The Name of Action

   "The Name of Action is Graham Greene's second novel, published in 1930. The book was badly received by critics and suffered poor sales. Greene later repudiated the book (along with his third novel Rumour at Nightfall) and it has remained out of print ever since."

 

   The above quote is from Wikipedia about a book I've just read (twice) and I now realise it doesn't actually say when Greene repudiated the book and it went out of print.  I've found images of three different covers for the book.

 

 

   Greene says in his autobiography Ways of Escape (1980) "some years after their publication I suppressed them", and this may be the source of the Wikipedia quote.  It looks to me that this Penguin is a bit more modern than 1930, possibly the 1960s or later. 

   I had begun to wonder if the book was out of copyright, through not being published in fifty years, and when I searched on the net, I found the book at archive.org, which gives at least the impression that apart from being hard to find, the book is out of copyright.

   I downloaded the epub ebook version to read it and was disappointed to find that it is almost unreadable.  The usual process with an old book is to scan each page with a scanner and then feed the images into an optical character recognition (OCR) program that converts the image into digital text by recognising in turn each letter and punctuation mark in the image.  Obviously, in the case of The Name of Action, the OCR software was dealing with images that were less than optimal, and had produced quite a lot of gobbledegook which the perpetrator had not bothered to edit.

   I went back to archive.org and found a pdf file of the book, which I thought I might use as a basis for a new epub version.  When I opened the pdf file, I found it consisted of photos of the pages, taken with an ordinary camera, and complete with a thumb or finger on many of the photos!!

 

   I would no more have success with this and an OCR application that anyone else.

   I was determined to read the book (to find out why Greene didn't like it!) but if I had to read it on the laptop, I might as well edit it into a readable file as I went.  So, I converted the gobbledegook version back to HTML and edited it in Word, using the pdf pictures as the basis for making corrections.

   Here's a page from the original epub which, although readable, has some words that can't easily be deduced.

   Here's the relevant photo from the pdf file, showing how corrections should be made.

   Here's my edited version of the same passage.  
   
   Corrections were reasonably straight forward for the most part, but there were many pages like the following:

 

And the corresponding pdf photo shows why:

   Not only is it out of focus, it's poorly exposed and the lens is doing strange things to the line ends at top and bottom.  The poor old OCR software wants to work its way along horizontal lines, and in lots of cases it was putting words into the line below or above according to the curves.

   This meant for some pages I had to type out whole paragraphs and occasionally a whole page.  Below is the completed version of the same page:

 

   I estimate it took twenty-five hours to read the book and produce the complete draft. I then converted the HTML to epub and opened the epub book in Sigil to proof read it, since lots of mistakes get through the first time.  This second read I used to look at Greene's writing.

   The chronology is that he wrote The Man Within in 1929 when he was 25 years old, and was happy with it.  He then wrote The Name of Action (1930) and Rumour at Nightfall (1931) and later disowned them. In 1932 Stamboul Train was published and his reputation made.  He wrote five other novels in the 1930s which were successful, including Brighton Rock in 1938.  Could it be that he no longer needed two novels that, in retrospect, disappointed him?

   I can see that The Name of Action* is far from Greene's best, but what I like about it is that his skills, dare I say, were budding.

   Greene probably felt that his plot was trite, not cognisant enough of his times, but in 2013 the plot is irrelevant except for being useful in the construction of the novel, for hanging the various scenes and characters together. 

  This is the market square in Trier, Germany where the book is set.

   On the other hand, the brilliance of Greene's ability to read and portray the minds of his characters, is on show in embryonic form here.  When I was 26, I'd been around a bit, but I had no experience of divorce, adultery, homosexuality, a whole range of things.  Graham Greene's depiction of the relationship between Paul and Anne-Marie Demassener, and the latter's relationship with the hero, Oliver Chant, reveal the sensitivity and skill for which Greene was to become famous.

   In the same way, there are descriptions of the city square and its happenings, and such memorable scenes as Chant with the customs officers on board the (gun-running) barge, which trumpet Greene's developing ability to squeeze the essence out of exotica (to English readers), which he was to make a specialty.

   Some things annoyed me, for example, the condescension of Chant, the hero, to his German surroundings, and particularly to (the real hero, plot-wise) the Jew, Joseph Kapper.  Greene's use of names is interesting.  Oliver Chant is called Chant, or full name, never Oliver.  Anne-Marie Demassener is always called her full name.  Kapper is more often referred to as "the Jew" (and his eyes are deep, black, ebony, and umpteen other devious variations).

   I enjoyed the experience of reading a novel closely enough to be able to dot every "i", etc.  1930s conventions are evident.  For example, "forever" and noone" are rendered as "for ever" and "no one".  The use of ";" and ":" often seem interchangeable or indiscriminate.

   The upshot of all this is that I've read a novel which is probably only worth reading if you have an interest in Graham Greene and how the book fits into his history.  I've produced an epub file of the book which is possibly unique in the world (you can actually read it all) and may or may not be subject to someone's copyright (I promise I won't attempt to make any personal gain from it). 
   As to whether it was all worth it, I'm sure it's not possible to buy an ebook version of this book, but there are two versions of the 1930s hard copy for sale on eBay at the moment, one for $685 and the other in excess of $1,000.  Tell 'em they're dreamin'!

* the title comes from Hamlet's "to be or not to be" soliloquy.

15  July:
I now understand that the Penguin cover above is apparently a fictitious "mock-up", done by the person who photographed the pages, and the book probably is out of copyright. 

Archibald Prize

   Doortje and I went yesterday to see the Archibald Prize finalists at the Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery, the only place in Victoria they are to be shown, as far as I can work out.

   The thirty-nine portraits in the prize shortlist were on display, including the winner, Del Kathryn Barton's hugo.  She is also a previous winner, and worth googling to see her art.

 

   We were taken aback by the crowd and the organisation.  Last time we visited the Mornington gallery, there were only a handful of other people to be seen.  This time, the surrounding parks were full of cars, with attendants directing traffic, and there was a twenty minute to half-hour queue waiting to get access to the building.  They'd thoughtfully provided a great long marquee around the outside of the building so that the queue was "indoors", which was just as well because it was cold and blustery.

   When we finally paid our money and got inside, it was more difficult to get a good look at the paintings than it had been at the Monet exhibition in the city.

   There were works that we liked, of course, and others which might not qualify in some people's minds as portraits.  Do you need to see a person's eyes in a portrait?  Perhaps the definition has changed over the years, or maybe it's harder to come up with something original.

 

   I liked the colour and composition of Michael Zavros' self-portrait of Bad dad, with its reference to Narcissus, and also the dark portrait of Warren Ellis, Helmy's former music teacher.

   The winning painting had extremely fine detail, with every hair of the animal's fur and Hugo Weaving's beard meticulously presented, as well as the background reminiscent of Aboriginal dot art.

   Doortje liked the portrait of Dr Catherine Hamlin AC by Sally Ryan.  The knee rug of knitted squares was beautifully done, as well as the traditional face and hands.

   You can see all the paintings with descriptions of the subject and artist on the Art Gallery of  NSW website, along with a slideshow of the art, here

http://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/prizes/archibald/2013/

Gatsby

   I note that Francis Scott Fitzgerald's novel The Great Gatsby  has been made into a movie.  No, not Robert Redford.  Sorry, another  movie.

   This was brought to mind by the fact that Doortje expressed a desire to read the novel this afternoon, so I delved into my epub files and found it.

   When a pdf file (basically photographs of the pages) is converted to epub, any page headers and footers are included as text, usually in the middle of the sentence running near the top or bottom of the page, which can be disconcerting to someone not used to the phenomenon.  

   For example, you get "The Great Gatsby" written in the middle of the sentence at the beginning of every right-hand page and "Chapter 1" or whatever in the middle of the sentence at the beginning of every left-hand page, and the page numbers at the bottom, also in the middle of the sentence.  When I realised this was the case with The Great Gatsby, I wacked it into a program that I have (Sigil), converted the headers and footers into easily recognised strings and then proceeded to remove them.

   In an hour and a half, the job was done (probably the time it takes to read the novel!), and the epub version looked respectable, and ready for the eReader.

   Then it occurred to me to look in the bookshelf!  It would be very surprising if we didn't have a Penguin of this book from way back.  Sure enough, it wasn't hard to find, and Doortje expressed pleasure at being able to read the real book!

   Anyway, skimming through the novel in Sigil got me to my favourite line in the book, in chapter 7, which is: 

"O, my Ga-od! O, my Ga-od! Oh, Ga-od! Oh, my Gaod!"

   What could be more expressive in an American novel?

    And as far as movies go, The Eye of the Storm (also about rich people) was made into a beautiful ABC telemovie by Fred Schepisi not long ago and the Australian public hardly noticed.

  

   Just to put my biases on the table, I rate George Orwell and Patrick White highly, but not F. Scott.

Tour de France

   The last day of the financial year and last night was the opening stage of the 2013 Tour de France.

   This is an archive photo which just happens to show the Adelaide lad Stuart O'Grady in the left foreground in the dark Saxobank colours, looking after his team-mate, Fabian Cancellara, in the yellow jersey.  It's either 2009 or 2010.  These two were members of the Saxobank team in those years, and Cancellara held the leader's yellow jersey for several stages in both years.

   O'Grady is now the old man of the Australian GreenEDGE team.  He'll turn 40 in a few weeks and his appearance in this year's TdF means he now holds the record for the number of appearances by any rider.  His first TdF was in 1997.

   There are eleven Australians in this year's Tour, the sixth largest contingent and more than the Yanks, Poms and Germans.

   GreenEDGE managed to get some publicity last night by getting their bus stuck under the finish line banner with the race riders only a few kilometres away!  After embarassment and panic, they managed to clear things up before the bikes arrived at full pelt.

   Anyway, I got to bed at 1.30am, and there are another three weeks of late nights and excitement coming up!

Early School Days

   My early memories of school are scant.  I can remember the first day of school.  But I'm not sure if it was my first day, and I'm sure I could colour-in the scant memory with later details from more recent memories.

   Ridley Grove primary school in north-western Adelaide, a light-green weatherboard row of classrooms in the "infant" part of the schoolyard (the main buildings being red-brick), the long enclosed porch with external doors, louvre windows and steps, thick wire hooks on the walls inside holding bags and coats, white-painted wooden hopper windows and an internal door to each classroom.

   Standing in the doorway of the end room, with the teacher and my mother exchanging a few polite words, the release of hands and then whisked away into the room and Mum gone.

   Such a minute scrap of memory which could easily be wrong!  Because I remember so little else, I suspect that I could easily be translating this memory from the day Peter began school, or Lester, or Alan; it could easily be that I was an external witness to this moment, being with my Mum and younger brother before going off to my own classroom, when I was seven or older.  If one of the boys had a hard time on their first day, I might have been empathetic, and the memory imprinted.  Or, one could argue that I remember the scrap because of my personal first-day trauma, but if this is the case, I have no recollection of the trauma!

    All I can truly say is that I remember the doorway inside the porch, Mum being there, and the transfer of child from Mum to teacher.

(click on photos to enlarge)

   This is the main entrance to Ridley Grove Primary School.

   I do have solid memories of school from Grade Two, or when I was about seven.  I remember the classroom had a concertina wall which could be opened and the adjoining classes combined.  I suspect I remember this because it meant fun.  Whenever it happened, and the two classes came together, routine was discarded; a piano might be involved and sometimes hand puppets or figures on felt boards - at any rate, we were entertained, and if required to participate, participation involved singing or jumping around.

I believe this was taken in about 1952 when I was seven.

 

   Independently of the concertina wall, for a while we had two teachers.  I think now that one was probably a student teacher with us for a few weeks;  my memory has the two teachers generating a lot of fun and lively goings-on, so they must have worked well together.  It could just be that when one teacher flagged, the other took over, so that we were kept on our toes!

School and I got on well together.  I never stood out from the class except for good reasons, for example, getting things "right".  But about this time I did have a traumatic experience that's never left me.  When I was about seven, I became sick and spent time away from school, possibly a week but it couldn't have been much more, with mumps or chicken pox.  When I returned to school I had overwhelming feelings that everyone had moved on to new things; while I was away the class might have learnt a foreign language for all I knew what was happening.  My memory is of asking to go to the toilet, standing in the concrete block facing the grey wall of the urinal, and then bursting into tears.  It's likely that someone had to come and get me to resolve the situation but I'm reasonably sure I was OK again in 24 hours!  Fancy being seven!

   There's a gap between then and the next things I can be sure of.  In Grade Four, aged about nine, during a history lesson with Mr Howell I was appointed "monitor".  This meant that I stood out in front of the class, who all had history books open to the same page of an heroic tale involving the British Empire.  My job was to direct a student to read aloud a paragraph of the story, at the end of which they would sit and I would choose someone else to stand and read the next paragraph. (Mr Howell, seated at his desk, was probably marking spelling tests or something similar).  At a certain point, when I may have called on a slow reader, I became completely engrossed in the story, reading several paragraphs ahead and forgetting my job.  The class soon began to realise the situation, their catcalls and jeers attracted the attention of Mr Howell and I was dismissed as "monitor", presumably with a red face!

   Something I've never seen since leaving Ridley Grove is the scale of the dustbowl in the playground that was the "alley ring".  Marbles or "allies" required a few square metres in the dirt with a circle and a baulk line, a bit like hopscotch in area, but there could be literally dozens of games happening simultaneously.  Beside the green of the oval, used at recess time for french cricket (summer) and footy end-to-end (winter), was a vast expanse of bare ground, scraped clean by use of the playground equipment (there was no soft-fall) and the alley ring as big as a tennis court.  At recess time, kids raced out to get the best places and then shuffled around avoiding eye contact with the bullies while the pecking order was re-established, deciding who could play where.  I can remember the scene more than the detail of playing so I was obviously not an expert.  An expert could fire his marble from the baulk line into the ring, hit an opponent and go on to "skin" the ring.  Playing against an expert was like gambling - start with a bag of marbles and try to hold on as long as possible before losing the last one. 

    A landmark which took place in Grade Four was the conversion from writing with pencil to writing with pen and ink.  Many old blokes of similar vintage have written about the pens and nibs, the inkwells in desks and the ink monitors who mixed up the ink powder and distributed it daily to the inkwells.  But I don't recall anyone writing about being left-handed.   I could get away with being left-handed while using a pencil but not with pen and ink.

   Our writing system is designed for a right-handed person.  A right-handed person writes with the pencil point or pen nib pointing roughly towards the top left-hand corner of the page, and with the slope of the letters, drags or pulls the tip to the right and from bottom left to upper right.  With my left hand hooked around like a claw and the pen facing the bottom right corner of the page, I could move from bottom left to upper right and emulate the correct slope of the letters, but I was pushing the pen to the right and unavoidably digging holes in the paper as the ink softened it, and then using my hand to smudge what I had just written before it had any hope of drying!

   When you consider that we had writing lessons daily for several years during primary school, you'll understand that the progression from pencil to pen and ink was a serious matter; I had no hope of satisfactorily mastering the transition.  Over time I learnt not to dig into the paper, and to keep my hand and arm off the fresh lettering.  If my memory is good, ballpoint pens, or biros, were introduced into the school not long before I was ready to leave, and either biros or leaving solved the whole problem.

   Generally speaking, I liked school, fitted in and had little trouble with the the work, which got easier as I got older.

 

********

Goldfields

   During last week we took the new car for a run to the Victorian goldfields.  We took advantage of a winter special on Wotif and stayed for three nights in a cottage at Hepburn Springs.  On the drive up, we turned off the highway at Myrniong and had lunch at the bakery at Trentham, famous for its wood-fired Scotch oven and sourdough bread.

(click on photos to enlarge)

   Here's the cottage at Hepburn Springs.  It was a good size but the heater had trouble coping and there was no wood for the fire.  Otherwise a pleasant stay.

   After brunch the next morning, we headed off to Hanging Rock to see the setting of Joan Lindsay's novel.

   The volcanic formations did create an eerie feel to the place, and the walks were a bit steep, but we managed to get up close.  Then we had a beaut lunch at the cafe and trundled off to the nearby winery to get souvenirs.  We also bought a DVD of Picnic at Hanging Rock and watched it back at the cottage. 

   Next day we visited some of the early goldfields towns.  This is the main street of Clunes.  We had lunch in the pub on the left.

   The earliest gold mining in Victoria was apparently begun at Clunes in 1851 near this site, where the old diggings can be seen.

 

   We took a lot of photos of old main streets.  This one is in Talbot where there is an original shopfront with "Ironmonger and Tinsmith" still on it.

   Here's the main street of Maldon, still with old verandah posts but spoilt a bit by modern cars.

   Doortje can be seen in the doorway of this old place in Maldon.  The verandah roof was a bit skew-whiff, so she was probably taking a risk (but the shop was selling chocolate)!

   I was impressed by the wrought iron on the front of the pub, which I imagine dates from the gold-mining times.

   We also visited the woollen mill at Creswick, and saw the carding machines in action - a bit bigger than my little hand-operated one!

   On our way home we stopped in Bacchus Marsh and at the library they told us about this building, which features as the home of Catchprice Motors in Peter Carey's The Tax Inspector.  Carey spent his early years there when his father had Carey Motors, and I assume the family lived upstairs.

   We had an enjoyable three days, the weather was kind, and the car was a pleasure to drive.

New Wheels

In this 60th anniversary of Volkswagen in Australia, it was appropriate to go for a cruise in one.

No.  Boring.  Start again...

Doortje and I took delivery of our new car today.  It's a Skoda and we're very pleased with it. (click on photos to enlarge)

 Woops! It's not a Skoda Felicia, it's a Skoda Octavia;  ours has a roof.

 And it's not this 1963 Octavia, fifty years old this year.  But it is red!

 Here's the new beast in front of our place.  It was built in 2007 but was compliance-plated in 2009, don't ask me why.  It has a Skoda body and interior built on the VW Golf/Jetta/Audi "platform" and has a 2 litre VW turbo-diesel motor and 6-speed DSG gearbox.  It's done 59,000km.

 The Skoda sedan looks like a sedan but has a huge hatch opening and lots of storage space.  This is the "bells and whistles" Elegance model with everything electric, cruise control, etc.  The wipers are rain-sensitive and the headlights light-sensitive.  Or you can operate them manually!  Oh, and like all the other VWs I've had, the indicator stalk is on the left.  I tried to indicate a left hand turn today with the windscreen wipers, but only once.

 Doortje wants me to mention that it's "corrida red", corrida being Spanish for running, as in corrida de toros, running the bulls = bullfight.  (The Honda has been relegated to the outside weather until it finds a new home).

Our car has two connections to the world of international cycling.  Red Octavias are always used by the race officials in the big stage races like the tour de France and the giro d'Italia (which is on at the moment); and Barloworld VW, where we bought our car, were sponsors of a pro tour team until a few years back, competing in two French tours.

I could bore you silly with lots of detail but one snippet will do.  When we picked the car up the trip computer said we had 1,000km until fuel should be added.  When we got home, 30km later, it said we had 1,060km left, and that's after stop-start driving down Nepean Highway.

Anyway, I think we'll be doing lots more driving in the coming months on our new wheels, and let's hope it's all safe with no mishaps.