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NEW WRITING / BOOK TALK / NEWS AND REVIEWS

THE READER

No. 36 WINTER 2009

Published by The University of Liverpool School of English.


Supported by:
EDITOR    Philip Davis

DEPUTY EDITOR    Sarah Coley


CO-EDITORS    Maura Kennedy
   Angela Macmillan
   Eleonor McCann
   Brian Nellist
   John Scrivener

NEW YORK EDITOR    Enid Stubin

CONTRIBUTING EDITOR    Les Murray

ADDRESS    The Reader Magazine


   The Reader Organisation
   19 Abercromby Square
   Liverpool L69 7ZG

EMAIL    magazine@thereader.org.uk
WEBSITE    www.thereader.org.uk
BLOG    www.thereaderonline.co.uk

DISTRIBUTION    See p. 128

ISBN 978-0-9558733-5-5

SUBMISSIONS
The Reader genuinely welcomes submissions of poetry, fiction, essays, read-
ings and thought. We publish professional writers and absolute beginners.
Send your manuscript with SAE please to:

The Reader Office, 19 Abercromby Square, Liverpool L69 7ZG, UK.

Printed and bound in the European Union by Bell and Bain Ltd, Glasgow
ABOUT THE READER ORGANISATION

Jane Davis, Director, The Reader Organisation

A Reading Revolution!

   ‘People are dying – it is no metaphor – for lack of something real to


   carry home when day is done.’
Saul Bellow, Herzog

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.

NEWS THIS ISSUE:


Get Into Reading has been highlighted in ‘New Horizons’, a new strategy by the
Department of Health that will promote good mental health and well-being, whilst
improving services for people who have mental health problems (http://www.dh.gov.
uk/en/News/Recentstories/DH_097701).

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

BOOK WORLD YOUR RECOMMENDATIONS


95 Tom Chalmers talks 55 Seamus Heaney
to Eleanor McCann ‘At His Letters’
We Know No Better 99 Brian Nellist
The Old Poem: Alexander Pope,
YOUR REGULARS ‘Argus’
21 Ian McMillan 112 Readers Connect
On the Train Willa Cather,
89 Jane Davis My Antonia
Having Another Go 114 Angela Macmillan
105 Enid Stubin Books About…
Our Spy in NY Old Age
108 The London Eye 116 Rose David
Not on the Table Books for Your Children:
110 Brian Nellist Kenneth Grahame,
Ask the Reader The Wind in the Willows

REVIEWS: NEW BOOKS THE BACK END


101 Brian Nellist 124 Prize Crossword
The New Book: William Trevor By Cassandra
Love and Summer 125 Buck’s Quiz
118 Good Books 126 Quiz and Puzzle Answers
Sarah Coley on David Mamet 127 Contributors

5
THE READER
IN
SCHOOLS

MONMOUTH COMPREHENSIVE SCHOOL, AUGUST 2009

‘TO BE YOURSELF…
   A SCARY ASK WITHIN SCHOOL WALLS’

        –CASI DYLAN, DIARiIES OF THE READER ORGANISATION, p.74

6
editorial

i was brodsky’s minder

Philip Davis

I n his brief memoir of the great philosopher, Norman Malcolm de-


scribed what it was like to watch Wittgenstein thinking. He would
meet his class weekly for a two-hour meeting in Whewell’s Court,
in Trinity College Cambridge. This number of The Reader features
Wittgenstein on architecture, but his own rooms in Cambridge
were remarkably bare: no easy chair, no ornaments or paintings; just
an iron heating stove, the metal safe in which he fearfully kept his
manuscripts, a card table on which he did his writing, and a canvas
deck-chair. And there Wittgenstein sat to give what he called ‘lectures’
though he had nothing written down, and would just think out-loud,
sometimes seeking a dialogue with a particular student in the room,
sometimes, as he tried to draw a thought out of himself, demanding a
prolonged period of silence. ‘During these silences, Wittgenstein was
extremely tense and active. His gaze was concentrated; his face was
alive; his hands made arresting movements; his expression was stern.’
Malcolm was one of the pupils, gathered there in fear and absorption,
waiting for the thought. In every one of these discussions, he notes:
Wittgenstein was trying to create. The force of will and spirit
that he exerted was awesome. As he struggled to work through
a problem one frequently felt that one was in the presence of
real suffering. Wittgenstein liked to draw an analogy between
philosophical thinking and swimming: just as one’s body has a
natural tendency towards the surface and one has to make an
exertion to get to the bottom – so it is with thinking. In talking
about human greatness, he once remarked, that he thought
that the measure of a man’s greatness would be in terms of
what his work cost him.

7
editorial

Wittgenstein’s philosophy, says Malcolm, cost him a great deal.


We live in the days of brain science. But even now it is a fantasy to
try to imagine what it would be like to watch Wittgenstein thinking,
from inside as well as out. Yet Thomas Hardy – about whom Seamus
Heaney writes a prose-poem vignette in this issue – liked to imagine
such things. Hardy’s poem ‘The Pedigree’ takes its origins from one dark
night in 1916 as the writer stared by moonlight at the Hardy family
tree on his desk. Suddenly before his eyes he finds its branches seem to
transform themselves into a sort of neurological mirror of what is going
on behind his forehead:
And then did I divine
That every heave and coil and move I made
Within my brain, and in my mood and speech,
Was in the glass portrayed

The almost simultaneous double perspective – what he could see, as


from outside himself, while still feeling it personally within – both
baffled and disturbed Hardy. He was afraid that all the time he igno-
rantly enjoyed the illusion of personal spontaneity, he was a product of
genetic determinism:
Said I then, sunk in tone,
‘I am the merest mimicker and counterfeit! –
Though thinking, I am I
And what I do I do myself alone.’

Desperately shaken by his own powerful feelings, Hardy would draw


diagrams of his mind, to try to get some sort of objective hold on
himself. Sometimes those diagrams were poems – poems which them-
selves served as brains or brain-scans on the page in front of him,
their very structures topologically recreating ‘every heave and coil and
move I made / Within my brain’. Often his own words moved him, as
with a great surge of emotion. These were small-scale versions of what
happened when he saw a stage dramatisation of his novel Tess of the
d’Urbervilles, which made him cry at his own work. Yet still at the end
of his life, he said of his work that he had done everything that he had
meant to do but ‘did not know whether it had been worth doing.’
I remember meeting the Nobel prize-winning poet, Joseph Brodsky,
an exile from Soviet Russia who lived in America from 1972 and from
then on wrote mainly in English until his death in 1996. He came to
Liverpool, it must have been late in his life, to give a lecture, a reading
and a seminar. Thomas Hardy, he said to me then, was one of the dead
poets he would have liked to talk to (others were Auden and Frost
and of course Mandelstam). Brodsky himself had been tried in Soviet

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

John Kinsella Omar Sabbagh

Recommend an Meeting with poet


author Ted Hughes or R.S.
Philip K. Dick Thomas.

Featured on page 19 Happiest age


On the cusp of 15 and
16.
Overused word
‘Avenue’ and ‘white’,
Michael Parker but avenue is
OMAR especially irritating,
SABBAGH because it seems a
Which poet would permanent fixture in
you have liked to my preconscious.
meet?
Zbigniew Herbert Recommend a book
(though my wife would Henry Miller’s Colossus
have had to act as a of Maroussi or W.H.
translator). Hudson’s Nature in
Downland. D. J. ANDR
Overused word
‘Although’, because How many drafts?
I have always liked One to three, or, an in-
weighing one proposi- finity. I take the latter
tion against another. case as a sign that the
poem was ill-starred
Recommend a book in conception.
Mikhail Bulgakhov,
The Master and Featured on page 41
Margarita.
TADEUSZ
DABROWSKI How many drafts?
At least six, although
even after something
appears complete
there are still
individual words or
phrases that require
agonising over.
Featured on page 33

10
Peter Robinson Tadeusz Dąbrowski D. J. Andrew

Meeting with poet Meeting with poet Meeting with poet


Anne Finch, Coun- No one. Poets are Among the living John
tess of Winchelsea usually less interesting Ashbery, among the
(1661–1720). than their poems. dead Auden.
Overused word Happiest age Happiest age
All the articles and In my married life, as Without trying, I hope
other determiners, the my wife remarked. to be happy today.
prepositions, the first
person singular, any Overused word Overused word
word with an ‘-ing’ You either write poetry ‘The’ and ‘now’.
or ‘-ion’ ending, the or tend to overuse
some words. Recommend an
verbs ‘to be’, ‘to have’, author
‘to go’ and so on. Recommend a book Thomas Lux.
Recommend an Ada or Ardour by
Vladimir Nabokov. How many drafts?
author Tend to write as it
The poet Bernard How many drafts? comes, revise until
Spencer (1909–1963). Very few, a poem nothing more to be
REW How many drafts?
should immediately done – for the time
There’s no way of stand on its own feet. being.
knowing: anything Otherwise no treat-
Featured on page 82
from around five on ments will save it
upwar from death.
Featured on page 66
Featured on page 49

MICHAEL
PARKER D. J. ANDREW

11
essay

climbing to a climax

Angela Patmore

W hat are the most arresting works of lit-


erature you have ever read? Chances are
they will contain a climax. In all of our key
leisure activities, in our literary classics, in
drama, cinema, sport, music, adventure
activities and rites of passage, the same exhilarating sequence emerges.
After a steady build-up of tension there is a peak of excitement, a
crescendo, followed by clarity and realisation, followed by resolution. I
call these extreme experiences CCs or ‘cerebral climaxes’. My research,
which spans twenty-five years in literature, sports psychology and the
science on ‘stress’, highlights the importance to mental health and well-
being of the CC, and the way in which ‘stress management’ undermines
this process.
The theory of ‘managing’ emotions by avoidance and calming down
is explored in The Truth About Stress, shortlisted for the MIND Book of
the Year Award. It all began with some dubious experiments on rats in
the 1930s and an attempt to graft an engineering concept, ‘stress’, onto
living things. My exposé presents evidence on the bogus science and the
lucrative unregulated industry in calm-downs and potted endocrinology
lessons that it has spawned: 15 million web sites offering advice and

12
essay

services; an army of UK practitioners with a growth rate over 12 years


of 804 per cent spreading pseudo-medical ‘stress awareness’. There are
currently around 650 different (and opposite) definitions of ‘stress’. The
word can be used to ‘disease’ (and therefore sell treatments for) any
natural physiological mechanism, any hormonal pattern, any emotion.
Stress management dictates that if you start to feel unusual or powerful
feelings, you should stop and have a lie-down, as you are ‘at grave risk’.
Such censorship of emotional life rubbishes our leisure pursuits.
Despite our modern obsession with ‘managing stress’, people spend
their spare time on climactic activities virtually guaranteed to involve
tension, tears and fears. They put themselves in some version of harm’s
way quite deliberately in order to go on an emotional rollercoaster that
climaxes in a crescendo, a result, a payoff. The conventional wisdom
is that we are all simply motivated by the pursuit of pleasure, but
climactic activities are much more complex than that. They facilitate
a so-called ‘adrenalin rush’, an arousal curve. They give us our highs,
our peak experiences. They are minor versions of the soul-sensing ex-
periences of religious faith, of Near Death Experiences, of Zen sartori
or enlightenment.
People have always been willing to endure tension, tears and fears,
so long as there is a climactic experience at the end of it. Falling in love
can be highly distressing but few would forego the amazing cerebral
climaxes that a love affair can give. Or consider the 1970s personal de-
velopment programme known as EST (Erhard Seminar Training), the
brainchild of Werner Erhard. Adopting the often abusive and demeaning
approach of Zen master training, EST stripped away every layer of belief
from trainees until they discovered within themselves a liberating, ego-
less state known as ‘It’. The need for the CC is very prevalent in human
society. It may explain (explain, not forgive) certain self-destructive and
anti-social acts such as gambling all the housekeeping or flirting with
the forbidden. For most of us CCs are obtained more easily, by taking
part in leisure activities. The more extreme the activity, the higher the
curve, but the pattern is always the same.
Juveniles favour childhood dares, fiction and fairy stories, gruesome
spewsome comics, computer games, daredevil pursuits, fighting and dis-
puting, rites of passage, romance and sex. Adults enjoy classics of fiction,
thrillers and chillers, drama and theatre, movies, poetry, quizzes and
contests, punchline jokes, hunting, sports, martial arts, white knuckle
rides, adventure activities, gambling, music, challenges – and romance
and sex. But cerebral climaxes are not some minor version of, or sub-
stitute for, sexual climaxes. They are better than sex. Religious devotees
have forsworn sexuality to experience them, and adventurers put their
very lives at risk. Indeed, sex is a version of what cerebral climaxes are,

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.

“Thrill-seekers are not trying to kill themselves”

Plummeting 100 feet through an explosive 5.5 g-force or submitting to


cyclonic forces on a raging vortex ride or a vertical drop rollercoaster
will produce one. So does descending from one of four BASE jumps
(the acronym stands for Building, Antenna, Span and Earth). Adrena-
lin junkies, as they are labelled by the uninitiated, are drawn to a place
beyond fear, of catharsis, ego-release, timeless beauty and tranquillity.
Professional sport is a test of nerve and courage. It is not simply a
contest of physical skill. If it were, outcomes would be predictable: the
most technically accomplished players would always win. But this is
not the case. The experiment pits skilled contestants against each other
under time limits and constraints, motivated by staggering amounts of
money. Millions of spectators can then watch as the tension mounts
to its climax. The Grand National commentary canters along, rises to
a frantic crescendo as front-runners pass the post, and then tails off
as they saunter into the winners’ enclosure. Television quizzes place
contestants under a microscope as they ascend a ladder of questions.
Reality shows expose contestants to gruelling emotional ordeals, ex-
ploring cerebral climaxing in the contestants and vicariously in the
viewer. In computer games the CC is achieved with the help of a ‘boss’
– a computer-generated force that struggles with the player in a tense
series of ‘grades’ and enables him to reach a final crisis.
Or consider the high point or best feature of your favourite work
of art. We might say of it that its climax causes a fusion in the mind.
It is the point at which a work of art makes total sense, or makes love
to your imagination. It is a visceral experience – the hairs rise on one’s
arms. It takes the breath away. It may even have a cathartic effect, coa-
lescing and releasing confused or pent-up emotions and moving you
to tears. Two millennia ago, Aristotle studied the effects of drama on
theatre audiences. He noticed that the Greeks went through hell with
the characters on stage, and the action built up to a moment of extreme

14
essay

tension before erupting in violence and terror. He divided a play into


four parts: protasis (the showing of the characters), epistasis (working
up the plot and expectations), catastasis (the climax of the play) and ca-
tastrophe, when all was unravelled, revealed and resolved. The audience
went away cleansed of their emotions. Aristotle called what they had
experienced catharsis.
The arts are predicated on tension and resolution. Usually, as in fiction,
ballet, opera, cinema and theatre, this is delivered through a storyline
that builds and takes the audience with it. But our great poems, paint-
ings and sculptures also manifest its impact by crystallising positively
and negatively charged emotional symbols and fusing them in utterly
satisfying harmonies of words or images. In the classical treatise On the
Sublime, attributed to Longinus Cecilius, we read of a power that ‘uplifts
our souls; we are filled with a proud exultation and a sense of vaunting
joy’ as the poet ‘selects and fuses the most extreme and intense mani-
festations of emotions.’ Poets’ brains produce brilliant crystallisations,
and their work is written in short lines on the page to signal that theirs
is not ordinary language but condensed and explosive, fusing multiple
meanings. Ezra Pound used the German term for poetry – Dichtung or
condensation – to describe it.
Dramatic fusion is a feature of all great poetry. T. S. Eliot felt that
the poet’s brain was a crucible for alchemy, ‘storing up numberless feel-
ings, phrases, images, which remain there until all the particles which
can unite to form a new compound are present together.’ What was
important was ‘the intensity of the artistic process, the pressure, so
to speak, under which the fusion takes place’. The poet-philosopher
Samuel Taylor Coleridge devoted much of his literary life to exploring
the creative process. He said the poet ‘brings the whole soul of man
into activity… He diffuses a tone and spirit of unity that blends and (as
it were) fuses, each into each, by that synthetic and magical power, to
which we have exclusively appropriated the name Imagination.’
All of the above are descriptions of the cerebral climax – the way in
which it occurs, and the way in which it transmits to the reader. The
central characters of great fiction are put through a wringer, and at the
point of highest tension there is a supreme struggle, during which the
protagonist fails or triumphs but dramatically learns. Writers explore
extreme emotions, narrating their characters’ crises and torments. They
take their readers through these as well, in order to achieve a resolution.
Kafka, in one of his most unsettling stories, describes the plight of a
prisoner subjected to torture under the harrow: ‘But how quiet the man
grows at the sixth hour. Enlightenment comes to the most dull-witted.
It begins around the eyes. From there it radiates. A moment that might
tempt one to get under the harrow with him.’ Kafka did not know about

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

suddenly produce order. One of these systems is the human brain.


Undergoing tension and resolution may be crucial to its vital work of
making connections.
The ‘nerves’ that our stress-managed age has come to fear and avoid
are actually part of a complex cerebral process designed to produce a
heightened version of our abilities. This could explain why creative
people go through an emotional loop to produce their best work. Rossini
couldn’t compose until the night before the performance. Once he
composed on the actual day of the performance, with the impresario’s
henchmen standing over him as he wrote and threatening to throw him
out of the window.
What was happening to Rossini’s brain during these episodes? When
we experience anything exciting, pleasant or unpleasant, the body goes
into the complex fight-or-flight response. One effect is that the blood is
diverted away from the extremities – hence cold feet and hands – and

“Emotions make up the richness of human experience


and they need to be understood, not lobotomised”

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.

Read more here:


http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2006/jan/24/health.lifeandhealth
Angela Patmore, The Truth About Stress, Atlantic Books, 2006 ISBN 978-
1843542353

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

For copyright reasons we are unable to offer John Kinsella’s


poems in the online edition of the magazine.

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

That’s because, every Wednesday from September to July, my office


is the 07.30 train from Doncaster to King’s Cross as I zip down the East
Coast Main Line to record my Radio 3 show, The Verb. Some people still
find it amazing that I can do things in London and live in Barnsley, but
the 07:30 only takes just over an hour and a half; that’s two cups of tea
and a few pages of a poetry book or a couple of chapters of a novel or
most of a short story. The first train down is at 05:35 and the last train
back is at 23:30 so there’s rarely any reason to follow Lenny Henry into
a Premier Inn. It’s odd though how the myth persists, to a lesser extent
than it used to, about having to be in London if you want to do your
lengths in the literary pool. Not long ago I heard somebody in quite a
high position in a literary organisation in the capital refer to ‘The Prov-
inces’ and in the smart new Digital Media Centre in Barnsley somebody
asked me if I ‘maintained a base’ in Barnsley. ‘Yes’ I said: ‘I call it my
house.’ And that’s why it’s glorious that The Reader is based in Liver-

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...

Bugs by Antony Dunn (Carcanet Press, ISBN 978-1903039953)


Deceiving Wild Creatures by Jeremy Over (Carcanet Press, ISBN 978-1847770042)
Wonderful Town ed. David Remnick (published by The Modern Library, ISBN 978-
0375757525)

23
ERIC LOMAX
BY THE OLD BRIDGE, BERWICK-UPON-TWEED
© Joe Payne

24
interview

the railway man


starting at the essentials

Angela Macmillan talks to Eric Lomax

What follows is not so much an interview as a record of a conversation I had


with Eric Lomax, author of The Railway Man.

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

decorative dust jacket of The Story of Mankind by H. W. Van Loon.


I was convinced that there were thousands of readers who had
never looked at the back of the jacket, and that this wonderful
branching tree of human ingenuity was for me alone.
(from The Railway Man)
In a soft Edinburgh accent, he answered my questions. ‘Childhood’ he
writes ‘was a time of stern affection’.

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.

‘Abou Ben Adhem’ seemed to declaim something beautiful


and defiant to us.
(from The Railway Man)
‘What writest thou?’ – The vision raised its head,
And with a look made of all sweet accord,
Answered ‘The names of those who love the Lord.’
‘And is mine one?’ said Abou. ‘Nay, not so,’
Replied the angel. Abou spoke more low,
But cheerly still, and said ‘I pray thee, then,
Write me as one that loves his fellow men.’
(from ‘Abou Ben Adham’)

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

AM: Do you still read it?

EL: Occasionally. I think there is one up there on the shelf.

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.

I am concerned now that we are straying into dark waters.

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!

AM: What do you enjoy reading now?

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

are we going to survive? We would sometimes talk about what we would


do when the Japanese started to exterminate us and in fact, we came
within two weeks of being disposed of. [Eric is quiet for a moment.]
Now this book is world famous. This is The Specialist, by Charles Sale; the
specialist, that is, in building… loos. It is Australian and short but one
of the funniest of books. There were several copies in Changi. Now this
one is totally different. On the train going from Singapore to Thailand in
1942, I struggled to read Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men. A man on
the railway truck commented that I could not have chosen a more un-
suitable book for the journey and I struggled with it all the way without
making much progress. Nevertheless I went out of my way to get a copy
post-war and read it again. I liked it but it was still heavy going.

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.

EL: I am tempted to answer you now, and this is a purely interim


answer, which I don’t think anyone will ever have offered before to that
question. It is The Sea Around Us by Rachel Carson. Do you know it? It

31
interview

is a most beautifully written book. Apart from the technical content, I


was struck by the quality of the language and I have quite a few of her
original editions.
AM: We should stop talking now because I don’t want to tire you.

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.

EL: I couldn’t believe it. That’s perfectly true.

As I walk back down the garden path I remember the epigraph for The
Railway Man:

I am alive, and was dead – Write therefore the things which


thou hast seen.
Revelation I, 18–19

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

According to the Gospel of James,


At the age of five,
Jesus fashioned five clay sparrows
On the Sabbath.
Locals in Nazareth,
Joseph amongst them,
Were scandalised.
Such levity, and on the Sabbath.
A good beating
Would do no harm,
They cried.
Jesus was amazed
At being reprimanded,
Yet held his tongue.
Instead, spreading arms
To their limits,
He called on the birds
To rise:
‘Go forth unto the heights and fly;
Ye shall not meet with death
At any hands.’
Requiring no further prompt,
The clay birds did just that.

33
poetry

According to the Gospel of James,


Each morning, at around three,
Their descendants congregate
To celebrate this feat,
And voice disbelief
At how this could be so,
Though, according to James,
The inconceivable
Is always possible,
Citing the birds’ very existence
As witness.

34
essay

literature and architecture


against optimism

Hans van der Heijden

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

W hen we build, we also talk and write,


Ludwig Wittgenstein asserted once. He
should know. Wittgenstein designed one of
the key twentieth century pieces of archi-
tecture, the house for his sister Margarethe
Stonborough-Wittgenstein. The aphorism reflects the instrumental view
on the use of language taken in his Philosophical Investigations. Commu-
nication on practical matters is measured by its effectiveness and not by
linguistic logic as formulated earlier in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.
But in the context of Wittgenstein’s Vienna the aphorism is more am-
biguous than that. It also reads as a plea for a reciprocity between the
art of architecture and that of the written and spoken word and as a
plea to explain and justify the things we do at length. Ludwig Wittgen-
stein was a moralist. He was also a radical dilettante in many fields.
He worked as a mechanical engineer, a soldier, an architect, a village

35
essay

teacher in Trattenbach and a professor in philosophy in Cambridge, but


perhaps his real passion was music.
A lot has been said and done to interpret the virtuosity of the Ston-
borough House that was designed in 1926. Architectural theorists
have tried to read its floor plans as logical diagrams, as architectural
switch-boards so to speak, others have stressed the ethical values of the
elementary volumes and bare aesthetic or the maniacal craftsmanship of
its details. However, there is also evidence that the Stonborough House
was a place of nostalgia. It was full of melancholy and memories.

The spatial arrangement of the house is rooted in the domestic con-


ventions of the Viennese aristocracy of the time. The living rooms of
the house are on the first floor. It is an urban Palais with a stately route
from the entrance vestibule to the upper floor. Double glass doors in the
vestibule give way to a straight staircase running to the upper lobby.
The eye is focused on a piece of sculpture positioned in the axis of sym-
metry of the stair. The house refers to the particulars of the Wittgenstein
family tradition in very explicit ways. The sequence of the vestibule
doors, staircase and statue is literally taken from the Palais of Karl
Wittgenstein, the father of Ludwig and Margarethe. In both houses

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

Spartanism altogether, but it is not depicted as a grandiose piece of total


design. It does not contain stylish contemporary furniture and art and
in this sense it is not a consistent modernist house. Today, we might
even be tempted to describe the furnishing as incorrect: the house
appears to be strongly personalised. Mahogany tables, crapauds, porce-
lain, candles, and art on pedestals lend the spaces a considerable degree
of intimacy (but not cosiness, the light comes from bare light bulbs).
This is confirmed by the photographic snapshots Ludwig Wittgenstein
glued in his notebooks. The house must have been a bohemian place

where Viennese intellectuals gathered, drank coffee and Schnapps. The


polish of antique grand pianos and cellos would not have looked odd. It
was a home, the home of the family of Ludwig’s sister Margarethe.
The Spartan properties of the architecture are reductive in nature
rather than abstract. That is an important distinction. Wittgenstein’s
objective is not to rework traditional motifs so as to arrive at a new
vocabulary. The Stonborough House is not revolutionary. It is an open
question whether its Spartanism is more or less intimidating than the

38
essay

baroque of the father’s house, but what is important is the intention to


approach architecture as an art that is rooted in traditions small and
large. Hermine Wittgenstein’s drawings and the photographs do not
depict any architectural purity, but instead they focus on the habits and
rituals of the family. These habits and rituals, by the way, were prob-
lematic. Father Wittgenstein was a dominant man, his expectations of
the children were high, three of his sons committed suicide. Music in
the house represented culture, but it was also like a major league sports
match in which it was not easy to earn praise. Wittgenstein family life
was tragic. Difficult as it was, the reference in the design to the family’s
history was a firm token of realism. Much later, in 1946, Ludwig Witt-
genstein would write: ‘Tradition is not something that everyone can pick
up, it is not a thread, that someone can pick up, if and when he pleases;
any more than you can choose your own ancestors. Someone who has
no tradition and would like to have it, is like an unhappy lover.’
Compare the building, talking and writing of the Stonborough House
to the architectural discourse today! Originality and innovation are now
the criteria to judge architecture. Architects are supposed to have their
own personal theory and style. The inherent contradiction is only clear to
those who stick to the notion that theories and styles are shared intellec-
tual properties. It is as though such theoretical anxiety must compensate
for the lack of a significant agenda for architects. The literary vehicles
that are used in architecture are descriptive in nature and style (minutes,
specifications, tables, schedules) or testimonial (critiques, design state-
ments) and only rarely investigative (mostly in an academic context)
and the overall tone is likely to be ostentatiously positive. Architecture is
forced into a performative corner. Architectural space seems to be pos-
sessed by a merciless optimism in which there is little room for doubts
and complexity. Inevitably, design visuals are supplied with clean streets,
mothers with prams and roller-skating kids. It never rains in these ar-
chitectural utopias. Doubts, complexity and melancholy don’t solve
problems and certainly don’t sell in the anonymous markets in which
design functions today. Good cheer does. Ambiguity is out.
We do not live in revolutionary times. Our built environment is
complex, expanding and in constant flux. Literature is much better
equipped than any architectural analysis to interpret these dynamics.
Words make us aware that our built environment is not just a physical
world, but also a lived world. Problematic environments (the American
suburb as pictured by John Irving and Jeffrey Eugenides, the post-war
point blocks in the Edinburgh of Irvine Welsh) are also habitats. The
melancholy of places becomes known by talking and writing and this
makes us speculate how houses have become homes and how built en-
vironments are grown into habitats.

39
essay

Wittgenstein suggested that the dignity of a habitat relates to the


habits and rituals of its occupiers. Viewed in his way, a home or a habitat
is not only a backdrop for pleasure and happiness, but also for disap-
pointment, grief and pain. The architecture of a house should not make
a funeral look ridiculous. In a very deep way, the dignity of our habitat
is measured by such dramas and by the melancholy of life. Crucial of
course in the case of the Stonborough House was the small gap that
existed between the conception and consummation of architecture and
that the architect Wittgenstein chose to associate himself quite strongly
with the family life that eventually would take place in the house.
Architecture has its own professional tools and in that sense it is an
autonomous artistic discipline. Yet, architecture as such changes little:
Wittgenstein seemed to say that the value of architecture all depends on
the engagement of its designers with the tasks they are given. Building
by talking and writing as Wittgenstein did leads architecture not to lose
itself in innovation and utopia, but instead to develop as an artistic skill
to cope with reality – for better or worse. Paradoxically, Wittgenstein’s
melancholic outlook on architectural issues should make us happier. So
he concludes his 1946 aphorism on the inevitability of the traditions
we build on: ‘The happy lover & the unhappy lover both have their par-
ticular pathos. But it is harder to bear yourself well as an unhappy lover
than as a happy one’.

40
poetry

omar sabbagh

The Ancient Discoverer

The chthonic god is deliberate in his actions.


When the drama of his admonishment begins
the people above ground will cower. The pedestrian
and the workaholic will simultaneously quicken…
All the senses take on luggage, and all minds
learn the meaning of care, in their movements,
in their gestures, in attitude, in prayer. The ascent
of the god is near: personal history and good intentions
are at loggerheads, and panic, the ancient discoverer,
leads the way. A million vital things – about our
pettiness, our littleness, and the moneyed threats
we build out of nothing to satisfy the avarice
of our perversity – all this will be discovered today.
Gone is the small hedonist and the small significance
in our lives. And gone is everything good
we left untested. The god will judge nothing but
covert plots, like a giant in the mist. He will see
into our bones from the inside of his own, and then
leave. And what’s left is only a skeleton, a skinnier version
of our former belief in ourselves, but settled, rested.

41
poetry

Prodigy

Start with a comma, so they know


I was there before I was born –
that the womb was only an alibi.
Tell them that in childhood I realized
that only the lucky are given
a little authorship in life, a pittance.
I knew, you see, so very quickly,
that just as the grown-ups would steer
what we saw, what we heard, and what
we endeavoured – I knew that even later
in life, things would be the same.
I was small, I was short, but I divined
the ubiquity of bullying. Fate,
and even character, were things of which
I knew nothing. I could not moralise.
But I knew that we, as a species, were not safe.
What can I say? I suppose I had psychic gifts,
that I was forward in the mind. It’s eighteen years
since I was eight. And when they write
my biography, whenever, however
long it takes, I know that I will still be
one of you, one of us, a puppet
steered by all the things I love,
all the things I hate, and the something in me,
spinning fractional within,
that sees the map, sees the X penciled in,
but also sees
the pirate chuckling with the pen.

42
poetry

Message in a Bottle
For Claudia H

Water. The delicate wandering of a deer.


Lavender. These are all better than words;
neither stiff counters nor dead symbols, but
legendary – they live, long and flexible,
from the inside of me to the inside
of you: even if there’s a world between us.
I thought of an apple the other day.
You know the kind, dear: shiny, red, plump.
It sat there, revolving, as if on display –
the space of my mind was an exhibition.
It made me think of something true,
not just precise, but with fire, alive.
Three women have counted days, hours,
then moments in my life. Three
have descended with me to the smallest
feeling. But it’s only you, with your
deliberate love, who remains, undiminished.
I think of you often. Too often.

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

He brought in the half-full bottle of Johnny Walker and two dirties


from the sink to save her washing them.
She drank. A tear had got stuck part way down her cheek. Wilson
touched his finger there to help it along. Then he pushed the hair away
from her eyes. They were so light brown they were almost yellow, like an
animal’s, and it surprised him a little, so he turned his head.
‘Jesus,’ she said. ‘Bob won’t look at me either.’ And that started her
crying all over again.
‘There’s nothing wrong with you,’ Wilson said. ‘Hey, I mean it.’ She
was way better looking than anything he’d ever taken out, but that
wasn’t all. She was nice – a good person. The place where she’d pressed
the towel to his head was throbbing a little. She’d have to be good to do
what she did every day with those old folks and then come home and
put up with Bob.
‘Bob’s a shit,’ Wilson said.
‘I guess I’m knee deep in it.’ She tried to crack a smile.
Wilson started pressing with one of his hands into her shoulder,
first just fingertips, and when, after a few moments, she moaned, he
held his thumb in the meaty part close to her neck. Honest to God, the
muscle was solid rock – until it melted right into his hands. He’d never
felt a human being ease into him like that. His dog almost every night,
but never a woman.
It was a vet who’d taught Wilson how to work a muscle, for a soft-
mouthed spaniel he’d shot once, purely on accident. The safety was on
– Wilson would have sworn it was, right up until the moment the gun
went off. The dog lived for a couple weeks after, his muscles taut always,
like he was bracing himself for a second hit, and that massage Wilson
would give him was the only thing that stopped the whimpering and
got the spaniel to sleep. Wilson even did it while the doctor slipped the
needle in, after he’d finally agreed to put the dog down.
‘You can do that forever,’ June said.
So Wilson started in on the other shoulder, real slow. Then down her
back, on either side of her spine, working with his thumbs and the pads
of his fingers through her t-shirt. He was careful around the clip of her
bra, working above and below it, when she reached back and undid it
for him. He slid his fingers under her shirt and around to her belly. The
flesh quivered and tensed, so he let her know with slow circles: Those
fingers weren’t moving on until the muscles gave way completely. By
the time his hands found her breasts, the nipples were hard.
‘You hear that?’ June said.
Wilson hadn’t heard a thing, but he didn’t say so. He couldn’t even
open his mouth to speak. How could he? A breast lay in each one of his
hands, two still-warm birds.

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

behind ‘otterspool prom’

Peter Robinson

Otterspool Prom

‘O cursed spite’
William Shakespeare

There’s a dazzle of sunlight on the low-tide river


and our far shore
has a silver-grey blur, bright as never, never,
ever before.

You see it’s enough to bring tears to the eyes


by silhouetting trees,
winter boughs spidery on mist-like white skies
twitched in a breeze.

But then down the promenade its flyers release


their dragon-tailed kite;
frost on the pitches is shrinking by degrees;

a student’s words return, her going ‘England’s shite!’


and I’m like ‘Please
yourself’ in sunshine born as if to set it right.

‘Otterspool Prom’ was first published in the Times Literary Supplement, 5 June
2008.

49
PETER ROBINSON

50
THE poet on his work

I had not taught creative writing on a regular basis until I returned


to England and came to work at the University of Reading, after
eighteen years in Japan. It’s been intriguing and enlightening to
lead weekly two-hour seminars in which students present their
work, and have it discussed by their fellow writers. What has also
been pleasantly surprising is the extent to which the group members,
who if discussing a canonical author might have been fairly tongue-
tied, would loquaciously engage in minutely constructive criticism of
their contemporaries’ writing, making points ranging from the adequa-
cy of the punctuation to lacunae in plotting, character inconsistencies,
and many other things that I hope they will go on to apply not only to
their own writing, but also to the work of those canonical writers who
had appeared to overawe them in literature seminars.
Most of the conversations have tended to be amicable and tem-
perate, but occasionally there have been quite heated and vociferous
exchanges. ‘Otterspool Prom’ would not have come to be written
without some words from the latter. One student’s chosen project for
the term was to write a collage prose piece based on gun crime in a Los
Angeles high school. Most of the material for this had been discovered
on the web, and then cast into an attempted imitation of Californian
speech among armed minors in a poor district of the city. As chance
would have it, there had happened to be, that term, a number of stories
set in simulacra of American metropolitan areas; and in each case I had
delicately raised the question of whether the handling of the spoken
idiom was sufficiently convincing to carry the themes that were being
explored. The bee in my bonnet at the time will have also contributed
to what I was saying to the students, it being that the landscapes and
societies of our own country are themselves a terra incognita under our
very noses. It’s not a new idea. George Borrow wrote in Lavengro (1851)
that ‘there are no countries in the world less known by the British than
these selfsame British Islands’.
So I suggested to them, in the gentlest possible terms, that it helps
when attempting creative composition, especially starting out, to write
about something that you know, using experiences that have made
strong impressions on you, and, most of all, that you can only make dis-
coveries about the matter you want to write about if you attempt it in a
language coming out of yourself. That way the sounds and associations

51
THE poet on his work

of words can interact in your mind to generate phrases and sentences,


which, when you work on them and read them back to yourself may
well illuminate what you are doing, may teach you things about your-
self, and thus, whatever the outcome, the process, with luck, will have
been a benefit anyway. So I suggested to the student of the Los Angeles
high-school gun-crime story that she consider setting the work in one
of the areas of Britain where, sadly, we also have teenage violence of
an equivalent kind, even if not on an American scale. I will have men-
tioned a few such inner city areas, including parts of the place where I’d
been raised — reminded of Liverpool by the shooting of the 11-year-old
Rhys Jones in the car park of the Fir Tree pub in Croxteth on the evening
of the 22 August 2007. I had imagined that my line of thought to the
seminar was practically a self-evident truth, but could feel some group
feeling developing against the idea …
‘I can’t do that,’ the student replied, ‘England’s shite!’
Well, her words did make me laugh, and out loud if I remember,
given that I’d spent the last eighteen years on the other side of the
planet wondering what the circumstances might have to be for my
return. I lost the argument too: none of the students who were present-
ing works located in high-threat transatlantic environments relocated
them in our own backstreets. And I would say, though it may sound
mean, that in retrospect the student’s sudden outburst seems the most
creative bit of language use she came up with during the term. After all,
her two-word phrase had identified the theme she should have been
exploring in her work. What had made her reach the age of nineteen
feeling that these words might be a true representation of the country in
which she’d grown up, and, if they were, why? Her words got under my
skin, if not on my nerves, interacting with snippets of usage and quota-
tion filed away in the recesses of my mind. Back at the beginning of the
1970s, I had been taken through Hamlet in minute detail for A-level. Not
long after that creative writing seminar, my thoughts somehow drifted
to Marcellus’s ‘Something is rotten in the state of Denmark’; to Hamlet
being sent to England where it is ‘no great matter’ if he doesn’t recover
his wits because ‘there the men are as mad as he’ (as if Shakespeare
added that plot twist just to work in the joke); and to Hamlet’s couplet
from Act 1: ‘The time is out of joint: O cursed spite / That ever I was born
to set it right!’ The student’s word ‘shite’ might have helped me recall
the rhyme words, and I made up a short version of Hamlet’s predica-
ment: ‘O cursed spite / Denmark’s shite.’
A week or two after this incident we drove up to Liverpool for an
overnight with my parents and, as is our habit, went out for a Sunday
pub lunch on Otterspool promenade with its view across the river Mersey
towards the Wirral side. It was a day of bright diffused misty sunlight in

52
THE poet on his work

mid-February, a day briefly evoked as best as I can in ‘Otterspool Prom’,


an improvised sonnet which was not planned as such before the writing
process. I had jotted down words and phrases about some of the phe-
nomena that moved me and made my eyes water, along with the odd
accidental detail, like those people flying their Chinese-style kite. English
is not a language especially rich in rhymes. If the phrases I’m noting
down seem to point towards a poem whose materials don’t demand to
be extended very far, and contain phrases with three rhyming echoes,
then my mind will turn to the Petrarchan sonnet, a form requiring triple
rhymes in its sestet. But the key thing that had to take place for the
poem to happen was the association of that stirring scene beyond the
pub window with the words of the creative writing student. Maybe the
sudden plethora of rhymes helped that happen too. Not only is there the
‘spite / kite / shite / right’, but also the other sestet rhyme, foreshadowed
in the second quatrain: ‘trees / breeze / release / degrees / Please’.
Contributing to this association, there could have been the back-
ground of Rhys Jones’s shooting, though I don’t recall it consciously
impinging on the writing process. I was certainly aware of the evident
emotional contradictions in the student’s words, and my relief at
having finally returned home, doubly instanced by our coming back to
my parents in Liverpool. What must have made me think there was
something apt about imitating the youth-speak of ‘I’m like’ followed
by the more long-in-the-tooth colloquialism, ‘Please / yourself’, must
have been that it exemplifies the process of her words getting under my
skin to the extent of sounding like her, and then performs an attempt to
recover a dialect equilibrium of my own. Maybe the hook-line to Ricky
Nelson’s ‘Garden Party’ was also coming to my rescue: ‘You see, you
can’t please everyone, so you got to please yourself.’
‘No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be’, as T. S. Eliot has
it. Behind the arras of ‘Otterspool Prom’ there may, I fear, be a tired
old Polonius advising the young, prompted by an ingrained tempta-
tion to take responsibility for the state of things; and yet, in the poem’s
concluding transfer of Hamlet’s words from the Prince’s duty to the
sunshine that Sunday lunchtime, there may also be a recognition of
limits to what can be amended, along with an implicitly expressed need
for things still to come right, and not just for me in my return home, but
more widely — as subliminally articulated in the closing rhymes of the
intuited sonnet form. My hope is that in reading the poem, preferably
aloud, you hear echoing within you the working out of those contradic-
tory feelings and that analogy for a state of things being wrong, and of
things still needing to be set right.

53
Thomas Hardy
by William Strang
1912, pencil

National Portrait Gallery, London

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 MAN IS ABOUT AS BIG


  AS THE THINGS THAT MAKE HIM ANGRY.
     
      – WINSTON CHURCHILL

Courtesy of Churchill Archives Centre,


Churchill
56Papers CHUR 1/103
the reading revolution

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.

how can this be me?

Josie Billington

O ne consequence of the success of The Reader


Organisation in using serious literature as an
intervention in mental health is a growing
pressure from public ‘user’ bodies formally to
evaluate the anecdotal evidence of its therapeu-
tic efficacy. We need a big, urgent language to press the literary case,
and one that will be respectable to the scientific community too.
This is not just our problem or a problem created by the two cultures
– literature and science – but the key problem faced by the Victorians.
When the neuroscientist, Antonio Damasio, wrote at the turn of the
present century, ‘There is an abyss between knowledge and experience
which cannot be bridged scientifically’, he was rehearsing for the twenty-
first century a problem which was felt with new urgency in the Victorian

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

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THE reading revolution

she was almost sure sooner or later to recover it. Permanent


rebellion, the disorder of a life without some loving reverent
resolve, was not possible to her; but she was now in an interval
when the very force of her nature heightened its confusion. In
this way, the early months of marriage often are times of criti-
cal tumult – whether that of a shrimp-pool or of deeper waters
– which afterwards subsides into cheerful peace.

This is a marvellous example of how George Eliot’s language mediates


gaps – those ‘intervals’ where things happen, and where big things orig-
inate themselves, secretly. Dorothea herself doesn’t feel she’s making
any progress – more the opposite: she is crying (causelessly, it seems
to her). And George Eliot’s language conceptualises the remoteness of
Dorothea’s feeling from any clear sense of meaning about that feeling as
an inevitable and necessary part of the process by which the ‘new real
future is replacing the imaginary’. Time is key here: Dorothea just needs
time, George Eliot’s language is saying at one level, whilst also recognis-
ing that Dorothea could not know that time will answer. This doesn’t
feel like a mere interval to her, but the only reality. These sentences
articulate thoughts that strictly do belong to Dorothea but which Dor-
othea herself, in the midst of experiencing her suffering, is incapable
of thinking ‘fully’ for herself: ‘It was too early yet for her fully to recog-
nise or at least admit the change, still more for her to have readjusted
that devotedness…’ Dorothea’s apparently causeless unhappiness here
is filling the chasm between what, on the one hand, at some level, she
knows herself to be – married to Mr Casaubon and an unhappy wife –
and what she experiences of herself on the inside – a young woman still
intensely, if residually, committed to a ‘maiden dream’.
It is the gift of George Eliot’s language to register how far the gap
between knowledge and experience is still a part of human experience.
It has probably been a painful part of the experience of members of our
imaginary group for whom one truthful reality – that they are widower,
divorcee, cancer-patient, depressed, bears no relation to the story they
have told themselves about their lives. How can this be me? But still,
how could this language, merely by witnessing this phenomenon in
Dorothea help this group? At the very minimum, it would give them
time out from their own condition, permission to stop being ill, and
access to a place where the pain doesn’t exist in the same way. Reading
holds open the possibility of recovering the whole person.
It’s just that recovery of the whole person, a former Dorothea, one
passionately committed to an ideal life, which seems impossible to Dor-
othea here: it feels to her that she has lost all devotedness. Yet in the next
sentence we learn that that very passion for life – the ‘force of her nature’
– is ‘heightening her confusion’. The best of Dorothea is making her situa-

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

E mpathy, connection, fellow-feeling, well-being: I’d say my


generation absorbed the idea that these were the goals of
literature without ever realising it – because the Victorian
age was near enough in time for its precepts to have sur-
vived, and because certain ideas current in the 1960s, not
least the idea that literature should be relevant, engaged, accessible and
anti-elitist, had their roots in Victorian thought. (In my own case there
was another factor: my parents were GPs in a Pennine milltown, and I
grew up with the example of what a purposeful, active, curative con-

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

with others; that books – whatever the peccadilloes or perversities of


their authors – are, at best, still a repository of positive values; that
reading can be a source of illumination, confidence, intellectual growth,
emotional healing, self-esteem; that without the imaginative leaps that
literary texts demand of us, we lack the agility to think, act decisively,
and avert the catastrophes that threaten us. If that tentative faith in
books makes us neo-Victorian, so be it.

second mind

Philip Davis

T o use the language of phrenology, there is now for us a sort


of Victorian bump in human mentality, a place in the mind
that marks the experience of existing in between definite
states – in particular in between religion and secularisa-
tion. That in-betweenness is a place that does not simply
pass away in the enlightened progress of history but remains a profound
sticking-point or holding-ground in the struggle for human meaning.
The Reader Organisation is not interested in abstract definitions so
much as individual examples. In the name of reality, I am now going to
read you what for me has long been a touchstone in marking out the in-
between territory that Victorian literature characteristically occupies as
a form of robust uncertainty, not the easy uncertainty of sitting-on-the-
fence kind. It is from David Copperfield, where David confesses to himself
that his marriage to the pretty but childish Dora, though not a dramatic
disaster, is not the perfection he had hoped for, either. This occupies, that
is to say, a characteristic middle area, the Victorian bump. I have been
looking recently at the manuscript of David Copperfield in the Victoria and
Albert Museum: let me also make this reading into a quiz for you.
Have a guess which one substantial clause in the sentences that
follow was inserted by Dickens only in revision?
The old unhappy feeling pervaded my life. It was deepened,
if it were changed at all; but it was as undefined as ever, and

63
the reading revolution

addressed me like a strain of sorrowful music faintly heard in


the night. I loved my wife dearly, and I was happy; but the hap-
piness I had vaguely anticipated, once, was not the happiness
I enjoyed, and there was always something wanting.
In fulfilment of the compact I have made with myself, to
reflect my mind on this paper, I again examine it, closely, and
bring its secrets to the light. What I missed, I still regarded – I
always regarded – as something that had been a dream of my
youthful fancy; that was incapable of realisation; that I was
now discovering to be so, with some natural pain, as all men
did. But that it would have been better for me if my wife could
have helped me more, and shared the many thoughts in which
I had no partner; and that this might have been; I knew.
Between these two irreconcilable conclusions: the one, that
what I felt was general and unavoidable; the other, that it was
particular to me, and might have been different: I balanced
curiously, with no distinct sense of their opposition to each
other.

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

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the reading revolution

and the inverted syntax of ‘I knew’. It means, in an act of written attes-


tation, that the knowledge of what is missing in a life is both permanent
but also unavailing. For the fact that ‘I knew’ is not even the end of a
chapter, let alone the book, only the end of a paragraph, means that the
next paragraph implicitly says that the life which is the subject of that
knowledge still goes on regardless of the knowledge. It is important to
know that knowing is not king, is not solution: that is what literary
knowing is like.
But what now at last is the answer to my question? What one utterly
significant clause did Dickens go back to include, as he went along? It is,
ladies and gentlemen, in that last sentence of the second paragraph:
But that it would have been better for me if my wife could
have helped me more, and shared the many thoughts in which
I had no partner; and that this might have been; I knew.

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?

Translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones

66
poetry

The word apple doesn’t contain any truth


about an apple, just like its shape, colour, smell
and taste. The truth isn’t for looking at, sniffing
or tasting. In saying apple you’re almost eating one.
In the space between the word apple and the truth of an apple
an apple happens. The space between the word death
and the truth of death is the greatest. Within it
life happens. Between the word truth and the truth what happens is
death.

Translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones

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essay

from this side of silence


an autobiographical work in progress

Anthony Rudolf

The second of these two extracts from my autobiographical meditation on


reading, This Side of Silence, was previously embedded in the first. The link
had been provided 1) by references to Pavese in Geoffrey Hill’s sequence
‘Pindarics (After Cesare Pavese)’ in Without Title and 2) by the close temporal
association of my first two day jobs. But I decided the link was too artificial
and separated the two texts.
                  – Anthony Rudolf

Cesare Pavese

I remember well the root cause, the generative source of my profligate


enthusiasm for Cesare Pavese. I had been overwhelmed by the intel-
ligence, mood and pathos of his diaries of 1935–1950, This Business of
Living, which I read in the Isle of Man in 1965 while enduring a week
attached to the island’s Tourist Board as part of a graduate traineeship
in the early months of my very first day job – with the now defunct
British Travel Association. My salary was £750 pounds a year but
younger readers should bear in mind that the rent of my bedsitter in
Powis Square, Notting Hill, was only one quarter of that.
This book led to my buying a large number of novels and volumes
of short stories by this writer, not all of which I have read. Most are in
classic 1960s small paperback format with cinema poster style covers:

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

‘Funes the Memorious’, you remember everything, but then, to prevent


madness, the system shuts down entirely. In a letter, George Oppen,
whose Alzheimer’s led to his death, quotes his mother’s suicide note: ‘I
cannot face the business of living’.
Pavese’s diary, a work of literature in its own right, led me to Marga-
ret Crosland’s selection and translation of his poetry A Mania for Solitude
(later reprinted as Selected Poems) which, again, profoundly moved me
– ‘death shall drink to me with your eyes’ (I chance my own free trans-
lation of the famous line) – and this led to the buying spree of his fiction.
It may well be too late for me to read the remaining novels that await
my attention but I shall read something from Summer Storm on the very
field of my writing ‘at this moment of time’. Five minutes later: I have
completed the beautiful six page story ‘Freewill’, an exploration of the
nature of children, whose tone reminds me of Natalia Ginzberg.
Here are Dialogues with Leuco and Selected Letters 1924–1950: there is
no mention of Primo Levi in the index of the latter book, nor in the bi-
ography of Pavese by Davide Lajolo, An Absurd Vice. It is impossible that
Pavese did not read Levi’s If This is a Man, whose first edition came out
in Italy in 1946. When I met Levi in 1986, I am sure he told me he was
taught by Pavese and yet Ian Thomson in his biography of Primo Levi is
adamant that Pavese was a supply teacher who only taught girls at the
Lyceo in Turin during Levi’s first year, 1934–5. In May that year, Pavese
was arrested on suspicion of subversive activities. The first stage of
Mussolini’s war against the Jews, which would culminate in the racial
laws of 1938, had begun. Perhaps it is not surprising that Pavese did not
associate the younger writer with the famous Lyceo, and he had other
things on his mind in the final years of his life. Levi, however, must have
read his fellow Turin writer’s first collection of poems published in 1936
or the revised and expanded version published in 1943. These may even
have influenced his own poems: something in the tone calls across the
waves in both directions. In the second of Pavese’s two essays accompa-
nying the poems in the 1943 edition, there is a fascinating paragraph:
It is certain that once again the problem of the image will
dominate the situation. But it will not be a question of nar-
rating images, an empty formula, as we have seen, because
nothing can distinguish the words which evoke an image from
those which evoke an object. It will be a question of describ-
ing – whether directly or by means of images is immaterial – a
reality which is not naturalistic but symbolic. In these poems
the facts will speak – if they speak – not because reality wishes
it but because intelligence decides it will be so. Individual
poems and the whole body of poems will not be an autobiog-
raphy but a judgment. As happens in La divina Commedia (we

70
essay

had to reach this point) – a warning that my symbol will want


to correspond not to Dante’s allegory but to his images.

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

Poem number nine in Geoffrey Hill’s sequence ‘Pindarics (After Cesare


Pavese)’ in Without Title kicks off with this quote from Pavese: ‘Poetry is
repetition. Calvino has cheerfully arrived to tell me this’. The poem ends:
Repetition betrays us, our minds at odds
In lassitude, diremption, the absurd vice,
Of contradictions, and of dictions contra.

71
essay

Gillian Rose is the only other writer, at least in my limited experience,


who uses the word ‘diremption’, which reminds me that Hill and his
wife Alice Goodman ordered ten copies of Gillian’s Paradiso, the post-
humous book by her which I published at Menard Press in 1999. This
was my largest order from a private individual since Christopher Ricks
ordered ten copies of Nicholas Moore’s Spleen. Hill explicitly refers to
Paradiso in his poem ‘In Memoriam: Gillian Rose’ in A Treatise on Civil
Power.
In the autumn of 1966, I met Geoffrey Hill for the first time (thanks
to our mutual friend, Hill’s student Jon Silkin) while I was on attach-
ment to the Leeds branch of the Automobile Association, early in my
second disastrous day job. I was a trainee in-house management con-
sultant with the organisation. Not really ‘me’, but in those days I applied
for many jobs that were not my ‘cup tea or piece cake’, as my grandfa-
ther used to say in his Polish/Yiddish English. Being good at interviews
and nothing else, I would be taken on. Hill bought me lunch at the
university and thus began a sporadic epistolary relationship (and occa-
sional meeting at his readings) with a poet of whom I remain in awe to
this day. For over forty years I have pressed his claims on Yves Bonnefoy
and others in France. Hill has lectured at the Collège de France and
been translated. He has a reputation for being distant and severe – he
certainly could never be accused of being populist and some would say
he keeps the reader at mind’s length via an armature of scholarly prose
and elevated poetry – and yet, when giving a public reading, he delivers
entertaining patter between poems that would have impressed Ronnie
Scott or Humphrey Lyttelton.
While I have all his books and note that his productivity has in-
creased many fold (thanks, they say, to lithium), it is to his earlier books
I return, as I do with Silkin, Tomlinson, Gunn and Ken Smith. This
reflects recent demands of autobiography in my own work, not neces-
sarily a belief that the earlier work of these poets is better than the later
work. King Log, Mercian Hymns and Tenebrae remain among my all-time
favourite and talismanic poetry books, along with Silkin’s A Peaceable
Kingdom and Tomlinson’s Seeing is Believing. Hill’s first book, For the Un-
fallen imposed itself immediately on readers, like another famous first
book, Bonnefoy’s Du Mouvement et de l’immobilité de Douve. It seems as
though the poems were always there, parthenogenetic despite the real
influences. The voice imposed itself, right from the start.
Hill’s music works on a broader span than, say, Charles Tomlinson’s;
the prime unit in any given poem is longer than in a Tomlinson poem.
Hill seduces the reader with his line, thereby leaving the dazed and hon-
our-bound reader with little choice but to seek an understanding of the
often difficult thought. As he said in an interview, ‘difficult poetry is the

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essay

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

diaries of the reader organisation

Casi Dylan

T he boy is nervous, hunched over the photocopy on the


desk in front of him. I ask whether he is happy to go next
and it is only his eyes that move, flickering assent. Filling
his chest full, he reads:

Halfway through our trek in life
   I found myself in this dark wood,
   miles away from the right road.
It’s no easy thing to talk about,
   this place, so dire and dismal
   I’m terrified just remembering it!
Death itself can hardly be worse;
   But since I got some good there
   I’ll talk about the bad as well.

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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THE reading revolution

formers, school governors, community business leaders, local librarians.


At the end of the first day of training, they share a poem of their choice
with the group – Dante, Wendy Cope, Spike Milligan, Wordsworth,
Leonard Cohen, local boy Owen Sheers. The goup’s expectations of the
week are as wide as their choice of poetry. Some are terrified at the pros-
pect of reading aloud in front of their peers or teachers (or both). Some
support the idea of Get Into Reading, but question the need to ‘intro-
duce’ a reading group culture to a school in which the number of English
students is steadily growing. Some are downright sceptical: ‘I am not
convinced this is for me,’ I read on one pre-course questionnaire. ‘I won’t
be interested if this turns out to be another book group.’
The schoolroom, more than any other setting, highlights the chal-
lenges of passing on the Get Into Reading ethos and practice. Despite the
overriding generosity and interest of the participants (many of whom
have given a week of their summer holiday to attend) the long-estab-
lished habit of the school hierarchy informs the group’s interactions. In
the first group of the day a teacher expounds upon the historical signifi-
cance of our short story’s setting, and a sixth-former raises her hand to
make a comment on the text. The freedoms of Get Into Reading are un-
familiar here, and my colleagues and I offer no easy set of rules by which
a group is guaranteed to make the grade. To be yourself, to be personal,
they’re the fundamental criteria of ‘success’ in this kind of reading – and
it’s a scary ask within school walls.
Gradually, over the course of the five days, the group does begin to
assert and feed on its new-found freedoms, and the results are wonder-
ful. A librarian thanks a fifth-former for offering her a less-mannered
way of reading Gerard Manley Hopkins’s ‘The Windhover’. A teacher
reads Christina Rossetti’s ‘Remember’ with his group – school head-
mistress to his left, Year 11 student to his right – and admits that he
still struggles to come to terms with the death of his mother. A fifteen-
year-old boy acknowledges in a nervous reading that he too knows
something of the ‘dire and dismal’ and the difficult to say. The group
begins to transform into a unit that is enough in and of itself.
One response on a feedback form stays in my mind. In unpractised
handwriting that seems to be teetering on the edge of something it says
‘The course has finally shown me the point of literature.’
My weekly reading group at Start, a creative arts and wellbeing centre
in Salford, is an anchor to an increasingly itinerant training schedule.
For the past few months we have been reading Jane Eyre, coupled with
poems such as Thomas Hardy’s ‘Between Us Now’, Seamus Heaney’s
‘Miracle’, and Edna St. Vincent Millay’s sonnet ‘Love is Not All’. Next
week we will be meeting the imprisoned Mrs Rochester for the first
time; I think I will read Maya Angelou’s poem, ‘Still I Rise’.

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the reading revolution

Prescribed reading
The osler literary roundtable at duke

Francis A. Neelon & Grey Brown

“While medicine is to be your vocation, or calling, see


to it that you have also an avocation – some
intellectual pastime which may serve to keep you in
touch with the world of art, of science, or of letters…
  No matter what it is… have an outside hobby.”
–Sir William Osler

S ince 1988, a small group of employees, faculty and stu-


dents has made the humanities a living presence at Duke
Medical Center in Durham, North Carolina. Their effort,
as it evolved and flourished, was christened the Osler
Literary Roundtable (OLR), in honor of William Osler,
Canadian physician, Professor of Medicine at Pennsylvania and Johns
Hopkins Universities, and finally Regius Professor at Oxford. Osler died
in 1919, but his memory lives on through the efforts of groups like the
Osler Club of London and the American Osler Society, dedicated to the
preservation of his vision of doctoring and of medical education.
Those of us who regularly attend the meetings of OLR are impressed
with the timeless wisdom of Sir William’s advice cited above, and the
continuing relevance of reading and listening to personal and profes-
sional lives.

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THE reading revolution

ORIGINS OF THE OLR


In 1987, Janice Palmer, head of Cultural Services at Duke University
Medical Center, and Louise Bost, director of Recreational Therapy in
the Duke Comprehensive Cancer Center, obtained a grant from the
Mary Duke Biddle Foundation to hire poet Grey Brown to introduce the
reading and writing of poetry to patients on the Cancer service. Grey
later sought and obtained a grant to fund seven visiting poets as readers
to patients in the Medical Center. This sequence of events, injecting
living verse into the hospital corridors, led Janice Palmer to organize a
discussion of the role of the humanities in medicine and how to use our
poet-in-residence. At an early meeting, Dr. Albert Heyman suggested
that members of the hospital community might meet regularly to share
poems that they personally cherished.
Thus was born our first venture, called ‘I Want To Read You A Poem’
(IWATRYAP). Ten or fifteen people met under Grey Brown’s leadership
on alternate Fridays from noon to 1 p.m. Eating lunch was allowed but
not encouraged. Over time, an informal structure emerged: at open
readings attendees would share poems of singular importance to them
(sometimes an original poem); on other days Grey or one of the large
number of local poets were invited to read.

THE MATURATION OF OLR


Several medical students attended IWATRYAP, and one argued that
courses in the humanities should be required of all medical students so
that medical education would not narrow their intellectual horizons.
Rather than lobbying to shoehorn another required course into an
already crowded curriculum, we broadened the IWATRYAP format to
include the discussion of short stories. These discussions were held on
alternate Fridays, interspersed with the poetry sessions. Stories selected
by the group were distributed and read in advance of each discussion.
Thus, since January 13, 1989, virtually every Friday of the year has
offered a literary opportunity in the Medical Center. In 1992, needing
an umbrella name to cover the several facets of our activity, we chose
our present title and OLR was born.
Over the years, OLR has developed a slowly growing cadre of
‘regulars’ – doctors, nurses, psychologists, therapists, administrators,
researchers, pastoral counselors, neighbors, and friends (medical stu-
dents are – to our dismay – only rare visitors). We meet to read and
listen, to discuss and argue, and learn a great deal, sometimes from
unexpected sources. Those who attend for any length of time find it a
source of rich pleasure, not to be done without, even though explaining

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THE reading revolution

the delights of our gatherings to the uninitiated is no easy task.


The only rule governing our meetings is ‘No rules!’ Anyone may come,
anyone may talk, anyone may submit a short story or poem, although we
do ask that submissions be compact enough to be digested in the allot-
ted hour. It is not requisite that submitted items have an overt ‘medical’
theme or aspect, although they certainly may, because we endorse William
Osler’s suggestion that reading fans the flames of ‘an insatiable desire to
know the inwardness of a disease.’ But it is our position that the very act
of reading has pertinence for medical personnel; it is the reading itself
that does the job – but more of this later.
We routinely count 12–15 participants each week. Each session begins
with announcements of interest to the group (literary events, public read-
ings, etc). Then, in a cherished ritual, each participant says aloud his or
her name and what role he or she plays in the Medical Center, or in the
outside world. We may spend the hour closely reading a single poem
(as at a session devoted to Caribbean poet and Nobel laureate, Derek
Walcott), or participants may bring poems to read aloud for the group
to discuss. On weeks devoted to short fiction, the story will, hopefully,
have been read in advance but we usually read some or all of the story
aloud, passing the honor of reading a paragraph or two at a time around
the table. Much of the ensuing discussion reflects how to understand the
story, the meaning of the author’s words. The submitter of the story may
offer the opening question for discussion, but thereafter it is free-for-all.
And lively sessions they are, producing a rich harvest of information and
interpretation. It is a rare day that we do not deepen our understanding
of even the simplest story (perhaps especially the simplest stories). This
kind of reading, this probing, this turning over of meaning never fails to
enrich us – it is the source of our enduring pleasure and satisfaction.

DIRECTION AND SUPPORT OF OLR


We have had four outstanding leaders of OLR, all talented authors
(three of them published poets); Grey Brown began, then Cedar Koons,
then Kate Daniels; then Virginia Holman, then Grey Brown again, after
a sojourn away. The guidance and inspiration of our group leaders has
been very helpful, and while it is conceivable that OLR could function
without such leadership, it would be a more fragile operation. OLR does
not aim to be didactic or pedagogical, but a lot of learning takes place,
thanks to the group’s leaders.
The total operating budget is modest in the extreme. We beg the
use of an empty room in which to meet. We do pay our group leader,
although this amounts to a pittance. Some funds are obtained from
the Medical Center, some through small grants, and some through the

78
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.

WHAT HAS OLR DONE?


Our success can be assessed in several ways. We continue to meet
weekly, now well into our twenty-second year. The guest authors who
come to read invariably comment on how sophisticated a group of lis-
teners we are, and on the appeal of reading to an attuned audience, an
audience that immediately enters into dialogue with the author. This
kind of feedback is something that does not happen when authors stand
behind a podium before a congregation of strangers. Our guest readers
appreciate the group as much as we appreciate their work.
Another measure of OLR’s success is the way it engages a disparate
group of people (many work in the Medical Center but few knew one
another before sitting at our Roundtable). Without OLR it is unlikely we
would have the meaningful discussion that it fosters. Finally, and some-
thing we did not expect, many OLRians have begun or resumed writing
– prose, and essays, and especially poems.
William Osler said that doctors should: ‘Every day do some reading or
work apart from [the] profession… I care not what it may be; gardening
or farming, literature, or history or bibliography, any one of which will
bring you in contact with books.’ Later, he said that to ‘keep his mind
sweet the modem [scientist] should be saturated with the Bible and Plato,
with Homer, Shakespeare, and Milton; to see life through their eyes may
enable him to strike a balance between the rational and the emotional,
which is the most serious difficulty of the intellectual life.’ It is books and
the reading of books that matters. Again, Sir William: ‘The all-important
thing [about reading] is to get a relish for the good company of the race in
a daily intercourse with some of the great minds of the ages.’
Whose minds have we met in OLR? whose voices, heard? The Table
overleaf shows a partial list of authors we have read; it is true that these
selections, submitted spontaneously by OLRians, lean toward modern
writers, but we have certainly listened to the voices of the past, includ-
ing a reading of The Epic of Gilgamesh, the oldest known work of literary
art. We have read longer works, and lingered over writers such as
Conrad, Dostoevsky and Henry James for two or three (and once four)
weeks. Each of these works has proven a rewarding exercise, provoking
dialogue and insight from the group discussion that we rarely achieve
inside our own heads. They are all excellent stories and worth ponder-
ing (especially if you can find a group with whom to share discussion).

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THE reading revolution

A PARTIAL LIST OF SHORT FICTION READ BY OLR

Anton Chekhov Ward Six


Roddy Doyle Teaching
Robert Olen Butler Jealous Husband Returns in the Form of Parrot
James Thurber Cat Bird Seat
Ana Menendez In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd
Jhumpa Lahiri Interpreter of Maladies
Alice Walker Everyday Use
Tobias Wolff Bullet in the Brain
Richard Wright Big Black Good Man
William Carlos Williams Use of Force
Franz Kafka A Country Doctor
Virginia Woolf Lappin and Lapinova
George Lamming Birthday Weather
J. D. Salinger A Perfect Day for Banana Fish
James Joyce The Dead
Jorge Luis Borges The Life of Tadeo Isidoro Cruz
Herman Melville Bartleby the Scrivener
W. E. B. Du Bois Returning Soldiers
Katherine Mansfield The Doll’s House
Langston Hughes Luani of the Jungle
Z.Z. Packer Brownie
Tim O’Brien The Things They Carried
Haruki Murakami Man Eating Cats
A.S.Byatt The Chinese Lobster
Tillie Olson I Stand Here Ironing
Andrea Barrett Birds With No Feet

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

80
THE reading revolution

proven a more moving experience than you or I might have predicted:


I read the poems in the Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center, waiting
through my father’s surgery and recovery… I think I’d have admired
the individual poems themselves, anyway. But it hit me with greater
force… Even when the poetry is artless or clumsy or in some techni-
cal sense impossible, these things seem very palpable and human and
moving. I guess it’s because they have the pressure of a subject, a feeling
which in some primitive or selfless way pre-exists the act or writing.’

READING, LISTENING, AND THE DOCTOR’S JOB


A few words about why an enterprise like OLR is worthwhile in a medical
center. As mentioned earlier, we make no attempt at a direct or overt link
between what is read and matters medical. This perplexes those who
think that only stories or poems with medical themes would be worth-
while for doctors to read. A casual look at Osler’s advice, or conversation
with devotees of the arts sometimes gives the impression that the arts
have only a recreational function, diverting or refreshing the doctor after
the toil and burdens of the medical day, that they help because they
differ so from the usual business of doctoring. In point of fact, we believe
that those opinions are precisely wrong! The doctor’s job is always an act
of creative interpreting. It is analogous in detail to the reader’s job of un-
derstanding the written or spoken word. The more we attune ourselves
to the ‘hearing’ that forms the basis of careful reading, the more we see
the multitude of sometimes contradictory ways that readers make sense
of the unchanging words on the printed page, then the better we prepare
ourselves for the doctor’s great and fearsome task: listening to the pa-
tient’s story and trying to make sense – anatomical sense, physiological
sense, psychological sense, social and societal sense – out of it.
Medical educators make a great mistake when they tell students
and residents, almost without thinking, to ‘take the patient’s history’.
We hear that phrase so often it almost seems correct. We say ‘take’, as
though history were an object to be grasped, something that exists ‘out
there’ where the student can go get it. We say ‘the history’, as though
there were one history rather than as many as there are historians.
Better we should tell our students, ‘Go create the patient’s history.’ Then
at least, we would emphasize the involvement of the interviewer; em-
phasize the shaping and pruning and assimilation of information; the
acts of interpretation. Every week, at the meetings of the OLR, we are
schooled again in the nuances of interpretation, our ears are honed in
the ways of hearing. And every day in the clinic thereafter, the experi-
ence has been a help as the doctor tries to understand the metaphor of
the body and the story the patient tells.

81
poetry

D. J. Andrew

Christmas morning

I was sleeping all night long:


they visited me as I dreamed those who
make sense with me in the daylit life.
Twice in the night I got up
or was it three times myself
or helping my wife find her way.
I fell to thought when not dreaming
how a living might recover itself
from damage while still breathing, feeding.
Not sadness but quiet slept with me
as company: my warm wife
lying close until we woke up.
Then it was Christmas: our children
moving around with their mother nearby
getting ready for presents, food.
I shall be awake all day long as
time visits this family making sense of
the night now gone in this daylit life.

82
poetry

The f irst time

Whatever the reason we put


a key in our door walk into
our home knowing
no voice from another room
ready with their day
will greet us.
After some months
the quietness in my house
a habit of talking
to myself only goes
unremarked everyday meeting
no-one on the stairs.
Different for everyone but
always the same sorrow,
I drive along a road
for the first time alone
towards a friend’s house,
I get out, at “Green Park”,
walk along Piccadilly to the RA,
go to a wedding,
travelling up a slope of
loneliness.
Studying a map of memories
here we know
there we can guess where
the hurt will begin.
Last week I went to my
wife’s home
behind its tall hedge.
Sitting as often in the lounge
with music on
I sat down by her side.
For the first time
unannounced
Gail didn’t know me.

83
interview

the reader gets angry

is it worth fighting?

Jane Davis talks to Ron Travis

Tell me about your life in libraries; when did it start?


It was 1969. I went to Lancashire County in a group of libraries out in
Prescot. It was a shock to find the classics didn’t move off the shelves.
Do libraries need outreach work to build the need for books?
I think libraries have always been too passive. There has never been
enough staff to do effective outreach work. There are children’s librar-
ians because getting young people into the library is seen as important
but there are insufficient resources to engage adults. The prevailing idea
remains that it’s not a librarian’s job to influence what people read and
that libraries should be neutral, welcoming places. It’s only in the last
ten years that the idea of reader development has arrived advocating a
more proactive approach to books and reading services to increase peo-
ple’s confidence and enjoyment in reading. Even so, it’s difficult to get
some staff to change their approach.
I went into a library and started to have a browse at the end of the day. A member
of staff came up to me and said, ‘Can I help you?’ and as I started to respond she
said, ‘Because we’re closing.’
One lingering old-fashioned aspect of libraries is the enforcement of
rules and regulations above everything else. This creates a sense of or-
derliness, but we need to make libraries more reader-friendly places
with positive intervention to encourage people to widen their reading,
try something different and talk about books. We need more reading-
based activities for adults and children. Some staff prefer to do craft
activities with children rather than read to them and they tend to give
more importance to computers and information services than reading
activities.

84
interview

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-

85
interview

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?

86
interview

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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your regulars

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....

Quick overview of what I read

Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers


Why I Chose It: Last time I went away I read Wikinomics and found
some useful stuff in it. So I thought I’ll try another of those idea pa-
perbacks... I picked this one because having failed at many things I’m
interested in the idea of success.
7/10: Good fast read that was oddly moving for something so full of
tables and charts. The basic idea: 10,000-hours’ practice makes you very,
very good at anything.
Lloyd Jones, Mr Pip
Why I Chose It: People kept telling me it was good and anything that
wants to commit Great Expectations to memory has got to be interesting.
2/10: Couldn’t keep up interest long enough to finish it. I didn’t believe
in the characters and stopped reading at p. 98.
David Burns and Ed Simon, The Corner, a year in the life of an inner-city
neighbourhood
Why I Chose It: I’ve been watching The Wire obsessively and here was
the book the TV series grew from.
10/10: Moving and terrible, full of personal stories; far too long at 600-
pages plus but I didn’t care. I learned something about the relation of
meaning / work / purpose to staying alive.
Joseph O’Neill, Netherland
Why I Chose It: Barack Obama had praised it, and an old friend and
colleague, Jonathan Bate, had picked it out as the best novel of the year.
As I first found Gilead on Jon’s shelves, and as Gilead had been men-
tioned by Mr Obama as a favourite novel, I thought something they
both thought well of would interest me.
4/10: This was the first thing I tried to read after finishing The Corner. I
don’t think I was able to give it my best attention, and felt all the way
through as if I couldn’t tune in, as if my mind was in another key al-
together. Still, I do not think I will go back to it for a second attempt.
Would I read another by the same author? No.

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your regulars

Hillary Jordan, Mudbound


Why I Chose It: Recommended by Jenny, my hairdresser, whose judge-
ment I trust.
5/10: A great story but it too suffered from coming after The Corner. Not
deep enough for its very deep subject matter. Still, it made me cry, which
is easy enough I grant. I thought: it will make a very good film.
William Nicholson, The Secret Intensity of Everyday Life
Why I Chose It: I saw it in Borders when I was buying the above and
was struck by its epigraph (‘hearing the grass grow’ Middlemarch). Also
noticed that the author was the writer of ‘Life Story’ a TV drama I’d
really admired (and still remembered from many years ago) about the
discovery of DNA.
5/10: It couldn’t live up to the Middlemarch quotation (What could? Well,
Gilead, for one, Home for another, The Corner). There were some very good
things in it – particularly the relation of adults to children. The very
deliberate setting in a very middle-class, very middle-England milieu
perhaps made an already difficult task too difficult. I didn’t care enough
about enough of the people.
James Agee and Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
Why I Chose It: Adam Phillips had recommended it to me after The
Reader Organisation’s event at the V&A, ‘Why Victorian Literature Still
Matters’. He said (I think) that something about Get Into Reading was
connected to it. When I picked it up I saw it had an Introduction by our
own Blake Morrison, chair of The Reader Organisation, so the sense of
synchronicity was compelling.
7/10: This needed more careful attention than I was prepared to give it.
It is both overdone and yet moving and heroic too. Will I give it more
attention? Yes. After I’d read it, I noticed that Mudbound uses a quota-
tion from it as an epigraph, and that Simon and Burns mention it in the
Afterword to The Corner. Suddenly things seemed to be connecting.
Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger
Why I Chose It: I did an event a while back with novelist Linda Grant who
told me it was good. I saw it and thought: I’m going on holiday, why not
read this Booker prizewinner, come on, don’t be a pre-judging snob.
4/10: I did keep going all the way through. And it made me laugh in
places: it’s witty, and angry. Will I recommend it to others? No. Would I
read another by the same man? No.
Alastair Campbell, All In The Mind
Why I Chose It: It was recommended by Adam Phillips, my husband
had a copy, and Campbell had recently visited Mersey Care NHS Trust.
4/10: Like Mudbound: it has a serious and moving subject (mental health)

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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.

So many contemporary novels seem too small, unreal or simply ‘liter-


ary’. The literary world feels like a tiny place located to one side of the
style section in the Sunday papers, next door but one to Grazia maga-
zine. People who inhabit that world appear obsessesed with surfaces,
with technical achievements. When I see prose described as ‘glittering’,
‘perfectly-judged’, ‘crystalline’ or ‘achingly’ beautiful I immediately
decide not to read it. Why must so many reviewers concentrate on style
rather than heart-content? I’ll tell you why: because most contemporary
literary works don’t have any heart-content, and neither do most of the
reviewers. ‘Literary’ is a little closed system with no air, no vision and no
sense of what’s happening out in the real world.
When I started reading The Corner, I thought, here’s a reality I haven’t

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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.’

Like a man in Dickens (Inspector Bucket, Mr George from Bleak House)


Fat Curt has an inner dimension of feeling beyond his technical role
in the novel, like someone in George Eliot (Hetty, Philip Wakem) our
authors know things about him that he doesn’t know about himself,
and like a man in War and Peace, Fat Curt has an individual place in a
huge picture that is being shaped up years and miles away, and yet in
which he has a living part. Nothing is easy in The Corner. It smells of
mortality. It’s good enough to make you forget it is a documentary: it
reads like art. By the end of the book, when we have followed Fran and
her family through to the end there is only the big question left: when
you take the daily life of work away, (and drugs have become the world
of daily work for people on the corner) what are human beings for?
If you went back there now – a last visit, perhaps – if you
walked twenty blocks due west from the city’s downtown to
Mount Street and found the sage idiot manning his post, then
you could state your case:
‘I been a dope fiend,’ you’d say.

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your regulars

‘I’m tired,’ you’d say.


‘I’m trying to stop,’ you’d say.
And the idiot on the corner would surely look at you and
offer a cold question that points very close to the truth:
‘Why?’
And damned if you could answer.

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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book world

we know no better

Tom Chalmers talks to Eleanor McCann

Tom Chalmers is Managing Director of Legend Press, a small, independ-


ent publishing company. He studied English at the University of Liverpool
before becoming, at the age of 25, the youngest founder of a publishing
company in the mainstream UK market. Legend Press specialises in con-
temporary paperback fiction and has recently launched the ReadGeneration
campaign, which promotes reading to young adults.

Tell me a bit about the history of Legend Press.


After I graduated in 2002, it took me nearly eight months to get my first
full-time publishing job, working on financial yearbooks and magazines.
But really I wanted to work in the book side of publishing, where my
heart lay. I came up with an idea for a short story collection – snapshots
of the monologues in people’s minds as they carry on their lives – and
founded Legend Press on 20th April 2005 so as to publish this collection,
The Remarkable Everyday. I left my full-time job and, with some support
from The Prince’s Trust and One London, signed up our first novels.
Since that date, Legend Press has doubled the number of books it pub-
lishes each year, launched its first non-fiction title last year, and we are
just announcing the launch of our e-books range and distribution agree-
ments in Germany and the US. We run several industry-wide initiatives
and last year I acquired the list of another publisher, Paperbooks, which
as a separate company is run alongside Legend Press. From setting the
company up in the local internet shop, through running the company
from home, we now have a small but dedicated team based in our office
in Shoreditch, London.
There have been many ups and downs over the last four years.
There are not many industries that are harder to start out in, for various
reasons, some inevitable, some frustrating, and we are the only fiction
publisher to have started out with no capital and survived and grown
this far in the mainstream market for around twenty-five years. We have

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also been lucky enough to be shortlisted for a number of national pub-


lishing and business awards, but at the heart of what we do is finding
new talents and providing the platform for them to become the writing
successes they and we passionately want them to be.
What does Legend Press stand for? What is distinctive about it?
We are a young team and one of our greatest attributes is that we know
no better. In an industry that has at times become stifled, we see op-
portunities and focus solely on making a success of them, regardless of
how things have been in the past and what may be expected from some
who have been in the industry for many years.
What kind of writing do you publish?
Legend Press publishes for the mainstream market, from more liter-
ary works, through to comedy and to the very commercial styles, such
as romantic comedy. We don’t publish genre fiction, thriller, fantasy,
sci-fi, and so on, though we are now publishing thrillers and crime at
Paperbooks.
Are writers better off with you, a smaller, independent publisher, than with a
much bigger company that can offer greater financial support?
I have worked at large companies and know many very talented people
at the major conglomerates, but I am passionate about what small pub-
lishers, if correctly run, can offer. What we lack in resources, we make
up for in innovation, speed of foot to implement ideas, and attention
to details. We don’t have 100s or 1000s of books to push at any one
moment so we are dedicated to the individual titles. One of my favour-
ite aspects of being a small press, is that we have a close relationship
with our authors – they have a role and say in all stages of the process
and many have become personal friends as well as fantastic authors.
You were short-listed for the UK Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award (2007).
Does being ambitious in business make you ambitious in what you publish?
There can be a much stronger link between creativity and business than
people would credit. Publishing is shaking off its old image where the
idea of looking to make money is frowned upon. Our basic aim is to find
new authors and to make them and their writing hugely successful –
and that involves to a degree generating financial success for ourselves,
which can in part help support them and their fellow authors and drive
further success and growth for the company. A lot of business is about
judging risk and then going the best way about achieving what you want
out of each strand of a project. Creative thinking becomes a part of that
mix, and within the correct framework it is the vital ingredient.

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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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book world

If you could have discovered any author, who would it be?


We have already discovered all of our authors and are absolutely de-
lighted by that, though to pick one author currently writing, I would say
Haruki Murakami. I like most of his work but The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
struck me more than any book in recent years. And I would have liked
to have signed up Obama several years ago, like Canongate did, but
never mind and well done to them…
You invest in little-known authors. Is it a risky business?
Publishing is a risky business – and Legend Press and Paperbooks
operate in the most risky area, contemporary fiction. It was said recently
at a conference that we arranged that the first rule in business is not to
fall in love with your business, and anyone in publishing breaks that
main rule immediately. So risk becomes part and parcel of what you
have chosen to do. First-time authors are a challenge in a market where
200,000 books are published a year, but they are also the lifeblood of the
industry, the foundation on which great publishing houses are built.
In the digital age, publishing must be a rapidly evolving industry. What changes
do you anticipate for Legend Press in the future?
Digitilisation and the e-book are going to play an increasingly important
role in the publishing world and a look across at the music industry
highlights the issues that can be caused if they are not approached and
accepted in the right manner. But publishing seems to be switching on
and starting to make the right moves – including looking at this as an
opportunity to pull in a new market of readers, to be able to offer more
and to have new avenues of low cost marketing and profile building.
You are nurturing Legend Press during a drastic economic downturn and printing
books at a time when it is debated whether the book will survive the digitalisation
of media. You must be pretty convinced of the enduring power of literature?
I got into publishing because of my love and belief in the book and that
hasn’t changed. As a physical product the book is unique; it is more than
the CD case or cardboard packaging – it is itself part of the experience. A
reader invests in the book as well as in the words inside. Digitialisation,
particularly among the new generation, will come in at an increasingly
rapid rate and publishing faces many challenges – largest of all being
the traditional publishing model no longer works in today’s market.
But while the financial downturn will magnify short-term issues, and
sadly publishing companies will suffer and fall as a consequence, in
the medium-term it may well help force the changes that the industry
needs to make and ensure the book comes through as strong as ever – as
it has the potential to do.

98
your recommendations

the old poem


Alexander pope, ‘Argus’

Brian Nellist

Argus

When wise Ulysses, from his native coast


Long kept by wars, and long by tempests tost,
Arrived at last – poor, old, disguised, alone,
To all his friends and e’en his queen unknown,
Changed as he was, with age, and toils, and cares,
Furrowed his rev’rend face, and white his hairs,
In his own palace forced to ask his bread,
Scorned by those slaves his former bounty fed,
Forgot of all his own domestic crew,
His faithful dog his rightful master knew!
Unfed, unhoused, neglected, on the clay,
Like an old servant, now cashiered, he lay;
And though ev’n then expiring on the plain,
Touched with resentment of ungrateful man,
And longing to behold his ancient lord again.
Him when he saw, he rose, and crawled to meet,
(‘Twas all he could), and fawned and kissed his feet,
Seized with dumb joy; then falling by his side,
Owned his returning lord, looked up, and died.

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your recommendations

T hree hundred years ago on October 19 Alexander Pope, aged


twenty-one, sent this poem in a letter to Henry Cromwell,
son of the Lord Protector’s first cousin. Henry, however,
was a rake, frequenter of theatres and brothels, a slight-
ly absurd fifty-year-old with whom young Pope, already
marked out by the malicious town as physically freakish, exchanged bad-
inage about sexual exploits and dogs. And that is the point; our domestic
animals don’t hold against us our physical and mental peculiarities. This
is a poem not really about a dog but about human beings who don’t share
what the satirist thinks are canine virtues. So Pope alters the original
story in Book XVII of the Odyssey. There the hero re-enters a home taken
over by his enemies, turned into an old beggar by his patron, the goddess
Athene, for his protection. Pope compresses Homer’s account to produce
an emblem of the changes that can happen in a life, ‘poor, old, disguised,
alone’. The couplets create an energy by the concision they demand; ‘In
his own palace forced to ask his bread’, where the splendour conjured by
‘palace’ jars against the homely need of ‘bread’. The vigorous syntax of
the lines without a full-stop is fuelled by indignation. The single creature
to recognise him, the old hound Argos (in the Greek) becomes the mirror
image of his master. If Odysseus is ‘scorned by those slaves’, the animal
is ‘Like an old servant, now cashiered’. The master’s slaves had been fed
by his ‘bounty’ but the dog is like the servant of a bad master, cast off.
In Paradise Lost Satan rebels partly because he says he doesn’t want to be
always owing gratitude to God but, of course, gratitude is properly an
impulse we feel not a demand laid upon us. In this poem, the old dog
gets the natural response right, ‘Touched with resentment of ungrateful
man’. Dignity is restored to the despised beggar when Argus ‘falling by
his side / Owned his returning lord’. Dogs recognise us not by our social
status or our physical condition but by our common humanity and ben-
efits conferred by the unique individual.
In my dictionary of quotations, Pope figures large but outside uni-
versity departments he isn’t I think read as much as he was, partly
doubtless because of all the footnotes clarifying contemporary refer-
ences. If you haven’t read much, start with poems less encumbered, the
passionate ‘To the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady’ or the sad, funny,
perceptive ‘Eloise to Abelard’ and go on to the more personal poetry,
the ‘Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot’ or the triumph of the countryside over the
constructs we impose on it in the fourth of the Moral Epistles, ‘To Richard
Boyle, Earl of Burlington’. For other animal epitaphs read Byron’s lines
for Boatswain, his Newfoundland, of if your supporter is a cat, Hardy’s
tenderly bitter ‘Last Words to a Dumb Friend’.

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reviews

The New BOok


William Trevor, Love and Summer
Viking, 2009
ISBN 978-0670918249

Brian Nellist

T hirty years ago if you travelled in the remoter corners of a


familiar European country you would often happen upon
tiny communities practically cut off from the outside
world, without electricity often or easy access to city,
town, or even village and you would think as you drank
a glass of water ‘This is what in terms of UN statistics would count as
a tiny item in world poverty’. Yet the older people at least were living
there contentedly as their parents had lived, and enjoyed happiness of
a sort in forms we have forgotten, the growth of crops, the care of a few
livestock, the presence of a neighbour or so, the repeated and familiar
stories, the permanence of an unchanging landscape. It was life almost
under the conditions that Wordsworth appealed to in the ‘Preface’ to
Lyrical Ballads; its people from ‘the sameness and narrow circle of their
intercourse being less under the influence of social vanity… convey
their feelings and notions in simple and unelaborated expressions’. In
such confined circumstances the feelings ‘give importance to the action
and situation and not the action and situation to the feeling’.
Love and Summer is like a Lyrical Ballad in prose. Mr Trevor’s earlier
Death in Summer and Felicia’s Journey are set in a more or less contempo-
rary England, a land where middle-class life unfolds threatened by but
also battening upon the dispossessed waifs and strays of a post-indus-
trial wasteland. But the Ireland of this novel or of The Story of Lucy Gault,

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for instance, is set in a country that predates or is at least untouched by


the new wealth brought by inward investment, the rise of IT industries
and, lucklessly, financial services, before the housing boom and the new
importance of the cities. This is the Ireland of agriculture and farms and
small market-towns. In terms of consumerism, it may seem poor; there
is a lot of shopping in the novel but all for homely items or essentials for
the farm, where a treat means a canister of 7-Up. It’s less poverty that
we see than a restriction of desires, at its best by obedience to inherited
manners and values, uninvaded by the exorbitant demand for novelty.
But no more than in Hardy does this constitute the cosiness of nos-
talgia. Terrible events have in the past touched many of these lives but
disaster is borne with reserve that both gives to the victims a kind of
dignity but also stifles feeling. Silence becomes a way of enduring what
can’t be uttered. The Connulty twins, middle-aged brother and sister
sharing the same parental house, now orphaned by the mother’s death
which opens the story, ‘often did not communicate with one another for
weeks on end, though less through not being on speaking terms than
having nothing to say’. There’s plenty that could be said, of course, he
his mother’s favourite but she cast off like her father because he took
her to Dublin for an abortion years before. Joseph Paul recognises, even
accepts that silence; ‘that he should be despised by his sister was one of
blaming’s variations’. The bitter feelings are cramped in the tight little
sentence. What seems not quite idiomatic in an English accent comes
out naturally spoken with an Irish lilt and you realise how close to the
oral the book is. Understatement used to be an English trait, though no
longer so, I think, because it’s the consequence of a sense of what is ac-
ceptable and of a privacy which gives priority to collective over personal
feeling. Here it can be both the expression of delicacy and gentleness as
in Dillahan but also moral cowardice, as in the brother.
Mr Trevor is in a way an historical novelist not in the sense that he
shows past societies but that right from The Old Boys onwards the bit of
the characters’ lives that you see is shadowed by terrible earlier events
they can scarcely express but which affect their subsequent actions. All
the major characters have stories though at the centre almost nothing
happens yet, as with Wordsworth’s ‘Simon Lee’, ‘should you think, /
Perhaps a tale you’ll make it’. The town is haunted by the ghost of the
old Ascendancy families, notably the St Johns, long gone but leaving
reports of scandal, kept alive by old Orpen Wren, their erstwhile librar-
ian, now mentally confused. But there is still Florian Kilderry to cause
mischief, the cherished son of two water-colourists now dead, about
to sell what is left of the old house, solitary and with no place in the
little locality but awakening love in the heart of Ellie Dillahan, convent-
reared orphan married to a local farmer. It used to be said, too easily,

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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.

What seems ever-so-slightly comic is actually moving; the middle-


aged bitter woman, who has lost her Christian name after her fall from
grace, struggles to justify instinctive sympathy with a young woman
she thinks is in the same situation. ‘Blame’ is the community response
but not hers. Yet sympathy easily rises from a displaced self-pity and
in making Ellie a greater victim than herself she invents a story that
isn’t there. Actually the Convent was a place where Ellie was loved and
Florian is not a ‘suave photographer’ but lonely and timid and secretly
obsessed with his Italian cousin, Isabella, who has disappeared from his
life. Yet Miss Connulty, with a sympathy that is partly jealousy, dreams
that Ellie’s life will unravel and she will be there to knit it together and
herself find love in return.
This is quite a short book but it expands in the mind of the reader
into Victorian dimensions because as in a nineteenth-century novel all
the major characters have a story that could be the basis of a wholly new
book. Few contemporary novelists trust the imagination of the reader
to this extent or allow such space for reflection. It’s the art of the great
short story writer I suppose. Farmer Dillahan had killed his child and
first wife backing his lorry into them in the yard and it’s when poor
confused Orpen Wren tries to tell him about Ellie and Florian that we
realise how that terrible memory turns everything into itself. Almost
breaking apart, he thinks it must be that event that Wren refers to as
he tells Ellie herself:
‘I’m all right when I’m in the fields,’ he said. ‘Or when I’m with
yourself in the house. I’d maybe be all right if I was walking in
a town where no one’d know me.’

Yes, ‘maybe’. Strangely a past disaster can become a kind of shelter to


the wounded psyche to prevent it recognising any new threat because
the original one is so all-consuming. Dillahan had seemed in earlier
pages to have been a good man simply emotionally limited by what had
happened to him. Secretly he carries this terrible burden of how he feels

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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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your regulars

Our spy in Ny
sleeping with scissors

Enid Stubin

M ornings by me don’t really begin; rather, the


night is exhausted. Grayish light spills over the
bed heaped with folders of student papers; the
fat, squishy anthology (Shorter Ninth Edition)
with the hopeful title Literature: The Human Ex-
perience (it weighs something less than a cinder block); sheaves of the
New York Times, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, TLS, and not
one but two pair of scissors. I’m looking for readings, essays, stories,
and poems – for connections. My English 92 remedial students find
reading onerous; street-smart and worldly-wise, they struggle with the
printed page. And how does one legislate appetite? If only I could tell
them how I pounce on a new journal, riffling hungrily pasts the pages of
ads for a new story by Orhan Pamuk, peer anxiously through the paper
for a word of Jude Law’s Hamlet, devour an essay by Frank Kermode on
Dorothy Wordsworth without sounding smug or precious. I remember
the fearsome Mrs. Eliasoff during the dark backward and abysm of time
at Far Rockaway High School, smiling thinly at my inability to state the
next step in a geometry theorem: ‘But it’s so easy,’ she lilted, establish-
ing my doltishness. For her, doubtless, it was. You’re so dense, I heard her
accuse, and much of my teaching philosophy involves the cautionary –
never insist on a text’s transparency.
Reading is perhaps the one act that comes easily for me; it provides
succor, escape, clarity, and access to a realm of ideas and the people who
hold them. In Speak, Memory, Nabokov describes a chessboard as a pane
of glass laid over a lake, revealing in the rocks and grasses below an
unmistakable pattern for the deft player, whereas to the chess illiterate,

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your regulars

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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your regulars

‘Don’t screw up,’ reads the penciled message accompanying a $12,000


check from Mortenson’s first major donor, a micro-chip magnate. Four
mornings a week, sulking and skulking under the rumpled sheets in
the pre-dawn gloom, I second-guess my pedagogical choices, decry my
lack of organization, and curse the procrastination that has dogged me
throughout my days. Staggering out of bed to make coffee and swallow
a Zyrtec-D (for ‘seasonal allergies,’ the all-purpose euphemism for New
York City’s environmental malaise), I climb back into my truckle bed to
trawl the New York Times for a story to engage my students. Is an article
in The New Yorker on the banking crisis too esoteric? Can I get student
rush tickets for a performance of Othello? Anna Deavere Smith is per-
forming her one-woman show on the body and its discontents, and I’m
wondering if I can arrange to have my students meet her.
Still dark, it’s time to clean up and get dressed, to pack the hibiscus-
print vinyl tote that serves as a sprightly briefcase. I pat myself down
to make certain of two pair of glasses, for the sun and for reading. My
unlimited Metro Card is tucked into its worn holder, a scuffed simu-
lacrum of a WPA mural depicting a hellish underground passage: The
People Work. Ahead lie the 6 train to Bleecker, the headlong rush down-
stairs to the B train, the ride out to Sheepshead Bay, and the unseemly
scramble for a cab to the campus. I’m invariably hustling though the
Stalinist Constructivist glazed-brick hallways, trying not to make one
more enemy on the way to my office, fumbling for my keys, longing for
coffee but hesitant to pour a cup of the departmental brew, usually ha-
zelnut vanilla or cinnamon mocha or some such confection. I shoulder
my way into my untidy office (‘Looks like a guy lives here, Cookie’) to
check my e-mail and phone messages, suddenly remembering with a
thump of fear the deadlines, meetings, promised letters of recommen-
dation, the thousand-and-one professional slights and petty insults that
need shoring up. I need to confirm the room, different for each day of
the week the class meets. Does the board require chalk or the noxious
markers that dry up unaccountably just as I need to demonstrate how
the comma splice interferes with a writer’s intention for a periodic sen-
tence? The creased folder with papers to return? Check. That day’s New
York Times? Check. Literature anthology for the following class? Check.
I lock the door and manage to propel myself to the proper classroom,
where Steven is ensconced in the last row, Joseph reluctantly removes
his i-Pod earbuds, and Latoya is stapling the pages of her latest draft.
Suddenly a surge of optimism gusts over me, like a wave of health after
a long bout of fever. Don’t screw up, I tell myself. And my students?
‘Let’s read.’

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your regulars

the london eye


not on the table

I ’m not strictly able to provide an Eye on literary London this quarter.


The office becomes a quieter place over the summer months; fewer
books are bought and sold, and ongoing deals, arguments and
queries go on hold while agents and publishers escape on their
holidays. Authors eye their autumn deadlines and suffer in silence,
or embark on / recover from gruelling festival tours. Meanwhile, we
hope, the hard work of springtime is paying off: bookshops are running
their ‘summer reading’ promotions. Books carefully selected, presented
and paid for by publishers are displayed front of store to catch the eye of
browsers looking for stories which will help pass the time on the beach
or round the pool.
I’m not really willing to be an Eye either: as I look out of the office
windows, London is grimly grey and drizzling – none of the romantic
fogginess Gershwin was so carried away with. The dim outlook makes
it harder to remember my holiday – for I chose my moment and escaped
too, leaving my desk (along with ships, towers, domes, theatres and
temples) for an unprecedented two-week break. I turned my nose up at
the bookshops’ gaudy tables and went to my mother and The Reader for
some real recommendations, picking some others from the shelves on a
whim. So when my boyfriend and I finally set off for France, squashed
between insect repellent, suntan lotion and summer skirts (seeing the
outside of my wardrobe for the only time this year) were Anthony Trol-
lope, Tobias Wolff, Mark Doty and Rafael Sabatini. We arrived at a tiny
cottage miles from anywhere remotely civic, surrounded by fig trees,
butterflies, a genial bunch of chickens and their resplendent rooster. We
grunted in a friendly way to the neighbouring farmer, and occasionally to
each other, but otherwise lapsed into blissful hours of reading.
A swashbuckler from Sabatini came first; something to ease the
mind into holiday mode. Scaramouche is known to most from Queen’s
‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, but he’s also a character in the commedia dell’arte,

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and the stern, cold-heartedly rational hero of Sabatini’s bestseller after


Captain Blood (who shot to fame after being played by Erroll Flynn and
loved by Olivia de Havilland in the 1935 film). On the eve of the French
Revolution, Andre-Louis witnesses the murder of a beloved friend by a
dastardly nobleman, and devotes his life to revenge. It turns out, luckily,
that Andre-Louis is good at just about everything, and plenty of expert
acting, public oration, duelling and general saving-of-the-day ensues.
Scaramouche comes thoroughly recommended if you’re in search of ad-
venture, romance, and a bite-sized history of revolutionary France.
Trollope’s Rachel Ray sets a very different pace, but offers real revolu-
tions of mind and heart during its focus on the inhabitants of a small
English town. No dangerous political argument here, but almost cease-
less questioning: is this man wrong? Is this woman unfair? Can you
blame her? Not one of the characters escapes Trollope’s scrutiny, but
the attention feels munificent rather than merciless, and a rich fabric is
formed from what Doris Lessing called the warp and weft of lives. You
probably won’t find any Trollope on the summer reading tables of high
street bookshops, but he should be there. In Rachel Ray a reader may
find space to contemplate the details of their life even from the midst of
it – who needs a holiday after all?
When Tobias Wolff confesses to all sorts of smallness, weakness and
error as his unnamed alter-ego in School Days, the result is a hard-won
integrity. His American boarding school teaches its boys to ignore petty
distinctions of class and wealth, which means the pupils have to find
other ways to distinguish themselves. Wolff writes about that agony of
trying to carve a striking-enough shape in the world, using (or avoiding)
all that messy inner stuff, which is by nature compromising and mys-
tifying. The book seems at first like a series of connected short stories,
formed around the visits of writers – including an archly mischievous
Robert Frost and a vile Ayn Rand – to the school. But by the end this
book, so deeply and personally felt, provided a structure and shape to
not only the narrator’s life but others too, as perhaps only a novel can.
Finally we had to make an unbelievably arduous journey home
as our trains broke down and we were sent on a very circuitous route
across France. I read Mark Doty’s Dog Years while crushed into small
spaces on trains. And wept. Copiously. I attracted a lot of attention
when I emerged from behind my book with red blotchy face in search
of tissues. The various guards and ticket-inspectors were kind to me.
Doty thinks we need and love dogs because of their silent fellowship.
I think the favourite part of my holiday was the silence, punctuated
by the occasional rooster crow – you rarely seem to find true quiet in
mighty London, and still less time to think. In between holidays then,
and after dogs, books must be man’s best friend.

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Your regulars

ask the reader

Brian Nellist

I heard a listener on BBC Radio 4 the other day complain that


Q they had spent years in reading Middlemarch and after such
drudgery it did not seem worth the effort. Why should we be
bullied by the threat of ‘great works’ hanging over our heads into think-
ing that if we don’t enjoy them we are in some sense deficient? Come
on; let’s have the honesty and courage to release our shackles.

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.

The secular scriptures can also ‘find me out’, explain me to myself,


‘make me understood’, not always a reassuring experience, to be ‘found
out’. Our reading should be a search for what enables that to happen. In
our deepest selves there is often a kind of loneliness because we cannot
or do not articulate the fears and hopes that gather there. The voice of
great literature that comes ‘home’ to us can speak to that place as little
else can do.
Sorry! Practical advice is maybe more useful than this preaching I
slip into now and again. Join a reading group and don’t let it be content
simply with the latest clutch of publishers’ good bets to appear in the
weekend reviews. Recognise that not only are books to be read at differ-
ent speeds but different parts of the same book. Even in Middlemarch I
have to confess that I don’t read the account of Mr Brooke’s electioneer-
ing with the same attention I give to Casaubon’s marriage. Your own
instincts will tell you what is important for you and it may well differ for
different readers. Don’t, unlike that Radio 4 listener, think that reading
about the author will help you to like the book more. If you enjoy it your
pleasure will be enhanced by learning more but it only works that way
round. To take a book in daily doses over a long time is masochism, not
reading; you already know you don’t like it so ask yourself why instead
of indulging in self-persecution. Remember the old adage that literature
mingles profit with pleasure, utile dulci as Roman Horace said, and that
pleasure comes first. Pleasure is what’s ‘honest’ in your response, to
use your own word. Pleasure is what happens when the heart offers a
‘home’ to the work, that delighted shock of recognition – though the
shock can be delayed. We have all met people whom at first we thought
we wouldn’t like but later become firm friends. And, of course, it’s fine
to like a book without finding it a life-saver. Pleasure is such a valuable
thing that we can’t afford to lose even its smaller manifestations.

111
Readers connect
with

Oxford World’s classics


willa cather
my antonia

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.

112
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.
*****

Eleanor McCann is an English student at Liverpool


University and student editor on The Reader magazine
As the narrator Jim Burden suggests, My Ántonia
seems built upon a string of still but arresting images.
I found myself losing interest between these imprints
but since My Ántonia is a tale of graft it seems apt that
it demands patience! Perseverance did reap reward:
there is a memorable freeze-frame of a plough, mag-
nified in silhouette against the sun, which appears the
vital icon of a people’s hard-won productivity in the
struggle for settlement.
**
Drummond Moir, once of Edinburgh, works for a
London-based publisher
The nostalgia that suffuses My Antonia is so rich you
can practically wring it from the pages, yet something
about this short novel just didn’t work for me. Many
of the vignettes work wonderfully as individual set-
pieces, yet the wider narrative lacked the momentum
of these minor but more engaging episodes.
**

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

113
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’.

Elizabeth Taylor, Mrs Palfrey at The Claremont (Virago, ISBN 978-


1844083213)
The Claremont is a residential hotel in London, home to a few mildly
eccentric elderly guests and the recently widowed Mrs Palfrey. She finds
herself breaking her rules, ‘Be independent, never give way to melan-
choly, never use capital’ when she meets the handsome young writer,
Ludo Myers. Elizabeth Taylor has been called one of the hidden treasures
of the English novel. This one is moving, funny and compassionate.

Thomas Eidson, The Last Ride (Harper Collins, ISBN 978-0007181353)

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.

Margaret Laurence, Stone Angel (Virago, ISBN 978-1844085378)

Ninety-year-old Hagar Shipley, relentlessly angry and obstinate, and


fearful, is living with her son and daughter-in-law and making their
lives a misery. When they begin to talk about nursing homes, she plans
to run away, and ‘rampant with memory’ is drawn into her joyless past
and forced to understand herself so as to come to some sort of peace.

Wendell Berry, The Memory of Old Jack (Counterpoint, ISBN 978-


1582430430)
Wendell Berry deserves a wider readership. This is a book to take slowly.
It is 1952. The book begins: ‘Since before sunup Old Jack has been
standing at the edge of the hotel porch, gazing out into the empty street
of the town of Port William, and now the sun has risen and covered him
from head to foot with light.‘ At 92 Jack looks into ‘the deepest depths
of his memory’ re-collecting a full life. Although he embodies a van-
ished way of life, his values are what this book affirms.

Balzac, Old Goriot (Penguin Classics, ISBN 978-0140440171)

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.

Stanley Middleton, An After Dinner’s Sleep (Out of print, available via


Amazon used books, ISBN 978-0708919033)
The story of Alistair Murray, now retired, formerly a busy and success-
ful director of an education authority in the Midlands. He is a widower
whose life seems now just a matter of filling his time. Then one evening
he opens the door to a woman he has not seen in nearly forty years. A.
S. Byatt, an admirer of his fiction, has described Middleton’s art as ‘an
exact vision of real things as they are’.

Other recommended novels: Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilych; Philip


Roth, Everyman; Graham Swift, Last Orders, and The Old Boys an early,
darkly comic novel by William Trevor.

115
your Recommendations

books for your children


kenneth Grahame, The wind in the willows

Rose David

S ometimes it is disappointing to offer your children books


you loved as a child. My oldest son hated something about
the start of Alice in Wonderland and I finally gave up when
he stuffed his fingers in his ears, closed his eyes and began
singing. What was it he hated? I don’t know, because he
didn’t want to talk about it, but it might have been the very thing I had
loved – the mad, the wacky. He doesn’t like that sort of thing.
Sometimes though, you see something in the bookshop that you
know will go down a storm and that’s how I felt when I saw the lovely
new illustrated the The Wind in the Willows (Walker Books) – illustrations
by Inga Moore. It’s perfect for reading aloud on the sofa and my lot –
even the older boy who hates Alice – have really got into it. I’d forgotten
that opening with the mole working his way up out of duty into the
freedom of sunshine – an opening for adults if there ever was one! We
haven’t finished yet, but I’d also forgotten the spaciousness of it – the
number of seasons, landscapes, animals... Inga Moore’s illustrations are
beautifully detailed, and the whole family from the four-year-old up
are enjoying looking into them – particularly enjoying those set into
the pages of text. Mr Badger, and the whole winter thing is so warm –
interesting feeling for a grumpy animal in the dead of winter! The book
is about comradeship, the comforts of home, and knowing who your
friends are – still things Wii generation kids need to know. We are at
chapter 5 as I write and they are now clamouring for more.
I do the voices by imagining Hugh Laurie for Ratty and David
Mitchell for Mole, with Ricky Gervais as Toad. For Badger I do my Dad,
because I remember him reading it to me, and though a bit of a grump
he’s still good in a crisis...

116
117
GOOD BOOKS

REVIEWS
Anything you can get your hands on by David Mamet

Criterion Collection have issued Homicide (Joe Mantegna, William H.


Macy, Ving Rhames) on DVD, probably David Mamet’s finest film as
writer and director. The texture and energy of the thing, driven along
by Mamet’s direct language, all of that is characteristic of his film work,
but the bewilderment and feeling at its centre are surprising. You think
it’s a cop show but without missing a step it becomes a painful private
questioning for the main character. It becomes what you would expect
to find in great literature. I cannot fully keep up with Mamet. I can’t at
all. It’s the decisiveness of a mind that never seems quite made up that
throws me. But he is one of my favourite writers of the moment. I’m
hooked by his films, plays and essays.
His words are easier to hear (especially spoken by those great Mamet
interpreters, Mantegna and Macy) than to read, but the pitfalls between
the sentences and the leaps across the gaps are exhilarating and good
for you. Here’s an example from the short play Goldberg Street (from Gold-
berg Street, Short Plays and Monologues), a play which is in many ways a
rehearsal for Homicide as it focuses on the question of Jewish identity
and American life, and on not belonging:
Lost in the woods. It seems simple enough. If you just take
away the thought someone’s coming to help you.

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

M um always speaks in Gaelic when we come up


to Skye. She speaks in Gaelic because that’s
what Gran likes to use in the house. I can’t
join in when they’re talking, but I understand
some of the things they say. Mum thinks that
I might go to school here soon and they’ll teach me, only I want to stay
at my other school with my friends.
Skye’s an island so you have to go over a bridge to get there. Davy
told me it was a troll bridge and that some people didn’t want to pay,
but I said I would because you wouldn’t want to make them angry like
in Billy Goat’s Gruff.
It’s always dark when we arrive. When we step out of the car we
can see how this place gets its name; all you can see for miles and miles
are millions of shining stars. Maybe they put an ‘e’ on the end it’s so
stretched out. In London the heavens seem so small. There are always
buildings in the way.
This time the journey had been awful. We packed in more than usual
because Mum thought we might stay longer. I got wedged up against
suitcases and dresses and stuff. Davy was fine though; he got to sit in
the front where Dad usually went, only Dad wasn’t coming this time.
And we didn’t get to play any of our usual games like I-Spy or
making words from registration plates.
Davy said that Dad always had a map in case we got lost. Mum told
him that she didn’t need maps; she was a human compass. Then she
didn’t say anything for the rest of the journey.

119
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

120
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.

Then yesterday happened.


Gran took off her tabard and put on her wellies so that she could
take me and Davy to the shore. Mum couldn’t make it. She stayed in
bed because of a headache. She kissed us goodbye and said she’d join us
later, and reminded me to look out for the banana fish.
It took about twenty minutes to get there.
There were lots of people with bags so they could tidy up the beach.
For the children it was going to be a competition. Whoever collected
the most rubbish would get to light the bonfire later. Second prize was
a toffee apple.
We put on our huge rubber gloves, took a handful of bags and
walked over to where no one else seemed to be. Uncle Tam was just over
the way collecting whelks. He’d sell them later on and said he’d make
a pretty penny.

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

121
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.

122
fiction

Eventually we had to go because my eyes wouldn’t stay open. The


music could be heard from the cottage till we shut the door behind us.

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.

Read to Lead Accredited Training


Sun 17th – Fri 22nd Jan 2010
See website for more 2010 dates
Over a fun but intensive five-
day residential course you
will discover for yourself what makes Get Into Reading work.

“A conflation of spirit – enthusiasm, energy, joy –


with formalised skills-centred training”
Participant

We offer a vigorous reading workout that all readers should enjoy.


Each participant will have the opportunity to lead a reading group in
a companionable and supportive environment, providing the tailored
individual skills you need to run a GIR project.

KEY AREAS:
• How to run a Get Into Reading group
• Potential challenges and solutions

email Casi Dylan on casidylan@thereader.org.uk


or visit www.thereader.org.uk/read-to-lead-training.html

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

1. Sovereign involved in decision to consult a *1 and 27 across. Messily arranged group of


neurosurgeon (6) characters by 16 across (7,6)
*4. See 26 across 2. Temporary stand-in could make you feel
9. Remove nothing from the club record (4) better (5)
*10. See 26 across 3. Helps in proving that the compass is Tsar
*11. See 25 across Peter’s property (7)
12. Phil Shaw collapsed suffering from a neck 5. Account of primitive instincts in charge sounds
injury (8) bitter (6)
13. They estimate the value of fools’ gold inside 6. Missing aristocrat might call round perhaps
the Gestapo (9) (4,5)
15. Mace twirled to perfection (4) 7. Is comeback a question of getting poise right
*16 and 18 down. He is discovered by American (7)
gents next to the square in Paris (4, 2, 5) 8. A bouquet of compliments from Mr. Collins
17. Letters from a liner last month for a native for example (7, 6)
from the north (9) 14. Translating a point he and I made to Haile
21. Poisonous compound from a beautiful Selassie (9)
Italian lady (8) 16. Is this speedy vessel always black? (7)
22. Dorcas, sister of charity, provides a fruit *18. See 16 across
cordial (6) 19. New England piece is confusingly androgy-
24. Is oil fired combination something to make nous (7)
it harder (10) 20. Limited tense (6)
*25 and 11 across. Freezing agent? Title would 23. 5 down and clever too (5)
imply otherwise (4,6)
*26, 4, and 10 across. Fiddle with worker, military
man and agent in the novel (6, 6, 7, 3)
* 27. See 1 down

* Clues with an asterisk have a common theme

124
buck’s quiz

i hear the lonesome whistle blow

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.

There were no winners last time. Bwah-haa-haaaa! We keep our paper-


backs. You must try harder!

Please send your solutions (marked either Cassandra Crossword, or


Buck’s Quiz) to 19 Abercromby Square, Liverpool L69 7ZG.

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

buck’s quiz no. 35


1. Xanadu 2. A Passage to India 3. Batemans 4. Porthos (The Man in the Iron
Mask) 5. Used as Pemberley in the 1995 television adaptation of Pride
and Prejudice 6. Thomas Hardy 7. Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes 8. Sir Patrick
O’Shaughlin, Sir Murtagh Rackrent, Sir Kit Stopgap and Sir Condy Rackrent
9. The Remains of the Day 10. Salisbury Cathedral 11. Bleak House 12. Un-
derneath the Paris Opera House 13. The House of Usher 14. Antigone 15.
A glass church

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

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