Steve Evans's Blog: The written world - Posts Tagged "celine"

This is the fifth instalment of my blog which I am struggling personfully to keep up fairly regularly. It's mainly about writing, or has been so far. After writing the previous one about violence, things have kept popping into my brain about other writers with something like experience and I feel a bit shamefaced that I didn't include Dashiell Hammett, one of my great literary models, in the "experienced" writer category. Hammett didn't murder anyone, so far as I know anyway. But he was a detective (for Pinkerton) and may very well have killed some one, though I've never read that he did. Certainly his long-time partner Lillian Hellman said he often put people he had met as a detective into his stories as characters, along with the language of the underworld of his time. "Gunsel", she said, was slang for a gay, and Hammett was very proud of having smuggled the word past the editorial censors of his publishers.
Hellman's testimony is always suspect but perhaps can believed on this score.

What is useful for the "experience" motif I'm trying to explore here however is the contrast between Hammett and his "follower" Raymond Chandler. Chandler was educated in England but spent most of his adult life in California and came to writing late, after a career in the oil industry. Unemployed in the 1930s he came on a copy of Black Mask, the magazine devoted to the so-called "hard boiled" school of detective fiction where Hammett was something of a king, and began his career. Chandler's Philip Marlowe became the model for many other detectives in later years (most notably Ross Macdonald's [Kenneth Millar's] Lew Archer). More significantly for what I want to get at here, Chandler's style of "hard-boiled" and "wise-cracking" became the model for the early work of English espionage fiction writer Len Deighton, whose first novels (The Ipcress File, Funeral in Berlin) owe a very great deal to Chandler and Hammett.

Chandler paid homage to Hammett in a famous essay, "The Simple of Art of Murder", an attack on the puzzle school of mystery writing exemplified by Agatha Christie, using an A A Milne novel The Red House Mystery, as his foil. Chandler was unaware that this best-seller was a satire, but then neither was the vast mass of readers who bought and devoured it. His larger point was the Hammett was aware of police methods and the reality of murder (he wrote that Hammett gave murder back to people who committed it "for reasons, not just to provide a corpse").

Yet despite Chandler's homage, he was considered by many critics to be a better writer than Hammett. I don't think that is fair. Any open-minded reader who reads both writers carefully - and there are not so many novels by the two combined, nor are they so long - will come to see Hammett's spare style refreshing alongside the cloying romanticism of his "pupil" (the two were not friends and met just once, at a Black Mask dinner).

And ultimately, I think the inferiority of Chandler derives, as I think he knew, from Hammett's genuine experience of crime and its aftermath. Chandler could write, without doubt, and Philip Marlowe was vastly more influential that any of Hammett's characters apart from "Nick and Nora Charles" of the last novel, The Thin Man, who became parodies of themselves on film and in television.

For this writer, however, Hammett remains the master. There is a terseness and a feeling of reality underlying Hammett's prose that I wish I could emulate successfully. There are other models for my work (Celine and Shakespeare for example), and I would not wish to put Hammett as a man on any more of a pedestal than he deserves - the destruction of his reputation since Hellman tried to make him a Lion King has been all too thorough. The contrast between his writing and Chandler's, though, is nonetheless a useful example how how real life knowledge can trump imagined reality.

Perhaps this is best seen through the prism of film. Not just The Thin Man and its spinoffs, but The Maltese Falcon were classic films of their time - the latter still able to pull in the crowds - while none of Chandler's novels was ever really successful as a film, though there have been several attempts. I reckon the reason for this is the mushiness at the heart of Chandler's work, while the toughness of mind that Hammett brought to his writing gives his work an edge.

To return to my original theme, most writers have no hope of having the experience that enabled a writer like Hammett to write "what he knew", and must use their "imaginative understanding" to visualise and create the scenes that will give their work verisimilitude. But given a real-life expert like Hammett on a plate - you can just go out and buy his books and eat them up - who can resist taking up a knife and fork?

Ah, a novel in its own right! If you are here reading this, put eight stars into your kit bag; you deserve them!

Ah, blog number six! It's mostly about writing, just like the other ones, and this time is about my favourite writer: the Bard himself, William Shakespeare.

It grieves me to admit it, but Shakespeare is not for everyone, even if, as Jonson said in his piece in the first folio, he is for all time. There are people I have tried really hard to interest in Shakespeare - talked to them, taken them to plays, given them authoritative and easy-read editions, done everything I can think of except pass them a Classics Illustrated, and they just don't care. Maybe it's me.

To me, Shakespeare is the greatest writer ever, in any language and in any genre - fiction, drama, poetry, non-fiction...that is, even in the types of literature he never tried, he outshone those who did and do. "Greatness" is a funny word, and by it I mean (in writing) that the work will be just as Jonson said, for all time; so far, that has been true of Shakespeare. Successive generations have discovered and rediscovered him, and I don't see any reasons why future ones shouldn't.

Being lucky and writing in English, a language of incredible adaptability that has now become the er lingua franca of the world, can't have hurt the Bard. And it is also true that at the time he was writing, the language was changing fast, incorporating an explosion of new words that were appearing to describe new things and places that the rising British Empire was meeting and greeting. But there was more to Shakespeare than being in the right place at the right time; others were also. Some of them were very gifted, and we remember them: Marlowe, Donne, Chapman, Beaumont and Fletcher, Webster, Tourneur, and others. But even in his own time, Shakespeare stood out. Jonson was not alone in seeing this factor in his talent. He was better than the others simply because he was better. Ha! A genius.

When I read Shakespeare, I am aware that I am in the presence of this genius, even when it lets its bearer down. Two Gentlemen of Verona, for example, is a nasty, misogynist play, whose anti-woman attitudes generations have tried to explain away. The Merchant of Venice, despite its deeply moving portrayal of Shylock, is nonetheless, as the Arden edition I own makes plain, anti-Semitic. That it is not so anti-Semitic as Marlowe's Jew of Malta is beside the point.

The point is that Shakespeare's genius rose even above his own limitations, so that Shylock remains a great creation despite the Jew-baiting. Not all the plays are perfect in other ways - structurally, thematically, historically...it doesn't matter: the deep penetration into the reality of the human condition remains, and re-reading and re-seeing the work can bring new insights, fresh understanding.

What with all that you'd think I'd have pumped the Shakespeare references through my own work, no opportunity lost. Sadly, this has not proven to be the case. One of my novels, Savonarola's Bones, has a big Shakespeare component, but I don't regard it as anything like my best book, though the Shakespeare aspect seems fine to me. Another that involves a man searching for a lost Shakespeare play is to me unpublishable. The one I'm working on now has a major bit "pencilled in", but I haven't got to it yet and may change my mind.

Well, it does puzzle me. Giordano Bruno, Savonarola, Celine, Berdyaev, Dostoevsky - they all get there, no problem. And the writers among them stand tall for emulation. But not William S. Sometimes I think that the reason Shakespeare is harder to make work into one of my books is that he is too big to handle, and there might be something in that. Then I think that it's because he was primarily a playwright, if a poetic one, and I write novels. There might be something in that too, but...

My plan now is to make good with the Bard this time. The book I'm writing now owes a lot to Dostoevsky, but not in the sense of discussing him as it was with The Russian Idea, which features a very large helping of the great man.

There is a let-off too, that I do incorporate Shakespeare into my books in my thinking and what interests me and how I express myself and so on. A pale version, without doubt, but a version even so. But I'm not going to flatter myself like that. It's probably not even true.

Whatever, Shakespeare is worth another visit another time. Hope you have enjoyed this one.

This one is another five star effort, but if you don't like Shakespeare and have reached this point, have another two or three. They're free to a good home.

This is number seven of my blog, which is mainly about writing. This one as it says is about influences, and it came into my head while I was writing the previous one about Shakespeare, who means so much to me. After having written a big screed, I've decided to make it a multi-parter.

Before I began in 1999 writing novels that actually finished, I had read a huge number of thrillers and detective stories, beginning decades before. I started with the puzzle type stories of Agatha Christie, Margery Allingham and similar British or British-style writers, and moved to the more realistic "hard-boiled" Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler and their school later, and finally to spy-fi, which to some degree sprang out of the Hammett-Chandler approach to writing, to mystery, and suspense.

Along the way I read a lot of straight-out thrillers. These did not have "mystery" associated with them, or did not need to: their model was and is to create tension and sustain it, and my taste in these was almost uniformly British. Writers like Eric Ambler and Graham Greene were my heroes of this genre. Greene remains to me outside the pale of the "typical" thriller writer: his interests and abilities far outshone others.

There were others, and I'll go into them perhaps another time. Anyway my familiarity with these genres and sub-genres was the underlying reason why I chose to write thrillers once I decided to try to succeed as a novelist. I had read so many of them the requirements of the form(s) were almost second nature to me; I could feel as much as think what would work as writing, as plot, as characterisation and so on as much as think these things through, and this gave me, or so I thought and think, an immense advantage in terms of creating believable stories that "follow the rules".

Even so, my aims as a writer were never to exist wholly and solely within the thriller genre; I wanted to succeed in the ways that Dashiell Hammett succeeded, that Graham Greene succeeded, and Shakespeare too: to create work that was ultimately "literature" or as I like to put it yet, with "a serious purpose in a frivolous genre".

This was out of a deep-seated prejudice against what is described usually as serious literature, and by Marxists as "the bourgeois novel". I reckon that sometime in the 19th century popular taste and the taste of the "literati" began to diverge, and that in the 20th this divergence became a gulf, that vast numbers of readers ceased to be interested in "serious" fiction because they were bored and/or "left behind" by the writers. If James Joyce could be fairly numbered as number one of these alienators of readers, there are plenty more, with less talent, and they tend to people the book reviews while the greatest number of readers follow other writers. You won't find Stephen King for example winning a Pulitzer, though in my opinion he should or even a Nobel Prize. Writers like Hammett, and Greene and Chandler, set the tone for me: they had serious purposes while the genre they chose was less "elevated".

Shakespeare didn't need to confront this problem, or perhaps more fairly, his genius allowed him to appeal to everyone - to the nobles and the "groundlings". The point I am making is that he needed to appeal to the groundlings, and if he also needed to appeal to more aristocratic sensibilities, it was kind of on top of the basics.

That has been my aim as a writer. So my "first port of call" in terms of influences in this blog is those who master the genre, the "sub-literary" genre of the thriller. But it would be pointless if that was all there was to it, and my other influences, like Shakespeare, Euripides, Celine, Mark Twain, and others, are ultimately the source of my inspiration.

Do readers care about this? Do writers have the same feelings as I do? If you've got this far, feel free to comment.

More anon...

Seven stars, with an extra three for the dedicated.

Sometime in the 1970s I fell under the influence of a French novelist practically no one had heard of at the time, though he'd been dead since 1961: Celine. He was a revelation to me, and my second novel, Evilheart, was as close as I could get to doing homage to him. Later, in Savonarala's Bones, I returned to him, but not in the detail, or attention to moral nuance.

To my mind Celine was one the great writers of the 20th century - both funny and wise in his way. He is ignored because after his second novel in the 1930s, Mort a Credit, variously translated as Death on Credit and Death on the Instalment Plan, he revealed himself as an anti-Semite in a series of really disturbing works. Not surprisingly after 1945 he was in bad odour among those who used to champion him, to the point where many French literary critics refused to review his later books, though they bore no traces of his crackpot ideas (they did bear all too many traces of his views of the treatment he'd received for holding them). Jean-Paul Sartre, who had dedicated one of his 1930s works to Celine, wrote a scathing essay after the war, "The mind of the anti-Semite", that was directed at Celine while not naming him. Celine gave as good or better than he got, and in his later novels mercilessly pilloried the once-lionised existentialist philosopher and writer - he became "Tartre" and a magazine he wrote for Your Ferrule.

Celine's anti-Semitism troubled me a lot, and it still does. I was far from the only person to find in Celine's "ordinary" fiction a genuinely extraordinary sensibility who seemed to have divined what life is all about, and given it both barrels - a savage view that was ameliorated by humour, somehow salvaged by it.

And I was far from alone, too, in being confused by the writer's revelation that he was, to put it mildly, down on Jews. (A contemporary in the 1930s, when the first of his anti-Semitic ravings was published, thought it was a satire). It seemed contradictory, and Celine himself later admitted as much in a somewhat left -handed way - "I got mixed up in stuff that was none of my business". But he never resiled, never said "I got it wrong". Far from it, he went out of this life as persuaded as ever that Jews were the enemy...

...but the enemy of what? Celine's larger message was one of the futility of life for the individual; his most famous bon mot was "the truth of this life is death". Why care if the Jews are in control of everything if even the Jews who are in control of everything are under the control of the grim reaper? Celine's terrific strength was to juxtapose and even portray as humorous the sad reality of physical life and death. In one of his most famous scenes, a trip over the English channel turns into a vomit parade, in which the deck is awash with the stuff and our hero, the hapless Ferdinand, retches and retches till he has just one something left...out it pops: a strawberry.

Celine delivered this strange amalgam of horror and humour with a vigorous style he refined to deliver through the ellipse (...), a punctuation that few writers since have felt compelled to emulate, at least to the same degree. He scoffed at this invention of his - "my three little dots! All the real writers will tell you what to think of it...". Except that when quizzed as to who the real writers were, he always mentioned three Frenchmen who are even more forgotten than he, presumably for literary rather than political reasons. Since he also said (in his last book), "In two hundred years I'll be helping the kids through high school", it seems that he had a better idea of his ultimate literary reputation than he sometimes let on.

Celine regarded his writing as a form of impressionism, and he sometimes compared his work to the French impressionists, but the virtue of the ellipse in his hands was to a kind of cubist writing, with the perspective of the narrator jumping from phrase to phrase, seemingly "stream of consciousness" but very artfully contrived.

Kurt Vonnegut in a much-quoted and republished essay said that "every writer" is in Celine's debt. I'm not sure this is so. But certainly many writers are, and those whose work bears the hallmark of his sensibility include Gunter Grass, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Tom Wolfe, whose non-fiction attack on art criticism The painted word, is written using the ellipse, but whose first novel, Bonfire of the vanities was clearly written in a Celinian style.

I wrote my first three or four novels using the ellipse; I liked it for its ability to shift perspective so rapidly, and, as Vonnegut said, give the writing an instant immediacy. While most of my readers didn't complain, enough of them did that I later went back and reworked those books to remove most though not all of them.

The ellipse was really the least significant of the many ways Celine affected me. He freed me to write more energetically and adventurously, not to fear criticism - his took the savagings he got on the chin, but got his own back in his writing - and to aspire to write the black humour that seemingly so effortlessly flowed off the nib of his pen.

I have been to many of the places Celine put in his books, most notably the sleepy town in Germany, Sigmaringen, where he set his fictionalised account of the last days of the Vichy government, Castle to Castle. I have stood outside his last home in Meudon, outside Paris, and at his grave in the nearby cemetery. The shopping arcade where he spent some of his youth is still there too, and one can see the narrow staircases in the small shops of the type his mother lamely mounted and descended many times a day. And I have puzzled over this man who as a doctor spent much of his non-literary life treating the poor, who worked for the League of Nations as part of what is now the World Health Organisation, aiming to eradicate diseases affecting the poor the world over, who maintained he was a devout pacifist after being decorated for bravery in the First World War, yet volunteered on the outbreak of the second, and before this, had "warned" his countrymen not to fight because the Jews were the cause of it all.

I don't have a way to explain Celine. I wish I did. Henry Miller, a writer who took much of his style from Celine, said that Celine lived within him and always would. He was that powerful a personality, shining through his work.

Certainly the last twenty years have seen his reputation, if not restored, certainly altered for the better. Many of his later works have been translated into English, there have been numerous biographies and literary studies, and if they all try to grapple with his hatred of Jews, none succeeds in explaining it to my satisfaction anyway. And recently the first of his anti-Semitic broadsides, Bagatelles for a massacre, was translated into English and made available in e-reader format, with "trifles" instead of "bagatelles" beginning the title. Non-francophone readers can now read it for themselves, and make up their own minds.

For me nothing can undo Celine's terrible attacks on Jews, not least because he was such a gifted writer he was more effective than most turgid anti-Semitic lunatics.

People try to explain away other anti-Semites - Wagner, for example. Yet when I listen to Wagner, I feel I hear in his music the limitation, the thwarting of potential, that is implied by something so self-evidently foolish as anti-Semitism. Perhaps Wagner was a great composer, but he was not as great as he may have been had he overcome his demons.

I guess that is how I feel about Celine - a powerful writer, able to transform our understanding of the world, but how much more powerful might he have been had he seen his hatred of Jews for what it was, and laugh at it as he laughed at his father's anti-Semitism in his second novel.

At least an eight star effort. Give yourself more if you like, and paste them into your notebook.

Yesterday I read a "blog" on the British Telegraph website about a human named Lehrer, who is not the satirical songwriter/singer/pianist Tom Lehrer but another one, Jonah, aged 31. It seems this fellow, who was working for the once-revered New Yorker weekly magazine, had resigned after digging himself a hole the size of the Grand Canyon, just before leaping in.

His spadework related to having made claims about quotations from Bob Dylan in a book called Imagine. Lehrer is apparently one of these instant science gurus who tells us astonishing things about the world by linking apparently unrelated "facts".

In this case Lehrer made up the facts about Dylan. The quotes he quotes were made up, and when he was quizzed about them, he lied. Pressed, he lied some more. Eventually he had to admit he lied. His career prospects, which must have seemed quite remarkable up to that moment, now look dim. If you, dear reader, happen to encounter him mopping the floor somewhere later in life, flip him a tip in recognition of the effort he must have spent climbing out of that hole.

In recent times - the past twenty years or so - manufactured stuff has appeared in newspapers and magazines with big type over it, only to trash the reputations of the people who created it. There was a case in the Washington Post, another in the New York Times, and finally in the Guardian in Britain. These are all well-known and at least at one time highly-regarded titles, of a liberal bent. It makes one wonder - well, it makes me wonder - what it is in the cultures of these institutions that let these mountebanks in, and once in, to blaze, if briefly, in the firmament.

This is not plagiarism; the writers in all these cases did not copy others' work - as I have done in the heading of this post, which is a steal from the Monty Python television series so famous no one would ever think I was claiming it as my own. No, they made things up. In Lehrer's case, he made things up to support a case he could not otherwise have made - "facts" that did not exist to support "facts" that may or may not be true.

We don't like this. Well, I don't like it. Yet there is another way of making things up that I do like, that has fascinated me for the whole of my adult life, and that I have even done a little bit myself.

Two of the writers I've written about in this blog as influencing my work (and me) are Celine, and B Traven. These very different people lived their literary lives behind a mask, or masks. Traven manufactured a series of them and even now, a lifetime after his death, there are different accounts of who he really was. The obsessive secrecy may originally have had a political motive, but later on...so his "nom de plume", something many writers adopt, went much further. I admire the man for it.

Celine was more elaborate, and in a way more interesting. He was a doctor, and his real name was Louis-Ferdinand Destouches, Celine being his mother's first name. The one word was his original nom-de-plume. When he was outed, shortly after the publication of his first book, he dropped the pretense, and many of his later works were published as by "Louis-Ferdinand Celine". "His" character in his books, which are a bizarre kind of fictionalised autobiography, is usually called Ferdinand.

Celine manufactured a whole lot of stuff about himself that Traven never needed to do. He made up facts about his life, made up opinions he held even, to keep the public at bay. When he discussed writing, he held forth with ideas he almost certainly never took seriously. And when the guard dropped, and a peek at the "real" writer and thinker was somehow revealed, it was unclear whether it was, in truth, the dinkum oil*, or another pose.

Celine's attitude in this was that the work is what matters, and the public's craving for insights into the personality of the creator should not be satisfied. It should not matter if he was handsome, tall, short, ugly, if he believed in witchcraft, or whatever. Each work should stand on its own.

There is of course something in this that is true, but Celine so mixed up his own life and opinions with his work, that it often seems like special pleading. The anti-Semitic ravings of his pamphlets are known, from other sources, to reflect his real views, and his mockery of them within his works becomes a kind of defence against the attacks he must have known were bound to come, a peculiar false modesty: "Don't pay any attention! Only, do..."

Well, as I said earlier, there is something romantic, something attractive to me about these secretive personalities, and I've had a slash at this on my own. In 1984, I wrote a non-fiction pamphlet and self-published it in the country where I live, New Zealand. New Zealand law requires three copies of everything published to be sent to a central clearing house as part of building a national "collection", complete with "bibliographical details" about the author.

As it happened, I did not want too many people to know who wrote this pamphlet. Armed with Traven's example, I made up a character, gave him another birthdate, and sent the required three copies up to the National Library. They swallowed it, and the book was duly listed under the nom-de-plume.

Imagine my surprise when, several years later, I picked up a book on the same topic in a bookshop and, flicking through it, suddenly hit on the nom-de-plume. There was an index and my goodness, this fellow I had created had morphed into a great number of entries, a sort of weird guru whose knowledge was used as a stick to beat the targets of this new author.

Later on I used the name to keep up the reputation of my creation in shorter pieces for various radical publications, but in 1992, I put him to bed finally and forever (well, I think so anyway). He had an interesting life, and in future may become a tiny footnote in a tiny corner of the intellectual history of my adopted country.

How far does my wee creation, or B Traven's various disguises, differ from this Lehrer fellow's? They are not in the same league, I reckon. The ideas I put forward were real ideas; they didn't rely on the identity of a made-up author to be true or not: they stood or fell on their own. Traven's books are good novels, or not, whatever his real name and whoever he really was. Lehrer's "facts" are not facts, just as his "quotes" are not quotes.

Celine's case is a bit different. He made up a "real" persona no one was meant to take seriously - or that's how I see it - at the same time he made up a fictional one "not meant to be taken seriously" but actually at least partly meant to be taken seriously.

But he was, after all, writing fiction. We may know that his characters, his "Ferdinand" and others, espouse his views, whatever gloss he puts on them, but we also know that his books are fiction - novels. I think Celine felt that the harassment he got because of the anti-Semitic views he expressed in his novels was unfair precisely because they were novels and hence "not true", a view as naive as his beliefs about Jews.

For Lehrer, then - no comfort. He too is "completely different". Nice mop technique, Jonah.

Make as many stars as you like out of moonbeams, and stick them in your imagination. Dear reader, you are fabulous!

*dinkum oil - the real thing. Traditional Australian slang sometimes heard in NZ.

This blog is about writing, and for the most part it's been about the writers and thinkers who have influenced me as I've gone along. There are more of these than I've written about so far, but rehashing the past, while interesting to me and I would hope to those who drop in to read these slim offerings, is not going forward really.

And my thinking has been zapping along in different directions lately prompted by all these posts about the past.

My new book, which is just shy of 50,000 words, has the working title of Kaos. Its theme came to me while I was working on my previous book, The Russian Idea, which dealt a lot with Russian religious philosophy, in particular the thinking and beliefs of Dostoevsky and Nikolai Berdyaev. Berdyaev wrote a book with the same title as my novel.

Over about a year before and while writing The Russian Idea I read a lot of Dostoevsky and Berdyaev that I had not read for a long time, or had never read: Berdyaev was a very prolific writer and I read or reread at least ten of his books, and many of his articles, while reintroducing myself to Dostoevsky through several of his masterpieces and newly through his journalism, and some biographical accounts. Sinking into a writer or thinker in this way can give the feeling for the mind of the person in a way that reading a single book, or reading a book now and again, can not do. My immersion therapies in writers and thinkers tell me that you can come to feel you really do understand what was going on in the mind of the person...and when you don't, when you are troubled, prompts you to keep going. There is a nagging feeling that something eludes me about Shakespeare, and that adds to the mystery of the man, and encourages me to keep reading him, and about him, and his time, and the intellectual movements associated with him, or even alleged to be associated with him. Ditto "secretive" writers like B Traven and Celine.

There is a lot to this: questions of language, its "grammar" and history, of translation, of attitude, of cultural nuance and perceptions, and the more you go into it, the deeper you go, the more amazing it turns out to be. Take one example of this: "a" v "he":

In the Arden edition of Hamlet edited by Harold Jenkins, there are numerous examples of "a" when "he" or "it" is meant. In a note, Jenkins says the "a" is a colloquial rendering of "ha" for "he" that was common in Elizabethan drama. To get this, both the "a" and the "ha", to bring it into oneself, to live with it, so that one reads or hears it spoken in performance as natural and "correct" (because it is), is to bring the Elizabethan age, in this intimate if tiny aspect, into one's heart through imaginative understanding. As I have written in an earlier post, it means not only that Shakespeare reaches out across the centuries to communicate with us, but that through this kind of understanding, we are able to "talk back", to respond creatively. It's teriffic! It's thrilling! We are taken out of our time, delving deeply in another, only to find, when we surface, that we are in our own place but with an enriched understanding that spans the centuries while telling us something about "now" and about ourselves. That's what being "universal" - "for all time" as Jonson had it about Shakespeare - means, sez me.

This is a long way around to get into the aura of Dostoevsky and Berdyaev that I was living in while writing The Russian Idea but may help explain how while writing that book, I was prompted to want to write another one by my feeling for the moral universe of this pair, in particular Dostoevsky, and to want to write a book something like he might want to write today (so say I) - not in terms of his genius, which of course I do not share, but in terms of his concerns, which I do, even if I find some of his urges unpalatable.

This is not the first time one of my books has been prompted by a previous one. The Kleiber Monster led me to write another book, Tobi's Gift (unpublished) because I felt I had not dealt with something frontally enough. And that led me into new places that prompted Savonarola's Bones.

Demented, however, the book that followed Savonarola's Bones, was not prompted by its predecessor, but sprang out of another set of concerns and experiences. What this says to me is that each successive novel is not, or not necessarily, the "sum" of an author's life to that point - in style, in theme or focus or what have you, it may not only not be an advance, but may even be worse than earlier work, and often a "sideways shift" into something new and different, but not necessarily better. Second novels are said to be the most difficult books for fiction writers, as the first one may all but leap from the mind to the page, and many second efforts are disappointing to the public as well as to the writer. Evilheart, my second novel (the first is unpublished), was very hard to write, and despite many revisions over a decade, is far from perfect. Though I think in some aspects it is an excellent book, in others it remains very disappointing to me.

But even later works can be poor. Raymond Chandler's last book for example must have been an embarrassment to him, and is certainly so to his memory. Any writer would - or at least should - find that worrying. Certainly Kaos is worrying me in that sense: much of the first draft seems quite shockingly written, and I know that later drafts are going to be pretty hard work if the thing is going to be worth reading, and hence worth bringing into public view.

So I am not sure about this one. The premise is good, and as with my other books, has something to say about the world around us and how we might navigate our way through the sometimes tortuous moral maze that can be any individual's life: the choices that confront us, the temptations we are asked to avoid, or invited to sink ourselves into, never to emerge...as I write, I am not sure if the anti-hero becomes a hero, or if he is a hero who becomes an anti-hero: this delicate balance is something that ultimately is going to define the book, and understanding how to express both of these elements of the human personality warring within an individual, so that one emerges at the end to vanquish the other, is the greatest challenge in writing I have ever faced: words that, as it were, "face both ways". Is that Dostoevsky peering over my shoulder, shaking his head in vigorous disapproval, wagging his finger at my poor offerings? Perhaps. I am trying my best, Fyodor! What's that you say?

If you are reading this, you can award as many stars to yourself as you wish, provided that none of them is purple.

This blog is notionally at least about writing and most of the posts have been about the writers and thinkers who have influenced me as I've gone about writing my novels, and how this has worked in practice. Fiction writers all however, even the most shallow or cynical, are really on about life and how it is lived. Lately I've been thinking and writing about other aspects of influence in this way - what comes to us by direct, lived experience, and how writers might or might not transform this in their books, what makes writing worth writing, and reading worth reading.

That brings up the ultimate of the ultimates - the death that comes to us all. As I write thrillers, death or the threat of death is a key element of all of my books. And it is unknowable, unless you count experiences of people who have died and been brought back to life, or have had "near death" experiences.

There is something these seem to have in common, in particular the "clear white light" seen/felt in the middle of the brain/mind featured in the so-called Tibetan Book of the Dead - a peaceful, very calm and reassuring light. This experience can be explained in a range of ways from the most basic materialism to highly religious, and it can be communicated so as to make sense in all these.

And after death? Writers do write about "after death", sometimes quite strangely. Mexican novelist Juan Rulfo's Pedro Paramo is about a man who dies midway through the book yet who continues to interact with the living. B Traven's long short story "The Night Visitor", also set in Mexico, is about a man who comes to the narrator night after night to complain that the narrator's dog is eating his leg. There is a grave nearby that has partly fallen in and the dog has been feasting on the remains inside; when the narrator closes it off, the night visitor stops coming...

These fantastic notions contrast with a more dour attitude like Celine's. The French novelist has a scene in one of his novels showing the family of a dead man visting his grave and having a picnic; Celine describes what is happening to the corpse below as the bugs and worms do their work.

All these, fantastic and realistic, do not square up with the usual western attitude to death. Norman Mailer, in a long meditation near the beginning of his book about the moon shot, Fire on the Moon, argued that the expedition was an attempt by the scientific, rationalist west to abolish death. The idea came to him, he claimed, as he could not see well and used his nose to work out what was going on, yet in the Nasa headquarters there was no smell...no smell equals distaste for our physical nature, equals abhorrence of death equals attempt to abolish this unpleasantness. Perhaps I am being unfair to Mailer as this was one of the best things I ever read by him, a marvelous account and probing analysis of both American and western values. And not just "no smell", Norman, but "some smell"...deodorants change the way we are perceived, and how we think about other people.

When living in Hawaii - obviously many years ago - I saw Elizabeth Taylor in a supermarket in the Kaimuki district; it was during one of her liaisons with Richard Burton. She was genuinely beautiful, pushing her trolley along. She hadn't become a parody of herself yet - indeed she had shown she could really act in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? where she starred opposite Burton, and won an Academy Award. I think Burton pushed her to excel; he had a commitment to his profession that inspired her, as perhaps Marilyn Monroe got from Arthur Miller, and when I saw her calmly making her choices of fresh foods from a cooler, I admired her for that, much more than for her assured yet understated poise at the controls of her shopping machine. (In case you are wondering, no one approached her, something that is unlikely to happen today anywhere in America).

What struck me most about Liz, though, was something I had read in an interview before this "near celeb experience" about her relationship with Burton that coloured how I saw her in the flesh, and appreciated her as an actress: that till she'd met Burton, she hadn't realised that people could be so dedicated. He would not bathe for days while preparing for a part, and actually pong! She had never met anyone like that before.

Weeelllllllll...I understood that completely. To be confronted with real life after a lifetime cossetted in Hollywood pseudo-reality, dressed up with deodorants and perfume and hair grease...Eddie Fisher, her husband when she met Burton, could hardly compete.

And in my own life, the fiction of Hollywood was only an exaggerated version of the America of the time: real people disguised themselves with hair grease, and deodorants, and incredibly silly haircuts and clothing. The Beats, and then the so-called hippies, took this America by the short and curlies and gave it a good shake, and whatever shortcomings these two movements (the latter the child of the former) may have had, westerners are all, Americans or not, much better off for their contribution. We've got our bodies back, with their sweat and smells and wrinkles - creases! - and if there is still a great deal in life that is unhealthy and a masquerade, today's world offers more personal freedom and more opportunity to be "real" by a great measure than that era so wholly make-believe only those who lived through it would believe it.

So: real life meets real death; the two are "obverses" of one another. Celine's most famous dictum was "the truth of this life is death", so perhaps it's hardly a surprise. But we want it to be a surprise, I think. We want to avoid it, as Mailer claimed.

In my writing, I want death to be real, not deodorised, but I'd like readers to find in my accounts of dying, or murder and suicide and natural passage, something more than shock and awe, something more than "verisimilitude": I want to provoke reflection, about life and death, about what this means in readers' own lives.

Naturally I have my own opinions about what everyone should think about these things; the Kantian imperative operates in all of us to some degree. But for me it is less important that people agree with me about how to live, or what death means, than at least that they are prompted by what I write to think about their attitudes, and perhaps change them.

My own ideas are still worth something, I think: that whatever the truth about "life after death" in the sense we usually take it, there is a life after death for each of us, in other people, and that is intimately connected with how we live. Do you, dear reader, care about how people will think of you after you are gone? If you do, you will treat others decently, that your memory, as it lingers, will be a kindly one. If you don't, it's immaterial. Doctrines of "enlightened self-interest" would suggest that you should be a nice person anyway, but it may be that this selfishness as a desire for a happy life beyond the grave is as good a basis for a "moral" life as any.

And it is clear - say I - that we do linger on, that it is not just our genes if we have children that carry us forward but our personalities. Those who love us, or who very emphatically don't, have us there, in themselves, and however they are changed by their perceptions of us, mixed up no doubt with their perceptions of other people and of the world, we are there, in them. We persist, whether we like it or not.

In me there are many people, and they jostle for position, one leaping into prominence because of something they, or someone else does, or I do, only to be shoved roughly aside by another, more relevant, more instructive, possibly enraging, perhaps more loving.

In my writing this is usually put as memory, and reflection. Alex in Evilheart is profoundly affected by his woman Lisa, or at least believes himself to be - but his nemesis pushes himself inside of him at least as strongly, and stays there. The Kleiber Monster features a villain who carries on inside two of the characters for half a century, only to be vanquished at last by his own son - and not replaced - while those loved and gone remain. Savonarola's Bones has several characters who work themselves into the fabric of the living after they have passed away. Demented has one character in particular whose entire life from boyhood is dominated by his dead father, and another who is confronted with a traumatic realisation as the father who'd lived within him was revealed to be...shall we say, somewhat unlike the image. The Russian Idea, finally, counterposes these elements of personalities - those who we know live within us, and those who do not, but who are there in real life, unknown to us.

And the new one? Kaos has these elements too, these passages of the dead into the living in an active way, but with new and I hope very different twists. While I honestly think my books satisfy my own demand that they be moral tales in a "frivolous" genre, they must satisfy the rules of the genre first, and when in a tight corner, as Raymond Chandler once advised, have a man come through the door with a gun...

Maybe this makes sense to you, dear reader. I hope so. If it does - 20 stars, in any combination of colour, shape and size you like; you can peel them off their backing and stick them near the vents in your PC case. If you don't understand it - 50 stars! You stayed the course despite everything. You might have wanted more Liz Taylor. Sorry.

This blog is mostly about writing, and this, its 19th instalment, is yet more about the French novelist Celine, whose influence on me I wrote about in an earlier post. It's rather long - dear reader, please accept my apologies for this. You don't have to read it though of course I hope you do, and enjoy it.

Originally I was going to write about something else - about greatness, what it means and why it matters, and I've got the bones of this stored quietly away as a draft. But I decided to go back to Celine partly because of my thinking about greatness. Celine has affected me more than any other "modern" (meaning 20th century and beyond) writer, and I am far from alone in being influenced by him. In my opinion he was a great writer but not a great man, and not everything a great writer writes is great.

Celine's anti-semitism, as I wrote in my earlier post, has troubled me for a long time, but it was difficult to get a real handle on it as the so-called "pamphlets" he wrote that included these wild-eyed views were hard to find even in French, and not translated into English. However "Translator Anonymous" a few years ago did translate the first of his three "anti-semitic" "pamphlets", Bagatelles for a massacre as Trifles for a massacre and posted it on the internet. Trifles is only available in this form, it's free, and I've got it on my e-reader. The translation is actually very good as a translation, but there is a large number of literals and the formatting means many of the notes (that reveal the quality of the translation) appear in odd places in the text.

The translator says in a short introduction that it has never been illegal to publish Trifles because of its anti-semitic content but that Celine's widow has never given permission - implying that she is still alive (she would be at least 80) and that the translation is illegal on copyright grounds. Readers should be able to make up their own minds about Celine's views, the translator says. Well, I am a pretty keen believer in copyright, but it's out there now, so I'm reading it. And there is a perhaps specific case to be made for new editions and translations of Celine's most scurrilous works: the translator has a point.

Though I am only half-way through Trifles there are some things about it that are worth saying now.

One of Celine's techniques as a writer was to intersperse "lucid" prose with "delirious" episodes, usually as a consequence of the narrator's having got malaria many years previously. The first time he used this technique was in his second novel, Mort a credit variously translated as Death or Credit or Death on the Instalment Plan, but he used it frequently after that, and in the first part of his final trilogy, Castle to Castle, he employed it with terrific effect to bring the past into the present and justify his reprise of wartime experiences, and his sometimes crazily expressed views about life.

Yet in this "pamphlet", which is in fact 344 pages long, and technically at least a novel, he does not use this technique. There aren't any excuses: this is straight from the lip in every respect. Unless the narrator - Celine always uses a narrator - wakes up suddenly at the end, this raving is compis mentis raving.

And while it's a novel with a narrator, it's a novel in which the author takes back the wheel whenever he pleases, and forgets about being "Ferdinand" and becomes Celine.

He's got a lot of anger, and a lot of targets to shoot at with that anger. It's not just about Jews, even though he manages - sometimes with incredible cunning - to find them behind practically everything he doesn't like.

It's these other things that are worth talking about now; I'll wait till I've finished the book to talk about the anti-semitism in more detail.

Celine could really write; he had a gift for it. Much of Trifles is screamingly funny - and extremely filthy in ways that could render this book unpublishable by reputable publishers even today. One of his literary biographers said that when he was tried in absentia after the war - he had made a dash to Denmark - that the audience, there to watch his figurative flaying, burst into laughter when excerpts of Trifles were read.

But he lost control of his imagination at some point. He took himself too seriously, and it looks to me that this book began this sad chapter in his life. Even if there were no anti-semitic elements in it, Trifles is not a great book because it is so over-written. He makes some acute points about other aspects of life, and there are turns of phrase that are wonderful. But there are too many of them, by a very wide margin.

The following two novels/pamphlets (L'ecole des cadavres and Les Beaux Draps) have not been reprinted or translated, but the supposedly more serious novels, and fragments have been: Casse-pipe (Cannon-fodder), an excerpt from an apparently much longer work that was lost when his belongings were ransacked in the closing days of the war; Guignol's Band, London Bridge, and Feerie pour une autre fois translated as Fable for another time, with its sequeal Normance. Apart from Guignol's band, which for other reasons is not a great novel, all these share the quality of being over-written to a fault.

Celine only returned to a more settled narrative form wtih Conversation with Professor Y before embarking on the trilogy that was his final work.

External sources suggest that Celine really believed he had developed a new and even revolutionary style in that middle period of his life and that the over-elaborated and repetitive quality of these books was an asset rather than a turn-off. He imagined for example that Normance, an account of the bombing of Paris in 1944, would restore his reputation; it didn't. What he thought was a tour-de-force was an oppressive bore: he wrote in the preface to Guignol's Band that writers in the future would "telegraph or you won't write at all", a lesson the master all too evidently forgot.

Trifles seems to have been the first of these too-much tangos. A previous non-fiction essay on his trip to the Soviet Union, Mea Culpa, was admirably concise.

And in a writing sense, that's a real shame. Setting the anti-semitism aside for the time being, there is a great deal of value in Trifles that is squandered, sometimes because it is sandwiched in among screeds of raving, and sometimes just because he goes on too long about it, making the same point again and again. "The novel as delirium", as one of his biographers called it, becomes the novel as tedium.

Celine's first novel, Journey to the End of Night, was translated into Russian after it was published in 1932 apparently under the mistaken impression that the author was a communist, but the Soviet royalty system meant Celine could only spend the money in the socialist paradise, so he went. To say he wasn't impressed is a very mild way of putting it. Mea Culpa was a precis; Trifles gives the detail and it's not a pretty sight. Celine's insights into Soviet life deserved better.

It is possible that Celine was an alcoholic who gave up drinking without the benefit of a programme like Alcoholics Anonymous; later in life he said he drank only water, and in Death on Credit he has an account of his narrator's loss of control after drinking. Trifles includes a broadside against the French fondness for drink, in particular but not only wine, that should give pause to people who think that the French people are civilised drinkers unlike say, Scots or New Zealanders, or Russians.

Trifles also has full measure of Celine's views on literature and on writing, in particular but not only the French literature of his time.

Celine didn't think much of his contemporaries. He believed they lacked the experience of life that made writing worth reading, and that they lacked skills that made writing worth doing. Focusing on grammar, rooted in the classics whose very fact of translation or rendering in another tongue made them unworthy, they made for a literature of "imposture" able to survive only by virtue of a monstrous profession: teachers.

There is something in what he says about literature, and it is worth noting that the writers he castigates, who are perhaps still read in French - Anatole France, Francois Mauriac, Andre Gide, and others of that period - are almost unread today in other countries unless as class assignments.

Something, of course, isn't everything. In my own writing, I hope that my experience and the lessons I have learned from it are the basis for "what I have to say". I write because I do think I have something to say that is worth reading. But writing has to have form; it has to have some kind of "grammar"; writing in a genre, as I do, means accepting some exterior rules and disciplines. Even Celine, with his revolutionary style, was published in books. They have pages that readers turn...even e-reading, like this, makes a pretense of the physical page.

And teaching is necessary in life, whether by a parent or a someone at the front of a classroom.

Celine had no doubt of his own contribution to literature; in his last book, Rigodon finished the day before he died, he said that "in two hundred years I'll be helping the kids through high school". That's a ways away yet, but as time has gone on, an increasing number of studies of his life and work have appeared along with translations of his "more serious" oeuvre. For a writer most people have never heard of, there is an impressive number of literary biographies in English - at least six. The University of Texas in Austin has a Celine collection, and there is a French-language society devoted to organising symposia on him. So in the legacy game, he seems to be winning.

Trifles sheds some explanatory light on Celine's craziness that makes him a tragic figure, but it is possible to go beyond that and find a deeper social tragedy in this twisted figure. There is more to say...

Those of you still here are entitled to at least have a galaxy of stars, beaming happy ones to light up your day...your month...your life.

Thanks for reading.

Trying to get Celine out of my system is a bit like having a stubborn virus that just won't give up, that keeps coming back and annoying you just at the time you thought you'd finally got over it. Lugging that madman around in my spiritual kitbag is a nuisance I can assure you, dear reader. While I am trying to find some other little nugget of wisdom to guide me through my day and my life, out pops the crooked grin of that very, very crooked fellow leering up at me...

"Will you go away, please?"

"No."

"Well, I am just going to ignore you, you dirty old man."

"I am the elephant and you are the gnat. Here is a jar of vaseline to help you through the experience."*

"Thanks ever so much."

"The pleasure is all mine."

"I will come back to you, later...when I've done this, and I've got some time to kill."

"You always will..."

Lately I've been thinking a lot about "greatness" - in literature, and any other way. Partly this was prompted by a remark in a comment on one of the posts to this blog that Shakespeare is "over-rated". That made me think. To me Shakespeare is the greatest writer ever, and I have felt blessed by the fact that he wrote in my native language. Unlike Celine, who wrote in a French argot already passe by the time he picked up his pen, Shakespeare's English is recognisably the English we use today.

That's misleading, and it matters both for our appreciation of the man and his work, and for our understanding of what greatness is and is not. Shakespeare's English is recognisably but far from precisely our English. Language changes over time in lots of ways - in the words we use, in their meaning, in grammar and punctuation when writing, in accent and more when speaking. Chaucer's "English" is unintelligible to us today, or nearly so - and may have even been to Shakespeare, who was born less than two hundred years after Chaucer's death.** So it is quite natural that about four hundred years after Shakespeare shuffled off, his English is quite a bit different from ours. Most editions of Shakespeare "modernise" the poems and plays, and the skeptic is not wrong to say this opens a door to changing our perceptions in ways that editors may not have intended and that would astonish any Elizabethan or Jacobean including the Bard himself.

But the fact is that we want to understand Shakespeare, which is why we go to all that trouble to make him "accessible". And we want to, because something in his work has an appeal that goes beyond even its limitations, whether of language, or other aspects of his work.

Here is a very current example that has been in the news in the past week. In Leicester, in England, the bones of the last Plantagenet English king, Richard III, have apparently been discovered under a carpark. Richard was the subject of the concluding part of a cycle of eight plays by Shakespeare***, and his character all these years later is indelibly associated with the play. We do not know whether the real Richard was all that phyically deformed as the hunchback Shakespeare made him; if he was really so evil as all that; if he caused the two young boys under his protection in the tower of London to be murdered; if he had his brother "drowned in a butt of malmsey"...there are many legends surrounding this last Plantagenet whose death in battle marked the end of the Wars of the Roses, the beginning of the Tudor dynasty and symbolically the English renaissance.

Whatever the truth, Shakespeare's version is OUR version. He has so coloured our imaginations that no "real" Richard can ever crawl out from under the blanket of evil tossed so artfully onto his crumpled corpse.

Richard ruled for only a few years; Macbeth, whose reputation Shakespeare similarly set in concrete forever, ruled for 17. The evidence for Macbeth's villainy is dubious, and for Duncan's saintliness, equally suspect.

We can know that Shakespeare had his own reasons for casting these two monarchs as evil. Richard was head of the competing house of York for the crown of England held by the Tudors who ruled for much of Shakespeare's life in the person of Elizabeth I. Macbeth was the loser of a struggle for the Scottish throne, whose victor's family came to London to rule Scotland and England as James I for the last fifteen or so years of Shakespeare's life. Shakespeare plainly had very strong reasons for writing these plays the way he did. The politics of his time made pleasing the powers that be important for many reasons including life and limb. Yet knowing this doesn't reduce our appreciation of Shakespeare; if anything, it enlarges it, or so say I. We can be aware of the dodgy history and enjoy the portraits of Richard and Macbeth even more: these are universal, they reach from some cultural substrate so deep that they touch and affect all who encounter them. If Richard wasn't the evil man Shakespeare made him, some man, somewhere, was, is; we feel it in our souls.

Shakespeare's contemporaries knew he was "one out of the box", a unique sensibility whose writing would last and last. Jonson's remark that he was "for all time" was a summary of what others thought. There was something, that is to say, that in his own time set him apart from the other poets and playwrights whose work crowded bookstalls and the theatres: Marlowe, Jonson, Chapman, Middleton, Beaumont and Fletcher, Webster and Tourneur...these were writers who were gifted, who jostled for attention with Shakespeare, who knew him, collaborated with him, and competed with him for attention, favours, patronage, audiences...Scholars and people who are really into it - yes, that includes me - read these others today, but talented though they were, they did not match the Bard, they knew it, and so do we.

This case, for Shakespeare, only puts flesh on bones that are as yet unidentified. If we say that Shakespeare was a great writer, what are we then saying? What is this "greatness", not only of Shakespeare but of any person we call great, of any writer?

In classical times - meaning the Greeks and Romans - if anyone ever thought that a writer, or indeed a philosopher, would be considered "great", I haven't known about it. Then greatness was pretty much military, and was about "honour" - dying in battle, even in a lost cause, that was great. And it was desirable...die in battle, conquer the known world, and your memory would live forever. Writing a dialogue on love that would be read two thousand five hundred years later, or a play about the love of a wife for her husband so fine and noble she would die for him, that was not great, though the gesture was.

In classical times the literature that remains to us shows many men aiming for greatness, and by it they meant a lasting memory in the world at large. Over time, that basic idea has stayed but we now pass out the gong*** of greatness rather more broadly, and more easily, as we do "genius". As one of the characters in my novel Evilheart says of contemporary Germany, "There are so many geniuses!" Greatness in the arts is a given; great painters, poets, sculptors, film-makers, musicians, composers, and writers surround us with a healthy regard for their talents.

Yet if we take "greatness" to mean "lasting" and "popular" there aren't that many great writers, and the crowded landscape of 20th century literary greatness bestowed by critics acting as self-appointed holders of the right to invoke "common consent" is likely to be seriously depopulated by the time the 22th century rolls around.

Does it matter? Well, I reckon it does matter. We need - and want - scales to judge merit, and "greatness" just happens to be at the top of the scale. Yet we discover the acme too easily.

Sadly, the top end is getting crowded by the new technology combined with human nature, and the market. Evilheart was in fact prescient - there are so many geniuses! E-publishing - like this post you are reading - means anyone who can string two words together can write a book, and that probably means, write a novel. And nearly everyone has friends and they will review the novel and give it five stars or whatever the maximum is, and shazam! another great writer. You can't go higher than the highest can you? This phenomenon has become a problem in that anyone who might review books on a more sensible basis risks hurting the author because so much lesser quality work gets the highest mark possible. My way of dealing with this is to give five stars to anything I like, and not review anything I don't.

Greatness as I've already said in literature is about "lasting" and "popular". "Lasting" implies value - that it is worth something, so people keep reading and/or seeing it in the case of say drama. And "popular", when combined with "lasting", implies something more too - that the value that is there is accessible. So a great writer reaches us, the common herd, and affects us, reveals things about reality, about life, about what is important, that we had not realised, and goes on doing it. When Ben Jonson wrote of Shakespeare that he was not merely of the age but for all time, he was saying that - that Shakespeare had somehow penetrated the mysteries of life and come back to tell us about them, and that repeated exposure to him yields more clues to the mysteries.

We don't know much about Shakespeare the man. His life story isn't a complete blank, but the "facts" don't really yield much about what kind of person he was. Jonson - again - referred to him as "gentle" in such a way as to imply he was known as a very decent chap. But that's about it. What we get about him from his plays is his sensibility, his way of looking at the world, through the language he uses, the plots he chooses, the heroes and villains he uses and abuses.

Yet accessibility has its limits as a definition of greatness. Shakespeare put bums on seats in the theatres - he had something for everyone. But part of that something was a secret, coded message or messages that only initiates in the cults of the time Shakespeare was presumably part of or at least aware of would understand. Ted Hughes wrote memorably of this in his amazing book Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being, but there are other takes on it: that he was a closet Catholic the most prominent, but also a "Rosicrucian" British imperialist, or a member of pagan cults sprung up as a result of the translation of the great Greek writers...People argue about this now, but what seems to me to be important is that Shakespeare delivered even on this level, without leaving the "groundlings" who just wanted a good story, out of the loop. It's all there for you - you don't have to do anything but sit back and enjoy the most superficial story unfold before you. But if you want more, there is more - always. The measure of Shakespeare's greatness is that there is always more; he was not just "the spirit of the age" but also "for all time".

There have been other writers who captured the flavour of their time, and beyond, people recognised at the time: Balzac in France, Mark Twain in the United States ("the Lincoln of our literature" another writer called him, and truly), Dickens in England...Pushkin, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy in Russia. Others were perhaps less lauded in their own lifetimes, their worth discovered only later, sometimes much later.

In our time? Perhaps I am jaded, but I don't see many novelists who have emerged since 1945 with that sort of cachet apart from two of the "Celinists" - Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Gunter Grass - and Solzhenitsyn. With the 20th century barely receding over the hills at the back of our consciousness, the writers who were lionised in their own times have for the most part fallen away. In my mind there are few post-war writers, in any language, who will be read in a hundred years. Yet at the same time, we find five star greatness virtually everywhere we look.

This evident contradiction is partly, I think, because of cultural changes. Poetry, for example, has become rarified, inaccessible to most people. The truly popular "poets" work as musicians, and it is likely that Bob Dylan's work and possibly Leonard Cohen's will be listened to for generations. Dylan is the one artist of our time whose work has something of the cachet that Shakespeare had in his time - someone who is recognised by his peers, writers and public, as expressing "the soul of the age". Yet Dylan, whose art is partly based on a conscious artlessness that throws his words into focus, is often treated with contempt by the "educated" and ignorant.

I know that my books aren't "great" and I don't think that in two hundred years, as Celine was so certain he would be, I'll be "helping the kids through high school". My aims in writing are to entertain and to provoke interest - in Shakespeare and Dostoevsky among others, but in lesser known characters I think people might get something from: Berdyaev, Giordano Bruno, the whole renaissance "white magic" movement. There's moral force, too, of a sort, and my interest in evil, what it is and what it means - the obverse of greatness.

My wee list of great writers troubles me - so many of them had personal foibles that set them apart too. Celine and Dostoevsky were virulent anti-semites, and Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice plays to anti-semitism too. Tolstoy was more than a bit of a nut. Solzhenitsyn had, shall we say, very unusual political views of the "Great Russian prejudice" variety. Balzac? A reactionary. Twain and Euripides seemed on the side of the angels - unless you count Twain's Mysterious Stranger...it does matter: if we say that greatness involves deep penetration into the "meaning of life", how can we square the wisdom with the weirdness?

We are back to the beginning and that ratbag in my kitbag.

"In two hundred years I'll be helping the kids through high school."^^

This is the first post I have written on wordpress but the twentieth of this blog, which is mainly about writing. The posts will be copied back to Goodreads, or they're meant to be. But if they aren't I will copy them myself.

You are a great reader if you've got here - ha! How many stars would you like? Forty-three? It's a good number - take them. You can get them in any shape you like from the star shop, spray paint them new colours if you like, and stick them in delicate patterns on the door of the fridge.

Thanks for reading.

*This is a joke deriving from Celine's so-called pamphlet that is the subject of my previous post.

**Shakespeare wrote a play, Troilus and Cressida, that was also the subject of a long narrative poem by Chaucer, so it is assumed the playwright was familiar with the poet. But there is little if anything of Chaucer in Shakespeare's version.

***gong: British empire expression for award.

^Machiavelli through his analysis of statecraft, The Prince, had become a synonym for evil by Shakespeare's time - he died about forty years before Shakespeare was born - and he is referred to in that way by the Bard on a few occasions. But the Italian was also a poet and playwright and arguably wrote the first renaissance play, Mandragola, and a second, Clizia. Both are sex farces. Machiavelli was not the great writer that Shakespeare was, but then neither was anyone else.

^^From Celine's Rigodon, his last book.

It's just barely possible that among the far-flung readers of this blog there is at least one person who will see the title of this post and say to her or himself, and silently to me, "You mean Dylan Thomas, do you?"

As the rest of us know - no. The namesake has overtaken the name. He who was once Robert Zimmerman is now, to virtually the entire planet, Bob Dylan, and he is the Dylan.

Dylan's choice of a new name was geniunely inspired. As with the Welshman, the new Dylan has a way with words, a quickness, that is remarkable - by which I mean sets him apart. But in a career that now spans more than 50 years, he has not just outlasted the poet, but supplanted him.

He came to mind while I was writing my last post, on greatness, as I was dabbling away with Shakespeare, who was called the spirit of the age. If there is an artist who can earn this rubric in our time, it surely is Dylan.

Dylan's gift is with words - words in English. But just as Shakespeare has survived translation to be loved and performed in every language, Dylan seems to get beyond the "limitations" of what I say is the world's most adaptable language. He performs to crowds whose members, for the most part anyway, cannot possibly hope to understand him in his native tongue and especially given that the nuances each native English speaker often but imagines she or he divines.

There are people who really study Dylan - see the post entitled Something completely different. I am not one of those, and if an expert happens to be reading this, please forgive my failure to be up with the literature. That he attracts not just a devoted following but a coterie of analysts proves he deserves respect in ways other people working in his field do not and never will. They will never be "discovered" to have hidden meanings and artistic qualities previously unknown. Dylan not just now but not far into his career was already heaving with them.

In the 1960s I saw a poster of him that showed just how amazing a man he is: Dylan's head was portrayed as a tree, with his many influences shown as roots: rock and roll, blues musicians like Blind Lemon Jefferson, country stars like Hank Williams, writers like Allen Ginsberg and many, many others, while in the leaves sat the birds he's influenced, musicians like The Byrds, but many others. Somehow Dylan has managed to speak to so many people in so many different ways, that today, if the poster were done again, the tree's roots would extend to take over the biggest yard in the world, and the birds would number in the thousands, and in the grandest sense, the tens of millions: Dylan's influence goes far beyond other artists. He has, truly, changed the way we see the world.

I'm one of those twittering in the foliage, a tiny sparrow trying to escape the notice of the big predators, the eagles and vultures and owls...all the same, I've got my perch, and till I'm thrust off it, I'll cling there, grimly...chirp when I feel in the mood...

Non-admirers like to knock Dylan. They complain about the simplicity of his music, the rawness of his voice, even his songs' "tunelessness". They see him not as an artist but an entertainer, and as an entertainer, for them he is so lacking in "talent" that their wonder is that he is such a star.

He is a star. But what he is beyond that, is a true artist. Like "greatness" that was the subject of my last post - and that partly provoked this one - "artist" is a word that needs some defining, and like greatness too, it's not so easy as one might imagine. "Art" has a lot of nuances, and can be applied in many creative fields, from music to painting to literature, between and beyond. I don't want to pretend to be an expert in this, but to me great artists creatively interpret the world in a way that changes it and changes the way we see the world - humanity in principle and if not universally typically personally in practice. No person, given the opportunity to listen to the popular music of the second half of the twentieth century, and to be further educated in it, would seriously be able to deny on the basis of this definition that Dylan is a great artist. What is acceptable, what can be stylish, how music can be performed, what sort of lyrics can be written - in all these, and beyond, Dylan has had a phenomenal impact, and it goes beyond music.

Dylan speaks to us in different ways, and some of those are perhaps unique in modern music - even all music. To me the most important is not what is easily understood, but what is difficult or even impossible to understand clearly. This is meant - fundamental to Dylan's technique.

For example, the song All Along the Watchtower. Dear reader, you can look this up for yourself on the internet if you don't know the words. This was released on an album back in the days when albums were the de rigeur and singles came off them rather than the other way around - Jimi Hendrix released a single of it. A review I read of this at the time said that Hendrix probably understood this song not at all but that it didn't matter as he'd done a good job: Hendrix was a brilliant guitarist who somehow made the song his own.

We weren't meant to understand that song, or many others Dylan has written over the years, in any kind of objective sense, in the sense of "this is what this song is about for everybody", or that is what I say. Dylan's genius was and is to write songs whose meaning is clear to each of us in a very personal way. We take deliberately ambiguous clues and give them sense in the contexts of our own understanding in our own lives.

Some songs are more clear than others but underlying the best of them, according to me, is this resonant ambiguity. "Something is happening here, but you don't know what it is - do you Mr Jones?" may have seemed a put down of the straight man in a wild hip party of the 60s, but who does not have something of the poor confused Jones in him? "You see somebody naked and you say 'who is that man'? You try so hard but you just don't understand what you will say when you get home..."

Some critics I've read have complained about this obscurity; they want a clarity that it seems to me would rob Dylan of his most significant contribution to modern art: he speaks to each of us individually. Our Dylan is OUR DYLAN and no one else's. That he manages to do this, in often extremely sly and incredibly complex ways, is wonderful.

Here's another example, that I like especially for its transformation in the course of a song from "You're an idiot" to "We're all idiots" but which begins "Some one's got it in for me - they're planting stories in the press. Whoever it is I wish they'd cut it out quick, but when they will, I can only guess. They say I shot a man named Grey, and took his wife to Italy. She inherited a million bucks, and when she died it came to me. I can't help it if I'm lucky."

The tag line to this verse renders everything that came before it even more ambiguous than it was till it got there. Did the singer, who we know is not "Bob Dylan" but the narrator of a song which is being sung by Bob Dylan (who also happened to write the song), shoot the man named Grey? The stories in the press say so but that doesn't make it so. It is strongly implied but not absolutely certain that he did go to Italy with Grey's wife, and that she died and he got the million bucks she inherited from her husband. Did he also do in Grey's wife? He can't help it if he's lucky...what is true and not true lives in a realm of possibility that can make sense to each of us quite differently, and for some, like me, there are no final answers - the very uncertainty lingers and is appealing in its uncertainty.

This is just one verse in one song. There are so many songs, and so many ways Dylan has incorporated this teasing, elusive sensibility into them, that his fans all have their favourites and their own ways of understanding. For many years, my favourite song of all by any musician was Positively Fourth Street, whose only positive feature was the word in the title. Arguably, it is the nastiest song ever written by anyone, and I loved it precisely for that. I have seen an interpretation that says it is an attack on his public, though I personally find that hard to believe - it just seems a put down on the New York scene in-groupies who snubbed him early in his career but suddenly wanted to be his mate when he'd made it - "when I was down, you just stood there grinning". These people exist and I've seen them at work in other areas of life. Dylan's rejection of the proffered friendship of those who'd once laughed at his failure is a testament to the power of hurt. When it's his turn to twist the knife, he doesn't pass it up..."I wish that for just one time you could stand inside my shoes, and just for that one moment I could be you; yes, I wish that for just one time you could stand inside my shoes: you'd know what a drag it is to see you."

Nowadays I still listen in my head to those words, and they still mean something to me, but I no longer regard it as the best song ever written. My Dylan, the Dylan who is in my heart and mind, has gone past that, as have I.

For a long time - about thirty years - I went away from Dylan. I didn't listen and didn't care that I didn't. Jazz and classical consumed my musical interests, and Dylan fell away for me after Blood on the Tracks and Desire. These days I still listen to very little popular music.

But about five years ago I happened to pick up a CD by him at a garage sale in Wellington, New Zealand, Love and Theft, made early in the present century. It was and is brilliant. His voice has become more expressive and jazz inflected - the "theft" in the title could be taken to refer to singing like Fats Waller, which he does beautifully...but then the opening to another song is ah, Creedence's Proud Mary...Bob and I were back together after all that time, all our different adventures...my Dylan...

Does Dylan affect my writing? Yes, but not in the sense that another writer might do, like Celine or Shakespeare, but nonetheless very definitely. If readers see in my writing some of the deliberately ambiguous prose I find in Dylan's verses (and in the short pieces of prose I've read by him), that could very well be written from my perch in his greenery. Whether he is aware of Celine or not - I can't imagine he isn't as he palled around with some of the beat poets for a while, including Allen Ginsberg - his explosive lyrics show his sensibility has passed that way at some stage.

Most importantly for me in my writing, I hope through a kind of spareness to get something of the personal into my books that Dylan gets into his songs. It would thrill me if readers "filled in the gaps" as I would like them to and make my novels theirs. I don't think I really succeed with this, or not as much as I would like, but when I am writing, it is an aim, always.

Recently I was watching Dylan sing in Hyde Park on YouTube...he sang among other songs, Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues ("when you're lost in the rain in Juarez and it's Easter time too/ and your gravity fails and negativity don't pull you through")...he had a good band including Ronnie Wood of the Rolling Stones and Al Kooper who was on his revolutionary album Highway 61 Revisited, and he showed he could sing and play the guitar. The clip was put up on YouTube by a German who called himself Ret Marut, with a message in German and a line in English wishing him well. Ret Marut was the early pen name of the man who later called himself B Traven, who is the subject of an earlier post. It seems there is a line of communication that runs through Dylan, a community of interest, that I share not only with this great musician, but with people I don't know and never will, but now know exist. Nice meeting you, "Ret".