How Was Your Bloomsday?

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

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!!!

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

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?

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

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

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.