Backlisted - The Constant Nymph by Margaret Kennedy

Episode Date: June 8, 2020

Margaret Kennedy's bestselling novel The Constant Nymph (1924) is the book featured in this episode of Backlisted. Joining John and Andy to discuss this tale of romance, passion and bohemianism - and the chequered career of its author - is publisher Alexandra Pringle. Please note: some aspects of this novel will be shocking to modern readers; meaningful discussion would be both difficult and limited without reference to them. Also in this episode Andy has been enjoying Romantic Moderns by Alexandra Harris, while John explores The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli.Timings: (may differ due to variable advert length)8'32 - Romantic Moderns by Alexandra Harris13'47 - The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli20'47 - The Constant Nymph by Margaret Kennedy* To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops.* For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm*If you'd like to support the show, listen without adverts, receive the show early and with extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a Patreon at www.patreon.com/backlisted Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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And when you get to the main event, skip to the good bit using the card member entrance. Let's go seize the night. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Visit amex.ca slash yamex. Benefits vary by card. Other conditions apply. Alexandra, where now? This has become a new feature of Batlisted since lockdown began and we ask our guests, where in the world are you? I am in London.

I am sitting on my houseboat on Cheney Walk in Chelsea on the Thames. And the tide is coming in. So if I start rocking a little bit, you'll know that it's not because i'm drinking wine which i'm not it's because the tide is coming in how long have you lived in a board a houseboat in cheney um for 20 years yeah gosh yeah yeah and um it's big um it's a bit like being in a loft or kind of new york loft but it goes up and down with the tides. It goes up and down twice a day, 20 foot up and down. And it's heaven. It's the most perfect place to spend lockdown, in my view, because I would rather die than be in the countryside. But it gives me all the joy of the big skies and the water and the birds

and a little bit of nature, just enough for me. Magic. It's the most spectacular boat. Some of the greatest publishing parties I've ever been to have been on that boat. It's wonderful. Do you get out? Do you get to walk? Yeah.

Do you walk along the Thames? Yeah. Is it strangely empty? No. Or filling up? Cheney Walk didn't stop with the traffic. I mean, even in the greatest moments of lockdown, there were still lorries and

cars pounding down Cheney Walk. And pounding joggers, of course, which are the greatest menace of London life at the moment, the panting joggers. Not just London life, are they? You can imagine though, in London, they're a little closer to them, and they pant a great deal. But yeah, I go out twice a day for morning walk before

I start work, and then for a longer one in the evening. And the evening is incredibly exciting, because there's a new river path that goes past Lotz Road power station, where there are a pair of peregrine falcons who've nested and they have five young which is apparently unprecedented i've become a bird watcher you know that's one of the extraordinary things instead of going out to launch parties i look at birds now and then there is a very spectacular boat further down on another mooring called Imperial Wharf, where somebody is creating a garden on a pontoon with the most beautiful columns and statues and ironwork and old gates. And so that enthralls me as well.

Those are my two most exciting things. That's excellent. It's really good. Someone was asking us this week if we would do, and remember the guests choose the books, everybody. The guests usually choose the books. Somebody was asking us if we would do The Peregrine by... J.A. Baker.

J.A. Baker. Have you read that, Alexandra? I haven't. Spectacular book. Sensational book. Is it? Yeah, it's wonderful. And even the book about him, Little Toller,

the biography of J.A. Baker, that they published a couple of years ago, is an amazing book. Shall we start? Let's do the podcast. Excellent. Hello and welcome to Backlisted, the podcast that gives new life to old books. Today you find us toiling up a steep slope in the Austrian Tyrol in the 1920s, surrounded by jagged peaks, our path thronged with gentians, the object of our journey,

a dilapidated chalet, the home in exile to a less well-known-than-he-should-be English composer and his family of semi-feral children. I'm John Mitchinson, the publisher of Unbound, the platform where readers crowdfund the books they really want to read. And I'm Andy Miller, author of The Year of Reading Dangerously. Joining us today is Alexandra Pringle. Hello, Alexandra. Hello. Hello again. Alexandra was editor-in-chief of Bloomsbury Publishing for 20 years and she is now executive publisher.

20 years and she is now executive publisher. She began her career on the art magazine Art Monthly and joined Virago Press in 1978 where, drum roll, she edited the Virago Modern Classics series becoming editorial director in 1984, something we will be coming on to talk about a bit later everybody but we'll get there in time. In 1990, she moved to Hamish Hamilton as editorial director, and four years later left publishing to become a literary agent. She joined Bloomsbury in 1999. Her list of authors includes... Actually, when John sent me the list,

I was going, how can one... But anyway, her list of authors includes Margaret Atwood, Richard Ford, Esther Freud, Elizabeth Gilbert, Sheila Hancock, Khaled Hosseini, Celia Imri, George Saunders, Camilla Shamsi, Patti Smith, Kate Summerscale and Barbara Trapedo. All of whom have you on speed dial. She is a patron of Index on Censorship, a trustee of Gifford's Circus and the charity Reprieve

and an honorary fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. So she's only just scraped on backlisted, everybody. She's barely qualified. Alexandra, tell me about Gifford Circus. Well, Gifford Circus is the circus of my astonishing and wonderful stepdaughter, Nell Gifford, who very tragically died in December last year. And she made me and her sister, Clover, and her niece, niece Lil and Guy, who's the finance guy, trustees of her estate.

And therefore to look after her twins, Red and Cecil, and her circus, Gifford Circus. You said when we met before the podcast, back in the days when we were able to meet people in person, that the plan is for it to continue in some form or other. Absolutely. Not just in some form. Absolutely rock and roll as it always has. As it was. That's such amazing news. Of course, this year it's been interrupted,

but there is a show all ready to go called The Hooli, and it will happen next year instead. So it's going to be amazing, absolutely amazing. Fantastic. I think with so many lockdown things as well, just you talking about it, it makes me think, God, how fucking amazing would it be to go to a circus? We've been locked in a room for three months.

It would be just incredible to go and do that. So that's so fantastic that that's going to happen. It is. With an amazingly kind of smooth segue, there is a character in the book who briefly played the trumpet in the circus in the book that you've chosen, Alexandra, which is The Constant Nymph by Margaret Kennedy. It's her second novel, I think, of 15 altogether.

16. 16. 16. Well, I've had 14, 15 and 16, but she wrote plenty of novels. This was the second, for sure. First published by William Heinemann in 1924, reissued by Vintage in 2014, but I'm guessing reissued by VMC back in the early 80s as well.

1983. 83 with an introduction by who else but Anita Bruckner. And it was adapted for the screen no fewer than three times. It was adapted for stage. That's the book that we're talking about. Very exciting, very, very good choice for us. This might be amongst the biggest bestsellers we've ever covered on Backlisted,

but it's so core Backlisted because it was so successful in its day and probably is less well-known and less successful now for all sorts of reasons that we'll come on to. Come on to. So to so anyway before we return to those giddy alpine heights andy what have you been reading this week uh uh on the last episode of backlisted i talked about a book called john piper's brighton

aquatint you did and uh i said that i i would talk about some of the books in the next over the next few episodes that that book has led me on to and so the book that i want to talk about this week is called romantic moderns by alexandra harris her most recent book is weatherland i don't know if you know that book john it strikes me as something that you probably might have a copy of or might have read no read it and really enjoyed it. She's a wonderful writer. I think this was her first book, Romantic Moderns. It was published in 2010. And I'm sure quite a few listeners will have heard of it or may have read it. But that's not a reason why I can't talk about it because I've only just read it and I've only just heard about it. So it's new to me. It won

the Guardian First Book Award, which is of course is a i was thinking i was thinking about the guardian first book award but as well that's the prize that no longer exists defunct yeah gone really sadly and so romantic moderns has all the merits and a couple of slight drawbacks that you might expect to find in a in a first book but as a repository of information and enthusiasm and learning and telling me stuff about subjects I didn't know I was interested in until I was reading them this is the this sort of perfect first book actually it sort of it gave me the same pleasure i assume um an episode of batlisted might give some of the listeners you know it's sort of it's a kind of lovely catholic selection of things from all different disciplines in in book form so it's not a book about just about

art the subtitle is english writers artists and the imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper and it's really about what modernism in England meant between the first world war and the second world war it was published by Thames and Hudson if you're thinking about buying a copy buy the hardback the hardback. The hardback and the paperback are still in print. They are a similar price. The hardback is beautifully produced. It has about 80 full colour plates or illustrations in it. She does a really interesting thing of, as a writer and a writer about, I about I mean doesn't matter really about art or literature or architecture she's got a really great eye so she can find not just a painting

that's worth talking about but an anecdote worth telling or a biographical detail worth passing on to you and I'll just read I'm not going to read from the book itself because um I just thought this was more useful really uh and this is the this is a little bit of the blurb on the inside jacket she says a rich network of personal and cultural encounters was the backdrop for a modern English renaissance in the 1930s. This great imaginative project was shared by writers, painters, gardeners, architects, critics, tourists and composers. John Piper left behind purist abstracts to make wind-snatched collages on the blustery coast.

Virginia Woolf wrote about a village pageant on a showery summer day. Florence White collected regional recipes. Christopher Tunnard designed modern gardens with a firmly 18th century feel Evelyn Waugh, E.M. Forster, the Sitwells are part of the story along with Vaughan Williams, Bill Brandt, Graham Sutherland, Eric Revillius, Cecil beaten and more. I just derived so much pleasure from reading about all those various artistic projects and then as a kind of starting point to investigate all sorts of things, some of which I knew about and some of which I didn't. And I found it the most culturally stimulating thing that I've read for a long time, actually. And it also struck me, I don't know what you feel about this,

but there's been a real revival in interest of many of those artists and writers, particularly Revellius, in the last 10 years. And I suppose, with the benefit of hindsight, Romantic Moderns, this particularly, but probably has something to do with that. It either starts a wave or it catches a wave or you know like all like a good piece of publishing like a great book it's probably doing a bit of both um it sounds i mean and does it cover is it's got piper in it does it have people like john minton in it as well yeah yeah it does on the next lock, we're going to play three different versions

of an excerpt from Facade. Edith Sitwell. Yeah, Edith Sitwell invents hip-hop on this thing. But I've also got other recordings by Fenella Fielding. Oh, brilliant. And Linda Snell from The Archers. Yay. John, what have you been reading this week? We don't do a lot of science on the podcast. And there's a good reason for that, because a lot of it doesn't really kind of seep into the things that we're sort of here to talk

about. But I read, had to read, because I interviewed him at the Hay Festival, Carlo Rovelli, the Italian physicist's book, The Order of Time. And every now and then I read a science book that seems to me to stand head and shoulders above the other books which are trying to explain things. And this is one of them. It's a book, clues in the title, about time. Rovelli is a proper grown-up, important quantum physicist. Loop quantum gravity theory is the thing that he's responsible for in his day job. As he said in the interview, when I publish a scientific paper, it's read by five other people who are qualified to pass judgment on it. But what he does is he writes with such precision and clarity and elegance about the things that are almost impossible for us to understand.

Quantum physics is very difficult for us to understand. Most physics is difficult. One thing I do want to say, it's beautifully translated by Erica Segritt and Simon Carnell. So, you know, thumbs up to Penguin for choosing excellent translators. But he's a writer who has a hinterland. You know, he is as familiar, each chapter has a quotation from Horace. He's as familiar and is easy with quoting from Shakespeare or Rilke or Nabokov as he is talking about Newton or Einstein or Paul Dirac. I mean, I'm not going to try and explain the theory of time in this book,

but a couple of things that I should say to you that gives you an idea of the flavour. He says the collapse of the notion of the present, basically, now doesn't exist now for modern physics. And that's apparently the most astounding conclusion arrived at in the whole of contemporary physics. conclusion arrived at in the whole of contemporary physics. The other thing that I, going back to the clarity and making things intelligible, I'd never thought about, our concept of time, our concept of the flow of time, the arrow of time moving in one direction, is completely predicated on heat. The idea that heat cannot pass from a cold body to a hot one. It can only flow in one direction. And that's the only reason that we need to have a theory of time at all. Everything else in the universe doesn't particularly need time. So I'll give you a couple of little, I think, beautiful quotes from what he

does very, very well. The world without time, the first bit of the book he shows why we don't need time. And then the second half of the book, he shows you why, of course, we need time, because that's where we live all our lives. So the world without a time variable is not a complicated one. It's a net of interconnected events where the variables in play adhere to probabilistic rules which, incredibly, we know for a good part how to write. and it's a clear world, windswept and full of beauty as the crests of mountains, as beautiful as the crap lips of adolescence. Weirdly, which made me think of Margaret Kennedy as I was reading it. The world is not a collection of things, it's a collection of events. The difference between things and events is that things persist in time, events have a limited duration.

A stone is a prototypical thing. We can ask ourselves where it will be tomorrow. Conversely, a kiss is an event. It makes no sense to ask where a kiss will be tomorrow. The world is made up of kisses, not of stones. Pretty good for a physicist. One last little quote from him before we go on to the main event. One last little quote from him before we go on to the main event. We are this space, this clearing opened by the traces of memory inside the connections between our neurons. We are memory. We are nostalgia. We are longing for a future that will not come. The clearing that is opened up in this way by memory and by anticipation is time. a source of anguish sometimes, but in the end a tremendous gift, a precious miracle that the infinite play of

combinations has unlocked for us, allowing us to exist. We may smile now. We can go back to serenely immersing ourselves in time, in our finite time, to savouring the clear intensity of every fleeting and cherished moment of the brief circle of our existence. Great. You say we don't do much science on this podcast, but this is the podcast that identified a mistake in a brief history of time. That's quite true. On an early episode, I found a mistake in a brief history of time and it's definitely

and it definitely was a mistake and the second thing to say is on the next lot listed which is the version of that listed you get to listen to if you support us on patreon i'll be playing john a song called i came to hear the music by mic Newbery, which Mickey Newbery's song paraphrases Einstein, which is quite an achievement in a country song, and actually deals with lots of the things you've just been talking about in relation to that book. I was going to read a bit of the lyric out, but I'm not going to. It'll be on LotList.

Ravelli, also, he's a Grateful Dead fan, so there's great stuff. But what I absolutely love about him is his humility. Somebody said to me on Twitter, said, I really struggled, you know, I really struggled with the book. And I said, he struggled with the book. That's the whole point. This stuff is really, really difficult to make clear and intelligible. He said to me, this is the one, you know, this is the one.

I don't think I'll ever write anything that's... It was, by the way, a number one bestseller, incredibly. So, you know, he's been massively successful. His seven brief lessons on physics has been 41 languages and a huge bestseller across the world. But really, really, I'm really pleased to have done it. And he was charm itself to talk to. Nicky just sent me a message to say, but how, Andy, can I get to hear these three different versions of facade on this thing called Locklisted? Well, Nicky, I would have thought you of all people would know. For other people, if you support us on Patreon

and you put the Patreon app on your phone, one of the things that you get if you're a lot listener or above is an extra episode of Backlisted called Lot Listed, a fortnight. And it's like Backlisted, but it's a bit more informal. And we don't just talk about books. We talk about other things as well. Whatever. We talk about whatever.

And if you support us on Patreon, that means we get to carry on making episodes of Backlisted as well so patreon.com forward slash backlisted thanks Nick any trousers John you want to talk about? no no we're good on the trousers I think then I suggest

if there's no other business we proceed we proceed to the constant nymph we'll pick this up again after some adverts. Stay tuned to this. Alexandra, thanks for sitting through that. It was very kind of you. It was very interesting.

Was it very interesting? It was like a lesson. How many thousands of hours have you had people pitching books? I mean, I just... Alexandra, I haven't been in a publishing meeting for 15 years, but that was close, so thank you very much. So lovely to be able to talk about this book in particular. But we should start with a bit of a warning, don't you think, Andy?

Yes, we talked about this before we came on. So The Constant Nymph was published in 1924, and there are a few things that i want to say straight up now to anybody who's listening so the book does contain a fair amount of anti-semitism we're going to talk about that it contains a depiction of a relationship between a grown man and an underage girl we're going to talk about that and also it contains a shock and arguably shocking ending and we're going to talk about that so we don't normally say this quite so forcefully at the beginning of an episode but we feel like you ought to know that so you can choose if you want

to keep listening and read the book keep listening and not read the book read the book come back and see if you agree with us so from this point on from now let's talk about nothing but underage relationships antisemitism and surprise endings let's go all those squares have gone we should say, Alexandra, you chose this book. Yes. And tell us when you first read it. I read it first when I was about the same age as our heroine, Tessa, in it. I was 14, 13, 14, maybe a little bit younger than her. And I read it because my mother gave it to me. My mother

gave me two books to read that she had read when she was young that had affected her life. One was Rosamund Lehman's Dusty Answer. And the other was Margaret Kennedy's The Constant Nymph. And my who was, she died last year, a rather astonishing Moroccan Jew, passed herself off as a sort of middle-class English woman, not that successfully, but she did okay at it. But she had run away from her family when she was 17, joined the army, and then after the war, she drove officers around in posh, joined the army. And then after the war, she drove officers around in posh cars during the war.

And she was stationed in Chelsea. And there she met artists and poets. And she went to art school after the war. She hated her father because he would never educate her. And so obviously for her, The Constant Nymph was an important book. And in fact, I'm just going to say now it was supposed to be based on the life of Augustus John, although it is in fact about a composer. And I read The Constant Nymph and it completely changed my life because it showed me a world that I became pretty much obsessed by, which was the world of Bohemia.

And I could not wait to get old enough to step into that world. And it's a world which I did not drown in, I'm happy to say. I skated around the periphery of it because I had to earn a living, mainly because I married men, I've married quite often, who were artists and didn't earn any money. But also it became something that I published into a great deal, not just at Virago, my years at Virago, where indeed there were very, very famous books in that area.

It's what I would call young girls let loose in Bohemia. So I Captured the Castle and The Dada Avocado are two supreme examples of those. But there are many others. There's Pamela Frankow and Rose McCauley and so forth there's an amazing Edith Wharton novel that I'd like to talk about later in relation to underage sex and novels but then it went on in my life in publishing and at Hamish Hamilton I published Raffaella Barker's first novel Come and and Tell Me Some Lies, which is an account of her childhood as one of the many, many, many children

of George Barker, the poet, one of at least 15. They're still counting. And, of course, I have for many years published the astonishing Esther Freud and Hideous Kinky was perhaps the youngest girl let loose in Bohemia because the central character is only five and in Morocco. You can imagine why I felt particularly close to that one. And then many others, including recently Polly Sampson's The Theatre for Dreamers and one which, again,

I'd like to return to later, which is Zofka Zinoviev's Putney, which is also about a child and an older man, and in this case a composer. So you can see there's a little bit of a thread in my life and it all began with the Constant Nymph. Can I just read the blurb on the back of the Virago modern classic? Did you write this blurb? Yes, I suspect I did.

Do you want me to read it? Yes, do. Do you want me to read it? Do. Listeners, this has taken us 110 episodes to reach this point. 12. 112 episodes to reach this point. Okay. 112 episodes to reach this point. Okay.

And John will give you a critique on it, Alexandra, when we finish. There's a quote. You started with a quote here. She would give herself to pain with a passionate readiness, seeing only its beauty. With the singleness of vision, which is the glory and the curse of such natures, he wondered anxiously and for the first time what was to become of her and then you take over and you say

Teresa is the daughter of a brilliant bohemian composer Albert Sanger who with his so-called circus of precocious children slovenly mistress and assorted hangers-on, lives in a rambling chalet high in the Austrian Alps. Thin, childish, green-eyed, with an indomitably eccentric taste in clothes, Tessa is, quote, unbalanced, untaught and fatally warm-hearted. At 14, she has already fallen in love with Louiswis dodd a gifted composer like her father confidently she awaits maturity and lewis but this longed for destiny is shattered by her father's sudden death lewis is drawn away by tessa's beautiful cousin florence however neither his marriage to her nor tessa's exile to an English boarding school can break the spell the gods have placed on Lewis and his nymph. Listeners, Alexandra just punched the air.

Tessa remains constant, her splendid heart all too ready for the rewards that love so inevitably brings. I tell you what, Alexandra, that's terrific. Surprisingly little about anti-Semitism. I was taught to write copy, of course, by Carmen Kalil. And I remember when I wrote very early on, I wept quite often over my copy, it has to be said. I was writing the copy for The Vet's Daughter by Barbara Commons. And I said that the girl dies at the end of it. And Carmen said, you'd never say that. She said, you never, ever, ever say that someone dies. And then she said,

I know what we'll say. We'll call it the final ecstasy. So you keep mentioning books that we've done on Batlisted over the years and The Vet's Daughter is one of our favourite. Oh, it's lovely. But I love Our Spoons Came From Woolworths. It's came from Woolworths. Which my mother, who hadn't read it, and I gave it to her to read and she said this is a portrait of my early married life.

Wow. In Chelsea, you know, just after the war. It was very quickly a bestseller on on both sides in Britain and in America. Everybody thought it was a brilliant book, but also a work of literary genius as well. And she had letters from a huge number of literary figures, including Thomas Hardy, for example. His wife wrote to Margaret and said he really enjoyed it.

Huge interest. He really enjoyed the chapter on the consulate in Chapter 12. Really detailed. Very detailed. A.A. Milne wrote to her and said he loved it, enormously enjoyed it. You finished before I did, he said. I was good for another thousand pages. J.M. Barrie, it goes on and on.

So very, very highly regarded both by fellow writers but also by the general public. It was so well regarded. It was put on as a stage play and Noel Coward starred in that performance in London, followed by John Gielgud. It was John Gielgud's first big West End break and Margaret got that arranged for him.

So it was very much regarded by everybody who was anybody at the time. So that is Dr Anne Manuel, who's Margaret Kennedy's archivist at Somerville, and with a cameo appearance by Damien Barr, you might have heard there in the background as well. Alexandra, this was a huge bestseller in its day. Yes, it sold well over a million copies in the first three or four years which is pretty astonishing yeah the genre you're talking about there or you're able to draw a line

from novels by women about young girls let loose in bohemia with whatever consequences may then come. Do you think that there was a particular feel in the 1930s where that was a new topic, or is it something that has a pedigree? Are there books that lead up to it? I think it was the flowering of it, but I would say it was the 20s, not the 30s, and that was a lot to do with reaction to the war,

the Jazz Age, the literally releasing of stays, women stepping forward into their lives. And the wars, both wars, I think had a dramatic effect, because there are these novels that were published just after the Second World War. There's a wonderful Rose McCauley, The World My Wilderness, about a girl who grows up in a wild way in the south of France, and ends up coming to a confining and horrible and dreary post-war London. So I think that those two world wars were very, very important for that. I was interested that the book seemed, there's a letter I read to a friend that she writes in the year after it's published.

It'd be fair to say she had a kind of uneasy relationship with celebrity and a lot of the ways she's presented, people expect her to be incredibly glamorous and bohemian, but she wasn't. Distressingly conventional was how she was described by one journalist. But she also said, if I get a hearing with any generation other than my own, it will be Tessa who will live for people, and Lewis will be rather a figure of fun, a sort of Mr Rochester,

which sort of suggests that when it was published that, I mean, we now would look, and obviously your blurb very much takes Tessa as sort of the emotional core of the novel. I was quite surprised that maybe it was seen as more of a, and certainly when the film comes out, it's definitely seen as much more as a sort of balanced kind of double-header romance. Yes. Because I think that people, I think the thing that's so shocking to us now, which is Tessa's age, I mean, she's 14 at the beginning

and she's 15 when she goes off with Lewis, wasn't seen as being so terrible then. And I think it's fascinating that this novel and Edith Wharton's The Children, which is a very similar novel, which was published in 28, I think it's fascinating that this novel and Edith Wharton's The Children, which is a very similar novel, which was published in 28, I think it was, prefigured Lolita. And everyone thinks of Lolita as the first book on that topic. But two women had written about it in very, very different ways, because they both wrote about it from the aspect of the girl's heart which I think is fascinating that's a very interesting idea that as well that Nabokov is actually

subverting an existing form that's been seen from a from a different perspective I mean I'm not saying that's that's right but it but it's it's a fascinating thought that it doesn't, as you say, Alexandra, just come out of nowhere. It's kind of... I have a review here. This was the review that ran in The Times, and I'm just going to read you the first couple of paragraphs because as publishing folk, I think you'll find two things of great interest in just these two paragraphs,

one which shows that some things never change and another that shows that everything changes. So this was by Alec Waugh, elder brother of Evelyn. This is what he said in 1924, nearly 100 years ago. There have been published during the last 12 months about 4,000 novels, 10 novels in fact a day. Oh, God. I told you, didn't I?

Plus ça change. I wish the listeners could see the faces of people here at the moment. That's really funny. We think it's just us, Alexander, but it's not. Shall I keep going? It gets better. Keep going, yes.

And even the most well-intentioned appraiser of modern fiction must have realised that he can in the future hope to do no more than take occasional soundings in this vast flood of work. The more one reads, the less able one is to distinguish between the mediocre and the good i won't ask you to reflect on that one's palate becomes cloyed and so it has come about that while it is today relatively easy to get a novel published it is extremely difficult to get the qualities of that novel recognized particularly if the book is not topical,

nor sensational, nor controversial. The novel by an unknown writer that has not the characteristics of poster work stands only a 50 to 1 chance of not being overlooked. Alec Waugh considered The Constant Nymph, in the light of the warning I had to give before we started talking about it, as one of those books, not top nor sensational nor controversial and he goes on to say it is not a controversial novel it does not expose anything it does not challenge anything it has no news value it is a

simple straightforward story I mean I think this is amongst the most problematic books in certain areas that we've probably done on Backlisted. But that's, as you were just saying, Alexandra, that's very much not how it was seen 100 years ago. No, and it's very interesting that it was so, it was applauded by people like Hardy and, you know, really distinguished writers and it was a massive bestseller, which, as we know,

is a very hard thing to achieve as a publisher. Yeah, very hard to do. Many are cool, very few are chosen. I mean, it's also, it seems to me that it is very sensational, isn't it? I mean, even reading it now in the 21st century, the tact with which she deals with the underage relationship and the psychological kind of subtlety with which she portrays it. I mean, Tessa is, I think, a really, really beautifully drawn character.

Maybe some of the other children are less well-sketched. I can see why the Bloomsbury's rated it highly. It does have that big melodramatic, starts in the Alps and it comes back to Chiswick and there's music and you can absolutely see why people wanted to adapt it for a movie. It's got great cinematic potential. But the psychology at the core of it, I think, is really interesting and advanced.

I think the psychology is astonishing. But I also think, and this is what obviously wasn't there in the movie, is it's a very funny book. And it's deeply eccentric. And I love the eccentricity of it. And it has, I mean, I obviously, particularly as a teenager, but I still love it. The wildness of it. And it has, I mean, I obviously, particularly as a teenager, but I still love it, the wildness of it. It's, you know, it's kind of, it's an unfettered book. And there's this woman

who was brought up in the sort of upper middle class, her, you know, her father and her husband were eminently respectable. She went to Somerville, but a really interesting year at Somerville. She was at Somerville with Vera Brittain, Winifred Holtby, Dorothy L. Sayers, Naomi Mitchison. I mean, it was probably the most extraordinary year Somerville has ever seen. But she understood these wild,

these feral children, seven children in the Alps in a way that you would not have imagined. But she is, as you say, very good talking about the respectable older people in it. And then you have Florence. And the other thing I love is that Florence, who gets to marry Louis, is a great beauty,

and that's sort of how she manages to sweep him off his feet. But Tessa is plain. And I love the way she, I mean, obviously I didn't describe her as plain in the cover copies of the Virago edition. You know, why would I? But she is. And she's plain, but she has this incredible style. They all do.

She and her sisters dress in rags and amazing colors and they're barefooted and tangle haired i mean i thought they were the most enchanting creatures i've ever met when i first read the book alexandra before you read us a bit can i just um point listeners to a blog a brilliant blog called clothesothes in Books. Yeah, I love that blog. Yeah. And she's written a brilliant entry about The Constant Nymph and a double entry about one of Margaret Kennedy's other novels, Lucy Carmichael. So what you were saying about the clothes,

the von Trapp family singers without the benefit of curtains. Yeah. It's the Von Trapp family singers without the benefit of curtains. Or any money. No, and feral. I mean, you know. Because the dynamic is brilliant. It is like a sort of serious boho Swallows in Amazons. The kids are just so great. I'm not sure whether at the time it would have felt like this,

but from this distance, the ridiculous kind of standing on ceremony that Florence and the idea of what manners are and what's socially acceptable, they really look like the dinosaurs now, whereas the sanghas, the bohemianism that must have been exotic at the time sort of feels not only much more sympathetic but also just a much better way of leading a life. must have been exotic at the time, sort of feels not only much more sympathetic, but also just a much better way of leading a life.

I took my mum, happier days, on a visit to Charleston Farmhouse near Lewis, the seat of various Bloomsbury people. And I took my mum round. My mum's not very Bloomsbury people. And I took my mum round. My mum's not very Bloomsbury. And we got to the end of it and I said, well, what did you think? And she said, well, it was quite nice, but I don't think they were very nice people. I love you, mum.

I love you. I love you. I wouldn't change you at all. So, Alexandra, could you read us a little bit from The Constant Nymph? OK, so I'm going to read a letter. So what has happened is that Florence and Louis have got married and we discover that Florence is an indescribably controlling woman and she sets up their household in Chiswick, in this beautiful house, and she wants her husband, really really to be a sort of pet composer

and lauded by everyone in London. And she's got these impossible children that she has to deal with. So, of course, what she does, she packs three of them off to boarding school. Two girls, Tessa and Paulina, are sent to a school which bears a strange resemblance, I think, to Cheltenham Ladies' College where Margaret Kennedy was incarcerated. So you get a little bit of a feeling of what it was like for her.

And Lewis gets this letter and it goes like this. Dear Lewis, will you please come and take us away from here? It is a disgusting school and we have endured it as long as we are able. Really and truly, we've tried to put up with it because Tessa said one ought to give everything a fair trial, but it doesn't and we can't. It isn't like what you said it would be. We would never have come if we had known what it would be like. We shall kill ourselves if we are not soon taken away. We cannot exist here. It is insufferable. The girls are hateful. They say we don't wash and

are liars. The governesses are a queer lot and not fitted to be teachers, I'm sure. They think of nothing but games. Why should we have to play games if we don't like? nothing but games. Why should we have to play games if we don't like? Would you like it? Work is sensible. We don't mind that. It was your fault that we were persuaded to come. And so you will be a murderer if you don't take us away before we end our miserable lives. When Florence wrote to say we must stay because it's good for us, our hearts broke and all the house rang with our frantic lamentations. Could you come and take us out to tea? They'd let you if you said you were married to her

and then we could all go to the station and take some train that goes a long way off. We have nobody to help us, only you. And as the poet says, on some fond breast the parting soul relies. Do, do, do, do come, dear Lewis. You will not be sorry when you hear our joyful ejaculations. Your sincerely friend, Paulina Eloise Sanger.

P.S. Probably we shall hang ourselves. Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant. It's absolute perfection, that letter, isn't it? I mean, how can you not love them? How can you not love them? Alexandra, before we move on to discuss anything else, I would like to read you a brief review by Penelope Fitzgerald, who could have been your neighbour but wasn't, I assume.

Yes, when I moved onto the boat 20 years ago, I wrote her a letter and I said, Penelope, I'm moving into the same mooring. So, you know, it was exactly where she was. And she wrote me this letter saying, whatever you do, do not move onto it. It will be a disaster. I implore you, do not move onto the boat.

To be fair, it hadn't worked out well for her. No. Literature's gain. It's a bit mean of me to put you on the spot. So you don't have to respond to this, Alexandra, if you don't want to. John can say what he thinks. So this penelope fitzgerald writing in 1983 in the lrb if there are such things as very good bad books one must be margaret kennedy's the constant nymph

yes again everybody's laughing it's kind true. Taking down my mother's copy, the seventh impression in the first few months of publication, I can feel the good-bad enticement at once. Here I am in the high alpine meadows with a wild musical family unashamedly based on Augustus Johns, and I know that the 15-year-old Tessa, graceless, witty and shabby, is the Undine or constant waif, and that she will end up in a shady rooming house. Margaret Kennedy, who wrote 16

novels, but scored her only great success with this one, we will discuss, gave an interview in 1956, in which she said that as a a child she had put off learning to write for as long as possible because she much preferred telling stories aloud she added that the trouble with most modern books was that they were too well written and that she herself had not produced any novels between 1938 and 1950 and she said i didn't want to write fiction and I was not obliged to do so I had 12 years in which to stroll about and look at things this suggests a certain cutting edge to Margaret Kennedy you can just hear Penelope Fitzgerald's slightly quirky querulous voice there I think think. That really captures her.

It's marvellous. Is this a bad, very good book? It's a very, very good second-layer book, and I love those books. And that's why I also love Edith Wharton's The Children. I have a particular passion for Edith Wharton. I mean, obviously, I love her first-layer books. But what a lot of people don't know is she wrote quite a lot of second-rate books and even third-rate books.

And The Children, which begins in a cruise ship in the 1920s and is about a little girl, I mean, she's 11 or 12, who falls in love with a man in his 20s, is one of those second-layer ones. And it was made into a rather mediocre film quite recently, actually actually but I've always had a passion for this and I think a lot of 19th century novels are like that they are sort of baggy it's one of the things I love about fiction is that it's very forgiving the short story isn't but the novel is and a lot of those 19th century novels by people like Mrs Oliphant are completely heavenly but they're very flawed.

And I'm a great believer in them. I love them. Here's a clip from the 1943 film adaptation of The Constant Nymph starring Joan Fontaine. And Charles Boyer. And Peter Lorre. Joan Fontaine was nominated for an Oscar for her performance. But this film was incredibly difficult to get to see for decades because Margaret Kennedy didn't like the film

and had some kind of legal sway over the rights to it. In her will, she said the film could only be shown in, I think it's like educational establishments and something else, that it had to come contextualised. It couldn't appear on television and it couldn't be reissued to cinemas. contextualized. It couldn't appear on television and it couldn't be reissued to cinemas. And in fact, it was unavailable for the mid 1940s until 2011. So it's only in 2011 the film started circulating again. One of the things we haven't talked about is this is a book, a play and a film about music, the relationship between art in music and entertainment in music. And here's a clip of Louis Dodd, the composer,

young Tessa and Louis's wife, Florence, discussing Louis's music. And Louis is sitting at the piano when this takes place. You mean this? Don't stop. It's so exciting. Well, it's exciting. You really took them by storm last night. They were thrilled.

Oh, they were amateurs. Ask Tessa what she thinks of it. Why should I? She's a musician. And what is your opinion, Tessa? Well, it was very loud and it was very defiant and it was very aggressive. And I suppose some people would pretend to like it even if they didn't understand it. And did you understand it, Tessa?

Thank you, Florence. Unfortunately, no, and I don't think Lewis did either. That is, if he's as honest about his work as he always has been. What are you talking about? A symphonic poem entitled Tomorrow by Louise Dart. Remember? That's what she's talking about. And it was very beautiful once and you had a melodic line and you were going to develop it. And I haven't developed it, I suppose.

You know you haven't. Oh, what's the matter with you, darling, Louise? I don't know. I'm bewildered. You aren't taking it seriously, are you? Why do you argue with her? Louise had something very worthwhile once, saying I said so, and at the time Lewis agreed. Then he must have become ashamed

of it and hid it under a lot of... A lot of what? Mathematics. I love how Lewis still appears to be playing The Lost Chord by Jimmy Durante at the beginning as a piece of avant-garde orchestral music.

In Italy, after the book was published in Italy, Gramsci, who read The Constant Nymph twice in his prison cell, wrote this. The title, The Constant Nymph, is somewhat foolish, but the book is interesting. It reminds me of Dostoevsky's The Idiot. It's certainly remarkable, both because it's written by a woman and because of the psychological atmosphere

and the world it describes. Wow. Take that, Penelope. That's astonishing. What other novel? Can anybody name a novel that has amongst its advocates even, you know, Gramsci, Thomas Hardy, Cyril Connolly, Arnold Bennett, grudging respect from Penelope Fitzgerald, we'll call it.

Richard Hughes was furious about its success, and he wrote, he said, they're being sold on Pullman, the author of The High Wind in Jamaica, great book, being sold on Pullman's sleeping cars, along with peanuts and the Saturday evening news. Really kind of wound everybody up, the success. And I love there's a line that one of the neighbours of Margaret Kennedy's parents said,

well, Margaret Kennedy, the very last person I should have expected to be famous. We cannot talk about this book without mentioning who wrote the introduction to the Virago edition, which is, of course, Anita Bruckner. We are a great favourite on Batlisted. We should have a bit of music for the Anita Bruckner moment. I'd like to allow Dr Bruckner to introduce another theme.

This is what she says at the end of her introduction from the VMC edition. The extraordinary and extraordinarily rapid denouement of the novel becomes a sort of romantic test case and may prompt reflections on the reliability of romantic passion. Go, Anita! God, isn't that brilliant, right? And anyway, so she goes on.

This is why whenever I read a bit of Bruckner on this and people go, oh, Bruckner, she's so miserable, she's in her cardigan. I want to say, no, it's so funny, It's so dry. And so anyway, she goes on. As everyone is bound to have some sort of opinion on this matter, it is easy to see why the constant nymph has proved to be attractive to so many people. For although the story is a simple one, it deals with matters which are effectively very complex, and it deals with them in a manner which is intellectually quite honourable, for the reader is not manipulated into sharing the author's point

of view. Indeed, we are not quite sure what the point of view is. The tragedy of the situation arises out of what is done rather than what is said. There is no attempt to cover dubious actions with the sort of special pleading or high-flown discourse common on these occasions. Actions, in fact, are allowed to speak much louder than words. In this respect, the climax of the novel and its aftermath indicate an authorial integrity of a very high order. an authorial integrity of a very high order. So Dr. Bruckner is not putting up with any of my nonsense or the listeners who contacted us to say, but the ending, the ending. And my sense, if I have a criticism of the book,

aside from the issues around anti-Semitism and modern-day qualms about the relationship, the ending does feel very fast and does feel very, I need to get out of the bind I've created for myself, or am I reading that wrong? There are lots of clues to what's going to happen it's not although i have to say the first time i read it i was so shocked and i was so upset it was just desperate you know the 14 year old alexandra just what's just how could that get the window open man i was so excited

about about them going away together in the film which is an adaptation of one of the films, which is an adaptation of the play that she had helped adapt from her own novel, they changed the ending in a very interesting way. This cuts right to the things you chose to emphasise in your blurb. My blurb, I like this. Your blurb, definitely your blurb my blurb i like your blurb definitely your blurb i once had my entire blurb

take up the entire column of sued's corner in private time it was for tatiana tolstaya's stories and it included the quote i got from joseph brodsky at the top that was one of my finest hour of blurb writing. It is a thankless task, let's be honest. In the film and the play, it ends with a sense that they haven't run away together, that Lewis is having his big concert evening. She has been ill and cannot attend the concert

and he comes away attend the concert. And he comes away from the concert having given this glorious, melodic performance to discover that she has died. And the film is very much saying Sanger predicted that Lewis would write no good music until he had learnt to cry. Cry. And therefore, Tessa has been sacrificed or sacrificed herself. Do I feel the hand of a man in this? Yes.

The sloppy, right? The sweaty palms of a man. Yeah. What do you think, Alexandra? It's just complete bollocks. Yeah. You know. just complete bollocks. Yeah. You know. Made-up bollocks.

And the book is not about Lewis. You know, it's not about his genius. As she said. He's a pretty second-rate person who happens to have what's known as charisma. And he's had the luck of having the love of this extraordinary, precocious and rather plain and divine child since she was tiny. It's about Tessa and actually Tessa's siblings.

It's about the children. It's not about him. And her amazing understanding of him, which I think is... Yeah. Can I just read a little bit from earlier in the novel, which I think shows Margaret Kennedy at her best, I think. And it's Lewis. They're all on the Tyrolean hillside, kind of Von Trapp styley. Tessa and her sister Paulina and Florence and Lewis. And Lewis says, when I was a boy, said Lewis abruptly, I used to sleep out on some cliffs in Cornwall and there were some birds, whole flocks of them. I don't know what they were. They used to fly out to sea just before it got light. I remember I woke up once when the moon had set and it was quite dark and all the air was full of them.

I couldn't see them. I heard wings. Teresa, on the grass at his side, stirred a little in response to the excitement behind his hesitating, drowsy voice. She knew that some impulse had prompted him to tell them of a supreme moment, one of those instants, rare and indescribable, when the quickened imagination stores up an impression which may become a secret key to beauty, the inspiration of a lifetime. Her mind swung back to meet the mind of that lost boy who had lain awake upon a high mysterious cliff beside a whispering sea. She too heard wings. Florence was interested also and asked if he had lived in Cornwall. No. Had he gone there on his

holidays? Did he live in the country? No, Bayswater. He got up. It was evident that he did not like being asked about his childhood, so she desisted. She rose too and they made their way up the hill towards the house. The girls remained sitting on the grass, occupied with rather gloomy thoughts. At last Paulina looked sharply at her sister and said, there's no use crying about it.

No use, agreed Teresa. But the tears poured down her face, whether she would or no, until she conceived the happy idea of trying to water a primula with them. Immediately the flood was dried after the manner of tears when a practical use has been found for them. It would have been interesting, said Paulina sorrowfully, to see if it would have made any difference to the primula. It's just that in a little, tiny little scene,

the difference between the two women and also Tessa's ability to imaginatively inhabit the other world of Lewis in his childhood. And that's, I think, where she's absolutely at her best. The controversial relationship between Tessa and Lewis is so, I think, so beautifully done. Could we just talk a little bit about, I mean, the aspect I did find problematic more than anything else with the book,

really, was the casual antisemitism. Antisemitism, yeah. And the casual nature, I'm stressing that element of it. There is one particular character who is presented in a fairly anti-Semitic way, viewed by the characters in an anti-Semitic way, but arguably viewed by Margaret Kennedy in an anti-Semitic way as well. Is that something that, do you remember that being an issue when you first read it? Is that something that, do you remember that being an issue when you first read it? Not at all when I was a teenager. I was completely unaware of it.

It did not impinge on me at all, which is really interesting. And so obviously I noticed it very much when I read it in my late 20s when we were going to publish it as a Viraga Modern Classic. I read it in my late 20s when we were going to publish it as a Virago Modern Classic. And then even more so this time around reading it to talk here. So it accumulates, the shocking nature of it. And it is very shocking, but it's shocking because of what it says about English society at that time rather than about the novel itself.

And I... You are, can I just clarify, you are Jewish? I'm Jewish, as in my mother was Jewish. But I had no idea that I was Jewish until I was well into my 20s, because my mother never told me. She turned back on uh her family completely and she reinvented herself um and in fact interestingly my uncle her younger brother said to me a few years ago um you have to remember that england was very anti-semitic in the 1930s. Your mother was very beautiful and she could pass. Just as light-skinned black people passed in America at the time. That's what my mother did. And I never heard her ever.

She died at the age of 94, so I knew her for a long time. I had never heard her say the word Jew or Jewish, not ever, not once. She would say, I'm foreign. My family were strangers, but she never ever said she was Jewish. So I think it's a very, very interesting. And I think that we pretend in Britain that we have never been like that. And I think that we need to face up to it. And this is part of that. And I think reading these books is part of it because it shows you what the society was like then.

And when I worked on the Virago Modern Classics series, obviously I read a great deal of books that were published at that time. And even some of the most sort of perfectly, in a sense, right on, left wing, culturally perfect, politically perfect people like Storm Jameson, were anti-Semitic. There's anti-Semitism through all of her novels. But it also dates right back to the 18th century, Emily Eden's wonderful novels, The Semi-Detached House and The Semi-Attached Couple, filled with anti-Semitism. And that is the way we were. And I think we have to embrace that and understand it and not say, this book is disgusting because it has anti-Semitism

in it. We have to look at that with interest and learn from that, I think. And the fascinating thing about this character, Jacob, is he's actually an incredibly attractive and lovely character. Yes. Because he takes off. He's the first one to seduce a young girl because the older sister of Tessa and Paulina, Antonia, disappears off with him and she loses her virginity to him. They actually have sex, unlike Tessa.

But then they get married and they have this wonderful, voluptuous marriage which is full of gorgeous things and silk stockings and fun and music and laughter. And it's like, what's not to like? Bring it on. So, you know, it's much more complicated than the account you've just given of the anti-semitism yeah and and i mean i for my part i think um i think you're totally right

alexandra i i think that the changes that if we have to acknowledge that they are period pieces but they still have the power to cause offense now now. So we have to be able to discuss them, but also acknowledge that, you know, if you might read it and your upset is not to be discounted. And I think the point you make, Alexandra, about the ideas, racial ideas, which are there in this novel, because it was in the kind of water. It was that there was an Anglo-Saxon type,

there was a Jewish type, there was a Slavic type. I mean, what is shocking is that, you know, eugenics was as much a left-wing idea as a sort of a right-wing idea. It might have been put into practice by Nazi Germany, but, you know, the Webs, Bertrand Russell and Bernard Shaw, they were... So in a way, I think you have to be able to read fiction in context. You have to be able to put it back into context

and not just reject it because of the attitudes it contains. Alexandra, could you tell me what it was like... What's it like in the in the 80s before the internet yes yeah good question finding books for the virago modern classics list oh my goodness so the the most important institution was the london library i don't know how we could have done a single thing without the London Library. He's just showing and he's holding up a London Library with its sticker. This copy of Lucy Carmichael by Margaret Kennedy came from the London Library. And it was for me a great escape from the office because it was very

hard work at Virago and we were locked in the office. We've seen the movie. Although you made me sound very grand as editorial director, it took many years of slavery before I got to that. I started as what we call the office slave, which was a lot of photocopying and going to the post, usually in my heels and tight skirts. So when I was released to go and find books in the London Library,

it was a very joyous time for me. So that's where we would get the physical copies. But it was through recommendations of people. It was through Carmen's reading, very, very, very largely, and my reading, but also all the sort of friends of Virago. So Michael Holroyd was incredibly important at the beginning with books like Frost in May and Sylvia Townsend Warner. His extraordinary reading had a lot to do with it. And then many other people, and of course, many of them wrote introductions. So Antonia Byatt wrote all the introductions to Willa Cather.

Susanna Clapp wrote a lot of introductions, particularly to Elizabeth Taylor, Paul Bailey. You know, we had all these amazing intellects and minds who were, you know, who were lent to us, who people said, you must read this and you must read that. So it was like a hunt. We would go off, somebody would say, have you read so-and-so? And then I'd go to the London Library and we'd take out all these books.

I would take reading weeks where I would disappear for a week and do, I wish editors could do this now, I think we should all do it, and just read, you know, the whole of Mrs Oliphant or enormous books, always London Library editions. And then the London Library in those days, they were so astonishing to us. They would let us unbind, take the books apart so that we could photoset

from those pages because we had no money and we couldn't afford to reset. Wow. And then we'd rebind them and give them back to the library. Can you imagine? That's incredible. That's a really, that is an extraordinary story. I've wondered because a lot of the Virago editions do look

like they have been just photographed from the 19th century. Yeah, they were. Yeah, a bit on the crummy side. We had no money. Alexandra, can you remember a book that you found? Can you remember a book that you, or the first time that you found something where you thought, wow, this is the real thing?

Do you know, there is one that was, I'm thinking about it because it's been read as book at bedtime on the radio recently and i couldn't believe that it was on the radio um i did a little section of scottish modern classics so as well as being jewish i'm also scottish my father's scottish um and um so i wanted to do a some scottish ones i did katherine carswell who was dh law Lawrence's great friend and son. But I found this 19th century novel by these sisters called The Findlayter Sisters, and it's called Cross Rigs. It was absolutely blissful.

I cannot remember how I found it, but I remember the excitement of it. And it had all the kind of wit, a bit like Mrs. Oliphant, Jane Austen kind of, you know, social observation, village life, but in Scotland, with Scottish accents. And amazingly, I was once in the basement of one of those secondhand book shops on the Charing Cross Road, and I found an edition of it signed by both the sisters. And I stood there and it was about £1.50. And I thought, I'm probably the only person in the world who knows about this book and cares about it. And tragically, I had a flood on the boat and lost all my Virago Modern Classics and that edition. It's so sad.

Penelope Fitzgerald was right. We have to wind up. So I'd like to give Alexandra the last word on The Constant Nymph. Alexandra, is this a good book to read during a lockdown? Oh, yes. I have just reread it. And, oh, my God, it took me away from all my work and with such joy. Yeah.

There you go, folks you there's your warning that's where we must leave it uh thank you alexandra for guiding us through the near but distant world of the sanger family to nicky birch for weaving our individual tracks into a harmonically pleasing whole and to unbound for four and a half years of no-strings-attached funding. You can download all 112 episodes of Backlisted plus follow links, clips and suggestions for further reading by visiting our website at backlisted.fm and we're always pleased if you contact us on Twitter and Facebook.

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So here's a batch of Lock Listers, people we feel entitled to call believers. John, do you want to go first on this this time? Go on. I have to apologise to Kenny Piper for calling him Kenny Peeper on the last edition of the show. So apologies, Kenny. Sorry, Kenny.

I'm now full retraction and I'm now saying the first name on the list is Kenny Piper. Kenny Piper, Brenda Crossgree, Bradley, Luke Williamson, David Hawks, Janet Harvey, Gillian Stern. Hi, Gillian. Blair Durbin, Alex Calder, Maurice Cremona, David Cummings, Claire Boucher, Joe Chopra-McGowan. Yay.

Nathaniel Webster, Rachel Moffat, Karen H. Brown, Helen Rose, Chris O'Donoghue, Claire Back, Julie Roach, Megan Clack. Andy? Alan Bremner, Nancy K. Shapiro, Maria Speedle, Yannick Pass. Yannick Pass, get in touch with me, Yannick, if I've got that wrong. Yannick Pass, Lev Pariakin, Mr. Birds. You can use that officially.

Katie Denisova, Alison Price, Holly Quaid, Emma Head. Thank you, everybody. Fiona Cliff, Simon Oliver, Monica Clements. Thank you. Lorna Symes, Annette Freeman, Dennis Dort, Kaisha, Mark Thompson, Harriet Gregory. Anne H. Moonid. Oh, I see.

You've spelled... Okay, yes. Anne H. Moonid. Jenny Bowden, Neil Clasper, Meg Lynch. Thank you so much for supporting us. Thank you, everybody. And Alexandra Pringle. You are welcome back any time.

Any time. Even more offensive than this one. I'd be delighted. That was brilliant. Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant. See you guys. See you next time. We'll be back in a fortnight.

See you soon. Bye. Bye. You can choose to listen to Backlisted with or without adverts. If you prefer to listen to it without adverts, you can join us on our Patreon at patreon.com forward slash backlisted, where you also get bonus content of two episodes of Locklisted, the podcast where we talk about the books and films and music that we've been listening to over the last couple of weeks.