B EVIS H ILLIER Usually I have to rack my brains at
this season to try to dredge up the titles of the books which have most appealed to me since New Year’s Day. But this year two books stand out. One is John Fowles: The Journals, Volume 2, edited by Charles Drazin (Cape, £25). It was recommended to me by Christopher Gray, the omniscient arts editor of the Oxford Times — I had not even read (but I have done now) the first volume, originally out in 2004 and now a paperback (Vintage, £9.99).
Fowles comes across as a strange, soured man, but then who wants a diarist who pours golden syrup over everyone? His powers of observation are exceptional, his honesty implacable; and he writes as naturally as if he were speaking to us (not, sadly, a virtue of his novels).
This second volume covers the years 1965 to 1990. Fowles writes lyrically about nature; lethally about other authors. Of Bruce Chatwin, whose Utz he had just read: ‘He was too dazzled by his knowledge to see that he hadn’t yet found humanity.’ My other choice is Nicholas Orme’s Medieval Schools from Roman Britain to Renaissance England (Yale, £25), the sequel to his much praised Medieval Children, also published by Yale five years ago. Orme, who is professor of history at Exeter University, shows that modern education isn’t new; it is built on centuries of experiment and improvement going back to the Romans. He recreates medieval schoolrooms to body forth masters and pupils at work and quotes from boys’ exercise books which amazingly survive. It is a fresh, Schama-like take on life in the Middle Ages. Orme’s writing is exhilarating and underpinned by profound scholarship. Why is he not a Fellow of the British Academy when so many lesser historians are?
You might be able to guess my unfavourite book of the year: A. N. Wilson’s Betjeman (Hutchinson, £20), a biography of the poet hastily cobbled together for his centenary. From the latest edition he has removed the spoof ‘Betjeman love-letter’ to Honor Tracy which I sent him under a hoax identity (shame: I had hoped for a modest royalty on it) but he has left in the very dodgy assertion, based upon it, that Tracy was ‘the missing link between Iris Murdoch and John Betjeman, having slept with them both’.
The excision reminds me of what Evelyn Waugh wrote in his diary in 1946 after Randolph Churchill went into hospital to have a lung removed. It was announced that the trouble was not malignant, and Waugh wrote, ‘It was a typical triumph of modern science to find the only part of Randolph that was not malignant and remove it.’ In the sprit of goodwill to all men, I am sending Wilson a Christmas present. It is a cribbage board — he is so adept at the game.
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