The Bibliophilic Blogger

Hammershoi: the Poetry of Silence

2008-07-21T06:35:00.004+01:00

Discovering a new artist is like discovering a new writer: a whole world of expression and consciousness suddenly opens up before you. The Royal Academy's current exhibition of the Danish artist Vilhelm Hammershoi [I can't do the oblique accent across the 'o'] is just such an opportunity. Working in the first couple of decades of the 20th Century, Hammershoi (1864-1916) painted endless interiors of his Copenhagen house - as the RA brochure puts it: "quiet, haunting interiors, their emptiness disturbed only occasionally by the presence of a solitary, graceful figure, often the artist's wife. Painted in the subtlest tones of silvery grey, these sparsely-furnished rooms exude a sense of melancholy, introspection and hypnotic quietude". The exhibition is subtitled appropriately: "The poetry of silence." As well as these expressive interiors there are some equally evocative landscapes, including a wonderful view of Montague Street in Bloomsbury 102 years ago, down the side of the British Museum. The exhibition is on until 7 September.

Chatwin Uncovered

2008-07-19T21:04:00.002+01:00

The picture here shows some of the participants in the Chatwin Symposium at Oxford today. The gentleman in the white jacket is Bruce Chatwin's younger brother Hugh and the lady in blue is his widow Elizabeth, talking to Symposium organiser, Jonathan Chatwin, who is not actually related. The Symposium heard papers from me, Susannah Clapp, author of With Chatwin, and several international scholars and Chatwin specialists. It was a very stimulating occasion and I learned a lot. The picture here was taken in the Divinity School, Old Bodleian Library, where there was also a display of some Chatwin items, including notebooks and photographs.

Iliya Troyanov Reviewed

2008-07-18T12:34:00.002+01:00

My review of Iliya Troyanov's The Collector of Worlds, a fine novel about the Victorian traveller, Richard Burton, is in today's Independent book section.

See below for an earlier posting about this book.

Bruce Chatwin: First Ever Conference

2008-07-14T08:11:00.004+01:00

If you are interested in the life and work of Bruce Chatwin you may want to know about this day conference on Saturday 19th July in Oxford. It is organised by Jonathan Chatwin (no relation!) of Exeter University in conjunction with the Centre for the Book at the Bodleian Library and New College Oxford. Chatwin's widow, Elizabeth Chatwin, will be speaking alongside various other scholars and critics. As the author of the first book on Chatwin (in 1993) I shall be presenting a paper myself and taking part in a panel at the end of the day with Elizabeth Chatwin. There is a useful Chatwin website by the way.

The Conference is the first ever in the UK though I recall having attended one in Turin on 11 December 1997 called "Chatwin: oltre il viaggio..." [Chatwin: Beyond the Journey] and have the T-shirt to prove it. I nearly brought the house down by addressing the conference in Italian (coached by my wonderful interpreter) with the words: "I am sorry that I cannot talk to you tonight in Italian." I then delivered my paper in English. It was also the first time I have written an article in a continental newspaper because that morning I had an article in La Stampa. I wonder what Chatwin's current stock is like in Europe? On that evening in 1997 he was the last word in literary chic.

Happy Birthday, Mr Blogger!

2008-07-12T17:18:00.003+01:00

Today is the first anniversary of this blog and this is the 99th post. I was about to deliver myself of some profound reflection on the art of literary blogging but then I suddenly, and uncharacteristically, decided to honour the virtues of silence. Instead contemplate this image of Venus from the recent exhibition at the Royal Academy of the work of Lucas Cranach the Elder.

Blast! Wyndham Lewis at the NPG

2008-07-11T11:29:00.003+01:00

After a rather jejeune display of the annual BP Portrait Award at the National Portrait Gallery (very conventional, almost photographic realism has made a massive comeback in this annual exhibition) it was a delightful shock to step into the new Wyndham Lewis Portraits exhibition at the opposite end of the corridor. Many of these are familiar, not least as Penguin and other bookjackets, but they really do confirm Lewis's mastery of draughtsmanship. Modernist greats like Eliot, Pound and Joyce are here and, er, Edith Sitwell and there is a magical drawing of Rebecca West I hadn't seen before. Lewis lived at an extraordinarily exciting epoch of artistic vigour and newness. His aesthetic battles seem like real ones where ours are with triviality, crass marketing and the invasion of the arts by celebrity culture. It's a tiny exhibition for a fiver but still unmissable. It's on until 19th October

Do I Like Science Fiction?

2008-07-09T14:22:00.004+01:00

Thanks to the Oxfam Bookshop in Hereford for this 1963 Penguin edition of John Christopher's 1956 novel, The Death of Grass. I remembered I had been looking for it ever since it was mentioned on a Channel 4 series about science fiction last year in which I took part (very, very briefly to say something, mostly edited out, on Huxley's Brave New World). Christopher's novel was said to be one of the classier examples of the genre which I'm not normally a fan of, except that if you start to include Huxley, Orwell etc then I suppose I am. This chilling novel is about the effect of a plant virus that kills off grass, wheat etc etc and results in millions dying of starvation in Asia before it reaches Europe. Britain's Government makes arrangements to atom bomb the cities to get rid of hungry mouths and the citizens overnight take up arms and start looting and killing each other. One family and friends get through the road blocks thrown up around London and head for a stoutly defended Lake District valley, murdering all sorts of innocent folk along the way without compunction, in order to reach the haven of their brother's secluded Westmorland farm. That summary makes it sound garish but actually the USP of this fiction is its quiet, intimate realism, the way it shows horrifying things happening in a familar English landscape with familiar English characters. It's at the opposite pole of the flashy techno-fantasy of Hollywood scary movies and somehow more disturbing and terrifying as a result. Overnight, it suggests, civilisation can mutate into barbarism. Very effective.

Fame At Last!

2008-07-01T15:37:00.000+01:00

No comment.

Biography, again.

2008-06-30T08:55:00.002+01:00

Sorry to return again to the subject of literary biography but there was a long article in the Guardian book section on Saturday by Kathryn Hughes about the fortunes of literary biography. She seemed to be saying (what many of us literary biographers have been saying for some time) that literary biography is entering into choppy waters. She made the surprising claim that such biographies were still holding up in sales which is certainly not my reading of the situation and most publishers and agents, I think, would now agree that literary biography - which formerly enjoyed very high prestige, is in the doldrums and not smiled upon by the sales and marketing people who drive contemporary publishing. Hughes spoke to several fashionable metropolitan names in the biography field who said everything in the garden was lovely which, for them, I am sure it is, but in the more bleak and windswept parts of Grub Street it is a different story. Many publishers simply will not commission a new literary biography of a classic writer. Does this matter? If everyone has been 'done' then probably not. Hughes, associating herself with the above Fashionable Names, claimed that many recent offerings had not been very good (naming no names). I am not sure about this but where I really differ from her is in her argument that biography is some kind of special calling and not something any good writer can turn her or his hand to. I did, however, like her admission that on her "life-writing" course (teaching people to write biography just now is a bit like teaching people to drive a pony and trap) she recommends Lytton Strachey. His revolutionary approach just after the First World War involved breaking with the tombstone-like "Life and Letters" two volume literary lives that were the norm at that time in order to be short, esssayistic, sharp and iconoclastic. This was a wonderful tonic. We need it again.

In the end the article pointed to what I see as an optimistic future. The wind will blow around the establishment biographers but the field may become open to writers who do it differently, taking an unconventional angle, and rejecting the standard cradle-to-grave life. New forms, new ways of discussing the writing life, are welcome. It goes without saying, however, that the work remains the thing and the only book about a writer worth reading is the one that sends you scurrying back to the texts.

How Pedantic Should We Be?

2008-06-25T10:38:00.005+01:00

There seems to have been a sudden small eruption of interest in the Victorian traveller, Sir Richard Burton, with a recent TV documentary by Rupert Everett (which I missed because I was travelling myself in Turkey) and now a new novel by the Bulgarian-born novelist Iliya Troyanov who writes in German. I have just filed my review of The Collector of Worlds for The Independent so I will keep my powder dry for the moment except to mention in passing that Burton of course features substantially in my new book about the Victorian travellers, A Corkscrew is Most Useful: The Travellers of Empire.

I just wanted to say that the translation by William Hobson is fluent and readable and achieves what all translators want to achieve I would guess: the feeling that one is actually reading the novel in its original language. The production is also up to Faber's customary standards except that I noticed several examples of what are traditionally regarded as grammatical howlers: use of "comprised of", "totally disinterested" to mean "totally uninterested" and "dependent" where it should have been "dependant". Apart from demonstrating that one has been paying attention to the book under review is anything served by pointing this out? (For the record I didn't in my review.) Or should one take up the cudgels on behalf of 'proper English'? Some things can no doubt be dismissed as pedantry (except that the 'disinterested' issue results in the stripping of a useful word of its entire meaning) and if, overall, the prose is excellent, why cause trouble? Also, with growing evidence that undergraduates are struggling with basic English (I have direct experience of this) perhaps these nit-pickings are a luxury we can't afford. Bigger problems need tackling. Or should it be zero tolerance?

Slightly Foxed

2008-06-12T06:52:00.002+01:00

Back refreshed from my two weeks in Turkey and Greece the padded envelope spills out the latest issue of Slightly Foxed where you can read my short piece on Gerald Durrell's My Family and Other Animals as well as many other interesting pieces such as Jeremy Noel-Tod taking a slightly sceptical line about W G Sebald. Slightly Foxed has the strap line "The Real Reader's Quarterly" which is reminiscent of another magazine called The Reader. Both seem to assume that there is such a thing as a "reader" which the people who read more self-consciously literary or intellectual periodicals are presumably not. I can't fathom this odd premiss but that doesn't matter, because Foxed is a a good read and is good at resurrecting sometimes neglected classics.

After torrential rain on Monday in Saloniki it was nice to get back to sunny English weather.

The Survival of the Essayist

2008-05-23T11:59:00.004+01:00

Reading John Gross, author of The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters, in today's TLS, on the continuing role of the essayist (he was reviewing Stefan Collini's Common Reading collection of essays) at a time of high academic specialisation, I shared Gross's (and Collini's) uncertainty about the future of this phenomenon. As a non-academic writer (in the sense of not having any university affiliation) I have sometimes fallen into the trap of academic-baiting. But the old conflict between Grub Street and Academe now seems merely self-indulgent. All those who care about literature and its continuing life in modern societies need to pull together these days. Trying to think of a good example I decided that Primo Levi was a fine representative of the essayist and his "To a Young Reader" in Other People's Trades was one of his best. One of his pieces of advice in this essay was to show work to other people but: "Not another writer: a writer is not a typical reader, he has preferences and peculiar fixations, faced by a beautiful text he is envious." Levi also added that his stylistic goal was "that of maximum information with minimum clutter". That wouldn't have got him a job in a department of English in, say, 1990.

Trop Chérie

2008-05-20T11:30:00.002+01:00

Perhaps the phenomenon of political memoir or "bystander political memoir" is not a worthy subject for a literary blog because it has more to do with just about anything other than literature but there have been so many of these recently that they are hard to ignore. That by Chérie Booth has attracted a lot of vitriol, in part because (seemingly innocent of British social history since the 1944 Education Act) she seems to think that there is something unusual about a bright working class kid getting a classy education and ending up in Connaught Square. She still believes that it is a miracle that "someone from Liverpool" (where seemingly everyone is an ill-educated slum-dweller) could end up enjoying the high life. Here I declare an interest, having been brought up a few streets away from Chérie in the north Liverpool suburb of Waterloo. Let the benighted working class girl take up the story, in a speech given on 17th June 2004 to the Literatures of the Commonwealth Festival in Manchester:

"I myself have been an avid reader from the day I first learned to read at the age of five. My mother and grandmother were also great readers and I am proud to carry on the family tradition. I read voraciously all kinds of books from different genres. By the time I was ten years old, I had read every single book in the children's public library in Waterloo Liverpool where I was brought up, and the librarian finally gave way to my pleading and allowed me to join the grownups' library where I continued to take out the maximum five books every week until I left school. I believe it is one of the great sadnesses of today that fewer young people, particularly boys, are reading books."

I used the same Library (I'm a couple of years older) and I'm sorry that all that reading didn't rub off on this memoir which sorely needs some literary panache (say I, having read only a few pages standing in a chain bookstore).

Come Back Leavis All is Forgiven

2008-05-13T12:00:00.005+01:00

Sorry, that was naughty of me, a catchpenny headline, for poor Frank L is no longer a force in the world of criticism. But the recent "Booker of Bookers" ballyhoo set me wondering about the perennial obsession with rankings and prizes and names excluded from or put in a canon which, supposedly, the last decade or two of High Literary Theory was meant to have put paid to, with everyone "equally valid". When it came to defining an exclusive canon the critic F.R. Leavis (who cast a long shadow over anyone "doing English" in the post-war school and university system) was up there with the best of them. My old Prof. of English at Liverpool University, Kenneth Allott, complained that Leavis wanted literature to be "like a well-swept room" that contained only a few exquisite pieces of furniture. Another word for this is English Puritanism which Leavis (of Huguenot stock actually) embodied - open neck shirts when collars and ties were the norm and a clean-limbed muscular approach to the business of literature. I used to have problems with my chums on the Left in my Bennite days because, as a dedicated hedonist, I found the puritan streak of the progressive classes got up my nose (especially when the latter was buried in a decent beaker of wine) but it's still with us. Leavis's famous "Great Tradition" published in the austerity year of 1948 was his triumph of lofty prescription. Moving some books the other day I found that I had it still, a second hand copy of the first 1962 Peregrine edition, which, as you see, has three of his superstars on the cover (and cost its first owner only nine bob!). There ought to be a word to define this accidental rediscovery of the contents of one's own library (biblioserendipity?) where one opens up at page one and reads: "The great English novelists are Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James, and Joseph Conrad..." That's FRL for you, shooting from the hip. No prisoners, no argument, this was the Great Tradition. Then you notice something about this list of the great English: half of them are, er, not exactly English. An American and a Pole sit alongside Jane Austen and George Eliot. One doesn't normally think of Leavis as a multicultural kind of guy but, look, he also ticks the gender positive box with half of his Gang of Four women. And here's another thing you didn't know: old man Leavis ran a piano shop in Cambridge with the slogan: LEAVIS SPELLS PIANOS. It's a funny old world.

The Uses of Literary Biography

2008-05-05T10:00:00.003+01:00

The always stimulating blog of Stephen Mitchelmore, This Space, is currently growling [correction: see Stephen's post below, he was not 'growling' merely demurring] at a recent defence of literary biography, citing Proust, who in his essay Contre Sainte-Beuve, attacked the famous French critic for his belief that the biographical method was the only one for critics. Proust disagreed, arguing memorably that his work proceeded not from the bundle of accidents that sat down for breakfast in the Proust household, but from "l'autre moi". Proust, it seems to me, was absolutely correct so how can I justify earning my living as a literary biographer? The answer is that biography cannot "explain" or account for a work of art but neither can criticism.

This is what I was asked in 2006 by the Buenos Aires Herald in an interview, together with my reply: "What do you feel is the strongest argument for biography, and which the strongest against the genre?

The strongest argument for literary biography is that it surrounds the work with a nourishing stream of relevant background information that cannot fail to increase understanding of the text. In addition, I think that the record of how a literary life was lived is always instructive, it has an intrinsic interest quite apart from its hermeneutic value. And let us be candid: we are inescapably interested in our fellow human beings. The case against has been put - with terrifying persuasiveness - by Proust in Contre Sainte-Beuve where he says that the life and the work are independent of each other, that the work proceeds from l’autre moi not the man or woman we meet convivially in the street."

I would add to this that Kafka (one of my subjects) and the beauty and transcendent mystery of his work remains above and beyond any explication based on his biography but that if we know about his Prague background, his Jewishness, his relationship with his father, his frustrated love affairs, his existential fears, we approach his work a little better-prepared, a little less thick-witted, a little more alive to its textures and meanings. It's a modest aim (and some biographers in recent decades have been very immodest indeed) but it is, I would contend, a perfectly decent one.

The Joys of Book Signing

2008-04-28T18:41:00.004+01:00

To Stanford's Travel Book shop in Covent Garden to sign some copies of my new book about the Victorian travellers, A Corkscrew is Most Useful. Then on by foot (rather than being slung from a pole carried by native bearers) to Hatchard's in Piccadilly to do the same again. Fortunately for my signing hand half the stock had been sold (no, Madam, I will not reveal how many they had ordered in the first place) and I was provided with a neat little éscritoire at which to sign with my fogeyish fountain pen containing sepia ink. Actually this wasn't one of those glamorous signings where the public come to press the flesh, more a workaday thing of signing copies to be put on display. One dignified and ancient Piccadilly lady approached tentatively but thought better of it. The whole thing reminded me of the time I signed some copies of my biography of Matthew Arnold in Blackwell's in Oxford in 1996. The staff told me that a few years previously they had sent someone a signed copy of a book and it had been returned angrily with the outraged comment that "someone had written in it". Probably "I Murdoch" or "S Heaney" I don't doubt.

Cry God for Harry, England and St George!!

2008-04-23T11:58:00.003+01:00

Today, apart from being my birthday and Shakespeare's, is St George's Day, and the Prime Minister has been instructing us to celebrate it - no doubt in the interests of "national identity" on which he is so keen. Having been aware of this day for the past 50 plus years (for obvious reasons) I have watched with fascination as this obscure feast has gradually become a major date in the calendar. This is due mostly to the fascists and the brewers who have been most assiduous in promoting that chap from Asia Minor, George, and his red and white flag which the Union Jack, one thought, had superseded as a symbol of the unity of this fractured isle. Anyway, in the spirit of things here are some good solid old English oak leaves to look at. Well, actually, they are Welsh ones, from the Radnor Forest, and are the logo of my poetry press, Rack Press. What complicated things nations are. No wonder people wrap themselves in the mindless comfort of the flag. Have a nice day!

Sartre and the Season of Literary Parties

2008-04-17T08:36:00.007+01:00

To Random House HQ in London for the launch of a new book about the partnership of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, A Dangerous Liaison, written by Carole Seymour-Jones. This was my second literary bash in one week and one's sense that the world is smaller than one thought was reinforced by the reappearance last night of some well-known faces from Tuesday (eg Margaret Drabble and Michael Holroyd). Carole's book has been widely praised and she is that marvel in the world of metropolitan letters a nice friendly person! Finding myself thrown against one or two publishers I was pleased to have confirmed that it is not just me: there is a widespread feeling that the obstacles to publishing serious books as opposed to celebrity or TV tie-in trash are growing by the day. One of these gents who is just about to take retirement said that we shouldn't just blame the publishers (or their corporate bosses who are the source of much of the rot). The whole culture is furiously dumbing-down and the days when large numbers of people snapped up Pelicans by Leavis or Hoggart or Raymond Williams (for example) are long gone. At least the wine flows and the canapés circulate at these events in the good old way.

Georges Perec: The People in the Street

2008-04-13T14:27:00.003+01:00

It's always good to find an excuse to refer to that quiet genius of twentieth century European literature, Georges Perec. I recently turned up this postcard which I think I bought in one of those tourist shops in Les Halles in Paris and it has a quote in which Perec asks: "The people in the street: where have they come from? Where are they going? Who are they?" It was Perec's gift to make the quotidian seem exotic through the fantastic power of his imagination and his literary invention. His question is really about realism itself. This is one of the most slippery terms in the literary lexicon. When Wallace Stevens writes: "The humble are they that move about the world with the lure of the real in their hearts," he is not in the same boat as those weekend supplement reviewers who berate novelists for not writing about "real people". Realism in literature is not for me reportage or naturalism but something much more elusive which I can't define but I know it when I find it. I find it in Perec.

Poets Descend on Swansea

2008-04-08T12:18:00.003+01:00

The 2008 Rack Press poets are appearing at the

Dylan Thomas Centre in Swansea
on
Friday 11 April

It will be a chance to meet the poets and hear them read and have a free glass of wine.
Byron Beynon's Cuffs, Steve Griffiths' Landing and David Wheatley's Lament for Ali Farka Touré will be launched at the Centre at an event starting at 7pm.
We look forward very much to seeing you there.

Contact: 01792 463980
www.dylanthomas.com
dylanthomas.lit@swansea.gov.uk
rackpress@nicholasmurray.co.uk

Liverpool: The Book and the Bistro

2008-04-02T21:42:00.003+01:00

To Liverpool's Everyman Theatre Bistro for the launch of my book So Spirited a Town: Visions and Versions of Liverpool from Liverpool University Press. A good crowd turned out and my signing hand was kept busy (thanks, Steve, for that gargantuan order for 10 copies!) and someone told me that the famous Everyman Bistro was the first bistro outside London when it opened back in the 1960s. Is this true, and what exactly defines a bistro? Thanks to either (a) the miracles of modern technology or (b) my unfortunate descent into geekdom I am writing this blog, via what is called a dongle inserted into my iBook, on a train from Liverpool to London. The train was delayed because "a male person", in the words of the official announcement over the pa system, threw himself off a bridge and caused the power supply to be turned off temporarily. That's enough excitement for one day, I feel. I shall switch this off now and sink back into the calming pleasure of my As I Crossed a Bridge of Dreams.

Oxford Here We Come

2008-04-01T21:05:00.004+01:00

What has this man got to look so animated about? The answer seems to be that he has penetrated one of the more traditional Oxford colleges, Christ Church (it is a hideous solecism to say "Christ Church College", as opposed to "Christ Church", a crime for which those men in bowler hats prowling the quad would probably disembowel you) in order to deliver a talk to a lively, intelligent, enthusiastic audience about his new book on the Victorian travellers. It was a beautiful day in Oxford, feeling like the first day of spring, and it reminded me, as I explained, of the day I came to Oxford in 1996 to launch my biography of Matthew Arnold ("the line of festal light in Christ Church Hall" - The Scholar Gypsy) at Blackwell's to an audience of three and a half people. Yesterday's event by contrast was a sellout but let me be the first to point out it was a very small venue. Tomorrow, Liverpool!

Oxford Literary Festival: Imperial Progress

2008-03-31T15:18:00.006+01:00

I shall be in Oxford at 2.30 on Tuesday 1st April to talk about my new book on the Victorian travellers, A Corkscrew is Most Useful: The Travellers of Empire which is published on that day. The event is part of the Oxford Literary Festival and I will be talking, taking questions, and signing books. I also intend to report here tomorrow on this April Fool's Day experience so watch this space!

The illustration here is of the frontispiece of a book of travels in India by Emma Roberts, one of many enterprising and insightful Victorian women travellers covered in my book.

The Blogger Awakes: On the Publishing Trail

2008-03-28T08:54:00.004Z

Apologies for the low profile recently. Easter and overwork are the culprits but now there is to be a burst of activity according to a schedule that has arrived today from my publishers. This will enable me to do a bit more orthodox blogging as I set off promoting my new book, A Corkscrew is Most Useful: The Travellers of Empire about the Victorian travellers and explorers. Next Tuesday, 1st April, is publication day and I shall be launching the book with a talk at the Oxford Literary Festival. The next day, just to complicate matters, I am in Liverpool to celebrate the recent publication of my other new book about Liverpool (see details to the left here) at a reception at the Everyman Theatre at 5.30. Do come along if you are in the city on Wednesday. Production delays have caused this rare co-incidence. On Friday I shall be closeted at the BBC doing radio interviews. You lucky folk in BBCs Cambridgeshire, Cumbria, and Hereford and Worcester (so far) will be able to hear the interviews. Later in the year I will be at other festivals, including the Edinburgh International Book Festival in August and I will be sending dispatches from those fronts.

Yesterday I was at Queen Mary College University of London in Mile End being grilled by some very clever students about my Liverpool book as part of their course on Contemporary Writing. As well as studying contemporary writing the students have some visits from the live animal and I thoroughly enjoyed an interesting and lively discussion.

Liverpool: the author interviewed

2008-03-17T11:13:00.006Z

My new book from Liverpool University Press, So Spirited a Town: Visions and Versions of Liverpool is the occasion of an interview with Mark Thwaite at the Book Depository. It will be launched in Liverpool on 2 April at 5pm at the Everyman Theatre (where Peter Postlethwaite is due later in the year to wow the European Capital of Culture with his King Lear).

As Mark quite rightly points out below, he is another fine citizen of that great city, as well as a superlative bookman.

The picture, by the way, is of Liverpool's Liver Buildings topped by one of the famous Liver Birds.