IGNOBLE HANDS
The English Understand Wool by Helen DeWitt
New DirectionsAugust 2022Selected by Barbara Epler
Curated by the writer and translator Gini Alhadeff, Storybook ND is a new series of slim hardcover books that look to recreate that childhood pleasure of reading a book from start to finish in a single afternoon. As Alhadeff says, “There's nothing sweeter than to fall, for a few hours, between the covers of a perfect book.” The series, designed by Peter Mendelsund and with covers by renowned contemporary artists, consists of original works of fiction from six international authors. These books, with their riotous individual energies, take the reader from Buenos Aires to Berlin via a mysterious magician, a cyborg child and Hebridean tweed, each telling a story that’s entirely their own.
This book’s protagonist, a 17-year-old girl raised in Marrakech by a French mother and English father, has learned above all to avoid mauvais ton (“bad taste” loses something in the translation). One should not ask servants to wait on one during Ramadan; they must have paid leave while one spends the holy month abroad. All this and much more she has learned, governed by a parent of ferociously lofty standards. But at 17, during the annual Ramadan travels, she finds herself more or less orphaned, and all assumptions overturned. – Barbara Epler
My mother sat on a small sofa in our suite at Claridge’s, from which the television had been removed at her request. She held in her lap a bolt of very beautiful handloomed tweed which she had brought back from the Outer Hebrides. She had in fact required only a few metres for a new suit.
I use the word “suit” because I am writing in English, but the French tailleur – she would naturally think of clothes in French – makes intelligible that one would travel from Marrakech to the Outer Hebrides to examine the work of a number of weavers, perhaps to establish a relationship with a weaver of real gifts. It makes intelligible that one would bring one’s daughter, so that she might develop an eye for excellence in the fabric, know the marks of workmanship of real quality, observe how one develops an understanding with a craftsman of talent. The word “suit,” I think, makes this look quite mad.
She had needed only a few metres, but she had bought the entire bolt to prevent it from falling into ignoble hands. We had stayed overnight on the way north in Inverness, where the shops were full of distinguished tweeds put to debased uses.
– C’est curieux. The Scots have the art, evidently, of converting wool to this glorious stuff, but with this comes a genius for fabricating atrocious garments. One could not have imagined such monstrosities if one had not seen them.
She had returned to London to take the precious lengths to her tailor.
One would necessarily be in London for at least six weeks. Claridge’s had installed, at her request, a Yamaha Clavinova with two sets of headphones in the space previously occupied by the television and the furniture which supported it. It would be mauvais ton to inflict one’s music on persons who have expressed no desire to hear it (the Royal Suite and Prince Alexander Suite, each with its grand piano, surround the instrument with “buffer” rooms, but Maman had been unable to satisfy herself of vertical protection sufficient to shield a sensitive ear). It was a regrettable but necessary sacrifice to accommodate to the inevitable shortcomings of the digital instrument. One cannot, of course, dispense with a piano for more than a day or two; one gets out of the habit of practice with fatal ease. It is one thing to resign oneself in the Outer Hebrides, where arrangements are understandably primitive, but in the heart of London it would be absurd. ◉