Toby Litt's Blog, page 19

Wrestliana – D.H.Lawrence

When D.H.Lawrence writes of sport, in his essay ‘Education of the People’, he wants agon.

Set the boys one against the other like young bantam cocks. Let them fight. Let them hurt one another. Teach them again to fight with gloves and fists, egg them on, spur them on. Let it be fine balanced contest in skill and fierce pride. Egg them on, and look on the black eye and bloody nose as insignia of honour, like the Germans of old. (Phoenix, Heinemann, 1961, pg 657)

Lawrence was writing in 1920. He says appalling things, and he means to. Lawrence didn’t know how much of a fool he was soon going to sound. He is racist, not fascist.

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You can dismiss Lawrence whole, just as you can choose not to listen to Wagner – and that may be the right decision. But Lawrence can be read against himself. The distinctions he is making are very fine, although he wants his language to be as direct, combative as it can possibly be. He upholds martial values against military ones. He wants humankind to be able to rear its young without destroying them.

What young men are may be a social construct. If the biological entities they once were had been raised by wolves, they would be feral. Bring them up in a blank white cell and never speak to them, have them fed by robots, they would remain infantile. They would burble and play with their poo. With that I don’t disagree. But have them grow up in our social world, as my sons are doing, and most infants born with external male genitalia will become young men. And young men are a big problem for the world, perhaps the biggest, because they are clearly not satisfied with the occupations the developed world has to offer them. Desk jobs and service industry politeness will not do. For many complicated cultural reasons, proviso proviso, they want glory. They desire agon. They see nothing wrong with it, though there may be collateral damage. (I am generalizing, I know – I have to.) This holds true, this glory-thirst, for the young men who are running away from Luton and Marseilles to join the Islamic State; this holds for young men who are staying up past midnight playing Call of Duty; and for young men who join gangs, and who plot shootings. Yes, some young women join IS, too, some game and also gang. (Has one yet done a mass shooting?) But the structure of these conflicts, real and virtual, is not feminine.

And so Lawrence’s argument still has some force. What do we do with the young men – what do we allow the young men to do, do to one another – that will not end up killing us all?

Another Lawrence, the novelist Lawrence Norfolk, once said to me – after a trip to Bosnia, the peripheries of the civil war – ‘All young men should go to war, it’s just, none of them should die.’

Sport is D.H.Lawrence’s answer as, I’d say, it is America’s to the question of what to do with its young men – particularly those it generally views as most troubled and troublesome, its young black men. The alternative to crime, for young black men, is the sports scholarship. Watch the documentary Hoop Dreams, to see how stark their choice can sometimes be. If your young men have basketballs in their hands (America hopes) they are less likely to pick up guns. But it’s more than possible that they’ll go to the guns when the territory of the court is under threat.

The question is not whether young men will desire agon, the utmost struggle which defines and refines both combatants – it’s against whom they will choose to struggle?

Most drugs negate the desire for struggle; they are agon obliterators; that, it seems to me, is their main purpose. Heroin, LSD, crack, crystal meth – they take you out of it, it being struggle. When you’re this high, how silly winning seems. Drugs give you the win without the contest.

There are exceptions to this: coke makes you massively up for it, but coke simultaneously undermines your ability to hold back. A coked-up chess grandmaster would be an easy beat for one playing straight.

Thinking about this, I find myself in a strange position. For someone left-wing, for a Buddhist, I don’t seem to believe what I should believe. I think we need strong armed forces, to give young men who want to fight and who dream of killing somewhere legitimate to go. For similar reasons, and despite the inevitable brain damage and death, I think boxing is an absolutely necessary thing. I think violent video games may save the world. If they’re violent enough and immersive enough, and answer directly enough to the desire for agon and glory, they may be a solution to where young office-bound men go.

I think D.H.Lawrence would have preferred something a little more like Fight Club.

Wrestliana – The Coal Delivery Man

Next in the continuing series of kill-your-darling sections painfully taken out of Wrestliana. The following really hurt. This was written to illustrate the split between intellectual and physical labour. (It’s meant to be very awkward.)

The symbolic moment for me, and I knew it was this at the time, came during the summer of 1986. I had got into Oxford to read English; the college had sent me a ten page reading list. I was expected to cover most of it before I ‘went up’ in September. Averaging it out, I needed to read three or four novels a week – and I am a slow, minute-a-page, words-aloud-in-my-head, reader. Three or four novels each seven days, but it was the Victorians, so whoppers by George Eliot and Dickens, so Middlemarch plus Bleak House plus…

My family went on holiday that summer, and I had the fantastic experience of reading The Mill on the Floss in a cottage almost at water level on the river Dart. I also had a summer job, clearing tables and washing up, at Toddington Service Station (Northbound). But I spent much of that August and September in my bedroom, trying to speed read.

This particular day, my father knew I would be in, and he had arranged a coal delivery to our house. There still existed a glass trapdoor on the street, covering a shoot down which coal had once been poured, but it was sealed now, so burglars wouldn’t get in and rob us. There was a lot of concern about burglars robbing us, probably because our house contained a quarter of a million pound’s worth of antiques. (My father was an antique dealer, and I have his insurance valuation.)

Because the shoot was sealed, the half ton needed to be carried in through the front door, along the hall, left, right, then down beneath the stairs into the cellar.

I was reading and making notes on what I was reading when the knock on the front door came.

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I showed the coal delivery man where the coal went. He fetched thick matting from the lorry and rolled it in sections on our Persian carpet, then began to carry in rough sackful after rough sackful.

He was a predictably solid man with a leather brace around his practical stomach. I snatched glances at him as he went past, above the words. His skin wasn’t filthy but he was grimy in a way we weren’t used to seeing in late twentieth century England. He was Victorian novel grimy – like a miner from Hard Times twenty minutes into his shift.

Third rough sackful, fourth. His breathing, steady. Of course, I couldn’t help him, that would have been ludicrous, but I also couldn’t go back up to my bedroom. And so, for about fifteen symbolic minutes, I sat at the Regency circular large breakfast table (£6,500) on one of the Set of 6 mahogany shield back chairs (£3,200), looked down on by the print that replaced the family portrait, opposite the bookshelf containing Wrestliana, and read – while the coal delivery man walked to and fro, hither and yon, tick and tock, weighed down by a full grey sack or lightened by an empty one.

Middle class always, I’d offered him a cup of tea, which he’d refused. That out of the way, my job – given me by my father – was to make sure no-one nipped through the front door and nicked anything. Pair Regency bronze and ormolu candelabra (£2,800). Tortoiseshell and mother of pearl caddy (£500).

As I sat there, I became very aware that I had fallen into rhythm with the delivery man. For every trip he made from the lorry to the cellar, I read a page. I stopped making marginal notes. (I couldn’t concentrate; the situation was too appallingly symbolic.) And I began to feel guilty, and wanted to say something to the man. ‘Look, I am working, too – it’s just a different kind of work to yours.’ The coal delivery man, as he went past, was massively impassive. He must long before have got used to the things people did whilst he was in and out of their lives and front doors. What I was up to, in sitting there seemingly ignoring him, was probably better than the friendly sorts who tried to maintain a conversation – like an tennis umpire speaking to the ball in play.

As far as I remember, he didn’t get out of breath. And he said nothing, passed no comment on the book I was reading, or the fact I was reading whilst he did hard physical labour. There were about twelve or thirteen steps down into the cellar, and the staircase at the top had a tight left turn.

The longer the delivery went on, the more I wanted to defend myself – to make the case that making notes on two hundred and fifty words of Dickens wasn’t worthless or lazy. At the same time, I imagined him stopping to give me a proud working class speech on the value of education and self-improvement. Or even, him casually saying that he reread all of Dickens’ work every year, and how did I think this one compared with, say, Bleak House? I also imagined him, hostile, telling his friends in the pub, that evening, ‘and the lazy little fucking fucker just sat there the whole time, reading a fucking book.’ He would be in the pub, that would make it worse. He would swear, that would make it terrible. I would never know, and would never be offered the chance to defend myself by telling him that I respected what he did, and didn’t see it as in any way lesser to what I was doing. But ‘lesser to what I was doing’! – even my syntax is condescending. ‘Syntax’.

By the fifteenth sack, I had become too distracted by the imagined scenes in my head to do anything more than pretend to read.

My father had left me some cash with which to tip the coal delivery man. After he had taken down the last full load, returned with the empty sack and was rolling up the carpet protectors, I got it out of my jeans pocket and stood there with it in my hand. ‘I’m not just reading all the time,’ I wanted to say. ‘I have a summer job in a service station. I clear tables.’ But instead I said, ‘Thank you very much,’ and handed over the cash.

The coal delivery man was standing on the doorstep – having completed his job cleanly, not wishing now to bring his black dust over the threshold.

I wanted him to leave; I knew, even then, that I would one day write about us.

His day’s work would long be done; mine would be starting.

Wrestliana – Samuel Beckett

This kill-your-darling section from Wrestliana is about Samuel Beckett, my love of and ambivalence towards him. Happy birthday, Sam.

So, I’m at my desk, who am I fighting right now? Who am I losing to?

Sentence by sentence, it’s Woolf, Bellow, Lawrence, Mandelstam. But in figuring myself as a writer? Samuel Beckett (1906-1989), author of Waiting for Godot, Endgame, Malone Dies, The Unnameable, and most of all the Beckett of the three texts contained in Nohow On.

Yet not only for what Beckett wrote but for his late modernist disgusts. His unwillingness to participate in the publicly trivial (and, for him, the publicly trivial includes the Nobel Prize for Literature). His ongoing refusal of things I feel I too should refuse. Plus, he was gorgeous to look at – thin, suede-suave. Not bald. Writerly.

Day to day, in returning to what I do, I’m far more contra-Beckett than I am contra-David Mitchell, contra-Hilary Mantel. He seems an ethic as well as a writer. More than those particular two are, or any other contemporary writers.

As a literary father, Beckett is an ironic choice. He was all about the fail. His entire mature output is a response to not-being James Joyce (Beckett’s father). Beckett was in the room as parts of Finnegans Wake were constructed; Beckett took dictation – from Joyce’s mouth to Beckett’s pen to immortality. How crushing was that? Beckett knew the importance of Ulysses, and knew he could not rewrite it. So he left the English ring, he fled, to France, to French. If father-Joyce was writing a character who was everything/everyman, son-Beckett would write a series of characters who were nothing/no-man. If Joyce was word-rich and word-weird, Beckett would reduce his means to a schoolmaster’s vocabulary. After Joyce, no choice. But the strength of Beckett’s reaction makes him an immensely powerful figure. I would like to say ‘in himself’, but this isn’t the case. He is only ever secondary, and he knew it. (Why do we like him more than Joyce? Perhaps because we’re an age more at home with the secondary. Schubert, not Beethoven.)

But I recognise that Beckett’s world, the moral grisaille of 1945-1955, the imminence of Auschwitz, is not mine. I wasn’t born in proximity to that burden. Others have interposed themselves – Warhol, The Beatles.

Beckett was pre-pop. He didn’t have to engage with pop culture, because he was formed in another era. Beckett’s version of the ‘catchy’ was silent films, Chaplin and Keaton, entirely un-avant garde.

Beckett never had to worry about whether or not he should (in screenwriting terms) Save the Cat. Beckett never, on the page, tried to make himself, or his characters, likeable – to win over the reader. They either came to him or they didn’t. If they came, it was for literary reasons. Because literature exists and because he was a recent instance. To that extent, even in his despair, he trusted in the culture.

Norman Mailer wrote a book Advertisements for Myself. I wrote a book called Adventures in Capitalism. In a way, it was an advertisement for myself. It was a catchy book, and it caught on. I’m glad I wrote it and wish I hadn’t. I wish it were more austere. I wish it were the next thing Beckett would have written, after Stirrings Still, his last. But that would be entirely bogus: he reached where he reached by virtue of his prior collapses. It’s almost impossible to understand Stirrings Still without having read earlier Beckett texts. He created his own lineage of stranded protagonists – immobilized in soul even as they flee the physical confines of his attic rooms. Stirrings Still, the title, puns on Beckett’s own unproductiveness – look, there’s life in the old god yet. Yet if that yet, that still, becomes a verb, to still, then the title flips round to being yet another finale, a finishing end. Almost every one of Beckett’s words, from First Love onwards, was a last word. By 1983, it had for a long time been – literally – beyond a joke. I can’t go on was always closely followed by I’ll go on.

This, though, is taking Beckett very straight. There’s another side of me, perhaps the snidey side, that thinks he wasn’t averse to what we would now call branding. The Beckett brand was created and guarded by Beckett himself. A couple of years ago in Cork, I had my photograph taken by John Minihan.

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He took the famous image of Beckett in a Paris café.

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I asked John – in a roundabout way –whether Beckett was vain of his image; indirectly, John said he was. The famous image came after they had been sitting in that café, which Beckett had chosen, at a table he’d decided was best, for a couple of hours. The light, fittingly for Beckett’s brand of dying light against raging, was dying. To the extent he could, Beckett took his own portrait, through John Minihan. He could have chosen not to.

After the global success of Waiting for Godot, Beckett was financially secure; the Nobel Prize made him rich. Like Thomas Pynchon and J.D.Salinger and Elena Ferrante and (until recently) Harper Lee, Beckett could afford to distain publicity. He could make a virtue out of saying No because he didn’t face the necessity of saying Yes. He didn’t have to be witty and charming and sufficiently banal not to appear superior at literary festivals, in the hopes of selling a couple more copies of Texts for Nothing. He didn’t have to pretend to collaborate with members of the public on projects designed to make Literature more accessible. He didn’t have to be liked. He didn’t have to teach.

Instead, he could concentrate on augmenting the quality of his verbal suffering. With greater and greater concision, he could agonize. His publishers accommodated this. So the texts were shorter and shorter; font sizes grew, making each line an epitaph; expanding white space brought an aura to his black words. All editions became boutique. This always has the effect of making aphorisms of statements. (Look what they did to David Foster Wallace’s Commencement Speech at Kenyon College when they – Little, Brown and Company – turned it into This is Water. Suddenly, instead of some meant-to-be-spoken observations, we have the Dao of Dave.)

It reminds me of Sarojini Naidu’s quip, ‘It costs a great deal of money to keep Gandhiji living in poverty.’

And yet, and still, Beckett convinces me beyond the Beckett brand. He wins through. I read him and am again overcome.

This is John Minihan’s photograph of me. No comparison.

 

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Wrestliana – Magnus Carlsen

In this extended section from Wrestliana, I am on my way up to Carlisle, to have a go at Cumberland Wrestling. I am nervous, and thinking about losing, and getting hurt. I watch a lot of chess videos on YouTube. One of them comes to mind.

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23rd March 2016.

 

All the way up, on the train, I read and reread William Litt’s Wrestliana and thought about how – in five hours, then four hours, then three – I could be riding in an ambulance.

And I thought of Magnus Carlsen. I had a catchphrase in my head which I blamed on him.

It had come from an affably terrifying clip of Magnus, future World Chess Champion and highest-rated player ever, beating Grandmaster Laurent Fressinet at bullet. (A chess variant where each player gets 60 seconds to play all their moves. If they run out of time, they lose.)

The video was posted to YouTube on August 9th, 2013. As of today, it has over a million views.

‘You can’t handle the truth…’ Magnus begins the trash-talking, eating a Pink Lady apple, bashing out a move a second – often disturbing pieces around the piece he’s swooshing up or banging down. Then he says it, the ultimate thing: ‘Too weak, too slow.’ Fressinet is too weak, too slow. All Magnus has to do is win the game, and prove it.

Magnus is relaxed; a laptop to his left with, on top of it, the book Fundamental Chess Endings by Frank Lamprecht and Kersten Müller. Tennis balls are on the white formica table, beside the board. A tennis racquet, in cover, on the floor behind Carlsen’s chair. Waterbottle, orange juice bottle (this was before Magnus switched from o.j. to water, during tournaments).

Carlsen is athletic; Fressinet (Grandmaster, peak rating 2718, 50th in the world rankings, no patzer) is a nerd. He could be a particle physicist, or a World of Warcraft champ.

Fressinet makes very French blowing noises with his lips; Carlsen smirks.

There are other people around, commenting, reacting, but for most of the clip they are off-camera.

‘You can take on D4. Take on D4. Let’s go!’ bullies Carlsen.’

‘Let’s go,’ echoes Fressinet.

Fressinet to whoever is behind the camera: ‘You’re taking a photo? [You’ve got photo?]’ Then, to Carlsen: ‘He’s streaming you. You should behave yourself – for a change…’ says Fressinet, hopeful.

LF: ‘I’m going to trick you,’ he says, none too convinced or convincingly, ‘as always.’

MC, impatient: ‘Queen A6, c’mon!’

Fressinet plays that move.

MC: ‘Really? You think this is great?’

Fressinet: ‘I’m just… enjoying… myself.’ (Basic liar.)

MC: ‘You wanna play H5?This is what you wanna play?’

Audience to Fressinet: ‘You wanna go faster.’

MC: ‘So you wanted to exchange Queens after all, huh?’

Play.

Audience: ‘Too slo-oo-ow!’

MC: ‘Too weak, too slow. C’mon. C’mon. E4. Do you want a draw? No draw for bad Fressinet!’ Laughs.

‘Tempo. Tempo.’

MC: ‘Ah, you’re taking my rook.’

Without realizing it, Fressinet has put his king on a square where it can be checkmated in one move.

Without hestitation, MC makes the right move. It’s not, to me, clear whether it takes him a fraction of a second to check there’s no way out.

MC: ‘What do you wanna play? Do you wanna play? Ah – ha ha – ha!’

(It looks like they’re in the corner of a science classroom. White desks.)

Someone online, on Reddit, annotated the move Bd5# ‘Carlsen – maniacal laughter’.

When this happened, Fressinet, 36th in the world, was helping Carlsen prepare for the World Championship match against Vishwanathan Anand. Carlsen went on to win.

Carlsen has an imploding face – as if there is a black hole somewhere behind the bridge of his nose, drawing his features back and in.

If you look online, you can find plenty of trash talking about Carlsen. Bobby Fisher would have beaten him. Kasparov, at his height, could have taken him apart. He’s arrogant, haters say. He’s an arrogant little piece of shit.

But how can it be called arrogance when Carlsen knows, objectively, that he is the strongest chess player of all time – and has achieved that at a time when there are more strong chess players than ever before in history?

It is a fact. In comparison to him, everyone other player – apart from computers – is too weak, too slow. We humans just don’t take kindly to being told so bluntly that’s what we are.

What the public likes to hear most is that everything’s a scam, and that if they were only tipped the wink, they too would be a winner.

There are no Faking It-style reality TV shows where a complete beginner, thanks to eight weeks intensive training, enters a grandmaster tournament and achieves a win. Neither are there such shows for mathematics, nor short stories, nor poetry.

You can’t get good that quick; if you could, others would.

Getting good quick is being Magnus Carlsen – becoming a Grandmaster aged 13 years, 148 days.

If you can’t do this, you’re too weak, too slow.

But however badly he loses, Magnus Carlsen doesn’t risk an ambulance-ride.

 

 

Wrestliana – Clare Grogan

In the next few weeks, I’m going to post a few blogs containing sections cut from the drafts of Wrestliana. Writers are told ‘Kill your darlings’. These are a few of mine. They’re all about particular people – Malcolm Bradbury, Ali Smith, my family.

The first concerns boarding school.

1st October 1981, Top of the Pops.

Down in the recently flooded cellar of Culver House. The TV room. Each sofa smells of a different brand of damp. Choose the wrong seat and an older or a bigger boy will evict you, dead arm. I am towards the back, sitting on the arm of the sofa, near the stairs, quick escape if necessary. There are 21 boys, the youngest around seven years-old, the eldest in the upper sixth. Everyone rushes their homework to watch Top of the Pops.

Mike Read in a stripey shirt and shades. ‘All the way from Scotland for the programme are Altered Images and here’s their new single and it’s called, “Happy Birthday”.’

Clare Grogan.

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I’m not sure I’ve ever adored anyone so completely so instantly.

Clare Grogan in some bizarre kind of broad-brimmed straw pith helmet.

Watch the clip now. Have you ever seen a singer who seems so completely unabashedly delighted to be in a band, to be in a band! making their debut!! on Top of the Pops!!!

And Clare Grogan is so tiny.

Here was someone dancing, happily, and then not getting hit afterwards. That was important to me.

Everything about her seemed perfect, including her joy.

Compare the freedom of Clare Grogan’s movements to anything you’ll see in a video nowadays.

Alan Lomax’s liner notes to Shirley Collins’ L.P. Sweet England begin, ‘Perhaps the most elusive of sounds is the voice of a young woman, alone the kitchen or garden, singing an old love song.’ Clare Grogan, miraculously (although she’s clearly also showing off and flirting and taking the mickey out of herself), was dancing just as she would ‘alone in the kitchen or garden’. I couldn’t do that, but I was glad someone could do it.

And I can still remember how all the other boys in the smelly cellar started laughing at her, sarcastically, because she was so silly and awkward.

It was catastrophic how open to being mocked Clare Grogan was. No-one should allow themselves to appear so silly. I wanted to protect her, intervene. I cared.

Around me arms flailed, like her arms were flailing, and voices fluted, like her adorable voice. And I thought, ‘That’s it for me.’

I cared more.

Here was openness and trust; someone being who they wanted to be, gleefully, unpunished. (I needed to see it, to give me hope.) Here, I now understand, years later, here was youth as youth should be allowed to be.

It was Clare Grogan’s vulnerability – it was the atrocious total vulnerability – the atrocious making-vulnerable-of-the-self, that must have been it.

My imaginary rescue.

 

 

Why I Hate Mowing The Lawn

Because I always think the same thoughts whilst doing it. And I hate these thoughts, and want to get rid of them, so I’m trying to do that by writing them here.

I think about –

Alan Bennett’s London Review of Books article, ‘Memories of Lindsay Anderson’, in which he said –

At the drabber moments of my life (swilling some excrement from the area steps, for instance, or rooting with a bent coat-hanger down a blocked sink) thoughts occur like ‘I bet Tom Stoppard doesn’t have to do this’ or ‘There is no doubt David Hare would have deputed this to an underling.’ (Vol. 22 No. 14 · 20 July 2000)

‘The Mower‘ Philip Larkin’s pitiful poem that begins “The mower stalled, twice; kneeling, I found/ A hedgehog jammed up against the blades,/ Killed.’
The frog from next door’s pond that I once killed whilst mowing the lawn. I did not write a poem about it. I should have done, but it wouldn’t have been anywhere near as good as Larkin’s.
Lawn mowers and how badly designed are. Particularly the catastrophically awful Fly-Mo I used for several years, because our lawn is less than half the size of half a squash court, and because I thought having a proper mower was ludicrous.
My street, and why everyone living on it doesn’t just share a single badly designed lawn mower to mow our equally tiny lawns.
Death. Specifically, I think about the death of my grandfather – my father’s father – who died whilst mowing the lawn in Lytham St Annes. This would have been on May 25th, 1947. He was discovered slumped over what I imagine to have been a large petrol-driven green lawn mower by my father, a boy of eight years-old. My grandfather had had a heart attack. My father, as far as I know, never mowed the lawn himself. He – like Tom Stoppard and David Hare – always got some else to do it.

Notes for a Young Gentleman

The opening of the new novel:

 

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and the opening of the new novel:

 

Until you have read this through, do not write in it. If you choose to do so thereafter, that is your own mistake.

It was spooked England, all laid out below and invisibly rushing up towards one—thirty-two feet per second per second—and how intimately I knew it and how passionately I loved it; as I fell, as I fell; once again.

. . the foxes refurbishing the entrance to their den—laying decoy trails for the hounds who will come again soon; . . .

. . the buck with its purposeful halt and the mortal challenge of its red gaze; . . .

. . the stoats performing their deeds because, as stoats, they are more than capable of deeds; . . .

. . the coddled husband-cat stepping out for further screwing whilst yesterday’s farm-kittens lie crisping in hessian; . . .

. . the tea-cosy dormouse so adorably a-snuggle beneath the floorboards of the abandoned cottage; . . .

. . the hisp of the bat, too high-pitched for lettering, halfway between the eave and the oak-branch, doubling back on its doublings-back; . . .

. . the increased air-pressure beneath the barn owl’s wings, oppressing the field-mouse, forcing it down the stalk and into the purple-thick of the wheat; . . .

. . the starlings spread out like stars, covered in stars, beneath the invisible stars; . . .

. . sparrows who take their own wings as the best blankets, dipping their heads into the blacked out warm-shadows; sparrows, disbelieving of how slowly their hearts are beating, even though ready for immediate flight; . . .

. . moles who are there but who do not deign to emerge, unless for dangerous gossip; . . .

. . the dead badger, rotting like Sodom and Gomorrah beneath the ivy whence in its last exercise of good judgement it had betaken itself to die; . . .

. . the ivy as emblem of its own tenacity, a shelter for the spider’s young.

Lovely England—long johns and empty breadbins; servants’ quarters and two of gold-top, please; conkers in murky vinegar and sprained ankle at the village fete; green grass and don’t strike too sudden if you want to catch the tench; Also.

Of all the unnatural, nonsensical things a human being can do, jumping from an aeroplane at ten thousand feet is probably the most exhilarating; spin.

This gorgeous night was far too succulently dark to do something as stupid as parachuting, and yet somehow one found oneself parachuting.

A sealed-dove: Jumping out of the plane itself was like finally speaking one’s love to the object of one’s obsession; terror.

With one’s love, though, there is always the possibility one will be lifted to higher heights; with a parachute jump, the only exhilaration is the acceleration of one’s failure.

It is awfully hard not to feel—classic—that to fall is to fail; even if one is doing it pretty well.

The first of my astonishments was the acceleration, then the simple fact that I was moving towards the earth in a way that would kill me if I did nothing about it.

By the time one has realized what one is actually doing, one realizes one no longer has time in which to do anything but survive.

Upside-down-world: My previous runs had been dry, and now the uprushing air felt like the plunging waters of a waterfall.

The new moon was no moon, sickle-hidden from the earth behind chinkless clouds—clouds out of which one had just tumbled.

Although one knew there must be a difference in quality between the blackness of the woods and the blackness of the cornfields, one could not for the life of one make it out. Not from this height.

And my confusion wasn’t helped by the hushing-howling air-rush in my ears, or the shivers which had started to convulse my body.

One feels abysmally safe—the whole sensation-of-fall being so classically dreamlike that one knows death will only mean awaking with a cosy bang back in bed.

The iron sea was all behind one now; one might—if one were unlucky—land in water, in the ornamental lake, but would have a chance to outswim drowning; as long as the canopy didn’t fall directly on top of one.

How could I have lived in this world so long and yet never before have seen it?

Seen from directly above, the pylons look like spider webs—when and if said webs are exposed by moonlight.

The rivers northwards glossed over themselves, still stilling, comparable to nothing but cold molten mirrors.

This world abstractly is too full of worlds beautifully for one person comprehensively to dwell in it desperately.

I was almost too overcome by thoughts of my homeland to remember that I would die if I didn’t remember to open my parachute. The instrument to achieve this was still grasped in my fist. Of course, at the first glimpse of tree-shaped darknesses beneath, I had stopped counting. Any idea of time-keeping was in the realms of the bizarre. Probably I had been in sight of the dark-that-wasn’t-clouds for ten or fifteen or twenty. Time to slow myself down—and when I realised that the way to prolong this imaginary view was to pull the cord, I did so immediately.

The black silk puckers above me, threatening to fold, and then with a colossal whump it goes resplendent into full black-swan mode.

Whump—a surprise even despite having practised the whole routine once a night for an entire week.

The canopy open above my head is, now I have done what I should and checked it, fine—the black of it has been turned almost indigo by the occluded moonlight.

I am not a soldier, and I do not intend to express myself like one. I believe I am a gentleman. Even at moments of pain and peril, and of them there are to be plenty, there is beauty here to be noted and later turned into phrases.

Winston Churchill, obviously—there could be no other target; Glider, not plane.

 

Available from…

Wrestliana – What is Cumberland and Westmoreland Wrestling?

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This is my all-time favourite image of Cumberland and Westmorland wrestling. It’s a great photograph, apart from anything else. And a great sports photograph.

It was taken in 2015 by Jill Robson, who attends most of the summer agricultural fairs (Grasmere, Ambleside, Penrith) where this kind of wrestling traditionally takes place.

Apart from the rain, the photo shows a very finely executed throw called the full buttock, a young man in a hoodie defiantly eating a Magnum, and (on the right) the extremely dedicated referee Tom Harrington, MBE – received for services to the sport. This is not WWE wrestling (John Cena, know him?). It’s not steroid muscles, big characters, ludicrous story lines. It’s not fake. It’s about as real as sport gets.

You’ll see that the young man in the white T-shirt who is about to hit the grass with some force is a. wearing socks and b. still bound on to the young man in the stripy shorts. This is because C&W wrestling isn’t catch as catch can style wrestling, where there’s that tedious bit at the start where the wrestlers try and grab bits of one another’s clothes. C&W starts like this:

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And it has started that way for centuries. That’s a Thomas Bewick woodcut from 1776. (A recent blog on the LRB website by Miranda Vane gives more details.)

When the wrestlers are ready, the referee says, ‘Take hold.’ They then reach around one another’s backs, heads close. When they’re ready, no advantage to either, the ref says, ‘En guard’ and then, a couple of seconds later, ‘Wrestle.’

If any part of your body apart from the soles of your feet touches the ground, you lose. Basically, it’s the first to trip or chuck the other to the floor. Anyone can understand it, and it’s usually fairly obvious who has won. Best of three throws. Usually it’s a knockout competition. Winner goes through to the next round.

When a wrestler hits the ground, you can hear a crunch.

Photographer Jill’s husband, Roger Robson, wrote the book on this particular kind of wrestling (the book is called Cumberland and Westmorland Wrestling). He’s an ex-wrestler and maintains the C&W Association website.

When I was researching Wrestliana, Roger was my main informant. He was the one who, in the end, arranged for me to have a go. More on that another time.

Wrestliana ; Or, an Historical Account of Ancient and Modern Wrestling

 

 

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This is the original Wrestliana – my great-great-great grandfather’s history of wrestling (as the oldest and greatest sport in the world)

Two shillings and sixpence is what it would have cost you in 1823.

In 2018, a first edition will cost you around £800. If you can find one.

It’s still available print-on-demand – that’ll cost around £10.

Or you can read it on archive.org for free.

 

 

Wrestliana – Things to do with wrestling with things to do with things to do with wrestling

[This is a different version of the first chapter of the book – currently up on the Galley Beggar website.]

The story of my great-great-great grandfather’s life is the best true story I know. It has everything – a strong, handsome, charismatic, tragic lead man (William Litt). It involves crime, disloyalty, poetry, love. It’s a mystery story. It even has some epic fight scenes. I’d known for a couple of decades that I’d have to write it, but – until now – I’d always resisted.

Why, if it was such a gift? Well, to explain that has taken the whole book. But let’s start with this photograph of my father, David Litt, standing in Cleator Moor, Cumbria, in Litt Place – named after my great-great-great grandfather.

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I took the photo in 2009, when we went together to Cumbria to seek the traces of our ancestor. But I went reluctantly. It wasn’t the right time. Yet.

When I was a boy, my Dad passed on the story of who William Litt was and what he achieved – as a Champion Wrestler and a renowned writer. He also told me about William’s later failures, his smuggling adventures, his loss of £3000, and how he had to run away to Canada ‘to escape the local Lord’. How he died in 1850, without ever returning to Cumbria.

When I grew up and became a writer, my Dad told me, ‘It’s a great story – you should write it.’

But I didn’t – God, no! – because, for me, writing has always been about getting away from my father, heading fast and far in the opposite direction. Writing was an act of disobedience, truancy. It was about telling the stories I wanted to tell, which were about the world I lived in and the time I knew. My father was an antique dealer. The past belonged to him.

So, I began with Adventures in Capitalism. I wrote about people who live in a very shallow, technological present moment. I wrote about quick lives going violent and perverse and weird and sometimes haunted. Because that’s how I saw things. That’s how things are, isn’t it?

It’s a common enough trajectory. You want to be different, to be original. You start out thinking that you come from nowhere and owe nothing to anyone. And that this is all good and necessary. Idiosyncrasy, self-reliance – yes.

Then, as years pass, you realize just how dependent on others you’ve always been, and how similar to them you now are.

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And rather than hating this (although sometimes it’s still oppressive and daunting), you come to welcome it. You’re not alone.

Finally, you arrive at a point when you realize, you have to go back and take a good hard look at what really made you who you are. You have to acknowledge your debts. You have to measure yourself against your forbears.

For me, about two and a half years ago, this time had come. It had come from looking up and looking down – looking up at my father, who is becoming frail and forgetful and has never asked me to write anything, except the story of William; looking down at my sons, who are desperately looking up at me for clues about how to grow up, how to be a man.

There are things I’d wanted to write about, ever since I began writing, but had never found a way to approach: growing up in the Cold War and taking its geopolitical violence very seriously, internalizing it; being badly bullied at boarding school, and deciding the best I could do was never pass any violence on; going from being sporty (Public Schools Relays and First Fifteen) to being anti- sport; spending most of my life – like so many of us do – sitting looking at words on a computer screen.

At the end of 2014, I sat down and read William Litt’s book Wrestliana for the first time – and I suddenly saw a way in: through William.

Here was a man who was both a wrestler and a writer – who was both immensely physical and intensely intellectual.

Even during his lifetime, a friend referred to him as ‘a kind of anomaly in nature’ – an unprecedented combination of athletic superiority and literary talent, ‘for, while he shines in the arena, and was, at no distant date, the undisputed champion of Cumberland for a series of years, in all those exercises which require superior strength, courage, skill, and dexterity, his mind is so exquisitely delicate, that many of his effusions in poetry will continue to be read so long as genuine taste and feeling are cultivated… ’

It seems this – balanced – is something we’re not able to be. Perhaps because the two tribes, Jocks and Nerds, are so culturally separate; or perhaps because we have to specialize so intensely in order to become good at any skill. If you’re an athlete, you train so many hours of the day that you never have time to read a book; if you’re a writer, you spend so many years at the desk that your muscles go slack and your spine gets crocked. If you’re well-balanced, you’re a well-balanced failure.

But because William, somehow, was able – if only for a few years – to exist successfully in both world, he seems to me a fascinating, mysterious figure.

Luckily, William left plenty of clues behind. He was famous, his name familiar in every household in the north, his doings retailed in the local press. And, aside from Wrestliana, he left behind many poems as well as his novel Henry and Mary, a supernatural adventure story set among smugglers. He confessed in novel’s introduction that ‘there is in reality more truth than fiction’ in it.

I wanted to write another book called Wrestliana – to take William on, on his home ground. Because all of this man-stuff was something I needed to wrestle with.

Could I, by investigating his life, find out what William’s secret was? Can I understand more about both him and myself?

Could I put us into the arena with one another, to see who won – as a wrestler, as a writer, as a man?

And, by wrestling with the past, could I say something worthwhile about our unbalanced present?

 

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Wrestliana will be published by Galley Beggar in May 2018.