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| John Mullan on the importance of food in The Inheritance of Loss Week two: The importance of foodThere seems to be food in every chapter of The Inheritance of Loss. The novel may appear to be taking on big themes – colonialism and its legacy, love and its limits – but it is attached to the small details of life. Over and over again its characters find solace or disappointment, a sense of cultural identity or of cultural contradiction, through what they eat. Rarely has there been a novel that reminds characters so often of their stomachs.When political violence erupts in the very first chapter, as a group of armed Nepalese nationalists invade the hilltop home of a retired judge, it is teatime. The judge, a brooding old man who worked for a lifetime in the British-run Indian Civil Service, is crossly demanding "a cake or scones, macaroons or cheese straws", while "the boys" creep across his lawn. "Something sweet and something salty." The judge, who has "worked at being English with the passion of hatred", has tastes inescapably formed by his colonial training.In the local Gymkhana dining hall he demands "roast mutton with mint sauce" and almost begs for tomato soup. When he first employs his cook, he tells him to learn a brown sauce and a white sauce: "shove the bloody white sauce on the fish and shove the bloody brown sauce on the mutton".His most important companion is his dog, for whom the cook must concoct elaborate recipes when political unrest ends the supply of meat. "It was her stew time and the cook had boiled soy Nutrinuggets with pumpkin and a Maggi soup cube. It worried the judge that she should have to eat like this".Meanwhile, in a parallel narrative, Biju, the son of his cook, is working illegally in the kitchens of cheap New York restaurants. His letters to his father tell of their bewildering variety. "He worked at Don Pollo – or was it The Hot Tomato? Or Ali Baba's Fried Chicken?" He knows only that if his son is cooking "English food" he must have "a higher position than if he were cooking Indian food".The sheer ethnic confusion of New York food is beyond his ken: Biju moves from one advertised cuisine (French, Italian, Chinese, "authentic colonial") to another, though the kitchens are "Mexican, Indian, Pakistani", or "Colombian, Tunisian, Ecuadorian, Gambian". Even when he encounters supposedly Indian food it is fitted to some "fusion trend": "the goat cheese and basil samosa, the mango margarita".What would feature in newspaper guides as a delightful, multi-cultural variety is, for Biju, a kind of gastronomic cacophony. His fellow exile Saeed cheers himself up with a reminder of East Africa: "cow peas and kingfish from the Price Chopper . . . and plantains in sugar and coconut milk". "This goo mixture smelling of hope so ripe he slathered on French bread and offered to the others".It is appropriate that the judge lives with "the cook" (he does not get a name). Though disappointed to be working for a fellow Indian ("his father had served white men only") he has qualified with an unstoppable list of all the English puddings he can produce. ". . . applecharlotteapplebettybreadandbutterjamtartcaramelcustardtipsypud-dingrumtumpuddingjamrolypolygingersteamdatepuddinglemonpancake-eggcustardorangecustard . . ."The judge's orphaned teenage grand-daughter Sai joins the household and begins a surreptitious romance with her tutor, Gyan. When Gyan and the judge speak to each other it is with the awkwardness that only a mealtime (with the eaters stuck in their places) can dramatise. The young Nepalese teacher, with his disdain for all colonial allegiances, has to join in a repast of lamb chops with peas, potatoes and gravy.We see the occasion through the judge's eyes, as he quizzes Gyan about his literary tastes and aggressively spears and chews his favoured grub. It is an exercise in crumbling authority. "He could tell Gyan had never eaten such food in such a manner".Food travels strangely. The judge (his name is Jemubhai, but this is only ever used of his younger self) recalls how, as a student in chilly Cambridge, he read about the British in India, with their mock turtle soup and Yarmouth herrings shipped thousands of miles to reassure them. A century later, as winter closes in in the hills, Lola and Noni, the two beleaguered Anglophile sisters, take refuge in food."Oh, beautiful soup in the copper Gyako pot . . . mutton steam in their hair, rollicking shimmer of golden fat, dried mushrooms growing so slippery they'd slither down scalding before you could chomp open their muscle". Comfort is gastric.As the Nepalese independence movement grows in strength, and the ethnic fissures in Kalimpong become clear, Lola and Noni – proud connoisseurs of Trollope and Agatha Christie and afternoon tea – become awkwardly aware of their tastes. "It did matter, buying tinned ham roll in a rice and dal country." Food focuses cultural unease. Eating makes you feel you belong, and makes you know when you do not.John Mullan is professor of English at University College London. Next week Kiran Desai explains how she came to write The Inheritance of Loss.Kiran DesaiJohn Mullanguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
William Miller obituary Innovative editor, publisher and literary agent with a love of the good lifeWilliam Miller, who has died aged 75, lived a life of many passions, but perhaps the most enduring of these was to try to make "good books popular and popular books good". And, first as an editor, then as a publisher, and finally as an agent, that is what Miller did.His first job was as an editor under Frank Rudman, the pioneering paperback publisher, at Four Square. From there, in 1962 he joined John Boothe as joint managing editor at Panther Books. At the time, Panther was an independently owned middle-range paperback publisher. William and John set about challenging Penguin's supremacy, publishing new writers such as Beryl Bainbridge, Len Deighton and Fay Weldon, and bringing Jean Genet, Herman Hesse and Jack Kerouac to a wider British readership. They also published the first mass-market paperback editions of The Kama Sutra and The Perfumed Garden.In 1965, Panther was bought by Sidney Bernstein's Granada Publishing and William and John were joined by Carmen Callil and Patrick Janson-Smith, among others. The drive to challenge Penguin continued, with authors such as John Fowles, Antonia Fraser, BS Johnson, Ruth Rendell and Kurt Vonnegut.In 1972, William and John resigned from Granada and, along with Ken Banerji and Brian Thompson, launched Quartet Books. The unique vision of Quartet was to publish both hardback and paperback editions under the same imprint, which at that time was unknown. Quartet also invented a new format called a "midway", a soft binding with a jacket and flaps, halfway between a hardback and a paperback. The Quartet list continued the tradition of writers that William and John had begun at Panther and Granada, publishing Angela Carter and Michael Moorcock, along with Maeve Binchy and The Joy of Sex (which no other British publisher would touch and which had to be printed abroad).In 1976, the original four founders agreed to sell Quartet to Naim Attallah's Namara Group. While he stayed on as an editorial director, William was already searching for something new. It was also in 1976 that William first met Bamba Toshitani. This meeting, when he was 42, began a new phase in William's life.In 1979, he moved to Tokyo to be with Bamba and to manage the English Agency Japan founded by Anthony Blond, Desmond Briggs and Peter Thompson, along with William, to sell the translation rights of British books to Japanese publishers. The company began small, with just William and Junzo Sawa, but gradually grew and established itself as one of the leading literary agencies in Japan.William would, on occasion, introduce himself as "a Scot, a homosexual and a socialist". He was born of Scottish seafaring stock in Kent. His father was a chief engineer on the Clan Line who died when William was seven. William's education was funded by the Marine Engineers Association and, following national service in the Royal Navy (where he took the Russian course), he read modern history at Lincoln College, Oxford.Towards the end of his time at Oxford, William briefly edited, with Paul Thompson, the student magazine Isis, in which they wrote a piece detailing the British government's contingency plans in the event of a nuclear strike. The publication of this piece was to have serious ramifications for both of them. William had come across the information through a contact in the navy. He had also, in the course of his own national service, signed the Official Secrets Act on a number of occasions. Upon graduation in 1958, he applied for a job at the News Chronicle and, as an example of his journalism, submitted the Isis piece. William did not get the job, but the News Chronicle got a story.The government reacted with fury and William and Paul were sent to trial at the Old Bailey for breaching the Official Secrets Act. Dennis Potter, who had by then taken over the editorship of Isis, was among the most vociferous campaigners on their behalf, but both were found guilty. However Lord Goddard, then lord chief justice, described the government's prosecution of the case as taking "a sledgehammer to crack a nut" and sentenced William and Paul to three months' imprisonment each, stipulating that their sentences be served in an open prison.In later years, particularly after a second bottle of wine, William would often romanticise these experiences. But, in truth, the case distressed him and would also cause him many problems when travelling to the US (which then, in part, encouraged his antipathy towards that country).In 1959, William took up a post as a journalist on the Financial Times, and it was also during this period that he wrote a novel, Every Night and All, which was published by Blond in 1961. William never wrote another book but, from this moment on, he would remain in publishing. But the work is only half the story; William was at his best in a bar or a restaurant, in London or Tokyo. These were his courts and his classrooms, where he both taught and learned. An evening with William was always an education, but he himself never lost his curiosity, his desire to meet new people, to discover new books, films, plays and music. This last summer, when he could hardly walk a foot without help, he still travelled with Junzo to Lisbon, because he had never been there.And this curiosity, with his compassion, his kindness and his love for everyone he met was, I believe, the reason he was so trusted and loved and will always be an inspiration to those people lucky enough to have met him. I was one of those lucky people; I met William 12 years ago in Tokyo and – as agent, editor, teacher and, most of all, friend – he changed my life, and turned my world upside down; for he truly was, in all he did, in how he lived, a radical.Bamba died in 2001. William is survived by his sister, Morag, and nephews Mark and James.• William Miller, editor, publisher and literary agent, born 4 May 1934; died 5 November 2009PublishingFinancial TimesJapanNuclear weaponsFictionguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
PD James, David Hockney and Tony Adams to guest edit Today programme Radio 4 reveals six luminaries who will guest edit news show between Christmas and New YearThe veteran crime writer PD James will attempt to unravel the mystery of the BBC's future when she interviews the corporation's director general, Mark Thompson, for the Today programme.James, whose detective novels include Cover Her Face and Devices and Desires, is one of the six luminaries named by the BBC today as this year's guest editors of Radio 4's flagship news programme in the week after Christmas.The others are the former Arsenal and England footballer Tony Adams, artist David Hockney, Liberal Democrat politician Shirley Williams, the musician Robert Wyatt and Martin Rees, the president of the Royal Society.As well as interviewing Thompson about the future of the BBC, James, 89, will discuss TV crime drama with screenwriter Lynda La Plante and Sir Ian Blair, the former head of the Metropolitan police.The guests on Adams's programme are set to be a varied bunch: there will be an interview with controversial Newcastle footballer Joey Barton, who was jailed for assault and affray last year, while the racing tips will come from the Duke of Devonshire.Hockney will be returning to his familiar hobbyhorse, the smoking ban – looking at how smokers in Europe and the US are fighting back against the laws passed curbing their habit.Wyatt will look at amateur choirs and at people willing to stick up for politicians after the MPs' expenses scandal.Williams's programme will include features on British theatre, the pros and cons of a "Tobin tax" on international currency trading and what is being done to ensure the financial crisis is not repeated.Rees will examine the place of choice in our lives, the role of dogs in science and "questions to which we will never know the answer".The guest editors – who will be responsible for between a third and a half of their programme's output – will be on air between Monday 28 December and Saturday 2 January."The guest editors have become something of a Christmas tradition on Today and we're very pleased with this year's list," said the Today editor, Ceri Thomas. "They will bring their own unique expertise and new – often surprising – ideas to the editorial process."The guest editors are given guidance by Today's producers and reporters about turning their ideas into broadcastable material, while the usual Today staff editors will be on hand to make sure it is newsworthy and complies with the BBC's editorial guidelines.• To contact the MediaGuardian news desk email editor@mediaguardian.co.uk or phone 020 3353 3857. For all other inquiries please call the main Guardian switchboard on 020 3353 2000.• If you are writing a comment for publication, please mark clearly "for publication".Radio 4BBCRadio industryRadioDavid HockneyPD JamesChris Tryhornguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
New and Creative Leniency for Overdue Library Books From negotiable fees to food drives, libraries institute new forms of payment. feeds.nytimes.com |
Bloomsbury secrets and lies Angelica Garnett grew up within the charmed circle of the Bloomsbury group – her aunt was Virginia Woolf. But her childhood was a tangled web of deceit, which she's still trying to unravel at the age of 91To the outside world, the painter and writer Angelica Garnett must have appeared to have had a charmed childhood. She grew up at Charleston farmhouse in East Sussex with her mother, the painter Vanessa Bell, her brothers, Julian and Quentin, and their father, Clive Bell. She was the cherished baby of a celebrated family, which found itself in the early part of the 20th century at the heart of the influential circle of artists, writers and intellectuals known as the Bloomsbury group.Then, when Angelica was 17, her mother took her to one side. She told her that her father was not Bell, but the painter Duncan Grant with whom Vanessa had had a love affair. "It was a fact which I had obscurely known for a long while," Garnett wrote in her Âcelebrated memoir Deceived with ÂKindness. Nonetheless, the effect was devastating. Although she is now 91, ÂÂGarnett is still to some degree grappling with her mother's revelation – and Âdeception – most recently with a new Âcollection of stories, The ÂUnspoken Truth: A Quartet of Bloomsbury ÂStories. It is her first work of fiction, but is closer to Âautobiography.The characters have been given new names and the stories are Âwritten in the third person, but "they're Âcompletely truthful, they're all Âautobiographical and not invented, except perhaps for the little story called The Birthday Party, I mean I've just Âembroidered it a little bit," she explains. That story describes her last visit to Duncan's bedside, and is heavy with regret: "[She] sat rather rigidly in the rocking chair, unable, for the wrong reasons, to make small talk. His hand was too frail for her to hold, his appearance too remote for risking a hug. Feeling it was for the last time, she wanted to elicit a response, but could only get as far as realising that her stare was too much like a burden for him."When she first found out the truth about her father, Garnett exulted in her private knowledge, "unable to contain the feeling that, with such a father, I had been marked for a special destiny." But Duncan Grant showed little enthusiasm for his daughter, and as Vanessa had warned her off talking directly to either Duncan or Clive, nothing more was said by anyone. "Although Vanessa comforted herself with the pretence that I had two fathers," Angelica wrote, "in reality ... I had none."Angelica's eldest brother, Julian, had just been killed in the Spanish civil war. The men in her life were disappearing one by one, and it seems Âunsurprising in these Âcircumstances that Angelica became strongly Âattracted to an older man.David "Bunny" Garnett was a writer and publisher, an old friend of her parents and a married man. A conscientious objector during the first world war, he had lived at Charleston and worked with Duncan on a nearby farm. He had been present on the day Angelica was born, on Christmas Day 1918. Years later, she learned that he had announced his intention to marry her then. Now, in the 1930s, his wife Ray was seriously ill and he began to court the teenage Angelica, impressing her with his man-of-the-world aura. "He was not typical Bloomsbury, and I think he was broader-minded than they were," she says. "One of the things that made me fall in love with him was that he seemed to know about life, you know, and was able to tell me things I couldn't have known otherwise. I think that made him more interesting."Her parents were appalled, believing that at 48 Bunny was far too old. Duncan even wrote him a letter. But they failed to supply her with the vital information that would have prevented Angelica from marrying him: that Bunny had been Duncan's lover, and had also propositioned and been rejected by Vanessa. It was left to Angelica's aunt, the writer Virginia Woolf, and another of her parents' friends, the economist John Maynard Keynes, to try to warn her: "He sent for me or he had me to tea or something and he tried to talk about it, and warn me that it might not be a very good idea. And I wish I'd listened to him, really, but naturally I couldn't because I was in love with Bunny."Aged 23 she married Garnett, now a widower, still ignorant of the fact that he had been her father's lover. Neither of her parents was invited to the Âwedding.When Vanessa Bell died in 1961, Angelica felt bereft but also liberated. "Even now I sometimes feel as though she might be looking over my shoulder," she wrote more than 20 years later. But Duncan Grant's death in 1978 brought on a breakdown, which began with a terrible headache and ended with the realisation that she had never managed fully to grow up and separate herself from her parents. She had left her unhappy marriage years earlier, and it was now, in her 60s with her four daughters grown up, that she began seriously to gather her thoughts about her childhood.In the house in the village of ÂForcalquier in the south of France where she has lived alone since the 1980s, facing out over snowy Alps and surrounded by paintings, she recalls the deep attachment of her parents: "They were very devoted, and that was a lovely thing to grow up with … they constantly come back into my mind and they always have."White-haired, with piercing pale blue eyes and strong features in a wide oval face, she walks stiffly and talks Âfalteringly. In her writing she is Âstartlingly candid about her own failings, but gives the impression of someone who has mastered her vulnerability to become remarkably self-reliant.The first story in the new book revisits the moment when Vanessa dropped her bombshell: "She found herself in Maman's arms where she felt much too big ... Her mind Âwandered and then Âreturned, sucked into a Âvortex – she suddenly understood: Jamie was her father and not Howard." And it describes her emotional reaction: "Confusion swallowed her. How could it make no difference? It made all the difference in the world! Maman did not want her to talk about it. That was evident. And yet now she knew who her father was, she was to be thought of as someone else's daughter – there was still a Âmystery. It bound her as she stared beyond the French windows at the apple tree, the grass and the flint walls. She felt Âencircled, a hopeless beating of wings on glass."This sense of powerlessness, of Âbeing trapped, stayed with her. But she insists it was not the fact that Grant was her father, but rather the dishonesty and pretence and the failure of the adults involved to take responsibility, that damaged her. "Of course it was very important, [but] I think it was still more important that my mother didn't really want me to talk about it. It had to be kept a secret, and I think that was a very bad idea." In her memoir she wrote that her "dream of the perfect father – unrealised – possessed me, and has done so for the rest of my life. My marriage was but a continuation of it, and almost engulfed me."She found emotional fulfilment as a mother – "infinite pleasure – more than I can put into words" – and Âbelieves she succeeded where her own mother failed, in maintaining a warm and close relationship with her Âdaughters ÂAmaryllis, Henrietta, and twins Frances and Nerissa. She was fiercely critical of her own education, believing she had become lazy and spoilt: "When I went to boarding school, for Âexample, it was very difficult to learn anything," she says. "Every time I came to Âsomething that was a little bit difficult, and said, 'Oh, Mummy, must I do this?' she always said, 'No you needn't, I'll let you off that', so I never did anything that was at all difficult and I think that was a great mistake and I regret that very much."As a mother herself, she was Âdetermined to do better and equip her daughters properly for lives and careers. But she believes she should have left Bunny much sooner, and that staying with him for their sake was mistaken. Amaryllis died in 1973, and her sad story may feature in a further volume of autobiography: "She was discovered in the Thames, drowned, but nobody knew why she'd fallen in, or whether she'd fallen in, or whether she'd done it herself, or what had Âhappened. She didn't leave any note or anything behind her."Nerissa died recently from a brain tumour. Frances lives in France, and Henrietta in London.Garnett still paints, in a bright Âupstairs studio – mainly still lifes, Âespecially flowers, because it's Âdifficult for her to get out now. But it is as a writer that she has earned highest acclaim. Her prize-winning memoir Deceived with Kindness, published in 1984, cast the Bloomsbury group in a new and unflattering light. She blames her husband for putting her off writing earlier, "Just laziness really on his part … He was a very selfish man who wanted to have everything, who wanted to have what he wanted to have, so much that he just took what he wanted. He never thought of the other person."Like other children of talented and famous parents, she Âsuffered most of her life from the burden of Âexpectation, and in the new book berates herself for never Âproducing a masterpiece. "I Âsuppose it's a bit crazy," she says, "but one must have some standard, you know, and the higher it is, the better. I mean, of course, it's always impossible to reach it but I think it's essential to have it all the same."She never really had it out with her parents. Vanessa "wasn't somebody I could talk to very easily about intimate things like that … I'm sure she would have liked to, but I couldn't do it and she for some reason couldn't do it either, so it didn't happen." Duncan Grant, she says, "wasn't much good at being a father … it wasn't his fault. He was just like that, he was just born like that. He didn't have, you know what I mean when I say a fatherly quality. He didn't have that at all. And that was a great pity, but it couldn't be helped."But she says she was lucky to grow up in Bloomsbury all the same, and is relaxed about the sexually permissive culture in which she was raised: "I think it's inevitable, I mean I've got no moral feelings against it. It may not always work, unfortunately, but I don't think it matters people trying things out. I think this idea that people should experiment with each other is a good idea." (Though she also suggests that there may not have been as much sex as Bloomsbury legend suggests: "Everyone slept in different bedrooms, you know, they didn't hop into each other's beds, and it wasn't promiscuous at all as far as I can tell.")If she was bitter for a long time about her wasted youth, living into her 90s has perhaps been a ÂconsolÂation. Garnett has outlived her Âcontemporaries to become keeper of the Bloomsbury flame, and her memories remain vivid. Of Virginia Woolf she says: "I was very fond of her and she was a very charming and delightful aunt to have. Most people seem to think she was somebody who was always on the edge of a nervous breakdown, but she wasn't. She was enormous fun." Maynard Keynes she describes as "impressive, I remember him when I was very small in London. I was in the bath and he would come in and throw the bath salts in."Does she feel she has finally been able to tear herself free from the web of deceit that was spun around her?"I just think it's a question of Âgrowing older and being sensitive and intelligent enough to accept new ideas and new feelings," she says. Unlike many in Bloomsbury circles she never underwent psychoanalysis, but was Âinfluenced by reading Jung. She says: "I think most autobiographical books are efforts to understand oneself and what one's done and why one's done it, and all that is part of psychoanalysis. Everyone has a certain difficulty in growing up, even my children, although I've been a good mother. I'm still not grown up in some ways compared with other people I know, so I suppose it has taken rather a long time, but you do what you can and there it is."The Unspoken Truth: A Quartet of Bloomsbury Stories by Angelica Garnett is published by Chatto & Windus, ÂŁ15. To order a copy for ÂŁ14 with free UK p&p, go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop or call 0330 333 6846FamilyArtSusanna Rustinguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |