NEW WRITING / BOOK TALK / NEWS AND REVIEWS

THE READER

No. 29 SPRING 2008

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Supported by:
EDITOR Philip Davis

DEPUTY EDITOR Sarah Coley

CO-EDITORS Angela Macmillan
Brian Nellist
Christopher Routledge
John Scrivener
Jen Tomkins

NEW YORK EDITOR Enid Stubin

CONTRIBUTING EDITOR Les Murray

ADDRESS The Reader

19 Abercromby Square
Liverpool L69 7ZG

EMAIL readers@liverpool.ac.uk
WEBSITE www.thereader.co.uk
BLOG thereaderonline.co.uk/

SUBSCRIPTIONS AND DISTRIBUTION See p. 119

ISBN: 978-0-9551168-8-9

SUBMISSIONS See p.xxx

The Reader welcomes submissions of poetry, fiction, essays, readings and thought.
We publish professional writers and absolute beginners with emphasis on quality
and originality of voice. Send your manuscript to The Reader Office, 19 Abercromby
Square, Liverpool L69 7ZG, UK. New York Office, Enid Stubin, 200 East 24th St., Apt.
504, New York, NY, 10010. SAE with all manuscripts please.

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 ABOUT THE READER

The Reader magazine is published by The Reader, a not-for-profit organi-

sation within the University of Liverpool. The organisation has grown
out of the magazine, which was launched when the founder editors
were literature teachers in the Continuing Education programme. In
what seemed a unique community, free from the constraints of exams
or accreditation, readers aged 18–80 and from all educational back-
grounds were sharing reading difficulties and enthusiasms. There was
a sense of exhilaration: we were reading big and daunting works to-
gether with growing confidence. The desire to keep that spirit alive is
behind everything we do.

The Reader magazine first appeared in 1997. We continue to provide

a platform for personal and passionate responses to books, as well as
seeking to identify new and exciting writers. We also publish a free
newsletter which details our events and projects.

Events include Readers’ Days, where people from all walks of life
come together to discuss books, stories and poems; large-scale public
events like the Penny Readings, which look to recreate the meetings
where Dickens would read to thousands; and live events featuring
authors as diverse as David Constantine, Doris Lessing and Will Self.
The Reader also offers tailored training for organisations that wish to
put reading into the heart of their work.

The Reader’s participation programme, Get Into Reading, is our

largest area of work, actively seeking out new readers in non-tradition-
al or disadvantaged areas. We believe that literature has a purpose in
the world beyond the syllabus, classroom or lecture hall, and that its
absence from common life is a loss to be remedied. We set up weekly
reading groups where facilitators read aloud, ensuring that the words
are made real for readers and non-readers alike. This makes a Get Into
Reading group profoundly democratic and leaves the power – to join in
and to speak, or to remain silent and private – entirely with the indi-
vidual. Group members report increased confidence, concentration and
motivation.
 THE READER

CONTENTS
Gabriel
Josipovici

Mark Rylance

A. S. Byatt

EDITORIAL ESSAYS
7 Philip Davis Tell Me! 28 Graham Hayes
10 Editor’s Picks Something to be Said for Dawkins
30 Howard Jacobson
POETRY Know Thine Enemy
14 Face to Face 47 A. S. Byatt
16 David Constantine Living Forms
27 Mark Rylance 120 Andrzej Gasiorek
37 Kenneth Steven The Call of the Human
44 Jeffrey Wainwright
53 Omar Sabbagh INTERVIEW
54 John Kinsella 18 Mark Rylance
72 Penny Fearn Tanks Mona Lisa

THE POET ON HIS WORK READING LIVES

34 Kenneth Steven 11 Ian McMillan
Letters to a Younger Self:
FICTION From Jack Brooks
39 Gabriel Josipovici to Peter Finch and Back
Love Across the Borders 69 Kate McDonnell
125 Raymond Tallis Fight or Flight
Heart of Darkness 74 Angela Macmillan
At the Quiet Limit of the World

4
 THE READER

Kenneth
Howard Steven
Joanna Jacobson
Trollope

YOUR REGULARS REVIEWS: NEW BOOKS

77 Enid Stubin 103 Good Books: short reviews
Our Spy in NY: Menuspotting by Clare Williams, Wendy Kay,
80 The London Eye Bea Colley and Jen Tomkins
Keeping Heart 105 Brian Nellist
83 Jane Davis William Trevor
What the Papers Say Cheating at Canasta
88 Brian Nellist 110 Brian Nellist
Ask the Reader Patrick McGuinness,
19th Century Blues
READERS CONNECT 113 Sarah Coley
90 Lynne Hatwell Neil Curry, Other Rooms
Meet the Reading Group
93 Suze Clarke THE BACK END
Joseph Conrad, The Shadow-Line 38 Tom Ashley
Syrian Picture No. 65
YOUR RECOMMENDATIONS 115 Buck’s Quiz
57 Four Helpings of Wordsworth 116 Prize Crossword
By Stephen Gill, Joanna Trollope, By Cassandra
Michael O’Neill and David Wilson 117 Quiz and Puzzle Answers
96 Sarah Coley 118 Contributors
A Letter to Milosz
99 Christopher Routledge
Crime Spree: Arthur Conan Doyle,
A Study in Scarlet

5
“2008 IS THE YEAR
IN WHICH LIVERPOOL
– THIS MAGAZINE’S HOME TOWN –
BECOMES EUROPEAN
CAPITAL OF CULTURE:
GOOD ON US!”
 EDITORIAL

TELL ME!

Philip Davis

S omething happened to me during this year’s Penny

Readings. The Reader stages this event every Christmas
at Liverpool’s magnificent St George’s Hall, in memory
of Dickens’s own appearances in the city – costing (in
folklore) one penny. For Dickens, the loneliness behind a
desk gave way to vocal drama, live at the lectern, where he could mes-
merise his audience into being one whole family of feeling.
This year we were doing something from Shakespeare’s The Winter’s
Tale – the arraignment scene in which the innocent Hermione is brought
before the court of Sicilia on account of the mad sexual jealousy of her
husband, King Leontes. It was informal, a reading with the texts in
front of us, and my role was simply that of a foil. I was to stand there,
Leontes himself, in confrontation – whilst our star guest, the actress
Annabelle Dowler, spoke Hermione’s great words of injured rebuttal.
In his terrible delusion Leontes threatens her with ‘justice’. Hermi-
one tells him to spare his threats: what does she care if she dies? She has
already lost his love; she has had her daughter taken away from her; her
new-born baby boy, deemed illegitimate, has been torn from her breast;
and she, Hermione, has to stand in open court accused of being a whore!
Then Annabelle said this to me, direct, looking up from her copy:
Now, my liege;
Tell me what blessings I have here alive,
That I should fear to die?

And then she stopped. For a moment I thought it was my turn and I
had missed my cue. Whether the audience registered it or not I don’t

7
 EDITORIAL

know – but for that split-second I was Leontes, physically shaken, un-
manned and unable to answer. What deliberately wasn’t there in the
text – Leontes’ failed response – actually happened. Then Annabelle went
on, telling Leontes to do so too:
Therefore proceed.
But yet hear this: mistake me not…

I think now that I had already been upset by a line or two earlier in
the speech. This also was almost to my embarrassment, even though
I know the play well, knew I was on public display, and thought I was
just trying to be professionally useful. It was when in the very midst of
her indignation, Annabelle spoke of Leontes’ love for her:
The crown and comfort of my life, your favour,
I do give lost, for I do feel it gone,
But know not how it went.

It is suddenly almost unbearably moving that even now when she

cannot see in front of her the man who loves her, she still vulnerably
loves him or his memory.
I am about to discuss future research with the brain scientists who
have been working with me on Shakespeare (I wrote about this in The
Reader 23). What I want to talk to them about is the way that Shake-
speare uses poetic lines as though they were brain waves. I mean: in one
line he has the woman say ‘I do feel it gone’ and in the next ‘but know
not how it went’. It is very important that ‘gone’ and ‘went’ are on two
lines and that the shift from one to the other (forward on the page, but
backwards in mental time) almost physically seems to change the wiring
and route of the brain itself. I could hear and feel it, trapped there on
the stage of St George’s Hall.
So: what I am talking about here is the effect of voice – the almost
physical effect that a person can leave in us. I remember the first time
this happened to me, in terms of poetry. It was 1974 and I was a lonely
undergraduate who, with little else to do this evening, decided to go to
a poetry reading. I didn’t normally like these things: the poets rarely
read their own work well, it being sufficient to them, it seemed, that
they had already written it; and I often restlessly lost track of what the
hell they meant. But this was a poet called Douglas Oliver, reading from
a long poem of his called ‘The Cave of Suicession’. It was about a bereft
seeker who took himself and his typewriter into an old abandoned lead
mine in the Derbyshire Peak District, called Suicide Cave, and worked
and thought and slept there in the dark. I didn’t know what exactly
was coming out of this cave, but the voice and its range was electric
and daring and risky, on a sort of mental journey. Oliver didn’t recite his
poem, he made the poem in front of us again.

8
 EDITORIAL

All I can remember is the voice. But the next time I heard him, years
later, he read a short poem on a connected subject-matter, the death of
his son Tom in 1969, a child with Down’s Syndrome. I don’t want to
look it up, only remember it. So I will say to you that it began with a
refrain from a negro spiritual, ‘Lay my burden down’, ‘Lay my burden
down’. And as the poem went on, deeper into the child’s death, the
refrain went into becoming finally: ‘Lay my bird in down’. It didn’t feel
like a pun, it wasn’t merely clever; but it was a sort of magical transmu-
tation of voice, and a gentle putting of the child to sleep.
A few days after that first reading in 1974, I saw Douglas Oliver
in the library but was too shy to go up to him to say, as I wanted, how
great his reading had been. Eventually, I met him on three occasions.
He died of cancer in 2000, at an unbearably young sixty-two. Though I
hardly knew him, I knew his voice and something of what his presence
stood for, and regularly, at odd times since, have felt something missing
in the world.
This isn’t just about poetry or drama, but what they themselves are
about. That is to say: in life, you know that people who get close to you
have a particular and distinctive blind feel to them in your mind, in your
heart. Or as Douglas Hofstadter says in I Am a Strange Loop, even deep
in your brain: ‘People, no less than objects, are represented by symbols
in the brain… the extent of each one depending on the degree to which
you faithfully represent, and resonate with, the individual in question.’
I love that ‘resonate with’: the internal echo of the living ones, or of
voices from the page, or of loved ones dead.
The Reader is always in search of those individual voices we need to
hear. But this particular issue is dedicated to them – to David Constantine,
to the novelists A.S. Byatt and Howard Jacobson speaking outside their
novels, to the older voices of Wordsworth and Joseph Conrad. I began by
talking about a reading in Liverpool’s St George’s Hall. But 2008 is the
year in which Liverpool – this magazine’s home town – becomes the Eu-
ropean Capital of Culture: good on us! This will culminate in a literary
festival, between the 7th and 9th of November, put on by the University
of Liverpool and its School of English, with Reader events before, within,
and around it. Some of the writers who will be appearing – Howard
Jacobson, Seamus Heaney, Melvyn Bragg, Doris Lessing, Philip Pullman
– will be giving us work to publish in forthcoming issues of this maga-
zine we hope, as a taster for those of you who can come to hear their
voices live and as a compensation for those who cannot.
In the remote Highlands Wordsworth heard a young woman in the
fields singing in a language he could not understand. Yet he felt it was
like something ‘breaking the silence of the seas / Among the farthest
Hebrides.’ We do our best by the waters of the river Mersey.

9
EDITOR’S PICKS

This issue is dedicated to voices that should be heard. We live sur-

rounded by words and sound, radio, print, TV and now the internet
too, but there are those who add to the clamour with more purpose.
Wordsworth and Conrad and Milosz are featured here along with
newer voices which help bring clarity or at least direction. We have new
fiction from Gabriel Josipovici and from Raymond Tallis, and new
poetry from David Constantine, John Kinsella, Kenneth Steven,
Jeffrey Wainwright, Penny Fearn and Omar Sabbagh (one of The
Reader’s favourite new poets). In three linked pieces Brian Nellist looks
out for individual voices in both poetry and fiction.

Other highlights:

Howard Jacobson We asked our own Graham Hayes to give a moderate

account of Richard Dawkins’ controversial The God Delusion, and then let
Howard loose.

Round Table on William Wordsworth In issue 25, we assembled a

group of writers to wrestle with Milton’s Paradise Lost, letting personal
responses make sense of his great forbidding poem. Now it is Words-
worth’s turn. Stephen Gill, Joanna Trollope, Michael O’Neill and David
Wilson take on The Prelude with a series of chosen passages.

Mark Rylance It is, as Mark commented, ‘an unusual interview’. The

actor offers us insights into his craft and his vision of life.

A. S. Byatt examines the ways that novelists have taken up the slack
after the absconding of God. Post-Darwin, post-Freud, human identity
is an arena of DNA and sex. Can science and our own biological reality
offer a route away from our narcissism?

10
 READING LIVES

LETTERS TO A YOUNGER SELF:

FROM JACK BROOKS
TO PETER FINCH AND BACK

Ian McMillan

Ian McMillan hosts the hit weekly show The Verb on BBC R3, dedicated to
investigating spoken words around the globe. He wants you to know: ‘John
Murray are publishing my verse autobiography Talking Myself Home in the
Autumn of 08, and we’ll be hearing more from Jack Brooks in that’.

E very other Thursday my mother would catch the 37 LP

bus (LP stood for Larratt Pepper, the bus company boss’s
magnificent name that made him sound like a magician
or a private eye. Most of us couldn’t bring ourselves to call
anybody Larratt so we all called him Lariat and his buses
were called, inevitably, Lariat’s Chariots) to the next village of Great
Houghton, where she was born, to have her hair done by her old mate
Muriel. I’d get home from school and if my brother was out I’d let
myself in and wait for the sound of the bus going up the street and my
mother’s heels down the path and the door opening. I can feel the fresh
winter air on my face now as I write this, forty-odd years later. She’d
come in and plant the big brown paper parcel on the table. ‘Yes, I’ve
been to Jack Brooks’s,’ she’d say, like she said every time.
I’ll tell you what: you can keep the Bodleian Library, and Foyle’s, and
those great bookshops on the Left Bank in Paris. Give me Jack Brooks’s
any day, in Great Houghton’s Latin Quarter. Give me his fortnightly
parcel full of comics. Give me that moment in the front room with the
sound of Mr Page’s piano coming from next door and the smell of my

11
 READING LIVES

mother’s hair lacquer filling the room like a sweet promise just as I
begin to open the parcel.
That’s what reading is, I guess: it’s an axis where memories meet
the present moment and the promise of the future; it’s a machine for re-
minding yourself who you once were, who you are and who you want to
become. The thing about Jack Brooks’s magical parcel was that it wasn’t
full of High Art. It was full of decidedly Low Art: The Beano, The Dandy,
The Victor, The Valiant and what my mother called ‘A Commando Book’
(calling magazines ‘books’ still persists in my part of Yorkshire, and a
good thing too). In The Victor The Tough of The Track trained on Fish
and Chips and fought a perpetual class war against Flapper Farmer; in
The Beano The Bash Street Kids shouted ‘Yaroo’ and put drawing pins
on the teacher’s chair; In The Dandy Beryl the Peril was like none of the
girls in my class at school and in The Valiant The Steel Claw scared me
to death and I had to go to sleep with the light on. Those comics had
a sheer delight in language and a masterly sense of plot and suspense;
they were funny, and frightening, and I delighted in reading them again
and again. A few years later, when I thought I was sophisticated, I got
my mother to order the Boy’s Own Paper. Sadly, it was 1967 and I was too
late: Jack Brooks had to inform my mother that the Boy’s Own Paper was
no more. In my memory I cried, but maybe in real life I didn’t.
Now these days I love reading strange and unusual poetry and prose;
I’m just working my way through the wonderful Anglo-Welsh (as they
used to be called) poet Peter Finch’s Selected Later Poems, published by
Seren. Peter has been described as a ‘one-man Welsh avant garde’ and I
won’t argue with that. The book is full of sound poems, found poems,
and texts wrestled and reworked until they cry for mercy and then dis-
solve into giggling. Here’s his ‘Text Message From Ffynnon Denis’ which,
as he says in the notes, is ‘one of the lost holy wells of Penylan, in Cardiff.
Its waters were said to cure bad eyes’: ‘Fnd tp Rth Pk Lk/a pond H2o
seep/sme bbbls &/1 duck\trfic cne & frdg./put drp on eye in/strng drzz-
/mke sgn of crss./dnt do a thng.’ Marvellous! Maybe you need to know
that Roath Park is a park in Cardiff, and maybe you don’t. Here’s some
of his variations on William Carlos Williams’s Icebox poem: ‘I have sold
your jewellery collection,/which you kept in a box, forgive me./I am sorry,
but it came upon me/and the money was so inviting, so sweet/and so
cold.//This is just to say I am in the pub/where I have purchased the fat
guy from/Merthyr’s entire collection of scratch and win./All I need now
is three delicious plums//Forgive me, sweetie/these things just happen.’
I’m sure that one of the reasons I love poets like Peter Finch is
because of those fortnightly parcels from Jack Brooks’s little shop in
Great Houghton. Those comics excited me with the possibilities of lan-
guage and what you might call a delight in the out-of-the-ordinary and

12
 READING LIVES

although I enjoyed The Famous Five and The Secret Seven and Biggles
and Gimlet they seemed at times too, well, into the ordinary. And you
couldn’t say that about The Steel Claw.
So, as far as my own reading is concerned, I moved from Jack
Brooks’s parcel to DC Comics (via a detour to Classics Illustrated, a series
of comic strip versions of the great books: it was here that I first encoun-
tered Moby Dick and Robinson Crusoe) where I loved the lesser heroes like
Metal Men (let’s be honest: I fancied Platinum) and Green Lantern, to
fantastic American magazines like Famous Monsters of Filmland; then as
an adolescent I landed, like an explorer dropping onto the planet Zog, on
Science Fiction. I remember picking up a science fiction magazine when
I was looking for copies of Justice League of America on a second-hand
comic stall on Wombwell market and I was hooked.
I loved the experimental end of Science Fiction best; plot has never
been something that’s interested me too much but I liked the way that
SF could mess about with concepts of time and space and sometimes
with language and grammar. I collected John Carnell’s New Writings in
SF series and it was here that I came across great experimental writers
like Brian Aldiss, Christopher Priest and a writer who is now forgot-
ten, Vincent King. There was one story by Vincent King about a species
growing up on a planet that turned out to be Earth, and it became
obvious as the story developed that life had begun on our planet when a
toilet was flushed and the detritus dropped onto the surface of a barren
rock in space. You can’t imagine how exciting it is to read that kind of
thing as a young man; in fact I’ve just gone onto a second-hand book
website and ordered several issues of New Writings in SF because my
original copies have got lost somewhere and I want to see if Vincent
King is as good as I thought he was!
So these days my need for experimentation and linguistic excite-
ment, begun on those distant Thursday afternoons, is mainly satisfied
by poetry that pushes the envelope; the L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poets like the
marvellous Ron Silliman (have a look at his addictive blog), and English
experimenters like Geraldine Monk and the late great Bill Griffiths.
And now, in a sense of completion and wheels turning full circle,
my middle daughter Elizabeth has opened the Sparkle Beauty Room in
Great Houghton, just a few doors down from where Jack Brooks’s shop
used to be. Okay, maybe it’s not much of a sense of completion, but I
told you I wasn’t very good at plot!

Selected Later Poems by Peter Finch: Seren Books www.seren-books.com

New Writings in SF available from www.AbeBooks.co.uk as are Vincent King’s
novels.
Salt Press publish The Salt Companion to Geraldine Monk and The Salt Companion to
Bill Griffiths.

13
FACE TO FACE
MEET THE POETS

David Constantine Penny Fearn John Kinsella

David Constantine What do you see from What do you see?

is one of our very where you are? Heaven, Hell, and Pur-
favourite writers in An open boxset of gatory all rolled into
The Reader ever. But ‘Frasier’ and a clothes one. It’s called ‘Earth’
when we asked him horse. and/or the Western
our questions, he said Australian wheat-
What book or poem
he couldn’t answer belt. I am looking out
would you like to
any without anguish. into darkness, it is
have written?
That’s the last thing still about a hundred
‘The Waste Land’, degrees (thirty eight
we’d want to…
T. S. Eliot celsius), and I might
Featured on page 16
Your own best work? just be able to hear
When it makes sense the night noises of
but is subtle, wry and a tawny frogmouth.
dark. The air is thick with
insects.
In three words
describe your ideal Like to have written?
reader. Paradise Lost
Patient, interesting Your own best work?
and bright. It’s always the poems I
Featured on page 72 am working on.
Ideal reader?
Vegan, anarchist,
pacifist
Featured on page 54

John Kinsella
by Christopher Williams

14
 Omar Sabbagh Kenneth Steven Jeffrey Wainwright

What do you see? What do you see? What do you see?

I’m in Beirut at the I can see the west My new writing
moment. Right before from where I’m position looks at a
me is a wall. writing now; west and basement light-well
Surrounding me on north are most vital that’s waiting for
all sides, shelves upon to me. crocuses but in the
shelves of books. summer my open-air
Like to have written?
Neither is where I take table looks out over
my inspiration. The Gospel of John the Tiber valley.
Of your own work,
Like to have written? Like to have written?
what pleases you?
Douglas Dunn’s Elegies: War and Peace or Shake-
if I didn’t enjoy it and Knowing when a poem speare’s history plays.
admire it so much I is finished.
would really be very Current reading?
Ideal reader?
very jealous – it comes Oliver Sacks’ Mus-
Quiet, questioning, icophilia and Cormac
naturally to me. kind. McCarthy’s No Country
Your own best work? Current reading? for Old Men. On the
When a poem is affect- The Complete subject of Musicophilia,
ing and moving at the Borrowers I hear ‘Country Roads’
first reading, without in my head: imagine if
being boring or banal. Featured on page 37 it never goes away!
Current reading? Featured on page 44
I am rereading Con-
rad’s Lord Jim for the
umpteenth time, for
my graduate research
work, and finding that
Conrad is so goddamn
subtle that there’s
no end to how much
depth one can plumb
in his work

Featured on page 53

Jeffrey
Wainwright
15
Kenneth Steven
POETRY

DAVID CONSTANTINE

18 Via del Corso

Incognito here he will become the one he is.

The room looks into the Via della Fontanella,
A promising name, five windows in from the Corso
Main artery of the blood of carnival
From one of the entrances and bowls of life
Brimming, the Piazza del Popolo.
He fits the city, he has a certain purpose
And he will have in to live with him
Only the deities who help, he wants them appraising
His table and chair, his shelf of books,
His box of manuscripts, his roomy bed. Oh he
Has come here very hungry, his eyes were starving.
So now to hell with martyrdoms and contortions!
To hell with all the sad deposits of the tide of Christ!
The Corso will deliver him straight to the heart’s terrain
Of goat, acanthus, fig against the rising moon,
Bucolics, the columns sprouting among the pines,
Wreckage and seedground. Out of the earth
He will lift himself her beauties, his writing hand
Is desirous of learning the other arts. This man sensing
The possibilities of the Via della Fontanella
Believes the point of the earth and her sun and moon and stars
Is him. Every dawn asks him
What will you do for the good of your life today?

16
 POETRY

26 Piazza di Spagna

Down his right side on the flowered steps

And at his feet in the piazza
From before the birth to beyond the dying of the lengthening days
There is the din the living make
As though his narrow room were faced on those two sides
Like a deep sarcophagus
Life rioting along them in a densely connected frieze,
Centaur, hippocamp, siren, the moving
Between forms, the partaking one of another,
Eyes bright with a purpose in the foliage. He
Cannot sort them now, he cannot rhyme them or scan them
To what they exactly are, the gift has gone,
He lies already heraldic in the hubbub of Chaos,
The bacilli eating his lungs of inspiration
Have stopped his mouth with blood. He suffers noise
And cannot make a music. Only at nights
The hearth of friendship warming his left side
He listens to the fountain in the emptiness
Under the stars, the endless renewing of water
That is like the speaking softly of a constant writing.
He swaps her white carnelian from hand to hand.
He will go under a roof of violets and daisies
(His friend has promised) holding her letters as though
In there he could bear to read them.

Goethe arrived in Rome at the end of October 1786, determined to live as he

wished. He registered with the authorities under an assumed name, as a German
painter: Filippo Miller, tedesco, pittore. Keats arrived in Rome in November 1820
and died there the following February. The carnelian was a leaving present from
Fanny Brawne. The two houses, 18 Via del Corso and 26 Piazza di Spagna, are
ten minutes walk apart.

17
INTERVIEW

TANKS MONA LISA

Mark Rylance

Philip Davis interviewed Mark Rylance during the Liverpool leg of the tour
of I Am Shakespeare written by Mark Rylance himself. The play is a quirky
and often comic celebration of the question ‘Who wrote the works of William
Shakespeare?’ ‘The majority of people agree that it was the actor from Strat-
ford,’ writes Rylance in his programme note, ‘But also, the majority of people
have not looked very closely into the history. For many years, some people
have doubted, from what we know of the actor’s life, that he would have been
able to write the plays and poems, and may therefore have served as a “front”
for a hidden author, or collaborated more extensively than we imagine. I have
been surprised again and again by the strength of emotion this historical
question of identity raises. An understanding of the creation could reveal a
creative process most beneficial to modern drama and society as a whole.’

You are a great and an authentically strange actor. Bacon’s line in the play
seems characteristic: ‘I love secrets, codes, and masks.’ Would you say this area
of anonymity and identity is important in what you’re like as an actor?
I love secrets, codes, and masks. Bacon is the candidate for Shakespeare
in I Am Shakespeare that I love the most – he’s the one I have to be careful
I don’t favour in the play. I admire the other candidates too but he is
the one who’s helped me the most and he clearly loved those secrets
and codes.

Are there times when as an actor you are trying to get into a Shakespeare play,
when you feel you need a sense of cracking the code in order to do it?
I think there is a joy of doing a Shakespeare play – probably of research-
ing one as well – but with with the acting you have to go further than

18
 INTERVIEW

the academic does because you have to find out the cause, the emo-
tional need to say something, which I suppose scholars will propose but
they don’t have to actually stand up and prove whether it works or not,
whether it’s believable to people, to the other actors and the audience.
When playing a part like Hamlet over four hundred performances there
is an ongoing discovery of layers of meaning in your understanding of
what a scene or a line means, but also suddenly what’s happening in the
world can change the meaning. Hamlet says: ‘The time is out of joint;
Oh cursed spite, / That ever I was born to set it right.’ You know what
that means but then Tiananmen Square happens and you see a young
man in front of a tank, and you suddenly have a considerably more
powerful sense of meaning that young revolutionaries must have.

But there’s a difference between the code and something contemporary that could
help stimulate your imagination.
The code is something to do with really making decisions. If you’re
playing the Duke in Measure for Measure, for example, you have to decide
at the end whether he is a manipulative bastard or a philanthropist. Is
his speech to Claudio about the absolute of death a version of torture or
a rather naff bit of advice, or is it that he wants young Claudio to be less
reckless, and is therefore giving him a death experience? Those kinds of
decisions are crucial, and take a number of code-breakings to come to
the right decision.

As with many considerable actors, there’s something quite anonymous about you.
Although I Am Shakespeare is concerned with identity, there are also parts
of the play that suggest thoughts exist almost prior to people. I’ve seen you in
Measure for Measure and there’s a lot that comes at pace and feels improvised
but crucially there isn’t a stability of character. ‘Be absolute for death’, the Duke
says, but at that moment it seems this is an idea that is called into being that
needs to be thought by Claudio and has to be given somewhere. It’s as if meanings
are coming in and out of you, and I don’t think you’re worried about identity, I
put it to you, at all. [Mark laughs.] Don’t laugh too long because I can’t put
that into the interview!
It’s very funny. Maybe I’m not so scared of being called a crackpot as
other people but in my own personal world I have a flexible identity. I
take on other people’s identities and I’m very greedy for them, for lots of
different identities. I’m wary for some reason, like an animal would be
wary of a zoo, of being pinned down as one particular identity.

I travelled back to my home town in Nottingham at one time to see you in

Macbeth, and the actors told me afterwards that this is somebody who doesn’t

19
 INTERVIEW

care what people will think and who will protect the group.
You know the funny thing is I forget. When I’m working on something
like Macbeth, I absolutely forget how far out it is, how out of conscious-
ness, and I am like a child. I just find it so fascinating, and then I
remember to think if people are enjoying it and following the story, but
I’m not thinking will they be offended. I’m always rather amazed when
I realise that what I’m talking about is off the radar of most people.

I get the sense that your ability to move between different thoughts and identities
isn’t simply greed but is to do with quite archaic beliefs. Here is an example from
the play, I Am Shakespeare, which I enjoy, but for the most part the play can’t
do for you all that you want it to do because the identity issue is split between too
many people. But when your character is not quite involved in that whole area
of the club of the illegitimate, then the play becomes very strange for a moment
– suddenly darker, and although the characters and the actors look very separate,
what’s really interesting about identity is how one person could be all of them and
move between them. That one person in a way is the sort of person you are.
I think it’s the sort of person Francis Bacon was too, in my impression
of that period he had the ability to be Shakespeare…

The man who wrote The Advancement of Learning doesn’t look like a play-
wright. The language is powerful but the framework that he works within is
linear, progressive, he believes in satisfaction rather than delight.
His essays are very poetic but I think he suffers under Macaulay’s dia-
tribe against him. There’s a much more compassionate and witty man
there than people realise, someone who wrote with a left hand and a
right hand.

That’s interesting because that wouldn’t contradict the fact that a man who wrote
one thing wouldn’t be the same as a man who wrote another.
It’s said about him that he wrote in different styles. That line that I give
him – why did Da Vinci the inventor of the tank want to paint the Mona
Lisa? – that’s the kind of model that I have for Bacon.

What you’re really doing is reinventing Shakespeare as Bacon – it’s still the same
thing, you want to be one person who can be many people!
I think I’d get more from ‘Shakespeare’ being a group actually, but I
probably do have an interest in archaic beliefs. I’m interested in platonic
type ideas and very interested in indigenous people’s faith, and pagan
faith, and I’m a practiser of those ideas. I believe that the laws of cour-
tesy apply on this side of the veil and on the other side of the veil.

20
 INTERVIEW

What do you mean by courtesy on the other side of the veil?

Places such as this building, The Playhouse, have ancestors who con-
tributed enormous amounts of effort or money. Their collaborative effort
created a spirit, this building has a spirit. You can see it has been a music
hall. The many performers, stage hands, audiences, have had experienc-
es here, and all that vitality has added to the place. There is a spirit that
is left behind much as we leave the dust of our bodies around. So there
are rules of courtesy or of thanks when you come into another person’s
space on both sides of the veil. Robert Bly, the American poet, said to me
once – he said it to a group of men – ‘your depression is in direct propor-
tion to your inability to praise’, and this has really stayed with me. I feel
that those elemental spiritual things need to be acknowledged
The thing that Shakespeare is very good at teaching is that we
should be wary of hierarchical responses. In my acting especially, and
now a little bit in my writing too, I feel more of a vessel than the sole
creator. I have to do the necessary work, the reading and preparing, of
course, and mulling and heating myself up in a certain way like you’d
heat up a pot, but ideas are really gifts.

Can you explain that sense of above and below and say why Shakespeare would
be interested in that?
From the work I’ve done on the comedies, particularly with the scholar
Peter Dawkins at the Francis Bacon Research Trust, I’ve become con-
vinced that the Tree of Life, the Kabbalistic Tree of Life is really the
backbone structure of Shakespeare’s comedies. The Tree of Life has
those ten principles, archetypes, which are probably developed from the
Egyptian into the Judaic system. In Much Ado About Nothing, for example,
at the top of the tree, you’ve got Don John and Don Pedro – John the
thinker and Pedro the speaker. One is the archetype of wisdom, love,
and the other one is the archetype of intelligence, the reflective. Then
you’ve got Beatrice with the perception of warlike Mars, ‘Kill Claudio’.
Below her, you’ve got Benedict, with mere thought and not a lot of per-
ception – the Mercury position. So you’ve got Mercury, Mars, Saturn.
And on the other side you’ve got Venus. Pedro is trying to bring Beatrice
and Benedict together, while John is trying to separate them. You have
these archetypal characters developed with great naturalism. What’s
above, the divine, is here in us too.

This is turning what would be static allegory into a sort of force field in which the
spaces between apparently static things is where the drama comes into being.
That is the love of the code for me. But let me just finish your question.
At the wedding scene when that huge terrible thing happens – when

21
 INTERVIEW

Hero is denounced on the brink of marriage by Claudio and by her own

father – Friar Francis creates that clarifying space. Friar Francis comes
in with enormous wisdom, way above everything else. But at the same
time, at the bottom of the pile, you’ve got Dogberry, absolute chaos,
chaos of language, chaos of understanding, and yet Dogberrry is the one
who finds the evidence that will clear Hero. Both figures are needed.
There is a lot of low fun with that chaotic character down below, but
at the same time Shakespeare gives him the key, the entrance, into the
resolution of the mysteries. This makes the Stratford man very interest-
ing because in a way he is Dogberry. The evidence about the Stratford
man shows that he is the antithesis to the consciousness of the author
you would expect to find behind his plays. What is most challenging to
me is, if someone else wrote the play, such as Bacon, then what is the
importance of this Stratford entrance point? It’s kind of obvious I guess,
I mean it makes a lot of people feel a lot better about themselves.

I like the idea of this somebody who is extraordinary pretending to be ordinary. I

saw a matinee of Much Ado where you were opposite Janet McTeer. As Beatrice
she was saying disparaging things about Benedict to you in disguise mode, and
at one moment, with a shrug more than with the mouth, you say ‘fair enough’.
Now, I think, in theory, if an actor starts putting his own words in Shakespeare
I’m very annoyed, but actually it seemed to come out of the body, and out of the
atmosphere between you more than out of the character.
I do that quite a bit you know, little noises and shrugs and things. Other
actors used to mock me in a friendly way at The Globe about it.

It seems to be a sort of response to the atmosphere rather than character driven.

Your characters are quite inchoate and good for that reason. They’re quite fluid.
So in Macbeth you are the one actor who has convinced me that the spirits are
actually there. When you talk about them they are more there than you are. Some
speeches come from the character, and some speeches come from the object of the
speech, and you’re good at that.
I tend not to go in with a concept of a character now. I don’t know
if I even did before, certainly not by the time I was doing Hamlet. I
was preparing extensive lists of everything the character had said about
himself, everything he said about others, everything everyone else said
about him, and then just solving lines and scenes and finding where
that brought me rather than interpreting those lines and scenes. That
may be why they seem quite fluid.

One of the technical things you do, which interests me a lot, is that sometimes
you’ll let a line just go all the way through and then wait, and have the audi-

22
 INTERVIEW

ence wait for the meaning at the end. In I Am Shakespeare, for example, you’re
talking about Shakespeare as a plagiarist and you say: ‘Italy, Italy, Italy, but you
haven’t been to Italy have you…’ and there’s no emphasis. You do that a lot in
Shakespeare. It’s as if you want to get past, to get over the speech, and then the
speech happens afterwards. Are you conscious of that as a technique? What are
you up to when you’re doing that, do you think?
That’s very perceptive of you. I’m hiding the fact that I’m planting it,
I’m planting and hiding… It’s about timing.

You get past the thing, and then you have to go back into it for a split second, so
it’s only a wobble.
Exactly, it’s interesting because it happened just last week – the lines
stopped getting a response, they weren’t as amusing to the audience,
and I realised that I was going straight to it, too straight, whereas if I
was going to do something else, like put the map of Italy here, to pull
attention off, the response would come back. I don’t know why it is, but
it makes a difference in how the line is planted well. It helps people to
feel too that the play, the event, is not prescribed. I’m always trying to
get the feeling that it is happening spontaneously.

And that is important with the Shakespeare, particularly, otherwise you get the
authorised version.
Yes, yes, it’s very important. His writing changes over the course of his
writing career, the movement of full stops in the middle of lines and
things and the verse changes too to be more like spontaneous speech.

‘Matching cause’, that was the phrase you used in the question and answer session
after the play… You said that there’s always a matching cause because art is based
on obstacles and if something great happens it is because of a blockage elsewhere.
This balancing act seems to be part of your sense of the structure of things. So to
challenge you – what is your own matching cause?
I think there are a number of matching causes really. I wasn’t able to be
understood until I was about six. I could speak but I don’t think I used
consonants at all – I can’t quite remember why I wasn’t understood but
my brother was the only one who could understand me. I was sent to
speech therapists. So very early on I had the impression that it was dif-
ficult for me to communicate with other people. I was also intensely shy
and self-conscious as a younger person – I’m better now because I have
an identity as an actor, but even before I was nine or eight I was playing
parts, and maybe that helped me to find language and words, copying
people who were in stories or on television. That world of pretending to

23
 INTERVIEW

be someone else always had more liberation, more chance for expres-
sion, for experiencing things, than the real world, so to speak.

Do you think the vulnerability has moved into your capacity to be surprised by
the outside world?
Maybe so. I get a great buzz from being with a group of people but I
need to have a task and a play. I think it’s that obstacle of feeling a little
self-conscious or outside of groups in real life. That obstacle prepares me
for the theatre where I love the interaction. The stage and the interac-
tion seems real and intimate.

‘Where do people exist who do not exist?’

Very good, yes. That’s Mathew’s favourite line in the theatre. Well I feel
that sometimes, a kind of weird feeling like that.

Where does religious happen for you? You clearly have a whole world view that
you work within.
I am a pantheist I suppose.

And an eclectic. You put a lot of things together in that whole. But say a bit more
about the pantheism.
I live my life as fully as I can, I mean, I’m not so sure that our con-
sciousness as human beings is the greatest consciousness – it can be
destructive and it’s capable of such cruelty and blinkeredness. The soul
of the animal and the soul of the world is something which can be ap-
preciated and it may be helpful to our society. That’s something that
Shakespeare does, he ensouls people, he ensouls things, and that is
one of the reasons Shakespeare plays are good to do. He ensouls people
almost unconsciously. I don’t really practise a religion. I have a faith,
and I have a spiritual practice, but I don’t care for religion really.
My faith in the simplest sense is that there is a force of love. There
is a collective consciousness that is beyond my conception, and there
are different levels of that consciousness, but it is a consciousness that
one can work with and that one has in different degrees. I think there
is a rhythm to that energy and that it is something to do with timing
and the working of the year, and I think that a lot of those folk festivals,
or Celtic festivals, a lot of these things that were crushed by the Civil
War and the industrial revolution were a great loss to this culture, and I
search for them in other cultures.

The rhythm of getting a line right, is that also part of that greater rhythm?

24
 INTERVIEW

Oh yes. Those crop circles that happen overnight are part of it too. I
suppose I think of it in terms of everything is in another consciousness
at work in our midst.

What does it want to do? Or perhaps the question is what does it want us to do?
Well that’s a really fascinating question. I think it wants us to think
outside ourselves. There are often patterns in the ideas that we have,
images that are in our consciousness. Geometric structures that are
unfamiliar, DNA type patterns, mind patterns, very interesting type
communication from symbologies.

Shakespeare is one of the greatest understanders of those shapes and configura-

tions, would you say? He seems to understand those charged spaces that come into
being even if only intuitively half created by himself.
I think that the plays can do that. We’re only just coming to under-
stand the kind of energy, the force field that the plays create. One of the
things people say about my enquiries into Shakespeare is that I deny
his theory of genius. It’s not true! I do think Shakespeare is a genius,
a very inspired genius in a strong line of inspired geniuses that share
a court of the muse which really exists and which can be sourced by a
particular type of human being. This ability to access it is probably to
do with the genes and physical makeup of that person, or maybe to do
with the society that person has been born into and the circumstances
of their life.

I’ve got one last question. Post-Globe, what is your mission?

To make new works. I want to make new works of theatre with what
I’ve learned. I’ve given twenty-five years of my life to predominately ex-
ploring this Elizabethan period, and now I want to make new works.

At the risk of embarrassing you, I need to say to you that there are people who one
doesn’t know you are glad are in the world, and for me you are one of those.

Thank you so much. Your questions have been so perceptive, I mean

I’ve talked very openly with you about stuff I would normally mask
and veil.

25
Mark Rylance
 POETRY

MARK RYLANCE

Like chalk from a cliff

For some of us it’s best to sniff the grail cup,
For some to drink, and for some just to pretend.
We walked in circles, crossing Caminos,
Singing and letting petals fall in the side streets of Santiago.
When we reached the road to Finisterre
We stood together with our navigator, and our thoughts rose
Like seagulls spiralling above the town, returning
Again to the western sea where Roman legions feared
They’d fall off the edge of the earth. Christians too,
Reversed the road sign. All should end safely, dryly
On the paved slope of this westward facing acropolis
And no one fall in the sea beyond the collection plate
Of human worship.
But everything had already fallen in the ocean anyway,
Five brightly nyloned bicyclists,
Two men and a hydraulic truck for fixing lights,
Road signs and fruit boxes, an entire university,
A couple of police stations, with all their vehicles,
Anarchist graffiti, a water fountain, and a pilgrim; each one
In its own time, like chalk from a cliff, fell into the sea
As we walked.
You dreamed of two thieves fleeing the law,
Their brutal childhood gathering to a knife’s edge,
Slashing the face of a policeman in a mind slashing
Pill induced despair, which you embraced, and offered
Sanctuary in your heart. It made you cry. Unable to walk,
You had to lie down until the Cathedral censer swung so high
It made you gasp like a little girl. And that was it.
Djabo, send me five funny monks swinging on a knotted rope
To swing a censer so high it almost breaks the ribs of my chest.
This woman I love, she feels things deeply.

27
ESSAY

SOMETHING TO BE SAID FOR DAWKINS

Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion
Black Swan, 2007
ISBN 978-0552773317

Graham Hayes

T his interesting and provocative book sets out to show that

the ‘God Delusion’ is just that.
With characteristic wry humour Dawkins explores the
origins of the religious phenomenon, reviewing the argu-
ments for the existence of a god, marvelling that many
otherwise intelligent and erudite individuals allow their critical fac-
ulties to be suspended and the need for evidence to be abandoned in
favour of ‘Faith’.
He finds the concept of a compassionate god strangely at odds with
the vindictive tyrant represented in the Old Testament and although
a more enlightened interpretation of the Bible is current, some pretty
weird beliefs still prevail.
He is mystified that there is a reluctance to criticise religious beliefs
and practices which is not present in respect of other aspects of human
behaviour.
Dawkins has much fun from examining the beliefs of the creation-
ists and their view that complex biological mechanisms derive from
‘intelligent design’ not chance. He agrees that chance is not a tenable
explanation, but chance is not the same as natural selection, which
is the real comparison and is a cumulative process which breaks the
problem of improbability into small elements.

28
 ESSAY

He shows that the basis of generally accepted morality is not de-

pendent on religious belief. Indeed he reserves much of his disapproval
for the pernicious effects of ‘religion’, quoting examples from a wide
spectrum of beliefs, principally the ‘Abraham’ trilogy of Judaism, Chris-
tianity and Islam.
He compares the intolerance of the religious right in America with
that of the Afghan Taliban.
Time and again he expresses wonderment and delight at the uni-
verse in which we humans live and clearly he is happy that evolution
provides a rational explanation for it – at least until future evidence
comes along to modify it.

EXTRACT FROM THE BOOK:

Great scientists of our time who sound religious usually turn
out not to be so when you examine their beliefs more deeply.
This is certainly true of Einstein and Hawking. The present
Astronomer Royal and President of the Royal Society, Martin
Rees, told me that he goes to church as an ‘unbelieving Angli-
can … out of loyalty to the tribe’. He has no theistic beliefs, but
shares the poetic naturalism that the cosmos provokes in the
other scientists I have mentioned. In the course of a recently
televised conversation, I challenged my friend the obstetrician
Robert Winston, a respected pillar of British Jewry, to admit
that his Judaism was of exactly this character and that he
didn’t really believe in anything supernatural. He came close
to admitting it but shied at the last fence (to be fair, he was
supposed to be interviewing me, not the other way around).
When I pressed him, he said he found that Judaism provided
a good discipline to help him structure his life and lead a good
one. Perhaps it does; but that, of course, has not the smallest
bearing on the truth value of any of its supernatural claims.
There are many intellectual atheists who proudly call them-
selves Jews and observe Jewish rites, perhaps out of loyalty to
an ancient tradition or to murdered relatives, but also because
of a confused and confusing willingness to label as ‘religion’
the pantheistic reverence which many of us share with its most
distinguished exponent, Albert Einstein. They may not believe
but, to borrow Dan Dennett’s phrase, they ‘believe in belief’.

29
ESSAY

KNOW THINE ENEMY

Howard Jacobson

‘Just finished a new novel. About obsessional jealousy and its consol-
ations.’

E xciting times for religion, what with the Vatican telling

Judas he can return to the Celebrity Big Brother House
and Professor Richard Dawkins, in his role as evangelist
of disbelief, offering a walk-on part to every crackpot who
ever took the name of God in vain. How many humanists,
sceptics and agnostics Dawkins contrived to lose to religious faith in
the course of his two-part extravaganza, Atheism: the Musical, there is
no scientific way of quantifying, but at a rough emotional count I’d say
he recruited a million new believers for every minute he was on the
box. Nothing returns one quicker to God than the sight of a scientist
with no imagination, no vocabulary, no sympathy, no comprehension of
metaphor, and no wit, looking soulless and forlorn amid the wonders
of nature.
On the eve of his television series, Professor Dawkins explained to
The Independent where beauty resided for him – in Darwinian evolution.
‘It starts from primeval simplicity (relatively easy to understand) and
works up, by plausibly small steps, to complex entities whose genesis,
by any non-gradual process, would be too improbable for serious con-
templation. . .’
Have you ever heard anything sadder in your life? If Dawkins had
a little more bend in him, and I had a little more of the milk of human
kindness in me, I would throw wide my arms and gather him to me.
‘But my dear, dear Professor,’ I would say, ‘do you not see that “prime-

30
Howard Jacobson
 ESSAY

val simplicity working up by plausibly small steps to complex entities”

is not what anyone means by beauty? Never mind that you are right.
Never mind that you have science and reason on your side. Something
else there is that human beings crave, not dreamed of in your philoso-
phy, some other way of grasping meaning, some other sort of elegance
and harmony your deafness and blindness to which leaves you stranded
in the universe like a stranger.’
The intellectual nullity of Dawkins’ argument – that what you
cannot scientifically prove cannot be, and that it is only religion that
makes good men do evil things – follows, as surely as complex entities
follow primeval simplicity, from the sorry blankness of his imagina-
tion. Take as an example his brutally illiterate reading of Abraham’s
near sacrifice of his son Isaac. For Dawkins, this hairspring parable of
covenant, initiation and love, balancing obedience to God with devo-
tion to your own flesh and blood, and explaining to a community the
history and meaning of its abandonment of human sacrifice – a myth
of civilisation, in other words – demonstrates nothing except the blood
thirst of the Patriarch. That the ambiguities of the story have for centu-
ries engaged and moved not only biblical commentators and the devout
of three divergent faiths, but philosophers, anthropologists, historians,
psychologists, poets and novelists, Dawkins doesn’t know or chooses
not to remember. Not very scientific, either way.
We do not deny the existence of Bible stories unpretty in their im-
plications. The story of Judas – another soul left stranded like a stranger
in the universe – for one. Great plot. Disciple betrays son of God with
kiss in garden, leading to an arrest, leading to a crucifixion, leading to
an ascension, leading to Christianity. Same disciple, meantime, suffers
paroxysms of remorse, gives the money back, coughs it up from his en-
trails, keeps it and goes mad, hangs himself, or wanders the earth in a
perpetuity of shame, depending which legend you believe. But becomes
byword for greed and betrayal, forever associating the Jew with those
vices (Judas/Jew – not an association that would have worked as well
with Andrew, James, John or Bartholomew), and in the process lopping
away the Jewish origins of a faith which its promulgators would rather
you forgot ever had a Jewish component at all. So no, from a Jewish
point of view, not an example of religion at its most conciliatory.
I made a television film about Judas some years ago for Channel
4. Sorry, Judas, it was called. Some serious theological discussion, some
art criticism, a few film clips, a bit of fooling about, but at its heart the
argument that Judas was more fiction than fact, that it is theologically
inconsistent to have traduced him for bringing about the will of God,
and that it was by the agency of his perfidious character that anti-Jew-
ishness became from earliest times embedded in Christianity. Not an

32
 ESSAY

original argument. I got it from that brilliant work of angry and im-
passioned erudition, Judas Iscariot and the Myth of Jewish Evil by the late
Hyam Maccoby. Mr Maccoby turned out to be disappointed by the pro-
gramme, for which I continue to be sorry. I think he would have liked
it to be more sober and more scholarly, which is not what television
does. He wasn’t alone in not liking it. Correspondents to The Times com-
plained of its flippancy, its irreligiousness, and its untruths. There was,
they said, no justification for re-evaluating Judas, no reason to quibble
with scripture, and no anti-Jewishness embedded in Christianity.
And now – ha! – I am vindicated by the Vatican. Or rather, Hyam
Maccoby is. They haven’t said ‘Sorry, Judas,’ exactly, as we had the Pope
doing in our satire. And they haven’t said ‘Sorry, Howard,’ or ‘Sorry,
Hyam,’ either. But they are seriously reconsidering Judas’s significance
to Christianity, and his part in the cataclysmic history of its relations to
Judaism. Which is a start.
So there you are, Professor Dawkins: even that which religion
appears to have set in stone, and which in your terms, yes, has been the
cause of innumerable injustices and deaths, is susceptible to change.
It has taken an unconscionable time, I grant you, but we should be
grateful at least that more flexible minds than yours go on bending
themselves to interpreting scripture.
But there is something else I want to say to you. You cannot rout your
enemy if you are determined not to know him. Religion comes in many
more shapes than you appear to be aware. Not everyone who goes to
Church or Synagogue believes that God made the world in five minutes
the day before yesterday. Some of them don’t believe in that sort of God
at all. And of those who do, only a few are what you call fundamental-
ists. If I made a programme about atheism and wheeled in Stalin and
Pol Pot as prime examples you would have something to say about it. At
the last, it is not religion that is the root of all evil, it is certainty. And the
secular can do certainty every bit as well as the religious.
It is a great thing to attack fundamentalism. But it would be an even
greater thing to save religious people from it. And yours is not the way.

This essay was originally published in The Independent.

33
THE POET ON HIS WORK

THE GIFT
ON ‘THAT YEAR’

Kenneth Steven

That Year

That year the plough hit a hollowness,

A missing thing whose sound stopped him,
Brought him to his knees,
His both hands dragging that wet blackness back.
A hole in the earth. Seven, and the last light
Honeyed from the west across the fields.
He heard his heart; lowered himself through emptiness,
Dropped into the softness of a cave kept silent
Who knew how many hundred years.
His eyes saw only darkness, then slowly woke, found walls
Curving the place to a beehive, a cupped heart
Woven out of careful stone, shaped smooth to something
Whose name was buried with the hands that built it.
Yet all at once he knew what this had been;
The whispers, soft as candle flames, breathed his hearing,
A peace shone from the dark and welled his heart
So full he dragged the tangle of his hat away, stood bowed,
As somewhere up above the curlews flew their evensong.

34
 THE POET ON HIS WORK

There are times a poem really seems to come from nowhere, to be an

utter surprise to one’s own pen. Of course I know full well there’s more
to it than that; poems come from deep places in the subconscious, trig-
gered by a certain event or memory, a particular wandering thought.
But I can well understand the Classical belief that poems were supplied
by the Muse, a spirit being bearing the gift of something new, some-
thing unseen and magical. Because there are times poems land whole,
require no re-working, are exactly the way they first spilled onto the
page. They are almost invariably the special ones, standing in stark con-
trast to the others, that had to be fought for, chiselled out of darkness,
laboured over intensively for days. No, it is those poems that are borne
whole out of the fire that are the purest; the inner editor (we all suffer
from one) has had no chance to destroy that purity, to end up editing
out its clearest light. And so one inevitably feels that it has come out of
nowhere, a magical thing for which one can take no credit. It has come
from beyond oneself.
I wanted in the poem to create a sense of the left emptiness, the
‘missing thing whose sound stopped him’. There are the two levels
there – the land of the plough and of everyday work that the man leaves
above, and then this extraordinary space below, but in a sense those two
worlds exchange places. The tangible world of which he has been part
falls away and he passes through into an emptiness, which was at one
time filled but now is like the imprint of a fossil. You find these places,
Celtic Christian sites like Clonmacnoise, an ancient monastic settlement
on the River Shannon, and they are really fossil imprints of a strong
spiritual feeling. And there’s the sense just in the very last breath of it,
‘the curlews flew their evensong’, as though he has understood some-
thing about this place, but that place itself has not been understood. It
has been forgotten or has lain dormant and not understood for so many
years.
I didn’t want entirely to fill that space. I wanted the emptiness he
goes through to survive so that in a sense every time the poem is read,
every time it’s found, there is a replication of that space and the finding
of it, and the filling of it by that individual. As a poet you have to learn
how to be still and quiet in order to let the poetry sound.
That business of listening is absolutely integral to the whole thing.
When a poem falls from the pen it will be written, as this one was
written, in no more than five minutes but then of course I’ll go back to
it, possibly an hour later, possibly a day later, and start to get a sense of
what the sound of this poem is to be. I start by reading it aloud, the whole
mess – it is absolutely a mess! But I think at the very heart of it, each
poem has got its own unique sound and there’s a characteristic sound
patterning too. The second visit to the poem is a process of listening,

35
 THE POET ON HIS WORK

cutting away and discarding the words that lie outside that particular
globe of sound. Here I wanted to create a kind of beehive shape – that’s
how I imagined the space that he goes through and into.
Some of the things I keep may seem to be superfluous but it’s really
important to me to keep those little bits that anchor the event in reality.
I call it the ‘kindling of detail’. In this poem for example it’s impor-
tant that this happens at seven o’clock in the last light, no matter how
prosaic that specific detail may seem to be, because of the significance
the discovery is going to have for the man, the reverberation. He has
a transcendent moment that is absolutely believable and fixed. In the
same way, it is important that the man is ordinary, of the land, of the
soil – I wanted him rooted in this world, and that fits in with my own
faith and spirituality, the idea of ordinariness meeting transcendence.
It’s about uniting what might be two disparate sides, bringing them to-
gether and underpinning them. Otherwise that space, that emptiness
that is being described might just become nebulous, too ethereal and
float away. The physicality of the encounter is crucial, the plough hitting
the hollowness – and also the way that it just happens.
I tend to find I pass through what I will call meteor showers of
poems. For many months I write the odd thing; I have a cabin where I
hide away to compose children’s stories, short fiction, essays – now and
again a poem will grace the desk by the end of the day. But it often feels
somewhat contrived, a ‘craft’ poem. This business of writing is, after all,
a craft just as much as acting or painting or playing the violin; it is all
about keeping the pen sharp and ready, about practising listening. Such
a period can last several months; indeed I often reach a point when I
believe it’s all over, that there won’t be a new shower of stars at all.
And then it happens. As unexpected as lightning out of blue sky. One
poem and then others, several and sometimes many. A large number of
the poems in my latest collection Salt and Light were born in such a way,
among them this poem. I didn’t even know where I was when I began
writing the words; I was as much searching as the man in the poem.
Somehow or other I was there, though (wherever there is) to the extent
that I could hear and see and touch what lay around me.
Somehow I’m more there than anything else. The writing cabin is a
kind of tardis, a place not in and of itself but a transporter, a conveyor.
And as the worker in the field begins to understand what he has dis-
covered, so do I. And as he is filled with wonder and reverence for what
he has found, so am I. For in the deepest sense it is not mine, it has not
been made by me. It came from somewhere else: it was a gift.

36
 POETRY

KENNETH STEVEN

The Somewhere Road

The car hummed out the dirt track west

And the sun was low, a ball of orange-pink
Flickering the trees and fields,
Peaching soft the level land, painting the sudden somewhere of a house,
Stranded in a field, deep in a sea of grass.
And every house was still a story, and in the undug fields
Were books, whole tomes, untouched, unwritten –
Yet I could see their edges, in stray geese and bob-tailed deer,
And in the eyes of those who stopped beside the road
To smile, their faces made of light.

Wild Irises

A gale of children swept in today

With wild bunches of flowers.
They left them laughing on the kitchen table
And in a gust were gone.
All day they ran themselves free
Up hills and down;
At seven they came home, blown out,
Sunset burning their faces.
Now the house is asleep;
It leans into the wind, smoke
Hurrying at an angle from the chimney –
The flowers on the table shining.

37
 FICTION

LOVE ACROSS THE BORDERS

Gabriel Josipovici

‘The best thing I read last year was Rosalind Belben’s Our Horses in Egypt’
(Chatto) and in homage to Malcolm Bowie, who died last year, I reread his
book on Mallarmé and the Art of Being Difficult and thought it was quite won-
derful. I’m struggling with a new novel. Carcanet will be publishing two
new novels of mine in 2009.’

T
– ake your coat, Veronica says to her son as the 11.52
express from Milan glides soundlessly into the main
line station of Geneva and comes, almost imperceptibly,
to a stop. Make sure you haven’t forgotten anything.
On the platform she takes his hand. – Can you see a
taxi sign anywhere? she asks him.
– There, Mum! he says, swerving off suddenly to the left. Once again
she marvels at how big he has grown in the past few months.
In the taxi she gives the driver an address and sits back, peering
short-sightedly at the passing houses.
– Are we going to see Philippe?
– Not now. We’re going to the hotel first.
– And then we’re going to see him?
– No. Tomorrow morning.
He is silent, playing with his backpack. Then, – Is this Geneva? he
asks.
– Yes.
He is silent again.
– I thought we could go for a boat-ride on the lake, she says. Would
you like that?

39
 FICTION

He is silent, staring out of the window.

– Would you? she repeats.
– I don’t mind, he says, not looking at her.
– Hôtel du Soleil, the driver says, pulling in to the kerb.

The next morning, at breakfast, he asks again: – Are we going to see

Philippe today?
– Yes, she says.
– Where does he live?
– Not far from here. We’ll walk.
In the street she says: – Look, one can see the lake from almost any-
where in this city.
– Come on, she says, stopping and waiting for him. Why are you
dawdling so much this morning?
She holds out her hand but he does not take it. He reaches up to my
armpit, she thinks, soon it will be my shoulder, and then he’ll be as tall
as I am.
She looks at her watch: – We’re early, she says. Let’s go and have a
coffee.
– I don’t want a coffee.
– You can have a coke.
Though autumn is drawing in it’s still warm enough to sit on the
terrace.
– Don’t do that, she says, as he sucks noisily at the dregs of his coke
through the straw.
He puts the glass down on the table.
– Do you want another? she asks him.
He looks at her in surprise: – Another coke?
– Why not? she says. We’re on holiday.
She laughs, but he goes on looking at her, puzzled, across the table.
– Or something else? she says.
She fumbles in her bag, takes out a packet of cigarettes, selects one,
lights it. – What’s the matter? she says. What are you looking at me like
that for?
– Nothing, he says.
He retreats into himself.
– Go on, she says. Have a milk shake.
– Will you have one?
– No. I don’t think so. But why don’t you?
– No thank you, he says, in his most adult tone.
– Another coke then?
– No, Mum, he says, I don’t want anything,

40
 FICTION

She calls for the bill, stubbing out her cigarette as she does so.
From her bag she takes a pair of soft black leather gloves. She
draws them on, pressing between her fingers, smoothing them over her
wrists.
– Do you like them? she asks, holding up her hands for him to see.
– They’re all right, he says.
– I think they’re very nice, she says.

In the street she takes a piece of paper from her bag, examines it. The
boy waits, looking idly round him.
– Come, she says. She pushes him ahead of her.
They round a corner. She says: – Look out for number 52.
He walks beside her. She can feel the heat of his body against her
side. – Here, he says.
She presses the buzzer and the door opens. Opposite them is a lift.
– Fifth floor, she says to him.
In the lift she opens her bag and feels about inside it. Then she ex-
amines her face in the wall mirror.
The lift stops. The inner doors slide open. They get out.
Three doors give onto the landing. She peers at the name on one,
moves to the next, rings a bell.
Silence.
– Come, she says to the boy. Stand here beside me.
She rings again.
Silence.
She waits.
Finally she says: – All right. We’ll come back later.
The lift is still there. She opens the door and pushes him in ahead
of her.
In the street she hesitates a moment, then turns right in the direc-
tion of the lake.
– What are we going to do? he asks.
– We’ll have a little walk, she says.
He walks beside her, absently.
They pass a café. – Come, she says. We’ll have a drink.
He follows her onto the terrace. She finds a table and sits down.
– What will you have? she asks him.
– Nothing, he says.
– You must have something.
– I’m not thirsty.
– On a hot day like this?
– The waiter is standing beside them. She orders a glass of wine for

41
 FICTION

herself and a coke for the boy. When he returns the waiter makes a great
show of opening the bottle and pouring the contents into a long glass
half-filled with ice.
The boy stares ahead of him.
– Go on, his mother says, when the waiter has left. Drink up.
She peels off her gloves and lays them on the table beside her.
– I’m not thirsty, the boy says.
– It’ll do you good.
– Mum, he says, it’s the second one this morning.
– Never mind, she says. This is a special occasion,
Reluctantly, he draws the glass towards him and sips the drink
through the straw.
She has finished her wine. She is examining her face in a pocket
mirror taken from her bag. She applies some lipstick.
She returns the lipstick and mirror to her bag, snaps it shut. – Go
on, she says, Drink up.
– I’ve had enough, he says,
She calls the waiter, pays.
She puts on her gloves, stands up. – Come, she says.
In the street the boy says: – Mum, I need to pee.
– Wait till we get to Philippe’s.
– And if he isn’t there?
– He’ll be there.
They retrace their steps. In the lift mirror she again checks her face.
The boy stands beside her, impassive.
Once again she presses the bell. This time, after a pause, there is the
sound of footsteps.
The door opens.
He stares at them in surprise.
– Veronica! he says, when he realises who it is. What are you doing
here?
– Are you alone? she asks him.
– Yes, he says, still staring.
– May we come in?
He steps aside. She pushes the boy in ahead of her.
– Where’s the lavatory? she asks. He needs to go.
He closes the front door. – I’ll take him, he says.
When he returns she has gone into the large light living-room next
to the entrance hall and is standing at the window.
– Veronica, he says, coming towards her. What do you want?
Then he sees the knife in her hand. – No, he says, Veronica. Put that
away.
He reaches out a hand to push her away but she brushes it aside.

42
 FICTION

– Veronica, he says.
She leans into him and pushes the knife into his stomach as far
as it will go. He gasps and sinks onto the sofa, dislodging a large glass
ashtray on a little table by the sofa, which slides to the floor and smashes
to pieces. She stands over him, puts her left hand on his shoulder and
pulls out the knife. He gasps again and seems to fold in two. She wipes
the blade of the knife on his trousers and puts it back in her bag.
The boy is standing at the door of the living-room.
– Come, she says. We’re going.
He stands, looking into the room.
– Philippe’s not feeling very well, she says, taking his hand and
turning him towards the front door.
In the lift she examines her face in the wall mirror.
– Come, she says, as they leave the house. We’ve got to get to the
hotel and collect our bags.
She sets off down the street. He trails a few steps behind her.

In the train he sits opposite her, staring out of the window.

Finally he says: – Will we have to go back to Geneva?
– No, she says. I don’t think so.
– I’m glad, he says, I didn’t like it much. Did you?
– I liked the lake, she says.
– I didn’t like it much, he says, putting on his most adult expression.
It was too pretty pretty.
She laughs, hearing the expression in his mouth.
– It was, Mum, he says. Didn’t you think so?
– I suppose so, she says. Now be quiet. I want to sleep.

43
POETRY

JEFFREY WAINWRIGHT

what need we know of the workings of Nature in order to ap-

preciate how consciousness may be a part of it?
there will most likely be a rule
but
I do not think an earthquake thinks
as I think,
nor the coral, nor the wasp’s nest
for instance I think I can decide
whether to dive today: yes or no
it feels simple enough
and started only this morning –
it does not feel as though a billion steps
have come to this:
I will / I will not
flop off the stern today
then suppose otherwise: suppose I’ve burnt my foot
and this black tissuey skin is shredding
by rule – not one that ‘decreed’
I would burn my foot today,
but one that said
the cells will fall this way
and this way shares a property
with the growth of coral and the wasp’s nest
and even with the shuffling of plates
or dominoes?

44
 POETRY

faith in reason is the trust that the ultimate natures of things

lie together in a harmony which excludes mere arbitrariness
the periodic tiling of the wasp’s nest, or coral
but then a fox under the breakfast table
and faith in the order of things
takes a knock,
though it was,
as you would expect, running for its life
at the time so there will be a thus and thus
does this mean that as I descend the page
the arbitrary must always elude me,
that however much I strive to be undeliberate,
cut paste and randomize or go automatic
out of dreams or dominoes,
or the thoughtless ingenuity embodied
in the mouse, the arrival of Kirkland’s
Warbler here, or August as Kintore,
though yet to be understood by you
could be, should you be interested enough?
what would really count?
can I who’s seen my Dad take the coal-hammer
to treacle-toffee and a Christmas nut
act words no explanatory power on earth could crack?
Stop it now. We cannot have faith
in the arbitrary, though some profess it,
and are happy that freedom must equal chance.
Are they more comforted than those of us
who long for it all to lie together?

These poems will be included in Jeffrey Wainwright’s new book Clarity or Death!
to be published by Carcanet in June 2008.

45
A. S. Byatt
by Michael Trevillion
 ESSAY

LIVING FORMS

A. S. Byatt

‘I have just finished Stefan Zweig’s Die Welt von Gestern (The World of Yesterday)
– which I was reading to improve my German. It is a wonderful picture of
the world before, during and after the First World War, and ends with some
marvellous moving pages about suddenly finding himself a stateless person
and “enemy alien” in Britain at the beginning of the Second World War. My
reading seems to be confined to that period as I am writing a novel which
begins in 1895 and ends in 1918.’

A t a conference in Venice I heard the critic Thomas

Pavel give a splendid paper on the changes in the
presentation of human nature during the history
of the novel. In the beginning, he said, charac-
ters had immortal souls, and their actions took
place in a battle between good and evil for the salvation or damnation
of these souls. In later sentimental novels, souls had been replaced by
hearts, and what mattered was romantic love, and the recognition of
other selves. Later still, he said, the heart had been replaced by the
psyche – a system of unconscious drives, revealed in dreams, not clear
to the characters, though controlled by the author, who like the analyst,
understood the forms of energy and action.
Iris Murdoch, I think, felt that humans – including those of her char-
acters who were philosophers and psychoanalysts – had not understood
the shift in the moral world that had come about with the absconding
of God, the vanishing of external, metaphysical moral authority. Her
analysts tend to be daemonic, manipulating what she described as a
‘system’ and a ‘mechanism’ of sado-masochism.
The effect of the understanding of Darwin’s evolutionary idea on lit-

47
 ESSAY

erature has been deeply studied. Characters in the novels I read as a girl
struggled with the meaninglessness of the chance world of gradual devel-
opment of species, and death as a final end. I believe European novels
went on using the Biblical and Christian stories as paradigms long after
many of the novelists had lost their belief. Forms of art change more
slowly than forms of thought or belief.
Both Freud and Darwin put sexuality at the centre of human nature.
In Darwin sexual selection is one of the important ways living creatures
stay alive and pass on their characteristics. Freud thought all human
action was driven by libido, and libido was sexual desire. This is rein-
forced and complicated by thinkers like Richard Dawkins, who sees all
life as driven by ‘selfish’ genes, seeking self-replication and outliving
the bodies in which they are temporarily housed. Freud saw what he
called ‘the germ-cell’ as immortality. The body dies, the gene lives on.
I’d like to make a brief comparison between two major American
writers to show how I think these ideas have affected fictive forms.
They are Saul Bellow’s Herzog (1964) and Philip Roth’s The Dying Animal
(2001).
Herzog’s hero, Moses Herzog, is Jewish, and a scholar who studies
European Romanticism. His two names, Hebrew Moses, Germanic
Herzog, define him ironically as a leader of men – he cries out, from
time to time, that he had wanted to be a marvellous Herzog. But he is
entangled in sexual disasters, cut off by successive divorced wives from
his children, in a bodily and mental mess. He writes an increasingly
wild series of letters to the living and the dead, trying to keep alive the
history of European culture. One of the phrases that recurs is a question
to Heidegger about ‘the fall into the Quotidian’, and a fall into the quo-
tidian – into unredeemable ordinary life – is what has happened to the
marvellous Herzog, a clever idiot. He writes a wild letter to an ex-tutor
about the general ‘hatred of the present’:
‘This hatred of the present has not been well-understood.
Perhaps the first demand of emerging consciousness in this
mass civilisation is expressive. The spirit, released from servile
dumbness spits dung and howls with anguish stored during
long ages. Perhaps the fish, the newt, the horrid scampering
ancestral mammal find their voice and add their long experi-
ence to this cry…’

But Herzog has no real means of self-expression. His world is reduced

to two things – sex, and cruelty. His moment of vision is a chance visit
to a children’s court where two ordinary stupid people (one of them,
the mother, disabled) are on trial for having beaten and killed a child.
Herzog imagines the child’s terrible death. He

48
 ESSAY

experienced nothing but his own human feelings, in which he

found nothing of use. What if he felt moved to cry? Or pray?
He pressed hand to hand. And what did he feel? Why he felt
himself – his own trembling hands and eyes that stung. And
what was there in modern post… post-Christian America to
pray for? Justice – justice and mercy? And pray away the mon-
strousness of life, the wicked dream it was?

Herzog ends being looked after by a mistress who is kind and beau-
tiful and has a religion of sex which she believes can cure his ailments.
She encourages him to go into a hospital and rest. The letter-writer is
defeated. The human being might survive.
If Bellow is looking backwards in pain, Roth is glaring at the present.
David Kepesh, the central character in The Professor of Desire, teaches a
class about ‘novels all concerned to a greater or lesser degree of obses-
siveness, with erotic desire’. He wishes ‘to disclose the undisclosable
– the story of the professor’s desire’. He makes a pilgrimage to Kafka’s
grave in Prague. He is taken to meet a woman who says she is the pros-
titute Kafka visited. He asks questions about the writer’s sexual habits,
that is, the writer’s body. He is expected to pay to see her pussy. This
is all he finds of the tragic, witty, complex mind of Kafka. Literature
reduced to gravestone and whore, death and the body.
Kepesh’s story continues in The Dying Animal. He is now a famous
professor and TV personality. He falls in love with a Cuban student,
called Consuelo, remarkable for her big breasts. He reflects on the wild-
ness and personal freedom of the sixties, and also on an early American
community, full of ‘riotous prodigality’, ‘licentiousness’ and ‘profuse
excess’, which was called Merry Mount, a version of the Venusberg. He
has, like Herzog’s Ramona, a kind of religion of sex – sex for pleasure,
not for procreation:
Because only when you fuck is everything that you dislike in
life and everything by which you are defeated in life purely, if
momentarily revenged. Only then are you most cleanly alive
and most cleanly yourself. It’s not the sex that’s the corrup-
tion – it’s the rest. Sex isn’t just friction and shallow fun. Sex
is also the revenge on death.

The quotation which is the title, The Dying Animal, comes from a poem
by Yeats – ‘Sailing to Byzantium’:
Consume my soul away. Sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is.

49
 ESSAY

Yeats’s speaker has an immortal soul. The Professor of Desire ends watching
Consuelo of the beautiful breasts, hairless after chemotherapy, preparing
to go under the knife and die.
In Richard Sennett’s brilliant sociological book The Fall of Public Man
(1977) there is a description of an extraordinary experiment in Paris
in the seventies. Sennett’s thesis is that modern humans define them-
selves to themselves in terms of their private lives, and define their
private lives in terms of sexuality. He says:
In the last four generations, physical love has been redefined,
from terms of eroticism to terms of sexuality. Victorian eroti-
cism involved social relationships, sexuality involves personal
identity. Eroticism meant that sexual expression transpired
through actions – of choice, repression, interaction. Sexuali-
ty is not an action but a state of being, in which the physical
act of love follows almost as a passive consequence, a natural
result, of people feeling intimate with each other.

It is in this context that he describes the Parisian experiment:

A primary relation between narcissism and sexuality can be
drawn in terms of images people have of their own bodies.
An interesting study conducted in Paris over many years has
shown that as people come to take their bodies as more and
more complete definitions of their own sexuality, the ‘sym-
bolising’ of the body becomes less and less easy for them. As
sexuality becomes an absolute state fixed in the form of the
body, the people who are those bodies have increasing difficul-
ty imagining phallic forms in natural organisms such as plants
or feeling a relationship between bodily movement and the ac-
tivity of a cylinder or a bellows… The study concludes that the
result of this narcissism is a decrease in the ‘metaphorical’ im-
agination of the body, which is to say an impoverishment of the
cognitive activity of creating a symbol out of a physical thing.

Self-definition in terms purely of sexuality is one consequence of the

thought-patterns of the last half-century. I’d like to mention a paradox
that interests me about human identity in the time of DNA analysis, and
fertility treatments. Someone said that the question posed by the nine-
teenth-century novel was ‘Who is the father?’ We can now know who is
the father, if we choose to find out, and increasingly we do. The British
inventor of eugenics, Francis Galton, once said that the one right he felt
every human being should have was the knowledge of his (Galton was
not interested in women) own identity. People in Britain obsessively re-
search their own genealogies on the Internet. At exactly the same time we

50
 ESSAY

have developed medical techniques for bringing about the birth of human
beings with very new forms of hereditary identities – humans born from
donated eggs, donated sperm, possibly cloned cells from homosexual
couples, brought up by couples, same-sex, heterosexual, to whom they
may be related, or not, in all sorts of ways. What interests me, as a novel-
ist, about all this, is how such a human being constructs his or her idea of
his or her identity. Such newly created kinds of humans may be happily
or unhappily brought up, contented or discontented – what is certain is
that they will need to define their selves to themselves in different ways
from children in nineteenth-century novels, orphans or members of large
families, lost heirs or illegitimate children inheriting the ‘sin’ of their
parents. I wondered, when I first began thinking about the Selfish Gene
theory, whether the interest of novelists would shift from romantic love
to parental love – from the desire for the Other to the need to know and
preserve and care for the genetic group to whom we belong.
I have attended the Darwin seminars at the London School of Eco-
nomics, and listened to passionate debates about the relative powers of
Nature and Nurture in the identity of living forms, including humans.
I have also listened to discussions of the origins of altruism – from the
sacrifice for the good of the genetically related, to the social benefits
of co-operation. All these things are full of conflicts and compromises,
tragic and hopeful, in which novelists can find both imagery and stories.
Ian McEwan does so, and he is not the only one.
The passage I quoted from Richard Sennett deplored the increase
of a narcissism which he said caused ‘a decrease in the “metaphori-
cal” imagination of the body, which is to say an impoverishment of the
cognitive activity of creating a symbol out of a physical thing’. My final
remarks concern the illumination that neuroscience, and the study of
the activity of the brain, is beginning to bring to our understanding of
how art works, and what it is. Over my years of writing I have come to
see the delight in making connections – of which metaphor-making is
one of the most intense – as perhaps the fundamental reason for art and
its pleasures. Once, seduced by the poet William Carlos Williams and
his pronouncement ‘No Ideas but in things’ – I decided to write a novel
without metaphor, a novel of statement and description, without figu-
rative language. I found I couldn’t write at all, and had to give up.
Scientists are beginning to be able to watch minds – brains, that is
– at work as they respond to art. Philip Davis, at Liverpool University,
has been working with scientists on responses to Shakespeare’s syntax,
and has found that the connecting links between neurones stay ‘live’
– lit up for longer – after responding to Shakespeare’s words, especially
his novel formations of verbs from nouns, than they do in the case of
‘ordinary’ sentences.

51
 ESSAY

When I was reading Jean-Pierre Dupuy’s extraordinary account of

the 1950s meetings of the cybernetics group, which discussed minds
and machines and what it was to be human, I came across a remark by
a neural network designer about puns. I think it was Von Neumann but
can’t be sure. Maybe, this scientist said, we delight in puns because the
neurone connections become very excited by the double input associ-
ated with all the stored information for two arbitrarily connected things
or ideas. Maybe we enjoy this excitement. It occurred to me that meta-
phors might arise from the same neuronal excitement – a double input,
a strengthened connection. I wrote an essay on John Donne’s meta-
phorical excitement – a sensuality of the brain. During my lifetime we
have used various metaphors for the activity of the mind – when I was a
girl it was seen as a telephone exchange. Later it became fashionable to
describe the brain as a computer – though a computer was constructed
by a brain. Then there were all the philosophical problems of whether
our perceptions were observed by a homunculus inside our heads – I
never understood this one, as I had no idea of what such a homuncu-
lus might be, or might be doing. But I have in the last few years come
across descriptions, both purely physical and philosophically theoreti-
cal, of the way the brain puts the mind together. They are in the work of
Jean-Pierre Changeux. When he describes the relations between axons,
dendrites, perception, memory, concepts and the world outside a brain,
I feel I am reading a description of what I always sensed was happen-
ing, but could not describe. He is interested both in a biological and
chemical ‘grammar’ or algebra, and in the way in which things we per-
ceive are – by the neurones – retained and combined to make ‘images’
(which still have a sensory input) and ‘concepts’ which are made by
strengthened and stabilised collections of neurones, related both by the
‘pruning’ (élagage) of the sensory input and the combinations resulting
from the way the mental objects are linked.
This may seem a little abstract. A novel is made of language, and
arouses both feelings and thoughts in its readers, as it should depict
both feelings and thoughts in its people and its microcosm. Changeux’s
descriptions of the flesh of the mind – the cells of the brain – and the
way they are excited and combine and recombine gives me a sense
of understanding the excitement, the drive, the pleasure, I get out of
making worlds with words. We have had a lot of the body as desire,
and listened to many professors of desire. There is something else – the
human capacity to think, and to make feelings into thoughts. It is a way
out of narcissism.

This essay was originally presented at the Villa Gillet international writers’ con-
ference in the summer of 2007.

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 POETRY

OMAR SABBAGH

My Only Ever Oedipal Complaint

Neither I nor you have anything left to say.

Neither I nor you can mend or, with a final shove,
Stay the damage, automatic and forever
As a graveyard epithet set in stone,

That spoils both our eulogies: a grudge

Will take human form and walk on
Heavy, clumsy, filthy feet, and with
Smiling rotting teeth, venomously pronounce

That both our lives were ruined

By a cowardice, a dithering, only found
In those guilty of some heinous, long-lived
Crime, or those who, to sick excess, love.

Father, though I’d lose the pleasure of the scan,

Could that final ‘or those’ in the stanza above
Disappear and then revivify, as it does
Each night in tears that realise it as an ‘and’?

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POETRY

JOHN KINSELLA

Rapture: Tim Discovers the Cosmos

As my cosmology fades, Tim’s

forms like a birthing star and brightens.
My illuminations go no further
than: on a dull day powderbarks
glow like conscience. Carnaby’s
cockatoos fly back and forth
uncertain as the barometer.
Brightness forces similes. And we
know about them. Once
outside the earth’s atmosphere
there’s no holding Tim back.
He knows the order of the planets
without a mnemonic, backwards.
He is already travelling beyond them.
An asteroid belt is no hindrance.
His new, habitable planets —
Leed, Watar, Vilantar, and Britar —
have the sulphuric yellow
clouds of Venus, the redness of Mars,
the basic lack of atmosphere
on his favourite ‘inner planet’,
Mercury. Mercury — days
of conflagration, nights of annihilating
cold. The extremities define
his planets, creation: the body
has no limits. In space you can breathe.
His — my — cosmos.

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 POETRY

Rapture 6: The Crescent of Little Beach

Whale bones within the bay engrain the sands

of Little Beach: waves lift from flatness
to hit the granite pivot, top dress, then scour.
Children make gothic castles out of sand
that sticks together just long enough: filigree
of kelp, all else beach-combed at first light.
Why go further than these trappings of paradise,
held in by peaks and islands, the intelligence
of granite and scrub, shifting densities
of sand? Sail out of the bay where edges
fall away into narratives of economics?
Dragging of footprints onto the clear,
washed panel around about the waterline’s
ambiguity, sunlight through clouds, light
we expect to find over our shoulders,
glancing off currents; bluer-green aura
of mirror, a sensation of safety.
We expect and accept the indigo depths:
out in the bay, sheer weight of weed
gripping the floor. Opened out, closed in.
Sand compacts in whiteness. Granite
Banksias: like mesophytic cultures
choosing to share a language
of distance and chance, parlay
before curving out into the crush
of the Southern Ocean. Always
diving fresh water. Phrases. Easily
injured. Inured, drawn into the crescent,
out into the bay, sight is sonar,
those blue-green variations in depth
voice-overs of a Western Whipbird. Rowdy
with tranquillity: Noisy Scrub Bird!
Nocturnal ambulation of rediscovery:
Gilbert’s Potoroo. The glimmering
taint of extinction? Phases of interest.
Rest here. Rest easy.

55
 POETRY

Canto of the Dry River Empyrean (30)

We cross river after river,

dry deep into their beds, riparian
fragility, cauterising winds
whipping sand and dust
into an effluvium of white rose
we imagine, brought in
from elsewhere. I clarify.
I see lightning in cloudless
skies. I see luscious fruits
burgeoning out of riverbanks.
I taste and see synonyms
for beauty plash against
the windscreen. All I see
is perfectly out of kilter.
All levels are levelled out.
We cross river after river.

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YOUR RECOMMENDATIONS

WORDSWORTH: FOUR HELPINGS

Faced by famous and great works from the past, it is hard for the modern
mind to steer between a natural awe and being daunted. The danger is that
we just give up. As an introduction and an encouragement to readers to
throw themselves into William Wordsworth’s poem, The Prelude, four writers
discuss their favourite passages. Stephen Gill, the renowned biographer of
the poet, novelist Joanna Trollope, Michael O’Neill, poet and academic, and
David Wilson, director of the Wordsworth Trust, lead the way.

‘A WEIGHT OF PLEASURE’

Stephen Gill

W illiam Wordsworth’s The Prelude is an auto-

biographical poem. The first part concerns
Wordsworth’s childhood in the Lake Dis-
trict, so that’s probably the part of the poem
that most people enjoy with its rich evoca-
tion of childhood joys. Then it follows him through chronologically from
youth in the Lake District, university at Cambridge, and an amazing
walking tour through Europe with a friend called Robert Jones where
they walked something like 2000 miles to reach and cross the Alps; we
have an account of his life in London, and then of course the poem takes
us to revolutionary France from 1791 through to about 1793. The poem
concludes with Wordsworth back in this country meeting Coleridge,
and writing the Lyrical Ballads when he was twenty-eight years old.
But reading the poem what we’re aware of all the time is that there
are two time scales at work here for the growth of this poet’s mind. On

57
 YOUR RECOMMENDATIONS

the one hand there’s the chronology I’ve just described, but the poem –
even the earlier 1805 poem – took as long as six years to write and while
he was doing it Wordsworth wasn’t sitting still. Inscribed in the poem
there is the poet’s mental and emotional growth from 1798 through to
1805. You can also see the influence of Coleridge strongly in the books
where he’s talking about imagination and love.
The Prelude starts as quite a short poem, two books written in a
burst of creative energy in 1798–9. But then it grew and was reshaped
with another great burst of energy so that by 1805 it had grown to
thirteen books. Between 1804 and 1805, perhaps thirteen months or
so, Wordsworth wrote many thousands of lines of concentrated blank
verse – some of the most wonderful, compressed poetry that he ever
wrote. That must all have been completed within a year and yet he lived
with his poem for the rest of his life. He continued to work on it, off
and on, until 1850. There were no more bursts of composition, but we
have to imagine Wordsworth growing old. He was sixty-nine when he
last revised the poem. Queen Victoria was on the throne and he was a
famous man. He was writing about himself in the French Revolution,
going back to it, and living with it.
The passage I’ve chosen shows the power nature came to bear on
him. The poet’s a schoolboy, and he’s been playing with his friends in
front of an inn by the side of a lake. The evening comes on, and he de-
scribes the pleasure they’ve taken in the afternoon:
The garden lay
Upon a slope, surmounted by the plain
Of a small bowling green; beneath us stood
A grove; with gleams of water through the trees
And over the tree-tops; nor did we want
Refreshment, strawberries and mellow cream.
And there, through half an afternoon, we play’d
On the smooth platform, and the shouts we sent
Made all the mountains ring. But ‘ere the fall
Of night, When in our pinnace we return’d
Over the dusky lake, and to the beach
Of some small island steer’d our course with one,
The Minstrel of our troop, and left him there,
And rowed off gently, while he blew his flute
Alone upon the rock; Oh! then the calm
And dead still water lay upon my mind
Even with a weight of pleasure, and the sky,
Never before so beautiful, sank down
Into my heart, and held me like a dream.
(1805 text, II. 162–80)

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 YOUR RECOMMENDATIONS

What I like about this passage is, it’s first of all Wordsworth giving a sense
of the pleasure he took with his friends. They’re just little boys, shouting
and making the mountains ring, but then the passage turns into one em-
phasising the quiet, the isolation of this little minstrel on his rock. Most
of all, look at the language of this. It’s all about your body being taken
over by the outside world: the ‘dead still water lay upon my mind’, the
‘sky sinks down into my heart’, and the pleasure of it all is a ‘weight’. One
of Wordsworth’s most used words is ‘joy’, and one of the things I value
most in him is the emphasis he puts on trying to foster that in children.
In the second book of the poem, Wordsworth says he wants to write
about the growth of human personality. Where can one start? Where
might one begin? And at that moment he says ‘Well, we must begin at
the beginning’: ‘Blessed the infant babe’. And in the passage he takes
the child back to the mother’s breast and describes the impact of love
upon the baby from the mother, and it’s the mother’s love that guaran-
tees the child’s, his word, ‘apprehensiveness’, his ability to learn about
the world. And if this isn’t pre-Freudian, I don’t know what is. And all
of this is written in 1799.

This piece is extracted from a conversation between the writer and Melvyn Bragg
on BBC Radio 4. Readers who would like to hear Stephen Gill’s warm and well-
felt reading of this passage from The Prelude, will find it by typing this address
into the browser window:

http://thereaderonline.co.uk/?p=223

This will bring you to The Reader’s blog, where there is a link to his reading.
Strongly recommended! Two clicks and you’re there.

59
Edridge portrait of Wordsworth by kind permission of The Wordsworth Trust
 ‘BEYOND THE REACH OF THOUGHT’

Joanna Trollope

Ithink – and actually, I think this about most poetry – that you have
to read the passage out loud. Only then will you really feel the
drama of it, and the urgency, and the energy: all qualities which
are not currently and commonly associated with Wordsworth. A
grave mistake…
My seventeenth year was come… I, at this time,
Saw blessings spread around me like a sea.
Thus while the days flew by, and the years passed on,
From Nature and her overflowing soul,
I had received so much, that all my thoughts
Were steeped in feeling; I only then
Contented, when with bliss ineffable
I felt the sentiment of Being spread
O’er all that moves and all that seemeth still;
O’er all that, lost beyond the reach of thought
And human knowledge, to the human eye
Invisible, yet liveth to the heart;
O’er all that leaps and runs, and shouts and sings,
Or beats the gladsome air; o’er all that glides
Beneath the wave, yea, in the wave itself,
And mighty depth of waters.
(1850 text, II. 386, 394–409)

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 YOUR RECOMMENDATIONS

This passage comes from the second book of the immense (fourteen-
book) autobiographical poem that took Wordsworth over half a century
to complete, and which he referred to, touchingly, as ‘The Poem to Col-
eridge’. Such a dedication was of course in homage to the latter’s genius,
but it was, as well, in homage to their shared belief in the supremacy
of poetry, and The Prelude is, amazingly, the first attempt by any writer
in English literature, to describe the growth of the human spirit and
the development of creative consciousness. It is, really, the first specific
chronicle of the imagination.
Wordsworth is out of fashion now. He’s seen as wordy and pon-
derous and self-absorbed. But if you read this passage – finally revised
when he was eighty – you will hear the boy of seventeen again, the boy
recalled as vividly as if he were still present, the boy who leapt and ran
and shouted and sang, and who understood that not only was he at one
with all the natural glories of his Lake District childhood, but that these
glories were the seed bed for all the passion and empathy and profound
understanding that were shaping the future poet, his poetry – and, in
turn and in time, all of us who read it.

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THE MORNING AFTER THE NIGHT BEFORE

Michael O’Neill

In a throng,
A festal company of maids and youths,
Old men and matrons staid – promiscuous rout,
A medley of all tempers – I had passed
The night in dancing, gaiety, and mirth,
With din of instruments and shuffling feet
And glancing forms and tapers glittering
And unaimed prattle flying up and down,
Spirits upon the stretch, and here and there
Slight shocks of young love-liking interspersed
That mounted up like joy into the head
And tingled through the veins. Ere we retired
The cock had crowed, the sky was bright with day;
Two miles I had to walk along the fields
Before I reached my home. Magnificent
The morning was, a memorable pomp,
More glorious than I ever had beheld.
The sea was laughing at a distance; all
The solid mountains were as bright as clouds,
Grain-tinctured, drenched in empyrean light;
And in the meadows and the lower grounds
Was all the sweetness of a common dawn –
Dews, vapours, and the melody of birds,
And labourers going forth into the fields.
Ah, need I say, dear friend, that to the brim
My heart was full? I made no vows, but vows

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 YOUR RECOMMENDATIONS

Were then made for me: bond unknown to me

Was given that I should be, else sinning greatly,
A dedicated spirit. On I walked
In blessedness, which even yet remains.
(1805 text, IV. 316–45)

Wordsworth doesn’t immediately fit the bill as a Romantic party-

animal; here, however, he recalls coming home in the morning, after
a night passed in ‘dancing, gaiety, and mirth’, with ‘Slight shocks of
young love-liking’ tingling through his veins. Two Wordsworths, as so
often, are in play: the young man, all keyed up, ‘Spirits upon the stretch’,
and the remembering poet, poised and in sympathetic control. And the
blank verse is a musical and mimetic form in Wordsworth’s hands, able
to be at one with what it speaks of and able, above all, to modulate. I
think of walking back from a disco past French vineyards when I read
this passage, yet, of course, Wordsworth’s experience remains glorious-
ly his, even though he enables us to share it. I’ve always admired the
lines for the swiftness with which they glide believably from a recognis-
able experience to a less familiar one, the poet flooded with joy because
somehow knowing (even though the recognition is ‘unknown’) that
he was meant to be ‘A dedicated spirit’. When Wordsworth scales the
heights, one feels obscurely that mere egotism has been swept aside; at
any rate, here, the poet delights in what’s outside himself. ‘Magnificent
/ The morning was, a memorable pomp’: how finely the phrasing mixes
up the polysyllabic and the bare, the verb ‘was’ (sadly revised in 1850
to ‘rose’) carrying and conferring the stamp of conviction. Wordsworth
fuses the sublime and the ordinary into a single vision in which the
‘solid mountains’ seem to liquefy. It’s as though the ‘empyrean light’
of Milton’s Heaven or Dante’s Paradiso had ‘drenched’ the Lake Dis-
trict. At the same time, everything bears witness to ‘the sweetness of a
common dawn’. Seeing those ‘labourers going forth’, the poet glimpses
his purpose in life. Touched with the ‘blessedness’ for which Words-
worth gives thanks, the passage creates its own ‘bond’ with the reader.

64
 ‘A VARIEGATED CROWD’

David Wilson

A s everyone knows, the French Revolution began in

1789 when a Paris mob stormed the Bastille. 1790
saw the abolition of the nobility and titles, and in
July of that year Louis XVI swore an oath to the new
Constitution. The supporters of the Revolution were
at their most optimistic during that period. Wordsworth visited France in
1790 and in Book VI of The Prelude (1805) described his feelings – ’twas a
time when Europe was rejoiced, / France standing on the top of golden
hours,/ And human nature seeming born again’ (lines 352–354).
In 1792, when again in Paris, Wordsworth met Michel Beaupuy,
who converted him to the revolutionary cause. Wordsworth returned to
England a short while after the September massacres in France of royalists
and other prisoners. The moderate French government under the Girond-
ins began to lose control to Robespierre and his radical Jacobins, leading to
the trial of Louis XVI, which began in December 1792 and resulted in 1793
in his execution and that of his Queen, Marie-Antoinette. The supremacy
of Robespierre and the Jacobins brought about the ‘Reign of Terror’, which
saw the deaths of some 20,000 to 40,000 people, and dashed the hopes of
many of those who had been supporters of the Revolution and its demo-
cratic ideals, including Wordsworth. This disillusionment with the failure

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 YOUR RECOMMENDATIONS

of the Revolution became a burning ember that helped to ignite the flame
of British Romanticism – the writing of Wordsworth and Coleridge was in a
sense both a reaction to the failure of the French Revolution and the desire
to ensure that its ideals of fairness and equality for all, and the pursuit of
the interests of ordinary people, were safeguarded. In the passage from
Book X of The Prelude (lines 523–543) that follows, Wordsworth describes
how, while crossing Lancaster Sands (Morecambe Bay Sands) in 1794,
he learned the news of Robespierre’s own execution, which had occurred
earlier that year, and his great joy at the news:
all the plain
Was spotted with a variegated crowd
Of coaches, wains, and travellers, horse and foot,
Wading, beneath the conduct of their guide
In loose procession through the shallow stream
Of inland water; the great sea meanwhile
Was at safe distance, far retired. I paused,
Unwilling to proceed, the scene appeared
So gay and cheerful – when a traveller
Chancing to pass, I carelessly inquired
If any news were stirring, he replied
In the familiar language of the day
That, Robespierre was dead. Nor was a doubt,
On further question, left within my mind
But that the tidings were substantial truth –
That he and his supporters all were fallen.

Great was my glee of spirit, great my joy

In vengeance, and eternal justice, thus
Made manifest. ‘Come now, ye golden times’,
Said I, forth-breathing on those open sands
A hymn of triumph, . . .

The oil-painting of Morecambe Bay, Lancaster Sands, illustrated here, was

executed by David Cox (1783–1859). Cox was primarily a watercolourist
and drawing master who achieved popularity through a series of influ-
ential drawing books. He first visited Lancaster Sands in 1834 and from
1835 to 1847 produced a number of both watercolours and oils on the
subject of travellers making the dangerous crossing from Lancashire to
what is now Cumbria. The scene depicted by Cox must be very similar to
that experienced by Wordsworth when he heard of Robespierre’s death.
In the passage from The Prelude Wordsworth not only conveys the rich-
ness of the setting, but also describes both his relief and his elation. It
is a masterful piece: with an economy of words it describes the caravan

66
Morecambe Bay, Lancaster Sands, David Cox, 1824, oil on canvas, 33 x 48 cm. © The Wordsworth Trust.
 YOUR RECOMMENDATIONS

of colour and gaiety observed by the poet, the water through which the
procession passed and the distant and personified sea, ‘far retired’ – the
poet’s interest in the natural world never absent from his mind and his
writing. Wordsworth’s concern with the vernacular is reflected by the
manner in which the glad tidings are conveyed to the poet, the traveller
expressing them ‘in the familiar language of the day’, a moment that re-
sulted in Wordsworth’s feelings of unbridled joy. This is all conveyed in
twenty-one lines of verse containing only one hundred and fifty words.
A prose writer might require many thousands of words to describe the
scene and convey the same depth of feeling and expression of emotion.

68
 READING LIVES

FIGHT OR FLIGHT

Kate McDonnell

Get Into Reading facilitator Kate McDonnell asks: ‘What do you read in
times of crisis?’

D o you look for literature which directly confronts

your experience, or would you rather use reading as
an escape from it? It’s personal – almost instinctive
– but I think I’ve always gone for the former. At a
time when I was facing a life-threatening operation,
I found help in Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich: an unblinking look at
what it is to die which tells you how to live.
During the last few years, though, I and the other members of the
Get Into Reading team have had to take this question beyond ourselves.
In weekly reading groups, we’ve been sharing books with people who
find themselves in hard places: homeless men, recovering drug addicts,
people with chronic illnesses, people with mental health problems. How
do you decide what to read with them? Should you avoid the sore spot,
or is that the very area of their lives that people most want to examine?
A while ago, a Cancer Information Coordinator who works with the
libraries came along to our weekly staff meeting to ask for our advice.
Every month she chooses a book and leaves copies of it in oncology clinics
for patients to read while they’re waiting for their appointments – a good
idea. Her first choice was a book by Gervase Phinn, but she’s struggled
to find suitable titles since. Someone suggested another cheerful book
to her – Millions, by Frank Cottrell Boyce – so she used that… only to

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 READING LIVES

discover that it’s actually (though indirectly) about two bereaved boys
struggling to find coping strategies after their mother has died – prob-
ably from cancer. She’s since become so supersensitive that she finds it
hard to consider any book that has any death in it at all. Her anxiety is
understandable: she has no way of knowing what effect the books will
have on people – leaving the wrong book could be like leaving unexplod-
ed bombs. But couldn’t Gervase Phinn hurt, too? Couldn’t his sunniness
press horribly on the raw emotions of some of those frightened people
in the waiting room? Our general advice was to be bolder, to accept that
one size will most definitely not fit all, and to trust individuals to follow
their instincts to read on… or to put the book down.
The advice to be bolder has grown directly out of our experience
in Get Into Reading, where we share books by reading them aloud in
weekly instalments and turning the pages together. Because facilitators
can see the effect of books on people, we can explore highly relevant
texts together, as when we read Of Mice And Men, Steinbeck’s classic
story of two homeless drifters, at Birkenhead’s YMCA homeless hostel:
George’s voice became deeper. He repeated his words
rhythmically as though he had said them many times
before. ‘Guys like us, that work on ranches, are the loneliest
guys in the world. They got no family. They don’t belong no
place. They come down to a ranch an’ work up a stake, and
the first thing you know they’re poundin’ their tail on some
other ranch. They ain’t got nothing to look ahead to.’
Imagine reading this aloud to a group of homeless men, round a table
in the shabby YMCA canteen, each with his own story of brokenness
and isolation, whether through drug addiction, prison, abuse or mental
health problems. They know how it may apply to them – and they know
that you know.
Of Mice and Men is set in America in the 1930s, but its core feelings of
loneliness and rootlessness reach down through the decades. It doesn’t
just patronisingly say, ‘I know how you feel’ (because however much
we try, we don’t – quite). It first of all makes us all feel for the char-
acters, for George and learning-disabled Lennie and their hard-to-live
lives. Somehow, we make the connection with each other through our
sympathy with them and, for a time at least, that makes everything level
between us. The passage continues:
‘With us it ain’t like that. We got a future. We got someone
that gives a damn about us. We don’t have to sit in no bar
room blowin’ in our jack jus’ because we got no place else
to go. If them other guys gets in jail they can rot for all
anybody gives a damn. But not us.’

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 READING LIVES

Lennie broke in. ‘But not us! An’ why? Because… because I
got you to look after me, and you got me to look after you, and
that’s why.’ He laughed delightedly. ‘Go on now, George!’
‘You got it by heart. You can do it yourself.’
‘No, you. I forget some a’ the things. Tell about how it’s
gonna be.’
‘O.K. Someday – we’re gonna get the jack together and
we’re gonna have a little house and a couple of acres an’ a
cow an’ some pigs and – ‘
‘An’ live off the fatta the lan’,’ Lennie shouted. ‘An’ have
rabbits. Go on, George! Tell about what we’re gonna have
in the garden and about the rabbits in the cages and about
the rain in the winter and the stove, and how thick the
cream is on the milk like you can hardly cut it. Tell about
that, George.’
The men in the YMCA, although they usually listened with intense con-
centration, didn’t always articulate their thoughts on what we were
reading – none had ever been in a reading group before and the whole
idea of talking about books was new to them – but after reading this
passage, one young man with literacy problems, who had a difficult
childhood which included spells in care, and who was also an alcoholic,
simply said: ‘That’s all any of us wants, in here.’
In response to Lennie’s pleas, George paints the dream picture time
and again throughout the novel, but they never do get their ‘little house’
even though, for a brief spell, and much to their astonishment, it really
seems that they might. The book has an extremely sad ending. But that
was okay with the blokes in the YMCA, too. ‘That’s well-sad, that,’ one
of the men commented. But there was also something satisfying about
it: it didn’t offer glib answers. The story George keeps telling to Lennie
isn’t just escapism: it always starts with grim reality and then moves on
to his relationship with Lennie and what might be built out of that, and
it really helps both of them to keep hearing it.
Our group for people suffering from depression chose to read (from
a short list of books I suggested) Tess of the D’Urbervilles together, chapter
by chapter, week by week for nearly five months. I have to admit that I
found reading Hardy’s vision aloud to this set of troubled people rather
a daunting prospect, and I ended each weekly session with a poetry
escape-ladder, linked to whatever we’d read in the book, but looking at
it in a different way. ‘Are you sure you don’t mind reading something so
sad?’ I asked when we were absolutely in the thick of it. ‘Not at all,’ one
woman smiled, ‘we all know sadness is a part of life, and we wouldn’t
believe in anything you brought in that said it wasn’t.’
‘Tell how it is with us, George,’ asks Lennie. And sometimes, that’s
where it has to start.

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POETRY

PENNY FEARN

A Little

There’s a plaque somewhere where you’re meant to be,

a fleeced memory near a baby oak tree.
You made my birthday cake when I was four,
can’t remember, did you like a cup or
a mug? For your strong white tea no sugar,
is it me, or have you been gone forever.

Black

And suddenly, slowly I’ll fade

into the piece of ocean so deep,
it looks to be black.
Cold like winter mornings,
shuddering to get dressed under the covers,
dark enough to warrant a pale light.
Black as the lane we wandered,
looking for a friend,
nothing but the road’s texture,
we guessed each unexpected bend.
I’ll fade and spare you,
there’s silence to hold me safe,
a calm hand smoothing out my panic,
a place of nothing to deafen me into peace.

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 POETRY

Not in the good way

I was snuggled in freezer frosted unfeeling,

wrapped up empty and alone.
Spending selfish Saturdays in lavish ways,
and never sharing the remote.
I’m exhausted already and now there’s texting,
there’s ‘wait at least an hour to reply’,
‘don’t: show it, say it, mean it’.
Great advice when I’d just like to try.
I’m baby’s first focused look.
I’m bambi learning to walk.
I’m a pigeon finally poisoned;
in short I’m totally fucked.

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READING LIVES

AT THE QUIET LIMIT OF THE WORLD

Angela Macmillan

S ome time ago, the thought occurred to me that there

must be hundreds of people in care homes, still mentally
alert but, for a variety of physical reasons, no longer able
to read much or at all. I had only to make myself avail-
able and there would be dozens of eager old folk queuing
to join my reading group. Now that I have been running reading groups
for the elderly for twelve months, I know that the majority of residents
in care homes are probably not going to be interested. But for those
who are, the comfort and mental stimulation of the reading group can
be hugely beneficial in terms of well being. Last week I asked my care
home group of six regular attenders what they thought they gained
from coming. One said that nothing else she did during the week was so
‘mentally stimulating … Well, it’s stimulating and relaxing at the same
time, if you see what I mean’. And I did see what she meant. The meet-
ings are regular, we feel comfortable with each other, people’s thoughts
and ideas are taken seriously, and we usually laugh a lot. We read eve-
rything from Wordsworth to Wendy Cope, from War and Peace to Wind in
the Willows. After some weeks I decided to read Tennyson’s great poem
on old age, ‘Ulysses’. Here is the ending of the poem:
Come, my friends.
‘T is not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths

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 READING LIVES

Of all the western stars, until I die.

It may be that the gulfs will wash us down;
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are,
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

Is it simply a poem about Ulysses or is there more to it? Molly said there
is more – it’s about being old but not giving in and thinking, ‘This is the
end and that’s that’. I asked them which lines they thought true and
she gave me: ‘That which we are, we are’. ‘You can’t change things’, she
added, ‘you just have to get on with it’. Tommy agreed with her. He said
you needed courage and willpower, and love, to go on facing life. I told
them that Tennyson had written it in response to the death of a friend
and Penny (who had been delighted to find that Ulysses’ wife was called
Penelope), said that having lost her husband two years ago she could
now understand the line ‘Tho’ much is taken, much abides’.

The main requirements of a good facilitator for the elderly are a love
of reading, a very loud voice, a thick skin – and the confidence to be able
to manage group dynamics. (Because the members of care home groups
live together, there are occasional differences and bad feeling between
residents.) Certainly it helps to have a background of serious reading,
as there is something of a relentless need to find suitable reading ma-
terial. Not all groups are capable of reading through a novel in weekly
instalments. The alternative is to find a good short story or extract from
a novel, which will most likely need judicious editing to fit the time slot.
For every twenty short stories read, probably only one will be suitable. A
lot of literature is about human unhappiness: a facilitator has to be able
to judge the mood of their group and know when to avoid the downbeat
and whether for example it is wise to read poems that have death or
bereavement as their subject. This is not to say we shy away from diffi-
cult books but the consequences of choosing the wrong texts are serious.
Time is short and precious for the elderly; if they are bored, or upset by
the readings they will just stop coming.
My second group is rather different. It takes place in a nursing home
for the elderly. Each week the home’s activities organiser, Gill sends out
invitations to the patients she thinks are likely to be interested. When
I arrive, those who have accepted are assembled and enjoying tea with
pretty china, and cakes and biscuits from an ornate cake stand. Gill and

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another carer always stay with us, which is essential, as usually someone
will need attention during the session. The average group number here
is ten and we all squash into a small room with no windows. I read a
poem and a short story and the whole session lasts approximately one
hour. Although we have lost people to illness and to death, at least eight
people have been coming regularly since I began in January ‘07. Most
members are in wheelchairs and many have suffered severe strokes
leaving them with different levels of disability. Several of them have
difficulty speaking, some are also rather deaf which means they can’t
hear each other, and yet after nine months we all feel the friendship and
relaxed pleasure of belonging together in the group.
The sheer effort of attending should not be underestimated. Anne,
for instance, is a very private, well-educated lifelong reader. She has
motor neurone disease and is increasingly unwell. Gill tells me the
reading group is the only activity for which she leaves her own room. She
is in constant pain and sometimes can barely speak or hold the photo-
copied poem, and yet she has missed just one session in nine months.
She thinks hard and seriously about what we read and is usually ex-
hausted by the end of the session.
I have found that the poems that work best are strongly rhymed and
rhythmed, and perhaps something remembered from school. My group
in the care home are willing and able to wrestle gently with the lan-
guage of a new poem, but in the nursing home what they really respond
to is something that they know: Tennyson’s ‘Lady of Shallott’, Walter
de la Mare’s ‘The Listeners’, or something that they know something
about: we talked for ages about steam trains and train journeys and the
joys of writing and receiving letters after reading Auden’s ‘Night Mail’.
After reading Elizabeth Jennings’ poem, ‘Friendship’, people told mov-
ingly of their life’s best friends. It is the same with the fiction: novels
or stories that remind them of something they have lived will stimulate
the best discussion.
Life is a constant struggle for meaning and understanding. Towards
the end of life the task of trying to fit together all the pieces of experi-
ence – some of which have become separated or lost – to make a sense
of whole, meaningful life is crucial. The idea of nostalgia, as merely
sentimental longing or wistful affection for the past, is often consid-
ered retrograde but I would argue that the positive and beneficial use of
nostalgia can be a re-collecting of past experience which allows a sense
of present pride and achievement. The reading of literature stimulates
and validates memories and it is, for the majority of elderly members of
reading groups, a serious pleasure.

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 YOUR REGULARS

OUR SPY IN NY:

MENUSPOTTING

Enid Stubin

A t Via Emilia, a rollicking Modenese trattoria in

my neighborhood, the menus were suffering from
typographical gremlins. Now, I happen to enjoy
typos: the sign at my late lamented local market,
the postlapsarian Garden of Eden, regularly offered
‘wollnuts’. ‘Gralefrit’ and ‘balm carousel’ confused diners at Fawlty
Towers, and on East 21st Street ‘fried calamity’ nudged up against ‘mas-
culine sald’. But at lunch last summer a table of editors from Farrar,
Straus & Giroux had complained about the Via Emilia errors, and I was
brought in last week, after salmon over greens with my niece, not just
to proofread (that is, to red-pencil the usual goofy mistakes only to find
them mysteriously restored in the next batch of menus), but to over-
haul the whole project.
Consider: ‘parmesan’ or ‘Parmigiano Reggiano’? Would anyone un-
derstand what ‘Modena’s little tile-baked mountain bread’ is, let alone
order it? Having regularly gobbled my way through the entire menu, I
came to welcome the silly transpositions and misspellings – maltigliati,
the rough-cut pasta that hobnobbed with cannellini beans in a favorite
soup, was rendered as ‘baldy-cut’. But William wasn’t kidding, and I
arrived, officious after a long day pushing students around, to set all
straight with an olive-green Le Pen. The Mac laptop I found poised at
a back booth alarmed me: it sat up expectantly, mouseless and daintily
unmoored to reality. And on it were the fall offerings, which resisted
centering on every line. I asked Johnny how to scroll down and insert

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emendations and recognized the central difference between PCs and

Macs – did Umberto Eco style it as the distinction between Protestant-
ism and Catholicism? I flung my briefcase, raincoat, and hat onto the
commodious banquette and eyed the machine. Tidy and charming, it
yielded nothing as I tapped gingerly and saw a regional specialty dis-
appear into the ether. Another few minutes at the touchpad and I
would obliterate the restaurant’s entire menu, forcing the place into
receivership and making way on the block for yet another upscale
kitchen-and-bath shop or strip club.
‘Bring this girl a glass of wine, somebody!’ William thundered, and I
began to understand the cachet of finding oneself under the protection
of the boss. I also thought of Volodya Vlashkin, magisterial emperor of
the Yiddish theater in Grace Paley’s ‘Goodbye and Good Luck’: ‘“Dorf-
mann!” he hollered like a king. “Bring this child a seltzer with fresh
ice!”’ Click, worry the pad, click, and type. Backspace to the left only.
Don’t get cute. Whole dishes capered flush right and then hiccupped
left. What good was I doing? The exquisite Yukiko ambled over to cast a
gimlet eye at the spacing, all of which looked spurious to her. ‘Martina!’
I wailed, but then we got slammed by the early dinner rush, and I was
left to my dithering. ‘Balsamic vinegar’ or simply ‘balsamic’? William
came over in his chef’s coat and baseball cap to correct my second-guess
spelling of ‘azzuro.’ I deliberated: ‘Roast wild boar’ or ‘Wild boar roast’
– the latter sounded like a Friar’s Club extravaganza. Adam carried over
a plate of cold cuts, soft cheeses, and tigelle (aha – Modena’s tile-baked
mountain bread) with a glass of chilled Pagadebit (‘Floral, aromatic,
herbal, honey, and medium body’), but I was sweating. The menus were
supposed to go out the next morning, twelve hours after I’d sworn to
mail my Spy copy to Sarah Coley.
‘Martina needs to do it’, I bit off, aware of my inadequacy, and so
Kiko, Paul, and Shinya covered the tables to allow Martina to perform
some fancy formatting that involved realigning margins, flushing left,
and centering each line individually – artisanal design, if you will. My
wispy knowledge of PC lore proved useless, and while I’d have loved
to bustle over and take some orders during the Thursday night crush, I
sat, tense, and watched. The final scroll-through posed more moments
of anxiety: capitalize ‘Lambrusco’ but lowercase ‘cacciatore’? What was
the textual justification? Had I, in fact, established anything in the way
of methodology for my editorial intervention? What would the machers
of the Society for Textual Studies say? The font for ‘Antipasti’ was
subtly smaller than that for ‘Zuppi’ or ‘Paste,’ but who knows whether
a change would bounce the whole megillah onto a third page? Those
graphic designers – they earn every penny they make.
Then, just as it was settled, the enigmatic Mac handed me this quan-

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dary: ‘Save’? ‘Save as’? You know the dilemma of replacing an entire file
– in this case, a season’s eats. I was ascared. The fruits of my decision
would be laminated and cry out my carelessness all winter.
I began to match piatti with the folks I’ve yet to meet. Sarah would
enjoy the tortelloni di zucca with butter and sage. I’d offer Brian the
stinco, a savory lamb shank served with polenta and sautéed spinach
(though with just a shrug he could have roasted potatoes and Swiss
chard instead). John, who shares my admiration for Nigella Lawson,
should definitely choose the gnocco fritto, puffy fritters served with pro-
sciutto di Parma, soppressata dolce, coppa, and mortadella – it’s a dish
that dish Nigella would happily scarf down in the wee small hours of
the morning. For Chris, the tagliatelle al ragù, noodles with a Bolognese
sauce that never fails to comfort – or maybe the lasagna, so popular
that it’s the only dish without a descriptor. And for Jen the tagliolini
alla vecchia Modena, a heady and elemental bowl of thin noodles with
braised garlic, Parmigiano Reggiano, and balsamic. The misticanza, a re-
freshing salad of microgreens, red grapefruit, and provolone, had been
axed after the relocation from Park Avenue South, but one could be
rustled up if my name was mentioned. It’s better than having a sand-
wich named for one at the Stage Deli.
Angie might like the salmon special, lemony and bright with diced
avocado. And I’d feed Jane and Phil the borlengo, a gossamer wafer
fragrant with rosemary and pancetta, scattered with parmesan – sorry,
that’s Parmigiano Reggiano – and prepared in a special two-foot-diame-
ter pan and halved and halved again, a savory wedge of satiny crispness
and salt. William once saw me applying knife and fork to one and
filipped the back of my head resoundingly with his middle finger and
thumb. ‘Don’t embarrass me,’ he hissed. ‘Eat it with your hands.’
And you, Reader’s readers – what would you like? Split a pasta ap-
petizer and choose the scaloppine with asparagus? Try the special soup
– carrot and ginger – and follow with the grilled bluefish over roasted
root vegetables? Have the polpettine di melanzane, eggplant patties
with goat cheese, and then share an order of caramelle di Castelvetro,
the witty candy-shaped pasta stuffed with pork, spinach, and ricotta? If
we’re feeling wicked, we can have the profiteroles or an espresso pan-
nacotta. Or should we double up on everything and feel virtuous about
the strawberries and balsamic for dessert? What are we drinking, the
tanniny Levata, the earthy Malbo Gentile, or one of Tomoe’s big, fizzy
Lambruscos? Order up, ragazzi – this is my party.

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THE LONDON EYE

KEEPING HEART

T his weekend I must find time to read a four-hundred-

page manuscript, two proposals for non-fiction books,
two hardbacks which must be reinvented in paperback
in a year’s time with fashionable, enticing jackets, and a
classic which needs a snappy new introduction from the
right person. I’m also halfway through a book by Jonathan Safran Foer
called Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, which has been lying half-fin-
ished by my bed for far too long. This is quite a lot of reading to fit into
two days, especially as I have a very splashy January cold; a friend I’d
like to see who’s departing imminently on a round-the-world tour for
six months; some knitting I’d like to finish and the normal business of
eating and sleeping to get on with.
It’s normal for me to have this much to do. I’m terrible at time
management, and really, it’s quite right and proper. When it emerges
in conversation that I work for a publisher, people sometimes ask how
many books I read in a week, or how many hours of the day are spent
with a book – do I really love reading? And they are surprised to hear
that my job itself (the office hours) involves anything but reading. It’s
the rest of life that the books absorb. Indeed, I was told point-blank by
my boss, that the more of my life I sacrifice to reading the better I will
do in my career. Perhaps it’s not surprising then, that despite my regular
weekend manuscript-load, my new year’s resolution for 2008 is to ‘read
more’.

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Other new year’s resolutions are more gruelling, I tell myself. I could
be trying to ‘exercise more’, ‘become a vegan’ or ‘discover the hidden
truth of it all’. But I’m finding this one enough of a struggle.
Here’s how it is. I’m eager for more reading in order to advance up
the ladder. I’m given a manuscript to read by my boss or another editor
– one of my superiors. I read it in order to judge if it’s worth publish-
ing with these questions in mind: Is it well written? Is it something
new? Who will buy it? And then there come the more personal kinds
of question: Is it worth publishing because it’s a great work of litera-
ture or because it will sell lots of copies? Does it move me? Then come
the most personal considerations of all, because I’m not reading the
book wholly for its own sake or that of the author, but for my sake too.
For, if I like the book and the editor who passed it on to me likes it too,
we’ve now got something in common; we’ve started a relationship. The
next time this editor likes something, they might pass it on to me in
hopes that I’ll support them again. The more reading I get, the better
I’m doing because I’m building up relationships – so my reaction to a
book becomes a kind of currency, which I hope will gain in value.
This could all appear excessively Machiavellian but in fact there is
little point in being crafty: championing a book merely to curry favour
with a colleague could easily backfire. In the absence of experience, a
newcomer like me must rely on honesty and instinct. And this means
that those tentative relationships with other readers that are based on
common liking are really deeper and more worthwhile, parallel in a way
to the kind of closeness you have to a writer.
My resolution to ‘read more’ is therefore expressive of a wish to do
better at my job. But depending on what I’m reading, my progress is
either cheerfully straightforward or hopelessly mired in doubt.
The job means that I’m constantly reading outside of my comfort
zone, both in terms of what I’m reading and the way I’m reading it.
When I was younger and reading for my purest pleasure, I devoured
books, skipping paragraphs of description or bits I didn’t understand
in order to follow the story and find out what happened at the end. If
I liked a book, I’d probably read it again sometime, at a more leisurely
and attentive pace. Then I learned how to read closely, how to value
my first response to a poem or a book and then how to explore and un-
derstand what was happening within that response. I began to value
the writers and books that most rewarded this kind of close reading;
those that taught me something about states of feeling, types of experi-
ence, ways of thinking. My acquaintance with The Reader and Get Into
Reading has made me think about the practical use of literature. The
result is that I want books to provide more than escapism and enjoy-
ment; I want them to teach me and help me somehow too.

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These demands are big and the right ones to make, but even so
I confess I can be somewhat puritanical in my approach to reading.
Especially when I’m approaching contemporary fiction. I’ve found so
much of it can be clever and well written but it seems contemptuous
in dealing with anything human or everyday, and disappointingly un-
original in its insights. I’m squeamish perhaps, but I’m fed up with the
perception that ‘good’ writing must derive from its ability to shock, to
horrify, or that the value of reading is only to expose yourself to what you
can hardly imagine in terms of cruelty, neglect, subversion or menace.
I’m not really interested in any more quirky journeys of self-discovery
either. In the worst of my Scrooge-like humours, the hyperbole that is a
prerequisite on the back cover of paperback books appears like a mirage,
a code that merely disguises a book I read before and didn’t like. So
‘breathtaking historical accuracy’ means to me ‘worthy but flat’; ‘su-
perbly crafted’ smacks to me of ‘overwritten’; ‘stylish’ is another word
for ‘slight’. But all this cynicism leaves a sour taste.
I know these descriptions don’t apply to everything being written
today, which is why I’m lucky that I’m forced to challenge my own preju-
dices every time I’m passed a manuscript. Yet, since this challenge is not
always rewarding, picture me now, racing through my four-hundred-
page manuscript, reading one word in ten while one half of my head is
thinking ‘Humbug! Not good enough!’ and the other is thinking ‘Yes,
but someone else might like it, and might it sell?’ The result is dizziness
and confusion and a fair amount of pomposity, and before the end of
2007 I fear my reading was sluggish and half-hearted and anything but
pleasurable (which is when the knitting started: a purposeful entangle-
ment of wool to hide from the confusion of my mind). Bad news for my
mental health, bad news for all the manuscripts that came my way, and
bad news for my career prospects.
My resolution to ‘read more’ this year will take just as much disci-
pline as a weekly trip to the gym, as it too involves building up muscles
that are growing flaccid; sometimes it may be just as distasteful as a
diet of broccoli. Reading more will mean I must ‘walk abroad’, to put it
in Jacob Marley’s terms, a little more; it means rediscovering inquisi-
tiveness and an open mind, and to do more of the reading which keeps
my heart up. Translated into other terms it is a resolution to avoid that
torpid and shrivelling cynicism at all costs.

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WHAT THE PAPERS SAY

Jane Davis

W ithin my adult life-time our culture has ac-

cepted the demise of the book. It is dying
on two different levels. Firstly, least impor-
tantly, it is probably about to be superseded
as an artefact. I don’t mind. Mechanical
print has been a great thing but if something comes along that makes
it easier and cheaper to get the living content of books into readers’
hands and hearts then I’m all for going digital. Only I hope the device,
whatever it is, is self-powered: I wouldn’t want to be left bookless when
civilisation breaks down and we have no national grid.
The second death is more serious. We are talking, to blow it up to
ultra-grand dimensions, about nothing less than the values of our civi-
lisation. You might not like me going on like that, but that is certainly
what Doris Lessing was talking about in her Nobel acceptance speech,
‘A Hunger for Books’ (reprinted in The Guardian, Saturday 8th Decem-
ber 2007). As in her novels, she looks upon our world with clear, puzzled
eyes and sees the pattern we are lost in, comparing desperate book-
hungry Africa with the careless over-stuffed non-reading West:
We are in a fragmenting culture, where our certainties of even
a few years ago are questioned and where it is common for
young men and young women, who have had years of educa-
tion, to know nothing of the world, to have read nothing.

The loss is not among the 23% of our adult working age population
who do not have the skill of reading a book and for whom the Govern-

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ment has launched a new National Year of Reading, aimed primarily at

the poor and unskilled. No, the loss is taking place among those who
have the skill but not the will to read and so I wonder whether the em-
phasis should have been placed on the non-reading or down-dumbing
educated people who set our cultural tones and benchmarks. I read the
rest of the papers on Saturday 8th December with Mrs Lessing’s words
ringing in my mind.
There’s Giles Whittell in The Times writing against Shakespeare.
It’s the plays I loathe, and the orgiastic groupthink that drips
from every one of them; the industrialised, irresistible consen-
sus, the greatness thrust upon them by brainwashed English
teachers… Shakespeare isn’t terrible. He was a decent jobbing
wordsmith chosen by accident of history as a vessel for the
projected yearnings, every bit as intense as his own, of suc-
ceeding generations. He was literature’s Brian (as in Life Of). If
he were alive today he’d be a copywriter with a blog.

This ignorant rant is typical of the relation some educated people have
to great literature: they want to crush it down to smallness. Perhaps for
a modern journalist it is fulfilling to look down on ‘great writers’ and to
show they were nothing special. If Dickens were alive he’d be writing
EastEnders – he only wrote for the money, you know. And Jane Austen
– why, it’s just sex and shopping without the shopping and with no sex:
pre-consumer chick-lit. Let’s laugh at those so-called greats.
Mariella Frostrup – voice of the BBC Radio 4 programme A Good Read
– knows what those greats are good for, and she tells us so in print. I
kept this cutting from The Observer a couple of weeks earlier:
We’re told that once we digest the classics we unlock the secrets
of the universe, but there are days when I wish I’d learnt to fix
a boiler or basic electrics. Literature may be revered in high
places but most writers I’ve met are pretty useless at anything
else. So we should be grateful there are intelligent children
and adults out there for whom books don’t appeal and whose
skills lie elsewhere.

Giles Whittell, I suppose, is one of those intelligent adults, and yet one
can’t help but feel it is not simply a lack of appeal that fires his rage against
Shakespeare. It is the idea of greatness, and perhaps more precisely, of
canonical greatness, because the canon, in more ways than one, implies
Authority. Who in our free-thinking democracy gave anyone the right or
clarity to make literary judgements? Who says Shakespeare’s the best?
Of course, in real life, people make critical judgements all the time
but there is a weird state of affairs in which it is culturally acceptable to

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choose to read Hello magazine or to watch Big Brother, but reading, let’s
say, Montaigne, is not something that most educated modern people
would mention in public. (All praise to Jane Shilling, who has often
mentioned her obsession with that great writer in her Times column,
and who once wrote about him in these pages.) People are wary of being
seen to choose the difficult, the thoughtful, the slow, as if there were,
after all, a nub of understanding in the anti-serious tone of our shared
public life: we must mock because what if life is serious after all? Isn’t it
better just to go for fun? For irony? And keep it up. My God, we’re glad
the Emperor is in the altogether.
Let me tell you the story of someone I’ll call Gill. I met her at a
Weight-Watchers club, on a Merseyside housing estate, where I had
come to lose a couple of stone, and to meet potential Get Into Reading
members. I’d brought some books, a short story to read, and was there
for a couple of hours meeting people. Mostly they weren’t very inter-
ested in what I had to offer. But Gill was interested.
‘I’ll come to a reading group,’ she said. ‘But will you have any
better books?’ She didn’t fancy the one I’d been reading, a short story
by Tobias Wolff. She looked though the selection I had unpacked and
picked up Great Expectations. ‘Dickens. I wouldn’t mind reading that,’ she
said. Some of the other women thought it would be boring but Gill said
‘I want to read all those books I thought were rubbish at school. Shake-
speare, the classics. I want to understand them. I want to know why they
are good.’ (A great response to the canon: meet the challenge.)
We try to recruit more mums on the basis that reading is good for
your kids. Because what children need is not just ‘the right book’ but
an adult role model for reading. Shared reading needs to go on past the
age when a child can read for herself, and reading ought to be some-
thing the adult is seen to choose to do. So it was encouraging to read the
front-page Daily Telegraph report that Ed Balls’ new education strategy is
to reach children by targeting parents. The measures will include incen-
tives to encourage mothers and fathers to take part in school life and to
read to their children.
You can see why this is necessary. I helped a young friend prepare
for A level two years ago. He got his ‘A’ grade and is now studying law
at one of the great redbrick universities. He was astonished that my first
requirement was that he read. His teacher – at a grammar school with
some of the best state school results in the country – did not expect the
A level English group to read a whole book, still less a whole Shake-
speare play. Neither did this teacher have his own (visible) response to
literature. He answered the question ‘What do you think, Sir?’ with the
bleak assertion, ‘I am not here to think, I am here to facilitate. I am a
facilitator.’

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We look back with disgust at previous styles of education, those

rows of desks with kids bolt upright reciting the times tables, but surely
people will look back at us with the same sense of appalled horror: our
cynical pursuit of exam passes while the actual skills and enjoyment of
reading fade.
I turn back to Doris Lessing:
Very recently, anyone even mildly educated would respect
learning, education and our great store of literature. Of course
we all know that when this happy state was with us, people
would pretend to read, would pretend respect for learning.
But it is on record that working men and women longed for
books, evidenced by the founding of working-men’s libraries,
institutes, and the colleges of the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries. Reading, books, used to be part of a general educa-
tion. Older people, talking to young ones, must understand
just how much of an education reading was, because the
young ones know so much less.
We all know this sad story. But we do not know the end of
it. We think of the old adage, ‘Reading maketh a full man’
– reading makes a woman and a man full of information, of
history, of all kinds of knowledge.

It is now accepted that the young won’t want to read. It is accepted

because, generally speaking, older people don’t want to read either. We
want new fashionable clothes; we want to drive our four-by-fours, jet
out to holidays in the Maldives, employ a Polish nanny, have a second
home in Cornwall or Gloucestershire, yes: but read great literature? Get
away – we haven’t time. But here’s the punch: it is not about time. The
truth is that our desires and imaginations have gone elsewhere. They
have gone, as Doris Lessing implies, into stuff. We are ‘stifling in our su-
perfluities’. We have lost connection with our human essence, the ‘full
man’. It is we, as much as and perhaps more than the book-hungry,
drought-ravaged Africans whom Lessing writes of, who are broken and
done for. Because this is the work of all that is termed ‘pretty useless’
by Frostrup:
It is our imaginations which shape us, keep us, create us – for
good and for ill. It is our stories that will recreate us, when we
are torn, hurt, even destroyed.

But I would pinpoint the cause of this loss more precisely than the mere
desire for ‘stuff’. There’s worse: the literary world has been killing itself
off. If you are a teacher or literature professional close your eyes now.
If we saw culture as an organism, I’m afraid we’d have to say that

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ours has been infected by a cannibalising virus. I’m talking literature-

impoverished teachers who turn students of all ages away from reading
through their cynicism or burnt-out exhaustion; bad-faith London lit-
erati who hype up rubbish; crass journalists – many of them graduates
of Oxbridge English courses – who wield power without accepting re-
sponsibility; and above all, the narrow-minded ‘literature’ academics
obsessed with outdated political notions because they have nothing else
in which to believe. I write from the lucky – and unusual – position of
someone who ended her university degree wanting to continue to read
and study: I had a great teacher. And by ‘great’ what do I mean? That
my great teacher taught me to read as myself while at the same time
trying to inhabit the mind and imagination of the writer. But that is
unusual. Tell me, why should a twenty-year-old man be asked to write
an essay on Victorian women writers from a feminist point of view? Are
‘points of view’ just spectacles we can put on – and off – as if we had no
eyes, no vision, no way of seeing of our own?
I wrote in a rather careless vein, ten years ago, in issue 3 of The
Reader, about the earlier Year of Reading:
The government has declared 1999 the Year of Reading. Do
we care?

I minded being told what to do by the Government then. These days I

am glad of any intervention. I care very much. I want a national pro-
gramme of Get Into Reading to reach non-reading adults. That should
be part of Ed Balls’ strategy for families.
I want readers to stand up for great books. All reading is reading,
says the National Year of Reading – it doesn’t have to be books. A Mor-
rissey song, graffiti, a leaflet: it is all reading. It’s true, and in one of the
best of the early issues of The Reader (No. 8) Michael Macilwee, boxing
coach and librarian, spoke of the English teacher who had hooked him
with Simon and Garfunkel’s song, ‘The Boxer’. That’s great. But read on
– how young Mike set himself to read the entire Penguin Classics library.
That’s greater. The Classics library contains more and bigger stuff than
the song lyric. And we need great as much as we need lyrical.
I want established readers and reading group members to visit what
is in effect the National Gallery of Literature. Never mind the latest Time
Traveller’s Wife, do some of your own time-travelling: get into the back
catalogue. Go visit and soak up your heritage. Learn to love it. Value it.
Because without values we’re done for.

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YOUR REGULARS

ASK THE READER

Brian Nellist

The Times recently published a list of the fifty most influential

Q British writers since World War II. Why doesn’t The Reader do
something similar to help poor wanderers lost in the range of
recent and not-so-recent poetry and prose?

I also read the article with interest and sympathy and, leaving
A aside some regrets at a few authors included, and more at several
who were not, I was really glad to see a national newspaper as-
sessing authors across fifty years instead of settling for the latest kids on
the block. It stimulated serious conversation as a good game should but
a game it remained because though the Oscar went to Larkin, how can
you weigh his claims against those of, for example, Doris Lessing? We
can all have our say but in the end, it is time by a mysterious process that
decides who goes on being read instead of just studied. Dr Johnson
speaks somewhere of writers who outlive their century. The writing of
our own time, in my own case at least fifty years, always remains under
question and what eventually is recognised as ‘literature’, even for the
most serious postulants, depends on the eventual consensus of a great
variety of perceptive readers. I have in front of me a book published by
Constable in 1915 and in their ‘Shilling Series’ appear recognisable
authors, Gissing, Shaw and H. G. Wells, but there is apparently nothing
to distinguish their titles from Winifred James’s Bachelor Betty, Maud
Diver’s The Hero of Herat or Mary Johnson’s Lewis Rand (only one of her
four books in the list). Duckworth’s ‘New Readers’ Library’ in 1927
offered works by Gerhardi, W. H. Hudson and Maurice Baring, who still
find readers, but even when I am told it is ‘The beautiful vision of Life
and Death which has brought joy and comfort to millions of men and

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 YOUR REGULARS

women’ I am not tempted to join the devotees of Michael Fairless’s The

Roadmender. ‘Readability’, the term used recently by someone on the Man
Booker prize committee, may explain why in a Methuen list of 1911 The
Golden Bowl was noted as reaching its third edition whereas Beatrice Har-
raden (who?) had attained fourteen with In Varying Moods. We don’t
really believe in attacking books in The Reader because time will do the
sifting and we prefer finding evidence of life to performing post-mortems.
When I was a boy the English author most respected in France was
Charles Morgan but who now reads The Judge’s Tale?
What makes writing endure? Larkin’s ‘An Arundel Tomb’ (printed
in The Times as its crowning exhibit) famously ends ‘What will survive of
us is love’. The little detail that the pair on the monument clasp hands
moves the spectator beyond mere respect for a piece of expensive funer-
ary art into claiming what is ‘almost true’. Writing, also, situated too
entirely in the interest of the passing moment cannot hold it without
appealing to the ‘almost instinct’ in us, whatever that may be. Time is
elitist, I’m afraid, though the market is not.
But if this argument appeals to an almost Darwinian sense of death,
another element alluded to in this issue of The Reader restores some
hope maybe. We often, when reading, become aware of what, without
blasphemous intention, one might call a real presence in the writing.
A personality emerges which is a compound of how the words speak
themselves in our minds, prompt thought and feeling, and we come to
respect that presence, and in some sense even to love it. Mysteriously the
presence can disappear though the voice persists and some late Words-
worth or Conrad, for instance, seems almost to ventriloquise what had
earlier been so alive in them. But contrariwise, a presence can sometimes
emerge from writing that had seemed anonymous. Do you know ‘The
Exequy’ on the death of his wife by the seventeenth-century poet, Henry
King? It is one of the great poems of its age, yet his other works are in-
telligent and well made but lack the unique presence one finds in these
wonderful lines. I’ve read a number of novels by Mrs Henry Wood and
forgotten them all but there’s a short story in the Johnny Ludlow series
about an engine driver missing a signal and killing a man on a level cross-
ing, which remains to haunt the mind; how can you be sure afterwards
that you didn’t see the thing and, if you didn’t see it, was it ever actu-
ally there? She is a writer always concerned with moral issues but here
the anxiety makes real what elsewhere becomes a bit glib. This is why
anthologies are so necessary to direct our attention to primary writing
by secondary authors. We should recall not simply individual authors
but particular poems and prose, which have the kind of presence that
we seek. It is the responsibility of us all to join in the debate, fashionable
concept, but no single critic or source has the authority finally to decide.

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READERS CONNECT

MEET THE READING GROUP

Lynne Hatwell

Since childhood and through a lifetime of working in the NHS, reading

has sustained Lynne Hatwell. The hugely popular dovegreyreader scribbles
(http://dovegreyreader.typepad.com) is the blog she set up two years ago to
share and create an online dialogue about good books, reading and an oc-
casional slice of country life. ‘But none of it can replace a welcoming and
enthusiastic face-to-face reading group.’ Modesty forbids her from men-
tioning that dovegreyreader has been archived by The British Library as a
social record for future research purposes.

A m I in a reading group?
Good grief I’ve been in hundreds over the years,
face-to-face, online, postal – any way possible to
share my love of reading with others, but all right,
only three at the moment but that could go up at
any minute. One run by the local library, one a group of about six friends
who meet every six weeks and all read the same book, but my absolute
favourite is The Endsleigh Salon.
I live in a very beautiful part of the country (if perhaps not the hub
of the literary universe), the Tamar Valley betwixt Devon and Corn-
wall, and within a pheasant’s hop of a very beautiful country retreat
once known as Endsleigh House, now a private hotel. It was built as
a holiday cottage by Georgiana Duchess of Bedford in the early 1800s
and is charged with period atmosphere. Set in Repton-designed gardens
high above the River Tamar looking across to Cornwall, it’s not difficult
to envisage Georgie succumbing to the charms of the artist Edwin Land-
seer, which she did on many an occasion.

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 READERS CONNECT

I had the idea that it would make a perfect setting for a different sort
of book group. I wanted to run something along the lines of the old lit-
erary salon; a place where people could meet and just talk about books,
their love of books, books they’d read, books they’d recommend, books
they wouldn’t. Surely I wasn’t the only bookaholic out there?
We meet either in a lovely little salon room with the original hand-
blocked and listed birds of paradise wallpaper or in the hotel library if
there aren’t many guests. This was Georgiana’s library too, which looks
out onto her nursery garden where she watched her thirteen children
play, and we love it.
Initially I invited everyone I knew who was as mad as me about
books and about twenty people turned up, which gradually became
about ten regulars. For that first evening I had begged and cajoled all
manner of free books and magazines from publishers (including copies
of The Reader!) who had all responded very generously and those got us
off to a racing start with some reading to be discussing.
We quickly agreed we wanted this group to be different; many people
already belonged to a structured group but we needed some focus beyond
a couple of hours of chatting, so we settled on themes for our evenings,
thus allowing a wide range of reading and books to be included. Fiction,
non-fiction, biography, diaries, letters, anything would be fine.
We also agreed that NO book would be frowned upon as of a lesser
value than any other. Despite our 5-star surroundings there was to be
nothing elitist about this evening, if someone had read and enjoyed a
book then that was fine by us. Several people in highly stressful jobs
could often only manage light and fluffy; well let me tell you we’ve had
some great evenings discussing light and fluffy and many of us have
read intentionally out of our comfort zone when challenged to by the
rest of the group.
So far themes have been wide ranging and fascinating: Humour,
America, Whodunit, Spooks and Spies, Summer Lurve, War, Travel, and
History for the Stupid, have all given us long lists of brilliant reading
suggestions. Coming soon we have The Far East, Autobiography, First
Novel, Australia and Sport.
Our War evening was a good example of the scope of choices.
Iron in the Soul by Jean-Paul Sartre, Suite Française by Irene Ne-
mirovsky, Charlotte Gray by Sebastian Faulks, The Last Post by Max Arthur,
The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje, Strange Meeting by Susan Hill,
Ordinary Heroes by Scott Turow, Testament of Youth by Vera Brittain, Castle
Commando by Donald Gilchrist and many more added in as the discus-
sion ranged far and wide.
The format has settled into the same for each evening: we each have
the floor for about ten minutes or so to talk about our book and answer

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 READERS CONNECT

questions on it. Everyone is welcome and we include new members

with ease – we did not want to become cliquey or exclusive. I have been
in book groups where that has happened or the groups are closed to
new members, often to the detriment of the group; new people with
new reading ideas are an excellent way of reinvigorating the discussion
so we always look forward to them coming along and joining us.
We’ve developed some quirky little ideas of our own too, includ-
ing a virtual Box 101 for the reading turkeys. These start life as a book
that someone has loathed, often diagnosed as a dose of emperor’s new
clothes masquerading as cutting edge literary fiction. The book then
makes its way around the group over the next few months. If three
people are in agreement, in it goes.
We’ve also entered into an exciting classics reading project thanks to
the generosity of Oxford University Press. Bemoaning all those unread
classics we chose four authors who we felt we’d all either neglected or
would love to discuss as a group. Eventually we settled on Alexandre
Dumas, Thomas Hardy, Ann Radcliffe and Edith Wharton as an eclec-
tic mix. The books duly arrived, have been shared out and we plan to
devote some time each month to these. The books will pass around us
each with a notebook for successive readers to add their thoughts so
that we have some record of the whole project.
So there you have it, the easiest and most relaxing book group I have
ever belonged to; it established itself with a minimum of fuss and I can
honestly say that even after the most hectic day at work nothing deters
any of us from the monthly salon evening and the convivial company
of fellow book lovers.
What more could a bookaholic ask?

Starting Short: Join our website discussion of short stories.

Get discounts: To register, send us an email (readers@liv.ac.uk) and tell us

about your reading group. We will email you back with a password, which
you can use to get discounted subscriptions to The Reader and to get 20%
off Oxford World’s Classics titles. More details on the website.

Win books for your reading group: Courtesy of Oxford University Press, we
have ten copies of the current Readers Connect title, The Shadow-Line, to
give away. Send a review of a book your group has read and loved; the
best review will win the books and will be published on our website.

www.thereader.co.uk

readers connect
In Partnership with Oxford World’s Classics
 READERS CONNECT

NOT JUST AN ADVENTURE FOR BOYS

Joseph Conrad, The Shadow-Line
Oxford World’s Classics, 2003
ISBN 978-0192801708

Suze Clarke

I t is astounding to think that The Shadow-Line is readable at one

sitting (just 130 pages), because when you read you seem to pass
through an immense and guideless place, between the young cap-
tain’s discovery of self-doubt and the discovered need to trust
himself. None of this is speculative – the book tells at one remove
the story of Conrad’s own first command of a sailing ship in the Eastern
seas. But the fact that neither the captain (who narrates the tale) nor the
ship is named gives the journey a shadowy, below-the-feet effect that
invites the reader into the young captain’s shoes. That is one thing that
Conrad is very good at – making you imagine yourself into difficulties.
In one sense, the life of a sailing ship is powerfully integrating,
drawing together men and ship, the seas and the winds in one great
endeavour: ‘a large, more intense life’ as the young captain says ro-
mantically. But when the ship is caught in a dead calm, there is no
wholeness. Sense itself seems to disengage:

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The darkness had risen around the ship like a mysterious em-
anation from the dumb and lonely waters. I leaned on the rail
and turned my ear to the shadows of the night. Not a sound.
My command might have been a planet flying vertiginously on
its appointed path in a space of infinite silence. I clung to the
rail as if my sense of balance were leaving me for good.

Unable to see, he turns his ear to the night, but his hearing is defeat-
ed as absolutely as his sight. The lack of input makes a sensory black
hole as if there were nothing out there at all – and no proper boundary
between the ‘command’ and ‘infinite silence’, mind and space, apart
from the rail he’s leaning on. It’s not merely a fleeting impression; it
carries with it a sense of rival reality, as if this could be how things will
be from now on, ‘as if my sense of balance were leaving me for good’.
But what makes it worse is that those deficits of sense are not just in the
captain’s imagination but in his conscience too.
Briefly, here is the situation. The ship lost its previous (utterly disso-
lute) captain in bad circumstances, damaging to the crew’s morale, and
needs taking in hand. The new young captain needs taking in hand too.
For reasons he doesn’t himself understand, he suddenly left his old berth
and was drifting when this command was more or less forced upon his
attention. But once he’s made captain, he feels that purpose and energy
come back to him – all he needs to do is to get out to sea and all will be
well. Instead they get nowhere; they are becalmed within sight of land
and there is sickness on board. Everyone is stricken by fever apart from
the captain himself, and the cook, Ransome (a man with a severe heart
condition). When he finds that the stock of quinine is gone – sold by the
awful predecessor – the captain has to tell the weakened men he can no
longer help them. Once again a silence opens in front of him:
The silence which followed upon my words was almost harder
to bear than the angriest uproar. I was crushed by the infinite
depth of its reproach. But, as a matter of fact, I was mistaken.

On one level it’s just an ordinary expression, the silence is hard to bear;
but, as before, the gap lets in something without limit – the infinite depth
of the reproach that his conscience interprets. It’s there for an immoder-
ate moment, then quashed by the extraordinarily ordinary ‘as a matter
of fact, I was mistaken’. The men were simply intelligently listening. But
here’s the puzzling thing, I think. The fact of the mistake can cut off in-
finite reproach but it does not answer it, or dispel it. It stays around and
has to be felt, together with his anticipated loss of balance. Both came
out of nothing, seemingly, and are not susceptible to explanation. They
are part of the great Conradian test that comes upon a life.
It is as if there are two versions of Conrad going on at the same time

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in The Shadow-Line, physical and metaphysical, just as much as in a book

like Lord Jim, where you have the pragmatic Marlow and the imagina-
tive Jim. Only here, those two alternative approaches are in the one man,
the captain. It’s not even that you could say the imaginative voice is his
younger self or the tougher practical one, the older. They struggle for
balance in the same man crossing a crucial line in his life; the two parts
forced into the same bare attention to a specific testing circumstance.
All at once a terrible storm comes and despite the fragility of the
crew they have to exert themselves to set sail in order not to be out of
control and destroyed:
And I steered, too tired for anxiety, too tired for connected
thought. I had moments of grim exultation and then my heart
would sink awfully at the thought of that forecastle at the
other end of the dark deck, full of fever-stricken men – some
of them dying. By my fault. But never mind. Remorse must
wait. I had to steer.

This is not a book where the narrator understands his development from
boy to man. The long sentence – where he feels how sick the men are
and sinks from exultation to despair – is replaced by short sentences, like
a kind of panting, or striking a blow, imagination grinding to a halt as
determination kicks into life. The solution is precisely not to feel or know
but to act. Put feeling aside, put yourself aside. What terrible and prac-
tical advice, at one level. You can know where you’re going, but only if
you give up on who you are. This is not just an adventure story for boys,
for grown-up boys: the sea is a way to think about struggling for survival
and a direction to purpose.
Back on shore after he has finally got the ship through the ordeal,
the tired but now tried young captain meets Captain Giles, the man
who guided him towards this command, and tells him that the experi-
ence has aged him. Giles replies:
‘A man should stand up to his bad luck, to his mistakes, to his
conscience and all that sort of thing. Why – what else would
you have to fight against?’

All at once I have to come back onto Conrad’s side. He is not quite
moral, or not conventionally so. How can accident and mistake be
ranked alongside conscience or imagination as ‘all that sort of thing’?
But you could not ask for a better source of guidance. ‘Keep facing it,
always facing it. That’s enough for any man,’ as another captain says in
‘Typhoon’, even though mistakenly facing it was what got him into the
storm in the first place. Still, face it. Reading Conrad is better than ‘Sat
Nav’ because he gives you your bearings and a mode of propulsion at
the same time. As long as you’re in trouble, you’ve got a chance.

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YOUR RECOMMENDATIONS

A LETTER TO MILOSZ

Sarah Coley

T here’s something odd about the deeds or the decisions

you leave until it is too late – almost as if they slip out of
ordinary time and stay in the memory as still possible.
They’re not of course – they simply don’t have a direction
to take and so kick around aimlessly in your head or con-
science. Undone deeds belch in the night.
I had meant for many years to write to Czeslaw Milosz on behalf of
The Reader but kept putting off the letter, scared of something about him,
his intelligent poetry with its unpredictable intimacies, or wary perhaps
of coming close to his life – a great bleak slice of twentieth-century
horror that he survived with a fine idea of balance. I wanted to know
what to do with the feeling of sadness that I find comes with reading
him (and wanted to ply him with questions) but it seemed impertinent
to bother the ninety-year-old poet in that way. His poems are not mel-
ancholy; they’re formidable and full of mind, poised between resistance
and responsiveness to the world. He died in September 2004 in Warsaw,
and my letter wasn’t written.
What on earth would I have asked of him?
Too much.
A Roman Catholic Lithuanian, Milosz grew up in the Polish town of
Wilno under Russian rule, born in time (1911) to catch the Bolshevik

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 YOUR RECOMMENDATIONS

revolution. He was living in Warsaw at the time of the Nazi occupation

– he managed to get out and made his way back to Wilno but then in-
credibly he fled back again across four dangerous borders, moving at
night, having judged the Russians’ wartime rule to be more unbear-
able than that of the Nazis. The walls of the Ghetto were being built
as he returned but he stayed in Warsaw and wrote and published anti-
fascist poetry under the noses of the occupiers. Afterwards he worked as
a cultural attaché for Poland in America and France and chafed under
censorship. He defected in 1951, and settled in Paris for a short while,
moving to America in 1960, where he was professor in Slavic languages
at Berkeley, writing prose in English and poetry in Polish.
I love the tangled-up earnestness of his writing. There’s an essay en-
titled ‘In Which the Author Confesses He Is on the Side of Man, for Lack
of Anything Better’, and it would be hard not to warm to this caustic
(not tentative) faith in humanity. There’s a constant thread in Milosz’s
writing – both in his poetry and his prose – a sense that there is a better
way to speak or write or exist that he isn’t matching up to (my un-
written letter hangs heavy here):
In pursuing the impossible, I did learn something. Each of us
is so ashamed of his own helplessness and ignorance that he
considers it appropriate to communicate only what he thinks
others will understand. There are, however, times when
somehow we slowly divest ourselves of that shame and begin
to speak openly about all the things we do not understand. If
I am not wise, why must I pretend to be?
(To Begin Where I Am, ‘My Intention’)
Perhaps this inhibition was accentuated by living as an exile, but he de-
scribes perfectly the ways in which we dodge each other and ourselves,
accepting every day less than we ought to. But when shame relaxes
its hold, a deepening takes place in its stead as the cautious commun-
ication of ‘what he thinks others will understand’ is replaced by the
blurting out of ‘all the things we do not understand’. Then a struggling
incomprehension makes people closer, more intimate and needy.
He is a careful writer, but those sudden bursts of emphasis mark his
poetry too. In ‘Dedication’ for example he writes to the two hundred
thousand who died in the Warsaw uprising, his friends and fellow poets
among them:
You whom I could not save
Listen to me.
Try to understand this simple speech as I would be
ashamed of another.

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 YOUR RECOMMENDATIONS

He’s very aware that he’s the one left with a voice, spokesman for all.
But the lines that follow have got a fierce eye-witness quality about
them that takes your breath away:
That I wanted good poetry without knowing it,
That I discovered, late, its salutary aim,
In this and only this I find salvation.

They used to pour millet on graves or poppy seeds

To feed the dead who would come disguised as birds.
I put this book here for you, who once lived
So that you should visit us no more.
(Warsaw, 1945)

The last line is a terrifying form of loyalty, as if honouring their lives

means he must have nothing more to do with them. He must simply live.
What would it be like to have that decision repeated inwardly – as an act
of mind against one’s own thoughts and memories? Another poem from
the same time (‘In Warsaw’) helps to explain the seemingly angry lines:
It’s madness to live without joy
And to repeat to the dead
Whose part was to be gladness
Of action in thought and in the flesh, singing, feasts,
Only the two salvaged words:
Truth and justice.

Of course, ‘the two salvaged words’ are necessary too and (on a line of
their own whatever the surrounding sentence) are not to be omitted,
but from Milosz’s perspective, they get in the way of ‘joy’ and ‘glad-
ness / Of action’ and they are a bad substitute for a living friend. If the
words ‘Truth and justice’ are all that can be given to the dead – all that
they can give back – he loses patience. (Though he also says the words,
fiercely, in a whisper.)
I don’t know what I would have asked of Milosz. Perhaps the biggest
question is that one about his determination not to waste himself.

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YOUR RECOMMENDATIONS

CRIME SPREE
Arthur Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet

Christopher Routledge

E verybody knows Sherlock Holmes. He is right up there

with Hamlet, Heathcliff and Oliver Twist as one of the best-
known characters in all of English Literature. His name is
familiar even to people who never read. He is the archetypal
fictional detective and a byword for careful observation, ra-
tional examination of evidence, and clear-sighted intelligence. Howard
Haycraft, whose book Murder For Pleasure (1941)1 was one of the first
serious works of criticism on detective fiction, finds many problems
with the Holmes stories, yet he concludes ‘But for the tales in which
[Holmes] appeared the detective story as we know it today might never
have developed – or only in a vastly different and certainly less pleasur-
able form’.
Holmes first appeared in print in 1887, in Arthur Conan Doyle’s
short novel A Study in Scarlet. In practical terms this first Holmes story is
structurally weak, broken-backed, stylistically uneven, and derivative.
It has been noted many times that Holmes arrives at the solution to the
mystery using information he has kept secret from the reader, a cardinal
sin in detective fiction. But for all that, A Study in Scarlet was revolu-
tionary. Its impact was felt almost immediately on popular culture in

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 YOUR RECOMMENDATIONS

general and on the genre of detective fiction in particular. In the 120

years that have passed since publication, A Study in Scarlet has emerged
as arguably one of the most influential pieces of writing to come out of
the nineteenth century. As George Orwell asks in his article ‘Good Bad
Books’ (Tribune, November 2, 1945), ‘Who has worn better, Conan Doyle
or Meredith?’
A Study in Scarlet was published by Ward Lock when Conan Doyle was
28 years old. The book had been rejected by several publishers and like
many young writers who would rather see their work published than
take a stand, in November 1886 Conan Doyle signed away all his rights
for a miserly £25. The following year it appeared in Beeton’s Christmas
Annual and while Conan Doyle did not benefit financially its publication
eventually led to a commission to write a second Holmes story, The Sign
of Four, for the American magazine Lippincott’s. By then Conan Doyle
was well aware that Ward Lock had taken advantage of him and he also
offered the new story to British publisher Spencer Blackett. It was pub-
lished in 1890 and in 1891 Conan Doyle began his long association with
Strand Magazine, where most of the Sherlock Holmes stories were serial-
ised over the next 25 years.
Holmes’s powers of observation and deduction have become a
benchmark for detectives, real and imagined, but Conan Doyle did not
invent the rationalist detective. Holmes is preceded by detectives in
stories by Emile Gaboriau, Wilkie Collins, and in particular by Edgar
Allan Poe. What Conan Doyle did was to transform a sensational figure
into a serious literary creation, though it is only relatively recently that
he has been treated as such. Poe’s detective stories from the 1840s fea-
tured amateur sleuth C. Auguste Dupin and a nameless, awestruck
narrator-sidekick. The link with Holmes and Watson is obvious. Poe’s
stories were popular, but tales of mystery and suspense, then as now,
were considered inferior, even disreputable fare.
Conan Doyle was aware of the limitations of detective fiction when
he began A Study in Scarlet and wanted his detective to be a cut above
the usual mystery story fare. It begins with reassurances that here was
a story for a more knowing, more sophisticated audience. Not for his
readers the gaudy voyeurism of the ‘Penny Dreadfuls’; here was science
and philosophy, music and poetry, as well as murder. At the beginning
of the novel, not long after Holmes and Watson have moved into their
lodgings at 221b Baker Street, Watson tells Holmes that he reminds him
of Poe’s ‘great detective’ character:
‘No doubt you think you are complimenting me in comparing
me to Dupin,’ he observed. ‘Now in my opinion Dupin was a
very inferior fellow. That trick of breaking in on his friends’
thoughts with an apropos remark after a quarter of an hour’s

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silence is really very showy and superficial. He had some

analytical genius no doubt; but he was by no means such a
phenomenon as Poe appeared to imagine.’ 2

Holmes’s own ability to see the significance in tiny detail is better de-
veloped than Dupin’s. It is also placed in the context of a man whose
personal habits and mode of living are both regular and chaotic; in-
dustrial and artistic. On the one hand Holmes embodies rationalism,
scientific endeavour, and careful observation. At the scene of the first
murder in A Study in Scarlet he analyses the room, taking measurements,
collecting clues, and studying surfaces with his trademark magnifying
glass. At this he is better than the police, who are unscientific and igno-
rant. But on the other hand Holmes is also a speculative man, who plays
the violin in a freeform, abstract way and, as becomes more clear in later
stories, takes mind-altering drugs. In this respect Holmes combines
several great Victorian character tropes: the inspired natural scientist
and the disturbed lone genius; the savvy, modern, man about town and
the alienated urban outcast. Rather than making him a detached re-
searcher, Conan Doyle gave Holmes a worldly doctor’s eye. His refined
analytical skills make him more ‘of the world’ not less.
A mark of the significance of A Study in Scarlet is that despite its
weaknesses it seems to have established the general structural arrange-
ment of most successful detective stories, as described by critic Tsvetan
Todorov in his important essay ‘The Typology of Detective Fiction’.3 It
begins with a murder, which appears at first to be the central problem
facing the detective. But the real mystery lies deep in the past, long
before the central crime takes place. Like all good detective stories A Study
in Scarlet extends beyond the ‘murder in Brixton’ with which it begins,
to address greater mysteries. Its scope includes the great westward mi-
gration in the United States, the alien (to British readers) culture of
‘The Country of the Saints’ and, in the figure of Watson himself, the
damaged young men who returned to London from military campaigns
in Afghanistan and India.
Contrast this with ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ (1841), often
considered to be the first true detective story in English. Like A Study in
Scarlet Poe’s story features a reclusive detective whose eccentric habits
and peculiar talent for reading clues fascinate and amaze the narra-
tor. But the focus of Poe’s story, a double murder and a locked room,
is the only mystery. There is nothing of any consequence ‘behind’ the
events in the Rue Morgue, even if the solution to the mystery comes as
a surprise. This mid-nineteenth-century tale has none of the doubt and
uncertainty of Conan Doyle’s, though Dupin, like Holmes, combines ra-
tional method with elastic imagination to solve his puzzles. Holmes is
essentially a Romantic hero, risking his health, his sanity, even his life,

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to be able to see more clearly than those around him. But he is also in
his own way an institutional figure, developing his theories on detec-
tion and forensic science for the general good.
Conan Doyle also went a long way towards making Holmes seem
real. The offset narration, taking the form of Watson’s journal, is calcu-
lated to confirm the truthfulness of the story. His success in convincing
readers that Holmes actually existed would soon become a curse for
the real-life tenants of 221b Baker Street who had to deal with the de-
tective’s mailbag. This may well have been one reason for the runaway
success of the Sherlock Holmes stories. Victorian readers living in many
of Britain’s large cities were afraid of street crime, drunkenness, and
seemingly random acts of violence, much of which was blamed on ‘for-
eigners’ and the failings of the police and justice system. In such an
atmosphere Conan Doyle’s masterly construction of Holmes through
the authoritative voice of a doctor and military man made him seem
a plausible enough saviour. In his extraordinary intelligence, physical
abilities and self-reliance, Holmes seems at times a hero more suited to
the twentieth century than the Victorian era. Detective fiction after A
Study in Scarlet was dominated by amateur and ‘consulting’ detectives,
including Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot, Dorothy
L. Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey, and, in the United States, Rex Stout’s
Nero Wolfe. As Conan Doyle’s brother in law E.W. Hornung once said,
‘Though he might be more humble, there’s no police like Holmes’.

1. Haycraft, Howard. Murder for Pleasure (1941). This edition New York: Carroll
and Graff, 1984. p. 61.
2. Conan Doyle, Sir Arthur. A Study in Scarlet (1887), Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1981. p. 25.
3. Todorov, Tsvetan. ‘The Typology of Detective Fiction’. In The Poetics of Prose.
Oxford: Blackwell, 1977.

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 THE BLURB

GOOD BOOKS

REVIEWS

In our blog review of the year, friends of The Reader recommended

books they had enjoyed in 2007 (http://thereaderonline.co.uk/). Here
are some of their choices.

Hotel World by Ali Smith

Hamish Hamilton (2001)
ISBN 978-0140296792
Hotel World explores the disconnected lives of five women, brought to-
gether in the anonymous world of the Global Hotel. One of the women
has died in an accident, and is endeavouring to make sense of her death;
another is homeless, and has been begging on the steps of the hotel so
long that she has all but forgotten how to speak. Then there is the hotel
receptionist who takes pity on the lonely world around her, a nameless
girl who works in a jewellery shop, and the deceased girl’s sister, angrily
searching for a reason to explain the family tragedy. It is a book to read
again and again, as I intend to when it eventually makes its way back to
me, after friends have read it. But given the subtle spiritual energy that
drifts through Hotel World, it seems appropriate that the book should be
left to roam from hand to hand.
Clare Williams

The Kite-Runner by Khaled Hosseini

Bloomsbury Publishing (2004)
ISBN 978-074756653
The story starts with Amir and Hassan as childhood friends in the
1970s in Afghanistan. After a terrible incident, guilt destroys the friend-
ship between the two. Later, as Afghanistan becomes unstable, Amir’s
wealthy family moves to America but even in that new and different
world he cannot forget or forgive his past until an opportunity arrives in
his adulthood to seek redemption. The question is how far will he go to
put right the mistakes of his past and will this redeem him?
Wendy Kay

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GOOD BOOKS

REVIEWS

Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

HarperPerennial (2007)
ISBN 978-0007200283
Half of a Yellow Sun follows a group of characters through the Nigeria–
Biafra war. It is the impact that the political situation has on the different
characters that makes this book powerful – some relationships are saved
by the war: arguments suddenly seem meaningless compared with the
horrific possibility of losing a child or a sister or a lover; some characters
seem to fade, the war slowly destroying their faith and their ideology;
some find themselves instigators of the war’s atrocities. The ending may
feel unsatisfactory for some readers, but it echoes the general mood of
unanswered questions and frustration. At the end, I felt uneasy, yet ten-
tatively hopeful for those characters who survive.
Bea Colley

Children of the Revolution by Dinaw Mengestu

Jonathan Cape (2007)
ISBN 978-0224079310
Telling the story of Sepha Stephanos, owner of a rather forlorn and di-
lapidated general store in an area of Washington DC that has been left
neglected for years, Mengestu diligently tracks the experience of the
lost immigrant in America. It’s set in the in-between spaces both of life
and of the city; it presents an America characterised by the displace-
ment and alienation of those searching for a home in a country that
promises so much, away from the terrors that have ripped the life they
knew to shreds in the name of ‘revolution’.
Jen Tomkins

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 REVIEWS

A MODEL FOR SHORT STORY WRITERS

William Trevor, Cheating at Canasta
VIking, 2007
ISBN 978–0670917266

Brian Nellist

P oets learning their craft in the Renaissance were told by

the rhetoricians, those who taught what we call now ‘cre-
ative writing’, that they should begin with the simplest
form, pastoral, and only slowly scale Parnassus to the
heights of epic. I am not sure how practical the advice
was though Spenser and Milton seem successfully to have followed
Virgil’s steps. Today the recommended starting-point seems for most
candidates to be the short story and judging by many of the examples
submitted to The Reader I am not sure it is a very good idea. Short the
form may be but simple it ain’t. Indeed in many ways it involves more
complex problems than the novel and William Trevor has behind the
mastery of the present collection years of writing longer fiction. We are
told that everyone has a book within them; maybe, but only if he and
she already know what a book is. They can only write it, that is, if they
have also read with the kind of attention that means they know what
they admire and what is real to them and then observe carefully not so
much what to include as what to avoid.

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Too many of the stories we reject start with some such sentence as
‘I looked with distaste at the sleeping form beside me’ or ‘The number
16 was late as usual and by the time I opened my front door I was
soaked to the skin’. Openings matter in such a tight form and neither
of these sentences inspires curiosity. First-person story-telling is par-
ticularly awkward. Such tales ramble on through maudlin confession
or rancorous rage with a little experimental adultery on the side. Sus-
tained negative emotion rarely pleases and never instructs as the old
rhetoricians might have said. Turn instead to the opening of ‘Old Flame’
in this present collection:
Grace died.
As Zoe replaces the lid of the electric kettle – having
steamed the envelope open – her eye is caught by that stark
statement.

Our attention is taken not by personal testament but by another per-

son’s life. The oddity of what is happening immediately implies a story,
hidden as yet. Without our even noticing it, the mixture of tenses
implies a mingling of memory with present activity. The tiny detail of
the electric kettle gives location and time, something recent if not now.
But what about Zoe’s feelings? Nothing is said but we infer something
fairly angry from so drastic and furtive an action. In fact, an elderly
wife is irritated by the letters her aging husband still receives from the
woman he once loved, and might have left home to join, but pathos is
controlled by what to the observing reader is also slightly humorous.
Slowly the complex emotions of all the people involved are going to take
us beyond the simply comic. Or take the opening words of ‘A Perfect
Relationship’:
‘I’ll tidy the room’, she said. ‘The least I can do.’
Prosper watched her doing it. She had denied that there was
anyone else.

Already we know this is a couple breaking up so we are starting at an

ending and the story will help us to understand where we have begun.
Again, the feelings are implied, not baldly stated. The woman is guiltily
offering a compensation absurdly out of proportion to the event she has
caused and the lover either allows her at least that much consolation or
is maybe simply stunned. Often in a crisis we cannot tell precisely what
we feel, so to rush in with premature analysis is simply unreal.
These stories are so perfectly judged that they make you feel, not
amazement that they could be done at all, like all too much clever
writing today, but as though you could do it yourself. I can’t, of course,
since the economy, the knowledge, not simply where to start but what

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to leave out, is the result not only of great qualities of heart and mind
but of a lifetime’s dedication to the short story by a supreme master. He
belongs with Chekhov rather than with Joyce or Hemingway but is to
be mentioned in the same breath with them. The last thing the form
can tolerate is the garrulous. Economy is like the beam of light focused
on the exact spot to be shown. In ‘Cheating at Canasta’ the title story
of the collection, a widower revisits Harry’s Bar in Venice because his
wife, dying of Alzheimer’s disease, had asked him to and, missing her,
he wonders why the promise matters so to him. After all:
In the depths of her darkening twilight, if there still were
places they belonged in a childhood he had not known, among
shadows that were hers, not his, not theirs.

That she lost most of her memory makes his the more important. But
then comes the recognition that the ‘places’ that remained to her at
the end excluded him. The flickering remnants of childhood replace the
‘they’ they had been, ‘not theirs’. As in a Hardy poem, laconic utter-
ance of feeling does not so much rhetorically intensify as do justice to
it. Or, again, in ‘Bravado’, wonderful title, a Dublin girl attached to the
leader of a small street gang witnesses the beating to death of a solitary
youth, explained away as retribution for how he had treated the sister
of a member of the group. She is never identified when the others are
arrested but comes to a realisation:
In a bleak cemetery Aisling begged forgiveness of the dead for
the falsity she had embraced when what there was had been
too ugly to accept. Silent, she had watched an act committed
to impress her, to deserve her love, as other acts had been.
And watching there was pleasure.

She knows now but dimly knew then that the given explanation was a
lie and that she herself was the not quite innocent cause of the horror.
She ‘embraced’ the falsehood because she embraced the perpetrator of
the act. The final self-confession has to be dragged out of her in its final
sentence, that ‘and’ signalling the something else she can barely ac-
knowledge: ‘And watching there was pleasure’.
Of course, I know that it is a shorthand to speak of ‘accuracy’ when
the situation has been invented but writing as good as this makes you
forget the process by which it has come into being. To enter so completely
the girl’s shattered consciousness is an act of imagination which replac-
es ‘due process’ by an understanding that replaces simple judgement.
In the most extreme instance, ‘An Afternoon’, a paedophile gloatingly
takes a girl met on a chat line to lunch in McDonald’s but nothing really
happens because his aunt turns up as he takes her to his home:

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‘My sister knew his chance would come. She knew there’d be a
day that would be too terrible for her to bear. He was her child,
after all, it was too much. She left a note.’

Inside the broken speech the aunt addresses to the girl, Jasmin, is con-
cealed not only her own anxiety but another story, that of the mother
who couldn’t cope and took her own life; ‘She left a note’. The ‘victim’
actually knows what she is up to, poor mite, but the true victim’s tale is
never told. It is often the silence in these stories that carries the weight
of understanding.
The author of a great short story shows much more than he or she is
going to explain. In place of protracted description, setting implies the
assumptions; in ‘An Afternoon’, for example, a busy urban centre where
no one notices what is going on around them but in ‘Men of Ireland’
a remote village, full of gossip and tale-telling. A vagrant returns from
England to his parish and threatens to spread scandal that touches his
long-retired priest and the priest, innocent of wrongdoing, angrily pays
him off. It is through pity or guilt that long ago he had failed to influ-
ence the already delinquent child:
Guiltless, he was guilty, his brave defiance as much of a subter-
fuge as any of his visitor’s. He might have belittled the petty
offence that had occurred, so slight it was when you put it
beside the betrayal of a Church and the shaming of Ireland’s
priesthood.

But for the scandals in the Irish church in the 90s and later, Fr Meade
might have been more relaxed with Declan Prunty and his accusations.
The person who suffers is not so much the priest himself as Declan
without knowing it. He may go off cocky about his little revenge on
the village that he left but he has missed the words that might one day
have touched him and calmed him when trouble came. Just as so much
of Russian life in the late nineteenth century conditions the voices and
actions of the characters in Chekhov so here, England and Ireland, town
and country, give substance to the individual lives on view. Ireland, and
Mr Trevor is Irish by nationality of course, is closer to a past organised
round religious faith and the demands of farming the land whereas
England is comparatively unstructured, individuals finding whatever
consolations they can, usually in relationships without the guidance
of allegiances beyond. Yet even in England the faint echo of ancient
voices in their minds keeps many of these characters guiltily alive to
loyalties and responsibilities. There is no nostalgia here; all the tales are
contemporary and in their rendering of compensation or regret all the
more accurately modern than stories that take their idea of today from
the simplified no-holds-barred mayhem too often promoted as the new

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freedom. The greater clarity of Irish life simply means that the char-
acters behave slightly differently. In ‘Faith’ a Church of Ireland rector
realises he no longer believes the words he must offer yet remains true
to his office out of loyalty to the bullying sister who has fashioned his
life and who is now dying. ‘At Olivehill’ tells of the widow of an old
Catholic landed family who discovers in newly prosperous Ireland that
the estate can only survive if it is turned into a golf course; economics
threaten more than even the old Penal times. Stories need a home and
too many of those we reject for this magazine are rootless, with ‘char-
acters’ living vaguely inside their own minds, not even realising that is
what they are doing. Maybe like the great American Jewish writers, Mr
Trevor is lucky in having knowledge from the inside of distinct customs,
ways of living, collective dispositions, thereby seeing the more clearly
the buried sources from which we live.
We have not place in our world for the grandly tragic or the heroic
but, like George Eliot, William Trevor rescues the repeatable griefs, the
small guilts and the uncatastrophic infidelities from oblivion or the
simplifications of gossip and newspaper-speak and restores depth and
dignity to ordinary life and the extraordinary things that happen in it.
These are the best short stories in the language since Mr Trevor’s last
collection.

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REVIEWS

A FINER WAVE
Patrick McGuinness, 19th Century Blues
Huddersfield: Smith/Doorstop Books, 2007
ISBN 978–1902382937

Brian Nellist

M onth by month, the waves of new poetry books

reach the shore and in the respectable Sundays
and TLS are ridden by those adept surfers, the
critics. I admit to a sense of guilt as well as
admiration when I witness their insight and
knowledge yet when I do venture out, not always but often, the rollers
seem small in scale if intricate in their movement or, when larger,
routine in their challenge. Leaving metaphor behind, I’m struck by how
a certain post-modern emptiness easily becomes a comfort zone, offer-
ing ready laughter or word-play as an escape; and death, a surprisingly
popular subject, offers larger feelings but often evades a still bigger sense
of loss. If I remember it right, Heidegger’s Introduction to Metaphysics (is
that its title even? I have mislaid my copy) starts with the question ‘Why
are there things (essents) rather than nothing?’ It is seeing our lives in
terms of a jaw-dropping question like that that we have also mislaid.
We settle for daily detail or rush into sorrow and anguish but miss the
connection between life’s variousness and the perplexing dimensions of
space and time, the large issues of being there – or here.

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That is why I was surprised and delighted when at the end of a

Reader editorial meeting this collection of poems came my way and I
read ‘The Shape of Nothing Happening’:
Dust knows the places we have forgotten, or we never see,
marking out the margins of our world: the windowledge’s
cracked paint, the bevelled edges of a doorframe,
the dado rails, the skirting boards, stifling the emphatic

corners of our lives.

What is almost not there, dust, makes us see what ‘we never see’.
Out of the corner of the eye we glimpse the nothing that surrounds
the neglected something. ‘Dust we are and dust we shall become’ but
the portentous warning here reminds us of what we always miss, ‘the
bevelled edges’. The resonance of the imagery is handled with an insou-
ciance miles away from our customary cosiness; a chiller wind, like the
dust, disturbs the domestic detail.
The neutrality of the tone and the strangeness of the point of view
here affect the mind far more than any verbal excess:
The dead flit lightly by. They have no ballast,
nothing can keep them down. Slowly,
like Zeppelins on the horizon, or thoughts
coming into view, they go about our lives.

The poem is called ‘The Other Side’ and the back-to-frontness tran-
scends the merely personal. The dead become not familiar phantoms
but air-ships, adrift, the ghost-image of the Zeppelin in old grainy pho-
tographs, an image of what we all know but have never seen. Partly
the power comes from the surprise of the metaphors, the black box
of crashed marriages in another poem or snow ‘soft and intimate as
marrow’ degenerating into the mire of which we are traditionally made.
But even more the rightness of this verse lies in the apparently casual
syntax which is always making ease work strenuously; ‘They go about
our lives’ where we are used to ‘they go about their lives.’
It’s that capacity to unnerve which, curiously, too often goes missing
in the big feelings evoked by death, ‘undisciplined squads of emotion’ as
Eliot called them. Detachment is more properly to be called honesty in
a poem here, addressed to a sister apparently about the death of a diffi-
cult father or step-father:
Unlovable as ever, yet he was brave
with that aura of unshared suffering
that spared us everything but grief at knowing
what we felt was not exactly grief.

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Precisely that ‘yet’ which makes the concession to the father mirrors
the ‘but’ which makes allowance for his children. The partial rhyme,
if oh so distant, makes ‘brave’, undoubtedly him, pair off with ‘grief’
more doubtfully theirs. This is the poetry of a man who reads so there
is no irksome ‘intertextuality’ when the weariness of the dying man
summons to mind ‘tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow’:
But that last day there was only one.
Then nothing. None.

No consolation, as we stare at the two full-stops, except that, at least

with ‘None’ there will be no more of those ‘tomorrows’ to extend the
‘Lists’, which is the poem’s title.
Look! This little book costs only £3 and for the price of three or four
newspapers you could have twenty-seven poems to last a lifetime. How
could you resist it?

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FRAGMENTS AND THEIR USES

Neil Curry, Other Rooms: New and Selected Poems
Enitharmon, 2007
ISBN 9781904634447

Sarah Coley

T he impact of poetry often doesn’t come with the book in your

hand. It comes after a long acquaintance, when you’re out
walking, perhaps, miles from the page, or doing nothing…
Suddenly you’ve got words in your ear, more urgent than
understood, neither a memory quite nor a fresh thought,
but vivid and exactly to the point as in ideal conversation.
In ‘Tidelines’ Neil Curry writes about the accumulation of broken
stones on the shore, the kind of stuff found beachcombing:
And down among the grit and gravel
(never mind the shells) there’s such
carmine and cadmium, such amber and
(who knows?) pearl, and not one bit of it
altogether accident – each with a history
of the collisions and contingencies
that have broken, shaped and burnished them,
as they judder backwards and forwards
between the grandeur and futility of it all.

I love his somewhat jagged ‘and not one bit of it / altogether accident’,
how in the fragments he finds a backwash of purpose or wholeness, or
perhaps the restoring sense is simply that they once have been. They
are like souls. But the line that turned up in my ears one after-midnight
walk is the last one, ‘between the grandeur and futility of it all’, and the
precise word was ‘between’. The setting reminds me of the cliff Edgar
describes to lead his father Gloucester from suicide, or the ‘melancholy,

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long, withdrawing roar’ in Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach’. It’s as though the

human responses of grandeur and futility were fully part of the land-
scape, with grandeur standing up and futility battering down. If that’s
it, it all seems hopeless. The sea will come and destroy everything as
surely as loss of purpose depletes will, hope and energy. Nothing can
hold shape in a sentence that ends with ‘futility’, or so you would think,
if it were not for that magnificently inconspicuous word ‘between’ that
shows that grandeur returns, if only on the tide, and only for a while.
The movement that erodes also keeps giving sight of restoration. This
kind of low profile comeback is characteristic of Neil Curry’s poetry.
He is unusual amongst modern poets in his use of conversational,
almost Browningesque speakers. It’s not all ‘I’, and this gives something
of an extra chance to the poetry to tangle with thoughts and notions that
aren’t altogether controlled or spoken for. In one of the new poems in
this collection, ‘An Abbot Bids Farewell to his Builders’, for example:
He would miss them – there was no doubt of that –
these masons, carpenters and quarrymen;
their womenfolk too – wives, they said,
whores, they were; he knew that much.

Not that it had been easy.

Those raucous songs they’d bawled out
in counterpoint against the Eucharist;
and that gargoyle – it had looked far too much
like poor old brother Anselm to be funny.

Untouched they might have been

by what they’d done, but just look
at what it was they’d done.

There’s something superabundant in the devotional building that is

beyond the builders’ conception and the abbot’s construction – in the
space between the first ‘what they’d done’ and the repetition. It’s like a
chord inverted so that the same notes emerge with an unexpected sound.
In human terms, the limits of character or of knowledge muster the
density or presence of something beyond ordinary bidding. Personally I
love the fact that you have this brilliant escape of sense in a poem that is
simply and earthily funny. Curry’s poetry is often religious but he’s not a
pious kind of chap.
Other Rooms gathers together the poet’s own choice of his best poems
from the last twenty years, together with new work, some of which you
will have read in these pages. Neil Curry has often been featured in
the magazine, and we are very glad of him. If you have to hear words
booming in your ears about loss and futility in the early hours of the
morning, let them be from ‘Tidelines’.

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 BUCK’S QUIZ 29

AND THERE’S ANOTHER COUNTRY…

1. ‘Whoso turns as I, this evening, turn to God to pause and pray, / While
Jove’s planet rises yonder, silent over Africa.’ These are the last lines of
which poem?
2. From which country does Miss Matty’s brother, Peter, finally return?
3. Which Canadian fictional orphan is sent by mistake to Matthew and
Marilla Cuthbert?
4. Who are the Russians, Dimitri, Ivan and Alyosha?
5. In what country was Alexandre Manette a prisoner?
6. In a novel by Charlotte Brontë, to which country does William
Crimsworth go, to seek his fortune?
7. ‘The isles of Greece, the isles of Greece!’ What is the next line?
8. Which 1984 novel is set in Czechoslovakia after the 1968 Soviet in-
vasion?
9. Which voyager is bought by the Queen of Brobdingnag and kept as a
favourite at court?
10. Which novel follows the story of Okonkwo, a highly respected
member of his village in Nigeria?
11.Which prize-winning novel of 2007 is set in Nigeria during the
Nigeria–Biafra war?
12. In which play does the Chancellor of England say ‘It profits a man
nothing to give his soul for the whole world… but for Wales – !’?
13. Which German novel is the story of the dwarf, Oskar, whose refusal
to grow is a response to the guilt of Germany after World War 2?
14. The Mosquito Coast tells of an inventor who sails with his wife and
children to a new life in which country?
15. Which poet heard ‘America Singing’?

PRIZE FOR WINNING ENTRY! SEE PAGE 117

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 THE READER CROSSWORD
Cassandra No.21
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

S p o n s o re d b y O x f o rd U n i v e r s i t y P re s s
9 10

11 12

13 14 15

16 17 18

19 20 21

22 23

24 25

ACROSS
9. Eastern invader about to go short (9)
*10. Is 24’s Madonna feeling melancholy? (5)
11. Bird given to horseplay (7)
12. Hindu philosophy found in preserved
Antarctic remains (7)
13. Old physician as a form of parasite (5)
14. Nearest and reportedly dearest couple
(7,2)
*16. A suitable match for 24’s work (1, 6, 8)
*19. 23 down and 4 down. Madly keen to get
hold on boy lacking chromosome for this
work (3, 6, 8)
*21. Mission for Martha, 24’s heroine (5)
*22. See 24 across
23. Chemical element initially found not in
our backyard, instead under mountain (7)
*24 and 22 across. Soldiers sing about this
highly prized writer (5, 7)
25. Banish Isocrates perhaps (9)
* Clues with an asterisk have a common theme
DOWN
1. Provider of professional advice for Roman
magistrate with so many in France (10)
2. Remain stingy and close (4,4)
3. Compound invoking pathos (6)
*4. See 19 across
5. Torch a vine to flush out mouse deer (10)
6. Certainly not annus mirabilis (1, 3, 4)
7. Powerful attraction in this object when
Charlemagne touched it (6)
8. Predatory seabird derived from auks (4)
14. Travelling ridge once I discovered the
Cardigan Bay area (10)
15. Something to be kept or lost (4,6)
17. Greatest sham but honest about 1p (8)
18. If I taper off it generally whets the appe-
tite (8)
20. Guarantee in return to pester us never
again (6)
21. These shares start to quickly undermine
our trust and security (6)
22. Eliza is a fair example (4)
*23. See 19 across

116
 THE BACK END

PRIZES!
The sender of the first completed
puzzle will receive our selection of
World’s Classics paperbacks, while the
first correct entry to Buck’s Quiz bags
a copy of the Concise Oxford English
Dictionary.

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Cassandra Crossword, or Buck’s Quiz)
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ANSWERS
CASSANDRA CROSSWORD NO.20
Across
1. Glitch 4. Mosaic 9. John 10. Adulterers 11. Strait 12. Noumenon 13.
Glamorous 15. Bess 16. Posh 17. Brightens 21. Reaffirm 22. Lacuna 24.
Pigeonhole 25. Viva 24. Nodule 27. Snatch

Down
1. Glottal 2. Ionia 3. Coaster 5. Output 6. Agreement 7. Cargoes 8. Quin-
quireme of 14. Masefield 16. Pierian 18. Galleon 19. Nineveh 20. Simnel
23. Covet

BUCK’S QUIZ NO. 28

1. Robert Louis Stevenson. 2. Maxim de Winter 3. Howards End 4. Charles
Dickens 5. Mr Bingley 6. Charles Pooter, Diary of a Nobody 7. Stevens 8.
Lady Chatterley 9. Thrushcross Grange 10. Walter Scott 11. Dr Johnson
12. Rudyard Kipling 13. Brideshead 14. Bleak House 15. A Doll’s House
16. 7 Eccles Street 17. Bertie Wooster 18. Miss Shepherd, Lady in the Van
19. Briony Tallis, Atonement 20. Guiderius, son of Cymbeline

117
CONTRIBUTORS 29
A. S. Byatt’s novels include the Booker Prize-winning Possession, The Biogra-
pher’s Tale and the quartet, The Virgin in the Garden, Still Life, Babel Tower and A
Whistling Woman. Her most recent book is Little Black Book of Stories. She was
appointed CBE in 1990 and DBE in 1999.
David Constantine is a translator of Hölderlin, Goethe, Kleist and Brecht.
Collected Poems was published in 2004 and a collection of stories Under the
Dam (Comma Press) in 2005. With his wife Helen he edits Modern Poetry in
Translation.
Penny Fearn is 27 and originally from Dorset. She works in Essex at the
moment as a secondary school teacher of English. Her poetry has appeared
in several magazines, including Poetry Wales and Mslexia.
Andrzej Gasiorek is a Reader in Twentieth-Century Literature at the Uni-
versity of Birmingham. He works mainly on fiction, especially on the con-
temporary novel and on literary modernism.
Stephen Gill is a Fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford and a long-standing
member of the Wordsworth Trust. He has written William Wordsworth: A Life
(1989) and Wordsworth and the Victorians (1998).
Graham Hayes is a sailor, woodworker, traveller and retired orthopaedic
surgeon.
Lynne Hatwell trained as a paediatric nurse at Great Ormond Street in the
1970s and now works as a health visitor in rural Devon. A degree in English
Literature has also enabled her to develop and share her love of books and
reading.
Howard Jacobson is a novelist and critic. His most recent novel, Kalooki
Nights, is published by Vintage. His new novel, The Act of Love, will be pub-
lished by Jonathan Cape in September.
Gabriel Josipovici was born in Nice in 1940 of Russo-Italian, Romano-
Levantine Jewish parents. He is the author of fourteen novels, three volumes
of short stories and six critical books and his plays have been performed on
the stage and on radio.
John Kinsella’s new volume of poetry is Shades of the Sublime and Beautiful
(Picador, March 2008). His new critical volume is Disclosed Poetics: Beyond
Landscape and Lyricism (MUP). He is a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge
University. He is a denizen of the Western Australian wheatbelt.
Kate McDonnell is Assistant Manager of The Reader’s community reading
project, Get Into Reading, and is also a scriptwriter. She lives in Liverpool
with her husband and two children.
Ian McMillan was born in 1956 and he’s been a freelance writer / performer
/broadcaster since 1981. He’s currently presenting The Verb on radio 3 every
Friday night.
Michael O’Neill is a Professor of English at Durham University. His second
collection of poems Wheel is forthcoming from Arc.
Christopher Routledge is a freelance writer and editor. His book Cain’s: The
Story of Liverpool in a Pint will be published in September 2008. Find him on
the web at http://chrisroutledge.co.uk
Mark Rylance is a renowned actor, director and author. He was Artistic
Director of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre from 1996 to 2006.

118
 THE BACK END

Omar Sabbagh is finishing an MA in Creative and Life Writing at Gold-

smiths College. His poetry has appeared in Poetry Review, Agenda Online Broad-
sheet, Stand and The Warwick Review, and is forthcoming in Stand.
Kenneth Steven is first and foremost a poet. His selected poems have ap-
peared recently from Peterloo, a volume entitled Wildscape. He lives in High-
land Scotland.
Enid Stubin is Assistant Professor of English at Kingsborough Community
College of the City University of New York and Adjunct Professor of Human-
ities at NY University’s School of Continuing and Professional Studies.
Raymond Tallis switched from medicine to become a full time writer in
March 2006. My Head: Portrait in a Foxed Mirror will be published by Atlantic
Books in 2008.
Joanna Trollope has been writing for over thirty years. Her enormously
successful contemporary works of fiction have made her a household name.
Her latest novel, Friday Nights, is published in February 2008. Joanna was
awarded the OBE in 1996 for services to literature.
Jeffrey Wainwright is about to retire from Manchester Metropolitan Uni-
versity to concentrate on writing.
David Wilson is an art historian and Robert Woof Director of the Words-
worth Trust.

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119
ESSAY

THE CALL OF THE HUMAN

Andrzej Gasiorek

I vividly remember my earliest encounter with Joseph Conrad’s

writing. I’d been aware of him somewhere in the literary canon (as
how could I not have been, with my Polish background?), but I’d not
read anything by him during my A Level studies. Eighteen years old,
a callow first-year university student, I’m told to go away and read
Nostromo. Even the exotic sounding title thrilled me. Nostromo. What on
earth could it be about? I don’t think I understood much at the time, but I
can certainly recall my experience of reading that extraordinary book. The
first thing that stuck in my mind was the wide cast of characters and the
fully realised imaginary republic of Costaguana, but I was also unsettled
by the novel’s curious narrative structure. It played fast and loose with
chronology, events were told and retold from different perspectives, and
the central protagonist (a man whose various names hinted at his slip-
pery identity) disappeared for a quarter of the book right in the middle of
the story. Nostromo was a historical novel of sorts, but a strange and dis-
turbing one; the events it depicted fell into no orderly pattern, and their
inner meaning (if indeed there was one) remained hidden. Presiding over
the whole tragi-comic mess was that wonderful Conradian caricature, the
sententious Captain Mitchell, with his naïve faith in the logic of history.
Even then I could see that the man knew nothing and that this darkly
ironic text was skewering his illusions as fiercely as it was undermining
the beliefs of just about everybody else in the novel.
Irony, I suppose, is one of the most noticeable features of Conrad’s
work. Born of Polish parents in the Ukraine in 1857, the writer who was

120
 ESSAY

first named Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski experienced both the va-
garies of politics and personal suffering when only a boy. His father was
a great patriot whose struggle for a free Poland led to the family’s exile
in northern Russia in 1862. Joseph was just five. His mother died when
he was eight, his father when he was twelve. At the age of sixteen he
left Poland and became a merchant seaman, a career he followed until
literary success permitted him to devote himself full-time to writing in
the language, English, he had only acquired as an adult. By then he had
attempted suicide, was prone to overpowering depressions, and had few
illusions about the world. Given his early experiences and his melancholy
disposition, it is perhaps not surprising that Conrad’s view of reality was
not exactly a sanguine one. Few writers have had such an unerring eye
for the accommodations people make as they attempt to realise their
innermost dreams and the suffering they cause to themselves and to
others along the way. At times it appears as though action of any kind
is fatally compromised in Conrad’s fictional world, since it is bound to
bring about disaster in the end. Even the early novels, books like Almay-
er’s Folly (1895) and An Outcast of the Islands (1896), deal implacably with
human insufficiency and the experience of disappointment, while late
works such as Victory (1915) and The Rover (1923) focus on characters
who withdraw from life, only to find themselves inexorably drawn back
by the bonds of community and a sense of obligation to others.
This call of the human prevents Conrad from being entirely a pes-
simist. His novels are above all marked by the tension that thinking
human beings experience between belief and scepticism, between the
burning need to have faith in some set of ideals or values and the para-
lysing fear that everything is meaningless. Nor is this just a matter of
abstract philosophical speculation. It is felt in his characters’ viscera, is
literally a matter of life and death. Consider, for example, the way that
Conrad deals with two suicides, Captain Brierly’s in Lord Jim (1900) and
Martin Decoud’s in Nostromo (1904). These two figures could scarcely
be more different. Brierly is the respected captain of a highly regarded
ship who appears to be the embodiment of rectitude, self-discipline,
and professional expertise, whereas Decoud is an elegant boulevardier,
a lighthearted wastrel who mocks human aspirations as so much dust.
One character would seem to be so sure of his achievements that the
thought of suicide could never enter his mind, while the other would
seem to be so dismissive of everything that he couldn’t even bother to
raise his hand against himself. But it turns out that both men are not
what they seem. Brierly’s demeanour conceals a man shadowed by self-
doubt, while Decoud’s nonchalance hides his inner vulnerability.
In a brilliant touch, Conrad draws attention to the material objects
that are the signs of Brierly’s success in order to suggest that his faith in

121
 ESSAY

external values (and the vanity they feed) are not enough to sustain him:
He had saved lives at sea, had rescued ships in distress, had
a gold chronometer presented to him by the underwriters,
and a pair of binoculars with a suitable inscription from some
foreign Government, in commemoration of those services. He
was acutely aware of his merits and his rewards . . . his self-
satisfaction presented to me and to the world a surface as
hard as granite. He committed suicide very soon after.

In Heart of Darkness (1899), the narrator Charlie Marlow holds onto the
belief that a man discovers himself in his work. If this is so, then Brierly,
it seems, has found in work nothing more than a ruse that conceals the
self’s fragility behind the façade of a purely social identity. Decoud, in
contrast, discovers that his irony offers no defence against intense lone-
liness. When he finds himself isolated on an island in the middle of the
sea he loses all faith in the meaning of his own personal existence and
the value of humanity. Putting a bullet in his brain, he drops into the sea
and disappears ‘without a trace, swallowed up in the immense indiffer-
ence of things.’ The passage in which he despairs is worth quoting for
the precision with which Conrad anatomises his collapse:
Decoud caught himself entertaining a doubt of his own indi-
viduality. It had merged into the world of cloud and water, of
natural forces and forms of nature. In our activity alone do
we find the sustaining illusion of an independent existence
as against the whole scheme of things of which we form a
helpless part. Decoud lost all belief in the reality of his action
past and to come . . . He had recognized no other virtue than
intelligence, and had erected passions into duties. Both his
intelligence and his passion were swallowed up easily in
this great unbroken solitude of waiting without faith . . . His
sadness was the sadness of a sceptical mind. He beheld the
universe as a succession of incomprehensible images.

Although the novel explains why Decoud loses all sense of the meaning
of his life, it doesn’t offer any answer to his scepticism. Human beings
are depicted as so much ‘helpless’ flotsam and jetsam on the tides of
life, while their belief in action is an ‘illusion’ that may temporarily
sustain them but remains a fantasy for all that.
If Conrad was indeed in certain respects a pessimist, then his fiction
provides us with an extraordinary record of the struggle – both his and
his characters’ – against despair. In novel after novel he displays the
folly, rapacity, egotism, blindness, and stupidity of human behaviour,
but these displays are almost always tinged with compassion. A major

122
 ESSAY

Conradian preoccupation was the credulity of those whose desire to

believe in some overarching redemptive story about human life leads
them into madness. The best known example of the consequences of
this way of thinking is the character Kurtz in Heart of Darkness, but his
fictional brothers in arms are figures like Charles Gould in Nostromo,
and Jim in Lord Jim. Every one of these characters is an extremist, and
Conrad’s view of extremism was pithily expressed in Nostromo: ‘A man
haunted by a fixed idea is insane. He is dangerous even if that idea is an
idea of justice; for may he not bring the heaven down pitilessly upon a
loved head?’
In Heart of Darkness disaster is pitilessly brought down upon the main
protagonist’s head. The novel explores the seamy underside of the im-
perialist enterprise in the Belgian Congo at the turn of the nineteenth
century, and much of what it describes Conrad had experienced at first
hand. Kurtz is the supposedly enlightened European ‘renaissance man’
who has gone to the Congo to work as a trader but also as ‘an emissary
of pity and science and progress, and devil knows what else’. But he
becomes a despot, tyrannising the Congolese natives, murdering those
who resist his authority, and doing everything in his power to amass
as much ivory as he can. The narrator, Marlow, is sent to find out what
has happened to Kurtz and discovers the terrible truth of his collapse,
which Kurtz himself summarises on his death-bed with the words: ‘The
horror! The horror!’ When Marlow discovers Kurtz’s uncompleted report
on the ivory district he is shocked by what it reveals about Kurtz, since it
begins by asserting that the whites ‘can exert a power for good practically
unbounded’ and ends with a scrawled footnote that simply reads: ‘Ex-
terminate all the brutes!’ The seemingly casual remark that has earlier
linked the white man’s notion of ‘good’ with the ‘devil knows what else’
is revealed to have been a calculated advance warning, for in thinking
about Kurtz Marlow is tormented by the question of ‘how many powers
of darkness claimed him for their own’. And Marlow’s horror at what
he sees in Kurtz is compounded by his realisation that Kurtz is his alter
ego, a figure whose monstrous excesses reveal the consequences of living
outside all human codes: ‘There was nothing either above or below him,
and I knew it. He had kicked himself loose of the earth. Confound the
man! He had kicked the very earth to pieces. He was alone, and I before
him did not know whether I stood on the ground or floated in the air’.
Marlow experiences a disorientating sense of weightlessness. Con-
fronted by Kurtz’s refusal to be bound by any ethical imperative, he
cannot locate himself in moral space. Much of Conrad’s most powerful
work addresses the tension he felt between society’s need for binding
moral and political principles of some kind and his scepticism that any
such principles could ever be grounded in reality or truth.

123
 ESSAY

This is why Marlow finds the central protagonist in Lord Jim so dis-
turbing. Jim is a young English sailor who fancies himself a hero but
in a moment of crisis abandons a sinking ship and all its passengers
instead of sticking to his post. But the ship doesn’t sink, and its crew
are brought to trial and sentenced. Marlow is positively haunted by Jim.
The young man has not only betrayed the seaman’s code and his Euro-
pean heritage but also shattered Marlow’s illusions about himself and
his own youth. The more Marlow considers Jim, the more aware he is
that, like Brierly, he cannot absolve himself of a similar guilt: ‘the less
I understood the more I was bound to him in the name of that doubt
which is the inseparable part of our knowledge. I did not know so much
more about myself’. And the more Marlow reflects on the whole case,
the more he realises that it isn’t really about Jim at all but rather about
something ‘more chilling than the certitude of death – the doubt of the
sovereign power enthroned in a fixed standard of conduct’, a doubt that
ultimately leads Marlow to suggest that the very idea of a moral identity
may be purely conventional, ‘only one of the rules of the game, nothing
more’. We are left, finally, neither with a clear view of Jim nor with a full
understanding of Marlow but with a plethora of competing perspectives
on the events the novel has depicted. The book is an open invitation to
the reader to think through the many complex issues it has raised.
Conrad claimed that before the novelist could contemplate writing
he must create a personal world, but he insisted that this world should
be rooted in a shared experience of reality. Although he was torment-
ed by profound doubts as to the meaning or value of this reality, he
never gave in to them, and his work is a testament to his honest ex-
ploration of their personal and social implications for human life. In a
fine phrase, he compared the art of fiction to ‘rescue work carried out
in darkness against cross gusts of wind swaying the action of a great
multitude.’ This was precarious work, always liable to fail and always
condemned to incompleteness. If his own fictional words were some-
times obscure, making his books hard to understand, this was because
he was so conscious of the difficulty of knowing other human beings,
still less of judging their behaviour or assessing what they owed to their
communities. Conrad once remarked that his objective as a novelist was
to make the reader see. He invites us to acknowledge just how difficult it
is to be sure that we have understood (really seen) ourselves and those
with whom we pass our lives. In Heart of Darkness, Marlow asks his audi-
tors: ‘Do you see the story? Do you see anything?’. The question is also
addressed to us. Conrad was never wilfully difficult and wanted, as he
put it, ‘to be read by many eyes and by all kinds of them.’ He is a great
writer. One can only enjoin others to discover in his novels the chal-
lenges and joys one has oneself discovered. Read him.

124
 FICTION

HEART OF DARKNESS

Raymond Tallis

I
‘
t’s so easy to kill a man’.
We had started off talking about Joseph Conrad and then got on
to war. You were explaining as usual: what Conrad meant to you and
should have meant to me. About the fragility of human beings. How
easy it was to kill a man.
‘All weapons – nailed clubs, Cruise missiles – boil down to the same
thing. Ways of turning our common vulnerability to our advantage.’
‘Quite so,’ I replied.
‘To kill someone, all you need to do is to take sides with nature. The
human body is a thermodynamic freak. We live in the teeth of our own
improbability: we may not always be glad to be alive but we are always
lucky to be alive. The crudest and most casually administered of physical
blows: so much irreversible damage. You mount the Second Law, take
sides with nature and BANG – end of a man – or a child…’
‘That’s right.’
‘Aren’t you appalled by the outrageous mismatch between the
simplicity of the injury and the exquisite complexity of the life that it
destroys? Between the ease with which a self can be cancelled and the
difficulty with which it is brought to physical, psychological and social
maturity?’

125
 FICTION

‘I am.’
‘The fundamental betrayal is that of perceiving the other’s frailty as
an opportunity. To take to arms is to sell out to the permanent enemy: the
physical chaos that assailant and victim should make common cause
against.’
‘Indeed.’
‘A human body, after all, is a grenade with the pin working its way
out.’
Outside, it was a blazing hot day. So we had the inside of the pub to
ourselves and its heavy silence italicised the particularity of our words
and our words italicised the silence. The smoke from your cigarette un-
packed itself to nothing. I studied its ‘volutations’ – your word – in the
sunbeams slicing the coffered gloom of The Snug. Authentic oak rafters,
dark as firedogs, roofed our conversation.
Sliced cucumber and cress-scented sandwiches, plated out behind
the bar, invoked summer outside the diamonded panes.
‘Just the kind of day,’ you remarked with customary scorn ‘for the
unhaunted to romp in, carefree in their pressed white kit.’
A July Saturday, anyway. A Saturday of loosened collars and rolled-
up sleeves; of jackets carried instead of worn; of bare legs; of fêtes and
shows littering dry suburban grasslands or cooped in stuffy marquees; of
horn-blaring exits to the coast. All life décolleté in the cloudless heat.
Except for us, the haunted: twenty years old, lying low inside The
Snug, sensing the static brilliance of the scorching street from within a
seasonless diverticulum; opposing its dazzle with our darkness.
‘I suppose I’m thinking of Conrad because it was around here that
Marlow told his guilt-ridden stories.’
The pub was near the wharfs where the great ships had come and
dockers had decanted the brutality and magnificence and agony of the
Empire as someone’s wealth, to be stored in huge and almost windowless
warehouses. More darkness: stuffed, stuffy, spidery. In this tap-room,
sailors returned from year-long voyages had smoothed high seas to quiet
talk; shaped howling winds to murmured anecdote; brought starvation,
cruelty, humiliation, vomit, heroism and death to halting articulation;
stowed experience suffered in tall ships in tall stories.
‘Our lives hang suspended by a spider’s thread above the dark. And
equally the lives of those who would destroy life.’
‘Same again?’ I responded, unable or unwilling to follow him in this
thought.
Later (to the sound of the oak door of the Gents creaking like the
timbers of a yawing ship): ‘Conrad was obsessed by the dialectic of will
and fate – neither making sense without the other, each incompatible
with the other… And he brooded on suicide, where will becomes its

126
 FICTION

own fate as they meet head-on in the act of self-destruction.’

And, finally, as we pushed against the exit door, unmasking a
dazzling picture of the street: ‘We need the friction that opposes our
movements, for without it we should not be able to move. Freedom can
express itself only through the causal nexus, the net of necessity, which
seems to ensnare it.’
Dazzled and drunk we plunged into the sunlight, superior in our
untimely thoughts, proud of a darkness half-assumed and half-felt. In
the burning street between the warehouses, summer met us in a thirsty
child howling to itself. The spectacle and sound of its misery was as
distant from our only half-ironic gloom as from the ritual and frippery
of kit and lawns and tents you had expected me to despise. Whose for-
gotten self was that grubby toddler, running away from his ice lolly
dropped on the pavement, blubbering to the melting tarmac, to an un-
feeling world scorched by the sun?
Five years later, in your first month as a doctor, you made a careless
mistake. Perhaps you were busy, or over-anxious or tired, or distracted
by metaphysical preoccupations alien to the world of mere busyness.
Potassium instead of sodium in the intravenous drip. The child’s heart
stopped, never to start again.
The child’s parents believed you had done your best. Even when
their shock and grief turned to anger, they had no wish to take action
against you. Nobody charged you with anything. You tried yourself in
the court of your solitude where a permanent sitting repeatedly found
you guilty. You lodged no appeal; for you didn’t want to live on, self-con-
demned, as the cause of that fatal mistake. You decided that the child’s
life should cost you your own. ‘It is so easy to kill a man.’ You mounted
the Second Law, took sides with Nature…BANG.
Smoke vanishes, words vanish, summers darken, and the marquees
are folded. Yet even smoke leaves its cloven footmark in our arteries and
airways. And words remain; and there remains, too, the alluvium of
daylight, the silt of hours: memory.
Fifteen or twenty years on – how long must I have outlived you for
such vagueness – the dusty sunlight of that day slants past the wharfs
and warehouses of dockland Thames to slice into my northbound doze
on a late train back from a lecture. The remembered light and remem-
bered shade, exterior street and interior pub, Conrad and the child,
disturb the stale brightness of a non-smoking carriage. I look out of the
window at my image staring inwards from the ghostless spaces the hur-
rying train divides…
Are you still somewhere, my friend; still out there, beyond the ‘quin-
kled’ night; still talking, savouring those rare words and gloomy, esoteric
ideas? Was it they that so fatally divided your attention on the day that

127
 FICTION

unlucky child died? (‘Conrad was acutely conscious of the dangers im-
agination presents to the practical life.’)
Or are you absolute in your absence now, voice- and window-less
since will and fate extinguished each other in a final embrace?
It is so easy to forget a man…
Even smoke can kill a man…
So slight an error, so minute a nudge, and yet so great a fall: down
through the thousand storeys and million stories of consciousness and
out through the bottom of the world. How could any merely human act
have had such effects? Only because ‘a human body is a grenade with
the pin working itself out’. Could a man be blamed for this, could a body
hold all that blame? No mere agent could reach so deep.
This is what Joseph Conrad meant. What, dead friend, he meant to
me.
And should have meant to you.

Raymond
Tallis

Joseph Conrad
By Muirhead Bone

128