The Truth About Lies

Aggie and Shuggie 32

2012-01-25T23:00:00.000Z

Maggie:	Da!
Shuggie:	Whit, hen?
Maggie:	Are we real?
Shuggie:	Are we whit?
Maggie:	Real?
Shuggie:	[feels himself over] Aye, hen, as far as Ah cun tell.
Maggie:	Tha’s no whit Ah mean. How’d we know we’re no the figment o sumwan’s imagination?
Shuggie:	Like Goad?
Maggie:	Aye.
Shuggie:	Wull, aw Ah cun say is if sumwan immaginified me Goad help ‘im.
Maggie:	Yoor no takin me seriously.
Shuggie:	Ah am. It’s jist Ah wis never much cop when it came to apisstomology. Ah aywis thought it were sumhim tae dae wi hinkin aboot bevvy.
Maggie:	Ye mean ontology?
Shuggie:	Aye, that tae.
Maggie:	Ontology is the philosophical study o the nature o being. Epistemology is more boathered wi the nature an scope o knowledge an at.
Shuggie:	Ah know that. Did ye hink Ah came up the Clyde oan a banana boat? Ah wis jist yanking yer chain. Cun ye no take a wee joke. Christ, weans these days.
Maggie:	So?
Shuggie:	La Te Doh.
Maggie:	Ah’m aff tae see Ma. She’ll take me seriously.
Shuggie:	No, cum oan. Dinnae be like that. Ah cun be serious. Whit’s goat ye hinkin aboot the nature af reality then? An is it fanomanologicul reality, virchool reality, awternate reality or jist plain ol’ common or garden reality?
Maggie:	Metaphysical reality.
Shuggie:	Oh, right. Ah forgoat aboot that wan. Right, Ah’m aw ears.
Maggie:	It’s jist in Unca Jim’s new book…
Shuggie:	Whoa! Hawd yer horses, lassie. Oor Jim’s goat a new book oot?
Maggie:	Aye. There’s a refyoo up oan Dave King’s bloag? Ah thought you read his bloag.
Shuggie:	On occashun, yes, Ah huff bin known tae parooze it. So whit’s oor Jim’s new book cawd?
Maggie:	Milligan and Murphy.
Shuggie:	Zat right?
Maggie:	Aye. An it’s aboot these two blokes who Ah hink arny real. They’re jist imaginary.
Shuggie:	They’re in a book, hen. Everywan in a book is imaginary. It’s a rule.
Maggie:	Ah know that. But I hink these two huff cottoned oan tae the fact that they’re no real.
Shuggie:	An tha’s why yoo wis wunnerin if perchance we wis aw jist made up.
Maggie:	Aye. How’d we know?
Shuggie:	Ah huff nae idea, hen. Noat a Scoobies.
Maggie:	Ah knew Ah shudda asked ma ma aboot this.
Shuggie:	Aye, perhaps ye shudda.
Maggie:	Yoor no real.
Shuggie:	Neffer a truer word said, hen.

Chronicle in Stone

2012-01-20T22:00:00.001Z

I could not understand how people could not like something as beautiful as the aerodrome. But I had lately become convinced that in general people were pretty boring. ― Ismail Kadare, Chronicle in Stone

Childhood is a wonderful place, part battleground, part playground. It is like a parallel universe that occupies the same time and space as the adult world and yet exists independently to it. Childhood is a popular subject for writers particularly their own childhoods. Of course it helps to have lived through interesting times. When I look back to me growing up in the sixties or, to be more accurate, when I look back at what the history books tell me was happening during the sixties, it’s clear I lived through some most interesting times, but most of what was going on in the world passed me by. If it didn’t happen in my street then it might as well have not been happening at all; I was the centre of the universe after all.

Thousands upon thousands of children grew up during the Second World War and many have written about their experiences. Two that jump to mind are John Boorman’s script for Hope and Glory and Empire of the Sun by JG Ballard which, of course, was also turned into a film. They present very different accounts of the war, the first set in England, the second in Shanghai. Ismail Kadare’s early semi-autobiographical novel, Chronicle in Stone, presents a different snapshot again, set this time in Albania but childhood is still childhood the world over.

The child in question here is a young boy from the museum-city of Gjirokastër which is where Kadare was born; in his case, in January 1936. It is an old city. The city's walls date from the 3rd century AD; the Citadel, which features in the novel, was built from the 6th to the 12th century which means that the house Kadare was brought up in, which was built in 1677, is positively modern by comparison:

Typical houses consist of a tall stone block structure which can be up to five stories high. There are external and internal staircases that surround the house. It is thought that such design stems from fortified country houses typical in southern Albania. The lower storey of the building contains a cistern and the stable. The upper storey is composed of a guest room and a family room containing a fireplace. Further upper stories are to accommodate extended families and are connected by internal stairs.

Many houses in Gjirokastër have a distinctive local style that has earned the city the nickname "City of Stone", because most of the old houses have roofs covered with stones. – Wikipedia

The kullë houses which characterise the city each contain approximately three million stones. – Preservation Journey

Albania is not, however, a new country. It was incorporated into the Ottoman Empire in 1418, as part of the Rumelia province, and it remained peacefully under Ottoman control until 1870 when the Albanian National Awakening, as it came to be known, took place followed by several years of bloodshed until, in 1912, the first independent Albanian state was declared. The only other book I’ve read by Kadare is his retelling of The Ghost Rider and one of the things that struck me when I researched my article on it was how passionately nationalistic the Albanians were. I didn’t get the same feeling from this book, presumably because we have a child as a narrator; at one point he doesn’t even seem aware that his country is called Albania which is odd because the boy clearly knows his countries and there is a lovely scene early in the book where the way Kadare sets it up you’re not sure if this isn’t the gods haggling over control of the world:

“OK, you can have France and Canada, but give me Luxembourg.”

“You’re kidding! You really want Luxembourg?”

“If it’s all right with you.”

“Well, give me Abyssinia for two Polands, and we could do a deal.”

“No, not Abyssinia. Take France and Canada for two Polands.”

“No way!”

“All right, then, give me back the India I gave you yesterday for Venezuela.”

“India? Here, it’s yours. What do you want with India anyway? To tell you the truth, I changed my mind about it last night.”

“Did you change your mind about Turkey, too, by any chance?”

“I sold Turkey already. Otherwise, I’d give it back to you.”

“In that case you don’t get the Germany I promised you yesterday. I’d rather tear it up.”

“Big deal. You think I care?”

We had been haggling for an hour, sitting in the middle of the street trading stamps. We were still arguing when Javer came by. He said, “Still carving up the world, I see.”

You would think nothing of this scene but the irony comes when you realise that this is taking place in 1940 in a city under the control of the Italian military, not that they stay in charge for terribly long. Over the course of the book – which covers about four years – the city changes hands numerous times: first the Greeks, then the Italians again, then the Greeks, then the Italians and this swapping back and forth lasts until Italy capitulates to the Allies in September 1943, whereupon the Germans troops march into the country. Gjirokastër with its castle was an important strategic target which is why over the past few years it had been regularly bombed by the aircraft belonging to whoever wasn’t currently occupying the city.

For the young narrator his city is alive; it has a personality and moods. At one point, late in the book, he writes:

At dusk the city, which through the centuries had appeared on maps as a possession of the Romans, the Normans, the Byzantines, the Turks, the Greeks and the Italians, now watched darkness fall as a part of the German empire. Utterly exhausted, dazed by the battle, it showed no sign of life.

It does not die though. In the single-page chapter which completes the novel we hear from the boy who has returned as an adult:

A very long time later I came back to the grey immemorial city. My feet timidly trod the spine of its stone-paved streets. They bore me up. You recognised me, you stones.

[…]

My streets, my cistern. My old house. Its beams, floorboards and staircase creaked slightly, almost imperceptibly, with a dry, uniform, almost constant cracking sound. What’s wrong? Where does it hurt? It seemed to be complaining of aches in its bones, in its centuries-old joints.

[…]

[A]t street corners, where walls join, I thought I could see some familiar features, like outlines of human faces, the shadows of cheekbones and eyebrows. They are really there, caught in stone for all time, along with the marks left by earthquakes, winters and scourges wrought by men.

Who is it he thinks he sees? Grandmother Selfixhe, Xhexho, Aunt Xhemo, Mane Voco, Nazo, frail Kako Pino with her persistent war cry, “It’s the end of the world,” Llukan, the Jailbird – never long out of prison and, more often than not, glad to be back there and others like Ҫeҫo Kailil’s daughter who grew a beard, now, all now gone; the humans have gone, but their humanity remains. These are his family – family is important to him, central to his life – his neighbours, who are also a constant feature in this tight knit community, and his friends with whom he trades stamps and plans the kind of mischief that boys of all nationalities get up to.

Children view the world differently from adults, partly due to lack of experience, often due to lack of information: if only adults would speak up. There is a wonderful scene at the end of the film Hope and Glory where, Bill, the nine-year-old protagonist arrives at his school to discover that all classes have been cancelled because the school has been damaged in the Blitz, whereupon the boy joyously cries to the sky, “Thank you, Hitler.” To him and his peers, the Blitz is exciting, even fun, as they collect shrapnel, play with live ammo, and muck about on bombsites. And although he’s living under almost constant enemy occupation, the young narrator – we never find out his exact age – acts in much the same way: where his knowledge and experience fail him, his imagination does not:

A neighbour is seen as Lady Macbeth, whereas a cabbage in the market takes the form of a severed head. Passing troops become Crusaders until the lad and his friends grow up to join a band of partisans, and the world of childhood fantasy gives way to that of our often savage maturity. – Robert Elsie, Albanian Literature: A Short History, p.171

In a recent article in The Daily Beast Kadare recalls his most recent visit to his hometown:

My most recent visit was a year ago. I went to see my old house, on a narrow street known as “Lunatics’ Lane.” Surely only a city with a sense of itself as superior could give such a name to one of its own streets. A house on the other side once belonged to the former dictator of Albania. As I walked along the lane, I saw an aged sculptor. He called out to me from a distance: “This street has produced three famous lunatics. Two of them, the dictator [Enver Hoxha]and you, left long ago. I’m the third, and I really am mad. I stayed here. And I’m proud of it.”

The old sculptor would have fit well in the pages of Chronicle in Stone; few of the characters contained therein are mad but some are exceedingly eccentric like the inventor, Dino Ҫiҫo, who is trying to design an aeroplane which will be powered by some kind of perpetual motion device and who, when the people are fleeing the city as the German army approaches, insists on carrying his model prototype on his back in case it falls into enemy hands; white, wooden, about the size of a man, the image of Jesus trudging up the hill to Golgotha is a hard one to avoid thinking about.

This is a simple and intimate novel more about childhood than the history that was unfolding around the boy in question.

Early on in the book the Italians build an aerodrome and as the planes arrive, these fire the boy’s imagination in much the same way that Jim in Empire of the Sun becomes obsessed with them:

Jim felt feverish, but he watched the Japanese planes overhead. The sound of their engines cleared his mind. Whenever his spirits flagged or he felt sorry for himself he thought of the silver aircraft he had seen at the detention centre. – Empire of the Sun

This is what our young Albanian has to say on the subject of the new aerodrome:

I was bewitched. … I knew everything that went on there. I could tell the difference between the heavy bombers and the light, and between the bombers and the fighters. Every morning I counted the planes, and watched the take-offs, flights and landings. I soon figured out that the bombers never went up by themselves, but were always escorted by fighters. I had given names to some planes that stood out from the rest, and I had some favourites. Whenever I saw some bomber take off with its fighter escort and disappear into the depths of the valley to the south, where they said the war was going on, I kept careful track and waited for it to come back. I worried when one of my favourites was late, and was filled with joy when I heard the humming of engines in the valley announcing its return. Some never came back. I would be sorry for a while, but eventually forgot about it.

But he is spellbound by one plane in particular:

I forgot all about its colleagues, which looked dwarfed beside it, and welcomed it warmly. Earth and sky together could not have sent me a more beautiful gift than this gigantic plane. It became my best friend. It was my very own flying and roaring machine that put death at my command.

I thought about it all the time. I felt proud to see it take off with a rumble that shook the world and that it alone could make, and to watch it turn slowly south. […] It always seemed to me that it stayed too long down there in the south. I thought I could hear it breathe heavily on its return. It seemed exhausted. At times like that I would wish it would never fly south again where they were fighting. The others are younger, let them go, I thought. The big one needed some rest.

The giant plane may well have become his best friend, but it wasn’t his first love. This task fell to a woman by the name of Margarita, a lodger in his grandfather’s house who gives him a little attention and thats all a boy his age needs. He tells his friend Ilir about her:

“At Grandfather’s, there’s now a beautiful married woman,” I told him.

He wasn’t impressed and didn’t answer. A little later I mentioned Margarita to him again. Again he showed no interest, and only asked me, “Does she have pink cheeks?”

“Yes,” I answered, somewhat perplexed. “Pink.”

The third time he broaches the subject Ilir tells him that the night previous he’d stolen his mother’s garters to make into a slingshot and wonders if our narrator will keep hold of them for a few days in case she finds them. Clearly Ilir hasn’t reached a point where the sight of a woman’s garter sparks off anything deeper than considering its functionality as part of homemade weaponry. He has only just discovered that “the world is round like a melon” – any kind of appreciation for womankind is still a while off. The matter of Margarita does not crop up as a subject for conversation again.

On his next trip to visit his grandparents the boy cannot hide his real interest:

“Where’s Margarita?” I asked Grandma, who was kneading dough for bread rolls.

“What do you want with Margarita?” she asked. “You’d do better to start by asking how Grandfather is, or your aunts and uncles, instead of starting right out with ‘Where’s Margarita?’”

The old woman is perceptive though. She can see he has a crush but holds back from teasing him about it. Later that day when Margarita hasn’t appeared he goes into the attic to try and spy on her – only to see if she’s there – and is rewarded with the sight of his first naked woman fresh from her bath. His infatuation with her doesn’t last too long though. He’s not caught, rather she is; stealing, and shortly after this bit of innocent voyeurism he arrives to discover she has been asked to leave.

This leaves a gaping hole in his life but not for long. Suzana, the daughter of his grandfather’s only neighbour, who he has known for years, steps in to fill the gap, but before their pubescent romance can find its feet, her mother discovers them and that puts an end to that. No more women for the boy; just relatives, nuns, prostitutes and crones, especially old crones like Granny Neslihan who, following one terrible night of bombing that left sixty-two dead, is found in the rubble, buried up to her waist:

She didn’t understand what had happened to her. Waving her long arms in the air she cried, “Who killed me?” She was 142 years old. And blind.

Others are also as old and many have never left their homes in decades, Not so the katenxhikas [“the mothers-in-law”] flooding down the streets and alleys running up and down the streets, their black scarves fluttering behind them, as they spread their own unique mixtures of news: “out of breath and full of gossip.” You know that times are bad when they appear en masse like this. It is with their arrival that we see the first appearance of another far more important character in the boy’s life, the writer within:

A cold, dry wind blew steadily down from the mountain passes to the north. I listened to its uniform howl, and for some reason the expression “words are gone with the wind” went round and round in my head. Something strange was happening to me lately. Everyday words or expressions, things I had heard dozen of times, were suddenly taking on new meanings in my mind. The words were casting off their usual idiomatic sense. Expressions made up of two or three words would painfully fall apart. If I heard someone say, “My head is boiling,” despite myself I couldn’t help imagining a head boiling like a pot of beans. Words have a certain force in their normal state. But now, as they began to shear and crack up, they acquired amazing energy. I was afraid they would explode.

[…]

I had entered the kingdom of words, where a merciless tyranny reigned. […] The world was falling apart before my very eyes. Surely that was what Kako Pino meant when she said, as she never stopped saying, “It’s the end of the world.”

There is much more I could talk about: his visit to the slaughterhouse; the defeated troops filing though the city begging for bread; the young lover who searches the cities cellars looking for his Eurydice; the anti-aircraft gun that seemed incapable of even winging a single enemy plane; the statue that got shot and the return of the giant plane, only as aggressor this time. I wonder a little about where Kadare chose to end this narrative, because it doesn’t really end; he simply decides on a point to stop and that’s where he stops, tagging on the single short chapter, almost as an afterthought, showing him as an adult.

I have to say I enjoyed this book. I’m not someone who gets especially nostalgic about his own childhood but I do find the subject of loss of innocence a captivating one. Innocence is like this odd little creature that scrabbles around trying to make sense of its environment before it becomes aware and disillusioned. Kadare never takes it that far here. Even when the narrator as an adult is introduced you still feel that they boy who scampered around that magical city and called, “A-oo,” into the cistern waiting on it calling back, however reluctantly, is still there inside him. There are things that happen to the people around the boy that upset him – he sees dead bodies but I don’t think he actually witnesses anyone being killed – and these affect him but he still clings onto who he sees himself to be, even though he cannot not change. I think had he been even three years older when the occupation started, the book might have had a very different tone.

As I’ve said already this is the second book by Kadare I’ve read but I’m not sure I’ve read the best of him yet; the man has been nominated for the Nobel Prize fifteen times for Christ’s sake. The Ghost Rider was a retelling of another’s tale and this is essentially a memoir, albeit a fictionalised, entertaining and well-written one. I must look out for something else by him, perhaps Agamemnon’s Daughter; in his article in The New Yorker James Wood, who, incidentally, wrote the introduction to the Canongate edition of Chronicle of Stone I’ve just read, suggests that as his greatest achievement. Plus, it’s a novella – always a selling point as far as I’m concerned.

You can sample the book here. This is not the Canongate edition but the translation is the same.

***

Ismail Kadare was born in 1936 in Gjirokastër, in the south of Albania. He studied in Tirana and Moscow, returning to Albania in 1960 after the country broke ties with the Soviet Union. He is known for his novels, although he was first noticed for his poetry collections. He stopped writing poems in the 1960s and focused on short stories until the publication of his first novel, The General of the Dead Army. From 1963 he has been a novelist. In 1996 he became a lifetime member of the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences of France. In 1992, he was awarded the Prix mondial Cino Del Duca; in 2005, he won the inaugural Man Booker International Prize and in 2009 the Prince of Asturias Award of Arts. He has divided his time between Albania and France since 1990. He began writing very young, in the mid 1950s but published only a few poems. His works have been published in about thirty languages.

Milligan and Murphy

2012-01-15T22:00:00.002Z

Over the past few years regular readers will have heard me mention and sometimes even quote from my unpublished novels. I finished Milligan and Murphy in August 2005 about three years after my play Vladimir and Estragon are Dead. I had kind of thought that after writing that I’d put my fascination with all things Beckettian to bed, but apparently not. The book was written in the two years we were living in an unfurnished flat in the Gorbals. You can actually see the flats in the photo below. They were brand new and we were the first occupants. It was a nice flat. We could actually see teams of rowers skooshing up and down the Clyde from our window. To get to work in the morning all I had to do was walk over the St Andrew’s suspension bridge, trudge across Glasgow Green and get a bus on London Road for the town centre; by Glaswegian standards, idyllic. Carrie and I didn’t have our own offices at this point and so the living room was subdivided into two office spaces and a TV-watching area. It sounds crowded but it was a big room and everything worked out just fine.

We were both working then—actually only a few blocks from each other—but we kept different hours. I’ve always been an early bird and so I was up and out the door at the back of six every morning and settled at my desk with my second coffee of the morning by seven, giving me the place to myself for a good hour and a half; to compensate for the early start I got to leave an hour early too. Things were very comfortable. We had no debts, money to burn and really the last thing I expected to be doing under such circumstances was writing, but those two years were exceptionally productive and, despite the fact the flat was a tad on the small side, a part of me regrets not just buying the damn place.

Anyway, one morning I got up, carried out my ablutions, dressed, prepared my lunch, stuck on my hat and coat and headed off to work. It was a day like any other day. Probably wasn’t even a Tuesday. (If you’ve read my first novel you’ll get the joke.) As I crossed the footbridge, out of nowhere—okay, not exactly out of nowhere, out of the dark recesses of my mind—came the following sentence:

Milligan and Murphy were brothers.

I had no idea who they were or anything like that or how they could have different surnames and still be brothers or imagine they were brothers. I certainly had no idea who was doing the talking. No, all I had were those five words. By the time I'd crossed Glasgow Green I had a paragraph but I was still none the wiser. The thing was—and let every writer out there heed this warning—I had neither pen nor paper on me at the time (rare for me, but true) and so I had to keep that paragraph in my head for the next half-hour until I got into the office, grabbed a sheet of paper and scribbled it down before I lost it. Granted, the paragraph was not as long as it ended up in the book but it was still a load of words to try and keep straight in my head. I wrote the words down and then got on with my day job.

St Andrew’s suspension bridge

When I got home I typed them up and did nothing more. At this point I knew two things:

This piece of writing was going to be called Milligan and Murphy
This was going to be a novel

I did nothing more for, as best I can remember, about a fortnight. Now, I know a novel is not like a rare gemstone but I felt like I was poised to split a diamond and terrified that I was going to mishit the thing and it was going to shatter into a thousand unusable pieces; into diamond dust. "The tale is told of Joseph Asscher, the greatest cleaver of the day, that when he prepared to cleave the largest diamond ever known, the 3,106 carats (621g) Cullinan, he had a doctor and nurse standing by and when he finally struck the diamond and it broke perfectly in two, he fainted dead away."[1] It’s pure myth but that best describes how I felt: everything depended on what I was to write next.

So I waited and I waited and I waited. I kept spinning the words I had written so far in my head and gradually an idea emerged. Of course no sooner had it emerged than I pooh-poohed it, but it wouldn’t go away. And when you have an idea like that, in my experience you have but one option: write the damn thing out.

I have never really bonded with Samuel Beckett’s novella, Mercier and Camier. I can see Vladimir and Estragon evolving (devolving?) into Hamm and Clov, but a younger Didi and Gogo would be like the younger Krapp, more positive as well as more naïve. It would be a lie to say that I’d always wanted to rewrite Mercier and Camier because no such thought had ever crossed my mind, but the idea of a Vladimir and Estragon: The Early Days did, I have to say, appeal. I’d already imagined them dead and in some kind of limbotic state so why not go the other way? And so that’s what I did—sort of.

The question I kept finding myself asking was: What caused Didi and Gogo to become tramps in the first place? No one is born a tramp and yet, somewhere along the line, the wanderlust takes a hold of certain people. What would cause someone to one day up and leave everything and turn into homo peripateticus, aimlessly wandering the roads? There are plenty of recorded cases of men who have, for no apparent reason, abandoned their lives and been discovered, often hundreds of miles away, living completely different lives and unaware of what they’ve done, but there are more who, to escape what’s going on at home, simply run away. Is that what happened to them?

Beckett was insistent that all he knew about his characters was what was written on the page. He once recalled when Sir Ralph Richardson "wanted the low-down on Pozzo, his home address and curriculum vitae, and seemed to make the forthcoming of this and similar information the condition of his condescending to illustrate the part of Vladimir ... I told him that all I knew about Pozzo was in the text, that if I had known more I would have put it in the text, and that was true also of the other characters."[2] So I was going to get no help there and the text says little about where they had been prior to ending up where they are. For example, Vladimir insists that they were employed as grape pickers in the Mâcon country— Mâcon is the name for the red and white wines which come from the Mâconnais section of Burgundy, France. This region is the most southerly in Burgundy, and also the largest—but Estragon is having none of it, although he doesn’t deny seeing the Eiffel Tower. Whether they are still in France when they have this conversation is another thing entirely.

It is said that every generation has its own Shakespeare and I suspect that the same will apply to Beckett. Whether Shakespeare in modern dress dilutes the quality of the writing or Waiting for Godot performed by an all-female cast somehow sullies the work, I’m not going to debate, but as generation follows generation, people find they can relate to these plays in new and unexpected ways. The more I thought about it the more I realised I was more interested in Didi and Gogo: The Next Generation than trying to imagine younger versions of these much-loved characters.

When is Waiting for Godot set? Clearly after 1889, because that’s when the Eiffel Tower was constructed, but other than that there’s little in the way of clues. Bishop Berkeley, one of the few actual people mentioned in Lucky’s tirade, died in 1753 so that’s no help. In 1875 Charles Peterson walked into the Kapp brothers’ elegant Dublin tobacconists and declared he could make pipes better than the ones they were selling, so it must have been after this date that Pozzo purchased his Kapp and Peterson. The most helpful reference, assuming this is what he is referring to, comes from Lucky when he babbles on about the “skull in Connemara” because in 1947 a Connemara farmer found a fully intact skeleton clad in Viking armour. This was, however, a change made to the French original (which talks about la tête en Normandie).

It’s not important but if there's one thing Beckett scholars love to do is scratch around in the dirt for details like this. The other people who love poking around for such trivia are readers of historical fiction. When Beckett wrote Waiting for Godot the discovery of the skull in Connemara was news; because time has marched on, one can forget that.

Me at work in the Gorbals

So, was I going to make my protagonists twenty-first century vagabonds? I have to say the thought never crossed my mind. Despite slipping in the odd detail as mentioned already, there is nothing in Waiting for Godot to really pinpoint where or when it is set. There are those who would argue that the action takes place in the Wicklow hills and their arguments do have a certain validity, but it’s not important. There are those who point to every tree in Mercier and Camier and say that it prefigures the tree in Waiting for Godot, despite the fact that the man himself said he based the set of Godot on Caspar David Friedrich’s Man and Woman Observing the Moon—not that we always trust what Beckett has to say.

Once I finally started writing those opening few pages to Milligan and Murphy one thing became clear: it was set sometime in the past. In my head the timeframe is the mid-nineteen-thirties and, as with Beckett, there are a few cultural references to draw on, if you’re keen to pin it down. Firstly, there is a scene where one of the characters talks about being in a mental hospital. The 1930 Mental Treatment Act modernised many terms: asylums became known as mental hospitals and so the book has to be set after this date. Secondly, one of the ships mentioned at the end of the novel is the Homeric which was built for North German Lloyd in 1913 and named Columbus. Construction was halted until 1914 due to the World War and the ship ceded to Britain in 1919 where it was sold to White Star and Dominion Lines and renamed Homeric. Its route was Southampton-New York and it was scrapped in Scotland in 1936. So, mid-nineteen-thirties.

This is, of course, assuming that the action is set in the real world. Just as Beckett never mentions Dublin by name, nowhere in my book does it say that the setting is the Irish Free State (as Ireland was between 1922 and 1937). None of the towns mentioned will be found on any map, although the town from which Milligan and Murphy hail, Lissoy, is the old name for Auburn in County Westmeath which sits in the middle of the island. The original Irish name for the village was Lissoy, i.e. Lios Uaimhe, fort of the cave.

Our story, such as it is, begins with our heroes, such as they are, sound asleep in bed.

It is a Tuesday. All my novels begin on a Tuesday. They also all feature protagonists whose names begin with the letter j: Jonathan Payne (Living with the Truth, Stranger than Fiction), James Henry Valentine (The More Things Change) and Jennifer Wilson (Left). The same is true here:

Murphy’s given name was John. As circumstance would have it this was to be his half-brother's also. Milligan’s paternal grandfather, whilst making the most of his deathbed, had compelled his son to swear an oath. The rotten old man had made the boy give his word that he would not break with family tradition in this particular regard and so, albeit years later, after some pointless-but-necessary debate with his new wife, Milligan’s father had taken the required legal steps to have his firstborn son registered with the appropriate authorities: John Milligan. From that day forth the two boys went by their surnames. Surprisingly they were close, though not joined at the hip.

Mercier and Camier look like Laurel and Hardy. I preferred to go down the Tweedledum and Tweedledee route:

Both took after their mother in appearance if in no other way: all three of them were short, stout, snub-nosed and sleepy-eyed, more like lost puppies than evil dwarves, it must be said.

Needless to say I am not the first to see a correlation between Lewis Carroll and Beckett:

Tweedledee and Tweedledum are not far from tramps and prefigure their modern counterparts Estragon and Vladimir or Clov and Hamm. Their verbal exchange only points to the difficulty of codifying possible meanings and, like Beckett’s characters, they seem to have no society, no history, no occupation, no real personality or identity except their names, and are very dependent on each other, which mutual dependence only helps to generate incomprehensibility and indeterminacy.[3]

But what of my opening line? Clearly they are not brothers. No, but that isn’t important to them. This is how that opening paragraph developed:

Milligan and Murphy were brothers. They introduced themselves to the world as such and such was the blatant straightfacedness that accompanied this assertion that few felt remotely inclined to press the matter further. As it happens there was sufficient physical similarity between the two men to win over even the most sceptical of individuals. That said, most people had enough things to worry about without losing any sleep over the likes of these two. Needless to say, they weren't actually brothers. No. For the record they were half-brothers; each had been dragged screaming from the innards of the same mother though a different father had been guilty for them winding up there.

They are, its fair to say, very alike, a fact my beta readers picked up on, but it is deliberate. There are differences: Milligan is quick tempered and impatient and likes to be told stories before going to sleep; Murphy is the more serious of the two, he smokes a pipe, has a decent singing voice and has a tendency to interfere with himself when no one’s looking. Both are lazy, fond of the drink when they can afford it and not especially bright.

The outside of the flat

So what is Milligan and Murphy about? As we’ve seen with Beckett a great deal of his work concerns the fact that people are not in control of their lives. There are, for want of a better expression, other forces at play. This is probably shown clearest in the mime Act Without Words I where a man in a desert is tormented by an unseen party who lowers items, some of which he can reach, others of which he has to work to reach (by stacking cubes) and still others that are whisked out of his reach. Milligan and Murphy are instructed by their mother to go looking for work. On the way there, after discovering a lucky penny, they encounter an old man who gets them to think about where they should be going before vanishing mysteriously without saying goodbye. A minor detail? Perhaps, but not if he was a pooka. We never find out the old man’s name but it’s not hard to work out who he appears to be:

They turned their backs on the man and found, much to their annoyance, that they had reached a road junction. Decisions, decisions, decisions. Why were they all of a sudden limping on two different opinions? They knew exactly which direction O’Connor’s farm was. This was not the first time they had been directed there.

As they mulled over their options, a voice was heard from behind them:

“Excuse me. Excuse me, gentlemen. Neither of you would happen to have a carrot about his person?” They turned as one and looked at the man who was now sitting on the ground dusting off his bowler, “Or a turnip. A turnip would be good too.”

Is this Gogo or the ghost of Gogo? I’m not saying. Or he might be a pooka pretending to be him—pookas never say goodbye. Suffice to say, the two find themselves, for the first time in their lives, heading off into the unknown. They wind up in Drumclaven and, after an encounter with a policeman who does little to make them feel welcome, they end up seeking sanctuary in “the local chapel of St. Brigid, the patron saint of travellers, fugitives, poets, scholars, chicken farmers, milk-maids and bastards” where the not-too-unkindly priest explains the point of the book:

“Gentlemen,” he began and then thought to soften his message, “Boys… lads… not everything in this life is reasonable. It is easier when you’re talking about good things and bad things. You murder a man in cold blood, for example, and then you think to yourself, Self, did I do a good thing or a bad thing? And your self says to you, ‘Look up Exodus Chapter Twenty,’ and you do and there it is in black and white. It’s a lot harder when it comes to reasonable and unreasonable things.

“You’ll have heard it said that everything happens for a reason. Well, poppycock! Simply because someone makes a statement like that doesn’t make it any truer than my insisting that the moon is made out of green cheese which it may or may not be; I have no empirical evidence either way. It is true, God has His grand plan—I have to believe that (it’s more than my job’s worth not to)—but it will come to fruition despite what we do not because of it. Make no mistake, we are all spanners in God’s works, you and I and everyone else. That’s what free will is all about.

“People do unreasonable things all the time—and by that I mean things for no good reason at all—and when they start to look for reasons why they did what they did in the first place, they find there aren’t any. That doesn’t mean that answers won’t ever exist for what they did, however, the answer comes at the end of the sum not before it. How would you feel Mr Murphy, Mr Milligan, if your schoolteacher had asked you one day what equalled four?”

“Two and two equals four,” fired back Milligan.

“Which can be true,” said the priest, “but what about three plus one or seven minus three or the square root of sixteen?” He had lost them there. “Reasons, if they exist at all, are always to be found before we do things; answers, once we’ve worked them out (if we ever figure them out), always come into being the fact.”

The emphases didn’t help.

“So did we sin or not, Father?” enquired a now more-confused-than-ever Milligan.

“That… is for each of you to answer.”

With that he nodded to both men and headed off quickly towards the rectory leaving the two bewildered brothers standing there.

There are no reasons for unreasonable things. They want to know why they left but the fact is that, purely on the spur of the moment, for no good reason, bad reason or any ol’ reason. Now that they’ve left they have the problem of where to go. Beckett would have them go nowhere and end up back where they started from. I do things a little differently. I take them through a wee adventure, not a very taxing one, and settle them with the local ex-madwoman in Rathnerth who takes on the role of their mother and I could have left them there, but where would be the fun in that? Do they get to escape or does their author have something else in store for them? Mercier and Camier felt a presence, the author of their destiny, but what about Milligan and Murphy?

“Since we left home wouldn’t you say that, on the whole, we’ve landed lucky? Look where we’ve ended up after just a few days.”

“You’ve got a point. It must be that penny we found. Would you ever have credited that such a wee penny could have so much luck attached to it?”

“I don’t mean the penny. Don’t you feel as if someone’s looking after us?”

“Someone? You mean someone… up there?”

“Precisely.”

“I do not.”

“It stands to reason. God, or possibly one of the saints, maybe; if He’s too busy.”

“Murphy, how on earth do you think that you and I could possibly fit into God’s plans? We’re not great thinkers. We’re not great doers. There must be a million people lying in their beds right now who could do whatever He might need doing faster and better than you or I could hope to.”

“I don’t know. Maybe it’s not so important a job. Maybe He needs someone dispensable. We’re that and more.”

They are right, of course. Just like Puckoon’s Dan Milligan had his author looking out for him so, too, do Milligan and Murphy. Whereas Mercier and Camier’s journey was plagued by “a long line of maleficent beings” things actually go disconcertingly well for these two. But their journey is not without hitches. Who is the stranger astride his “sturdy black Raleigh 3-speed” in hot pursuit?

My Beckett shelf as it was then (I have more now)

I never set out to rewrite Beckett, or to emulate him or even to do a Beckett Lite parody or pastiche, but I cannot pretend he wasn’t an influence and those who know his work well will doubtless be able to see that. If you know nothing about him, have never read anything by him and have never seen one of his plays, there is still a lot to enjoy here and, who knows, you might even enjoy it more.

If you want to know you’ll have to buy the ruddy thing; it’s available now from the FV Books site in paperback. An ebook version will follow in due course.

You can read the first chapter here and there are already two reviews online, one from John Baker and a second from Guy Fraser-Sampson.

REFERENCES

[1] Matthew Hart, Diamond: A Journey to the Heart of an Obsession, p.204

[2] Samuel Beckett to Barney Rosset, 18 October 1954 (Syracuse). Quoted in James Knowlson, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett, p 412

[3] Teke Charles Ngiewih, ‘From Carroll to Beckett: Retrospection and Prefiguring; The Romantic and (Post)Modern Context of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and Through The Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There’, L'Observatoire Réunionnais des Arts, des Civilisations et des Littératures dans leur Environnement

I selected this post to be featured on my blog’s page at www.bookblogs.org.

Beckett's pseudo-couples (part two)

2012-01-10T23:00:00.000Z

In his book, Beckett Before Godot, John Pilling notes:

PJ Murphy has been one of the very few Beckett critics to see that Mercier et Camier suffers from what the Denis Devlin review calls 'the need that in its haste to be abolished cannot pause to be stated'. For a book so full of statement, indeed, Mercier et Camier seems oddly insubstantial, as if the 'haste to be abolished' had been more important than 'the predicament of particular human identity.'[1]

The English version certainly has a rushed feel about it. Scenes which other authors would have devoted an entire chapter to, Beckett shrugs off in a few sentences.

Mercier and Camier are trying to leave an unnamed city that can, nevertheless, be clearly identified as Dublin. After a while, they succeed in getting into the Wicklow mountains where they part company; at the end, they are both in the city again where they (for what we might imagine might be the last time) part company once more. So, as with Waiting for Godot and Endgame, the status quo is maintained. They are modelled on tramps—and, for much of the book their choice of conveyance is Shanks’ Pony, despite having a woman’s bicycle with them for much of the time which neither of them rides—but they are not tramps in the sense that they are not mendicant wanderers; Camier, we discover, is a private investigator but all we find out about Mercier is that he is a married man with children. They are never short of money to pay for cakes, sandwiches, drink, train fares or lodgings or, indeed, to offer a bribe.

We never learn where they are headed; it is unclear if they know themselves. They arrange to meet at Saint Ruth Square—“which in fact is not a square but a public garden in the centre of town”[2]— on St Macarius’ Day [3] but keep missing each other and so it takes time for the book to even get started. Mercier arrives first at 9:05, waits for five minutes and then sets out for a saunter which he expects to last fifteen minutes; in the meantime Camier appears at 9:15, dallies for five minutes and then decides he too would have a little stroll; returning to the spot at 9:25 and finding his travelling companion still not there. Mercier once again wanders off after five minutes, this time planning to be away a mere ten minutes. By 9:50 they finally manage to come face to face and hug each other—at which point “the rain began to fall, with quite oriental abruptness” and they have to head for cover which they found “in the form of a pagoda [which] had been erected … as a protection from the rain and other inclemencies.”

They remain there until page 21 (and two pages longer in the French original) whereupon they finally begin their journey proper. So, considering the book is only 123 pages long 17% of it is spent getting nowhere. This does not mean that their time in the pagoda is not entertaining: a pair of ‘locked-in’ copulating dogs provide the opening act followed quickly enough by the park ranger, a moustachioed, stiff-upper-lipped ex-military man, the first, as it turns out, “of a long line of maleficent beings” that they will encounter, who demands to know which of them owns a certain bicycle he has noticed propped up against the pagoda and which was doubtlessly flaunting some public ordinance or other. Despite the fact the bicycle is not theirs and clearly an encumbrance, they nevertheless leave with it and the items they arrived with, a sack, an umbrella and a raincoat.

But where to go next?

Where do our feet think they’re taking us? said Camier.

They would seem to be heading for the canal, said Mercier.

They do indeed follow the canal until it gets dark whereupon Camier proposes a libation despite the fact they had happened to swear off the demon drink some time before. They stop at the first pub but having been declined admission because of the bike (although it is unclear whether or not they actually tried to enter the pub with the contraption) they adjourn to the bar across the way where they take stock of their progress so far, compiling a list of ten items, the most important of which in the context of the book in general being #9: “Only one thing mattered: depart.” This is, of course, the thing that frustrates Didi and Gogo so, and Hamm also: the fervent desire to depart and their apparent inability to do so despite the fact nothing appears to be stopping them.

They do not depart. They find themselves at Helen’s. Who precisely Helen is is hard to tell. She has only been mentioned briefly once before when Camier, trying to prove at what hour the two men had in fact agreed to meet, had read from his notebook and reported he was to collect an umbrella from Helen’s, which he must have done some time earlier because he has the very item when they leave the pagoda. The events that take place at Helen’s are covered in just over a page of the book, thirty-six lines in total, fourteen of which are used describing a cockatoo and nine of which involve an exchange about the quality of her floor covering. Here are the remaining lines and one extra:

There’s my bed and there’s my couch, said Helen.

They’re all yours, said Mercier. For my part I’ll sleep with none.

A nice little suck-off, said Camier, not too prolonged, by all means, but nothing more.

Terminated, said Helen, the nice little suck-offs but nothing more.

I’ll lie on the floor, said Mercier, and wait for dawn. Scenes and faces will unfold before my gaze, the rain on the skylight sound like claws and night rehearse its colours. The longing will take me to throw myself out of the window, but I’ll master it. He repeated, in a roar, I’ll master it.

Back in the street they wondered what they had done with the bicycle. The sack too had disappeared.

It’s an odd passage I grant you. Only later on is it clear that they did in fact spend the night there and had not been ejected therefrom for being too loud and/or requesting sexual favours. It seems quite likely that Helen is a prostitute, nevertheless, even if not she does appear a woman of easy virtue. I can only imagine what a writing tutor would say if one of his students handed in the above. But this is Beckett we’re talking about; a literary genius. It does feel like he’s got carried away somewhere along the line editing this section and if it was only this section I might be more forgiving, but this sets the tone for much of which is to come. He takes his time over their banal conversations and it’s easy to see how Didi and Gogo could have evolved from this pair; Beckett’s not very interested in what these two do, so much as what they think.

Now I am all for asking my readers to pull their weight when reading my books and yet I fear here that Beckett is asking a little too much of me. But not all have felt this. In his enthusiastic-if-not-exactly-painfully-researched article in The Guardian, fellow Irishman Keith Ridgway found in the book familiar ground:

On my first reading of it the biggest thrills I got were ones of recognition. Of course I knew Beckett was from the same city I was, but the first time I could see this clearly was in Mercier and Camier. The city in the book, though unnamed, is certainly Dublin. I recognised the voices, the accents, the mood of it. The Dublin mountains appear, clearly, with references to ruins and roads where I was sure I'd been. The pubs in the book were exactly the kinds of places I was sitting in while reading it.[4]

But at the same time he acknowledges:

You can get this feeling of recognition in all the major Beckett works, but the familiar is only implied, if beautifully so, by the author. Space is made for the details, but you bring them yourself.[5]

Another thing we must keep in mind when reading the English translation is the time difference between its writing and its translating. It was a task that gave him little or no pleasure. Beckett wrote in a letter of 1973 to Barney Rosset that the translation of Mercier et Camier was not going well and that he was “bogged down through loathing of the original.”[6] Beckett has moved on from his vaudeville phase—it’s been seventeen years since Waiting for Godot was first staged and thirteen years since Endgame—and so now Beckett is looking back on these prototypes with much less affection than he had for them originally; the success of Godot has in fact become something of a thorn in his side. He is also going through a dry spell and hasn’t written anything new since Eh Joe in 1966. (It is 1972 before he writes Not I midway through the translation of Mercier et Camier into English.) It has also been eleven years since he wrote anything that might be described as realism (Krapp’s Last Tape) and his prose has taken a strange turn indeed—anyone having read, or at least attempted to read, How It Is, All Strange Away or Imagination Dead Imagine will know what I mean—works of calm, exact austerity and yet for all his hacking away at the text his “resculpting” of Mercier et Camier evokes his earlier works like More Pricks than Kicks, Murphy and Watt, works riddled with cultural references and allusions. My suspicion is that it wasn’t so much that he loathed the original—Beckett was prone to exaggeration on occasion—but that he resented having to take what he saw as a backward step. That said:

Already, in the French version, Mercier and Camier are strangely cut off from the world of ordinary people and objects, hardly communicating and finding it easier to discard than to retain possessions. Beckett intensifies this divorce in his translation by the frequent omission of details which might link Mercier and Camier to the ordinary world.[7]

Moving on. There are eight chapters in the book. After every second chapter there follows a list summarising what was contained in the previous pages. None of these are especially helpful and have the feel of checklists that he, as the translator, might have used to make sure that what was important in the original was transferred to the new version. Again, I note the word ‘feel’ and I see I have used ‘seem’ and ‘appear’ already. There are so few things in this book where you can say ‘is’ or ‘are’. Here is the list for chapter one:

Outset.
Meeting of Mercier and Camier.
Saint Ruth Square.
The beech.
The rain.
The shelter.
The dogs.
Distress of Camier.
The ranger.
The bicycle.
Words with the ranger.
Mercier and Camier confer.
Results of this conference.
Bright too late.
The bell.
Mercier and Camier set out.

And, indeed, these “dry résumés seem like attempts to control and neutralise the unruliness of the preceding material.”[8] They are not additions in the English translation but, because of his cuts and also because of a change of perspective, they do differ from the French. In his book, A Reader’s Guide to Samuel Beckett, Hugh Kenner makes an interesting comparison:

A dozen years later Beckett conceived Krapp, playing over the tape he recorded three decades earlier and lingering on a segment which at the time he had entered in his ledger only as 'Farewell to Love'. The segments which had celebrated great insight leave him impatient now. These Résumés are a first glimpse of Krapp's ledger; the narrator of Mercier et Camier is a proto-Krapp.[9]

In chapter three the pair have taken the train, “the slow and easy”, or the Dublin and South Eastern Railway, from a station noted for its architectural arch, clearly Harcourt Street Station. (The station facade was designed by George Wilkinson, and contained a central arch and a colonnade of doric columns.) They alight at a small town and lodge at an inn managed by a man called (possibly) Gall; Mercier calls him Gall but there is some doubt cast as to whether this is actually his name. This is where we discover that Camier—F. X. Camier, as it says on his business card—is a private investigator because a man going by the name of Conaire turns up having, it appears, arranged to meet with Camier there; this is the first we learn of that. This is also the first we learn about the physical appearance of the two men: Camier—“[s]mall and fat … red face, scant hair, four chins, protruding paunch, bandy legs, beady piggy eyes;” Mercier—“[a] big bony hank with a beard … hardly able to stand, wicked expression.” Grotesque versions of Laurel and Hardy to be sure. (Bair tells us that Beckett “never missed a film starring Charlie Chaplin, Laurel and Hardy … or Harold Lloyd.”[10]) Needless to say Conaire does not get to keep his appointment as the two men are found sound asleep on the floor of their room. “Snoring hand in hand.”

The following day they venture into the countryside—surely this is them escaped?—but by chapter five, sometime later (it is unclear how much later as “[t]hey had lost the notion of time”) they find themselves back in the city and back at Helen’s where they spend a couple of nights, the first “without debauch of any kind”. During the next day, as time is beginning to drag, they, to use Beckett’s expression, “manstruprated mildly, without fatigue.” Before an open fire, “their naked bodies mingled, fingering and fondling with the languorous tact of hands arranging flowers.”

Now, there are those who have gone to some lengths to suggest that Vladimir and Estragon are in fact a gay couple—a recent adaptation Waiting for Rev. Gaydot has boyfriends Vladimir and Estragon stand at the altar for two hours, waiting for the Reverend Gaydot to pronounce them husbands. Of course, he never shows—but despite insisting that the roles be played by males, Beckett never gave any indication that they were a gay couple or even homosexually-inclined. (See the Wikipedia entry however.) They hug more than most blokes but you don’t see them sitting around even holding hands—something Mercier and Camier do several times—and let’s face it, the fireside scene is a hard one to talk one’s way out of especially when, only a few pages earlier, when discussing a variety of unconnected concepts they respond to the proposition: “What would one do without women? [with] Explore other channels.” The matter is discussed at some length in Paul Stewart’s Sex and Aesthetics in Samuel Beckett’s Work but one point worth noting is this:

The abhorrence of procreation partly accounts for the often virulent misogyny to be found in … Beckett’s early works. This misogyny is reinforced in Beckett by an oft- expressed hatred of the child, or misopedia, which again is rooted in an understanding of the inherent dangers of procreation and indeed of existence as such. Both misogyny and misopedia—two of the more unpalatable aspects of Beckett’s oeuvre—are an integral part of his reaction against the results of heteronormative, penetrative sex.[11]

I think, in fairness, these two dislikes/hatreds only form part of his more general misanthropy: without sex there would be no conception and without procreation there would be no one to grow old and be miserable doing it.

In [his first] novel, [Dream of Fair to Middling Women], Belacqua substitutes for physical intercourse with the Smeraldina “a fraudulent system of Platonic manualisation, chiroplatonism” – in other words, masturbation. That Beckett should prefer masturbation to the "real thing" was in keeping with his general narcissism and quietism, his preference for what took place in his own mind rather than in the outer, "real" world, with its contingencies, its disturbances of inner tranquillity, its futile exercises of will and ambition.[12]

Masturbation, to be fair, does crop up not infrequently in Beckett’s prose, not that other sexual practices are verboten but when the others do appear, so often they are unsuccessful or unpleasant, if not both; at the very least it’s usually hard work. The thing about that scene in Mercier and Camier is that it doesn’t say that Helen was not a participant. It all depends what Beckett meant when he wrote “they”, doesn’t it? At the end of the day, though, is it not all simply mental masturbation, irrespective of what the characters get up to? If there is one thing Beckett can’t be accused of is taking himself too seriously and if all the aforementioned action takes place within a “skullscape” and the parties involved are two halves of a single personality then what exactly is going on?

Paul Stewart makes a good point here:

Rather than championing a “queer” sexuality in counterpoint to the “normal,” and thereby restricting the queer within the parameters it might seek to question, Beckett’s ambiguous use of nonreproductive sexuality severs the link between the sex object and the identification of the subject that approaches it. More often than not, Beckett’s characters are indifferent to the niceties of sexual choice and the identity politics that plays around that choice, and merely seek a means to scratch the itch of sexual desire, no matter how feeble that desire might be.[13]

Let’s press on.

From there they proceed to a city, visit rough pubs and scenes of Mercier’s youth, and return to a city square, where they assault a constable. Presumably in flight, they appear next on a moor (in the French edition, the Old Military Road in the Wicklow mountains) and then, taking shelter among the ruins along the way, they travel back to the city: “such roughly must have been the course of events.” In the city they meet Watt [who bears little resemblance to the protagonist in Beckett’s novel of the same name] … Passing over the canal Lock Bridge, they sit and contemplate for a time a hospital for diseases of the skin before departing for their homes.[14]

It is hard not to feel somewhat dissatisfied when you reach the end of Mercier and Camier. At least with Didi and Gogo one feels that there was a point to everything they say and do and that they’ve not failed: they’ve survived another day of having to wait. There is small cause for feeling triumphant.

So what is Mercier and Camier about? If Didi and Gogo represent Sam and Suzanne then Mercier and Camier, as a unified whole, represent Sam as he was prior to World War II and the city represents his old life, specifically his overpowering mother. I mentioned the raincoat earlier in passing and the bike. To a casual reader these won’t mean anything but bikes appear too often in Beckett’s writing for us not to realise that they are special to him.[15] As for the raincoat, let Deirdre Bair explain:

Mercier and Camier is about voluntary exile, much like Beckett's own. While it can be read as the odyssey of Beckett and the other young Irishmen who went to Paris in the 1930's hoping to gain the same success as their countryman of an older generation, James Joyce, it can also be read as two aspects of the personality of Beckett himself. Before his departure, he had been easily recognizable in Dublin by his shapeless, dirty raincoat, several sizes too large. He was plagued by recurring idiosyncratic cysts. When he wrecked his own car, he had continuous problems with his bicycle. In a drunken moment, he lost his favourite hat, which he mourned long afterwards.

It is the raincoat, however, which best symbolises the final division of his first 30 years from the rest of his life, as well as this novel's place in his canon: when he left Dublin, Beckett threw his raincoat away, just as Mercier and Camier, after throwing theirs away, walk off into their own uncertain future, looking back now and again at the heap on the ground—unwilling to go on with it, but hesitant to abandon it.[16]

This scene towards the end of the books takes on a very different complexion now. Talking about the raincoat:

We could bury it, said Mercier.

Don't be mawkish, said Camier.

One of the good things about the rise of the ebook is that an author can easily fix any minor errors that he is made aware of after publication. On the downside, if you’re someone like Beckett, there is the temptation of continually keep chipping away at a work as you grow older and have less and less patience for older works.

In the eighties, Beckett was invited to Germany to direct Waiting For Godot. When presented with the script which he had not read in many years he exclaimed: “This thing needs a good edit.” And this was his masterpiece![17]

The danger in pruning, as any rose grower will warn you, is that one can get carried away. As John and Beryl Fletcher wrote in their introduction to Fin de Partie:

[I]n pruning his work Beckett undoubtedly improved it, but sometimes he compressed things so drastically that the surviving statement is somewhat obscure.[18]

Why Mercier and Camier doesn’t work as well as his other novels will always be a matter of conjecture. Beckett certainly never opened up on the subject. I tend to feel about the book the same way as Keith Ridgway, to whom I’ll give the final words:

Mercier and Camier also makes clear that the major Beckett works did not come from nothing. It's comforting, as a writer, to stumble upon a stumbling Beckett, one who is not exactly sure of what it is he's doing, or where it is he wants to go. He makes mistakes in this book, hits a couple of flat notes. […] But Beckett on an off-day is still more compelling, funnier, more incisive than almost anybody else.[19]

Actually that’s not true. I have more to say concerning Mercier and Camier in my next post, Milligan and Murphy.

REFERENCES

[1] John Pilling, Beckett Before Godot, p.211

[2] Stephen Watt, ‘Beckett by Way of Baudrillard’ in Katherine H. Burkman, Ed,, Myth and Ritual in the Plays of Samuel Beckett, p.114

[3] A Latinised version of the Freek Makarios meaning "supremely blessed; by extension fortunate, well off: - blessed, happy." An ironic comment on the condition of Mercier and Camier. See Four saints in two acts: a note on the Saints Macarius and the canonization of Gogo and Didi by Lois Friedberg-Dobry

[4] Keith Ridgway, ‘Knowing me, knowing you’, The Guardian, 19 July 2003

[5] Keith Ridgway, ‘Knowing me, knowing you’, The Guardian, 19 July 2003

[6] Quoted in Deirdre Bair, Samuel Beckett: A Biography, p.634

[7] Steven Connor, ‘“Traduttore, traditore”: Samuel Beckett’s Translation of Mercier et Camier’, Journal of Beckett Studies, No 11, December 1989, p.2

[8] Steven Connor, ‘“Traduttore, traditore”: Samuel Beckett’s Translation of Mercier et Camier’, Journal of Beckett Studies, No 11, December 1989, p.7

[9] Hugh Kenner, A Reader’s Guide to Samuel Beckett, p.88

[10] Deirdre Bair, Samuel Beckett: A Biography, p.48

[11] Paul Stewart, Sex and Aesthetics in Samuel Beckett’s Work, p.6

[12] Anthony Cronin, Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist, p.106

[13] Paul Stewart, Sex and Aesthetics in Samuel Beckett’s Work, p.196

[14] John P. Harrington, The Irish Beckett, pp.150,151

[15] See Janet Menzies, ‘Beckett’s Bicycles’ in Journal of Beckett Studies, No.6 and ‘The Joys of Cycling with Beckett’ in Samuel Beckett und seine Fahrräder by Friedhelm Rathjen

[16] Deirdre Bair, ‘While Waiting for Godot’, The New York Times, 9 March 1975

[17] Irish Poets and Novelists, The Icon Walk

[18] John and Beryl Fletcher’s critical edition of Fin de partie (London, Methuen, 1970), p.9

[19] Keith Ridgway, ‘Knowing me, knowing you’, The Guardian, 19 July 2003

Beckett's pseudo-couples (part one)

2012-01-05T22:00:00.001Z

Who is the third who walks always beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together...
TS Eliot, The Waste Land

I have no idea what the IQs of these gentlemen are but I don’t think the same criterion applies when you’re talking about writers, composers, comedians and artists. Few would dispute that Beethoven was a musical genius, that Picasso was an artistic genius, that Shakespeare was a literary genius and that Peter Sellers was a comedic genius but does that mean that every note Beethoven wrote was a work of genius? or that every line penned by Shakespeare was a work of genius? Do geniuses ever have off days?

I am a huge fan of the writer Samuel Beckett. I believe him to be a literary genius. I do not, however, believe that everything he penned was a work of genius, merely that it was the work of a genius; there is a difference. Beckett himself was nothing if not self-effacing. Indeed, often in the scribbled notes he sent along with his manuscripts he apologises for them saying that this or that was the best he could manage and he hopes it will do. Even after receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature—as if any greater validation was needed after that—he still remained the man he had always been, shy and unimpressed by fame, especially his own. He received the award in 1969, “for his writing, which—in new forms for the novel and drama—in the destitution of modern man acquires its elevation” but he declined to attend the ceremony. The following year, due to pressure from his French publisher, Les Éditions de Minuit, he agreed to the publication of his novella Mercier et Camier. It was not a new work. In fact it predated his most famous play, Waiting for Godot, which he began in October 1948 but wasn’t first performed until January 1953. He had sworn never to publish Mercier et Camier—he described it as “jettisoned”—in fact his first biographer, Deirdre Bair, in an article in The New York Times, notes this:

The manuscript was accepted in 1947 by Beckett's first French publisher, Bordas, but for reasons unknown he withdrew it before publication. For 24 years he steadfastly refused to allow it to be published, calling it a working draft or preliminary attempt to evolve a new technique in fiction.[1]

So why the change of heart? Simply to cash in after the publicity surrounding the Nobel Prize? Hardly Beckett’s style. Really the problem lay in his own generosity having previously allowed scholars access to the text, permitting bits to be quoted and translated, so that his defence against eventual publication got weaker and weaker year by year.

Wilhelm Dilthey says that we all perform the act of autobiography all the time, not in the sense of writing it down, of course, or sending it into the world for publication, but in the sense of—as Beckett puts it and performs it so often—drawing the line and making the tot. But the tot will be different each time, for memory and the self will have altered with circumstances, and these—self and circumstances—taken in adaptive conjunction, will determine the new tot. We can see such a totting up of a career, of necessity provisional and incomplete, as early as 1948, in a letter Beckett wrote to George Reavey: "I am now retyping, for rejection by the publishers, Malone Meurt, the last I hope of the series Murphy, Watt, Mercier & Camier, Molloy, not to mention the 4 Nouvelles & Eleuthéria" (No Symbol Where None Intended, 53).[2]

The irony here, of course, is that, whilst taking a break from his next novel, L'Innomable, which he was working on at the time he wrote this letter, he began the play that would secure his place in literary history, as a bit of light relief, to, as he put it, "get away from the awful prose [he] was writing at the time." That play was En attendant Godot. The rest, as they say, is history.

Let’s jump back though to 1945. 1945 was a pivotal year for Beckett. He had been living in France but returned home to Dublin where he had his famous epiphany in his mother’s house which he, in a rather romantic gesture for him, relocated to the end of the East Pier of Dún Laoghaire staring out into the Irish sea. Less studious researchers often assume his references to it in Krapp’s Last Tape are autobiographical but they are not, although when the opportunity to correct people arose, Beckett did not always jump in to provide a more accurate account. Three years before his death in 1989 he did, however, set the record straight in a letter to Richard Ellmann: “All the jetty and howling wind are imaginary. It happened to me, summer 1945, in my mother’s little house, named New Place, across the road from Cooldrinagh.”[3]

The first work to be produced after this revelation was written in French. He made the switch because—as he himself claimed—it was easier for him thus to write "without style"[4] Prior to this Beckett’s prose is heavily indebted to his adoration of the writing of his fellow Irishman, James Joyce but following his revelation he realised…

… that Joyce had gone as far as one could in the direction of knowing more, [being] in control of one’s material. He was always adding to it; you only have to look at his proofs to see that. I realised that my own way was in impoverishment, in lack of knowledge and in taking away, in subtracting rather than in adding.[5]

Although undoubtedly an Irishman—the thick accent stuck until his dying day (with no loss of viscosity)—even his early scribblings are not as overtly Irish as is the writing of Synge or Flann O'Brien, but although the Irishisms faded from his work post-1945, their echo remained. In his book Memory and Narrative: The Weave of Life Writing, James Olney makes an interesting observation:

It was with the intention, I believe, of clothing memories in a language that had for him no tentacular roots in memory, a language that was therefore safer, more formal and abstract than the intensely charged medium of English, that Beckett decided, when memory became in all ways central to his work, to write in French.[6]

The adjective ‘tentacular’ is a good choice here for it means “equipped with tentacles” and the fact is that although “he did not wish to indulge in memory: he had no choice but to take it on as a subject along with the self.”[7] This is why when the two men with the ever-so-French-sounding names in his next book set out on their journey, although the city is never named it is obvious to all and sundry that it is a thinly-disguised Dublin. He began the novella on 5th May 1946 and completed it by 3rd October[8] that same year lumbering it with the rather unwieldy title of Le Voyage de Mercier et Camier autour du Pot dans les Bosquets de Bondy (literally The Journey of Mercier and Camier around the pot in the groves of Bondy). The subtleties of this title do not come across in the transliteration:

"Tourner autour du pot" is colloquial French for "to detour," and the voyage of Mercier and Camier proves to be a series of detours from the undesignated destination of the two travelling friends. Further, the title situates these detours in the groves of Bondy, which is colloquial French for "a den of thieves." [...] The long French title therefore implies that the two friends engage in a series of detours within an environment of ill-wishers.[9]

Now we have Beckett’s complete canon, it’s hard to see how Mercier et Camier stands out but these were the first of his vaudeville couples and the only ones in prose. His most famous pair, obviously, are Vladimir and Estragon from Waiting for Godot followed by Hamm and Clov in Endgame of whom Beckett said, “You must realise that Hamm and Clov are Didi and Gogo at a later date, at the end of their lives.”[10] Once he qualified this remark, stating that Hamm and Clov were actually “himself and Suzanne” (his long-time mistress and finally wife who he first met in1929) "as they were in the 1950s—when they found it difficult to stay together but impossible to leave each other."[11] Beckett's Waiting for Godot has been called "a metaphor for the long walk into Roussillon, when Beckett and Suzanne slept in haystacks... during the day and walked by night..."[12] when they were fleeing the Nazis and, as at least some “of the dialogue of the novella Mercier et Camier is repeated word for word in”[13] Waiting for Godot, it’s not unreasonable to look as Mercier and Camier as prototypes, if not exactly much younger versions, of Didi and Gogo. In his novel, L'Innomable, published in French in 1953, a number of characters from Beckett’s earlier works get a brief mention, Belacqua Shua, Murphy, Watt, Molloy, Moran, Malone and Mercier and Camier who get singled out and referred to as a “pseudo-couple.”

It is an odd expression and one Beckett (typically) never expounded on so it has been left to others to try and agree upon what he meant. As his three main male pairs (I’m not discounting the pairs in Rough for Theatre I and II but let’s not overcomplicate the issue) are clearly connected then what people, including Beckett himself, have said about the latter two may also be applied to the original pair and one of those things is that rather than be viewed as separate individuals, Didi and Gogo and Hamm and Clov should be viewed as two halves of a single personality. Peter Boxall writes:

Vladimir and Estragon have been seen as so complimentary that they might be the two halves of a single personality, the conscious and the subconscious mind. Each of these three pairs—Pozzo-Lucky; Vladimir-Estragon; Hamm-Clov—is linked by a relationship of mutual interdependance, wanting to leave each other, at war with each other, and yet dependent on each other. 'Nec tecum, nec sine te.'[14] This is a frequent situation among people--married couples, for example--but it is also an image of the interrelatedness of the elements within a single personality, particularly if the personality is in conflict with itself.[15]

Boxall’s book only focuses on the two plays, Waiting for Godot and Endgame, but if I added ‘Mercier-Camier’ into his list of pairs I am sure no one would argue. In fact in The Faber Guide to Samuel Beckett there is a lengthy section on ‘pseudocouples’ which notes that…

[P]airs of characters pervade SB’s terrain like animals in search of an ark. Some wander deserted byways in pursuit of a saviour; others go nowhere, doomed to existence in claustrophobic rooms or ashbins. Whatever their predicament, the men and women who make up SB’s teetering twosomes are tied to each other, figuratively or, like Pozzo and Lucky, literally.[16]

Unlike most others in the Beckett canon Mercier and Camier are not together at the start of the book, nor, in fact, do they remain together, parting at the end after their journey has returned them to where they started off from in the first place.

Beckett may have come to dislike the work but he pottered around with it for years. An English translation appeared in 1974—Beckett had worked intermittently on this since the 1940s—but it’s not really a translation, rather a “reshaping” into English; he also took this opportunity to trim the novella reducing its length by some twelve percent, the omitted material varying from the odd line or phrase to two or three pages at a time. It tends to get overlooked by scholars but it has its admirers. Al Alvarez reviewed it for The Observer and called it “a comedy of high style, tenser and, I think, funnier than any of his other novels.”[17] Ruby Cohn considers it “an accomplished work” and “a milestone on Beckett’s French path.”[18] I never took to the book but then Endgame is probably one of my least favourite of Beckett’s plays. The reason in both cases is that, like so many people, I developed a great affection for Didi and Gogo; they are a most likeable couple (pseudo or not). Hamm and Clov are not nor did I find Mercier and Camier a pair that I cared about. I don’t have a problem with an author producing unlikeable or unsympathetic protagonists—much can be learned from them—but still no reader is going to be in a rush to return to their company: Waiting for Godot I have seen many time but Endgame only three. Mercier and Camier I have only read twice.

From what I’ve read I think a great many people simply do not get where Beckett is coming from in this book. The book opens, for example, with the following statement:

The journey of Mercier and Camier is one I can tell, if I will, for I was with them all the time.

Does this mean that there was a third person travelling alongside them? No, that’s not it. This is simply the book’s narrator who butts in every now and them and makes his presence felt but, for the most part, contents himself with the telling of the story like a good omniscient narrator should. But why personalise him then? Why have him refer to himself as ‘I’? The Faber Companion to Samuel Beckett says:

The opening claim that “I” was there, with no further evidence, is an irritant.

The clue comes later in the book, a short interchange:

Strange impression, said Mercier, strange impression sometimes that we are not alone. You not?

I am not sure I understand, said Camier.

Now quick, now slow, that is Camier all over.

Like the presence of a third party, said Mercier. Enveloping us. I have felt it from the start. And I am anything but psychic.

Does it bother you? said Camier.

At first no, said Mercier.

And now? said Camier.

It begins to bother me a little, said Mercier.

So who is this presence? Julie Campbell has the right idea:

When Beckett approaches the idea of a quest the probability of failure is posited right from the beginning. Beckett’s narrator begins with an attempt to authenticate his text: “The journey of Mercier and Camier is one I can tell, if I will, for I was with them all the time”. Yet this authenticating statement of the narrative’s ‘reality’ is quite obviously exploded, for instance, when Mercier and Camier separate, as they do more than once. It is, of course, impossible for the narrator to be with them both all the time. Beckett is here mocking the inability of narrative to present simultaneity, and his placing of the narrator within the narrated world mocks the ‘reality’ of the fictional creation, for the ‘real’ author is outside his creation while, conversely, it is inside him: the narrated journey originates within the author’s mind, is an inner journey.[19]

Metafiction is, at least according to Wikipedia, “a type of fiction that self-consciously addresses the devices of fiction, exposing the fictional illusion.” This can be done is a variety of ways, e.g. Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author begins as follows:

The play begins with an acting company preparing to rehearse a play. As the rehearsal is about to begin the play is unexpectedly interrupted by the arrival of six strange people. The Director of the play, furious at the interruption, demands an explanation. The Father explains that they are unfinished characters in search of an author to finish their story. The Director initially believes them to be mad, but as they begin to argue amongst themselves and reveal details of their story he begins to listen. While he isn't an author, the Director agrees to stage their story despite the disbelief amongst the jeering actors...

Or in Puckoon Spike Milligan has the character Dan Milligan engage in an exchange with the author of the book he finds himself in complaining about the state of his legs or looking for wee favours.

The ‘I’ in Mercier and Camier is their "author who is following the same road as them."[20] Hugh Kenner [21]hits the nail on the head when he writes:

The point of 'I was with them, all the time' ... is the sly point that I invented them, and made up their journey, every step of which, so far as steps are specified, they took with my deliberate cooperation.

Whether the ‘I’ is Beckett or not is another thing. I would say not. Beckett is his author. My own suspicion is that the narrator of this book is actual Malone the bedridden author in Malone Dies who says at one point:

Then it will be all over with the Murphys, Merciers, Molloys, Morans and Malones, unless it goes on beyond the grave. But sufficient unto the day, let us first defunge, then we’ll see. How many have I killed, hitting them on the head or setting fire to them? Offhand I can think of only four, all unknowns, I never knew anyone … There was the old butler too, in London I think, there’s London again, I cut his throat with his razor, that makes five.[22]

suggesting—and that’s all we can ever do—that he is the author of these earlier texts. The ambiguity is, no doubt, deliberate on Beckett’s behalf. (The one set on fire, by the way, was Murphy. The other four were the butler (also in Murphy), A and C (from Molloy) and the police officer (from Mercier and Camier.)

But why do we need this kind of narrator? Would a common-or-garden omniscient narrator do the job fine without intruding into the story as he does?

[T]o neutralize the expectation that fiction represent life or, more precisely, that the experience presented be construed as a life, Beckett, especially since Mercier and Camier, foregrounds the very act of imagination creating the fiction. The opening words of Company will illustrate: “A voice comes to one in the dark. Imagine.”

By emphasizing the act of imagination, Beckettian narration becomes self-referential, a closed system where experience can be presented that relates only to the special purposes of the “reasonridden” imagination which conceives it and not to the movement of a self through time called life. In the closed system, imagination is free to express experience in alternative modes that resist the reader’s tendency to assimilate them to his more familiar notions.[23]

In other words this is not the real world we are dealing with here and so normal rules apply. This is why, after the pantomime of the book’s opening, our narrator/author confesses: “What stink of artifice.”

The notion of a “closed system” is one that Beckett fans will be familiar with, the “skullscape” or the less commonly used “soulscape.”[24] The former is a term used to describe many of Beckett’s works both on the stage (Words and Music, Embers) and off (The Unnamable, All Strange Away, Imagination Dead Imagine), the “ivory dungeon” as he himself refers to it in Texts for Nothing; but it is nowhere more obvious than in the play Endgame where the actual stage where the room might be a skull, the windows eyes, and the characters aspects of a mind: “four people oppressed by forces largely beyond their control.”[25]

The nature of Beckett’s literary enterprise was largely cerebral. His subject was, to quote Beckett himself, “ontospeleology”[26]—a term derived from the Greek words for ''being'' and ''cave''—although there are more confusing definitions out there.

In the next part of this article I’ll talk about the actual novella itself.

REFERENCES

[1] Deirdre Bair, ‘While Waiting for Godot’, The New York Times, 9 March 1975. The Faber Guide to Samuel Beckett actually says that the word was “accepted then turned down by Bordas, it was shelved as ‘unpublished and unavailable.’ (p.367)

[2] James Olney, Memory & Narrative: The Weave of Life-Writing, pp.344,345

[3] Letter to Richard Ellmann, 27 January 1986; qtd. in John Knowlson, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett, p.772 n. 55.

[4] John Knowlson, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett, p.324

[5] Ibid, p.319

[6] James Olney, Memory and Narrative: The Weave of Life Writing, p347

[7] Ibid

[8] Some sources say 26th September, however, The Faber Guide to Samuel Beckett gives the date as 3rd October

[9] Ruby Cohn, A Beckett Canon, p.133

[10] Dougald McMillan and Martha Fehsenfeld, eds., Beckett in the Theatre: The Author as Practical Playwright and Director, p.163

[11] Deirdre Bair, Samuel Beckett: A Biography, p.495

[12] Ibid, pp.409,410

[13] Raili Elovaara in The Problem of Identity in Samuel Beckett's Prose: An Approach From Philosophies of Existence on p.76 says that “[a] great part of the dialogue is transferred” and in her article in The New York Times Deirdre Bair says that there “are large chunks of dialogue which he later transferred directly into Godot” but as the Éditions de Minuit edition of En attendant Godot the foreword (p.lxxii) indicates that “very little of the actual dialogue of the novel is repeated in the play” I am tempted to accept that as my French is not good enough to check myself.

[14] Sic ego nec sine te nec tecum vivere possum. Translation: So I can't live either without you or with you. Ovid, Amores

[15] Peter Boxall, Samuel Beckett: Waiting for Godot, Endgame,p.32

[16] CJ Ackerley and SE Gontarski, eds., The Faber Guide to Samuel Beckett, p.463

[17] CJ Ackerley and SE Gontarski, eds., The Grove Guide to Samuel Beckett, p.367

[18] Ruby Cohn, A Beckett Canon, p. 139

[19] Julie Campbell, Bunyan And Beckett: The Legacy of Pilgrim’s Progress in Mercier and Camier, p.3

[20] PJ Murphy quoted in Daniela Caselli, Beckett's Dantes: Intertextuality in the Fiction and Criticism, p.105

[21] Hugh Kenner, A Reader’s Guide to Samuel Beckett, p.86

[22] Samuel Beckett, Trilogy: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable, p.237

[23] Eric Levy, ‘Company: the mirror of Beckettian mimesis’, Journal of Beckett Studies, No.8, Autumn 1982

[24] The designation "skullscape" is Linda Ben Zvi's, "soulscape" is Ruby Cohn's, both in the recorded discussion that follows the production of Embers for the Beckett Festival of Radio Plays, recorded at the BBC Studios, London on January 1988.

[25] Peter Boxall, Samuel Beckett: Waiting for Godot, Endgame, p.129

[26] Cited in James Knowlson and John Pilling, Frescoes of the Skull: The Later Prose and Drama of Samuel Beckett, p.xiii.

An introduction to the ever-so-slightly-odd worlds of Jonathan Gould

2011-12-21T22:30:00.001Z

Daggy – adjective (Australian slang)

The opposite of trendy. Uncool, in an unfashionable sense. Think so last season, or old fashioned. Applies to people and things, not just fashion. Not particularly insulting; can even have friendly undertones.

That flannelette shirt is so daggy; why don't you update your wardrobe ?
Stop hanging out with your daggy friends, get with the hip, new crowd.

Just what the world needs, another genre. Finding that his books were uncomfortable in any of the existing genres – Doodling, for example, takes place in outer space but you’d never call it ‘science fiction’ – Jonathan Gould had a think about it and decided to invent a term that he could use to describe the kind of writing he produces. The term he opted for, being an Australian, was ‘dag-lit’ which, based on the definition above, seems not a little self-deprecatory. The Wikipedia article on ‘Dag’ certainly makes interesting reading. This is what Jonathan means by his term:

It’s a term I’ve used to create a genre for my books, obviously based on things like chick-lit and lad-lit. Dag is Australian slang for someone who is uncool and doesn’t follow the crowd but usually in a funny kind of way. Originally it was an insult (a bit like nerd) derived from the wool industry (the dags are the bits of poo stuck to the wool on a sheep’s bum) but its meaning has been flipped around and many people (myself included) now wear that badge with pride. I like it, partly because, like a true dag, my stories don’t follow the crowd and can be hard to classify. It also gives a sense of the audience I’m writing for. Dags can be young or old, male or female – they just need to have their own unique view of the world. And that’s a good description of the sort of readers I’m aiming for. – L.T. Suzuki, ‘Jonathan Gould Interview’, Author’s Den

Personally I see his books as natural responses to the exigencies of life in the twenty-first century. Let me explain.

Two of the most important concepts in the rhetorical tradition – classical kairos and modern exigence – involve … special attention to the time of communication. Kairos has to do with finding the right argument for the right moment. Exigence suggests that topics emerge as urgent considerations at a particular historical time. The power of both concepts depends upon the author and audience coming to an agreement that the moment has arrived for a certain topic to receive close attention.

[…]

Exigence has to do with what prompts the author to write in the first place, a sense of urgency, a problem that requires attention right now, a need that must be met, a concept that must be understood before the audience can move to a next step. – M. Jimmie Killingsworth, Appeals in Modern Rhetoric, pp. 38,26,27

If Jonathan hadn’t provided his own label for his books I think I would have opted for ‘satire’. I never read Gulliver’s Travels growing up but for many years I assumed it was merely a children’s book like Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland not realising that both were, in fact, satirical works, the former, a transparently anti-Whig satire whereas the latter lampooned the ordered, earnest world of Victorian England. But if you look at the recent films by Tim Burton and Rob Letterman all of that edge has gone. The stories still have their points to make – which is why they have survived when others have become dated – and that is why they continue and will continue to entertain when other biting works of satirical fiction have faded into obscurity. Ever heard of John Marston or Joseph Hall?

The thing about a lot of satirists is that they can be a bit aggressive, even downright vicious, but that’s not what we get here. In his book on the subject George Test writes:

Satire allows opportunities for creative verbal and formal gyrations that transform aggression into a social and artistic expression that satisfies peoples’ needs for play and humour. Satire then is in part an expression of playful aggression, a sportive assault.

[…]

The general attitude toward satire is comparable to that of members of a family toward a slightly disreputable relative, who though popular with children makes some of the adults a bit uncomfortable. – George Austin Test, Satire: Spirit and Art, pp.3-5

In 1961 a new musical opened in the West End called Stop the World – I Want to Get Off. It’s been described as “a thought-provoking tale about the fleeting nature of worldly success. The hero of the show, Littlechap, attempts to apply some braking effect on his world before it spins out of control.” The metaphor of an individual as the centre of his or her own universe is not a new one but it is a modern one, “a problem that requires attention right now,” to quote Killingsworth. This is where Jonathan Gould’s novella, Doodling, begins:

Neville Lansdowne fell off the world.

Actually, he did not so much fall off as let go. The world had been moving so quickly lately and Neville was finding it almost impossible to keep up.

It hadn’t always been that way. There had been a time when keeping up was not a problem; a time when the world was moving at a nice, leisurely speed and, a gentle walk had been sufficient. But then the world began to get faster. Suddenly, Neville found himself jogging, and then running. His cheeks became flushed and his lungs panted and puffed as they struggled to get the air he needed to maintain his pace.

Still faster and faster the world went. Neville’s life was like a never-ending hundred metre sprint. There was no way he could keep this going. As his legs turned to jelly and collapsed under him, Neville grasped in desperation for something to hold on to. A tree, a stick, a small crack in the footpath. He dug his fingernails in and gripped tightly as the world dragged him along, his hair flying wildly behind him and his legs kicking loosely at the air. His whole body strained and tears began to well in his eyes as the wind rushed against his face.

Slowly, surely, he could feel his grip loosening, could sense the strength departing from his fingers. He couldn’t hold on much longer. Any second now and the strain would be too much. His arms would break. His fingers would be ripped off. His whole body would snap into two. The pain was unbearable. Something had to give.

Neville let go.

For a couple of seconds, he lay, breathing slowly, while the strength flowed back into his body and the feeling returned to his arms. Then he looked up and saw the world spinning away into the darkness of space. Neville was seized with panic. He leapt up and began chasing after the world, trying to catch up with it again so he could get back on board. But he was too slow. Soon the world was nothing but a tiny dot, no bigger than a golf ball.

Neville stopped and watched as the world diminished into a pinhole of blue and then vanished. He was alone. All around him was nothingness. Neville shivered. He wasn’t used to such quiet. It felt strange and slightly unnerving. What could it mean? How should he feel? What was he to do?

Neville looked around. High above, the lights of the stars twinkled. To his left, a comet flashed past. To his right, a distant supernova flared in a sudden blaze of brightness. It was a beautiful sight; an everlasting silent night.

Suddenly Neville was overcome by a feeling of peace. No more desperately rushing to keep up. No more frantically clinging on for dear life. Neville didn’t need the world anymore. He was free.

I don’t know about you but I grew up with two contradictory sets of the laws of physics in my head. There were those that applied in the real world, the ones that stopped me spinning off into outer space like Neville does, irrespective of the fact that the world was whizzing round at a speed of about 67,000 miles per hour, and then there were the laws of physics that applied to cartoon characters, most memorably Wile E. Coyote, for whom the effects of gravity would often pause to allow him a moment to reflect upon his fate before we see him plummet to the desert below, something which ought to have resulted in him shattering every bone in his body but which, in this reality, often left him little more than bruised and dazed. This is not the first time the laws of physics have been lampooned, however: Voltaire famously mocked these in his satirical novel Candide.

So what happens to Neville? Is this a dream or an allegory like The Wonderful Wizard of Oz? (The Wikipedia article Political interpretations of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz makes interesting reading.) Or just a bit of nonsense to amuse the kids?

Floating around aimlessly in space might have been a refreshing change to his prior hectic life but there wouldn’t be much of a story here if that was all he did. After a bit Neville finds his way to an asteroid “about the size of a large house” and climbs aboard. Actually Jonathan says Neville “walked quickly to the asteroid” and we just accept that that is what he did. Of course once he’s there it was hard not to think of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's novella, The Little Prince, whose home asteroid, or "planet", was also the size of a house, has three volcanoes (two active, and one dormant) and a rose, among various other objects. Neville’s asteroid isn’t nearly as remarkable. What is notable is that one of the first things he does is decide he needs a country and since “countries need borders, [u]sing his heel, he marked out a series of lines on the dusty surface.” He decides to name the country Bolivia because that was a place he had always had an inkling to visit.

Question: Was Neville the first, or, perhaps, the only person to have found himself flung out of Earth’s orbit? Answer: No. After losing interest in his own asteroid, Neville trudges “away into the inky blackness of the universe. In search of a better place for a Neville.” Just as Gulliver makes his way through Lilliput and Blefuscu, Brobdingnag, Laputa, Balnibarbi, Luggnagg and Glubbdubdrib so Neville discovers that others have set up homes and communities amongst the stars. The first he encounters because he catches sight of an asteroid with “a flagpole with a small makeshift flag on the top, fluttering gently in the solar-breeze.” It’s the home of a small community who introduce themselves to him as follows:

“We, like you, are refugees from the world. … We, like you, could no longer handle the pace and the pressure. We, like you, have made the decision to escape the madness and to find here, on our asteroid, a far simpler lifestyle. A lifestyle you are more than welcome to join in.

[…]

“I don’t suppose you brought a toaster.”

Have you ever read A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller, Jr.?

Set in a Roman Catholic monastery in the desert of the south-western United States after a devastating nuclear war, the story spans thousands of years as civilization rebuilds itself. The monks of the fictional Albertian Order of Leibowitz take up the mission of preserving the surviving remnants of man's scientific knowledge until the day the outside world is again ready for it. – Wikipedia

Leibowitz had been an electrical engineer and the monks have been copying his blueprints, notes and memos by hand as if they are holy relics. The Holy Book of the Toaster People turns out to be Operating Instructions for the A367 Toasterama and they have been awaiting the arrival of the eponymous toaster. I seem to recall some Jews had a similar notion once. In her review of this book, Donna Brown also found herself referencing Voltaire; his famous quote from Letter to the author of The Three Impostors: "If God hadn't existed, it would have been necessary to invent Him."

I won’t list all the other asteroids Neville visits but he quickly realises that all is not rosy in paradise. And it’s not just that everyone has their own ideas as to what perfection should be like; no, there is a bigger problem that is going to affect them all:

[I]f the world kept on getting faster and faster, it would eventually break away from [the] gravitational pull [of the sun] and fly off into space. And if anything lay in its way? … The first thing the world would crash into once it had escaped its orbit [would be the asteroid field].

Neville realises that something must be done and it falls to him to rally the troops but, in much the same way as Alice had difficulty persuading people to do things in Wonderland, Neville encounters a similar intransigent bunch, entrenched in their ways and unwilling to listen to the facts.

A similar situation is faced by Kriffle in Jonathan’s second novella, Flidderbugs. Jonathan describes this book as “a sort of political satire/fable about a strange bunch of insects with some very peculiar obsessions.” Whereas the problem with Neville’s world – he never actually says it’s the Earth – is that it is spinning too fast; Kriffle’s tree – which is all the world he knows – is lopsided, sort of. Put it this way: it’s in danger of collapse. On one side of the tree, the side we are introduced to in the opening chapter, there is a problem with the leaves which are growing uncontrollably; this is the side of the tree where the Triplifer tribe live. On the other side, populated by the Quadrigons, the current ruling tribe (and hence those in possession of the shears), life is far more comfortable. The tribes disagree on just about everything but the most fundamental issue on which they cannot see eye to eye is with regard to how many points the leaves on the Krephiloff Tree should have: the Triplifers are adamant it is three, the Quadrigons insist it is four.

Now I don’t know a great deal about dendrology but all the trees I encountered growing up tended to have the same leaves on them no matter what side of them you encountered. So I assumed what we had here was a Nineteen Eighty-Four-type situation: two warring (okay, bickering) factions who don’t care what the truth is but just believe what they’re told. Perhaps the leaves actually had five points! But, no, that’s not the case. If it were then surely someone of the Quadrigons would pick up a leaf, count the points and realise that there were only three points or one of the Triplifers would do the same and realise that there were actually four. But that would be too easy.

Kriffle’s father Proggle is “proud leader of the Triplifer tribe” but he is getting old. He’s at his wits’ end with the leaf issue and intends to bring the matter up that very day at the Fleedenhall debate. His wife will have none of it and tells him to permit Kriffle go in his stead. As it happens, the leader of the Quadrigons and head of the Fliddercouncil, Farggle, is also unwell and so his daughter, Fargeeta, stands up in his place. The debate does not go well. Elections are not far off and it doesn’t look as if the Triplifers are going to have any chance of winning unless Kriffle can find support elsewhere. He heads off to the Florddenbureau with its Kafkaesque snaking corridors to try and find support from an old friend of his father’s, Brakliff, who has risen over the years from third-assistant-junior-secretary to first-higher-senior-official-over-secretary but Brakliff is unwilling to help him. Then Kriffle visits the academics at Flooderversity but things are not easy there either: Professor Skervvle is only interested in the essence of leaves; Professor Horkelo's specialty is how many leaves there are; Professor Yangbelu only cares about the concept of leaf and, much to the consternation of his esteemed colleagues, Professor Sklinger only studies bark.

Kriffle is about to despair until he accidentally runs into Fargeeta and decides radical action is called for:

Without even thinking, he grabbed Fargeeta by the claw and began pulling her away from the trunk and out along one of the branches that led to his side of the Tree.

It took her a few seconds to realise what was happening, but when she did, she began to scream:

“Help, help. I’m being ‘bugnapped.”

But it was too late. Kriffle was moving so fast and with such fierce determination that they were already well clear of her gang of supporters back at the trunk.

It didn’t take long before they reached the bristling mass of leaves. Kriffle hurriedly reached out, grabbing the first one he could find.

“Count the points,” he roared, thrusting it roughly in front of Fargeeta’s face.

She does. There are three. All her life she had been led to believe that the Triplifer tribe were liars or fools but now she has seen with her own eyes. But the truth is never that simple, is it? Besides, much as in Doodling, the ‘bugs have a much bigger problem. Oh, if only everyone had listened to crazy old Professor Sklinger.

Doodling and Flidderbugs are both charming novellas without a doubt. Jonathan says they’re not exclusively aimed at children but they are definitely books that could be read to children. The kids will enjoy the stories as simply funny stories; the adults will appreciate the subtext. I don’t particularly like the title Doodling. The reason Jonathan kept it was because he “liked the idea that the story evolved from [his] literary doodling” but it doesn’t really work for me. Other than that I have no problems with either book but of the two I personally preferred the first.

You can read excerpts from Doodling online here: Falling Off, A Toast to You, Taking Aim, Not So Peachy.

***

Jonathan Gould is a Melbourne-based writer, doodler and a confirmed and proud dag. These are not his first attempts to have work published and he has authored two children’s books in the past, A Right Royal Day and Madoop and the Mountain Mower; you can read a review of the latter here. Over the years, his writing has been compared to Douglas Adams, Monty Python, A.A. Milne, Lewis Carroll, the Goons, Dr Seuss and even Enid Blyton – “in a good way,” he says. His next project is his first novel, Magnus Opum which he describes as, “An epic fantasy with a twist: Tolkien meets Dr Seuss.” Here’s a taster:

Far, far over the Mounji Mountains, past the shores of Lake Kroulchip where the boulcher fish bellow, across the misty, musty Plains of Plartoosis and beyond the depths of the dingy, dungy Drungledum Valley, lay the small homely village of Lower Kertoob.

And if you happened to be passing on a bright Tuesday afternoon, as spring slowly drifted into summer, there is a fair chance you would have seen Magnus Mandalora with his borse, out ploughing in his pflugberry field.

A borse, of course, was the primary beast of burden used by the Kertoobis, as the singular race who inhabited Lower Kertoob were known. It looked a little like a cow and a little like a pig and not an awful lot like a horse at all. However the most striking thing you would notice, if you should happen to see a borse for the first time, was that the two legs on the left were substantially shorter than the two legs on the right.

Not surprisingly, this meant that a borse was not the most practical sort of animal to use to pull a plough, displaying an annoying tendency to reel off to the left at the slightest notice. But although there were several other, far more suitable creatures, such as the powerful jingloo, the extraordinarily endurable truffelong and the seldom seen but much discussed diperagoff, none of these had ever been considered as an alternative. The Kertoobis were determined to stick to their borses, even if that meant ploughing a field was a constant battle to keep the wayward beasts going in anything vaguely resembling a straight line. That was just the way thing were done in Lower Kertoob, and once you got used to it, it really wasn’t such a difficult thing to manage. Unless, that is, you happened to be Magnus Mandalora on that particular Tuesday afternoon.

The basic theme of Magnus Opum is perception and how the various characters see each other.

Although Doodling and Flidderbugs are currently only available as ebooks Jonathan tells me that an Australian book chain has taken an interest in self-published authors and intends to promote both the ebooks and paperback versions thereof and so there, at least, you should be able to get your hand on a real book if you still haven’t succumbed to the pressure to buy a Kindle.

Further Reading

Writers And Their Chosen Settings – Jonathan Gould (the photo is actually of the former Scottish international footballer)

Kindle Author Interview: Jonathan Gould

Interview With Jonathan Gould

I love you

2011-12-16T23:00:00.001Z

If love is blind, why is lingerie so popular? ~ Author Unknown

I love you. Yes, you, the person reading this just now. I love you. I know, I know, we’ve never met and the odds are we never will but what has that to do with anything? It’s quite possible I don’t know your name, at least not your real name or what you look like now (assuming the photo you have online is you now and not you twenty years ago). But I still love you.

How can you possibly say that with a straight face. You’re joking right?

No, I’m deadly serious: I love you. Do you love me?

I’m sure there are many people you love and have loved and have yet to love, people and things and places and activities. And when you say you love them you will mean it every bit as much as I do just now.

I don’t fancy you. I mean I might fancy you if I met you. I’m sure there are a number of people who read my blog who I might conceivably fancy. There are a number I’m sure I could never fancy – all the blokes for starters (sorry blokes) – but that doesn’t mean I don’t love them. I’m expressing my love right now. I’m giving of my time and (limited) expertise and I’m doing it for you. I’m not doing it for me. I know all these things I’m talking to you about. No, I’m doing it all for you . . . and the couple of hundred other people who will read this blog today and the several hundred who might eventually end up reading it if I leave it up here long enough.

Raymond Carver wrote a short story collection entitled What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. I don’t think we know what we’re talking about. And yet we can’t stop talking about it. And writing about it. The following just concerns itself with the States:

By the 2000s, romance had become the most popular genre in modern literature. In 2008, romantic fiction generated $1.37 billion in sales, with 7,311 romance novels published and making up 13.5% of the fiction market. Over 74 million people claimed to have read at least one romance novel in 2008, according to a Romance Writers of America study. Nine point five percent of romance readers identified themselves as male, and the study reported that romance readers were more likely to be married or living with a partner. Of the entire American population, 24.6% read at least one romance novel in 2008. – Wikipedia

Love is complicated. In some respects it’s very simple. It’s easy to do but hard to explain. There have, of course, been times when I’ve thought I was in love but it wasn’t real love; it was a crush, infatuation, but it felt like love at the time and I’m not entirely convinced that it wasn’t love. Love is not an on/off switch and if it’s not reciprocated it can wither and die. Unless it’s a certain kind of love, the kind that exists for all people whether they’re your enemies or not. I’m talking about agápe love, principled love, the kind of love the Bible is on about when it says that God is love.

So, you’re some kind of religious freak? Should I be worried?

No, I gave up all that religious nonsense years ago but it’s the easiest way I can think of to explain what I’m on about. The Bible uses four Greek words for love: agápe (principled love), philia (brotherly affection – think Philadelphia, the city of brotherly love), storge (familial love) and eros (erotic love). I don’t what word the Greeks used for love of Nature or love of pets or love of a certain kind of food.

I have loved a number of women in my life but I’m not convinced that the love I felt for each of them, even the ones I ended up marrying, was the same thing. I still feel I love certain women I never married, never got even close to marrying, and haven’t seen in many years. To my mind I love each and every one of them uniquely. And it is impossible for me to communicate exactly what I felt for each of them. Utterly impossible.

I think we sometimes forget just how badly language does what it is supposed to do. Much of the problems are because we aren’t very good with words, any of us. We do our best, most of us, and we rely on the abilities of those we’re addressing to be able to decode what we have encoded. But always, always, always something is lost in the translation.

You don’t know what I mean and I don’t know if you know what I mean because no sooner do you try and explain back to me what I’ve just said to you, using your own words, the waters get muddied even further. C S Lewis famously said, “We read to know we are not alone,” but I say that we read to know we are not alone in being alone. A man in a prison cell is so much happier when he learns that there’s another man in the cell next to him even if he cannot communicate in any meaningful way. Why would he be happy that another human being is going though what he’s going through? Well, that’s not it. But somehow it still helps. He can focus his attention on the other and not on his self. He knows what a rubbish time he’s having in his cell and although logic dictates that his fellow detainee is having an equally miserable time it does help to know that he’s not going through this alone even though for all intents and purposes he is going though this alone.

I am in a cell. It’s a pretty decent cell as far as cells go. It has computers and a widescreen TV and nice things to eat in the fridge and the freezer and a comfy bed to sleep in but apart from the bird (who’s more interested in his reflection than me) I am alone. Carrie is in the States. There’s just me . . . and you. And the nearest any of you is to me is about twenty miles away. Most are hundreds if not thousands of miles away. And all we have is this wee slot to express ourselves through. But it doesn’t really matter. Even if you were sitting across the table from me in a nice local café (or at least the best of a bad bunch in the case of where I live) we would still have to resort to words to try and communicate. We could hug. I could hold your hand. But in my experience taction contact is as unreliable as verbal communication. It’s open to interpretation. People hear what they think/expect people are going to say and don’t listen. I bet you’re not listening right now. You just can’t wait to have your say in the comments. Or you might be wondering what I’m really saying. You know what I’m saying – no big fancy words there other than ‘taction’ and I’ve used that a number of times in blogs – but what am I really saying? That’s the thing about words; they don’t always contain the meanings one might automatically expect them to. Like I love you.

But there are other Greek words applicable to this topic: pragma (pragmatic, expedient love), ludus (playful love, and also joyous love), mania (in which the lover is possessed by being in love, unstable, highly emotional—what in Western culture is taken as romantic love, courtly love, obsessive love).[1]

Ignoring philial affection for some odd reason (which he lumps together with storge), these six form the basic love styles as defined by the psychologist John Alan Lee in his article ‘A Typology of Styles of Loving’:

This particular general theory posits three primary love styles: (a) eros, which is romantic os passionate love, (b) ludus, which is game playing love, and (c) storge, which is friendship love. Lee suggested three secondary styles are formed as compounds of the primary styles: (d) mania, which is a compound of ludus and eros, (e) pragma, which is a compound of storge and ludus, and (f) agápe, which is a compound of eros and storge.[2]

I find it interesting how he redefines some of these words but psychologists have been doing that for years.

When I was first getting to know my first wife I said to her at one point, “I’m in like with you.” It’s cute-sounding but it makes an important distinction. There are people we love and people we are in love with. So why not be ‘in like’ with someone? Makes perfect sense to me.

Why just ‘in’ though? There are about 150 prepositions in English, in fact the prepositions of, to and in are among the ten most frequent words in English so why don’t we have ‘of love’, ‘to love’, ‘at love’, ‘by love’, ‘for love’? To say that someone is ‘in love’ with someone suggests polar states – ‘in’ and ‘out’ – you are in love or have fallen out of love.

Levinger observed that there are five phases in personal relationships: (1) acquaintance, (2) build-up of an ongoing relationship, (3) continuation (couples commit themselves to long-term relationships and continue to consolidate their lives), (4) deterioration or decline of the interconnections, and finally, (5) ending of the relationship, through death or separation.[3]

We talk of falling in love but no one loves at another person. We can talk to someone but we can also talk at them. Would loving at someone not be an expression of manic love?

Do you love me? Love is too weak a word. I lerve you. You know, I lo-ove you. I luff you. There are two "f's." I have to invent... of course I love you. – Woody Allen, Annie Hall

I hadn’t seen Annie Hall when I told that girl I was in like with her. I probably saw it with her in fact a couple of years later by which time we were married having decided were actually in love although I have my doubts whether that was ever the case; sexually attracted, yes, but so many people confuse sexual longing and actual love. Of course all of this is easy to say with twenty-twenty hindsight.

Broadly-speaking what is love? It is attraction to something, plain and simple. The closer we are to that person or thing the better we feel. It could involve anything from holding hands to ingesting (as in the case of chocolate). We entrust our feeling of wellbeing to someone or something else. Of course we’re social creatures (even people like me who like to think they’re not) and company is good for us, even virtual company seemingly, so in what ways can I become attached to people? Psychologists have identified three primary attachment styles:

secure,
avoidant
anxious/ambivalent (later renamed anxious/resistant)

Secure adult attachment was characterized by trust and a desire for closeness without the need to merge completely with another. In this group, the self was considered worthy of care and the partner was esteemed and expected to be responsive.

Avoidantly attached adults reported discomfort with closeness and an expectation that the partner would be unresponsive. They found it difficult to trust and depend on others and so dismissed the importance of the relationship in order to keep emotions at low levels of intensity.

Anxiously attached people, on the other hand, had a desire to merge with another. Their relationships were characterized by clinging and neediness, as the partner’s responsiveness was uncertain. Self worth was low and the partner was often idealized.[4]

Attachment theory is meant to describe and explain people's enduring patterns of relationships from birth to death.

I am separated from my loved one at the moment. (As I mentioned earlier Carrie is in the US visiting her parents.)

When a human or non-human primate infant is separated from its parent, the infant goes through a series of three stages of emotional reactions. First is protest, in which the infant cries and refuses to be consoled by others. Second is despair, in which the infant is sad and passive. Third is detachment, in which the infant actively disregards and avoids the parent if the parent returns.[5]

Every day we share a phone call. It usually lasts about ten minutes during which time I report what I’ve written, eaten, watched, received in the post and so on. Also what the bird’s been up to. Today he’s been very noisy and has been chastising various mirrors for the last two hours. The last time Carrie came back the bird’s response to her was interesting. For the first few days he treated her like a total stranger, wouldn’t fly to her and if I took him over to her on a stick he’d fly off. Does our bird love us? No idea. But we are his flock and he most definitely suffers from separation anxiety. It’s quite possible that all the noise he’s making today is him calling Carrie.

There have, needless to say, been a number of various theories about the nature of attraction. The Love Schemas Scale, for example, includes six categories of love:

Those who are interested in romantic relationships were said to fall into one of four types: The secure (who are comfortable with closeness and independence), the clingy (who are comfortable with closeness but fearful of too much independence), the skittish (who are fearful of too much closeness but comfortable with independence), and the fickle (who are uneasy with both closeness or independence). … Those who are relatively uninterested in relationships might fall into one of two categories—the casual (who are interested in relationships only if they are almost problem free), and the uninterested (who are not at all interested in relationships, problem free or not).[6]

In 1986, a psychologist Robert Sternberg proposed a simple way we can look at relationships via a triangle. Our experience of love is held together by three aspects:

Intimacy – the friendship element of love, sharing and bonding
Passion – the romantic or physical element of love including sexual attraction
Commitment – the basic decision to love another person - and the longer term part of keeping that love going

The "amount" of strength of each of these components in a love determines how that love will be between two people. From these three basic components he extrapolated eight states:

	Intimacy	Passion	Commitment
Non-Love
Liking / Friendship	Yes
Infatuated Love		Yes
Empty Love			Yes
Romantic Love	Yes	Yes
Companionate Love	Yes		Yes
Fatuous Love		Yes	Yes
Consummate Love	Yes	Yes	Yes

What he does say is that over time we all come to define love in our own unique ways, the bottom line being that no one knows how much or in what ways I love my wife, my daughter, my siblings, the bird or the box of chocolates in the fridge . . . probably not even me, not in any way that I could possibly communicate to you or to any of the above.

There are nine love instruments – methods of determining/assessing/ quantifying/qualifying/defining love – and you can read about them all here from the Rubin Love Scale to the Passionate Love Scale. Love is a multidimensional construct that has proven difficult to define and, consequently, challenging to measure. Jung got it right when he called it “a mystery”[7].

Is it any wonder that so much has been written and continues to be written about this one subject?

Of course all the above conveniently ignores the fact that there is as arguable a basis for love being nothing more than a chemical reaction. The three core stages of attraction all involve chemistry:

Lust – testosterone and oestrogen
Attraction – adrenaline, dopamine and serotonin
Attachment – oxytocin and vasopressin

Strange that pheromones don’t get a mention. For more read The science of love.

I’ve just realised that I’ve got all the way down here and never yet mentioned Platonic love:

In short, with genuine platonic love, the beautiful or lovely other person inspires the mind and the soul and directs one's attention to spiritual things. One proceeds from recognition of the beauty of another to appreciation of beauty as it exists apart from any individual, to consideration of divinity, the source of beauty, to love of divinity. – Wikipedia

I suspect though it has been a long time since anyone has used the expression and meant that.

I don’t write much about love these days. I wish I did more because it would make my wife happy and it never hurts to make ones wife happy, let me tell you, but I find it hard to say anything meaningful about love anymore. But I’ll leave you with my last one, and, yes, that is a nod to Larkin at the end:

You

I am not in love with           you.
I am in love with           the idea           of you.

I hope
that is
okay
with you.

You are flesh and bone,           merely
a holdall for aches           and painful memories

but that
is not
how I
see you.

You are a voice           in my head.
You are never           very far away           and so

when your
body
is gone
what will

remain of you           will be this:
an idea.            That is what love truly is.

6th December 2010

Now I think about it I probably don’t love you. Just ignore everything I just said.

FURTHER READING

Love Measures

REFERENCES

[1] Art Durkee, ‘Erotica vs. Pornography’, Dragoncave

[2] Bruce Thompson, Donna Davenport, Rebecca Wilkinson, Lee’s Topology of Love Styles: A Confirmatory Factor Analysis of the Hendrick-Hendrick Measure with Implications for Counselling, p.2

[3] Elaine Hatfield,Theodore Singelis, Timothy Levine, Guy Bachman, Keiko Muto, and Patricia Choo, ‘Love Schemas, Preferences in Romantic Partners, and Reactions to Commitment’, Interpersona, 1(1), June 2007, p.3

[4] Julie Fricker, Susan Moore, ‘Relationship Satisfaction: The Role of Love Styles and Attachment Styles’, Current Research in Social Psychology, Volume 7, Number 11, 9 May 2002

[5] Attachment Theory, Great Ideas in Personality

[6] Elaine Hatfield,Theodore Singelis, Timothy Levine, Guy Bachman, Keiko Muto, and Patricia Choo, ‘Love Schemas, Preferences in Romantic Partners, and Reactions to Commitment’, Interpersona, 1(1), June 2007, p.2

[7] Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p.353

This is the Quickest Way Down

2011-12-11T22:50:00.001Z

People think I’m crazy, but they haven’t seen the things I’ve seen. – Charles Christian, ‘A Beretta for Azraella’

Proxima Books is a new imprint from those nice people at Salt who somehow – God alone knows how – manage to keep bringing out quality books at a time when the publishing industry is in upheaval if not out-and-out crisis. You would think they’d be battening down the hatches and getting ready to weather the storm but this is obviously their way of tackling the problem – diversification: Proxima Books is a science fiction, fantasy and horror imprint. Their other new venture, Embrace Books, was set to publish historical and romance titles but it didn’t take off as well as they’d hoped and Charles tells me they’ve decided to close it.

Proxima, however, is firing on all cylinders. The first books to be released under the Proxima banner are Jonathan Pinnock’s Mrs Darcy versus the Aliens, Aly’s Luck by Renee Harrell and Charles Christian’s short story collection, This is the Quickest Way Down. Charles kindly sent me a review copy to have a look at. On their website, Steve Haynes, the editor at Proxima Books, lists the eleven stories in the collection and says a little about them. His comments make up the headings that follow with my own responses below. Hope that’s clear.

The book is being marketed as a sci-fi and dark fantasy short story collection.

First a few words about me and science fiction. I’m a huge fan of science fiction; huge. If anything comes on the telly or if anyone makes a film that could remotely be classified as Sci-Fi then I’ll want to see it. Strangely though I have not read a fraction of the science fiction available in book form with the exceptions – and odd bedfellows they are too – of Isaac Asimov and Philip K Dick; I own loads of their books. But I’ve read novels, novellas and short stories by many of the greats: Ray Bradbury, Robert Silverberg, Brian Aldiss, Frederik Pohl, Alfred Bester, John Wyndham, Olaf Stapledon… writers of a certain period and therefore mostly dead or certainly not long for this world. I haven’t read anything you might call ‘contemporary science fiction’ since the seventies. That said, I have approached my science fiction in the same manner as I approached the rest of my reading: when I was only reading literary novels by people who had won the Nobel Prize I restricted my diet of science fiction to authors who had won Hugo or Nebula awards. So, as with the rest of my reading, I am not widely read but I’d like to think that I’m well read.

One of the problems with science fiction is that in every situation you have to explain the rules of that particular universe and exposition takes time so you’d think that short-stories would be avoided by writers of that genre. The odd thing is that it couldn’t be further from the truth. Short stories are the perfect vehicle for science fiction. When they work, they work well, but they only work well when people who can actually write write them. The key skills needed in being able to write quality science fiction short stories are the same ones required to write good flash fiction: knowing how much to safely leave out and what absolutely has to be kept in.

As far as fantasy goes (dark, light or whatever shade) I know very little. Bar The Hobbit, I have never read anything you could really label fantasy. George R R Martin, Steven Erikson, Anne McCaffrey, even Terry Pratchett – these are just names to me – so I didn’t know what to expect from ‘dark fantasy’ but I was willing to give it a go.

Waiting for my Mocha to cool has a killer first page, and is a primer for the themes explored in the rest of the book. It clearly has the author’s voice and is confidently written.

Okay, see what you think:

‘Listen,’ says Nikita, as she begins to unzip my jeans. ‘At work today I overheard a couple of the girls talking about me. One of them called me Concrete Eyes. What do you think she meant by that?’

Nikita looks up at me. I can smell the Jamesons on her breath. It’s obviously been another bad day at the office, so I lie. Well I am a man – and a pretty shallow one dimensional man at that. There’s stationery in my filing cabinet with more depth than me. And I am about to get a blow-job, so I make up a story I hope she’ll believe – or at least she’ll want to believe.

How do you tell a woman (a woman who at this very moment is tying back her long hair – using one of her Montblanc pens as a hairpin to keep it in place – and about to go down on me) that the reason the girls at work call her Concrete Eyes is because they are unusually perceptive? It took me the best part of twelve months to realise she’s possibly the most clinical, obsessed workaholic, emotionally sterile, empty, unlived-in woman to have ever walked the planet.

Sometimes I think this is the only reason why the sex we have is so good – because we both lose ourselves in the physicality of the action to escape from the world.

That’s the whole first page. It’s also the end of that scene those of you who realise that it’s nigh impossible to do justice to any act of sexual congress in just words will be glad to hear. Charles doesn’t avoid sex in this collection but neither does he make a either a meal or a dog’s breakfast out of it. Sex is part of life but it does tend to slow down the action.

This opening doesn’t quite have the power of William Gibson’s opening to Neuromancer – "The sky above the port was the colour of television, tuned to a dead channel," or Orwell’s albeit now a bit dated, "It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen," but as far as nicknames go, “Concrete Eyes” is a great one; I wanted to know more.

This is a story told in vignettes essentially; a novel (okay, probably a novella) squished down to eighteen pages. It takes just over twelve years to tell their story and for most of that time they’re actually apart; Nikita appears at the beginning and then at the end where she tells him precisely how long the intervening gap has been – 4481 days. Up until that point in the story there has been very little science fiction, fantasy or horror and even when the reason for its inclusion in the collection appeared at a precipitous moment in his life (a ‘manifestation’ let’s call it which both saves his life at that moment and sets him on a course which will put his life back on track) I was a little underwhelmed.

I think if I’d related more to the characters I might have got more out of it. The narrator, Lex, reminded me a little of a slightly-toned-down John Self, from Martin Amis’s Money.

Already Gone is a sharp piece of flash fiction.

This is two pages long, so about 500 words. I’m not the biggest fan of flash fiction. It’s trendy but I have seen it used to good effect even in a speculative fiction context. This particular one, despite its brevity, reminded me one of Roald Dahl's Tales of the Unexpected. It’s not so much that there is a twist at the end, although there is, but so many of those tales leave characters on some kind of precipice. Again, as with the opening story, this is not what I’d call a science fiction story. It has a supernatural element and although it’s a decent story for what it is, it wasn’t what I was hoping for.

Kastellorizon is a good solid traditional sci-fi story.

This was much better; in fact I might have used this as the opening story if I’d been the editor. It begins:

I awake with a jolt – there must have been a sand fly crawling across my face – and for a moment I am disoriented. It is the same beach of my childhood dreams – and childhood nightmares? I look around. Next to me lies a dark-skinned woman, she is asleep and in her arms she is cradling a heavy calibre machine gun. Overhead an enormous sun, an enormous alien sun the colour of yellow ochre, blazes down through a cloudless, cerulean blue sky. No this is an entirely different nightmare.

This is how it begins…

At this point we jump back in time and through space, beyond the Oort Clouds, to his childhood and his sister, Aimee, with whom he used to play on the beach and just what brought him to this Dune-like planet. This looked like it was going to be a fairly classic story of the intransience of guilt and it is a bit, but the theme here is more one of redemption, of second chances. Like the very best science fiction stories if you filtered out all the sci-fi elements, maybe set the story in war torn Afghanistan or somewhere instead, it would still work.

More Important Than Baby Stenick has the vibe of an early Michael Moorcock.

I’ve only read a comic strip adaptation of one of Moorcock’s Elric of Melniboné stories – not sure which one – and it didn’t grab me; I’ve never been much of a fan of sword and sorcery stuff. This five-page story couldn’t be further from that. It is set some time in the future during what sounds like World War III, "somewhere south of the former army base at Catterick. Not that the location matters.” A group of men including our narrator, a pilot, take shelter in an old garage workshop whereupon he chances on an old magazine still in its cellophane wrapper and, in a similar vein to the previous story, this triggers a reminiscence of how the world got to where he now found himself. They are clearly on the losing side if Fate has anything to do with it, which is ironic because there was a time not that long before when “there really was nothing more to concern [people] than the fate of Baby Stenick, the then “teenage darling and global superstar of the country and western music scene.”

The End of Flight Number 505 had the feel of an old-fashioned piece of sci-fi, a bit like The Twilight Zone.

As soon as you mention The Twilight Zone to me I think about the original series that ran from 1959 through 1964 not the later incarnations. I think of the bibliophilic Henry Bemis who is content to be the last man on earth as long as he has his books, that is until he shatters his glasses and is left virtually blind crying out, "That's not fair. That's not fair at all. There was time now. There was all the time I needed...! That's not fair!" Or what about William Shatner in the fifth season episode ‘Nightmare at 20,000 Feet’, the only person who seems to be able to see a gremlin tinkering with the wiring under one of the wing flaps?

‘The End of Flight Number 505’ certainly has that feel and I think much of that comes from the first person narrator who says stuff like:

Oh? My name? It’s irrelevant. You won’t have heard of me before and you certainly won’t be hearing about me in the future. However you will have heard the phrase ‘the holiday of a lifetime.’ Well, this was to be the holiday of my lifetime. Which is kind of an odd thing to say, seeing as I’m only 16 years old, but in my case fate has determined I will not live to see my 17th birthday.

There is also a nod to H G Wells’ The War of the Worlds – you know how that ends: “The smallest creatures "that God in His wisdom had put upon this Earth" have saved mankind from extinction.” Well, that’s not quite how this one ends.

Empire State of Mind - Steve Haynes forgot to mention this in his blog

This one reminded me of two things, the final episode of the American version of Life on Mars and the pilot for a show called Virtuality. The storylines in both cases involve malfunctions to the virtual reality modules which are installed aboard spaceships to help crews endure long missions.

This story is in three phases under the general heading: AGENCY PROJECT-SYBOT#29. In this case it’s…

‘Eight men and four women crammed together into a tight space…? Sounds like a recipe for trouble.

‘Haven’t you heard? We’ve been warned to expect 50 percent casualties.’

Is Jack out with his mates enjoying curry and beer night as they have done “every third Thursday of the month for the past 25 years” or is he actually trapped in the North Tower of the World Trade Centre on that fateful day in 2001? Or is any of the above real because suddenly we have Diane with her tutor discussing how to round off these two stories “without resorting to a cop-out of clichéd ending.”

That was also the problem Charles faced here and the problem with science fiction is that there is very little that hasn’t been done before. He opts for the old standby of the science fiction short story writer, the open ended conclusion.

This is the Quickest Way Down is my favourite – it’s a sharp Harlan Ellison type story, that’s very dark and very sexy.

This was not my favourite; I’ll get to which one was in a bit. Ellison I know primarily for three things, the Star Trek episode ‘The City on the Edge of Forever’, the film, A Boy and his Dog, based on his novel and an issue of Detective Comics (#567) where Batman spends the entire issue running to the aid of people who don’t need saving.

This is another short one; three pages long. It is an expanded version of the flash piece originally published in Micro Horror which you can read here. For my money this version would have worked fine in the collection. The Hellevator is a common trope appearing in everything from Angel Heart to Woody Allen’s Deconstructing Harry. That the Hindu goddess Kali is the bad guy here is a novel twist, I suppose, but I really don’t see why this was Steve’s favourite.

A Beretta for Azraella is great fun, written in a kind of ‘cybernoir meets the devil’ style.

I didn’t see any noir elements in this one at all on first read. It felt more like a high-octane horror film, something along the lines of Doom, with guns a-blazing, and it has that too, but with the presence of the first person narrator and the femme fatale

‘My name’s Azraella,’ she says, ‘but you can call me Ella.’

Yeah, right, I think. As if Momma and Poppa Goth would have named their little girl after the Angel of Death.

I can buy it; there’s a touch of the Rick Deckard here, the film version anyway. I will agree with Steve on this one: good fun, nice surprise (as opposed to a twist) ending and some sharp dialogue:

Dawn is just breaking as we walk through the still open gate. ‘You choose,’ I say pointing at the abandoned Hummer and the Porsche that Retro will never drive again.

‘The Hummer’s got the coolest plates, but the Porsche is more ecologically sound,’ she replies.

We both laugh and get into the Porsche.

The Hot Chick is a very funny and naughty satire on sci-fi authors and conventions.

Fun and funny don’t necessarily mean the same thing – funny that – and Steve is perfectly right when he says that ‘A Beretta for Azraella’ is a fun story, exciting as opposed to humorous, whereas ‘The Hot Chick’ is intentionally comical. Science fiction and humour mix well when done right – just think about Red Dwarf – and it can also be a disaster – remember Morons from Outer Space or Red Dwarf in the hands of the Americans. But I do like a writer who doesn’t take himself too seriously and that’s what we have here. Not Charles Christian, although I’m sure that applies to him too, but the narrator of ‘The Hot Chick’ who describes himself as “a C-list science fiction writer … I write meat-and-potatoes sci-fi.” A taster of his style:

Flushed from drinking too much blood wine, the Klingon warrior maiden threw her puny Earthling prisoner onto the bed. Tossing aside her fearsome bat’leth blade, she tugged open the top half of her tunic, allowing her firm, ample breasts to fall free. ‘jiH DichDaq non IljHab Quch yab tlhej wIjneH,’ she growled. (‘I will blow your smooth-foreheaded mind with my lust.’) Then, grabbing her prisoner’s engorged penis with both hands, she plunged it deep within her mouth. As he watched the Klingon’s head rhythmically bob up and down at his crotch, the Earthling smiled. All was well in his universe.

So you have to wonder what kind of guy writes stuff like that for a living and, hey, we have the return of the guy from the opening story because this fellow also describes himself as “a typical, shallow, one-dimensional male” who has had several encounters of the kind described above even if the particular Klingon warrior maidens involved in his case have sported some less-than-fetching prosthetic enhancements. Where does he meet these extraterrestrial beauties? Where other than the many, many science fiction conventions he attends.

You may have wondered about the fetching blue creature on the cover of this book. Well, she’s n’Drangheta and even though I thought she was supposed to suggest one of the Na’vi from Avatar apparently that’s not the case; well, probably not. He’s seriously impressed with her make-up:

I’d expected her colouring to be limited to the parts of her body not covered by her clothes – but after she gets naked with me (and we get naked quickly), I’m amazed to find that every part of her is blue.

I can see the scalp beneath her short-cropped blue hair is blue. As is her tongue and, well, even those parts of her anatomy on which the sun doesn’t usually shine. They are all bright blue. It’s not a normal pan-stick or body-paint either. It must be some sort of spray-on body-dye as nothing runs, smears nor smudges, no matter how hot, sweaty and moist we get.

Then again she might just be an actual alien and I suppose if he had not thought his (space) ship had come in he might have actually considered that as a distinct possibility – where best to hide in plain sight if not a science fiction convention? – but the furthest he gets to wondering about her is why she chose the name n’Drangheta (apparently it’s “one of the names for the Calabrian mafia”) and what were all those cameras doing pointing at him?

Confessions of a Teenage Ghost-Hunter is a neat and pleasant ghost story.

Okay another not-strictly-science-fiction story – what’s that, four? – and it has a similar tone to a couple of the other stories. Charles lets us think we’re heading in one direction when actually he has something else up his sleeve. Seriously, though, who calls their dog, Woolfgang? Georgia and her boyfriend, the narrator, are strolling home one night, at least they’re trying to stroll, but Woolfgang is having none of it; something in the wood has scared him, his “ears are slicked down onto a head that never once glances back in the direction of the wood.” But the couple have sensed something too and once safely back at home Georgia brings the matter up; they share their past experiences of all things spooky and for a while I wondered where it was all going until the big reveal at the end that has Woolfgang’s “eyes rolling white in fear.” Somewhat similar in approach to the prologue to Twilight Zone: The Movie.

By The Steps of Villefranche Station is a great long-story to end the collection. A confident piece of a gentle apocalypse, very J.G. Ballard, that combines many of the themes that run through the book.

Loren Eaton in his blog I Saw Lightning Fall writes, “Even those only fleeting familiar with science fiction know the genre took a dark turn a few years ago and has kept the course since. Post-apocalyptic rules bookstore shelves…” I wouldn’t know. But I do have a soft spot for this kind of fiction so I was pleased that the last story in this collection takes place after a most unusual apocalypse. No nuclear holocaust, no alien invasion, no biological disaster. No, people just start dropping dead of, as far as anyone can tell, natural causes.

This was my favourite story without a doubt. I was a great fan of the British series Survivors devised by Terry Nation, the guy who gave the world the daleks. I also quite enjoyed the recent remake but I hold a soft spot for the original. In this short story, Lex, a journalist, decides that rather than staying “in the grey cold and wet on an English spring waiting for death [he] could head for the sun.” Which is what he does. (I presume this is the same Lex from the opening story.) He drives down to the Channel ports in Kent, blags his way aboard a yacht heading for France and then, driving a succession of abandoned cars, heads off through Provence along the Route Nationale N98 until he reaches Villefranche-sur-Mer, a town he knew from before, a place which brings back some good memories when he thinks about it; somewhere he’d once been happy. The community is welcoming: he buys his way in with a bag full of morphine – “[p]robably enough to kill off everyone still left alive on the Riviera – and is granted “life membership of the Club Civette.”

This is a gentle story. Life is peaceful there. The community is self-sufficient and friendly. Things have not degenerated enough at this stage for them to be afraid of road warriors or bands of cannibals. They fish, they drink good wine, engage in convivial conversation and, every now and then (apparently when there’s an energy spike from some dying reactor) they can even be entertained by the occasional e-mail including one from a Russian mail-order bride, Tasha, who, for the hell of it, the community invite to visit.

I pointed out at the start how derivative and self-referential science fiction has become and although this isn’t the most original science fiction story I’ve ever read it is a different take on the classic dystopian view of the future, a peculiarly continental one. Interestingly, in his short review of this collection, R B Harkness cites this story as his least favourite:

If there is one slight smudge on the shine, it’s the last story. ‘By the Steps of Villefranche Station’ is not a bad story, but it doesn't quite have the polish of the others. It feels as though it might have been written some time before the others.

All I can say is that it takes all kinds to make a post-apocalyptic world.

Overall then? This is a well-written collection of stories and considering the fact that it mixes fairly traditional science fiction stories with others that have a more supernatural bent I think he pulls it off. None of them wowed me – I didn’t feel the need to pull Carrie away from her editing to tell her what I’d just read – but I think that’s more because most science fiction these days underwhelms me. The best compliment I can pay these is that if they did decide to produce another anthology science fiction series along the lines of The Twilight Zone or The Outer Limits then several of these would be worth looking at adapting. Oh, one thing to watch out for: the sly reappearance of the mocha in many of the stories; that and Prisoner mugs, and probably more – a nice touch.

***

Charles Christian is a former practising barrister which he quit because, as he puts it on his blog, “the work I was then doing was t-e-d-i-o-u-s-l-y sucking-my-soul-from-me-dull and that I would go mad if that was all I had to look forward to for the next 35 years.” From there he moved into PR and is currently a freelance journalist and writer.

He is the editor and publisher of the Legal Technology Insider newsletter and The Orange Rag is the newsletter's official blog and breaking news source. In addition he is the former editor and publisher of the Ink Sweat & Tears webzine, which is where I first became aware of him. He has also had a number of poems and short stories published in the UK and USA. This is the Quickest Way Down is his first collection. Currently he is working on “a revision and re-MacGuffinization of” his novel featuring a Russian nightclub gun-check girl and is “thinking about converting one or two of [his] stories into a graphic novel format. [He’s] therefore currently looking for a hot-shot manga-literate artist with good figurative skills as a starting point.” If you know one or are one, drop him a line.

Great Dream of Heaven

2011-12-06T23:00:00.000Z

What we've got here is a failure to communicate. – Cool Hand Luke

Things being the way they are I would imagine Sam Shepard is best known by most people as an actor – the Internet Movie Database lists a respectable 56 entries for him spanning 5 decades including a nomination for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his portrayal of pilot Chuck Yeager in The Right Stuff – but his real claim to fame is as a playwright for which he received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1979 for his play Buried Child; he’s written almost as many plays as he’s had film roles. Not content with that he has also branched off into novels, memoirs, essays and collections of short stories. His third short story collection has just been published but I thought I’d have a look at his second, Great Dream of Heaven, which was published in 2002 and has been lying on my to-read shelf for a good couple of years now.

Carole Cadwalladr, who interviewed him in March 2010, describes him well:

If you had to invent an all-American literary hero, he'd be something like Sam Shepard. With his slow, western drawl, and his love of the open road and the empty badlands way out west, he's always seemed like the authentic voice of a certain sort of American manhood; telling stories – of suffocating families and wretched lovers – from the forgotten, inbetween places of the American outback.[1]

When I read that what jumped to mind was Arthur Miller’s The Misfits. I could even see Shepard stepping into the Clark Gable role if they ever decided to remake the thing. In the eighteen stories that make up Great Dream of Heaven three revolve around horses. (Shepard owns a horse farm in Midway, Kentucky and is passionate about them.) Also The Misfits was set in Reno in the Southwest of America and that’s where Shepard grew up:

All over the Southwest, really—Cucamonga, Duarte, California, Texas, New Mexico. My dad was a pilot in the air force. After the war he got a Fulbright fellowship, spent a little time in Colombia, then taught high-school Spanish. He kind of moved us from place to place.[2]

Although he has homes in New York and the ranch in Kentucky he still keeps a place in New Mexico.

His upbringing clearly did a lot to shape him as a man and subsequently as a writer. His father was an alcoholic (from a long line of alcoholics) with whom he had a difficult relationship. Needless to say in his own time Shepard has struggled with the bottle. In 2009 he was arrested for driving under the influence and ordered to attend an alcohol rehabilitation programme. He is routinely described as ‘taciturn’ and ‘private,’ “closer to the laconic and inarticulate men of his plays than to his movie roles.”[3] The irony is that he’s famous for the length of his monologues so I was curious to see how theatrical his short stories were, written, as one might expect, on an old manual typewriter; he has a mobile phone but refuses to even look at the Internet. Two reviewers[4] have called his short stories “one act plays masquerading as fiction” (one talking about this collection and the other talking about Cruising Paradise) and that’s a fair comment. If there were more internal monologues in the collection I might try to argue the other way but I can’t.

The pivotal moment in his life came on reading Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. At that point he decided he wanted to become a playwright and his “greatest literary regret” he says is that he never met Beckett. Shepard's early plays show absurdist influences but he’s come a long way since then and he’s read a great deal more. Calling him “[a] kind of cowboy Samuel Beckett”[5] or even suggesting that in his old age he’s starting to look a bit like his hero are things that would not displease him at all. Beckett became perhaps the most influential playwright of the second half of the 20th century. Being influenced by him is not novel and too much should not be made of this; Shepard is his own man with his own voice. Just because he’s influenced by Beckett doesn’t mean he’s hiding in the man’s shadow.

There are eighteen stories in this collection which, at 139 pages, is not long. They are in the style of vignettes, character studies, slices of life, scenes snipped from larger works and saved from the cutting room floor if you like; two of the stories are completely in dialogue. So if you need your stories to have a beginning, a middle, an end and maybe a nice moral tossed in for good luck then these are probably not for you.

Me? I loved them. It wasn’t the Beckett connection – I discovered all that afterwards – but this is exactly the kind of short fiction I enjoy. The descriptions are minimal, the writing is tight – he says what he has to say and gets off the page. I read the book in three sessions and that’s probably fast enough.

The first story, ‘The Remedy Man’ (which you can read in full here) is perhaps the most traditional story. It probably has more in common with Steinbeck than Beckett. It was also the one I liked the least although I certainly didn’t hate it. Put it this way, if I knew what I knew now about Shepard’s life before I read it and someone asked me, “Who do think wrote that?” I would say, “Sam Shepard” without batting an eye. The narrator is someone remembering an incident when he was a fourteen-year-old boy, the day E.V., “a springy little man in his late fifties with an exaggerated limp from having his kneecap crushed in a shoeing accident” arrives in his beat-up ’54 Chevy half ton to help tame a horse:

[H]e was not a horse whisperer by any stretch. He was a remedy man. He could fix bad horses and when he fixed them they stayed fixed. That’s all he laid claim to.

We never learn the boy’s name nor where this happens but it’s probably somewhere in California – Sonoma and Oakdale are mentioned in passing as being local destinations – not that that’s very important. The imagery is a bit heavy-handed and obvious and it really said nothing particularly new at the end, nothing I didn’t expect it to say. The boy’s going to leave. We leave him at the end hanging from the rubber inner tube that E.V. brought with him and the boy tied to a tree for him. He hangs there while his father calls him from the house:

I just hung there spinning in silence. I knew right then where I’d come from and how far I’d be going.

The image of someone hanging, dangling, is one that permeates the book. Okay the boy is literally hanging but so is the man in the second story, ‘Coalinga ½ Way’ in which a man leaves his wife without thinking things through properly and because of that the story ends with him asking pathetically:

“Where am I supposed to go?”

Again as readers we’re left not knowing what will become of the protagonist. We can guess. I expect he ends up going back to his wife with his tail between his legs but who knows. This is a minimal tale in more ways than one. It’s not simply a tale told in a few words; very little actually happens. The bulk of the story is taken up in two phone conversations, one with his wife, to let her know he’s left, and one with his lover, to let her know he’s arrived. The sentences are short on the whole and even those that aren’t are broken up by commas and semicolons so that they feel short:

“It’s time to make the call.” It comes to him like a voice; a command. If he doesn’t make it now, he never will. Dread or no dread, it’s time to make the call. He swings out and slams the door of the Dodge. The sound doesn’t carry. It ends abruptly at his feet.

There are other women he talks to, the operators, “female voices, different ages, each one completely devoid of sexuality.” The only other women we read about are those he sees in the stretch limos once he reaches L.A. and they’re every bit as distant as the others. The woman I called his lover earlier is actually only referred to in the text as “[t]he voice he’s become convinced he can’t live without” – there’s no clear indication that they’ve ever even met. Have they? By this point in the story I’m ready to read the whole thing again to see what I might have missed. In that respect this story has a lot in common with Beckett: it’s easy to read the thing and get the gist but miss the point.

Minimal stories tend to skimp on descriptions. Much as I’m in favour of that descriptions can be made to pull double-duty: they describe both the location and also the state of mind of the protagonist: what jumps out at him says a great deal about it. For example in Coalinga (which is in Fresno County, California by the way) this is what the man sees:

Beyond the phone [booth], pathetic groups of steers stand on tall black mounds of their own shit, waiting for slaughter. Heat vapours rise from their mounds, cooking under the intense sun as though about ready to explode and send dismembered cow parts flying into the highway. Beyond the cattle there’s nothing. Absolutely nothing moves, clear to the smoky gray horizon.

and when he arrives at the Tropicana in L.A.:

The hotel logo, a red neon palm tree, dances its reflection in the deep end [of the pool]. A fat man wearing a black Speedo sits perched at the top of the water slide, staring down at his toes. He wriggles them as though testing for signs of life. A TV goes on in a room across the pool deck. Someone pulls their curtains shut.

I fully expected that Shepard’s dialogue would ring true and it does, in every story.

‘The Blinking Eye’ is a road movie for one, sort of. A woman is driving across Utah towards Green Bay on the east coast for her mother’s funeral. Her mother is in the car with her. In the urn in the seat beside her that is. That’s no problem. She talks to her anyway:

She’s glad she finally has this time alone with her mother and she speaks to the tall green urn … in a voice exactly like the one she used when her mother was living. She speaks out loud while her bright eyes scan the enormous white sea of salt.

“I don’t know, Mom – I thought that check was for me. I mean, I honestly did. I never would’ve cashed it otherwise. Now Sally’s all pissed – outraged, like I’ve stolen something from her, committed some horrible crime behind her back. She gets so violent with me sometimes. You’ve never seen her get like that but she does. … Now she’s going to be at the funeral and I’ve got to go through this whole thing all over again with her. This whole routine. She won’t give it up.

Just then she notices “something fluttering, hovering low over the broken white divider line” on the row ahead. She stops to investigate and it’s an injured hawk. Sally doesn’t appear until the end of the story and so the hawk stands in as her proxy, a wild bird that doesn’t understand that the woman leaping from one foot to the next in the scalding heat is actually trying to do the right thing.

‘Betty’s Cats’ is one of two stories in the collection that consists solely of dialogue. It differs from the other, ‘It Wasn’t Proust’ in that the latter story has a few what amount to stage directions. All we have in ‘Betty’s Cats’ is Betty and yet another unnamed character who I read as one of her two most likely younger sisters but in truth even the gender of the second speaker is not revealed. If you imagine Betty as the actress Betty White and Bea Arthur as the other then you have the idea:

Now Betty, how are we going to address this situation?

What’s the problem?

The cats, Betty.

That’s not my problem.

It’s our problem, Betty. They’re going to confiscate your trailer again if you don’t do something about it.

They can’t confiscate my trailer.

They did it once already.

Well they won’t do it again.

Betty – They’ve given you notice. If you don’t get rid of the cats they’re going to take your trailer away, It’s as simple as that. I don’t want to see that happen again. I mean where are you going to go, Betty?

I’ll find something.

And so we go on for another ten pages of trying to reason with Betty who, although the text never says, probably wears purple with a red hat that doesn't go, and doesn't suit her. Trailer parks exist the world over – we in the UK call them caravan sites – and so do ‘cat women’; there’s really nothing in this story that’s uniquely American. A delightful character study nevertheless.

There are a couple of very short pieces in the collection: ‘Foreigners’ is less than two pages long and ‘Convulsion’ is even shorter than that. Both have first person narrators and have the feel of little monologues. In the first a café owner talks about his attitude to his fellow Americans, how he treats easterners like tourists and how on a trip to Santa Fe he and his wife were made to feel like foreigners in their own country. I suppose non-Americans sometimes forget just how big the USA is – it might be a country but it’s a country that’s as big as a continent.

I think the two most interesting stories for me were ‘Living the Sign’ and ‘An Unfair Question’. They both involve confrontations but then there’s a lot of confrontation in this book; conflict makes good drama. Both reminded me of Pinter but that’s more to do with the setting than anything else. In the first story someone has put up a sign in a fast food restaurant and gone to some pains to hang it so that it’s at eyelevel and anyone standing at the counter can see it. It reads, in Magic Marker:

LIFE IS WHAT’S HAPPENING TO YOU WHILE YOU’RE MAKING PLANS FOR SOMETHING ELSE

It’s a quote from John Lennon from his 1980 album Double Fantasy. The story doesn’t tell you that. I’m telling you that. Knowing that isn’t important. You’ll get the story without knowing that, but I just thought I’d mention it.

The yet again unnamed narrator of this story enters this establishment – called ‘Wings’ by the way – and orders “a single order of ten wings” with Medium Hot sauce. While he – I reasoned it was a man this time – is waiting for his order he asks the stereotypical girl-behind-the-counter:

“Who wrote that sign right there, hanging over the chicken?”

“I have no idea,” she says, even more peeved that I’m demanding her attention beyond the call of duty.

“I’d like to meet him.”

“Who?” she says in disbelief.

“Whoever wrote the sign.”

“I don’t know who wrote the sign,” she whines.

“Does anybody here know?”

Eventually a kid with a pulled-down cap from under which his ears protrude owns up and finds himself being interrogated: What does it mean? Did he make it up? Why did he feel the need to even put up the notice in the first place? It’s not as aggressive or menacing as The Birthday Party for example but this is a guy who’s ended up working in a fast food restaurant, who dreams about watching it snow in Colorado and has never given his actions that much thought. When the man asks, “Who wrote that sign?” he’s not looking so much for who came up with the words in the first place – he may already know – but he wants to know why someone felt the need to pass on those wise words of wisdom. Towards the end of their conversation he says to the kid:

[Y]ou wrote it down. You cut that little piece of cardboard very carefully and found a Magic Marker and wrote all the words down in capital letters. Then you covered the whole thing with strips of invisible tape so the words wouldn’t get splattered with chicken grease and you punched that little hole in the top and threaded that shoelace through it and then you climbed up there, above the wings, balancing and manoeuvring you fingers through the electric wires, tying the knot so that it would hang dead centre just below the lamps in plain sight of anyone who might come in, right at eye level where you knew the eye would be seduced into reading it and the mind would then turn it over, replacing for just a second and thought about food or hunger with a new thought that might turn them toward the actual plain fact of living and away from dreaming about the stock market or their girlfriend or their failed marriage or their history grades or even Armageddon. And in that flashing moment some mysterious light explodes through their whole body, sending signals to a remote part of themselves that suddenly remembers being born and just as certainly knows it’s bound to die. You did that…

‘An Unfair Question’ on the other hand is menacing. Enclosed spaces are at the best of times. Being in one with a bloke with a gun and a bit of an attitude is another thing. It is a story of two halves; in fact with very little rejigging they could stand as separate stories. Why they work better as one is because we know the guy in the first half searching for basil for his wife’s party in an almost empty supermarket only to return home empty-handed to learn that she’d had some all along is the same guy who ends up scaring the bejesus out of one of his wife’s guests, a woman he believes is from Montana and who makes the mistake of asking his advice on purchasing a firearm, in the second half.

There are very few couples in these stories and those there are are odd at best and strained at worst. In two of the stories, ‘The Door to Women’ and the title story, ‘Great Dream of Heaven’ the couples living together are men; in the first, a old man and his grandson, in the second two old men whose wives have died. On the surface both relationships seem sound but as the stories progress you realise that that’s not really the case.

Most of the stories focus on the individual and just how isolated people can find themselves. The blurb on the back says:

In these … stories, Sam Shepherd taps the same wellspring that has made him one of America's most acclaimed playwrights; sex and regret; the yearning for a frontier that has been subdivided out of existence and the anxious gulf that separates men and women.

There’s no sex, no sexual congress of any kind, but there is frustration and not merely sexual although if I was being flippant I might suggest that what most of these people need is to get laid. If there is a single theme to the whole work it is an inability to communicate. Some, like the couple in ‘It Wasn’t Proust’ still try though:

The one reading Proust?

It wasn’t Proust!

Just kidding.

I don’t know what it was but it wasn’t Proust.

Take it easy.

I can’t tell you anything without some underlying –

What? Some underlying what?

(They both go silent. A sharp wind creates a rippling line of surf like a miniature tidal wave heading straight toward them. Neither of them acknowledges the unaccountable terror it sparks in them. The man continues his tale but now it’s more like he’s talking to himself or maybe the reflections of puffy clouds racing across the lake.)

I enjoyed this book. Collections like this can sometimes be a mixed bag but these stories hang well together. It felt American but not the bold and brassy America we foreigners tend to think the whole country is like. In the old days the West represented the American dream. “Go West, Young Man,” was once the war cry. Now that dream had deteriorated, crumbled away. Old frontier landscapes and ideals have given way to shopping malls and suburban malaise. There’s nowhere to run. All that’s left is to turn around and look reality squarely in the face. Violence is a word that gets associated with many of Shepard’s earlier works but these are not violent stories. There’s the potential for violence but mostly what we find here are frustrated and isolated people who see no way out; there’s little or no fight left in them.

For the man who was once so inspired by Beckett’s Waiting for Godot which as you know ends with the two tramps saying they’re going to go and yet don’t move a muscle, it’s notable how many of these stories also end with the characters unable to move, to make progress: "He stays like that" (‘The Stout of Heart’); "I have no plans" (‘Living the Sign’); "There's nothing to do" (‘Betty's Cats’) and "I watched them very closely but they never moved at all." (‘Concepción’). This is more than a snapshot of America. This is America in stasis – the stillest of lives. Dead still in fact.

The evocative cover of the book is actually a family photograph showing Sam and his son Walker. It was taken by his partner, the actress Jessica Lange.

REFERENCES

[1] Carole Cadwalladr, ‘Sam Shepard opens up’, The Guardian, 21^st March 2010

[2] ‘Sam Shepard, The Art of Theatre No. 12’, The Paris Review, Spring 1997, No.142

[3] Ibid

[4] Ben Fowlkes on Goodreads and Sarah Aswell quotes her friend Ben (who may well be the same Ben) on her blog.

[5] Michael Astor, ‘Sam Shepard's Day Out of Days offers glimpses of cowboy Beckett in era of the cell phone’, Washington Examiner, 11^th January 2010

Blooms of Darkness

2011-12-01T23:00:00.001Z

“Strange things happen during a war,” he said. “But you made some of it beautiful.” – Harold Robbins, Goodbye, Janette

Things happen during a war, strange things, bad things, unexpected thing, things out of character, unwanted things. Someone once said that only four things happen during a war: the unscrupulous make money, atrocities are committed, truth becomes a casualty and frequently lots of people die. That’s certainly a cynical view of war but as Edwin Starr sang: “War, what is it good for? Absolutely nothing.” Yet when you read stories of those who have survived conflicts, invariably their stories say something positive about the human spirit. The problem with wars is that they force people into situations that under normal circumstances they would never have been in and under such circumstances normal rules of behaviour don’t apply which makes judging people’s actions after the fact difficult because who is to say what we would have done if we were in their shoes?

It is amazing when you start trawling through the articles online how many times the phrase, “Things happen during a war,” appears and often just on its own as if those five words say it all.

In his novel, Blooms of Darkness, the Israeli novelist Aharon Appelfeld, the author of some forty books, writes about some things that may or may not have happened during World War II; there are certainly a number of autobiographical elements woven into the story, but it is not a memoir:

Appelfeld is one of Israel's foremost living Hebrew-language authors, despite the fact that he did not learn the language until he was a teenager. His mother tongue is German, but he also speaks Yiddish, Ukrainian, Russian, English and Italian. With his subject matter revolving around the Holocaust and the sufferings of the Jews in Europe, he could not bring himself to write in German. He chose Hebrew as his literary vehicle for its succinctness and biblical imagery. – Wikipedia

He is a writer after my own heart:

[H]e deplores the way contemporary authors 'cover us with words'. He hides each finished manuscript in a drawer for two or three years, before returning to prune it further. The results are tightly packed sentences like this: 'In the ghetto, children and madmen were friends', sentences loaded with magical, terrible potential.

[…]

'I don't write easily,' he explains. 'Writing is always taking out a piece of yourself; it's a mixture of pain and pleasure.'[1]

Aharon Appelfeld was born in the village of Zhadova near Czernowitz, Romania, now Ukraine, and deported to a concentration camp at the age of eight when the Romanian army invaded his hometown; his mother died during the Nazi occupation:

Separated from his father in the camp, the young Appelfeld decides he's going to die anyway, so he might as well escape. Having just completed first grade, Appelfeld manages to fend for himself over the next three years by attaching himself to various marginal characters living on the peripheries of peasant villages. Horse thief and prostitute's errand boy are just two of the jobs he finds in his quest to survive. A stint as kitchen boy with the Russian Army takes him to Yugoslavia and then Italy, where he meets members of the Jewish Brigade who encourage him to leave Europe behind and head for Palestine.[2]

After some twenty years he was reunited with his father after finding his name on a Jewish Agency list. His father had been sent to a ma'abara (refugee camp) in Be'er Tuvia.

Appelfeld resists being referred to as a 'Holocaust writer', insisting that he writes only about human beings, about individuals, and that he cannot write about the deaths of millions:

I was labelled a "holocaust writer." There is nothing more annoying. A writer, if he's a writer, writes from within himself and mainly about himself, and if there is any meaning to what he says, it's because he's faithful to himself--to his voice and rhythm.[3]

He has said, though, that he recalls little of his own experiences during the Holocaust:

I say “I don’t remember,” and that’s the whole truth. The strongest imprints those years have left on me are intense physical ones. The hunger for bread. To this very day I can wake up in the middle of the night ravenously hungry. Dreams of hunger and thirst haunt me almost on a weekly basis. I eat as only people who have known hunger eat, with a strangely ravenous appetite.

[…]

Everything that happened is imprinted within my body and not within my memory. The cells of my body… remember more than my mind.

[…]

I say “I don’t remember,” and yet I still recall thousands of details. Sometimes just the aroma of a certain dish or the dampness of shoes or a sudden noise is enough to take me back into the middle of the war, and then it seems to me that it never really ended, but that it has continued without my knowledge. And now that I am fully aware of it, I realize that there’s been no letup since it began.[4]

I can’t speak about his other writings but Blooms of Darkness is most definitely a chamber piece, almost all its action taking place in a single room and within the imagination of a young boy. Although set in a history that is well-known to us all there is actually a timelessness about the core story; this could have been set in Rwanda in the nineties or Cambodia in the seventies. Philip Roth, who is a fan, has described Appelfeld's fiction as being 'midway between parable and history' and I can see where he’s coming from, although this particular novel does veer towards the realistic.

Appelfeld was a curious and considerate boy, blond-haired, blue-eyed, and not especially Jewish-looking and so is Hugo, the eleven-year-old boy who is at the centre of this new novel. Hugo has not escaped from a concentration camp. When we first encounter him he is living in the Czernowitz ghetto with his mother, Julia (this is never stated explicitly in the book but Appelfeld has confirmed this in interview), although things are about to change:

A few days ago Hugo was about to be sent to the mountains … but the peasant who was supposed to take him never came. Meanwhile, his birthday approached, and his mother decided to have a party so Hugo would remember the house and his parents. Who knows what awaits us? Who knows when we will see one another again. That was the thought that passed through his mother’s mind.

Her husband has already been sent to a labour camp. Two other children come to his party, Otto, who gives him “a fountain pen decorated with mother-of-pearl”, and Anna, who arrives with “a chocolate bar and a package of halvah”. There is even an accordion player “who goes to great lengths to cheer them up, but the sounds he produces only make the sadness heavier.” The next day a peasant comes and takes Anna away with them. Otto goes into hiding in a cellar:

At night his mother admits that she hasn’t succeeded in finding a peasant who is willing to hide [Hugo]. If there is no alternative, she will take him to Mariana.

Mariana is a Ukrainian woman who went to primary school with Hugo’s mother. While still a young girl, she left school and had fallen low. What does “fallen low” mean? Hugo asks himself.

It is some time before he works it out for himself. He knows the woman but all he can really remember is her height. His mother has been kind to her and this is clearly her way of repaying the debt she feels she owes. As they are scurrying through the sewers towards her village Hugo has more questions:

“Does Mariana live in the country?” Hugo gropes in this new darkness.

“In a village.”

“Will I be able to play outside?”

“I don’t think so. Mariana will explain everything to you. We’ve been friends ever since we were girls. She’s a good woman, but fate hasn’t been kind to her. You will have to be very disciplined and do

exactly what she tells you to.”

What is the meaning of “fate hasn’t been kind to her”? Hugo wonders. It is hard for him to imagine that tall, pretty woman dejected or humiliated.

His mother repeats, “Everyone has his own fate.”

That sentence, like the one before, is inscrutable.

The handover takes only moments. His mother promises she will visit him if she can but even though Hugo is something of an innocent, he realises that this may well be the last time he ever sees his mother:

Hugo manages to see her go away. She walks stooped over, making a way for herself through the bushes. When she is swallowed up in the thick darkness, Mariana closes the door.

That is the break, but Hugo doesn’t feel it. Perhaps because of the night chill that his body had soaked up, or because of his fatigue.

He is very confused and says, “Mama left.”

“She’ll come back,” says Mariana, not meaning it.

She leads him inside and explains about his sleeping arrangements:

“You’re surely tired,” Mariana says, letting him into the closet, a long, narrow space without windows. At first sight it looks like the roomy pantry in Hugo’s house. But the strong smell of sheepskins immediately reminds him of the shoemaker’s cellar, where his mother brought shoes to be repaired every few months.

“This will be your bedroom. Can I bring you something to drink?”

From here on Hugo’s world consists of this closet and, when she feels it’s safe to let him out, Mariana’s room. Although the closet gets cold in the wintertime he’s not without covers and so is relatively comfortable. Mariana fusses over him in a manner he is unaccustomed to, showering endearments on him. She asks little from him in return: simply to stay quiet when she has company and if during the day he happens to be out in the bedroom never to answer a knock at the door. As is his nature, Hugo complies. Their relationship is a congenial one. Hugo’s politeness delights her – many of her clients (mainly German soldiers) treat her badly – as does the way he responds to her hugs and kisses, but she, in turn, does not delight the madam and often Hugo hears them squabbling through the door: Mariana has something of a drink problem, a fondness for the brandy (which she feels she needs to be able to do what is asked of her), and as a result she doesn’t take care of the room as she is expected to, changing the linen regularly, nor, despite her assertions that the drink relaxes her, is she always as accommodating with her clients as she is expected to be:

“I miss the Jewish men. … They were good and gentle. Contact with them was mild and correct.

“And they always bring you a box of sweets or silk stockings and they always kiss you as if you were their faithful girlfriend. They never hurt you.”

Hugo, as the only available representative of Jewish masculinity, finds he has to stand in for them. At first Mariana is content with hugs and kisses but then, simply seeking comfort after one particularly bad encounter – out of the bedroom so we don’t get the details – she invites him one day into her bed:

“Come and sleep with me. I don’t want to sleep alone.”

“Should I put on my pyjamas?”

“No need. Just take off your shoes and trousers.”

Mariana’s bed is soft, the covers and pleasant to the touch, and perfumed. Hugo immediately finds himself embraced in her arms. “You’re good. You’re sweet. You don’t want anything from Mariana. You pay attention to her.” Hugo feels the warmth of her body flow to him.

It is the thin end of the wedge. You can blame it on the drink. You can blame it on the war. You can blame it on her emotional instability. You can blame it on her father. You can even, I suppose, in an odd way, blame it on the Jews – they get blamed for everything else. What happens happens. Not all at once but too soon. This may seem like a major spoiler but the blurb on the dust jacket doesn’t leave a great deal to the imagination. I made the mistake of reading it before I settled down to start the book but as their relationship began to get increasingly physical – she bathes him a few pages before the scene above – and when what happened happened, I wasn’t surprised. It happens tastefully and without details but it happens. Esra Magazine describes this novel as a “tale of wartime erotica” but that’s wholly misleading; just because there’s some sex in it doesn’t make it erotica.

This is where we have to go back to my opening paragraph: Things happen during a war. Appelfeld makes no attempt to excuse Mariana and neither will I. Under any normal circumstances her behaviour would be regarded as reprehensible, both immoral and criminal, but these are not normal circumstances. At one point Hugo repeats words he had heard at home – "Circumstances are guilty" – he has no idea when he says that how true that statement will become for him. In this world there are bad people and there are people who do bad things, often for good reasons, or what look like good reasons at the time. It is very hard to see Mariana as an evil woman although for many, simply her profession will be enough to call her that. The author does not moralise. “I don't believe in didactics,” Applefeld has said. “Characters should be human beings. I don't believe in preaching. I'm not a rabbi. I'm not a political leader.”[5]

Of course the war didn’t last forever. Although a work of fiction, it is based on historical facts. The Red Army is on the outskirts of the town. The end is nigh. Salvation is coming but salvation comes at a price. How will the invading forces treat collaborators and will they view prostitutes as collaborators or just unfortunate women who were in the wrong place at the wrong time? When I talk about salvation I’m talking about Mariana and Hugo here, too: Mariana saves Hugo’s life – that is a given – and Hugo saves Mariana from herself because without him as a reason to survive, it’s quite possible that she might have ended her own life.

Fully aware that she is likely to be executed for treason, Mariana adds to the burden of his memories:

I buried some of my soul inside you… [From] time to time say to yourself, once there was Mariana. She was a mortally wounded woman, but she never lost faith in God.

Mariana may not have been a Jew but she knew all too well what it was like to be marginalised at best, vilified and persecuted at worst. Memory is an important theme in this work. What I found especially interesting is how Hugo occupies himself in the months he spends alone in his closet. He arrives with big plans: books to read, chess games to play (not that his hostess has any intentions of learning to play), arithmetic exercises he’s promised his mother he’ll do, but from the very start he finds himself swallowed up in a dreamlike world where his parents and friends visit him in dreams or visions (it’s sometimes hard to tell). Gradually – or I suppose not so gradually, as he’s only with Mariana for some eighteen months – the only thing he can think about is Mariana. At first he’s only interested in understanding her. Ignorant of sex, he thinks of her as some kind of magician:

At night she entertains the audience at the circus, and in the daytime she sleeps. The circus suits her. He immediately imagines her uttering bird calls, throwing balls up very high and, with marvellous balance, carrying three coloured bottles on her head.

but she turns out to be a complex creature: her moods veer from self-destructive through self-pitying and unexpectedly pious (Hugo is the irreligious one) to joyous and capricious. Often she forgets about him, so wrapped up in her own woes she becomes, but as soon as she opens that door everything is forgiven. In many ways she is every bit an innocent as her charge and the fact that they would become interdependent and synergetic is unsurprising.

Why this book is so powerful is because it deals with the consequences of war without the horrors of war. It’s like a Shakespearian play in that respect; the battles all take place offstage. Appelfeld similarly use elision to great effect. Also he reminds us that life goes on even during wartime. Anne Frank became romantically entangled with the shy and awkward Peter van Pels because he was there and Hugo does the same. So, in some ways the same, but also very different. Whereas Anne writes compulsively, Hugo struggles to write and allows lethargy to overwhelm him.

I have read a lot about the experiences of children during wartime recently, AS Byatt’s Ragnarok: The End of the Gods, Mary Horlock’s The Book of Lies, Trilby Kent’s Smoke Portrait, Jerry Spinelli’s Milkweed, Sue Reid Sexton’s Mavis’s Shoe and Reinhardt Jung’s Dreaming in Black and White and I have to say Blooms of Darkness is in a league of its own. It’s not an especially literary novel – the chapters are short, that language uncomplicated and it reads quickly – but its approach is certainly different and the experience of reading it is not easily shaken. In an interview Appelfeld says:

An artist has to be modest and to know his limitations. An artist is writing his books, and he’s trying to do his best to put his inside, his inspiration, his imagination, and probably his morals in his writing. What books are going to do? I don’t know exactly how much they do [but] they keep the process going – but how much, how deep, and so on? There are moments in my life when I’m a great believer in the printed word, and there are moments in my life when I’m disappointed.[6]

I doubt anyone will be disappointed with this book. You can read an excerpt here and listen to a radio interview with the author here.

REFERENCES

[1] Hephzibah Anderson, ‘One man's road to freedom’, The Observer, 21 August 2005

[2] Judy Lash Balint, ‘Perspectives’, Jerusalem Diaries, 15 March 2004

[3] Aharon Appelfeld, The Story of a Life, p.125 quoted in Arnold Jacob Wolf, ‘Marvellous Memories’, Judaism, Winter-Spring 2005

[4] Aharon Appelfeld, ‘The Story of a Life’, The Jewish Daily Forward, 15 October 2004

[5] Ben Naparstek, ‘Silence is the Highest Language: An Interview with Aharon Appelfeld’, Tikkum Magazine, September/October 2006

[6] Ann Parson, ‘Interview: Aharon Appelfeld’, Boston Review, December 1982

The need to see

2011-11-26T23:00:00.001Z

Rachel: And your fly's still open...
[Ross looks down.]
Rachel: Ha, I made you look....
– Friends (The One with All the Poker)

How do you say things? Do you get right to the point or are you a shillyshallier, pussyfooting around the issue? Or is there another way?

I’m thinking here, in broad terms at least, about the difference between prose and poetry. As I said, in broad terms. Prose states things, poetry not so much or when it does it’s usually saying one thing and meaning another. In cinematic terms we’re talking about the difference between Alien and Alien Resurrection. In the original film more is suggested than anything else but in Alien Resurrection metaphorically-speaking (and literally) the lights are all up full. (I’m thinking about the scene in the lab with the three aliens behind glass.) We all know what the monster looks like so let’s get to see him up close and personal. But which is the better film? Okay, Alien, hands down, but if we’d never had the first three films to compare Alien Resurrection to it might have received better reviews than it did.

What I’m saying here that there is nothing more powerful that what we imagine. As soon as we get to see something we can step back from it and go, as in Aliens: “Oh, that’s just a couple of guys in rubber suits.” (I’m thinking this time of the scene where Ripley sees them crawling through the space above the ceiling.) Aliens was clever film though in that it suggested an army of creatures but I don’t think we ever get to see more than two or three onscreen at any given time.

Am I saying that it’s never appropriate to show things in surgical detail? What is this need to see all about? Here’s a photograph from Naked New York by Greg Friedler. The whole book is made up of diptychs like this, one clothed, one unclothed:

The first photo is intriguing. I wonder how many men have seen her floating around the office and thought to themselves, I wonder what she looks like naked. And now we all know. Yay! Next page, please! What more is there to see? Oh, we’ve not seen her bum. Maybe she’s got a cute bum. She looks like she might have a cute bum; pert. But do we really need to see her bum? Haven’t we seen enough? When is enough enough? Would we have been happier if the photo had been in colour? Or bigger? There’s not exactly a lot of detail here, is there? The thing is, one seen we can’t unsee:

DRESSED APOLOGY

I've exposed myself too much
and embarrassed you.
I'm sorry:
I thought we were that close.

Can you pretend
it never happened?

And you only imagined
my weaknesses?

28 August 1989

I picked this photo because of the expression on her face. It’s almost identical in each picture. There are a few more online if you’re curious. Just type ‘greg friedler’ into Google.

Truth is often described as being naked. Personally I’m not a big fan. Of truth. I quite liked nakedness, just not my own especially. What I really don’t like about the truth is the fact that I find nothing is ever true enough for most people:

THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO SWEET WILLIAM

What do you do when you've seen?

Look again. See more. It pays to be sure.
Of course, third time's the charm,
three points make a straight line
and we all know where they lead.

It's always the same though,
always in familiar places.
always doing the same old things.
There's a certain comfort to be had in that.

It's different though, every single time,
each time, the same but different,
a revelation or a kick in the teeth.
That's what's kept us coming back for more.

Curiosity crippled the cat
and all cats are peeping toms.

25 December 2002

This is the last in the Sweet William sequence and I think after nine years we can call it a day. I’ve said all I can about William but when you read the whole sequence (which I will publish one day – promise) what’s pretty clear is how little I actually say. I leave much to the imagination of the readers.

Here’s an early experiment:

OLD WALT

Old Walt used to watch the cleaning woman –

Through the spy hole.

Breasts hung as she scrubbed.

In the monochrome passage.

One day...
...and the neighbours
talked about it for weeks...

29 May 1979

So what happened? Did he kill her? Rape her? Flash her? Shout obscenities through the letterbox? Propose? I don’t know. I never knew. And even if I did I can’t remember and if I could I wouldn’t say. That’s not what the poem is about. It’s about you. What do you think happened?

There are two styles of writing: explicit vs. implicit:

Implicit	Explicit
Are you busy tonight?	If you’re not busy tonight, would you go out with me?
Is that seat taken?	Can I sit beside you?
I wouldn’t if I were you.	You will die.
Does my bum look big in this?	If you say it is you will suffer.

which means there are two ways of acquiring knowledge:

Implicit (or Tacit) Knowledge	Explicit Knowledge
acquired subconscious, internalised unanalysed intuitive covert spontaneous, automatic typically procedural	learnt conscious analysed metalingual overt controlled (processing) declarative

Of course we use both all the time. In the poem above I implied that something happened, Walt did something and probably to or with the cleaning woman. You may infer that something bad happened based on your knowledge of voyeurs who’ve got tired merely looking and escalate to doing. In my poem ‘The Rapist’ which was written about the same time as ‘Old Walt’ this is all I say about the actual assault:

Then in the wood:
Stains and not simply on clothes.

I suggest what happened, where it happened and how it affected the victim (and possibly the perpetrator) but I really don’t say anything very much. I don’t need to.

I used to want to know everything, every gory detail. Does this ring any bells with any of you?

Where did he touch you and how did it feel
And why did you let it begin?
What did he whisper and when did you cry
And where do you think it will end?
How long did you do it and why did you stop?
Did you get to try anything new?
How good was he honestly and where did you go
And who made the very first move?

It’s from the spoken introduction to Jim Steinman’s song ‘Left in the Dark’ in case you wondered. These are all facts. The two that’re missing are probably: Who was he? and Was he better than me? although I’m sure you could think of lots more. But this is all explicit knowledge – names, dates, places – and it’s ultimately dissatisfying because what he wants to know is how it felt. And not just the physical act, the emotions, before, during the act and after. He wants to know how she felt and how the guy felt.

We want the truth – we say we want the truth – but no matter what we get it’s never true enough:

SIGHT UNSEEN

We start off looking for truths
but end up just looking
not seeing even what we thought
we wanted to

or hoped we might
because, at the end of the day,
nothing could ever come
close to our expectations.

Especially the truth.

21 June 1997

I’ve always acknowledged the role of the reader in a work of fiction and the thing about voyeurism (all writers are voyeurs and, let’s face it, so are all readers) is that no matter how much you concentrate on looking at whatever it is that you’re fixated on at that moment, you cannot not look into yourself and see yourself for who you really are:

MIRROR, MIRROR

Before we start, gentle reader
tell me what you're looking for;
it helps if I know beforehand.

(Because poems are whores;
they become what you want,
but there's always a price).

Or we could just talk if you like.
What do you want to hear?
Surely not the truth?

Oh, I see: you like mirrors.
Well that's quite all right.
I have just the thing here.

All it takes is a little imagination.

19 August 1996

We all know the story about Adam and Eve. Whether you accept it as fact or fiction it doesn’t really matter. It makes its point beautifully:

And the LORD God commanded the man, saying: 'Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it; for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.' – Genesis 2:16,17

The key expression here for me is ‘Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat.’ It’s not as if he was depriving them of food or anything so Eve didn’t eat of the fruit because she was ravenous and although the Bible never actually states explicitly what the fruit was (it’s a misnomer to think the first pair ate the first apple) doubtless there were dozens of other trees with the same fruit close by. But Eve’s curiosity got the better of her. Curiosity is not a sin but it led to her sinning.

There are lots of things I’m curious about. Even without acting on that curiosity much is revealed about me but once I’ve acted on it there’s no going back. And if I’m disappointed well I’m always going to be disappointed. I like Christina Ricci. It’s okay, my wife knows. I like lots of other actresses but let’s just stick with her. I think she’s sexy. I don’t quite know when she got sexy. One day she was Wednesday Addams and kissing Casper the Friendly Ghost and the next she’s falling out of her clothes in Buffalo ‘66 and The Opposite of Sex. And I would be lying if I’d never wondered what she looked like without her clothes on. I have. There I’ve said it. And then one day I watched After.Life and well, now I know. If you’re curious just type ‘christina ricci After.Life’ into Google. Try and not. Go on. And even if you don’t I still make you wonder.

I wrote a poem about this once. As you all know I keep my poems in a big red folder. One day, a good few years ago, a friend was over with her daughter and her daughter was flicking though my poems when she came across a poem entitled ‘Do Not Read This Poem’ at which point she said, out loud, “All right,” and turned the page without reading it. Of course every adult who’s ever come across the poem has read it. It’s like anything that says ‘Don’t press this button’ or ‘Don’t eat this’ – we want to. It suddenly becomes desirable. Knowledge is, let’s put no fine point on it, alluring. We want to see Truth naked so badly. We’re scared we might be missing something. I assure you Christina Ricci has exactly the kind of body that you would expect from a slender thirty-year-old. It’s quite like the one of the thirty-one-year-old Friedler photographed in New York – no extra nipples, no appendectomy scar, no blemishes. So, if you’ve seen one naked about-thirty-year-old woman have you seen them all?

There are times when you want to be explicit. Giving evidence in a court of law is a good time. I don’t think writing poetry is one of those places. I don’t honestly think that prose is either but because you can routinely get away with writing 90,000 words in a row about a particular subject it’s tempting to say more than you need to and IMHO most novelists do.

The salient characteristic of the tacit knowledge approach is the basic belief that knowledge is essentially personal in nature and is therefore difficult to extract from the heads of individuals. – Ron Sanchez, “Tacit Knowledge” versus “Explicit Knowledge” – approaches to Knowledge Management Practice, p.3

This is why savvy businesses move people (“knowledge carriers”) around rather than retrain staff because not all knowledge is transferrable. That doesn’t mean that tacit knowledge isn’t transferrable:

The process of transforming tacit knowledge into explicit or specifiable knowledge is known as codification, articulation, or specification. The tacit aspects of knowledge are those that cannot be codified, but can only be transmitted via training or gained through personal experience. – Wikipedia (italics mine)

I repeat: some things have to be experienced, which is why I wrote this last poem:

DO NOTE READ THIS POEM

You mustn't read this.
Turn the page, please.

You don't want to see
            the home truth here.

Because when you peer
            in this darkness

            you'll discover a
            side to yourself

            you didn't want to.
Just like right now.

I do hope you think
            it was worth it.

13 July 1997

This is my version of Genesis 2:16,17. I think we as writers should be more aware of the limitations of our craft. We encode and readers decode but this isn’t maths and there’s always something lost in the translation. We may get to see the words naked on the page but we never get to see them with anyone’s eyes other than our own. I cannot put into words how I feel about Christina Ricci. I think I know how I feel but I’ve never tried to articulate it. Why would I want to? They’re my feelings. When I say, “I think Christina Ricci,” is sexy I am sure there will be people out there nodding and thinking, I know exactly what he means (there will be others going, Eh?), but how do they know what I mean by ‘sexy’? That knowledge will go to the grave with me. Unless my wife gets it out of me first.

Is the purpose of writing to pass on knowledge? It can be a purpose. Maths textbooks pass on knowledge. Atlases pass on knowledge. And telephone directories. But the remit of fictional writing (both poetry and prose) should be to make people think and feel not to teach; education is a by-product. Someone told me that 2+2=4 (most likely Miss Kettle) and someone probably told that someone but once upon a time someone worked out that all for themselves and in theory all of us are capable of working out that 2+2=4 on our own. Would I care more about knowing that 2+2=4 if I’d worked it out for myself without any assistance? Yes, probably. Just as I feel a certain possessiveness towards poems that I’ve read in the past that I’ve made my own.

Good teachers don’t just tell. They will explain what numbers are, what the concept of addition is and then they will allow you to (literally and metaphorically) add two and two together for yourself. And sometimes their pupils will get five. And that’s not as wrong as it seems.

The People of the Sea

2011-11-21T23:00:00.001Z

‘We believe what we believe,’ said his father, getting up and moving to the door. ‘And there’s no way to ken is it right or wrong.’ – David Thomson, The People of the Sea

On the surface, if I can begin with an appropriately aquatic metaphor, The People of the Sea is a work of non-fiction; a journal kept by one man recording his experiences travelling through Ireland and the farthest islands of Scotland, but unlike Heinrich Böll’s Irish Journal, a book which has also quite rightly been reprinted many times, David Thomson’s interest in talking to the locals, the crofters, fishermen and travellers, was not to produce some kind of tourist guide but to document for posterity the stories that have been passed down orally from generation to generation, specifically those concerning the selkies, ‘selkie’ being the word for ‘seal’ in the Orcadian dialect. Thomson was not a naturalist or even a conservationist; that was not where his interest stemmed. At the time of writing The People of the Sea he was employed by the BBC as a writer and producer of radio documentaries, a post he held between 1943 and1969. The writing of the book might have been facilitated by the fact that many of the programmes he worked on were to do with natural history but his personal fascination with seals dates back to the time when, aged eleven, he sustained an eye injury playing rugby which nearly blinded him and unable to continue his schooling in London he was packed off to Tigh na Rosen, the home of his maternal grandmother, in Nairn, an ancient fishing port and market town close to Inverness in Scotland; this would have been circa 1925 but it was not his first trip there; that would have been when he was five along accompanied by his parents and sisters.

The opening chapter to The People of the Sea sees Thomson, now a grown man, recalling that time with obvious fondness. It is also worth noting that his last memoir, published in 1987, a year before his death, was Nairn In Darkness And Light which won the NCR Book Award for Non-Fiction in 1988. The place must have had some effect on him for him to be drawn back to its memory over sixty years later but that’s not the book that he’ll be remembered for. His legacy will undoubtedly be The People of the Sea which, although autobiographical in tone, has Thomson taking on the role of folklorist recording for future generations some of the many tales told around the fireside of an evening and also, in passing, presenting a snapshot of a way of living that has all but died out.

To a zoologist a seal is a pinniped (from Latin pinna, wing or fin, and ped-, foot), a fin-footed semiaquatic marine mammal; the majority – those known as true seals or earless seals – being members of the family Phocidae. But what do scientists know? They might very well be the descendants of a man called Kane or “the souls of drowned men” or fallen angels like the fairies, except that they had fallen into the sea and became seals or they might simply turn out to be fur-clad Finns, travelling by kayak: it depends who you’re listening to and how good a storyteller they are. And there are not a few contained within the pages of this book.

But let’s start when he was eleven. In the pantry one day he innocently asks Mina, their nurse, who he describes as “the mildest and kindest and probably the weakest woman in the world,” and La, his mother’s cousin who happens to be there at the time, about Mrs Carnoustie’s legs; he had heard mentioned that she was deformed. And it wasn’t only her legs; no. La explains:

‘You must remember. You must. I remember her arms too. It’s perfectly true. They only came down a little below where they should be and they were supposed to be flattish, but you never really saw them because she wore big sleeves, big full ones, and I think they were sewn up at the ends. But they looked flattish, like flippers, and she held them against her sides or across her chest and she moved them rather awkwardly. But you could never see her legs. We always wanted to. We wanted to see her in the bath and of course we couldn’t, and it was terrible. I remember, never being able to know, and of course we couldn’t ask her or anyone else really – anyway we couldn’t get proper answers from anyone. And, you see, she was always in the same kind of dress – a long, long grey shiny dress, silk I think, that fastened at the neck with a close collar and came right down to the ground and hid everything.

[…]

‘[H]er face was round and plump too, with a small nose sort of flattened and a big wide sort of mouth. And I think she had a moustache.’

Don’t laugh. I was once served in a bakers in Ayr by an ancient crone who had the most impressive ‘tache – put the few whiskers I was sporting on my top lip well and truly to shame. More details follow concerning poor Mrs Carnoustie, descriptions of her hair and her eyes which “were very big. Enormous. And brown.” “Were they as big as horse’s eyes?” asks the boy but, no, he is told, “[t]hey must have been as big as a seal’s eyes … [b]ecause she was supposed to be a seal.” Well, not exactly a seal but the daughter of one:

‘People said her mother was a seal. They said her father met a woman wandering about on the beach somewhere on the west coast, and he got married to this woman. But people said the woman was really a seal – disguised as a woman. And when they had a baby it turned out to be half a seal and it grew up to be Mrs Carnoustie.’

Now you might have been forgiven for thinking the ladies were just having a bit of fun at the expense of a gullible wee lad and when she learns of it his grandmother dismisses what he had been told as nothing more than “an old wifie’s tale … there’s no truth in those tales.” Truth is not the only reason to listen to tales being told though. Many years later, on a return visit to South Uist, Thomson runs into an eighteen-year-old girl who he had encountered on his first trip there. Like the majority of her generation she dreams of moving to the mainland – in her case to go into service – and she can’t understand Thomson’s interest in all the old stories:

‘It is all lies,’ she said. ‘You know well it is lies.’

‘What do you mean, Mairi?’

‘It is well for you to come and ask about the seals. And away home with you then, to the mainland.’

‘But I don’t think of the stories that way – as lies or truth. I like to hear them; that’s all.’

She stared.

‘Like reading a Western?’ [Her preferred reading matter.]

‘Perhaps.’

‘But the old people believe them.’

‘Well, I don’t see any harm in that, do you?’

‘On the mainland they wouldn’t believe them.’

‘No.’

‘Not even the old people?’

‘Very few of them would. But they believe lots of other things, just as strange.’

Lies they may well all be despite the assertions of those telling their tales that what they are relating is the God’s honest truth, but, as Thomson said, the veracity of the tales he is being told was not an issue.

You might think that this will be a book steeped in nostalgia and although I can't promise that it won't make you nostalgic for times past, what I can say is that Thomson will not be the one to start you down that path. In his introduction to the book, the poet Seamus Heaney, who was friend of Thomson’s, has this to say:

What delights is the absence of nostalgia. Even as the men in a cabin give themselves up to an eerie tale of child-kidnap by a seal, one of them is talking about remedies for the warble-fly: "I tried motor oil and sulfur powder mixed." Even as a storyteller invokes the ancient glamour of the Celtic ceo draíochta [magic mist], he resolutely de-mystifies it: "So the seal set up a magic fog, or what is called in modern parlance a smoke screen . . ." And yet, for all the up-to-dateness of the idiom, the fundamental understanding of these characters is shaped by what the poet Edwin Muir once termed "that long lost, archaic companionship" between human beings and the creatures. Plainly, memorably, repeatedly, instances of this old eye-to-eye and breath-to-breath closeness between living things appear in the narrative. Michael the Ferryman judges the strength of the current he is rowing into by watching the toils of the big seal in heavy water adjacent to the boat; a child escaped from drowning is warmed back to consciousness in a "Black House" in South Uist between the generous bodies of two cows; on Papa Stour in Shetland, in an old cowshed, the author himself gradually attains a state of almost animal consciousness:

I heard a raven croak twice. I felt the autumn coldly on my face, but because this old cowshed had been lately used for dipping sheep there was a smell of dung as though the warm life of the farm lingered on.

You can read his entire introduction in The Guardian from 2001, here.

Over the years Thomson travels far and wide and becomes well-known for his interest in tales about seals. Chapter 2 sees him in South Uist in the Outer Hebrides; in chapters three through five he visits Ireland, counties Mayo and Kerry specifically; chapter six finds him on the tiny Island of Papa Stour off the west coast of Shetland; in chapter seven he ventures to the northernmost of the Orkney Islands, North Ronaldsay before, in the final two chapters, revisiting South Uist and Ireland. All in all it must have taken him the best part of twenty years to compile this collection, discounting his time in Nairn. What I was particularly impressed with was his ability to capture the subtleties of the various dialects. One thing that surprised me was that he didn’t visit Norway or Iceland; perhaps he planned to but could never quite manage it.

To illustrate, on South Uist Thomson meets two young children, Angus and his sister, Mairi, whom I mentioned above from his last visit. They take him home (everyone in the book makes a point of offering hospitality to “strangers”) where he meets their father, Ronald Iain Finley. During the subsequent conversation Ronald asks his son, “What is the strongest type of rope, boy?” When Angus suggests hemp or cotton his father replies:

‘He is right for the mainland maybe, but the strongest rope on the islands is a rope made of horsehair. Your factor has rope, but he’ll never know the strength of it till a boy like yourself ties a three-year-old and the three-year-old breaks away. But if I or my father used a rope of horsehair we would surely know the strength of it, and how to use it, because every inch of that rope would be made by ourselves. That is the difference between myself and the factor. That’s where the old island ways is better. That’s how you’ll learn more with myself than ever you’ll learn with school or the factor.’

In Ireland many of the stories he gets told are in the convivial atmosphere of a pub or someone’s home with all of those gathered contributing stories and adding to the stories told by the others. On his first trip Thomson finds himself in the home of Sean Sweeney, an octogenarian seal-killer, along with Tadhg Tracy, the bilingual schoolmaster who acted as his translator since Thomson, as they would put it, “had no Irish.” During this particular evening the conversation found its way round to the peripatetic tailors that used to frequent the land:

‘They went from house to house making clothes for the people,’ said Tadhg, ‘and whatever house they went to, there they would stay until the work for that house was finished, and they’d get their bit to eat and a place to lie down for themselves every night, for what time they stayed in that house.’

‘They would, they would. That’s true,’ said Sean, puffing.

‘And a great number of tailors were great storytellers,’ said Tadhg. ‘I remember ’twas a thing we’d all look forward to, the visit of the tailor, because of the long stories he’d tell by the fire at night. ’Twas a thing you’d expect of a tailor, to be able to tell stories, for when he was able to make clothes and travel, he was surely well able for that.’

‘If he wasn’t able for stories,’ said Sean, ‘the people those times would hardly think him fit to remain in the house making clothes.’

On Papa Stour Thomson finds himself accepting hospitality from Thomas Charleson and his son, Gilbert, of whom he inquires where the best place to see some of the local seals:

‘I think Hamna Voe is your likeliest bay for the seals,’ said Thomas, after we had finished eating.

‘Is it for photographs?’ said Gilbert.

‘No. It’s …’ I never know how to explain my obsession. ‘I am interested in them,’ I said. ‘I have heard strange things about them in Ireland and places.’ The two men laughed.

‘There are strange things here,’ said Gilbert. He searched his pockets for a cigarette. There was only one. I had tobacco and cigarette papers, so I made one for myself and one for the old man. He examined it carefully.

‘What is the name of the maker?’ he said.

‘Lucky Star.’

‘Na, na. I mean the maker o’ the cigarette.’

I told him my name.

‘Ye are the first factory that ever was on Papa Stour.’

‘Did ye ever hear about the man that was lost on the Ve Skerries?’ said Gilbert.

‘No.’

‘Now there’s a strange thing for ye. What was his name, Father?’

‘I never kent his name. But the names o’ the two selchies with him were Geira and Hancie.’

Mrs Charleson looked at me apologetically. ‘It is only a story,’ she said. ‘It’s no true.’

‘We canna tell is it true or no,’ said Thomas. ‘It is long, long syne it happened.’

And when visiting Orkney, whilst in conversation with lanky Osie Fea – and his even lankier wife – Thomson is distracted by “a weird and mournful sound”:

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I thought I heard something.’

[Mrs Fea] stood still in the middle of the room with the teapot in her hand. ‘It is the selchies,’ she said. ‘I dinna care to listen to them crying.’

Osie laughed. ‘Ye should be used to them by now,’ he said. ‘Ye’ve lived beside them a’ your life.’

‘There’s times I wouldna heed them any more than I’d heed the cock crow in the morning and there’s times –’

‘Did ye never hear yon sound afore?’ said Osie to me, interrupting.

‘Yes. I’ve heard it – often. But I’m never sure at first what it is.’

‘There’s whiles it sounds human,’ said Osie. ‘There’s something unco strange about the selchie. Did ye ever look close at their eyes?’

‘Not very close,’ I said.

‘They are able to weep,’ said Osie. ‘There’s no other animal does yon.’

‘And they’ll kiss one another,’ said his wife. ‘I wonder Osie, is that true?’ She laughed.

And they’ll throw stones, predict the future, guide men to lost children, strip off their skins and mingle with humans (in one of the stories a herd of them are heading off to a fair) and, as we have heard, even marry men and bear children to them. Needless to say there are rules. They cannot shapeshift at will – some maintain it was once a year on Midsummer’s Eve, while others say it could be every ninth night – but once fully transformed if their sealskin was lost, or stolen, the creature was doomed to remain in human form until it could be recovered even if years had passed. Selchies are not to be confused with merfolk or finfolk though; in Orcadian folklore, a mermaid was traditionally thought to be the daughter of a finman, a member of a race of dark and gloomy sorcerers.

Although killing seals was a part of their culture, I was very interested to see how unlucky they regarded the practice and many of the tales told to Thomson relate how things went badly for those who did, especially those who killed a pup. They, unlike most mythological sea creatures, are generally regarded as gentle, magical and often benevolent. Or at least in the old days they were. Now all that remain are the stories.

This could have been a dry textbook and, indeed, as Stewart Sanderson says in the book’s afterword, “Some of the material has been published in scholarly monographs and journals [and] more is to be found in the collections of folklore archives in Ireland, Scotland and the Scandinavian countries in particular,” but what works for me about this collection is the fact that real people tell the stories. That Thomson writes himself into the book is one thing – and a good thing – but he doesn’t simply retell the tales as A S Byatt chose to do, albeit eloquently, in her recent Ragnarok: The End of the Gods; instead we feel the presence of the various storytellers exactly as in Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya’s novel The Storyteller of Marrakesh. As Heaney puts it:

David Thomson's achievement is pre-eminently stylistic; his writing combines a feel for the "this-worldness" of his characters' lives with an understanding of the "otherworldness" they keep a place for in their consciousness.

I found this a thoroughly-engaging book, quite a delight to read, in fact, and it doesn’t feel like non-fiction in the slightest because so much of it isn’t.

At the end of the book there is an additional section, ‘The Music of the Seals’, in which Thomson talks about the many songs that have been written about the seals, the most famous of which is probably ‘The Grey Selchie of Sule Skerrie’ which Thomson incorrectly states was first written down in 1938 by one Dr Otto Andersson, who had heard the song sung on the island of Flotta by a man called John Sinclair. It appears, however, that the words at least had been written down long before that, by F.W.L. Thomas, a Captain in the Royal Navy, from the dictation of a "venerable lady of Snarra Voe, Shetland." He published it in 1852, and Francis Child included it in The English and Scottish Popular Ballads as number 113. Thomas didn't note any melody, but remarked that it was “sung to a tune sufficiently melancholy to express the surprise and sorrow of the deluded mother of the Phocine babe.” The original pentatonic tune is no longer used. I’ll leave you with The Corries performing their version. There’s a wee bit of preamble but it’s worth waiting for the music – quite, quite haunting. Judy Collins also recorded the song and you can hear her interpretation here. Her vocals are cleaner but I prefer the Corries.

***

David Thomson was born in India of Scottish parents in 1914 but returned to the UK shortly thereafter. During and after university, Thomson took tutoring jobs, staying with one family in Ireland for almost ten years. These Scottish and Irish experiences were explicitly translated into his writing, most particularly in Nairn in Darkness and Light (1987), and Woodbrook (1974). From 1943 Thomson spent twenty-six years working for the BBC as a writer and producer of radio documentaries, writing many distinguished programmes. He met his wife in 1952, whilst working for UNESCO, and continued to write fiction, children’s fiction and non-fiction until his death.

Death of a Naturalist

2011-11-16T22:30:00.001Z

The naturalist is obsessed with transience – Harry Hayden Clark

On its original appearance in 1966, over forty years ago, Seamus Heaney’s first major collection, Death of a Naturalist, won the Cholmondeley Award, the Eric Gregory Award, the Somerset Maugham Award and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. I would have been seven at the time and so I can relate strongly to the title poem’s narrator who I cannot see as being anything other than a boy about that age then, maybe a year or two older. I’ve written before about my lack of interest in nature poetry but I was not always disinterested in Nature. I was born in a city, about as near to the heart of Glasgow as one can get, just a short walk from George Square, but when I was nine-months-old my parents moved house and I spent the rest of my childhood in a little Council estate on the edge of town. Across the road was a small run-down farm, a river with a salmon leap which we enjoyed running across as kids and then you were in the countryside. In the early sixties parents didn’t feel the same need to cling onto their children for fear of what might happen to them and so it wasn’t uncommon for me, alone most often or with some of the neighbourhood kids, to traipse through the fields, long grasses and trees all around looking for adventure. There were plenty of old buildings to explore, too, the sand quarry, the golf course and just beyond that the frog pond.

I’m not sure when a pond turns into a lake but this was quite a big pond, completely enclosed and artificially created I’m sure. It’s main attraction were the pipes that had been tipped there, big concrete affairs, wide enough to walk through and shelter in when it was pouring down, that tumbled down a steep slope and ended somewhere underwater. Who knows, perhaps there were more underwater than above it. Some kids would drag a pallet and a couple of oil drums from the local industrial estate and construct a raft but I was far too afraid of water at that age to suggest or agree to anything so reckless; I didn’t learn to swim until I was a teenager and I wouldn’t call myself a good swimmer now but I could probably save my own life.

The pond had its seasons. There were times we went there looking for brambles, other times to play on the ice when it froze over (not that I ever risked going out any great distance), it was a good place to find caterpillars and then there was frog season. In the British Isles, common frogs typically hibernate from late October to January. They will re-emerge as early as February if conditions are favourable, and migrate to bodies of water such as garden ponds to spawn. February still sounds cold to me. Back then the seasons felt like proper seasons, like the seasons in the rhymes; I don’t feel that now.

I know I collected tadpoles as a kid but I have to say I can’t ever remember scooping frogspawn into jars and carrying it home nor can I remember any of my tadpoles ever surviving long enough to turn into frogs.

Later in the year we’d return to the frog pond and there would be tiny froglets everywhere on land. As we trudged through the grass – usually following a rabbit path – it’s hard to say how many we ended up treading on but over the years I bet I’ve killed hundreds although never deliberately; I wasn’t that kind of kid. The atmosphere was always a bit different once the frogs were out and about. I always found the place a bit creepy then as if I was outnumbered, which I was, by thousands to one, but I couldn’t say that I was afraid, not in any real sense (they weren’t interested in us in the slightest) although there was a . . . I’m going to go with ‘potentiality’ . . . a potentiality in the air, a sense that something might happen. Put it this way, when I read what Heaney wrote in ‘Omphalos’:

Around that badger's hole there hung a field of dangerous force. This was the realm of bogeys.[1]

I understood exactly what he meant.

Toads were rare but I’ve run across a few in my time. I remember driving home and noticing one in the middle of the road and this fellow must have been six inches wide – a wonderful specimen. I stopped the car and carried him over to the riverbank. There was one in our back garden a few years back which I dashed upstairs with to show Carrie. She says she’s rarely seen me as delighted over anything. And it’s true, I was. It was like being a wee boy again and we all know the wee boys we once were never die; they get swallowed whole by the adults we are forced to become but they never disappear completely.

As most of my regular readers will know I’m very poorly read when it comes to poetry. Lots of reasons for this but even more excuses. Anyway a few times my friend Dave King has mentioned his fondness for the poetry of Seamus Heaney amongst others and so I thought I would give him a try. And, as I could only name one poem by him (even though I’d never read it), I thought I would start there. The only other thing about him I’d actually read was an essay talking about his Bog Poems when I was researching Milligan and Murphy:

Death of a Naturalist

All the year the flax-dam festered in the heart
Of the townland; green and heavy headed
Flax had rotted there, weighted down by huge sods.
Daily it sweltered in the punishing sun.
Bubbles gargled delicately, bluebottles
Wove a strong gauze of sound around the smell.
There were dragon-flies, spotted butterflies,
But best of all was the warm thick slobber
Of frogspawn that grew like clotted water
In the shade of the banks. Here, every spring
I would fill jampots full of the jellied
Specks to range on the window-sills at home,
On shelves at school, and wait and watch until
The fattening dots burst into nimble-
Swimming tadpoles. Miss Walls would tell us how
The daddy frog was called a bull frog
And how he croaked and how the mammy frog
Laid hundreds of little eggs and this was
Frogspawn. You could tell the weather by frogs too
For they were yellow in the sun and brown
In rain.

Then one hot day when fields were rank
With cowdung in the grass the angry frogs
Invaded the flax-dam; I ducked through hedges
To a coarse croaking that I had not heard
Before. The air was thick with a bass chorus.
Right down the dam gross-bellied frogs were cocked
On sods; their loose necks pulsed like sails. Some hopped:
The slap and plop were obscene threats. Some sat
Poised like mud grenades, their blunt heads farting.
I sickened, turned, and ran. The great slime kings
Were gathered there for vengeance and I knew
That if I dipped my hand the spawn would clutch it.

I find Heaney’s take on events an interesting one, clearly a very different one to mine in some ways and yet at the same time one I find I can relate to, too. Once the frogs were fully-grown my frog pond was a different place in fact you had to search to find a frog on land and I don’t recall being deafened by the croaking of a thousand frogs either. They must have been there – where else would they go? – but it felt like they’d all just vanished. I suppose if aliens abduct humans and cows they might have an interest in frogs, too.

Heaney is twenty years older than I am but I don’t expect his childhood was that different from mine. It’s only in recent years that there’s been a real change in how kids spend their time.

He was born in Mossbawn, just outside Derry in Northern Ireland; he later moved to the Republic of Ireland but he has moved back and forth a few times in his adult life. His parents were Catholic farmers and he was the eldest of nine children. His father, Patrick Heaney, owned and worked a small farm of fifty acres, but his real commitment was to cattle dealing with his brother, Heaney’s uncle. Heaney initially attended Anahorish Primary School but when he was twelve-years-old, he won a scholarship to St. Columb's College, a Catholic boarding school situated in Derry. In 1957, Heaney travelled to Belfast to study English Language and Literature at the Queen's University of Belfast. During his time in Belfast he found a copy of Ted Hughes' Lupercal – published in 1960 – and this was a revelation to him:

I remember the day I opened Ted Hughes’ Lupercal in the Belfast University Library. [There was] a poem called ‘View of a Pig’ and in my childhood we’d killed pigs on the farm, and I’d seen pigs shaved, hung up, and so on . . . Suddenly the matter of contemporary poetry was the material of my own life. I had had some notion that modern poetry was far beyond the likes of me – there was Eliot and so on – so I got a thrill out of trusting my own background, and, I started a year later, I think.[2]

I didn’t read ‘View of a Pig’ until probably about 1972 and it failed to move me. The same went for ‘Hawk Roosting’ and ‘Pike’ which were the other poems we were made to read in English. Now, if they’d made me read, ‘Bullfrog’ that might have been different but none of these other poems had anything to do with my life which is perhaps why Larkin’s take on ‘Toads’ was more to my tastes although to be fair I’ve always nurtured a similar fondness for work as for toads.

From what I’ve been reading it looks as this poem might not have been the best place to start off reading Heaney. The work is clearly indebted to Hughes but there are worse poets to emulate; I was always fond of Hughes’ poem ‘The Jaguar’ especially the final stanza:

More than to the visionary his cell:
His stride is wildernesses of freedom:
The world rolls under the long thrust of his heel.
Over the cage floor the horizons come.

which reminds me of Blake; perhaps his poem ‘The Tyger’? You can compare both poems here. That said ‘Death of a Naturalist’ was once described by George MacBeth as:

A poem dense with the mucky thickness that is often the trademark of a Heaney poem...reading Heaney is like trudging through clay.[3]

so maybe this wasn’t such a bad place to start either.

One thing is clear from this particular poem and that is that Heaney is less interested in technique – by that I mean showing off – than he is in communication. He, however, has a broader definition that I have. I found this quote by him from the essay ‘Feeling into Words’:

Craft is what you can learn from other verse. Craft is the skill of making … Technique … involves not only a poet’s way with words, his management of metre, rhythm and verbal texture; it involves also a definition of his stance towards life, a definition of his own reality … And if I were asked for a figure who represents pure technique, I would say a water diviner.[4]

This doesn’t mean the poem is not riddled with poetic techniques – alliteration (‘wait and watch’), metaphor (‘gauze of sound’), simile (‘like clotted water’), oxymoron (‘gargled delicately’), pararhymes (‘fill jampots full’) and onomatopoeia (‘slap and plop’) – but these are used to enhance communication, to make the real more real. Heaney is interested in what he calls "a musically satisfying order of sounds"[5] and it’s clear even in this early poem that he has chosen his words with care; it’s not enough for them to mean, they also have to evoke, and as such I find it hard to understand Larkin’s criticism of Heaney’s poetry. To his credit Larkin wasn’t one for publicly criticising poetry he didn’t like but in private he told Anthony Thwaite:

[Dunn's] things seem heavy to me, no lilt, no ear, no tune. Of course that goes for lots of people – S. Heaney, for one.[6]

Heaney, to be fair, also struggled with Larkin’s verse. His discussions of Larkin's work are apparently marked by an undertone of concession and reservation. He wrote:

He offers "the melody of intelligence," refusing to allow "the temptations of melody to chloroform the exactions of his common sense" (GT 17). These judgments oddly parallel Larkin's criticisms of Heaney for being "too-clever" and having "no tune."[7]

Apart from Hughes, there is another poet who, not surprisingly, influenced Heaney: William Wordsworth. It’s worth noting what he writes in his introduction to a new selection of Wordsworth's poetry that was published in 2006:

As a child, William Wordsworth imagined he heard the moorlands breathing down his neck; he rowed in panic when he thought a cliff was pursuing him across moonlit water; and once, when he found himself on the hills east of Penrith Beacon, beside a gibbet where a murderer had been executed, the place and its associations were enough to send him fleeing in terror to the beacon summit.

Every childhood has its share of such uncanny moments.[8]

Frogs never really bothered me but there were another couple of “uncanny moments” of suddenly becoming aware of Nature that I do remember. The first, although I have no idea which of these two events actually came first chronologically, was when I was walking home from the river one evening and suddenly I realised that I was surrounded by slugs. Big, black, sticky slugs – hundreds of them easily. They were on every plant and blade of grass it seemed. Now there was no way they were all going to rise up and have at me but it was nevertheless an unforgettable experience. The second was with my dad. We’d been out for a walk and as the sun was starting the sky began to fill with birds. They used to gather on the roof of one of the factories over the hill from where we lived and just as we were approaching the foot of the hill they took off and the sky went black for several minutes. I have never seen that many birds in my life. There must have been millions of them, tens of millions, I don’t know, the numbers are meaningless. And there were other less dramatic encounters with nature like coming face to face with a fox in a railway yard so I have to wonder why I never connected with the poetry of Ted Hughes but I never did.

This poem by Heaney though seems to straddle what I loved about Larkin and . . . I won’t say ‘hated’ but failed to connect with in Hughes, at least the Hughes I read as a teenager. There is a strong morality to ‘Death of a Naturalist’, not so much a moral per se, but it leaves me hanging in the same way that much of Larkin’s poetry does, though, especially ‘Mr Bleaney’.

So what do I see in the poem? Okay, he’s split the piece into two sections. The first stanza is twenty-one lines long and the second is twelve. Had this been my poem I might have been tempted to divide it into three parts, the first at the pond, the second at home and school and the third back at the pond although I have no objection to his choice to split it into light and dark, innocent and not-quite-as-innocent, before and after – whatever way you want to look at it. It’s not as simple as pretty and ugly because from the very onset the imagery is far from pretty with words like ‘festered’ and ‘rotted’ painting a picture of the decay from which life rises. The poem begins with the death of nature: “In the midst of life we are in death.” A true naturalist would be well aware that this is the way of things but unexpectedly this is not a poem about a naturalist but rather a young boy. I suppose he could just as easily have called the poem ‘Death of a Herpetologist’ but if we ignore the dictionary definition of ‘naturalist’ and take the word literally it suggests a person who does things naturally, a natural-ist. It’s unnatural to put frogspawn in jam jars. Before that he may well have been content simply to be a part of nature but once he assumes the role of the Naturalist of the title the natural-ist – if I can distinguish between the two – dies. Perhaps I’m reading too much into the title. There is also the possibility that what dies are the boy’s aspirations of becoming a naturalist once he starts to realise what’s involved in the job.

Collecting frogspawn is not something new. He’s done it “every spring” but this year it’s different. This year when he returns he hears something in the croaking of the frogs that he has not heard before, a malevolence towards him. Of course the frogs are just croaking as they have always croaked, the change of tone is purely in his own head. I have often wondered about the expression ‘loss of innocence.’ I get the idea but if innocence is lost what replaces it? Guilt? In this poem the boy returns to the scene of the crime – why do so many criminals feel the need to do that? – but he returns with an awareness that he has done something wrong. In many respects the scene is the same, dirty and smelly, but what are missing (at least what the boy fails to notice) are the “bluebottles … dragon-flies [and] spotted butterflies;” the only sound in the second stanza is the chorus of the frog army. He uses words like ‘cocked’ (as in cocking a gun) and ‘grenades’ – weapons of warfare (do the ‘sails’ belong to warships?) – and he talks about his presence as an invader who has to make his way across a minefield covered in cow pats; the frogs are now kings and prepared to war with him if their ‘threats’ don’t scare him off. Some people have tried to impose a political reading on this piece – he’s Irish and therefore must be political! – but I think it’s stretching a point too far frankly although certainly growing up in the kind of environment he did would have meant that military imagery would have been something he would have thought of easily.

I’m not sure what to make of the name ‘Miss Walls’ but the language used here suggests she’s talking to very young children, perhaps as young as five and yet if he’s been already collecting frogspawn for years that feels incongruous, not right. Also the fact that the second stanza begins “one hot day” and not “one year” suggesting the passage of a decent amount of time makes me wonder just what age the kid really is. The loss of innocence is something we tend to associate with the move from puberty to adolescence but perhaps it is really something we lose gradually over many years. When the teacher talks about the frogs she anthropomorphises them – they become ‘mummies’ and ‘daddies’ – and perhaps this is the moment when the fact that he has captured and imprisoned their children hits home although we never learn what happens to the tadpoles it should be noted.

Or perhaps trying to pin this all down to a single literal year is wrong. Read metaphorically the imagery in the second stanza reflects changes that he has (or would very soon) experience as his own body matured and although the language used to describe how the frogspawn comes into existence is simplistic it does mean that Miss Walls has to introduce the children to sex and procreation. Heaney only can devote a few words to what goes on in the class but doubtless this lesson took some time. Growing up has been compressed into a single summer which is all the frogs need to move from frogspawn to adult frog although it’s normal for the common frog to live for up to eight years; toads usually manage up to ten to twelve years. This, incidentally, is where the poem is inaccurate in its description of frogs as having ‘blunt heads’ as this is a characteristic of toads. Or perhaps, as was occasionally the case with my frog pond, these were actually toads and he didn’t know the difference yet; it was a long time before I could.

I decided research if there was a deeper meaning to ‘flax’ and, more importantly, ‘flax dam’:

When grown for fibre, flax is harvested after the pale blue flowers have fallen, but before the seed ripens, and because it is the stalk that is being harvested it is not cut, but pulled up by the roots. ... The beets (sheaves) are carried as soon as possible to be steeped (drowned or dubbed) in the flax dam or 'lint hole' where soft peaty water has been standing for some days to warm up ... The process of retting (rotting) takes from seven to twelve days and is soon advertised by a foul and penetrating odour as the core or 'bone' of the stalk decays.[9]

This is far different from my experience. I can see mucking around a flax dam as something kids might set out to endure – kids love undergoing trials like that – or it might be that youngsters aren’t as offended by bad smells as are adults and the prize of the frogspawn was worth putting up with the malodorous pong. Certainly there were some reeds around my pond but I can’t recall any particular odours.

I’ve managed to find a few more of Heaney’s poems from that time. I don’t have any books by him but he appears in a few anthologies. ‘Blackberry Picking’ is a very similar piece and, as I mentioned above, this is something we did annually. I can even remember my whole family going out blackberry picking though I think most of the berries that survived the trip home ended up being eaten with sugar – just imagine how bad that was for us – because I can’t see my mum making jam; perhaps once. ‘Blackberry Picking’ is also a poem about transformation, the key lines being:

We hoarded the fresh berries in the byre.
But when the bath was filled we found a fur,
A rat-grey fungus, glutting on our cache.
The juice was stinking too.

In ‘The Barn’ the familiar becomes inexplicably menacing:

The dark gulfed like a roof-space. I was chaff
To be pecked up when birds shot through the air-slits.
I lay face-down to shun the fear above.
The two-lugged sacks moved in like great blind rats.

However in ‘An Advancement of Learning’ the narrator has grown up a little and proves it by facing down a rat:

This terror, cold, wet-furred, small-clawed,
Retreated up a pipe of sewage.
I stared a minute after him.
Then I walked on and crossed the bridge.

In much the same way as sailors personify the sea Heaney treats nature as a living entity, not just a variety of living things something that might “clutch” him and drag him under. Perhaps this is where his fascination developed around 1970 for the Iron Age bodies that had been found in bogs throughout Ireland and Denmark.[10] As much as Heaney could be described a nature poet what strikes me here in this collection is Heaney’s fear of nature and the ways in which the commonplace can become threatening or evil. This is exactly what I got from ‘Mr. Bleaney’ in which the ordinary and everyday becomes menacing. I have to wonder just what Heaney’s experiences of nature were growing up. As the eldest child it must have been anticipated that Seamus might follow in his father's footsteps and yet he chose to reject that lifestyle. This is probably evidenced in the first poem of the collection, ‘Digging’ in which he sits in his room writing whilst his father digs outside:

The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I've no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I'll dig with it.

You can see the transformation by comparing the first and last stanzas of ‘Personal Helicon’:

As a child, they could not keep me from wells
And old pumps with buckets and windlasses.
I loved the dark drop, the trapped sky, the smells
Of waterweed, fungus and dank moss.

[…]

Now, to pry into roots, to finger slime,
To stare, big-eyed Narcissus, into some spring
Is beneath all adult dignity. I rhyme
To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.

In his 1995 Nobel acceptance speech Heaney noted that his writing, like his life, has been “a journey where each point of arrival … turned out to be a stepping-stone rather than a destination,”[11] but every journey has to start with a first step, a stepping away from some place and that place is one we have likely been used to calling ‘home’. I don’t know where Heaney’s poetry goes from here. I do know he becomes more of a political poet but that’s about it. Suffice to say that this exercise has been a worthwhile one and I think I might be keen to see where he goes after this. What I do find interesting is that the metaphor of “stepping-stones” was one he used as far back as 1974 in his essay ‘Feeling into Words’ talking about his early attempts at poetry:

I was in love with words themselves, but had no sense of a poem as a whole structure and no experience of how the successful achievement of a poem could be a stepping-stone in your life.[12]

I get that. I get what he means when he talks about a poet as someone who reveals “the self to the self.”[13] I can look back on my own early poems and see myself testing to see if the next ‘stone’ is stable. What I found myself appreciating about all the poems I read from Death of a Naturalist is what Paul Hurt calls “matter-of-factness is raised to an inspired level.”[14] It makes me a little sad that I wasn’t introduced to Heaney a long time ago.

Let me leave you with the film On Nostalgia & On Reality which is a dramatisation of the poem and includes a reading by Heaney himself.

FUTHER READING

Pilar Abad García, Heaney’s Poetic Mind and Practice: From ‘Feeling into Words’ to ‘The Government of the Tongue’ and ‘The Redress of Poetry’

Paul Williams, Critical appreciation of the works of Seamus Heaney

REFERENCES

[1] Seamus Heaney, Finders Keepers: Selected Prose 1971-2001

[2] Seamus Heaney quoted in Terry Gifford, Green Voices: Understanding Contemporary Nature Poetry, pp.98,99

[3] Ed. George MacBeth, Poetry 1900 to 1975, p.345

[4] Seamus Heaney, Preoccupations, p.47

[5] Heaney, Seamus, ‘Crediting Poetry’, Nobel Lecture

[6] Philip Larkin, Selected Letters: 1940-1985. Ed. Anthony Thwaite quoted in James Booth, ‘The turf cutter and the nine-to-five man: Heaney, Larkin, and "the spiritual intellect's great work." - poets Seamus Heaney and Philip Larkin’, Twentieth Century Literature, Winter 1997

[7] Seamus Heaney, The Government of the Tongue, p. 17 quoted in James Booth, ‘The turf cutter and the nine-to-five man: Heaney, Larkin, and "the spiritual intellect's great work." - poets Seamus Heaney and Philip Larkin’, Twentieth Century Literature, Winter 1997

[8] Seamus Heaney, ‘The triumph of spirit’, The Guardian, 11 February 2006

[9] E. Estyn Evans, Irish Folk Ways quoted in Michael Parker, Seamus Heaney: the Making of the Poet, p.65

[10] See Anthony Purdy, ‘The bog body as mnemotope: nationalist archaeologies in Heaney and Tournier - Seamus Heaney, Michel Tournier - Critical Essay’, Style, Spring 2002

[11] Heaney, Seamus, ‘Crediting Poetry’, Nobel Lecture

[12] Seamus Heaney, Preoccupations, p.45

[13] Seamus Heaney, Preoccupations, p.49

[14] Paul Hurt, Criticism of Seamus Heaney's 'The Grauballe Man' and other poems

The Next Stop is Croy and other stories

2011-11-11T22:50:00.001Z

It is much easier to become a father than to be one. ~ Kent Nerburn

The first time I heard the word ‘understated’ used I thought is was a bad thing or at least a negative thing like ‘underwhelmed’ or ‘underhand’. The dictionary’s definition doesn’t really help:

un·der·state [uhn-der-steyt]
to state or represent less strongly or strikingly than the facts would bear out; set forth in restrained, moderate, or weak terms: The casualty lists understate the extent of the disaster.

The context where the word was used more than any other was in reference to actors. Critics would talk about an “understated performance” as if it was a good thing – it can be a good thing – and there are numerous performances that I could cite but here are three: Robin Williams in One Hour Photo, Colin Farrell in Ondine, Steve Martin in The Spanish Prisoner – three actors renowned for their over the top antics who dialled it back to deliver pitch perfect performances. And all a long way away from Croy.

Croy is a village in North Lanarkshire), Scotland. A former mining community, Croy is situated some 21 km (13 miles) from Glasgow and 60 km (37 miles) from Edinburgh on the main railway line between the two cities, with a frequent service to both. Croy station is also served by local trains between Glasgow and Stirling. – Wikipedia

I’ve been to Edinburgh a few times and Stirling once and so I must have passed through it, but if you’d asked me a week ago where Croy was I wouldn’t have had a clue; the Inner Hebrides maybe. Croy is understated – it gets its mention over the intercom but, unless you’re going there, I’m sure most regular commuters pay it little heed; it just looks like any one of a thousand local railway stations: nowhere in particular on the way to somewhere you need to be.

It’s unfair to generalise but I’m going to anyway. As a race the Scots can be a terse, laconic, inexpressive bunch. We’re getting better but when I started to read the first story in Andrew McCallum Crawford’s e-book, The Next Stop Is Croy and other stories, there was something awfully familiar about the relationship between the father and the son and I’m sure that there will be readers all over the globe who feel the same because there are men like Alan’s dad the world over. All I have to do is think about the early plays of Dennis Potter, the two featuring Nigel Barton, and we have a similar dynamic, the working-class father with an educated son he can’t quite decide whether he’s proud of or ashamed of, a bit of both most likely.

In the foreword to this collection Andrew says:

The stories in this collection were not written in the order in which they appear here; they certainly were not conceived as part of a continuous narrative. However, I have decided to bring them together because of the chronology and themes which, it turns out, run through them. Please bear in mind that this is in no way a novella or novelette. It is a collection of short stories, and each story stands or falls on its own, as short stories must.

The word count is just shy of 12,000 words so if this were a single piece of text it would be a novelette and although Andrew is keen to emphasise that each story should be able to stand on its own, and as some of them have appeared separately in print and online before this, there are three editors out there who obviously agree with him; I, on the other hand, read them straight through from beginning to end in the order in which they appear in the book and it is very hard not to see the stories as chapters: they follow a natural chronology and all revolve around the same three characters, Alan and his parents, Robert and Jean. Because of that it’s impossible not to feel a bit cheated as the narrative lurches forward through the years from Alan’s boyhood to manhood. There is much unsaid. There is much unsaid within the stories too. This is what started me thinking about how to describe the collection and I kept coming back to ‘understated’.

The book is divided into three parts. The first part comprises of ‘Golf Balls’, ‘Saw Set’ and ‘The Watchmaker’s Wife’; the second contains only two stories, ‘Teeth’ and ‘Norwood Junction’ leaving only, ‘The Next Stop Is Croy’, to bring up the rear.

When my wife first arrived in Scotland – Carrie is an American for those who don’t know her – one of the things that took her aback a bit was the aggressiveness of the language and not just the tone, the actual words we use to talk to each other. We know when we’re being serious even if the words are exactly the same. So non-Scots readers when they open up this collection might think that Alan comes from the most dysfunctional of families. He does, but all Scottish families are dysfunctional – that’s how we function. For me Andrew hits the nail on the head in the title story. Now a grown man and living in Greece, Alan’s returned home for his father’s funeral at which he gives the eulogy. Later he finds himself in the pub with his mate Cliff:

Alan ordered a Laphroaig, but Cliff spotted a porcelain bottle on the middle shelf. The barman took it down and uncorked it. ‘Try this for size,’ he said, and passed it to Alan. ‘Smell the peat? Ten pound a nip, mind.’

Alan laughed and handed the bottle back.

‘Make it a double,’ said Cliff. ‘And a double Balvenie for me.’

They returned to the table. Maybe now’s the time, thought Alan. Maybe this was the way. The Scottish way, over a dram. He took a deep breath. I gave the Eulogy at my father’s funeral, he didn’t say. He wanted to, though. Why did he want to? He wanted to tell Cliff, this stranger who wasn’t. He wanted to share something with him. He had told everyone in the church that he loved his father, which was more than he had ever told the man himself. He had wanted to say it so often, but had been unable to bring himself to. What was the point? Love is a feeling. You feel it, you don’t have to say it. Not in Scotland, anyway, not to your dad.

Was that true? Alan had been away a long time, and had exotic ideas of how sons talked to their fathers. He’d been away so long that Scotland was exotic. Maybe things had changed. Maybe nowadays Scottish fathers and their sons were all over each other, smothering one another in kisses and words. But that didn’t matter. It didn’t matter what other people did or didn’t do. What mattered was how he felt, here and now, this. And it was too late. It was done, it was finished. Too late for anything but inner monologues and regrets. At least he had kissed him. He had laid his fingers on his father’s forehead, which was cold, like glass, as he knew it would be. He had leaned and placed his lips on the flesh where his fingers had been.

I never gave the eulogy at my father’s funeral. I never even went to the funeral director’s to view the body. My dad wasn’t a Scot; he was a Northerner (i.e. from the north of England) and they’re every bit as bad. Once you understand the culture, though, each of these stories opens up like, as Steve Alker, an Amazon reviewer put it, “a flower sprouting out of cracked concrete.”

I’ve written a few stories set in Scotland and it’s hard to know where to draw the line when it comes to dialect. Some authors like Irvine Welsh take it to one extreme – I’ve lived my whole life here and yet I struggle with his prose – whereas others include just enough touches to give us the feel without burdening the readers. For my tastes Andrew is a little light on the Scotticisms. I would have written part of the above as:

Love’s a feelin’. Ye feel it, ye don’t have to say it. No in Scotland, anyway, no to your da.

but it probably sounded more like:

Love’s a feelin. Ye feel it, ye don hufftie say it. No in Scoatlan oanyway, no t’ yer da.

It’s a hard call. He includes the odd word like ‘skiting’ (which means ‘skidded off’ – if your dad hit you on the head he’s given you a skite), ‘chittering’ (which means something different in Scottish as opposed to English, it means freezing) or ‘cludge’ (meaning toilet) but I would have spelled it ‘cludgie’ to stop their being any confusion with the word ‘kludge’ which can also be spelled with a c. I would have preferred a bit more consistency over the whole volume, but I don’t think anyone outside Scotland will bother; if anything they’ll probably be grateful for his restraint.

I used to live beside a golf course when I was young and so the idea of looking for lost balls is not new to me. Although there was a pond close to one of the holes that must have contained a decent supply of lost balls, I would never have dreamed of getting my feet wet to recover them, let alone diving for them, but that’s what the story ‘Golf Balls’ that opens the collection is about. When Alan announces his intention to go looking for them one day the following interchange ensues:

‘I’ve told you not to go up there by yourself,’ said his dad. ‘There’s a pipe at the bottom of the Resi. It pumps water down to the BP. There’s an undertow. I thought you knew.’

Of course Alan knew. Everyone knew the story about the undertow. There was no need to tell him. He wasn’t a baby. Anyway, it was just a story.

‘Is this you being precocious?’ said his dad. Precocious. He sneered the word like he’d just learned it. Sarcasm. ‘Golf balls? How many?’

‘Loads,’ said Alan. He regretted telling him.

His dad folded his newspaper and put it on the table. ‘Can you swim?’ he said.

‘Aye,’ Alan lied.

‘Tomorrow morning,’ said his dad. ‘We’ll get up early.’

The ‘Resi’ is the local reservoir. It would be easy to read this as an attempt to belittle his son but that’s really not the intent. Robert is constantly throwing down the gauntlet hoping that Alan will rise to the challenge. The second story, ‘Saw Set’, begins:

He didn’t want to be there. Morning sunlight was struggling to penetrate the dust on the front window, but the shop was still dark. The place had been stripped bare. He couldn’t explain the shadows – there seemed to be corners where in fact there was nothing. All that was left was a huge counter running the length of the wall. He felt as if he were in a cave. A long, dark cave. With a counter in it.

‘It’s like something out of Malamud,’ he said.

His father looked up from the saw he was sharpening. ‘Eh?’ he said.

Alan wiped the window with the side of his hand, to little effect. The outside was dirty, too. The sun disappeared behind a cloud.

‘Pay attention to this,’ said his father. ‘You might learn something.’

When I read this I thought of the many, many hours I spent standing beside my father in our garage handing him spanners and hammers and tools with daft names like torque wrench and needle-nose pliers. My dad was a proper dad; a dad that worked with his hands; a dad who’d started “in t’mill” (remember he was a Lancashire lad) when he was something like thirteen and never had a day off discounting his National Service and a few weeks following his heart attack (probably caused by overwork). Before I read this story I had no idea what a saw set was but I bet my dad had one. He had all kinds of saws. He wasn’t a joiner by trade but he’d have a crack at anything: bricklaying, plumbing, electrics, you name it. I can change a plug and I can change a tyre but that’s about my limit.

The third story is the only one not to feature Alan. In it we get to see what his mum’s life is like, creeping out of bed early in the morning so as not to wake Robert and then heading off to the local school where she works as a cleaner. When Robert was made redundant for a while she was the sole breadwinner but now he’s taken a course and decided to set up shop in the High Street fixing watches and clocks. Like most of the pieces in this volume there’s not much of a story here but that’s not the kind of story Andrew writes; these are slices of lives which is another reason why this feels like the skeleton of a novel but I won’t labour the point because I like this style of writing very much. It feels less contrived than more carefully structured pieces; more real. Lives aren’t neat and so stories about people’s lives shouldn’t be neat either.

In this story we get Jean’s insights into her husband:

She would have stayed longer, but she had to be back here again for 4 o’clock and her afternoon shift. It was tiring, but it was worth it. Anything to keep him happy. He hadn’t been very happy lately. Something had happened. It shouldn’t have mattered, but it did. They’d spent a few evenings making display mats for the window, nothing fancy, just small sheets of plywood covered in green felt, stuffed with tissue paper. It was her idea. They’d laughed about it. It would do for a beginning. Then on Monday that woman from the fancy Jewellers had come in for a nosey. ‘You must have had a good time making your wee mats for the window,’ she’d said. Robert had clammed up there and then. He was still in the huff. Three days; it wasn’t a record. She knew the signs. He needed time to work through things, until they were worked out. And his temper. But his late nights were back – the ashtray that morning had been full to the brim with cigarette ends. God knows what time he had come to bed. She knew he wouldn’t sleep in, though. He had an alarm on his watch. He slept with it under his pillow.

The book’s dedication reads: “For sons, and for their fathers.” I’m not saying that daughters and mothers won’t enjoy the book but the mother-daughter dynamic is different to the father-son dynamic. Andrew didn’t ask me to review this book; I offered. He’s from Grangemouth on the east coast and the only thing that connects us is the Forth and Clyde Canal – literally.

In a recent interview he was asked who his literary heroes were. This was his answer:

Literary Heroes – got to be Bernard Malamud, JP Donleavy (both American, interestingly enough). James Kelman – ask any Scottish writer, and they'll mention James Kelman. John Irving for the way he crafts a tale.

He’s right, Kelman is an obvious choice, but the sad fact is, as elsewhere, when you start to look for outstanding Scottish short story collections there aren’t that many to pick from – Alasdair Gray’s Unlikely Stories, Mostly and AL Kennedy’s Night Geometry and the Garscadden Trains jump out for me. While The Next Stop Is Croy and other stories is not substantial enough to knock these two and Kelman off their perches, it is well worth the read. The great thing about the recent changes in technology is that we would likely never have seen these six stories collected like this under any other circumstances because it wouldn’t be financially viable. And that would have been a crying shame because this is a good (albeit slim) collection. The asking price on Amazon.co.uk is £2.42 which you might think a wee bit steep when there are so many e-books out there for 99¢. It’s like everything in this life: you get what you pay for.

If you fancy having a read of some of Andrew’s work free and for gratis – we Scots love a bargain – there are a number of his pieces online including two from this collection:

‘The Next Stop is Croy’
‘Teeth’
‘The Weird and Wonderful World of TEFL’ #1 - #10, #11 - #14, #16 - #20
‘The Cafeneio in Forty Churches’
‘The House of Hugh Green’
‘That Hope’
‘Tassos’
‘Cl’

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Andrew McCallum Crawford grew up in Grangemouth, an industrial town in East Central Scotland. He studied Biology and Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh and went on to take a teaching qualification at Jordanhill College, Glasgow. He started writing when he was twenty and has been hard at it for twenty-four years now. His poetry and short fiction have appeared in Lines Review, The Athens News, Junk Junction, Ink Sweat and Tears, McStorytellers, Weaponizer, New Linear Perspectives, Spilling Ink Review, Drey 2 (Red Squirrel Press), Ironstone, The Legendary, The Midwest Literary Magazine and The. His first novel, Drive!, was published in 2010. He lives in Greece where he works as a teacher.