Peter Stothard's Blog, page 87

Wigtown and A Crooked Sixpence

Wigtown is not a place where one should be surprised to see a man reading a book, almost any book. But on the wooden seats outside the festival tents of 'Scotland's booktown' last weekend it was a small surprise to me to see a man with a yellow-covered copy of Murray Sayle's novel of newspapers in the 1950s, A Crooked Sixpence.

This was first of all, in its original 1960 edition, quite a rare book, having been withdrawn soon after publication because of an alleged libel. I had my own copy at home but I had never seen one before, as it were, away from home. Wigtown is a smaller version of Hay-on-Wye, both in its wonderful festival, where I was talking about On the Spartacus Road, and in its shops. It was still odd not only to see the rarity but to see someone reading it.

The man said he had picked it up because he had heard that the author had died, which was a nastier surprise to me since I knew him a little and had admired him very much. He was the leading first generation man of Harold Evans' Sunday Times, still much talked of and revered when I arrived there in the late seventies; he was the only reporter to have interviewed Kim Philby and his novel was excellent of its kind too.

The title comes from a nursery rhyme.

There was a crooked man and he walked a crooked mile,
He found a crooked sixpence upon a crooked stile.
He bought a crooked cat, which caught a crooked mouse.
And they all lived together in a little crooked house

According to Murray Sayle's Scottish reader, the nursery rhyme comes from a story that is local to the Wigtown area, a tale of crooked seventeenth century politicians and the crooked border between England and Scotland and the crooked deal done to suppress Scottish presbyterianism and impose the King as head of the Church. I had already been taken to see the monument to the 'Wigtown martyrs', two old lady 'Covenanters'  staked out to drown on the beach for refusing to change their spiritual ways. So I already knew something of the nasty events of which he spoke.

So did someone from Wigtown once buy the book thinking it was a story about their ancestors?

He didn't think so

But it couldn't be ruled out: 'people buy books for very strange reasons sometimes'. I couldn't dispute that.

I asked him if he was enjoying the book - which stars prostitutes, pimps and reporters and a young Australian on Fleet Street.

 Not very much, he said.

So now I have two copies. Murray's version of the rhyme, set out on page five, is slightly and lightly subedited.

There was a crooked man and he walked a crooked mile,
He found a crooked sixpence. It wasn't enough.

 

MI6, TLS and off to Wigtown

I am getting ready for several consecutive weekends of literary festivals in which I can tell readers what they are missing if they fail to subscribe to the TLS. The first is Wigtown in Scotland where I'm talking about family memoirs and the remembering of Roman history, After that comes Henley and Cheltenham and Boston, Mass..

One problem of the literary festival season is facing the complaints of authors and publishers about the books we do not review, review too late or even review too...

Is there a bomb in my body zone?

 I'm accused, not for the first time, of harping excessively on the horrors ten years ago of the Millennium Dome.

After all, Tony Blair has admitted in his book (reviewed by me in the TLS last week) that  it 'wasn't brilliant', 'lacked sense' and 'should never have been'. He even admits that Gordon Brown was always against it. Shouldn't we just all forget about it now?

Well, my defence is that the Dome section contains the funniest dialogue in 'A Journey' - and that, although I was...

Urinating on Blair's wall

For all the attacks on Tony Blair's memoir, A Journey, reviewers have found it hard to identify many outright errors of the sort commonly found in instant history, too instantly written. Top of one paper's challenges mounted last week (I can't find the reference on-line) was the claim that Blair couldn't be right about his story on page 274 about being threatened in the late 1980s by a 'large knife' near his home on Stavordale Road, Highbury, when he challenged a 'bloke urinating against a w...

LITHE MEN TAR UP

How many lines of poetry can you make out of the letters THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT?

The Scottish poet, Edwin Morgan, who has been much mourned since his death two weeks ago, once produced twenty six - although the work in question seems to have disappeared from view until our TLS diarist, JC, rediscovered it for this week's issue.

There are some fine juxtapositions in the tradition of the concrete jeu d'esprit.

Like:
 
ST. PLINY HIM RE-TART SLUM

Particularly enjoyable for a classicist...

George Woodpecker Bush

If I'm caught by some electronic tracker in the perverse-seeming act of googling  "Peter Stothard and "woodpecker", it is not because I'm suffering from ornithological egomania. My aim last night was simply to track any communication relating to recent blogs on a probably (but not absolutely definitely) extinct bird from Louisiana.

This search, I can report, ended with nothing much more about the lost, picky-eating woodpeckers of the American southern swamps but did produce a different...

Ivory-billed woodpecker - the movie

 Clayton Burns has sent the following after my last post about the lost woodpecker of Louisiana whose bodies I once saw laid out in such numbers in a laboratory desk drawer. 

"There's an entity that I dearly wish existed, for its presence would bring me solace and wonder.  Alas, it's elusive.  There are rumors that it is actually present in the world, but, sadly, these never pass empirical scrutiny.  A few people have had personal experience of this being, but these haven't confirmed by...

Arise again, Sir Walter

 There is a characteristically fine report by Charlotte Higgins in The Guardian this morning about the debt the English owe to Sir Walter Scott, the novelist who for many years of the Romantic age was the biggest selling author by far, possibly the biggest selling author of all time in comparison with his peers, but who is now, she rightly says, almost wholly unread.

The piece caught my eye because, until my holiday trip to the Orkney and Shetland in the past two weeks, I too was a member (...

To my own chickweed

 We regularly applaud the peculiar immortality of poets who perform and die young but the achivement of youthful botanists had eluded me until I tiptoed around Thomas Edmondston's eponymous chickweed last week.

On the northernmost bit of Britain, the roof of the Queen's realm, are the serpentine rocks of Unst where the Edmonston Chickweed uniquely grows.

It does not grow very big, or very bright, but at this time of the year, when the puffins have departed and the otters are somewhat...

Mandelson, the triumph

It is always good to see conventional wisdom overturned. Peter Mandelson's memoir was supposed to be a failure because only very popular politicians are supposed to do well from their books. In the past couple of weeks there has been much media muttering about how Denis Healey's sales had been the best among recent Labour memoirs because so many buyers had liked the beetle-browed sometime Chancellor of the Exchequer so much. The latest Private Eye cover, picking up the theme, shows New...