Laurie Lee. As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning: Illustrated Edition. 1969. Designed by David Fordham. Book Club Associates. London: Guild Publishing, 1985.
It's true that I already own a copy of Laurie Lee's autobiographical trilogy, but somehow that didn't stop me from purchasing an illustrated edition of his second most famous book,
As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning, when I ran across it in an Op Shop the other day.
I say
second most famous, as first prize would certainly have to go to
Cider with Rosie, his evocative memoir of an English countryside childhood - cruelly inflicted on generations of UK school kids as a set text for interpretation ...
So who exactly was Laurie Lee, and why are
his books still popular when so many of his more promising looking contemporaries have disappeared from the shelves?
He certainly had a gift for evocative, poetic prose - but then, so did most of the others. Nor does his poetry really pass muster when measured against the likes of
Auden and
Spender.
Part of it was good luck: the exigencies of literary history. His books appeared at just the right time to cash in on certain cultural pressure points.
Cider with Rosie came out in 1959, when nostalgia for the idyllic - albeit largely mythical - life of the British countryside was at its height. It was the era of H. E. Bates'
Darling Buds of May (1958), as well as Philip Larkin's "Whitsun Weddings", and other poetical evocations of England's pastoral past.
As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning was published a decade later, in 1969, when "tune in - turn on - drop out" hippiedom was the order of the day. What could be more congenial to young readers at that time than this account of simply wandering off from home, first to London, thence to Spain, busking for loose change in the immemorial towns and villages of the peninsula?
More to the point, his second volume of autobiography ended with the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, still a subject of perennial fascination to sentimental Lefties (such as myself) everywhere. It took a while, but Lee eventually supplied a memoir of his direct engagement in the fighting in the final volume of his trilogy,
A Moment of War (1991).
There's a running gag in the second, Spanish, sequel to the Steve Coogan / Rob Brydon comedy
The Trip, where the pompous, vainglorious Coogan claims a close acquaintance with Laurie Lee's writings about Spain, only to be thoroughly shown up by a busker who turns out to have actually
read them, and is thus able to correct Coogan's multiple inaccuracies.
Laurie Lee, then, managed to touch on two of the most potent nerves in the English literary psyche:
pastoral nostalgia, and
class struggle. It's hard to begrudge him his success, given the undoubted charm of his two autobiographical classics. There can't be too much harm in trying to contextualise them a little, though.
I've accordingly supplied, in the two sections below, a brief summary of the highlights of:
- The English Pastoral tradition
- The literature of the Spanish Civil War
Books I own are marked in bold:
Going, Going
I thought it would last my time –
The sense that, beyond the town,
There would always be fields and farms,
Where the village louts could climb
Such trees as were not cut down;
I knew there’d be false alarms
In the papers about old streets
And split level shopping, but some
Have always been left so far;
And when the old part retreats
As the bleak high-risers come
We can always escape in the car.
Things are tougher than we are, just
As earth will always respond
However we mess it about;
Chuck filth in the sea, if you must:
The tides will be clean beyond. –
But what do I feel now? Doubt?
Or age, simply? The crowd
Is young in the M1 cafe;
Their kids are screaming for more –
More houses, more parking allowed,
More caravan sites, more pay.
On the Business Page, a score
Of spectacled grins approve
Some takeover bid that entails
Five per cent profit (and ten
Per cent more in the estuaries): move
Your works to the unspoilt dales
(Grey area grants)! And when
You try to get near the sea
In summer ...
It seems, just now,
To be happening so very fast;
Despite all the land left free
For the first time I feel somehow
That it isn’t going to last,
That before I snuff it, the whole
Boiling will be bricked in
Except for the tourist parts –
First slum of Europe: a role
It won’t be hard to win,
With a cast of crooks and tarts.
And that will be England gone,
The shadows, the meadows, the lanes,
The guildhalls, the carved choirs.
There’ll be books; it will linger on
In galleries; but all that remains
For us will be concrete and tyres.
Most things are never meant.
This won’t be, most likely; but greeds
And garbage are too thick-strewn
To be swept up now, or invent
Excuses that make them all needs.
I just think it will happen, soon.
Exemplars:
- George Borrow (1803-1881)
- W. H. Davies (1871-1940)
- Richard Jefferies (1848-1887)
- Francis Kilvert (1840-1879)
- Mary Russell Mitford (1787-1855)
- Harold Owen (1897-1971)
- Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967)
- Edward Thomas (1878-1917)
- Flora Thompson (1876-1947)
Mary Russell Mitford. Our Village. 1824-32. Introduction by William J. Roberts. Wood Engravings By Joan Hassall. 1947. London: George G. Harrap & Co. Ltd., 1949.
Enclosure is a term, used in English landownership, that refers to the appropriation of "waste" or "common land", enclosing it, and by doing so depriving commoners of their traditional rights of access and usage.
Enclosure (or Inclosure) is often associated with the Industrial Revolution, although the practice goes back long before that. The 1773
Inclosure Act, however, provided landowners with new legal powers to close traditional roads and rights-of-way as well as forbidding access to what had hitherto been common land.
Nostalgia for a lost rural paradise is a constant in European literature, but the practice of Enclosure focussed it on landlords and their disregard for their fellow-citizens, increasingly defined as tenants rather than independent workers. Writers such as John Clare, Thomas Hardy, and Oliver Goldsmith (in his 1770 poem "
The Deserted Village") felt an urgent need to record and itemise the customs and habits of their rural surroundings as a result of these changes.
That, too, accounts for much of the popularity of such works as Mary Mitford's
Our Village or Gilbert White's
The Natural History of Selborne (1789). It was assumed that if it wasn't all written down now, this lore of the land would be lost for subsequent generations.
Prose:
- Our Village (1824-32)
- First Series (1824)
- Second Series (1826)
- Third Series (1828)
- Fourth Series (1830)
- Fifth Series (1832)
- Our Village. 1824-32. Introduction by William J. Roberts. Wood Engravings By Joan Hassall. 1947. London: George G. Harrap & Co. Ltd., 1949.
- Belford Regis; or, Sketches of a Country Town, 3 vols (1835)
- Country Stories (1837)
- Recollections of a Literary Life, or Books, Places and People, 3 vols (1852)
- Atherton, and Other Tales, 3 vols (1854)
Poetry:
- Miscellaneous Poems (1810)
- Christina, the Maid of the South Seas (1811)
- Watlington Hill: A Poem (1812)
- Blanch of Castile (1812)
- Narrative Poems on the Female Character (1813)
- Dramatic Scenes, Sonnets, and other Poems (1827)
Plays:
- Julian: A Tragedy (1823)
- Foscari: A Tragedy (1826)
- Rienzi: A Tragedy in Five Acts (1828)
- Mary Queen of Scots: A Scene in English Verse (1831)
- Charles the First: An Historical Tragedy (1834)
- Sadak and Kalascado, or The Waters of Oblivion [libretto] (1835)
- Dramatic Works (1854)
Edited:
- Stories of American Life, by American Writers, Vol. 2 (1830)
- American Stories for Little Boys and Girls (1831)
- Tales for Young People (1832)
- Lights and Shadows of American Life (1832)
George Borrow. Lavengro: The Classic Account of Gypsy Life in Nineteenth-Century Britain. 1851. Rev. ed. 1900. New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1991.
George Borrow's classic semi-autobiographical novel, split somewhat artificially into the two volumes
Lavengro (1851) and
The Romany Rye (1857), takes a rather different approach to the topic of English rural life.
Borrow's focus is not exclusively on the Gypsies, as the subtitle of the Dover reprint pictured above would imply, but they certainly figure largely in his chronicle of the roving nomads and dispossessed peasants of England. Mainly, though, he's interested in himself: in particular, his prowess as a linguist, long-distance walker, lover, fighter, and budding scholar.
Remind you of anyone? Laurie Lee, too, exhibits a fine conceit of himself throughout his own autobiographical trilogy - especially when it comes to his frequent sexual trysts along the way.
Borrow, too, is an acquired taste. Like Lee, he's not overly concerned with factual veracity, but his point-of-view is certainly an original one: particularly his fascination with the wandering Gypsies of England and Spain. His fanatical Protestantism can be rather offputting, but it
does help to explain how such an anarchic set of books could have been so widely distributed and read in Victorian England.
Perhaps the reason these books remain so perennially enchanting to more distant onlookers such as myself, though, is the fact that
his paradise is portrayed as being not so much lost in the mists of childhood, as immediately accessibly to anyone with the gumption to put on a pair of hiking boots and start wandering through the villages and copses of England or Wales.
All you need is some knowledge of the secret signs and obscure tongues of the land, and you too might be made free of this hidden world.
Richard Jefferies. The Gamekeeper at Home: Sketches of Natural History and Rural Life. 1878. London: Smith, Elder, & Co., 1910.
Richard Jefferies, once a late Victorian bestseller, has now sunk well below the level of immediate name recognition.
If he
is remembered still, it's probably for his 1882 boys' book
Bevis, which inspired a number of later authors such as Arthur Ransome, Roland Pertwee, and John Masefield to write similar swashbuckling stories about imaginative children in 'wild' surroundings.
It was his essays on rural life which were most widely read during his lifetime, though - as well as his Thoreau-like autobiography
The Story of My Heart (1883), which emphasised the mystical side of his love of nature.
Despite his early death at the age of 38, Jefferies has exercised a massive influence on the whole field of English pastoral writing, as well as directly inspiring writers such as Edward Thomas and Henry Williamson.
Fiction:
- The Scarlet Shawl (1874)
- Restless Human Hearts (1875)
- World's End (1877)
- Greene Ferne Farm (1880)
- Wood Magic (1881)
- Wood Magic. 1881. Wordsworth Classics. Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions Ltd., 1995.
- Bevis: the Story of a Boy (1882)
- Bevis: The Story of a Boy. 1882. Illustrated by E. H. Shepard. 1932. Introduction by E. V. Lucas. London: Jonathan Cape, 1943.
- The Dewy Morn (1884)
- The Dewy Morn: A Novel. 1884. Introduction by Laurence Lerner. London: Wildwood House Ltd., 1982.
- After London; Or, Wild England (1885)
- After London, or Wild England. In Two Parts; I. The Relapse into Barbarism; II. Wild England. 1885. Introduction by John Fowles. The World’s Classics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980.
- Amaryllis at the Fair (1887)
- Amaryllis at the Fair: A Novel. 1887. Introduction by Andrew Rossabi. London: Quartet Books, 1980.
- The Early Fiction of Richard Jefferies. Ed. G. Toplis (1896)
- Ben Tubbs Adventures (2016)
Non-Fiction:
- Reporting, Editing, and Authorship: Practical Hints for Beginners in Literature (1873)
- The Gamekeeper at Home (1878)
- The Gamekeeper at Home: Sketches of Natural History and Rural Life. 1878. London: Smith, Elder, & Co., 1910.
- Wild Life in a Southern County (1879)
- Wild Life in a Southern County. 1879. London: Thomas Nelson & Sons, n.d.
- The Amateur Poacher (1879)
- Hodge and His Masters (1880)
- Round About a Great Estate (1880)
- Nature Near London (1883)
- The Story of My Heart: An Autobiography (1883)
- Red Deer (1884)
- The Life of the Fields (1884)
- The Open Air (1885)
- The Open Air. 1885. The Wayfarer’s Library. London: J. M. Dent & Sons, Ltd., n.d.
- Field and Hedgerow; Being the Last Essays of Richard Jefferies (1889)
- Field & Hedgerow: Being the Last Essays of Richard Jefferies, Collected by His Widow. 1889. London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1904.
- The Toilers in the Field (1892)
- Jefferies' Land: A History of Swindon and its Environs. Ed. G. Toplis (1896)
- The Hills and the Vale. Collected and introduced by Edward Thomas (1909)
- The Essential Richard Jefferies. Ed. Malcolm Elwin (1948)
- The Essential Richard Jefferies. Ed. Malcolm Elwin. London: Jonathan Cape, 1948.
- Eye of the Beholder: An Illustrated Anthology (1987)
- The Rise of Maximin: Emperor of the Orient. 1876–77 (2012)
- The Farmer's World: Richard Jefferies' Agricultural Journalism in the late 1870s [Articles published in the Livestock Journal] (2016)
Secondary:
- Thomas, Edward. Richard Jefferies: His Life and Work. London: Hutchinson & Co., 1909.
Edward Thomas. The Heart of England. 1906. Foreword and Wood-Engravings by Eric Fitch Daglish. The Open-Air Library. London & Toronto: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd., 1932.
Edward Thomas is, of course, best known now for the powerful poetry, composed under the shadow of war, which he began to write in the last two or three years of his life.
Before that, though, he'd had to make a living churning out books about English rural life, along with hastily boned up literary studies. He published some
23 of these between 1897 and 1917: a terrifying rate of production which must have contributed considerably to the depression which dogged him much of the time. He simply couldn't afford to feed his wife and family in any other way.
And yet, there are some pretty striking works among them: biographies of Richard Jefferies (1909) and George Borrow (1912), travel books such as
The Heart of England (1906) and
A Literary Pilgrim in England (1917), as well as a novel,
The Happy-Go-Lucky Morgans (1913), and a children's book,
Four and Twenty Blackbirds (1915).
Much has been written about his friendship with Robert Frost, who first suggested that he transcribe some of the more lyrical passages from his prose in the form of poems. Thomas is also said to have inspired Frost's famous poem "
The Road Not Taken", due to his lifelong inability to choose between two equally alluring paths.
Who knows what might have become of him if he'd survived the war? Poems such as "
As the Team's Head Brass" are in themselves guarantees of his immortality, but there may have been much more to come.
He must be among the most beloved figures in English literary history and yet, like Keats, he never lived to see his own success.
W. H. Davies. The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp. Preface by George Bernard Shaw. 1908. A Digit Book. London: Brown, Watson, Ltd., n.d.
W. H. Davies is another once celebrated figure who has fallen on harsh days. There was a time when nobody who read poetry at all was unfamiliar with lines like "What is this life if, full of care, / We have no time to stand and stare" ("
Leisure"), or - for that matter - this elegy for his friend Edward Thomas, "
Killed in Action":
Happy the man whose home is still
In Nature's green and peaceful ways;
To wake and hear the birds so loud,
That scream for joy to see the sun
Is shouldering past a sullen cloud.
And we have known those days, when we
Would wait to hear the cuckoo first;
When you and I, with thoughtful mind,
Would help a bird to hide her nest,
For fear of other hands less kind.
But thou, my friend, art lying dead:
War, with its hell-born childishness,
Has claimed thy life, with many more:
The man that loved this England well,
And never left it once before.
There's a distinct oddity about his work which makes it worth persevering with, though - little details such as the way the birds "scream" for joy in the verses above.
This is particularly the case with his prose work. His various accounts of the life of a tramp in England and America were revelatory at the time they were first written. Even now the brutality of the experiences he depicts is pretty arresting.
I don't think he can ever be said to have been entirely tamed or naturalised by the ways of literary life, but he certainly benefited greatly by the generosity of his literary and artistic friends in his later years.
It's the early work, such as his first great success
The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp (2008), or
Beggars (1909) which best expresses the vividness and originality of his approach to the wandering, "natural" life, however.
Augustus John: W. H. Davies (1871-1940)
William Henry Davies
(1871-1940)
Poetry:
- The Soul's Destroyer and Other Poems (1905)
- New Poems (1907)
- Nature Poems (1908)
- Farewell to Poesy (1910)
- Songs of Joy and Others (1911)
- Foliage: Various Poems (1913)
- The Bird of Paradise (1914)
- Child Lovers (1916)
- Collected Poems (1916)
- Forty New Poems (1918)
- Raptures (1918)
- The Song of Life (1920)
- The Captive Lion and Other Poems [Yale University Press] (1921)
- The Hour of Magic. Illustrated by Sir William Nicholson (1922)
- Collected Poems, 1st Series (1923)
- Collected Poems, 2nd Series (1923)
- Selected Poems. Illustrated with woodcuts by Stephen Bone (1923)
- Secrets (Jonathan Cape, 1924)
- A Poet's Alphabet. Illustrated by Dora Batty (1925)
- Augustan Book of Poetry: Thirty Selected Poems (1925)
- The Song of Love (1926)
- A Poet's Calendar (1927)
- Dancing Mad (1927)
- The Collected Poems of W. H. Davies (1928)
- Moss and Feather. Illustrated by Sir William Nicholson. Ariel Poems 10 (1928)
- Forty Nine Poems. Illustrated by Jacynth Parsons (1928)
- Selected Poems. Ed. Edward Garnett (1928)
- Ambition and Other Poems (1929)
- In Winter. Illustrated by Edward Carrick (1931)
- Poems 1930–31. Illustrated by Elizabeth Montgomery (1931)
- The Lover's Song Book (1933)
- My Birds. Illustrated with engravings by Hilda M. Quick (1933)
- My Garden. Illustrated by Hilda M. Quick (1933)
- 'Memories.' School (1 November 1933)
- The Poems of W. H. Davies: A Complete Collection (1934)
- Love Poems (1935)
- The Birth of Song (1936)
- 'Epilogue' to The Romance of the Echoing Wood: A Welsh Tale, by W. J. T. Collins (1937)
- The Loneliest Mountain (1939)
- The Poems of W. H. Davies (1940)
- Common Joys and Other Poems (1941)
- Collected Poems of W. H. Davies. Introduction by Osbert Sitwell (1943)
- Collected Poems. Introduction by Osbert Sitwell. 1943. London: Jonathan Cape Limited, 1951.
- The Essential W. H. Davies (1951)
- The Essential W. H. Davies. Ed. Brian Waters. London: Jonathan Cape, 1951.
- Complete Poems of W. H. Davies. Preface by Daniel George. Introduction by Osbert Sitwell (1963)
- The Complete Poems. Introduction by Osbert Sitwell. 1943. Foreword by Daniel George. London: Jonathan Cape Limited, 1963.
- The Complete Poems. Introduction by Osbert Sitwell. 1943. Foreword by Daniel George. 1963. Jonathan Cape Paperback JCP 50. London: Jonathan Cape Limited, 1967.
Drama:
- True Travellers: A Tramp's Opera in Three Acts. Illustrated by Sir William Nicholson (1923)
Prose:
- The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp (1908)
- The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp. Preface by George Bernard Shaw. 1908. A Digit Book. London: Brown, Watson, Ltd., n.d.
- 'How It Feels To Be Out of Work.' The English Review (1 December 1908)
- Beggars (1909)
- Beggars. London: Duckworth & Co., 1909.
- A Weak Woman: A Novel (1911)
- The True Traveller (1912)
- Nature (1914)
- A Poet's Pilgrimage [aka A Pilgrimage In Wales] (1918)
- 'Poets and Critics.' New Statesman (8 September 1923)
- 'What I Gained and Lost By Not Staying at School.' Teachers World (June 1923)
- Later Days (1925)
- The Adventures of Johnny Walker, Tramp (1926)
- Young Emma. 1924 (1980)
- Young Emma. Foreword by C. V. Wedgwood. 1980. Isis Large Print. Oxford: Clio Press, 1991.
Edited:
- [with Austin O. Spare] Form. Vol 1, Numbers 1, 2 & 3 (1921/1922)
- Shorter Lyrics of the Twentieth Century, 1900–1922 (1922)
- Moll Flanders. Introduction by W. H. Davies (1924)
- Jewels of Song (1930)
- An Anthology of Short Poems (1938)
Secondary:
- Stonesifer, Richard J. W. H. Davies: A Critical Biography. London: Jonathan Cape, 1963.
Siegfried Sassoon. Memoirs of a Fox-hunting Man. 1928. The Faber Library, 1. London: Faber, 1932.
Modern readers often forget that
Aeneid-poet Virgil's first major poetical work,
The Eclogues (or "Bucolics"), was inspired not simply by the Greek tradition of pastoral poetry, but also by the redistribution of land to Octavian and Mark Antony's triumphant veterans after their victory over Brutus and Cassius at the Battle of Philippi in 44 BCE.
The herdsmen and rural swains he depicts lament not only the cruelty of the nymphs with whom they have fallen in love, but also the turbulence of the times, which threatens their own right to stay on their ancestral lands.
This political and
engagé aspect to pastoral poetry should help to explain the inclusion of the war poet Siegfried Sassoon in this list of English ruralists. The structure of his classic "Sherston" trilogy of autobiographical novels (1928-36) is predicated on setting up an idyllic past against which to measure the hellish present of the trenches.
Hence the immense, loving detail with which Sassoon embellishes his account of the "Fox-hunting Man" who is his chosen protagonist, even though he lacks many other aspects of the author himself. The horses, the gallops across country, the panoply of the hunt - all are depicted with only the lightest touch of irony.
You can't be a war poet (or a genuine ruralist) if you don't have something to lament. Sassoon had lost the bliss of his pre-war rural paradise - just as Virgil himself was alleged to have been inspired to write the Eclogues by the loss of his own family farm near Mantua to veterans of the civil war.
It's a subject Sassoon returns to again and again, in his later "Weald of Youth" trilogy (1938-45) as well as the Sherston books.
Francis Kilvert. Kilvert’s Diary: Selections from the Diary of the Rev. Francis Kilvert, 1 January 1870 - 13 March 1879. 3 vols. Ed. William Plomer. 1938-40. Rev ed. 1960-61. Illustrated Edition. London: Jonathan Cape, 1977.
Though written in the 1870s, it's important to note that the first selections from Kilvert's diaries weren't actually published until the end of the 1930s, thus coinciding almost exactly with the onset of the Second World War.
Was that a large part of their appeal? Undoubtedly. The England they depicted was even more ideal than Siegfried Sassoon's pre-First World War "Weald of Youth". Kilvert, after all, was writing in the very noontide of the Victorian era, a time of certainty and self-confidence virtually without equal in European history.
All of which makes his writings sound smug and clichéd; in fact the opposite is the case. Kilvert was a very odd man indeed. Despite being a clergyman, he was obsessed with nude bathing, extremely flirtatious with women, and fond of coining odd aphorisms:
A man can hardly be a beast or a fool alone on a great mountain. [1: 349]
Nor is he often at a loss for an interesting conversation or anecdote to record:
As we crossed the bridge [at Bangor] and were approaching the Angelsey shore we overtook a quaint humorous old man with a tall white hat, a merry twinkle in his eye, and a huge cancer in his face. I fell into talk with him. 'Now,' he said as we left the bridge and walked into Anglesey, 'now you are like Robinson Crusoe, you are on your island. How should you like to live in that house all the year round, winter and summer?' he said pointing at a white house on a little rock island in the straits. I said I thought there might be worse places. 'They live like fighting cocks there,' winked the old man with the merry twinkle in his eye and his tall white hat nodding from side to side. 'They have got a weir there and they catch all the fish.' [1: 360]
He's argumentative, eccentric, and yet still somehow loveable. He's almost as fully delineated in these diaries as Samuel Pepys himself:
I fear those grey old men of Moccas, those grey, gnarled, low-browed, knock-kneed, bowed, bent, huge, strange, long-armed, deformed, hunchbacked, misshapen oak men that stand waiting and watching century after century, biding God's time with both feet in the grave and yet tiring down and seeing out generation after generation, with such tales to tell, as they whisper them to each other in the midsummer nights, make the silver birches weep and the long ears of the hares and rabbits stand on end. No human hand set those oaks. They are 'the trees which the Lord hath planted'. They look as if they had been at the beginning and making of the world, and they will probably see its end. [3: 263-64]
It's perhaps understandable that the only family outsider ever to see the diaries in their entirety, South African poet and novelist William Plomer, who edited the first (and only) selection from them, commented that he "could have strangled her with his bare hands" when he heard that
the majority of the surviving diaries had been destroyed by their then owner, an elderly niece of Kilvert's, who claimed to have done so to protect "private family matters".
All three of the surviving diaries have now been published, but the loss of all those other volumes remains irreparable for any real enthusiast for his work.
Diary:
- Selections from the Diary of the Rev. Francis Kilvert. 3 vols. Ed. William Plomer (1938-40)
- 1870–1871 (1938)
- Kilvert’s Diary: Selections from the Diary of the Rev. Francis Kilvert, 1 January 1870 - 19 August 1871. vol. 1 of 3. Ed. William Plomer. 1938. Rev ed. 1960-61. Illustrated Edition. London: Jonathan Cape, 1977.
- 1871–1874 (1939)
- Kilvert’s Diary: Selections from the Diary of the Rev. Francis Kilvert, 23 August 1871 - 13 May 1874. vol. 2 of 3. Ed. William Plomer. 1939. Rev ed. 1960-61. Illustrated Edition. London: Jonathan Cape, 1977.
- 1874–1879 (1940)
- Kilvert’s Diary: Selections from the Diary of the Rev. Francis Kilvert, 14 May 1874 - 13 March 1879. vol. 3 of 3. Ed. William Plomer. 1940. Rev ed. 1960-61. Illustrated Edition. London: Jonathan Cape, 1977.
- Kilvert's Diary, 1870–1879. Ed. William Plomer (1944)
- Kilvert’s Diary, 1870-1879: Selections from the Diary of the Rev. Francis Kilvert. 1938-40. Ed. William Plomer. 1944. Jonathan Cape Paperback, 22. London: Jonathan Cape, 1964.
- Ardizzone's Kilvert. Illustrated by Edward Ardizzone (1976)
- Journal of a Country Curate: Selections from the Diary of Francis Kilvert. Folio Society (1960)
- Kilvert, the Victorian: A New Selection from Kilvert's Diaries. Ed. David Lockwood (1992)
- The Diary of Francis Kilvert: April–June 1870. National Library of Wales (1982)
- The Diary of Francis Kilvert: June–July 1870. National Library of Wales (1989)
- The Cornish Diary: Journal No.4, 1870 — From 19 July to 6 August, Cornwall. Ed. Alison Hodge (1989)
Poetry:
- Collected Verse: 3rd December 1840 - 23rd September 1879 by the Reverend Francis Kilvert (1968)
Thompson, Flora. Lark Rise to Candleford. A Trilogy: Lark Rise; Over to Candleford; Candleford Green. 1939, 1941, 1943, 1945. Introduction by H. J. Massingham. Penguin Modern Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973.
According to Richard Mabey in his 2014 book
Dreams of the Good Life:
Thompson "was a sophisticated and imaginative writer, involved in a more complicated business than straightforward autobiography". The stories are told in the third person by 'Laura' (a version of the author's childhood self) who observes events directly, while the adult author is also present as a second narrator, commenting and reflecting on past events. Mabey comments that the counterpoint between these dual viewpoints "is part of what gives Lark Rise its unique voice".
Written in the late 1930s and published in the early years of the Second World War, the life Thompson describes in her semi-autobiographical novels was set some forty years earlier, in her youth, at "a pivotal point in rural history":
the time when the quiet, close-knit and peaceful rural culture, governed by the seasons, began a transformation, through agricultural mechanisation, better communications and urban expansion, into the homogenised society of today.
In this her books anticipate Laurie Lee's account of the transformation of the village society he remembered from his First World War childhood by the oncoming rush of modernity. He attributes this metamorphosis chiefly to motorcars and the burgeoning officialdom they brought with them.
Thompson, by contrast, writing in the 1930s about events forty years before, sees the post office and the railways as the vital agents of change.
Her books were already well known before the appearance of the popular TV series, but of course their vogue has grown greatly since then. Flora Thompson is now regarded as one of the most important commentators on English societal shifts around the turn of the century through the medium of these gentle chronicles of her own early life.
Verse:
- Bog Myrtle and Peat (1921)
Prose:
- Lark Rise (1939)
- Over to Candleford (1941)
- Candleford Green (1943)
- Lark Rise to Candleford (1945)
- Lark Rise to Candleford. A Trilogy: Lark Rise; Over to Candleford; Candleford Green. 1939, 1941, 1943, 1945. Introduction by H. J. Massingham. Penguin Modern Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973.
- Still Glides the Stream (1948)
- Still Glides the Stream. Drawings by Lynton Lamb. 1948. Oxford University Press Paperbacks. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979.
- A Country Calendar ["Heatherley", 1944; Peverel Papers & poems] (1979)
- The Peverel Papers ["Gates of Eden", 1920s; "Dashpers"] (1986)
- Heatherley (1998)
- The Peverel Papers: Complete Edition (2008)
Harold Owen. Journey from Obscurity: Memoirs of the Owen Family. Wilfred Owen, 1893-1918. 3 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963-65.
It's interesting that the only substantive comment about Harold Owen's large and immersive autobiography on the
Wikipedia page-stub allotted to him runs as follows:
For decades Harold Owen tried to control the public image of his dead brother. His three-volume biography of Wilfred, Journey from Obscurity (1963-5), was for many years assumed to be an accurate and objective record. However, it has since come to be regarded as a somewhat romanticised version of events. In particular, Harold feared that the public might discover that his brother had been a homosexual and censored many of his letters and diaries.
It's rather difficult to believe that the writer of this paragraph has actually read the work in question - except possibly to skim through it in search of mentions of his brother Wilfred, whom Harold generally refers to, rather equivocally, as "old Wolf."
It's anything but "a romanticised version of events"! Harold was a quintessential younger brother - intensely rebellious and resistant to discipline from his parents as well as his older sibling, whom he represents as (for the most part) a bloodless, pompous young prig.
Whatever efforts Harold may have made in later life to resist purely homosexual readings of Wilfred's life and work - and it's worth noting here that the same might be said of Wilfred Owen's principal biographer, Jon Stallworthy - the picture he paints is of a troubled and timid individual, dedicated to his artistic destiny, but unable to imagine a means of achieving it with the resources at his disposal.
Harold's main focus is on himself, and the account he gives of his early life as a merchant seaman, travelling the ports of the world, is both interesting and very accomplished of its type. Although he was a painter by training and avocation, he was a powerful and vivid writer as well.
The real reason I've included him here, though, is for the portrait he gives of a miserably class-conscious upbringing in a poverty-stricken family who, while scarcely able to afford food and lodgings, still remained determined not to "sink" to the level of the working class people around them.
Aitches must be sounded, standard grammar insisted on at all times. Harold's rebellion against this genteel misery, and Wilfred's implicit acceptance of these, his mother's conventions, make for a fascinating tale. It's hard to know how else one could understand the sheer power of these ideas for the generation which included Edward Thomas and George Gissing as well as the young Owenses.
Harold's publishers may have insisted that his memoir be refocussed into a biography of his more famous brother, but that was not even remotely the book that Harold ended up writing. And I, for one, admire him for it.
Harold Owen (1897-1971)
William Harold Owen
(1897-1971)
- Journey from Obscurity: Memoirs of the Owen Family. 3 vols (1963-65)
- Journey from Obscurity: Memoirs of the Owen Family. Wilfred Owen, 1893-1918. 3 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963-65.
- Childhood (1963)
- Youth (1964)
- War (1965)
- Aftermath (1971)
Edited:
- [with John Bell] Wilfred Owen: Collected Letters (1967)
- Owen, Wilfred. Collected Letters. Ed. Harold Owen & John Bell. London: Oxford University Press, 1967.
•
Perhaps the easiest way to characterise
Cider with Rosie itself is to quote a few contemporary reactions to the book:
On receiving the final draft, Leonard Woolf [said] he did not really care much for this kind of book, and did not encourage the writing of childhood memories. ‘But I think in your case we will publish it’. So Cider with Rosie was duly published by Hogarth Press in 1959 and went on to sell over six million copies ...
J. B. Priestley wrote, ‘Often he trembles on the very edge of affectation and overwriting … But always … he dances out of danger, and coins phrase after phrase with which to delight us.’
Reviewers were unanimous in their praise of the portrait of Lee’s mother, Annie. ‘It is to Mrs Lee – haphazard, lackadaisical, fanatically unselfish, tender, extravagant, with her love of finery, her unmade beds, her litters of unfinished scrapbooks … her remarkable dignity, her pity for the persecuted, her awe of the gentry … that this book belongs, rather than to the Rosie of the title,’ said one. And another: ‘He became a poet. How could he help it with a mother like that?’
Like most of the other books in the list above,
Cider with Rosie navigates a perilous path between pastoral and anti-pastoral. Sickness, death, poverty, misery are never far away from its pages, but the overall impression given is nevertheless of sunny hedgerows and amusing village characters.
It's a
tour-de-force - his masterpiece - and therefore, by its very nature, unrepeatable. That's not to say Lee didn't try hard to do so, however:
Ultima Ratio Regum
The guns spell money's ultimate reason
In letters of lead on the spring hillside.
But the boy lying dead under the olive trees
Was too young and too silly
To have been notable to their important eye.
He was a better target for a kiss.
When he lived, tall factory hooters never summoned him.
Nor did restaurant plate-glass doors revolve to wave him in.
His name never appeared in the papers.
The world maintained its traditional wall
Round the dead with their gold sunk deep as a well,
Whilst his life, intangible as a Stock Exchange rumour, drifted outside.
O too lightly he threw down his cap
One day when the breeze threw petals from the trees.
The unflowering wall sprouted with guns,
Machine-gun anger quickly scythed the grasses;
Flags and leaves fell from hands and branches;
The tweed cap rotted in the nettles.
Consider his life which was valueless
In terms of employment, hotel ledgers, news files.
Consider. One bullet in ten thousand kills a man.
Ask. Was so much expenditure justified
On the death of one so young and so silly
Lying under the olive tree, O world, O death?
- Stephen Spender (1939)
Exemplars:
- Antony Beevor (1946- )
- George Borrow (1803-1881)
- Gerald Brenan (1894-1987)
- Ronald Fraser (1930-2012)
- Ian Gibson (1939- )
- Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961)
- Arthur Koestler (1905-1983)
- George Orwell (1903-1950)
- Hugh Thomas (1931-2017)
George Borrow: The Bible in Spain (1843)
George Borrow
The Bible in Spain:
or, The Journeys, Adventures, and Imprisonments
of an Englishman in an Attempt to Circulate the Scriptures
in the Peninsula
George Borrow. The Bible in Spain: or, The Journeys, Adventures, and Imprisonments of an Englishman in an Attempt to Circulate the Scriptures in the Peninsula. 1843. Ed. Ulick Ralph Burke. London: John Murray, 1912.
The Bible in Spain ... was a popular work ... running through several editions. Borrow tells of his travels through Spain while working as a Bible salesman in 1835–1838, during the Carlist Civil War. His activities on behalf of the Bible Society encountered much opposition from the Roman Catholic Church and from politicians.
Once again, George Borrow leads the way with this still exciting travel narrative. The fact that his Spanish adventures were thinly cloaked in the assumed piety of his role as a Bible-peddlar in the peninsula allowed religious families to authorise it for reading on Sundays, alongside other devotional works.
In reality, of course, it has far less in common with
The Whole Duty of Man than with picaresque romances such as
Don Quixote or
Gil Blas, but given that most of those recommending it had never read any books of that type, it was able to pass undetected for many a long year.
Arthur Koestler. Spanish Testament. Trans. Trevor & Phyllis Blewitt. Left Book Club Edition. London: Gollancz, 1937.
Spanish Testament ... describes [Koestler's] experiences during the Spanish Civil War. Part II of the book was subsequently published on its own, with minor modifications, under the title Dialogue with Death ... Koestler made three trips to Spain during the civil war; the third time he was captured, sentenced to death and imprisoned by the Nationalist forces of General Franco. Koestler was working as an espionage agent on behalf of the Comintern and as an agent of the Second Spanish Republic's official news agency, using for cover accreditation to the British daily News Chronicle.
I have a strong belief that this is one of the very few really lasting books from the Spanish war - not so much for the topical agitprop about the still ongoing war, as for the intense and personal account of Koestler's own imprisonment by the Fascists under threat of immediate execution.
This second section,
Dialogue with Death, is one of the best prison memoirs I've ever read. It's also some of the most honest and direct writing this polymathic Hungarian trickster-magus ever produced.
Orwell, George. Homage to Catalonia, & Looking Back on the Spanish War. 1938 & 1953. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978.
Homage to Catalonia is a memoir ... of [Orwell's] personal experiences and observations while fighting in the Spanish Civil War. Covering the period between December 1936 and June 1937, Orwell recounts Catalonia's revolutionary fervor during his training in Barcelona, his boredom on the front lines in Aragon, his involvement in the interfactional May Days conflict back in Barcelona on leave, his getting shot in the throat back on the front lines, and his escape to France after the POUM was declared an illegal organization. The war was one of the defining events of his political outlook.
Even though it only provides a very partial view of the conflict, Orwell's is probably still the most widely read memoir of the Spanish Civil War.
Anna Funder's recent book
Wifehood does its best to draw attention to the vital and courageous work done by Orwell's wife, Maureen O'Shaugnessy, during his time in the trenches. Full documentation is unfortunately lacking for much of this period, but it's clear that she was at least as heroic as he was - and probably a lot more useful.
Ernest Hemingway. For Whom the Bell Tolls. 1940. London: Jonathan Cape Ltd., 1945.
For Whom the Bell Tolls ... tells the story of Robert Jordan, a young American volunteer attached to a Republican guerrilla unit during the Spanish Civil War. As a dynamiter, he is assigned to blow up a bridge during an attack on the city of Segovia.
It's definitely a powerful (albeit, at times, sentimental and self-indulgent) novel. Some would see it as marking the end of
Hemingway's great period, but given that it's still being read four-score and seven-odd years after its first publication - and isn't that all a novelist can really hope for from posterity? - even the most carping critics would surely have to agree that it's earned its place as a work of permanent value.
Whether the same can be claimed for the 1943 Gary Cooper film version is another question ...
Gerald Brenan. The Literature of the Spanish People: From Roman Times to the Present Day. 1951. Peregrine Books. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963.
The Spanish Labyrinth ... is an account of Spain's social, economic, and political history as the background of the Spanish Civil War. First published in 1943, it has stayed in print, with repeated reissues. [It] is deemed to be essential background reading for studies of Spain and its history.
The Spanish Labyrinth was banned by the government of Francisco Franco because of its criticism of his regime. A Spanish-language translation ..., published in Paris by Ruedo Ibérico, was secretly smuggled into the country by anti-Franco travelers, and the book became popular among Spanish dissidents. After Franco's death, the ban was lifted and the book was well received by Spanish historians.
Gerald Brenan was a fascinating man. He figures in the 1995 film
Carrington as an attractive outsider to the Bloomsbury set. His love and fascination for Spain and its culture found fruit in a long series of books - but also in an extraordinary set of wanderings around the peninsula, both before and after the war. All of his work is relevant to the understanding of this tragic event.
Clearly no-one will ever be able to claim to have laid out its causes it once and for all.
Fiction:
- [as George Beaton] Jack Robinson. A Picaresque Novel (1933)
- [as George Beaton] Doctor Partridge's Almanack for 1935 (1934)
- Shanahan's Old Shebeen, or The Mornin's Mornin' (1940)
Non-fiction:
- The Spanish Labyrinth: An Account of the Social and Political Background of the Civil War (1943)
- The Spanish Scene. Current Affairs No.7 (1946)
- The Face of Spain (1950)
- The Literature of the Spanish People – From Roman Times to the Present Day (1951)
- Gerald Brenan. The Literature of the Spanish People: From Roman Times to the Present Day. 1951. Peregrine Books. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963.
- South From Granada: Seven Years in an Andalusian Village (1957)
- A Holiday by the Sea (1961)
- A Life of One's Own: Childhood and Youth (1962)
- The Lighthouse Always Says Yes (1966)
- [with Lynda Nicholson] St John of the Cross: His life and Poetry (1973)
- St John of the Cross: His Life and Poetry. Poetry translated by Lynda Nicholson. 1973. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975.
- A Personal Record, 1920–1972 (1975)
- Thoughts in a Dry Season: A Miscellany (1978)
- La Copla Popular Española. Ed. Antonio José López (1995)
- The Lord of the Castle and his Prisoner. He. Intended as an Autobiographical Sequence of Thoughts (2009)
Poetry:
- The Magnetic Moment: Poems (1978)
Diaries:
- Diarios sobre Dora Carrington y otros escritos (1925–1932) (2012)
Hugh Thomas. The Spanish Civil War. 1961. A Pelican Book. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971.
The Spanish Civil War ... provides a scholarly historiographic account of the Spanish Civil War. ... Upon release it received rather positive reviews; ... Despite initial approving reviews, in Francoist Spain the book received unfavorable treatment and was never published.
The work was ... re-issued many times, the last edition during the lifetime of the author in 2012 and the last known edition in 2022. During decades it remained the most popular monograph on the war and was translated into at least 13 languages; it reportedly sold in over 1m copies around the globe. It remains quoted as a key work in bibliographical listings of present-day scholarly works on the war. It is usually acclaimed for non-biased perspective, high level of detail and lively narrative. Fairly rare critical remarks claim that the work is about storytelling rather than historical analysis, that some interpretations advanced are doubtful, and that some sources are trusted too much while other have not been consulted at all.
Much though I admired Thomas's updated version of Prescott's distinctly outmoded
Conquest of Mexico, I'm afraid that the conclusion to his
Rivers of Gold, in which he declares himself decidedly in
favour of the Spanish conquest of the Indies because of the longterm "benefits" of this supreme catalogue of atrocities, has led me to approach his histories with a certain wariness.
The Spanish Civil War is the first of these books, and has certainly earned its place as a foundational account of the war. It, too, has its moral and ethical blindspots. On balance, though, it's hard to imagine
any history of such an event being able to please everyone.
Hugh Thomas (1931-2017)
Hugh Swynnerton Thomas, Baron Thomas of Swynnerton
(1931-2017)
Fiction:
- The World's Game: A Novel (1957)
- The Oxygen Age: A Novel (1958)
- Klara: A Novel (1988)
Non-fiction:
- Disarmament – The Way Ahead Fabian Society (1957)
- The Spanish Civil War [rev. eds 1968, 1977, 2003 & 2011] (1961)
- The Spanish Civil War. 1961. A Pelican Book. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971.
- The Suez Affair (1966)
- Cuba, or the Pursuit of Freedom [rev. eds 1998, 2002 & 2010] (1971)
- Europe: The Radical Challenge (1973)
- John Strachey (1973)
- An Unfinished History of the World [USA: A History of the World & World History, 1998] (1979)
- The Revolution On Balance [Cuban American National Foundation pamphlet #5] (1983)
- Armed Truce (1986)
- Ever Closer Union (1991)
- The Conquest of Mexico [USA: Conquest: Montezuma, Cortés and the Fall of Old Mexico] (1993)
- The Conquest of Mexico. Hutchinson. London: Random House (UK) Ltd., 1993.
- The Slave Trade: The History of the Atlantic Slave Trade 1440–1870 (1997)
- Who is Who of the Conquistadors (2000)
- Rivers of Gold [The Spanish Empire trilogy, 1] (2003)
- Rivers of Gold: The Rise of the Spanish Empire, from Columbus to Magellan. 2003. Random House Trade Paperbacks. New York: Random House, Inc., 2005.
- Beaumarchais in Seville (2006)
- Eduardo Barreiros and the Recovery of Spain (2009)
- The Golden Age: The Spanish Empire of Charles V [USA: The Golden Empire: Spain, Charles V, and the Creation of America, 2011] [The Spanish Empire trilogy, 2] (2010)
- World Without End: The Global Empire of Philip II [The Spanish Empire trilogy, 3] (2014)
Ian Gibson. The Death of Lorca. 1973. Paladin. Frogmore, St Albans, Herts: Granada Publishing Limited, 1974.
Ian Gibson ... is an Irish author and Hispanist known for his biographies of the poet Antonio Machado, the artist Salvador Dalí, the bibliographer Henry Spencer Ashbee, the filmmaker Luis Buñuel, and particularly his work on the poet and playwright Federico García Lorca, for which he won several awards, including the 1989 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for biography. His work, La represión nacionalista de Granada en 1936 y la muerte de Federico García Lorca [The Nationalist Repression of Granada in 1936 and the Death of Federico García Lorca] was banned in Spain under Franco.
Ian Gibson is an unusual man, to say the least. His prowess as a Hispanist is beyond question, and the value of his investigations of major twentieth century Spanish artistic figures is similarly impressive.
This, the first of his many books, is both morbidly fascinating and horrifying to read. Shooting Lorca still seems a little bit like smashing a Ming vase. Someone so delightful, so talented, so much in love with life: why not simply let him leave the country?
Fiction:
- Viento del sur. Memorias apócrifas de un inglés salvado por España (2001)
- Yo, Rubén Darío. Memorias póstumas de un Rey de la Poesía (2002)
- La berlina de Prim (2012)
Non-fiction:
- La represión nacionalista de Granada en 1936 y la muerte de Federico García Lorca [translated as The Death of Lorca, 1972] (1971)
- The Death of Lorca. 1973. Paladin. Frogmore, St Albans, Herts: Granada Publishing Limited, 1974.
- The English Vice [translated as El vicio inglés, 1980] (1978)
- En busca de José Antonio (1980)
- La noche en que mataron a Calvo Sotelo (1982)
- Paracuellos, cómo fue (1983)
- Federico García Lorca [translated as Federico García Lorca: A Life, 1989] (1985)
- Federico García Lorca: A Life. 1985 & 1987. London: Faber, 1990.
- Queipo de Llano. Sevilla, verano de 1936 (1986)
- En Granada, su Granada... Guía a la Granada de Federico García Lorca [translated as Lorca's Granada: A Practical Guide, 1992] (1989)
- España [translated as Fire in the Blood. The New Spain, 1993 (1992)
- The Shameful Life of Salvador Dalí (1997)
- Vida, pasión y muerte de Federico García Lorca (1998)
- Lorca-Dalí, el amor que no pudo ser (1999)
- The Erotomaniac: The Secret Life of Henry Spencer Ashbee (2001)
- The Erotomaniac: The Secret Life of Henry Spencer Ashbee. 2001. London: Faber, 2002.
- Cela, el hombre que quiso ganar (2003)
- Dalí joven, Dalí genial (2004)
- Ligero de equipaje: La vida de Antonio Machado (2006)
- Cuatro poetas en guerra (2007)
- El hombre que detuvo a García Lorca: Ramón Ruiz Alonso y la muerte del poeta (2008)
- Caballo azul de mi locura: Lorca y el mundo gay (2009)
- La fosa de Lorca: Crónica de un despropósito (2010)
- Luis Buñuel: La forja de un cineasta universal (2013)
- Poeta en Granada: Paseos con Federico García Lorca (2015)
- Los últimos caminos de Antonio Machado: De Collioure a Sevilla (2019)
- Hacia la República Federal Ibérica: Reflexión y sueño de un hispanista irredento (2021)
Autobiographical:
- Un irlandés en España (1981)
- Aventuras ibéricas. Recorridos, reflexiones e irreverencias (2017)
- Un carmen en Granada (2023)
Ronald Fraser. Blood of Spain: An Oral History of the Spanish Civil War. [as 'Blood of Spain: The Experience of Civil War,' 1979]. Pantheon Books. New York: Random House, Inc., 1980.
Blood of Spain ... is an influential oral history of the Spanish Civil War. The contents of the book is drawn from hundreds of interviews that Fraser conducted in the 1970s with people who lived through the Spanish civil war.
Favorable contemporary reviews included The New York Times Book Review, in which Paul Preston wrote that the book would "take its place among the dozen or so truly important books about the Spanish conflict," and Time magazine, whose reviewer noted, "No other volume on the Spanish Civil War can surpass the power and detail of this one."
Fellow historian Tariq Ali described Blood of Spain in Fraser's obituary as "a peerless account of the Spanish civil war, carefully constructed from interviews with participants on both sides. Conducted with a steady and consistently courteous voice, the book helped establish oral history as a discipline in its own right.".
The concensus of opinion does seem to be that this is a permanently valuable - indeed irreplaceable - collection of testimonies about the war. Given the time period during which they were collected, it's impossible to imagine anyone ever being able to replicate this feat.
Fraser is certainly up there with Studs Terkel and other pioneers of the oral history genre. His work goes a long way towards justifying it as perhaps the ideal approach to collective events such as revolution or civil war.
Books:
- Yvette (1960)
- Work: Twenty Personal Accounts (1968)
- Work: Twenty Personal Accounts, Vol. 2 (1969)
- In Hiding: The Life of Manuel Cortes (1972)
- The Pueblo: A Mountain Village on the Costa del Sol [USA: Tajos: A Mountain Village on the Costa del Sol] (1973)
- Blood of Spain: An Oral History of the Spanish Civil War (1979)
- Blood of Spain: An Oral History of the Spanish Civil War. [as 'Blood of Spain: The Experience of Civil War,' 1979]. Pantheon Books. New York: Random House, Inc., 1980.
- In Search of a Past: The Manor House Amnersfield, 1933-1945 [USA: In Search of a Past: The Rearing of an English Gentleman, 1933-1945] (1984)
- [contributor, with eight other authors] 1968: A Student Generation in Revolt (1988)
- Napoleon’s Cursed War: Spanish Popular Resistance in the Peninsular War, 1808-1814 (2008)
Antony Beevor. The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War 1936-1939. ['The Spanish Civil War', 1982]. Rev. ed. A Phoenix Paperback. London: Orion Books Ltd., 2006.
The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War 1936–1939 is ... a revised edition of Beevor's 1982 The Spanish Civil War. It won the 2006 La Vanguardia Prize for Non-Fiction.
Antony Beevor is, of course, best known for his long series of books about the Second World War.
The Spanish Civil War was his first work of non-fiction, so it's natural that he should wish to rewrite it completely rather than simply reissue it with a few revisions.
It
does still have more the air of a chronicle of atrocities than an analysis of the intellectual and political background of the war, but then Beever is, essentially, a military historian. This makes it very hard to read in places. The brutality it dispassionately chronicles seems just so hopelessly cruel and pointless. But then, perhaps that was the idea.
•
It's well known that Laurie Lee was rather unreliable when it came to the precise details in his self-vaunting books. Some, indeed, questioned whether or not he'd ever
been to Spain - let alone fought for the Republic.
It wasn't till the appearance of Valerie Grove's detailed, well-researched biography of Lee appeared in 1999, two years after his death, that there was any real way of telling what was fact and what fiction - and what exactly the nature of his literary achievement could really be said to be.
Since then a book of essays (
Village Christmas: And Other Notes on the English Year - 2016), a book of interviews (
Down in the Valley: A Writer's Landscape - 2019), and his
Collected Poems (2023) have appeared, however, so I think it's safe to say that he's not going anywhere - in the immediate future, that is.
He's become part of the landscape of rural England and of the Spanish war, and - like his even more irrepressible and bumptious predecessor, George Borrow - his thoughts on both will no doubt continue to be celebrated (and scrutinised) for many years to come.
•
David Parker: Laurie Lee
Laurence Edward Alan [Laurie] Lee
(1914–1997)
Poetry:
- The Sun My Monument (1944)
- The Sun My Monument. The New Hogarth Library, vol. xiii. London: The Hogarth Press, 1944.
- The Bloom of Candles: Verse from a Poet's Year (1947)
- My Many-Coated Man (1955)
- The Pocket Poets: Laurie Lee (1960)
- Selected Poems (1983)
- Collected Poems (2023)
Autobiography:
- Cider with Rosie [aka "The Edge of Day"] (1959)
- The Illustrated Cider with Rosie. 1959. Designed by Nicholas Thirkell. London: Century Publishing Co. Ltd., 1984.
- As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning (1969)
- As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning: Illustrated Edition. 1969. Designed by David Fordham. Book Club Associates. London: Guild Publishing, 1985.
- A Moment of War (1991)
- Red Sky at Sunrise: An Autobiographical Trilogy (1993)
- Red Sky at Sunrise: An Autobiographical Trilogy. Cider with Rosie / As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning / A Moment of War. Illustrated by John Ward, Leonard Rosoman & Keith Bowen. 1959, 1969, 1991. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993.
Non-fiction:
- Land at War (1945)
- [with Ralph Keene] We Made a Film in Cyprus (1947)
- An Obstinate Exile (1951)
- A Rose for Winter: Travels in Andalusia (1955)
- A Rose for Winter: Travels in Andalusia. 1955. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978.
- [with David Lambert] Man Must Move: The Story of Transport [aka "The Wonderful World of Transportation"] (1960)
- The Firstborn (1964)
- I Can't Stay Long (1975)
- Innocence in the Mirror (1978)
- Two Women (1983)
- Village Christmas: And Other Notes on the English Year (2016)
- [with David Parker] Down in the Valley: A Writer's Landscape [interviews] (2019)
Plays:
- Peasants' Priest (1947)
Screenplays:
- Cyprus Is an Island (1946)
- A Tale in a Teacup (1947)
Radio Plays:
- The Voyage of Magellan (1946 / 1948)
- Black Saturday, Red Sunday. Produced by Louis MacNeice (1956)
- I Call Me Adam. Produced by Louis MacNeice (1959)
Secondary:
- Grove, Valerie. Laurie Lee: The Well-Loved Stranger. Viking. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1999.
•
- category - English Poetry (post-1900): Authors
•
