It occurred to me just before I went to sleep a couple of nights ago, or maybe it was in the early hours of half asleep, that the guy who wrote the pamphlet (!) for the police on how to ride a bike just has to be a genius. How else to explain the ability to fill ninety three pages? That is half a novelette for goodness sake. God alone knows how many pages it would take learning about anything more complicated.
I am reading a book I have meaning to read for goodness knows how long, right back to my schooldays I think, “The Story Of An African Farm” by Olive Schreiner. (I’ve just looked her up on Google, interesting but what do you make of one site that says she was born in the Cape and another which states she was born in Basutoland?) Evidently the first South African woman on the fictional literary scene how does one describe her writing? I think “cute” or rather “quaint” would be apt. The first part which contains some religious writing, Christian although she was Jewish, is the story of a con man. The farm is owned by a fat old Boer woman with two daughters and a niece and the overseer on the farm is an old German who lives in a one room hut with his son, Waldo who is to put it nicely a little backward in coming forward. Into this ménage walks a stranger who goes by the improbable name of Bonaparte Blenkins, but as he is meant to be Irish that probably explains that. He’s a sort of cross between Uriah Heep and Alfred Jingle. Despite being mistrusted by one of the daughters who susses him out and calls him a liar he wheedles his way into the Boer woman’s confidence, ending up by causing the German to have a heart attack, accusing Waldo of stealing peaches from the loft and whipping him, and generally lording it over all, ostensibly because he and the Boer woman are going to be married. He gets his come uppence when a pretty niece of the Boer woman visits and he pays court to her. (She is also evidently a whole lot wealthier), Unfortunately for him, the Boer woman has gone up into the loft to inspect her supposedly stolen peaches and witnesses all that goes on in the room down below. He gets a barrel of pickled lamb poured over him and has to flee the farm and the Boer woman’s wrath. Justice is served. It’s pretty straightforward story telling. But the second portion of the book is religion with knobs on apart from another would be swooning swain entering the scene to profess undying love and to court a daughter and the third portion headed Lyndall is page after page of feminism. Interesting that that was her mother’s name. Though one might agree completely with her arguments and her summing up of what it is to be a woman (this is 1883) I am afraid there is no way a girl just out of boarding school could possibly voice these thoughts as they are written. At least I don’t believe so. They are Miss Schreiner’s and she has lost her fictional character completely but she must be one of the first writers to argue so forcibly on socialism, labour and feminism and evidently on Judaism though I have not come across that in this particular book, not yet anyway. I have to admit, quaint though the writing is, I am enjoying it and glad I have finally got around to reading it.
Another snippet from Seymour Hicks. ‘The use of obscene words unless absolutely necessary to the text is a thing to be eliminated from every script.’ I wonder what he would think of today’s offerings when every second word is obscene?