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folioSEPTEMBER 2014

One of the many wonderful articles to be found in this issue of folio is by Sue Clifford and Angela King, founders of the conservation group Common Ground. The authors argue passionately that diversity should be at the heart of any healthy environment. Well, this issue is certainly diverse, and that is the central joy of The Folio Society – the abun-dant, rich field of ideas which make up our programme.

Marking the centennial anniversary of the start of the Great War, historian Lyn Macdonald undercuts the popular rose-tinted view of the ‘Tommy’, offering us a far more ribald and assorted reality. The great Shakespearean editor, Stanley Wells, shows us the full range of the Bard’s learning. Lavinia Greenlaw, fresh from her epic bout of reading whilst chairing the judging panel for the inaugural Folio Prize, reflects on her own multifarious responses to fiction; and Simon Brett, President of the enigmatic Detection Club, regales us with stories from a golden age of crime. We also have articles on two great polymaths: the last ‘Renaissance man’, Erasmus, and one of the twentieth century’s most engaged historians, Jacques Barzun, by his grandson, the US Ambassador to the United Kingdom.

From the poor soil of Robert Burns’s farm to the blos-soming tall-tree orchards of Common Ground, welcome to the bountiful offerings of The Folio Society.

foliofred karno’s army Lyn Macdonald 4

shakespeare: a lover of books Stanley Wells 10

the worldly apple Sue Clifford and Angela King 16

robert burns: the simple bard Kathleen Jamie 22

the activist historian Matthew Barzun 26

on judging literary prizes Lavinia Greenlaw 32

illustrating in praise of folly Matthew Richardson 36

the detection club Simon Brett 42

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44 Lion St, Hay-on-Wye HR3 5AA

01497 820 322

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Richard Booth’s Bookshop is the largest bookshop in Hay-on-Wye, the Town of Books, and cultural hub of the town. Its elegant façade with its glazed animalier tiles leads to a vast three-fl oor emporium with hundreds of thousands of secondhand, antiquarian and new books. We buy and sell books on all subjects and are always delighted to hear from people wishing to downsize their personal libraries or sell on collections. We look forward to welcoming you to our bookshop, café and cinema soon.

Richard Booth,sBookshop

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The Folio Society was delighted to be involved in the Hay Festival 2014, sponsoring the sold-out event ‘Shakespeare 450: Shakespeare and Love’, at which the writer and actor (and newly inaugurated president of the Hay Festival) Stephen Fry talked about the Bard and love.

Following an introduction from Hay Festival founder and director Peter Florence, we were excited also to launch a Folio outpost at Richard Booth’s Bookshop in Hay. The Folio Society Reading Room is a space dedicated to Folio, situated upstairs in this renowned bookshop. Founded over fty years ago by Richard Booth, who contributed to Hay’s reputation as the ‘Town of Books’, the shop is now under the ownership of Elizabeth Haycox and Paul Greatbatch. Speaking about the new partnership Elizabeth said: ‘I’ve long been an admirer of The Folio Society, their publishing values are second to none and as such they’re the perfect partner for Booth’s. This wonderful new area, dedicated to stocking a selected range of The Folio Society’s beautifully illustrated, collectable volumes, ts perfectly in the shop.’

Reading Room

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FRED KARNO’S

A R M Y

We are Fred Karno’s Army, what bloody use are we?We cannot fight we cannot shoot, so send the infantry;But when we get to Berlin, the Kaiser he will say,‘Hoch, Hoch, mein Gott, what a bloody fine lot are the boys of The X Brigade.’

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T h i s , w i t h i n f i n i t e va r i a t i o n s , was the anthem of the Tommies of Kitchener’s Army. They sang it to the familiar tune of ‘The Church’s One

Foundation’. They sang it all through the Great War, they sang it when the war was over, and they kept on singing it whenever veterans got together until the last mouth organ faded into silence eight decades later. So who was Fred Karno and who were the Tommies anyway? The first is easy. At the beginning of the last century Fred Karno’s touring company of knockabout acrobats and slapstick comedians topped the bill at music halls all over the country, and by 1914 their chaotic antics had become a byword. The parallel with the shambolic early efforts of the youthful enthusiasts who flocked to join the army at Lord Kitchener’s behest was irresistible.

The second is more difficult. If newspapers and period- icals of the time are to be believed there was a widespread assumption that every officer was a public school educated ‘gentleman’ and every Tommy was either a country yokel or a product of the mean back streets. Their words were always rendered phonetically in cockney or, in the case of a Jock, in an approximation of Scottish vernacular. This style was not intended to denigrate the rank and file: rather there was a tendency in the popular press to idealise the troops. A particularly nauseating paragraph appeared in The Sphere in February 1915: ‘Tommy is kind, Tommy is brave, Tommy

Lyn Macdonald’s interviews with veterans lent a personal side to the history of the Great War; a hundred years after the war began, she finds there are still stereotypes to be exploded

Liverpool Scottish in bivouac, Ouderdom, Belgium, June 1915. (TopFoto)

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is gallant and thoughtful. See him on the road in France carrying a child, assisting a comrade, or helping an aged peasant with a heavy burden . . .’ and so on in ever more unappealing prose. And there is a third version of Tommy, no less spurious, which can be attributed to many of the war poets – Tommy the victim driven to his doom by a merciless High Command. ‘Tommy’ would not have recognised him-self in any of those roles.

By far the best perk of my work as an historian of the First World War was getting to know hundreds of those legendary Tommies of Kitchener’s Army and forming real friendships with many of them. Every year, with the help of willing volunteers, I organised a trip for a few of those old soldiers, to the Somme in summer and to Ypres at Armistice – and what good times we had! Naturally there were poignant moments – laying a wreath on the grave of a com-rade, recalling some long-buried memory on a once-famil-iar spot, and there were times when all of us had a lump in our throats. But my overriding recollections of those trips are of the laughs and the jokes, the jolly evenings, the good fellowship and, most of all, the songs, for the drives back to the hotel were often enlivened by a resounding sing-song which introduced us to some very unofficial versions of familiar war songs. ‘That’s the wrong way to tickle Mary . . .’ they would chant, with fruity chuckles.

Although they were octogenarians and nonagenarians to a man, we referred to them quite unconsciously as ‘The Boys’, for all this had an oddly rejuvenating effect and, as the trip went on, the years seemed to roll away. Now and again passions could still run high. We were once treated to the sight of one elderly gentleman belabouring another with his walking stick. Both had been in the attack on Guillemont during the Battle of the Somme, one in the artillery, and his assailant in the infantry. ‘Those damned guns were firing short and we got the lot,’ he fumed, adding with some satis-faction, ‘I’ve always wanted to get my hands on one of those

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bloody gunners!’ It seems that honour was satisfied and when they were seen later having a beer together it was clear that there were no hard feelings.

So who were these men? They included a bookie’s runner, an accountant, a lorry driver, a prison officer, a tax inspector, a schoolmaster, a doctor, a bus driver, a gardener, plus a few civil servants and businessmen. All they had in common was that as young men, many barely out of school, they had joined the ranks of Kitchener’s Army. Some had attained the dizzy rank of lance corporal, one rose to be company sergeant major, another had been commissioned later in the war, and after it was over some had been able to continue their interrupted education. ‘Tommy’ simply rep-resented a cross-section of every echelon of British society, and since there were five million men under arms by the end of the war it could hardly have been otherwise. And yet the clichés and the myths continued and were perpetuated by the more lyrical of the war poets. They continue still.

In recent years there has been a growing fascination with the Great War (I refuse to demote it to World War One, and still less to WWI) and one can understand its attraction to modern novelists. But I must sadly confess that these fictional

Mobile field oven and Royal Navy motorcycle combo, c.1914. (Mary Evans/Pharcide)

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soldiers in present-day novels are strangers to me and the landscape of their world is unfamiliar, as is the unmitigated misery of their existence, leavened only by occasional bouts of licentiousness and the obligatory dollop of sex to enliven the page or the screen. And always there are the clichés, the sorry victims, the brutal senior officers, the suicidal orders. Much of this can be traced back to a few of the often-quoted war poets (‘. . . he did for them both by his plan of attack’, ‘I have a rendezvous with Death at some disputed barri-cade . . .’). The trouble with those Great War poets, whose work has been so influential, is that their poetry is so very good, and I am as susceptible to its beauty as anyone. But it is poetry, not reportage.

I recently re-read David Jones’s epic In Parenthesis (which I was delighted to learn the Folio Society is publishing later this year) and, hallelujah, there was Tommy. Tommy march-ing with a weeping blister on his heel and spare socks shoved beneath his tunic to keep the straps of his equipment from chafing. Tommy extracting a mix of tea and sugar plus shreds of canvas from the corner of a sandbag, to add to warmish water in the hope of producing a hot cup of tea. Tommy in an estaminet with his mates ‘discussing the High Command’. Tommy making liberal use of ‘the efficacious word’ which served equally well as expletive, verb or adjective according to need. Tommy passing long tedious hours of trench-duty in a cubbyhole turning the damp pages of a well-thumbed magazine. And the trench itself festooned with a network of telephone wires that had to be dodged and never broken, for your life might well depend on it. And here, hanging in a prominent position, is the empty shellcase that was an essential item in every trench system. Here and there some wag who would never be a threat to the war poets would have affixed a terse but effective notice: ‘If a whiff of gas you smell, beat this gong and run like hell.’

In the ranks of Kitchener’s Army, Fred Karno was never far away!

Postcard, c.1914. (Mary Evans/Grenville Collins Postcard Collection)

The Folio Society’s edition of David Jones’s In Parenthesis is available

from September 2014

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Sh a k e s p e a r e u s e s t h e wor d ‘fol io’ only once. In Love’s Labour’s Lost Don Armado, eager to pen poetry addressed to the woman he loves, says, ‘I am

for whole volumes in folio.’ Technically, a folio is a book printed from sheets of paper that have been folded only once, making for an impressively large volume. When Shakespeare made Armado say those words he could not have known that his own plays would be published in folio – the famous First Folio – seven years after he died, still less that a full series of individual plays and poems would appear in the magnificent Folio Society Letterpress edition, reach-ing completion four hundred and fifty years after he was born.

But books played a massively important part in Shakespeare’s life from his schooldays onwards. In what is surely the most autobiographical scene in his plays, Act 4 Scene 1 of The Merry Wives of Windsor, he portrays a school-boy named William being put through his paces in Latin grammar, quoting directly from William Lily’s Short Intro-duction to Grammar. It is easy to imagine this as a scene from Shakespeare’s own boyhood. Lily’s book, prescribed by royal proclamation for use in all the grammar schools of the nation, continued in use until well into the nineteenth cen-tury. From it Shakespeare himself would have received his grounding in the language at the King’s New School in Stratford-upon-Avon.

There too, as he proceeded up the school, he must have read some of the books of poetry and prose, many of them written in Latin, that were to enrich his imagination and feed his creativity throughout his career as a writer. One of the most important of these was Ovid’s Metamorphoses, on which he draws heavily in his early narrative poem Venus

Title page created using the border decoration from A Short Introduction of Grammar generally to be used, 1597. (© The British Library Board)

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and Adonis. He brings the book onstage in the hands of a schoolboy in Titus Andronicus, shows Innogen reading it in bed in Cymbeline, and it continued as a source of inspiration to the end of his career: one of Prospero’s greatest speeches in The Tempest – the one beginning ‘Ye elves of hills . . . ’ – is so closely based on Ovid that he might almost be accused of having plagiarised it.

At school too Shakespeare would have known his towns-fellow Richard Field, three years his senior, who, like him, was to go from Stratford to pursue a successful career in London. There Field became apprenticed to the publishing trade, married his master’s widow, and printed many great and learned books. His publications include the first four editions of Shakespeare’s immensely successful narrative poem Venus and Adonis, which first appeared in 1593, the first edition of the almost equally popular poem The Rape of Lucrece, which appeared one year later, and in 1601 the volume which contains Shakespeare’s beautiful, if enig-matic, poem The Phoenix and the Turtle. Shakespeare may well have used Field’s publishing shop as a kind of library where he could read, and perhaps borrow – or even buy – some of the books which inspired his plays. Field appears to have been a lifelong friend: Shakespeare pays him the com-pliment of using a French version of his name – Richard du Champ – in the late play Cymbeline. Curiously, but perhaps relevantly, when printing Spanish texts Field called himself Ricardo del Campo.

Some of the books on which Shakespeare draws had appeared before he began to write. They include Arthur Brooke’s long poem Romeus and Juliet of 1562, Arthur Gold-ing’s 1567 translation of Ovid and Sir Thomas North’s 1579

Shakespeare remained a great reader throughout his life

Title page of Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies, 1623, commonly referred to as the First Folio. (© The British Library Board)

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translation of Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans, which is the major source for his Roman plays. But, far from drawing only on his early reading experiences, Shakespeare remained a great reader throughout his life. Thomas Lodge’s Rosalynde, first published in 1590, gave him the material for As You Like It. Lodge became a distinguished physician and lived on until 1625; I like to imagine him in the audience for early performances of the play based on his charming book. A weird book about witchcraft, Samuel Harsnet’s Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures, also of 1603, gave Shakespeare ideas for some of Tom o’Bedlam’s speeches in King Lear, written soon afterwards. John Florio’s great translation of Montaigne’s essays appeared also in 1603; Shakespeare draws on it in The Tempest – indeed, it may well have given him the central idea for the whole play.

Very late in Shakespeare’s career he picked up a book that had appeared around the time he must have started writing, Pandosto, published in 1588 by Robert Greene. The first known allusion to Shakespeare, calling him an ‘upstart crow’, comes in Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit, of 1592; it is the least flattering of all the references to Shakespeare that appeared during his lifetime, but Shakespeare, who must have read it, nevertheless forgave Greene enough to turn the earlier writer’s rather mediocre tale into one of his late masterpieces, The Winter’s Tale. And what is almost certainly the last play in which Shakespeare had a hand, The Two Noble Kinsmen, written in collaboration with his younger colleague John Fletcher, not merely draws upon Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale – which Shakespeare had already used in A Midsummer Night’s Dream – but mentions him in the prologue: ‘Chaucer, of all admired, the story gives.’ They probably used an edition of Chaucer published in 1598.

Prospero, in The Tempest, says, ‘I loved my books.’ The idea that the character represents Shakespeare himself has been attacked as no more than a sentimental fantasy, but this at least they certainly had in common.

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The Worldly Apple

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o w d i d i t h a p p e n , that apples originating inthe fruit forests of the Tien Shan in central Asia, as far

from the ocean as can be, came to fl ourish on this sea-washed isle off mainland Europe?

There, in the Heavenly Mountains, bears and people must have gradually favoured the less sour fruits. Perhaps there grew a thriving trade in fruit and trees. But traders, as they trod the routes that would later become the Silk Road, must have spread trees to the Mediterranean and northern Europe without even trying, much as we now populate road verges in tossing away apple cores. Certainly by Neolithic times the eating apple had made landfall here.

Each apple pip brings novel progeny, so how did we learn to perpetuate favoured varieties? In The Georgics Virgil describes the magic of taking a twig to graft or bud onto a root stock so that ‘Presently / Up shoots a lofty tree with fl ourishing boughs, / Marvelling at its unfamiliar leaves / And fruits unlike its own . . .’ Imagine Court Pendu Plat, reputed to trace back to Roman times, being passed on down the generations. In the latter part of the sixteenth cen-tury the monastic cultivation of botanical specimens was brought to an abrupt end in Britain, but Henry VIII did cause orchards of cherry, pear and apple to be planted in Kent and the newly landed aristocracy followed his lead.

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Sue Cliff ord and Angela King, founders of Common Ground, celebrate the history and variety of the apple in Britain

Apple tree. Malus – Apple Wadhurst Pippin, West Dean, Sussex, 10 October 2011. (Abigail Rex/GAP Photos)

‘Winter Pomeroy’ from The Folio Society edition of The Herefordshire Pomona, published October 2014

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Once the Victorians got their teeth into cross-breeding, the apple became a focus of competitive questing for new varieties. A retired brewer from Bermondsey brought into existence the Cox’s Orange Pippin in Colnbrook; a vicar from Lincolnshire gave us Ellison’s Orange; the Laxton Brothers raised Lord Lamborne and many others, such as Laxton’s Epicure and Beauty of Bedford. Newton Wonder started life as a chance find on the thatched roof of the Hardinge Arms in King’s Newton, Derbyshire. These stories of emergent science and happenstance are part of our culture, as are the wonderful names: Coul Blush from north of Inverness, Roundway Magnum Bonham from Wiltshire, Flowery Town from York, Slack-ma-girdle from Somerset, Bloody Ploughman from the Carse of Gowrie.

In the 1980s, Common Ground had been working hard to interest people in taking more care of trees in both city and country. Our fellow conservationists had a blind spot: they regarded all orchards as commercial, short-lived, intensive, profusely sprayed and hence hopeless for wildlife. Moreover, growers had bowed to the marketing onslaught of Golden Delicious from France and had countered by ditching many varieties coveted locally, and specialised instead in Bramley and Cox.

Unsprayed, tall-tree orchards of cherries, plums, dam-sons, pears, as well as apples, were slipping away; hazel nut plats too. Almost every farm had once had its orchard, from Cornwall to Anglesey to Inverness. Victorian town houses, stately homes, Hampstead Garden Suburb all had their fruit trees, but rarely was anyone bothering to research their richness or their loss. We were shocked by a Devon WI estimate that the county had lost 90 per cent of its orchards in forty years.

At Common Ground, it excited us that perhaps three thousand varieties of eating and cider apples have been grown here. We began to discover names and stories, games and customs, songs and recipes, many particular to place and

Common Ground’s Apple Map of Britain, published on Apple Day 1993.

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certainly to season. In tall-tree orchards of some longevity we recognised that people had created places where humans and wild things could flourish together. Apple trees find a cen-tury or two an easy run – the original Bramleys Seedling still reclines in a garden in Southwell, Nottinghamshire. Young Mary Ann Brailsford planted it as a pip over two hundred years ago. In 1790 just one perry pear tree was recorded as covering three-quarters of an acre and producing up to seven tonnes of fruit at Holme Lacey, Herefordshire. Its ghost is still there as a dancing ring of productive trees. Falling and rooting is a good reproductive strategy and maintains the variety.

What could Common Ground do? Commissioning James Ravilious to photograph orchards in the West Coun-try, we launched a campaign to Save Our Orchards and plant new ones: as we toured the exhibition from 1989 we organised gatherings and talks to rouse imaginative responses locally and we began the national promotion of care for orchards. We were entranced by stories and origins

Cider-apple orchard in Hele, Devon, c.1988.

(Photograph by James Ravilious © Robin Ravilious)

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and realised that linking fruit with counties and particular places stirred people to their own researches and action. Cre-ating the first county Apple Map, we advocated recording the provenance of fruit varieties.

In 1990 Common Ground invented Apple Day, holding the first ourselves in Covent Garden and then inspiring people across the country to celebrate annually in their own ways on 21 October, preceded by All Fruits Eve. Games such as apple ducking and pinning the maggot on the apple, challenges from the longest peel to best apple cake, poetry, grafting and pruning classes, cluster around displays of dif-ferent varieties, tastings and identification of people’s own apples. Apple Day continues in back gardens, botanic gar-dens, book shops, restaurants, market halls, school orchards, art centres and hospitals, and builds pride and interest in local distinctiveness in nature and culture.

Common Ground encouraged the revival and invention of apple games and customs, local recipes and seasonal activ-ities, and we connected nature, landscape and tall fruit trees. In 1992 we pioneered the creation of Community Orchards.

In reasserting the things people were forgetting to value we fuelled a movement which brought grants for orchards, local researches, micro cider-making, hundreds of Com-munity Orchards and celebrations of Apple Day, and demand for more locally grown varieties to be made avail-able to buy. There are county and city organisations that act-ively promote good practice, wassailing has seen a great revival, and belated research into orchard loss has proved our point – nearly two-thirds of English orchards have been lost since the 1950s. There is still much to be done.

In our small island the blossom, the bees, the beetles, the birds and the badgers need these places as much as we do. In orchards of tall trees humans have achieved an exemplary relationship with the world, one that is mutually beneficial and life enhancing. Orchards demonstrate how we could,

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In spr ing 1786 roBert Bu r ns was tw en ty-sev en, unstable, ambitious and attractive. His life was in a

mess. Robert and his brother Gilbert had rented a farm, Mossgiel, to try to save themselves and their family, but it was poor land, and Burns was fearful. Furthermore, his lover Jean Armour was pregnant, and had been sent away from Ayrshire to spare her family the shame. Armour’s family shunned Burns. Burns, believing himself jilted, was considering emigrating to Jamaica. But meanwhile, there was ploughing to be done – and poems to be written. In this latter venture, at least, he had hope: in the same April that he turned down a daisy with his plough and sparked a poem, he had sent out the subscription forms for his proposed book, Poems, Chiefl y in the Scottish Dialect.

Not six months before writing ‘To a Mountain Daisy’ Burns had written ‘To a Mouse’. There is a rare privacy in these apostrophising poems. In ‘To a Mouse, On turning her up in her Nest with the Plough, November, 1785’ and ‘To a Mountain-Daisy, On turning One down with the Plough, in April 1786’ the sometimes performative, bardic manner of his other work is dropped in favour of intimacy. In the company of fl owers or mice Burns has nothing to prove or to gain. He is not in the grip of his ‘social and amorous

The Simple BardKathleen Jamie explores how the poet Robert Burns found fertile ground for his imagination in the soil of a failing farm

23Wood engravings newly commissioned for this article are © Jonathan Gibbs 2014

madness’ (his own words). He finds an equivalence in their helplessness. ‘To a Mouse’ is the better poem, and much more famous. Its language is both richer and tighter (some phrases have dropped into common usage), its movement from the timorous mouse to the universal is more smoothly handled, its emotion more tightly controlled. Burns must have known it was a successful work, because he tried to revisit the same source and repeat the same procedures when the daisy also fell under his plough. He was thinking ahead to his book! Although ‘To a Mountain Daisy’ is a more extravagant poem, it too offers a genuine moment of atten-tion and compassion. Both poems are written in the same form, the ‘standard habbie’, and though less accomplished than ‘To a Mouse’, ‘To a Mountain Daisy’ suggests that the anxiety Burns had felt the previous November had not abated, and was if anything more acute. Jean’s pregnancy and absence were now in the forefront of his mind, as was his own departure overseas. Indeed, in the daisy poem he equates the flower’s crushing with a girl’s ruination, when she is ‘By love’s simplicity betray’d’. He also found a meta-phor for the fate of a ‘Bard’, as he now saw himself (or hoped to become), too simple for ‘life’s rough ocean’.

Life and Love - his great themes, both crushed beneath the furrow’s weight.

‘To a Mountain Daisy’ was indeed included in his Poems, published in Kilmarnock the following July. Burns was right to anticipate this event with hope. At once his fortunes changed. If he ever held serious intentions of going to Jamaica, they were forgotten. Jean Armour gave birth to twins in September and by November Burns was in Edinburgh, sampling the delights of literary acclaim and social inclusion.

It felt like success, but Burns wrote very little poetry after that, turning his attention to song. He had only ten more years to live. One wonders if he could foretell that already, alone in the fields in April 1786, and if the last verse

Wee, modest, crimson-tipped fl ow’r,Thou’s met me in an evil hour;For I maun crush amang the stoureThy slender stem:To spare thee now is past my pow’r,Thou bonie gem.

Alas! it’s no thy neebor sweet,The bonie lark, companion meet!Bending thee ’mang the dewy weet!Wi’ spreckl’d breast,When upward-springing, blythe, to greetThe purpling east.

Cauld blew the bitter-biting northUpon thy early, humble birth;Yet cheerfully thou glinted forthAmid the storm,Scarce rear’d above the Parent-earthThy tender form.

The fl aunting fl ow’rs our gardens yield,High shelt’ring woods and wa’s maun shield;But thou, beneath the random bieldO’ clod or stane,Adorns the histie stibble-fi eld,Unseen, alane.

To a Mountain DaisyOn turning One down with the Plough,in April 18

There, in thy scanty mantle clad,Thy snawie bosom sun-ward spread,Thou lifts thy unassuming headIn humble guise;But now the share uptears thy bed,And low thou lies!

Such is the fate of artless Maid,Sweet fl ow’ret of the rural shade!By love’s simplicity betray’d,And guileless trust;Till she, like thee, all soil’d, is laidLow i’ the dust.

Such is the fate of simple Bard,On life’s rough ocean luckless starr’d!Unskilful he to note the cardOf prudent lore,Till billows rage, and gales blow hard,And whelm him o’er.

Such fate to suff ering worth is giv’n,Who long with wants and woes has striv’n,By human pride or cunning driv’n,To mis’rys brink,Till, wrench’d of ev’ry stay but Heav’n,He, ruin’d, sink!

Ev’n thou, who mourn’st the Daisy’s fate,That fate is thine – no distant date;Stern Ruin’s plough-share drives, elate,Full on thy bloom,Till crush’d beneath the furrow’s weight,Shall be thy doom!

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‘It is a perpetual refreshment to the soul to see that the country is so large, so indifferent to the uses we have put it to, so like a piece of the earth’s crust and unlike any map . . .’

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THE ACTIVIST HISTORIAN

Matthew Barzun remembers his grandfather, the historian Jacques Barzun, whose seminal work, From Dawn to Decadence, is published by Folio in spring 2015

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T h e h u n d r e d t h a n n i v e r s a r y of the out-break of World War I has reawakened painful, if fading, memories, revived appeals to remember the

lessons of history and rekindled an appreciation of effective diplomacy. For me, such thoughts come personified – all wrapped up in the form of one man, my grandfather Jacques Barzun.

As for so many, the Great War turned my grandfather’s world upside down, even though he didn’t fight in it and was only a boy when it began. His father, Henri, was a diplomat in France, and both his parents were deeply engaged in its cultural life. Jacques’ childhood home near Paris was a kind of avant-garde salon. He called it a ‘nursery of living cul-ture’ and among its visitors were figures of French modern-ism such as Jean Cocteau and Marcel Duchamp.

The war put an end to that nursery. And to European culture as it had been known. For my grandfather, it also brought on a severe depression when he was just eleven. Relief came with a move to America to pursue his educa-tion. But to the end of his life he believed, like many, that World War I was initiated by completely irrational causes.

This searing childhood experience very much coloured his understanding of Europe and of America, the latter a nation set apart from ancient entanglements and hierarchies. He believed America had kept alive the culture of Romanti-cism that Europe had forsaken – Romanticism with a capital ‘R’ that celebrated individual effort, diversity and humanity, while eschewing grand theories and the mechanisation of human life.

One of my favorite passages from his 1954 book, God’s Country and Mine, is such a paean to America that it could be turned into stanza form and read like poetry:

Previous page: Eastern plains, Colorado. (Ed Darack/Superstock)

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The way to see America is from a lower berth about two in the morning. You’ve just left a station . . . and you raise the curtain a bit between thumb and forefinger to look out . . . It is a perpetual refreshment to the soul to see that the country is so large, so indifferent to the uses we have put it to, so like a piece of the earth’s crust and unlike any map . . . Europe is lovely but it looks like a poodle cut – the trees are numbered, the flat parts divided like a checkerboard, the rivers as slim and well-behaved as mercury in a thermometer. The towns, like dead men’s bones on the line of a caravan, huddle white and dry, crowded behind defenses that have crumbled. And everywhere the steeples point to remind you that you must look upward if you want space and serenity.

Map of Lyon (detail), 16th century. (DeAgostini/Superstock)

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Jacques wanted to be a diplomat like his father but was instead convinced to take up teaching by his professor at Columbia University, which was where he ended up working his entire academic career from the time of his precocious graduation at nineteen. He told me this the last time I saw him (I had left every visit for the previous ten years thinking it might be the last) and it made me smile, because I had wanted to be a history teacher like him but eventually became a diplomat.

Thinking about my grandfather, especially in the con-text of the World War I centenary, it occurs to me that one might describe a diplomat as an activist historian, who seeks to apply oil when the gears of history turn. Indeed, Jacques Barzun worked very hard to keep history alive in the cultural consciousness – to teach the limits of power and the power of ideas.

His last bestseller was a survey of cultural history over the last five centuries, published when he was ninety-three, called From Dawn to Decadence. As the title implies, he believed there was a ‘falling away’ in the order of things that had made those five hundred years hang together. But when asked if this was a pessimistic assessment he struck a positive note, saying that something would come next. He didn’t say what, since as a historian he wasn’t in the business of making predictions.

I believe we are at the beginning of that next thing. For instance, one of the persistent new modes appears to be in the way we’re organising ourselves, evolving away from hier- archical models to networks. And, in general, we sense things are changing fast. Sometimes too fast. This is all the more reason to go back to the writings of Jacques Barzun, and to heed the vocal historians and cultural critics of our time.

My grandfather believed he was duty-bound to offer his perspective and opinions – and more. One of the most revolutionary things I’ve ever heard was a comment he made to me on the eve of my college year abroad in South Africa during the last years of apartheid. ‘The innocent bystander deserves the stray bullet,’ he said.

The Folio Society edition of Jacques Barzun’s From Dawn to Decadence is available from spring 2015

South African Nanny, 1982. (Orde Eliason/Camera Press)

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La s t w i n t e r , I read fiction in greater concentration than ever before. All in all I felt restored to its essen-tial purpose and nature, although there were times

when, walled in by books, I dreamt of a world in which fiction didn’t exist.

The writer Edmund Gosse grew up in such a world. His strictly religious Victorian parents would not have a novel in the house. They forgot, however, to check the attic, where the young Gosse found an empty trunk lined with sensa-tional pages, which he read ‘with indescribable rapture’. He goes on to explain that ‘the idea of fiction, of a deliberately invented story, had been kept from me with entire success. I therefore implicitly believed the tale in the lid of the trunk to be a true account of the sorrows of a lady of title, who had to flee the country, and who was pursued into foreign lands by enemies bent upon her ruin . . . This ridiculous fragment filled me with delicious fears; I fancied that my Mother, who was out so much, might be threatened by dangers of the same sort; and the fact that the narrative came abruptly to an end, in the middle of one of its most thrilling sentences, wound me up almost to a disorder of wonder and romance.’

Although Gosse didn’t know what fiction was, he recog-nised that here was an extra dimension to ordinary life and gave himself over to it. His reward was to suffer a disorder of wonder and romance – something, surely, we all wish for.

ON JUDGING LITERARY PRIZESLavinia Greenlaw, chair of the jury for the inaugural Folio Prize, describes the search that led to the choice of George Saunders’s Tenth of December

Frontispiece of Father and Son: a study of two

temperaments, 1907, by Edmund W. Gosse,

showing a photograph of Edmund Gosse with his father, dated 1857.

(© The British Library Board)

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This disorder is one in which the world is made of the same stuff, only we see things more clearly and feel them more strongly. It also helps us to grasp the vital instrument of metaphor and as Robert Frost said, ‘unless you are at home in the metaphor . . . you are not safe anywhere’.

Those of us who have made metaphor our home may be expert readers, and so more attuned to the engine of prose, but what we are looking for is what anyone is looking for – the magical synthesis that occurs when the components of fiction fall into place and you forget that you are reading and find yourself inhabiting a new world.

My fellow judges and I were not looking for novelty but we were looking for the new: writing with its own laws and its own physics, which placed itself in tension with our expectations, and which was unsettling and invigorating. The eight books we shortlisted are all those things and more. Our deliberations were long and intense. We forgot about the authors and focused on the books. Only when we sur-faced with our chosen eight in hand did we reflect on what they collectively represent: the art of fiction at full stretch and in all its forms, and the ingenious and dazzling results of form under exquisite pressure.

I knew none of my fellow judges before we started and yet as soon as we did it became clear that we could proceed with the confidence and understanding of those who have worked together for years. They talked books with unin-hibited conviction and specificity, and listened with equal intent. Our experience of reading eighty books over five months was full of surprises, challenges, frustrations, provo- cations, regrets and delights. Each of us experienced being taken over by a book when we least expected it as well as the gradual admission that something we loved did not in the end sustain itself.

Writers take control of their work knowing that at times it will be vital to relinquish it. The same can be said of reading. You set out with expectations, whether aware of them or not.

A name, a reputation, a title or cover will have given you ideas before you’ve even reached the fi rst page. If you know how writing works, and have experience of the ways in which it can fail, then you’re less easily impressed, less easily manipu-lated and also more likely to admit when you have been.

Each work of fi ction establishes its own rules, but good writing is not a matter of following certain steps. It requires bringing the same things into balance but understanding that this balance will be diff erent each time. When fi ction succeeds, you don’t notice the nuts and bolts of its con-struction. This makes how writing works much harder to describe than how it doesn’t. My reading notes show that there were books that brought to mind upholstery, Power-Point presentations, architects’ models, bad plays, boring speeches, blancmanges, muzak and dodgy electrics: ‘. . . a series of thoughts about an idea . . . over-stuff ed and air-less . . . dead acoustic . . . pasteurised prose . . . embroidered melancholy . . . costume drama . . . unmediated from life . . . characters have the self-consciousness of acting . . . a world that neither gathers nor builds . . . no palpable sense of the urgency described . . . attractive but familiar . . . too much inert detail . . . overloaded . . . leaks rhetoric . . . dullness that is dull rather than a form of tension . . . lyrical blurt . . . dia-grammatic . . . characters that are characterless . . . virtuoso detailing . . . under-invested . . . over-invested . . . irrelevant panoramics . . . wobbly . . . messy . . . hyper-lyrical without gathering static . . . writing an aesthetic more than a story . . .’

The books we shortlisted operate at extremes of lan-guage, scale, arrangement and form in ways that cast light and create depth rather than simply impressing or distract-ing us. We were not looking for variety but they could not be more various – long and short, quiet and loud, fantastical and quotidian, concentrated and shattered, turned up and tamped down. No one should be using these books to line a trunk but if they do, any half-dozen pages would be enough to convey the thrill and substance they hold.

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h e m o s t s t r i k i n g f e a t u r e o f e r a s m u s ’ writing is his use of rhetoric in recasting and recom- posing older texts, using puns, metaphor, hyperbole

and a host of other literary devices. When I began to think about ideas for illustrations to accompany In Praise of Folly, it occurred to me that Erasmus, the great intellectual innov-ator of his day, might well approve a new visual inter- pretation, a reformulation of the illustrations Hans Holbein the Younger had made for one of the early editions of the book.

My first idea was to make Holbein’s work the basis for a series of collages, adding something of my own to the mix. In the end, I used only partial elements. I did, however, retain the idea of ‘stages’ or backgrounds from Holbein’s drawings. I removed the ‘action’ that Holbein had shown and created my own – new actors performing on a much older stage. I attempted a visual rhetoric to match Erasmus’ verbal inventiveness, and, in developing ideas, thought about how visual meaning – symbols and signs – drift

Artist Matthew Richardson discusses how he tackled this commission, creating a visual rhetoric to match Erasmus.

t

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and transform over time, and certainly over a span of five hundred years.

Double or triple meanings occur throughout In Praise of Folly, and the way I tackled visual ideas tries to echo this aspect of multiple layers – where an image or object may signify more than one thing. In my illustrations, the inten-tion can be hidden, lost – or obvious. Sometimes ideas are veiled, sometimes they are direct. Erasmus was a close friend of Sir Thomas More, his intellectual sparring partner and someone who shared his dry humour. Moriae Encomium (the book’s Latin title) can also be read as In Praise of More. The enigmatic text on the back cover alludes to this private joke, the misaligned letter forms recalling the recent inven-tion of movable type in printmaking. The composition of elements on the cover is fragile and might collapse or fall away – a visualisation of acts of ‘folly’. The white ladder represents a journey between earth and heaven, and along with the black ladder, forms a cross, almost suggestive of a Bible. However, the shape of the cross is being subtly pushed out of position by a bubble (of hot air, wind, overblown speech?) – a critique of the Church. The white ladder can be used to reach and change a lightbulb – a playful symbol of the ‘Enlightenment’. Foolishly though, the person attempt-ing this job has probably had one drink too many – there is at least evidence – an empty goblet rests at the base of the ladder.

In Praise of Folly is a mix of observation, wit and satire narrated through the voice of Folly – a goddess, dressed as a jester, celebrating frivolity, self-deception, inebriation, ignorance, self-love, flattery and pleasure. Erasmus uses the character of Folly as a mask behind which he can attack the orthodoxies of his day and lambast the teachers, professors, theologians and prelates still toiling in the web of medieval scholasticism.

When I was thinking about the representation of Folly, I looked at different characterisations and enactments of

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who Folly was and where she might be found. I looked across time and in different cultures, and especially at the discovery of truth through misrule, mockery, ribaldry and excess. I looked at the Fool, the Jester, commedia dell’arte, Pierrot, the Folies-Bergère, the Mardi Gras carnival, and also more recent characters like Carmen Miranda, the Cat in the Hat and ‘ jester punk’ Malcolm McLaren.

So within the illustrations there may be ghosts or layered references to these aspects – to different historical frames speaking as Folly. For example, the portrait of Folly shows her holding a feather duster – both a cleaning tool to brush away the cobwebs of mystification and also, like Ken Dodd’s ‘tickling stick’, a tool of distraction to make us laugh. In addition, it represents and enlarges the female aspect of this personification by Erasmus. Her ruff is at the same time a marker of medieval elegance and the emblem of ‘the clown’.

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I was interested to learn that in 1511, when Erasmus published In Praise of Folly, his writings accounted for almost a quarter of all books printed and produced. I wanted to include an early printing press, as it was so pivotal to publicising his ideas and the means by which In Praise of Folly achieved its great success. In Folly of Teachers I show the printing press that, along with a boom in maritime trade, created a new circulation of knowledge, a rapid flow of information and a washing through of the established social order.

Folly of Intellectuals shows an academic obsessed with measuring, working things out ‘in theory’ and looking only to books for answers. As he gazes upwards, unnoticed by him, reality bites – a tower, perhaps his home (or Rome?) burns. In Folly of Kings the monarch is literally borne down by the weight of his crowns and insignia. Erasmus treats kings as more interested in flattery, entertainment and self- indulgence than affairs of state. The gold and silver poodle suggests vanity, primping and pomp. It is also a toy – a plaything for the king’s foolish amusement. In Folly of Clergy an apple tempts a monkey. The image looks superficially like a High Church altar, but the arrangement of objects suggests a more earthly – or earthy – taste for food, drink (Abbot Ale, Bishops Finger), money and enjoyment.

Finally we see ‘Folly’ revealed as Erasmus himself. He has cast off his comic mask and now contemplates a world unadorned by literary artifice, a world of humanist clarity, in which he speaks plainly, saying what he means and meaning what he says.

Illustrations in this article © Matthew Richardson 2014, for The Folio Society edition of In Praise of Folly

The Folio Society edition of Erasmus’ In Praise of Folly is available from October 2014

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Simon Brett reveals the secrets of the detective novel writers’ mysterious society

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The 1920s and 1930s have been frequently described as the ‘Golden Age’ of detective fiction, and images of that

time are still conjured up whenever the word ‘whodunnit’ is mentioned. This tendency is, of course, encouraged by

television’s persistent harking back to the period with ever more lavish recreations of the cases of Hercule Poirot, Miss

Marple and others.These decades were also a time of house parties. Though

radio was up and running, the advent of television was still some way away and people had to ‘make their own enter-

tainment’. The puzzle presented by a murder mystery fitted very well into that world, and it is no coincidence that

the development and popularity of the whodunnit almost exactly matched that of the crossword. People liked party

games, particularly ones with a macabre twist such as ‘Murder in the Dark’.

Murder had become fun.

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A 1929 American publication, The Baffle Book by Lassiter Wren and Randle McKay, edited for the UK market by F. Tennyson Jesse, also became very popular. It was a series of short crime puzzles to which the readers and other parti-cipants had to find the solutions (printed upside down in the back of the book for cheats). In the 1930s Dennis Wheatley and J. G. Links produced their crime dossiers, such as Murder off Miami, murder stories whose files actually contained phys-ical evidence – scene-of-crime photographs, cigarette ends, locks of hair and bloodstained material – to enable the reader to solve the crime.

Murder had become fun. And it was against that back-ground that the Detection Club was founded. As is appro-priate for such an organisation, its precise origins are clouded in mystery. G. K. Chesterton is said by various authorities to have become the club’s first president in 1930 or 1932. But what seems most likely is that a group of detective writers, led by Anthony Berkeley, had started to meet together in 1928 for informal dinners, during which the formation of a club had been discussed. In keeping with the tastes of the time, it was to be a secret society, with its own elaborate initiation ceremony and other rituals. As well as Berkeley and Chesterton, the founding members included Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers and E. C. Bentley.

By 11 March 1932 the set-up was more formal and the ‘Constitution and Rules of the Detection Club’ were adopted. The opening section announced, ‘The Detection Club is instituted for the association of writers of detective novels and for promoting and continuing a mutual interest and fellowship between them.’ And over more than eighty years the club has continued to follow that admirable prin- ciple. It is an association of some sixty crime writers, voted

Should I be revealing this information?

Dorothy L. Sayers pictured at the Detection Club with

Eric the Skull, London, 1939. (Photo by Popperfoto/

Getty Images)

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in by their peers, which exists solely for the purpose of having three very good dinners a year, currently two at the Garrick Club and one at The Dorchester. It is at the last that the initiation of new members takes place, in an arcane and mysterious ceremony which dates back to the founding of the club.

The script has been altered a bit over the years – the ori- ginal is thought to be chiefly the work of Dorothy L. Sayers – but otherwise the components are pretty much as they were in 1930 (or 1932). The room is candlelit, the president wears a voluminous red robe (certainly large enough to contain the ample proportions of G. K. Chesterton) and each initiate has to place his or her hand on Eric the Skull and say what, in the context of their crime writing, they hold sacred.

But should I be revealing this information? By doing so, am I betraying the privacy of the Detection Club? Sadly, in these days of the Internet, it’s almost impossible for a secret society to exist. What is the point of my clamming up about the initiation ritual when its text can be readily accessed on Wikipedia?

One thing that has changed since the club was started is the range of books written by its members. In the 1920s all crime writers were writing whodunnits of devious complex-ity, with no graphic bloodletting, in which the murder was no more than a key to set in motion the clockwork toy of the plot. Over the years, since the crime-writing genre has opened out to include so many subgenres, the membership of the Detection Club has broadened to reflect that change.

Crime writing is currently in robust health, and that is reflected in how long some of its classics have stayed in print.

In the 1920s all crime writers were writing whodunnits of

devious complexity.

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And the fact that so many crime novels have been issued in the splendid form of Folio Society editions is another tribute to the durability and respectability of the genre. Some of the authors so honoured were of course Detection Club members: Agatha Christie obviously, as well as Margery Allingham, Eric Ambler, Patricia Highsmith and Geoff rey Household.

And one of the most interesting writers in that elite is Edmund Crispin, whose The Moving Toyshop will be pub-lished in a Folio Society edition at Christmas. His nine comic detective novels and many short stories take mischiev-ous delight in subverting their genre, introducing elements of the preposterous and the surreal, which have been much appreciated by his many fans.

But there was another side to Edmund Crispin. Under his real name of Bruce Montgomery, he was a prolifi c com-poser of music for British fi lms, and in fact wrote the scores for six of the Carry On series. He certainly combined a unique mix of talents, but I wouldn’t be surprised to fi nd out about other Detection Club members with unsuspected secrets. Even in the days of Wikipedia, such an organisation must retain some mysteries.

There is even a rumour that the original owner of that most venerable piece of the Club’s arcana, Eric the Skull, was in fact a woman, and should properly be called Erica.

The Folio Society edition of Edmund Crispin’s The Moving Toyshop is available from October 2014

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matthew barzun is currently US Ambas-sador to the UK, and is the grandson of Jacques Barzun.

simon brett is the author of over ninety books, most of them crime novels. For radio he has written No Commitments and After Henry, the latter of which was also made into a success-ful television show.

sue clifford and angela king founded Common Ground and ran it from 1982 to 2013. Their books include England in Particular: A Celebration of the Commonplace, the Local, the Ver-nacular and the Distinctive (2006), The Apple Source Book (2007), Community Orchard Handbook (2011) and Journeys through England in Particular (2014).

jonathan gibbs works in wood engraving, drawing and painting. He regularly exhibits in Edinburgh and London and is Head of Illustration at Edinburgh College of Art.

lavinia greenlaw is a poet, novelist, artist and writer of non-fiction works including The Importance of Music to Girls (2007) and Questions of Travel: William Morris in Iceland (2011). Her latest poetry collection is A Double Sorrow: Troilus and Criseyde (2014).

Editor: Tom Walker

Commissioning Editors: Emily DeedmanJohanna GearyMandy KirkbyFrancesca Wade

Advertising: Simon Toombs

Art Direction and Design: Charlotte Tate

Art Commission: Sheri Gee

Picture Research: Laura CanterCaroline Hotblack Julie McMahon

Print Production: Kirstin SibleyMandy Swain

The Folio Society44 Eagle Street, London WC1R 4FS

Set in Gill Sans and Bembo Book at The Folio Society.

Reprographics by Technik. Printed by the Westdale Press.

kathleen jamie is a Scottish poet, essayist and travel writer, whose latest book is the award-winning Sightlines (2012).

lyn macdonald is a First World War historian, whose books, based on the accounts of eyewitnesses and survivors, include They Called It Passchendaele, The Roses of No Man’s Land, 1914-1918: Voices and Images of the Great War and To the Last Man: Spring 1918.

matthew richardson’s illustration credits include novels by Gabriel Garcia Marquez for Penguin Books and cult classic The Meow- morphosis for Quirk Books. He was the winner of the 2011 Book Illustration Competition for Albert Camus’ The Outsider, subsequently pub-lished by The Folio Society.

stanley wells is a Shakespeare scholar and Honorary President of the Shakespeare Birth-place Trust. He has been general editor of the Oxford Shakespeare series since 1978, and his most recent book is Shakespeare, Sex, and Love (2010).

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The fruit on the front and back covers have been reproduced – reduced in size and rearranged – from The Herefordshire Pomona, published by The Folio Society in October 2014