Alice Thomas Ellis
Well, I've got bad news, Jenny. I'd tell you to sit down, but I'm pretty sure that when you're on the computer you sit, so it would be silly to tell you to sit down, which you're doing already. But you want to mentally sit, so as to get ready: it's bad, honey -- Alice Thomas Ellis is dead.
Indeed, she died in March, and I guess the reason that we never heard about it was that no news about Alice Thomas Ellis ever got to the States anyway, so who would have cared. Well, except you and me and the guys over at Common Reader. They've been reprinting her works for some years now, God bless them. They'd be otherwise almost impossible to find in the States.
For all the rest of you -- I think we're up to five readers or so besides Jenny -- "Alice Thomas Ellis" was the nom de plume of Anna Haycraft, a Welsh convert to Catholicism who wrote novels -- excellent, biting, funny novels -- and a sort of domestic life column for Spectator magazine. She was married to Colin Haycraft, the publisher of Duckworth's, and was the fiction editor there, in the course of which career she discovered such novelists as Beryl Bainbridge.
I just adore her. I'm all the time trying to get students to read her -- Jenny would be my main success here. She took a "directed reading" class with me one semester, and in exchange for spending half the class on Flannery O'Connor (another of my favorites; I like ruthless writers), we spent the other half on Ellis. Oh, lovely times!
But there's no point in telling you how delightful this writer is. Let's have some examples.
Here she is, in a excerpt from her "Home Life" column:
One of the things I like about the country is that the problems it presents are different. For instance while the drain in London sometimes gets blocked up it is never because there is a hedgehog in it. This happened last summer, and by the time we located the cause of the trouble the poor creature was coated in detergent foam and half drowned, because it hadn't thought of climbing out of the drain, which is not deep, but had sought to preserve itself by curling up into a ball. I think hedgehogs are possibly even dumber than sheep, but they are more likeable. They come in at night to steal the cats' food from the step and when we open the door they scuttle away like little old winos discovered rifling dustbins. Hearing a clanking one night the third son went bravely out in his underpants, air gun at the ready, and five hedgehogs loped away looking embarrassed -- not, I think, at the sight of the son, but because they had been apprehended.
Here's another:
I vividly recall an occasion when the eldest son was beginning to crawl. We were sitting in a garden in the country with acres of velvet lawn and I picked him up and ran with him, dropped him on the touch line and flew back to sip a drink in comparative peace before he could get at me again. He came thundering over the lawn on his hands and knees and peed on Randolph Churchill who had ill-advisedly taken him on his lap. I can't imagine why. It was a most uncharacteristic gesture -- on the part of Randolph Churchill, I mean, not of the son. There's nothing you can say, really. Apology seems inadequate and explanation otiose. My cousin Pansy was once on a bus with her baby when he suddenly and without warning threw up in the brim of the hat of the lady in front. My cousin said nothing -- what can you say? "My baby's been sick in your hat?" It sounds stupid. Anyway, she simply got off the bus at the next stop, bang in the middle of the North Wales littoral and waited for an hour or so for the next bus. I would have done the same thing myself.
I've enjoyed all her novels -- Fairy Tale, is, think, my favorite. One of those stories in which the fairies are Not Cute. But maybe I like Inn at the Edge of the World best -- either the worst or the best Christmas ever, depending on how you look at it. No, no, The Other Side of the Fire -- that's my favorite. Love sucks.
I found out she was dead because I've just gotten, in the mail, another of her books, one of the non-fiction works on Catholicism, God Has Not Changed. I was googling to see if anything else was getting published, when I got the bad news.
Ellis was fired as a columnist for the Catholic Herald for accusing Archbishop Derek Worlock of watering down the faith. She accused a lot of people of watering down the faith, actually. I'm one of the people she would have despised -- I'm a Progressive Catholic. She was a Conservative Catholic. Oh, she said cutting things about people like me! She was, for instance, Not A Feminist. (Jenny and I found this amusing. So you're not a feminist, and you have lots to say about women and cooking: how they naturally go together, and yet you're the fiction editor at Duckworth's, and a Woman of Some Power. Please explain.) Also, she didn't like all that jolly handshaking, and God forbid kissing, at the Sign Of Peace after the Lord's Prayer. Also, she thought it was a mistake that we all (those of us who are female) took those doilies off our heads after Vatican II. She pretty much didn't like Vatican II, actually.
So I disagreed with her on many points.
But oh, I love a writer who makes me think. If I don't agree with her, I better damn well know why. Excellent.
I've been given, in trying to explain her to students and colleagues, to calling her "a Welsh Flannery O'Connor who's not dead." Alas. She's gone.
Sorry, Jenny.
Indeed, she died in March, and I guess the reason that we never heard about it was that no news about Alice Thomas Ellis ever got to the States anyway, so who would have cared. Well, except you and me and the guys over at Common Reader. They've been reprinting her works for some years now, God bless them. They'd be otherwise almost impossible to find in the States.
For all the rest of you -- I think we're up to five readers or so besides Jenny -- "Alice Thomas Ellis" was the nom de plume of Anna Haycraft, a Welsh convert to Catholicism who wrote novels -- excellent, biting, funny novels -- and a sort of domestic life column for Spectator magazine. She was married to Colin Haycraft, the publisher of Duckworth's, and was the fiction editor there, in the course of which career she discovered such novelists as Beryl Bainbridge.
I just adore her. I'm all the time trying to get students to read her -- Jenny would be my main success here. She took a "directed reading" class with me one semester, and in exchange for spending half the class on Flannery O'Connor (another of my favorites; I like ruthless writers), we spent the other half on Ellis. Oh, lovely times!
But there's no point in telling you how delightful this writer is. Let's have some examples.
Here she is, in a excerpt from her "Home Life" column:
One of the things I like about the country is that the problems it presents are different. For instance while the drain in London sometimes gets blocked up it is never because there is a hedgehog in it. This happened last summer, and by the time we located the cause of the trouble the poor creature was coated in detergent foam and half drowned, because it hadn't thought of climbing out of the drain, which is not deep, but had sought to preserve itself by curling up into a ball. I think hedgehogs are possibly even dumber than sheep, but they are more likeable. They come in at night to steal the cats' food from the step and when we open the door they scuttle away like little old winos discovered rifling dustbins. Hearing a clanking one night the third son went bravely out in his underpants, air gun at the ready, and five hedgehogs loped away looking embarrassed -- not, I think, at the sight of the son, but because they had been apprehended.
Here's another:
I vividly recall an occasion when the eldest son was beginning to crawl. We were sitting in a garden in the country with acres of velvet lawn and I picked him up and ran with him, dropped him on the touch line and flew back to sip a drink in comparative peace before he could get at me again. He came thundering over the lawn on his hands and knees and peed on Randolph Churchill who had ill-advisedly taken him on his lap. I can't imagine why. It was a most uncharacteristic gesture -- on the part of Randolph Churchill, I mean, not of the son. There's nothing you can say, really. Apology seems inadequate and explanation otiose. My cousin Pansy was once on a bus with her baby when he suddenly and without warning threw up in the brim of the hat of the lady in front. My cousin said nothing -- what can you say? "My baby's been sick in your hat?" It sounds stupid. Anyway, she simply got off the bus at the next stop, bang in the middle of the North Wales littoral and waited for an hour or so for the next bus. I would have done the same thing myself.
I've enjoyed all her novels -- Fairy Tale, is, think, my favorite. One of those stories in which the fairies are Not Cute. But maybe I like Inn at the Edge of the World best -- either the worst or the best Christmas ever, depending on how you look at it. No, no, The Other Side of the Fire -- that's my favorite. Love sucks.
I found out she was dead because I've just gotten, in the mail, another of her books, one of the non-fiction works on Catholicism, God Has Not Changed. I was googling to see if anything else was getting published, when I got the bad news.
Ellis was fired as a columnist for the Catholic Herald for accusing Archbishop Derek Worlock of watering down the faith. She accused a lot of people of watering down the faith, actually. I'm one of the people she would have despised -- I'm a Progressive Catholic. She was a Conservative Catholic. Oh, she said cutting things about people like me! She was, for instance, Not A Feminist. (Jenny and I found this amusing. So you're not a feminist, and you have lots to say about women and cooking: how they naturally go together, and yet you're the fiction editor at Duckworth's, and a Woman of Some Power. Please explain.) Also, she didn't like all that jolly handshaking, and God forbid kissing, at the Sign Of Peace after the Lord's Prayer. Also, she thought it was a mistake that we all (those of us who are female) took those doilies off our heads after Vatican II. She pretty much didn't like Vatican II, actually.
So I disagreed with her on many points.
But oh, I love a writer who makes me think. If I don't agree with her, I better damn well know why. Excellent.
I've been given, in trying to explain her to students and colleagues, to calling her "a Welsh Flannery O'Connor who's not dead." Alas. She's gone.
Sorry, Jenny.
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