48. Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch - 'The Mont-Bazillac' (1913)

'Here was another thing - I'd never been drunk before, and I haven't been drunk since: but all the same I knew that this wasn't the least like ordinary drunkenness: it was too - what shall I say? - too brilliant. The whole town of Bergerac belonged to me: and, what was better, it was lit so that I could steer my way perfectly, although the street seemed to be quite amazingly full of people, jostling and chattering. I turned to call Jinks's attention to this, and was saying something about a French crowd - how much cheerfuller it was than your average English one - when all of a sudden Jinks wasn't there! No, nor the crowd! I was alone on Bergerac bridge, and I leaned with both elbows on the parapet and gazed at the Dordogne flowing beneath the moon.'
(Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, Selected Short Stories, Penguin Books, 1957, pp.112-3)

'Besides, the Conservative blogger Iain Dale has examined the TV schedules during this year's Lib Dem spring conference, when this incident is supposed to have taken place, and found that Strictly Come Dancing was not being shown - and nor was Strictly Dance Fever or any other such programme.

If this fable is typical of the communication agency's strategic advice then Campbell would do well to think twice before accepting it.

It is hard to imagine him prospering with an approach that treats any sign of education or enthusiasm for the finer things in life as a guilty secret to be hidden from the electorate.'
(Jonathan Calder, 'Let Ming be Ming', The Guardian, 31 July 2006, http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2006/jul/31/liberaldemocrats.comment)

A palpably bourgeois excursion and a good deal more worldly than the M.R. James, with his protagonist's ascetic 'Evening Drink of small Ale in a silver vessel of about a pint measure.' I came upon this book at a Tynemouth book fair last year and, recalling the author's name and - it must be said - fetishizing the belisha orange Penguin design, I bought the musty smelling 52-year-old book (its inner cover inscribed 'R.H.H. Jones, MARCH 1965' in starchy red ink).

One could make obvious points regarding this being published with the world on the edge of the precipice.

I prefer to highlight Quiller-Couch's role as a pillar of the establishment past: educated, simultaneously liberal and conservative. Not tied to social conservatism; indeed open to the bohemian, but skeptical of 'modenity' in its economic sense. This story reflects Q-C's position as cultured cultural arbiter: telling the story of an Oxford undergraduate's rites of passage in the Loire Valley, south France. The story centres on Bergerac, a market town 'on the edge of claret country' and particularly on the unique drunken experience produced by a near-mythical, 'extinct' local white wine named Mont-Bazillac (one which produced no hangover). It is a delicately sweet wine, with almost a trace of the madeira about it - one of my favourite drinks, immortalised in English song by Flanders and Swann.

Ungodly Church of England vicars, gentle mockery of the 'teetotal craze', 'old boys with grizzled moustaches' and 'prize Baden-Powell scouts', ease among classicist porticos; these symbolise the culture inherited by the likes of the late Sirs Hugh Carleton Greene and John Mortimer, both critical figures in the liberalisation of Britain in the 1960s. One can easily trace the lineage through to the jocular Horace Rumpole, with his love of liberty and fine clarets. There is an instinctive, well-heeled Europeanism at play, not especially political but cultural.

Having recently finished Martin J. Wiener's English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit: 1850-1980 (Cambridge University Press, 1981), one can identify AQC as in the lineage of prominent figures who shaped our culture in that period through suspicion of industrialisation and materialism: John Ruskin, Charles Dickens, William Morris, G.K. Chesterton, Herbert Asquith, Ramsay MacDonald, Stanley Baldwin and Aneurin Bevan, to name but eight. He is a not a Liberal in the free-market libertarian sense as Nick Clegg, but a Keynesian Liberal. Liberals tend to accept the prevailing consensus of their day, but their value is in achieving significant reforms - the like of which Roy Jenkins and David Steel achieved, but which it seems doubtful that Clegg will, hitched to a discredited economic programme.

'Q', as he was known, wrote novels and verse, as well as teaching and becoming a key player in English literary criticism pre-F.R. Leavis. He edited the vastly popular Oxford Book of English Verse: 1250-1900 (later extended to 1918), constantly referenced in Mortimer's Rumpole of the Bailey. His daughter was the inspiration for Kenneth Grahame's Ratty in The Wind in the Willows, he completed unfinished works by Robert Louis Stevenson and a certain Alastair Cooke was a notable student of his. In addition, this native of Cornwall was active in local Liberal Party politics.

An interesting footnote to this tale is that  the village of Monbazillac - near Bergerac - was designated in 1936 as an AOC (Appellation d’origine contrôlée), a specific regional wine classified by central government as adhering to traditional standards of wine production. The sort of preservationist ideal inherent in the controversial EU legislation, the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) and the popular Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA) over here in the UK.

Ultimately, this is a light, jocund story; how much you enjoy it will largely depend on how partial you are to old-school liberal values, or indeed to sweet white wines from the Loire Valley.

6/10

26. William Makepeace Thackeray - 'The Devil's Wager' (1836)

'it appeared that the holy father could not manage the desired prayer.'
(Peter Haining, ed., Gothic Stories of Horror and Romance 1765-1840, Penguin, 1973, p.492)

This is the first of two stories drawn from a Peter Haining curated anthology of 'Gothic Stories of Horror and Romance'. Unsurprisingly, given its moniker, this tale tends towards emphasising the horror side of things.

Thackeray opens with a Gothic flourish which surely even in 1836 had an element of the parodic - presumably deliberate. It is a florid, archetypal setting of the scene that deserves quoting in full:

'It was the hour of the night when there be none stirring save churchyard ghosts - when all doors are closed except the gates of graves, and all eyes shut but the eyes of wicked men.
When there is no sound on the earth except the ticking of the grasshopper, or the croaking of obscene frogs in the pool.
And no light except that of the blinking stars, and the wicked and devilish wills-o'-the-wisp, as they gambol among the marshes and lead good men astray.
When there is nothing moving in heaven except the owl, as he flappeth along lazily; or the magician, as he rideth on his infernal broomstick, whistling through the air like the arrows of a Yorkshire archer.
It was at this hour (namely, at twelve o'clock of the night,) that two things went winging through the black clouds, and holding converse with each other.'
(pp.485-6)

He then breaks with this studiously ominous prose style; there is an almost debunking bathos in his reversion to a duologue remisicent of one of Poe's more philosophical asides: reminding me of 'Mesmeric Revelation' (1844), for example. This dialogue is established between a demon-messenger, Mercurius, and the soul of Sir Rollo, a dead knight in purgatory, whom the demon is supervising, indeed keeping him in line through winding his tail around his neck. The two establish a wager that would enable Rollo to ascend to heaven - if only he can get a living person to save an ave (prayer) for him, given three opportunities. First he tries his niece, who is startled by the visitation 'and of course fainted' (p.486) and when revived refuses to save the ave because the knight goes on to insult her current suitor, Edward. In a move which sums up the freewheeling style of this tale, Thackeray spells the niece Matilda's name in at least three different ways.

Next the pair intrude upon a friar, Father Peter, and his drunken company, who are predictably most amused by the spectacle: 'a person with hoofs, horns and a tail rather distubred the hilarity of the company.' (p.491) As is clear in my epigraph, this inebriated friar is unable to utter a prayer, and indeed is manipulated by Mercurius - who edits the hymnbook - into singing a satirical, anti-Church song:

'My pulpit is an ale-house bench,
Whereon I sit so jolly
A smiling rosy country wench
My saint and patron holy.'
(p.492)

A decided dose of satirical humour is evident throughout this tale, bringing this horror tale perhaps surprisingly into the orbit of WMT's novel, Vanity Fair (1847-8). The third visit is to Rollo's brother, a prior who had entered into a pact with the devil 'never to say a prayer.' The dead knight is by this point unable to contemplate winning the wager, faced with a gloating Mercurius, cutting 'a hundred jokes at the expense of his poor associate.' (p.493)

He enters the room of his brother, a 'wicked and maligant sorcerer', with no hope; as amusingly put by WMT: 'he entered his brother's room more for the five minutes' respite than from any hope of success.' (p.494) Yet, Rollo manages to develop a more wily strategy, taking Father Ignatius into his full confidence and then tricking him into saying the ave, and thus leading to his brother taking his place in hell. Thackeray's vivid tableau at the end includes a memorable description of the miserable Ignatius being dragged downwards by Mercurius towards hell: by his long beard.

This story was enjoyable, much like one of the tales inserted by Dickens within hihumours contemporaneous saga, The Pickwick Papers (1836-7). Thackeray tells a basically moral tale, but invests it with enough diabolic incident and satiric good humour to make it a worthwhile read.

7/10