by Susan Hill
He felt himself growing heavier.
He felt himself growing lighter.
When a man says he hears angels singing,
he hears angels singing.
That stanza, repeated, stressed, tells all:
When a man says he hears angels singing,
he hears angels singing.
Such a writer is always an animal lover and more often a cat lover. She does not say much about cats – though she is keen on foxes. But Mary Oliver is primarily a dog lover. Strange that.
SOME WORDS, SOME SENTENCES, some names, some stories are part of the fabric of my mind, part of the store of references and images I was certainly not born with but which I began to acquire and memorise as a child and continued to absorb through all my growing up and into adulthood. I heard the Bible being read and the prayers of the Church of England services – the words of Morning Prayer, the Eucharist and Evensong, the Collects – all from The Book of Common Prayer and the hymns from The English Hymnal. I am still surprised at how much I know of all this by heart, and I was not from a vicarage family. I wasn’t alone. Everyone used to know chunks of the Bible because they heard it without fail every Sunday, and those who could not read it did not really need to, they listened and remembered over the years.
I did Latin at school, and Greek for a couple of years later, but the Classical stories were told to us and read to us in English, so they too became part of my frame of cultural reference. Folk tales, fairy stories, great poetry are in there, too. It was not anything out of the way. We all knew these things. It was what happened in school and out of it.
It makes me sad that the Bible, the Prayer Book, the Classical canon are not part of my own children’s fabric. The rot set in forty years ago or more. I doubt if they know anything much by heart and it is not their fault. Schools regard learning by rote as time-wasting and sterile and how does a rich store of literary and cultural references help one in Real Life?
The Collects are a particular source of beautiful cadences and deep meaning. They are inspiring, and comforting, and they are all quite short, so reading the Collect of the Day each morning takes only a couple of minutes.
You need not be a believer to gain a lot. This reading is a form of meditation and mindfulness and, goodness knows, those are all the rage. I think the Collects strengthen one’s mental immune system and guard against all manner of ills. Is that just me?
O God,
you know us to be set
in the midst of so many and great dangers,
that by reason of the frailty of our nature
we cannot always stand upright:
grant to us such strength and protection
as may support us in all dangers
and carry us through all temptations;
through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord.
HAVE ALWAYS WONDERED why my antipathy to William Wordsworth is so ingrained. Then today I wondered if it was because of his intensely political spell – unless you are a historian, and more, a political historian, the passions of the political past do not heat up well. Even those poets and other artists who marched off to fight in the Spanish Civil War are of interest now because of their poetry. Politics is such a fleeting thing.
I never got Wordsworth at all. Nor the overblown Keats. But Coleridge, now … there is that streak of lightning in him, genius, which makes Wordsworth seem so leaden.
Through caverns measureless to man.
Down to a sunless sea.
And the desperation of the Ancient Mariner, Kubla Khan and all the rest that blazed out of that opium-fuelled imagination.
… Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.
Makes flames come out of your ears.
I WAS TRYING TO THINK of lines, or passages, that shock the reader into crying out, ‘Oh NO!’ A bit like the second when the identity of the killer is at last revealed in Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. I first read it on a long train journey, and jumped when I got to that bit and did indeed shout, ‘Oh NO!’
The traveller opposite smiled. ‘Good, isn’t it?’ he said.
But it is another sort of shock, one of disbelief and immense sadness, when one reaches the Time Passes section of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse.
Mr Ramsay, stumbling along a passage one dark morning, stretched his arms out, but Mrs Ramsay having died rather suddenly the night before, his arms, though stretched out, remained empty.”
Once you have taken the novel to your heart, and loved Mrs Ramsay, you never get her shocking offstage death out of your mind. Indeed, it is one book which does change after the first reading because you can never un-know what happens, and so, in a strange way, you slightly withhold your affection for her.
The denouement of any crime novel or thriller may give the reader a jolt but one reads those genres precisely in order to be jolted. Virginia Woolf plants her shock carefully and cleverly, to make the maximum impact. It is not for one moment foreseen.
I have tried to do that myself in novels, from time to time. It has succeeded sometimes. And it has not. One plays a dangerous game with the reader.
THE BOAT MAKERS AND MENDERS at Glandford are busy repairing, refurbishing and painting all winter. The smell of varnish floats on the air.
News is that there is likely to be a record number of seal pups on the Point. There was a record number last year, too. Seals are thriving.
News also has it that we are going to have a bitterly cold winter, and another Ice Age will start in four years time.
All depends on who you believe.
Looking at the still water under a bright sky this morning, the poem went through my mind about the lonely sea and the sky.
And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by;
(John Masefield – a better poet than is often thought. Poet Laureate, too. Not to mention author of one of the best children’s books, The Box of Delights.)
I often wish I had spent time in small boats on the water. I should have done. I am a good sailor, too. Whether you are or you aren’t is pure luck. Too late now, so watching will have to do.
READING JAMES WOOD’S How Fiction Works again, I am reminded how sane a writer and commentator he is, how balanced and clear-headed and full of common sense: ‘The novel is the great virtuoso of exceptionalism: it always wriggles out of the rules thrown around it.’
There are no rules, I say over and over again.
‘Show, don’t tell.’ That is one of the worst ‘rules’ – you do what you want, when writing a novel. Some of the very greatest ones tell, and either never show or only show some of the time. Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady. Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier.
V. S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr Biswas … They tell and show and the telling sections are there because the author knew they were the best way of writing this or that particular section. James Wood highlights the scene where the author tells how Mr Biswas went on his bicycle to purchase a dolls’ house for his daughter, which cost more than a month’s wages. ‘Not a word of dialogue’ and even the key moments are described ‘off stage’.
None of the rules are obeyed.
There are no rules.
It would help aspiring authors considerably if they understood that.
MINUS 4 OUT THERE.
Norfolk night skies are beautiful and there is so little light pollution here it is possible to see the constellations very clearly. I keep trying astronomy. People have bought me books about the night sky, and telescopes and DVDs and … It’s no good. Once they take away the dot-to-dot line, it all looks a mess. I can sort out Orion, and the Belt, the Great Bear and the Pleiades and once, I think, I got Bootes and Cassiopeia, but that’s it. In summer here you can lie on your back on the grass and see the Milky Way. Pa
rts of our coast get the Northern Lights, but I always hear about it the next day. I would love to go on a Northern Lights trip to the very very far north but I don’t suppose I ever shall.
Did anyone ever write a novel about the night sky? SF, I suppose, and I can’t get on with SF. As Shakespeare said in Much Ado about Nothing:
‘[A] star danced, and under that was I born.’
That will do.
MEANWHILE, NEW TELEVISION adaptations of Agatha Christie are announced, and they mean to shock. No gentle Geraldine McEwan as Miss Marple, nor the mincing Hercule Poirot of David Suchet. These will, apparently, be strong stuff, about murder as it really is and murderers ditto. Fast-paced. Violent. I think Christie can take it. And, as ever, if people don’t like the new adaptations, the old ones will trundle along in the twilight world that is afternoon television, and of course the books do not change. People forget. When I wrote Mrs de Winter, the sequel to Rebecca, some people were cross … and when I pointed out that a) they didn’t have to read it, and b) Rebecca was still there as it was written by Daphne du M, they missed the points. But no adaptation or sequel or whatever can ever change the original book. Not now. In the eighteenth century Nahum Tate re-wrote King Lear, giving it a happy ending and, as if that were not bad enough, he managed to have the original Shakespeare play banned so that only his was played or read. Now, that is a wholly different matter and shocking. That is what fascist dictatorships do with books they do not like.
I JUST WENT OUTSIDE. It smells of cold and the grass is crisp. Wish I could find the poem I read many years ago, about opening the door at night and just standing, taking in what it is like out there …
AND SO, THE LAST DAY of the year. I have never done anything celebratory about it – a non-event if ever there was one. But the last week of December shows two faces. The shortest day has come and gone. By infinitesimal steps, the nights are drawing out. The birds sing again. The rite of excess that Christmas has become is over. There is just the aftermath in terms of family fall-outs and over-indulged children and stomachs.
But January is a new start. There is spring to look forward to. No matter how grim it, and February, may be, if I get my head down and get through them, March comes and in March there really is spring to look forward to.
Yet, today it is still December and the Old Year. Everything is fast in its winter hibernation, like the Moomins under their duvets during the Long Sleep. The fires and stoves are lit. The wood pile is stacked high. Not even a snowdrop has yet dared to struggle towards the light in some sheltered spot.
This is a time for thinking. Reading. More reading. Making writing notes. Reading again. Dreaming. Wondering. Scheming. Planning. Hunkering down. Lighting the lamps.
Settling.
I go outside and have my nose bitten off by cold. The dog and the cat turn their back to the outside world and burrow deep down into their baskets.
Snowflakes drift down from a laden, leaden sky.
I come inside. And close the door.
BOOK LIST
Janet and Allan Ahlberg
Each Peach Pear Plum // 208
Hugh Aldersey-Williams
Tide: Science and Lore of the Greatest Force on Earth // 195
The Adventures of Sir Thomas Browne in the 21st Century // 238
Marjorie Allingham
The Tiger in the Smoke // 244
Al Alvarez
The Writer’s Voice // 58
Martin Amis
Experience // 106
London Fields // 106
Money // 106
W. H. Auden
Night Mail // 70
Cicely Mary Baker
Flower Fairies series // 21
Julian Barnes
The Sense of an Ending // 146, 162
Beano Annual // 5
Adrian Bell
Corduroy // 154
Alan Bennett
The Wind in the Willows //
E. F. Benson
Mapp and Lucia books // 138
John Betjeman
‘Parliament Hill Fields’ // 68
Ronald Blythe
Akenfield // 54
Enid Blyton
The Magic Faraway Tree // 38, 90
The Book of Common Prayer // 135
Elizabeth Bowen
‘Ivy Gripped the Steps’ // 214
British Library Crime Classics // 239
Emily Brontë
Wuthering Heights // 210
Italo Calvino
If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller // 177
Cambridge Latin Course // 26
John le Carré
The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories from My Life // 140
Eleanor Catton
The Luminaries // 148
Deborah Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire
Counting My Chickens and Other Home Thoughts // 39
David Cecil
Library Looking-glass // 5
Raymond Chandler
The Big Sleep // 131
The High Window // 131
The Little Sister // 131
Tracy Chevalier (ed.)
Reader, I Married Him // 117
Agatha Christie
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd // 250
Susanna Clark
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell // 149
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Kubla Khan // 250
The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner // 249
Michael Cunningham
The Hours // 227
Rachel Cusk
Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation // 127
Charles Dickens
A Christmas Carol // 33, 229, 243
Lynley Dodd
Hairy Maclary from Donaldson’s Dairy // 209
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
The Hound of the Baskervilles // 32, 34
Gerald Durrell
My Family and Other Animals // 156
George Eliot
Daniel Deronda // 93
T. S. Eliot
Preludes // 211
The Waste Land // 68
Duncan Fallowell
Going as Far as I Can // 87
How to Disappear // 86
To Noto // 87
U. A. Fanthorpe
New & Collected Poems (preface by Carol Ann Duffy) // 15
U. A. Fanthorpe & R. V. Bailey
From Me to You: Love Poems // 13
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby // 209
Ian Fleming
Casino Royale // 93
Moonraker // 93
Ford Madox Ford
The Good Soldier // 85, 143
Richard Ford
The Sportswriter // 203
Tom Fort
The Book of Eels // 189
Edward Gorey
The Unstrung Harp // 72
C. L. Graves
Railway Rhymes // 69
Ursula Le Guin
Words are My Matter: Writing about Life and Books, 2000–2016 // 158
Lilias Rider Haggard
A Norfolk Notebook // 121
Christopher de Hamel
Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts // 232
Thomas Hardy
The Return of the Native // 97
Tess of the D’Urbevilles // 97
Shirley Hazzard
Greene on Capri // 138
We Need Silence to Find Out What We Think // 204
Patricia Highsmith
Edith’s Diary // 211
The Talented Mr Ripley // 210
Susan Hill
Mrs de Winter // 254
Strange Meeting // 192, 213
To Debo, on Her 85th Birthday. From Her Friends // 39
The Woman in Black // 94, 187, 192, 229
A. E. Housman
A Shropshire Lad // 72
Henry James
The Portrait of a Lady // 252
The Turn of the Screw // 229
P. D. James
A Shroud for a
Nightingale // 92
Tove Jansson
Finn Family Moomintroll series // 8
Moominland Midwinter // 217
Alan Judd
The Devil’s Own Work // 84
John Keats
‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’ // 142
Johannes Kepler
The Six-Cornered Snowflake // 23
Rudyard Kipling
‘A Smuggler’s Song’ // 224
Ladybird Books // 51
Andrew Lang
Rainbow Fairy books // 21
Hermione Lee
Edith Wharton // 66
Diarmaid MacCulloch
All Things Made New: Writings on the Reformation // 220
Olivia Manning
The Balkan Trilogy // 166
The Levant Trilogy // 166
Sandor Marai
Embers // 6
Captain Frederick Marryat
The Children of the New Forest // 225
John Masefield
The Box of Delights // 252
W. Somerset Maugham
The Painted Veil // 102
A Writer’s Notebook // 100
Daphne du Maurier
Rebecca // 254
Jay McInerney
Brightness Falls // 165
A. A. Milne
Toad of Toad Hall // 133
Iris Murdoch
The Bell // 170
Occasional Essays // 27
Vladimir Nabokov
Ada or Ardor // 146
Lectures on Literature // 145
Pnin // 146
V. S. Naipaul
A House for Mr Bigwas // 232
Mary Oliver
A Thousand Mornings // 247
Lilian Pizzichini
The Blue Hour: A Life of Jean Rhys // 186
David Plante
Difficult Women: A Memoir of Three // 187
J. B. Priestley
An Inspector Calls // 46
Marcel Proust
A la recherche du temps perdu // 215
Barbara Pym
Quartet in Autumn // 200
Arthur Ransome
Swallows and Amazons // 55
Jean Rhys
Wide Sargasso Sea // 187
F. N. Robinson
The Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer // 103
Katie Roiphe
The Violet Hour: Great Writers at the End // 109
St Matthew’s Gospel (Authorised Version) // 242
May Sarton
The House by the Sea // 11