Today is the 100th anniversary of the birth of novelist, Daphne du Maurier. Readers of this site may be interested in a piece I wrote on the author in A Literary Life.

Although dead for eighteen years, du Maurier’s popularity never ceases, with her beautifully written — and often quite frightening — novels, continually appealing to new generations of readers.

Dame Daphne led a colourful and controversial life, which the BBC celebrated in style last night, with a feature length film drama on BBC 2, starring Geraldine Somerville as Daphne.

Read the article here .

Stratford Mosaic: The Shakespeare Club and a Medley of Memories

Gerald Jaggard, the author of Stratford Mosaic: The Shakespeare Club and a Medley of Memories, died in 2001, aged 97. But his book, published in 1960, lives on, and is still one of the best ever written about the town and its people; it also fetches extremely high prices in good second-hand bookshops, which is appropriate as Jaggard ran one of the best Stratford ever had: the Shakespeare Press.

I remember the book shop well (situated toward the top of Sheep Street, in what is today Vintner’s restaurant) as a dark place which felt like something out of a Dickens’ novel, and there were plenty of those around, including small leather bound first editions that reeked of the past. Jaggard was a very quiet man who acknowledged your presence with a nod, allowing you to meander around the two floors of his shop, all the while keeping a discreet eye on you. Back in the late 1950s and early ’60s most of his stuff was out of my price range, although I recall buying a copy of R.L.Stevenson’s Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes there for less than £2. Most of my book buying money was spent at The Chaucer Head Bookshop just around the corner in Chapel Street, where, unlike Jaggard’s place, books were piled high in every dusty corner, a totally different experience.

Gerald Jaggard was born in Liverpool in 1904, with - as the Stratford Herald reminds us - a family “steeped in Shakespearean folklore…” not least that of being related to William and Isaac Jaggard, the father and son printers of Shakespeare’s First Folio of 1623, which isn’t a bad link for a Stratford bookseller.

Gerald’s father, Captain William Jaggard, was born in Berkshire, but, as Gerald tells us, his father’s love of books took him, as a teenager…

“…to Leamington Spa, where he was apprenticed to Simmons the bookseller. From there he moved to Liverpool, where, from a partnership, he developed his own business, and it was here that he married and settled in Canning Street. In the shadow of the great unfinished cathedral he combined with the daily hustle of his city bookshop the writing of pamphlets and other literary work. When in Warwickshire, he had spent many hours in the Memorial Theatre Library. Proud of his lineal descent from the printer-editor of the First Folio… he resolved to make his own contribution to Shakespearean literature. His choice was soon made. When a young man, hardly twenty, he had been employed by the Earl of Warwick to catalogue and classify the great collection [over 2,000 volumes] of Shakespeariana at Warwick Castle.

“I sometimes wonder if my father would have tackled his self-imposed labour of Hercules if he had realized that it would occupy his spare moments for over twenty years!

“The necessity for research brought my father on frequent visits to Stratford, and much of his time was spent in the Memorial Theatre Library. He returned from these sojourns full of the charm and loveliness of the town, and undoubtedly the smoke and grime of Liverpool, the bustle of city life, seemed more oppressive after the glimpses of country quiet. As a youth he had dreamed of settling down one day in Shakespeare’s home town, and now, some twenty years later, those dreams were hardening into definite plans. Liverpool, suitable though it was for the book trade, and for the printing press from which my father issued his index to Book Prices Current and a small study of Printing - its Birth and Growth, held little or no encouragement for the Shakespeare lover. Stratford, the very home of such study, was ready to welcome him, as he was already a governor of its theatre, a member of its Shakespeare Club, and a prolific and diligent correspondent of its weekly newspaper The Stratford-upon-Avon Herald, whose editor, Mr. George Boyden was a personal friend.”

Read the rest of this entry »

North Face of Soho

Stratford-upon-Avon Civic Hall

There’s no doubt that Clive James is as good a talker as he is a writer - and he’s a brilliant writer - and as funny on his feet as he is on the printed page, which is a pretty good combination. Last Thursday evening (9th November) at the Civic Hall, he entertained a capacity audience for well over the allotted time of ninety minutes, which, according to James’ driver means he’s enjoying himself as much as the audience.

These so called ‘audiences’ are invariably little more than a showcase for a celebrity to sell a new and usually badly written book, which often results in a half-hearted, and lack-luster affair, where the celeb in question recounts all too familiar anecdotes, the veracity of which is often questionable. They are there, not to talk to and entertain an audience (who will have spent £15 - £18 on a ticket) but to fulfill the demands of a publisher’s contract.

Like the rest of them Clive James has a book to sell, but in this case it’s a rather good one called North Face of Soho, which is the fourth in his series of Unreliable Memoirs. And he got stuck into selling the thing from the start with an off-handed antipodean wit that could drag the required £17.99 out of the most scrooge-like of pockets. And let’s remember that James is a writer, so writing, and, when he gets the chance, selling books - his books - is what he does for a living. And you get the impression he has, and still does make a pretty good living.

A good living that was undoubtedly helped along by being one of the most familiar figures on our TV screens, interviewing the likes of Robert Mitchum and Richard Burton. That is until 2001 when mainstream TV (with the exception of becoming a ‘professional’ guest on just about every chat show going, and where, if the host loses the plot, he’ll ask himself questions) didn’t want his kind of literate and engaging shows any more. And as James made it clear on Thursday - after his documentary about Cuba was shelved by a 12 year old executive producer - it was the worst and the best thing that ever happened to him. He now hosts a chat show for Sky from his own living-room.

And you will see in this new and intimate chat show the irreverent wit and highly cultured base from which James has built his reputation over the last forty odd years; an irreverence and culture that was also the basis of his audience on Thursday, which dealt hilariously with everything from smoking, drinking, weight, sex and the balding man, a discourse on Australian culture, plus some wonderful readings from his new book, especially one about men’s fashions and the world of the 1970s…

” If, during the course of this volume, I refer to my mode of dress as if I looked outstanding, the reader should grasp in advance that standing out, in that period, was unusually hard to do. We all looked like that: or, at any rate, the younger men did. The Duke of Edinburgh never dressed to get attention. If he didn’t, why did we? It is a very hard thing to evoke an era. Pick up a notebook and a pen right now, stick your head outside the door, and command yourself to evoke your era. How, for example, would you capture your era’s atmosphere of squalid menace in public places? Where would you start? As the sixties slithered into the seventies, the streets were still almost incomparably safer than they are now, but the post-punk body-piercing hoodies of today look diffident, almost self-effacing, compared to the young males of that time. With few exceptions, we all looked more amazing than anything seen in Britain since the Restoration brought in horned wigs and stilt heels. You can’t really tell from photographs how universal the bizarrerie actually was, to the extent that nobody noticed because everybody was doing it…

” The fashion dictated long and thick sideboards to the hair, as if the head had been joined on each side by a small sofa deprived of its covering and tilted on end. There were velvet jackets, flared trousers, zip-sided boots. With the possible exception of the hair, all these elements entailed a lavish use of industrially generated materials, especially polyester. It meant that the average young male was carrying a greater proportion of artificial fabrics than an airliner’s interior…

” My own range of shirts included an electric blue number that made the unwary spectator’s eyes ache. As its proud owner, I thought it looked particularly good with a cravat. The cravats I favoured were of a chemically derived material printed with a paisley pattern…They sometimes delivered electric shocks when touched, but so did almost everything else I was wearing. When charged up by walking on the right kind of nylon carpet, I could be seen in the dark…”

Lovely stuff.

A good piece of advice Clive James gave on Thursday night is that would-be interviewers and chat show hosts must never ask a question of a guest and then answer it themselves, because, quite naturally, it leaves the interviewee nothing to say. Good basic advice that sadly - during the question and answer period toward the end of the evening - fell on the deaf ears of a well known local journalist who gave an embarrassing two minute answer to his own embarrassing five minute question. I shall read his next column with interest.

It was a super evening with some very thoughtful nonpcness that went to the humorous heart of things. I, along with my two old friends Lawrence and Byron, enjoyed it hugely.

Congratulations to Fiona, Claude, and the rest of the gang at the Civic Hall for getting Clive to Stratford.

If you want to see Clive’s new chat show from his own home click onto Clive James dot com.