Book World

Funny old life

I have, in a quiet way, been absorbed by the after-story of Pat Kavanagh the literary agent who died, aged 68, within a month of having been diagnosed as having a brain tumour. 

Some facts that add to the quiet interest: she was married to author Julian Barnes, who before her diagnosis or death published his meditation on dying, Nothing To Be Frightened Of, and she was also the lover of Jeanette Winterson, for whom she left Barnes for a period.  I admire both Barnes and Winterson and the love triangle always intrigues. 

How sad then to see this account in The Telegraph that Winterson, who was absent, no doubt for reasons of compassion for the family,from Pat Kavanagh's funeral, was not mentioned in a will that did make a number of specific bequests. 

But the killer line, is,to my mind, this one: 

"Although Winterson, 49, was not present at her former lover's funeral, she paid tribute to her on her blog and said: "I wrote The Passion for her, and I loved her very much."

In such an impoverished national emotional landscape, where the death of a talentless, ignorant woman like Jade Goody becomes 'news', yes real hard news, where does an honest, uncompromising, uncomfortable comment like Winterson's sit?  When the cultural discourse is so debased and corrupted, how do we hear the authentic voices?

Well, ignoring propaganda is one strategy (and as a bonus this post has, to my mind, the single best line from a blog for a long time... "the Leni Riefenstahl of Richard & Judy's Britain") and another strategy is to follow one's own interests quietly.  Though that does make blog posting a little intermittent. 

 

Sometimes you only see what you're looking for

The title will be a truism to any woman feeling broody.  As soon as the idea is in your head, the only women in the world are pregnant women.  But it has broader applications as well, as I found to my cost today in the London Library.  I was browsing the section on Birds, looking more in hope than certainty, for a book on the mythology of ravens, crows or rooks.  And suddenly, there it was, staring at me: "The Mythology of the Raven".  I settled down in the reading room but after a puzzled few minutes flicking through pictures of dissected birds and diagrams of muscles I looked again at the title.  And learnt a new word: myology.

Inspired gifts from Hesperus

I had the delight of finding two volumes of Christmas stories from Hesperus Press in my post this morning.  If you're looking for a last minute present for a bookish friend then this and this look just the thing:

   

Many thanks to the good people at Hesperus for making my day!

Many bookmarks

A quick scan of the bedside table reveals a total of ten books with bookmarks sticking out of them.  I used to be much more disciplined about just reading one or two books at a time, but nowadays I seem to be a fussier reader and must have a half dozen or more books in progress in order to be assured that one of them will suit my mood.

The Art of the Personal Essay edited by Phillip Lopate has been a fixture on the bedside table for some time and is destined to stay even longer.  It is a wonderfully rich selection of essays and has already led to my falling in love with Montaigne (and yes, I am waiting to read Jenny Diski's Apology for the Woman Writing).  Lined up elsewhere in the house are volumes dedicated to individual essayists I have discovered through this marvellous anthology.  So many that it would take me years to read them all.  And for once that is a comforting rather than a depressing thought.

The Road Washes Out in Spring by Baron Wormser, combines two of my fascinations: poetry and living in the wilds.  I can't remember where I first heard of the book, but I do recall that it instantly sprang off the page as a book I would love.  And I do.  Of course it makes me want to read Thoreau all over again.

Jeanette Winterson's The Passion I picked up in the London Library when I meant to bring home Written on the Body (I had left my list at home and so had to reconstruct it from memory; this was the only muddle I made in a list of 15 books), but so far I am enjoying Napoleon and Venice equally.  And am reminded what a talented writer Winterson is.

Browsing the London Library's numerous  "Biog Woolf" shelves produced Leonard and Virginia Woolf by Peter Alexander.  A book about Virginia Woolf's slightly mysterious, or at least ambiguous, marriage was of course irresistible, and reading the introduction on the train on the way home piqued my interest even more as the author nails his colours firmly to the mast: much of Virginia's output and virtually all of the rest of the Bloomsburyites achievements have been vastly over rated and he is on a mission to redress the balance.  I'm halfway through and learning much and arguing with more.  Great fun.

Amos Oz's A Perfect Peace will, I fear, fall by the wayside.  I have struggled halfway but I'm unarguably stuck.  I am not the right reader or in the right place.

Christina Stead's The Man Who Loved Children was one I started to race through and then put down one day and somehow couldn't pick up again.  Another recommendation from Francine Prose's Reading Like a Writer, I think.  A very distinctive voice and style but I am struggling to get the characters into focus in my mind.  Thinking about it though revives my desire to persevere.

Paul Auster's The Invention of Solitude is a book I have nearly finished and I raced through it until I got bogged down in some Old Testament dullness towards the end (Nineveh, and whales may have been involved).  I'll be annoyed with myself if I don't finish it but the biblical stuff is tiresome.  I have never got on with Auster's fiction, but this memoir is gripping and supremely well written.

I am on a Janet Malcolm binge at the moment.  I enjoyed In the Freud Archives (who doesn't love a good internecine feud?) and Reading Chekhov is one of the best books I've read all year.  Obviously I now have to read all of Chekhov's stories and plays.  The book mark sticking out of Psychoanalysis: the Impossible Profession, is in the early part of the book but already I am happy and wondering if I should dig out some Freud, or maybe Ernest Jones's biography on my next visit to St James's Square.

The slimmest volume is a Hesperus Press edition of previously unpublished sketches by Virginia Woolf: Carlyle's House.  The foreword by Doris Lessing warns that this is early stuff and Virginia at her least likable (ie anti-Semitic, snobbish and judgmental), but in the manner of a true addict I will read it anyway.  And as ever there is the lurking idea that I might start the final volume of her diary, the only one I haven't read.  But the fear of finishing it and not having it in reserve stops me.

And finally, War and Peace, with its bookmark a mere 13 pages in.  It has been in the back of my mind for a few months to re-read Tolstoy and so when I saw a new fat, silky paper volume on the Books in Translation table at Waterstones the other day, I couldn't resist.

Christmas Present

My combined present for Christmas and birthday is, for the third year running, membership of the London Library.  And on a day like today, with husband and children all out for the evening, when I settle down with a heap of 15 austere looking volumes, stripped of their covers (and gaudy graphics and alluring blurbs) and read, read and read some more, I wonder how I ever lived without this treasure.

I finished Jane Bowles's novel Two Serious Ladies earlier.  A very unprepossessing volume to judge it by its cover, and not borrowed once between January 2005 and November 2008.  Any municipal library would have weeded it long ago and denied me the pleasure of being charmed and baffled by it in equal parts, having been desperate to read it since I read excerpts from it in Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose. 

This refusal to give up on the out of fashion, or slightly obscure, is the strength of the London Library.  The current magazine reports, to my mingled delight and sadness, that as a result of the cretinous policy of our current government, libraries are getting rid of evermore of those inconvenient books that clutter up the space between computer terminals and DVD display racks:

"The public library service used to pride itself on its national 'Joint Fiction Reserve', whereby each library authority in the UK was assigned certain letters of the alphabet and was expected to keep a copy of each fiction title by authors with surnames in its alphabetical section, so that there was always a copy of an older title available to satisfy a reader's request via the inter-regional lending service. "

As these reserves are now being dispersed (ie thrown away) the London Library has been able to acquire around 200 older fiction titles from the Tower Hamlets library system, which was responsible for authors with surnames St- to Th-.  And this means that they have acquired a number of books by Rosemary Sutcliffe, one of my all time favourite authors as a child.  I will be raiding those shelves soon.  But my gain (as a paying member of the London Library) is undoubtedly the loss of far more people who depend on the public library system (and fund it with their taxes).

I have changed the words 'great men' to 'Judy'

I have to share with you this quote from Susie Boyt's My Judy Garland Life, which somehow sums up the total madcap seriousness of her enterprise:

"Hero-worship can be seen as a modest and ill-adjusted form of love, but it can be so productive.  You may consider it essentially deranged, and deduce that therefore nothing good can come from it, but you are wrong.  In 1841, in his lecture "The Hero as Divinity", Thomas Carlyle expressed what, for me, are some of the chief benefits of this kind of love.  I have changed the words 'great men' to 'Judy' or 'Judy Garland' throughout and altered the pronouns accordingly.  The word 'humanity' replaces the word 'manhood':

One comfort is, that Judy Garland, taken up in any way, is profitable company.  We cannot look, however imperfectly upon Judy, without gaining something by her.  She is the living light fountain which it is good and pleasant to be near.  The light which enlightens, which has enlightened the darkness of the world; and this not as a kindled lamp only, but rather as a natural luminary shining by the gift of Heaven; a flowing light fountain, as I say, of native original insight, of humanity and heroic nobleness; in whose radiance all souls feel that it is well with them.  On any terms whatsoever, you will not grudge to wonder in such neighbourhood for a while.

What Carlyle neglected to add was that hero-worship broadens one's love horizons wildly, for if love doesn't require the merest hint of participation from the other party then the number of potential candidates is infinite."

 

Other people's enthusiasm

I simply don't know why I persist in reading, or at least starting to read, crime novels when I have, post children, become so hypersensitive to even fictional violence involving children.  Still, optimism still triumphs over experience from time to time and seduced by reviews of When Will There Be Good News? I waited patiently to move to the front of the library reservations queue.  Then on page 20 (and bearing in mind that the first page of full text is page 13) I closed it; ostensibly on the pretext that a dead mother, baby and child was a bit much for reading over lunch, but actually knowing that the library queue was going to shorten a little faster.  To be honest it hadn't grabbed me much by then anyway.  It was one of those competent but unexceptional starts that make me ask myself in exasperation 'what made the author want to write this? What obsession or passion drove it?'  With the weary feeling that 'nothing and none' might be the answers.

But the experience of opening my next library reservation could not have been more different.  It was a bit like one of those cartoon moments where a character in a calm room opens a door or window and suddenly a gale pours in and hurls everything to the other end of the room.  For gale, substitute passion. The moment I read this review in The Times, I knew I had to read My Judy Garland Life by Susie Boyt. I have no especial interest in Judy Garland, but I love other people's enthusiasms.  And if they can quote poetry and indulge in some thoughtful self-analysis along the way then so much the better.  Eighty six pages in and I am swept along on a fabulous tidal wave of passion and intelligence.  And no dead babies in sight.

 

Thinking about voice in writing

One of the several hundred things I can't yet do in my writing is find my real voice.  Reading The Writer's Voice by Al Alvarez, some quotes made me stop and ponder:

"Style is a very simple matter; it is all rhythm.  Once you get that, you can't use the wrong words.  But on the other hand here am I sitting half the morning, crammed with ideas, and visions, and so on, and can't dislodge them, for lack of the right rhythm.  Now this is very profound, what rhythm is, and goes far deeper than words.  A sight, an emotion, creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes words to fit it; and in writing (such is my present belief) one has to recapture this, and set this working (which has nothing apparently to do with words), and then, as it breaks and tumbles in the mind, it makes words to fit it."

(Virginia Woolf writing to Vita Sackville-West)

"The man that hath not music in his soul can indeed never be a genuine poet.  Imagery ..., affecting incidents, just thoughts, interesting personal or domestic feelings, and with these the art of their combination or intertexture in the form of a poem, may all by incessant effort be acquired as a trade, by a man of talent and much reading, who ... has mistaken an intense desire of poetic reputation for a natural poetic genius... But the sense of musical delight, with the power of producing it, is a gift of imagination ... [It] may be cultivated and improved, but can never be learned."

Coleridge, Biographia Literaria

"Imagery, delivery, vocabulary spring from the body and the past of the writer and gradually become the very reflexes of his art.  Thus under the name of style a self-sufficient language is evolved which has its roots only in the depths of the author's personal and secret mythology. ... Its frame of reference is biological or biographical, not historical."

Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero

"For the dissident writers, an author's integrity could be judged by his tone of voice and his attitude to language.  Like George Orwell, they believed "the greatest enemy of clear language is insincerity," and the language of insincerity is cliche - the debased phrases and dead metaphors that come automatically, without thinking, without any personal input from the writer.  Orwell says of empty formulations like these, "If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought."  Style, he meant, defines intelligence as well as sensibility; how you write shows how you think."

Al Alvarez, The Writer's Voice

Instead

I still get a few offers of review copies from publishers. One that I wholeheartedly accepted (a while ago now) was Canongate's offer of The Gargoyle by Andrew Davidson.  I haven't got round to it yet, but the review in today's Guardian Review section makes it a likely candidate for next new read (when I've finished my current comfort re-reads of Bob Dylan Chronicles and Francine Prose's Reading Like a Writer).  This is the best use of 'instead' that I've read in a long, long time:

"This is at once a redemptive love story, gothic horror, historical epic and tale of addiction, and Davidson would need a dab hand to chisel a balanced work from his twisting mix of genres. Instead, he has produced a colourful, sentimental and lopsided pageturner; it may be as unreal as Marianne Engel's [the novel's heroine] bestial carvings, but if you've the stomach for grisly detail and the patience to sit through icky prose, you'll find The Gargoyle a splendidly compulsive novel."

"Instead" now becomes my new favourite deadpan word.

Long time, no post

Yes, its been a long time since I posted here and I confess to missing the old blog from time to time.  I am still reading compulsively but I find that without the background thought that I will be summarizing or expressing an opinion on my reading, I've got lazy; both in the books I'm reading and my responses to them.  So I may, just may, pop back for the occasional post.

On the writing front, I recently started an introductory creative writing course and within 30 seconds of entering the room I was itching to write about my fellow participants.  The title of my first short story collection came to me instantly too: "Cruel and Heartless Stories About my Writing Class".  I may end the term with serious injury I am biting my tongue so hard. I can't decide if I am profoundly depressed or deliriously overjoyed that it confirms all my worst fears about creative writing classes.  Still, by the end of the day I had produced 3,000 words.  We are definitely talking quantity not quality though.