Edizioni Leucasia; cloth-bound; 430 pages

ISBN 88 87809 01 1

£30.00 each (UK post free)

It should be stressed that this is not a cookery book. This is not a matter of regret but simply to alert those that presume otherwise - because they have Patience Gray's Plats du Jour (new out of print) and Honey from a Weed. Food is sometimes described and there is even one recipe. To describe the subjects of the twenty-four essays would need more space than we have here, but they encompass an account of the marble-workers and artists of Carrara; a visit with her sister to pre-war Roumania; an evocative description of a visit to Brittany in 1951/2; some consequences of her journalism on The Observer in the late 1950s and early 1960s when she was writing the Woman's Page; a photographic essay on the architect Palladio; and a tour de force on Irving Davis and the possibilities of reincarnation.

The book has been printed by Rolando Civilla at Presicce in Apulia, working in close collaboration with Patience Gray in what is in essence a private publication. The front cover has a gouache dedicated to the author by her husband, the artist and sculptor Norman Mommens, who sadly died just as this book saw the light of day. A very few copies are only available through ourselves, at £30 each (UK post free). If you would like one please enclose a cheque (made payable to Prospect Books) with your order.

A woman for all seaons

Patience Gray's 1986 Honey from a Weed was set in Mediterranean landscapes where she smithed silver and cooked in austere local styles; it described, with recipes, and almost gone way of life - droughts, fuel dearths, fastings, feastings. It was an original work, close to John Berger documenting peasant land before the final wild asparagus is rooted out, or perhaps Norman Lewis hearing the last voices from an old Spanish sea before the Germans throw down their towels.

Honey made me speculate about Gray - there was something obliquely interesting about this woman and her basil plants among the quarries of Carrera and Naxos, her past mentioned only in rare parentheses as she reduced the tomato crop the vats of sanguine sauce. The presence of her partner, called 'the sculptor' or 'the man of stone', lent her sexiness - he was clearly worth the lack of plumbing in the barns on rocky outcrops where they dwelt. Gray's dishes might just about be approximated with ingredients from Waitrose, but her life was evidently savoury beyond imagination. I was very curious about what she might write away from the pot of fave beans.

Well, over a decade later, here are Gray's collected fascicoli - 'little bundles' or pamphlets, which are her anti-autobiography. They are not scenes arranged in any linear time. Each bundle ties together a discrete event - an encounter with a spooked T S Eliot at a Sussex cocktail party, a gate never opened into a Palladian villa garden in the Veneto - but Gray does not foreshorten her life along the usual convergent lines of narrative. Perhaps the crucial paragraph of the book is her observation aboard a bus of an Italian landscape from a crazy angle that verifies the pre-perspective conventions of Gothic art: what is important zooms up big and close, the rest far away, small.

And that's how she treats her past. From far back, there looms a childhood scene of the 1920s: her father, a reverberatingly military man, lately arrived from Mesopotamia to set up a pig farm on heavy clay near Basingstoke, forces Gray's governess to walk with a tusked boar; the swinish promenade ends with tears in a ditch. From the middle distance of 1958, there is a vignette of Gray's appointment as women's-page editor on the Observer: the phone call interrupts her ironing of a dress in which to fly to Naples, mission unspecified. Soon a certain George Seddon arrives from the Guardian to tell her 'he had discovered Observer readers to be mostly working men living in Victorian back-to-backs in the Mislands' - so the paper begins 'to sing the deceptive but seductive juys of aquisition' and Gray is dismissed: much she cares.

There is an episode form 1964, set in a haunted Venice of flotsam on dazzling waters; Gray walks a roof parapet to find sanctuary after the greedy trafficking in artworks at the Biennale. After a long day at the Rialto among collectors and contessas, she remarks that 'the study of what human beings can do without is hardly begun'. This is her core belief: the necessary desire for less; the richness of the empty; the ultimate luxury of the minimal. Summarising Gray can make her style sound merely anecdotal and her adventures averagely picaresque, which they never are: not even when she couriers an early package tour on the Orient Express, aided only by Mr St Leger, paragon, ex-commando and expert at petit-point. As she writes, the alarms and excursions of Dalmatia 50 years ago drop away, and Gray remembers how happiness 'hummed about the pockmarked sunstruck walls of Diocletian's Palace'. She seems often surprised by happiness, which, she writes, 'embraces the traveller like a cloak'. Perhaps her childhood, spent on tiptoe to avoid promoting more parental reverberations, and her own solitary young motherhood (she discreetly bore and raised two children around 1940) left her unprepared for happiness, although she has a great capacity for enjoying it.

And also for reveries, those subterranean, subaquatic connections now mostly impermissible in print. This book, with sketches and snaps strewn through the text, was originally put out by an Italian house, Edizoni Leucasia, and feels almost like samizdat publishing, because Gray writes of moments unvalued in an aquisitive age.

There is a powerful undertow to all her memories: she mislays a key so archetypal it might be an icon for all locks, for the act of unlocking: she wounds her knee in the Alps and subsides on a clump of marestails, and ancient styptic that heals the cut in hours. And after the death of her friend Irving Davis - bibliophile, insect lover and cook, whose kitchen familier was a bluebottle - she attends a party for the posthumous sale of his volumes; a bluebottle sips from her glass of champagne. These are not stories of enormous changes, nor of journeys with urgent appointments to keep (and there is only a single recipe, moreover one that, in its reliance on techniques impossible to learn from the page, proves the pointlessness of cookbooks). But Gray's bundles are subtly marvelous, and she gets 'very close to the music of what happens'.

A jeweller's treasure chest

Patience Gray was well known 40 years ago as the author of Plats du Jour (now out of print), a book a influential as Elizabeth David's French Provincal Cooking in bringing Mediterranean culture to the English table. For a few years she edited a Women's Page for the Observer, under David Asstor. Then she took off to Italy, reappearing for the British public only once more, so far as I am aware, in a book called Honey from a Weed - until now. Even mow, nobody could say she is playing for publicity on a grand scale, since the book is, in effect, self-published. It must be said that no publisher could have published it as it is, but I don't suppose Miss Gray cares very much about what the publishers think, and so much the better: as a result, she had produced something more personal, marginal and eccentric - and very much grander.

Work Adventures Childhood Dreams is a very satisfying object. It is slightly larger than the normal format and heavier, printed well on good paper and properly bound. A great number of black and white photographs and drawings are reproduced in the text. These vary in quality, but the page design is admirable throughout. On the front cover is a gouache of the author by Norman Mommens, who is often mentioned as artist, mentor, partner. On the back is a photograph of the prow of a small painted boat.

The dismal title is a list of the parts into which the book is divided, but Gray does not really follow her own divisions, perhaps because her life is too coherent to fall into compartments so neatly. The final section, for example, contains only one passage directly concerning dreams, followed by two superb pieces about the autors adoptive Apulia: one recounts a visit by her aged mother, who wanted to take back stories to tell her neighbour in Sussex; the other, called 'The Ladies of Lecce', describes the changes wrought by modernity. The last passage is a brilliant and moving tribute to a dead friend whom Gray fancies has returned as a bluebottle. There was 'something definitely out of tune even before emerging from childhood in my response to convention, something fatally dissonant in the observable models,' she writes, and the truth of this is evident. In the section entitled 'Childhood', she more or less sticks to the subject, but the conventional title is misleading. The first paragraph is just, 'Why I never married.' The second begins, 'The kneeling upset me.' What follows are three vignettes of an adventurous girl growing up in a well-to-do home with three sisters and an irascible father during the Twenties. Together these comprise one of the most vivid accounts of childhood, and the difficulty of becoming an independent adult, that I have read. A large picture of Buster Keaton appears in the middle, for no obvious reason, but I am glad it is there. 'Adventures' contains a passage called 'Marestails', describing a work-trip to interview a jeweler in the hills being Nice. 'Work' begins with a dream-like tale of making a sculpture for a wayside shrine. Yet for all the apparent disorder, a marvelous sense of purpose and integrity pervades this book. The construction, like the title, seems like an afterthought.

Gray has been making jewelry for the last 30 years. She writes about materials she has used, the genesis of shapes, the relationship of the object to the wearer. But when she refers to 'work', as she does often, it is as likely to be that of Norman Mommens as her own. I doubt that it is an accident that the title for the very first passage, 'Patron Saint and Patron', faces a picture of a grim, granite-faced man in a leather apron, surrounded by stone and cacti: Mommens. One could read this book as a hymn to him, although he is never properly introduced; and this is touching and surprising because almost everything Gray writes about is so very original and intriguing - the description of a marble workshop in Carrar, the record of a solitary walking tour in the Veneto in 1961, a meeting with T. S. Eliot at a cocktail party, holidays with the children in Brittany. If there are times when Gray's prose is obscure, these are vastly outweighed by the riches. A random example:

'We enquired for her spouse and were shown into a thin-lipped room whose photographs, planted like artichokes at decent intervals, and some forbidding chairs proclaimed it to be the salotto.'

This is a very special book, which presents the question, what is it that makes one treasure a book? For while Work Adventures Childhood Dreams is remarkable, it is not in every respect a good book: yet, beyond doubt, it is one I shall treasure. It is erratic and wayward, and its episodic nature makes it more suited to dipping into than reading from cover to cover, but it amounts to a magnificent, inspiring testimony to a well-lived life. I bet she's a difficult granny.

Talking to Women of Michelangelo

The only lacklustre thing about Patience Gray's extraordinary new book is its plodding title. Work Adventures Childhood Dreams is a collection of occasional writings - what the Italians call fascicoli - tapped out on a portable Olivetti over several years in a variety of beautiful places. It is a pleasure to look at and hold, being handsomely designed and printed on fine paper by a publishing house composed of Gray's friends. There is an abundance of striking photographs - of people, buildings, sculptures, paintings, jewelry - that usually have something to do with the text. The inclusion of a haunting portrait of Buster Keatonremains a mystery, however. Perhaps he is there because the author reveres him, as she reveres Stendhal, T S Eliot, Jacopo Bassano and Michelangelo, whose frescos in the Sistene Chapel she viewed lying flat on her back while the other visitors craned their aching necks to glimpse the wonders above.

In the 1950s. Patience Gray collaborated with Primrose Boyd to produce Plats du Jour (now out of print), a pioneering work which has been unjustly overshadowed by the more famous books by Elizabeth David. Thirty years were to elapse before her masterpiece Honey from a Weed appeared. This is one of the great, eccentric cookery books: Gray is cavalier in regard to such humdrum concerns as exact amounts and measures, and many of her recipes have to be approached in the spirit of invention and discovery. The late Angela Carter compared Gray's prose to that of Sir Thomas Browne, and with justification since Honey from a Weed has a spiritual dimension entirely absent from most books about eating and cooking. Gray is formidably well-read in at least three languages, yet she shared her erudition with a beguiling generosity.

Work Adventures Childhood Dreams is not an autobiography, though it does contain autobiographical elements. Gray's father, an army officer who had no time for women unless they were sporting does, was the solitary, erasable male in an Edwardian household run by female domestics. Gray conjures up that vanished world with its starched collars and cuffs in a few atmospheric pages.

She writes, too, of her brief career as the first editor of The Observer's Women's Page. She was already at home in parts of Europe that tourists didn't know of, and wanted to include features devoted to history and art. The easy-going Nigel Gosling allowed her free rein, but his successor George Seddon found her too European. She had assumed that the women who read The Observer would welcome a change from fashion and food, but she was told she was wrong. She was too intelligent to keep the job.

In the 1960s Patience Gray met the Flemish sculptor Normen Mommens, and went with him to Greece, to Spain and to Carrara in Italy, wherever there was marble for him to work with. She became a jeweler of a wholly individual kind. They married in 1994, despite her lifelong antipathy to marriage. She was a single parent of two children in the 1940s - another period she evokes here.

My own favourite pieces are the account of her meeting T S Eliot at a grand house in Sussex, when the poet expressed his envy of Henry James; a description of Lecce in the days before boutiques and supermarkets; an essay on Stendhal's travel writings; and the story of her friend Irving Davis's reincarnation as a bluebottle. This is, in every respect, a lovely book.

CONTENTS
Introduction 6
WORK Patron Saint and Patron 15
Patrelle - Les Lilas 29
At Twenty-Two Tudor Street 37
"The Treasures of Greece" 49
Long ago in Carrara 69
Mr Masmer's Workshop 103
Salentine Strands 113
ADVENTURES About your journey and mine 150
About making things 167
Long ago in Balcic 181
Diocletian's Palace 193
Meeting Mr. Eliot 211
Crossing La Vilaine 223
Locmariaquer 235
Marestail 255
Appointment with Palladio 269
CHILDHOOD Mentioned in Despatches 304
Forbidden Subjects 319
Shuttlecock and Battledore 335
DREAMS Ancestors 351
Other Worlds and other Rooms 361
La Scappatina 373
The Ladies of Lecce and "Il Cambiamento" 385
Irving and Immortality 399
Question of Intent 413
Notes 417
Illustrations 423

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Introduction

Writing fascicoli, as I have always thought of them, on and off for years, I tried to pin down the elusive moment. Tapping the keys of a partable Olivetti in my vaulted room opening on a lake of stone, it happens that the moment now leads to writing about then. Sometimes the then-and-now get intertwined.

If you re-read Jean Rhys's story 'The Lotus' in Tigers are Better-Looking you rediscover the advice given to Lotus Heath by her friend: "Whatever you do don't be gloomy, because that gets on people's nerves. And don't write about anything you know, for then you say too much, and that gets under their skin too. Make it up; use your imagination."

Now that I've stopped writing for a moment and begin to gather up the fragments, I realize how excellent is this advice. Unconsciously perhaps I have for the most part avoided gloom. But haven't I bypassed the final instruction?

Writing is an imaginative act whether it is concerned with 'fiction' or with 'fact'. In pondering on the past one does not forget Eliot's phrase: "memories draped by the beneficient spider." Searching for what it was really like one puts some of it in, leaves some of it out. Already in the realm of fiction!

Living far away - same world - but geographically remote from those who speak my native language, I sometimes think of writing as bridging distance, of keeping in touch with friends, my children. That's an excuse.

Writing is a passion, not a life-belt, whatever people say. It is a recurring need to trap the moment which so easily slips away. I think of it as an adventure, taking on board what I care about, what I can share.

Alan Davidson suggested that these ephemera should be put together in a more permanent form between the covers of a book. He calls them "essays". A bundle of essays? The word has long been mixed up with "assay" which has to do with "trying and testing". In this case I'm not testing precious metals but experience. That sounds alright until you recall Ben Johnson's opinion of essayists: "A few loose sentences! and that's all."

In any case, they anticipated a suggestion made by Anthony Burgess in The Observer: that writers, instead of dreaming about seeing their work in print, could, given an electric typewriter and a reproducing machine within reach, print their own work and "hand a copy to a friend". This may have occurred in the early 'eighties; in 1990 when I asked him, he didn't answer.

My first fascicolo was dated 1966. I have been posting them ever since to England and sometimes to Paris and other places as booklets with illustrations. At first I had to send them to a forebearing friend, the painter Lia Rondelli, for reproduction in Turin. But then in 1980 the over-worked printer in Presicce, our nearest village, invested in a copying machine producing clear pictures once a month when the technician came to clean it.

Others followed suit, notably Norman - often present in these pages - producing dreams, Salentine scenes, stories, and childhood memories - The Grown-Ups, with brilliant illustrations. Inspired by him, the painter Edith Schloss made Scenes from la Serra, poems and pen-drawings evoking ligurian summers shared with Alvin Curran, American composer.

Meanwhile Lia Rondelli and Eddie Allen in Turin, in a little warehouse on the Giudecca inj Venice, and sometimes on Primrose Hill, were making a series of "little books" recording their far-out artistic adventures, to give only a few examples.

What are my themes? They divide or overlap under four headings: Work, Adventures, Childhood, Dreams, or so I have arranged them to make a picture, a rather odd one, of living in a remote corner of Europe that until lately was well outside the 'technological dream'.

The result is a kind of patchwork in which time is not strung out in an orderly way and gloom is held at bay as recommended by Lotus Heath's friend. Those with a teasing desire 'to begin at the beginning' can satisfy their curiosity by turning to page 304 where the section Childhood begins.

However far from "ordinary life" the picture may seem, it certainly reflects my life. How happy I would be if it were to prompt others to embark on their own fascicoli.

Spigolizzi, April 1999

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