Novelists From England

"Miles of cornfields, and ballet in the evening."

"Typically, young women of her class were expected to marry someone rich and titled, but she rebelled almost from childhood...She was a wonderful mother to those children and a treasure for Mexico and for me...She made a decision to live her own life and not the life that was expected of her. Or perhaps she followed a vocation more than she made a decision. I am filled with admiration for her integrity—defending it against the rules of a social class that prevented gifted people from becoming all that they had in them to become. Carrington never gave in...She defended her integrity from the beginning of her life in a very blunt way"

"I am afraid I am going to drift into fiction, truthful but incomplete, for lack of some details which I cannot conjure up today and which might have enlightened us. This morning, the idea of the egg came again to my mind and I thought that I could use it as a crystal to look at Madrid in those days of July and August 1940—for why should it not enclose my own experiences as well as the past and future history of the Universe? The egg is the macrocosm and the microcosm, the dividing line between the Big and the Small which makes it impossible to see the whole. To possess a telescope without its other essential half—the microscope—seems to me a symbol of the darkest incomprehension. The task of the right eye is to peer into the telescope, while the left eye peers into the microscope. (August 24, 1943)"

"Widely read in alchemical writings, a regular pilgrim since 1971 to the lamas in exile from Tibet, analysed by followers of Jung, and loyal to a fierce and personal brand of feminist idealism, Leonora Carrington never altogether sheds in her quest for wisdom a wonderful, saving mischievousness. Her great friend and collector Edward James wrote over her door in Mexico, "This is the house of the Sphinx." A sphinx, yes, but a sphinx who sets riddles not to confound or mock but to provoke laughter and open doors in the chambers of the mind, where love and fear and the other passions have their seat. She has said, "I try to empty myself of images which have made me blind": in many ways she is breaking spells which blind others' sight too, although the landscape she travels remains a place enchanted."

"When Carmella gave me the present of a hearing trumpet she may have foreseen some of the consequences. (first line)"

"“...I believe in inspiration, an inspired conversation between two people with some mysterious affinity can bring more joy into life than even the most expensive kind of clock. Unfortunately there are very few inspired people and one has to fall back on one’s own store of vital fire, this is most exhausting especially, as you know, I have to work day and night even if all my bones ache and my head is swimming and I am fainting with fatigue and nobody understands my mortal fight to keep on my feet and not to lose my inspired joy of life even if I do have palpitations of the heart and they drive me like a poor beast of burden I often feel like Joan of Arc so dreadfully misunderstood and all those terrible cardinals and bishops prodding her poor agonized mind with so many unnecessary questions. I can’t help feeling some deep affinity with Joan of Arc and I often feel I am being burned at the stake just because I have always refused to give up that wonderful strange power I have inside me that becomes manifested when I am in harmonious communication with some other inspired being like myself.” (p25)"

"Houses are really bodies. We connect ourselves with walls, roofs, and objects just as we hang on to our livers, skeletons, flesh and bloodstream. (p13)"

"Strange how the bible always seems to end up in misery and cataclysm. I often wondered how their angry and vicious God became so popular. Humanity is very strange and I don’t pretend to understand anything, however why worship something that only sends you plagues and massacres? and why was Eve blamed for everything? (p20)"

"If I remember correctly writers usually find some excuse for their books, although why one should excuse oneself for having such a quiet and peaceful occupation I really don't know. Military people never seem to apologize for killing each other yet novelists feel ashamed for writing some nice inert paper book that is not certain to be read by anybody. Values are very strange, they change so quickly I can’t keep track of them. (p21)"

""I am never lonely...Or rather I never suffer from loneliness. I suffer much from the idea that my loneliness might be taken away from me by a lot of mercilessly well meaning people. Of course I never hope that you will understand me, so all I ask is that you do not imagine that you are persuading me into something when you are actually forcing me against my will." (p18)"

"Before taking up the actual facts of my experience, I want to say that the sentence passed on me by society at that particular time was probably, surely even, a god-send, for I was not aware of the importance of health, I mean of the absolute necessity of having a healthy body to avoid disaster in the liberation of the mind. More important yet, the necessity that others be with me that we may feed each other with our knowledge and thus constitute the Whole…The time had not come for me to understand. What I am going to endeavor to express here with the utmost fidelity was but an embryo of knowledge. (from first page)"

"There are things that are not sayable. That’s why we have art. (2009)"

"Everything has a cause and the cause of anything is everything."

"The mind of the people is like mud, From which arise strange and beautiful things."

"If you imagine you are going to read of model children, with perhaps a naughtily inclined one to point a moral, you had better lay down the book immediately and betake yourself to "Sandford and Merton" or similar standard juvenile works. Not one of the seven is really good, for the very excellent reason that Australian children never are."

"When I was but thirteen or so I went into a golden land, Chimborazo, Cotopaxi Took me by the hand."

"Anyone can prove anything except that anything’s worth proving."

"I shall leave this farm-house very soon. The people are all right, but they are people, and therefore insufferable."

"The baronet, in his old age, had been cast up by his vices on the shores of melancholy; heavy-eyed, gray-haired, bent, he seemed to pass through life as in a dream."

"On bitter nights in winter the moon called her and she came, when the breath was vapor, and the trees that circled her dancing-room were black, bare skeletons, and the frost was cruel."

"How madly she danced that night!"

"He was so disrespectful that it was believed that he spoke truth."

"Perhaps the prayer that is offered when the time for praying is over is more terribly pathetic than any other. Yet one might hesitate to say that this prayer was unanswered."

"Once more the music came. This time it was a dance of caprice, pelting along over the violin-strings, leaping, laughing, wanton. Again an illusion seemed to cross her eyes. An old king was watching her, a king with the sordid history of the exhaustion of pleasure written on his flaccid face. A hook-nosed courtier by his side settled the ruffles at his wrists and mumbled, Ravissant! Quel malheur que la vieillesse! It was a strange illusion. Faster and faster she sped to the music, stepping, spinning, pirouetting; the dance was light as thistle-down, fierce as fire, smooth as a rapid stream."

"Modernity kills ghostly romance."

"Oh why was I born for this time? Before one is thirty to know more dead than living people."

"I am beginning to rub my eyes at the prospect of peace. I think it will require more courage than anything that has gone before. ... One will have to look at long vistas again, instead of short ones, and one will at last fully recognise that the dead are not only dead for the duration of the war."

"I use the word smile for lack of a better word, but how to convey the beauty of the indefinable expression that transfigured that time-worn face? Tender triumph: gentle joy: rapturous reverence. What mystery did I witness? It was like iron frost yielding to sunshine — the thawing of grief in the dawn-radiance of some unsurmisable redemption."

"Outside everything was uncannily visible in the light of the full moon, but here in the dark shaded alleys the night was conscious of itself."

"In her fantastic mood she stretched her soft, clasped hands upward toward the moon. 'Sweet moon,' she said in a kind of mock prayer, 'make your white light come down in music into my dancing-room here, and I will dance most deliciously for you to see.' She flung her head backward and let her hands fall; her eyes were half closed, and her mouth was a kissing mouth. 'Ah! sweet moon,' she whispered, 'do this for me, and I will be your slave; I will be what you will.'"

"The air seemed to be filled with the perfume of some bitter spice. Viola could fancy almost that she saw a smoldering campfire and heard far off the roar of some desolate wild beast. She let her long hair fall, raising the heavy strands of it in either hand as she moved slowly to the laden music. Slowly her body swayed with drowsy grace, slowly her satin shoes slid over the silver sand."

"She would rather be an old man's darling than a young man's warling."

"I’ve always been a relentlessly creative person. Creativity has saved me from mental trauma. I’ve always been amazed at how a piece of music, a feat of architecture or a picture could move me. I have looked into what the origins of creativity might be, whether there’s a scientific explanation for it, or whether it’s something less knowable. And since there’s no definitive answer to it, it’s grown more compelling. I also find it difficult to write about characters who don’t have an instinct to create something. I always want to write about people who are looking to add more to the world than they’re taking from it."

"I do a lot of thinking about the arc of the story before I begin—who the s are at the beginning, who they will become by the end—but I never have a rigid plan. Instead, I do the plot-making equivalent of looking up the journey on the map before I set off, noting where all the important junctions and turn-offs are, then putting the map in the glovebox; and if I happen to encounter a more direct or scenic route along the way, or if any landmarks I thought I would stop and see get bypassed, then I don’t worry too much about it—as long as the journey is interesting and I reach my intended destination. Then I go back and delete all the tiresome road travel metaphors I’ve put in."

"Lord, it's a hard life, son, I know that it is,"

"I tend to read a lot of life stories of artists or creative people who I find inspiring. With this, I was reading about Alasdair Gray and Francis Bacon and . I tried to find ways to appropriate elements of their lives and create a viable character of my own. I try to build a character out of found materials and my own personal reflections, to mould them into something that’s believable and authentic — as authentic as fiction can be, anyway."

"We meet in Smith's idyllic little house bordering in . There are overgrown roses in the front garden and the shelves are crammed full of books, family photographs and a solitary carved wooden bear. An almost-completed crossword lies on a pile of paper next to her armchair. The whole thing is delightfully redolent of a slightly chaotic . As we sit down to talk, a man from pest control knocks on the door and removes a dead mouse from the kitchen. Smith is unperturbed."

"The opening volume of her childhood s, The Great Western Beach (2009), described the first 12 years of her family life in , where all was not well in her parents’ marriage; As Green as Grass begins when the family moves to a house called Melrose in the village of , , where all continues to be not well between Mummy and Daddy. ... What the book is really about is escape: from Melrose, from working as a local schoolteacher in Devon, from a grinding job as secretary in a stuffy hut in the grounds of . ... After the war Smith decides she would like to work in s, and the next thing she knows, she’s on a boat to India with as well as ‘ — Bunny’. She’s the junior, the dogsbody of the filming team, but adores it and, again, we luxuriate in this new escape. Ralph — Bunny wants her to be ‘his girl’, but she escapes from him, too, and marries a much nicer man, who dies six years later. And then, the long silence."

"Our display is quickly over, since fireworks, we know, cost money, and we three children, from a very early age, are made aware that money is a commodity of which we have wretchedly little. We also know that we mustn't speak of this. Our poverty, like my fear of explosions, is something to be ashamed of, and so to be concealed from the world outside the family. One day my mother, throwing a handful of scrumpled-up rubbish on the fire, notices with horror that amongst the rubbish is a . Ten shillings is a fortune! Too late! It's gone for ever in a lick of flame. Kneeling on the hearthrug, she bursts into tears. This is the first, but not the last time I behold my mother weeping."

"This was India, made for her amusement. Even the sun invited her to pour out her gladness, to soak up its immense generous heat and sweat out her salty thanks. Even the beggars pranced with hope."

"We passed s and playing-grounds, and heard from open factory windows the magnified cheerfulness of ""."

"Supper was as convivial a meal as our picnic had been. They sang songs for us, sitting round the table, unaccompanied, Byelorussian and Ukrainian and Russian songs. And they asked me to sing, in return, an English song for them; but I sing , and couldn't."

"Any very loud may eventually damage or disrupt the and lead to the death of s, whether that's an always on full volume or . Sometimes that damage results in hearing loss and sometimes it results in , where true sound is replaced by sounds the brain itself has made. Some people hear hissing or fizzing or clicking, or a steady like an internal . Tinnitus can be loud or soft, constant or intermittent, but of all the different kinds of s it's often considered the worst because it covers over the sounds that people want to hear with a drizzle of sound that they don't."

"It seems that publishers have awakened to the realization that the history of technology can provide some very good stories. Six years ago we had 's colorful account of 's epic struggle to make a , . Now Bella Bathurst has made an excellent yarn out of the careers of the who built most of the lighthouses around the coast of Scotland. The story was told with more solidity in 1978 by Craig Mair as A Star for Seamen. But not to worry: there is a splendid archive of Stevenson family material, much of it now in the , and Bathurst has drawn on this and other primary material to construct her story."

"In Holland, the subject of one of her most satisfying chapters, she marvels at a cycling landscape that could have been reclaimed from the sea with the bicycle in mind, and discovers that, far from taking to two wheels like ducks to water, doughty Dutch velocipedists of the mid-19th century were bombarded with stones and coal by locals who accused them of traumatising the . Modern Dutch cyclists have taken the land into their own hands. She examines a where, thanks partly to a parallel and partly to the "bizarre" notion that cyclists have a legal and moral right to exist, the accident rate per 100 cycled is 0.8 – a tenth of that in the UK."

"Bathurst is a restless, curious writer, and she interweaves the story of her own experiences with imaginative research around hearing and sound. She interviews people who were and those who have , from army veterans to s to s. She visits an ear-splitting shipbuilders’ yard, and sits in an anechoic chamber; she interviews a professor of and an . In every chapter she comes up with gems of information. ... Bathurst’s story provides a satisfying narrative arc. After 12 years of her hearing gradually deteriorating, she was diagnosed with a disorder called , which can be cured by means of a delicate operation to the . Results are variable but in Bathurst’s case the operation was a success, and her hearing was almost completely recovered."

"Though few other countries had Britain's unique combination of advantages for a — island status, a vicious coastline, plenty of expensive traffic — almost every country with a coastline produced their own variants. There were Flemish wreckers, Spanish wreckers, Scandinavian wreckers. The French were such expert wreckers that they had been responsible for . In the , wrecks were so frequent that the eighteenth-century colonial government was estimated to derive two-fifths of its income from salvage."

"Field Work’s aim is to broaden and insert nuance into our understanding of farming. Bathurst moves to live in a attached to Rise Farm, a 180-acre Welsh hill farm run by Bert and Alison Howell. ... Bathurst has a seemingly supernatural facility for getting people to speak to her about the land. ... I thought often of ’s glorious agricultural novel All Among the Barley while reading Field Work. Partly it’s the engagement with a dying way of life. Partly it’s the fact that both books understand how important accurate and specific language is to bringing this rural existence alive on the page. Bathurst has a seemingly supernatural facility for getting people to speak to her honestly and movingly about the land and their place within it. One passage, in which a young farmer describes night-time with her father, is among the loveliest pieces of writing I’ve read anywhere."

"Seven years ago, I moved into a farm on a hill near Wales. Rise Farm was run by Bert and Alison Howell, a couple in their seventies whose son had gone to live in Spain and whose main source of assistance was now their two s – Bryn and a dog who for a long time I genuinely believed to be called Come Here You Useless Bugger. Rise was one of a declining number of small farms making the best of the high places in the , places which would once have represented a generous living but which now struggled by on rents, subsidy and the heart-attack price of lamb."

"At this time, in 2004, I am deaf. Not completely deaf, just down to about 30 per cent of normal hearing. I had started to lose my hearing in both ears about seven years ago and it has been declining ever since. I wear s in both ears and when I take them out, I can hear individual fragments of sound but not really the links between them. Certain words in a sentence or specific sounds are audible, but music is only a beat and a voice is just a chain of broken s."