Backlisted - Told by an Idiot by Rose Macaulay

Episode Date: June 25, 2018

This week John and Andy are joined by super-librarian Nancy Pearl, possibly the only librarian in the world to have their own action figure, to discuss Rose Macaulay's gloriously eccentric family saga Told by an Idiot. John has been reading Sally Bayley's acclaimed bibliomemoir Girl With Dove, while Andy waxes lyrical over Andrew Sean Greer's Pulitzer-winning novel Less (and has a surprise in store...) This episode was recorded in the library at the recent Stoke Newington literary festival.Timings: (may differ due to variable advert length)9'04 - Less by Andrew Shaun Greer, 17'44 - *Unnamed Memoir* by Sally Bailey, 32'04 Told by an Idiot by Rose Macaulay* 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. Sounds alright. We should always record in here. Also. This is the library in the town hall. Yes.

So there's something to be said for recording at lunchtime rather than at the end of the working week. Don't you think? Yeah, definitely. Energy levels are quite... But I understand why we have to do it because there's nobody around so what are you what are you going to do while you're here i know you're not here for long are you what am i going to do while i'm here yeah i have barely looked at the program but i was hoping you would tell me that there's something brilliant to go on to after this dave haslam the dj yeah he has a

book out called Sonic Youth Slept on My Floor. And he's being interviewed here at two o'clock by Thurston Moore from Sonic Youth. Well, that does sound pretty unmissable. Everybody always has a good time here. Oh, I love this festival.

I was saying to somebody yesterday, this is not just my favourite festival in North London or even Greater London. It's my favourite festival in Middlesex. Ignoring the 1961 boundary change. Is it East End or West End? I think it's a really brilliant festival

and it does those for the community in Stoke Newton. It represents all sorts of voices that other literary festivals don't. And, you know, I'm allowed to come here and muck about and do things I wouldn't be able to do elsewhere. So I really love it. It's and do things I wouldn't be able to do elsewhere so I really love it it's great fun. I won't be able to stay this late but there's a fabulous live poetry

thing on this evening with a guy called Tim Wells who was one of the original zine publishers and he still has his poetry zine that he distributes for free or niche as it says on the front and it's still hand typed but he gets amazing gets Selina Godden and Adele Stripe and I mean really good people to write for him and he is Jewish

skinhead from up the road in Stamford Hill he's writing for Unbound do you remember Andy that the New English Library pulp novels of the late 60s, early 70s. Richard Allen. Richard Allen, skinhead. He's writing a London skinhead werewolf novel called Moonstomp. It's 20,000 words. He's already written it. It's brilliant. Hey, you know what? We could get him in

to talk about Richard Allen. What a backlisted that would be. Actually, he's brilliant talker. There was also, I got a book out on the couch. This, he's a brilliant talker. There was also, I got a book out on the... This is how we do it, actually. This is how the magic happens. Well, you remember the Redskins and that whole sort of... Yeah, it's all great.

Of course. Also, we got sort of an anthology of the books of that period, the New English Library period. And some of the titles are great. The one I particularly loved was called You Write Soft Lot. Was should bring it in actually because I mean if you read them at all there was this hell's angel series and they were yeah they were sort of they were perfect coming of age books for sort of also as they you know 10 11 12 year old boys and we passed them around the class at school and read them because they're really short but i'm particularly skinhead suede suede

head i mean also as they were as they go on they you know they're clearly the publisher has an eye to whatever youth cult might be happening at the time there's one i've got one called teeny bopper idol which is the which is not necessarily the most promising of uh starting points but he manages to get all the violence and sex in there as usual nancy what are you looking forward to seeing while you're here in stoke newton i was sorry to miss meg woolitzer she was last night yesterday i think i don't i think after this which i was very nervous about coming on with you guys absolutely you're right to me i know i know i know we'll be submitting our report obviously so. Full report afterwards.

So I have to sort of get over my nervousness. And then once this is done, then I can sort of take a calm look at what's happening. And make my choices. John, should we just let's... Should we do it? We'll just... It's even more seamless than it usually is. What are you reading this week, John? Hey, what?

No, come on. Whoa, she took my one line. Hello and welcome to Backlisted, the podcast that gives new life to old books. Today you find us behind the scenes of the Stoke Newington Literary Festival, cloistered in the library of its town hall, swapping bustles for bloomers

and preparing to ride our newfangled bicycles out of the 19th century and into the 20th. 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 we're joined today by a legendary figure in the world of books and reading but you're laughing nancy but that is factually accurate nancy pearl is perhaps the world's most famous librarian and surely the only one to have an action figure made in her honor in fact nancy's given me this action figure i'm just gonna this is a proper action figure it comes like a little star wars figure in a box and

she's got a cape on he's got a cave on you said you told me this is the third one right the third iteration amazing this is what it says on this action it's got nancy looks like nancy it's clearly modeled on you right closely i was digitized when an age of darkness comes a hero must rise nancy pearl librarian she stands against censorship anti-intellectualism and ignorance i mean warning choking hazard this is how did this come about many years ago i i was my husband and i were at a dinner party and the there's a company in seattle that makes action figures jesus action figure, Shakespeare, Jane Austen.

And he was telling us that people were writing in saying that the Jesus action figure was performing miracles in their lives, healing them. And I said, but, you know, really, the people who really perform miracles every day are librarians, which I believe. You're good. I know. I know know that was good and then somebody else said oh mark you should make a librarian action figure and somebody else said and nancy should be the model for that and and then the conversation went on to other things and everybody kept drinking at the dinner party and then we were driving home that night and my husband said his four favorite words to me, and I'm sure other husbands have their own four favorite words that they say, but my husband's four favorite words are, Nancy, think this through.

He said, do you really want to be a five-inch, non-biodegradable plastic action figure? I said, my favorite words are, oh, this will never happen. Don't even think about it. Brilliant. Brilliant. Well, I'm holding you in the palm of my hand here. Nancy was for many years the executive director of the Washington Center for the Book at Seattle Public Library. And her book recommendation, Radio Broadcast, made her famous first in Seattle and then nationally.

Building on this with her best-selling books, Book Lust, More Book Lust, and Book Crush, Nancy was named 2011 Librarian of the Year by Library Journal. In short, Nancy Pearl is the Doyenne of book recommendation. The book recommender's book recommender. And also, we should say that her novel, George and Lizzie, is out now.

Hey, you do it all. You literally read books and write books. Well, I wrote poetry, but I mean, I wouldn't call it my thing. Nancy, welcome to Backlisted. We are both absolutely thrilled that you were able to make time for us to do this. You know, a cursory glance at Wikipedia also. I've got the delicious news this morning that there is a bluegrass band called the nancy pearls in australia in australia but i don't think they're still i think that was a long time ago

but still it's good but isn't that good at one time where's my bluegrass come on people you must be out there get with it. Well, the book that Nancy's chosen for us to discuss, I'm guessing amongst many other things, is Told by an Idiot, Rose McCauley's original and satirical version of the family saga, which was first published in 1923 and re-released by Virago in 1983. Regular listeners will remember that I talked a bit about

one of Rose McCauley's other novels, The World by Wilderness, last year, which I absolutely loved. So for me, this was such a great excuse to revisit an author I was already keen to read more books by. Absolutely. And I hadn't read at all and now feel very, very thrilled that I've discovered her late in life. Late in life? It's been a long week, hasn't it? But before we transport ourselves back to Bloomsbury in the 1880s, Andy, tradition demands that I ask you the question, what have you been reading this week?

Thank you, John. I have been reading a novel by Andrew Sean Greer called Less, which has just been published in the UK. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction last year. It's about an unsuccessful writer approaching 50, who in order to escape from bad things in his life, travels around the world to a series of underwhelming literary events, several of which take place in rooms such as the one we are in now. And it seemed, first of all, I absolutely love the book.

It seems so appropriate to talk about it today. And also, almost like a gift from the cosmos, the writer in the book turns 50 in the course of the book. And I was reading it when I turned 50. And on the day I turned 50, I read the chapter in which he turns 50. And I was saying to Nancy earlier that I, it sounds so pathetic to say, but it is actually what happened. I both laughed and cried in this book.

It was such a blessing that this book should have fallen out of the skies to land in front of me at the period that it did. It's such a wonderfully funny, moving, wise book about the first half and then the second half of life. Is it a comic novel? Yes. I mean, the idea that there aren't any funny novels around at the moment. I was going to say,

you should have been submitted if it wasn't for the... But also, it seemed really amazing to me. I was really fascinated that this won the Pulitzer Prize. Yeah. I mean, it doesn't seem like... Well, I was the chair of the fiction jury for the Pulitzers this year. Get out of here!

Get out of the room! Are you serious? Totally. Amazing. Totally. And you knew I was going to talk about this book you did i did no oh my goodness we're andy and i are both assuming uh we are not worthy poses oh my goodness don't do that yes so that was um personally that was my favorite book of the year but you know that humorous novels are not normally Pulitzer fodder and so

my fear was when I read the book that maybe there wasn't enough heft to it and I was so happy when my co-judges two other women said um I mean we all felt the same way about that book and then the two other books that were the finalists. And genuinely, you've genuinely shocked me. Because now my head is the questions I'm falling over myself to ask you. I'm so fascinated, as I just said, I'm so fascinated that this book won the Pulitzer Prize because it didn't seem like the kind of big, hefty, important statement, 600-page blockbuster that would usually win the Pulitzer Prize, or I perceive as usually winning the Pulitzer Prize right yes and you know this was the year 2017 was a year of big books Lincoln and the Bardo um Sing Unburied Sing both both interestingly enough about the Unquiet Dead

yeah which I thought was um I love that phrase the the unquiet dead. And then here were these three books that we ended up, and, you know, in some awards, I've been on some award committees where you're just fighting. I mean, you're just, you know, nasty things get said between among the judges, but this was surprisingly, we just all sort of came to this agreement on the three finalists. The fortunate thing for British readers is Less has been published straight into paperback.

So it's out now. There were several things I thought were great about it. But actually, like all the great novels, and by the end of the book, I was almost holding my breath. Andrew Sean Greer, he never puts a foot wrong in this book tonally yeah when he wants to be funny he's really funny it's really moving when he wants to introduce an intellectual idea he does so in quite a light way but lets it float I mean it's it's a great novel plus he wore a bright red suit to the Pulitzer Awards. And if you look on Twitter, he's posted different pictures of himself.

And I have to say, having met him and interviewed him twice, he's just one of the most genuine, nicest people, writers that I've ever met. You know, one of the things that I loved about this book, John, you and I, because it could have been written for us right it's a it's it's full of brilliantly observed moments of literary mortification yes right there is a brilliant line I keep quoting this for and why there's a brilliant line where Les has flown to Mexico to take part in a literary panel event and his co-panelist drops out at the last minute. So the host says, it doesn't matter, I'll do it with you and I'll talk about my work first. And this is what happens.

And he introduces Les on stage after 20 minutes with the work. Let me turn to you now. We were talking backstage about mediocrity. Right. As his opening gambit. We were talking backstage about mediocrity. Right. As his opening gambit. So I'm just going to read a little bit now. This made me laugh repeatedly.

I can't believe Nancy. Actually, I'm a bullet surprise. Amazing thing. All right, okay. Arthur Less has been here for three days. He is in New York to interview famous science fiction author H. H. H. Manden on stage to celebrate the launch of H. H. H. Manden's new novel. In it, he revives his wildly popular Holmesian robot, Peabody. news and a great deal of money is jangling behind the scenes money in the voice that called less out of the blue and asked if he was familiar with the work of hhh mandan and if he might be available for an interview money in the messages from the publicist instructing less what questions were

absolutely off the table for hhh mandan his wife his daughter his poorly reviewed poetry collection. Money in the choice of venue, the advertisements plastered all over the village. Money in the inflatable pea body battling the wind outside the theatre. Money even in the hotel Arthur has been placed in, where he was shown a pile of complimentary apples he can feel free to take any time, day or night, you're welcome. In a world where most people read one book a year,

there is a lot of money hoping that this is the book and that this night will be the glorious kick-off and they are depending on Arthur Less. Why him? Why did they ask Arthur Less? A minor author whose greatest fame was a useful association with the Russian River School of Writers and Artists. An author too old to be fresh and too young to be rediscovered.

One who never sits next to anyone on a plane who has heard of his books. Well, less knows why. It is no mystery. A calculation was made. What literary writer would agree to prepare for an interview and yet not be paid it had to be someone terribly desperate how many other writers of his acquaintance said no chance half hour how far down the list did they go before someone said what about arthur less he is indeed a desperate man from behind the wall he can hear the crowd chanting something, surely the name HHH Mandan.

In the past month, Les has privately gorged on HHH Mandan's works, those space operettas which at first appalled him with their tin ear language and laughable stock characters and then drew him in with their talent for invention, surely greater than his own. Les's new novel, A Serious Investigation of the Human Soul, seems like a minor planet compared with the constellations invented by this man. And yet, what is there to ask him? What does one ever ask an author except, how?

And the answer, as Les well knows is obvious beats me i i cannot recommend this book strongly or enough or more enthusiastically is it wonderful it is out we are recording this on june the second and it is in the shops now brilliant It is out. We are recording this on June 2nd, and it is in the shops now. Brilliant. John, what have you been reading this week that Nancy may have judged worthy or unworthy? Interestingly, I don't think you'll have read it, Nancy, but I hope you will, because it's a memoir by Sally Bailey, who has done two,

backlisted for us as a writer, and also I can declare an interest. Her book The Private Life of the Diary was published by Unbound but this is a memoir about her childhood, a childhood memoir. Essentially the theme is reading saved her life. She grew up in a large dysfunctional family. One of her brothers died at a young age her mother was had suffered from terrible depression her aunt came to live with them and sally was uh was was bright and basically lived a kind of an imaginative life and the book is the story of that imaginative life fed initially by millie molly mandy books and then she progressed on to Agatha Christie which she read voraciously and then the book the two books that that that sort of the narrative is almost kind of constructed around Jane Eyre and David Copperfield I think the really brilliant thing that she does is she she never pulls back in a way that other biblio memoirs might you know Francisis buffett or even lucy magnum to give you the adult kind of uh nuanced in in

you know this is the view from now this is who i am now sally's obviously gone on to be an incredibly famous academic that you have to piece together the story um through the bits of the narrative through the evolving child consciousness and i'll read a little bit to give you a flavor of that where she internalizes these Jane Eyre in particular becomes a kind of an alternative Sally that this isn't just reading a book for the peace and quiet although it is that it's it's a man imaginatively inhabiting the world and interpreting the world and the things that she cannot control going on around her by her reading it's's very, very moving. Sally was turned herself into care. She gave herself into care at the age of 14 because she could just

felt that the family environment was, and it was obviously she went through very, very difficult things that she lived through. It's an amazingly optimistic book. She's the only, I think the only child in care from the West Sussex Council ever to make it to university. So in a way, her life is her triumph. But her courage, I think, in writing it in the way that she writes it is what makes it as memorable a book as it is. I'll just read a little bit. It's also incidentally very, very funny, particularly the mother who is a sort of dominant, deluded, but she never loses her affection for a mother and it's her mother that gets her to read you know she'll be reading proper literature not not just

children's books so this is the a really terrible supper where the father who she knows hardly at all called lorry comes back and they're taking the kids out for a supper the row went on for a while i pressed my ear to the door and i heard mum huffing and puffing like an angry wolf. And behind the door I could see her face steaming red and the man with no hair, that's her father, Laurie, steaming red, pacing up and down. By the time they came out it was dark and we were getting dressed to go to the beach hotel. Sally, put your dress on with the green collar and velvet hem. I don't want you looking like a rag muffin. Peter, tuck your shirt in for goodness sake. Right, coats on, do them up. We're going to a nice hotel. I want you to look your best.

Paul, go and wash your face. You've got a nasty black streak on your chin. The Beach Hotel was on the other side of the main road, behind a long stone wall. Around the front and sides grew dark elm trees and pines. Tall lords and ladies, said Mays. That's her grandmother, who also lives with them, who knew all her trees. I thought of Betsy Trotwood. She wouldn't have been happy with the name Beach Hotel. It was too far from the beach to call it that. No, Betsy Trotwood would have sent a cross note to the manager to let him know that he'd had any sort of sensible ideas in his head. He would have called the hotel Pine Tree Lodge or the Elms. If you had any practical ideas of life, sir, you would know that you don't call a thing what it is not. If you were any practical ideas of life, sir, you would know that you don't call a thing what it is not. If you were expecting a boy, you don't call him Emily. If you are, however,

you might call him David. When you're on more certain tames, you might call him Davy, but only after a lot of fuss and hullabaloo. In the name of heaven, there'll only be calls for disturbance and much complaint. And then I thought of Miss Marple. She would have been cross about the lack of a sea view. Well, really, Dolly, I do call this a bit much, don't you? I can't see beyond that dirty street lamp, let alone the beach. Miss Marple looked at her companion, who wasn't paying any attention at all, only pulling at the curtains. Can you see anything, Dolly dear? And did you bring your binoculars? Of course I did, Jane. Stop fussing. Here, let me have a look. If I can't see anything through these, then I'm going to insist that we are moved. This is distinctly not a sea view.

Now, Jane, move that chair. I want to get it closer to the window. Be a dear and tuck those curtains away for a moment. I need to get a proper look. Shabby, I call this. Quite shabby. Dolly lifted her leg firmly onto the chair by the window. The chair wobbled. Jane, will you give me a lift up? Come on, dear, like we used to at school. Hand over thumb and up now. Lift off. Mind my nylons. But the Beach Hotel had always been hidden from the sea,

behind a lovely sea wall, Mum said. Sussex Flint. The Beach Hotel was surrounded by Sussex and hidden by stone. I'd never seen the hotel from the front and I would never have dared to go up the white stone steps or through the glass door if mum hadn't been pushing me hard from behind. Mum, I felt a handbag digging into my back. Go on, in you go, straight ahead, down the hall. But the hall was dark and except for a few peach lampshades stuck to the wall, I couldn't see anything. I stopped and looked and blinked. Go on, Mum said from behind.

Hurry up. We haven't got all day. And so it goes on. And the kids are offered grapefruit and bread. That's their treat for the dinner. And then they behave so badly. They say, nobody eats grapefruit at night, Mum. It's for breakfast.

She says, right, you're all going home. And you're not even allowed cheese on toast. But it's it's it's a comic scene i can't but but it's what she you can see what she's doing and it's i mean there are passages that are heart-rending where she's particularly the jane eyre passages it's it's a brilliant bit of work i think and and so i'm very brave to do because there you you're the some people who've reviewed it have said you know you still don't really know what went on. And I'm sure that's the point.

It's kind of, you read it more like a, I mean, it really feels like a dense and beautiful work of fiction rather than simply I had a sad childhood. I think one of the things about, I mean, my own experience about writing a book about books, and Nancy, you've written books about reading and books about books, is I think our individual sense of what reading means and why reading is important is actually buried very deep within us.

And it's difficult sometimes with books about books, I think, to respect that someone doesn't always have the same experience of reading as you do. I don't know how you feel about that, Nancy. Yeah, I mean, I've always felt that no two people, in fact, read the same version of any book. You know, we've read three different versions of Told by an Idiot, and that our lives inform our reading in this very wonderful, particular, individualistic way. And Paul Auster, the American novelist and essayist,

has an essay where he says, in his books, he believes that his books are a collaboration between the reader and the writer, and that he deliberately leaves space for the reader in all of his books. And I think that that is, I mean, that's a wonderful, to me, that's really the wonderful part about reading, is that we're in a collaboration with the writer, I think. is that we're in a collaboration with the writer, I think. It's such a great way to describe it because, I mean, you know, we often talk about rereading as well, which is so,

it's such a profound experience because you, you know, it's difficult when people ask you if you've read a novel, and what you can remember of a novel is so small usually. It's flavors and scenes and kind of, and sometimes you discover that there are scenes in a book that you that aren't there at all yes so there's a wonderful book by a book i hope we end up doing on here one day there's a wonderful book by nicholson baker called you and i about john uptight where he does a fantastic thing in that book where he he wrote this book about upike and his love of Updike. And he says to the reader at the beginning, I'm going to do no research for this.

And what I'm going to do is I'm going to quote from Updike. And then I'll double check when I finish and see if I got it right. And it's full of footnotes where he said, no, look, I was completely wrong about this. This isn't even by Updike. But the relationship that you have with the writer, the sense of what the writer means to you is different for for all of us right why nancy why it seems there are many books about books being yeah written published and even read at the moment surprising why why do you think people are so interested in it at the moment well do you think so many people are or do you think people are so interested in it at the moment? Well, do you think so many people are,

or do you think it's just a small group of the same people who are reading all of the Biblio memoirs? I think you probably have a point. I certainly think it's something that we're fascinated by. Yes. But some of those books seem to speak to people. I mean, I don't know. My pet theory is that, which I think lots of people, my pet theory, a theory that I think has some weight,

is as everything moves digitally, the sense of, and we are time poor, quote unquote, the desire for the object, not just the object, but a nostalgic sense of what the object might have meant when you had time to read it, is probably um pushing its way forward i mean i think there are there are some books that you know that are more list books but i mean if you look at what sally's doing and maybe to an extent what lucy is doing

they're very much memoirs of childhood um and their ways of of that if you are a child that reads a lot it is actually impossible just as we were saying to disentangle your sense of the world from your reading because that's often what's you know your sense of of your developing sense of your own uh understanding i mean sally in in in um girl with dove is i mean she sets herself up as a detective because she'd read all of Agatha Christie. And of course, what you are doing is trying to work out what's happened in your childhood, the overheard glimpses of conversation and things that adults say that don't make any sense and things that you know are somehow that feel wrong. So in a way, that seems to me a kind of entirely natural thing to do I suspect that you know as usual Andy it's publishing you know all the books about books seem to be doing well who could do one of those for us oh yeah I mean your book is

totally different your book is a completely different it happens to be about books but it's much more to do with um euro reading dangerously is yeah it's it's a challenge but it's much more about how literature at a certain point in one's life why it's it's a great thing to to welcome it in and to and it and to keep welcoming it in i hope i love your nancy your is it your 50 page rule yes about yes i mean andy as know, is even more hardcore than that. He won't admit to anyone not finishing a book. I do, and they're nice in a loving way.

But I'm older. So I have less time, so I have to stop earlier. I sat next to John Updike just by chance on an airplane. I mean, just by chance. by chance on an airplane. And I mean, just by chance. And it took me a while to figure out who he was, because I thought he was Russell Baker, the American humorist, who also had a very craggy face. But what I remembered about John Updike was that he was an early fan of Ann Tyler. And I was an early fan of Ann Tyler's as well. So I mentioned when I finally figured out who it was, because I kept looking over to see what he was reading and trying to look at his briefcase,

hoping there were initials, because he was reading a biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald. And so when I finally figured out who he was, you know, and he saw me looking at the book, and he said, he said, I'm writing an article for the New Yorker. And then I knew it wasn't Russell Baker because I knew it was John Updike. And, and so he said, oh, by the way, I'm John Updike. And so I said, I know, which was really great. But then I got to recommend Bud Schulberg's book called The Disenchanted, But then I got to recommend Bud Schulberg's book called The Disenchanted, which has a small section or part, I think, that F. Scott Fitzgerald is a character in that,

which he said he had not read or he should reread. So that was pretty exciting. I've told you my Cormac McCarthy story, haven't I? Go on. You sat next to Cormac McCarthy? No, it was worse, much, much worse. I was at the, you know, American weddings go on for days. So Gary Fiske, John, editor at Knopf, was getting married.

He'd invited me to the wedding. The next day, his pal, Morgan Entrichen, was hosting the lunch party. I didn't know that many people there. I noticed there was a really quiet-looking guy standing in the with a kind of a fairly nondescript jumper on. And I went and just sort of struck up conversation. And we had a perfectly nice conversation about how much I enjoyed being in Tennessee, never been before. I said, are you a friend of Morgan's? He said, I'm a writer and Morgan has published me in the past. I said, great. Well, anything do you think? I mean, I'm English.

I reasonably well read anything. He said, I don't know. You might know a book called All the Pretty Horses. So I did have my... I mean, I just, I was, as you know, rarely speechless. But I said, I called Matt McCarthy. He said, yeah, that's me. I said, I'm very much a fan of your work.

No, no, I found it really, really difficult. I said, I've just got to go and get a drink. Let's pick this up again shortly. I've got something here, you know, as we move into talking about Told by an Idiot and talking about Rose McCauley. I've got an essay here from Rose McCauley's book, Personal Pleasures.

And Rose McCauley wrote a lot of books. We will come on to this. But I have a – and here is her essay on reading. Oh, great. Oh, wow. This book is long, long out of print. I have an edition which was republished in the 60s, and it hasn't been in print since then.

So I'll just read a tiny book from her essay, Reading. And this is a book personal pleasures it's it's uh it's things that Rose McCauley in the 1930s I think some of these would have been written for punch and uh so they're things that that made her happy essays include astronomy canoeing Christmas morning not going to parties doves in the chimney ignorance and there's the one on reading

my humble dwelling room becomes a salon where I receive without even troubling to rise or bow an extraordinary miscellaneous crowd or rabble of persons chattering in all tongues on all topics in verse, in stately prose, in strolling colloquial late Stuart slang, in round and booming Johnsonian, in demure and

ladylike Austenian, in sly and delicate Proustian, in gay modern English and French. Many are pompous, foolish, absurd, many have wit, Many have ideas. Many have neither. What is the extraordinary pleasure that we derive from this pastime? Why do we forget everything for it, feel by it transported, enlarged, enslaved, freed, impassioned, enlivened, soothed, drugged, delighted, distressed, entertained, sharpened in wits, ennobled in soul, winged in imagination, gratified in humour, stirred to pity, rage, love, rapture, enthusiasm, creation, zeal for learning, infinite zest and curiosity for life i do not know nor anyone and in the end it wears down our eyes never intended for this strange and crabbed use

so that we have to read through discs of magnifying glass as to our health quote the man whom about midnight when others take their rest thou seest come out of his study meagre-looking, squalid and spalling. Doth thou think that plodding on his books he doth seek how he shall become an honester man? There is no such matter. No indeed, concludes Rose McCauley. Still, he has enjoyed his reading. That's brilliant. This is a wonderful wonderful book anyone who's listening to this now, Personal Pleasures by Rose Macaulay. But that whole section could have come from Told by an Idiot.

Really could. I mean you know there's I have a section here where Imogen is, that's how you pronounce it, where she's talking about a teenager, Imogen was quite content. She was, as always, busy writing stories and sunk deep in her own imaginings, which were still of a very puerile sort. Imogen read a great deal, but was not really intelligent. It was as if she had not yet grown up. She knew and cared little about politics or progress. Bernard Shaw was, to her, merely the most enchanting of playwrights. She was happy, drugged with poetry, her own and that of others, and adventurous dreams.

She was a lanky slip of an undeveloped girl, light-footed, active as a cat, but more awkward with her hands than any creature before her. So it's getting to this reading part. At once a romantic dreamer and a tomboyish child, loving school, her friends, active games, bathing, climbing, reading and writing, animals, W.B. Yates, Conrad Kipling, Henry Seaton, Merriman, Shelley, William Morris, Stevenson, a Shropshire lad, meringues, battleships, marzipan, Irene Van Brew, B-R-U-G-H, Granville Barker, and practically all drama. Hating strangers, society, drawing room meetings, needlework love stories, people who talked about clothes, sentimentalists, and her Aunt Amy. I mean, isn't that – Her dreadful Aunt Amy as well.

Her dreadful Aunt Amy. Her dreadful Aunt Amy in this book. She's a great character. We should sort of start talking about this book in a bit more clarity. But that reading thing is so interesting. And you know the point she makes about glasses. There's a book I love called The Glass Bathyscape by Alan McFarlane, which basically posits that without glass,

that the reason that Western civilization, the Renaissance, pretty much everything happened was the discovery of glass. He said if the Chinese had had glass, in fact, they had it and they didn't have much use for it because they liked porcelain. You know, they were so far ahead at one point in terms of civilization, they would have been uncatchable. But because we liked wine, the Romans liked wine, and that we developed, because he said, just one example being

spectacles that it doubled the life of a scholar so you know had you been working by candlelight by tallow lamp with just your own eyes trying to read and write by the age of sort of 40 you were you were absolutely finished whereas glasses spectacles which were developed in the early in the 14th century and and he goes on to make scientific retorts and there's a whole argument. It's a really interesting book. But it does make me think that we read, but we do ruin our eyes doing it.

As a recent convert to spectacles, I'm all for them. They've allowed me to carry on reading so um anyway nancy back to back to rose rose mccauley told by an idiot where were you when you first found this book or this author well like both of you i worked in a bookstore, a wonderful bookstore called Yorktown Alley Bookstore in Tulsa, Oklahoma. And in 1982 and 83, Dial Press, the American publisher, part of Doubleday at that time, brought out the Virago books that were published in England. And they, rather than that green cover that all the Viragos had here, they did them in a very distinctive black cover with a painting. And we got, because we were that kind of bookstore, we got all of the Virago books.

And I just went on a tear reading them. And I, so it was 1983. I'd gotten a master's degree in history, with a sort of emphasis on British history. And so I was, you know, very interested in in that. And so all these great British writers that I had not somehow had heard of, but not read, but told by anot was one of my absolute favorites. And so reading it again, now almost 30 years or 40 years, almost a long time later, it was an entirely different book for me. And, well, I said earlier that Rose McCauley wrote many, many books. One of the things I was surprised about, about actually how few of her books are are easily available now she's the author of some it's something 23 or 24 novels yes and probably an

equivalent number of books of non-fiction poetry she was a brilliant essayist books of travel writing studies of milton em forster history posthumous volumes of letters very well known in her day one of the great literary lionesses of the late 19th to mid-20th century most famous probably for her novel her last novel the towers of trebizond which we'll come on and talk about in a bit but actually there's only three or four of her books currently in print or seemingly in print since she died i mean uh which is fascinating i think if you'd said to somebody 30, 40 years ago that she would become a backlisted author,

they would say, no, that's ridiculous. She was a best-selling, famous, well-respected figure in British literary life. It's interesting. And she was slightly disparaged, wasn't she, by Virginia Woolf, stringy old Rose McCauley. They had a slightly... They were frenemies. Not that they would have called it that.

But they were, weren't they? It is the mystery of... I mean, you can sort of see... I haven't read enough of Rose McCauley to judge, but you can see that she's not maybe expanding the form in the way that Virginia Woolf was doing. She doesn't fit as neatly into it, one sense of the evolution of the literary novel as Virginia Woolf.

But, boy, if you want to know about what happened between 1880 and 1923... While sending up the generational saga at the same time, it's a good trick to be able to pull off. It's an amazing trick to pull off. And also through the core of the book, you can feel that there is this sort of, she's evolving this philosophy of the idea that the past is,

it's a great hymn to longue durée, isn't it? It's the idea that actually, if you take a long perspective. So it's a book that's just fizzing with detail, but also it does have a really interesting core. Although she's sending up the family saga, you do end up really caring about the characters rather more than you.

It's really entertaining, considering that, in fact, the characters spend relatively little time talking to one another, interacting or affecting one another's lives, right? Yes. I mean, I think this is a book where the main character is england and and the characters are merely there because she felt oh i need some people in this book and i mean you know i mean oh i'm writing a novel right i need some people, I'll read the blurb because the blurb on this

is from the Virago Modern Classics edition. This sets up the book really well, actually, I think. So in terms of the characters and in terms of what you're saying, Nancy, it is shortly before Christmas in the year 1879, the 42nd year of Queen Victoria's reign, when the curtain rises on the Garden family, on Mr Garden, a clergyman of many denominations about to lose his faith for the umpteenth time, and on his selfless devoted

wife, and on their six children about to be launched on the adult world. There is Victoria, a pre-Raphaelite beauty intent on marriage. Morris, shaking his fist at the injustices of the world. Stanley, a follower of Ruskin and Morris, doing good as radical fashion dictates. Irving, a lusty young capitalist, and Una, born for happy marriage and maternity. All are watched from the sidelines by their sister, Rome. Detached, intelligent, urbane, she observes three generations of her family strut and fret their hour upon the stage. To her, their sound and fury signify nothing. But to us, the memory of Rome's one brief love affair strikes the final note of truth, defiantly affirming that it is better to have loved and lost.

That's one of the best blurbs we've ever read on Backlisted, actually. It's an absolutely brilliant blurb, isn't it? Do you think Carmen Khalil wrote that? I don't know, but somebody brilliant wrote that. Well, they took this original blurb and added and tweaked it enough so that this is not the same blurb as that, but it contains a lot of what's in that one. It just says, shortly before Christmas in the year 1879, the curtain rises on the Garden family.

Mr. Garden is selfless wife and their six children, whom we watch grow up, fall in love, marry and take on the world. But that's awful. That's kind of been sanded down. Yeah, yeah, totally. Now, I was saying how hard it is to get hold of some of Rose McCauley's books. And in fact, we were talking about, Nancy, when we were arranging for you to come and do this. Yes, that I couldn't find it. I was saying, well, maybe we should do The World My Wilderness because I love that book so much, even though we've already talked about it.

And you were saying you found it hard to get hold of, right? Well, not in time for the podcast, but here's my gift to you. Oh, thank you. You gave me the action figure. I'm giving you a copy of The but here's my gift to you. Oh, thank you. You gave me the action figure. I'm giving you a copy of The World My Wilderness. Thank you. Which I now just buy habitually whenever I see it so that I can give it to people. Although it has just been republished by Virago, so it is in print at the moment.

What was interesting about reading The World My Wilderness and then going back to Told by an Idiot is even though there is 35 years between 37 years between them yeah 37 years between them macaulay who wrote no fiction for 10 years from 1940 to 1950 having written basically a novel every 18 months from 1906 or something onwards the great love of her life died and she lost her library, imagine that, in an air raid during the Second World War and all his love letters. And there is a short story called Miss Anstruther's Letters, which you can find in a volume that's out of print now,

again Virago, called Wave Me Goodbye, which was published in 1989 a collection of women's writing about world war ii which has rose mccauley in it elizabeth taylor elizabeth bowen barbara pym stevie smith rosamund loman jean reese etc etc and that story is absolutely wonderful and heartbreaking but clearly mccauley lost her lost her will for fiction because she had other things that she needed to try and address. She writes, but she moves into non-fiction for several years. What was interesting about comparing Told by an Idiot with The World by a Wilderness

is they are recognisably the same author, but The World by a Wilderness is unquestionably written with the benefit of hindsight yeah it has that kind of list making joie de vivre that we've heard in the bits that we've read already but she also knows when to lean back a bit more and she's writing about darker things although there's some darkness in this book too, in Told by an Idiot. Yes.

I mean, the other thing about this book, it seems to me, is it's very, it is, I think A.N. Wilson in the introduction says, you know, it's saved from straight-she-like bitchiness by the fact that she does like some of the characters a lot. Although her father,

the father in the book, is a sort of an absurd man whose faith keeps changing. I mean, she struggled with her faith as well, I think. But didn't turn her back on it. I mean, I think that Virginia Woolf straight, there was a definite thing that the Victorians were just

buffoons and their pomposity and their kind of world domineering arrogance needed to be perpetuated. She's much more nuanced in her view of it. Also there's a wonderful thing in Told by an Idiot a recurring joke but not just a joke, a recurring

theme of the idea of things being cyclical. Things come round again, there's nothing new under the sun. And there's a little section here here very near the beginning of the book uh this is in the victorian section youth it was said at this period as at other periods before and since youth in the last quarter of the 19th century is broken with tradition it is no longer willing to accept forms and formulae only on account of their age. At what stage in history youth ever did this is never explained. It is set out on a voyage of inquiry and finding some things which are doubtful and others which are

insufficient. It's searching for forms of experience more in harmony with the realities of life and knowledge. These are the actual words of a writer in the 1920s, but they were used in effect also in the 1870s and many other decades. And that exact phrase, that formulation of a description of the young crops up in every section in a cumulatively hilarious way. That's one of the things that I love about how we write. Perhaps we should say that the book is divided into sections. It starts, it's Victorian. Fantasy Eccler Victorian Fantasy Eccler

Edwardian and then Georgian which is essentially the kind of the accession of George V is it? It also runs up to, deals with incredible economy and moves on

from. World War. Yes I marked that one too give us a little give us a give us a little bit of that nancy i'm not going to go on about the first world war i thought that was a remarkable thing to be writing in 1923 she suffered quite badly during the war the georgian period in the book is divided up into three periods circus smash and debris and you've got the beginning of smash this is the beginning of smash all there um it is enough if not too much to say that there was a great and dreadful war in europe and that nightmare and chaos and the abomination of desolation held sway for four

horrid years all there was of civilization whatever we mean by that unsatisfactory undefined relative word suffered irretrievable damage. All there was of greed, of cruelty, of barbarism, of folly, incompetence, meanness, valor, heroism, selfishness, littleness, self-sacrifice and hate, rose to the call in each belligerent country and showed itself for what it was. And then it goes on from there. It's amazing. Yes, I agree. Amazing. I also read The Towers of Trebizond.

Now, you've read that before, haven't you? I love The Towers of Trebizond. I have to say that the newest American edition from Farrar Strauss has a terrific cover, a kind of comic cover, of my Aunt Dot sitting on the camel taking her tea which I think is a very come hither cover. One of the most

famous lines of late 20th century literature Take my camel dear, said my Aunt Dot, as she climbed down from the animal on her return from high mass. That's right there with earthly powers isn't it and the uh you know oh the bishop and his catamount right i found towns of trebizond

very interesting first half is a bit of a romp second half is not a romp at all and becomes again thought this was amusing john disfigured by catholicism as you said about the end of the affair but it's not disfigured by Catholicism but the extent to which it is willing to move from the register of a romp with a camel to a serious discussion about comparative religious belief mysticism and adultery in particular which has that final chapter final chapter just like the thing that you were just reading nancy where she suddenly switches into a mode that could have been lulled into a false sense of thinking well she can only write in this slightly larky way and then when she wants to she can plumb these real depths of restraint know. My experience of reading Towers of Trebizond was that every time I read it,

I change my opinion about whether Laurie is ever male or female. Ah, yeah. You know, and I think when I first read it, I thought Laurie was male. And then I, now, the second time, female. And then I went back to male. I think the last time I thought Laurie was male. But that's the thing that's a fascinating thing about macaulay though you know that in in the world my wilderness the young girl

barbary dennison the heroine behaves very like a boy in told by an idiot yes yeah the gender issues are never far from the surface I've got Sarah Lafanna whose biography of Rose McCauley here and she makes the point quite early on that in most of Rose McCauley's novels there is a female character or heroine with a

boy's name. And here there's at least two, Rome and Stanley. Brilliantly the children are all named after the particular faith that the father is going through at the moment it's fabulous Rome and Una because Ronis becomes a Unitarian

Irving I thought you'd find this funny she wrote to a friend I think about Graham Green's The End of the Affair which we talked about last time and this is what Rose McCauley wrote. I found it disfigured by Catholicism.

She did say that. The people are all rather low types and not convincing. And the religion in it, such as it is, is brought down to a very trivial plane by two rather absurd miracles at the end, which are supposed to show the heroine's sanctity, though there are no other signs of this. What a mess his mind must be. Nothing in it scarcely but religion and sex,

and these all mixed up together. And on being invited to one of Green's parties, she wrote, on Tuesday I am bidden to a party at Graham Green's. Wouldn't it be interesting if at that party I was surrounded by GG characters? Evil men, racing touts, false clergymen, drunken priests, and with GG in the middle of them talking about sin. That's as good a description as green. And I love green, but, you know. Brilliant. The character of Rome is sort of changed by the fact that the brief,

not very easy love affair of hers is, without giving away the spoiler, but it does. He dies. She never remarries. Sorry, everybody. But what it turns her into is, I think the two most interesting characters in the book are the mother and Rome. They're kind of the heroines because the mother is there's a brilliant moment it's my favorite i think my favorite moment in the book where he comes back and he's decided to go back to catholicism and she just says no no i'm not no

more i've had enough i'm not and she said i'm i just you know i've been with you all i kind of feel some things and other things. I don't, it's just, you know, and he said, is that a problem for you? Because she's amazing. She's amazingly selfless and wonderful. And towards the end of the book, Rome, who I think is the daughter that most resembles her, say how much she misses her mother. Again, I won't give that spoiler away, but they're connected in more than just temperament.

But I was just going to read, in her absolutely heart, and this is, I think, this is a brilliant, this is Rose McCauley at her best, being both philosophical and very, very funny and moving the story on. This is an exchange between Rome,

the cool, monocle-wearing, slightly sexually ambiguous ambiguous I think you never know yeah um modern sort of bordering on cynical but I think she's basically just deeply intelligent and can't stand reductivism of any kind but she's a mistress of paradox with the slightly glib Denman Crofts, who is sort of a literateur and a playwright. So she says, I wonder, Rome mused, if posterity will really be so diligent and so intelligent as their ancestors seem to think. People always say they write for posterity when they're not appreciated at the moment. They seem to imagine posterity as a smug and spectacled best scholar, spending its time delving among the chronicles of wasted years

in the reading room of the British Museum and hailing with rapture the literary efforts of their ancestors. Whereas I, said Devon, see posterity as a leaping savage, enjoying nameless orgies among the ruins of our civilisation, but not enjoying literature. Possibly even there will be no posterity. The debacle of our civilization, and it's obviously too good to last, may mean the debacle of the world itself. I hope so. Abba, le posterity, I say. Who wants it? I scorn to write for it,

or to plant horrible little baby trees for it, or to suck up to it in any way whatsoever. or to suck up to it in any way whatsoever. Crude and uncultured savage. Vive l'Age de Oui. And I, said Rome, see posterity as it being precisely like ourselves. It will read every morning in its newspapers, just as we do, that our relations with France are strained, that so many people have been murdered, born, divorced, married,

that such and such a war is in progress, that such and such a law has been passed, or speech made, or book published, and it will know, just as we do, that none of it matters in the least. I've no grudge against posterity. Let it have its little day. Oh, that's so wonderful.

I've got a copy of a book here, the first biography of Rose McCauley, by Constance Babington Smith. And there is in the back an appendix called The Pleasures of Knowing Rose McCauley where she asked writers who had known McCauley for their I'm just going to give you a couple of them by writers who have a place in Batlisted's heart here is Rosamund Lehman writing about The Ple pleasure of knowing Rose McCauley. She says, she wrote, she was forever in transit, physically, intellectually, spiritually, energetically, not eating, not drinking or sleeping, so it seemed. Yet such was her transparency and charity

of spirit that she seemed universally available to her friends. She has been called childlike, but to me she suggested youth, a girl of that pure eccentric English breed which perhaps no longer exists, sexless yet not unfeminine, naive yet shrewd, and although romantic, stripped of all veils of self-interest and self-involvement,

I cannot write of her tenderness and understanding of the grief of others, fruit of deep personal suffering triumphantly surmounted. No one had better cause than I to know and value it. Her last letter arrived the morning before the morning of her death. One of the things it discussed was, quote, our corrupting profession. I was meditating on her incorruptibility when the news reached me. With the first piercing pan came the thought, we've all just seen her, just been talking to her.

How like her to slip off and run lightly, unhampered, without backward glance, straight into her death, straight through it. What a wonderful thing and also i've got here one of the other writers recording his impressions of rose mccauley as only he can anthony pole not long after the war we gave a party and the french husband of our daily came in to help wash the glasses. Who was the lady who chained her bicycle to the area railings he asked afterwards rightly suspecting that he was on the track of some new form of English eccentricity. Rose was known to be addicted to this practice somehow reminiscent vicariously through a machine of the former demonstrations of militant suffragettes. He was told her name. Ah, he said, if only I had known you were going to invite Miss Macaulay, I could have brought Potterism with me and she could have signed it. After hearing who she was,

the fettered bicycle seemed to cause him no further surprise. His familiarity with her novels well suggests the wide range of her literary popularity and i i felt that that idea of the wide range of her literary popularity this is one of those occasions on backlisted i loved told by an idiot i loved uh the world my wilderness i loved with a few reservations the towers of trebizond but But no one book does justice to the fecundity of the personality of the writer involved here. Yeah, it's interesting those are both brilliant memories of her. You do get the feeling that she was, she feels like somebody who would be,

I mean, you'd really want to spend a day with listening to and talking to. There's a sort of generosity in her kind of attitude to her characters. There is a naivety in there as well. She writes naivety incredibly well, the image and character that we've already discussed. One of my favourite passages is when they get onto the circle line and shout poetry out with her brother, kind of loudly. And there's some sneery girl who said

well what's the point of doing that it just goes around and said but it's that's the whole point that it goes around you know well no a train is for getting from a to b she's sort of you know well obviously you've lost the point she's very good on children although yeah very not very she's very down on marriage marriage very down on marriage. That's a whole, I mean, the thing is, we've got two hours to go, right? There's a whole other topic, the attitude to marriage. Nancy, you were talking to me earlier, you do lots of, you know, you're the librarians,

you're the super librarian, and you recommend books professionally. Yes. You were saying something fascinating to me. You've listened to quite a few episodes of this thing. I have indeed. Which we are delighted and astonished by and you identified for me what you felt our respective reading tastes were well so it seems to me that people when when they are looking for something to read what they want to do is is re-experience a pleasurable reading from the past. I mean,

they don't want, it's not that they're looking for a similar, they're not looking for a plot, the same plot at all. They're looking for those other, I call them doorways to get into a book. And so when I think about Andy's reading and the books that he talks about at the beginning, I think that what Andy reads for or is most interesting in discovering in a book is the prose, a quality of the prose, and the people. It's the three-dimensionality of the characters, this sort of sense of coming to know them. And a good way to find books, a really sort of quick and dirty way of finding books that have that focus or that big doorway of the people is to look for books in which the title is the name of the character.

So there you have Les. That brings you back to Les. It brings you back. Brilliant. Oh, you're good. I mean. Sabbath theater. Sabbath theater.

Yeah. About a boy, Nick Hornby. I don't know how you feel about that, but. I like it. You know, that was, you know, there it is. So it's either going to be a character. Patrick Melrose. Yes.

If we refer to all five of those as Patrick Melrose, you're spot on. So there's that. And John, what I think that you are really interested in and what you love is place is, you know, that whole sort of sense of, of the place almost being like, you know, all those books, the place is another character in this book, all that kind of thing. that kind of thing but you know i mean all those books that you that you talk about about you know those things that those way out of print books that you talk about that are all about the place and the time and even this passage that you read from the biblio memoir yeah i mean it was about the beach house in a way you know and that's sort of bringing that scene to life absolutely and the names yeah names and names of places right yeah yeah never use your powers for evil we're gonna have to wind up in a minute um i want to read one i want to leave the last words for rose mcculley i've got another i've got another tiny thing from this wonderful book of essays called personal

pleasures as i said earlier one of the essays is about ignorance the pleasures of ignorance and it's broken into subsections and the essays is about ignorance the pleasures of ignorance and it's broken into subsections and the second one is ignorance of current literature so I'm just going to read that because it seems appropriate no I am afraid I have not read that either it's good you say I'm sure you're right but I have no time for all these novels and things I cannot imagine how you make time for them You find they're worth it They do not look good Not that I see them

but they do not sound good from the advertisements and reviews Not that I read advertisements and reviews I like to keep myself clear from all this second rate stuff Am I not afraid of missing something good? Well, I feel that the danger of reading something bad outweighs that risk yes as you point out i contribute to current literature myself but then i scarcely read my own stuff and the point is i get money for writing it

if anyone gave me money for reading that would be a different matter that is brilliant um so unfortunately that is all we have time for we'll end resisting generalities as rose garden rome garden would have it all generalities about human beings and nonsense anyway but i just have to draw your attention very quickly to this week's unbound project worth backing it's jonathan meads pedro and Ricky Come Again, a collection of the inimitable Mead's writing drawn from the last 30 years. Mead's on the page is even more eclectic, splenetic and erudite than he is on TV. If essays on cliché, the ubiquitous abuse of the word iconic, the inexcusability of nationalism, New Ageism,

Victorian artist studios, John Lennon shopping lists and the wine we call Black Tower. If that sounds appealing, you'll surely want to make this book happen. Remember, if you pledge for it or for any of the other 359 Unbound projects currently live on the site, you will get free postage on that pledge by entering the special code PEARL as you check out. And if you'd like to support Backlisted by sponsoring the show, getting your brand product heard

by thousands of lovely, intelligent, deeply well-read people, then visit our new website, Backlisted FM, and hit the sponsor button to find out more. So thank you to Nancy. I'm sorry this podcast is only five hours long. Thank you, Nancy. Thank you to our producer today, Alana Chance.

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