Documentos de Académico
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Documentos de Cultura
THE READER
EMAIL readers@liverpool.ac.uk
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ABOUT THE READER ORGANISATION
Jane Davis, Director, The Reader Organisation
The Reader Organisation is a group of people for whom literature is a key way to
understand and relate to the world. Through four strands of activity, we want to
bring about a reading revolution, and put books at the heart of life:
GET INTO READING is our fflagship social outreach programme, building commu-
nity through shared reading. Groups meet weekly and books are read aloud.
THE READER MAGAZINE addresses those for whom literature is already a much-
loved activity, urging them to read more deeply, widely, or more demandingly.
READER EVENTS bring readers – old hands and absolute beginners – together in
new ways, from a Food for Thought working lunch to the Christmas Party that is
The Penny Readings.
RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT helps us to improve what we do, or to prove its
value. We hope to create new ways of writing about reading and its effect on readers.
In this issue I write about a new Reader adventure, Wirral Community Shakespeare
(see page 97).
THE FUTURE
‘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. We believe that
we have something real to offer the UK and we are seeking investment and support
at a national level for our vision of a new large-scale social function for literature.
The Reader Organisation is committed to making sure that this precious untapped
resource (old stuff, classics, poetry, the great unread) gets out of the university and
into the hands of people for whom it might be humanly valuable.
This is a reading revolution!
THE READER
CONTENTS
Morgan Meis
and friend
Blake
Morrison
Melvyn
Bragg
EDITORIAL ESSAYS
7 Philip Davis 39 Philip Pullman
‘Def iant of Outcomes!’ The Storyteller’s Responsibility
9 Editor’s Picks 63 Morgan Meis
Rivers, Boats, Bridges and the Sea
POETRY 69 Tessa Hadley
18 Face to Face Crying at Novels
20 Les Murray’s Ten Favourite
Australian Poets, Part I INTERVIEW
37 Stephen Sandy 29 Adam Phillips
59 Phill Jupitus Possibilities
76 Matt Simpson
READING LIVES
10 Ian McMillan
THE POET ON HER WORK Letters to a Younger Self
47 Myra Schneider 77 Blake Morrison
Books to Make Us Better
FICTION
51 Melvyn Bragg BOOK WORLD
Remember Me 13 Josie Dixon
125 Frank Wedekind, What is Happening to
trans. John Lynch Our Bookshops?
The Inoculation 103 Donna Coonan
Thirty Years of Virago Modern
Classics
4
THE READER
Adam Phillips
Phillip
Myra Schneider Pullman
5
photograph by
Tom Ashley
‘defiant of outcomes!’
Philip Davis
7
editorial
8
editor’s Picks
In this living and writing issue, two novelists – Tessa Hadley and
Philip Pullman – discuss what writing and reading the novel means
to them. Read excerpts from Melvyn Bragg’s new novel and have the
privilege of seeing some of his earlier drafts, showing something of how
a novelist does it. As requested by many, there is a longer version of the
article Blake Morrison published in The Guardian on the work of The
Reader Organisation in its outreach programme. Our new section ‘Book
World’ concentrates on the world of publishing and booksselling.
Our old friend the poet Les Murray introduces the first in a two-issue
presentation of his favourite Australian poets of all time: five in this
issue, five in September. Our new young friend Morgan Meis writes
from America on the bridges of the world. Matt Simpson is one of the
many distinguished poets here in Liverpool. From Vermont Stephen
Sandy has sent us a poem to launch our Shipping Lines literary festival:
our editor first met Stephen when interviewing him on his memories of
Bernard Malamud.
Two other pieces arise from the more geographically limited wanderings
of the editor. The interview with the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips is a
continuation of the conversation between Adam and Phil at the Radio 3
Live Thinking Festival held in Liverpool last year. At about the same time,
comedian Phill Jupitus came to The Reader office to record material for
a Radio 4 programme he was doing on little magazines. We got these
poems out of him before he got out of the door: look for the reference to
his colleague Russell Brand.
SUBMISSIONS
The Reader genuinely welcomes submissions of poetry, fiction, essays,
readings and thought. We publish professional writers and absolute be-
ginners. Send your manuscript with SAE please to:
The Reader Office, 19 Abercromby Square, Liverpool L69 7ZG, UK.
9
reading lives
Ian McMillan
Ian McMillan hosts the hit weekly show The Verb on BBC R3. He invites you
into his crowded house.
10
reading lives
11
reading lives
This is dense and allusive work, worth spending a long time with. It
sent me back to Doppler Effect, the huge book of mainly experimental
work that Kinsella published with Salt a few years ago, and also to his
fat Bloodaxe volume of Selected Poems from 1980–1994. Life could almost
be too short to try to take in a vastly prolific poet like Kinsella, but it
could also be too short not to.
As always, though, with my Verb reading, it takes me back to the
book room and to the tottering piles. There’s someone that Kinsella
reminds me of, and I can’t quite decide who. I stare at spines for a while
and to be frank that’s not helping. I need to get the books down and
read them, if I’ve got time. Ken Smith? Maybe. Roy Fisher? Perhaps.
Then at the back of a low shelf I come across a couple of old volumes
of Penguin Modern Poets; Number 9, featuring Denise Levertov, Kenneth
Rexroth and William Carlos Williams, and Number 24 with Kenward
Elmslie, Kenneth Koch and James Schuyler. Number 9 was 25p, and
Number 24 was 45p, and I can remember buying them both at Grass
Roots Books in Manchester in the early 1970s.
So now I put Kinsella aside and I plunge into these old friends, os-
tensibly looking for echoes of what I’ve just been reading but really just
up for a good time. I sit and grin at Rexroth’s delightful versions of old
Japanese poems:
When I went out
in the Spring meadows
to gather violets,
I enjoyed myself
so much that I stayed all night
and then I rush from the room to share one of Kenward Elmslie’s ex-
quisite prose poems with the only person in the house available for
listening, my grandson Thomas. ‘Gordon makes abusive telephone calls.
Uncle Charles pulls over to the side by an inn. He gets out of the car and
dies. Gordon comes to the funeral and walks in the garden but does
not set foot in the house. Ken takes up the crusade!’ Thomas isn’t im-
pressed. He prefers Topsy and Tim.
Hey, I’m writing like Kenward Elmslie!
12
book world
what is happening
to our bookshops?
Josie Dixon
I t all started with the collapse of the Net Book Agreement. In ret-
rospect it was an extraordinary arrangement – established on 1st
January 1900, the NBA worked effectively as an industry-wide
cartel, to fix the minimum price of books across the retail spec-
trum, with controlled exceptions for bookclubs and remaindering.
Whether you bought the latest Booker Prize winner in W H Smith or
your local independent bookshop, the price was the same. By the mid-
1990s, this situation – unique in consumer retailing – was becoming
untenable, as the power of the major bookselling chains increased (and
arguably that of publishers diminished). As Smiths, Dillons – remem-
ber them? – Waterstone’s and others squeezed ever larger discounts
from publishers in return for their high-volume sales, the pressure was
growing to compete for commercial advantage by sharing these dis-
counts with the customer.
Eventually, the NBA, like the Berlin Wall a few years before it, fell
remarkably quickly – once the first stones were dislodged, the edifice
turned out to be a pretty fragile one. In September 1995, a year after
the Office of Fair Trading announced a review of the NBA, several
major trade publishers, including Harper Collins and Random House,
withdrew from the agreement, and the Publishers’ Association (who
had previously policed any breaches from rogue booksellers) decided
that it could no longer defend it in court. To all intents and purposes
it collapsed there and then, and it was something of a formality when
in March 1997 the Restrictive Practices Court judged the NBA to be
13
book world
14
book world
wrote in my last piece for The Reader, internet bookselling has made a
rapid and triumphant leap to fill this gap. The rise of Amazon has been
the most obvious success story, but the internet has been equally im-
portant for specialist bookselling businesses of every sort, from small
niche markets to the trade in second-hand, out-of-print and antiquarian
books through wonderful sites such as Abebooks.
One of the toughest factors for bookshops in having to compete
with the likes of Amazon is the fact that their internet rivals have vastly
lower overheads, with no retail premises or shopfloor staff, and a rela-
tionship with wholesale suppliers which means that they don’t actually
have to stock the books (even on the sale-or-return basis which is now
more or less universal in the rest of the retail booktrade), thus eliminat-
ing the biggest risk factor and financial burden in one fell swoop. In this
context, competing with Amazon’s levels of discounting is a formida-
ble challenge, and has largely taken the form of offering incentives for
multiple purchases to raise the volume of sales: Waterstone’s 3 for 2s,
W H Smith’s ‘Buy one get one half price’ etc. Beyond these, bestsellers
are inevitably the main focus of discounting battles between retail-
ers, with competitors now including supermarkets, garages and even
vending machines. The price wars over the latest Harry Potter moved
discounting into loss-leader territory. Asda’s controversial, headline-
grabbing price of £5 (set against a recommended retail price of £17.99)
had booksellers working harder than ever to keep their customers, with
early ordering incentives, midnight opening and other in-store events
to celebrate publication.
Children’s bookselling is in fact a good case to illustrate the ways
in which our bookshops are getting it so wrong, and yet sometimes tri-
umphantly right. As a parent of two small children who are fanatical
consumers of books, I am amazed by the number of booksellers who
hide their children’s section upstairs in shops without a lift, thus making
it impossible to negotiate with a pushchair. The best children’s sections
are those which are made most accessible in every sense, with real
freedom to browse – some Borders stores include a play area and feel
more like a children’s library: the books are there to be tried out in situ,
even if the odd one does get a bit too battered for sale. But for all the vital
joys of browsing, internet bookselling has a great role to play for chil-
dren’s books too. I am a devotee of the Red House (originally a book club,
now a mail order and online business, with no compulsory purchase and
free delivery), perhaps because it began life as an offshoot of the Red
House bookshop in the nearest town to where I grew up in the Oxford-
shire countryside. This was where I made my first purchases with pocket
money or book tokens, and once debated with myself long and hard as to
whether I dared spend a school prize on the fabulously grotesque Fungus
15
book world
the Bogeyman Pop-up Book, solely for the pleasure of having it solemnly
presented by the visiting dignitary at the annual Speech Day prize-giving
ceremony (alas, I did not). Consumer loyalty of this kind may have its
basis in oddly sentimental impulses, but if booksellers continue to earn
our custom, they can keep it for generations.
The mission to inspire this kind of fidelity by identifying with a sense
of community spirit is central to ‘Love Your Local Bookshop’ – a nation-
al marketing campaign for independent booksellers launched in the
autumn of 2007, funded by key wholesalers and the Booksellers’ Asso-
ciation’s Small Business Forum, with support from a number of major
publishers. The enterprise is clearly conceived in retaliation against the
growing power of chains and superstores, and declares as a central item
in its mission statement the aim to ‘engage booksellers and their custom-
ers in a positive, celebratory campaign about independence’. Keith Smith,
owner of Warwick Books, characterises the campaign as ‘a national lit-
erary festival brought to a local level’, with book awards based on sales
through the independent sector and voted for by their customers.
The first week in July of this year will see the launch of ‘Independ-
ent Booksellers’ Week’, with a PR campaign that will be both national
and regional; the aim is to establish it more permanently on the calen-
dar alongside events like World Book Day. The regional element is key to
the thinking behind this enterprise: it’s not only about the independent
status of small bookselling businesses, but also about resisting publish-
ers’ London-centric assumptions – a national marketing strategy has
to mean more than adverts on the Tube. Since the type of point-of-sale
promotional materials we are used to seeing rolled out in the chains and
superstores are all too often beyond the budgets of small independents,
a central element of the campaign is to provide these free for participat-
ing booksellers to give their marketing more oomph. Watch this space
in your local bookshop to see the results in 2008.
In a competitive market, the issue of retaining customer loyalty is
by no means restricted to independent booksellers, and cropped up
repeatedly when I asked Euan Hirst, stock development manager for
Blackwell’s in Oxford, for his views on current trends in bookselling.
While the seismic changes wrought by the demise of the NBA and the
rise of internet bookselling have challenged the traditional set-up of the
trade, he points to ways in which they have also helped to ‘profession-
alise’ its operations – a word he associates with the exemplary German
concept of bookselling as a ‘proper trade’. Yet the biggest challenge
remains how to keep profit and cash generation at the right level to
invest in retaining the best staff, increased stock levels, new technolo-
gies, and the highest levels of shopfitting and presentation. This means
convincing customers that value is not simply equated with the biggest
16
book world
17
Face to Face
POET BIOGRAPHIES
Featured on page 59
Stephen
Sandy
18
Myra Schneider Matt Simpson Billy Marshall
Stoneking
What do you see? What do you see? What do you see?
Papers, folders, note- A computer screen Morning on Hen and
books, dictionaries, and piles of books and Chicken Bay and
books and dust and papers. Wareemba Beach,
remind myself that looking west towards
within the chaos are Like to have written?
a broken line of clouds
organised areas! Shakespeare’s Sonnets, hovering over the Blue
Blake’s Songs of In- Mountains.
Your own best work? nocence and Experience,
Always the last poem Keats’s Odes. Like to have written?
which I feel has been Huckleberry Finn
some kind of success- Your own best work?
ful breakthrough. I am deeply suspicious Your own best work?
of being pleased with My collection of
Current reading? anything I write. poems, Singing the
I have just finished Snake. And my play
Ian McEwen’s On Ideal reader?
about Ezra Pound,
Chesil Beach. His Ideally? Anyone. Sixteen Words for Water.
writing is accom- Current reading?
plished and the story Ideal reader?
Julius Caesar. An empathetic adver-
poignant and yet I felt,
as I always do with his Featured on page 76 sary
work, that a dimen- Current reading?
sion is missing. I have Plan of Attack by Bob
just started On Skirrid Woodward; Finite
Hill, Owen Sheers’ and Infinite Games by
second collection. He’s James Carse.
a talented poet with
an authentic voice. Featured on page 25
Featured on page 47
Billy Marshall
Stoneking
Myra Schneider
Matt
Simpson
poetry
Les Murray
20
poetry
by the venerable firm of Angus and Robertson, but much that under-
lay that book didn’t belong to the Western calendar at all. Interestingly,
in the same period and in the desert region, the renaissance of Abo-
riginal non-figurative painting which has since gone round the world
was just getting started. Much of that painting, of course, is done as it
were in code, to protect sacred content. We on the outer delight in the
intricacy, the sumptuous colours, the haunting gesture and design, yet
nothing is really given away. Our critique is baffled and kept at an es-
sential remove. Taking that hint, and from much gloomy experience, I
have become gun-shy of ever seeing poetry on the same pages as critical
commentary. Or even in the same magazines. For this reason, I offer no
more apparatus with this mini-anthology. Not even potted biographies:
those can be got from Google, if wanted. Now enjoy the reading, and
feel free to cough.
Mary Gilmore
1865–1962
Bones in a Pot
21
poetry
Lesbia Harford
1891–1927
Poems XIV
22
poetry
Judith Wright
1915–2000
Legend
When he came to the end of the day the sun began falling.
Up came the night ready to swallow him,
like the barrel of a gun,
like an old black hat,
like a black dog hungry to follow him.
Then the pigeon, the magpie and the dove began wailing
and the grass lay down to pillow him.
His rifle broke, his hat blew away and his dog was gone
and the sun was falling.
23
poetry
24
poetry
25
poetry
26
poetry
Robert Gray
b.1947
I had been wading for a long while in the sands of the world
and was buffeted by its fiery winds,
then I found myself carried on a bamboo raft (I am speaking
literally now),
poled by a boatman down the Li River.
27
poetry
28
interview
possibilities
By the time a bright spark turns on the voice recorder, Adam Phillips and
Philip Davis are deep in a discussion of American Jewish writers, Bernard
Malamud and Saul Bellow. The main characters of their books are very dif-
ferent individuals. A typical Malamud hero is trapped in tight circumstances
that he fights against, with all the odds against him. Over his head, however,
the reader glimpses the possibility that limits are what give him strength.
On the other hand, a typical Bellow hero explodes in his world with life-
transforming aspiration. Plot and matter give way to his will as well as to
his luck. Adam and Philip first met at a Radio 4 ‘Live Thinking’ event in
Liverpool in November 2007: this is a continuation of the conversation they
began in public back then, following Adam’s now having read Philip’s biog-
raphy of Malamud.
[PD] You said Malamud made you think things that you hadn’t wanted to
think.
[AP] When I read Roth and Bellow, I feel their power and exuber-
ance and their energy, and a kind of indomitable quality. When I read
Malamud, I’m reminded of a certain kind of grimness, of pared-down,
lowered expectation. I have a temperamental aversion to a wailing wall
version of Judaism, which is a combination of grandiosity as in ‘the
chosen people’, and also the grandiosity of victimhood – the sense of
having come from an impoverishment that would cripple the genera-
tions and leave one overwhelmed and undone by sadness and/or terror.
Roth and Bellow are Emersonian. They believe in the possibility, not of
non-assimilation but of non-compliant adaptation. Whereas Malamud
is dauntingly realistic. The sense I get from him, or rather from his char-
29
Adam Phillips
interview
acters and indeed from his prose, is that there’s a terrible struggle here,
and that being seen to struggle can’t be avoided and is masochistically
enjoyed. I think I’m frightened of that kind of poignancy, and when I
read Malamud there’s a poignancy which is very powerful and that I
think is both the most important thing going and therefore something
I am suspicious of…
I’m slightly depressed by the depression that causes you! I think that sometimes,
in Roth’s desire to break out there’s an act of will going on, and to a degree in
Bellow too, and that that’s OK but it is temporary. It is late adolescent. I know
that readers can get an almost electric surge of energy in reading Ralph Waldo
Emerson’s Essays: thought abruptly made big by a single sentence. ‘On History’,
for example: ‘All public facts are to be individualized, all private facts are to be
generalized.’
The point for me is not exactly that this act of will is late adolescent but
that whatever late adolescence holds is peculiarly difficult to sustain,
but may well be worth sustaining in terms of the imaginative possi-
bilities created. In other words, we really never know what’s possible.
The risk for me of the Malamud ethos is that he has too certain a sense
of the reality principle. Bellow and Roth heroes by contrast think that
the reality principle is to be defied or tested: they think it is a set-up
invented by people who want to thwart them. Malamud is full of inspir-
ingly strong people, and Dubin’s Lives is a very good example of this, but
his people don’t ever believe in bravado, and I want the opportunity to
believe in bravado. It scares me! I feel as if in Malamud there’s poten-
tially a sort of inertia or black hole, or a giving up of possibility. I don’t
want to be melodramatic about this but I’m aware that reading some of
Malamud creates an anti-Emersonian mood.
This is interesting and it reminds me of Marion Milner saying there were books ‘to
keep my heart up’. Tell me a bit about your involvement with her: you said when
we last met that you knew her towards the end of her life. She was a psychoana-
lyst who wrote those books to expand herself – A Life of One’s Own and An
Experiment in Leisure…
She has a belief in the potentiality of the self. Psychoanalysis is part
of a project that does not simply disclose to you the way your past has
delimited you, but is committed, in the tradition of the psychoanalyst
Winnicott, to the sense of unknown and unknowable individual poten-
tial. Analysis is not re-parenting, of course, but it offers an opportunity
for forms of recognition that might offer new roads that couldn’t have
occurred to you. It’s as though, in any given life, parenting is aesthetic,
selective. You have originally a range of developmental potentials which
are inevitably selected out by virtue of your family. One of the things
31
interview
analysis can do is show the way in which certain options were pre-
empted or made too fearful, and that is why I want to have Emerson
and Freud in the British tradition in psychoanalysis.
I would have said that Malamud had a strong sense of possibilities within what
looked like small, timid openings, but the more you live with him in time, the
more those apparently little openings become important. You begin to forget the
scale. My slight quarrel with what you’re saying is whether you’re asking for
something big early… to keep your mood up.
One of the things I thought your biography of Malamud was brilliant
in talking about was his building of sentences. Malamud works in a
way that is rigorous and scrupulous, and determined and so on, but
actually produces wonderful releases and liberations and astounding
sentences. I want to believe, and do believe, in inspiration – the thought
that we don’t know where the astounding things come from. What
Malamud represents for me, whether or not it’s true about him, is a
kind of doggedness that I fear doesn’t necessarily issue in anything. In
your Malamud it clearly works and he is a great advertisement for the
virtues of letting yourself be bogged down and seeing what comes of it.
(Beckett is much funnier about this necessity not being a virtue.) It’s
not that I want the big themes in there right from the beginning, but I
do want the possibility of them and my money is on unconscious work.
That doesn’t mean sitting around waiting to be inspired, but it does
mean there’s a limit to what you can consciously contrive.
Over-starkly, the difference we have between us is reality principle versus in-
spiration. Though it’s wrong to think of oneself as a character in a novel, as if
there’s an omnipotent novelist who knows the external truth, nonetheless, in
any situation in which I find myself, I do think that there is an external truth,
even if I never get to it or know it. It can be inhibiting but without that sense
of an external reality or truth in which I am placed adventure becomes adven-
turism.
There are hard facts of life that are not changed by being re-described
– and one of the things psychoanalysis is valuable for is to show what
can’t be changed by re-description. Having said that, it is amazing what
people can call up in each other and also what people can inhibit in
each other. That is to say, what I’m capable of thinking and feeling in
some people’s presence is really quite different. One of the things this
suggests is that I might for all sorts of defensive reasons want to trans-
late the idea of a reality principle to a too-omniscient knowledge about
myself… It’s as if one is saying to oneself, ‘This is the character I am’.
And indeed, if for example I were to start believing that I wasn’t a shy
person, or that my shyness was a way of protecting myself from my
32
interview
wish to show off, there would be a catastrophe. I suppose what I’m in-
terested in is not whether or not there’s a reality principle, but how the
idea of a reality principle is exploitable.
Say some more, because the one thing I’m not sure the reality principle could be is
‘exploitable’. It’s very important to me that I’m first of all a creature, not a creator.
Insofar as I ever get to a form of creation, it’s on the second move as an act of self-
reflection. One of the reasons I like Malamud is that he is only, from your point of
view, half-creative: an ordinary man using extraordinary means to remain still
ordinary. The position of oneself within the world is partly what this is about…
What needs to be acknowledged in the middle of this is one’s absolute
dependence on the recipient. For me that’s the model. So that I must
write from within my creaturely locale, but I’m not the absolute or final
authority on what this is that I’ve written. It’ll be sent out and it’ll be re-
ceived and returned back in various forms, and my belief is that I can’t
say, ‘No you’ve got this wrong’. What I can acknowledge is that you will
receive this thing that I’ve written or said, and you will metabolise it
it in your own way, and something will come back. There’s a sense in
which we are inter-dependent rather than soloists.
Doesn’t the author know – and rightly know – if he or she is being misunderstood
or unrecognised?
I would want to promote the idea that it’s impossible to be misun-
derstood. That when one feels misunderstood, what you’ve stumbled
upon is the fact that there are other people in the world. In a way
that is the most interesting thing. The better world would be one in
which I wouldn’t be sitting there feeling outraged and scandalised
at being misunderstood; I would be thinking, ‘That’s really interest-
ing’. I would be interested, in that moment, in seeing what’s coming
through, rather than wanting to blow the system apart by my rage.
There are affinities in this acknowledgement of difference that I think
are better than the outrage if people don’t understand me. I think that
rage is adolescent. We shouldn’t want to be understood, we should
want to be redescribed.
Samuel Johnson said it’s very difficult to be friends with people who hold views
directly opposed to your own…
It’s not that I think ‘How fascinating it is that there are other people’.
What reassures me or makes me feel better is the fact that I don’t have
to respond with violence, as a reflex, to the person with the opposed
view. This is not a liberal point – clearly there’s a point at which the
unacceptable is unacceptable. Morality is based on that. But I do think
the thing we are likely to be affronted by is the thing with which we
33
interview
have some affinity. And there’s a loss of energy in the repudiation of the
opposing view. Because your enemy, so to speak, has something pro-
foundly in common with you.
The model you don’t like is one of anger and enmity whereas what I think I am
talking about is more to do with the feeling of disappointment when people don’t
understand your work, and then a sort of indifference that then comes upon one…
There may well be another subject matter you can have with that other person,
and that usually means giving up on your thing and looking for their thing.
What of the possibility that sadness and indifference is a transforma-
tion of violent anger? Unconsciously, your first experience is ‘I want to
murder this person’. This is obviously terrible and impossible and you’ll
be in prison, so you can’t do that. This anger turns into indifference,
boredom, sadness. In other words, you’ve had a resignation and faced
the fact that there’s no meeting here. I would want more of the violence
to be available for conversation without it being enacted. I do believe in
conflict as a form of affinity, rather than conflict being the problem.
There are connections, says Wordsworth, finer than those of contrast. Though I
appreciate your argument that the sadness is a version of the anger, I think there
is some terrible truth in a shamed and reluctant sense that everything is poten-
tially disappointing. That’s my biggest fear. And that would exactly be in the area
of what we were talking in reading Malamud.
Let’s imagine that disappointment is a useful refuge, so that once you
feel disappointed you know where you are. This is one version. The other
version is that there’s a life organised to avoid the possibility of disap-
pointment. And then the question would be, what’s the big problem
with disappointment? You could think disappointment is integral to
being human so you had better start learning about it in order to be
able to take risks. I would not want my children not to do things for fear
of disappointment. I’d want them to be attentive to the moments when
they take flight into disappointment as an avoidance of something else.
Because I think disappointment is extremely consoling.
Yes, agreed: I do associate disappointment with those forms of ageing that give up
and I do want to resist it.
There’s also a sense in which hope can be poisonous… I think it would
be better to bring up our children, from early on, with the idea that
there is a question whether life is worth living for any given individual
at any point in their lives. For some people, it is a real question and one
of the things we can do, thank God, is to kill ourselves. That should be
a serious option built into our education. Why are you tolerating pain?
I would prefer to start from the position of asking the question whether
34
interview
life is worth living, whether certain kinds of pain are worth suffering.
You’re more ‘sixties’ than I am. For me, suicide is a sin against life. There’s a
poem by Wordsworth called ‘Argument for Suicide’ where he talks about: ‘the
magic circles / Drawn round the thing called life. Till we have learned / To prize
it less, we ne’er shall learn to prize / The things worth living for’. Until we begin
to contemplate the thought of suicide we won’t be able to find the things worth
living for. You have to go to some brink. But I don’t think it has to be the brink
of suicide.
There are two checks traditionally. The first is the thought that we ought
to live it through and to bear it, as if one has an inbuilt hero myth. The
other though is one’s parents and one’s children. The reason one can’t
commit suicide is because it’s the ultimate act of hatred and rejection
of one’s parents, and it’s the ultimate act of betrayal of one’s children.
Those seem to be as close to laws that make suicide a sin as possible. But
I think it’s important to have in the picture the possibility that things
can happen that make one’s life literally unbearable. I don’t think we
should start from the assumption that we can bear anything, because
life is harder than that. And I don’t think we should let ourselves be su-
pervised by our children; it is a terrible burden for them.
I agree, though I don’t believe that staying it out is a vision of the heroic as such.
I think it’s a vision of the non-heroic. But let’s talk about specifics, Primo Levi
for example. It’s a sad narrative – to have survived the concentration camps and
finally years after to kill yourself as he did is awful.
I agree. Yet the question is whether he’s let himself down, or us. I can
see why we would want him not to have done it, but I can imagine that
for him not to have done it might have felt like self-betrayal.
Levi was a representative, however unfair that burden was on him: a representa-
tive of survival. And that wasn’t just our vicarious imposition on him. I was
thinking of Doris Lessing’s The Making of the Representative of Planet 8
where one lone figure at the end has to see life through to its final extinction on
the planet without giving in – because he is the representative of the human life-
force and no longer simply a frail and frightened individual; because the genetic
memory of what he stood for may live on as a result somehow. So in Malamud’s
The Fixer, Yakov Bok is only a Jew in so far as he is arrested as a result of anti-
semitism. He doesn’t believe in Judaism. But increasingly he comes to be the
representative of the Jews, because he is being persecuted as one of them. And that
makes him feel less lonely, less a single person. We stand for something and are
not just ourselves.
I believe the Jews think they’re the chosen people because they have
such a profound apprehension of their contingency that they know
35
interview
36
poetry
stephen sandy
Sea Chest
37
Philip Pullman
is appearing at
Shipping Lines
Liverpool Literary Festival
7-9 November 2008
essay
Philip Pullman
39
essay
40
essay
41
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beings have done to one another, but that was a dishonest one. An emo-
tional response from the reader is a precious thing. Stories should earn
their own tears and not pilfer them from elsewhere.
When it comes to the craft of saying what happened, the responsibil-
ities become technical, and more and more fascinating. The playwright
David Mamet said something very interesting about this. He said that
the basic story-telling question for a film director is ‘Where do I put
the camera?’ I’ve found that to be a very rich metaphor for the first big
problem you have to solve when you start to tell a story: where am I
seeing this from? Whose voice is telling this? To judge from their work,
it seems that the great directors, the great storytellers, know immedi-
ately and without thinking where the best place is to put the camera.
They seem to see it as clearly as we can see that leaves are green. A
good director will choose one of several goodish positions. A bad direc-
tor won’t know, and will move the camera about, fidgeting with the
angles, trying all sorts of tricky shots or fancy ways of telling the story,
and forgetting that the function of the camera is not to draw attention
to itself, but to show something else – the subject – with as much clarity
as it can manage.
But the truth is that great directors only seem to know the best place
at once. The notebooks of great writers and composers are full of hesita-
tions and mistakes and crossings-out; perhaps the real difference is that
they keep on trying till they’ve found the best place to put the camera.
The responsibility of those of us who are neither very good nor very bad
is to imitate the best, to look closely at what they do and try to emulate
it, to take the greatest as our models.
Next, I think that we should keep a check on our self-importance.
We who tell stories should be modest about the job, and not assume
that just because we’ve thought of an interesting story, we’re interesting
ourselves. A storyteller should be invisible, as far as I’m concerned; and
the best way to be sure of that is to make the story itself so interesting
that the teller just disappears. When I was in the business of helping
students to become teachers, I used to urge them to tell stories in the
classroom – not read them from a book, but stand up and tell them, face
to face, with nothing to hide behind. The students were very nervous
until they tried it; they thought that under the pressure of all those
wide-open eyes, they’d melt into a puddle of self-consciousness. But
some of them tried, and they always came back next week and reported
with amazement that it worked, they could do it. What was happening
was that the children were gazing, not at the storyteller, but at the story
she was telling. The teller had become invisible, and the story worked
much more effectively as a result.
Of course, you have to find a good story in the first place, but we can
42
essay
do that. I’ve said before that the great collections of British folk-tales,
by writers such as Alan Garner, Kevin Crossley-Holland, and Neil Philip,
should be treated in two ways: first, they should be bound in gold and
brought out on ceremonial occasions as national treasures; and second,
they should be printed in editions of hundreds of thousands, at the
public expense, and given away free to every young teacher and every
new parent.
And stories make themselves at home anywhere. Nowadays a story-
teller in Ireland can learn Australian stories, an African storyteller can
tell Indonesian stories, a storyteller in Poland can pass on Inuit stories.
Should we storytellers make sure we pass on the experience of our own
culture? Yes, of course. It’s one of our prime duties. But should we only
tell stories that reflect our own background? Should we self-righteously
refrain from telling stories that originated elsewhere, on the grounds
that we don’t have the right to annex the experience of others? Ab-
solutely not. A culture that never encounters any others becomes first
inward-looking, and then stagnant, and then rotten. We are responsible
– there’s that word again – for bringing fresh streams of story into our
own cultures from all over the world.
43
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shows that temptation is truly tempting, and that actions have conse-
quences, and that when people make a mess of their lives, they have to
deal with the results.
Some writers of children’s books feel that they shouldn’t take too
bleak a view of the world; that however dark and gloomy the story
they’re telling, they should always leave the reader with a glimpse of
hope. I think that has something to be said for it, but children can deal
with the fact that tragedy is uplifting, too, if it shows the human spirit
at its finest. ‘The true aim of writing,’ said Samuel Johnson, ‘is to enable
the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.’ Children need both
those kinds of help, just as grown-ups do.
What’s true about depicting life in general is true of our responsibil-
ity when it comes to depicting people. There’s a sentence I saw not long
ago from Walter Savage Landor which is the best definition of this sort
of responsibility I’ve ever seen: ‘We must not indulge in unfavourable
views of mankind, since by doing it we make bad men believe that they
are no worse than others, and we teach the good that they are good in
44
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45
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46
the poet on her work
MYRA SCHNEIDER
Field
47
the poet on her work
on ‘field’
Myra Schneider
48
the poet on her work
I considered opening with the second poem which began: ‘Out and
running across the gravelly road’ but this seemed too bald. In any case
removing the first poem would distort the shape of the sequence. The
more I looked at it, the more certain I became that something was in-
trinsically wrong and that at two and a quarter pages it was too long.
I put the poem into the abandoned poems file together with my typed
notes. The writing process, of course, is a journey into the unknown via
notes, drafts, revisions, and it sinks into or rises out of the slough of
despond so I didn’t feel I had necessarily abandoned ‘Field’ for good.
49
the poet on her work
I can’t remember what made me look at the poem again in 2006 but
as soon as I read it I saw the first section was a mistake and the whole
needed to be re-focused as a single poem in which the present had as
much weight as the past. By writing a group of four poems I had given
myself permission to include any material I felt like from the past, and
I felt ashamed because I’d long been aware how easy it is to be beguiled
by vivid early memories.
I cringe now when I read the ‘poetic’ poem quoted above and I find
it hard to believe I hadn’t seen then how it muddied the whole poem.
The first thing I did was to cross it out. I then went carefully through
the rest of the original version underlining what struck me as essential.
The whole of the last poem about the slope in the park was not only
the best written but also the most crucial material and I knew at once
that the memory section needed to balance it in length, that the poem
turned on juxtaposing past and present. I don’t know what instinct led
me to the syntax in which I used a repeated ‘was’ to hang together in
one sentence everything I decided on for the first half of the re-envi-
sioned poem. It set a pattern and helped me to shape the poem which
seemed to ask to be fitted into rhyming quatrains. I kept two lines from
the original first poem and cut some of the detail from the second and
third poems. I also omitted two verses at the end of the second poem
about the fields opposite our house being dug up for a housing estate
(material which was a diversion and was needed, in fact, for a different
poem). I hardly altered a word of the fourth poem.
The new poem was written quickly and when I’d finished it I saw I
had retained all the central material of the sequence and yet it was less
than half its original length! The journey had been a difficult one. It was
also a warning not to fix the shape of a poem too quickly but the final
result was very satisfying. I was amazed by the flow in the re-structured
poem, by the way the details now seemed to shine through. The poem
seemed to me at last to carry that potency of field which I wanted to
express: a sense of childhood freedom and my love of wildlife, its beauty
which is untamed, scary, unfathomable, full of possibility. I was amazed
that the ‘real poem’ had been there buried in the original until I had
found a way to pull it out.
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fiction
‘remember me,
but ah! forget my fate’
Melvyn Bragg
The first extract, given below in its final version, concerns the ambitious
young Joe who, seeking to establish himself, is making a documentary on the
work of a young woman artist. Jessica, a miner’s daughter from his native Cum-
berland, paints the mountains of the Lake District as if under the influence of
drugs or illness or nightmare. Here, after filming, the newly married Joe and
Natasha have drinks with Jessica and the cameraman, Alex, who hopes to bed the
painter. Jessica begins a boozy discussion on the idea that an artist must always be
51
Melvyn Bragg
fiction
unhappy, Joe violently dissents, and a row erupts as Jessica turns on Joe’s denial,
trying to humiliate him.
‘You’re unhappy but you won’t admit it,’ said Jessica, whose slender
body was fortified and steadied, it seemed at this stage, by alcohol. She
swept back the second brandy.
‘Beddy byes?’ said Alex, his hopes of a conquest deflated.
‘You are very, very unhappy,’ said Jessica and she held his eyes in
her gaze as intensely as a hypnotist. ‘And until you admit it you’ll write
nothing any good.’
‘Admit what?’
The bravado in his tone alerted Natasha.
‘Admit it,’ said Jessica sotto voce. ‘We’re twins, Joe. And polar op-
posites. Admit it.’
‘Admit what?’
This time it was more of a plea and Natasha remembered that her
best friend and bridesmaid, Frances,1 now in America, had spoken of
seeing the ‘shadows’ around Joseph and she had dismissed the insight
as merely part of Frances’ psychic indulgence. But undoubtedly,2 now,
the shadows were gathering3 over him.4 He was losing something of
himself. It was unlike anything she had seen in him before.5
‘Confess the suffering. Admit the pain.’6 Jessica beat her hands on
the arm of the chair.
Natasha saw a face of Joseph which was new to her. It had loosened.
There was some7 fear in it and an unmistakable violence.8 Even his voice
had changed, thicker toned, coarser.
‘It’s not fair,’ he said, picking out the monosyllable with great care.
‘I mean – it’s not true.’
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fiction
9. lunged through his mind [22.08.06]: ‘swung up into his mind’ [9.01.05]
10. imprisoned in panic [22.08.06]: ‘imprisoned in fear, overwhelmed by panic’
[9.01.05]
11. distraught [8.02.05]: ‘distraught in his mind’ [9.01.05]
12. ‘his soul, whatever it was’ [deleted 22.08.06]
13. and took away the life of him [8.02.05]: ‘and took with him all life and hovered
on the temptation of an abyss which if taken would have paralysed or destroyed
him.’ [9.01.05]
14. ‘pleading’ [deleted 22.08.06]
15. quickly [added 22.08.06]
16. Joseph [22.08.06]: Joe [9.01.05]
17. She knew something now that she had not previously known. She knew the fear that
was all but suffocating him [22.08.06]: ‘She sensed now what she had never known
about him and she knew also the shame which was all but suffocating him.’
[9.01.05]; ‘She knew something now that she had not precisely known about
him and she sensed also the pain that was all but suffocating him.’ [8.02.05]
18. This was another Joseph, this was a different man, stripped bare. [27.09.06]:
‘This was another Joseph, this was a different man, exposed in his homeland’
[19.02.05]; ‘So this was another Joseph, this was a new man, revealed in his
homeland’ [8.02.05]; ‘So this was Joe. This was another Joe, revealed in his
homeland’ [9.01.05]
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fiction
A Son of War described Joe’s teenage breakdown, the scars of which are re-
vealed again here. But Natasha from their first meeting had always preferred to
call him ‘Joseph’.
The next devastatingly short passage finds Joe deep in trouble with the mar-
riage. It reaches a culmination one evening as he travels home from the BBC by
tube. It seems to mark the return of that earlier breakdown, now in a different
world.
The first time it hit him with its full force was on Shepherd’s Bush
underground station. He had been to see friends at the BBC to discuss
the possibility of working on a new arts magazine programme. Lunch in
the bar had been noisy, beery, full of gossip with19 old pals, worlds away
from his solitudes.20 He envied what he might have been had he stayed
in the BBC and left the bar cheerful at the prospect that he might in
some way rejoin that communal21 part of his past.
Shepherd’s Bush Central Line station was all but deserted on the
autumn afternoon. He did not have long to wait for the train.
As he heard it come closer through the tunnel it was as if a massive
magnetic force began to pull him towards the edge of the platform,
drawing him towards the track, overwhelming his resistance,22 and
as the noise grew louder the strength of the23 pull grew and he found
himself swaying, helpless,24 about to be taken fatally25 forward by it and
then the train broke out of the tunnel and charged towards him. He
backed away, he had to push himself back, against nothing but air but it
took all his will, all his might26 to back away until he met the wall and
pressed himself against it as the train braked loudly to a stop. The doors
opened. He could not move. The doors closed. He waited until the train
had gone. Keeping close to the wall he found the exit and took the stairs.
55
fiction
The grey light of day made him blink. He would find a bus. He looked
around at the strange world which was the same as the world before he
had gone underground.27
That was how it began.28
‘We were so blind to each other at that crucial time,’ Joe wrote to their
daughter. ‘How in God’s name had we come to that pass?’
***
‘We squabble,’ she said, ‘like old people who have nothing to say to each
other but find some comfort in constant complaints.’
‘Sometimes silence is better proof of…’
‘Can’t you complete the sentence?’
Joseph raised his glass and took too big a sip, she thought.
‘When we moved here you said there would be people like us we
would meet and make friends with. Where are they?’ The shot of whisky
had restored the anaesthetic effect.
‘It takes time,’ he said. ‘You don’t just march up and say “be my
friend”.’
‘We could have a party.’
‘I hate parties. I hate people coming into our house.’
‘You used to love them. In Kew you loved them.’
‘It’s as if you licence people to break into your home. Just to roam
around and gawp. To spy everything that you are. It’s voyeurism! No!’
‘Joseph.’
She uttered his name with such despair that he was compelled to
dismount from the alcohol-fuelled ride to stupor.
27. which was the same as the world before he had gone underground [30.8.06]: ‘which
was the same as before’ [24.07.05]
28. That was how it began [30.8.06]: ‘And that was the beginning of it.’ [24.07.05]
Cf ‘Thus the thing began’ in Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles (book 1
chapter 5).
56
fiction
She looked pale and there was about her a pain he did not want to
acknowledge29 because he had so much of his own and yet he knew he
ought to reach out to her. His name, her chosen version of his name,
was a cry he could not recognise, or would not, afraid perhaps that a full
knowledge of her suffering30 would crush him and so he flinched away,
turned tail like an animal evading danger. There was nothing he could
say and his name hung in the silence.
* * *
‘Your mother called my name and I made no answer,’ he wrote to Mar-
celle. ‘It would not be too much to say that my silence has run down the
years and has come back time and again as an accusation.’
This last extract is two hundred pages on from the first one. But the name
‘Joseph’ calls across them in memory amidst all the other cries and noises in
this novel. Remember Me (the cry of Dido to her deserted lover at her death
in Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas) is full of such tiny echoes and quietly explosive
details. These are worked for throughout the drafts by unflinching changes such
as ‘sensed’ to ‘knew’, or ‘know’ to ‘acknowledge’ (footnotes 17, 29) or ‘resistance’
added only to be overwhelmed (footnote 22), and attempted certainties disturb-
ingly removed (footnotes 4, 5, 18, 27). It is a process described by Natasha herself
when she thinks of her own writing:
From chapter 37
What most fascinated her were the little flashes of light – illuminations
of memory or traces of insight, elusive, puzzling, each one a will-o’-
the-wisp; a sheaf of lavender, the black swans in full sail, her father
laughing with Isabel; but most of them so fleeting they did not even
bring an image with them, mere pulses between the stars she could
recognise, messages from the dark, infinitely small particles of energy
which she longed to grasp and felt that once known could complete the
puzzle of herself.
*
57
Phill Jupitus
poetry
phill Jupitus
He Loves You
59
poetry
60
poetry
Einstein’s Pint
61
poetry
Carry On Crow
Until
We passed a shiny dead crow
On the hard shoulder
Head to one side
Wondering no more
Ebony blue wings folded
Pointlessly fluttering
Hopelessly beautiful
Sightless eyes that saw through me
A petty spiteful fool
My black heart
Unmasked by a crow’s demise
Then I thought
I bet that Russell ran it over…
62
essay
Morgan Meis
I f you want to talk about boats and bridges you have to talk about
rivers and if you want to talk about rivers you have to talk about
the sea. The sea is a big thing and throughout human history it has
often taken up the role as the ‘unformed’, as the limit of civilization.
The birth of what we currently consider Western civilization hap-
pened mostly around the borders of the Mediterranean, which was both
the sustenance for that civilization as well as a constant threat to it. You
never knew what was going to come of the sea. You never knew what
was going to come of its waters or across its expanses and you never
knew what was going to happen to you if you left the land. An ongoing
theme in ancient literature is that heading out to sea is necessary in
order to achieve something beyond the ordinary, and simultaneously a
fundamental act of hubris that will almost certainly be punished.
In one of Western civilization’s Ur-texts, Hesiod’s Works and Days,
Hesiod denounces his ‘foolish’ brother Perses for his desire to buck the
natural order of things and to seek his fortune in seafaring. Still, Hesiod
can’t help mentioning that he once took to the waters in order to reach
Chalcis where he took a prize in poetic competition. If you want glory,
or riches, or simply one fate rather than another, you’re going to have to
brave the sea. Hesiod knew that well enough, he was just of two minds
about it and he wasn’t above lecturing his little brother.
Everyone knows that rivers and streams do the flowing that they
do in order, eventually, to get to the sea. They are little parts of the sea,
incursions into the kingdom of land that provide both the nourishment
of water and the inherent danger of the formless sea. Rivers rage, they
63
essay
separate chunks of land and they are the right arm of flood, the primary
surrogate by which the sea takes its revenge on the dry land. When that
happens, men get knocked about even without having dared the sea.
Sometimes it seems as if mankind is simply a pawn in the games being
played between the sea, the land, and the sky. I suppose myth spins
itself out from the possibilities of that basic thought.
Within this grand schema, mankind’s contribution has rarely risen
beyond the pathetic. In the face of the greatness of the sea, we have
offered the boat. Storm tossed in the meanest gale or forlorn on the
placid expanse of a wine-dark infinity, the boat has never exactly in-
spired confidence. From Hesiod to the Titanic it is the symbol of a barely
concealed anxiety. Our deepest anxiety, because it is existential. Will we
make it at all? Civilization has often been compared to a ship and the
fear encapsulated in that thought is that our fate as a people and a civi-
lization is just as uncertain as any boat’s.
The land’s answer to the boat is the bridge. It is the opposite solu-
tion to the boat in that the river below moves, the bridge stays still. But
the basic relationship is similar. The bridge does its modest job to tame
the absolute divisions offered up by the river. It leaps over the expanse
of water in a moment both of daring and of fragility. It is so small in
contrast to what it challenges. But bridges also do something big in
their littleness. They stake a claim against the sea and the river. They eke
out an arrangement between bits of land on mankind’s terms. Bridges
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tend to get built when a series of smaller human settlements are being
stitched together into a more sustained and sustainable community.
Enfolded in every bridge is a dream of the city, the metropolis.
Hart Crane was obsessed with bridges, I think, for exactly that
reason. He knew that bridges were the site of our terrestrial triumphs,
modest though they be. His poem, The Bridge, with its homage to the
Brooklyn Bridge, has often been remarked upon for its modernity. Here
is a man writing poetic odes to human triumphs in industry and tech-
nology. Here is a man brave enough to attach his poetic gift to something
beyond the mute sublimity of nature. Crane wrote beautifully of the
bridge and of the urban landscape of cinemas and subways and traffic
lights that struck him as being as worthy of versification as any verdant
hill or shimmering dale.
Performances, assortments, resumes—
Up Times Square to Columbus Circle lights
Channel the congresses, nightly sessions,
Refractions of the thousand theaters, faces—
Mysterious kitchens… You shall search them all.
Crane saw the city in the bridge and vice versa. But it ought to be
noted also that Crane was excited about bridge things because he was
also excited about sea things. The last stanza of the proem to The Bridge
goes backward across the exact territory we’ve just covered. Crane goes
from the bridge to the river to the sea. Always the sea. He writes of the
bridge:
O sleepless as the river under thee,
Vaulting the sea, the prairies dreaming sod,
Unto us lowliest sometime sweep, descend
And of the curveship lend a myth to God.
For all its city-centrism, Crane’s poetry is thick with sea talk and water
references. His mind had a persistent tendency to slide back to the sea.
In the end, he did too. On April 27th, 1932, on a ship called the Orizaba
sailing from Mexico to New York, Crane made his way to the railing,
slipped off his robe, and went over. That was that. Back to the sea.
Forget the Brooklyn Bridge, forget all the bridges. In the end he wanted
to be subsumed in the fathomless waste of the sea.
And that’s what is so disturbing about bridges. They are our solution
of sorts, our own hard work against the tyranny of the sea. At the same
time, they don’t solve anything. Melville’s got the same damn problem.
The first chapters of Moby-Dick are as wondrous a description of human
things as you’re going to find. There are rapturous words. Words of the
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city, of the streets, of the milling mix and the crowd. But in Melville’s
eyes the entire city of New York is water-directed, straining toward the
ocean in spite of itself. Of its denizens he says, ‘Nothing will content
them but the extremest limit of the land; loitering under the shady lee
of yonder warehouses will not suffice. No. They must get just as nigh
the water as they possibly can without falling in.’
Melville throws it all away. He can’t bear it somehow. The city is
too solid, the world is too solid, the bridge is too fixed. He heads for
the whaling harbors and the ships of the open sea. He goes back out
from something toward nothing. He explains, ‘And still deeper the
meaning of that story of Narcissus, who because he could not grasp
the tormenting, mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and
was drowned. But that same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and
oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is
the key to it all.’ Narcissus, Melville, Crane: the city achieved and then
denied for the inchoate doom of the ocean’s depths.
Auden thought he had hold of this problem and laid it out in a series
of lectures he gave in 1949 published later as The Enchafèd Flood. He
says:
The sea, in fact, is that state of barbaric vengeance and dis-
order out of which civilization has emerged and into which,
unless saved by the efforts of gods and men, it is always liable
to relapse. It is so little of a friendly symbol that the first thing
which the author of the Book of Revelation notices in his
vision of the new heaven and earth at the end of time is that
‘there was no more sea’.
But we are drawn to that same disorder and barbaric vengeance, Auden
thinks, when we are confronted by the reciprocally stifling order and
lawfulness of civilization. The revenge of the sea works itself out as a
trick by means of the bridge. The bridge tames the river, but in doing so
tames us. Although the sea is the end of life, its limit, the great over-
arching threat to life, it is also its beginning, its primordial source. The
bridge lifts us up from the slime, but then away from what matters.
We go back to the sea as going back to the source. Speaking explicitly
of Melville’s Ishmael, Auden writes, ‘The only outside “necessities” are
the random winds of fashion or the lifeless chains of a meaningless job,
which, so long as he remains an individual, he can and will reject. … So
he must take drastic measures and go down to the waters.…’
So reasons Auden. And he’s not wrong in reasoning so. Still, I wonder
if that opposition is too simple. If Crane and Melville (and others like
them) finally reject the city, they do so in the mood of the lover more
than that of the adversary. More importantly, the fascination with the
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bridge and the boat isn’t really an opting either for civilization or its
other. Melville may feel the yearning for the sea, but the real story of
Moby-Dick is the story of the Pequod, that city-in-miniature within which
the crew makes its world. The love of bridges is the love of suspension.
You’re nowhere in particular when you’re on a bridge. You’re above the
rushing water below, held by a tenuous arm-length extension of the city
that has thrown its thin span over the void.
There is a terse and beautiful novel by Thornton Wilder called The
Bridge of San Luis Rey. It purports to tell the story of an odd book written
by Brother Juniper in Peru at the beginning of the eighteenth century.
Brother Juniper has witnessed the collapse of a woven bridge between
Lima and Cuzco that threw five individuals to their deaths. The Brother
decides to investigate the lives of these five individuals in order to tease
out a divine will that, in the manner of Leibniz’s ‘best of all possible
worlds,’ would choose to take these five people at this particular time. His
book becomes, instead, a testament to the impenetrability of any cosmic
plan and the Brother and the book are burned in the town square years
later. The final words of the novel are the following. ‘There is a land of
the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only sur-
vival, the only meaning.’ Picking apart the sentence for a moment we
come up with an intriguing thesis. The land of the living means nothing
in and of itself. The land of the dead means nothing in and of itself. ‘The
only survival,’ ‘the only meaning,’ is in that spot where they touch one
another. That’s the meaning-generating spot and it’s where the artist
instinctively wants to be. It is the nexus point between the world as it
has been given to us and the world as something we are shaping of our
own volition. It’s the shaky place where bridges and boats are. It’s the
place where you have a glimmer of a chance of glimpsing ‘the unfath-
omable phantom of life.’
Some (Narcissus, Crane, Ahab) cannot hold the line very long. They
succumb to the abyss on the other side. But the point is to hold fast on
the bridge or the boat for as long as you can. Or maybe there isn’t any
point. It is just that certain kinds of minds will always be bridge and
boat minds. Some people will get as close to rivers and the sea as they
can. They will seek the edges where two things meet, with the idea that
a kind of truth is there. But there is no escape, no transcendence. The
truth to be found is only a small one, a quickening of the pulse when
we reach the very center of the bridge or that place on the ocean where
there is no land yet to be seen from either shore.
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Tessa Hadley
essay
crying at novels
Tessa Hadley
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Now for the first time I felt the desire to write fiction.
I wanted to feel I could change this inexorable place, these
lonely, shapeless deaths, even in imagination: fiction as defi-
ance of exigency. I also wanted to memorialise the woman on
the trolley – to make her a story about a more fortunate mortal
who was able to choose his death in a place a world away from
hospitals…
Being able to make a story from nothing instead of concoct-
ing it out of elusive memories made me happy. It also relieved
my fear of being trapped ‘inside’. My labelled body might be
lying on my labelled bed, but my mind could be anywhere,
keeping whatever company I chose.
I also discovered that fiction can make its own claims to
truth; that I believed in fabricated Noah more completely than
I believed in my account of myself as a girl. Fiction began to
offer a balm for the obstinate opacities, the jagged inadequa-
cies of memory.
I wrote more stories. I discovered what surprising company
the people who grow from the tip of your pen can be, and how
pleasurable it is to map the small, curiously complete, arti-
ficial worlds in which they live – worlds where madness and
death, even murder, is a fiction.
We could not want Clendinnen account of her time in hospital to be any
different, including her account of her experiences of writing fiction.
Tiger’s Eye is intriguing, illuminating; it reads like the truth of an expe-
rience, many experiences. It has the open-endedness – the dialogism
– that makes it possible for a reader roused by the power of the writing
to argue with some of what the writing asserts without refusing the
whole work. And I want to argue with this subordinate role she assigns
to fiction (‘balm’) beside history, or ‘reality’.
She is wrong, I am sure, in her account of what fiction is and does.
What fiction does, can do, should do, is much more like the passage that
precedes the story, where the woman dies on the hospital trolley. The
‘story’ itself, about an Australian surfer choosing to die out in the water,
is rather glib and factitious; all the ‘stories’ in the book, the self-con-
scious short fictions, fail. They fail in exactly the ways one might expect
of a fiction writer who thinks that writing has nothing to do with ‘the
obstinate opacities, the jagged inadequacies of memory’; who thinks
fiction is shaped ‘in defiance of exigency’, to change ‘inexorable’ things;
and that its worlds are ‘small’ and ‘curiously complete’.
In Madame Bovary Flaubert also expresses some anxieties about the
irresponsibility of novels which are relevant to this argument. Emma
Bovary’s unfulfillable desires and her delusions are explicitly related
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lived like peasants without the freedoms and the material wealth of the
privileged (‘The Death of Ivan Ilyich’), or that the very forms of Euro-
pean civilisation which brought forth this possibility of illusionism that
enchants us are also destroying our authentic selves (‘Hadji Murat’).
It is this last point that seems to me best to answer Clendinnen’s
difficulty with the ‘curiously complete, artificial worlds’ of the novel,
the ‘circumscribed place of play’. That novels are artificial is a tautol-
ogy; but they are not complete, and of all art forms they are perhaps the
least circumscribed. Novelists are, as we have seen, able to argue about
the dangers of novel-reading inside novels. Just as the novel imitates
life so effectively, with its air of casual improvisation and the apparent
contingency of its discoveries, so it is especially and generically capable
of whatever openness to doubt is intrinsic to the life it represents. When
writer Alice Munro, for example, builds into her narrative style her habit
of worrying whether as a writer she has the authority to describe what
she wants to describe (‘And they may get it wrong, after all. I may have
got it wrong’), she is making explicit that in-built self-questioning re-
flexivity which is a crucial aspect of the novel’s ‘lifelikeness’.
When novelists sit down to write – to invent, to choose what will
happen and whether their characters will be happy and how they will
die – they do not delude themselves that they are responsible in the
way they would be responsible for ‘real people’ in their care. They may
well, nonetheless, feel themselves answerable to something beyond
the words: and to the very difficulties in fact that Clendinnen wants to
leave out when she starts to ‘make up stories’. Writing in hospital, she
wants to ‘change’ an ‘inexorable place’ and transform ‘lonely, shapeless
deaths’; she wants to use ‘fiction as defiance of exigency’, ‘a balm for
the obstinate opacities, the jagged inadequacies of memory.’ But good
writing, writing that aspires to represent what is real, will not want to
write in spite of those things: it will want to write, as she indeed wants
to write in all the other parts of her book, about them.
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poetry
matt simpson
Note: a silent film of Oscar Straus’s operetta The Chocolate Soldier, based on Shaw’s
Arms and the Man, was made in 1915
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Blake Morrison
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Blake Morrison
by Mark Gerson
reading lives
Under the umbrella of Jane Davis’s Get into Reading scheme, there
are now around 50 groups like this across Merseyside: groups in care
homes, day centres, neurological rehab units, acute psychiatric wards,
cottage hospitals, sheltered accommodation and libraries; groups for
people with learning disabilities, Alzheimer’s, mental health problems;
groups for prisoners, excluded teenagers, looked-after children, recov-
ering drug-addicts, nurses and carers; groups up to a maximum of ten
people, since any more and there’s no real intimacy. The educational
background of the participants varies widely but there’s no dumbing
down in the choice of texts – The Mayor of Casterbridge, Uncle Tom’s Cabin,
Rebecca, Great Expectations, Adam Bede, Sherlock Holmes, Jane Eyre, Of Mice
and Men, Kes, even (phew) Robert Pirsig’s The Art of Motorcycle Mainte-
nance among them. In most groups a complete book will be read aloud,
cover to cover, at weekly sessions, which for a group spending an hour a
week on a Dickens novel can mean six months devoted to a single book.
Nobody is pressured to read aloud, but if and when they do the boost to
their confidence can be striking.
The word ‘confidence’ is one that kept coming up when I talked to
group members: ‘Books make you think about big issues, and prepare
you to face them, and that helps your confidence’ was a typical comment.
But for Jane Davis and her fellow project manager Kate McDonnell,
reading groups aren’t just about helping people feel less isolated or
building their self-esteem. Nor are they merely a pretext, in an area of
high unemployment, for giving people the experience of working to-
gether as a unit. More ambitiously, they’re an experiment in healing, or,
to put it less grandiosely, an attempt to see whether reading can alleviate
pain, stress or mental health problems. For Kate, who has suffered from
severe rheumatoid arthritis for 30 years, the answer is clear: ‘Reading
pushes the pain away into a place where it no longer seems important.
No matter how ill you are, there’s a world inside books which you can
enter and explore, and where you focus on something other than your
own problems. You get to talk about things that people usually skate
over, like ageing or death, and that kind of conversation – with everyone
chipping in, so you feel part of something – can be enormously helpful.’
Others say the same: ‘I’ve stopped seeing the doctor since I came here
and cut down on my medication’; ‘Being in a group with other women
who have what I had, breast cancer, didn’t help me, but talking about
books has made a huge difference’; ‘The group mends holes in the net
you would otherwise fall through’.
Medical staff involved in the scheme (doctors, nurses, occupational
therapists, speech therapists) tell stories of the remarkable successes
they’ve seen: the neurological patient who sat in a group saying nothing
for months, then after a reading of a George Herbert poem launched
into a 10-minute monologue at the end of which he announced ‘I feel
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for a poet when they are seriously ill.’ In fact in earlier times, people did,
more or less: ‘Throughout Spain,’ the physician Rodericus a Castro wrote
in 1614, ‘whenever anyone falls seriously ill, it is usual to summon mu-
sicians.’ Still, Tallis is surely right to say that given the choice between
a pain-relieving drug and a terrific poem about bone metastases, few
of us would choose the poem. However, even he concedes that ‘my last
boss before I became a consultant was hugely helped in his last weeks by
reading War and Peace, when he was attached to a diamorphine pump.’
Moreover, Tallis acknowledges that reading might be therapeutic in a
variety of ways, not least in easing depression: ‘the pleasure of escape into
a parallel world; the sense of control one has as a reader; and the ability
to distance one’s self from one’s own circumstances by seeing them from
without, suffered by someone else and gathered up into a nicely worked
out plot – somewhere around here is the notion, also, of the Aristotelian
purgation and Sartre’s idea of “the purifying reflection”.’
Perhaps the most convincing argument for the effectiveness of bib-
liotherapy comes from writers themselves. There’s the case of George
Eliot, for example, who recovered from the grief of losing her husband
George Henry Lewes by reading Dante with a young friend, John Cross,
who subsequently married her. ‘Her sympathetic delight in stimulating
my newly awakened enthusiasm for Dante did something to distract her
mind from sorrowful memories,’ Cross later wrote. ‘The divine poet took
us to a new world. It was a renovation of life.’ John Stuart Mill enjoyed
a similar renovation after the ‘crisis in my mental history’ which he de-
scribes in his Autobiography, a crisis that began in the autumn of 1826
D. H. Lawrence:
“One sheds one’s sicknesses in books.”
when ‘the whole foundation on which my life was constructed fell down
[and] I seemed to have nothing left to live for.’ A sense of ‘dry heavy de-
jection’ persisted through ‘the melancholy winter’. Then one day ‘a small
ray of light broke in upon my gloom. I was reading, accidentally, Mar-
montel’s Mémoires, and came to the passage which relates his father’s
death… A vivid conception of the scene and its feelings came over me,
and I was moved to tears. From this moment my being grew lighter. The
oppression of the thought that all feeling was dead within me was gone.
I was no longer hopeless: I was not a stock or a stone.’
What cured Mill was an account of death; what eased Eliot’s
mourning of her husband was a journey through Dante’s Inferno. If
books are to be therapeutic, it seems, it’s because they take us to dark
places rather than bright ones. As Thomas Hardy recognised, ‘If way to
the better there be it exacts a full look at the worst.’ Hence Jane Davis’s
preference for classic texts which address existential concerns, not
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reading lives
Each of Hardy’s ‘In Tenebris’ poems has an epigraph from the Psalms.
And far from being a simple glorification of God, the Psalms are often
engulfed by despair: ‘my heart is smitten, and withered like grass’;
‘attend unto my cry; for I am brought very low’. Yet reading the Psalms
or Hardy or Gerard Manley Hopkins’s ‘terrible sonnets’ can be cathartic.
By attending to the cry of another, we articulate our own cries, frame
them, contain them, and feel better for it. Hector, in Alan Bennett’s The
History Boys, puts it beautifully when he describes how, in the presence
of great literature, it’s as if a hand has reached out and taken our own. ‘I
wake and feel the fell of dark, not day,’ Hopkins writes, in his anguish:
What hours, O what black hours we have spent
This night! What sights you, heart, saw, ways you went!
And more must in yet longer light’s delay…
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best of them never make it beyond the syllabus, classroom and lecture-
hall, and have no impact on everyday life. Of course, books don’t always
save lives: writing about the Holocaust didn’t prevent Primo Levi from
ultimately committing suicide; and the reading or misreading of The
Satanic Verses led to the deaths of innocent people. But literature’s power
to heal and console outweighs its power to do damage. And it’s the ben-
eficial effects that Jane Davis is putting into practice.
Before I leave, she takes me to meet some of the elderly long-term
patients in the Hoylake Cottage Hospital. A book group meets here
every Thursday, and a hard core of half a dozen eagerly look forward to
it, including Pat, a woman whose voice is so frail that I have to lean in
to catch what’s she’s saying. Many times the nurses have given her no
chance of making the session but, however ill, she always gets there.
‘Why? Because it’s tedious in here, and it’s the one thing in the week
that’s different. You never know how people will respond or what they’ll
like and the ones who come aren’t necessarily those you’d expect. We
always begin with a poem, and lot of memories come up, especially of
the war – both wars – which the men in particular like to talk about.’
No one in the Hoylake Cottage Hospital is going to get better. No
one is not going to die. But poetry gives Pat and the others a language
in which to remember the past, face the future and feel better about
the present. They don’t want false cheer but nor is the knowledge that
everything and everyone must decay oppressive, if a poet puts it well
enough. And sometimes, as George Herbert’s ‘The Flower’ conveys,
hope and happiness can bud in the most unlikely places:
Who would have thought my shrivelled heart
Could have recovered greenness? It was gone
Quite underground; as flowers depart
To see their mother-root, when they have blown,
Where they together
All the hard weather,
Dead to the world, keep house unknown
…
And now in age I bud again,
After so many deaths I live and write;
I once more smell the dew and rain,
And relish versing….
A shorter version of this article was published first in The Guardian (January 5,
2008)
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good Books
reviews
Ryan Cunliffe
Mary Knight
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readers connect
WITH
anne brontë,
the tenant of wildfell hall
Published in 1848, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is the least well-known of
the Brontë novels, but it is a very great account of a woman trapped in a
marriage she would not leave save for her fear of the moral influence of
her drunkard husband on their son. Even within the marriage she feels
like a single parent, while the father spoils their child, even offering him
sips of alcohol. ‘It is hard that my little darling child should love him
more than me.’ Here is an example of her lonely confession to herself in
her diary, the long almost unshaped sentences reflecting her mess:
“I am too grave to minister to his amuse-
ments and enter into his infantile sports as
a nurse or a mother ought to do, and often
his bursts of gleeful merriment trouble and
alarm me; I see in them his father’s spirit
and temperament, and I tremble for the
consequences; and, too often, damp the in-
nocent mirth I ought to share. That father
on the contrary has no weight of sadness
in his mind – is troubled with no fears, no
scruples concerning his son’s future welfare
… therefore, of course, the child dotes upon
his seemingly joyous, amusing, ever in-
dulgent papa, and will at any time gladly
exchange my company for his. This disturbs
me greatly; not so much for the sake of my son’s affection
(though I do prize that highly, and though I feel it is my right,
and know I have done much to earn it), as for that influence
over him which, for his own advantage, I would strive to pur-
chase and retain, and which for very spite his father delights
to rob me of, and, from motives of mere idle egotism, is pleased
to win to himself, making no use of it but to torment me, and
ruin the child.” (Chapter 37)
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readers connect
THE jury
Jo Cannon is a Sheff ield GP and short story writer.
Dear Reader,
I was delighted to read Howard Jacobson’s piece ‘Know Thine Enemy’
[Reader no. 29] – it was like biting into a ripe olive, sharp and tangy, lit-
erally witty and wise. I’m sure Mr Jacobson is right in suggesting that
Professor Dawkins with his myopic view of religion is a sure-fire re-
cruiting agent for the very thing he despises in all we lesser mortals,
our curiosity or faith in what we cannot understand and which cannot
be ‘scientifically proved’. But, I wonder whether Mr Jacobson has ever
considered that the Prof. may well be a ‘closet Christian’, for ‘methinks
he doth protest too much’. On the other hand there is no doubt that
in reducing the odds against God, or ‘higher intelligence’, Dawkins is
banking on banking. There is no surer way of making loads of money
than by denigrating received wisdom or shooting at ‘unholy’ cows.
I read Mr Jacobson in a hospital waiting room and laughed out loud,
making others smile, which can’t be bad. In a context of suspended dis-
belief, Richard Dawkins is entertaining in a perverse way but you get
the feeling he’s not the world’s greatest exponent of laughter, which
surely has its own curious and life-giving place in human evolution!
Kind regards,
Maggie Goren
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Our spy in Ny
how i got good at grief
Enid Stubin
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More to the point, we’d inherited sorrow in the aftermath of The War:
no extant grandparents, and uncles not quite right in the head were
excused by dint of their tenure in Auschwitz. All of her clothing and
personal items had been cleared out, expunged: even the bottom drawer
that had held a crocheted shawl was emptied, the exotic paisley motif
of a challis blouse vanished, no remnants of her much admired taste
available besides the two sets of dishes and a small bust of Lincoln.
One of the only pretty things that remained was a box of get-well cards,
bursting with color and bearing affectionate message and signatures
in Palmer script, the approved method for teaching penmanship in the
New York City public schools. The greeting-card industry must have
been booming in the late 1950s, because the box yielded over a dozen
versions of the botanical trope, ‘Pansies Are for Thoughts’. I remember
the companionable bustle of the shiva – and the gorgeous haze of the
amber cellophane that shrouded the wicker fruit baskets, studded with
the tiny faux-ivory forks that I hoarded with a miser’s obsessiveness.
But then everyone went away, my brothers took to the playground and
beach for the games they thrived on, and it was a lonely and empty flat.
Perhaps weary of my listlessness, my brothers took upon themselves
the task of teaching me how to read: formally setting up a chair in the
middle of the barren room, they put a copy of Tom Sawyer in my hands
and hovered over me until I began to pick out words, phrases, sentenc-
es. Pleased by their success, they escaped outside to their jock realm,
while I waded through their big-boy books: Guadalcanal Diary and God Is
My Co-Pilot, alongside the Little Golden Books that tenderhearted visi-
tors brought: The Golden Goose and an improbably wacky parable of greed
and responsibility called The Baby Bunny – “‘Wonderful, wonderful!’ the
farmer cried. ‘The baby bunny has eaten all the carrots!’”
None of this is unfamiliar territory to The Reader’s readers – a soli-
tary child consoling herself with books. It might do for a frontispiece;
look what it did for Charlotte Brontë. But the comfort of words ‘after so
many deaths,’ in Herbert’s phrase, endures, maybe because it’s all we’ve
got. If there is nothing to say, there is also everything to say – tactless,
unfeeling, sanctimonious, but also precise, luminous, evocative. I came
of age loving those books that told so well of loss: James Agee’s A Death
in the Family was part of the public-school canon, but a novel I adored
for its re-creation of the Depression Lower East Side, Hurray for Me, was
written by an author, S. J. Wilson, of whom I have lost track. My friend
wrote a most extraordinary book, a biography of his novelist father, a
suicide, because he’d grown up, he says, with a book instead of a father.
To reclaim that father by imagining him into a book of his own is an act
of immeasurable grace and generosity, and Shade of the Raintree is a work
of vast, sympathetic imagination.
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as it implies that the mind is larger than itself. Centuries after St Augus-
tine was writing, Wordsworth wrote, again with gratitude, of the strange
places our minds can find themselves:
… I raise
The song of thanks and praise;
But for those obstinate questionings
Of sense and outward things,
Fallings from us, vanishings;
Blank misgivings of a Creature
Moving about in worlds not realised,
High instincts before which our mortal Nature
Did tremble like a guilty Thing surprised.
When the talk finished, bumping back down to the reality of filing
out of the theatre, saying goodbyes with a buzzing brain, I took with
me a valuable feeling of well, surprise, I suppose, at having my daily
mental sphere suddenly widened. To keep my mind buzzing and to
help it recover old lines of enquiry, I went home to the books that had
last surprised me like this. One was the novel Fugitive Pieces by Cana-
dian poet Anne Michaels, and, read most recently, Breath, by Michael
Symmons Roberts. As well as the feeling of ‘moving about in worlds not
realised’ that these books give, they connect that intense inner think-
ing to the outside, physical world. Michael Symmons Roberts’ novel is
full of wonder and gratitude for ‘the gift’ of breath itself, and constantly
evokes the physical manifestations of breathing, the fragile, arboreal
structure of the lung, to make the invisible tangible. In Fugitive Pieces,
the narrator is eventually saved from the ghosts of his past by sheer
physicality, ‘power lines of blood… cables of tendons… forests of bone
in wrists and feet.’ This inward/outward contact happened often in the
Memory talk itself: A.S. Byatt would talk about how it was almost painful
to put a pre-verbal memory from her childhood into words, and Steven
Rose would attempt to explain the scientific side, what might be going
on in her brain. To his credit, he refused to supply a definitive answer,
although he was speaking as an expert in his field, and he would not
allow the talk of synapses and dendrites to eclipse the original feeling.
Walking over the bridge and looking down through the sudden
opening in the city imposed by the thick, black, tar-like river, I think the
books and writers who create these disturbances are so surprising and
valuable because, rather than lifting you up to a cerebral higher level,
their enforced openings into the 9-to-5 jog trot of life in a big city make
you feel more like being returned to earth again.
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believe it:
the winter’s tale in birkenhead
Jane Davis
B irkenhead Park, the first urban park and model for New
York’s Central Park, has recently been restored, thanks
to a Heritage Lottery grant and a great deal of concen-
trated effort from its Friends. For a very long time the
place had seemed dead and done for, but someone must
have believed that the process of urban decay could be arrested and
indeed reversed. Years passed: I looked up and it had newly restored
railings and plantings: it had come back to life. In August this year
The Reader Organisation will lead a group of partners in a community
production of The Winter’s Tale in the outdoor performance space in the
upper park. What larks!
The Winter’s Tale is a story of personal restoration, of serious adult
life going wrong and yet ultimately being (more or less) fixed. ‘More
or less’ because damage is done and things cannot be put back togeth-
er as they were (‘Hermione was not so much wrinkled’, says Leontes,
when his apparently dead wife is restored to him after 16 years). And
the beloved ones, Mamillius and Antigonus, who really do die, cannot be
brought back. Yet the survivors live on, re-learn happiness, and they find
that time does sometimes heal. It seems the ideal play for adult readers
because this basic story is one with which we all have to come to terms.
And where else will we find a play that makes so much of middle-
aged women? Paulina, the play’s centre and engine, represents ordinary
real-life women keeping families together, managing their husbands,
partners, sons, bosses, visiting nursing homes, carrying home the shop-
ping, holding down (probably part-time) jobs. Let them get a little older
and they become the women David Constantine writes movingly about
in his poem ‘Shoes in the Charity Shop’:
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Noblest
Were those worn shoes of women queuing at the bus-stop
…
No feet on earth after theirs would have fitted them.
A little younger and they are Dorothea Brooke, the great ordinary
heroine of Middlemarch, a woman who found no vocation. Let them be
embroiled in a career and they become something else again – Lady
Macbeths of the Civil Service, a little bonkers, a bit too controlling. Or
let them not have a career to use up their energy. OK, these women can
be bossy, and fussy, and that’s why younger writers tend not to love
them (see the young Doris Lessing heap scorn upon them in Martha
Quest, or the Brontës make them merely conventional, or fussy or obedi-
ent). George Eliot and Charles Dickens, the most feelingful of novelists,
know that the growing good of the world depends upon them, and offer
us loving warts-and-all portraits in Aunt Trotwood, Mrs Poyser, Mrs
Bagnett and even daft Mrs Tulliver.
But it is in Shakespeare, perhaps surprisingly, that we find the great-
est middle-aged woman, Paulina. With something of a god-like power,
she is a priestess of life: she creates a future, a family, by believing in it
so powerfully that it comes to be.
The Winter’s Tale is the story of a man who wrecks his own life. As
Leontes’ madness takes hold, it affects not only a man but a king and
the courtiers can’t contest the effects of his madness, however devoted
to his interests they are. They can’t fight it from within the court. In
Shakespeare’s other family-based play, King Lear, honest Kent resists the
madness of the king, by giving up his place and identity to remain at
Lear’s side. But in The Winter’s Tale, the role of loving truth-teller is given
to a woman who more than anything reminds us of a mother-in-law.
Paulina has no courtly or political power, only a sort of domestic or per-
sonal energy that cannot be refuted. Although the characters are royal,
everyday personal relationships are at the play’s heart, and what this
brusque and demanding woman believes is what gives the play its magic.
Her position outside the court’s power structure gives her a freedom not
available, for instance, to Leontes’ very sane advisor, Camillo. There is
no safe option for him: the King ‘in rebellion with himself will have /
All that are his so too.’ But for Paulina, coming from a different angle,
the case is different: the King is a human being and a father, and must
be made to feel like one:
[PAULINA] I dare be sworn
These dangerous unsafe lunes i’ the king,
beshrew them!
He must be told on’t, and he shall: the office
Becomes a woman best; I’ll take’t upon me:
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It is not long before she is plainly telling Leontes that he is mad, a traitor
to himself:
[LEONTES] I’ll ha’ thee burnt.
[PAULINA] I care not:
It is an heretic that makes the fire,
Not she which burns in’t. I’ll not call you tyrant;
But this most cruel usage of your queen,
Not able to produce more accusation
Than your own weak-hinged fancy, something savours
Of tyranny and will ignoble make you,
Yea, scandalous to the world.
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Those two words ‘is dead’ seem the heaviest words of the play, and they
can’t be undone by any sort of magic. It is those words which finally
cause brave, dignified Hermione, on trial for her life, to swoon and fall,
and that is the last time we – and Leontes – see Hermione for 16 years.
What is required to bring her back? In Paulina’s chapel (or gallery),
as in our Birkenhead Park, it is belief in the possibility of restoration:
[PAULINA] It is required
You do awake your faith. Then all stand still;
On: those that think it is unlawful business
I am about, let them depart.
[LEONTES] Proceed:
No foot shall stir.
[PAULINA] Music, awake her; strike!
‘Tis time; descend; be stone no more; approach;
Strike all that look upon with marvel. Come,
I’ll fill your grave up: stir, nay, come away,
Bequeath to death your numbness, for from him
Dear life redeems you. You perceive she stirs:
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Brian Nellist
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Horace even though the details of social life in those letters from Hadri-
an’s Wall may be more historically revealing than The Aeneid.
You are wanting I know to make literature just a part of Cultural
Studies, that academic study of the last twenty years or so, but that
makes all writing a kind of specialism within a branch of Sociology.
Though literature, especially the novel, may be useful to the sociologist,
I’m less sure of the contrary case. In the medieval university theology
was Queen of the Sciences but ‘humane letters’, as they used to be called,
survived as part of the syllabus in the guise of rhetoric. If we are not
careful, sociology can become a more exclusive mistress than ever divin-
ity was in the fourteenth century. I recommend to you a recent book by
Rónán MacDonald, The Death of the Critic. He argues that there has always
been a division between the critic’s desire to describe what is valuable in
a given work and his or her self-consciousness about the basis of those
judgements. Notoriously, the critic is ill tempered not simply about lit-
erature but about other and earlier critics, as Coleridge is about Johnson,
for example. The judgements produced as though they were final and
absolute are based on the beliefs and preferences of distinct historical
cultures. Cultural Studies overcomes that contradiction by assuming that
now we understand cultural relativism we should attend to that and rec-
ognise that value is simply a matter for the individual, from which they
often also need to be rescued. But in that case the writer about ‘culture’
himself becomes the subject for individual taste and few specialists in
the subject attract readers outside the academy. Read the book.
Maybe over-ambitiously, The Reader tries to reconnect readers in
general, members of book groups, of the review pages in the Sunday
papers, those who continue to use our shrinking public libraries or who
do not automatically rush past the doors of Waterstone’s with lowered
heads, those who want to try the originals behind TV and film adap-
tations, to persuade all these people that some writing carries more
weight than others and more importantly, that all good books, when-
ever written, belong to our present. Without any belief in a rigid canon,
a fixed list of ‘great books’, we want to connect good writing today with
good writing in the past. Even critics who thought their primary duty
was to the best that was written never set their preferences in stone. If
Johnson praises Dryden and Pope he also writes about Christopher Pitt
and Gilbert West; if Matthew Arnold is attached to the idea of a great
tradition, he also writes about Joubert and Maurice du Guérin, neither
exactly classics of French literature. When attention spans are short,
we need good literature of all shapes and sizes not simply because it
demonstrates the subtlety and depth of which the language is capable
but because the sustained concentration it demands is necessary to our
mental health. Sudoku squares are simply no substitute.
102
book world
thirty years of
virago modern classics
Donna Coonan
103
Excellent Women
by Barbara Pym
of this much-loved and important part of Virago Press. The authors are
Angela Carter, Zora Neale Hurston, Muriel Spark, Barbara Pym, Eliza-
beth Taylor, Jacqueline Susann, E. M. Delafield and Helene Hanff.
Earlier this year The Times ran an article listing who it considered to
be the fifty greatest post-war British writers. Three of the authors in our
series featured in it: Angela Carter, ‘a literary sorceress to be reckoned
with’; Muriel Spark, ‘mistress of the highest high comedy and a maker
of immaculate prose’; and Barbara Pym, whom Philip Larkin preferred
to Jane Austen. It must have been an oversight that The Times neglected
to mention Elizabeth Taylor, but she is such a firm favourite that there
would have been an uproar if she wasn’t included in our celebrations.
She is a writer of great humanity and humour, but her genius lies in
capturing with both subtlety and absolute precision the feelings that
run below the surface. Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God
is a rich, beautiful and trailblazing book, one of the most important in
the canon of African American literature, and has been an inspiration
to many writers, including Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Maya Angelou
and Zadie Smith. 84 Charing Cross Road is a touching collection of corre-
spondence charting a twenty-year friendship between two bibliophiles
who never meet, while The Diary of a Provincial Lady is a comical, fiction-
al account of the trials and tribulations of a 1930s’ Devon housewife.
Although Valley of the Dolls may not be what traditionalists would call
a classic, it is an era-defining book that hailed a new genre of mass-
market fiction and is still often referred to as the bestselling novel of all
time. Its continued appeal cannot be denied.
This celebratory series features cover artwork by women textile de-
signers. In the past few years, textiles for both interiors and fashion
have taken on a definite retro aesthetic – informed by the past, yet still
very contemporary – and this captures the spirit of our modern classics.
The books and designs aren’t necessarily from corresponding periods,
but each design has been chosen to capture the tone of the book: Luci-
enne Day’s lively, staccato print echoes Muriel Spark’s never predictable,
darkly humorous writing to perfection; Cath Kidston’s floral pattern
suggests the bright domesticity of the Provincial Lady’s drawing-room;
the birds in Marion Dorn’s print evoke carrier pigeons, which seems
fitting for a book about a long-distance friendship through letters.
A claim sometimes made about women’s writing is that it is too
domestic, too housebound, that it concentrates on the emotions, rela-
tionships, the family; that it lacks imagination and scope. On the Virago
Modern Classics list we can counter this charge by citing, for a start,
the pyrotechnic imagination of Angela Carter and the dark, murderous
stories of Daphne du Maurier. But I take the view that a small canvas is
not necessarily an unambitious one. What is seen under the microscope
105
book world
can reveal much about the world in which we live. And what skill it
takes to write observantly, feelingly, with wit and perception, about the
everyday. Nobody could accuse the artist Louise Bourgeois of lacking
imagination, but when I recently visited an exhibition of hers, recur-
ring themes were apparent: motherhood, the home, and the ‘Femme
Maison’ (the French term for ‘housewife’) – sculptures and paintings of
a woman’s body and a house combined. Bourgeois brings these ‘domes-
tic’ images into her art over and over again, yet it is not something she
is criticised for. We are shaped by our experiences and so is our work.
Relationships, families, children, love – these are not marginal; on the
contrary, they are life itself.
This undermining of women’s writing is discussed in the accompa-
nying article written for the TLS by Carmen Callil, the founder of Virago
and creator of the Virago Modern Classics list, back in 1980, but it is
a conversation we are still having today. Thirty years after the Virago
Modern Classics list began, we are still discussing male and female
writing, and not just with regard to classic books. What’s more, the
supporters and detractors do not fall along obvious gender lines. Muriel
Gray, who was one of the judges of the Orange Prize for Fiction last
year, berated the state of contemporary women’s writing as being, for
the most part, lacking in ambition and imagination (though she did say
that this didn’t apply to writers on the Orange longlist):
It’s hard to ignore the sheer volume of thinly disguised au-
tobiographical writing from women on small-scale domestic
themes such as motherhood, boyfriend troubles and tiny
family dramas. These writers appear to have forgotten the
fundamental imperative of fiction writing. It’s called making
stuff up.1
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book world
were once fresh and exciting and were integral to establishing the list’s
identity, but we have to move with the times, and so the decision was
taken to create a distinctive look to complement each individual au-
thor’s style rather than following a generic design. The great majority
of the list is from the twentieth century, so these books are accessible,
enjoyable and relevant to readers today, not dreary, earnest old tomes
– they are modern classics after all, and need to look vibrant. In addition
to producing striking covers, we also commission popular contempo-
rary authors to write introductions to books they want to champion. A
reader might not have heard of Elizabeth Taylor or Barbara Pym but if
Sarah Waters or Alexander McCall Smith has written the introduction
it gives a personal recommendation.
The reason the Virago Modern Classics exist is to bring back into
print wonderful books that have been neglected or overlooked but will
be enjoyable to readers today. As well as revitalising our own titles
by reissuing them, and keeping many books available in our print on
demand scheme, we are continually looking for titles to resurrect. This
year we’ve published one of the great autobiographies of the twenti-
eth century, Janet Frame’s An Angel at My Table, and, for the first time
in many years, Hungry Hill by Daphne du Maurier is in print, which
means we have every one of her novels on the list. Next year there will
be more books by Barbara Pym and Muriel Spark. We will also be pub-
lishing Nightingale Wood by Stella Gibbons, a wonderfully satirical 1930s’
Cinderella story that has been unavailable for decades, and The Group by
Mary McCarthy, a book that in its frank depiction of female friendship,
sex and women’s lives can be seen as the precursor to The Women’s Room
and even Sex and the City. So we continue to build on the sterling work
that started thirty years ago – the Virago Modern Classics list is very
much alive, growing, and going from strength to strength.
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Brian Nellist
108
your recommendations
109
reviews
Brian Nellist
110
reviews
As, again, with Jonson such poetry involves not a random and open
verse form but the engagement of a meticulous mode of articulation
with the contingency of life. The diction is alert with metaphor but
also casually colloquial and reader-friendly, and always ring-fenced by
the regularities of metre and rhyme. He wonders in ‘My Pen has Ink
Enough’ why he writes:
This longing to make wicks of words, light lamps
However frail and dim. And hell, why not?
I’ve had six children yet more casually got.
The tone of rueful exasperation is typical; how strange the really serious
things in life, those children, might happen lightly, while he was intent
on making love, whereas the other business, his work, writing poems,
serious yes but not a life-or-death matter, takes all his attention. And
with dubious results; not the certainty of flicking a switch but the old
fiddle of wicks and lamps to spread maybe a little light in someone’s
mind, ‘frail and dim though it be’. The nature of the light depends on
the emphatic monosyllables, the throwaway expletive, the regularity
of the metre (pointed by rhythmic syncopation) and the appropriately
thumping final rhyme. The exactness of the form makes possible what
one can only call, using the old term, wit.
The modesty of the claim he makes is also typical of Scannell, though
the ambition is high. In the introduction to the Collected Poems he quotes
Dr Johnson’s demand for literature that it ‘enables [us] the better to
enjoy life or the better to endure it’. If he also often writes about the
process of writing that is not because he thinks words can only ever
refer to other words in our tricksy modernist way, but partly because it
is his occupation and work matters, and because, mysteriously, of what
he calls in Last Post, ‘The Need’, ‘to make a shape of words, / a singing
picture or a prayer’. Though in old age most other desires have been as
he says ‘pilfered’, this one remains:
So once again I seek a theme
to flesh the spectral shape which might
flower and sing but what I hear
is ‘Try to get the words down right.’
For a writer so often punning, that is also of course ‘downright’.
The obituary I read identified what it called ‘a persistent melancholy’
in his earlier work but the term seems to me too passive and plangent
to do him justice. He writes in a late poem, ‘Second Sight’ (1992) as a
man who needs to wear glasses, ‘Poor eyesight has its compensations’.
He momentarily removes his spectacles while walking the whippet in
the park and enters a magic realm:
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112
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how like his appearance is to the man who made his youth a hell and
betrayed his marriage by his drunken whoring. Yet the face he sees is
a weakened version of the other one and for once he is glad that it has
allowed him to escape at least that remembered sadism. For all that, he
exists because of that parent, ‘And though I cannot love him, feel a sort
/ Of salty tenderness’:
This morning as I shave, I find I can
Forgive the blows, the meanness and the lust,
The ricochetting arsenal of a man
Who groaned groin-deep in hope’s ironic dust;
But these eyes in the glass regard the living
Features with distaste, quite unforgiving.
His poems usually end, as here, strongly. This final stanza may start with
momentary forgiveness but ends with eyes staring back ‘quite unforgiv-
ing’. They are both his own eyes true to their remembered dislike but
of course also the father’s eyes finding even in the son’s generosity a
weakness. But it is also the father looking at himself and identifying a
self-loathing which may explain if it does not excuse. Being a poet the
son can find the language for ‘hope’s ironic dust’ where, without it, the
father’s emotions imploded. Read a lot of Scannell and you recognise how
poem connects with poem so that instead of apparent miscellany you
become conscious of myriad connections; the father is in miniature that
army and its victims the poet so often recalls, hence the metaphor of the
arsenal.
Publishing poems for nearly sixty years (his first collection appeared
in 1948) inevitably one of his persistent subjects is ageing, as also the
full stop towards which the ‘Long Sentence’ (as he calls it in a poem of
1965) inevitably travels. But there is none of Larkin’s horror which is
replaced usually by a healthy humour as in ‘Spot Check at Fifty’:
Fifty scored and still I’m in.
I raise my cap to dumb applause,
But as I wave I see, appalled,
The new fast bowler’s wicked grin.
But it’s in this new final volume (Last Post) that he writes of old age, an
octogenarian, with an honesty only the aged have a right to, rejecting
the lenitive idioms to which his condition is subjected:
Whatever others say, I’ll never
play those euphemistic games;
I’d sooner use the simple names
and have it all quite plainly said:
I am old. I’ll soon be dead.
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This collection is moving because all the old concerns are there but
now as valedictions and distant memories of war, of love most of all,
often plenary richness of the objects we take for granted, a bowl of fruit
and a wooden chair in ‘Still Life’, with its endlessly punning title, offer-
ing ‘an unimperilled quietude’ or, another pun, ‘Missing Things’ because
it is he who will be missing and the objects he loved that will survive.
Slowly the poem relinquishes the fiction that they will miss him:
and I, of course, will neither know nor care
since, like the stone of which the house is made,
I’ll feel no more than it does light and air.
‘Well, of course’ you might say, but it is being made to recognise within
the discipline of rhyme and metre the apparently obvious, so that we
really see, as for the first time, what insentience means that makes
Scannell an honourable successor to the Thomas Hardy line of descent.
But there is also in these late poems a non-Hardyan calm, that de-
tachment that old age can yield, and pleasure in even something so
ordinary as fine weather:
The shimmering remnants of a summer’s day;
a drowsy sun still holds the dark at bay,
while out of sight, a blackbird serenades
his nested mate before the daylight fades.
As I do now, he might say, in what is really a reply to Hardy’s ‘Darkling
Thrush’. Different season, different singer, but as the bells ring they
bring to his mind a word he cannot at once locate:
The word now brings him comfort, soft yet strong;
enough to say it quietly, – ‘Evensong.’
The earlier poet’s bird had also sung that service but it brought no con-
solation, though behind the poem also lie the only magical lines written
by the late medieval poet, Stephen Hawes:
For though the day be never so long,
At last, the bells ringeth to evensong.
Patience and acceptance of a momentary calm is maybe the last thing
the very old can offer us.
This volume completes a life in poetry with honour, continued
insight and unclouded clarity of vision. Whenever you are looking for a
poem on a specific subject or object, an occasion, that is, look at Vernon
Scannell’s poetry. You will be almost certain to find what you are looking
for.
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your recommendations
Marion Leibl
115
your recommendations
and a bit of her own cunning, Frances gets her money and her own
back after being tricked by her friend Thelma. (I won’t tell you how, go
to the library and find the book!) But it is a lesson in friendship, not
in cunning, when Thelma says ‘from now on I will have to be careful
when I play with you’ and Frances suggests that ‘being careful is not as
much fun as being friends’. The book ends with genuine reconciliation
between the two.
I sometimes puzzle over what it means to be grown-up, because
some things seem to me to grow in size and years, but not necessarily
in quality. The ability to assert one’s own place in life while at the same
time being generous in the face of others’ failings and remaining friends
is one of these things that don’t ever seem to become really easy. Maybe
it’s this that made me grateful for unexpectedly spending a bit of time
with such a kind little book, but even without its gentle guidance on
friendship, anything that facilitates my time travel so easily must be
special, as far as I’m concerned.
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reviews
being moved
Oliver Sacks, Musicophilia
Picador, 2007
ISBN 978-0330418379
Sarah Coley
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It is as if, all unguarded, the invisible emotion of love itself were the
perceiving, cognitive sense. The man knows that this is his wife because
he loves her. Sacks speculates that the memory is planted in Wear-
ing’s limbic system, where (as he explains) emotional memories from
infancy are stored that we cannot remember but which ‘may determine
one’s behaviour for a lifetime’. Love as knowing – it is dazzling to find
it here.
As with Deborah, Wearing remembers music only in the presence
of music, though the memory is different in its type. Sacks calls it a
procedural memory. Asked to play one of Bach’s Forty-Eight Preludes and
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Fugues he declares (wrongly) that he has never played them before, and
he then plays Prelude 9: ‘His playing is infused with intelligence and
feeling, with a sensitive attunement to the composer’s style and mind’.
With his hands on the keyboard, playing, he knows the piece. He has
other ‘skills’ from ‘procedural memory’ that he can call upon in his daily
life; he can for example shave and calculate and find his way about,
though he could not give directions round the house where he lives. It
troubles Sacks that Wearing’s music could be automatic in just this way
– an ordinary task like shaving:
Clive’s performance self seems to those who know him, just
as vivid and complete as it was before his illness. This mode of
being, this self, is seemingly untouched by his amnesia, even
though his autobiographical self, the self that depends on ex-
plicit, episodic memories, is virtually lost.
There may be automatic skill in the performance but ‘to those who
know him’ there is also Clive Wearing, regathered and given shape by
the music. Is the way that music is stored in some way related to the
way that self is stored, linking backwards, yearning forwards? Sacks
comments: ‘Remembering music is not, in the usual sense, remember-
ing at all. Remembering music, listening to it, is entirely in the present’
– a blessing for a man who only has a present tense. It makes a possi-
ble relationship, stretching the seconds, but crucially for the observer
the fact that the man can be moved for those seconds makes him also
moving: ‘Once one has seen such responses, one knows that there is
still a self to be called upon’. When Clive is found by the Bach piece, or
when dementia patients are engaged by music, they may not be able to
hold onto the moment – but there they are ‘vivid and complete’ for that
moment. They take the music’s time.
In the New Scientist article Sacks talks of the need to approach case
histories both from the perspective of ‘analytic, reductive science’ and
‘from that of a “romantic” narrative and an almost novelistic science’.
Bucking conventional expectations, he uses imagination because he is
a scientist, in order accurately to describe the patient’s reality. This is
Sacks the great novelist of real life.
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The Reader Crossword
Cassandra No.22
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
9 10
11
12
13 14 15
16
17 18
19
20 21
22
23 24
25 26
ACROSS DOWN
*1 and 26 across. Struggling around hill, pink 2. This contemptible person is responsible
pair come across our poet (6, 6) for Greek hero’s fatal weakness (4)
5. We hear municipal vision for this US city 3. Swarming bees lack a rental agreement
layout (8) (9)
9. Nothing to do with being independent 4. In this spot one will discover fish (6)
(8) *5. Certainly not Ophelia’s experience (3, 4,
10. Melodious sound of boring group (6) 8)
11. Clerics chase letters from church leaders *6. See 8 down
(12) *7. Utilizing the sun’s energy in so large an
13. She features in a Lancastrian narrow boat area (5)
and the Staffordshire potteries (4) *8 and 6 down. Pentecostal unions? (3, 7, 8)
14. Wisdom of epic town? (8) 12. Travelling quite nude I transmit a sense of
17. Dollars man reports as costing nothing (8) uneasiness (10)
18. Inhabitant of icy region is first in not un- 15. Leading role for minor celestial body?
derestimating kinetics (4) (5,4)
20. Accompanied by five hundred, wild *16. Actor-manager’s arboreal family (3,5)
Theban beast vanquishes all opposition (5, 19. Can be a form of knowledge or material
3, 4) (6)
*23. In Dolgellau bad elocution can lead to a *21. According to Grahame one of these am-
form of poetry (6) phibians was a menace on the road (5)
24. Blind inhabitant of merchant’s city (8) 22. Almost a sense of enchantment invoked
25. Perhaps useless democrat is underem- by these wise men (4)
ployed (4,4)
*26. See 1 across
120
Buck’s quiz
1. ‘Have you news of my boy Jack?’ Which poet asks this question?
2. What is the name of the former hairdresser whom Guy Crouchback
meets on the Scottish Island of Mugg?
3. Which book is set on the island of Anopopei during the assault on the
Philippines during WWII?
4. Stephen Spielberg produced a TV mini series about WWII called Band
of Brothers. Where does the title come from?
5. Which novel tells of Robert Jordan’s mission to blow up a bridge
during the Spanish Civil War?
6. Which books feature Billy Prior and his experiences in the trenches?
7. Who wrote, ‘Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose, / But young men
think it is, and we were young’?
8. Who turns up nude on the parade ground to receive a medal in
WWII?
9. Which battle was fought because a snake bit a soldier on the foot and
he drew his sword?
10. In which novel is the world divided into the pacifists (the Eloi) and
those who wish to make war (the Morlocks)?
11. Who is ‘the certified idiot’ conscripted to serve in the armies of
Austria–Hungary in WWI?
12. In which 1949 novel does Stella Rodney have a passionate wartime
affair with a man from the War Office who later turns out to be a spy?
13. Which novelist, mostly known for his spy stories, wrote a novel
closely documenting an RAF bombing raid on Germany?
14. ‘I am the enemy you killed, my friend’. Where does this confronta-
tion take place?
15. ‘And we are here as on a darkling plain/ Swept with confused alarms
of struggle and flight,/ Where ignorant armies clash by night.’ Where is
‘here’?
121
the back end
PrizeS!
The sender of the first completed
puzzle will receive our selection of
World’s Classics paperbacks, while the
first correct entry to Buck’s Quiz bags
a copy of the Concise Oxford English
Dictionary. Congratulations to Angus
Pickles of Liverpool (crossword) and
to Pam Nixon of Oxford (quiz).
answers
Cassandra Crossword no. 21
Across
9. Ostrogoth 10. Black 11. Skylark 12. Vedanta 13. Leech 14. Closest to
16. A proper marriage 19. The golden 21. Quest 22. Lessing 23. Niobium
24. Doris 25. Ostracise
Down
1. Consultant 2. Stay near 3. Potash 4. Book 5. Chevrotain 6. A bad year 7.
Magnet 8. Skua 14. Ceredigion 15. One’s temper 17. Phoniest 18. Aperitif
20. Ensure 21. Quotas 22. Lady 23. Note
122
contributors 30
Melvyn Bragg is a writer and broadcaster. His most recent books are Twelve
Books That Changed the World (Sceptre 2007) and a new novel Remember Me
(Sceptre 2008).
Donna Coonan is the commissioning editor of Virago Modern Classics, a
rich and diverse list with a pioneering history. Iconic authors include Daphne
du Maurier, Angela Carter, Edith Wharton, Willa Cather and Muriel Spark.
Ryan Cunliffe is from Hemel Hempstead, dreams of becoming the next
Randall Jarrell and is travelling to the Matterhorn to become a sherpa.
Josie Dixon works as a consultant in the publishing industry, and gives
lectures and workshops on publishing research for around 30 universities
internationally. Formerly Academic Publishing Director at Palgrave Macmil-
lan (after many years at CUP), she studied English at Oxford.
Tessa Hadley is the author of two highly praised novels, Accidents in the Home
and Everything Will Be All Right. She lives in Cardiff and teaches English and
Creative Writing at Bath Spa University. Her stories appear regularly in the
New Yorker, Granta and other magazines.
Lynne Hatwell, writer of the highly successful blog dovegreyreader and a
Devon-based community nurse for thirty years, is busy discovering the clas-
sics anew and now can’t read them fast enough.
Phill Jupitus is a writer, broadcaster and performer from Essex who likes the
poetry of Ian Dury, baseball, 1960s’ Jamaican ska and fish finger sandwiches.
Marion Leibl grew up in Munich and now lives in Liverpool. She works at
the University of Liverpool and divides her remaining time between training
as a psychotherapist and producing visual art.
John Lynch translated a Danish novel in 1969 but subsequently had little
time for such work while working as a language teacher and college librar-
ian. Now retired he is seeking publishers for three translated books, one
German, two Danish.
Billy Marshall Stoneking: I have been led into, and transformed by count-
less unexpected and miraculous adventures simply by seeking the answer to
the question, ‘where’s the drama?’, and then finding it.
Ian McMillan was born in 1956 and has been a freelance writer/performer/
broadcaster since 1981. He’s currently presenting The Verb on Radio 3 every
Friday night.
Morgan Meis has a PhD in Philosophy and writes a weekly column for The
Smart Set. He is an editor at 3Quarksdaily.com and is a founding member of
Flux Factory, an arts collective in NYC.
Drummond Moir is from Edinburgh and now works at a non-fiction pub-
lisher in London. His favourite writers are Jonathan Safran Foer and Gerard
Manley Hopkins.
Blake Morrison is a novelist and journalist and probably best known for
his two memoirs, And When Did You Last See Your Father? and Things My Mother
Never Told Me. His new novel is South of the River (Vintage 2008).
Les Murray has won many literary awards, including the Grace Leven Prize
(1980 and 1990), the Petrarch Prize (1995), and the prestigious T. S. Eliot
Award (1996). In 1999 he was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry
on the recommendation of Ted Hughes.
Adam Phillips is a psychoanalyst and author of eleven previous books, in-
cluding Side Effects and Houdini’s Box. He writes regularly for The New York
123
contributors
Times, the London Review of Books, and The Observer, and is General Editor of
The Penguin Freud Reader.
Philip Pullman was educated in England, Zimbabwe, Australia and Wales
before becoming a teacher. He has published over twenty books and is best
known for his award-winning trilogy His Dark Materials.
Stephen Sandy’s books of poetry include The Thread, New and Selected Poems
(1998), Black Box (1999), Surface Impressions: A Poem in Eight Parts (2002),
Weathers Permitting (2005). He lives in Vermont.
Myra Schneider’s most recent poetry collection is Multiplying the Moon (Enit-
harmon 2004). Circling the Core is due this autumn. She has written and
co-written books about writing and children’s fiction. She is a tutor for The
Poetry School in London.
Matt Simpson lives in Liverpool and has published six books of poetry,
three with Bloodaxe, two with LUP and In Deep (Shoestring Press 2006). A
collection for children What the Wind Said is imminent. He reviews for Stride
and Orbis.
Tom Sperlinger is Director of Lifelong Learning in the English Department
at Bristol University.
Enid Stubin is Assistant Professor of English at Kingsborough Community
College of the City University of New York and Adjunct Professor of Human-
ities at NY University’s School of Continuing and Professional Studies.
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124
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the inoculation
Frank Wedekind
Translated by John Lynch
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clothes. Right on the top lay a fine cambric lace-chemise with her name
embroidered in red together with two long, black silk, openwork stock-
ings with golden clocking. As there was no other visible sign of a female
presence his eyes fixed lecherously on to these items of wardrobe.
The moment was crucial. One more second and he would surely
remember having seen these garments somewhere before in this life.
At any price I had to divert his attention from this fateful spectacle
and ensure that it no longer slipped away from me. That was only to
be achieved, however, through something unprecedented. This thought
flashed like lightning through my mind; it led me to commit a brutish
act of such enormity that even today, after twenty years, I have not yet
forgiven myself, despite the fact that it saved the situation then.
‘I am not on my own,’ I said. ‘But if you had any inkling of how gor-
geous this creature is, you would envy me.’ Whilst saying this, at the
risk of smothering her, I frantically pressed the arm which had drawn
the cover over her head, against the spot where I supposed her mouth
to be, so as to prevent any sign of life from her side.
His gaze lustfully slid up and down the curving form revealed by
the blanket.
And now comes that outrageous, that unprecedented act. I took
hold of the coverlet at the bottom end and lifted it up to her neck, so
that only her head was still concealed. – ‘Have you ever seen anything
so fantastic in your life?’ I asked him.
His eyes opened wide, but he grew visibly embarassed.
‘Yes, yes – you can say that – you have good taste – well, I – I’ll be off
now – please excuse me – for – having disturbed you.’ – At that he re-
treated to the door, and slowly and deliberately I allowed the veil to fall
back again. Then I quickly sprang to my feet and placed myself near to
the door in such a way that he could not possibly see the stockings lying
on the armchair any longer.
His hand was already on the door latch as I said, ‘Anyway I’ll come
to Ebenhausen with the noon train. Perhaps you’ll wait for me there in
the Gasthof zur Post. Then we can ride to Ammerland together. That’ll
be a splendid outing. Thank you very much indeed for asking me.’
After making a few more friendly, jocular remarks he left the room.
I stood rooted to the spot until I heard his footsteps dying away in the
entrance.
I won’t trouble to describe the dreadful state of rage and despera-
tion which the unfortunate woman felt after this scene. She seemed to
have gone to pieces and furnished me with such proofs of hatred and
contempt as I had never in my life experienced. Hurriedly donning her
clothes, she threatened to spit in my face. Naturally I made no attempt
to defend myself.
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