Green Hope

The sun is shining and the sky is blue; the first swallows have arrived and the world is, as Verga said, green with hope. These are the things of life that are real. There are books which go well with this new world, this mother universe outside the artificiality of economic systems; any attempt to grab and stash the fruits of these works results in empty fists. These are the writings which convert words miraculously into joys, joys far more concrete than the flimsy solids of the materialistic world.

One of the great free joys is to learn even a little of a new language. In that way you can visit the hearts, minds and spirits of another nation without any of the hassle which is part of physically going there. That is how I found Giovanni Verga's short story 'Pane Nero', with the words which enhance my thoughts now that spring is here: “La primavera cominciava a spuntare dappertutto, nelle siepi di fichidindia, nelle macchie della viottola, fra i sassi sul tetto dei casolari, verde come la speranza;.... “ The story is in 'Tutte le novelle' Volume Primo (Part One), and my copy was published in 1996 by Anoldo Mondadori Editore in Milan. I am not fluent in Italian, but I have managed to read and embrace those words.

                                                        





Herbs For Health And Cookery' by Claire Loewenfeld and Philippa Back, published by Pan Books Ltd. London, in 1965, is a book I have owned for a long time. It is a book about the goodness of herbs, and how to use them both in cooking and in healing. The herbs are described and then recipes for using them in salads, herbal teas, washes and compresses are given in plenty. Above is the recipe for Cheese Soufflé and a Bread and Cheese Pie.

 While I have the cookery books open, I found a great recipe in the Amish Country Cookbook, Volume 1, which was published by Bethel Publishing, Elkhart, Indiana, U.S.A., and edited by Bob and Sue Miller. The book consists of pages and pages of recipes submitted by Amish cooks and gathered by Das Dutchman Essenhaus. This book is a truly wonderful resource, rescued from the recycling centre.                                                                

“ Cocoa Drop Cookies (Unbaked)

Boil together 5 minutes:

2 c. (cups) white sugar
1/2 c. cocoa
1/2 c. milk
1/2 c. butter
1 t. (teaspoon) vanilla

Mix well with 3 c. Quick oats. Drop by spoonfuls on waxed paper and cool.

(Edna Mae Schmucker (Dishwasher)

Now that isn't going to take up too much time to make for your brood. The names of the contributors and their vocations are almost as fascinating as the recipes themselves.

I mentioned before that gardening is one of the joys of my life. It doesn't really matter which gardening book you take up at this time of the year, almost any one will feed your habit while it's dark outside. Royton E. Heath wrote “Miniature Rock Gardening in troughs and pans”, published by W.H. & L. Collingridge Ltd. London in 1957. If you grow any of the plants he recommends in this you can be sure they will be very small. Even more wonderfully, he shows you how to construct the troughs in which to grow them. Having said this, I myself use a miscellany of old fish boxes, very large tubs and old sinks to grow mine. These miniature plants are magic. The other day I found myself gazing in wonder at Anemone lippiensis, which lives underground for a large part of the year. It had emerged in a matter of days, little golden-yellow bowls smaller than the tip of your little finger, lying on green lacy beds of leaves; they are for all the world like miniature peonies. One whole garden of treasures like these can be sited just outside a back door, to be enjoyed no matter what the weather, and every day something new appears.

Growing fruit is something you can do for almost nothing too. The best way may be to find a good variety of apple or pear in a nursery, but you can also grow all kinds of fruit plants from pips and stones, and eventually they will flower and bear fruit. Of course a certain sort of gardener will enjoy telling you that either they will not flower at all, or the fruit they bear, if you should be so lucky, will not be up to much. A week ago I looked at a tub where I am growing a red-leaved apple tree, grown from a pip on a whim about seven years ago, and I saw to my excitement that it has little clusters of buds. It wasn't a question of patience, for there is always too much going on in a garden to sit around waiting for things to happen; those seven or so years have flown, and now my little tree is about to flower. What joy! If you want to read a very good and easy to read book on growing fruit trees, “Growing Fruit” by Roy Genders is one of the very best. Roy Genders is a name to look out for no matter what the garden subject, by the way. This book is in The World Of The Garden series, edited by Alan Gemmell, and I see now that it is actually a Teach Yourself Book by Hodder and Stoughton, published in 1979, which I hadn't noticed before, since I bought it at a school sale many years ago.

Collins Tree Guide, published by HarperColllins in 2004, written by Owen Johnson and illustrated by David More, will lead you to another source of happiness. We are surrounded by trees, but many of us do not know their names, except perhaps the commonest, such as Oak, Sycamore, Holly...it adds to the pleasure of walking in the countryside to know the names of its trees, those creatures great and small without which all life on earth would be unsustainable, and who give to us every living breath we take. It seems a courtesy after that to learn what they are called.

How about a little book just to look through, to calm the spirits, to enjoy just for itself? 'Japanese Style', by Suzanne Slesin, Stafford Cliff, and Daniel Rozensztroch, with photographs by Gilles De Chabaneix, published by Clarkson Potter/Publishers, New York 1994, is a small, colourful book of pictures from Japan, showing Japanese style indoors and out. I don't know why this little work, showing empty rooms and snatches of courtyards should be calming, but it is. Sometimes the pictures are taken through a partly-open door, sometimes they are merely of a hallway or a length of carpet, an open doorway to the outside or a window frame; it reminds me of what you see as a very young child, not knowing for sure what it is, but because you are confined to your cot or seat or wherever until someone deigns to move you, you gaze at the same view, pondering. This too is a magic book. Found with joy at the recycling centre.

From Amazon I bought 'The Haiku Anthology', edited by Cor Van Den Heuvel, and published by W.W. Norton & Co., New York and London, in 1999. On the cover it says ' Over 800 Of The Best English Language Haiku And Related Works' . It is just simply a beautiful book, one to carry with you when you know you are going to have to wait somewhere; it is full of verbal snapshots; the meaning I get from one of these little poems may not be the same as the one you get; it doesn't matter; what I think of the flying swallow I see and what you think of it need not be the same; that is just another joy of life for which there is no payment to be made. The name Haiku has come from the Japanese, and I know these poems are far from their origins. It doesn't matter.

Here are two:

“A plastic rose
rides the old car's antenna -
spring morning”                                             
                                 by Elizabeth Searle Lamb
                                                               

“She's running for office -

for the first time
my neighbour waves.”
                                               by Alexis Rotella

I love them all. Of course, some more than others.

That dear friend I lost last year introduced me to Haiku. Such a gift lasts forever.

A Mixed Bag

Tonight I grabbed six books together off a shelf for the blog. The majority of my books are shelved in a vigorous disorder, so these are quite a mixed bag:

The cookery book “Full and Plenty” was written by Maura Laverty and published by the Irish Flour Millers Association. This is an old copy of the second edition, dated 1966. The unusual thing about this cookery book is that it was written by a novelist, and as you read the chapters, this is plain to see. Before every set of recipes comes a story, about love or blighted love, about the sorrows and tragedies in ordinary people's lives.   The chapter entitled “Eggs Cheese and Cereals” tells the story of a loving widowed mother whose daughter married a well-off man, and who went to live with him in England and never contacted home again. Anyway, the story ends with the daughter's return:

' “Wasn't she the foolish poor child,” said my mother, “to cut herself off from everyone when that go-boy of a husband cleared out and left her without a penny?”

“Don't be talking,” said my aunt Julia. “Pride is responsible for many a sorrow. But I think she had every right to warn her mother when she decided to come home. Mary Neelan might have died of the shock.”

“Small fear of it,” my mother retorted. “No one ever died of joy.” Which, of course, is very true. '

You get the flavour of the book now? It's full of lovely, old-fashioned recipes, mostly Irish.

Here is a description of how to make Irish soda bread, by a character in the chapter on bread:

"Pride and happiness dawned like the rising sun in Mrs. Feeney's face. “It's simple,” she explained eagerly. “Just take the full of the little blue jug of milk, as much as you think of flour, a taste of salt and a suspicion of bread soda. And then you mix it – but you don't wet it, if you know what I mean.”

I got my copy at a school sale, but you should be able to find one yourself easily enough. It was hugely popular in Ireland the minute it was published, and is probably one of those books which would sell very well if republished.*

*It has just been pointed out to me that actually Maura Laverty's cookery book has been republished, but in sections corresponding to the chapters in the original editions.  So obviously it would be better to find a secondhand copy!  Thanks to my reader for the tip.

“The Insurrection in Dublin” was written by James Stephens, a writer who also created Mary Makebelieve in his “The Charwoman's Daughter”.  He wrote the work in 1916 at the time of the Easter Rising, and I found this copy, dated 1965, in a secondhand bookshop. It was probably republished because the 50^th anniversary of the uprising was approaching.

I will let the first part of the foreword introduce the work:
"The day before the rising was Easter Sunday, and they were crying joyfully in the churches “Christ has risen” . On the following day they were saying in the streets “Ireland has risen”. The luck of the moment was with her. The auguries were good, and, notwithstanding all that has succeeded, I do not believe she must take to the earth again, nor be ever again buried. The pages hereafter were written day by day during the Insurrection that followed Holy Week, and, as a hasty impression of a most singular time, the author allows them to stand without any emendation.

The few chapters which make up this book are not a history of the rising. I knew nothing about the rising. I do not know anything about it now, and it may be years before exact information on the subject is available. What I have written is no more than a statement of what passed in one quarter of our city, and a gathering together of the rumour and tension which for nearly two weeks had to serve the Dublin people in lieu of news. It had to serve many Dublin people in place of bread. “

'Insurrection' is a beautifully-written book, without any wordiness, an unbearable trait in so many history books. I don't know how historians regard Stephens' account, but it is a pleasure to read. I recommend it to anyone interested in this time in the story of Ireland.   Part of its lure is that it is an account of historic events as experienced by a non-political person.  I have read that Stephens, in company with the novelist Liam O'Flaherty, writes in the manner of the great Russian writers.  How much he was influenced by them I do not know, but his style is sparse, to the point and convincing.

“The Grasmere Journals”, edited by Pamela Woof and published by Oxford University Press in 1991, consists of the diaries of Dorothy Wordsworth, the sister of the poet William. Once again, I will let the Introduction by the editor speak for itself:

“There is simply nothing like it anywhere else. This Journal calls out to us directly across almost two hundred years, and its writer and her world come alive. It sometimes moves in little rushes when days can be noted with a staccato speed; it sometimes slows down to linger on a single figure: a beggar woman, a leech-gatherer, a child catching hailstones at a cottage door, a bow-bent postman with his little wooden box at his back, an old seaman with a beard like grey plush; it sometimes slows to linger on a whole scene: a funeral, or children with their mother by a fire, or a lakeshore on a windy day with daffodils, or a man with carts going up a hill and a little girl putting stones behind the wheels. It sometimes almost stops as the ear catches a ticking watch, a page being turned over, and the breathing of the silent reader by the fire; and then it starts off again at a great pace with the planting and mending and baking and washing and reading and writing and walking and talking, all the weather and the work crammed into a little space of words. “

At times I personally found these journals rather 'dark'. A lot of the entries told of illness, cold, toothache. Dorothy was totally devoted to William in a way most brothers would not tolerate these days; she found his marriage very hard to take and didn't mind admitting it. Then there were bright spots, as when they stop at an inn where they had stayed before:

“My heart danced at the sight of its cleanly outside, bright yellow walls, casements overshadowed with jasmine & its low, double gavel-ended front. We were not shewn into the same parlour where Wm & I were, it was a small room with a drawing over the chimney piece which the woman told us had been bought at a sale.”

Ah, so they had sales in those days too, that is a nice, homely touch.

I love Shakespeare's “Macbeth”. I studied it in school and have never tired of it. It has everything of human nature in it, with the added merit of being short, which anybody reading this blog now knows is an important virtue in books for me. The murder scenes, the ominous chanting of the witches, the guilt-ridden nightmares of Lady Macbeth, the neat plot in which Macduff turns out to be a man 'not of woman born', and in which Great Birnham Wood comes to Dunsinane, all combine to make a gem of brilliance unsurpassed, Who could ever forget Macbeth's soliloquoy after the death of his wife! Close your eyes, imagine a Scottish accent:

“Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,

 Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,

 To the last syllable of recorded time;

 And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

 The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!

 Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player

 That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,

 And then is heard no more: it is a tale 

 Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

 Signifying nothing.”

The “Dictionary Of Literary Terms” by Coles Editorial Board, part of the series of Coles Notes published by Coles Publishing Company Limited of Canada, is simply a very useful book for students, giving concise meanings for the terms you will find in works of literary criticism, for instance:

“Imagery: The use of figurative language to enrich poetry or prose. Imagery conveys word pictures. Imagery evokes an imaginary, emotional response, as well as providing a vivid, specific description. Compare, for example, - What you are saying is unpleasant for me to hear, - with “These words are razors to my wounded heart” (Shakespeare, Titus Adronicus.).”
I think now we get the picture.

“The Silent Duchess” was written by Dacia Maraini, who, we are told beside her picture on the inside cover of this Flamingo 1993 paperback, “is one of Italy's best-known female writers.” The blurb ends by saying that “The Silent Duchess has been hailed across Europe as a modern masterpiece.” I came across it in a university bookshop in Dublin. At the heart of this work is a stunning mystery, which I do not wish to destroy for anyone who might read it, so I cannot say much more, except to assure you that for that reason alone, it should not be missed. This translation from the Italian is by Dick Kitto and Elspeth Spottiswood. An historical novel, it reads quickly and easily. I would be willing to bet that you will not guess the outcome if you decide to find and read it. It is at times very sad, without, however, dragging the reader down, and it ends in hope, illustrating the tenacity of a human spirit no matter what the odds.

Whatever book you are reading, let it bring you hope and joy.