Alexander Men and G.K.Chesterton

Today is the birthday of English author G.K. Chesterton, inventor of English detective Father Brown. The Father Brown stories were the favourite light reading (along with Agatha Christie's Miss Marple) of Father Alexander Men, the reforming Russian Orthdox priest who I was privileged to meet and who was murdered - probably by agents of the state church - on Sept 10 1990, five months after he had baptised my elder daughter Abi. Father Alexander was on his way to take morning service at his church in the village of Novaya Derevnya ('New Village') northeast of Moscow not far from the seat of the Russian Orthodox Patriarchate at Sergiev Posad - the equivalent of our Canterbury, when (deducing from the evidence) he was stopped and asked a question which caused him to open his briefcase and put on his spectacles. He was mortally injured by a skilled blow to the back of the head, probably with a sappers' spade, a sharp instrument used by the (then) Soviet, now Russian, Special Forces. The story of his life and samples of his work are to be found in Christianity for the Twentyfirst Century: the life and work of Alexander Men co-edited by myself and Ann Shukman (now of nearby Elshieshields, Lochmaben)and published in the UK by SCM Press in 1996. The book is for sale in Creativity , Well St, Moffat or direct from me. I also co-wrote with Russian theatre director Mark Rozovsky a play about the affair based on T. S. Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral called A Russian Rehearsal which was put on at the equivalent of Moscow's West End at the Theatre At the Nikitsky Gates and which continues to tour as part of that theatre's repertory. Sadly, T.S. Eliot's widow Valerie forbids its performance outside Russia because she does not allow the use of any of her late husband's texts in other work. Anyway, back to GKC, who was born Gilbert Keith Chesterton in London (1874). He was a large man, well over six feet, and rotund. He disagreed sharply with many people, most notably H.G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw, but he was so agreeable and full of good humor that he kept them as close friends. He was also remarkably prolific, writing fast and scarcely editing what he wrote. He considered himself primarily a journalist, and he wrote 4,000 newspaper essays; he also wrote some 80 books -- books of fiction, criticism, literary biography, and theology -- as well as several hundred poems, about 200 short stories, and several plays. His best-known character is Father Brown, a detective-slash-priest, who features in several short stories. He dabbled in the occult as a young man, and he and his brother tried out the Ouija board, but eventually he returned to the Church of England, and converted to Catholicism later in life; his thoughts on religion influenced much of his writing. His book The Everlasting Man (1925) contributed to C.S. Lewis's conversion from atheism to Christianity.
George Bernard Shaw was his good friend and verbal sparring partner. They rarely agreed on anything, but disagreed amicably. Chesterton wrote of Shaw, a modernist, in Heretics (1905): "If man, as we know him, is incapable of the philosophy of progress, Mr. Shaw asks, not for a new kind of philosophy, but for a new kind of man. It is rather as if a nurse had tried a rather bitter food for some years on a baby, and on discovering that it was not suitable, should not throw away the food and ask for a new food, but throw the baby out of window, and ask for a new baby."
He made his points with wit and paradox, and in such a large body of work, there is no shortage of quotable material:
"The sane man knows that he has a touch of the beast, a touch of the devil, a touch of the saint, a touch of the citizen. Nay, the really sane man knows that he has a touch of the madman. But the materialist's world is quite simple and solid, just as the madman is quite sure he is sane." (Orthodoxy, 1908)
"Fairy tales do not give a child his first idea of bogey. What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey. The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon." (Tremendous Trifles, 1909)
"Thieves respect property. They merely wish the property to become their property, that they may more perfectly respect it." (The Man Who Was Thursday, 1908)
For the great Gaels of Ireland
Are the men that God made mad,
For all their wars are merry,
And all their songs are sad."
(The Ballad of the White Horse, 1911)
(information about G.K.Chesterton courtesy of The Writer's Almanac)

John Muir, the tree and me

John Muir recorded in his diaries what a fan he was of Picea Sitchensis, the tree I grow in south Lanarkshire, and the tree we use to make our Zacharry's spruce beer. His aims overlap with that of Borders Forest Trust at Corehead, Moffat, as follows: on this day in 1892, John Muir founded the Sierra Club in San Francisco at the prompting of journalist Robert Underwood Johnson, and served as its first president until his death in 1914. One of the original aims of the Sierra Club was to encourage urbanites to leave the cities and experience nature; as he later wrote in Our National Parks (1901), "Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountain is going home; that wildness is necessity; that mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life." He hoped that once their awareness was raised, they would pressure their local, state, and federal governments to preserve the wilderness. "It took more than three thousand years to make some of the trees in these Western woods," he wrote, "trees that are still standing in perfect strength and beauty, waving and singing in the mighty forests of the Sierra. Through all the wonderful, eventful centuries since Christ's time -- and long before that -- God has cared for these trees, saved them from drought, disease, avalanches, and a thousand straining, leveling tempests and floods; but he cannot save them from fools, -- only Uncle Sam can do that."
What Muir did with words, Ansel Adams did with photographs; as Wallace Stegner said, "A place is not fully a place until it has had its poet. Yosemite and the Sierra Nevada have had two great poets, Muir and Adams." Adams first visited Yosemite in 1916, when he was 14, two years after Muir's death. He served on the Sierra Club's board of directors from 1934 to 1971, and his photographs of Yosemite played a role, much as Muir's words had, in ensuring its preservation.
Though the Sierra Club originally concerned itself mainly with California and the West, it opened an office in Washington, D.C., in 1963, and began conservation efforts nationally and internationally. Its mission: "To explore, enjoy, and protect the wild places of the earth; To practice and promote the responsible use of the earth's ecosystems and resources; To educate and enlist humanity to protect and restore the quality of the natural and human environment; and to use all lawful means to carry out these objectives." (information courtesy of The Writers Almanac). I took the family to Yosemite 25 years ago. One night in our cabin, where the bedrooms were divided by thin wooden partitions three of us were woken by Abi shouting 'Stop snoring!'. We all awoke with a start to discover that Abi, meanwhile, had gone back to sleep. It was on that trip that we drove from LA where I was working at the time, up the coast to San Francsco and first saw wind turbines. They lined the ocean side of the road for mile after mile, , disused and rusting - an experiment before their time. On Thursday (May 26), Elly and I went to an event organised by SAOS - the Scottish Agriculture Society (I've forgotten what the 'O' stands for) at Dunblane to hear about their scheme for collaboration between rural businesses such as ours. Examples were given of how small makers can form into groups for marketing and distribution. We were encouraged to submit samples of our spruce beer and shoots to various specialist outlets - how we fare will be reported here in due course. I have also started work with a publisher on a a big book, on a subject dear to my heart, none other than the heroic tree with the initials 'p.s.'.

A tree at risk; another spa

Yesterday (Wednesday May 25)thanks to prompt responses from Marilyn and Moffat Online, I walked across the playing field with Bob Opray of Moffat's Flood Watch Group to inspect the oak tree on the south bank of the Birnock Water whose roots have been exposed by erosion when the storm water rushed down the burn on Monday and Tuesday. Whose responsibility might it be to make sure the damage is contained and repaired so that this tree does not fall across the burn? SEPA perhaps. As we crossed the road, Bob pointed out a drain blocked by leaves and twigs blown off the birch trees during the storm. I have lost my way with Candia McWilliam's What To Look For in Winter. It is too painful, inexplicable, sad; it made me feel dizzy and reach for something simple, like a railway timetable or a cookbook. Off with Elly today to Dunblane Hydro - another spa town. We have a meeting with Morrisons and Sodexco to talk about distribution of our Zacharry's spruce beer.

Candia McWilliam and Carol Lee

Now for Candia McWilliam's doorstopper What To Look For in Winter: A Memoir in Blindness. (I sped-read to the end of Alistair Moffat's The Faded Map yesterday, intending to return to it at more leisure and keen to get to grips with Candia's memoir). I had a colleague, Carol Lee, on a newspaper many years ago who, like me, became a writer of books and like Candia suffered a similar (or should that be analogous), acute, physically disabling failure of faculty which also - how interesting - for a while prevented her from writing. In Carol's case, it was that she suddenly found one day that she could not use her hands and lower arms. In Candia's it is that in 2006 while acting as a judge on the Booker prize, her eyelids closed over perfectly functioning eyes - a condition known as blepharospasm. Carol Lee describes in her memoir Crooked Angels how, after many weary months and years traipsing from one specialist to another, she finally found relief in an unexpected quarter and recovered her arms' function by being helped to remember an episode in her childhood where her father shut her in a trunk. Carol has turned her attention recently to the Moors Murders, her new book Witness from Random House is out 2nd June. My next book is The Spruce Cookbook a Scottish-Swedish co-production. I particularly enjoy spruce jam or preserve - watch out for the recipe when the book is out next year.

Moffat anatomised

Moffat is a fascinating town which appears to the newcomer to work like a Swiss watch, a mysterious and efficient mechanism. How are decisions made? Who runs Moffat? I am gradually learning, by asking, observing and by taking part. The names of some 'elders' (in a secular sense) have been recommended to me for background. Helping to get the Book Event off the ground has given me a privileged view into Moffat's innards, and the workings of the regional and national arts establishment; another benefit is that it has caused me to get in touch with friends from the distant past such as Julia Eccleshare, doyen of UK children's books. I have asked her to recommend books for young readers on the Arthur myths and have invited her to come up for Alistair Moffat's walk to the Devil's Beef Tub on July 2. I have put V S Naipaul aside for a day or so and am reading Alistair's The Faded Map, making a mental note to quiz him about a persistant tendency to describe Brytthonic - the language of the majority of the aboriginal inhabitants, including those of the Kingdom of Strathclyde, as 'Old Welsh'. Is it a reluctance to use the 'B' (Britain/British) word? I also hope to interest him in making a study of the upper Clyde valley which, living as he does in the Borders, he knows less well than the valleys of the Annan and the Tweed. I spent a satisfying couple of hours yesterday updating the list of books I have written, translated or co-edited for the Authors Licensing and Collecting Society (ALCS) and Public Lending Right. I have a tally of 14, to which I hope one day to add the Diary of a Book Festival organizer. At Andrea's suggestion, I have been in touch this morning with the Manhattan and New York chambers of commerce to see if they have any institutional memory of John MacAdam father of modern road building and buried in Moffat churchyard. As a young entrepreneur in America in the 1770's, he co-founded the first New York Chamber of Commerce. Yesterday, the air pressure was so low and/or the wind so high that I could hardly get my front door open, a rare experience. There was also a leak from rainwater being driven through the rather complicated roof gable which started to drip through the ceiling upstairs on the landing, thankfully not my problem because I only rent this house. At Auchinleck on Sunday I sat next to Diana Athill the memoirist, now, like my mother, in her 90's, who recently wrote about the unexpected pleasure of moving into a care home - something which many dread but which I (aged 67) can also now appreciate, as the importance of personal possessions and status to my identity recedes and other pleasures - living for the day, friendships old and new, 'making a contribution' etc become central to my life.

Blown away

To the first Boswell Book Festival of biography and autobiography at Auchinleck house yesterday, on a gusty day of sunshine and sharp showers. It was bitterly cold but that did not blight the experience. Impressions are of a place unaccountably once abandoned, now loved again (it belongs to the Landmark Trust which has restored it), with unrivalled views across brilliant green countryside across to Arran; an exquisite house, a baby variant of Dumfries House just up the road and possibly by the same architect and builders. We (Susan Garnsworthy who kindly gave us a lift in her car; Marilyn Elliott; Andrea Reive and myself) were allowed to park right near the scene of the action because of Marilyn's mobility issues. The event had the charm of experiment and being new, but with all the right ingredients: interesting speakers, skilfully introduced - we had booked to hear Alistair Moffat on Scottish DNA and Candia McWilliam on her memoir What to look for in winter. Alistair managed to compress the message of his detailed book into the phrase: 'We are all immigrants' - we will be going to hear him again at his own Book Event in Melrose in June. The unspoken question that follows from his discovery is: so - if Alistair, a famous Scot, is actually 'English' - his DNA on his father's side is Anglian/Bernician - what constitutes identity? Culture, of course - tradition, custom, language. Candia was a revelation. I had expected someone cold and hard, instead she was large and cosy, wry and vulnerable. I bought her book which she personalised with a flourish under my name like Elizabeth R's signature. All the way there in Susan Garnsworthy's car and all the way back we talked about the Moffat book Event and how we can associate ourselves with everything else Moffat is seeking to achieve through the Initiative and other local organisations, from the Town Hall renovation (the Pump Room was once a Reading Room and still houses the library) to the Corehead project. By the time Susan dropped us off, the sun was blazing and the sky was blue - it was therefore thought appropriate to fish the first bottle of rose of the season out of the fridge, which I sampled with great pleasure.

Africa

I have finally picked up The Masque of Africa: Glimpses of African Belief by V S Naipaul. This is prep for going to hear Naipaul 'in conversation' at the Royal Geographical Society next week - my sister's birthday treat. She and I might have become South Africans: in 1947 our father took us with our mother on a trial visit with a view to emigrating. His father's two sisters had gone out and married South Africans, so we had - have - close relations out there. For better or worse, my mother wouldn't take that step so my father commuted for some years between the businesses he had started in the UK and southern Africa (Rhodesia and SA). He used to fly out on the airline then known as BOAC (British Overseas Airways Corporation) via Rome, Alexandria, Salisbury,capital city of the country known then as Rhodesia after its founder Cecil Rhodes, now Zimbabwe, then finally to Johannesburg. If you ever walk west from Victoria rail station to the coach station, you will see a building on the opposite side of the road with the BOAC logo still above the entrance way, which used to be the check-in for BOAC (now BA). My sister flew out to Cape Town last night to finalise arrangements for the publication of her latest collection of photographs, Origins (see www.jennifer-gough-cooper.com). We used to see my father off from Croydon or Blackbushe, when the airline terminal was just a corrugated iron shed in a field. This dislocated life continued until the inevitable happened and my father fell for an air hostess, or more properly the VIP receptionist in Johannesburg and after a messy period of attempting to keep both ends going she gave birth to my half sister, there was a divorce and they married. I remember that 1947 visit quite vividly: there was an apricot tree in one corner of the modest bungalow we rented near the zoo; the ripe apricots fell and got squashed under the tree. We went to the zoo nearly every day with our Scots nanny, Peggy, who hated the sun on her pale freckled face. My mother, then aged 30, also a pale-skinned Scot, was a distant figure, exuding a faint air of disapproval. Christmas that year was memorable for the presents: I (aged 4) got a thrilling round white plastic handbag. There was a fancy dress party at the golf club and Santa Claus (my uncle Joey) gave rides in his little airplane. In those days, the star presents even once we were back in northwest Kent were those from overseas, beautifully packed outfits from our Italian aunt in Canada, preserved fruits from South Africa. More recently, I took issue with the editor of the Royal Scottish Geographic journal for publishing a series of articles which seem to suggest moral, political and cultural equivalency - including, for instance, that treatment based on primitive belief systems are of equal efficacy as those based on scientifically-arrived western medicine - possibly true for some mental ailments but surely not for bacterial or viral diseases such as cholera, malaria or AIDS. My own impulse to go back to university to study for a science degree in 1975 arose from trying to understand the disturbed behaviour of the young children, some of them recent immigrants, who I was teaching in a so-called 'withdrawal class' at a south London primary school. The reviews of The Masque of Africa were hostile, objecting to Naipaul's revulsion at the dark heart of African belief, the cannibalism and the cruelty. The 'conversation' (to be held on May 31) is therefore of personal interest to us both. Alistair Moffat's book on Scottish DNA which will feature at our MBE Oct 15 2011 event recapitulates what is now known: that we all came out of Africa, and I am going to hear him speak later today at the Boswell Book Festival at Auchinleck.