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Episode image is a detail from the cover of The Hunting Of The Snark by Lewis Carroll, published in 1975 by Chatto & Windus; cover illustration by Mervyn Peake.
It’s a bumper edition this week! For this, the 49th Page One, Charles Adrian picks books and music more or less at random: A little bit of philosophy, a little bit of medicine, a little bit of fun, a little bit of historical romance, a little bit of nonsense. It is August when this first goes online so sit back, imagine the sunshine, let this wash over you.
An Evening With Samantha was part of PBH’s Free Fringe at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in August 2013. You can find out more about Charles Adrian’s alter-ego Ms Samantha Mann here.
You can find The Body In Question on YouTube here.
You can find the NPR Tiny Desk performance of Same Love by Macklemore & Ryan Lewis here.
You can listen to the episode featuring Charles Adrian’s father Roland, Page One 46, here.
Another pair of books by Lewis Carroll, Alice In Wonderland and Alice Through The Looking Glass, is discussed in Page One 73.
The edition of The Hunting Of The Snark by Lewis Carroll that is read from here is illustrated by Mervyn Peake; a book by him, Mr Pye, is discussed in Page One 34.
L’Heure Exquise (which is beautifully sung by Philippe Jaroussky - please look it up!) is by Reynaldo Hahn.
This episode was recorded in Acton 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: 19th August, 2013.
Book listing:
The Republic by Plato (trans. H. D. P. Lee)
The Body In Question by Jonathan Miller
Auntie Mame by Patrick Dennis
Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott
The Hunting Of The Snark by Lewis Carroll
Links:
The Body In Question on YouTube
Episode transcript:
Jingle
You're listening.... you're listening... to London Fields Radio.
Charles Adrian
Hello and welcome to the 49th Page One for London Fields Radio. I'm Charles Adrian. This is going to be a ragtag mixed bag of books and music today. There's no theme at all. It's the summer, life is carefree. I'm going to be in Edinburgh when this goes out doing the Free Fringe with my show An Evening With Samantha so I'm going to start today with the unofficial anthem for PBH's Free Fringe. This is by Johnny Awsum and it's called The Bucket Is Half Full.
Music
[The Bucket Is Half Full by Johnny Awsum]
Charles Adrian
That was The Bucket Is Half Full by Johnny Awsum, which was recorded... written, recorded, produced, created I think, especially for PBH's Free Fringe this year.
And. So. My first book is rather forbidding edition of The Republic by Plato. It's a Penguin Classics edition retailing at six shillings... I think. That's six apostrophe. Originally published in 1955 in this translation but this one is from 1965. It's translated by H. D. P. Lee and the translation is described as “clear and colloquial”. I would agree with that. I think that... Well, the reason I've decided to read it... I could have included it in the Utopia podcast I did a little while ago but there wasn't space. So I've decided to put it in now because I think it's surprisingly engaging. I think that sometimes people talk about it in very lofty terms and I was surprised, I suppose, when I first read it how conversational it is. I'm going to read you the first page and you'll see how the tone is set. I mean later on you get into more detail but to start with it's just fun.
THE REPUBLIC
*
PART ONE
INTRODUCTION
*
§I. PRELUDE
The scene set and the characters introduced. The subject of the dialogue, Justice or Right, is introduced in a preliminary discussion with Cephalus, who defines it, in effect, as telling the truth and paying one's debts.
I WENT down yesterday to the Piraeus with Glaucon, son of Ariston. I wanted to say a prayer to the goddess and also to see what they would make of the festival, as this was the first time they were holding it. I must say that I thought the local contribution to the procession was splendid, though the Thracian contingent seem to show up just as well. We had said our prayers and seen the show and were on our way back to town when Polemarchus, son of Cephalus, saw us in the distance making our way home and sent his slave running on ahead to tell us to wait for him. The slave caught hold of my coat from behind and said ‘Polemarchus says you are to wait.’ I turned and asked where his master was. ‘He's coming along behind you,’ he said. ‘Do wait.’ ‘We will,’ said Glaucon, and soon afterwards Polemarchus came up; with him were Adeimantus, Glaucon's brother, Niceratus, son of Nicias, and others who had all apparently been to the procession. ‘Socrates,’ said Polemarchus, ‘I believe you are starting off on your way back to town.’ ‘You are right,’ I replied. ‘Do you see how many of us there are?’ he asked. ‘I do.’ ‘Well, you will either have to get the better of us or stay here.’ ‘Oh, but [...]’
And then it goes on. They go to somebody's house and they start to talk and... it's all rather fun.
My second book, which I'm going to move straight on to, is The Body In Question by Jonathan Miller, and I was so happy to find this. This was in a bookshop round behind the Poor School, more or less, near Kings Cross, where they have a trolley outside filled with second hand books for sale at very, very low prices. This is priced £1.99 and it was owned at one stage by Ian McDonald, who stuck a sticker in the front. It was published in 1978 for the first time and this one is a paperback edition published in 1982. The television series that this is based on is wonderful. I saw it on YouTube. I imagine it's still there. You can see the whole thing. It's, you know, twelve or fifteen episodes. And he explores the body, the way the body works, the way medicine works, the way we experience things... all kinds of questions, essentially, about the body. I'm going to read you two things from this book. I'm going to read you the preface and then I'm going to read you the first page proper. When I say I'm going to read the preface, I'm going to read the first page of the preface and then the first page proper. Here is first page of the preface.
This book has arisen because I was commissioned by the BBC to do a thirteen-part television series on the history of medicine. At the outset I was daunted by the prospect of making a chronological trudge from Hippocrates to Christiaan Barnard, and I knew that my own energy and patience would have been exhausted by the time I had reached the sixteenth century. In any case, writing history in this way presupposes that medicine steadily groped its way towards enlightenment and efficiency, its progress punctuated by flashes of genius and cries of ‘Eureka!’ When I recalled my own medical training, however, I realised that the principles I had been taught and the assumptions which were supposed to guide my practice had their origins in the comparatively recent past, and that it was almost impossible to trace back a direct line of thought much beyond the seventeenth century. From that date on, the descriptions of the body and its processes are at least comparable with our own, and although the insights of the scientific renaissance did not have important practical consequences until the beginning of this century, it is possible to identify and sympathise with these founding interests.
Even so, medicine did not make an effective contribution to human welfare until the middle of the twentieth century. The great leap forward is often attributed to a rapid increase in heroic procedures and the discovery of new drugs, but what distinguishes the medicine of the past twenty-five years is not that its practitioners are equipped with an arsenal of antibiotics and antiseptics, but that they are furnished with a comprehensive and unprecedented understanding of what the healthy body is and how it survives and protects itself. We have today an impressive mastery of our illnesses precisely because we have a systematic insight into the processes which constitute health. This has been achieved by the accurate identification of the sort of thing our body is. And since finding out what something is is largely a matter of discovering what it is like, the most impressive contribution to the growth of intelligibility has been made by the application of suggestive metaphors.
There we go. So, yeah, thirteen-part television series. I should really read ahead, shouldn't I, before I start talking. But his last sentence there when he talks about the application of suggestive metaphors... I think one of the things that makes the television series so wonderful is the way that he's able to give us insights into what he's talking about. And those come through metaphors and also through just images. He uses images of other things to describe how our body is working and he also shows us our body visually. It's just wonderful. Okay. I'm going read you the first page of the book proper.
OF ALL THE OBJECTS IN THE WORLD, THE HUMAN BODY HAS a peculiar status: it is not only possessed by the person who has it, it also possesses and constitutes him. Our body is quite different from all the other things we claim as our own. We can lose money, books and even houses and still remain recognisably ourselves, but it is hard to give any intelligible sense to the idea of a disembodied person. Although we speak of our bodies as premises that we live in, it is a special form of tenancy: our body is where we can always be contacted, but our continued presence in it is more than a radical form of being a stick-in-the-mud.
Our body is not, in short, something we have, it is a large part of what we actually are: it is by and through our bodies that we recognise our existence in the world, and it is only by being able to move in and act upon the world that we can distinguish it from ourselves. Without a body, it would be difficult to claim sensations and experiences as our own. Who or what would be having them, and where would they be happening? Without a body, it would be hard to make sense of the notions of effort and failure and, since the concept of powers and their limits is built into the definition of personality, the absence of a physique through which these could readily be realised or frustrated would make it almost impossible to speak about the existence of a recognisable person.
The body is the medium of experience and the instrument of action. Through its actions we shape and organise our experiences and distinguish our perceptions of the outside world from the sensations that arise within the body itself. Material objects are called into existence by the fact that we can walk around them, get different views of them and eventually arrive at the conclusion that they exist independently of our own experience of them.
We can, however, also perceive our body as if it were one object among others. We can gaze at it, touch it, grope many of its contours, as if it were another of the many items in the world's furniture. Each of us, then, has two images of the bodily self: one which is immediately felt as the source of sensation and the spring of action, and one which we see and sometimes touch. In growing up, in emerging from the ‘blooming, buzzing chaos’ of infancy, these two images blend with each other so that the body which we see becomes the [...]
And if you are not gripped by that, then there is frankly no hope for you.
I'm going to play my second track now. As I say, no logic to this, it's just a track that I love. This is Macklemore & Ryan Lewis performing Same Love from the NPR Tiny Desk concert that they did. You can find this online. This is so beautiful. Go and find it. The other two tracks that they perform are also wonderful.
Music
[Same Love by Macklemore & Ryan Lewis]
Charles Adrian
So that was Same Love by Macklemore & Ryan Lewis.
Now, it's a strange book next. I bought it from the same trolley as the last one, The Body In Question. This is Auntie Mame by Patrick Dennis. It's described as “an irreverent escapade” and it's also described as “an exclusive extract from the novel” but I can assure you I have read this whole extract and as far as I'm concerned it's enough. I don't understand how there could be any more. This is fully satisfying. It's short but, as I say, sufficient.
This is... It's a sort of powder pink on the outside. It's rather lurid. It was originally published by Vanguard Press in 1955 and this is a re-print or re-publication by Penguin Classics from 2010. It's just... Essentially, it's just fun. Let me read you the first page.
Auntie Mame and the Orphan Boy.
It has rained all day. Not that I mind rain, but this is the day I promised to put up the screens and take my kid to the beach. I also meant to daub some giddy stencils on the composition walls of the place in the cellar which the realtor called a Rumpus Room and to start finishing what the realtor called an Unfinished Attic, Ideal for Guest Room, Game Room, Studio or Den.
Somehow I got sidetracked right after breakfast.
It all started over an old issue of the Digest. This is a magazine I rarely read. I don't have to, because I hear all of its articles discussed every morning on the seven-fifty-one and every evening on the six-oh-three. Everybody in Verdant Greens - a community of two hundred houses in four styles - swears by the Digest. In fact, they talk of nothing else.
But I find that the magazine has the same snake-bird fascination for me, too. Almost against my will, I read about the menace in our public schools; the fun of natural childbirth; how a community in Oregon put down a dope ring; and about somebody whom a famous writer - I forget which one - considers to be the Most Unforgettable Character he's ever met.
That stopped me.
Unforgettable Character? Why, that writer hasn't met any[...]
And on it goes. It describes Auntie Mame for the next forty, fifty, sixty pages. It's fun. It's fun. I recommend it. It won't take you long to read.
Now, this - the next one - is an edition of Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott illustrated by Eric Tansley. It's in hardback of unknown date. But in the front is written “To London” - or Landon... probably Landon - “To Landon, With Best Wishes, From Robert”. It's very water damaged. It's, sort of, stained and warped, which just makes it all the more dear to me, obviously. The publishers note is quite fun too. It says in the front:
The original text of Ivanhoe is of great length. In this abbreviated version specially prepared for the Heirloom Library, not only are all the main incidents of this well-known story faithfully preserved, but it actually gains considerably in pace, interest and excitement.
A kind of... slightly... slap with the back of a hand to Sir Walter. But listen to this. I think this is wonderful. I read Ivanhoe for the first time a little while ago. It's still the only novel by Sir Walter Scott I've read but I feel like I should read others. And I can see why all those other writers raved about him so much. Just sit back and listen to the way he sets the scene.
Chapter I
In that pleasant district of merry England which is watered by the river Don, there extended in ancient times a large forest, covering the greater part of the beautiful hills and valleys which lie between Sheffield and the pleasant town of Doncaster. The remains of this extensive wood are still to be seen at the noble seats of Wentworth, of Warncliffe Park, and around Rotherham. Here haunted of yore the fabulous dragon of Wantley; here were fought many of the most desperate battles during the Civil Wars of the Roses; and here also flourished in ancient times those bands of gallant outlaws, whose deeds have been rendered so popular in English song.
The sun was setting upon one of the rich grassy glades of the forest. Hundreds of broad-headed, short-stemmed, wide-branched oaks, which had witnessed perhaps the stately march of the Roman soldiery, flung their gnarled arms over a thick carpet of the most delicious greensward. In some places they were intermingled with beeches, hollies, and copsewood of various descriptions, so closely as totally to intercept the level beams of the sinking sun; in others they receded from each other, forming those long sweeping vistas, in the intricacy of which the eye delights to lose itself, while imagination considers them as the paths to yet wilder scenes of silvan solitude. Here the red rays of the sun shot a broken and discoloured light, that partially hung upon the shattered boughs and mossy trunks of the trees, and there they illuminated in brilliant patches the portions of turf to which they made their way. A considerable open space, in the midst of this glade, seemed formerly to have been dedicated to the rights of Druidical superstition; for, on the summit of a hillock, so regular as to seem artificial, there still remained part of a circle of rough unhewn stones, of large dimensions. Seven stood upright; the rest had been dislodged from their places, probably by the zeal of some convert to Christianity, and lay, some prostrate near their former site, and others on the side of the hill. One large stone only had found its way to the bottom, and in stopping the course of a small brook, which glided smoothly around the foot of the eminence, gave, by its opposition, a feeble voice of murmur to the placid and elsewhere silent streamlet.
The human figures which completed this landscape were in number two, partaking, in their dress and appearance, of that wild and rustic character which belonged to the woodlands of the West Riding of Yorkshire at that early period. The eldest of these men had a stern, savage, and wild aspect. His garment was of the simplest form imaginable, being a close jacket with sleeves, composed of the tanned skin of some animal, on which the hair had been originally left, but which had worn off in so many places that it would have been difficult to distinguish, from the patches that remained, to what creature the fur had belonged. This primeval vestment reached from the throat to the knees, and served at once all the usual purposes of body clothing; [...]
My next track - which, again, is just a track I happen to like - is Retrograde by James Blake.
Music
[Retrograde by James Blake]
Jingle
London Fields Radio... it's London Fields Radio.
Charles Adrian
It is. It's London Fields Radio, I'm Charles Adrian and this is the 49th Page One.
Now, anybody who's listened to the interview I did with my father a couple of weeks ago, which is the 46th Page One, may remember that we discussed Mike Batt's musical version of The Hunting Of The Snark by Lewis Carroll. I have chased out my beautiful slim hardback bright yellow edition of this, which turnes out to be my father's edition of it. It was given to him for his birthday, apparently, in August 1976 by some friends of his. It is gorgeous, though. I will give it back eventually, Dad.
This edition that I have in my hand is from 1975. It was originally published in 1941. It contains illustrations by Mervyn Peake, author of Gormenghast of course, who... yeah, they're just great and they complement the poem so well. I love this. I love this poem. I think it's just gorgeous. I say poem: it's described as AN AGONY IN EIGHT FITS, which is probably a better description. So here is the FIT THE FIRST:
The Landing
“JUST the place for Snark!” the Bellman cried,
As he landed his crew with care;
Supporting each man on the top of the tide
By a finger entwined in his hair.
”Just the place for Snark! I have said it twice:
That alone should encourage the crew.
Just the place for a snark! I have said it thrice:
What I tell you three times is true.”
The crew was complete: it included a Boots—
A maker of Bonnets and Hoods—
A Barrister, brought to arrange their disputes—
And a Broker, to value their goods.
A Billiard-maker, whose skill was immense,
Might perhaps have won more than his share—
But a Banker, engaged at enormous expense,
Had the whole of their cash in his care.
There was also Beaver, that paced on the deck,
Or would sit making lace in the bow:
And had often (the Bellman said) saved them from wreck,
Though none of the sailors knew how.
This is the end of this 49th edition of Page One and it's also the last solo Page One that I'll be making for London Fields Radio. There are two Second Hand Book Factories still to come but then I'm moving to iTunes from the beginning of October. I will provide details of all that but I just wanted to take the opportunity to thank London Fields Radio - and everybody at London Fields Radio - for giving me a home for this last year and a bit and to encourage you, my listeners, to go and visit their home, the Wilton Way Cafe on Wilton Way in Hackney. It's a wonderful place to spend some time on a summer afternoon or on a winter morning. Anytime, really. And they generally have something interesting on the walls or inside somewhere. And lovely people. So. That's... yeah. That's what I wanted to say about that.
I'm going to play us out with a song for the evening so sit on your front porch, or on your veranda, on your roof terrace, watch the sun go down and listen to Philippe Jaroussky singing L'Heure Exquise by... Hahn. I don't know what Hahn's first name is. I've been Charles Adrian. This has been the 49th Page One for London Fields Radio.
Music
[L'Heure Exquise by Philippe Jaroussky]
[Initial trasncription by https://otter.ai]