Poor Enoch Soames (who knows not Enoch Soames?)

I was thinking about Enoch Soames the other day – Max Beerbohm’s fame-hungry poetaster, and the patron saint of self-googlers everywhere. Soames was on a hiding to nothing, perhaps - but Beerbohm’s story makes the false assumption that talent (like murder) will out. In fact, many crimes and talents stay hidden - or get forgotten, which is perhaps more culpable. I’ve been hanging around the children’s lit scene for a while now, but not one reference have I ever seen to Nina Beachcroft – a wonderful writer of the ‘70s and ‘80s. Her nearest equivalent is Penelope Lively – but PL is a CBE, and the subject of at least one heavy academic tome, whereas Beachcroft is forgotten. (Under the Enchanter is a terrific book, for those of us who are aficianados of stories about sisters rescuing enchanted brothers - but that’s a subject for another post.)

And then there’s Anthony Thorne. lady_schrapnell bought his Young Man on a Dolphin at a fete over a month ago, more out of charity (for her heart was ever tender) than from an urgent intention of reading it, I think. Last weekend I picked it up off her kitchen table, and opened it at a few assorted pages. The setting is post-war Venice, and a congress of literary and music stars including Cocteau, Eliot, John Dos Passos, Georges Auric and Yehudi Menuhin. In style, it’s somewhere between Waugh and Anthony Powell, perhaps. It was great! Every random paragraph contained riches:

“But the air was oppressive, the sky changed its expression rapidly, there was something impending which never seemed to arrive. It was possible to believe that there was some extraordinary, even impertinent combination of planets in the heavens—somebody in somebody’s house who had no right to be there.”

Here’s a rather grand bed on a small Italian island:

“And it had lace—yards upon yards of close, intricate lace, obviously hand-made through the storms of several generations. Bygone matrons of Pescano had started making it for daughters in their infancy, and those daughters had continued it for the sake of prospective husbands; and later, their virginity gone, for the sake of children. Quietly and patiently, using the Ave stitch or the Pater stitch, inventing stitches of their own, they had turned the life of Pescano into small patterns. Round the pillow, round the sheets, round the stiff frilling vallances, and a great spread of it as a bed-cover, square joined to square imperceptibly as their days and months and years had imperceptibly merged with no event of any importance to distinguish them, there was a timeless human lace into which had been woven the mixed emotions of many families and the great unvoicable boredom of a sea-people.”

A very English, 1950s complaint:

“Octopus? But you might just as well eat bicycle tyres in tomato sauce!”

So, who is Anthony Thorne? His face takes up the entire back of the jacket, and a very up-and-coming young man he looks, at least in 1952, with a handful of novels in the bag and the promise a bushel more to come. Did he imagine he’d be on everybody’s lips today? I googled him, and found--nothing. He sits with Soames in the outer reaches of oblivion. Well, almost: Abebooks does list his books, and somebody must be collecting them somewhere. It rather looks as if lady_schrapnell might be able to make a 10 Euro profit on the deal.