Category: Literature

By accident, in the trashy wilderness of HBO Max, I discovered “Parade’s End,” a lavish five-part series from BBC Two that was broadcast in 2012. Benedict Cumberbatch plays Christopher Tietjens, a character in four novels by Ford Madox Ford published between 1924 and 1928. I’ve watched only the first episode so far, but it’s one of the best things I’ve come across in a while. The screenplay was adapted by Tom Stoppard, and, according to Wikipedia, it was often described as “the highbrow Downton Abbey.”

Who was Ford Madox Ford, and why had I never heard of him? Ford was very prolific and published something like 70 books. He knew all the literary luminaries of his time. But he never made any money, and his first editions seem to have ended up in rare book collections. That is, he fell out of print. His style was said to be experimental, modernist, and even impressionist — not at all a style to which I am attracted. But I sampled some of his prose at Google Books, and it seems entirely readable.

By some accounts, Ford was a disagreeable person, and Ernest Hemingway famously hated him, though Ford, as editor of the Transatlantic Review, had published some of Hemingway’s work. In a 2016 article “Why did Ernest Hemingway despise Ford Madox Ford?“, there is a quote from an interview with Ford:

“During a late interview with journalist George Seldes, Ford, on the verge of tears, says of Hemingway: ‘he disowns me now that he has become better known than I am.’ Tears now came to Ford’s eyes… ‘I helped Joseph Conrad, I helped Hemingway. I helped a dozen, a score of writers, and many of them have beaten me. I’m now an old man and I’ll die without making a name like Hemingway.’ In his published description of the encounter, Seldes notes, ‘At this climax Ford began to sob. Then he began to cry.'”

On eBay, I found a 1961 edition of the four novels in a single volume. The titles are Some Do Not …, No More Parades, A Man Could Stand Up–, and The Last Post.

As I think I’ve said here before, novels that don’t become classics tend to become obscure. Some are rediscovered. Ford lived during a very fertile time for literature — Proust, Hemingway, James Joyce. Fertile or not, it’s not a period that interests me very much. But I’ll have a go at Ford, in the hope that, if a nimrod like Hemingway disliked him, that’s a recommendation.

A new edition of Tolkien’s letters (from William Morrow in the U.S. and HarperCollins in the U.K.) will be released in the U.S. on November 14, and in the U.K. on November 9. The new edition, in hardback, contains 150 new letters since the previous edition of Tolkien’s letters in 1981, bringing the total number of letters to 500.

The book can be pre-ordered from Amazon.

Look at that tweed jacket! And I’m still waiting for the Tolkien Society to do something about my suggestion of an article on Tolkien’s typewriters.

Once again, unable to find any newer fiction that interested me, I’m reading another Sir Walter Scott. It’s The Fortunes of Nigel, and I believe this will be the eighth or ninth Walter Scott that I’ve read. Though Scott’s works are available at Gutenberg and can be read on Kindles, I like having nice old editions of 19th Century classics. I bought this copy of Nigel on eBay from a seller in the United Kingdom.

The book was not expensive, but I was immediately impressed by the quality of the binding and, in particular, the quality of the paper. Though the paper is 111 years old, it is bright white and has hardly yellowed at all (though the heavier paper used for the illustrations has yellowed somewhat). The paper is remarkably thin and opaque. There is no brittleness. It wasn’t too hard to figure out what kind of paper this almost certainly is. The clue is the name Henry Frowde on the title page, over the Oxford University Press imprint.

Henry Frowde, it seems, was not a scholar, but he was a genius at printing and binding. He must have been a bit of a religious fanatic, because he printed a lot of Bibles. One of his innovations was the use of Oxford India paper, which was made from bleached rags and hemp. It was often used for Bibles, and as you’ll see in the Wikipedia article, Encylopedia Britannica used it for their 1911 edition.

So now that’s another item for my next visit to the U.K. — visiting some bookstores that sell old books. I’m guessing that there are several of those in Edinburgh. I am not particularly interested in rare books, nor would I be able to afford them. But I am very interested in beautiful books that are beautifully printed on good paper and beautifully bound. There are many cheaply printed old editions of 19th Century classics. It’s nice to see that the Oxford press adhered to a higher standard.

The Collapsing Empire. John Scalzi. Tor, 2017. This is part one of a three-part series, The Interdependency Series.

I had been gasping for a space opera, and I found one. Scalzi, I think, is one of our best contemporary science fiction writers, and, at age 53, I hope he’s got a long career ahead of him. About five years ago, I read Scalzi’s Old Man’s War and found it to be entirely entertaining. At the time, though the first part of The Interdependency Series had been published, the remaining two books of the trilogy were yet to come. I found this book while experimenting with Google searches that would find recently published space operas (if any even existed).

Space operas seem to be out of fashion. I find that irksome. Though socially conscious novels about social oppression and diversity seem to be what publishers are interested in these days, that’s not what I’m interested in. Social oppression and diversity are what politics is for. Novels are for entertainment and escape. The more one is involved in politics, the more one needs some means of escape — preferably to anywhere other than the here and now. It’s all about imagination.

Scalzi, I think, is not a writer who is greatly concerned with big ideas. I may find, in books 2 and 3 of this series, that he is concerned with the big idea of what happens in failing empires. But Scalzi’s greater concern, I think, is in providing a hot read. I finished this book in two days and immediately ordered book 2.

Often I’m afraid that, having devoured novels all my life, I’ve now read all the good ones, and few good ones are being written anymore. Regular readers here know that one of my quirks is that stories set in the here and now almost always bore the daylights out of me. I just don’t see the point of it. If one consumes as much news as I do, then one is saturated with more than enough stories from the here and now. I make an exception for stories about espionage and international intrigue, probably because they take us to exotic places that I’ll never see and inside such places as MI6 where the news can’t take us — Prague, St. Petersburg, Vauxhall Cross, arctic outposts, top-secret military installations. Another visit to L.A.? No thanks.

Speaking of imagination, I’ve been re-watching Game of Thrones on HBO. I don’t know how much of it I’ll watch, but it’s comforting to visit characters who feel like old friends — the Starks, John Snow, Sam Tarley. Speaking of the Starks and international intrigue, I also have been watching The Citadel on Amazon Prime, which stars Richard Madden, who played Rob Stark.

A few days ago I read yet another article about how reading novels is good exercise for the memory, because one has to remember on page 486 what happened on page 37. Scalzi is a lot like Isaac Asimov in that there is not a lot of action. Rather, the story unfolds as the characters, sitting in rooms (in palaces or aboard space vessels) talk. There’s more exposition than most editors would recommend. But, like Asimov’s characters and dialogues, Scalzi’s characters, both the nice people and the villains, are sharp and interesting. One might be tempted to make a list of Scalzi’s characters (of which there are a great many), the places on multiple planets, or the almost-a-dozen space vessels that Scalzi names, to keep everything straight. But I didn’t, and instead I did brief periodic reviews to make sure that I had it all down.

According to the Wikipedia article, Scalzi’s writing style was influenced by Robert Heinlein, Orson Scott Card, and Joe Haldeman. Though I haven’t read much Haldeman, I would agree. I suspect that Scalzi also was inspired by George R.R. Martin’s model of empire, drawing on the conflicts among powerful families doing terrible things to amplify their power.

A few weeks ago I mentioned having joined the Tolkien Society. Today I received in the mail a welcome letter and a copy of the April 2023 Amon Hen, the Bulletin of the Tolkien Society.

The packet was hand addressed, with nice U.K. postage stamps. International mail always looks so exotic!

Amon Hen is very nicely printed on heavy paper. The April issue contains some beautiful artwork, a photograph of Tolkien, and seven articles.

Soon I will write a letter to the Amon Hen editor begging them to do an article on Tolkien and his typewriters, hoping that photos of Tolkien with a typewriter exist.

After I saw this letter in the Reddit /r/typewriters group, I Googled for Tolkien’s address to have a look at the house. In that search there was a link to the Tolkien Society.

A Tolkien Society! Now that is cool. According to the web site, the Tolkien Society has existed since 1969, with Tolkien’s blessing. Tolkien also was the society’s first president and remains the honorary president today. It seems to be a fairly small, but viable and active, organization.

One of the first things I noticed is that, each year, they have a gathering at Oxford called Oxenmoot. This year’s Oxenmoot is August 31 through September 3 at Saint Anne’s College. Next year’s World Science Fiction Convention will be in Glasgow, August 8-12, 2024. So I immediately wondered whether an American traveler might be able to attend both WorldCon and Oxenmoot next year on the same trip. I have emailed the Oxenmoot chair to encourage that.

I instantly joined the Tolkien Society for a year, to see what they’re like and what they’re up to. They create some printed periodicals, and I’d paid a bit extra to have those mailed to me in the U.S.

Tolkien, by the way, is known to have loved typewriters. His favorite typewriter was a very expensive Varitype. He did use other typewriters, though, and the letter above clearly was not typed with a Varitype. The characters are very sharp and even, so my guess is that the letter was written with an electric typewriter. Tolkien was known to have had some painful rheumatism in his hands, so an electric typewriter would have been easier for him to use.