Stuff I’ve Been Reading December 2018/January 2019

BOOKS READ:

• Rosamond Lehmann—Selina Hastings
• The Echoing Grove—Rosamond Lehmann
• The Weather in the Streets—Rosamond Lehmann
• Invitation to the Waltz—Rosamond Lehmann
• Grant and I: Inside and Outside the Go-Betweens—Robert Forster

BOOKS BOUGHT:

• The Marriage of a Young Stockbroker—Charles Webb
• The Weather in the Streets—Rosamond Lehmann
• Invitation to the Waltz—Rosamond Lehmann
• The Gypsy’s Baby—Rosamond Lehmann
• Princes in the Land—Joanna Cannan
• The Idiot—Elif Batuman

How and why did I spend a few weeks, mostly on vacation, immersed in the life and works of Rosamond Lehmann, an author I had never read before? I hadn’t planned to read her, particularly. It just happened. I have been feeling sufficiently baffled by my dedication that I decided to retrace my steps, and I now see that the journey started a couple of years ago, on holiday in Dorset. My family and several others stay in a big house there every year, and one of the many reasons we keep going back is the little market town of Bridport. And while it is not strictly necessary to provide an account of Bridport’s appeal before coming to grips with a Bloomsbury novelist who, as far as I know, never went anywhere near the place (Bridport, not Bloomsbury), I’m going to do it anyway.

Bridport contains two proper secondhand-book shops, an excellent independent bookshop, a decent Waterstones, a secondhand-record shop, and a fantastic hat shop called Snook’s. I live in Islington, North London, and we’ve got a Waterstones and a secondhand-record shop. In other words, Bridport is now more interesting than North London, if we’re talking about the Saturday retail experience. When I was young, I used to travel twenty-five miles to London so I could buy the books, records, and clothes I wanted; now it’s the other way around. Nobody can afford to own an independent store in my city, and maybe not in yours, either, and as a consequence, surprises and hats have been rendered nearly impossible to find. This year I found in Bridport vinyl copies of albums I’d wanted by Buddy Rich, Bob Brookmeyer, Bob Florence, and Stan Kenton, among others, at a record fair in the back of a church, and a paperback copy of an old Charles Webb book I’d never come across; the summer before last, I bought a beautiful 1953 edition of Rosamond Lehmann’s The Echoing Grove in one of the used-book stores. That was step one of three.

Step two: The Echoing Grove sat on a shelf, lovely but unopened, until this year, when I was looking at my shelves for holiday...