Backlisted - The Dud Avocado by Elaine Dundy

Episode Date: October 1, 2018

This week John and Andy are joined by novelist and literary journalist Sarra Manning (author of The Rise and Fall of Becky Sharp) to discuss Elaine Dundy's sparkling debut The Dud Avocado and its follow-up The Old Man and Me. Other books under discussion are Anna Burns's Man Booker-shortlisted Milkman and Daniel Deronda by George Eliot, published 150 years ago and still startlingly relevant.Timings: (may differ due to variable advert length)10'41 - Daniel Deronda by George Elliot19'25 - Milkman by Anna Burns24'11 - The Dud Avocado by Elaine Dundy* 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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Let's go seize the night. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Visit amex.ca slash yamex. Benefits vary by car and other conditions apply. So much to go in and skip. Bits of furniture, a stash of stuff, loads of stuff. Have you had a kind of Marie Kondo moment? Does it make me joy? I brought that book home and I had it thrown at me by Rachel.

John and Rachel are moving everyone. They're moving house. How long have you lived in that place? Eight years. So long enough to accumulate crap. They're moving everyone. They're moving house. How long have you lived in that place? Eight years. Okay, so they've managed to... Strong enough to accumulate crap. Yeah, yeah. And the other thing is our garage is full of two other people

who said, oh, you've got loads of space. Can we put our stuff in your garage? And of course you say, yeah, no problem. No, fine. Loads of space. One of them's moved, left the village, and they said, well, can you not just sort it out? Well, the answer is yes,

but it's probably going to cost me money to do that. Sara, you're in a constant battle with the books arriving i see you tweet photographs of like two bags that arrive every day it's just i know just one of the joys that's just gonna go away i live in a badly converted flat and just i just you know's creaking every now and again. Because I sort of review books, and sometimes you get like three copies of one book. You get an early proof, you get the proof, and then you get the finished copy.

There must be a more sensible way of doing it, don't you think? Well, I suppose it would be NetGalley and e-readers, but, you know, I'm of an age now where I just can't read on screen. It's one of the laws of this that i inevitably whenever i do a clear out of things that i've been very kindly sent as soon as i get rid of a book the next day it will appear on a short list or a friend of mine will recommend it to me do you you sell or donate? Donate. I do, actually.

I'm not just saying that. You're looking at me as if to say, well, you have to say that because this is being recorded. What I found when I just cannot go into Oxfam Books with another thing, I put a big box out on the garden wall. It's Muswell Hill. Big readers. How do they go? You know, have a book. How brilliant.

You see, the thing is, that's what we're all going to have to do because charity shops are beginning to turn away books, aren't they? Totally, yeah. There's a little library box around the corner from me on a street, you know, where people just give and take books. I think it's quite sweet. Well, in fact, we have, as many stations now do, a place where you can leave your books and people can pick them up.

And by a staggering coincidence, when I was coming in this morning, somebody had left an old Penguin Books vintage copy of our book, The Dud Avocado by Elaine Dundee, for this episode. It's statistically almost impossible for that to happen. And yet it did. I know, isn't it incredible? I had never heard of the book we're going to discuss. And now, since you mentioned it to me,

I can't move for people mentioning it. It's always very odd that... I feel a bit ashamed that I hadn't heard of it. It's very beloved of women of a certain age. I can see why. But also, fascinatingly, it's not like it was an obscure book in its era. It was a huge bestseller in its era. But I'm with you.

I'd heard of it. I haven't read it. It's such a great title. Shall we start? It's weird, though, isn't it, with the fashion for avocados. You'd think it would have come back and had history. I think we might have to talk avocado, yeah. For the millennial.

Are we going to toast the dulled avocado? Let's hope so. Hello and welcome to Backlisted, the podcast that gives new life to old books. Today you find us jiving in a dive bar off the boulevard Montparnasse, deep in the Parisian night, downing large martinis with lost Americans still hoping to find a cafe that's open for a bowl of late-night onion soup.

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. And joining us today is Sarah Manning. Hello, Sarah. Hello. Sarah Manning is an author and journalist who has written a constellation of adult and YA novels.

Young adult. And has contributed to the Guardian L stylist Harper's Bazaar and is currently the literary editor of Red magazine. Her latest adult novel, The Rise and Fall of Becky Sharp, was published last week by HarperCollins. Riding high in the charts, I noticed in the Kindle charts. Yes, I've got that little orange bestseller tag, not that I'm refreshing my page every half hour.

And couldn't really be, I was thinking, there aren't many books that could be much more backlisted than what you've done with The Rise and Fall of Becky Sharp. Could you just tell us what it is? Well, the clue's in the name, really, in that it's a modern retelling of Vanity Fair,

which is one of those books that everybody says they've read, but they haven't read it, though I have actually read it now three times. Yeah, I see on Twitter, somebody was accusing you of not having read the book and you were i think it was lisa evans just saying how many times have you read it and she was worried that i was going to say yeah it's my favorite book like 20 billion times it was a bit of opportunistic publishing i have to say that they announced that they were doing a television

adaptation last year and a publisher approached me and said, would you like to do it? Have you read Vanity Fair? Yeah, it's my favourite book. I first read it at university. It wasn't even a set text, but I was in love with this very well-read boy, so I just positioned myself for the copy of Vanity Fair

when he was likely to pass. Very Elaine Dundee, if I may say so. Very Elaine Dundee. if I'm being honest. Very Elaine Dundee. That in the CCS common room. Sara and I were at the same university at approximately the same time. Really? Yes. Amazing.

So anyway, we keep interrupting you. So? So it's a modern retelling of Vanity Fair, and it's very modern. It kind of starts when Becky Sharp and sharp and amelia sedley leave the big brother house and there's kind of instagram influencers the crawlies are like an acting dynasty matilda crawley is kind of she's not maggie smith because that would be libelous she's off that ilk um and then you can't give me a character called George Osborne and not expect me to make him a Conservative MP.

Brilliant. Although we then had to change his name to the more Thackerian, George Wiley, so I didn't get sued. Lord Stane is like a media mogul. It's very much a faithful retelling of Vanity Fair in that if you put my copy over the original, kind of all the beats are hit but it's very much a sort of satire of sort of modern manners and celebrity and and in

terms of writing it presumably because as you say the story beats are all there so you're not having to reinvent the wheel was it fun to try and think your way through what you were going to do or was it scarier than that well I had seven weeks to write it so that was quite scary oh my god so I had two weeks of just sheer sort of panic and like what can I do and I'm just write commercial women's fiction and I can't rewrite a classic and actually I swim a lot and I sort of do all my best work in the pool and I actually thought I'm gonna have a swim and I actually sort of said to the receptionist at the gym oh I'm just in terrible trouble I'm gonna have a swim and if I don't have my epiphany I'm just gonna have to call my editor and say I can't do it

and as I was sort of doing my laps I just I just sort of thought about Thackeray and kind of when you read Vanity Fair you can just tell that this is a man who is just enjoying himself immensely and kind of once I I thought what would Thackeray do I just really just enjoyed myself so much and just kind of cackled all the way through writing it. My favourite bit, actually, is one of the many Crawleys. So they're all actors now. It's Pitt Younger. He's the one Crawley that isn't a successful actor but has found himself in an Aloe Lo style sitcom,

which, of course, I had to call Good Moaning. It's just things like that. Towards the end of the book, it was when Time's Up and Me Too were happening. And I took the opportunity to kind of make Amelia Sedley woke. So it was just a joy to write, actually. Such fun. That sounds great.

Has anyone read it who hasn't read Vanity Fair? Lots. Because I come from a commercial women's fiction background, so there have been some reviews saying, it's a pitch-perfect retelling of Vanity Fair, but it doesn't have the heart of, like, your other books. There is a whole thing in commercial women's fiction, you know, you've got to make the heroine likeable.

Relatable. But famously, it's a novel without a hero, as Zachary said. So there was a lot with my editor saying, can you warm her up a bit? And could she just do something really nice out of the goodness of her heart? No. Although my Becky isn't responsible for anybody's death.

Spoiler alert. Well, we're here to talk with Sarah about The Dud Avocado by Elaine Dundee, first published in the UK by Galantz in 1958 and an immediate bestseller. But before we flaneur our way down the Champs-Élysées with Sarah, we're delighted to welcome back our sponsor, Spoke, the sharp online menswear company. Spoke designed men's trousers and now also shorts and polo shirts with a difference they fit you and not the other way around with their online fit finder enter a few simple details and in under a minute you'll have a perfect fit you can choose from almost 200 size combinations spoke obsess over every detail the fabric the lining the fastness ordering from

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Just use the code BACKLISTED20. Terms and conditions inevitably apply. But first, from stylish hoes to stylish pros, Andy, what have you been reading this week? Showing your usual flair, John. So I'm going to talk for three minutes on the subject of the novel Daniel Deronda by George Eliot. All 880 pages of it. So I started

reading Daniel Deronda five years ago and I got to about page 360, it's 880 pages long in my Penguin Classic Edition, and I gave up. Or rather I didn't give up because I never give up, but I put it to one side because it was proving quite chewy. And I thought, well, I'll come back to that. And then what happened is what always happens if you do that. Of course, then I didn't go back to it. And instead, I sort of had a vaguely guilty feeling about it for five years. And then I decided, because we had a few weeks off from recording Batlisted and reading books for Batlisted,

that I'd go back, start it again and make sure I finished it this time. So Daniel Deronda is Elliot's final novel and it's the novel that she wrote after Middlemarch. And it felt quite strange reading it in the summer of 2018. Ezra Pound's famous phrase that literature is news that stays news. If you had to describe what Daniel Deronda is about, it's a novel about anti-Semitism, men's power over women and social inequality that was written 150 years ago. Not a bad trick to pull off.

Good line. But I've also been reading this year In Search of Lost Time by Proust. And you could also say that that's a very long novel about anti-Semitism, men's power over women, women's power over men and social inequality. And it made me think actually that Ezra Pound thing. Ezra Pound, who himself knew a thing or two about anti-Semitism. Nonetheless, you know, news that stays news, absolutely. Has anyone around this table read Daniel de Rond?

I have. When did you read it? I read it in that ridiculous period when you read a lot of 19th century fiction when I was at university. So you can't remember practically none of it. And I'm confident that... I remember liking it.

Had I read it when I was at university, I would not have... I'm not saying I understood all of it now, but I'm not saying that... I don't think I would have understood understood. I'm not saying I understood all of it now, but I'm not saying that I... I don't think I would have understood much of it then. It does a very strange thing, very forward-thinking for the era, certainly, of being...

It appears to be a novel about a young woman called Gwendolyn Harleth, and then at the halfway point, it turns into a novel about the Jewish community in Britain and the early philosophical points about the founding of the state of Israel and she manages to bring those two seemingly quite separate subjects together in an ending which is, again, sort of fascinatingly neither happy nor unhappy. It felt incredibly modern while simultaneously being written in that beautiful Eliot prose.

I found it quite challenging. I don't mind challenging books. In fact, I rather like them. But it's certainly a book that I feel that I have improved as a reader, even in the five years since I first started trying to read it. And I found it very, very rewarding. Not just rewarding to finish it, but rewarding to stop and think about it and have the time to contemplate it. I don't think there's much point in it. I'm not going to read anything out from it.

It's an interesting bit pointless. It's an interesting one, though. You know, thinking about our discussions about what you actually remember from books and the Pierre Bayard episode we did recently. But if I go back to that book, the idea that we incorporate the story into our own autobiography, I can't remember anything.

Vague, vague. Remember the opening where she starts the story in media rays, which is that start the story in the middle of the action. Now, I remember that being quite a strong way she's in a casino yeah and then she's run away and she's in a casino and she's spotted by daniel deronda on the point of gambling away uh a necklace yes that's and he bought and she she's pawned it and he buys it back from the pawn shop the first jewish reference in the novel and and leaves it for her and she thereafter for the whole of the novel feels under a moral debt to him so the part of the story of the novel is how is

that moral debt paid out which in and of itself is a fairly highfalutin and sophisticated theme to introduce into your novel quite early on. Certainly it doesn't have, it has love stories within it, but it does not have the Middlemarch sense of predestined lovers. In fact, if anything, you could read the book as a reaction to Middlemarch, as trying to push the novel in directions that it hadn't, it hadn't gone. It did make me think the devaluing of the word genius in the book world. But when you're talking about Eliot, you're dealing with someone who is palpable genius. I always say this in regard to Eliot. If you read Middlemarch or you read Eliot, you don't get on with it.

You're not a genius and she was. You picked out that marvellous sentence that is the epigraph to normal people. Well, I hadn't clocked that, but yes, the epigraph to Sally Rooney's normal people is taken from Daniel de Deronda by George Eliot, and I think actually at whatever level it must... Because I loved Normal People so much.

It's a brilliant sentence. Yeah, it probably pushed me back. Perfect for that book as well. Yeah, it pushed me back in that direction. I wanted to ask people whether they... So it took me five years on and off to finish. What is the book that it has taken you the longest to finish? I'm only on this earth for a short time so i just feel like i've got a very low tolerance for books i'm not enjoying

so 50 pages and i'm cutting you off having said that every now and again i think i'm gonna do anna karenina i'm gonna do it this time. And then just the Russian names do for me every time. I just can't keep track. I love Anna Karenina. I just can't. I look at you with my most puppyish eyes and say, do it, do it, do it.

I might do something like Daily Lit where you sign up and they email. That's how I did, what's the Balsack one I did? Literally, they would just email you a chunk every morning and while I'm sort of eating my Cheerios, I would do a bit of Balsack. Really? That's a really good idea.

It's a really good way to kind of get through a classic that you kind of want to read, but, you know... Do you follow the To The Lighthouse account on Twitter? No. Somebody is currently tweeting all of To The Lighthouse, like, phrase by phrase. So you can read that, you know, in a highly dissociative way. But that can be, you know, soaked up quite easily.

I haven't got anything quite like the daniel deronda book that i'm sure actually i think i have i don't think i ever finished our mutual friend and i've i meant to because i wasn't no there wasn't enjoying it i just got and i often do that i've got a lot of books that i know of and there are some i've intentionally stopped reading. I stopped reading about 20 years ago, What Am I Doing Here? by Bruce Chatwin. Because rather touchingly at that time I thought, well, I don't want to have nothing new to read by Bruce Chatwin. And I stopped myself reading Muriel Sparks last year

for the same reason. Because you felt you were binging on them. I felt I'd read too many too quickly and then there wouldn't be any new ones to read. But actually that's a sort of stupid thing to do. And I'm going to ask you, because regular listeners might want to know, how are you going on now we're in September? I'm on track.

I'm on track. It's weird. You know you have that sort of early morning or middle of the night sort of terror's dread and you feel I just can't deal with anything, and I can't bear to look at Instagram. It's making me feel sick. I can't bear any of the people who are...

I don't know what you mean, John. So I just find Pole is... or Pal. Pole. Pole is the perfect thing. It's the perfect thing. Back in Nick's head, dealing with with you know stuff now it's the war yeah it's very reassuring and witty without being annoyingly mugging for laughs it's just well we'll talk about it we're going to do a christmas special we are in addition to that though

john what have you been reading this week i've been reading a book which i i really really love as you know still reeling from the experience of reading Normal People, which I think I can say I thought it was a masterpiece. So I wasn't really thinking. I'm reading another book by an Irish woman called Milkman by Anna Burns, and it's fatter than Normal People, and it has come with a lot of it. It's her third novel, and I think Anna Burns' second book, second book or no bones her first book was shortlisted for the orange prize but i really loved this it's very different i mean it couldn't be more

different in a way sally rooney has sort of taken and created two characters you absolutely care and invest in it's sort of in its own way quite a traditional whereas this is much more experimental and different it's all told from within the consciousness of a 18 year old girl it's set in late 70s belfast in a republican community kind of closed tight republican community and the narrator the girl um basically the plot such as there is in the book is that she is she is connected with a sinister character called the milkman who interrupts her while she's walking along the street reading ivanhoe it's a very very tense closed community where nothing is as it seems you don't know her name she's known as middle sister Middle Sister. And she gets through it by reading, and she reads 19th-century fiction

because she doesn't like the 20th century. It's very, very funny. I'll read a tiny little passage from it just to give you the flavour of it. But the milkman is this sinister character who is obviously a paramilitary. He also grooms young girls, and he comes and joins her on a run, and then she gets linked in the community's mind with him him it's a demanding read because you're in one head in that sort of ama mcbride way it doesn't deliver it it's a story in a straightforward way but it's particularly about men controlling women i'll give you the first sentence that give you an idea of of the kind of uh it's very unique original style the day

somebody mcsomebody put a gun to my breast and called me a cat and threatened to shoot me was the same day the milkman died and the milkman has been shot by paramilitaries it's a really really extraordinary book i think and fully deserves it's on the man book a long list reminded me in some you know how we like priest daddy the the patricia lockwood it's got the man book a long list reminded me and some you know how we like priest daddy the the patricia lockwood or it's got a similar kind of originality about it anyway i'll read you just one little passage first time i awoke it was daylight and i was in my bed mentally conjugating the french verb etch i was running through the person's tenses and cases of it in my mind second time i woke i was still in bed thinking well if that's the latest effect he's had on me with his sexual prowling, I don't know how I'm going

to escape from him now. Third time I woke, it was from a dream of Proust, or rather a nightmare of Proust, in which he turned out to be some reprehensible contemporary 1970s writer, passing himself off as a turn-of-the-century writer, which apparently was why he was being sued and caught in the dream by, I think, me. At that point I fell asleep and then the final time I awoke, for I continued this waking and sleeping many times before waking up properly, I knew I'd turn a corner and was now on the mend. The reason I knew this was because of fray bentos. I was doing an elaborate fray bentos steak and kidney pie fantasy in my head.

I'd got the tin out of the cupboard, took off the lid, put it in the oven. Then I set out a plate, knife, fork and mug of tea for myself. Even in bed, in my head, the aroma of that pie was making my mouth water. Thank God then in the next second it was done. I got it out of the oven, fainting with anticipation. I was about to tuck in when my bedroom door burst open. It was Wee Sisters. Again, as one, they sprang into the room. It's a lot of that. It's a great achievement, I think, to keep you going through what is, yeah, it's not a short book, it's 300, 350 pages. But very original.

The story is, I've thought about it a lot since. I mean, it's a book that you absolutely go back to and want to read and reread. I mean, Ireland is obviously a great place for... It's a great place for the literature. You said blindingly banal insight. But she's original in the way that Anne writes original. In a funny kind of way, even in the way that Roddy Doyle's original,

it's a great book. I really, really recommend it. Thanks, John. Thanks, John, for talking about Milkman. That's fine. Now it's commercials. So the book we're here to talk about with Sarah is The Dud Avocado by Elaine Dundee. And we're also going to talk a bit about Elaine Dundee's follow-up novel, which is called The Old Man and Me.

I think you can see them as a pair and they can be understood in relation to one another. But we're going to talk first of all, an avocado pair. I'm so sorry. I think we're going to talk first about the dud avocado. Let me just read out the blurb from... I've got a Virago edition here, a Virago modern classic. This is to set the plot up for listeners who might not be familiar with the book. Sally J. Gorse is a woman with a mission.

It's the 1950s. She's young and she's in Paris. Having dyed her hair pink and vowed to go native in a way not even the natives can manage. She's busy getting drunk, bedding men, losing money, losing jewellery and losing God knows what. The Dud Avocado is the story of Sally J's rite of passage, a charming and hilarious novel that gained instant cult status on first publication and remains a timeless and inspiring portrait of a woman hell-bent on living. I can sort of see why I was first attracted to it.

Being the kind of girl, when I was in my early 20s, of thinking I was living life, not in Paris though, but just going out for a night and ending up in a car park in so much height with somebody's knickers on my head in the morning. Well, then I ask, somewhat gingerly, do you remember where you were when you first read this book? Probably not, actually, just because I was going out so much. OK, all right. this book? Probably not actually just because I was going out so much.

But I can remember the last time I read it before I swatted up for the podcast which fittingly enough was I went to Paris seven years ago. What am I going to take to read? I'll take the Del D'Avocado. Perfect. For the full kind of surround sound. Lovely.

HD ready effect, yeah. And it's the Paris of the 1950s. So I would say in several ways it's the Paris of the Gene Kelly film and American Empire. Yeah, yeah. It's very much. Even with the beards. Yeah, the hardcore.

The hardcore, we love it. There's poets and there's beatniks and there's artists and there's pavement cafes and the Sorbonne and... Jive. Paris, Jive, yeah. It's very much an American in Paris in that most of the people that she meets are sort of rich Americans being authentic

with sort of, you know, the benefit of large trust funds and sort of wanting to be sort of artists, which, of course, we love. And yet, she's very likeable. Because the way you describe it there... She's insanely likeable. That's the thing. I can't imagine anybody not... It's hard to imagine not enjoying this, isn't it?

I didn't know anything about it i never heard of it it felt i feel a bit silly now because i wish i like you i wish i discovered it when i was sort of in paris when i was 18 because i can't think of anything it'd be the most the most joyful companion and and she's sally j is just the voice is just brilliant it's interesting because this is like i think my fourth or fifth read now and I realise I just cannot remember anything that happens in the novel because all I know is Sally J calls because she just kind of roars off the page. Yeah, that's really true.

Actually, I think Rachel Cook says in her introduction that it's all about the voice. Yeah. The plot, there is a plot, but you'd be hard-pressed to recap it. She meant she... I could, I can, actually. Go on, do it.

OK, I'm ready. So, I mean, it's just got such a great beginning to a novel in that she's got... She's dyed her hair pink, like all the French tarts do, and she's wearing an evening gown because all the clothes are in the laundry. And the laundry has really complicated hours. And she has really complicated hours. And their complicated hours don't mesh up.

So within the first page, she's met this American boy that she vaguely knows, falls madly in love with him. And then this other guy comes along, Teddy, who's actually her lover. And the only reason he's her lover is because he's already got a wife and a mistress. So she thought, oh, that's quite a glamorous person to lose my virginity to.

And then she kind of, she loves Larry, this American guy, but he just is quite dismissive of her love and she wants to be an actress and he's putting on plays. So she acts in the plays and then she loses her passport. That's quite a big thing. And then she sort of beds a couple of sort of artists, but her heart's not really in it. And then they all decamp to be Aritz

and then there's a pool fighter. How am I doing so far? As I say, the plot... El huido. El huido. But what makes it work is there's a sort of energy and sparkle in the true sense and wit to how she tells you the story, which is really distinctive. and sparkle in the true sense and wit to how she tells you the story, which is really distinctive.

I mean, this book always gets compared to Breakfast at Tiffany's, doesn't it? And yet it's more, crackles more than Breakfast at Tiffany's does. Well, if Holly Golightly had actually written Breakfast at Tiffany's instead of Truman Capote, I think. There's links to the screwball heroines of the 1930s as well. Definitely, she mentions screwball a lot. Anita Luce, it's just, I mean, the word I'm always, is moxie. You know, she's got this incredible kind of, incredible self-confidence. And yet there's, it's also, there's that wonderful bit towards the end

where she's basically trying to figure out what kind of person she is. And she says, my problem is I'm a complicated person We think it's really funny, it's really joyous but certainly this time reading it and the bits that I picked out and I post-it post-it-ed? Post-noted it? Post-it-noted

that I really liked there's something actually sort of quite tragic about it. And I just was thinking to myself, actually, in The Dard Avocado, just sort of the desperate drinking and the not wanting to be alone. A bit Jean Rees-y.

Well, this is it. It's all the elements of a Jean Rees novel. But there's just something, even when she's tragic, she's kind of being funny. And so whereas Jean Reys is just like everything is awful now I'm just going to sort of drink myself into a stupor and maybe put my head in the oven she's like you know what I'm just going to sort of dress up in a dundle and with my pink hair I'm just going to sort of go out and get drunk and fall off my heels have you got a bit

you could you could read us from the um of the book? OK, well, the really controversial bit of the Dada Avocado, I mean, in our sort of modern ways where anything goes, it just seems very tame now. It was a huge kind of cause celeb at the time. So it's like page 20, and so she's met Larry and decided that she's in love with him and she's sort of had a little altercation with teddy her married lover and they're in a cafe near the at this point aren't they and he's saying take it easy take it easy he was saying everything's going

to be all right he took my hand away from my drink and held it gently in his own. By now I was maybe drunk, I don't know, but in such a state of uncontrolled passion that the mere touch of his hand on mine charged through my body like a thousand volts. You know how it is, some people can hack and hack away at you and nothing happens at all and then someone else just touches you lightly on the arm and it happens yes i mean that's what happened i remember looking down at the table and seeing my fingers clinging and curling around his i remember being quite aware of this but at the same time quite unable to stop myself and i put his hand up to my cheek and caressed his knuckles with my mouth. A split second suspended itself into infinity in the air

while my heart pounded furiously and I kept kissing and kissing his knuckles. And then it was over. So I'm reading from the Penguin Classic, which I think I'm just going to Penguin Classic, which I think... I'm just going to tell you when it was printed because this is actually sort of quite... So that was printed... My edition is 1961.

Pre-Lady Chatterley. Yeah. So what actually happens in the Virago edition is the word came because she just reached her crisis through the mere touch of a hand and in life itself her memoir she does actually sort of talk about publishing the book with golance and actually having lunch with golance himself and turning up with um i think it's a

biographer um kate oh dylan thomas's wife, Caitlin Thomas, her biography, and said, well, look, she says orgasm, why can't I? And Go Lance is just, no, no, no, it's very unseemly. But then it's reinstated, isn't it? So he won't let that past in the first editions like that, Penguin Edition,

and then she arranged for it to be reinstated in all subsequent ones. In fact before I left the house I had to go and find my more recent Virago modern classic just to make sure that she had come. Excellent. Can we hear a clip now?

This is an interview that Elaine Dundee did actually on the publication of that memoir Life It Itself, circa 2001 or 2002 with Molly Barnes. And she's just been asked, how did you settle on becoming a writer? It is the only thing you can do without being asked. I mean, you cannot be an actress unless somebody asks you to be an actress. And after I had my child, my daughter, I said to myself, I'm not going to audition anymore. You know, they know what I can do. You know, they they can call me.

I will call them. And they didn't. Writing surprises me. It absolutely surprises me. I thought that, you know, that my whole body of work was actually very different. Each one different settings you know i was a moving target in other words and i found out no they all have the same thing and it's the old western gimmick of a stranger comes to town to which i had i am that stranger and together with the reader let me take you through this place and explain it and we all get to know what we get to know at the end and make some sense out of it she sounds like a woman that's had a few cuts well so famously elaine dundee was married to the critic kenneth tynan they had a very stormy relationship that we're not going to dwell on

but suffice it to say neither of them treated one another very well. And when their daughter, Tracy Tynan, published her memoir, Wear and Tear, a couple of years ago, Anthony Quinn reviewed it in The Observer and said, this is one curtain behind which I wish I hadn't peaked. They were pretty... I mean, the thing about Life It life itself i read some of life itself her memoir and what's clear about elaine dundee a bit like kenneth tynan is that they were both ferociously ambitious they were most interested in uh who they could attract to come and sit at their table.

You know, the parade of celebrities that runs through life itself is extraordinary in terms of some of the great writers and artists and actors of that era. But it also slightly explains why she didn't go on to have a more illustrious literary career. You know, she writes three novels, the third of which... I'd say she'd written a third, actually. You know, this doesn't come out until 1974.

She writes several biographies. She wrote a biography of Peter Finch. She wrote a very famous book, which I knew, but I didn't know it was by her, called Elvis and Gladys, about Elvis Presley and his mother. I didn't know it was by her, called Elvis and Gladys, about Elvis Presley and his mother. Tynan was, it was widely perceived, had had his nose put out of joint by the fact that his wife had done the thing that he wanted to do.

Yeah, written a bestseller. He was famous for a critic, and she'd come out and written, at the first attempt, a bestseller. He famously said to her when he read it, this is going to be a bestseller. Yeah. And that's the thing we should say about this. This wasn't a cult book when it was this is going to be a bestseller. Yeah. And that's the thing we should say about this. This wasn't a cult book when it was published.

This was a big bestseller. I mean, she actually sort of actually in life itself talks about how smooth sailing it was, the whole process, the sort of publication. But it's interesting to me. I know that you don't want to sort of dwell on Kenneth Tynan, but with the done avocado, I did sort of read it a bit as men explaining things to her.

Yes. But there's also a real undercurrent of rage, but just also sort of like a real sort of world weariness to her. Because a lot of the things that men are explaining to her is herself. So it's all, let me tell you about yourself sally jay yeah there's just this one scene where she's actually um breaking up with her married lover or sort of trying to he doesn't take it very well when she wants to sort of dump him and sort of in the end they have a big argument and he calls her a slut and tells her to get out and there's just this she just says i reflected wearily that it was

not easy to be a woman in these stirring times i said it then and i say it now it just isn't our century and there's just a sort of a lot of things like that and having sort of read life itself which i hadn't before and then sort of going back to read the Dada Avocado, it was just sort of very interesting to me that I can just... I think I can sort of see the cracks in her marriage. Well, there's another bit here, a very short bit, about dinner parties. Quite late in the book, where she's talking about the challenges, what were the rules of hosting dinner parties.

She says, The amount of jumping up and down required on the part of both hosts and guests to get the meal assembled and in eating order kept my stomach in a constant turmoil. It had rather the same effect on the conversation which settled down only after the last dish had been cleared away and we women were busy at the sink washing up. For the female guest the washing up was then followed by a sort of homage to the household gods, rites which involved unqualified and highly vocal admiration of everything in sight. After that, we were allowed to listen to the menfolk for a while, and after that, it was bedtime.

But that is the grit in the book, I think. I agree with you, Sarah. The idea that she's constantly, how can I express my freedom within the constraints of what men are expecting of me at this time of what men are expecting of me at this time and what society is expecting of me at this time? It's interesting, again, we're not dwelling on Tynan, but he came home and famously threw it out the window,

saying, you know, when I married you, you were an actress, not a writer. And then the next day he relented and said, you know, there's love on every page. And he bound a nice copy for her. And the other thing I loved about it was that Gullance, when she hated the title, he said it sounded like a cookbook. I love this. He said it needed a subtitle. La Vie Amoureuse of Sally J in Paris.

Such a publisher thing to do. It's basically you haven't got confidence in this. We have to tell people that it's like the arguments over a chick lit cover. We need to make them know. Do you know what the compromise they reached was? Oh, this is brilliant, isn't it? So it's on the front cover, his subtitle,

but it's not inside the book. Inside the book, it says the subtitle on the cover is the decision of us, the publisher, and not the author. So The Old Man and Me is the novel that she published six years after The Dud Avocado. I hadn't read either of these books before, and I have to say, I really like The Dud Avocado. It's a very unusual moment on Batlist. We almost never do this. I really like The Dud Avocado. I preferred The Old Man and Me. And I'm happy to say there are personal reasons for that

one of which is it's set in London in the early 1960s what I found so fascinating about it was I'm used to reading London novels of that era by British people usually men so to read a swinging London quote-unquote novel by a woman who not only that doesn't really like Swinging Londoners and incredibly rude about most of the things that were happening in Britain at that time, I found incredibly funny, it's also a very black comedy. You know, all the stuff that I think is held back

in the dud avocado is pushed up to the surface. It's got a plot. No, it's got a plot as well. You know, it's got a proper three-act structure to it i disagree i think we're gonna have a heated debate now good i like the old man i mean it does have a plot in the there's this american girl called honey flood who's come over to London to meet this guy called C.D. McKay, who basically was married to her stepmother. And when her stepmother died, he inherited her fortune,

which was actually Honey Flood's fortune. And she's going to basically kill him and get her money. And she's not fussy how she does it. She thinks she might bed him to death. Then she thinks she might bed him to death. Then she thinks she might poison him. So I kind of, that is a plot. You know, there's lots of things going on there.

And I did sort of like the Becky Sharp aspect. She said when she was writing it, she wanted to create the fashion for the angry young man in British literature at that time, Jimmy Porter. What you've got here is an anti-heroine who is constantly testing your patience. I really like that. I see the Dodd Avocado as kind of the

debut album where you just think you might never get a chance and you just throw everything at it. It just sings. There's just a sort of beauty to it. You know, Sally J. Gorse is just one of those characters that you don't meet very often, and I think it's why so many people love it.

Whereas with The Old Man and Me, I mean, I love 60s... Difficult second album. Exactly. I love 60s swinging London as much as The Next Girl, but I did find... Paris in the 50s. I found it bully, Andy. I just found there were bits where people were saying clever things

to each other at parties. Zara, I'm just saying Doris Lessing said it's as full of wry charm as the Dada Vicala. Well, I don't like Doris Lessing. Gore Vidal said it's a witty black comedy of manners, a sort of hipster Daisy Miller. Well, John Davenport in The Observer said of the Dada Avocado, it's rich, invigorating and deceptively simple to the taste.

One falls for Sally J from a great height. And Gratcho Marx said about that, I'm coming out Dada Avocado, largely because I haven't read The Old Man and Me, but I'm just instinctively coming out. I had't read the old man in me. I'm just instinctively coming out. I had to tell someone and it might as well be you since you're the author how much I enjoyed the dad avocado. It made me laugh

scream and guffaw which incidentally is a great name for a law firm. Was it Hemingway who said you found your voice because you he said you know it took me a long time because I never listened to anybody whereas she's the diary section has some of the funniest writing I think I've read for a long time

May the 11th, Saturday, still raining Larry and Missy just don't appear anymore except occasionally for meals Here is the story of Bax's life He was born in Canada, he was raised in Canada, he went to Ontario University and has never been out of Canada before He doesn't know what he wants to do

but would like it to be something artistic. She's just so great at writing people. Just that real knack of within a couple of lines, she can just sketch out somebody and you know exactly who they are. There's a great bit when she has her first real relationship with a painter called Jim, who thinks she's terribly sophisticated.

And she says, the trouble was, of course, and she's kind of bored by him and ends up leaving him, but she says, the trouble was, of course, that what Jim really ideally needed at that point was some nice, simple, outdoor bohemian girl, brown-haired, with rain in it. As I said, I don't know what he saw in me, but then I don't know what on earth I saw in him either, for that matter.

It seems incredible that I, who had spent all this time in Paris adrift so to speak in an uncharted ocean of raging passions should be knocked over by so small a wave and yet he was I suppose my first real relationship the disagreement we always had quarrel would be too strong a word was about my refusing to go and live with him, move in with him under his roof. That it would seem to me something so sturdy, sweated and dirndl-skirted about living with a man you're not married to. I mean, it was too intensely domestic, the one thing.

The next thing you knew, you were darning socks and cooking. And to be quite honest, there were some phone calls I wouldn't have wanted to take with him in the room and some that, frankly, I couldn't. It's just great. I just think with the Dada Avocado it is just that tragic comedy, it's light and shade

and there's just I just will always love a novel and cheer for a novel but it's just somebody trying to figure out who the hell they are. I mean it reminded me a bit of Catcher in the Rye, just that whole sort of thing about the phone is and everybody's kind of obsessed with people being authentic and she used the rye, just that whole sort of thing about the ponies. Yeah, I can see that, yeah. And kind of everybody's kind of obsessed with people being authentic.

And she is the precursor. I know it gets trotted out in the reviews I've read, but she is the precursor to Carrie Bradshaw and possibly even Bridget Jones in terms of that kind of... I mean, I think she's much more joyous than either of those two characters. She's younger as well. I mean, it does remind me so much of my early 20s, just being that girl that, in the end, thank God,

you sort of grow out of, where you lock yourself out of your house regularly, you know. There's just... Yeah, I mean, she's hopeless, like a Jean Rees heroine, in that sense of being undone by alcohol and forming kind of liaisons that she's not really getting much out of but she's making really bad decisions and I I like that let's hear a clip now of Elaine Dundee talking about what it was like to be in Paris and

London in the 50s and 60s how did I get to england went to paris went to paris as an actress i thought i can get work there because there was americans they're doing lots of films you know this is post-war post-war was an absolute the 50s was an absolutely wonderful wonderful time we'd won the war we were alive and there was an explosion of culture okay went to paris then i thought yeah it's hard i speak french well, but, you know, I can't get away with it. And England, let's face it, you know, speaks English. And so I better see what I can do over there. I went over there. I was in a poetry reading on the BBC. All of this led to my meeting with Kenneth Tynan, well, he opened the door for me and I walked through.

And to be in London, you know, they had particularly won the war because they stood alone for a while, if you remember. And it was an explosion of culture. And the point was that everyone wanted to meet him. I mean, Ava Gardner would call and say, I'm here because I'm doing Mogambo, but we've got a break and I've come to England. Can I come over? You know, I mean, that just kept happening. Yeah.

If you like a name to be dropped from a great height, then life itself is the book for you. I'd like to say something else about The Old Man and Me. And I would sort of like to say to listeners, I think the two books are worth reading together. Because in a sense, The Old Man and Me is like the evil twin of the dud avocado. It's like the dud avocado from The Darkest Timeline. Something bad has happened to what we could call the Elaine Dundee heroine, as we would call the Jean Rees heroine, in the five or six years between these two books.

And we kind of know now what it was. I'd just like to read a little bit. This is from The Old Man and Me. This is quite near the end. And I thought this was just a tremendous piece of writing. She and her lover, C.D., a.k.a. Cyril Connolly, are... Well, here we go. They're in pretty bad shape.

We were in pretty bad shape by then, both CD and I. I was smoking the roof off my mouth. I'd lost 15 pounds and any interest in food. I ate about every other day. On the other hand, I was drinking a great deal. Drink had become important to me. It kept me going for long stretches at a time, although in the end, passing out around every three nights as I did,

it tired me dreadfully, so that I was sleeping well into most afternoons actually I kept myself going on a blend of nicotine caffeine alcohol barbiturates stimulants and a modest use of narcotics only four or five puffs per evening on the communal marijuana stick never more than one spoonful of hashish jam at a time after a while I was able to balance one stimulant or sedative against another, rather like Alice nibbling on the two sides of the mushroom that made her grow or shrink, with such deafness that by a dash of this, a few grains of that, and a puff of the other, I could play the most indescribably delicate airs on my psyche. Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard. I cry now at their memory, blurred though they be.

Sometimes I would arrange my pills neatly on my bureau top. Dexedrine, dexamil, drinamil, benzadrine, librium, seconal, veginin, etc, etc. Anything I could get my hands on in neat rows, spansules to the front in their pretty two-tone capsule jackets, deep green and white or plum and bright blue, the tiny pill grains of contrasting colours sparkling through the transparent celluloid. Then the shorties, those heart-shaped happy pills of soft musty mauve, pale blue or apple green, with that faint incision down their middlesdles a scattering of the stark white bennies and finally the vitamin pills vitamin c forte just for the hell of it tailored in chic

yellow and brown costumes and looking at them i would feel within them or rather with them within me the possibilities of a whole symphony first movement g. Dexedrine, allegro. Second movement, slurp. Gin and tonic, andante. Spancioul, poof, minuet. Third movement, benzadrine. Scherzo, rondo and collapse. Ah, that scherzoid rag. Or how about going along with those programme notes of Beethoven's sixth? Awakening of serene impressions on arriving in the country, a soupçon of hashish jam. Seen by the brook, a touch of drinnemill. A merry gathering of peasant folk, a couple of scotches.

Thunderstorm, a couple of hundred more. Glad and thankful feelings after the storm. A mill town and a second owl. I don't know. Something like that. And that paragraph is, first of all, that is a real tour de force, that paragraph. But also capping it with the I don't know, something like that.

You see, for me, that's the writer of The Dud Avocado, but she's turned it all up a notch. But that, I think for me, though, The Old Man and Me is just a novel without hope. You know, we know what she wants. I like it. But just, the dark avocado is just somebody on the cusp. And you just root for her.

I mean, ironically, from the woman that wrote Vanity Fair, rewrote Vanity Fair, I was really adamant that I wasn't going to sort of warm Becky Sharp up. I just, I don't root for Honey Flood in the way that Sally J. Gorse is just my girl. And you just want her to be all right. Whereas with Honey Flood, I don't want to give away the ending. But even when she gets what she thinks she wants, it's just despair. I feel like with The Old Man and Me... What, the ending of The Old Man and Me? Yeah. When she gets what she thinks she wants, it's just despair. I feel like with The Old Man and Me... What, the ending of The Old Man and Me?

Yeah. Oh, it's bleak. I feel like that is just... We're going full Jean Rees by the end of The Old Man and Me. You see, these are our different temperaments. That's, I think, one of the reasons I prefer it, because it's blacker. Things have curdled. But then that sounds like you have to choose one of the reasons I prefer it because it's blacker things have curdled

but then that sounds like you have to choose one or the other I don't think you do have to choose one or the other I'm fascinated that The Old Man and Me was not a commercial success but I found even though we've just sort of said that the plot in The Dark Avocado is kind of mostly incidental

I found The Old Man and Me a quite woolly read, actually. I just sort of found it went off on tangents. I mean, even in The Dard Avocado, she is a writer who's very fond of just people saying clever things to each other at parties. Yeah, yeah. Like several pages and just sort of, you know... And again, there is just a lot of men talking at her,

which I don't have a lot of time for, really. But I just love that sense of here's a girl finding herself and you just feel that she will find herself and the herself that she finds will be fabulous. Where do you think she is now? Sally J. If she's still here, where is do you think she is now? Sally J. If she's still here, where is she? What did she do?

She's got several rich... Every husband was richer than the last. Because there's no way Max rammed... She's in Malibu. She's a bit sort of decrepit, but she looks fantastic in a poochy caftan. And she's saying to Jorge, the pool boy, I'll teach you to tango if you can make me laugh

again there's so many gorgeous details in it when she goes to see her friend Judy she's always pacing around in the room but there's that brilliant bit where she says that she's pacing around and she's going they're corrupt corrupt I kept saying to myself over and over again as I paced around the room it was the first time I'd ever used that word about people I actually knew and again the idea that I could take a moral word about people I actually knew. And again, the idea that I could take a moral stand, or rather that I couldn't avoid taking one, filled me with the same confusion it had that morning.

I mean, she's got more depth than a Lauralee Lee. One of my favourite bits, Andy sort of read out the start of it, and it's going back to that scene about cooking.

So she's with this artist, Jim Bright, who's just really pulling her down. She's dull. And they mix with other artists and their girlfriends, so she's just somebody that shouldn't be sort of corralled. So he says, we must have the DeWalds to dinner here next week, said Jim to me one afternoon after we'd spent a weekend

in their windswept hut just off the coast of Brittany. Why can't we take them out? It's not the same. What about the cooking? What do you mean, what about the cooking? I mean, I can't cook. You can't cook? Why, good Lord, Sally J, I thought every girl knew how to cook. He looked at me, his little Floradora girl, and gave me a very wry sort of some women are made for only one thing smile. Then he shook his head hopelessly. Marion DeWald cooks, he said grimly. She does all the cooking and looks after two kids as well. I try to remember

one minute that whole weekend when Marion and I went either feeding people or clearing up from doing it or preparing to do it again and presumably she never stopped doing it but I couldn't quite see why just because she did I should. I mean here I was practically fresh out of the egg everything was so new to me and here was everybody telling me to stop drifting and start living in this world telling me to start cooking and sewing and cleaning and I don't know what and that to me is just the crux of Sally J. Course and the Dad Avocado. She's just this free, restless, chaotic spirit. And just all the men that she meets just kind of want to put her on the straight and narrow.

Take the joy out of it. You know what the thing about the Dad Avocado is? It's really got that life force, hasn't it? It's got, in the same way, the comparison with Catcher in the Rye is a good one. Yeah, yeah. Because it's got that same, in the same way the comparison with Catcher in the Rye is a good one because it's got that same adolescent need to be right you know, that kind of

forcing your way on because you have the energy and the will to express yourself. Well it's interesting, this book keeps getting reprinted and reprinted it's a classic isn't it? I mean to me sort of the old man in me, I'd had it on my shelf for ages and this was the thing that made me, it will never be a reread whereas you know, The Dard Av Me, I'd had it on my shelf for ages, and this was the thing that made me...

It will never be a reread, whereas The Dad Avocado, I just keep coming back to it. All I want to say, my final word on The Old Man and Me is I can see that if you read and loved The Dad Avocado, you might not read and love this, but if, on the other hand, you read and loved Absolute Beginners or The Low Life or Capital by Maureen Duffy, you should read The Old Man and Me

because it's a book about London from a perspective that very rarely gets written about. I think that we've got to, unfortunately, say au revoir to Sally J. Gorse. I do feel that it's a friend-for-life thing, isn't it? You find characters like that and you think, I will go back to this book. I can't imagine anything more fun to read in Paris. So, anyway.

Post-Brexit. Anyway. This is why you prefer the old man. Yeah. Rough, rough, rough. Yeah, because that's what Britain's going to be like. Just six months from now. Brown with ransom. Oh, man. Anyway, because that's what Britain's going to be like. Just six months from now. Brown, red, brown, silver.

Oh, man. Anyway, that's all we have time for. Huge thanks to Sarah, to our producer, Nicky Birch, to Unbound, and to our leg-enhancing sponsor, Spoke. You can download all 74 Backlisted, plus follow up all the links, clips, and suggestions for further reading on our website, backlisted.fm, and, of course, you can still contact us on Twitter,

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