NEW WRITING / BOOK TALK / NEWS AND REVIEWS

THE READER

No. 33 SPRING 2009

Published by The University of Liverpool School of English.

Supported by:
EDITOR    Philip Davis

DEPUTY EDITOR    Sarah Coley

CO-EDITORS    Maura Kennedy
   Angela Macmillan
   Brian Nellist
   John Scrivener
STUDENT EDITOR    Eleanor McCann

NEW YORK EDITOR    Enid Stubin

CONTRIBUTING EDITOR    Les Murray

ADDRESS    The Reader Magazine

   The Reader Organisation
   19 Abercromby Square
   Liverpool L69 7ZG

EMAIL    magazine@thereader.org.uk
WEBSITE    www.thereader.org.uk
BLOG    www.thereaderonline.co.uk

SUBMISSIONS    See p. 3
DISTRIBUTION    See p. 128

ISBN 978-0-9558733-2-4

Printed and bound in the European Union by Bell and Bain Ltd, Glasgow
 ABOUT THE READER ORGANISATION

Jane Davis, Director, The Reader Organisation

A Reading Revolution!

   ‘People are dying – it is no metaphor – for lack of something real to

   carry home when day is done.’
Saul Bellow, Herzog

We used this quotation in 1997 in the very f irst issue of The Reader.

We believe literature is for life, not just for courses.

That’s why we’re working in day centres, old people’s homes, community groups,
hospitals, drug rehabs, refugee centres, public libraries, schools and children’s
homes and many other places to bring the pleasure and value of reading to as
many people as possible.

We f ind it easy to imagine a near future where literature graduates leave univer-
sity to work in banks, hospitals, retail, management and human resources. Their
job? To bring books to life, opening and sharing the centuries of vital information
contained within them, making sure this amazingly rich content is available to
everyone.

   ‘It moves you. I mean it hits you inside where it meets you and means
   something.’
Dementia sufferer reading poetry

SUBMISSIONS
The Reader genuinely welcomes submissions of poetry, fiction, essays, read-
ings and thought. We publish professional writers and absolute beginners.
Send your manuscript with SAE please to:

The Reader Office, 19 Abercromby Square, Liverpool L69 7ZG, UK.

 THE READER

CONTENTS

EDITORIAL 80 Clive sinclair

7 Philip Davis The Venus Mosaic
In Which I Do Not 119 The Reader Serial
Meet Robert Redford Mary Weston
9 editor’s Picks The Junction Part 3:
What’s the Title?
POETRY
16 Face to Face ESSAYS
19 angela Leighton 22 Jonathan Bate
36 David Constantine Reading Shakespeare’s Mind
43 rebecca Gethin with extract from Soul of the Age
55 Joel Lane 33 David Constantine
63 andrew McNeillie ‘Thy Book Doth Live’
73 Isabel Lusted 45 Camille Paglia
77 Gary allen Final Cut: the Selection Process for
Break, Blow, Burn
THE POET ON HER WORK 84 Philip Davis
39 rebecca Gethin Defining the Literary

FICTION READING LIVES

13 Jonathan Davis 10 Ian McMillan
Snow, Clowns and Otters Dropping Aitches
57 rana Dasgupta 68 Marshall Brooks
extracts from Solo The Library
74 Pauline rowe
Going to Poetry

4
 THE READER

BOOK WORLD REVIEWS: NEW BOOKS

106 The London eye 90 Good Books: short reviews
In Which I Tell A Few Bitter Truths Angela Macmillan on
Gerard Donovan, Julius Winsome
YOUR REGULARS Sarah Coley on
96 enid stubin Tove Jansson, A Winter Book
Our Spy in NY: On the Books 110 Brian Nellist
99 Jane Davis Round up books for
Silver Threads Among the Dross Liverpool, Capital of Culture
104 Brian Nellist 114 Michael Caines
Ask the Reader David Garnett, Lady Into Fox

YOUR RECOMMENDATIONS THE BACK END

92 readers Connect 91 Letters
Thomas Hardy, 116 Buck’s Quiz
Far from the Madding Crowd 117 Prize Crossword
94 John scrivener The Old Poem By Cassandra
Marvell, The Mower 119 Quiz and Puzzle answers
to the Glow Worms 127 Contributors
108 John Killick
James Kirkup, A Child of the Tyne

08 | Hardback | £25.00 | www.penguin.co.uk

5
PHILIP DAVIS
SAN FRANCISCO, CHRISTMAS 2008
 editorial

in which i do not meet

robert redford

Philip Davis

T here is no interview in this issue. I am writing this ed-

itorial from San Francisco where I was invited to give
(what turned out to be) two ill-attended talks on the
novels of Bernard Malamud. From here I was also hoping
to interview Robert Redford on the occasion of the 25th
anniversary of the baseball film The Natural, the 1984 adaptation of
Malamud’s novel published in 1952. In it Redford played the golden
hero Roy Hobbs, a natural prodigy who badly muffed his first chance as
a pitcher but in his second life makes a comeback fifteen years later as
a hitter. (Okay, so one resolution for 2009 is that henceforth from this
issue the name of Malamud will not appear in these pages.)
A face-to-face interview with Robert Redford would have been ter-
rific; a conversation by phone more than generous. What a cover that
would have made for The Reader. I had to settle for an email exchange
via Mr Redford’s personal assistant. I prefer person-to-person of course,
where I have found it best to act as Colombo (small, dark, vague mum-
bling, hand to brow, in ageing coat, asking just one last thing). By email
you have to finish your sentences.
Interviewer: Near the beginning of The Natural when you are at the
train station, you look alone like a man from nowhere in an Edward
Hopper painting. The director Barry Levinson said of your portrayal that
‘Robert Redford makes you come to him’. Were you aware of seeming
almost anonymous in the film, like a man hiding his past but also being

7
 editorial

a sort of Everyman? Aware of trying to make an audience guess at your

inner life amidst a world of externalized sports?
Mr Redford: Yes.

The Wikipedia entry on Redford reports, with what truth I didn’t know:
‘He attended Van Nuys High School in Los Angeles, California (where
he met Natalie Wood), graduated in 1954, and received a baseball schol-
arship to the University of Colorado, where he was a pitcher. He lost
the scholarship due to excessive drinking, possibly fueled by the death
of his mother, which occurred when Redford was 18. He later studied
painting at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and took classes in theatrical
set design at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York City.’
I thought about these connections.
Interviewer: I was astonished to find that the novel’s key sentence
(used in the film) – ‘We have two lives, Roy, the life we learn with and
the life we live with after that’ – was inserted by Malamud (a great
reviser) only at the last minute in the final proof. The film also offers a
line of its own, given to Roy’s father: ‘Rely too much on your own gift
and you’ll fail’. His own craft wasn’t as natural for Malamud as it was
for Roy: ‘Anything he wants to hit, he hits; anything he wants to do he
does.’ But second chances are vital to Malamud, as a poor Brooklyn boy
from an unhappy family suffering a sense of lost time and damaged
lives, struggling for both gift and the character to go with it. Forgive
the long introduction to this question, but I get the sense that second
chances is a theme of emotional importance to yourself too?
Mr Redford: Yes

On receiving these responses, I was reminded of my attempt to in-

terview Philip Roth during the writing of my biography of Malamud.
Again Roth would not meet me in person or talk over the phone (Is it
I, O Lord?), but said I might send him written questions. I did so. Roth
wrote back to say that my questions were ignorant, too ignorant for him
to answer. I wrote back to say that ignorant was what questions were.
I received no answer.
Still, your interviewer persisted, trying to interest his man.
Interviewer: The film, like the book, is very good about athletes
having a winning streak, the mysteries of being ‘on form’ or not – be
it luck or fate – and the relation to confidence. ‘I lost my confidence’
says Roy at one point, looking back obliquely to the period after his
first failure: you say that sad line very well, very quietly, if I may say so.
Malamud himself was not confident of his powers, and thought himself
less well-educated and talented than Saul Bellow. From your own expe-
rience, how important is confidence compared to uncertainty?

8
 editorial

Mr Redford: Balance. Too much of one or the other will defeat.

Interviewer: (thinking of Redford as director of Ordinary People and
as supporter of small independent films in Sundance): Malamud said
he had not given up on the idea of the heroic but sought it in small
men and women. What do you think of that emotional idealism of his
– the heroic in relation to the underdog: I mean, does it seem merely
old-fashioned or naïve to you? And where would or should young kids
(their hero-worship so important in the film) find heroes now?
Mr Redford: I like Malamud’s idea. Kids should find it in smaller
ways.
And that was about it. I went off with my wife to see Dame Edna
Everage in the San Francisco Post Street Theatre, where Barry Humphries
(born 1934) peered intently but disconsolately at his audience through
the mask of Edna to say right at the start: ‘What happened to you? You
got so old.’ Later he asked for questions but I was all out of them. Happy
New Year.

Editor’s Picks

In this our first issue of 2009, we ring in as usual both new and old.

New writing in abundance this time. In fiction, excerpts from Rana

Dasgupta’s new novel; a short story by the wonderful Clive Sinclair
(who back in 1983 was on Granta’s original list of Best Young British
Authors) and another by young Jonathan Davis, freshly graduated from
the School of English at the University of Liverpool; plus the ending of
Mary Weston’s ambitious serial (you can catch up with the first two
installments on our website). In poetry, Angela Leighton, Andrew
McNeillie, David Constantine, and amongst others the return of one
of our old favourites, Gary Allen.

Also, a big section on Shakespeare (another of our old favourites) with

Jonathan Bate and David Constantine.

Plus angryish essays by Camille Paglia and the editor. And no interview.

9
reading lives

dropping aitches

Ian McMillan

T here’s a (probably) apocryphal story about somebody who

was driving around Dudley in the West Midlands one day;
they were looking for the railway station and they were
lost and they stopped and wound the window down and
asked a passerby how to get there. The passerby pointed
and said ‘Yow turn left at “Toys Yam We”!’ Believe it if you like: I do.
What that story, which comes out of an oral anecdotal tradition,
demonstrates is the difficulty if not the impossibility of rendering dialect
into writing. Think of the cod, embarrassing Yorkshire accents in Wuth-
ering Heights. It’s a great, great book but the Yorkshire speech sounds
like an actor straight from RADA in his first rehearsal for a small part
in Emmerdale. Think of the much more successful but ultimately inad-
equate attempts by Barry Hines in a book like A Kestrel for a Knave or the
early Melvyn Bragg novels to capture the spoken rhythms of Barnsley
and Cumbria respectively; they almost got away with it, but not quite,
and maybe that not quite is where written language fails its spoken
counterpart.
The more I read the more I get exercised about the presentation of
what people call dialect, tha knows. As I was walking down to the paper
shop this morning I overheard a conversation at the bus stop, which I
noted down when I got home. Because I live in Barnsley and because

10
 reading lives

we speak in a kind of stripped-down post-modern South Yorkshire min-

imalism, the exchange went like this. Man 1: Or8? Man 2: R. R Yore?
Man1: Did tha gu? Man 2: R. Crap. Man 1: Reyt. Man 2: Reyt. Man 1:
Reyt then. Man 2: Reyt then.* A translation of this conversation can be
found at the bottom of this piece. Follow the asterisk like you’re a dog
hunting a scent.
Now, I think that you can search high and wide in books, depend-
ing on the size of your bookshelves of course, and you won’t find much
of that kind of language, with the pauses and gazing-at-the-sky that
are part of its rhythm and syntax, written down. Perhaps the North
Eastern poet Tom Pickard gets in the right ball park with some of his
work, and the Scottish poet Tom Leonard gets close to it in some of his
Glasgow poems: ‘Hey Jimmy / yawright ih / stull wayiz urryi / ih // ma
right insane yirra pape / ma right insane yir wanni us jimmy / see it yir
eyes / wanni uz // heh // look jimmy / lookslik wirgonny miss thi gemm /
nearly three o cloke thi noo // dork init / good job they’ve got the lights’
which seem to me to get closer to a kind of vernacular Scottish language
than my dad’s old favourite Oor Wullie, who still appears in the Sunday
Post and whose annual (along with his D.C. Thompson stablemates The
Broons, about whom Jackie Kay has written wonderfully) was a big part
of my Christmas every year. Oor Wullie would say ‘Jings’ and ‘Crivvens’
and ‘Help Ma Boab’, which very few Scots people actually say. Although
they say it in Oor Wullie and Broons annuals which means, as far as some
readers are concerned, that Scots people actually talk like that.
Perhaps it’s easier to recreate dialect in poetry because at least you
can help the reader along with line breaks and stanza breaks and pieces
of white space to give the reader an indication of where to take a breath
or where to simulate the act of being grabbed by the collar by a Glas-
wegian who wants to tell you something urgent. Prose is more difficult,
as Emily Brontë found; the dialect ear is a spoken rather than a written
machine, I guess.
There have been a number of attempts over the past few years to rec-
reate the language of real life, to use a blanket term, in novels; Gautam
Malkani’s 2006 book Londonstani is narrated by a young Sikh in a kind
of street slang that’s a mixture of text language and various slangs and
dialects chucked into a melting pot: ‘Come out wid dat shit from yo
mouth again and I’m a knock u so hard u’ll be shittin out yo mouth fo
real, innit’. Ross Raisin, in his novel God’s Own Country, is more success-
ful than Emily Brontë in creating an authentic-sounding version of the
Ilkley branch of the Yorkshire language tree by recreating the cadences
of the young protagonist Sam Marsdyke’s sentences and the tone of
his voice rather than going in for the apostrophe overkill that can be’t
sign o’dialect writing: ‘The ramblers hadn’t marked me. They’d walked

11
 reading lives

past the farm without taking notice, of me or of father rounding up the

flock on the moor. Oi there ramblers, I’d a mind for shouting, what the
bugger are you doing, talking to that sheep ? Do you think she fancies
a natter, eh?’ A book that’s a little older, but which works very hard
to capture dialect in prose, in Anne Donovan’s 2003 novel Buddha Da,
which owes a little to the father of this kind of writing, James Kelman:
‘They were sittin cross-legged on the flair in fronty the coffin and they
were singin. I suppose you would cry it singin but it was a funny kindy
wailin singin…’
I can’t come to any kind of conclusion on this question about dialect
writing that I’m asking myself, but I want to take the question further,
and I want readers of The Reader to think about representations of the
way they speak in books. Can written language ever capture and recreate
spoken language, or is it a place where the book is finally a lesser artistic
vehicle than the tongue and the ear ? At the moment, oral storytelling
is going through a huge and many-faceted golden age, from tradition-
al storytellers like Daniel Morden via storytelling comedians like Terry
Saunders to storytelling artists at the edge of hip-hop like Polar Bear,
and maybe novels and written stories are struggling to keep up. It’s just
a thought, tha knows, but one that’s worth pursuing. In’t it? Toys Yam
We!† Hahahahahahahahaha!

* Man 1: Hello my friend, are you well this fine morning? Man 2: Yes, indeed I
am, and how are you? Man1: Did you go to the recent football match featuring
the mighty Barnsley FC? Man 2: Yes, I went to the football match and it wasn’t
up to the standards I expect from a Championship team. Man 1: I see. Man 2:
Yes, it was extremely disappointing. Man 1: Well, I’ll be on my way. Man 2: Yes,
I’ll be on my way too, and I’ll see you around.

†
Toys R Us

12
 fiction

snow, clowns and otters

Jonathan Davis

A ll I remember about my mother’s death is Chinese

oranges ripening on nutmeg and raspberry yoghurt.
She had a coronary.
I was young then. Young and not very good
at spelling, or telling the time. I don’t remember
much, her collapsing or the hospital. But I remember those magical
oranges. I think they rubbed the yoghurt into her skin in the hope that
it would revive her. It didn’t. It appears that neither nutmeg and rasp-
berry yoghurt or Chinese oranges (or any oranges for that matter) have
any healing powers. She died. Of a hard to spell coronary.
I couldn’t spell very well then. But my Grandma helped me. I went
to stay with her after my mother’s death. My father had left just after I
was born. It was because he was a foreigner. That’s what my Grandma
said. I don’t think it was that. He had these otters. They lived in the
huge pockets of his Mac. They were foreign too. These foreign otters
really enjoyed iced ginger nuts. Well my mother never liked nuts, aller-
gic. So I think he left on their account.
I think these wild fancies were linked to my problem of spelling.
My Grandma had this phonetic system. We would make up memorable
sentences, each word beginning with the right letter in the word. I had
trouble spelling ‘coronary’ so Grandma made up this sentence, Chinese
oranges ripening on nutmeg and raspberry yoghurt. C.O.R.O.N.A.R.Y. It
was the same with ‘foreign’. Unfortunately I forgot the actual events
of my mother’s death and in a bizarre mental mix-up remember the

13
 fiction

oranges and yoghurt as if they actually played a role. It is the same with
my father; somehow his appearance is confused with the method of
spelling ‘foreign’. So I’m left with a dead mother covered in yoghurt and
a father who liked his otters more than his wife.
I’ve later found out that this is called the ‘association of ideas’. I
think Ivan Pavlov had something to do with it. I see or hear something
and it sets my imagination running. It runs so far that the actual igni-
tion is completely forgotten. Sometimes it’s good. Sometimes it’s bad.
Of course, it helped when I was a child. For when I first met my
Grandma on the day of my mother’s funeral she was dressed as a clown.
Her face was as white as ice cream, her eyes accentuated with black and
blue make-up and her mouth was a red half moon. Her nose was also
red, I was sure if I had squeezed it would have honked. I was so ecstatic
to find out that this clown was going to look after me from then on that
I hardly noticed the sombre expressions on everyone’s faces. However,
it turned out later that she hadn’t been dressed like a clown at all. Her
face was pale and white from two days of acute vomiting and diarrhoea,
perhaps induced by the news of her daughter’s death. The make-up
around her eyes had run because of her tears and her nose was red from
blowing it so regularly. The copious amounts of red lipstick were simply
an attempt to make herself look younger. This finally explained why
she never dressed like a clown again or taught me how to make balloon
animals.
My over-active imagination also transformed her stuffy home. The
kitchen had a small hatch which opened into the dining room. I was
constantly climbing through it; it was far more fun than simply using
the door. In a moment of anger usually unknown to my Grandma, she
had it nailed shut. She said that if I forced it open it would fill the house
with all the snow and rock in the Himalayas. I’m not sure now why this
image occurred to her or why she even thought it would stop me at-
tempting to open it. I was unsure how much snow and rock there was
in the Himalayas and whether it was enough to fill the kitchen. And so
in a moment of curiosity I opened the hatch when my Grandma had
gone to get her hair done. Snow and rock poured in for hours accompa-
nied every so often by a yak and a Sherpa. Once it stopped I managed to
clear the mess up except for one yak which continued to chew the grass
in the garden. Luckily my Grandma couldn’t see it.
It could not last forever. The imagination is not always full of snow,
clowns and otters. It has its darker side. It began when I asked Grandma
if we could get a cat. She said no. I asked again and she said no again.
One day I brought a small cat I found in the street home. She kicked it
out. She said if I ever brought another one into the house she would cut
its tail off and kick it out the back door. From then on I was haunted

14
 fiction

by an image of this felisidal maniac. I imagined her wandering about in

the dead of night hunting and killing alley cats. The next day she would
feed me her prey in pies or stews. From then on I became a vegetarian.
Grandma’s hands were getting older and I couldn’t help but see
them as spiders. Her touch almost became repulsive, her hands running
across the piano horrific. There appeared nothing more revolting to me
than musical spiders. Also one day I caught sight of her large breasts
and they evoked such a strong image of melons, so that I could no longer
eat the fruit which I had formerly wolfed down ever Sunday morning.
But my adulthood soon came, it couldn’t be dissuaded. My thoughts
became prescribed to the norm. A hand returned to being simply a
hand. I realised the hatch was simply a quick and easy way of trans-
porting food form the kitchen to the dining room. Images became boxed
in, filed in sensible ways. They no longer lead on from one another in
uncontrollable spirals. For when my Grandma died the doctors didn’t
try dipping her in yoghurt, nor were the foreigners at the funeral ac-
companied by otters, no one was dressed as a clown.
I returned to eating meat and melons.

15
Face to Face
POET BIOGRAPHIES

Angela Leighton David Constantine Rebecca Gethin

What do you keep on What poems do you Known by heart

your writing desk? know by heart? Many of those school
Books and papers for Bits of Shakespeare anthology poem like
literary criticism. I I learned at school, ‘Dulce et Decorum
write poetry in a note- Keats’ ‘Bright Star’, Est’, ‘The Naming
book on my knees, Goethe’s ‘An den of Parts’ as well as
thus keeping the two Mond’, Verlaine’s ‘Je snatches from
activities as far apart fais souvent ce rêve…’, Shakespeare’s
as possible. many stray stanzas sonnets, T.S Eliot’s The
and lines, all in all a Wasteland and when
What is the first small anthology, by no Milton’s ‘L’Allegro’
poem you remember means enough. was read on the radio
hearing? the other day I found
Christina Rossetti’s First poem heard I could remember
‘Who has seen the Nursery rhymes, chunks from it.
wind?’ It summed up playground rhymes,
a child’s unanswerable hymns, carols, among If you could be any
questions, and still them several that I character in fiction or
haunts me as a lovely remember and real life…
simple form of words. misremember and Jane Eyre because she
that whole or in bits is always sure of what
Longest time to write affect me as poems do. she should do.
a poem?
Years. Half-written Recommend a book First poem heard
poems never quite I’m reading Raymond An Italian one: ‘Dante
let go. Williams’ Border Alighieri/ Spacca
Featured on page 18 Country. I’ve had it on bicchieri/Sulle teste/Dei
my shelves for decades Carabinieri ‘. It means
and now I am very Dante breaks glasses
drawn into it. on the heads of the
carabinieri.
Featured on page 30
Featured on page 39

16
 Joel Lane Andrew McNeillie Isobel Lusted

What character in So at what age were On your writing desk

fiction? you happiest? I wander. no desk,
The narrator of Poe’s 62 mainly knees.
‘The Fall of the House
of Usher’, because he What poet would you What character in
sees incredible things most have liked to fiction?
and survives. meet? Basho. I like the idea
Gerard Manley Hopkins of walking com-
First poem heard bined with an album
Have you ever been
‘The Dong With the of haiku rather than
Luminous Nose’ by scared by writing on
photographs.
Edward Lear. any subject?
No, but by not writing, Recommend a book
Longest time to write yes, on any subject. or an author
a poem and what
Featured on page 63 A book, The Road to
kept you going? Xanadu; an author,
About a fortnight to John Burnside.
produce a long first
Featured on page 73
draft – what kept me
going was the desire
to impress the person
I was writing for and
about.
Gary Allen
Featured on page 55
Known by heart
‘Death Fugue’, Paul
Celan.
First poem heard
‘The Highwayman’,
Alfred Noyes.

Recommend a book
REBECCA Cillin by Gary Allen,
a postmodern classic
GETHIN novel.
Featured on page 77

17
ANGELA LEIGHTON
 poetry

angela Leighton

Quake

Something in the air, a slipped kilter or mean,

shove or drift, like someone thinking,
a faint from under, twitch, a base that gives…
my nudged brain wires
a fall that floors the complex of our lives –

and finds a name before it knows what for.

From far, from further back than far,
from bone-memory, a sense beyond recall,
my shocked sleep stores
a cradling jolt, a stay as keen as fall –

and halfway waked (the moon’s white squash on the floor –

Lacus Timoris, Palus Somni),
I catch the reflex of a note not heard,
as if the spine’s long probe,
struck and jarred, had caught the current of a word.

Something, for once, in the bone’s acoustic hall,

a summons, faint percussion in the marrow –
Christ! from the earth’s small shudder, its adjustment of room,
the stirred duppy of its pulse,
I wake – the roll of a stone, its fault on my tongue.

19
 poetry

The Child in the Tree

Why should it lay a finger on her,

or even care
about her quick spidery reaches, halfway to air?
They’re locked together.
She too might net decades of weather,
grow higher and higher,
feeling its strong, knuckly sculpture,
and shadowed by the shadower,
hear, so high and almost nowhere,
its enormous whisper.

Why should this great passive bearer

of sky and weather
notice her small arboreal dare?
They’ll branch together.
She’ll read it slowly, feel each notch and bole, finger
a grainy book, an open, woody future.
This is her
own Christopher,
till growing by inches, years, weather,
she’ll be herself self’s carrier, weightlifter.

20
 poetry

In the Potter’s Yard

This mortgaged plot of earth is full of shards.

Blue china shows, suddenly, like an eye.
Shells and bones are dead-white in daylight,
pumiced and raw, a treasure, clinker-light.

Earth’s earthenware degrades – a debt of the soul –

rusts slowly back to rubble and grit.
Foisted below, in soil that gives it space,
how small a chip will stop the spade’s deep slice.

My Judas tree will stream with blossom soon,

beribboned like a model of self-harm.
Weather will cross it daily and not hear
the chink of silver earmarked in its hair.

Where are we, then? housed on these scattered pieces,

a midden-yard, preserve of ware and scrap.
We’ll dig for silver bells and cockle shells,
bones, flutey as a tune, for crocks and spells,

knacks and tales. What makes a garden grow

out of the muck-heap’s trash? Mud-larks, are we?
scavenging here, years after Easter went,
for something lost in the ground, or long absent?

In clay-cold soil the clay looks baked or raw.

Decay turns its hand to what must go.
And still, in the grass, I catch a glint of foil:
an egg the children missed, ovarian, whole.

21
essay

reading shakespeare’s mind

Jonathan Bate

C an there really be anything new to say about Shake-

speare? He’s up there with Hitler and Marilyn
Monroe among the most biographized figures in
history. But on the basis of a far patchier collection
of source materials.
If you click on ‘biographies’ in the online World Shakespeare Bibliog-
raphy, you get 1052 hits. And that’s only for studies published in the
last fifty years. Granted, many of these are specialized academic studies
of some particular corner of Shakespeare’s life. But since the success
of the movie Shakespeare in Love a decade ago, Shakespeare has been
big business for trade publishers too. Bill Bryson’s breezy little life and
times has shifted more than two hundred thousand copies – though
probably more because of his name than Shakespeare’s. In America the
much more academic Will in the World by Stephen Greenblatt garnered a
million dollar advance and rose high in the bestseller lists.
Most lives of Shakespeare follow a highly predictable pattern. Child-
hood in Stratford, ‘lost years’ when he disappears from the archival
record, successful twenty year career in the London theatre, and finally
retirement back to Stratford. There have recently been some innova-
tive attempts to break this highly restrictive mould: James Shapiro’s
prize-winning 1599 focused down on a single year, Charles Nicholl’s
The Lodger on a single document. Germaine Greer turned the tables by

22
 essay

writing a life of Shakespeare’s Wife, about whom there are no more than
three or four known facts, all of them disputed.
People keep telling me that I must be insane to have spent the last
few years adding to the over-burdened shelf of Shakespeare biographies.
When I began, I half agreed with them myself: my previous contribu-
tion to the genre had been a kind of anti-biography called The Genius of
Shakespeare, in which I argued that since there will never be a satisfac-
tory cradle-to-grave life of the man we should instead concentrate on
the idea of Shakespeare, the history of how he came to be regarded as
the greatest genius in the history of writing and theatre.
Why was I sceptical to begin with? Partly because of the gaps in the
documentary record. Partly because of the sheer tedium, the predict-
ability and dutifulness of the cradle-to-grave narrative. But above all
because of the mismatch between the stuff that survives in the archives
– records of births, marriages and deaths; legal documentation about
property purchases and forays into the small claims court; payments for
dramatic services rendered at royal festivities – and the things we really
want to know about Shakespeare: how his mind was formed, what in-
spired him to write, how he viewed the world, what he believed.
George Bernard Shaw once claimed that everything we know about
Shakespeare can be got into a half-hour sketch:
He was a very civil gentleman who got round men of all classes;
he was extremely susceptible to word-music and to graces of
speech; he picked up all sorts of odds and ends from books
and from the street talk of his day and welded them into his
work ... Add to this that he was, like all highly intelligent and
conscientious people, business-like about money and appre-
ciative of the value of respectability and the discomfort and
discredit of Bohemianism; also that he stood on his social po-
sition and desired to have it affirmed by the grant of a coat of
arms, and you have all we know of Shakespeare beyond what
we gather from his plays.

Gathering what we can from his plays and poems: that is how we
will write a biography that is true to him. But the process has immense
perils. As the critic Barbara Everett wrote a couple of years ago in an
acute Times Literary Supplement essay on the problem of Shakespearean
life-writing, ‘if his biography is to be found it has to be here, in the plays
and poems, but never literally and never provably’. That Shakespeare wrote
in sonnet 37 of being ‘made lame by Fortune’s dearest spite’ does not
necessarily mean that he had a limp, as more than one biographer has
supposed. An accurate triangulation of the life, the work and the world
must be more subtle. It must look for traces of cultural DNA – little

23
 essay

details such as a reference to the forest of Arden or the knowledge of a

particular school textbook – and must be prepared to make surprising
connections in the style of Shakespeare’s own inventive metaphorical
imagination. We must by indirections find directions out.
Shakespeare was the least autobiographical of great writers. He
wasn’t like, say, Evelyn Waugh turning his Oxford friends into the char-
acters of Brideshead Revisited. Many of the characters in the plays are,
after all, worked up from historical origins and other source materials.
He brings Cleopatra and Henry V to memorable life, but they were not
his personal acquaintances. Just occasionally, though, something more
personal gets woven into the mix. The floral crown of the mad King Lear
is improvised from the exact combination of weeds that grew in the
furrows of ploughed fields in South Warwickshire. An invented name
in Cymbeline is a little nod of gratitude to the school friend who first got
Shakespeare’s poetry into print, Richard Field.
From his works we can work out what he read and, as important,
how he read. From little-known sources such as marginal annotations
in original copies of the First Folio of his complete plays, we can also
work out how Shakespeare’s first readers read him. We don’t know his
political beliefs, but we know which political factions he was associated
with. We don’t know his personal philosophical credo, but we can work
out what he thought about the prevalent belief systems of his age, for
instance the highly influential neo-Roman code of Stoicism (he was, I
am pretty sure, a fully paid up anti-Stoic).
A biography of the mind of Shakespeare: how it was shaped by the
world about him and the worlds he entered through his reading. A
reading of the life that is also a reading of the plays in which his mind
was working at full stretch – Hamlet, Lear, The Tempest. That’s what I’ve
been writing over the past few years. A biography of Shakespeare for
thoughtful rather than casual readers.

24
 ‘A dazzling portrait’
Simon RuSSell BeAle

‘A stunning tour de force’

DAviD CRyS tAl

october 2008 | Hardback | £25.00 | www.penguin.co.uk

from Soul of the Age

‘that to philosophize is
to learn how to die’

H amlet’s public image is that of the versatile ‘Renais-

sance man’ who is at once soldier, scholar and courtier,
the embodiment of the three mature ages of man in
one. Privately, he struggles to hold together the many
pieces of the jigsaw of human being: he finds it diffi-
cult to move from ‘apprehension’ to ‘action’. Soliloquizing on what Brutus
called the ‘interim’, and in reflecting upon his father’s untimely murder
and his mother’s hasty remarriage he is unable to sustain his belief in
humankind’s beauty and admirability. It is only when he faces up to the
graveyard and the skull that he is able to accept the mortification of the
body, the implication of the words of the funeral service that will be evoked
by the entrance of Ophelia’s cortege, as Hamlet throws down the jester’s
decayed head: ‘we therefore commit [her] body to the ground, earth to
earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, in sure and certain hope of resurrec-
tion to eternal life, through our Lord Jesus Christ, who shall change our
vile body, that it may be like to his glorious body, according to the mighty
working whereby he is able to subdue all things to himself.’
Hamlet is obsessed by the division between words – the medium of
noble reasoning, the faculty of admirable expression – and matter, the
substance of the body and of action. The play begins from something
insubstantial: a moral imperative, a paternal injunction from beyond
the grave. The first question to be resolved is whether the ghost has
substance. Hamlet’s tragic dilemma is to proceed to an act of revenge
without himself becoming the beast which he takes Claudius to be. The
dilemma is dramatized by the duality between soliloquy (words, the
self) and action (deeds, engagement with others). It is compounded by
the play’s restless self-consciousness: Lucianus in The Mousetrap has no
difficulty in proceeding from words to action, but his identity as a player

26
 from ‘soul of the age’

raises the possibility that to perform the action demanded may be to

act a performance. Hamlet has an existential problem: he wishes to be
himself rather than a role which one might play (the Revenger), but for
much of the play he cannot reconcile his wish with the knowledge that
to be human means to have a set of social relations (which are especial-
ly constrained if one is a prince) and a body that is both desiring (like
his mother’s) and mortal (like his father’s).
Literary genre is a means of structuring experience. As the title of
Dante’s divine poem the Commedia reminds us, the structure of Christian-
ity is essentially that of comedy: it looks forward to the day of resurrection,
when, as ‘The Order for the Burial of the Dead’ puts it, ‘our vile body’ is
sloughed off and we become like to the ‘glorious’ (eternal, pure, spiritu-
al) body of Jesus Christ. Elizabethan tragedies usually end with piles of
body being carted off for burial. Elizabethan audiences would be bound
to ask themselves which souls among the dead persons of the drama are
imagined to be saved. Hamlet and Laertes exchange forgiveness, Laertes
dying on a prayer that on the day of judgement he should not be held to
account for Hamlet’s death nor Hamlet for his and his father’s. Ophelia is
not mentioned here, for hers – as we learn from the gravediggers’ debate
about burial rites – was a doubtful case, since suicide meant damnation
whereas accidental death left open the possibility of salvation.
In his ‘To be, or not to be’ soliloquy, Hamlet has worried about the
hereafter; in his dying speeches, he is more concerned with the manner
in which his history is recorded on earth. The audience cannot know his
ultimate destination, just as they cannot know their own. In the Prot-
estant world-picture ‘a noble heart’ – Horatio’s final judgement on his
friend – does not guarantee salvation. ‘Goodnight, sweet prince, / And
flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!’ is the expression of a hope, not
the statement of a fact. Hamlet’s closing emphasis on the telling of his
story – his history, his posthumous fame – is a sign of the secularization
of the drama during the reign of Elizabeth. The gravedigger reminds
us that the pagan hero Alexander the Great and the court clown Yorick
come to the same end. Only the dust is certain.
But Hamlet seems ready for that. As many critics have observed, he is
a changed man on his return from the English voyage: ‘If it be now, ’tis
not to come: if it be not to come, it will be now: if it be not now, yet it will
come: the readiness is all.’ He has come to a mood that could be described
as Stoic acceptance. Or, more strictly, since he combines a classically
achieved ‘readiness’ or ‘constancy’ with a Christian sense of ‘providence’
(‘there’s a divinity that shapes our ends … there’s a special providence in
the fall of a sparrow’), we should say neo-Stoic acceptance.
Hamlet is a great reader. In the first published version of the play,
he speaks his ‘To be or not to be’ soliloquy as he enters ‘poring upon a

27
 from ‘soul of the age’

book’. A book and a philosophical ‘question’. To an educated Elizabethan,

it would almost certainly have been apparent that Hamlet is reading the
Tusculan Questions of Marcus Tullius Cicero. A university man such as
Hamlet would have been expected to read this hugely influential book in
its Latin original, but it was also available in an English version of 1561
with the catchy title Those five QUESTIONS, which Mark Tully Cicero disput-
ed in his Manor of Tusculanum: Written afterwards by him, in as many books,
to his friend and familiar Brutus, in the Latin tongue, and now out of the same
translated and englished by John Dolman, Student and fellow of the Inner Temple.
The first of those ‘questions’ (disputationes), debated in dialogue form, was
‘whether death be evil: yea or no?’ Cicero’s conclusion, ultimately derived
from a famous speech by Socrates when he is condemned to death (as re-
ported in Plato’s Apology), is that we should not fear death. Why? Because
after death, either the soul survives or it does not. If it does not, then
death ‘resembles sleep without any trouble of dreams’. If the soul does
survive, then it will go to what Hamlet calls ‘The undiscovered country
from whose bourn / No traveller returns’ where it will meet a just judge.
A person who has lived a good life accordingly has nothing to fear in the
afterlife. Hamlet’s problem is that if he carries out his father’s demand for
revenge or if he kills himself in despair at the ills of life, then he will be a

“Contempt not for the world, but for death.”

murderer or a self-murderer and will accordingly have something to fear

when he meets the ultimate judge. He has to go on a long journey of his
own before he reaches the state of ‘readiness’ for death.
If there is a single book that parallels his journey, that brings us
close to the workings of the mind of Hamlet, it is Montaigne’s Essays.
Scholars debate as to whether or not Shakespeare saw Florio’s transla-
tion before it was published in 1603. The balance of evidence suggests
that he probably did not, but rather that his mind and Montaigne’s
worked in such similar ways that Hamlet seems like a reader of Mon-
taigne even though he could not have been.
Imagine that Hamlet could have read Montaigne. He would have
found a meditation on the pros and cons of suicide in an essay called
‘A custom of the isle of Cea’, but he would most characteristically have
turned to the essay in the first book, strongly influenced by Cicero’s Five
Questions, called ‘That to philosophize is to learn how to die’. As a uni-
versity-educated reader, he would have been trained to copy the pithiest
wisdom from his reading into his commonplace book, known as his
‘tables’. Here are some of the sentences of Montaigne, as translated by
Florio, that we can imagine the princely student of Wittenberg copying

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 from ‘soul of the age’

out (in that ‘fair’ handwriting which served him so well when devising
the ‘new commission’ for the killing of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern):
CICERO saith, that to Philosophize is no other thing, than for a
man to prepare himself to death: which is the reason that study
and contemplation doth in some sort withdraw our soul from
us and severally employ it from our body, which is a kind of
apprentisage and resemblance of death; or else it is, that all
the wisdom and discourse of the world doth in the end resolve
upon this point, to teach us not to fear to die.

Hamlet would have relished the double sense there. The action of study
and contemplation is a little rehearsal for death, in that it involves
a withdrawal from the bustle of life. At the same time, the ultimate
content of philosophy is the knowledge that we are all going to die, and
that we should accordingly, as the Duke puts it in Measure for Measure,
‘Be absolute for death’.
The Duke’s oration to the condemned Claudio offers a typically
neo-Stoic mix of classical resignation and Christian contemptum mundi.
Montaigne and Hamlet have a subtly different emphasis. They seek to
cultivate contempt not for the world, but for death. They teach them-
selves to be ready but not to be afraid. A fool, says Montaigne, deals
with fear of death by not thinking about it. A wise man simultaneously
thinks about it all the time and gets on with his life:
The end of our career is death, it is the necessary object of our
aim ... Let us learn to stand and combat her with a resolute
mind ... let us remove her strangeness from her, let us converse,
frequent, and acquaint ourselves with her, let us have nothing
so much in mind as death, let us at all times and seasons, and
in the ugliest manner that may be, yea with all faces, shapen
and represent the same unto our imagination … And there-
upon let us take heart of grace, and call our wits together to
confront her. Amidst our banquets, feasts, and pleasures, let
us ever have this restraint or object before us, that is, the re-
membrance of our condition ... He who hath learned to die
hath unlearned to serve ... A man should ever, as much as in
him lieth, be ready booted to take his journey, and above all
things, look he have then nothing to do but with himself ... let
death seize upon me whilst I am setting my cabbages, careless
of her dart, but more of my unperfect garden.

We do not know whether Shakespeare grew cabbages in his garden at

New Place, but it is a reasonable bet that he would have shared Mon-
taigne’s hope of ending his life in some such way. The readiness was all.

29
poetry

david Constantine

Three Notes on Lear

Edgar

Bedlam begins at the garden gate.

The King did not know this but Edgar did
Who perhaps had grown up lonely
And stood there often to see them coming from the tombs
Cutting themselves, legion. He saw them feelingly.
And I suppose he had a nurse from among the poor
Closer, who told him the truth in bedtime stories
And scraps of lullaby into nightmare. Easily
He became Poor Tom, fished deep
And as in posh old people after a stroke
Up came the vernacular, the dirt, the baby talk,
The horrors. So he acted in truth
And pretty soon added this to the facts at his disposal:
That worse than bedlam may come up the garden path
As guests, as a lord and lady
And befoul the living room beyond any catharsis
And turn out the host with holes that were his eyes
To be contemplated by his son
Edgar, survivor.

30
 poetry

The Word

Give the word. Get it right.

Get it wrong, the portrait of your sainted mother will fall in smithereens
The French windows will blow open and in the glacial draught
All faces present will set in one or other of the possibilities:
Terror or murderous rage. Say the wrong word
All simples ever after will be ineffectual.
Too late. Best, if you are not the person challenged
Should there be a pause while whoever is deliberates
Decamp over the garden wall. Bedlam is kinder.
Their meat is rats and mice, their drink crawling, the wind
Stilettoes through their ribs, but better
This accommodation than the big house.
In bedlam they sprig their veins with rosemary.

Hysterica passio

All the mothers are dead and of them only one,

The Bastard’s, gets much of a mention:
She was good sport under the dragon’s tail.
The surviving wombs are in the care of their father, an unfit person.
He has the king’s evil, his touch is mortal.
Soon he finds himself pregnant, he has no idea how.
It swells up in him, he orders it back down.
But labour is not like that (altogether he has no idea),
Begun is begun, the King is beginning to teem,
King Malediction is bringing forth a mother of his own
Hysterica passio
Who never knew he was so deep with sorrow.
The waters break through his mouth, irrevocable.
No one can bear to look at the mother he brings into the world.
It is a tangle of fiends, six of them he names Kill
Four Howl, and the last out
Never, Never, Never, Never, Never.

31
DAVID CONSTANTINE
 essay

‘thy booke doth live’

David Constantine

I have been thinking about Antony and Cleopatra in the light of Keats’s
axiom that ‘poetry should surprise by a fine excess’. I understand
the excess to be that in poetic language which exceeds what a sen-
tence would need simply to convey its burden of fact, information
or opinion. A beautiful and effective superfluity; the palpable dif-
ference between language being used discursively and language being
used poetically. Much of the speech of Antony and Cleopatra may be called
‘excessive’ in that sense.
So it is even from the first:
Nay, but this dotage of our general’s
O’erflows the measure.

Enjambment concerns us particularly here. Very frequent in later Shake-

speare it is almost the hallmark of the verse of Antony and Cleopatra. The
opening line does what in very many following lines and in its entirety
the play itself will do: it reaches over, to augment itself, it wants more,
it overflows to have its fulfilment. But the whole movement of the play
is hyperbolic, a ‘flinging further and beyond’. It cannot contain itself in
one place; it needs to go out to the limits of the Roman Empire. And it
needs many episodes, over a long period of historical time, so that hero
and heroine can live themselves out. The play abounds in imagery of in-
crease, extension, and the desired and sometimes achieved passage out
of one state or form and into another.
One expression of Antony’s abundance is his enjoyment of sex, eating
and drinking (2.2.187ff), for which his puritanical opponent Octavius
despises him (1.4.16). Maecenas, keeping in Octavius’ favour, says of
Antony that he is ‘most large / In his abominations’ (3.6.95). But those
who love and admire him couple his largeness (he bestrides the ocean)

33
 essay

with his largesse. Cleopatra’s infinite variety show itself in her rapid de-
ployment of one face, mood, persona after another. At least, sometimes
it seems like a deployment – willed, calculating, designed for a particular
purpose; at others it is more a helpless volatility. Facets of self shift and
show themselves as quickly as any mix of light, air and water. She is a
good actress, but her ability to act cannot in practice be separated from
her inability to keep still. Her very nature is quickness, and this, like her
sexuality (of which it is a chief part), also transforms those around her.
So in Antony and Cleopatra, whose hero and heroine are excessive,
the excess natural to poetry is put to the particular purpose of saying
what excess in people and their deeds – overflowing bounty, love without
measure, incomparable living – is like. This is a lyrical drama, and very
aptly so. The subject requires that poetry, the means by which the subject
is bodied forth, should be freely and superabundantly itself.
You can see this, as you always can in Shakespeare but in this play par-
ticularly well, in speeches whose essential function is to relate an event or
convey some factual information. In the speech of the Second Messenger,
for example, who, arriving to tell Octavius that Pompey and the pirates
Menas and Menacrates have become bolder, says it in these words:
Caesar, I bring thee word
Menacrates and Menas, famous pirates,
Make the sea serve them, which they ear and wound
With keels of every kind.

The modern reader is most likely to hesitate over the category and meaning
of the word ‘ear’. It must be a verb, but its usage as one is unusual – to
come into ear, of corn; to give ear to – or, in the sense here, to plough, ob-
solete. And that uncertainty may even, momentarily, cause us to wonder
is ‘wound’ verb or noun. That pause before deciding, however brief, is an
instance of poetry’s working against the onward drive of a speech whose
prime function is to report. Very briefly the reading mind entertains more
than one possibility. The hesitation will doubtless be longer now than it
was in Shakespeare’s day, when ‘to ear’ in the sense of ‘to plough’, was
current. Nonetheless, there must have been some slight pause in which,
then as now, there was not only a query as to the category of the word
and its chief sense but also, perhaps, a memory of Antony’s densely sug-
gestive lines only two scenes back (1.2.115–7): ‘Oh, then we bring forth
weeds / When our quick minds lie still, and our ills told us / Is as our
earing.’ Any such after-effect, combining with a hesitation over sense,
engages the mind in possibilities which are in the wake and to either side
of the route along which the action of the play is proceeding.
Shakespeare’s ‘functional shifts’ are a part of his total linguistic cre-
ativity. Not only does he make up words, he uses familiar words newly.

34
 essay

The reading or listening mind, programmed for a noun, has to adjust to

its transformation into a verb. Similarly with conjectures and emenda-
tions. In the First Folio Octavius says:
It hath been taught us from the primal state
That he which is was wished until he were,
And the ebbed man, ne’er loved till ne’er worth love,
Comes feared by being lacked. This common body,
Like to a vagabond flag upon the stream,
Goes to and back, lacking the varying tide,
To rot itself with motion. (1.4.41–7)

‘Feared’ is usually emended to ‘deared’ (giving the sense ‘becomes

loved’) and ‘lacking’ to ‘lackeying’ (in the sense of following this way
and that as a lackey must his master’). The dense lines feel borne
along by, rather than in control of, the very imagery – stream, tide – of
their meaning, and the intelligent emendations thicken them further.
‘Lacking’ may well be a compositor’s error after the ‘lacked’ two lines
before. But if Shakespeare did indeed write ‘lackeying’ that word itself
may have been thrown up on the current of his poetic thinking by the
just uttered ‘lacked’. And ‘flag’ (not in doubt) is certainly a reed or rush,
but must trail with it, through ‘vagabond’ to ‘varying’, a suggestion of
‘flag of allegiance’, one always changing sides.
In many speeches we feel the mind and the tongue of the speaker
to be under pressure and in haste. The words come crowding out under
the compulsion of more and more words likewise pressing to be said. As
the speech proceeds and things are said in sequence (as by the nature of
language they must be), other possibilities are thrown off laterally, and
linger in the mind as possible further developments, while the main
thrust of the utterance continues until it stops. The language is densely
packed, and as the lines, and with them the action of the play, move on,
they drag a comet-tail of not yet fully apprehended connotations with
them. I mean such passages as this from Antony:
O sun, thy uprise shall I see no more.
Fortune and Antony part here; even here
Do we shake hands. All come to this! The hearts
That spanieled me at heels, to whom I gave
Their wishes, do discandy, melt their sweets
On blossoming Caesar, and this pine is barked
That overtopped them all. (4.12.18–2)

The risk in volatility, in trying out many selves, is the loss of what John
Clare, approaching madness, called ‘self-identity’. Keats says of the cha-

35
 essay

meleon poet – or poetry – that it has no self. For poetry also that is a risk,
but a necessary one, the essaying of possibilities. But in a person loss of
self is dissolution; the person, undelineated, dissolves, dislimns. This is
what Antony suffers. Hercules leaves him. Eros disarms him; his shape
becomes as unstable as clouds. He was a soldier. That denomination has
a quite peculiar definiteness and resonance in this play. As a soldier, a
man is something. And Antony was a great soldier. But after Actium, he
says ‘I am so lated in the world that I / Have lost my way for ever’ and
that is his chief meaning when he says, ‘I have fled myself’ (more than,
though not excluding, the sense ‘I too have fled’). So he urges his fol-
lowers to leave him: ‘Let that be left / Which leaves itself.’

“Listening closely, watch the

language in action.”

We might say that the lyric and the dramatic are in combat, the
first retarding, spreading, tending to simultaneity; the second hurrying
forward. Since Nicholas Rowe’s editing in the early eighteenth century
the play has been divided and subdivided into five acts and forty-two
scenes; but in the First Folio it proceeds without such breaks and in
Shakespeare’s theatre was, very likely, acted out in one rapid session of
about three hours. Such a performance would reinforce the dramatic
mode in hurrying the events towards their fated end. All the more vig-
orous then must be the lyric’s answering back.

The paradox, entirely logical, is that by its very liveliness, by its power
of engendering present life, the poetic word is strong enough to kill.
When Antony sends his treasure after him, Enobarbus feels that this
bounty set against his treachery will of itself be enough to kill him:
O Antony
Thou mine of bounty, how wouldst thou have paid
My better service, when my turpitude
Thou dost so crown with gold! This blows my heart.
If swift thought break it not, a swifter mean
Shall outstrike thought, but thought will do’t, I feel.
(4.6.32-7)
In 4.9 the sentry and his men witness, with us, the power of thought
incarnated in Enobarbus’s soliloquy to the point of killing him. He ad-
dresses the moon:
O sovereign mistress of true melancholy,
The poisonous damp of night disponge upon me,

36
 essay

That life, a very rebel to my will,

May hang no longer upon me. Throw my heart
Against the flint and hardness of my fault,
Which, being dried with grief, will break to powder
And finish all foul thoughts. O Antony,
Nobler than my revolt is infamous,
Forgive me in thine own particular,
But let the world rank me in register
A master-leaver and a fugitive.
O Antony! O Antony!

He works up his thoughts into a killing flint by three times uttering the
name synonymous with generosity: Antony. And dies wishing to be re-
membered as the very type of treachery: ‘a master-leaver and a fugitive’.
The simple opposites of bounty and betrayal, brought to the point, are
enough to kill him.
Cleopatra, a consummate actress, spurs herself into suicide by the
thought that if taken alive to Rome she will have to witness herself and
Antony being insultingly impersonated:
The quick comedians
Extemporarily will stage us and present
Our Alexandrian revels; Antony
Shall be brought drunken forth; and I shall see
Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness
I’th’posture of a whore. (5.2.215 ff)

Shakespeare’s stage was almost bare of scenery and props. The eyes of
the audience were not diverted or distracted. Actors entered abruptly and
obviously and stood and moved under the audience’s intensely listening
close gaze. And the troupe was not large, doubling-up was normal; the
actors, all male, impersonated more than one life and it was obvious that
they were doing so. That economy of means – few props, scant scenery, few
actors – demonstrates where the energy for the necessary augmentation
lies: in the language. Listen, watch. Listening closely, watch the language
in action. And, most important, let it induce you into bringing it fully to
life. So here Cleopatra in Shakespeare’s play already foresees herself as a
character in a play, who may be well or, as she expects, insultingly badly
played. It is a nice irony, of course, a moment of amusing knowingness,
that in Shakespeare’s theatre Cleopatra would have been played by a boy
whose unbroken voice she – Shakespeare’s fiction – disparagingly calls
‘squeaking’. But she – and Shakespeare in her voice – points to the gap
there will always be between the poetry, the poetically realised character,
and any realisation on stage by however great an actress.
Antony and Cleopatra potentiate one another, they combine and

37
 essay

compound their resources of life. And they do so because they are in

love. Their love is hyperbolic, a continual outbidding. They seem bent on
eliminating the falling short which Troilus, another famous lover, called
a ‘monstruosity’. He says to Cressida who fears that lovers promise
more than they deliver: ‘This is the monstruosity in love, lady, that the
will is infinite and the execution is confined; that the desire is boundless
and the act a slave to limit’ (Troilus and Cressida, 3.2.79). By their restless
doings, their play, their enjoyments, Antony and Cleopatra chase in the
execution after the will and in the act after desire. In so doing of course,
making hungry where most they satisfy, growing the more by reaping,
they further potentiate the will and the desire. Goethe observed that
‘das Unzulängliche ist positiv’ (falling short is a positive thing), meaning
perhaps that the gap itself is a further excitement and incitement.
Antony and Cleopatra, who needed the whole world for their peer-
lessly abundant living, imagine, on the threshold of death, a life beyond
it. Antony, thinking Cleopatra dead, promises:
Where souls do couch on flowers we’ll hand in hand
And with our sprightly port make the ghosts gaze.
Dido and her Aeneas shall want troops,
And all the haunt be ours. (4.14.52-5)

And she brings herself to the act of suicide by imagining that he is en-
couraging her from there:
Methinks I hear
Antony call. I see him rouse himself
To praise my noble act. I hear him mock
The luck of Caesar, which the gods give men
To excuse their after wrath. Husband, I come! (5.2.283-6)

That bid for after-life, or, better, for continuing life having overflowed the
allotted measure of the first, is repeated by the text itself every time it
is staged and, still more far-reachingly, every time an audience watches
and listens and a reader of it reads. Ben Jonson’s poem to his dead friend
Shakespeare, there with a likeness of the man in the First Folio, says
something commonplace and true: ‘And art alive still, while thy Booke
doth live / And we have wits to read…’ Those lines are a challenge not
a sop: books live if we read them, we are the continuation they cannot
live without, their next overflowing, body and soul of their further life,
another of their metamorphoses, their new translations.

This is an edited and greatly abbreviated version of David Constantine’s essay.

38
 poet on her work

How ‘Afterlife’ came into being

Rebecca Gethin

Afterlife

They buried their dead so high

the graves are specks on the cliff-face.
They imagined ancestors watching
over their comings and goings.
Fingers pointing upward they’d name
great-grandparents, sensors of daybreak’s first impulse,
approaching weathers, who now voiced thoughts
in thunder, directed lightning, conducted stars.
Inside the crevices a puzzle of bronze bracelets, shell beads
circling what was clavicle, axe heads clinking on metatarsal.
To reach a geological hour all they had to do
was lie still, while rain seeped through limestone.

39
 the poet on her work

M y father’s family originally came from a

remote area in the Ligurian Alps. Twice a
year I go back to the valley where I feel very
much at home. Below our tiny house in these
mountains is a deep gorge, and rising up on
the opposite side is a rock-face, which dominates the village. I am fas-
cinated by the way sunlight and weather play on its surface. Everybody
likes to stand and watch the sea but, for me, a rock-face is equally com-
pelling. My first intention was to write about the effects of sun and
moon light on stone.
I scribbled bits in my notebook like this:
A raw nerve of earth:
light on its face is active
a searching intelligence;
mutely accepting
the pressures and fronts
fingering its surface

So, through successive days, I kept glancing at the rock to see how it
changed: from early morning when rock martins flew out of the clefts
through to dusk falling when owls hooted from precariously angled
trees. t started to feel like a sacred site, which made me remember that
the local museum in Triora displays artefacts that were found in prehis-
toric burial chambers high up in the valley: pots and weapons, beautiful
beads and even shells. Some were 2–2,500 years old. As a number of such
caves have been discovered I thought it possible the people had mapped
their whereabouts. There are old photographs of skulls excavated from
these caves, which are now kept in another museum with controlled
conditions to stop them deteriorating.As the skulls were intact when
first removed from their thousands of years of lying in a cave I started
wondering how they came to be so well preserved. I was struck by the
shells that were purposefully left in the chambers (the area being far
from the sea) and asked why so many of the beads were blue.
The other thing that kept going through my mind was the sheer

40
 the poet on her work

height of the burial chambers. It must have taken a lot of courage to get
those corpses up there. How did the mourners climb so high with a body
to carry? Did they carry it over their shoulders? If instead they lowered
them down from the top then there was the real risk of the edge crum-
bling away and the drop below would be certain death.
The first line of the poem had to be about the height. I wanted to
juxtapose our under-the-ground graves with these people’s over-their-
heads burials. They clearly wanted to be able to see their graves. Perhaps
even to be watched over by their dead. But after the thought of the first
line, ‘They buried their dead so high’, I couldn’t find the next thread of
thought. The past and its meaning was muddled in my mind.
I felt hampered because I knew so little about the archaeological and
geological facts. So I googled the word ‘limestone’ and learned about
its properties and idiosyncrasies. I started trying to use the geological
words in the poem but then felt that I was coming unstuck through not
knowing the real currency of these words:
its skin, all clints and grykes,
quickens as sun breaks through
spirals of river mist.
All its flutes and runnels
charcoaled by clouds…

I read Auden’s ‘In Praise of Limestone’ many times, a poem so won-

derful that it intimidated me:
I am the solitude that asks and promises nothing.

A dead end for my poem.

Having been to the museum for a second time I marvelled how the
archaeologists had come to discover those inaccessible chambers. The
Italians of Triora are good climbers and a villager told me how he used
to free-climb all the rock faces. I supposed some early twentieth-century
fearless mountaineer must have spotted something striking on a ledge,
or found a rock that moved.
…to feel for niches to climb
inside, to turn into seepage
to fold into wrinkle…

I thought I’d try fourteen lines, packed together for closeness and
abandon the short tercets in which I’d been writing:
A rock wedged in the cave mouth, like any fallen
stone. Fingertips and muscle strain
to shift it, exposing the human stash
beneath the schist.

41
 the poet on her work

Packed inside so small a place

so high the hole is a speck in the rock face.
Blue beads circle the remains of a clavicle
axe heads clink against metatarsal
bronze bracelets embrace vanished wrists
necklaces and weapons were their letters
of introduction to their futures
– blood warmth long gone
in this lost map of tombs and caves
revealing what was always known
limestone turns the dead to stone.

But this wasn’t working either. Too dense and line length doing nothing.
I wanted to find something out about the religious belief or practices
of these pre-historic peoples, some reason why they went to so much
trouble and risked personal danger to bury bodies so high, so well-hid-
den and removed. But all my attempts at research ended in nothing.
Then my husband made a joke that maybe the bodies in the prehis-
toric caves were my ancestors. My father’s family had lived in this area for
many centuries. It is a sort of clan and the surname (Lanteri) belongs to
at least five different families, all of whom hail from the same village.
And then the poem clicked for me. I could imagine people living
on these mountainsides feeling the closeness of their grandparents and
earlier ancestors beyond that, just as I, myself, feel drawn to the same
village to feel the closeness of my long-dead grandparents and the pre-
ceding generations, who I know are all buried in the local cemetery. I
know that because they have graves with names and photos on them.
As these prehistoric people went about their daily chores – garden-
ing, herding, hunting – they would feel the narrow valley was guarded
by their ancestors. This knowledge would give their forebears a kind of
immortality and the limestone must physically preserve the bones and
objects left in the burial chambers.
I went back to the tercets but found them too busy and eventually
decided on couplets with longer lines. They left enough space for my
unanswered questions to remain hanging on the page.
The title shifted between ‘Ancestors’, ‘Afterdeath’, ‘Museum Exhib-
its’ (my poetry group unanimously vetoed this one) but finally I decided
on ‘Afterlife’ as I felt the livingness of the dead people was always im-
manent to their descendants living in the forests and grassy slopes
below. So for now the poem is like this, but knowing me, it will gradu-
ally evolve over time into something else.

42
 poetry

rebecca gethin

Dangerous translating

They eat funghi. We don’t eat fungi

only mushrooms. They learned the language
by osmosis as children – to me, the woods
are filled with unpronounceable names.
Ten days after rain. A waxing moon.
Look for pine trees whose needles point down,
not up. Don’t eat anything that smells of carrion
but a whiff of freshly milled flour is especially good.
The night is so still I can almost hear them
growing – rustle of leaves being pushed to one side
as they poke from the ground like lithe muscles,
calloused toes – earlobe-soft, knuckle-hard
– monk’s hoods, pigs’ ears, goats’ beard, one-eyed,
born-together, fog fungus, small nails, white dove,
potato fungus, Judas’ ears, drum sticks, sheeps’ feet,
hidden-under-leaves, covered-in-pearls.
Ten days after rain. A waxing moon
and di buon ora their baskets are laden
with kilos of funghi. They know boletus
from russula, amanitus from tricholoma.
Shaking their heads over my haul,
the fungi are tossed over their shoulders
into the grass. All I’ve discovered
is a fear of adders.

43
CAMILLE PAGLIA
 essay

Final cut: the selection process

for break, blow, burn

Camille Paglia

B reak, Blow, Burn, my collection of close readings of forty-

three poems, took five years to write. The first year was
devoted to a search for material in public and academic
libraries as well as bookstores. I was looking for poems in
English from the last four centuries that I could whole-
heartedly recommend to general readers, especially those who may not
have read a poem since college. For decades, poetry has been a losing
proposition for major trade publishers. I was convinced that there was still
a potentially large audience for poetry who had drifted away for unclear
reasons. That such an audience does in fact exist seemed proved by the
success of Break, Blow, Burn, which may be the only book of poetry criticism
that has ever reached the national bestseller list in the United States.
On my two book tours (for the Pantheon hardback in 2005 and the
Vintage paperback in 2006), I was constantly asked by readers or inter-
viewers why this or that famous poet was not included in Break, Blow,
Burn, which begins with Shakespeare and ends with Joni Mitchell. At
the prospectus stage of the project, I had assumed that most of the prin-
cipal modern and contemporary poets would be well represented. But
once launched on the task of gathering possible entries, I was shocked
and disappointed by what I found. Poem after poem, when approached
from the perspective of the general audience rather than that of academ-
ic criticism, shrank into inconsequence or pretension. Or poets whom I
fondly remembered from my college and graduate school studies turned
out to have produced impressive bodies of serious work but no single
poem that could stand up as an artifact to the classic poems elsewhere
in the book. The ultimate standard that I applied in my selection process
was based on William Butler Yeats’ ‘The Second Coming’, a masterpiece

45
 essay

of sinewy modern English.

Ezra Pound, because of his generous mentoring of and vast influ-
ence on other poets (such as T. S. Eliot and William Carlos Williams),
should have been automatically included in Break, Blow, Burn. But to my
dismay, I could not find a single usable Pound poem – just a monoto-
nous series of showy, pointless, arcane allusions to prior literature. The
equally influential W. H. Auden was high on my original list. But after
reviewing Auden’s collected poetry, I was stunned to discover how few
of his poems can stand on their own in today’s media-saturated cultural
climate. Auden’s most anthologized poem, ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’, in-
spired by a Breughel painting, felt dated in its portentous mannerisms.
A homoerotic love poem by Auden that I had always planned to include
begins, ‘Lay your sleeping head, my love, / Human on my faithless arm’.
But when I returned to it, I found the poem perilously top-heavy with
that single fine sentence. Everything afterward dissolves into vague
blather. It was perhaps the most painful example that I encountered of
great openings not being sustained.
Surely the lucid and vivacious Marianne Moore, so hugely popular in
her day, would have produced many poems to appeal to the general reader.
However, while I was charmed by Moore’s ingenious variety of formats,
I became uncomfortable and impatient with her reflex jokiness, which
began to seem like an avoidance of emotion. Nothing went very deep.
Because I was so eager to get a good sports poem into Break, Blow, Burn (I
never found one), I had high hopes for Moore’s beloved odes to baseball.
Alas, compared to today’s high-impact, around-the-clock sports talk on
radio and TV, Moore’s baseball lingo came across as fussy and corny.
Elizabeth Bishop presented an opposite problem. Bishop is truly a
poet’s poet, a refined craftsman whose discreet, shapely poems carry a
potent emotional charge beneath their transparent surface. I had ex-
pected a wealth of Bishop poems to choose from. With my eye on the
general reader, I was keenly anticipating a cascade of sensuous tropical
imagery drawn from Bishop’s life in Brazil. But when I returned to her
collected poems, the observed details to my surprise seemed oppres-
sively clouded with sentimental self-projection. For example, I found
Bishop’s much-anthologized poem ‘The Fish’ nearly unbearable due to
her obtrusively simmering self-pity. (Wounded animal poems, typify-
ing the anthropomorphic fallacy, have become an exasperating cliché
over the past sixty years.) Even splendid, monumental Brazil evident-
ly couldn’t break into Bishop’s weary bubble, which traveled with her
wherever she went. It may be time to jettison depressiveness as a fash-
ionable badge of creativity.
Charles Bukowski was another poet slated from the start to be promi-
nently featured in Break, Blow, Burn. (Indeed, he proved to be the writer I
was most asked about on my book tours.) I had planned to make the dis-

46
 essay

solute Bukowski a crown jewel, demonstrating the scornful rejection by

my rowdy, raucous 1960s generation of the genteel proprieties of 1950s
literary criticism, still faithfully practiced by the erudite but terminally
prim Helen Vendler. I was looking for a funny, squalid street or barroom
poem, preferably with boorish knockdown brawling and half-clad shady
ladies. But as with Elizabeth Bishop, I could not find a single poem to
endorse in good faith for the general reader. And Bukowski was stagger-
ingly prolific: I ransacked shelf upon shelf of his work. But he obviously
had little interest in disciplining or consolidating his garrulous, meander-
ing poems. Frustrated, I fantasized about scissoring out juicy excerpts
and taping together my own ideal Platonic form of a Bukowski poem. The
missing Bukowski may be the surly Banquo’s ghost of Break, Blow, Burn.
Feminist poetry proved a dispiriting dead end. Grimly ideological and
message-driven, it preaches to the choir and has little crossover relevance
for a general audience. Adrienne Rich’s ‘Diving into the Wreck’, a big

“I fantasized about scissoring out juicy excerpts.”

anthology favorite, is symptomatic of the intractable artistic problem. A

tremendously promising master metaphor – Rich uses deep-sea diving to
dramatize modern women’s confrontation with a declining patriarchal
civilization – collapses into monotonous sermonizing and embarrassing
bathos. The poem’s clumsiness and redundancy are excruciating (risible
‘flippers’, for example, loom large). I was more optimistic about finding
a good feminist poem by Marge Piercy, who treats her woman-centric
themes with spunky humor. Piercy’s work is full of smart perceptions
and sparkling turns of phrase, but her poems too often seem like casual
venting – notes or first drafts rather than considered artifacts. I finally
chose for Break, Blow, Burn two forceful, lively poems by Wanda Coleman
and Rochelle Kraut that are not explicitly feminist but that express a
mature and complex perspective on women’s lives.
I had glowing memories of dozens of poets whom I had avidly read
(or seen read in person) after my introduction to contemporary poetry
in college in the mid-1960s: Denise Levertov, Randall Jarrell, Muriel
Rukeyser, Robert Duncan, John Berryman, W. D. Snodgrass, Robert
Creeley, John Ashbery, and Galway Kinnell, among many others. But
when I returned to their work to find material for Break, Blow, Burn, I
was mortified by my inability to identify a single important short poem
to set before the general reader. Live readings seem to have beguiled
and distracted too many writers from the more rigorous demands of
the printed page – the medium that lasts and that speaks to posterity.
All of the above poets deserve our great respect for their talent, skill,
versatility, and commitment, but I would question how long their repu-
tations will last in the absence of strong freestanding poems. Beyond

47
 essay

that, I was puzzled and repelled by the stratospheric elevation in the

critical canon given to John Ashbery in recent decades. ‘Self-Portrait
in a Convex Mirror’ (1974), Ashbery’s most famous poem, is a florid
exercise in strained significance that could and should have been com-
pressed and radically reduced by two thirds. Can there be any wonder
that poetry has lost the cultural status it once enjoyed in the United
States when an ingrown, overwrought, and pseudo-philosophical style
such as Ashbery’s is so universally praised and promoted?
Given my distaste for Ashbery’s affectations, it would come as no
surprise how much I detest the precious grandiloquence of marquee
poets like Jorie Graham, who mirrors back to elite academics their own
pedantic preoccupations and inflated sense of self. That Graham, with
her fey locutions and tedious self-interrogations, is considered a ‘dif-
ficult’ or intellectual poet is simply preposterous. Anointing by the Ivy
League, of course, may be the kiss of death: Nobel Prize winner Seamus
Heaney, another academic star, enjoys an exaggerated reputation for en-
ergetically well-crafted but middling poems that strike me as second- or
third-hand Yeats. As for the so-called language poets, with their post-
modernist game-playing, they are co-conspirators in the murder and
marginalization of poetry in the United States.
For the contemporary poems in Break, Blow, Burn, my decisions were
based solely on the quality of the poem and never on the fame of the
poet. As I stumbled on a promising poem in my search, I photocopied it
for later consideration. Once the finalists were assembled, I pored over
them again and again to see if they could hold up to sequential reread-
ing. Did a poem retain its freshness and surprise? Some of my finds
were soon dropped when I noted how a powerful opening was not sus-
tained by the rest of the text. It was highly distressing to see what might

“When poets defensively cluster in a ghetto of opinion,

they lose contact with their audience.”
have been a remarkable poem self-destruct or wither away, as if the poet
failed to keep pressure on his or her own imagination – or perhaps to
hold the poem back long enough to let it develop and ripen on its own.
An example of this latter problem is William Stafford’s ‘The Color That
Really Is’. The poem begins stunningly: ‘The color that really is comes over
a desert / after the sun goes down: blue, lavender, / purple. … What if you
saw all this in the day?’ Stafford sees the rays of the sun as swords that
‘slice – life, death, disguise – through space!’ These amazing, even sha-
manistic perceptions about existence are followed by an arresting second
stanza sketching a stark scene of chilling specificity: the poet glimpses
a woman’s ‘terrible face’ under the light of a casino table in Reno. That
ravaged face reveals ‘what a desert was / if you lived there the way it is’.

48
 essay

The juxtaposition of sublime, visionary images with a gritty slice-of-life

portrait is brilliant and daring. But then Stafford attaches a jarring finale
– a stanza awkwardly inserting himself in a posture of mawkish piety:
‘Since then I pause every day to bow my head’. What a waste!
Again and again, there were poems that had provocative or inspired
first lines but that then fell flat, as if the poet were baffled about how
to proceed. Sometimes an ambitious poem would find its natural ar-
chitecture but then neglect smaller details of workmanship or tone.
An example is Bob Kaufman’s ‘To My Son Parker, Asleep in the Next
Room.’ An African-American Beat poet, Kaufman, like his colleague
Allen Ginsberg, was directly influenced by Walt Whitman. This memo-
rable poem is an epic chant that surveys human history from ‘shaggy
Neanderthals’ marking ‘ochre walls in ice-formed caves’ to artists and
priests in far-flung cultures from Egypt and Assyria to China, Mela-
nesia, and Peru. The rhythms are forceful and insistent and the images
compellingly visual or visceral. The poem ends in an exalted if uneven
coda celebrating freedom.
After working with Kaufman’s poem, however, I became disillu-
sioned by its needlessly simplistic politics, exalting all non-Caucasians
over Europeans. The poet would have served his poem better with a more
expansive, forgiving, and authentically Whitmanian vision. Kaufman’s
sadly self-limiting poem demonstrates how progressive American poetry
began to isolate itself from general society in the last half of the twenti-
eth century. When poets defensively cluster in a ghetto of homogeneous
opinion, they lose contact with their larger audience.
A poem that emerged from a quite different social milieu is Morris
Bishop’s ‘The Witch of East Seventy-Second Street,’ which was pub-
lished in The New Yorker in 1953. Though my primary critical sympathy
remains with the rude, rebellious Beat style, I find Bishop’s poem far
more effective than Kaufman’s in reaching its artistic goal:
‘I will put upon you the Telephone Curse,’ said the witch.
‘The telephone will call when you are standing on a chair with
a Chinese vase in either hand,
And when you answer, you will hear only the derisive
popping of corks.’
But I was armed so strong in honesty
Her threats passed by me like the idle wind.

‘And I will put upon you the Curse of Dropping,’ said the
witch.
‘The dropping of tiny tacks, the dropping of food gobbets,
The escape of wet dishes from the eager-grasping hand,
The dropping of spectacles, stitches, final consonants, the
abdomen.’

49
 essay

I sneered, jeered, fleered; I flouted, scouted; I

pooh-pooh-poohed.

‘I will put upon you the Curse of Forgetting!’ screamed

the witch.
‘Names, numbers, faces, old songs, old joy,
Words that once were magic, love, upward ways, the way
home.’
‘No doubt the forgotten is well forgotten,’ said I.

‘And I will put upon you the Curse of Remembering,’

bubbled the witch.
Terror struck my eyes, knees, heart;
And I took her charred contract
And signed in triplicate.

Catering with its chic uptown address, well-appointed decor, and sophis-
ticated whimsy to the affluent readers of the glossy New Yorker, ‘TheWitch
of East Seventy-Second Street’ nevertheless manages to tap archetypal
imagery for eerily unsettling effect. Poet and witch have an odd intimacy:
she breaks into his ordered routine like an ambassador from elemental
nature. Is she a malign proxy for mother or wife, as in fairy tales? She
speaks in ominous parallelism, like the witches of Macbeth – four curses
in four stanzas, culminating in the parodic ‘triplicate’ business contract,
‘charred’ by hellfire and signed by the defeated poet.
As with Jaques’ melancholy speech about the seven ages of man in
Shakespeare’s As You Like It, human life is mapped as a series of losses,
with the elderly regressing to an infantile state. The witch’s ‘Curse of
Dropping’ attacks the body (fingers and hands stiffen; the belly sags),
while her ‘Curse of Forgetting’ attacks the mind (memory lapses, espe-
cially costly to poets with their bardic mission). Everything valuable in
life – emotion as well as sensation – seems to recede. But the worst is
the ‘Curse of Remembering,’ which overwhelms the mind with regrets.
Remembering is too crushing a burden. Better to remain in the fenced
preserve of quaint connoisseurship (the Chinese vases), into which
modern technology can barely penetrate (the sputtering telephone). The
poem presents the poet as isolated, refined, and removed from collective
joys (the ‘popping of corks’ at unattended parties), but vulnerable to
attack from mythic forces. It’s as if, with their active imagination, poets
are the vulnerable point in modern civilization, where the archaic can
invade and retake spiritual territory.
Bishop’s poem, for all its virtues, finally seemed too arch or pat for
Break, Blow, Burn. A poem that came very close to inclusion, however, was
Gary Snyder’s ‘Strategic Air Command.’ (I decided to use Snyder’s ‘Old
Pond’ instead.) ‘The hiss and flashing lights of a jet / Pass near Jupiter in

50
 essay

Virgo […] // Frost settles on the sleeping bags. / The last embers of fire,
/ One more cup of tea, / At the edge of a high lake rimmed with snow’.
Snyder’s opposition of serene nature to ethically distorted society is clas-
sically High Romantic. The two men camping out in the Sierra Nevada
mountains hear the ‘hiss’ of a military jet, the serpent in the garden as
well as an avatar of impersonal industrial mechanization.
The visitors seek a spartan simplicity. They have stripped down to es-
sentials in order to purify themselves, like teadrinking Buddhist monks
at the ‘high lake rimmed with snow.’ The men’s humble comforts, with
their tactile immediacy, contrast with the jet’s dehumanized perfection
and arrogance. Earth, air, water, and fire: these endure, while political
events flare up and disappear, like the jet. Skeptical questions could cer-
tainly be asked: would Snyder return society to the preliterate nomadic
era, when humans lived desperately hand to mouth and were helpless-
ly vulnerable to accident and disease? But that does not invalidate his
protest. The poem is prophetic: machines, dazzling artifices of the mind,
may gradually be robbing humanity of free will, but nature is ultimately
unreachable, unperturbed by human folly.
David Young’s ‘Occupational Hazards’ still enchants and intrigues
me. It draws its inspiration from riddles, fairy tales, children’s songs, and
emblematic chapbooks with roots in medieval allegory:
Butcher
If I want to go to pieces
I can do that. When I try
to pull myself together
I get sausage.

Bakers
Can’t be choosers. Rising
from a white bed, from dreams
of kings, bright cities, buttocks,
to see the moon by daylight.

Tailor
It’s not the way the needle
drags the poor thread around.
It’s sewing the monster together,
my misshapen son.

Gravediggers
To be the baker’s dark opposite,
to dig the anti-cake, to stow
the sinking loaves in the unoven—
then to be dancing on the job!

51
 essay

Woodcutter
Deep in my hands
as far as I can go
the fallen trees
keep ringing.

The poet’s pure pleasure in improvisational, associative play with lan-

guage is registered in the mercurial puns and quirky metaphors. Young’s
catalog of occupations echoes the children’s limerick ‘Rub-a-dub-dub,
three men in a tub’ (‘The butcher, the baker, the candlestick-maker’).
However, each vocation here – butcher, baker, tailor, gravedigger, wood-
cutter – can be read as an analogue to the practice of poetry.
The butcher going to pieces is the poet exploring his or her emo-
tional extremes, out of which may come ‘sausage,’ the inner life ground
up, processed, and strung together in linked stanzas. Such a life re-
quires intestinal fortitude. Rising long before dawn, bakers (normally
beggars) ‘can’t be choosers’; like writers wrestling with their material,
they are under compulsion to knead their sticky, shapeless dough. With a
strangely active dream life, the bakers see metaphorically: ‘buttocks’ and
‘moon’ prefigure the raw white loaf (compare the slang term ‘buns’ for
buttocks; flashing one’s buttocks is ‘mooning’). Poets, the ‘kings’ of their
own ‘bright cities,’ have a tactile intimacy with language, while their
sources of inspiration range from the coarsely material to the celestial.
A tailor at work resembles the poet cutting, trimming, and stitch-
ing his verse. The needle is the sudden penetration of insight, while the
flexible thread, assuring continuity and shape, is dragged in the rear as
a secondary process. The result is ‘my misshapen son’: art-making by
men is an appropriation of female fertility. The end product, like Frank-
enstein’s ‘monster’ with his stitched-up face, may seem ugly or distorted
(in an avant-garde era). But the artwork is the artist’s true posterity, a
child of the intellect rather than the body – a distinction made by Plato.
Young wittily says that the merry gravedigger (‘the baker’s dark oppo-
site’) must ‘dig the anti-cake’ and ‘stow the sinking loaves in the unoven’
– as if the bakery has gone through Alice’s looking-glass and turned into
a graveyard. Cake and corpses: this morbid mingling of sweets and rot
is a brilliant conflation of motifs from Hamlet, with its jovial gravedig-
ger and its satirical imagery of the murdered king’s body served up as
‘funeral baked meats’ at a too-hasty wedding banquet, where the main
dish is the queen (Hamlet 1.2.180). Meditating on elemental realities,
the poet faces death and turns it into artistic sustenance and pleasure
(‘dancing on the job’). Finally, the woodcutter is the poet who ruthlessly
topples his lofty forebears to clear mental space for himself. But their
words still ring in his mind. They have seeped into his bones, to the
deepest layers of his psyche. Poetry, a form of making, is a mission he

52
 essay

cannot escape. The battered hands of the craftsman dictate to the soul.
A. R. Ammons’ “Mechanism” upset me severely and still does. This
poem should have been the dramatic climax of Break, Blow, Burn. In
fact, it should have been one of the greatest poems of the twentieth
century. Its vision of complex systems operating simultaneously in
human beings and animal nature is at the very highest level of artis-
tic inspiration. But in execution, the poem is a shambles, with weak
transitions and phrasings that veer from the derivative to the pedantic.
‘Mechanism’ is my primary exhibit for the isolation and self-destruction
of American poetry over the past forty years:
Honor a going thing, goldfinch, corporation, tree,
    morality: any working order,
   animate or inanimate: it

has managed directed balance,

     the incoming and outgoing energies are working right,
   some energy left to the mechanism

The pretty goldfinch flitting in and out of the poem symbolizes nature
unconscious of itself. Flashing through the cherry bushes in the last
stanza (‘unconscious of the billion operations / that stay its form’), it
carries a valedictory blessing like the ones in Wordsworth’s ‘Tintern
Abbey’ and Wallace Stevens’ early poem ‘Sunday Morning’ (which ends
with flocks of birds sinking “on extended wings”).
But it is the doggedly philosophical late Stevens, notably in ‘The
Auroras of Autumn’ and ‘An Ordinary Evening in New Haven’, who is
exercising a baleful and crippling influence here on Ammons, as on so
many other American poets of his generation, including John Ashbery.

“Pompous, big-think gestures have become a crutch.”

(Two examples of luminous early Stevens appear in Break, Blow, Burn.)
Over time, Stevens’ language tragically failed him. He ended his career
with a laborious, plodding, skeletal style, employed in self-questioning
poems of numbing length. Gorgeous images or lines still abound, but
pompous, big-think gestures have become a crutch.
The obtrusive ‘ideas’ in late Stevens have naturally provided grist for
the ever-churning academic mill. But poetry is not philosophy. Philo-
sophic discourse has its own noble medium as prose argumentation or
dramatic dialogue. Poetry is a sensory mode where ideas are or should
be fully embodied in emotion or in imagery grounded in the material
world. Late Stevens suffers from spiritual anorexia; he shows the mod-
ernist sensibility stretched to the breaking point. Late Stevens is not a
fruitful model for the future of poetry.

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 essay

In Ammons’ ‘Mechanism’, Whitman’s influence can be felt in the

cosmic perspective and catalog of organic phenomena. But there isn’t
nearly enough specificity here. Whitman was able to invoke nature’s
largest, most turbulent forces along with the tiniest details of straw, seeds,
or sea spray. Ammons was on the verge of a major conceptual breakthrough
in his willingness to consider the intricacies of human organizations,
corporations, and management as expressions of the nature-inspired
drive toward order. Whitman’s melting, all-embracing Romantic love
is no longer enough for a modern high-tech world. Connecting sexual
‘courtship’ to state-guaranteed ‘territorial rights’, Ammons is using an
anthropological lens to focus on the ancient birth of civilization itself in
law and contract. And by conflating history, science, economy, and art, he
would end the war between the artist and commercial society that began
with the Industrial Revolution and that has resulted in the artist’s pitiful
marginalization in an era dominated by mass media.
‘Mechanism’ approaches a view of consciousness itself as a product
of evolutionary biology. The minute chemistry of enzymes and platelets
is made almost psychedelically visible. The poem makes us ponder huge
questions: are we merely flitting goldfinches in nature’s master plan? Is
free will an illusion? Is art too a product of natural design? But the poem
is fatally weakened by its abstruse diction, bombastic syntax, and facti-
tious format. Why did Ammons choose these untidy staggered triads?
They seem forced and arbitrary, out of sync with his own music. While
David Young’s cryptic ‘Occupational Hazards’ uses a concrete, vigorous,
living English that connects us to the sixteenth century, ‘Mechanism’
relies on a clotted, undigested academese that strains at profundity .
And the poem is too long. Shakespeare’s sonnets, bridging his
piercing emotional experiences with his wary social observations,
demonstrate the beauty and power of high condensation. In his great
sonnet, ‘Leda and the Swan’, Yeats showed how a vast historical per-
spective could illuminate shattering contemporary events. Perhaps
“Mechanism” should have been a sonnet, a worthy heir to Shakespeare
and Yeats. But the poem shows the increasing distance of the poet from
general society, which Ammons is analyzing but is no longer address-
ing in its own language. It prefigures what would happen to American
poetry over the following decades, as the most ambitious poets became
stranded in their own coteries and cultivated a self-blinding disdain for
the surrounding culture.

The full text for this abridged article originally appeared in Arion. Grateful ac-
knowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously
published material: Alison Jolly: Morris Bishop, ‘The Witch of East Seventy-Sec-
ond Street,’ published in The New Yorker, Nov. 14, 1953. David Young and the
University of Pittsburgh Press: David Young, ‘Occupational Hazards,’ from The
Names of a Hare in English. © 1979 by David Young.

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 poetry

Joel Lane

Canada

When the hospital sent you home

I came to see you, bringing grapes
you wouldn’t eat and music
you couldn’t listen to any more.
Sickness had bent your middle age
into something too old to last,
a stony pale beach that shivered
as the tide made its way in.
After an hour, I walked out
into the black November glow,
went home and read your stories,
then played the CD I’d bought
and thought of snow falling down
in perfect silence, erasing the prints
of shoes and paws, hooding the trees:
a new world, a cloud made fresh.

55
RANA DASGUPTA
 fiction

solo (extracts)

Rana Dasgupta

Solo is the second novel from Rana Dasgupta, author of the brilliant debut
novel Tokyo Cancelled which has been described as a modern Canterbury Tales.
In Solo, a blind man approaches his one hundredth birthday in Sofia, Bul-
garia. Alone and dependant on the kindness of neighbours, he muses on the
ungraspability of life in passing and fears that nothing personal or real can
be saved and passed forward – despite his having lived through Fascism,
Communism, revolutions, wars, and great scientific discoveries. At the end
of his days he looks back through the hundred years and writes up his life
in the Book of Life and the Book of Daydreams.
  We print three extracts from The Book of Life. The first (Magnesium)
is from the start of the novel as the old man embarks on his quest. The
second (Carbon) finds him a young man just returned from an exciting life
as an experimental chemist in Germany, perplexed to find that his child-
hood friend Boris still seems bigger and more vital than he does, especially
now he has been killed as a revolutionary. The third extract (Barium) is one
attempt of many to locate and hold an important memory – his mother – in
a surviving form. Can these lost moments keep warmth alive?

Solo (Fourth Estate, 9 March, 2009), 978-0007182145

Book 1
The Book of Life

Magnesium

With the exception of his back, which tortures him every morning, the
man’s health is still passable, and yet, by the sheer force of numbers, his
death cannot be so far away.
As a child, the man watched his grandmother stick up biogra-
phies of the dead on the trees outside their house. She had come from
a village near the Black Sea – cut off, now, by the border – and it was
the dead from this distant village whose accomplishments were listed
on the trunks of those proud and equidistant plane trees. Every day, it

57
 fiction

seemed, was the death-day of someone or other from that remote place,
and his grandmother told him the stories over morning tea as she wrote
out her obituaries. She tied them with string to the trees, where they
decomposed gradually in the rain, to be renewed the following year.
‘How do you remember?’ he asked her again and again, for it
seemed marvellous that the entire history of that lost dynasty could be
preserved in her mind. But his father disapproved of the rural practice
and her own life was never written up on a tree.
Sensitive, like all infants, to the beyond, the man had in those years
a powerful sense of the infinitude of generations. He had seen people
buried in the ground with their eyes closed; and in his mind he en-
visioned the earth in cutaway, with the stacked-up strata of sleeping
bodies so vertiginous in its depth that it was simple to believe the light-
ness of life on the surface to be no more than their collective dream. For
the dreamers, quiet and eternal in their moist refuge, greatly outnum-
bered those with open eyes.
These old intuitions returned to the man recently, when he listened
to a television programme about a town that was buried under water
after the construction of a dam. Eighty years later, the dam was de-
commissioned and dismantled. The lake subsided, the river resumed its
previous route, and the town rose again into the sunlight.
There had been extensive damage, of course. Water had dissolved
the plaster from walls, and roofs had caved in. Wooden buildings had
floated away, bit by bit. Trees had died, and the whole town stank of
dead fish and river weed for weeks after it was drained. But there were
a couple of cars still parked on the streets – antique models, as the man
remembered from his own youth. There were clocks arrested at differ-
ent times, and a cinema with the titles of old films still stuck up outside.
Road signs had stood firm all this time, pointing the way to underwater
destinations. In every house, things had been left behind. A man found
a jar of pickles in a kitchen, and tasted them, and pronounced them
still good.
There were some old people who had lived in the town before the
deluge and were taken back to see it again, and it was for them as if they
were transported back into a childhood fantasy.
These days, the man devotes himself to wading through the princi-
pal events of his life in order to discover what relics may lie submerged
there. Of course, he has no family around him, his friends have all gone,
and he knows that no living person is interested in his thoughts. But he
has survived a long time, and he does not want it to end with a mind-
less falling-off.
Before the man lost his sight, he read this story in a magazine. A
group of explorers came upon a community of parrots speaking the

58
 fiction

language of a society that had been wiped out in a recent catastrophe.

Astonished by this discovery, they put the parrots in cages and sent
them home so that linguists could record what remained of the lost lan-
guage. But the parrots, already traumatised by the devastation they had
recently witnessed, died on the way.
The man feels a great fraternity with those birds. He feels he carries,
like them, a shredded inheritance, and he is too concussed to pass any-
thing on.
That is why he is combing through his life again. He has no wealth
and no heirs, and if he has anything at all to leave behind, it will be
tangled deep, and difficult to find.

Carbon

Two days later, Boris was arrested for sedition, and executed.
The police went out in force, with names and addresses, and many
were taken in. Georgi was arrested too, and thrown into jail.
Afterwards, the police sent word to Boris’s parents that his body was
available for collection.
When the coffin was lowered into the earth, Magdalena and her
mother collapsed simultaneously into their skirts.
Ulrich walked home afterwards with his parents. Elizaveta was dis-
abled by it.
‘I loved that boy,’ she kept saying. ‘I loved that boy.’
She forbade Ulrich from going out, fearing that something might
happen to him, too. But when evening came he could not stay shut up
any more. He ran to Boris’s house.
A storm had come up suddenly, and unfastened shutters banged. He
battled through a wind so fierce that the entire sky was too small a pipe
for it, and the air groaned in its confines.
Outside Boris’s house was a crowd of street people. Magdalena
stood in front, handing out clothes, while her mother wept on the steps.
Boris’s shrunken father watched from an upstairs window.
‘Ulrich!’ cried Magdalena when she saw him, and she threw herself
at his chest.
‘What’s going on?’ he asked.
‘I’m giving away his clothes.’
She had brought everything out of the house. Jackets, shirts and
sweaters flapped in the gale. Ulrich could not bear to see it all disap-
pear.
‘So his warmth stays alive,’ she said. ‘Look how many have come.’

59
 fiction

Ulrich saw Misha in the crowd and, for the first time, burst into
tears. The fool approached him. He secreted two cold marbles in Ul-
rich’s hands.
‘I did not know that fish could drown. Those marbles were his
eyes.’
It began to rain. The people dispersed, only a scattering of unwanted
shirt collars and neckties left on the ground. Magdalena went into the
house and emerged with Boris’s umbrella.
‘Let’s walk,’ she said.
‘But it’s late.’
She ignored him.
The storm became stupendous. She led him, pulling his arm, and
they found a place for sex. There were no lips, no hands, no hair: just
genitals. In the tumult, the umbrella blew away and they were en-
tirely exposed under the flashes. Her skirt was at her thighs and she
screamed: not with the sex, but with its insufficiency. Over her shoulder,
Ulrich saw a man watching them from his shelter in a doorway, and he
felt ashamed. He sank to the floor, sobbing in the downpour.
‘No,’ he said.
She stared at him in disbelief, untrussing her skirt.
‘You know how much I need you,’ she shrieked into the tempest.
She beat his head with her fists, and ran away, clacking and splash-
ing on the street. He pulled up his trousers and retrieved the umbrella
from the iron fence where it had lodged. When he reached the main
road she had disappeared.
Disturbed crows were wheeling overhead, their wet wings slapping
ineffectually at the air.
He did not know where to escape to. The city was suddenly without
dimension, like a whipped-up ocean, and the umbrella, in this hori-
zontal torrent, a flailing superfluity. He arrived finally at the bar where
they had been two nights earlier. He found Else, the guileless prostitute,
and took her upstairs. She was alarmed at his inconsiderate, uncouth
pounding, but he did not stop until the barmaid knocked angrily at the
door, complaining of the noise and the hour, and he grabbed his clothes
and went home.
For a long time, Ulrich avoided all places where he might run the
risk of meeting any member of Boris’s family.

Many years later, Ulrich heard a story about the great pianist,
Leopold Godowsky, whom he had once seen in Berlin playing the music
of Franz Liszt.
Leopold Godowsky was born in Lithuania but spent his life in Paris,
Vienna, Berlin and then New York. He had a gift for friendship and hos-

60
 fiction

pitality, and, wherever he lived, his home became a centre for artists and
thinkers. His friends included Caruso, Stravinsky, Gershwin, Chaplin,
Diaghilev, Nijinsky, Gide, Matisse, Ravel – and Albert Einstein.
Godowsky was one of those people who are born to do one thing,
and when a stroke rendered his right hand useless for piano playing, he
fell into a deep depression. He never played in public again.
During his final unhappy years in New York, Godowsky saw Einstein
frequently, as the scientist had moved from Berlin to nearby Princeton.
Leopold Godowsky had an Italian barber in New York, named Caruso.
Caruso was a great follower of Einstein, and when he discovered that
his customer, Godowsky, knew him personally, he begged him to bring
the famous man to his shop. Each time Godowsky saw Einstein, he told
him that Caruso the barber wanted to meet him, and Einstein each time
agreed to go and see the man whenever he was next in the city. With
one thing and another, however, the visit never took place.
Eventually, Godowsky died. When the news reached Einstein at
Princeton he did not say a word. He immediately picked up his hat and
coat, took the first train to New York, and went to visit Caruso at his
barbershop.
Ulrich thinks back, sometimes, to the conversation he had with
Boris in that attic laboratory so long ago, when they discussed the news
of an uncle who had died. He feels that he did not ever progress far
beyond his childhood bewilderment, and is ashamed of the inadequa-
cy he always felt in the face of death. He has always been affected by
stories of people who knew precisely how to respond when a person
has died.
Perhaps it is because his behaviour after Boris’s death fell so short of
the mark that the terrible finality of it never truly settled.
Whenever he thinks back to his wedding day, he remembers the
smile on Boris’s face, and the way his hand was tucked in the belt of his
green army uniform. But such a thing is impossible: for Boris had been
dead for years by then – and he would never have worn army clothes.
There are many other memories like that, which have all the flesh of ter-
restrial recollections, but must have slipped in somehow from another
world.

Barium

Sometimes he made common cause with his mother over music.

When Sviatoslav Richter, the great Soviet pianist, came to play a week
of recitals in Sofia, Ulrich took Elizaveta to all the concerts. Richter was

61
 fiction

a wild-looking man, even in his suit, and he tamed the piano monster
with the mere application of his fingertips. Ulrich was terrified to see
the speed at which he played Chopin, for no one could sustain such a
fury. When he finished it with such a contemptuous flourish, the tears
ran down Ulrich’s face.
It was the period when he had strong physical reactions if he wit-
nessed some form of surpassing human achievement. He wept at
athletes breaking records. He trembled when he saw a standing ovation
in the theatre.
When Albert Einstein died, he read his words in the newspaper,
which made him weep too:
The years of anxious serarching in the dark for a truth that one feels but
cannot express, the intense desire and the alternations of confidence and misgiv-
ing, and the final emergence into light – only those who have experienced it can
appreciate it.
At the time of Richter’s visit, there was an influenza epidemic in
Sofia, and Elizaveta was one of those who coughed uncontrollably
through the music. Her nose ran continually, and her constant wiping
irritated Ulrich during the performance.
Many years later, after her death, Ulrich heard a recording of those
recitals on the radio, and he could identify his mother’s cough, preserved
during the long note that Richter held at the beginning of Catacombs,
near the end of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition.

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 poetry

andrew Mcneillie

In the Midst of Life

for Gail
in homage to Patrick Conneely

Or mist, I dreamt myself alive again, back from

the dead, beachcombing down that wintry shore,
lit by a sea-candle’s orange-iodine flame –
the bay drawling, like a conch at my ear,
sea-spray and salt-wind whirling, and the dunes
whistling in a gooseflesh shiver of marram.
The day was like a night with no moon,
and the air crustacean, clawed; had there been a bell
it would have tolled, ask not for whom.
It isn’t fanciful to think, heaven and hell
got married that morning, bride and groom,
and I there uninvited, one long-ago drowned
beyond space and time, in Blind Sound.
So seawards, singing my sea-words to the world,
flotsam-jetsam, heart’s kindling, I strode –
with voices in my head, or not, I couldn’t tell.
But both, the answer was, not either or.
‘What a memory you have,’ he said, and smiled.

63
 poetry

He didn’t know the half of it. Though he’d hand-hauled

in twenty fathoms the better part of his days
and seen such changes in a body’s fortunes
would shake faith down to the rock of ages.
‘Fish-stocks recover, left to their own devices . . .
It’s never too late. But what can you do with the weather?’
The fog flurried our mis-en-scène. (Enter: a polar bear,
adrift on an ice-cube.) ‘Curtains for us all!’
he cried, ‘and yet they say we still have far to fall . . .’
Then he said, ‘You know, I think those were better days’
and glanced as he spoke, weighing his words,
to the last syllable of what it is to know poverty.
Involuntarily, my mind flashed, like a night at sea,
aglitter with stars and villages ashore, barely lit,
and shipping lights, freighted with memory.
I struggled to agree but knew grace required it
and to be true to my heart, I said I feared it was so.
How can you live with so little fishing to look at
leaning on the sea-wall of old age? I don’t know.
Winter indeed, the only tourist-free zone,
winter and its slender hold on light.
But you don’t need to be old to be deranged, just
thin-partitioned from looking askance at life
and its short way with us all from the start. Mad
in the style of Father Ted, who now has his day,
his little immortality, when fancy-dress priests
and nuns invade the island, to party wildly.
It being our duty to laugh in the face of grief.
Yet to know which comes first and what it means
to name so many lost at sea and still believe in life.
And who knows what else might come to pass
to catch our leisure by the heels and wake us
from our sleep? . . . The sea was in and now the plane
roared on the runway at Cill Eine, then took to the air
like a swan in reverse. As if to prove that
you can turn the clock back. And now ‘Somewhere

64
 poetry

beyond the sea . . .’ the crooner croons

to Saturday night, singing so long ago . . .
Prize what’s new, I say, but give me retro too.
‘I know beyond a doubt . . .’ he purrs . . . but
nothing will be as before, however many moons
go quartering the tides to make a haul of silver.
True places aren’t down on any map, said Ishmael.
Thoughts run, beyond the page, and do not fit.
White is the colour of truth? So of the whale
that’s never found on Ahab’s map but in his head?
Never say never, nor either or? But both, I think,
inner and outer; and seize the hour’s the trick.
For myself I was born in Thermidor. Unlike Patrick
Lobsterman, I’d sooner tire of life than lobster-meat.
But the sea is always greener, not to say the drink.
So with his sea-green hair Charles Baudelaire led
thought on a leash through the streets of Paris,
and sang so long ago, ‘Somewhere beyond the sea . . .’
Là-bas . . . his bittersweet melody divine.
No matter the barman stands forever calling time.
Drink deep but keep your head above water.
As out here the islands keep theirs and prosper
while earth’s luck lasts. Only the immortal poor,
and their poem, have footing that is surer.
However far into the hour you row dreaming
you’ll wake from your senses. But waking may I
never hear you sing: ‘Never again will I go sailing.’
Though now the curraghs are made of fibre glass,
and they have outboards . . . What is it in
habitude’s reciprocity? ‘No more canvas!’
Patrick laments. The quick pulse within,
inboard swell of ocean felt athwart,
dancing cheek to cheek, and sea to skin.
For intimacy’s the best we have by heart.
Had I a hand for it I’d paint his portrait,
in oily impasto of sea-surge and cloud . . .

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 poetry

But this instead. Like poetry, fishing’s an art, I said,

and when we put out to shoot a net
or spill a line, we do it with both thought
and craft, one stretched to the other, taut
but not too taut, as to be merely formal,
with give and take, between wave and boat.
As here and now, the soul’s recital
turns on an oar, and comes full circle.
On holiday in Sardinia he bought sea-bream.
So once he caught them here, in autumn,
but never now, their stock fished out,
though time may yet shoal them back again.
He felt at home, islanded, and hearing ‘Irish’ in
the slap and splash of the Med, and loved at dawn
to see fresh fish landed, as for the first time.
Just what the thing itself must be about
when the scales fall from your eyes and you see
your life flash by. Then out goes the light . . .

What might be better days? Don’t get me started.

True and untrue to say they lie ahead
as in the first line of a poem poised to be written.
But to say at once farewell, fare forward, and
haste back won’t do. For all is nothing new.
I folded the money and put it in his hand
and thanked him for his company. He shook his rein
and the pony ‘Grace’ struck out for home, hoofbeat
for heartbeat . . . remembered all the way again
that tattoo round the bay, and down the strand,
where beachcombing for metaphor I meet
that one with a torch still burning in his hand.

66
ANDREW
MCNEILLIE
reading lives

the library

Marshall Brooks

F or my friend Liam O’Dell1 and myself, books helped shape a

parallel universe beginning sometime in the late 1960s and
on into the early 1970s, when we were schoolboys. The active
book sharing, for that is what it was, lasted a little more than
a decade until we were just out of our twenties. Besides sym-
bolizing the excitement of what books can mean to people, especially
young people who are in the process of formulating their own world,
these books are all that remain for me of this once close friendship.
Liam read a lot. He read so much as a boy, in fact, that he had a repu-
tation around the neighborhood. At about 14 or 15 he was, in everyone’s
eyes, the acknowledged local expert on history and warfare. (He may
have already read all of Bruce Catton’s books on the American Civil War
at this point. No one would have been surprised by this fact if he had.)
Coupled with this precociousness was a kind of attractive maturity
about him that comes to some at a very early age. People were inclined
to trust Liam and, no doubt, found relief and reassurance in this. It was
also widely known that Liam’s parents had given him a rifle for one
of his birthdays, a bolt-action thing with a wooden gunstock as heavy
and ungainly as a small ugly tree trunk. The rifle, a WWI vintage relic,
would not have been out of place in the Khyber Pass, then or now. Liam
never abused the impressive trust this gift represented (mind, few boys
his age owned such weaponry in suburban Boston). The gun, which

68
 reading lives

hung on homemade scrap metal brackets down in his makeshift base-

ment digs, was an impressive symbol of Liam’s unimpeachable standing
within the community at large. It was also a symbol of his absolute au-
thority on the battlefield in boyhood games of war. Liam was not merely
a precocious reader, but a young reader with all the fearsome drive of a
Rommel and all the tactical acuity of a Montgomery. We were all in awe
of him. His serious, not-to-be-questioned bearing hinted at some grave
aspect of the world that we could only but barely imagine.
The other side of the very same coin is that Liam had read about
Shangri-la in James Hilton’s Lost Horizon. He, in turn, christened a part
of the Metropolitan District Commission woods Shangri-la (the very
same woods where we sometimes played war) and claimed it for per-
sonal sanctuary space. He took me there once (and only once). All
rock and hemlock, with maybe a low-slung branch lean-to or couch
adorning it, it reminded me of a monadnock, just above its scraggly,
semi-lunar timberline. The place was almost too private to bear. You felt
as if you had mistakenly put on another person’s skin in place of your
own pajamas. Even then, Liam had an adult need for place and topogra-
phy. This, anyway, is how I learned the meaning of Shangri-La without
having to read the book.
At some point, Liam and I fell in with one another. The long walks
to junior high school were made less lonely, and scary, this way; our
acquaintanceship grew into a friendship. I am happy to say that Liam
was like an older brother to me and what we had most in common was
books, despite the fact that back then I was more of what you might
call a ‘book watcher’ as opposed to being a full-fledged reader; someone
who got more from a book before, rather than after, reading it.
At first there were the books about war. Guadalcanal Diary and books
about the Battle of Midway, Yamamoto and Nimitz, for instance. Liam
read those and regaled me with their highlights, but I did not necessar-
ily follow suit and read them. I preferred WWI dogfight classics such
as Quentin Reynolds’s They Fought for the Sky or peculiarities such as The
Birdman of Alcatraz. Gradually, as we aged, we moved on to meatier works
and shared more actual reading in common, but Liam’s enthusiastic re-
tellings of whatever he had just read remained a constant pleasure.
His sardonically accurate summarizations were steeped in a
youth-coded vocabulary featuring, among other things, strong appo-
site allusions to persons we knew from around town. A Guns of August
could, therefore, be superbly rendered in a paragraph or two of pas-
sionate speech, with the hapless Archduke Franz Ferdinand made to
bear comparison to a suspect shop teacher or an unpopular assistant
scoutmaster. History never sounded so immediate or accessible. One
day, on the bus home from high school, Liam unpacked a slightly over-

69
 reading lives

size, very flat-looking hardcover book that he had specially ordered from
the United States Government Printing Office. The book’s exterior was
a sober, institutional green but the sheer import of its contents changed
our lives forever.
The book was Edwin T. Adney and Howard I. Chappelle’s Bark Canoes
and Skin Boats of North America, an indisputably authoritative (to us, at
least) text complemented by wonderfully grainy black-and-white pho-
tographs highlighting the details of Native American and Eskimo boat
building in their most sinewy splendor. The book possessed a terrific
feral quality, almost tactile, on account of its esotericism; this made it
quite indigestible for the mainstream but all the more palatable for two
teenage boys.
Therefrom, Liam constructed a 12’ canvas-covered kayak from a
‘kit’. (The kit was really a pile of wiggly lumber, a bolt of white canvas
and a gallon of liquid airplane dope in a clear glass cider jug, purchased
out of an old man’s barn in neighboring Dedham.) I soon followed suit.
Our boats enabled us to effortlessly depart civilization at the merest
whim and we would spend long afternoons lazing about, and gunkhol-
ing on, the Charles River. We sometimes talked about books, friends,
acquaintances, or – the topic could hardly be avoided – school, but often
we said nothing at all and just drifted.
The simplicity of the boats became our standard, emblem and
measure both. While exploiting the very same principles that upheld
an aircraft carrier in the Tonkin Gulf or another unnecessary yacht on
the Inland Waterway, our nautical profile more resembled driftwood;
or fallen leaves; or pine needles, even. We were, above all, unassum-
ing watermen, shielded by and within our own super-consciousness,
plainly invisible to the serious traffic of the moment (always plentiful
in some way or other) surrounding us. This simple and practical sense
of freedom was reflected more and more in the reading that we did and
how we did it.
One or two more historical notes are in order. At about the time
that we became suitable for the draft and Nixon was entering into his
peak political years, Liam had, once again, entered into new realms of
thought and action through the sheer nerve of his native intelligence. He
started fashioning such new-fangled materials as rip-stop nylon fabric,
Gore-Tex, Velcro, et al., into customized clothing, lightweight (breath-
able) camping gear, and sundry drawstring duffel and ditty bags, atop
his mother’s sewing machine. By so doing he produced, in effect, an au-
thentically habitable world for himself.
Liam O’Dell went through the rest of high school wrapped (winters)
in a space blanket, fueled on homemade pemmican, and reading people
like Alexis de Tocqueville and James Fenimore Cooper in a pioneer’s

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 reading lives

corner space up in his parents’ unfinished attic. (Summers, substitute

army fatigue cut-offs and tee shirts dyed bivouac olive drab in place of
the Apollo Mission space blanket.)
Informationally, and in other ways as well, the early 1970s prefig-
ured the internet. Vast amounts of information, heretofore beyond the
reach of the masses, became available. The visually compartmental-
ized newsprint portions of Harper’s Magazine and the encyclopedic Whole
Earth Catalog come immediately to mind, as does the collectively-pro-
duced – via the Boston Women’s Health Collectlve – 1970 Our Bodies,
Ourselves. Design-wise, they all accelerated the absorption of informa-
tion from off the printed page in completely innovative ways, which
today’s web pages perforce echo. In conjunction with FM radio, foreign
films, super 8 film, Swinger cameras, stereo records, tape cassettes, early
video, offset printing, the 1976 Freedom of Information Act, and such
empowering movements as Women’s Lib, etc., they revolutionized the
lives of everyone, and youth culture in particular.
Liam seemed magically poised for these developments. If you owned
a ten-speed bike (he did, later) or had money for the subway (we both
did, you could probably ride it for less than a dollar, each way), much
of urban society behaved as one mammoth web site in and of itself. You
just had to establish all the new connections yourself, physically, and in
real time.
And bookstores – especially paperback bookstores – abounded when
Liam and I were at large and book-hungry in the city. Downtown Boston,
for example, might have at one time boasted two bookstores per block,
up and down the length Boylston Street, between Arlington Street and
Massachusetts Avenue, a distance of about a half-mile or more. Now
there is but one store.
The first copy of Studs Lonigan that I ever bought, a still in-print
95-cent Signet paperback edition, was purchased along this bountiful
book route at the still new Prudential Center complex. Studs proved
a genuine highpoint – and my most memorable contribution – in the
reading that Liam and I shared. Pint-size, irascible Studs, from Chi-
cago’s tough South Side, alongside James Fenimore Cooper’s lean
Leatherstocking, six foot Natty Bumppo (but, in truth, Natty B. – a.k.a.
Deerslayer, Hawkeye – always seemed to me more a creation of Liam’s
stoked imagination than Cooper’s) and Henry David Thoreau’s largely
unsung better half, Penobscot Indian guide Joe Polis, capped our work-
ing-middleclass-meets-backwoods literary pantheon with truly stylish
and, what is more, recognizably American sass.
Ultimately, it was a book that came between us or, rather, triggered
the dissolution of our friendship. The title in question, A Thoreau Gazet-
teer, not at a favorite of mine but a useful addition to our H.D.T. shelf

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 reading lives

(I had, in fact, purchased two remaindered copies, one for Liam, one
for myself), raised the question in Liam’s mind as to my motives for
mailing him a copy to own. A genuine act of selfless generosity? Or was
it something else? Et cetera. In retrospect, I suspect that no gift, however
well intentioned, is absolutely without the taint of self-interest or guile,
even if it is only to take undue pleasure in the act of giving. Suffice it to
say, unspoken, unexamined business bested both Liam and myself, to
my enormous and everlasting regret.
I once imagined that a catalog of our shared reading and suburban
education, would be a relatively simple one to compile – encompassing
just ten or twelve books. But, happily, I keep thinking of new books that
can and should be added. Then there are, of course, the books that I
have forgotten. What to do about them? Like a Paul Valéry poem, then,
this personal bibliography would have to be abandoned before it could
be ever finished.
For the record, a few years ago I did accidentally see Liam after being
out of touch with him for some twenty years – in a library. Then he was
gone again, like a vanished book title.

1. Liam O’Dell is a pseudonym.

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 poetry

isobel lusted

Winter, New Town, China (1979)

A rock face
a grey frieze where the knife
slipped
a scramble of snow on the seam
snow
on the ninety steps to go
from the old to the new
frozen spit cabbage leaves
a few
shoes enmeshed in ice
every step a slide.
Coal carrying women pails
slung
across shoulders frail
as early aconite
will come tonight
to the Engish lesson where
the Party Member snoozes
in fur-lined mittens.
A market lane iced
and bitter
a bookshop long and narrow
a single bulb that might
just light
my garden shed
students peering through
a fog of
ideagrams
to the world outside.

73
reading lives

Going to Poetry

Pauline Rowe

I n 1978, above a wool shop in Widnes, a group of eccentric men

(mostly called John) saved my life by reading poetry every week.
I had recently started O levels and on Wednesday evening I would
leave ‘for Poetry’, and no-one at home questioned what I was doing
or why. They were used to my pursuit of words and books. When
I was just five-years old, my mother had used me as a sounding-board
for her revision. Her night-school subjects included English Literature
and Language, History and Economics, and I developed the impression
William Blake’s ‘Tyger’ was somehow connected to the Spinning Jenny.
By the time I was doing O levels, my mother was teaching English Lit-
erature at the school that she had left without any qualifications at the
age of fourteen.
The reading group I attended called itself a Poetry group and was
organised by one of my mother’s colleagues, John W. I think she must
have mentioned the group to me in a moment of impatience. There
was an occasional appearance by a woman called Sue, but typically the
group was made up of John W., John who worked in the Council’s Legal
Department, John J. with his constant cigarettes and passion for visual
art and painting, Stephen, an occasional Dave, and me. John W, in his
mid to late 30s, was the heart of the group.
He was nothing like Robin Williams and this was no Dead Poets
Society. He looked like a young Jim Broadbent and could do a perfect
imitation of Dylan Thomas’s lilting barely Welsh English. He used to
roar with laughter and talk about the decline of the nation in terms
of the desperate state of poetry. He longed for John Berryman or Hart
Crane and told me all about the disappearance of Weldon Kees many
years before Simon Armitage made a film about him. No surprise then,

74
 reading lives

this being in Widnes, and given John W’s favourite poets, that the
rooms above the wool shop were called ‘The Bridge’. At ‘The Bridge’ I
was introduced to writers who have remained companions and even, on
a few precious occasions, saved my life.
When I read Wallace Stevens’ ‘Snowman’ I hear John W’s voice:
For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

When I read Emily Dickinson, I remember how John brought me a twig

from her garden when he visited New England. If I think of Dylan Tho-
mas’s thirtieth year to heaven, I see that small whitewashed room with
its few hopeful readers sitting uncomfortably on plastic chairs and cel-
ebrating life through the words of others.


O may my heart’s truth 

Still be sung 

On this high hill in a year’s turning.

‘The Bridge’ was an arts centre with a compassionate heart. At the

very first meeting, I was taken to a new world in which men loved each
other’s company, conversation and ideas. As I climbed the uncarpet-
ed stairs for the first time I could hear a voice enthusing and laughing.
Deeply self-conscious standing at the open door of the room, I was wel-
comed warmly. John W knew me by sight and started telling me about
Edgar Lee Masters and The Spoon River Anthology – each poem a grave-
stone obituary from the dead of small town America. The room where we
met was newly painted and had frames of alarmingly ugly work by local
painters. There were two large windows with nets facing Albert Road. We
were a few doors away from Big Jim’s nightclub (the patron a local lad
made good via rugby league). Widnes felt still as though the 50s held it by
the scruff of its thick, industrial neck. I knew the place and hated it.
We didn’t call ourselves a Reading group at ‘The Bridge’ but that’s
what we were. I sometimes wonder why those men were so tolerant of
me. I was a confused, bright and deeply unhappy girl who spent many
hours reading poetry. I read D.H. Lawrence and Lawrence Ferlinghet-
ti, re-read William Blake (my first love), Wallace Stevens and William
Carlos Williams. Reading Keats for school remained a separate occupa-
tion. At school, a Liverpool all-girls grammar school run by a French
order of nuns, we learned most through singing; we performed Edward
German’s Merrie England, Britten’s Ceremony of Carols, The Messiah, and we
were always preparing for concerts and prize evenings and special as-
semblies which required choral music. I recall one ditty we sang as part
of choir rehearsal. I still sing it to cheer myself in moments of gloom:

75
 reading lives

I left my pink parasol

On the upper deck
Of a Hammersmith bus
Oh bother! Oh Bother!

Exams were not seen as vital – Oxbridge entrance was virtually

unknown in spite of the cleverness of many of our girls. Within still
living memory, our school had been advertised to the world as ‘A school
for the daughters of gentlemen’. In 1978, Sister Sarah our eager young
literature teacher taught us by dictating pages and pages of pre-pre-
pared notes about Keats. I learned ‘To Autumn’ and ‘La Belle Dame
Sans Merci’ by heart, and struggled with ‘The Eve of St Agnes’. We read
To Kill a Mocking Bird together and discussed Julius Caesar but my abiding
memory is of my aching hand taking dictation as I looked out at the rain
on Princes Park. I didn’t find the deep consolation in Keats at fifteen
that I find now as a middle-aged woman.
The consolation and support of reading was found at ‘The Bridge’. For
reasons too painful to elaborate here, I drifted away from going to poetry
on a Wednesday but never completely abandoned it as long as I lived in
the town (I left when I was 18). That group of poetry-reading men even
included me on visits to ‘The Snig’ a pub in West Bank that they frequent-
ed after the meeting. I took my place securely beside them, listening and
learning and drinking a pint of bitter. There was never a word of censure
or exclusion. No obvious discomfort about my adolescent struggles and
confusion.
John W. was a mentor and friend but I don’t know what became of
him. Unless he uses another name I haven’t seen his poetry in any of
the magazines or journals I read. He is probably best remembered as
a lost hero perpetually laughing and reading, and loving the human-
ity he found and conveyed through poetry. The rooms that served as
a place for people to go if they painted or read, or tried to write, were
converted long ago into a taxi office or upstairs flat and Widnes is now
part of Halton which has the Brindley arts centre in Runcorn. But I
wonder what would happen if my fifteen-year-old ghost wandered into
the Brindley and asked to join a group of men in their 30s to read and
share poetry. It wouldn’t be possible.
John W. introduced me to John Clare and Anne Sexton, Rimbaud
and Christina Rossetti, Robert Lowell and Stevie Smith. His voice was
the first I heard reading the work of Tony Harrison and he was the first
person to listen with patience to my strange adolescent poems without
laughing. He gave me permission to love poetry and to write without
being afraid. He made me write the words of others in my heart so that,
in deep crisis, they came back to save me.

76
 poetry

gary allen

Painting the 1st Presbyterian Church

Where comes a fire in the fierce afternoon

eating up the pavement kerbs, the somnolent
gravestones, the wisps of straw round
the disused petrol pumps – no one is on
the long main street that ends where
the burning sky meets the foot of Slemish.
Tarmac bubbles, sun curtains hang
like striped sails in the doorways, light
flashes from the wing mirrors of a hundred
parked cars. The primer is overpowering
with the smell of cut grass and graveyard
bouquets, a line of holes remain cut
into the plaster from forty years ago –
this could be the early sixties. Wasps fly
in and out from a nest under the eaves.
We are at peace – the painted words
on the fascia board tell us, the tall men
have gone back to their chamber graves,
their ring of hill farms, the catechisms
piled in the windows, the school doors locked.
Miliuc slumbers under the ruins of his fort
on Skerry, Patrick finds God among the rooting
pigs, the linen mill silent as the brush
making long slow sweeps, painting away
the newly dead, the afternoon, history.

77
 poetry

Epitaph

Look at the windows

clouds broken across their faces

the wind feet on pitted stairs –

we have wasted the finest years of our lives

there at the long tables

unable to see the quiet days

of wintry sunshine become night.

Youthful flesh is weak

tears easily on heddle wires, flying shuttles –

on old men:

my grandmother’s friend giving birth

in a stockroom at thirteen

to a fiery bible-preaching layman

who hid Mausers

in the rafters of the carding room

was blown to pieces in France.

Black water crippled their bare feet:

let us meet by the winding sheds

on days like these

my grandmother ninety-three
and always frail

reaching up with the other giggling girls

to gouge their names into the soft plaster

that still remain among the ruins

epitaphs on grave stones, or poems.

78
 poetry

Ornithology

These houses are little better than caves

the small brick blackened by running water
the lintel height not fit for a decent man

and there is my grandfather

almost young again

cycling the country road to his digs in the Sandy Row

fitting out liners that could fill the street

he stops to eat berries from the hedges

to find God in the song of a thrush

before the long descent to the gleaming lough

daydreams of Montreal.

All the women and girls are laughing

walking barefoot to the mills in the sun –

the washing is out

the steps are scrubbed
the men are working

there will be food on the table.

The women and girls eat heels of loaf

drink from bottles of water

a row of chittering birds in the grass

as my grandfather planes wood

behind bolted shipyard gates

marvels at the delicate condition

of the speckled egg in his work pail.

79
CLIVE SINCLAIR
 fiction

the venus mosaic

Clive Sinclair

T ime was when I laid claim to be the finest portrait painter

in the USA, by which I mean the University of St Albans 
of
course. That preeminence came to an abrupt end when
Professor Newbroom took over the Art Department,
and 
announced that Life Drawing was an artisan craft,
unworthy of university study. Besides, he added, what use is portraiture
in an age when selves are fragmented and personalities multiple? If I
wished to retain my position I would have to embrace Conceptual Art.


The process of making thought visible had no appeal. Instead of
Conceptual Art I embraced life itself in the shape of Connie Hanks,
Connie Hanks of Malmesbury, a member of the Wiltshire family which
had gifted the New World the great Abe Lincoln (mine had blown in
from elsewhere, like an easterly).

Oh for the balm of Malmesbury, that most ancient of cities. Most
English too, if I may say. How its very name rolls around my tongue
like a boiled sweet, leaving a taste of marmalade and mulled wine. My
wife’s dowry was a house on its High Street, which in a previous exist-
ence had been the Bear Inn. After our marriage she resigned her post
as head of history at Beaumont, and together we sought a new life in
the west.
 

By 1981, the year our only child was born, we had stripped away
most of the soiled patina of the fifties – linoleum, false ceilings – to

81
 fiction

reveal the pine floors and oaken beams beneath. Our bedroom, located
in the former attic, filled with dawn light on summer mornings. No
sleeper I, it was my delight to watch the sun butter my wife’s face. As
it rose higher her hair turned as golden as ripening wheat. Her eyes –
when she opened them – were as blue as cornflowers. It was the very
picture and image of my happiness. However, my wife was not always
comfortable with the intensity of my gaze. Once she even went so far as
to say: ‘That look of yours feels like a pillow on my face.’

In those early years we lived off the income that came from com-
missions I received to portray the ladies of the 
Beaufort Hunt. It was
from Lady X herself I learned that Prince Charles was going to bring his
new bride to 
Highgrove House in neighbouring Tetbury. Though sworn
to secrecy I passed on the news to my wife, whose indifference matched
my own. Even so, the presence of the royals, invisible to us, began to
exert a significant influence upon our own lives. Strangers began to
stare at my wife in the street, especially when her pregnancy began to
show. One even sneaked a photograph. Only when a tabloid ran a story
labelled ‘Exclusive’, and headlined, ‘England Expects’, 
did the penny
drop. My wife was Princess Di¹s double. And the hapless paparazzi had
snapped and sold a photo of the wrong twin.
 

Urged on by her friends my wife joined the books of an agency which
specialised in celebrity look-alikes. Why not? The extra money paid for
our child’s nanny, and for our annual trip to Italy, where my mother-in-
law owned a villa on the Amalfi coast.
 

It was a sight more substantial than the ruin we helped unearth in
a field outside Kingscote, on the Cotswold escarpment, just a few miles
beyond Tetbury. A shared love of Roman history meant that my wife
and the dig’s 
director soon became as thick as thieves. Me he called ‘the
miserable sod’.
We turned what seemed like tons of the stuff and were
eventually rewarded with a mosaic pavement. At the centre of which
was a medallion featuring a female bust assumed to be Venus. Her head
was tilted to the left, the better to examine her reflection in the oval
mirror she was holding aloft.
 

An entrance to a hypocaust, more or less intact, was found beside
an adjoining room. The director claimed the privilege of being the first
to enter. Someone handed him a torch, and he penetrated the narrow
aperture on his belly. Soon only the soles of his shoes were visible, and
then they too were swallowed by the underworld. He returned breath-
less with excitement. My wife insisted upon seeing what he had seen.
He did not discourage her. Within moments the space once occupied by
Connie was transparent. All that remained was the echo of her voice
calling enthusiastically: ‘I must be below the Venus mosaic.’ And the
rest, it seemed, was silence, until from deep beneath our feet: ‘I cannot

82
 fiction

breathe!’ The director pulled her out, feet first, like a country vet.
 

Our growing child, I’m glad to say, preferred the living thing, his
grandmother’s villa over in Italy. Unlocking the door, after our return
from the sixteenth consecutive visit, I heard the telephone ring. ‘Bring
up the cases,’ I 
said to the teenager who was following in my footsteps,
and unencumbered ascended the stairs at a run. ‘Hello,’ I
 said, snatch-
ing up the receiver. A man with an over-pronounced French accent
asked to parler avec ma belle femme. ’Connie,’ I called, ‘it’s your lover.’


That was the Deputy Head of Security at the Ritz in Paris, she re-
ported afterwards. ‘He wants me to check into the hotel at the end of
the month, when Diana is due to spend one night there with her Dodi.
My role will be to act as a decoy to keep the paparazzi off the scent
of their real quarry.’ The Ritz. Now the word sticks in my craw like a
broken cracker. But at the time I advised her to take the job. My wife
telephoned but once from France. ’You should see what they’ve done to
me,’ she said. ‘Even I can’t tell the difference. If there is such a thing
as a perfect counterfeit I am it.’ They said it was Princess Diana they
were burying that August, but since that day my wife has been officially
listed as a missing person.


83
essay

defining the literary

Philip Davis

O f course for most of my working life, the formal

study of literature in schools and universities
has been a disaster-area. The ‘literary’ has been
hi-jacked for the use of other disciplines as if
in its vulnerable shame it had no discipline of
its own. And so for thirty years in universities it has been appropriated
for social and political purposes, mainly the soft left pretending to be
hard enough through the use of fiction, and thus literature is sacrificed
for the sake of gender and agenda alike. For a long time you wouldn’t
have thought that ‘the literary’ challenged conventional categories and
frameworks, through the individuality of praxis, and by the relatively
unprogrammed nature of a thinking-out into language that does not
know in advance the route that it is taking. Literary venturing does not
know in advance – in the way that ideological opinionatedness emphat-
ically does know beforehand.
And now am I pleased that at long last that unliterary appropria-
tion may be coming to a close? Am I pleased that we have the critical
turn of something like Derek Attridge’s famous recent critical work The
Singularity of Literature? Am I happy when I read in that book that litera-
ture ‘solves no problems and saves no souls’, is not predictable enough
‘to serve a political or moral programme’, and thus is not susceptible to

84
 essay

an instrumental approach that seeks ‘to comprehend the text by relat-

ing it to known and fixed parameters and values’. If we are not literary,
says Attridge, we risk generalizing a book’s uniqueness, ‘transforming
its performativity into a static paradigm’? But no, I am not pleased, I
remain unhappy in the profession, because when Attridge praises the
‘elusive pleasures’ of the literary, what I see is an equal and opposite error, in
the danger of a return to the old prim aestheticism. I do not want to rid
myself of the instrumentalist’s purposive question: what is this for? how
can I use the literary? I hate every form of formal institutionalism which
says that a practice exists justifiably by means of its own internal reasons:
I hate the idea that there is no external challenge and purpose. My sort
of readers go to the literary, not as in art for art’s sake, for elusive pleas-
ures, but naively or stupidly expecting every time to find something (yes)
that might save their souls, something that has referential relation to the
imaginable world, to human life, and to themselves. Rightly thwarted,
properly complicated, proven again and again to be grossly over-simpli-
fied, nonetheless that primary purpose remains and should remain if the
literary is not to make itself secondary, inhabiting as fictional a refuge as
Plato’s cave. At some primary level John Ruskin hated the way that litera-
ture would not be straightforward and could not say directly all it meant:
‘I cannot quite see the reason of this,’ says Ruskin, ‘nor analyse that cruel
reticence in the breasts of wise men which makes them always hide their
deeper thought. They do not give it you by way of help, but of reward,
and will make themselves sure that you want it and deserve it before
they allow you to reach it.’ Literature may do some of its good work in
refusing to write life off, by reduction to paraphrase. But the first quality
of literature is not that it is or needs to be elusive: we don’t go to it for it
to be elusive. We go to reading, I say, because of problems with living; we
seek communication through writing because of the failure, the impossi-
bility or the evanescence of direct spoken communication. I repeat: some
literary obstacles are necessary to ward off reductive paraphrase, but if
writings are substitutes for primary purposes in life, as I believe they are,
all the more reason to retain that lost primary drive that lies behind their
substitute-creation and not forget it in the subsequent specialization of
the art. What is literature for? No to literature existing merely for the sake
of politics. But No too to literature existing purely for its own sake.
Let’s be clear: none of this is my fault. It is not me being ambivalent
about ‘the literary’, it is about a series of misalignments that has left the
literary badly askew. The problem therefore is not so much about defining
the literary as correctly positioning it, finding its place. For that reason I
want to go back in time to some clearer points of origin or orientation.
In 1873 in Literature and Dogma, Matthew Arnold launched an attack
on Biblical fundamentalists by making a crucial distinction between the

85
 essay

literal and the literary. The literalists, he insisted, were bad readers, even
of their own Bible, because they did not realize that many of its utter-
ances were not so much like facts of science or laws of exact knowledge
but terms of poetry, terms ‘thrown out, so to speak, at a not fully grasped
object of the speaker’s consciousness’. These approximative efforts at
the meaning of the unknown were literary terms, not literal ones. In
particular the utterances of Christ, says Arnold, ‘are put in such a way
that his hearer was led to take each rule or fact of conduct by its inward
side, its effect on the heart and character; then the reason of the thing,
the meaning of what had been mere matter of blind rule, flashed upon
him.’ You would think the disciples were right in telling the woman
with the alabaster box of ointment not to waste pouring it on the head
of Christ but to go sell it and give the proceeds to the poor; you would
think they were literally following Christ’s own injunctions. But all too
literally, not inwardly; it was the way of the anticipated outward letter,
not of the inner spirit. Jesus said ‘Let her alone, why trouble ye her? She
hath wrought a good work upon me. For ye have the poor always with
you; but me ye have not always.’
But that brings me to another, alternative point of entry, over 300
years earlier. In 1528, in The Obedience of a Christian Man, on the other
hand, William Tyndale – assuredly no bad reader of a Bible which he
himself translated into the vernacular – protested that the literal is the
spiritual. For all the supposedly higher allegorical readings of the Bible,
‘Thou shalt understand, therefore, that the scripture hath but one sense,
which is the literal sense. And that literal sense is the root and ground
of all [other senses]… If thou leave the literal sense, thou canst not but
go out of the way.’ It is not only the translation into the vernacular, it
is also the Incarnation itself that means nothing, if the embodiment of
spiritual meaning in the ordinarily human is not supposed sufficient.
There is something real out there, in here, which the language is liter-
ally and committedly pointing towards. When I read in Cranmer’s 1559
Book of Common Prayer:
We have left undone those thinges whiche we ought to have
done; And we have done those thinges which we ought not to
have done; And there is no health in us.

that basic word ‘thinges’ means something, just as much as the basic
‘un’ and the ‘not’ and the ‘no’ and the ‘ands’ literally do. As a reader, it
does not seem to matter that I am not formally a Christian, and maybe
not what is called in the categories of the world ‘religious’. But the liter-
ary finds us, whatever we think we think, whatever we think we are.
It’s not difficult to put the positions of Arnold and Tyndale into op-
position – to dismiss each in the eyes of the other as dogmatic early

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Calvinist and moralized latter-day Aesthete – literal versus literary. Nor

is it difficult to historicize that opposition, to explain it historically in
terms of a religious sixteenth century and an increasingly godless nine-
teenth century. But this is not, I believe, what we do in the right exercise
of ‘the literary’, meaning by that term an event in the moment of reading.
I am not talking about an ahistorical timelessness here. I am talking
about the way in which both Tyndale and Arnold are part of our inher-
itance. I say ‘our’ though perhaps every man and woman must work
out the specifics of their own inheritance in terms of the books that find
them, books that ring bells, fire synapses, and make us think involun-
tarily, ‘That must be where I got this from’ or ‘This I recognize somehow

“No Truth Without Poetry. No Poetry Without Truth.”

as if it were a hidden part of my memory and make-up, or something
I need for a future’. For by inheritance here I mean something of what
Alasdair MacIntyre means in his fine book After Virtue. There he refers
to the modern almost biological sense of a rich confusion of different
and often ill-sorted cultural genes in us, arising out of an uneasy jumble
of fragmented traditions and languages. I am only interested in those
of you – frankly – who feel that both Tyndale and Arnold are somehow
right on the literal/literary, or rather that something in you responds to
both, at a level deeper than the externalized simplicities of historical
contrast or ideological opposition. When Blake says ‘Everything possi-
ble to be believed is an image of Truth,’ when Keats says, ‘Every point of
thought is the centre of an intellectual world’, I think they well describe
the act of reading, throwing oneself into thoughts that seem separately
true in the absolute moment of their happening and yet extraordinarily
difficult to integrate thereafter.
To find the place of the literary, our problems are structural or, more
specifically, syntactical. For the literary is a distinct discipline in so far
as it offers a syntactic holding-ground for those who, for example,
want neither to separate the literary from the literal nor allow indi-
vidual nuance and tone and verbal care to suffer and collapse at the
hands of broad-brush reductionists; and furthermore do not wish to be
merely wishy-washy in between. Our problems are syntactical. I am
thinking here of that slogan that I believe J. H. Prynne formulated with
Charles Olson: No Truth Without Poetry. No Poetry Without Truth. In
between those two is the space for everything that needs to be thought.
Or again Samuel Beckett in a letter to Harold Hobson, which is one
of my favourites, in pointing to some sentences from St Augustine on
the crucifixion: ‘Then were there two thieves crucified with him, one
on the right hand, and another on the left.’ One the crowd released;

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the other suffered Christ’s fate. Says Augustine: ‘Do not despair; one
of the thieves was saved.’ But also: ‘Do not presume; one of the thieves
was damned.’ Beckett says what interests him it is the silent shape of
the idea created between ‘Do not presume’ and ‘Do not despair’. Some-
where and somehow between these two, according to their connected
law, all mankind must work out their way, alone, in the dark of double
negatives. What is created here is a sort of gene pool of human possi-
bility and risk. Ultimately one person was saved, one damned, and the
two came out separately in terms of character and story. But before that
outcome, the thought of being either of them, of feeling anything and
everything in between the emotions of confidence and despair, creates
the life-spectrum or gene pool of all the subsequent reality which then
happens to happen to you, personally, more narrowly and specifically. It
is easy to have one thought or one feeling – presumption or despair –
and be just one fixed person: it gets more serious when you can imagine
having either, both, and the rival fates assigned to them.
And that is what our discipline exists first of all to do – in the words
of the great George MacDonald on Wordsworth: ‘When Nature puts a
man into that mood or condition in which thoughts come of themselves
– that is perhaps the best thing that can be done for us.’ It is what

“The teaching profession made ‘close’ reading

seem like something Mr Magoo does,
through pebbled glasses.”

Nature did for Wordsworth, it is what Wordsworth does for us: put us
into the space, the place where the thoughts come out of. So I say for
shorthand: not names, not themes, but places.
For the great literary moment is not just to create the two great sen-
tences as Augustine does, but rather to inhabit, mine, and work within
the space that is opened up by them. That is the saturated space for your
thought, a place to do thinking in created in front of your eyes, a medi-
tative holding-ground charging itself or filling up in front of you. Here
is another of my favourite passages which I think of and often use. The
poet David Constantine, a great regular in The Reader, is helpful when he
describes what it is like, on sitting down, to have at the back of his mind
some pre-existent adumbration of the poem he wants to write and then
to have to try to match and realize it on the page before him:
Trying to write a poem, the space you are staring into will in the
end, if you are lucky, begin to fill with words. The space becomes
a shape. But you need to be quite peculiarly lucky. The words
taking shape may be the wrong words. They may be in the way

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 essay

of, not on the way towards the poem. They may actually make
it less likely that you will ever get where you feel you want to
get. Then you would prefer the space to the shape, blankness to
fullness, if the words coming in are wrong and in the way.

I spoke at the beginning of the literary as a ‘thinking out into lan-

guage’ – it is of course John Henry Newman’s definition of style. What
I love there is the ‘out’ and the ‘into’ in the almost visibly struggling
interchange between mind and language registered in the midst of the
formation of sentences. With Constantine, writers are situated between
the pre-verbal structurings at the back of the mind and what they seek
to make of them on the page before their eyes. The writer is trying to
make the two click together, resonate, seeking a two-way correspond-
ence and reciprocal modification between them. And it is when this
does not work that the writer feels the words are only replacing the dim
thoughts or getting in their way. Or, again, he or she feels the syntax
not so much creating the room, the niche, the triggering contour for
the words to come into being, but rather pre-empting or cajoling or
distorting them. It may indeed be impossible, but in some imaginary
brain-imaging of the future, it would be truly wonderful to see the two
mental levels – the unwritten and the written – moving together and
apart, mapping onto and composing each other.
What these dense utterances offer is not just a language for thinking
about things, where knowledge is but the dry residue of experience, but
a way of thinking within the inferred structure of things, in the midst
of the space created between hope and despair, virtue and fault. There
thought lies in what Shakespeare in Troilus and Cressida calls ‘its dumb
cradles’ – between ‘do not despair’ and ‘do not presume’. That is how
literature is a syntactic force-field, a melting-pot, containing within
itself not merely opinions or arguments but the very sites or places that
thoughts must come out of.
But when the teaching profession began to call it ‘close reading’, it
had already given up on it. It made attentive reading seem like some-
thing Mr Magoo does, through pebbled glasses. But the literary has
to do with precisely human sentences and the shapes they make as
they follow upon each other; it has to with individual utterances, with
persons thinking out into language. ‘There must be some way,’ said the
Victorian F. D. Maurice, ‘of uttering ourselves without talking about
ourselves.’ The literary is that way: it is the way of signalling all that
a person means, really means and not just deliberately so, in resonant
context. The literary is – final go at defining it – the height of what the
philosophers call ‘qualia’, the felt inner this-ness of our mental lives.

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GOOD BOOKS

REVIEWS

Julius Winsome by Gerard Donovan

faber and faber, 2008
ISBN 978-0571235377
A man lives in a cabin in the woods of northern Maine. Inside, the walls
are lined with 3282 books. When he finds his dog shot he takes up his
late father’s Lee Enfield rifle and begins a series of revenge killings.
This is a highly surprising, disturbing and intensely thought-provoking
novel about loss, instinct, war and the language of communication. It is
hard to get this very good book out of your mind.
Here only short sentences and long thoughts can survive…
Distances collapse, time is thrown out. Children skate their
names on ponds, sleds drag dogs in front of them. People defeat
winter by reading out the nights, spinning pages a hundred
times faster than a day turns, small cogs revolving a larger one
through all those months. The winter is fifty books long and
fixes you to silence like a pinned insect; your sentences fold
themselves into single words, the hand of twelve makes one
hand of time. Every glance ends in snow. Every footstep sinks
North. That’s time in Maine, the white of time.

Angela Macmillan

A Winter Book by Tove Jansson

Sort of Books, 2006
ISBN 978-0954899523

The creator of the Moomins wrote for adults in the later years of her
life and this book collects stories many of which have been unavailable
in English for nearly forty years. In ‘The Squirrel’ an old woman lives
alone on an island with a squirrel: ‘Dogs are dangerous, they mirror
everything, instantly, they’re superficial, compassionate beasts. A squir-
rel’s better.’ In ‘Parties’ the child comments on her parents’ friends: ‘A
pal never says anything that’s worth repeating the following day. He
just feels that nothing is so important at the time‘. There’s nothing kept
back and nothing that can be saved, and that is experience.
Sarah Coley
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 Letters
Dear Reader,
I wanted to tell you about my work as a Library and Information Worker
and to share our success story here in Dundee. In the past few years, the
scope of library work has expanded, with greater emphasis being placed
on the delivery of library resources to special needs groups, embracing
people with a wide diversity of learning and physical disabilities.
We run weekly sessions for these groups in which the aim is to
connect to the individuals – so rather than just reading a story to them,
we want them to become involved in the stories and the storytelling
process. This can be achieved by something as simple as having them
choose a story that they would like to hear, or deciding on options within
a story to dictate how the story unfolds.
We use stories to encourage skills ranging from visual tracking,
making choices, selecting items and storylines, to discussing the story
and answering questions about it. Each story is accompanied by rele-
vant artefacts, such as puppets, shells, fruit, flowers, soaps and seaweed.
These aromatic and tactile props are particularly important to members
of the groups who have visual impairments, or are blind, and have to
rely on their other senses. Particular interests are also catered for; these
could include topics of local significance, such as the football teams,
places of interest, or historic events.
Staff, carers and relatives, as well as the members of the groups
themselves, have noticed a marked improvement in concentration
spans, from initial visits, many can now maintain attention for the du-
ration of the story and experience a greater anticipation of storylines.
Other developments include significant advances in eye and finger
pointing, responding positively to stimuli, choosing between a numbers
of objects and manipulating objects.
Group work has now becomes an integral and rewarding part of the
job for the library staff who work with the groups. Such is the success of
this initiative that Dundee City Council has received funding to provide
a new facility to make libraries more accessible to vulnerable people.
This support area will provide, not only a dedicated area for the group
sessions to take place for people with learning and physical disabilities,
but also, it will provide various activities for young mothers, and those
in recovery from addiction. It’s rewarding and important work.
Maureen Hood
Dundee

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Readers connect
with

Oxford World’s classics

Thomas Hardy
Far from the madding crowd

William Boldwood, a rich gentleman farmer, appears to be a man of

immense solidity. But when he receives a Valentine message from the
beautiful but capricious Bathsheba Everdene, what to her was a joke is
to him a sexual bombshell. That steady dull stillness in him which pre-
viously characterised him was in fact the result of ‘the perfect balance
of enormous antagonistic forces – positives and negatives in fine ad-
justment. His equilibrium disturbed, he was in extremity at once. If
an emotion possessed him at all, it ruled him.’
The whole novel (first published in 1874) is like this – thrown out
of balance and into extremity by sexual forces. For what Bathsheba
has stirred in Boldwood is precisely what the charismatically amoral
Sergeant Frank Troy had earlier released in her through a hypnotis-
ing display of swordmanship. Meanwhile the only
figure who continues to represent that dogged, loyal
steadiness which the others forsake is Gabriel Oak,
a ruined sheep-farmer who becomes Bathsheba’s
farm-manager and is the poor third amongst her
admirers. What is remarkable is the strange pat-
terning that results from this erotic possession – a
sort of chaotic order in the overlapping triangles of
rivalry: Troy-Bathsheba-Boldwood; Oak-Bathsheba-
Troy; Bathsheba-Troy-Fanny Robin (Troy’s previous
deserted love). “We seem to have shifted our posi-
tions,’ says Boldwoood to Oak. ‘Our moods meet
in the wrong places’ says Bathsheba to Boldwood.
These configurations flash into being, like the light-
ning in the storm scenes suddenly showing the
characters to themselves in dark silhouettes. So it
is when Bathsheba sees her husband Troy contritely
bending over the dead body of Fanny Robin who was bearing his child,
and gently kissing her lips, ‘as one would kiss an infant asleep to avoid
awakening it’ – then Bathsheba cries out:
‘Don’t – don’t kiss them! . . . I love you better than she did: kiss
me too, Frank – kiss me! You will, Frank, kiss me too.’
This is the novel that established Hardy as a major writer of human
emotion.
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 THE jury
Jo Cannon is a Sheffield GP and short story writer
This book trundled along until I adjusted to the cum-
bersome sentences, ponderous humour (mostly at
the expense of quaint working class characters) and
weighty voice-over, but then I was hooked. The miser-
able vulnerability and destructive dramas induced by
the altered mental state of love are timeless. Towards
the end the action gets exciting, and the unassuming
hero satisfyingly gets the chastened, morally im-
proved girl. The descriptions of weather and scenery
are great.
***
Lynne Hatwell (dovegreyreader) is a Devon-based com-
munity nurse
Reading this book again has been like having an old
lifelong friend to stay – the same but with the passing
years comes renewed understanding and something
unnoticed suddenly commands my attention. As I get
older do Gabriel and Bathsheba seem to be getting
younger? Always a supreme joy to read this book,
possibly my favourite Hardy. 
It is almost as beautiful
as the star-studded sky that captures Gabriel’s gaze.
Please read this book at least once your life.
*****
Eleanor McCann, is an English student at Liverpool Uni
and an assistant editor of The Reader magazine

WILL BE ELEANOR’s COMMENT AND PICTURE

INSTEAD

Drummond Moir, once of Edinburgh, works for a London-

based publisher
Beautifully written, gripping, infuriating – and a
masterful exploration of life’s almosts, what-ifs and
nearlys. Whatever your opinions of Gabriel (saint),
Boldwood (agonising), Troy (repented too late) and
Bathsheba (awful, but repented just in time – hurrah!),
you can’t help but get immersed in their tragic yet
moving stories. I’m a huge fan of Hardy’s poetry; Far
from the Madding Crowd is definitely a good place to start
if you’re even remotely intrigued by the novels.
****
STAR RATINGS
*****  one of the best books I’ve read   **  worth reading
****  one of the best I’ve read this year   *  not for me but worth trying
***  highly recommended   0  don’t bother

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your recommendations

the old Poem

Andrew Marvell,
‘the mower to the glow-worms’

John Scrivener

1
Ye living lamps, by whose dear light
The nightingale does sit so late,
And studying all the summer night,
Her matchless songs does meditate;

2.
Ye country comets, that portend
No war, nor prince’s funeral,
Shining unto no higher end
Than to presage the grass’s fall;

3.
Ye glow-worms, whose officious flame
To wandering mowers shows the way,
That in the night have lost their aim,
And after foolish fires do stray;

4.
Your courteous lights in vain you waste,
Since Juliana here is come,
For she my mind hath so displaced
That I shall never find my home.

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 your recommendations

The opening picture strikes us as slightly comical: we think of birds as

producing their song in a spontaneous and unpremeditated way, yet here
the nightingale burns the midnight oil while he labours at his composi-
tion. The smile comes partly from the poet, surely, who has to work hard
at his verses, though he might prefer them to seem effortless. Marvell
creates a miniature world in the first three stanzas which address the
glow-worms. It is a genial little world of neighbourly offices and courte-
sy. The glow-worms provide light to the mower returning from work and
to the student alike, ‘courteous’ and ‘officious’ (‘officious’ meaning not
meddlesome but efficient and even solicitous). This world, which em-
braces ordinary rural work but also art and learning, is seen as inherently
natural, since the glow-worms do what they can’t help. In their role as
tiny rustic comets they ‘portend / No war, nor prince’s funeral’, no great
convulsions, but only the fall of grass (‘no higher end’ because princes
have a long way to fall, but grass hasn’t, being near the ground).
The events of the big world seem to be at a remote distance here,
things heard and known of in a general way but which don’t affect you.
But if this poem, as seems likely, was written by Marvell during the time
he spent at Nun Appleton in Yorkshire as tutor to Sir Thomas Fairfax’s
daughter, the words would have had a much more specific charge – only
a year or so before a prince’s head had been cut off, and the country
convulsed with civil war. In this period following the King’s execution
in 1649, men retired to ponder lessons and lick wounds – Jeremy Taylor
writing Holy Living and Holy Dying at Goldengrove, Hobbes his Leviathan
in Paris. Perhaps men had ‘lost their aim’and strayed after ‘foolish fires’.
A contemporary reader would not have missed the oblique presence in
the poem of these references.
In the poem’s world things unravel in the final stanza, when all the
elements which have been kept at bay by the kindly work of the glow-
worms – the darkness in which no man can work, the commotions
portended by real comets, the danger of losing your way – are brought
back by the main verb we now discover we’ve been waiting for: ‘Your
courteous lights in vain you waste’. Juliana, love for whom will derange
the mower, is a purely conventional figure, but she gains weight from
the political sub-text: this microcosm can be thrown out of joint too, and
the feeling of displacement in a world turned upside down is focused in
the closing word ‘home’. How to find one’s way back? What if a country
ceases in some bewildering way to be its own home?
The effect of pregnancy is enhanced by Marvell’s characteristic use
of the tetrameter. English poetry naturally tends to four main stresses
in the line, so when the verse is four-footed there is no slack. There is a
kind of buttoned effect: ‘I might say more but won’t’. (Aubrey says of
Marvell: ‘Though he loved wine he would never drink hard in company,
and was wont to say, that “he would not play the good-fellow in any
man’s company, in whose hands he would not trust his life”’.)

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your regulars

our spy in NY
on meeting Ben Jonson

Enid Stubin

I n the holiday season you can find me wending my way from one
academic party to the next, collecting slights, snubs, and sneers as
I go. Thursday evening’s fête at my home school, for which I waited
around The Store the entire day, did not disappoint. Colleagues in
sparkly Lurex sweaters appraised each other warily, and someone
who had shot past tenure and promotion with the shared publication of
a prepositional phrase accepted my congratulations with queenly poise.
Told that she looked wonderful, she graciously concurred, announcing
that she’d just separated from her husband. Someone else in the depart-
ment gauged how long I’d wait just outside a crescent of comrades to
greet him and then, before I could pipe up, sauntered off to the sushi
station (thunder of God, we have a multicultural menu), assured of his
deft maneuvering. Hail fellow, well met.
The next night held a double header: the dean’s reception at Baruch,
where the head of the psychology department, a fellow I’ve always
liked, suddenly displayed a bewildered sense of who I was, asking after
my daughter. Half a declarative sentence into my explanation that the
kid he’d seen me pushing in a stroller was not my own, he ambled off
in search of – who knows? I sallied downtown to New York University’s
party for the School of Continuing and Professional Studies. The place
was so crammed that no one at the coat room would accept my trench,
briefcase, or umbrella, but I was offered my choice of chocolate bar –
milk or dark, to match my mood, as it happened – and a do-it-yourself
identification tag. Suddenly shy, I took off, pausing only to salute the

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 your regulars

program administrator who’d tipped a terrible teaching observation into

my personnel file. Furious at the time, I left off my outraged response
when it reached four pages and desisted. Now, of course, I looked cool,
too disinterested to cavil about pedagogical differences. I could bide my
time, especially accompanied by Brenda Lee warbling ‘The Jingle Bell
Rock,’ and give the Buffalo chicken wings a miss.
But it was pouring out, and the closest bus I could catch ran along
University Place. Hustling past Number 19, which houses the English
department offices, I caught a glimpse of a familiar head dipped to
accommodate the opening of a collapsible umbrella – a linguistics spe-
cialist I hadn’t seen for years. He recognized me and began chatting
happily in the vestibule until, with Faustian accuracy, I asked after my
dissertation adviser. ‘Right behind you,’ my interlocutor warned. And
indeed, there were the dyspeptic scowl and grudged greeting of a veri-
table Scrooge for the post-postmodern era. Clearly undelighted to see
me, he growled ‘Happy Chanukah’ and shoved past toward the door.
Stunned despite myself, I stomped off along University Place, my own
Boulevard of Deferred, if not quite Broken, Dreams, after the M3 bus,
which I’d just missed.
All of which is by way of chronicling my attachment to Ben Jonson,
that bad boy of social satire, the Big Kahuna of Renaissance Postclas-
sicalism. This is the tale of our meeting. Our first real contact. I was
reviewing seven hundred years of literature for the doctoral compre-
hensives – three days of exams in which the top of one’s head is lifted
off and a committee peers in – and determined to take the procedure
seriously, something I had most demonstrably avoided throughout my
coursework. I set aside two months from freelance copyediting and
waitressing to present myself at the red-brick monolith of Bobst Library
six days a week at 11:00 a.m. with a canvas bag filled with books, notes,
and a litre of Vintage seltzer, my favored brand. Never having registered
for a course in Old or Middle English, I needed to teach myself Period
One and slogged through The Dream of the Rood and Piers Plowman. Period
Two began with more familiar fare, the Renaissance, and my progress
quickened. I knew the authors and works on the bruise-colored typed
and mimeographed list. I ticked off Shakespeare, Plays and Sonnets
shortly after the Fourth of July, and opened The Alchemist in the slender
green New Mermaid edition to read Subtle’s challenge: ‘I fart at thee.’ I
was halted in my tracks. I was home.
I had read Jonson’s plays in a course on Elizabethan and Jacobean
drama with a wonderful Renaissance scholar, but revisiting them at the
battered library table during my grim summer of cramming gave me
my first moments of unalloyed pleasure in his company. Of course it
had been a joy to take in Shakespeare, but Jonson was so much more

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 your regulars

acidulous, scabrous, outrageous. Drawing from Plautine comedy and

his own teeming resentments as the bricklayer’s stepson, the day-stu-
dent at Westminster School – the un-Shakespeare – he had to pace
himself against the favorites, the darlings. Jonson’s world of cheats and
the cheated exposes a swirling society in which negotiations include
the gimlet-eyed acknowledgment of class attainment and its subver-
sion. His [low?] characters Subtle, Face, and Dol Common establish
the ‘venture tripartite’ of The Alchemist and take over Lovewit’s London
house while the master is away in the countryside; Volpone creates his
own whirlgig of would-be cozeners around him, using Mosca to fetch
and choreograph the dance of greed, flattery, and [ ] that circles
him like one of Jonson’s own masques for the court of King James.
No one in Jonson’s world really knows his or her place. The energies
and exasperations of the plays (‘I don’t have time to flatter you now,’ a
rushed-off-his-feet Mosca reminds the recumbent Volpone) suggest the
exuberance and appetite of their author, not only his quickness to take
umbrage but also his generosity and amplitude.
And then there are the poems, among which luminous evocations of
camaraderie and warmth, conviviality and [ ], jostle alongside
Juvenalian flailings, derisive caricatures, and couplets that simply snuff
their subjects out of existence. Through the body of his work looms the
vast figure of Jonson himself, all twenty-stone of ‘mountaine belly’ and
‘rockie face,’ anxious about who might be counting his drinks at the
table of the great and endorsing the most liberal hospitality himself.
After my sullen summer of cramming and the sodden anticlimax of the
exams themselves, when I never knew so much so pointlessly, I turned
to Bartholomew Fair and the masques and the Epigrams to find a Jonson
who bestrides the world, if not quite as a Colossus, then certainly as
a Rabelaisian figure and, despite his upholding of brevitas, emblem of
copia. In the masque Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue, Comus, the belly-god, is
heralded: ‘Room, room! Make room for the bouncing belly, / First father
of sauce, and deviser of jelly,’ ‘the father of farts.’
The image of Jonson at the end of his life, old and ill, paralyzed by
a stroke and defiant, is an unbearable one. I’d like to imagine him com-
forted by the tierce of canary wine allotted to him by King Charles, by
‘a little winter love in a dark corner,’ and by the assurance that the body
of his artistry, The Workes of Benjamin Jonson, would endure. The biog-
rapher David Riggs writes, ‘If Jonson flourishes today, at a time when
authoritarian modes of interpretation appear to be increasingly bank-
rupt, it is probably because of the powerfully subversive streak that led
him to seek the shelter of authorship in the first place. He comes near
to us not as a father or a judge, but as a chronic transgressor who lived
to tell the tale.’

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 your regulars

silver threads among the dross

Jane Davis

The world is too much with us; late and soon,

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
William Wordsworth

L et’s start where we are: December 2008, Primark, Liverpool,

European Capital of Culture, and this it: in this huge flag-
ship church of the cheap and chuckable, the shoppers are
as determined as a football crowd. Men, women and chil-
dren are pressed together, talking, eating, shouting into
mobiles, crying in pushchairs, holding hands in the thronging aisles,
being searched by store detectives, putting earrings to their ears, clutch-
ing clothes and bags of clothes. There is too much stuff, and it is all very
cheap, girls kick tried-on shoes out of the way and laugh at their actions
– aren’t we awful – but no one is picking them up. A woman, perhaps
Somalian, in African dress, looks puzzled as the girls laugh at the shoes.
The woman has two or three large Primark bags in either hand. Almost
everyone looks angry, fed-up, anxious.
‘He said go upstairs, everyone’s there’ cries a boy aged about nine
to a woman who looks like his grandmother, and she looks angry and
then I see that the boy is angry too. He’s been lost. I imagine how it

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 your regulars

feels to be lost in this huge chaos of stuff. Two Chinese girls are trying
to take a tourist photo of their friend beside the donkey jackets. ‘He
said go upstairs’, the boy scowls and swears at the woman whose face
is hardening even as she turns away from him. The Chinese girls laugh
and speak to each other in high-pitched voices, flashing their cameras.
‘He said everyone’s there’, the boy repeats. I imagine the whole family
in the shop, shopping on a Saturday. The boy turns violently away from
the woman. He’d rather get lost again, his little thin shoulders hunched
against it all. You can see his feelings pouring out of him; hurt, anger, a
settled lack of satisfaction. It’s what he expects.
After my trip to Primark, at a putative after-school reading club, I
meet Stacey, Cara and Mica, aged twelve. Two of the children, Stacey
and Cara, are very bight kids, keen to engage me in conversation and
good at telling stories, but with a reading age of about seven, or less, I’d
say. Mica, hunched self-protectively inside her own body, looking out
from her eyes like child in a cave, is more troubled and less obviously
bright but still with a sly human intelligence that means she ends up
with the book she wanted to take home in her bag. Mica does not read
at all during the session, perhaps she can’t read. Still, she wanted to
take the book home, and told me her Mum would read it to her.
These were bottom-set children in an inner city school which has
raised its standards of attainment enormously in the last couple of
years.
The girls had virtually no relation to books. Not only were their own
literacy skills poor, but the whole sense of why you might read at all was
almost entirely missing. (An exception: Stacey had read The BFG and
she loved it, pounced on it when she saw it in the pile, an old friend. It
was interesting that she, who had this history of knowing a book, was
the most likely of the three of them to participate in the play with the
books we had brought) As for concentration: no, none, not possible, not
in the range at all. They can flit, they can chatter, they can dance for a
few seconds, but concentration isn’t a skill they possess. This must be,
at least partially, due to their lack of literacy. Reading asks us to be still
and to wait. I had the sense that nothing and no one had ever asked
these kids to do that.
During the course of our two hour session we played with twenty or
so books we had brought with us, looked at pictures, read sentences out,
made weak and sugary cups of tea, ate many biscuits, washed up and
chatted, I saw Stacey make a reading connection which lit up something
in her. She offered to read a Brian Patten poem to us, and we sat back as
she monotone-stumbled her way along the lines about a baby brother
who ate coal and other strange things… until he went to school and ate
a teacher. Stacey saw the word ‘teacher’ coming from about a line away

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and her eyes widened in shocked delight. Her voice became animated
and she threw dramatic glances at us as she read. Something inside
her had made a naughty, joyful connection with something outside her
and the book came to life in her hands. She began to ask us if we were
coming back to do reading club every week.
It is essential that someone does something about Stacey, Cara and
Mica. Even more so about Liam, Terry and David, some of the boys
who attended the session but left as soon as possible and without any
reading at all. These kids are doomed to educational failure because
they have no relation to the book and therefore to the only likely source
of calm and concentration and perseverance they are likely to meet. But
this is about more than educational failure. This is also about the anger
and unhappiness of that small boy in Primark. There is an inner life in
humans and we ignore that reality at our peril. We are not robots to be
programmed to sell ourselves and buy products, as our appallingly sad
mental health statistic show us.
The Reader Organisation’s Liverpool Reads project has chosen David
Almond’s The Savage as its city-wide read for 2009. This is a graphic
novel, with pictures by David McKean, and it is entirely about ‘the inner
life’ and its relation to outer reality. As Zak, one of the Liverpool Reads
book selection committee said during our deliberations, anyone who
can create the savage – as an act of imagination – does not have to be
the savage. I am looking forward to getting thousands of copies of the
book into the hands of Liverpool’s twelve-year olds, but the physical
object will be more mere stuff unless someone teaches our children how
and why to read. And who will do that? My own sadly chequered edu-
cational experience tells me that only people who really love the stuff
can pass it on.
For the past year I have been travelling the country meeting people
who have become interested in Get Into Reading project, largely through
reading Blake Morrison’s article in The Guardian in January 08. These
are people who recognise the power of the book to move, sustain and
shape us. I have met doctors, nurses, librarians, housing officers, social
workers, probation officers, teachers and many people who do not
have an easily nameable job – freelancers, retired people, indies, people
who are unemployed but shouldn’t be, stay-at-home Mums, voluntary
agency workers, service users… It has been a tremendous experience
meeting these people and learning about their work and their lives, and
the way in which books, and what books stand for, can help.
But it has also been shocking. I have seen first hand that the range
of reading that goes on, even among committed readers, is much nar-
rower than I would like to think. The word ‘poetry’ strikes terror into
the hearts of many and the idea of reading Shakespeare is unthink-

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able to most. For many a ‘great’ novel comes shrouded in anxiety – the
length! the footnotes! the reputation going before! Or perhaps the po-
tential for boredom, for being in some way forced or coerced. No one
wants to be forced to read but that is what universal free education has
meant for many people.
Why read an old book when there are so many contemporary ones?
This question was put to me recently by a very committed senior librar-
ian. On another occasion, and more annoyingly, I’m questioned about
the word ‘literature’ by a leading advocate for reading: why make value
judgements? Is one kind of reading really any better than another? Who
says a football magazine or Grazia is not ‘as good’ as Anna Karenina? Just
a different choice, isn’t it?
I constantly want to make a metaphorical connection to food. If
people who liked food went to college and came out determined never
to eat Bearnaise sauce, Caesar salad, Chocolate Marquise or fine Lanca-
shire cheese ever again, wouldn’t we think there was something wrong
with the education we were offering? Imagine the national promoters
of food saying junk food is a ‘just another choice’, and the fact that
people are eating at all is ‘brilliant’. Imagine a world of food where the
chief law was: above all there must be no judgement of quality.
So here we are, 139 years on from the Elementary Education Act
of 1870 and we do, in the UK, have universal access to reading. Or at
least about 76% of the working age population do (the rest suffer ‘lit-
eracy difficulties’). 20% of children leave primary school unable to read
well enough to cope with the secondary curriculum. I’ve met those kids
and they are not thick. They are simply uneducated. Stacey can rec-
ognise a metaphor but she can’t read with fluency, partly because she
doesn’t think there is any reason to do so, and partly because no one
has had the time to sit with her and help her want to do so. We need
to change our ideas of education. We must teach children to become
entranced. We must let them dream. We must start that process with
simple stories. Adults, too, need to learn this skill, in order to believe
in it. The alternative is the nightmare we are already living. And yet,
in Primark, a child aged about four is pushed past. Slumped sideways
in his chair he holds a short plastic sword, a scimitar. He regards this
toy through half closed eyes, as if dazed, as if lost, and I imagine him
playing a game in imagination so he’s not there, he’s escaped. Some-
thing wants to bless him for that or make it be true that a child might
still escape into imagination and find there space and a silence in which
to become… other than we are.
You can do this in all sorts of ways. Animals help: read Mark Doty’s
wonderful account of living with dogs, Dog Days. Football supporters
know what it is and that is why Tranmere supporters will turn up,

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grimly determined though thoroughly depressed week after week. Reli-

gious practice does it for some. As does Tracy Emin’s Bird or Bed. Music
can do it (and do the opposite). But you most often find it made explicit
in books.
And that doesn’t have to mean Paradise Lost. We could start a little
further down the scale. Two rather different writers I admire both rec-
ommended Terry Pratchett to me. I had thought that I couldn’t read Mr
Pratchett because there is too much of the farting thirteen-year-old boy
about his books. But when A. S.Byatt told me how much she admired
Prachett because unlike almost every other living writer ‘he will take on
death’ I began to think it was time to give him a try. Then Frank Cottrell
Boyce’s ecstatic review of Nation persuaded me to do it. It’s a children’s
novel and if you had a bookish twelve-year-old to read it to that would
be a good mutual experience. It’s a novel about the necessity of belief
(and also, because this is Terry Prachett, about bird poo and swearing
and beer) and in praise of ‘the order which is, amazingly, inherent in all
things and in the way the universe opens to our questioning.’ It is also
a novel about fighting for survival and it is brilliant on how imagination
or thinking or memory works as an experience. Our hero, Mau, is able
to make things happen because he can imagine making them happen.
Lost in the wake of a giant wave, Mau, adrift in a tiny canoe, imagines
returning to his island home:
His father would be watching for him at the edge of the reef,
and they’d bring the canoe up the beach, and his uncles would
come running up, and the new young men would rush to con-
gratulate him… And if he could just hold it in his mind, then it
would be so. There was a shining silver thread connecting him
to that future. It would work like a god anchor, which stopped
the gods from wandering away.

Imagining doesn’t make it happen, but creates ‘the shining silver

thread’ which is in fact hope or belief, and it is this which gives Mau the
strength to continue to paddle. When he reaches home his father and
all the others are dead. The silver thread connecting him to a future is,
from this point on, impossibly stretched, but its vital relation to Mau’s
survival is one of the subjects of the book.
Piled Primark high, Terry Prachett’s books take up a whole section
in my local Borders. Let’s hope the enormously successful Mr P has put
some money into a Foundation for the Protection the Silver Thread,
and that some of that dosh lands with a Pratchettian splat near Stacey,
Cara and Mica very soon. The resultant tidal wave might propel them
towards a bookshop.

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your regulars

ask the reader

Brian Nellist

I believe most Working Men’s Institutes when they were

Q founded in the 1800s refused to have prose fiction in their li-
braries. Though I read novels I can understand that ban. Two or
three days it takes me to get through the latest best seller and in three
weeks time I can scarcely recall the name of a single character and have
only the faintest recollection of the plot. Am I wasting my time?

In some sense everything that goes in, stays in, which is why we
A should take some care over what we put in our minds. Any novel
worth reading should give you more than character and plot
though our ‘rage for narrative’ as Walter Scott called it is so insistent that
it must be a fundamental need. It’s the significant moments we should
be able to recognise and recover, so never read a book without a pencil to
hand (unless it belongs to a public library, of course) and not only mark
the moments where you are moved to think hard and your steady career
through the pages is arrested but also note the page number where the
explosion happened on the fly-leaf! ‘It’s only a novel’, Jane Austen in
Northanger Abbey imagines some reader saying dismissively to which she
responds ‘Only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are
displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature,
the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and
humour are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language’. She’s
setting the stakes high because she’s writing a story where the ill effects
of the bestsellers of her day, Gothic novels, on inexperienced minds is
readily acknowledged, though it’s clear that she herself had read and
appreciated at least the best of them. Maybe you need to demand more
of your reading since there are enough novels of the kind she describes
to keep us busy through a lifetime.

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 your regulars

Not the least important part of her praise of her own art is the final,
to us apparently awkward, term, ‘the best chosen language’. Such delib-
erateness seems to rule out spontaneity. But it refers back to the adjective
‘liveliest’ and the noun ‘wit’. Our own capacity to articulate, which is
almost the same as to think, is prompted not simply by being in the pres-
ence of articulate companions but by reading. ‘Wit and humour’ she
writes which is not to say the same thing twice. Wit is not a joke but
the sharpness and economy with which an idea is formulated so that it
seems to strike the mind as for the first time and remains there because it
becomes memorable for that reason. The old definition of a straight line
as ‘the shortest distance between two points’ is witty in that sense and
Jane Austen’s own novels are full of such wit. Even if you forget many
of the details of the plot and some of the characters, a good novel should
have altered, maybe ever so slightly, the way in which your mind reacts.
But I’m not denying that dosing oneself in a not supremely good but
exciting books can sometimes become almost a therapy and certainly
nothing to feel guilt about. Any such act of reading at least demands at-
tentiveness over a span of time and the mental business of construing
the words. But read actively and avoid surrender. Read as though the
book were given you to review. While recognising generously what it
has to offer you ask yourself why it doesn’t offer more. It’s not just that
less than the best reminds you of what the best is like but that you dis-
cover your own mind by finding what you really want when you read.
Don’t let it remain a vague dissatisfaction (‘Am I wasting my time?) but
imagine a friendly voice within asking you ‘What was wrong with it,
then?’ It doesn’t matter that you couldn’t write a novel yourself though
that should produce at least a considerateness towards an actual achieve-
ment. You can still find a meal unsatisfactory without yourself being a
cordon bleu chef. Reading is a dialogue between two minds, your own
and the mind of the book so you must know your own mind for the con-
versation to take place. But also you must listen and be patient in order
to hear that other unfamiliar voice speaking in your head. Don’t demand
too much immediate excitement. Catherine Morland setting out on her
first big journey going to Bath with family friends in Northanger Abbey
finds her own enthusiasm and expectations not at all replicated in her
mother and father but rather that she is surrounded by ‘the common
feelings of common life’. That gap between youthful hopefulness and
parental experience is inevitable, sad in a way but understandable, and
our sympathies lie on both sides of the divide. To Catherine ‘common’
means over-familiar, trite, small but to her parents it means normal, rep-
resentative, what we can cheerfully cope with. The detail is small, made
in passing in the novel but if we are over-eager in pursuit of plot or daz-
zling characters we shall miss it. And that would be a pity.

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book world

the london eye

winter of discontent

A s the credit crunch became a crash several months

ago, life at the large publishing firm where I work
continued pretty much as normal. We read the
newspapers and shook our heads as we swapped
stories of poor friends in the City, but then we
turned back to the serious business of book-buying, scheduling meet-
ings with agents, booking taxis and restaurant tables. Editors and sales
people began wondering how many ‘we told you so’ books we could buy
and sell from exasperated economics experts who saw it all coming a
mile off. We began mining the archives for books that sold well the last
time round: how to knit, how to darn your socks and sew on buttons,
where to find food for free, how to hold dinner parties on a budget, how
to cook in a bed-sitter. Surely, we mused, people would want to turn
off televisions and radios with their hourly gloomy news broadcasts,
and lose themselves instead in a good book? With people pretty much
compelled to spend long winter evenings at home, surely War and Peace
would fly from the shelves? Booksellers saw their sales pitch: hours of
entertainment for under ten pounds!
The thinking was not that publishing and bookselling would have a
merry old time of it but that books would prove ‘recession-proof’. Book
buyers tend to be relatively better off; or they are special-interest cus-
tomers who are not to be deterred by the financial situation. With all
the current of talk about value for money, and the fact that books make
affordable Christmas gifts, perhaps we even might attract those elusive
‘non book-buyers’. A few months ago, this view might have been opti-
mistic, but it was not wishful thinking.
But then the talk of a crash became talk of a recession. While on
the shop floor we were distracted by the miraculous American election
(should we buy the Obama books now, or cynically wait till he’s been

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a year in office and things have begun to sour?), paranoia was sweep-
ing executive offices and emergency boardroom meetings were called
on the floors above. Slowly news of ‘new profit-enhancing initiatives’
began trickling down to us. Recently vacated positions were not ad-
vertised, books with low-sales expectations were cancelled and their
agents did not kick up a fuss, special finishes were dropped from book
covers, lunches and taxis were cancelled.
Book sales were slipping and have continued to slide. Last week,
Bookscan, the web-based provider of book sales information (the book
world’s Eye of Sauron), showed that growth was down 0.2%. In other
words, sales over the last twelve months are smaller than sales over the
twelve months before that. The financial meltdown that once seemed to
be happening in quite a different part of London became harsh reality
for us too with rising unemployment and rocketing bills.
The less-than-festive spirit in the office was not improved when Wool-
worths announced they were going into administration. Not because we
got sentimental about the loss of venerable old Woolies, but because
Woolworths owns Entertainment UK, a wholesale distributor of books
to major supermarkets and other outlets such as Zavvi and W. H. Smiths.
Right before the season’s biggest titles were due out on the shelves, our
supply to these massive retailers was blocked. This may make for a very
blue Christmas, especially as masses of books are at the time of writing
trapped, malingering in warehouses while the accountants do their sums.
And now someone must decide whether to wait out the seige or bear the
cost of reprinting the trapped books. EUK also owns Bertrams, which
supplies independent bookshops, and while Bertrams operates outside of
Woolies and is so far unaffected, stern alarums are ringing. If Bertrams
were to suffer at all it would be very bad news for the indies, and thus (as
I explained in a previous edition) very bad news for publishing.
No more wishful thinking, in this calm before the storm we have
become as superstitious as sailors. But it is a genuine comfort to remem-
ber ‘the product’ amongst all these louring clouds, since the product is
books and not baked beans. Screeching reporters and neurotic bloggers
are quick to turn troubled times for publishers into the beginning of the
end of the book, but this a peculiarly backwards way of looking at our
business – as the steady stream of unsolicited manuscripts will prove.
I trust any true and useful book will still make it into print, though
getting it there might be more of a struggle. A recent (particularly bad-
tempered) Reader editorial reminded me of the words of Daniel Doyce
from Little Dorrit, and his quiet self-sustainment can be a comfort now.
It is a consolation to think that the best of these books, despite what
quality of paper they might be printed on, or what foils and finishes we
can’t add to the cover, remain as true as they ever were.

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your Recommendations

a clear-eyed view of Childhood

James Kirkup, A Child of the Tyne
University of Salzburg Press, 1997
ISBN 978-3705200609

John Killick

J ames Kirkup was brought up in a poor street in the working

class town of South Shields. He was born in 1923, and his
childhood encompassed those very lean years of the Thirties.
His father was a joiner and work was often hard to come by.
Cockburn Street was, in Kirkup’s own words, ‘a near-slum’.
Yet his parents had standards, the house was kept spotlessly clean and
the boy was treated with unfailing kindness and had as much mental
stimulation as the limited environment afforded.
Kirkup’s first two volumes of autobiography The Only Child and
Sorrows, Passions and Alarms (republished together in 1996 as A Child of
the Tyne) constitute one of the clearest and most affectionate portraits
of such an upbringing that we have. They are an astonishing feat of
memory: the first book, packed with circumstantial detail, deals with
the first six years of his life, and the second with the years up to his
eighteenth birthday. Despite poverty, this was an almost idyllic child-
hood (the sorrows and alarms in the title of the second book refer almost
exclusively to his primary and secondary school experiences, which
proved stultifying to a curious and imaginative child). Kirkup takes us
through a variety of enthralling areas: street-games, parks, sweets, early
friendships, and reading and writing. His accounts are unfailingly vivid
and exact. Here he is writing on a snowflake:
I would often try to follow the course of one turning, shivering,
drifting flake as it fell and fell, but could never be sure if my eyes
had lost it and seized on another before it reached the ground.
I loved the snow’s absolute quietness. It was a stillness I knew

108
 your recommendations

well, and that I sympathized with. I would fasten pieces of cot-

ton-wool to long lengths of white thread and hang them inside
the white lace curtains, against the window-panes, like an ar-
rested snowstorm in the house, and then I would gaze and gaze
through the artificial snowflakes at the real snowflakes falling
outside, falling so densely, so silently, so steadily, that a kind of
hallucination would gradually come upon me, my eyes would
stare and stare until they went out of focus, and I would slowly
begin to feel that the veils of snow were no longer falling: they
were still and I was rising, and the window, and the table I sat on,
and the whole heavy house were rising weightlessly with me.

Kirkup is not an introspective writer. Indeed his strengths through-

out his extensive output are those of an observer: that is why his most
famous poem ‘A Correct Compassion’, which describes a surgeon’s
work, and his poems about the sights and sounds of Japan, are so effec-
tive: he does not let himself get in the way of his subjects. Nevertheless
the personal does leak through:
It was natural that, a Taurean, I should really love the earth
itself: I would often play with it like sand, and stretch full-length
upon it, burying my face in its warm, crumbling darkness. The
manure heap had a broad, jolly stink, like a wink from Nellie
Wallace: it was the smell of life. What is strange is that I should
also have such a strong affinity with water – not only with
the sea, the ancestral element, but also with rivers, streams,
springs, rainwater and common tap water. The rainwater tubs
in our backyard were to me sources of mystery and power: their
dark, soot-flighted water had an elemental smell, an unforget-
table mineral tang with a ‘snatch’ of tar: their depths had often
held the reflected outline of my head and thrown back a deep-
ened, gloomy echo of my lonely talks with myself.

What is so remarkable about this passage is that, whilst dealing with

outward things, particularly sights and smells, it is also self-revealing.
It is not only the phrase ‘my lonely talks with myself’ which lets us in
under the writer’s guard. The creativity of the poet is present in the sen-
tence about the manure heap too: imagination is at work here as well as
the memory. This is the pattern throughout A Child of the Tyne: personal
observations have a cumulative effect, so that the reader builds up a
picture of a personality, his tastes, his strengths and weaknesses, and
projects them forward into the developing adult. The almost overwhelm-
ing immediacy of person and place are filtered through the sensibility of
a unique individual, and the reader quite subconsciously absorbs a way
of looking at the world. We feel we know James Kirkup just as well as if
he had provided us with an interior monologue to absorb.

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reviews

a capital of culture
Liverpool 800, Culture, Character and History, ed. John Belchem
Liverpool University Press, 2006
ISBN 978-1846310348;
Nicholas Murray, So Spirited a Town
Liverpool University Press, 2008
ISBN 978-1846311284;
David Seed, American Travellers in Liverpool
Liverpool University Press, 2008
ISBN 978-1846311291;
J. Carmen Smith, Chasing Shadows
Appin Press, 2008
ISBN 978-1906205089

Brian Nellist

T Those who conceived the idea of a circulating Capital of

Culture must originally I suppose have thought they were
offering a display-space for the group that Karl Mannheim
believed ‘create culture, i.e. the intelligentsia’. Liverpool’s
response has had more in common with T. S. Eliot’s more
pragmatic conception; ‘a “culture” is conceived as the creation of the
society as a whole; being, from another aspect, that which makes it a
society’. His selective list of cultural phenomena may be centred too purely
in England, now seems dated or quaint but at least aims at a kind of in-
clusiveness, ‘Derby Day, Henley Regatta, Cowes, the twelfth of August, a
cup final, the dog races, the pin table, the dart board, Wenslydale cheese,
boiled cabbage cut into sections, beetroot in vinegar, nineteenth-centu-
ry Gothic churches and the music of Elgar’ (Notes towards a Definition of
Culture). Certainly Liverpool’s celebrations have had a similar happy het-
erogeneity, partly because the city, except for a brief period between say
1790 and 1830 has never really had a defining intelligentsia, nothing to

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compare with Birmingham’s Lunar Society or the Manchester of Engels,

Cobden and Mrs Gaskell (let alone the distinguished thinkers who
adorned Edinburgh for almost a century). Why that should be so is ex-
plained in passing by the sumptuously produced and illustrated Liverpool
800, edited by John Belchem and significantly subtitled Culture, Character
and History. Though arranged chronologically this is not a continuous nar-
rative (like Ramsay Muir’s volume a century before) but a series of essays,
some designed more for the specialist but others, on the eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century city, for example, informing also the general reader. A
port with a fairly transient population, people came here to make money.
If they stayed, they spent their riches on bricks and mortar (or marble)
and on charitable enterprises like the Bluecoat School or the school for
the blind which so impressed later American visitors, on buildings to
demonstrate civic self-confidence, including admittedly a public library,
or art objects. Such writers as the city produced tended to leave in a hurry.
The famous exception was William Ruscoe, though the great man lives
in print today, if at all, not for his histories of the Medici but for the little
children’s poem, ‘The Butterfly’s Ball’:
Come take up your hats, and away let us haste
To the Butterfly’s Ball and the Grasshopper’s Feast;
The tempter, Gadfly, has summoned the crew,
And the revels are now only waiting for you.

The verbal culture of Liverpool is less literary, in fact, than oral, and that
rich mix of street humour, stand-up comedians, traditional tales and
popular song and drama is the subject of Nicholas Murray’s So Spirited a
Town. The title comes from Charles Dickens’s response to a visit to the
docks, well-protected by the local constabulary, typical of the reaction
of strangers to the astonishing mix of grandeur and squalour that met
them. Personal reminiscence of a Catholic boyhood here in the fifties at-
tractively mingles with a sharp eye for detail in other people’s accounts
of the city. Kilvert comments on Liverpool horses:
I admired the dray horses very much, huge creatures 17 or 18
hands high, more like elephants than horses. Liverpool boasts
the finest breed of Flemish draught horse in the world.

Not by chance, the following chapter discusses Hopkin’s ‘Felix Randal’, the
farrier. Mr Murray’s experience as a skilled biographer has equipped him
for telling his stories with the flair and vitality that typify his subject.
If you want to know what Liverpool felt like, looked like, even
smelled like, a hundred and fifty and more years ago read David Seed’s
absorbing anthology of American reports, American Travellers in Liverpool,
not only for the accounts themselves but for the mass of information
offered in the introduction and head-notes. Many identify it with New

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 reviews

York as a place given over wholly to commerce and Washington Irving

makes so much of a sight of Roscoe because he alone represents the
values of the mind. In 1816 (not 1860) the bank in which he was a
partner failed and in 1820, Roscoe as a bankrupt sold his early Renais-
sance paintings (now largely in the Walker) and his books (some at least
in the Athenaeum). Irving didn’t know that with supreme honour the
victim refused any private arrangement but the point about the city’s
collective oblivion to intellectual pursuits remains valid:
Even that amiable and unostentatious simplicity of charac-
ter, which gives the nameless grace to real excellence, may
cause him to be undervalued by some coarse minds, who do
not know that true worth is always void of glare and preten-
sion. But the man of letters, who speaks of Liverpool, speaks
of it as the residence of Roscoe. —The intelligent traveller who
visits it inquires where Roscoe is to be seen. He is the literary
landmark of the place, indicating its existence to the distant
scholar. —He is like Pompey’s column at Alexandria, towering
alone in classic dignity.

W. D. Howells, paying us a visit eighty years later comments far more

bitterly on this peculiarity of the city. He asks why
so great a city should make so small an appeal to the imagina-
tion. In this it outdoes almost any metropolis of our own. Even
in journalism, an intensely modern production, it does not
excel. [Sorry Daily Post!] Manchester has its able and well-writ-
ten Guardian but what has Liverpool? Glasgow has its school
of painting, but what has Liverpool?

Point taken, but what it did have other American writers found in-
tensely valuable, its school and chapel for the blind, for example, where
great music was to be heard and a pre-Braille system of raised script
was in use or Nathaniel Hawthorne’s rather comical description of the
laying of the foundation stone of the library by William Brown in 1851.
Despite our terrible past, African-Americans found here a lack of preju-
dice which astonished them (oh that it had remained so) and there is a
fascinating chapter about visits by Abolitionists. For sheer enthusiasm
and descriptive detail read William H. Riding’s article from Harper’s of
1879 ‘England’s Great Sea-port’. George Catlin, painter of the native
American nations, brought his Red Indian troupe to the town in 1839:
During the last week of their noble exhibition, the children
from all the charitable and other schools were admitted free,
and in battalions and phalanxes they were passed through my
room, as many hundreds at a time as could stand upon the
floor, to hear the lectures (shaped to suit their infant minds),

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and then the deafening war-whoop raised by my men in Indian

paint and Indian arms, which drove many of the little creatures
with alarm under the tables and benches, from which they
were pulled out by their feet; and the list that we kept showed
us the number of 22,000 of these little urchins, who, free of
expense, saw my collection, and having heard me lecture, went
home, sounding the war-whoop in various parts of the town.

One of the stories of the year that reveals most compellingly why mi-
grants settled in the city without quite becoming part of it is J. Carmen
Smith’s Chasing Shadows. The author’s grandmother was Spanish and
came to Liverpool in 1904 to work in a boarding house for Iberian sailors,
married, had a child and remained there through two difficult World
Wars without really becoming English or becoming a British citizen:
Micaela’s apparent devotion to the British Royal Family was
never fully explained. The only possible justification lay in
the apocryphal tale of King Edward VII’s visit to Liverpool in
1907, when he is said to have kissed baby Pilar [the author’s
mother] as Micaela stood outside Lime Street station.

She had come to England in the first place because she had [left?] her
first husband and son in Spain but this and much else in her past, in-
cluding the mystery other birth, is gradually revealed in a semi-fictional
recreation of her life on the basis of visits to Galicia made by the author
and her husband, themselves with minimal Spanish. The result is not
just a piece of family history but an account of a complex series of lives
over a period of a hundred and fifty years shared between two countries.
But it also describes from the inside that sense of separation between
authority and is subject people, which bedevilled Liverpool until close to
the present day and maybe explains its disjunctive ‘culture’. When, as a
child, the author was badly burned on the leg, her mother doesn’t want
to take her to the hospital:
‘What am I going to do, Mam?’
Micaela had no words of comfort for her daughter. She too
was uneasy at the thought of interference by the faceless ‘they’.
Her weekly visits to the police station had become a matter of
routine [as a resident alien in the war]. The policia were kind,
called her ‘Ma’, but the restrictions – she couldn’t even spend
a night away from home without permission – increased her
sense of alienation, her lack of control over her own life.

Well, at least all that is now changing but the process of overcoming the
divisions continues. The Get into Reading programme makes its unique
contribution to overcoming these largely cultural divisions here and in
other communities up and down the kingdom.

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reviews

the less delightful beast

David Garnett, Lady into Fox
Hesperus Modern Voices, 2008
ISBN 978 1 84391 449 5

Michael Caines

D avid Garnett was a lucky man: he had a fox for a

wife.
She was a person, according to her sister, Frances
Partridge, ‘reserved almost to shyness but perfectly
self-possessed’, and in The Flowers of the Forest (1956),
her husband likened her to ‘a woodland creature’: ‘among the beeches
and the pines I saw her as I could never see her in London’. Rachel Alice
Marshall, ‘Ray’ to her friends, ‘R. A. Garnett’ to readers of the books she
illustrated, was with her husband in the woods near his parents’ home
one day, when their vain attempts to spot some fox cubs caused him to
say, ‘There’s no hope of seeing a fox – unless you were suddenly to turn
into one. You might. I should not really be much surprised if you did’.
‘You must write that as a story’, said Ray, reminding him that he had re-
cently bought a copy, with woodcuts, of Ovid’s Metamorphoses.
The Garnetts had married in 1921, and Lady into Fox appeared the
following year; it made Garnett’s name. Ray provided both the model
for Silvia Tebrick – the lady who, within a few of its pages, turns into
a fox – and her own woodcuts. David provided the words. The novella
strikes a balance somehow between whimsical sophistication and being
seriously concerned with the workings of love and loyalty.
Perhaps it is the husband who triggers his wife’s metamorphosis.
(The narrator calls it a miracle.) Does Richard Tebrick betray his wife
by turning his head away from her for one moment, while they are out

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walking near their Oxfordshire home? When he turns it back, ‘Where his
wife had been the moment before was a small fox, of very bright red’.
This fox’s beseeching gaze and demure behaviour convince Richard
that it is Silvia indeed. He puts her under his coat and whisks her
home. The trouble really begins after the transformation has taken
place. Husband promises to stick by wife, dismisses the servants,
shoots the dogs, and lives in fear of the hunting season. Wife plays
cards with husband, and struggles into dresses in order to cover her
(furry) nakedness. Husband despairs as wife begins to take a less
modest interest in chasing wildfowl.
‘This womanliness in her never failed to delight him, for it showed
she was still his wife, buried as it were in the carcass of a beast but
with a woman’s soul.’ The less delightful beast is also present, however,
and it has more interest in eating its meat raw and running wild than
in piquet and the piano indoors. Richard’s love is tested by his wife’s
attempts at escape. Her instantanous physical transformation is less
awful, it would seem, than the gradual but ineluctable mental shifting
that is the true source of their tragedy.
Lady into Fox has stayed in print, in several languages, with good
reason: it is, as the narrator promises, a ‘strange’ and resonant tale, its
civilized prose rendering it all the stranger. If this Hesperus edition has
advantages over its predecessors, they are threefold: its pleasing format,
the inclusion of R. A. Garnett’s woodcuts (not to be taken for granted)
and John Burnside’s insightful foreword.

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 The Reader Crossword
Cassandra No.25
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

9 10

11 12

13

14 15

16 17

18

19 20

21 22 23

24

25 26

27 28

ACROSS DOWN

1. They don’t believe in heartache at Henley
(7)
*5 down and 20 down. Lift for a silent servant
(3,4,6)
9. Real Madrid provides an area of interest
(5)
*10. Perhaps housebound tough Tina may
fancy one of these (1,5,3)
11. Garments revealed by dancing Scot on
hill (10)
12. Composer for an old Irish soldier (4)
14. They could give nepotism a good name
(5,7)
18. Do we do this when listening to Lear?
(4,8)
21. These rolls signal the start of birthday and
party snacks (4)
22. Instrument for spinning Cretan coin (10)
25. Grenadier adjusting to revision (9)
26. There is little to be found in repetition (5)
27. Wagon trip to East Riyadh maybe (7)
28. Former striker expert with clippers (7)
* 1 and 19 down. Our subject is top hardliner in rev-
olution (6,6)
2. Often second of three, coming in slowly (5)
*3. Returning former Liberal leader following do-
mestic company (10)
4. Marsh tree found in Wellington (5)
5. An ostrich in Aegina was found to be carrying
parasites (9)
6. The start of Edward’s career hit trouble despite
being genuine (4)
7. Necessary condition of Schroedinger’s box (8)
8. In returning retsina to bar we came across
plantsman (8)
13. Lynne dislikes how greengrocers often use it
(10)
15. Romanized set up to validate statistical results
(9)
*16 and 17 down. Family planning may prevent this
celebration (3,8,5)
*17. See 16 down
*19. See 1 down
* 20. See 5 across
23. These enclosures may feature in Neolithic Age
settlements (5)
24. Garment leading one to adopt airs (4)

* Clues with an asterisk have a common theme

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 Buck’s quiz

that’s the way the money goes

1. What do Mr Micawber and Mr Dorrit have in common?

2. Which eponymous hero says of his love: ‘Her voice is full of money’?
3. Who earned Browning’s versified contempt: ‘Just for a handful of
silver he left us’?
4. How old was ‘I’ when ‘I heard a wise man say / Give crowns and
pounds and guineas / But not your heart away’?
5. In which 1980’s novel does film director John Self pursue a film deal
only to have his credit card returned to him cut into four pieces in the
end?
6. Who, oppressed by debt and the sorry consequences of adultery, takes
her own life with arsenic?
7. Which play ends with the main character driving off intent upon
killing himself so that his son might receive his $20.000 life insurance?
8. ‘His gold, as he hung over it and saw it grow, gathered his power of
loving together into a hard isolation like its own.’ Who is the miser?
9. Who has too much to drink and sells his wife for five guineas?
10. Who wrote a scandalous novel while imprisoned in The Fleet for a
debt of £840?
11. Whose publishing house was a nineteenth century victim of falling
financial markets leaving him in debt for £120.000?
12. Who, in 1692, went bankrupt owing £17.000 and thereafter at-
tempted to write himself out of debt?
13. Which fictional heroine said, ‘I think I could be a good woman if I
had five thousand a year’?
14. Which 21st century story concerns a boy who finds a bag containing
£229.370 which he thinks must have fallen from the sky?
15. Whose latest book, based on the 2008 Massey Lecture is subtitled
Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth?

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 the back end

PrizeS!
The sender of the first completed crossword will receive our selection of
World’s Classics paperbacks, and the same to the winner of the fiend-
ishly difficult Buck’s Quiz. Congratulations to Richard Hook of Liverpool
(Crossword), and to Jan Sear, also of Liverpool who answered all ques-
tions correctly in Buck’s Quiz.

Please send your solutions (marked either Cassandra Crossword, or

Buck’s Quiz) to 19 Abercromby Square, Liverpool L69 7ZG.

answers
Cassandra Crossword no. 24
Across
1. Heckle 4. Pastel 9. Swat 10. Abhorrence 11. Argyle 12. Macaroni 13.
Charlotte 15. Anne 16. Arch 17. Beanfeast 21. Jane Eyre 22. Cheese 24.
Cartoonist 25. Item 26. Threes 27. Beryls

Down
1. Haworth 2. Cathy 3. Leave to 5. Africa 6. The Brontë 7. Lacunae 8.
Shame the devil 14. Rochester 16. Adamant 18. Necktie 19. Sisters 20.
Zygote 23. Emily

buck’s quiz no. 32

1. Gregor Samsa (Metamorphosis). 2. Clarice Starling (Silence of the
Lambs)3. Raskolnikov, (Crime and Punishment) 4. ‘Beetles black approach
not near’ 5. The Fly, Mary Howitt 6. David Constantine 7. . Daddy Long-
Legs 8. The Behaviour of Moths 9. John Fowles 10. John Donne 11. Stealing
Sicilian cheese 12. The Grasshopper 13. Ogden Nash 14. Robert Burns
15. The Caterpillar. (Alice in Wonderland)

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fiction
The reader serial

the junction
part 3: ricky

Mary Weston

The story so far: Captain Peter Scott dies just as the First World War is ending.
He awakes in a curious old-fashioned village, The Junction, where he seems
to have been expected. Is this Heaven? He fights against the thought though
at the same time he cannot bear to dispel the mystery by questioning the
inhabitants. On the brink of forgetting all his former life he is visited by
memories of his brother Ricky and girlfriend Celia – intense recollections of
not having lived intensely enough. He decides to accept the offered oblivion
and finds that this second death brings not loss of consciousness but loss of
judgement, and an experience of being ‘very sharply alive’.

This is the final instalment. The full text of the earlier episodes can be found
at www.thereader.co.uk.

P eter went out for an early walk. A mist had come down in
the night. It was still, and he could barely see ten feet in
from of him; a curious feeling, no views, no past or future,
only the immediate circle around him – the hedgerows,
haw-scraggly and lit by spiderweb chandeliers, as if light
had condensed into dew. The birdsong was strangely immediate, not
coming from left or right, but happening there in his head, like an aural
hallucination. ‘Just – this,’ he kept saying to himself. He was only this
moment, this experience, a point of view without a perspective. The

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tweed of his jacket was dusted with tiny spangles of airborne water.
The sound of marching feet. Men marching in silence, a company
at least, he judged, and syncopated with their regular tramp the hollow
notes of horseshoes on the hard road. They rose out of the mist, the
leader on a big chestnut horse. Peter stepped aside into the gap of a
gateway. The colonel saluted him as he passed. The ranks, khaki and
feldgrau, officers and men jumbled together, turned their faces toward
him, intently, as if wanting to be known, or curiously, wondering who
he was. They were the dead, he realised. His dead, though he could no
longer name them. He stood by the gate after they had passed, some
hundreds, until the sound of their tread faded into the stillness.

There was heat in the sun. Peter followed the road upwards, deeper into
the valley. The air thinned. At first he thought the fog was lifting, but
in fact he had cleared it, and turning back he saw it lying low, a layer of
pinkish cloud over the village and river fields.
The road ended with the last farm house, but a path continued,
leading over stiles and fields of sheep, meeting up with the stream and
tracking it right back to the waterfall at the deep cleft of the valley.
The rock wall rose some twenty feet above the pool, and a concealed
flourish at the top threw the water upwards, so that it plunged with
an arching trajectory, flinging spray into the air. The pool was deep and
peaty looking, and it absorbed the force into a tranquil circling current.
It was almost unbearable to watch, and almost without thinking (cer-
tainly without calculations of temperature) Peter stripped and lowered
himself into it, making a slipping way into the centre to stand under the
cascade. The water pounded into him and he did not resist it; the tenor
voice of the rushing water, and the rich contralto of the currents in the
pool were singing about giving, giving, the ecstasy of pouring oneself
out – telling him he was also the kind of thing that could empty himself,
and be continuously refreshed. Me? Was that what you meant? Uncer-
tainly, he essayed it – it felt like opening his throat to sing, opening his
heart to a girl – and he was part of the endless circling transformation
of watery being, swirling, thrown upwards in a shiver of drops, rarefied
momentarily into vapour, cooling and falling and tumbling downwards
in white rapids. Chance reassembled him a hundred yards downstream.
On fire with cold, he clambered out to the first field that sloped down
from the wooded ridge.
He lay down in the grass, and looked up at the sun. He could look
the sun in the eye, and his gaze seemed to channel its warmth. After
the waterfall’s ecstasy of giving, the pure receptiveness of the earth was
rich. He soaked up light energy until it flung him upwards to his human

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height. He made his way across the field to the path, remembering just
in time that he’d better go back up to the pool to get his clothes.

Coming down to the road again, he realised that a familiar sound had
been growing gradually louder: he looked up, and there it was coming
over the ridge, a biplane. He thought it had a jaunty pre-war sound, but
that was perhaps the effect of the silence; at any rate, it was a Camel.
Peter watched as it circled the valley. The freedom those sky people must
feel! He wondered if he could fling himself up into the machine, as
he had made himself part of the waterfall and soaked himself into the
earth, and was just lifting his heart to attempt it when the pilot put it
into a dive, stooping like a hawk. The daredevil! Time stretched. Now!
Now! Peter willed him to pull out of it. Time snapped back, and the little
plane was a crumpled X in the field just down from him.
Recovering his senses, Peter ran, jumping the hedge. The left wing
had hit the ground first and taken most of the shock. The nose and the
cockpit were relatively undamaged. He scrambled over the wreckage.
The pilot was unconscious, but there was a pulse under the corner of
his jaw. Powered by shock and necessity, Peter lifted him out and carried
him home without finding it difficult, almost without noticing he was
doing it. He only felt the weight in his arms when Mrs Fielding ran out
and opened the gate for him. ‘Can you get him up the stairs?’
‘Try,’ Peter grunted, and this was hard work. He went automatically
to his own room and dropped the pilot on the bed.
Mrs Fielding pulled off his leather helmet and loosened the silk
scarf. He was fair-haired, with a face that had probably once been round
and boyish, but was now weathered by aerial combat, sharp and ratlike.
A neat little chap, probably a bit of a dandy. His boots were very tall and
tight-fitting: Peter had to work away at the first, heel and toe, for several
minutes before he got it off. As soon as he attacked the other, it came
away directly – with the leg still inside it!
Oh. It was wooden. Of course. But Peter had to sit down and breathe
for a while before his stomach settled.
The Archdeacon came in, wheezing from the stairs, with a bottle.
‘Not too much,’ said Mrs Fielding.
‘Just a drop,’ he promised her, measuring out a spoonful. She raised
the patient’s head, and he administered it.
‘That’s better,’ gasped the airman, eyes still shut.
‘Try to rest,’ Mrs Fielding told him. But he struggled to rise and
pulled himself up, resting on his elbows, coughing and blinking, until
he glanced across the room and exclaimed, ‘Peter!’

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Yes, it really was Peter, sitting there on a blanket chest. Alive!

Why? How?
Could it have been a hoax? No. God knows, his father had a strange
sense of humour, but he couldn’t have joked about that.
A mistake then? But they’d opened Peter up, to find out why he’d
died, and found all the nerves curdled like cooking egg whites. Even if it
had been a mistake, he couldn’t have survived the autopsy.
At last he worked it out. ‘Well Peter, this is an unexpected pleasure.’
He frowned. ‘How do you know my name?’
‘You’re my brother!’
‘Oh,’ he said, as if taking in a piece of information, the solution to a
very minor puzzle.
‘Don’t you remember me?’
The woman who was standing at the side of the bed advised him
to keep calm; the elderly gent at the window remarked that the doctor
was coming up the path. ‘I wonder who called him. Not much goes un-
noticed, in this place.’ Peter ran down to let him in.
The doctor was a big man, like a bull with a curly poll. He listened
to Ricky’s heart for a good long time – several minutes of silence – but
conducted no further examination. ‘Suicide attempt,’ was his diagnosis.
‘Well? Am I right?’
Ricky shrugged. ‘I just felt like I had to smash something.’
‘You swerved at the last moment, I take it.’
Indignantly, ‘I did not!’
‘Anyway, you’ve bought yourself some time to think about it, which
is just as well, as it doesn’t sound like you were thinking before.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘If you want to live, you’ll have to go back. You don’t have the cardiac
capacity to survive here, not for long.’
‘What are you on about? I’m fine!’ He pushed himself up, gasping
as he encountered a bruised or fractured rib. ‘Nothing wrong with me
that a bit more of that won’t fix.’ By ‘that’ he meant the brandy that had
restored him to consciousness.
‘Last thing you need!’ the doctor bellowed. ‘You want to go back to
where you came from and make something of yourself, my boy!’ He
packed up his stethoscope, told the Archdeacon to lock up the brandy,
and charged down the stairs snorting.

The others followed to see him out. Ricky lay back and put his hands
over his face, pressing his eyelids with his fingers. In fact, his suicide
was not as impulsive as bravado pretended: it was a decision he’d begun
work on more than a year ago, when they had his leg off. ‘If I can’t fly…’

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(but as it happened, he could, and in 1917, the Corps was so desper-

ate for pilots they kept him on). A few months later: ‘If Mark Thaper’s
dead…’ (but by the time the Red Cross came back with the confirma-
tion, he’d got used to limping along without hope). He still didn’t quite
understand why it was Peter’s death that had decided it.
Peter came up the stairs, as if summoned by thought. He placed a
cup of tea on the table beside the bed – he was moving carefully quiet as
if in deference to an invalid, and was about to go without speaking.
‘Wait!’
He stood in the doorway, regarding him with strangerly alertness.
‘Can you really not remember me?’
‘I don’t want to try,’ he said. ‘I’d rather get to know you from what
I am now.’
This triggered the exact shaken feeling that had hit him when he
had first heard of Peter’s death – the sense that the ground under his
feet was no longer solid. I needed him to be myself against, he realised.
We defined each other. And though he sensed that the man standing
there was someone very strong and… and clear, he wanted the shabby
old brother, the affection, frowsty and sour, the rivalry, the moralising.
The new man was loss made absolute.
He (Ricky didn’t want to think of him as Peter) he, the prosthetic
brother, went back to the blanket chest and sat there. ‘Were you terribly
unhappy?’
‘Yes – I don’t know. Not unhappy, exactly. I just couldn’t go on.’
‘Things look very different, you know, from this end.’
‘I hadn’t noticed.’
He picked up the boot and peered, with uninhibited curiosity, at the
wooden leg inside it. ‘Does it hurt?’
‘Not any more. The phantom itching is the worst. – What is this
place?’
‘They call it the Junction.’
‘You didn’t used to believe in an afterlife.’
This provoked a smile, rather difficult to read, rather uncomfortable
to receive. ‘What?’ Ricky demanded.
‘Just that ‘after’ seems a funny sort of word to stick to life. You
know? If you’re alive, how can there be an after, or a before, for that
matter?’
‘Eternity?’ Ricky snorted. ‘Well, at least the climate’s more temper-
ate than Auntie Matt used to make it sound!’

‘Peter!’ the woman’s voice came from below. ‘Don’t wear him out with
talking!’

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Peter went downstairs. The front door was open, and the Archdea-
con stood at the garden gate, waving and talking to the people who
were coming along on foot or in carts to see the wreckage of the flying
machine. Children were scrambling perilously on the wings or fighting
for a place in the cockpit. Peter marched across the field and ordered
them off.
The plane did not appear to be all that badly damaged. One wing
smashed of course, but the engine housing appeared intact. He enlisted
a couple of farm hands and the hauled the tail down and got it set on
its wheels again. Cocked up like that, it looked so jaunty and so crushed
– so very like the little pilot-bloke. Peter felt a twist in his gut, a pain he
couldn’t name, and he hurried back to Rosemont House.
Mrs Fielding was in the kitchen. ‘What will happen to him?’ he
asked her. ‘Is there no way he can stay here?’
She sighed. ‘Dr James is usually pretty accurate.’
A series of thumps from upstairs, as if someone was moving furni-
ture – or hopping across the room. Peter came out into the hall just as
Ricky emerged onto the landing. He came down the stairs one step at
a time, wooden leg first. Halfway down he had to pause and hold the
rail to steady himself, shutting his eyes as if he was feeling faint. Peter
braced himself to break his fall, but he drew a deep breath and recov-
ered, and tock-tapped the rest of the way down. ‘There! I deserve a drink
for that, wouldn’t you say?’
On the level ground, he walked well, with only a bit of a limp. It was
the sound rather than the movement that gave the wooden leg away.
Peter opened the door into the sitting room; he went in and dropped on
the sofa.
Peter pulled the piano stool over and sat beside him saying, ‘I didn’t
want to understand what the doctor was saying. But we’d better face it.
You can’t survive here. You need to go back.’
Ricky sighed. It looked like he was going to need it spelling out.
‘There’s nothing to go back for. Mark – my friend’s dead. You’re dead. I’ll
be even more crippled – demobbed for sure, and no chance of civil work.
Not flying, anyway.’
‘I know it’s hard, but that’s the kind of thing that expands your
heart, takes you out of yourself.’
Softly, ‘I chose to die.’
‘What about your family?’
‘There’s only Pa. You don’t remember him, either?’
‘No, but if he’s lost two sons – ’
‘He’ll bounce.’ No need to tell him that it had looked like Pa and
Celia were well on the way to consoling each other for Peter’s loss. There

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was perhaps no real reason why they shouldn’t, but it wasn’t something
Ricky had wanted to witness.
‘Then will you do it for me?’
‘For you? You don’t even know me!’
‘I find that I want to. But I won’t ever, unless you go back and let life
make you into someone who could be my brother.’
Nausea. At first Ricky took it for a reaction against soppiness, but it
deepened into something cold and dizzy, and he must have looked bad,
judging by the yelp the other let out. A cold sweat broke out of him, and
his lungs were fluttering. Yes, it was his heart.
The Archdeacon came in and gave him brandy, which helped the
nausea. But his heart – how had he never realised how frail it was? A
tiny, trembly thing, that had never flown against the limits of his own
predilections and passions. Maybe Peter was right: the dreary slog of his
resumed life was probably the exact thing that would build it up. The
business of always striving to be better than yourself – in the short term
it made you miserable, but it seemed that it worked in the long run.
Huh. The stranger was Peter, then. What he had made of himself
– but still enough of the old Peter to want me to do the same! Ricky
smiled.
And this is me. Not strong enough to be something different, but
maybe brave enough to be what I am.
He had a sense of himself standing up to Auntie Matt, all those
years ago.
And then, years later, of the time he had run away from school to
live in a leaky shed in an asparagus field on the Thaper family farm.
Mark raided pies for him, and he slept under a tarpaulin next to the
love of his life, a wood and canvas fuselage, wingless and engineless at
that stage, mounted on bicycle wheels. He survived three nights before
his distraught father found him. Rather a biblical scene, actually. Except
that he had refused to go home and obey.
He felt a light, objective fondness for the little chap he had been.
No, I can’t betray him. Let him be what he is, and come to an end.

‘Ah, that was that lovely.’

Peter looked at the Archdeacon.
‘You could see him deciding to go, and then, ever so neatly, he went.
Just like that!’ He made a little flicking gesture with his fingers, trying
to express the quality of the disappearance, silvery and instantaneous.
The gesture, like the note of a clear bell, temporarily suspended
feeling. Not the numbness of shock, but clarity, so that Peter could
see that the death was of a piece with the person. And that what the

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Archdeacon had called neatness was actually courage: letting go of life

without fear or regret. But perhaps only someone with a light grasp on
survival could ever have cast himself into the sky in one of those rickety
machines.
And yet it still seemed heartbreaking that his brother should only
have stayed with him for such a very short time. ‘Excuse me,’ he said,
suspecting that the Archdeacon wouldn’t understand his emotion – or
that he would see it as an error of taste, allowing self-indulgence to
cloud his appreciation of a death that had really been a quite exquisite
piece of work. He went upstairs and sat down on the bed. Ricky had, of
course, left it rumpled.
To stay yourself, you simply stop at your own end. Simplicity. To go
on, you become what you are not. Difficult, but it could happen.
But what was it all for? The sense of Ricky’s all-of-a-piece life and
death returned to him. Only now it seemed that the sorrow he felt
wasn’t an emotion, not a feeling inside him, but a feeling that he was
in, something of Ricky still tingling in the air. Almost as soon as he
grasped this, it was withdrawn, as if Ricky himself – no. No, he was
gone, the feeling didn’t make sense except it took in his death.
Not Ricky, but perhaps the principle that had structured him –
teasing, refusing to be solemn. And it was answering his question; was
in itself the answer to his question.

126
 contributors 33

Gary Allen was born in Ballymena, Co. Antrim. Latest collections, Iscariot’s
Dream (Agenda Editions) and The Bone House (Lagan Press). A selection of
poems has been published in the anthology The New North (Wake Forest
University Press).
Jonathan Bate
Marshall Brooks lives in Southern Vermont with his wife and youngest
son. Currently, he is working on a book about readers and their personal
libraries.
Michael Caines works for the Times Literary Supplement. He has edited an an-
thology of plays by eighteenth-century women and a book about the actor
David Garrick.
David Constantine is a translator of Hölderlin, Goethe, Kleist and Brecht.
Collected Poems was published in 2004 and a collection of stories Under the Dam
(Comma Press) in 2005. His new collection is Nine Fathom Deep (Bloodaxe
2009).
Rana Dasgupta is a British writer based in Delhi. His first book, Tokyo Can-
celled, was a collection of folktales for the era of globalisation. Solo is his first
novel.
Jonathan Davis graduated from Liverpool University in English and Phi-
losophy in 2008 and has become a Teaching Assistant. This has given him
time to write and apply for a Creative Writing MA that he hopes will develop
and foster his writing.
Rebecca Gethin lives on Dartmoor. Her poems appear in various magazines
and her first collection, River is the Plural of Rain will be published by Over-
steps Books in 2009. She teaches creative writing in a prison.
John Killick is a poet and critic. His contribution in this issue will appear in
his next book (co-authored with Myra Schneider) Writing Your Self, due from
Continuum International in November 2009.
Angela Leighton has published two volumes of poetry: A Cold Spell (Shoe-
string 2000) and Sea Level (Shoestring 2007; 2nd ed. 2009) In addition,
various critical books, most recently On Form: Poetry, Aestheticism, and the
Legacy of a Word (OUP 2007).
Joel Lane lives in Birmingham. He is the author of two poetry collections,
The Edge of the Screen and Trouble in the Heartland (both from Arc), and five
other books.
Isobel Lusted is a New Zealander who has lived in London for many years.
Ian McMillan was born in 1956 and has been a freelance writer/performer
/broadcaster since 1981. He presents The Verb on BBC Radio 3 every Friday
night.
Andrew McNeillie’s most recent poetry collection is Slower (2006). His
memoir An Aran Keening came out in 2001. Its prequel Once will appear in
Spring 2009. He is literature editor at OUP.

127
 contributors

Camille Paglia, the scholar and culture critic, is the University Professor of
Humanities and Media Studies at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia.
She has written numerous articles on art, literature, popular culture, femi-
nism, politics, and religion for publications around the world.
Pauline Rowe was born and brought up in Widnes. She lives in Liverpool
with her husband and 5 children. Her first full poetry collection will be pub-
lished by Headland Publications in 2009.
Clive Sinclair is the author of thirteen books, some of which have won
prizes. Clive Sinclair’s True Tales of the Wild West, the most recent, was pub-
lished last July.
Enid Stubin is Assistant Professor of English at Kingsborough Community
College of the City University of New York and Adjunct Professor of Human-
ities at NY University’s School of Continuing and Professional Studies.
Mary Weston was born in Hawaii and now lives in Liverpool. She is an out-
reach worker for The Reader Organisation and a novelist.

The Reader Magazine

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