TLS hails the ‘astoundingly good’ David Stacton

05/04/2013 Richard T. Kelly

We were delighted this week to read a quite splendid appreciation of our reissues of David Stacton, offered in the TLS by Hal Jensen. A few choice bits below:

Faber Finds is a print-on-demand series which aims to rediscover forgotten classics and neglected authors. This treasure-seeking imprint has now found David Stacton, who was certainly well hidden… If he was that good, whispers our vanity, we would have heard of him. Stacton’s books, however, are astoundingly good…

… Stacton was, from the start, a fully formed writer. A Fox Inside (1955) and The Self-Enchanted (1956) are perfectly good noir thrillers: fast-moving, tense and enjoyably overwrought, evoking a corrupt, dangerous and secretive world of Californian money and power…

Stacton made the leap from contemporary to historical with a spectacular flourish. His next three books [Remember Me (1957), On a Balcony (1958) and Segaki (1958)] form the “panels” of his first triptych. Although able to stand alone, they are thematically linked by what Stacton called “The Invincible Questions” (about fleetingness and permanence, art and the representation of reality). Each novel has at its centre a responsible public figure (king, pharaoh, abbot) at a moment of personal psychological crisis, haunted by questions of identity, body and spirit, reality and appearance… Taken together, they acquire an unforgettable resonance.

Great stuff- and as one Stacton aficianado put it in a mail to Finds Towers this week, ‘This may well be a turning point in bringing Stacton to the attention of the reading public.’ Here’s to that.

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“An English Tolstoy”: TLS on T.F. Powys

24/10/2011 Richard T. Kelly

Michael Caines of the TLS has for some time been brewing a piece on Finds’ reissuing of T.F. Powys, and the very fine result was made available in print last Friday (entitled ‘Love or Death’) and online here (‘T. F. Powys, an English Tolstoy?’). By way of introduction Caines opts for the always-interesting gambit of foregrounding an author’s most vituperative critic, in this case The Man from the Saturday Review:

‘Why, he asked, did Powys insist on tormenting his readers and himself with his stories of these awful people? Why did he go on “producing book after book (this last is the fifth in two years) depicting all rustics as dolts and rascals, bestially lustful and cruel, and all sophisticated characters as nervous wrecks and ineffectual sentimentalists”?’

As a keen TFP fan, thus member of a small but fierce fan club, I’m used to hearing this critical line without ever feeling the need to engage with it. For me, any sane reader ought to delight in the style that Caines thumbnails as:

‘early Powys (much admired by Q. D. Leavis, who quoted approvingly and at length from MR TASKER’S GODS in FICTION AND THE READING PUBLIC), a thing of biblical cadences and a plain yet resonant vocabulary. Like [David] Garnett, Sylvia Townsend Warner, T. E. Lawrence, Liam O’Flaherty and other literary mavericks, Dennis Wheatley responded strongly to this earthy, unfashionable fiction, calling Powys the “English Tolstoy”.’

If you too feel a calling toward the earthy and unfashionable, and the prose of the King James Bible, may I humbly suggest you start with Mockery Gap and Innocent Birds?

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Virginia Cowles: ‘Days of wine and shrapnel’

06/12/2010 Richard T. Kelly

Virginia Cowles

The TLS also cites as one of the Best of 2010 the Finds reissue of Virginia Cowles’ Looking For Trouble, which has undoubtedly deserved its glowing reviews, capturing as it does the extraordinary experiences of an intrepid and perspicacious war correspondent who witnessed some of the most momentous scenes of what Auden famously characterised as a ‘low dishonest decade.’ It’s Rachel Polonsky who’s picked Cowles for the TLS, noting that she ‘observes the political monstrosities of late 1930s Europe with unforced moral clarity and singular wit.’
Caroline Moorhead’s excellent Spectator review of Looking for Trouble offers a good gauge of Cowles’ range and accomplishment. As Moorhead notes, “When in London, she went to Chartwell to see Churchill. In Nuremberg, she was part of a very small group to have tea with Hitler, Himmler, Göring, Heydrich and Goebbels. She dined with Duff Cooper, during Chamberlain’s ‘peace with honour’ period, who told her that he might not have resigned from the Cabinet had Chamberlain returned from Munich saying ‘peace with terrible, unmitigated, unparalleled dishonour’. Bold, tenacious and tireless, she made the most of her introductions. Air Marshal Italo Balbo took her flying in a two-seater plane over Tripoli. Mussolini gave her an interview the week he launched his attack on Abyssinia…”
The Daily Mail also ran a generous review of our Finds edition, and there is this fine notice too from Janine di Giovanni in the British Journalism Review. John Julius Norwich, who knew and ‘rather fell in love with’ Cowles, offers his own splendid tribute to her on the main Finds site.

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Brian Glanville’s ‘Gerry Logan’: Still scoring…

06/12/2010 Richard T. Kelly

The TLS are running the results of their ‘Best of 2010′ canvassing (a selection online here, the full version in print), and I am delighted to report a good showing for Finds. Let’s begin with Brian Glanville, as learned and perceptive a writer on football as this country has ever produced, still going strong today, and with a whole other strength to his game in the shape of his string of highly praised novels. This year Finds has brought back The Olympian, The Dying of the Light and The Rise of Gerry Logan, and it’s the latter title that has earned the warm praise of no less an authority than Frederic Raphael in the TLS. Raphael describes Gerry as ‘…surely the best novel about footballers ever written’ and ‘a reminder of what fiction can do when a natural novelist draws from life.’
Brian Glanville’s regular column for the World Soccer site can be found here, and his bracing opinions on the power, corruption and lies now awash in the game are also reflected in this interview for the Jewish Telegraph, which makes room for a fonder focus on his beloved Arsenal.  Also eminently worth a look is this selection Glanville made for the Times of his 65 favourite footballing moments, all of which unfolded under his own penetrating gaze from the press box or the stands, naturally…

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TLS on A.S.J. Tessimond

08/11/2010 Richard T. Kelly

For the current TLS Andrew McCulloch has written a fine piece entitled ”Not Love perhaps . . .’ – The poetry of A. S. J. Tessimond.’ (Not accessible online, alas, but then the TLS cover price is always worth paying.) Returning Tessimond to print has proved a striking success for Finds, and it’s a pleasure to see a revived title of this sort inspiring comment and analysis in the present-day literary press.

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