A Journal of the Plague Year

Suddenly, it seemed urgent to read one particular none-more-black item that had been on my shelf for quite some time. Not only is the subject matter super-relevant, there’s now acres of free time in which to tackle it.

Actually, it’s a quick read, told in crisp, journalistic style. It’s fanatically well-researched, sober and factual, yet despite the title, it’s not a personal record of the plague that swept London then the country in 1665; author Daniel Defoe was only a child at the time. The book lies somewhere between a historical novel and narrative non-fiction. It purports to be written by a man who elects to stay in the capital while the distemper, as he calls it, is at its height, walking the streets, observing and talking to fellow Londoners, while maintaining social distancing – people walk down the middle of the street to avoid each other.

The distemper begins in one house in Covent Garden, before spreading rapidly, area by area, to the eastern part of the city, where our somewhat opaque narrator resides (we learn very little about him personally). He watches it spread like a grim tide, eventually lapping at distant Deptford and Greenwich. Our imaginary Everyman has a keen interest in statistics, particularly the weekly ‘bills’ – announcements of deaths in each parish – and attempts to analyse how many deaths there would have been anyway, and how many are to be attributed to the plague. It’s like watching an early attempt to model an epidemic.

The moments where past and present nudge each other and the Londons of the 17th and the 21st century elide are what make the book especially striking for today’s readers. There is hoarding, and reckless mingling, and the brutal application of self-isolation, or ‘shutting up’. Sick and well family members were forcibly penned in together at home, which led to the deaths of entire households. Social gatherings were banned, the authorities ordering: ‘That all public feasting… and dinners at taverns, ale-houses and other places of common entertainment, be forborne until further order or allowance’.

There’s fake news about cures, and misgivings about touching, shopping and currency: ‘When anyone bought a joint of meat in the market, they would not take it off the butcher’s hand, but took it off the hooks themselves… the butcher would not touch the money, but have it put into a pot full of vinegar, which he kept for that purpose.’

As the infection continues, a hardening of the spirit takes place among the inhabitants. On one of his walks abroad, the narrator hears a woman scream ‘Oh! death, death, death!’ No one responds, and though chilled ‘in my very blood’, he too walks on, ‘for people had no curiosity now in any case, nor could anybody help one another.’ We’re not there yet.

The central section of the book is taken up with the adventures of three men, a joiner, a sail-maker and a baker, on their flight from the city at the height of the plague, and their harsh reception by villagers as they travelled through Essex. It’s practically a novel in miniature. There’s also the comic tale of a drunkard taken up by the dead cart, ready to be tipped in the plague pit. You can almost hear the voices of the people who must have told the adult Defoe their stories; and no doubt an urban myth or two crept in.

The frequent religious musings on the ways of Providence situate the book firmly in its era, with the narrator wondering whether attempts to cure the plague or mitigate its effects amount to subverting God’s will. Though pious, the narrator seems scientific in his approach, scoffing at others’ superstious notions. Discounting the idea of a stroke from God, the narrator understands the principle of infection. This passage in particular strikes a chill: ‘others… talk of infection being carried on by the air only, by carrying with it vast numbers of insects and invisible creatures, who enter in the body with the breath… and there generate or emit most acute poisons, or poisonous ovae or eggs, which mingle themselves with the blood, and so infect the body…’

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Lit on the Rock

‘Is this your first time in Gib?’ locals are wont to ask. Actually, no, it’s the second time I have been involved in the Gibunco Gibraltar Literary Festival, to give it its full title, the last being two years ago. Then I stayed at the Caleta hotel, where I was hugely entertained by the regular incursions of the macaques from the Rock, who nimbly crossed the road and scaled the walls, entering the rooms of anyone unwise enough to leave a window open. One sat on the wall of my terrace, daintily opening and eating, sherbet-dab-like, sugar packets filched from the room above.

This time the festival entourage stayed at the Eliott hotel in the centre of town, right opposite the Garrison Library, one of the festival venues and also the Green room. And this time I understand the huge significance of the name Eliott, having read up on some history. In the Governor’s residence, the Convent, I had idly said of an oil painting of what looked like a sea battle, ‘Is that the battle of Trafalgar?’, only to be sternly told that it depicted the siege of Gibraltar. George Augustus Eliott was the Governor in the late 18th century, who with great resolve held on to the Rock in the face of many months of bombardment and blockade by the Spanish. On reading of his exploits I can now see why there is a huge pillar to his memory in the Alameda Gardens, and why the hotel is so named. He’s as remarkable a character as Nelson, but for some reason much less celebrated today.

But on to the festival. I interviewed musician-composer-lyricist-novelist Alba Arikha at the Convent, where the organisers laid on a baby grand for her to sing the song she wrote about Flora, the heroine of her novel ‘Where to Find Me’. The song was a kind of exorcism, she explained. With her previous novels, characters disappeared as soon as the novel was finished, but Flora stuck around, only taking her leave when the song was written. Alba also talked about her wonderful memoir, ‘Major/Minor’, about her cosmopolitan upbringing in Paris, with her tricky painter father, Avigdor Arika. Her godfather was Samuel Beckett!

Next up was Bart Van Es, who won the 2018 Costa Book of the Year prize for ‘The Cut Out Girl’, which tells the story of the Jewish child his grandparents took in during the war when her parents were seized by the Nazis. He knew a little of the tale, but a strange family reticence hung over it, and it wasn’t until he met Lien, now an elegant octogenarian, that he managed to piece together its full poignancy. As Bart retraces her steps as a juvenile fugitive, the book becomes as much about the Netherlands today as in wartime.

The next morning I headed to the University of Gibraltar on Europa Point, reflecting on the mass evacuation up to the heights during the most furious bombardments of the Great Siege, when most of the town was flattened. As I looked out to sea I imagined the bay filled with menacing Spanish warships in full sail. Europa Point has the continent’s most southerly Trinity lighthouse, and the main University building comprises a breathtaking glass atrium uniting two former military buildings, one Georgian and one Victorian. The latter, where I interviewed Lord Price, was bombproof, always reassuring to know.

Mark Price has written many books, alongside being a life peer and former head of the John Lewis Partnership and Waitrose. We were discussing his ‘Fairness For All’, about the philosophy of John Spedan Lewis, who made all his employees partners in his grocery business. Where most businesses prioritise their shareholders, then customers, and only after that their staff, Mark eloquently put the case for businesses to consider their employees first – because everything else will follow naturally. He is a terrifically engaging speaker, with many lively anecdotes and aphorisms illustrating his views. One lucky audience member even got a bit of free business advice!

Lastly, interviewing Paul Conroy, Marie Colvin’s photojournalist colleague, who was with her when she died in Syria, was not just a privilege but fall-off-the-chair hilarious. Paul has that unstoppable Liverpudlian gift of the gab and must have been a great comrade when things got rough in the field. I began by asking him to sum up Colvin in three words. ‘How many is “pain in the arse”?’ he replied with a grin. Gallows humour aside, he remains steadfast in his disgust at the Assad regime, and determined not to let the world forget the atrocities he and Colvin witnessed. Afterwards I chatted to the Governor and his wife as they waited patiently in a very long queue to get their copy of ‘Under the Wire’ signed.

‘Hospitality is very important to Gibraltarians,’ the festival director told me over coffee, and as ever the festival combines suitably military precision in the organisation and huge generosity towards writers and guests. Long may this brilliant festival continue.

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From the Attic 3: Journeys to the Underworld

A survey of classical sites in Italy associated with the ancient Sibyls, this is a really odd work from a woman who was a publishing phenomenon in the late Eighties. Fiona Pitt-Kethley came to attention as a poet whose racy subject matter – blow jobs for example – combined with a prim exterior that hardly hinted at the volcanic passions that apparently lay beneath.

Appropriately for a travel-book-cum-memoir (and indeed cum memoir) we learn quite a bit about its author, who at the time of writing is skint (par for the course for a poet) and living in Hastings. She seems to have been contracted to write the book, but if there was an advance it was a small one, as much of ‘Journeys to the Underworld’ involves taking budget train journeys, walking for miles and cadging lifts. As a solo female traveller she is certainly intrepid.

‘Casual sex is much more in my line [than drinking]’ she claims early on. ‘Most women on package tours pick up the waiters at the hotel… I’m more into picking up the guides and archaeologists working on sites or in museums.’ Furthermore ‘I only have sex with good-looking men… “Slag” I feel doesn’t really fit me… I’m not cheap, I’m free.’ The author biog describes her as ‘a female Casanova’. You can imagine the chaps at the TLS getting all excited when the book was published in 1988.

About the Sibyls she is well-informed, full of erudition and consistently interesting. She travels through Italy, starting in Naples (in a chapter called ‘Neapolitan Erections’ where a man springs out at her ‘wildly wanking’) via Rome, Sicily, Herculaneum (a chapter entitled ‘Men’, where she encounters a foot fetishist), Mantua, city of Virgil and finally Orvieto: ‘Etruscan tombs are a great place for trying to rape tourists.’ It’s not that there is a massive amount of sex, or that it is particularly explicit – quite the contrary. It’s just that the juxtaposition with scholarship is more jarring than exciting. Also, 30 years after publication, it looks like narratives which were daring in their own time might be the quickest to become dated.

Pitt-Kethley’s frankness about sex might have felt refreshingly fearless back then, but post MeToo and many layers of consciousness-raising later, she can seem inappropriately jaunty, as when she speculates that Italian children might be less at risk from paedophiles than British ones. Due to national prudishness, she claims ‘it’s probably easier for [British men] to mess around with their own daughters. Of course, keeping it in the family is also cheaper. They never have to buy their girl a drink.’

She accepts a lift to Caserta from a pestering rock musician. He must have been one of those good-looking men because ‘We made love,’ although at the beginning she refuses because ‘A girl has to say no for the first two minutes.’ It’s surprisingly conventional attitude from a self-professed female Don Juan, and one that has continued to wreak havoc and misunderstanding around issues of consent.

But we can’t blame Pitt-Kethley for writing within her own historical period. The quality of ‘Journeys to the Underworld’ lies firmly in her shrewd encounters with the ancient world, and anyone seeking raciness would be much better served with the torrent of franker, fresher accounts of female sexuality that have been published since.

Pitt-Kethley comes across less as a female Casanova than a lone woman who is constantly solicited, hassled, and sexually harassed and who every so often succumbs to the pressure. She has no interest in women beyond the Sibyls, and when male bores and time-wasters take her on lengthy detours and fail to fulfil their promises of private tours and free meals, she seems too meek even to protest. It doesn’t feel much like liberation – or libertinism.

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A Curious escapade

The Curious Arts festival moved this year to a new venue and combined with the Byline Festival for a three-day extravaganza of ideas in the woods. Stunning setting. I was with the New River Press poets, taking part in an epic reading of Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell on Saturday night.

The Curious events were held in the Speakeasy tent at the top of the site and on arrival on Friday afternoon (great cab ride from East Grinstead with the musician Ebson, of whom more later) I headed there to hear the wonderful John Niven (‘Kill Your Friends’) in conversation. He was about 20 minutes late (he had a good excuse) and chair Cosmo Landesman had the brilliant idea of interviewing members of the audience while we waited, including a man in the front row who actually owned and erected the tent we were sitting in. Niven, when he arrived, was as filthily funny and interestingly introspective as we could have hoped.

Extinction Rebellion were a heavy presence at the festival and in the evening they led a funeral procession (for the planet) from the bottom to the top of the site. I happened upon the Forest Forum in time for an insane set by Seething Akira – at least that’s who I think they were judging from the programme, but the billing ‘5-piece Electronic Rock Band’ barely does them justice. For a start there seemed to be about a dozen of them, the lead singer looked like a Hairy Biker and the intensity was off the scale. Made even funnier by the fact that a sedate audience sat around on haybales politely applauding their antics. Meanwhile behind me, the rest of the New River crew threw themselves repeatedly into a haybale construction until they’d reduced it to stubble.

We had promised to go and check out Ebson down in the Future Dome and he didn’t disappoint. In the cab he explained that it was going to be a stripped-down set, just him and piano, though he has worked with more elaborate orchestration in the past. Plaintive, mellow, heartfelt songs, melancholic with a touch of uplift, bearded soul rather along the lines of Rag’n’Bone Man. He was terrific. Other musical treats included The Feeling, Blow Monkeys and Pussy Riot who got everyone leaping around.

On Saturday Murray Lachlan Young’s show ‘Modern Cautionary Tales For Children’ was utterly hilarious as he lined up nine (I think) kids and poetically killed them one by one. They really enjoyed dying one after another, from dramatic sideways slump to full-on faceplant, all the while being sardonically rated by the host. There was just the right amount of mild sadism directed at the tinies to keep the adults amused.

The New River Poets took to the Speakeasy at 5pm, comprising Heathcote Ruthven, Niall McDevitt, Anna Seferovic and me, bookended by a performance by singer-songwriter Sophie Naufal, whose songs have a wonderful kind of dreamy malevolence, and Toby, an actor, reading an astonishingly in your face piece by poet Jamie Lee (preferring to remain in the audience). It concerned unmentionable things happening in the Gents toilet of a pub after hours. Just when you didn’t think it would get any more graphic… it did.

I read a poem inspired by a character well known to anybody who has arrived at the Port Eliot festival by train – the young chap who greets all arrivals and speeds all departures, reads out the destinations and advises where best to stand on the platform for the journey back to London. I’m afraid I turned him into a mythological character in (slightly bastardised) terza rima. ‘Station Freddie’ as he’s known didn’t seem to mind; the piece was later Tweeted to him.

Some of the best times at festivals involve simply sitting around and talking to people: in my case twilight drinks with Kirsty Lang and Mischa Glenny and friends, including a former colleague from the Independent; chats with Geoff Dyer and Duncan Minshull in the clubhouse; and a long time spent lounging on a haybale with Stephanie Theobald, also reminiscing about beloved colleagues (Tim Clarke of Time Out and Paris Passion).

Later that night we lit candles in the Human Library tent, handed round cups of absinthe and roared our way through (most of) A Season in Hell, with help from audience members and crew (thanks Meredith, Darren and Kat!). It ended in absolute chaos, but I think Rimbaud would have approved of that.

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Recent literary (and other) adventures

I’ve wanted to go to the Ledbury Poetry Festival for some time and after bumping into the festival’s artistic director Chloe Garner at the T S Eliot prize party finally got my wish. I was invited to interview Ali Smith about her ‘Desert Island poems’. The date, 13 July, clashed with the Idler festival at Fenton House in Hampstead, but you can’t have everything.

On the way from the station I got chatting to Fiona, like me dragging a small suitcase. She was looking forward to seeing Margaret Atwood read later that evening, but was also coming to see Ali Smith. ‘Think of a good question to ask,’ I instructed, semi-seriously. Fiona demurred, saying she would be far too shy. She went off to her hotel while I found the festival green room on the first floor of a medieval building with a floor so wonky and sloping that just walking across it felt like being on board ship.

On the way to the community hall where the event was taking place I spotted Ali. She explained that she had come up with 28 poems and suggested that we play a sort of ‘poetry bingo’, and ask the audience to shout out numbers. This worked extremely well, with Ali reading and discussing poems by Hardy, Shakespeare, Keats, Larkin, Stevie Smith and TS Eliot. Of course a smartypants had to shout out ’28!’ right at the start, but since the choice was ‘Little Gidding’ with its lines: ‘What we call the beginning is often the end / And to make an end is to make a beginning’ it proved apt.

Ali read beautifully and commented profoundly on all her choices, and in between I threw in a few questions, such as was it important to her to have a role model when starting out, and does it matter that Larkin was piggish? Yes to the first – Liz Lochhead was a teenage inspiration (‘A girl! Scottish, like me!’) – and a defiant No to the second. When it came to questions, a hand waved near the front of the audience – ‘Is that Fiona?’ I said. She’d come up with an excellent question – about writers and social media – after all. Finally Ali read the list of the writers we hadn’t managed to cover within the hour, including Elizabeth Bishop and Rilke – how I’d’ve loved to hear her thoughts on those.

Owen Sheers was on next, interviewed by Chloe, discussing his latest collection. ‘The Green Hollow’ was commissioned to mark the 50th anniversary of the Aberfan disaster. Sheers described interviewing the inhabitants of the village in the making of the book and read sections that vividly conveyed their voices and the magnitude of the tragedy.

At the reception afterwards (Owen had decamped to the pub) I got chatting to Margaret Atwood and confessed that I’d once interviewed her years ago over the phone and she’d seemed rather terrifying to a young journalist. She looked surprised to hear that and actually couldn’t have been more affable. (Close up, she has remarkably beautiful skin.) The reading was sold out and Atwood’s witty, taut and clever verse wowed and amused a rapt audience.

That night I was staying in the same house as Atwood, together with a Scandinavian folk trio. The evening wound up with a lengthy sing-song; turns out she has an ear for a traditional tune. Sadly I couldn’t stay around for more of the festival as I had to get back to London the next morning, having been given a free ticket to On Blackheath on the Sunday. So less than 24 hours after singing folk songs with Margaret Atwood, I was watching Grace Jones perform a fabulous set of all the hits with costume changes, masks, headdresses and skyscraper heels, punctuating each perfectly delivered song with hilarious and rude banter. Jones topped it off by hula-hooping throughout the entire final number. Two incredible fierce and funny ladies in one weekend. Amazing.

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From the Attic 2: In the Orchard, The Swallows

A haunting 2012 novella from Peter Hobbs, the author of the Impac Prize-shortlisted ‘The Short Day Dying’ and the short story collection ‘I Could Ride All Day in my Cool Blue Train’. Hobbs never wastes a word in this bleak yet somehow uplifting story of a man all but broken by a monstrous injustice who slowly comes to life again.

It’s a first-person narrative and I’m not sure the narrator is named. He has returned to his village in Afghanistan after being summarily thrown in jail for an innocent infraction of the harsh code of honour in his culture. As a young man he dared to look on the daughter of a prominent local with adoration. He must navigate the brutal prison system while keeping his sanity intact.

The power of the novella lies in what’s not spoken. What happened to his family? Where is his beloved? On return to the village he is taken in by a kindly scholar and nursed back to health, despite the daughter of the household’s deep disdain. The family orchard with its pomegranate trees, lushly described, is deeply healing, but outside his zone of safety attitudes are hardening and beyond the novels bounds we intuit the suffering that will shortly engulf the region. We’re left with a fragile sense of hope in a short but profound work which garnered deserved praise from Hisham Matat, Sarah Hall and Kamila Shamsie.

‘In the Orchard, The Swallows’ by Peter Hobbs, Faber

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A Walk for Yeats’s Birthday

June 13 is the birthdate of William Butler Yeats and poet Niall McDevitt, artist Julie Goldsmith and I celebrated with a walk through central London taking in various spots of Yeatsian significance. We began our wander at Woburn Walk just off the Euston Road, Yeats’s London base for a couple of decades. It’s a delightful little street of Georgian shopfronts, so unchanged that it was easy to imagine that by merely touching the doorknob you were shaking hands with the poet himself.

It seemed appropriate, given Yeats’s occult interests, that diagonally opposite was a shop offering Tarot card readings. Directly opposite was a plaque to the writer Dorothy Richardson, who apparently used to glimpse the great poet in his sitting room from her own. Niall had a wonderful anecdote about Yeats embarassedly shopping for a bed with his lover-to-be Olivia Shakespeare, who, on discovering the soulful young fellow was still a virgin, decided to remedy the situation.

Through Bloomsbury’s green squares we wandered, discovering a statue to Rabindranath Tagore, cueing a discussion about Yeats’s interest in Indian philosophy via Theosophy, and even a tree dedicated to ‘the poetic genius of WB Yeats’. Outside the British Museum we discussed his friendship with the eccentric MacGregor Mathers, stopping to read some passages from the great poem ‘All Souls’ Night’:

And I call up MacGregor from the grave,

For in my first hard springtime we were friends,

Although of late estranged,

I thought him half a lunatic, half a knave.

And told him so, but friendship never ends…

A ghost-lover he was,

And may have grown more arrogant, being a ghost.

We paused to peer in the window of Atlantis, the occult bookshop, spying the portrait of Aleister Crowley on the back wall. Then down through Covent Garden to the headquarters of the Freemasons – more poetry was recited here – and we paused to pay homage at the site where the young William Blake (Yeats was a great enthusiast) worked as an apprentice engraver.

‘All Souls’ Night begins:

Midnight has come, and the great Christ Church Bell

And many a lesser bell sound through the room;

And it is All Souls’ Night,

And two long glasses brimmed with muscatel

Bubble upon the table. A ghost may come;

For it is a ghost’s right,

His element is so fine

Being sharpened by his death,

To drink from the wine-breath

While our gross palates drink from the whole wine.

The walk concluded, we set off to partake of some brimming glasses ourselves, not of muscatel (sounds a bit sweet) but of crisp rose, inviting the spirits to drink with us.

Niall McDevitt is the author of several collections from New River Press. He leads regular walks round literary London and they are highly recommended. His website is poetopography.wordpress.com

Julie Goldsmith’s ceramics have been described as ‘Angela Carter on a plate’ with their themes culled from vampire lore and fairytales. You can find examples of her work on Instagram @juliegoldsmith

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The Life of Stuff

When did tidying become a thing? Marie Kondo’s current series on Netflix is strange but compelling; a radiantly happy-seeming elf trots into people’s messy homes and transforms them. Or rather, after she’s skipped about a bit talking about sparking joy, she leaves them to it, and it’s a hell of a lot of work.

Just how much is clear in Susannah Walker’s book ‘The Life of Stuff’ (Doubleday £14.99), published last year. Walker’s account of dealing with her deceased mother’s hoarded house is filled with insight and empathy as she unpicks their troubled relationship. In her attempts to find out why her mother’s pristine home was gradually swamped by filth and junk she faces tough questions about her own attitude to possessions. Was there something she could have done to protect and support the mother whom she found so maddening? And is there anything, buried deep in the clutter, that will provide a clue to the cause?

It’s a desperately sad story of a life allowed to go to waste, and a family whose hold on gentility is fragile. Along the way Walker has fascinating things to say about why this problem is so intractable and widespread. What are museums, she says provocatively, but vast hoards of stuff we can’t bear to get rid of? If a person’s belongings are disposed of, are we disposing of them too? If our things could speak, what would they say about us, and would we want to listen?

Walker does find an immensely sad little token in the rubble that says so much about her family’s trauma, and her way of putting it to rest is touching. This is a wonderfully compassionate and thought-provoking read. Once you’ve done tidying.

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From the Attic 1: The House of Sight and Shadow

Over years of being a literary journalist, books have come into my hands that I haven’t got round to reading. In many cases I never will; but every so often I pick something up to while away a few hours. First in an occasional series is Nicholas Griffin’s ‘The House of Sight and Shadow’, published by Abacus in 2001. (Gosh – a long time ago!) 

Historical novelists rarely forego the opportunity to have their protagonists rub shoulders with compelling real-life characters. So if the setting is London and it’s the early 18th century, there’s a good chance they will encounter the infamous thief-taker, Jonathan Wild, and his cohort, the burglar and serial prison-escapee Jack Sheppard. Griffin has not resisted, any more than did Jake Arnott in his last novel, ‘The Fatal Tree’. Griffin doesn’t use the colourful underworld cant that Arnott relishes, but then his focus is upon higher echelons of society. At first I found it distracting that Griffin’s lead character is called Bendix, like the narrator of Graham Greene’s ‘The End of the Affair’. Then I forgot all about that as the narrative wove its spell.

This Bendix, one Joseph, having been romantically burnt in Paris by a married noblewoman, becomes apprenticed to Sir Edmund Calcraft, an unconventional surgeon based in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Bendix is from a well-to-do family but is unlikely to inherit. Older than the usual apprentice, he retains ideas above his current station, sometimes having to bite back a retort when chided by his master. Still sighing over his lost Comtesse, Bendix finds an outlet for his romantic nature when he discovers that in the other wing, Calcraft is keeping his daughter sequestered from the world. Amelia is unable to tolerate daylight; can her father and would-be lover restore her failing sight despite radically different theories of medicine?

Both men have recourse to the dismal trade of the bodysnatcher, another well-worn trope of historical fiction. Calcraft’s notions are half-magical, half-scientific, as he actively seeks out the corpses of wicked men, with the help of the pamphleteer and novelist Daniel Defoe. I did wonder whether a young man of the period would own quite so many silk suits as Bendix does, and the way he flings golden guineas seems excessive. But generally this feels like an authentic, lived-in eighteenth century London, filled with charm and menace, populated with charlatans and link boys, coachmen and chambermaids, with a plot thematically poised between the light of knowledge and the dark of unreason:

The house, from the western wing to the basement, was bathed in a compromise of light. Neither was it illuminated by the bright candles that usually accompanied the doctor’s work, nor dimmed for Amelia’s muted world. Instead Lemon had placed lanterns with opaque glass about the steps to the basement, so that every ten yards yielded soft orange light as if suns were setting all about the house. 

 

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Castle creeping

It’s taken me at least a year to re-read ‘The Mysteries of Udolpho’. Of course I’ve read a lot of other things in the meantime, but Ann Radcliffe’s 1794 gothic whopper is an easy book to put down, and I don’t mean that as an insult.

It was hugely popular and influential in its day, and later writers paid it the tribute of parody: Byron, writing from Venice to his half-sister Augusta in 1816, announced: ‘I am going out this evening in my cloak and Gondola – there are two nice Mrs Radcliffe words for you.’ Jane Austen poked fun at the novel in ‘Northanger Abbey’ (1818) while Keats wrote mischievously of ‘Damosel Radcliffe’ and her gloomy trappings. As late as 1840, Thackeray referenced its unlucky lovers, Emily and Valancourt, in the assumption that his readers would know who they were. 

I first read the novel as an undergraduate. That I found it so entertaining and involving probably says a lot about the coursework I was reading at the time, both more challenging and less fun. Because tackling it in 2018, Udolpho is a very heavy read, its three volumes coming in at 672 close-set pages in my edition.

The reason that the book can be laid aside so easily, and picked up again months later with no confusion, is that very little happens to Emily St Aubert, its heroine. Rather it’s a book of intense moods and atmospheres, so leaving Emily to moulder for months in an Italian stronghold while you read a few contemporary novels seems to be doing her, and her author, no injustice.

Vague references date the novel as taking place towards the end of the 16th century, though the tender sensibility of the novel’s heroine better fits the time of composition. When Emily, a young noblewoman of Gascony, loses her mother, travel is recommended for her grieving father to distract him from his loss, and the pair set out on a meticulously and romantically described journey to Provence. On the way, they encounter a seemingly rootless young man, Valancourt, who dogs Emily’s footsteps. When the elderly St Aubert dies on the journey, Emily has to throw herself on her sole remaining relative, her disagreeable aunt, Madame Cheron. Upon marrying the severe Count Montoni, Madame banishes Valancourt and sweeps her niece along, first to Venice, where a rich, annoying suitor is proposed, then to Udolpho, Montoni’s formidable perch in the Apennines. It swiftly becomes clear to both women that they are prisoners, and that something very sinister has happened to a previous countess within the castle walls.

All the ingredients are now in place: a terrifically saturnine villain, a helpless heroine, secret passages, ghostly phenomena, murderous plots, vertiginous ramparts, damp dungeons and, wafting over the castle at intervals, spectral music. Outside is little better with troops of soldiers and packs of wandering banditti thronging the forests.

There are two obstacles to a modern appreciation of Emily. One: she is deeply religious, earnestly praying and seeking guidance from the Almighty, while trusting in some deeper divine purpose behind her losses and trials. This you just have to go with. Two: she’s an amateur poet, apt to stop at intervals and pen lengthy, derivative screeds of verse about the sea, the mountains, love, death, even what she’s been reading. A perusal of The Iliad, for example, brings forth 18 quatrains beginning thus: ‘O’er Ilion’s plains, where once the warrior bled, / And once the poet rais’d his deathless strains…’ These you can SKIP!

Stuck in the castle for hundreds of pages, Emily has even less to do, but fortunately possesses some very positive traits to keep the reader going. Though always mindful of the dignity her social position entails, when roused by the malevolent Montoni or his ignorant wife, she can deliver a stinging moral rebuke or defiant riposte worthy of Austen. This spikiness saves her innocent charm and conventionality from being merely bland. Emily’s dialogue with her maid, the babbling Annette, is also a shaft of light in the narrative. The maid is Emily’s chief line of communication with the wider world of the servant hall and beyond, but Annette is incapable of clearly delivering a vital message without a tumble of irrelevant information. It’s not hard to see that, too, influencing Austen.

But the chief glory of the novel is the lengthy descriptive passages providing, for readers deprived of European travel due to the Napoleonic wars, ravishing glimpses of unimaginable sublimity, grandeur and glamour. To skip these would be to miss the point of the novel, which aims to slow us down to an almost breathless, meditative state of rich receptivity. Emily is a heroine who has almost nothing to do apart from think and feel. In today’s fast-moving world, she feels like an antidote.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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