BOOKS ON TRAINS AND HERBAL GARDENS SAINT ANDREW PRESS

ally for reading on these journeys, something far more erudite and impressive than the book I was currently reading for fun.
I remember holding these "train books" in such a way as to enable anyone sitting or standing near me to observe the titles quite plainly. Accused by my mother of being a proper little intellectual snob, I replied huffily that my reason for doing this was to protect myself from being picked up. Little did she guess that this had exactly the opposite effect..
I'm sad that the friends I made as a result of these quasiliterary flirtations have largely skipped out of my ken. On the other hand I acquired an extraordinary amount of useful information (some days there was nothing else to do but actually read the wretched book) and this gave me many new interests, some of which have flowered into respectable love affairs such as the one I am enjoying at the moment with the history of gardens and the folklore and uses of herbs which, in turn, is giving birth to a book I am now writing. You never know in life what will eventually lead to what.
Today, I am suggesting a trio of books which have little correlation between them except that they all struck me as being informative in a particularly interesting or original way or merely a pleasure to read, which is just as important.
I think I can say with my hand on my heart that The Literary Life by George Phelps and Peter Deane is the best scrapbook of any kind that I have come across. A ioy to read and a joy to look at (plenty of pictures), and all chronologically arranged in columns under each year, listing the important writers of verse, drama, and fiction in the English language, plus related events— artistic, musical, theatrical, political, biographical — which had some bearing upon the development of the main characters whose lives, achievements, slipups and incidental experiences are traced along the years be tween 1900 and 1950.
So the reader quickly gets a feel of the English literary scene during that period in a way which makes it come to life. In 1913, for instance, Virginia Woolf had her first nervous breakdown, Charlie Chaplin ap
peered in his first film, while Joyce Cary was working as a cook in the Montenegrin army and George Bernard Shaw was founding the New Statesman.
On the other side of the Atlantic, T. S. Eliot was still at the university playing the role of Lord Bantock in a Harvard production of "Fanny and the Servant Problem" which, the authors suggest, may well have inspired that unforgettable line about "the damp souls of housemaids". And Edith Wharton had just got divorced, a move which Henry James regarded as "the only thing which saved her life". Besides alcohol and fiscal mismanagement, Mr. Wharton was apparently also prone to showing off his gold garters in public.
The result of all this is a fascinating calendar of the crisscross influences and relationships which constitute that enigmatic abstraction known as "the literary scene", or indeed any other kind of scene which gives an authentic picture of a period in history.
The development of medicine, on the other hand, was not always the smoothly progressing phenomenon we take for granted today. In the past. medical improvements tended to appear rather erratically and mainly during wars (particularly surgical techniques), for the good reason that in wartime human beings were more valuable to the State than in peacetime. If you lost too many men you lost your war. So it became expedient to patch them up and get them back in working order as quickly and cheaply as possible. It is therefore not surprising to find in Surgeons in the Field by John Laffin that the army doctor is as much to be blessed for medical advances as the Pasteurs and the Hunts.
For instance, the hospital system was originally thought up by the Romans who linked it with the army, each military camp having its own valetudinarium to accommodate the sick and wounded, while the Byzantine armies of the 10th century produced the first organised ambulance corps which had no modern equivalent until the 17th century.
Then in 1764 Dr. Donald Munro of the British army was the first surgeon to campaign for elementary rules of health and hygiene, many of which did not become commonplace until a century later. He advocated, for instance. that men on sentry duty should wear a greatcoat and that the period of duty should be limited because of the extreme fatigue of standing still for hours at a time. No one had apparently thought of that before.
In 1781 another Englishman, Surgeon Hamilton, was one of
the first doctors to recognise homesickness as a positive disease which could kill a man. In spite of this kind of advanced thinking. it seems unbelievable that the British soldier was still required to pay for his own medical treatment until the middle of the 19th century.
Army doctors were also among the few people (until the advent of war correspondents) who made a point of depicting war in all its idiocy, misery and hopelessness. Presumably the. common soldier could have done so too, but he was usually too inarticulate and without connections to make such impact Until the first world war, most politicians and commanders-in-chief still saw a cavalry charge as gallant when, in reality, it was often nothing more than the deliberate throwing of men on to a butcher's block.
The whole tenor of this book is one of compassion and humour and interesting anecdote. It is also philosophical enough to make us all think more deeply about the realities of war, as well as evoking our admiration for the medical advances which, more often than not, were born out of expediency in situations which appeared at the time to be almost hopeless.
We are so accustomed today to books about the emancipation of women which set out primarily to prove that women can be equal of men (which they can be in many ways). But this is not the point. My point is that the contemporary attitude to the battle of the sexes is so flogged to death that at times it is only too easy to forget that men and women are essentially different psychologically as well as physically. It seems a pity therefore that we do not explore more profoundly the particular qualities which are indigenous to each sex. This might bc more conducive to a harmonious world than the present state of affairs in which we are beating our heads against walls comparing men against women as well as men against men.
Uncrowned Queens by Anny Latour is a refreshingly deferent book about the business of being is woman. It is wholly concerned with a study of the enormous influence which women have had upon history, even in the bad old days when serious moralists were arguing about whether they had souls!
It is a book about woman the catalyst; about the women who talk, who encourage, who get people together, who love. It is not about royal mistresses or notorious love affairs. These women had the gift of magnetism. Isabella D'este Madame de Rambouillet who held the first literary salon where she encouraged friendships but was never known to have an affair; where she transformed gossip into conversation of general interest and knew how to attune it to a higher plane. She was fond of saying that daily life must be *brutalised, and that this was the role of woman..
And then came the Blue Stockings of England, the Blue Club as Fanny Burney called them. Among these Mrs. Montagu, who ran a yearly party for chimney sweeper boys in her house in Portman Square, and Elizabeth Carter about whom Dr. Johnson said "Sir, a man would rather have a good dinner than a woman that was master of the Greek. But my old friend Miss Carter could make a pudding as well as translate Epietetus from the Greek."
Then there is the German Jewess, Rahel Varnhagen who, in the 19th century, ran one of the cultivated salons of Berlin which were almost exclusively nurtured by the Jewish community. Here she rallied poets, artists, actors, musicians. She foresaw the tempest of Jew baiting that was to come to Germany. She died in 1933.
My favourite among these ladies of character is Princess Christina Di Belgioso, a beautiful firebrand who played a not unimportant part in the Risoi-gimono. In her Paris home she gathered around her people whom she trained for the struggle that was to liberate and unify Italy. Here she indulged in a flirtatious skirmish with the elderly General Lafayette. Her only drawback seems to have been her taste in interior decoration. Theophile Gautier complained that her house was "a veritable suite of tombs which seemed to have been been decorated throughout business", isnoernss”eone in the undertaking But the most interesting influence of the lot was that which Gertrude Stein exerted upon the 20th century literature; an influence which the author argues was born of her intuition which was in advance of her intellect: a gift which is very much part of a woman's psychological make-up. She was without doubt one of the pioneers in the history of modern literature, although she was not one of the greatest writers. But she did set out a new path. She isolated the word; she detached it from its context of thought and feeling. She matched it with other words which she strung together like beads on a string. She stopped using special punctuation. She was the first with this innovation. James Joyce came after. She chose words according to their colouring. She invented an alchemy of writing with words as nothing but a culture bouillon in which ideas and visions are able to thrive and grow into something beautiful. ,