Jane Wormell lives and works in North London. She studied with her father, the painter
L. J. W. Linsey, who was a Principal Lecturer in Fine Art at Hornsey College of Art. She has been creating and exhibiting her flower paintings for more than thirty years, beginning with botanical studies in watercolour before moving into oils. As well as studies of individual plants, she also paints expansive canvases of hedgerows and flower borders. She is interested in the atmosphere each flower creates, its relationship with the plants around it and the spaces created between them. She has exhibited in commercial galleries and public institutions, including the Royal Academy, London’s Barbican Centre and the University of York, and her work is held in numerous private collections worldwide. For more of her paintings see www.jonathancooper.co.uk.
Back cover fox by Ella Balaam, design by Octavius Murray, layout by Andrew Evans, colophon and tailpiece by David Eccles
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Contents
From the Editors
A Matter of Compression • sTephen bayley
Laurence Pomeroy, The Racing Car Explained
The Agony and the Ecstasy • ariane banKes
Nigel Nicolson, Portrait of a Marriage
The Sound of a Leaf • posy FalloWField
Ronald Blythe, Outsiders
Reaching for the Stars • JusTin MaroZZi
The novels of James Salter
Laying It on with a Trowel • noonie Minogue
Axel Munthe, The Story of San Michele
Best of British • JiM ring
P. R. Reid, The Colditz Story & The Latter Days
Grace and a Great Heart • Maggie Fergusson
Alan Johnson, This Boy
The Noblest Profession • riChard plaTT
Christopher Morley, Parnassus on Wheels & The Haunted Bookshop
War’s Long Tail • isabel lloyd
Ian Serraillier, The Silver Sword
Joie de Vivre • MarTin sorrell
Richard Cobb, The End of the Line
Frills and Thrills • rebeCCa Willis
James Laver, A Concise History of Costume
His Fate Was Sealed • andreW Joynes
James Thurber, The Years with Ross
A Russian Adrian Mole • pauline MelVille
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Adolescent
At Home with Mrs Thrale • roger hudson
Mrs Thrale’s Thraliana
The Colour of Sunlight • sue gee
Eva Ibbotson, The Morning Gift
Dorothy: The Highlights • Tony huFTon
On reading Dorothy Wordsworth’s Continental Journals
Bibliography
The Slightly Foxed Podcast
New episodes of our podcast are available on the 15th of April, July, October and January. To listen, visit www.foxedquarterly.com/pod or search for Slightly Foxed on Audioboom, Apple Podcasts or your podcast app.
Subscriber Benefits
Slightly Foxed can obtain any books reviewed in this issue, whether new or second-hand. To enquire about a book, access the digital edition of Slightly Foxed or view a list of membership benefits, visit www.foxedquarterly.com/ members or contact the office: 020 7033 0258/office@foxedquarterly.com.
From the Editors
Spring again, and the start of a new, third decade for Slightly Foxed. Looking back at the end of our twentieth anniversary year made us think about the promises we’d given when we started SF, and how well – or not! – we’ve kept to them. The world of 2004, when we two and Steph launched the magazine from a table in the children’s playroom of Gail’s house in Canonbury, did all the packing ourselves and queued to send off the first issues at the Post Office on Essex Road, seems very remote when we look at the office now.
Yet a lot of things are still the same. A good number of our original contributors are still with us, and indeed some faithful subscribers too. Slightly Foxed, and now of course the Slightly Foxed Editions, are still printed by our wonderful friends, the craftsmen printers at Smith Settle in Yorkshire. We’ve done our best to stick faithfully to our original do-as-you-would-be-done-by policy of paying contributors and other people we deal with fairly and on time, making sure our phones are answered by a human being and believing that the words ‘customer service’ actually mean something. And if we’ve learned anything in these twenty happy years it’s to follow our instincts, even if that means going against the tide, and not to take ourselves, or Slightly Foxed, too seriously.
But back to the present. Our Spring Slightly Foxed Edition, Portrait of a Marriage, created a sensation when it first appeared in 1973, and its author and publisher Nigel Nicolson feared he might be prosecuted for obscenity. Based on diaries and journals he found when his mother Vita Sackville-West died, it details the passionate lesbian affair that nearly ended her marriage to the writer and diplomat
Harold Nicolson. Ultimately the marriage survived to become what Nigel describes as ‘one of the strangest and most successful unions that two gifted people have ever enjoyed’. Strange it certainly was, and Nigel’s own perspective on his parents’ marriage provides an intriguing counterpoint to the agonies and ecstasies of Vita’s journals. Times have changed but the effect is still electric.
The special offer we made to subscribers last summer was so popular, we’ve decided to do the same again. So we’re offering a 50 per cent reduction to anyone taking out a new annual gift subscription between 1 March and 31 May this year (new, rather than renewed, that is). It’s a chance to give pleasure to another booklover and of course to help Slightly Foxed. Just call the office or use the code gift25 on the website. We know there are difficult times ahead, especially for small businesses like ours, and you’ll really be helping us along –as you do so often in so many ways – by spreading the word.
And finally, our usual warm congratulations to the winner of our sixteenth crossword competition, Margaret Armitage, who receives a free annual subscription. For anyone still struggling, the answers are on p. 46.
gail pirKis & haZel Wood
Tonkin
Lou
A Matter of Compression
s T ephen bayley
With the Royal Mail in a death loop, letterboxes will soon be redundant. I doubt if future houses will have them. And future generations will, if they think of them at all, marvel at a curiosity as distant for them as gas mantles and ducking stools are for us. ‘You mean people used to send a message in ink on paper and someone in uniform stuck it through a hole in your door? Wow. That’s cool,’ I can hear my grandchildren say.
It will be the same with cars, and especially racing cars. When these grandchildren are old enough to drive, private cars will have become redundant. As J. G. Ballard predicted, their use will be restricted to ‘motoring parks’, where they might briefly be enjoyed only under psychiatric supervision.
And imagine explaining the origins of motor-racing! A sport employing petrol-gobbling, rubber-burning, air-sucking, deafeningly noisy, hot, smelly deathtraps driven by men with over-abundant testosterone, wearing Aertex shirts and leather helmets. To kids brought up with the unexamined conviction that extraction industries are the work of Satan, the historic racing car would seem a herald from Hell.
I belong to the last generation when ‘going for a drive’ with parents was a leisure pursuit, a recreation. My father was not bookish, but he was very dapper. Bespoke suits and pocket squares were unusual in the Liverpool of my youth. On summer evenings, we would go for a drive to a pub in Skelmersdale. There was no traffic.
Laurence Pomeroy, The Racing Car Explained: A Guide for the Younger Enthusiast (1963), is out of print but we can obtain second-hand copies.
A Matter of Compression
Ever since, a car interior has suggested to me well-being and serenity. The very first photograph of me does not show an infant with a cuddly toy, but one sitting next to the giant headlamp of my father’s Georges Roesch Talbot. They say le style c’est l’homme and this was so with him and his car. The Anglo-French Talbot was dashing, but it did not work very well since it was bought second-hand without much diligence and found to have a piston missing, which compromised its performance.
My adolescent world was framed by the view from the back seat of such cars. And one day, while we were going for a drive, I saw my first racing car being trailered to the Aintree circuit. I had never seen anything so perfectly beautiful. I did not at the time have the vocabulary to describe it, but the effect was ravishing. It was dark blue, composed of subtle curves that were both elegant and, evidently, functional – a masterpiece of what I would later call ‘design’. The car I now realize was a Lotus XI, engineered on sublimely simple principles by Colin Chapman, wrapped in gorgeous aerodynamic bodywork by Mike Costin.
Soon I was deep into my autodidact period in which my instructor was Penguin. The brilliant design of Penguin Modern Classics was by Germano Facetti who, again with Lotus-like elegance, between 1962 and 1971 gave new life to old titles with a combination of modern typography and adroit picture-research for the covers. I cannot, for example, separate a memory of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Wind, Sand and Stars from the Paul Klee painting Facetti chose for the cover. Ditto Thomas Mann and Lovis Corinth and so on with Camus, Sartre and AlainFournier.
But I never separated my
A Matter of Compression
fascination with cars from my enlarging love of literature and art. On the contrary, they all seemed elements of a seamless project to understand and influence the forces which move us, whether dynamic or aesthetic. And when I discovered Laurence Pomeroy’s The Racing Car Explained, it confirmed this belief.
Pomeroy (1907–66) was the author of The Grand Prix Car (1949) and co-author with Stirling Moss of The Design and Behaviour of the Racing Car (1963). His father, Laurence Pomeroy Senior, was automobile aristocracy, promoting himself from an apprenticeship at the North London Locomotive Works to the Thornycroft Steam Carriage and Van Company, and then on to Vauxhall in its heyday. There he designed engines, much influenced by avant-garde French combustion theory. Then to the Aluminium Corporation of America, Daimler and de Havilland.
The Racing Car Explained (1963) is a masterpiece of technical exegesis. Although directed at young people, there is not a whiff of condescension in the writing. On the contrary, while superbly lucid in his explanations, Pomeroy expects a mature level of literacy and numeracy in his readers. And, I think rather beautifully, does not even question for a moment the importance of understanding what a ‘scrub angle’ might be. Or ‘the geometry of linkages’. And this in the era of the Beatles’ first LP.
Rereading it now, I get a disabling nostalgia not only for my teens before I discovered the distractions of girls and beer, but also for a lost age which might have been more polluted than ours but which was also more innocent and optimistic. After all, a ‘sports’ car is a concept that aligns gasoline with grass, fresh air, water and snow as a means of facilitating human athleticism.
Pomeroy begins with a succinct account of the history of motor-racing, noting that since 1895 every European country except Norway has staged motor races. This was the year of the very first, between Paris and Bordeaux. The entries consisted of seven petrol cars, four steam-engined examples and one driven by electricity.
A Matter of Compression
Competing cars included Mercedes, Fiat and Peugeot, and other makes now obscured by history: Nazzaro, Gregoire, Hotchkiss and Schneider. The race was won by Emile Levassor at an average speed of 15 mph. It took two days.
In 1906, the French organized the first ‘Grand Prix’ for cars, a title that had hitherto been used for events involving horses. Of course, horses have made their own semantic contribution to the culture of the car, at first understood as a coachbuilder’s carriage defined by its horselessness. And the measure of a vehicle’s puissance was for a long time what the French call cheval vapeur or ‘horsepower’. One horsepower is defined as the capacity to lift thirty-three pounds a hundred feet in six seconds. (Nowadays, we prefer watts.)
And in 1961, the motoring authorities established ‘Formula One’, the pinnacle of motor-racing. Formula One today is a garish, mediamanaged pseudo-event, flush with celebrity which, as it gains popularity, loses its connection with sporting character and technical purity. It is the great charm of Pomeroy that he shows us another world. In Chapter Three, ‘The Bases of Engine Power’, we read his stately prose: ‘Let us consider this matter of compression.’
Let us indeed. The most familiar form of internal combustion engine works in four ‘strokes’ nicely known as suck/squeeze/bang/ blow. Pomeroy invites the teenage mind to envisage a sixteencylinder engine sucking, squeezing, banging and blowing at 12,400 revolutions per minute. That means an oily little piston is moving up and down its constraining cylinder 207 times every second. The valves that feed the beast and exhaust its effluent open and shut in just one five-hundredth of a second. My teenage mind found this obscene mechanical inferno enthralling, if terrifying.
Pomeroy takes us through all the elements of the racing car. When we are done with camshafts and piston speed, he moves on to independent suspension and shock absorbers. With absolute clarity and confidence, he presents the ability to design a single-seater to go ever faster as a metaphor of progress. Perhaps nothing dates him more.
A Matter of Compression
But he is not innocent of aesthetics. Of racing car shapes and the need for them to penetrate air with the least resistance, he explains: ‘Fish travel somewhat slowly in a relatively thick fluid and birds fly fast in a rather thin fluid.’ Accordingly, the jacket is illustrated with a photograph of Colin Chapman’s Lotus 25 which won the Formula One World Championship in the year the book was published. Chapman had trained as an aeronautical engineer and his philosophy was ‘simplify and add lightness’, which sounds like good advice to authors as well as racing car designers.
The Racing Car Explained was, with Penguin Modern Classics, a complete education for me. I learned more from Laurence Pomeroy and Germano Facetti than I ever did at school. And the book contains some nice drawings of brakes, hub-carriers and wishbones, which I admired so much that I copied them with great reverence for my first published article. I was 15.
And I still believe that oversteer and understeer have an almost moral character. Clive James agreed. He enjoyed the significance of vehicle dynamics and wrote a wonderful lyric, ‘Lay off the brakes and steer into the skid’. Pomeroy could explain the physics of that advice. It’s the same with ‘unsprung weight’. It is an education in itself to explain this concept. So let me try. Cars of any sort need suspension so that bumps in the road may be absorbed, otherwise they might turn over. Suspension is normally provided by springs connecting the wheel to the vehicle’s frame. The weight of the whole vehicle is therefore ‘sprung weight’ while the wheel itself is ‘unsprung weight’: it is the engineer’s objective to reduce unsprung weight to the minimum so as to make the wheels subject to fewer forces and, therefore, more controllable. Thank you, Laurence Pomeroy, for giving me an enduring ability to explain such mysteries.
There are other sources of insight and beauty here. If you can understand that in any moving body, weight is transferred in the direction opposite to acceleration, then you are well on the way to understanding Newton’s Principia. Here Isaac modestly stated that
A Matter of Compression
he laid bare no less than the entire state and frame of the Universe –as Laurence Pomeroy did in this noble little book.
The 1944 Education Act had such an effect on the schooling of his readers that Pomeroy was able to write: ‘It is a commonplace of physics that the coefficient of friction between two smooth materials cannot exceed 1.0’, and be certain that his readers would not be dumbfounded. I doubt you can be certain of such commonplaces sixty years on.
What’s the lesson here? For all the gross silliness of Formula One today, I sometimes think the design of racing cars should be on the National Curriculum. Children would learn about physics and design, materials science and aerodynamics – as well as marketing, schmoozing, fundraising and PR.
But then I recall something Laurence Pomeroy Senior said to his son, the author: ‘Well, my boy, always bear in mind that you will never be a really good driver until you have had three big accidents.’ I suppose my fascination with this book is based in a yearning for a simpler past when mechanical forces presented great danger – as well as great beauty.
sTephen bayley was the first person to exhibit a car in the Victoria & Albert Museum. Hitherto, the museum had ignored cars because, quaintly, they could not decide if they were ‘metalwork’ or ‘sculpture’. Later, with Terence Conran, he founded London’s influential Design Museum.
The Agony and the Ecstasy
ariane ban K es
Half a century after it was first published in 1973, Portrait of a Marriage still delivers a powerful depth charge, still intrigues and amazes in equal measure. The story it tells, of a marriage made all the stronger by the centrifugal forces of bisexual love affairs forcing it apart, is profoundly moving, and in Nigel Nicolson’s graceful telling, as relevant now as ever. We live in an age of soundbites, where complex lives are often reduced to simplistic labels – Vita Sackville-West? Ah, yes, the gardener, the lover of Virginia Woolf, the inspiration for Orlando – and need to be reminded of the fire and passion, the agony and ecstasy, that combined in the making of two such singular lives and one such singular marriage.
After his mother Vita Sackville-West died in 1962, Nicolson went through her papers and came upon a locked Gladstone bag. This contained her account – her confession – of the tumultuous affair with Violet Keppel that had pushed her marriage to the writer and diplomat Harold Nicolson to the very brink. Written in 1920 when she was 28, it was her attempt to be truthful, and it was locked away, because:
I shall be able to trust no one to read it; there is only one person in whom I have such utter confidence that I would give every line of this confession into his hands, knowing that after wading through this morass – for it is a morass, my life, a bog, a swamp, a deceitful country, with one bright patch in the middle, the patch that is unalterably his – I know that after wading through it all he would emerge holding his estimate of me steadfast.
The Agony and the Ecstasy
Ten years passed before Nicolson decided to publish Vita’s account, verbatim, but interspersed with his own more nuanced commentary. Her voice is raw, urgent, occasionally confused and confusing; his steady and sympathetic, putting the story Vita tells into the context of contemporary letters between the dramatis personae and his own experience of his parents’ marriage.
And what a drama it was, unfolding through Vita’s extraordinary upbringing as the only child of Lord Sackville, incumbent of Knole (famously, a house with fifty-two staircases, set within a thousand acres), and illegitimate granddaughter of an Andalucian dancer –an inheritance which might account for her fiery and rebellious temperament. The seductive Violet Keppel (daughter of Alice Keppel, mistress of Edward VII), whom she met at the age of 13 and who kissed her on the spot, would not be the first object of Vita’s affections. That was neat, dull Rosamund Grosvenor, with whom she became obsessed while being simultaneously courted by numerous men at débutante balls and notably by Harold Nicolson, who proposed marriage before they had even exchanged a kiss. Intense as it was, she would shrug off her liaison with Rosamund as ‘superficial. I mean that it was almost exclusively physical as, to be frank, she always bored me as a companion. I was very fond of her, however; she had a sweet nature. But she was quite stupid. Harold wasn’t.’
Rosamund, and indeed Harold, would be no match for Violet when she burst upon the scene again in April 1918. Vita had by now enjoyed nearly four years of unadulterated married happiness with Harold, giving birth to two sons, Ben and Nigel. When Violet asked
The Agony and the Ecstasy
if she might visit her at Long Barn, the Nicolsons’ house near Sevenoaks, Vita reluctantly agreed. At first, ‘We were both bored. My serenity got on her nerves, her restlessness got on mine . . .’ until one day Vita acquired some breeches and gaiters ‘like the women-on-theland were wearing’ and was intoxicated by the freedom they gave her. Violet was transfixed. ‘I remember that wild irresponsible day,’ recalled Vita. ‘It was one of the most vibrant days of my life . . . the old undercurrent had come back stronger than ever.’
It was Violet, not Vita, who acted as seductress, drawing Vita into her sphere: ‘She was more skilful than I . . . she was infinitely clever.’ Violet had little to lose, for her engagement to the absent but gallant Denys Trefusis was a farce: she had forced him to accept that their union would be platonic and had no intention of making him happy. Vita meanwhile absconded with Violet to Cornwall, to London, to Paris, to Monte Carlo, wherever the two could be together – ‘a mad and irresponsible summer of moonlight nights, and infinite escapades, and passionate letters, and music, and poetry’.
So bewitched was she by Violet and the exhilaration of self-discovery that Harold and her children faded into the background, and she barely gave them a thought. In London and Paris that autumn Vita dressed as a boy, revelling in her newfound freedom as ‘Julian’: ‘It was marvellous fun, all the more so as there was always the risk of being found out.’ But she never was: cross-dressing suited her, an expression of her alter ego, and the fugitive couple stayed abroad all winter, prolonging their ‘wild and radiant months’ before the inevitable and dreadful
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Coming attractions
sarah perry takes Seven Brief Lessons in Physics • anThony Wells discovers there’s Room at the Top • laura FreeMan is soothed by The French Country Housewife • saM saloWay-CooKe is bowled over by Orwell’s Coming Up for Air • daisy hay goes shopping with Evelina • daVid FleMing enjoys a colourful tour of England • helen MaCeWan finds company at Juniper Hall • andreW niXon makes toast with Nigel Slater • isabel lloyd goes backstage at the National • george CoChrane admires the major life of a minor poet
