On Sunday 13th July 2009, the winners of the Shirley Jackson Awards were announced at Readercon in Burlington, Massachusetts. The awards are given each year for outstanding achievement in the literature of psychological suspense, horror, and the dark fantastic, in recognition of one of America’s greatest writers and the author of the classic short story ‘The Lottery’.

The New Uncanny, edited by independent publishers Ra Page and Sarah Eyre of Comma Press, explored and updated Freud’s famous theory of the uncanny – or the ‘unheimliche’ – which laid out a psychoanalytic framework for understanding horror writing. The anthology featured specially commissioned stories by the likes of AS Byatt, Hanif Kureishi, Christopher Priest, Matthew Holness, Jane Rogers, Alison MacLeod, and Frank Cottrell Boyce, among others. The anthology was nominated alongside authors such as Stephen King, Joyce Carol Oates and Etgar Keret (in other categories).

For Manchester-based Comma Press, this award comes hard on the heels of winning the World Fantasy Award 2008 for Best Collection for Tiny Deaths, by Robert Shearman. A not inconsiderable feat given that these are Comma’s first two publications in the realm of fantasy.

Congratualations, Comma!

 
ASK THE READER

Brian Nellist

Q 

I go to Stratford regularly and read George Eliot and Anne Michaels for CE classes but for my own pleasure I used to read John le Carré and nowadays it’s John Grisham; in those complicated plots I forget everything else. Yet this is condemned as escapism. What’s wrong with that?

A 

Calm down; don’t be so defensive. From what you have just said I rather suspect that you yourself could hazard a guess at two things that are slightly askew. It is not that you refer to Shakespeare as though he is a medicine to be taken for one’s mental health (‘regularly’) which is true in a way but rather that you are limiting the meaning not of Shakespeare but of pleasure. I am reminded of the use of the term by Wordsworth who is the great apostle of its gospel. In the ‘Preface’ to Lyrical Ballads he credits poetry with only a single limitation, ‘the necessity of giving immediate pleasure’. The harm comes from trivialising the word, he believes, because in essence man is a creature who seeks pleasure; ‘the grand elementary principle of pleasure by which he knows, and feels, and lives, and moves.’ Pleasure always involves the satisfaction of desires, so the argument goes, and the deepest pleasure must be given by what meets our profoundest, not our most immediate, needs. Hence for Wordsworth, surprisingly, all acts of sympathy, even with those in intense pain, whether in literature or in life, are grounded in pleasure because they embody our need for kinship, fellow feeling, pride in human endurance. Of course, we should not pervert this into pleasure in suffering itself but grant that in its acts of understanding literature encourages a tenderness and fineness of feeling that fulfils a need in us; ‘wherever we sympathise with pain it will be found that the sympathy is produced and carried on by subtle combinations with pleasure’. So, feel free to acknowledge that Stratford and Middlemarch, without any juvenile sense of schadenfreude, are also sources of pleasure.At the moment you are turning literature into hard slog for which you compensate by guilty weekends of holiday reading. As you know, the greatest pleasures demand effort as much as the greatest anything else. It is natural if you enjoy playing bowls that the pleasure will be increased if you work seriously at your game.

But the second thing, from what you say, that you are not taking seriously enough is that word ‘escapism’. To get out of gaol is generally classed as beneficial to the prisoner. All literature in its attempt to make sense of things, even in expressing the fear they make no sense at all, is to that extent a liberation from the cell of non-meaning. We use this accusation too easily. I note from the dictionary that Punch (!) in December, 1939, significant date of course, thought the reading of the big Victorian realist novel an ‘escape’; ‘Many a publisher has had the good idea of advising you to escape thoroughly by way of an eighthundred-and-fifty page novel about family life in the Victorian era.’ Yet I remember after World War II being told by someone from GCHQ (or whatever it was called then) that the World’s Classic Trollope had preserved for him a sense of moral normality that very directly helped to sustain a belief in what he was doing.

But I am evading the issue now, I agree, because your point concerns not the use to which we put books that are ambitious in their aims but what used to be called light literature, a branch of the entertainment industry, to be dismissive of it. Those complicated plots by which you ‘escape’ are often the means by which the sense of friends and foes are identified with good and evil but by complicated routes to make the belief tenable to our sceptical minds, so that their identities become fluid and there are crossovers between the categories. The modern thriller has to complicate the sense that judgement was once a lot easier yet the resolution of the plot, however tentatively, gives you the reassurance that in the end the balance works out on the right side. Popular literature is often close to myth in the clarity with which it will work out its resolutions and a part of your guilty delight in it, I suspect, is the desire for an easier life than more complicated literature allows. Fairy stories do that, of course, and John Grisham may be closer to ‘Goldilocks and the Three Bears’ than to Middlemarch but that does not make it necessarily suspect. Behind the excitements of the Lord of the Rings, for example, we notice that Sauron is destroyed less by action than by suffering, including Frodo’s own corruption, that indeed fighting is part of that corruption and that unless it is registered as suffering there is no value in the fight. When we read quickly for plot and event we do not necessarily register these things but that does not mean they are not being noted somewhere inside us or that we do not feel refreshed in consequence.

Yet if it is a pleasure sometimes to read quickly, be conscious that you may have to do that because otherwise not enough is going on to hold the attention and also to avoid being irritated by how much better you could have expressed it yourself. Inattention in the reader can begin as an excuse and end as a habit; take care that you do not blunt your capacity for still greater pleasure, Paradise Lost or Women in Love.

(Remember: you can purchase all of these books, plus many others, through The Reader Organisation’s Online Bookshop.)

Literature, Iris Murdoch said, as opposed to philosophy, her other concern, is ‘very natural to us, close to ordinary life and to the way we live as reflective beings’. Why then, you might ask, are her stories so rich in extraordinary and eccentric characters, why do they culminate in some explosive event or catastrophe and why do her people behave in extreme ways, incest, attempted murder, suicide? She was writing in rebellion against the reduced scale, as she saw it, of other twentieth century fiction which seemed to assume that every individual was free to make his or her own way in the world with other people as objects of choice or mere background to their lives. She wrote instead about disturbing figures of power, both what it was like to exercise such influence and about those subject to its authority and in doubt or open reaction or delighted acquiescence. She saw very clearly all the non-rational obsessive and desiring elements of a self which was often far from free. ‘Reality is not a given whole,’ she wrote. ‘An understanding of this, a respect for the contingent is essential to imagination as opposed to fantasy.’ Her characters are always articulate middle-class not out of snobbery but because they constantly try to understand their competing and conflicting inner pressures. There’s always an intense excitement in her books as they move, especially in the earlier works, between something close to myth or fairy tale, say The Bell or The Italian Girl and a more recognisable sense of the everyday, say The Sandcastle or, my own favourite, An Unofficial Rose. But the greatest achievement is really the long later novels where the power of the almost magically endowed prophetic figures casts a spell over an immensely varied cast of characters, as in The Message to the Planet or The Book and the Brotherhood. Each novel is a world in itself, compulsively readable, constantly surprising, stimulating of thought but above all, to use her own word, ‘fun’ to be with. If you haven’t read any before, what pleasure is in store for you, and if you have they will seem even more rewarding when you return.

Brian Nellist

Vintage Classics have recently republished most of Iris Murdoch’s novels together with her essays on Sartre and the challenging and brilliant Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals.

Beautiful, aren’t they?
 
Remember: you can purchase the above books through The Reader Organisation’s Online Bookshop.

The Junction tells the story of Captain Peter Scott, paralysed and dying of a nervous disorder, just as the First World War is coming to an end. After losing consciousness in the Mawdsley Hospital Peter wakes to find himself in a mysterious village called The Junction, where he encounters intense recollections from his past. Curiously, the inhabitants of The Junction seem to have been expecting him…

In Mary’s own words:

The thought behind this story came to me when I was in the Wallasey tunnel, on my way to one of my Get into Reading groups, in the summer of 2005. I don’t know where it came from, or what to call it – an intuition, delusion, realisation or fantasy.

The idea was that if there was an afterlife, most of the stuff that I think of as me wouldn’t get there. Even the most spiritual-seeming parts of myself are rooted in the psycho-physical being that’s going to end when I die. If there’s anything more to me…would I even know what it was?

The good thing about writing fiction is that it means you don’t have to translate ideas like that into a world view or religious belief – you can just make a story around it. Originally The Junction was a 70,000 word long novel. In 2007, Phil Davis asked me to turn it into a three to five episode serial. At first I thought I would be able to do it by condensing and cutting. It was his advice to stop the first episode where it stops now that made me understand the whole shape of the story was going to have to change – this taught me more about plot than anything else I’d ever heard or read.

 

Download The Junction here

After the initial publication of Leaves of Grass, which Whitman paid for himself in 1855, a later edition of the volume provided him with enough money to buy a house in New Jersey. It was here that Whitman spent the rest of his days, revising his collections of poetry and preparing Good-bye, My Fancy (1891), his final volume.

After the Sea-Ship is taken from Whitman’s Leaves of Grass collection, and is deeply in tune with the politics of the time of its composition. Whitman explores the nature of people’s individuality when united within a new and ideal democracy, towards which it seemed America was progressing.

After the Sea-Ship

After the sea-ship, after the whistling winds,

After the white-gray sails taut to their spars and ropes,

Below, a myriad myriad waves hastening, lifting up their necks,

Tending in ceaseless flow toward the track of the ship,

Waves of the ocean bubbling and gurgling, blithely prying,

Waves, undulating waves, liquid, uneven, emulous waves,

Toward that whirling current, laughing and buoyant, with curves,

Where the great vessel sailing and tacking displaced the surface,

Larger and smaller waves in the spread of the ocean yearnfully

flowing;

The wake of the sea-ship after she passes, flashing and frolicsome

under the sun,

A motley procession with many a fleck of foam and many fragments,

Following the stately and rapid ship, in the wake following.

Walt Whitman, 1874

Leaves of Grass is available from our online bookshop

To see the planet desecrated is to behold the undoing of God’s creation.

The above subject was discussed on this morning’s BBC Radio 4 Thought for the Day, presented by Bishop James Jones of the Diocese of Liverpool.

In his discussion, Bishop James made reference to the poem Binsey Poplars by Gerard Manley Hopkins; in which Hopkins expresses his outrage at the felling in 1879 of an avenue of grand poplar trees, which once ran along the side of the river Thames between Oxford and the village of Binsey.

In the poem, Hopkins mourns the loss of his ‘dear aspens’, and condemns man’s unecessary interference with the power and beauty of nature; regretfully noting that ‘Even where we mean / To mend her we end her’. You’ll find Binsey Poplars below, where Hopkins’ fury, sadness, and indignation at man’s arrogance in robbing future generations of the chance to ever know this ‘beauty-been’ is evident.

Binsey Poplars, Felled 1879

My aspens dear, whose airy cages quelled,

Quelled or quenched in leaves the leaping sun,

All felled, felled, are all felled;

Of a fresh and following folded rank

Not spared, not one

That dandled a sandalled

Shadow that swam or sank

On meadow and river and wind-wandering weed-winding bank.

O if we but knew what we do

When we delve or hew—

Hack and rack the growing green!

Since country is so tender

To touch, her being so slender,

That, like this sleek and seeing ball

But a prick will make no eye at all,

Where we, even where we mean

To mend her we end her,

When we hew or delve:

After-comers cannot guess the beauty been.

Ten or twelve, only ten or twelve

Strokes of havoc unselve

The sweet especial scene,

Rural scene, a rural scene,

Sweet especial rural scene.

Gerard Manley Hopkins, 1879

Anyone catch Thought for the Day, or have any thoughts on today’s subject?

If you missed it, Thought for the Day will be available on the iplayer shortly.

Cardus: Celebrant of Beauty
A Memoir by Robin Daniels
(Palatine Books)

We have been sent a review copy of an absolutely beautifully produced new book. Cardus: Celebrant of Beauty by Robin Daniels is a book of charm and insight, combining personal memories, biography, a fine selection of Cardus maxims and extracts, and an appraisal of Cardus the man, the friend and the writer.

Nevil Cardus was born in Manchester in 1888. He was the first music critic to be knighted, the most evocative and most often quoted writer on cricket of all time, (Wisden dubbed him ‘the patron saint of the craft of cricket writing’) and one of the great English essayists of the 20th century.

For more than half a century he wrote about music and cricket for The Manchester Guardian, changing the course of writing on cricket. He developed a style of writing that was intuitive, richly felt, evocative of colour and atmosphere and insightful about player or musician.

In a long and remarkable life, Cardus was a friend of famous writers such as JM Barrie and JB Priestley, cricketers CB Fry, Don Bradman; singers Kathleen Ferrier and Lotte Lehmann; conductors Beecham and Barbirolli and musicians Menuhin and Barenboim. The book is filled with a sense of Cardus’s large and warm personality.

Robin Daniels’ loving reflection on the life and work of his friend is testament to his own lifetime’s love of reading:

Unlike the internet, books offer a place to feel, respond and ponder – safely, slowly and inwardly. Reading is not meant to be an end in itself: it need not be just for escape and entertainment, or the passive gathering of information. Reading invites interpretation and close dialogue (with the text and with oneself); it offers a site for thinking about self and others and the world around us. Reading gives us space to alter rigid pathways of habitual thought. It can touch our own emotions, yielding new links or associations and insights.

In his introduction to the book Andrew Flintoff writes: ‘I am glad to recommend this book, especially because Robin Daniels is honouring the memory of his friend by donating some of the royalties to the Lancashire Academy, for the finding and coaching of Lancashire stars of the future … For specialist and non specialist alike, this is a first-class book about a first class writer. Neville Cardus has many imitators but no equal.’

(You can buy Cardus: Celebrant of Beauty A Memoir by Robin Daniels here at our online bookshop.)

by Angela Macmillan

Our panel will consider: ‘The heritage that the Victorians invented for us – are we still living in a Victorian world?’

On the panel will be: Dr Jane Davis (Director of The Reader Organisation; Chair), Dr Josie Billington (University of Liverpool School of English), Professor Philip Davis (University of Liverpool School of English; editor of The Reader magazine) and Blake Morrison (author and journalist).

Metaphysically speaking, ‘our Victorian heritage’ is the difficulty of finding meaningful purpose or of knowing what to make of human experience in a post-religious age. Victorian literature, the novel especially, represented the period’s commitment to finding means of mediating, tolerating or recognizing the predicament. This panel will consider the degree to which literature does, can or should have a ‘Victorian’ role in the contemporary world in relation to the secular/religious problems of how to live which it has inherited; and it will offer The Reader Organisation, in its commitment to opening up and sharing serious literature with people for whom it might be humanly valuable, as a model for carrying forward a Victorian mission, a belief in literature, from the past into the future.

More information about the conference can be found here.

The festival focuses largely, but not exclusively, on issues relating to gender equality and active citizenship, with particular attention paid to how they affect young people. As well as working with schools and civic groups, the festival has invited a variety of different artists to share their expertise in using their tools to examine and challenge what they perceive as inequities.

Kayd is an organisation promoting the freedom of expression through art and culture in the Somali territories, and aims to encourage the tolerance and appreciation of the diverse Somali culture.

If you would like any more information, here’s a link back to a previous post about HIBF.

John Clare (1793-1864) was born in the Northamptonshire village of Helpston and attended school there until he was around eleven years old, following which he was largely self-taught. Clare’s first book of poetry: Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery (1820), was very well-received, and his work was extremely popular with the public. In the 1830s, however, his popularity faded; a problem his publishers tried to correct by standardising his verses into what they considered to be more contemporary poetic conventions. Clare wrote this Sonnet in 1841, the year before he was confined in the Northampton County Asylum where he spent the rest of his days.

Sonnet

I love to see the summer beaming forth

And white wool sack clouds sailing to the north

I love to see the wild flowers come again

And mare blobs stain with gold the meadow drain

And water lillies whiten on the floods

Where reed clumps rustle like a wind shook wood

Where from her hiding place the Moor Hen pushes

And seeks her flag nest floating in bull rushes

I like the willow leaning half way o’er

The clear deep lake to stand upon its shore

I love the hay grass when the flower head swings

To summer winds and insects happy wings

That sport about the meadow the bright day

And see bright beetles in the clear lake play

John Clare, 1841.

If you want to read more John Clare, here’s a link back to one of our previous featured poems: ‘I Am!’