Book World

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