Small Presses Rule OK?

Making Books for Love and Money: On the Value of Small Presses

Thursday 15 November at 7.00 p.m. 

London Review Bookshop, Bury Place, London WC1

with Charles Boyle, David Lea, Nicholas Lezard, Patrick McGuiness and Nicholas Murray

As the book world undergoes some of the biggest changes in its history, we ask what the value will be of small presses in the new literary landscape – and what those values are that they hold that make them so important for the future of the book. Discussing the question will be a panel made up of publisher, author, critic and bookseller, with Nicholas Murray, biographer and publisher of Rack Press, Charles Boyle of CB Editions, critic Nicholas Lezard, whose column in the Saturday Guardian has championed countless gems from small presses, Patrick McGuinness, poet and author of The Last Hundred Days (Seren), longlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2011, and our own David Lea, bookseller at the London Review Bookshop.

The Kafka Papers Latest

In "A Week in Books" in the Guardian Review of 20 October 2012 I wrote:

Anyone who has ever worked in the great literary archives like the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center in Austin, Texas knows that Yukon moment when, late in the afternoon, after another interminable box has been opened, the grey sand swishes to one side and a fragment of gold glitters in the pan.

So much of the greatness of Kafka resides in riddling fragments that it is inconceivable that the archive ordered by an Israeli court to be released to the Israeli National Library in Jerusalem will not contain something of vital interest, but anyone expecting the manuscript of another Trial is not advised to hold their breath.

Ever since this story first broke a few years ago there has been copious speculation about what the archive, owned by the implacable daughters of Esther Hoffe, former secretary and mistress of Kafka’s friend and biographer, Max Brod, might contain.  It is worth recalling, however, that Brod was the man who countermanded Kafka’s request that his unpublished work be destroyed (a bonfire that would have included all the major novels) and the idea that he would have allowed major work by Kafka to have languished for years in a bottom drawer is ludicrous.

But the simple fact is that no one knows what is about to be liberated by decree of the court from safe-deposit boxes in Tel Aviv and Zurich.  “We don’t know what’s in there exactly,” said David Blumberg, chairman of the Israeli National Library, in a welcome moment of candour this week.  The best guess is that it will contain Brod’s manuscript diaries, which must certainly have material about his close friend, as well as Kafka’s Hebrew notebooks.  And somewhere in all that heap of paper we must hope there will be at least one gleaming fragment.

The archive began its journey to Israel when Brod fled the Nazis in 1939 bearing a suitcase stuffed with manuscripts.  His 1948 will stated that it should go to “the library of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem or the Tel Aviv municipal library” but there was an ambivalent coda “or that of any other public institution in Israel or abroad”.  Up to now that has allowed others, like the German Literature Archive at Marbach, to stake a claim to the papers, Kafka being, after all, one of the great masters of modern German prose, born an Austrian citizen in Prague in the last years of the Habsburg Empire.  Marbach has already shelled out $2 million to the Hoffe sisters for the manuscript of The Trial – back in 1988 when the pair had begun to flog off bits of the archive to the highest bidder.  

The ruling of the Tel Aviv District Family Court on 11 October by Judge Talia Pardo Kupelman was that the papers were not a gift to the plaintiffs but intended by Brod’s will for a national collection.  The surviving daughter, Eva Hoffe, intends to appeal.

Behind this court drama is the insistent fact of Kafka’s Jewishness, vitally important to him, though critics continue to fight over its significance for his art. Fortunately for us, the latter is the private property of no one.

Brave New World: Huxley Revisited

The Institute of English Studies at London University is the location this week of a significant day conference on Aldous Huxley's Brave New World which is 80 years old this year.

There will be a range of academic speakers and I will be giving a paper on Fordism in Brave New World.

It takes place at Senate House in the University of London on this Friday 12 October and there are still places if you are interested.

Bloomsbury Festival Marches On

This attractively leafy scene is in fact in the centre of London in Russell Square and from here at 12.30 on Sunday 21st October I will be leading an hour-long literary walk around Bloomsbury as part of the Bloomsbury Festival.  The running gag is that it is called "Bloomsbury Without Woolf", not because I have any animus against Virginia but because I wanted to point out the connections with some other writers, including less well-known ones associated with Bloomsbury, most of whom figure in my book about the area, Real Bloomsbury (Seren).  The walk is free and signed copies of my book will be on sale.

Kafka: Saturday Night and Sunday Morning

Tomorrow is the centenary of one of the more remarkable moments of 20th century literature when, through the night of 22/23 September 1912, Franz Kafka wrote his breakthrough story, Das Urteil, ("The Judgement").  He wrote it, as he said afterwards, "in einem Zug" or "in one go".  One translator is said apocryphally to have rendered this as Kafka having written it "on a train" (Zug being the same word for both).  It is wonderful to read, in Kafka's diaries, his description of the joy of this creation, how he was carried away by it, how he felt suddenly that "everything could be said" ("Wie alles gesagt werden kann").  Whatever else Kafka was, he was, for me, the supremely dedicated writer of his century, who was interested not in fame, "deals", "exposure", and all the other things that are urged on young writers as their goal, but the act of writing itself, its beauty and agony, its needfulness.  "The conviction verified," he wrote in the aftermath of the story, "that with my novel-writing I am in the shameful lowlands of writing.  Only in this way can writing be done, only with such coherence [Zusammenhang], with such a complete opening out of the body and the soul."

I won't say any more about the story itself but I suggest you join me in reading it in silent tribute tomorrow night.

Just now there is a little flurry of correspondence in the Times Literary Supplement following a review by Gabriel Josipovici of some recent books on Kafka in which Josipovici expressed some discontent (I oversimplify his argument) with critics who think they have finally captured Kafka's meaning.  I have some sympathy with him.  Kafka's greatness is partly due to the fact that we cannot neatly sum up what he was "saying".  The mystery, the never quite knowing, is what constitutes the peculiar appeal of his writing.  I have written a biography of Kafka and you can order it by clicking on the dreaded Amazon box to the right of this column but, in truth, biography can point to certain correspondences in the story with Kafka's life and can contextualise it usefully but it cannot explain its magic.  Reading it to his sister when it was still fresh she said that the house in the story was like theirs: "I said: How? In that case, then, Father would have to be living in the toilet."

Once again Kafka has the last word.

Acapulco Reviewed

I have just returned from northern Italy to find a review of my poetry collection Acapulco: New and Selected Poems (Melos) by Martina Evans on Writer's Hub and another by John Greening which I hope the TLS won't mind my reproducing here:-

"There is often a single poem early in a collection that helps the reader find their way. In Acapulco by Nicholas Murray, it is "Bedroom", about a painting by Vilhelm Hammershoi: "How you anticipate / our love of the minimal ...", it begins, concluding a few lines later: Your silence grows in us, expands like rising dough, until we reach the street and find ourselves, altered, in an exalted elsewhere. That heavy cadence is characteristic, as is the sound-shift from "altered" to "exalted". In Murray's strongest work the effect is exactly as described in "Bedroom". The silence can be that of "Honfleur" - "amongst smiling gourmands /who do not know our secret"; the more spiritual regions of "Icon", the opening poem; or raw and malevolent - most vividly in a piece about an owl ("That cold, accusing look!") accidentally smoked from its nest. "Owl" is Murray at full stretch. "Get Real!", his extended satire on the Coalition (as the biographer of Andrew Marvell, he can be forgiven for trying) is less successful than pieces where the mockery is reined in: his snaps of Liverpool ("Culture Capital" - Murray has also written a Life of Matthew Arnold), for example, or the gentle pokes at archaeology, photographers, cyclists ("chasing pleasure, with the grimness it deserves") and even writers in "Himself a Poet": Oh yes, we all know the truthfulness of blurbs: like the grocer's insistence that his gnarled loaf with its scatter of grains, signalling wholesomeness, was not drawn, craftily, from the freezer at dawn. Shakier in descriptive work such as "First Day of Summer", where "cooing pigeons" reappear from two pages earlier, Murray is at his best when least adjectival, when a poem feels like a "tossed titbit", one of those "buoyant scraps" fed to appease those same "pigeons in the square". He frequently emphasizes the importance of selection, knowing what and when to exclude - the minimalist title poem, for instance, is rounded off (again somewhat over-emphatically) with the idea of a "viewfinder getting in the way of the view", but also more sinisterly in "Der Führer", where Hitler "ordered that the blinds be drawn" when his train was passing bombed cities."

From the Times Literary Supplement, 14 September 2012

Warwick Review and Acapulco

The latest issue of The Warwick Review has been published and contains the usual rich variety of poems, fiction, and reviews.

I was particularly pleased the have a review of my latest poetry collection, Acapulco (Melos) by Jackie Wills.  Here is what she said:

After referring to the poet's "taut precision" which "can spill into satire or deliver meticulous detail" she went on:

"Murray is an acclaimed biographer, novelist, runs Rack Press and is a Fellow of the Welsh Academy. This collection contains 25 new poems and selected work from two previous collections, Plausible Fictions and The Narrators Murray's range is eclectic and within the new poems, unsurprisingly, his political voice is present. He tackles pollution with stark imagery in 'Food', homophobia in 'Courage', and racist violence in 'Culture Capital'. Later in the collection, his furious satire 'Get Real' takes on contemporary politics in the fine tradition of poets as diverse as Alexander
Pope, Linton Kwesi Johnson and the late Peter Reading. Murray's tight style, at its best in the first verse from 'Food', serves his politics well:

On Midway Atoll they spread out the infant albatross:
its stomach slit to show the bellyful of plastic trash
that parents plucked from the polluted sea as food.

In the older sequence 'Greek Islands', Murray’s brevity delivers a sense of transience, of visual pleasure, of moments attached to places like tiny threads or found objects. These poems are as beautiful and challenging as the newer poem 'Island Swimmer', in which the subject, an older woman, easily outpaces the narrator, her body emulating "the action of the eel".  At times, among the many subjects this collection tackles, there is a sense of the fragility of relationships, and, while Murray's a careful writer, occasionally his language leans towards the archaic. But the wry title poem, ‘Acapulco’, is another that shows him on form, condensing the image – "the tower blocks gather to the contemplation of blue” – and setting pelican against tourist.

Subscribe now to The Warwick Review by emailing: m.w.hulse@warwick.ac.uk.