A Cider With Rosie rehash that only makes you long for the original
At literary festivals, the pleasure of reading must take second place to the more dubious pleasure of hearing an author chatting. The process goes like this. An author spends years crafting the best book possible. The book is then published, and the author is invited to talk about it. Reading aloud is frowned upon: organisers and audiences alike prefer the loose, unformed, impromptu sound of talking. When the session comes to an end, a small number of people, maybe 10 or 20, queue to buy the book. The others drift off to watch another author talking. By the end of a busy day, audiences may have listened to five or six authors but they still won’t have read a single word.
Down In The Valley is a perfect illustration of this essentially philistine drift towards chatter.
Laurie Lee first published his childhood memoir Cider With Rosie in 1959. It was an instant classic in Britain and America. Even the jaded Dorothy Parker described it as ‘an entirely delightful experience’, while Harold Nicolson called it ‘a firstrate work of art’. And it stands up very well today. Rereading it last week, I was struck by the beautiful notes and rhythms of Lee’s prose, and how fresh it all seems.
Cider With Rosie was to become an examination set text. Consequently, coachloads of fifth-formers were regularly bussed to the Gloucestershire village of Slad, where it is set. One day, when Lee was getting on for 80 years old, a group of schoolchildren approached him outside the village pub. ‘Excuse me, sir,’ said one of them. ‘Can you tell me where Laurie Lee’s buried?’
By now, he had become a valued part of the heritage industry, an author as famous as his books. Journalists and telly people loved interviewing him: he spoke with a lovely Gloucestershire burr, and well-rounded sentences rolled from his mouth.
In 1994, his 80th year, he recorded a documentary for HTV. He was taken to various different locations around Slad – the village pond, the church, the pub – where he talked about incidents from his childhood that he had first covered, at greater length, some 35 years before in Cider With Rosie.
Laurie Lee died in 1997. A couple of years ago, David Parker, who made the obscure HTV documentary, found his recordings of Lee in a mis-labelled box and presented them to Penguin, who have now published a transcription in a very thin book of barely 100 pages.
The finished product – billed, presumptuously, as a Penguin Classic – is the equivalent of an author’s turn at a literary festival, a thin, uneven, chatty version of a prose work of infinitely greater subtlety and richness. Would Lee have approved of such a philistine project?
Let’s compare his spoken and written accounts of the same incident. Take the famous passage in Cider With Rosie involving the murder of a villager who goes to New Zealand and returns, years later, a wealthy man. He makes the mistake of bragging in the pub about all the money he has made. When he finally leaves the pub, the villagers catch up with him in the fields and beat him to death.
This is the way Lee talks about the murder in Down In The Valley: ‘They hit him and they knocked him down and they kicked him. They stole his watch and they threw him over the wall. And in the morning he was found frozen to death.’
Interesting enough, but the description of the same incident in Cider With Rosie is much fuller and more striking: ‘They hit him in turn, beat him down to his knees, beat him bloodily down in the snow. They beat and kicked him for the sake of themselves, as he lay there face down, groaning. Then they ripped off his coat, emptied his pockets, threw him over a wall, and left him. He was insensible now from his wounds and the drink; the storm blew all night across him. He didn’t stir again from the place where he lay; and in the morning he was found frozen to death.’
Or compare the two accounts of the beautiful young woman who went crazy and drowned herself. In Cider With Rosie, the eight-year-old Laurie stares at the pond in which Miss Flynn – ‘tall, consumptive, and pale as thistledown’ – drowned the day before. ‘This was the pond that had choked Miss Flynn. Yet strangely, and not by accident. She had come to it naked, alone in the night, and had slipped into it like a bed; she lay down there, and drew the water over her,
A thin, uneven, chatty version of a …work of infinitely greater subtlety and richness’