Tag: book review

The Madness of Art

 

Author, Author by David Lodge

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British Writer, David Lodge

When the Irish writer, Colm Tóibín, was working on his (masterpiece?) The Master (2004), about the American-English writer Henry James, he visited Lamb House, HJ’s East Sussex home in the town of Rye, and met 3 other writers all doing exactly what he was doing: researching HJ. There has been a resurgence in interest in Henry James usually considered an obtuse fiction writer but a recognition that his most alluring characteristic is that he was, like most literary greats, a writer like no other. The English writer, David Lodge, also produced a book on HJ in 2004 which seemed to have sunk from view since Tóibín’s effort was so successful: it was shortlisted for the Booker-Man Prize in 2004. Lodge’s story focuses on the same events, and in particular James’s unsuccessful foray into the theatre, as Tóibín’s, but it is a very different novel.

Lodges’s story is more old-fashioned in the sense that he puts HJ in the midst of his history setting up a life of work, friendships, and his exhausting social life, into which then Lodge plunges the unsuspecting, and dare I say it, theatrically naive writer to surround the reader with an understanding of the great cataclysm that befell HJ  and his subsequent inability to come to terms with what had happened: failure.

 It is not enough that one succeeds – others must fail.

However, Lodge has a more nuanced ambition: the juxtaposition of a literary figure and his sense of his own talent against the success of his peers, and in HJ’s terms, his inferiors. James had a contemptuous attitude towards his contemporary, Oscar Wilde, whose unprecedented theatrical success was a claw in his side, made more painful by the success of An Ideal Husband, an early performance James attended on the opening night of his own fateful play Guy Domville. He hurried from the thunderous and appreciative applause of Wilde’s audience to the jeering ‘gods’ of his own. HJ was deeply humiliated by the audience’s reaction to his play. Guy Domville only lasted three weeks and was, ironicly,  replaced by Wilde’s even-bigger success, The Importance of Being Earnest. Wilde’s subsequent fall, social disgrace, trial for sodomy, and imprisonment were his just desserts in James’s mind even if they were, not for low-brow literary frippery, but for ‘outrageous and disgraceful conduct’; James’s own sexual proclivities were always buried deep and, it is surmised, never allowed expression. However it was the popular successes of his good friends, George Du Maurier and Constance Fenimore Woolson  that really contrasted HJ’s failure and showed his idea of friendship to be constantly compromised.

It was Wilde who quipped

Anyone can sympathise with a friend’s success, but it takes a truly exceptional nature to rejoice in a friend’s failure;

which he topped a little time later with,

It is not enough that one succeeds – others must fail.

Gore Vidal, that Wilde-ish American, rephrased it in the late twentieth century as

Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something inside me dies.

HJ’s close friend, George Du Maurier, was famous as an illustrator for Punch magazine and only turned to writing a novel, Trilby, because of failing eyesight: he dictated the text to his wife. Trilby was, by today’s jargon, a blockbuster, on both sides of the Atlantic, in print and on stage; a level of success that Du Maurier never quite understood. Neither did HJ. The Trilby hat, the phrase ‘in the altogether’ and the name ‘Svengali’ are all due to George Du Maurier, who is now forgotten; his name only lives on in that of his grand-daughter, the novelist Daphne Du Maurier (1907 – 1989), author of Rebecca and Don’t Look Now.

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Henry James at his desk, 1900. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize three times.

Henry James had many female friends but his closest was Constance Fenimore Woolson (grand-niece of James Fenimore Cooper). She, as did Du Maurier, considered HJ as a writer of the highest order and was always self-deprecating about her own short stories and novels which sold much better than HJ’s; he agreed with her but never said so. He was always haunted by her suicide – she fell from her apartment window in Venice to the payment below – in the fear that it had something to do with her un-reciprocated love for him.

In both Tóibín’s and Lodge’s accounts the failure, and in particular the doomed opening night, of Guy Domville is the focus, although Tóibín places it near the beginning, while Lodge puts it near the end. Both also are deeply interested in HJ’s recovery and his return to prose-writing. However Lodge’s structure of the event wrings every bit of drama there is. He alternates the thoughts and utterances of the audience members– HJ’s friends and allies – on the opening night with James’s actions and thoughts as he dresses and prepares for the evening, sits through a performance of Wilde’s An Ideal Husband, – which he hates and thinks is crass and silly, and then hurries to St James Theatre to be on hand, if required, for the curtain-call. It’s a very effective use of dramatic irony – the reader knows what the protagonist doesn’t – and when George Alexander, having just taken his own curtain call, beckons the unsuspecting James onto the stage, HJ assumes it has all gone well (readers mentally yell, ‘No, James! No!’); but when his presence in the spot-light elicits a volley of abuse from the cheap-seats he is confused and to make matters worse bows not once but twice causing the rabble to ramp-up the volume of their displeasure. The already humiliating moment is compounded by Alexander who then makes a fawning and apologetic speech about him promising ‘to do better, next time.’ Despite mixed reviews – and positive ones from the youthful but the then unknown H.G Wells and George Bernard Shaw – no report, vocally or in print, avoided the mention of the reaction from the ‘gods’, and the play was doomed.

Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something inside me dies.

What Lodge is getting at is summed up thus,

Something had happened in the culture of the English-speaking world in the past few decades, some huge seismic shift caused by a number of different converging forces – the spread and thinning of literacy, the leveling effect of democracy, the rampart energy of capitalism, the distorting of values by journalism and advertising – which made it impossible for a practitioner of art of fiction to achieve both excellence and popularity, as Scott and Balzac, Dickens and George Elliot, has done in their prime.

And the result of this was a growing craving for un-intellectual entertainment. Lodge is referring to, of course, the difference between what today we call popular fiction and literary fiction.

The plot of Guy Domville angered the public the most: an eligible bachelor, a Catholic, plans to enter the priest-hood, but he is the last of his line; he discovers that he is loved, decides therefore to marry, then realises his intended is loved by another; he fosters that relationship, succeeds, and then joins the priesthood anyway. The End; three acts and over two hours to finish as it began, and no happy ending. To James it was a serious dilemma, skillfully presented as art, to the public it was boring.

 

The effect of such an event on a writer, his work, his sense of himself, and his friendships is what makes this novel so engaging. It’s one of the most enlightening works on success, failure, and friendship and any reader interested in such things should read it no matter what their artistic bent.

 

The review of Author, Author in The Independent in 2004 puts it succinctly;

 

Lodge deploys all his seductive storytelling craft to explore not merely the life and art of James himself, but the fate of any proud writer in an age of hype and spin.

 

David Lodge’s Author, Author is an immensely enjoyable work; I scheduled reading time – always a good sign.

The kindle and paper editions of Author, Author are available here.

I leave the last word to Henry James: We work in the dark – we do what we can – we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.

 

 

 

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Time Enough Later by Kylie Tennant

 

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Australian writer, Kathleen ‘Kylie’ Tennant.

There are many Australian writers that seem to have been forgotten: Miles Franklin, Christina Stead, Katherine Susannah Pritchard, Henry Handle Richardson, Ruth Park, and Kylie Tennant (Thank god Elizabeth Harrower has been resurrected from obscurity by Text Publishing).

Kylie Tennant (1912 – 1988) was hailed in 1935 as the new star of the Australian social-realist tradition with the publication of her first novel Tiburon, a three-pronged story of a small mid-west New South Wales country town and its life and loses. This was followed in 1939 with Foveaux, which translated the themes of Tiburon to the inner-city suburb of fictitious Forveau, identifiable as the Sydney suburb of Surry Hills. Her reputation peaked in 1941 with the publication of her best known work, The Battlers, which deals with the itinerant unemployed who tramp the back-roads of the countryside when war breaks out in Europe in 1939. It also secured her an international reputation and is still her best-known work among Australians. A television series of Ride on Stranger (1943), her fourth novel, in 1979, starring Noni Hazlehurst and Liddy Clark, sparked a brief revival but unfortunately Kylie Tennant has slipped from the literary landscape.

Her third novel, Time Enough Later (1942), is a departure, in that it is more light-hearted – almost (but not quite) a comedy – than her first three novels which were a serious look at the working underclass, but also a continuation of her development as a writer as it is the first to feature an independent woman and her unconventional choices, a theme she continues and masters in the novel that followed, Ride on Stranger.

 Time Enough Later is a light, slip of a story of a young girl’s discovery of an agreeable alternative to men: agriculture. Bessie Drew grows up in the inner-city Sydney suburb of Redfern. She is “unfashionably wholesome, sensible, and unselfconscious.” Her squabbling family, especially her hard-done-by mother and alcohol and temper ridden father, force her to set her feet on a different path to an unknown but adventurous future. She forms a tenuous relationship – part amorous, part professional – with a cad of a man, Maurice Wainwright: a theatrical, selfish, ego-maniac; a con-man who has a talent for photography, sets up a studio with Bessie’s self-sacrificing help, and establishes a reasonable living and reputation but without the work-ethic to make it a continuing success. Into Wainwright’s coterie of Bohemians, performers, and socialists comes Esther, a free-thinking loner who lives in the country and continually urges Bessie to come and see her place. This she finally does to house-sit for Esther as she travels on one of her botanical/zoological expeditions. Bessie takes the whinging and whining Maurice with her and all is set for what we would call in times between then and now, a ‘dirty weekend’. The seduction is a failure – a “disconcerting mixture” of Maurice’s self-possession; the normalities of the rural night – strange noises from out of the quiet, moths the size of dinner-plates, and a lumpy bed; and Bessie’s “unconventional matter-of-factness which strikes her would-be lover as exasperating stolidity”. But it’s Bessie’s plain-speaking that undermines Maurice and precipitates the slow and floppy end to their ‘affair’.

“I don’t see what you’re getting so mad about,” Bessie went on patiently. “If a thing doesn’t work, what’s the use of wasting time on it? Here’s twice we’ve had this hoo-doo on us. And it just looks like the idea is no good … Don’t think I’m not fond of you. But it just seems a waste of time getting all stirred up when it’s just as easy not to get stirred up.”

But what does grab city-raised Bessie’s interest is the countryside. Her eyes are opened to a possibility, and a place, that had never occurred to her. She had always thought of Esther as a “lonely and disappointed woman who put her passion into a wild hermitage, wilfully withdrawing into the desert.

Yet here was the desert flowering like paradise in a glory of red and gold. The trees, the earth, the smell of the leaves, stirred Bessie as none of Maurice’s ideas, none of his talk about beauty and art had done. This place talked a language of long thirst and survival, of struggle and rain and the bite of weather. Something in her knew this language; and the old restlessness clamoured as it had never done before – not Archer Street, not the studio – this place.”

Margaret Dick in her slight 1966 volume, The Novels of Kylie Tennant, almost apologises for the slapstick, the humour, and the ‘lightness’ of the theme, as if such novelistic considerations are beneath Tennant’s talent. However the success of Time Enough Later lies in the novelist’s expert handling of these difficult, and unlikely scenarios. It’s not easy making a believable failure of a sexual seduction by a selfish roué; nor is it a mere trifle to make the offerings of a rural existence, toil and thin-reward, a believable alternative for a young girl from a society which has already set her future: a future she sees as aprons, children, and the gray, grime, and gossip of Redfern. Tennant’s descriptive passages of the rural setting, nature, a threatening bushfire, and the simple rewards of husbanding chickens and ducks, rhubarb and radishes are beautiful, alive and even tantalising. You can well understand, and believe, Bessie’s attraction to such things. Light the story may be but the writing is assured, entertaining, and masterful.

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Bad Blood: a walk along the Irish border by Colm Tóibín

 

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Young Colm Tóibín

In a pub in the little cross-road town of Cullaville, just two fields north of the border between the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland, the bar has two till-drawers: one for Euros (Irish currency) and one for the British pound. More than 200 formal and informal roads (tractor and foot paths) cross the border and it isn’t often clear for travellers which country they are in; sometimes it may only be the change of the speed-limit that may give them a clue, sometimes nothing at all.

Alastair McDonnell, an MP from Belfast has been flooded with queries, following the Brexit vote, from his constituents about what will happen if the border becomes ‘hard’ again. It’s possible that come the reality of Brexit (2019 says British PM, Therese May) little border towns like Cullaville will potentially become the EU’s back door to Britain.

Anne Devlin, a resident of the North who buys her petrol in the South where it’s cheaper, said, “Brexit got everyone talking, that’s for sure. It reminds everyone who is who, where is where, north or south, the Troubles, all of that.” It’s been only 18 years since the last bomb exploded during the religious-based conflict that claimed more than 3,500 lives.

With the signing of the Anglo-Irish Agreement in 1985 between the UK and the Irish Republic the path was finally set for peace but which didn’t come for another 13 years with the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. In the summer of 1986 Colm Tóibín walked the border in preparation for his account of the feat published the following year: Bad Blood: a walk along the Irish border. Actually it was more like a ‘drink’ along the Irish border: Colm likes his ale.

For a border that may now need to be re-fortified, given the European refugee problem that doesn’t look like slowing down – certainly not within the next two years, its ‘hardness’ may have many other repercussions. Sometimes it runs through the middle of someone’s field; in South Armagh (the North) there is a shop whose “doorway itself was the border, the outside of the shop being in the North, every entry and exit involved smuggling”; and not only that, where the border separates County Fermanagh (the North) from County Caven (the South) there is a house where “the border went right through like a slicer through a block of cheese.

The house was a small, modest, old-fashioned cottage. When I knocked on the door a man in his sixties came out. His name was Felix Murray, I discovered, and the border ran through his house in which he and his two brothers lived. These days, he said, all three slept in the North, but there was a time when one of them had slept in the South. ‘Only an odd time now,’ he said, ‘we sleep in the State’. There was a sofa in the kitchen, he pointed out through the window. Where you could sit and let the border run through you.”

This was 20 years ago and things may be a different now but as you can see from the image below, the border to this day, seems a long way from logical.

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His early non-fiction shows the development of Tóibín’s style later employed, to some extent, in his novels; his first novel, The South, was published in the following year, 1990. His fiction shows his debt to journalism with his plain unadorned prose, seen here in Bad Blood.

“I told him I was writing a book. He invited us in. He didn’t say anything. The front room of the house was small and comfortable. There was a fire lit. A television and a video machine stood in the corner.”

Compare this is a passage from his second novel, The Heather Blazing (1992),

“His grandmother was in the kitchen with his Aunt Margaret and his Aunt Molly who was married to his Uncle Patrick. Two of his cousins were in his the back room in cowboy suits. They all stood round as Eamon distributed the presents. Stephen sat by the fire, huddled in against the wall with his legs crossed. He opened his parcel slowly and smiled when he saw the book.”  Short, bald, unadorned sentences.

Tóibín trusts his readers to do most of the descriptive work and gives them great responsibility to fill in the detail, so much so that in his latest novel, Nora Webster (2014) no place or person is described: every reader has a hometown, its feel and smells, and every reader knows a nosy neighbour or a favourite aunt and Tóibín relies on this reader-experience. In this way Toibin’s work, for readers, becomes very personal. A reader from Melbourne, Australia, on finishing reading The South, slept with it under her pillow for two weeks.

In 1989, even though the border may have been on the map it wasn’t, in a lot of places, on the land (large white crosses had to be painted on roads to make the border visible to British helicopter pilots), but it was in people’s hearts. Back then it was all about tension in the air but a stiff upper British lip, this is in the North, was still the way people behaved.

At dinner in a hospitable family house in the North the first course served was beetroot soup. Toibin, from the South, innocently commented that it was called borscht, and it was a great favourite of the Pope’s. That word hung in the air like a fart. Everyone stopped listening and became immensely interested in their soup and the care it took to not let it spill on the white tablecloth. No-one spoke.

Religion was not at the heart of it but at the bottom of it.

“Yes, one of them said, the older people maintained that the accidents were a sort of revenge for what was done to the Grahams. God, you know, did I understand? It was God. It seemed like a large number of young people from the same area, I said, to be killed in accidents. They nodded grimly. I said I didn’t think it was God. No, they agreed, they didn’t either. It was just something which was said.”

Since Brexit the talk now is again about Irish re-unification: Gerry Adams, leader of Sinn Fein (once a terrorist organisation, now a major political player), said that since the vote by the North against Brexit (56%) a referendum over unification was necessary, Michael Martin leader of the main opposition party in Ireland agrees; Arlene Foster, first minister of the North, thinks such a move would be ‘a folly’.

When Tóibín walked the border the air was still tense. Now a lot of golf is being played and it’s a nice place to be a cow. In people’s lives now the border is a shadow: it’s crossed for shopping, for school, for selling. No-one wants it to become a frontier again. What everyone wants is for the leaders in London, Brussels, Dublin and Belfast to manage Brexit while preserving the peace and allowing the economy to flourish. They’ve got 2 years.

by Categories: Book review, Brexit, Irish history, Irish literature, Literary criticism, Literary magazine, Non-fiction, The Irish BorderTags: , , , , 2 Comments

A Place Called Winter by Patrick Gale

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British writer, Patrick Gale

This is a very different book, Gale’s latest, from his other work which have usually been an insular look at a group of people in a localised area, usually a small Cornish community. A Place Called Winter is epic in its geography, historic in its time and language, and romantic in its tone. If you had to write a précis of this book it would read something like a historical romance, complete with abandonment of wife and family, a journey across the ocean to a strange and inhospitable land, the finding of love in the most unlikely place, a world war, murder, insanity, tragedy, and a villain of truly despicable proportions, but Gale avoids all the possible clichés that would otherwise render such a story fit only for the sensational shelves of suburban bookshops patronised by retired ladies.

“I didn’t decide, ‘Now for an historical novel!’ Rather I found myself more and more possessed by the material suggested by the fragments of my great-grandfather’s story,” and Gale has been reported many times as saying that for the purposes of fiction, and to account for surprising decisions from his ancestor’s known but sketchy life, he ‘turned’ his great-grandfather gay. This is not surprising for Gale readers, as Gale, an out gay man, writes often and well about sexuality. However “The great challenge in this novel was to write about sexuality while inhabiting the head of a man who realistically would not have had anything like the psycho-sexual vocabulary we take for granted now.” Indeed, in his first homosexual experience, which he, Harry Cane, subconsciously seeks out under the guise of a remedy for his stuttering from a handsome, but opportunistic actor and speech therapist, says, when it is obvious what is going to happen and without any stutter at all, “I have absolutely no idea what to do.”

Once his affair is discovered by a kind but firm brother he is forced to avoid a family scandal and possible imprisonment, and flees to the wild cold west of Canada where he is befriended, then abused, but finally set up by a land agent next to a shy and reclusive brother and sister pair, there for their own reasons of displacement. It is here, near a place called Winter, that he discovers what life, love, sacrifice and family really mean. Plot points of self-realization, murder and reunion are described in unsentimental terms and even the climatic act of …. No; no spoilers here.

For all of Gale’s extolling his attention “on the psychology and emotional life” of his characters I found A Place Called Winter, although enjoyable and sustaining, not as rewarding as his other works that focused on a domestic band of rural characters dealing with each other, and more importantly, themselves. The Cornish landscape, both emotional and geographic, he knows well and writes about it with, insight, force and understanding, while such considerations in A Place Called Winter are a little overshadowed by the grandeur of the plot. However, there is a lot to gain from this book; it’s probably the most commercial of his works and one that will gain him a new and, hopefully, loyal readership. He’s prolific: this is his 17th work and I eagerly look forward to what next he has to offer.

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The Blue Touch Paper by David Hare

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British screenwriter and playwright, David Hare

Any child who has stumbled through childhood surrounded by unanswered questions, where adults were too occupied with their own demons to take notice; where one parent was largely absent in body and/or interest, and the other so shackled to society’s norms and buffeted uncomplainingly by the stings and shallows of the life they thought they had to lead, will relate to David Hare’s childhood in this, his 2015 memoir. David Hare’s father, Clifford Hare, a merchant sailor, was absent most of the time, while his mother, Agnes, conformed to the norms of the town of Bexhill, “a parody of suburbia”, between Eastbourne and Hastings on the Channel coast; a town described by James Agate as ‘bleak and purse-proud’ and used by the director Alfonso Cuarón as the location for those surviving Armageddon in his film Children of Men.

“Childhood is like going into the jungle without knowing what animals you will meet there.”

Saved from a fate he so easily saw on his horizon by cinema, the local theatre repertory companies, and his natural intelligence he weathered his upbringing and won a scholarship to Cambridge. Hare writes in a self-deprecating tone, which is endearing, but at the same time there is a feeling that he has done this to hide a sense of self-importance, as if his success and intellectual rise was inevitable. He wants to be liked. And steps in his making did seem to come easily and letter writing was one of his most successful modes of advancement: a holiday job in Los Angeles, a visit by Alfred Hitchcock, and a meeting with Peter Hall which had formidable repercussions.

It was at Cambridge in the 1960, ‘all wasps and no honey’ so said Kenneth Tynan, in a “self-deluded Britain” that Hare began his theatre-making, as both performer, director, and then as playwright.

“The very over-sensitivity which equips you to be a writer also makes being a writer agony.”

In 1969 while leading his Portable Theatre Company, Hare and co-founder Tony Bicât, had the idea of presenting, in their second season a play based on the history of evil and asked their new friend Howard Brenton, at the time working in the Royal Mint, to take it on. He eschewed the ‘history’ but kept the ‘evil’ in the character of serial killer John Reginald Christie, and set it in a pen made of chicken wire filled with old newspaper. Christie in Love “plays with the controversial notion that when Christie practised necrophilia, assaulting his dead women, he was, in his own eyes, expressing a kind of love.” Hare had only written one short play to fill in a gap in the previous program but Brenton’s “brilliant” play, directed by Hare, set Portable, and Hare, on a path of creating and presenting new plays.

“…my most important discovery about playwriting … Every line on dialogue, every exit and entry, every development of the story, every deliberate change of mood on the stage pleases or displeases the author for reasons they would be at a loss to explain. The mystery of style is exactly that: a mystery. Yes, of course, I could clean the play up. I could redraft. I could, if necessary, make the action more deft. I was perfectly capable of saying. ‘That scene’s working, but that one isn’t. That joke’s working, but that one isn’t.’ But to the basic question ‘Why is the play the way it is?’ I had no answer at all.” No matter what you WANT to write,  “ultimately you are at the mercy of your imagination – what ever that might be”; a bit like Christie.

There are moments in everyone’s life when the wanting of something is far more powerful than the getting of it; and there are many times when our bodies and our imagination are at odds; the latter taking over from the former and causing a positive, or negative, but involuntary, outcome. A man knows when his body betrays his will with an unnecessary erection; a woman once was so attracted to Ted Hughes, she vomited, something she did not want to do; Marcel Proust wrote at the age of 18 that ‘Desire makes all things flourish, possession withers them’; and David Hare separates his wanting to write a play, from his imagination that finally finishes it. In this sense we are all victims of our imagination, which can give our lives succor, as in a creative individual like Hare, or destroy it, as in another individual like Christie.

Theatre “is about people, it is not about types. Shakespeare did not intend Macbeth to be an indictment of Scottish monarchy. Nor is the characterisation of Lady M misogynist.” Recently in the London Review of Books review of The Girl on the Train; the writer, a woman, was horrified that the novelist, a women, seemed to her, to hate women. Yes, the female characters are in turn, liars, drunks, traitors, and lay-abouts, but the story is about these women, not all women. Hare derides this “idiotic language of role models” as a symptom of the late 1988s but it continues today. He says, “…with the rising tide of programmatic wordsoup which would threaten the vigour and authenticity of theatre in the new century, I would have no patience. Work, when fully achieved, seemed to me a more powerful manifesto than manifestos.”

David Hare, now Sir David Hare, is a very British writer for stage and film with an impressive list of work over many decades: they include Knuckle (1974), Fanshen (1975), Teeth ‘n’ Smiles (1975), Plenty (1978), The Blue Room (1998), The Judas Kiss (1998), Stuff Happens (2004), South Downs (2011), The Moderate Soprano (2015). His Skylight (1995) play was presented by the Melbourne Theatre Company earlier this year. He also penned the screenplay for the 2002 film The Hours, among many others.

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A Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century by Steven Pinker

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American psychologist and language expert, Steven Pinker

If you are bored rigid by style guides, grammar tomes, and ‘How to write’ books, skip this one. However if you are fascinated by the building blocks of a sentence; how English has changed; and the black, white, and beige of grammar rules then keep reading.

Steven Pinker, the American “Rock Star” psychologist and a Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University conducts research on language and cognition and has penned many popular and accessible books on language, the mind, and thought. His latest book is this one which came out in 2014 and for which he received the International Award of the Plain English Campaign.

Generally commentators on the English language fall into two broad camps: the prescriptivists, those who believe there are rules that define how language should be used, and that mistakes result from breaking those rules; and the descriptivists, those who believe that a language is defined by what people do with it. You may recognise the former as “sticklers, pedants, peevers, snobs, snoots, nit-pickers, traditionalists, language police, usage nannies, grammar Nazis, and the Gotcha! Gang” but Pinker also damns the latter as “hypocrites: they adhere to standards of correct usage in their own writing but discourage the teaching and dissemination of those standards to others, thereby denying the possibility of social advancement to the less privileged.”

Pinker is the chair of the Usage Panel of the famously prescriptive American Heritage Dictionary but he quotes the editor as saying, “We pay attention to the way people use the language”, a clearly descriptive view. Pinker, like most writers and readers, sit on the fence. Their anchor? Clarity and meaning. There are words that we continuously mis-use, such as decimate to mean ‘destroy most of’ instead of ‘destroy a tenth of’. There is no point in using the word in its original meaning if the reader or listener believes it to mean something else. The old prescriptivist rule of ‘never split an infinitive’ only exists because of the early English need to squeeze the language to fit Latin rules. The Latin word for the English verb to go is a single word ire; it’s impossible to split a single word but splitting the English word is of course possible: ‘to boldly go where no man has gone before’ is fine by Steven Pinker, and most people, I suspect.

His chapter 3, The Curse of Knowledge, is a delight and has cleared up that old annoyance illustrated in the following cartoon

Giving Directions cartoon TNY

“The curse of knowledge: a difficulty in imagining what it is like for someone else not to know something that you know.” When someone gives you inadequate (to you) directions that they think are obvious (to them) and ends with the phrase ‘you can’t miss it’, you usually will. See! It’s their fault, not yours.

And did you notice I used the plural pronoun they for a singular subject someone? This has been common usage for over a century and solves the English language’s lack of a neutral singular pronoun. Oh, and did you notice I began that sentence with the conjunction, and? This was something that was considered the grammatical sin of sins in the 60s and 70s but has again been used for centuries.

However the last, and longest chapter Telling Right from Wrong will give you a lot of joy, understanding, and the edge in arguments about where to put that comma, when to use lay and lie, and the sometimes acceptable use of an adjective when the grammar police insist on an adverb.

Eggs over easily

P.S. In a student exam paper, recently, there appeared a sentence that confused everyone. “It would be a great idea if we went to the park tomorrow.” This is a sentence about the future but with the modal verb would, and the auxiliary past tense verb went. Using the future form sounds strange: “It will be a great idea if we will go to the park tomorrow.” No, the past tense is correct. This is called factual remoteness as Pinker explains with the example, If you left now, you would get there on time. “The if-clause contains a verb which sets up a hypothetical world; the then-clause explores what will happen in that world, using a modal auxiliary. Both clauses use the past tense to express the meaning ‘factual remoteness’.”

Note the full stop after the quote (not ‘ ….remoteness.’”). You’ll have to read the book now to find out what Pinker says about this (or is it that?).

You can by the kindle edition, and paper editions, here.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Days of Abandonment by Elena Ferrante

Female-silhouette
Elena Ferrante is the pseudonymous name of an Italian writer. Publicity shy, she only accepts interviews by email.
        The abandoned woman has a long tradition in classic poetry and literature with Dido, Queen of Carthage during the Trojan war as the most famous example; a time when virtuous heroes where meant to choose duty over love. Abandonment, and the courage to put up with it, became a romantic womanly duty.
        Not so for Elena Ferrante in her most famous novel, Days of Abandonment, 2002, (courageously translated by Ann Goldstein): her protagonist, Olga, who is told by her husband, Mario, a man of “quiet feelings” that he is leaving her because he was having “terrible moments of weariness, of dissatisfaction, perhaps of cowardice” and “he assumed the blame for everything that was happening and closed the front door carefully behind him” leaving Olga “turned to stone beside the sink.”  At first she thinks it is just a phase, he will be back,  but when she finds out the real reason for his departure she is enraged, she becomes violent, obsessed, deranged but determined.
        Told in the first person, the prose is robust, strong; I can understand why some readers think Ferrante is really a man: it feels masculine and has a rowdy momentum that could sweep away any male equivalent like bulls before a train. But this is its strength. It certainly makes you turn the page. I’ve never read rage like this from a writer of either gender. It’s mesmerizing. And her attempt to redeem herself by adopting a man-ish attempt at seduction is funny, sad, distressing, messy, and humiliating all at once.
        The action culminates in a single hot August day: the kids are on summer holidays; there’s no money to entertain them, besides the lock on the front door is faulty and they are trapped. There is sickness, outrage, potential violence and indifference, an annoying brat, and ants. It is exhausting and exhilarating. Great stuff. But if you hate reading strong language stay away!
        It is a war, an internal war between the woman she was and the woman she’s become. Her senses become distorted: time stretches, her spacial understanding convulses and she no longer knows the usual spaces of her own home; they’ve become “transformed into separate platforms, far away from each other.” She loses her balance and can no longer trust her eyes to tell her what is there, her ears what is said, and her past what is true.
        Convoluted but fascinating discourses on love, her past, the world, and relationships – “what a complex foamy mixture a couple is” – sways her brain away from her responsibilities which she fears will unseat her; she employs her daughter to jab her with a paper-cutter. She is losing it but she knows she is losing it.
        She is also an outsider, from Naples, in Italy’s south but living in the northern city of Turin where a common saying peppers local conversation: North Africa starts at Rome. This would put her origins, in the minds of her neighbours, as somewhere in the southern Sahara, as remote as their imaginations could muster. They already think she is a little mad; maybe she is.
        What you think could happen in a locked apartment during a hot summer’s day doesn’t prepare you for what does. The ending will be for you to discover but Ferrante’s point is unexpected, politically incorrect, but perspicacious, and once you read it, digest it and realise what she means, that last line will stay with you for a very   long    time.
the-days-of-abandonment film pic
Margarita Buy as Olga in the 2005 film directed by Roberto Faenza who co-write the script with six other writers.
        You can buy the ebook at Amazon, Kobo, and Europa Editions and if you haven’t read it you should.
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Ease by Patrick Gale

Patrick Gale Pic
British writer, Patrick Gale

I’m not a recipe-bound cook. I like recipe books for ideas not instructions. Generally due to this approach I produce eatable, sometimes interesting, but usually unmemorable dishes. However, sometimes I even amaze myself: my first soufflé was a triumph and I basked in my own pride, and praise from others. Usually, though, when I attempt a former triumph a second time, it is a disaster: my second soufflé was more like a biscuit.

I have seen evidence of this second-time-failure phenomenon in other human endeavours, and not just mine, but Patrick Gale’s second novel of 17, Ease (1985), is not one of them.

His first The Aerodynamics of Pork (1985) was a joy to read but Ease surpasses it: its simpler, clearer, better structured, and philosophically more interesting.

Domina (Dom, Min, Mina) Tey is a successful playwright, who lives with her long-time partner – too long to be a boyfriend, but not legal enough to be a husband – Randolf Herskewitz, (Ran, Rand, Randy – Gale loves to play with names). He’s a writer too, although an academic one, more truth-as-wonder than Domina’s truth-as-reality.

Min writes plays about “menopausal lecturers and novelists” for “the discerning Guardian-reading, professional-oblique-arty masses”, which Des (Desiree), her agent, loves and can sell, but Min is worried she’s getting bored, and therefore boring.

Min leaves Randy and leaves behind the loveliest ‘I’m leaving you/not leaving you’ note you have ever read: “I won’t be in for dinner for a few weeks but the freezer is well stocked,’ it begins. She goes to “visit herself” and “secrecy of whereabouts vital to success of spiritual growth” and she signs “Apologetic affec. Mxxxxxxx.”

She moves to “a top-floor bedsit by Queensway, with no view, in a house full of odd little men and an old-bag downstairs who used to be a mortician.” One of these little men is Thierry, a young, French, gorgeous, promiscuous, and very successful, homosexual who takes her on one of his sauna-searching escapades; another is Quintus, a young, sweet, naïve history student who is trying also to find himself but has just found God, well, not God really, more a church; and not just any church, the Greek Orthodox Church. He captures Min’s curiosity and she captures a few other little things of his as well. I won’t go on; no spoilers here, and there’s quite a lot I could spoil, but no.

No-one knows how this thing we call human life started, if only by a bolt of lightning in a pool of primordial ooze, but start it did, with or without a creative hand. It sounds unlikely but it only had to happen once in a multi-squillion or so years. Anyway, stuff happens and us humans have many diverting, equally unlikely, annoying, and definite views on how we cause or are affected by such stuff and what we then need to feel or do; but if you are of the philosophical bent of our protagonist, Min, (and Mr. Gale, I suspect) you may come away from reading this book with a more peaceful, uncluttered, and sanguine view of us, allowing you to get on with life, like washing the dishes, walking the dog, loving, reading and /or writing books.

Patrick Gale is a British novelist whose ebook editions of his many novels are published in the US by Early Bird Books, and marketed by Open Road Media.

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What W. H. Auden Can do for You by Alexander McCall Smith

Auden via Smith

In a primary school in a small country town on the Adelaide Plain in South Australia in 1960-something, poetry was a page of writing, usually with a rhyming pattern of a-a-b-b or, if we were good, a-b-a-b, given to us students at Friday’s last session. The copies were made on that ancient, clumsy, messy, clanky machine: the Gestetna. Each student had a poetry exercise book, blank not lined. We had to carefully smear Clag on the back of the poetry page and stick it nicely, no splodges, onto the right hand side of a double page in our poetry exercise book. On the blank left-hand page we had to draw something inspired by the poem. No matter what the poem was about, spring, the Queen, a train, elephants, I always drew a two dimensional, two-storey house as big as the page would allow; so big in fact that the smoke coming from the chimney – there was always a smoking chimney – had nowhere to go except, unrealistically, down the side of the page towards the ground. The teacher never made a comment about this.

No attempt was ever made to make us think that we could possibly write a poem. I didn’t write one but I learned one: a poem of the “A starling, a silly little darling, such a pretty sight to see” variety. I recited this poem to my parents one day in the car on the way to Adelaide, that little flat city that was the capital of the state and, to me, the centre of the universe. My stepfather said nothing: he was deaf. My mother said something nice to me, which I liked. I liked it very much even though my mother’s praise was usually of the “That’s nice, dear, but don’t get too big for your boots” variety. Somehow I understood that she thought that I had written it. I didn’t know how to tell her that I hadn’t and, besides the warmth of praise, even meagre praise, was something rare and utterly delightful. I let her believe that I had written it and felt guilty for years to come, especially since she made me write it down and submit it to my monthly children’s magazine, and in which it was printed. I thought the police would arrive any day and take me away and do what they did to little boys who told lies, claimed other people’s words as their own, and thought poems were things to be proud about.

I’ve had a love-hate relationship with poetry ever since: I love mine but hate everyone else’s. I thought for a long time that my schoolteachers weren’t telling me something: like a missing bit from an IKEA pack. However then I thought that maybe I was not getting something so I read a lot of poetry and from all those years only three have gained some traction in my satisfaction bank: Robert Browning’s Porphyria’s Lover, a narrative poem of sacrificial love but, as I understood later, extremely misogynistic; William Carlos Williams’ To a Poor Old Woman which is simple-sad but strong and showed me that poetry doesn’t need punctuation if the lines are the right length; and Clive James’ Japanese Maple which is about approaching death which is apt since he’s dying (talk-about write what you know!).

Anyway, imagine my expectation when I saw Alexander McCall Smith What W. H. Auden can do for you (2013) on a friend’s bookshelf. Maybe I’ll find what I’m looking for in this little book.

Mr. McCall Smith (or is it simply Mr. Smith?) obviously loves poetry and has been reading it since he was 15 and he also obviously loves Auden, although he seems eager to point out that his little tome is not a hagiography. Auden has often been criticized for using words simply for effect and without real regard to their meaning; a criticism McCall Smith agrees with. Here is a quote from his Letters from Iceland (1937).

And the traveller hopes; ‘Let me be far from my

Physician’; and the ports have names for the sea;

The citiless, the corroding, the sorrow;

And North means to all: Reject!’

The curious line “and the ports have names for the sea” is actually a misprint: he meant ‘poets’ but ‘ports’ was printed. Auden left it in. He liked the sound of it. The other line of interest is “Let me be far from my physician.” McCall Smith is critical of this word too, but as I read the first line the surprise certainly came with the word ‘physician’. I was expecting ‘mother’ or ‘country’ or ‘crowds’ (as McCall Smith suggests) but with the surprise came understanding. I read it as ‘far from all that is safe and fixable.’ McCall Smith thought it may stand “for all that is overly fussy and cosseting in modern society.” The point here is that, no matter what Auden meant, and what he meant is really irrelevant: meaning is in the mind of the reader. I’m sticking to my ‘safe and fixable.’

McCall Smith makes it clear that Auden’s homosexuality was reflective of his time which was full of perverse contradictions: single sex boarding schools which thrust a single sex together while punishing single sex itself, which is itself reflective in the hypocrisy of calling moneyed schools ‘public’ as if their money was for all, which it wasn’t. Such a system, a bed of oppression and treachery, not surprisingly, also produced spies. And intellectuals who in their declining years re-embraced Christianity, as did Auden. All this is mirrored in his choice of subjects, Freud, limestone, Iceland, Spain, Hitler, Rome, love – sexual and not, dreams, birds, water, fascism, and vales but not mountains.

Knowing something of the poet, and his times, helps in understanding his poetry; even an older Auden disowned the words of his younger self. Thank god he told us. McCall Smith also states that influences of time and place can’t be ignored. He identifies two great influences on artistic endeavour in the twentieth century: war and Freud… Now, hang on! All I’m looking for is an ‘in’ to the appreciation of poetry and here, Auden’s in particular. I, nor anyone, have the time for an academic investigation to eek out meaning to the words I’ve just read.

In the musical theatre characters sing when the emotion, or action, expressed is bigger than the text, when just words are not enough. Similarly it seems with poetry: it’s louder, stronger, more complex, more succinct, and usually more effective than mere words. To write about political decline, as he did in The Fall of Rome, less is more:

The piers are pummelled by the waves;

In a lonely field the rain

Lashes an abandoned train;

Outlaws fill the mountain caves.

 

 

Fantastic grow the evening gowns;

Agents of the Fisc pursue

Absconding tax-defaulters through

The sewers of provincial towns.

 

 

Private rites of magic send

The temple prostitutes to sleep;

All the literati keep

An imaginary friend. …

 

 

Caesar’s double-bed is warm

As an unimportant clerk

Writes I DO NOT LIKE MY WORK

On a pink official form…

The imagery here is singular but powerful: an abandoned train; fantastical evening gowns; tax-defaulters fleeing through sewers; private rites of magic; sleeping leaders; and an unimportant and disillusioned clerk. These are four of the six verses in the poem; Edward Gibbon’s  The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire stands at 12 massive tomes With Auden you don’t get the history, but you get the idea.

What I take from this book is the affirmation that if a poem doesn’t speak to you, read it again, really listen to what the words, and, more importantly, the words together, conjure, and what you think it means is what it means, but if you still can’t hear anything, put it back and read something else.

W. H. Auden
British poet, Wystan Hugh Auden (1907-1973)

Oh, and in 1940-41 W. H. Auden lived in Brooklyn Heights in a house, that has become known as the February House, with Benjamin Britten, Jane and Paul Bowles, Carson McCullers and Gypsy Rose Lee. What a Sunday-lunch gathering that would be!

For more insight into poetry John Goodman succinctly explains obscurity in poetry, not forgetting that obscurity as a fad in art comes and goes. You can read his article here.

And you can listen to Auden himself reading his As I Walked Out One Evening (1937) here.

 

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The Story of the Night by Colm Tóibín

Colm Toibin image
Irish writer Colm Tóibín

Page one can tell you a lot about a book. Here, in  Colm Tóibín’s 1996 novel, The Story of the Night, the first paragraph is in the simple past tense with a first person narrator, Richard Garay, a young Argentinian with an English mother:

“During her last year my mother grew obsessive about the emblems of empire: the Union Jack, the Tower of London, the Queen and Mrs. Thatcher.”

The second paragraph is in the present continuous: now, the time of writing.

“I am living once more in her apartment. I am sleeping in her bed, and I am using, with particular relish, the heavy cotton sheets that she was saving for some special occasion. ”

The third paragraph returns to the past, to the story Tóibín wants to tell; set in the time before, and after, his mother’s death,

“She died a year before the war [The Falkland’s war, 1982] and thus I was spared her mad patriotism and foolishness … The war would have been her shrill revenge on everybody, on my father and his family, and on the life she had been forced to live down here [Buenos Aires] so far away from home.”

What you also get from page one is the tone, generated by a sparse prose peppered with well-chosen adjectives (“her shrill revenge”); simple and often short sentences; a formal style – few contractions; and of course the situation, melancholic and fearful, which has a lot to do with meaning: his mother a widow in a foreign country with an only child who is anxious about his future and his desires.

By the end of page one it is clear that the world of The Story of the Night is dark, devious, and dangerous.

“She was elated by the election of Mrs Thatcher. Here is a woman, she said, who knows what is right and what is wrong. And that is what we need here, she said. She showed me Thatcher’s face in a magazine, pointed to her and said how sorry she was not to be in England now.”

This direct speech without punctuation; more like indirect speech is curious since there are passages of traditionally punctuated direct speech. It may be that this direct/non-direct speech, which is reported by Garay, is his version of what was said which raises the question of his trustworthiness; yet he is our key to the story. He is honest with us about his desires, inexperience, political naïveté, and inaction; or is he?

The creation of verisimilitude is essential to the novelist’s goal: to make the reader believe that what they are reading is true, even if that truth only exists in the universe that the writer has created and in which the story lives. As in the theatre, the audience, the readers, are expected to suspend disbelief and believe what they are experiencing. With a first person narrative a strong and common way to do this is, ironically, for the narrator to admit what he or she does not know:

“I don’t remember how or why I began to talk about this.”

Curiously, such a line makes the narrator more believable; we all forget things, why we said things, how we met someone, how we know something. (This doesn’t work, of course, for a third person narrative who is usually all-seeing, all-knowing, god-like) But this not remembering makes him more like us. Tóibín uses this little technique to also heighten the tension surrounding the narrative which is steeped in the political uncertainty following the war with Britain over the Falklands, the Malvinas as the Argentinians call them. Garay is fearful of his professional future; he has a lowly paid English-teaching job which he hates; he is watchful of others who may be spying on him; he is anxious about others knowing his desires; and doesn’t know who to trust. However he is brave (or foolish) enough to take a gamble and becomes politically involved with the father of one of his regular students who introduces him to an American couple, Donald and Susan Ford, with whom he embarks on a friendship but with hidden motives and where the real story, what he assumes, is possibly false. These layers of acquaintances help to deepen the fear; slipping him deeper into a labyrinth. This mixture of political and sexual intrigue creates a sense of danger that always threatens to manifest itself: it is as if danger is around every corner, under every bed, over every page. Garay is constantly on edge and so are we.

Tóibín has been criticized for getting the history wrong and although the setting is a country we all know exists, Argentina, it doesn’t have to be that Argentina; it is the Argentina of the writer’s imagination and this a reader accepts or doesn’t. This is creative writing and one has to accept that it is all created; just because he writer uses the name of an exiting place the reader should not confuse the associational reference with the place itself; anyway, how many of us know the political climate, atmospheric geography, and bar etiquette of 1983 Buenos Aires? And would you take time out to research such things at such times? I think not. The writer wants us to use our knowledge, albeit skimpy and tabloid-ish, to his advantage: he is creating a world in which it is possible for us to believe that what we are reading is true (even if it isn’t). That is the point of fiction.

The Story of the Night is a love story, a tragedy, but also an affirmation: Tóibín is too much an optimist about love to let it be down-trodden by plot.

Tóibín has written previously about men, The Heather Blazing (1992) and The Master (2004), but not for over a decade; his last three novels have been about women; but of all his long-form work The Story of the Night is the most unusual. It has been reported that he has said that his next novel will be again about a man. We can all look forward to that!

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