dovegreyreader scribbles

Inky confessions

2009-07-19T00:15:00+01:00

'Truth is such a rare thing, it is delighted to tell it.'
So said Emily Dickinson and it is a truth I must delight in telling you that I need another fountain pen about as much as I need another book, which is to say I can't have too many of them, nor can I have too much of the ink to accompany.
It's another truth that were I to hand write this blog for the next twenty years I would still have ink to spare, but there is something strangely comforting about the sight of a bottle of ink.
Is it about nostalgia over that Quinky mess you used to get into at school with those Osmiroid dip pens with a sort of well behind the nib which was supposed to stash enough ink for a sentence?
It would always blob out the whole lot suddenly, earning a terrifying 'Please see me' in red on your exercise book.
Or is it the thought of all the words you might write?
That you could write if you wanted to because you have miles of ink so it will never be a problem?
My newest acquisition, which may not completely usurp my love of the good old Lamy Safari with a 1.1 italic nib, is a very dinky little pen from Pilot called a Pluminix.
It's seen me through Dartington wonderfully this last week and is a comfortable joy to write with despite the fact that I have issues with the name.
Did they all brainstorm out of an envelope and blue-sky think this around a table and if so why didn't they ask me to be there?
I could have told them it sounds like something from the outsize lingerie department at Grace Brothers.
'Miss Brahms, could you serve this traditionally-built lady with some Pluminix please?'
'Yes, Mrs Slocombe, would Madame like the standard or the deluxe with frills?'
I can see the French, plume de ma tante, fountain pen connection but the rest escapes me.
But overcoming the name associations, the pen is a perfectly, lovely gorgeous little vision of beauty in peacock blue, just 4.5" long with a transparent barrel and 0.9mm italic nib. If it doesn't suck ink from a bottle, it's not a real pen apparently and sadly this only takes a cartridge but you can't have everything for £4.99.
But even cartridges are looking nice these days and forgive my folly but how could I resist them in those sweet little tins too?
Some more Herbin Gris Nuage which is a favoured colour here and what about Violet Pensee?
Sounds edible and whatever I write with it is bound to be thoughtful if not a little purple.
Still catching up from Dartington and getting ready for Port Eliot next weekend (polishing my wellies) so expect erratic postings for a bit longer but don't miss 'dovegreyreader asks...' Julia Blackburn here tomorrow and prize draw copies of The Three of Us then too.

How Ted Hughes Became - Andrew Motion, Dartington 2009

2009-07-18T15:08:49+01:00

The Ted Hughes Memorial Lecture given this year by out-going Poet Laureate, Sir Andrew Motion in the grand setting of the Great Hall at Dartington once more and to a packed audience. It's virtually impossible to do justice to the scale and scope of this lecture from the back row of the balcony whilst I'm scribbling but concentrating too, because I wanted to learn as well as get the gist for all of you.
I grew to love the poetry of Ted Hughes whilst studying it for that OU degree mostly acquired through the 2am writing of essays after a long day's work.
Literature in the Modern World (A319) and an essay was required.

'Nostalgia for an imperial past may be mediated in a very oblique way in literature, oblique not only in subject matter but in the form and style of its embodiment"
Discuss this statement with reference to the work of any two writers.

I had chosen Philip Larkin and Ted Hughes and waited for the muse to strike which it hadn't really.
I'd read and gathered in a copious notes about Larkins 'parochialism and unfulfillment', recognisable poetic form, some end of empire/ loss of face quotes, continuity of the pre-modernist poetic voice of Rupert Brooke and Edward Thomas and had opted to use his poem At Grass and Going Going to back it all up. I was edging towards something about an England of traditions, customs and institutions being threatened and throwing in something about potent anxiety, and nostalgia as an antidote to a fear of the future.
For Hughes I had come a bit unstuck and was sitting staring out into the night probably having one of those 'why on earth am I doing this' moments and worrying about having to get up for work in the morning.
In desperation I listened, for the first time, to a tape of Ted Hughes reading his poetry and listened in a state of shock and awe as he read The Thought Fox and Horses and that was me smitten with the poetry of Ted Hughes for life.
Thoughts flew in thick and fast as all that background reading fell into place, I suddenly felt I knew what Ted Hughes was about, that denial of history and his need to alert me (and only me at 2am on that May night in 2000) to other dimensions. Ted was breaking the mould and re-shaping the poetic form and I used Horses and that feeling of the dawn of time and something lost to create the atmosphere and then waded fearlessly into Wodwo, which looking back seems quite courageous, but I remember being truly excited about what I was discovering. Tapping into that lost world of instinctual responses, nature over nurture as the main determinant of the shape of human life.
The price might have been me walking around half asleep through a baby clinic the next day, for which I can only apologise.
How Ted Hughes Became was the given title for the memorial lecture but, as Andrew Motion explained, these things can gain a life of their own and mutate with thought and writing into something slightly estranged from the source.
There was a 'bad language' warning with the blame laid fairly and squarely at the typewriter of Philip Larkin as Andrew Motion proceeded to offer a nicely defined comparison between Hughes and Larkin which as you can imagine I bought into instantly.
Larkin the heir to Edward Thomas, disparaging of modernism in all its guises.
Hughes the heir to Blake and Lawrence and welcoming and embracing modernism a sort of 'yes to life'.
There followed an interesting analysis of Ted Hughes's poetry from the early and more orthodox form of Hawk in the Rain and Lupercal through to Wodwo where the conflicts and separate voices begin to be revealed.
I was interested in Andrew Motion's reflections on what these two poets may have thought of each other. Largely evidenced from correspondence, it would seem that Hughes genuinely admired Larkin, whilst Larkin saw 'terribleTed' and created a toxic compound of actual dislike based on a genuine feeling of threat from a new and up-coming poet.
Ted Hughes's opinions on Larkin shifted with time as he broke away from the safety of Larkin's world with the publication of Wodwo, a pursuit of simplicity and a marking of time downwards to that dreamtime before history and Andrew Motion made interesting points about the red in tooth and claw aspects of Hughes's writing reading Pike to demonstrate.
By this time, I'm really sorry but I'm enjoying it so much the notes are a bit disjointed so you might have to place them within the whole for yourselves, things like
'The health of everything depends on experiment which is often harder to enjoy.'
'Full gaze on a visible world.'
'Continual sense of contact with forces that challenge and control.'
'When these two voices meet witness Ted Hughes @ his most extraordinary.'

Only time for one question asking whether the poetry of Hughes carried any coherent responses to environmental crises, to which Andrew Motion replied that poetry carries its message most effectively when it doesn't wag its finger at us, by allowing us to celebrate where beauty remains and express sorrow when it is damaged. An answer which I liked very much and will remember because it fits neatly alongside my own feeling that poetry teaches, consoles and warns in equal measure.
For some reason I've then written,
'Gift of afterthought to those who have listened.'
Which I think Andrew Motion added and I've certainly used that gift since this excellent lecture to revisit the poetry of Ted Hughes yet again.
I ended my 2am (by now 3am) essay with a quote by Ted Hughes (from Erica Wagner's book Ariel's Gift according to my footnotes) which must have impressed my tutor too because I winged an 88% for these 2am meanderings. I tell you that for one reason only and that is to encourage anyone out there who might be thinking about an OU degree, but is wondering whether they can do it.
Well this thing can be done because I thought that too, get on and do it and surprise yourself as much I did about the doors that it will open in your mind.
That quote from Ted Hughes seems to fit this moment too,

'May be all poetry...is a revealing of something that the writer doesn't actually want to say, but desperately needs to communicate. to be delivered of. The writer daren't actually put it into words, so it leaks out obliquely, smuggled through analogies.'

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

2009-07-17T00:15:00+01:00

No apologies for a post about as long as the reign of Henry VIII because this is a vast book and I don't seem able to do it justice on the turn of a groat. Also today I go to hear Hilary Mantel talk about Wolf Hall (or Woofle as Book Hound has christened this permanent feature around the house) in the highly charged and atmospheric surroundings of the Great Hall at Dartington with the Tilting Yard outside. Hilary Mantel on my list of passionate and inspiring LitFest speakers who must never be missed under any circumstances and doubtless I'll come away with all the right answers.
In the end there was only one reading method that seemed to suit Wolf Hall.
Sitting on the bed with the book well-propped and a plate of bacon toasted lark's tongue sandwiches and a pot of tea to hand, which is why, after 650 pages I might have been the size of Henry VIII but for that fact this has taken weeks of reading, so I've done a lot of other things in between.
In fact the whole process has been not unlike a Tudor royal progress, timely and measured with lots of treats and stop-overs along the way.
But how pleased am I with myself for turning the final page when in the early days I quite thought my lack of Tudor insider info was going to be my downfall. Much of what I thought I knew can only have come from the pen of Jean Plaidy about forty years ago. I wanted to be a nurse, this didn't seem important, but take heart any fellow history lesson slackers, you'll have it all at your gem-encrusted fingertips by the end.
Once I got a grip and waded in it was like visiting a house full of semi-strangers. After a few days you start to get to know them, know what happens at the dinner table and about the washing up, whose turn it is to use the shower and by the end you're pledging to meet up every year.
In fact Henry gets to use the shower first, but 300 pages in I suddenly realised I had become part of the furniture, I knew everyone, knew which house I was walking into and who might be there, knew who to trust and who not, the first half slotted into place perfectly and I wanted to strangle Anne Boleyn but probably won't have to (sorry spoiler).
I also understood Henry VIII in a way that I hadn't before having previously picked up all the gouty off-with-her-head myth and mystery down the years, but perhaps not the true desperation and turmoil of the inner man.
The cast is vast, almost one hundred characters and if Hilary Mantel used Post-it notes for plotting their whereabouts then I hope she has shares, because Wolf Hall feels like an awesome accomplishment, a feat of huge narrative daring and complexity. There is word alchemy and rare sleight of pen afoot here because it's beyond me to describe how it's done, but to make a reader feel like a participant in this emerging social world, a world still trying to find its feet and know its direction, feels like true writerly, spell-weaving magic to me.
I shouldn't even really try and pronounce on events of which I know so little but it would seem England and Agincourt are history, the glory days are done and not for the first time before or since has the country sunk into something of an embarrassing and parlous state.
None of this helped by Henry's desperation for a son and heir and his slithery wriggling out of the marriage to Katharine of Aragon with some very devious manoeuvring, thence to pick up with Ann Boleyn, the tease of the century. After six years of waiting (might be seven) Henry like a slavering dog by the time Ann is finally installed on the throne and into the Royal bed.
When the baby arrives and it's a Princess, Henry does at least shout call it Elizabeth and asks if she's healthy before heading off hunting or jousting or something.
Meanwhile in the background, easing whoever needs to be eased, plotting the downfall of those who stand in the King's way, oiling whichever wheels seem to fit the courtly bicycle (and I thought about that analogy) at any given moment, Thomas Cromwell.
Don't for goodness' sake ask a history klutz like me to be able to have honestly known the difference between Thomas and Oliver Cromwell if you'd asked me to explain. I'd have waffled on about Roundheads, warts and the Civil War for one and known nothing of the other.
Thomas Cromwell, sometime Henry's right hand Mr Fix-It, apparently much-maligned by history but re-visited by Hilary Mantel as a man with a heart and soul, borne of an abusive childhood, stalked by tragedy, yet a caring father-figure to his children and countless other waifs and strays. Always with an eye for the shrewd move around Court, the blacksmith's son who does indeed 'make his own tools', it is Thomas whose life is central to this book, a man whose perception of self seems greatly at odds with how others see him, his dismay is unwritten but evident when his son confirms that he does indeed look like a murderer.

'A man's power is in the half-light, in the half-seen movements of his hand and the unguessed-at expression of his face.It is the absence of facts that frightens people: the gap you open into which they pour their fears, fantasies, desires.'

Always Hilary Mantel seems to offer perfectly good and logical reasons for Cromwell's behaviour, often episodes from his past,

'One fear creates a dereliction, the offence brings on a greater fear, and there comes a point when the fear is too great and the human spirit just gives up and a child wanders off numb and directionless and ends up following a crowd and watching a killing.'

I was verging on tears towards the end as Thomas Cromwell searches in vain to find an honourable way out for the incarcerated Thomas More, a principled but cruel and deeply flawed man, hell-bent on heaven but overtly terrified about quite what variety of punitive death will transport him there. No matter who's about to be thwarted in love or political ambition, char-grilled or parted from their innards, the light and the shadows always reflect well on Thomas Cromwell and, even in the final analysis, the light falls favourably on those like More who it's hard not to have loathed from the off.
Hilary Mantel makes quite sure we understand why, often by saying very little indeed.
That apart there is so much more to say it could take me the reign of Elizabeth I too, but this being me, I loved the costumes and the textures of the fabrics and those discreetly conjured up wardrobe details offering something quite sumptuous and special.
Someone walks into a room, hops onto a barge or heads for front-row seats at the disembowelling in suitable raiment; a Lemster wool jacket or sable trimmings, gowns of figured damask, a black wool cape with lambskin lining (I want one) and then Hilary Mantel adds in a snippet of crimson velvet or some tawny silk to assuage my need to feel a book like this between my fingers.
Picture Lord Rochford doing this and be there,

...what fascinates him is the flame-coloured satin that is pulled through his slashed velvet over-sleeve. He keeps coaxing little puffs of fabric with a fingertip, pleating and nudging them to grow bigger, so that he looks like one of those jugglers who runs balls down their arms.'

Other characters gained momentum as I came to know them, the blustering Duke of Norfolk could always be relied on for some brash abrasiveness, almost a comic character, then Thomas Wriothesley, known throughout as Call-Me-Risley and I was there and basking in this entire Tudor innovation, because this book is history made fresh, both renewed and different.
Sequels are promised and we can but keep calm and wait patiently when really I feel like jumping up and down and wanting the next book yesterday.
Right, now, before I dash off across Dartmoor we have to talk about the Booker Prize, the long list announcement just eleven days hence.
If Wolf Hall doesn't at least make the long list followed swiftly by the shortlist then England is fast sinking into another of those embarrassing and parlous declines for sure, the ravens might as well scoot from the Tower because we're done for. Books like this don't come along every day, this is a literary Agincourt... now what a fine and muddled historical mess I'm getting in.
I'll stop there and be back with news of what Wolf Hall is really about soon.

Team Ulysses - Camp One

2009-07-16T00:15:00+01:00

NB Ulyssesian academics who have stumbled in here by chance might want to look away now or risk tearing their hair out.
So how's it going Team Ulysses?
Are you all still there?
Please don't worry if you're behind, ahead, haven't started, don't want to...this is for pleasure not pain, but I can report that I've been really good, haven't cut the ropes and climbed on ahead, just stuck with the first chapter for this month and ended up reading that three times now.
If I carry on like this I'll end the year being able say 'yes well actually I've read Ulysses three times' but we'll see.
I read over and again to give myself a bit of a grounding while the going was good, like digging in the foundations for when things get tough and the air gets a bit thin, which I have no doubt it will.
I'm also sticking to my pledge not to bring in anything other than Declan Kiberd's Ulysses and Us for guidance, so it's me and the words and that's it. I've no plans to cheat either and filch ideas from elsewhere and pretend I've had a brainwave, what I share will be my initial naive thoughts and if Declan or anyone else has had a hand in it I'll say so.
For anyone who might find it helpful, and my thanks to Faber for this, you can download the first chapter of Declan Kiberd's book here.
That said, I have ordered a book by Frank Delaney which looks interesting and relevant for me, James Joyce's Odyssey.
I've never been to Dublin and I wanted a book that gave me a Ulyssesian feel for the city because already I'm getting that sense of place and country from this first chapter and I feel as if I'm half blindfolded and missing sights and sounds along the way that I definitely don't want to miss.
It took me three readings to pick up the significance of the Martello Tower setting and not suprisingly, given my Tudor deficits, Irish history doesn't come high up my list of competencies either. Whilst I sense much reference to an Irish past and, what Declan Kiberd describes as the absolute penetration of a colonial power, I'm not as conversant with the intricate details as I should be, only with the fall-out in my own lifetime, but I'm sure that will change.
Declan Kiberd has already pointed out that whilst England was staging a Great Exhibition in 1851 and proclaiming herself the pinnacle of scientific and industrial achievement, the people of Ireland were dying of starvation on the streets.
It's a sobering thought and one the rather haughty Haines clearly understates,

'We feel in England that we have treated you rather unfairly. It seems history is to blame'.

Placing the book in its historical context has felt important to me too because nor had I really appreciated that, as James Joyce was writing Ulysses, a world system was busy collapsing in Europe and Joyce was writing a book for the new order that would surely replace it,

' he would explore modes of teaching and learning which answer the emotional and intellectual needs of ordinary people in search of a wiser way of life.'

But in a way that's all extraneous, because what I am enjoying are the words and the flow and this sense of a single day, chosen because nothing great happened on June 16th 1904, nothing could detract from Stephen's life on that day.
How much easier to do that in 1904.
It made me think how it is virtually impossible to have a day like that now unless I make a conscious effort to ignore all media intrusions, no news, no papers, no radio, no sneaking a look at the headlines at the top of my computer task bar.
Just the discovery that we've lost soldiers in Afghanistan invades my day with a background of sadness and affects it in a way that I can't possibly avoid.
There is mention of the Jesuits and I'm getting little whispers of a Gerard Manley Hopkins-like prose at times too, he did a lot of treading and wreaking as I recall and often just a line of Joyce's would be enough.

'Seaspawn and seawrack...to hear his boots crush crackling wrack and shells'

had me thinking about Hopkins's inscape and instress, all studied at school and so long ago it's lost in the mists of essays for which I got B - and 'fair attempt.' I was far too callow to appreciate it all, that has come with the years, but I do still have my annotated copy from the sixth form with a couple of those terrible essays tucked inside.
These words of Joyce felt completely Hopkins-esque.

'Woodshadows floated silently by through the morning peace from the stairhead seaward where he gazed. Inshore and farther out the mirror of water whitened, spurned by lightshod hurrying feet. White breast of the din sea. The twining stresses two by two. A hand plucking the harpstrings, two by two. Wavewhite wedded words shimmering on the dim tide.'

Joyce was at great pains to slow down the skimming speed reader, troubled by the fact that words were read at a far greater speed than the speed of oral delivery and Declan Kiberd makes a wonderful analogy with the flaneur whose

'languid gait on the boulevards was an attempt to decelerate the modern world, by reducing quick walking to a slow crawl.'

I'm being a Ulyssesian literary flaneur and loving the stroll and it makes me think that we are probably all seeing different things as we walk and gaze around which makes this quite exciting. To James Joyce the 'ordinary' reader mattered and I can only imagine how dismayed he may have felt to see his book taken hostage by the academy and perhaps how pleased he might have been to see the masses storming the ramparts and reclaiming it.
So Ulysses is like reading the inner ramblings of a mind or as Ruth over at Crafty People says, listening to her talking.

"I’m really enjoying the stream of consciousness of this book. The thoughts of the protagonists wander in much the same way that mine do. However, I’ve not yet mastered the trick of keeping my mouth shut and many of my thoughts just come flowing out sweeping unwary bystanders in their path. Those who know me just switch off but the uninitiated have been known to feel faint at the torrent of seemingly disconnected words and ideas rushing in their direction."

Ruth is a dear friend and won't mind me saying that she is indeed like a walking talking version of Ulysses and spending a day with her is not as she thinks about stopping up my ears but enjoying the listening. Ruth's creative stream of consciousness whilst strolling through Liberty's of London should be preserved for posterity:-)
There is an acknowledgment that many readers give up their reading of Ulysses at this point, about sixty pages in struggling with the impending density, but I'm feeling really up for whatever comes next, as Declan so comfortingly reassures,

' Joyce is laughing at the pitiful pretentiousness of the youth he once was. Nobody could understand all that Stephen says or thinks. Nobody could take all of his ideas with utter seriousness.'

In that vein I've been walking round saying

'well, it's the ineluctable modality of the visual...I'd have thought that was obvious.'

My mother always argued that a university degree was training for nothing and who knows whether she'd absorbed that from James Joyce or not, but she could have done because as Declan Kiberd elaborates, Stephen's over interpretation of events, his shyness, his bouts of arrogance all point to the fact that

'a college arts degree may unfit you for the world.'

Mine seemed to expand and fit into the space waiting for it when I did it in my forties, but I doubt I would have taken so much life experience into it or gained as much from it if I'd done it in my late teens.
So that's me and with all that in mind I'm now really excited about moving onto Camp Two, how about you?
We'll bivouac here for the next month so please add comments whenever you want to, I can't wait to hear your thoughts and we'll reconvene on August 16th and see what we find when we get there.

Ted and Lenny's ways with words - Dartington 2009

2009-07-15T00:15:00+01:00

A Ted Hughes-filled day at Dartington last Saturday and one I was really looking forward to especially the Ted Hughes Memorial Lecture delivered by Sir Andrew Motion, the former Poet Laureate and in the presence of Carol Hughes.
In the morning a clash of events meant I had privileged William Fiennes and The Music Room over Terry Gifford talking on Ted Hughes Environmentalist, but I did settle into my seat in the Barn Theatre for Noel Chanan showing his documentary film which explored the nature of the friendship and artistic collaboration between Ted Hughes and Leonard Baskin.
All enough to ensure I took out my little collection of first edition Ted & Lennys when I got home just to remind myself what things of beauty they are. In a way I don't enjoy first editions like this, they are investments not books, hardly touchable as books should be, so I have well-thumbed readable copies too.
Noel Chanan, the photographer and film maker, whose greyscale images of Ted Hughes now grace the covers of several recent publications including the Collected Poems, introduced his film.
Some twenty-five years ago he had recorded extensive film footage of Hughes and Baskin in conversation at Leonard Baskin's Devon studio.
'Oh faaaaaaaaaaantastic' I thought, this is going to be incredible.
Noel Chanan then explained apologetically that the original film footage had been faulty and only the sound recording survived.
'Oh *£%^&*# ' I suspect thought the entire audience as of one.
In fact spare a thought because I can only begin to imagine Noel Chanan's despair at that discovery, but he has recently edited his collection of still photographs with the sound track.
So The Artist and The Poet began and we listened to these two huge creative forces talking about their work and their friendship. If ever two voices and some photos on a screen held the power to carry an audience's initial disappointment along, moulding it into a moving and memorable experience, then Lenny and Ted stole the show with some help from Noel, who was by his own admission 'the servant of the material'.
Crow, their first work together and I learnt a thing or two as well, as Ted Hughes explained in a discussion about the significance of the crow, that when the ravens departed from the Tower of London during the war, (apparently the Blitz did for them) they were replaced with birds from Sourton Wood, just up the road from here.
As we all know and fear, left raven-less the monarchy and the Tower itself will fall.
There were intricate discussions about mythology and the symbolism of the crow as a trickster, vain and despised and outcast, a totem symbol of an inverted god and then more about each book they had worked on together.
Cave Birds and which came first, the poems or the pictures?
Ted Hughes wrote a narrative to fit Leonard Baskin's drawings and, not being a believer in down-beat endings, the themes went from conviction, trial, execution and death to resurrection. Then Leonard Baskin produced ten more 'doodles' (much banter between the two) and so the narrative was extended to encompass judgement and the underworld. Ted Hughes then added a human level and Leonard Baskin had to produce nine more 'doodles' to fit the words.
Both talked about the happy constraints offered by the boundaries of working in this way, working together and out of each other but separately and in a completely unplanned way.
Under the North Star written in its entirety when Ted Hughes visited Leonard Baskin in Maine and they journeyed into the backwoods, how Baskin's paintings for this book were all that Hughes could have dreamed of and more and at this point he read The Bear.
Moving on to Flowers and Insects (or The Flower Book as Ted Hughes called it), Ted Hughes described how the painting of the daffodil done by Leonard Baskin offered more inspiration for the words than the acre of daffodils that he was looking at, how this relationship between the two of them was on an even keel, it had an ease, an affinity.

'I'd bought a patch of wild ground.
In March it surprised me. Suddenly I saw what I owned.
A cauldron of daffodils boiling gently.'

By this time I'm completely immersed and scribbling in the dark, my writing's wandering as I'm watching but Season's Songs was Leonard Baskin's first impressions of Devon where he lived with his family from 1973 to1983. New to watercolours and feeling his way into a fresh and different landscape Baskin explained how he felt spurred on to do that by the poetry.
I've read a few poems from Season's Songs again this week and it's going right on my Roger Deakin shelf this minute. If you've missed the significance of that, it's a collection of books which speak of and to the natural world any which way that touches me, making me see anew what I think I so often miss.

'The swallow of summer, the seamstress of summer,
She scissors the blue into shapes and she sews it,
She draws a long thread and she knots it at corners.

Both died within two years of each other Ted Hughes in 1998, Leonard Baskin in 2000 and their final collaboration, a limited edition of the Oresteia, with forty-seven woodcuts by Baskin, a fitting memorial to a unique and lasting friendship, as is this wonderful film.
It was left to a questioner at the end to put our speechlessness into words,

'Surely, in the end, the loss of the moving visual footage was a happy accident'

and I think we all nodded in awesome agreement.

An embarrassment of riches...

2009-07-14T16:46:44+01:00

Heartfelt congratulations to Julia Blackburn who last night won the PEN/Ackerley Prize for her memoir The Three of Us.
You may remember I was very moved by this book last year and said so here and as luck would have it, just guess who was already lined up for the dovegreyreader asks...armchair next Monday?
Don't miss Julia Blackburn answering our questions and prize draw copies of the book too.
On another matter entirely, I'm not quite sure who decides these things or quite how they happen but suddenly last week the dovegreyreader stats showed visitors from here and, well, who'd have thought it?
We're first, yes that seems to be us and as this couldn't possibly happen without all of you, please all bask in the glory because every one of you contributes by reading and commenting, though of course you can guess <<<< who is taking the credit as usual.
Best not get above ourselves though because there's going to be hot egg-nog posset on my face and I'll be flailing around in vats of syllabub when I share my fledgling Tudor thoughts on Wolf Hall, and I'm going to do that before I hear Hilary Mantel speak about the book on Friday.
It seemed like the honourable thing to do, rather than get all the answers and then cheat and pretend I knew all along.
It really is a truly magnificent book, the scope and scale of the writing has reduced me to a heap of crushed velvet and then, trying to write about it all, I feel like a fingers-and-thumbs court jester juggling with five balls when really I should stick to two; more belated regrets for all that window-gazing during Miss Spencer's history lessons.
Coming up soon my thoughts on Sunday at Dartington, Ted Hughes and Leonard Baskin and Noel Chanan's documentary film about their friendship and artistic collaboration, The Artist and the Poet.

dovegreyreader asks...A.S.Byatt

2009-07-13T00:15:00+01:00

Well, I asked and A.S.Byatt very kindly agreed to take a seat in the virtual armchair and answer our 'dovegreyreader asks...' questions. I think you're going to enjoy this and how grateful I am to A.S.Byatt for taking the time out to do this for us. If you've somehow forgotten quite how much I loved The Children's Book you can read again here.
Perhaps we sometimes mistakenly think of writers as inaccessible and remote from us as readers, but I hope you will agree that you will know A.S.Byatt (or Antonia as we settled on in the end) quite uniquely once you've read these wonderfully informative insights into her writing of The Children's Book, her working day and her favourite books. Have the printer plugged in or pen and paper to hand, because the reading suggestions create a must-have list and I've taken the liberty of linking back to a few that we've talked about on here, even our attempts at caffeine-loaded Balzac last Christmas.
And I'm afraid I know it all too well, sometimes I need saving from myself, I couldn't resist asking Antonia if she had thrown a pot in her research for this book, read on to find out.

Antonia, I've gone off on a frolic of my own with my reading of The Children's Book, probably many miles from the book's intention, and as I read I often paused to wonder whether a writer has intentions like this for their readers. Could you talk us through the genesis of this book, the germ of a beginning, its themes, what were the founding ideas and directions you wanted to take as you wrote and where did you want to take your readers?

I’m happy about the frolic. I don’t think novelists should have designs on or for readers – I have come to see my novels as worlds in which all sorts of things are connected in all sorts of ways. No two readers will read all the same words – the only people who read every word are translators. What’s good about writing novels is that one is writing for one person only – and each one has her/his way of reading and preoccupations. I have found that I increasingly use tales and fairy tale as a kind of underpinning structure – several of the plots in this novel are connected to the fairy story about the king who tried to marry his dead wife’s daughter (a version of Cinderella – Donkeyskin, Manyfurs, Catskin.) I began to wonder about children’s book writers – their children seem to be very unhappy people – there was a wonderfully funny tale about Alison Uttley (whose son drove himself off Beachy Head, which was not funny) in Saturday’s Guardian Review. I was intrigued by things I read about E Nesbit being a founding Fabian – how do fairy stories and socialism go together? I got a lot of help from Jack Zipes, the great fairytale scholar, who said the fairytale was the natural form for socialists. Novels are topsy turvy – the City of London got in because of a repeated image of gold and silver such as the gold and silver dresses the king gives his daughter-bride-to-be - and because of the father in Rebecca West’s The Fountain Overflows, who was preoccupied with bimetallism. That novel had a great effect on me – it started me thinking about the time when adults began to talk to children as grown-ups. I saw at the beginning that my own novel was going to have a large number of main characters – no one hero or heroine – but I did not see, at first, that children in 1895 were going to hit the first world war head on. So it’s only accidentally a war novel – which is a good thing – as I think that was an accidental war, that could easily not have happened. Re children’s book writers – there are bits of Kenneth Grahame, Kipling, Alison Uttley, and Evelyn Sharp in there – not only E Nesbit. I try not to make any of my characters a “portrait” of any real person – they move more freely if they have many originals. As one reviewer remarked, there is a lot of D.H.Lawrence in Olive Wellwood – E.Nesbit was southern and middle class, Olive brings with her the coal mines, and real poverty. And, as Philip does, the North. My own ancestors, on one side, were potters, from the Five Towns.

My reading gives me the impression that you had loved writing this book as much as I had loved reading it, the research into the arts and crafts, the potters and their work, the fabrics, the textures, the V & A, the puppets and fairy tales. Can you tell us what was involved in this research? (I'm actually desperate to know whether you threw a pot!)

I did indeed love all the research – this is not a period I knew a great deal about and it was all there to find out. I find I am increasingly interested in human beings who make things – glassblowers, weavers, and so on. I watch the Antiques Road Show and Flogit not for the human dramas and revelations of value but for the things – furniture, jewellery, silver, pots. I had slightly avoided pots, because of the family connection, before The Children’s Book but I became completely enthralled in finding out about them. I bought books about De Morgan and Minton, and books for would-be craftsmen, and reprints of the V and A’s textbooks for ceramics students and jewellery students. Amazon international and Amazon second-hand – and a great bookbuying research site called Addall – have transfigured the whole research process. My daughter lives next door to a great modern potter, Edmund de Waal, and so I was able to go to his studio, where he told me a great deal about the processes of preparing the clay, and the kilns. It was Edmund who made me understand just how violent and in a way haphazard making pots can be – that you have the two extremes of cold clay and heat and flames. He sat me down at a wheel and centred a lump of clay for me – so I did get my fingers in it and feel the wall rising before it collapsed. I read a great deal about the Martin Brothers and Palissy. Edmund gave me a copy of his book about the history of modern pottery – you would love it, if you haven’t found it – and it was Edmund who told me about Morris and Co’s irrational dislike of porcelain (his own is exquisite) and the general Arts and Crafts mystique from the inside. He was apprenticed to a rural potter and remarked dryly that many Arts and crafts vessels don’t hold water!

The V and A got in because of E Nesbit – who went to the British Museum in search of a plot and had a love affair with the expert who helped her. So I thought I’d set some of the story in the V and A and invent a Keeper of gold and silver. I was very fortunate to meet Marian Campbell who showed me the Gloucester Candlestick and took me on a tour of the basement – the shrine where Philip slept is really there. And I was shown the majolica and the V and A’s collection of Palissy – I was fortunate enough to pick up an imitation Palissy in the Furniture Cave – I pointed out that a dragonfly was broken and got it at a reduced price.

I could go on and on. My husband has a collection of books about the first World War. My German translator Melanie Walz lives in Munich and showed me the puppet museum there – and everything else – and told me about Richard Teschner whose Golden Shrine I managed to visit in the Vienna theatre-museum when I was lecturing there. And my daughter who was then at the Women’s Library introduced me to Jennian Geddes whose help with Dorothy’s studies was invaluable – you cannot imagine what trouble I had in correlating all the dates of all the exams etc. with the rest of the story (and history). I did get one thing wrong – not about Dorothy but partly because of her inexorable timetable – but I am not going to tell you what it was. It was picked up by the American proofreader.

We always love to hear about the workings of a writer's writing day. To know and and visualise the process that gives us the finished book somehow completes the reading circle here, so can we know about any special desk, pen, ink and paper, old typewriter or PC, room with a view or a blank wall, anything that helps us visualise you at work?

I write in an attic looking out at treetops (ashes and a sad eucalyptus someone has cruelly cropped this year. ) Although it is south London herons and parrots fly past – and magpies and jays and wood pigeons and all sorts of small birds. I like colour – so there are bright prints by Matisse and Donald Houston and Patrick Heron – and an ecologically improper case of Amazonian butterflies. Then there is the glass – a number of paperweights, old and new and a lot of American marbles in bowls. American glass is amazing. And then there are a lot of stones – phantom quartz with which I became obsessed, a chunk of Filey Brigg, boulders from the Boggle Hole…Most of the walls are covered by books –a working library – and there is a low semi-circular bookcase inside a bookcase round my chair which puts my working library for the book I am working on in reach – coalmines, Rye, Fabians, Germans and puppets, and the basics – bible (Authorised) dictionaries, place-names , Gray’s Anatomy, some maps…

I’ve banished the computer from my writing room. I write on narrow feint A4 with a Pilot fine-point (0.5) . I write fiction by hand and everything else on the computer. I was never any good with a type-writer and still rejoice in the computer’s wordwrap. But I think with my fingers through a pen. I write fiction in the mornings – or try to – I do my reading up there too – There are, even I admit it, too many books in the house. I fear the stairs may collapse. I should perhaps say that I suffer badly from SAD so I have a lightbox on the surface near the desk. Writing facing a blank wall would throw me into a real depression.

Could you try and imagine that none of us here read books at all, an unlikely scenario I know, but who should we read as a matter of urgency, who should we read for pure pleasure and who is writing now who we mustn't overlook?

Where to begin? I think I’ll start with a list of great novels of the world and then a list of moderns.

Tolstoi War and Peace Flaubert Madame Bovary (You really ought to have Anna Karenina for comparison but I love War and Peace more.) Dostoevski The Brothers Karamazov. Thomas Mann Death in Venice (for starters). George Eliot Middlemarch Jane Austen Persuasion Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby Saul Bellow Henderson the Rain King Henry James The Ambassadors. Chekhov stories – start with the collection in Penguin that includes Lady with a Little Dog. I am at the moment passionately reading Balzac but I don’t think I can ask anyone of you to take a run at him, especially in translation which doesn’t always work You could try Lost Illusions and its sequel. Dickens – what to include, what to leave out? Any and all. Bleak House and Great Expectations – one in the third person, one in the first person.

Moderns. Alice Munro’s short stories. Penelope Fitzgerald The Blue Flower but all her books are wonderful. Like some of you I am excited by Hilary Mantel. Lawrence Norfolk (not easy but if you get caught up in it, amazing) The Pope’s Rhinoceros. Julia Franck The Blind Side of the Heart – translation just out, knocked me over. I am very interested in Michelle de Kretser. Michael Ondaatje’s early novel In the Skin of a Lion. I am also watching Nadeem Aslam who writes wonderfully. His last book was grim and beautiful in equal proportions. Iris Murdoch – my favourites are perhaps her first Under the Net and maybe The Black Prince. Philip Hensher – both his elegant early short novels and the two big ones – The Mulberry Empire and The Northern Clemency. I read Yiyun Li’s The Vagrants and cannot get it out of my head. She and Julia Franck are my Books of the Year, so far. And Wolf Hall. As you can see I have mixed up two sections of the answer – moderns, and “who to look out for.” I truly enjoyed Dai Siije’s Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress – it’s translated from the French, and the French, who are preoccupied with style, say the sentences are not elegant. But it’s an amazing story, told with wit, and a way of seeing into a distant world. His second book is amazing too. A new way into China by a maker of fables who is both grim and funny and elegant. It’s not that I’m peculiarly interested in China – it’s because there are a few new Chinese writers who seem to be saying new things in new ways.

I could go on and on. Kafka is essential at some point. I love Ford Madox Ford – I think I’d recommend The Good Soldier and his first world war quartet before D.H.Lawrence and E,M.Forster – but I think this is partly reaction after having taught those two too much and reacted against their influence. This is a list of books that matter to me as a writer – and I write because I read. Which brings me on to my last point. I really write as I do because I was overwhelmed by Shakespeare as a girl. The English language is wonderful and can do all sorts of things both simple and complicated , straightforward and beautiful – and I do think much of its range and flexibility and breadth – for writers and readers – exists because he wrote as he did when he did. So you imaginary readers who have read nothing must at some point read him – the major tragedies first – Lear, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, Hamlet – and then things like Troilus and Cressida and Measure for Measure - and The Tempest and The Winter’s Tale – and then, the comedies, which are harder than the tragedies because the jokes and the vocabularies have dated – except perhaps A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which is a must-read. And haunts The Children’s Book, so maybe I’ll stop there. Thank you for all the intelligent reading.