A touching, suggestive portrait, Max - well-chosen details, well-paced.
"Were we ever intellectuals?" indeed.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Max Richards" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Wednesday, August 19, 2009 3:58 PM
Subject: late snap: visiting Norman
> His rundown weatherboard in a quiet suburb
> is outstanding for its wildness,
> all the wrong trees out front,
> littered bits of wood everywhere,
> torn wire-netting, seedlings in old tins,
> lumber and junk. He used to cycle home with builders'
> offcuts, and fallen trees for his woodpiles,
> perhaps still does. Down the side and out the back
> is worse. He was there on the back porch
> under a blanket, teapot by his feet,
> reading, as I expected. He had made
> his annual visit to Arizona, said nowt about
> family there, taken part in some dinosaur dig
> (his passion which has taken him to remote
> regions of Argentina), and returned too late
> for our friend's funeral - which he would not have gone to.
> But he has a bad conscience because he knew Josephine
> had been ill but put off making contact.
> He used to lend novels to her too. But mainly I had to hear about
> the many works of Angela Thirkell, a new interest of his.
>
> Trollope had been his first, and his London PhD, done under the
> Tillotsons, no less, had been on Frances Trollope.
> Thirkell set numerous novels in Barsetshire!
> he showed me an endpapers map. Thirkell makes
> delicious jokes, but is offputtingly concerned
> with children and happy-wedding-endings,
> two of Norman's bugbears.
>
> I was getting ready to ask if he knew Elizabeth Goudge
> but couldn't a word in. He wrote out yet another
> version of an email address (no phone, our Norman),
> as previous ones have not worked. Must now try again.
> Books are everywhere in his house, which I did not
> enter this time. Especially underfoot.
> He returned to me Hofstadter's 1960s book
> on anti-intellectualism in American life -
> unreadable he finds H now. (I must have a go myself,
> having good memories of it when new. Are we now
> or were we ever intellectuals? Not exactly.
> What old codgers we have both become!)
>
> Mostly Norman pursues forgotten Victorian novelists,
> especially the prolific ladies. I practiced his definitions
> of the dime-novel and the penny-dreadful.
> He showed me some who don't even appear
> in the reference books he keeps by him.
> Sutherland is a wonder, he said. What he doesn't know...!
> Have you read his book, I asked, on addiction and after?
>
> This novel of 1873 mentions a woman on a train
> reading 'Mansfield Park'. This may be a significant
> bibliographical, indeed cultural, clue.
>
> Norman has wild eyes behind thick spectacles,
> wispy hair, much tan from all that cycling,
> eyebrows and forehead-lines that shoot up constantly,
> and I always come away with several undelivered
> contributions to our lopsided conversation.
> He told me which op shops are worth visiting -
> the one in Northcote where old and sometimes valuable books
> from college libraries are trickling out.
> Perry the secondhandbookseller who used to be next
> to the Ivanhoe Fire Station, lived at Norman's for a time,
> and has lately opened in High Street Northcote
> near the remainder shop, the Book Grocer.
> (Ah yes, I was in both the other day, I could say.)
>
> But when you are a bachelor and do no housekeeping
> and cycle somewhere every morning, you get book adventures
> constantly, even if constrained by your cycling
> no longer being so easy. He once cycled across the US,
> posting books to himself, and went to India with the same plan.
> I forget how much he achieved on that excursion,
> but do recall how disappointed he was.
> His two hip replacements have been a great success.
>
> Max Richards in Melbourne
>
>
>
>
>
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