Steve Evans's Blog: The written world , page 6
July 17, 2013
Writing Kaos
Kaos is the ninth novel I’ve written and the seventh I’ve “e-published”. Two others remain in the bottom drawer so to speak. As I wrote, it kept occurring to me that other writers, and those curious about writing, might be interested in the process as one writer has done it. It’s not really my idea that people will go on to read the book though of course more readers are always welcome. There will not be any “spoilers” but this is about writing, not marketing – “telling not selling”.
The novel I wrote before Kaos was The Russian Idea. It had been in my mind for a long time to do a novel revolving around the thinking of the Russian religious philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev*, and circumstances allowed me the time and ideas to work up a plot and write it.
The Russian Idea is not nearly so good a novel as I would have liked it to be. For one thing, it is too “intellectual” or more woundingly, “pseudo-intellectual”. All my novels from the first have been so-called novels of ideas cloaked in the garb of thrillers, but this one had too many ideas not well-clothed enough – or perhaps, given the genre, not ill-clothed enough. To me it is still not a bad book, but it is not my best by any means.
Even so it had something in its structure and in its basic theme that I rather liked. Moreover, Berdyaev was heavily influenced. as I am, by the 19th century Russian novelist and wild man Fyodor Dostoevsky, and in the course of research on Berdyaev, I ended up rereading a lot of Dostoevsky as well as Berdyaev’s book on him.
Something like a revolution has gone on in Dostoevsky studies since I first read his great novels longer ago than I really want to admit. New translations** have piled onto each other as new generations bid to make the Russian accessible as he meant to be in his own time. His strange “feuilleton” A Writer’s Diary*** has been half-translated with claims that if true make it far in advance of its time. As I reread the great novels, read a volume of a five part biography, some specialised religious material**** and read the Diary my appreciation of Dostoevsky was more than renewed; it was broadened and deepened. Much better translations revealed aspects to Dostoevsky’s writing that had previously been poorly shown, if at all. Berdyaev became – as he himself said – a follower of the novelist, in a prophetic Christian tradition few non-Russians would have imagined him to inhabit.
The Russian Idea turned into a homage to Dostoevsky as well as Berdyaev.
One of the things I admire about Dostoevsky was that he wrote thrillers. Like Shakespeare he explored great themes with great writing in a popular genre. As Shakespeare took the popular forms of writing in his time and made them something more than his peers, Dostoevsky took a popular form of fiction and made it more than his contemporaries.
The Idiot, Brothers Karamazov, Demons…three of his last four novels are enduring masterpieces all the more compelling for their dark themes. While I was writing The Russian Idea I had them in the back of my mind.
Unsatisfied with The Russian Idea, I nonetheless kept the basic approach of that book for Kaos, with Demons my guide. I wanted to write a book that began one way, and turned inside out, as Demons does: the first section of Demons is often hilarious, with a gentle mockery that makes it seem a comedy of manners. By the end, as one of the editors writes in the Penguin edition, “this is a scary book”.
Well, I have my own things to say. I’m not Dostoevsky either in outlook or talent, but as I was writing Kaos I kept that transitional approach in mind, that things should turn “inside out”. They do, if in a different way, and I am much happier with the result.
Yet the impulse for writing Kaos lay as much in Shakespeare as in Doestoevsky, in the Bard’s strange play Troilus and Cressida^. In one sense “T & C” has a walk-on part in Kaos, but in another its underlying theme is the larger theme of Kaos, which is – ahem! Pay attention now! – a study in gender politics whose multiple foci shift as the novel shifts. Oh, dear!
Of course the stuff of writing – plot, characterisation, dialogue, description, and so on, the meat if you like, may look far removed from this. There are heaps of “how-to” writing guides that will sell you the hows and tos, and lately a number of blogs I follow have patiently explained various aspects of the technical facets of writing. Each is worthy in its own right, but all are and can be no more than elaborations of Raymond Chandler’s three word short course: “Analyse, and emulate”. My aim, of having a serious purpose in a frivolous genre, comes from reading on both levels. Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Len Deighton, Ross Macdonald^^, Margery Allingham, Agatha Christie…and the greats, Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, Euripides etc as you can find in the earlier posts of this blog. There are others, and I’ll perhaps approach them in time.
The idea has always been to offer a “good read” with some food for thought for anyone who wants it, and for me Kaos manages that. The more successful I am, the less the reader will notice.
Well, there you go. Hopefully you found this interesting, dear reader. If you didn’t – my apologies, with thanks for getting through it.
* Most of this unusual man’s works are in print in hard copy and his shorter works are on the net. A book about the Catholic Worker movement, which he strongly influenced, was published in the 1970s: William D Miller’s A harsh and dreadful love.
** Every Dostoevsky lover is likely to have her or his favourite. My preference has been the Penguins – for Demons, the Maguire translation put out by Penguin.
*** The editor of the English translation keeps calling the diary a “project”. See an online dictionary for a definition of feuilleton.
**** The rare book by Nicholas Zernov, Three Russian prophets, is still in print. Dostoevsky is the middle prophet, sandwiched in between Khomiakov and Soloviev. The chapter on Dostoevsky is extremely good.
^ As in an earlier post, my plan is to treat Troilus and Cressida separately.
^^ These are the so-called hard boiled school. Hammett is the master, Chandler his pupil who added some qualities of dialogue. Len Deighton’s early novels took these and made them a part of espionage fiction; Macdonald added nothing but was a success. Allingham and Christie worked in the earlier “puzzle” style for the most part but added something for me.
The novel I wrote before Kaos was The Russian Idea. It had been in my mind for a long time to do a novel revolving around the thinking of the Russian religious philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev*, and circumstances allowed me the time and ideas to work up a plot and write it.
The Russian Idea is not nearly so good a novel as I would have liked it to be. For one thing, it is too “intellectual” or more woundingly, “pseudo-intellectual”. All my novels from the first have been so-called novels of ideas cloaked in the garb of thrillers, but this one had too many ideas not well-clothed enough – or perhaps, given the genre, not ill-clothed enough. To me it is still not a bad book, but it is not my best by any means.
Even so it had something in its structure and in its basic theme that I rather liked. Moreover, Berdyaev was heavily influenced. as I am, by the 19th century Russian novelist and wild man Fyodor Dostoevsky, and in the course of research on Berdyaev, I ended up rereading a lot of Dostoevsky as well as Berdyaev’s book on him.
Something like a revolution has gone on in Dostoevsky studies since I first read his great novels longer ago than I really want to admit. New translations** have piled onto each other as new generations bid to make the Russian accessible as he meant to be in his own time. His strange “feuilleton” A Writer’s Diary*** has been half-translated with claims that if true make it far in advance of its time. As I reread the great novels, read a volume of a five part biography, some specialised religious material**** and read the Diary my appreciation of Dostoevsky was more than renewed; it was broadened and deepened. Much better translations revealed aspects to Dostoevsky’s writing that had previously been poorly shown, if at all. Berdyaev became – as he himself said – a follower of the novelist, in a prophetic Christian tradition few non-Russians would have imagined him to inhabit.
The Russian Idea turned into a homage to Dostoevsky as well as Berdyaev.
One of the things I admire about Dostoevsky was that he wrote thrillers. Like Shakespeare he explored great themes with great writing in a popular genre. As Shakespeare took the popular forms of writing in his time and made them something more than his peers, Dostoevsky took a popular form of fiction and made it more than his contemporaries.
The Idiot, Brothers Karamazov, Demons…three of his last four novels are enduring masterpieces all the more compelling for their dark themes. While I was writing The Russian Idea I had them in the back of my mind.
Unsatisfied with The Russian Idea, I nonetheless kept the basic approach of that book for Kaos, with Demons my guide. I wanted to write a book that began one way, and turned inside out, as Demons does: the first section of Demons is often hilarious, with a gentle mockery that makes it seem a comedy of manners. By the end, as one of the editors writes in the Penguin edition, “this is a scary book”.
Well, I have my own things to say. I’m not Dostoevsky either in outlook or talent, but as I was writing Kaos I kept that transitional approach in mind, that things should turn “inside out”. They do, if in a different way, and I am much happier with the result.
Yet the impulse for writing Kaos lay as much in Shakespeare as in Doestoevsky, in the Bard’s strange play Troilus and Cressida^. In one sense “T & C” has a walk-on part in Kaos, but in another its underlying theme is the larger theme of Kaos, which is – ahem! Pay attention now! – a study in gender politics whose multiple foci shift as the novel shifts. Oh, dear!
Of course the stuff of writing – plot, characterisation, dialogue, description, and so on, the meat if you like, may look far removed from this. There are heaps of “how-to” writing guides that will sell you the hows and tos, and lately a number of blogs I follow have patiently explained various aspects of the technical facets of writing. Each is worthy in its own right, but all are and can be no more than elaborations of Raymond Chandler’s three word short course: “Analyse, and emulate”. My aim, of having a serious purpose in a frivolous genre, comes from reading on both levels. Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Len Deighton, Ross Macdonald^^, Margery Allingham, Agatha Christie…and the greats, Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, Euripides etc as you can find in the earlier posts of this blog. There are others, and I’ll perhaps approach them in time.
The idea has always been to offer a “good read” with some food for thought for anyone who wants it, and for me Kaos manages that. The more successful I am, the less the reader will notice.
Well, there you go. Hopefully you found this interesting, dear reader. If you didn’t – my apologies, with thanks for getting through it.
* Most of this unusual man’s works are in print in hard copy and his shorter works are on the net. A book about the Catholic Worker movement, which he strongly influenced, was published in the 1970s: William D Miller’s A harsh and dreadful love.
** Every Dostoevsky lover is likely to have her or his favourite. My preference has been the Penguins – for Demons, the Maguire translation put out by Penguin.
*** The editor of the English translation keeps calling the diary a “project”. See an online dictionary for a definition of feuilleton.
**** The rare book by Nicholas Zernov, Three Russian prophets, is still in print. Dostoevsky is the middle prophet, sandwiched in between Khomiakov and Soloviev. The chapter on Dostoevsky is extremely good.
^ As in an earlier post, my plan is to treat Troilus and Cressida separately.
^^ These are the so-called hard boiled school. Hammett is the master, Chandler his pupil who added some qualities of dialogue. Len Deighton’s early novels took these and made them a part of espionage fiction; Macdonald added nothing but was a success. Allingham and Christie worked in the earlier “puzzle” style for the most part but added something for me.
July 12, 2013
Meet "The Struggler"!
After celebrating having a blog that lasted an entire year, producing the next post has turned out to be a struggle, so much so that I think I could be a comic book character with a lycra suit I could never quite get into or take off, yet as I pull and twist, hop from one foot to another, wriggle and writhe, somehow save civilisation, only to be landed with a lawsuit for trampling someone’s flower bed…Yes, things are grim.
The troubles I am having! There are several reasons. One is that I somehow have got bogged down in my “reading programme” and that is interfering with my writing. My plan has been for quite some time to write a post about Troilus and Cressida and how I reckon that it just may be that the Shakespeare industry has got this play wrong. Since that is an ambitious undertaking I want to reread the play first, but while doing that I started reading Edward Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire on my e-reader and it has suddenly taken over.
Reading is not what it used to be. The internet allows us to be provoked by what we are reading, sit down at the PC, and check something out. Gibbon’s masterwork has sent me scurrying to the keyboard time and again to find out things. And my goodness me! The things there are to find out! Just the great man’s biography is amazing – try it on Wikipedia. Wow!
Moreover, this is not just some tiny wee book that prompts my queries. It is a monster, and a landmark in historiography and literature…six volumes, and none of them, so far as I can tell on my e-reader, is small. I have just moved into volume two, wherein Gibbon is trying to explain why it was that the Romans persecuted the Christians, when they started to do it, and what came after…and in doing this, he casts doubt on much of the received “wisdom” and knowledge of shall we say Christian lore. And of course since Gibbon was writing in the 18th century, that means more roaming the net to see what scholarship since has turned up.
Gibbon’s work was banned in several places, largely it seems because of the chapter I am presently reading – the edition I’ve got from “Project Gutenburg” is a 19th century one done by a minister who can’t help putting in outraged notes of his own and other editors*, so I don’t really want to put it down just yet. But it is obvious that if I want to do the other things I want to do, I should have a break at some stage soon.
But for those who might be interested, it is more than worth the time and effort to get through what has turned out to be one of the great reading experiences of my life. As well as the scholarship involved, it is very well written, the kind of writing that is genuinely a pleasure, yes a physical pleasure, to read. Gibbon’s refined irony is wonderful.
Now, the post I want to write on Troilus and Cressida is a sort of addendum to the novel I have just published, Kaos. In it the play has a role of its own, and the post I would like to write justifies that role for anyone curious enough to want to know about it.
But that’s not all. Kaos is the 7th novel I’ve put up on the net, and I’d like to see it sell a few more copies – say, a quarter of a million or so more, just plucking a number out of the air. While I have been contemplating how to do this, blogs I follow have leapt obligingly into the breach to tell wannabes like myself how to market our stuff. Some have even, for reasons I do not entirely understand, also tried to teach us how to write.
And those blogs have prompted more reflection, on what I reckon are fundamental issues of life and art. I’ve wrestled with a few posts on these issues before deciding to park them and write this one.
There is more too…about writing, the focus of this blog. I’d like to go into some of the things that have occurred to me while I was writing Kaos that if “personal” are also generic, I think, to the craft and art of writing.
So there is a fair swack of posts stored up waiting…to be thought through, researched as and when necessary, and then written and posted.
And while that is happening I just know there will be more things popping into my fevered mind; the queue will lengthen. And yes, outside of this is life! At the mo I am clearing up a large pile of apple tree prunings that need to be chopped up and sawn so they can be stacked and when dry fed lovingly into my wood burner. The trees that were pruned had not been cared for, at all, for many years – one, I think, for more than a century – and some of the branches are huge.
And and and! These are trivial personal concerns. Life is more important than that. The Struggler…he’s got his teeth on the sleeve of the suit and thinks just maybe he’ll be able to make it fit right so he can go out there and save…save…save…save a vulnerable maiden from the clutches of a rank intruder whose many bad qualities begin with his body odour before moving sublimely on to his breath…but wait a minute, Struggler! That’s me you’re wrestling with…get your teeth off my suit!…
*Principally Francois Guizot. We shall meet M Guizot in one of those coming posts.
The troubles I am having! There are several reasons. One is that I somehow have got bogged down in my “reading programme” and that is interfering with my writing. My plan has been for quite some time to write a post about Troilus and Cressida and how I reckon that it just may be that the Shakespeare industry has got this play wrong. Since that is an ambitious undertaking I want to reread the play first, but while doing that I started reading Edward Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire on my e-reader and it has suddenly taken over.
Reading is not what it used to be. The internet allows us to be provoked by what we are reading, sit down at the PC, and check something out. Gibbon’s masterwork has sent me scurrying to the keyboard time and again to find out things. And my goodness me! The things there are to find out! Just the great man’s biography is amazing – try it on Wikipedia. Wow!
Moreover, this is not just some tiny wee book that prompts my queries. It is a monster, and a landmark in historiography and literature…six volumes, and none of them, so far as I can tell on my e-reader, is small. I have just moved into volume two, wherein Gibbon is trying to explain why it was that the Romans persecuted the Christians, when they started to do it, and what came after…and in doing this, he casts doubt on much of the received “wisdom” and knowledge of shall we say Christian lore. And of course since Gibbon was writing in the 18th century, that means more roaming the net to see what scholarship since has turned up.
Gibbon’s work was banned in several places, largely it seems because of the chapter I am presently reading – the edition I’ve got from “Project Gutenburg” is a 19th century one done by a minister who can’t help putting in outraged notes of his own and other editors*, so I don’t really want to put it down just yet. But it is obvious that if I want to do the other things I want to do, I should have a break at some stage soon.
But for those who might be interested, it is more than worth the time and effort to get through what has turned out to be one of the great reading experiences of my life. As well as the scholarship involved, it is very well written, the kind of writing that is genuinely a pleasure, yes a physical pleasure, to read. Gibbon’s refined irony is wonderful.
Now, the post I want to write on Troilus and Cressida is a sort of addendum to the novel I have just published, Kaos. In it the play has a role of its own, and the post I would like to write justifies that role for anyone curious enough to want to know about it.
But that’s not all. Kaos is the 7th novel I’ve put up on the net, and I’d like to see it sell a few more copies – say, a quarter of a million or so more, just plucking a number out of the air. While I have been contemplating how to do this, blogs I follow have leapt obligingly into the breach to tell wannabes like myself how to market our stuff. Some have even, for reasons I do not entirely understand, also tried to teach us how to write.
And those blogs have prompted more reflection, on what I reckon are fundamental issues of life and art. I’ve wrestled with a few posts on these issues before deciding to park them and write this one.
There is more too…about writing, the focus of this blog. I’d like to go into some of the things that have occurred to me while I was writing Kaos that if “personal” are also generic, I think, to the craft and art of writing.
So there is a fair swack of posts stored up waiting…to be thought through, researched as and when necessary, and then written and posted.
And while that is happening I just know there will be more things popping into my fevered mind; the queue will lengthen. And yes, outside of this is life! At the mo I am clearing up a large pile of apple tree prunings that need to be chopped up and sawn so they can be stacked and when dry fed lovingly into my wood burner. The trees that were pruned had not been cared for, at all, for many years – one, I think, for more than a century – and some of the branches are huge.
And and and! These are trivial personal concerns. Life is more important than that. The Struggler…he’s got his teeth on the sleeve of the suit and thinks just maybe he’ll be able to make it fit right so he can go out there and save…save…save…save a vulnerable maiden from the clutches of a rank intruder whose many bad qualities begin with his body odour before moving sublimely on to his breath…but wait a minute, Struggler! That’s me you’re wrestling with…get your teeth off my suit!…
*Principally Francois Guizot. We shall meet M Guizot in one of those coming posts.
June 30, 2013
Happy birthday, blog!
It is just more than a year since I wrote the first post of this blog. I was not at all sure that I would keep going. My aim then was to average one a week. Sometimes I have done more than that, but overall I have done less: this is number forty.
Anyway happy birthday, blog! And thank you to all the readers who have taken the time to check out what I’ve had to say, and even more thanks to those who have responded to the ideas and interacted with them, and with me. This is in many, many respects an “old fashioned” blog – it is functional rather than replete with bells and whistles, it tends to be about subjects most people could not care less about, it is written in what smashwords calls the “New Zealand dialect” of English, and of course it is written by me in my way, with my style which is unlikely to suit everybody. So I’m pretty happy to discover that there are people out there in netland who share my interests and concerns.
This is an opportunity to look at how it’s been and how I might change it. The model I would think of would be – again – Dostoevsky and his Writer’s Notebook. This amazing work was meant to be monthly but he didn’t manage it all that long. The notebook or diary was a sort of miscellany. Dostoevsky included short pieces of fiction along with commentary and essays, and he gave full throttle to his often surprising and sometimes unpalatable views.
The thing about Dostoevsky that can be maddening is that he can be very hard to pin down, not unlike another of my favourite writers, Celine. Just when you think you’ve got him pegged as some kind of weird loony, he slithers away and appears on the other side of the bog where you’ve been wrestling with him, and while you are filthy from the muck, he’s already had a nice bath, a shave, has changed into something decent and is waving gaily to you as he makes off with the beautiful woman* you turned up with to show how you would deal with this monster.
What mattered for Dostoevsky about the diary apart from making a living was that he was engaged with the world around him. He really launched into issues and didn’t flinch, even a millimetre, from his adversaries. To his contemporaries, he did seem eccentric: once a revolutionary and an apostle of the western road to social and economic development he had turned his back on revolutionary socialism. Once a slavophil, he had harsh things to say about and to them too. It seems his final position if that is possible to say, was his own brand of Christian socialism. He didn’t think that at all out of kilter with a tsar, nobility and all the trappings that go with them, as well as the Orthodox Christianity he stoutly opposed to the European Christianity he’d experienced on his travels (he was especially down on Catholicism).
Despite the many specific dissimilarities there is something similar about the issues of Dostoevsky’s time in Russia and our own. Everyone in Russia, whatever their views, knew the country was in crisis We are in a similar fix in that general sense. Things aren’t going well economically, and the “green shoots” of recovery people keep seeing seem awfully feeble.
Moreover, there is, and has been for quite a while, a spiritual crisis in the West that has been in various ways the focus of my fiction from the first. So far, I’ve not discussed my work and its underlying themes in this way. Is it a lack of courage? Perhaps. Maybe it is just a feeling that I should leave the work to itself, that people should find what they want to find in it, without hints or “guides” from their creator beyond the general. I will have to think about this. Readers will see a change, if there is one, as I go along.
Meanwhile the big deal for me has happened and Kaos is up on the smashwords site, ready for perusal and even purchase by a grateful/gullible public. This is the seventh novel I’ve put up there. Am I blase about it all, a battle-scarred veteran of market wars?
No.
According to me that’s good. It means I still care about what I write, even if no one else does, that the fundamental reasons I started to write in the first place haven’t changed even if I have: to communicate feelings and ideas, to give people pleasure and if they wish, something to think about. Naturally I want my books to be good as I think they are good, and ideally to challenge, to provoke readers, even if gently.
A lot of what I do is “counter-intuitive”, and that makes me anxious – that the people I hope will read my work will “understand me too quickly” as Norman Mailer said of his own writing. Celine, the bizarre Frenchman I have referred to so often in these posts, was said to have wished in a diary he wrote early in his life that he wanted to drag people through the mud of reality so that, having been as yucky as can be, they would be more free, as a result of accepting the reality of the human condition.
I don’t have the confidence to have such exalted aims…but I would like to think that people who approach my work with an open mind and who look beneath the words, do also emerge more free, even when this is in a negative sense. Anyone who has read my books knows that I write about extreme people a lot, and about different people. I want to show these differences as fully human…and not sheltering under a label. My heroines and heroes are not perfect, and my villains are typically not only not wholly evil, but sometimes not the sort of people nowadays thought even to be capable of evil. And when they are wholly evil, it is clearly set out.
Naturally I try to do more than one thing with my novels; novels are about doing more than one thing, or so I reckon, which is partly why people write them and read them. Kaos is a sort of satire on maleness, on male fantasies and male self-regard, but it is more and different than that too, in particular relating to the moral values of sexuality. While I was writing it, Doestoevsky’s novel Demons** was in my mind. The idea is that everything is turned inside out, and then inside out again, if you take my meaning. Well, I am not sure I want you to, dear reader! I want you to read my book…indeed all my books!
There is a lot I would like to say about Kaos but am not sure I should. Meanwhile the realities of life do not go away: housework, for example.
Thanks for reading.
* Or if if is your preference, beautiful man.
**There have been at least four translations of this amazing work: by Constance Garnett, David Magarshack, Robert Maguire, and the new flavours of the month, Pevear and Volokhonsky. I have read the first three of these and cannot recommend the Maguire highly enough. Translators can produce masterpieces and this one qualifies according to me. Pevear and Volokhonsky get raves for their work but while I have not read their version of Demons, it lacks the notes of the Maguire, which are very valuable. And their version of The Adolescent, while workpersonlike, disappointed me.
Anyway happy birthday, blog! And thank you to all the readers who have taken the time to check out what I’ve had to say, and even more thanks to those who have responded to the ideas and interacted with them, and with me. This is in many, many respects an “old fashioned” blog – it is functional rather than replete with bells and whistles, it tends to be about subjects most people could not care less about, it is written in what smashwords calls the “New Zealand dialect” of English, and of course it is written by me in my way, with my style which is unlikely to suit everybody. So I’m pretty happy to discover that there are people out there in netland who share my interests and concerns.
This is an opportunity to look at how it’s been and how I might change it. The model I would think of would be – again – Dostoevsky and his Writer’s Notebook. This amazing work was meant to be monthly but he didn’t manage it all that long. The notebook or diary was a sort of miscellany. Dostoevsky included short pieces of fiction along with commentary and essays, and he gave full throttle to his often surprising and sometimes unpalatable views.
The thing about Dostoevsky that can be maddening is that he can be very hard to pin down, not unlike another of my favourite writers, Celine. Just when you think you’ve got him pegged as some kind of weird loony, he slithers away and appears on the other side of the bog where you’ve been wrestling with him, and while you are filthy from the muck, he’s already had a nice bath, a shave, has changed into something decent and is waving gaily to you as he makes off with the beautiful woman* you turned up with to show how you would deal with this monster.
What mattered for Dostoevsky about the diary apart from making a living was that he was engaged with the world around him. He really launched into issues and didn’t flinch, even a millimetre, from his adversaries. To his contemporaries, he did seem eccentric: once a revolutionary and an apostle of the western road to social and economic development he had turned his back on revolutionary socialism. Once a slavophil, he had harsh things to say about and to them too. It seems his final position if that is possible to say, was his own brand of Christian socialism. He didn’t think that at all out of kilter with a tsar, nobility and all the trappings that go with them, as well as the Orthodox Christianity he stoutly opposed to the European Christianity he’d experienced on his travels (he was especially down on Catholicism).
Despite the many specific dissimilarities there is something similar about the issues of Dostoevsky’s time in Russia and our own. Everyone in Russia, whatever their views, knew the country was in crisis We are in a similar fix in that general sense. Things aren’t going well economically, and the “green shoots” of recovery people keep seeing seem awfully feeble.
Moreover, there is, and has been for quite a while, a spiritual crisis in the West that has been in various ways the focus of my fiction from the first. So far, I’ve not discussed my work and its underlying themes in this way. Is it a lack of courage? Perhaps. Maybe it is just a feeling that I should leave the work to itself, that people should find what they want to find in it, without hints or “guides” from their creator beyond the general. I will have to think about this. Readers will see a change, if there is one, as I go along.
Meanwhile the big deal for me has happened and Kaos is up on the smashwords site, ready for perusal and even purchase by a grateful/gullible public. This is the seventh novel I’ve put up there. Am I blase about it all, a battle-scarred veteran of market wars?
No.
According to me that’s good. It means I still care about what I write, even if no one else does, that the fundamental reasons I started to write in the first place haven’t changed even if I have: to communicate feelings and ideas, to give people pleasure and if they wish, something to think about. Naturally I want my books to be good as I think they are good, and ideally to challenge, to provoke readers, even if gently.
A lot of what I do is “counter-intuitive”, and that makes me anxious – that the people I hope will read my work will “understand me too quickly” as Norman Mailer said of his own writing. Celine, the bizarre Frenchman I have referred to so often in these posts, was said to have wished in a diary he wrote early in his life that he wanted to drag people through the mud of reality so that, having been as yucky as can be, they would be more free, as a result of accepting the reality of the human condition.
I don’t have the confidence to have such exalted aims…but I would like to think that people who approach my work with an open mind and who look beneath the words, do also emerge more free, even when this is in a negative sense. Anyone who has read my books knows that I write about extreme people a lot, and about different people. I want to show these differences as fully human…and not sheltering under a label. My heroines and heroes are not perfect, and my villains are typically not only not wholly evil, but sometimes not the sort of people nowadays thought even to be capable of evil. And when they are wholly evil, it is clearly set out.
Naturally I try to do more than one thing with my novels; novels are about doing more than one thing, or so I reckon, which is partly why people write them and read them. Kaos is a sort of satire on maleness, on male fantasies and male self-regard, but it is more and different than that too, in particular relating to the moral values of sexuality. While I was writing it, Doestoevsky’s novel Demons** was in my mind. The idea is that everything is turned inside out, and then inside out again, if you take my meaning. Well, I am not sure I want you to, dear reader! I want you to read my book…indeed all my books!
There is a lot I would like to say about Kaos but am not sure I should. Meanwhile the realities of life do not go away: housework, for example.
Thanks for reading.
* Or if if is your preference, beautiful man.
**There have been at least four translations of this amazing work: by Constance Garnett, David Magarshack, Robert Maguire, and the new flavours of the month, Pevear and Volokhonsky. I have read the first three of these and cannot recommend the Maguire highly enough. Translators can produce masterpieces and this one qualifies according to me. Pevear and Volokhonsky get raves for their work but while I have not read their version of Demons, it lacks the notes of the Maguire, which are very valuable. And their version of The Adolescent, while workpersonlike, disappointed me.
June 23, 2013
Eeeeeeeeeeee-k!
One of the wonderful things about the internet is the global availability of resources that once were the privilege of the few, or when not, for one reason or another hard to find. It is truly amazing what is there for the curious, the hungry, the determined. Just now I am reading, on my e-reader, Edward Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in a 19th century edition. This is a work I have been meaning to read since I was very young, a teenager or not much older. I first saw it somewhere in hard copy, multiple volumes glaring at me off a library shelf. The edition I am reading came with the e-reader, one of a hundred titles obviously out of copyright.
Since then I have found and acquired some really rare titles, got them down onto my adobe digital editions package and from there to my e-reader, which is a Kobo. I’d like to share some of them: the first folio of the works of William Shakespeare. There are not many physical copies of this particular title around, and I don’t even recall ever seeing a facsimile edition. Yet a few flicks through the net, there it is, download and shazam! It’s on my Kobo.
Then there is the quarto* of Troilus and Cressida, a curious play by the Bard. Ditto…hanging in there on my e-reader as it has been digitalised and put up on the net by a helpful soul.
Recently I was gobsmacked to find most of a collected works edition of the writings of Irish/English politician and political philosopher Edmund Burke up there too, for free. Turned out the volume containing the one I wanted, was not there, and I had to find another version. But I did, and it’s there, Kobo-ised.
This is truly a revolution in learning. It may be restricted to older material in terms of being free, but that is not especially important. If it is new and costs and you want it enough, you’ll pay. And a lot of free newer stuff that is non-fiction anyway also seems to appear, whacked up on the net by their authors or authorised people who just want to share whatever the magic is.
Not everything fits on a Kobo, but it can fit on the PC and maybe on a tablet or an iPad. Here is something that has really thrown a spark across my jumper leads, causing my hair to stand on end and goosebumps to cover my body:
There is something called the Voynich Manuscript. It was acquired from Jesuits owning a palace outside Rome in 1912 by an antiquarian styling himself W M Voynich. It is an illustrated manuscript, possibly some kind of herbal, and has been dated around 1400-1500. The thing is, this manuscript is written in a script that is unlike any other known, and despite hard work by people who are really good at codes, it has never been cracked.
I read about this on the BBC: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-env...
The Voynich manuscript is now on my PC, in my adobe digital editions package, and there is a long thread of what it is about from those who think they’ve figured it out. It seems “translators” have rendered it as the history of the Czech land, in Macedonian, some other language the first five books of the New Testament, etc…the best, in the quick squiz I had was that it was a herbal by a disciple of or himself, Paracelsus, written in a code to discourage the unworthy (the authorities too!).
But that is not all! The thick plottens!* The Voynich concerned was a Pole whose real name was Michał Habdank-Wojnicz, and who married an Irish woman named Ethel Lilian Boole. As E L Voynich she wrote one of the allegedly great revolutionary novels, The Gadfly. R Bruce Lockhart, a man for whom the truth was ever elastic, reckoned the hero of the novel was based on the early career of Sidney Reilly (“Ace of Spies”) who had an affair with Ethel in Italy and told her his story as a revolutionary would, especially if he was keen to get her into bed.
Before meeting Ethel, W M Voynich was a revolutionary in Poland, then part of the Russian empire. His wealthy family did not prevent his being sent to Siberia for his role in a plot to free two other revolutionaries in 1886. The plot failed, they were executed, and Voynich managed to escape from Siberia and do a runner to safety, washing up in London.
The rest may or may not be history. Voynich ran into Ethel, they got married, she wrote The Gadfly which made pots of dough, and he stopped being a revolutionary and settled down as an antiquarian bookseller with shops in London and New York. The couple apparently moved to New York where he died in 1930 while she carried on till the 1960s, dying at the tender age of 96.
Now, all of that is safely lodged in my PC or easily cribbed from the net, and what I say is that put together, it is pretty amazing. Here I sit, quite a long way from anywhere, and I can not only find all this stuff out, but if I want to, I can have a crack at deciphering this manuscript myself, as anyone else can who cares to have a go.
Or, I can put the whole lot into my literary pipe, smoke it, and see if there is a story, or a novel, or part of one, lurking in there…there may be you know?
Thanks for reading.
* I have seen a quarto of a Shakespeare play, in a display case in a gallery/museum in Edinburgh, Scotland. It looked very much like a rudimentary Penguin paperback.
** I am congratulating Spooner on being who he was.
Since then I have found and acquired some really rare titles, got them down onto my adobe digital editions package and from there to my e-reader, which is a Kobo. I’d like to share some of them: the first folio of the works of William Shakespeare. There are not many physical copies of this particular title around, and I don’t even recall ever seeing a facsimile edition. Yet a few flicks through the net, there it is, download and shazam! It’s on my Kobo.
Then there is the quarto* of Troilus and Cressida, a curious play by the Bard. Ditto…hanging in there on my e-reader as it has been digitalised and put up on the net by a helpful soul.
Recently I was gobsmacked to find most of a collected works edition of the writings of Irish/English politician and political philosopher Edmund Burke up there too, for free. Turned out the volume containing the one I wanted, was not there, and I had to find another version. But I did, and it’s there, Kobo-ised.
This is truly a revolution in learning. It may be restricted to older material in terms of being free, but that is not especially important. If it is new and costs and you want it enough, you’ll pay. And a lot of free newer stuff that is non-fiction anyway also seems to appear, whacked up on the net by their authors or authorised people who just want to share whatever the magic is.
Not everything fits on a Kobo, but it can fit on the PC and maybe on a tablet or an iPad. Here is something that has really thrown a spark across my jumper leads, causing my hair to stand on end and goosebumps to cover my body:
There is something called the Voynich Manuscript. It was acquired from Jesuits owning a palace outside Rome in 1912 by an antiquarian styling himself W M Voynich. It is an illustrated manuscript, possibly some kind of herbal, and has been dated around 1400-1500. The thing is, this manuscript is written in a script that is unlike any other known, and despite hard work by people who are really good at codes, it has never been cracked.
I read about this on the BBC: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-env...
The Voynich manuscript is now on my PC, in my adobe digital editions package, and there is a long thread of what it is about from those who think they’ve figured it out. It seems “translators” have rendered it as the history of the Czech land, in Macedonian, some other language the first five books of the New Testament, etc…the best, in the quick squiz I had was that it was a herbal by a disciple of or himself, Paracelsus, written in a code to discourage the unworthy (the authorities too!).
But that is not all! The thick plottens!* The Voynich concerned was a Pole whose real name was Michał Habdank-Wojnicz, and who married an Irish woman named Ethel Lilian Boole. As E L Voynich she wrote one of the allegedly great revolutionary novels, The Gadfly. R Bruce Lockhart, a man for whom the truth was ever elastic, reckoned the hero of the novel was based on the early career of Sidney Reilly (“Ace of Spies”) who had an affair with Ethel in Italy and told her his story as a revolutionary would, especially if he was keen to get her into bed.
Before meeting Ethel, W M Voynich was a revolutionary in Poland, then part of the Russian empire. His wealthy family did not prevent his being sent to Siberia for his role in a plot to free two other revolutionaries in 1886. The plot failed, they were executed, and Voynich managed to escape from Siberia and do a runner to safety, washing up in London.
The rest may or may not be history. Voynich ran into Ethel, they got married, she wrote The Gadfly which made pots of dough, and he stopped being a revolutionary and settled down as an antiquarian bookseller with shops in London and New York. The couple apparently moved to New York where he died in 1930 while she carried on till the 1960s, dying at the tender age of 96.
Now, all of that is safely lodged in my PC or easily cribbed from the net, and what I say is that put together, it is pretty amazing. Here I sit, quite a long way from anywhere, and I can not only find all this stuff out, but if I want to, I can have a crack at deciphering this manuscript myself, as anyone else can who cares to have a go.
Or, I can put the whole lot into my literary pipe, smoke it, and see if there is a story, or a novel, or part of one, lurking in there…there may be you know?
Thanks for reading.
* I have seen a quarto of a Shakespeare play, in a display case in a gallery/museum in Edinburgh, Scotland. It looked very much like a rudimentary Penguin paperback.
** I am congratulating Spooner on being who he was.
June 19, 2013
It's Kaos
The first post of this blog was written just on a year ago, and at that time I was already working on my novel, Kaos. Since then quite a lot has gone on in my miserable excuse for an existence, including working for the man for eight or nine months. But now that’s done, and so is Kaos.
Or I hope so. I have finished what I hope is the final run-through, and sent it off to the artist and formatter to have the things done to it that it needs to have done before it can join its siblings on the net.
Of course I want it to be the book I had in mind when I started, and when I finished. I want it to be good too, and it certainly would be a wonderful thing if it ah “went viral” and had millions of readers, who would of course then go on to read my other books.
Is this likely to happen? Sadly, no.
Will it stop me from writing? No.
From go to whoa as New Zealanders say, Kaos has taken longer to write than any of my other books. That’s not entirely true in the sense that Evilheart, my second novel and the first to grace the public eye, took a year to write and was revised a number of times later on, the last time just before it went up onto the net as an e-book. Evilheart was however written before e-books existed so the revisions don’t count, at least to me.
To my mind Kaos is my best book, so far. The writing is better, the plot is quite interesting, and the weak parts – which exist in any book of any sort according to me – are not much to worry about. My last run-through was a “read aloud” version and I found myself admiring some of the prose. Amazing! My own stuff! Good! Wow!
Good writing is only part of what makes a good book, and may even stand in the way of certain kinds of books being good. Readers may think otherwise, but a “rattling good yarn” matters more, and rattling good yarns come not from good writing but good plotting. Many best-selling writers write very poorly, awkwardly, very far from stylishly, yet their books sell in the millions. Dan Brown is only the latest of a very shall we say distinguished line of rattling good yarn spinners whose writing is weak. One reviewer said of his latest effort, Inferno, that the writing was much improved but that it was his worst book so far!
Writers like Dan Brown, who provide “rattling good yarns” composed of poor prose dominate fiction. Recently the village where I live in New Zealand held its annual book sale. There were some great writers represented – Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy. But their offerings were miniscule next to the Dan Browns, and their ilk…yards of Dan and Stephen King and Wilbur Smith compared with a few WS plays, one Fyodor novel (Brothers Karamazov in its least good translation), one copy of War and Peace.
What this says to me is that most readers are not interested in “good writing”. They want “good reading”. They are the punters too, the ones who pay, and they are quite entitled to want what they want. My aim as a writer has been to give them what they want, while also giving them some “good writing”, and beyond that, some intellectual, “serious” extras that usually don’t come wrapped up in the thriller genre where so far I have worked. One of my few mantras about my aim is that I have a “serious purpose in a frivolous genre”, that I would like the “goodness” in my work to go down easy with readers who are there for the good read, but also to have something to reward the serious reader.
Does Kaos do that? I want it to. Shakespeare did it. Nowadays people think him too elevated to read, or to go see on stage, but the reality is that he was competing not only with other playwrights but with bear-baiting! He had to do the job, to get the “groundlings” to pay to catch his stuff. Shakespeare was not, that is to say, writing for the upper crust, or not for them alone. He wanted to appeal from the top to the bottom of society, and he did.
Of course I am not Shakespeare, but my aim is not that far removed from his. I would like to write books that stay in the mind, that are more than a “good read”. But they have to be a good read first, one that leaves no bodice unripped, no dagger unplunged, no corpse deodorised*. Titus Andronicus fed a woman’s children to her in a pie.I have yet to contrive a story that allows for that. Kaos however has its own “out there” elements, and I hope readers find them compelling and go beyond that to find the “message” interesting.
If you have got this far, thanks for reading.
*But if I write a zombie novel, undead!
Or I hope so. I have finished what I hope is the final run-through, and sent it off to the artist and formatter to have the things done to it that it needs to have done before it can join its siblings on the net.
Of course I want it to be the book I had in mind when I started, and when I finished. I want it to be good too, and it certainly would be a wonderful thing if it ah “went viral” and had millions of readers, who would of course then go on to read my other books.
Is this likely to happen? Sadly, no.
Will it stop me from writing? No.
From go to whoa as New Zealanders say, Kaos has taken longer to write than any of my other books. That’s not entirely true in the sense that Evilheart, my second novel and the first to grace the public eye, took a year to write and was revised a number of times later on, the last time just before it went up onto the net as an e-book. Evilheart was however written before e-books existed so the revisions don’t count, at least to me.
To my mind Kaos is my best book, so far. The writing is better, the plot is quite interesting, and the weak parts – which exist in any book of any sort according to me – are not much to worry about. My last run-through was a “read aloud” version and I found myself admiring some of the prose. Amazing! My own stuff! Good! Wow!
Good writing is only part of what makes a good book, and may even stand in the way of certain kinds of books being good. Readers may think otherwise, but a “rattling good yarn” matters more, and rattling good yarns come not from good writing but good plotting. Many best-selling writers write very poorly, awkwardly, very far from stylishly, yet their books sell in the millions. Dan Brown is only the latest of a very shall we say distinguished line of rattling good yarn spinners whose writing is weak. One reviewer said of his latest effort, Inferno, that the writing was much improved but that it was his worst book so far!
Writers like Dan Brown, who provide “rattling good yarns” composed of poor prose dominate fiction. Recently the village where I live in New Zealand held its annual book sale. There were some great writers represented – Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy. But their offerings were miniscule next to the Dan Browns, and their ilk…yards of Dan and Stephen King and Wilbur Smith compared with a few WS plays, one Fyodor novel (Brothers Karamazov in its least good translation), one copy of War and Peace.
What this says to me is that most readers are not interested in “good writing”. They want “good reading”. They are the punters too, the ones who pay, and they are quite entitled to want what they want. My aim as a writer has been to give them what they want, while also giving them some “good writing”, and beyond that, some intellectual, “serious” extras that usually don’t come wrapped up in the thriller genre where so far I have worked. One of my few mantras about my aim is that I have a “serious purpose in a frivolous genre”, that I would like the “goodness” in my work to go down easy with readers who are there for the good read, but also to have something to reward the serious reader.
Does Kaos do that? I want it to. Shakespeare did it. Nowadays people think him too elevated to read, or to go see on stage, but the reality is that he was competing not only with other playwrights but with bear-baiting! He had to do the job, to get the “groundlings” to pay to catch his stuff. Shakespeare was not, that is to say, writing for the upper crust, or not for them alone. He wanted to appeal from the top to the bottom of society, and he did.
Of course I am not Shakespeare, but my aim is not that far removed from his. I would like to write books that stay in the mind, that are more than a “good read”. But they have to be a good read first, one that leaves no bodice unripped, no dagger unplunged, no corpse deodorised*. Titus Andronicus fed a woman’s children to her in a pie.I have yet to contrive a story that allows for that. Kaos however has its own “out there” elements, and I hope readers find them compelling and go beyond that to find the “message” interesting.
If you have got this far, thanks for reading.
*But if I write a zombie novel, undead!
June 6, 2013
RIP Tom Sharpe
Not too long ago (October last year) I wrote a post about wit, and mentioned Tom Sharpe, the English satirist who savaged the apartheid regime in South Africa and went on to spray hilarious vitriol on British society, along with whatever else caught his sardonic eye.
Sharpe has died in Spain, aged 85. The village where I live in the one-time outpost of empire that is New Zealand is having a book fair this weekend, and while I was helping to sort through the piles, I came across two of his novels, Riotous Assembly and Blott on the Landscape. I'll be sure to pick them up if I can.
RIP Tom Sharpe
Sharpe has died in Spain, aged 85. The village where I live in the one-time outpost of empire that is New Zealand is having a book fair this weekend, and while I was helping to sort through the piles, I came across two of his novels, Riotous Assembly and Blott on the Landscape. I'll be sure to pick them up if I can.
RIP Tom Sharpe
May 16, 2013
Tragic circumstances part 94b
Dear reader -
Have you ever tried typing with your elbows? This is what happens when writers “finish” something and put it out for criticism by specially nominated “readers” who are typically very busy people, caught up in the whirl of daily life: earning, spending, loving, hating, all that stuff. These readers may be writers themselves trying to keep their minds on what they’re working on. Others may be struggling to keep their heads above water and if the work in question is fiction, don’t have time for make believe, or if it’s not, don’t have time for another world, however real it may be.
So a writer who has put a work out into this strange half-lit limbo world – sometimes called “beta” but which might just as appropriately be termed “waita” – waiting for the word, starts at the fingernails, and in a little while, is down to the wrists and then, nibble by nibble, pacing the floor or the yard or the cosmos, arrives at the elbows. Even the most confident writer occasionally gets a feeling for this, banging away at the keyboard, splashing splodges of letters and painfully, carefully removing the unwanted ones, while she or he waits and waits and waits…
As you are certainly by now aware, that is the place I am living in. This post is metaphorically hammered out using my elbows as I await the judgment of two readers on my latest epic, Kaos.
The reason the opinion of good readers matters, to any writer, is that however hard a writer tries, it is impossible to get “outside” one’s work enough to have a totally objective view of it. There are ways to approach objectivity, including if necessary simply putting a work away for a lengthy period and coming back at it “cold”, but none I know of really does the job. The trouble is, the writer knows what comes next, and knowing that sucks tension away.
This is to the writer’s advantage. What seems dull after forty or fifty runs-through simply can’t be as dull on first reading. But there are other problems with familiarity that are not so kind and that repeated readings may not pick up, from ill-constructed sentences with clauses rubbing each other the wrong way, to paragraphs whose sentences similarly need reordering, to blatant nonsense, and beyond: none of this may be present in a manuscript, yet it can nonetheless be boring as.
Kaos is not quite finished in the “tweaking” sense, but is near. It’s taken me a while to write – the first instalment of this blog talks about it, and it wasn’t new then – and its title is appropriate for how my life seems to run.
But I am not sure about it, not sure if this book is any good at all, if it is worth tweaking. Normally I am quite excited when I finish a book, and think it is much better than it turns out to be in the eyes of other beholders. This time – I don’t know. Certainly I get tingles in many places, and there are times when I see some bit of description or action and sit back gobsmacked – “I wrote that! Really! Wow!” But there are other times when I think, “I am too much ‘inside’ of this book to judge it at all as a whole.” It doesn’t mean I think it is necessarily bad but that I just don’t know. The advice I give to other writers, to have a reader on the shoulder, is all too apposite for me. But while I’ve tried to do this, and know that at least every sentence really does make sense, and that the book has a beginning, a middle and an end and moreover, that all relate to each other – whether it’s a bore or not eludes me, so far.
I do think that in a few spots it gets bogged down, and if my readers approve of it, in successive reads I’ll smooth these over so readers can avoid this swamp, but these are not vital and can be fixed, I think, with a bit of glue and tissue paper – or bog roll.
Kaos follows the mantra I’ve kept at since I first started out as a novelist: “a serious purpose in a frivolous genre”. Of course I would like every single person on the planet to read my books, but if that can’t be so – and very, very grudgingly, under extreme pressure, I may admit it – then it would be great if thriller lovers the world over tore through my pages, and that many of them got something out of them beyond use as emergency loo paper: fun, a “good reading experience”, and something more, some insight or other that they didn’t have about life, the universe and ablosutely everything in it.
Compared to The Russian Idea, my previous book in writing terms, I have peeled back the philosophy, if it can be called that. But I think about every writer’s nightmare and envy, Dan Brown, whose new book, Inferno, was already satirised before it hit the shops. He could be said to have a serious purpose in a frivolous genre too, and his books sell and sell and sell.
It is very easy to laugh at Dan Brown, so people do, and that includes me. Michael Deacon of the Telegraph did a pre-release send-up of him that is a scream. But some of that laughter, when it comes from writers or would be writers, is based on envy. Well, I’m not envious of his success – whether he deserves it or not, he’s got it. But I wouldn’t mind also…even if I, also, don’t deserve it. Life is just inherently unfair. And it may be that sometimes people who don’t deserve something good that they get for one reason, do deserve something good for some other reason. Dan Brown for example may be a very nice chap who has always been a nice chap, and who has given away lots of money even when he didn’t have much, who helped his neighbours when they were skint and who has always had an eye out for cats up trees and little old ladies who can’t see properly trying to navigate their ways across busy roads.
For just such a person there was a 1950s American television programme, The Millionaire*, about a philanthropist who picked out the otherwise invisible worthies and gave them a million dollars each. “My name is Michael Anthony and I’m here to give you a million dollars” his man would say to the disbelieving beneficiary. J Beresford Tipton, the philanthropist, is sadly not a real person. I would like to emulate him nonetheless, and if the enabling gains are undeserved, well, what goes around etc.
Meanwhile I am waiting for my test audience to come back to me, to say yea or nay. Do I detect “Nay”? Maybe…but it’s a good story, so if they don’t like it, I can have another slash at making it better. If I have to do it, I can just drop it for now, go on to something new, and go back to it later, when I have got some “distance”.
Those of you with a cruel turn of mind may wonder why I have stopped at my elbows. Why not typing with one’s shoulders? Ultimately,with the nose, and when that’s not available, the earlobe? The totally cruel may ask if I wrote Kaos with another part of my anatomy.
I’m not telling.
Thanks for reading.
* See Wiki for details.
Have you ever tried typing with your elbows? This is what happens when writers “finish” something and put it out for criticism by specially nominated “readers” who are typically very busy people, caught up in the whirl of daily life: earning, spending, loving, hating, all that stuff. These readers may be writers themselves trying to keep their minds on what they’re working on. Others may be struggling to keep their heads above water and if the work in question is fiction, don’t have time for make believe, or if it’s not, don’t have time for another world, however real it may be.
So a writer who has put a work out into this strange half-lit limbo world – sometimes called “beta” but which might just as appropriately be termed “waita” – waiting for the word, starts at the fingernails, and in a little while, is down to the wrists and then, nibble by nibble, pacing the floor or the yard or the cosmos, arrives at the elbows. Even the most confident writer occasionally gets a feeling for this, banging away at the keyboard, splashing splodges of letters and painfully, carefully removing the unwanted ones, while she or he waits and waits and waits…
As you are certainly by now aware, that is the place I am living in. This post is metaphorically hammered out using my elbows as I await the judgment of two readers on my latest epic, Kaos.
The reason the opinion of good readers matters, to any writer, is that however hard a writer tries, it is impossible to get “outside” one’s work enough to have a totally objective view of it. There are ways to approach objectivity, including if necessary simply putting a work away for a lengthy period and coming back at it “cold”, but none I know of really does the job. The trouble is, the writer knows what comes next, and knowing that sucks tension away.
This is to the writer’s advantage. What seems dull after forty or fifty runs-through simply can’t be as dull on first reading. But there are other problems with familiarity that are not so kind and that repeated readings may not pick up, from ill-constructed sentences with clauses rubbing each other the wrong way, to paragraphs whose sentences similarly need reordering, to blatant nonsense, and beyond: none of this may be present in a manuscript, yet it can nonetheless be boring as.
Kaos is not quite finished in the “tweaking” sense, but is near. It’s taken me a while to write – the first instalment of this blog talks about it, and it wasn’t new then – and its title is appropriate for how my life seems to run.
But I am not sure about it, not sure if this book is any good at all, if it is worth tweaking. Normally I am quite excited when I finish a book, and think it is much better than it turns out to be in the eyes of other beholders. This time – I don’t know. Certainly I get tingles in many places, and there are times when I see some bit of description or action and sit back gobsmacked – “I wrote that! Really! Wow!” But there are other times when I think, “I am too much ‘inside’ of this book to judge it at all as a whole.” It doesn’t mean I think it is necessarily bad but that I just don’t know. The advice I give to other writers, to have a reader on the shoulder, is all too apposite for me. But while I’ve tried to do this, and know that at least every sentence really does make sense, and that the book has a beginning, a middle and an end and moreover, that all relate to each other – whether it’s a bore or not eludes me, so far.
I do think that in a few spots it gets bogged down, and if my readers approve of it, in successive reads I’ll smooth these over so readers can avoid this swamp, but these are not vital and can be fixed, I think, with a bit of glue and tissue paper – or bog roll.
Kaos follows the mantra I’ve kept at since I first started out as a novelist: “a serious purpose in a frivolous genre”. Of course I would like every single person on the planet to read my books, but if that can’t be so – and very, very grudgingly, under extreme pressure, I may admit it – then it would be great if thriller lovers the world over tore through my pages, and that many of them got something out of them beyond use as emergency loo paper: fun, a “good reading experience”, and something more, some insight or other that they didn’t have about life, the universe and ablosutely everything in it.
Compared to The Russian Idea, my previous book in writing terms, I have peeled back the philosophy, if it can be called that. But I think about every writer’s nightmare and envy, Dan Brown, whose new book, Inferno, was already satirised before it hit the shops. He could be said to have a serious purpose in a frivolous genre too, and his books sell and sell and sell.
It is very easy to laugh at Dan Brown, so people do, and that includes me. Michael Deacon of the Telegraph did a pre-release send-up of him that is a scream. But some of that laughter, when it comes from writers or would be writers, is based on envy. Well, I’m not envious of his success – whether he deserves it or not, he’s got it. But I wouldn’t mind also…even if I, also, don’t deserve it. Life is just inherently unfair. And it may be that sometimes people who don’t deserve something good that they get for one reason, do deserve something good for some other reason. Dan Brown for example may be a very nice chap who has always been a nice chap, and who has given away lots of money even when he didn’t have much, who helped his neighbours when they were skint and who has always had an eye out for cats up trees and little old ladies who can’t see properly trying to navigate their ways across busy roads.
For just such a person there was a 1950s American television programme, The Millionaire*, about a philanthropist who picked out the otherwise invisible worthies and gave them a million dollars each. “My name is Michael Anthony and I’m here to give you a million dollars” his man would say to the disbelieving beneficiary. J Beresford Tipton, the philanthropist, is sadly not a real person. I would like to emulate him nonetheless, and if the enabling gains are undeserved, well, what goes around etc.
Meanwhile I am waiting for my test audience to come back to me, to say yea or nay. Do I detect “Nay”? Maybe…but it’s a good story, so if they don’t like it, I can have another slash at making it better. If I have to do it, I can just drop it for now, go on to something new, and go back to it later, when I have got some “distance”.
Those of you with a cruel turn of mind may wonder why I have stopped at my elbows. Why not typing with one’s shoulders? Ultimately,with the nose, and when that’s not available, the earlobe? The totally cruel may ask if I wrote Kaos with another part of my anatomy.
I’m not telling.
Thanks for reading.
* See Wiki for details.
April 1, 2013
Serial killer
This is a dilemma some authors might er, die for: whether to transform a novel originally meant to be a one-off into a series. Having now published a number of one-off novels in the “indie” line on-line, and working on a new one, it has occurred to me that this one might turn itself into a multi-parter.
I’ve had this inclination in the past. Savonarola’s Bones, a romp of a certain sort, has periodically cropped up in my consciousness as a possible part one, and I’ve even toyed with an introduction to the sequel. I may do it yet.
What makes me think more of this now is Joleene Naylor. She is the author of a kind of genre fiction that normally I would never bother with: “vampire lit”. Till I read some of her books in what is called “beta” – apparently some pre-publication version put out to friends/enemies/passersby for a response before tidying it up as a “finished product” – the only vampire novel I had ever read was Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Several “beta” novels in the Amaranthine series later, I know that my contempt for the contemporary dress of this genre (teenage junk lit, inevitably superficial, unendingly boring, without literary, moral, or intellectual merit) was just prejudice on my part. Moreover this is but a reminder of an argument I put in an essay many years ago, and that forms the basis of my own genre writing:any genre can be the occasion of literary merit. In the case of Joleene Naylor, as she has gone along her series has improved as writing, and it has always had a serious purpose.
Nor is there anything unliterary about a series. Many English novelists with shall we say advanced reputations wrote them. Dostoevsky was toying with extending his last finished work, The Brothers Karamazov with a second part. Shakespeare, my model for many aspects of writing, did an eight part play cycle – King John, Henry IV parts one and two, Henry V, Henry VI one two and three, and Richard III. I have seen an argument that this greatest of all writers actually conceived this cycle, and worked out all its ins and outs, from the first.
Actually I find this hard to believe. But who am I?
There are of course “series, and series”. Some writers use a hero or heroine whose exploits and problems consume book after book. This is not quite the same thing but nonetheless there is a link there that allows for development both of character and plot. It is a motif of thriller writers whose principal character or characters is in a sense “the story”. Yes, Sherlock Holmes. Later, Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe was a model for this type of series, and spun off many similar characters (Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer, Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer, perhaps most significantly the unnamed protagonist of the first few espionage thrillers by Len Deighton). The plots could be unrelated to one another because the hero was the same hero, but they could have loose or very close connections. It’s a popular wheeze today.
Putting that aside the full-blown series is an epic and takes quite a bit of doing seems to me. Joleene Naylor so far has five parts plus a “prequel” in her Amaranthine series and for those reading this who are not writers, to keep this logical and interesting and relevant is not at all easy. If there is a pot of gold at the end as there should be, all the twists and turns getting to it should add up to something, not just be bumper cars at a literary fairground, banging about haphazardly on the track till at some point time is up.
The promise of a second part to some of my own work, including the present one, is comprised of loose ends. I like loose ends, or at least ends that are not spelled out exactly. There are things that may look like something that isn’t resolved in the existing writing, that I decided to leave unresolved, or perhaps “full of promise” – I like the idea that my books become the readers’ books too, that they engage with the stories and where things are not specified, spelt out just so, colour them in with their own private palettes of the mind. Yet these can prompt another book, and then another…as the loose ends unravel at another end…and if there is still a loose end, another one…and then another one…all of the plot elements remain relevant by necessity. Yet I’m not sure I’m made of the right stuff to do that.
With Kaos, the book I am working on now, I finished the “body proper” of the first draft and was working on a sort of coda when I began writing this post. This coda shuffled into my consciousness as perhaps something that might be quite long by my standards – a part two of the novel, or the second part, that could lead to a series! That may yet come. But for now, I finished the coda off at 10,000 words, knowing that more words are going to spin out of what is there. But I’d like to rewrite the whole thing, so am going to do that and call it a second draft, or even a reworking and a first draft.
So nope, it’s another one-off. So far.
Thanks for reading.
I’ve had this inclination in the past. Savonarola’s Bones, a romp of a certain sort, has periodically cropped up in my consciousness as a possible part one, and I’ve even toyed with an introduction to the sequel. I may do it yet.
What makes me think more of this now is Joleene Naylor. She is the author of a kind of genre fiction that normally I would never bother with: “vampire lit”. Till I read some of her books in what is called “beta” – apparently some pre-publication version put out to friends/enemies/passersby for a response before tidying it up as a “finished product” – the only vampire novel I had ever read was Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Several “beta” novels in the Amaranthine series later, I know that my contempt for the contemporary dress of this genre (teenage junk lit, inevitably superficial, unendingly boring, without literary, moral, or intellectual merit) was just prejudice on my part. Moreover this is but a reminder of an argument I put in an essay many years ago, and that forms the basis of my own genre writing:any genre can be the occasion of literary merit. In the case of Joleene Naylor, as she has gone along her series has improved as writing, and it has always had a serious purpose.
Nor is there anything unliterary about a series. Many English novelists with shall we say advanced reputations wrote them. Dostoevsky was toying with extending his last finished work, The Brothers Karamazov with a second part. Shakespeare, my model for many aspects of writing, did an eight part play cycle – King John, Henry IV parts one and two, Henry V, Henry VI one two and three, and Richard III. I have seen an argument that this greatest of all writers actually conceived this cycle, and worked out all its ins and outs, from the first.
Actually I find this hard to believe. But who am I?
There are of course “series, and series”. Some writers use a hero or heroine whose exploits and problems consume book after book. This is not quite the same thing but nonetheless there is a link there that allows for development both of character and plot. It is a motif of thriller writers whose principal character or characters is in a sense “the story”. Yes, Sherlock Holmes. Later, Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe was a model for this type of series, and spun off many similar characters (Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer, Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer, perhaps most significantly the unnamed protagonist of the first few espionage thrillers by Len Deighton). The plots could be unrelated to one another because the hero was the same hero, but they could have loose or very close connections. It’s a popular wheeze today.
Putting that aside the full-blown series is an epic and takes quite a bit of doing seems to me. Joleene Naylor so far has five parts plus a “prequel” in her Amaranthine series and for those reading this who are not writers, to keep this logical and interesting and relevant is not at all easy. If there is a pot of gold at the end as there should be, all the twists and turns getting to it should add up to something, not just be bumper cars at a literary fairground, banging about haphazardly on the track till at some point time is up.
The promise of a second part to some of my own work, including the present one, is comprised of loose ends. I like loose ends, or at least ends that are not spelled out exactly. There are things that may look like something that isn’t resolved in the existing writing, that I decided to leave unresolved, or perhaps “full of promise” – I like the idea that my books become the readers’ books too, that they engage with the stories and where things are not specified, spelt out just so, colour them in with their own private palettes of the mind. Yet these can prompt another book, and then another…as the loose ends unravel at another end…and if there is still a loose end, another one…and then another one…all of the plot elements remain relevant by necessity. Yet I’m not sure I’m made of the right stuff to do that.
With Kaos, the book I am working on now, I finished the “body proper” of the first draft and was working on a sort of coda when I began writing this post. This coda shuffled into my consciousness as perhaps something that might be quite long by my standards – a part two of the novel, or the second part, that could lead to a series! That may yet come. But for now, I finished the coda off at 10,000 words, knowing that more words are going to spin out of what is there. But I’d like to rewrite the whole thing, so am going to do that and call it a second draft, or even a reworking and a first draft.
So nope, it’s another one-off. So far.
Thanks for reading.
March 13, 2013
New! Improved! Added enzymes!
Recently I changed the title of this blog. It's the same blog, with all the same posts. The original title was given to me by a friend, but I never really liked it, not because it was "bad" but because it "wasn't me". The new one - I'm not sure and will let it sink in for a while before I decide that it's "really me". And if it isn't, I'll change it again. The blog isn't actually about me, but about writing and my attitudes towards writing, so the difference is how I feel about how close to what I'm on about the title manages to be. The new one is meant to suggest that the world of writing is not the world, that when we write, we create a world unlike the world as it really is - even though we are hoping, I think, to penetrate the real world, to reflect it perhaps, to read our written work into it and even to change it, through the creations of our imaginations.This is as true of non-fiction as fiction; in terms of me, of this blog as of my novels.
Nikolai Berdyaev, whose thinking led to my novel The Russian Idea, might have approved of this. One of his books was called The Meaning of the Creative Act, but he emphasised this point in a lot of his writings, in different ways.
Cynics might say that this is all too typical of the fantasist masquerading as a writer, and there is more truth in this than many writers might like to admit. Writers are by definition intellectuals, even if they are undisciplined and incoherent - they are after all living the life of the mind. Perhaps intellectuals in general as well as writers hold dear the illusion that their mental gymnastics can somehow change the world for the better. Certainly writers are often found in this territory. Norman Mailer, for example, tried for many years to bring his stature as a writer to bear on a more general public life. He announced his willingness to be President of the United States and campaigned as I recall for other public offices, though with how much seriousness is perhaps open to dispute.
But Mailer was far from alone. Upton Sinclair, an earlier American writer who wrote social realist novels (one, Oil, was made into the film There will be blood, but an earlier and very successful novel The Jungle was about meat packing, and he could claim to have changed the law relating to food hygiene), ran for office over and over, and once gained nearly 900,000 votes in a California election for governor.
Dostoevsky had what in his time was the equivalent of a blog, A writer's diary, meant to be a monthly excursion for readers through the mind of this amazing man. It ran on and off during the 1870s, and he gave it up to write The Brothers Karamazov. Like most people, he wasn't planning to die, and aimed to return to it, just as he aimed to carry the Karamazov family into further adventures.
The English-language edition - an abridgement with about half the total content - makes more than great claims for the Writer's diary, crediting Dostoevsky with looking so far ahead in intellectual trends that he could discern, a century ahead of his own life, the emergence of post-modernism. The diary was a "project" as the posties say these days, and it had intellectual pretensions in this line that may very well have astonished the writer.
Shorn of its poseur baggage, however, the editor has some very good points to make, and any English-speaking person interested in Dostoevsky who is not a Russian language expert can only be grateful that this edition exists. Dostoevsky becomes, through its pages, a much more rounded, more intelligible, and more intelligent human being than he would otherwise be.
Dostoevsky was engaged with the world, and the "diary" shows it. A woman threw her stepdaughter out of a window and Dostoevsky had some idea that he understood this in a way that should see the woman freed. He went to see her, intervened and in the end she was reunited with her husband though the stepdaughter, who had survived the incident, did not live with the family.
More significantly, Dostoevsky used the platform of his magazine for political aims. He saw his writing, as Mailer and Sinclair saw theirs, as a platform for politics. That's not all he saw it as, but the same idea remains: that a writer through writing reaches from the life of her or his mind to the minds of others, and through that to meaningful action to change the world in a larger, grander, more social and political sense.
Dostoevsky had some pretty strange notions in this regard and it is fascinating to discern in the diary some of the threads that he could not be open about: he was a Christian socialist, and sought to marry two very antagonistic schools of thought about the future of Russia: the materialist, quasi-Marxian industrial-development and internationalist movement and the mystical, religious, Orthodox and inward movement. He consorted with the Russian royal family (this is not made clear in the diary) as he urged his readers to talk across the dividing lines of their political precepts.
Today we might call this foolish. It may have even actually been foolish at the time. But there is certainly something noble in Dostoevsky's wishing his profound insight into the human condition to spread outward to transform our relations with one another that might enrich us all materially as well as spiritually.
Noble or not, the writer's conceit that the mere fact of having a public face through one's writing earns a purchase on a wider public interest, as Mailer, Sinclair and their ilk insisted, is not necessarily a pretty one. Dostoevsky purchased his right to his views the hard way: long years in prison, opprobrium for other aspects of his life, and a willingness to be "out there" rather than "up there". He didn't demand respect. He earned it, even or especially in his craziest moments.
This week I finished the first draft of the bulk of my new book, Kaos. It will be a long time before it appears in print, as I am far from happy about a lot of it, and in addition have a tail-piece and perhaps a prologue to write too. It's not especially long - 63,000 words, a short novel as it stands. It will grow, but hopefully remain short.
Is it political in the broad, Dostoevskian sense? Do I hope to reach across the divide between reader and writer and spur some personal transformations that will in the end lead to larger, more generalised changes? Of course.
Thanks for reading.
Nikolai Berdyaev, whose thinking led to my novel The Russian Idea, might have approved of this. One of his books was called The Meaning of the Creative Act, but he emphasised this point in a lot of his writings, in different ways.
Cynics might say that this is all too typical of the fantasist masquerading as a writer, and there is more truth in this than many writers might like to admit. Writers are by definition intellectuals, even if they are undisciplined and incoherent - they are after all living the life of the mind. Perhaps intellectuals in general as well as writers hold dear the illusion that their mental gymnastics can somehow change the world for the better. Certainly writers are often found in this territory. Norman Mailer, for example, tried for many years to bring his stature as a writer to bear on a more general public life. He announced his willingness to be President of the United States and campaigned as I recall for other public offices, though with how much seriousness is perhaps open to dispute.
But Mailer was far from alone. Upton Sinclair, an earlier American writer who wrote social realist novels (one, Oil, was made into the film There will be blood, but an earlier and very successful novel The Jungle was about meat packing, and he could claim to have changed the law relating to food hygiene), ran for office over and over, and once gained nearly 900,000 votes in a California election for governor.
Dostoevsky had what in his time was the equivalent of a blog, A writer's diary, meant to be a monthly excursion for readers through the mind of this amazing man. It ran on and off during the 1870s, and he gave it up to write The Brothers Karamazov. Like most people, he wasn't planning to die, and aimed to return to it, just as he aimed to carry the Karamazov family into further adventures.
The English-language edition - an abridgement with about half the total content - makes more than great claims for the Writer's diary, crediting Dostoevsky with looking so far ahead in intellectual trends that he could discern, a century ahead of his own life, the emergence of post-modernism. The diary was a "project" as the posties say these days, and it had intellectual pretensions in this line that may very well have astonished the writer.
Shorn of its poseur baggage, however, the editor has some very good points to make, and any English-speaking person interested in Dostoevsky who is not a Russian language expert can only be grateful that this edition exists. Dostoevsky becomes, through its pages, a much more rounded, more intelligible, and more intelligent human being than he would otherwise be.
Dostoevsky was engaged with the world, and the "diary" shows it. A woman threw her stepdaughter out of a window and Dostoevsky had some idea that he understood this in a way that should see the woman freed. He went to see her, intervened and in the end she was reunited with her husband though the stepdaughter, who had survived the incident, did not live with the family.
More significantly, Dostoevsky used the platform of his magazine for political aims. He saw his writing, as Mailer and Sinclair saw theirs, as a platform for politics. That's not all he saw it as, but the same idea remains: that a writer through writing reaches from the life of her or his mind to the minds of others, and through that to meaningful action to change the world in a larger, grander, more social and political sense.
Dostoevsky had some pretty strange notions in this regard and it is fascinating to discern in the diary some of the threads that he could not be open about: he was a Christian socialist, and sought to marry two very antagonistic schools of thought about the future of Russia: the materialist, quasi-Marxian industrial-development and internationalist movement and the mystical, religious, Orthodox and inward movement. He consorted with the Russian royal family (this is not made clear in the diary) as he urged his readers to talk across the dividing lines of their political precepts.
Today we might call this foolish. It may have even actually been foolish at the time. But there is certainly something noble in Dostoevsky's wishing his profound insight into the human condition to spread outward to transform our relations with one another that might enrich us all materially as well as spiritually.
Noble or not, the writer's conceit that the mere fact of having a public face through one's writing earns a purchase on a wider public interest, as Mailer, Sinclair and their ilk insisted, is not necessarily a pretty one. Dostoevsky purchased his right to his views the hard way: long years in prison, opprobrium for other aspects of his life, and a willingness to be "out there" rather than "up there". He didn't demand respect. He earned it, even or especially in his craziest moments.
This week I finished the first draft of the bulk of my new book, Kaos. It will be a long time before it appears in print, as I am far from happy about a lot of it, and in addition have a tail-piece and perhaps a prologue to write too. It's not especially long - 63,000 words, a short novel as it stands. It will grow, but hopefully remain short.
Is it political in the broad, Dostoevskian sense? Do I hope to reach across the divide between reader and writer and spur some personal transformations that will in the end lead to larger, more generalised changes? Of course.
Thanks for reading.
March 8, 2013
Eusebius lashes out
Devoted readers may remember my next to last post, on Apollonius of Tyana and the biography of him written by Philostratus of Athens, as it was translated in a parallel text edition in three volumes.
The first two volumes were devoted to the biography, written a few centuries after Apollonius’ death, always assuming he was a real person. As readers of the post on this may remember, I was pretty disappointed by the failure of the biography to reveal much about philosophy though it had its moments, and had other sorts of interest.
The third and final volume is much different. It consists of letters by the great man, “testimonia” – writings about him, which often were mere scraps, asides in works about something else – ending with a scathing attack both on Apollonius and Philostratus by one Eusebius. This concluding section is by far the longest and also the most interesting of the volume.
Eusebius was unknown to me, ignorant alleged human. It turns out* he was a big deal at the time Christianity got its spurs and began to ride hard over all objectors to become first co-extensive with the Roman Empire, and then to dominate Europe for a very, very long time. This man grew up in Caesarea Maritima, a town in what is now Israel that at the time had a huge population, perhaps has many as 100,000.** He was in the shadow of one of the greatest and most learned of the early Christians, Origen, who settled in the place and whose book collection/library formed the basis of Eusbius’ work. Eusebius himself lived through the great persecutions by Diocletian and his ilk to witness the triumph of Christianity through Constantine’s Edict of Toleration (of Christians) which quickly developed into a toleration of only Christians, and not all of those. He was a trusted adviser of the emperor and more, and wrote a biography of him. He also wrote commentaries on the gospels, a history of the early church, and a gazetteer of the places in the holy scriptures.
To say that Eusebius was combative was a mild way of putting things. Origen, his philosophical mentor – they never met, and he was schooled by a follower of Origen named Pamphilus – was immensely learned, and peppered his writings with references to pagan literature, in particular quotations from Plato. Eusebius too used quotations from the pagans to buttress his arguments, but he went a lot further in pressing his aim of converting the globe to Christian faith. It might be necessary, he wrote, to lie to help them along. It might be useful to pass over the imperfections of the early Christian fathers when discussing their martyrdoms. He was, Burckhardt wrote, “the first thoroughly dishonest historian of antiquity”.
So perhaps it’s not surprising that while Origen retains an honoured place in intellectual history, and Augustine remains well-known beyond the confines of Christian history, Eusebius is largely forgotten in spite of a really, really energetic contribution to church literature.
His attack on Apollonius bears all the hallmarks of a degraded intellect. Some of his arguments are obviously right, while others amount to no more than willful corruption of the intent of Philostratus and/or Apollonius. He was determined to demolish both, and ended up failing to harm either: they did themselves in the eye, while Eusebius left me in the end more sympathetic to Apollonius than I had been when I began his dismissive account.
Eusebius also showed his version of Christianity somewhat at odds with what we think today. He believed, for example, in “familiar demons” and their abilities, and explained Apollonius’ “magic” or “sorcery” as the workings of his familiar demon (check wikipedia out for an explanation of this), managing, to our eyes, to do less than explain anything at all.
Eusebius' intent was dishonest at source. He was attacking something much greater than Apollonius’ alleged sorcery. He was having a go at the pagans who were resisting Christianity, and there were a few of them. As Christianity grew in strength and Christians in number, pagan intellectuals had begun to resist. Porphyry’s attack Against the Christians is the most famous, and after the triumph of Christianity, it was banned. Porphyry had been a student of Plotinus, and had edited his lectures, and had written on his own account texts on logic and other philosophical subjects. Like Plotinus he was a real philosopher, and was so far outside the class of a mediocre intelligence like Eusebius or Philostratus that it would have been impossible for the churchman to have joined him in intellectual combat, so he chose an easy target, but missed: a hunter who sees his quarry in the telescopic sight of his rifle, only to sneeze as he pulls the trigger.
Eusebius is a useful if minor figure in an intellectual landscape teeming with ideas and debate, and dispute. The great tragedy came not long after, when Christians shut down competing philosophical schools, dispersed their libraries, burnt their books, a great group of proto-Nazis. It took nearly a thousand years for the discarded shreds of their victims’ learning to again push out boats into Europe’s intellectual currents.
All the same, reading Philostratus, and Eusebius, and the meagre scraps of others’ writings about the odd fellow named Apollonius was for me quite an adventure, new territory in a continent I have always visited with pleasure and for intellectual profit. Perhaps I should dip into Plotinus again…tough going, good bedtime reading for insomniacs, but persistence repays the effort. Plotinus made an appearance in my second (and first published) novel, Evilheart. He could stop in again.
* Wikipedia is just fine on Eusebius
**The place is almost abandoned now.
The first two volumes were devoted to the biography, written a few centuries after Apollonius’ death, always assuming he was a real person. As readers of the post on this may remember, I was pretty disappointed by the failure of the biography to reveal much about philosophy though it had its moments, and had other sorts of interest.
The third and final volume is much different. It consists of letters by the great man, “testimonia” – writings about him, which often were mere scraps, asides in works about something else – ending with a scathing attack both on Apollonius and Philostratus by one Eusebius. This concluding section is by far the longest and also the most interesting of the volume.
Eusebius was unknown to me, ignorant alleged human. It turns out* he was a big deal at the time Christianity got its spurs and began to ride hard over all objectors to become first co-extensive with the Roman Empire, and then to dominate Europe for a very, very long time. This man grew up in Caesarea Maritima, a town in what is now Israel that at the time had a huge population, perhaps has many as 100,000.** He was in the shadow of one of the greatest and most learned of the early Christians, Origen, who settled in the place and whose book collection/library formed the basis of Eusbius’ work. Eusebius himself lived through the great persecutions by Diocletian and his ilk to witness the triumph of Christianity through Constantine’s Edict of Toleration (of Christians) which quickly developed into a toleration of only Christians, and not all of those. He was a trusted adviser of the emperor and more, and wrote a biography of him. He also wrote commentaries on the gospels, a history of the early church, and a gazetteer of the places in the holy scriptures.
To say that Eusebius was combative was a mild way of putting things. Origen, his philosophical mentor – they never met, and he was schooled by a follower of Origen named Pamphilus – was immensely learned, and peppered his writings with references to pagan literature, in particular quotations from Plato. Eusebius too used quotations from the pagans to buttress his arguments, but he went a lot further in pressing his aim of converting the globe to Christian faith. It might be necessary, he wrote, to lie to help them along. It might be useful to pass over the imperfections of the early Christian fathers when discussing their martyrdoms. He was, Burckhardt wrote, “the first thoroughly dishonest historian of antiquity”.
So perhaps it’s not surprising that while Origen retains an honoured place in intellectual history, and Augustine remains well-known beyond the confines of Christian history, Eusebius is largely forgotten in spite of a really, really energetic contribution to church literature.
His attack on Apollonius bears all the hallmarks of a degraded intellect. Some of his arguments are obviously right, while others amount to no more than willful corruption of the intent of Philostratus and/or Apollonius. He was determined to demolish both, and ended up failing to harm either: they did themselves in the eye, while Eusebius left me in the end more sympathetic to Apollonius than I had been when I began his dismissive account.
Eusebius also showed his version of Christianity somewhat at odds with what we think today. He believed, for example, in “familiar demons” and their abilities, and explained Apollonius’ “magic” or “sorcery” as the workings of his familiar demon (check wikipedia out for an explanation of this), managing, to our eyes, to do less than explain anything at all.
Eusebius' intent was dishonest at source. He was attacking something much greater than Apollonius’ alleged sorcery. He was having a go at the pagans who were resisting Christianity, and there were a few of them. As Christianity grew in strength and Christians in number, pagan intellectuals had begun to resist. Porphyry’s attack Against the Christians is the most famous, and after the triumph of Christianity, it was banned. Porphyry had been a student of Plotinus, and had edited his lectures, and had written on his own account texts on logic and other philosophical subjects. Like Plotinus he was a real philosopher, and was so far outside the class of a mediocre intelligence like Eusebius or Philostratus that it would have been impossible for the churchman to have joined him in intellectual combat, so he chose an easy target, but missed: a hunter who sees his quarry in the telescopic sight of his rifle, only to sneeze as he pulls the trigger.
Eusebius is a useful if minor figure in an intellectual landscape teeming with ideas and debate, and dispute. The great tragedy came not long after, when Christians shut down competing philosophical schools, dispersed their libraries, burnt their books, a great group of proto-Nazis. It took nearly a thousand years for the discarded shreds of their victims’ learning to again push out boats into Europe’s intellectual currents.
All the same, reading Philostratus, and Eusebius, and the meagre scraps of others’ writings about the odd fellow named Apollonius was for me quite an adventure, new territory in a continent I have always visited with pleasure and for intellectual profit. Perhaps I should dip into Plotinus again…tough going, good bedtime reading for insomniacs, but persistence repays the effort. Plotinus made an appearance in my second (and first published) novel, Evilheart. He could stop in again.
* Wikipedia is just fine on Eusebius
**The place is almost abandoned now.
The written world
This blog was originally started "just because" but as I've gone along I've realised how valuable it is to be able to think about writing, about the writers who matter to me, and to help clarify my th
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