Toby Litt's Blog, page 18

Wrestliana – ‘Journeys’ Which Aren’t

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‘Where does the journey look…?’

– W.H.Auden, ‘The Voyage’

‘It’s been such a journey.’

We hear a nauseating amount about journeys – almost as much as we hear about stories.

‘My journey’ – every television documentary must, of necessity, be ‘a personal journey in search of…’

Because if it isn’t, it will just be facts and pictures with a voiceover. Documentaries must be authored, and the discovery of facts must be also a progressively intensifying emotional trajectory (a journey).

But the falsity is this, and it is total: in order to get the TV documentary commissioned to begin with, the endpoint of ‘discovery’ must already be known. You will not get production money with the words ‘and we may find nothing of interest whatsoever’.

The documentary of failure and anti-climax is its own subgenre. (See Nick Broomfield’s films, i.e., Kurt & Courtney.) But bafflement is not what viewers want midweek primetime. They demand satisfactory emotional catharsis.

So, the most successful shows often take the form of Who Do You Think You Are? where the producer and their team have already to reached the journey’s endpoint, but have kept the star in ignorance of it.

Then, neatly emotionally staged, on camera (don’t forget that – if a revelation occurs anywhere but in front of the lens, it’s worthless, in TV terms) – on camera, the star can ‘discover’ what happened in the lives of their ancestors. From this they may draw a moral applicable for their own lives, and/or for those of the viewers. Here, the viewer can be privileged to witness ‘genuine’, by which I mean not acted, not Take Four, surprise, dismay, wonder, grief (on camera, in focus). Because the star doesn’t know. (Although, because they are aware of the commissioning process, they are aware there is something specific they don’t know.)

But in many other documentaries, the presenter is the star, the emotional centre, and they are in on the pitch (they are a major part of what sells the idea ).

Therefore, when they reach the endpoint, it is not genuinely an unexpected endpoint for them (except, perhaps, of the shoot). They may transfer the emotion that the six weeks of standing in front of the camera, emoting, at various picturesque locations, has finally come to a successful, well-lit ending. They may weep.

W.H. Auden’s words in his poem ‘The Voyage’ are, for these stars, definitive: ‘No, he discovers nothing: he does not want to arrive.’

A true but untelevisual discovery would ruin the programme, make it unbroadcastable. The hero turns out to be a creep or vice versa – the genre (feelgood or investigative) is broken, and the documentary becomes too radical (morally complex) to fit within TV. The director, if truly determined, has to head out into the wilderness of film festivals.

‘The journey is false…’

Every time someone on TV says, ‘It’s been a real journey…’ this isn’t true. They’ve not been on a journey, they’ve been on a coach excursion within a package tour. Their emotions may be real, but it has all been timetabled (as real journeys are not).

I can book, today, to have a profoundly unsettling moment in exactly two weeks time – on a tourist visit to Auschwitz. This would not, according to my definition, be a ‘journey’. It wouldn’t be setting out from your front door with no idea what you’re likely to encounter, and facing the possibility of ultimate, profound anti-climax.

Some knowledge of commissioning and production makes watching TV hard to endure. Everything has been pitched, discussed, cast, staged. Of course. It is all showbiz.

And I didn’t want to do that for Wrestliana – to showbiz it.

‘..the false journey really an illness / on the false island’ TV ‘where the heart cannot act’ giving act its full dignity, an act rather than an enactment or re-enactment: “Here I am at the graveside…”

Rewind to the pitch: He’ll be able to stand beside the grave and do the weepy bit. ‘..cannot act and will not suffer.’

Again, to suffer is to be lost in the tempest out at sea, not surrounded by water cannons and special effects in a swimming pool.

A while ago I made a documentary for Radio 3, about the Armenian composer Komitas. And I cried when I reached Komitas’s grave, and the producer was pissed off because I wouldn’t let him record it.

I wanted to say something interesting, but what he needed was the absolutely simple choked, broken voice saying, ‘Such a sad life. Such a sad life.’

I wasn’t able to get beyond that. There wasn’t much more to say.

The Producer even said, in advance, ‘If you’re going to cry, make sure I get it on mic…’

So, I did go to Armenia, I visited and learned things I didn’t know before, but I wouldn’t dignify my trip there with the word journey.

 

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THE VOYAGE

W.H.Auden

 

Where does the journey look which the watcher on the quay,

Standing under his evil star, so bitterly envies?

When the mountains swim away with slow calm strokes, and the gulls

Abandon their vows? Does it still promise the Juster Life?

 

And, alone with his heart at last, does the traveller find

In the vague touch of the wind and the fickle flash of the sea

Proofs that somewhere there exists, really, the Good Place,

As certain as those the children find in stones and holes?

 

No, he discovers nothing: he does not want to arrive.

The journey is false; the false journey really an illness

On the false island where the heart cannot act and will not suffer:

He condones the fever; he is weaker than he thought; his weakness is real.

 

But at moments, as when the real dolphins with leap and abandon

Cajole for recognition, or, far away, a real island

Gets up to catch his eye, the trance is broken: he remembers

The hours, the places where he was well; he believes in joy.

 

And maybe the fever shall have a cure, the true journey an end

Where hearts meet and are really true: and always this sea that parts

The hearts that alter, but is the same, always; and goes

Everywhere, joining the false and the true, but cannot suffer.

9 Reasons Your Novel Might Not Be Published

[image error]It’s Too Original

Your novel is ahead of its time. This means that no-one is equipped to understand it, because in order to understand it’d they’d have to have read it, and no-one has yet read it because – when they try – they find they’re not equipped.

A very vicious circle, this.

However, your work will be a sensation, eventually. Probably posthumously. During your lifetime, it won’t even be published. But you know you’re good, don’t you? More than good. Great. You sense it. That’s all you’ve got. Be satisfied with that, if you can be.

It’s Not Original Enough

Publishers are looking for the reasonably familiar that can be marketed as the unfamiliar because it’s just unfamiliar enough to pass. Until the genuinely original comes along and unexpectedly sells a vast amount, therefore creating a new reasonably familiar thing.

It’s Just Missed Its Moment

Your novel is perfectly good. Moving, well written, entertaining. It would have been published three years ago. Perhaps even two. This year, though, it just isn’t what publishers are looking for – because they’ve seen its like, and seen its like not do fantastically well. Perhaps you took the sensible approach, and wrote in a way that was similar to what you saw being published. Unless you’re very lucky, and things stay still for two or three years within your genre, this isn’t really a sensible approach. Writing a novel is not a sensible thing to do anyway. Genres don’t stay still.

It’s Missed Its Moment by a Few Decades

A lot of people, in starting to write, mistake being authoritative with poshing up their language. This makes their tone out of date, condescending, distant and is likely to put off publishers because they know it will put off readers. The voice of most novels now is not one that hovers, dissects, sneers. We tend to be down with the characters, in their bodies, in their dilemmas.

It’s Too Slow-Paced

I don’t mean it’s not a thriller. The best way to test your novel is to take down from your shelves five novels you think are similar in your genre (you should have at least five). Now, read the first five pages of each and see how many narrative possibilities have been set up. Does your novel have an equal number? Published writers are jugglers who generally keep five or six balls in the air; if you are only keeping two, you need to get better at juggling.

It’s Got a Point

An anger, yes. A sense of wrongness in the world, fine. Something the plot is constructed to demonstrate, no. This is off-putting to publishers, because they know readers will be ahead of it from the moment they start reading. If your accompanying email says that you’ve written a novel to counter global warming, you’re getting the formula rejection before tea time.

It’s Full of Bitterness

It is very very easy for your second and third novels, after the first has been rejected (if it has, as my first novel was, and my second, and my third, and my fourth, and my last but one), to become allegories of rejection. (This also happened to me.) These will feature a main character who is inevitably right surrounded by minor characters who are only there to be wrong in painful or amusing ways. Bitterness is corrosive. Within a novel, it eats through everything else, like the blood of the Alien, leaving what’s behind it softened, edgeless – it becomes its own motive. Novels are about understanding, not demonising. Novelists, unless they are satirists, are moral relativists – they can’t afford not to be. If the righteous are right, within a novel, then it’s a pointless exercise. (In contemporary Western novels, a character’s sense of righteousness is almost always a sign of their essential wrongness.) Certainty only exists within the compass of one point of view, and if you’re depicting a plural world then most of the people in it are partly right, partly wrong.

It’s Full of Love

This is similar to having a point. You loved your characters so much when you were writing them that you didn’t really want anything all that terrible to happen to them. So it didn’t. Not really. They pootled along for a while, they suffered a bit, they patched things up. But readers read novels because they want things to happen, including terrible things (perhaps especially terrible things).

It’s Just Not Finished

Experienced novelists often take years to write each book. There’s a reason for that. Sometimes a book needs to be left alone, then returned to months later – months during which the writer has written something else, so as to become a better writer.

It takes a long time to learn what a finished novel feels like. But if you go back to something you wrote that you thought was finished five years ago, you’ll probably see that it needed more work.

Of course the main reason your novel might not be published is that you gave up on it part way through. And that reason, at least, is something you can do something about.

 

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Wrestliana – William’s Lake Walk

WILLIAM’S LAKE WALK

In 1824, William Litt wrote an account of his attendance at the Windermere Regatta. It was published in the local paper, the Cumberland Pacquet. I think it’s probably his best piece of writing, outside his book Wrestliana. Although I tried, I couldn’t find anywhere to include it – or even mention it – in my own Wrestliana. To make up for that, I’m going to post it here.

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__________

To the Editor of the Cumberland Pacquet.

SIR. — Were I to choose a familiar correspondent when writing upon an indifferent subject, I would invariably prefer the Editor of a Newspaper – because I should then almost feel myself warranted in multiplying, or at least doubling myself, and therefore, Sir, as some account of my late excursion to Windermere will be expected by the public, I ought to be allowed the liberty of adopting the little inconsequential editorial mony-syllable we, which I infinitely prefer, as in such a case it appears equally as important, and much less assuming than I, which sounds very pompous and egotistical, and looks not the less so from always being written in its full dimensions.

Whenever we undertake a journey for pleasure, fine weather and leisure, if in our power to choose, we always prefer to walk. The first, when stinted to time is, to be sure, somewhat risky, but on this occasion we had it in full perfection ; and as we started betimes on Wednesday, we had an opportunity of observing all along that Wheat and Potatoes had never looked better, and that Hardknot and Wrynose stood exactly where they did in 1811. This must be very agreeable to all classes, as our veracity is unquestionable; and food, good and cheap, and no probability of these stupendous mountains overwhelming any of it, are surely things not to be sneered at. We do not wish to interfere with the regular Tourists, and shall therefore only observe, that the road from the foot of Wrynose by Scalewith Bridge to Ambleside seemed much more pleasant than on our former journey, for which variation we assign the following reasons : — First, the season was better, and therefore the prospects appeared to more advantage; secondly, the day was finer, and not so near its close, and darkness, we have always observed to be a most gigantic impediment to a clear view of any country whatever; and thirdly, we had company, the advantages of which are too palpable to need description. We had no reason to complain of our entertainment on our former visit, but the house of an agreeable acquaintance, and an old brother of the ring is, to us, a second home. Refreshment – we always on such occasions prefer tea – a little chaffing relative to the ensuing sports, with some very friendly lads not altogether unknown to us, made the evening pass smoothly on, and a good bed enabled us to rise in a proper mood for relishing the pleasures of the Regatta.

Mark ye, my readers, I consider myself on terms of perfect equality with many of you. I know that you expected some account of these proceedings from me, and therefore, if I choose not to disappoint, I think myself bound to deal plainly with you, and consequently will make no pretence to describe what I did not see. The Races were over before I got to Low Wood, and concerning them I can only inform you that the account in the Westmorland Gazette is very correct. The Grand Aquatic Procession then commenced, and never did I witness anything so beautiful or picturesque. The harmonious strains of the music in the barge threw such an enchantment over the spectacle, which, of itself, was so superior and imposing to whatever had been seen upon any of the northern Lakes, as at once to delight and astonish every civilized spectator. With a meaning worthy of the Gentleman to whom the arrangement was confided, and with whom the scheme first originated, the evolutions of the procession were rendered more instructive and impressive by adopting the manoeuvres of our immortal Nelson at the battle of Trafalgar. Here, there was a scene worthy of every patriotic Briton, and well may Westmorland be proud of the conduct of her resident gentry on this occasion. Every idea of party spirit was as placid as the clear element on which they rode, and those energetic feelings of the mind, which constitute the distinguished characteristics of Englishmen, determined to preserve their independence as firm as the hills that surrounded them, were as lofty and boundless as the clouds which canopied, and the breeze which gently agitated the streamers, that at once served to distinguish and ornament the most conspicuous of the varied Flotilla.

Immediately after the termination of this most delightful spectacle, the trial of speed commenced. There is no ground favourable for such an exhibition in the vicinity of Ambleside, and the combat was decided upon the highway, the competitors starting from opposite the Inn, and turning round two men, one stationed on the road leading to Bowness, and the other on that towards Ambleside. The crowd was great – the road dusty and unequal – and the prize easily won by a native of Green Erin, of the name of Campbell, but who is now married and residing in Ambleside. Campbell is a little, dark looking man, and pretty well advanced in years, and we understand entertains an idea of extending his conquests, which, it is said, are nearly coequal to his exhibitions somewhat beyond the precincts of Westmorland, and therefore, ye gentlemen of Keswick, we off to your acceptance one bottle of Ginger Beer, and one piece of the largest silver coin current in this kingdom – for we will not bet gold – on the heel, not the head of this Patlander, against any light-footed native swain, not only of your own far famed vale, but of the County which boasts your beauties as one of its most attractive embellishments. The said wager, if it please you to accept it, to be decided at the trial of pedestrian prowess which we expect to witness at your approaching Races.

The concourse of people, which was never what we, in the vicinity of the great and populous town of Whitehaven, would call large, but which on the banks of Windermere might justly be deemed immense, now separated. The Ladies and Gentlemen to partake of the respective repasts provided for them, and the commonality either to the ring, where the leaping soon after commenced, or to enjoy themselves with what they could procure in the different receptacles contiguous to the inn. The taste and elegance displayed in the selection and arrangement of the plentiful collations were creditable to Mrs. and Miss Robinson, but the company exceeded all calculation, and great number that could not be accommodated were obliged to seek refreshment elsewhere.

The leaping was meanwhile carried on with as much spirit as the dry and hard state of the ground permitted and the competitors, we understand, were pretty numerous; but, here again we can only refer to the Westmorland Gazette, as we were then present to the ordinary, where the name of the Gentleman who presided, Professor WILSON, is quite sufficient to account for the unanimity and hilarity which delighted and gratified every Gentleman present on this joyful occasion.

We come now to a circumstance which is rather embarrassing to one so extremely diffident as we are allowed to be and which our modesty would not permit us to mention, were it not so well known, that omission might occasion more conjecture to the particular manner in which it was done and received, than we are willing to be the subject of – we mean the drinking our health, with three times three, as that of a man whose efforts had contributed to rouse the attention of the great to the importance of athletic exercises – Had we omitted stating this, it would have appeared neglectful if not ungrateful in us and might probably have afforded some of our friends an opportunity of buttering us, in recapitulating our thanks for the great and unmerited honour ; but this we will avoid by distinctly stating that we had so little idea of being thus distinguished, that we were overpowered by surprise, and made but at stammering reply in return, yet we trust sufficiently luminous to convince the Gentlemen of the just sense we entertained of the high compliment paid us. – Exactly at five o’clock the Gentlemen adjourned to the Ring, where the most elegant belt we ever saw, and five guineas to the victor, two to the second, and one to the third, were contested for as follows:

FIRST ROUND

 

        Stood.               Fell.

James Beetham             William […]

William Sands   James Dixon

etc

The wrestling was certainly not equal to what might have been expected from the very handsome prizes which were given. Sands was the only Cumberland wrestler present, and his vast superiority over the other men in the ring probably dampened their exertions. It was, in fact, Windermere to a windmill, as none of his competitors could bid him wrestle ; and if any thirteen stone man in the kingdom chooses, he may be accommodated for from ten to fifty sovereigns. Many very liberal prizes were afterwards given to chosen men, who were supposed by the umpires to rate nearly equal, and these displays were very superior to the principal wrestling, and afforded much amusement to the Gentlemen present. Yet notwithstanding this great, nay unprecedented encouragement, from any observation we could make, it will be some time before Westmorland or Lancashire will produce a wrestler of sufficient celebrity to cause any sensation in the Cumberland rings —

One of the best and most successful in the bye-matches was George Irvine. He was victor in a match with Preston, which was well contested, and he likewise won the [sum] given to the eight last standers, throwing Tyson (who won the running leap) the best of three falls. As to Beetham and Hodgson, who threw our old friend, Rowland Long, they are both very likely young men, and taller than Sands, but their faults are the same which characterized the other candidates of first rate weight. They wanted steadiness, and took hold with their joints loose and their muscles unbraced, and seemed to know nothing of the great additional energy with which a wrestler either attacks or defends before he draws his breath after the hold is taken.

We now call the scientific reader’s attention to the manner of the wrestling, or the regular method of calling the first and last men together. Ticketing has no other recommendation, even with its most strenuous advocates, than the uncertainty attending it ; and it cannot surely be contended by any man of common sense, that uncertainty can possibly be equal to a regular system. We ask the other umpires, both of whom have had much experience, if they ever saw the same number of men wrestle through in the same time? We ask the writer and the gentlemen who assisted him, if it be possible to give the names with the same accuracy, the same dispatch, or the same impossibility of confusion? We ask the Gentleman who gave the prizes if it be not much pleasanter to contradict all assertion of names being called purposely together, by referring to a regular list, than to be eternally tormented with idle and even groundless stories of the unfairness of the conductors of the sport in this respect ? We ask the Wrestlers themselves, if it be not more agreeable to them to divest either umpire or conductor of all such power? And finally we appeal to all men of common sense, if the mode we recommend does not combine regularity with sufficient uncertainty?

Now, ye Gentlemen of Workington and Whitehaven, suffer me to pay the highest compliment in my power to the Gentlemen of Westmorland, by recommending you to follow their example. Is sailing the object of your pleasure, as it is the means of your affluence? do not the waves of the Frith lave the very dwellings of your goodly towns to which Windermere, though a noble sheet of water, is but a fishpond ; and could you not, by consulting time and tide, if the weather proved favourable, command a procession, to which even the fascinating scene I have endeavoured to describe would scarcely form a shade in picture. And if you prefer Races, or Athletic Performances, are you not more favourably situated for witnessing them than the unequal, however beautiful country in the vicinity of the Lakes will ever permit? If you question their utility, we urge their importance to your own interests, the happiness of your fellow townsmen, and their tendency to extend the religion of that Established Church of which the great majority of you are members. You need not stare at our motives, they are clear and sufficiently convincing. May not the proportionate number of dissenters be estimated, in every part of the kingdom, by the extent of the practice of innocent and interesting diversions in the vicinity of each place? And are not your towns so overrun with schismatics of different denominations, that more than a majority are found to be in their ranks ? and is it not natural it should be so? If the labouring man is to be a continual drudge, and enjoy no recreation, it will depress his spirits and unhinge the energies of his mind so much, that he will listen to those only who are continually ringing in his ears, and impressing on his mind, the most gloomy pictures of this, and the terrors of a future state ? And when such ascetic doctrines are rapidly gaining ground, will they not become alarming to you as individuals, and dangerous to the National Establishments ? It is our serious belief, that well regulated diversions, while they are innocent in themselves, would tend more to enliven the spirits of the commonalty, and counteract the effects of that despicable trash which is frequently disseminated amongst them, and therefore tend more to advance the interests of the Established Religion than all the churches built, and to be built in this century, without them.

Hensingham W.L.

 

 

 

 

Wrestliana – Georgians

This was the original opening chapter to Wrestliana. I think it was the hardest bit to leave out.

If the family portrait is to be trusted, I and my two younger sisters – one fair and one dark – are the human offspring of a Giant and a Witch.

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I mean, don’t we look just magnificently, gorgeously odd?

The words in that book, upside-down on the canvas, scratched into the acrylic paint in soft-leaded pencil, are –

 

HELEN             CHARLET

DAVID               HAVE MY

LITT                   LOVE

TOBY                 HANNELORE

GEORGINA       KÖHLER

 

And the painting is dated 1974.

Meet the Litts of Dunstable Street, Ampthill, Bedfordshire, as envisaged by Hannelore – a German artist, and the good friend of the wife of my father’s best customer, Manfred Heyduck.

My father is an antique dealer whose business, whose antiques shop, is doing rather well. A year ago he and my mother bought this five-bedroom Georgian house, at auction, for £14,500.

(I was five when I walked through the large front door, turned right into what came to be known as ‘the playroom’ and placed an object – I can’t remember which object – on the new orangey pine shelves. A toy, perhaps. Probably a car.)

To most people, I think, the house would have seemed a lot like a museum or an antiques shop. Although built around a Tudor house, it looked from the outside very Georgian, and my father had furnished it appropriately. Of course, it didn’t seem weird to me that I’d grown up surrounded by eighteenth century teapots, brass and ormolu candlesticks, china cats, ostrich eggs, tortoiseshell tea caddies. This had been my landscape since I looked up at the bottoms of tables, seeing where the leaves locked into one another, where I could get a handhold to pull myself onto my feet.

This portrait is my parents announcing, ‘We’re here – our family is complete – our home is settled – carpets down – we’ve made it.’

They were there and they had made it. Mr and Mrs D.H.B.Litt were destined to live happily in the house on Dunstable Street for over thirty years. A marriage of opposites, hearty and reserved, vague and precise, but Giant and Witch? Come on, Hannelore.

My father was very big and my mother was very small. That may prove to be the defining sentence of this book, as far as my place in it is concerned.

Although the family portrait exaggerates their size difference, the point is there. My father was 6’5”, my mother was around 5’1”. At my tallest, I ended up just short of six foot. Okay, more like 5’10” and a half. My father looks far too big for the space. If he stands up, his head would surely go through the ceiling. My mother, by contrast, looks far too small for my father. She’s more in scale with me than with him.

I know that my parents were more than a little embarrassed by how Hannelore had made us appear, and after a couple of years hanging in exactly the spot on the wall where the map of England hangs, the family portrait found its way up to the attic. The colours it was painted in didn’t match any part of the house, not even the room it showed. My sisters never liked the painting either. Too odd. And it was not until I moved into a house of my own, and put it up in an off-white sitting-room that the painting came good.

When the artist Frances Upritchard – maker of sculptures about the cult of Prince Charles and lopsided, bomb-crater creatures (not mere animals) – attended a party at ours, I was keen to show her a big photorealist portrait I’d bought, by an artist shortlisted for the BP prize; Frances hated that and moved straight towards the family portrait. She said it was the best contemporary family portrait she’d ever seen.

It was only looking at it subsequently, and taking it a little more seriously (If Frances rates it, this could actually be quite good) that I realized Hannelore was having some marvellous fun, probably at our expense – even though she said we had her love.

There are multiple visual gags here. Surely that sofa is meant to suggest the gigantic scallop in Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus? But instead of a vision of female gorgeousness we get the Giant, the Witch and the Naked Babe – all gathered around a moonlike white balloon.

And, in another joke, aren’t Georgina and I floating on the carpet just like cherubs from a renaissance ceiling? – there we hang in the green, unevenly zig-zaggy foreground, which seems to be covered in petals or inexplicable potato crisps.

On the shelves to either side of my parents, painted in the style of Egyptian figures or even hieroglyphs, stand teapots and tea caddies and china plates and heavy crystal glasses. They are valuable possessions but they are also merely empty outlines.

Resolutely above us five is a map of our country, as if to say, ‘Behold the English, in all their glory!’

My father’s profile is echoed by that of the East Coast of England and perhaps parodied by the West Coast, with Cornwall coming out of his mouth and turning the whole country into a speech bubble. He’s saying the nation, or breathing it out like smoke. Further up, the Bristol Channel licks away from his glasses like a tongue of flame, Wales lifts crab-pincers toward his forehead, after which it’s fairly featureless – apart from a dent for Morecombe Bay, just north of where he grew up, until the big Eastwards overhang where Scotland juts out, towards my father’s hairline, above the Solway Firth and over Cumbria, where (as he told us) we – Litts – ‘come from’.

The white balloon in Charlotte’s little hands seems to be it’s own world, but balloons pop. Perhaps there is a reason why these funereal English need Hannelore’s love.

But you’ve been thinking about the feet, haven’t you? My father almost never wore a suit, didn’t possess a black one, and certainly never wore a black suit with bare feet – except when asked to, by a visiting German artist. Yet his feet are the most definite part of the painting, and probably the most endearing.

The least endearing thing are my mother’s awful shoes, which may have been another reason why the portrait spent two decades up in the attic – among the wine bottles and tea cases.

There’s a reason why Helen Litt is wearing shoes. Hannelore liked, when she could, to paint people barefoot, because – she said – it revealed more about them. My parents had seen her previous portraits. I still have a catalogue to her shows. The family of Dr Manfred Bergener surround the squiggly cross-section of a human head, all of them barefoot. Kurt and Lisette Neyers picnic, barefoot. My father’s best customer Manfred and his wife Meichen sit on a spindley bench and gaze at one another, her bare toes caressing his bare toes. But my mother totally refused to be shown like this – she probably thought it was affected – so Hannelore rewarded my mother, as Snow White’s wicked stepmother was rewarded, with iron shoes.

Perhaps, to finish her off, Hannelore also gave my mother a deliberately odd hairstyle. Part Brian Eno, part Morticia Addams. I can’t ever remember my mother looking so goth.

My father looks smilingly down at Charlotte whose red cheeks reveal the strongest emotion on display here: passionate embarrassment. My mother touches the surface of balloon, as if it really were the moon. She is impassive, only the bulge of her belly declaring motherhood. The paper in her hands is a pale mystery.

The family – apart from my father’s tie and Georgina’s blonde hair and my brown hair – is a series of black and white alliances.

Pale Georgina and paler Charlotte are aligned with the book, the paper in my mother’s hands, the linen of my father’s collar, with the map of England and the white balloon that popped some time in 1974.

It is slightly odd to put a child in such a black outfit as I’m shown wearing. And I can’t remember ever owning such colourless clothes. My darkness aligns me with my gigantic father just as much as my witchy mother; but the outfit I’m wearing is almost identical to my mother’s.

There I am, with my sister, united and opposing, she relaxed, me dreamy, she looking off to the something on the right, me gazing down at a book with my name in it.

A happy boy.

Wrestliana – Emily Brontë

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In this kill you darling (or DVD extra), I am visiting my great-great-great grandfather’s William Litt’s birthplace, Bowthorn Cottage.

Above the door were carved the date ‘1685’ and the initials ‘E.M.S.’

I suddenly felt as if I were standing outside Wuthering Heights – over the principal door of which is carved the date ‘1500’ and the name ‘Hareton Earnshaw’.

This was a point of connection with William. I imagined him, as I had often imagined myself, sitting near the fireplace in the kitchen of the Heights.

A couple of years ago, I was asked to write a six word autobiography. What I came up with was:

My first proper girlfriend: Emily Brontë.

The set books for my ‘A’ Level in English – the books that made me want to be a writer – were about as bleak and perverse an assembly as English Literature houses: Thomas Hardy’s Emma Poems, ‘Hamlet’, Webster’s ‘The Duchess of Malfi’. Death, death and a smidgeon more death. To this, as extra-curricular reading, you can add Shakespeare’s other tragedies, T.S.Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’, and The Poems of John Keats. But it was within Wuthering Heights that I desired to dwell, and it was Emily Brontë I wanted there with me. I read her poems, and Winifred Gerin’s biography. I imagined contributing further romances to the epic manikin literature of Gondal. I listened to Cocteau Twins’ ‘Pearly-Dewdrops’ Drops’ and Treasure, as if their swirlingness and Emily’s were somehow the same thing.

The English teacher who led us throughWuthering Heights was keen – for reasons of his own – to douse our self-love. Like a sandy-haired Abraham Lincoln, stiff in body and accent, he stood at the front of class. ‘I don’t know about you,’ he said, ‘but for myself I have the humility to know that I’m more Edgar Linton than Heathcliff.’

Edgar is wild Cathy’s fake husband – a disgusting, sickly milksop; Heathcliff, you already know. There they are, the mental man and the physical man – the main two figures in Wrestliana. And we, as schoolboys, were being told not to aspire to being truly embodied. The kitchen of the Heights was not a place we should pretend, even to ourselves, that we would fit in.

At university, still obsessed, I wrote her a poem.

Emily Bronte

 

The Dark Interpreter has come, to rid

you of yourself & of yourself. The blue

& moon-mottled doorstep has felt his shadow

 

fall & pass, the dog was chasing dream-

rabbits & did not wake to his dark blue

shadow, the stairs have groaned for him, their dark

 

made darker by his dark blue shadow. He

& only he possesses you & you.

Into his shadow, through the dark, the blue

 

& then through his shadow to where the light

is clear, to where the light is black with light,

& then into the light, to find him there.

 

 

 

Wrestliana – William Litt (A Creative Writing Tutorial)

In this cut section from Wrestliana, I imagine giving my ancestor William Litt a creative writing tutorial, to help him improve his novel Henry & Mary.

 

Scene: My office.

 

Ah, William – hello. Come in. Yes, that chair. I always sit in this one, don’t know why. Fine – okay? How are you? How have you been finding the course, so far?

It has proven most stimulating, I must say.

Very good. So, you’re enjoying the classes, the workshops, are you?

To be amongst convivial literary fellows is always a pleasure, although the presence of the fairer sex took a deal of getting accustomed to, particularly when discussion turned – as it often seems to – to matters immodest. However, when so they are as sympathetic and social as are the fairer of my fellow students at Birkbeck College, I began to find their presence amusing if not entirely necessary.

Um, excellent. And how about the written feedback – um, comments – you’ve received on your work. Have they been helpful?

Aye. Most helpful.

You haven’t found an imbalance between that you’ve given to other people, and what you’ve received back from them?

No. All has been equitable.

Right. I just have to check these things – it’s part of my job as tutor, and pastoral care, you know. So – I really should stop saying ‘so’ so much – I expect you’d like to talk about your novel.

Henry & Mary.

Yes. I like the title.

It’s a plain title for a plain tale.

Well, not that plain, actually. You’re being too modest. For a first novel – this is the first novel you’ve tried to write, isn’t it?

That it is.

In fact, as I understand it, you’ve only ever written poetry before – no fiction.

True.

Then I’d say it’s a really remarkable piece of work.

Thank you, sir.

No need to call me ‘sir’. Yes, you have an astonishing command of English. I think I heard a report that you were sitting in someone’s garden, writing page after page, and that you didn’t touch any part twice.

There was an issue of haste, sir. The production was promised to Robert Gibson, printer, upon a certain day. When I make a contract, sir, I intent to honour it. That was my father’s way, and it is my way, too. And so I did, upon the very day the final words fell due, deliver them to King Street.

Well, yes – we all have to cope with deadlines, now and again. But now that you’ve finished a first draft and had a bit of time to think about it, what are your thoughts. (Think, thoughts – terrible.)

I have not thought much on’t, truth were told. I have been considering some verses to be appended to the finale.

But writing is rewriting is re-rewriting. You’re going to need to start back in at page one, and go through each line –

Nay! ‘tis a finished production.

That’s not how writing works.

That is how my Wrestliana was made.

Yes, but – as I understand it – that was non-fiction, and very much within your compass, as it were. You could write it off the top of your head.

From the heart, sir. ‘Tis a fine passion.

Let me be a bit more specific about what I’m thinking of, for the second draft. I have the manuscript here, but also the proofs from Mr Gibson – which are at least page-numbered. Here’s one example: the novel is called Henry & Mary, and we know a lot about Henry – how he is physically, what he thinks at moments of great emotion. Yet the other half of your couple, Mary, we get almost nothing of.

I don’t quite –

She’s a cipher, William. Or rather, she’s an idealized and conventionalized version of pretty emptyheaded young womanhood. We know she’s attractive, with bright, communicative, blue eyes, but apart from that we don’t know anything. We don’t know how she walks into a room, how she talks.

‘Her voice was ever soft and low a – ’

‘Thing most becoming in woman.’ Yes. I know my King Lear, too. And my Hamlet, Macbeth and Othello. I caught those allusions. You’re trying to build something really tragic, here. But the reader won’t feel for your lovers unless you convince them they both exist. Mary isn’t allowed to do anything independent – to show herself, and how she is different from other young women.

She isn’t. She’s a fine young lass who’d make a good wife for any lucky fellow.

All I’m saying is, I think you need to give her some more depth. The early scenes in which she and Henry are alone, you need to make more of them. The readers must love her as Henry does. She must be worthy of his love, in their eyes.

The heart does what it may.

Okay, let’s take another example, specifically. The novel turns on Henry’s being drawn to the dark side – I mean smuggling. For the first half of the book, he is completely morally impeccable. Then, in the second half, on page 259 out of 382, in fact, he just turns round and becomes a criminal. You do some scrabbling afterwards to explain this – you tell the reader why – but the whole turn to smuggling, the whole novel, would be far more convincing if you replotted it from the start to build up to this change of heart. You’ve got the basis here, all the ingredients. But Henry needs to be in a much more critical state to give in to the temptation of easy money. It can’t just be ‘Fancy doing some smuggling, Henry?’ ‘Yeah, Walter, that sounds great.’ You could easily make it that Mary’s family faces financial ruin, and that she and they will be destitute unless Henry helps them with this one last – we promise, we really promise – heist. This, after all, is the moment all is lost – Mary, his life in England, everything. It’s a BIG moment.

Henry is not a very considering fellow. He is not sufficiently adhered to high moral principles. If I may have the manuscript and…

A minute passes as William goes back and forth through the pages. He then begins to read, but I cut him off – 

Yes, yes – I see. But the reader is getting that after, ex post facto, the decision has been made. What I’m saying is, the novel would be stronger if the reader were convinced by Henry’s decision at the moment he makes it rather than having to be persuaded subsequently.

You are most eloquent on this matter, sir. But I can’t see how it avails much, for he himself did not realize the import of his commitment until many days afterwards.

Just because a character is a bit shallow, it doesn’t mean the novel written about them should be, too. I think you’ll have to give this one some thought, before you hand in your dissertation. A couple more things, though. What genre is Henry & Mary?

Genre? I don’t quite follow.

It seems part adventure story and part ghost story and part romance.

It is a true story. I had it upon the witness of many reliable notables.

Yes, that’s the framing device. What I mean is, you need to be careful you don’t confuse the reader. They must be confident you’re in control of the form.

I am – as I believe I said – telling a tale, as best I can.

And at many points, you’re telling it very well. There are some great set-pieces. The first encounter between the young lovers and Ellen Anderson; in fact, all the gothic scenes. The fight sequences.

Those are from personal habituation to –

I can tell. The reader can tell. And perhaps the best scene in the book is that final one with Henry’s sister and his nieces and nephews, after he has decided to go and join the army in taking Havanna. However, –

I am most obligated to you for your kind words.

However, I have to finish this sentence, William – very often you’re failing to fulfil the most important task of fiction, which is to put us in the room, or out in the open air, with the characters.

I do not see that of the very highest importance. Surely, factual instruction, moral uplift –

If we can’t see them, where they are in a room, how they slouch or sit up straight, what they’re wearing…

That, surely, is the business of the reader.

You do almost no descriptions of clothes. If you don’t give them to us physically, then they remain disembodied – just ideas, notions of people.

What does it matter the clothes a man wears? Everyone knows how a gentleman should dress.

This is 2015, you’re writing about the 1700s. The reader needs some help.

If you would but let me conclude. The crux is knowing how the story goes. You want me to fill up my pages with shoes and dresses and candlesticks when –

Yes, I do.

When –

Of at least some. One candlestick. There are hardly any.

Sir, I was in the course of saying. The heart of the tale is in the way things go. I leave the reader to provide the costume and scenery for himself. Any sensible fellow will be able to outfit a name with a coat and hat.

Alright. Well, now we come to my biggest issue. And I don’t expect you to agree with me on this, but please hear me out.

If you will cease interrupting me.

Yes. Sorry about that. Now I’m not a huge fan of just saying to students ‘Show, Don’t Tell’. It’s not a universal rule. (You’re certainly writing what you know, William.) But, in your case, you really are doing about 97% telling and only 3% showing. There are some magnificent descriptions of landscapes, some glimpses of how children are, a few vivid scenes in graveyards and around spooky houses, but overall the novel takes place behind a veil – no, behind a thick velvet curtain of eloquence.

– ?

You never chose a simple, straightforward word over a complicated or polysyllabic one. As a result, the novel sometimes reads like a lecture or a treatise or a sermon or an essay – all forms of discourse that you’re very familiar with. But the novel needs to be more open, more accessible, more alive to the moment of decision and action.

But I know the tale, and I’m telling it as best I can. When I make a speech, it has to have some magnificence of address. A romance is not chatter in a pub.

I think Henry & Mary could do with a little more pub chatter. Put what you’ve written aside, especially the asides. You might want to tell people about the effects of enclosure but don’t do it just when your novel is about to reach its dramatic climax.

Folks need to know, in order properly to comprehend.

William, you are one of the most talented wordsmiths I’ve had the pleasure of teaching. You can turn the logic of a sentence back to front, upside down, inside out – and very often you seem to do that for the hell of it. What I’d like to see in the next draft is you taking on board a few of the things I’ve said, and trying them out just to see how they feel. Also, you need to stop reading ‘The Author of “Waverley”’. His influence upon you is too great. Have a look at Jane Austen.

A woman?

Yes, she’s a contemporary of yours. Very good. Very efficient.

Does she ‘do’ candlesticks.

When necessary.

I can’t say as I shall.

Well, I’m afraid we’ve almost come to the end of our –

You, sir, have expectations I do not recognize.

Excuse me?

You speak of a relation between reader and author as if it were a certain thing. I know my readers, sir. I could name you two hundred of ’em, but I do not presume to enter their heads and make myself familiar with their cogitations. A tale is a tale. It can be made or marred in the telling, I grant you that. But if it is a good tale – as I believe this one is – then all the writer need to is deal with it honestly, let the words fall as they may.

It’s really not quite as simple as –

It is, sir. It is.

William, believe me, of the two of us in this room, I am the one who is most on the side of simplicity.

Of idiocy, rather. Of treating readers as if they mayn’t for themselves picture a room or a person’s entering it.

Take the character of Mrs Steel –

The devil take her. I knew the rumours of Henry Armstrong, and I have set them down as best I can. Now, have done with it. If we were talking of poetry –

Well, hopefully you’ll be able to take that option next term.

No, I am off home. There’s little enough I can learn from the likes of you.

 

And with this, William leaves. The door has never been quite so solidly shut.

 

 

Wrestliana – Ali Smith

A kill your darling from Wrestliana. Written a while ago.

I miss Ali Smith. We edited an anthology together. We used to have the same publisher. Yesterday, searching for something else, I saw she was up for another prize. There was a photo of her, from The Independent.

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She stands, arms spread, as if caught halfway through her version of ‘Singin’ in the Rain’. I missed her very acutely, at that moment, and wanted to talk to the photograph. It seemed an example of right mind, correct attitude.

I worry too much, I know, about being or making myself likeable (on the page, off). Ali, by her pose, says,

Here I am – vulnerable – confident – like me or don’t – this is who I am – I’m not dressed up – hate me if you’re hateful – I can take it.

She’s in a cheesecloth shirt, her tummy is showing and isn’t tiny, her jeans are rumpled, she could just have stepped away from her desk. (When I have my photo taken, I dress up.) There’s no mystique, she’s saying – and saying it to girls out there who might want to be writers, like her. Be honest, and let people make up their own minds. Even so, as her Gene Kelly stance asserts, it is performative. Dressing up or dressing down – it’s all drag, darling. Don’t forget it, and don’t let anyone else forget it.

As I couldn’t talk to Ali, because she was just a photograph on my screen, I printed her out and put her up on my big green baize noticeboard; and promised myself I would email her. Ali gives good advice and, as her wingspan here suggests, the best hugs. People are drawn to confide in her. Wisely. When we taught an Arvon course together (my first, Lumb Bank – in Yorkshire, near Sylvia Plath’s grave), we had a pow-wow after the first tutorial session. We were there to help the attendees write better short stories.

‘Whoa,’ I said, ‘one of my students spent all their time telling me what medication they were on.’

Ali smiled, she’d seen twelve people, she said. ‘I only talked about writing with two of them.’ The others had all inexorably been called to confide personal stuff. Some may even have been lucky enough to be hugged.

A very wise woman, Ali Smith. A woman of the sort the world very much needs.

So, here I am, in this book, singin’, just singin’ – as I think Ali would want.

 

 

Politics/Poems

Today is the launch day of New Poetries 7, the occasional Carcanet anthology of new and not-established poets. I am very happy to be one of them.

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Most of the poems by me included in the anthology are lyrical. But the opening few are from a sequence I wrote the day Donald Trump won the US Presidential Election. These are from the afternoon of that day. I wrote a lot. They are angry.

 

Politics/ 9.11.16 pm

 

I.

 

When you cross a bridge over a river

you can be definite about something –

but the insides, altered, leave an after-

shock of what, and what the fuck is happening.

 

It would be neat if one were like the other,

and the flow and bowels met in meaning

so that out of it come mother, father,

family, house, all subordinated into song.

 

Instead, I am borrowing several futures

to explain yesterday’s present moment

that now is cancelled, and fairly brutal

was its ending – instead, I have my fears

gradated between drowned calm, burnt torment

and the headlong lull of going foetal.

 

II.

 

I foresee a life’s work in this placement,

cadence that will fall unflatteringly

upon the judged, the camped jury, the wanted

and police force. Not harsh enough, they

 

are revealed to be; not sufficiently compliant

with pain-giving eloquence. We told a lie,

to no-one but ourselves, and now we can’t

backspace its bold typography.

 

Clanging down from less than heavens

there are some awoken ones, burial-mates,

drowners, who matter because of weakness

and sense-memory. Crows, crows and ravens,

the trees they engrave. Kestrels, kites,

their prey. And cuckoos, cuckoos, cuckoos.

 

 

III.

 

Against futility, and the clasped hands

of century-separated cognoscenti –

because on dapple-pattern we all can agree,

and Beauty makes eternal amends.

 

The whole scaffold is entirely purposeful,

and blood-soaked, as a legitimate viewpoint.

There is an act that forces whatever it will

and cannot be don’t, you won’t, you can’t.

 

Ease yourself into the cell, liberal,

you have prepared your own welcome

and furnished with defeats a red chamber.

This zone will always be comfortable,

and you know it to be somebody’s home.

The dead are never without number.

 

IV.

 

When even a piss against a tree has

greater significance than a new move

in a familiar opening in chess –

we come to a point, sadly, where we have

 

to admit to ourselves that what we meant

when we insisted upon the validity

of clear and beautiful restatement

was, in fact, a truth founded on a lie.

 

How argument was actually quadrille,

and laws were signed on Beatrice’s heart,

and even handshakes were made out of wood.

There are men who kill the men who kill

the men who kill,

there is a death behind the death of art,

and there is bad is caused by good.

 

V.

 

Exhaustion was the first fault, loosed

by lovers of style, the demographic

that demanded to choose where it placed

not only itself but every heretic

 

that had ever failed to see the funny side;

and in magazines spread self-belief

as a gospel that could be flash-fried

and served with carpaccio of beef.

 

Meat was a fact, this could be granted,

but butchers were not invited in, and so

butchers bowing their heads went to the lake

of all the blood they ever spilled, and counted

waves as they came in, then turned to go,

or rather turned to come back.

 

VI.

 

Self-accusation will become the mode

adopted by the mortgage-paid, the hobby-

rich, the baked old, when the mistake they made

begins to organize, demand, lobby.

 

Fine graduations of guilt, like Cuban cigars,

snipped perfectly with steel after decades storage

in custom-made mahogany humidors,

will send up smoke, like carving, like plumage.

 

There will be an aesthetique du mal

resurgent in the shires, years afterwards,

and I may be long ago cremated

but there is nothing I can do but feel,

no purpose beyond ordering these words

to say: Apologists are ever hated.

 

Wrestliana – Malcolm Bradbury

In this cut section from Wrestliana, I write about turning in to someone else.

As a very private joke, a couple of years ago, I bought myself – from GAP – a grey tweed jacket of the blazer variety with oval black patches on the elbows.

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It was to make mischief of something I saw happening to me: the gradual Malcolmization of my life.

Malcolm Bradbury was the main tutor on the Creative Writing M.A. I attended, at the University of East Anglia; 1994 to 1995: I was one of the final cohort of students he taught.

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By then, Malcolm had been teaching writers at UEA for twenty-five years – with sabbaticals and time away, leading to the toilet graffiti I once saw: ‘Q: What’s the difference between Malcolm Bradbury and God? A: God is everywhere, Malcolm Bradbury is everywhere but here.’

He was famous. When other writers died – when Iris Murdoch died – he was on the news (from a studio in Norwich) anatomizing her achievements.

A book by one of his former students, The Remains of the Day, had won the Booker Prize. After Kazuo Ishiguro’s triumph (Malcolm insisted on calling him ‘Ish’), applications to the UEA course trebled – and Malcolm saw the success that a new generation of writers was going to enjoy. I think this upset him, because he saw how terribly he desired that success for his own books. His penultimate novel, Doctor Criminale, begins with a scene at the Booker Prize awards ceremony – it fails to be satire, as it’s clearly a hopefully in-joke; look, this book is shortlisted for the prize and in the book is a book shortlisted for the prize.

Malcolm had already written his great novel, The History Man, which – with a TV adaptation starring Antony Sher – must have made novelists of an older generation similarly envious. He had also written, apart from poetry, just about everything else – novels, short stories, monographs, essays, teleplays, screenplays, documentaries on literary subjects, standard works of literary criticism. But he must have known when he chose The History Man as a title, that he was asking the Gods of Irony to make him himself historic.

When I met him, he was best known as the father of Creative Writing courses in England. Actually, co-father, as he had – to tutor their first student, a Lennon-haired, Lennon-specc’ed Ian McEwan – brought in Angus Wilson. Angus Wilson, too, had had his great moment, with the dangerous stories he published in the 1950s and his panoptic social novels, Anglo-Saxon Attitudes and The Old Men at the Zoo. To many contemporary readers, these seem as dense as the concrete of the Berlin wall – or rather, they seem that way to very few contemporary readers; because readers talk amongst themselves, and some time in the 1980s Angus Wilson was called ‘a bit heavy’. Like Malcolm, his whole reputation seems to be being condensed into a single book, one read only with trepidation, but then surprise at just how good he is. Shorter paragraphs, that’s what he needed. Page spaces. Roughage. And fewer characters from a narrower social spectrum. And more sex and violence.

So, the grey tweed jacket of my Malcolmization could also be the jacket of my Wilsonization.

To continue to live as a writer, I have become a teacher of writing. Perforce, I have joined the academy, and found it acceptable to begin sentences with words like ‘perforce’.

Malcolm, I think, had modelled his writing persona on the author photographs he encountered on the reverse of a previous generation’s Penguin paperbacks. There was the tweed jacket, the pipe, the sometimes-shaggy-sometimes-tamed hair, there was the intent to be great. It was this recognisability as a writer that made the TV news producers call Malcolm, repeatedly, when his elders and contemporaries died. Even if the viewers were watching with the sound down, they’d know what he was and what he was most likely saying.

..of the great writers of our time… inimitable… comic gift… to be greatly missed.. of course, the humour…

Malcolm became or more likely made himself into the icon of a literary writer. And, with my GAP jacket, I pretended I was doing the same – just as I was doing the same.

Writers now look different. That tweedy appearance went around the same time as the typewriter. Ironically, however, hipsterism has brought it back. Micro brewers now try to look like brewers from the 1950s, and advertising bods to look like Malcolm’s earliest author photos, plus beard. Every man is an ersatz D.H.Lawrence.

What is Malcolmization?

Malcolmization involves becoming a facilitator rather than an agitator. One refrains more from pursuing what looks likely to be not worthwhile, not recalling that most of the best things one has done looked that way. It’s the difficult middle period. As Lawrence Norfolk says, being young and being old are easy, for a writer, it’s just there’s no place in-between. New kid or eminence grise, otherwise get lost. I think of Philip Roth and his keeping going period. The massively ignored and specious, until editorial policy changes, and you’re back in vogue, because you might die soon. S/he looks likely to die, let’s get the lifetime achievement awards rolling. Honorary this and that. So we go picking wild strawberries.

Wrestliana – Harold Bloom

This kill-your-darling from Wrestliana is about the American literary critic Harold Bloom.

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In A Map of Misreading and The Anxiety of Influence, Bloom puts forward a theory of how writers come to be the writers they are. It is, he says, because of an agon, an Oedipal struggle, a wrestling match, a war-embrace, with strong forbears – fathers.

For Bloom, Milton battled Shakespeare, Keats took on Milton, Wallace Stevens grappled with Keats.

Bloom’s isn’t an opening gambit of a metaphor – he doesn’t forget it or let it go; everything is perpetual muscular mano-a-mano struggle.

Poetic strength comes only from a triumphant wrestling with the greatest of the dead, and from an even more triumphant solipsism. pg 9. A Map of Misreading (Oxford University Press, New York, 1975).

Who could set forth on the poet’s long journey, upon the path of labouring Heracles, if he knew that at last he must wrestle with the dead? Wrestling Jacob could triumph, because his adversary was the Everliving, but even the strongest poets must grapple with phantoms. (pg 17)

Nothing is less generous than the poetic self when it wrestles for its own survival. (pg 18)

Bloom’s theory is cranky and full of dead white males – and, sadly, the truest thing about how I felt while trying to become a writer that I have ever read.

Of course, even as I first read Bloom, at university in the 1980s, I knew he was heinously, irredeemably sexist. In The Anxiety of Influence, Bloom leaves all female writers out of account; none of them are for him strong ancestors, in the way of Dante, Shakespeare and Milton; none of them shake the earth with their stride.

I have found, in writing, that I am frequently bested by a mother, usually Virginia Woolf. Each novel I’ve written has at least one antagonist-novel or -genre. Beatniks was vs. On the Road; Corpsing vs. Crime (Revenge); deadkidsongs vs. The Island Novel (Crusoe, Lord of the Flies, The Virgin Suicides); Finding Myself vs. Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse; Ghost Story vs. Ghost Stories (specifically Haunted House); Hospital vs. Dream Visions (Pearl, Piers Plowman, The Divine Comedy, Blake’s Prophetic Books); Journey into Space vs. Science Fiction (specifically, Generation Ship and Space Opera); King Death vs. Crime (Amateur Sleuth) and vs. Minimalism (American and Japanese); Notes for a Young Gentleman vs. Virginia Woolf’s The Waves.

This is too schematic. Each book battled multiple other books. This book, Wrestliana, is no exception. It explicitly takes on William’s Wrestliana, but he’s not a strong ancestor prosewise. He’s only a trace in this paragraph. Each sentence here is wrenched against itself by not-being so-and-so’s cadence or trying to exist beyond obvious avoidances. In writing this, right now, I feel I’m grappling with Saul Bellow (for gnarliness of telling, dense-intensity), D.H.Lawrence (lava-flow), Osip Mandelstam (Fourth Prose and Journey to Armenia are conscious models), Beckett (who wouldn’t write it at all, but came closest when he wrote Our Exagmination Round His Factification For Incamination of Work in Progress, an ago with Finnegans Wake). And all writing-about-writing loses to Virginia Woolf’s letters and diaries.

I can’t generalize about Women Writers – do they wrestle predominantly with Mothers? Or against an Army of silencing Maleness? Or against inner demons that are essentially anti-writing (you shouldn’t be doing this)? Is the Oedipal model moot, just a testosterone-fuelled illusion? Does, instead, a truly supportive sisterhood exist – where rising generations are supported on by the great dead? Where doors are opened by ghost-hands, keys to secret gardens are hidden in sewing boxes? In their case no agon, only agape.

I can’t really see it. Bloom probably still applies. To take poetry as an example, Sylvia Plath destroyed generation after generation of female poets (1963 onwards) just as comprehensively as Auden did (1928 onwards). Plath was simply too strong; write against her or in her grip, her influence still annihilated weaker souls.

Bloom’s theory of agon may be, as objective description of literary influence, wrong. Yet when I was at university it answered to my twin desires. I desired a vocation, and I desired a defining and refining struggle. Writing, for me, became both. (‘Writing’ makes it sound so simple – as if it’s a matter of handwriting, rather a matter of struggling towards worthwhile being, making your being worthwhile through language.) What is at stake, with too intense a reading of your ‘influences’, is obliteration. If you lose your balance entirely, all you will become is a landing-ground for the stronger poet. The only way to defeat them is to find their moments of imbalance and turn their very strength against them, for you.

It’s not so much a theory, I guess, as disguised autobiography. Or paternal self-hatred. The Oedipus Complex transferred directly across to literary fathers and sons (the mother, Bloom leaves us to assume, is the voluptuous language itself).

Bloom is questionable, even dismissible all the way down. Yet, emotionally, his agon is very much a description of how it felt – why the desk was a violent place.