THE JILLY COOPER CURE

Imogen, my first Jilly Cooper

Jilly Cooper is my universal panacea - whenever the sky looks like it's falling in, I duck into one of her novels and shelter there for a while (rather than bolt off to tell the King like Henny Penny - the flight or fight instinct is not strong in me - I'm all about the hiding). I re-read Riders, Rivals, Polo, Imogen, Emily, Harriet, Octavian, even the lesser Jilly's of Jump! Score! and Wicked! (Let the exclamation mark be a warning sign) until I feel I can tackle whatever has sent me scuttling.

The comfort of Cooper has, of course, a lot to do with the way she writes within a conventional literary framework, rather than challenging it, and even when things look bleak for her characters, we know that the wheel of fortune will turn upwards again for them. Her language underpins this narrative certainty - things are larky, merry, jaunty - and one reads on, secure in the knowledge that the good will end happily and the bad unhappily, because, to quote Wilde, 'that is what Fiction means', at least in the cosy world of Cooper.

As a teenager, two authors kicked down the door to the magical, infinite riches offered by books: TS Eliot's The Waste Land was a poem which came with a free gift of a literary education, a Grand Tour of Western Culture, books upon which all sorts of other books are built: Dante and Milton, Shakespeare and Spenser, The Bible and Baudelaire, Ovid and Virgil - an intellectual paradise. But Jilly Cooper took me to the books that nourish and sustain the soul - through her I discovered Nancy Mitford, Barbara Pym, Forever Amber, The Diary of A Provincial Lady, Cold Comfort Farm, Barbara Comyns, Mary Webb, Austen and Trollope. In her voice, in her characters and in her plots you sense the blissful influence of these writers, and if occasionally Cooper's love for them seeps into her writing a little too literally - a character in Harriet, confronted with a bawling, teething child, suggests it should go to the dentist and Red Alderton, in Polo, is given to sporting brightly coloured jackets, piped with a contrasting braid, both of which echo Cedric in The Pursuit of Love - it's more as a musician might use a sample than anything else, a reminder of her references, staking her claim to a particular literary tradition. 

But it's not simply Cooper's voice that led me down a primrose path of literary dalliance - she uses literary quotation to as a shortcut to describe character better than any other writer I can think of - sexy, temperamental, irresistible Rory Balniel is Young Lochinvar, you know Polo's Luke Alderton is a thoroughly good egg because he reads poetry - Martin Fierro and Robert Frost's 'Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening'. Declan O'Hara, Rival's charismatic, irascible, tragic-romantic hero's great love is Yeats: he whispers to his faithless wife 'there is grey in your hair, Young men no longer catch their breath, When you are passing' and the quote so cleverly captures the drama of their relationship, I had my head stuck in Yeat's Collected Works for months afterwards. Cooper doesn't only feed the quote habit of her male characters - literary women abound, and nor is literariness a universal indicator of goodness in a character - Helen, Rupert Campbell-Black's first wife is given to earnest quoting as a sign both of her pretension and also a signifier of the mismatch in the relationship between her and Rupert, who believes reading anything other than Horse and Hound a monumental waste of time.

So, for thirty years, Cooper has sustained me, and brought me enormous pleasure, not only with her own books but with those to which she's introduced me. If T.S Eliot and Jilly Cooper are my formative literary experiences, and if what you read can't help but rub off onto what you write, then heaven help the Great Unfinished Novel ...

INDIA KNIGHT AT THE BOOKS THAT BUILT ME

In Your Prime; Older, Wiser, Happier by India Knight, a copy of Harper's Bazaar and Prestat's delicious chocolate - ready for guests to take home.

'The charm of your writing' Evelyn Waugh once wrote to Nancy Mitford, 'depends on your refusal to recognise a distinction between girlish chatter and literary language.' The same could be said, I think, of the appeal of India Knight, whose considerable intellectual clout is effortlessly tempered by the warmth, wit and generosity of her writing. 

Guests drank ice-cold Nyetimber - not for nothing has it outclassed the big brand champagnes in blind testing - and went home with a goodybag containing a copy of In Your Prime, December Harper's Bazaar and a delicious bar of Prestat chocolate. I went home without my copy of In Your Prime (I think a guest may have inadvertently picked it up. Tant pis...) but with a renewed sense of purpose and in my full pomp - very much in my prime.

India has an uncanny ability to produce a book at precisely the moment I need her most  - From Pig to Twig  [more properly known as 'Neris and India's Idiot-Proof Diet'] arrived when I realised that the avoirdupois I'd acquired whilst pregnant with The Tiniest Trefusis wasn't going to shift itself. Thrift turned up - helpfully - in time for the Great Trefusis Economic Crisis, and her four novels have endlessly consoled and amused me (& once, when I was reading 'Comfort and Joy' aloud to my sister as she drove us up the A303, she became so hysterical with laughter she had to stop the car). And of course, India's weekly comment column and newish beauty feature for the Sunday Times seem to connect exactly with the collective zeitgeist (one has no sooner thought, 'God, my legs are the colour of skimmed milk' than a column appears recommending the ne plus ultra of fake tans). Now, when the face that stares back at me in the mirror shows the relentless march towards middle-age, India's latest book 'In Your Prime; Older, Wiser, Happier,' appears, oasis-like. It's full of India's trademark drollery and shrewd, sensible advice - not all of which must be followed prescriptively - my blissful friend Belgian Waffling and I were paralysed by wardrobe anxiety before the launch party for In Your Prime, after reading in its pages that after a certain age one must never wear black, it being so funereal and 'draining'. Obediently, both of us cast off our nightly colour only to discover India resplendent in a super-sexy black sparkly number, looking for all the world as if she'd had her DNA blended in a centrifuge with Gina Lollobrigida's and Sophia Loren's. Nor do I think we should worry too much about getting  'on top': as suggested, I put a mirror on the floor, straddled it, and looked down. Admittedly,  the view wasn't delightful but I think one's partner is probably too busy in the throes to pause for much thought (also, if similar age, will probably be quite grateful to you for taking weight off his ageing joints). 

Anyway, if you're tempted to punch people when they ask you what you're going to do for 'your big birthday', this book is for you. If you're about to ask one of your friends, or your mum, or any other woman in your life what she plans to do for her 'big birthday', please button your lip and buy them 'In Your Prime' instead. 

 'In Your Prime' has my favourite appendix of all time - a list of more than fifty comfort reads, alone quite worth the price of the book. Uncle Matthew, one of the glorious characters in India's first Books That Built Me choice, Nancy Mitford, The Pursuit of Love, says "My dear Lady Kroesig, I have only read one book in my life, and that is ‘White Fang.’ It’s so frightfully good I’ve never bothered to read another.”. I'd go so far as to say these fifty are so good one would never have to bother to read others, though one should definitely add these, below. So, here are India's Books That Built Me

1. The Pursuit of Love, Nancy Mitford. A novel that can be read again and again without it ever losing its charm. 

(Regular guests at TBTBM will know that Penhaligon's always perfume the room with a scent to match something in one of the books - this time they chose their new gentleman's cologne, Bayolea, based on a traditional recipe and gorgeously manly with citrus and cedar, lavender, musk and moss, absolutely the essence of Linda's great love, Fabrice de Sauveterre.) The Amazon link is to the Complete Novels of Nancy Mitford, because India wrote the foreword, and as India said at TBTBM, everything Mitford wrote is worth reading, not simply the novels but also the hugely entertaining and well-researched biographies - Madame De Pompadour, Frederick The Great, The Sun King, Voltaire in Love, and so on.

2. An Omelette and a Glass of Wine,  Elizabeth David. India's mum sent her off to university with this book, but India said she mostly read it for the beauty of Elizabeth David's writing and ate Pot Noodle. David not only transformed how the British Middle-class art after the war (as India said, even as late as the early seventies, her mother was horrified to discover that olive oil was sold in tiny quantities from Boots, for medicinal purposes, quite insufficient for dressing a salad) but was also a very literary food writer, much published in newspapers and magazines (Harper's Bazaar published her first ever piece, about rice, in 1949). An Omelette and A Glass of Wine is her anthology of her journalism and, I quite agree with India when she says it's also the perfect description of the perfect meal for one.

3. The Man Who Watched Trains Go By, Georges Simenon. All writers are tremendous readers, says India, and as a child in Belgium with her grandparents, she devoured books - everything she could lay her hands on, including Tin Tin and Asterix and detective stories like Simenon's The Man Who Watched Trains Go By. It's not a Maigret novel, but a bleakly gripping thriller about a petit-bourgeois official who is so tired of being who he is he commits murder. John Banville calls it 'insouciantly gruesome ... A superb and polished work of art masquerading as pulp fiction', and I wonder aloud if India has unconsciously absorbed Simenon's ability to pen a page-turner yet not stint on intelligent writing, as with Mitford. I think the truth lies in India's response -'What was it Dolly Parton said? 'it takes a lot of effort to look this cheap'' 

4. India's fourth book choice is by fellow Belgian Albert Cohen's Belle Du Seigneur (often translated in English as 'Her Lover'). Cohen is hugely celebrated in Belgium but little known in England and, published in 1968, Belle Du Seigneur, has sold over a million copies on the continent. It's a story of a doomed love affair between Solal, a handsome Mediterranean Jew who has risen to become  Under Secretary-General of the League of Nations and Ariane, the beautiful, aristocratic Swiss wife of one of his underlings.  

Belle Du Seigneur is an epic tale of adulterous passion in the Paolo and Francesca mode, two legendary lovers doomed, in Dante's Inferno, India's penultimate book, to float perpetually on the wings of love, always reaching for each other, always missing each other's embrace.

Belle Du Seigneur is also the reason I know India, but that's for another time.

5. Speaking of Paolo and Francesco, who occupy the Second Circle of Dante's Inferno (quite unfair, really, adulterous get away with only the second circle of hell, whilst fortune tellers and tarot readers get the 8th, India's fifth book is The Divine Comedy (Inferno) by Dante. India read modern languages at University, and first discovered Dante in its original Italian, which must have been wonderful (I can say Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate, but that's the only Italian I can muster, soI'm all about the English translation). 

Delicious Nyetimber

6. Barbara Pym - all but in particular Excellent Women and Some Tame Gazelle. James Thurber once wrote that the difference between American and English humour is that the former makes the extraordinary, ordinary, and the latter turns on transforming the ordinary into the extraordinary, and the quiet pleasure of Pym's writing is quintessentially English. Wistful, witty and wise, Barbara Pym's novels are marvellous about all the quiet details in the lives of the middle-classes and much of the joy of her as an author lies in the way one recognises one's own life in her pages - in her novels, as in life, it's the small, seemingly inconsequential details that have the most power. I have some recollection of India saying that she could never quite love anyone who didn't like Barbara Pym - if I've misquoted that, forgive me and ascribe the sentiment to me instead. 

Guests drank ice-cold Nyetimber - not for nothing has it outclassed the big name champagnes in blind testing - and went home with a goodybag containing In Your Prime, a copy of Harper's Bazaar and a bar of Prestat's gorgeous cardamom and orange chocolate. I went home without my copy of In Your Prime (I think someone must have inadvertently picked it up, tant pis) but, having spent an hour or so talking to India, I think I absorbed by osmosis the essence of what she means by being in one's prime, and off I went, full of confidence, vigour and very much in my full pomp.

The next Books That Built Me salon is on 8th December with Justine Picardie, author of several books, including the best-selling Coco Chanel; the Legend and the Life, and Editor in Chief of Harper's Bazaar

WIGS ON THE GREEN

First published in 1935, Nancy Mitford’s third novel, Wigs on the Green, was never reprinted in her lifetime. Although its plot - like all of Mitford’s novels – is essentially an exploration of love and marriage, and has all the trademark Mitford wit, brio, and strong autobiographical detail, it’s also a satire on British fascism.

Mitford wasn’t the only novelist to poke fun at the British Union of Fascists – I’ve always loved Wodehouse’s parody of Mosley, as Roderick Spode in The Code of the Woosters (1938), which makes him as ridiculous as one could possibly wish.

“The trouble with you, Spode, [says Wooster] is that just because you have succeeded in inducing a handful of half-wits to disfigure the London scene by going about in black shorts, you think you're someone. You hear them shouting "Heil, Spode!" and you imagine it is the Voice of the People. That is where you make your bloomer. What the Voice of the People is saying is: "Look at that frightful ass Spode swanking about in footer bags! Did you ever in your puff see such a perfect perisher?"

Whilst the satire is rather gentler in Wigs on the Green, Wodehouse didn’t have sisters who were infamously and intimately involved with the Fascist cause, and its publication went particularly hard with Diana, who was married in all but name to Oswald Mosley, for whom she’d left her husband in 1932. Although Mitford removed the three chapters that most obviously lampooned Mosley as Captain Jack, the leader of the Union Jackshirts, Wigs on the Green caused a rift between her and Diana that lasted almost until the end of the war. “But I also know your point of view,” wrote Nancy to Diana shortly before its publication, in an attempt to mollify her, “That Fascism is something too serious to be dealt with in a funny book at all.” In fact, Nancy later took her sister’s commitment to fascism extremely seriously, warning MI5 that she was "far cleverer and more dangerous than her husband" (Diana had married Mosley in a secret ceremony in Berlin in 1936).

Yet it’s not Diana who is caricatured in Wigs on the Green, it’s Unity, who at twenty-one was already under the spell of National Socialism, albeit some years from becoming the Hitler obsessive who shot herself in the head the day war broke out between England and Germany, with a pistol given to her by the Führer himself . In Wigs on the Green, Unity is Eugenia Malmain, ardent supporter of Captain Jack and his Union Jackshirts, and one of the richest girls in Britain, a perfect target for the attentions of the fortune-hunting Noel Foster and his disreputable pal, Jasper Aspect. It’s the adolescent aspects of the Jackshirt movement that seem to appeal to Eugenia most– the dressing up, belonging to a gang and rampaging around on her spirited horse, Vivien Jackson, with the faithful Reichshund at her side. The politics are full of fabulous rhetoric, bombast and nonsense – I’m particularly taken with Eugenia's definition of Aryan:

"Well, it's quite easy. A non-Aryan is the missing link between man and beast. That can be proved by the fact that no animals, except the Baltic goose, have blue eyes."

“How about Siamese cats?” said Jasper.

Every joke – even a clever if light-hearted satire – has its moment: by the time Mitford’s publisher asked for permission to reissue the novel, in 1951, the world had changed. As she wrote to Evelyn Waugh, “Too much has happened for jokes about Nazis to be regarded as…anything but the worst of taste”.

And so it remained out of print for nearly seventy five years. Next week, Penguin publishes Wigs on the Green alongside a new edition of Mitford’s finest novels – The Pursuit of Love, Love in a Cold Climate, The Blessing and Don’t Tell Alfred. It doesn’t have quite the same marvellousness of the post-war novels, which are so captivating one can’t help but read them again and again and again until the spines fall apart with love and delight– my first ever copy of The Pursuit of Love is now more sellotape than novel, really – but it is still a tremendous read. Wigs on the Green has sufficient Mitford hallmarks to have you roaring with laughter, but with the added fascination of having elements of a roman à clef.

Wigs on the Green, by Nancy Mitford, is published by Fig Tree (Penguin) on 4^th March.

NB: If you are new to Mitford, you should definitely start with The Pursuit of Love - as A Whirl in London says below, it is to Mitford what Pride and Prejudice is to Austen.

THINGS AIN'T WHAT THEY MEME

I'm not one for memes. I am really quite a tiresome person, so the idea of a questionnaire in which I let you know even more dreary drivel about myself than I already write here fills me with dread.

However, what are rules if there are no exceptions? And so, when one of my all time favourite bloggers, Mothership, tagged me in a meme, it felt only courteous to follow her request.

As if to add insult to injury, I've taken terrible liberties with the original meme. I hope that Motherhood the Final Frontier will forgive me for having bent the rules. It's probably an enormous sin in the blogosphere and I'll have to go to confession. But not this one, I hope.



Anyway, here's the meme. Or, ahem, my version of the meme....

What's your favourite piece of writing?
I'm afraid you'd get a different answer to this question every time it was asked. Writing is a little like clothes, so much depends on your mood. The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford made a great impression on me when I first read it at eighteen, and I must have read it at least every decade since, possibly because it has one of the boldest opening lines of any book - if you start your first chapter 'This is the saddest story I have ever heard', you're setting the bar very high.
But there's a passage within it that struck a chord with me then, and it still resonates, for reasons I'm not prepared to go into, not being a confessional blogger.

We are all so afraid, we are all so alone, we all so need from the outside the assurance of our own worthiness to exist.
So, for a time, if such a passion comes to fruition, the man will get what he wants. He will get the moral support, the encouragement, the relief from the sense of loneliness, the assurance of his own worth. But these things pass away; inevitably they pass away as the shadows across sun-dials. It is sad, but it is so. The pages of the book will have become familiar; the beautiful corner of the road will have been turned to many times. Well, this is the saddest story.

What's the favourite thing you've ever written?

Ha. I can hardly go from Ford Madox Ford into hopelessly amateur Mrs Trefusis, can I? Worryingly,I am still quite pleased by 'THE DUST ON A BOWL OF ROSELEAVES', though it's horribly pretentious. But the four part love story, in which I meet Mr Trefusis is rather better and infinitely more readable. It begins with LOVE IN THE TIME OF INTERWEB, but continues into Espresso Bongo, Love's Labour's Lust, and finally, Love in a Foreign Language.

What blog post do you wish you'd written?

Just about anything by Belgian Waffling, but particularly this gorgeously dark Stella Gibbonsesque post from earlier this week. The Waffle is a genius and can turn 200 words about house dust into something compelling and meaningful.

Choose a favourite quotation

'I like people better than principles, and people without principles best of all'

Oscar Wilde. It always is, isn't it.

Three favourite words

Lambent, idiosyncratic, tenebrous.

Just like the way they sound. But I also like velleity, a word I hadn't heard until yesterday, when Sarah Churchwell mentioned it on twitter. It means 'a mere wish, unaccompanied by an effort to obtain it.' I think I suffer from velleity more often than I'd like.

Do you have a writing mentor, role model, influence or inspiration

Hmm, I'd like to say it's someone very grand, like George Eliot, but it's not. I'm ready to confess that my greatest influences are probably Nancy Mitford and Jilly Cooper. The highbrow stuff is mostly me showing how unbearably affected I am.

What's your writing ambition?

To avoid very obvious spelling mistakes, and to always use the apostrophe in an appropriate manner.

And now I'm supposed to send it onto three people.

I choose Joad Raymond, who writes a very good blog called Miles to Go Before I Sleep , but now he's unable to run, he needs something new to write about, and it may as well be this since he's one of the best read people I know.

And The Age of Uncertainty. This blog, mostly about antiquarian books and the stories they unconsciously tell, gives me such enormous pleasure: I urge you to seek it out so you can discover its delights for yourself.

And last but not least, Helena Halme, an ex-pat Finn whose wonderful story about her English sailor is serialised on her blog. Start at the beginning and I'm sure that like me, you'll be hooked, and desperate to follow it to its conclusion.