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THE READER
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ABOUT THE READER ORGANISATION
Jane Davis, Director, The Reader Organisation
A Reading Revolution!
We used this quotation in 1997 in the very f irst issue of The Reader magazine. The
Reader Organisation didn’t exist then, it was just a few friends who wanted to open
up the exciting experiences we were having teaching the Literature programme in
the Department of Continuing Education at the University of Liverpool. We were
running evening and weekend classes for adults willing to read and make real books
from Saul Bellow to Chaucer, via Shakespeare, H. G. Wells and Ann Michaels.
Twelve years on and this magazine, which has been in continuous production ever
since, is the voice of an independent charity which is bringing about a Reading
Revolution: putting great books in the hands of people who need them.
Amongst other activities, The Reader Organisation is currently delivering 128 weekly
read-aloud shared ‘Get Into Reading’ groups on Merseyside, and supporting the de-
velopment of many more across the UK and beyond, particularly through our Read
to Lead training programme. We work in schools, workplaces, community groups
and old people’s homes, and a great deal of our work is delivered in partnership
with the NHS.
One in four people will suffer poor mental health at some point in their life. Shared
reading of great books is a simple way to provide ‘something real to carry home’.
THE READER
CONTENTS
EDITORIAL ESSAYS
7 Philip Davis 12 Angela Patmore
I Was Brodsky’s Minder Climbing to a Climax
35 Hans van der Heijden
POETRY Literature and Architecture:
10 Face to Face Against Optimism
19 John Kinsella 68 Anthony Rudolf
33 Michael Parker From This Side of Silence, An
41 Omar Sabbagh Autobiographical Work in Progress
66 Tadeusz Dąbrowski
82 D. J. Andrew INTERVIEWS
25 Eric Lomax
THE POET ON HIS WORK The Railway Man
49 Peter Robinson 84 Ron Travis talks to Jane Davis
Behind ‘Otterspool Prom’ The Reader Gets Angry:
Is it Worth Fighting?
FICTION
44 Vanessa Hemingway READING REVOLUTION
Where’s Bob? 57 Josie Billington, Blake Morrison
119 Nigel Bird & Philip Davis
Sea Minor A Discussion on Reading
74 Casi Dylan
Diaries of The Reader Organisation
76 Francis A. Neelon & Grey Brown
Prescribed Reading: The Osler
Literary Roundtable at Duke
4
THE READER
5
THE READER
IN
SCHOOLS
‘TO BE YOURSELF…
A SCARY ASK WITHIN SCHOOL WALLS’
–CASI DYLAN, DIARiIES OF THE READER ORGANISATION, p.74
6
editorial
Philip Davis
7
editorial
8
editorial
Russia in 1964 for the crime of being a poet – or as the judge called it
‘a parasite’.
Judge: Who recognises you as a poet? Who enrolled you in the
ranks of poets?
Brodsky: No one. Who enrolled me in the ranks of human-
kind?
You did not qualify as a poet, said the judge, you didn’t even finish your
high-school studies.
Brodsky: I didn’t think you could get this from school.
Judge: How then?
Brodsky: I think that it… comes from God.
I remember Brodsky saying to me, ‘I used to be one of the Strong’ – it
was across a drink in a Liverpool bar – ‘But not now.’
I was Brodsky’s minder. For two days. He had taken a dislike to
several of his academic hosts, my colleagues, and saw at once it was a
dislike with which I greatly sympathised. So I was employed to keep
them off him and guide him about. But he was a heavy smoker, ruth-
lessly pulling the filter off his cigarettes before lighting them, and
couldn’t by then walk far round Liverpool. I got him to his reading
where he read his English poems, but halfway through he suddenly
stopped and apologetically said that this was boring. Abruptly he began
to read in Russian instead. I don’t believe those people who tell you the
sense still comes across even if you don’t understand the language. But
what came across was Brodsky’s singing passion, the sense of his lost
homeland, and the great crying tradition of Russian declamatory verse.
Some people are events (on which, see Anthony Rudolf on Pavese and
Geoffrey Hill in this issue), and Brodsky was one such. In his sudden
enthusiasm he talked about buying a house in Liverpool but it was a
momentary impulse. ‘Phyeel’, he said to me as we parted, ‘We have to
survive’. As Angela Patmore’s essay makes clear, this issue is about emo-
tional force and about creative survival – hence also the interview with
Eric Lomax. But Brodsky himself didn’t live long after that.
Norman Malcolm says that when Wittgenstein died, his last words
were ‘Tell them I’ve had a wonderful life!’ When I think of his profound
pessimism, writes Malcolm,
the intensity of his mental and moral suffering, the relentless
way in which he drove his intellect, his need for love together
with the harshness that repelled love, I am inclined to believe
that his life was fiercely unhappy. Yet at the end he himself
exclaimed that it had been ‘wonderful’.
9
Face to Face
POET BIOGRAPHIES
10
Peter Robinson Tadeusz Dąbrowski D. J. Andrew
MICHAEL
PARKER D. J. ANDREW
11
essay
climbing to a climax
Angela Patmore
12
essay
13
essay
because the body serves the brain, and in all its sub-systems recognises
its master. ‘Frisson’ is that exhilarating tension without which sex can
be staid, and humans have turned sex into an art form just so that they
can have lots of CCs. Animals just use it for making little animals.
Thrill-seekers are generally not trying to kill themselves. The edge-
technician, the danger-controller, is going for the CC. Anyone willing
to freefall, sky-dive, fly, water-ski, leap or climb may achieve one: the
surfer boring through the coil of a wave, the skier or speeding motorcy-
clist, senses forced against the wind, just on the knife-edge of control.
14
essay
15
essay
the science on Near Death Experiences. What he did know was that
in extreme emotional situations the brain may suddenly convulse its
powers and produce something rapturous, as great writers do.
Perhaps the most famous example of a fictional epiphany comes
from Charles Dickens. In A Christmas Carol hardened miser Scrooge is
subjected to disturbing visions, the most harrowing concerning his own
death. Scrooge is converted by all this terror into a joyous fellow who
gives his money away and stands on his head. Scary movies also carry
the hallmarks of the CC art form, its patterns and devices. Alfred Hitch-
cock was known as the Master of Tension. His movies focused not on
gore, but on unsettling the viewer. He wanted to ‘make the audience
suffer as much as possible’. The resolution, when it came, was so much
more satisfying. Quentin Tarantino once boasted, ‘We’re gonna sell you
this seat but you’re only gonna use the edge of it.’ Half the frightened
moviegoer wants to escape, whilst the other half wants to know what
happens. The climax and pay-off leave him flushed and laughing.
Classical music transcends linguistic and cultural barriers and speaks
directly to the brain. It has been composed by geniuses over the centu-
ries to invoke the cerebral climax. Its complex notations are a formula,
exquisitely developed, for producing tension and pressure in sounds
and sequences, climbing, falling back and then climbing ever higher, to
one CC after another. Listeners can both hear them and feel them. The
work of Frances H. Rauscher and colleagues at the University of Califor-
nia-Irvine, who published their initial findings in Nature in 1993, found
that the brain-functioning of college students improved after listening
to Mozart’s Sonata for Two Pianos in D Major. Scientific research on
‘the Mozart Effect’ has proliferated. Mozart and Bach have been found
to improve the spatial learning of schoolchildren. In six London primary
schools, Verdi’s Requiem has been used to tone up concentration and
intelligence in 2,000 pupils and short bursts of Mozart have been found
to reduce epileptic fits.
The brain’s powers are heightened during CCs, and scientists now
have a good idea why it navigates us towards them, rewarding us with
goosebumps and spine-tinglings when we are willing to undergo a
particularly big ‘tension loop’. Even involuntary loops that may occur
during personal crises can provide the necessary tension-resolution
pattern for an epiphany, a brainwave. Survivors of disasters have report-
ed experiencing visionary joy or clarity and a profound sense of peace.
Why? At the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico, Nobel Prize-winning
scientists like Murray Gell-Mann, Philip Anderson and Kenneth Arrow
study complex systems like piles of sand, the money markets, artificial
intelligence and insect swarms. All exhibit ‘emergence’ – at the highest
point of tension, and on the very edge of chaos, they change gear and
16
essay
goes to the large muscles, which we may need for fighting or running
away, and to the brain, which dilates its blood vessels and literally has a
rush of blood. It is about to orchestrate connections. An electrical charge
goes down the axon of each affected nerve cell and crosses the synaptic
gap to neighbouring cells and circuits, sometimes on a very large scale.
The bigger the connection, the bigger the buzz we experience. The brain
is signalling to us that it is making sense of our reality.
There are now international congresses on the benefits of the arts
to mankind, from psychodrama in prisons to poetry therapy for autistic
children. In an age so dominated by the sciences, the arts are beginning
to re-emerge as needful to human health and sanity. Without them,
a society becomes unbalanced, unhealthy, brutal and mechanised. In
cerebral terms, it lurches to the left. ‘Stress management’ is in many
ways the technical, left-brain theory of how to manage emotions and
keep them under control. But emotions make up the richness of human
experience and they need to be understood, not lobotomised. The arts
facilitate this, and they provide not just relaxation – the mantra of stress
management – but resolution, which is infinitely more satisfying.
17
For copyright reasons we are unable to offer John Kinsella’s
poems in the online edition of the magazine.
18
For copyright reasons we are unable to offer John Kinsella’s
poems in the online edition of the magazine.
19
poetry
20
your regulars
on the train
Ian McMillan
H
towards heaven.
ere I am in my office, ready to do a bit of work. I’ve
got my papers and my books and my notebook and
my cup of tea. And the weather is amazing, clouds
rushing across the sky and the sun briefly dazzling
me then going back into hiding. And Grantham is
whizzing by like a speeded-up film, its tall church spire pointing up
21
your regulars
pool and that it promotes all kinds of reading and writing generated in
places a long way from the perceived centre of things.
Today on the 07:30 I’m not going to The Verb because we’re off for the
summer; I’m off recording something else, but the train still feels fa-
miliar and comfortable. I like to sit on the little bench we have between
carriages on the East Coast Main Line trains. It’s like having your own
suite: I’ve got a seat, a view, a toilet, and a person with a trolley who
likes to serve me tea.
On the train today I’ve got some excellent books and a guilty pleas-
ure; I’ll come to the guilty pleasure later, somewhere near Stevenage. I
always grab too many books for the train, thinking that just one slim
volume of poems won’t be enough when of course it will be, so conse-
quently I dip between books as the train zooms on. I’m really enjoying
Antony Dunn’s new collection Bugs from Carcanet’s Oxford Poets series.
I’ve been a fan of Antony’s careful and precise verse for years; I think
he really enjoys celebrating the uncelebrated, in a way that many poets
threaten to but don’t quite bring off. Many of the poems in Bugs are
about just that: insects, grubs, creepy-crawlies and the things that can
threaten to get under your skin. Just like poems can. The work is clever
and allusive and elusive; take ‘Flea Circus’, for instance, ostensibly about
some flea circus owners accidentally letting the fleas escape (‘we’d never
be sure which of our number / left the Top unhooked; by trick or blunder
// let our stars seize the chance, make a clean jump / out through the
countless non-doors of the trunk’) and having to fake the fleas’ tricks,
and eventually becoming reluctantly used to the fakery (‘some of us re-
sented living off tricks // and felt in the itch of our bad-feeling / the bite
of our great hope’s flight, the bleeding, // the drop-by-drop drain of a life
gone thin. / The fleas somehow, still, get under our skin.’) but written
in a way which seems to be also about the writing of poems, about how
writing can filter and remake experience. In other words, am I really
experiencing Newark because I’m going past it at a hundred miles an
hour? And of course Antony lives in York, part of The Provinces. A con-
trast to Antony Dunn (and he lives near Cockermouth, that’s Zone 47 on
the Tube map) is the splendid Jeremy Over, a restless experimenter and
game-player with language. His book Deceiving Wild Creatures carries on
the exhilarating work he began in his first book A Little Bit of Bread and
No Cheese. There’s prose here, and lists, a Raymond Chandler pantoum
(‘Nothing more happened. / I had another hunch. / I poked it under her
nose, / then I ran away. // I had another hunch. / That stopped the door
closing, / then I ran away. / I don’t know why.’) and a fantastic example
of a Haibun, a rarely-seen Japanese form that can be defined as a com-
bination of prose and haiku poetry, often charting special moments in a
person’s life. Over’s Haibun is in memory of Roger Deakin and I’ll quote
22
your regulars
the opening section because the writing is lovely and it carried me over
an unexpected stop just south of St. Neots: ‘The river’s quieter now.
So I can hear it. Before, further upstream where the river rushed over
and around boulders and down falls, the sound seemed to fill my head
completely – the whole landscape too. Now, because I can hear other
things, like the thin calls of some goldcrests and the occasional piping
of a wagtail, I can also hear the river. // to the wagtail / the river sounds
like / the front door swinging open.’
And now that the train is moving again and gathering speed, it’s
time for my guilty pleasure: The New Yorker. I love The New Yorker maga-
zine for the font and the listings of jazz clubs and galleries that I’ll never
get the chance to go to, and the cartoons and the poems and the articles
and, above all, the stories. The stories are always immaculately written
and somehow glamorous, especially the ones about New York; they
contain loving paragraphs of description of Manhattan and Brooklyn
and somehow, in ways that I can’t quite define, they contain essential
truths about the way we live. I recently bought a collection called Won-
derful Town, stories about New York from The New Yorker, and reading that
book is for an old unbeliever like me the equivalent of dying and going
to heaven. There are stories in it by great stylists like John Cheever and
James Thurber, and lesser-known but equally New Yorkerish writers like
the magnificent (and magnificently named) Hortense Callisher, Jean
Stafford, Lorrie Moore, Peter Taylor, John Updike and William Maxwell.
Let’s have a look at this latest issue, as the train begins to gather speed
for the final run-in to King’s Cross: there’s a beautiful cartoon with a
man on a beach saying to his wife who is holding a trowel and a fork
‘It’s a beach, Roslyn! There’s nothing to garden’. That cartoon is like a
story or a poem, brimming with narrative and observation and those es-
sential truths about the way we live that I mentioned earlier. There are
poems by John Ashbery and Bruce Smith, and a story by Orhan Pamuk.
They’ll keep me going on the trip home. And the great thing is that a
subscription to The New Yorker isn’t all that expensive. Not for all that
great writing and all those epic covers.
We’re there now. King’s Cross. Time to pack up and walk out into
the city, pretending I’m in an Antony Dunn poem, or a Jeremy Over
haibun, or a New Yorker story...
23
ERIC LOMAX
BY THE OLD BRIDGE, BERWICK-UPON-TWEED
© Joe Payne
24
interview
N
‘
ow, I had better warn you, the alarm clock will go off
at twelve o’clock but don’t worry, it won’t mean your
time is up, it is just to remind me to take my medi-
cation’, says Eric Lomax, laughing, as I settle into a
chair in his comfortable sitting room in the heart of
Berwick-upon-Tweed. At 90 and not in the best of health, he has agreed
to see me to talk about his reading life. The first things I see are two
enormous bookcases on either side of the fireplace; the best part of one
shelf taken up with different editions of his extraordinary autobiogra-
phy, The Railway Man. Despite age and illness he is a large presence and
the imposing armchair in which he sits adds to that impression. His
wife Patti had greeted me at the door and she stays with us throughout
our conversation.
Eric Lomax grew up, an only child, in Edinburgh; quite a solitary boy
who became passionately and incurably interested in trains and railways.
Ironically, he found himself in 1942 a prisoner of the Japanese, working
on the infamous Burma railway. The story, which he tells quietly and
25
interview
with great dignity in The Railway Man concerns the consequences of his
secret construction of a radio and a map. When the Japanese discovered
them, he was subjected to prolonged torture and captivity in a series of
appalling prisons. After the war he lived with all the emotional and psy-
chological damage festering away inside him until, more than forty years
later, he encountered Helen Bamber at the Medical Foundation for the
Care of Victims of Torture. Shortly after, he was given a pamphlet written
by the man who had acted as interpreter while he was tortured; a man
who had since become the focus of his pent up hatred. The last part of
his story concerns his journey towards a meeting and eventual reconcili-
ation with Nagase at the River Kwai Bridge.
He said to me ‘Fifty years is a long time, but for me it is a
time of suffering. I never forget you, I remember your face,
especially your eyes.’ He looked deep into my eyes when he
said this. His own face still looked like the one I remembered,
rather fine featured, with dark and slightly hidden eyes; his
wide mouth was still noticeable beneath cheeks that had
sunken inwards.
I told him that I could remember his very last words to me.
He asked what they were and laughed when I said ‘Keep your
chin up.’
He asked if he could touch my hand. My former interroga-
tor held my arm, which was so much larger than his, stroking
it quite unselfconsciously. I didn’t find it embarrassing. He
gripped my wrist with both of his hands and told me that
when I was being tortured – he used the word – he measured
my pulse. I remembered he had written this in his memoir. Yet
now that we were face to face, his grief seemed far more acute
than mine. ‘I was a member of Imperial Japanese Army; we
treated your countrymen very, very badly.’ ‘We both survived’,
I said encouragingly, really believing it now.
(from The Railway Man)
A large part of what is now The Railway Man was written in Singapore
in 1945 and completed in the 1990s. A true story of a man who walks
through horror towards a realisation of the possibility that the things
that make up the best of humanity, might finally overcome the worst.
But I had not come to talk to Eric about torture or even forgiveness. All
that publicly needs to be said about that is unflinchingly told in his book;
the rest is not my business. I wanted to talk to him about the importance
of books and reading in his life, both at times of war and in peace.
One of the most intense events of my childhood was finding
the secret chart of ‘The Great Discoveries’ hidden inside the
26
interview
Angela Macmillan: You mention that in the 1920s and 30s your father was a
member of a reading circle. How much do you remember about that?
Eric Lomax: Oh yes, I attended one or two of those meetings aged
about nine or ten. I was a bit of a pushy infant. Reading circles were
not uncommon at the time. In the 1920s and 30s remember there was
no television and practically no radio, just personal contact and com-
munication. This particular reading circle consisted of about nine or
ten people, mostly men, perhaps a few ladies, who would gather in
somebody’s house every two or three weeks and settle in for the after-
noon, with tea. One afternoon I remember, for example someone gave
a talk on Arnold Bennett and one or two of his books were produced
and passed round and others commented on their experience of reading
Arnold Bennett. Even for a small boy like me it was very interesting,
though I must have stuck out like a sore thumb. But I don’t think any
of those reading circles survived the war.
AM: Your mother wrote essays and poems and read a lot of books and, I’m
quoting, ‘She gave her child a sense of mystery’. [Eric laughs heartily] Was
your house full of books?
EL: Oh yes, my father had an enormous collection, quite varied, mostly
historical; not very much historical fiction; nobody in my parents’ house
approved of that. We thought fiction distorted the real story.
AM: Your school years at the Royal High School don’t seem to have been particu-
larly happy. Did you come out of them with any love of books?
EL: The straight answer to that is that I don’t think anything we did in
school encouraged, accidentally or otherwise, an interest in reading. I
can remember spending hours and hours dealing with Milton, ‘Il Penser-
oso’ and ‘L’Allegro’, and even now I can do blocks of the shorter poems. I
recall yet sitting in the classroom and all of us chanting in unison ‘Hence,
vain deluding joys, / The brood of Folly without father bred!’ and all the
rest of it. I can’t think of anything more calculated to put us off for life
and I don’t think I was the only one with that feeling towards organised
English. But we got over it in time. How did you get on Patti?
27
interview
Patti Lomax: Oh, I had to learn poems by rote but the reading of books
I can’t recall at all. It was handwriting yes, and spelling.
EL: I remember having Walter Scott and Robert Burns hammered down
my throat until I was sick and tired of them and to this day I can’t stand
Burns. Scott is a different matter because, after all, he had been at the
Royal High School too.
AM: Later on you describe a period when you were in the very worst prison,
Outram Road in Singapore, and although you shared a cell, you were not permit-
ted to speak to your companion. Nevertheless you did and you would sometimes
recite poems to each other.
EL: Yes, we had to gauge how far away the guards were by their foot-
steps. And then have a short talk and when we heard them approach
again we would look all innocent. I shared a cell with an Australian
who had been brought up by the Christian brothers. He produced ‘Abou
Ben Adhem’ by James Henry Leigh Hunt, which I had not heard of and
in exchange he got ‘Il Penseroso’ and ‘L’Allegro’, and so on. [We laugh
together at the irony.] And I remember reciting ‘The Lady of Shallott’, to
the great mystification of this Christian Brothers’ boy from the Austral-
ian outback. To this day I think it is a marvellous poem.
AM: I am glad she was there with you. Did you get anything from the poetry?
EL: I think we did, though I find it difficult to specify what that was.
AM: All through your life, with the exception of Outram Road, you have had your
Bible with you. You talk about reading the New Testament through with a book-
mark, again and again. Have you always gone to the Bible for the same thing?
EL: I think the answer is probably no. That is a difficult question to
answer.
28
interview
I ask if I can read a bit of his own book back to him and he follows in
his own copy.
AM: This is when you had been moved to the notorious Changi prison which was
surprisingly less terrible than Outram Road:
There were enough books in Changi to provide an amazing
and eclectic library, endlessly circulating until the books fell
to pieces: religious tracts, Victorian novels, the works of Hugh
Walpole, Somerset Maugham, the Powys brothers and Arnold
Bennett, moving from hand to hand in the hot sweaty prison-
city…
EL: Every book lost its fly leaves, the blank pages and even some of the
preliminaries would all be removed and used for making cigarettes, so
every book we had started at the essentials.
There was a book bindery at the prison, and the tattered
volumes were kept together with heavy, home-made gums
made from rice and water or stewed bones, and patched up
with cannibalised prison records, of which there were reams.
Charge sheets for Indian privates written in copperplate
in happier colonial days became the endpapers of works by
Bunyan and Blake or Defoe. The adhesive still feels solid,
heavy and crude, but also very strong; I have some of these
books with me now. They are the most well-thumbed, eroded
books I have ever seen, worn to a softness and fragility, and
made compact by sheer use, but they seem indestructible.
EL: Reading made all the difference to our prospects of survival. There
were a lot of individuals, as in any walk of life, who never read a book
from one year to another. They had difficulty in surviving but anyone
who had access to reasonable quality books could keep occupied for
hours. In Changi and also in Kanchanaburi we had a fair number of
books. Nearly everyone had at least one book and they were swapped
around but you couldn’t really choose what you got, you just swapped
and took a chance on it.
AM: ‘Reading was an important part of normality and dignity.’, you write. But
when you came out of Outram Road where they had taken every possible thing from
you including your name, you found that you had also lost the ability to read.
29
interview
EL: I had not read so much as a single word for months. I didn’t know
that you could lose the ability to read. I recall the struggle to learn to
read again.
PL: You had been very, very ill and malnourished. I think it was prob-
ably physical.
AM: On a happier note, it seems a beautiful coincidence that when you and
Patti met, it should have been on a train on your return from a book auction and
furthermore, when you talked, you discovered that Patti had run an antiquarian
bookshop in Montreal. What wonderful bookish / railway connections!
EL: Yes, see what I picked up at the auction!
EL: Second World War in the Far East. Non-fiction. Industrial and ma-
terial history – lots of books on railway history, engineering history, on
what I would call ‘material history’. I don’t read much fiction now but I
have some copies of books I read and liked in Changi for you. They are
not original Changi copies, I bought them one by one after the war.
From a pile by the side of his chair Eric passes me a copy of Robinson of
England by John Drinkwater, the story of a man in love with his country.
We look at a copy of England, Their England by A. G. MacDonnell and Eric
laughs to remember how everyone in Changi knew the famous chapter
of the village cricket match. A Tribute to England by Martin Gilkes is an
anthology of poetry, essays, architecture, history. I try to imagine that
hot remote prison; the prisoners with those patched-up, worn, valuable
books, thirstily drinking in scenes of home. Perhaps:
As I lie
Abed between cool walls I watch the host
Of the slow stars lit over Gloucester plain,
And drowsily the habit of these most
Beloved of English lands moves in my brain.
‘The Midlands’, John Drinkwater
AM: You often mention talking to various prisoners about books; did you have
organised reading groups in Changi?
EL: No it was all very informal although we would exchange notes and
have discussions, and so on, but people forget that in such a situation
no matter what you did, at the back of one’s mind, 24 hours a day there
was the thought: are we going to survive? That was the dominant factor:
30
interview
The alarm goes off. The clock that has been ticking away behind me
chimes the hour loudly and stylishly and we have a medicinal break.
AM: Would you say books have played an important part in your life?
EL: Yes, absolutely. I have never been much interested in sports or games
and socialising. One of the books I mention is the Stanley Gibbons
Stamp Catalogue. You see I can read that just as if it is a novel. Now
some people think it very odd that I can read a stamp catalogue. And
here is an example of something I like: Rupert Brooke. Everyone knows
‘If I should die think only this of me’. But I don’t think anyone has ever
heard of this one except me: The Christ of the Indian Road by E. Slatey
Jones. It is about missionary work in India and I read it from cover to
cover in Changi. It was totally different from anything else I could get
my hands on.
AM: My final question and it is a silly one really: if your house was burning down
and you could only save one of your books, what would it be?
EL: Oh. Could you give me a little time to think about that. If I could
defer that question – I want to take some care about it. It would not be
the Bible.
AM: Of course. I brought three poems with me. They are all about how impos-
sible it is to imagine a world without books.
EL: Oh that would be terrible.
AM: I will leave them with you for when you have a moment.
31
interview
EL: Oh no, I’m doing fine, I think I am recovering. [We laugh.] No, I
am quite serious.
PL: Can I make a point? I think, listening to Eric, that reading has really
stretched his mind and in a sense even this interview has done that.
EL: These books [pointing to one of the bookcases] are all about the
Second World War in the Far East and there are a lot more upstairs as
well. We had a sale of surplus books which took place in London. There
are very few auctions of one man’s library and I provided 700 lots for the
catalogue. The auction raised a great deal of money and it was entirely
my surplus books.
AM: How did it feel for such a great reader of books to produce your own book?
When you first held it in your hand, how did you feel?
EL: Well, I remember sitting in that chair there where you are. In those
days [1996] the post came early in the morning. I opened the parcel
and immediately rang Neil Belton the editor at the time to tell him the
book had just arrived, and he said, ‘Do you know what time it is? Half-
past seven.’ He later made the point that I must have been very pleased
with it.
PL: You behaved as if you just couldn’t believe it.
As I walk back down the garden path I remember the epigraph for The
Railway Man:
Eric Lomax has very recently written the introduction to a new edition of A Town
Like Alice, Nevil Shute (Vintage Classics, 2009)
32
poetry
michael parker
Apocrypha
33
poetry
34
essay
Hans van der Heijden is an architect and director of BIQ in Rotterdam, the
Netherlands. One of his designs is the restoration and extension of the Blue-
coat arts centre in Liverpool
35
essay
36
essay
the Saal (drawing room) is important as a place both for reception and
music performance. Karl Wittgenstein had a reputation as a supporter
of musical talent and music was a driving force in his family.
In the Stonborough House these domestic rituals have radically
been intensified by reducing the formal vocabulary of the architecture.
Unlike the almost baroque precedent of the father’s house, the Ston-
borough House is Spartan in appearance. Decorations and expressive
finishing such as carpets, floor and wall paintings are absent, thus rein-
forcing prime architectural choices: the spatial sequence along the axis
of symmetry of the lobby and the dominance of the statue in the route
leading upstairs.
In all senses of the word the Saal is a pivotal space in the Ston-
borough House. Unlike the vestibule-staircase-lobby sequence, the Saal
does not refer to a specific pre-existing arrangement, but is carefully
manipulated within the space plan of the house and accurately posi-
tioned between the lobby and the private rooms of Margarethe.
Another Wittgenstein sister, Hermine, has extensively drawn both
her father’s and her sister’s house. A meticulous ink drawing shows
the staircase with the statue of her father’s house. By comparison, the
interior of the Stonborough House is rendered far less precise and more
spherical, using charcoal in most cases. The drawings show how the
house was occupied in a slightly disorderly fashion. It does not lose its
37
essay
38
essay
39
essay
40
poetry
omar sabbagh
41
poetry
Prodigy
42
poetry
Message in a Bottle
For Claudia H
43
fiction
where’s bob?
Vanessa Hemingway
I t was the door slamming that woke Wilson. He never heard any car
pull up, no key in the lock. Just the slammed door and June already
inside the dark house. So he’d blown it. He knew right away there
was nothing left to do but play it out. What else could Wilson do?
Nothing.
June had some mail in one hand, keys in the other, a purse as big
as a small ice chest hanging off one shoulder. She went straight for
the garbage in the cupboard under the sink. From where Wilson was,
it looked as if she was just checking it – maybe to see how full it was –
but probably she’d thrown something in. Then she went to the message
machine by the phone – no messages – she only brushed the buttons
with her fingers and then ran the same hand through her long dark
hair. From the refrigerator she pulled out a can of diet cola, popped the
top, started toward Wilson, and stopped dead in her tracks.
‘Wilson? Jesus, you scared me. What are you doing lying there in the
dark? Is Bob home?’
‘Hey, June,’ Wilson said loudly. When he sat up, he knocked over the
beer he’d set on the floor sometime earlier. ‘Christ, I’m sorry.’
June went into the kitchen to get some paper towels, and probably
Wilson would have snuck out right then, but she kept an eye on him,
walking with her head turned around. When she came back, she flicked
44
fiction
on the lamp next to the sofa and kneeled down on the floor to clean up
the mess. ‘It’s a little early isn’t it?’
Wilson looked at her like he didn’t have a clue.
‘To be passed out on our couch. It’s only four-thirty,’ she said.
‘Where’s Bob?’
‘It’s four-thirty?’ Wilson said. ‘Damn. You just get off work?’
And, for some reason, that really annoyed her.
‘Yeah, I just got off,’ she said. ‘I just got done spending the whole day
on my feet, cleaning up after people who can’t take care of themselves,
and now here I am at home, on my knees, doing the same thing.’
‘Take a load off,’ Wilson said. ‘I got it.’
But she was already up, bringing the wet towels to the sink, slam-
ming the cupboard door where the garbage was. She opened the
refrigerator. ‘There’s another. You want it?’
Wilson tried to remember – she was wearing a pair of those white
lace-up shoes with the chunky rubber soles. What had Bob told him?
She wiped people’s asses for a living. A nurse’s aide. June likes to serve,
Bob had said, more than once, grinning over a beer at the Rusty Nail.
‘Sure,’ Wilson told her. He could use another.
She brought the beer over, scooted a cardboard coaster with a color
ad for Lott’s BBQ in front of him on the table, set the can down on
it, said, ‘I’m going to wash up,’ and moved toward the bedroom door
behind him.
There was only his body between June and the bedroom door.
Wilson did the first thing that came to him, and very quickly – because
that was the way his mind worked – he decided it was the only thing he
could have done. He had the crazy notion even Bob might have thought
so. Wilson stood up and kissed her.
And who’d have known Wilson could move so fast in the state he
was in? It surprised the hell out of both of them. Or that June was as
strong as she was, because the next thing Wilson knew, after his lips
brushed something soft and lemon-smelling, he was on the floor, his
head cracked against something hard, sharp, and solid.
‘Shit, Wilson. What’s the matter with you?’
He looked for her, and there was the coffee table edge, close up.
‘You’re bleeding,’ she said. ‘On the rug.’
Wilson let his head back down when he saw she wasn’t going toward
the bedroom, but to the kitchen instead. There were the sounds of water
running in a metal sink, paper towels ripped from the roll, her moving
back across the carpet in those enormous white shoes.
‘Jesus, you got a gash. Hold this,’ she said, handing him a wad of
paper towels with little dancing bears printed in pink and blue. ‘Not
like that. With some force. To stop the bleeding.’ She started working at
45
fiction
the carpet, scrubbing, her breasts jiggling inside her t-shirt. But Wilson
obviously wasn’t doing it right because she left off with the carpet, put
one cool hand along the left side of his face, and started pressing with
the other hand and a wad of paper towel on his cut.
‘Does it hurt?’
‘No.’ Wilson couldn’t feel a thing.
‘It will tomorrow.’ She let go of his head and sort of half-smiled. ‘I
always wondered how I’d do in the heat of the moment, if I had to.’ She
sounded satisfied. And then angry. ‘What the hell were you thinking?
Just how drunk are you? And where’s Bob? Were you two at the bar the
whole day? He’s still there, isn’t he,’ she said, like she knew it was true.
‘Did he put you up to this?’ She started to stand up, but Wilson kept his
hold on her.
‘Maybe,’ Wilson said. ‘Damn, you smell good. Kiss me again.’
‘You’re crazy.’
‘You’re pretty.’
‘Bob would kill you.’
It was something Wilson had thought of, but God knows, the situ-
ation was complicated. ‘Let me worry about Bob, baby.’ She let Wilson
kiss her. Probably he reeked of stale cigarettes and beer, but it couldn’t
be worse than what she had her nose in all day at the Paradise Villa,
the old folk’s home. That was where she worked – Wilson remembered
now.
‘Okay,’ she said, pushing him back a little. ‘I need to wash up. I’ve
got the day all over me.’
‘I like you,’ he said. ‘I like your day.’ Wilson was just mumbling
because he’d forgotten why he was there. All he wanted was to get in
her pants. Somehow he’d convinced himself that’s where the lemon
smell was coming from. In her pants, under her t-shirt. It was in her
skin. Part of her anatomy.
‘You’re drunk,’ she said, pulling away, knocking his head once more,
this time against the leg of the table. ‘My day was shit. You like my
day? You like me? You’re a shit,’ she said, and then she was crying. ‘I
can’t believe I’m sitting here kissing my husband’s drinking buddy. On
the floor of our living room. This is so bad.’ She was shaking her head,
sobbing. ‘This is rock bottom.’
She didn’t know the half of it.
‘I need a drink,’ Wilson said, and even after all that she was going
to get it for him, but he told her, ‘You sit. You stay.’ He made it into the
kitchen without looking back. Could he let himself out the door and
get gone, to hell with Bob? June was sniffing and whimpering – soft,
animal sounds. Wilson thought to himself that the least, the very least
he could do was to get her a drink. He could do that.
46
fiction
47
fiction
Quick she was on her feet, her chin tilted slightly upward, nose in
the air, her head cocked to the side, trembling. She still had on those
white shoes, terrible and quiet, as she went for the bedroom door, and
finally, flung it open.
Wilson couldn’t see what June was seeing, but he knew what was
there. On the bed, tangled up in the sheets lay June’s husband, Bob,
snoring, one hairy leg dangled over the bare ass of the vacant little
barmaid from the Rusty Nail.
Wilson’s mind immediately started in on its usual tricks. It wasn’t
his fault. These weren’t his cares. Sure, he’d fallen asleep when all
he’d had to do was stay awake and signal – three solid knocks on the
bedroom door as soon as the car pulled into the drive, it’s June! – but Bob
was a grown man, capable of covering his own tracks. None of this was
up to Wilson to make right.
Until June turned her head away from the bodies in the bed and
fixed on Wilson with those yellow eyes. It wasn’t like the way the dog
had looked when Wilson shot him. The dog never even made the con-
nection: Wilson’s rifle, the dog’s life. The dog trusted Wilson to the very
last, when the vet pushed the needle through his skin and straight into
the vein. The look from June was different – as if those yellow eyes saw
everything. Everything Wilson could have and should have done his
whole life, and the things he’d done instead, the things he would keep
on doing, and finally, everything he would never do.
48
the poet on his work
Peter Robinson
Otterspool Prom
‘O cursed spite’
William Shakespeare
‘Otterspool Prom’ was first published in the Times Literary Supplement, 5 June
2008.
49
PETER ROBINSON
50
THE poet on his work
51
THE poet on his work
52
THE poet on his work
53
Thomas Hardy
by William Strang
1912, pencil
54
your recommendations
at his letters
Seamus Heaney
T hirty years have passed since he sat for Strang. And still
he sits at his desk in the house he built for himself at Max
Gate, his violin on the wall, his cello in the corner as it
used to be in the stone mason’s house where he was born
in Bockhampton. The maid has set the fire but he won’t
light it until later: he likes the room as cool as the ones in illo tempore
under the thatch, behind the whitewashed walls.
He is at work, at his letters, in his working clothes that would suit
a stone mason – a pair of old trousers he has mended with string, an
ancient woollen shawl that may have been crocheted by his well-doing
mother. When the three grandfather clocks strike in and out of time
– one from the kitchen passage, one from the hallway, one from the
drawing room – he dips his pen, pauses for a moment, nib held at an
angle to the lip of the inkwell, then proceeds with his ‘writer at work’
answer:
‘I never did let a day go past without using a pen. Just holding it sets
me off; in fact I can’t think without it. It’s important not to wait for the
right mood. If you do it will come less and less.’
Originally written and donated as a fair copy for ‘The Portrait Gala’ pen portrait
auction at the National Portrait Gallery, 3 March 2009.
55
THE BLURB
A discussion on reading
churchill college, Cambridge
The Reader Organisation presented its case for the Reading Revolution to
an audience of academics and others at Churchill College, Cambridge as
part of the British Association of Victorian Studies conference. This was the
first time we had banded together and ventured into the world of academic
conferencing. Our three speakers attempt to bridge the fundamental gap
between experience and knowledge through readings of George Eliot (Josie
Billington) and Charles Dickens (Philip Davis); and a personal account by
Blake Morrison of his changing relationship to the Victorians.
Josie Billington
57
THE reading revolution
period, when the abyss between knowledge and experience could not be
bridged metaphysically by belief in the existence of God, the all-know-
ing divinity who also experienced what it was to be human, and when
advances in technology and science served to widen the chasm. ‘Who’,
said George Henry Lewes, in Problems of Life and Mind, ‘that had ever
looked upon the pulpy mass of brain substance, and the nervous cords
connecting it with the organs, could resist the shock of incredulity on
hearing that all he knew of passion, intellect and will was nothing more
than molecular change in this pulpy mass? How can this pulpy mass
be credited with thought? How can these material changes be feeling?’
Equally, how would a scientific mind credit so emotional an account
as this, in which that inherently encouraging word ‘material’ seems
spoken in pure disappointment?
Jane Davis and I have more than once come to the conclusion that
we can only capture what goes on in reading groups by narrating it
and using all the resources of narrative time to slow a moment down,
scrutinise it over paragraphs or pages (as George Eliot does) to catch
and analyse fleeting and subtle effects. But this wouldn’t wash with the
scientists of course – the Department of Health doesn’t want a novel.
But I think a novel like Middlemarch is not just concerned to give
a language for the inside cover of life. George Eliot’s language seems
to me precisely dedicated to mediating the gap between inside/outside,
experience/knowledge, subjective and objective accountings of a life,
which Damasio, remember, said could not be bridged scientifically. I
want you to imagine as I’m reading this passage from Middlemarch that
it’s being read to a group of people – a widower, a divorcee, a recovering
cancer patient, a ‘depressed’ person the reasons for which state of mind
are not so readily accounted for by life-events. Consider how the capac-
ity for literary language to hold a middle course between inside/outside,
private/public is given new vitality and power, possibly of a therapeutic
kind, in the context of a shared reading group:
Dorothea was crying, and if she had been required to state
the cause, she could only have done so in some such general
words as I have used: to have been driven to be more particular
would have been like trying to give a history of the lights and
shadows; for that new real future which was replacing the im-
aginary drew its material from the endless minutiae by which
her view of Mr Casaubon and her wifely relation, now that she
was married to him, was gradually changing with the secret
motion of a watch-hand from what it had been in her maiden
dream. It was too early yet for her fully to recognise or at least
admit the change, still more for her to have readjusted that de-
votedness which was so necessary a part of her mental life that
58
THE reading revolution
59
THE reading revolution
tion worse, but by the same token, though she cannot see it, the best of her
is not lost. What an idea to mobilise in our imaginary reading group!
Reading gives time for such thinking to happen, and it gives the tools,
the equipment, the language for thinking feeling. That is why I want to
draw attention to Maryanne Wolf’s Proust and the Squid: The Story and
Science of the Reading Brain which concludes, wonderfully, by saying that
reading is evolution’s great gift to us in giving us time to think. ‘By
its ability to become virtually automatic, literacy allowed the individu-
al reader to give less time to initial decoding processes and to allocate
more cognitive time and ultimately more cortical space to the deeper
analysis of recorded thought’:
The secret at the heart of reading [is] the time it frees for the
brain to have thoughts deeper than those that came before…
The mysterious, invisible gift of time to think beyond is the
reading brain’s greatest achievement; these built-in milli-
seconds form the basis of our ability to propel knowledge, to
ponder virtue, and to articulate what was once inexpressible –
which, when expressed, builds the next platform from which
we dive below or soar above.
Such time gives us a place to think in, within the very midst of life.
the neo-victorian
Blake Morrison
60
BLAKE MORRISON
© MARK GERSON
61
the reading revolution
tribution to the community might mean.) All that was there at some
unconscious level. But then came the reaction – the impulse to fly free
of the nets of home, family and church. And for me, as for many of my
contemporaries, the place to escape to was Modernism, which thrilled
us with its fragmentation, its impenetrability, its refusal of reason and
coherence. The Victorians knew about Doubt but they were solid; they
exacted a full look at the worst yet there was still a darkling thrush
singing in the gloom. Not so for the weightless, nihilistic Modernists,
who showed us the abyss – Kafka’s castle, Joyce’s night-town, Beck-
ett’s Godot-less limbo, the waste land, the Unreal City, ‘falling towers
/ Jerusalem Athens Alexandria / Vienna London’. Central to the ethos
of Modernism was its globalism, its crossing of language barriers and
national frontiers. But the price of this was a loss of commonality. In
Modernism, there were no roots, no shared values, no names we could
put a face to, only ‘hooded hordes swarming / Over endless plains’.
Death and despair were the message. The message had no appeal to our
parents and grandparents, who’d experienced a world war or two. But
for us, a peacetime generation, it was thrilling.
One key part of this was a loss of confidence in the notion of a reading
public. To Victorian writers, large sales did not signify a dereliction of
duty or debasement of standards. Any such respect had disappeared
by the early twentieth century, it seems. ‘Damn their eyes,’ Ezra Pound
said. ‘No art ever yet grew by looking into the eyes of the public.’ Along
with their contempt for the public, the Modernists opposed the idea that
art might have a moral or social purpose. Pound said: ‘Art never asks
anybody to do anything, or to think anything, or to be anything. It exists
as the trees exist, you can admire, you can sit in the shade, you can pick
bananas, you can cut firewood, you can do as you jolly well please..’
I’m sceptical of the power of literature directly to effect social change,
or to do so indirectly in the way that film, television and the Internet
can. But I’m not of Auden’s view that ‘poetry makes nothing happen’.
There has been too much evidence to the contrary – at least once pub-
licly, with the controversy over The Satanic Verses (where lives were not
only changed but lost), and many times privately. I’ve known a poem
save a life, no exaggeration. And on a personal level, in the decade and a
half since I published a memoir of my father, many readers have written
to say that it ‘helped’ them with griefs and losses of their own.
My generation grew up with the idea, post-Auschwitz, that Matthew
Arnold was wrong – that high culture doesn’t civilise; that the concen-
tration camp commandants who read Goethe and listened to Mozart
were perfectly capable of genocide. But that scepticism about the re-
demptive power of culture has given way, over the years, to something
more tentatively optimistic or perhaps simply more desperate – a reas-
sertion of the belief that the imagination is the only way we can connect
62
the reading revolution
second mind
Philip Davis
63
the reading revolution
Let me give you more time to have a think about that great second-
thought clause, by offering one or two surrounding thoughts. This is a
passage pitched, in middling uncertainty, between the particular and the
general, between the romantic youth of so-called fancy and the disap-
pointed adulthood of so-called realisation, between the unavoidable and
the conceivably different. The realist novel is the name for that melting-
pot, that force-field, that testing- or holding-ground, that bump. Here
it serves as a commitment to neither simply telling a particular story
nor offering a generalisation about the laws of life, but to testing out
the agnostic realm in between the two. On the one hand David does
not pray to God; on the other he cannot speak to his partner; instead he
can only write, putting his mind onto paper – not just to express it but
in order to try to read it, on reflection. Victorian writing fills that per-
sonally registered gap between the theological on the one side and the
social on the other. In this private arena we read over David’s shoulder:
the writer is our model for what reading as if for life really means. So
incidentally, in the manuscript ‘In fulfilment of the compact’ was not
originally a new paragraph. But as he went along, Dickens deleted some
words now illegible that came after ‘wanting’, then added the defini-
tive word ‘always’ (‘there was always something wanting’) and, having
achieved that finality, then made the compact into a separate paragraph
– suddenly and characteristically finding something formal and almost
legal arising out of the midst of informal process in personal writing.
Moreover, twice in the manuscript Dickens made and then re-made the
decision to end this new second paragraph with the delayed main verb
64
the reading revolution
Did you guess it? It is the painfully added clause ‘and that this might have
been’. Even Dickens could not do it in one go, he needed the second
thought – no, more than that, he needed the second mind – that writing
and reading your writing allows. And it is very important that this is
process, a clause in the midst of a sentence and not a separate sen-
tence on its own. For this is a model of what reading is, taken from
a man reading his own writing: getting sudden unexpected thoughts
back even in the midst of going on with the sentence. Reading gives you
thoughts, unwritten, inconvenient, spin-offs, as you go along, at a deep
unpredictable personal level.
‘But that it would have been better for me if…’ Whoever invented
that syntactical formulation ‘But that’ or ‘and that’ performed a great
service in opening up the pathways of the human mind ‘on this paper’
and that anonymous inventor of thought-holding grammar lives again
in David at this moment. The great clause ‘and that this might have been’
is not mere wistful wish-fulfilment but the robust uncertainty of lost
possibility, the things that did not happen, still present as uncertainty’s
pain. Victorian realism frequently threatens a second-order world of the
reality principle, a world fallen into a closed and realistic acceptance of
common and ordinary disappointment in life. But to find room for the
painful admission of a lost primary reality within and behind this half-
disappointingly ordinary one – the old visionary-ideal type of a partner
who could completely share one’s thoughts – is to have a thought which
ostensibly may do no good at all, in fact may only add to the pain, but
nonetheless corresponds to a real truth waiting to be released and re-
alised. That ostensibly little clause has therapeutic value. For what
matters is not the pain of a thought but the necessity of thinking it.
65
poetry
tadeusz dAbrowski
How many times in life have I died already – it’s hard to say,
because I’m sure I have died. Today I had a brush with
a tram and saw my own death; there’s my body lying
on the edge of the tramlines as I go on walking
down the avenue of limes. Or nine years ago,
when I rode my bike under the wheels of the priest’s
Peugeot, smashing the windscreen with my cranium –
couldn’t I have been killed that time? And the seven-year-old
boy who walked along the ridge of the roof,
saved by a salutary spasm
in his right calf, didn’t he leave his own corpse
down below? I remember dozens of these deaths,
how many could I have missed? Probably
for many years I’ve been rising into higher and higher spheres
of heaven. But only lately has the fear
been pestering me that one day the dying will end. For how
am I to know if the sudden darkness – now, as
I stand up after a fall and try to brush off the dirt,
the darkness in which the trees grow with their roots
upwards – is hell or heaven on a late December
afternoon?
66
poetry
67
essay
Anthony Rudolf
Cesare Pavese
68
essay
The Political Prisoner, The Moon and the Bonfire, The Beach, The Devil in the
Hills, The House on the Hill, The Harvesters, The Comrade and Among Women
Only. Here too are two hardback collections of stories, Festival Night and
Summer Storm: we learn from the introduction to Summer Storm that
Pavese translated Moby Dick at the age of twenty-four.
My battered copy of Pavese’s diary (in the undistinguished trans-
lation by A. E. Murch) which he began in prison – incarcerated for
anti-fascist journalism – and which was published in 1952, two years
after his suicide, bears much pencilled evidence of my attentive and
passionate reading. Many but not all of these markings I would repeat
today, if I were reading the book for the first time: ‘Giving is a passion.
Almost a vice. We must have someone to whom we can give’ or ‘Oh!
The power of indifference! That is what has enabled stones to endure,
unchanged, for millions of years’. Pavese quotes Louis Lavelle’s L’Erreur
de Narcisse: ‘…the only thing that counts is what we are, not what we do’
and, a few days later, writes his own version: ‘A person counts for what
he is, not for what he does. Actions are not moral life’. How Baudelaire
and Malraux would disagree with this! Then: ‘Only rarely does one
suffer a real out-and-out injustice. Our own actions are so tortuous. In
general, it always turns out that we are a little at fault ourselves, and
then – goodbye to the feeling of a winter morning’. This was worth em-
phasising, but he goes too far with the two sentences that immediately
follow the painful insight: ‘A little at fault? It’s all our fault and there’s
no getting away from it. Always.’ Such insights followed by an exag-
geration amount almost to a trope in the diary.
Dare one say that this is linked, in some way, to his suicide, the
ultimate expression of depression? I no longer find his thought that
‘water is more all-pervading than any lover’ interesting or worth saying
in the first place, assuming it means anything. And why did I underline
‘The only reason why we are always thinking of our own ego is that we
have to live with it more continuously than with anyone else’s?’ I must
have thought the comment was profound or at least relevant to my own
experience and understanding of the world. Today, if anything, I would
say it is not true. Other people’s egos impinge on me more than my
own. My ego is a problem for others! Finally, my 1965 question-mark
against ‘The richness of life lies in memories we have forgotten’ was, as
it had to be, that of a twenty-three-year-old. Today, forty-four years of
remembered memories and forgotten memories later, and with my book
The Arithmetic of Memory (1999) exploring this very question, experience
confirms that Pavese was right. I don’t know if he had been reading
Bergson when he made that entry on February 13, 1944. I am reminded
too that I read somewhere that Alzheimer’s is caused by the inability
to forget. That is, the inability to select. Like the character in Borges’s
69
essay
70
essay
Thus, when we listen to Bach we need not share the theology or the
religious belief powering the music in order to be moved and instructed,
just as Dante’s allegorical sub-scendence need not bother us either. Re-
flecting on Pavese has got me thinking about other nineteenth- and
twentieth-century Italian poetry and fiction I have read and how fine
and wondrous this blessed country’s literature is. Here, for example,
are Dino Buzzatti’s A Love Affair and Giorgio Bassani’s The Garden of the
Finzi-Continis and The Heron and a bilingual edition of Leopardi. Back to
the Pavese novels I have not yet read: you see the problem. At my age,
I am caught up in a zero-sum game: a victory on one front – reading
more Pavese – involves a defeat on another front: not reading Galdos or
Witkewicz for the first time. But even the greatest and most disciplined
reader in the world cannot read everything. What a blessing it is to
read the best literature. Read as much as you can, as well as you can,
without skimping on your writing or your loved ones or your responsi-
bility towards the planet. It’s as simple as that.
Note: The diaries have just been reissued in a facsimile edition
(Transaction Books, 2009), in other words the publisher did not com-
mission a new translation. But at least the edition is graced by a new
introduction from the pen of that peerless guide to European literature,
John Taylor. Taylor is particularly insightful on the quality or nature of
the relationship between that old married couple, literature and life, so
painfully explored in the diaries. Truly, for Pavese, the dialectical relation-
ship between life on the page and life off the page was so all-consuming
that we can risk saying he had a problem with boundaries, unlike, say,
Stendhal, who never confused the two, or Jorge Semprun. One would
love to have Pavese’s reaction to the latter’s Literature or Life, but then,
had Pavese lived long enough to read it, he would not have been the man
who wrote these diaries.
Geoffrey Hill
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most democratic, because you are doing your audience the honour of
supposing that they are intelligent human beings’. Amen to that.
In 1968, I must have been impatiently waiting for King Log to come
out because my copy was inscribed to me – ‘At last! Brenda’ – by my then
girl friend, whose [ex-] husband I later became. This book contains the
marvellous ‘Song-book’, a sequence by the apocryphal Spanish poet, Se-
bastian Arrurruz, 1868–1922. Removed from Hill in time and language,
he speaks in a slower, softer, more languorous voice than his ventrilo-
quist. Hill wrote this poem in the late sixties, when the great flowering
of poetry translation was getting under way. That may have been one of
the influences generating the conceit of translation deployed in ‘Song-
book’. Hill in those days was close to Stand magazine under Jon Silkin’s
editorship. Stand, like another magazine Hill contributed to, Agenda, was
a major player in the translation renaissance.
‘Funeral Music’ is another wondrous sequence from the same book.
The eight sonnets are, in the words of Hill’s note, ‘a commination and
an alleluia for the period … known as the Wars of the Roses’. This is
‘history as poetry’, the title of another poem in the same book, a poem
with fraternal affinities to the earlier poems of Celan, although I don’t
know if Hill was yet reading Celan. The later Tenebrae (1978) contains
‘Two Chorale-Preludes’, on melodies of Paul Celan. ‘History as poetry’,
needless to say, does not mean that the ‘florid grim’ (Hill’s own words)
‘Funeral Music’ is a narrative. It commemorates a dreadful and bloody
time. In the words of the final sonnet: ‘So it is required; so we bear
witness, / Despite ourselves, to what is beyond us, / Each distant sphere
of harmony forever / Poised, unanswerable’.
This is a poet who, like Charles Péguy, is a Christian and, I would say,
a communitarian. Not only does Hill think redemption, think atone-
ment, think ‘the tongue’s atrocities’ (‘History as Poetry’), he thinks
them in poetry (which, in the marvellous phrase of Rosanna Warren in
Fables of the Self, is ‘language suffering the condition of its utterance’),
and this is a blessing for us, whatever the cost to the poet. Here are Tene-
brae, The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Péguy, The Triumph of Love, Canaan,
Speech! Speech!, Without Title, The Orchards of Syon. If we try to imagine a
Protestant David Jones, a socialist Eliot, a democratic Ezra Pound, a
Christian Paul Celan, we might be able to assemble a high modernist
rhetorical synthesis à la Pessoa, a synthesis whose elements Geoffrey
Hill has deployed for his own grand purposes.
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the reading revolution
Casi Dylan
The poem is new to me but afterwards the boy tells the group that these
are the opening lines of Dante’s Inferno. When I ask why he chose this
particular piece he says that though he’s only started reading the poem,
and despite not understanding much of it, he knows some passages to
be ‘brilliant and really… real’. His self-doubt and yet confidence that
he’s feeling his way through something important seems to me exactly
the point of the lines he reads; remarkably and movingly. I find an
uneasy fifteen-year-old my perfect guide to Dante’s epic poem.
The boy is part of a reading group in a classroom at Monmouth Com-
prehensive School. He and the others around me are taking part in a
specially-commissioned training course, ‘Read to Live’, which aims to
establish a Get Into Reading culture within the school and, eventually, in
the local community. The trainees are a mixed group of teachers, sixth-
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Prescribed reading
The osler literary roundtable at duke
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THE reading revolution
generosity of donors. In toto, we spend about $5,000 per year – for pho-
tocopying, for the leader’s salary, for miscellaneous expenses. If all the
money disappeared, OLR would survive, although somewhat dimin-
ished, on volunteer support alone.
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WRITE US A POEM
Since 1992, OLR has sponsored a biennial poetry contest, ‘Write Us a
Poem’, open to anyone with a connection to the Medical Center. This
year we will publish the ninth volume of ‘They Wrote Us a Poem’; the
collected entries from these contests amount to 705 original poems. As
might be expected, the quality of submitted poems varies considerably,
from the naïvely sincere to the truly sophisticated, but taken together
they form a powerful corpus. As Kate Daniels said when she introduced
her report of the contest: ‘The poems overwhelmed us with their deeply
felt expressions of emotion. Voices that seemed silent in the vast work-
place of the hospital spoke up: grieving relatives, nurses’ aides, clerical
workers… The emotionless self-control of doctors gave way to deep
feeling about the patients they treat, and the patients, so often seen as
passive and victimized, raised their voices in both praise and protest.’
Equally telling are the words of Richard Kenney, MacArthur Fellow
and prize-winning poet, and judge of the first contest: ‘[Judging] has
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poetry
D. J. Andrew
Christmas morning
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is it worth fighting?
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Why is that?
I don’t think the majority of librarians are attracted to the profession
because they are avid readers of imaginative literature. It’s because they
enjoy being gate-keepers of knowledge and enjoy responding to peo-
ple’s requests for information by using their information skills. They
have been trained to organise knowledge and retrieve information
rather than promote reading.
What was the original force behind public libraries when they started in the nine-
teenth century?
The first Public Libraries Act became law in 1850 and initially restrictions
in levying rates meant that wealthy philanthropists provided the library
buildings. The rates could not be used to purchase books. Books were
provided by donation. Certainly Liverpool has magnificent buildings – the
Brown, Picton and Hornby libraries were all donated by wealthy ben-
efactors, and then at the turn of the century there were bequests from
Andrew Carnegie to build branch libraries at Toxteth, Wavertree, Sefton
Park and other places. It wasn’t until 1919 when the rate limit was abol-
ished that libraries had sufficient funds to purchase books.
Those public libraries were designed to promote self-help, education
and sobriety amongst the working class. There was a puritanical culture
which was still around when I joined the libraries. We used to blot out
the racing pages in the papers! According to this culture, a pigeon book
was more valuable than, say, Middlemarch because the pigeon book was
factual whereas Middlemarch was just fiction and not real information.
So public libraries always were about information?
Carnegie gave vast sums of money to build thousands of libraries because
he saw the value of self-improvement through books and learning. He
had benefited from libraries and had become a millionaire. He believed
they were places of self-help where people could find the information and
knowledge needed to become useful citizens.
There’s always a slight tension going into the public library system and saying not
just ‘Read’ but ‘Read great books’.
Falling issues of books and the need to meet performance indicators puts
pressure on the library to provide popular material. Classics are not repre-
sented on the shelves as much as I’d like because there is greater demand
for more popular books. Supplier selection has taken over right across
the country. There’s no doubt there are great benefits – you get huge dis-
counts on books and they arrive shelf-ready within a fraction of the time.
The danger is that you get a lot of bland books and more challenging or
serious books can be overlooked or under represented. There is also a tra-
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dition that libraries are non-judgemental and should provide what people
want. The reader-centred approach (introduced into libraries by Opening
the Book) cuts across the tension between great and popular books by
switching attention to the quality of the reading experience rather than the
quality of the book and using book promotions to tempt people to read
outside their safe and familiar reading zones.
Say I gave you a little run-down library, what would you do to start again?
You’ve got to have a facility that attracts people for a range of reasons.
Books and reading should be at the heart of it but people are looking
for more now. They expect computers, CDs, DVDs and computer games.
The number of people that come for books is limited because there are
so many recreational activities competing for their time. In deprived
areas of the city reading is not a high priority for many people and lit-
eracy problems put others off using libraries.
What kind of things do we want?
Library users are fragmented into different types with different reading
needs. The young people want places to download music or to play
games, something active and interactive, and a cultural centre to meet
in. Providing all of that in a small space is difficult, and that’s one of the
struggles in Liverpool where most of the libraries are tiny. The trouble is
that libraries need to meet performance indicators that are quantitative
not qualitative: it’s the number of visitors, the number of books issued,
the percentage of time the computers are in use that matter. When you
start to look at the quality of a reading group meeting or a Readers’
Day which may cost a lot of money, it’s hard to justify in this climate.
Nowadays the average user spends about five minutes per library visit.
They are readers in a hurry who want to find a good read quickly, use a
self-service system and get out.
Those kinds of facility are brilliant in some of the libraries.
Yes, they have been properly designed to work well, especially in large,
busy libraries where they are cost effective. Self-service helps readers
in a hurry and people can keep their reading choices private from staff
inspection. The idea was to use self-issue to release staff from routine
issue and discharge duties and free them to do more customer focused
services such as better book displays, engagement with children e.g.
homework support and support for IT users, but I’m not sure that this
always happens and I’m not convinced that costly self-service systems
offer value for money in small community libraries. I think there’s a
danger of wasting money that could be better spent.
Were you in Liverpool when the left-wing Hatton administration was here?
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Yes, and that was the worst time for libraries. Councillors called meet-
ings to tell you that you had to go out on strike or action would be taken
and they said, ‘Remember you are not a statutory service.’ Some brave
soul had the guts to stand up and say ‘You’re wrong, we are a statutory
service.’ What the Militants were not interested in was people being
informed; they wanted to control people; they didn’t want free thinkers
and they didn’t value the library service. Buildings got run-down, hours
were reduced, and there were a lot of cuts. And again, because the Con-
servative administration didn’t believe in that sort of thing – society – it
was a double defeat for the city.
I’ve been travelling around the country over the last year or two seeing different
services and you can really tell that Liverpool has suffered.
In Liverpool there have been cuts and communities have been shifted
around so much that libraries end up being in the wrong place and not
at the heart of the community. You’ve got to offer a spread of services
and libraries need to be adjacent to shops. You’ve got to create space for
different activities, but then there is less space for books. Hopefully the
planned Central Library redevelopment will address these problems by
providing a more attractive, family-friendly facility that’s easy to navi-
gate and offers more interactive activities for different kinds of users.
You’re at the end of a long working life in libraries, and here’s a hard question: is
it worth fighting for them?
A free public library service is worth fighting for, but libraries have to
meet the needs of the community and be in the right place. Public librar-
ies have not kept abreast of change because they have been starved of
resources, despite the Labour administration being supportive of librar-
ies. In recent times there’s been a shift in demand away from books and
it’s hard to predict the future because of the electronic revolution.
Perhaps that is the future, libraries could have fewer books but do more with
them. They could be a place where books go ‘live’, like a theatre for reading.
The library service must become more proactive and dynamic. It needs
a different blend of staff with new skills paid appropriately for the job.
Perhaps an evangelisation of libraries is necessary. But there is new
hope in the Big Lottery Fund-supported Toxteth Library redevelopment
that may provide a useful model for change. Here the library is being
redesigned as a centre of community learning and a neighbourhood in-
formation hub by working with partners, such as The Reader Organisa-
tion and other learning and information providers. Outreach workers
will engage the community in Get Into Reading groups, bibliotherapy
sessions and other learning activities and provide help and advice on a
range of topics. The library is expected to re-open later this year.
87
“THIS ISLE
IS FULL
OF STORIES”
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having another go
Jane Davis
I t’s a long time since June and Tobago seems more than thou-
sands of miles away. Why Tobago? I don’t know: we needed heat, I
wanted to go somewhere I wouldn’t feel pressured to do anything
touristy, and I always want the sea. Apart from that it was south of
the hurricane belt, and sounded both laid-back and old-fashioned.
And it sounded like a bit of an adventure. Once away from the town
of Scarboro (great local food takeaways: coo-coo, goat curry, crab) and
the developed couple of square miles around the airport, Tobago is still
1950s rural. Miss Pat, proprietress of the seafront flat we rented in Char-
lotteville told us proudly that the four-poster bed had belonged to her
grandparents and had been sent from London. I recognised the rest of
the furniture from my childhood: the kitchen cabinet with glass sliding
doors, the calor gas stove, and white lace plastic table cloth. Miss Pat,
and the young Tobagoan girls she was training, launder the snowiest
sheets I’ve ever slept on (‘We lay them to bleach in the sun’) and the flat
was seafront spick and span in its green and white paint. The first-floor
windows overlooked the bay and Caribbean sunsets with a bottle of rum
seemed to slow time to a virtual stop. There was really not much to do
except walk very slowly to the shop for a pineapple or bottle of beer and
immerse yourself in books or the sea.
For many years I was first a student, then a teacher of literature, and
reading and writing were my full-time activities. Now that I have a more
than full-time job, reading is for me, as it is for most readers, I imagine,
a sort of necessary but always additional activity to be somehow fitted
in between waking and sleeping, on trains, in snatched half hours. In
addition, a lot of reading I do at work is shared, in Get Into Reading or
Read to Lead training where reading aloud in groups is the norm. But
on holiday in Tobago, reading became once more the compelling silent
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activity it has been for me for most of my life. It was surprising to find
myself plunged back into that inner rhythm. In two weeks I read ten
books and long sections of The Divine Comedy. I had deliberately chosen a
few contemporary novels for the holiday because I don’t naturally warm
to them and so I keep trying to get over the sense that they are no good:
surely this one will be the one, I tell myself, having another go, this one
will be large of spirit, humanly ambitious, moving, true....
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which sometimes has enough raw power to move simply by being what
it is, though finally the writing, clear and straightforward as it is, isn’t
deep enough for the subject matter.
John Steinbeck, The Long Valley
Why I Chose It: I’ve been wanting to re-read Cannery Row but they didn’t
have a copy in the shop. I didn’t think I could get through a re-reading
of The Grapes of Wrath, and I couldn’t remember ever reading this collec-
tion of short stories.
7/10: The quality of the writing and its pace seemed exactly right.
Looking over this list retrospectively, The Corner blew the others out of
the water. Well, there’s a furious Dickensian rhetoric:
We can’t stop it.
Not with all the lawyers, guns and money in this world. Not
with guilt or morality or righteous indignation. Not with crime
summits, or task forces, or committees. Not with policy deci-
sions that can’t be seen from the lost corner of Fayette and
Monroe. No lasting victory in the war on drugs can be bought
by doubling the number of beat cops or tripling the number
of prison beds. No peace can come from kingpin statutes and
civil forfeiture laws and warrantless searches and whatever
the hell else is about to be tossed into next year’s omnibus
crime bill…
Get it straight: they’re not just here to sling and shoot drugs…
We want it to be about nothing more complicated than cash
money and human greed, when at bottom, it’s about a reason
to believe. We want to think that it’s chemical, that it’s all about
the addictive mind, when instead it has become about valida-
tion, about lost souls assuring themselves that a daily relevance
can be found at the fine point of a disposable syringe.
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seen in a book before. Here’s someone who is moved and angry. But you
can only take so much rhetoric and social vision. The Corner offers a
sweeping picture of communal life in a fixed historical moment – 1990s
West Baltimore – but the whole thing is brought to life by stories of
daily existence for a cluster of individuals in that big picture. The book
begins with a man:
Fat Curt is on the corner.
He leans hard into his aluminium hospital cane, bent to
this ancient business of survival. His fattened, needle-scarred
hands will never again see the deep bottom of a trouser pocket;
his forearms are swollen leather; his bloated legs mass up
from the concrete. But then obese limbs converge on a with-
ered torso: at the heart of the man, Fat Curt is fat no more…
…No point in talking about changing, or stopping, or even
slowing down. In his soldier’s heart, Curt knows that every-
one talks that shit and no one believes it a minute after they
say it. Like Blue – running and gunning tonight, but telling
himself he’s going to quit come tomorrow. A resolution, says
Blue. Naw, Curt tells himself, the shit is forever.
‘Yo Curt.’
‘Hey, hey.’
‘Wassup, Mr Curt?’
Curt smiles sadly, then growls out the simple truth: ‘Oh,
man, ain’t nothing here but some of the same foolishness.’
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Burns and Simon end the book with an Authors’ Note which explains
how the book, ‘a work of journalism’, came to be – they stayed on the
corner for a year, living among, watching, reporting on its residents. But
they confess they got caught up too, as men among human beings. ‘A
year is a long time to watch people struggle and suffer’. They came to
see that ‘urban drug culture is about real people, real lives’. Only a great
work of art gives us that complex feel of reality.
On Tobago, we found the isle was full of stories: Miss Pat and her
love of everything London, ‘In the Empire we could get everything you
had in London, here.’ Malachi, the strongman security guard, whose
career in violence had begun when as a boy of ten he had taken a cutlass
to his father as he beat his mother. ‘Security guard,’ he whispered, ‘is
a hard life.’ He gazes out to the ocean, remembering his life like a man
remembering pain. ‘I have lain in ditches, armed, waiting for men...’
Driving in a jeep to the ridge of rainforest which makes the backbone
of the island, the guide, Chris, tells us his daughter has died of com-
plications giving birth to her baby. She was sixteen, pregnant by her
boyfriend but people in the village are saying he, Chris, was the father.
‘They ignorant village people, they angry because I have a boat, this
business.’ She had sickle-cell anaemia. He shows us her photograph,
laughing on the boat with her trophy for deep-sea fishing. He speaks
of his wife working in the laundry in the public hospital at Scarboro:
every day she rides two hours on the bus to work, her mother minds the
little one. Two hours to return home. ‘They jealous we earn money.’ All
day as he walks us through the forest the great sadness of his daughter
seems with us. And behind everything in Tobago the great and terrible
story of slavery is still whispering there, in the cutlasses carried by men
and boys, as here in England a man might carry a bunch of keys or a
shopping bag. In the rich uncultivated land, ‘When we slaves we had to
till the earth. When we got free everyone says no more working land for
me. It is slaves’ work’.
You could find great human stories in Liverpool One, or the city of
London, or Boston, Lincolnshire if you had your ears tuned to living
people. But you’ve got to listen. Escaping the constraints of the small
world of the literary The Corner does that. Looking for a great contempo-
rary novel? After reading Marilynne Robinson’s Home, read The Corner.
Holiday reading it ain’t.
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we know no better
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As a young adult yourself, do you feel more in touch with what young people want
and need from a reading experience?
It is dangerous to say that you’re ‘in touch with what young people
want’. When we launched our scheme to enthuse 18–30 year-olds to
read, we decided there and then to avoid turning up at events with
vodka jelly and trying to act all cool and crazy – it’s patronising and
frankly embarrassing. We wanted to take a more neutral approach
where we simply push the merits of reading while trying to grasp what
will work here and engage them – as we would do with any age group.
What is ReadGeneration?
ReadGeneration is a pioneering scheme, which we launched in conjunc-
tion with the Arts Council last October aiming to get students and those
under thirty more involved and engaged in reading. This is a group tra-
ditionally ignored by publishers as ‘the reading gap’. Through discounts,
events, promotions and interaction with authors, we want to see more
students and under-thirties reading regularly. We have also arranged
and been involved in various university events and competitions up and
down the country as well as giving a number of talks from us and our
authors. We have exciting plans for this growing and important project
and really want to take it forward to make a big difference and close
that so-described reading gap.
Is the publisher as important as the writer?
Maybe you should ask our writers! They are first and foremost the foun-
dation of what we do. Following the completion of writing and sign-up,
the publisher has to package, promote and sell the work correctly and –
particularly important today with the growth of self-publishing options
– prove their worth as part of the process. Quality of writing is no guar-
antee of success; excellent publishing, and some luck, is required – but
that initial nugget of quality comes from the writer.
Is there an average day for you?
One of the main challenges and enjoyments of running a small business
is that there are so many different areas to cover. I think it actually suits
me, being someone who enjoys understanding and working on many dif-
ferent areas rather than specialising in one. There are common strands
but a particular day or week could see a focus on sales, editing, produc-
tion, rights, events, projects, finances, new avenues/proposals, overall
management or basic administration. Each member of the team has their
own area(s) though it is not unusual to find everyone helping out on a
pressing matter. My team will embrace whatever work and challenge is
asked of them.
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Brian Nellist
Argus
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that it was easier to convince the reader about bad rather than good
characters. Yet in the delicate generosity of this book we recognise that
everyone is trying not to cause pain to others though in the process they
often increase it. Miss Connulty is the indignant observer of what is
happening to Ellie:
It wasn’t easy to blame Ellie; you wouldn’t want to and it
didn’t seem natural to do so. Child of an institution, child of
need and humility, born into nothing, expecting nothing, Ellie
Dillahan was victim enough without the attentions of a suave
photographer.
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others regard him, and as he breaks apart it has to be guilty Ellie who is
there to support him, trying also for her own sake to prevent him from
knowing the truth. All he had wanted with Ellie was to be safe, ‘all
right’, yet she had had no choice in the matter. An immeasurable pity
interferes with the spontaneities of love.
Always with a new book as strong and delicate in its insights as
this, one wonders in speaking of it how much to give away. I want you
to read it so I mustn’t dispel its secrets and riches. It is like the re-in-
vention of realism, modern in its conciseness, in its constant movement
across time and place, and refusal to comment on what happens but
with all realism’s sense of things and people present in a substantial
world, the little town of Rathmoye, the empty big house, the lavender
bushes beside the lodge that once guarded the St John’s place or Dil-
lahan re-hanging the yard door:
The screws came out easily. He marked with the point of a
bradawl a new position for the hinge and pierced the wood of
the jamb just deep enough to hold the screws in place before
he drove them in.
That’s not simply respect for the outside world but for the character, for
the care and capacity of a man so cursedly unlucky, coping better with
a door than with his young wife. 2009? The year Love and Summer was
published.
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Our spy in Ny
sleeping with scissors
Enid Stubin
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all is murk and billowing sand. Talk of clarity won’t do any good. I need
the murk to help me. I remember working for Julian Caterers. Presenta-
tion is everything, barked owner Jerry, a dapper fellow in trim tuxedo and
ruffled shirt, his casual sadism played out in knowing tweaks of knee
or elbow that sent the other waitresses writhing. I escaped these favors
as ‘the showoff,’ icing a table’s water glasses without spilling, notorious
for my stamina and aplomb when, once, an overextended father of the
bride shrugged out of his rented dinner jacket as if it were aflame and
flung it at my head. ‘Fix the fucking button!’ he snapped. But the cater-
ing gig taught me something about service: Presentation is everything.
The students are charged with mastering the Kingsborough Reads
choice, the hagiography of an American mountaineer who, in gratitude
to the people who nursed him after a disastrous climbing failure, builds
schools in the impoverished villages of Pakistan: Three Cups of Tea by Greg
Mortenson and David Oliver Relin. Three Cups of Treacle, I call it, wishing
that this year’s choice (by committee, naturally, a process that yields little
besides resentment and hurt feelings) had more literary mettle. But I
recognize that the overwritten sentences and gloppy prose hold some
joys of discovery for my students. Christopher and Tyrone, questioning
the dual authorship, decide to collaborate on a roundtable discussion
panel, ‘Who’s Writing This Book? Narrative Confusion and Collusion in
Three Cups of Tea.’ That should grab the campus poststructuralists. On
the description of Mortenson’s father as having caught ‘the travel bug,’
Randa says knowingly, ‘Like father, like son.’ And I exult: if they can
read this schmoozy account, big on uplift and peddling a message of
volunteerism, and see what’s going on, they can read anything. By the
end of the semester they will have to write and revise essays and pass
several layers of departmental exams before receiving permission to take
a writing exam that, should they pass, offers them entry into credit-
bearing English composition. I wish – no, I want desperately for them to
pass. But I also want them to love reading, to find recognition and excite-
ment in a book, to pick up a copy of An Anthropologist on Mars, the current
freshman text, and decipher the codes, untangle the ironies, discover the
compassion and poignancy of Sacks’s large sympathies. So when they
notice the lacunae in Mortensen’s biography (‘How come he’s thirty-four
and can’t use a computer?’ Shorena fumes even as she acknowledges
that the project to build dozens of schools in a desperate corner of the
world is a laudable one), I feel encouraged about their future as readers.
Gladys, whose mother is Catholic and whose father is Muslim, under-
stands the Protestant Mortenson’s attraction to Islam. Nino is alert to all
manner of xenophobia, however nicely articulated. And nothing is lost
on Ervin and Oscar, two generous-souled skeptics. They don’t have to
share my tastes, but I’d like them to come to the table.
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Brian Nellist
Yes, I also heard that and was reminded of a story told, I think,
A by Ernst Gombrich, of a lady coming out of a Dutch art gallery
telling an attendant that she hadn’t liked his pictures. ‘Madam,’
he replied, ‘it’s not the paintings that are on trial here.’ ‘Well, up to a
point, Lord Copper’, she might have answered, if she remembered her
Evelyn Waugh. Because, yes, confronted by some indisputably great
human achievement in literature or the visual arts we might for many
reasons not be personally moved. That might not be because complex
utterances take time to appreciate. I’ve known responsive, widely read,
massively intelligent colleagues who also haven’t actually liked George
Eliot. But they knew why and they didn’t impute love of her work to a
mere delusion, which was the tone at least, if not the expressed view,
of the Radio 4 programme and of your question, if you’ll forgive me.
Writers make assumptions, sometimes have beliefs, and simply to let
their words wash over you when you disagree with them is not to take
those writers seriously but, indeed, to reduce books to a mere literary
dilettantism, objects in an aesthetic peepshow. But equally there are
dangers on the other side, a childish desire to burp during a chamber
recital, a kind of egotistic desire to belittle what is serious and grand.
Not to appreciate Middlemarch is to lose one magnificent human experi-
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ence and that is fine only if there are other great sources of insight you
have available and closer to your sensibility.
When Francis Bacon republished his Essays in 1625 he claimed
somewhat ruefully that they had been his most popular work, ‘for that
as it seems they come home to men’s business and bosoms’. Wonderful
image that, of coming ‘home’! Though written by someone we don’t
know, when we read it the work seems to belong with us; we are its
‘home’, its proper place. George Herbert, Bacon’s younger contempo-
rary, writes of the Holy Scriptures:
Such are thy secrets, which my life makes good,
And comments on thee; for in everything
Thy words do find me out, and parallels bring,
And in another make me understood.
111
Readers connect
with
A boy is travelling by train from Virginia after the death of his mother
and father to live with his grandparents on a little farm in Nebraska some
time in the 1870s and he looks out at ‘nothing but land: not a country
at all but the material out of which countries
are made.’ This is a novel about the human
material, the immigrants including that boy,
Jim Burden, who tells the story but mainly
the people from half a dozen European coun-
tries who settle under the vast skies on the
hard soil covered in tough reddish grass as
tenant farmers or labourers. Mainly we see a
family from what is now the Czech Republic
who nearly succumb to the hardship of that
first terrible winter. The European memories
of the settlers, their tales of the old world and
their manners and beliefs surface at different
points in their lives, sometimes to disable,
indeed they lead Mr Shimerda, Antonia’s father, to take his own life,
but gradually become complications in their common American iden-
tity. Old pieties underlie new sexual freedoms, the elegiac touches the
tale of survival, but always through the teeming life of the book shines
the resilience of Antonia as she is seen, now a woman of fifty, in the
concluding part:
She lent herself to immemorial human attitudes which we
recognise by instinct as universal and true. I had not been
mistaken. She was a battered woman now, not a lovely girl;
but she still had that something which fires the imagination,
could still stop one’s breath for a moment by a look or gesture
that somehow revealed the meaning in common things.
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THE jury
Jo Cannon is a Sheffield GP and short story writer
I’ve never seen a prairie, but Cather’s grasslands,
skies and seasons are as vivid as photographs. The
hardships of immigrant settler life in nineteenth-
century America are conveyed cinematically. Antonia
is a tough, sympathetic heroine. At times I feared for
her, but she overcomes extreme adversity with forti-
tude and optimism. The ending is pleasing: everyone
gets what they deserve. My Antonia is unexpectedly
modern in attitude and style, and an easy, satisfying
read.
****
Lynne Hatwell (dovegreyreader) is a Devon-based
community nurse
A perfectly rendered, elegiac journey across the
plains of Nebraska and a window onto the lives
of two children as they grow into adulthood in
this harsh, unforgiving territory. All life is here in
equal measure, and there is a magical Christmas
scene, which deserves to go in anyone’s person-
al anthology of must-read seasonal extracts. I’ll
revisit this one again and again.
*****
STAR RATINGS
***** one of the best books I’ve read ** worth reading
**** one of the best I’ve read this year * not for me but worth trying
*** highly recommended 0 don’t bother
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your recommendations
Books about...
old age
Angela Macmillan
‘Grow old with me, the best is yet to be’ wrote the presumably young
Robert Browning. I am not so optimistic. There is too much that can go
wrong, not just physically but emotionally. Here, in her 1996 novel Love,
Again, Doris Lessing writes: ‘This fate of us all, to get old, or even to grow
older, is one so cruel that while we spend every energy in trying to avert
or postpone it, we in fact seldom allow the realisation to strike home
sharp and cold: from being this… one becomes this, a husk without
colour, above all without the lustre, the shine.’ What happens to feeling
and desire when we are ‘this’? Do they also become husks? Not so for
Thomas Hardy; for the sake of equanimity, he wished for rather less
lustre and shine: ‘I look into my glass / And view my wasting skin, /
And say “Would God it came to pass / My heart had shrunk as thin”.’
The books I have chosen show that the reality of aging often defies ex-
pectations, as George Herbert found, ‘And now in age I bud again’, or as
Tennyson’s Ulysses reflects, ‘though much is taken, much abides’.
Set in the American West, this is the story of Samuel Jones who having
cut all ties with his family has been living as an Apache for thirty years.
114
your recommendations
An old man, he comes home to die, and finds his daughter Maggie, who
has children of her own, wants nothing to do with him, until her own
daughter is kidnapped and she has no choice but to ride with him. At
times brutal and unforgiving, Eidson is interested in the ties of family,
in the need for belief and in the possibility of redemption.
Another book with the word ‘Old’ in the title. Does this put people off?
It shouldn’t do, for Balzac’s tale of a man who gives a fortune to his
ungrateful daughters and consequently has to live a life of poverty is a
hugely readable and lively tale of greed, betrayal and obsession. Inevita-
bly the story invites comparisons with King Lear.
115
your Recommendations
Rose David
116
117
GOOD BOOKS
REVIEWS
Anything you can get your hands on by David Mamet
You have just three mind-clearing sentences. The setting: ‘Lost in the
woods’. The appraisal: ‘It seems simple enough’. The hammer blow: ‘If
you just take away the thought that someone’s coming to help you’. It’s
a practical matter, a man’s questioning about what he is and what he can
do to help himself. Eventually you fix yourself because there is no alter-
native. Reading the words again, it strikes me how little guidance there
is in the language: it asserts and it moves on to the next statement, like
someone walking in big strides that make you skip. The adjustments you
go through in order to keep up with the thought strip away confidence
until you have only the essentials of paying attention. But the failure to
help is precisely what could be useful here, or so the speaker claims.
Sarah Coley
118
FICTION
SEA MINOR
Nigel Bird
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fiction
Lots of things are different here. Some are better and some aren’t. It’s
wonderful wandering around in fields and woods, but it’s not so much
fun walking to the shops and back, especially the back part. I love swim-
ming in the sea and paddling, but I’m not so keen on taking a bath in
the old tin thing we fill with buckets. I love the way Gran gets us quiet
for the weather forecast every evening, but I miss the television and my
computer.
It was even more different when Mum was young. There wasn’t a
road, the toilet was outside, the washing was done by hand, things like
that. Mum said that the only things that hadn’t changed were Gran’s
tabard and the weather.
Whatever time we get up Gran’s always ready with a pan or two
frying. We have a big cooked breakfast ‘to keep the wind out,’ Gran says,
and we go out and explore. When we get back we wash our hands and
by the time we get into the kitchen there’s a plate of fresh scones on the
table and a jug of milk from Naomi the cow, all warm and creamy.
We explore a bit more and it’s lunch, then dinner, then supper for
the weather forecast, and in the evenings we listen to stories. I think
some of them are true because they have real people in them and some
are made up because they’ve got fairies and giants in them.
Mum’s the best storyteller though. Perhaps that’s because she reads so
much. She was reading when down at the sea last week - ‘A Perfect Day
For Banana Fish’. She’s been reading that lots recently; it must be her
favourite.
Thinking about banana fish makes me laugh because I start to think
of other fish: orange, grapefruit, kiwi, potato… Maybe there’s a pineap-
ple shark out there too. The one I like best of all is the onion fish. It’s
always crying, even if fish can’t cry, not really.
When she finished it she put the book face down on the rock, pulled
her knees to her chest and held them there, ‘giving herself a hug,’ she
said. She didn’t move for a long time, staring out over the water into
the distance; perhaps that’s what distant means. I played with Davy till
it began to get chilly and went for a cuddle to warm up. This was a safe
place. Old Man’s Jaw it’s called. If you stand on top of the hill behind
you can see the face and this long, flat rock sticking out. I’ve seen it in a
photo at home, Mum pointing across the bay to where she was born. She
had one more story for me that day, about how I was made in that very
place almost eight years ago. This is where I started out as a tiny seed.
‘Just look at you now,’ she whispered and I wondered how big I’d
been when I began and how big I’ll be in the end.
A few days after that we went to collect peat. A tractor came along and
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fiction
we all helped to load the trailer. The midgies kept biting everyone so
we put on this cream to keep them away. It’s for moisturising the skin
really and smells like perfume, so it’s not for the midgies at all, but they
didn’t come near me after that. Uncle Tam’s hands were green from the
string by the time we’d finished and Bob had a bad back. The children
got to sit on the trailer all the way home, and we piled into the kitchen
when it was unloaded for cakes and beer and whisky or whatever you
wanted.
Most of us went for a walk after that. We turned round when the
dark clouds started rolling in and got back just before the storm. I don’t
know how she’d managed, but Gran had moved all the peat into the
shed by then. The stacks in front of all the other houses were getting
soaked through and Uncle Tam was struggling with a tarpaulin in the
gale and the gale was winning.
‘He’s only himself to blame, now. They said the rain would be
coming,’ said Gran shaking her head, wiping her hands on her apron
and putting on the kettle. We all had tea to warm up our hands, which
made Davy and me feel very grown-up. We watched the flames thinking
about how much we deserved to be cosy, especially me with my blister
and Tam with his green skin.
I found the rusty bit of an old spade, a plastic bottle, a long metal stick
and a burst football. Davy spent most of his time digging a piece of rope
from the sand. It looked small at first, but the more he dug, the longer
it got. In the end it filled up half the bag. Daddy was always asking
how long a piece of string is when we asked him things; I didn’t think
it would be that long. Gran had sawn off a gill net from the post in
the water using the blade of her penknife and that filled the bag. Just
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fiction
think of all the birds we were saving and how nice it would be for all the
walkers to see it so wonderfully clean.
We started another bag. The first thing we found was an old bike
tyre. Davy was trying to stuff it in when it went all quiet; he stopped
what he was doing. This is the bit I don’t want to say because it sounds
stupid, but you can ask Davy and Gran if you like. I couldn’t hear the sea
or the birds and it was creepy, then there was music, soft at first, then
louder and louder. It was like a choir in church. It was all high voices
and ladies singing and it was the most beautiful sound I’ve ever heard.
There weren’t any words, just tunes. Davy held my hand tightly and
then the sound was suddenly the wind again. Just like that.
We looked at each other then sprinted over to Gran. Davy was first
and grabbed onto one leg, and I got the other. He was telling her about
the music and I joined in until she couldn’t tell who was saying what, so
we had to start again one at a time. He’d heard the same as me.
She went quiet for a moment and said, just like it was nothing
important,
‘That’ll be bad news at sea; someone won’t be making it to supper
tonight.’ She looked up, touched her forehead and shoulders and chest
and said something Gaelic.
‘I heard it once when I was a girl a long time ago. My mother heard
it too. Like the sound of heaven itself, and yet it was a horrible thing
that happened when it came to me. Two boats collided. Full of men
they were – fathers, husbands, brothers – none of them seen again.’ It
sounded a bit like the start to one of her fairytales, but she didn’t take
it any further.
‘Now don’t you worry, there’s nothing to be done. Let’s get this bag
filled up,’ she said, and so we did.
The bags were heavy, but we managed to drag them to the pile.
I couldn’t believe what was there: lobster pots, a bicycle, tubes,
bottles, netting, a doll’s arm, crates and rope. The twins had brought
a bag of seaweed even though the man at the start had told us that
seaweed wasn’t rubbish, so that couldn’t count for the competition.
Angus got to light the bonfire. He’d found a whole carpet, but he
didn’t carry it back himself so I don’t think he should have been the
winner.
Mum hadn’t arrived. Now it was later and I wanted her to be
there.
It turned into a party. There were guitars, fiddles and songs. The
people who weren’t playing were mostly dancing. The only ones who
didn’t look happy were the twins, because they’d had a fight, and Gran.
She was gazing into the flames, the light seeming to make her look
strangely old and tired. I guess she is pretty old, really.
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fiction
She wasn’t in bed. It was the first thing we did, go and see if she
was better.
I cried and Davy told me to stop being a baby, but I think he was
nearly crying too, so Gran made us hot chocolate. We got into Mum’s
bed, wrapped ourselves up in the blankets and she told us cheery stories
until I fell asleep.
I had a funny dream. I walked down to the sea and could hear the
church music again. I could see my mother sitting in the things we’d
collected, except the bicycle was like brand-new. She was staring again
and brushing her hair and we smiled at each other for ages.
When I woke up I tried to keep that picture in my mind and when it
faded I pulled my knees up and gave myself a huge hug.
KEY AREAS:
• How to run a Get Into Reading group
• Potential challenges and solutions
123
The Reader Crossword
Cassandra No.27
1 2 3 4 5 6 7
9 10
11 12
13 14 15
16 17 18 19
20
21 22 23
24 25
26
ACROSS DOWN
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buck’s quiz
1. Which novelist returning from France with his mistress was involved
in a train crash? After helping with survivors he returned to the train to
rescue his manuscript.
2. Who ‘thought words traveled the wires /
In the shiny pouches of
raindrops’?
3. Who found a hound in a red jersey in a railway tunnel?
4. Who, waking in the night on board a train, sees a woman in a scarlet
kimono disappearing down the corridor? Later he finds the kimono in
his luggage.
5. Who is observed from a train to be ‘Missing so much and so much’?
6. What poem is read by the author in a 1936 documentary to the ac-
companiment of music composed by Benjamin Britten?
7. Which poem by possibly ‘the worst poet in British History’ recounts
the events of December 28th 1879?
8. What is the immediate consequence of the meeting between Guy
Haines and Charles Bruno on a train?
9. In which novel do fatal train accidents at the beginning and end of
the story, frame the plot?
10. Which novel’s opening chapter is called ‘The Five O’Clock Express’?
11. ‘Gaily into Ruislip Gardens? / Runs the red electric train’. And who
gets off there?
12. The great commercial (fictional) town of Drumble is ‘distant only
twenty miles on a railroad’ from which other fictional town?
13. In which novel do Begbie and Renton meet ‘an auld drunkard’ in a
disused railway station?
14. What is the title of the 1975 non-fictional account of a series of train
journeys from London to Tokyo by train and back through Siberia?
15. In which novel is the villain run down by a red-eyed, monstrous
express, which ‘licked up his stream of life with its fiery heat’?
125
the back end
PrizeS!
The winner of the Crossword (plucked in time-honoured tradition from
a hat) will receive our selection of World’s Classics paperbacks, and the
same to the winner of the fiendishly difficult Buck’s Quiz.
answers
Cassandra Crossword no. 27
Across
1. Eton rower 11. Red side 12. Bowling 13. Imams 14. Waterland 16.
Gothic transepts 19. Out of this world 21. Garda 22. Locarno 23. Bravado
25. Ever after
Down
1. Learning to swim 2. Good part 5. Prebuttals 6. Two words 7. Troika 8.
A dog 14. Watchtower 15. Disfavours 17. Infarcts 18. Perianth 20. Tocsin
21. Graham Swift 22. Last orders 23. Blew
126
contributors 36
D J Andrew lives in Leeds, has been writing poetry for 55 years and been widely
published in magazines; among his hobbies is taking photos at poetry events.
Josie Billington teaches in the School of English where she is also Research
Manager of The Reader Organisaton. She is currently writing a book on nine-
teenth-century poetry and collaborating with the School of Medicine on a study
of reading and depression.
Nigel Bird is a Support For Learning teacher in a school near Edinburgh. Co-pro-
ducer of The Rue Bella magazine between 1998 and 2003, he is currently working
on his first novel.
Grey Brown is the director and co-founder of the literary arts for Health Arts
Network at Duke Medical Center. She is the author of three collections of
poetry.
Tom Chalmers set-up Legend Press in 2005 and the fiction publisher has re-
cently launched its first non-fiction and business titles. In 2008, he acquired a
further small publisher, Paperbooks. Chalmers has been shortlisted for a number
of publishing and national entrepreneur awards.
Tadeusz Dąbrowski. Poet, essayist and critic who edits the literary bi-monthly
Topos. He is the author of five books of poetry, including Czarny kwadrat (2009).
A collection of his poetry in English will be published soon by Zephyr Press. He
lives in Gdansk, Poland.
Casi Dylan is Training Manager for The Reader Organisation. Born in an old
miner’s cottage in mid Wales, she is a fluent Welsh speaker. She read Anglo-
Saxon, Norse & Celtic Studies and English at Cambridge, and sees working at
TRO as a genuine continuous education.
Seamus Heaney’s most recent books were District and Circle (2006) and a trans-
lation of The Testament Cresseid and Seven Fables by the 15th century poet, Robert
Henryson (2009)
Hans van der Heijden is an award-winning architect. With Rick Wessels he co-
founded the Rotterdam-based practice of architects BIQ Architecten in 1994.
Vanessa Hemingway, the youngest grandchild of Ernest Hemingway, holds a
bachelors in literature and a masters in occupational therapy. Currently pursuing
an MFA in Creative Writing at San Francisco State University, she lives with her
husband and daughter in Santa Cruz, California.
John Kinsella’s most recent book of poetry is Shades of the Sublime and Beauti-
ful (Picador, 2008). He is the editor of the Penguin Anthology of Australian Poetry
(Penguin, 2009).
Ian McMillan was born in 1956 and has been a freelance writer/performer/
broadcaster since 1981. He presents The Verb on BBC Radio 3 every Friday night.
Blake Morrison Is a poet and author. His memoirs And When Did You Last See
Your Father? won the J. R. Ackerly Prize for Autobiography. Latest novel, The Last
Weekend will be published May 2010.
Francis A. Neelon is a physician, and emeritus member of the faculty at Duke
University. He is past-president of the American Osler Society, and a charter
member of the Osler Literary Roundtable at Duke.
Angela Patmore was an International Fulbright Scholar (English) and Univer-
sity of East Anglia Research Fellow (environmental sciences). She is a member of
the Royal Society of Literature and a member of the Friends of Coleridge.
Michael Parker is an academic who writes on Irish, British and postcolonial lit-
erature. His books include Seamus Heaney: The Making of the Poet (1993) and, most
recently, Northern Irish Literature 1956–2006: The Imprint of History (2007).
127
contributors 36
Peter Robinson’s most recent collection is The Look of Goodbye: Poems 2001–2006
from Shearsman Books, who also brought out Spirits of the Stair: Selected Aphorisms
this September. Poetry & Translation: The Art of the Impossible, a new volume of liter-
ary criticism, is published by Liverpool University Press.
Anthony Rudolf a Londoner born in 1942, is the author of poetry (his own and
translations from French and Russian), literary and art criticism, fiction and au-
tobiography. Northern House (in association with Carcanet) is to publish Zigzag,
five prose/verse sequences.
Omar Sabbagh is a Lebanese/British poet. His work has appeared in PN Review,
Poetry Review, Stand and other journals. His first collection, My Only Ever Oedipal
Complaint, is forthcoming with Cinnamon Press (2010). He is currently in the
third year of his PhD on the representation of time in Ford and Conrad.
Ron Travis is a retired librarian (ex-Liverpool Libraries & Information Services).
He was Customer Services Manager: Books and Reading, responsible for main-
streaming reader development in Liverpool and setting up Time to Read, North
West Libraries Book Promotion Partnership.
Enid Stubin is Assistant Professor of English at Kingsborough Community
College of the City University of New York and Adjunct Professor of Humanities
at NY University’s School of Continuing and Professional Studies.
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128