Reading matter

You'd expect the London Review Cake Shop to have a copy of the magazine lying around. I leafed through it idly while savouring a chocolate swirl biscuit and decided I had to buy a copy.

Alan Bennett wanders through the libraries of his youth, with many an entrancing anecdote. Of the reference room in the library at Leeds, where he gleaned the smattering of culture that he claims got him a scholarship to Oxford, he says:

"It had glamour, too, for me and getting in first a nine one morning I felt, opening my books, as I had when a small boy at Armley Baths and I had been first in there, the one to whom it fell to break the immaculate stillness of the water, shatter the straight lines tiled on the bottom of the bath and set the day on its way."

In his earlier life as a medieval historian he spent time in the Round Room of the Public Record Office at Chancery Lane:

"The Memoranda Rolls on which I spent much of my time were long thin swatches of parchment about five feet long and one foot wide and written on both sides. Thus to turn the page required the co-operation and forbearance of most of the other readers at the table, and what would sometimes look like the cast of the Mad Hatter's tea party struggling to put wallpaper up was just me trying to turn over. A side effect of reading these unwieldy documents was that one was straightaway propelled into quite an intimate relationship with readers alongside and among those I got to know in this way as the historian Cecil Woodham-Smith.

"The author of The Great Hunger, an account of the Irish Famine, and The Reason Why, about the events leading up to the Charge of the Light Brigade, Cecil was a frail woman with a tiny bird-like skull, looking more like Elizabeth I (in later life) than Edith Sitwell ever did (and minus her sheet metal earrings). Irish, she had a Firbankian wit and a lovely turn of phrase. 'Do you know the Atlantic at all?' she once asked me and I put the line into Habeas Corpus and got a big laugh on it. From a grand Irish family she was quite snobbish; talking of someone she said: 'Then he married a Mitford ... but that's a stage everybody goes through.' Even the most ordinary remark would be given her own particular twist and she could be quite camp. Conversation had once turned, as conversations will, to fork-lift trucks. Feeling that industrial machinery might be remote from Cecil's sphere of interest I said: 'Do you know what a fork-lift truck is?' She looked at me in her best Annie Walker manner. 'I do. To my cost.'"

Also, in a letter Tim Parks wonders whether a character's inner monologue can be nuanced, if his speech is stumbling, "poor with words", and points out that in The Empty Family, stories about Pakistani immigrants to Barcelona, Colm Toibin uses "close description of movement and body language, dialogue and narrative details to suggest a rich inner life". He concludes: "The temptation for the novelist, who lives so much in language, is to imagine that all thought is expressed in words, words like his or her own, and indeed that word-driven consciousness is somehow superior. Perhaps the real achievement when evoking the inner life of a character who thinks of himself as 'poor with words' would be to suggest how rich he is without them."

But it was the article on Outsider Art by Terry Castle that led me to buy the magazine, and very interesting it was. To sum it up: "What draws me in ... is the promise - the colourful, bobbing lure - of meaning itself. ... Yet precisely what draws me in ... is precisely what shuts me out."

A while back I was given a year's sub to LRB and did try to "keep up" - it's fortnightly - but even the boring-looking articles turned out to be so very interesting, and I fell farther and farther behind, pages-turned-back copies with scarcely time to gather dust before another joined the pile beside the bed. One issue contained Bridget Riley's article on her use of repetitious drawing, which got me thinking about another aspect of drawing-as-a-tool. When the subscription ran out, though, I was rather relieved!

Another delight in this issue was Eliot Weinberger's "The Cloud Bookcase" - all titles are of actual books by "ancient chinese" authors. Among them are many mysteries, revealed in annotations; you can read them all on the LRB website.

(Not to be confused with Ronan & Erwan Bouroullec's Cloud Bookcase or Dripta Roy's Dream Bookshelf.)