BOOKSHELVES

I dreamed I went to stay for a few days in a hotel and installed in my room the bricks and planks that for many years I used as bookshelves, complete with an array of books to feed my habit and defend me against all-comers. This, perhaps, because for the last few weeks of revolving 'flu I have read a considerable number of books, mostly early Penguins, by Nancy Mitford, Evelyn Waugh and Vita Sackville West, the latter the earliest and least worthy, Penguin number 16. When I left the hotel I took the books but forgot the bricks and planks and then had to make elaborate arrangements to retrieve them. As when I first came to Ireland I brought my bricks and planks with me, thinking it would be easier to have bookshelves ready to install, and as it turned out, southern Ireland was not rich in clay and so rather short of bricks, especially bricks of character, so my foresight was justified.

I often turn to early and mid-twentieth century novels, all of them variously cracking and reinforcing upper class codes of behaviour, especially when I'm ill. Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh knew each other well; they were of a kind, he far more caustic than she, and broader, more able for savagery, and, eventually, depth. After Decline and Fall, A Handful of Dust and Vile Bodies, all short, derisive books, and still in bed with a violent headache, in need of larger narrative in order to find these past months of my own life, I read Brideshead Revisited, and, once past the Oxford posing and spending and drinking, and beyond, or inside, the tv adaptation I loved in the eighties, or was it nineties, found myself fully involved, to my surprise, in the ghastly turmoil of Catholicism.

Evelyn Waugh is strangely serious when he is. I read Brideshead during the worst of my third 'flu, the whole book in not much more than twenty-four hours, and felt almost as convinced of the grave hold of Catholicism on people's lives as the narrator, Charles Ryder, aka Jeremy Irons. Uncomprehending but acknowledging. Ireland has not made me think about Catholicism in the same way. It's too much part of the fabric, along with the music and the language and myriad daily habits; whereas Evelyn Waugh's involvement with English Catholicism represented a dive out of the meaningless into the mystery and the sadness.