Western Wind
Western wind, when will thou blow,
The small rain down can rain?
Christ, if my love were in my arms
And I in my bed again!
Anonymous poem from:-
The New Oxford Book of Sixteenth Century Verse (1991)
edited by Emrys Jones, p44.
Wednesday, 18 July 2007
Tuesday, 17 July 2007
Kafka and the Women
The seventh foreign edition of my biography of Franz Kafka has just flopped through the letterbox. They have changed the title to Kafka and the Women or Kafka's Women which I suppose is fair enough given that this was an emphasis of the book (Kafka's lifelong search for a partner) but it's an interesting insight into the world of international publishing where the author doesn't always get a look in. The US edition of my biography of Aldous Huxley, which in the UK was called Aldous Huxley: an English Intellectual, became Aldous Huxley: a biography, the first I knew about it being when a boxful arrived at the door. In the latter case the word "intellectual" was probably a bit high-risk.
This reminds me of WH Auden's little rhyme (forgive me, I'm quoting this from memory): "To the man in the street whom I'm sorry to say/Is a keen observer of life/The word 'intellectual' means straightaway/A man who's untrue to his wife."
Saturday, 14 July 2007
George Orwell and (New) New Labour
The announcement on 12th July by Ken Boston, chief executive of the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, that there is to be what one newspaper called “the biggest shake-up of the secondary school curriculum for years”, triggered in many of us the usual sceptical reflexes. After all, shaking up the system (as opposed to improving its outcomes) seems to have been a constant activity in the ten years of New Labour and the announcement of a new bout of agitation so soon after Gordon Brown took over from Tony Blair as Prime Minister inevitably raises the question of whether educational policy is simply going to be more of the same or whether we should expect something new. It all seemed to merit a second look.
Ken Boston certainly thinks we should expect fireworks. What drew most attention, however, was his list of key authors that school students should be expected to read. As someone who writes literary biographies for a living I was gratified to see four of my subjects (Chatwin, Arnold, Marvell, Huxley) on the list but, as with all lists, one began to wonder about the omisssions, particularly as it had been extended beyond the comfortable Eng. Lit. canon to include “writers from different cultures and traditions” (though not a single one from central or eastern Europe). To take three random favourites of mine: Paul Auster, J.M Coetzee, and John Banville I suppose their omission had to do with perceived “difficulty” in the classroom. Which brings me on to Orwell.
Ken Boston observed: “You could begin with something not too taxing for some pupils, like Orwell, and then move on to more difficult works such as Thomas Hardy.” This rather pulled me up. True, Orwell writes with pellucid clarity. He is eminently readable but does this mean he is not “difficult”? Perhaps Boston only means at a very immediate level of being superficially easy to read (though Hardy isn’t exactly Gertrude Stein is he?) but I was worried about the opposition being set up here. Orwell deals with some of the most crucial issues of twentieth century politics, he teased out in his essays many of the nuances of British society from his quirkily radical Old Etonian perspective, he tackled the big issues. So did Hardy, of course, but in a much more locally rooted fashion. I can’t see why Orwell is considered “easier” than anyone else.
One of Orwell’s most brilliant essays is the 1946 “Politics and the English Language”. When I was teaching writing skills to undergraduates at Queen Mary College, University of London (a four year one-day-a-week experience that deserves a blog all of its own!) I regularly recommended this essay to students with its excellent discussion of what makes good, honest writing. But I always had a slight reservation about another of his famous assertions, in the essay “Why I Write”, that “good prose is like a window pane”. It does its job so well that one isn’t aware that it is there. One looks through the glass to the content within, the thing that allows one to grasp the meaning is irrelevant to the seizure of the meaning itself. Bad writing, on the other hand, is always getting in the way, a dirty smudge that one has to wipe away before one can see the meaning clearly. It’s a nice idea but, even without tipping out on the floor a lorryload of long-winded recent literary theory, it’s possible to argue that this isn’t quite good enough. Writing is not that simple. The form modifies the content (and vice versa) and language does have a life of its own. It isn’t a simple tool that one picks up to do a job. It is endlessly complex. In short it is “difficult” and so is Orwell. Much of this is to do with the complexity of his political and social positioning and, for contemporary teenagers, there’s a great deal of historical and political matter assumed by his writing that they may well find “difficult”. Books like 1984 or Animal Farm were written out of their particular historical moment. A lot of context is needed if one is to understand them. I would argue that this is as much if not more than is needed for Hardy (who of course was also a man deeply sensitive to the undercurrents of his time).
All this means that once one starts on the task of trying to sort the sheep from the goats one is pretty soon going to get onto tricky ground. It nearly always means making assumptions that turn out to be dubious, talking down to people, making false assertions, reducing the complexity, richness and variety of a writer’s oeuvre to some fatuous generality.
Let’s allow Orwell his complexity, his richness of content. His difficulty.
Ken Boston certainly thinks we should expect fireworks. What drew most attention, however, was his list of key authors that school students should be expected to read. As someone who writes literary biographies for a living I was gratified to see four of my subjects (Chatwin, Arnold, Marvell, Huxley) on the list but, as with all lists, one began to wonder about the omisssions, particularly as it had been extended beyond the comfortable Eng. Lit. canon to include “writers from different cultures and traditions” (though not a single one from central or eastern Europe). To take three random favourites of mine: Paul Auster, J.M Coetzee, and John Banville I suppose their omission had to do with perceived “difficulty” in the classroom. Which brings me on to Orwell.
Ken Boston observed: “You could begin with something not too taxing for some pupils, like Orwell, and then move on to more difficult works such as Thomas Hardy.” This rather pulled me up. True, Orwell writes with pellucid clarity. He is eminently readable but does this mean he is not “difficult”? Perhaps Boston only means at a very immediate level of being superficially easy to read (though Hardy isn’t exactly Gertrude Stein is he?) but I was worried about the opposition being set up here. Orwell deals with some of the most crucial issues of twentieth century politics, he teased out in his essays many of the nuances of British society from his quirkily radical Old Etonian perspective, he tackled the big issues. So did Hardy, of course, but in a much more locally rooted fashion. I can’t see why Orwell is considered “easier” than anyone else.
One of Orwell’s most brilliant essays is the 1946 “Politics and the English Language”. When I was teaching writing skills to undergraduates at Queen Mary College, University of London (a four year one-day-a-week experience that deserves a blog all of its own!) I regularly recommended this essay to students with its excellent discussion of what makes good, honest writing. But I always had a slight reservation about another of his famous assertions, in the essay “Why I Write”, that “good prose is like a window pane”. It does its job so well that one isn’t aware that it is there. One looks through the glass to the content within, the thing that allows one to grasp the meaning is irrelevant to the seizure of the meaning itself. Bad writing, on the other hand, is always getting in the way, a dirty smudge that one has to wipe away before one can see the meaning clearly. It’s a nice idea but, even without tipping out on the floor a lorryload of long-winded recent literary theory, it’s possible to argue that this isn’t quite good enough. Writing is not that simple. The form modifies the content (and vice versa) and language does have a life of its own. It isn’t a simple tool that one picks up to do a job. It is endlessly complex. In short it is “difficult” and so is Orwell. Much of this is to do with the complexity of his political and social positioning and, for contemporary teenagers, there’s a great deal of historical and political matter assumed by his writing that they may well find “difficult”. Books like 1984 or Animal Farm were written out of their particular historical moment. A lot of context is needed if one is to understand them. I would argue that this is as much if not more than is needed for Hardy (who of course was also a man deeply sensitive to the undercurrents of his time).
All this means that once one starts on the task of trying to sort the sheep from the goats one is pretty soon going to get onto tricky ground. It nearly always means making assumptions that turn out to be dubious, talking down to people, making false assertions, reducing the complexity, richness and variety of a writer’s oeuvre to some fatuous generality.
Let’s allow Orwell his complexity, his richness of content. His difficulty.
Thursday, 12 July 2007
A Poem for Today
If you like this poem and wish to know more about the published collection from which it came let me know.
A PLATE OF SPAGHETTI
These are the wide, incredulous eyes of Harpo Marx,
handed a plate which will soon be filled
with the tangled cordage of fresh spaghetti.
They speak of astonishment at such reversals
when the out-of-luck come into their own
and the least they can do is eat up.
The post-prandial concert is inevitable.
They are singing after supper their only song:
We have only our talent and our hunger to give you;
We are the century's displaced, the scuttling survivors
who seem to travel light but whose baggage
is weightier than any braced trunk deep in the hold.
A PLATE OF SPAGHETTI
These are the wide, incredulous eyes of Harpo Marx,
handed a plate which will soon be filled
with the tangled cordage of fresh spaghetti.
They speak of astonishment at such reversals
when the out-of-luck come into their own
and the least they can do is eat up.
The post-prandial concert is inevitable.
They are singing after supper their only song:
We have only our talent and our hunger to give you;
We are the century's displaced, the scuttling survivors
who seem to travel light but whose baggage
is weightier than any braced trunk deep in the hold.
Contemporary Greek Writing
For those of us who don't read Greek, translations are vital and as summer is here and we start to think of heading for the sun it's a good time to consider what's available.
Michel Faïs’s From the Same Glass, the seventh contemporary Greek title from the Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies at the University of Birmingham has now appeared. It’s a collection of stories translated by Jane Nisselson Assimakopoulos which won the Greek State Literature Prize when it was first published in Greek in 2000. The stories - richly varied in form and voice - reflect some new aspects of contemporary Greece such as the in-migration from the Balkans in recent years.
Although it would be wrong to say that British publishers totally neglect contemporary Greek fiction (Arcadia publish Pavlos Matesis’ The Daughter, Marion Boyars Four Walls by Vangelis Hatziyannis, Harvill the slightly more best-selling Andreas Staikos (Les Liaisons Culinaires) and Petros Markaris (The Late-Night News), as with the French there’s a bit of a disparity in the numbers of British readers who will be flocking to these countries this summer and the ones who will be even aware of what is going on in the literatures of their destination countries. Birmingham University’s series of translations is therefore to be welcomed. It has issued since the mid-1990s a couple of early twentieth century Greek classics such as Stratis Doukas, A Prisoner of War’s Story (1929) and Dimitris Hatzis The End of Our Small Town (1953; sadly now out of print) as well as recent novels like Sotiris Dimitriou May Your Name be Blessed (the best of the modern bunch).
They don’t believe in mailing lists or e-lists and you can get these books only by downloading a form from the website [www.iaa.bham.ac.uk/publications/translations.htm] but it’s worth the doggedness.
Michel Faïs’s From the Same Glass, the seventh contemporary Greek title from the Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies at the University of Birmingham has now appeared. It’s a collection of stories translated by Jane Nisselson Assimakopoulos which won the Greek State Literature Prize when it was first published in Greek in 2000. The stories - richly varied in form and voice - reflect some new aspects of contemporary Greece such as the in-migration from the Balkans in recent years.
Although it would be wrong to say that British publishers totally neglect contemporary Greek fiction (Arcadia publish Pavlos Matesis’ The Daughter, Marion Boyars Four Walls by Vangelis Hatziyannis, Harvill the slightly more best-selling Andreas Staikos (Les Liaisons Culinaires) and Petros Markaris (The Late-Night News), as with the French there’s a bit of a disparity in the numbers of British readers who will be flocking to these countries this summer and the ones who will be even aware of what is going on in the literatures of their destination countries. Birmingham University’s series of translations is therefore to be welcomed. It has issued since the mid-1990s a couple of early twentieth century Greek classics such as Stratis Doukas, A Prisoner of War’s Story (1929) and Dimitris Hatzis The End of Our Small Town (1953; sadly now out of print) as well as recent novels like Sotiris Dimitriou May Your Name be Blessed (the best of the modern bunch).
They don’t believe in mailing lists or e-lists and you can get these books only by downloading a form from the website [www.iaa.bham.ac.uk/publications/translations.htm] but it’s worth the doggedness.
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