Peter Stothard's Blog, page 32

Sui generous

As the newspapers have dutifully reported, a poet won something this week: the poet being David Harsent and the something being the T. S. Eliot Prize. The award gains in piquancy when it is noted, too, that it is fifty years since Eliot’s death (the award, named in his honour and funded by the Eliot Estate, has been going for almost half of that time). The judging panel of three, chaired by Helen Dunmore, chose Harsent’s collection Fire Songs over 112 others, for its “technical brilliance and prophetic power” (how can they be sure about that latter quality, I wonder?). Harsent, apparently, is a poet for “dark and dangerous days”.

Now, taking issue with prizes and prizewinners has about as much point as putting peas back in a pod. For how – so the argument goes – are we to distinguish fair comment from the wails of the envious and the noise of sour grapes being swallowed? And if the prize is one for poetry, for heaven’s sake – well, need we say more? The stakes are so low, the rewards so small, the impact so muffled.

But – actually – they aren’t, or not any more. . . .

Harsent’s latest winnings are a far-from negligible £20,000 – raised this year from a previous £15,000 to “mark” the half-century since Eliot’s death, in the papers’ curious phrase (a form of commemoration that, we are sure, would have delighted the author of The Idea of a Christian Society, also – indirectly – of Cats). And only a couple of years ago the same David Harsent found himself on the receiving end of a cool C$65,000 as winner in the international category of the Griffin Poetry Prizes – the most generous given for poetry in the Western world. Who says lightning – or good fortune – doesn’t strike twice, even in dark and dangerous days?

At a time when, outside the world of little magazines (and with one or two honourable exceptions), the reviewing of poetry is more and more squeezed for space and pushed further and further to the sidelines, the culture of prizes and instant “bankability” will almost certainly have a disproportionate impact on the general reading public. This being so, interested readers will be reassured to know that Harsent, who has been, since 2013, Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Roehampton, has garnered some lofty praise in his progress to his current eminence. Such as the Independent’s review of Fire Songs, from August last year:

"Truly significant poets continue to challenge their readers from book to book. Some – like W. B. Yeats, Czeslaw Milosz and even R. S. Thomas – go on to have 'late great' flowerings. David Harsent may not be at the 'late' stage yet, but with every book his stature as a truly significant writer becomes more undeniable."

Readers of the Independent would not have been surprised to hear this. Only a few years ago, in 2011, they would have learned of Harsent’s stature in a review of his previous collection, Night:

"Truly significant poets write like no one else, and David Harsent is both sui generis and unsurpassed. Taking over where his Forward Prize-winning book Legion left off, Night conducts an examination of the human psyche that is unique in both the unflinchingness of its gaze, and the narrative metaphors it uses to explore dream-life, terror and hidden impulse."

“Truly significant”, here, takes on an unfortunate ring of the circular or self-fulfilling, as in: likely to win big prizes. (For a slightly different take on Night, readers are referred to the TLS’s review, "Grime after grime", July 1, 2011.) Both of these first paragraphs, incidentally, are the work of the same reviewer, Fiona Sampson – and why shouldn’t they be? She used the same paper as a vehicle for praise of that earlier Harsent collection, Legion, and his translations of Yannis Ritsos, so is nothing if not consistent in her views. Sampson, the former editor of Poetry Review, now editor of Poem, and a poet who has herself been praised as “sui generis” by none other than David Harsent, was also, as it happens, one of the judges of the 2014 Eliot Prize. She has also been, since 2013, Professor of Poetry at the University of Roehampton.

Isn’t this the sort of thing a journalist, even an arts journalist, ought to find curious? – that a judge of a poetry competition could read over 100 books and find that the best of them turns out to be the work of a colleague of hers. (Even Roehampton’s own website, in announcing Harsent’s coup, seems to avoid noting the involvement of another member of the faculty, while linking to Sampson’s review of Fire Songs.) Perhaps what we should be celebrating this week is the remarkable power of coincidence? Or the remarkable power of loyal championship, since Sampson was also, in 2012, one of two judges who awarded the Griffin Prize to Harsent for Night, after reading 481 volumes of poets from thirty-seven countries?

Before you jump to conclusions, though, bear in mind that the award of the Eliot Prize does not rest solely with a single critic, or even a single academic department in Roehampton, but is the work of many hands – the Poetry Book Society, who administer the prize, have confirmed that a “clear and unambiguous” verdict was reached in the proper way, with all three judges playing their parts (the third was the poet Sean Borodale). And Sampson’s admiration for Harsent is, as another poetry critic, Jeremy Noel-Tod, reminded me, “clearly very sincere”. “Having reviewed his latest book, Fire Songs, warmly in the Independent”, he points out, “she also made it one of her Books of the Year in the same newspaper.” But, Noel-Tod continued,

"As T. S. Eliot himself said, 'it is part of the business of the critic . . . to see literature steadily and to see it whole', and I would suggest that no critic should endorse one writer too often. There is a danger of becoming so impassioned in advocacy of a particular cause that it loses the authority of objectivity, or even has an inverse effect – just as we sometimes fail to read the book that a friend insists we borrow."

Others may carp (mainly in the Twittersphere), but it is difficult in the small world of poetry (and poetry prizes for £20,000) to avoid accidentally treading on a colleague’s toe, as it were, every now and then. Why, it seems only yesterday that one heard complaints to the effect that the big prizes seemed to be a perpetual game of musical chairs that only ever stopped at one or other of a few powerful poet-publishers and their favoured poets. Chris Hollifield of the PBS takes the (slightly defeatist?) view that “if you excluded everyone who’s ever worked with someone or is married to someone [!] you’d never get a judging panel together”. Or, as the poet and sometime poetry competition judge Ruth Padel opined in 2006:

"The competitions where the writers are known I find difficult. I was judging the T. S. Eliot Prize. You are dealing with the work, it's the work that is the important thing. But you also know the people and I find it very painful indeed. At the moment I'm a Poetry Book Society selector. . . but I find this painful too; the poets are your friends quite often and you know just how it will affect their lives. I'm glad I'm going to stop quite soon."

Saving Spiegelhalter’s

 

By DAVID COLLARD 

Ian Nairn is regarded by his many admirers as Britain's greatest topographical writer, and Nairn's London (published in 1966 and recently reissued by Penguin Books in an edition reviewed in this week’s TLS) is his masterpiece. It is (Nairn says, modestly, in his introduction) “simply my personal list of the best things in London”. There are around 450 of these, between Uxbridge and Dagenham.

Nairn had astonishing powers of evocation and taught his readers not only how to look at buildings but how to feel about what they saw. He was interested not only in buildings but, as Gavin Stamp points out in his afterword to this edition, in the character of places.

Nairn was also the exemplary outsider. . . .

The architectural establishment was snootily disparaging about his lack of qualifications but he knew more about buildings and their communities than most of the professionals. He became a household name in 1955 at the age of twenty-five with the publication of OUTRAGE, a brilliantly scathing and bilious polemic directed at the post-war planners and architects responsible for what he called “subtopia”, a dreary combination of suburban and utopian tastes that meant the outskirts of Southampton and Carlisle were indistinguishable. Nairn didn't hate modern architecture – just bad architecture, and particularly the heartless perpetrations of property developers and town planners that involved the wholesale demolition of city centres in the 1960s and 70s. An eloquent contrarian, a non-clubbable dissident and anti-establishment to the core, Nairn was a cross (said Jonathan Meades) between Anthony Burgess and Tony Hancock. He died young, aged fifty-two, in 1983, from the effect of chronic alcoholism. We need his glum, incisive voice more than ever.

Which brings us to Spiegelhalter's. It's not much to look at – a tatty shop front on London's Mile End Road a few miles to the east of King's Cross. Now roofless and derelict, it's what's left of a family-run jewellers’ shop, a business founded in 1828 by German migrants. But it is a powerful symbol of East End indomitability, surviving the Depression and Blitz and subsequent economic downturns until finally closing down in the late 1980s. It is fondly remembered by locals who bought their wedding rings or had their ears pierced on the premises, and more widely appreciated by those of us who, like Nairn, know a good joke when we see one because the Spiegelhalter family simply refused to budge or sell out as a construction project for a department store went ahead on either side of their shop, leaving their modest, low-rise establishment sandwiched between two grandiose but hilariously unbalanced frontages. A local legend has it that the store owners, the Wickhams, offered to cover the ground floor of Spiegelhalter's in gold sovereigns if the owners would move out. The owners said they would – if the coins were all balanced on their sides. Nairn wrote about it fondly:

“Messrs Wickham, circa 1920, wanted an emporium. Messrs Spiegelhalter, one infers, wouldn't sell out. Messrs Wickham, one infers further, pressed on regardless, thereby putting their Baroque tower badly out of centre. Messrs Spiegelhalter ('The East End Jewellers') remain; two stucco'd storeys, surrounded on both sides by giant columns à la Selfridges. The result is one of the best visual jokes in London, a perennial triumph for the little man, the blokes who won't conform. May he stay there till the bomb falls.”

It's still there. The bomb has not dropped – yet. For almost a century this plucky little structure has stood its ground, a remarkable survivor. In China such buildings are known as “nails” (as in a stubborn nail embedded in the plank, that cannot be prised out), and it's hard not to share Nairn's sentimental view that they represent a triumph of the individual over bullying property developers, planners and architects. Nairn added this melancholy reflection:

 “A bleak thought is that, if Messrs Wickham's problem had arisen today, smooth lawyers and architects would probably have presented a case for comprehensive redevelopment, and persuaded the council to use their powers of compulsory purchase. Big deal; fine democracy.”

Spiegelhalter's is not just a great visual joke but a marvellously evocative record of the area’s complex ethnic mixture and cultural continuities. I've recently launched an online petition to secure the future of this lovable landmark. The campaign is supported by the Twentieth Century Society and has, within a few days, attracted more than one thousand supporters. Anyone interested can add their signature here.

 

Charlie Hebdo - and Voltaire

A street in South Kensington, London, January 9

 

By ADRIAN TAHOURDIN

Voltaire spent much of his long life railing against religious intolerance and fanaticism. In his Dictionnaire philosophique (1764), divided into themed sections, he discusses "Fanaticism":

"Le plus détestable example de fanatisme est celui des bourgeois de Paris qui coururent assassiner, égorger, jeter par les fenêtres, mettre en pièces, la nuit de la Saint-Barthélemy, leurs concitoyens qui n'allaient point à la messe."

(The most detestable example of fanaticism is that of the citizens of Paris who hurried to murder, slit the throats of, defenestrate, hack into pieces, on the night of St Bartholomew, their fellow citizens who didn't attend mass – my rough translation)

The Massacre of St Bartholomew, perpetrated by Catholics on Protestants, or Huguenots, took place in the centre of Paris in 1572.

Voltaire goes on:

"Lorsqu'une fois le fanatisme a gangrené un cerveau, la maladie est presque incurable."

(Once fanaticism has gangrenated the brain, the sickness is practically incurable.)

And

"Que répondre à un homme qui vous dit qu'il aime mieux obéir à Dieu qu'aux hommes, et qui, en conséquence, est sûr de mériter le ciel en vous égorgeant?"

Ce sont d'ordinaire les fripons qui conduisent les fanatiques, et qui mettent le poignard entre leurs mains; ils ressemblent à ce Vieux de la Montagne qui faisait, dit-on, goûter les joies du paradis à des imbéciles, et qui leur promettait une éternité de ces plaisirs dont il leur avait donné un avant-goût, à condition qu'ils iraient assassiner tous ceux qu'il leur nommerait."

(What to say to a man who tells you that he prefers obeying God to obeying man, and who, as a consequence, is sure that, in slitting your throat, he has guaranteed himself a place in paradise?

It’s normally the rogues who lead the fanatics, and who put a dagger in their hands; they resemble that Old Man on the Mountain who, they say, offered a taste of paradise to idiots, and who promised them an eternity of the pleasures of which he had given them a foretaste, on condition that they went off and murdered everybody he named.)

Under "Superstition" he concludes: "En un mot, moins de superstitions, moins de fanatisme; et moins de fanatisme, moins de malheurs."

(In a word, fewer superstitions, less fanaticism; and less fanaticism leads to fewer misfortunes.)

It hardly needs stating that, 250 years on, Voltaire’s observations are as relevant as ever. Not for nothing was his called the Age of Enlightenment.

It would be hard to overstate – beyond the horror and grief, and dignified stoicism – the depth of affront that the country that produced Voltaire (before, admittedly, driving him into Swiss exile) is feeling. On the widely listened to radio station France Inter yesterday there were displays of almost hysterical levity. These were after all in the main cartoonists who had been murdered. But from a distance across the Channel it made for curious listening.

France’s weightiest newspaper Le Monde appears in late afternoon and so was unavoidably behind in its print coverage of the atrocity. But the extra time gave it the opportunity to produce an extended edition the following day with the front-page heading “Le 11-Septembre Français” (in an editorial it qualifies the heading by quashing any suggestion that the attacks in Paris were on anything like the scale of 9/11). It was Le Monde that famously ran the headline, on September 12, 2001, “We are all Americans”.

By a curious irony the previous day’s Monde (dated January 8), gave prominent coverage (including a Muslim-themed cartoon) to the ageing enfant terrible Michel Houellebecq, whose new novel Soumission is just out. Houellebecq had also appeared on the cover of the most recent Charlie Hebdo. In Le Monde the paper’s reviewer Raphaëlle Leyris calls Soumission Houellebecq's "most mediocre novel so far". Among other things, the book imagines a presidential election in 2022 between the far-right National Front and a Muslim party, with the latter coming out on top.

 

New Year at Sissinghurst

By TOBY LICHTIG

Don't tell everyone but it turns out you can stay at Sissinghurst. I don't mean the small and picturesque village in Kent, near the splendid estate where Vita Sackville-West and her husband Harold Nicolson resurrected the ruins of a Renaissance manor and lived for three decades until their deaths in the 1960s. I don't even mean the B&B on the fringes of the estate. I'm talking about a small Elizabethan cottage, the Priest's House, slap bang in the middle of the estate itself and fringed by the renowned “white garden” designed by Vita.

Sissinghurst Castle Garden has for many years been administered by the National Trust, which, in its wisdom, lets out the Priest's House to weekenders willing to pay National Trust prices to stay in a cosy, three-bedroomed cottage, complete with mullion and leaded windows, brick floors and inglenook – a word I've always admired but never previously had the chance to employ. 200,000 people visit Sissinghurst Castle Garden every year, but not many of them in December and January. Even in the middle of the day it felt like we had the run of the estate.

Upstairs at the Priest's House, you can stay in the quaintly sloping bedroom where Vita drew her last breath (she was moved from the larger house during her final illness). Downstairs is a small but well-stocked library for guests' use, containing, among the usual English country cottage jumble of novels by Jilly Cooper, Stephen Fry and Zadie Smith, several books about Sissinghurst and its gardens, biographies of Vita and Harold, and books by Vita and her descendants, including her late sons Benedict Nicolson (the art historian) and Nigel Nicolson (the author, publisher and MP) and Nigel's son Adam Nicolson, who until recently still lived on the estate.

Perusing Nigel Nicolson's memoir about his unconventional parents, Portrait of a Marriage (1973), I came across a passage written by Vita, following the beginning of her affair with Violet Trefusis, whose seductive portrait (by Sir John Lavery) still stands in the wonderful writing room in Sissinghurst’s Elizabethan tower. In 2013, a poem by Vita about Trefusis came to light, after falling out from between the pages of a book during restoration work in the writing room. In it (as rendered in the translation from the original French by the scholar Harvey James), Vita reflected on the "intoxicating night" during which

"I search on your lip for a madder caress
I tear secrets from your yielding flesh
Giving thanks to the fate which made you my mistress."

In the passage from Portrait of a Marriage, however, Vita is rather more philosophical. She writes, of her "connection" with Violet:

"I hold the conviction that, as the centuries go on, and the sexes become more nearly merged on account of their increasing resemblances . . . such connections will to a very large extent cease to be regarded as merely unnatural, and will be understood far better, at least in their intellectual if not in their physical aspect. (Such is already the case in Russia.) I believe then that the psychology of people like myself will be a matter of interest, and I believe it will be recognized that many more people of my type do exist than under the present-day system of hypocrisy is commonly admitted. I am not saying that such personalities, and the connections that result from them, will not be deplored as they are now; but I do believe that their greatest prevalence, and the spirit of candour which one hopes will spread with the progress of the world, will lead to their recognition, if only as an inevitable evil."

It was richly satisfying (as well as poignant) to read this passage at the end of the year in which same-sex marriage legislation finally passed into force in England and Wales (the same cannot be said of Vita's aside about Russia, given current attitudes to homosexuality there). And if Vita might have baulked at the sight of six slightly dishevelled Londoners lounging around with wine and books in her final home, one can only imagine that she'd be delighted with the "spirit of candour" and "spread of progress" prevalent in at least this aspect of modernity.

Sissinghurst itself has evolved in surprising ways over the centuries. A former Saxon pig farm, the estate became the site of a moated manor house, visited by Edward I in the early fourteenth century and 250 years later by Elizabeth I, whose 200-strong retinue nearly bankrupted the owners, the Baker family. In the eighteenth century, it briefly became a notoriously ghastly prisoner-of-war camp for 3,000 French sailors, taken captive during the Seven Years' War. Graffiti by the prisoners can still be seen scratched into the walls of the tower.

War came to Sissinghurst in a milder form during Vita and Harold's tenure, when the herds of cattle on the estate were managed by members of the Women's Land Army.

Today, Sissinghurst is both a great place for a daytrip and, it transpires, a bijou holiday destination. It was a delightful place to bring in the new year. But best not spread the word or everyone will know . . . .

Dostojewski on the Polish stage

Szymon Sędrowski as Stavrogin, Monika Babicka as Maria Lebyadkina and Grzegorz Wolf as Captain Lebyadkin; photograph by Joanna Siercha (2014)

By OLIVER READY

Throughout much of the world, if not England, Dostoevsky’s novels have had a rich afterlife in the theatre, one mischievously encouraged by the author’s most famous detractor, Vladimir Nabokov. In his influential lectures delivered at Wellesley and Cornell in the 1940s and 50s, Nabokov cast Dostoevsky as a dramatist manqué who seemed “to have been chosen by the destiny of Russian letters to become Russia's greatest playwright, but took the wrong turning and wrote novels”. The chief exhibit Nabokov put before his student juries was Besy (1871–2), which, following Constance Garnett, he called The Possessed, but which in recent English translations goes by the more literal, if less evocative title Demons or Devils. An eccentric chronicle of revolutionary intrigue and murder in a Russian provincial town c.1870, The Possessed, Nabokov declared, “is incredible nonsense, but it is grand booming nonsense with flashes of genius illuminating the whole gloomy and mad farce”.

Over in France, Albert Camus was busy turning this 700-page “farce” into actual theatre, working from a position of awe rather than ambivalent hostility and trying to capture the arc of Dostoevsky’s heterogeneous text from, as Camus rightly saw it, comedy to tragedy.

Just before the premiere of Les Possédés in the Théâtre Antoine in January 1959, he gave a detailed television interview to explain why Dostoevsky’s characters are “infinitely closer to us than might seem at first glance”. The Russian author’s premonition of a universe defined by “the emptiness of the heart, the impossibility of holding to any faith or belief” (“le vide du coeur, l'impossibilité d'adhérer à une foi ou une croyance”) had, Camus claimed, become the reality of his own time.

Fifty-five years later, a striking adaptation of Camus’s adaptation, directed by Krzysztof Babicki, is drawing packed audiences at the Gombrowicz Theatre in the port city of Gdynia in northern Poland, a country little loved by Dostoevsky. In modern dress, and on a stage bare but for the odd chair and a large mirror employed for effects both erotic and morbid, Babicki’s Biesy goes to the nub of the dramatic potential of Dostoevsky’s great novels and shows why they should remain of prime interest to brave directors everywhere. This potential is not only, and not so much, a matter of “the scenes where all the people are brought together . . . with all the tricks of the theatre” that Nabokov mentions; there is also a more elusive quarry that Babicki succeeds in capturing. To the extent that Dostoevsky’s fiction is about the gradual and imperfect search for self-knowledge through the stripping away of self-deception, dramatization can allow this psychological process to be visualized and given flesh – sometimes, paradoxically, at the expense of more obviously theatrical and melodramatic elements.

Such is the case with Babicki’s Biesy.Out goes the Gogolian and highly entertaining narrator; out goes all the French used by his ageing, logorrheic “friend” and teacher, Stepan Trofimovich; out goes much, if not all, of the satire of provincial gentry and officialdom. What is left is a relentless succession of scenes of verbal and physical confrontation (accentuated by the use of a catwalk running right through the audience) and incomplete disclosure. Characters enter and exit in the swirling, blizzard-like movement evoked by the Pushkin poem, also called “Besy”, that Dostoevsky took for his first epigraph and that is aptly reinstated as the opening words of this production, before the play proper begins. If the ringleader of revolutionary chaos remains Stepan’s son, Pyotr, played with tireless impishness by Maciej Wizner, a source of dramatic coherence is surprisingly supplied by Shigalyov (Piotr Michalski), the “methodical”, bespectacled socialist with a theory of total freedom as total despotism, who appears much earlier here than in the novel, and serves at times as a surrogate narrator.

At one point we see Shigalyov holding cards – a metaphor, perhaps, for Babicki’s daring reshuffling of Dostoevsky’s text, notably of its most scandalous scene: the “confession” of the rape of a young girl made to a monk by the conspirators’ idol, Nikolai Stavrogin. This chapter was cut during and after Dostoevsky’s lifetime, and now usually appears as an appendix to the novel. Here, it is placed at the very beginning of the play and delivered at breakneck speed, away from the monk and straight at the audience, by the impressive Szymon Sędrowski. Is Stavrogin a demon or merely possessed by demons? A cause or a consequence? Sędrowski’s performance, like Krzysztof Babicki’s powerful and intelligent production, retains this critical ambiguity.

Literary centenaries and other signs of the (old) times

Around this time of year, as TLS subscribers will know, our weekly diary column, NB, takes note of the literary causes for celebration and reassessment over the year to come. Births, deaths and the anniversaries of significant publications are all too likely to draw the attention of literary editors and freelance writers alike, while visitors to the British Library will no doubt find themselves paying homage to Anthony Trollope (born April 24, 1815) and Alice in Wonderland (first published in 1865), as well as the considerably older Magna Carta. You wouldn't be entirely wrong to imagine that this sort of thing might rub off on the TLS itself, too, although I'm not holding out much hope of some enterprising theatre company reviving Gay, Pope and Dr Arbuthnot's "tragi-comi-pastoral farce" The What D'Ye Call It (1715) . . .

Here are NB's wry observations about the year just gone and the year to come, from the first issue of 2015:

The year just ended was a good one for literary anniversaries and corresponding publications. Three centenarians stood out: William Burroughs was the subject of a brick-sized biography by Barry Miles (reviewed in the TLS of May 16); the poems of the neglected poet John Berryman were reissued by his US (but not his UK) publisher; the novels and stories of Bernard Malamud were collected in two volumes by the Library of America. The works of the last two will be considered in future issues of the TLS. As far as we saw, however, no 100-year-old received more attention in 2014 than Albert Camus, whose centenary fell the previous year, and whose worth and troubled nationality were widely discussed.

How does the coming year compare? Saul Bellow was born on June 10, 1915; the centenary will be marked in the spring by the first part of Zachary Leader’s biography. The standing of Arthur Miller, born five months later, has proved less durable, two or three redoubtable plays notwithstanding. It is often remarked that he has more traction in the UK than the US, where it can be hard to utter “Miller” without hearing an echoing “Monroe”. Less well known than either is Jean Stafford (1915–79), novelist and short-story writer, wife to both Robert Lowell and A. J. Liebling. One of her novels, The Mountain Lion, is in print (New York Review Books). Should more be available? Someone might tell us.

In the TLS of March 11, 1915, the reviewer of a quarterly magazine drew attention to the sonnets of Rupert Brooke, “a poet whose rich promise is still in its dawn, but whose life, as [the sonnets] prove, is at its zenith”. The soon-to-be-famous lines were quoted,

If I should die, think only this of me:
That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is forever England.

Six weeks later, on the doubly significant day of April 23 (Shakespeare’s birthday and St George’s Day), the Naval Volunteer Reservist died on board a hospital ship in the Aegean. A corner of an olive grove on the Greek island of Skyros is forever England.

Brooke’s collection 1914 and Other Poems was rushed into print. Our reviewer (July 22, 1915) described the work as like “the apples, sweet or sour, hard or sleepy, but marvellously attractive, of a schoolboy’s evening raid over the walls of the transitory into the orchards of beauty”. We will surely taste those apples again in the year ahead. Among other books published were The Rainbow, The Thirty-Nine Steps, Pound’s Cathay – greeted with baffled approval by the TLS: did Mr Pound really translate these works from the Chinese by himself? – and Archibald MacLeish’s Songs for a Summer’s Day. This now unappreciated poet was an unlikely mentor of Bob Dylan’s. “He possessed more knowledge of mankind and its vagaries than most men acquire in a lifetime”, wrote Dylan in his memoir. As for MacLeish himself, he is best remembered for the remark, “A poem should not mean / But be”, made in the poem “Ars Poetica”.

Sesquicentenaries in 2015 include the births of Kipling and Yeats, the publication of Alice in Wonderland and Whitman’s Drum-Taps. Perhaps you can persuade us to read more of Jean Stafford or MacLeish; or confirm that Pound alone decoded the pictograms; or rediscover the magic that Edwardian readers found in The Rainbow, now faded.

poets-win-prizes

Snow falling faintly through the universe

 

In late 2013, I was treated to a tour of the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, then yet to see its opening production of The Duchess of Malfi – just over a year on, isn’t it safe to call this new-old theatre, a twenty-first-century take on a seventeenth-century design, one of the best things to happen to London in 2014?

I was there again on Monday night for one of the last in the Globe's series of readings, Winter's Tales: Aiden Gillen’s magnificent rendition of “The Dead” by James Joyce, that great story of stories, published a century ago in Dubliners. In evening dress, that familiar glint in his eye, Gillen sat at a desk beneath the candles. A pianist upstage interceded with the occasional musical comment on proceedings, seeming to observe how the bonhomie is becoming stranger as the Christmas party Joyce describes goes on into the night. Gillen gave that pinched word “English” just enough emphasis, when it so impertinently butts in, to add to the disquiet; other awkward moments (“Is it because he’s only a black?”) and the absurd silence-filling remarks people make at such gatherings (“They are very good men, the monks, very pious men”) were unsurprisingly effective, too.

Gillen exited at the interval with imaginary fork held high (Freddy Malins exultant as the party’s hostesses, those “Three Graces”, are toasted and acclaimed as “jolly gay fellows”), and came back sombrely to narrate with aplomb the final journey from Gretta listening in the hallway to Gabriel’s lust for her to that final, lyrical vision of the living, dying, snow-covered world.

I feel very lucky to have witnessed this, and to have seen out the old year with "The Dead". That said: theatregoers in 2015 should try to remember that switching a mobile phone to “silent” mode doesn’t necessarily silence it (the sound of a phone vibrating in a handbag or pocket easily carries around a small auditorium); and I discovered at the interval that the two Graces sitting next to me had been gently bemused by the story so far. They’d been hoping for some kind of Jacobean scenes of comedy or tragedy rather than a recital, it turned out. I told them to come back in a month . . .

Unlike them, I can be fairly sure that “The Dead” won’t be the last “live” story reading I hear in the near future. That’s thanks to my peripheral involvement with the Liars League, which organizes evenings of short story readings in London, New York and occasionally elsewhere. Every month, writers are invited to submit stories on a given theme (Blood & Guts in October, say, or Love & Kisses in February), and actors read/recite/perform the winning entries. We’ve had shocking months when everything submitted seems to have been written by Bulwer-Lytton on a bad day (Yes, it was another dark and stormy night . . . and he woke up and it all turned out to have been a terrible dream again), and others when it’s been nothing but a pleasure. I failed to make it to many of the performances in the past twelve months, however, so there’s one obvious resolution for next twelve.

I doubt the Liars League will be able to persuade their venues to use candle light any time soon – unless the Globe is willing to loan the London branch the Sam Wanamaker – and on the whole LL sticks to prose rather than medieval verse. But what these events ask of the audience is essentially the same, I think – not to expect spectacle in the conventional sense, but to listen closely and hear what words (almost) alone can do in performance.

Thanks to everybody who's read and commented on this blog in 2014 – may 2015 bring you harmless pleasure, candle-lit, owl-lit or otherwise . . . .

Reading resolutions

Edward Gibbon

By ADRIAN TAHOURDIN

I’m not a big fan of New Year’s resolutions, mainly because I find it so hard to keep them. Swim twice a week? Not enough time, or the water in the indoor pool’s too chlorinated. Drink less alcohol? How about drinking more?

But it occurred to me that a couple of reading resolutions might be in order. I haven’t made these before and I generally try to balance the old and the new or unexpected as much as I can in my reading. Next year, however, in an attempt to plug some of the enormous gaps in my literary-historical knowledge, I’ve resolved to read Herodotus’ Histories, in the translation by Tom Holland that Edith Hall gave a favourable review to in the TLS (November 15, 2013). Hall makes it sound like quite good fun, apart from anything else. She commends the edition for its “well-pitched notes, and a brilliant introduction by Paul Cartledge, the best living exponent of scholarly controversies in ancient Greek history”, and professes herself to be “in awe of Tom Holland’s achievement”. I’ve ordered myself a copy.

And to go with Herodotus? How about Edward Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire? Well, I can make a start on it at least. Actually, I think I’ll take a rather easier option and kick off – a little perversely perhaps – with Gibbon’s Autobiography, of which I have a very neat pocket hardback edition before me. It’s only 300-odd pages long, and opens:

“In the fifty-second year of my age, after the completion of an arduous and successful work, I now propose to employ some moments of my leisure in reviewing the simple transactions of a private and literary life. Truth, naked, unblushing truth, the first virtue of more serious history, must be the sole recommendation of this personal narrative.”

I’m hooked already. Happy 2015.

 

After the best books of 2014 – the best reviews?

Another year is fading out to the accompaniment of triumphal lists of favourite books – (largely male) publishers' hits and misses, dullness distilled on Goodreads, more interesting selections from friends of the new Irish journal Gorse and Galley Beggar Press, and so on. The Telegraph's recommendations for Christmas gifts include links to the original reviews, presumably to help you decide if your brother/mother/lover/significant other is going to get along with, say, the "studied unreality" of Andrew's Brain by E. L. Doctorow.

There seems to be no escape from list-mania this year. But never mind the books – what about the reviews?

I try to believe that there is a certain knack, if not an art, to writing book reviews – and that insight does not automatically equate with invective. It's neither about being nice or nasty for their own sake – it's about representing your own reading of a book honestly. The TLS's J. C. once put it like this, partly prompted by the appearance of what was supposedly the "most pointedly brutal review" of 2012, Zoë Heller's gentle NYRB meditation on Salman Rushdie’s memoir Joseph Anton:

"The reviewer’s chief responsibility is to the potential purchaser of the book, who, unlike the reviewer himself, is asked to pay hard-earned cash for the product. The most difficult task for a reviewer is to remain true in writing to the feelings experienced while reading, to convey them in elegant, entertaining prose."

It is not just, in other words, about wielding a critical hatchet, although that can sometimes seem to be what reviewers are encouraged to do – to attract attention to their own talents rather than weigh up those of a given author. Entertaining though the shortlisted pieces can be, the Hatchet Job of the Year isn't all there is to it. At least, these were my vague thoughts on the subject in an especially idle moment just before Christmas.

Surely my fellow TLS editors would agree? As they tried to get on with the proper business of commissioning reviews for 2015 and obliterating Oxford commas, I found myself asking them – what were the best reviews they'd read this year, outside the pages of the TLS itself? The most elegant and entertaining, perhaps those that they thought remained true to "the feelings experienced while reading" the book in question?

Well, I didn't ask everyone – sensing danger, perhaps, some had already knocked off for the holidays – but perhaps that's just as well:

"Splashing through the Puddles", Michael Hofmann's LRB review of The Zone of Interest, emerged as by far the most popular choice. "It's elegantly done", one enthusiast assured me. "Not a total hatchet job, either . . ." – despite remarks such as "It elicits not one but both types of unwelcome reaction from the reader: both the 'so what?' and the 'I don't believe you' and sometimes both together . . .".

The managing editor came forward to express his admiration for Jeremy Noel-Tod's Literary Review account of Philip Larkin: Life, art and love by James Booth. Others relished Tom Holland's Sunday Times review of Fields of Blood by Karen Armstrong (a "well-deserved" drubbing) and – more scalpel than hatchet, I thought, clutching at a straw – Edward Mendelson's NYRB essay on "The Strange Powers of Norman Mailer" (point of fact: published in 2013). But then the intern came forward dutifully to remind me of two bloody encounters with the Guardian – Nick Cohen on Russell Brand ("long-winded, confused and smug") and Will Self on Julie Burchill ("There isn't a shred of reason in this text"). (To quote/paraphrase the Guardian against itself, it could have been more of an editorial challenge – and perhaps more of a service to the art of book reviewing – to find a pro-Brand or Burchill voice; it is difficult, particularly in the latter case, to imagine what could be said in her favour.)

And hadn't I caught David Sexton on – what else? – Martin Amis's Zone of Interest . . ?

After all this blokeish spite, which had lived on for months in both male and female memories, apparently, it was a relief to reach a classicist's desk. What book review had stood out for him, I asked, in 2014? Nothing from our own pages, mind . . .

He looked off wistfully for a minute.

“I thought that Emily Gowers piece on graffiti was really good . . .”

Well, he is the Editor. What else is he going to say?