Peter Stothard's Blog, page 81

NB: Perambulatory Christmas Books, part 2

 

Some people seem to enjoy the business of hunting out books as much as they enjoy reading them. For those people, last Saturday, I posted the first part of this year's "Perambulatory Christmas Books" series, in which J. C., the author of the TLS's NB column, goes looking in London's secondhand bookshops for alternatives to the "so-called festive fare" of mainstream publishers. Apparently, it was appreciated – so here's the second instalment:

Perambulatory Christmas Books, 5th series, "Back to Basics", part II. We'll go to any lengths to provide you with alternatives to the so-called festive fare put out by many mainstream publishers (Reading, My Arse, Can't Be Arsed, How Not To Talk Like an Arse, etc). Our aim is to find a neglected work or curiosity by an established writer, for about £5, in one of London's bountiful secondhand bookshops.

When word arrived of a shop previously unknown to us, My Back Pages in Balham, we were soon on the Northern Line, rocketing through Charing Cross, beneath the Thames, beyond Clapham's verdant pastures. It helps to have innate or prior knowledge that you are entering My Back Pages, just a few paces from Balham Tube station, for no painted sign informs you of the fact. The shop is dreary on the outside (no bad thing), with mean pickings outdoors. Inside, however, everything is as it should be, which is to say muddled and confusing. A shelf labelled Fiction holds Beat poetry. New books are shelved with secondhand. An area given to Victorian literature takes one up hills of Dickens and down dales of Trollope, but not much further. Lovers of mountaineering, film and music will find the shop diverting. There is a bookcase devoted to that dubious territory, "Black literature", and there we found a copy of a lesser-known work by James Baldwin, A Rap on Race (1971). It takes the form of a dialogue with Margaret Mead, author of Coming of Age in Samoa and Professor of Anthropology at Columbia. The encounter itself is of anthropological interest. The speakers in the conversation are both Americans, both fiercely intelligent – with nothing in common.

Mead is cool and inquisitorial, Baldwin heated and rhetorical. "If you tell me that James Earl Ray managed to blow Martin Luther King's head off in Memphis and then swam all the way to London by himself, I'm sorry. It's simply not to be considered." Mead protests that he is talking like "an Old Testament person". Baldwin corrects her: "Prophet". He talks about slave traders as if they were his New York neighbours.

Mead: "I absolutely refuse racial guilt".
Baldwin: "All I'm saying is that one is born carrying one's history on one's brow".

There are humorous moments peculiar to the time, as when Baldwin refers to a new, educated generation of African Americans. "I am terribly tired of these middle-class darkies with Afro hairstyles and dashikis telling me what it means to be black."

A Rap on Race carries its history on its brow. The cover of this solid 1972 US paperback, for which My Back Pages asked £4.50, quotes Alfred Kazin on Baldwin: "No one around practises the old-fashioned art of spellbinding with such force". Mead would have rejoined that the force overwhelmed the spellbinder himself. With the loose change in our pocket we bought a 1967 Livre de Poche of Camus's great novel (see above), purely for the pleasure of the cover.

The 'New International'?

If you find yourself within striking distance of London's Free Word Centre on Farringdon Road next Thursday (October 20), and you have a spare quid (or seven): please come along and say hello: I'll be speaking on the discussion panel for "The New International?: Literature in an age of 'globish'", alongside TLS contributors Shirley Dent and George Szirtes, among others. It's a "satellite" event for this year's Battle of Ideas, a whole weekend of topical debating at the Royal College of Art at the end of the month. 

The blurb for this particular satellite event (see below) suggests the potentially unwieldy vastness of the subject; and that the discussion probably won't have that much to do with "globish" in the linguistic sense of the term as used by Jean-Paul Nerriere. But the question of translation alone – "Are we kidding ourselves we even understand works in translation?", as the blurb puts it – could make for a lively debate . . . .

That aside, I like the confidence of the line below about the Nobel Prize for Literature, written well in advance of the announcement of Tomas Transtromer's Nobelification earlier this month. (Although it may also be significant for the future that the Indian-Canadian author of A Fine Balance, Rohinton Mistry, has just won the Neustadt International Prize for Literature; the organizers justifiably boast of the prize's association with future Nobel winners.) Perhaps we'll also find ourselves agreeing with Tim Parks's about the "essential silliness" of it all.

Here's what the organizers have to say about the "New International":

 

"The New International?: Literature in the age of 'globish'"

"'Nothing human is alien to me,' claimed Roman playwright Terence in the second century BC. If he were alive today, he might find good company among 21st century readers. Browsing the shelves of a high-street bookstore, one easily find see a range of world literature, from Chinua Achebe to Zadie Smith; international literature prizes and festivals abound, while World Book Day has become a fixture in the literary calendar. The Nobel Prize for Literature continues to offer a snapshot of the global literati even if, as is alleged by some, it may never again be won by an American.

Yet while the Nobel committee proclaims that it 'is not a contest between nations' there can be no denying that national literature has a particular place in the literary consciousness. Whether it is 'imperial' writers such as Virgil or Spenser, or modern nationalists such as Yeats and Mahmoud Darwish, or distinct national bodies of literature (19th century Russian, 20th century American and English), we certainly use nationality as a shorthand when talking about literature. To take America as an example, there can be no doubt that its writers influenced each other in developing a distinctive body of literature: from Henry James and Edith Wharton to Ezra Pound and TS Eliot, Hemingway and Faulkner, Updike and Roth, Pynchon and DeLillo… Today celebrating indigenous or foreign language writers has become the hallmark of a cosmopolitan sophistication or Western intellectual guilt, depending on your perspective. Genres such as 'Jewish' or 'immigrant' literature, meanwhile, find commonalities between peoples that transcend geographical location but imply a certain specific cultural bond.

Is it ever valid to judge literature with reference to its nationality, linguistic distinctions aside? Are some national traditions simply more important than others? Or, to paraphrase Oscar Wilde, does it matter more to the modern reader whether books are well written or badly written? Is the interest in global literature evidence of a rootless cosmopolitanism, hostile to the influence of the social and political realities of a particular author's nationality and cultural background? Are we kidding ourselves we even understand works in translation? Is great national literature universal because it is great, or great because it is universal?"

Houellebecq and Wikipedia

There were signs that the former enfant terrible of French fiction was going soft when Michel Houellebecq included an Acknowledgements page at the end of his most recent novel La Carte et le territoire (2010). Acknowledgements, Houellebecq?!

Among those thanked were the novelist's publisher Teresa Cremesi and a police officer who had provided him with information he used in the rather unconvincing police-procedural section of the book. The new English translation (by Gavin Bowd, published by Heinemann) goes one stage further: in it the author thanks "Wikipedia . . . and its contributors whose entries I have occasionally used as a source of inspiration, notably those concerning the housefly, the town of Beauvais and Frédéric Nihous [a minor French politician]". Is this, one wonders, the first occasion on which the author of a novel thanks Wikipedia in the Acknowledgements?

Although it is tempting to take the gesture with a pinch of salt (Houellebecq being something of a joker), it's also worth remembering that the author was accused of plagiarism by the website Slate when the novel came out in France. He brushed off his accusers, branding them imbeciles and suggesting that they didn't understand how fiction works. The novel went on to win the Prix Goncourt.The English translation (which comes dressed in a rather unattractive bubble-wrap) faithfully reflects the French title: The Map and the Territory. This hasn't always been the case. Houellebecq's first novel, the wonderfully titled Extension du domaine de la lutte appeared in English as the flip Whatever. "Extension of the domain of the struggle" might have been a bit much on the other hand, but still . . . . Les Particules élémentaires, Houellebecq's best novel to date, appeared in English as Atomised, where the more straightforward "The Elementary Particles" might have been preferable, given that one of the half-brothers at the heart of the story, Michel, is a molecular biologist. The temptation to play fast and loose with Houellebecq's choice of words should be resisted; after all, whatever else he is, no one would deny that he is a great stylist who chooses his words extremely carefully.

 

NB: Perambulatory Christmas Books, 5th series

Those who have turned to the back page of the TLS in winters past will know that this has become the customary season for J. C. to investigate the bookshops in search of alternatives to the "dismal" offerings of certain mainstream publishers (see below: "Is It Just Me or Is Everything Shit?", etc). Here's the first instalment of the fifth series of these wise perambulations, as published in this week's TLS:

Perambulatory Christmas Books, 5th series. Over the past few years, it has been our custom in the period leading up to Christmas to seek each week a neglected book or curiosity by an established author, purchased from a secondhand bookshop for about £5. All books are bought to be read. Last year, we tweaked the rules and concentrated on the presence of foreign writers in London. This led to protest: What we want you to do is tramp round the bookshops, they said. This year's rubric, therefore, is "Back to basics". The £5 mark should be regarded as flexible. It remains our perambulatory mission to offer an alternative to the dismal festive fare offered by some mainstream publishers. By now, everyone should know the classic of the genre: Is It Just Me or Is Everything Shit? by Steve Lowe and Alan McArthur. And everyone should know our response: It isn't just you, guys, but it's you, too.

To warm up, we headed for WC2. Experience has taught that, as mushrooms grow at the roots of birch trees, bargains sprout on the barrows of Cecil Court. So it proved on our return. At Peter Ellis, which inside is neatly collectible but outside prodigiously untidy, we found two treasures, each by a Smith. One was Trivia, the gathering of reflections by Logan Pearsall Smith, about which the TLS reviewer in 1918 said, "There is little to be got from this book except pleasure. It contains no information . . .". Most of the 150 or so entries are a paragraph in length. All are the thoughts of an idler. The brief preface tells of a "kindly adviser" who warned the author to beware of caring too much for "Style", lest he become "'like those fastidious people who polish and polish until there is nothing left.' 'Then there really are such people?' I asked eagerly".

This second printing, also published in 1918, comes with an added feature: the bookplate of Richard Strachey, probably the son of Lytton's brother Ralph. It has an epigraph derived from Horace, "caelum non animum", which a learned friend of ours tells us was a Strachey family motto. We paid £3 for it.

The other Smith could not be more different. So Late into the Night (1952) contains fifty love lyrics by Sydney Goodsir Smith (1915–75), all written in Scots, or what was once called Lallans. Most are short; "Luve's Fule" is among the shortest:

In my saul's a Universe
Whar ramp the restless deid,
Othello reives my thrawan hert
And Lear raves in my heid.

The TLS reviewer called Goodsir Smith the most important writer in Lallans since Hugh MacDiarmid. He enjoyed the erotic undertone of the lyrics, while acknowledging the challenge implicit in being a Scots hedonist:But the wraith o Johnnie Calvin's Aye chappan at the door.This beautiful paperback with dust jacket, published by Peter Russell, comes with a frontispiece by John Maxwell (see above). In a fit of folly, the bookseller had marked it at £2. Our £5 budget had brought ample reward.

Tomas Transtromer: Accept no imitation

The Nobel Prize in Literature for 2011 has today gone to the Swedish poet Tomas Transtromer. Transtromer is the first poet to win the prize since Wislawa Szymborska in 1996, and the first Swedish recipient since 1974.

The Nobel Academy already stood charged of Eurocentrism, making Transtromer something of a defiant choice. Many TLS readers will associate his name with another controversy not of his own making.

Back in 1998 we were invited in the pages of the paper to consider Transtromer's work, "the work of a major, even a great, modern poet"; and the "icy Nordic romanticism of bleak forests, remote villages, and shorelines" where "half-smothered, the gods of summer / fumble in sea-mist". A year later, Paul Binding, commented on the "sophisticated and intellectually adventurous" writers of Sweden, who were surely nurtured by an equally sophisticated and intellectually adventurous society.

So far, so un-extraordinary. Then, in 2007, Alan Browjohn began a review by noting the many translators who had "addressed with devotion and distinction the task of rendering into English the work of the Swedish poet Tomas Transtromer". Robin Robertson's "versions" of Transtomer had recently appeared, leaving Brownjohn to consider the nuances of the terms "translation", "version" and "imitation". But for one reader he was being too  "diplomatic". According to Robin Fulton, "An excessively large number of Robertson's lines are identical to mine in my Transtromer translations". Further, "Robertson makes arbitrary changes to the Swedish, a language he does not seem to understand". And so the spat began proper. 

Robertson was not the first to make such "arbitrary changes" and take liberties with the language, added W. S. Milne: "The most famous (or perhaps notorious?) case is that of Robert Lowell in his Imitations of 1961". "If only Robertson had vandalized Transtromer in the way Lowell vandalized his originals", came the response. Others weighed in with both opinions and further related questions: Is the translator of poetry meant to recreate the sense of the original? Or should they do their best to recreate "the music, the atmosphere, the entire spirit" of it? Is it possible to do one, without doing the other?

Here's a question of our own: Was it all just "a muddy, mean-spirited and potentially damaging squabble over nothing"? Decide for yourself by reading the argument in full, here.

Of course, the Swedish Nobel committee did not need to translate Transtromer to consider him for this year's laureateship. They chose him because "through his condensed, translucent images, he gives us fresh access to reality".

Saving libraries

As anyone following the fate of UK libraries will know, the judicial review hearing about the planned closure of libraries in Somerset and Gloucestershire finished last Thursday. It may be some weeks before we know the outcome. The review inspired an article by Caitlin Moran in The Times about the library she used when she was a child (which "allowed a girl so poor she didn't even own a purse to come in twice a day and experience actual magic"). In turn, a little survey here at the TLS reveals, unsurprisingly perhaps, that libraries were an important feature in the childhoods of many of the staff.

The Science and German Literature editor Maren Meinhardt used her local library "compulsively, . . . particularly enjoying taking out stuff I thought would make me look clever, such as Dostoyevsky and James Joyce. Dostoyevsky I was too immature to understand (which of course I didn't realize at the time), whereas Joyce was a true eye-opener, giving me some sort of an idea how daring and elegant an enterprise literature could be".

The Deputy Editor, the poet Alan Jenkins, went regularly to his local library in East Sheen, which in those days was housed in a collection of pre-fab Nissen huts. He says: "I went through, in no particular order, the Collected Pound and Eliot, Auden, MacNeice, Spender, Stevens, Marianne Moore; and I got into the slim volumes as well – Ian Hamilton's The Visit; Larkin, The Whitsun Weddings and The North Ship; Ted Hughes, The Hawk in the Rain; Plath's Ariel; Near the Ocean by Robert Lowell; and – a really big discovery – 77 Dream Songs by John Berryman . . . . They gave me an idea of how a book of poems, though slender, didn't have to be slight. No one ever seemed to take them out but me. There must have been an enthusiast on the staff who bought them all in, but I felt it was my personal library, and inwardly congratulated the local authorities on having provided it for me".

The Arts and Website editor Lucy Dallas used her library in Halifax so much, and held on to the books so tenaciously, that a librarian was dispatched to her house to collect the accrued fines.

It's difficult to know how influential personal testimonies are in the fight to keep libraries open, but the Man Booker Prize for Fiction has invested in an evening of them on October 11; three of the shortlisted authors – Carol Birch, Stephen Kelman and A.D. Miller – will speak.

Another of them, Julian Barnes, has already said of his own experience: "Like most writers of my generation, I grew up with the weekly exchange of library books, and took their pleasures and treasures for granted. The cost of our free public library system is small, its value immense. To diminish and dismantle it would be a kind of national self-mutilation, as stupid as it would be wicked".

Perhaps the nominees will have something to say in response to the Oxfordshire local authority leader Keith Mitchell, who complained in an article published yesterday about "largely well-heeled worthies" – including the writers Philip Pullman and Colin Dexter – who "refused to accept that reducing library cuts would add to the cuts to other services". . . .

 

After Ramona: a call to Australian TLS-lovers

At nine in the London morning, in Portland Place, beside the Falun Gong protesters and the BBC coffee-clutching day shift, I was rarely at my best.

 The prospect of speaking to Australia's literary microphone mistress, Ramona Koval, was always a challenge.

 She would ask probing questions about the latest issue of the TLS - and I would answer them as best I could. We covered the classics and the contemporary for the ABC Book Show in sunny Melbourne (I always thought of it as sunny) and that was fine.

 We sometimes extended into centuries where my 9 am knowledge was not quite so sharp as of the ancients and of now. But on this show, with this interviewer, that was always fine too. Ramona knew a lot - and thus, so it seemed, did we both. And for her it was evening.

I hadn't heard from Ramona for a while.  I was half wondering whether my knowledge of the nineteenth century had suddenly been found just too wanting. 

I discover today - late, I know - that the Book Show has disappeared in to an arts show, the latest case of the global obsession with pretending that literature can be mixed up with other cultural stuff without damage to the common good.

Australians who read the TLS, want to read it, or think they should will in future lack the Koval spur. I invite you now to subscribe and read us just to spite the misguided..

Here comes the Flann

Today marks what would have been the hundredth birthday of Brian Ó Nualláin, or Brian O'Nolan, alias Myles na gCopaleen, Brother Barnabas, George Knowall . . . that is to say, Flann O'Brien, best know as the author of At Swim-Two-Birds (1939), The Dalkey Archive (1964) and The Third Policeman, which was published shortly after his death in April 1966. For the anniversary of the writer's death on April 1, scholars, performers and writers (among them the novelist Ed O'Loughlin) gathered at the Palace Bar in Dublin's Fleet Street to celebrate "Myslesday" – a night of drinking, reading, discussion and . . . drinking.

 

In Singapore, in June, the Nanyang Technological University organized a Flann O'Brien Centenary Symposium, as part of its International Conference of Literature and the Arts, while, the following month, the University of Vienna was the seat of "100 Myles: The international Flann O'Brien Centenary Conference". Professor Werner Huber cites Kurt Palm's theatre productions and his film In Schwimmen-Zwei-Vögel (1997), as well as Harry Rowohlt, the German translator of O'Brien's main works (Lore Fiedler is the original German translator of At Swim-Two-Birds, in 1966), as proof of Austria's "rich tradition of adapting the work of Flann O'Brien". And so The International Flann O'Brien Society was born – in Austria.

The Dalkey Archive Press are, of course, not far behind in celebrating the author of the novel that is their namesake: a special issue of the Review of Contemporary Fiction, co-edited by Keith Hopper and Neil Murphy is forthcoming. And, as one would hope, much celebrating remains to be done closer to home, too. At Trinity College Dublin, the Flann O'Brien Centenary Weekend will take place on October 14–16, with speakers including Fintan O'Toole from the Irish Times, the poet Louis de Paor, Anthony Cronin and Joseph Brooker. The keynote will be Keith Hopper on "Writing to the Future: Flann O'Brien in the 21st Century".

Meanwhile, in London, after financial backing for an opera adaptation of The Third Policeman fell through in March, the eccentric composer Ergo Phizmiz ran a successful campaign on crowdfunder.co.uk. His "neuropera" – which, Ergo explains in an interview with the Wire, stands for "new experimental underground radical opera, and also stands for noisy eccentric uber-ropey opera, nasty exceptional uppity rabid opera, and naughty elegant umpty dumpty raging opera. That's to say that it's a home made opera produced and performed by thieves and vagabonds like myself" – is now touring. "Expect bicycles, murder, atomic theory, typewriters, infinity, and sweets", we are told.

The Irish actor Brendan Gleeson (Braveheart, Gangs of New York, In Bruges, 28 Days Later, and, most recently, Into the Storm, in which he played Winston Churchill), appears to have found funding more readily available for his directorial debut – a film adaptation of At Swim-Two-Birds, scheduled for completion in 2013. It looks set to be an all-Irish affair: produced by Parallel Pictures in Dublin, the actors Michael Fassbender, Gabriel Byrne, Colin Farrell and Cillian Murphy are rumoured to be involved.

And can we expect similar events to take place in O'Brien's birth place – or, rather, the town in which Brian Ó Nualláin was born – Strabane, County Tyrone? As part of their Centenary Programme which started September 10, Strabane District Council has scheduled "activities": book readings, film screenings, talks and walks. So far these have included readings of poetry and dialogues inspired by O'Brien and written by young residents of Strabane (which will be "collated via digital media" to become a "cyber exhibition"), and a screening of Babble, a film by David O'Kane, in which "Flann O'Brien, Franz Kafka and Jorge Luis Borges converse about infinity and the implications of logical order in language and society, each speaking in his native tongue". Still, no plans for a neuropera.

To tide you over until then: see D. H. on "Myles: His part in our downfall" and David Wheatley's commentary piece from last week's TLS, "A day of his own", an absorbing account of the "odd symmetry" of this mythical man of many names.

Paris cannot abandon Balzac!

Balzac was always changing addresses in Paris, but he did spend seven years (1840–47) at an address in the rue Raynouard in the sixteenth arrondissement. In that time he produced such masterpieces as Une Ténébreuse Affaire, La Rabouilleuse and La Cousine Bette. The house is described by Graham Robb in his wonderful biography of the author (1994) as a "little eighteenth-century house in the suburban village of Passy", where "the landlord filled the empty apartments . . . with a colony of launderers who brought with them the greatest enemy known to writers: noisy children". It has for several decades accommodated the Maison de Balzac, one of apparently only three literary museums in the capital – the other two being the Maison de Victor Hugo and the Musée de la Vie Romantique. The Maison de Balzac receives more than 50,000 visitors a year.

In 2001 the Parisian city authorities were on the point of buying three properties adjoining the property, with a view to extending the cramped museum space. This hasn't happened. . . .

Instead, according to Gonzague Saint Bris, writing recently in Le Figaro, the Mairie is looking to sell the three properties, to take advantage of the buoyant property market in the city. He points out that "these three houses . . . full of charm if dilapidated, could easily be replaced by a building that would crush the maison de Balzac, that ancient 'folly' which, alone, bears witness to what was once the village of Passy, with its terraces going down to the Seine where, at the bottom of his garden, the writer would flee his creditors by taking a riverboat to the centre of Paris". Saint Bris reminds us that the house in Passy is one of only two surviving Paris addresses associated with the writer, the other being in rue Visconti where he set up his printing press (since converted into apartments).

Gonzague Saint Bris is president of the Société Honoré de Balzac de Touraine and the author of more than forty works including the recently published Balzac, une vie de roman, as well as biographies of other nineteenth-century French literary figures. He has also written a book about Michael Jackson, whom he accompanied on a tour of Africa in 1992 (Au Paradis avec Michael Jackson, 2010). He has twice stood as a candidate for the Académie française. In his Figaro piece he makes an eloquent plea to the Mayor of Paris (Bertrand Delanoë – whom he doesn't name) to rethink his decision and to see through a project initiated by his predecessor, suggesting that he would as a result gain "a place in literary history". As he says, "Paris cannot abandon Balzac!"

Is It Not Passing Brave?

 

Two weeks ago I was at the Berlin Literary Festival on a platform with Patrick Bahners, the author of Die Panikmacher ("The Scaremongers"). While Bahners talked mostly about the German Islamophobes who were the target of his book, I sounded off about Islamophobes in the English-speaking world, including Robert Kilroy-Silk, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Robert Spencer and the English Defence League. Then a week ago I was at the Wigtown Book Festival, this time on a platform with Martin Bell, the former television BBC journalist, MP and UNICEF emissary to Yemen and Rosemary Hollis, formerly of Chatham House and currently lecturer on the politics of the Middle East at City University. This time the topic was the "Arab Spring". Was regime change really happening? If so what were the causes? Was it part of the background to the impending vote at the United Nations on Palestinian nationhood? What role did the television broadcasts of Jazeera play in stirring up the Arab masses? And so on. Whither the Arab Spring? Whither Islamophobia? At both festivals I was at pains to point out that I pronounced on these issues with the full authority of someone who was an expert on medieval manuscripts of The Thousand and One Nights.

 

Iris Murdoch and John Bayley used to go from conference to conference pontificating on such nebulous subjects as "Whither the Novel?" and they became specialists in what they termed "whithering". Now it is evident to me that I too have reached the foothills of whithering and of punditry. (A pundit, a man learned in Sanskrit lore, then a Hindu law officer whose job it was to advise English judges, later yet Indians trained in use of instruments and their concealment who were employed to survey territories beyond the frontiers of the Raj. All this comes from Hobson-Jobson: The Anglo-English Dictionary.)

 

As far as the general public is concerned, there are relatively few experts on the modern Middle East and the same names come round again and again: Robert Fisk, Amir Taheri, Patrick Seale, Brian Whitaker, Ali Ansari and a handful of others. Coverage of the Middle East seems stretched and yet the region never seems to be out of the headlines. Has it always been thus since the time of the Crusades? Saladin and Richard the Lionheart in renewed peace talks; no end in sight for the Zengid succession crisis; new atrocities committed by suicidal devotees of the Assassin sect . . . But is it not passing brave to be a pundit? Yes, though there is a danger that, if I do more of this stuff, I shall become one of those absurd people who have an emphatic opinion on everything under the sun – like the panellists on Any Questions.  "I do think . . ."  Oh no.