“I must have wanton Poets” (Edward II/Christopher Marlowe)

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Oh dear, I’ve been very slack with regard to writing this blog lately.  I’ve been beavering away trying to prepare for my final year at uni, and have not managed my time properly – this does not bode well for the mania of finals.  Anyway, my pending exam failures aside,  I was wracking my brains trying to think of a theme for this post, when all I’ve been doing is studying.  Very dull, and does not make for lots of choices for a theme that relates to my life in any way.  But then I thought of something that happened recently and I want you stick with me when I tell you the theme of this post: its Renaissance theatre.  Wait!  For those of you groaning and having flashbacks to sweating over Shakespeare at school, let me say this: you were taught badly.  Renaissance drama can be the best drama there is, from a golden age of theatre when some of the greatest minds were so engaged with the art form they produced lively, innovative, downright entertaining plays.  Then generations of schoolchildren were tortured into trying to unpick it all bit by bit, whilst being told it was good for them.  I hope if that was your experience you’ll finish reading this post, and let me try and persuade you back into the theatre, because I love it.  The reason I’ve made it the theme of this post is because I went and saw Edward II at the National, and it was fantastic.  For those of you with ease of access to the South Bank, I highly recommend you try and catch it.  The production was so innovative and fresh (actors in the audience, multimedia approach, ad-libbing) but it still didn’t lose sight of Marlowe’s brilliant language.  Its iconoclastic approach may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but for me it was one of the best adaptations I’ve seen.

So I thought I’d look at two more Renaissance plays, neither by Shakespeare, because there’s an abundance of stuff on him, no?  (This doesn’t mean I won’t opt to write a post on him at another time, he was a genius after all).  Firstly, Dr Faustus by Christopher Marlowe.  I last saw this performed in 2011 at The Globe, and it was a great production.  I’m not always so keen on The Globe’s approach to things, but this worked well, and Arthur Darvill (Rory in Dr Who according to the excited audience members that surrounded me) was a perfect Mephistopheles.  Here’s the final scene from that production (filmed theatre is always a bit odd I think, and often does the production no justice, but hey ho):

Dr Faustus is about an academic who sells his soul to the devil, asking him to “Resolve me of all ambiguities”.  Ultimately however, Faustus does not use his devilish power to find the answers to anything, but instead uses his time to enjoy prestige and wealth.  This is the first time he and Mephistopheles (Lucifer’s servant) speak:

MEPH. Now, Faustus, what wouldst thou have me do?

FAUSTUS. I charge thee wait upon me whilst I live,

To do whatever Faustus shall command,

Be it to make the moon drop from her sphere,

Or the ocean to overwhelm the world.

 MEPH. I am a servant to great Lucifer,

 And may not follow thee without his leave:

 No more than he commands must we perform.

 FAUSTUS. Did not he charge thee to appear to me?

 MEPH. No, I came hither of mine own accord.

FAUSTUS. Did not my conjuring speeches raise thee? speak.

MEPH. That was the cause, but yet per accidens;

For, when we hear one rack the name of God,

 Abjure the Scriptures and his Saviour Christ,

 We fly, in hope to get his glorious soul…

This first conversation shows so much about the rest of the play.  Firstly, Faustus is a pompous idiot.  He’s just muttered all these complex Latinate incantations, entirely unnecessarily.  When Mephistopheles arrives it’s because he was hanging around, and dropped in “of his own accord”.  Faustus has not conjured  Lucifer, who would not concern himself with such a weasel.  Faustus asks for silly things, the moon to drop, a servant to obey his commands. Secondly, he has no real understanding of what he’s done, it is Mephistopheles who knows the true price paid with his “glorious soul”.  This devil explains:

MEPH. Unhappy spirits that fell with Lucifer,

Conspir’d against our God with Lucifer,

And are for ever damn’d with Lucifer.

FAUSTUS. Where are you damn’d?

MEPH. In hell.

FAUSTUS. How comes it, then, that thou art out of hell?

MEPH. Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it:

Think’st thou that I, who saw the face of God,

And tasted the eternal joys of heaven,

Am not tormented with ten thousand hells,

In being depriv’d of everlasting bliss?

 O, Faustus, leave these frivolous demands,

 Which strike a terror to my fainting soul!

That line: Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it, to me is the killer line of the whole play.  It shows just how little Faustus understands of what he has forfeited, and makes Mephistopheles the most complex character in the play.  He is both malevolent, and deeply, tragically sad, a fallen angel.  It shows how the person you are enables the power you have, to create a heaven or hell of your own making.  Marlowe was a controversial figure in his time; a government informer claimed the playwright was an atheist, an extreme and dangerous view to hold in the late sixteenth century.  (The informer also claimed Marlowe said “All they that love not tobacco and boys are fools”, a slightly less contentious view at the time).  Atheism was equated with immorality at the time, but I would argue Dr Faustus is a highly moral play whether or not you believe in God.  It asks the questions: what do you worship? and what price are you paying for that worship?  In this way, I would argue it still has plenty to say today, whether you are religious or not.  And if that all sounds a bit heavy, well, the full title is The Tragical History of Dr Faustus, but there are plenty of comic scenes and the play is so artfully written that you never feel like you’re being preached at.

Secondly, a comedy after all that tragedy, by Shakespeare’s frenemy, Ben Jonson: The Alchemist.  Jonson is rarely performed compared to his peers, and I think that’s a real shame.  This play is fast, frenetic, has plenty of physical and verbal comedy and is hugely entertaining.  It’s set in London during the plague, when all those who can afford it have fled to the country.  A servant, Face, takes advantage of his master’s absence to team up with an alchemist, Subtle, and a prostitute, Doll Common, to con people out of their money.  Cue lots of scenes with the three in various disguises, spinning ridiculous stories and scenarios to a succession of gullible idiots.  One of the most colourful of these is Sir Epicure Mammon, who desires the Philosopher’s Stone, for the following dubious reasons:

MAM. For I do mean

To have a list of wives and concubines,

Equal with Solomon, who had the stone

Alike with me; and I will make me a back

With the elixir, that shall be as tough

 As Hercules, to encounter fifty a night.—

 Thou’rt sure thou saw’st it blood?

 FACE. Both blood and spirit, sir.

 MAM. I will have all my beds blown up, not stuft;

Down is too hard: and then, mine oval room

Fill’d with such pictures as Tiberius took

From Elephantis, and dull Aretine

But coldly imitated. Then, my glasses

Cut in more subtle angles, to disperse

And multiply the figures, as I walk

 Naked between my succubae. My mists

 I’ll have of perfume, vapour’d ’bout the room,

 To lose ourselves in; and my baths, like pits

 To fall into; from whence we will come forth,

 And roll us dry in gossamer and roses.—

 Is it arrived at ruby?—Where I spy

 A wealthy citizen, or [a] rich lawyer,

 Have a sublimed pure wife, unto that fellow

 I’ll send a thousand pound to be my cuckold.

Jonson was scathing of those who practiced alchemy (attempting to turn base material into gold) and the greed of both the tricksters and their tricks is scathingly skewered.  However, it is a comedy, and (SPOILER) no-one is severely punished.  Of course, nowadays we’re far too savvy to believe in such things as alchemy – now, where did I put that lottery ticket…..?

Here’s an example of sixteenth-century alchemical experiments in action:

“Procrastinate now, don’t put it off.” (Ellen DeGeneres)

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The Guardian newspaper has a series it runs on Saturdays, called The Q&A, short interviews with celebrities.  One of the regular questions is: “What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?”  I don’t even have to pause for thought to answer this one.  Having lived with myself all these years there are plenty of things I deplore in myself, but far and away is my enormous capacity for procrastination.  Since I’ve started this blog, my procrastination has developed two-fold: I use the blog to procrastinate from whatever else I’m meant to be doing, and the blog also provides something else I procrastinate over.  Let’s just say there’s some reading for next term not getting done right now, and certain members of my household facilitate my procrastination by indulging their favourite pastime of sitting on my laptop – how can I possibly work in these conditions?

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If you are fellow procrastinator, take heart from the fact that you are in great company.  Famous procrastinators include Leonardo da Vinci, Douglas Adams, Franz Kafka and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The last of these is who I turn to now, with The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.  You can read the full poem here. This famous long poem tells the story of a mariner cursed after he shoots an albatross that had brought a warm wind to his ship:

And I had done a hellish thing,

And it would work ’em woe:

For all averred, I had killed the bird

That made the breeze to blow.

Ah wretch! said they, the bird to slay,

That made the breeze to blow!

As a result of his actions, he has to wear the albatross around his neck (hence the phrase for a guilty burden) and the ship is taken into new waters by vengeful spirits where the crew begin to die.

Day after day, day after day,

We stuck, nor breath nor motion;

As idle as a painted ship

Upon a painted ocean.

 

Water, water, every where,

And all the boards did shrink;

Water, water, every where,

Nor any drop to drink.

 

The very deep did rot: O Christ!

That ever this should be!

Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs

Upon the slimy sea.

 

About, about, in reel and rout

The death-fires danced at night;

The water, like a witch’s oils,

Burnt green, and blue and white.

As these lines show, there is an eerie, hallucinatory quality to the imagery that really evokes a feeling of desolation and disquiet on a vast expanse of ocean. The atmosphere of the poem is deeply unsettling.

When the mariner begins to appreciate the natural life around him, he prays, and the albatross falls from his neck, lifting the curse.

Beyond the shadow of the ship,

I watched the water-snakes:

They moved in tracks of shining white,

And when they reared, the elfish light

Fell off in hoary flakes.

 

Within the shadow of the ship

I watched their rich attire:

Blue, glossy green, and velvet black,

They coiled and swam; and every track

Was a flash of golden fire.

 

O happy living things! no tongue

Their beauty might declare:

A spring of love gushed from my heart,

And I blessèd them unaware:

Sure my kind saint took pity on me,

And I blessed them unaware.

 

The self-same moment I could pray;

And from my neck so free

The Albatross fell off, and sank

Like lead into the sea.

However, the Mariner is left to wander the earth, telling his story. It is not a comfortable resolution, and apparently Coleridge was in some sort of spiritual crisis when he wrote this poem.  But although it’s an uncomfortable read, it’s also Coleridge at his best, and the imagery is beautiful and arresting.  Definitely worth a read, and as a procrastination tool it should use up about an hour.

Secondly, back to the twenty-first century with Where’d You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple. Semple used to write for various television shows, including one of my all-time favourites, Arrested Development, so I approached this novel with high hopes.  I wasn’t let down.   The novel is funny, but not at the expense of the characters.  Semple manages to create people you really care about, even as you laugh at their foibles and delusions.  I chose it for this post because Bernadette is an architect who hasn’t created anything in years.  The novel is told from the point of view of her adoring 15-year-old daughter Bee, but also multiple viewpoints as we read letters, emails, notes and even a transcript of a TED talk.  Bernadette lives with her husband and daughter in a crumbling building:

“All day and night it cracks and groans, like it’s trying to get comfortable but can’t, which I’m sure has everything to do with the huge amount of water it absorbs any time it rains.  It’s happened before that a door all of a sudden won’t open because the house has settled around it.”

“I knew our blackberry vines were buckling the library floor and causing weird lumps in the carpet and shattering basement windows. But I had a smile on my face, because while I slept, there was a force protecting me.”

Bernadette hates living in Seattle, “this Canada-close sinkhole they call the Emerald city”.  She responds with antagonism bordering on aggression to the parents at Bee’s school who try and get her involved in the “community”.  Then one day she disappears.  As Bee tries to put together what’s happened and find her idiosyncratic, forceful mother, the various characters emerge through Bee’s impression of them and their own words in the various transcripts that make up the novel. They are all flawed, funny, recognisable and likeable.  Even the character I most wanted to throttle redeemed herself in the end.

Although it’s Bee looking for her mother, the title is Where’d You Go, Bernadette, not Where’d You Go, Mom.  Ultimately the novel is about Bernadette’s search for herself, because, as a friend of hers points out: “If you don’t create, Bernadette, you will become a menace to society”.  And funny though Bernadette’s menace is, you’re rooting for this eccentric and engaging character to find her way back to working again. Where’d You Go, Bernadette is a reassuring, feel-good novel about how we’re all trying to get through life and not lose ourselves along the way.

Normally I end with a photo of the books, but I thought it was apt to the theme of procrastination not to get round to it.  Instead here is Tim from The Office exploring his favourite way to procrastinate, by torturing Gareth:

“Walk on air against your better judgement.” (Seamus Heaney, Nobel Lecture, 1995)

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I wasn’t planning on posting this week, as I have two exams on Thursday, and despite the fact that I am a major procrastinator I’m really trying to revise.  (And keep getting distracted by episodes of Cake Boss, of which there seem to be approximately twenty million.  If I end up answering a question with the phrase “Byron is prime example of poetry in the Hoboken style, baby!” I have only myself to blame.  A little in-joke there for anyone else who follows this extraordinary bake-fest.)

Anyway, I wanted to post to commemorate the work of Seamus Heaney, whose death was announced today.  This is a sad loss to the contemporary poetry scene.  Heaney was as extraordinarily sensitive poet, dedicated to his craft, alive to all the possibilities of language.  To see him interviewed was the opportunity to listen to someone intelligent, unpretentious and engaging.

I’ve picked two of his poems pretty much at random.  He was a prolific writer so even if you don’t think much of my choices do check him out, there’s bound to be something for you.

Firstly, Blackberry Picking.  I chose this poem because I’m pretty sure this was the first Heaney poem I ever read, at school.  My English teacher was a massive Ted Hughes fan, so Heaney (contemporary and friend of Hughes) wasn’t too much of a leap.  You can view the whole poem here.  I’m just going to look at the first ten lines, and then the end line.

Late August, given heavy rain and sun
for a full week, the blackberries would ripen.
At first, just one, a glossy purple clot
among others, red, green, hard as a knot.
You ate that first one and its flesh was sweet
like thickened wine: summer’s blood was in it
leaving stains upon the tongue and lust for
picking. Then red ones inked up and that hunger
sent us out with milk-cans, pea-tins, jam-pots
where briars scratched and wet grass bleached our boots.

I love his imagery here.  I grew up with blackberries at the bottom of my garden and to me this vividly evokes that memory, but also his use of language is so accessible.  Sometimes contemporary poetry (or any poetry) can seem so impenetrable.  Heaney is great communicator, and I think this poem is easy to understand.  That’s not to say it’s simple – there’s a violence to this childhood memory, created through the visceral imagery (clot/flesh/blood/lust/scratched) that unnerves me, and stops it being a straightforward nostalgia trip.   Heaney’s last lines are often powerful and punchy endings.  In Blackberry Picking it’s this:

Each year I hoped they’d keep, knew they would not.

I think this is so simple and beautiful.  It succinctly captures the sadness that tinges childhood memories, and the way we learn that the world is not always as we want it to be, or something we can control. I don’t want to go on too much because I think poetry is an intensely personal experience, and everyone sees and gains different things from it.  I hope its enough of a taster to encourage you to check out the full poem.

Secondly, Two Lorries.  This is quite a famous poem of Heaney’s, from his Whitbread Award winning collection The Spirit Level, published the year after he won the Nobel Prize.  I chose it because there’s a recording of Heaney reading the poem available online, here.  What better way to experience the poem? This is one of the poems where Heaney looks at the Troubles that have been the enduring political experience of his country in his lifetime.  Here are the first two stanzas:

It’s raining on black coal and warm wet ashes.
There are tyre-marks in the yard, Agnew’s old lorry
Has all its cribs down and Agnew the coalman
With his Belfast accent’s sweet-talking my mother.
Would she ever go to a film in Magherafelt?
But it’s raining and he still has half the load

To deliver farther on. This time the lode
Our coal came from was silk-black, so the ashes
Will be the silkiest white. The Magherafelt
(Via Toomebridge) bus goes by. The half-stripped lorry
With its emptied, folded coal-bags moves my mother:
The tasty ways of a leather-aproned coalman!

This shows Heaney’s great skill at capturing life experience: the voices of his mother and the coalman are so clear and direct, despite being indirectly quoted.  Once again, I find his imagery so beautiful, and disturbing.  The idea that the coal turns from one extreme to the other (silk-black to silkiest white) is an image that has so much to say, and the extremity is evoked within a resolutely domestic scene gives it an extended context that makes it personal and political.  The second lorry of the title is the one that blows up the bus station in Magherafelt.  Here’s the end of the poem:

So tally bags and sweet-talk darkness, coalman,
Listen to the rain spit in new ashes

As you heft a load of dust that was Magherafelt,
Then reappear from your lorry as my mother’s
Dreamboat coalman filmed in silk-white ashes.

I’ve said before that I find it hard to write about things I really love.  This is one of those times.  The end of that poem is incredibly powerful and moving, I think I’ll just let it speak for itself.

Seamus Heaney 1939-2013.

Seamus Heaney

Image taken from: http://www.laobserved.com/archive/2013/08/seamus_heaney_nobel_prize.php

“The apparition of these faces in the crowd;/Petals on a wet, black bough.” (Ezra Pound, In a Station of the Metro)

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This week’s post was prompted by an elastic band.  But first let me confess to a bad habit: I make up stories about people.  I’m sure lots of people do.  I sit on the train/in the café/bored out of my mind in the supermarket queue and I’ll notice someone and start concocting a whole story about them.  Half the time I don’t even realise it’s what I’m doing.  A lot of the time I forget this means I can end up staring quite intently at someone, and it’s frankly somewhat of a miracle that I’ve reached my ripe old age without getting my face punched in. If you suffer from this affliction and live in the UK, may I recommend the National Portrait Gallery?  A safe space where you are actively invited to go round staring at faces, it’s a haven for the fantasist of this type.  So, with my anti-social habit established, let me rewind to the elastic band…

I was on the train to Brighton (hence the title quote about Metro passengers, and an excuse to highlight one of my favourite poems).  The man across the aisle from me, facing away, was reading a book whose cover I couldn’t see, and on the little pull down table in front of him he had a bag of crisps.  This was a mammoth bag of crisps, and he’d eaten about half, folded over the top of the packet, and secured it with an elastic band wrapped round the packet.  After I’d admired his restraint – because if I open a big bag of crisps the entire contents of that bag is getting eaten – I became mesmerised by this elastic band.  Where had it come from?  Had he brought it with him, planned in advance for just such an eventuality?  Or did he carry round bits of stationery (is an elastic band stationery?) just in case events took a turn and he would be called on to secure something? Did he buy the elastic band having eaten half the packet and deciding the crisps needed better containment that just folding the top over?  How the hell had this circumstance arisen? He didn’t appear to have any bags with him, just the book and the crisps, so it wasn’t like he had an elastic band conveniently buried in a capacious man bag.

I realise thinking about almost anything other than this elastic band would have been a better use of my time, but I couldn’t help it.  This coupled with the man’s appearance – shoulders so big he was halfway in the aisle despite sitting fully in his seat, and a shaved head – convinced me he must be some ultra-capable marine/secret agent type.  I was certain the book he was reading was by Andy McNab.  And now a shoddy visual representation to keep you going through this long, waffly post:

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When he got up to leave I saw the front cover of the book and I couldn’t have got it more wrong. Most unexpected.  It was a book the BBC adapted for a Sunday night TV programme, that’s how cosy it was.  As my visions of him as MacGyver (or a more recent reference for the youngsters, Michael Weston from Burn Notice) crumbled to dust, I realised that I am rubbish at judging people.  I’d either got it totally wrong, or he was some hardcore daredevil marine, who just happened to like cosy reading. Either way my ideas about him based on elastic band usage and reading matter were entirely false.  By way of recompense I offer this book recommendation, which I think someone who is fastidious enough to wrap his crisps in an elastic band might enjoy (and yes, I realise this is still me being judgemental – and probably getting it wrong again – sorry, sorry, sorry):

So Many Ways to Begin by Jon McGregor (2006, Bloomsbury) tells the story of David, a museum curator.  Working in museums is his vocation, he has loved them since childhood:

“He liked the smell of museums, the musty scent of things dug from the earth and buried in heavy wooden store cupboards.  He liked the smell of the polish on the marbled floors, and the way his shoes squeaked as he walked across them.  He liked the way people’s voices would drift up and be lost in the hush of the high-ceilinged rooms.  He liked the coldness of the glass cases when he pressed his face against them.  He liked looking at the dates of the objects , and trying not to get dizzy as he added up how long ago that was.  He didn’t understand why people had to ask, why they didn’t enjoy museums as much as he did…”

A friend of his mother’s accidently exposes a family secret, one which sends David into free-fall.  As he struggles to comprehend his present in light of his altered past, he curates his own belongings.  Each chapter has a heading which refers to an object in David’s life: “handwritten list of household items c.1947”, “pair of cinema tickets annotated 19 May 1967”, “cut fragments of surgical thread, in small transparent case, dated July 1983”.  As we learn the meaning these objects hold, we understand David and the life he leads, alongside his mother, wife and daughter.  David fully realises the meaning of the minutiae in our lives when he curates an exhibition on the immigrants arriving in Coventry after the war:

“He wasn’t surprised by the interviewees eagerness to loan him their few treasured keepsakes –the watches, the framed photographs, the religious artefacts – trusting him to keep their last attachments to a lost home safe, pushing them gladly into his arms.  But what he hadn’t quite been expecting was just how readily people held these things to hand, arranged together in the alcoves of their front rooms, or across a chest of drawers in a bedroom, or filling a glass-fronted cabinet in a kitchen, like miniature museums of their own.”

So Many Ways to Begin is a sensitive portrayal of the intensely personal nature of the physicality of lives, how we ground ourselves in objects and are keepers of our own histories.  It is also about the shifting nature of those histories, and how relationships with others, the intangible, is what gives meaning to the tangible.

My second recommendation I give to the man who was sitting directly opposite me, (facing me) on the same journey.  You, sir, are beautiful.  This adjective is overused, applied with alarming regularity to people who simply have capped teeth and a good blow-dry.  But you are beautiful: you look like Henry Cavill and Toby Stephens had a baby together, then got Michelangelo in to complete the job.  (Seriously, why are you on a train in south London?  Shouldn’t you be in a convertible in the south of France?) Shoddy visual representation to keep you going through this long, waffly post:

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While I’m on this judgemental trip, I’ll assert that I think you owe it to the world to ensure your mind is as beautiful as your face.  Stop reading the free newspapers that litter every train compartment.  Yes, that’s what you were doing.  It only serves to sully you.  I know they’re free, I know everyone does it, but do you know the free paper is owned by the same group as the Daily Mail?  And frankly there isn’t a blog post long enough for me to tell you all that’s wrong with that newspaper.  So here is my recommendation for reading matter as lovely as your face:

The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy (1997, Flamingo) is novel that takes joy in language and is beautifully written.  I know some people found it a bit over the top in this regard, but I really enjoyed losing myself in this lyrical novel.  It tells the story of a family through the eyes of twins, Estha and Rahel.  Roy is a political activist (this is her only novel so far) and there are strong political themes running through the novel, around India’s caste system, economics, and communism.  She considers the effect these large forces can have on families and individuals:

“it was a skyblue day in December sixty-nine (the nineteen silent).  It was the kind of time in the life of a family when something happens to nudge its hidden morality from its resting place and make it bubble to the surface and float for a while. In clear view. For everyone to see.”

The conflict between the family morality and societal constructs results in tragedy that tears the family apart. The twins are separated at age 7 and only reunited at age 31, where the damage that has been done continues to exert its power.  It’s difficult to go into details without giving away great swathes of plot, so I’ll just give you a few little bits.  Estha reacts to the events by becoming increasingly silent:

“A raindrop glistened on the end of Estha’s earlobe.  Thick, silver in the light, like a heavy bead of mercury.  She reached out. Touched it. Took it away.  Estha didn’t look at her.  He retreated into further stillness.”

The Kerala setting is vividly evoked, such as in the opening paragraph to the novel:

“May in Ayemenem is a hot, brooding month.  The days are long and humid. The river shrinks and black crows gorge on bright mangoes in still, dustgreen trees. Red bananas ripen. Jackfruits burst. Dissolute bluebottles hum vacuously in the fruity air.  Then they stun themselves against clear windows and die, fatly baffled in the sun. The nights are clear but suffused with sloth and sullen expectation.”

The God of Small Things takes controversial issues shows the impact on individuals bound up in circumstances they cannot control.  The beauty of the prose emphasises the drama rather than disguises it, making a powerful and highly readable novel.

Here are the novels with a scene from Strangers on a Train:

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“Many people, myself among them, feel better at the mere sight of a book.” (Jane Smiley)

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Hello you gorgeous creature.  Yes, you.  I’m talking to you.  You’re lovely.  Thank you for visiting my blog, I really appreciate it.  And I’m confident in my assertion that you’re lovely, because in the short time I’ve been blogging, I’ve been struck by what a great community the blogosphere (as I’ve encountered it) is.  Recently there’s been a lot of attention in the media given to trolls, and the very real havoc they can wreak.  While this atrocious, it’s also true that “Two Bloggers Disagree – Lively & Respectful Debate Ensues” is not a headline you’ll see anytime soon.  People behaving well is just not newsworthy.  So this week I thought I’d make the theme of my post comfort reading.  A cosy corner to celebrate the niceties of life, with you, my fellow bibliophiles and general all round good-eggs.  Pull up an overstuffed chair, wrap yourself in a quilt, keep the hot chocolate and cake within arm’s reach – let’s get cosy and settle down to some books!

Firstly, Emma by Jane Austen (1815, my edition  Wordsworth, 1992).   I chose this novel because I remember the first time I read it, once all the characters were introduced, thinking “well, I can see exactly how this is going to play out”.  And I don’t think I’m particularly clever or insightful, I think most readers would experience the same.  It’s not that it’s a badly written book, far from it, but just that nowadays we’re used to these sorts of plotlines (romantic story arc, some misunderstanding and confusion, resolution leading to reunited lovers) and I think there’s comfort to be gleaned from that predictability.  I’m not a big reader of crime fiction, but I imagine it’s a similar sort of deal – you get to walk away from the novel with the ends nicely tied up and equilibrium restored.  And that can be very comforting.  So let me introduce you to:

“Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her.”

Emma is not necessarily all that likeable – she’s a spolit snob who thinks she knows what is best for people.  But Emma grows and matures throughout the novel and becomes more humble, and fundamentally has her heart in the right place, so it’s difficult not to warm to her.  The novel is resolutely domestic, as Emma concerns herself with her neighbours and plots to arrange romantic attachments.  The plot is slight, but Emma sees Jane Austen writing as a confident and accomplished author, and the story is delivered with great verve.  There are plenty of Austen’s aphorisms to enjoy:

“It was a delightful visit;-perfect, in being much too short.” 

“I always deserve the best treatment because I never put up with any other.” 

“One half of the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other.” 

I had a tutor who specialised in Austen, and told me she enjoyed her because she was such an absolute bitch, at odds with her rather twee image.  Certainly the portrayals of the vain, boorish characters pull no punches:

“Emma was not required, by any subsequent discovery, to retract her ill opinion of Mrs. Elton. Her observation had been pretty correct. Such as Mrs. Elton appeared to her on this second interview, such she appeared whenever they met again,—self-important, presuming, familiar, ignorant, and ill-bred. She had a little beauty and a little accomplishment, but so little judgment that she thought herself coming with superior knowledge of the world, to enliven and improve a country neighbourhood”

Ouch.  So if you fancy losing yourself in the domestic and romantic concerns of Regency England, just beware that all is not as cosy as it appears.  But Emma is still a comforting read, and one that is huge fun.

Secondly, A Patchwork Planet by Anne Tyler (Vintage, 1999). I haven’t read much by this prolific and much-loved author, only this novel and Breathing Lessons, so forgive me if I seem to be saying very obvious things to established Anne Tyler fans out there. I chose it because I found it comforting read, suggesting there is hope for all of us and people are capable of giving a great deal to one another as we all muddle through life.  Anne Tyler has observed in an interview that “very small things are often really larger than the large things” and this is what she concerns herself with, the small things that hold great meaning in our lives.  A Patchwork Planet tells the story of Barnaby Gaitlin, a man whose life is not where he wants it to be, but he’s not sure what he does want.  His family struggle to forgive him after he was caught in high school breaking into peoples’ homes to go through their things and read their mail.  His ex-wife has moved away and taken their rabbit-faced daughter with her.  He works for Rent-a-Back, providing odd jobs for the elderly in the neighbourhood. He feels he is not the good person others think he is:

“Oh, what makes some people more virtuous than others? Is it something they know form birth? Don’t they ever feel that zingy , thrilling urge to smash the world to bits? Isn’t it possible, maybe, that good people are just luckier people? Couldn’t that be the explanation?”

A Patchwork Planet is peopled with eccentric characters, Barnaby’s co-workers, clients and family. Tyler writes with warmth and acceptance for people in all their guises:

“Then Mrs Alford started sorting her belongings.  That’s always a worrisome sign.  For a solid week she had three of us come in daily – me, Ray Oakley, and Martine. (“Two men for the real lifting,” was how she put it, “and a girl so as to encourage the hiring of women.”) […] Half the time she called Martine “Celeste” which was the name of our other female employee, and I was “Terry”.

“It’s Barnaby, Mrs Alford,” I said as gently as possible.

“Oh! I’m sorry! I thought your name was Terry and you played in that musical group.””

The humour in A Patchwork Planet is gentle, and never at the expense of the characters. As Barnaby muddles his way through another year of his life, you’re left with the feeling that nothing’s perfect but it’s OK.  Sometimes it’s better than OK.  And we may all be alone, but we’re all in this together.  What’s more comforting than that?

Here are the books getting cosy, wrapped in a chunky woollen scarf I knitted (and got completely carried away with, it’s about 8 feet long, good job I’m tall):

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“Oh, brothers! I don’t care for brothers. My elder brother won’t die, and my younger brothers seem never to do anything else.” (Oscar Wilde)

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According to a skincare company trying to get me to spend more money, Friday was International Sisters Day. I don’t have a sister so my spending on moisturiser was limited, but I do have a brother. (And he buys his own moisturiser).  I have no idea when International Brothers Day is, so I thought I would theme this post around male siblings and just ignore the fact that it was supposed to be a celebration of sisterhood.  I should just point out that I chose the title quote because I love Oscar Wilde and it was about brothers, not because I’m waiting for my brother to die.  Without him in my life I would lose the one person who manages to simultaneously ridicule the things I say and do, whilst being unconditionally, unwaveringly supportive.  It’s a seemingly paradoxical combination that I’m sure many of you with siblings will recognise.  The texts I’ve chosen both feature brothers, but admittedly not a sibling relationship I found familiar. This is hardly surprising – I consider having a brother one of the great blessings of my life, and this doesn’t make for a very dynamic narrative. So the relationships depicted are dysfunctional and bordering on destructive, but this makes for two powerful tales of familial drama.

Firstly, a classic of modern American theatre, Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller (1949, my copy Penguin 2000).  The play tells the story of Willy Loman, the salesman of the title, as he loses his grip on his life.  He is aging, always a threat to a salesman’s career, and his sanity is wavering, he is subject to flashbacks and unable to distinguish between past and present at times.  The play is a damning indictment of a consumerist culture, and written in 1948, it sadly hasn’t aged at all:

LINDA: And Willy, don’t forget to ask for a little advance, because we’ve got the insurance premium. It’s the grace period now.

WILLY: That’s a hundred… ?

LINDA: A hundred and eight, sixty-eight. Because we’re a little short again.

WILLY: Why are we short?

LINDA: Well, you had the motor job on the car…

WILLY: That goddam Studebaker!

LINDA: And you got one more payment on the refrigerator…

WILLY: But it just broke again!

LINDA: Well, it’s old, dear.

WILLY: I told you we should’ve bought a well-advertised machine. Charley bought a General Electric and it’s twenty years old and it’s still good, that son-of-a-bitch.

LINDA: But, Willy…

WILLY: Whoever heard of a Hastings refrigerator? Once in my life I would like to own something outright before it’s broken! I’m always in a race with the junkyard! I just finished paying for the car and it’s on its last legs. The refrigerator consumes belts like a goddam maniac. They time those things. They time them so when you finally paid for them, they’re used up.

Within the pressures of consumerism, Willy and his sons struggle to make the money the need to buy the things they’re convinced they need, and still create a life of meaning.  The sons of the play, Happy and Biff, are close brothers, but very different.  Happy is a ladies man, working in the commercial sector, but lonely without fully knowing why.  Biff struggles under the weight of his father’s expectations, only knowing what he doesn’t want – to follow his father into sales:

BIFF: Why does Dad mock me all the time?

HAPPY: He’s not mocking you, he…

BIFF: Everything I say there’s a twist of mockery on his face. I can’t get near him.

HAPPY: He just wants you to make good, that’s all. I wanted to talk to you about Dad for a long time, Biff. Something’s — happening to him. He — talks to himself.

BIFF: I noticed that this morning. But he always mumbled.

HAPPY: But not so noticeable. It got so embarrassing I sent him to Florida. And you know something? Most of the time he’s talking to you.

BIFF: What’s he say about me?

HAPPY: I can’t make it out.

BIFF: What’s he say about me?

HAPPY: I think the fact that you’re not settled, that you’re still kind of up in the air…

BIFF: There’s one or two other things depressing him, Happy.

HAPPY: What do you mean?

BIFF: Never mind. Just don’t lay it all to me.

HAPPY: But I think if you just got started — I mean — is there any future for you out there?

BIFF: I tell ya, Hap, I don’t know what the future is. I don’t know — what I’m supposed to want.

Arthur Miller has a great reputation for good reason.  As the Loman family implodes under the weight of failure and disappointment, the play powerfully demonstrates the forces modern life can exert to a tragic extent.  Not a light read, but sixty-five years later, still a vital one.

Secondly, and with a title that gives two sibling types for the price of one, The Sisters Brothers by Patrick de Witt (Granta, 2011).  This novel was published to great acclaim and was shortlisted for the Booker in 2011.  I found it a strange read. Apparently there were suggestions that the Coen brothers buy the film rights (something which John C. Reilly has apparently done) and that fact should give you a good idea of the tone of the novel.  Like a Coen brothers film it is full of peculiar characters and situations, viscerally real yet oddly surreal, with a dry, deadpan humour.  The novel tells the tale of Charlie and Eli Sisters, brothers  who are murderers for hire amongst the gold rush of the 1850s. They are in the pay of the sinister Commodore, who has charged them to hunt down and kill the muppetly-named Hermann Kermit Warm.  The story is narrated by Eli, the more sensitive of the two brothers who longs to leave the life and open a trading post.  He and Charlie are bound by blood and deep understanding, a shared violent history and the fact that they work effectively as a murderous team.  Charlie is an alcoholic and the more violent of the two, but at times Eli sees him anew:

“He then located a deep spot in the stream, stripped down, and leapt in, shrieking loudly at its coldness.  I sat on the bank and watched him splashing and singing; he had not had anything to drink the night before and there had been no other people around to upset his volatile nature, and I found myself becoming sentimental by this rare show of happiness. Charlie had often been glad and singing as a younger man, before we took up with the Commodore, when he became guarded and hard”

The story has an episodic nature and short chapters, but the plot gains momentum as the brothers gain on their prey and realise all may not be as it seems.  It turns out these two seemingly immoral characters have a line they will not cross, but discovering this does not help them:

“He exhaled through his nostrils. “What do you think we should do?”

“What do you think we should do?”

But neither of us knew what to do.”

As the Sisters Brothers continue on their path, not knowing where it will lead, they struggle, similarly to the Loman family, to work out a vocation for themselves that will give their lives meaning. Although their circumstances may be more extreme – and downright weird – than most of us will ever know, the fundamental need for meaning and acceptance makes their struggles recogniseable.

Here are the books with a present my brother gave me a few years back, in memory of our childhood; Gabriel the folk-singing toad from Bagpuss, my favourite character from my favourite kids programme:

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And as a P.S.: Those of you interested in management leadership/self-improvement/self-leadership do check out my brother’s blog here.  He hasn’t updated in ages but he assures me he’s got lots of good posts planned soon.

“Everyone talks about the weather, but no one does anything about it.” (Mark Twain)

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Being a Brit, I love talking about the weather.  Seriously.  I love the fact that it’s the usual conversation opener for the stranger next to you in the queue (another great British past time). I never tire of it.  There’s always something to say.  At the moment, that thing is: “Will this never end?  I’m melting. I’m honestly melting.  Look, my feet are fusing with the tarmac.  Look.” Yes, we are having a heat wave.  And my usual refrain in hot weather of “At least it’s not as bad as 2006” won’t work, because it is as bad as 2006. It’s too hot.  I live in London.  Over 30C is fine by the coast, but in a city that is ill-equipped to deal with it (there’s not exactly an abundance of air-conditioning; the Tube is like some sort of medieval torture oven masquerading as public transport; the shops are selling out of water, and people are leaving huge chunks of their own scorched skin in their wake) it’s truly revolting.  We had respite of one blissfully grey day and then that blistering ball of fire was back in the sky.  So I’m afraid there was only one choice for a theme for this week’s post, and it has to reflect my current obsession with all things meteorological (I’m checking the BBC weather pages every few hours in the delusional hope the forecast changes to gale-force winds and squally showers.  Not that I know what squally showers are but I’m pretty sure I’d welcome them right now. Although last night there was a thunderstorm & all that’s done is make the humidity worse.) I’ve chosen two novels that use stifling hot weather to further the oppression felt by their protagonists. For those of you suffering a heat wave, I hope it helps in the way CS Lewis identified: “We read to know we are not alone.”  For those of you in colder climes, I hope you feel a reflected warmth from the stories, you lucky, chilly people.

Firstly, A Crime in the Neighbourhood by Suzanne Berne (Penguin,1997).  This was Suzanne Berne’s first book and was pretty well-hyped, winning the Orange Prize and being compared to To Kill a Mockingbird. I’m sure the comparisons were well-intentioned, but who can live up to that?  To Kill a Mockingbird is about as perfect a piece of writing as you’ll come across.  It’s hardly a major criticism if I say this isn’t as good; few books are.  But A Crime in the Neighbourhood is still a well-written, atmospheric and insightful novel with plenty to say.

Set in 1972 with the Watergate scandal playing out in the background, 10-year-old Marsha tells the story of her suburban neighbourhood, where the  body of a 12-year-old boy has been found, raped and strangled.  Marsha has broken her ankle and so is somewhat confined, and her father has left the family for his wife’s sister.  As both her family and the wider community try to deal with the acts of violence that have been perpetrated, Marsha watches and tries to make sense of it all.

“It had been wet in March and early April, then suddenly it got very hot.  In just a few days, our big front yard went from a brown mat to a seething tangle of colour […] Blooming saturated the air, seeping in through open windows and under doors and into the sofa’s upholstery […] A kind of lawlessness infected everything.  Next door, eight-year-old Luann Lauder decorated herself with toothpaste one Sunday morning and ran across the lawn in only her underpants.  Boyd Ellison appeared on the playground one afternoon with a ten-speed bicycle he said was a birthday present but which looked just like our neighbour David Bridgeman’s bicycle, which had recently been stolen.  Blue jays screamed all day long. Even the grass looked unearthly green, as it does right before an electrical storm, when the air starts to hum and your hair stands on end.  And yet our neighbourhood was anything but lawless.”

The atmosphere in the neighbourhood becomes stifling both physically and psychologically.  Berne creates a sense of things quietly building towards a denouement, but not an outcome that can be trusted to bring resolution (we know from the start that the boy’s killer is never found).  When Marsha’s mother says “I sometimes think the suburbs are a distortion.” she picks up on the way human beings can warp what they see when emotions are heightened, and how dangerous this can be when it happens as a group.  Within this atmosphere, Marsha builds her notebook of Evidence:

“Among the details I overheard from my post on the porch, all of which I printed in my notebook with Julie’s Bic pen, are the following: Boyd Ellison was alive and had told the police everything. A man on a motorcycle had attacked him. A man with a beard attacked him. It was a bearded man with a foreign accent, maybe Dutch or Turkish. It was a hippie on drugs. Boyd was in a coma. Boyd had called out his mother’s name. He didn’t know who his parents were.  He was dead. He was alive. He was alive but just barely. He was dead.”

Marsha’s distortions will have a cataclysmic effect when she decides to voice them.  Although taking a single crime in the neighbourhood as its starting point, the novel actually concerns itself with many types of violence human beings can enact on each other, almost with indifference. However, the tone is realistic rather than downbeat, and so the novel is thought-provoking without being depressing.

A very different tale takes place within the sultry weather of The Mango Season by Amulya Malladi.  Now, this is a slight departure for me because generally I’ll only write about books I really rate, whereas I think The Mango Season is…OK.  It’s not a terrible book by any stretch, but it’s quite pedestrian in its language and the story is somewhat slight. However, I decided I would write about it as generally “summer reads” are usually something light by definition, nothing too taxing while you’re roasting your body by the pool.  And as a summer read The Mango Season fits the bill fine. Priya is living in the US, engaged to an American.  She returns home to India to meet her family for the first time in seven years, to try and deal with the fact that they want to arrange a marriage for her.  She returns in mango season, the hottest time of year:

“It was overpowering, the smell of mangoes – some fresh, some old, some rotten.  With a large empty coconut straw basket, I followed my mother as she stopped at every stall in the massive mango bazaar.  They had to taste a certain way; they had to be sour and they had to be mangoes that would not turn sweet when ripened. The mangoes that went into making mango pickle were special mangoes. It was important to use your senses to pick the right batch.”

The story plays out as you’d expect – Priya struggles to adjust to being back at home and the differences between America and India, and between her and her family. This is a light book and the dramas play out comfortably, The Mango Season is a comforting read. Malladi writes about India evocatively and with affection:

“Yellow and black auto rickshaws drove noisily on the thin, broken, asphalt road as I walked on the dirty roadside, sidestepping around rotten banana peels and other unidentified trash.  […] I stopped in front of a small paan and bidi shop where they sold soda, cigarettes, bidis, paan, chewing gum and black market porn magazines, the covers of which you could only see through shiny plastic wrappers. They were hidden, but not completely; you could once in a while catch a naked thigh or dark nipple thrusting against the plastic wrap. A man sat in a hole in the wall and looked at me questioningly.

“Goli soda hai?” I asked.”

The Mango Season is a pleasant read, and when it’s this hot, that’s enough.

Here are the books basking:

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“If you think you are too small to be effective, you have never been in bed with a mosquito.” (Betty Reese)

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My mother was telling me this week that she has had a lot of ideas for short stories come to her, and was asking me for collections of short stories to read to update herself with the form.  It was a coincidence as I’d just finished reading Miranda July’s No-one Belongs Here More than You (Canongate, 2007) which is a highly readable collection of odd, unsettling stories that were both challenging and compassionate.  So there’s my first recommendation.  I’ve talked about short story collections in other posts: James Joyce’s Dubliners, Jeremy Dyson’s Never Trust a Rabbit, but I thought I’d write a post specifically around this type of fiction, as according to Truman Capote, the short story is “the most difficult and disciplining form of prose writing”. Good luck Maman!

Firstly, Sea Monster Tattoo and Other Stories by Ruth Thomas (1997, Polygon).  This was Ruth Thomas’ debut, and it is a confident and varied collection of stories, some of which are only a few pages.  “In Love” is one such story, an entire love affair described over 2 and half sides.  Thomas is such an accomplished writer than the brevity doesn’t result in a lack of depth.  Rather, she is able to create a sense of things distilled to their essence, but lightly, looking at the meaning of everyday occurrences.  Sometimes her imagery is startling:

“In February her flatmate said, “I can’t stand the strain,” and moved out. Everything had ice on it, even eyelashes.”

This almost seems like a non-sequitur, then the meaning hits you, all the more forcefully for allowing the reader to connect the dots.  Some of the stories read like that as a whole; Thomas takes snapshots of lives and then leaves you to find the meaning in the picture.  The title story tells the tale of a group of girls travelling in southern Europe.  Rather than a time of youthful exuberance, it’s an experience of dreary surroundings and small niggles.  As the narrator feels distanced from her companions, we are brought alongside her thoughts:

“I’m thinking of the last time I was on a ferry, in Scotland.  It was cold then too, at a strange time in the morning; I had got off some coach, woken up from some strange dream, and I think there were also sheep in a lorry.  But I was much younger, travelling with my family.  When we got on board there was a fruit machine and decks of cards sticky with beer.  The crossing took over four hours.  My mother tried to get me to sleep on an orange plastic sofa in the lounge but I just sat and stared out of the window at the sea , which was dark and wide and smooth as chocolate.”

The stories in Sea Monster Tattoo are full of such small observances, both of surroundings and of people.  Through these details, Thomas shows great empathy and understanding, and just how much a short narrative can express.

Secondly, Here’s Your Hat What’s Your Hurry by Elizabeth McCracken (1993, Turtle Bay Books).  Again, this was a writer’s debut, but I confess I read it after I’d read her first novel, The Giant’s House, because I’d loved it so much.  I wasn’t disappointed.  The things I’d loved about the novel: inventiveness, compassion, quirkiness, are all present in McCracken’s short fiction.  In “It’s Bad Luck to Die”, a woman tells of her love for her tattoo artist husband.  She’s six feet tall:

“Years later he told me how he was bowled over by all those square inches of skin, how I was so big and still not fat.  “I fell for you right away,” he said.

[…] but he didn’t give me my first tattoo till a year later, the day after we were married: a little butterfly pooled in the small of my back.  Five years later, he began referring to it as his “early work,” even though he’d been tattooing for twenty-five years before he met me.  That didn’’t rankle me as much as you might think – I liked being his early body of work, work-in-progress, future.  That little butterfly sat by itself for a while, but in five years time Tiny flooded it with other designs: carnations, an apple, a bomber plane, his initials.”

The tattoos are a living part of her, she almost expects to prick herself on a rose etched on her body.  In the course of 22 pages McCracken portrays this couple and their method of communication that no-one around them understands with such delicate sensitivity that I was really moved by the story; I found the final line brought tears to my eyes. Proof that in the right writer’s hands, you don’t need a whole novel.

In the title story, McCracken’s offbeat humour is at the fore, with a tale of Aunt Helen Beck, who claims to be peoples’ aunt even though they don’t know her, and in this way travels around the country taking advantage of their hospitality. She is a forceful presence:

They went around back and walked into a bright kitchen, full of the sorts of long skinny plants Aunt Helen Beck had always distrusted: they looked like they wanted to ruffle your hair or sample your cooking.  The boy followed them into the house…

“So,” she said. “what’s your name?”

“Mercury,” he said.

“I beg your pardon?”

Ford shrugged. “His mother likes planets.”

“I like vegetables,” said Aunt Helen Beck, “but I wouldn’t name my child Rutabaga.”

Aunt Helen Beck isn’t quite as morally upright and conservative as she likes to convey, and she and Mercury bond in what is a truly touching, unlikely friendship. I think this is McCracken’s great strength: her characters are always unusual but not self-consciously quirky, and her writing reminds us of all the ways human beings can reach out to each other across seeming differences.

Both these collections contain lots of little gems, great stories by accomplished writers with distinctive voices.

Here are the books with a pea, and any princess who’s had a sleepless night can attest to how powerful this small thing can be:

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“L’anglais n’est que du français mal prononcé”/“English is little more than badly pronounced French” (D’Artagnan in Vingt ans après / Twenty Years After – Alexandre Dumas)

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Sunday was Bastille Day (La Fête Nationale /Le Quatorze Juillet in France) and so in honour of my friends across La Manche I thought this week I would look at two novels by French writers.  Unfortunately, being a typical Brit, I’m useless at other languages – even one with a 60% overlap with English – and so je regrette, I will be discussing the novels in their English translations. Both are novels, classics of French literature, and both concern adolescents, but other than that they are very different. J’espère que vous apprécierez!

Firstly Le Grand Meaulnes by Alain-Fournier (1913, my copy Penguin 1987).  Alain-Fournier was the pen name of Henri Alban who died in 1914, fighting in World War I.  He was only 27 when he wrote Le Grand Meaulnes, and I think this is a case where it’s very hard not to read the novel biographically with regard to the author’s own life story.  Le Grand Meaulnes has an elegiac quality, a mourning for a lost France, a golden time which has passed.  It is a story of young adulthood and sexual awakening being told by a narrator looking back on events, and as such it has a nostalgic, idealised tone.  Knowing the author died so quickly after writing it adds to this atmosphere of loss.

The novel is narrated by fifteen year old Francois, who attends the school where his parents are teachers.  He is lonely, and when seventeen year old Augustin Meaulnes arrives at the school, Francois finds a hero (hence le grand…).  Not long after his arrival, Meaulnes finds fireworks left over from Le Quatorze Juillet celebrations (apt for this post):

“He was showing me the two fuses with paper wicks which the flames had bitten into, seared, and then abandoned.  He stuck the nave of the wheels into the gravel, produced a box of matches – this to my astonishment for we were not allowed matches – and stooping carefully held a flame to the wicks.  Then, taking my hand, he pulled me quickly back.

Coming out of doors with Madame Meaulnes…my mother saw to great bouquets of red and white stars soar up from the ground with a hiss.  And for the space of a second she could see me standing in a magical glow, holding the tall newcomer by the hand, and not flinching…

Once again, she had nothing to say.

And that evening a silent companion sat eating at the family table, his head bent over his plate, paying no heed to three pairs of eyes that saw nothing but him.”

A little while after this, Meaulnes disappears for three days.  He returns without explanation, wearing the waistcoat of a Marquis.  Eventually he tells Francois what happened in those missing days, and the adventure is somewhere between reality and a dream.  He lost his way on a journey to the village, and ends up in the grounds of a large estate.  The house has the feeling of being abandoned, and he discovers a box of old clothes, rich costumes, which he dresses in.  He follows a “young dandy”, also dressed in clothes of a bygone era, into the “farm, chateau, abbey, whatever it might be” and finds himself in the middle of a fete where everyone is dressed oddly, feasting and dancing.   In the garden, he sees a young woman, and follows her onto a boat:

“And now on shore, everything fell into place as in a dream.  While children ran about shouting and laughing, and their elders broke up into groups and moved away through the woods, Meaulnes kept to the path where the girl was walking only a few steps ahead. He came up with her before he had given himself time to reflect and said simply:

“You are beautiful.””

And so le grand Meaulnes becomes the romantic hero, as he returns to school and he and Francois attempt to find the chateau, and the young woman, Yvonne, again.  As Meaulnes searches for her in Paris, Francois discovers where the chateau is. Meaulnes and Yvonne are reunited and marry, but not before Meaulnes has had a crisis over the fact that things can never be as they once were:

“Once she laid a hand on his arm gently, in a gesture of trust and helplessness.  Why was le grand Meaulnes at that moment like a stranger, like a man who has failed to find what he sought and for whom nothing else held any interest?  Three years before such a gesture would have overjoyed him to the point of terror, perhaps even madness.  Why then this present emptiness, this aloofness, this inability to be happy?”

And therein lies the rub of this novel – le grand Meaulnes can behave like a bit of an idiot.  He is the eternal romantic, but life cannot be all romance.  As he tries to live out his fantasies, he actually behaves quite badly toward the women in his life.  The women in this novel are not fully drawn, they exist as vessels for le grand Meaulnes’ romanticism, and as such this novel can be a frustrating experience for 21st century readers. But as a portrayal of the time when childhood has been left behind but adulthood is still to be realised, and of a time when a person has an all-consuming romantic sensibility before it becomes tempered by experience, Le Grand Meaulnes is brilliantly evocative.

Secondly, and with a protagonist very different to Meaulnes, Zazie in the Metro/Zazie dans le Metro by Raymond Queneau (1959, my copy Penguin, 2000). Zazie lives in the country, but when her mother wants to have a few days alone with her lover, Zazie arrives in Paris to spend time with her uncle Gabriel, a female impersonator.  Zazie is excited to ride the Metro, but there is a strike on. Undeterred, she explores Paris and has adventures.  And that’s about it, really.  But despite an outwardly simple plot, Zazie is a hugely enjoyable and compelling read.  Zazie is worldly wise and foul-mouthed, and has a great time rocketing around Paris on her own.  Here she is chatting to a police constable about her missing uncle:

“He added with a nostalgic air:

“Words don’t have the same meaning as they did.”

And he sighed as he looked at the extremity of his beetle-crushers.

“None of this gives me back my unkoo,” said Zazie.  “they’ll start saying I got a phobia again and it won’t be true.”

“Don’t worry my child,” said the widow.  “I shall be there to bear witness to your good will and to your innocence.”

“When people are really innocent, that is,” said the constable, “they don’t need anybody.”

“The bastard,” said Zazie, “I can see him coming a mile off. They’re all the same.”

“You know them well as that, then, my poor child?”

“Don’t talk to me about ‘em, my poor lady,” replies Zazie, simpering. “Just fancy, my mamma, she split open my papa’s skull with a chopper. So after that, cops, talk about getting to know them, my dear.”

“Well I never,” said the constable.

“Cops though, they’re just nothing,” said Zazie. “But judges. Well now, that lot…”

“All swine,” said the constable impartially.

“Anyhow, the cops and the judges too,” said Zazie, “I fooled ‘em.  Like that (gesture).””

This scene shows a lot about Zazie: the heroine is no idealised infant, but a manipulative, savvy, funny, independent being who seeks to please no-one.  The novel has a lot of dialogue and as such a lot of slang, like unkoo, or the opening word “Howcanaystinksotho” (how can they stink so?) which according to Wikipedia, in the French original was “Doukipudonktan”  to represent “D’où qu’ils puent donc tant” (“Why do they stink so much?”).  This gives the novel a unique voice and a real feel of stepping into a pre-teenager’s world (although we’re never told exactly how old Zazie is).  It almost reads like a script, particularly when it uses devices like “(gesture)”, and in fact it was made into a film by Louis Malle just a year after publication. But there are times when Queneau takes on a stronger authorial role, and the voice has a light comic tone that is wholly in keeping with his heroine’s dialogue:

“Perceiving her uncle a prey to the victualing mob, she bawled out: Come on, unkoo! And grabbing hold of a carafe full of water, threw it at random into the fray.  So strong is the martial spirit among the daughters of France.  Following this example, the widow Mouaque disseminated ashtrays all around her. So powerful is the spirit of imitation which can cause even the least gifted to act. Then was heard a considerable fracas: Gabriel had just collapsed into the crockery, carrying with him into the debris seven waiters who were completely out of control, five customers who had been taking part and one epileptic.

Rising to their feet with simultaneous impulse, Zazie and the widow Mouaque approached the human magma which was struggling in the sawdust and crockery.  A few judiciously applied blows with a syphon eliminated from the competition several persons endowed with fragile skulls.  Thanks to which Gabriel was able to pick himself up…”

Zazie isn’t necessarily likeable, she’s a self-serving brat, but I love her.  I urge you to spend three days with Zazie as she gets to know the great city of Paris and some of its more idiosyncratic inhabitants.

Here are the books with one of France’s greatest products, fromage bleu.  Ah, Roquefort, je t’aime, je t’aime beaucoup….

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“The world is governed by very different personages from what is imagined by those who are not behind the scenes.” (Benjamin Disraeli)

/ madamebibilophile / Leave a comment

This week I’ve been thinking about what goes on behind the scenes of things.  There’s been the Edward Snowden/Stephen Lawrence bugging stories running on in the press, and on a much lighter note I’ve been watching Scandal (about a political fixer), which has replaced a certain epic fantasy drama as my conflicted- inner-monologue programme of choice. My conflicted-inner-monologue goes thusly: “Why am I watching this?  Its fluffy drivel…I’m not watching this…I have to wait how long for the next episode?” ad infinitum until the end of the series, followed by googling to see what happens in the next series & how long I’ll have to wait before its screened.  Anyway, my psychological torments aside, I’ve branched out a bit this week by making a diary one of the choices, rather than sticking purely to fiction.  Jeanette Winterson once said: “There’s no such thing as autobiography, there’s only art and lies” so I think a diary fits into this category and isn’t so out of place in a blog about fiction. Both the diary and the novel are told from the point of view of someone in the background of another’s fame, bound up in their domestic life and the intimacy that necessarily entails; behind the scenes of their public life.

Firstly, sister of William Wordsworth, Dorothy Wordsworth’s The Grasmere Journal (my copy Oxford World’s Classics, 2002).  William and Dorothy were separated as children but once reunited as adults they lived together in the Lake District, even after his marriage, until her death.  They were incredibly close (weirdly close, rumours of incest continue to this day) and she is thought to have been his muse.  Coleridge and De Quincey both rated her writing and her intellect.  Certainly Dorothy had a big influence on her brother’s writing; she was his scribe, as Wordsworth became ill in the through the physical act of writing, so it’s not too much of a stretch to assert that if it wasn’t for her we probably wouldn’t have Worsdworth’s poems, either in terms of their inspiration or the words on the page. The diary details the minutiae of their life together, but she writes very little about what she feels, only what she sees.  While at times this can make the writing a bit limited, at other times her powerful observations are beautiful, as this famous passage from “Thursday 15th April 1802” shows:

“When we were in the woods beyond Gowbarrow Park we saw a few daffodils close to the water-side. We fancied that the sea had floated the seeds ashore, and that the little colony had so sprung up. But as we went along there were more and yet more; and at last, under the boughs of the trees, we saw that there was a long belt of them along the shore, about the breadth of a country turnpike road. I never saw daffodils so beautiful. They grew among the mossy stones about and above them; some rested their heads upon these stones, as on a pillow, for weariness; and the rest tossed and reeled and danced, and seemed as if they verily laughed with the wind, that blew upon them over the lake; they looked so gay, ever glancing, ever changing. This wind blew directly over the lake to them. There was here and there a little knot, and a few stragglers higher up; but they were so few as not to disturb the simplicity, unity, and life of that one busy highway.”

Guess which monumentally famous poem that inspired?  Yup, if it wasn’t for Dorothy, Wordsworth would never have “wandered lonely as a cloud”. Some of you may think that’s no bad thing, and I have to confess I would be amongst you – I am really not one for the Romantic poets at all.  But even if you don’t like the poetry, Dorothy’s diary is still worth a look as firstly, it’s not Romantic poetry so it’s very different, and secondly, she’s a brilliant nature writer.  She has great feeling for the Lake District, and if you’ve ever been there you’ll find yourself transported back through her writing.  Here she is writing not about the Lakes, but on a rare trip away (to Calais, to see Wordsworth’s French mistress and his daughter), gazing back towards England:

“We had delightful walks after the heat of the day was passed away – seeing far off in the west the coast of England like a cloud crested with Dover castle, which was but like the summit of the cloud – the evening star and the glory of the sky. The reflections in the water were more beautiful than the sky itself, purple waves brighter than precious stones, for ever melting away upon the sands. The fort, a wooden building, at the entrance of the harbour at Calais, when the evening twilight was coming on, and we could not see anything of the building but its shape, which was far more distinct than in perfect daylight, seemed to be reared upon pillars of ebony, between which pillars the sea was seen in the most beautiful colours that can be conceived. Nothing in romance was ever half so beautiful.”

Finally, she’s worth reading for the small domestic scenes that remind us all that even great poets have to eat.  “I went and sate with W & walked backwards and forwards in the Orchard till dinner time – he read me his poem.  I broiled beefsteaks.”  I love that – the orchard, the declaiming of poetry, all very idyllic and impressive, followed by the mundane detail of what happened next.  Poetry, then beefsteaks.  It’s not just Wordsworth we see in this light.  On “Monday Morning 1 September 1800” Dorothy documents “I broiled Coleridge a mutton chop which he ate in bed.” Another time she has letters from the great poet and mutton chop consumer: “very melancholy letters, he had been very ill in his bowels”.  (I’m not a doctor but I’d suggest being a massive opium addict is not the best for one’s melancholia or one’s bowels).   There’s plenty to Dorothy’s short journals, and while the feeling of getting behind the scenes of Wordsworth and Coleridge’s poetry is enticing, her writing stands on its own as an intriguing observation of the natural world and early nineteenth century domestic life. 

Before I discuss the second book here’s a picture of the Lake District (or at least one lake in the district) to keep you going.  This is a long post, I’m sorry…

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Secondly, The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog and of his Friend Marilyn Monroe by Andrew O’Hagan (Faber & Faber, 2010).  Yes, it’s a well-known and much debated story told from the point of view of a dog.  If that sounds like a premise that would make you want to poke your own eyes out, stay with me.  It’s not a novel I would have read either, except it’s by Andrew O’Hagan, who is a terrific writer, and who dealt with the dark side of fame and its repercussions on the famous so brilliantly in his 2003 novel Personality. If you thought the dog thing sounded like quite a fun and original way of telling the story, well, you were right, and I shouldn’t be so jaded and blinkered. Maf (there’s no way I’m writing that title out in full again)tells the story of Marilyn’s last few years through the eyes of her Bichon Maltese dog, Mafia Honey, given to her by Frank Sinatra.  Except it sort of doesn’t.  Marilyn was placed under intense scrutiny and yet still remained an enigma, and Maf doesn’t seek to change this.  By the end of the novel she is still a mystery, O’Hagan doesn’t have a “Marilyn theory” to put forward.  Instead, through Maf, we take a look at Hollywood, and to wider extent the USA, on the brink of change, as the Golden Age of the 1950s fades and the momentum for immense change in the 1960s builds.

“There was a neon halo over Times Square.  The puddles were lighted pink and the bulbs made a cartoon beauty of Midtown, pulling shadows and poor men out of the alleys…bright commerce took advantage of the dark, the changes in colour feeling like events…in the middle of all those twinkles, you might wonder if people even had a chance of spending their lives wisely.”

It’s a comedy in the main though, and there’s plenty of whimsy which plays with the unusual point of view but never overdoes it:

“We usually hate cats, not for the typical reasons, but because they show an exclusive preference for poetry over prose.  No cat ever spoke for long in the warmth of good prose.  A dog’s biggest talent, though, is for absorbing everything of interest – we absorb the best of what is known to our owners and we retain the thoughts of those we meet.”

This psychic device means Maf is able to speak with knowledge on a wide range topics, particularly philosophy.  Apparently most dogs are socialists, and Maf particularly loves Trotsky.  This I felt was the weakness of the novel; Maf is an engaging and unique voice, but a little pompous.  Generally this doesn’t stop him from being likeable, but at times I felt the philosophising and intellectual name-dropping could have done with a more heavy-handed edit.  Still, the descriptions of Marilyn are sympathetic and delicate:

“She found it hard. Many of the old bids for independence had fallen short.  She was tired.  When she hugged me, her comforter, her guardian, I felt a weight of disappointment about her, as if the stands she had taken in life, and in love, had only revealed her personal shortcomings and the impossibility of respect.”

While Marilyn struggles, Maf is her constant companion and goes everywhere wither, meaning we learn about Sinatra’s temper tantrums, JFK’s shoes, George Cukor’s interior design…  When he accompanies her to Lee Strasberg’s famous actor’s studio to learn about method acting, Maf takes on board all the techniques:

“I reached inwards. All the way in.  I recalled some humiliation I once suffered at the hands of Evelyn Waugh and a croquet ball.  I must have been the merest puppy and was pootling on the lawn […] Evelyn was making a point, a facetious point, naturally, about the ugliness of George Eliot, and when I tried to correct him along Latin principles he knocked a croquet ball across the lawn at vicious speed and it struck me in the centre of my infant forehead…I used it to deepen my performance on the table at the back of Jack’s Bar.”

The great Strasberg takes notice and asks someone to fetch the dog some water.  A method acting dog – brilliant.  Along the way there are other light comic touches – rats with Brooklyn accents, an Old English Sheepdog who speaks like Boris Johnson (only more coherent), the fact that Lady from Lady and the Tramp is the dog of his dreams, and he congratulates himself on seeing beyond her typecasting as the love interest: “If only she had met me things would be different.” Over the years many people seem to have felt that way about tragic Marilyn, but she wasn’t saved, and the book isn’t so funny as to downplay this part of the story.  Marilyn comes across as vulnerable and damaged, and her little dog, like so many others around her, can only watch her self-destruct.  Maf is an original take on a behind the scenes story, one that respectfully leaves the same questions unanswered as to why Marilyn’s life ended the way it did.

Originally I planned to write “the scenes” on a piece of paper and photograph the books behind it (fnar fnar) but I decided against this marvellous visual pun and instead opted to photograph them with a picture of the peerless Sir Humphrey Appleby (Sir Nigel Hawthorne) from Yes Minister/Yes Prime Minister, master manipulator of behind the scenes political power wielding: 

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