Down Memory Lane

Susan Hill

How much money have you got? £1.50 in small change? ‘I finally got through the barbed wire, and found myself among the ruins. And under the glorious December light, as happens once or twice in lives which ever after can consider themselves favoured to the full, I found exactly what I had come seeking, what, despite the era and the world, was offered to me, truly to me alone in that forsaken nature ... In this light and this silence, years of wrath and night melted slowly away. I listened to an almost forgotten sound within myself as if my heart, long stopped, were calmly beginning to beat again.’ That paragraph alone is worth £1.50 of anybody’s money. It comes from Return to Tipasa by Albert Camus, a heart-piercing evocation of his journey across Algeria to a place of ancient ruins where he was a boy, innocent, happy and free, before the war — what he calls ‘the barbed wire’ destroyed his youth and its world. ‘For me, there is not a single one of those 69 kilometres that is not filled with memories and sensations.’ This slender book, which also contains his Summer in Algiers, is a precious inclusion in the set of 70 Penguin 70s for itself, of course, but also because it led me to a writer I am ashamed never to have read, the principle raison d’être of these impressively designed and well-produced paperbacks. They have a mission. They are very consciously — some might say self-consciously — in the fervently educative tradition of the publisher Allen Lane, when he founded Penguin Books 70 years ago.

Each one reprints quotations from Lane and from those pillars of the Old Left, George Orwell, Richard Hoggart and the Guardian, which dubbed Penguin Books ‘more than a business, a national cultural asset’. To Hoggart, Lane’s enterprise was ‘one of the more democratic successes of our recent social history’.

How earnest they all were! We have come a long way since those Workers’ Educational days, and in a sales-driven publishing climate a harking back to the days of self-improvement is a bit embarrassing. Besides, it was Wordsworth Classics which broke new ground to give everyone Dickens, Shakespeare and George Eliot for a quid a book, even if they fell apart before you had finished improving yourself. Penguin was well caught out and chased behind with their own cheap, badly produced classics.

Then came the 60th anniversary and Penguin 60s, tiny sample books printed badly on lavatory paper, horrible to hold and to read, even if the design, as ever, was at the cutting edge.

The 70s are a great improvement on those. But let us take a very close look in the complete box, which you can buy for £105 — or £73 from Amazon. They look so charming arrayed together, their colourcoded spines like the shades on emulsion paint-charts, that it seems a pity to disturb them, but here goes.

It pays to be suspicious. Most of them are simply rehashed extracts from complete, recently published books, nothing more than commercial samples. I would rather buy the whole book than have something called Innocent House, which is in fact a slice from P. D. James’s 1994 crime novel Original Sin, or find that Christmas at Stalingrad is filleted from Antony Beevor’s bestseller. Inspect the small print inside before parting with even your small change.

This was an ideal opportunity for Penguin to have us try new or little-known contemporary writers, but there were only two unknown to me and they had better remain anonymous as neither deserves its place in the box.

Other things, though, have been dug up from semi-obscurity, dusted off and given smart new coats. A new story by William Trevor is always to be relished and although The Dressmaker’s Child did first appear in the New Yorker magazine it counts as new to this country, and it is a classic, about an Irish roadside statue of the virgin which wept tears — until somebody spotted the little declivities where the raindrops got caught.

Zadie Smith’s Martha was also published in the New Yorker. Smith includes an apologia, saying she is only just learning to write short stories because most of those she has done have been more the beginnings of novels. Martha is an arresting, unnerving piece, set in New York but still more part-novel than true short story — which is no shame and she should complete it. Letting the public sample more prolific short-story writers is a good enough reason for putting two or three by Muriel Spark or Helen Dunmore up at £1.50. But to offer yet another reprint of The Diamond As Big As the Ritz or Virginia Woolf’s Kew Gardens is lazy publishing.

It is the non-fiction that wins hands down. Where the researchers have dug deep into the Penguin archive they have unearthed some gems, packed with stimulating ideas, original and challenging observation and brilliant descriptions. Each one feels complete in itself, but also serves as an introduction to the rest of the author’s work.

Aside from the Camus, two slim books are worth six times their cover price. The Two Stars of Paul Theroux’s title are Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor. The Monroe piece is an extraordinarily revealing, poignant account of the auction of her goods and chattels years after her death.

It is one thing to read that Marilyn left school at 15, and, as an aspiring actress . . . exercised with weights, and was unhappily married to Arthur Miller. To see her childish, misspelled handwriting, and the old-fashioned handweights, and the ‘Certificate of Conversion to the Jewish Faith’ and the sheet of paper monogrammed MMM, blank except for the words in her writing pencilled on one line ‘He does not love me’, is quite another.

Theroux’s eight pages say more about Monroe and the world’s response to her than most long biographies.

His very different essay on Elizabeth Taylor, too, is more perceptive than most things written about her. The paragraph about how Taylor acted out a different role, even down to the clothes she wore, with every husband she married — ‘the fresh young all-American Mrs Hilton, the English Mrs Wilding, the Jewish Mrs Todd, the stage wife Mrs Fisher, the much louder and somewhat Welsh Mrs Burton, the podgy political campaigner Mrs Warner and finally the svelte Mrs Fortensky, in a leather jacket and jeans’ — is brilliantly revelatory.

Poetry by Tony Harrison sits uneasily next to froth by Marion Keyes and Jamie Oliver recipes, a bit of Homer rests uncomfortably beside two very good, very typical Nick Hornby stories. Call the mixture eclectic, or call it weird.

If you are down to your last £1.50, which should you buy? On Seeing and Noticing by Alain de Botton. De Botton is a national treasure. He illuminates life in such clear, clean prose, brings philosophy to bear on our everyday, explains the paintings of Edward Hopper, defines the pleasures of sadness, accuses us of making ourselves miserable by demanding that our work should make us happy as well as make us a living, and gives as touching an account of the first stages in a love affair that led to a happy marriage — his own — as I have read anywhere, ever.