah, I'm not going to read an awful lot of this. I'm just going to read you the first twelve lines of Canto One of the poem because I find them very, very beautiful and they haven't been read on the podcast up until now. I was also going to read you the notes to lines 1-4 because they demonstrate quite how loose an attitude to the poem Charles Kinbote, the commentator and editor, takes. Kinbote is either deluded or dishonest - I don't really know which - but, yeah, the interplay between the poem and the notes is wonderful and the story that Kinbote tells is rather wonderful and fantastical. And yeah, as I've said before, I think it gives a little nod towards The Prisoner Of Zenda - Zenda and Zembla seem to me too similar for that not to be deliberate. Although, as Mary McCarthy writes in the introductory essay to this edition of the novel, Zemla is also ‘semblance’. She makes a connection between Zembla and ‘semblance’ and... and she points out that these first twelve lines of the poem talk about, kind of, reflections and illusions and shifting realities, which is... which is what the whole novel ends up being about.
But yeah, so let me read these... these lines from page 29 of this edition of Pale Fire:
Canto One
I was the shadow of the waxwing slain
By the false azure in the windowpain;
I was the smudge of ashen fluff - and I
Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky.
And from the inside, too, I'd duplicate
Myself, my lamp, an apple on a plate:
Uncurtaining the night, I'd let dark glass
Hang all the furniture above the grass,
And how delightful when a fall of snow
Covered my glimpse of lawn and reached up so
As to make chair and bed exactly stand
Upon that snow, out in that crystal land!
I think that's gorgeous. Yeah, I've been talking more about poetry on the podcast recently: that's another piece of poetry that I really like. And the whole poem, I think, is very beautiful and well worth reading. The note to line 12, which is the last line that I read there, and particularly the words “that crystal land”, starts:
Perhaps an allusion to Zembla, my dear country.
That's on page 62. I think absolutely not an allusion to “Zembla, my dear country” but, yeah, that gives you a little glimpse of Charles Kinbote's character, I think, and his necessary narcissism.
[page turning]
Okay. The 120th Page One was my conversation with A. F. Harrold. We had that conversation at Tilehurst near Reading. I forgot to say that... oh... yeah, my conversation with Katherine Leedale took place somewhere in London. I don't remember where she was living and where I went. Possibly Hackney way. Yeah, I don't know. In any case, yeah, I went to Tilehurst for my conversation with A. F. Harrold. That was the 120th Page One and he gave me The Razor's Edge by W. Somerset Maugham. Is he William? I don't remember now.
I've read a lot of Somerset Maugham. I have a collection of his short stories and I have had quite a few of the short novels, although I've given away or sold a lot of those. I still have - looking at my shelf here - Up At The Villa, Ashenden and The Painted Veil. I remember... Yeah, Ashenden is probably the novel I remember the most about. It's a, sort of, novelisation of Somerset Maugham's experience of being a spy during the First World War and it's quite fun. The others - and all the short stories - I... I remember enjoying them but I don't remember really anything about them. And the same is true of The Razor's Edge. I vaguely remember that it's set in France but I had forgotten until I looked at it earlier this afternoon that Maugham himself appears as... as the narrator of this novel, which is... yeah, it's quite fun.
I d... Yeah, I don't know what... I really don't know what to say about the plot of this book because I remember so little about it. But about Somerset Maugham in general I think I wanted to say that a big thing that I see in his writing - one of the things that strikes me most forcibly - is the... the, kind of, waspish wit and snobbery of a certain kind of homosexual, [laughing] I would say - and I use the word “homosexual” quite deliberately. And I want to say a certain kind of affluent homosexual, standing uncomfortably between respectability and rejection. I think that's really important. I don't think the nationality is important. Originally, I was thinking: “Oh, do I mean a, kind of, British homosexual of, you know... a, kind of, early twentieth century Imperial British homosexuality?” And that's... that... it's definitely in there but it's not, I think, confined to Britain and to the age of empire. I've met homosexuals of different nationalities [laughing] who fit this profile during my life. And I have taken on some of the characteristics of that... of that homosexuality that I'm talking about, with its mannerisms and its affected superiority and carelessness - callousness, even, I would say.
I see... So I see that in Somerset Maugham's writing. I also see it in the writing of “Saki”, which I talked about in one of the early Page One In Review episodes. I... I talked... When I was talking about “Saki” I was talking about the cruelty of his characters. What I didn't say is that the cruelty which I see in his writing is... is the cruelty of the marginalised insider. And I think that's, kind of, what I'm talking about. Somebody who is precariously placed on the edge of acceptance, on the edge of affluence. So doing really very well but always vulnerable, as I think the trial of Oscar Wilde demonstrated so traumatically, to an instant reversal of fortune. There's a... There's a kind of insecurity, a kind of... a knowledge that one is not entirely accepted and that one's membership of this affluence, of this... you know, one's place in society might be revoked at any time. And, yeah, at the same time I think the fact that one has that position - that the person who I'm talking about, the homosexual [laughing] that I'm talking about - has that position is very important. This is not just all gay people or... This is not even all gay men. This is a particular kind of gay man in a particular kind of structural position. And, yeah, I guess it's a position that I occupy also, which is perhaps why I recognise it or... or am projecting it onto the people that I meet and the things that I'm reading. But I think I've always seen that in Somerset Maugham's writing.
And I... So I want to read you a couple of pages from the third chapter of the fifth part of this book. And it's... it's an account of a conversation between Somerset Maugham, as the narrator of this novel, and Elliott Templeton, who is... [musing] mmm, I think he's A... Yeah, he's... no, he's definitely American. It says on the back he's the uncle of Isabel, who is the fiancée of Larry Darrell, who is “a young American in search of the absolute”. There you go. I don't remember Isabel or Larry Darrell. I do have some memory of Elliott Templeton, who's described here as “a classic expatriate snob” and, yes, very much the kind of person that I met when I was an expatriate snob living in Florence, for example. So, yeah, this is just... it's on pages 215, 216 and 217 of this 341-page edition of The Razor's Edge, which is published by Vintage. Okay:
3.
On the following evening I took the Blue Train to the Riviera and two or three days later went over to Antibes to see Elliott and give him news of Paris. He looked far from well. The cure at Montecatini had not done him the good he expected, and his subsequent wanderings had exhausted him. He found a baptismal font in Venice and then went on to Florence to buy the triptych he had been negotiating for. Anxious to see these objects duly placed, he went down to the Pontine Marshes and put up at a miserable inn where the heat had been hard to bear. His precious purchases were a long time on the way, but determined not to leave till he had accomplished his purpose, he stayed on. He was delighted with the effect when at last everything was in order, and he showed me with pride the photographs he had taken. The church, though small, had dignity, and the restrained richness of the interior was proof of Elliott's good taste.
‘I saw an early Christian sarcophagus in Rome that took my fancy and I deliberated a long time about buying it, but in the end I thought better of it.’
‘What on earth did you want with an early Christian sarcophagus, Elliott?’
‘To put myself in it, my dear fellow. It was of a very good design, and I thought it would balance the font on the other side of the entrance, but those early Christians were stumpy little fellows and I shouldn't have fitted in. I wasn't going to lie there till the Last Trump with my knees doubled up to my chin like a foetus. Most uncomfortable.’
I laughed, but Elliott was serious.
‘I had a better idea. I've made all arrangements, with some difficulty, but that was to be expected, to be buried in front of the altar at the foot of the chancel steps, so that when the poor peasants of the Pontine Marshes come up to take the Sacrament they'll clump over my bones with their heavy shoes. Rather chic, don't you think? Just a plain stone slab with my name on it and a couple of dates. Si monumentum quaeris, circumspice. If you seek his monument, look around, you know.’
‘I do know enough Latin to understand a hackneyed quotation, Elliott,’ I said tartly.
‘I beg your pardon, my dear fellow. I'm so accustomed to the crass ignorance of the upper classes, I forgot for the moment that I was talking to an author.’
He scored.
‘But what I wanted to say to you was this,’ he continued.
‘I've left proper instructions in my will, but I want you to see they're carried out. I will not be buried on the Riviera among a lot of retired colonels and middle-class French people.’
‘Of course, I'll do what you wish, Elliott. But I don't think we need plan for anything like that for many years to come.’
‘I'm getting on, you know, and to tell you the truth I shan't be sorry to go. What are those lines of Landor's? “I've warmed both hands...”’
Though I have a bad verbal memory, the poem is very short and I was able to repeat it.
‘I strove with none, for none was worth my strife.
Nature I loved, and, next to Nature, Art;
I warmed both hands before the fire of Life;
It sinks and I am ready to depart.'
‘That's it,’ he said.
I could not but reflect that it was only by a violent stretch of the imagination that Elliott could fit the epigram to himself.
‘It expresses my sentiments exactly,’ he said, however. ‘The only thing I could add to it is that I've always moved in the best society in Europe.’
‘It would be difficult to squeeze that into a quatrain.’
‘Society is dead. At one time I had hopes that America would take the place of Europe and create an aristocracy that the hoi polloi would respect, but the depression has destroyed any chance of that. My poor country is becoming hopelessly middle-class. You wouldn't believe it, my dear fellow, but last time I was in America a taxi driver addressed me as brother.’
There you go. Right, that's... so that's it for today. Thank you very much for... for listening to this. In the next episode... Oh, actually, I was going to say: “I will talk about the last books that I was given during the fourth season” but I'm not sure. I might split... I might split them into two. There are going to be a couple of ghost books. So I'll s... Yeah, I don't know. I might just lump everything together and make it one episode or I might draw it out. We'll see. We'll see.
I hope you're all doing all right and... Yeah, you have all my best wishes whether or not you are in lockdown or whatever the situation is where you are at the moment - you know, in the moment that you're listening to this. Yeah. Okay. Anyway, until very soon. Thank you and goodbye.
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]