Book World

Whose fog is it anyway?

Yesterday I read one of the best chapters so far in London: the Biography.  Chapter 47 is entitled 'A Foggy Day' and in eight pages of perfection deals with reports of London fog from Tacitus to the 1960s.  Despite this long history, as Ackroyd says, fog is most closely associated with the Victorian era.  As he puts it:

"It can be said that fog is the greatest character in nineteenth-century fiction, and the novelists looked upon fog as might people upon London Bridge, 'peering over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all around them, as if they were up in a balloon and hanging in the misty clouds'.  "

He then goes on to say "the greatest novel of London fog is, perhaps, Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde in which the fable of changing identities and secret lives takes place within the medium of the city's 'shifting insubstantial mists' ".  A remark which reminded me amusingly of an interview I head recently on Oneword radio (now deceased, sob!) with the author Ian Rankin.  As many of you will know, Rankin is a resident of Edinburgh and in choosing his favourite books he included Jekyll as one of his choices with a comment to the effect that although the story is supposedly set in London the city it portrays is really Edinburgh, "pure Edinburgh".  And I have to applaud such patriotic misappropriation.  You haven't really fallen in love with a book until you've made it your own in some such way. 

"Every reader reads himself.  The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself."

(from The Maxims of Marcel Proust compiled by Justin O'Brien and quoted by Michael Dirda in Readings.)

Flights of Fancy: Birds in Myth, Legend and Superstition by Peter Tate

Flights of Fancy by Peter Tate is a delightful book.  As the author says in his introduction, his aim was not an overview of the entire history and literature of bird mythology, but a presentation of the ideas and folklore clustered around a couple of dozen species.  The book is eclectic, entertaining, wide ranging and random in the best possible way.  Much learning and research is worn lightly and humorously.  Many stories are embellishments of Biblical incidents: in particular, Christ on the cross seems to have been positively besieged by birds usually native to Western Europe, and Solomon expended a fair share of his wisdom on them too.  Nor was I aware quite how much dubious natural history had flowed from the pen of Aristotle.

Every chapter varies but here's a representative excerpt from the eagle section:

"Seeing an eagle was invariably though to be a favourable omen, but there was one rare event that was considered to foretell dire consequences: an eagle or other bird of prey being overcome by a lesser bird.  This inversion of the natural order of things is referred to by Shakespeare in Act II of Macbeth, where, among other strange events observed after the murder of Duncan (including horses turning cannibal), it is observed how:

On Tuesday last,

A falcon, towering in her pride of place,

Was by a mousing owl hawked at and killed.

While eagles are understandably considered to be strong and powerful birds, it is their vision that is often singled out for praise: 'eagle-eyed' is still a widely used phrase to describe someone who is incredibly meticulous and misses nothing.  Interestingly, the expression arose from the myth that eagles could look directly at the sun without blinking.  It was believed that females made their young look straight at the sun; if they were not able to do so, they were not considered to be true eagles and were thrown out of the nest.  Shakespeare referred to this myth in Henry VI, Part III (Act II, Scene I):

Nay if thou be that princely eagle’s bird

Show thy descent by gazing ‘gainst the sun.

Another myth claims that eagles never grow old because they are able to refresh their strength, hence the line in Psalm 103: 'thy youth is renewed like the eagle's.'  The two ideas of renewal and the eagle's relationship with the sun come together in the belief that the eagle could place itself in the focus of the sun's rays, set its wings on fire and burn its old feathers away.  The bird would then plunge into the sea or a pool of water from which it would arise, phoenix-like, with new feathers, new life and new strength.  In his Sefer ha-Qabbalah (Book of Tradition), the twelfth-century Spanish historian and philosopher Rabbi Avraham ben David ha-Levi recorded this belief, adding that sometimes the eagle delayed its rejuvenation for too long and, not having the necessary strength to rise from the water, consequently drowned.  Writing around the year 1250, Albertus Magnus, who was one of the Middle Ages' greatest advocates of the compatibility of religion and science and the first scholar to apply Aristotle's philosophy to Christian thought, described almost the same myth, but added his doubts as to its veracity:

I can only consider this a miraculous occurrence, since in the two eagles which I kept I observed no changes of this sort; for they were tame and docile and moulted in the same manner as other birds of prey."

And as the book's final delight, there is a good bibliography including books by authors surnamed both Swann and Raven, with habitat provided by Messrs Greenoak and Pollard.  I wonder if they grew up knowing they were always destined to write about birds?

Jacob's Room by Virginia Woolf

With Jacob's Room, her third novel, Virginia Woolf found her distinctive voice.  Both The Voyage Out and Night and Day, although already concerned with Woolf's central themes of portraying inner consciousness and the frustration of how human beings can never make themselves fully understood to one another, stuck to traditional narrative formats.  Jacob's Room quite literally breaks with literary convention and is deliberately fragmentary and splintered.  It portrays moments, incidents, scraps of unfinished conversation, moods and landscapes from Jacob's childhood in Cornwall, his student days at Cambridge and then his truncated adult days in London (and the book is full of excellent London descriptions). 

Jacob is handsome, clever and popular, and yet somewhat unknowable both to the reader and the other characters, all part of that theme of how impossible it is to make oneself known or to be known.  Although the incidents are broadly chronological they don't have an overt unifying omniscient narrator nudging us towards conclusions and judgments.  The tone is almost aloof.  Towards the end of the book there is a section I especially liked in which Woolf shows several characters at the same moment living their separate but parallel lives in different places and ways, but all connected through having crossed paths with Jacob whose fate is, at that moment, being decided by impersonal and faintly incompetent forces in authority. 

Jacob's fate (killed in the First World War) is an intriguing aspect of the book since Woolf never suggests that it is predestined to happen.  Every part of the book seems set in the present moment and when Jacob's death is announced, almost casually, in a scene where his mother and friend go into his empty room and comment on its untidiness and that it is as if he'd expected to come back, I felt real shock.  Each moment seems precariously beautiful and random, a skillful representation of how life feels as it is lived, and it is only at the end that the reader can look back and see which, if any, moments were more significant than the others in pointing the course of Jacob's life.  And this is also true to life: you can only make sense of it in a connected semi-narrative way, later; never at the moment of experience.  This is a very beautiful, haunting and poignant book.   Probably also a good place to start with Virginia Woolf's work if you haven't read her yet.  And really you should.

Dipping

So, we have the first book casualty of the year: Anne Enright's The Gathering.  Not the fault of the book; it simply wasn't the book for me at the moment.  After the wide open plains of the Egypt and Palestine in Our Horses in Egypt, being transported to a dreary family house in Dublin gave me instant claustrophobia and seemed to suck all the air out of the surrounding atmosphere.  It's rare for me to give up so quickly (30 pages in), but I'm getting more ruthless about ditching books for which I am not the right reader, in the hope of finding those gems for which I am the right reader.

As I've completed my three planned novels for the month I decided not to begin another until it's time to start on February's three.  Again, uncharacteristic behaviour but rather liberating.  Without a novel on the go I have instead been dipping into all sorts of books, Anne Fadiman's At Large and At Small, chief among them.  Her Ex Libris is one of my all time favourites.  I no longer possess a copy because I lent it to an office-mate about five years ago and he never returned it.  I haven't lent a book outside the family since. 

Essays are the perfect "dip into" material and fired by enthusiasm I have been busy ordering a couple of anthologies in the hope that my plan to read just three novels a month will leave more of these spaces in the year in which I can roam.

But back to Fadiman.  The essays in Ex Libris were mainly concerned with reading and books;  At Large and At Small ranges wider:  butterfly collecting, Charles Lamb, ice cream, the difference between night owls and larks, coffee, the arctic explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson and so on.  All lovely, all fascinating, all written with precision and a pitch perfect ear for the cadences of a sentence.  I know that I must now go and order a replacement copy of Ex Libris.

Funnily enough, one of my favourite essays of Ex Libris concerned Fadiman's passion for books about Arctic explorers, a subject about which I know nothing, but her enthusiasm was so infectious that whenever I now see news or reviews of books on the subject I sit up and pay attention.  The essay on Vilhjalmur Stefansson now revives that urge and the essay on collecting natural specimens chimes with all the interviews and reviews of Richard Fortey's Dry Store Room No 1: the Secret Life of the Natural History Museum.  Again, natural history and collectors have never had any previous appeal, but now when just these few hints are dropped, I feel the subject conceals previously unsuspected fascinations. 

Expect more dipping and dotting around before February's plans get going.

Versions and variations

I finished listening to the audio version of The Iliad last week and have to say that it was an amazing experience; all sixteen and a half hours of it.  I now no longer have to hang my head in shame at being totally ignorant of a work so central to Western literature.   You'd think that the work's ubiquitous influence would mean that there were few surprises, but in this respect my ignorance was a boon: it was fresh and new to me. My preconceptions about it all turned out to be misconceptions and when it ended after Hector's burial I started frantically pressing buttons and shaking my iPod thinking that I'd mislaid the next section.  But no; the story which I'd thought concerned the fall of Troy, actually ends before the war ends; the death of Achilles has been foretold but hasn't yet happened. Talk about a cliff-hanger.  So I plunged straight into The Odyssey.

This post from Jenny Davidson (back in 2006!  How's that for a brooding memory?) suggested that one is either an Iliad or an Odyssey person.  Four books into The Odyssey and I already know that it's the one for me.  I can feel much more emotional kinship with the quest theme, Telemachus's frustration, uncertainty, lack of confidence and attempts to assert himself in life ("make himself a story" was a phrase used I think) all feel more personal.  In The Iliad everybody was overwhelmingly valiant, even in the quality of their anger and unreasonableness and I never felt much personal empathy with a character.  I also have a love of stories within stories, so even the structure of The Odyssey feels right for me. 

My problem though is that after listening at the gym, I want to come home and re-read certain passages but am vanquished by the three translations I have: Lattimore, Fagles and Pope.  My audiobook is, as far as I can tell, translated by Samuel Butler and not rated by anyone, though it does the trick for me.  I had the same problem with The Iliad, and ended up not reading, simply listening. 

Dissatisfied I turned to Oxford Book of Classical Verse which has extracts of both poems translated by various hands.  The Iliad sections are mainly Seventeenth and Eighteenth century authors (Chapman, Dryden, Pope and Cowper) with only a smattering of later authors: Tennyson, Meredith, Fagles, Fitzgerald, Lowell and Logue.  The selections from The Odyssey although fewer have more modern poets: Fitzgerald again, plus Ezra Pound, William Neill, Michael Longley and David Constantine.  I can't conclude that this is support for my feeling that The Odyssey is more relevant, more accessible to our current age but it's an interesting list of poets and sent me back to Logue's War Music which I really must read now that I've a vague notion of The Iliad.  And that should logically lead to his further instalments All Day Permanent Red and Cold Calls.  So much for my 2008 disciplined reading plan.

I was delighted to see from Logue's introduction to War Music that he too struggled with the question of versions and variations, though sadly I can't emulate his solution of making up a new version:

"Knowing no Greek I began work on the passages [the commissioning editor] chose by studying the same passages in the translations published by Chapman (1611), Pope (1720), Lord Derby (1865), A. T. Murray (1924), and Rieu (1950).

Whilst Pope was the most and Murray the least accomplished of these authors, Murray, according to learned gossip, possessed the most and Pope the least information about Homer's Greek - though Chapman had tried to abort the charge that his translation was based on a French crib by calling his judges 'envious Windfuckers'.  Lord Derby was high-Victorian and Rieu mid-Windsor-steady.  ...

Rather than a translation in the accepted sense of the word, I was writing what I hoped would turn out to be a poem in English dependent upon whatever, through reading and through conversation, I could guess about the Iliad, a work whose composition is reckoned to have preceded the beginnings of our own written language by fifteen centuries.

My reading on the subject of translation had produced at least one important opinion: 'We must try its effect as an English poem,' Boswell reports Johnson as saying; 'that is the way to judge of the merit of a translation.' "

If I'm missing any superlative translations of either poem then do drop me a comment.

Author, Author by David Lodge

Regular readers may recall that I "accidentally" read most of David Lodge's book of essays The Year of Henry James and especially loved the title essay about the writing and publication of Author, Author.  Obviously, after that I had to read the book itself, so fascinating was the account of its conception and reception.  Happily I can report that Author, Author was immensely enjoyable.

The narrative is an account of those years of his life when James's novel writing was in the doldrums and he took to playwriting as a scheme to make money and subsidise a life of writing high art which would not need to be commercial; a project which, in common with virtually all get rich quick schemes, failed and saw him publicly jeered on the London stage at the opening night of his play Guy Domville.  Interwoven with this is the story of his deep friendship with George Du Maurier (grandfather of Daphne), a Punch cartoonist who takes to novel writing as his eyesight fails and who, without really trying, writes the blockbusting novel Trilby which makes him rich but not happy.  Meanwhile, Henry James, fastidious and insightful dissector of fictional relationships, tries not too look too hard at the uncomfortable truth of his own relationship with the writer Constance Fenimore Cooper who eventually commits suicide.  Irony abounds at every turn in the story.  It is, as Lodge points out in The Year of Henry James, a story that James himself could have written.  And yet..  And yet, this isn't a fiction shaped by Lodge, it is a presentation and selection of true incidents.  This really happened and it really happened in pretty much the way Lodge sets it out.  He is scrupulous in an afterword in distinguishing any incidents which are not actually documented and pointing out which bits he invented.

It shouldn't matter that Lodge didn't make it all up, but I did find myself wondering really if this was a novel after all.  Long sections read like potted biography, albeit fascinating stuff, until a section of action and dialogue intervenes (and it was only at that point that I recognised my own relief in the change of tone, for some action not telling).  In wondering why Lodge chose to tell this as fiction, and not say a biographical essay, I was put in mind of my own passion for the life of Mary Wollstonecraft.  I've often thought it would make a superb novel;  but I could add nothing to the extensive and excellent factual biographies.  Other perhaps than sympathy and passion and the desire to (re) animate her interior life, to invent the subtle, intimate, exciting bits that the biographies have to leave out because they are undocumented, to reclaim a living individual.  I think this is what Lodge has done.  If we were to look for the mirror image - a factual biography with fictional elements - then Peter Ackroyd's biography of Charles Dickens would come to mind: a magisterial book with occasional interludes in which Ackroyd imagines scenes from the life which, whilst they can't be definitively documented and may never have occurred, are undoubtedly representative of the essence of the man. 

So, whilst I sometimes felt jarred by Lodge's gear changes from biography to fiction, and especially by the explicit voice of the author at the end of the book recapping the current status of James's literary reputation and urging him to take a bow, I enjoyed the book, was absorbed and touched by it.  Henry James lives, breathes and thinks in this book and Lodge's affection for him is palpable, though with a healthy dose of humour at his subject's expense thrown in for good measure. 

Group hug

How long is it since you visited the BritLitBlogs site and explored the amazing variety and quality of the blogs collected there?  If you answered  "more than 24 hours" then that's not good enough; off you go now.  You should already know all about the miracle of Mark at Ready Steady Book whose taste in books is impeccable, interesting and amazingly wide-ranging.  Steve at This Space is, in my humble opinion one of the absolute top litbloggers on the web;  not for him a stream of consciousness spew of links, but deep thoughtful posts revealing the grain of a mind that thinks and cares deeply about literature.  Read don't skim his posts.  Ditto Litlove, a Cambridge academic who has embraced blogging with a passion and added dozens of books to my 'must read' list.

DoveGreyReader is my secret heroine: four books a week, knitting, quilting and ministering to the health of Devon with never a moment's loss of enthusiasm.  She and I seem to be on a bit of a parallel reading path at the moment with piles of Sebald, Belben and Josipovici sprouting all over the place, thanks in large measure to the recommendations of the afore-mentioned Mark and Steve.  I especially loved this post on how reading Sebald lead her back to re-read a Virginia Woolf essay with new eyes. 

Also don't miss John Self's The Asylum, Steerforth's Age of Uncertainty, Jim Murdoch's The Truth About Lies (especially this on close reading) and who could resist Vertigo, with its emphasis on the novels of Sebald?  (And yes, that was a rhetorical question).  And so many more... I'll expect you back in a couple of days when you've had a good browse.

Department of Dubious Writing Advice

From the latest issue of Mslexia (subtitle: for women who write) under the headline 'How to Write a Bestseller', comes a dissection of the latest Jacqueline Wilson book, which concludes:

"Things to Try at Home

Crucial things to get right are voice and subject matter.  Hang out in cheapo boutiques eavesdropping on girls in your target age group.  Surf teenage websites, especially those with chat rooms and discussion threads, to get a handle on what interests, excites or worries them.  If this doesn't suggest a social issue, buy an armful of teen magazines and peruse the problem pages until your eyes pop out of their sockets."

Probably not advice that any of you chaps out there should follow, unless that is, you're looking to break into the prison memoir market. 

Aspriring to eclectic; settling for random

My visits to the London Library never cease to amaze and delight me.  The people are as interesting as the books.  Today yielded a possible sighting of Jeremy Paxman (or at least a lookalike); a lady in an electric blue silk jacket studying Indian architecture and someone, no doubt the product of a decent public school, wondering if he would get into his club dressed as he was in a formal dark suit, tie and red converse baseball boots.

I keep a running list of volumes to peruse next time I'm at the Library and add to it as books on blogs and (rarely) the review pages catch my attention.  Part of the fun is tracking the books down in the caverns of the library.  Today thirty minutes of navigating the labyrinthine corridors, secret staircases and metal grilles masquerading as floors (which allow you to see from the fourth floor of one particular building straight down into its basement); of hunting the pre-Dewey classifications of S. Birds, L. Literature, Hist. of (Gen), of finally crossing the Hogwarts-type invisible bridge into Biog. L to M and yet even then going up a flight too far and being marooned in Theology before finding what looked like a metal step-ladder down to Biog A to K, left me convinced that no sight in the world surpasses the beauty of a sign saying 'Exit to Main Stairs'. 

Eventually though the haul consisted of:

Flights of Fancy by Peter Tate, its subtitle explains it all: birds in myth, legend and superstition.  At 162 pages it covers a couple of dozen birds but is fascinating and nicely illustrated.

Goldberg Variations by Gabriel Josipovici.  I can't remember which blogger(s) have been reading this, but after loving Moo Pak, I have been meaning to read more of Josipovici's fiction and he's on the great 2008 reading plan (some time in the summer, I think but the London Library's lending periods are understandingly generous).

Living by Fiction by Annie Dillard, the only one of her works the Library had that I haven't.  Looks good, especially part two which wonders why anyone is still writing traditional fiction and why there has been no radical revolution despite the upheavals of the Modernists.  So a double hit here: it's by Dillard, my new favourite writer, and it dovetails with my 2008 Modernist writing plan.  I bet she anticipated that particular conjunction of events when she published the book in 1982.

L'Etranger by Albert Camus.  Because I'm piqued by the apparent inaccuracy of what is for me a very clear memory.  So I'm going to re-read the book.  I reached page 17 on the train home and am jubilant to find my French still in working order.

Soren Kierkegaard: an Introduction to his Life and Philosophy by Peter Rohde.  The least scary, not in Danish, book I could find.  (I was going to say, the only Noddy guide I could find.  And then I saw this listing  on Amazon. Bizarre.)   Also, in the Department of Never Too Old to Discover an Embarrassing Hole in One's Knowledge, I find he's pronounced kier-kir-gaw.  Well, I was two thirds right.

Singer on the Shore: Essays 1991-2004 by Gabriel Josipovici.  I'm in the mood for literary essays at the moment, and just to join the dots, this volume contains an essay on that man whose name begins with 'K' and ends in a way not at all predictable from the presence of a 'D'.

Memoirs of a Seafaring Life by William Spavens, an Eighteenth century seaman who I'm hoping will weigh in with help on some nautical terms for my shipwreck which I actually got round to writing on Monday and found to be utter tripe when I typed it up on Tuesday (clearly the Fairy of Rubbish Writing visited overnight and sprinkled the same five adjectives liberally on every single paragraph, before erasing my exciting narrative and replacing it with a shipwreck as exciting as an evening in with a cup of cocoa).

As I took my spoils to the issue desk I hoped they looked eclectic and wide ranging, but frankly am prepared to settle for good old random.

Distracted

I was all set to give you my thoughts on David Lodge's Author, Author, but got distracted by this excellent post by Mark on novels that are more than just story.  As I keep moaning when I am disappointed by yet another (over) praised book, I want more than plot.  Mark puts it very well:

"I am interested in stories, but my interest is second to my interest in why this particular writer thinks that this particular story is important enough for them to write and me to read. A self-consciousness about the act of writing and reading needs to be folded into the writing for the writing in front of me to become more than merely a vehicle to carry a plot."

And in so doing, articulates my current puzzle with Rosalind Belben's Our Horses in Egypt.  I'm enjoying the narrative action, rather liking the increasingly less respectable heroine, and I'm busy trying to work out how Belben's prose style works, but most of all I'm reading with my mental breath held, waiting to find out why she's telling me this story and in this way.  [And if you've read it - no spoilers in the comments please!]  Something telegraphs the fact that this isn't just about a woman in search of a horse and so I find myself inveigled into speculation and reflection after each section I read.  It also has a quality that I'm coming to identify and prize: otherness.  A reading experience which estranges me from how my mind naturally works, sees things, tells itself stories.  All of this is good.