Jonathan Chamberlain's Blog, page 3

Kundera’s Ignorance

Refreshing…that was the word I used at the end of the last post – but as I did so I felt I was copping out. OK. OK. Kundera’s first essay does provide a useful – and, dare I say it, perceptive – overview. Sadly the other essays, transcripts of interviews and speeches add nothing. Here and there an interesting aside, a detail – but nothing substantive – except that collectively they say, loud and clear: I, Milan Kundera, am an intellectual.

The day after posting, I was again browsing in the bookshops and for £3 acquired four books: The Pelican Guide to English Literature vol 7 (I could have got the entire set but frankly that would have been too heavy an intellectual load – but I did particularly want to see what they said on Forster. Published in 1961, the Modern Age has Sylvia Plath as its most modern figure – no Ted Hughes – literary dissection studies, only dead pigs need apply); Gulliver’s Travels and two books by Leonard Cottrell on the ancient pharoahs. Which would have been a worthy deal had I not gone in to browse the more expensive shelves – and there was a Kundera I had not read when it first came out: Ignorance. So five books for £5.95 it was.

Ah! Milan! How the mighty are fallen. I loved The Joke. You say that Laughable Loves is among your favourites – but Ignorance…well, let’s approach this from another angle.

The thing about a novel, that makes it a novel, is that, at its base there is a story. If that’s all there is then perhaps we can say it is a negligible thing. Then there are the characters – flat or round, it doesn’t matter (necessarily!) – but rich in their characterisation. And then there may be so many other things that can be added to the mix. But one thing that does not work too well (and this is the fault of Ignorance) is the addition of a serious intellectual narrator eviscerating an experience. What happens then is that the story ceases to be a story and becomes simply an illustration, a cartoon. Kundera wants to explain the complexities of returning to the homeland after a couple of decades of exile. And the complexities are interesting – but the novel isn’t. We simply don’t buy the characters because they are only there to illustrate. Kundera has become a narrative essayist – and frankly it’s a bit of a bore.

Maugham (or someone else) famously said: “There are three rules when it comes to writing a novel – but no-one knows what they are.” But I think one of those three rules is that the characters have to be real to the reader – and here, in this book, they aren’t.

Kundera is too aware of Literature (capital ‘L’) and his possible place in the progression of  Great Writers – and this is a destructive knowledge. This book is a warning to all of us who wish to write: do not take yourself too seriously – indeed, best to get out of the way and let the story tell what it has to tell.

One interesting detail (this from his The Art of the Novel) is that Kundera has a number obsession: his number is 7. This is the number of essays in this book and the number of sections in each of his novels  (I’m taking his word for this).  Even Lo Kuan-Chung’s Romance of the Three Kingdoms is constructed on a number basis. Each of the two volumes has exactly 60 chapters. Volume one is the rise of the heroes; volume two describes their slow eclipse. These are two life cycles. Sixty is for the Chinese, the cycle of time. The problem the Chinese had in terms of putting their finger on ‘time’ was that they didn’t, as we do, have a virtual Year Zero (actually not quite true as the year before 1AD is 1BC) – but  the Chinese had no point of beginning. Their time was attached to Emperors or an endlessness of sixty-year cycles. Each year has a name composed of two characters (words), one progresses in a series of ten and the other in a series of twelve. So each year has a different name during the cycle of 60 years and then the names repeat themselves. So no coincidence then that The Romance of the Three Kingdoms has two cycles of sixty chapters.

Nice to know I’m not alone in my obsessions with number.

Kundera on the novel

After Forster, the obvious book to extract from my heaving shelves was Milan Kundera’s The Art of the Novel. Immediately we are treading different waters. Where Forster dissects the novel like a pig, Kundera communes with its deeper significance. He sees it as a rare flower that could, at any moment, become extinct. Under Communist Russia this was nearly its fate.  Naturally, for Kundera, we are not talking simply of a story of a certain length. We are talking rather about an existential communication between existential being and existential being.

There were aeons of human existence before the novel came into being. Then, in Japan,  1,000 years ago, came The Tale of Genji. Sometime later – probably during the C14th – an unknown author, (said to be one Lo Kuan Chung),  wrote the wonderful, mature, Chinese historical novel: The Tale of the Three Kingdoms (if you intend to read this book, I strongly recommend Brewitt-Taylor’s masterly two volume  1925 translation re-published in 1959 by Kelly & Walsh of Hong Kong). I have read this novel – all 1,300 pages – twice and could read it again.

But Kundera is not interested in these or indeed in anything that is not European. For him the great ancestor of the novel is Cervantes’ Don Quixote.  It is Cervantes who first takes an individual on an adventure –  on a journey to discover. It is this that marks for Kundera  the start of ‘The Modern Era’ that is defined by “a passion to know”.  A journey that anyone can take who has this desire to know.

And the novel too has been on its own journey: “In its own way, through its own logic, the novel discovered the various dimensions of existence one by one: with Cervantes and his contemporaries, it enquires into the nature of adventure; with Richardson, it begins to examine ‘what happens inside’, to unmask the secret life of the feelings; with Balzac, it discovers mans rootedness in history; with Flaubert, it explores the terra previously incognita of the everyday; with Tolstoy, it focuses on the intrusions of the irrational in human behavious and decisions. It probes time: the elusive past with Proust, the elusive present with Joyce. With Thomas Mann, it examines the role of the myths from the remote past that control our present actions. Et cetera, et cetera.” He goes on. “A novel that does not discover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral.

These quotes are from the first, most interesting, of the seven essays that make up this book. Kundera is writing from a central European perspective and only once – with Faulkner mentioned very much in passing – does he refer to any novel that was not European in the continental sense. He talks at length about a novelist that most English readers will be unfamiliar with: Broch, as well as one with which we should all be much more aware of than most of us are: Kafka. But he does not include the American novels and therein lies a deep parochialism.

Nevertheless this first essay is interesting – the novel moves in time;  the novel is concerned about individual people and their horizons. Kundera has a lovely passage on how there is no sense of borders in Cervantes but decade on decade the fictional horizon becomes fore-shortened. But if we look at the major American writers we see something of the same journeys. It would be interesting to compare Kerouac’s On the Road to Don Quixote; Faulkner with Flaubert; Yossarian with Schweik. Who would we pair Hemingway with? Scott Fitzgerald? Lowry?

Kundera is also interesting on the gradual elimination of playfulness from the mainstream of the novel. It’s true the 1001 Nights is not strictly a novel but there is the extraordinary playfulness there in which stories emerge from other stories through the keyhole of dreams, as tangents, and this is a device that has never taken hold in the European or American novel.

There is also the narrative playfulness – in which the narrator talks directly to the reader unmediated by his characters – as in Tristram Shandy, Spike Milligan and dare I say it, the new comic genius on the block: yours truly – in Dreams of Gold (Ed: No! No! No! This is too much!  Have you no shame? The lengths you go to in your vile self-promotion is utterly disgusting.)  Et cetera, et cetera.

So, for Kundera the history of the Novel is the history of great books. Most novels (lower case) are merely pandering to an urge for narrative but say nothing about the great questions of the individual in the world. He disregards these novels utterly.  He is not rude; he simply ignores them.

This is the perspective of a man of Culture. It is a perspective that in itself is at odds with the more demotic perspectives of the English-speaking world. But it is a refreshing perspective – and I for one will be looking to renew my acquaintance with Kafka sooner rather than later.

Author chat link

Here’s the author chat I did May 2012 on Goodreads. It was fun.

http://bit.ly/K0HJZY

The novel according to Forster

 

The slim, blue backed Pelican did not at first attract my eye. Pelican as in book,  a variation on the P-bird theme of Penguin Books.  But eventually I got round to it. Such an unassuming title: Aspects of the Novel . And I would probably not have stayed long with it if it had not been written by E.M.Forster. First published in 1927 (republished as a Pelican in 1962 – 35 years later! How many books will have that happy fate?). Clearly, if a book needed saving this was it. And if a writer needed educating it was I (or should that be me?). Anyway some money changed hands and I slipped the book into a pocket, from where it was tidily placed on a shelf in my sitting room and within an hour or so it was completely forgotten.

But from time to time my Currently In Resident Ex (CIRE) – not quite Circe, though she sometimes considers me to be a bit of a pig – insists I do a book cull and curiously I find it quite easy to get rid of a couple of boxes of books – often those I have read half a dozen pages of and realised they were crap (crap that someone has slaved over for months or years, crap that someone has decided is more worthy of being published than my own worthy books – (publishers note: I have three decent novels in the bottom drawer just itching to be aired) -  but that’s another bag of worms. So out go these books and within weeks I am filling up the resultant gaps with, well, books like Aspects of the Novel that really I should read sometime.

And now’s my chance. It was waiting for just this moment.

Forster was in his late forties when he wrote this book – a few short years after publishing his most famous work, A Passage to India. This is a mature reflection on what it takes to be a novel. The book’s simplicity – linguistically, conceptually – immediately caught me up. No archaic language, no arch assumptions about the reader’s class or indeed level of education – that is to say no French bon mots or egregious quotes in Latin. In fact the editor is almost embarrassed about how straight forward it was – being the text of lectures written to be spoken – and with a good sense of what  spoken language was really like. He calls it a ramshackly course as it will be his own raw, unacademically guided attempt to make sense of the key ingredients of what a novel is. And as to what a novel is he quotes with approval a French writer (one M. Abel Chevalley – what do you mean you’ve never heard of him?). According to this French critic a novel is ‘a fiction in prose of a certain extent’, to which Forster adds the proviso that the extent should not be less than 50,000 words. A curious case of the positive and negative of a word meaning exactly the same – put the word ‘uncertain’ into the above sentence and it varies its meaning not one iota.

For Forster,  it matters not whether  a novel is French, Russian or English, eighteenth century or twenty-first, there must be some common denominators and it is Forster’s task to give some meat to these bones.  Not an easy task.  Novels are “most distinctly one of the moister areas of literature…occasionally degenerating into a swamp.”

The aspects of  ‘The Novel’ that Forster considers are ‘The Story’, ‘People’. ‘The Plot’, ‘Fantasy’, ‘Prophecy’, ‘Pattern and Rhythm’.

Now it may seem obvious that a novel should have a story but he’s not wholly thrilled by this. The kind of reader he himself is – in opposition to the kind of reader who  likes a bloody good story – is the kind of reader who says: “Yes – oh dear yes – the novel tells a story”. But he says this sadly. He likens the story aspect of a novel to a tapeworm that runs from beginning to end. The story is what appeals to the voice that keeps asking: ‘What happens next?  But he recognises that the story is the one thing ‘common to all the very complicated organisms known as novels.” And then Forster summarises one of Sir Walter Scott’s novels to devastating effect and we see how negligible a thing is mere story. And yet War and Peace too is a story very dependent on things happening one after the other.

In the chapters on ‘People’ – he devotes two to this subject – he comes up with the delightful formulation that there are ‘flat’ characters and ‘round’ characters. This seems like a moral judgment but in fact he points out that many books require their characters to be flat. That Charles Dickens probably has not one ’round’ character in all his many novels.

Then we come to plot – plot is distinguished from story in that the latter is concerned simply with time sequence, the former is concerned with causality.” ‘The King died and then the Queen died’ is a story. ‘The King died and then the Queen died of grief’ is a plot.” Readers of stories need only have curiosity but readers of plots require intelligence and memory.  Central to plot is mystery and the question ‘why?’

And so Forster’s slim book proceeds in the simplest way, with examples extracted from the great works – George Eliot, Dostoyevsky, Dickens, Austen and others – through various novel-related thickets.  To what extent do they depend on fantasy? On prophesy? Or to what extent are they concerned with the sound and pattern of words. Some novels epitomise this aspect, others another.

And at the end – well, if you’re like me, you’ve forgotten it all and have to go back and read it over again.

There’s quite a bit of meat in this offering, and some of it is very chewy.

Abrazos

Jerking my chain

The ad for Switzerland dropped out of the newspaper and lay around on the table for a week or two before I noticed the headline: “Switzerland – the land of…”

OK. Hit the pause button. What word do you think comes next? It must be a good word, a word that hits all our buttons and makes us want to go to Switzerland during the summer. I mean this is a slogan paid for by the Swiss Tourist Board, obviously to a top agency. Hip ad writers. Megabucks in print costs. It’s got to be the right word. Yep, there’s a hint. Just one word. A word that will hit all your buttons.

Well, we’ll come to that in a minute. Now what about the shop that sells “pre-loved clothes”? I don’t know about you but that got me thinking too. Was that going to make me feel good? I mean the way my mind works is this: those clothes were once loved so I guess that means the love has gone, is dead. These clothes are rejected clothes – once loved, then spurned. They’re orphans looking for decent foster parents; they’re pets that have outlived their Xmas present appeal. I mean, these clothes were once chosen, once bought, for good cash, by jerks. Do I have the same taste as these jerks? Hell no. Get me out of here. I’m sorry clothes. Lots of sympathy and all that but I don’t want jerk-sweat to come in contact with my skin. I mean, you’ve heard of transplant organs infiltrating their previous owner’s personality into the new body. Who knows? Jerk sweat might just work in the same way. You put on these clothes and soon you’re throwing away your entire wardrobe – all those clothes you once fell in love with. You become a clothes jerk – and the shop just takes it all in and tries to find a new home for these rejects, these pre-loved dresses. And, I know this is crazy but, have you noticed: all these pre-loved clothes have been rejected by women. What’s the conclusion here? Maybe, it’s time to move on.

And, I don’t know about you but I get these blog thingies that tell me how to write novels. One of them started by saying “Make sure your main character is likeable…” Likeable? Why? “Because you want your readers to engage and identify with them. Jesus. Is it just me? Forget Macbeth, King Lear, Julius Caesar. Shakespeare, you got it wrong.

And this all connects (don’t ask me how) with E.M.Forster’s Where Angels Fear to Tread, the grey-backed, yellowy pages of which accompanied me on a two hour train ride – and there isn’t an attractive person in the entire book. And, let’s face it, the story just doesn’t follow the right rules. If Vonnegut were drawing the story line it would be two waves – think sound waves – that cross over half way. One of the lines is for major characters and the other is for minor characters. It is about a pre-loved woman whose husband has died on her. She goes to Italy. She is a woman of strong emotions. She is a water balloon of love that breaks over the genial young man who greets her one day as she is walking around a provincial town. Love hurtles into marriage, boredom, baby and death. That’s where we are at the midpoint of this tale. What follows is even more tragedy. But Forster is not interested in making us feel the tragedy. He is interested in mocking everyone – except, interestingly, the young Italian man, who having been set up as a primitive target for our condescension becomes, not grand, but merely human. At one point the fate of the baby is discussed and the options for it are either to go to England where it will not be loved but will be properly brought up or left in Italy where it will not be brought up properly but will be loved. This story is interesting because Forster is using it simply to place a mirror in front of his English readers, showing them how monstrous their attitudes and assumptions are. Later of course he wrote a passage to India where it was an Indian doctor who was the victim of the engrained culture of the English characters.

And because he is really mocking his characters, and his readers? Did his first readers feel uncomfortable?

As I was reading, and enjoying this book – because it is well written and well observed – I saw it as a form of time travel. 107 years ago it was published (the second time in a matter of weeks that that number has appeared in these columns). 1905. So if we take 1903-4 as being the period of the story, we find all international communications taking place by telegraph and frequent letters. There are no cars. And yet in many other respects it is modern. The characters are tourists in Italy enjoying the culture, the paintings, the history, the architecture.

But interestingly, summer is the season not to travel to Italy – much too hot of course. And though the characters are in Italy during this off season (then) there is no comment on how awfully hot it must have been in the clothes they wore (no slopping around in shorts and t-shirt!).

A travel, summer, our thoughts tend to Switzerland – because the message of the ad writer has wormed its way into our unconscious. Of course. How sweet that word sounds. “Come to Switzerland – the land of …water” – Hah! Water! Sheer genius! Only a Swiss would think of it.

Numbers

We’ve had lines and shapes – let’s look at numbers. I’ve written a novel in 88,888 words; a novel about a mathematician in 28 chapters (28 is a perfect number) – both still in the bottom drawer –  and a published novel (Whitebait & Tofu (UK) http://amzn.to/IWBMww (USA) http://amzn.to/Khlpde) in 107 sections – why 107? Because 108 is a complete number for a reason explained in the novel – so why didn’t I write it in 108 sections? Again the answer to that puzzle is also in the book.

I was reminded of these kinds of games ( inessential but…very satisfying when you pull them off) that some of us like to play when I read the obituaries this morning. The novelist Christine Brooke-Rose died in March aged 89. Who? The great author of A ZBC of Ezra Pound among other works (Great title). She too played games. Her novel Between was written entirely omitting the verb ‘to be’. Her autobiography, Remake, was written entirely without using the first person. Her novel Amalgememnon was written entirely in the future tense. I love her already.

However, there is one number – actually a whole range of numbers – that I detest. I absolutely abhore any number greater than 200,000 appearing in the following sentence: Humans emerged as a distinct species around _______ years ago. You read it all the time – the assumption that humans were walking this planet one million years ago. Now it is true that various homo species (No! Not that!) existed several millions of years ago: Here is Wikepedia:

“Humans (known taxonomically as Homo sapiens,[3][4] Latin for “wise man” or “knowing man”)[5] are the only living species in the Homo genus. Anatomically modern humans originated in Africa about 200,000 years ago, reaching full behavioral modernity around 50,000 years ago.[6]“ 

But this means Neanderthals were not humans; Peking Man was not a human. They were hominids. Homo erectus and Homo habilis did live millions of years ago and spread widely across the Eurasian land mass but they are not humans – OK?

Can we have agreement on this – or do we have to get a UN fact finding mission to sort it out? It’s irritating details like this (numbers!) that get my goat. My goat was last got this morning as I read Colin Wilson’s The Occult. Now I like Colin Wilson – or rather, I like the idea of Colin Wilson. If you remember he was the self-educated young enfant terrible (can you have an old enfant terrible?) in the 1960s (?) -[just checked (always check!) - actually 1956] – when he published his book The Outsiders. 

I love the idea that someone with simple fire, grit and a bit of the maverick about him/her can produce work that is new and thrilling and sells loads – it is, after all, what I aspire to. Sadly, it’s a bit late for me to be an enfant terrible! A dotard terrible, perhaps?

The problem is that Colin Wilson is wading in deep waters with his accounts of magic and other stuff in that vein – this book is 750 pages long and I too, at page 200, am drowning. What on earth is he saying? What is the purpose of it in the grand scheme of things that he is conjuring up? It’s too much and much of it is nonsense. Let’s take incest, which is all I can remember of the book right now (200 pages and all you can remember is incest? I’m afraid so.). He sets himself up against Claude Levi Strauss who argues very reasonably (I am speaking as a one time student of Social Anthropology) –  that the incest prohibition is really explained by the need to engage in gift linking with other groups. The unmarried girls are the gifts. No, says Colin Wilson, that’s not it. The reason is that ‘primitives’ (his words) do instinctively understand that intermarriage will lead to a genetic weakening and so must be avoided. Hmm? Assertion isn’t demonstration or proof of anything – it’s not even an argument, frankly. And there is too much of that kind of thing, I’m afraid, in The Occult. And he’s not a great stylist either sadly so I, for one, was not carried along.

Why did I start to read the Occult? Because of the death theme – leading to the hereafter – which is why I started taking an interest in obituaries which reminds me: Don’t you just hate it when they don’t tell you why someone died? OK, at 89, as with Ms Brooke-Rose, we can accept old age as sufficient. And indeed as I read through the obituaries in this morning’s Times, I find that person after person is said to have died of cancer. I am always sad when I read this. There is a voice in me that wants to scream: If only they had read my cancer book they would have… But it’s a waste of breath, frankly. But if you want to respond to my question: Is dying of cancer optional? go to www.cancerfighter.wordpress.com

And while I’m on the subject of facts: I discovered many years ago that a typical Guardian article (and sadly, the same goes for The Observer) tells you what the attitudes and conclusions are without providing the facts so you can form your own opinion. There, that was fermenting for some time. The Guardian is certainly on my list of Most Annoying Things.

So: Numbers? When your number’s up, it’s time to go. And I am this minute going to see what it will cost me to buy a book or two of Christine’s. Perhaps we should form a fan club? Any takers?

P.S. I have just had a quick browse of Ms Brooke-Rose’s books on Amazon and sadly, I won’t be joining any Christine Brooke-Rose Appreciation Club. Sorry.

Stephen Fry and Time Travel

My previous post on lines – time lines, story lines – prompted a memory and thank God for You Tube, here is Vonnegut talking about the shapes of stories – delightful.

Now, I have been meaning to write about Stephen Fry’s novel, Making History, for some time – but there’s been ‘an issue’ – you see I sent Stephen Fry a copy of my own humorous novel, Dreams of Gold, hoping that he would read it and be amused and post a comment about what a wonderful book it was so that all his Twitter-followers would rush out and buy the book [available here (UK) http://amzn.to/HVn9O4 or here (USA) http://amzn.to/HWb3TS or here (Canada) http://amzn.to/J4FYi9 or here (Germany) http://amzn.to/HVK36d or here (Italy) http://bit.ly/JfwKi9   - Not that I'm desperately pushing it or anything!] – but so far he hasn’t. (Stephen, if you find yourself reading this, it’s the one with the vibrant orange cover in your book mountain). Now the reason I know that my book is in Stephen’s book mountain is that he responded to receiving the book with a personal note from his secretary to that effect, which is really extremely civilized of him)

But onwards. Let’s look at his book. Making History is a classically humorous novel in the English style. I’ve already mentioned the key ingredient of this in relation to Flann O’Brien’s The Dalkey Archive, it is the bumbling, well-intentioned, bright but stupid, ineffectual protagonist (that presumably we can all identify with because that is how we see ourselves? Hmm? Not entirely convinced) – however, I have to say that Michael Young, the would-be History PhD, who is the person occupying this role in this novel, is a particularly irritating example of the species. The other signature element of this kind of novel is the romantic interest (the happy ending). Fry manages to squeeze this in at the end in a slightly quirky (but not at all surprising to the alert reader) way.

But all of this is padding. The key elements of this narrative are eruditely manoeuvred into play. There is the time travel, which as in The Dalkey Archive, is presented in an absurd way – there’s no point trying to create a realistic scenario for corporeal transfer to the past and back again – but with this kind of novel we cannot judge it on its credibility, all we can do is sit back and enjoy the ride (or not, as may be). But whereas Flann O’Brien uses his time travel as a throw-away dimension of his narrative, one in which he pokes a few jokes at the Catholic Church, Fry has serious fish to…bake.

In Making History, his hero goes back in time in order to prevent Hitler from being born. But the consequences of this act are not quite as he had hoped; very, very badly not as he had hoped. There is an amusing re-entry to the present which he discovers is not at all like the present he had left. In fact…  of course… there needs to be some form of rectification and so… I’m afraid so, you’re going to have to read the book to find out what the hell I’m talking about.

But as all readers know there is a point in every book where you say, why on earth did he do that? And then you realise that if everyone did the normal sensible thing there would be no story. The irrationality is at the heart of the book.

And this is true of Making History – the truth is that if one somehow managed to arrange matters so that Hitler (to take an example or Genghis Khan’s father (with whom 10 percent of us share a genetic relationship to take another) never existed, then very few, if any of us would be alive today, would ever have existed. Instead the world would be peopled by others who, because we came into existence, didn’t. Think about it. How many of our parents would have met if Hitler hadn’t been born? How many of our great great grandparents would have existed if Genghis Khan hadn’t decided to send his armies west? And since if time travel was possible there would always be some idiot  going back and tinkering with the result that the present time would be continually ceasing to exist – but since it hasn’t ceased to exist or since there hasn’t been a convulsive change in personnel, we can conclude that time travel is not possible.

So the minute our protagonist (well, not mine – Stephen’s)  succeeded in arranging things so that Hitler wasn’t born, he would have himself flashed into non-existence – which is an impossible reality to include in a humorous novel (in the English style), which is no doubt why Stephen – who is a bright man and would have thought of this – ignored it.

Tangent: I remember reading a description of the world as it was 20 million years ago. The author said that it would have looked very similar in many ways to the present time with one curious fact, every single species of life – animal and vegetal – would have been different. I was in Australia at the time where all the animal and vegetal species were all looking similar but were, almost entirely, very different to the natural background I was more used to, so I comprehended this point immediately. 20 million years ago the world looked like Australia.

Today’s haul of goodies

Well, unusually for me I had to venture outdoors into a leaden day that symbolically offered rain but provided a mere spattering – not enough to dent the drought, not by a long chalk (and where are those ‘long chalks’ when you need them, whatever they are?).

So, business done I sauntered back along my favourite route. At the first shop I bought three books for £2 each – a collection of Pauline Kael’s cinematic commentary; Villages of Northern Argyll and a Lesbian and Gay history of Brighton.

Buying is never (well, hardly ever) a wholly impulsive act. It is preceded by some moments of  deliberative browsing. What on earth do I want, for example, with a book on Argyll? Well, the back cover blurb wades straight into this kind of scepticism:  ”Argyll’s historical importance goes back thousands of years. As the centre of the kingdom of Dalriada, the area was of seminal importance in terms of Gaelic culture…” (don’t you just love that ‘seminal’ , not to mention ‘ in terms of’ – why not just ‘to’ or ‘for’) -A quick browse took me past a discussion of the chemical virtues of seaweed and the story of a man hacked down on his way to church to marry his mistress – nevertheless the victim insisted the marriage be completed before he died – so legitimising his son, so establishing him as his legal heir – and so eliminating from the inheritance the man who had orchestrated the attack. Now, that’s history! I had to read more.

At the cash desk the shop owner – a man of independent intellect – laughed: “Ah yes, Pauline Kael, very good except on Orson Welles and his contributions or otherwise to the film Citizen Kane. She attributed most of its excellencies to those working around Welles – the editor, the cinematographer and so on. Welles, when told of this, apparently laughed and said: ‘At least she can’t say I didn’t act in it!’”

But this wasn’t the last of my purchases.  The 3 books for £2 offer at the next shop meant that Nigel Calder’s ‘Spaceships of the mind – the deserts of space are rich in energy and materials that could support life’ slipped sweetly into my possession – a BBC hardback published in 1978 and containing such nuggets as “Phobos [a captured asteroid orbiting Mars - once thought by the Russian astrophysicist Joseph Shklovsky to be an artificial satellite launched by an extinct race of Martians] looks not so much like an artificial satellite but a diseased potato,’ says Calder, who, you will all remember, was a former editor of New Scientist. Along with it went a rather ropey copy of Tobias Smollet’s Humphrey Clinker (guilt at never having read him) and The Tarot of the Bohemians by ‘Papus’ – this is worth it simply for the title alone. My excuse for this book is that I am planning – oh dear, oh dear, ‘planning’ is much too concrete a word – a novel in which such esoteric knowledge (or at least the style of it if not the content) may – I stress ‘may’ – be useful.

But the eye is promiscuous and in the window I spied Prologomena to the study of Greek Religion by Jane Harrison – first published in 1903 and completely scrambling contemporary attitudes to classical studies. What I held in my hand was a paperback reissue dated 1980. A book that is still worth keeping in print  77 years on is a book worth reading. Especially as I am potentially very interested in the ancient Greeks – I keep buying books about them and then I keep refraining from reading them. Still, I must have it (for £9.95!!!!).

“Only the best books here,” says the bookseller chuckling as he pockets my money. “I refuse to have thrillers or romance. Won’t have them in the shop.” A man of discriminating principle. I tell him the rain seems to be threatening his books laid out in plastic tubs on a shelf outside his shop. He shrugs.

So by 11 am I am back home having spent £18 on 7 books – averaging £2.57 (say £2.60) a book. As my uncle once pointed out you can go seriously broke saving money on cheap deals.

Lines and spaces

The other night in the pub, R started to discourse on lines. “There are no lines in nature,” he said. “There are edges, but no lines.” So, anywhere you see a line, you see meaning; you see an indication of intelligent creation, purpose even.”

The more we discussed it the more we saw in the subject. There are thin lines and thick, straight lines and curved – even squiggly and zig-zag. Then there are the architectural lines. Lines that intersect and create angles (do two curved lines intersecting create an angle? If so how would you measure it?) – three or more intersecting lines create spaces. Can lines be infinitely long? Surely not. Infinity is beyond the ability of a line-maker. There is only the possibility of infiniteness. Lovely story of how a child is counting past infinity, “Infinity-one, infinity two, infinity three…”

There are the intentional lines of poetry and the often random lines of prose (dependent on typeface and font size for their positioning). There are the punitive lines of school: “Do 100 lines”. And then there are the hard lines of luck. I’m not sure I’ve heard anyone say “Hard lines” for a while.

And then there are all those virtual lines, metaphorical lines: time lines, story lines.

I was reminded of this discussion when I read Netherland by Joseph O’Neill. (“Mesmerising” according to Jeremy Paxman; ‘An exquisitely written novel,” according to the New Yorker magazine). The Netherland of the title is a play on the fact that the protagonist is Dutch and he finds himself not so much exploring (too intentional) but accidentally exposed to a ‘below world’ – so this is also Netherland as in Nether Wallop.

The novel starts promisingly. Hans is a rich money man in New York, early thirties – so rich and sexy. He discovers a world of Caribbean cricket and joins it. He becomes very pally with the captain who has big schemes (wants to build a cricket stadium in New York). Meanwhile his wife leaves him and returns to London.

I was interested in the idea of a cricket culture in New York, and that is what the story appeared to promise. But something odd happened on the way. What I took to be back story seemed to take over and bullied the main story out of the way (or so it seemed to me) and then an incidental fore-story also muscled in and we had two fringe stories competing cannabilistically, devouring the narrative meat. And the promising foreground of cricket in New York disappeared. And in any case how was it a money man had so much time on his hands and why did he choose to live in such a dump of a hotel?

There was an odd sense of the story being half real – particularly at the beginning. I had to check several times that I was reading a novel rather than a memoir. To a certain extent that should be taken as a sign of very good writing but as we saw in the discussion of lines, reality is formless, fiction has form. There was a very odd merging here between the formless and the formed. I got a bit queasy.

In the end I didn’t really care about the protagonist, or about his silly wife or about his criminal best pal. And I was sad because there had been something there in the beginning that had got lost. ( “A brilliant, haunting novel’ said the Daily Telegraph. “Beautifully written,” according to Monica Ali.) Ah well, Joseph, you can’t win them all. I’m just sad that the one you didn’t win was me.

Death

Flann O’Brien’s darkly comic tour of one man’s Hell, the real place, led me to The Oxford Book of Death- e compilation of quotes and wisdom. This one was edited by D.J.Enright, one of those grand old men of literature known as eminent critics; a man who has managed to squeeze a living out of the business of reviewing books. And how do you divide up the references? Into what categories? Does it matter as long as we get some juicy wisdom. And there is some here. Here are the ones that struck me as capturing the essence of the business:

“When compared with the stretch of time unknown to us, O king, the present life on earth is like the flight of a single sparrow through the hall where, in winter, you sit with your captains and ministers. Entering at one door and leaving by another, while it is inside it is untouched by the wintry storm; but this brief interval of calm is over in a moment, and it returns to the winter, whence it came, vanishing from your sight. Man’s life is similar; and of what follows it, or what went before, we are utterly ignorant.”

This was the Venerable Bede, a monk who lived in the north of England around 675-735 A.D. Note he was honest enough not to bore us with guff about Heaven and Hell. And he has put it so simply that it cannot be improved upon. Our lives are no more than a sparrow’s flight through the hall of life. This is the truth. What else can one say about it. Well, a great deal, as it happens:

Alexander Pope puts the objective facts to rhyming couplets:

See dying vegetables life sustain

See life dissolving vegetate again

All forms that perish other forms supply

(By turns we catch the vital breath and die

Like bubbles on the sea of Matter born

They rise, they break and to that sea return.

And yes, of course we can see that. And Pope was not above joking about other people’s deaths (not in the best of taste of course – but funny!) Here is his couplet on a couple killed by lightning

Here lie two poor lovers, who had the mishap

Though very chaste people, to die of a Clap

But of course it is not death in general the concerns us. It is our own death that obsesses us (or not – In my case I have long been an Epicurean, one of those who believe that life is fine as long as it is comfortable but when not, not. There is one thing I fear infinitely more than death – and I speak as one who has just entered The Death Zone (the age of 60 onwards) – and that is a long and helpless long life. My father has just been released from a solitary confinement more punitive than any handed out to a criminal – locked into his own body by advanced Parkinson’s. Also I have seen death – my wife’s, my daughter’s – and this makes an enormous difference. The Japanese poet Issa expressed this more poignantly than anyone ever could:

This world of dew

Is a world of dew

And yet…

And yet…

A poem written on the death of a son. Acceptance and regret lashed together.)

It is Andre Malraux who makes this point:

“There is…no death…There is only…me…me…who is going to die…”

Malraux had a full life and lived to the age of 75. He can have no complaints. Twelve more years for me and I would happily follow him. (If I am blessed with 12 more years, the heart twinges from time to time and there are fears (my doctor’s) that I may have had one of those pre-stroke thingies called TIAs – transient ischaemic attacks. I don’t believe I had, and nor did the cardiac specialists that I talked to (they told me they had never heard of the kind of symptoms I had had (it happened the evening of my father’s death (could it have been spirit possession?) – but that’s not what they said in their report (covering their asses)).

And who says the Germans have no sense of humour. Here’s Heine:

The heavenly fields of Paradise,

That happy country, don’t tempt me:

I’ll find no women in the sky

Lovelier than those that here I spy

O Lord I think the best for me’s

To leave me in this world, don’t you?

But first, heal my infirmities

And see about some money too.

And then there’s the matter of epitaphs and last words. I’m sure Oscar Wilde didn’t say: “Either those curtains go, or I do!” But it’s so good I’m sure he would have been pleased to have the ascription. And then there’s this from Malcolm Lowry.

Malcolm Lowry

Late of the Bowery (it’s true he was a terrible drunk)

His prose was flowery (hmmm?)

And often glowery

He lived, nightly, and drank, daily

And died playing the ukulele (if only!)

I was pleased to see this as I have in fact been to visit – as many Catholics visit Lourdes – the grave of Malcolm Lowry in Ripe, East Sussex on which, if memory serves, are just his name and dates.

In his book on Savannah, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (a truly wonderful book), John Berendt describes how the poet Conrad Aiken had his grave so arranged that people could sit on it by the river side. Wonderful. And Lowry was once a student of Aiken’s (one of those frivolous links that appear to be significant but aren’t).

And as for me, there will be no epitaphs, no clever last words. I will be cremated and my ashes will be dissolved in the waters of Nam Tam bay on Cheung Chau island, Hong Kong, where, from time to time, when I am able to do so, I spread flowers on the water in remembrance of Bern and Stevie, and some are washed back to the shore and some are taken out to sea. And so it goes..

This story is told in Wordjazz for Stevie  http://amzn.to/JdZ2UY