This month on the Finds slate of offerings we are proud to be reissuing The Trap by Dan Billany: a work of great distinction behind which is a quite extraordinary and poignant story. The Yorkshire Post have been kind enough to note the publication in a news item dated March 1 2012, as follows:
THE story of a soldier-author from Hull, one of the many thousands who never made it home after the end of the Second World War, is republished today.
Faber Finds has reissued ‘The Trap’ at the request of Dan Billany’s niece Jodi Weston Brake, who is still trying to find out more about what happened to her uncle, who went missing after going on the run from a prisoner of war camp in Italy.
Billany was born into poverty on Hull’s Hessle Road but managed to get into college, later becoming a teacher and author.
A lieutenant in the Second World War, he was captured with hundreds of others in North Africa by the Germans on June 1, 1942.
Biographer Valerie Reeves, who has been a fan ever since reading his story the Magic Door as a child, said: “He is an outstanding writer who deserves to be better known. ‘The Trap’ is considered one of the best books to come out of World War Two.”
After the fall of Mussolini in 1943, Billany and his friend David Dowie were set free and tried to head south to the British lines. The manuscript for ‘The Trap’ and another book ‘The Cage’ were left in 13 scruffy exercise books in the safe-keeping of an Italian family, who kept their promise to post them home at the end of the War. They were published after his father Harry, who for years refused to accept his son was dead, approached Faber.
Finds’ has been thrilled to reissue four collections of short stories by the great Sylvia Townsend Warner, an endeavour which we were pleased to have endorsed by Sarah Waters, who told us last year that she rated STW as ‘one of the most talented and well-respected British authors of the twentieth century.’ Last weekend Waters expanded on this appreciation in a long piece for the Guardian, focused on the debut novel Lolly Willowes but considering many aspects of STW’s life, work, accomplishments and influence. It is a splendid tribute worth reading in full:
‘The intelligence of her writing has sometimes resulted in her fiction being misunderstood as difficult, and has perhaps lost her readers; she’s certainly one of the most shamefully under-read great British authors of the past 100 years… She remains [] relatively under-appreciated – a fact that baffles, frustrates and, I think, secretly pleases her admirers, for she’s the kind of novelist who inspires an intense sense of ownership in her fans. She has a special significance for lesbian readers, thanks not so much to the content of her work (only her fourth novel, Summer Will Show, can really be claimed as a lesbian text) as to the example of her life, nearly 40 years of which she spent in open, passionate partnership with another woman, Valentine Ackland. Both she and Ackland were writers and avid readers, and both were seriously committed to radical leftwing causes. Together they constitute a tremendously inspiring model of romantic, literary and political engagement.’
“[D]igitisation is encouraging the growth of small magazines, fostering a new burst of creativity, and traditional publishers can print on demand. Schemes such as Faber Finds, an exceptional archaeology of lost books, haul up genuine treasures – for you, the individual reader. In other words, the demand does exist, and what’s being supplied is, if anything, a rather traditional bespoke service…”
Evidently Gaby has a strong feeling for printed books and a wish for their endurance, as do I. The familiar distinctive pleasures of page-turning, shelf-referencing etc she makes an eloquent case for, though not stinting on all the useful tricks and modern conveniences that come with the Kindle. Here at Finds Towers, where ebook and POD are our current delivery modes, we take no sides on the matter, our concern being only that people in appreciable numbers continue to seek out and read the very best kinds of writing, and that they encounter no unnecessary cost or obstacle to that great and common pursuit.
Ingrid Pitt and Madeline Smith in 'The Vampire Lovers' (1970), after Le Fanu
The library that is Faber Finds contains many panelled sub-chambers, nooks and corner cabinets, and within one moody recess you will find our range of offerings in the genre of the supernatural – ‘tales of mystery and imagination’, to borrow a phrase from a master. One title of this dark shading that we cherish especially is our edition of Sheridan Le Fanu’s collection In a Glass Darkly (which revives a 1929 printing with illustrations by Edward Ardizzone, one of the best and most distinctive illustrators of the twentieth century) and which includes the justly famous and oft-filmed yarn Carmilla (1872) – a delicate, rather touching, sensuous and deeply sinister fairytale about a young girl who makes a lovely but disconcerting female friend of her own age, one who takes to visiting her by night…
Surely the most adored of Carmilla’s film adaptations is The Vampire Lovers, a 1970 offering from the UK’s mighty Hammer Film Productions. Hammer is, of course, one of the great brand-names of British cinema, and you don’t even need to be a horror fan to feel your heart gladdened by its recent resurrection of theatrical releases, much noted last year with Wakewood and Let Me In, and now bolstered by a smash hit in the shape of the just-released The Woman in Black, starring Daniel Radcliffe. Yes, once again rich red blood is coursing through Hammer’s quivering veins…
This month a glorious opportunity has arisen for us all to be reminded of Hammer’s past and present glories through a collaboration between Hammer, the Vault Festival at the Old Vic Tunnels, and The Flicker Club, an ingenious outfit who mount screenings of movies adapted from novels or short stories, and bring to the party surprise guests from stage, screen and literature to read from the literary source material in advance of the movie-show. In February Flicker Club’s offering is a season of Hammer at the Vault: Hammer treasures old and new, with appetisers in the form of introductions and readings from writers and actors. For a full calendar of films and to buy tickets, you can visit the Vault website. Hammer’s own site lists the schedule plus the various guests. In celebration of this thrilling endeavour, over at the main Faber site you can WIN a copy of our Finds edition of LeFanu’s In a Glass Darkly and tickets to the Flicker Club/Vault screening of Hammer’s The Witches, preceded by a reading from Helen Dunmore of passages from her much-acclaimed new offering, The Greatcoat, published by Hammer’s own new imprint through Random House.
Elsewhere in the season I’m happy to recommend the screening of The Vampire Lovers on Friday February 17, an event which will also be blessed by a reading from Le Fanu by one of the film’s stars, Madeline Smith. Hammer horror was a source of exquisite chills for me all through my childhood, including their productions of the early 1970s, when the studio was generally reckoned to be trying to incorporate more ‘adult’, blood-boltered and distinctly risqué flavours from American and European cinema into their more familiar concoctions. Hence The Vampire Lovers, a deathless testament to the screen presence of its leading lady, the late Ingrid Pitt (1937-2010), whose life story was more extraordinary than any supernatural yarn. (Born Ingoushka Petrov in Warsaw, 1937, she was a childhood survivor of Stutthof concentration camp and an alumnus of the Berliner Ensemble before she and Hammer made their bloodily marvellous marriage of talents.) The Vampire Lovers was considered highly racy at the time of its release, and it remains a souvenir of Pitt’s lustrous good looks. It is reasonably faithful to Le Fanu, too, in serving up the story of a beautiful stranger (Pitt) who insinuates herself into a respectable Styrian household so as to prey upon the young mistress (Smith). But from its ripping first reel the movie – unlike the stealthily insinuating Le Fanu – leaves us in no doubt that this is a full-blooded tale of vampiric evil.
Pitt is a wholly persuasive incarnation of the creature described by Le Fanu’s narrator Laura (‘She was slender, and wonderfully graceful. Except that her movements were languid — very languid… Her complexion was rich and brilliant… her eyes large, dark, and lustrous; her hair was quite wonderful, I never saw hair so magnificently thick and long…’) Relations between the two young females soon turn physical, very darkly so; but if you think Hammer made matters a little over-steamy then consider how unrestrained Le Fanu was for his time in limning the Sapphic tendency (Laura speaks of her ‘strange and beautiful companion… gazing in my face with languid and burning eyes, and breathing so fast that her dress rose and fell with the tumultuous respiration. It was like the ardour of a lover… she drew me to her, and her hot lips travelled along my cheek in kisses; and she would whisper, almost in sobs, “You are mine, you shall be mine, and you and I are one for ever”…’) This stuff is a fair bit easier to write than it is to act; but then there’s a good reason why Ingrid Pitt so swiftly became one of cinema’s foremost ‘Queens of Scream’, and it’s all there in The Vampire Lovers: she gives a truly physical performance, not just by dint of the low-cut gowns and unabashed carnality but in the quite startling violence of her assaults both on female prey and on any man feckless enough to try to get in her way. The trailer below gives a very good account of all these elements… But you can witness all the charm and menace of Pitt’s Carmilla at the Hamer/Flicker/Vault screening February 17.
J. Sheridan Le Fanu is one leading figure in the Irish contribution to the Gothic and another is of course Bram Stoker, who unquestionably borrowed a trick or two from the pages of Carmilla for his later Dracula (1897). As part of the Hammer/Flicker/Vault season there will be a world premiere of the definitive version of Terence Fisher’s 1958 Hammer Dracula on Saturday 18th February at 3.00pm. I daresay in critical terms this remains the quintessential Hammer production, not least because Martin Scorsese has been such an outspoken fan of its rich reds and blacks. By the time of its fiftieth anniversary it was sufficiently august for the BFI to re-release it, and construct the splendid trailer (below) that puts an elegant frame around its enduring – undead – charms.
Oh, and trailer-wise, shall we have a butcher’s at Hammer’s The Woman in Black, screening tonight? Yes, I rather think we shall…
The killing of children by children is always a truly grievous occurrence in human affairs: one from which most of us who don’t work in the legal or policing or penal professions – and thus aren’t required to look in the abyss – will recoil and throw up our hands instinctively. This may in part be because the suffering of children – so deeply unforgivable and at the heart of that Dostoyevskian theodical challenge to the notion of a kind and just creator – becomes impossibly paining and complex to us when a child is killed by his or her peer. The child-victim can only ever be a sad exemplar of innocence; by contrast the child who kills is quite often depicted in the wider societal debate as hopelessly depraved. Even if one sees the latter perception as unenlightened, the question may linger: how does one redeem oneself, arrive at a spiritual understanding of one’s crime, return to and rejoin society, when one has done such a thing at such an age?
Whatever we feel as individuals it seems there is little societal consensus as to the question of whether a child who takes the life of another should be spared the full weight of the law that would come down on an adult killer, and further made subject to special cares in respect of their possible rehabilitation; or whether such a child, guilty of such a terrible offence when so young, should be considered always as a possible threat to society on account of some special, integral wickedness.
No consensus, no… but mercifully we do have fine and brave writing on this subject, none better than David James Smith’s The Sleep of Reason: The James Bulger Case which was made available in Finds near the end of last year, and includes a new preface in which Smith addresses the events surrounding the re-arrest and return to prison of Jon Venables in 2010. I would thoroughly recommend the book to anyone who wants to consider this painful moral tangle of thorns. Readers seeking a reminder of the facts in the tragic case of James Bulger will find much to ponder in the BBC True North documentary below, directed by Julian Hendy.
“It seems as if only magic could have gathered this mass of wealth from all the ends of the earth.” Thus Charlotte Bronte writing after her visit to Hyde Park’s Crystal Palace for the ‘Great Exhibition’ of 1851: that legendary pageant of imperial industry held in the 15th year of Victoria’s reign (with, had they but known, a further half-century still in store.) 150-odd years later, in the Diamond Jubilee of HM Elizabeth II, the machine built around London’s hosting of the Olympic Games is now making a strenuous effort to promote a present-day sense of ‘Greatness’ around Britain’s productive or creative or presentational capacities. We’ll just have to see how that one turns out. But anyone with an interest in the history of such national showcases will want to take a look at a pair of titles new to Finds, Nikolaus Pevsner’s High Victorian Design and Michael Leapman’s The World for a Shilling.
Pevsner took the view that what the Exhibition pointed to in the character of 1851 Britain was ‘thirst for information, faith in commerce and industry, inventiveness and technical daring, energy and tenacity, and a tendency to mix up religion with visible success.’ Today? Information we certainly desire and consume at wizard-like speed. In commerce we trust, though we’re currently and rather gloomily getting up to much less of it. Meanwhile industry has become rather a lost and fondly-remembered father-king, and as for the prospects of revival we worry whether we have quite enough ‘inventiveness and technical daring’ – or adequate and tangible faith in what we have of it.
However the Calvinistic idea that visible success is a hallmark of heavenly favour – a phenomenon on which Max Weber wrote with such vigour – has certainly gone to live behind a glass case in some museum of misconceptions. In short the Great Exhibition of 1851 belongs most eminently to a thoroughly bygone era, and Pevsner and Leapman offer invaluable retrospective assessments of its merits. The future historians of 2012, meanwhile, have already got a glut of material to start sifting…
Our regulars will recall that only last summer Margaret Drabble went into print on behalf of Angus Wilson’s splendid Late Call (1964), one of the jewels in our Finds offerings of Wilson’s works; and now Gillian Darley has composed a long piece for the Guardian‘s Re-Readings page in which she too extols the merits of what she describe as ‘to my knowledge, the only work of fiction to be set in a postwar new town.’ The socio-historical interest of the new towns and their ripeness for writerly exploration only grows, I suppose; and that is why Darley is smart to note Andrew O’Hagan’s reflections on his Irvine childhood in The Missing toward the end of her piece. This is her thoughtful conclusion:
“The late social theorist and anarchist Colin Ward who, as he put it, “wandered around new towns for 40 years” and steadfastly believed in their aspirations, remarked how by the early 1990s they had “become old towns for the new generations growing up there”. People had grown old and died in those houses, entire generations had come and gone. As O’Hagan wrote, “some things had gone well with the new town idea; other things had not gone well at all”. Yet, seen from our current cramped perspective, that underlying breadth of vision is still admirable, embodying a social morality that we, apparently, can no longer afford. For [Wilson's protaonist] Sylvia Calvert, at least, the new town was a new beginning…”
You sometimes hear said, with appropriate regret, that these days we talk so much about ‘communities’ in the hope of disguising the fact that so few of us live in them. True or not, communities can at least thrive even by longer-distance connections that are made by fellow-feeling rather than proximity; and this is particularly true, I think, of writers – writers in genres maybe above all?
I hear now that the crime novelist Celia Dale passed away on December 31 2011, not far short of her 100th birthday – and I hear this because Martin Edwards, himself a well-regarded practioner of the crime novel, has noted her passing at his blog and suggests that he might even have been the first person to post an obituary tribute, in which he hails her ‘spare and highly effective style, coupled with a good deal of insight into human nature.’ (Edwards also collated some useful extant praise: ‘The late Harry Keating said that she had “the accuracy, understanding and quiet wit of Jane Austen”, and Susan Hill lauded her as “a past mistress of the bizarre truth behind normal facades”.’ Elsewhere Ruth Rendell is impressively on record that ‘Celia Dale’s writing is quiet, clever, subtle – and terrifying. I can’t think of anyone whose stories of suspense I appreciate more.’
It was our pleasure at Finds to reissue a quartet of Dale’s best novels back in 2008, and you will find more information about them by following these links to our pages for A Helping Hand, A Dark Corner, A Spring of Love, and Sheep’s Clothing.
Here at Finds Towers we of course need no persuading that Robert Aickman is a) as fine a writer of ‘strange stories’ as ever lived, b) still not fully recognised for all his powers, and c) tremendously well suited to the wireless. Thankful news, then, that this Thursday December 15 from 11.30-12.00pm BBC Radio 4 offers ‘The Unsettled Dust: The Strange Stories of Robert Aickman’, written and presented by the actor and screenwriter Jeremy Dyson, alumnus of the League of Gentlemen who has adapted Aickman’s work in various forms.
According to the BBC’s press release:
‘By speaking with fans of Aickman and introducing students to his work for the first time, Dyson argues that Aickman’s literary gifts have been undervalued and during his lifetime he should have received greater critical acclaim.’
Quite. The PR also offers an intriguing fact of which I was hitherto unaware: Aickman was the grandson of a Victorian novelist named Richard Marsh whose The Beetle (1897) was, apparently, “in its time as popular as Bram Stoker’s Dracula.” Suitably murky genetic materials, then…
How many British prime ministers have there been in history? There’s a small measure of academic dispute here, and it also depends whether you care to start the real counting with the First Lords of the Treasury pre-Walpole. But the official tally stands at fifty-two men and one woman. And here at Faber Finds, of course, we care for them all, whatever their political stripe or level of accomplishment, for all of this is a matter of historical record, not to say the cause of some extraordinarily fine biographical writing. Finds already has on its list Norman Gash’s Peel, Lord Blake’s Disraeli, Andrew Robert’s Salisbury – and John Grigg’s Lloyd George, in four volumes. Anthony Seldon, one of the notable biographers of Anthony Charles Lynton Blair (1997-2007), has now selected his 5 personal favourite political biographies for The Browser, and we’re delighted to see that Grigg’s Lloyd George makes the list. Below are Seldon’s comments on his selection, in an interview with Daisy Banks:
BROWSER: Your next choice, Lloyd George, is in four volumes written by John Grigg, who is regarded by many as one of the greatest political biographers of the 20th century.
SELDON: I think what is special about this biography is John Grigg himself. He was the son of Edward Grigg, an eminent figure in Britain in World War II, who was in Churchill’s wartime government. John Grigg went on to forsake his own membership of the House of Lords when his father died. He was an important figure himself in politics. He was a prominent critic of the Suez Crisis. He had this real insider’s understanding of politics, which is what makes him such a good biographer. He also wrote very elegantly. He managed to be a great literary biographer.
BROWSER: What made this work about Lloyd George particularly compelling?
SELDON: I think the insight into the politics of the period around Lloyd George and the quality of his own writing. He won the Whitbread Award for the second volume and he won the Wolfson Prize for the third. He was this combination of someone who grew up with politics at a very early age in the world of his father and then in his own right. He used all that understanding to write extraordinary biographies in a very polished and fine style.
BROWSER: Is there one particular aspect of Lloyd George that you understood better from reading this work?
SELDON: I think it shows his humanity. The closer you get to people the more you realise that simplistic judgments are naive…
