A Trip to Tuscany

Phil Doran
Author of
The Reluctant Tuscan

I haven't had much luck with two of the fiction books I bought on my recent meanderings in Missouri. Apparently I didn't choose the most most popular books of authors Maeve Binchy (Nights of Rain and Stars) or Margaret Drabble (The Witch of Exmoor). Perhaps that is why I found them languishing in a used book store. 

Anyway, I am moving on to another find - the real life tale of American television writer and producer Phil Doran and his move from Hollywood to Tuscany. From the title of his book, The Reluctant Tuscan (2005), I take it he was not all that keen on the adventure.

The dust jacket tells me that actually it was Mr. Doran's wife, Nancy, who decided it was time for a change from their Life of Hell in Hollywood and surprised her husband by purchasing a 300-year-old Tuscan farmhouse for them to restore.

Some surprise, eh?

As Mr. Doran wrote comedies for television - Sanford and Son, The Bob Newhart Show, the Smothers Brothers - I feel as if I will be in good hands with the telling of this adventure. And I do love reading this sort of book in the same vein as Peter Mayle's A Year in Provence and Frances Mayes's Under the Tuscan Sun.

Here is how Mr. Doran begins:

I had a machete in my hand and I was thinking about using it on Henry David Thoreau. You know, that guy they made you read in school who popularized the notion that we should find solace in nature. Maybe I was doing this all wrong, but I had been hacking my way through nature all morning and all I had to show for it were blisters, sweat, and a shooting pain up my arm. I didn't think I was having a heart attack, but if I were, it would have been more amusing than dealing with a hill covered in underbrush so thick it made this little corner of Tuscany look like a Brazilian rain forest.

Pen, Typewriter, and Laptop

William Zinsser
Portrait by Thomas Buechner
Source: Smithsonian, April 2007

I recently wrote about William Zinsser and my absolute favorite book on writing, his On Writing Well (here). To my delight I discovered that Mr. Zinsser's columns written for The American Scholar's website have been collected in the book entitled The Writer Who Stayed.

I could not resist its bright red cover featuring the evolving tools of a writer: pen, typewriter, and laptop. I have used them all.

I feel a particular kinship to Mr. Zinsser...almost as if he were a personal writing professor of mine. I have met him and have read his book on writing so many times that when I write I sense he is standing over my shoulder whispering: Simplify, simplify.

The essays in this book published in 2012 cover culture and the arts; travel; baseball (he is a big fan of the sport, as am I); the good, the bad, and the ugly of technology; and, who knows what other surprises he has in store for me. 

I am so happy to have My Professor with me again in this new book and will be writing about it soon.

The Witch of Exmoor by Margaret Drabble

I have not read anything by British author Margaret Drabble so when I saw her book The Witch of Exmoor at The Village Bookstore I thought, well, why not give her a try.

I have read about 50 pages and so far it appears to be the type of story where people sit around the dinner table discussing things. I have already attended two dinners. The main topic of discussion is Mom. Her three children and their spouses are all wondering why, in her sixties, Frieda decided to sell the family home and buy an isolated, crumbling castle at the edge of the sea. (After listening to her children prattle on, I can make a good guess...)

Anyway, is she going a bit mad or has she just become even more eccentric, they wonder. And what is going to happen to her money? When she dies, will there be enough left to leave her already successful children and their families?

I need a bit more action and fewer psychological musings. Ms. Drabble does offer some smart, caustic observations about Britain's middle class (or so the dust cover tells me) so I may sit through one more dinner.

I was hoping for more 'witching' and less 'bitching'. And I don't mean magic, but more about Frieda, retired writer, and less about her self-satisfied, selfish children.

Equilateral by Ken Kalfus

The central character in Equilateral (2013) is a simple triangle. But what occupies its equidistant points? Man, woman, love? Corporate profits, scientific research, political dominion? Truth, fantasy, hope?

The story takes place in 1894 and concerns the building of an equilateral triangle in Egypt's Western Desert. A triangle of huge dimensions - 330 miles on each side with deep trenches five miles wide - that is being carved out of the sands and when finished will be filled with petrol and set afire as a communication with beings on Mars. 

The author, Ken Kalfus, has constructed this story that stars the brilliant astronomer Sanford Thayer whose idea of building the triangle is based on his own observations and belief that there is intelligent life on the Red Planet. Aiding him in the enormous project are his personal secretary and fellow adventurer Miss Keaton; the project engineer Ballard; and, the British head of the Board of Governors made up of representatives from every participating nation, Sir Harry.

There is also the Arab girl, Bint, who is combination nursemaid, servant, and is an object of Thayer's, if not affections, at least his attentions. 

There are troubles galore in the race to build the The Equilateral stemming from stifling heat, fevers, conspiracies, lazy workers, sabotage, failures to communicate, and outright mutinies. 

But there are also the fancies and aspirations "for the good of humanity" that lie behind the project that keep the vision inching forward.

I liked this dreamy, 200-page novel that looks at the wonders of the night sky while keeping its feet firmly planted in the shifting sands of the African desert.

In Which I Make Preparations to Dig

Max Mallowan and Agatha Christie
Archeaologists

I belong to a local organization - the Monday Afternoon Club - which has as its mission "the encouragement of culture among women". It was founded in 1887. It meets in a community room at the library from October to April.  We begin the year with a very civilized tea complete with silver tea service at a member's home and end each year with a luncheon.  

In between those two social events, each Monday afternoon a member presents a research paper on a subject in one of three broad categories chosen by the 35 members the previous year. We have a short business meeting, one member presents Current Events - highlights from the headlines of the preceding week - and then the week's paper is given. 

It is all very enlightening.

Which leads me to tell you that this year I will be giving a paper in the category of "Unearthing History". My subject will be the Middle Eastern archaeological adventures of Dame Agatha Christie. I started nosing about for stories on female archaeologists in general and discovered that Ms. Christie wrote what she called 'an archaeological memoir' - a tale first published in 1946 of her experiences investigating ancient, dusty ruins with her husband Max Mallowan. Some of her most delightful mysteries take place in or around those foreign excavations.

I have taken the title of my paper from the title of her book: Come, Tell Me How You Live.

The book arrived yesterday along with another volume of stories of seven female archaeologists by Amanda Adams entitled Ladies of the Field (2010). It takes a look at Victorian ladies - including Ms. Christie - who gathered up their skirts and went off to seek adventures far from home. 

So I will be spending the next month or two reading and researching these brave ladies and then comes the most fun - writing the paper. 

This will be my fifth presentation to the club and although it causes quite a bit of nail-biting, hair-tearing, and heavy sighing, in the end it always proves to be an enriching experience and one that I look forward to. I do think it will be quite fun Unearthing History.

Nights of Rain and Stars by Maeve Binchy

I am sorry to report that I didn't find the characters in Maeve Binchy's Nights of Rain and Stars to be very interesting or engaging. In fact, the word that kept coming to mind was 'Losers'. I am sure they will all be redeemed by the last page, but I won't be around to see it.

Basically, there are five travelers - three traveling alone and one couple - strangers to one another and all from different countries who find themselves together in a hilltop taverna in the Greek village of Aghia Anna in time to witness the not-very-dramatically-described explosion of a tourist boat that kills twenty-four people including four from the village. 

Around the table we have two women who have not made very good romantic choices. One, a confident, smart broadcast journalist, is running away from her choice; the other, the sweet, shy one, is traveling with her choice of lover and before page 60 he winds up in the village jail for assaulting her. One young man is running away from his father's expectations that he will follow in the family business only the son is not enticed by business nor is he motivated by money (although he doesn't seem to mind spending the money his father has made). A fourth fellow, an American professor on sabbatical, has left behind his son, his ex-wife and her new husband.

Yawn. 

I was warned by commenter Joyce in KS that this was not one of Ms. Binchy's best. I believe her. This is the first book by this popular author that I have tried and maybe I will give her a second chance. It is one I bought recently at The Village Bookstore in Missouri and I thought I might enjoy it because of the foreign setting. I was wrong.

Anyway, by page 65 I decided I had had enough and now have moved on to reading another find, Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit, by my darling P.G. Wodehouse. I need a good laugh after all the angst in Nights of Rain and Stars. 

I think Ms. Binchy should have named it Nights of Pain and Stares.

In which a new book arrives

Always a red-letter day when a book shows up in my mailbox. Today, Four Hedges: A Gardener's Chronicle (1935) arrived from the kind folks at Luminaria Books. The book is much larger than I expected, and it is in perfect condition. It was carefully and neatly wrapped in brown paper with 'Fragile' marked on both sides of the package. Aren't all books fragile?

The book covers a year in the author's garden in Monks Risborough in the Chiltern Hills of England. Simon at Stuck in a Book recently reviewed it and it immediately appealed to me. I ordered it that day. Four Hedges also contains 80 engravings or woodcuts by its author, Clare Leighton. 

The chronicle is broken down month by month starting with April, so I am not too far behind.

Here is how it begins:
Ours is an ordinary garden. It is perched on a slope of the Chiltern Hills, exposed to every wind that blows. Its soil is chalk; its flower beds are pale grey. Dig into it just one spit, and you reach, as it were a solid cement foundation. One might be hacking at the white cliffs of Dover. Only when it is wet from heavy rain does our soil darken and look normal. It is a new garden. In it there are none of the great trees that spread their shade over stretches of lawn, none of the mellow, age-silvered bricks that shelter a walled-in fruit garden, not a hint of a crazy paving patterned with moss, or a sundial with edges blunted by time. 

In other words, a blank slate. Lots to do, oh, lots to do.

I love reading personal experiences about gardens and gardening although you won't ever find me digging in the dirt. I wonder if Ms. Leighton and Beverley Nichols, another great gardener, author, and a favorite of mine, were acquainted?

Here is a close-up of the book's amusing endpapers. 

Grasshoppers galore.