(no subject)

One of the great joys of spending a few weeks in Canada is that books are available here in their British editions rather than the US editions; thus far I have acquired a paperback copy of Diana Wynne Jones' The Merlin Conspiracy, and the fifth and sixth Aubrey & Maturin novels. Merlin Conspiracy is decorated with somewhat overblown Celtic knotwork, and the climax of the novel involves a magical unbraiding, so it seemed quite appropriate for a workshop on knot theory. And the British paperback editions of Patrick O'Brian's series have essays in the back; Fortune of War includes an autobiographical note, which contains the following remarks:

It is with a certain reluctance that I write about myself, in the first place because such an exercise is very rarely successful [. . . ]

I felt this more strongly when I was young, and when Rupert Hart-Davis asked me to write the blurb for a collection of my short stories I ended it by saying:

As for the personal side, the Spectator for 1 March 1710 begins, 'I have observed, that a reader seldom peruses a Book with much Pleasure, till he knows whether the Writer of it be a black or a fair Man, of mild or choleric Disposition, Married or a Batchelor, with other particulars of the like nature, that conduces very much to the understanding of the Author.' To gratify this curiosity, which is so natural to a reader, we may state that Mr. O'Brian is a black man, choleric and married.

That pleased me at the time, but now it seems perhaps rather overdone; and no doubt there is an ill-defined zone between the public and the private that can be spoken of without egotism . . .

He goes on to observe that he was a spy in World War II, without giving any details. I suspect he would have gotten on with my grandmother, who was very fond of his novels in her younger days, and also knew how to sail, which I do not.

At any rate, I am amused by his epigram, and would steal the classification system (in which I am black, mild, and though unmarried decidedly taken) for one of my own public bits of autobiography, did copying not move one from the realm of potentially-overdone to burned to a crisp.