My blog is moving

I have now moved my blog to unite it with my new website - please follow the link to www.sarahbakewell.com to see any posts from October 2013 on.

Sorry about the inconvenience!

Poodles, dodos and historiographers

It's been a while since my last Guardian piece, but here's one today, on armchairs, poodles, and military "strikes".

Also today, in the FT: my review of Simon Winder's Danubia, an entertaining history of Habsburg Central Europe, starring, among others, the weird and not-always-wonderful Rudolf II of Prague.  Together with the lions, tigers, dodos and other wild beasts in his castle, Rudolf kept a pet "historiographer": Joannes Sambucus (or János Zsámboky), of whom I am especially fond.  I tried to squeeze him into the review but soon realised that he wouldn't fit and that it was pure self-indulgence.

Sambucus was a great Hungarian manuscript collector and editor of classical texts, best remembered for his Emblemata (1564), an emblem book (and what a strange fashion that was).   I compiled a Sambucus bibliography for my librarianship dissertation years ago, an over-ambitious and quite pointless project for a single summer.  I could no doubt have carried on working on it for years, travelling over Europe and America, comparing editions down to their tiniest detail, and might still be at it today - but fortunately I had neither time nor money for the job. 

Sambucus himself spent all his money and time chasing manuscripts, buying them up, piling them up, poring over them.  He was one of the great Renaissance bibliomaniacs and humanists.  Towards the end of his life, he ran into debt, and had to sell his collection again. 

Here is a picture, taken by Michal Maňas, of the memorial on his house in Vienna.

To the boundaries of the universe and beyond

Another Guardian ramble of mine, this time about Igor Stravinsky, Alban Berg, and the Viennese Skandalkonzert of 1913, all connected with the excellent Rest is Noise festival about to begin at the South Bank Centre in London.

The two loves of Andre Maurois

In the New Yorker's Page-Turner blog yesterday: my essay on Andre Maurois, his tortuous love life, and his novel 'Climates', which is about to be reissued by the wonderful Other Press in a new translation by Adriana Hunter (4 December 2012).

Kerouac drifting off

I've just been marvelling at Jack Kerouac's original scroll draft of On the Road, on display at the British Library in a special looooooooong display case. (It doesn't display the whole 120 feet, but a large portion of it, with the rest rolled at one end.) 

It's impressive to see it, but there's one thing I don't understand.  Every source I've ever seen says that Kerouac taped tracing-paper together to form the scroll so he wouldn't have to be distracted by changing paper in the typewriter.  But at regular intervals all the way along, probably equivalent to about 2-3 sheets  of ordinary paper, a neat shift occurs in the margin.  Seems his typewriter was typing crooked, and when the text block drifted too far over he had to stop what he was doing, raise the bar that locks the paper in place, and shove the whole thing over a bit before clamping it back down and carrying on.

So - how is that not distracting?  I think I'd find it even more so, as you'd end up constantly monitoring how far you were floating off to the side.

Am I interpreting what I'm seeing correctly?  Or does anyone know a better explanation of these breaks?

Jelly Baby Boost

On Saturday 29 September I attended a wonderful all-day symposium at London's Wellcome Collection, called 'Human Limits'.  Here's a piece I wrote for The Guardian on Monday 1 October, which (rather to my own surprise) turned out to be about goggles, jelly babies and other small technology.

The headline in the print version (which I much prefer to the online one) was The Jelly Baby Boost. No contest, I'd say.

Kings Cross Lighthouse 26 July 2012

Kings Cross Lighthouse 26 July 2012, a set on Flickr.

Waiting for the Olympic torch to pass Kings Cross this morning, I got distracted watching this - the lighthouse on the corner of Pentonville Road, under refurbishment but not yet finished, being covered with a picture of what it's supposed to look like.

Memorials

Here's a link to another little meandering of mine, in today's Guardian, prompted by the theft and patient police re-assembling of memorial plaques in Croydon.

If anyone's interested in seeing more pictures of the plaques, and reading a bit more about the story, here is a report in the Croydon Guardian.

The beast must be free too

Here's a link to a little reflection of mine on freedom and reality, in today's Guardian.

Larkin Centre

A couple of weeks ago I went to the Larkin Centre at the University of Hull, to talk about Montaigne with the wonderful novelist Ray French.  Do read his Going Under if you don't already know it - it's a gem.  The university made a video of our evening and uploaded it to their website - you can watch here.

I also like this photo by Mike Park. I am not sure whether the characters in the Stanley Spencer painting behind us are pleading with me, begging me to stop, or trying to push me off stage.. 


Image courtesy Mike Park / University of Hull


This picture gives just a glimpse of the excellent art collection at the Larkin Centre.  They put on lots of events - do see what's on, if you are in the Hull area.  You can also follow the Larkin Trail around the city.  Ray and I popped in to the Royal Hotel near the station, immortalised in one of the bard's works.  A fragment of the poem is reproduced outside, in an ugly way, but ifyou go inside and look to the left of the bar, you can see it in full.  The hotel has hardly changed a bit, except it doesn't have overflowing ashtrays any more.  Here's a lnk to the poem, Friday Night at the Royal Station Hotel.  

Affordable Art Fair

Affordable Art Fair
Originally uploaded by sarabak

I went to the Affordable Art Fair in London's Battersea Park. Couldn't afford anything. But I met this strange wistful creature outside ...

Carl Dreyer at the BFI

I've been going to a lot of films in the British Film Institute's Carl Dreyer season, and what better place to resurrect a dead-looking blog than with the director of classic I-vaunt-to-suck-your-blood drama, Vampyr?

Dreyer was an extraordinary Danish director, an innovator who is now best known for somewhat sparse and serious films like The Passion of Joan of Arc, Day of Wrath and Ordet.  I first came across him through his last film, Gertrud, which may be his best.

What I didn't know until recently was that he also directed truly fabulous early silent comedies. Last week I saw his third film, The Parson's Widow (1920), and it was so funny and so moving that I can't stop thinking about it.  It's about a young man who becomes parson of a small village, but only on condition that he marry Dame Margaret, a gaunt crone, the widow of the previous parson. With trepidaton, he agrees, and moves his sweetheart into the household too, pretending that she is his sister.  What ensues is a set of farcical mishaps as he and his girlfriend try to set up secret trysts, which of course go wrong.  They even try to scare the widow to death to get her out of the way.  By the end, they repent of their callous ways.  And this is where the film changes tone entirely, as we see things from the old lady's point of view and realise that she too once played a very different role in life.

It's beautifully filmed, deeply humane, and very well acted.  Apparently Hildur Carlberg, who played the widow, was herself terminally ill at the time of filming, but promised Dreyer that she would not die until the job was done.  She kept her promise, and died just a few weeks later, before she could see the final film.

Her performance is so good that I am sad not to be able to see her at other points of her career.  There is something eerie about the thought of her much younger self, lost to the camera because films hadn't been invented yet.

The Dreyer season continues .. and I will be going to several more.

In praise of things

Here's a piece I wrote in last week's Guardian, about the beauties of railway engineering - with added songs of praise for web pages, archivists and writers of guidebooks.

Just a photo

Flower
Originally uploaded by sarabak

I still feel cheered by this photo I took with my phone a few weeks ago. First the flower fluttered down from a windowbox, outside a Tottenham Court Road pub. Passers-by didn't seem to see it, yet they never stepped on it either. (Well, eventually somebody did.) Meanwhile, these two people came and stood by it for ages, talking.

The NBCC awards

Sarah Bakewell How to Live 2011 Shankbone
Originally uploaded by david_shankbone

I like this picture by David Shankbone - it's of me clutching the podium so as not to collapse to the floor, two minutes after learning that I'd won the National Book Critics' Circle Biography Award last Thursday!

Soldiers

I saw this when I was walking in Hyde Park yesterday - though, strangely, I didn't notice how the colours and postures of the woman and the soldier echoed each other until I got it home and looked at it on the screen.  Which is weird because, given that I didn't notice it, I'm honestly not sure why I was taking the photo..

Across the centuries

There's a great New York Times piece out about me and Montaigne this weekend, by Patricia Cohen. I love the way she describes my style of biography - "a delightful conversation across the centuries".  Of course historical conversations can go badly wrong, like any other.  There can be arguments, misunderstandings, bullying, or a refusal to listen.  The wrong end of the stick is always there, temptingly easy to grasp.  But there can be enlightening, congenial encounters too. The best conversations help bring what Montaigne called "a gay and sociable wisdom".  At least, that's why I enjoy reading him.

Some writing to do now - then I'll go out in the snow and take some pictures.

Magnificent gremlins

A few days ago, news broke that the U.K. edition of Jonathan Franzen's new novel Freedom was riddled with tiny errors, because the printers had inadvertently used the last-but-one version of the text.  Instead of the version to which Franzen had added his final amendments, they used the one before. This meant losing a few tweaks affecting characterisation, he says, but mainly he lost thousands of improvements to vocabulary and phrasing.

My sympathy for Franzen is so intense that I feel like weeping.  If this happened to me, I would rage, I would moan; I would ask why the gods hated me.  Every time I saw a copy of the thing in a bookshop, I would die a small death and wish I'd never written it at all. Better to have no book than to have one still haunted by those flabby adverbs and unnecessary intensifiers that you had eliminated just in time. Franzen spent nine years writing Freedom: I suspect this matters to him.

The good news is that Franzen is probably the only one who notices. The writer cares about every word; readers are less likely to bother, not because they are slapdash people but because they are reading. Just as a canoeist does not notice a pebble out of place on the bottom of a stream, few readers notice itsy-bitsy imperfections in a book.  This is so even when the readers are themselves writers. Yesterday's Guardian article quotes Blake Morrison, who reviewed Freedom; he sympathised with Franzen just as I do, but he had spotted nothing wrong.

This is a comforting truth - but it's not quite a full truth. Of course it matters. A finely sanded, polished, cliche-free text tells a better story.  It conjures up images more clearly, and its characters breathe more freely.  They are easier to love or hate or care about.

So I still weep for Franzen - even if Franzen is the only one who sees the pebbles out of place.

I was reading this news over breakfast yesterday - a fry-up with black pudding in Wigtown, Scotland, where I had gone to talk about Montaigne at the Wigtown Book Festival. 

After breakfast, but before my talk, I walked through the town, a place filled with bookshops and cafes.  In one cafe window I saw this: a collection of customers' favourite words, contributed, transcribed, and hung up to flutter in the breeze.

Then I bought a book, in one of Wigtown's second-hand shops: Canoe Errant on the Nile, by Major R. Raven-Hart.

Published in 1936, it's the story of his paddle up that river in search of all kinds of things.  He writes about crocodiles, temples, folk stories, Islam, and emperors. He talks about rowing in his canoe in the nude ("unless a sun-helmet and sunglasses count as clothes").  And he prefaces it all with an announcement of his main purpose in making the trip.  He says: "I wanted to test a pet theory about the way Egyptian sculptors worked, based on the study of museum exhibits. It proved quite false, and there is nothing about it in this book."

How beautiful is that? I bought Major Raven-Hart because of that sentence.  I'm planning to give it someone today, as a gift - someone I know would appreciate it - but meanwhile the book is sitting on my desk smiling at me.  It seems to want to tell me something. I think it wants to say that error can be a nasty little gremlin, but it can also be a magnificent achievement.

Open House in London

A weekend or two ago it was open day in London - lots of buildings flung their arms open to the masses.  More importantly, you could also wander around the City Square Mile and take pictures of buildings to your heart's content, without being arrested as a terrorist.

I tried my hand at some architecture - the Gherkin (from the outside) and the Lloyds Building (mostly from the inside). Here's a link to flickr for the set, if you fancy seeing them all.

But here's the one I like best: the Gherkin, reflected in a watery silvery way:

Thunder made out of diamonds

When I’m working from home there usually comes a point where I have to get up from my desk and rush out into the air, usually on the pretext of going to the supermarket or post office. But sometimes, once I get out into the street, I realise at once that I don’t need groceries and I have nothing to post.

When this happens, I keep walking past Balham tube station until I get to the best second-hand bookshop in the neighbourhood (also one of the best in London), My Back Pages.

I tend to come out with exactly one book, and it’s never one I had previously intended to buy. Last week it was a Penguin Classic I’d never heard of, by Irmard Keun, called Child of All Nations.

I bought it because I liked the cover:

Child of All Nations was written in 1938, and only translated into English in 2008 – by Michael Hoffman, who is best known for his translations of Joseph Roth. There’s a connection, for Irmgard Keun travelled round Europe for many years as Joseph Roth’s companion. Both were writers and bohemians, both drank too much, and both were in flight from the Nazis, who were burning their books.

The novel is the story of Kully, a young girl whose parents are doing just what Keun and Roth did. The father drifts from one European capital to the next, writing and boozing, and trying to charm or wheedle money out of people. Whenever he does get a few coins, he blows it on inviting impecunious poets and street-drinkers out for absinthe and rum. Meanwhile, Kully waits with her mother in Dutch and Belgian hotels which they cannot afford to leave, for that would mean paying the bill. She picks up languages by the half-dozen, meets children and adults, and plays with anything she happens to find, from rotting crabs to tiny balls of mercury spilled from a broken thermometer. She observes all: an eternally naïve narrator who misunderstands what is going on, but who – of course – really understands more than anyone. The adults are lost and often sad; Kully does not get it, and so she sees things as they really are.

It’s an exquisite, moving book, beautifully written (and beautifully translated). Kully’s father is an unforgettable character: warm, impulsive, generous; intimidating when drunk, shockingly irresponsible, yet somehow reassuring. When he is around, it seems nothing can go wrong; the trouble is, he is hardly ever around. Early on, he is described as having eyes which “sometimes looked as if they had swum far out to sea and weren’t completely back yet.” And when he gives a lecture in Poland, Kully (who isn’t sure what a lecture is) pictures it as a glittering spectacle in a vast castle, attended by thousands of people. It must, she imagines, “must be something like thunder made out of diamonds.”

This book is thunder made out of diamonds too, and it takes you far out to sea. I’m glad so few of the books I find are like this, or I’d never get anything else done; I’d read and re-read them, and perhaps forget to come back.

Here is Irmgard: