Christmas Time: Spontaneous collection - “We live in an interesting place …”

Fennimore, The Bronte Sisters, Edger Poe … reads them now!

Books reach us through various channels: bookshops, libraries (both private and public), social networks and religious and professional groups, and so on.

Sometimes, people find it’s hard to remember the books they have read. Mark Twain famously remarked that “the further he went back the better recall he had of things,” he said.

“It’s whether they happened or not.” 

In Australian Readers Remember, on oral history of reading from 1890 to 1930, based on research by Martin Lyons and Lucy Taska, people were asked to name the author and the novels “they remembered best.” 

As the researchers explain, “the interviewees did so with love, at other times with grimace of anguish.” Lyons and Taska called it “spontaneous recollections.”

Some of the authors I read and reread, while growing up, were Dickens, Fennimore Cooper, Bronte Sisters, Edgar Poe, Wilds, Ion Idriess and many others.

“Why old and wiser is better” says Frank Devine, newspaperman, who read every author mentioned here. 

Columnist Frank Devine (main image) is a New Zealand import and I have admired him for his perspicacity; he was so lucid, so expressive. Says Devine: “However, Australia did not become an interesting place for me until I had read a solid chunk of Henry Lawson, whose beautiful mind shone light on his country.” 

Then, further on in his column, he chats about Colette, the writer who died in 1953. 

You might recall Colette as the author of the play, Gigi; and the stunning Lerner and Loewe film of the same name. I’ve never seen the play, but the colourful, delightful and memorable songfest of the movie literally blew me away with its songs and fine acting. 

The song, Thank Heavens for Little Girls, had Maurice Chevalier, Gigi’s guardian, come up trumps. I’ve liked the Frenchman ever since. 
 

A newsclip of one of Devine’s columns.
 

Says Devine: “Colette made Paris a real place for me but so did Georges Simenon, the detective writer. Colette has embedded Paris in my mind and heart; and it is likely that Simenon has lodged in the liver. New York is O. Henry for me and Spain is Hemingway, perhaps more than Cervantes.” 

In the Australian 14 years ago, columnist Frank Devine, the nomadic journo, wrote that as an early teenager in New Zealand, he read several Mary Grant Bruce’s Billabong books. 

“They made Australia seems like a delightful place and I resolved to go there, have adventures and marry Norah, one of the books’ characters.”

Devine, a former editor of The Australian, described the fact he is the observer “is second nature.” Devine is a remarkable journalist. He has lived in three countries, editing newspapers and magazines.

How do you interpret the role of a newspaper column?, he was asked in 1991.

“Harrison Salisbury. He was a very famous correspondent who became for a while the editor of the feature page opposite the editorials.”

I believe that he paid homage to the fact that other newspapers were following it.

Frank Devine passed away in 2011.

Colette, the writer