The Truth About Lies

Guest Post: Haiku and its related forms: an introductory essay

2009-11-26T12:33:00.001Z

I've written a couple of posts about short forms of Japanese poetry (most recently Why I hate haiku) but I've always been acutely aware that I've been out of my depth. To that end a while back I asked my very knowledgeable friend Art Durkee to see if he could rattle together something and, lo and behold, he has. So, without further ado, let me leave you in Art's capable hands.

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Preface: This is an essay written and re-written periodically over about 6 years. It’s a topic, or rather a set of topics, that is continually expanding. The subject is endless and ever-growing. So, this particular version of this essay may become obsolete again, before I can ever add to it. What I’ve tried to do is assemble an overview, a possibly over-simplified summary view, overlooking a vast literary landscape that is still being explored and colonized. At minimum, I hope to have provided a few ideas which interested poets can take and run with, to begin their own journeys into this rich and rewarding poetic territory. As for myself, I continue to write in haiku and haibun more than in any other poetic form; even when I am not really writing any poems at all, a few haiku will turn up, based on moments of experience that one wishes to distill from memory into poems.

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When working with haiku in English, there are several good reference books to start from; I’ll list a few of those later. Meanwhile, here are some basic ideas to get any interested haijin (writer of haiku) started. A tremendous amount of material about haiku is available online, from critical articles to full-fledged journals, so I’ll post some links later.

Before we dig in, though, here’s an important caveat: most beginning haijin get stuck on the “rules” of haiku. The most important thing that needs to be said is this: the rules are neither as rigid nor as deterministic as most people think they are. If you think of them as guidelines, or tendencies based on long tradition, rather than purely as rules, you will have a lot more fun—and probably make better haiku. Haiku is an art form, after all, a way of poetry; it’s not engineering, and it’s not a purely intellectual game.

Most beginning haijin think that the most important feature to haiku is the form and syllable structure of three lines of 5, 7, and 5 syllables respectively. This is understandable, as we’re used to thinking of poetic forms in this way, as well as in other purely formal terms such as meter and rhyme. While this 17-syllable count is traditional, it is not as set in stone as you might think. It is the original form as developed in imperial Japan, but there are haiku by the classical masters that use a 16, 15, and 18 syllable count. In Japanese, in fact, haiku are most often written out in one long line, rather than broken into three lines; the line-breaks are pauses that are understood, and pauses are marked by placer-words and syllables that are understood in common practice.

While the syllable count matters in Japanese, there are several reasons why it doesn’t need to be strictly followed in English. Japanese is an uninflected language relative to English. In English, which is usually inflected in units of stressed-unstressed tones, it makes sense to use a syllable count of even numbers, for example, 4-6-4 rather than 5-7-5; and indeed, many English-language haijin do just that. There is much merit in the 4-6-4 argument, but again, don’t adhere to it too blindly. Many good haiku in English use both these and other syllable counts. Many good haiku in English pursue the spirit of haiku rather than the strict syllabic form, as well; this will be discussed in more detail below.

So, the 5-7-5 syllable count is relevant in Japanese but not always relevant, or replicable, in English. That's why many translators of Japanese haiku go for sense, or feel, rather than strict adherence to the 5-7-5 form in English. Similarly, meter and rhyme, while considered by many in English poetry to be essential to poetry, are not present in Japanese haiku at all. Some early translators tried to force their haiku translations into rhymed couplets, sometimes using four lines, and this led to some seriously bad renditions. Nowadays, again, many translators strive to bring the meaning across, and not force their translations into expectations about poetry in English.

A very good essay, about why this should be so, by a bilingual Japanese scholar, can be read here.

Note that this is a fairly technical article that may be most interesting to poets who want to go deeper into the issues of syllabics and line-breaks. Nonetheless, the essayist’s concluding statement is one I think all haijin would do well to keep in mind, when writing haiku in English:

By concerning ourselves too much with the outward form of haiku, we can lose sight of its essence.

Sentence fragments in Japanese can be considered poetic, in that they can be images that within context take on meaning. Japanese syntax is quite different from English syntax, and context rather than linear grammar can be very important. Verbs can be entirely absent, in some Japanese haiku. A really big mistake is to try to apply English ideas about grammar and syntax to Japanese haiku, either when translating or when writing new haiku in English. The mark of a good translation is to create a new poem in English that gets the sense across while making grammatical sense in English; not all translators are good at this. Similarly, when creating a new haiku in English, pay attention to tone and style as much as to form, but don’t feel locked into English rules of grammar and syntax. Haiku are meant to evoke, and as in painting, sometimes what it left out is what matters most.

Many of the "rules," or expected common practices, of haiku are aesthetic rather than technically formal. Traditional haiku typically include all of the following: the use of two contrasting images; the use of a kigo, or seasonal indicator word (cicadas in autumn, cherry blossoms in spring, etc.) that indicate what time of year the haiku is set in; the turn, or hinge, between the two images, which in English is usually represented in English by a dash or colon, can entirely change the meaning of the first image, after you've experienced the second; the preference in haiku is for capturing a pure “haiku moment.”

deer move in the woods,
stepping high, noses down—
snow falling hard, now

(one of my own haiku by way of example)

Haiku tend to be concrete, “of the moment,” rather than abstract or allusional; metaphor or simile is atypical. The aesthetic is to take a small moment of insight into the world, and write it out immediately, spontaneously: light and quick. Of course, the great haiku poets did revise and rework their poems; often just changing one word, in so compressed and concise a poetic form, can make all the difference.

Another important aspect of the haiku aesthetic is that the reader is expected to “complete” the poem, by bringing their own life-experience to it, which enhances its meaning and creates resonance. The reader is not a passive recipient, but a participant in the poem. Readers bring their own emotions and experiences to the poems they read. Haiku can be very deeply felt, very moving—but emotion is usually expressed in a restrained manner, sometimes quasi-symbolically. Many haiku are glimpses of nature, with no apparent human content: but humans are also part of nature, and the reader brings the human element to the poem, and is in relationship to the nature images and events of the poem. The poem is a reflection of the human encounter with the world.

Thus, many haiku are about “aha!” moments: moments of revelation; of sudden deep understanding; of contemplation. They connect the universal to the particular: the cosmos expressed in the chirp of a cricket.

Haiku can also be gently ironic, for example this famous haiku of Matsuo Bashō’s about sleeping in a barn while traveling:

nomi shirami | uma no bari suru | makuramoto

fleas and lice—
next to my pillow,
a horse pisses

Bashō, Issa, and Buson are considered the three great classical Japanese haiku masters. They each have characteristic topics, and a familiar poetic “voice.” I strongly recommend that any beginning haijin read these poets extensively, especially Bashō, who was the originator of the form. Over 1000 can be found here.

An oft-quoted haiku definition (from Poets.org) includes some comments that get it mostly right about the aesthetic aspects of haiku:

Haiku was traditionally written in the present tense and focused on associations between images. There was a pause at the end of the first or second line, and a "season word," or kigo, specified the time of year.

As the form has evolved, many of these rules--including the 5-7-5 practice--have been routinely broken. However, the philosophy of haiku has been preserved: the focus on a brief moment in time; a use of provocative, colorful images; an ability to be read in one breath; and a sense of sudden enlightenment and illumination.

The pause (often represented in English haiku by punctuation) mentioned is really more of a hinge or turn. Haiku often consist of two apparently contrasting images, with a turn in between them. For example:

out the window
wild turkeys on the lawn—
lone rabbit watches

The images might seem unconnected, but they are connected on a deeper level because they are placed in association, in contrast or in relationship, and they comment upon one another, so that the poem synergizes into something bigger than just two images.

The aesthetic in haiku is often based in the Japanese aesthetic of wabi-sabi, the impermanence of existence, and the roughness of natural things. The moment of illumination (the haiku moment) is very central to this aesthetic, no matter how the poem is structured technically. It's difficult to call a poem a haiku without that "aha!" Although many haiku are about small things, many also open up into the wider universe of existence, and expand the mind.

Issa's haiku are often very small and simple, and even humorous. But one of his most sublime haiku, written soon after his infant daughter had died:

this world of dew
is just a world of dew—
and yet . . . and yet . . .

“The world of dew” is a classic Japanese Buddhist image of impermanence: the world is a reflection in a dewdrop, soon to evaporate. In this haiku, Issa affirms how impermanent life is—but then he equivocates, he wonders, he questions. Life is fleeting—and yet, so compelling, so attractive; we cling to it, even knowing it must end.

I write a lot in haiku and its related forms; most notably, haibun, which can be thought of as densely poetic prose sections, or prose-poems, interspersed with haiku. Many of Bashō’s most famous writings are actually haibun, even though their associated haiku are sometimes excerpted as stand-along poems. His masterpiece of travel writing is composed in haibun form: Oku no hosomichi, or The Narrow Road to the Interior.

When writing haiku, my personal preference is to keep to the “rules” that make the most sense to me, and be looser about the rest. This can be subjective, of course, and haijin and haiku critics will argue indeed about it. One of the things that attracts me to haiku is non-linearity, that sense of being in the moment yet the moment is eternal. I almost always follow the aesthetic aspects of haiku—tone and subject matter and “haiku moment”—because these are what attract me to haiku; but I am looser about following a strict syllable count. Some short-form poems I’ve written use the haiku moment as root-moment for making a poem, but I suppose are not strictly haiku, formally or structurally. At other times, I like to sometimes strictly follow a strict syllable count, because it can be a challenge to make a good haiku in English doing just that. At yet other times, I stretch the form pretty far, in terms of content, subject matter, and style. I recognize and honor the Japanese tradition, and I view myself as a serious student of Bashō and Issa in particular, and I also like to experiment.

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Here is a brief list of words and concepts related to haiku forms (with gratitude to fellow haijin Beth Vieira for the initial list, which I have expanded upon). Most of these are terms that refer to aesthetic or technical aspects of haiku and its related forms:

aware – grief, pity. This term is complex, referring to what has been called the "touchingness of things," that is, being moved to feel pathos for this floating world. (This floating world, the dewdrop world—both refer to the impermanence of existence.)

fuga – the poetic spirit. A combination of wind and elegance, this term refers to the aesthetic vitality and sensitivity found in haiku poetry as well as associated arts such as landscape painting, architecture, and the tea ceremony.

haibun – haiku prose-poems. Normally structured as a brief prose text that exhibits haiku aesthetics, followed by a poem. Often described as dense poetic prose interspersed with haiku. Probably the most similar form from European poetics is the prose-poem as developed by Lautréamont, Baudelaire, and the Symbolists. An important aspect of haibun writing is that the haiku that follows the prose section does not merely repeat what has already been said, but reflects upon it from a different angle, or is a poetic response, or a poetic observation that moves the narrative forward by expressing the poet’s feelings about the actions or events in the prose section.

senryū – comic, unorthodox, a senryu is a poem in haiku form that evokes both comic playfulness, or lightness, and spiritual depth, plus it may comment on the "floating world" of human society. In essence, a senryu uses the traditional haiku form but its subject is human nature, and is often humorous or ironic in tone. Most English-language haijin who write humorous haiku, or wry commentaries on human foibles, are, strictly speaking, writing senryu rather than haiku; not all of them realize this distinction, however. Western poetry is very human-centric, and so when a beginning Western haijin starts to work within the haiku form, they transport their familiar subject matter to the new form; this produces senryu than haiku, typically.

haiga – traditionally, the visual art form of a painting that includes a poem written out in calligraphy as part of the painting. Traditionally, the poem and painting are about the same subject matter, but do not merely repeat each other; rather, they present different aspects, different responses. In approaching a subject from two directions, there is a parallel to haiku’s traditional of two images placed in juxtaposition to create a greater whole, a greater meaning. Haiga is not, therefore, merely a poem illustrated. It relies on the synergy between the two forms of art to make a greater work of art. Also, the calligraphy of the poem has its own aesthetic rules and traditions, and its placement as part of the artwork must be neither casual nor random. Calligraphy is its own way, its own aesthetic tradition, known as shodo.

hokku – opening stanza or first stanza of a renga (linked poem), with a 5-7-5 syllabic rhythm. This stanza was considered the most important and was usually offered by the master poet at a linked-verse gathering, or renga party. A season word was required. Renga consist of alternating stanzas of 5-7-5 and 7-7, composed collaboratively, each poet composing the next stanza as the poem goes around the circle. Each stanza completes the thought of the previous stanza, then presents something new; so the subject of the poem can veer off from where it began, and circle around, or keep going in new directions.

kigo – season word. A word that in the classical literary tradition suggests a particular season, or possibly a specific moment of a season, even if the object may be seen in other seasons (a type of bird for instance). Traditionally, every haiku should contain a kigo. There are numerous published season-word dictionaries, called saijiki or kigo jiten. In English haiku season-words are more problematic, as there is less of a tradition of associating specific words and images with specific seasons; some obvious examples, however, are pumpkin = autumn, snow = winter, etc. Traditionally, many kigo were names of birds or flowers associated with the time of year in which they were most prevalent. Thus, one went to view cherry blossoms in spring; one listened to cicadas in autumn; and so forth; and so these activities and images become the sources for kigo.

kiko bungaku – travel literature. Accounts of travel in prose often accompanied by haiku or tanka. Similar to and overlapping with nikki bungaku, or diary literature. Also overlaps with zuihitsu (see below). Many of Bashō’s most famous haibun sequences, such as The Narrow Road to the Interior, are formally structured as travel literature.

mujo – impermanence. A prominent and complex concept in Japanese literature as well as in Buddhism and Taoism. One of the most fundamental aspects of life is its changeability, which can take the forms of cycles of the seasons, creative transformations in nature, the inescapable degeneration of aging, the inconstancy of lovers, and the inevitability of death.

renga – classical linked verse. A sequenced poem with multiple, alternating stanzas. The first stanza is 5-7-5 then followed by 7-7 making a poetic unit of 5-7-5-7-7. Then another 5-7-5 etc. Usually this is a poem composed by a group, with poets alternating stanzas. Typically, renga are made from 36 to 100 individual stanzas.

sabi – loneliness. The word suggests both sorrowful and tranquil, a response to the realization and acceptance of the essential and shared loneliness of things. It can refer to an aspect of the fundamental nature of reality, a quality of a particular moment, or the state of mind that apprehends this loneliness.

tanka – the older form of classical Japanese poetry, closely related to both renga and haiku. Tanka are structurally composed of two stanzas, one 5-7-5 followed by a 7-7 stanza. The first section is very much like a haiku in form and aesthetic, while the second section adds to the first, and also can turn it in a new direction. Classically, tanka are very much associated with passionate love poetry, even explicitly erotic poetry.

wabi – aesthetic rusticity. A complex word that suggests simplicity and poverty, unadorned natural beauty, the elegant patina of age, especially in terms of weathered natural materials, asymmetry, and dynamic balance. Wabi is often combined with sabi to describe the haiku aesthetic. Wabi-sabi is also an important aesthetic in other arts such as architecture, and the tea ceremony.

zuihitsu – "Following the brush"—a traditional form of apparently random composition in Japanese literature, where the writer roams widely in subject matter and attention. Often very poetic, there's overlap here with diary-literature, travel-literature, and haibun. Some of the great classics of Japanese literature are combinations of following the brush, travel writing, and haibun poetry.

See also this Haikai Glossary at Terebess Asia Online.

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One note about contemporary haiga: the idea of combining poetry, typography or calligraphy, and imagery, has gone digital. This is a fascinating modern trend that combines poetry and both traditionally-made art from hand-made materials, such as woodcut prints on paper, and digital art, Photoshop art, digital photography, fractal art, and combinations of all of these.

Doris Kasson

For example, here some online journals that feature contemporary haiga: Haiga, Daily Haiga, Haiga Gallery

Here is a link to Bashō's Narrow Road to the Deep North, one which is interactive and has multiple translations as well as the Japanese:

Here is a link to a rather exhaustive list of haiku reference materials, including journals and online sites:

Here is a link that has bibliographies and links for 5 Japanese essential haiku poets (Bashō, Buson, Issa, Ikkyū, Shiki)

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Examples of haibun:

Bashō: Narrow Road to the Interior (trans. Sam Hamill)

Contemporary Haibun Online

Haibun by Contemporary Writers

Haibun: Poetic Journey

Haryana Online

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Examples of zuihitsu:

The Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon

As I Crossed a Bridge of Dreams (another zuihitsu from the Heian era, contemporary with Sei Shōnagon)

Both the zuihitsu and travel-diary-writing forms continue to be used in modern Japan, and are gradually working their way in to English. The rules of no-rules, following the brush, brush-mind, random jottings.

Two modern published versions of zuihitsu in English that I’ve enjoyed reading:

Game-Texts: A Guatemalan Journey – Erskine Lane

Landscape With Traveler: The Pillow Book of Francis Reeves – Barry Gifford (this is a short novel written in pillow book form)

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Book resources which I recommend to both beginning haijin and those who have which to pursue the Way of Poetry (kado as Bashō called it) more deeply:

The Essential Bashō – (trans. Sam Hamill)

Kobayashi Issa: The Spring of My Life and Selected Haiku – trans. Sam Hamill

The Classic Tradition of Haiku: An Anthology – Faubion Bowers, ed.

The Essential Haiku: Versions of Bashō, Issa, and Buson – Robert Hass, ed.

The Haiku Handbook: How to Write, Share and Teach Haiku – William J. Higginson (contains an anthology)

The Haiku Seasons: Poetry of the Natural World – William J. Higginson

The Ink Dark Moon: Love Poems by Ono No Komachi and Izumi Shikibu Women of the Ancient Court of Japan – trans. Jane Hirshfield with Mariko Aratani

A Zen Wave: Bashō's Haiku and Zen – Robert Aitken Roshi

Autumn Wind Haiku: Selected Poems by Kobayashi Issa – trans. Lewis MacKenzie

Japanese Haiku: Its Essential Nature, History, and Possibilities in English – Kenneth Yasuda

A History of Haiku – R.H. Blyth

Bashō and His Interpreters: Selected Hokku with Commentary – trans. Makoto Ueda

The literary biography of Bashō by Makoto Ueda, titled Matsuo Bashō, is excellent. Ueda authored another very excellent book that I highly recommend: Zeami, Bashō, Yeats, Pound: A Study in Japanese and English Poetics. Ueda is one of the most readable of serious haiku scholars.

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These are some general anthologies, and a few specific anthologies of the three poets who are considered the great haiku masters: Bashō, Buson, Issa. I can recommend most of these as having read them personally, and having them in my haiku library:

Haiku Moment: An Anthology of Contemporary North American Haiku – Bruce Ross, ed.

An Introduction to Haiku: An anthology of poems and poets from Bashō to Shiki – Harold Gould Henderson

Japanese Death Poems: Written by Zen Monks and Haiku Poets on the Verge of Death – Yoel Hoffman, ed.

One Hundred Poems from the Japanese, and, One Hundred More Poems from the Japanese – trans. Kenneth Rexroth

The Haiku Anthology – Cor van den Heuvel, ed.

Haiku: The Poetry of Nature – David Cobb

On Love and Barley: Haiku of Bashō – trans. Lucien Stryk

Zen Poems of China and Japan: The Crane's Bill – Lucien Stryk and Takashi Ikemoto, eds.

Zen Poetry: Let the Spring Breeze Enter – Lucien Stryk and Takashi Ikemoto, eds.

Zen Poems Prayers: Sermons, Anecdotes, Interviews – Lucien Stryk and Takashi Ikemoto (mostly on Zen, with some poetry)

Afterimages: Zen poems of Shinkichi Takahashi – trans. Lucien Stryk

A Net of Fireflies: Japanese Haiku and Haiku Paintings – trans. Harold Stewart

Classic Haiku: An Anthology by Bashō and his Followers – trans. Asataro Miyamori

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For Bashō's seminal haibun, Oku no hosomichi, usually translated as Narrow Road to the Deep North or Narrow Road to the Interior, I recommend:

Narrow Road to the Interior and Other Writings – trans. Sam Hamill This also contains the haibun Travelogue of Weather-Beaten Bones, and The Knapsack Notebook, and selected haiku. My edition is bilingual.

Donald Keene's translation in the illustrated edition with artwork by Miyata Masayuki – The Narrow Road to Oku. Also a bilingual edition.

The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches – trans. Nobuyuki Yuasa

Death of a Superhero

2009-11-23T08:10:00.001Z

Not since Gunter Grass's The Tin Drum has the pains of growing up been rendered this powerfully – Blick, Zurich

I'm a kid at heart. Any book with the word 'superhero' in the title, the tag line, the blurb or in a review of the aforementioned book will have my spider-sense tingling. It is a definite in. So when I was thumbing through Alma Books' Spring 2010 catalogue and noticed at the back a photo of a book cover, well, the book cover you'll have noticed before you started to read this review, I was hooked. It didn't really matter what the book was about I was interested.

Here's how the blurb from the back of the book begins:

Donald Delpe is a troubled teenager. Not only is he a ‘terrible teen’ by default, as obsessed with sex, music, videogames and drugs as the rest of his gang…

I was a bit worried when I read that opening bit that Donald was going to be a really unlikeable character. I didn't need him to be loveable but I didn't want him to be nasty. Much to my delight I took to him right away but I'll come back to that. Let's continue with the blurb:

…but he is also suffering from a life-threatening form of leukaemia, which makes him an even more difficult boy, both for his parents and his teachers.

Okay. Now that could go a few ways but I saw this building up to be a real tear-jerker, a sort of adolescent Tuesdays with Morrie. I wasn't sure I was up to that. Now, having finished it I can't pretend that it wasn't sad, it was dead sad, but it was also dead funny. Death may be a serious business but how many teenagers take anything that seriously, even be it their own impending death? On with the blurb:

Escaping into his own comic-book realm of immortal superheroes, ruthless villains and sex-crazed vamps, he repeatedly dashes his family’s hopes by refusing to fight the battles facing him in the real world.

The book is written in an unusual way, part narrative, part script, part comic-book outline. I'm a writer; if I was heading full throttle towards death I'd write about it, so what would I do if I was an aspiring comic book artist? It makes total sense to me. The blurb concludes:

As famous psychologist Dr King is brought in to help, a glimmer of hope is rekindled. But will the doctor break the rules, betray the parents’ trust and risk everything to help Donald achieve his greatest wish? Or will Donald be the one to save the doctor?

Hmmm. This has been done before surely, young, handsome doctor formulates radical treatment plan, one that his elders insist has no chance of success and will probably do more harm than good. Yeah, I can see where you might come up with that idea but that's not really how things play out. As for saving the doctor, now that does sound clichéd. Are we seriously expecting him walking into the sunset at the end of the book a changed man after his encounter with this extraordinary human being? Not quite. Okay, maybe a bit but when you put it like this is all sounds like the plot to My Sister's Keeper or Lorenzo's Oil or something.

I compare the book to films because it's being made into a film, due for release in 2010, and I think it might do quite well if the film manages to steer that fine line between sentimentality and dark humour. It can be done and I would refer you to Peter Chelsom's 1999 film, The Mighty, about a wise-cracking terminally-ill kid who, along with the neighbourhood's dim-witted, over-sized outcast, together create their own superhero. See, I know about all things superheroic – well, a lot of things superheroic.

When I used to collect comics back in the sixties there was one thing that annoyed me about them, they'd present a starting cover showing something that never actually happens in the comic. That bugged me. The one that jumps to mind is Supergirl smashing the miniature city of Kandor and Superman crying our something along the lines of: "My God! You've just killed seven million people!" Never happens. I find blurbs a bit like that, never completely honest. They're hard to write I'll give them that but they should be viewed with caution if not exactly taken with a pinch of salt. So, I'm not saying the blurb is that bad but caveat lector (that's my best guess at reader beware) is all I have to say.

I don’t think the blurb does the book justice that's what I'm getting at but enough about that, let's have a look inside.

The book begins:

Fade in ... DONALD DELPE. Fourteen years old. A skinny kid, shoulders as meatless as coat-hangers. Odd-looking. No eyebrows, no hair. Face like a peeled potato. Walks paddle-footed down the streets of Watford…

Now, wait a minute! According to the New Zealand Herald Donald is "[q]ueer-looking" and is walking down the street of Wellington.

Eh?

When I got sent this book for review – actually I begged a copy – I was delighted that it was by a New Zealander (I couldn't remember reading anything by a New Zealand writer before) and so I was royally cheesed off to find the book was set in Watford. Now I'm even more annoyed to find that the edition that was published in New Zealand was set in New Zealand. Why the change for the UK? Are the streets of Wellington too exotic for our tastes?

The book is written in three acts followed by out-takes and deleted scenes. Once you've got to the end of Act Three the story has effectively come to an end. Its not-overly-complicated plot is tied up and that seems to be that. I frankly felt a little disappointed by the ending. And then I read the so-called out-takes and suddenly this became quite a different book. It's hard to know when a story is finished. It's hard not to say too much. In the novel Donald goes missing for a few hours. This unfortunately gets his doctor into a lot of bother but we never learn what happens during those hours, they're quite expertly glossed over. And then, once we think the story is over, we discover what happened. The deleted scenes also allow the storyline to run on a little and serves as a dénouement. It's very cleverly done.

Okay, in the film The Bucket List two terminally-ill old codgers make a list of things they want to do before they kick the bucket – see the Pyramids, drive a Shelby Mustang, kiss the most beautiful girl in the world, that sort of thing – but what would top a fourteen-year-old boy's bucket list? Getting his neno ("Nookie Experience Number One"), joining the Six-Inch-Deep Club, landing the Martian Probe on Venus. The blurb says he's "obsessed with sex". He's not obsessed with sex, he's fourteen.

His big problem? Sex is on his mind, as usual. Been this way for a couple of years now. Acid-tripping on testosterone, lonesome as hell, his every second thought X-rated. Were these mind movies ever to go out on general release, the film censors would have to cut them to ribbons for family audiences, bleeping and blanking and pixelating all the reality out them, until they became the 12A-rated sleeper which is all the world ever sees of Donald F. Delpe.

(Note to self: shouldn't that be '18-rated'? We've not had an X certificate in the UK since 1982?)

It's high summer, 2006: the summer when nearly everyone feels they have tentative links with Hollywood, the land of fantasies so far away across the rolling sea; the summer when nearly everybody fancies themselves in show business and has begun to think in frames per second, dream in Panavision, see the world in montage, as scenes either brilliantly or poorly directed, as a series of smash-cuts and slow-fades to black, of lives as hits or flops, of relationships as comedies with cliché endings, of the Past as prequel and the Future as a franchise whose film rights are unencumbered – making all life, all of it, behave in the glorious nowness of the present tense common to film scripts, so that even the rubbish man is insomniac waiting for a call from his agent, and all the local barbers and bars display photos of staff with their arms wrapped around a star. It is the first summer in memory where an ordinary, hard-working, God-fearing life looks like an awfully dim choice compared with the brilliant projections of white light through celluloid.

This is how Donald sees life. When his parents drag him to church – not that they're especially religious, they're just desperate – he spies a good-looking brunette on the far side of the nave. Actually 'good-looking' is my expression. This is what Donald 'thought-bubbles' (his euphemism for thinking):

An Eve with centre-parted hair, a radiant babe, a babeatron, a looker to send his heart tom-tomming.

From simply adoring her from afar his internal movie disintegrates in his usual "grope-fest" of a film:

The film is obviously a turkey, shot for his own amusement and repetitive in its obsessions, but he will not touch a frame of it. … But then he gets an itch. An unscripted itch. Under his beanie. A monster scalp tickle that will be cured only by removing the woollen disguise, by real fingers digging into actual skin. Oh God, oh God he prays. Where art thou?

He pulls off his beanie.

And what a moment for her to look over at him, this girl who should've / could've / would've worn his ring. Their eyes meet, lock. Donald's fingers freeze mid-scratch.

Being fourteen is awful at the best of times but being fourteen and suffering from cancer must suck big time. Which it does. And we get to see a lot more moments like that where McCarten's plot conspires against poor Donald.

This is where I didn't like the word 'gang' in the blurb because Donald tends to keep to himself. Even when his father brings two of his friends, Mike and Raff, round to see him when he sees them he rushes back into the house and his dad has to take the two boys back.

The blurb mentioned a 'famous psychologist'. That would be Adrian King – "early, fifties, revered, published, brilliant" neither handsome nor it seems "a sexy man" carrying a bit too much weight although he has "a redeeming elegance that makes him uplifting company among people who wish to contemplate higher-order things" – and we get to learn quite a bit about him and what's going on in his life both with and apart from Donald. He's not dying of cancer but his life is in almost as much of a mess as his patient's. His wife and he live apart during the working week, she on a farm where she can fuss around her horses, him in a flat in the city with "Roof", Rufus, the cat his wife bought "before her interest in pets spread, became equine". Their relationship is one of "reciprocal tolerance". That's the doctor and the cat I'm talking about there. As far as his relationship with his wife goes he's the one who seems to be doing all of the tolerating. Their sex life is almost non-existent so he had that in common with Donald if nothing else. He suspects his wife is giving the local vet one but can't muster up the energy to do anything about it.

They are a mismatched couple let's put it that way. I'm talking about Adrian and Donald now. Here's a fairly typical interchange between doctor and patient:

Int. Oncology Ward / Hospital. Day

It's one of those days for Donald when you feel like a piece of taxidermy, when the last thought you had has been frozen on your face since the moment you got shot. A jammed idea and a trophy expression now yours for evermore.

ADRIAN: Do you want to talk about anything?

DONALD: I'm not going to make it.

ARDIAN: We don't know that.

DONALD: I'm not going to make it.

ADRIAN: (after staring at him, waiting for more, to no avail): What do you mean?

DONALD: I'm crapping out before I've even partied. (Shakes his head at the raw injustice of it.) And you know what the worst thing is? The worst thing? I'm gonna die a friggin' virgin. Pretty pathetic.

ADRIAN: You need to try and get sex in perspective.

DONALD: Hey, fuck you. I'm fourteen. Sex is my perspective.

ADRIAN: Okay. I know. I remember what it was like. Kids like you… you get a hard-on when you see a crack in the pavement.

Donald looks at Adrian with something like respect.

DONALD: I like that. Who said that? Oscar Wilde?

ADRIAN: Toilet wall.

Are you starting to see why I took to Donald right from the jump? Yes, he has an attitude but he also has a biting sense of humour.

That quote was from the opening page of Act Two. I could've picked an earlier interchange but most of the early ones are a bit one-sided. By Act Two Adrian has at least managed to break through the teenager's wall of silence.

A three-act structure is a type of dramatic arrangement. It includes three broad actions:

Setup (of the location and characters)
Confrontation (with an obstacle)
Resolution (culminating in a climax and a dénouement).

And that's how the novel works only the dénouement is, as I've already said, a part of the 'Out-takes and Deleted Scenes' section of the book. It's also fair to say that the supporting players in the book, the mother, the father, the brother, the two best friends and the love interest could have been plucked from any plucky, well-meaning made-for-TV movie. They play their parts perfectly but this is Donald's book.

Oh, there was a bit of the blurb I missed out. The next paragraph begins:

Inspired by true events…

Why do I need to know this? I don't. So which bits were real? Does it really matter? Can you imagine how many books you could say that about? Actually I've found an interview with the author where he does say precisely where the inspiration comes from but I'm not going to tell you because it's the scene around which the whole book revolves but I can see where the attraction was. He was certainly inspired:

This was not a typical book to write for me. Either I took in too much coffee or it was something in the air in Corfu where I wrote the bulk of this short book, but it all came to me in a mad exhilarating dash. At one point I was writing 20 pages a day and in four weeks I had finished the first draft. – interview with Mark Thwaite for The Book Depository

One of my all-time favourite books is Billy Liar about a boy in a dead-end job in a dead-end town who copes by fantasising. Donald Delpe's frustrated young life is heading towards its own dead end and this is way of facing up to what looks like being the inevitable. But is it? A short scene from the comic where Donald's hero comes up against his nemesis, a mad doctor, The Glove:

MEANWHILE… further down the street. THE GLOVE lowers his BINOCULARS and picks up a RIFLE. He and his NURSE have taken up a perfect position behind a LOW WALL.

THE GLOVE: Here he comes. Excellent.

NURSE: But darling, you said I could do it. You know how hard I've been practising. Pleaaseee let me kill him…

She's tough to resist, especially when she has her hand on his CROTCH. THE GLOVE gives up the RIFLE.

THE GLOVE: Okay. But don't fire until I say. (Raises binoculars and once more sees MIRACLEMAN and RACHEL roaring closer, closer, closer.) Wait till he comes within range… wait… we'll only get one chance… wait…

NURSE: (taking aim) Can I ask you one question?

THE GLOVE: Shoot.

She FIRES! BANGGGG!!!

THE GLOVE: What are you?!!!!... I didn't mean – YOU IDIOT!!! – I just meant…

THE NURSE: What? You said SHOOT. You said shoot.

THE GLOVE slaps his head as MIRACLEMAN roars safely by on his MOTORBIKE.

THE GLOVE: Women! Aaarghh!

So, he's only fourteen, what did you expect, great literature? Of course the blurb says that the superheroes are immortal. Well, there's actually only the one superhero, Donald's alter ego, MiracleMan and that's the big question here: Is he somehow going to die and if he did what would be the consequences? Of course in the world of comics superheroes die all the time, it's a cynical marketing ploy and we all know that now, but do you think that Donald would buy into that? You'll have to read through his comic to find out. And that really is the key to understanding Donald if you can overlook all the gratuitous sex; Donald's is a comic that would not get a Comics Code Authority stamp of approval.

Before I forget you might have noticed a certain Rachel clinging to MiracleMan on his bike. That would be a proxy for…

SHELLY DRISCOLL, fifteen years old, brunette, from an unhampered upper-income family, two credit cards already in her wallet, going places. She plays the piano, can pound out the Minute Waltz in fifty-five seconds flat, toys with the idea of being a concert pianist but is unlikely to marshal the discipline.

Yep, she was the brunette from church and so out of his league. So what are we setting up here, a kind of Love Story where it's the Ryan O'Neill character that gets sick and dies? Not quite because he pretty much makes a total muck of their first 'date' and that looks like that. He's going to die a virgin. Or is he? Going to die? Or going to lose his virginity? Or going to lose his virginity and then die because it would be awfully hard to do it the other way round?

I'm not saying. What I am saying is thank God for all those deleted scenes and out-takes.

This was a good book. I think it will make a better film. Comics are all about images before anything else and this novel doesn't have any. A few black and white ones might have helped. – I've seen that done before – but what it really needs is for the characters to come to life. And that's what the new film will hopefully bring; MiracleMan will be animated by Munich-based Teixter Fil while the rest of the film will be shot using live actors in New Zealand and not Watford – thank God. Variety reports that Freddie Highmore and Jessica Schwarz will star; McCarten will sit in the director's chair himself and not for the first time:

It was that with great foolishness and no small trepidation therefore that I recently put my name forward not only to adapt but also to direct for the cinema a new novel of mine, ten years after my first fledgling effort to complete the same tricky trifecta.

I was emboldened by a single presumption: that these three different disciplines are actually only variants of each other. By this I mean that the writer of novels directs the action in a scene just as meticulously, and just as visually, as a director, while the film director, by the injection of his or her ideas, is also rewriting the scene and is thereby partly a novelist. If it’s all the same game, then, the challenge is not one of mastering different art forms, but merely becoming competent with very different tools. – The film of the script of the book

McCarten's novel won the Austrian Youth Literature Prize and was a finalist for the 2008 German Youth Literature Prize. I find that interesting. I see nothing to suggest that this book was aimed at a youth market – indeed some parents would object to their kids reading it I'm sure – but those were the books we were swapping in the playground when I was young, the ones we weren't supposed to read. In 1960 another book about a disgruntled teenager found itself actually banned and it has been a subject of debate ever since. That book is, of course, Catcher in the Rye, and although I find it hard to imagine that book being passed around in a schoolyard I have no doubt that it was. I'd like to see teenagers getting their hands on this and recommending it to each other. I don't see it happening – X-rated . . . sorry, 18-rated . . . films have taken the place of books in that respect. It would be something if the film of this book got passed around the playground. That would be an achievement.

If life is a film, what do you think Donald thought of it? Let me leave you with his suggestion for his epitaph:

I want my money back. I didn’t understand a thing.

***

Anthony McCarten is a playwright, filmmaker, poet, and fiction writer. McCarten, with Stephen Sinclair, wrote Ladies’ Night (1987), a play about male strippers that became an unprecedented commercial success. It has been translated into six languages and was the most successful touring production in Britain between 1990 and 1994. He has also directed films, published a short story collection, and a number of poems. Death of a Superhero is his third novel to make it to the big screen, The English Harem being the first and, his fourth novel, Show of Hands being the second. Not sure what happened to Spinners.

English in its underwear

2009-11-19T11:26:00.002Z

Scots is English in its underwear. It's difficult to be pretentious in a language like that. - William McIlvanney

McIlvanney has pointed out more than once that the lower down the social ladder you get, the more metaphorical, the more idiomatic, and quite simply, the more poetic the language gets. His books deal with people across the whole social strata but he will be best remembered for his Laidlaw crime novels and Docherty, a story about a working-class miner. What is particularly distinctive about his style is that when people speak McIlvanney writes what they actually say and doesn't try to Anglify the text. A short example:

'Ah'm gonny kill 'im.'

'You dae. An' Ah kill you. No question.'

My background is not that dissimilar to McIlvanney’s. We both come from working class families, we both received better educations than our fathers and we both had fathers who didn't quite get us. Neither could see the point in reading fiction, “summat someone’s jist made up oot o’ their heed,” but both did read non-fiction. We both started off as poets before we became novelists (him, successful, me, not so much) – in spite of, or because of, all the Burns we had to read growing up (it’s hard to be sure) – but neither of us could leave the poetry alone; like a toddler, it gets into everything.

My own writing is quite different to McIlvanney’s – I never felt the need try and emulate his style even in the couple of short stories I’ve written in dialect – but the simple fact is he was the first writer I ever met in the flesh and got to talk to and, do you know what? He was just a bloke: no airs and graces and certainly no pretensions, as if being a writer was no different from being a miner or a teacher or the guy whose job it was to lock up the swings at night, something maybe I could be.

A number of Scottish writers have chosen on occasion to write in dialect rather than plain old English. This can cause problems for some readers so why bother? I'll come back to that but first a question: what's the difference between an accent and a dialect?

When you listen to someone like Billy Connolly talking nowadays no one would doubt that he was Scottish. He has a Scottish accent. Wrong. The thing is there is no such a thing as a 'Scottish' accent just as there is no such a thing as a 'Southern' accent – I'm talking about south of the Mason-Dixon Line here. Someone in Aberdeen sounds quite different to someone from Glasgow just as someone from Belfast sounds quite different from someone from Dublin. It's even imprecise to say that Connolly has a Glaswegian accent because someone from Kelvinside sounds completely different to someone from Partick where Connolly grew up; Connolly describes the Kelvinside accent as talking "wi jawries in yer gob" (marbles in ones mouth). But if we gave representatives from all the above a copy of the Sermon on the Mount to read we'd know in seconds where each of them was from. That's an accent, speaking your country's dominant language with a regional twang.

Billy Connolly on visiting Scotland

A dialect is another thing completely. It's not a language in its own right – Scottish isn't a language – but it is local variant of a language although there are those who would strenuously argue to the contrary (see here). I had a friend once who hailed from Stranraer in south-west Scotland, She talked about '"the bairns' meaning children, whereas in Glasgow the term is 'weans' (pronounced 'wains'); also she often used the expression 'ye ken' – which non-Scots assume we all say all the time (along with 'och aye the noo') – but that's not something you'd hear in Glasgow.

Dialects have rules. Let's take the word 'not'. In Glasgow we use 'no' most of the time. For example: "I'm not doing that" would become "Ah'm no daein that" however it all depends on where the word comes in a sentence, because "It was not me" would be rendered as "It wisne me". Likewise the difference between 'was' and 'were' – "I was there" becomes "Ah were there" and "We were there" becomes "We wis there." And, yes, I know that's the wrong way round but it's consistently that way.

Wherever you go in the world you'll encounter dialects and those dialects have rules. For example:

Speakers of African American English add the word 'be' before a verb to indicate that the action is habitual or ongoing. The sentence 'He be sleeping on the couch' means 'he sleeps on the couch on a regular basis', while 'He sleeping on the couch' mean 'he's sleeping on the couch now.' - Writing Accents and Dialects, Grammar Girl

For many kids, the English they learn at school is for all intents and purposes a foreign language.

Contrary to any still prevalent notions among academicians and educators that nonstandard dialects are simply sloppy, slovenly or careless usage, "broken English" or "bad grammar", scholars from various academic disciplines have been studying these dialects and have revealed them to be highly systematic and socially viable, with their own valid, linguistically describable rules of phonology, morphology and syntax. Indeed the very systematicity of such nonstandard dialects as American Black English Vernacular and its Caribbean Creole cousins suggests one reason for their persistence among students we are confronting in our inner-city classrooms. – Writing: Variation in writing, functional and linguistic-cultural, p142

Although attitudes to non-standard accents have become more tolerant in recent years – just look at the BBC announcers these days – non-standard syntax is still widely stigmatised.

Talking about the BBC, the first writer I ran across who wrote in dialect wasn't actually McIlvanney, although they were writing at the same time, it was the poet Tom Leonard. I bought his collection Intimate Voices – it was more than likely the first poetry collection I bought. In it we find probably his most (in)famous poem:

THE 6 O'CLOCK NEWS

this is thi
six a clock
news thi
man said n
thi reason
a talk wia
BBC accent
iz coz yi
widny wahnt
mi ti talk
aboot thi
trooth wia
voice lik
wanna yoo
scruff. if
a toktaboot
thi trooth
lik wanna yoo
scruff yi
widny thingk
it wuz troo.
jist wanna yoo
scruff tokn.
thirza right
way ti spell
ana right way
to tok it. this
is me tokn yir
right way a
spellin. this
is ma trooth.
yooz doant no
thi trooth
yirsellz cawz
yi canny talk
right. this is
the six a clock
nyooz. belt up.

A reading of ‘The 6 O’Clock News’

Now I know a few of you struggle with my 'Aggie and Shuggie' sketches when they appear so why do I do it to you? It's because I hate pretension. I use this family to poke fun at myself and even at the good people who do the reviews I'm hoping you'll read. It's far better than a post every few days pleading with people to buy my books. Am I poking fun at working class Scots. Yes. But then I've been a working class Scot all my life and we're more than happy to poke fun at ourselves. Aggie and Shuggie are my proxies. But I could be accused of writing in dialect simply because people who talk that way sound funny. Correction, that’s how people talk around here. It's all of yous that sound funny (no, 'yous' is not a typo).

Is Tom Leonard poking fun at Scottish people? No. He's poking the finger at the pretentious twats at the BBC who used to read the news in Received Pronunciation, that strangled version of English they insisted on broadcasting in for decades, as if the truth was only valid if spoken in BBC English. The fact is that no one has a monopoly on truth.

Leonard doesn't write all his poetry like that. In fact as far as I'm aware he's not written any poetry like that since 1979. It wasn't a fad though. He had a point to make and that was the best way to make it. Leonard's urban phonetic poetry is hard to read. When McIlvanney chose to use more realistic dialogue in his books he decided that a middle ground would be the best place for him. Consider this paragraph from the short story 'How Many Miles to Babylon?':

'Christ we're everywhere,' Benny said, raising his beercan in a toast to the empty room. 'We are the people. Open an alligator's gub in the Congo an' a Scotsman'll nod oot at ye. We're everywhere. Australia, Canada, America, South America, Asia.' He paused, running out of places. 'Russia. There was always Scotsmen in Russia. An' all over Europe. For centuries. India. A lotta Scottish graves in India.' He started to sing. 'There was a soldier, a Scottish soldier. We are the people. Scotsmen can go anywhere. An' why no' me? Why not Benny Mullen? Ye can go anywhere. Ye could even go –' His mind eddied with the drink and he waited to find what exotic flotsam it would throw up. 'To Babylon.' The word shimmered in his head. 'Babylon.' He laughed and drained his can. 'Correct. Ye could even go to Babylon. How many miles wid that be?'

Just on its own this is a wonderful character study and we learn to so much in this single paragraph. The use of dialect isn't intrusive and, once you realise it's a Scot talking, don't you find that a Scots accent appears too?

Hawd yer hosses! Whit's tha aboot a Scoats accent?

Sorry, Shuggie. He's perfectly right. There is no such a thing as a Scots accent. We've already established that but just like I have a 'Southern accent' in my head when I read Tennessee Williams so I appreciate that non-Scots will do their best to approximate the right accent so I imagine a few of you had Aggie and Shuggie talking like Groundskeeper Willie on The Simpsons or even (perish the thought) Shrek. My wife can tell the difference between a Louisiana accent and a Georgia accent but it all blurs into one in my head. But then unless you're familiar with all of McIlvanney's characters you won't know if the paragraph above is set in Graithnock (where he would have an Ayrshire twang like McIlvanney himself) or Glasgow. To be totally honest I can't remember but I tend to hear all his books in his voice when I read them irrespective of where they're set.

William McIlvanney in a TV advert

If we have a closer look at the dialogue here we have to admit that (and this is also true of the writer James Kelman) McIlvanney uses language that is neither "standard" nor "dialect," but trades on both in pursuit of specific literary ends. Let's just consider this wee bit from that last paragraph:

'There was a soldier, a Scottish soldier. We are the people."[1]

There's nothing inherently Scottish in those sentences but because we know a Scot is saying – well singing in first sentence and chanting the second – we 'hear' the accent. In reality what he’d say would be more like:

[sings] 'Thur wis a soja, a Scoattish soja. [shouts] We arra peep-puuul!'

The fact is that only the first sentence is part of the song, the opening line of 'The Green Hills of Tyrol'. The second is basically a war cry, part of a football chant.[2] There is no way someone who isn't very familiar with Scotland is going to get the cultural references here.

On the east coast of Scotland lies Edinburgh. It also has its own accents and dialects. Just as Glasgow's posh speak with a Kelvinside accent, Edinburgh's affluent speak with a Morningside accent – both are variations on Standard Scottish English. You would immediately recognise them as Scottish but the amount of Scotticisms would be limited to the occasional 'aye' or 'wee'. It could, of course, be argued that these are social dialects rather than geographical ones.

I've written about the relationship between Glasgow and Edinburgh before but Edinburgh is not without its deprived areas and common folk. We get to meet some of them in the work of Irvine Welsh. Here's a wee taster of his style. Renton, the hero of Trainspotting (his best known work) muses on the Scottish identity:

Ah hate cunts like that. Cunts like Begbie. Cunts that are intae baseball-batting every fucker that’s different; pakis, poofs, n what huv ye. Fuckin failures in a country ay failures. It’s nae good blamin it oan the English fir colonising us. Ah don’t hate the English. They’re just wankers. We are colonised by wankers. We can’t even pick a decent, vibrant, healthy culture to be colonised by. No. We’re ruled by effete arseholes. What does that make us? The lowest of the fuckin low, the scum of the earth. The most wretched, servile, miserable, pathetic trash that was ever shat intae creation. Ah don’t hate the English. They just git oan wi the shite thuv goat. Ah hate the Scots.

Irvine Welsh interviewed

The language is coarse. Of course the language is coarse. This is the same Scot's voice that Tom Leonard uses in the poem I quoted above. You could just imagine Groundskeeper Willie spouting off like that. The fact is Willie is quite unrealistic – he should swear like a trooper.

Okay, we've had monologues so far, but the best place to get the feel of what Scots are all about is to look at a bit of dialogue like this between two co-workers in a chicken processing plant from Mark McNay's Fresh:

Albert?

        Aye pal?

        Ye'll no believe this.

        What?

        Ah've just counted sixty-seven seconds between two chickens.

        Sixty-seven?

        Aye sixty-fuckin-seven.

        Is that a record for ye the day?

        Fuckin right it is.

Albert picked a chicken off the belt and hung it on a hook.

        D'ye think it'll stay a record?

        Course it will. Sixty-seven seconds. Put that in yer pipe and smoke it.

        Ah would but smoking shite gies me a soar throat.

        Jealous eh?

        Of course Ah am. Sixty-seven seconds is a great achievement.

        Fuck off ya sarky old cunt.

Albert laughed.

        Ah'm messin with ye. Sixty-seven's no a bad score.

Sean held a chicken up like a trophy and shook it by the wings.

        No bad? It's pure fuckin champion.

        It's no quite champion son.

        How d'ye mean?

Albert pushed his cheek out with his tongue.

        It's no as good as seventy-three.

        When did ye get seventy-three?

Ah got that between two Sunday roasters before we went for breakfast.

        Aye right.

        Ah'm serious.

        What really?

Albert breathed on his hand and rubbed it on his shoulder.

        Aye. Seventy-three.

        Bet ye counted fast.

Albert pointed at Sean.

        No as fast as you ya wee cunt.

        Ah count slow ya old bastard.

        Yer too tight to count slow.

        Ah used my watch.

Albert turned his back.

        Liar.

        Aye. Ah know ye are.

Bear in mind that these two men are friends. This is friendly banter, two workmates passing the time of day. Derision is a part of Glaswegian humour. That whole conversation could have been the prelude to a fight, the exact same words, but you'd have to hear the tone to determine whether these two were squaring up for a fight. If the next line involved Sean grabbing a hold of Albert and knocking him to the ground then you'd know. And as soon as the other men saw what was happening someone would shout out "Square go!" and they'd probably all gather round until someone decided it had gone too far. Chickens aside the above is a playground conversation.

But why write like this? Is realism so damn important?

I think it is. And clearly a lot of my fellow Scots think it is too. So where are all the novels in a Newcastle dialect or a Birmingham dialect? Or what about other countries? I'm just reading a novel by a New Zealand writer at the moment and it's set in Watford, England. But even if it hadn't been I doubt he would have gone to the same extent as someone like Irvine Welsh to capture the flavour of the place. And why not? Surely Scotland is not the only country with such a strong national identity. This is what Irvine Welsh had to say about the subject:

"There's a big fuss about the language in some of my books … [b]ut it's like the book is the only cultural artefact now that has all these walls. ... Why is it only in the novel — the English novel — that everyone's got the same narrative voice? They're still stuck in these kind of standard poems. Every other medium has exorcised it. People just don't talk like that anymore. They don't talk in standard English anymore. So why present [novel dialogue] in it?"

He goes on to answer his own question:

"Because if you're a novelist in Britain, you're almost seen as a custodian or something, like a curator, and that's just stupid. Then you get all this angst about death of the novel, and why people aren't reading the novel. Well, no duh. You know, right? It's like the standard English, the Queen's English, is an imperialist language set for us to control our knowledge. Therefore, it's not very interesting. It's an administrative language. It's not got many beats, it's not got any rhythm. It's terrible to write with." – interview with Benjamin Arnold in Flakmag

Which bring us to Lallans. I'm not going to talk about Gaelic because that is another language but there are terms kicking around to try and describe the Scots' tongue: Lallans and Doric are the two best known. Lallans is a variant of the Scots word 'lawlands' meaning the lowlands of Scotland. There's no specific geographic area that you could call 'the lowlands'. In simplistic terms, however, the lowlands are everywhere in Scotland that aren't the highlands. So, broadly speaking, Lallans refers to the dialects of south and central Scotland and Doric refers to the dialects spoken in the north east of Scotland.

Robert Burns' poetry is written in Lallans. To illustrate:

They took nae pains their speech to balance,
Or rules to gie;
But spak their thoughts in plain, braid lallans,
Like you or me.

from 'Epistle To William Simson'

I think of it as the Scottish equivalent to Shakespearian English only less intelligible and you'd think we were done with it. But no.

The term Lallans was also used during the Scottish Renaissance of the early 20th century to refer to what Hugh MacDiarmid called synthetic Scots, i.e., a synthesis integrating, blending, and combining various forms of the Scots language, both vernacular and archaic. This was intended as a classical, standard Scots for a world-class literature, although it was more often than not Scots words grafted on to a standard English grammatical structure somewhat removed from traditional spoken Scots, its main practitioners not being habitual Lowland Scots speakers themselves. – Wikipedia

I'm not sure I personally approve of this trend. I can't see the point of a language that exists as a purely literary form. Writing poems and songs in Gaelic is another matter entirely because Gaelic is still alive although not very well and the same goes for Welsh; pockets of resistance against the English invaders. MacDiarmid's detractors often referred to it as plastic Scots – a play on synthetic as in synthetic plastics – to underline its artificiality.

A short documentary about the poet especially interesting because it includes an old BBC radio broadcast in Received Pronunciation

But is Aggie-and-Shuggie-speak not artificial since you don't talk that way?

Good point. I think that my sketches would be better if I didn't have to translate what I want to say into an approximation of Govan-speak but they're just a bit of fun. What I decided quite early on was to provide all my characters with an idiolect, basically a family dialect, and try and stick to it, e.g. when Shuggie means 'never' he says 'neffer' and instead on 'review' we get 'refyoo'. I'd take the whole process a lot more seriously if I was trying to get them published. I have written stories in dialect. You can find two of them in an early edition of Ranfurly Review. Here's an excerpt from 'Just Thinking':

Jack:

Should Ah stay or should Ah go? That’s a song isn’t it? Who the hell did that now? Some punk outfit. The Skids Ah think. OK, ten reasons to stay. Ah can do that. Wan: she’s got huge tits, two: she laughed at your jokes, three: she’s OK in bed, four: she’ll fill the gap till you bump into Little Miss Right at the dancin, five: it’s been far too long since you had a real girlfriend, six: she hasne got nuthin pierced – Ah hate body piercin, seven: she likes you – that’s important – I think she likes you, eight: she disne punce me out the door as soon as we’d done the business – another plus, nine: her pal went off wi Mikey so Ah’d better no drap her till Ah see whit the score is wi the two of them an ten: sod it, Ah’ll give her tits two points – they fuckin deserve it.

Ah guess that means Ah’m stayin put.

Looking back over it I can see places where I'd change it. It really is an impossible task trying to get it right and it's hard to know where to draw the line. Take 'nothing' for example – I've written 'nuthin' above but when I read it I hear 'nuhin' in my head because that's how it would be said . . . probably, depending on who was talking, because we all put our own twists on language. One of the first things my wife commented on was how I pronounce the word 'poem' – apparently I say 'poyem'. So there you go.

I have no doubt where you live people have their own unique way of talking. As a writer do you embrace the local speech idiosyncrasies and incorporate them into your work or smooth out the rough edges? I'd be interested to hear what you have to say.

There are examples to be found all over the world, like the opening lines of this one from the Trinidadian poet, Miguel Browne:

TRINI TALK

Trinidadians are a special people of dat there is no doubt,
Doh care what odders say of how dey run dey mouth.
But of all de special talents dat we Trinis possess,
Is de way we talk dat ranks us among de best.
At de street corners, in de shop or at work on any given day,
Is to hear us speak and carry on in our own special way.
De colourful words, de antics and de accent all combine,
To create a whole language dat has stood de test of time.

But I suspect the problem has its roots in our education systems. There is prevalent opinion that people who can't express themselves in the official language of a country are somehow stupid. Here's what a teacher in the Caribbean wrote:

I interviewed each of my Caribbean students one by one. They shared with me that they had never written in their vernacular because they were not allowed to in their school systems. One student said she had been told by her teachers that the dialect she spoke was "broken English" and not worthy of being written. Another told me it was hard for her to write in patois because she had never been taught how to do it.

Elsasser and Irvine found in their work with Caribbean students:

. . . their reluctance to write (was) directly attributable to the denigration of their native language and to their conviction that they do not, in fact, possess a true language but speak a bastardized version of English. It is difficult if not impossible to write without a language, and it is emotionally draining to attempt to develop voice and fluency in an education system that has historically denigrated one's own language. (1985, 406)[3]

My students who spoke vernacular Englishes seemed to suffer from the stigmatization that Elsasser and Irvine described. Their dialect had been devalued and banned from the classroom. [4]

We then have an excerpt from a student:

I definate hate writing. Takes too much time when you can talk about what you want. Writing is a bore and a process we can live without. Writing is a very difficult process that involves a lot of thinking especially if you don't have a command of the English grammar . . . In my country, we spoke `Patois,' as a result, is sometimes confuses my tenses and my punctuation. Everytime I tried to write exceptionally well, thinking that my grammar is intact, the end result is always watch your grammar. I really feel down at times when I have to write.

I think this is an important issue. A lot can be lost by trying to get people to confirm to the 'Newspeak' of the day be it Hindi (the official language of India) or English (the official language of too many places to list). When a 13-year-old Scottish girl handed in an essay written in Textese, she explained to her flabbergasted teacher that it was easier than Standard English. Part of me is appalled at this but that's just because I'm old and struggle with texting. It's not my lingua franca but it is fast becoming many people's. Should we cling to English as it stands just now or let it evolve naturally just like Scots did and is continuing to do? Good question. There is room for all kinds of speech. As Thoreau put it:

It is a ridiculous demand which England and America make, that you shall speak so that they can understand you. Neither men nor toadstools grow so. – Walden; or, Life in the Woods

This wee article’s drifted away from Glasgow where we started off so I’d like to bring us back there with a song written and performed by Billy Connolly, a serious one and one that reduced me to tears listening to it again and not for the first time:

The Wrong Miracle

2009-11-16T02:12:00.001Z

Everything is a miracle. It is a miracle one does not dissolve in one's bath like a lump of sugar – Pablo Picasso

This is book about ordinary things, getting you hair done, having breakfast, going to church and eating gobstoppers. It's about childhood, the strain of being part of a family, the joy of sex, the question of love, the problems surrounding married life and life's little and not-so-little losses. It is about art and music and what was on TV last night. It is about all those daily miracles and disasters that make up an ordinary life.

Sure there's some fancy word play and clever metaphors to be found in this collection but these poems are not puzzles to leave you scratching your heads, these are not things to be solved so much as things to be savoured. By that I mean don't gulp them down. Let them sit on your tongue a while and appreciate the sweets, the sours, the salty and the bitter. Some will leave a bad taste – well, that's life – and others will provoke washes of nostalgia, of childhood mainly for me but other times too.

Selecting poems to go in an anthology is a difficult thing. I would imagine if Liz is anything like me she has a lot of very similar poems in her collection but there's no real sense of having the same old truths hammered into you page after page. Yes, there are a lot of poems about family and many of these touch on religious topics but this was clearly a part of her upbringing (as it was with many of us) and so I felt on familiar ground. Granted I was never a Catholic girl in Ireland (unless in a former life I've no memory of) and yet a poem like this one resonates strongly for me. It begins:

My father's call for spare silver
for the priest's money box
is a Sunday ritual. So too is the rag
my mother uses to polish shoes
that she later positions in front
of the fireplace. My father's hair refuses
to stay up at the sides, it is flattened
in place by a smear of Brylcreem . . .

from 'Sunday with Ritual

I don't need to taste this poem. I can smell it. For those who don't know, Brylcreem is a brand name of a men's hair grooming product which probably had its heyday in the seventies (in the UK) with it's advertising slogan: "A little dab of Brylcreem on your hair gives you the Brylcreem bounce". Brylcreem was sold in a tube in the States and tubs in Europe and Canada. I remember those tubs and the feel of the white cream. Very much a part of my childhood. And the same with the routine for polishing shoes. It's not the rags I remember so much as the brushes and the shoehorn which I always regretted forgetting to save when my parents' house was emptied. There were so many mundane moments like that growing up. Who would ever imagine that I would pine after them? At the time this poem evokes a feeling of resentment – all the atheists got to sleep in on Sundays.

So you can see that it was the family poems that managed to reach me whereas others like the first poem in the collection, 'Decorum' (about flamenco) missed the mark completely, but that's only to be expected. I did find it an odd choice for an opening poem mind. Liz may have lived in Gran Canaria for the past fourteen years (they're a group of seven islands and six islets set off the coast of western Africa) where flamenco is apparently a big thing (it's the Spanish connection) but that's one of the few poems with a distinct sense of place, though of course anyone not reading the blurb on the back might assume the poem was set in Spain or perhaps even the Donegal Flamenco Club. The fandango makes a late appearance on page 17: 'Spring the Life Fandango'. To my mind both of these poems felt out of place. There's nothing wrong with them as poems just not here. I would rather have seen a poem about 'Lanigan' Ball' which gets mentioned in passing on the previous page. (My wife, on the other hand, felt that ‘Decorum’ was an excellent choice to set up the collection, but then she has a gypsy soul.)

If we can just consider the title of that last poem for a moment, I don't know about you but it reminds me of the phrase “trip the light fantastic”, an expression which means “to dance nimbly or lightly” according to Wikipedia. Were there not a few other odd expressions like this in the collection I might have dismissed this but I suspect it was deliberate; like any good poet she's making the words work overtime: For example:

...I use my secret voice that I keep for gut
reactions and the garters of the insides...

from 'Finding the Right Silences'

and the music snapping at heart strings, not
enough to fiddle and bow about, only to jig and
reach out about...

from 'Search Me (All Else Failing)'

Spanish dances well and truly aside the poems are peppered with plenty of other cultural references to make me feel comfortable. I remember watching Land of the Giants on TV in the late sixties and I remember Leo Sayer in the mid-seventies. This was a time when The Magic Roundabout was a gentle stop-motion animation shown across the country at 5.40pm on BBC1 just before the early evening news each day not some appalling animated action movie which Americans will know as Doogal (yes, I know the spelling's wrong).In the late seventies we had Watership Down and that moany N° 1 single by Art Garfunkel – 'Bright Eyes' – that never seemed to be off the radio.

I felt at home in these poems. They were comfortable and familiar. Then she moves onto the eighties (a reference to the guitarist The Edge and 'Fairytale of New York') and even the present day (The Dark Knight gets a nod). These were touchstones for me. Anyone born after 1980 (which apparently a lot of you were) will miss out a whole (and important) layer of this collection although that's what's Google's for I suppose. I spoke to Liz about this and she feels that you can still get the poems without being necessarily "au fait, so to speak, with the references", and I agree up to a point but the poems are so much richer if you can tap into the associations that come with those references.

So, how do you explain the ordinary? In what terms? In magical terms: loudness becomes a skin that can be shed, a truck can haul away the dawn, a story can be a place of retreat and beauty is something we can soak in. Most of us don't realise how metaphorical our language is, so it's easy to miss on the beauty of these poems because there are so many throw away lines like these and very few punch lines; it's not that kind of poetry.

There are 58 poems in this collection. There is no way I can comment on them all but they can be grouped. This is a Venn diagram collection. There is much overlap: the war poems are never simply about war and the religious poems are not only about religion. These are backdrops just as I imagine Ireland is the backdrop for a great many of these poems but one doesn't feel as if they're all lying in its shadow. As I've already mentioned most of the poems don't have a great sense of place: people have sex the world over, it rains the world over and others go for strolls in graveyards the world over. This is a plus to the collection because ordinary things happen the world over to ordinary people and that's who this book is aimed at, me and you

I don't know what it is but we are always willing to assume that poems are autobiographical and so when I read the start of this poem:

When she died they used soapy steel wool to clean
the black smoke stains beneath the Sacred
Heart picture. A cotton sheet was hung over the TV.

The mother filled the Virgin Mary holy water font
with water from Lourdes. She scolded that they should
have rung the chimney sweep at least a year ago. A red

haired daughter with a black haired mother came to see
the corpse – their hands covered their mouths as they sat
on a very old sofa.

from 'Waking a Grandmother'

I wouldn't have thought twice about the daughter's hair colour if I hadn't read this poem at the start of the collection:

I had asked for cappuccino-coloured
hair. I triangulated my choice. Cappuccino morphed
into the afterword – red. So now I am a redhead
by a miscalculation of the otherness of colour.

from 'Woman in a Redhead'

(Clever observations, Jim, but in 'Waking a Grandmother' I am the poet in the bathroom weeping not the red haired daughter! but yes, in 'Woman in a Redhead' it's me! - Liz)

This is where the reader needs to use their own imagination but I imagined this dour little wake with everyone in shades of black bar this one girl with flame-coloured hair sticking out like a sore thumb. But there was another thing about 'Waking a Grandmother' that struck me. For such a personal poem all the characters in it are depersonalised: the mother, a red-haired daughter, the father, the man who had ECT, the poet, the man she really loved. This is a simple thing Liz has done here – I didn't even notice it on the first read – and yet this poem leaps out at you especially since it's surrounded by poems written in the first person. Perhaps there's good reason for this:

The man who had had
electric shock treatment and who once touched the poet's
breasts through a brown school uniform said that when
we die a white light takes the fear away.

Families have histories, skeletons in cupboards, and so many of us live in families we really wish we weren't a part of.

I'm assuming that the poet is the red-haired girl and that she was the twelve-year-old girl in the 'Small Acts', the previous poem, preparing for chapel with her grandmother. My first thought that this was a first communion service but not if she's wearing a 'green crimplene dress' and a 'white polka-dotted cap. 'She's twelve and she's starting to question things: 'I shred bible parts looking for an iota of truth, / the mote in my eye.'

(Liz tells me that was not a communion but rather a "confirmation – where one can forego the bride-look and look like the mother-of-the-bride instead". I think this underlines my point earlier about how we bring ourselves to a poem. I was not brought up as a Roman Catholic and so I only have an academic appreciation of the religion – it doesn't resonate for me in the same way that it will for anyone who has been brought up a Catholic.)

I'm assuming too that Liz is the girl in the next poem gardening with her dad:

My father rises to snip bushes

into circular shapes. He says the moon's orbit round the earth
is not circular. I follow him with a leaf-blower that I cannot
handle.

from 'My Father Shows Me How to Sharpen a Bush-Trimmer'

And I'm assuming that this is the girl who has sex in coal shed and believes that '[l]ove exists in the back-boiler room', that she's the girl on 'a city roof top' with a guy with a beard who wants to 'tumble' her:

He measures me by finger
lengths. As far as I know I'm fine. Sometimes I

use 'I' like a scalpel. I can't answer
with ordinary answers. I come

completely clothed. He gives solid
gifts. What matters is where my mind places

itself at the point of countdown. We wrap
legs round a whole revolution and push

the war away.

from 'City RoofTop'

I'm assuming that the man is going to war, the same war that appears in half a dozen of the poems and that she is the woman on the end of the phone here:

When I lift the receiver and they tell me the news,
I will think of your face, you lying there, skin
with the sheen of polythene. I imagine the hum
of small talk as neighbours place endless

cups in a stainless steel sink. The silence is dotted
and stares me in the eye. Night is stitched
at the corners. Threadbare light does not stand
a chance.

from 'A Woman with All Her Curtains Drawn'

This is not a novel though. There might be no connections between these poems other than the fact that Liz Gallagher wrote them. But that's the problem with all poetry collections, we try and make sense of all the poems presented as a unified body of work. I assume that is what Liz intends me to do. I don't know. My assumptions may be all wrong.

What I do know is that the first time I read this collection I missed just about everything. This is not a criticism, merely an observation; it says more about me than Liz I fear.

I do have a favourite poem however. The one that stands out for me was this one:

A Poem that Thinks It Has Joined a Circus

A handkerchief is not an emotional holdall.
A cup of tea does not eradicate all-smothering sensations.
A hands-on approach is not the same as a hand-on-a-shoulder
willing chin to life and an upper lip to stiffen.
A forehead resting on fingers does not imply that the grains
of sand in an hourglass have filtered through.
A set of eyes staring into space is not an indictment that the sun
came crashing down in the middle of the night.
A sigh that causes trembling and wobbly knees should be
henceforth and without warning trapped in a bell jar and retrained
to come out tinkling ivories with every gasp.
A poem trying to turn a sad feeling on its head does not constitute
a real poem, it is a cancan poem, dancing on a pinhead
a walking a tightrope with arms pressed tightly by its sides.

Why this one? I like poems that are self-reflective. I like when a poet comments on what she sees poetry to be. Personally I would have made this either the first or more likely the last poem in the collection.

I would love to recommend this collection unreservedly but I can't. There are too many cultural references that non-Brits will struggle with as will younger Brits. I was surprised to find that Sunsilk was still on the go for example but it was the can my mother used that I saw when I read about it in one of her poems; the same goes for 'Daz-blue' and the Colgate 'ring of confidence'. These subtleties will be lost on many but for those who get them then a whole world of images and associations will open up to them.

Many of the poems have very long lines, the majority in fact. Let me just say that they took some getting used to and leave it at that.

This is a book that will grow on you if you give it time. I've been picking it up and putting it down for the past week. I certainly won't be selling my copy on eBay after this, for starters there's hardly a page that doesn't have underlining in five colors and notes in the margins cross-referencing the different poems and that's not counting the three A4 pages of notes I wrote before I even began typing this up most of which I simply don't have room to talk about. These poems made me think and they made me remember. A lot of them made me sad but sad in a good way if that makes any sense to you at all. Liz is a poet – I'm sure she'll know exactly what I mean by that.

***

Liz Gallagher was born and brought up in Donegal, Ireland. She has been living in Gran Canary Island for the past 14 years. She has an Education degree where she specialised in Irish language. She also has a Computer Science degree. She is at present doing research into online debating for her PhD. She began writing about 5 years ago and has won a variety of awards in both Ireland and the US: Best New Poet 2007 (Meridian Press, Virginia University) First Prize in The Listowel Writers’ Single Poem Competition 2009 and she was selected by Poetry Ireland for their 2009 Introductions Series in recognition of her status as an emerging poet.

The Wrong Miracle, Liz's first full collection, was published in July 2009 and is available from Salt Publishing. All the royalties are going to Sands, the stillbirth and neonatal death charity.

Beckett the tinkerer (part two)

2009-11-12T13:13:00.002Z

Here’s a link to Part one if you missed it.

What Where was Beckett's last play produced following a request for a new work for the 1983 Autumn Festival in Graz, Austria. It was written between February and March 1983 initially in French as Quoi où and translated by Beckett himself. My Wikipedia article was thoroughly researched and is quite comprehensive but let me explain the gist of the play for you, at least how the play stands on paper. I'm referencing the (you would have thought) definitive Grove Centenary Edition here. First a summary courtesy of The Modern World:

After preparing the stage through a wordless rehearsal, a quadrille of identical figures entering and leaving, V calls Bam to the stage and sets events in motion.

Bam, who will remain onstage until the last moments of the play, greets Bom, and asks him for the results of his interrogation of an unnamed subject. The answer is not good – although Bom gave him "the works" until he wept, screamed, begged for mercy, and finally "passed out," Bom was unable to make his subject "say it." Bam accuses him of lying, and V summons Bim.

After asking Bim "Are you free?" Bam orders him to give Bom "the works" until he confesses that his subject said "it," and "what." After a season passes, Bim reports back to Bam, but he's had the same results – though Bom wept, screamed, and begged for mercy, he passed out without "saying it" or saying "where." Ever mistrustful, Bam also accuses Bim of lying. V summons Bem, and the process goes through yet another iteration, with Bem torturing Bim to reveal what Bom was hiding from Bam.

After another season passes, Bem returns with the same negative results. Now the only one left, Bam is forced to give Bem "the works" himself. Bam leads Bem off the stage, returning alone after another season has passed, his head bowed in obvious defeat. Satisfied, the Voice remarks, "Make sense what may" and switches off.

Beckett's descriptions of the actors are as follows:

Players as alike as possible

Same long grey gown

Same long grey hair

and even the voice has preconditions set:

V in the shape of a small megaphone at head level

He also describes precisely the layout of the stage:

Playing area (P) rectangle 3 m x 2 m, dimly it, surrounded by shadow, stage right as seen from house. Downstage left, dimply lit, surrounded by shadow, V.

and, if that wasn't enough, he adds a wee diagram:

So, what's wrong then with this production by the Silverlake Company of Angels?

Well, V has found his body for starters.

Or what about this version which was part of the 2003 Beckett on Film project which tackled all of his stage plays with the exception of the early and unperformed in his lifetime Eleutheria?

Well, there was no book in Beckett's stage instructions and would you look at the size of that megaphone and where it's located! And where's all the grey gone?

There is a clear difference with this second version. The political undertones . . . well, there's nothing 'under' about them.

This is Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four a few generations later, when even the eternal boot in the face becomes commonplace, making Bam's question to each new subordinate — "Are you free?" all the more ironic. There is no freedom here, there is nothing but the reflexive application of power, and not even their collective failure elicits any emotional response from Bam — just a vague, irritated resignation. Finally, Bam must face the fact that the instruments he uses to gain information have become useless, his resources exhausted: turning upon themselves, they only expose their hollow impotence. Indeed, it is likely that there is nothing really to confess. Left with only himself, Bam is the inheritor of a totalitarian regime of emptiness.[1]

You can read what the Damien O'Donnell had to say about directing the play here.

Interrogation and torture appear in other plays by Beckett. Catastrophe is an obvious choice for those looking for a political interpretation (even though when you dig into the play this may well not have been Beckett's intention) but Play is the closest in comparison to What Where, three ghosts up to the necks in urns, answering when the spotlight shines on them.

If I can go back to music for a moment, the first version of Holst's orchestral suite The Planets I heard was one conducted by his friend Sir Adrian Boult; it's a rather stiff, very "British", performance. Later on I got to hear other interpretations — I have one with Karajan conducting and another under Andre Previn – and although I didn't hate them they weren't what I was familiar with; they were somehow wrong. To be fair Boult's recording likely is the closest to what Holst conceived but the point I'm making is that that was the version I heard first and so it becomes my base line, my definitive version and all others stand or fall by comparison to it. The first version of What Where I saw was indeed the Beckett on Film version and so when I got to see Beckett's own films they looked strange and I didn't really care for them that much. What Where was apparently shown on TV at a time when it could have been seen by school children who would have seen it and thought: This is how it should be done. This is one danger of radical adaptations.

On the surface What Where is really just an arty "who's on first?" vaudeville routine and considering many of Beckett's other plays where he includes vaudevillian touches (e.g. the hat routine in Waiting for Godot) this too is an obvious interpretation – the play is one long gag albeit a serious one. What's Beckett saying, that life is a joke?

The four characters could be components of a split personality and Bam, the dominant one, could be torturing the others for information they are incapable of providing.

Or is it more of an epistemological puzzle? I suggest this based on how Beckett modified the play in later years. Take this example where we see Beckett caught on camera actually discussing his 1987 American TV production. There are also excerpts from the play and from the 1986 German TV production of Was Wo where Beckett first decided to do away with the megaphone and replace it with a large head (invariably blurred) which he called "a death mask"[2] the voice coming from “beyond the grave”[3] and the action taking place in a “field of memory”.^[4]In other words the only character who is sentient (as opposed to alive) is the big blurry head who is remembering what happened when he was alive.

When you consider Beckett's other work from this period this makes perfect sense because he often used the motif of a ghost in his works (both prose works and plays) even if not explicitly naming them as such (e.g. the mother's voice in Footfalls). This makes sense of the fact that the Voice 'pauses' the action / memory from time to time and 'rewinds' where the initial 'memory' is not the way he wants to remember it:

BAM:

But he didn't say anything?

BOM:

No.

V:

Not good.

I start again.

BAM:

Well?

BOM:

Nothing.

BAM:

He didn't say it?

V:

Good.

To my mind it does make that one aspect of the play clearer, that the disembodied voice is what's going on inside Bam's head — a typical Beckettian conceit:

Neither representation then of Bam is corporeal, Beckett representing instead a spectre and its mirror reflection, and the rest of the figures of What Where are ghosts as well, all the more so as they are re-presented by the patterns of dots on the television screen.[5]

But does that mean all of this invalidates any later productions that stage the play? And what about the later Beckett on Film version — why take a backwards step when all the technical jiggery-pokery would have advanced to improve on what was televisually possible in the eighties? I don't have an answer for that except to underline that the play has validity in all its different realisations but I do find a comment made by Jennifer Jeffers interesting:

The works composed for television . . . fare poorly whenever they have been performed as live theatre. […] The figures of Quad and What Where are conceived to dwell on a flat surface, backlighted and fluorescent, quite separate from the dimensional world of the viewer. On the screen they project a ghostly depthlessness; they move in a kind of spaceless no man's land. In contrast once these figures are placed on a stage in front of an audience, their material reality cannot help but be disappointing.[6]

Ignoring for the moment that What Where was originally conceived as a stage play her point really is that the original staged version of What Where was inadequate to encompass Beckett's vision. Beckett is famously reported as saying of What Where: "I don't know what it means. Don't ask me what it means. It's an object."[7] I don't accept that when he says he had no idea what the play is about he is being serious — he often gave answers like that just to shut people up or half an answer and he wasn’t beyond actual lying.

In 1988 the composer Heinz Holliger took What Where and turned it into a chamber opera as he had done with Come and Go in 1977 and Not I in 1980 all while Beckett was still alive. Yet another interpretation, one that could expose the musical aspects that are present in all of Beckett's theatrical works.

The last thing the voice says in the play is:

V:

I am alone.

In the present as were I still.

It is winter.

Without journey.

Time passes.

That is all.

Make sense who may.

I switch off.

And that is the point. We are the ones — and by "we" I include the directors who take on this and any other of Beckett's plays — we are the ones who have to make sense of his words.

I'll leave you to ponder that.

A production note at the front of the script has the heading ‘Process of Elimination'. Elimination, that is, of colour, visual, light and sound effects, with an unchanging black background.

Further reading

Katherine Weiss, 'What Where: Reading Faces and Surfaces on the Beckettian Stage and Screen', Ball State University English Studies Forum
Dr. Aylin Kesim, 'An Analysis of Themes in Samuel Beckett's What Where'
Mary A Doll, 'The Demeter Myth in Beckett'
Phillipe Albèra, 'Beckett and Holliger' in Mary Bryden ed., Beckett and Music
Steven Connor, 'What Where: Space and the Body' in Samuel Beckett: repetition, theory, and text
Christina Adamou, 'What Where Revisited: Answering the Question' in Marius Bunnng ed., Historicising Beckett: issues of performance

References

[1] 'What Where', The Modern World

[2] "‘In his Stuggart notebook Beckett wrote that “S (Stimme [Voice]) = mirror reflection of Bam’s face … S’s voice prerecorded. Bam’s but changed.’ This enlarged and distorted death mask … replaced the suspended ‘megaphone at head level’ of the original publication.” – Gontarski, S. E., ‘The Body in the Body of Beckett’s Theater’ in Moorjani, A. and Veit, C., (Eds.) Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd'hui, Samuel Beckett: Endlessness in the Year 2000 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001), p175

[3] Knowlson, J., Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (London: Bloomsbury, 1996), p686

[4] Quoted in Gontarski, S. E., ‘Notes to What Where: The Revised Text, by Samuel Beckett’ in Journal of Beckett Studies 2.1 (1992), p12

[5] S E Gontarski, 'The body in the body of Beckett's theatre' in Angela B. Moorjani, Carola Veit eds., Samuel Beckett: endlessness in the year 2000, p176

[6] Jennifer Jeffers, Samuel Beckett: a casebook, p220

[7] Much as I try I cannot find out where this 'famous' quote comes from.

The Search

2009-11-09T00:03:00.001Z

Before I get down to the nitty-gritty of reviewing this novel we need a short history lesson:

Lidice (German: Liditz) is a village in the Czech Republic just north-west of Prague. It is built on the site of a previous village of the same name which, as part of the Nazi created Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, was, as per orders directly from Heinrich Himmler, completely destroyed by German forces in reprisal for the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich in the late spring of 1942. On June 10, 1942, all 192 men over 16 years of age from the village were murdered on the spot by the Germans in a much publicised atrocity. The rest of the population were sent to Nazi concentration camps where many women and nearly all the children were killed. - Wikipedia

There is so much history attached to Word War II that I couldn't tell you if I knew that or not. I sat and watch the whole World at War series with my dad back in 1973 so I must have heard about it. The fact is after a while the war just blurs into five years of wall-to-wall horror stories and atrocities with the odd act of heroism thrown in for good measure and it's hard to get emotional about it any more. At least 50 million people died in that war and since then we've heard many stories of entire villages being massacred in Africa and Cambodia, for example.

We have our own tragedies to mourn. Do we really need another book about World War II?

I had my doubts when I started to read this, not the author's fault I have to stress, but mine. I read the scene where the village's men are executed without batting an eye. Even the fact that the only witness is Jan (a ten-year-old boy) and one of the men is his father still left me dry-eyed. Then he returns home only to be captured by the Nazis where he sees his mother and elder sister rounded up with all the other women and shipped off to God knows where. This leaves him in charge of his little four-year-old sister, Lena.

It's hard to keep close to her though. Eventually they wind up in a children's home in Germany.

It isn't often he gets a chance to speak to Lena, for the girls and boys are kept apart most of the time. Weeks pass before he manages to find a moment when she is alone; when he tries to speak to her, he thinks she's changed. For one thing, she speaks German. When Jan talks to her in Czech, she screws up her face and tells him to speak properly.

"Only peasants speak the way you do."

Jan gazes at her wordless. It's not her fault; she doesn’t know what she's saying. Every day the women tell them lies like this, and she's only little. It's no surprise that she takes in and believes what they say to her.

"Our parents spoke this way," he reminds her.

Lena kicks a stone away. "Ich habe keine Eltern. Sie sind tod." [I have no parents. They are dead]

The blurb on the back of the book told me what to expect next. Soon his sister is removed too leaving him alone.

Now for the vast majority of kids his age that would have been pretty much the end of his story. All we would be left to find out was whether he survived the war or not. But I'm not an educational psychologist. Myant writes:

The men were killed, the women sent to Ravensbrück and some of the children were sent to Germany to be adopted. This raised questions for me as a psychologist. Quite apart from the appalling trauma of being torn from your family, what did it do to a child to have their identity stripped from them like that? Did they form bonds with their new family, how did they feel when reunited with what remained of their real family after the war, what did the people who were duped into adopting the children feel? The Search explores these issues in the story of Jan and Lena. – The Reading Agency

Virtually all the tales about the war we have are from the perspective of grown-ups with the obvious exception of The Diary of Anne Frank so I can see why this might have piqued her interest. It would never have struck me but this is what we need, the right writer to come in contact with the right material.

The book is written in the present tense, third person, so we go through this as Jan does without the benefit of hindsight. I think the present tense was a sensible choice but I would have liked, as with Anne Frank, to have a first person narrative – just a personal preference – but considering the fact there are two narrative threads she's made the sensible choice I think.

The first thread is Jan's story. A determined young boy, he decides not to sit tight and wait to see how things pan out, rather he resolves to escape from the children's home and try and locate his family. A bit of a tall order.

The second thread revolves around the Schefflers, Friedrich and Gisela, a German couple, and their grown-up son, Wilhelm, who is a soldier away at war. Having lost their own daughter they decide to adopt what they think is a German girl orphaned by the war. What they get is a little Czech girl who has been conditioned to speak German and think of herself as 'Helena'; the girl is, of course, Jan's sister, Lena.

She settles in quickly enough but they soon realise all is not right:

Upstairs, the little girl laughs. She's settling in now, though she's very quiet, and when she speaks, her words don't sound right. The accent's all wrong. When [Friedrich] mentions this to Gisela, saying he thought her language was very poor for a child of her age, Gisela frowned and shook her head. "Poor thing, what do you expect? She's lost both her parents."

"But she says so little. Perhaps she' retarded."

"Have you seen how she helps me round the house? She's smart all right, don’t you doubt it for a minute."

"But –"

"No more buts, Friedrich. She has no parents, and she's from Hamburg, That's why she sounds so different."

People believe what they want to believe . . . or what they need to believe.

Now Jan may be, as I've just said, a determined little boy but he's not especially resourceful. Like Lena he's been forced to learn German but he speaks with a Czech accent, has a very limited vocabulary (enough to do what's required of him) and cannot read German; actually he struggles to read joined-up writing full stop. It’s just as well he makes friends with an older boy called Pawel because he simply isn't equipped to make his escape alone. And, yes, of course, they both escape. It wouldn't be much of a book if they didn't. They learn the address of the farm in Germany where Lena lives and set off to reclaim her. Inconveniently, they wind up near Pawel’s home in Poland instead, but at least there they get some adult assistance and get pointed in the right direction.

Things don't work out, the boys get separated and if it wasn't for Marek, a sympathetic Resistance leader, Jan's story would probably peter out there. But it doesn't and he ends up joining a small band hiding out in the woods. This keeps him relatively safe but doesn’t help him with his task. He bides his time and waits for an opportunity which eventually comes and he gets a final shove towards his goal.

In the meantime we get to learn a bit about the Schefflers and their son who has deserted and ends up living in a hole in the ground in their barn. It's easy to see all Germans as the bad guys and certainly Jan does or at least he would like to. The thing is he keeps getting glimpses of their humanity. When he is up the tree watching the executions in Lidice a young German sees him and helps him escape before he is discovered and during an ambush he comes face to face with another German who pleads for his life before Marek shoots him. And when he finally makes his way to the Schefflers, he ends up in the middle of a situation he could never have anticipated.

In the final chapter everyone's stories collide and rarely does anyone walk away unscathed from a collision. The scars they're all left with are not what any of them could have expected. So, yes, from a plot perspective, all the i's are dotted and the t's are crossed but it's not a neat ending, not in that respect, and I was rather grateful for that because in the rest of the book the plot shows through a bit too much for my tastes. It's a little too neat; the writing is clean and professional, like a film script where the action needs a nudge forward and so things happen when they need to happen, even the unexpected bits.

Did I enjoy the book? Is this a book you're supposed to enjoy? It's a book that makes you think. The last chapter certainly makes you think. It made me think and I'm positive it will drag a tear or two out of some of you. This was a side of the war that I knew of but that was about it. Like The Diary of Anne Frank, Ian McEwan's Rose Blanche and the more recent The Boy in Striped Pyjamas this is a story worth telling. Although not marketed as a young adult novel I suspect this book is one that teenagers would get a lot from.

Having got to this point in the review I felt like I'd been nitpicking, dwelling on the negatives rather than the positives, so I contacted the publisher to see if I could ask Myant a few questions. Once you read these I'm sure you'll realise that there's a lot to recommend this book.

Both Schindler's List and The Boy in Striped Pyjamas have been criticised for presenting unrealistic, even sanitised, pictures of their chosen subjects. How important was it for you to present an accurate picture of Jan's journey? (Please feel free to outline your research for the book.)

It was very important. I started the novel when I was working for a PhD in creative writing at Glasgow University. The final thesis comprised a novel about the repercussions of the Holocaust on the lives of three women along with a 40,000 word critical essay about issues relating to writing about the Holocaust. One of the issues was that of representation of the Holocaust. In the essay I argue that there are essentially three critical responses to writing about the Holocaust - the first being that the Holocaust cannot and should not be represented, the second that testimonial accounts are acceptable and the third being that fictional responses are acceptable.

Some critics argue that it is all right for survivors to write fiction about the Holocaust but not for those who were not involved. I think that as the distance from WW2 increases and there are fewer people around who can write about it from personal experience, we will come to rely more on fictional accounts. I feel strongly that this is something we have to keep alive and I've read with dismay about research which showed that many young people are unaware of the Holocaust (a poll in 2005 suggested 60% of young people under the age of 35 were unaware[1]). Part of my essay goes on to discuss my instinctive feeling that if I were to write about this topic I had to be as accurate as possible and this seems to be the general feeling of Holocaust specialists.

Some feel that inaccurate representations can be used to lend credence to Holocaust deniers (a lot of ire is directed at a TV series of the seventies called Holocaust which was erroneously set in a work camp which in the series was alleged to be a death camp). You mention two of the well known representations which have been criticised severely by some critics. Lanzmann, for example (the director of Shoah) took issue with Spielberg's representation of the gas chambers saying that 'I deeply believe that there are things which cannot and should not be represented.' I was quite critical of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas in my thesis because of the inaccuracies in the text but now feel that I was perhaps a bit unfair as the text has stayed with me in a way that few do. But I was concerned about lots of things. There isn't space here to mention all of them but just to take one seemingly small thing: there is a mention of mud towards the end of The Boy with the Striped Pyjamas when Bruno takes off his shoes: 'At first it felt horrible putting his bare feet into so much mud; they sank down to his ankles and every time he lifted a foot it felt worse. But then he started to rather enjoy it (p. 204).' Many survivor accounts I read mention the mud at Auschwitz, one woman, an Italian Jew called Piera Sonnino[2], said of it:

It didn’t seem like earth and water: but something organic that had decomposed, putrefied flesh that had turned liquid. And at the same time, it had a presence of its own. As if death had given birth to monstrous, vermin-like form of life, treacherous and perfidious, which grabbed us by the ankles and kept us from moving quickly as we had been ordered.

I felt that Boyne's bland description was insulting to the perceptions of those who had been there. As you say, a sanitised account.

The research I did for the PhD novel was extremely helpful for The Search and gave me the broad background but in addition I read historical accounts which gave me details about Aryanisation programmes and the Lebensborn project. They gave me the details of how children were selected for these: the medical and psychological tests used (the latter of great interest to me as I work as a psychologist). I read about resistance groups in the occupied countries and how children were used in these. There's not a great deal written about Lidice but I read everything I could about it. I also visited the memorial site at Lidice which has photographic and film evidence of the destruction. Most movingly, it has interviews with some of the children (now in old age) who were sent to German families and the effect this had on them. Some talk about how they have no memory of being taken from their birth mothers but do have vivid memories of being brought back to Czechoslovakia and the wrench they felt leaving the people they had come to think of as their parents. They had lost the knowledge of Czech which they'd had and one man talked about how he felt he never caught up at school because of it. There were differences between siblings, between those who were old enough to have some memory of Lidice and those who were too young to remember it. I was pretty immersed in that time period while I wrote the book.

You must have considered at some point including a third plot thread talking about the trials of Jan's mother and sister. Why did you choose to reject it? I have to say towards the end I half-expected the book to end on a cliff-hanger and wondered if a sequel was coming.

Although I didn't consider a third plot thread about Jan's mother (in my mind, Maria is dead) The Search is based on the true story of the village of Lidice and no one knows for sure what happened to the children who weren't selected for Aryanisation but most agree they were likely to have been gassed at Chelmno), I have wondered about a sequel. This would be a novel from Jan's mother's point of view which follows her to Ravensbruck and then to the reunion with Jan and Lena and what happens to them then. I also wanted to write more about Pawel and his experience. I haven't ruled either of these possibilities out for the future.

Anne Frank's diary's narrative is, of course, in the first person. Although I agree that your choice of the present tense has its pluses I think I lot could have been gained by using a first person narrative to help us really get inside Jan's head. How do you feel about that?

This is a really interesting question. I didn't at any point consider using the first person voice for Jan and so I have to think retrospectively about this. It's pretty unusual for me not to consider all the options; my computer is full of various versions of things I've written with changes to tense, point of view etc. The novel I wrote for my PhD for example, went through seven or eight serious drafts (by that I mean substantial changes to structure, not just editing). In The Search I used the present tense to try to gain a sense of immediacy and I hope I've been successful in this. I also wanted to keep a certain distance emotionally. This is quite hard to explain. While researching for the PhD, I read a large number of accounts about the Holocaust. These included fictional and biographical accounts as well as historical ones. The Holocaust is obviously a highly emotive topic and there were books I read that had me sobbing for hours. That said though, it is the more measured ones, the ones that report calmly what happened, that have stayed with me. I'm thinking of works like Anne Frank's diary, Primo Levi's If This Is a Man and Charlotte Delbo's On Auschwitz. I think that at a subconscious level, I was afraid that if I wrote in the first person that I would become over emotional, perhaps even lapse into sentiment and I really wanted to avoid that. Maybe I didn't trust myself as a writer.

I'm always concerned when it comes to marketing a book that the cover attracts a certain demographic. I'm not sure for example that I would have picked up this book based solely on the cover. That said, I actually think this is a novel that a lot of young adults would appreciate because it's not too graphic although it is honest. Do you agree?

I like the cover! The Search was published first in Spain (as La Cancion de Jan) and then in Holland (as Zoeken Naar Lena). When Alma picked it up in the UK, they suggested staying with the Spanish cover and I was happy to go with that. I wouldn't have been too happy if they'd chosen the Dutch cover - I'm not at all sure about that one. I suppose my only quibble with this cover is that the boy seems to me to be rather small for a ten year old. I know exactly what you mean about book cover design though - my particular hate are those books for women which have a photograph of a headless young woman on them, often upside down, doing a handstand or a cartwheel or something. What on earth are the publishers trying to say? And as for lime green and neon pink covers with that curly font in relief...

I agree that the novel might appeal to young adults and this has been suggested to me by friends and colleagues who have read it. I hope that its honesty will appeal to a wide audience though.

AFTERTHOUGHT

Having carefully read through these answers I have to say that I have come to look at this book a little differently. That said I've not edited what I wrote before because that was my initial reaction and I can't change that. So what would I have done differently, maybe added in pages and pages of existential angst? I don't know.

Certainly my respect for historical fiction writers is growing.

***

Maureen Myant is a senior educational psychologist based in Glasgow. In 2004 she was awarded a New Writers’ Bursary by the Scottish Arts Council and she has completed her MLit in Creative Writing from the University of Glasgow. She is married with three grown-up children.

The Search is her first novel to appear in print however her short story 'Tea in Tashkent', one of a series of linked short stories set in the USSR appear in the print anthology Knuckle End: An Anthology of Emerging Scottish Literary Talent. You can read 'A Parting Gift', another story from the collection, here. At the moment she is working on a novel about a trip to the USSR in the late seventies by a British tour group.

The Search is published in the UK by Alma Books and retails at £12.99 which sounds like a lot but it is printed on good paper and it feels like a substantial volume in your hand.

REFERENCES

[1] Last year a comprehensive BBC poll found that only 55 percent of Britons (and just 40 percent of those aged 18 - 35) had heard of Auschwitz, the death camp where one fifth of the 6 million Jews killed in the Holocaust were murdered.

A new BBC poll reveals that 94 percent of respondents now say they have heard of Auschwitz, including 86 percent of those under 35.

This change is likely caused by:

(a) The comprehensive and generally accurate media coverage of the commemorations surrounding the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz on January 27.

(b) The widespread media coverage of the scandal around Prince Harry wearing Nazi regalia at a costume party.

(c) The BBC itself must take some credit after it broadcast in late January of its program "Auschwitz: The Nazis and the Final Solution," parts of which were watched by more than one-third of the UK population.

- Tom Gross, "Holocaust Memorial Day raises awareness among Britons" (AFP / Yahoo news, March 17, 2005)

[2] Piera Sonnino was deported to Auschwitz in 1944. She was later transferred to Bergen Belsen and Braunschweig. The sole survivor of a family of eight, she returned to Italy in 1950. She died in 1999.

Beckett the tinkerer (part one)

2009-11-05T11:46:00.004Z

We're not entirely restrictive. We're not . . . conservers of museum pieces. Not at all. — Edward Beckett

There is a school of thought (passionately held by many) that holds that it is tantamount to sacrilege to tamper with one of Samuel Beckett's texts. In the most recent (and most successful) run of Waiting for Godot some have criticised the production for playing for laughs. Had they forgotten that this was supposed to be a comedy?

It is true that his estate now keeps a wary eye on new performances and has waded in where it thought the director was overstepping the mark. And some have done exactly that. A famous one is where director Deborah Warner tampered – slightly – with Beckett's one-woman play, Footfalls. She made two main changes:

[T]here were two occasions when a small number of lines had been purposely reassigned, spoken not by the ancient mother (who is present in the play just as a voice) but by her daughter.

[and]

Rather than pace up and down the one narrow strip of stage, Fiona Shaw's May has two fields of operation: a rostrum erected at the front of the dress circle where, on each turn of her robotic shuffle, she has to clutch nervously at the overhanging masonry; and the dark vast void of the main stage.[1]

There were also some issues concerning May's costume. For one critic, the effect of Warner's changes was "a bit like seeing someone doodling on a Rembrandt".[2]

Most people frankly wouldn't have noticed the changes nor objected once they were pointed out but the Beckett estate had the play shut down and a planned production in France stopped.

While condemning the production, Edward Beckett, the playwright's nephew and executor, said: "I don't want to preserve the plays in aspic. I think that would be harmful to Sam and to the estate. We're not trying to produce cloned productions, but we insist they play the play as Sam wrote it."

Watching the production at its opening performance, he thought, in the manner of a Beckett character, "This can't go on." In that performance, five lines of dialogue had been transposed from mother to daughter. At the estate's insistence, the lines were returned to their original speaker. But there were other problems. "The production destroyed the play's timing, atmosphere, the ghostly aspect," Edward Beckett said. "The hypnotic effect of the words was shattered by the perambulation. And for what purpose?"[3]

You can read an interview with Edward Beckett here.

But where did the man himself stand? Should his plays be simply performed as opposed to interpreted? Since Billie Whitelaw has already given the definitive performances of Winnie in Happy Days, May in Footfalls, W in Rockaby and Mouth in Not I — each under Beckett's exacting personal direction — why don't we simply set up a screen in front of the audience showing her doing it right and be done with it?

Beckett rehearsing Footfalls with Billie Whitelaw
at the Royal Court Theatre, 1976

If we can take a cinematic example, what about the 1998 remake of Psycho which duplicated Hitchcock's 1960 original only this time in glorious colour? In general this wasn't well received. And the big question was: Why not? The consensus was that it brought nothing new to the table, so what's the point of it? At least Tim Burton's "reimagining" of Planet of the Apes was a genuine attempt to update the material even if it too didn't succeed.

The fact of the matter is that "[t]hough protective of his plays' integrity, [Beckett] was always ready to approve or admire when he saw something unorthodox that worked (italics mine)."[4] It is true that Beckett did, on occasion, made a fuss. He tried to stop the first New York production of his 35-second play Breath on the grounds that his stage directions weren't being fully adhered to. One has to bear in mind that Breath consists of nothing but stage directions. Certainly, the producers of Oh! Calcutta, to which the sketch made a contribution, must have realised that there's a significant difference between 'Faint light on stage littered with miscellaneous rubbish. Hold light about five seconds' and the same orders with the phrase 'including naked bodies' tagged on after the word 'rubbish'.

This was an exceptional case though. In most instances Beckett actually sought compromise if indeed he did anything. He did make every effort to stop productions of Waiting for Godot where women took the leads. To his mind it was ludicrous to tamper with the roles: "Women don't have prostates,"[5] he commented at one point, referring to Vladimir's constant need to urinate because of his ailing prostate.

Many of the appeals made to Beckett requesting permission for performances of this kind were of a fervently personal nature, and he actually yielded in at least one case, telling a German director that her production could go on as long as it had only one run, and as long as the publicity for the production made clear his position of "total disapproval" (his German publishers, however, refused to authorise this Godot).[6]

He had no problem with the tramps' colour though:

[O]ne of the productions in which Beckett became most deeply invested in a personal sense took place in South Africa, during a period of particularly bad political turbulence. Beckett despised the policy of apartheid in South Africa, and had ruled that his plays could only be performed in non-segregated theatres. […] But in 1976, the young director of a new, mixed-race Johannesburg troupe wrote to Beckett's agent requesting permission to stage Godot as its debut production. The cast was intended to be multi-racial, as was the audience, and Beckett consented, but the cast turned out eventually to be entirely black and the scanty audiences almost entirely white, due to the great risk involved for black people in attending the production.[7]

Kyle Manzay, left, and Wendell Pierce perform
Waiting for Godot in New Orleans

The director Herbert Blau, who introduced American audiences to some of the country's first productions of Samuel Beckett, found Beckett's often vehement objections to his texts being adapted both a little strange, and out of character:

Beckett taught us before theory that paratextuality[8] is built into the language, and, as with the gospels derided by Didi and Gogo, no text is sacred. That people are inclined to do odd things with Beckett's own texts is, one might say, a matter of poetic justice.[9]

When it came to directing his own plays things were a little different:

Between 1953, when Waiting for Godot was first staged in Paris, and 1967, Samuel Beckett served a fourteen-year theatrical apprenticeship, moving from being a consultant in the staging of his dramatic works to taking full responsibility for their direction. During his twenty-year directing career, 1967-1986, Beckett staged some seventeen productions of his work in three languages, English, French, and German. Each time he returned to his plays — most often to texts already in print — to prepare them for staging, he was dissatisfied. He found his plays wordy and incompletely conceived for the stage, and so he set about revising them as he staged them. Of Godot, for instance, he has said on more than one occasion, "I knew nothing about theatre when I wrote it," and during rehearsals in Berlin in 1967 for Endspiel (Endgame) he conceded that the play was "not visualized" (Theatrical Notebooks. Vol. II xv).

[…]

As Beckett grew increasingly dissatisfied with his plays as published, he decided in 1986, after years of suggesting that theatrical directors not stage the published scripts but follow instead his directorial revisions, to authorize publication of his theatrical notebooks and what he called "corrected texts" for his plays, that is, texts which incorporated the revisions he made as a director, along with the notebooks in which the rationale of those revisions was worked out. This was an extraordinary decision on Beckett's part, essentially repudiating his dramatic cannon as published and available to the public, and offering instead a much more fluid and multiple series of performing texts.[10]

The changes he made in his plays were sometimes minor and sometimes not: in Not I he excised the role of the Auditor completely, brought it back and then removed it again (to date though no script for the play suggests that the elimination of the Auditor is a directorial option); in Krapp's Last Tape he changed Krapp's costume and appearance, fiddled with the stage directions (most noticeably removing the slapstick element from the play) and in What Where, which I'll come back to, he took advantage of modern technology to reduce the actors to talking heads floating in space, a radical departure from the written text.

In 1985 Samuel Beckett directed Waiting for Godot, Krapp’s Last Tape and Endgame as stage pieces with the San Quentin Players:

Though the initial productions as staged in 1985 already brought forth substantial changes in the published acting texts of the plays, each time a re-mounting of the productions occurred additional changes were made. The same was true during the production period for these television versions, with Beckett sometimes making textual changes on the telephone even as a given scene was being taped.[11]

These films are now regarded as the definitive productions as far as the text goes but who is to say what further changes Beckett might have made had he lived longer. You can see all of these here:

DOWNLOAD or STREAM from UbuWeb

Beckett Directs Beckett: Waiting for Godot, Part 1 (1985)

Beckett Directs Beckett: Waiting for Godot, Part 2 (1985)

Beckett Directs Beckett: Krapp’s Last Tape (1985)

Beckett Directs Beckett: Endgame (1985)

I never got to see the most recent production of Waiting for Godot, the one featuring Sir Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart but I did get to see some snippets care of the Theatreland programmes on Sky Arts 1. One thing that was brought up several times by the actors was the ephemeral nature of theatre. I'm not sure I entirely agree with the arguments but the simple fact is that the vast majorities of productions of Beckett's plays worldwide come and go and will be forgotten in time. And in time he will be just another Shakespeare with people questioning the productions of the day and arguing about the validity of any given performance or interpretation and there will be no on left who worked with Beckett or even knew him to say yea or nay.

And that is how it should be. A play is a thing to be discovered in exactly the same way as a symphony is. Have you any idea how many times Beethoven's Fifth Symphony has been recorded? I think I have four copies myself. And who is to say which one is right? For starters they don't make instruments the same as they used to. But each performance brings out something the conductor saw and thought deserved to be highlighted. Plays are no different.

There was a recording of Krapp's Last Tape that Beckett got to see where, as the lights faded, all we were left with was the red light of the tape recorder. This fortunate happenstance delighted Beckett. It wasn't scripted because he's never thought of it at the time he wrote the play being pretty unfamiliar with how this new-fangled mechanism worked. In a letter to Alan Schneider Beckett described it as "the beautiful and quite accidental effect in London of the luminous eye burning up as the machine runs on in silence and the light goes down."[12]

Likewise when Carey Perloff had the opportunity to direct Charlotte Rae in Happy Days she had her daughter on set with her and at the time:

At the time of rehearsals my daughter Alexandra was just a year old, that age when the favourite game is pulling everything out of Mummy's purse. Often during the Happy Days rehearsal process Lexie would sit in the corner of the theatre, stealthily opening my purse and removing the contents. . .

I should interject here that by 'purse' she means 'handbag' — I have an American wife, I know about these things.

. . .arranging everything in a circle around her. She knew the contents of the bag by heart; it was not the surprise factor that kept her returning to the "empty-the-purse" game but, instead, the sheer joy of recognition in seeing those familiar objects reappear every time the game was played. She exhibited so many of Winnie's behavioural traits that Charlotte and I would stop rehearsals and watch Lexie perform her illicit game.[13]

Needless to say the women took this joy from Lexie and incorporated it into the performance. Was that wrong? Beckett fathered no children so it's unlikely he was around them enough for them to have a direct effect on his writing but, had he been the director, might he not also have taken opportunity of the synchronicity of the moment?

Beckett only started making major changes in his plays after watching them over and over again, till they were in danger of becoming stale, till he could really distance himself from the text and see the thing as a work apart from the words on the page. In Nacht und Träume we have the following stage directions:

9. From same dark R appears with a cup, conveys it gently to B's lips. B drinks, R disappears.

10. R reappears with a cloth, wipes gently B's brow, disappears with cloth.

and that's it. In his production "Beckett used a wine glass and a studiously folded napkin, which evoked association of objects used during mass" whereas when Antoni Libera directed his version he used "a 'poor-looking' cup and a 'poor-looking' wrinkled cloth . . . to intensify the impression of the poverty of the Dreamer: even in his most extravagant dream he sees objects that he probably uses every day; only the fact of who uses them and for what is remarkable."[14]

Was he wrong or are Beckett's stage directions simply imprecise? Is that what the problem is? Or does it really not matter? Considering how pernickety many of Beckett's directions are — at least the aspects he considers important — one has to say, no, not in this case; the overtones that the choice of vessel and type of cloth are clearly secondary to what's going on. This doesn’t mean they shouldn't be given some consideration — what else is a director supposed to do when faced with a Beckett play? — but they are not the be all and end all.

Performance became an increasingly important part of the creative process for Beckett. But as far back as 1956 he was becoming aware that what he had written had its limits. As he wrote to an American friend, Pamela Mitchell, on 28^th September 1956: "The new play [Fin de partie] is now as finished as it is possible before rehearsals (italics mine).[15] And the same in 1963 when he wrote to Barney Rosset: "I realise I can't establish definitive text of Play without a certain number of rehearsals."[16]

This of course is simply fine-tuning but it sets the groundwork for the discoveries he made during later rehearsals and performances when actors did more than simply repeat his words parrot-fashioned. A simple example would be the "personal relationship" between Krapp and his tape recorder that Patrick Magee projected in his performance; this goes beyond words.[17] One would have imagined though in the 24 years between that first performance of Fin de partie and the 1980 performance by the San Quentin Drama Workshop that he would have ironed out the creases but apparently not. The actor Alan Mandell (who played Nagg in that production) remembers:

Beckett was a tireless editor, making many cuts and changes in the text during the rehearsal period. 'There's too much text,' he would say with irritation in his voice, and then he would make a cut. It had to do with the way a line scanned, so that a change in a line, though minor to the actor, was major to the playwright.[18]

A scene from the San Quentin Drama Workshop's production
of Endgame featuring Alan Mandell as Nagg

In his biography of Beckett, Damned to Fame, his friend James Knowlson acknowledges that his reputation "as a tyrannical figure, an arch-controller of his own work, ready to unleash fiery thunderbolts onto the head of any bold, innovative director, unwilling to follow his text and stage directions to the last counted dot and precisely timed pause" was somewhat exaggerated and "the truth of his position was more complex and certainly more interesting than this caricature suggests."[19]

Let's take two examples, the American Repertory Theatre Company's 1984 production of Endgame in a subway and the 1983 Belgian production in a former warehouse flooded with water. Which do you think he made a fuss over? I would have though the both of them but that wasn't the case. The Belgian production went ahead unchallenged whereas the American version almost reached the courts; a compromise was met — "Beckett insisting in an agreed programme insert that that the play, as it was being staged, was no longer his play."[20] Understandably the director was aggrieved. He saw this as double-standards and once you get down to it he was right. "It made a tremendous difference [to Beckett] if he liked and respected the persons involved or if he had been able to listen to their reasons for wanting to attempt something highly innovative or even slightly different."[21]

My own personal opinion is that I welcome innovation. The Romanian conductor Sergiu Celibidache is well known for his unorthodox interpretations of the works of major composers like Beethoven and Mahler. Indeed his recorded performances differ so widely from the majority of other recordings that this has led them to be seen by some as collectors' items rather than mainstream releases, 'one-offs' rather than reference recordings. Is that a bad thing? When you've heard Beethoven's Fifth as many times as I have it does lose some of its magic and what you need is someone to make you look at it afresh. Celibidache's version is the most stately I've ever heard; it never gets ahead of itself. Celibidache is not saying that this is the way is must be done, rather this is how it can be done. And I accept new interpretations of Beckett's work in much the same way.

In Part two of this article I'm going to look in close detail at one particular play, What Where and show how Beckett couldn't leave this one alone.

In the meantime let me leave you with a graphical score animation of the first movement of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony:

References

[1] Paul Taylor, 'Theatre, Way Our of Line', The Independent, Friday, 18 March 1994

[2] Michael Billington, the critic for The Guardian

[3] Mel Gusson, 'Modify Beckett? Enter, Outrage', The New York Times, Saturday, March 26, 1994

[4] Katherine Worth, 'Beckett on the world stage', Christopher Murray, ed., Samuel Beckett – 100 Years, p154

[5] Linda Ben-Zvi, Women in Beckett: performance and critical perspectives, p x

[6] Belinda McKeon, 'Beckett was drawn back to Godot', Irish Times, Tuesday, September 08, 2009

[7] Belinda McKeon, 'Beckett was drawn back to Godot', Irish Times, Tuesday, September 08, 2009

[8] Paratextuality incorporates every secondary “text” e.g. reviews or author interviews all become part of the paratext. How many people come to the Bible without some prior knowledge that colours their interpretation of the text itself?

[9] Interview with Herbert Blau in Lois Oppenheim, Directing Beckett, p57

[10] S E Gontarski, 'Editing Beckett', Twentieth Century Literature, v. 41 (Summer '95) p. 190-207

[11] Beckett Directs Beckett, Grey Lodge

[12] Letter to Alan Schneider, 4 Jan. 1960, qtd. in M. Harmon, ed., No Author Better Served: The Correspondence of Samuel Beckett and Alan Schneider (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1998) 59.

[13] Carey Perloff, 'Three Women and a Mound: Directing Happy Days' in Lois Oppenheim, Directing Beckett, p165

[14] Interview with Antoni Libera in Lois Oppenheim, Directing Beckett, p123

[15] S E Gontarski, 'Beckett and performance', Lois Oppenheim, ed., Palgrave Advances in Samuel Beckett Studies, p199

[16] S E Gontarski, 'Beckett and performance', Lois Oppenheim, ed., Palgrave Advances in Samuel Beckett Studies, p201

[17] Maurice Harmon ed., No Author Better Served: the Correspondence of Samuel Beckett and Alan Schneider, p50

[18] Alan Mandell in James and Elizabeth Knowlson eds., Beckett Remembering: Remembering Beckett, p201

[19] James Knowlson, Damned to Fame, p 691

[20] James Knowlson, Damned to Fame, p 692

[21] James Knowlson, Damned to Fame, p 692, 693

Travels in the Scriptorium Part II

2009-11-02T00:02:00.002Z

I have spent my life in conversations with people I have never seen, with people I will never know and I hope to continue until the day I stop breathing. - from Paul Auster's acceptance speech for the Prince of Asturias Prize for Letters

If you have not read Part I then here is a link. You may not want to read this at all afterwards.

Paul Auster is an American writer, based in Brooklyn, New York. He was born in Newark, New Jersey to Jewish middle class parents of Polish descent and grew up in South Orange, New Jersey. As well as prose he has also written poetry, screenplays, essays, memoirs and an autobiography in addition to editing collections and translating other people's work. Before the publication of The New York Trilogy, three existential detective stories, Auster was best known for having edited the Random House Book of Twentieth-Century French Poetry and for having written several insightful literary essays – not the stuff best sellers generally grow from. He married his second wife, writer Siri Hustvedt, in 1981. Previously, Auster was married to the acclaimed writer Lydia Davis. He is the father of Daniel and Sophie.

His writing style has been described as “finely-wrought, self-reflexive, filled with doublings, coincidences and mysteries.” Most critics would label him as post-modern (occasionally post-apocalyptic) with a fondness for metafiction; characters migrate from one novel to the next, as do props (a red notebook, the same kind in which he writes, in particular) and he occasionally inserts himself into the narrative, sometimes as the pseudonymous 'Mr Trause', sometimes as 'Paul Auster'.

Michael Dirda puts it this way:

Auster has perfected a limpid, confessional style, then used it to set disoriented heroes in a seemingly familiar world gradually suffused with mounting uneasiness, vague menace and possible hallucination. His plots—drawing on elements from suspense stories, existential récit and autobiography—keep readers turning the pages, but sometimes end by leaving them uncertain about what they've just been through. – 'Spellbound', The New York Review of Books, Volume 55, Number 19 · December 4, 2008

Auster wrote Travels in the Scriptorium whilst trying to raise funding to film his screenplay, The Inner Life of Martin Frost:

I was on the phone all day every day to producers, getting nowhere. Finally, Siri said: 'You have to get out of the house. Go to work in your office (he writes in a Spartan rented room near his Park Slope home). Go doodle, you noodle!' she said. 'You can't keep knocking your head against a brick wall.' Siri was right – always is! – so I wrote Scriptorium... – Jackie McGlone, 'A voice in the darkness - Paul Auster interview', The Scotsman, 1st August 2009

Now I don't know about you but when I think of “a Spartan rented room” two things jump immediately to my mind, the empty room – empty bar an upright piano and stool – where Stravinsky wrote The Rite of Spring and the various rooms that Samuel Beckett has written in throughout his life. The photograph on the cover of my copy of Travels in the Scriptorium shows such a room, a room that also appears in many of Beckett's later television plays (e.g Eh Joe, Nacht und Traúme and Ghost Trio) and his only film.

There is a stronger connection with Beckett than that though. Auster edited the recent 4-volume Grove edition of Beckett's (almost) complete works. I never really thought about it at the time nor did I wonder why he gets a chapter in Beckett Remembering – Remembering Beckett since at the time he was just a name to me and no more. As it happens he was a friend of Beckett's although he admits not a close one; perhaps had he continued in France he might have become on. They first met when, as a young man of twenty-four living in Paris, he chanced his arm and wrote Beckett a letter asking to meet him. Three days later he received an invitation to meet with him at La Closerie des Lilacs. Over the years they shared correspondence – Auster would send him copies of his work – and Beckett was very supportive when Auster got the job of editing the Random House Book of Twentieth-Century French Poetry and contributed translations of Apollinaire, Breton and Eluard. Auster admits that as a young man his love of Beckett's work “bordered on idolatry” and it's easy to see Beckettian influences in his work. Reading reviews and articles about Auster Beckett's name crops up frequently. But, is there a stronger connection yet?

In the book that follows Travels in the Scriptorium, Man in the Dark, Auster makes quite obvious nods towards him as with this little quote which combines thoughts from Waiting for Godot, The Unnamable and Worstward Ho:

Concentration can be a problem, however, and more often than not my mind eventually drifts away from the story I’m trying to tell to the things I don’t want to think about. There’s nothing to be done. I fail again and again, fail more often than I succeed, but that doesn’t mean I don’t give it my best effort.

In Travels in the Scriptorium he draws inspiration from other writings. The protagonist here is one that features in a great deal of Beckett's writing, an old man:

The only fact that can be set down with any certainty is that he is not young, but the word old is a flexible term and can be used to describe a person anywhere between sixty and a hundred. We will therefore drop the epithet old man and henceforth refer to the person in the room as Mr. Blank.

Sounds like a character from Watt. We learn later from a woman called Sophie who is described as being “somewhere in her late forties or early fifties” that Mr. Blank is “a lot older” than she is but we never learn his exact age nor do we ever learn his first name.

Like many of Beckett's characters he is struggling with issues of identity and memory; the man in That Time is a good example. Like him Blank is dependent on external forces to generate memories. The first comes when he sits in the chair at the desk. He gets a wave of pleasure from the experience especially when he discovers that “an invisible spring mechanism … allows him to rock back and forth at will”. This brings back a childhood memory of a “rocking horse that sat in his bedroom when he was a small boy … whose name was Whitey and who, in the young Mr. Blank's mind, was not a wooden object adorned with white paint but a living being, a true horse.” The next comes when he looks at one of the photos on the desk; a picture of a young woman conjures up the name “Anna” and a feeling of “overpowering love” The image is not a million miles away from Krapp sitting at his desk wallowing in his own past.

Then a phone call from one James P. Flood, “a minor character”, at least that is how he describes himself, who wants to visit him. From Flood he discovers that he is being cared for by a woman named Anna, who, Flood tells Blank, “[o]f all the people involved in this story, she's the only one who's completely on your side.” Is this the same Anna in the photo? For some reason he thinks she might be dead and that he is somehow responsible for her death.

Apart from the photos there are also pages, some handwritten, others typewritten. The typed pages appear to be a story, a report actually, written by a man in a cell in the garrison town of “Ultima: the westernmost tip of the Confederation, the place that stands at the edge of the known world … overlooking the unmapped expanses of the Alien Territories. The law says that no one is allowed to go out there. I went,” the man writes, “because I was ordered to go and now I have returned to give my report.”

So, what is this? Is this an allegory? Is the room, as in Endgame, the inside of a human skull? Are these characters in a story? Have the lunatics taken over the asylum? Or is this set in a strange future? Is the Confederation friend or foe? Has the world been invaded by aliens? Who are the “shadow-beings” that invade his thoughts when he closes his eye? Did he write the story he's been reading? Is it a story or an actual report? He sounds like Moran after writing his report of Molloy's disappearance – in the book of the same name – and wondering if Molloy really existed. So many questions.

Anna arrives with his breakfast but she is not the same woman as in the photo; she has aged and could be anything between forty-five and sixty; the photograph apparently was taken thirty-five years earlier. She encourages him to breakfast before the meal gets cold but first his pills which he stubbornly only agrees to take if she gives him “a real kiss” which she does without squabbling with him. The pills make him twitch so badly that he can't feed himself; Anna takes over.

Afterwards she wants to know if he needs to use the bathroom and whether he requires any assistance. Yes, he does and no, he doesn't. Nothing is glossed over:

The pyjama bottoms fall to his ankles; he sits down on the toilet seat; his bladder and bowels prepare to evacuate their pent-up liquids and solids. Urine flows from his penis, first one stool and then a second stool slide from his anus, and so good does it feel to be relieving himself in this manner that he forgets the sorrow that took hold of him just moments before. Of course he can manage on his own, he tells himself. He's been doing it ever since he was a little boy, and when it comes to pissing and shitting, he's as capable as any person in the world. Not only that, but he's an expert at wiping his ass as well.

Beckett, of course, never shied away from the scatalogical. The novella The End springs to mind here. Blank cannot get his pyjama bottoms back up and Anna has to help him. He wants to bathe but agrees to a sponge bath instead. The woman's ministrations cause him to have an erection:

We're feeling frisky today, Mr. Blank, Anna says.

I'm afraid so, Mr. Blank whispers, his eyes still shut. I can't help it.

If I were you, I'd feel proud of myself. Not every man your age is still . . . still capable of this.

It has nothing to do with me. The thing has a life of its own.

With that and without fuss or further discussion she relieves Mr. Blank of his problem. This recalls Beckett's short story 'Enough' although the method of release differs. Did you notice no inverted commas around the speech? Another Beckettism.

Afterwards Anna provides Mr. Blank with some more tantalising clues. He had apparently sent her on a dangerous “mission” (his word) which she barely survived; she was once married to a man called David Zimmer who has now died, something Blank is only indirectly responsible for. And yet she is clearly devoted to the old man, above and beyond the call of duty. He apologises for everything he's put her through:

I'm sorry

Don't be. Without you, I never would have met David in the first place. Believe me Mr. Blank, it isn't your fault. You do what you have to do, and then things happen. Good things and bad things both. That's the way of it. We might be the ones who suffer, but there's a reason for it, a good reason, and anyone who complains about it doesn't understand what it means to be alive.

She helps him dress – all in white, “a special request . . . [f]rom Peter Stillman” – and then leaves. Mr. Blank, all dressed in white, now that's got to be a clue for us and not him.

At this point we're 25 pages into a 130 page novella. I haven't got a clue what's going on but my head is buzzing with ideas.

Did you ever watch Masters of Science Fiction when it was on? There was one episode called 'A Clean Escape' that's very similar to this, a man in a room who can't remember. It's based on a short story by John Kessel. The man happens to be the president of the United States, the very president who finally pressed the button. Outside, although in the safety of his bunker he is unaware of it, a nuclear winter is raging. The problem is he can't retain memories for more than forty-five minutes. The whole episode revolves around a female psychiatrist's efforts to get him to remember so that he can be held accountable for his actions.

Was something similar happening here? Is that why Flood wants to see him? Is that why Auster goes to pains to point out that he's an ex-policeman? Are there no more policemen?

In the previous post I mentioned that the Guardian said that “[f]ans wouldn't be able to resist consuming [this book] whole” but what I didn't realise was that there's a clue here, the word “fans”. I think most people would agree that if you're going to start reading Beckett then The Unnamable should probably not be your first port of call. The book's intertextuality would miss you. Names like Molloy, Watt and Murphy would be simply that, names, however “fans” of Beckett's writing would recognise these as important touchstones – each of these three has their own book for starters – and it's the same with the world Auster has created for Mr. Blank, it's populated with names (or is it characters?) from his previous books: Peter Stillman is a character (actually two characters, father and son) in City of Glass, the first book in the New York Trilogy; David Zimmer is the main character in The Book of Illusions; James P. Flood appeared first in Moon Palace and In the Country of Last Things Auster describes the odyssey of nineteen year-old Anna to find her brother in a post-apocalyptic vision of New York, told to a childhood friend in a letter that will never be read. There are more. I won't list them all. But what connects all these disparate characters? Mr. Blank, that's who. And who is he?

Fans will pick up on more subtle stuff. The story that Mr. Blank begins to read about the Confederation, “why does the prose sound like something written in the nineteenth century?” Perhaps because the American transcendentalism of the early to middle nineteenth century is a major influence in him, specifically authors like Hawthorne and Melville. The subtle inside jokes and a-ha moments like this are endless. For example, a character called Fanshawe makes an appearance later in the book too. Fanshawe is a novel written by Nathaniel Hawthorne. A certain Mr. Trause also pops his head in too.

There is a precision to Auster's writing that suggests Beckett's mature prose where he meticulously covers all options in painstaking (and sometimes painful to read) detail. The language is stripped down (shades of the mature Beckett again) and reads like a report which we are told at the start of the book this is. In an interview Auster had this to say:

It's stripped-down because it's the language of the report. That's the form of the novel; it's a report. So it doesn't read necessarily like a piece of fiction. So much the better, as far as I'm concerned.

This is a fascinating read but the ending may well frustrate many because much is not answered. People who love shows like Lost where we're drip-fed clues will get caught up in this book right away but woe betide the network if that last episode doesn't answer all their questions. Auster does provide us with an answer if you've not worked it out yourself. No, Blank's not the president and, no, aliens haven't landed on earth. Having read a great number of reviews of the book I can tell you that not everyone was pleased with how things get wrapped up. And some of these were “fans” too. But there are fans and there are fans. I'm the kind of fan of Beckett's who spends six weeks researching Waiting for Godot and who gets silly-excited when I discover some nibblet of information that I never knew before.

I wouldn't go so far as to say: “Don't read this book,” because you don't need to know his entire canon by heart to get where he's coming from. In the same interview he says:

People who come upon this book not having read anything of mine before will read it in one way, and I'm hoping that there's enough in it so that it will be compelling. That's the gamble I've made. People who are familiar with my work will get more out of it, I think. But I don't think not knowing is going to make for a bad experience. At least, I hope not.

How do I feel about Auster after reading this book? I want to read more and soon. I've already ordered a copy of The New York Trilogy from Amazon. At 1p plus postage, what's there to lose?

Travels in the Scriptorium Part I

2009-11-02T00:01:00.002Z

I knew very little about Paul Auster when I bought this book. I knew the name. I knew of him and that he was a respected, probably American, author. It was certainly why I picked the book up although I suspect its size – it's only 130 pages long – would have been the first thing that attracted me to it. The austere cover was striking, although I'm sure I only saw the book's spine; I doubt the book's title had even registered at this point, however, once it did, this would have been a definite plus.

I expect I flipped the book over in my hand and scanned the blurb. I sometimes do I sometimes don't; it's a mood thing. Since I can't remember – I bought the book well over a year ago – let's assume that I did. This is what I would have read:

An old man wakes alone in an almost empty room, unable to remember his past. The only clues to his identity are a manuscript, a pile of photos and a visitor called Anna who sparks memories of forgotten love and tragedy. A mystery about memory, growing old and our responsibilities, Travels in the Scriptorium is a brilliant new work from one of America's best-loved and lost intriguing storytellers.

That I can tell you here and now would have done it for me but now I've begun to write about it I'm sure I opened the book and read the first page:

The old man sits on the edge of the narrow bed, palms spread out on his knees, head down, staring at the floor. He has no idea that a camera is planted in the ceiling directly above him. The shutter clicks silently once every second, producing eighty-six thousand four hundred still photos with every revolution of the earth. Even if he knew he was being watched, it wouldn't make any difference. His mind is elsewhere, stranded among the figments in his head as he searches for an answer to the question that haunts him

Who is he? What is he doing here? When did he arrive and how long will he remain? With any luck, time will tell us all. For the moment, our only task is to study the pictures as attentively as we can and refrain from drawing any premature conclusions.

There are a number of objects in the room, and on each one a strip of white tape has been affixed to the surface, bearing a single word written out in block letters. On the bedside table, for example, the word is TABLE. On the lamp the word is LAMP. Even on the wall, which is not strictly speaking an object, there is a strip of tape that reads WALL. The old man looks up for a moment, sees the wall...

And that's probably as far as I went. Is this a cell or a room in a hospice? Is he prisoner or patient? Based on the above information, would you buy the book? Yes, or no? Fine, then I'm done. This could be my shortest book review ever.

I read the book in two sittings one night after the other although once I'd reached the halfway point I was so embroiled in the story that the man is reading that I wanted to continue. Forty pages is usually my limit at one sitting, after that my concentration starts to go and I need to do something different, answer e-mails or maybe something physical. That I'd read sixty-five pages and wanted to go on does say something.

I didn't mention the quote on the cover. I didn't mention it before because I don't generally pay much attention to quotes no matter how illustrious a paper they're from. This particular one was from the Guardian:

Fans won't be able to resist consuming it whole.

For what it's worth I concur with that assessment. Had I become a fan by this point though? It's probably safe to say, no, but I was well on the way to becoming one. My one overriding fear at this point was that I was going to get to the end and he was going to let me down.

A part of me would like to leave you there. You already know more than I did. In fact I'm going to. Another post will go up in a couple of minutes which will talk about what I've learned if you're interested but I'm still not going to tell you what the book is about and I am absolutely not going to give away the ending, which, depending on who you are will either have you slapping your forehead and exclaiming: “How could I not have seen that? All the clues were there.” or chucking the book across the room going: “Was that it? For Christ's sake, was that it?” Personally I veered towards the former although I have to confess to being a bit disappointed that what I had imagined in my head was so far from the mark.

And with that I'll leave you. If your curiosity gets the better of you then there's a link to the second part of this review below.

Part II

Where are all the poetical prodigies?

2009-10-29T15:25:00.001Z

If you were asked to think of a prodigy, who would jump to mind? I would suggest that that list would be topped by Mozart. Wee Wölfi began to play the harpsichord when he was 3. By 5 he was performing publicly and had begun composing. But were these early pieces any good? Well, good enough at the time but the earliest work by him that is still performed today is Exsultate, Jubilate K165, written in 1773 when he was 17. (The K refers to Köchel, a musicologist who catalogued Mozart's complete output which makes Exsultate, Jubilate his 165^th composition.)

Musical prodigies come ten a penny. If I restrict myself to the composers, though, there are a few well-known names there who made careers out of music: Mendelssohn was 12 when he started; Nino Rota and Korngold (best known as composer of film music) began at 11; Bizet entered the Paris Conservatoire at age 10 whilst Menotti began writing music at the tender age of 7, as did Paganini, Barber and Rheinberger.

So, how do you decide who's the greatest? According to the Times:

Ask most people to name classical music’s greatest child prodigy and you’d guess they would probably say Mozart. Not according to a poll in next month’s BBC Music Magazine, where Mendelssohn comes top, followed by Schubert. And Mozart? Not even in the top 10.

This rum result is partly to do with a condition of the poll, carried out by the country’s “most renowned” critics. The composers’ works had to be written before they were 18. And although little Wolfgang might have begun scribbling at the age of 5, he did nothing of great note, apparently, until his Symphony in A Major, K201, written when he was already 18. Quite a put-down for a man who composed more than 600 works before his death, aged 35. – TimesOnline, May 17^th 2009

There was a recent television series highlighting the talents of Alex Prior (born 5 October 1992 in London) who began composing when he was only 8 and has already got 4 symphonies, 4 concertos, 2 ballets and an opera under his belt; the programme we saw concerned his Concerto for 4 soloists and orchestra, Velesslavitsa, the premiere of which featured 4 child prodigies as the soloists that were hand-picked during the series.

Just what is a child prodigy, though?

According to American developmental psychologist Dr David Henry Feldman, typically it is a child younger than 10 who is performing at the level of a highly trained adult in a very demanding field of endeavour. – thestar.com

Other sites say they can be anything up to 13 or even 15.

Musical prodigies are well known, as are science prodigies, maths prodigies, chess prodigies, but where are the poets?

In the future I won't need a Köchel to come along and catalogue my poems. I've been cataloguing and numbering them since I was 13 and by the time I'd reached 17 I'd already passed the 400 mark, 99% of which were eminently forgettable. I was first published at 16 and continued to see my name in print from then on. But was I a prodigy? I think not.

Wikipedia has a list of child prodigies and from it I extracted the poets:

Ervin Hatibi published his first poems at 14 in the major journals of the time, and, at 15, published his first book - well acclaimed by the critics.

William Cullen Bryant was published at 10 years old; at 13 years old, he published a book of political-satire poems.

Thomas Chatterton started as a poet at 11 years old. He began writing the poems that would make him famous at 12 years old.

Lucretia Maria Davidson, by 11 years old, had written some poems of note; before her death at 16 years old, she received praise as a writer.

Marjorie Fleming was a published poet before her death at 8 years old.

H. P. Lovecraft recited poetry at 2 years old and wrote long poems at 5 years old.

Other than Lovecraft – and who thinks of him as a poet nowadays? – I knew none of the names. So I started to see what I could discover on my own.

Milton was my first discovery, the only one I know as a poet. He started writing when he was 10.

Frankly, I don't think 10 is that amazing. And I certainly expect there are loads of poets out there who began writing by the age of 12. The question is: Have they written anything memorable? And I bet the answer is: No. I still have all my juvenilia. Almost all the paintings and music are long gone following a stupid self-righteous clear out about twenty years ago but the poems survived. I can think of very little I own from before I was twenty apart from them. A letter opener from Arran (or perhaps Dunoon) is the only other thing that jumps to mind although it's an ugly thing with some animal's leg as a handle. I have no idea what possessed me to buy it even at the time.

One prodigy I found online is a young girl called Akiane Kramarik, who is 13 now. You can read a selection of the poetry she has written between the ages of 7 and 11 here. She's probably better known as a painter and, while I'm not particularly taken by her work’s New Age-ness, I can't criticise her technique. I have seen far worse made into mass-market prints. One has to wonder if Mozart would be marketed more vigorously nowadays and I guess knowing what I do about Leopold (his dad) the answer would be: Yes.

I'm going to have a look at one of Akiane's poems on the subject of love. I'm assuming she was 11 when she wrote this one and, of course, one has to ask: What does a kid of 11 know about love?

Love

Love is never alone
Love is always crowded
Love is the shared self
We cannot own our love
And we cannot teach our love
The longest breath of love
is the shortest distance to heaven
The deepest life is love
The deepest love is an embrace
Love is not rest
Love is peace
Love is the purpose

Seriously I wonder how many times people have attempted this very poem? And how do you write about love without dipping into the vast well of clichés that exist revolving around it? That's a hard one. I suppose it's one of those we need to get out of our system before we move on. Akiane's chosen to go down the 1 Corinthians 13 route and that's just fine, agape love is as valid a subject as any of the other loves. The problem is, how to improve on the scripture:

⁴Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. ⁵It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. ⁶Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. ⁷It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

I actually think she's done a fair job. And I so badly want to write ". . . for a kid," but I'm not going to. The whole thing about prodigies is that they need to be measured on adult terms – Akiane is either a good poet, full stop, or she's not. On the whole I think what's she's produced is the kind of stuff that a lot of kids who've undergone a strict religious upbringing might have done; yes, she's a bit precocious but I don’t see her, poetically anyway, as a child genius; her art is another thing entirely.

My very first poem was about love, the unrequited kind. 275 poems later I finally got round to trying to define love and it's just about as bad as you'd expect with a line like "Olives, vines and marble pillars" in it but I don't mind sharing poem #1 because I realised when I'd written it that I had something, didn't know quite what and it was years before it became clear to me:

Dreams Don't Come True

I put my arm around her shoulder,
I touched her skin:
So soft.
It was all unreal, a fantasy.
Her hands were on her lap.
Her lips were sealed.
So cold.
She was so cold.
And I,
So helpless.

A beautiful thing,
Lovely and fair,
Colder than ice,
Heart of stone,
She and I alone:
And she was so cold.

I talked a little,
She laughed me off.
Like the fly on the horse's back,
Crushed my dream,
Crushed my hope,
Squashed my life, my soul.

And she was so cold.

I never dated my poems back then but I'd say I was 13 at the time. And I'm sure it's not the worst poem that a 13-year-old has written but I would never pretend to be any kind of prodigy. For all that it's still a poem that still manages to please me 37 years later.

Someone said – I forget who and, for once, Google has let me down – that no one should be allowed to be a writer until they reach 30. By 30 I'd just about given up writing. Oh, I'd been published, loads of times, but that stopped mattering to me and I hardly sent anything out and finally I stopped writing completely. And then I hit my mid-thirties and began writing novels. Who the hell knew there was a novelist in there? Certainly not me. And after two novels the poetry came back.

The point that guy (I think it was a guy) had to make is to do with life experience. If I can twist a scripture to my own ends: When I was a child I wrote as a child but when I became a man I wrote like a man. There are two things that contribute to someone becoming a half-decent writer: reading and living, and both take time. Add these to natural talent and you might just have a fighting chance of making it as a writer.

I'm not sure that this applies to the other arts. As one can see by Akiane's paintings, they stand up against the paintings of adults; you would never know that Mozart's Symphony No 1 had been written by a child (I have a copy so I can say for sure) although it is understandably derivative. Mind you if you're going to copy anyone then the Bachs are a good place to start.

Another prodigy I ran across was Mattie Stepanek who died recently at the age of 13; he suffered from a rare form of muscular dystrophy, dysautonomic mitochondrial myopathy. He has been hailed not only as a poet but a peacemaker. Precociously intelligent from all accounts, he began writing poetry at age 3 to cope with the death of his brother. He had apparently written hundreds of poems by the time he was 6. Only time will tell if he will be remembered or not but I suspect his response to the events of September 2001 might just be. It's hard to say. So many artists responded to that event that his poem might just get lost in the fray.

FOR OUR WORLD – Written September 2001

We need to stop.
Just stop.
Stop for a moment…
Before anybody
Says or does anything
That may hurt anyone else.
We need to be silent.
Just silent.
Silent for a moment…
Before we forever lose
The blessing of songs
That grow in our hearts.
We need to notice.
Just notice.
Notice for a moment…
Before the future slips away
Into ashes and dust of humility.

                       Stop, be silent, and notice…
                       In so many ways, we are the same.
                       Our differences are unique treasures,
                       We have, we are, a mosaic of gifts
                       To nurture, to offer, to accept.
                       We need to be.
                       Just be.
                       Be for a moment…
                       Kind and gentle, innocent and trusting.
                       Like children and lambs.
                       Never judging or vengeful
                       Like the judging and vengeful.
                       And now, let us pray.
                       Differently, yet together,
                       Before there is no earth, no life,
                       No chance for peace.

After him I'm struggling. Why?

Prodigies tend to appear almost exclusively in "rule-based" fields like music, chess or mathematics. Sam Vaknin, author of Malignant Self Love - Narcissism Revisited, likens child prodigies to computers: Both excel in symbol manipulation, but fail to impress when it comes to the fuzzier undertakings.

“Fields like literature require maturity and life experience,” he explains. “Prodigies, no matter how gifted, rarely possess the requisite emotional spectrum, an acquaintance with the nuances and subtleties of human relationships, or the accumulated knowledge that comes from first-hand exposure to the ups and downs of reality.”

Some scholars, however, have argued that brilliant young minds like H.P. Lovecraft (who composed long poems by age 5) and John Stuart Mill (who knew several dead languages by age 8) were indeed gifted enough to qualify as prodigies. But they are in the minority. – 'Whiz Kids', Forbes.com

So what do you think? Is there a poetic prodigy out there who could stand shoulder to shoulder – metaphorically speaking – with Eliot or Yeats or Heaney or even Kipling? I await you comments.

The Master and Margarita

2009-10-26T03:00:00.001Z

When God created light, the first shadow was born – tagline to the film Shadow Builder

This is a very long review so for those of you reading this in your lunch hour let me cut to the chase. The Master and Margarita can be reasonably called the greatest novel to come out of Communist Russia, a work of magical realism, a pre-apocalyptic novel, a love story, a biting political satire or simply a damn good read if you can get over the fact that most of the names are thirty-odd characters long. But even that doesn't really cover it so there's no way in this review I can do this book justice. Oh, I can hurl superlatives at it but I won't have space to back them all up. To that end at the end of this post there will be links to numerous lengthy articles (I've been reading them for the past two days solid) which underscore much of what I'm about to say. It's the kind of book you'd expect a writer to produce after working on it for eleven years. It is a book every writer should read.

There are many levels to this book and numerous interpretations. The Master and Margarita was not, however, its original title; one of its working titles was Satan in Moscow[1] but even that is not an especially helpful title although it does set the scene. A more accurate, if unwieldy, title might have been The Master, the Master, the Master, the Master and Margarita because there are four main masters in this book, all with their own disciples. Here they are:

the Master of the title, a historian who, when he wins a hundred-thousand rubles in a lottery connected to a state loan, quits his job to work on a book – we never learn his true name
Jesus Christ (or Yeshua Ha-Nozri[2] as he is known in the book), a character in the Master's novel
Pontius Pilate, the subject of the Master's novel, the Prefect (governor) of the Roman province of Judaea from AD 26–36
the devil who decides to visit Moscow in the 1930s in the guise of a professor called Woland, a character clearly reminiscent of Goethe's Mephistopheles and, to a lesser extent, perhaps Milton's Satan.

Some of the disciples are Margarita, the Master's lover; Matthew Levi, the only one of Jesus' followers to take an active role in the book although he's something of an amalgam of both the apostle and the evangelist; Banga, Pilate's faithful dog, the only creature who truly loves him and Woland's small entourage: Korovyev (also known as 'Fagot'), Behemoth [3], Azazello [4], Abadona [5] and the witch, Hella, who all serve as his proxies, an apparently typical Russian Orthodox representation of the devil.

Many of these characters have counterparts in the real world: for example, it is generally accepted that Woland represents Stalin (his parallel in the Master's book being Emperor Tiberius); Azazello is immediately recognizable as one of the chiefs of the secret police (his parallel in the Master's book is Afranius); the Master is based on Bulgakov himself – no prizes there – although he really stands for all the disenfranchised writers of the time and Margarita was inspired by his third wife, Yelena Shilovskaya, who actually put the finishing touches to the novel after Bulgakov's death in 1940 although one or two minor inconsistencies still exist.

This is not to say that these are the only significant characters, in fact the book opens with two key characters. Ivan Nikolayevich Ponyryov is a 23 year old poet who goes by the pseudonym 'Bezdomny', which means 'homeless' in Russian. Mikhaïl Alexandrovitch Berlioz is editor of "a fat literary journal" and chairman of the board of one of the major Moscow literary associations, MASSOLIT, a fictitious organisation that takes the place of the Union of Soviet Writers which, after 1934, one effectively had to be a member of in order to work as a writer.

Later in the novel MASSOLIT is attacked when Korovyev and Behemoth attempt to enter Massolit headquarters without identity cards:

"Your identification cards?" asked the citizeness in her turn.

"My lovely…" Korovyev began tenderly.

"I'm not lovely," the citizeness interrupted him.

"Oh, isn’t that a pity," said Korovyev, disenchanted, and continued: "Well, all right, if you don't wish to be lovely, which would have been most pleasant, you don't have to be. So then, to be satisfied that Dostoevsky is a writer, surely it's not necessary to ask for his identification card? Just take any five pages from any of his novels, and you'll be satisfied without any identification card that you're dealing with a writer. I actually suspect that he didn't even have an identification card."

[…]

"You're not Dostoevsky," said the citizeness, knocked out of her stride by Korovyev.

"Well, who knows, who knows?" he replied.

"Dostoevsky is dead," said the citizeness, but not very confidently somehow.

"I protest!" exclaimed Behemoth heatedly. "Dostoevsky is immortal!"

The Master and Margarita had, as you can imagine, a hell of a time getting published in Russia, even after the death of Stalin, so it was quite an achievement when on 19^th December 2005 some 80 million Russians sat down to watch the first episode of an almost 10-hour long television adaptation of the novel which is more than tuned into The Ed Sullivan Show to watch The Beatles (73.3 million). That is astounding when you consider that most of the first episode consists of three blokes talking on a bench. In between that we have a couple of guys talking in a colonnade; the only real action takes place in the last few seconds – CSI it is not. The significance of this book to Russians cannot be minimised, especially to those who grew up in the former USSR; they understand the analogies, know who is symbolic of whom, and can relate to the emotions, motivations, and weaknesses of the characters.

Does this mean that if you are unfamiliar with Soviet history, Russian culture, or the fact that this is a satire you won't appreciate the book? The Master and Margarita has been described as Solzhenitsyn crossed with Lewis Carroll – now, are Carroll's Alice books simply children's stories or a satire on the ordered, earnest world of Victorian England? Bulgakov's novel works just fine as a plain ol' story with a beginning, middle and an end. When I first read it thirty years ago my knowledge of Russian history was sketchy at best and I treated it simply as a fantasy novel, in fact the blurb on the back of my copy, which I still own, has this quote:

The fantastic scenes are done with terrific verve and the nonsense is sometimes reminiscent of Lewis Carroll . . . on another level. Bulgakov's intentions are mystically serious. You need not catch them all to appreciate his great imaginative power and ingenuity. – Sunday Times

The key word here is 'fantastic' and what is interesting is that it is the supposed real world of 1930s Moscow that contains all the fantastical elements whereas the chapters set in Judea in the first century are presented as cold, hard facts: Bulgakov has turned everything on its head. Bulgakov's Yeshua Ha-Nozri is quite unlike the Jesus of the gospels, sometimes funny, sometimes cowardly, manipulative even – very human. The same can be said for Bulgakov's Woland. In that respect the cover of the latest translation by Hugh Aplin, published by Oneworld Classics, is misleading. This is not how the devil appears in the book, even at the end when he sheds his 'Woland' persona. He's certainly not evil incarnate in fact he seems more interested in making the lives of bad people more miserable rather than rewarding them for keeping the faith.

Bulgakov's Satan seeks out the essence of each individual life and sees to it that each is transformed into an eternal form of that essence. He is the embodiment of merciless truth, the kind of truth which does not allow for questions of mercy, compassion, or forgiveness. […] Like the artist, Satan discerns the essence of a life and transforms it into its pure form.[6]

He is actually capable of benevolence. He is far more subtle and sophisticated than the biblical Devil; "he acts more as a counterpart to God rather than his opponent."[7]

We get to meet Woland in the very first chapter of the novel. He is walking through the Patriarch's Ponds area of Moscow one hot evening in May (one might say 'devilishly hot') when he chances upon Bezdomny and Berlioz sitting on a bench engrossed in a heated discussion regarding the existence, historically at least, of Jesus Christ. Eyewitness accounts vary but the narrator of the novel describes the stranger as follows:

First of all: the person described did not limp on either leg, and was neither small nor enormous in stature, but simply tall. As far as his teeth are concerned, on the left side he had platinum crowns, and on the right gold ones. He wore an expensive grey suit and foreign shoes the same colour as the suit. He had his grey beret cocked jauntily over one ear, and under his arm he carried a walking stick with a black handle in the shape of a poodle's head. To look at, he was about forty plus. Mouth a bit crooked. Clean-shaven. Dark-haired. The right eye black, the left for some reason green. Eyebrows black, but one higher than the other. In short – a foreigner.

Just before this Berlioz was witness to what he thought was a hallucination but what actually turned out to be a semi-transparent Korovyev which he describes as follows:

On his head a jockey's peaked cap, I little checked jacket, tight and airy too… A citizen almost seven feet tall, but narrow at the shoulders, unbelievably thin, and a physiognomy, I beg you to note, that was mocking.

"Well I'll be damned!" he exclaims. Now, that's the kind of thing we all say without thinking about it along with expressions like 'devilish business', 'the devil knows where', 'go to the devil' and 'what the devil for' – we never think twice about them but you start to notice these more and more in this book. Everyone calls on the devil. Why else would the devil appear? He was invited.

Woland's discussion with the two men focused on two areas, their atheism – and resultant belief that, assuming there is no God, they are somehow in control over their own destinies – and the historicity of Jesus of Nazareth. The latter he 'proves' by describing in detail the conversation between Jesus and Pilate prior to Jesus being sentenced saying that he had witnessed it personally; the former he proves by telling Berlioz that he would miss an appointment later in the day, that the professor intended staying in Berlioz's flat and finally by foretelling the manner of his death (that he would be beheaded by a woman) although this proof is lost on Berlioz, at least until later in the book. Slipping on spilled sunflower oil at the end of chapter three (which Woland had mentioned in passing in the first chapter), Berlioz falls onto the rails of an oncoming tram-car, which severs his head.

The question one needs to answer is: did the devil make that happen? I don't believe he did. He was simply at the right place, at the right time to relate what was just about to happen. Of note is the novel's epigraph, from Goethe's Faust:

"...so who are you in the end?"

"I am part of that power which eternally
desires evil and eternally works good."

How can Berlioz's death do anyone good? Well it starts a sequence of events that sends his companion into an asylum where he meets the Master who has been an inmate there for four months. This is an experience that ultimately changes the course of his life perhaps more than his encounter with Woland. As for Berlioz, we will meet him again later, in parts.

I mentioned that the Master winds up in an asylum. The breaking point for him has been an inability to get his novel about Pilate published. The editorial board reject it leaving the editorial secretary Lapshennikova, "a girl whose eyes were crossed towards her nose from constant lying", to inform him that the publisher already has sufficient material for two years ahead, and therefore the question of printing the novel, as she put it, "did not arise".

The final straw, however, is that, even though they have rejected his manuscript, members of the board – one in particular, the critic Latunsky – attack him in the press. The name Latunsky is probably a contraction of the names of two real critics, who were rather hostile to Bulgakov. The first one was Osaf Semenovich Litovsky who was the head of the Central Committee for Repertoires from 1930 to 1937, and who had coined the term Bulgakovism after the first performances of The Days of the Turbins. The second is the critic Alexander Robertovich Orlinsky, who preached resistance against Bulgakovism. In this respect the Master is not an especially heroic figure in the way he keels over, so easily it seems, after a bit of bad press. Bulgakov is much more of a hero. In the book's Appendix we have extracts from some of letters and diary entries:

Letter – 28^th March 1930 – A very long letter, to the Soviet Government asking once again whether he could either be expelled, or at least be permitted to find gainful employment in the theatrical world:

"…when I carried out an analysis of my albums of press cuttings, I discovered that there had been 301 references to me in the Soviet press during my ten years in the field of literature, of these, three were complimentary, 298 were hostile and abusive."

We don't get to meet Margarita Nikolaevna until 221 pages into the novel. She is oblivious to the Master's whereabouts or even if he's alive or dead; in fact all she has of him is a fragment of the manuscript which she has saved from being burned which she reads over and over to try and find some comfort in it. While sitting on one of the benches beneath the Kremlin she hears "the approaching beats of a drum and the sounds of trumpets, a little out of tune" – it's a funeral procession, the late Mikhaïl Alexandrovitch Berlioz's as it happens, sans head as it also happens though, of course, she could not be aware of that at the time. We’ll catch up with his head later.

Margarita's eyes followed the procession, and she listened to the doleful bass drum producing that same repeated "boom boom boom" as it faded into the distance, and she thought: "What a strange funeral! And how depressing that 'boom' is. Oh, I’d truly pawn my soul to the Devil just to find out if he's alive or not! I winder who that is they’re burying?" (italics mine)

She doesn't have to wait long for an answer. A "somewhat nasal male voice" from behind her tells her: "Berlioz, Mikhaïl Alexandrovitch . . . the chairman of MASSOLIT." This time it's not Woland, it's one of his retinue, Azazello with an offer. Yes, you've guessed it.

Of course, quite a bit has happened between Berlioz's death and his funeral the misappropriation of his head notwithstanding (16 chapters worth). This is just before you think the entire book consists of Russian citizens being propositioned on park benches. The thing that everyone has been talking about has been a performance at the variety theatre the night before where Woland had appeared onstage with two other members of his retinue, Korovyev and Behemoth (in the guise of a large black cat), who crop up as a double act several times in the book and leave a trail of havoc in the wake. The main treats that were in store for the theatre audience were the decapitation of the compère, the distribution of new clothes and the showering of the audience with ten ruble notes. The compère gets his head back (and winds up in the cell next to Ivan in the asylum), the clothes vanish on the way home (leaving most of the audience half-naked in the street) and the money turns into bits of paper the next day (causing a furore among the city's taxi drivers for a start).

All of this Margarita is aware of. So when Azazello says that "a perfectly harmless foreigner" who is aware of the whereabouts of the Master would like to meet her she puts two and two together and realises – well Azazello states it in so many words – that this is an opportunity she can exploit. Azazello provides Margarita with some cream with instructions to cover herself in it. Later that day at the hour on which she has been instructed to she smears the cream over her body, is transformed into a witch and, following further instructions from. Azazello, proceeds to fly naked on a broom to the river for a meeting with Woland only pausing to wreck the critic Latunsky's apartment.

What the devil does Woland want with her? Quite simply to be the hostess of the Spring Ball of the Full Moon[8] which takes place annually during Easter week. This she agrees to and this is where she finally gets to meet the rest of poor Berlioz:

The limping Woland stopped beside his raised area, and immediately Azazello was before him with a dish in his hands, and on that dish Margarita saw a man's severed head with the front teeth knocked out. The most complete silence continued to reign, and it was broken only by a bell, incomprehensible in these circumstances, which was heard once in the distance, as if from a front entrance.

"Mikhaïl Alexandrovitch," Woland addressed the head quietly, and then the eyelids of the man who had been killed were raised a little, and in the dead face Margarita saw with a shudder living eyes, full of thought and suffering. "Everything came true, didn't it?" Woland continued, gazing into the head's eyes. "Your head was cut off by a woman, the meeting didn't take place, and I'm staying in your apartment. That is fact. And fact is the most obstinate thing in the world. But now we're interested in what happens next, and not this already accomplished fact. You were always an ardent advocate of the theory that upon the severance of the head, life ceases in a man, he turns to ashes and departs into unbeing. It's pleasant for me to inform you, in the presence of my guests, although they actually serve of proof of a quite different theory, that your theory is both well-founded and witty. There is even one amongst them, whereby everyone will receive in accordance with his beliefs. Let it come to pass! You depart into unbeing, and I shall take joy in drinking to being from the goblet into which you turn.

At this point the skull shrivels up and is transformed into a goblet with a hinged lid. Berlioz has had his proof.

Berlioz is not the only person to meet his final end at the ball. The informer Baron Von Meigel is killed paralleling the murder of Yehudah[9], another informer, by Pilate during the feast of the Passover. Bulgakov here may have had in mind the assassination of Kirov in 1934 although this is conjecture. Suffice to say when the book was first published in 1966 this section was heavily censored.

After the ball Woland grants Margarita a wish. Interestingly she chooses to use this to end the suffering of one of the other guests at the ball rather than selfishly ask to be reunited with the Master and so Woland grants her a second wish specifically for herself; within moments the Master is returned to her and shortly thereafter the immolated manuscript is returned intact to him. "Manuscripts don't burn," Woland tells him, one of the book's key sentences.

In May 1926, Bulgakov's apartment was searched by the OGPU (precursor to the NKVD and KGB), and his diaries and the manuscript of the novel Heart of a Dog were confiscated. After repeated protests, they were returned to him. He burned the diaries, and never again kept another. Ironically, it was the OGPU that preserved the diaries for posterity, as they had made copies.

By 1929, all of Bulgakov's works had been banned. He compared his situation to "being buried alive."[10]

Anyway you would think that would tie everything up nicely but that's not the end of the story for the Master and Margarita, there's an interesting (and unexpected) coda. And you might have thought that we'd also seen the last of Pilate too but he appears again, no longer a character in a novel but a soul who has been trapped for nigh on two thousand years tormented in the moonlight: "Twenty-four thousand moons in penance for one moon long ago; isn't

that too much?" Margarita wants to know. Well we find out what happens to him. As for Moscow, yes, we find out too what happens in the weeks following and how the citizens cope with what they've been through by pure rationalisation. We also hear what happens to a few key characters like the poet Bezdomny who are honest enough to admit to what they've experienced. At the end of the book Woland and his retinue revert to their true forms and we see four of them on horseback fleeing the scene of their crimes; despite the fact they're all on black horses the nod to Revelation's four horsemen of the apocalypse is too tempting to miss. Although he never lived to see it, Bulgakov is calling time on Stalinism.

The book begins asking epistemological questions and it ends with one too when Woland asks Matthew Levi:

[W]hat would your good do if evil did not exist, and what would the earth look like if shadows disappeared from it? After all, shadows are cast by objects and people. There is the shadow of my sword. But there are also shadows of trees and living creatures. Would you like to denude the earth of all the trees and all living beings in order to satisfy your fantasy of rejoicing in the naked light?

Nothing is black and white in this life. The Master and Margarita is a funny book but it touches on very serious issues concerning human freedom and the nature of good and evil. Is evil all bad?

But there is still more, one final question that we are left to ponder. In chapter 13 the Master tells Ivan that he knew what the last words of his novel about Pilate would be, "The fifth Procurator of Judea, the knight Pontius Pilate," and these coincidentally are the final words of The Master and Margarita suggesting that the novel the Master actually wrote is the one we have just read, a work of metafiction on top of everything else.

Reading back on this I have to confess what a poor job I have done trying to convey the full depth of this novel. Books have been written about it and rightly so. What is so impressive about the book is that all the cleverness is a bonus. A lot of clever books are simply not very reader-friendly and apart from the long names (which you simply have to learn to cope with if you want to read any great Russian literature) it is a carefully-plotted, well-written page-turner. It can be a bit wordy at times but that's a style thing. Don't try and read the book in one sitting and you'll probably be all right. And, did I mention, it's also very funny?

Let me leave you with the first episode of that Russian adaptation covering the first three chapters of the book. The physical descriptions are a bit off but the dialogue is very accurate.

***

There is a ton of material on this book online. So here's some further reading you might like to have a look at:

The complete novel online - 1967 translation – by Michael Glenny

The complete novel online – 1997 translation – by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky

The Master and Margarita – nice one-page summary with a lot of interesting discussion questions

The Master and Margarita website – a very comprehensive site indeed which include a page of links to essays online

A Duet In Three Movements: Bulgakov -- Olesha – Bulgakov

Naming things that aren’t: Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita

Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita: Why Can’t Critics Agree on What it Means?

Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita: the true content

Sympathy for the Devil – a 3-part article which includes a lot of personal recollections about the book from the likes of Roman Polanski who tried to get Warner Bros to make a film of the book

***

This new translation is available from Oneworld Classics priced at £8.99. As always with this publisher this is a nice edition on good paper supplemented by notes from the translator, a short biography and even a few black and white photographs.

REFERENCES

[1] Other early titles were The Black Magician (1929), The Prince of Darkness (1930) and The Great Chancellor (1934).

[2] Yeshua Ha-Nozri means Jesus of Nazareth in Aramaic

[3] A large biblical creature mentioned in the Book of Job, 40:15-24

[4] In the Old Testament apocryphal Book of Enoch 8:1-3, Azazel is the fallen angel who taught people to make weapons and jewellery

[5] In the Old Testament, Abaddon comes to mean "place of destruction," or the realm of the dead, and is associated with Sheol (see, for instance, Job 26:6, Proverbs 15:11, Proverbs 27:20 and Psalm 88:3, among others)

[6] Carol Arenberg, Mythic and Daimonic Paradigms in Bulgakov's Master i Margarita

[7] Marc Neininger, The Gnostic devil in Bulgakov's Master and Margarita

[8] This sun and its light, and the moon and its, are constantly present throughout the novel, in the "Moscow" chapters as well as in the "Bible" chapters.

[9] Judas Iscariot

[10] Mia Taylor, Sympathy for the Devil

Memories of Spike (part two)

2009-10-22T20:38:00.002+01:00

If you missed Part one you can find it here.

Radio

During the Second World War Spike served as a signaller in the 56th Heavy Regiment Royal Artillery, D Battery, as Gunner Milligan, 954024. He rose to the rank of Lance Bombardier and was about to be promoted to Bombardier when he was wounded in action in Italy. Subsequently hospitalised for a mortar wound to the right leg and shell shock, he was demoted by an unsympathetic commanding officer (identified in his war diaries as Major Evan 'Jumbo' Jenkins) back to Gunner.

After his hospitalisation, Milligan drifted through a number of rear-echelon military jobs in Italy, eventually becoming a full-time entertainer. He played the guitar with a jazz and comedy group called The Bill Hall Trio in concert parties for the troops. After being demobilised, Milligan stayed on in Italy playing with the Trio but returned to England soon after. While he was with the Central Pool of Artists (a group he described as composed "of bomb-happy squaddies") he began to write parodies of their mainstream plays that displayed many of the key elements of what would later become The Goon Show.

Milligan's professional entertainment career (after being demobbed) was on the radio. He appeared in – but more importantly wrote for a number of shows. His big break came in 1951 when he got the opportunity to write for a new show originally cowering under the unwieldy title Crazy People, featuring Radio's own Crazy Gang - "The Goons" subsequently truncated to simply The Goon Show.

Broadly speaking the Goons engaged in 'sound cartooning'. The kind of things that you would expect in a Tex Avery cartoon would happen on the show, holes could be picked up and carried to where needed and doors drawn on walls would open afterwards. The Wikipedia entry on The Goons is quite detailed and I would recommend you read the section on Surrealism. As a lead in to my favourite sketch I'll reproduce the section on transference of time:

If time causes calendars, calendars can cause time. If you drop a bundle of 1918 calendars on German troops in 1916, then they will all go home, thus shortening the war. (World War One (aka!), 22nd episode/ 8th series.) Two other shows with extreme examples of time transference are The Treasure in the Tower, 5th episode/8th series; and The Mysterious Punch Up the Conker, 19th episode / 7th series. (The famous 'What time is it Eccles?' scene.)

It was a huge success with the fans but not with the powers that be. From 1952 to 1956 alone, the producer, Peter Eton, faced thirty separate attempts from within the BBC to have the show taken off the air. Why?

Secombe, Bentine, Milligan and Sellers

Although The Goon Show did not deal explicitly in political satire, it was widely regarded at the time as subversive, both by the BBC hierarchy and the chief scriptwriter, Milligan. Among the prime objects of Goon humour were authority figures and officialdom generally, and the show specialised in sending up a whole host of hallowed British institutions. Privilege, patriotism, the parliament, the military and the Empire were all frequently lampooned. – Stuart Ward, British culture and the end of empire, p94

One has simply to look back on Milligan's life to see where all of that came from. Don't let the Irish-sounding name fool you, Spike was actually born in India, the son of a working-class military family in the dying days of the British Raj; he was fifteen before he returned to England, to Catford specifically, a stark contrast to India, and then a few years later he was off to war. He has said in so many words:

If all my youth had been spent in Catford, there would have been no Goon Show. . . I wasn’t consciously aware of it, but I had had enough of the British Empire. The Goons gave me a chance to knock people my father and I had to call ‘Sir’. Colonels. Chaps . . . with educated voices who were really bloody scoundrels.

Really what Milligan was doing was taking the anarchic comedy of the Marx Brothers and giving it his own peculiarly British twist. This is not to belittle him as an innovator but simply to point out that everyone builds on what has gone before; they develop it or react against it and Milligan did a bit of both.

When he began writing for the BBC, British radio was very mannered and polite and its shows were driven by catchphrases, as was the case the many music hall routines. The Goons maintained this tradition at least, one of the most popular being Little Jim's only line in most episodes (voiced by Milligan) where he simply exclaims: "He's fallen in the wah-taa!" Wikipedia has a section on The Goon Show running jokes here. Catchphrases from The Goon Show form the longest index entry in the 2002 publication of The Oxford Dictionary of Catchphrases.

Just as in a cartoon there are loose rules that exist in the gooniverse. Broadly speaking they're rules of convenience and conventional logic does not apply. To my mind the best example of this is the 'What Time is it, Eccles?' sketch from the Goon Show episode 'Mysterious Punch-up of the Conker'. The voices are Spike Milligan (Eccles – an amiable, well-meaning man with no wits or understanding) and Peter Sellers (Bluebottle – a young, lustful boy scout with a squeaky voice who normally gets blown up in each episode – shades of Kenny from South Park there):

Bluebottle:	What time is it Eccles?
Eccles:	Err, just a minute. I, I've got it written down 'ere on a piece of paper. A nice man wrote the time down for me this morning.
Bluebottle:	Ooooh, then why do you carry it around with you Eccles?
Eccles:	Well, umm, if a anybody asks me the ti-ime, I ca-can show it to dem.
Bluebottle:	Wait a minute Eccles, my good man...
Eccles:	What is it fellow?
Bluebottle:	It's writted on this bit of paper, what is eight o'clock, is writted.
Eccles:	I know that my good fellow. That's right, um, when I asked the fella to write it down, it was eight o'clock.
Bluebottle:	Well then. Supposing when somebody asks you the time, it isn't eight o'clock?
Eccles:	Ah, den I don't show it to dem.
Bluebottle:	Ooohhh
Eccles:	[Smacks lips] Yeah.
Bluebottle:	Well how do you know when it's eight o'clock?
Eccles:	I've got it written down on a piece of paper!
Bluebottle:	Oh, I wish I could afford a piece of paper with the time written on.
Eccles:	Oohhhh
Bluebottle:	'Ere Eccles?
Eccles:	Yah
Bluebottle:	Let me hold that piece of paper to my ear would you? - 'Ere. This piece of paper ain't goin'.
Eccles:	What? I've been sold a forgery!
Bluebottle:	No wonder it's stopped at eight o'clock.
Eccles:	Oh dear.
Bluebottle:	You should get one of them tings my grandad's got.
Eccles:	Oooohhh?
Bluebottle:	His firm give it to him when he retired.
Eccles:	Oooohhh
Bluebottle:	It's one of dem tings what it is that wakes you up at eight o'clock, boils the kettil, and pours a cuppa tea.
Eccles:	Ohhh yeah! What's it called? Um...
Bluebottle:	My granma.
Eccles:	Ohh... Ohh, ah wait a minute. How does she know when it's eight o'clock?
Bluebottle:	She's got it written down on a piece of paper!

Now, it's funny on paper. But it's hysterical live:

Years later this inspired a poem:

Twelve O'Clock, Union City

(for Spike Milligan)

I wanted the time
so a nice woman
wrote it down for me.

It was eight o'clock
and it was true then
and twice a day it

becomes true again
but then it isn't
so true anymore.

What goes round comes round.

9th May 1997

The Prince of Wales was a huge fan of The Goons (he even made his own Goon-esque skits) so either the show didn't live up to biting social satire that Milligan claimed he was aiming for, or Charles just didn't get the joke. Milligan caused a bit of a kerfuffle by calling him a "grovelling little bastard" on television in 1994 when he received the British Comedy Award for Lifetime Achievement. Milligan later faxed him, saying: "I suppose a knighthood is out of the question?" A knighthood (honorary because of his Irish citizenship) was finally awarded in 2000.

Poetry

Milligan wrote nonsense verse for children, the best of which is comparable with that of Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear, and (while depressed) serious poetry. His most famous poem, On the Ning Nang Nong, was voted the UK's favourite comic poem in 1998 in a nationwide poll:

<On the Ning Nang Nong

On the Ning Nang Nong
Where the Cows go Bong!
and the monkeys all say BOO!
There's a Nong Nang Ning
Where the trees go Ping!
And the tea pots jibber jabber joo.
On the Nong Ning Nang
All the mice go Clang
And you just can't catch 'em when they do!
So its Ning Nang Nong
Cows go Bong!
Nong Nang Ning
Trees go ping
Nong Ning Nang
The mice go Clang
What a noisy place to belong
is the Ning Nang Ning Nang Nong!!

This is not the poem that I remember best, however. It is a simple four-liner called 'Rain':

Rain

There are holes in the sky
Where the rain gets in
But they're ever so small
That's why rain is thin.

While still at school I parodied this poem:

The Irish

There are holes in their heads
Where their brains get in
But they're ever so small
That's why they are dim.

Spike was not beyond a parody himself:

I must go down to the sea again

I must go down to the sea again,
To the lonely sea and the sky;
I left my shoes and socks there -
I wonder if they're dry?

Or just taking the mickey:

A Silly Poem

Said Hamlet to Ophelia,
I’ll draw a sketch of thee,
What kind of pencil shall I use?
2B or not 2B?

Although best known for his nonsense poetry, Spike also wrote serious poetry. You can listen to him read some of his poems about depression here. But here are a couple of gentler pieces.

Love Song

If I could write words
Like leaves on an Autumn Forest floor
What a bonfire my letters would make.
If I could speak words of water
You would drown when I said
‘I love you’.

When I Suspected

There will be a time when it will end.
Be it parting
Be it death
So each passing minute with you
Pendulummed with sadness.
So many times
I looked long into your face.
I could hear the clock ticking.

Film

Probably Milligan's best known film role was an accident. While the Pythons were filming The Life of Brian it just so happened that Milligan was on holiday in Tunisia where the filming was taking place – he was visiting his old World War II battlefields. The Pythons were alerted to this one morning and he was promptly included in the scene that just happened to be being filmed.

In an interview in Australia he remembers the occasion:

Do you know what they never told me? They said, 'we want you to make up a speech to the followers of the slipper, a Biblical little speech to these people, with your back to them'. And so I said.

Surely they that goeth away do not seek the sun, they that cometh unto us do wee the serpent, and the apple of eel. We that go, therefore, wherefore, and though shall see, therefore, and thou shall cometh again. Surely as the day is red ...

I went on talking this shit, all the while, they're being told to move away. So when I turned, there was nobody there. They hadn't told me. That's why I walked sideways off the screen. – 'I think I caught up' with Spike Milligan, Union Recorder, v75 no 5

He disappeared again in the afternoon before he could be included in any of the close-up or publicity shots for the film.

After The Life of Brian, the main film that I associate Milligan with is The Bed-Sitting Room which he wrote along with John Antrobus. It started off as a one-act play which was adapted to a longer play in 1963 revived in 1967 and finally filmed in 1970 featuring such luminaries of the day as Ralph Richardson, Arthur Lowe, Rita Tushingham, Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Michael Hordern, Marty Feldman, Harry Secombe and Milligan himself.

One critic memorably described it as being "like Samuel Beckett, but with better jokes".

The play is set in a post-apocalyptic London, nine months after World War III ("the Nuclear Misunderstanding"), which lasted for two minutes and twenty eight seconds – "including the signing of the peace treaty". Anyone who has read my novel, Stranger than Fiction, will recognise my nod to Milligan there.

Michael Coveney describes it as:

a Cold War farce three years after "the next war", a ragbag of sketches, visual jokes and satirical barbs limed in a premonition of radiation-infused doom which climaxed in a cannibalistic ritual and, literally, the last dance, the extermination waltz. – The Independent, 23 June 2009

The whole Independent article is worth a read because it details Milligan's pretty much forgotten stage career, something I knew next to nothing of.

Here's the first ten minutes of the film. You'll note that the credits are in order of height.

One other point of note. If anyone is interested in what Jonathan Payne (the hero of my first two novels) looks like then take note of the short, bald man in the underground train; that's Arthur Lowe and he was the model for Jonathan.

This, of course, was not the only time we see Milligan on screen. Most people would assume his first screen role would have been in 1952's commercial flop Down Among the Z Men which drew heavily on his work for the Goons and in fact starred all four of the original members, but there were two appearances before this, in 1951, in Let's Go Crazy and Penny Points to Paradise along with Peter Sellers and Harry Secombe.

The only film I'm aware of in which he was involved as a writer – as opposed to an ad-libber – was The Great McGonagall, which featured Peter Sellers as Queen Victoria although he did 'write', and feature in, the sixth segment of The Magnificent Seven Deadly Sins, 'Sloth' which is a series of silent film clips showing people not being active. I seem to recall his part involved him standing under a tree with his hands in his pockets waiting for an apple to drop.

Health

Spike had his first major nervous breakdown in late 1951 (just after the start of Series 3 of The Goon Show) and spent two months in hospital. The pressure of writing the shows is given as a major contributing reason for the breakdown and the break-up of his first marriage. He was eventually diagnosed with manic depression as it was known then (bipolar disorder) and battled it for the rest of his life.

On one occasion, Peter Sellers had to lock his door against a knife-wielding Milligan; on another, Sellers and Harry Secombe broke into Milligan's dressing room, fearing he was suicidal. Over the years he did in fact attempt suicide. Eventually lithium was found to be the most effective treatment. He suffered from bipolar disorder for most of his life, having at least ten mental breakdowns. He was hospitalised more than once. His major coping strategy for this seems to have been his endlessly prolific writing which he states he absolutely had no choice but to do in order to extricate himself from the terrible blacknesses he fell into. Eventually, in 1994, he collaborated with Anthony Clare and they brought out a book, Depression and How to Survive It.

Summary

Reading back over all of this I feel it is such a cursory portrayal of the man. I've mentioned nothing of his infidelities, his large family, his work for animal rights or his charity work. For a man who started his career late in life (he was 33) he achieved so much. In trawling through the Net looking for stuff to include here I discovered for example that from the 1960s onwards Spike was a regular correspondent with the writer Robert Graves. Milligan's letters to Graves usually addressed a question to do with classical studies. Now, I would never have imagined that. Nor would I have imagined him being passionate about archaeology but it seems he was.

What I can say is that my life has been indelibly marked by its contact with him. Like all my heroes he wasn't perfect. He had a bad temper. He even shot a boy with an airgun for coming onto his property once. But then who's perfect? Language was never the same for me after him. He was every bit as important in my development as a writer as Philip Larkin and William Carlos Williams were.

He was a professional amateur, a dabbler; he was having too much fun to treat what he was doing too seriously and so there are rough edges everywhere with him but that is a part of his charm. He had no airs and graces. And when he died the papers gave him the most coverage anyone had had since the death of Winston Churchill. If you've enjoyed anything I've touched on here I would heartily recommend you follow up. At the very least treat yourself to a copy of Puckoon.

Foe

2009-10-19T02:32:00.001+01:00

History is nothing but a certain kind of story that people agree to tell each other – J M Coetzee

Titles are odd things. How do you decide on a title that will encompass a complete novel? What is the purpose of that title? Is it simply a label or is it a code, a way into the book? And, keeping this in mind, what do you make of the title of J. M. Coetzee's 1986 novel, Foe? Strangely enough my first thought was right, at least I thought it was; it was a name. As I started to read through the book I realised that it might also signify a foe, an opponent or, in fact, a number of opposing forces. But I'll come back to that.

What is the purpose of writing? Okay, big question. Let’s rephrase. Is the purpose of writing to provide answers? Up to a point, yes, and Coetzee does indeed provide a number of them. We learn who Foe is for starters. It's the writer Daniel Foe, better known to us nowadays as Daniel Defoe, best known as the author of Robinson Crusoe. And there will be few people out there who don't know his story. But is it a story? Yes and no. It's generally accepted that the book is based on Alexander Selkirk, a Scottish castaway who lived four years on the Pacific island called Más a Tierra, now renamed Robinson Crusoe Island, off the coast of Chile, but in reality Defoe had access to a much wider and more plausible range of potential sources of inspiration and the fact is castaway surgeon Henry Pitman is a more likely candidate as the model for Crusoe. Pitman's short book about his desperate escape from a Caribbean penal colony, followed by his shipwrecking and subsequent desert island misadventures, was published by J. Taylor of Paternoster Row, London, whose son William Taylor later published Defoe's novel.

But what if that's not how it happened? This is the premise behind Coetzee's novel. In Foe he proposes that a woman, Susan Barton, ends up on the island and is rescued along with Cruso (as he is known in the book) and Friday and that Cruso dies on the voyage home once they are rescued. Additionally he suggests that Susan is the one who actually approaches Daniel Foe in the hotel in Clock Lane where she happens to be staying and asked him to write their story. So what happened to Susan in the Defoe’s book because I think I would have noticed if there had been a woman running around half-naked in it?

Lots of people have ideas for books. You don't need to be a writer to have a good idea and Susan freely admits that she is no writer but a good idea is a good idea. And Foe agrees. It is a good idea . . . up to a point . . . but one that could be improved upon if he were not encumbered by the facts. The truth is all well and good but truth does not necessarily sell books because, most of the time, the truth is rather dull. How many stories have come down to us over the years where it’s obvious that the facts have been elaborated upon if not downright romanticised? Even Susan herself realises that "the idea of Cruso on his island is a better thing than the true Cruso."

But perhaps we should backtrack and explain how Susan came to be on the island. I'll let her do the talking:

'"Two years ago my only daughter was abducted and conveyed to the New World by an Englishman, a factor and agent in the carrying trade. I followed in search of her. Arriving in Bahia, I was met with denials and, when I persisted, with rudeness and threats. The officers of the Crown afforded me no aid, saying it was a matter between the English. I lived in lodgings, and took in sewing, and searched, and waited, but saw no trace of my child. So, despairing at last, and my means giving out, I embarked for Lisbon on a merchantman.

'"Ten days out from port, as if my misfortunes were not great enough, the crew mutinied. Bursting into their captain's cabin, they slew him heartlessly even while he pleaded for his life. Those of their fellows who were not with them they clapped in irons. They put me in a boat with the captain's corpse beside me and set us adrift. Why they chose to cast me away I do not know.'"

This she tells Cruso on arriving on the island but you'll notice the double inverted commas above. This is her telling Foe what she told Cruso. In fact the entire first two sections of the book, 106 pages, is in quotes; in Part I she is speaking – presumably directly to Foe – whereas Part II consists of a number of letters addressed to the writer expanding on what she has told him in Part I.

My first introduction to Robinson Crusoe, like many from my generation I'm sure, will have been the French production, The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe shown by the BBC first in 1965 and repeated on a regular basis. I didn’t remember a huge amount about the show but watching a few clips brought it all flooding back to me. The theme tune, however, and much of the incidental music is etched into my consciousness. I've just found a copy of it online and it's filled me with a warm fuzzy feeling. I actually teared-up for a second – seriously.

And, if you're really sentimental and have seven minutes to spare here's a link to a good quality recording of the entire Suite from the Adventures of Robinson Crusoe by Robert Mellin and Gian Piero Reverberi.

Robert Hoffmann will always be Crusoe for me, a civilised man despite the circumstances he found himself in. Coetzee's Cruso is nothing like him. And it's not simply time that has worn him down, he was never like that. The man Friday takes Susan to meet has lost all interest. He may well be monarch of all he surveys (to paraphrase the opening line of William Cowper's poem The Solitude Of Alexander Selkirk) but that is not saying much:

'In the hut there was nothing but the bed, which was made of poles bound together with thongs, crude in workmanship yet sturdy, and in a corner a pile of cured apeskins that made the hut smell like a tanner's storehouse (in time I grew used to the smell, and even missed it after I had put the island behind me; even today when I smell new leather I grow drowsy), and the stove in which the embers of the last fire were always left banked, for making new fire was tedious work.

'What I chiefly hoped to find was not there. Cruso kept no journal, perhaps because he lacked paper and ink, but more likely, I now believe, because he lacked the inclination to keep one, or, if he ever possessed the inclination, had lost it. I searched the poles that supported the roof, and the legs of the bed, but found no carvings, not even notches to indicate that he counted the years of his banishment or the cycles of the moon.'

Cruso offers scant explanation for any of this. He is clearly a man unused to having to answer for his actions and also one who has all but forgotten how to converse. Surely though he has had Friday for company for many years, has he not taught him to talk if not to aid communication between them then at least to wile away the hours? The answer is: no, but there is a good reason for that. Whereas the Friday I knew growing up was rescued by Crusoe, the Friday in this book came ashore with Cruso; he had been a slave onboard and what is more he had, according to Cruso, had his tongue removed by the slavers long before the two of them had become acquainted, So normal conversation was impossible and all Cruso had chosen to do was teach Friday to understand a few basic English words:

'One evening, as I was preparing our supper, my hands being full, I turned to Friday and said, "Bring more wood, Friday." Friday heard me, I could have sworn, but he did not stir. So I said the word "Wood" again, indicating the fire; upon which he stood up, but he did no more. Then Cruso spoke. "Firewood, Friday," he said and Friday went off and fetched wood from the woodpile.

'My first thought was that Friday was like a dog that heeds but one master; yet it was not so. "Firewood is the word I have taught him," said Cruso. "Wood he does not know."'

I asked earlier: Is the purpose of writing to provide answers? As far as this book goes the answers are as short as the answers Cruso provides Susan with; he answers but he rarely explains. He is the king of his island and although Susan can't fathom what law made him king she does her best to fit in with this odd couple. As the days pass though she ends up with more and more questions, questions that she – and, by extension, we – don't get answers to, don't expect to get answered and, indeed, never do get answered. Many of these are questions of a practical nature, for example, why had Cruso not tried to salvage items from the ship? Why had he contented himself with a knife as his only tool?

As the book progresses though Parts II and III Susan's questions become more and more philosophical in nature. When she finally returns to civilisation she finds herself living on its fringes not simply because she is carrying around Friday who is little more than deadweight but more because she cannot shake the island even though she only spends a year there, nothing in comparison to Cruso's fifteen. Indeed the wrench from the island proves too much for him and he dies on the homeward voyage, essentially "of woe, the extremest woe."

There are a number of issues that this book touches up but the three that crop up most in discussions are postcolonialism, feminism and postmodernism (and its tool, historiographic metafiction, a term which describes metafictional works that concentrate on histories and the historical). Let's take them one at a time:

The optimistic Robinson Crusoe, in Foe, becomes Cruso, a weak-minded mountain of insecurity who, unlike the original protagonist, lives sullenly on a desert island with only a few tools, no gun, no Bible, no writing utensils, and no records. He labours every day to construct gigantic terraces, walled by stone, which stand empty and barren, for he has nothing to plant. In Cruso's island (as opposed to Crusoe's island), there are no providential seeds, spiritual or natural. Such meaningless construction also symbolises the hollowness at the core of Empire-building. Cruso as colonist manqué is not only impotent but also ludicrous. - Ayo Kehinde, 'Post Colonial Literatures as Counter-Duscourse: J M Coetzee's Foe and the Reworking of the Canon'

Defoe's Friday has a voice. His Crusoe has discourses with him. It's all very civilised; his Friday (a handsome Caribbean youth with near-European features) quickly learns his place. Cruso's Friday (now cast as an African slave) has had his tongue cut out of him. Is Coetzee presenting the true face of colonialism here? Susan also wonders if Friday's mutilation was at the hand of Cruso. History is written by the victors or if not by them by the survivors.

The book came out in 1986 at a time of cumulative and violent civil conflict in South Africa. It was not especially well received because, presumably following a cursory reading of the text, the reviewers couldn't understand why he was "writing about the writing of a somewhat pedestrian eighteenth-century English novelist", to quote Eugene Marais, when the country was burning, quite literally in many places. Since then appreciation for it has grown.

The most glaring difference between the two accounts is the insertion into proceedings of a woman. At first you can accept her treatment by the males around her a just a sign of the times but although that might have been typical, Susan Barton is not. The fact that she would get on a ship to pursue her child shows her metal. Perhaps had she remained in England she would have settled down but exposure to the rigors of the island only serves to develop this side to her.

Whoever owned this book before me has made copious notes in pencil especially in Part I and I would lay money that it was a female considering the tone of some of these and the fact 'she' makes a point of highlighting every sexist remark. Susan answers Cruso back on a couple of occasions and then apologises later. My predecessor has written: "Why?" both times in the margins. Actually I'm grateful to whoever she was; her underlining and comments drew my attention to a lot of detail I might have otherwise missed on a first reading.

Cruso is not really interested in Susan. Specifically he is not really interested in her as a woman. He only uses her once and that is more a matter of proximity than anything else; she had spent the night in his bed trying to calm him while he had a fever and once it broke, well, she was just there. Friday, the younger man, never comes near her.

The real problems arise for Susan when she returns to England and encounters Foe, the successful author, who is interested in her tale but really wants to write her out of it.

"Successful author" is a barbed phrase here, a highly barbed phrase. Foe in the book, or Daniel Defoe in "real" life is the type of the successful author. Am I being classed with Foe, though my interest clearly lies with Foe’s foe, the unsuccessful author, worse authoress – Susan Barton? How can one question power or "success" from a position of power? One ought to question it from its antagonistic position, namely, the position of weakness. Yet, once again in this interview, I am being installed in a position of power – power in this case over my own text. – Tony Morphett, "Two Interviews with J. M. Coetzee. 1983 and 1987." Triquarterly 69 (1987) p456

At one point she writes to him:

'"Better had there been only Cruso and Friday," you will murmur to yourself: "Better without the woman." Yet where would you be without the woman? Would Cruso have come to you of his own accord? Could you have made up Cruso and Friday and the island with its fleas and apes and lizards? I think not. Many strengths you have, but invention is not one of them.'

And then later and very much to the point:

Return to me the substance I have lost, Mr Foe.

Susan's in an ontological battle, a battle to determine her own worth and role in life, be it as a character, a person or a muse. Is her story enough or can it only find its place "by setting it within a larger story"? She's acutely aware of losing her place in Foe's book but she's also aware that she's gradually losing herself; it may have begun on the island but it has continued, perhaps even accelerated, back in Britain; people look at her and they see an old gypsy. Much 180of her problem is due to the fact she is metaphorically chained to the childlike Friday who is completely lost in this new land and has come to depend on her for everything. She tries to get him on a ship bound for Africa but when she realises that she would just be sending him back to a life of slavery she finds she can't do it.

Foe, however, does disappear. For the whole of Part II he is in hiding, ostensibly from the bailiffs but more and more it looks as if he is hiding from Susan who has to make extraordinary efforts to trace him. She is like a character who refuses to be written out of her own story and this is where, for me, the book is simply about the confrontational aspects of writing, as the following text makes clear when, in Part III, after finally tracking him down, Susan ends up in bed with Foe:

I calmed Foe. 'Permit me,' I whispered – 'there is a privilege that comes with the first night that I claim as mine.' So I coaxed him till he lay beneath me. Then I drew off my shift and straddled him (which he did not seem easy with, in a woman). 'This is the manner of the Muse when she visits her poets,' I whispered, and felt some of the listlessness go out of my limbs.

'A bracing ride,' said Foe afterwards – 'My very bones are jolted, I must catch my breath before we resume.' 'It is always a hard ride when the Muse pays her visits,' I replied – 'She must do whatever lies in her power to father her offspring.' – italics mine

Such a curious turn of phrase! You'll need to read the whole conversation that precedes this to make sense of it though. The word author suggests authority but does that necessarily mean that every author write with authority?

Is the purpose of writing to provide answers? Perhaps. Is the true purpose of writing to provide questions? I would suggest that it is. And this book asks many questions: Why does Friday float on a log out to sea and toss petals? Who is the strange girl who calls herself 'Susan Barton' and stands watching Susan's lodgings? What's Friday's real story? Was he ever a cannibal? And who exactly is the narrator of Part IV? These are perhaps the obvious questions. There are others. Your head is probably full of them right now. I know mine is.

This is a book where much of the work will be done once the cover have been closed and I suspect the urge to pick it up and thumb through it will be strong especially after that final section to which my first response was quite simply: "Eh?" and I immediately went back to the start of Part IV and reread it. I felt very much the same after reading another metafiction recently, Paul Auster's Travels in the Scriptorium. Going back over it while writing this if there was one thing I noticed was how carefully Coetzee chooses his words but then his doctoral dissertation was on the early fiction of Samuel Beckett. I would read him again without question.

***

John Michael Coetzee is a South African writer who was educated at the University of Cape Town, where he received his master’s degree in 1963. He earned his doctorate in linguistics at the University of Texas in 1969. For two years, he taught at SUNY Buffalo, where he was arrested for protesting the Vietnam War. This arrest returned him to South Africa. He taught at the University of Cape Town since 1971 and was appointed Distinguished Professor of General Literature in 1999.

Between 1984 and 2003 he also taught frequently in the United States: at the State University of New York, Johns Hopkins University, Harvard University, Stanford University, and the University of Chicago, where for six years he was a member of the Committee on Social Thought.

His books are critically acclaimed, and he is the only writer to have been awarded the prestigious Booker Prize twice, once for The Life & Times of Michael K in 1983 and again for Disgrace in 1999.

In 2002 Coetzee emigrated to Australia. He lives with his partner Dorothy Driver in Adelaide, South Australia, where he holds an honorary position at the University of Adelaide. In 2003 he won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

***

Understandably a lot has been written about Foe and I would recommend the following for those who get captivated by it:

This is an expanded version of the review that appeared originally on the Canongate site.

Memories of Spike (part one)

2009-10-15T11:26:00.002+01:00

I've been trying to write this blog for over a year now. I kept meaning to start it but then I couldn't find my keys and then I realised just how much material I had to work with and the very thought of it made me tired. So, I'm not going to try and cover everything. What I'm going to talk about are the personal memories I have of Spike Milligan and why I'm so fond of him. I'm quite sure that someone else could write this and produce a completely different and equally valid list and that would be fine.

What I've learned to appreciate about Spike is his passion for language, that and his razor-sharp wit. In this article, the authors Clive Barker and Simon Trussler had this to say about him:

Milligan shows reality floundering on the wreckage of language, doubting the very possibility of communication through words. Our language has become either too refined or banal, sometimes both. It falsifies thought from the start. The only radical solution is to cut the ropes tying it to the fake, blowing it to pieces and putting the pieces together, in a new and revealing configuration. In the process of pursuing its inner logic, Milligan's language deviates more and more from something descriptively into something descriptively ordinary into something luminously funny, even to itself. - New Theatre Quarterly 71

The word 'surreal' is often used when talking about Milligan's humour. I think it's an overused word. In the vein of poets like Edward Lear and authors like Lewis Carroll before him Milligan revels in word play. Of him one can say quite happily: the pun is greater than the word. Bear the following in mind through as we work our way through these two posts:

Surrealist works feature the element of surprise, unexpected juxtapositions and non sequitur… – Surrealism, Wikipedia

That said, when you do look at some of the poetry of the Surrealists it's easy to see why people might say something like that. "As beautiful as the chance encounter, on an operating table, of a sewing machine and an umbrella," wrote the poet Isidore Ducasse which is not a million miles away from:

Who's that approaching riding a kilted monkey and carrying a mackintosh sackbut?

These are exactly the kind of things that a young Woody Allen would come out with. In fact there is an interesting connection between the two writers:

One of the oddest things about the death of the late Spike Milligan was the willingness of so many newspapers to quote the same verdict on death which Spike was credited with saying before he died.

Here it is.

"I'm not afraid of dying. I just don't want to be there when it happens."

Good remark. Funny and true. What was odd about this was that Spike Milligan never said it. Or at least, if he did say it, he stole it from someone else. From Woody Allen. – 'Did I say that? You will, Spike, you will', The Independent, 20 March 2002

What Milligan did have to say on the matter, in fact, at his request, it's on his tombstone (although admittedly in Gaelic), was: "I told you I was ill."

Milligan above anything else was a poet. His actual poetry is amateurish but that's not what I'm talking about. Spike looked at the world, saw (or more often heard) one thing and interpreted it in his own unique way. He truly understood the metaphoricality of language. Let's take my opening paragraph. I originally wrote:

I kept meaning to start it and then I realised just how much material I had to work with and the very thought of it made me tired

but I couldn't resist inserting a Milliganesque remark. I saw the word 'start' and immediately thought about trying to start a car and what would stop me starting my car? Having no keys. Or I could've jumped on the word 'material' and written:

I kept meaning to start it and then I realised just how much material I had to work with and so I ran off a suit and two jackets instead.

This is exactly the kind of thing Woody Allen would do with language years later on the other side of the Atlantic. A simple example is: "I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying." But then Groucho Marx had done it before him: "A child of five would understand this. Send somebody to fetch a child of five." Milligan was pioneer and quite rightly can be called the father of modern British comedy but he is also part of a long and continuing tradition.

Michael Winner hits the nail on the head when he describes Spike's brand of humour:

The great thing about Milligan's humour is that you feel there is danger in it. Anything can happen. A noise, a repetition of words, non sequiturs, outbursts at variance with reality – all these produce a mesmerising force. - Ed. Maxine Ventham, Spike Milligan: his part in our lives

I could start at the beginning and try and do this chronologically but it would soon fall to pieces as Milligan's life had as much contempt for time as his writing has. I'll get back to you on that point later. To be honest I've already got to the point but I'm adding this bit in to explain what I know is coming further down the page. Actually, now I think about it, none of this is later because it's all happened before you ever got to read it. Apologies for mucking around with your concept of time. I'll just move on. And see if I sink or swim.

Composer

It was his talent as a musician that first made me sit up and take notice of Spike which is probably right and proper as that's what he was for the first part of his career. Milligan spent much of his youth playing the trumpet and singing in various jazz bands. He could also play the saxophone, piano, guitar and ukulele.

I will have seen him on the tele before this but I don't think he really registered with me until in 1973 a most bizarre song was rereleased. It was 'The Ying Tong Song', originally a hit in 1956. It was stupid – and I don't mean that in a bad way – and it was infectious.

It actually dates back to his time during World War II. He came up with the piece along with fellow musician Harry Edgington (nicknamed Edge-ying-Tong).

Probably the next piece of music that I grew to love was the theme music to his series Q5 and the follow-ons, Q6, Q7, Kuwait and Q9. The final series was renamed There's a Lot of It About, after, according to Milligan's autobiography, the BBC felt the public might find Q10 too confusing. I have always had a fondness for this limping style of music which I suppose started off with Laurel and Hardy's theme music, 'The Cuckoo Song'. Anyway here is a link to an MP3 of the Q Theme. I'll talk about his TV work in a minute.

Has it been a minute already? Okay then. I must have dozed off.

Milligan has a long and (at times) illustrious television career. Much of it was eminently forgettable (e.g. Curry and Chips written by Johnny Speight, creator of 'Alf Garnett' in which Milligan 'blacking up' to play Kevin O'Grady, a half-Pakistani/half-Irish factory worker) and to prove that, I've forgotten it, but a lot of it was not, particularly his Q series. Like Monty Python's Flying Circus that arrived on our screens in 1969, the members of which openly acknowledge a huge debt of gratitude to Spike (and probably wouldn't have existed in the form we know them today without him), his shows produced widely variable material but his best stuff is very funny.

Having been exposed to the likes of Python it's hard to see what was so innovative about Spike's approach of comedy. His mainstay, the pun, had been around for years and had served the music hall stars like Tommy Trinder and George Formby well but his approach to sketches was unique. His did away the whole idea of a punch line or a payoff and the characters were often left at the end muttering, "What are we gonna do now? What are we gonna do now?" whilst shuffling zombie-like towards the camera or simply off the set. Either that or simply merging into another completely unrelated skit.

One of my favourite sketches was the 'Pakistani Daleks' and I can remember clearly the next day at school all of us wandering round saying, "Put it in the curry also" to just about everything:

A more representative sketch is this one here:

On doing research for this article I was surprised to find how much TV Spike did before Q. His first series was The Idiot Weekly, Price 2d, followed by A Show Called Fred, Son of Fred, Milligan's Wake and The World of Beachcomber. You can read a nice potted history here. After 1982 his TV appearances other than as an interviewee were rare as were his film roles but then he was in his sixties. Not that he was idle.

Here is Spike on the Bob Monkhouse Show improvising for all he's worth – note the tribute to Groucho Marx in the piece.

Books

Spike has written lots of books including a series of humorous army memoirs including Adolf Hitler, My Part in His Downfall, "Rommel?" "Gunner Who?" and the later Where Have All the Bullets Gone? where he mixes outrageous anecdotes with often moving passages reflecting the nature of conflict on individuals but the book I hold dearest is Puckoon, which was first published in 1963. Even the foreword is funny:

This damn book nearly drove me mad. I started it in 1958 and doodled with it for 4 years. I don't think I could go through it all again, therefore, as this will be my first and only novel, I would like to thank those who helped me get it finished.

Which he does. And among the list is "Harry Edgington my old army pal, who cheered me up when I was down."

Spike, of course, had no regard for the fourth wall or any other wall come to think of it and within a couple of pages his protagonist, Dan Milligan, is having a heart to heart with the author of the book he finds himself in:

In an attempt to break the white man's supremacy, Paul Robeson had once remarked 'All handsome men are slightly sunburned'. Milligan was no exception, he had also said it. He sat in the half upright. 'I tink,' he reflected, 'I tink I'll bronze me limbs.' He rolled his trousers kneewards revealing the like of two thin white hairy affairs of the leg variety. He eyed them with obvious dissatisfaction. After examining them he spoke out aloud. 'Holy God! Wot are dese den? Eh?' He looked around for an answer. 'Wot are dey?' he repeated angrily.

'Legs.'

'Legs? LEGS? Whose legs?'

'Yours.'

'Mine? And who are you?'

'The Author.'

'Author? Author? Did you write these legs?'

'Yes.'

'Well, I don't like dem. I don't like 'em at all at all. I could ha' writted better legs meself. Did you write your legs?'

'No.

'Ahhh. Sooo! You got some one else to write your legs, some one who's a good leg writer and den you write dis pair of crappy old legs fer me, well mister, it's not good enough.'

'I'll try and develop them with the plot.'

'It's a dia-bo-likal liberty lettin' an untrained leg writer loose on an unsuspectin' human bean like me.'

It was a Dublin accent charged with theatrical innuendo; like all Irish he could make Good Morning sound like a declaration of war - which it usually was.

He did eventually write others. More than a few in fact. His next novel, The Looney, did not, however, come out until 1987. In later years he turned his hand to rewriting classics like . . . well, er, The Bible: The Old Testament According to Spike Milligan, Robin Hood: According to Spike Milligan, Lady Chatterley's Lover: According to Spike Milligan and The Hound of the Baskervilles: According to Spike Milligan. You can read a Wikipedia entry covering all the books here.

With The Bible: The Old Testament According to Spike Milligan, Milligan admits "I just wanted to make fun of The Old Testament." He opens with "The Creation According To The Trade Unions" which states that:

God said, Let there be light; and there was light, but the Eastern Electricity Board said He would have to wait until Thursday to be connected.

Here's Spike reading the first couple of pages:

But I digress. And you can get tablets for that.

Eventually, not long before his death, Puckoon was finally turned into a film with a star-studded cast including the likes of Griff Rhys Jones, Milo O'Shea, Elliott Gould and Lord Attenborough ('Dickie' to his friends) many of whom waived their fees in lieu of a pint of Guinness. It was clearly a labour of love on the part of the entire cast. The one shame was the casting of Dan Milligan (for some reason renamed Dan Madigan); Sean Hughes worked his butt off but didn't quite pull it off – the part, not his butt – but this was mainly due to the fact he'd stepped in at the last minutes because the actor who had been cast (which I believe was Milligan himself) was too ill to act. A shame but apart from that it was wonderful to see these characters realised. One of Milligan's daughters, Jane, played Dan's wife.

Art

Like John Lennon (a huge Goons fan – Yoko Ono gave John some 40 hours of Goon Show tapes on his 37th birthday – I'll get to The Goons in a bit), Spike was a doodler. And his illustrations often go with his work. I've included a few in this article. And his style is quite distinctive. But, just as with his poetry, he was also a serious artist and I remember a programme about the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition one year where Spike was interviewed about a tiny painting of a flower he'd had accepted.

I could only find one painting online and here's his daughter, Shelagh, holding it.

Stay tuned for Part two in a few days.

Black Spring

2009-10-12T00:50:00.000+01:00

Plots and character don't make life. Life is here and now, anytime you say the word, anytime you let her rip. – Henry Miller

I have had a copy of Henry Miller's Tropic of Capricorn on my bookshelf for years, twenty years at least without reading it. I bought it because I knew that Miller was a writer I ought to read but somehow I never got round to it. When Oneworld Classics offered me a copy of Black Spring to review I thought that it was about time I got to grips with Mr Miller.

Easier said than done. I freely admit I didn't know what to expect when I began reading and that is a good place to start. I did know the book had been banned in America and the UK as soon as it was released but that was back in 1936 so I didn't think there would be too much in it that would shock me. And to be honest there wasn't. There's a good deal of swearing and reference to unsavoury topics but really that's it.

Let's just dive in to the opening of the last story, 'Burlesque'. If it bothers you then this may not be the book for you, but I would still encourage you to hold that thought and read on a bit because there are diamonds in the rough here to be found:

Standing at the bar looking at the English cunt with all her front teeth missing, it suddenly comes back to me: Don't Spit On the Floor! It comes back to me like a dream: Don't Spit On the Floor! It was at Freddie's Bar on the Rue Pigalle, and a man with lacy fingers, a man in a white silk shirt with loose flowing sleeves, had just rippled off "Goodbye Mexico!" She said she wasn't doin' much now, just battin' around. She was from the Big Broadcast and she had caught the hoof and mouth disease. She kept running back and forth to the toilet through the beaded curtains. The harp was swell, like angels pissing in your beer. She was a little drunk and trying to be a lady at the same time.

Okay, so the language is coarse but there's also poetry in there. And, in under 150 words, such detail and colour.

Black Spring was written while Miller was in France between 1934 and 1935 so that explains why Freddie's Bar is on the Rue Pigalle; there was a vibrant jazz scene in Paris at that time. The Quartier Pigalle is a sleazy area in Paris around the Place Pigalle, on the border between the 9th and the 18th arrondissements. It's also coincidentally where you'll find the Moulin Rouge. 'Freddie's Bar' is probably Fred Payne's Bar, 14 Rue Pigalle, according to Anaïs Nin's diary, where she describes the area as "rough point, pickpockets, apaches, etc." The neighborhood's reputation – prostitutes operating in the side streets – led to its World War II nickname of "Pig Alley" by Allied soldiers. Now we have our setting.

The Big Broadcast, was the first of a series of films made by Paramount Pictures, beginning in 1932 (the second in the series was in 1936, after the book was completed) so I'm assuming that the woman had a bit part in the film but that's only guesswork. I'm also assuming that "hoof and mouth disease" is a euphemism and someone kicked her teeth in. Why that happened and how she ended up in Paris is anyone's guess.

I'm not sure what Don't Spit On the Floor! refers to but I suspect it's a parody of Bizet's 'Toreador Song' from Carmen popular in American barrooms: "Toreador / Don't spit on the floor / Spit in the cuspidor / That's what it's for" but I have no idea what a harp might be doing in a jazz band. It was probably a harmonica.

It may seem as if we need a lot of information to really appreciate what's going on here. And you do but you don't. Most of what's going on you can work out from the context. Details like this you can look up later if you have a mind to.

Black Spring is not a novel; it's not even a book of short stories, at least not in the traditional sense. It's closer to a collection of memoirs beginning in the streets of Williamsburg, Brooklyn (known locally as the "14^th Ward) where Henry's family lived between 1892 and 1900 and ending up in France where he lived for a number of years in the nineteen-thirties.

Miller's style is unlike any other author I've read although I did get a similar feeling reading through this book to reading Molloy by another ex-pat living in France, Samuel Beckett, as if this wall of words was just about to collapse and crush me. There are a couple of audio files available online where Miller reads two sections from this book and he actually reads them at a sedate pace but when I began reading 'The 14^th Ward' I found myself getting faster and faster; it was exhausting. And exhilarating. I found it hard to pick just one quote from this opening piece but I finally settled on this:

To be born in the street means to wander all your life, to be free. It means accident and incident, drama, movement. It means above all dream. A harmony of irrelevant facts which gives to your wandering a metaphysical certitude. In the street you learn what human beings really are; otherwise, or afterwards, you invent them. What is not in the open street is false, derived, that is to say literature. Nothing of what is called "adventure" ever approaches the flavour of the street. It doesn’t matter whether you fly to the Pole, whether you sit on the floor of the ocean with a pad in your hand, whether you pull up nine cities one after the other or whether, like Kurtz, you sail up the river and go mad. No matter how exciting, how intolerable the situation, there are always exits, always ameliorations, comforts, compensations, newspapers, religions. But once there was none of this. Once you were free, wild, murderous…

The boys you worshipped when you first came down into the street remain with you all your life. They are the only real heroes. Napoleon, Lenin, Capone – all fiction. Napoleon is nothing to me in comparison with Eddie Carney, who gave me my first black eye. No man I have ever met seem as princely, as regal, as noble, as Lester Reardon, who by the mere act of walking down the street inspired fear and admiration. Jules Verne never led me to the places the Stanley Borowski had up his sleeve when it came dark. Robinson Crusoe lacked imagination in comparison with Johnny Paul. All these boys of the 14^th Ward have a flavour about them still. They were not invented or imagined: they were real.

He then goes on from there to describe the Brooklyn of his childhood in dramatic and enthusiastic terms and, like I said earlier, I found myself falling headlong into this text and being dragged along by the words until it suddenly came to its end.

The abrupt end to this first text is appropriate because Miller felt himself ripped away from that area when he was ten, when the family moved to 1063 Decatur Street, in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn where he lived until he graduated and got his first job but it was Williamsburg that provided the raw material he worked with as a writer:

Miller's experience of his childhood environment was physical, primal, as deeply ingrained in his being as the stains he described on the hands of the ironworkers – something he could not simply wash away. The scenes that passed before his childish eyes were forceful because they were new and unknown, and the fact that they were not scenes from an idyllic childhood but rather rough, working class dramas probably made Miller's childhood memories that much more forceful. Perhaps what Miller later attempted in his writing – the frank and graphic descriptions of sex, the emotional nudity – was an attempt to recapture that particular internal violence of his own first childish impressions. As a writer, Miller did not recoil from the harshness of the streets, the dirt, the coarseness, rather he embraced it, sought it out and found in it vitality and beauty. – Jeanne Storck, 'Band of Outsiders: Williamsburg's Renegade Artists', Billburg, Jan 1, 2002

So this is an important text, one that provides groundwork for the whole book, indeed his whole life.

His description of this time contrasts vividly with the next piece, 'Third or Fourth Day of Spring' where he talks about Decatur Street which he calls the "Street of Early Sorrows". The piece begins:

The house wherein I passed the most important years of my life had only three rooms. One was the room in which my grandfather died. At the funeral my mother's grief was so violent that she almost yanked my grandfather out of the coffin. He looked ridiculous, my dead grandfather, weeping with his daughter's tears. As if he were weeping at his own funeral.

In another room my aunt gave birth to twins. When I heard twins, 180she being so thin and barren, I said to myself: why twins? why not triplets? why not quadruplets? why stop? So thin and scraggy she was, and the room so small – with green walls and a dirty iron sink in the corner. Yet it was the only room in the house which could produce twins – or triplets, or jackasses.

The third room was an alcove where I contracted the measles, chickenpox, scarlet fever, diphtheria, et cetera: all the lovely diseases of childhood […] In this room I heard nothing but insanities.

By the third story we've relocated to France. 'A Saturday Afternoon' is essentially a tour of the public urinals of Paris:

One likes to piss in sunlight, among human beings who watch and smile down at you. And while the female squatting down to empty her bladder in a china bowl may not be a sight to relish, no man with any feeling can deny that the sight of the male standing behind a tin strip and looking out on the throng with that contented, easy, vacant smile, that long, reminiscent, pleasurable look in his eye is a good thing. To relieve a full bladder is one of the great human joys.

There are certain urinals I go out of my way to make – such as the battered rattle-trap outside the deaf and dumb asylum, corner of the Rue St. Jacques and the Rue de l'Abbé-de-l'Epée, or the Pneu Hutchinson one by the Luxembourg Gardens, corner Rue d'Assas and Rue Guynemer.

I had imagined that these would have long since gone but perhaps not. In his review of the book, Tom Cunliffe has this to say about a passage where a woman smiles at Miller from an open window while he is in mid-flow:

[T]he above passage seems highly improbable: as someone who has used the Parisian pissoirs, I have never seen a Frenchwoman do anything other than avert her eyes and pass hurriedly on! – A Common Reader

The fourth piece, 'The Angel is my Watermark', describes "the genesis of a masterpiece", the masterpiece being a watercolour painting. Miller wasn't simply a dabbler either. Seven years before Miller published the Tropic of Cancer he had held his first watercolour painting exhibition. In total he painted over 2000 watercolours over six decades and had over sixty international exhibitions. His paintings are in museums and private collections in Japan, Europe and the United States. "To paint is to love again and to love is to live life at its fullest", Miller wrote. You can download a nice PDF with a good selection of his artwork here and for those with time there's an excellent slideshow presentation here showing 130 works.

As one might imagine Miller was a passionate painter but it's his philosophy of painting that interests me more:

When you can draw up a clean balance you will no longer have a picture. Now you have an intangible, an accident, and you sit up all night with the open ledger cracking your skull over it. You have a minus sign in your hands. All live, interesting data in labelled minus. When you find the plus equivalent you have – nothing. You have that imaginary, momentary something called "a balance". A balance never is. It's a fraud, like stopping the clock, or like calling a truce. You strike a balance in order to add a hypothetical weight, in order to create a reason for your existence.

Henry's father was a gregarious and easygoing Bavarian. In 'The Tailor Shop' we get to see the adult world he inhabited while his son was being a little tearaway. Chronologically this story seemed a bit out of sequence – I would have placed it third – but since they're all standalone pieces it's not a big deal. Miller grew up in a polyglot world where he learned to speak German before English (his mother was German) and with the sound of Yiddish and Polish all around him. His father's tailor's shop was located at 5 West 31^st Street, off of 5^th Avenue and this chapter describes its world at some length. For about four or five years during his twenties Miller worked there too and it does not appear to have been a particularly happy time for him but that doesn't really come out in this description of the place; it's quite funny in places. Maybe I was just too taken with all the colourful characters to notice. A small – no pun intended – taster:

They were all midgets in the bushelling room – Robin, Rapp and Chaimowitz. At noon they brought out the big round loaves of Jewish bread, which they smeared with sweet butter and slivers of lax [salmon]. While the old man was ordering squabs [pigeon] and Rhine wine, Bunchek the cutter and the three little bushelmen sat on the big bench among the goose irons and the legs and sleeves and talked earnestly and solemnly about things like the rent or the ulcers that Mrs Chaimowitz had in her womb.

Possibly my favourite of the ten chapters is 'Jabberwhorl Cronstadt'. This is a wonderful verbal caricature of the aforementioned Mr Constadt, a bohemian:

He lives in the back of a sunken garden, a sort of bosky glade shaded by whiffletrees and spinozas, by deodars and baobabs, a sort of queasy Buxtehude diapered with elytras and feluccas. You pass through a sentry box where the concierge twirls his mustache con furioso like in the last act of Ouida. They live on the third floor behind a mullioned belvedere filigreed with snaffled spaniels and sebaceous wens, with debentures and megrims hanging out to dry. Over the bell-push it says: "JABBERWHORL CRONSTADT, poet, musician, herbologist, weather man, linguist, oceanographer, old clothes, colloids." Under this it reads: "Wipe your feet and blow your nose!" And under this is a rosette from a second-hand suit.

This is a chapter for anyone who revels in the use of language. You can read the whole story online courtesy of Google Books; it was included in the collection The Cosmological Eye which you can find here and you can hear Miller reading the story here.

It's impossible to read this story without thinking of Lewis Carroll, a writer he admired. Henry Miller's friend Walter Lowenfels was the model for Cronstadt who also appears in Tropic of Cancer something which pleased me when I discovered this because he's too large a character to waste on a single story. Death and food were apparently Miller and Lowenfels' favourite topics of conversation and I'm reliably informed that this story is not as sunny as it might appear on an initial read. I can't comment because I only read it the once and I was too busy fighting with words like ontogenyphylogeny, rotogravure, defluxions, cotyldons and glycophosphates to mention just a few that trip off Cronstadt's tongue. As the day progresses, and, as he gets drunker and drunker, the more entertaining he becomes.

The next piece, 'Into the Nightlife', is essentially a long dream sequence although I've never had a dream like this in my life, certainly not one that would take up 22 pages. Of all the pieces in the book this was probably the one I enjoyed the least. It's not that the language isn't wonderful it's just the fact that it goes on and on and I couldn't connect with it and I couldn't see its relevance to the book as a whole. I wasn't that excited by 'Walking Up and Down in China' and 'Burlesque' either but I think I was just getting tired by this point and wanted to be done. I felt much the same when I completed Beckett's Trilogy, as if I'd been beaten about the head with the English dictionary and left for dead.

I've read that Miller is out of fashion at the moment. I can see why he might have been in fashion in just the same way as James Joyce and D H Lawrence were banned – and so also fashionable – because of their shock element. Now none of them are particularly shocking so why should we keep reading? Based purely on this book, which the blurb on the back calls "his most distinguished book from a stylistic point of view," I can see that there is a lot more to Miller than simple shock tactics. His biggest strength is as an observer but there's not much point being an observer if you're not also equipped to effectively communicate what you've observed, then what he does is comment on what he has observed (which he does with Joycean flair) and what he has to say is thought-provoking.

Is it dated? Yes, of course it is, but who would suggest that we stop reading Dickens because he's dated? I would suggest that he's not outdated. Good writing doesn't get old especially if its themes are broad: everyone has a childhood, everyone had a dad, everyone needs to pee and although I doubt many of us will ever have a friend quite like Jabberwhorl Cronstadt we all have friends who from time to time test the bonds of friendship. I would recommend this book to writers as a textbook first and foremost. I'm sure we've all had a crack at stream of consciousness writing and fallen flat on our faces; like abstract art, it's not as easy as it looks. These are ten ways of doing it. I say, ten, because every story is different in style and approach and yet they all have the name Miller running through the centre of them like a stick of Blackpool rock.

I would not pretend for a minute that this is an easy book because it is not. Who said reading was supposed to be easy? Going for a stroll is easy. Climbing up a mountain isn't but which is the more satisfying I ask you?

***

Normally I'd end this piece with a short bio but here's one written by his daughter, Valentine, which I think does just fine.

Sites worth checking out:

Walking Paris with Henry Miller

Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company: A Henry Miller Blog

Henry-Miller.com

The Paris Review Interview

Wanted: a home for used poems

2009-10-08T13:13:00.003+01:00

This post is not original. The original is in the recycle bin on my laptop. There's a copy in my 'Sent Items' and a proofread copy in my wife's 'Sent Items'. Oh, and there's a copy on my test blog, the place I tweak my posts before they go live. So, lots of other copies exist. I hope you don't feel that it's been any way diluted by being copied so often. I wonder what the literary equivalent of 'tape hiss' is?

My most popular poem is 'The Venereologist':

THE VENEREOLOGIST

How sad to see the venereologist,
with his mistress tucked carefully
under his arm, emerging from
the doorway of her flat -

a rectangular orifice
exhaling ash and smoke.

The car door opens at the
turning of the handle –
a mechanical thing,
but less habitual
than what has foregone these lines.

His car moves away, down the street
like a germ in the bloodstream.

9 March 1978

It's certainly not my best poem. So, how can I make the statement that it's my most popular? How does one measure 'popularity'?

I can make that statement because it been published more than any other poem I've written, five or six times. Far better poems have only been read by my wife. It's twisted, isn't it? Of course the only reason 'The Venereologist' managed to get published so often is that I was young and ignorant. I had no idea that you were only supposed to send a poem out until it managed to be published once and then that was it, consigned to oblivion; no one would be interested in it. I thought it was a good poem and I wanted people to read it. As many people as possible. So I kept sending out into the big bad world.

Okay, all you poets out there, hands up those of you who don't want people to read your work. See! Not a blinkin' one of you. We all want to be read to have people tell us how good we are. It's natural. And yet nowadays virtually every time I read submission guidelines I come across the same old expression: IF YOUR POEM HAS BEEN PUBLISHED BEFORE THEN SOD OFF. Okay, they're usually a tad more polite than that but that's the gist of it.

The big question is what is 'PUBLISHED'? Now, that's where there's a little leeway but most say that if it's appeared in print or in an e-zine then it's deemed to have been 'published'. Others extend that to private forums and even personal blogs. And what they're saying is: WE ONLY WANT VIRGIN POEMS FOR OUR SITE. OUR SITE IS TOO GOOD TO PUBLISH ANYTHING THAT ANYONE IN THE UNIVERSE HAS LOOKED AT BEFORE WE HAVE. CAPICHE?

Okay, maybe that's not what they're saying but that's what it feels like. I would just like to find a magazine that wants to publish the best poetry it can. Full stop. Actually there are one or two out there like that but they're very much in the minority.

How many poetry e-zines do you think there are out there? I bet it's a silly number so I'm not even going to guess at it. And how many do you subscribe to? Probably not that many. A helluva lot less than you send stuff out to. My big question is: Just how many eyes are out their sullying our poems that we can't send anywhere else because they're now somehow tainted?

I know, I know, everyone wants to be able to say that what's they're offering is fresh. I mean a fruit stall owner wouldn't last in business very long if he sold used fruit: Honest madam, it's just got a wee bite in it and it was from a very nice lady from Broomhill. No, I'm quite sure she's not HIV positive. I doubt she's been sexually active for the past twenty years.

POEMS DON'T GO OFF.

They don't mature with age either. No matter how many copies you make, no matter how many people read that poem before you get to it, it is as pure as when the author put the last full stop – assuming he or she is the kind of poet who uses conventional punctuation – and sits back feeling warm and smug with themselves.

I have never understood this obsession with purity. A first edition does not read any better than a seventeenth. In fact the seventeenth is probably more readable because printing will have improved over the years. The first edition probably has yellow pages and has that old book smell that you feel in the back of your throat.

What I really don’t get are those people – stamp collectors are very bad for this – who think something is worth more because it has a flaw in it. If I started sticking the odd typo in a poem how many editors do you think would pounce on it slavering with excitement? A big fat zero I can tell you. A poem is not a Persian rug.

Question: What does it mean to be 'published'? Is this post 'published'? I would argue that it isn't. My logic is simple. There has been no editorial control exercised whatsoever. I can write whatever I want to and get away with it. There is no possibility of rejection. I am never going to send myself an e-mail saying, "Sorry, ol' son, but that one wasn't quite up to par." Nope, 'snever gonna happen. (See! See! I wrote ''snever' and there was no one to stop me.)

As I write this I've been asked to submit some poems to a themed collection. I'd say 'commissioned' but that sounds just plain pompous. What the hell, it's my blog: I've been commissioned to write some poems on a theme. I'm not sure that I'll be able to write as many as they want but I already have some that will do and one that is perfect. Yeah, you're ahead of me, the perfect one has been published before. And I bet, I just bet, that this editor will say that it won't do. Which I do not get. Because it is abso-bloomin'-perfect. Really. And it deserves to be read by as many people as possible and I don't get why I can't send a copy to every damn e-zine of the planet.

I may have mentioned that I have a fondness for the poetry of Philip Larkin in passing. Just think how many times 'Toads' or 'An Arundel Tomb' or 'The Whitsun Weddings' have been published over the years and they will continue to be published ad infinitum when you and I are dead and gone . . . because they are good poems and they deserve to be read by the next generation and the next. To my mind it would be criminal for them to get published just the once and then forgotten about. No, we don't want old crap. Give us new crap.

This has been something of a rant. It's been a while since I've let rip like this and it'll probably be a while before I do it again. I would simply like poetry magazines, both on and offline, to be realistic and think: "I probably have a readership of a dozen people discounting the poets themselves who probably only read their own poems to see if I've made a mistake in the HTML so why should I be so snotty-nosed about who I publish? The odds of more than a couple of readers discovering a poem in my 'zine and thinking to themselves, 'Hm, I'm sure I've read that elsewhere in a classier 'zine with a nicer font and cooler pictures,' are infinitesimal, so what the hell, I'll just publish the best poetry I can whether it's appeared elsewhere or not." That would be nice. I would like that. But it's never gonna happen, is it? No matter how much I rant. So why am I bothering?

If I had the time – which I don't so don't get me started – I'd put my money where my mouth is and start up an e-zine that only published pre-published poems. I'd call it Used Poems. It would be a home for all the waifs and strays out there who think that no one loves them any more. But I don't have the time, let alone the energy. So, if anyone out there feels like giving it a go then that's fine by me. Just tell me where I can e-mail my submissions and I'll send you 'The Venereologist' and 'The Pathologist' (which I think has been published three or four times already) and I'm sure I could rattle up a few more.

Let's face it most of my published poetry appeared before most of the people using the Internet were born. In fact most of it was written before the Internet was born.

I had the perfect poem to finish this article with but I can't use it because I'm saving it to see if I can get it published in a real magazine. It's a shame because it really would have tidied up this post very nicely. Ah, well. Sorry about that.

BAM:	But he didn't say anything?
BOM:	No.
V:	Not good.
	I start again.
BAM:	Well?
BOM:	Nothing.
BAM:	He didn't say it?
V:	Good.

V:	I am alone.
	In the present as were I still.
	It is winter.
	Without journey.
	Time passes.
	That is all.
	Make sense who may.
	I switch off.