NEW WRITING / BOOK TALK / NEWS AND REVIEWS

THE READER

No. 31 SUMMER 2008

Published by The University of Liverpool School of English.

Supported by:

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EDITOR    Philip Davis

DEPUTY EDITOR    Sarah Coley

CO-EDITORS    Angela Macmillan
   Brian Nellist
   Christopher Routledge
   John Scrivener
   Jen Tomkins

NEW YORK EDITOR    Enid Stubin

CONTRIBUTING EDITOR    Les Murray

ADDRESS    The Reader

   19 Abercromby Square
   Liverpool L69 7ZG

EMAIL    readers@liverpool.ac.uk
WEBSITE    www.thereader.co.uk

SUBSCRIPTIONS    See p. 3
DISTRIBUTION    See p. 127

ISBN 978-0-9558733-0-0

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

Jane Davis,
Director, The Reader Organisation

A Reading Revolution!

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

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

We used this quotation in 1997 in the very f irst issue of The Reader.

We believe literature is for life, not just for courses.

That’s why we’re working in day centres, old people’s homes, community groups,
hospitals, drug rehabs, refugee centres, public libraries, schools and children’s
homes and many other places to bring the pleasure and value of reading to as
many people as possible.

We f ind it easy to imagine a near future where literature graduates leave univer-
sity to work in banks, hospitals, retail, management and Human Resources. Their
job? To bring books to life, opening and sharing the centuries of vital information
contained within them, making sure this amazingly rich content is available to
everyone.

   ‘It moves you. I mean it hits you inside where it meets you and means
   something.’
Dementia sufferer reading poetry.

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

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

 THE READER

CONTENTS

EDITORIAL ESSAYS
7 Philip Davis ‘The Reader Says…’ 15 Howard Jacobson
9 Editor’s Picks It’s the Thought that Counts
111 Raymond Tallis
POETRY Reader I Shagged Him
26 Face to Face
28 Les Murray’s Ten Favourite INTERVIEW
Australian Poets, Part II 33 Janet Suzman
42 John Welch Sending Robes to Oxfam
63 Anna Woodford
72 Andrew McNeillie READING LIVES
77 Michael O’Neill 9 Ian McMillan
Letters to a Younger Self
THE POET ON HIS WORK 13 Andrew McMillan
43 Jeffrey Wainwright Please Do Disturb
65 Andrew McNeillie
fICTION Once
47 Frank Cottrell Boyce 73 Katie Peters
Accelerate Reading in Reality
119 The Reader Serial:
Mary Weston BOOK WORLD
The Junction 95 Kirsty McHugh
Freedom to Blog
102 Maureen Watry
Poets in the Library

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 THE READER

YOUR REGULARS REVIEWS: NEW BOOKS

84 Enid Stubin 82 Good Books: short reviews
Our Spy in NY Angela Macmillan on Richard Yates,
87 The London Eye Eleven Kinds of Loneliness
Page to Screen Jane Davis on Mark Doty,
89 Jane Davis Dog Years
The Winter’s Tale 104 Fran Brearton
in Birkenhead On John Redmond, MUDe
93 Brian Nellist 106 Sarah Coley on Raymond Tallis,
Ask the Reader The Kingdom of Inf inite Space

YOUR RECOMMENDATIONS THE BACK END

58 Francis Boyce 108 Prize Crossword
Seafarers and Storytelling By Cassandra
80 Readers Connect 109 Buck’s Quiz
Rudyard Kipling, Kim 110 Quiz and Puzzle Answers
83 Letters page 126 Contributors
100 Brian Nellist The Old Poem
Thomas Randolph,
‘Upon his Picture’
128 Angela Macmillan
Calling all Book Groups

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 editorial

‘The Reader says…’

Philip Davis

Y ou know the old joke about the unlucky man who was
left the contents of his aunt’s attic. Amongst all the
clutter he found an old violin and an old portrait in oils,
and sent them for valuation. Back came the amazing
news, the change in the whole of this man’s fortune:
one was a Rembrandt, the other was a Stradivarius.
But this is where there is a key word to the story. The word is ‘Un-
fortunately’.
Unfortunately, the violin was by Rembrandt and the portrait by
Stradivarius.
Some people are unlucky. The novelist I have spent the last few
years trying to promote is Bernard Malamud, born 1914, died 1986. In
July 2005 I was sitting in the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas,
reading my way through the Malamud archive there and came on this
in a notebook entry for 21 October 1976: ‘Bellow gets Nobel Prize. I win
$24.25 in poker.’ This was the little, often unfashionable nearly-man,
the one who always felt he came second, who whilst shaving would
mutter unconvincingly to himself in the mirror, ‘Someday I’m going to
win.’ He had known no real success until he published his first novel at
the age of 38.
Nowadays there is a big revival of interest in another American
novelist, Richard Yates (1926-92). Revolutionary Road is a novel worth
reading but honestly, compared to Malamud, Yates can’t write and he
hasn’t heart. Yet he has long been an unknown and he can be marketed
today as an astonishing re-discovery. This week, in contrast, I was vexed
and disheartened to learn from a leading British publisher that after
careful consideration he wasn’t going to reprint the works of Malamud
that his firm had had in print ten years ago. Why? Because Malamud

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 editorial

wasn’t an unknown like Yates and isn’t a well-known like Bellow.

Question: What would Malamud have found in an attic?
Answer; Two stools, for the use of, to fall between. A publisher’s
old back-catalogue. And the winning lottery ticket he could no longer
claim.
It makes it worse that Malamud spent his life largely writing about
the little unattractive people, using the novel to right the dismissive-
ly wrong perceptions. So in The Assistant, ex-thief Frank Alpine can’t
convince the woman he loves but has hurt that he has changed. It’s
understandable, of course: ‘How could she know what was going on in
him? If she ever looked at him again she would see the same guy on the
outside. He could see out but nobody could see in.’
I wrote a biography of Malamud to try to put these things right and
spread his word. And recently it was even shortlisted for a (minor) lit-
erary prize. Unfortunately, as we say, it was runner-up. I think I know
what Malamud would have said.
But I would speak from the curled and not the drooping lip. The
conventional world is not real, though it is strong. When nobody can
see in, Literature exists for the alternative world, inside, the invisible
church of the really real, though still surrounded by the world without.
And this re-writing of the world’s dim text can go on all the time.
For example. A month or so ago I attended degree day at my university
when hundreds of students graduate. I have been going to these cere-
monies, largely out of duty, for years. But every time something in them
moves me. And it is to do with that momentarily realised gap between
the formality of the ceremony and the informal stories behind it. Most of
the students I don’t know, as they go past with their apparently regula-
tion 2.1 honours degrees. But then there are a few I do know, really quite
well. This one lost her father last year. That one was brought up in a chil-
dren’s home but has got to this. He nearly left in his first year. She wrote a
great little piece on George Eliot that some other member of staff marked
down. These, at this moment of silent culmination, are their inner stories
so far, though as they walk across the stage, they themselves may not be
as aware of them as I am, their onlooker. And of course each one of them
has that inner story, though I only know a little of a few. But when you
make these correctives in a sudden flash of relative time, when you ‘see
in’ a little more than usual, that is literature, what literature is for, even if
you never write it down; it is what Wordsworth meant by the possibility
of being ‘a silent poet’ – or a silent novelist. The Reader says: Literature is
something you do, and not just read, even if you are not a writer.
In the mental attic, Rembrandt paints the portrait, Stradivarius makes
the violin, Malamud lives for ever writing, and the young student is ac-
claimed with roars and music.

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 reading lives

letters to a younger self

Ian McMillan

I ’ve got to admit that, unlike the Younger Reader these letters are
addressed to, I sometimes get fed up with books. The younger self
thought that books were just the best thing ever; they could fit
in your pocket and you could get them out on the bus and (let’s
face it) pose with ‘em. Nothing better, as a seventeen-year-old in
an ex-army greatcoat, than trundling along on the 14 bus to Doncaster
with a copy of On the Road in your pocket that you could, with a flick of
the wrist, transfer from pocket to hand as though the appearance of the
book in the hand was a magical thing, as indeed it was.
Reading on the bus always made me feel sick, of course, so all I
really did was fish the book out of the pocket, glance at it, make sure
that some people saw me reading it, and then put it back. Fish/glance/
impress/return: the book as artefact, the book as cultural crutch for a
young lad who wasn’t really sure who he was. As a 52-year old, though,
I sometimes have days when I doubt the book; I doubt the book as
aforementioned cultural artefact, I doubt the book’s power to make the
journey easier, and I doubt the book’s ability to make any difference at
all.
Maybe the reason for this is that I worked for many years in com-
munity arts with people on what those in the centre call The Edge and
in what those on The Edge call The Real World. A lot of the time they

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 reading lives

couldn’t read and write and the book was just something to prop a door
open with. Part of me wanted (and still wants) to get them to read and
write, but part of me thought (and still, sometimes, thinks) that talking
and singing and dancing and arguing and telling tales is enough. Every
now and then I feel that somehow the deeper oral and movement skills
are more profound and that maybe the book is only something to parade
on a bus journey. Fish/glance/impress/return.
The trouble is, being the kind of chap I am, I turn to books to help
with my ‘are books really useful’ conundrum, and I’ve recently been
reading and rereading three that seem to be able to point, if not out of
the jungle, then at least towards where the clearings are.
The first of the trio is the magnificent In Comes I: Performance, Memory
and Landscape by Mike Pearson, a theatre-maker and lecturer at the
University of Wales. The book, published by the University of Exeter
press in their Performance Studies series, is hard to describe and is at
times dauntingly academic, using words like Chorography (not chore-
ography as I first read) and phrases like Thick Description, which Mike
elucidates as ‘the detailed and contextual description of cultural phe-
nomena, in order to discern the complexities behind the action, the
codes at work, the possible structures of meaning.’ This complex lan-
guage is worth persisting with, though, because the central premise of
the book is an exhilarating one: the recreating of a memory or series of
memories through an act of performance. In the book Pearson describes
his recreation of his childhood in some of the lost and forgotten settle-
ments of the Scunthorpe hinterland through a one-man show that took
him (and other members of his family and friends and general audi-
ence members) on a walk to the chip shop he frequented as a child in
the village of Hibaldstow, the school he went to, the graveyard in which
his relatives are buried. The book emphasised the importance of story,
of memory, of place (as I’ve said before in these columns, I still live in
the place I was born) and seemed to place the spoken word above the
written word. Mind you, I read it in a book.
This took me back to a couple of books I read a few years ago, but
which I’ve never really got to the bottom of, and which I often return
to when I’m asking myself questions about the written word. The first
is The Singing Neanderthals by Stephen Mithen, published by Weidenfield
and Nicholson, and the second is Juniper Fuse by Clayton Eshelman,
published by Wesleyan University Press. The subtitles of each book, as
ever, tell you a lot about what they’re about and where their thinking
comes from. The Singing Neanderthals is ‘The Origins of Music, Language,
Mind and Body’, and Juniper Fuse is ‘Upper Paleolithic Imagination and
the Construction of the Underworld’. There’s nothing like an all-envel-
oping subtitle, I reckon, to make you want to wave the book around

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 reading lives

on the bus! I remember ordering Juniper Fuse from a now defunct in-
dependent bookshop in Barnsley; it took weeks to come and when it
arrived the bloke who ran the shop rang me up and said ‘Your light
holiday reading has arrived!’ and whenever I went in the shop after
that he would say ‘How’s the airport book coming along ?’ Well, I have
taken both these books on holiday before, and I can say they certainly
illuminate the walks on the beach and the long afternoons in country
pubs. The Singing Neanderthals posits the theory that, as ancient people,
we sang before we could talk. We sang to remind ourselves where we
were going, who we are, how we were feeling, and to bond ourselves to-
gether as a group. Excitingly, Mithen says that it is impossible to study
music without studying language, and vice versa; Clayton Eshelman,
himself a marvellous poet, writes in a mixture of verse and prose in
Juniper Fuse about the Ice Age cave art of Southern France and how it
exemplifies and symbolises the human race’s need and desire to create.
Both books talk about a world before and beyond books, and although
they’re a bit too big and hardbacked for the fish/glance/impress/return
dance, they’re in that category.
Of course, the conclusion, luckily for The Reader, is that books are
indispensible, because they can remind us of a world in which books
might not have been indispensible. Maybe, as a cultural artefact, they
aren’t too bad at all!

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 reading lives

please do disturb

Andrew McMillan

I learned pretty early-on at university that you need a ‘thing’, a hook,

a personality trait that people can identify you by. Some bloke in
my flat was a bit lost on the first night, so he downed a bottle of
Jack Daniels at a kitchen party. That was that, from then on he
was J.D. – he’d made it on the University social scene. I decided
on Postmodern-Bohemian-Intellectual for myself. I added ‘postmodern’
because it helped me to justify a love of designer clothing whilst adher-
ing to most of the bohemian political manifesto. The ‘intellectual’ part
of my personality brief I decided to tackle with books. I’d have a book
for every occasion or location. So, earlier, as I wandered around my flat
with a hangover the size and shape of a small Pacific island, I gathered
together my current reading.
Inside the bag I take on the train, a battered old school satchel to
give off that postmodern-bohemian-intellectual vibe, I have Selima
Hill’s latest collection, The Hat; one of the many books I’ve managed
to ransack from my dad’s collection. Selima Hill would be my desert-
island read. If everyone wrote images like hers television would become
obsolete. As my train staggers out of Chorley, I lose myself in lines like:
What she really wants is a desert
where wild horses break the speed of sound
and where a man is hurrying towards her
who only ever wants to play the piano
When the woman with the trolley comes around I tell her that ‘Women
are like gardens where gold snails / Are walking back and forth in the rain’.
However, this seems a little too post-modernly bohemian for just outside
of Salford, so I settle for a cup of tea and swim back into Hill’s world.
Above the bag, I have Thom Gunn’s Collected Poems. I keep it at the
side of the bed so I can dip in and out of it on the nights when I can’t
sleep. On the other side of my room sit Hamlet and Silas Marner, smoth-

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 reading lives

ered with green post-it notes as if a mould were slowly taking hold of
them; books prescribed for my course. There should be a copy of Thom
Gunn post-it-noted in every student’s room. Part of me thinks I keep it
here, beside my bed, in case I bring someone back one night and they
see it and we start a night-long conversation about him, and Schuyler,
and O’Hara. It hasn’t happened yet, but the postmodern-bohemian-in-
tellectual in me is optimistic that it one day might.
On top of my bag of washing there’s a newish novel called Winter in
Madrid by C. J. Sansom, a fascinating tale about the epicity of love, war
and betrayal. Clearly, tackling subjects like that, it’s quite thick, which
makes it excellent reading for the laundry room. Perched on plastic seats
that remind me of a football stadium, I am free to read chapter after
chapter; nobody ever seems to want to disturb an intellectual looking
bloke with a lot of bohemian clothes to wash. I try to see this as a good
thing, but I do sometimes wish someone would stop folding their Lan-
caster hoodie and ask about the chapter that I’m reading. But they don’t
because I’m an intellectual looking bloke with a thick book.
Beside the toilet in the en-suite wet-room I notice that there’s a wrin-
kled copy of my dad’s Selected Poems that Carcanet published in 1987. I
decide on moving it back to the shelf, before some psychology student
comes in and starts proclaiming a Freudian thesis as to why I keep my
dad’s poetry books in my bathroom, and begin flicking through the pages
again. Reading poems about people you’ve met and know and love is a
surreal experience, seeing written portraits of your parents before you
were born; it’s like looking through a photo-less photo-album. Perhaps it
reveals a different kind of truth. Rita Ann-Higgins said:
To get to the poetic truth it is
Not always necessary to tell the
What-actually-happened truth;
These times I lie
Maybe it’s just the bohemian in me talking but maybe the ‘poetic truth’
could be better than a load of posed photographs. I place the book back
in the middle of the shelf, proud, and I hear the whispers of my mum’s
voice as the pages squeeze back into their place, telling me to eat right,
and enough, and to stay healthy; I decide to acquiesce to her request
and my stomach rumbles its agreement like a Wimbledon crowd mur-
muring over balls that fail to leave the net.
The kitchen is full with pots, last night’s meals and last week’s con-
versations. There are celebrity weeklys spread out like a fan on the table.
I like to flick through them while I’m cooking. Heat and Closer might not
be very intellectual, but I figure it can be part of my postmodern-bohemia
to re-read discarded magazines. I’m getting hungry. And I’m sure I’ve got
one packet of Somerfield’s nine pence chicken-flavour noodles left over.
Somewhere.

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 essay

it’s the thought that counts

Howard Jacobson

O f all the pleasures of reading I rank this the

highest – hearing a voice, speaking as it were
directly to you – almost as a confidence – of
something the writer has come to know for
himself: come to know at a cost, or as a joy, but
the knowledge of which, as he conveys it, feels indispensable to our
humanity. This is the reading equivalent of having someone open his
heart to you; and while there are many ways a writer might convey to
you what he knows in his heart – and in a novel, particularly, the dra-
matic means are infinite – I believe that the intimate, naked, voice of
indurated experience is what stays with us after all the paraphernalia of
plot and what else has been forgotten. The measure of a good novel, for
me, is that I close it much as the wedding guest hears out the Ancient
Mariner – as ‘One that hath been stunned, / And is of sense forlorn, and
rise a sadder and a wiser man the morrow morn’.
Of course, in any novel worthy of the name it is the entire dramat-
ic apparatus that bears the burden of its seriousness, but nothing sets
the seal on that seriousness, nothing measures consequences or sends

15
HOWARD JACOBSON
is appearing at
Shipping Lines
Liverpool Literary Festival
3-9 November 2008

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 essay

the novel out beyond itself, so much as the voice in which, person to
person and for time immemorial, we have shared experience and con-
fided terrors. Seriousness has more than one accent; it need not always
sound like the Book of Job or the Song of Solomon; I happen to like se-
riousness laced with laughter – but we know it for seriousness when it
finds the words which seem to anticipate our final conversation, when
we will talk of the things that last and the things that don’t, and com-
miserate over our common fate.
Take, as an example, the hellish last paragraph of Kafka’s The Trial in
which the two anonymous partners turn the knife twice in Joseph K.’s
heart: ‘With failing eyes K. could still see the two of them, cheek leaning
against cheek, immediately before his face, watching the final act. ‘”Like
a dog!” he said.’ Which could have been the end of it. How much more
indignity is left? But there is a final phrase, coming from somewhere
all-knowing, if all-knowing nothing: ‘It was as if he meant the shame of
it to outlive him.’ A mere hair’s breadth divides the degree of authorial
intervention here from that of the famously impassive first line – ‘Some
one must have been telling lies about Joseph K’. The author remains as
much in the dark at the end as he was at the beginning, but the ‘It was
as if’ takes a sliver of liberty the first line does not. Is it really Joseph K.
who means the shame to outlive him, or is it Kafka? Is the comment a
sort of gloss, at the very last, on the novel’s fraught incomprehension?
– a guess, a supposition, a moral sounding of those depths of shame, a
third twist of the knife? However we read it, its shock derives, I think,
from the pain-speak voice in which it’s spoken: the voice in which we
try to find sense in what would otherwise make no sense, the voice we
reserve to talk of meaning, even when – particularly when – meaning
would seem to elude us.
There are some electrifying moments in the novels of Philip Roth,
but none more electrifying, to my mind, than the naked indignation of
the concluding sentences to American Pastoral. The achievements of the
ruined family, the Levovs, are weighed, their depleted future assessed –
‘Everything is against them, everyone and everything that does not like
their life. All the voices from without, condemning and rejecting their
life!’ – and then the question is asked – almost as a preacher might ask
it of a silenced congregation – ‘And what is wrong with their life? What
on earth is less reprehensible than the life of the Levovs?’
For me that is like being struck by lightning. The authority of the
outrage the greater for being so unexpected and so unliterary – And what
is wrong with their life? What on earth – like the puzzled voice of the most
unlettered humanity in extremis. Only angrier.
It would be wrong to say it is the plainest literature that speaks most
directly to our hearts. I am a late Henry James man myself. I am moved

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 essay

by convolution. But without doubt we attend most keenly when the

statue comes off its pedestal, as it were, and addresses us in language
we share – and that language, by virtue of the fact that it is shared, is
invariably the language of moral discourse.
This is not the same as saying that the novel is moral precept in
fancy dress. There are things a novelist may not do today. He may not
morally bully, or dogmatize, or even speak his thoughts. Strictly speak-
ing, Milan Kundera has said, a novelist has no thoughts. This is what
D. H. Lawrence meant too when he said we must trust the tale as told
not the teller as he would wish to tell it. Tolstoy was privately dismissive
about society women who ran off with cavalry officers, but had Anna
Karenina been the expression of that disapproval we would not still be
reading it today. In our time, when every other idea is just an ideology
in sheep’s clothing, the novelist is more than ever obliged to have no
truck with convictions or beliefs. There will be something wrong with a
modern novelist, I maintain, who does not offend the deep-entrenched
pieties of the times.
But in another, less combative corner of myself I retain a sneak-
ing affection for the older-fashioned idea of the novel as a dramatic
homily of sorts and the novelist as oracle or preacher; a sneaking af-
fection for the idea of literature, in general, as continuous with our

“There are things a novelist may not do today”

religious or philosophical pursuit of the good. It is precisely in order to
be re-connected with moral thought of the Rothian, Kafkaesque kind –
unforgiving of the arrogant and the vain; gloomy in its depiction of an
eviscerated future, thinking at the very edge of what is thinkable – that
I read novels at all.
The idea of going to a novel to be improved – I take despair to be an
improvement – might seem preposterous. I suspect, though, that it is a
pleasure to which many remain secretly addicted. You lock the bedroom
door, you pull the bedcovers over your head, you shine the torch, you
turn the page, and go in search of moral improvement…
Though the other side of the bargain has to be that the author doing
the moralizing is a moralist not by virtue of what he closes his mind
against, but of what he opens it to. So enter Dr Johnson, the founding
father, in my view, of the English novel.
‘Nothing odd will do long,’ Johnson told Boswell. ‘Tristram Shandy
did not last.’ That was 1776. The first two volumes of Tristram Shandy
had appeared 17 years before, in 1759. The same year as Johnson’s
Rasselas. People of an ungracious nature delight in Johnson’s misjudge-
ment. The oddity which is Tristram Shandy has lasted – despite some

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 essay

ups and downs in the nineteenth century – and in our time is seen as a
seminal work, the bridge between Rushdie and Rabelais, Pynchon and
Cervantes: the first novel in English to open the door to those fictional
irresponsibilities our age holds dear – flummery, cock and bull, digres-
sion, the higher footling, the lower facetiousness, downright tedium.
Whereas Rasselas – though beloved of the early Victorians (consumptive
schoolgirls know it off by heart in Jane Eyre) – is now studied only in
the academy.
I would rather read Rasselas than Tristram Shandy any day. Though
both make play with the elephantine periods and pomposities of Augus-
tan prose, Rasselas deploys them to greater straight-faced comic effect:
‘Ye who listen with credulity to the whispers of fancy, and persue with
eagerness the phantoms of hope,’ is how Rasselas begins, ‘who expect
that age will perform the promises of youth, and that the deficiencies of
the present day will be supplied by the morrow; attend to the history of
Rasselas Prince of Abyssinia.’
A reader has to have a cloth ear not to hear the rumble of drollery
in that. At the very heart of the sententiousness is a mordant joke, first
at the expense of those who are susceptible to fancy’s whisperings, sec-
ondly at the expense of the moralist who would condemn them – for
we all pursue with eagerness the phantoms of hope. The comedy of
Tristram Shandy is more knockabout, making fun of the sonorities of
Augustan prose rather than using them to its advantage: ‘On the fifth
day of November, 1718, which to the aera fixed on, was as near nine cal-
endar months as any husband could in reason have expected, – was I,
Tristram Shandy, gentleman – brought forth into this scurvy and disas-
terous world of ours…’ That is not a misanthropy with any substance.
‘Scurvy and disastrous’ are the mere makeweights of ribaldry and ill-
temper, as is the phrase ‘this vile, dirty planet of ours’ which occurs a
few lines later.
I hold Rasselas to be a better novel than Tristram Shandy on the usual
grounds that we prefer one novel to another – because in language
which resounds the deeper it more completely tells the story of human-
ity. Pekuah, a member of the Prince’s party on his expedition to find
happiness, falls into the hands of a wealthy and well-educated Arab – a
man surrounded by a seraglio of attentive women, from whose company
he cannot wait to escape to the lonely consolation of his tower where,
in the silence of the desert, he studies the stars. Quizzed later on the ac-
complishments and looks of the women of the Arab’s seraglio, Pekuah
replies with magisterial primness and conceit:
‘They do not… want that unaffecting and ignoble beauty
which may subsist without sprightliness or sublimity, without
energy of thought or dignity of virtue. But to a man like the

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 essay

Arab such beauty was only a flower casually plucked and care-
lessly thrown away.’

It’s at the moment when Pekuah considers the Arab’s state of mind that
we move from comedy to tragedy: ‘Whatever pleasures he might find’
among the beauties, Pekuah surmises:
‘they were not those of friendship or society… As they had no
knowledge, their talk could take nothing from the tediousness
of life; as they had no choice, their fondness, or appearance of
fondness, excited in him neither pride nor gratitude… That
which he gave, and they received as love, was only a careless
distribution of superfluous time.’

On the face of it the language is unapologetically that of sermon –

making a distinction between real and feigned affection, reminding the
congregation of that which riches can never buy. But a phrase like ‘the
careless distribution of superfluous time’ raises it to literature. There,
as life hangs heavy on every word, we enter into the frustration and
futility of the Arab’s existence. In so far as he is judged, he is judged
morally; in so far as he is understood, he is understood imaginatively –
his life rendered as it feels to him. And the story is, of course, made still
more dramatic – that is to say seen all around rather than pronounced
on – by the circumstance of its being told by Pekuah, who is an inter-
ested party, whose vanity has been piqued by the Arab’s interest in her
above the beauties of his seraglio, and whose pity has been touched
by his loneliness. Though the language remains, on the surface, at all
times sententious and homiletic, the brief tale of Pekua and her captor
has the power of a complex love story, told in the voice of more than
one person, though every one of them, I grant you, speaks uncannily
like Dr Johnson.
Anyone who has not read Rasselas but knows Sense and Sensibility or
Persuasion will be struck by the resemblance in vocabulary, tone and
spirit. Tristram Shandy made no inroads to speak of into the nineteenth
century novel. Even Thackeray, with whom one might suppose it to have
had its best chance, complained that Sterne was not a great humourist,
merely a great jester. Virginia Woolf admired it, though it hardly minis-
tered to jest in her novels. It’s probably not until Ulysses that its presence
is felt… Except that one shouldn’t forget its influence on Karl Marx
whose infatuation with the novel, Francis Wheen argues in his biog-
raphy of Marx, explains the style of Das Kapital, ‘Full,’ and I quote, ‘of
paradoxes and hypotheses, abstruse explanations and whimsical tom-
foolery, fractured narratives and curious oddities. How else could Marx
do justice to the mysterious and often topsy-turvy logic of capitalism?’
Thus, to Tristram Shandy, do we owe Stalinism, the Gulags and the

20
 essay

Berlin Wall. Rasselas – though we cannot attribute world revolution to

it – made its own quiet impact, getting into the Victorian novel’s blood-
stream through Jane Austen. Where characters wander too far from the
literature she considers good for them, it’s sentimental poetry or gothic
romance they get lost in, or the transports of shared taste indulged too
soon. We know Marianne Dashwood and Willoughby aren’t going to
make it as a couple when we catch them agreeing about everything

“I am always pleased when a novel does

stand up for itself.”
on first meeting. ‘But how is your acquaintance to be long supported,
under such extraordinary dispatch of every subject for discourse!’ ex-
claims her sister, Elinor, ‘Another meeting will suffice to explain his
sentiments on picturesque beauty and second marriages, and then you
can have nothing farther to ask.‘
The Johnsonian dryness is not without affection. Enthusiasm is to be
suspected but not frowned upon. Like Johnson, Jane Austen understands
the hunger of the human heart from which it springs. In common with
many of Jane Austen’s heroines, Elinor Dashwood thinks and speaks
much like Dr Johnson. Where the heroine is more wayward, like Emma,
a complementary Dr Johnson in masculine form must be found for her –
hence Mr Knightley. If felicity is to be found in a Jane Austen novel, it is
in a marriage to which at least one party is Johnsonian.
The thought of husband and wife sermonizing to each other in bed
might strike some as ridiculous, but the undiminished popularity of
Jane Austen must attest to something – to our desire to see love triumph
undoubtedly, but also to our desire to see it triumph in a context of
intelligent and reflective conjugality. Even in the marriage bed the de-
liberations of morality do not go amiss.
It’s in Persuasion – that melancholy, if-only novel – that Jane Austen
dishes out her sternest, and funniest, reading lesson. While sojourning
in Lyme Regis, Anne Elliot meets the broken hearted Captain Benwick,
a man once engaged to a woman who died before they could be married,
and now immersed in the poetry of hopeless agony. Concerned by how
closely this literature matches Benwick’s own tremulousness of spirits,
Anne ventures to
hope he did not always read only poetry; and to say, that she
thought it was the misfortune of poetry, to be seldom safely
enjoyed by those who enjoyed it completely; and that the
strong feelings which alone could estimate it truly, were the
very feelings which ought to taste it but sparingly.

21
 essay

It says much for Captain Benwick’s temper that he accepts this dev-
astating critique, not only of poetry’s perils, but of his susceptibility to
them. And that from a young woman he has known only for an after-
noon. But there you are: people were once better used to being given
sound-advice than we are today. Submit to it, anyway, he does:
His looks shewing him not pained, but pleased with this allu-
sion to his situation, she was emboldened to go on; and feeling
in herself the right of seniority of mind

– we call that Chuztpah where I come from –

she ventured to recommend a larger allowance of prose in
his daily study; and on being requested to particularize, men-
tioned such works of our best moralists, such collections of
the finest letters, such memoirs of characters of worth and
suffering, as occurred to her at the moment as calculated to
rouse and fortify the mind by the highest precepts, and the
strongest examples of moral and religious endurances.

I take immense pleasure in this scene. I don’t find Anne Elliot con-
descending or sanctimonious – Benwick, after all, is pleased to be the
centre of her attention – nor do I feel that the novel momentarily stops
being a novel in order to give Jane Austen the chance to play the teacher.
Anne registers the absurdity of her presumption, given her own roman-
tic wretchedness right now:
Anne could not but be amused at the idea of her coming to
Lyme, to preach patience and resignation to a young man
whom she had never seen before; nor could she help fearing,
on more serious reflection, that, like many other great moral-
ists and preachers, she had been eloquent on a point in which
her own conduct would ill bear examination.

A piece of moralizing does not go unmoralized upon. Irony is re-estab-

lished. But one cannot pretend that it’s only by undermining itself that
this scene gives pleasure. For me, anyway, there is a deep satisfaction –
at once comic and earnest – in the recommendation of a large allowance
of prose, and not only because I am a prose writer. A novel is not bound
to be explicit in the matter of what novels are for – and I notice that
Anne Elliot does not adjudge Benwick to be strong enough to be recom-
mended one – but I am always pleased when a novel does stand up for
itself. It’s in Northanger Abbey that Jane Austen makes her most spirited
defence of the form. Only a novel… ‘only Cecilia or Camilla or Belinda…
only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed,
in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest

22
 essay

delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are
conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language.’
In the event, Captain Benwick does not follow Anne’s advice. Soon,
he is reading poetry again, in the company of another woman to whom
he has lost his heart, the flighty Louisa Musgrove. Anne Elliot is aston-
ished. Louisa so high-spirited and such a talker! Benwick so dejected and
such a reader! But a little thought reconciles her to the match. She recalls
that Benwick had shown some feeling for her in the course of her instruc-
tion. The point being ‘that any tolerably pleasing young woman who had
listened and seemed to feel for him, would have received the same com-
pliment. He had an affectionate heart. He must love somebody.’
You could look on that as waspish if you like. Myself I think the
zest of the satire releases a sort of benefaction. It reconciles us to our
natures. And it comprehends the futility of Anne’s efforts to make a
deeper reader of Captain Benwick. ‘Of course,’ she muses, ‘they had
fallen in love over poetry.’
Here, you might say, is the difference between the moralizer and the
novelist – the moralizer delivers himself of his lessons in expectation
of their doing good, the novelist in dramatic expectation, as the tale
unfolds, of their doing no good whatsoever. In this happy outcome to
Captain Benwick’s suffering, the ultimate inadequacy of the ‘best works
of our best moralists’ is revealed. Not only don’t they cut the mustard
for Captain Benwick, they don’t tell his story. He, after all, will gain
cheerfulness in Louisa Musgrove’s shallow company, and she, as a good

“Any reader who does not enjoy thinking morally

will not get far with novels that matter.”
wife, will learn to love Scott and Byron. That’s humanity – comic, cruel,
absurd, sweetly self-interested, beyond the reach of the highest serious-
ness, but capable of snatching happiness on the wing – as the novelist,
not the preacher, sees it. But you can’t get to be a novelist all at once;
you must have something of the preacher in you first. But any reader
who does not enjoy thinking morally, who does not have a soft spot for
garrulousness in a novel so long as the novel has interesting things to be
garrulous about, will not get far with novels that matter.
The happy outcome of Benwick’s story always reminds me of the
unhappy outcome of Lydgate’s in Middlemarch. A similar intelligence is
at work in the telling and the understanding. Lydgate stays with Ro-
samund, you will remember – a woman more virulently vacuous than
Louisa – because ‘He dreaded a future without affection.’ It is a power-
ful insight, at once devastating and humane. An insight from across the
gender divide, I think, in that it expresses the sort of disappointment

23
 essay

one sex occasions in another. It describes the limits of what, in the way
of reciprocity, one may ever expect. In this case the inability of intel-
ligent men to hold out against women who are their intellectual and
moral inferiors, for fear of losing, in the process, not only their affection
but access to the affective life altogether.
A preacher might call this weakness engendered by sensuality and
lack of fortititude. The novelist, however disappointed, will know it to

“You grasp its necessity.”

be essential to what is also charming and purposeful in the men in ques-
tion. Affection will make Benwick a kind husband. Affection, or want of
it, will destroy Lydgate, but it explains what made him a conscientious
doctor in the first place.
While we’re in Middlemarch, it’s worth recalling that most familiar of
George Eliot’s direct addresses to the reader. The circumstance is Dor-
othea discovering that her husband doesn’t have the largeness of soul
she had imagined him to possess:
We are all of us born in moral stupidity, taking the world as an
udder to feed our supreme selves: Dorothea had early begun
to emerge from that stupidity, but yet it had been easier to her
to imagine how she would devote herself to Mr. Casaubon, and
become wise and strong in his strength and wisdom, than to
conceive with that distinctness which is no longer reflection
but feeling – an idea wrought back to the directness of sense,
like the solidity of objects – that he had an equivalent centre
of self, whence the lights and shadows must always fall with
a certain difference.

Though by modern standards this piece of writing is sinfully omnis-

cient, I find it exhilarating. As thought it is not remarkable. Preachers
have been berating us for our emotional selfishness, urging us to think
of others as equivalent in feeling to ourselves, as long as there have been
pulpits for them to preach from. What makes this different is the dra-
matic specificity of its language. The progress from reflection to feeling
which George Eliot describes – a progress Dorothea has still to make –
is not so much moral or even intellectual as sensory: distinctness is the
prize. What powers this progress sounds like something that happens
in the laboratory: an idea is wrought back to sense, an abstraction is
alchemized into concretion, until the thing we call sympathy is dis-
covered, not in an act of voluntary loving kindness but as an actual
sense-perception. The other person’s equivalence to you is now there.
Not as an obligation but an object. A think you might walk into.

24
 essay

George Eliot is here describing what a novel’s for. Eliot was listened
to by high Victorian England as a moral sage; her novels performed
the function that Christianity no longer could. Lucky her to be writing
novels at such a time. But though no writer could have been less of an
aesthete, her morality was essentially an artist’s morality, that is to say
she saw how art could perform an indispensable moral function, not by
forgetting to be art but by remembering. The slow unveiling to Dorothea
of the object which is Casaubon, her page by page conception of the
lights and shadows that fall from him, is among the great achievements
of literature. You see it. But it is also among the great achievements of
morality. You grasp its necessity. For not to sense another’s equivalent
centre of self is not to sense morally – and not to sense it morally is not
to be possessed of sense at all.
We lack, popularly, a satisfactory language for describing what novels
do. Our highest praise today is that they’re readable or page-turners.
Un-putdownable, we say, as though there’s virtue in not wanting to
pause and think about what we read. Day by day, the novel proper – I
cannot bear to say ‘the literary novel’, as though there’s another kind –
falls into neglect.
But a great strength of the English novel was once the accommoda-
tion it made with the nation’s practical religious, that’s to say ethical
life; as religion’s hold on the public conscience weakened, novelists like
Dickens and George Eliot assumed priestly functions. Readers did as
those writers bade them do. Shed tears over the good, poured scorn on
the rascally, endeavoured to free themselves from moral stupidity. Even
Lawrence, writing in the 1920s, could say without self-consciousness,
‘The novel can help us to live.’
I’m not such a fool as to suppose readers will ever again gather at
the feet of a novelist – and if they do it’s bound to be the wrong novelist.
Nor do I know how, in a world where everyone’s looking for seriousness,
we can persuade them it’s the seriousness to be found in novels – that
voice, which is the voice of humanity itself, urging the mind to after-
sight and foresight – they could really do with. I only know it is.

25
Face to Face
POET BIOGRAPHIES

Jennifer Compton Andrew McNeillie Michael O’Neill

What do you keep on On your writing desk On your writing desk

your writing desk? Stones from various My desk is over-
A venerable wooden wilderness places flowing with books,
out tray. I like to have papers, bills, disks, etc.
Known by heart Many of my poems
a cat filed there, su-
pervising operations. Ben Jonson ‘To start away from the
Himself’ desk; I walk around,
The fictional you… mumbling to myself,
Ishmael in Moby Dick unintentionally ignor-
ing people
What is the first
poem your remember The fictional you…
hearing? Franz Beckenbauer or
‘The Poplar Field’ Charles Baudelaire
William Cowper
What poem has
Jennifer taken the longest to
Compton write?
Sequence of 28
What poems do you sonnets over five
know by heart? weeks. What kept me
Shakespeare’s ‘Let going? They kept me
me not to the mar- going. The dynamic
riage of true minds…’; they liberated, the Michael
the stanza of Denis angles they discovered. O’Neill
Glover’s ‘Sings Harry’
(‘Once the days were Featured on page 43 First poem you heard
easy...’).Sometimes I I was lucky to hear
can remember ‘Fern poetry spoken quite
Hill’ by Dylan Thomas. normally as I was
Not always. growing up. My
grandmother knew
If you could be any
Robert Browning’s
character in fiction or
work inside out and I
real life…
remember her quoting
Too much choice. I
‘Home Thoughts from
might just stick with
Andrew Abroad’ – also a lot of
being me.
McNeillie Shakespeare.
Featured on page 30 Featured on page 77

26
 Jeffrey Wainright John Welch Anna Woodford

On your writing desk Known by heart On your writing desk

Something to fiddle Thomas Hood’s ‘I re- I’d love to say nothing
with: a stone I dig into member I remember / – or a stash of opium.
my palm when things The house where I was It’s full of the usual
are going badly, born’. Oh and that stuff though: pots of
hymn of Mrs Alexan- pens (that no longer
Known by heart der’s: ‘There is a green work), keys (to houses
Shakespeare, mostly: hill far away…‘ which I no longer live in)
Sonnet 138: ‘When my used to go round and and occasionally a
love swears that she is round in my head. tabby cat.
made of truth, / I do
believe her, though I Featured on page 42 Known by heart
know she lies’. My own poems
because I tend to learn
The fictional you… them in the process
I should love to be of writing them – also
able to play Gertrude lots of Sharon Olds’s
in Hamlet – to try to work because I’m
understand one of the writing a PhD on her.
saddest characters in
fiction. Recommend a book
Anything by the
First poem you heard Polish Poet Anna Ka-
‘Leisure’ by W.H. mineska who writes:
Davies. Unfortunately. ‘Blessed are those who
Longest time to write carry/ for they shall be
It’s not unusual for me lifted.’
to have poems under- Featured on page 63
weigh – or becalmed
– for months or even
years but I will persist
as long as I’m con-
vinced it will work out. Jeffrey
Wainwright
Recommend a book (see left)
Mary Midgley, Beast
and Man.
Featured on page 43 Anna
Woodford

27
Poetry

favourite australian poets

part II

Selected by Les Murray

John Forbes
1950-1999

Malta

The sky was carpeted with Italian flak. Crump!

It explodes in the war comic. ‘Stone the crows’
We think ‘That was close’. Closer than we think
They sing ‘If ever a wiz there was it’s that
Wonderful wizard of Oz’ or ‘Circuits & bumps & loops
Laddie & how to get out of a spin’. Maria Schneider
Says: ‘Tu es cet homme’. I loop the loop. ‘Wizard
Prang, Red Leader!’ exclaims the Wing Commander
‘Want a beer?’ All this helps the war along. We
Fight the Hearts & Minds campaign. For instance,
‘My heart throbs inside a sandbagged blast-pen
But a lousy dumbness holds my tongue. It’s a matter
Of mind over matter, my head avoiding the matter
Cradled in the space between your tits.’ I’m not
But the aircrew are trained for this. They kept
Australia free. That is, up to scratch – not
Spectacular, but par for the course (‘The sky was
Carpeted…’ etc.) I hope you can see this. It’s
A picture of my father who almost flew a bomber.
Up close he looks like me – both cocky, a cigarette
Balanced on the edge of the intense inane. This comic
Is called ‘Torpedoes Running’. Then later, over
Malta in a terminal spin, I throw away the rule book
& bring her in. then a terrific Italian raid begins.

28
 poetry

Peter Goldsworthy
b.1951

Alcohol

You are the eights

and shallowest
of the seven seas,
a shrivelled fragmented ocean
dispersed into bottles, kegs, casks,
warm puddles in lanes behind pubs:
a chain of ponds.
Also a kind of spa,
a very hot spring:
medicinal water to be taken
before meals, with meals, after meals,
without meals;
chief cure
for gout, dropsy, phlegm,
bad humours, apoplexy, rheumatism
and chief cause of all the same.
At best you make lovely mischief:
wetter of cunts,
drooper of cocks.
At worst you never know when to stop:
wife-beater, mugger of innocents,
chief mitigating circumstance
for half the evil in the world.
All of which I know too well
but choose to ignore,
remembering each night only this advice:
never eat on an empty stomach;
for always you make me a child again –
sentimental, boring
and for one happy hour very happy –
sniffing out my true character like a dog:
my Sea of Tranquillity,
always exactly shallow enough to drown in.

29
 poetry

Jennifer Compton
b.1951

From the other woman left under the pillow

…he is a lovely man has a lovely thing smiles with his eyes &
mouth
you saw him first but I would have if I’d been there
he is a lovely man sweet as honey his thing is plums & rose
petals
I know all there is, you know, about him, know about you
I walk into your house I have walked into your home
‘You crazy bitch get your gear off si tu veux’
pardonnez-moi we speak French which you speak better than me
but here I am I’ve found a place in his heart your home
I’m drinking coffee he is naked & you are just around the corner
I could snatch my hand back not without opening it & letting go
displacement has taken place eureka we all found each other
he likes you so he couldn’t like me as much without liking you
conundrum
it’s always two out of three with the other round the corner
in a corner of his heart his heart the shuttlecock
not us not me & you my sister ma semblable ma soeur
we are not together him the net we speak through touch fingers
perhaps
we desire each other he carries our love for each other back &
forward
our passionate messenger we fill him up so he spills us into each
other…

30
 poetry

Philip Hodgins
1959-95

Midday Horizon

The summer’s worn-out paddocks

aligned as neatly as quatrains on a page,
one of those highly buffed duco skies,
and in between, a fine graph line
as nervy as a lot of black snakes in the heat.
Great sheets of mirage are lying there
as bright as new galvo.
You squint into the glare until your eyes
are nothing more than two short twitching lines
and see on the horizon
the standing shadow of a eucalyptus tree.
A bit mob of sheep is moving to the left,
breaking up and catching up
in slow eddies like a lava flow.
Seen through the hot distorting air
clear flames seem to be tearing off the mob.
A man is walking sheep-slow behind them.
From where you are
his shape is continually being modified
as if he were walking through different dimensions.
Sometimes he seems to slip into separate pieces,
then pull back together, temporarily.
The same thing is happening to the tree.
The man stops
and a low piece of him draws right away this time.
It must be a dog.
You notice the silence, how near it is.
There’s no threat that you can see
and yet the thin exposed horizon trembles.

31
 poetry

Ashlley Morgan-Shae

Edinburgh

Up, down, tower round

So many steps in Edinburgh
Streets all end in a friendly bar
Tour-guides spruik, all costume-gowned
‘We have a real ghost,’ for ten pund
‘Bide a while here,’ rim ram rah
August fireworks shoot up stars
It’s push and shove to get out far
The Royal Mile of hungry Fringe hounds
Up, down, tower round
Museum on each cobbled tar
Fairy-floss, side-stalls and tea-jar
On Princes’ green, fat seagulls mound
Castle, cathedral, uphill wound
History theme park, dum-dee-dah
Up, down, tower round
Turrets on top, streets underground
Keystone cabs, tipsy buses sound
Old books, wee cups, candelabra
Royal Yacht Britannia, oomp-pah-pah
Unicorn rules – ground-chained and crowned
Up, down, tower round
A gene-line, tartan, gravestone found
Plague-street, proclaimed witch torture-bound
The Covenanter’s last hurrah
So many steps in Edinburgh
Up, down, tower round

32
 interview

sending robes to oxfam

Janet Suzman talks to Philip Davis

PD: You were saying before that some things are dramatic, some things aren’t.
JS: I don’t know what they are until I see them. It’s a technique that
actors use instinctively. Actors are always looking for things to rest their
minds on. It’s like crossing a rushing river – you look for the stones to
put your feet on, so you can traverse this space which is in somebody
else’s mind. It’s going somewhere, but you don’t know where it’s going.
This reminds me of your book on Shakespearean comedy (Acting with Shake-
speare: Three Comedies) where you wrote about the missing links, the
unspoken connections that an actor puts in to make the drama. The practical in-
telligence of a writer is to do with the implicit, the opposite of explication.
Peggy Ashcroft and I had a long afternoon once in Stratford-Upon-Avon
discussing four words in Shakespeare, in Antony and Cleopatra. The words
are ‘That head, my lord?’ They’re from the scene where Antony comes
in – he and Cleopatra have been defeated by Caesar – and he finds Cae-
sar’s emissary kissing Cleopatra’s hand. He has the man taken away
and whipped to within an inch of his life. There are ructions between
Cleopatra and Antony, and he says ‘Take this grizzled head and send it
to Caesar. Betray me.’ She says ‘That head, my lord?’ Peggy Ashcroft

33
34
 interview

said ‘That is the greatest poem in the English language’.

And you?
For Peggy Ashcroft, Cleopatra’s feelings are inexpressible, too big to
express. I took, of course, the absolutely opposite view and said that
their love affair was so wrong at this moment that she couldn’t possibly
tell him the truth, and she got round it by saying nothing about it at all,
just ‘That head, my lord?’ – not even ‘That grizzled head’ or ‘Leave that
head alone’ or ‘I love that head’. She was unable to say what lay inside
her own head about Antony’s misjudgements, which are coming thick
and fast at that point in the play. ‘That head’ doesn’t know how to think
any more. It isn’t doing what heads are meant to do, which is to think
clearly. That was one of the rarest, most wonderful conversations I’ve
ever had with a peer. I don’t even dare call her peer, because she was in
my eyes such a great actress, older than me, wiser than me. I was in a
sort of pupil role, except that we were playing the same part.
Was this during that famous production of Antony and Cleopatra of yours?
Yes. I was pretty young for Cleopatra. Usually Cleopatra’s a little bit
older and I was 32 or 33. But I was well cast for Cleopatra, I have to say
that. Partly because, I don’t feel very English, on the whole. Cleopatra is
impossible, educated, clever, and she didn’t know which way she would
jump. She was very un-English in that she was very educated, and very,
very sure of her powers on the whole.
You have written on that play.
In fact I did the commentary to the Applause Shakespeare Library’s
edition of Antony and Cleopatra. They did a whole edition of the Shake-
speare plays which have a commentary by ‘doers’ rather than editors.
They’ve got directors and actors to write. ‘That head, my lord?’ is a key
moment.
This is the section. Antony’s ambassador has come back from Caesar with the
message that Caesar will grant Antony nothing, but Cleopatra, she can improve
her lot by handing over Antony to Caesar. He’s driving them apart: ‘The Queen /
Of audience nor desire shall fail, so she / From Egypt drive her all-disgraced friend
/ Or take his life there’ (Caesar, III.xii.19–22). I’ll read you the passage and you
tell me what you said about it:
antony  Is that his answer?
ambassador  Ay, my lord.
antony  The Queen shall then have courtesy, so she
   Will yield us up.

35
 interview

ambassador      He says so.

antony       Let her know’t.
   To the boy Caesar send this grizzled head,
   And he will fill thy wishes to the brim
   With principalities.
cleopatra  That head, my lord?
  [III.xiii, 13–19]

That tiny half-line is laden with meanings and there are choices that an
actor has to make. There are four ways to read it. 1. As an overwhelming
rush of emotion. She’s unable to express how much ‘that head’ means
to her. All she can do is cradle it to her bosom as if it were the greatest
gift ever known. The half-line is an entire love-poem, as Peggy Ashcroft
felt. 2. How dare he consider, even in bitter jest, sending Caesar that pre-
cious head? 3. A bitter-sweet affection for that foolish old head that has
got them both into hot water. 4. That she can’t bring herself to express
how perilously ‘that head’ has declined. ‘That head’ has lost the astute-
ness that made it great. The choice depends on how Cleopatra assesses
her chances in relation to Antony after the defeat. Her power-base has
been diminished and so, as queen, she has to fend for herself and to be
cleverer than Antony has been. I chose the fourth view when I played
Cleopatra because I didn’t feel that this difficult moment was the time
for a declaration of love. There is something restless, troubled, guilty,
throughout all this scene. It’s not merely herself that she must remem-
ber in her dealings with Caesar, but the future of her children, her entire
kingdom. That’s what gives the play a discussion beyond just a tragic
love story. That doesn’t mean she can’t caress ‘that head’, even embrace
it, but her eyes, abstracted with thought, will tell a different story.
What I say in the book is really like recollected working notes.
Whether in performance the audience picks up on what I mean or not,
I don’t care. That doesn’t matter. As long as you’re clear about what
you’re doing as an actor the audience will think themselves clear too.
They don’t get all the impact. They can’t, because I’m not explaining
anything.
You really don’t mind if the audience doesn’t notice the impact?
Do you remember Chebutykin, the old doctor in Chekhov’s The Three
Sisters? At the end, Marsha says to him ‘Were you in love with my
mother?’ And he says ‘I can’t remember.’ If you have loved and lost – if
you have experienced the joy of finding a way through a great piece of
writing and making other people go along with you, that is a moment
of life’s transience, overpoweringly wonderful at the time, and when it’s
past it’s past. You unwittingly give somebody a pleasure, but you don’t

36
 interview

share the experience – it becomes their experience. Acting is, by defini-

tion, gone. Shakespeare writes that in his sonnets. Acting is transient
but it becomes part of your tool kit for standards, your own personal
touchstones. If you’ve seen Paul Schofield saying ‘Let me not go mad’
to Alec McCowan, you’ll keep that moment of ‘touchstone-ery’ in your
head, and when you see another Lear, it will creep into your memory
and you’ll remember how that amazing moment was when you last saw
it. So it becomes part of your tool kit, not mine.
If I was going to play Cleopatra – this is going to be a feat of imagination on your
part – give me some advice how to play her.
I’m going to be directing Antony and Cleopatra next year in Canada, with
Kim Cattrall. It’s deceptive how much work you have to do on being
comfortable with blank verse, especially late Shakespeare, where you
have his jaw-dropping genius in combining the highest poetry with the
utmost naturalism. You can call somebody ‘My nightingale’, and then
say something perfectly ordinary afterwards. It’s staggering the ground
he covers.
It’s also in Cleopatra that funny mixture of genuine and false. I’m interested in
that.
Well, we all should be because everybody puts on performances. Put it
this way – the best actors don’t know when they’re acting, or rather,
they do know, but they believe what they’re doing. There are politicians
who are lying through their teeth but appear to be calm as marble. It
seems to me that everybody acts just as well as Cleopatra does, and that
every court of law presumes that somebody is lying. To lie in legal terms
means to be acting, but that’s not Cleopatra’s bag. Cleopatra wants to
dramatise things to get Antony to feel ashamed or sorry. There’s a clear
purpose in view when she decides to be impossible and lose her temper, to
cry and snarl and be temperamental. She’s hurt, and she wants Antony
to feel bad about leaving her and going to Rome.
There’s a lot of writing about performance but very few people write to capture
those kinds of moment, those important moments that pass in time.
You’re sitting in a dark space and the action is moving on; you can’t pause
it and contemplate what’s just happened to you. After the performance
you can ask what was it in that performance that was so wonderful.
You recollect it, so it can’t be instantaneous. I think that’s the buzz that
actors get on stage, that it seems more wonderful than maybe it is.
Tell me, does the transience of the actor’s part bother you?

37
 interview

I’m always impressed by Wimbledon tennis players… As an actor you

don’t really talk about a performance like that, but they talk about their
match afterwards. Maybe that’s because they’re doing and not speak-
ing while they’re doing it. The speaking mechanism means that you’re
taken up with the very essence of what it is to be human.
That is interesting – about speaking.
You can’t eradicate what you’ve said from the world. Once it’s said it’s
out, and once it’s out, it’s happened. By expressing it, it is. You cannot
say ‘I love you’ and not have some feeling about it, or if you say it,
you’ve got to say it so that a person believes it, and that’s either to be an
actress or to be believed. Maybe they’re the same thing. The recipient’s
view is probably the more important one.
Do your insights into how people act make you suspicious about real life?
Yes! It’s such a bruised, bandaged old word now, ‘reality’. You get reality
television, what the hell does that mean? Reality this and reality that,
and people are so thrilled to have a camera on them that they will forget
it’s there and pick their noses in public. Is that reality?
You’re pretty tough-minded, but you’re not cynical, it seems to me, though cyni-
cism would have been an easier option. You’re idealistic about your background
in South Africa.
I’m disappointed now about South Africa a little bit because so many
stupid things, wasteful of opportunity, have happened since freedom.
The greatest day of my life was voting in those elections in 1994, here in
London. Queuing at 6 o’clock in the morning to put my ‘X’ for the first
time in my life against Nelson Mandela’s photograph on a ballot sheet
– that was thrilling, and something we had all breathed and dreamed
about for years. That was reality! So, no I’m not a cynic, but I get dis-
appointed about things and I get tired of predictable behaviour from
public figures and I get a bit tired of some performances from actors,
not least myself.
And that’s to do with the sense of the predictable?
Well, I’ve been there, done that, seen that performance. It’s difficult to
go on being fresh as a performer. One of the things I get tired of is that
there are expectations about women’s parts in the theatre which ought
to be growing up a little bit, and one of them is the expectation that
Cleopatra is a sexpot, that she’s got all that sexuality, which I think she
should have – but then forget about it! She’s much more interesting in
the canon, let’s say, because there are very few women’s parts that have
some kind of autonomy of action, and she’s one of them.

38
 interview

If you don’t mind me saying, when you were doing it, it was devastatingly sexual.
Well, I’m pleased with that. But I’m also pleased at the thought of it
not being a staggering love story from the word go, because I’ve got the
feeling that Cleopatra only really falls in love with Antony the moment
he dies. It’s a tempestuous relationship – full of wrong messages from
her and dramatised feeling – and you don’t really know how it lies,
except that Antony’s drawn and drawn and drawn towards her. Not her
to him, he to her. And then comes this astonishing moment when he
breathes his last, and she holds his lifeless body, and suddenly she goes
completely silent. Most editors insert ‘She faints’. Well, she’s not the
fainting type, I don’t believe she faints. But a thundering silence enters
her soul. They try to wake her – ‘Empress, Empress!!’ – and she comes
out of it with this astonishing speech – ‘I’m not an Empress, I’m just
like a milkmaid, I’m just ordinary, I’m just a woman’. So everything has
gone into perspective and, at that moment, she’s a woman who’s lost
the man she loves. She marries him in Act V, when she’s lost him. That’s
something about the play I would love to try and bring out more.
When you’re directing do you have a strategy of when and how you’ll intervene, or
is that temperamental depending on the actors?
I don’t have a game plan. The better the actor, the less you intervene I
think. But I do think it’s really nice to be able to help young actors. Peter
Hall said in the paper recently that young actors don’t know how to fill
a space anymore. Kim Cattrall’s an experienced actress, but I would ask
her to go and have some voice lessons so she can fill the spaces with all
those huge thoughts. But Peter Hall was quite right, because he said
actors muddle being quiet with being real. He says ‘What’s real? You’re
speaking somebody else’s words, wearing somebody else’s clothes,
standing on a stage with lights on you, so what’s real?’
When you were in The Singing Detective, opposite Michael Gambon, both of
you stage actors – you didn’t find that transition to a different medium difficult.
Well, I think it’s one-way traffic. Film people don’t necessarily work
well on the stage, but stage people can make the switch. If you’re a
teacher and you’re holding a piece of chalk in your hand and there’s a
blackboard in front of you, you don’t think twice about writing big on
the board so the kids at the back can read it. It’s natural. But now I’ve
got a bit of paper here; I’m writing small. The TV space is small.
You knew how to goad Gambon in The Singing Detective. It was sexually pro-
vocative, it was aggressive, and also very matey as well. That was a good mix of
stuff. And you like those mixes.

39
 interview

You’re right. You asked how I felt about people acting in the world.
There’s a fantastic mixture of stuff that goes on in people and a bit of
complexity is really attractive, I think. I get rather phased by people
who are ‘what you see is what you get’. Is that all there is? But maybe
you can be over-complex. Some of the ways in which I failed most on
the stage was when I’ve been over-complex.
Explain a little. Give me an example of that.
When your clarity about what you’re thinking and feeling is so strong
you feel sure the audience must be with you. But you do come to learn
that unless you say something clearly people will never pick up what
you’re thinking. They can’t. By what means do they pick up what you’re
thinking? So you come to this crux in life, don’t you? Come out with it:
your meaning is clear, but it’s also diminished.
Yes, but say why ‘diminished’?
It’s said. It can no longer go on cooking and seething.
That’s important isn’t it? But that’s very different from the example you were
giving about Cleopatra. She’s silent at that moment when she falls in love.
There are her own realisations about what she’s messed up, what she’s
missed, how too-late it is. It’s a terrifically mature moment. As you get
older you realise what you have messed up and what you’ve missed.
And that all happens in that one moment there. A realisation of some-
body’s passing is also an unspeakably grown up thing – the great silence
of death comes home to you. I lost my mother seven years ago. We
all lose people. And when you do lose them, there’s this great silence,
there’s this non-presence, which is why you can understand, sort of,
people being religious and thinking ‘Well I’ll meet them somewhere up
there in heaven’. But I haven’t got the sort of mind that can go there.
No, but there is still the feel of the person or the feel of them for you. People do
have different feels, and you do know those inside yourself, a particular feel that
they created.
There is a tremendous sixth sense in an actor that makes them want to
find that other person’s very core: what makes them talk like that, dress
like that, who are they? When you find that, there’s a wonderful feeling
that you can’t explain.
But I was talking to a psychoanalyst earlier today and he would say ‘Well there
isn’t an essential person’.
No, there isn’t. But an actor has to find a key, so this ‘core’ feeling is a
piece of mechanism you need to find. And when the play is over, you

40
 interview

have to lose it again. You don’t go on owning a part. Relinquishing it is

part of the business because otherwise you’ll be full of possessions that
you can’t walk around with. They would make you fat with owning.
You sound really good at relinquishing.
It’s not that I’m good or bad. There’d be too many griefs, too many mem-
ories, too many possessions to carry around with you. It goes because
it’s not being used. It’s like a piece of really nice clothing that you had
once that you enjoyed wearing, then you gave it to Oxfam.
But your fame and celebrity continue. Is that a problem or do you enjoy that?
I don’t know. It’s not something to do with you, it’s to do with some-
body else.
But it’s how people treat you.
Yes but it’s really not to do with you. The first thing you say to young
actors is that if you’re going to play a king, it doesn’t matter what you
do, it’s how your subjects treat you – that’s what makes you a king on
stage. I think that’s the same thing. But I can’t say I’m passionate about
the way perfectly adequate actors are treated if they happen to be a ce-
lebrity. It’s ludicrous.
Who have you genuinely admired, either that you’ve worked with or encountered?
Peggy Ashcroft was a big figure in my life, because she lived nearby and
she’s my child’s godmother, and because she befriended me, so I be-
friended her, and because she was a bit of a legend, and because I used
to enjoy watching her. I couldn’t learn from her because she was so par-
ticularly herself.
What was the best thing about her?
Just her nature. I loved that she was a political animal as well as
an actress. Her concentration was less on the theatre than on life in
general, and that appeals to me. I’m not at all comfortable with very
theatrical elements – people who only think about the theatre and are
always telling funny stories about the theatre. I’m much more comfort-
able talking to civilians about anything! There’s only so much you can
say. A performance is a performance because it’s a performance. That
sounds so trite. But what I’m trying to say is you can’t talk about it.
Is there a part you wish you’d played?
No, I’ve been very lucky. I can’t moan about what I haven’t played.

41
poetry

John Welch

Ambassador
With the ex-ambassador, ninety years old,
‘I am so well looked after’
Talking Philby and Cairncross,
Darlan, Vichy, de Gaulle,

World events like the fading noise of a city

As I watch the process of my own skin
Alter like landscape in the slow afternoon
Then return to that small, lizard mouth,

Skin on the verge of translucence

Where a sweet-natured man
Is gratefully eating the flesh off the bone –
‘I shall permit myself a small whisky’.

Leaving next day we met the ambassador,

Green-shirted, waving and calling
‘Jane is off shopping somewhere’.
He was bright as the insect kingdom

As it dances its moment of being,

Not quite our stilted epiphanies
Here in la France profonde
Where death waits with perfect manners.

The ambassador, pleni-

potentiary full of death’s powers
Moves carefully on two sticks
Still knocking at the door of the world.

42
 the poet on his work

on ‘Mere bagatelle 1’

Jeffrey Wainwright

T he style and structure of this poem – the first in what

was to become a sequence called ‘Mere Bagatelle’ – arose
out of the repeated failure of work attempted in a very
different manner. It’s the change in style and angle of ap-
proach between the failed work and what was to become
‘Mere Bagatelle 1’ that I want to explore here.
Like many writers I keep a commonplace book of quotations and un-
publishable musings which I may or may not mine for poetic stimulus.
Sometimes this overlaps with my composition workbooks where drafts
are worked at in longhand before I think they might survive the batter-
ing from the keyboard. Here they exist among jottings of phrases, odd
and possible words, and memos and exhortations to self. Much of this
raw material might take years before it suggests itself to a viable poem.
A quotation that lay a while in my commonplace book was this from
the philosopher Jerry Fodor, culled from the London Review of Books in
1996, on the true character of the natural world:
…sometimes, out of the corner of an eye, ‘at the moment
which is not action or inaction’, one can glimpse the true
scientific vision: austere, tragic, alienated and supremely
beautiful. A world that isn’t for anything, a world that is
just there.

43
 the poet on his work

The inciting quotations I keep are not often as substantial as this and
are less marked for their ideas than for some sensuousness of phrasing.
Fodor’s challenge to teleology – ‘a world that isn’t for anything, a world
that is just there’ – is evidently a big idea, but equally compelling for
me are the other clauses, the claim that this vision is fleeting and to be
caught all but accidentally, and especially that he chooses to call this
‘true scientific vision’ ‘supremely beautiful’ as well as, less surprisingly
given that Fodor is evoking a universe entirely uninterested in human
activity and purpose, ‘austere, tragic, alienated’. But in the failed poem
that I speak of it was the last sentence, ‘A world that isn’t for anything
…’ that was preoccupying me.
This failed draft began with the classical figure of Empedocles, ‘in
a hat I like’, craning from a window to look at chaos come again, as his
philosophical scheme had predicted. In the fresco inspiring this, by Si-
gnorelli, his posture is such that I fancied he might be inspecting his
guttering. I still like Empedocles’ hat and his interest in drainpipes but
it will have to find another home. The draft continued strophically in
long lines of ten syllables or longer trying to use the figure of Empe-
docles to animate an ideas-laden discourse; ‘For he has an idea, you
see, Empedocles, / the universe does change …. // Or else the universe
is taking place without us …’ After the years I’ve spent trying to write
poetry I should have known better.
Meanwhile, on a facing page of the workbook I was making another
effort at what I was now labelling ‘the Fodor poem’. Under a putative
title made of the ‘A world that isn’t for anything …’ quotation, this
draft begins: ‘The usual thing would be, still is, to look up at night: /
there, there, there it is / or, more modern, to squirrel into the lawn /
there, there, there it is, /somewhere under the nail in aereated soil …’
This proceeds for a further twenty-four lines with Empedocles this time
making a more belated appearance, just after another heavyweight, Lu-
cretius. There follows thirty or so pages of the further projected sections
of this long poem, all in an extensive style of long cadences in often
elaborate syntax with leading parts for Jupiter, Venus, Mars and Apollo.
I did fear that this was hopelessly prolix but persisted because I was
consciously trying to avoid, or at least postpone the familiar impulse to
compress, minimalise and straiten the work into the tight shapes that I
had often employed before.
Nonetheless I was not convincing myself and when, thirty pages
later the page heading ‘# (Fodor again!)’ appears, the draft begins: ‘the
usual thing would be /? to look up at night – / there, there, there it
is, / or, more often now, squirrel into the lawn – / there, there, there
it is, / somewhere under the nail / do we still expect names? // Venus,
shallow in the western sky, / is the first to be seen // “Propitious Queen

44
 the poet on his work

of Love” …’ This was the crucial changing-point. The facing page shows
an immediate draft that confirms the queried line-break in line one and
the use of lower-case from the beginning, and ditches Venus entirely.
After the fingernail it reads ‘must it still have names? // no, leave it //
that[this] will introduce the idea / of its beauty’.
The succeeding period of daily work outdoors over several weeks in
summer 2005 was one of the most consistent and progressive I have
ever enjoyed. The key ideas of metaphysical meaning, alienation, what
is beautiful in the world, and how ‘austere’ thought can be are worried
at through the developing sequence. But I do not experience these ideas
abstractly, instead they have sensuous existence, and indeed one of
themes of the sequence is the necessary persistence of instantiation, of
embodiment, in thought. I recognise the high level of abstraction nec-
essary to philosophical thought but I cannot achieve it and my hunch
is that much of our philosophical thinking – which we all perform with
a greater or lesser degree of self-awareness – is alloyed with incidental
observations and concerns. Looking back at those two important pages
of the workbook I see that I boxed in an unanswered question to myself:
‘Does the need for “out there” meaning come from infant & childhood?
The need for the parent who cares, loves & reproves?’ I have no recol-
lection of thinking much further about this as the sequence developed,
but in retrospect I can see that the thought is connected to some of
the incidents that turn up in the poem such as the image of Raphael’s
Madonna, newspaper reporting of parent-child suicide, and bits of my
own childhood recollections. Much of the rest of the material for the
poems is drawn from everyday observation: stars, swallows, sand, a
flashing light, sun-reflections, a cat, a lizard, as well as images drawn
from artworks.
Stylistically I came to want shorter lines, a light-footed approach
which changed angle and tone frequently in the manner of piano vari-
ations or preludes, bagatelle indeed. With this musical analogy in mind
I did think about seeking some structural recurrences into the sequence
such as rhyme, stanza or simply uniform length as I had in the earlier
substantial sequences of The Red-Headed Pupil but decided against it.
The apparently provisional jotted quality of the free verse method I was
using aims to undercut the portentousness and ’tall talk’ of the earlier
attempt: hence the eventual title of ‘Mere Bagatelle’, a favourite phrase
of my father’s when he wanted to joke that something substantial –
usually the cost of something – was nothing much at all.

45
 the poet on his work

‘Mere Bagatelle’
1

the usual thing would be

to look up at night –
there, there, there it is!
or, more often now,
to squirrel into the lawn –
there, there, there it is!
somewhere under the nail

must it still have names?

no, leave that aside –

there is this idea
of its beauty

46
 fiction

accelerate

Frank Cottrell Boyce

H alf way through Wednesday’s episode of Countdown,

Wendy realised she couldn’t take it any more. It was
the bit where they give the contestants a long word
– it was ‘accelerate’, in case you’re interested – and
ask them to make as many other words from it as
they can. ‘You have thirty seconds starting from now,’ said the man
in the blazer. The contestants dropped their heads and got to work. A
big clock appeared on the screen, chipping away at the allotted time.
‘Thirty seconds!’ thought Wendy, ‘What am I supposed to do for thirty
seconds?’ A kind of panic gripped her. The thirty seconds seemed to
stretch out like a day in a doctor’s waiting room. It wasn’t that she was
really bothered about the game. It never occurred, for instance, to her
to try and make a few words herself. But she did need to know who
won. Thirty seconds wasn’t long enough to get up and do something.
But it was too long to sit still. By the time she’d been assailed by all
these thoughts, she still had twenty-seven seconds left. Twenty-seven!
Somehow twenty-seven seemed more than thirty. What could anyone
do with twenty-seven seconds? Make a decision, that’s what. She knew
she was having problems filling her time but a person should be able to
kill thirty seconds without breaking into a cold sweat. She decided to do
something about her life.

47
 fiction

The winner by the way was a woman from Andover. She had a
squint and made twenty-two words in thirty seconds.
Wendy had had problems filling her time ever since the baby was
born. Apart from anything else, the days were actually longer. The little
fella wouldn’t go to bed till past midnight and was up again, screaming
for his bottle, by five. She’d feed him, change him, make up the next
feed, play with him for a bit, a full day’s work. Then she’d look at her
mobile and it would be only seven o’clock. She shouldn’t even be up
yet. Her mates would not be up for hours. And what do you do with a
baby that small? You look at them – so little and just doing nothing –
and it’s hard to figure out how they’re managing to monopolise you like
this, filling every minute with nothing. This one would lie there for half
an hour just looking at his own fingers opening and closing. In the af-
ternoon, he’d have a nap but you never knew when of how long for. It
wasn’t like you could have a bath in case the running water woke him.
It wasn’t like you could start anything, because he’d probably wake
up right away then and that does do your head in. it wasn’t like you
could have a nap, because you were too tense by then. All you could do
was watch telly with the sound right down, and sit there wishing he’d
bloody grow up so at least he could talk to you.
After the Countdown incident she knew she had to get help. She took
herself down to the Well Mother Clinic on High Park Street. She would
never go there normally because all the other mothers looked so cheerful
but the moment had come, she knew that. Anyway, they had a super-
vised play area and the little fella loved to lie on the mini-trampoline,
put his legs in the air and stare at his own toes. The child was obsessed
with his digits. You were allowed to leave them there while you went
into the doctor. If you timed it properly you could get ten minutes to
yourself out of it. In the surgery, she chatted about feeds and rashes and
stimulating the baby properly and then she said, ‘The only thing really
is that the days are too long.’
The doctor didn’t look up. Wendy wasn’t sure if she’d even heard
her. Then she said, ‘Have you ever considered donating your time?’
‘That’s the point. I haven’t got any time. Or I have got time but I can’t
do anything with it. It’s just lying there like clothes that don’t fit you.’
The doctor closed the door.
‘Were you meaning voluntary work or something?’ said Wendy.
‘No. You would be paid.’
Wendy was interested. No one had offered to pay her since that man
in the park when she was nine.
‘You’d be donating your time more literally than that. Completely
literally in fact.’
Wendy must have looked baffled because the doctor launched into
a long explanation – one of those explanations where you know the

48
 fiction

explainer is mentally revising the whole thing for their own benefit.
They’ve forgotten that you’re there really. Certainly, it didn’t leave Wendy
much wiser, and anyway I can’t go into detail here because it was largely
technological and the technology is under copyright. It’s something to
do with synapses and the middle ear. There’s a procedure which, inter-
estingly, involves using your mobile phone. The bottom line is that the
doctor offered to shave fifteen seconds out of each of Wendy’s minutes.
‘You mean my minutes will be shorter than other people’s?’
‘So your day will pass more quickly.’
‘That’s amazing. No one’s mentioned this before.’
‘It’s a secret procedure,’ said the doctor. ‘I’d have to ask you to sign
a document saying that I’d explained all the risks and that you under-
stood that this was a commercial rather than a medical venture.’
‘How’d you mean, commercial?’
‘The seconds you donate, we pass on – well, we sell really – to people
who want their minutes to be longer…’
‘What people?’
‘I’m not at liberty to say. People in this city.’
‘They want their days to be longer? Is it old people like?’
‘No. Not at the moment. It’s such a small market. A few people.
Good payers.’
‘How much?’
‘How much do you earn now?’
‘Are you joking? I’m not earning anything.’
‘They would pay you twenty pounds an hour.’
‘Bloody hell.’
‘That’s not twenty pounds for every hour you work – you won’t
be doing any work. It’s twenty pounds for every hour you donate. At
fifteen seconds out of every minute, that means four hours donation a
day. I wouldn’t advise that you did more than that.’
‘Twenty quid a day for…’
‘An hour of your time. Just the time. You don’t have to do anything
with it. Because the time is scattered over a number of hours, most
people don’t even notice that they’ve given it. Their days go faster, but
that’s something you’d welcome.’
‘True that.’
‘You register, using your mobile. After that, we can begin the proce-
dure.’ The procedure doesn’t hurt, that’s about all I can say about it.
When it was over, the Doctor gave her twenty quid there and then.
The rest of her earnings would be delivered to her mobile as transferable
credit. ‘It’s unconventional,’ said the Doctor. ‘But it’s also very conven-
ient and also discreet.’
As soon as she was back in the open air, she stopped believing in
what had happened. It was probably some kind of joke or wind-up.

49
 fiction

Doctors were like that, weren’t they? On the other hand, she still had
the twenty quid. And she could see her bus passing Steble Street and
heading towards her. Perfect timing. Life was all right for once.
But somehow, even though she quickened her pace, even though she
had loads of time, the bus seemed to change state from ‘on its way’ to
‘at the stop’, in a single instant. It had decanted two old ladies with one
of those shopping bags on wheels, and moved away, before she made
the stop. It was as though the DVD of her life had skipped.
The two old ladies were heading towards Lidl, setting a brisk, self-
confident pace that only seemed unusual when you thought about it.
This was High Park Street. No one hurried on High Park Street. If you
had a meeting on High Park Street it would be with someone – a doctor,
the ReStart, the Social – who was going to keep you waiting for hours
anyway. People here didn’t walk. They shuffled. They drifted. But not
today. Everyone was striding out, vigorous and focused, as though eve-
ryone had been given a brand new sense of purpose.
She called her Mother. ‘Wendy, are you alright, love?’
‘I’ve missed my bus. Do you want anything from Lidl?’
‘There’s something wrong with the signal, love.’ Her Mother said.
‘You keep cutting out.’
‘I can hear you fine, Mum.’
‘It just happened again. I say something and you don’t reply for
ages. It’s like there’s a delay on the line or something.’
When she got home, she put some oven chips in but they seemed to
burn before she had time to put the kettle on.
Watching Countdown, she barely had time to read the long word
(procrastinate) before the second hand had swept the half minute into
the past.
By the time she’d given the baby his feed, and changed him, it was
more or less time for bed. He cried in his cot as he always did. She hated
this. It was so hard not to give in and pick him up. But both the book
they’d given her and her Mother had warned that this was the worst
thing you could do. Normally she had to go down and listen to her
music really loud, or have a drink. But tonight it seemed to be over in a
flash. And then it was her own bedtime. A whole day gone without too
much boredom. Selling time was the best bargain she’d ever made.
It took some getting used to, though. She learned that it was no use
trusting to her senses. If she wanted to cook ready meals or catch a bus,
she used the timer on her phone. Same with the little fella’s feeds. Her
Mother rang and complained that she hadn’t heard from her for days.
‘Mum, I just seem to be so busy all of a sudden,’ she said.
‘That’s great but don’t forget about your old Mum.’
So she put a reminder on her phone to call her Mother too.
The only drawback was the comedown. That was hard. You’d be at

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the checkout say when suddenly you’d get that jolt in your stomach that
told you were back on normal time. That was the worst. The Yoplait, the
fish fingers, Ma Baker’s Roast Potatoes, all moved in solemn procession
down the conveyer belt. The check out girl picked them up and slowly
slowly t’ai chi’d them over the scanner which responded not with a pert
little beep but with a protracted whine. In his pushchair, the little fella
howled eternally.
After a couple of weeks, she got a text thanking her for her time,
informing her of her credit (£270!). And telling her that if she wanted
to continue with the arrangement she would have to see her doctor in
person.
In the Well Woman Clinic, all the Mums in the waiting room were
smiling and chilled. Now Wendy knew why. Like her, they spent their
mornings surrounded by busy, focused people bustling through a day
that was cantering nicely towards bedtime.
The doctor asked her how it was going. ‘It’s great,’ she said, ‘I love
it.’
‘So you want to renew?’
‘God yeah. I’ll do more if you like. I could do it all day.’
The doctor looked up and bit her lip. ‘In that case,’ she said, ‘I’m
afraid I can’t ask you again.’
‘What? But you’ve got to.’
‘Actually the more insistent you are, the more certain I am that I
shouldn’t let you renew. You’re a bit too enthusiastic, if you see what
I mean. I think there’s potential there for addictive behaviour. I try to
stick with donors who are doing it mostly for commercial rather than
emotional reasons.’
Outside it was like the pavement had turned to glue. She tried to
cheer herself up by buying some nice stuff for the little fella. It was
while she was getting him measured for trainers that she met Craig. He
seemed nice enough. He still asked her out even though he knew about
the little fella. She thought that love might make things better. People
say, don’t they, about the heart beating faster.
In fact, the opposite was true. Love made everything even slower –
waiting for him to ring, waiting for him to pick her up, waiting for him
to read the bloody menu the night they went out for a meal – to celebrate
their first month as a couple. Somewhere along the way, the Little Fella
did learn to talk. But what did he say? Mostly ‘No’, ‘Not like’, oh and
‘Mama’ which was nice as far as it went but not exactly a conversation.
Then there was a day when her Mother babysat while she and Craig
went to watch a Champions’ League game on the big screen in the Brook
House. She doesn’t remember who they were playing. What sticks in
her mind is the slow motion replay of Torres’ final minute wonder goal.
Gerard slithered between three defenders before slipping the ball along

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the ground, right to Torres’ feet. Torres’ unexpectedly pulled it back,

stopped it dead, tricking their goalie into diving early before chipping it
over his prone body.
‘How can anyone think that quick?’ said Craig.
But Wendy knew exactly how. She’d seen it in slo-mo. Gerard’s
legs moved at the same pace as everyone else but his eyes – his eyes
weren’t in slow motion at all. They were flickering everywhere, reading
the defenders’ movements, looking down at the ball, searching out a
space and, finally, in an electrifying moment – finding Torres’ gaze and
holding it still, while he slid the ball to him. Torres was in on it too. They
were moving at the same speed as the other players but they had twenty
five per cent more time to think, because their minutes were that much
longer. The two of them were in a different dimension.
So that’s where her seconds had gone. That was the small market
of big payers. As the ball went in again, this second time, in slo-mo for
the replay, everyone in the pub jumped to their feet again and cheered
again. To Wendy, it looked like they were moving in slo-mo too. She
knew she had to get back in the game.
She tried lots of smart things – tracing the bank that made the
payment on the Internet, leaving cryptic messages on a Fernando Torres
fansite. None of it worked. Her Mother said she looked lethargic. Wendy
said, ‘They say I’m in good shape at the Well Woman’s.’
Her Mother said, ‘You should get a second opinion.’
And there it was. Of course. Why didn’t she just go to a different
clinic? She took herself to the One Stop Drop In on Smithdown Road. It
was a man doctor there, chap in a suit and funny-shaped specs. She gave
him the same spiel she’d given the lady doctor in the Well Woman’s. He
got up, closed the door, and asked her if she’d ever thought of donat-
ing her time.
It took all her self-control to stop herself from blurting out an emo-
tionally unbalanced ‘Yes!’ Instead she said she wasn’t sure what he
meant and let him go off on this big rigmarole about risks and respon-
sibilities and remuneration.
‘With your mobile phone, doctor? Really?’ She said when he’d fin-
ished. ‘I never head of such a thing.’
When she went outside, she was twenty quid richer and all the way
up Smithdown Road, people were bouncing around like pieces on a
child’s mobile blown by a breeze.
Two weeks later she was back in there and he was asking her how
she found it. She’d learnt her lesson. ‘Don’t get me wrong, doctor,’ she
said. ‘I’m glad of the extra money – as I’m sure you are yourself – and
it does seem to help a little bit. I’m more energetic and funny enough I
seem to have a bit more time. Maybe I’m more decisive or something.
I don’t know.’

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‘Interesting. Let’s keep you on the programme.’

Two more visits and when she was four hundred quid to the good,
the doctor said, ‘This seems to be a good arrangement all round. Let’s
normalise it shall we?’ and he gave her some passwords and showed her
how to donate online.
Of course she tried at first to stick to the accelerated mornings but
accelerated mornings were followed by extended afternoons and it was
during one of these that she discovered that you could alter the set-
tings. Soon she was donating two hours a day, not one. This meant eight
hours of accelerated day. That’s when the brakes really came off. Days
tumbled by in a rush of colour and noise, like the edited highlights of
themselves. Sometimes a moment stood out. The day, for instance, that
Craig came and took the little fella out for the day and came back all
aglow, saying, ‘He’s talking loads now, if you know how to listen. Kaka,
that’s me. And when he says pulla, I’m sure that means apple. He loves
apple, doesn’t he? And when he says ‘you me’ – have you heard him say
that? ‘You me’ means do this for me, like ‘push you me’ means push me
please. See?’
‘Yeah, I think so,’ she said. In fact, she’d never noticed the little fella
saying any of this stuff. It was good to have it pointed out to her. And
nice to think what it would be like when the two of them could just sit
and chat.
Of course it was harder than ever to stay on top of the whole dates
and times thing. There was the day her Mother came round to the house
with a bucket of Playmobil and a big cake with ‘Gary’ written on it.
‘Let me at him,’ she smiled. ‘Where is he?’
‘Who?’ said Wendy.
‘Who? The birthday boy. Our Gary. The little fella. Your son.’
‘Oh,’ said Wendy. ‘Gary. The Little Fella. Sure.’ Had she really forgot-
ten his birthday? ‘It can’t be his birthday. Are you saying he’s two? How
can he be? He’s only just been one, she said.
‘Everyone feels like that,’ said Mother. ‘But not everyone forgets
their own child’s birthday.’
But when you think about it, so what? She had about three thou-
sand quid on her phone by this stage. She took him out on a massive
spree. She bought him the fittest jacket you’ve ever seen and a pair of
trainers that really went with it and that cost an absolute wad. And was
he thrilled? Not really, to be honest. All he seemed to care about was the
mini trampoline in the corner of Mothercare. She more or less had to
prise his hands off it. Ungrateful little item.
The good thing about acceleration was that it helped you keep
things in perspective, stopped you getting too worked up about stuff.
When Craig stopped calling for instance, she didn’t even notice until
her Mother said, ‘I see that Craig one has stopped calling.’

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‘Oh yeah. I hope he’s all right.’

‘I think he finally took the hint,’ said her Mother.
‘What hint was that?’
‘He had a big heart-to-heart with me about it. Every time he called
you, there’d be these big silences every time he asked you a question.
Whenever you went anywhere, you’d always end up half a mile behind
him. I said to him, Craig she’s like that with everyone. She’s like that
with me. But he was determined to take it personal. I think he would’ve
gone ages ago, except he really loved our Gary.
Last time someone dumped her it was Gary’s Dad. That’s when life
first seemed slow and empty. She wasn’t going to let that happen again.
She wondered if she could mess with the preferences and take a few
more seconds out of her minutes.
‘Gwen,’ said her Mum, ‘Are you listening to me?’
She always called her Gwen when she was worried. And that’s
where she got the idea from. ‘Yes, Mum, I’m absolutely fine. I’m just a
bit busy.’ She chivvied her Mother out of the house, got herself online
and quickly set up a second donation account, using her full name,
Gwendoline, instead of Wendy. The passwords all still worked fine. She
could now make two fifteen second donations from each minute, and
run thirty-second minutes eight hours a day.
Walking up to Lidl felt like running down hill. One second someone
was walking towards you, the next you’d nearly bumped into them.
What had been dreamy meanders down the aisles of products now felt
like school sports day. Sometimes they went so quick she didn’t have
time to put anything in her trolley and she’d have to start again. At the
checkout she’d sometimes be aware that the time lag between her and
the sixty-seconds-a-minute checkout girl might be a bit embarrassing.
‘Hi. Lovely day. Would you like any help with your packing? The
oven chips are two-for-one. D’you want me to send someone to get you
another one? Are you OK?’
‘Yes. It is a lovely day.’
‘That’s twenty-seven ninety-eight. Are you paying by card?’
‘Yes please, I would like help with my packing.’
‘Are you OK, girl?’
‘No, I know they’re two for one. But I don’t need a second packet.’
She didn’t bother with special offers now that she had all this money.
‘Are you sure you’re OK?’
‘Is it all right if I pay by card?’

It must have been a similar conversation with her Mum when they’d
decided that the Little Fella should stay with his Grandma ‘for a while’.
She couldn’t remember it. But it wasn’t a problem. He loved his grandma
and she liked the company. Plus she lived nearer to playgroup, didn’t

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she? So it made sense.

When the little fella had been there, she normally couldn’t wait to
get out of the house. Now he was gone, she couldn’t bring herself to go
past the front door. Instead of going to Lidl, she started shopping online.
That way you didn’t have to deal with embarrassing checkout conver-
sations, you didn’t have to dodge oncoming trolleys and you could pay
by moving the credit straight across from your accelerate account. You
could even order food to your door. You could tell the seasons by what
was on sale. A summer of barbecue packs and garden furniture was fol-
lowed by an autumn of insurance and holiday offers, a Christmas of
special edition DVDs and collectable jewellery, a New Year of interest-
free loans and more holiday offers.
Her Mother always brought the little fella round at weekends. That
was like watching someone’s life in a flick book. This weekend, he’d lost
a tooth, another weekend, he’d lost another. Now he’d had a haircut.
Now a new tooth. Always something new. And she made sure there was
always something new in the house too – new carpet, new sofa, new
kitchen, massive new telly, new laptop plus broadband. You want to do
the best for your kids, don’t you?
Spring burst in with a flourish of new discounts, including some
amazing offers from Little Tykes. That’s where she spotted the tram-
poline. A trampoline. The Little Fella loves trampolines. She ordered
one and then got so excited she paid for express delivery too and when
it came, paid the chap who brought it round to set it up for her. When
her Mother brought the Little Fella round to show her his new school
uniform, she chivvied them both into the garden to see it. ‘What d’you
think of that?’ she said.
‘Who’s it for?’ said her Mother.
‘For the Little Fella. For my Gary.’
There was an awkward moment. Then her Mother said, ‘Gwen, love,
on the box this says 3 to 8.’
‘So?’
‘Gwen, love, our Garry is 11.’
She looked at him. He did look big, with his tie and his blazer. ‘But
he’s only just starting school,’ said Wendy.
‘Yes,’ her Mother explained. ‘Secondary school. Look, long trou-
sers.’
‘Oh, I see.’

There was a certain amount of toing and froing after that. Various forms
were filled in. Someone came to clean the house which had, admitted-
ly, got into a bit of a state (she had other things to do). Then she was
moved into a kind of flat where they could keep an eye on you. It didn’t
matter. Just knowing that your days were only a quarter as long as eve-

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ryone else’s made them easier to cope.

One evening, she got up from her workstation, went to the window
for a stretch, and there he was, staring up at her room. She waved to him.
Not quickly enough. He’d gone by the time her hand was in the air.
The next night, she looked out again and there he was again. It
was winter. Already going dark by the time school finished. When he
stepped into the driveway, it flicked on the security lighting. And he
stood there, haloed in it. As though for display purposes. She wanted
to go down and say something but by the time she made it to the main
entrance, he was long gone. But she checked the time. It was always the
same. Every day. He was a punctual boy. If someone had asked her to tell
them all about her son, that would be the only thing she’d be able to say
with certainty. He’s very punctual.
She knew now what she wanted to do. She made certain enquir-
ies. I can’t go into details. She was shocked when she discovered had
to pay for the time she was selling for £20 an hour. Best part of a thou-
sand pounds. Quite a mark-up even when you took out the costs of
the technology and the admin. It was only when she was trying to buy
some back that she realised she might have sold her time too cheap.
She bought it anyway. Half an hour. She knew enough about how to
finagle the preference now to do what she wanted. She wedged the
whole extra hour into the ten minutes between 4.25 and 4.35. She stood
at the window.
She stood there so long that at first she thought he wasn’t coming.
Perhaps it was a Saturday or school holidays or something. Then a
bright light unfurled across the gardens and the boy stepped delicately
into it, trailing his own wavering shadow. She watched as the muscles
in his neck made their minute adjustments, carefully altering the incli-
nation of his head so that he was looking up at her window. He wanted
to see her. She hurried down the stairs and out onto the driveway, in the
interval between one of his breaths and the next. She stood in front of
him and watched an expression – curiosity maybe or longing – gather
on his face, slow as a season. She paid attention to the undulation of his
lovely black eyelashes, to the soft tongue, moving along the top of his
teeth, to the scrutinising frown that collected on his forehead as his eyes
rose into focus. She concentrated most of all on his hand, on the fingers
that unfurled like the fronds of some slow submarine vegetation, on
the fascinating articulations of his wrist as he brought the hand up to
shade his eyes, as he searched the building for a glimpse of the woman
who was standing in front of him, who had kissed his cheek, too quick
to feel or see. Those hands. She remembered now how he had been en-
thralled by them himself when he was a baby. And she knew that she
was seeing things now as he had seen them then. That she had become
for a moment as a little child.

56
 FRANK COTTRELL BOYCE
is appearing at
Shipping Lines
Liverpool Literary Festival
3-9 November 2008

Francis Boyce and

Frank Cottrell Boyce,
Ty Nant, 1961

57
your recommendations

seafarers and storytelling

Francis Boyce

T he seafaring husbands and sons of Liverpool who worked

at the time when the port was the Gateway of the British
Empire, were the blood and guts of the city’s mercan-
tile trade: the trimmers, donkeymen and boilermen who
sweated in the raging heat of ships’ stokeholds on voyages
lasting weeks or months, or who worked as stewards serving the rich and
famous on trans-Atlantic luxury liners. Yarns and anecdotes of the trials
and dubious delights of seafaring emerged as a natural part of family
life. Listening in early childhood to the tales of my seafaring father and
brothers, I imagined that places with such exotic-sounding names as
Shanghai, Montevideo, Alexandria and Port Said lay just beyond the
sandy beaches of New Brighton. Childhood imagination was further en-
riched by the romantic names of the shipping companies they sailed for,
the Orient Line, Elder Dempster, the Pacific Steam Navigation Company
and the names of the ships they sailed in, the Otranto, the Orentes, the
Rena del Pacifico and Cunard’s Mauretania.
For generations, the sea and seafaring were deeply rooted in Liver-
pool’s working class culture, as Tony Lane, a former seafarer himself,
indicates in his oral histories of seafarers. He quotes Tony Santamera a
former galley boy who made his first trip from Liverpool in 1966:
As far back as I can remember I wanted to go to sea. I’d never
wanted to do anything else. There was the idea of travel and…
there was always sea-talk. There would be parties in the house

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 your recommendations

and there were always seamen who came and then people
would drop in who’d just come back from a trip…. All we ever
heard in the house was about ships and the sea, and I didn’t
know about anything else.

Like Tony Santamara, as a young boy I was conscious of the ebb and
flow of seamen arriving home with their presents for the family, then
after a few days departing on yet another trip. The homecoming was
celebrated with the extended family coming together in a local pub
until closing time, then returning to the house for a sing-a-long till the
early hours – the sort of family event that is poetically and powerfully
evoked in Terence Davies’s film, Distant Voices, Still Lives.
The romance of seafaring was enhanced at school, where classroom
walls displayed Millais’ The Boyhood of Raleigh, coloured photographs of
Cunard and P&O luxury liners, and a model of the Cutty Sark. The library
was stocked with the works of adventure storywriters such as ex-sea-
man Percy F. Westerman, the author of With Beatty at Jutland and The
Flying Submarine. The sea was part of daily life. Not far from my neigh-
bourhood were the north end docks and the river, ever busy with ships
loading and unloading cargoes to and from far-off places. There was the
Pier Head and Landing Stage where Trans-Atlantic liners were berthed
dwarfing the Mersey ferries, waiting for the tide to turn, and their ce-
lebrity passengers to embark.
In 2004 Liverpool City Council published a booklet, Literary Liverpool
– City of Storytellers, exploring the roots of Liverpool’s literary heritage,
and proposing a ‘canon’ of literary works by writers with Liverpool con-
nections in preparation for 2008. Mike Storey, former leader of the City
Council, wrote in the introduction: ‘Liverpool is a city of storytellers…
for centuries the ships on the Mersey brought home seafarers with
tales from around the world.’ It is disappointing then that lived ex-
periences of seafaring find little mention in the work of the twenty-six
writers included in Literary Liverpool. Of those mentioned only three
– Herman Melville (1819–1891), John Masefield (1878–1967) and Ni-
cholas Monsarrat (1910–1979) had credible seafaring backgrounds, and
only Monsarrat could claim family roots in the city.
Two writers eminently qualified for inclusion in Literary Liverpool
are George Garrett (1896–1966) and James Hanley (1901–1985). Both
were seafarers and dockers who followed in the footsteps of hundreds
of teenage boys from Liverpool who ran away to sea. Both suffered
the agonies of casual employment and experienced the horrors of the
1914–18 war. Both became writers of fiction into which they distilled
their experiences. Although the quality of their work was highly regard-
ed by the British literary establishment in the 1930s, and in Hanley’s
case, well into the 1970s and 80s, sadly they remain virtually unknown

59
 your recommendations

in their own city, hence their omission from Literary Liverpool.

Yet both wrote realistically about the city and its people during a
traumatic period of social change, particularly in the fictionalised ac-
counts of the strange relationship between the sea and the seafarer, and
how this relationship reverberated in family life.
On 27 February 1936, George Orwell took the road from Wigan to
Liverpool to meet a writer whose name he assumed was Matt Low and
whose essays on Shakespeare and Joseph Conrad had recently been
published in The Adelphi and The Shakespeare Survey. Orwell had read and
admired these as well as several short stories published by Low in The
Left Review and Penguin New Writing. Matt Low was actually Seacome-
born George Garrett. Apart from their respective political views, Orwell
and Garrett had much in common. As the Old Etonian mingled with
down-and-outs in London and Paris in the 1930s, so the ex-elementary
schoolboy Garrett had mingled with down-and-outs in South America
and the United States in the years prior to the outbreak of the Great
War. Just as Eric Blair adopted the pseudonym ‘George Orwell’ through-
out his writing career, so Garrett used the pseudonym ‘Matt Low’, an
obvious pun on his seafaring aspirations.
Garrett’s unfinished autobiography, Ten Years on the Parish traces his
life after leaving school at the age of thirteen, his successful attempt
to stow away to sea (after three failures), and an account of his first
voyage. He gives a vivid impressionistic account of the Liverpool docks
in 1913, the Dock Road dominated by warehouses and ‘gaudy public
houses’ the surrounding streets thronged with:
wagons and carts of different lengths and shapes… loaded
with everything from wet hides to new boots, chocolates to
deadly poisons, feathers to marble slabs, and gold images to
scrap iron. Everywhere there are ships; more steam than sail,
charging the air with smoke and noise.

This is a world that Garrett was desperate to belong to, ‘these men
(seafarers and dockers) are a race apart with a gate of their own.’ But
how was he to gain entry to this exciting culture of seafaring and dock
work?
His short story ‘Apostate’ draws upon his experiences of family strife
and schooling. Cuff, the story’s anti-hero is humiliated by his teacher
and beaten brutally by a visiting priest. Pupils at the dilapidated school
are beaten as a matter of routine as they struggle to memorise and un-
derstand the Church’s doctrinal teachings, and Cuff seems to symbolise
a generation of Liverpool working-class youth trapped in slum dwell-
ings, under-educated, with little prospects of finding work. As he dives
into the murky waters of the nearby canal to escape a further beating

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 your recommendations

from the priest, the reader is left to speculate on Cuff’s future. Will he,
like Garrett, take a leap towards freedom by stowing away on one of the
ships loading at the Liverpool docks?

Anthony Burgess in his introduction to Hanley’s controversial novel

Boy refers to Hanley as ‘The neglected genius of the English novel’,
an accolade conferred on the writer by The Times in its obituary after
his death (November 1985). Burgess goes on to point out that Hanley
‘remains that kind of novelist whose eligibility for the Nobel Prize for
Literature has become clear only posthumously. ‘Hanley’, he claimed
needs ‘worshipful advocates’ to salvage his work and establish his repu-
tation as one of Britain’s finest writers of the twentieth century.
Hanley served on merchant vessels until April 1917 when he jumped
ship at New Brunswick and enlisted in the Canadian army. In August
1918 serving in France he was a victim of a gas attack. After hospital
treatment in Toronto, he came home to Liverpool. Between 1919 and
1930 he returned to the sea, worked as a railway porter, took formal
piano lessons, and started to write short stories and articles. At sea
he read widely, especially the works of Russian and Irish writers. He
claimed that in his own writings he followed Chekhov’s advice that the
aim of fiction is absolute truth.
Like Garrett, Hanley brought his experience of working class life
in Liverpool during the 1920s and 1930s into his fiction. Schooling
and teachers, religion and sectarianism, poverty and politics, family
strife and the abuse of children, and of course the sea and seafarers
are themes common to both. But Hanley also introduced a psycho-
logical element into his fiction and in doing so shows the influence of
modernist writers, in particular James Joyce. In his novel Boy and his
five-volume saga of the Fury family, his narrative moves into the inner
psyche of his characters as he portrays the interplay of dream and of
conscious and subconscious reality, as a ‘stream of consciousness’.
His career as a writer got off to a controversial start with Boy (1931).
Valentine Cunningham offers a graphic summary of the novel:
What helps make Hanley’s Boy one of the period’s most af-
fective fictions is the sequence of incarcerations its youthful
hero is thrust into. Pressed by a harsh father to leave school
at thirteen (he was bereaved of his brother and sister in the
War), he becomes a de-scaler of ships’ boilers, a filthy, danger-
ous occupation. At one point inside a boiler that’s smelly and
very hot, he weeps in consternation… So he stows away in a
ship’s bunker-he’s discovered half-dead under the coal – only
to be oppressed by the terrible attentions of lustfully pawing
seamen and to catch syphilis in a brothel. Then very ill, deliri-

61
 your recommendations

ous, crying for his mother, he’s vengefully smothered by the

ship’s captain.

Reading Cunningham’s summary one can see why publication of the

book became one of the most controversial issues of the literary world
in Britain between the two world wars. Between 1931–36, there were
four editions, two expurgated and two unexpurgated. The 1934 edition
was withdrawn from sale. Ninety-nine copies were seized by the police
and burnt together with copies of Hanley’s short story of the first world
war ‘The German Prisoner’.
Hanley’s Furys saga consists of five novels: The Furys (1935), The
Secret Journey (1936), Our Time is Gone (1940), Winter Song (1950) and
An End and a Beginning (1958). The location of all five novels is the port
town Gelton, a fictional name for Liverpool. The Fury family live in Hat-
fields, a working-class area in the north end of the docklands, closely
resembling the district of Hanley’s family home. His description of the
district also serves as a metaphor for the character of the people who
live there:
The row of houses, whose fronts faced the long King’s Road,
was counted to be the oldest property in that neighbourhood.
Their rears faced the river Those thick back doors facing the
sea were like so many dogs, barking out their defiance of time
and change. They stood erect, solid as a rock. Immune. Sur-
rounding properties had been pulled down, new buildings
erected, and those in turn had surrended to the industrial
flood. But Hatfields remained erect.

The saga unfolds lifting the lid on family secrets and lies that include
a brutal murder, evictions, jealousies, infidelities and frustrated ambi-
tions.
In a short article it is difficult to do justice to the work of Garrett
and Hanley, particularly Hanley. He adopted various styles which can
sometimes make his work difficult and perhaps unappealing for some
readers. He wrote about a wide range of human experiences, from the
turmoils of the Fury family to the horrors of war in ’The German Pris-
oner’; from the poetic prose of The Welsh Sonata to the documentary Grey
Children. But it is perhaps his reputation as a ‘writer of the sea’ that
has brought him most acclaim from literary critics. Drift, The Hollow Sea,
Closed Harbour, Levine and Sailor’s Song, have led to comparisons between
Hanley’s novels with those of Joseph Conrad.
The time has come for Garrett and Hanley to be brought in from the
cold, for a reappraisal of their work, and for a recognition of their status
as outstanding contributors to the select band of writers that constitute
an authentic’Literary Liverpool’.

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 poetry

anna woodford

Fresco

Uncle Peter talked us through our third cathedral that day,

delivering the word of the guidebook. Christopher strode over our head
through a storm that flickered above the candles and pillars.
I picked out Christopher not by his peeling god-beard or staff
that was sunk into the murk of the river
but by the child he carried so heavily
though it looked like nothing; a bundle of light on his shoulders.

I might have thought of my father then

weighed down by kids and bills and a brush,
my father who wouldn’t fly, who bore
the name of the patron saint of travellers.
He would have been at home painting the hall
while I stared at the man painted into a river
who was struggling against the tide, uplifting me
to the beauty of the Florentine cathedral.

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 poetry

The Dead Are Always Looking Down On Us They Say

Tonight Uncle Len’s body bridges the river:

his feet are planted in Newcastle,
his hair mizzles in Gateshead,
beneath the arch of his back
boats have drifted like flowers, now
women with brailled legs and feather boas
stream across his raised torso.

I have come from the Crown,

the last old man’s pub on the Quayside
and am hanging on to a stranger’s
familiar arm when I stumble
across Len’s cast iron rainbow:
this is the place where he threw himself into the sky,
I can see now he might have made it to the other side.

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 reading lives

once

Andrew McNeillie

I n the infants life was gentle enough, though they struggled with
me, for a while, trying to make me use scissors in my right-hand,
but I am left-handed, and a pencil. How Miss Lewis pounded me in
the back when I broke the pencil.
They picked me to play Joseph in the nativity. It doesn’t get more
innocent than that, and a very unlikely choice, to pick a nervous boy.
So nervous was I that I not only knew my own part by heart, I knew
everyone else’s. When my mother rehearsed me, to try to build up my
confidence, I would repeat my opening lines, and add: ‘Then Mary
says… Then the First Shepherd says… Then I say… Then the Second or
the First or the Third Wise Man says...’ and so on and on until they’d all
had their say and the Christ child came once again to Colwyn. The best
Joseph they ever had, they said, as they always said. Be-robed in my sis-
ter’s dressing gown, it was my only thespian triumph ever and (barring
one other much later, in Synge’s Riders to the Sea) the only time I trod the
boards in my life.
We sang in English and we sang in Welsh, and also, sometimes ‘Non
nobis domine…’ etc, in Latin, and not always hymns. Pa D loved music,

65
 reading lives

with a vengeance, the vengeance being visited on us. He did the thing
properly, conducting us with a real ‘ivory’ baton. If we started at 9am,
it was not unheard of for us to be still at it at 11.30am, and not to be
dislodged but by protesting dinner ladies anticipating the siren. ‘Who
is Sylvia, what is she?…’ we’d warble, curious indeed as to who she
might be. Sorry to know it wasn’t Sylvia Hughes. Our ranks might be
thinned, as one or other Sylvia fainted, thudding down onto the rough
wood floor, and our singing suspended while her body was removed. Or,
after a boy was sick there was a hurried halt and fluster as one of the
staff put sawdust down, tipping it from a galvanised bucket, to absorb
the vomit. Those nearby stood clear, now feeling sick themselves, from
the sweet scent of sick and resin.
So our ranks were thinned and not perfectly serried by the end of
a session.
No translations were ever offered. I didn’t understand them. But I
loved the Welsh hymns best of all. It shows I didn’t lack discernment,
for nothing’s more rousing than a Welsh hymn. But the test piece of test
pieces for us at Pa D’s was an English hymn, ‘There is a green hill far
away’. Sometimes we would spend an hour on it, while Pa D got more
and more exercised about the fact that when we sang ‘without a city
wall’, the emphasis was all wrong, reflecting of course our incompre-
hension: why mention the city wall if there wasn’t one?
Up would come the vomit. Down the troops would go. Bash would
go the baton on the lectern. And bash, until, one memorable morning, it
broke, and for the following week a much cruder one was used, one you
could hardly take seriously, a clumsy thing, not at all the fine white im-
plement, with its pointed tip and little cork end for the maestro to grip,
with which we were accustomed to be kept in time. Even if we managed
to get the pitch of ‘with-out’ right, we had ‘o dearly, dearly, has he loved’
to come, and the intensity with which we were supposed to sing ‘dearly’
always cost us dear.
In spite of it all, as I say, I liked – and I still like – hymn singing,
the old hymns that is (however banal their words), and I loved Welsh
hymns best of all.
Most lessons were a great mystery to me, for quite a long time – for
far longer than might be considered ‘normal’ or average. I had misera-
ble difficulties learning. Perhaps I had what are now classed as ‘learning
difficulties’. At any rate, by any standard, I took a painful age to learn
to read. I found it a mystery and I’m not sure why. I found it hard to
connect words with their sounds. I looked at them and they seemed like
objects to me, opaque combinations from the alphabet, attractive but
meaningless, except I knew that they generally meant what you saw
in the picture above them. As long as there weren’t too many things

67
 reading lives

to choose from, that was fine. Otherwise they swam before my gaze
like fish in a tank. My progress was so slow that my father, an impa-
tient, hot-tempered man, took an interest in it. He was like Pa-D on the
home front, without the cane, but with far greater intensity of rage and
I suppose far more pervasive and intimate and so crueller authority.
What did I have in my head, sawdust? – he’d rant furiously. I am
sure this helped a great deal. But help or no, my progress through the
Beacon Reader series was painful. Book One about the wretched farmer
‘Old Lob’ had me dug in for the long haul and not just down to Christ-
mas. I was like those soldiers in their trenches in the Great War. The
longer it went on, the worse it got. The worse it got, the longer it went
on. In the process I suffered a kind of educational shell-shock. As for
arithmetic, I couldn’t even begin to spell it. Nothing seemed to add up,
except blushing and burning unhappiness, and fear. (I’m still deeply
challenged numerically.)
Words swam before my gaze. They were like the perch my father
kept in a fish tank in the backyard. Their world was a silent mouthing
world. They couldn’t say their letters either, but at least they were full
of life and a different, an absorbing, mystery. I could stand and stare at
them for half a morning at a time, feeding them earthworms and slaters
and other grubs I found under stones, watching them dart and turn
and vie with each other, bold, bright, green, dark barred, ruddy-finned,
spiky hump-backs, darting over the gravel bed of the tank. The word for
them: ‘perch’ – so odd after all, paradoxically sedentary, or more than
five yards longer than any perch you saw. What sense is one to make of
words? What not? The word is your oyster.
Then one winter the tank froze. The thaw came. The tank burst and
the poor perch perished. Their silence now complete, they were like that
8lb pike my father caught and for half a day perhaps, but it seemed for
ever, had hanging on a meat-hook from the cistern in the disused outside
lavatory. It seemed to me that I peeped in at that door a thousand times
to hear what the pike had to say out of his big unfunny grin – it would
have been a she in fact, as the bigger pike are – a dark, browny fish the
way an old one is, scales now dulled, eye set matt, before being cut up
into lengths and cutlets. Pike a good word for a stiff fish, like a pikestaff.
The pike I would know on the end of my line were greenish, barred and
spotted, with pale bellies, lean young fish, not monsters. Though they
spoke volumes to me, hooked from the Bladnoch below Crouse Farm,
the Bladnoch in which it was said there were pike big enough to take
the leg off a drowning horse.
I am now more or less as literate as the next person. I have earned
my living scribbling, one way, or another, for most of my adult life. It
could also be said I have lived for language and the word, quite wildly,

68
 reading lives

to my cost now, as well as to my gain if not to my profit, more than most

people I know, following my muse. For this reason this miserable period
in my education intrigues me. It intrigues me all the more that when
at last I started reading, sometime again when I was eight, I did so as
it were overnight, from nought to top speed. The thaw came and I was
free at last.
So the age of eight was a turning point, a seamark in my voyage.
What had been going on meanwhile? What had not been going on? I
am an eye. Stare at the world. Stare at the word. What a queer thing it
is. What a queer fish that one is. What is it? A fish called ‘perch’. What
is it doing, especially in oh so mutable, compounding and confounding
Welsh? Draenogiad… the word for perch fish, meaning: hedgehog head
[draen = thorn, draenog = hedgehog, iad = pate or skull or head]). Pen-
hwyad… the word for pike, meaning: duck head [pen = head, hwyad =
duck]). How inspired that duck-head, how graphic and true. Don’t ask
me which tongue I’d prefer to think and live in. Duck-heads fond of a
duckling dinner too.
Today I like my language textured and sprung. In poetry I like it to
rhyme and half rhyme and alliterate and sing and delay about itself.
Vertical a poem is and I like the path that winds down the mountain to
go this way and that (as did John Donne, a Welshman some say, who
profess to know), by way of vertiginous caesurae too. In prose also I
want and need it to resist its horizontal, its linear path, to be rhythmic,
and to hark back, with elliptical back-throws, parenthetical whirlpools
and eddies, bightsome in the aftergate, as Hugh MacDiarmid put it. So
for as long as I can remember have I always.
I like to sound words with the eye. I don’t say them audibly but
say the words to myself as I read. Perhaps something in me wanted
that then, or registered it even in such simple beginning phrases and
sentences, and it got in the way of reading? Or perhaps it all was just
delayed development of my wiring, complicated by attendant anxiety?
Perhaps this preference for textured language is also a Welsh thing, a
thing in my case derived from Welsh-in-English, partly alliterative, gen-
erally alien to English formations, with some residual trace about it that
English is foreign in construction and sounding to the ear, if not in my
case in vocabulary.
While I admire prose that’s plain and even, simple, unaccented,
measured, disinterested, I do love it to be deep and crisp and uneven,
energetic and opinionated. I hate safety-first. I like sentences to go off at
a tangent, or to have a little touch of opacity bred of thought’s resistance
to the expected, like jack-frost at the window, denying transparency.
Such as now no one in our lost archipelago knows anything about. So
frost-proof has our centrally-heated world become, so uninflected, so

69
 reading lives

flat, so bland. I nearly wrote illiterate. How deprived you westerners and
northerners are who have never woken to the ice fern-lands and frozen
forests, the deep tundras, the Siberias in the window pane, as you take
the temperature of the lino through your bare toes. Life should not be
choked with cotton wool, as for the immortal wretched of the earth it
is not. Stare at the word. What might it not do? What might you not do
with it? Step up and speak. Spare not a thought for the chorus of doubt
and disagreement or the disciples of perfection. All that will always look
after itself.
Whatever the nature of my encounter with the word, the thing
missing from the account is day-dreaming. All children are great day-
dreamers, their minds always at play. (What are you being?… What are
you being? my two-and-a-half-year-old granddaughter demands excit-
edly to know of me, when I get down on all fours. A tiger, I decide,
having up to that point thought I was being just myself.) For my part,
when pushed and punished for my slowness, when struggling, I diluted
my misery and confusion, and only made things worse, by deliberate
day-dreaming. I threw the switch on my heart’s ejector seat. My eyes
skimmed off the page and my gaze turned inward in no time and I was
away. The more I stared out the more I stared in. In fact day-dreaming
has been my modus operandi ever since. Just so it invents this page
with its illogical optimism and momentum, and air of necessity.
My father was fierce but only meant his cruelties in the heat of the
moment. We had many and frequent stormy episodes, with him ranting
and raging at something, an inability to read, a pair of new shoes scuffed
and battered on their first day out, or the need for new shoes in the first
place, as if you could help your feet growing, a terrible school report
(very commonly in my case), something and nothing, money, and work,
Ratcliffe’s, and writing books, writing and writing in the middle of the
family: hammer, hammer, hammer of the two-finger typewriter rattling
and thumping and dancing a jig, as with a swipe he raced the car-
riage back, spawning millions of words, on the fold-down bureau, in the
alcove under the hot-water tank, below the window, beside the back-
yard where with a rash kick of small hard ball I once shattered the glass
about his head.
But I got off lightly. An evening huddled in the dark on the stairs,
on the rust carpet, with mother failing again to pack our bags and leave.
I had a friend for whom a broken window meant the strap and the
wooden spoon on his legs and three or four hours in the ‘spence’, or
under-stair cupboard, dark as a coalhole, and stale with the odour of gas
that hung about the meter. Nor did the boys I knew have a father who
wrote stories you’d hear on the radio, one about a boy called Andrew, a
man who wrote books and was, to a proud boy at least, different from

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 reading lives

everyone else, in this and many another respect. A man who loved the
written word and loved no less to fish for trout.
But he did keep us a little strapped for cash. Not that we wanted for
anything but that he made sure we did. In the fiscal regime my father
oversaw, we McNeillie children had much less pocket money than most
of our friends, with fewer and smaller increases. We made do. It was
good for us. We weren’t ground down as were many boys I knew at
school, some of them heartbreakingly, living in post-war prefabs by the
gasworks, fathers away, in the merchant marine or the forces, or just
absent without leave. But to my shame I remember once at a hardware
counter stealing a Christmas present for my father, for want of enough
to buy a little green millstone, with a red handle and a bracket to fix it
to a bench, having obtained from a bran-tub in the village hall, for all I
had, bars of soap for my mother.
I found that millstone, still functional, the stone worn down low,
among my father’s tools, when he died. Like a ghost, the millstone
round the neck of my childish guilt, stared at me, questioning my char-
acter.
So truth will out. And here it is, for a wonder, guilt become shame
at last.

71
poetry

andrew mcNeillie

Schooling

Pay attention at the back there.

But the back of the mind knows better.
If it didn’t where would I be,
and who, empty of all poetry?

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 reading lives

reading in reality

Katie Peters

M y involvement with Get Into Reading began in

November 2006 when I started reading with
dementia patients in a local care home. I have
been struck by my experiences of reading to
and with individuals, some of whom have lost
any sense of who and where they are, but can recite the words of a poem
they learnt at school 70 years ago.
The group is open to residents and visitors to the day centre attached
to the home and it meets twice weekly. Initially I felt anxious about how
the group would work and whether people would like the material I
had chosen. And there were moments when I wondered if this project
was a good idea at all, times when people didn’t respond in any way to
the short story I had just read, or got up and walked away because they
simply weren’t interested.
The change came during one session early on when I handed out
copies of ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’ by William Wordsworth. Several
people in the group read the first line aloud and then put the poem
down, and to my surprise began reciting the rest of it without looking at
it. The familiarity of the poem, its rhyme and rhythm seemed to strike a
chord. ‘We know this one, we learnt it in school’ they told me.
One lady had been very apprehensive about the group up until this
point, telling her friend ‘They’re here to educate us!’ This was a turning

73
 reading lives

point for her however as she seemed to understand that I had no inten-
tion of trying to educate her, that I wanted to enjoy the poems with her.
Now she loves coming to the group. Shortly after this her husband
met me as I was leaving and told me ‘I don’t like having to leave her, but
if she stays at home she just sits and doesn’t do anything’. Another time
he met me he seemed very excited. ‘She was reading the poems’, he
said. ‘She never reads anything anymore. She loved reading, but now…
She picks up a paper like, but she puts it straight down again because
it’s too hard. But she loves the poetry group. I came in the other day and
she was sat reading the poem you gave her to bring home.’ She often
asks to keep the poems she likes and told me recently ‘I have my little
stash that I keep upstairs and when it’s quiet I can go and read them
by myself.’
In a group session a few weeks ago we read ‘Beer’ by George Arnold.
When we had finished, this lady said, ‘I loved it. It gave you the length
as well as the words and you felt you didn’t have to rush’. I re-read the
line about ‘golden moments’ which echoes this idea of not rushing, and
she said ‘and they are special moments, especially if you haven’t read
for weeks and then you read this here and it touches you and you realise
how much you have been longing for it really. I love poetry’
Interestingly, poetry has continued to receive a completely differ-
ent reaction to the short stories and chunks of prose I attempted near
the beginning of the project. There is something about the poems, the
way they sound and move (everyone prefers poems with a clear rhythm
and rhyme scheme) but also in the fact that each line is full of meaning
which can be pondered and considered over a period of time, rather
than got at instantly. Here is a short example from the final stanza of ‘I
wandered lonely as a cloud’:
For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude.

You can appreciate the instant sound and rhythm of the words, but as
they are read, that rhythm slows you down, and draws your attention
to the words themselves and to their meaning. I believe this is a big part
of what appeals to the people I am working with. Poetry provides the
opportunity to hold a thought together through time.
Often in the discussions we have about a poem, people re-read one
particular line several times over. After reading ‘Returning, we hear the
larks’ by Issac Rosenberg a resident instinctively re-read the part which
reads ‘Joy, joy, strange joy’. She was perplexed by the idea of strange joy
and throughout the discussion kept returning to this idea, which seems

74
 reading lives

to be at the heart of the poem. I think it is interesting that she should

have picked up on this straight away, and wanted to stay with it and
think about it.
So much of the communication we have with people is fleeting and,
in the care system, where time is such a precious commodity, exchanges
are often hurried. The staff at the care home are fantastic but realisti-
cally they do not have the opportunity to really engage with patients
and interactions operate under this time pressure. With these poems,
there is a chance to stop for a moment and hold onto the words and un-
derstand the meaning.
And the experience is not a solitary one. Many people in the care
home have talked to me about loneliness. It can be difficult for residents
to hold meaningful conversations with one another, lost as they are in
their own world and way of understanding it. I have observed dialogues
where the exchanges bear no relation to each other, two separate con-
versations held together by intonation only.
In the reading group however instead of disparate, disconnected con-
versations, connections are made, with the poem acting as the shared
point of focus. During one session where we looked at war poetry we
read ‘February Afternoon’ by Edward Thomas. People liked the lines:
Time swims before me, making as a day
A thousand years…

Two ladies were deep in conversation and then one turned to the group
and said ‘You’ve hit it on the head because that is just how we were
feeling this morning!’ Another lady replied ‘Ah yes, but then you look
back over your life and it’s hard to believe it lasted more than a few
minutes, it went so fast!’ We talked about this for a while and one group
member suddenly said ‘I understand now. Sometimes in the afternoon
when you try and talk about something it doesn’t drop – then you talk
about it here and it sinks in and you can understand. I loved the way
he puts something down here that we can read about and know some-
thing of’.
People listened to one another and heard what the other person
was saying. They encouraged one another with the reading and I have
noticed that they love most of all, to read aloud altogether, sharing the
reading in the purest sense. This means that less confident readers can
join in too without any pressure.
On a number of occasions at the end of the sessions when we have
finished reading and are having a cup of tea, people have suddenly come
out with a verse or line from a poem that they were taught at school
many years ago. One patient remembered the first stanza of ‘The Slave’s
Dream’ by Longfellow. Another recalled ‘Silver’ by Walter De La Mare.

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 reading lives

A quiet gentleman came out with a Norwegian poem, learnt during his
years in the Navy. He then translated it into English for us and told
us about his adventures and his affection for Norwegian people. It is
interesting that this happens after we have finished, that the rhythm
and rhyme seem to continue moving through peoples’ minds after the
reading itself is over, and that they have the power to regather these
distant memories.
Nurses report that patients seem less anxious and agitated after ses-
sions. One lady ate a meal for the first time in three days after a session.
Carers and family members visiting the home often take a keen interest
in the poems and take a copy to read again to those they are visiting.
Many of these people are not natural readers and have been surprised
by how persuasive the actuality of it is.
This is a simple way of involving more people in the work. Leaving
poems in the home itself and encouraging staff, family and friends to
take an active role in reading them with patients whenever they have
the opportunity means that they too can share in the experience. (I have
seen a gentleman reading a sonnet to his wife, who is now a resident at
the care home, and talking to her about their own wedding day.)
Here at the Reader Organisation we would like to see this sort of ac-
tivity in every care home in the UK and believe this is perfectly possible
through a system of trained and supported volunteers. If you would like
to know any more about this please do have a look at our website.

http://www.thereader.co.uk

76
 poetry

michael o’Neill

Appearances

‘Appearances’, he snorts
and who can blame him? You sift through days –
so busy, so important, so unreal;
only the oddest rag of circumstance
still eddies in the memory.
The solace is that little stays
to haunt or to reproach, except the lack of things
to haunt or to reproach ... Appearances,
appearances - your daughter, fifteen,
stowed in the back seat, in a spiked haze.
Now that upset you and you kept vigil
beside her bed; waking her twice an hour
to help her navigate the druggy maze,
you prayed appearances would be resumed

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 poetry

Sunday Morning

Swigging your coffee,

you flick through an old notebook:
half-lines collide with earnest notes to self
and a Venetian gag
(‘Better to keep your mouth shut and appear stupid
than open it and remove all doubt’).
Outside, Princes Street is sprinkled
with scarved Christmas shoppers ...
And it lies
before you, not unlike a far field
under snow, an unfolded flatness
shining and curving towards the horizon ...

You want to give it a name –

your ‘sense of the past’, a ‘spot of time’ even –
but before you know it, it’s in your head,
an underground voice you’d been shutting out:
Why don’t you walk towards me, lose yourself
in that dimension always beckoning,
always receding?
And the brightness melts,
and the impermeable light of a day
with a date and things to do
takes over, falls on your page
like a censor’s stamp
or a grace of sorts.

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 poetry

Bengal Night

Pertly, a petrifying dream, she glides beside me.

Seven or so. ‘Foreign currency?
American dollar? English pound?’ ‘Controlled by goons’,
I’m assured later. In the pre-dawn heat,

I’ve emerged luggageless from Kolkata airport

where a man who speaks no English holds a sign,
then whisks me away till the girl stops beseeching.
His friend drives, foot right down.

Bouncing off the car, a stray dog

emits a cry of shocked, blood-freezing pain
and is lost amidst the potholes as on we batter
past small fires, crouched forms and shells of houses I beg

whatever god presides here at night not to allow

people to live in. Soon we roar down emptied Park Street,
take a left and blast the horn …
The gate
opens, allotting me my room, the gang

of strident crows sweeping from roof to tree,

the silence and the service, and the Raj
seeping its ghosts from portraits and from shy
motions of the head throughout the Club,

while out there, night after night, a girl,

long since vanished from the wing-mirror,
mimics with angelic pitch the mumble
of one more visitor’s appalled rejection.

79
Readers connect
with

Oxford World’s classics

Rudyard Kipling
kim

It is predictable that this choice will expose our panel’s prejudices just
when they pride themselves on avoiding stereotyped agendas. Kipling!
He is always supposed to be The Great Imperialist. But in this novel,
published in 1901, India is not for Kipling some colonial outpost but
the very centre of the universe in all its generous and unpredictable va-
rieties. The hero is the young adventurer Kimball O’Hara – orphaned
son of a drunken Irish sergeant, left in the care of
an Indian guardian, growing up as a mixed-race,
street-wise celebrant of the multitudinous life of
the place. Among his associates on the one hand is
the worldly Mahbub Ali, a horse dealer and British
agent in the ‘great game’ of almost comic espio-
nage; on the other a Tibetan lama, a naïve and
aged holy man in final quest of a sacred river. It is
the unlikely relationship between Kim, so relishing
of this world, and the other-worldly fool/saint that
is the most beautiful part of the book. It’s not like
E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India (1924), where the
caves are empty and the words are hollow: in Kim
the world is full of meaning and feeling. Here, for
example, is Kim recovering after traumatic illness:
He did not want to cry, – had never felt less like crying in his
life, – but of a sudden easy, stupid tears trickled down his
nose, and with an almost audible click he felt the wheels of
his being lock up anew on the world without. Things that rode
meaningless on the eyeball an instant before slid into proper
proportion. Roads were meant to be walked upon, houses to
be lived in, cattle to be driven, fields to be tilled, and men and
women to be talked to. They were all real and true – solidly
planted upon the feet. (chapter 15)

‘To be talked to’! That penultimate sentence is like the grammar of life.

80
 THE jury

Lynne Hatwell (dovegreyreader) is a Devon-based com-

munity nurse
Kipling offers an opportunity to experience coloni-
al India intimately with even more rippling beneath
the surface, yet the writing often felt inaccessible,
its sense of purpose remote, The book has not cap-
tured my imagination as I had hoped it might.
*

Matthew Hayes, a wine-broker for a Burgandy négo-

ciant, lives near Dijon with his wife and three children
An early Edwardian novel on the Raj, Kim is surprising-
ly sympathetic to India and its people. The Indian-ness
of the central characters is essential to the success of
‘the Game’. Kim is white, admittedly, but brought up
amongst the wonder and chaos of India, his hybrid
character gives him his promise and talent.
***
Drummond Moir, once of Edinburgh, works for a London-
based publisher
What makes Kim special – aside from its shrewd,
headstrong and curious protagonist – is that despite
the lama’s ideals about ‘two souls seeking escape’,
their quest for individual enlightenment culminates
in something even more inspiring – a tender, recip-
rocal, and emphatically human, love.
****

Tom Sperlinger directs English courses for Lifelong Learn-

ing at Bristol University
I first bought Kim in 2002, but got bogged down in
the first 20 pages. I’m sorry it took me so long to try
again. I loved it this time – it’s an adventure story, full
of wisdom.
****

Sarah Turvey runs reading groups in London prisons

Kim traces the journey of its boy-hero through the
landscapes and complex politics of British India.
Kim himself is both a foul-mouthed street urchin and
loving disciple to an aged Tibetan monk. The book is
filled with exotic characters and the vivid textures of
India – its languages, religions, food and dress.
***

STAR RATINGS
*****  one of best books I’ve ever read   **  worth reading
****  one of the best I’ve read this year   *  not for me but worth trying
***  highly recommended   0  don’t bother

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 good Books

reviews

Eleven Kinds of Loneliness by Richard Yates

Vintage. EAN
ISBN 9780099518570
A writer of suburban realism, Richard Yates’ novels and short stories
paint a bleak picture of 1950’s America in which the large hopes and
dreams of ordinary people too often end in small, sad failures. Eleven
Kinds of Loneliness is a collection of short stories worth reading for their
tough intensity. He writes plainly, without flashiness of un-heroic people
stuck in mundane office jobs, small town schools, isolation hospitals and
loveless marriages. He does not bring his stories to redemptive endings,
rather his people are left to face a comfortless future after exacting a
full look at the worst. The strength of Yates is the life in his characters
and his affection for the ones who struggle to do their best despite their
faults. There are no laughs but the stories are compelling and once you
have read one, you will go straight to the next.

Angela Macmillan

Dog Years by Mark Doty

need to get these detials
ISBN XXXXXXX
This moving book – handkerchiefs, more handkerchiefs – is it memoir?
love 
story? meditation? poem? portrait? – is simply about the lives and
deaths 
of two very different and very beloved dogs. If you don’t get
why people have 
animals, read and understand. If you love a dog, this
is strong medicine 
for mortality. It is a love story. It is possibly the most
love I’ve ever 
experienced in a book.

Jane Davis

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letters
Dear Reader,
I want to join in with the praise of Wordsworth in Reader 29. Recently
I was being driven by a friend to see The Redwoods, along a highway
in Northern California, when I had a Eureka moment! The road wound
through the most magnificent scenery – mountains and forests and
clear areas of pasture. The bends in the highway however, were such
that there was an amazing change of scene round every corner. This
gave, at times, a quite unnerving impression that it was the mountains
that were moving and that we in the car were stationary. The strength of
the sensation was such that I had to look away every now and again to
remind myself that it was an optical illusion. It came to my mind then
that I knew exactly how the child Wordsworth felt as a child skating
‘When we had given our bodies to the wind’:

then at once
Have I, reclining back upon my heels,
Stopp’d short, yet still the solitary Cliffs
Wheeled by me, even as if the earth had roll’d
With visible motion her diurnal round;
Behind me did they stretch in solemn train
Feebler and feebler, and I stood and watch’d
Till all was tranquil as a dreamless sleep.
Marjorie Tuohy
Cheshire

Dear Reader,
Erica Wagner’s poem ‘Ox Heart’ (Reader 28) made me sit up and take
notice. Why did an obviously very talented lady choose such a subject
to enthuse about? Even she however had second thoughts, wondering
‘What she had opened with her knife / And what she might become’. As
a practising veterinary surgeon I listened to the hearts of various animals
and wondered what power drives this essential organ. I have felt the
bovine heart pumping on the other side of the stomach wall and the dia-
phragm during a rumenotomy operation, and still the motivation remains
a mystery. The heart is all muscle, as the poet correctly states, but is clas-
sified as offal and possibly therein lies the reason for its lack of popularity
in culinary terms. The similarity between the hearts of man and pig have
stimulated research by the medical profession of the possibility of using
the porcine heart as a replacement for the human organ. Congratulations
to Erica Wagner. She has brought together in her short poem, at least to
my mind, cardiac surgery, butchery and creation all in one thought fold.
Alun Jones
Denbighshire

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your regulars

our spy in ny
no country for old men

Enid Stubin

waiting on final version -- Will email it

through/post it very very shortly

p.84-86

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your regulars

85
your regulars

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 your regulars

London Eye
page to screen

H ard on the heels of a Jane Austen fest in which all

her books were adapted for television for the second,
third, even fourth time, brand spanking new versions
of Little Dorrit and Tess of the D’Urbervilles will soon light
up our television screens. Then, in good time, Jane
Eyre, Wuthering Heights (which was to star teeny tiny Natalie Portman
until someone thought better of it) and Middlemarch, adapted by the ir-
repressible Andrew Davies for a second time, will appear on the silver
screen. Whether or not you think any or all of these projects are particu-
larly good ideas, its clear that adaptations of the classics are big business.
And of course, those in the book trade can’t afford to be picky.
When we’re battling for attention alongside television, films, games
consoles and the internet, publishers are delighted when these alterna-
tive forms of entertainment inadvertently lend our sales force a helping
hand. Film tie-ins – which are normally simply the book with the film
poster on the jacket – can really boost the sales of new and established
authors. The recent Oscar nominated film of Ian McEwan’s Atonement
sent both the film tie-in edition and the standard edition of the book
rocketing into the top-ten bestseller lists. Meryl Streep helped raise The
Devil Wears Prada out of the rank and file of common chick lit, and when
a few inspired people finally convinced someone at the BBC to take on
Cranford it was a very merry Christmas for Gaskell fans and publishers.
But it is not always an easy partnership: for a start, film companies
and publishers work on very different schedules. The life of a paperback,
in particular the search for a jacket image, can begin about a year before
it is published: it must appear in sales catalogues around the world, and
the sales reps begin selling to bookshops months before the book will

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appear on the shelves. But film production and distribution companies

don’t decide on a release date, never mind their final poster artwork,
until very late in the game. Publishers and authors might be delighted
to hear that an adaptation of one of their books has been made, only to
find that adaptation shelved, slated, or sent straight to DVD. Occasion-
ally the producers don’t realise they are making an adaptation. There’s a
well-known story about an American film company who were interested
in investing in the BBC series of Pride and Prejudice, but were disappoint-
ed to find the author wouldn’t be available for book-signings. Or they
can be too enthusiastic, so proud of their script that they will cheerfully
propose a ‘novelisation’ – turn the book into a film and then back into a
book again, to the sound of the original author spinning in the grave.
When things go well, of course, the book and the author can achieve
a level of stardom – and sales – that are almost equal to an appear-
ance in the Richard and Judy book club. But why is it always the same
authors? I met a guy from a film company recently, and he confirmed a
suspicion that I have long held. It’s all about the brand.
Dickens and Austen are both brands, the Coca Cola and Cadbury of
the classic adaptation world; Oliver Twist is probably a brand, Mansfield
Park probably isn’t; Winnie the Pooh is an obvious brand (though prob-
ably via Disney rather than Alan Bennet) but A. A. Milne is certainly
not; Dracula and Frankenstein leave their creators trailing, though Conan
Doyle is gaining on his detective; and of Harry Potter, nothing else need
be said. Perhaps the brand authors and books deserve their standing:
most scriptwriters would give their left arm to be able to draw charac-
ters as various and sparkling as those in Dickens; because Jane Eyre is
so full of soul and heart we will be drawn time and time again to see her
embodied. Apparently crime doesn’t work on the big screen, but when
Agatha Christie created Poirot and Miss Marple she created a permanent
slot in Sunday night television programming. But as with any other busi-
ness, the big brands make it hard for others to get any recognition. What
about a dollop more of Trollope? Why is Wilkie Collins always passed
over for Dickens? Was everyone too embarrassed by the naked wrestling
in the last adaptation of Women in Love to ever approach D.H. Lawrence
again? Is everyone terrified of Tolstoy? Too awed by the musical of Les
Miserables? I doubt that temerity can be the answer – you only have to
remember Andrew Lloyd Webber’s abandoned musical of The Master and
Margarita or 20th Century Fox’s upcoming big screen Paradise Lost.
Perhaps you think that the more intrepid scriptwriters had better
keep their paws off these authors or books I’ve mentioned, and spare
them the possible indignities of bad casting, anaemic scripts and that
apparently compulsory sexy-scene-in-the-rain. If you have any sugges-
tions (or concerns) do let me know, and it makes a great parlour-game
while we’re waiting for Middlemarch to hit the multiplexes.

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not holiday reading

dostoevsky, the idiot

Jane Davis

G etting into a novel is at first a one- and then

suddenly a two-way process. You have it in
your hand, this new (currently closed) world.
You open at the first page and, often, the sen-
tences seem to lie off at a distance, mere words
on a page, while the characters and places they talk of are stark un-
knowns: you feel – well I do, often – a bit resistant. I am writing this
as I start reading The Idiot, by Fydor Dostoevsky. A novel like this seems
at first armoured in a casing designed to keep you out; long sentences,
complex syntax, big vocabulary, or just the Russian names, the strange-
ness of it all. You don’t know it. You feel unwilling.
Here I am in a real chair in a real (and distracting) world and simul-
taneously on the train to Petersburg trying to hold these new characters
– the Prince, Rogozhin, Lebedev – differentiated and apart in my im-
agination, waiting for the key which will begin to effect the magic of
identification: the book becoming mine. I am in this room in the Tarn
Valley, France, and on the Warsaw-Petersburg train at daybreak feeling
the cold and crowdedness of the third-class carriage. But already, some-
where in the middle of voicing my discontent, the language which
seemed so merely word-like a few moments ago is starting to workits
live-it film-magic: I am both watching and in some sense being the
young men at the centre of the scene:

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Both young men, both travelling light, both plainly dressed,

both with rather striking features, and both at length desirous
of engaging each other in conversation. Had each been aware
of what was remarkable about the other at that particular
moment, they would naturally have marvelled that chance
had so curiously placed them opposite one another in a third-
class carriage of the Warsaw-Petersburg train.

The fifth iteration of the word ‘both’ is the natural culmination of all
the others, and the product, too, of time: ‘at length’ they are desirous
of striking up a conversation, but only once all those similarities have
been clocked and processed. I recognise it. It is not that I have been on
such a train, or worn the same kind of clothes as these young men.
Reading recognition is not about the peculiarities of place and time but
rather, about the underlying structures of experience. I am thinking of
children’s stories, folk tales. As a child I never was lost in the forest,
pursued by a wolf, met by a dog with eyes as big as saucers… yet those
stories did their magic on me by matching something as it were in the
structure of experience: primitive fears, primitive triumphs.
So it’s not that I am indentifying with the Prince – a single, slight-
ly bonkers, Russian male of aristocratic descent (no, that’s not me)
– rather that I am recognising the inner process whereby we find our-
selves wanting to strike up a conversation with a stranger. At this point
reading feels like matching tiny fragments of reality in the book to my
own stock of experienced, or possibly imagined, realities. The more
easily I make matches, the more at home I am in the book.
*
Am I particularly easily distracted or inattentive? I have had to read
the opening chapter twice, just to get fixed in my head who is who,
what is happening, and why. The first time I skated over the story of
the diamond earrings – rushing on with the narrative – only at the
end of the chapter to discover that I needed to pay attention to those
jewels. Re-reading, I’m now puzzled by the thing that so attracted me
at the beginning: the sense of connection between Rogozhin and Prince
Mishkin. Because despite all those ‘boths’ these are two very differ-
ent men. Prince Mishkin, impoverished and physically ill, is naïve and
trusting. Rogozhin seems stronger, much more a man of this world but
– is he spiritually sick? His easy adoption of the pen-pusher Lebedev is
disturbing, as if a powerful man wants someone to beat and lord it over.
And Lebedev? He smells money and power and wants to be close to
that. It’s horrible – it smells of rot, but I’m interested. I remember this
feeling from Crime and Punishment and all at once I know where I am.
I’m feeling relatively confident as I put the book down.

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 your regulars

*
Then Chapter Two starts somewhere else, with someone else – with
General Yepanchin – and I am conscious of irritation and inertia: I don’t
want to start again in another place. It is like having to climb out and
re-enter the pool just at the point where you had begun to acclimatise
to the cold. I realise I am waiting for more of Prince Mishkin. Is reading
really this simple, this childlike?
And now here he comes, to the house of the General. The scene starts
like something from Dickens, as a sophisticated servant puts down the
naïve Prince. They speak, as it were, different languages. Indeed the fact
that the Prince is willing to speak to the servant at all is a different lan-
guage and one that offends the servant by breaking the code by which
he must live. And yet, as the Prince speaks, the two become men, for the
servant is interested , as many of us would be, in how other countries do
things differently. I’m going along with it, at this point, waiting, really.
And then the Prince suddenly speaks of his most affecting personal ex-
periences and we are in the deep end: what happens to consciousness
for a condemned criminal at the moment of his death:
Take a soldier and put him in front of a cannon in battle and
fire at him and he will still hope, but read the same soldier his
death sentence for certain, and he will go mad or burst out
crying. Who says that human nature is capable of bearing this
without madness? … No, you can’t treat a man like that!

The narrative pull (interesting, but not overpoweringly so) seems to be

on the horizontal plane. You go willingly or reluctantly, quick or slow,
along with it. But then there are these moments of depth which create a
different dimension. You plunge down a vertical drop. Is the compelling
force of reading to do with the moment when there is a meshing of one
of these vertical moments with some personal centre of feeling?
*
The next day I am being pulled along – rushing – by the story of Totsky
and Nastasya Fillipovna. He spotted her when she was an orphaned
child, predicted her beauty, had her educated, housed and socially
trained to become his mistress. Totsky now wishes to marry – Nastasya
must be abandoned. And suddenly she is no longer a merely a beautiful
and amusing girl:
No, it was an extraordinary and startling creature who sat
laughing in front of him now, stinging him with venomous
taunts as she told him straight to his face that in her heart
she had never held him in anything but the most profound
contempt, contempt verging on nausea, which had begun

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immediately after her initial shock and surprise. This new

woman declared that she was perfectly indifferent whether,
when or whom he married, but that she had come to prevent
this union out of sheer spite, for the reason that she felt like
it and consequently so it must be, ‘if only so I can laugh at you
to my heart’s content, because now at last I want to laugh as
well.’
That, at least, was how she put it; all that was in her heart
she perhaps did not express.

The book is no longer something I hold in my hand: it seems more

like something which has opened me as I imagine beyond the narra-
tive – that orphaned girl growing up, groomed, as we would say now,
to accept the visiting gentleman as a lover, as something to be looked
forward to, something to break the lonely world of hired women (the
governess, the maid) in which she is a sort of prisoner. And then ’the
contempt verging on nausea, which had begun immediately after her
initial shock and surprise.’ This is a tactful nineteenth-century way of
saying she has been sexually exploited. It is no wonder Nastasya wants
her revenge. I’m interested that Dostoevsky sees more than that strong
surface: ‘all that was in her heart she perhaps did not express.’ This is
where tact grows psychologically acute. He does not say what it is that
is in her heart (as perhaps she cannot either) but the confusion of feel-
ings that remain with the abused and now socially inconvenient young
woman are present. I read the words (but am no longer really conscious
of them as words, I am simply in it), and beyond the words, I am creat-
ing (it feels more like remembering or uncovering) the back story of her
previous life – her growing up in that house with its maid and govern-
ess, the visiting man.
The process I’m describing here took seconds – perhaps less – to
happen as I read. It seemed simultaneous with the reading of the words,
as if in one’s mind many levels of creative neuron-connecting activity
were happening at once.
The strong, almost physical aversion I felt at the very beginning has
gone away without my noticing the change. I am no longer moved by a
compelling desire to get up and walk around, get a cushion or a drink,
check what my companion is doing, look at the view. Now I’m deep
in the book for what seem long periods at a time – how long? Half an
hour? Two hours? Too deep in to remember to take these notes or notice
what is happening to me. When I remember to start noticing again I’ve
read more than a hundred pages. I’m into it now.

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ask the reader

Brian Nellist

As a reader I am always impressed by the assurance with which

Q the essays, stories and novels I read begin because when I try
to write myself (admittedly only short stories) somehow I can
never find the right place to start from. Either everything comes out to-
gether in a clogged mass or I find something so trivial that I fall asleep
myself while tediously spelling it out. Have you any suggestions?

Well, I was wondering what to write about this time myself

A when you asked that question. I’m certainly not going to say, sit
down quietly and sort things out with patience and calm. You
have to accept the way your mind reacts and make use of it as a strength
instead of a weakness. Too often we are bullied by the linear model of
thinking as though we start with A and proceed through the alphabeti-
cal series in search of the inevitable Z. Actually before A there is always
another letter, q, the question that starts us off, even if that is subse-
quently buried because when we write we find other things we want
to say. Often the anxiety that is holding us up is what we really should
be writing about. In George Gissing’s bleak, worried, perceptive novel
The New Grub Street the central figure Edward Reardon is a gifted novel-
ist who needs time and space to write but the pressures of the market,
the need to feed his family, induce a depression which prevents him
from finding the beginning for his next book. He starts a story, main-
tains momentum for a couple of days and then thinks it isn’t as good as
another opening he had earlier discarded. He returns to that one only in
a fret to reject it again and start a third which is then also ditched. That
assurance you recognise in the books you read may conceal just such

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uncertainty in the writer and may have seemed quite arbitrary when
they wrote it. Reardon never does solve his problem but Gissing does,
of course, by making it the subject of his own novel. The problem can
become the solution. The issue of what to write about becomes what he
writes about and that is not the arid trick of literature about literature
because he interests us in the people who would be involved in such
difficulties, Reardon, troubled but authentic and the one who succeeds,
jaunty, ruthless, practical Jasper Milvain.
It’s partly the Enlightenment which is to blame for the glamour we
attribute to beginnings, the purity of fresh starts, that Lockean clean
sheet of paper, the tabula rasa. Rousseau’s ‘Man is born free and every-
where he is in chains’ is at least as false as it is true. We are born not free
but embedded into a series of relationships with other people, usually
a family, heir to a particular language spoken in a particular place at a
particular moment in its history. These are not chains but the constitu-
ents of our identity, there to be loved and used. So your start need not
be that brilliant idea you wish to deliver to the world but the specifics
of the moment. At the start of her last novel, Daniel Deronda, George
Eliot, faced like you with teeming possibilities of the coming book and
two distinct stories seizing her attention, asks the question, how do I
begin? ‘Man can do nothing without the make-believe of a beginning’;
why ‘make-believe’? ‘No retrospect will take us to the true beginning’.
And then as though to dismiss that propble she and you share she starts
in the middle of a story, apparently arbitrarily writing of the two chief
characters as though the reader already knew all about them. Daniel
and Gwendolen Harleth exchange glances in a German casino. Moving
forwards in the novel then involves moving backwards and we realise
that the whole novel can be seen as a search for how to begin living.
Daniel can’t move on until he finds his origins whereas Gwendolen
thinks only the future will save her from hers. By the end of the book
both characters are about to begin their real lives, Daniel ito find a home
for the Jews in Palestine and Gwendolen to cherish the home she had
rejected in her desire for social importance.
I know that George Eliot cannot possibly be a direct model for
anyone not knowing how to start their own story but I recall the in-
stance of Daniel Deronda to your mind not as a tricky reconstruction of
linear time but as a reminder that beginnings are always the middle of
something and if by the end you find what is closer to ‘a true beginning’
you will have succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of most of us. Start
with some small specific moment and think forwards by understanding
the backwards of it.

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freedom to blog

Kirsty McHugh

I
‘ don’t have much time for the kind of site where readers do all the
reviewing. Reviewing takes expertise, wisdom and judgment. I am
not much fond of the notion that anyone’s view is as good as anyone
else’s.’ So said Ian McEwan recently in an interview with Time Mag-
azine, and the blogosphere let out a collective sigh of dismay.
I am a book blogger. I started Other Stories almost exactly one year ago
for two reasons. One, I like talking about books, and the blogosphere
offers the perfect platform for us book-lovers to start a dialogue with
one another about the books we have read. Two, I love the internet and
have always been in awe of the breadth of information and conver-
sation that can be had so incredibly easily. The literary blogosphere is
essentially the world’s biggest book group. The beauty of it is that it is
truly egalitarian: anyone can talk about the books they love. However,
blogging seems to have become somewhat of a divisive issue of late.
Tension between the established professional critics and the bloggers
has been fuelled by comments such as McEwan’s. Nicola Beauman of
Persephone Books said in May 2007:
Only the professional critics – Anthony Lane, Alex Ross, James
Wood, AS Byatt, Claire Tomalin – know what they are talking
about; bloggers are merely expressing an opinion… Hurrah for
blogs, we say – but only if they are never mistaken for anything
but yammering.

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 book world

But are the book bloggers trying to emulate the Anthony Lanes and
the A. S. Byatts of the world? No, I don’t think we are. I know I’m not.
The majority of bloggers are absolutely honest about what we are: we
are common readers, talking to people about what we have read. It’s
not even a case of thinking that we’re not ‘as good’ as the professional
critics, we are just different from them, we fulfill a different function.
If publishers want people to buy a book and tell their friends about it
because word of mouth is the most valuable marketing tool there is,
then we bloggers are word of mouth on the grandest scale. We don’t
just tell our friends, we tell the whole world when we enjoy a book. We
have nothing to gain other than the joy of seeing our webstats climb (or
maybe it’s just me that gets overexcited when my blog gets more readers
than it did yesterday, I’m perfectly happy to admit that I’m a geek) and,
if we’re very lucky, the odd thrilling email from a publisher offering us
a review copy. After all, to someone sufficiently in love with books to
start a blog about them, what else could make the heart skip more than
to get free books? In the year that Other Stories has been going, I have
been sent five review copies, which I know is small beer compared to
the more established bloggers such as Dovegrey Reader and John Self,
but still, that’s five books that I didn’t have to pay for, people actually
emailing me to ask if I wanted to read them.
Professional critics we are not. But neither are we merely yam-
mering. I read, on average, a book or two a week. Sometimes more,
sometimes less. I think I am able to verbalize what it is I enjoy, or what
it is I don’t enjoy, about a book. I believe I can pick out a piece of good
writing from a line-up, even if I didn’t necessarily enjoy the story itself.
Why shouldn’t I be able to express my opinions on a book? Which leads
us to another major debate raging in the blogosphere. Should bloggers
post negative reviews? Author Susan Hill is quoted in an interview with
the Vulpes Libris blog as saying:
You do not have a remit from anyone to be negative. If you are
paid for a paper review you have to be honest. But on a blog
you are not being paid and it is far, far better to say nothing.

My own feelings on this topic are very mixed, and here I feel I must
’fess up to a potential clash of interests. My day job is as a press officer
for a (largely non-fiction) publisher. As a press officer, of course I don’t
want to see negative reviews of the books I work on, but as a reader and
blogger I want to be able to be honest at all times, not because I’m being
paid to be – I’m not – but because I believe that above all else blog-
gers have to have absolute integrity. After all, there are enough people
who don’t like blogs as it is, we certainly don’t need to give the detrac-
tors any more ammunition! Susan Hill makes the point that blogs are

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unedited. Any gratuitous negativity would be cut out of a newspaper

review before it was printed, while blogs can be written and published
in minutes, and if you post in anger it’s out there in the ether before you
can blink. Bloggers, then, have a responsibility to be self-regulating. My
own policy, in common with many other bloggers, is to keep schtum
on books that I really didn’t like, especially if they are review copies.
However, I think that it’s fair to be able to point out the odd glitch here
and there in books that you otherwise enjoyed, otherwise there is a risk
of falling into the other major blogging trap: unbridled praise for abso-
lutely everything. If everything is ‘simply wonderful’, or ‘one of the best
books ever’, then how can anyone really take you seriously? We need to
be able to say that this or that wasn’t quite what we hoped for, but this
piece of characterization or this use of language over here was really
well done. We need to be able to have those shades of grey.
Let us celebrate book blogging! Let us cheer for the publishers who
recognize that we’re a force for good in the literary world! We’re not
trying to replace the Establishment; we’re just carving out our own little
corner, because when it comes down to it, blogs do sell books. Only this
weekend was I in a bookshop, in one hand grasping the book tokens my
mum sent me for my birthday, in the other the battered list of ‘Books I
Want’ which I keep in my bag at all times, just in case I see a recommen-
dation in the course of my day. I bought Sophie’s Choice by William Styron
because a very good friend was certain I’d love it, and I bought Crusaders
by Richard T Kelly, because I read about it on Dovegrey Reader’s blog. I’d
never heard of that book before reading her post, I hadn’t (and at time
of writing still haven’t) seen it reviewed in any of the papers, but DGR’s
recommendation was enough for me to part with my precious tokens.
The point is that I don’t differentiate in my head between the fact that
one recommendation came from a close friend, while the other was
from a blog. There are certain blogs that I read and usually comment on
every day, there is a dialogue there, and I feel that I can gauge that if a
particular blogger likes something, then chances are I will too. Despite
reading it every weekend, that isn’t the kind of relationship that I have
with The Guardian Review section.
This is because every blogger has their own voice. In between book
reviews, and comments on the book world in general, and reports on
how many books we’ve bought this week, we occasionally let out a little
information about our real lives outside of book and blogging. For many
of us this means posting pictures of our cats, though obviously felines
are not essential to starting a blog. (They help though, I won’t lie.) But
seriously: knowing a little bit about the person behind the blog always
helps to make the contact real. We could be talking about our favourite
Virginia Woolf novel over a cup of coffee just as easily as we are doing

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it over a broadband connection. As a blogger, I always try to write my

posts exactly as if I am speaking the words out loud. It needs to sounds
as if I am actually talking to someone, because I am talking to someone.
It needs to invite people to talk back in the comments section, whether
they agree with me or not.
Blogs are rising in popularity, and even the newspapers and pub-
lishers now have their own blogs, and they are a good place to start
for those entirely new to the blogosphere and who want to ease them-
selves in gently. The world of blogs can be a daunting one. After all, at
last count there are something in the region of 2 billion blogs out there.
How do you know where to start? Well, for those of you feeling brave
enough to dip your toes in the uncharted waters of the blogs written by
us common readers, then here is my top five book blogs:
Dovegrey Reader (http://dovegreyreader.typepad.com)
Dovegrey is – in her words – a Devonshire based bookaholic, sock-knit-
ting quilter, who happens to be a community nurse in her spare time.
She reads a massive amount of books, across a huge range of genres and
styles, including new fiction from small independent publishers, high-
brow, low-brow, non-fiction. You name it.
[ed. She is also Lynne Hatwell of the Readers Connect jury]
John Self’s Asylum (http://theasylum.wordpress.com)
A blogger from Northern Ireland, who covers mainly fiction across the
genres. Recently shortlisted in the Irish Blog Awards Best Art & Culture
Blog category, he is one of the better known bloggers out there, along
with Dovegrey.
Booklit: A Literary Handout (http://www.booklit.com/blog)
Again, Booklit covers mainly fiction, with a particular penchant for
novels in translation.
Vulpes Libris (http://vulpeslibris.wordpress.com)
This is a book blogging collective of 10 or so people taking turns to post.
As such, they cover a wide range of books as well as having interviews
with authors, and the fact that different people are posting all the time
means that there is a great variety of opinions there. Recently posted an
excellent piece on the bloggers versus professional critics debate: http://
vulpeslibris.wordpress.com/2008/02/07/feature-fox-in-the-city/
Ready Steady Book (http://www.readysteadybook.com/Blog.aspx)
Mark Thwaite runs both this literary website and the Editor’s Corner
blog for The Book Depository, where he is managing editor (http://
www.bookdepository.co.uk/WEBSITE/WWW/WEBPAGES/listarticle.
php?type=blogarticle). As well as lots of news and opinions from the

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 book world

publishing world, he also blogs about books he enjoys, which tend to be

at the higher-brow end of the scale, though by no means inaccessible.
And so, fair readers, I wish you luck on your new journey into the heart
of the blogosphere. I hope I have convinced at least a few of you that
we aren’t militant renegades, hell-bent on bringing down the literary
system We are the people that all those publishers and reviewers have
been trying to reach all along – the common readers, the ones going
out and buying the books. We readers have always talked to each other
about books. Now we’re just able to do it on a grander scale, and I think
that is something to be celebrated.

The Reader Online

http://thereaderonline.co.uk/
We can’t resist chipping in with this glowing praise recently given
to our own blog by roundtablereview(http://roundtablereview.
co.uk/roundtable/article.php?Code=205).
They say:
’One of the most well-researched and informative literary blogs is to be
found here at the website of the Liverpool University-based magazine
The Reader. Updated frequently and often carrying news of the work
of independent publishers – always a plus point for me – the dignified
and thought-provoking commentary here is a far cry from the wailing
and gnashing of teeth that many literary bloggers go in for. The site also
carries a selection of links to some of the more polished and intriguing lit-
erary sites on the web.’
Many thanks to Chris ‘Blogman’ Routledge and Jen Tomkins for
their hard work and zest in making and maintaining the blog.
Please do drop by at the Reader Online as well as visiting all the
other wonderful blogs recommended by Kirsty. Not forgetting her
own Other Stories: http://otherstories.typepad.com/

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your recommendations

the old poem

Thomas Randolph (1605–35)
‘upon his picture’

Brian Nellist

Upon his picture

When age hath made me what I am not now,

And every wrinkle tells me where the plow
Of time hath furrowed, when an ice shall flow
Through every vein, and all my head wear snow;
When death displays his coldness in my cheek,
And I myself in my own picture seek,
Not finding what I am, but what I was,
In doubt which to believe, this or my glass:
Yet though I alter, this remains the same
As it was drawn, retains the primitive frame
And first complexion; here will still be seen
Blood on the cheek, and down upon the chin;
Here the smooth brow will stay, the lively eye,
The ruddy lip, and hair of youthful dye.
Behold what frailty we in man may see,
Whose shadow is less given to change than he.

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 your recommendations

S eeing a poem with a title inevitably puts expectations in

the mind of the reader so that, often, we’re surprised.
This is not a poem in which age contemplates youth but
the other way around; a slightly older man, in his twen-
ties, say, looks at himself as a teenager, with ‘down upon
the chin’ (l.12) and thinks how when old he will regret the loss of all
that physical health (‘Blood on the cheek’) and well-being. The glass
(l.8), the mirror, will then offer a very different image from the paint-
ing with which he now identifies himself. Like The Picture of Dorian Grey
in reverse, the image, ‘shadow’, will stay constant but his body decay.
The tenses are complex; ‘hath’ in l.1 looks to be past but is really future
when the ‘now’ at the end of the line will have been forgotten. There
is a mild and forgivable narcissism, like poring over old photographs;
youth changes its appearance and hence is often self-preoccupied. An
extraneous poignancy is due to our knowledge that Randolph never ex-
perienced this regret; he was dead by the time he was thirty. A prodigy
writing an epic when he was nine, he was noted not only for the dissi-
pation which probably killed him but the brilliance of his conversation
in the circle around Ben Jonson and the poem has the clarity, strength
and originality of good talk, the values in fact of other Caroline lyricists,
Carew, Lovelace, Suckling and Herrick. Look for their work in any an-
thology of seventeenth-century poetry and read Hardy’s ‘I look into my
glass’, which is like this poem back to front.

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book world

poets in the library

Maureen Watry

R oger McGough, Brian Patten and the late Adrian Henri

collectively known as the ‘Liverpool Poets’ burst onto the
national cultural scene with the publication, in 1967, of
The Mersey Sound, Penguin Modern Poets, Number 10.
Last year this revolutionary anthology had its 40th anni-
versary which made it a particularly appropriate time for the University
Library to acquire the archives of all three poets.
The materials filled a large van and last November arrived, as ar-
chival collections tend to, in a variety of boxes, folders, plastic bags,
suitcases, trunks, and cardboard tubes. The archives contain material
saved from decades of writing and performing from the 1960s to the
beginning of the 21st century: notebooks, drafts of poems, correspond-
ence, publicity materials, photographs and play scripts.
Each poet organized and packed his own materials and in this
process the archives underwent the first stage in the transformation
from private hoards to publically accessible collections. The transforma-
tion is rarely easy, particularly if a writer is still working and actively
returns to the archive for inspiration, as Roger McGough realized shortly
after sending his archive to the Library:
‘Just the other day, I went to look in a notebook as I’d been asked to write some
lyrics, but the cupboard was bare – they were all with the university. I was sud-
denly aware of that and felt a bit bereft. It is the end of something, it is a loss’.
For researchers, of course, it is a beginning, as the archives of the three
poets are brought together for the first time in one place. The period
around the publication of The Mersey Sound is particularly well docu-
mented presenting future researchers with a cultural snapshot, one that
will enable them to understand the historical and social context that
fostered Liverpool’s explosion of creativity at that time.

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 book world

During the next two years, with support from the Heritage Lottery
Fund and several other organisations, the archives will be catalogued,
materials will be exhibited, and a variety of outreach activities are
planned in Liverpool, the city that inspired so much of the writing.

ROGER MCGOUGH &

BRIAN PATTEN
are appearing at
Shipping Lines
Liverpool Literary Festival
3-9 November 2008

photograph by Dan Kenyon

from his forthcoming book
Liverpool: Sung and Unsung

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reviews

the only obvious exit

John Redmond, MUDe
Carcanet, 2008
ISBN 978-1-85754-927-0

Fran Brearton

T here’s an episode of Doctor Who (‘Gridlock’) in which the

citizens of New New York, on New Earth, drive perpetu-
ally on an underground motorway. They receive (fictional)
traffic updates from a (non-existent) online ‘Sally’, who
tantalises them with descriptions of a ‘real’ open-air world,
the sun blazing in the sky. Travellers can talk to people in other cars only
if they’re on their ‘friends list’. It’s a vision of hell, a living death in
which cars undertake a Dante-esque descent to the evil creatures below
who will devour them. Yet there exists a powerful sense of community
(epitomised in the singing of ‘the Old Rugged Cross’) and although these
people are trapped, they have also been ‘saved’ from a worse fate by trav-
elling on the motorway. For ‘the motorway’ read also ‘the internet’.
Redmond’s second collection begins with a series of poems im-
mersed in (and faintly appalled by) American car culture; it closes with
a long poem, ‘MUDe’ which explores the world of Multi-User Dimen-
sions, the text-based games played online. Some of the car poems are
racy and fun. Inspired by Redmond’s time in St Paul, Minnesota, they
capture the idiom and pulse of American life. What is ‘real’, as in ‘The
Clown Lounge’, with its ‘soccer moms’, SUVs, and ‘Mall of America’,
also slips into what is a ‘virtual’, as in ‘Grand Theft America’, where
‘America loads in the background’ and the drive of the poem becomes
a textual form of graphic art. In viewing the world through a car wind-
screen the poems play, implicitly, on Baudrillard’s ideas about simulacra
and hyperreality – an issue also central to ‘MUDe’. The style and tone
owe much – perhaps sometimes too much – to Muldoon’s post-1980s

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 reviews

‘American’ mode, as in ‘Grand Theft America’: ‘Though upside-down,

my burning stickshift / leapfrogs Chinatown – “Hey! / Learn how to
drive! – though crashed to bits, / my crumbling Hummer / outguns the
runaway underground train…’.
Yet even Muldoon can nowadays sound like a parody of himself, and
what Redmond does in a poem such as ‘Grand Theft America’ he does
with verve, a spirit of mischief and a parodic knowingness. More distinc-
tive, however, among these short poems, are those less obviously designed
as reflections on and of our postmodern, post-industrial, late capitalist
culture. There are many good cat poems in the world, and Redmond has
written one of them. ‘Double Felix’ is perfect: wry, graceful. It picks its
way with catlike precision through sound: ‘Her fur is for / portraiture. //
His purr is far / more appreciative […] All night he pursues / her – but
for fun, // nothing further.’ He seems tonally more assured on his ‘home’
ground too, with the elegiac mode of ‘Frisk’, or the humorous nostalgia of
‘Omey’: ‘Oh my. Sunk wheels, low tide – / my aunts in a spin…’.
The risk Redmond takes with this book is in its closing long poem,
since a ‘MUD’ is not a spectator sport. The poem ‘MUDe’ is, the note tells
us, ‘supposed to read like the printout of a session, or sessions, generated
by one person playing a fictional MUD’. The concept allows Redmond to
blur the lines between real and fictional selves; it provides a framework
and rationale for certain kinds of formal experimentation. It allows him
to probe ideas of community, and the capacity of the internet both to
unite and divide its users: the online characters playing bring with them
to their fictional scenario all the baggage of their own selves, their po-
litical assumptions, their problems; alliances are forged and as quickly
broken in ways suggestive of the ‘real’ world. The elegiac and autobio-
graphical quality associated with the rural landscapes sets them against
a more surreal narrative sequence: ‘Shredded darkness. A barn. […]
To the south a small window, half-lost in all the confusion, gleams up
densely. / The only obvious exit is west. / Your ten-year-old self is here.’
Amongst MUD devotees, apparently, the jury is still out on whether
MUDding is ‘a game, or an extension of real life with gamelike qualities’
(see mudconnect.com). My jury is out on whether what is undoubtedly a
provocative approach to a long poem actually works. Perhaps the idea is
more enticing than the ‘finished’ product (by its nature, the MUD game is
without closure – the game reboots, the characters come back to life). At
points, it is all too tempting to identify with the ‘Godsend’ character – an
‘utter novice’, he eventually violates codes of courtesy and logs off – who
sends the repeated question around the users: ‘How do you kill things?
[…] TELL ME HOW TO KILL THINGS!’ Yet that said, there is a seductive-
ness to the experience of reading this poem, and a carefully constructed
narrative momentum across different levels (the past, the present, the
‘game’, the ‘reality’) that will (probably) make me log on to it again.

105
reviews

Title of piece
Raymond Tallis, The Kingdom of Infinite Space
Publisher, 2008
ISBN

Sarah Coley

waiting on final version -- Will email it

through/post it very very shortly

106-7

106
reviews

107
 The Reader Crossword
Cassandra No.23
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 27

28 29

ACROSS
9. Her Majesty’s bin cart in collision (9)
10. Share out sounds substantial (5)
11. Permission to go (5)
12. Holmes found these characters to be in a
league of their own (3, 6)
*13. See 15 down
14. To get all the advantages from a situation
he often delivers (7)
17.The beginning of American life and
manners outlined in Texas mission (5)
*19. Our heroine is featured in a daring es-
capade (3)
20. In Eastern Europe these words signal
the start of uprising, giving rebel insurgents
courage (5)
*21. See 7 down
22. Pedagogue able to communicate with
spirits, according to Marcellus (7)
24. If poor ref is confused he may nonethe-
less be unaffected by the heat (9)
26. Red Sea port in which Sheila threw a
party (5)
28. Kingdom described in five hundred
pages with another fifty inserted (5)
29. When I led RAF it set out how things were
transported (9)
* Clues with an asterisk have a common
theme
DOWN
1. What Charon charged for ferry crossing? (4)
2. I engaged in commerce, giving rise to a critical
attack (6)
3. Filming chamber music score (10)
4. Obsessive perhaps but probably not wet (6)
5. Is there an intellectual element in the vulgar
façade Miami Beach displays? (8)
*6 and 24 down. Pair feel transformed by this work
(4, 4)
*7 and 21 across. Book van broke down when fol-
lowing Estragon’s partner in pursuit of our author
(8, 7)
8. Form of poker played at this kind of farm? (4)
13. They both follow Mark but according to Kipling
they will never meet (5)
*15 and 13 across. 7 is noted for his black humour,
in this case literally (8, 2, 3, 4)
16. To be more precise this seaside town in France
has a king (5)
18. To begin with a rare breed of rabbits, eating
and living among trees (8)
19. Words on the tip of one’s tongue reveal a real
love without end (8)
22. This hunt for animals partly involves a far Indian
province (6)
*23. Our young heroine initially inspires love or
lust in the Amazon (6)
*24. See 6 down
25. In trying to keep important secrets safe pro-
curer is exposed (4)
27. Change of diet for this course (4)
 buck’s quiz

what’s in a name?

Who are the creators of the following characters:

1.  Frankie Adams. Nick Adams. Nick Carraway

2.  Daniel Quilp. Peter Quince. Peter Quint
3.  Therese Raquin. Therese Desqueyroux
4.  Nathan Detroit. Nathan Zuckerman. Nathan Price
5.  Felix Holt. Felix Randall. Lord Randall
6.  Lucy Grey. Lucy Honeychurch. Honeychile Rider
7.  Jimmy Porter. Jim Burden. Jim Dixon
8.  Lily Bart. Lily Briscoe
9.  Anthony Adverse. Anthony Blanche. Blanche Ingram
10.  Aunt Agatha. Agatha Runcible
11.  Billy Caspar. Billy Prior. Billy Fisher
12.  Anne Elliot. Anne Shirley. Shirley Keeldar
13.  Marlow. Charles Marlow
14.  Willy Loman. Willy Lyons. Willy Wonka
15.  Dorothy Gale. Dorothea Brooke. John Brooke

109
 the back end

PrizeS!
The sender of the first completed puzzle
will receive our selection of World’s Clas-
sics paperbacks, while the first correct
entry to Buck’s Quiz bags a copy of the
Concise Oxford English Dictionary. Con-
gratulations to Angus Pickles of Liverpool
(crossword) and to Pam Nixon of Oxford
(quiz).

Please send solutions (marked either Cas-

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

answers
Cassandra Crossword no. 22
Across
1. Philip 5. Townsite 9. Separate 10. Dulcet 11. Ecclesiarchs 13. Anna 14.
Sagacity 17. Buckshee 18. Inuk 20. Beats the band 23. Aubade 24. Vene-
tian 25. Less used 26. Larkin

Down
2. Heel 3. Leaseback 4. Plaice 5. The less deceived 6. Weddings 7. Solar
8. The Whitsun 12. Inquietude 15. Child star 16. The trees 19. Carnal 21.
Toads 22. Magi

buck’s quiz no. 29

1. Rudyard Kipling 2. Trimmer 3. The Naked and the Dead 4. Henry V 5. For
Whom the Bell Tolls 6. Regeneration Trilogy 7. A. E. Housman 8. Yossarian,
Catch 22 9. The Last Battle (Mordred and Arthur) 10. The Time Machine,
H.G.Wells 11. The Good Soldier Svejk 12. The Heat of the Day, Elizabeth
Bowen 13. Len Deighton 14. In a tunnel; ‘Strange Meeting’, W. Owen
15. Dover Beach

110
 essay

Reader, i sH*GGed him

reflections on the decline and fall of the asterisk

Raymond Tallis

W hen, a couple of years ago, I read Helen

Walsh’s widely praised novel Brass about a
female student in the Sociology Department
of the University of Liverpool, I was struck
by its graphic sexual descriptions: tissues
were named, orifices specified, and secretions (quantity, taste) reported.
Walsh might have been disappointed to learn that her book – which is in
some respects a serious novel – made this particular reader neither intu-
mescent or incandescent. Like the legendary psychologist who goes to a
strip show in order to study the audience, I appreciated Brass for the way
it made me think about, and find puzzling, something that we nowadays
take rather too much for granted: sexual explicitness in fiction.
There is certainly much more sex on the page than there used to be.
You may think this is because there is a lot more sex outside the page
and serious fiction has a duty to mirror extra-literary reality. Actually
we don’t know how much is going on: the world is a thicket of medi-
ated rumours and our choice of rumours has little basis in objective data.
Surveys may measure trends in sexual behaviour; or they may simply
record trends in wishful thinking, or in the balance between reserve
and boasting. What, however, is beyond doubt is that sex now figures
massively in the Big Conversation society has with itself and the small
conversations we have with each other. While Catherine McKinnon’s
claim that contemporary culture is defined by pornography seems a little
exaggerated, sexual imagery and sexual suggestion are almost wall-to-

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 essay

wall. And, to judge by the contents of my Spam catcher, assistance is on

offer 24/365 (and 24/366 in leap years) for those who have the desire but
not the opportunity or the opportunity and not the machinery.
Whatever the between-the-sheets or among-the-haystacks truth,
therefore, it seems reasonable that sex should be now installed even in
the sort of writing that attracts patrons, arts council grants, and appre-
ciative and serious critical examination. What’s new, you may ask. The
names of Petronius, Rabelais, Shakespeare, and Boccaccio remind us
that what Mrs Grundy would have called ‘smut’ and school-children ‘the
dirty bits’ have always had a place in the best literature. Sexual love, par-

“Why should anyone want to write about sex?”

ticularly of the forbidden sort – adulterous, homoerotic, or transgressing
political, tribal, religious, class or generational divides – has been the
throbbing heart of European literature since Tristan first hooked up with
Isolde. Even the most discreet romances, in which desire is concealed
under good manners, and convention deflects or sublimates lust into a
multitude of actions and emotions that are only indirectly expressive of
it, we know that, if the course of true love eventually smoothes out, the
protagonists are due for something a bit more hands on.
What’s new is how much we are expected to be present when the
hands are on. The first cohort of asterisks to be retired were those that
closed the door and switched off the light before the undressing started.
More recently, the remaining asterisks, and even the final lingerie of
suspension points, have been removed from the scantily dressed bodies
of the characters. The reader is ushered to a bedside seat to observe
actual love-making rather than being obliged merely to guess at generi-
cally specified shenanigans. Quality fiction has entered zones that were
the preserve of writing that used to be placed on the top shelf, out of
reach of the impressionable and, hence potentially corruptible, who are
assumed to be of short stature.
For some, the removal of the asterisks and the displacement of the
implied by the stated, has been unequivocally a Good Thing. The famous
obscenity trials – of Ulysses, The Well of Loneliness, The Tropic of Cancer, Lady
Chatterley’s Lover, and Last Exit to Brooklyn – which ended in humiliation for
the prosecutors and bequeathed us some memorably risible quotes, mark
the stages by which the Berlin Wall that separated public show from
private truth, hypocrisy from honesty, the gagged artist from his or her
right to free expression, and so on, has been dismantled. We do not feel
that we are simply succumbing to ‘the massive condescension of poster-
ity’ when we laugh out loud at the Sunday Express book critic who declared
in 1931, of The Well of Loneliness, that he would ‘rather give a healthy boy or
a healthy girl a phial of prussic acid than this novel. Poison kills the body,

112
 essay

but moral poison kills the soul’. A ‘Williad’ such as Alan Hollingshurst’s
Swimming Pool Library can now be applauded for its (very considerable)
literary merits and not condemned for the eye-popping number of times
and ways the characters penetrate each other’s bodies. ‘Cliterature’ is now
entirely respectable: authors may with impunity arrange for the printed
tipping of printed velvet. We are all adults now.
This Whiggish tale of The Triumph of Artistic Freedom has not
been uncontested. There was much talk, around the time of the Moors
Murders 40 years ago, that the perpetrators, who used the taped cries
of their dying victims as sex aids, had been corrupted by the Marquis
de Sade’s The 120 Days of Sodom. And yet, compared with Brett Easton
Ellis’s American Psycho – published in the 1990s and regarded by many
as a serious and important commentary on contemporary life – the
formulaic and somewhat perfunctory gyrations of the characters in
Marquis’ masturbation fantasia seem relatively unshocking. But no-one
considered prosecuting Ellis, his publishers or the retail outlets where
American Psycho was sold in large quantities. Protests about the moral
impact of fiction deemed pornographic appear to have died along with
Mrs Whitehouse. This may be because the arguments – including those
about the difference between pornography and ‘cutting edge’ literature
– do not seem amenable to resolution. This is not, anyway, relevant to
my present concern. I am less interested in the broader social effects of
increasing sexual explicitness in novels (which is anyway surely minute
compared with the impact of magazines, TV, cinema and the internet)
but with the significance of sex in the novel for the art of fiction itself.
Let me ask a couple of seemingly daft questions. Why should
anyone want to write about sex? And why should a serious novelist
want to write about sex? Sex, after all, is a form of human interaction
that is most immediate, and thus furthest from any kind of writing.
Perhaps, that in itself should not be a problem; after all, a fist-fight
is a pretty direct interaction. The fist-fight, however, has a story: who
won and the reverses of fortune on the way to the knock-out blow. Sex
is not quite the same, though the successive phases of undressing, of
visiting ever-more private parts of the other’s body, and the finale of
the orgasm, do amount to a story. (In some respects, the progression
from first sighting to climax is the archetypal story.) In the fist-fight,
however, the sensations experienced by the protagonists are not valued
for themselves. They are means to an obvious end: victory, escape from
captivity, revenge, punishment, humiliation or whatever. The narration
of sex therefore presents especial difficulties, because pure sensations
are difficult to articulate. I will come to that presently but let me re-pose
the second question: ‘Why write about sex?’
The obvious answer is that people want to read about sex. In the
case of writers whose primary aim is commercial, this is the point: sex

113
 essay

helps to shift product. But this only moves the question on. Why do the
punters want to read accounts of imaginary people having sex? The most
immediate answer is that it brings sexual arousal which is, of course,
exciting and possibly pleasurable. (This in itself is rather amazing. The
remarkable fact that we can be sexually stimulated by means of words
that have long since been separated from the mouths, and hence from
the bodies, of others and are set out in military rows on a page, is insuf-
ficiently noticed.) Literary fiction, however, is not usually about giving
the punters a cheap thrill. Indeed, the rejection of this aim has been one
of the ways in which quality novels have distanced themselves from
the shilling shockers. It has been crucial to their defence in obscenity
trials. In his famous judgement, Judge Woolsey deemed Ulysses not to be
obscene because it was ‘emetic rather than erotic’.
Nevertheless, a direct contrast between literary fiction that instructs
or awakens and Thrills & Swoon stuff that titillates, does not capture the
whole truth about either genre. There is something else that commercial
pornography offers, which it has in common with literary fiction. Our
interest in fiction of all sorts, high and low, is much closer to our inter-
est in gossip than we readily admit to. A novel gives us the illusion of
privileged access to the life of people who, for at least the duration of our
read, seem real to us. Wanting to see what happens next, wanting to find
out what these other people get up to and what it feels like, will extend
most particularly to this most private of experiences. We have been privy
to the characters’ thoughts; why should we not be privy to their sheets?
The importance of this interest is underlined by the lengths to which
writers and publishers try to establish ‘authenticity’. A recent trend,
evident in the marketing of Brass, was the attempt by the author and her
publishers to link the author’s life with that of her protagonist. Clearly
‘A Young Girl’s Sexual Odyssey’ is more compelling if readers believe it
is a ‘thinly disguised autobiography’ or even ‘a piece of the [real] world
discover’d’– than if they suspect it is the money-spinning fantasy of an
elderly gent on his uppers – not that this did Fanny Hill too much harm.
When we read literary fiction, we do not shed ourselves. Indeed, we
bring to fiction more, not less, of ourselves than we do to the reading of
a newspaper or sub-literary tale. That is why serious writers, as much as
pulp novelists, have to appeal to the gossip in us. Nevertheless, we read
‘quality’ fiction to be changed – woken out of everyday perceptions –
not just to be given what some writer or market analyst knows that we,
the punters, want. This may be why, with some exceptions, writers who
assume the traditional mantle of the bourgeois-shocking artist who says
‘what it’s really like’ in the real world, take less advantage than might
be expected of the freedom to write about sex. Helen Walsh’s Brass is
exceptional. While, as I started out by saying, there is much more sex
in literary fiction than there used to be, on reflection there is less than

114
 essay

there might be. And the reason for this is interesting. For once you want
to do something more than catering to readers’ desires to feel randy or
pandering to their inner Peeping Tom, it becomes very difficult to know
how to write about sex or indeed how or why one should write about it
at all in fiction that has high ambitions. It fits in rather uncomfortably
as sex itself often does in life.
Consider the ‘how’ question first. Describing sexual activity in a way
that does it phenomenological justice, rather than simply giving sufficient
detail to give the punter a bit of the old stirring, is a formidable challenge.
I have already alluded to the difficulty of writing down ‘pure sensation’.
Actually, sex is not about ‘pure’ or even ‘impure’ sensation. There are so
many different things going on at the same time and they will all be of
equal importance to a writer who wants to transcend pornography. Yes,
there are erotic sensations; and these are not only unnarratable in them-
selves (hence all those unsatisfactory ‘tingles’ and ‘swoons’ and ‘breaking
waves’) but also in their transitions from one to the other. It is even more
difficult to know how to deal with their numerous repetitions, as may
occur in a night of lovemaking. In addition, there are emotions: surprise,
shock, delight, gratitude, amazement, awe, disgust, irritation, joy. And
there is the huge symbolic significance of physical intimacy, which the

“Strip off the asterisks, switch on the lights”

writer must also somehow capture. And, on top of all that, there are the
different ways the lovemaking may or may not fit into the biography of
the characters, the story of their mutual involvement; and there is the
complex and even elusive way the relationship of the characters connects
with other and future stories, and, ultimately, the big story of the novel
which is that of the world it tries to illuminate from within.
Paul Valéry, the great French poet and thinker, once said that writing
about the sex led one either to the anatomy book or the gutter. In fact
there are many other ways of earning the Literary Bad Sex Award: the
road to unintentional comedy is as well-paved with clinical abstraction
as with romantic gush. The observer of, as opposed to the participant in,
sex tends to the Martian. And fidelity to who did what when and from
what angle can lead to sheer bafflement as to what is actually happening.
The reader may feel the lack of a diagram or two. (It is here that film can
effortlessly outstrip, in both senses of the word, the novel.) Paradoxical-
ly, the very intensity of sexual experiences makes memory an unfaithful
document. The carnal choreography, which is so important at the time,
and the complex emotional experiences, and the various modes of com-
munication and non-communication that accompany them, elude the
net of verbs and nouns and adjectives and adverbs. The inner logic of
lovemaking is no more transferable to the page than those mute sensa-

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 essay

tions that resist verbalisation. Precise descriptions have a tendency to

reduce what is happening to the interactions of overheated meat. The
third-person view – ‘And then he did this ’, ‘And then she did that’
seems a betrayal of the spirit of sexual intimacy. A first-person account
on the other hand can seem (particularly if the narrator is male) squirm
worthy or boastful. (Miller, Mailer and Roth, step forward.)
Trying to combine carnal close-ups with high romanticism, D. H.
Lawrence-style, is particularly risky. One way out is to focus on the
comedy. If comedy is about the conflict between categories, in particular
between material and mental categories, sex, which brings together two
persons and two bodies, is always going to be a rich source of humour.
The writer can affirm solidarity with fellow humans as she describes
the humiliations, misunderstandings, and physical awkwardness that
attend the transitions from sentences to caresses and thence to the in-
teraction of body parts, that have to be unsheathed of their clothes and
the inhibitions of their owners, and the equally difficult journey back
to ordinary intercourse. But this deeply humane comedy seems to be
evading the real challenge.
For sex is important and deeply serious as well as very funny. It is
certainly up there with birth, dinner and death, which are well covered
in classical fiction. Many novelists, therefore, feel that artistic integrity
demands that they really should try to go beyond perfunctory descrip-
tions of sex or statements to the effect that it took place. Their bad
conscience at ducking out of this challenge may take the form of finding
bad reasons for averting their gaze once the action really gets going.
Graham Greene, for example, argued that sexual description was unnec-
essary because ‘everyone knows how to do it’. This is deeply insincere.
Not everyone does know how to do it, and no-one knows how everyone
else does it, even less how it feels and what it means to others.
Even if good taste, good humour, and the appropriate level of tact are
maintained, and a compelling account of lovemaking results, the result
may still not be entirely friendly to the fundamental enterprise of litera-
ture. And this is my central point. Wordsworth’s definition of poetry as
‘the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings from emotions recollected
in tranquillity’ also touches on something at the heart of literary fiction.
And it helps us to put our finger on why explicit sexual description can
be a problem for the serious writer. ‘Emission recollected in tranquil-
lity’ may be a contradiction in terms: tranquillity doesn’t come with this
territory. A slightly frustrating or frustrated randiness is a rather disap-
pointing state for authors to induce in readers whose consciousness they
are hoping to widen. ‘The dirty bits’ have a habit of punching above their
weight. It is difficult, when we are invited to participate, at least as spec-
tators, in an intense sex scene, not to lose sight of, not to say interest
in, the beautiful description of the landscape, the subtle interpretation

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 essay

of the characters’ responses to each other, the tragic implications of

their passionate lovemaking, the larger dispensation under which they,
and we ourselves, live. The feelings the dirty bits arouse may be at once
stronger and more narrowly focused than is compatible with that wider
state of consciousness. They may subvert the very thing fiction tries to
do – to wake us out of our immediate reactions. DH Lawrence would not
have been happy to see how many copies of his great-in-parts novel Lady
Chatterley’s Lover had the same well-thumbed pages.
Sexual description may undo the author’s work, for this additional
reason: when real human beings have sex, they remain human beings,
however much they may try to dehumanise each other; but when char-
acters in novels do so, they are at risks of becoming naked bodies and
orifices, pleasured or pained, and members, tumid and detumescent,
in or out. (This is why the line between pornographic and literary
writing about sex is neither straight nor continuous.) Characters, who
have been liberated by the imaginative genius of the writer from the
reductions of the busy, instrumental, distracted, prejudice-riddled con-
sciousness of everyday life, may be re-imprisoned in a gaze that reduces
them to fantasy objects of an impersonal carnal desire.
This is the fundamental problem: how to write about sex in a way
that does not merely create a second-order, second-rate fantasy which
works against the greater ambitions of literary fiction. Deconstruction-
ists used to talk about ‘the warring forces of signification in the text’.
Well, sex in the novel causes civil war in the text. When someone’s
clothes are coming off or someone’s genitalia are being deployed for
their second main purpose, descriptions of trees are somewhat put into
the shade and the author’s best-honed aphorisms may not get the at-
tention they deserve.
Contemporary serious novelists, who are free to write about any-
thing as explicitly as they like, may find themselves caught between
two unattractive alternatives. The one is to leave sex wrapped up in the
traditional asterisks and then to feel guilty for failing to engage directly
with something that preoccupies so much of the time of their readers.
The other is to strip off the asterisks, switch on the lights, and describe
in clear detail what Jane E. and Edward R. get up to between the sheets
and in so doing risk undermining the characters’ humanity and for-
feiting their readers’ hard-won, wider sympathies, their awakening to
the complexity of the lives, worlds, and selves that engage with one
another in so many ways, of which sex is only one of the most impor-
tant. Solving that dilemma may require a better understanding of the
nature of sex, how it does or does not fit into our lives, and the many
purposes and ambitions of serious fiction. Such understanding does not
seem likely to dawn in the near future.

117
118
 fiction

the junction
part 1: rest and quiet, somewhere nice

Mary Weston

P eter Scott lived in the trenches as if they were his natural

habitat. He was tall and pale like a shadowed plant over-
stretching toward the light. Half-deaf, he could see in the
dark. His mother was dead, his brother and father both
in active service, Ricky with the RFC, his father more ob-
scurely. Every connection with the civilian world – photographs, parcels
– had withered away, and when he had home leave he had to stay in a
hotel.
He spoke German, and during quiet spells serenaded the enemy
with An die Musik and ‘Bist du bei mir, geh’ ich mit Freuden zum Sterben
und zu meiner Ruh’. When the old CO, Colonel Adair, went missing in
action, he became the spiritual head of the Battalion: the new com-
mander, Pollard, didn’t exactly take orders from him, but he did well to
take advice. It seemed fitting that Peter collapsed when the Armistice
was in sight, as if the War was what had been keeping him going, and
he couldn’t exist in peacetime.

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 fiction

And he had just – collapsed. Without warning. He was sitting in the

CO’s dugout, looking at a two-day-old-copy of The Times. Perhaps he’d
felt a little nauseous, but he’d attributed that to the gas he was reading.
He went to stand up, and his balance felt funny – he stepped forward,
and his legs gave out beneath him. He dropped forwards, unable to
break his fall. It was so sudden and inexplicable that the others, Lt
Colonel Pollard and the Adjutant, sat staring at him in shocked silence.
He couldn’t move. Give it a minute, he told himself, though he knew
it couldn’t really be the shock of the fall. The paralysis had caused it. Could
he have been carrying some kind of spinal injury without knowing it –
the fault line of some incipient fracture? ‘Don’t touch me!’ he told the
Adjutant, who had mobilised at last, and was about to roll him over.
The medical boys had to strap him into the stretcher to get him up
the incline of the dugout steps. Now here he was in a field hospital near
Boulogne. The orderly who had last seen to his needs had laid him out
with his arms across his chest and he could just about feel the warmth
and pressure where his hands touched, but there was no sensation in
his gut to rise in revulsion against this deathly posture.
The undertaker-nurse reappeared. ‘A visitor!’ he exclaimed, scandal-
ised – field hospitals don’t deal in visitors. Peter felt quite as surprised
as he did. Who was there to come and see him? Straining to lift his
head, he caught sight of an officer’s uniform. Pioneers’ capbadge. What
on earth?
The next moment his father was at his side, kissing his forehead. As
he drew back, Peter saw that he was a major. Bloody hell! ‘You outrank
me.’
‘I shouldn’t think it will last,’ his father consoled him, under his
breath. Louder, ‘But what’s going on here?’
‘I can’t move. It just happened, I don’t know how.’
Regarding him diagnostically, ‘One of the privileges of rank: I got
the MO to confide in me, and he thinks it’s been an accumulation of
damage to the nerves over the years. What shell shock really is, or ought
to be, instead of a euphemism for funk.’
‘Permanent damage?’
‘He didn’t know, but they’re going to give you every chance, rest and
quiet, somewhere nice.’
‘Rest and quiet? The shock will probably kill me.’
His father accorded this a laugh, but something else was on his
mind. At last he spat it out. ‘There was that girl you mentioned, way
back when. Are you still in touch?’
Peter shut his eyes. One of the few gestures left to him, and he made
it eloquent.

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 fiction

They shipped him to the Mawdsley, but the shock experts there couldn’t
make any more sense of him. Three days later, a letter came from
Ricky.

Peter,
Pa tells me your’re back. What odds the two of us making it home in one piece?
Tho come to think of it, I’m not, but the other bit was below the knee, so I can still
walk, and fly, I hope. 41 kills all told, makes me a bit of an ace, what? Sticking
with the Corps – they need me.
Bad news about Colonel Adair. Pa told me – didn’t see it in the papers at
the time. Can’t be many of that lot get anywhere near the action never mind get
killed in it.
Hope this leaves you as it finds me etc
R

Peter had made a practice of saying to himself every morning before

he got out of bed, ‘There’s every chance I could die today,’ and spending
five or ten minutes trying to really believe it deep down, and accept it.
It didn’t cure fear, but it boosted dignity, and kept things in perspective.
Now that he was safe in hospital, no longer entitled to this grim little
devotion, he felt like a lesser being. Like a staff officer (as Ricky would
have it) or a civilian.

He didn’t hear her come in. His eyes were shut, his hearing destroyed.
‘Peter?’
Every working muscle jumped, producing a small start. ‘Celia!’
She came up and knelt beside the bed, a tall girl and golden, more
warm and golden for being flushed with emotion, and dressed in sky
blue. The light and temperature changed in the ward: the other nerve-
less patients began to stir, coming to life, trying to see her. But Peter
could only lie there.
‘How did you find out I was here?’ he asked finally.
‘Colonel Adair wrote to me.’
‘Colonel Adair!’
‘Yes, I know,’ she said, mistaking his surprise. ‘It was good of him,
wasn’t it? Though he couldn’t quite bring himself to apologise for
ruining both our lives.’
‘Have you got the letter?’ Peter demanded. She passed it to him, and
the mystery dissolved. ‘This is my father’s writing. Adair went missing
a year, eighteen months ago.’
‘Your father? But… why? Couldn’t he just have written as himself?’
‘I don’t know! Because Sonny Scott won’t take the straight road if
there’s a twisty one for him to go down. He shouldn’t have done that,
Celia!’ And when she declined to accept this, ‘I’m paralysed.’

121
 fiction

‘I know.’ And leaning forward, taking his hand, and speaking so

that no one else could hear, ‘I never felt guilty – you know? I thought I
should, but I couldn’t. Now I understand why.’
As if sensing indiscretion, a nurse came in, carrying a chair, and
obliged her to let go of him and sit a seemly three feet back from the
bed.
‘It isn’t just that,’ he said, when they were alone again. ‘You’d be
stuck with looking after me, the rest of your life. Or mine, anyway.’
‘Peter, what do you think I’ve been feeling all this years? You’ve been
in something huge and horrible, and there’s been nothing I could do for
you, stuck at home in my petty little life!’
‘Living is petty. Over there too. Just a series of little tasks: eat, clean
your boots, breathe… Why go on?’ He saw her eyes widen. ‘I’m sorry. I
shouldn’t inflict that on you.’
Gamely, ‘No, if it’s what you feel – ’
‘I don’t feel! It’s gone. You think you can keep your soul. But you
can’t. Your nerves make the decision, and it just dies off bit by bit.
It’s like getting used to bombardment, or bodies. It just happens, even
when you know it shouldn’t.’
He sighed, and found himself remembering what it had felt like at
the beginning. The War would knock away all the pettinesses and ambiv-
alences that irritated him in his own and the common life. A good clear
out! And something in him that needed to be wholehearted had rejoiced
in this, even though it had meant ending their engagement. I chose it!
he realised. I wanted it to happen. A career soldier, he couldn’t pretend
he hadn’t known what it would be like, or at least that he could have
known something of what it would be like. But the desire to test himself
had been stronger. Wanting to be only what he had to be, stripping eve-
rything unnecessary away. Well, here he was, with little enough.
A sudden convulsive tug from his chest made him gasp for breath.
God, what was this? Again, so powerfully it woke the nerves below his
neck to half-life, a memory of pain. Again and again, with a halting
rhythm. At last he realised he was weeping, or his body was – his eyes
and his emotions were dry.
It subsided in its own time. There was still a faint tingle from the
nerves, or so he imagined; he pictured shards of ice. A cold, clean
feeling.

The next morning he woke up in pain. The shards of ice had turned into
a raggedy hot sensation emanating from the new nerves. The feeling,
functioning muscles in his neck had seized up against it, and his head
ached. The doctors were very excited. They wouldn’t give him any mor-
phine, afraid of smothering the first stirrings of life with a sedative.
Celia came in at ten. They must have told her of his progress, but

122
 fiction

she quickly sensed that she had to temper her rejoicing to his headache.
She spoke softly, of small happy things, looking for a flat on a ground
floor, hiring a nurse or perhaps a man to help lift him… She stroked his
cheek with the back of her index finger. With matching gentleness, the
thought came to him: I am dying.
When the tea came round, Celia had to lift him and stuff pillows
under his shoulders so that he could drink it. ‘You’re low today,’ she
observed.
‘I don’t feel good,’ he admitted. There was a foul taste in his mouth,
and he directed his words away from her, so that she wouldn’t smell his
breath. He tried to wash it away with tea, but could only stomach a few
mouthfuls. Ten minutes later they came back up. He couldn’t twist to
vomit cleanly, and the liquid ran down his chin and on to his chest. She
attended to him gravely with her handkerchief.
I must tell her. ‘I think I’m dying.’
‘Oh, Peter!’ she cried, and seized his hand. Then, ‘You’re awfully
cold.’ She made a semi-competent attempt to take his pulse. A sense
of hovering uncertainty; anxiety growing stronger. She left the room
without saying anything.
What his father had said he needed. ‘Rest and quiet, somewhere
nice.’ Yes, it would have been nice to have had more time to repossess
his soul. The feeling of being back behind the lines, somewhere with
grass and whole trees. Solitary walks or just lying late in bed, working
out that ‘coming to terms’ which is always a wholesale surrender to
what has happened, but which the heart nevertheless insists on nego-
tiating point by point.
Soon, none of this will matter, he told himself. The pang it raised
was not of fear, or regret. I just wish I understood!

His vision clouded, then went out, and he knew, somehow, that this was
a signpost, a landmark like the church at Albert. Not long now.
They were back in the room now, Celia and others. He could hear
their conversation as a dull noise, but could not make out words, and
didn’t want to. He was aware of their handling his body – pulse-takings,
injections – as fuss, but not as touch-sensation. Oh! The pain was gone!
It had slipped away so imperceptibly he wasn’t aware of it as a relief.
He rested in this peaceful state for a while. The medics thought he
had stabilised and left. There was nothing to think or feel. The only
object presented to his awareness was Celia’s inner state, and that was
very distant, thin wavering contentions of painful hope and fear.
Quite suddenly, vision returned. He saw a woman bent over a man’s
body.

123
 fiction

‘Have you had a good rest?’

He jumped: he awoke with a shock – he awoke. Oh my god – he was
in a bed, in a body, and a woman was drawing the curtains in a pleasant
room with a view of green slopes and a blue sky. The woman was not a
nurse: under the white apron her skirts were green. She was handsome,
perhaps forty, auburn haired, with a Roman profile.
Here he was in a body, and that couldn’t be right, though it was
serviceable enough, sitting up when he asked it to. Out of pain, clean,
male, adult, and seemingly in good fettle. But how?
‘Some post for you,’ the woman said brightly. ‘And it looks like good
news.’ She handed him an envelope of heavy, parchment-grained paper.
‘Well, go on, open it!’ But he was staring at the address, or indeed,
the addressee.
Captain Peter Scott
C/o Mrs. Olave Fielding
Rosemont House
The Junction
Opening the envelope was more a matter of seeking answers to
these riddles than wanting to know the ‘good news’ it might contain.

Dear Sir,
It gives me very great pleasure to inform you that you have been awarded the
Founder’s Scholarship, entitling you to a year’s tuition and bursary.
Please report to the New College Buildings on the 15 September for enrolment
and registration.
Yours faithfully,
Theodoric unreadable
Senior Tutor

There was no proper letterhead. ‘New College Buildings’ sounded omi-

nously like Sandhurst, but there was a New College at Cambridge too,
wasn’t there?
‘What day is it today?’ he asked the woman, too embarrassed to
admit the extent of his confusion with ‘Where is this?’ ‘Why am I here?’
or ‘How the hell did all this happen?’
‘Tuesday.’ His look prompted, and she added, ‘the 12th. When does
term start?’
‘The 15th,’ he said, then on an impulse he handed her the letter.
She exclaimed over the scholarship, apparently a prestigious one. ‘Are
we too grand to get up? Or do you want to miss lunch as well as break-
fast?’
‘I’ll get up.’
She withdrew and he rose, discovering that the oak wardrobe con-
tained clothes. No khaki, just comfortable things, corduroys and worn

124
 fiction

tweeds, and a pair of walking boots of the sort universally described as

‘stout’. There was a cubicle with a plumbed-in sink and shaving tackle.
The face in the mirror was recognisably Peter Scott’s, though very dif-
ferent from the hollow misery he’d seen the day before he died.

In the hall at the bottom of the steps hung a framed map of the area.
He paused to look at it, hoping to find out where he was. But on a four
inch to the mile scale, the map didn’t run to any large towns. ‘The Junc-
tion’ was a railway junction, and from the way the line ran alongside
the river he guessed that the topography was rather hilly.
‘Why not go for a walk after lunch?’ Mrs. Fielding came through,
bearing a laden tray. Executing a three-step turn, she backed into a door,
which swung open to reveal a dining room.
An elderly gentleman with Victorian whiskers was carving a ham
at the table, which was already set with three places, and spread with
chicken and salads. There were cheeses and a fruitcake on the sideboard.
Mrs. Fielding set down her tray while she unloaded butter and relishes
and introduced Peter to Archdeacon Leith. ‘He’s won the scholarship!’
‘Ah well, congratulations,’ the old man said genially. ‘Do you think
this calls…?’ He laid down his knife and was just angling, arthritically
shoulder first, toward the cabinet in the corner.
‘Tonight,’ said Mrs. Fielding, with some firmness.

Yes. It was hilly country. Rosemont House was at the high end of the
village. Peter followed the road as it sloped down fifty yards, to the
station on the opposite side. It was neat, with fancy ironwork painted
cherry red, but small for a junction, only two platforms. A hundred
yards further along there were signals and points, so it maybe it merited
the name, just. There was a cluster of shops, but no one about to patron-
ise them; apart from the shadowy figure of a grocer or chemist indoors,
the village was deserted.
And then a horrid fancy that this was not a real place assailed him
– that it was a mock-up, a diorama of a typical English country scene, a
setting for the half-life a being who was not properly dead nor properly
alive, and not a properly insubstantial ghost either. A shout escaped him
and on an impulse he ran, bolted down the road, in the mad belief that
there must be some kind of physical boundary to this illusory state, that
he could burst his way out of it.
He ran for a rolling half mile before the panic burnt itself out. As he
slowed to a walk it struck him that being born, finding oneself on earth
for the first time would be just as mysterious and terrifying, if an infant
had the sophistication to recognise it. But by the time you’re able to say
‘What!? Why!?’ the novelty has worn off. You take the world for granted
and are hardly able to think out of it. He turned back.

125
contributors 30
Francis Boyce. Since retiring from full-time teaching he has been tutor-
ing courses in local history (part-time) at the University’s Department of
Continuing Education, and researching Liverpool writers James Hanley and
George Garrett.
Fran Brearton is Reader in English at Queen’s University Belfast and assist-
ant director of the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry. Her most recent book
is Reading Michael Longley (Bloodaxe 2006).
Frank Cottrell Boyce is a screenwriter and children’s novelist. He lives in
his hometown, Liverpool, with his wife and seven children. His latest book
is called Cosmic.
Peter Goldsworthy. You may find more about him on the Poetry Archive,
and on his own website: www.petergoldsworthy.com.
Howard Jacobson is a novelist and critic. His most recent novel, Kalooki
Nights, is published by vintage. His new novel, The Act of Love, will be pub-
lished by Jonathan Cape in September.
Kirsty McHugh. As well as blogging, Kirsty works in publishing and is
studying for an MA in Victorian Studies. She lives in Oxford with her musi-
cian boyfriend and two black cats.
Andrew McMillan was born in Barnsley and currently studies at Lancas-
ter University. He is a poet-in-training and can normally be found on buses,
trains or in charity shops. Tomato Ketchup scares him.
Ian McMillan was born in 1956 and has been a freelance writer/performer/
broadcaster since 1981. He presents The Verb on BBC Radio 3 every Friday
night.
Andrew McNeillie’s most recent poetry collection is Slower (2006). His
memoir An Aran Keening came out in 2001. Its prequel Once will appear in
Spring 2009. He is literature editor at OUP.
Michael O’Neill is a Professor of English at Durham University. He has pub-
lished two collections of poems, The Stripped Bed (Collins Harvill, 1990), and
Wheel (Arc, 2008). In 1990 he received a Cholmondeley Award for Poets.
Katie Peters is a project worker for The Reader Organisation’s community
reading project, Get Into Reading and lives in Liverpool with her husband.
Janet Suzman. Born in South Africa, pursued her love of Shakespeare in
England, with frequent forays into other engrossing landscapes in Russia,
Norway or the Attic plain. Occasional directing keeps wolf from door.
Raymond Tallis switched from medicine to become a full time writer in
March 2006. He is an unstoppable writer and thinker and his latest book,
The Kingdom of Infinite Space, is published by Atlantic Books.
John Welch
Mary Weston
Jeffrey Wainwright. Recently retired from university teaching to write full-
time. Publications include Poetry the Basics and Acceptable Words: Essays on the

126
 THE BLURB

Poetry of Geoffrey Hill. Clarity or Death!, his fifth book of poems from Carcanet
Press, is just out. www.jeffreywainwright.co.uk.
Anna Woodford’s poems and reviews have been published in TLS, Rialto
and Poetry London. Her pamphlet Trailer (Five Leaves, 2007) was a Poetry
Book Society Choice. She has received an Eric Gregory Award. In 2007 she
was writer in residence at Alnwick Garden and Durham Cathedral.

The Reader Magazine

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127
your recommendations

calling all book groups

Angela Macmillan

We have been asked to suggest a reading list for book groups based on
previous recommendations in The Reader. As most reading groups meet
monthly, I have selected books for one year with a couple extra to allow
for choice. Shakespeare is included because a reading group can provide
excellent support to tackle a challenging read. Why not skip the reading
in advance and simply begin reading out loud in the group stopping to
discuss thoughts, characters and difficulties as they arise. One month
and one meeting for a whole play will barely be long enough, so take
two if you can. The same goes for Anna Karenina, which will be more re-
warding for two discussions and extra reading time. Do please write or
email and tell us about your reading group selections and discussions,
especially if you decide to follow our list of suggestions. We want to
know what is going on out there.

Anne Brontë, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (Issue 30)

Richard Hughes, A High Wind in Jamaica (Issue 19)
Shakespeare, Othello (Issue 10) or The Winter’s Tale (Issue 30)
Andrea Levy, Small Island (Issue 20)
Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth (Issue 23)
Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (Issue 24)
Alice Munro, Runaway (Issue 27)
Thomas Hardy, A Pair of Blue Eyes (Issue 25)
Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (Issue 22) recommend 2 sessions
Alexander Masters, Stuart A Life Backwards (Issue 24)
Best of The Reader: 4 essays (see website for copies)
  ‘Looking Up’ by Ann Stapleton (Issue 24)
  ‘The Inner Anthology’ by Mark Crees (Issue 14)
  ‘The Place of the Implicit’ by Philip Davis (Issue 10)
  ‘Reading Groups: The Crucial Factor’ by Angela Macmillan (Issue 28)
Mrs Oliphant, Hester (Issue 24)
Anthony Trollope, Cousin Henry (Issue 28)

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