The
first week of September contains a red-letter day in my literary
world, as does the beginning of December, March, and June. Four
times a year the new edition of Slightly Foxed drops through the
letter box and the rest of that particular day is given over to
delving in and out of its 96 luxurious cream pages and making a list
of out-of-print books that I never before knew existed but which I
now MUST READ. Issue number 47, Autumn 2015, which arrived last week
is no exception. It contains the usual mix of essays on books I'm
familiar with – in this instance Patrick McGrath's Asylum,
Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago and John Updike's
Rabbit novels – alongside a couple I enjoyed reading about
but don't think I actually want to read – Louise Fitzhugh's Harriet
the Spy and Ronald Welch's Escape from France and Nicholas
Carey. But for me, the joy and value in each issue of Slightly
Foxed are in those essays that describe and enthuse about books that
I wonder how I unwittingly have conspired to overlook. My first
discovery in the new issue was The Cone Gatherers by Robin
Jenkins, an intriguing tale of two brothers who work on a Scottish
estate beside a sea loch during the second world war. The book is
lovingly summarized and endorsed by Julian Hoffman, a first-class
writer himself and author of a book called The Small Heart of
Things which is near the top of my current 'wants list'. He also
has his own web-site/blog : www.julianhoffman.wordpress.com
and is, like another writer to be found in this issue – Amy
Liptrop, an occasional contributor to the world's best web-site,
Caught By The River. A copy of The Cone Gatherers,
which I had no problem finding at a very reasonable price, has now
joined the teetering 'to be read' pile in my study. And the
dangerously unsteady stack will, I know, continue to grow in the
coming weeks as I get deeper into this issue. Brandon Robshaw's piece
on the stories of Robert Aickman looks like it might entice me to
investigate further and Anthony Longden's article on The Diary of
William Holland, Somerset Parson is sure to as it concerns itself
with an area of ths country that I am becoming increasingly familiar
with. And then of course to coincide with every new issue the good
people at Slightly Foxed also publish a book, invariably a memoir,
that is out of print, hard to find, and deserving of re-evaluation.
This quarter the new 'Slightly Foxed Edition', and the 31st
in a series that has become eminently collectable, is Gavin Maxwell's
The House of Elrig, his account of his childhood in a large
house in rural Scotland with his eccentric mother and sisters and the
countryside that went on to inspire him as a writer and
conservationist. In his introductory essay, titled Mowgli with a
Gun, Galen O'Hanlon concludes his testimonial for the book by
describing it as “a brief glimpse of a wild childhood that is
recognizable even in its strangeness – he has captured the essence
of youth, that delicate balance of happiness and misery”. When I
have posted this piece I will be attempting to balance my handsome
new copy of The House of Elrig upon the leaning tower of
books.
www.foxedquarterly.com
