The Bibliophilic Blogger

Would You Treat Your Apostrophe Like That?

2012-01-25T11:59:00.001Z

As someone who has had to teach writing skills to undergraduates (sometimes in "world class" institutions where one might have thought such a task unnecessary) I know that the basics of English grammar are not universally grasped even by the brightest of young minds. This was the context of Lynne Truss's best-selling Eats, Shoots & Leaves which revealed a hidden passion amongst the British population for trying to get things right grammatically. There were opponents, of course, in the shape of the academic professors of linguistics who (unlike the person in the street) didn't like the idea of prescriptive grammar and who argued instead that usage is the God and that permissive grammar is the only permissible version. No one, however, has taken much notice of them.

Now someone has come up with the bright idea of following the success of Eats Etc with a practical workbook, that helps you get on top of the good advice in the earlier book and try out its prescriptions for grammatical improvement for yourself. It's a simple idea but an excellent one and saves you having to spend Tuesday nights in a drafty further education hall being taught how to do it. You can do these exercises at home with a G&T in one hand. The author of Can You Eat, Shoot & Leave?, Clare Dignall, has put together a lively little workbook that is a lot more attractive to use than those big fat hortatory books about good usage (sorry Simon Heffer) that clog up the bookshops. There's a characteristically trenchant and funny introduction by Lynne Truss herself who makes the interesting point that never in human history have we done so much writing, as we scribble texts, emails, Facebook posts, tweets – you name it – all day long. So it makes more sense than ever before for us to get it right.

Clare Dignall briskly takes us on a tour round the well-known troublespots of punctuation (beginning, of course, with the apostrophe) and not only does her book complement Lynne Truss's book, it has something of the same lively wit. She points out, for example that the apostrophe is "obedient, enthusiastic, and capable of carrying out many important tasks" which makes it a bit like a much-loved spaniel: "However, that's where the analogy ends, because we are usually nice to spaniels."

If you have any difficulty with grammar and punctuation I would say this looks like a very good starting point.

P.S. When I was an English undergraduate at Liverpool University in the 1970s I proudly went to collect my first marked essay by the great Shakespearian scholar, Professor Kenneth Muir. Would he congratulate me on the brilliance of my critical insights into The Tempest? A very grave and professorial professor, Muir slid the essay across the table and announced in the tones of an Old Testament prophet: "You should never begin a sentence with 'however'." I have not done so since. Actually, as Clare demonstrated in that sentence of hers I have just quoted, of course you flipping can. Being exact in your punctuation doesn't mean being rigid and fogeyish. It just means getting it right.

Can You Eat, Shoot & Leave? by Clare Dignall is published by Collins at £7.99

Dickens's London

2011-12-27T16:02:00.000Z

Numberless books about aspects of Dickens's London have been written but here is one that actually has a practical utility in that it enables you to pace the streets today and see exactly which locations the author had in mind when he positioned his fictional characters in those districts of London he knew so well. Written by Peter Clark and published by Haus in its "Armchair Traveller" series, Dickens's London, (£9.99, hardback) is based around five central London walks and, based on a road-test of the sections in Bloomsbury that I am familiar with from my own recent book, Real Bloomsbury (Seren, 2011), I'd say it is accurate and full of relevant detail and a great excuse to go walking in central London with a theme to follow. It's an attractive, pocket-sized hardback, and probably one of the more useful and substantial of the Bicentenary missiles that will shortly be raining down on us.

Ruritania Lives?

2011-12-02T08:33:00.001Z

I must begin by declaring an interest. Mike Parker's Real Powys, the latest in the Real series of offbeat guides to (mostly) Welsh cities edited by Peter Finch, is in a series to which I myself contributed a volume earlier this year (Real Bloomsbury). So successful have these books from Welsh literary publisher Seren been that the series has decided to invade England and a few titles like mine have started to appear, or are planned to appear, for other cities like Liverpool and Oxford. The innovation of Real Powys is that it is about a rural county and in his introduction Peter Finch admits that he had doubts about the workability of the 'psychogeography' (I don't like this fashionable word) that is generally associated with urban writing and the lowdown on cities. He needn't have had worries because Mike Parker shows that the idea of writing about place with an alertness to what is going on and what has been going on works just as well in the country as it does in the city. And even rural places have their towns, pubs, streets, and built oddities and quirks.

Powys, which the Welsh poet Harri Webb, aptly called "the green desert" covers a quarter of the landmass of Wales but sheep outnumber humans by 60 to 1 and its population, such as it is, is 99 per cent white. Bordering England along its eastern side it has had an often vicious history of conflict with its neighbour that, as Mike Parker rightly argues, still lingers in the quiet, clean air of these windy hills.

For the past quarter century I have lived in eastern Powys, in the old county of Radnorshire, dividing my time for the past ten of those years between it and London (hence that Real Bloomsbury) so I read the new book with great interest, especially on my patch of East Radnor. (Yes, madam, I agree you haven't the faintest idea where any of these places are but that is the charm of Powys.) I am pleased to report that Mike Parker has got it right. This isn't Pevsner or Wikipedia. It isn't an exhaustive checklist of everything. It is a personal account, like all the Real books, where Penybont trotting races take up more space than architectural jottings, but you will learn a lot from it along the way. It's true I would have liked more about Knighton, the town on the Dyke (Offa's), or a mention of the extraordinarily innovative Presteigne music festival which manages to win audiences for more original commissions of new work in classical music than the Proms would dare put on (the Proms controller frankly admitted to the larger than life director of the Presteigne festival, George Vass that he wouldn't get away with any of this at the Albert Hall), or a gesture at places like Cascob or Old Radnor. But what he does say rings true and this is a lively and interesting book.

Powys invites gentle satire. We all think of ourselves as 21st Century urban sophisticates and quaint customs and unchanged surfaces are easy to smile at. Mike Parker, by dubbing this "smallest, poorest county in the land" Ruritania once or twice, might seem to go along with that trend but he is not mocking and he has a good knowledge of the patch and its history. Highly recommended if you are venturing out into the kind of country where grass grows in the middle of the road and (indigenous) people in small market towns sometimes greet strangers in the street as if they were old acquaintances, something that would never happen in Bloomsbury.

Real Powys by Mike Parker is published by Seren at £9.99

30th November, Lincoln's Inn Fields...

2011-11-30T13:31:00.000Z

Shakespeare and the Folio Hunters: A Detective Story

2011-11-23T08:10:00.001Z

750 copies of the first folio edition of Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies were published after the playwright's death in 1623 on the initiative of two of the actors in Shakespeare's acting company, The King's Men. John Heminges and Henry Condell were fed up with the fact that so many bootleg editions of the individual plays were circulating. Today 232 of these First Folios have been located and (almost) each one has been seen by scholar Eric Rasmussen who has written a surprisingly fascinating book, The Shakespeare Thefts (Palgrave Macmillan) about his team's search for the missing First Folios and their painstaking examination of the ones we do know about. Some will have perished in fires, some will have been torn up to wrap vegetables in, and some will exist in private collections, probably stolen, and thus secreted away.

This is a book full of stories, of obsessive collectors, of careless owners, of thieves, of fantasists (like the man who lived with his old Mum on a weekly carer's allowance and funded a lavish lifestyle on stolen credit cards used to purchase a stolen First Folio), of rich men looking for the ultimate status symbol, of Japanese universities owning no fewer than twelve of the things from the days when the yen would get you whatever you wanted. In 2002 Sir Paul Getty paid $7 million for his entry to this very special millionaire's club. In 1623 it cost £1 which for the time was a staggering amount so it has never been an object for the ordinary person. Rasmussen calls this a "literary detective story" and it has all the appeal of a page-turning chase after the elusive Folios, many of which must still be out there. But beware: a worryingly large number of people have died shortly after acquiring their copy. For an academic book this is a pacy read, written in a lively popular style and highly recommended. My only suggestion is that Rasmussen and the team should reach down their copy of the Oxford English Dictionary and look up the meaning of "disinterest" (p23).

What would one do if one had the dosh to acquire a First Folio? Probably look at it lovingly then replace it in the fireproof vault and pull down the RSC complete Shakespeare edited by Jonathan Bate. And Eric Rasmussen.

In Praise of the North: Jeanette Winterson

2011-11-10T15:21:00.000Z

Jeanette Winterson's new memoir, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? appears to have been highly praised, rightly it seems to me, for its zest and candour and noted for a quality that some reviewers have seen as haste or even carelessness but which I see as her characteristic lively, pugnacious inventiveness. She describes herself as "a bare-knuckle fighter" who is her own worst enemy in love, lashing out at those she wants to love, all of which may proceed not just from the oddity of her beginnings in a crazy Evangelical household dominated by the unloved and unloving adoptive mother she calls Mrs Winterson, but in that sense of being unwanted, though the social workers and adoption agencies of course repeat to her the mantra that she was wanted, the birth mother when eventually located singing the same song. There are harrowing descriptions of her bout of madness after a long relationship ended and her attempted suicide, as well as some rollicking humour from that mad religious household. But what stuck in my mind was something else: her repeatedly stated affection for the North of England (like me she is a Lancastrian) and her regret at what has happened to it. The emptying of the libraries (she read the literature section right through in A to Z order) by infotainment librarians, the triumph of Utility over inspiration in education, are all vigorously condemned but some of the most moving passages (aside from the personal ones of course) are where she observes contemporary England, the urban fringes of Manchester, for example, where the terraces have been demolished to be replaced by a waste land of "tower blocks and cul-de-sacs, shopping compounds, and gaming arcades...most of the small shops... boarded up, lost on fast, hostile roads". She asks why decent people cannot live in decent environments:

"Now and again, forlorn and marooned, there's a four-square stone building that says Mechanics' Institute or Co-operative Society. There's a viaduct, a cluster of birch trees, a blackened stone wall; the remains of the remains. A tyre warehouse, a giant supermarket, a minicab sign, a betting shop, kids on skateboards who have never known life any other way. Old men with bewildered faces. How did we get here?...I love the industrial north of England and I hate what has happened to it."

And this was the case before the current recession.

The Slogans of St Paul's

2011-10-31T08:20:00.001Z

Walking around the anti-capitalist camp outside St Paul's yesterday I saw some interesting slogans. Good to see a spirit of linguistic invention in our stale political culture:

No Comment

2011-10-20T16:09:00.002+01:00

This was spotted in Foyle's bookshop at St Pancras International .

It Could Be You: Change in the Bizarre World of Literary Prizes?

2011-10-13T08:22:00.001+01:00

News of plans to start a new literary prize in response to the decline of the Man Booker's reputation are welcome but, if one ponders it for more than five minutes, the surprise is that it has taken so long for the literary establishment (whence the new idea originates though they won't like me for saying it) to realise something was radically wrong. To suggest that a literary prize should be awarded solely on literary merit rather than basing the award on the usual British populist criteria is hardly a startling piece of innovative cultural "blue skies thinking". It should be bleedin' obvious. But at least the focus is on the right issue: what should be considered excellent, rather than the usual prize preoccupations about which favoured person should be given an award they don't need by one of their friends who received it last time they were a judge etc etc. The tangled web of favouritism and conventionality routinely ensnares the usual suspects and there is a certain type of 'prize writer' (especially in the poetry world, where it can be seen in sharper relief because that world is so small) who is, as the Italian Catholics say of cardinals who are potential Popes – papabile – or designed to win prizes.

But what concerns me is that the very people advocating this new incorruptible, aesthetically pure prize are the same ones who control the levers of literary power: the agents and publishers, however laudably critical they might be of the current mess, who, the rest of the time, are solemnly telling authors that "no one wants" anything other than genre fiction, that X and Y will no longer sell, etc etc.

Let there be prizes. Let there be more prizes. But let there also be publishers of vision, ambition, originality, daring. And let pigs fly in a beautiful, curving arc across the roseate dawn sky.

La Rentrée or National Poetry Day is Here

2011-10-01T16:58:00.000+01:00

Apologies to regular readers of this blog (Sid and Doris Bonkers of Neasden) but I have been silent since the 15th August (a date known to me since my Catholic childhood as The Feast of the Assumption) and a new month has begun so I really must do something about this slothful inaction.

I am still trying to pick myself up off the floor after bringing back from France with me Hélène Lenoir's shattering novel of the dark side of the family, Pièce rapportée, [a French idiom which means someone connected to the family by marriage but never considered quite part of it] and maybe I will blog about this soon. Otherwise I have been re-reading with the usual pleasure Wordsworth's Prelude, but you don't want to know this.

So some useful information at last: Thursday is National Poetry Day and lots of things will be happening. For Londoners there are events at the Southbank Centre organised jointly with the Poetry Society, now seemingly cured of its recent bout of self-destructiveness.

I am grateful to the incomparable Katy Evans-Bush for this summary of what will happen on Thursday: "It's look-to-the-future time for the Poetry Society, and the day's festivities are all over the future: the Foyle Young Poets of the Year will be announced earlier that day, and judges Imtiaz Dharker and Glyn Maxwell will read with former Foyle Young Poets Helen Mort (just signed by Chatto) and Richard O'Brien. Children's poets including Michael Rosen and Philip Wells will read, and so will rising young SLAMbassadors.

The theme is Games, and the event will be like a sort of giant poetry fête: there will be poetry quizzes, poetry bingo, poetry cupcakes, a drop-in poetry surgery, and even poetry cupcakes! And also tons of poets.

The day will also feature the launch of the new issue of Poetry Review by the young, Donut-published, Gregory-winning poet Ahren Warner. (Glyn Maxwell is also featured in this issue, and will be on hand.)

And Julia Bird will be running a Poembola! (What could be inside that drum??)

There will be live tweeting from the event, including twitter games and quizzes so people outside London (or in the office!) don't miss out - the hashtag is #NPDLive. "

The Spark of Tahar Ben Jelloun, Part Two: 'L'étincelle'

2011-08-15T09:22:00.001+01:00

A couple of months ago I wrote here about Par le feu, the short fictional account by the French-Moroccan writer, Tahar Ben Jelloun of the death of the Tunisian, Mohamed Bouazizi, whose self-immolation was the spark that ignited the Arab Spring. At more or less the same time Ben Jelloun wrote another, non-fictional, analysis of the arab revolts called L'étincelle: révoltes dans les pays arabes (Gallimard). L'étincelle means 'the spark'. There is no sign as yet of either being published in English but they would make in combination a very important book.

Ben Jelloun's brief but powerful overview of recent events, written in March and published in May (and not without its critics, as an example of which see a rather personal attack from a partisan website that fails completely to address the substance of his argument) is nothing if not topical. Those of us with rather queasy recollections of the fashionable novelists wheeled out to give their twopennyworth in The Guardian after 9/11 tend to approach The Great Writer on the Topics of the Day with some caution but Ben Jelloun has some good reasons to speak out for he was born in Fez in French Morocco, and knows the culture of the Arab world from within. Written with his usual limpid economy, it describes, witheringly, the despotic cruelty of the dictators – les vieux turbans – of the Arab world and celebrates the spirit of resistance.

He begins by confronting the alleged 'silence of the Arab intellectuals'. Far from being silent, he points out, writers and journalists in the Arab world have repeatedly spoken out and paid the price in imprisonment, torture and death, not the usual result of the engagements of the public intellectual in Western Europe or the USA. Using his novelistic gifts, Ben Jelloun presents little vignettes of the two dictators who were dismissed – Ben Ali in Tunisia and Moubarak in Egypt – giving us a picture of their fury at their people for having rejected them and this is followed by a brief tour of what happened this spring in the leading countries where revolts broke out. It is a horrifying story of brutal repression, personal enrichment at the expense of poor and humiliated people, and the turning of a blind eye by the outside world for fear of losing contracts and because the savagery of the dictators was seen to be useful in keeping the radical islamists at bay.

Ben Jelloun is scathing of the islamists, who watched the popular demands for freedom, justice and equality with dismay. The author of Islam Explained brands their rhetoric "bland, anachronistic and stupid" [lénifiant, anachronique et stupide] and celebrates instead the radical political demands of the people who revolted, demands which derive clearly from classic human rights and democratic principles. Unlike our recent apolitical shopping riots, the Arab revolts knew what they wanted and the early acts of self-immolation happened always outside buildings symbolising political or state power, the message clear enough: that the governments had let down their people. A constant theme of this short book is that of humiliation (it figures largely in the earlier story of Bouazazi) but Ben Jelloun ends on a note of optimism in calling the current fury of the people "creative and alive" [vive et créatrice] and in particular young people, some of whom have lived abroad and had their eyes opened to political possibilities, have seen how other young people live and how vital liberty is to life. "As in a dream, they have suddenly realised that they too have the chance to live a better life, to finish with dictatorships, to recover a little dignity." [Comme dans un rêve, ils ont entrevu soudain qu'ils avaient eux aussi la possibilité de vivre mieux, d'en finir avec les dictatures, de retrouver un peu de dignité.] The tools they have used have been communication, the exchange of ideas and plans, and the most notable thing about the new generation is that it is fearless and this is something new that the dictators – represented by Ben Jelloun as desperate cornered animals who know only how to snarl and spit – cannot cope with. They suddenly see that the revolt is non-negotiable and will not stop. "It is that which is new and historic."

I only hope that the optimism is justified.

The Prize Obsession

2011-08-07T09:23:00.004+01:00

I can recall reading somewhere that there are so many literary prizes it is difficult to avoid winning one. Let me reassure you, it is perfectly easy. Having published fifteen books I have yet to win a prize – though I was on a shortlist of six for the 2003 Marsh Biography Prize and took my charity shop tuxedo out of mothballs for the dinner where Brenda Maddox deservedly pipped us all to the post. Naturally everyone would like to win because there is usually some cash, sometimes a lot of it, and it does wonders for sales but one doesn't have to be a conspiracy theorist to see how, as with most other aspects of the English literary world, the usual rules of engagement apply. These can be summed up briefly: make sure you know the right people. In the case of major poetry prizes: really make sure you know the right people.

In a literary culture where reviewing is becoming ever more inadequate prizes start to become significant as a device for ranking books so it's no surprise that publishers get so excited about them. Independent-minded readers don't need them because they award their own prizes in their head.

Which brings me to the Man Booker which never quite seems to get it right in contrast to the much more reliable (in my view) Goncourt in France which has (a) no musical chair-changing celebrity judges (b) a cash award of 10 euros and (b) a very good track record. I was interested to see Boyd Tonkin in The Independent on Friday proposing something which sounded rather like the Goncourt. Over to you Boyd:

Not the Man Booker Prize?

I refuse to criticise the Man Booker long-list. I've done that job; it's tough. You can't begin to satisfy the clamour of competing voices in your head, let alone in the world outside (established stars vs newcomers; large vs small firms; British novelists vs the rest, and so on). Yet as I began to tally my cherished casualties this year (Michael Ondaatje, Graham Swift, Ali Smith, Justin Cartwright, Andrew Miller, Francesca Kay... ), as well as other critics', a subversive idea took shape. Perhaps we need a new prize. As well as, not instead of. Only for UK authors or else permanent British residents. The same jury of genuine authorities (writers, teachers, critics) every year. No submissions from publishers; just selections by the judges. No thought of striking a balance between ages, genders, genres, publishers. Above all, an uncompromising, single-minded commitment to excellence in the art of fiction. Howls of complaint against "elitism" would pierce the air. Publishers would hate it. And novelists would kill to win.

[The Independent, 5 August 2011 by Boyd Tonkin]

A Postcript

It has been pointed out to me that the Goncourt is not necessarily such a good model and that is had its fair share of weird choices and has attracted accusations of being controlled by a cabal of publishers etc etc. All I can say is that its last three choices which I have read have been more satisfying to me than the Booker choices.

Tony Judt and the Alternative Conversation

2011-07-27T14:24:00.002+01:00

The historian and critic Tony Judt – who died almost a year ago of a variant of motor neurone disease known as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis – managed to complete a book Ill Fares the Land which I have just finished and which makes me think of Stéphane Hessel's Indignez Vous! (see older post in this blog) in its determination not to be cowed by the current intellectual climate of supine acceptance of the nostrums of privatisation and the worship of markets as a substitute for creative public policy. Too sharply intelligent and knowledgeable to fall back on nostalgia, romanticising past struggles, or self-indulgent political fantasy, Judt simply asks for what he calls "a new moral narrative", a way of thinking and talking about contemporary politics that returns to ethical principles instead of parroting the post-Thatcher free market slogans. It is a thoughtful, crisply written book that, like Hessel, offers no single Great Idea to solve all our problems but rather calls for a willingness to challenge, to dissent, as a preparation for a better way. And its opening sentence makes a declaration that no one in the Labour Party, for example, would ever make: "Something is profoundly wrong with the way we live today." It is a book to read and ponder rather than a source book of slogans or policies and none the worse for that. One can imagine the policy wonks in all the parties, trapped in their bubble of self-referring and self-reflecting cant, dismissing it with a smug wave of the hand but those of us who long ago ceased to expect anything from that quarter at least have something to energise our thinking about alternatives.

Where Do Fictional Characters Come From?

2011-07-19T09:55:00.000+01:00

I have enjoyed reading Alan Hollinghurst's new novel The Stranger's Child, which centres around a First World War poet called Cecil Valance and I notice that some people have been having fun trying to identify "the original of" Cecil, arguing, for example that he is "based on" Rupert Brooke. This in spite of the fact that Brooke is mentioned in the novel alongside Cecil Valance. I found myself playing the game too, seeing Julian Grenfell and maybe a bit of Charles Hamilton Sorley in this character. And then I reminded myself that this is fiction. That's right: invention, imagination, creation. Novelists, even conventionally realistic ones, are not newspaper reporters (perhaps a bad analogy just now but you know what I mean) but they may well build their characters out of the raw material of people they have known and experienced. In an autobiographical novel the relationship one supposes is clear enough but mostly characters are amalgams of perhaps three or four people or they are pure invention. In so far as we observe the mantra of the creative writing classes – Write About What You Know – then we will draw on actual experience, but surely what matters is the significance and meaning of the character in the novel's overall aesthetic structure. "The only sure truth about characters in prose fiction," wrote Susan Sontag, "is that they are, in Henry James' phrase, 'a compositional resource'." The more we emphasise the realism of the novel over its other elements, the more we will think these detective games matter.

A Twitter Poem (+140)

2011-07-06T14:27:00.001+01:00

Trending

Tied it seems in perpetuity

to the ceaseless fatuity

of Twittering

I go on littering

the lawn of my mind with stuff

when I should cry: Enough!

Shakespeare and the Chavs

2011-06-29T10:19:00.001+01:00

A play opening on Saturday in London about the current crisis in Greece? It is an odd experience re-reading Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream against a background of news reports of the 'austerity measures' being inflicted on the Greeks that will, as ever, have the worst impact on the poorest. For at the heart of the play is of course The Most Lamentable Comedy and Most Cruel Death of Pyramus and Thisbe performed by a cast of 'rude mechanicals' aka the Athens working class (carpenters, joiners, weavers, repair-men tailors, etc). In Athinas Street in Athens, just off Omonia Square, each morning Shakespeare's "hard-handed" workers gather with the tools of their particular trade in front of them on the pavement as a sort of advertisement – or they did last time I was there but today they are probably queueing in one of the soup-kitchens shown this week on the news bulletins. This connects also to a debate about Owen Jones recent book (which I haven't yet read) Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class which I gather deals with the way we represent and talk about the working class in a context of the daft belief in the media that we now live in a classless society.

Shakespeare presents his working men with humour rather than the kind of aggressive prejudice towards "chavs" that I presume Owen Jones is taking issue with. He pokes fun at their uneducated speech, their malapropisms, their comic bombast and exaggerations, but it feels affectionate, and their play embodies the "serious" themes of the main play in a valuable way. Apologising for the fact that a stage lion might frighten the middle class women in the audience "whose gentle hearts do fear/The smallest monstrous mouse that creeps on floor" Snug the joiner explains that he is not a real lion, just an ordinary trades unionist moonlighting as an actor for the evening. So these are not terrifying hoodies with knives and guns on their person but mild mechanicals on a summer's evening in Athens. They are the old-fashioned decent working class that we all love and sentimentalise but don't want to be because we want to pursue our upward mobility and dine in fancy restaurants and write literary blogs.

When the play is put on it is the aristocracy who seem to have a problem. Hippolyta, about to be married to Theseus, Duke of Athens, is clearly a Daily Mail reader and resents having to watch these proles perform but the Duke exudes liberal tolerance from his throne and chooses the play of the "hard-handed men that work in Athens here" in preference to some other worthy options including a piece of cultural lament about dumbing-down which he decides sounds too heavy and serious for a wedding bash. He argues that the naive art of the working men is worthy of respect: "For never anything can be amiss/When simpleness and duty tender it." Surrounded by terrified sycophants who can hardly get their words out he appreciates the "tongue-tied simplicity" of the workers turned actors for the night. Hippolyta doesn't share this view and continues to mutter about the quality of the performance ("This is the silliest stuff that ever I heard.") but Theseus is prepared to look for the glint in the rough diamond and to exercise a little sympathetic imagination towards their "palpable-gross play": "If we imagine no worse of them than they of themselves, they may pass for excellent men."

Granted, this is all feudal stuff, power patronising the workers, but it's at least an attempt at fairness of representation, of respect, and a lot better than middle-class fear of the "feral" working class of the inner city estates. I just hope those painters in Athinas Street, with their white-spattered boots, have got some work this morning.

Tahar Ben Jelloun: Writing on Fire

2011-06-09T10:44:00.001+01:00

The leading French-Moroccan novelist Tahar Ben Jelloun has always been unafraid of tackling contemporary political subjects in a way that British novelists always seem to find so difficult to do, terrified as they are of seeming "strident" or insufficiently circumspect. But his latest book, Par le feu [By Fire], just published, is a remarkably rapid response to the events of the Arab Spring. It is a short story or récit of a mere 50 pages that tells as fiction the story of Mohamed Bouazizi, the unemployed Tunisian graduate forced to sell fruit from a handcart until beaten up by the police. Pushed to the limit, he then set fire to himself last December, igniting the Arab revolutions. The fiction is beautifully and sparely written and it conveys with great economy the brutal daily reality of life under the Tunisian régime, the harassment by corrupt police and officials, the resignation of the majority of the people in spite of their awareness of the injustice that was their daily ration, and the absence of all hope in a culture of grinding poverty where the poor face only humiliation and harassment. Less than six months after the death of Mohamed the Gallimard presses have rolled (I picked it up on Monday in the Librairie Pages et Images in St Malo) and Ben Jelloun's composed and restrained anger shows no sign of undue haste in the writing. Let's hope it's quickly translated.

P.S. Ben Jelloun has also written simultaneously, I gather, an essay on the same theme called L'étincelle [The Spark] which I haven't yet seen.

William Empson Remembered

2011-06-01T17:42:00.002+01:00

Today in Marchmont Street, Bloomsbury, a plaque was unveiled, by his son, to the poet and critic, Sir William Empson, who lived in this Bloomsbury Street after he was expelled from Cambridge in the late 1920s and who wrote a substantial part of his famous work of literary criticism, Seven Types of Ambiguity, in the flat above what is now a Bangladeshi food store.

Passers-by were intrigued to watch a collection of writers and scholars who had gathered to hear Empson's poem about the British Museum read for the first and perhaps the last time in a Bloomsbury shopping street. The crowd included a sprinkling of professors, a former poetry editor of Faber and Faber, the diarist of the TLS (the famous "J.C."), the mayor of Camden, and even yours truly who was handed the microphone at one point only to stammer out a plug for his own book, Real Bloomsbury, which contains an account of Empson's residence. Another of his sons told me that one night Empson and Dylan Thomas returned from a boozy evening in Fitzrovia and were found the next morning each rolled up in the carpet where they had fallen the night before.

I think they may have exceeded their number of units on that occasion.

Colin Thubron on Travel Writing

2011-05-29T10:29:00.001+01:00

No sooner do I deliver my twopennyworth on travel writing than Colin Thubron comes along and says it all so much better than I can do in The Guardian. Before visiting Cyprus last December I read his 1970s book, Journey to Cyprus, and found it, like all his books, beautifully written, wise and observant. Less flashy and self-advertising than some of the well-known travel writers, Thubron is an unfailingly interesting writer about place.

Geert Mak's Slice of Istanbul Life

2011-05-24T13:25:00.000+01:00

Is travel-writing dead? That's the sort of question that is only marginally less sleep-inducing than: "Is the novel dead?" Of course it isn't, but the old-fashioned travel narrative may well be so, and the sorts of travel book that work these days seem to be the ones that mix it – history, philosophising, autobiography, fiction etc etc. Off to Istanbul shortly (volcanic ash permitting) I have just read the Dutch writer Geert Mak's splendid little book, The Bridge (2007) based on the daily life of the Galata Bridge over the Golden Horn in Istanbul. It's about far more than the bridge itself which links the old part of Istanbul where I always stay, scruffy as it is, with the newer, westernised Pera ("outside") district. The tussle in contemporary Turkey between modernisation and tradition which has been a feature of the country since at least the era of its modern founder Ataturk, is symbolised to some extent by the bridge.

What makes Mak's book so good is that he has talked to the shabby, poor, sometimes desperate street vendors and fishermen on the bridge as well as providing a brilliant pocket history of modern Turkey in general and Istanbul in particular. These voices are what makes the book and he lets them speak in ways that some of the classic travel writers don't always manage to pull off. It's a short book but an excellent one and makes me want to read his longer book about Europe, In Europe. Everyone travels now, it is said, and so travel writing doesn't work any more, because we have all been there. It might be true that the old 'traveller's tales' are harder to get away with but there will always be a role for the writer who travels with eyes and ears open and some real historical knowledge. Geert Mak is one of them.

What is Biography For?

2011-05-06T09:18:00.002+01:00

Once upon a time certain literary critics argued that biography was superfluous at best, pernicious at worst, because it encouraged us to concentrate on gossipy trivia instead of focussing on that sacred space: The Text. Nothing dates quite so quickly as fashions in criticism and "the New Critics" are no longer new and the "doctrine of impersonality" is probably equally covered in dust in some lit. crit. mausoleum and many subsequent hot tickets are now being heavily discounted. Quite what the current status of biography is in the austere world of criticism I am not sure but on Monday, if you happen to be in London, fellow biographer, Phil Baker, and I will be discussing "The Perils of Biography". We both think that it has a future and a role but I still have a lot of respect for Proust's view in Contre Sainte-Beuve that, contrary to Sainte-Beuve (a critic who believed that you couldn't say anything useful about a writer unless you knew all about their life, preferably from personal acquaintance) the writer was far more than the bundle of atoms who sat down for breakfast. The writer was, as Proust put it, "l'autre moi", the "other me", and his personal foibles had nothing to do with the writer who wrote those books. A striking irony, of course, given the deep personal sources of Proust's writing. But I think we get his point. Come along on Monday and see if we manage to refer to him.

Damn You England: The Latest Version

2011-04-27T12:42:00.002+01:00

The news that Martin Amis is to leave Britain again, in disgust at his native land, has been greeted with the usual round of derision from journalistic commentators. It is what always seems to greet the public pronouncements of Amis. Several have referred to John Osborne's notorious "A Letter to My Fellow Countrymen" published in Tribune half a century ago in August 1961 at the worst period of the Cold War. Describing this as "a letter of hate" to his fellow countrymen by which "I mean those men of my country who have defiled it. The men with manic fingers leading the sightless, feeble, betrayed body of my country to its death. You are its murderers..." it goes on in similar vein rather too long. Osborne was only 31 at the time so this is not the ranting of an Amis who feels that he has had enough after a lifetime of watching his country go to the dogs. "Damn you, England," said Osborne. "You're rotting now, and quite soon you'll disappear." Well, as we all know, England hasn't disappeared. The tradition of hating England has deep roots. See for example the Victorian explorer, Sir Richard Burton, or more recently the writers of the 1930s like Lawrence Durrell. But it is always difficult to know where hate ends and love begins.

We all have our Meldrewish moments and I notice that over in the Twitter aviary I have been sounding off in recent weeks about aggressive London cyclists, contemporary pub culture, and so forth. In a sense Amis has a point but his manner is against him. There is quite a lot about contemporary English life (I am deliberately avoiding conscripting Wales, Scotland and Ireland into all this) that is hard to take and, reflecting on it here in the Welsh countryside in glorious weather in recent days, I have been trying to get in touch with my mellow side and put it all in perspective. I think it mostly boils down to a prevailing lack of adequate socialisation. In the cities we seem to have lost the art of negotiating one another's space, the small courtesies and urbanities that make life tolerable when we are herded together. The cyclist with his shrill whistle or deep aggressive bellowing at a pedestrian perceived to have committed some misdemeanour or the crowd of people blocking the pavement outside the pub and forcing a blind person to walk into the road (I am not making that one up) are people who have allowed themselves to get trapped in their own egos and we need to find a way to let them out. Oh dear, what am I saying? We need to be nice to each other? Can't I come up with something less bland? The social psychologists tell us that people aren't really happy, in spite of all the material benefits we shower ourselves with, and I suppose this is it. All that manic, competitive stuff on the city streets, isn't an index of personal contentment. If you are a rich writer you can move abroad, put it all behind you, start again somewhere else. The rest of us just need to keep on battling. Osborne and Amis are perhaps fortunate in finding someone they can blame.

Elizabeth Bishop: On Not Saying Too Much

2011-04-11T07:46:00.000+01:00

I recently reported a comment from Bruce Chatwin's letters about writers needing to write only what there is a compelling urgency to write (an echo of Kafka's famous apothegm about a book needing to be an axe for the frozen sea within us). In the penultimate issue of the New York Review of Books [March 24-April 6 LVIII (5)] there's an excellent piece by April Bernard about two new editions of Elizabeth Bishop's poetry and prose. Bernard worries that too much of Bishop's ephemera, including drafts not intended for publication and stuff she herself did not allow into print for good reason, has been made available and turned into part of the Bishop canon. She quotes Bishop, after a meeting with her mentor, the poet Marianne Moore, saying that she never left the latter's house: "without feeling happier: uplifted, even inspired, determined to be good, to work harder, not to worry about what other people thought, never to try to publish anything until I thought I'd done my best with it, no matter how many years it took – or never to publish at all."

Or never to publish at all!

Kafka Again

2011-04-08T08:13:00.001+01:00

My comment in the Guardian's "Comment is Free" section appeared yesterday:-

The remarkable announcement this week by the Bodleian Library and the German Literary Archive at Marbach that they have agreed jointly to purchase a collection of more than 100 letters and postcards from Franz Kafka to his sister Ottla will cause great excitement amongst Kafka biographers and scholars. New archival material about this exhaustively covered writer is an increasing rarity.

The new material will offer a chance to learn more about Kafka's favourite sister, who is a remarkable woman in her own right. Ottilie ("Ottla") David was totally dedicated to her brother. She divorced her non-Jewish Czech husband, Josef David ("Pepa") in order to save his life, declared herself a Jew to the Nazi authorities and, on arrival at Theresienstadt concentration camp, volunteered to accompany around 1,200 children on a "special transport" to Auschwitz, where she was gassed to death on arrival.

The Bodleian has not yet itemised the material in detail so it is difficult to know exactly how much of this material is genuinely new (a volume Letters to Ottla and the Family was published in 1974) but it is clear from the joint statement by the two institutions that there is at least some brand new material unseen by any scholars and biographers to date. In particular there are said to be new letters from Kafka's last lover Dora Diamant and the young Hungarian medical student and friend of Kafka's on his deathbed, Robert Klopstock.

In a novel arrangement, the Bodleian and Marbach are to share ownership of the new letters, which would otherwise have been auctioned off on 19 April in a sale in Germany by family descendants.

Part of the deal is that the financial sums involved remain secret. Almost all the newly acquired papers have actually been sitting in the Bodleian archive for 40 years. They were acquired by the enterprising Kafka scholar and translator Professor Malcolm Pasley, who had earlier rescued other Kafka manuscripts, including the famous 'blue octavo notebooks', which I remember handling with awe when researching my biography of Kafka.

This bold and unusual initiative points to a sharp contrast with the seemingly endless and bitter wrangles over that other collection of Kafka papers, currently in Israel in the firm possession of the daughters of Esther Hoffe, former secretary and putative lover of Kafka's friend Max Brod, who famously defied Kafka's request that he destroy all his unpublished manuscripts.

In Israel the row is about Who Owns Kafka?, as Judith Butler titled her sardonic London Review of Books lecture given on the subject in London last month, with the National Library of Israel and the Marbach archive in Germany slugging it out in the courts over who should get custody of the papers. The Israelis appear to argue that Kafka's Jewishness (avowedly important to him) makes him the property of the state of Israel. Those who see him as a master of modern German prose see his allegiance as being to the German language. The Czechs, of course, have always been lukewarm in their designs on him. In my view Kafka belongs to no one but himself. A writer is not the property of the state, and his true curators are his readers. Kafka, like Joyce, flies past those nets of nationalism that would seek to bring down his flight. He belongs to the imagination of the world.

Back in Oxford it is to be hoped that, as well as offering valuable new material on Kafka, this new cache of papers will help to give more prominence to Ottilie David, who, however hard I struggle to overcome vulgar biographical reductionism, is always present in my mind when I read the "soft, plaintive voice" of Gregor Samsa's sister in Metamorphosis asking, after his transformation into a repellent thing: "Gregor? Aren't you well? Is there anything you want?"

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2011

Elizabeth Bowen: The Difference a Word Makes

2011-04-04T08:56:00.002+01:00

The sense you get with a lot of currently hyped British fiction that the writers are straining too hard, that the writing has been overcooked, strikes you more forcefully when you confront the opposite: writing that seems perfectly in control of itself. Elizabeth Bowen's Friends and Relations (1932) opens with a wedding that is realised with extraordinary economy of means. At one point the sister of the bride, Janet Studdart, looks into the marquee on a couple who have been more or less abandoned, without chairs, without anyone speaking to them, alone in the empty tent. "'It's a pity,' she added, looking dispassionately round the marquee, 'you can't sit down.'" That single word "dispassionately" animates the cliché: "speaks volumes".

The Company You Keep

2011-03-28T07:24:00.002+01:00

At last, in serious company in the window of Waterstone's in Camden High Street, London!

Sybille Bedford Centenary

2011-03-15T07:57:00.000Z

The novelist Sybille Bedford (1911-2006) who would have been 100 tomorrow, has been getting a lot of coverage in the papers recently. One of those stylish and elegant writers who have a following but who never seem quite to capture the "mass literary fiction" market, to coin an unpleasant phrase, Sybille Bedford was a great friend of the novelist Aldous Huxley and even more so his wife, Maria, and became Huxley's first official biographer, her two volumes appearing in 1972-3. When, thirty years later, I came to write the next full biography of Huxley [Aldous Huxley: An English Intellectual (2002)] I beat a path to her door in Chelsea. I have written about this in a long piece for the magazine Areté [No 20, Spring/Summer 2006, not online] and also a shorter tribute in the memorial volume: Sybille Bedford: In Memory (2007). Sybille, notorious for her acid way with people she didn't like, was extremely kind and helpful to me with my biography of Huxley and gave me a great deal of valuable information and insight when we spoke together over a glass of wine in her dark (she had problems with her eyesight) Chelsea basement flat on several occasions. I have been struck by the recent tributes to her which have tended in the main to consist of posh literati reminiscing about posh Sybille (she was of Austrian blue blood) but I am not posh and it is worth recording that she could not have treated me with more generosity and respect. Some of her novels are being reissued this week but they are easy to find second hand as Penguin Modern Classics (not all that neglected then). Good old Sybille.

A Time for Outrage: Stéphane Hessel

2011-03-11T08:14:00.001Z

The surprise best-seller in France last year was a pamphlet from the Montpellier-based Indigène éditions, who specialise in giving a voice to third world and other "natives" closer to home, those who challenge the consensus, or as their slogan has it: "Ceux qui marchent contre le vent." This little publishing house suddenly found itself with a success on its hands that sold over 600,000 copies in the run-up to Christmas where people seemed to be giving it to each other as a stocking filler. The author, Stéphane Hessel, 93, a survivor of Buchenwald, a member of the French Resistance, and one of the drafters of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and an international diplomat, issued this passionate call to arms (I would translate it as: Get Angry!) particularly addressed to the young, to resist once more the negative political forces of our time. He is the polar opposite of crass right wing media stars like Niall Fergusson and he seems to have struck a chord in France.

Now he is published in Britain as A Time for Outrage and it will be very interesting to see how he fares in a politically comatose country where even the Governor of the Bank of England is baffled at our failure to be more angry at what the bankers have done to us. Already there have been sneers against Hessel to the effect that it is all words and no programme. But this is to miss the point. He is not a policy wonk, he is a man who is enraged, and wants us to be enraged. He is trying to inspire. He is invoking a spirit of resistance, of nay-saying, of dissent. This doesn't play well in Britain where, slumped in front of our computer screens, we have got out of the habit of fighting back – though it's good news that a majority of people, according to a recent poll, are already bored to death with the idea of the fatuous Royal Wedding.

A personal footnote: I used a quotation from Indignez-vous! as the epigraph to my new verse broadside against the coalition government, Get Real!

Get both!

The Red Sweet Wine of Youth: the British First World War Poets Launched in London

2011-02-28T08:15:00.002Z

Tomorrow night in London at King's College in The Strand I will be in conversation with Max Saunders, biographer of Ford Madox Ford, talking about my new book about the British poets of the First World War: The Red Sweet Wine of Youth (Little, Brown). This event takes place in The Anatomy Museum so bring your intellectual scalpels along at 6.30pm. It's free and there are refreshments. The book, just published, has already been reviewed favourably in The Financial Times and The Wall Street Journal though I have to say, for the world of global finance, it doesn't have any special message that I can work out! See also this and this from Dermot Bolger. I am also very pleased to have been recommended by the War Poets blog of Tim Kendall, a leading British expert on war poetry and Professor of English at Exeter University.

Oscar Wilde Week Begins!

2011-02-14T15:22:00.002Z

Over at the always excellent Baroque in Hackney blog news of the start of Oscar Wilde Week in conjunction with Esoteric London blog. Go to!

We approve very much of Wilde here at BB so more power to their joint elbows.

Another piece of scintillating news. After rejecting Twitter and flouncing out of its room 18 months ago, claiming that it was a waste of time, I have now slyly crept back in as @bloomsburyman. I am going to give it another go but equally determined not to let it take over my trivia-time.

Get Real!

2011-02-10T10:04:00.001Z

Today's Times Literary Supplement has an item about my new satirical broadside Get Real! (Rack Press) aimed at those nice people in the coalition Government. In the diary column the notoriously stringent critic, "J.C." is very complimentary. Details of how to order this can be found at the Rack Press website. If you live in London you can buy it over the counter at the London Review Bookshop in Bury Place or Bookmarks in Bloomsbury Street.

The Red Sweet Wine of Youth: the British First World War Poets

2011-02-03T07:01:00.002Z

Today is publication day of my new book on the British poets of the First World War, The Red Sweet Wine of Youth and I am writing this on a train to Liverpool where Radio Merseyside is to have the privilege of being the first to talk to me about it. This is my fourteenth (or twelfth, depending on how you categorise a couple of publications that are hardly book-length) since my first book was published in 1993 and maybe it's time to pause for breath...well, until after the weekend at any rate.

Like most of my fellow-writers of more-or-less-serious books the struggle to survive gets harder. Reading The Author, the journal of the Society of Authors, is a sort of mediaeval penance, a glum self-scourging, and most writers I know are ducking and diving, teaching and preaching, hustling for some tossed coin of fugitive income. Delightful reviews, the positive responses of one's friends, even the fleeting sight of one of one's books in a branch of Waterstone's, never seem to make any inroads into penury.

But it's fun to write, or we wouldn't be doing it, and the spectacle of writers bleating is never an edifying one.

News that a reprint of TRSWOY (as the emails now have it) of 2000 hardback copies, was ordered even before publication day is heartening. I hope you enjoy it.

Update: a review from the Financial Times of 12 February 2011

Romantic Moderns and the Hedgehog

2011-01-15T11:21:00.003Z

Heaven forbid that I should start applying to the random ephemerality of blogging the portentous tools of literary criticism but I have a vague feeling that if I were to embark on a bit of auto-criticism over the past year I would see one theme emerging: the persistent claims of realism as opposed to a view of literature that would banish all that naturalistic stuff and replace it with the austere formalism of the modernist classics. Now I am as passionately fond of a spare Beckettian dialogue or passage of prose as the next person but I also like the kind of writing that gives me the smell and feel of things – and that doesn't have to mean plodding and conventional novelistic realism of the kind modern fictional innovators have been in revolt against.

As it happens I have just finished reading Alexandra Harris's Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists and the Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper (Thames and Hudson, 2010), a much-praised book that deals with the art and literature of the 1930s and argues that there was a native tradition, embodied in artists like John Piper, that reconciled modernism and the specificity of English landscape and architecture and writing. I began this book with some resistance because the merest hint of Little Englandism usually sends me into hysterics, but Harris is anything but a polemical writer and her gentle argument merely suggests that, even at the height of the enthusiasm for inter-war modernism (embodied, for example, in the Isokon flats in Hampstead) there was an intense interest in the particular English tradition, with Piper, for example, touring the country to photograph 12th century church fonts. She cites Piper's wartime book British Romantic Artists (1942) in a series called "Britain in Pictures" published to celebrate, presumably, what we were fighting to defend. Intrigued by this very new (to me) use of the word "Romantic", I sought out the book and read its opening sentence: "Romantic art deals with the particular. The particularisation of Bewick about a bird's wing, of Turner about a waterfall or a hill town, or of Rossetti about Elizabeth Siddal, is the result of a vision that can see in these things something that for a moment seems to contain the whole world; and, when the moment is past, carries over some comment on life or experience besides the comment on appearances." Underlying Harris's argument is the suggestion that modernist abstraction simply missed out too many of these "things" and that the contemporary art theorists like Roger Fry, who argued that art was sullied in its purity of focus by irrelevant external details and that "significant form" was the goal, were in effect aesthetic puritans. Although she presents convincing evidence that contemporary cutting-edge artists shared this growing reservation about pure formalism, my resistance took some calming down. First of all, I never accept, in literature or art, what I call the football supporter's imperative, that one has to wear a red and blue or a black and white scarf. Abstraction works and so does realism. I can happily move from Bacon to Hodgkin, Freud to Riley. Secondly, the argument that international modernism was somehow rootless, cosmopolitan, not drawing sustenance from a particular cultural tradition, is simply unsustainable. The Andalusian Picasso is a sufficient example. In fairness to Harris, she doesn't ever put it as crudely as this and, generally, she opens more doors than she shuts. Like all the best critical works it sends you away with a reading list scribbled on the back of the bookmark and my first port of call was Gilbert White's The Natural History of Selborne (1789) which became a popular text (my edition, with drawings, see below, by Edmund New, is dated 1937) in the rediscovery of interest in "England" and its rural life in the mid-1930s.

This is one of those books I have possessed for a decade and never actually got round to reading and it is a delight. Written with a beautiful clarity of observation it describes the topography and animate and inanimate life of the parish of Selborne in Hampshire. There's a passage early on about the "raven-tree" near the village where a "large excrescence" bulges out in the middle of the stem of the oak and ravens nest above it unmolested by the village boys who try, unsuccessfully, to dislodge their nest. Then the tree is eventually cut down and the raven, sitting on her eggs, comes down with it "dead to the ground". It's one of countless passages that derive their force from the intensity of White's observation. Read it and you'll see what I mean. Literature and the imagination need that fuel, that particularity, that vivid detail, every bit as much as they need "significant form".

Telling the Truth Must Stop!

2010-12-23T09:48:00.000Z

First the Wikileaks, telling us mostly what we already knew or what was utterly plausible and now Lib Dem politicians speaking the unvarnished truth that everyone also knows: Murdoch must be resisted in his bid for global media power, Osborne is a fatuous and out of touch toff, politicians in a coalition disagree with each other about one or two things, etc etc. Behind the synthetic outrage of the Daily Telegraph lies an assumption that politicians are not meant to be frank and truthful but to put up a deceitful show.

Prepare for shock revelations on Christmas Eve that snow on one's boots melts when they are put in front of the fire.

Joyeux Nöel, comrades.

No Books of the Year?

2010-12-22T14:46:00.000Z

Once again the "Books of the Year" features are upon us and soon we will have the "Books to Come in 2011" on their heels. I did my best and supplied my choices for the P.E.N. newsletter but, in truth, once again I spent more time this year in the company of the illustrious dead than with the dazzling talents of the books pages. Perhaps next year will be different...

Meanwhile I am about to disappear into the snowy hills of Wales. So adieu and Season's Greetings to one and all.

Real Bloomsbury

2010-12-08T15:01:00.001Z

This week sees the publication of my latest book, Real Bloomsbury, from Seren Books. It's the newest in a series edited by Peter Finch that began in Wales with his pioneering Real Cardiff and the idea is that writers respond to a place in a very personal or offbeat way. It was great fun to research and write and I hope you will enjoy it. The Bloomsbury Group (Virginia et al.) obviously figure though I try to stop them hogging the stage and there's plenty of other interest, associations, present day diversions to fill a book even without them.

Andrew Marvell: Can I See Your Pass?

2010-11-29T17:28:00.000Z

I have, so far, read only the preface to Nigel Smith's new biography of Andrew Marvell but, if it is anything like his splendid annotated edition of the poems, it is going to be a treat. But there is an odd passage in that preface in which he looks coldly at the last published biography, er, mine: World Enough and Time: The Life of Andrew Marvell (1999). Smith is alarmed that this book was written by a professional literary biographer who had completed lives of Matthew Arnold, Aldous Huxley etc etc. He says, in fact, that I make Marvell "sound like a modern man of letters" and asserts that I am "no early modern scholar". As regards that last point I agree, and would point out in passing also that there is an accumulating body of evidence, increasingly difficult to ignore, that points inescapably to the Pope being a Catholic. As regards the former, whilst I am as critical as the next person of silly or coy anachronisms in writing about the past, to consider what Marvell as a poet means to a present day readership, a lyric poet who was also a politician, juggling two vocations, seems to me to be a wholly legitimate thing to do. And to seek for points of contact between a writer of the past and writers who may be engaged in similar searches today is, I submit, perfectly proper. I was writing a life of a poet. Reading the reviews of the new biography (which seem to indicate that in its outline Smith's Marvell is very similar to mine, notwithstanding the greater scholarly ambition and accomplishment of his book) which had mostly been given to specialist "early modern" historians, I began to notice a second form of condescension from this tight little trade guild. Smith himself was effectively patronised in the Independent and London Review of Books for being a mere literary scholar. And this is the nub. The historians see Marvell as their property and resent the fact that literary scholars (not to mention poets) have had the temerity to take possession of him. It rankles with them that the early 20th Century "New Critics", with their downgrading not just of biographical chatter but, arguably, historical context, in order to focus on "the words on the page", on the work of art pre-eminently as a text in which to search for aesthetic meanings (I oversimplify of course), sidelined historicism. Marvell was the property of historians after his death and throughout most of the 18th century. His rediscovery as a poet came later, sealed by the approval of T S Eliot. The battle continues and will run and run.

Chatwin Under the Sun

2010-11-18T13:13:00.000Z

The publication of Bruce Chatwin's letters, Under the Sun, edited by his wife Elizabeth Chatwin and his biographer, Nicholas Shakespeare, has led to the usual assertions about (a) his being the most wonderful, magical being that ever wrote in the late 20th century or (b) his being a precious pain in the neck. The letters, which are well-edited, giving helpful linking passages and crisply informative (and often, in Elizabeth's case, sharply funny) footnotes, build up to a picture of Chatwin, that once again emphasises his originality and interest. Yes, he can seem precious, especially when talking about his art collection, his writing materials, even his rucksack (hand made to his instructions by a Cirencester saddler) but people sometimes forget that his first job after leaving school was to work for the auction house Sotheby's where his job involved writing copious and detailed descriptions of rare and beautiful objects. You and I can get away with saying "that green marble thingummy" but Chatwin was trained to do the exact opposite of this vague approximation and was at home with dates, attributions, provenance, materials etc.

It is possible to quote some rather absurd passages, but usually Elizabeth has got there first with a wryly deflating footnote. And there are some unexpected moments, such as his discomfort at emerging as "a writer" in the 1980s, a role, relished by his friend Salman Rushdie, but one that he hated. He didn't want to be lionised, televised, invited to review books and so forth. He just wanted to disappear and write his next book. There are contradictions of course. He was televised. He did court the rich and famous and his friends always seemed to have been utterly exceptional in his estimation, the dull and the pedestrian members of the population never seemingly coming to his attention. But one day he had a group of writers around to lunch at his Oxfordshire home and found their noisy, shrill posturing unbearable: "a lot of egos sounding off, but we were able to open the windows so all the talk blew out over the sheep..."

And I can forgive him everything for writing: "With so many 'cooked-up' books knocking around, I don't really believe in writing unless one has to."

Houellebecq: I Was Wrong

2010-11-08T22:26:00.001Z

Well, he did win the Goncourt and, unlike the Man Booker where the right people so often win with the wrong book here is a case where the right book of the author has won. That's enough prize-babble - ED.

Echenoz Completes His Trilogy

2010-11-08T17:06:00.002Z

In complete contrast to the noise that surrounds the productions of Michel Houellebecq (see below) the French writer Jean Echenoz, whose books appear without any fanfare or author information or marketing blurb, between the austere white covers of Les Éditions de Minuit, has produced, over the last six years three short, beautifully written and observed biographical novels. The first, Ravel, in 2006, the second, Courir, in 2008 on the legendary Czech runner Emil Zatopek, and now the third, Des Éclairs, on the inventor Nikola Tesla (1856-1943) have given me a lot of understated pleasure.

Echenoz is drawn to these solitary, strange, obsessive characters in what his publishers call "fiction sans scrupules biographiques" and he recounts the story of Tesla, here called Gregor, with economy, dry wit, and a nice sense of period flavour (early 20th century New York). Exquisite.

Houellebecq Strikes Again

2010-10-26T20:54:00.005+01:00

Any day now they will be announcing the results of the Prix Goncourt, whose recent prize winners, I have to say, have been more interesting to me than the Man Booker's in the UK. One title being tipped is enfant [well he's actually 53] terrible Michel Houellebecq's new novel La carte et le territoire. The low argument (and literary prizes of this kind are usually about low arguments) is that it will win because (a) it is long overdue (b) it's crazy that one of the most read French novelists worldwide hasn't won it and (c) under Buggins' turn it's Flammarion's turn, that being the way French literary prizes work, and MH is their big one this season. The argument against is that (a) Houellebecq is far too politically incorrect (b) he has upset too many people and (c) the Ben Jelloun Question. The last of these is the only one that matters. In his regular column in an Italian newspaper, the French North African novelist Tahar Ben Jelloun (whom I admire far more than Houellebecq) laid into MH's latest novel saying he had wasted three days of his life reading it and that its trick of inserting real people into the narrative simply revealed a lack of inventive power. Ben Jelloun matters because he is on the Goncourt jury.

So what about the novel itself? I found it better written than his previous novels, both at the level of its prose, and in its tighter construction. Some have found it less obviously provocative and, even more surprisingly, it is almost equable in parts. There is also almost no sex in it which is a turn up for the books. I think these critics who imply that the fire has gone out of him are wrong and that the old provocations are there even if they are a little less in-your-face. The MH we love, mordant, savagely deadpan in his satirical swipes is very much in evidence and I found it very funny for that reason. Yes, he inserts himself in the narrative but not in some sort of arch metafictional manner. He does it to send himself up as a smelly, unwashed slob living in a hideous bungalow in Ireland feeding himself on cheap charcuterie, swilling cheap south American wine, and being generally surly and unattractive. It's an old joke but it works. The book sends up the contemporary art market through its central character Jed Martin, an artist with a touch of the master about him, and also aims at a range of Houellebecquian targets like assisted suicide, cremation, "inherently fascist" airlines etc etc. It is also about ageing and death and his usual big subjects and it is about NOW. He loves to describe, with toxic accuracy, the mediocrity of so much in the contemporary world. Much of his "provocation" resides in his inability to praise what we know shouldn't be praised but regularly is. Unfortunately I can't tell you what happens in the final third section of the novel because it will spoil your enjoyment but it is brilliantly done and funny. It also made me think that he could have a future as the author of romans policiers. But it probably won't win the Prix Goncourt.

Twenty Thousand Stars In the Sky

2010-10-19T08:47:00.001+01:00

About eighteen months ago I installed a stat counter on this blog and I see that I have at last exceeded 20,000 hits since then. Thank you to everyone who has thought it worthwhile to pay a visit and just imagine if each of those constituted a book sale....

What is a Best Selling Author?

2010-10-13T12:15:00.000+01:00

Later this month a book, Writers in Black and White, is published which includes interviews with a range of contemporary British authors, described as "best-selling", in which they talk about their writing lives. It is a beautifully produced book with stunning black and white photographs and I am very honoured to be one of the subjects. But a "best-selling author"? I think there's a mistake but I am happy to go along with it. I really feel, as Matthew Arnold once put it, that: "I am the most unpopular of authors." Bruce Chatwin, when his Songlines became an authentic best-seller, asked himself: "Have I joined the trash artists?" Typically, he wanted his cake and eat it. Every writer wants his or her book to sell, not out of vanity, but because books need the co-operation of readers to come alive. An unread book is simply a heap of paper and glue until another's imagination comes along to breathe life into it. No doubt there are some authors who like the idea of not being appreciated by the vulgar, of being a rarified taste, but I think they are very few. So I am going to enjoy my slightly fraudulent status as a "best-seller" for at least as long as it takes for anyone to look up my sales figures. Oh, and do go out and buy this lovely book.

Kadare and Kafka: an Update

2010-10-08T09:31:00.001+01:00

The Albanian novelist Ismail Kadare [seen here on the right, with his fine translator, John Hodgson, on the left of the picture and me in the middle] has been in London this week at a number of events to promote his gripping new novel, The Accident (Canongate). He was in conversation on Tuesday with Julian Evans at the Free Word Centre (and at the Cheltenham Festival today). Yesterday I interviewed him on behalf of English P.E.N. as part of the 'Bloomberg Bites' lunchtime series of talks at the finance house Bloomberg in the City. Kadare, whose relationship with the Stalinist regime of Enver Hoxha has always been controversial, came over as a very charming personality and he was in reflective mood, offering us some very interesting 'bites'. One of these came when I asked him how much he felt he had been influenced by Kafka, a name that is invariably mentioned in interviews with Kadare, often by the author himself. He revealed that he had not read the banned Kafka until the early 1980s, or rather that he had read very limited extracts as a student where Kafka was presented in order to be repudiated as an example of capitalist decadence. Which of course simply made young people all the more anxious to read him. Not very bright these dictators.

Bloomberg's HQ in Finsbury Square is a marvel. Through its stage-lit spaces, where copious security people stand every few yards like flunkeys at a Versailles court ball, and where in the refreshment area everything is free, including great domed piles of bananas, cookies, apples and cherry tomatoes, and large screens everywhere broadcast the latest share prices and financial news (and the breaking news that Mario Vargas Llosa had just been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature) the bemused Kadare, his interpreter and his interviewer moved as if through the film set for a remake of Brave New World. But Bloomberg are generous hosts and it was good to learn that The Accident is being discussed at their next in-house book group.

The Other Hay-on-Wye

2010-10-04T15:17:00.000+01:00

Each year around the May bank holiday the literary world descends on the Welsh market town of Hay-on-Wye for the annual literary festival and the town assumes a different character. But yesterday, as the rains came sheeting down and the river Wye looked very turbulent and brown and dangerously high, the twice yearly Hay Horse Fair took place and I wandered into the auction arena where dozens of these tiny Welsh mountain ponies (left) were being sold. They are beautiful creatures, full of excited nervous energy and, as the auctioneer put it at one point, "straight off the hill". The going rate for a small chestnut pony was only £10 but one or two were clearly marked much higher by the cognoscenti and attracted five times that price. One lot was a mare in foal accompanied by one of her earlier offspring. "Three for the price of one," declared the auctioneer who had clearly been determined to outdo the marketing tactics of the British book trade which manages only three for two. His auctioneer's gavel was a marvel. I couldn't get near enough to see exactly what it was made of but it looked like, if not the jawbone of an ass, then a bone of some kind. It added to the slightly wild, primitive flavour of the event. As I cast my eye around the ring there was little sign of the literati and it was definitely an outing for the folks.

As Hay and its puffed-up booksellers (whose absurdly climbing prices are presumably a desperate attempt to stem the tide of loss from rival internet book-dealing) continue on their journey upmarket it was nice to be rubbing shoulders with down to earth people with a practical job in hand who remind you that Hay was a Welsh market town long before it became a synonym for bookishness.

Polyglot Music: Joseph Roth and the Imbecility of Patriotism

2010-09-24T07:16:00.001+01:00

With the current spectacle of the French Prime Minister (himself of immigrant stock) hounding the Roma and even Labour leadership candidates talking solemnly of the need to address public "concern" about immigration it is time to listen to the bracing good sense of the Austrian writer Joseph Roth:

One might say: Patriotism has killed Europe...European culture is much older than the European nation states. Greece, Rome, Israel, Christendom and Renaissance, the French Revolution and Germany's eighteenth century, the polyglot music of Austria and the poetry of the Slavs: these are the forces that have formed Europe...All are naturally opposed to the barbarity of so-called national pride.

The imbecile love of the "soil" kills the love of the earth. The pride of being born in a particular country, within a particular nation, wrecks the feeling of European universality."

Joseph Roth, "Europe is Possible Only Without the Third Reich" (1934) from The White Cities

Borges and the Toothbrush or What to Read on Holiday

2010-09-14T11:01:00.001+01:00

The BBC recently aired a documentary about Bruce Chatwin (about whom I have an interest since I wrote the first book about him, photographed here by a friend of mine in an African schoolroom) to co-incide with the publication of Chatwin's selected letters. One of the clips was from a TV chat show where "Bruce" was holding forth on Borges whose work, he said, should always go into the traveller's knapsack, as an essential "like a toothbrush". I see his point and it raises the old question of what one does take on holiday. I am off to Corfu for a week and the choice, as usual, is between a big fat serious book and more "entertaining" matter. I usually choose the former and I was about to pack Thomas Mann's Dr Faustus, having been alerted to it by Gabriel Josipovici in his new book (see recent post) and having realised I hadn't read it. But I have an hour or two to decide. I am hovering over Labyrinths and a book or two of poems. With memories of a whole holiday dominated by the 1000 odd pages of Dombey and Son I am leaning towards some elegant brevity. Aldous Huxley's recommendation was for Boswell's life of Johnson, in the portable Oxford india paper edition, which I have somewhere, but this is a short trip and I will be doing a lot of lazing and daydreaming so something a little more dilettante is going to end up in the bag I can see. Plenty of time to get serious again when I am back. (But I'll slip in the Mann anyway as an insurance policy.)

The Hell of Forgotten Books

2010-09-13T07:38:00.001+01:00

For the true bibliophile the book is sacrosanct and destroying books is as monstrously unthinkable as a pet lover dropping their pussy cat into a wheelie-bin. Or is it? This snap is from the Honesty Bookshop in Hay-on-Wye ("the town of books") a kind of sump where books that have nowhere else to go end up. Stacked in the open air and exposed to the weather, they are battered and warped and abandoned and, if you care to have one, you drop a small sum in the honesty box. Why not just pulp the lot and start again with freshly recycled paper, blank pages, awaiting the arrival of new text?

Josipovici and the Story of Modernism

2010-09-07T11:47:00.000+01:00

One of the unexpected pleasures of the recent silly season was witnessing the emergence of Private Eye after all these years as a Leavisite organ. Its Literary Review section, written anonymously but probably by the ubiquitous scribbler D.J. Taylor, with whom Craig Raine in a letter to the current issue of the Eye ironically identifies himself ("I am a very very minor writer like D.J.Taylor"), took on a new book by the critic and novelist, Gabriel Josipovici, What Ever Happened to Modernism? The Eye could not be expected to endorse anything so un-English as the European avant-garde and Josipovici was accordingly sneered at for criticising the sacred cows of contemporary British fiction whilst writing fictions of his own which had not won any awards (seemingly the way one distinguishes merit ). But the review concluded that Leavis had pointed out a long time ago "the essential difference between Joyce and Shakespeare. Joyce, Leavis remarked, wrote to extend his technique; Shakespeare laboured under the pressure of something that had to be conveyed." So many non sequiturs are released from the bag by this that it is impossible to catch hold of any of them.

Over at The Literary Review, where Josipovici was equally unwelcome, John Sutherland took the predictably sarcastic line that the author had been let down by England and its indifference to Modernism. He complained about Josipovici's familiarity with European writers and critics, some of whom he appeared to read in their original languages which horrified Sutherland, described as Lord Northcliffe Professor Emeritus at UCL. In spite of that status, the "world class" professor emeritus described Josipovici as "not a man many of us can meet on level terms". That a leading academic could loudly boast of his ignorance in such a way speaks volumes.

Actually, Josipovici writes in a very engaging and lucid way, so much so that he had his knuckles rapped by Tom McCarthy in his Guardian review: "Adopting the vocabulary of the middlebrow in order to legitimise the vanguard merely robs it of what animates it most," observed McCarthy disdainfully. Caught thus between the populists and the snooty avant-gardists, and saddled with a massive non-controversy that the newspapers before his book's publication tried to whip up (his dismissal, actually more in sorrow than in anger, of the currently fashionable English novelists in a page or two towards the end of the book) Josipovici's argument has had to struggle to be heard.

It is an interesting one. Instead of the usual argument in defence of Modernism that involves bashing us over the head with someone (usually Ezra Pound) in order to reprimand us for being so insular and resistant in a way that can sometimes come to seem like our failure to toe a party line, Josipovici offers a persuasive and generous narrative of what he thinks modernism is about and why so much contemporary writing in Britain doesn't persuade him (and me). He has also upset the modernist fundamentalists by choosing as one example of proto-Modernism the poet Wordsworth. I thought it entirely appropriate in the context of his overall argument to do this and it is characteristic of his open and enquiring mind that he should seek more widely for his examples (though writers like Kafka and Proust and Woolf, Mann and Beckett, if not Joyce, are at the forefront of his mind). "He has much to teach us about the paradoxes of the freed imagination, that poisoned chalice passed on from Romanticism to Modernism, " he writes of Wordsworth.

For Josipovici, the essence of Modernism (and he reaches back to Cervantes to pinpoint its beginnings) is that it is "a response to the simplifications of the self and of life which Protestantism and the Enlightenment brought with them" and its hallmark is an awareness that, for the artist (painters and musicians being as much a part of his argument as writers) things can never be the same again. He quotes Beckett: "I speak of an art...weary of puny exploits, weary of pretending to be able, of being able, of doing a little better the same old thing, of going a little further along a dreary road." Or as Barthes put it: "to be modern is to know that which is not possible any more". Josipovici himself sees in Modernism something absent from so much lauded contemporary writing (though William Golding and Muriel Spark from an earlier period are allowed through his net), namely "neither illustration [Francis Bacon's dismissive term for too facile art] nor abstraction but the daily struggle of a dialogue with the world, without any assurance that what one will produce will have value because there is nothing already there against which to test it, but with the possibility always present that something new, something genuine, something surprising, will emerge."

I remain cool towards the football supporter's view of Modernism: we support our eleven lads and despise all eleven on the other side. But faced with the Private Eye canon I think I know which scarf I would wear if I had to. "Reading Barnes," Josipovici writes towards the end of the book, "like reading so many of the other English writers of his generation, Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, Blake Morrison, or a critic from an older generation who belongs with them, John Carey, leaves me feeling that I and the world have been made smaller and meaner...The irony which at first made one smile, the precision of language, which was at first so satisfying, the cynicism, which at first was used only to puncture pretension, in the end come to seem like a terrible constriction, a fear of opening oneself up to the world."

La rentrée littéraire

2010-08-17T09:34:00.000+01:00

Paris is sleeping now during August with the blinds pulled down on businesses en vacances but soon the annual burst of publishing, la rentrée littéraire will explode in France and the event is celebrated in The Independent with a piece about a new novel by a 15-year-old who has written about a 14-year-old who has lost her virginity. Yes, folks, our equivalent of the rentrée is the silly season. The article that we should have read was the one that said what was being published in France just now that was of interest, who were the serious novelists, what was the general literary health of France. Admittedly we heard last week about the new Michel Houellebecq but then he has long been a news item in himself so we expect gossipy broadsheet pieces on him as a matter of course. Given that a million British people are said to be living in France why is its literature so invisible in this country? Why is so little translated? We get the French movies in our art houses so why not more of its contemporary writing?

Recently, the critic and novelist Gabriel Josipovici, was reported as having said that contemporary British writers weren't up to much though, as he explained last week in a letter to the TLS, the reporting of his comments, buried in a serious work of criticism forthcoming from Yale UP, trivialised them. He bravely refused to be dragged on to Newsnight to take part in a shallow staged debate about the merits or otherwise of Amis, Rushdie, McEwan et al. His apparent argument that, in the wake of the great moderns, contemporary writing in Britain doesn't measure up, misses some vital dimension, sounds interesting and highly plausible. So what of the comparable position in France? Will we be told? I doubt it.

Tony Judt and Reminiscence

2010-08-10T09:18:00.002+01:00

The death at the weekend of Tony Judt, the author of Post War and Ill Fares the Land and a lively polemicist, who was always ready, from a broadly Left starting point, to tackle some of the Left's sacred cows, was suitably noted by the broadsheets. I have enjoyed particularly his recent short pieces of reminiscence in the New York Review of Books and there's a good item today in the Le Monde blog where he is described as the "archétype de l’intellectuel engagé “à la française”". The fact that one senses a gap now is eloquent. The papers are full of opinionating pundits and the blogosphere is loud with noisy folk with things to say but here was someone who wrote, as in those recent NYRB pieces, with superb clarity and directness but with a wider sense of where things might fit in.

Josipovici And Other Animals

2010-08-03T10:46:00.000+01:00

In my last post I commented laconically on coverage of a very interesting-looking book by the writer and critic Gabriel Josipovici, Whatever Happened to Modernism? which I will talk about later when I have caught up with it. But I have just read his 2001 memoir A Life which I found a delightful book and perhaps a surprising one for someone whose reputation is as a somewhat austere and rigorous critic. It is the life of his mother, Sacha Rabinovitch, as much as his own, their lives being entwined by the facts of history and exile, and he makes use of her (excellent) poems and family photographs to build up a picture of a remarkable woman. Both were passionate animal lovers and there are some marvellous descriptions of the various dogs they owned and, inevitably, grieved over. It's a story that passes through Egypt, France and England and I found it deeply absorbing.

Josipovici, in spite of having written an affecting memoir claims that he is suspicious of the genre. He quotes his mother's view: "...to write one's memoirs is to cease to look forward. It's a form of nostalgia and self-indulgence." He says much later in the book that autobiography is unsatisfactory because: "A person can never grasp the trajectory of their own life, not only because that trajectory is not over till their life ends, but because a life is more than what one can say, it is more than one can think.. It can only be lived, not told – not told by the liver, that is, but only by another." That is why he chose to write another person's life. Again, he says: "A memoir would have left me to wallow in my sorrow; writing the life of another, of that other, was what I needed to do, and I now see why." We can only be grateful that he overcame his reservations and wrote this book.

I Agree

2010-07-29T08:29:00.002+01:00

Don't you?

Kafka Again

2010-07-24T10:07:00.001+01:00

The recent non-story about Kafka's papers which involved (apart from repeated wince-making use of the word 'Kafkaesque') various talking heads telling TV interviewers that they had nothing to say – but they were going to say it – about what the disputed trunks of hitherto unopened papers might contain had one interesting contribution from John Banville which I recommend for its view of what is best in Kafka and its encouraging re-iteration of the fact that the greatness of Kafka's art lies in his lack of a 'message'. To see his contribution click here.

Bruce Chatwin by Bike and Who Owns Kafka?

2010-07-20T08:10:00.002+01:00

What is the connection between Bruce Chatwin and cycling? And you thought the exams were over now? The answer is that he pops up on next week's (27th July) episode of Britain by Bike, a series in which presenter Clare Balding follows in the footsteps (or is that pedals in the groove of?) a 1950s classic bicycle tour guide. The series opens tonight on BBC 4 at 20.30 and next week's show at the same time has Clare striding across a lawn in the Welsh borders to encounter me just about to spout on the subject of Chatwin (about whom I wrote a book in 1993) who stayed at the house in the Welsh Marches where the filming took place, while writing his novel On the Black Hill.

[You can now see this in BBC iplayer for a limited period. Click here

Yesterday I had a call from the BBC World Service to appear live on their early evening news programme to be interviewed about the controversy surrounding the Kafka archive. Ten boxes of material formerly owned by Esther Hoffe, secretary to Kafka's friend, Max Brod, who left them to her and who famously defied Kafka's request that all his unpublished writings be destroyed, are being currently fought over. Hoffe's two daughters are engaged in legal battles to stop the boxes being opened but no one knows what they contain. Yesterday one of the boxes, in a bank vault in Zurich, was being examined by a scholar under the instruction of the court so we may still not know for some time what is on the inventory. On the programme I suggested that it is unlikely that they will contain any major unpublished work, since Brod dedicated himself to promoting and massaging Kafka's reputation and would surely not have missed a chance to publish more of it. Probably, they will contain Brod's own diaries and letters, though "drawings" have been mentioned in the press. There is bound to be much of interest but we will have to wait. Meanwhile both the Jewish National Library in Israel and the German Literary Archives in Marbach are fighting to acquire the eventual material. As I suggested on the programme, Kafka's body is spread out on a table, all four limbs being tugged in different directions: born in Prague in the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1883 and thus an Austrian, waking up in 1918 to find himself a citizen of the Czech Republic, a Jew, and a master of modern German prose. According to the Israelis his archive belongs as of right to them, but the Germans surely have an equal right since language is always the defining issue when considering a writer, and what about the Czechs?

We will have to be patient.

Craig Raine and The Critics

2010-07-13T08:34:00.000+01:00

It is a basic rule of this blog that I only talk about books I have read and so I can't say anything about Craig Raine's new novel, Heartbreak, because I haven't yet read it. Like everyone else, however, I have read Terry Eagleton's hatchet-job in the London Review of Books, and it has reminded me – to compare great with small – of my own 2001 novel, A Short Book About Love which also provoked the comment that it was "not really a novel". Raine is not shy of controversy of course and can look after himself. I have to declare an interest in that his magazine Areté published two pieces by me (one very long, one very short) and in consequence I was invited to his lovely house in Oxford for the 10th birthday bash of the magazine where many famous literati pullulated. Since both pieces were published not as a result of any currying of favour with this charmed literary élite whom we all love to hate (I didn't know any of them so there were no strings to pull) but by the simpler expedient of putting them in an envelope addressed "Dear Sir" I salute his openness to unsolicited material, always the mark of a good editor. As former poetry editor of Faber and Faber and putative founder of the Martian school of poetry, and chum of Martin, Ian, Julian etc, Raine was bound to attract enemies but I can only say he was very nice to me.

The new book, which appears to be a series of episodic reflections and digressions on the subject of love (a fair description also of my book) raises the question of what is and is not a novel. The epigraph to my book was taken from Dr Johnson, who defined the novel in his A Dictionary of the English Language as "A small tale, generally of love." My definition would be "whatever you want it to be". Aldous Huxley said there are no rules governing the novel except that it must be interesting and I agree. What we want writers to be is inventive, original, entertaining. If they don't have plots – or beginnings, middles, and ends – then so be it, as long as they are a pleasure to read. In my last post about Isaac Bashevis Singer I said how much power there still is in realist fiction and I believe this. But there is also scope for the sort of writing that takes liberties and gives pleasure in the process. So let people break the rules and let the puritans be discomfited.

Now I will go and read Raine's book...

Isaac Bashevis Singer and the Vitamin Pills

2010-07-02T14:30:00.001+01:00

Isaac Bashevis Singer said that he preferred to write in Yiddish because it was a language that contained more vitamins. Reading his great saga of early 20th Century Polish Jewish life, The Family Moskat (1950) whose translation by A.H.Gross he personally supervised, I can't judge the quality of the Yiddish but it is certainly a powerful and absorbing read and, unlike some family historical sagas, you never get confused about who is who, thanks to Singer's gift for rapid thumbnail sketches of people and scenes. I hauled this substantial book around with me on a recent trip to the USA and it made me realise that the realistic novel, sometimes thought to have been usurped by modernist experiment and innovation, still has a lot of life left in it. Singer builds up a vividly felt picture of a world that was doomed as much by the forces of modernity unleashed within it as the external threat without. It runs from the start of the 20th century to the rise of Hitler and is saved from any kind of romantic nostalgia for a lost culture by the fierceness and candour of its realism but nonetheless I still find it profoundly moving to reflect that this Jewish world of pre-war Warsaw no longer exists.

How Was Your Bloomsday?

2010-06-16T08:54:00.002+01:00

Being reminded, during the research for my recently completed book about Bloomsbury, that Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath were married on 16th June 1956 in St George the Martyr church (see picture) in Queen Square, Bloomsbury, on Bloomsday, has triggered some thoughts about literary anniversaries. Is it just a weeny bit silly to celebrate today as Bloomsday, a fictional day across which the narrative of Joyce's masterpiece, Ulysses, unfurled? I think it isn't – because to say that today is Bloomsday is to allow the imagination to prevail over mere fact and routine. A work of art has managed to usurp the work diary.

The sun is shining, the longest day is still to come, and I have a feeling that a re-reading of Ulysses is on the way. My lovely green Bodley Head 1960 edition [I don't give a fig about the 'Joyce Wars' of the scholars over which text is to be preferred] is on the shelf, waiting to be taken down: "Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed..."

Definitely.

Life-Writing: The Arvon Book

2010-06-15T09:23:00.003+01:00

I am glad to break a long silence here at this blog (I have been finishing two books and making a trip to the USA) by announcing that the new Arvon Book of Life-Writing (Methuen) written by Sally Cline and Carole Angier has just been published and I am honoured to be one of 32 biographers whose brief reflections on the genre have been included. The book, by two experienced biographers, will be indispensable for people doing courses on life-writing and covers practical and theoretical issues raised by the genre of biography, autobiography and memoir.

Anyone in London interested in this subject might like to know that I am teaching a 12-week course on it at The City Lit this autumn.

The British Library: Work for Free!!!

2010-05-16T14:17:00.000+01:00

We are now in the era of the new progressive politics with everyone championing "fairness" at every turn so hats off to the British Library which has just sent me news of a job I might like to apply for. Actually it turns out not to be a job at all but a chance to be a work-donor. The "job" is for someone to work in the internal communications department and the job description is a serious one that looks as though it might require some skills and experience. Here's an extract from the advertisement:

"writing for our staff intranet and newsletter; creating intranet pages; monitoring the team’s day-to-day work; updating notice boards and generally helping out with the administration in our department. We’re looking for someone with great communication and interpersonal skills...An interest in marketing communications and/or public relations, an excellent standard of written English and the ability to use a PC and the internet would be of advantage."

There's just one catch: you don't get paid. This is of course a job for an unpaid skivvy, aka "intern". Once upon a time young graduates (for that is my guess as to whom the likely appointee will be) got real work experience by doing a real job (in fact this one sounds a bit like my first media job) but now a public body like the British Library (Chief Executive's salary £195,000) is cynically hoping to get work done by not paying someone at all. Did the staff unions agree to this? Where will the employee live? How will they pay the rent? How will they eat?

It could be worse because there are reports that in the US, graduates actually pay in some cases for the privilege of being a work-donor. But is this going to be the pattern now in the British public sector?

But I agree, "fairness" is a good thing. I can't get enough of it myself.

Gillian Tindall: A Microhistorian in Paris

2010-05-03T17:49:00.001+01:00

Having recently read Gillian Tindall's The Fields Beneath about the rural roots of Kentish Town I was glad to receive as a birthday present her latest, about the Latin Quarter of Paris, the changes to it over two centuries since an ancestor of hers, Arthur Jacob, arrived there in 1814, and her own family history: Footprints in Paris. It's an attractive, slowly-unfolding book, that gets under the skin of a place where she lived as a young woman in the 1950s and reveals her skill at teasing out the history of place that is so strikingly done in The Fields Beneath. In the throes myself of writing a book about Bloomsbury, I am fascinated by this kind of "microhistory" as it has been called, that reads the urban landscape with minute attention. Quieter in tone than the more hyped "psychogeographers" of London, I found this a very moving book about how one tries to imagine other lives and their passage through history. I was struck particularly by her observation that the Latin Quarter has slowly been emptied of its working class or ordinary population as gentrification, the surest of urban trends, removes the cheap "hotels" or long-term lodging houses, places where people without lots of money (students, workers, artists, writers, recent migrants) could once live. Their future is to be shipped out to the suburbs and tower blocks with their "social problems" (which really amount to a rupture from real living communities and the difficulty of re-inventing them in concrete jungles). Public housing at affordable rents once enabled a range of social classes to live in the heart of London. This is not about sentimental nostalgia; it's about the idea that communities are just that: organic patterns of multi-cultural, multi-class, living where change is of course part of that organic life but also variety, social mix, and even a bit of scruffiness.

Who Will Give a Fig for Figes?

2010-04-28T13:27:00.001+01:00

The recent "squalid little story" as Robert Service put it, of the writer Orlando Figes paying lawyers to silence other writers who had alleged someone was rubbishing his rivals' work on Amazon – before he then first blamed his wife then admitted he was the culprit – is a very nasty one and will have ruined his reputation for good. Obviously anyone who takes an anonymous Amazon review seriously has got problems that they need to address for themselves but the case does highlight two things (a) writers should conduct their intellectual disputes with each other in the fresh air of print and not in the courtroom and (b) anonymous blogging (something that mystifies me) has no intellectual validity in serious criticism of books: someone who is too cowardly even to stand by their own words cannot expect to be taken seriously by anyone.

This reminds me of a review (not anonymous) that appeared on Amazon in 1999 when my life of Andrew Marvell was published. It wasn't vindictive, just vaguely sneering, and contrasted with the very pleasing reviews the book received generally. Since no other Amazon review ever appeared this slab of disparagement has stood on the site for eleven years to confront anyone thinking of buying the book and will, no doubt, remain there across the "deserts of vast eternity". At the time, I entered the name of the self-appointed reviewer into a search box and up popped a long, laudatory review of his own book – written by himself. Now why didn't I think of that?

My fault in this instance was to have written a book about a 17th Century poet without seeking permission from the relevant academic 17th Cent. Lit. trade guilds and annoying an ambitious would-be media don on the rise by writing the book he wanted to be commissioned to write. I am always amused by academics who sneer haughtily at the general Grub Street author then go running as fast as their little legs will carry them into the nearest TV studio or literary festival tent if there is the slightest chance of being on the telly.

We're the Tops – Well, Near the Bottom, Actually

2010-04-19T15:18:00.002+01:00

You may have noticed a small logo that has appeared in the top right-hand corner of this page announcing that this blog is (just!) one of the 100 top Uk and Ireland literary blogs at No 91.

Some years ago I read an article suggesting that there were so many literary prizes and awards that you had to try pretty hard to avoid securing one. Having never won a literary prize (though I was once on a shortlist of six for the Marsh Biography Prize alongside weighty literati like Roy Hattersley) I assure you that it is easier than people claim to avoid winning anything. So let's throw our hats in the air to Wikio (whomsoever they be) for this unexpected garland.

It makes me feel I should be blogging more regularly. I have, like many literary bloggers, been flagging a bit recently so let this be a wake-up call.

A Postscript on Literary Elections

I am currently reading V.S. Naipaul's 1958 novel The Suffrage of Elvira and it is a wonderfully witty story about an election in Trinidad circa 1950. Much more fun than page after page in the Sunday papers dribbling on about whether X looked better on TV than Y. Having not long ago read his first novel, The Mystic Masseur (1957) I have become a great fan of Naipaul's early work.

Literature and the Election

2010-04-14T07:32:00.001+01:00

Yesterday in the park I walked past the Labour MP who will be expecting me to vote for him on 6th May and he beamed at all passers-by with a universal, impersonal smirk. Why am I so indifferent to this election? Why does my heart sink at the preparations for "the TV debate" – a stage-managed process which I will certainly not be watching? And will there be more features in the Guardian Review embodying novel ways of rounding up the usual suspects (Pullman etc) to offer their valuable contribution as "writers" to the understanding of a process which Dickens (see picture) dealt with more appropriately in The Pickwick Papers?

I am not 'cynical about politics' or trying to dodge my civic duty. I shall 'exercise my vote'. But the spectacle of the issues that matter being daily evaded by all sides does not help the digestion.

Summer is y-comen in

2010-04-08T16:43:00.000+01:00

Well, spring at any rate, as these wood anemone in the Welsh Marches seem to show. How much more interesting than the British election campaign.

The Luxury of Art

2010-03-30T18:07:00.000+01:00

A clutch of letters in The Guardian has appeared on "the battle between arts and science" – a phoney war surely? Many of us are the victims of a British educational system that created, around the age of 14, a division into arts and sciences that has been intellectually damaging and, of course, it is scandalous for artistic and literary people to be ignorant of science – or of anything else for that matter. Although the queasy spectacle of watching Ian McEwan writing about brain surgery in Saturday could in itself constitute an argument for writers not attempting to mug up on science, clearly art and science are fundamental aspects of human knowledge and shouldn't be set against each other.

But one of the Guardian letter writers, Iain Morgan, Professor of Molecular Oncology at the University of Glasgow, insists that science is necessary, not to further knowledge, but because "without science and technology our country will lag behind others". Moreover – and this is his killer conclusion – "only by science and technology generating inventions and wealth can we afford the luxury of art". Why do I find this such a miserable conclusion?

Because art is not "a luxury", a by-product of wealth-creation. Art simply exists, it is. Art is fundamental, necessary, needs no justification, is the element in which sentient, intelligent human beings move like fish in a stream. It is not a by-product or an incidental consequence of anything. Given the current state of British universities where money-making is the summum bonum, I suppose it is not surprising that such ideas as that of the Prof. flourish.

The Literature Sector: Production Values

2010-03-12T15:28:00.000Z

The following appears in the latest newsletter of the Welsh Academi. Comment, I think, is superfluous:

"Creative & Cultural Skills is inviting the literature sector to contribute to a new plan to develop the skills needs of the industry. The Literature Blueprint will be a workforce development plan for literature in the UK. It will analyse the skills needs of the literature sector and propose key actions in response.
The plan is focused on creative writers and those who support them. They would like to hear a range of views from the sector, from writers across different disciplines to writers’ networks and anyone who works to support the development of the literature sector. The plan will be UK-wide.
Tom Bewick, Group Chief Executive, Creative & Cultural Skills, said: “The UK is rightly proud of its literature sector, which encompasses a range of working practices and business models. To ensure the continued success of the sector in a time of intense technological and economic change, we need to focus now on developing those skills that will be needed in the future.”
Antonia Byatt, Director, Literature Strategy at Arts Council England, said: “We are delighted to have been partners with Creative & Cultural Skills in developing the Literature Blueprint. To ensure that everybody can access high-quality literature experiences, both now and in the future, is at the heart of our work, and the development of skills is vital in this aim.”

Paweł Huelle: Mercedes-Benz

2010-03-10T07:56:00.002Z

Scanning the shelves of bookshops in Paris or Athens or Madrid it is always interesting to see what gets translated, what is considered canonical, from the UK. And in the same way various random factors conspire to deliver certain foreign titles to us. Is Orhan Pamuk the most important Turkish writer, for example? The Nobel committee seems to think so. I am reading another novel by Paweł Huelle, having enjoyed his Castorp, and this time it is an absorbing tale, Mercedes-Benz, of a man who takes driving lessons in the city of Gdansk (where Huelle comes from) with a crazy instructor, Miss Ciwle, just after the collapse of communism. It's a lively, witty tale, juxtaposing, through the medium of the motor vehicle, three Polish generations: the pre-war brief period of independence, the communist years, and the new era of post-communist liberation. The narrator is based on Huelle himself (that's his dad in this picture) and the stories he recounts as he drives around Gdansk with Miss Ciwle are addressed to the Czech master Bohamil Hrabal to whom this book is a kind of hommage. I have no idea how Huelle is seen in Poland but this translation by Antonia Lloyd-Jones certainly glides along with the smoothness of a Mercedes and even someone like me who is about as far from being a petrol-head as it is possible to be can enjoy the ride. Recommended.

Amazing Amazon: Part Two

2010-02-24T10:14:00.001Z

The Amazon saga continues as I discover their "three strikes and you're out" policy of dealing with customers. I mentioned in my last post their appallingly discourteous policy of sending you an email that you can't reply to. It is like talking to someone in a high-security compound through a tiny grille. Each time they failed to answer my point I went laboriously back to their website to leave another comment but after my third attempt they sent a chilling statement: "We regret that we have not been able to address your concerns to your satisfaction. Unfortunately, we will not be able to offer any additional insight or action on these matters." I think that what they were really trying to say should have been expressed with a row of asterisks.

Amazon also claimed that once an order is placed: "we will try to source the item from our suppliers" which is indeed what has happened over the past five years of the Rack Press, but not any more because there has been no attempt to "try to source the item" from this year's titles as disgruntled customers have been telling me. I know this for a fact because I am the person who would supply such a request. The net result is that Amazon refuses to discuss the matter any further, refuses to remove my titles from the website, in spite of the inaccurate statements there, and refuses to source any of the items it insists on listing. They are as responsive as an absolutist monarch or a Stalinist apparatchik.

Still, it is comforting to read their slogan: "We strive to be Earth's Most Customer-Centric Company. Your feedback helps us build it."

No comment.

Amazon The Corporate Behemoth

2010-02-23T08:25:00.000Z

As a small publisher of poetry pamphlets (see Rack Press) I naturally seek as many outlets as I can for my titles. Once a new title is registered with Nielsen Book Data it appears automatically on Amazon/Blackwell/Tesco etc. You have no choice about this and there shouldn't really be any reason to object to more publicity and points of sale but Amazon, acting in their usual peremptory fashion, have indicated on their site that Rack Press titles are "Temporarily Out of Stock". This is complete nonsense but the message is going out to all potential purchasers who are being told that new titles in plentiful supply are "out of stock". I approached Amazon (you can't do this directly but only by using a web-based pro forma) and pointed this out and I was greeted with an automated reply not admitting that their previous policy had changed (for the past five years they simply source our titles from a wholesaler and I supply them, a system that has worked well) but inviting me to join something called Amazon "Advantage" where you pay money to them to keep stocks in their warehouse. For a small poetry press with short print-runs of limited edition titles this is not realistic. I persisted and received an email from a named person but the email was rigged so that one couldn't reply to it. It merely repeated the standard response. I have asked them to remove titles from their site because this is the only way to end this damaging falsehood that titles are out of stock. One's sense of frustration is that Amazon appear to hold all the cards and not to care a jot about what they may be doing to small publishers.

Grrrr!

Gazmend Kapllani and Border Syndrome

2010-02-09T09:00:00.000Z

Little enough contemporary Greek writing is translated into English so it's always good to see something new. Gazmend Kapllani's witty 2006 account of the life of Albanian migrants in Greece, translated by Anne-Marie Stanton-Ife, has now been published by Portobello Books. Kapllani writes with bitter humour about the realities of being a migrant, shrewdly observing that some of the Greek hostility towards Albanians comes from not wanting to be reminded of their own history of having to migrate to survive. If you were a tourist, he suggests, "your broken Greek would endear you to people...but when an Albanian speaks broken Greek, he is classed as nothing more than a 'bloody Albanian'. When an American speaks perfect Greek, he is an 'exceptional American', but when an Albanian speaks perfect Greek, all he hears is, 'You'll never be Greek!'

This short book is written in thirty sections which combine the stories of a group of those Albanians who, after the fall of the Communist regime, poured over the border with Greece, as Kapllani himself did in 1991, with reflections on what he calls "border syndrome" which is "an illness that's difficult to describe with precision". There are vivid moments, like the first visit of the Albanians from a brutal and Spartan political regime to a supermarket in northern Greece, and overall the book offers an insight into the condition of the migrant in a week when British newspapers reported the deaths from hypothermia of some European migrants living in tents in the British countryside. We tend to think that exploitation and hardship of a kind meted out to migrants in our midst happens elsewhere, not in the farms that supply our cheap supermarket fruit and vegetables, making us complicit in that suffering. Fortunately, migrants of this kind conveniently stay out of sight so that we don't have to think about them and our responsibility for what they go through.

Clough and The Blue Plaque Business

2010-02-04T08:20:00.003Z

To North London yesterday for the unveiling of a plaque to the poet Arthur Hugh Clough (1819-1861) at the house in St Mark's Crescent, NW1 where Clough lived from 1854 to 1859. According to Clough scholar, Sir Anthony Kenny, pictured here, the poet didn't, er, actually write anything while he was here, but anything that raises the profile of this excellent and astonishingly modern-sounding Victorian poet must be a good thing. Talking afterwards to someone from English Heritage, the body that masterminds the plaque-business, I thought I sensed some scepticism about Clough's status, not so much in the canon of English poetry (the poet Christopher Reid who was there agreed with me that he is one of the best half dozen English poets of his period – which seemed to astonish the heritage people) as in the canon of The Higher Celebrity. When I suggested en passant that there should be a plaque to William Empson, author of that classic of 20th century literary criticism, Seven Types of Ambiguity, on the house at 65 Marchmont Street, Bloomsbury where the book was written in 1929-30 I was the recipient of one of those oh-God-here's-one-of-those-loony-obsessives looks. I can see that it's hard for the adjudicators to judge who is deserving of this kind of honour but I had that feeling I often get in these situations of sudden gloom induced by the mournful tolling of the great lugubrious bell of English cultural populism. Just like being in a publisher's office and suggesting a life of Arthur Hugh Clough, for example, when embarrassed faces turn to the window and someone suddenly finds there is a phone to answer. In a culture of lists and rankings and "no one reads people like X" how can the heritage industry buck the trend of sticking with what's safe and consensual?

Amis Strikes Again

2010-01-28T09:03:00.004Z

Does Martin Amis have no friends who can have a quiet word with him? No sooner has he finished rubbishing that increasingly large and influential section of society, the elderly, who, he recently informed us "stink" (subtlety always his hallmark) than he turns his attention to his fellow writers. Prospect magazine in a preview of an interview it is about to publish with the Great Writer offers us a view of the second rate talents against whose mediocrity the talent of Amis shines out more brightly: "Coetzee, for instance—his whole style is predicated on transmitting absolutely no pleasure,” he explained. “I read one and I thought, he’s got no talent. But the denial of the pleasure principle has got a lot of followers.” How did we get here – to a world where Coetzee is declared to have no talent and Amis is fêted? Answers on a postcard please.

A Poet Wins!

2010-01-27T18:12:00.003Z

How nice that Christopher Reid's book A Scattering should win not only the Costa poetry award but also the overall Costa Book of the Year award. Poetry is often the poor relation of literary prizes (but the Costa, it must be said, has a better track record than most) so this is excellent news.

And I forgot to say, it's an excellent book of poetry!

Poetry Readings Are Cool OK?

2010-01-13T17:10:00.005Z

One of my Christmas gifts this year was J. G Ballard's absorbing autobiography, Miracles of Life, which at one point presents his observations on poetry readings: "Most poets were products of English Literature schools, and showed it; poetry readings were a special form of social deprivation. In some rather dingy hall a sad little cult would listen to their cut-price shaman speaking in voices, feel their emotions vaguely stirred and drift away to a darkened tube station."

Tomorrow night, 14th January at 6.30, we have a chance to prove him wrong because Rack Press is launching its four new collections of poetry for 2010 at the Horse Hospital in Bloomsbury. With words like "cool" long back in fashion "groovy" must surely be the next to be retrieved from oblivion. Come along tonight. If not groovy it will be "fab" and we will prove Ballard wrong.

Snowfall

2010-01-07T16:04:00.003Z

I don't mean to be rude but when mid-Wales was covered in snow last week it somehow didn't seem to be as grave as when it actually fell in London – giving Gandhi in Tavistock Square, semi-naked on his plinth, a tonsure of white overnight. London and the south-east still think of themselves as the centre of the universe and until something occurs inside the M25 it's not judged a real event at all.

These sheep, however, in the Radnor Valley in the Welsh Marches, after most of it had melted, and before the second dose, don't seem offended.

A New Year Resolution

2009-12-23T08:38:00.002Z

It sometimes seems as though 2009 has been the year of Lists. Endless lists, with The Guardian and The Observer particularly obsessed with this form of rather childish journalism. Instead of articles of intellectual discovery or exploration we get endless drilling into rows of the usual suspects, the same old names, the same old cultural 'celebrities', the safe choices. And we stop caring. It has been made worse by the fact that this year's lists can play the end-of-the-decade variation as the "noughties" vanish unlamented. Can it really be a decade since I was on the streets of a little market town in the Welsh Marches at midnight celebrating the end of the 20th Century? And what are centuries anyway? – 500 years ago this pew end in my picture (I seem to be right out of robins) was carved in Geneva cathedral and it's still there, looking well on it.

So, no lists from me for 2009 (oh, all right then, three novels slug it out for first prize: Colm Toibin's Brooklyn which everyone else seems to have chosen; Coetzee's Summertime which no one, amazingly, seems to have chosen; and Jean-Philippe Toussaint's electrifying La Vérité sur Marie which probably wins in the end, an astonishing novel).

So a Happy Christmas and a prosperous New Year to everyone.

James Hanley: The Closed Harbour

2009-12-14T07:59:00.003Z

The writer James Hanley (who always pretended he had been born in Dublin in 1901 but who was actually born in Liverpool in 1897) is one of those (all too numerous!) interesting authors who achieve a great deal of respect from their peers and a discerning readership but who never quite succeed in breaking through to a wider public. I wrote about him in my book on Liverpool and its writers So Spirited A Town: Visions and Versions of Liverpool (2008). The latest of his novels to be reprinted is The Closed Harbour (1952) set in Marseilles not long after the war and centring on a sea captain, Eugène Marius, who is desperately seeking work from the city's shipping offices but whose career has been blighted by a seeming error of judgement (shades of Conrad's Lord Jim) involving the death of a relative at sea under his command. It is a characteristic Hanley study of a haunted individual battling against the odds and the grimness he relishes is augmented by an effective portrait of an unforgiving and vengeful mother who arrives in Marseilles to rub salt in the old salt's wounds. This is not, you will have gathered, a light and entertaining read but as an unflinchingly realistic portrait of a man struggling (and failing) to defeat his demons it has undeniable power. With news that the "Faber Finds" series is about to re-issue some of his earlier work might a Hanley revival, always promised but never delivered, be on the way?

Hats off to One World Classics for bringing out this handsome paperback (£7.99) with useful appendices on Hanley, including a biographical and critical summary by Chris Gostick and some fascinating photographs.

Laugh? I Nearly Cried.

2009-11-28T21:36:00.003Z

Geneva, where I have spent the past week (don't ask) is a peaceful sort of place, I thought, until I got a whiff of teargas earlier. The city is so neat and tidy and full of solid bourgeois moneyed Calvinist respectability that even the yobs and hoodies look positively unthreatening but today there seem to have been at least three manifestations: one was a string of tractors chugging through the city centre (farmers doing what they do so well, asking for more); people protesting against people protesting against mosque-building ("a third Crusade?" asked one poster on a neat set of boards provided by the municipality – we don't do flyposting in this town); and a march against the arms trade. I think it was the latter that brought out the heavy police in crash helmets and visors and tear-gas guns at tea time. I was waiting for a bus outside the central station when they started firing tear gas canisters at the demonstrators, without bothering to warn the public. Imagine British riot police (not exactly covered in glory) exploding tear-gas canisters on the concourse at Paddington without bothering to tell anyone. It's horrible stuff, stinging one's cheeks, making one's eyes red, naturally, and bringing on the swine-flu-style coughs. And my crime was waiting to catch a flipping bus to Ferney-Voltaire where the great man of the Enlightenment stands on at least two pedestals in the town. Moi, I'm flying back tomorrow!

Bartók: 'Not for the Faint-Hearted'

2009-11-17T08:32:00.004Z

Bartók's "Duke Bluebeard's Castle" currently being staged by the English National Opera at The Coliseum and paired in a double bill with Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring" – that score still breathtaking after all these years – is a powerful work, dramatically and musically, and everyone acquits themselves well has been the general opinion.

Based on Perrault's fairy tale about a woman fatally drawn into the orbit of an evil man, it's a grisly tale but the staging by Daniel Kramer concentrates on the sexual violence and his climax is particularly unpleasant and disturbing. The crowd loved it of course as they always do and the whistling and joyful stamping of feet that accompanied the closing image of a woman's genitals on the point of being attacked by Bluebeard's drawn sword, knew no bounds. One shouldn't read too much into this, perhaps, and it's worth remembering Patrick White's acid comment about theatrical audiences "suffering from the clap". Moreover, violence against women is so much an integral part of popular culture that one can't expect the desperately crowd-pleasing opera managements to buck lucrative trends. I was nevertheless glad to see that at least one critic had the courage to challenge this scene which The Guardian blandly called "not for the faint-hearted". In the Independent on Sunday Anna Picard pointed out that this "pornographic flourish" was what it was and said: "a line is crossed that no excellence of musicianship or stagecraft can mitigate". Even if you don't agree it is good to see a critic having the independence of mind to dissent.

Georges Perec: Still Crazy After All Those Years

2009-10-28T09:05:00.003Z

The media obsession with cultural anniversaries is not always complete – look how the books pages missed the fact that this year, nearly over, has been the centenary of Malcolm Lowry – but here's one you definitely haven't thought of. This month is the 35th anniversary of a literary experiment by that delightful and inventive French writer, Georges Perec. In October 1974 he decided to station himself for three days in the place Saint-Sulpice in the posh 6th arrondissement of Paris in St Germain just north of the Jardin du Luxembourg and make a record of everything he saw. Tentative d'épuisement d'un lieu parisien (Attempt to exhaust all the possibilities of one particular spot in Paris) his little book is a record of what he saw. All those apple-green 2CVs, buses, Japanese tourists, aubergines (I'd forgotten that's French slang for a traffic warden), taxi-drivers, flâneurs, children, dogs, dossers passed by as he sat in cafés drinking coffee or vittel. Perec loved to tease out the poetry of the ordinary and what might sound like an exercise in obsessive tedium is in fact fascinating as we see a little quartier of Paris under the microscope. The artist, of course, sees what we don't always see and this is of course selective and proves that, in writing, the glory is in the detail and in what is selected rather than left out. This tiny book, with its occasionally glittering observations, has made my week, in that glum period after the clocks went back.

Martina Evans: Facing the Public

2009-10-20T14:41:00.005+01:00

I have just finished a fine new collection of poems by the Irish poet and novelist, Martina Evans, called Facing the Public and published by Anvil (£7.95). This is one of the best collections I have read for some time, drawing deep on her experience growing up in Ireland, the youngest of ten children, in a bar and shop in Cork in wonderfully deft and supple narratives. "These look like easy, anecdotal poems," Alan Brownjohn said of an earlier collection, "but they bite." That's certainly true of the new collection too – for beneath the swift-flowing narrative surface lie the raw anguish of childhood experience, and of family life, and the wider political legacy of sectarian and political violence. There's fine, dry humour here that suddenly lays bare the shock of raw experience or betrayal as when she tells of being invited to sit on the knee of a rather too friendly pseudo-progressive Franciscan at her boarding school: "I thought he was the liberated uncle I never had/so when he asked me to sit on his lap/I was genuinely sorry that I couldn't oblige." These are unillusioned pictures of Irish family life, with a sharp political perspective that is taken in by no one. Some of the short prose-poems made me impatient for more of those equally skilful and sharp-seeing novels like Midnight Feast that made Evans's reputation. "Tragedy and cheerfulness are inextricable," Bernard O'Donoghue has said about her poems. The mixture is compelling.

Is this It?

2009-10-17T16:50:00.002+01:00

I step into Stanford's travel bookshop in Covent Garden and what do I see: I have finally become part of that doubtful company: the Three For Twos! The evidence is in this picture that my A Corkscrew is Most Useful: The Travellers of Empire (Abacus, 2009) is on the front table as part of a 3 for 2 promotion. 16 years after my first book was published I have finally crossed this Rubicon. Will life ever be the same again? Have I joined the fraternity of schlock? Well, not if being adjacent to Mark Mazower's Salonica is what it entails. I must digest this.

Elizabeth Bishop: A Poem to Wake Up To

2009-10-13T06:42:00.003+01:00

One of the joys of having finally turned into my publisher a big non-fiction book is that I can return to poetry and I have just come across a glorious (untitled) poem by Elizabeth Bishop written some time in the late 1930s and published for the first time in Elizabeth Bishop: Poems, Prose and Letters which came out last year in the Library of America series.

Here is the opening stanza:

It is marvellous to wake up together

At the same minute; marvellous to hear

The rain begin suddenly all over the roof,

To feel the air suddenly clear

As if electricity had passed through it

From a black mesh of wires in the sky.

All over the roof the rain hisses,

And below, the light falling of kisses.

Read on p217ff

Lowry Ale in Liverpool

2009-09-29T17:31:00.004+01:00

I have already written about the Malcolm Lowry Centenary Exhibition at Liverpool's Bluecoat Arts Centre but forgot to mention that there is a special ale (appropriate given Lowry's favourite leisure activity) brewed by the local Wapping microbrewery available in the Bluecoat bar . A crowded schedule prevented me from imbibing any of this ale at the opening night but I managed to snaffle an empty bottle whose contents had just been poured into the glass of the Bluecoat Director, Bryan Biggs (who drew the label) and here it is.

Win a Free Copy of de Bernière's New Book!

2009-09-23T07:49:00.003+01:00

A free copy of Louis de Bernière's new collection of stories, Notwithstanding will be sent to the first person who identifies the location of this watercolour by Herbert Davis Richter R.I. (1874-1955) which my wife and I recently acquired. The painting is untitled and my guess is somewhere in Corsica but I could be wrong. It's a lovely picture and I'd like to know which waterside spot it represents. Thanks to Random House for the copy of the book.

Manoly Lascaris, Partner of Patrick White

2009-09-14T10:57:00.003+01:00

I have just received a fascinating book about Manoly Lascaris who was for many years the partner of the Australian novelist Patrick White. The book consists of records of the conversations its author, Vrasidas Karalis, associate professor in Modern Greek Studies at the University of Sydney, had over a seven year period as a young man with Lascaris, or "Mr Lascaris" as he insisted on being addressed. The conversations took place in Greek but the writing here in English is sharp and vivid. Vrasidas Karalis, whom I met in 2007 in Oxford when we were both delivering papers at a conference on Bruce Chatwin, is a very engaging, lively, and, on the evidence here, deeply tolerant thinker who put up cheerfully (mostly!) with the haughty patrician putdowns of Lascaris – who considered that he was descended from the Byzantine aristocracy. His bark, however, may have been worse than his bite and, in spite of his constant rebukes to his young interlocutor he clearly enjoyed the opportunity to talk about life and art in what is no less than a modern Socratic dialogue. One learns little about Patrick White, whom Vrasidas Karalis was translating at the time, and nothing about what Lascaris referred to as "the erotics" of his partnership with White, but it is a fascinating encounter with a provocative thinker who has previously not been allowed to come out from under the shadow of the Great Novelist. As Vrasidas Karalis says at one point: "Like Socrates, Lascaris was a wise old man who revealed unexpected truths through whimsical jokes and clumsy gestures." And again: "Manoly Lascaris never wrote anything, but he was a truly eloquent talker. He went directly to the heart of the matter, avoiding the periphrastic mannerisms of professional thinkers. He was a catalyst; his observations reduced everything to the basics." I strongly recommend this vigorous dramatic enactment of a surprising and unusual intellectual encounter.

The book is published in Australia by Brandl & Schlesinger

Who's Afraid of Malcolm Lowry?

2009-09-10T14:14:00.002+01:00

2009 is the centenary of the birth of Malcolm Lowry but you could be forgiven for not knowing this fact as it has attracted little attention so far. But a new book by many hands, Malcolm Lowry: From Mersey to the World is just about to be published by Liverpool University Press and there's an accompanying exhibition opening at the Bluecoat Arts Centre in Liverpool on 24th September when the book is launched. I have contributed a chapter on October Ferry to Gabriola with an autobiographical introduction explaining my choice of this, probably one of Lowry's lesser read works. There are lots of essays by a very varied cast of contributors under the helmsmanship of Bluecoat Director Bryan Biggs and Helen Tookey so don't delay!

John Banville in Bloomsbury

2009-09-09T08:14:00.003+01:00

Hot on the heels of J.M. Coetzee's Summertime comes another new novel from a contemporary master of fiction, John Banville. I have only just acquired The Infinities so I have nothing yet to say about its content but Banville himself was in London last night at the London Review Bookshop in Bury Place, Bloomsbury talking to a sell-out audience and reading from the book. Banville was on sparkling and witty form, and, after reading a self-contained section of the book he answered questions with great aplomb. Aplomb and tact, one might add, as the inevitable bores who are attracted to this kind of event put their long-winded and self-regarding "questions" to him. In a sense these "meet the author" sessions have little to do with the book (which most people would not have had the chance to read) and everything to do with the author's performance and my own reasons for being there were, I imagine, no different from most people's: to get a squint at a writer I have admired for many years. Engaging and funny with lots of pithy comments and lively opinions, Banville gave us our money's worth and we all dispersed into the muggy Bloomsbury night air clutching our signed copies of the book.

Ah, yes, the book. Now I shall open it at page one...

Summertime: the New Coetzee

2009-08-26T15:39:00.002+01:00

From time to time some under-employed journalist writes one of those standard pieces about what is wrong with the contemporary novel and the diagnosis is always the same: let us have a grand state-of-the-nation panorama and all will be well in the best of all possible worlds. I gather that, even as I speak, Sebastian Faulks has obliged. I have never been convinced by this to-hell-with-Dostoevsky-let-us-have-Trollope thesis. I think the art of fiction is different from documentary and that the difference matters.

The new novel from J.M. Coetzee, Summertime, is not a huge Balzacian portrait of South Africa in the 1970s but it seems to me in its brilliantly elliptical way to say more about contemporary life and literature than most of what is indulgently hyped in the books pages. And the good news is that this is vastly better than his last novel Diary of a Bad Year which some (but not I) found too tricksy with its 'split-level' narrative that ran three strands simultaneously on the page. I wanted more depth of human insight than I got and the second bit of good news is that the new novel has that in spades. It also has more humour, some of it exquisitely subtle irony, some of it just good old-fashioned funny – and a writer without humour is like a painter with one of the colours missing from the palette. The prose, too, is razor-sharp, glittering like a finely cut diamond – but then what else would one expect from Coetzee? Yes, I liked this one!

Summertime ostensibly picks up where two previous volumes of fictionalised autobiography left off, Youth and Boyhood, taking the story up to around 1977 when Coetzee emerged as a writer. Those books pages this weekend will be awash with speculation about how far the fictionalised Coetzee here is the real one, and to what extent, by writing his own version of his life, he is pre-empting future biographers. Watch out for the copious use of the word 'self-indulgent'. The form of the novel is a series of interviews by an English literary biographer, "Mr Vincent" with people who have known John Coetzee (like Morse, Coetzee has come out about his first name at last) in these years. Most of them are women and their memories and judgements are designed to be as unsparing as possible. It is as if Coetzee wants us to know that he understands the worst that can possibly be said about himself but at the same time these rueful, sharp self-presentations are the source of some of the finest humour in the book. Look for example at page 242 where, through the eyes of a French former academic colleague with whom he had a brief affair: "As a writer he knew what he was doing, he had a certain style, and style is the beginning of distinction. But he had no special sensitivity that I could detect, no original insight into the human condition. He was just a man, a man of his time, talented, maybe even gifted, but, frankly, not a giant." Can you imagine such a passage being written by Amis? McEwan? Even in jest?

What emerges from these reminiscences and stories of his thirties in South Africa in the 1970s is also a deep love of the landscape of the Karoo, however much he despises the politics of his country pre- and post-liberation, and his inability to break the emotional ties that bind him to the Afrikaner culture he came from, symbolized by his relationship with his father, whom the buttoned-up, emotionally cold son cannot reach and who becomes, the last sentence seems to suggest, a metaphor for his native land: his need for it and his need to escape it, the dilemma eternally unresolved. This is an honest, moving, unflinching book and, though "John Coetzee" is dead as the biographer does his work, I sincerely hope there are many more to come.

Kate Pullinger: The Mistress of Nothing

2009-08-20T07:28:00.001+01:00

My review of kate Pullinger's new novel The Mistress of Nothing appears in today's Independent.

Pietro Grossi: An Interview

2009-08-18T16:49:00.009+01:00

Bibliophilic Blogger hosts its first ever Virtual Book Tour. Scary!

Pietro Grossi's second book Fists, first published in Italian as Pugni in 2006 and now receiving its first English language publication by Pushkin Press, translated by Howard Curtis, has won great acclaim in Italy, winning many distinguished literary prizes. It consists of three novellas, all of which explore male rites of passage into adult life. The first story, “Boxing”, is about the confrontation between two young boxers who learn the hard way that life is about winners and losers, the second, “Horses, is about two brothers exploring the adult world together through the world of horses, and the third, “Monkey” is about a young man whose friend withdraws from life and starts behaving like a monkey, an unsettling experience that forces him to evaluate his own life and values. These three narratives are spare and swift and compelling and the influence of American masters like Hemingway has been noted by critics.

Pietro very kindly agreed to be interviewed by email in English by the Bibliophilic Blogger.

B.B: It seemed to me that this was a very masculine book in the sense that women hardly feature in the first two stories and when they do assume a larger role in the third story the male characters are not entirely at their ease with them. Nor are they free from some rather old-fashioned macho ideas – assuming a woman's difficult behaviour in one case proceeds from premature menopause, for example. And there's that rather shocking sentence about a woman film agent:"She was one those overweight women with their wombs full of cement who at some point in their lives have decided that a good business deal is better than sleeping with a man." [p121] Was this deliberate,? It is clear that each of the three stories is in some sense an exploration of the male rite of passage but were you also trying to conduct an implicit critique of masculinity?

PG: My grandparents, on my mother's side, gave life to a 65 person family, still increasing. Most of them are females. I just think that in my book I was trying to forget women. Joking apart, I found out along the way that my stories have a deep connection with my dreams, more than with my life. In this sense I am sure that the main characters of Fists are all people that somehow or another I dreamt of being. I would have loved to live their experiences, have their guts or their will or their talent or their madness. And yes, also the opportunity to simply live their changes as young men, with all its power and its loneliness. An older Italian author once, presenting me and my book at a festival, said that he loved “Boxing” so much because he thought it was mainly a duel story and that in duels – when it's a duel between men – women have to be

left aside. I remember smiling when he said this. Anyway, to be honest, I don't know: most of my stories come out in their own way and once they are written I just can sit there and read them like anyone else. Then think about what I read and decide if keep it as it is or not. Women weren't there that much and I guess I simply didn't miss them.

B.B: You have expressed your imagination for Salinger and Hemingway and Italian critics seem to have concentrated on the influence on your writing of various other American authors, but what of European authors? Which do you admire? And which Italian authors?

P.G: When you start talking about literature it is always difficult – if not impossible – to compress in a bunch of seconds or a bunch of words all the books and the authors you loved and who influenced you and your life and your writing. This is why next to my name always popped out American authors: because, at least for the moment, if I have to highlight the literature that mostly influenced me it is definitely 20th century North American literature. Having said that, there are endless European authors that made the man and the author I am: Tolstoy, Dumas, Svevo, Pirandello, Conrad, Austen, Shakespeare, Dante, Hesse... The list is so long that I really wouldn't know where to start from, and to be honest the greatness of these authors is so huge that to me talking about them is very difficult: it would be like a sailor trying to explain the importance of wind.

B.B: You are evidently attracted to the shorter novella form. Is this more congenial to you? Are you tempted by the idea of a longer novel?

P.G.: Yes, apparently for the moment novellas are a lot more congenial to me. Which wouldn't be a big problem if I was one of those people who love to sit on what they are good at. Sadly I am not that kind of person, so I keep on trying to write longer and more complex stories, which intrigue me a lot more but for the moment don't come out as smooth. The book I published after Fists is actually a longer story (not really a novel by my point of view) and among other things I am working now on a book that could probably be the closest thing to a novel I ever wrote.

B.B: Stylistically you prefer a relatively spare, unadorned style. Is this simply a matter of personally feeling more comfortable with that way of writing or are you reacting in any sense against prevailing styles in contemporary Italian fiction?

P.G. I think I am just reacting against what is going on inside my own head. As a kid I was very presumptuous and thought that I had some very good ideas about the world and all its matters. Than I realized that my ideas weren't that bright, they were just complicated. So I tried to write without thinking and things came out much smoother: everything was very simple and the world appeared like a pretty nice place. I thought I could live with that for a while.

B.B: The translation of your book by Howard Curtis reads very well and is very pacy. Do you have any apprehensions about being translated? Do you fear that something can be lost in the process?

P.G: No, not really. I don't want to sound immodest but I don't feel any apprehension about being translated. I have translated some books myself and I know that something is always lost. Something else, on the other side, is found. I just think that translated books are somehow different animals and have to be read in a different way: they will probably find different kinds of readers and give slightly different emotions. This anyway happens to every reader: the story is somehow told to me by the narrator, I put it on paper the best I can, then I start reading it and I discover a lot of surprising things I had no idea about; then somebody publishes it and thousands of other people read it and find thousands of other surprising things. I guess this is just the whole big magic about literature.

B.B: What are you working on now?

P.G: I am as always working on different things. I write my first draft by hand and without thinking about anything, then some time or another I have to bring the story to the computer and start thinking about it. So it ends up I am always working on two or three different things, at different stages. Lately I am mostly working on the book I was previously talking about, my probable next novel. If it will keep the way it is it will be pretty different from the way I have been working till now, so I am very excited and very anxious. Anxiety pills work very well.

B.B: In the UK, notoriously, fewer European authors are translated than in any other European country, and in Italy there is probably more curiosity about foreign writers. Which contemporary British writers interest you?

P.G: At the top of my list I have to put Nick Hornby, especially High Fidelity. I have no idea how he is seen in the UK but I definitely would have never written the way I write if I hadn't read the book four or five times. Its wit and its simple style struck me at the time. Then probably, out of all, the two authors I find most interesting are Zadie Smith and Martin Amis. The latter's The Information is probably one of the most important European books of the past twenty years, at least for an author.

B.B: Thank you Pietro, and thanks to Pushkin Press.

For details of the Virtual Blog Tour see:

August
Wednesday 19th Alma Books Bloggerel http://www.bloggerel.com
Thursday 20th Bibliophilic Blogger http://bibliophilicblogger.blogspot.com
Friday 21st Nihoni Distractions http://nihondistractions.blogspot.com
Monday 24th The Truth About Lies http://jimmurdoch.blogspot.com
Tuesday 25th Pursewarden http://pursewardenblog.blogspot.com
Wednesday 26th The View From Here http://www.viewfromheremagazine.com
Thursday 27th Bookmunch http://bookmunch.wordpress.com
Friday 28th Notes in theMargin http://christopherschuler.independentminds.livejournal.com
September
Thursday 3rd Lizzy’s Literary Life http://lizzysiddal.wordpress.com

I Remember, I remember

2009-08-06T08:55:00.003+01:00

Remember the 1980s? Remember feminism? Remember 'gender-specific language'?

Clearly they don't in the Ask restaurant chain.

An Instant Poem

2009-08-04T09:57:00.001+01:00

From my desk at the British Library:

A Wish

Outside the Library in Euston Road

a girl is running in a shower of rain;

on the taut canopy of her umbrella

the multi-coloured letters spell:

PLEASE RAIN ON ME.

In the long dampness of an English summer,

may her wish be granted.

Blogging and the Real World

2009-08-03T08:37:00.001+01:00

I see that the Archbishop of Westminster, Vincent Nichols, has attacked young Facebook users for letting the site cripple their social skills and stop them forming meaningful relationships. I can see a glimmer of truth in this and I know that many thoughtful people (eg Susan Greenfield) are worried about the impact of computers and internet use on our brains and personalities and much else. But the debate always seems to polarise between Luddites and Panglossian geeks, the latter regarding any reservation about internet use as a kind of blasphemy or letting the side down. I simply don't know but I am struck by the high proportion of my literary friends who are active users and bloggers.

Vincent Nichols is famous in my family for having stopped my three-year-old self in a Liverpool street when a nut fell off my yellow tricycle and effected an emergency repair. It is thus hard for me to criticise him, but another schoolfriend who lived next door to him when they were kids tells me that he thinks Nichols will be the next English Pope. If ambition were all that were required I am sure it's in the bag.

At the Bright Hem of God: Radnorshire Pastoral by Peter J Conradi

2009-07-28T08:38:00.002+01:00

Today's Independent has a review by me of Peter J Conradi's At the Bright Hem of God: Radnorshire Pastoral published by Seren Books at £9.99. This is an excellent book about the Welsh Marches. Inevitably, reviews are cut down, even given the tiny word allocation of contemporary newspapers so here's my original version:-

At the Bright Hem of God: Radnorshire Pastoral

by Peter J Conradi

Seren, £9.99. 240pp

The last dragon in Wales sleeps in the Radnor Forest – a seven mile long upland area of East Wales that most Independent readers would understandably be unable to pinpoint on a map. The creature will not wake so long as he remains ringed by the multiple churches of the dragon-slayer, St Michael (Llanfihangel). In the lee of one such church, at the end of a two and a half mile hedged cul de sac, and itself ringed by 1000-year-old yews in a circular churchyard (the devil enters at corners) lives Peter J Conradi, a mild-mannered Prospero summoning up the benign spirits of Radnorshire past: writers, poets, historians, anchorites and mystics.

Conradi is alive to the magical and other-worldly dimension of the hauntingly beautiful Welsh March – the Elizabethan magician, Simon Dee may have been born here – but this is not a flaky or New Age treatise – and he acknowledges the mixed benefits of the incomer invasions which somehow have never swamped the locals, whose characteristic speech patterns, weathered obliquity, and gift for slow living he captures well. He is also keen to refute the idea that this is some sort of anglicised margin rather than, as he contends, a central repository of the true spirit of Welshness since the 12^th century. He presents in sequence writers like Gerald of Wales, a suitably mongrel Welsh/Norman border figure, the poets Herbert, Traherne, Vaughan who sought and found “the Paradise within” in this numinous landscape, the attractive figure of the Reverend Francis Kilvert whose humane curiosity and kindness appeal to him and who provokes one of his rare personal lyric flights. There is Chatwin of course, and a contemporary trio of poets, R.S.Thomas, Roland Matthias, and Ruth Bidgood who have celebrated what Conradi calls 'the March', an area he has known for 40 years. Wales “has absorbed many English enthusiasts for its scenery and history: it can in me find room for one more”.

Generally, Conradi doesn't thrust himself on the reader, and writes a thoughtful and non-judgemental prose even when dealing with what have been highly contentious matters of Welsh politics and cultural identity. He judges (in a gentle slight to the more famous Thomas) R.S. Thomas (who supplies the book's title) to be the greatest 20^th century Welsh poet writing in English but is unillusioned about what he calls tactfully, Thomas's “human frailties”. He is glad to quote Bidgood's declaration that she did not come to this area to escape the world: “This is the world.”

Conradi has written the perfect primer to this quiet stretch of Wales and Simon Dorrell's exquisite pen and ink miniatures complete what must be the best introduction to this area ever written.

Nicholas Murray's Bruce Chatwin (1993) is to be re-issued later this year.

Can Anyone Save Publishers from Themselves?

2009-07-13T21:08:00.005+01:00

Contemplating (above) the fresh honeysuckle in my Radnorshire garden I try to hold on to some sanity in a world where publishing seems intent on a course of wild self-destruction. In today's Independent a two-page spread with a silly heading: "Two Weeks to Save Britain's Book Trade" attempts to say what is wrong with the business [meaning: the big hitters like Coetzee will all be published in our equivalent of the French rentrée littéraire in September in a two week period hoping to stem the losses so far this year being incurred by publishers]. Conventional wisdom says that publishing always rides the recession but this time it isn't happening and sales have slumped. Publishers are sacking their staff, advances are crashing down and things, as this blog has been saying for some time, are looking very grim indeed. Even Richard and Judy seem to have retired from the fray. In this article, however, one ray of light shines out. Someone actually enunciates a simple but incontrovertible truth about how we got into the mess that is contemporary British publishing. Step forward Jonny Geller, managing director of the books division of the Curtis Brown literary agency who tells it like it is: "Publishing has become quite reactive. It is sales-led. We need publishers to start taking risks again." He is saying that publishers should become publishers again. Give that man a gong.

Tsvetaeva in Pimlico: Russian Poetry at the Tate

2009-07-03T09:24:00.003+01:00

To Tate Britain for the launch of the newly revised and expanded edition of Bride of Ice: New Selected Poems by Marina Tsvetaeva translated by Elaine Feinstein. This was a very swanky venue at the Rex Whistler Restaurant at Tate Britain so I assume some Russian cultural foundation or other was footing the bill for a small poetry press (Michael Schmidt, the boss of Carcanet had to double up, in more traditional small press style, as his own photographer for the evening). Lots of poets and writers turned up, including Ruth Padel, no doubt relieved to have the Oxford Professor of Poetry debacle put behind her, Dannie Abse, Michèle Roberts, Ruth Fainlight, Peter Robinson, Anthony Rudolf and others.

It was good to be reminded again how good, how powerful and moving this great 20th Century Russian poet is:-

In a world

In a world where most people

are hunched and sweaty

I know only one person

equal to me in strength.

In a world where there is

so much to want

I know only one person

equal to me in power.

In a world where mould

and ivy cover everything

I know only one person – you –

who equals me in spirit.

Some Heatwave Recommendations

2009-07-02T15:19:00.002+01:00

It must be the heat – over 30 degrees today in London – that is slowing down the blogbrain but I seem to be writing less here these days. Here, however, are two recommendations following people kindly sending me copies of their publications. The first is the latest issue of The Reader. This is a very nicely produced magazine with an odd title and the issue I have been sent has articles on Milton (see right), poems, fiction extracts, celebrity columns (Ian McMillan etc) and reviews. And what's more it originates from my old university Department of English at Liverpool.

The second item, also with a Liverpool connection, is the latest poetry book from Donut Press (run by a very good poet, Julia Bird) and it is called Field Recordings: BBC Poems (1998-2008) by Liverpool poet Paul Farley. Donut editions are beautifully produced and the poems are good (including the first poem I have ever read on the subject of 'blind scouse' ) so get along there pronto.

New Music at the War Museum

2009-06-24T12:06:00.004+01:00

To the Imperial War Museum last night for a fine concert of newly commissioned pieces for strings played exquisitely by the Solaris Quartet. The Museum decided to launch a Young Composer Competition with the commission to write a piece prompted by the current "In Memoriam" exhibition at the Museum until September.

The winner was Ben Cox for his piece with that name. Four other young composers (Richard Norris, Robert Peate and Edward Nesbitt and Duncan Ward) had their shortlisted pieces played and I particularly liked Ward's, "Eugene Cruft's Radio" which was clever and original.

Three things struck me about these five composers: they looked very young indeed, they were very good, and they were all male. How many young women entered I wonder?