Tim Newton Anderson's Blog, page 7

The Good Old days?

There are lots of posts in my internet feed – mostly from people in local groups – about The Good Old Days.

Whenever I hear the phrase I always think of the lyrics in Capstick Comes Home by Tony Captick:

We’d lots o’ things in them days they ‘aven’t got today – rickets, diptheria, Hitler and my, we did look well goin’ to school wi’ no backside in us trousers an’ all us little ‘eads painted purple because we ‘ad ringworm.
They don’t know they’re born today!!!

There seems to be a nostalgia for the 1950s which erases all memory of what it was actually like to live then. However much we would like it, we don’t get to choose which bits of the past we keep and which bits we get rid of. We can try and manage what we take into the future, but most of it is beyond our control as people will keep inventing things, and market forces (i.e. what we decide to buy and use) will determine which ones take off and which ones go the way of Strand cigarettes and eight track tapes.

I suspect part of the nostalgia is driven by the fact that we look back to our childhood when we had few responsibilities and we had our parents to look after us (if we were lucky in who our parents were). Schooldays were only the best days of our lives because we didn’t have to earn a living, look after other people and do our own cooking and cleaning.

We could go out and play with our friends without having to worry about how we were going to pay for it, and had the expectation that things were going to get better. We could also have the naive belief that the “great and good” had our best interests at heart because we did not have the experience to show that they generally put their own self interest first and looking after our interests only came in when they coincided with theirs.

This may make me sound cynical but in fact I think there are lots of things to be happy about. Medical science is constantly finding new ways to fight disease and help us live longer. We are all aware of the challenges facing the environment and society in general is becoming more tolerant – particularly the younger generation who are engaged and articulate in a way those of us who were told children should be seen and not heard were not encouraged to be.

This is not blind optimism – there are lots of dangers as we move forward, and those who feel their position and prejudices are under threat are going to try and roll back some of those advances. There are also lots of things we cannot control.

Do I miss anything from the past? People I’ve lost, and a booming economy that meant young people had a chance of affording decent housing, but that is about all. I certainly don’t miss unquestioning reverence for billionaires and the idea that our problems are the fault of some other group that we see as less worthy and not the people who are managing business and politics.

R S Very Pleased

I seem to have reached the stage where I get invited to submit to publications rather than just sending stuff off. I’m hoping this is because they like stories I have written for them before rather than being desperate for contributions.

The most unexpected was from Rhys Hughes who asked whether I wanted to write something for a themed poetry anthology he was doing. It was unexpected (a) because I hadn’t written for Rhys before and (b) because I am not known for poetry – in fact it is something I had rarely tried. However he seemed to like the stuff I sent in, so that is all good.

The other invites were from Emanations , which is aiming to publish its 10th volume  this year, Tales of the Shadowmen which will produce volume 20 in December, and the MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories . I had submitted a Holmes pastiche to the More Untold Cases set due out later this year and the editor decided he wanted it for an earlier instalment so asked for another one. They were all adressed to me by name which suggests they weren’t blanket emails to everyone who had ever written for them.

Emanations and TOTS were where some of my earliest attempts were published and are both anthologies I admire – for very different reasons. Emanations publishes some amazing experimental art and fiction and TOTS speaks to my love for pulp crossovers initially sparked by Philip Jose Farmer’s pioneering work. Needless to say, the stories I have written for them are also very different from each other.

Publishing the Damned

I’ve just finished reading Published in Paris by Hugh Ford which details English language small press publishers in Paris between the wars.

Although the book told me more than I needed or wanted to know about paper types and the minutia of publishing it was interesting read about the Lost Generation of US writers in particular.

There were a couple of reasons why writers moved to Paris in this period – and after WW2 as well, with the cheaper cost of living being one of them. The other was the comparative freedom they enjoyed to write what they wanted rather than what publishers would accept.

One of the publishers detailed was Jack Kahane – father of Maurice Girodias of Olympia Press. Like his son after him, he actively sought out books that had or were likely to be banned for their controversial content in the US and UK and made a business of making them available to travellers who would hope to pick up banned books in the more liberal France.

Many of the other publishers detailed in the book also published books that had problems finding publishers – starting with Sylvia Beach and Ulysses – but their primary objective was to print books by writers they admired. Kahane admired lots of the authors he published but circumventing censorship and selling books that had the cachet of controversy seemed to be his main aim. The fact he gave a home to authors like Henry Miller and Lawrence Durrell, as his son did for William Burroughs and many others was a happy by product. I’m not suggesting they were blind to their literary qualities – far from it – but if the same authors had offered something that couldn’t be marketed as ‘dangerous’ I’m not sure they would have printed it.

Publishers may seem more open to taking a gamble on controversial content nowadays, but they still emphasise this in their marketing over other aspects of the books. Sex sells and books that are experimental in form and style without that element are less likely to be published and aggressively marketed. Thankfully there are still many small publishers who will take a chance on less commercial books as heirs to those detailed in Published in Paris.

Faith, Hope and Charity – the latest of these is Charity.

I have recently had another story accepted which means one of my earliest series will now all see print.

Letters to My Daughter (subtitled Hope) was one of my first stories to be accepted – in Parsec magazine. An environmental scientist writes a series of messages to a daughter who will be born from her ovum on a new world after a space ark travels to establish a new home for humanity. As she imagines what is happening to her daughter she documents the increasing environmental catastrophe on Earth.

I followed it up with two connected stories subtitled Faith and Charity. In the first – formally called The Sea’s Gift – the eco catastrophe has taken place and our descendants are living on an archipelego created by the sea isolating the tops of mountains in the Pacific North West. It gave me the chance to explore the idea of magic based on Potlatch which I had discovered when doing my Anthropology degree. The ruler is given gifts but they then distribute these back and prestige comes from generosity rather than wealth accumulation. It was published in Thuggish Itch By the Seaside.

The second – The Parable of the Talents or Charity – is set in a world where the catastrophe is averted and a utopia created where everyone has a job based on their talents. It is a reply to Vonnegut’s Harrison Bergeron to question whether it is ever possible to avoid prejudice in society. It should appear in anthology from Other Worlds Ink later this year or early next. Needless to ay, I am delighted to appear in one of their books.

Time of the ‘Signs

I was recently given a paperback copy of Phil Austin’s Tales of the Old Detective which reminded me of how much I love The Firesign Theatre.

If you haven’t come across them, they are a comedy group who initially operated in the late 60s and the 70s who started on radio and then made a series of groundbreaking comedy albums.

Inspired by The Goons and the radio dramas of the 40s and 50s, they created a set of characters in a surreal world which allowed them to riff off cultural references and  just be silly.

Their masterpiece is generally reckoned to be Don’t Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me The Pliers where one of their recurring characters – George Tirebiter – watches himself on TV, regularly switching channels in parodies of Archie comics, war movies and more. However my favourite is Everything You Know is Wrong which eviscerates every new age fad in a brilliant overarching story about a radio podcaster trying to explain mysterious happenings. I am also fond of their Sherlock Holmes parody The Giant Rat of Sumatra.

Apparently their working method was to each write sketches and then weave them together into a single album. Their tag line – Four or Five Crazy Guys – comes from their feeling that there was a fifth member who contributed when they worked together.

They officially split in the mid 70s – partly due to burnout after making so many albums over a short period – but continued to appear on each other’s solo or duo work. They then got together again in the late 90s and came up with more original material – some of which matched the level of their early work.

Phil Austin’s book (which I first found as a cassette tape) is a collection of surreal short stories which match the brilliance of his work with Firesign and his solo album Roller Maidens From Outer Space which is probably the best of their solo projects. Noir detective parodies were one of his specialities in the group including the iconic Nick Danger first featured on How Can You Be in Two places at Once.

I was fortunate to discover them when Virgin Records were selling remainder copies of their records cheaply, but if you go to their website or search for them on Amazon you can experience their talents for yourself.

A Tale of Two Bookshops

They had the best of times, they had the worst of times. Parisian bookshop owners Adrienne Monnier and Sylvia Beach played a major part in world literature from their shops, facing each other on Rue de l’Odeon in Paris’s left bank.

Adrienne Monnier was the first woman to open (as opposed to inheriting) a bookshop in Paris when La Maison des Amis des Livres in 1915. Four years later she encouraged Sylvia Beach – who was to become her life partner – to open Shakespeare and Company. Two years later Sylvia’s shop moved across the road from Adrienne’s.  The two bookshops had a similar ethos – to support writers and help make their work available to the public – but Monnier’s shop concentrated on French artists while Beach’s was to become a haven for the Lost Generation of American and English speaking authors.

More people have heard of Beach nowadays. As well as the bookshop’s name having continued past her death in 1962 in new premises set up by George Whitman, she is famous for having published the first edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses. However Monnier published the book’s first French translation.

While Beach’s shop was haunted by Hemingway, D H Lawrence, Ezra Pound, T S Elliot and Gertrude Stein among many others. If they couldn’t afford to buy books they could always borrow them from her lending library.

Across the road, Apollinaire and Breton and the other surrealists would meet and Monnier’s magazine Le Navire d’Argent featured their writing along with other native authors and translations of Beach’s customers. As both American and a surrealist Man Ray frequented both. The Potasson’s – inspired by poems by Leon Paul Fargue and including Eric Satie – met at Monnier’s shop.

The golden years ended when the German occupation started and Sylvia Beach was interred, She was soon released and moved back with Monnier where they suffered hunger and cold and supported the Resistance. Hemingway “liberated” Shakespeare and Co when he entered the city with the allies but it didn’t reopen. Monnier committed suicide in 1955 and after some more years in Paris Beach opened the Martello Tower in Dublin as a Joyce Museum.

I was reminded of their story reading Hugh Ford’s Published in Paris, bought from another great female owned bookshop – Barnabees in Westleton. The book fills a gap in my reference books on the arts in Paris from 1830’s Bohemia to the Beat Hotel of the 1960s. During virtually the whole period the city has been a magnet for American talent as well as European and the cross fertilisation spawned some of the greatest art movements of two centuries. Beach and Monnier played a key part in many of them.

Firing a Feuilleton

Writing some pieces for collections by the wonderful Black Scat Books (https://blackscatbooks.com/) and a discussion about S. J. Perelman reminded me about the feuilleton.

The feuilleton – from feuillet or leaf of a book – started in France in 1800 where the newly censored newspapers sought a way of evading censorship. A section of the paper given over to the arts started to include satirical articles in the guise of literary criticism.

The section became more popular as novels started to be serialised there but for me its true flowering was in the fin de siecle when it became a place for literary experimentation by writers including Alphonse Allais, Alfred Jarry and others. Allais took it to another level when he started to write satires of prominent theatre critic Francisque Sarcey using the other’s name as well as pieces using Allais own signature.

Jarry turned to journalism as his poetry and novels failed to prosper but the pieces he write which are collected in his Chandelle Verte have the same unbridled humour as his plays and longer works.  Black Scat have a collection Speculations and several are also included in Atlas Books Adventures in ‘Pataphysics It is also worth seeking out the translation of the first Ubu Alamanac.

Black Scat have also been publishing lots of titles by Allais – until this century the only part of his work existing in English was a collection edited by Miles Kington. Black Scat and translator Doug Skinner should be praised for their work in bringing this early absurdist to the Anglophone world.

There was another flowering of the feuilleton in the 30s in America when members of the Algonquin Circle like Perelman were active – especially in the New Yorker. Perelman adopted the name for his pieces which share the absurd humour of Jarry and Allais. British newspapers had their own version with columns like Beachcomber. Staring as a society column in the Daily Express at the start of the 20th century, this reached its zenith under J. B Morton.

While I don’t pretend to be as good as any of these, the joy of having a funny idea and being able to elaborate it without the need to make it into a narrative is wonderful. It’s one of the reasons I use the club story template for my tales of my imaginary version of the London Institute of ‘Pataphysics as I can throw in lots of ideas as activities in the club as well as weaving them through the narrative.

Making My Way Along Baker Street

I have just finished a third Holmes pastiche for the next but one set of volumes of the MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories based on one of the untold cases mentioned by Watson in the Canon.

My second pastiche will appear in the next set of volumes and there is a kickstarter to help with the costs – profits going to help the school for pupils with additional needs based in Conan Doyle’s former home.

I enjoy writing pastiche, although making sure it is both canonically and historically accurate requires a bit of research. As I have a number of Holmes biographies and other reference books this is not too onerous. And there is also Google, of course.

I knew where I wanted to set the story, having recently read and enjoyed Peter Ackroyd’s London Under. It featured a section on the toshers who braved the dangers of the sewers to sift through the waste to find coins and other treasure, and I wondered how long the trade persisted after Bazalgette built his marvellous new system to solve the problems which led to the Great Stink of 1858. I deliberately chose one of the less well known references to untold cases – there are enough Giant Rats of Sumatra to overwhelm the best Pied Piper.

Parallel Lives – Davidson and Kersh

Reading Avram Davidson’s posthumously published novel Beer, Beer, Beer I was struck by how his mastery of voices echoed that of another of my favourite writers – Gerald Kersh. A quick google brought up a number of other parallels.

Both writers were Jewish and used that background in some of their writing. Both served in World War II and also used that. Both grew up in areas with high immigrant populations which informed their characters – especially in speech patterns. Both wrote across the Science Fiction, Fantasy, Crime and Horror genres often using pen names. Both faced challenges later in life because their writing fell out of fashion.

There are, of course, also differences. Kersh was born in Teddington in London while Davidson was born in Yonkers, New York. Davidson (younger by 11 years) served as a Navy medic in the Pacific while Kersh was in the Coldstream Guards and later the Army Film Unit in Europe.

Davidson won a number of genre awards for Fantasy and SF and Crime fiction while Kersh’s success was commercial. Both excelled at short fiction in particular, although they also both wrote brilliant novels. Kersh’s fame peaked at the end of the 50s while Davidson’s commercial success peaked in the 60s. Both have a hard core of fans who try and keep their legacy alive – more successfully in the case of Davidson than of Kersh.

The other thing that links them both is the ready availability of outlets for their shorter work which would have helped their early careers as well as encouraging the range of genres they wrote in. From the 40s to the early 70s was a flourishing time for magazines – both generic and genre. This meant there were outlets hungry to fill the latest issue and less afraid to take stories that stretched style and subject.

Kersh had a wide range of jobs in his youth from cinema manager, bodyguard and debt collector to all in wrestler. All of these found their way into his books alongside the characters he encountered while sitting in Soho cafe’s scribbling out stories on napkins before touting them round the newspapers, magazines and periodical publishers in Fleet Street. Some of his most acclaimed stories – featuring self proclaimed master thief Carmody – use this as a framing device. Carmody tells stories after cadging a coffee and filling his pockets with packets of sugar – behaviour at odds with his tales of fantastic heists.

While his fame took off after the noir classic Night and the City, many fans consider the late realistic novels Fowler’s End and the Angel and the Cuckoo better books. Both feature a startling range of characters – each with their own distinct voice –  in a cross section of low life London. The plots are minimal – it is the people and their stories who make the books.

Davidson was also a master of character and voice as well as language. He also concentrated on character rather than plot, especially in his later novels and single character collections. His stories are allusive rather than straightforward and what other writers would have as the plot often takes place offstage. Again, the stories and people are often informed by his life – growing up in Yonkers, his time in the army, and his perpitatetic lifestyle in Mexico and Belize.

And finally, both were masters of realistic dialogue that gave you the feel of a person from what they said and how they said it.

In Fowler’s End the first meeting of the hero with the amoral cinema owner Sam Yudenow has this fragment of conversation from his boss:

“A little palace I made of it. I want you should veneer it with venerance – like…like…like a covered wagon miv Indians in the milderness. Bing, bash, bosh – Idills, it’s my idill.”

The irony being the cinema is as down at heel as most of its customers.

In Beer. Beer, Beer Davidson performs similar miracles with even the smallest characters. An unnamed citizen complains to an equally unnamed city official:

“He come around. He come around with this bunch of hunks and he says now, he says, like he says, ‘We got too many godahm complaints thats rats is breeding in the backa dthis warehiuse, and besides, its a hazard to navigation or sumppin’. An I says, I says, I says ‘Say don’t tell me what ta do on my own propitty you hunky son of a bitch.’ “

Davidson is fortunate that his friends, family and fans have fought to keep his books alive and in print and the Avram Davidson Universe podcasts and All the Seas with Oysters press have been very active in that. A new collection of 100 uncollected stories for what would be his 100th birthday is out later this year.

Kersh has not been as fortunate but a number of his novels have come back into print and will well reward seeking them out.

For Better or Verse

I have a confession – I never really got poetry.

The only poetry book I have ever bought (apart from The Liverpool Scene in the 60s) is the collected works of Private Eye’s E J Thribb. I particularly like his tribute to the late Pope John Paul where Keith’s mum suggest the next two Popes should be called Paul and Ringo.

I have only tried to write two poems – one a koan about the Zen Archers (their target, the Bull) and one for the late Stanley Chapman’s birthday. Lyrics, on the other hand, I don’t have problems with.

Perhaps its being on the spectrum, but I feel words far more when there is a melody underneath them than when I just read them. Or perhaps it is a thing about constraints – I can write more easily if I need to adhere to a rhyme and scansion.

I am listening as I write to Ken Nordstrom’s word jazz. I love the Beats and can see the chain between Nordstrom, them and mid period Tom Waits – all of which I appreciate (although I can also see the potential for parody, like the Bonzo’s Big Shot: nice…).

This lacunae is nothing to do with the language or emotional freight of the words – put it in prose and I love it. I can also appreciate it if there is humour running through it and love comic monologues.

Perhaps it goes back to school – every English teacher I have ever had has ranked poetry above prose. There is a snobbery within literary criticism that seems to downplay prose, however rich its language. Yet a finely crafted sentence can carry all of the power, meaning, and emotional impact as a good sestina. It may be that this derives from what has gone before in the story, but in many cases you can take it out of that context and it still works as well.

Or perhaps its just jealousy because I can’t do it myself.