Backlisted - The Tortoise and the Hare by Elizabeth Jenkins

Episode Date: November 26, 2018

Andy and John are joined by Carmen Callil, publisher, writer and critic and founder of Virago Press, to discuss The Tortoise and the Hare by Elizabeth Jenkins, a novel first published in 1954 and then republished by Carmen in the 1980s as a Virago Modern Classic. Producer Nicky Birch also talks about her work on a new interactive adaptation of B.S. Johnson's novel The Unfortunates for BBC and Amazon Alexa.Timings: (may differ due to variable advert length)6'16 - The Unfortunates by B.S.Johnson19'16 - The Tortoise and the Hare by Elizabeth Jenkins* 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

Make your nights unforgettable with American Express. Unmissable show coming up? Good news. We've got access to pre-sale tickets so you don't miss it. Meeting with friends before the show? We can book your reservation. 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 car and other conditions apply. When you're working out at Planet Fitness, it's a judgment-free zone, so you can really step up your workout. That's why we've got treadmills. And our team members are here to help, so you can be carefree with the free weights.

There are also balance balls, bikes, cables, kettlebells, and TRX equipment. But, like, no pressure. Get started for $1 enrollment and then only $15 a month. Hurry this $1 enrollment sale of Planet Fitness ends July 18th. $49 annual fee applies. See Home Club for details. yes so on my way here today i I went to two bookshops, and both of which will be of interest to our listeners. The first bookshop is new.

It only opened a few days ago. It's in Soho, and it's called The Second Shelf, and it is a feminist bookshop and quarterly publisher run by Alison Devers, and they sell first editions of many of the books that we have featured on that list, apart from everything else. So if you want to pop in and buy a first edition of Barbara Cummings, for instance, she is available.

Oh, isn't that wonderful? That could be Christmas sold. Absolutely. Many Jean Rees first editions in there, I noticed when I was in there earlier. And they were really helpful and friendly and we wish them all the the best in that endeavor the the other bookshop I went into was foils on the south bank and I want to say thank you to Scott and Colm at foils because

they have got an amazing display at moment of books that we featured on Backlisted. But not only that, Carmen, they are already trailing your episode. No. Yeah, it says, books featured on Backlisted, coming soon, The Tortoise and the Hare. And they're selling a big cardboard box of Moomins under the desk as well.

So I'd like to say thank you very much to them. They also let me see, John, a sheet of the sales figures. And they were going this really works this is really selling books so any of our publishing brethren who are listening to this and also while we're dealing with any other business before we move on i also want to say thanks everyone who's bought tickets to come and see the live podcast at the lrb bookshop we're doing i'm looking at our guests i haven haven't even introduced our guests, so we are being joined by Hilary Sperling and Philip Hensher to talk about Books Do

Furnish a Room. Oh, my favourite writer, Anthony Paul. Oh! Absolutely adore. I can get you a comp. Oh, that's great. I've got my old, old, old copies of A Dance is the Music of Time. I have been reading it one a month. Isn't it wonderful? You have to be an outsider to like dance to the music of time because I was always told it was completely unacceptable that I liked to dance to the music of time because the whole class then was wasted on me. But British people, or English,

find it, you know, far too snobbish. This sold-out event is achieving legendary status. And finally, I've got one more piece of business which is so appropriate given Carmen's here which is we featured a book on the podcast about six months ago by Gail Jones

called Corregidora and as a result of hearing Sarah Churchwell and us talk about Corregidora by Gail Jones I'm very delighted to say that Donna Coonan at Virago Modern Classics... There you go, I told you. Excellent!

I will introduce you in a moment, Effie. It's fine. Donna Coonan at Virago Modern Classics will be reissuing Corregidora and two more of Gail Jones's novels next year. So we're really thrilled about that. So thank you, Sarah Churchwell. Thank you, Donna. Thank you, Virago. Continuing the great work of Virago.

Yes, Donna's doing a wonderful job with the classics. I mean, couldn't be happier. Donna said she'd discovered the book through the podcast, which is massively... Yeah, so we're thrilled. And I'm sure many listeners who want to get hold of that book just have to wait a little bit longer and it'll be in the shops again. So that's great.

And now let's get on with the podcast. Hello and welcome to Backlisted, the podcast that gives new life to old books. Today, for our 80th episode, you find us in a small Berkshire village in the drawing room of a handsome Regency Gothic house, pouring ourselves a stiff drink after our trip up to town, breathing in the mossy air and looking across the grove of beech trees towards the river, the chalk downs hunched behind us. 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 are two guests. The first is Carmen Khalil, the legendary publisher and writer who is best known for founding the Virago Press in 1972. That's it. Once described by The Guardian as, quote, part Lebanese, part Irish and wholly Australian. Actually, you've forgotten the English bit, which is quite just as well, I suppose, because it's the least interesting.

Carmen settled in London in 1964, advertising herself in The Times as Australian, BA, wants job in book publishing. That's right. I did do that. After changing a generation's taste through her publishing at Virago, and in particular the Virago Modern Classics, which we will be talking about shortly, Carmen went on to run Chateau and Windus and become a global editor at Large Random House. In 2006, she published Bad Faith, A History of Family and Fatherland, which Hilary Sperling called a work of phenomenally thorough, generous and humane scholarship,

appointed DBE in 2017. Do you wish me to draw a veil over that? Exactly. Right. Welcome to Backlisted, Carmen. And also we're joined by our first canine guest, who you may have heard already. Please welcome Carmen's dog Effie, who is with us today, who is a lovely Border Terrier, aren't you? Now you're quiet.

Carmen's here to talk to us about one of her favourite novels, The Tortoise and the Hare by Elizabeth Jenkins, first published by Galantz in 1954 and, of course, triumphantly reissued by Virago Modern Classics in 1983. But before we set that tortoise off ambling, and in a departure from our usual routine, we've got something exciting we want to alert you to. Well, I can ask you, John, actually, traditionally, what have you been reading this week? Because it is true to say you have been reading it.

And I have. And reading with huge pleasure, I've been reading the unfortunate by bs johnson now there are two things to say about the unfortunate by bs johnson the first thing is nikki has been involved with the project that she's going to tell us about in a minute to do a new adaptation of bs johnson the unfortunate but this is a total coincidence we realized a couple of days ago that our guest today karma khalil was the publicist i know for bs johnson's the unfortunate in 1969 69 was it yes because what happened i mean karma was that seca who was supposed to be publishing the book that's right fell apart at the thought

of publishing a book in a box just to to remind everybody, Unfortunates is a book that was published in 27 loose sections, a first and a last, and the other 25 you could read in any kind of random order. And obviously, as a bit of publishing, it's a challenge to publish a box. It wasn't something that Second War would be used to. But the Collins paperback imprint that was sort of setting new standards

for for kind of publishing and and risk-taking Panther took it on and it's it's it says it's published by Panther and in association with Sekhar and Warburg. So Carmen before we move on to the to the 2018 version what was it I don't know I'm going to ask you the what was it like working on the famous book in the box? Well, I learned everything about publishing from the four men who ran it. I mean, they weren't the owners of Panther, but they ran it. There were two editorial directors, and one of them, John Booth, is still alive and living in... The only trouble is, of course, I've forgotten the name of the... Harlow, Essex.

And I always think John was the most responsible for that. But Brian Thompson, who was the production manager, they agonised over getting this right because one of the things about Brian was he was an absolute perfectionist. He was absolutely committed to his wish to change the English novel. It holds in the paperback. And he basically thought that after Joyce and Beckett,

anything that wasn't trying to push the form of the novel was sort of invalid, as Jonathan Cohen, his great biography, shows you. That's exactly right. This was his life's work, more or less, this one. And also it connected with football, which he was very, very keen on. Yeah, he was a massive Chelsea fan. Yes, he was. I must say, this is my favourite. I think it's a wonderful book. It is a wonderful

book, isn't it? Brilliant book about talking about ageing and death. It's fabulous about the decline of his friend. I mean, he goes to Nottingham, but his friend has died. It being B.S. Johnson, it's not really a novel in the way that, you know, it's about him. The characters

in the book are real people. I mean, he's writing about himself. He's writing about his own children and his family and his wife and his friend, Tony. His best friend, Tony. And he's remembering time that they had together in Nottingham, the city. But it's also full of architecture and the kind of smell, the griminess of kind of provincial life. Carmen, the question I must ask you about this. So you're the publicist of this book. The things we know about Brian B.S. Johnson are that he's publishing a book which could be thought perhaps erroneously to be slightly gimmicky,

that he really doesn't want people to think of as gimmicky. So was it challenging to publicise it? Was he hard to work with? No. No, no. One of the reasons I remember him so well is that we got on extremely well. And what happened a couple of weeks ago, funnily enough, I was in the LRB bookshop doing something or other,

you know, listening to somebody, and his widow came up to me and she said, are you, you know, because you wouldn't recognise me sort of from the way I look now. And I said, yes, I am. And we had the most wonderful conversation about it. And she said he was just as pleased with my work for him as I admired him.

And physically, he looked very like you, John. He did. He was the most lovely, gorgeous hunk of a man. So, Nicky, tell us what you've been working on. Yeah, well, maybe new technology can bring new audiences to this book, right? That's the idea. Well, we're going to give it a go. Did you write the book, Nicky?

I did. I did, actually. And I came to the book via the audio first. So I heard the Radio 3 adaptation before I read the book, Nikki? I did. I did, actually. And I came to the book via the audio first. So I heard the Radio 3 adaptation before I read the book. What we've done now is that Radio 3 did an adaptation back in 2010. They turned it into about 17 chapters, but they still had to play it in a linear form, right? Because it's the radio. So they did sort of pick out what chapters they were going to do out of the hat. What we've done now, because I make, in my other job,

I make what we're calling voiced-first experiences, so experiences that can be heard through an Amazon Alexa or a Google Home. And in this instance, we've made one for The Unfortunate, so we've taken the Radio 3 drama, the adaptation, and we've basically allowed you to, every time you listen to it, you could get a random order so it's much more true to the original concept of the book and there are 1.3 trillion combinations i read in the press release 1.3 trillion potential uh combinations versions of

this novel one of the things genius about the book extraordinary whenever youinary. Whenever you read it, I've read it three times, you think the order that you've... It's the right one. It's the right one. That's so good. What I love about it, I mean, you know, we're not averse to a bit of experimentation, as you know, on Backlist.

He said he wanted to somehow reflect the movement of a mind that you don't think in linear fashions. You remember stuff and then other things are connected so that it wasn't a kind of some sort of smart ass experiment he was inspired by another a french writer called mark supporter who did who did a book when all the pages were completely random but he felt having a beginning and an end gave the reader a kind of a framework

that they could work within um so nick you've kept that haven't you so you have to listen to the first chapter first and the last chapter last yeah and i just want to add i think what's interesting about this and why it works is it's about sort of form and function isn't it because actually the idea about memory and loss um you know the way memories of somebody who's died you know they just suddenly come to you don't they and and actually that's why it works so well in this form, because you're listening, or in my case, listening or reading. And you don't know what order you're suddenly...

You don't know when you're going to remember a feeling about an emotion or a memory about somebody or what triggers that. And that's why I think this works really well. So what have you done? So what we've done is we work with Amazon. This is on Amazon Alexa, which is the smart speaker platform. And if you say... I'm going to give you an example because I brought a speaker in here.

But if you say, Alexa, open The Unfortunates. Alexa, open The Unfortunates. Welcome to The Unfortunates, a roaming story about friendship, memory and loss. Adapted from the book by B.S. Johnson and starring Martin Freeman. This story changes every time you listen. It's made up of sections which are shuffled into a random order. New meanings are created with each new sequence. Before we get started, you can decide

if you'd like to hear where the sections begin or if you'd prefer to hear the story flow uninterrupted. If you'd like to hear the joins, a sound like this, we'll play between each section. Would you like to keep these section markers? No. Right, before we begin, we just want to let you know that there is some swearing and some explicit content in this story now it's time for martin freeman starring in the unfortunates by bs johnson the train just arrived on platform one is the 830 service from london All right, don't bellow. Ascending. Time to get bearings. Always the same.

Another Saturday, another unknown city, another nondescript station, another god-awful match. But I know this city. This green ticket hall, that long office, half-rounded at its ends. All brown glazed tiles. Of course, I know this city. How did I not realise when he said go and do City this week against United at home that it was this City. I forgot to say that it stars Martin Freeman. Well, I can hear the voice, that wonderful voice.

He's perfect for him, isn't he? He's really good, yeah. When we played it to Brian's widow... Oh, did you? Yes. ..and his son, and they all said... Oh, and his son was there too. Yeah, they really enjoyed it so carmen um johnson was a writer who was very into as we know different forms of fiction and he was a poet and he was a filmmaker and he was on tv what do you it's a ridiculous question

really because obviously technology has gone far and wide but do you think he would have appreciated the idea of taking the random element and really putting it into a different medium definitely it was an adventurer i'm so going to listen to it it's brilliant it's wonderful such a clever thing tell me how did you learn to do these things i can't say i take all the credit there's somebody there's quite a few engineers who are helping so if anybody wants to have a Tell me, how did you learn to do these things? I can't say I take all the credit. There's quite a few engineers who are helping. So if anybody wants to have a listen, on your Amazon Alexa device,

you have to say, hold on, I'm just going to turn her off so she doesn't start talking now. You have to say, Alexa, enable the unfortunates. So you enable it. Wow, that's a powerful message. You enable it first and then you can open it. But I mean, who owns it, for example? I mean, where is it? Where is it?

Well, it's sitting in the cloud somewhere at the moment or on a server. And you have to get what to listen to it like? You have to get one of those little devices. Yeah, you need an app. So Amazon paid you to do it? No, it's the BBC. So the BBC are publishing via Amazon. Very baffling. If you bought dog biscuits,

you may also enjoy the unfortunate. Well, you know what? Amazon do fairly undeservedly cop a lot of criticism. But actually, that does seem to me to be a really, really exciting use of technology. Absolutely. Very good. What's interesting about it is that it was designed for commerce and kind of things like calling taxis and things like that, but actually it's really interesting to see how creative people are utilising it and coming up with new forms. Really? And that's, I think, what's exciting.

Well, I'm really, knowing what I know about B.S. Johnson and about the estate and how everyone has made efforts, particularly in the last 20 years, to make sure that people read his books and are aware of his work. I'm just really pleased that they managed to make this happen. It's wonderful. You know, that it's a new way to bring life to not just the book but the radio play and introduce a new creative element to it

in terms of the randomised element. It's great. Do you know, I've just remembered how i first met him panther published a book on national service do you remember when men did national service not personally but i remember that nobody's done anything about that for years have they no interesting and he did this book which i've got for panther was an original about all these men men, I think Carl Miller was in it, you know, counting their national service. And then he did one about losing your virginity. And he interviewed me for that.

Called Always Remember the First Time. That was Brian. He did those sort of books too. He's a most extraordinary man. He had a great sense of humour. He did, he did, yes. The detail I love in Jonathan Coe's biography of him is he reproduces quite a lot of the letters that Brian used to write to newspaper editors

or other publishers saying, hello, I am B.S. Johnson. I am the author of the following books. Samuel Beckett has called me. And Samuel Beckett has called me. And Samuel Beckett had to ask him to stop using the quotes. Did you know that? Beckett said, I much prefer that you didn't do that. Didn't he write a letter

to another author when he'd just released a book saying, no competition? No, he rang them up. It was Antonia Byers. It was A.S. Byers. He rang her up and said, I just read your book. No competition. Goodbye. What aas. He rang her up and said, I just read your book. No competition. Goodbye. What a lovely coincidence that you should be here, Carmen.

Amazing. I'm very pleased to talk about him. Lovely. We've talked about books enough. Now for some capitalism. We should move on to the main event, which is the fabulous Tortoise and the Hare. It's the question we always ask, Carmen, which is where were you when you first read this book? Do you remember?

No, I don't. I don't remember. But I think I would have been living in Hammersmith. I think it would have been then, about 1980, something like that. And at that time I used to go and have supper regularly with Rosamund Lehmann and Anita Bruckner. And... Why are you laughing?

Andy's such a new man. Andy, I'm mopping my brow. I'm so thrilled. Please carry on. Well, Rosamund recommended... You see, all my... The first Virago authors I published in the classics, they were still alive. And so I met them.

You know, I'd climb up 1,000 stairs for some of them and they'd be living in a garret or living off a banana peel or something like that. And they all told me other books to read. Amazing. I know. And Rosamund Lehmann... Rosamund Lehmann told me other books to read. Amazing. I know. And Rosamund Lehmann. Rosamund Lehmann told me to read The Tortoise and the Hare.

And you can see why, can't you? Because, I mean, she also wrote novels about the torture that women lived through in having to be attached to men and the lack of power they had in their lives and their dependence on their absolutely extraordinarily precise position in the English social class system if they were married to a professional man or a wealthy man or a poor man, for that matter.

Yeah. And that is absolutely what this book's about. Shall we say a little bit about the book? Which blurb shall I read? Shall I read the Vigarago modern classic blurb that you yourself might have written? I would have written this one. Do you want to read the blurb yourself, then?

You wrote it. Well, if I did. But I might not have. It could have been Alexandra. OK. It's an art. Some people have it, Evelyn had said. Evelyn is a man, by the way. I must be dreaming, she thought wildly. It could not be. A woman without looks,

without... But Paul had said, are you sure you know what men fall in love with? This is the plot of the novel that Fulton and I'm now going to recite to you. The Magnetic Evelyn Gresham, 52, is a Casey of considerable distinction. He has everything life could offer, a gracious riverside house in Berkshire, a beautiful grey-eyed wife Imogen, devoted to him and to their 11-year-old son, a replica of his father. Their nearest neighbour is Blanche Silcox, a plain tweed-wearing woman of 50 who rides, shoots, fishes and drives a Rolls Royce. In every way the opposite of the domestic, loving Imogen. Their world is conventional country life at its most idyllic. How can its gentle

surfaces be disturbed? This exquisite novel tells a love story with a difference as it subtly demonstrates that in the affairs of the heart the race is not necessarily to the swift or the fair. Hmm I think it's okay as some copy because you can't really give away the plot, can you? No. And so it was recommended to you by Rosamund Lehmann. And of course, Rosamund Lehmann, you made a great success of At Virago when you brought her books back into print, didn't you? Well, she made a success of herself, really. I mean, people were just waiting to read them. It's just a question of rather like you, John, you know, getting the paper, getting the print, It's just a question of rather like you, John, you know,

getting the paper, getting the print, ringing up, bashing a literary editor over the head and saying, time you, you know, did something about this. Yes. Still the same. One of the things about Elizabeth Jenkins is she wrote 23 books, fiction and non-fiction. She was probably better known as a biographer, do you think?

Yes, she was. And she picked big subjects for her biographies. I'm going to read just... We'll bring the listeners up to speed as quickly as we can because I'm just going to read... In the current edition of The Tortoise and the Hare, there is an afterword by Carmen Kalil and there is an introduction by Hilary Mantel. And I'm just going to allow Hilary Mantel to do the heavy lifting for me

by giving you a potted biography of Elizabeth Jenkins. In 2004, in her 100th year, Elizabeth Jenkins wrote a memoir called The View from Downshire Hill, which I have a copy of here today, which I got from the London Library earlier today. It offers graceful and startlingly fresh pictures from a long writing life concentrating on her earlier years. Educated at Cambridge, condescended to by Virginia Woolf, befriended by Elizabeth Bowen, she lived at the

heart of English cultural life and published 23 books. She wrote biographies of Elizabeth I, of Lady Caroline Lamb and of Jane Austen. She was a founder member of the Jane Austen Society, one of those practical enthusiasts who bought and restored Jane's house at Chawton, saved it from dereliction, furnished it with impeccable attention to the period and opened it to the public. Jenkins' hypersensitivity to atmosphere may remind readers of Rebecca West. Her eye for colour and texture, her precise descriptions of the civilised surfaces of life recall Sybil Bedford. Like both these near contemporaries, she wrote reportage as well as fiction. All three of them were interested in spies and poisoners,

in hidden acts and the murky undergrowth of human intention. But more than she is like them, she is like Austin. Formal, nuanced, acid. She surveys a room as if she were perched on the mantelpiece, an unruffled owl of Minerva, a recording angel. Yes, that's very, very good, isn't it? I'm that spot on. I wanted to say to you, Carmen, that I read The Tortoise and the Hare, which I loved. I also read a book that Jenkins published in 1933 called Harriet, and then

a similar book she wrote 40 years later called Dr Gully. called Harriet, and then a similar book she wrote 40 years later called Dr Gully. Well, you see, there's one thing that Hillary... I don't think it would be possible for Hillary to know because she didn't publish as many of these women as I did. A remarkable number of these women of this period were interested in murder. They wrote about murders, they went to the old Bailey,

they wrote biographies of murderers. And I think in The Tortoise and the Hare, you can feel the same mind. I mean, it is a novel of tremendous placidity and passion in a way, and a love story of a different kind. But there's fury underneath it. What I was going to say, Carmen, was that Harriet in particular is a terrific book. Yes, but it's... And they are based on real criminal cases of neglect and possibly murder.

Yes. When I read The Tortoise and the Hare, I totally agree with you. It's a different kind of murder. No, it is, absolutely. A crime is taking place, but where is the crime? The crime is spread through the books. That's what struck me this time with reading it, absolutely. A crime is taking place, but where is the crime? The crime is spread through the books. That's what struck me this time with reading it, yes. It is brilliant, isn't it? Because when I started to read it, I was thinking, this is very upper middle class.

I know, yes. I can't quite believe that this is Carmen's favourite novel. And then what she does is you realise, of course, that Evelyn, who is an idiot, and then what she does is you realise, of course, that Evelyn, who is an idiot, you just think he's one of those upper-middle-class, kind of annoying, know-it-all kind of lawyer types, and Blanche is a bit of a joke and Imogen's a bit wet,

very quickly all of those things are blown away and these characters come to sort of extraordinary four-dimensional life. You want to hate all of them, but she just will not let you do it. She won't give you the easy out. She resists melodrama, even when it seems that there's going to be no possibility other than there's going to be a dramatic scene. It's remarkable, this book, for that control, I think. Well, I think there's something quite important to say about just one tiny reply to what you said.

If you're not interested in class and you can't observe it, you don't see what you're objecting to in that novel. It never occurred to me to worry about class when I read a novel because I wasn't raised as an English person to think about class. So you were saying about dance and the music of time. Absolutely. But I do agree with you, the food in this novel is disgusting. I mean, the English do eat disgusting food.

They pretend they don't, but it all comes from somewhere else. And it's terribly funny in an Austen-esque way. I mean, I'd love to read some of the Austen-esque sayings, but will you ever forget the iced ham mousse that they have at one point? And that is a part of the incredible class that they belong to. Go to the Berkshire, go hunt with the hounds. Read some of the Austen-like. I'll do my Austenesques, shall I?

OK. Well, this one, which I simply adore. The other woman in this novel is called Blanche Silcox. She's very, very unattractive, and most particularly unattractive, her little pointy feet. And here is Elizabeth Jenkins describing her. In the general estimation of the female sex at least, Blanche Silcox would have been lucky in having an intimate connection with any man reasonably pleasant

and agreeable. Now, wait a minute. I've done the ham mousse. We don't want any more ham mousse. This is Cecil, who is Imogen, the heroine's best friend, describing Blanche. If hypocrisy and adultery are no drawbacks to being a nice woman, I'm sure she's as nice as can be. This little description of Blanche, when you think you've got Blanche and you think

she's almost a kind of Jennifer Saunders pastiche of a country woman. But listen to this. This is so good. The impression Blanche made upon her in the first few moments was like that of the in-drawing draft of a furnace. Had this quality been, as it were, unregulated, it might well have frightened a man off. But here it was accompanied by the awkwardness, the diffidence, the modesty of an inexperienced elderly woman. What the combined effect of these qualities might produce, even in the most unlikely circumstances, was by no means easy to decide.

Cecil was fonder of Imogen than anyone in the world, and though she was not saying very much, it said everything of which she was capable. Therefore, when she roused her powers of observation for Imogen's sake, her mind became so alert that everything she saw and heard told her something. She noticed that when Blanche Silcock spoke to Evelyn, it was in a slightly lower tone than she used for anybody else. It's just... Tiny little touches. And it's this...

Like you say, it's like a case. You're building up the case for a prosecution that you're not sure who's in the... It's like, who is the tortoise, who is the hare? Yes, absolutely. But also that connects once again to our discussion on how many of these novelists were interested in crime and observed crime and observed how people punished each other.

You were saying about class and you were saying, John, rightly, I agree with you. I started reading this and thought, oh, OK, well, it's a certain group of people at a certain moment. And then as you as you observe correctly, it then opens out and down as it goes on. But clearly, this was an issue that a lot of these writers had even when they were publishing there's a story that Elizabeth Jenkins tells in her memoir The View from Downshire Hill which illustrates this really well. When my novel The Tortoise and the Hare was published in 1954 Rose McCauley was on a BBC committee which discussed

recent fiction. This was, in terms of financial success, my best novel, but I encountered some severe personal criticism from readers who felt that the interest of the book was much too confined to one class, not to say one income bracket. I was told by a young man, a student in a university society to which I had been asked to give a talk, that what was wrong with the book was that it wasn't about anything that really mattered. As I felt that the suffering caused by the breakup of a marriage was something that did matter, I asked him in surprise what were some of the things that really mattered. asked him, in surprise, what were some of the things that really mattered. After a pause, he said, well, trade unions.

Some of the speakers on the air held a view similar to the young man's, though more fluently and pungently expressed. One of them said in withering tones, all this about gracious living. The centre of the book was a brilliant, hard-natured man, the woman's husband, and her ten-year-old son who was completely remote from her, and I felt this criticism was altogether unfair. I was listening to the programme and at this point was so glad to hear Rose McCauley exclaim,

Gracious living? What do you mean by gracious living? Evelyn wasn't very gracious. Gavin wasn't gracious. Do you just mean that they had enough to eat? That's great. You know, what that reminds me of is the same thing as Torve Janssen being criticised, that the

Moomins, and then it was bourgeois, you know, because the Mama Moomin carried a handbag and the father had it. It wasn't sufficiently rigorously, you know, kind of pseudo-proletarian. Well, trade unions. Yeah, trade unions. I was thinking about it today and thinking, what would she have voted?

Because, of course, at the moment, what is one to do except slit one's head around the throat was the nearest implement. I think she was a liberal. Yes. You know what I mean? That's what she feels to me, suffragette and a kind of... Yes, because she can be quite vicious about the upper classes as well, if you're going to go on about class here.

I mean, I love this description of Evelyn. She was perfectly aware of what it was like to be an inferior woman in British society. This is a description of him after he's had his holiday. He comes back from a holiday where he's been with men. By the way, she's tremendously aware of how much men of that class wanted to be with other men. I think there's a very strange frenzy in this novel because in fact Blanche

is quite masculine and he's an upper class or upper middle class boy. He's probably been to a public school and there's a sort of sense of strange sexuality throughout it but we won't go there. Instead I'm going to describe to you,

I'm going to read to you how she describes him. The holiday had left his face the colour of tawny marble. The sea bright eyes with their dark framing of brows and lashes had a look of indulgent interest. The short nose with its springing arch of nostril suggested, it was true, a less benevolent temper. In the heavy lower part of the face, the lips were shut like the edges of an iron box. Ooh.

I know. Now, you... Now, you... Evelyn, the husband in this novel... Yeah. ..you, in your afterwards... I know. Could you tell us...

You met Elizabeth Jenkins and you discussed the character with her. Yes. Well, you see, it's quite clear that the sort of man I would absolutely abominate. I mean, he's the Jacob Rees-Mogg of his time. But what happened when I went to see her was she told me that the whole story of this was true. It was based on her love for, I think, he was a... He was a gynaecologist. He was a gynaecologist.

He was a gynaecologist. That was useful, wasn't it, in case you... Called, I got his name, Sir Erdley Holland. Yes. Well, they gave each other up. And his wife died and he married the next-door neighbour. And this novel was her response to the... Because he'd come back to her after he'd married the next-door neighbour

and said, could we start again with our, you know, affair, which is, after all, the most important thing in both our lives. And she, instead of replying, she sent him a copy of The Tortoise and the Hare. And, you see, that was her revenge. She never heard from him again. But a few weeks later she knew he collected, can you imagine being in love with a man who collects things like this,

he collected glass paintings of Queen Charlotte and she found one and posted it to him with a kind note saying she thought he didn't have this particular one and some weeks later it came back very badly wrapped and very badly scratched and the handwriting was not his and it had been it had been bashed so that the glass was broken but when she turned it around the original string had been changed for a new string. So he had got it, he'd hung it up, and the Blanche Silcox had read the novel too, read her portrait, and bashed the glass thing and posted it back to Elizabeth.

But don't you adore it as a piece of revenge? Because you see, it is about fury, the fury of the rejection. But you said, didn't you, Colin, this is the detail that I absolutely loved. You said to her, oh, he's detestable. What did she say? You didn't know him. Isn't that perfect? She says in an interview that she took, you know, about the affair,

I offered him my heart on a plate. He made me unhappy, but it was worth it. My feeling for him lasted after his death. It's still going on now. I know. This was when she was nearly 100. Yes, but can we discuss now for about 24 hours, female masochism?

Let us not draw breath on the subject. Let us drone on and on and on and on. I'm sure our producer will have something to say on that topic. And you see, what is so extraordinary about Elizabeth Jenkins, she knew about it because she was an exemplar of it. Yeah. And that's what they do for their men, you know, in those days. In those days?

They did. Because what they got as a reward was the protection of a great strong man with a jaw of an iron box. But many of the writers who wrote introductions to these novels when I first published them now, what is it, 40 years ago? Republished them, sorry. Or a different class of writer. 40 years ago, republished them, sorry, or a different class of writer, you know, it's wonderful to think how much women's lives have improved

because there's always the element of astonishment when you read an awful like this to think what women suffered before everybody tried to change their lives in the Western world anyway. Can I ask you a couple of things? Because you talked about when you were publishing these books. I'm, you know, John and I are fascinated by this element.

So there were or are or have been approximately 800 Virago modern classics. When you were researching and finding these books, I read a thing you were talking about that you would get a recommendation from an author or you would go to the London Library or you would go to the British Library or... There wasn't an internet to refer to. No, no, there wasn't. But the thing is, once I started,

I met a lot of the writers of that generation. The first writer, I think everybody knows, the first one I published was Antonia White. And though she was terribly, had mental illness, now, of course, she wouldn't suffer from it at all, she'd have a lovely pill and be perfect, she knew a lot of them from previous parts of her life, even though she was 80 when I first met her, or 78,

which I'm older than Antonia now, when I first met her. And then, you know, Rosamund introduced me to them, and Rebecca West, I knew. All of them would suggest other ones. And you see, Rosamund also suggested one that nobody reads anymore now, whom I absolutely love, called Maisie and Claire. But there's an interesting thing love called Maisie and Claire but there's an interesting thing there Maisie and Claire became very involved with a poet called Charlotte Mew who killed herself by drinking a bottle of Lysol and all of that became was opened up to me the whole world of Charlotte Mew, Harriet the Month, the poetryshop, was an entire literary world that they all opened up to me, that they passed on to me.

Do you see what I mean? Yes, sure. And there was Storm Jameson who was alive. I went to see her in Cambridge. She was 93 and she was sitting in her chair. She said, I walk into Cambridge every day. And I come back and I sit in this chair and I have a little nap and I wake up and I can't believe I've woken up again.

And Virago was, you know, a very popular author with our listeners is Elizabeth Taylor. Oh, my heroine. There you go, who you were instrumental in keeping in print. Yes. And, I mean, I don't know if you'd started Virago at this point. Did you ever meet Elizabeth Taylor? No, she died very young.

And, you see, what was fascinating about her was I left Virago. I didn't leave it, but I went. It's too complicated a publishing story to tell you, but I also ran Chateau. I didn't run Virago at that point. I just continued to do... Once I went to Chateau, I just continued with the Virago Modern Classics for Virago.

And Chateau published Elizabeth Taylor. And Chateau always was a big pat because of the Hogarth Press. Yes. It seemed more sympathetic to women than Kate. I know. I mean, it's... Still is, actually, isn't it? Yeah, I think that's true

what do you think i'm often wondering what do you think would have happened to all these writers if you hadn't launched for rocker i mean do you think they would have just sunk into all the wood it's it's it's extraordinary how many great what we now see well i don't i don't think so because you see i can i'm part of a generation of women who started to get power in publishing because it's all to do with power. The fact that I started my own company and could do what I like is marginally different. But if you think about the rest of them, like Liz Calder

and there's hundreds of others who did the same in their own publishing houses and I think they would have done it within publishing in some way. They would have said, goodness me, I've got this on my backlist. And when, I'm fascinated to know, when you went to the book trade and said, we're republishing a series of old books by writers you may not have heard of, please support us. Did they look at you like, why would we do that? Well, there's various things to be said about that.

First, I never went near any bookshop. I was hopeless for sales, completely hopeless. And luckily I had Kate Griffin who came. And Kate just took over and she just did everything, you know, dump-ins, all that. I could do a dump-in because I did publicity. But I didn't like anybody to question, you know, say I don't like the look of that cover and I'd have hysterics.

Do you see what I mean? So you couldn't get me in there. Okay. And that was one thing. What was the question? Well, was the trade, was the book trade resistant or were they supportive? I've given my, I haven't even given, I sold it for a little bit of money, thank God, to the British Library. And it's open to everybody to read.

The abuse I got for starting Virago, there's no words to describe it. The press were the worst, obviously. They still are. But did booksellers respond warmly well once they were up and running nothing like the place absolutely and yeah i think and we had lovely reps helping us we were our first reps were something called writers and readers but they were having terrible troubles of their own because quite a lot of the people in alternative publishing at that time were quite radical and i like collected and things like that which i was not very collective to put it mildly terrible troubles of their own, because quite a lot of the people in alternative publishing at that time were quite radical

and they liked collectives and things like that, which I was not very collective, to put it mildly. And what was the first of the Virago modern classics, do you think, that made a real cultural impact, shall we say? I would definitely say the first one, which was Frost in May. OK. So it was game on straight away. Yeah, straight on. But later on, I honestly would say that if you were going to change the sense of what is great in English literature, it would be Elizabeth Taylor. And in that sense, Elizabeth Jenkins is not unlike Elizabeth Taylor.

These are novels in the tradition of English women's writing, which is very phenomenal. And which, famously, Saul Bellow was the main problem when Elizabeth Taylor was shortlisted for the Booker. We've told this story before. Have we? His immortal phrase at the Booker judges' meeting was to pick up a copy of Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont

rather disdainfully and say, I think I hear the tinkle of teacups. I didn't know that. Just as well. Returning to Elizabeth Jenkins, I'd like to read just a tiny bit here. There's a really lovely passage about the differences in taste

between Evelyn, the husband in taste between evelyn the husband and imogen the wife he has for instance a strong aesthetic sense for decoration the ways in which he wants to decorate a room and they move from she moves from discussing that into another into a discussion of their reading and books and um i think anyone who's listened to this podcast will find this very enlightening. Their reading was sometimes a source of disharmony. Imogen read so willingly and so much and where their tastes coincided, pleased him so greatly by her sympathy and intelligence

that it disappointed him when she declared she could not read Conrad or Herman Melville or the more political of Disraeli's novels. Worse, however, was her addiction to those lesser works of literature, exactly what you're talking about, Carmen, that combine thrilling emotion with a grave deficiency of common sense. Evelyn had stigmatised someone in court as, quote, a gay Lothario, and Imogen, seeing this reported in the newspapers, once sat down to read The Fair Penitent and was absorbed and charmed by this vehement, if unbalanced, work.

She thought it only right in the circumstances that Evelyn should read it himself. This he could hardly deny and he accepted it from her though with some misgiving. He sat up to read it and told her next morning that he had seldom been so glad to get to the end of anything. What miserable stuff, he exclaimed. But don't you think it interesting, she asked. I see it isn't great, but I thought it so intensely fascinating. My dear girl, he said, you must be out of your mind. For heaven's sake, read something worthwhile if you must spend all this time reading.

You know. Absolutely, that's very good, isn't it? But also, I looked up who wrote The Fair Penitent, do you know? No, not off the top of my head. It's a short story by Wilkie Collins. Wilkie Collins. It is a short story by Wilkie. So Wilkie Collins would have been seen as sensational and melodramatic

in a way that, say, Conrad and Melville were not. Just going back to White, Evelyn, who we can all sort of detest, but this is good. She doesn't let you detest him because he's incapable. There are more detestable people in the book than... Her minor characters, the Leapers, are... I don't think they're more detestable. I think she detests them more.

Yeah, that's possibly true. But here's Evelyn. Evelyn had not much time for sitting in the village pub, but he enjoyed an occasional half hour in the dark little back room of the Fisherman's Rest, where the windows were glazed with thick greenish panes that gave the light a watery quality, and where he, the postman, the station master, the neighbouring farmers and shopkeepers would sit in a contented silence, so companionable that it seemed to an outsider

that they must be having some wordless intercourse, like animals. To Mr Leeper, this is the man who likes to tear everything down and build modern houses, the fisherman's rest was a pokey little hole that made no worthwhile contribution to communal life. He explained to Evelyn one evening, as they walked home from it, his plans for a new public house in the development area. The green in front of it would be covered with chairs and tables and gay umbrellas, and here, not men only, but their wives and families would congregate, drinking Coca-Cola and ice cream sodas. What will they do when it's wet or cold? asked Evelyn. Mr Leeper mastered his displeasure and said, they will go inside.

I should concentrate on the inside if I were you, said Evelyn, kindly. I were you, said Evelyn, kindly. I think there's one thing one has to point out about Elizabeth Jenkins, which that piece that you've just read explains very well. Not all these writers were the same. No. And Elizabeth Jenkins is far more precise than Elizabeth Taylor. There's nothing that she misses.

No. Not the slightest little thing. You know, you can sort of see it's quite a surprising ending, but a wonderful... The ending's wonderful. Absolutely brilliant. How did she know? It's one of those brilliant literary things of an ending that seems inevitable

that you couldn't call three pages before you read it. No way. Because it's simultaneously surprising and completely satisfying, and yet you realise it's been seeded all the way through the book and you haven't read it. No way. Because it's simultaneously surprising and completely satisfying, and yet you realise it's been seeded all the way through the book and you haven't spotted it. It's sort of hiding in front of you. It's wonderful. It's a novel about two other things, really, too.

One is her descriptions of female beauty, of what women feel about other women, the hell with men in this regard. She's so precise of a woman who presumably wasn't very beautiful herself, Elizabeth Jenkins. Her observations of what it is to be a beautiful woman and the limitations she felt it placed on their lives

when that's all they had. Hilary Mantel has this great line, which I think is right. Imogen has been asked to play the ingenue and has missed the point where her husband changed and required her to change. It's that terrible feeling through the book of her trying to catch up. She's missed something and she can't get it back.

And meanwhile he is, as you say, indulging in this kind of... Because she's practical and has... You know, likes hunting and fishing, and it doesn't matter what she looks like. Yes, but think of all the other women in the book, as described by Elizabeth Jenkins. You can see her, like Hilary Mantel says, sitting on a mantelpiece... Yes.

..observing the women. The beautiful Zenobia, how she is described. Primrose, the wife of... Yeah. ..Paul. All of them, precise. Utterly precise. Yeah. how she is described. Primrose, the wife of Paul. All of them, precise. Utterly precise. She's observed women like no one else. Here we go, Carmen, this is Zenobia, the poet. This is one of the Austin-like lines you were reading earlier.

Zenobia wrote verse which, though it made no concessions to popular understanding, yet sold at a small profit rather than a dead loss. This was very extraordinary, and it gave Zenobia the importance of a celebrity and of a serious artist. She had another claim to fame. She was a beautiful woman, so beautiful that her beauty was admitted everywhere

as a matter of fact rather than opinion. I mean, it's writing of the best kind that manages to be so condensed yet tell you in the space of a few lines make you laugh, tell you a truth. Also just the writing about nature, light through the novel, it's exquisite I think. There's a stuff too. She was a spiritualist, Elizabeth Jenkins. Not again. Yeah, another one. You didn't tell me that. Where did you read that?

I found she wrote a book about a medium, David Douglas Hume, The Shadow and the Light, published in 19... Of course, that's why Rosamund recommended it to me. Yeah, exactly. Of course, they met at seances. So there's a sort of slightly... You know the Sylvia Townsend, Warner, Lolly Willows mode? It happens with Blanc.

She suddenly starts to look younger and she's filled with this kind of strange energy and what love can do, how it can kind of inhabit someone and transform them physically. She writes about that so brilliantly. I've always liked my Varago my Virago Modern Classics, to be flawed, you know, a little bit flawed. And I don't think that Blanche's transformation,

because of having fornicated with Evelyn, comes across. No, all of a sudden, this lumpen proletariat of a woman, though she's not a proletariat, she's a lumpen upper class. Lumpen bourgeois. Lumpen aristocrat. Well, I'm not an aristocrat. And all of a sudden, because she's fornicated with some... What's his face?

Evelyn. She's transformed. Her skin glows. Dad, I didn't... That's my one flaw. There's another question I want to ask you, Carmen, but before I get to it... I might actually ask you about that. Hang on. question I want to ask you, Karma, but before I get to it... No, I might actually ask you about that. Hang on.

John, I'm writing that down so I don't forget. How many times do you think you've read The Tortoise and the Hare? Three or four times. How has it changed over the years as you've read it? This time I thought it was much more brilliant than I did. Much more brilliant. I was amazed because I've lived in another world for 20 years, you know, French history and now English history

because I write history, social history or history or whatever it is. And I just couldn't believe how much better it was. Not that I ever thought it was bad. I thought it was wonderful. It was my favourite classic. But goodness me, I thought, well done, Carmen. Not a thought that, you know, not something I live with on an hourly basis.

I think it's a marvellous book. I'm going to ask you now, Carmen, I've said that I would ask you this. That listed listeners will be pleased that I ask this. So you were great friends with and were the publisher of Angela Carter. Yes. And you were also very great friends

with Anita Bruckner. Yes. And in the early 1980s, it's fair to say that they were perceived as opposite ends of the literary spectrum. One experimental, the other conservative with a small seat perhaps and i wondered whether uh whether you ever felt caught in the middle there or whether that needed

i certainly did angie wasn't in love with novels like the tortoise and the hare that's definitely the case but she did love some of my classics writers and helped me a great deal with them. I always remember some of them she would read. For example, Angie read Enid Bagnold and I said to her, Angie, I've come across a novel by

Enid Bagnold I just don't think I can publish but it's absolutely wonderful and don't ask me the title because I've forgotten it and i gave it to angie to read and what happens in the end is that enid bagnold introduces a black man and she describes him in a way that is simply unacceptable by everybody not just today but a thousand years ago you know it's the british empire it worse and she wrote me a wonderful thing saying even you can't go this far so she did read me and she loved Christina Stead

she loved some of them but certainly not that sort of novel I always thought that that Barbara Cummings Anita was the great patron of I mean didn't give me a Rosamund Lehman I can't remember although we couldn't publish Rosamund Lehmann? I can't remember. She loved Lehmann.

We couldn't publish Rosamund Lehmann. Collins wouldn't let me do it. But I think it would be Anita who gave me a Rosamund Lehmann to read. No, no, no, Weather in the Streets I'd always read because of having abortions. Everybody who had abortions read Rosamund Lehmann, The Weather in the Streets. That was all you had to go on, actually.

Anita dedicated Friend from England to you, didn't she? Yes, she did, yes. Was there ever a dinner party at which you... There would have been, but I think you're... I think Angie got crosser about the lack of acknowledgement she had during her lifetime, and she'd with people like Anita. She knew, she valued Anita but not Anita's vein of literary thought.

Yeah, okay. Fascinating. But strangely enough both of them were extraordinarily interested in, well say Anita was interested in art, it's ridiculous she was wonderfully interested in art but Angie's sort of interest in art was more exotic and also related to movies and cinema,

which, of course, was much more me. But, no, they were never rude to each other. Anita was never rude to anybody, which was her loss, actually. She should have been. And I don't think Angie was either. They never got at each other's throats. No. But Angie could be very, very cross about the big four.

You know, the... Name them. Well, I've told this story. Didn't I tell this story on the television? Angie was dying of lung cancer and she gave me the synopsis for her last novel called Adela, which is about Jane Eyre's, you know, the little girl Jane Eyre's looking after.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Anyway, I sent it upstairs to they who must be obeyed and I got a thing back, not an email, memo, saying this is obviously a minor work and we know that she's dying of lung cancer so we must be kind. Therefore, I permit you to offer something like £60,000. And I knew that Martin Amis had been offered £400,000 that very day. That's the sort of thing that drove him.

That's why I left publishing. But that's the sort of thing she knew about, and that made her cross. Yeah, OK. Do you see? But I think she makes a lot of money now, Angie, and I wouldn't have thought a lot of other writers do make a money.

We'll leave that. We'll leave that hanging. That would be true. I was just amused because about the paradigm of Virago Modern Classic, the famous line that you always use,

you wouldn't go below the Whipple line. Yes, that's still true. But I didn't see anything wrong with that but it became very famous I didn't see anything wrong with that. But it became very famous, didn't it? It did. And why?

This is the novels of Dorothy Whipple. Why, Carmen? Well, when the writer couldn't write, you know, there had to be some social reasons of great, great interest. For example, Jonathan Miller had a mother called Mrs Betty Miller. She was married to the psychiatrist. And Stevie Smith wrote a wonderful short story about Jonathan Miller and his mother,

pointing out... Well, never mind, I don't think I'd better tell that story. But... LAUGHTER Betty Miller wrote very, very... Not very good English, but her description of London during the war was wonderful. So I did publish one novel of hers.

That's above the Whipple line. Do you see what I mean? OK, yeah, all right. Because it looked... I read a Virago Modern Classic recently by Ellen Wilkinson about an account of the Jarrow March and the strikes. Yes, yes. Which, again, is not tremendously well written.

But it's absolutely fascinating. Oh, I often did that. Because there aren't any other novels by women written who took part in Jarrow. Exactly. So it had a sort of... Yeah, yeah. And you see something like The Spoons Came From Wars or idiosyncratic one-off books,

but not droning on like Woman's Own, which Dorothy Whipple did. I think we might leave it there. But is there anything else we want to say about The Tortoise and the Hare before we sign off? Do you think we've been explained enough to this machine, this podcast machine, how wonderful the novel is? Well, I hope so. Why should somebody read it here now, 2018?

To make you exquisitely happy because you've read a great piece of work. And also, I don't want to say it's like reading Charles Dickens because a lot of people don't like to read him anymore, but it tells such a story. I love to be told a story. I think anybody who's ever been in love and who's had love that's gone wrong,

that feeling that she creates of it doesn't matter what you do, you're losing this person and there's no way that you can change it. And she doesn't sentimentalise it. She doesn't make it into melodrama. She's true to each of the characters in their own way. You get enough of the inner motivation for each of the characters in their own way. You get enough of the inner motivation for each of the characters in the triangle for you not to despise them completely.

And whoever you think the tortoise and the hare are, in fact, it doesn't matter, does it? Because you can see it either way round. It doesn't matter, isn't she clever? Yeah, really. Just as a piece of work, rather like her beautiful descriptions of the Evelyn, one of the main metaphors in the book or symbols in the book

is that there are these badly silvered... I thought of that today and I thought, shall we discuss the silver plating? And he's desperate to have them plated and she likes the fact that they're tarnished and burnished and have a kind of a patina of age. Those details, that's what this book is like. It's like an incredibly perfectly realised object. Yes, it is.

I mean, from whichever angle you come into it, you're surprised and thrilled by just the craftsmanship. And its atmosphere, if you're going to be Austen-esque, which she is, is persuasion. Yeah. It's a persuasion novel. Right. Well, that's it.

Our mismatched race is now run. Huge thanks to Carmen, to our producer, Nicky Birch, and to our track sponsors, Unbound. You can download all 79 of our other shows, plus follow up all the links, clips and suggestions for further reading on our website batlisted.fm and of course you can still contact us on twitter facebook and boundless uh if you've enjoyed we have we always do so we can say oh don't say that because we i think some listeners want us to sound like we're enjoying it less anyway why why not leave a review with stars

if you feel so moved on iTunes or wherever else you get your podcasts from. Thank you for listening. We'll be back in a fortnight. Thank you, Carmen. Thank you. And Alexa. If you prefer to listen to Backlisted without adverts, you can sign up to our Patreon. It's www.patreon.com forward slash backlisted.

As well as getting the show early, you get a whole two extra episodes of what we call Locklisted, which is Andy, me and Nicky talking about the books, music and films we've enjoyed in the previous fortnight.