The majority of books take you on some sort of journey with the author, from page one to the end. You are with the writer as he or she develops a theme, story, or whatever. I Can’t Stay Long, by Laurie Lee is an anthology of collected writings, and so there is no uniform message or journey, but instead there are extracts from his writings from different periods in his life. The book is divided into three sections, with the first one covering aspects of his childhood in the English countryside, the second one has some more abstract essays, and the final one contains short travel writings.
I was most interested in Part 3, the travel writing, having seen it referenced in a book I reviewed previously, but I learned quite a bit about Lee’s previous times in the first two sections. Sometimes his writing is wonderful. Take this sentence, for example, about reproduction in the countryside:
Sex, in the country, was like grain in the wood, self-renewing as the daily paper, never obsessive, nor crowding the attention, but always going on if you cared to look for it.
I particularly enjoyed the piece on “Appetite” in Part 2, where Lee advocates regular self-denial, on a small scale, in order to appreciate basic things a bit more and so that they don’t become mundane. Part 2 is full of old-fashioned viewpoints, a few of which would probably be questioned nowadays by the more woke among us. Lee’s chapter on “The Firstborn” is delightful. He came late to parenthood, and eventually had a baby daughter. He writes that he would like to protect her from the need to go one better than her parents in order to improve their status by proxy, and he also wants to protect her from the opposite kind of freakishness which can force children into experimental behaviour in order to indulge some theoretical fidget of their parents. He hopes that his daughter can grow up to appreciate the simple, natural things in life. What excellent advice.
The third section, containing extracts from his travel writings, did not disappoint one jot. When it comes to describing travel, he has a wonderful way with words. A simple three day walk in Tuscany, some time spent in Spain, his experiences in Mexico, are all transcribed in a magical way. He undertook such travels many years ago, but the tales come to life under his pen. It quickly becomes obvious how much these places have changed over time. I wonder how many Spanish tapas bars will still offer the following:
As well as the sea food with which any bar will provide you, there will also be a range of delicious hot morsels – fried tongue, baked sparrows, larks on a spit, stewed cow’s belly and kidneys in garlic.
How many people do you know who can write like this?
It was now afternoon, and the landscape seemed empty. The light shone in the heat like glass. I saw an Indian family sitting in the shade of a tree like tropical fish hiding under a rock. But nothing else moved save a few flapping vultures and the wild dog that ran beside them.
Great stuff! It was a joy to read Lee’s description of his trip to Warsaw as a guest of honour at an event celebrating national poet Adam Mickiewicz, where by chance he met Graham Greene. And I enjoyed the chapter entitled ‘Gift From The Sea’ which is about his trip to Holland. He writes about seeing a landscape “flat as a defeated soufflé” and that Holland “…lies coiled on itself like a North Sea prawn, clasping the Ijssel Lake to its heart, and poking a bent antenna of sandy islands in the direction of Scandinavia”. I’ll never be able to see a map of Holland without thinking of that description.
I Can’t Stay Long captures a world of the mid-20th century which is now lost forever. Here’s an interview with Lee, from Thames Television, 1975. Here’s a video with information about Lee from The One Show.