Real people in novels : a new idea?

Also in today's blog
Finding Dalrymple's articles

My apologies for misleading you into thinking that Theodore Dalrymple's new column for The Spectator is readable at their website. Apparently it's "subscribers only".



However, a wide range of his excellent pieces can be found by typing his name into Google. A good starter piece is at the Brussels Journal from which site I borrowed the photo of him. Wonder who the flowers are for? His French wife is my guess. Since TD's retirement, the Dalrymples have made their home in France.

Real people in fiction e.g. Sigmund Freud

Perhaps I'm having a lapse of memory but, off hand, I can't remember a novel featuring an internationally-known real person in the way that Jed Rubenfeld uses Sigmund Freud as a character in The Interpretation of Murder.

As a Princeton undergraduate, Rubenfeld wrote his senior thesis on Freud and, at the back of his novel, there's a long Author's Note explaining that, while TIOM, is "a work of fiction from beginning to end", much is based on fact.

"Sigmund Freud did of course visit the United States in 1909, arriving aboard the steamship George Washington with Carl Jung and Sándor Ferenczi on the evening of August 29…Freud did stay at the Hotel Manhattan in New York City for a week before traveling to Clark University to deliver his famous lectures, and he did contract a kind of horror of America. While in the United States, Freud was indeed asked to render impromptu impromptu psychoanalyses, although never, as far as we know, by the mayor of New York City."

What's your view of pyschoanalysis, I wonder? To be honest, my feeling is that it's largely claptrap. Perhaps I'm unfairly prejudiced because I've known one or two people who've tried it and, in my opinion, they would have been more usefully occupied digging the garden or making new curtains rather than pouring out their souls to an analyst.

My doubts about Freud were confirmed by a conversation he has on p 285 of The Interpretation of Murder.

Someone asks him if marriage is a good thing.

"For society or for the individual?" Freud responded. "For society, marriage is undoubtedly beneficial. But the burdens of civilised morality are too heavy for many to bear. How long have you been a wife, Mrs Banwell?"

"I married George when I was nineteen…that makes seven years."

"In that case you will know enough," Freud went on, "if not from your own experience, then that of your friends. not to be surprised by what I say. Satisfying intercourse does not last long in most marriages. After four or five years, marriage tends to fail utterly in this respect, and when this happens it spells the end of spiritual communion too. As a result, in the great run of cases, marriage ends in disappointment, spiritual as well as physical. The man and the woman are thrown back, pyschologically speaking, to their premarital state – with only one difference. They are poorer now. Poorer by the loss of an illusion."

It may be that Freud's negative message was based on personal experience. Many happily married people could have told him that, in fact, good marriages get better as time goes on, in every respect.

Jed Rubenfeld, Rosie Thomas, Theodore Dalrymple

Having finished reading Jed Rubenfeld's thriller The Interpretation of Murder, I find that it's not the main characters – Dr Stratham Younger and Nora Acton – I cared about most. The character who captured my interest was Jimmy Littlemore.

"The detective was twenty-five. Neither tall nor short, Jimmy Littlemore wasn't bad-looking, but he wasn't quite good-looking either. His close-cropped hair was neither dark nor fair; if anything it was closer to red. He had a distinctly American face, open and friendly, which, apart from a few freckles, was not particularly memorable. If you passed him in the street, you were not likely to recall him later. You might, however, remember the ready smile or the red bow tie that he liked to sport below his straw boater."

Why did this man make such a strong impression? Why, at a point in story when it seemed he was out of the action permanently, did I feel horrified? And wonder if I could go on reading?

Maybe because none of the rest of the characters seemed quite real and Littlemore did.

For me the book's second strength are the riveting descriptions such as this -

"The Manhattan Bridge, nearing completion in the summer of 1909, was the last of the three great suspension bridges built across the East River to connect the island of Manhattan with what had been, until 1898, the City of Brooklyn. These bridges - the Brooklyn, the Williamsburg, the Manhattan - were, when constructed, the longest single spans in existence, extolled by the Scientific American as the greatest engineering feats the world had ever known. Together with the invention of spun-steel cable, one particular technological innovation made them possible : the ingeneious conceit of the pneumatic caisson."

The author then goes on to describe these caissons and weave them into the plot in a most gripping way. None of the men in my life are engineers and I've never been particularly interested in engineering before, but Rubenfeld has me hooked.

The book's third strength is his presentation of Sigmund Freud, but I'll write about that tomorrow.

Rosie Thomas's award-winning novel

You may already have read Grumpy Old Bookman's review of the novel which won the Romantic Novelists' Association £5,000 Award last week. I made some comments on the book on 14 March this year, since when I've been waiting to hear news of Ms Thomas's website.

Theodore Dalrymple's new column

This week one of my favourite writers has started a new column in The Spectator. Worth keeping an eye on.

Granger, Grigson and Glasse : three very different cookery writers

[Posted 2 May 2007]

Also in today's blog

Richard Charkin's site statistics


First off, a thank you to everyone who used the comment button to wish me well.

From Australia, another Anne wrote – "Welcome back Anne - as you are a part of my daily routine, I have missed your insights into new books that I might read.

As an Australian who has known about Donna Hay for years, I am pleased that you have discovered her cookery style. I am not much of a cook, but my sister is fantastic. One of her favourite Australian cooks is Bill Granger who is more of the personality type but if you get a chance look him up. He has a regular coloumn in the Sydney Morning Herald and if you enter the search site at www.smh.com.au you will see a number of his recipes."

So I shot off to the SMH and found a piece by Granger about tomato sauce in which he writes "One of my favourites meals using the sauce is bistecca alla pizzaiola (grilled steak with tomato sauce) to which I add oregano and dried chilli flakes. You can also stir the sauce through pasta and serve it with torn mozzarella and roughly pitted olives. The other night I used some leftover roasted tomato sauce cooked down with green beans and served it with roast chicken. Tomato sauce is a true kitchen staple and, as you have suggested, it should not be limited to pizza."




Then I found Bill Granger's website. Obviously the new generation of male cookery writers are not as paunchy as their predecessors.

Another Australian, Treva, wrote - "So pleased you are back at your desk, Anne. I was starting to worry when your blog didn't appear. I'm afraid Donna Hay is a bit too minimalist for me. As another Australian, I've been familiar with her work for quite a few years. I'm afraid I prefer my cookery writers to add a little bit of anecdote to their recipes. Past favourites have been Jane Grigson & Josceline Dimblebey, and on television I like my cookery experts to be just a little bit over the top such as the Two Fat Ladies and Nigella Lawson. At the moment Australia has an ABC TV cooking series "The Cook & the Chef" which is just the right blend of personality & information."

I'm a Grigson fan too, Treva. I've just been to the kitchen to make a cup of tea and to fetch my treasured copy of Jane Grigson's Vegetable Book, first published by Michael Joseph in 1978 and by Penguin in 1980.

It's dedicated to her husband "who introduced me to John Evelyn and gardenage" and below the dedication are two quotes.

"Every book is, in an intimate sense, a circular letter to the friends of him who writes it. They alone take his meaning; they find the private message, assurances of love and expressions of gratitude, dropped for them in every corner." R L Steveenson

"Most people spoil garden things by over boiling them. All things green should have a little crispness, for if they are overboil'd they neither have sweetness or beauty." Hannah Glasse

Jane Grigson

For those of you who haven't discovered Jane Grigson, at Penguin's website I found this –

"Jane Grigson was brought up in the north-east of England, where there is a strong tradition of good eating, but it was not until many years later, when she began to spend three months of each year in France, that she became really interested in food. Charcuterie and French Pork Cookery was the result, exploring the wonderful range of cooked meat products on sale in even the smallest market towns. This book has also been translated into French, a singular honour for an English cookery writer.
After taking an English degree at Cambridge in 1949, Jane Grigson worked in art galleries and publishers' offices, and then as a translator. In 1966 she shared the John Florio prize (with Father Kenelm Foster) for her translation of Beccaria's Of Crime and Punishment. It was in 1968 that Jane Grigson began her long association with the Observer Magazine for whom she wrote right up until her untimely death in 1990; Good Things and Food With The Famous are all based on these highly successful series. In 1973, Fish Cookery was published by the Wine and Food Society, followed by The Mushroom Feast (1975), a collection of recipes for cultivated, woodland, field and dried mushrooms. She received both the Glenfiddich Writer of the Year Award and the André Simon Memorial Fund Book Award for her Vegetable Book (1978) and for her Fruit Book (1982), and was voted Cookery Writer of the Year in 1977 for English Food. A compilation of her best recipes, The Enjoyment of Food, was published in 1992 with an introduction by her daughter, the cookery writer Sophie Grigson. Most of Jane Grigson's books are published in Penguin.
Jane Grigson died in March 1990. In her obituary for the Independent, Alan Davidson wrote that 'Jane Grigson left to the English-speaking world a legacy of fine writing on food and cookery for which no exact parallel exists ... She won to herself this wide audience because she was above all a friendly writer ... the most companionable presence in the kitchen; often catching the imagination with a deftly chosen fragment of history or poetry, but never failing to explain the "why" as well as the "how" of cookery'. Jane Grigson was married to the poet and critic the late Geoffrey Grigson."

Hannah Glasse

The Independent newspaper has a good piece on Glasse here.

Richard Charkin's site statistics

Richard Charkin, CEO of Macmillan, whose site I visit most mornings, is complaining that "In April we had a disappointing 68227 visits. This is down from March's record 81424 bringing the total visits to 689184. Any ideas for boosting traffic (apart from the obvious ones) gratefully received. I'm returning to London this morning, just another seventeen hours travelling. Thank goodness for books."

I don't envy the man his life which seems to be spent flying round the world. Even travelling first class with plenty of good books to read, it must become awfully wearing. I've been flying since 1951 when it was a still an exciting adventure, but alas that time has long gone. Though I still like people-watching in airports.

Techie problems

Today's blog [May 2] on cookery writers has somehow got itself behind/after yesterday's blog. Will try to sort it out. AW

Jed Rubenfeld's extraordinary bestseller

[Posted 1 May 2007]

Also in today's blog

Claudia Roden and Liz Fielding
Is there a danger that reading will stop?

Now to tell you something about the marvellous book I was lent while in hospital last week. It's so enjoyable that I'm rationing myself to 30 pages a day.

Had I been on top form last month, I should have spotted a photograph of the author on page 18 of Publishing News [13 April issue], part of their coverage of the 2007 British Book Awards.

Being an early riser, I don't often stay up late and the opening scenes of the TV coverage of the Awards didn't tempt me to watch the whole thing. Which was a pity because I should have liked to see Jed Rubenfeld receiving his award for The Interpretation of Murder.



Extract from Publishing News : "It was a family celebration for Jed Rubenfeld, who took the Richard & Judy Award for his debut novel The Interpretation of Murder [Headline]. He was accompanied at the Awards by his wife, Amy Chua, also a best-selling author, and agent Suzanne Gluck of William Morris. His children were back at the hotel – "I can't wait to tell them. I'm thrilled beyond description – this is the only honour I've had in my life," claimed the high-flying Yale law professor. Having refused a two-book contract, what about that second novel now the first is so successful? "I'm going to skip the second one," he replied. Straight on to the third, then!"

Last Friday's issue of The Bookseller shows Rubenfeld's book at No 1 on the Top 50 chart with a total of 453,140 units sold.

Neither the R&J Award or the No 1 spot on the Top 50 chart would have influenced me to buy the book had I not been lent it. Too many books are hyped to the skies these days and prove disappointing.

For a change, the praise for this book is justified. I agree with The Times critic who wrote "…and unusually intelligent novel which entertains, informs and intrigues on several levels" and with the Independent reviewer's comment, "Rubenfeld's brilliant conceit is to weave this real-life event into an accomplished thriller…a dazzling novel."

Bookreporter has an interesting interview with Rubenfeld whose site is here.

Why am I enjoying this story so much? Partly because it's full of what so many current novels lack : interesting information. I have been to New York only once – an enthralling experience – and therefore am keenly interested in its history.

On p 7 the author writes – "At the beginning of the twentieth century, an architectural paroxysm shook New York City. Gigantic towers called skyscrapers soared up one after another, higher than anything built by the hand of man before. At a ribbon-cutting ceremeony on Liberty Street in 1908, the top hats applauded as Mayor McClellan declared the forty-seven-storey redbrick and bluestone Singer Building the world's tallest structure. Eighteen months later, the mayor had to repeat the same ceremoney at the fifty-story Metropolitan Life tower on Twenty-fourth Street. But even then, they were already breaking ground for Mr Woolworth's staggering fifty-eight ziggurate back downtown.

On every block, enormous steel-beam skeletons appeared where empty lots had been the day before. The smash and scream of steam shovels never ceased. The only comparison was with Haussmann's transformation of Paris a half a century earlier, but in New York there was no signle vision behind the scenes, no unifying plan, no disciplining authority. Capital and speculation drove everything, releasing fantastic energies, distinctly American and individualistic."

Some readers might find those details boring. I find them enriching. They enhance a gripping murder story. I like to emerge from a book knowing more about the world than I did on Page 1, and Rubenfeld satisfies that hunger in a way that too few contemporary novelists do. Particularly women writers who nowadays seem to concentrate almost exclusively on "emotion", much of it tediously repetitive.

Supermarket fiction seems to be going the same way as supermarket vegetables, increasingly tasteless and lacking in nourishment. Yesterday, fancying a tomato with my bread-and-feta-cheese lunch, I cut up a Guernsey- shop-bought tomato which, apart from being red, bore little resemblance to a tomato from the street market where we shop in Spain. In a word, it was tasteless.

The problem is that UK supermarket shoppers, unless they spend time in mainland Europe, don't realise how second-rate most imported produce has become. The same thing seems to be happening with popular fiction.

Claudia Roden and Liz Fielding

A comment by Liz Fielding, on yesterday's Bookworm blog referred to cookery writer Claudia Roden. [See first photo] I'm pretty sure I have one of her books on my Spanish shelves but haven't yet got around to trying the recipes.

Cooking was one of my passions back in the Seventies, but other interests have taken over and being married to a first rate cook is another disencentive.

As I used to in an earlier, less stressful era, Liz Fielding writes for Harlequin Mills & Boon. She has amazing energy. [See second photo]



Liz not only has a website, but also a blog and now a place on MySpace. The three sites must need a good deal of attention and I wonder if they are worth the time involved? It's difficult to judge how rewarding these promotional exercises are.

But with parent companyHarlequin currently publishing over 1,300 authors from around the world – I think there were fewer than 40 authors when I joined the Boon brothers' list more than half a century ago – today's M&B writers have a much tougher row to hoe than their predecessors.

Is there a danger that reading will stop?

Extract : "The truth is that the book and newspaper businesses share the same dreadful fear: that people will stop reading. And the fear may be well-founded. Across the country, newspaper circulations are down — and this is clearly part of the reason for the cuts to book sections. At the same time, the book business increasingly relies on an aging customer base that may not be refueling itself with enough new readers.

In the past, newspaper executives understood the symbiotic relationship between their product and books. People who read books also read newspapers. From that basic tenet came a philosophy: If you foster books, you foster reading. If you foster reading, you foster newspapers. That loss-leader ends up helping you build and keep your base."

Read more of this piece by Michael Connelly, author of 17 mysteries, most of them featuring LAPD Det. Harry Bosch, at the L A Times.

Granger, Grigson and Glasse : three very different cookery writers

[Posted 2 May 2007]

Also in today's blog

Richard Charkin's site statistics


First off, a thank you to everyone who used the comment button to wish me well.

From Australia, another Anne wrote – "Welcome back Anne - as you are a part of my daily routine, I have missed your insights into new books that I might read.

As an Australian who has known about Donna Hay for years, I am pleased that you have discovered her cookery style. I am not much of a cook, but my sister is fantastic. One of her favourite Australian cooks is Bill Granger who is more of the personality type but if you get a chance look him up. He has a regular coloumn in the Sydney Morning Herald and if you enter the search site at www.smh.com.au you will see a number of his recipes."

So I shot off to the SMH and found a piece by Granger about tomato sauce in which he writes "One of my favourites meals using the sauce is bistecca alla pizzaiola (grilled steak with tomato sauce) to which I add oregano and dried chilli flakes. You can also stir the sauce through pasta and serve it with torn mozzarella and roughly pitted olives. The other night I used some leftover roasted tomato sauce cooked down with green beans and served it with roast chicken. Tomato sauce is a true kitchen staple and, as you have suggested, it should not be limited to pizza."




Then I found Bill Granger's website. Obviously the new generation of male cookery writers are not as paunchy as their predecessors.

Another Australian, Treva, wrote - "So pleased you are back at your desk, Anne. I was starting to worry when your blog didn't appear. I'm afraid Donna Hay is a bit too minimalist for me. As another Australian, I've been familiar with her work for quite a few years. I'm afraid I prefer my cookery writers to add a little bit of anecdote to their recipes. Past favourites have been Jane Grigson & Josceline Dimblebey, and on television I like my cookery experts to be just a little bit over the top such as the Two Fat Ladies and Nigella Lawson. At the moment Australia has an ABC TV cooking series "The Cook & the Chef" which is just the right blend of personality & information."

I'm a Grigson fan too, Treva. I've just been to the kitchen to make a cup of tea and to fetch my treasured copy of Jane Grigson's Vegetable Book, first published by Michael Joseph in 1978 and by Penguin in 1980.

It's dedicated to her husband "who introduced me to John Evelyn and gardenage" and below the dedication are two quotes.

"Every book is, in an intimate sense, a circular letter to the friends of him who writes it. They alone take his meaning; they find the private message, assurances of love and expressions of gratitude, dropped for them in every corner." R L Steveenson

"Most people spoil garden things by over boiling them. All things green should have a little crispness, for if they are overboil'd they neither have sweetness or beauty." Hannah Glasse

Jane Grigson

For those of you who haven't discovered Jane Grigson, at Penguin's website I found this –

"Jane Grigson was brought up in the north-east of England, where there is a strong tradition of good eating, but it was not until many years later, when she began to spend three months of each year in France, that she became really interested in food. Charcuterie and French Pork Cookery was the result, exploring the wonderful range of cooked meat products on sale in even the smallest market towns. This book has also been translated into French, a singular honour for an English cookery writer.
After taking an English degree at Cambridge in 1949, Jane Grigson worked in art galleries and publishers' offices, and then as a translator. In 1966 she shared the John Florio prize (with Father Kenelm Foster) for her translation of Beccaria's Of Crime and Punishment. It was in 1968 that Jane Grigson began her long association with the Observer Magazine for whom she wrote right up until her untimely death in 1990; Good Things and Food With The Famous are all based on these highly successful series. In 1973, Fish Cookery was published by the Wine and Food Society, followed by The Mushroom Feast (1975), a collection of recipes for cultivated, woodland, field and dried mushrooms. She received both the Glenfiddich Writer of the Year Award and the André Simon Memorial Fund Book Award for her Vegetable Book (1978) and for her Fruit Book (1982), and was voted Cookery Writer of the Year in 1977 for English Food. A compilation of her best recipes, The Enjoyment of Food, was published in 1992 with an introduction by her daughter, the cookery writer Sophie Grigson. Most of Jane Grigson's books are published in Penguin.
Jane Grigson died in March 1990. In her obituary for the Independent, Alan Davidson wrote that 'Jane Grigson left to the English-speaking world a legacy of fine writing on food and cookery for which no exact parallel exists ... She won to herself this wide audience because she was above all a friendly writer ... the most companionable presence in the kitchen; often catching the imagination with a deftly chosen fragment of history or poetry, but never failing to explain the "why" as well as the "how" of cookery'. Jane Grigson was married to the poet and critic the late Geoffrey Grigson."

Hannah Glasse

The Independent newspaper has a good piece on Glasse here.

Richard Charkin's site statistics

Richard Charkin, CEO of Macmillan, whose site I visit most mornings, is complaining that "In April we had a disappointing 68227 visits. This is down from March's record 81424 bringing the total visits to 689184. Any ideas for boosting traffic (apart from the obvious ones) gratefully received. I'm returning to London this morning, just another seventeen hours travelling. Thank goodness for books."

I don't envy the man his life which seems to be spent flying round the world. Even travelling first class with plenty of good books to read, it must become awfully wearing. I've been flying since 1951 when it was a still an exciting adventure, but alas that time has long gone. Though I still like people-watching in airports.

Apology for absence

[Posted 30 April 2007]

Also in today's blog

An exciting parcel from Bibliophile
A new-to-me cookery writer

I'm sorry Bookworm has been offline since Monday, 9 April. The reason : having caught a cough which wouldn't clear up, unexpectedly I was whipped into hospital with pneumonia.

The first time I had pneumonia was in January 1936 while a pupil at Stafford House, the junior section of Norwich High School.

While I was in bed, recovering, the death of King George V was announced on the wireless, as the radio was called in those days.

Both my mother and our landlady – we were living in furnished rooms in a house in Mount Pleasant not far from the school – shed a few tears, a display of emotion much less usual in The Thirties than today when people often weep and wail in public.

Being stuck in bed for about a month in 1936 was boring.

Spending 12 nights in Guernsey's Princess Elizabeth Hospital – opened by H M The Queen in 1948 - was far more interesting. Indeed there was never a dull moment. Both the staff and my fellow patients included some fascinating people and, to my delight, I was lent the most interesting novel I've read in a long time. This morning I shall be ordering my own copy from one of St Peter Port's bookshops.

More about this book tomorrow.

A parcel from Bibliophile

On Saturday morning, a parcel post van delivered four biographies ordered from Bibliophile. They are -

Patrick O'Brian : The Making of a Novelist by Nikolai Tolstoy [Century 2004]















Clarice Cliff by Lynn Knight [Bloomsbury 2005]

















Gwen John : A Life by Sue Roe [Vintage 2002]

















Nigella Lawson :The Unauthorised Biography by Gilly Smith [André Deutsch 2005]



















Three are hardbacks, all are in immaculate condition. Cost, inc. postage, £28. Excellent value. New, they would have cost me £55.98.

My interest in Clarice Cliff "one of the most prominent ceramic designers of the twentieth century" goes back to the early Sixties when my small son's push-chair was often parked outside antique and junk shops. One of my favourite dealers frequently tried to persuade me to buy pieces by Clarice Cliff, and an excellent investment they would have been. But my collecting budget was limited and I had fallen in love with antique needlework tools. Though often tempted, I rarely bought anything else.

A new-to-me cookery writer

While I was in hospital, my eye was caught by some photographs of food illustrating an article headed "Making sun while Hay shines" on the Food & Drink page of The Telegraph Weekend for Saturday April 21.

It began - "Australian cookery writer Donna Hay bucks the celebrity-chef trend. Unlike Nigella, Gordon and Jamie, she doesn't do television. She doesn't have a restaurant and her photograph is hardly ever seen, even in her Donna Hay magazine. Her writing style is mininmalist in the extreme, entirely devoid of reminiscence or description. Yet Hay is the bestselling non-fiction writer in Australia and has a growing following worldwide. She has published more than a dozen books and her magazine is exported around the world, with a circulation of almost 100,000. What's remarkable is that it's her cooking rather than her personality that has made her an international phenomenon."

My thanks to Telegraph columnist Xanthe Clay for introducing me to Donna Hay. Can't wait to try out Hay's Peaches in Prosciutto and Salmon Carpaccio with Campari Dressing.