...really lifts the spirits. I went biking with a mate on each of the last two weekends, enjoying the dry and settled weather. It helps blow the cobwebs away, and we visited a clutch of interesting mediaeval churches in East Sussex last Sunday, following some wonderful back roads, before ending up in a very nice pub (the Six Bells in Chiddingly). Worth going back to at some point, I think...One discovery was the grave of Malcolm Lowry in the churchyard of St John the Baptist in the village of Ripe.
He wrote 'Under the Volcano', one of the most highly regarded novels of the 20th century, but died tragically young, in his forties, thanks to a formidable drinking habit. It would be hard to find a place more different from the setting of the novel: Ripe is as tranquil as rural England gets.
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Him and Mervyn Peake. Two of the Penguin Classic writers that opened up literature to me in the early 1970's. And Herbert Read's "Green Child".
Novels that were full of possibilities and improbabilities.
Under the Volcano is a challenging place to start in terms of opening up literature! I didn't realise, until I went to Ripe, quite how autobiographical it was in terms of Lowry's own drinking problems.
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