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Richard Davenport-Hines describes the background to his choices in Picture Perfect, an anthology of poetry and prose published by Anthony Eyre. Article published in the Literary Review, November 2023.

The most satisfying room I know is in a Gloucestershire farmhouse. It is neither large nor imposing, but it has quiet perfection. Over the course of thirty years, at auctions and gallery openings, in shops in country towns and markets in London, my friend Ursula has bought paintings and objects that appeal to her. They are not rare or costly, but they chime with one another in finely attuned harmony.

I have been thinking a lot of Ursula’s sitting room, and of the Frick museum in New York, and of Derek Jarman’s garden at Dungeness. Each of them is the sure and coherent expression of an individual’s unhampered choices. Subjective taste in the hang of pictures or the planting of gardens always seems to me more rewarding than a didactic, conscientiously even-handed, impersonally curated display. It’s no different with another type of collector and arranger, the literary anthologist – something very much on my mind at the moment as I put the finishing touches to my own anthology.

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Clare Bucknell’s The Treasuries: Poetry Anthologies and the Making of British Culture, which I reviewed for this magazine in February, reminded me why I prefer anthologies that, like Jarman’s garden, make a personal testament. Auden’s A Certain World (1970), for example, is a bewitching autobiography of taste and feeling. By contrast, Al Alvarez’s hectoring collection The New Poetry (1962), with its Freudian authoritarianism, battering masculinity and personal opacity, has always offended me.

A generation ago, anthologies which served as mere boosterish coteriecollections were easily identifiable by a common factor: they tended to include the pallidly Audenish versifying of James Fenton. Auden, as Bucknell shows, was the most prolific anthologist among 20th-century poets. The best definition of poetry, he thought, is ‘memorable speech’. Remembrance is secured through ‘the audible spoken word and cadence, to which in all its power of suggestion and incantation we must surrender, as we do when talking to an intimate friend’.

These opinions come from the preface to The Poet’s Tongue (1935), the sprightly polyvocal anthology that Auden co-edited with John Garrett, headmaster of Raynes Park County School. Their book celebrates the spoken word with reams of folk songs, dialect, nursery rhymes, sea shanties, ballads, carols, doggerel from broadsheets, choral verses and so forth. It is a collection for recitation, and especially for speaking aloud from memory, although it does not include the jolly rhyme about Garrett’s school that I sing when motoring on the A3:

Have you heard of the wonderful school
They’ve built on the Kingston by-pass?
They say it’s no place for a fool,
But it helps if you’ve got a nice arse.

Best are the writers who listen to the sound of their words and induce their readers to listen too, halting the heedless speeding traffic on the A3s of life. The act of memorising makes one pause. Many of the most attractive anthologies contain poems fit for recitative memorising: Lord Wavell’s Other Men’s Flowers (1944), Francis Meynell’s By Heart (1965) and, best of all, Josephine Hart’s Catching Life by the Throat (2006). Both Wavell and Meynell began reciting poetry in childhood. As a small boy, Wavell was paid threepence a time for declaiming Macaulay’s ‘Horatius’. He then found an uncle who was willing to pay him sixpence for refraining. At a similar age, Meynell, who was morbidly shy, was besought to recite Gray’s ‘Elegy’. He would only do this if he could hide from sight under the dining-room table while doing so. Hart described herself as ‘a word child’. She was schooled in Ireland, ‘where life was language before it was anything else’. She felt, as I do, that every phase of her life would have been ‘less comprehensible, less bearable, and infinitely less enjoyable’ without poetry.

Larkin likened the art of poetry to the art of photography. I tried to make my sons into ‘word children’ by reading them poems that are pictorial. One of my happiest moments was reading aloud The Waste Land to them when they were aged six and four. The marvel, the thrill, the alertness, the delighted incomprehension on their faces as they heard Eliot’s rich, incongruous words remain an ineradicable joy after more than thirty years.

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During 2022, when I was compiling my anthology, I took as my models Ursula’s room and the shingle shore at Garden Prospect Cottage. As best I could, I tried to emulate Hart, creating a collection with a single sensibility, and words of poetry and prose that sound enriching when read aloud. I cherished in my mind the image that had entranced my sons: the moon that shone bright on Mrs Porter and her daughter as they washed their feet in soda water.

For years, my friend Charity Charity, who took her forename as her post-divorce surname and brand, circulated a Christmas pamphlet containing the plums of her year’s reading. At Christmas 2021, six months after her death from a brief, devastating illness, her son circulated a last set of extracts. It was this gift, together with the memory of Charity’s phenomenal accuracy in the recitation of poetry and prose, and of her love of strength and sensuality in words and images, that persuaded me to compile the anthology in her memory.

The spirit of my anthology is contained in a remark of I A Richards: ‘A decline in our sensitiveness and discrimination with words must be followed soon by a decline in the quality of our living also.’ How good it is to see the word ‘discrimination’ used in a positive sense rather than by grievance-mongering campaigners. The anthology, as Charity would have wished, celebrates the life-enhancing and discriminate use of words. Everything in it, whether poetry, prose, maxim or deathbed gasp, gains in its meaning by being read aloud. My imagination is pictorial. I remember rooms and landscapes more keenly than emotions. For that reason, the book is entitled Picture Perfect.

Although there are few words by me in it, it is the most personal of the two dozen books with my name on the spine. It is a book for discriminating ‘word children’ and I hope it reminds people that it is as important to listen aloud as it is to read.

PICTURE PERFECT
ISBN 9781912945443
200pp, £25
Buy HERE

Ettie Neil-Gallacher’s review of An Unanchored Heart by Rory Knight Bruce:

With the advent of the Christ Child’s birth upon us, it hardly seems appropriate to be recommending these memoirs so wholeheartedly. Great swathes are really quite naughty; we have a frank account of sex in a Parisian porn shop as well as details of anger-fuelled shenanigans in rustic Greece.

But it would be priggish to fail to extol the joys of this book, as the reflections of this contributor to The Field are such a rompingly absorbing read, by turns funny, touching, moving and, yes, shocking in almost equal measure.

Knight Bruce’s memoirs start and finish in Devon, where he moved when his father died and where certain personal ghosts seem to persist. For all his years of studying and campaigning in Edinburgh, and learning and plying his trade in the Fleet Street of old, he has retained his profound love of the countryside. This book is rich in anecdotes from every stage and act, and his bracing honesty ensures there is no pretension or artifice. Knight Bruce has indeed played many parts.

Ettie Neil-Gallacher

The Field, November 2022

Claire de Pratz was the author of French Dishes for English Tables, to be published by Mount Orleans Press in November 2018. This is the Introduction to the book.

claire de pratz

“Swimming, walking, lying in a hammock…”.  Claire de Pratz’s preferred recreations as listed in Who was Who do not really do credit to the intellectual side of her life; but they are a good evocation of her elegantly hedonistic character. She was comfortable in her skin and secure in her independence. Well educated, both femme de lettres and feminist, her life reflected the Anglo-French cultural harmony of the Entente Cordiale and the good living of La Belle Epoque and the Fin de Siècle. Mixing easily in the artistic, literary and political salons of both Paris and London – it was to her that Oscar Wilde addressed his famous wallpaper observation, “One or the other of us has to go” – she wrote prolifically as well as pursuing a career in education and working for the French government.

Claire was born Zoé Clara Solange Cadiot in Hampstead in 1866. Her parents were French. Her father, Emmanuel-Horace Cadiot, was a businessman. Her mother, Philotea Rosin de Pratz, held a professorship in French Literature at Queen’s College in London. Both came from the French provinces, the father from Pillac in the Charente in the south, and the mother from Armentières in the north. They appear to have met in London, because it was in Clerkenwell that their marriage was registered in July 1865, barely six months before Claire’s birth.

In an era when girls were given little education Claire was lucky to receive a good one, starting in London where she attended Queen’s College, founded in 1848 and the first educational institute in the world to award academic qualifications to women. In 1881 her mother died, following which Emmanuel-Horace moved Claire and her two younger brothers, Julien and William, to Paris; it was at the Sorbonne that she continued her studies and from there that she graduated.

In her introduction to France from Within (1912) Claire describes her bilingual upbringing. Her formal English education went hand in hand with a French domestic life. The 1871 census records the family’s live-in cook Ada as being from the Seine. As Claire described, “I never remember any time of my life when I did not possess the two points of view – English and French – simultaneously, being constantly moving from one atmosphere to another”. As she observed, she was both an insider and an outsider.

At around about the time of her graduation from the Sorbonne Claire’s first literary work came out, An Iceland Fisherman (1888), a translation of Pêcheur d’Islande by Pierre Loti which was published under her father’s surname, Clara Cadiot. She wrote an article about Loti for Women’s World (edited by Oscar Wilde), and at this time began a long career as a journalist, writing for the Westminster Gazette, Daily News, Contemporary Review, Athenaeum, Petit Parisien, La Fronde and Revue Bleue. La Fronde was distinguished as being the only magazine of its time entirely managed and written by women.

She also embarked on a career in teaching. She gave adult evening classes before going on to take on professorships in English at the Lycée Racine and the Lycée Lamartine in Paris. In the mid 1890s she was appointed General Inspector of Public Charities for the French Ministry of the Interior.

In the new century Claire embarked on a career as a novelist, writing Eve Norris (1907), Elisabeth Davenay (1909), The Education of Jacqueline (1910) and Pomm’s Daughter (1914). With her non-fiction – French Dishes for English Tables (1908), France from Within (1912) and A Frenchwoman’s Notes on the War (1916) – she was writing almost a book a year. The novels were well received. They are vividly written, strong on characterisation and description though the plots are rather formulaic. Their great interest lies in the fact that they draw on the events of Claire’s own life, and they articulate very eloquently her beliefs and passions.

Her heroines are intelligent, sensitive and independent, but are all a long way from the stereotype of the English blue-stocking of the time; as The Oxford Companion to Edwardian Fiction puts it, “she argues that the English are too mealy-mouthed to recognise the central importance of sex; feminists cannot be expected simply to abstain”. Throughout her writing there is an attack on narrow and restrictive prejudice; in Eve Norris the young heroine fights against her provincial family background, “conventional, prejudiced, with no temperament at all, and weighted with the false narrow morals which are the result of generations of wrongly-applied and misunderstood puritanical principles”. In The Education of Jacqueline the young child is brought up by her mother Francoise, who is widowed before she is thirty and finds herself “totally ignorant of life… Brought up by careful parents in view of a husband who would demand not only an innocent but also an ignorant wife…”.

Claire’s heroines are all capable of great passion – there are passages of richly sensual purple prose, and it is interesting to see that two of the novels were published by Mills & Boon – but ultimately they are independent and confident. In Elisabeth Davenay the eponymous heroine is a young journalist and teacher in Paris, with many eligible admirers whom she finally rejects, wishing to avoid “spiritual bondage”; she leaves France for London where she joins the Suffragette movement. The book created a strong impression, with the Pall Mall Gazette commenting “Elisabeth Davenay is a book that every grown-up girl should read”; more thoughtfully, WT Stead wrote in “The Love Ideals of a Suffragette”
[Elisabeth Davenay’s] interest, and it is a deep and absorbing interest, consists in the fact that more intrepidly than in any other English book that I have read the great question is faced and answered as to the change which the emergence of the soul and intellect of women will effect in the realm of love… The theme is handled with a boldness that never degenerates into coarseness. Although Mlle. de Pratz never flinches, she writes with delicacy that is unsullied by even a passing shadow of the impure. She is a woman handling the greatest of all woman’s questions without any false shame or prudish impurity of thought…

A Frenchwoman’s Notes on the War was the last book Claire wrote. French Dishes for English Tables was republished in New York in 1925 under the title French Home Cooking, with further editions coming out in New York in 1956 and in London in 1958.

Claire died on 27 March 1934.

What did Morris ever do for us? The Kelmscott Press, so effective in bringing about a printing revolution, a watershed moment presaging the birth of the private press movement, was a stylistic dead end. The influence of the press was massive, although its life was extraordinarily short, operating from its foundation in 1891 to Morris’ death in 1896, finally closing down under the guidance of its Manager and Morris’ executor Sydney Cockerell in 1898. During that period it produced over 50 titles and fundamentally changed attitudes to printing. Yet despite this great influence the most interesting printers to follow Morris, whose work has best stood the test of time and has had greatest impact on subsequent typography, eschewed his style and turned their back on his heavily decorated pages. The ones who tried to imitate Morris, and there were many, are largely forgotten; who remembers the Essex House Press? Set up by CR Ashbee it inherited both pressmen and plant from Kelmscott; but sadly none of the magic.

Two of the greatest presses to follow Morris were the Doves Press, set up by TJ Cobden-Sanderson and Emery Walker, and the Ashendene Press, set up by Charles St John Hornby.

The change of mood from Kelmscott to Doves or Ashendene could not have been starker: suddenly white space, abhorred by Morris with a passion verging on agoraphobia, becomes an important part of the page. Simplicity, rather than rich complexity, becomes the vehicle of quality. This, on the threshold of the new century, established the central tenet of modern typography, articulated very famously by Beatrice Warde in a lecture entitled Printing Should be Invisible in 1930, subsequently published as The Crystal Goblet. You have a fine vintage wine, what do you prefer to drink it from? A heavy, jewel-encrusted gold chalice, or a clear crystal glass? The basic role of typography, conceived of by William Morris as being to create a beautiful object, has been fundamentally re-thought; Warde wrote:

Now the man who first chose glass instead of clay or metal to hold his wine was a “modernist” in the sense in which I am going to use that term. That is, the first he asked of this particular object was not “How should it look?” but “What must it do?” and to that extent all good typography is modernist.

 

Beatrice Warde represented the modern thinking in typography best represented in England by the private press movement as well as some of the better trade publishers, notably Jonathan Cape. Perhaps the greatest expression of this classical simplicity came from Jan Tschichold, who was employed by Allen Lane in the post-war years to clean up the Penguin house style .

So what did Morris ever do for us? His greatest lesson, to go back to first principles, ironically proved to be his own undoing. But he did establish that a book had to have integrity, could be a thing of beauty and that all the components of a book, type, paper, binding and design had to be individually judged and evaluated. He also made money: the Kelmscott Press, like his other enterprises under Morris & Co, was commercially successful, well worth remembering by publishers today.

HOW I GOT INTO THIS MESS

It might be that I had no choice about becoming a printer. The house I grew up in, 21 Upper Mall in Hammersmith, had been used by William Morris to print The Complete Works of Chaucer. Next door was Emery Walker’s home, Sussex House, opposite No. 15 Upper Mall, where he and his partner T J Cobden-Sanderson set up the Doves Press, producing work of possibly even greater beauty than the Kelmscott Press. Other Hammersmith figures in the world of typography included the calligrapher Edward Johnston (who designed the London Underground typeface), Eric Gill and Eric Ravilious.

My own introduction to print was to take place in Lancashire, at Stonyhurst College. Stonyhurst is England’s second largest residential building under one roof, after Hampton Court, and under that roof the treasures are inspiring: we grew up amidst paintings, prints and books of an exceptional quality. Artists such as Durer, Rembrandt and Piranesi surrounding our daily lives. The College produced two greats associated with the world of printing – the typographer and scholar Bernard Newdigate, who worked with Sir Basil Blackwell at the Shakespeare Head Press, and the artist Paul Woodroffe, who worked extensively as a book illustrator and stained glass artist.

The college had a small printing press, the Octagon Press, for use by the Upper Syntax (lower sixth) year. It was here that I entered the world of pica and nonpareil, of leading and letter-spacing; type catalogues became an entrancing distraction and from sans- to slab-serif I would memorize typefaces and designers. It was not all so dry, though; there was a healthy market under that huge roof for all sorts of jobbing printing, and the press was able to meet this demand on a very sound commercial basis: all jobs were charged. and all bills sent to the bursar, so our turnover became our net profit. We never looked back.

At university (UEA and the University of Texas at Austin) I read History of Art. Returning to London I took on the mantle of committee member of the William Morris Society with responsibility for the three printing presses in the basement of Kelmscott House. Here a small team of us printed for the Society: mostly ephemera, but there was one reasonably sized project, William Morris’s Printing Press (1983). In articles by Sir Basil Blackwell, Ray Watkinson and myself it established the provenance of the press then at Kelmscott House. It was on that Albion that we printed the booklet.

My introduction to publishing during this period was with Bettina Tayleur, who operated as what was known as a book packager: she found the ideas and the authors, costed the projects and sold the package to established trade publishers. We would undertake all the editorial, design and production work, usually involving considerable picture research and close liaison with authors over editorial issues. We used print centres all over the world, delivering the books straight to the publishers’ warehouses, most typically undertaking US/UK co-editions. It was a job I was very lucky to get, because it introduced me to every aspect of book production, and being a tiny company of 3 ½ I got hands on experience in all areas. Within three weeks of starting I was at the Frankfurt Book Fair. The titles we produced included biographies of John Nash, Eric Ravilious and Charles Rennie Mackintosh, in many ways leading public interest.

In 1986 I set up The Letter Press of Cirencester, which I ran with my wife Kate Rous. It became a very successful jobbing printer specialising in high class social and wedding stationery, forming an effective partnership with John Lewis and early on building a commercially successful trading website, letterpress.co.uk. However I never left the world of publishing and book production, in 1987 producing Biddesden Cookery and the children’s book The Tale of a Little Horse Radish. I continued to produce books to commission until in 2003 I embarked on an altogether more ambitious project, helping to found St Omers Press as the publishing imprint of Stonyhurst College. With St Omers I have produced a huge variety of titles, from hymn books and prayer books to facsimiles of 17^th century titles and limited editions of copperplate prints by Rubens. Production continues steadily, drawing on the huge resources of the collections at Stonyhurst and fed by a steady succession of exhibitions requiring catalogues.

In 2016, faced with a shrinking market for jobbing stationery, The Letter Press entered into a merger with Gee Brothers of London; after a year working with the combined company I decided in October 2017 the time was right to leave the jobbing world in order to devote myself completely to book production and publishing; I have produced since then Banners of the Bold, a book on the heraldry of the Knights of Malta; Peter the Power Chair’s Birthday Bash, a children’s story; and Hold my Hand, a limited edition of poetry, just 15 full leather bound copies. Forthcoming projects include a fully illustrated guide to the paintings collection at Meols Hall; and two weighty museum catalogues. And I am always looking for more!

 

Athanasius Kircher, “the last man who knew everything”, was a Jesuit polymath of the 17th century who put together an extraordinary collection in Rome which came to be accepted as the first museum of modern time. In 1678 Giorgio de Sepi published the Musaeum Celeberrimum, a large and prestigious volume cataloguing the collection. St Omers Press published a facsimile edition in 2015, a handsome cloth-bound volume including all the original fold-out plates which we printed in Croatia. This would be a worthy addition to any fine library, and copies can be acquired from the Press at Stonyhurst ([email protected]).

Jeremy Warren ([email protected]) wrote the review below for The London Library.

Anastasi Callinicos, Daniel Höhr, Jane Stevenson and Peter Davidson, The Celebrated Museum of the Roman College of the Society of Jesus. A facsimile of the 1678 Amsterdam edition of Giorgio de Sepi’s description of Athanasius Kircher’s Museum, Musæum celeberrimum collegii romani societatis Jesu. Stonyhurst and Philadelphia, St Omers Press and Saint Joseph’s University Press, 2015. isbn 978-0-9553592-4-8 [UK], 978-0-9161010-87-9 [US]. 172 pp., 39 b. & w. illus. £50 / $120.

For anyone who worries from time to time that the history of collecting is a niche subject, Father Athanasius Kircher (1602–1680) would seem to offer welcome comfort. The Jesuit polymath, his writings and his famous museum in Rome are the subject of enduring interest, a modest but steady stream of publications, and even a dedicated academic website, the Stanford University Athanasius Kircher project (http://web.stanford.edu/group/kircher/). Kircher was certainly an extraordinary individual, whose life reflects the troubled times into which he was born and grew up. As a young priest undertaking his novitiate in his native Germany, he was firstly caught up in the turmoil of the Thirty Years War, being driven from one Catholic centre to another before finally escaping to Paris in 1631. After moving to Avignon, he came to the notice of Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc and other antiquarian-minded intellectuals, and began his own studies into ancient Egypt and its hieroglyphs. Kircher’s arrival in Rome in 1634 came about as a mixture of accident – a picaresque series of shipwrecks, robberies and other mishaps as he tried to make his way across the Mediterranean in order to take up a post in Vienna – and design, Peiresc and Kircher’s future patron Cardinal Francesco Barberini having decided that the promising young man should in fact be appointed professor of mathematics at the Collegio Romano. Kircher was to spend the remainder of his life at the college, producing books on an astonishing range of subjects, from the interpretation of hieroglyphs (e.g. Oedipus Aegyptiacus, 1652) to music (Musurgia universalis, 1650) to the Tower of Babel (Turris Babel, 1679). It is hardly surprising that he should have developed a Europe-wide reputation for his encyclopaedic learning and knowledge, nicely summed up by the scholar of Kircher, Paula Findlen, in the title for one of her books, The Last Man who knew Everything (New York and London, 2004). However, the visual as opposed to literary manifestation of Kircher’s learning was the museum he established in the Collegio Romano. It was a significant reason why the learned and the curious, from all over Europe and from monarchs downwards, sought to visit the College in Rome and the venerable custodian of the museum, and also bore witness to Kircher’s apparently all-but-universal understanding and conception of the world.

The work under review constitutes a full description of the museum, not written by Kircher, who at the end of his life became incapacitated, but by his assistant Giorgio de Sepi. As a guide to what the museum contained, the book is not as comprehensive as that published by Kircher’s successor as curator Filippo Bonanni (Rome, 1709), who did much to try to restore his predecessor’s vision, as well as making his own additions, and whose catalogue has an extensive series of engraved plates of many of the objects in the museum in 1709. But the 1678 work was published in Kircher’s own lifetime, the descriptions are no doubt in many cases his own, and they present the museum more or less in the form in which he had built it, and before it began its rapid decline. So it is wonderful to have the first-ever full English translation in this luxurious edition, which includes a facsimile of the (slightly battered) Stonyhurst copy of the Musæum celeberrimum. This includes all the fold-out plates, mainly depicting Kircher’s beloved obelisks, which formed important exemplars in his then celebrated interpretations of hieroglyphs, subsequently shown to be entirely incorrect. The facsimile is followed by an excellent English translation by Anastasi Callinicos and Daniel Höhr, with notes by Jane Stevenson. Peter Davidson concludes the volume with an interesting short essay, in which inter alia he asks what might be regarded as specifically Jesuit about Kircher’s museum. He rightly points to it as a museum of world cultures, which benefited from regular consignments of material from the Jesuit order’s missions to almost every corner of the globe. But this global reach is hardly untypical of early collections. What is perhaps more special, as Davidson notes, was the collection’s pedagogical element, which reflected the emphasis placed by the Jesuits on education in their missions and schools.

The itinerary through the museum is a fascinating one, which reveals how highly representative it was of early collections in its combination of the exotic and fantastical – flying fish suspended from the ceiling, a Siren’s tail, eternally-burning lamps – with the scientific and practical, seen in the many magnetic and optical machines developed by Kircher, which were for visitors among the most popular sights of the museum. Several of these are in fact illustrated in the Latin text, and their operation discussed in some detail, which makes the lack of a simple crossreference in the translated text to the plates and other images a little regrettable. Not infrequently the fantastical and the scientific come together in the Musæum Kircherianum; for example, the flying fish was in fact suspended within a compass rose and spun about, to demonstrate the workings of an Aeolian magnet. As a Jesuit, Kircher conceived his museum ultimately as a demonstration of a world ordained and directed by God. Already, though, in his lifetime could be felt the stirrings of Enlightenment scepticism and a new spirit of more disciplined scientific enquiry, which would discredit many of the Jesuit father’s theories and would lead some later generations to label him as a charlatan, dependent on magnetic and optical trickery. The 1678 Musæum celeberrimum demonstrates that the truth was considerably more complex. It confirms the status of Athanasius Kircher’s assemblage as one of the great prototypes of the modern museum, so the appearance of this translation, making the work so much more widely accessible, is greatly to be welcomed.

Jeremy Warren