“There’s no such thing as autobiography, there’s only art and lies” (Jeanette Winterson) or “The poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.” (G. K. Chesterton)

April 23, 2015June 9, 2018 / madamebibilophile / 8 Comments

Recently I fell subject to one of those viruses that seems never ending. Basically for about two and half weeks I was behaving like this:

(Only with much less impressive cheekbones). I wouldn’t bother mentioning it, stoic that I am, except it meant I had to turn down a last-minute ticket to see Zoe Wanamaker in Stevie, Hugh Whitemore’s play about the life of the poet Stevie Smith. I love Zoe Wanamaker and I’m sure she’d be great as the idiosyncratic Smith, so I did not take this in my stride:

(Only with much less impressive cheekbones). So to compensate for my loss, I’m going to look at two other instances where the lives of poets have been imagined, in a novel and in a play.

Firstly, John Clare (and to a lesser extend Alfred Lord Tennyson) as imagined by Adam Foulds in The Quickening Maze (Vintage, 2009), which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2009.

Alfred_Tennyson.

John Clare suffered with poor mental health for most of his adult life, and for a time was an inpatient at High Beach Asylum in Essex. The Tennyson brothers move nearby as Septimus is being treated for depression, but thankfully this isn’t an excuse for Foulds to create conversations on the nature of poetry between the two versifiers (can you imagine? ‘What think you Clare, of this long poem of mine?’ ‘Will you permit me Alfred, to suggest In Memoriam is better name than My Friend Hallam What Died?’ Ugh. OK, so Foulds would never be that bad, but sometimes these things can be so clumsy as to become comical).

Instead Foulds looks at the lives contained within and without the asylum, and the nature of their various freedoms and restraints. Alongside the patients live the profligate Dr Allen, who has progressive ideas on treatment but lacks the focus to truly push things forward; his daughter Hannah, desperate for freedom but unsure how to get it other than by marrying; the grieving Tennyson yearning for his dead friend and for critical approval; and of course Clare, the ‘peasant poet’, determined to leave the built environment of the asylum for the forest beyond:

“As he worked in the admiral’s garden…being there, given time, the world revealed itself again in silence, coming to him. Gently it breathed around him its atmosphere: vulnerable, benign, full of secrets, his. A lost thing returning. How it waited for him in eternity and almost knew him. He’d known and sung it all his life.”

Things begin to unravel: Clare becomes progressively more deluded, the doctor veers towards bankruptcy again, Hannah harbours fantasies regarding Tennyson which amount to nothing. But The Quickening Maze is a novel of quiet, closely observed drama of domestic life (despite the asylum and famous poets), rather than enormous, declamatory moments:

“From her window, Hannah could see Charles Seymour prowling outside the grounds, swishing his stick from side to side. Boredom, a sane frustration, a continuous mild anger: Hannah thought he looked like a friend, someone whose life was as empty and miserable as her own…he raised a hand to lift his hat and found he wasn’t wearing one. He smiled and mimed instead. Hannah gazed for a moment down at his shoes and smiled also.”

Foulds is an accomplished poet himself, and this shows itself in tightly constructed prose full of startling images:

“She liked the pinch of absence, the hollow air, reminiscent of the real absence. She wanted to stay out there, to hang on her branch in the world until the cold had burned down to her bones. She could leave her scattered bones on the snow and depart like light.”

The result is a tightly plotted novel that maintains a contemplative, elegiac quality: perfect for the poets it captures.

Secondly, Oscar Wilde, as imagined by David Hare in The Judas Kiss, which premiered at the Almeida in 1998.

423px-Napoleon_Sarony_-_Oscar_Wilde

The story of Oscar Wilde is so well-known, it can be difficult to imagine what more there is to be said on it. What Hare gives his audience is an Oscar past his prime, bruised and sad, the architect of his own downfall. The first act sees Wilde staying in London to face the court over allegations he is gay (which was illegal at the time) while his friends urge him to leave:

“Ross. Oscar, I’m afraid it’s out of the question. You simply do not have time.

Wilde. Do I not?

Ross. You are here to say your goodbyes to Bosie.

Wilde. Yes of course. But a small drink, please, Robbie, you must not deny me.

Ross. Why, no.

Wilde. And then, of course I shall get going. I shall go on the instant.

Arthur. Do you want to taste, sir?

Wilde. Pour away. Hock tastes like hock, and seltzer like seltzer. Taste is not in the bottle. It resides in one’s mood. So today no doubt hock will taste like burnt ashes. Today I will drink to my own death.”

The knowledge we have of the outcome, rather than resigning us to Wilde’s fate, actually adds to the dramatic urgency. I found myself desperately rooting for Ross, wishing Oscar would listen, that somehow the outcome would be different and he wouldn’t stay long enough to allow the courts to give him a two year sentence. But Wilde is stubborn, proud, defiant, and wonderful, as his selfish, weak lover Bosie testifies:

“You have wanted this thing. In some awful part your being, you love the idea of surrender. You think there’s some hideous glamour in letting Fate propel you down from the heights!”

But Bosie doesn’t want Wilde to leave, rather stay and fight his battles for him with his father, the Marquess of Queensbury, who is challenging Wide in court. Between his own wilfulness and Bosie’s self-interest, Wilde agrees to stay…

In the second act we are in Italy with a Wilde after he has left prison and moved abroad “grown slack and fat and his face is ravaged by deprivation and alcohol”. Bosie is enjoying himself with the local beauties, while Wilde is isolated and contemplative:

“I am shunned by you all, and my work goes unperformed, not because of the sin – never because of the sin – but because I refuse to accept the lesson of the sin.”

The Judas Kiss is a tragic play, but not in the usual sense. No-one dies, there is no physical violence, and yet we witness betrayal, destruction and loss. It’s heart-breaking, and at the centre of it all is the great genius of Oscar Wilde, who we witness fading away.

To end, the words of a poet rather than words written about them. Wilde responded to this trauma through his art, and created The Ballad of Reading Gaol:

“Never love anyone who treats you like you’re ordinary.” (Oscar Wilde)

May 14, 2013July 18, 2013 / madamebibilophile / 8 Comments

This week I struggled to find a theme to write about, as absolutely nothing remotely noteworthy happened. I went to work, I saw friends, I cooked, I shopped (as little as possible, I hate shopping in all forms), I read, I watched DVDs (I’m catching up on Breaking Bad)…you get the utterly banal picture. So I was completely at a loss until an epiphany – that’s probably overstating it, a realisation – earlier today: in my problem lay my solution. There’s probably a tenet of some philosophy that tells you that very thing, but I took my time getting there. The theme of this week’s post is novels that take a look at the resolutely everyday, the ordinary events in ordinary lives.

Firstly, The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields (1993, 4^th Estate). This novel tells the story of Daisy Goodwill, from birth to death, her life lead along entirely ordinary lines. The Stone Diaries was showered with awards, and certainly Shields is an author gifted in finding the poetic in the everyday. Take for example this description of eating to assuage a stomach ache (Daisy’s mother failing to recognise birth contractions):

“Frequently she sprinkles sugar on top of the buttered bread. The surface winks with brilliance, its crystals working between her teeth, giving her strength. She imagines the soft dough entering the bin of her stomach, lining that bitter bloated vessel with a cottony warmth that absorbs and neutralises the poisons of her own body.”

This first chapter is narrated in the first person, with Daisy telling the part of her life from before she could speak. The rest of the novel though, is a mixed narration, including third person, letters, newspaper cuttings. This has the effect of demonstrating the difficulty of biography – how it is a patchwork of sources and viewpoints, and that there can never be a definitive telling of a life. This distance is reflected in the character of Daisy herself, a woman who never quite becomes the protagonist of her own life. She never quite engages with the events or people that surround her. The closest she comes to being fully present is in her garden:

“It is, you might almost say, her dearest child, the most beautiful of her offspring…she understands, perhaps, a quarter of its green secrets, no more. It in turn perceives nothing of her, not her history, her name, her longings, nothing – which is why she is able to love it as purely as she does, why she has opened her arms to it, taking it as it comes, every leaf, every stem, every root and sign.”

So Daisy is not necessarily the most likeable character, but this is turn adds to the verisimilitude of the story – she is just as flawed and problematic as everyone else, ordinary and yet entirely unique.

Secondly, Mr Phillips by John Lanchester (2000, Faber & Faber), and from a book that encompasses an entire lifespan to one than concerns just a single day. However, this is not an ordinary day in the life the eponymous protagonist (hero is a bit much, Mr Phillips is far from a heroic character). Mr Phillips has lost his job, but he gets up and leaves for work as he has done for decades. His wife and family, and his neighbours, do not know he has been made redundant. He spends the day aimlessly wandering around London. Through the events he experiences and his thoughts and fantasies, Lanchester creates a fully drawn and minutely observed character. Mr Phillips may not be employed as an accountant any longer, but it is an intrinsic part of his nature. He cannot enjoy a walk in Battersea Park without drawing up what he sees in double entry style. For example, the lovely peace pagoda in the park is reduced to “Asset: Golden Buddha, Liability: Upkeep of Buddha, gilt paint, etc.” It reminded me of Oscar Wilde’s definition of a cynic, a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. But this cost/benefit analysis does make for some funny passages such as his colleagues discussing the chances of being dead before the next Lottery draw, and therefore when you should buy your ticket to maximise your chances of winning the Lottery and minimising your chances of being dead. “It had lingered in the mind. Mr Phillips wonders what his relative chances of being dead before this week’s Lottery draw are at this precise moment. In all probability they have never been better. Or worse, depending on your point of view.”

Poor Mr Phillips, so bound by the quantifiable realities of life. Watching someone bungee jump he reflects how adrenalin sports hold no appeal: “You would have to see gravity as a joke or as a benign force or at the very least something you could trifle with …whereas all that Mr Phillips has to do is look downwards, at his sagged and weighted flesh, to feel differently.” Mr Phillips also thinks about sex a lot, but calculates that “even allowing for films, Mr Phillips is still left with an average daily probability of 96.7 per cent against having sex.” It is this dour acceptance of all odds, weighing up of everything, that makes Mr Phillips so ordinary. He will never truly experience the extraordinary because he’d never embrace the unknown. Or will he? On this day unlike any other, Mr Phillips is forced out of the ordinary.

I was tempted to present the books this week on my toilet, as I thought what is more ordinary than that? You’ll be relieved to know I decided not to do this, and opted for my ordinary, everyday dining table instead: