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Season 1 Episodes

The summer is here! Really! It is! In preparation, we take a short trip to the States and through a small part of Western Europe in this, the 4th edition of Page One. You are again treated to Charles Adrian’s masterful, if geographically ambiguous, American accent and he even reads in French. It is a treat. There is some beautiful, calm, velvety music in this programme so make sure you are somewhere quiet when you listen. Perhaps you could listen to it at home and then listen to it again once you are, yourselves, on holiday.

Soon after this episode was first released, Charles Adrian took his alter-ego Ms Samantha Mann to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. You can find more information about Ms Samantha Mann here.

Another book by Sinclair Lewis, Cass Timberlane, is discussed in Page One 59.

This episode was recorded at the Wilton Way Cafe for London Fields Radio.

This episode has been edited to remove music that is no longer covered by licence for this podcast.

A transcript of this episode is below.

Episode released: July, 2012.

Book listing:

Babbit by Sinclair Lewis

Studies of Great Composers by Sir C. Hubert H. Parry

Totem and Taboo by Sigmund Freud (trans. A. A. Brill)

Chiens Perdus Sans Colliers by Gilbert Cesbrun

Flight Into Camden by David Storey

Links:

Ms Samantha Mann

Page One 59

Charles Adrian

Episode transcript:

Charles Adrian
Hello and welcome to Page One. This is the 4th edition. I'm Charles Adrian, sitting in the Wilton Way Cafe for London Fields Radio.

Jingle
London Fields Radio... it's London Fields Radio.

Charles Adrian
Let's... Let's start with some music this... this month. This is the Coronation Scott by the Queen's Hall Light Orchestra.

Music
[Coronation Scott by the Queen's Hall Light Orchestra]

Charles Adrian
So. No, I'm not starting with a children's story and nor is it a Paul Temple mystery. There just happens to be a mention of a train in... in what I'm going to read first. But also, we are, in this edition, travelling around the world. Kind of.

Okay, I'm ready. I'm, kind of, settled in my chair now.

I live on the outskirts of Chiswick, just close enough that I can pop into the high street for quinoa sourdough loaf when I need one, and I was in Oxfam Books on Turnham Green Terrace on Monday and found this, my... my first book. It's called Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis. This was first published in 1922. My edition is from 1961 and seems to have been owned in 1962 by someone called Marion Angus, who loved it enough to... to write in the front. H. G. Wells apparently said of this novel: “I wish I could have written Babbitt.”

See what you think after the first page.

Chapter One

The towers of Zenith aspired above the morning mist; austere towers of steel and cement and limestone, sturdy as cliffs and delicate as silver rods. They were neither citadels nor churches, but frankly and beautifully office buildings.
The mist took pity on the fretted structures of earlier generations: the Post Office with its shingle-tortured mansard, the red brick minarets of hulking old houses, factories with stingy and sooted windows, wooden tenements coloured like mud. The city was full of such grotesqueries, but the clean towers were thrusting them from the business center, and on the farther hills were shining new houses, homes - they seemed - for laughter and tranquility.
Over a concrete bridge fled a limousine of long sleek hood and noiseless engine. These people in evening clothes were returning from an all-night rehearsal of a Little Theatre play, an artistic adventure considerably illuminated by champagne. Below the bridge curved a railroad, a maze of green and crimson lights. The New York Flyer boomed past, and twenty lines of polished steel leapt into the glare.
In one of the skyscrapers the wires of the Associated Press were closing down. The telegraph operators wearily raised their celluloid eye-shades after a night of talking with Paris and Peking. Through the building crawled the scrubwomen, yawning, their old shoes slapping. The dawn mist spun away. Queues of men with lunch-boxes clumped towards the immensity of new factories, sheets of glass and hollow tile, glittering shops where five thousand men worked beneath one roof, pouring out the honest wares that would be sold up the Euphrates and across the veldt. The whistles rolled out in...

There we go.

Next, we are going to travel to Italy, after a fashion, so who better to take us all the way there than Dean Martin singing Come Back To Sorrento.

Music
[Come Back To Sorrento by Dean Martin]

Charles Adrian
It occurred to me that it would be nice if everybody could read along with me while I... while I read these pages. I mean, why should I do all the work?

Now, you may think that this is... this is going to be tricky when you hear that my next book is Sir C. Hubert H. Parry's Studies Of Great Composers, but not at all. These are for sale online in all editions, it turns out. Mine is from somewhere between 1900 and 1910. It has an olive-coloured cloth binding and cut pages, if you please. This was published by George Rutledge and Sons and is the tenth edition of Parry's book. There are there are tens and tens of editions of this book. This one... this one, the tenth edition, is available from abebooksco.uk for a mere £2.50. So pause the Mixcloud and buy the book and we'll read it together in a couple of days' time.

Okay. Have you got it? Good. Let us read the preface first.

PREFACE

THE following short studies were originally written for a periodical for young people. They, therefore, do not attempt to deal with the profounder and more abstruse questions which are of interest to advanced musicians and students, and professed masters of artistic philosophy.
Though the conditions of their first publication necessitated their being cast in a form which admitted of each article's being separately intelligible, they were not from the first intended to be absolutely distinct or independently complete, but a connected and continuous series.
The object of the work as a whole was to help people of average general intelligence to get some idea of the positions which the most important composers occupy in the historical development of the art; by showing their relations to one another, and the social, personal, and historical conditions which made them individually the representatives of various branches and phases of musical art.

We get a sense already, I think, of... of the composer of such subtle works as I Was Glad and Jerusalem.

Now, I said that we were going to Italy and indeed we are. One of only two non-German speakers that interests Sir C. Hubert, his first composer is Giovanni Pierluigi Sante da Palestrina. And this is how the book begins:

STUDIES
OF
GREAT COMPOSERS

I.
PALESTRINA.

PEOPLE often talk of music as the modern art, but it is not probable that they always realise clearly how very modern it is in the shape in which we know it. The sister arts, which comprise painting, and sculpture, and architecture, and decorative works of various kinds, can show masterpieces which still impress us as perfect and complete objects of beauty, though they were made or carried out more than two thousands of years ago. But if we go back as much as two hundred years in music, we feel as if we were among things in a crude and incomplete condition, like barbarous examples of the sister arts of races and nations even before history began. It seems indeed as if all other arts began with the beginnings of civilised life, but music came only with its well-advanced development.
The ancients had some sort of music, but it certainly was of a very slight and unimpressive kind; not calculated to...

There, mercifully, the first page ends. Still, I've read the whole book and I enjoyed it.

Now, when I was at school, I sang in my school choir and we were lucky enough to travel to Venice and sing Mass in St. Marks. The whole service was in Latin with the sermon in Italian, which none of us understood. The heat was oppressive - it was July - and we all fell asleep. I remember that we were woken up to sing Tu Es Petrus by Palestrina, which we did, loudly. And, unfortunately, it turned out that we'd been woken up by mistake during the most solemn part of the Mass. And we were almost immediately hushed by a clergical assistant who ran round to wave his hands at us.

We sang Tu Es Petrus very brashly and enjoyed ourselves. But this, I think, is probably how it is supposed to sound.

Music
[Tu Es Petrus by G. P. S. da Palestrina]

Charles Adrian
Good. Let us now take the night train north to Vienna...

Music
[Night Train (excerpt) by Oscar Peterson]

Charles Adrian
Okay. I'm sorry. That was a... that was an extremely cheesy musical pun. It has, however, transported us to Vienna, city of Haydn, which is chapter four of Parry's book, city of Schiele, city of Klimt, city of Freud. Sigmund Freud is much maligned nowadays... or perhaps I should say much criticised, given that he does write so much rubbish. All the same, my next book contains much that is wise and interesting and, in my opinion, is well worth the reading. Even if the first page is no less patronising than that of the last book.

This is a beautiful turquoise and beige Pelican edition of Totem And Taboo. From 1940, by the way, Does everyone have their's ready?

TOTEM AND TABOO

CHAPTER I
THE SAVAGE'S DREAD OF INCEST

PRIMITIVE man is known to us by the stages of development through which he has passed: that is, through the inanimate monuments and implements which he has left behind for us; through our knowledge of his art, his religion, and his attitude towards life, which we have received either directly or through the medium of legends, myths and fairy tales; and through the remnants of his ways of thinking that survive in our own manners and customs. Moreover, in a certain sense he is still our contemporary: there are people whom we still consider more closely related to primitive man than to ourselves, in whom we therefore recognize the direct descendants and representatives of earlier man. We can thus judge the so-called savage and semi-savage races; their psychic life assumes a peculiar interest for us, for we can recognize in their psychic life a well-preserved, early stage of our own development.
If this assumption is correct, a comparison of the “Psychology of Primitive Races” as taught by folklore, with the psychology of the neurotic as it has become known through psychoanalysis, will reveal numerous points of correspondence and throw new light on subjects that are more or less familiar to us.
For outer as well as for inner reasons, I am choosing...

And there the first page ends.

For reasons of my own, I am choosing You Are My Sister by Antony & The Johnsons.

Music
[You Are My Sister by Antony & The Johnsons]

Charles Adrian
We are in Paris quite suddenly.

I have no idea where I bought this book. It's called Chiens Perdus Sans Colliers and is by Gilbert Cesbron. Apparently, it was also turned into a film. This edition is from 1954. It has a picture of two kids and a stern magistrate on the front. That's basically what the book is about.

Et, tout d'un coup, Alain Robert aperçut un châteu fort, le premier de sa vie... Oui, sur l'autre rive, et dans cette poussière de soleil qui rendait tout lointain, hautain et théâtral: un donjon, des créneaux, des tourelles, peut-être même des ‹‹ mâchicoulis ›› (si seulement il avait su ce que c'était)... Quels Chevaliers et quels chevaux logeaient ainsi en plein Paris?
- Dépêchons-nous, Alain Robert! fit le convoyeur d'un ton las.
Depuis ce matin, quatre heures: depuis la sonnerie du rev... du réveil, la rue déserte, la gare et le compartiment à la mauvaise haleine, il ne savait que répéter cela: ‹‹ Dépêchons-nous, Alain Robert! ››
- Allons bon! reprit le convoyeur, qu'y a-t-il encore?
Il se retourna et vit l'enfant immobile: les sourcils froncés qui se rejoignaient, deux vagues de proue; les yeux noirs et tout neufs; les lèvres entrovertes comme s'il allait parler - non! comme s'il venait de pleurer. Ce petit garçon de onze ans qui ne cillait jamais, qui dans le train, mains dans les poches, col...

I reckon I could play just about anything now as long as it was French. Here is Babara with Gottingen.

Music
[Gottingen by Barbara]

Charles Adrian
You might have noticed that this fourth edition of Page One is a little bit longer than some of the others. It's the summer! It's the holidays! I'm going to be in Edinburgh for the whole of August at The Street, 2b Picardy Place... the show starts at 7:45 between the 4th and the 25th, although not on the 8th or the 14th or the 20th... you should check out www.samanthaman.co.uk for details... um... what was I saying?

Jingle
You're listening... you're listening... to London Fields Radio.

Charles Adrian
Oh yes! But, in September, the holidays are over and we all come home. Do you all have your copies of our last book? It's David Storey's Flight Into Camden. If you have the 1979 Penguin Edition as I do, that's obviously the best, but any edition will do.

1

We buried my grandfather the second week before Christmas. It wasn't cold, but there was a light drizzle and all of us had come in thick clothes. My mother and I shared an umbrella.
The priest from the Old People's Home stood on a small board at the end of the grave. The rain blew in his face and gathered in fine drops on his forehead.
‘Man that is born of a woman hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery,’ he said, then screwed up his eyes as he began reading through the cellophane cover on his prayer book.
My father stood with Michael.
Not all of my father's family were there. My grandfather, in spite of silicosis and a severe spinal injury, had had nine children in his eighty-six years; two had died. But the family didn't keep in touch. It might be Christmas itself before they'd all heard of his death. As it was I hadn't seen my grandfather since I was a girl, when he'd lived with us for a year at the beginning of the war. We gathered round the hole like workmen. It was difficult not to push one another off the boards, which had been laid unevenly over the yellow clay. The spaces between the plots were only broad enough for people to walk in single file.
No one looked grieved, except my father and perhaps my Uncle Jack. None of the men wore full black, but had black silk triangles or armbands on their overcoat sleeves.
Michael merely watched the coffin. It was poised at the...

[gasps] Who is Michael? Who is the narrator? You can read on in your own time, of course.

I have come to the end of this, the 4th edition of Page One on London Fields Radio. I am Charles Adrian, as ever, sitting in the Wilton Way Cafe in Hackney. Until September, then! Yeah.

Now, who do we reckon is Camden's favourite child? Who knows? Here to play us out for the summer is Amy Winehouse with Valerie.

Music
[Valerie by Mark Ronson feat. Amy Winehouse]

[Initial transcription by https://otter.ai]