The pleasure of rootling around in second-hand bookshops has largely been replaced by instant gratification delivered through shopping on the Internet; largely but not entirely.
Luke Honey, who writes The Greasy Spoon blog, recommended to me the World’s End Bookshop on the kink* in the King’s Road. I was really hoping to add to my Olivia Manning collection which, so far, consists only of The Great Fortune. There was nothing by her but no bibliophile can walk out of a bookshop without staying to browse.
I admire the work of Evelyn Waugh, Simon Raven and PG Wodehouse and have a pretty comprehensive collection of their books. I didn’t expect to add to it until I came across Robbery Under Law: the Mexican Object-Lesson, by Waugh. It was first published in 1939 and records his impressions of Mexico and its politics after he had spent two months there. It is critical of the left wing government which were nationalising industries and persecuting Catholics. The former upset the Cowdray family, whose oil interests in Mexico had been nationalised, and the latter of course angered Catholic-convert Waugh. The Cowdrays financed his trip to Mexico and he obliged them by serving up a polemical travel book.
The 1940 edition I found is published by the Catholic Book Club and stamped in the front as having belonged to Priests’ Library, St. Mary’s College, Strawberry Hill. St. Mary’s is now the largest Catholic university in the UK and was visited by Pope Benedict XVI in 2010. I’m sure Waugh would be gratified, even though he must bear the disappointment that the Catholic Book Club is no more.
Next I found The World of Simon Raven, published in 2002 by Prion Books. It is a selection of his non-fiction writing with an introduction by his publisher Anthony Blond. He recounts a tale new to me. “The psychotherapist Andrew McCall who accompanied him frequently in later years, not in a professional capacity, remembers that Simon tried to order two half-bottles of the same wine on the grounds that if they were more expensive than one bottle, they must be better.”
Then I saw Bring on the Girls by PG Wodehouse and Guy Bolton. I had heard of this book but didn’t own a copy and hadn’t read it. Both have now been achieved for the modest sum of £5. While on the subject of PG Wodehouse, it saddens me that Terry Wogan has died. As a radio presenter he was a big part of my young life and latterly I came to know him again in his role as President of the P G Wodehouse Society.
* The Kinks paid their tax bill, did you?
Selina Hastings, Waugh’s biographer, records that Waugh wrote to his agent ” A very rich chap [Clive Pearson, second son of Viscount Cowdray ] wants me to write a book about Mexico. I gather he is willing to subsidise it.” Waugh accepted without hesitation the offer to produce a blatant piece of propaganda but he warned the reader, in a firm statement of his own conservative beliefs, that ” I believe that inequalities of wealth and position are inevitable and that it is therefore meaningless to discuss the advantages of their elimination; that men naturally arrange themselves in a system of classes”.
I, too have a copy of the Catholic Book Club edition published in 1940, picked up for a song twenty years ago in a street market in Wexford, where Cromwell made himself so unpopular, as well as the Chapman and Hall first edition of 1939.
Anthony Blond in “Jew made in England” ( 2004) records his recollections of Raven, “I gave him a regular retainer of ten pounds per week, on condition that he lived more than fifty miles from London: the remittance man’s distance.” Raven settled at Deal. According to Blond his last words were “Who’s paying for all this, I’d like to know?”, certainly more amusing than some.
While working with Guy Bolton on “Bring on the Girls” Wodehouse wrote to Bolton ” We saw the Coronation on television….they ought to have cut at least half an hour out of it and brought on the girls in the spot where the Archbishop did the extract from the Gospel”.
I share your admiration of Waugh, Raven and Wodehouse who were all in the very first rank of writers of English. Sir Terry Wogan’s sad death is a blow to The P G Wodehouse Society, who will need to find a new President again.